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Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Alright, everybody. Welcome to the number one podcast in the world. I am your boy, JCal, the world's greatest moderator executive producer for life. With me again on the All-In Podcast is the Rainman, David Sacks. Yeah. Looking healthy. Looking good. Looking trim. The hair's great. How are you feeling, brother? David Sacks (00:00:19): Good. Good. Oh, haircut. All good. Jason Calacanis (00:00:22): Haircut looks good. Now do you go to the barber, the stylist? They come to you? Everybody wants to know. David Sacks (00:00:26): They come to me. Jason Calacanis (00:00:27): Yeah. Of course. Of course. Of course. I do. And then with us, of course, your sultan of science. He loves those vegetables. His name is David Friedberg. From Berkeley to the Bay, our boy. How you doing there, brother? Oh, you live in the lake lifestyle. You have a nice rest for August. David Friedberg (00:00:45): Loving, loving the outdoors. Jason Calacanis (00:00:47): Good for you. You look so healthy. Speaking of looking healthy, David Friedberg (00:00:50): celebrated birthday with Jason Calacanis yesterday. Happy 52nd, Jason Calacanis. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:55): Happy 52nd, Jason Calacanis. David Friedberg (00:00:58): We did a long mountain bike ride with our other buddy, Z. And, I had a little family barbecue last night. Jason Calacanis (00:01:04): Very nice. Had David Friedberg (00:01:05): a good time. Jason Calacanis (00:01:06): You do portobello mushrooms? What did you do? You put a little zucchini on the grill? David Friedberg (00:01:10): Let's just say I show up with my own food to a barbecue. Jason Calacanis (00:01:13): Absolutely. You do. Alright. And everybody's favorite, the chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. You love him. You hate him, but you can't ignore him. How you do look at the number of buttons here. Speaker 5 (00:01:25): You got the mouse collar on, and I don't think Jason Calacanis (00:01:25): any of those buttons are buttoned. No. There's another Speaker 5 (00:01:30): button. Jason Calacanis (00:01:32): You became a meme once again. Once again, the All-In Podcast creating memes, you were swirling. You were swirling a little white wine last week. You were in the arena. And, I'm putting Speaker 5 (00:01:39): up all the numbers, going macro, and you're swirling wine. The audience loved Jason Calacanis (00:01:43): it. What's going on today? Do you have a bottle? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:48): That was a 2019 Karel Boatsco. Really, really glazedly. Jason Calacanis (00:01:53): Could you tell us the flavor profile? The notes, what did you get? What'd you get as you were swirling? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:57): There was some plum. There's a little truffle there. Oh, the poison bearings? Little poison very fantastic. David Sacks (00:02:05): It was a touch of inflation with a hint of unemployment. Speaker 5 (00:02:13): The weather winner's Jason Calacanis (00:02:15): wide. Rainman, David Sacks. And I said we open source it to the fans in a Well, you know, boys, I had a big week. I had a big week this week. You know, I'm at the lake still, but, I made a little trip to Silicon Valley. I was, hanging out with Roelof at Sequoia. And as I'm prone to do, I love to go to Bucks. You guys been to Bucks before in Woodside? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:44): Yeah. I went once a couple Speaker 5 (00:02:45): of years Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:45): And I've never been back since. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:02:48): Well, it's my favorite place to get breakfast or get my little tuna melt. I've been going there for ages. It's a little bit of a legendary place. Where Steve Jurvetson made the Hotmail investment, the Tesla investment, all kinds of Speaker 5 (00:02:59): famous stuff happens at Bucks. Well, it's where PayPal got its first funding round where John Malloy from Nokia Ventures beamed Jason Calacanis (00:02:59): the money to Peter and Max at Bucks. On a PalmPilot. David Sacks (00:03:10): On Palm. Way back in 1999. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:03:13): For those people who don't know, PalmPilot was the most innovative and poorly designed product. That was Jake Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:19): name in college. Jason Calacanis (00:03:25): So good. But, you know, I'm wearing my Bucks hat and I got my Bucks menu here. Boys, it was like a pinnacle of my career. I've been waiting for this. If you go to Bucks and you look at the sides, you can get your crispy Brussels sprouts there, Friedberg, get your sweet potato fries. But there it is. Jake House onion rings are now on the menu at Bucks. I have hit the big leagues, folks. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:48): Wait. Is that is that real? Did you really get that? Jason Calacanis (00:03:50): I did. I'm the first person. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:52): But but do you like onion rings? Jason Calacanis (00:03:54): I love onion rings. I love a good tuna melt. It's a weird sandwich, but they do it so great there. And I keep asking for onion rings for, like, a decade. And then we don't do onion rings. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:04): melt too. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:04:05): And so suddenly, you know, that the team there comes out. They say, Jacob, we have 2 different types of onion rings. Please pick which one you like best. I went with the Panko Crusted Friedberg. These are for you. Delicious Panko Crusted. And, they put them on the menu. So I was so touched. I just wanted Speaker 5 (00:04:19): to get a shot Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:20): of him. While we're on while we're on sandwiches, Speaker 5 (00:04:22): Sure. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:22): You know what I love? Jason Calacanis (00:04:24): What do you mean? Speaker 5 (00:04:25): A Reuben made with turkey breast instead of the strong ones. Have you guys ever had a turkey wonderful? I haven't. Oh, it's incredible. Because I think a pastrami Reuben is a Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:26): little too much. It just feels too sclerotic. Jason Calacanis (00:04:39): Too fatty. Like, your arteries or Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:42): Yeah. It's terrible. But, like, you get a good Thousand Island sauce and, like, the sauerkraut and Swiss cheese. It's it's made. Jason Calacanis (00:04:48): I took my I took mine. I was in New York a couple weeks ago. I took my daughter to Katz's Deli. I took her on a little tour of the Lower East Side, and we we made a stop at Katz's. What's your favorite, Sammy there? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:04:57): Deli, by the way. How's it turned to you? The max Speaker 5 (00:04:59): is dumb. David Friedberg (00:05:00): Why did you do a paid promo for bucks at Woodside? I don't they gave you hat. Jason Calacanis (00:05:04): Every time they sell one of those onion rings, they I get $1 on my account. Yeah. Of course. The grift never ends. The David Friedberg (00:05:10): grift never ends. Jason Calacanis (00:05:11): I don't get it. Only podcast David Friedberg (00:05:13): to sell onion rings. Perfect. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:05:15): I mean, you're selling potatoes and Chamath is just selling Loro Piana. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:20): To sell onion rings. Jason Calacanis (00:05:21): Onion rings and Loro Piana. Well, we go high, we go low. I mean, they go high, we go low. They go low. We go high. Alright. Listen, Chamath's Big O outcome is on the table. The DOJ is looking at breaking up Google. This is huge news in our industry. Last week, we talked about the ruling that Google had an illegal monopoly in search and advertising. The case was brought by Trump's DOJ back in 2020. Chamath said, two outcomes are possible. A little old Big O, little old consent decree, you know, like Microsoft did back in 2000 with the Internet Explorer decision, the Big O. We didn't think that was a major possibility, but here we are Google getting broken up DOJ is going Big O. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, the DOJ is considering a breakup according to the article. Most likely breakup targets are Android OS, Google Chrome, and AdWords. Okay. Last time the government tried to break up a monopoly was 20 years ago when they tried and failed to dismantle Microsoft. We know how that's gone. The company's doing great. So let's talk about it. Aside from search and advertising, there's kind of five pillars at Google, and then your form of Google, which will go to you first, Friedberg, I think. Cloud, $40 billion in revenue growing 30 percent. YouTube, $34 billion growing 15 percent, a little volatile because it's advertising. That doesn't include, like, premium, YouTube TV, and that stuff. But, oh my lord, YouTube is up to 2.7 billion monthly active users. World population's 8.2 billion. So quite significant. Netflix has $38 billion in revenue. They're worth almost $300 billion. So that's an interesting corollary. You got Waymo doing 50,000 paid trips a week now. 2.5 million a year, and that's growing quite nicely. You got Android. Right? They don't disclose revenue. You got the G Suite. So let's start with you, Friedberg, and then I'll go to you, Chamath, because you made the prediction. What do you think would be accretive or generally increase the market cap and be something that Google would be happy with and the government would be happy with if you had to, like, maybe shed one or two properties? What's a possible outcome here? And your thoughts broadly on this? David Friedberg (00:07:24): I'll just start by commenting. I'm not really sure what the improvement to consumer pricing or competition would be in different breakup scenarios. I'd really like to understand the DOJ's analysis on that. How does breaking up one of these things improve the consumer experience? I could see the case for Android because Android defaults to Google search. But again, Android's an open-sourced operating system. And so everyone has their own fork. A lot of the handset manufacturers will have their own fork of Android. Obviously, the Google fork defaults to Google search. So it benefits Google services quite well. I think that would be an analysis that the DOJ would really have to kind of prove out that there is real anti-competition associated with Google's influence over the open-source Android operating system that they manage and license out. I think understanding that would be good. I do think that there's a lot of value unlock in YouTube. So if Google were to just generally spin out YouTube, that is probably a business that on its own would attract an investor base that might otherwise not want to get into the conglomerate. And you know, there's always this notion of what's called a conglomerate discount. When you put a lot of different businesses together, the businesses in aggregate get valued less than the individual parts would be valued on their own because different investors interested in a business investment thesis would like to bet on cloud, would like to bet on YouTube, would like to bet on, and so each one of these segments, if they can be unlocked, can actually be value-creating in terms of overall market cap. The challenge is the way YouTube's infrastructure operates; it operates on shared infrastructure with the rest of Google services. So does cloud, so does search, so does AdWords. So there's one common cloud infrastructure that everything runs on. David Friedberg (00:09:20): And then there's one common advertiser pool. There are dedicated advertising salespeople within YouTube, but there's also dedicated shared infrastructure on advertising between YouTube and search and AdSense and so on. And there's ad sales teams that actually can sell across search and third-party publisher sites and YouTube. And so, you know, breaking up those shared teams becomes a little more technically difficult, but YouTube certainly seems like an unlock. The question is what happens with all the infrastructure layer? Does that go with Cloud? And if it does, then YouTube, AdWords, and Search all become customers of Cloud? So that might be one way that this could work. But I think net net, if this were to happen, there could be a lot of upside in the market cap. I'll also say it just feels like the tenor of all of this is And not anti-competition and anything that's kind of successful or big is automatically deemed to be a monopoly. And I think we really have to kind of understand how are consumers and the market for competition being affected by having all these things together. And that's what should really be focused on and studied, not just the fact that something is big and successful. And we'll see how that all plays out. Jason Calacanis (00:10:33): Alright. Chamath, you predicted the possibility of a big o. Here we are. Your thoughts on what this might look like, chances of it happening, and then just maybe if you're interested in the anti-success approach here, or do you think this is more, you know, valid criticism of Google's mass of search monopoly. Well, when I painted that series of outcomes, just sort of Speaker 5 (00:10:51): like looking forward, I really didn't think Jason Calacanis (00:10:52): that this big o outcome Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:07): was a very large probability. I was like, you know, I would have handicapped that at single-digit percentages. Speaker 5 (00:11:11): And I think the reason why the DOJ leaked Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:12): this thing and floated this trial balloon essentially is in part I didn't weigh enough what Sacks was talking about, which is that there Speaker 5 (00:11:23): really is a massive bipartisan amount of support Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:33): against Google. Now it cuts on two different dimensions. I think that Speaker 5 (00:11:38): there is one dimension, which is more Republican-oriented, which is just about freedom of Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:38): speech and putting your thumb on the scale. But if you take the Democratic point of view, it's more the anti-successful vein that Friedberg just mentioned. Speaker 5 (00:11:55): The thing is though that it'll make strange bedfellows Chamath Palihapitiya (00:11:55): because it unites both sides against pushing for a big outcome. If you go back to the last big outcome that we had in antitrust law, which was AT&T in the seventies and eighties. That lawsuit was a decade long. Right? And, essentially, what happened was when it looked like AT&T was gonna lose the case, they were the ones that proposed splitting itself up. And so I think that this is going to start this really interesting chess game here where obviously Google has to appeal and fight this. But if it looks like the political pressure is gonna build and the courts aren't going to let them off the hook and have a little outcome, probably the best thing to do is for Google to initiate it themselves because they can answer a lot of the questions that Friedberg just raised. And they'll do it in a way where going back to the people that matter along with the customers and the employees are the shareholders you can do it in a way where the sum of the parts will be greater than the value today of Google. So I think that there's a shareholder win. It needs to be offered by Google and then negotiated. But to be really honest with you, Jason, when I when I kind of was thinking about it last week, I really thought this was a single-digit probability. I still think it's a single-digit probability. And if it grows, it's the most meaningful thing that's happened in technology, quite honestly. Jason Calacanis (00:13:37): Alright. Sacks Chamath Palihapitiya (00:13:38): from a business perspective. Jason Calacanis (00:13:39): Cool. Sacks, your thoughts. David Sacks (00:13:41): I agree with Chamath that Google has the opportunity to do something really interesting here, which is get ahead of the curve and break itself up before the political system forces that onto it. And the advantage of doing that is that it could partition the company in ways that are economically smart. The big categories would be search, advertising, and YouTube. And I think that would have two big economic benefits for shareholders. One is you unlock value by deconglomerating, like Friedberg was saying. Second, once you break up the company into these pieces, there's less places for employees who aren't doing anything to hide, you know, for all this bureaucracy to hide. Speaker 5 (00:14:19): I mean, look, Google is famous for employees who don't do anything. Right? The guys sitting on David Sacks (00:14:19): the roof, sunning themselves all day, if you break up the company into three or four smaller companies, right, there's just way less room for people to hide. And I think that they could all be leaner, more efficient operations, and that would accrue to the benefit of shareholders. So I think that would make a lot of sense. And then furthermore, I guess a third point is that you forestall the possibility of the government doing something that could actually be very harmful. And, you know, the piece here is that I guess the DOJ is talking about spinning off Android and Chrome. And I think it's worth pointing out that those aren't really businesses in and of themselves. The reason why Google developed Android and Chrome was to prevent anybody from getting upstream of them. Right? They saw what Speaker 5 (00:15:11): Microsoft did in terms of capturing the operating system and then capturing the browser, and they didn't want to potentially allow Microsoft or anyone else to essentially David Sacks (00:15:22): win the high ground, capture the high ground upstream of them Speaker 5 (00:15:23): and be able to divert traffic away from search to their own David Sacks (00:15:24): search engine or someone else's search engine. So they began the strategy of commoditizing those layers of the stack. And it worked brilliantly. I mean, Android and Chrome have Speaker 5 (00:15:36): become very popular, and it guarantees that nobody else can get upstream of them and then disintermediate them. David Sacks (00:15:37): But the problem is if those things get spun out, and have to become businesses on their own, how would they function as businesses? It's not clear to me that there's an obvious strategy there. I would like to ask Friedberg. Friedberg, do you see a way that Chrome and Android could be spun out and become viable businesses on their own, Speaker 5 (00:16:05): or do you agree that they were essentially created to commoditize layers of the stack rather than become profitable businesses on their own? Yeah. David Sacks (00:16:05): So they were both created David Friedberg (00:16:16): to avoid third parties blocking access to Google search. Speaker 5 (00:16:18): That's why they were both started. And remember, Sundar was the product manager on Chrome originally. That was his big kind of product David Friedberg (00:16:18): that he ran for quite some time. So Android was all about making sure that the handset manufacturers didn't basically default Speaker 5 (00:16:34): consumers to do search and use the internet in a way that would disadvantage Google. So Google said, you know what? Just like David Friedberg (00:16:34): Zuck is doing currently with LLaMA, Google said, let's make an open-sourced mobile operating system. It's better than any other mobile operating system. And we'll make sure that consumers have choice and they have the ability to go where they wanna go, and it's not just defaulted by the telcos or the handset manufacturers. So that was the reason. And obviously, they ended up making their own fork of Android, which is the most popular fork of Android that has Google as a default search engine. So, yeah, and they get license fees from that. But fundamentally, it's really just in service of making sure that people go to Google search. So where that ends up sitting in a split-up company, I have no idea. And, Chrome Speaker 5 (00:17:17): similarly, you know, Google originally supported Firefox and gave a lot of money to Firefox. And then Firefox just wasn't moving fast enough. So Google started David Friedberg (00:17:27): hiring Firefox engineers and built Chrome in-house as a way to keep Netscape and Internet Explorer from blocking access to Google search and defaulting. And they built a default to Google search, obviously. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:17:38): What do you think, Jason? Jason Calacanis (00:17:40): You know, I have a long relationship with Google as a content creator, and they do have a massive monopoly in search. That's absolutely true. And the Justice Department, I think, is well within their rights to take a deep dive on that. They don't have it in ads. If you look at the competition for Google in advertising, you got Meta, TikTok, and Amazon, which have very, very significant advertising businesses, and then, like, a bunch of new players, which are referred to basically as the shopping cart and networks. That's Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, etc. And so when you look at this, it's kind of paradoxical that it really does rhyme with what happened with Microsoft. They're two decades late on this. The search Speaker 5 (00:18:21): monopoly has been squeezed for every dollar and to build every subcomponent of Jason Calacanis (00:18:21): Google's monopoly, lights, shopping, all of these things, put into Google search, and put at the top above organic search, has basically killed hundreds of startups over the decades. And so I Speaker 5 (00:18:40): actually don't think this is gonna do much if they do a breakup. The easy solution for Google, and I agree with, I think, people who said that here is to Jason Calacanis (00:18:41): just spin out YouTube and Waymo. Those two are perfect stand-alone businesses. Yeah. There's some back end stuff. But like you said, Friedberg, they could become customers of the ad network of the cloud for some number of years. But YouTube and Waymo, those should be like a $400 billion company, a $50 billion company, and those are right in the zeitgeist of the future and what advertisers want. So I think offering those two up would unlock massive shareholder value. The most damaging one would be Android. If they force them to sell Android, that is going to be massively damaging because an independent Android company could Speaker 5 (00:19:23): then, you know, give their search default to Bing. And Microsoft would happily manage for that. Not could. Jason Calacanis (00:19:23): Not could. They they must in order to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:32): to capture the maximum economic value. It would have to Jason Calacanis (00:19:35): auction it. Right. And so, I mean, launching every Speaker 5 (00:19:36): of Android. Right? Correct. And so that is the dominant player. And then they have handsets. So that Jason Calacanis (00:19:36): answers our company. David Sacks (00:19:44): Much is that worth? Because maybe that does make Android a viable business on its own. Jason Calacanis (00:19:48): When, you know, it it would be David Friedberg (00:19:49): it's probably $30 billion of revenue a year. David Sacks (00:19:52): Okay. Great. So let's do it. I take back what I said. It can survive as an independent business. Chrome can't, right? Chrome can't, Speaker 5 (00:19:58): but David Sacks (00:19:58): maybe Android and Chrome go together. Jason Calacanis (00:20:00): That would be incredibly damaging to Google. That's the most damaging. The easiest is YouTube and Waymo in this whole mix, but I'll give you the wild card in all of this. David Friedberg (00:20:10): Think about the math. Sorry, just real quick, think about the math on that. So let's say it spins out and it generates $30 billion of revenue a year. And Google owns the majority of it. And eventually, they'll sell it down, but that business will be valued on the money that Google's paying. So Google will make that equity value back because they own the shares. Jason Calacanis (00:20:25): And they will lose one-third of their revenue to that new company. Now, of course, they'll get it in the equity, but then they don't have it because about a third of searches are mobile now. And that's increasing. The big wild card in all this is Apple. When I was doing Mahalo, which was a human-powered search engine over 10 years ago that Sequoia backed, I emailed it to Steve Jobs. He opened it. He played with it a bunch. I wouldn't talk about anything else in that regard, but they had a search project in the works when Steve Jobs was in charge over there. They were looking at search because he had such an axe to grind with Eric Schmidt because they launched Android, and they kicked Eric Schmidt off the board. And there was a lot of hand-wringing there. I think Apple is, and I've heard this from folks around Apple, that they're looking at search again. And there's DuckDuckGo and this company called Brave that has their own search engine and search API that's gotten very popular. I believe Apple's gonna launch their own search engine and compete head-to-head with Google. And so I Speaker 5 (00:21:22): think that's gonna be the very interesting thing Jason Calacanis (00:21:23): that happens in this market. The question then becomes, Chamath, does this distract management to a level like it did Microsoft? Then you have a lost Speaker 5 (00:21:34): decade and it takes their eyes off the prize of, well, AI. No. Jason Calacanis (00:21:34): And the reason I say no is that I think that Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:45): people's reaction to these things become more sophisticated Speaker 5 (00:21:48): in time because folks go back and actually study what Chamath Palihapitiya (00:21:48): happened in the Marvell situation, AT&T in the RBOCs, what happened in Microsoft. And so I suspect that they know how to shield the rank-and-file employee from whatever is going to happen. So I think that that's less likely. I think the management. You know? Jason Calacanis (00:22:15): Like, do you think it disturb do you think it distracts management from running the business, Shamal? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:22:20): I don't think so either because I think that these things get put into a very tight group of people, mostly lawyers, who then go and deal with this issue. I think that there's an acute moment where if they think that they're going to lose an appeal or that appeal is not going to get heard, then, yeah, I do think management and the board are brought together. And the Speaker 5 (00:22:41): again, if history is a guide, they should want to propose the terms on which they break Chamath Palihapitiya (00:22:41): their own company up. Because I think if the government tries to decide, there's going to be so much imprecision that they'll break the company. And I think that would be a shame because, I mean, look, take a step back. The breaking up of Google is great for competition and for startups. But let's not forget Google is an incredible company that has created enormous amounts of good. They have done way more good than bad, way more. Like, three, four, five orders of magnitude more good than bad. And to break a company like that, I think would be a really bad outcome. Perspective and game theory, it's pretty reasonable to hobble them. That's why I think the small o outcome is much more palatable and seems more fair to me. A breakup is a really draconian action, and I'm not sure that when you look at Google versus AT&T and the and the Baby Bells, I don't think it's anywhere Jason Calacanis (00:23:51): near the same. But if there's the political will, they'll be able to craft and change some Chamath Palihapitiya (00:23:51): of the laws that allow these folks to just keep going after them. And if that happens, I think it's going to be really important for Google to define the terms of their own breakup. David Friedberg (00:24:09): I wanna just underline what Chamath said real quick. Speaker 5 (00:24:12): Being big can be very good in the sense that it David Friedberg (00:24:12): can drive an ability to invest in innovation that is Speaker 5 (00:24:19): not possible without the scale and the David Friedberg (00:24:19): significant cash flow that's being generated by being that big. And AT&T is a great example. Bell Labs. So the way AT&T was set up is there was all the the local telephone companies under this bell system that AT&T owned. And then Western Electric was the company that manufactured all the telephone equipment that was put into the, the telephone system. And then Bell Labs was the third entity. It was the research arm. And all that they did at Bell Labs was do research, and they were fully funded. They had all this cash flow pouring into them, so they could discover and work on and invent whatever they wanted. With that capital, Bell Labs is so insane. If you guys haven't read any of the books on Bell Labs and what was discovered there and how it operated, it truly is, like, the most innovative center ever in human history. But they invented, like, antenna arrays. They invented microwaves. They invented radar. They invented the transistor. They invented information theory, which was the basis for everything on the internet. There were even some efforts to try and invent a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan Project started. They invented integrated circuits and on and on and on. And that's because they could invest all this money in doing this research that would have been very difficult for a small startup, a company that's trying to grow and is barely profitable, to be able to do. At Google, they've invested billions of dollars in Waymo. And I think as we all know, Waymo really was, if not the leader, the inspiration for a whole generation of autonomous driving that ultimately will come to market and will really transform our lives in a meaningful way. In the same way, Amazon and Microsoft and Meta have all invested tens of billions of dollars in innovation. Look at what Zuck is doing at Meta with the open sourcing of LLaMA models. It's incredible. That would have never been possible if you had a small company that was trying to get profitable. So I just want to highlight, these businesses, just because they're big and successful, doesn't necessarily mean that they're stifling innovation. In fact, they may be accelerating innovation and enabling progress. Just pointing out that the cash flows that are being generated and the way they're investing those cash flows is pretty, pretty impressive. David Friedberg (00:26:23): And we lose that if we end up going after every big company just because they're big and saying, hey, we should take away their ability to do this. Jason Calacanis (00:26:30): I'm gonna take the other side of that. I think that what they can do with their massive amount of power is destructive to competition in the marketplace. If you look at self-driving, we have had tens Speaker 5 (00:26:41): of billions of dollars invested Jason Calacanis (00:26:42): without Waymo. It would have been just fine. There has been so much money, Tesla, Uber, Cruise, GM. There's plenty of people out there. There's plenty of capital out there from around the world. And I think when these companies, in Facebook's case, I think, prove my point. What you're saying here is I think it would be better that you didn't have these companies that could put $20 billion into something and you had 50 startups go after it rather than these giant companies just steal it and overpower them, flooding them with capital. It makes the world less dynamic that Zuck can just and Google can keep taking the next category from the marketplace. Go ahead, Sacks. You had a point? Speaker 5 (00:27:22): If you break Google up from a conglomerate of, let's call it, four monopolies or duopolies or companies David Sacks (00:27:22): with extraordinary market power into four separate companies, they're still gonna be generating extraordinary profits, and those could still be invested in a Waymo. So I don't know that it stops the innovation. Arm workshopping this issue has pretty much convinced me that it should be four companies, Search, Advertising, YouTube, and Android because I think Android could be a standalone business because of the value of the search default. David Friedberg (00:27:52): in Search or Advertising? David Sacks (00:27:54): That's gotta be figured out. I don't know the answer to that. Jason Calacanis (00:27:58): Yeah. So, I mean, I guess it's a negotiation now. Maybe they put up one or two to be spun out, and then the negotiation happens. And who knows? You could have regime change in Washington. Okay. Let's keep moving through this incredibly juicy docket. Starbucks CEO is out after a year and a half of underperformance. Starbucks CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, stepped down after just 16 months on the job. I'll break down what went wrong and get your reaction to all this. I know you have some strong feelings on it. Friedberg as well. Earlier this week, Starbucks shares were down 20% year to date compared to the S and P up 12%. Companies are 2 straight quarters of declining revenue, the definition of a recession. In fact, they've had to raise prices massively due to inflation that has annoyed customers and Customers have been irate about the wait, which has been caused by 2 things. 1, they have a broken staffing algorithm. That's led to massive understaffing. And then the app has become the Starbucks app is incredibly complex, and you can order ridiculous drinks. That's causing a massive why Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:57): Why do you keep saying Starbies? Jason Calacanis (00:29:00): It's what the kids Speaker 5 (00:29:01): Call it. Jason Calacanis (00:29:01): It's what the kids call it. Starbies. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:02): Oh, that's part of the syrup. Okay. David Friedberg (00:29:04): I've never Jason Calacanis (00:29:05): Heard of it. David Friedberg (00:29:05): That's what they're called. Jason Calacanis (00:29:07): Yeah. And they've added, like, all these, like, fruity drinks with and stuff that would be, like, along the boba lines that have become incredibly popular with millennials and Gen Z. So, anyway, Laxman was the handpicked successor by Howard Schultz, and Schultz helped prep and train Laxman, but he's been super critical of him recently. Kinda like the Bob Iger, Bob Chapek relationship we saw play out in 2022 over at Disney. Brian Niccol, the CEO of Chipotle, is gonna take over at the end of August. Investors love this move. Shares jumped 25% on Tuesday. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:40): Sorry. What what did you call it? It's called Chipotle. Normal people call Jason Calacanis (00:29:43): it Chipotle. The current CEO of Chipotle. Chipotle? David Sacks (00:29:48): Chipotle. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:49): CEO Chipotle. No. Chipotle. Chipotle. Chipotle. Chipotle. Chipotle. Please. That's true. I don't need it in this place. Anyway, Jason Calacanis (00:30:00): stop. Twenty-five percent on Tuesday, largest day. Day increase yada yada. Meanwhile, Chipotle dropped 8%. Niccol is on a heater. When he switches teams, the odds go with him. And Starbucks has a bunch of activist investors who are winning massively as part of putting pressure on this Friedberg. Starbucks and Nike, both iconic global brands, both have faltered. What's your take? David Friedberg (00:30:23): Well, the one argument is there's a founder-led problem here, which is when the founder steps out and professional management takes over and you have the same expectations that you had when the founder was leading, things go sideways. But Starbucks faces many more kind of macroeconomic challenges. Nick, if you pull up a Starbucks financial report, so here you can see that their net revenue growth was only 1% year over year, but their operating margin's been on the decline. So they have not really been able to boost their operating margin very much in the past five years. So while they've raised prices, they've had a really hard time making more money. And that's because the cost of food and the cost of labor and the cost of rent and the capital expenditures needed to upgrade stores has far exceeded the ability for them to grow revenue and compete. And now revenue is flatlining because consumers are getting tapped out with respect to how much they can spend. And there's only so much innovation you can really do to charge more, get people to come in the store more, and drive up revenue. Brian Niccol has an incredible reputation. Prior to Chipotle, he ran Speaker 5 (00:31:34): Taco Bell, and he ran Taco Bell for several years and David Friedberg (00:31:34): made it one of the most profitable QSR quick-serve restaurants in the world. He did this by focusing on every nickel. He is notorious for being a cost cutter, for being an efficiency driver, for being a productivity hound. He goes into the business and he figures out every step in the supply chain, every step of the operating activities of the employees and the stores, and figures out ways to make sure. David Sacks (00:32:01): Did you say that Brian Niccol focuses on every nickel? Was that? Speaker 5 (00:32:05): He did say that. I can do what he said. He did David Sacks (00:32:08): say it. Jason Calacanis (00:32:09): He did say it. Don't interrupt him. He's just collecting the interrupt. Speaker 5 (00:32:12): Yeah. No. No. It's good. David Sacks (00:32:13): Sorry. Keep going. David Friedberg (00:32:14): That was good. And, and so he was recruited heavily. I don't know if you guys remember Chipotle's founder was running Chipotle. And at the time, there was a lot of investor activism around Chipotle because they were wasting money like no one's business. The guy had a private jet. He was flying, but his management team back and forth between Denver and New York. They were spending money on crazy projects, and the board fired the CEO founder of Chipotle, brought in Niccol. Niccol came in and made Chipotle an incredibly profitable, growing business. And the expectation is he'll come in and do the same here, that maybe over the years, Starbucks's success has bred laziness. Starbucks's success has bred fat, slowness, productivity decline, and that this guy is the right guy to come in and find all the nickels. Brian Niccol is probably the right guy, which is why you're seeing the stock kind of rally as hard as it has. Jason Calacanis (00:33:03): Sacks or Friedberg, anybody have strong feelings here? David Sacks (00:33:06): Yeah. I would just add something here, which is I do think that macroeconomic forces played a huge role here. We've seen that we have had a tremendous amount of inflation over the last few years, and Starbucks has gotten more expensive. And if you're a worker whose wages have not kept up with inflation, do you really want to spend 10, 15 bucks on a cup of coffee? I mean, it's a pretty fancy cup of coffee. I'm not saying it's not, but when you could just go to your commissary at work and pour yourself a cup of coffee for free, do you really want to work roughly an hour every day to pay for your coffee fix? And I think more and more consumers are just saying that this is a luxury good. I'm looking to cut costs. When I go to the grocery store and buy groceries, they're 30% more expensive than they were a few years ago. I got to cut somewhere, and Jason Calacanis (00:33:53): a luxury cup of coffee Speaker 5 (00:33:53): just seems like a really easy place to cut. So I think that's a huge part of this, and I don't know how Brian Niccol's gonna David Sacks (00:33:53): fix that. It's a macroeconomic force. Kamala, that's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:04): I have a couple. The first is that I think Starbucks is actually an incredible brand. And it's actually a really good business. And the mistakes here have nothing to do with the product per se, meaning Chipotle, if you remember, someone got poisoned there. There was like botulism. The chicken was bad, so there was a core product problem, but that's not the case here. If you unpack what Starbucks is, I think that they are a premium product, and that's reinforced by what Sacks said, which is they price in such a way because they believe that they are a premium product. The problem is they are not a premium brand. And the difference is Speaker 5 (00:34:51): Hermès as an example is a premium brand. They can charge whatever they want under all weather conditions. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:51): They have pricing power. So if their inputs go up, they can make sure they maintain Speaker 5 (00:35:02): margin by changing the final price that the customer paid. Starbucks doesn't have that power. So they charge like a premium product, but they're not a premium brand that Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:03): has pricing power. And that's why you've seen this compression. So very specifically, when Speaker 5 (00:35:17): the new CEO came in, he, I think, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:18): made one important mistake, which is he came in on the heels of a very rosy set of projections that Howard Speaker 5 (00:35:29): Schultz and the board put out to the street. And I think that he had an opportunity then and there to just cut it because they Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:30): saw inflation. They saw what it was doing. And if you just looked around the corner, you would have seen that there would have been this compression in the product. And I think what he should have done is just cut the analyst projections in the forecast to give him room and time. He didn't do that. And by the way, when you bring in somebody who ran Taco Bell, that is proving that this is neither a premium product nor a premium brand anymore. It is a mass market product that will ebb and flow cyclically with the vicissitudes of inflation. That doesn't mean it's a bad business. I'm just saying it's just an observation. Speaker 5 (00:36:16): I expect that Brian Niccol, if he is Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:16): smart, will look at this forecast and shred it. To give himself time. So that's the sort Speaker 5 (00:36:27): of the short-term thing. The long-term thing though is in the following image, which I just sent to Nick, I think there's a real question mark Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:38): on this company over the medium to long term. And I think it's best represented in this graphic. Starbucks did a sugar company. So, for example, a caramel macchiato, 32 grams of sugar, a mocha frappuccino, 60 grams of sugar. This is three times what you're supposed to have as a human in a day. A frappuccino, 53 grams of sugar, a caramel ribbon crunch frappuccino, 62 grams of sugar. And these products also average 400 to 500 calories per drink. Speaker 5 (00:37:09): So the real issue is that more consumers, as they question, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:09): the repercussions of consuming a lot of sugar. What will they do? As more consumers get on GLP-1s, what will Speaker 5 (00:37:24): they do? As more people think about the fact that fat was never an enemy, in fact, fats are actually really good for Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:24): you, the problem was that the sugar lobby convinced us that fat was bad Speaker 5 (00:37:36): and sugar was okay, what will consumers do? And I think that's a really big strategic question mark because the company has to embrace Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:36): where the world is going. The world is going away from sugar. And I think as consumers become smarter, they're gonna have to Speaker 5 (00:37:53): really figure out what to do. Could Starbucks introduce a line of low-calorie Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:53): drinks that use sugar substitutes to achieve the same flavor? David Friedberg (00:38:03): But it takes I got that. Yeah. When you open Speaker 5 (00:38:05): the app, they have every single syrup comes in sugar-free and regular. So when I go there, now that I'm on GLPs and Jason Calacanis (00:38:05): I've lost all this weight, I just get the nitro cold brew. It's got zero calories or five calories. Kinda might throw a little cold foam on it. And then my kids, I do. Speaker 5 (00:38:20): Kids want. That's not what the kids want. And with the kids is is critical. What I do with my kids is I do low sweet Jason Calacanis (00:38:20): or, like, one-third sweet. I order one giant one. I pour it Speaker 5 (00:38:31): into three glasses at home with ice, and I cut it with water because it is like drinking an unbelievable amount of sugar. It is nuts. And Jason Calacanis (00:38:32): they have I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go get an espresso after this. No. The nice thing about coffee is coffee's supposed to have zero calories. You put a little half and half in it, and you get the fat, and you David Friedberg (00:38:50): get good. But, I mean, here's what happened. The thing about Starbucks, I studied Starbucks, and I've spent some time with Howard Schultz, actually, Jason Calacanis (00:38:56): couple years ago. Right? Maybe you could talk about your Eats. I did a little retail. You feel a little reach out. David Friedberg (00:39:02): But the thing about Starbucks is they realized early on that when Speaker 5 (00:39:04): you can customize a consumer experience, the consumer comes back more frequently. So when you see your name written on that cup, you feel like you're getting your product. You're not buying an David Friedberg (00:39:05): off-the-shelf product. You're getting a custom personalized experience. What that led to is people customizing their drinks, and what did they find that they like when they customized their drinks, sugary sweet add-ons, and then that became more and more of the standard menu. And then that just kept evolving. And that's just the consumer feedback mechanism working, which is, to Chamath's point, led to 60 grams sugar drinks that are now the standard product at Starbucks, not an espresso or a cappuccino, which is how they started. And it's really unfortunate. I don't think that Brian Niccol's gonna focus on that, to be honest, given his background with Taco Bell and Chipotle that No. No. No. And to Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:51): your to your point, he'll be able to plug the leaks. My my question is just more, what does a company that's selling a product that people are learning is worse and worse for them. What do they do? They have to embrace a different alternative, but I think it can be very hard because it may be so disruptive to the core product that they sell. David Friedberg (00:40:11): Yeah. That's that's what do you think? I mean, what do you think about Starbucks? I mean, this guy. Jason Calacanis (00:40:15): Hi. My kids love Starbucks, we are regular consumers. The app is extraordinary, and I think the key issue here, you know, is obviously the inputs and inflation. That that's a major driver. But wage inflation is is a critical piece of this. Here's a chart for you, you know, just in terms of weekly earnings of full-time workers since Q4 2019. Starbucks started having a lot of labor movements, a lot of unionization, a lot of complaints from the green aprons, and they have massively raised salaries. They were at, you know, $15, $16, $17. Speaker 5 (00:40:47): A lot of people were going into gig work, DoorDash, you know, Uber. Jason Calacanis (00:40:48): And so this competition for entry-level employees forced Starbucks, and I know this from the Uber experience and then DoorDash, people wanted to set their own schedules, not be, like, in shift work. And so you could make $20 working for Uber and DoorDash; you're making $15. Can you have to drag your ass into Starbucks at 5, 6, 7 a.m. and work a shift and not be able to pick up your kids? That led them to go to, like, $20.22 per hour for these baristas. And they continue to raise those rates. They've been very generous with employees. And so I think that's a key piece of it. I think the big story here is gonna be automation. I think you're gonna see a lot more robotics in these. If you look at, I just had the CEO of, what's the salad company that people, ah, Sweetgreen. Yeah. I just had the CEO of Sweetgreen on This Week in Startups, and he is all in on automation. And they are making salad robots, and they've already 2 or 3 stores with them. And his whole concept is this gonna take $3 out of every salad. We have an investment in a company called Cafe X; Nicky and Blake, a clip of it. These two machines in SFO have broken $1 million a year in revenue. They are serving a massive number of them, and they've sold a dozen of these to other people. So I think automation is what's gonna come to this. I don't think you can sustain it, and the money has to come out of somewhere. And the two big costs it can come out of are the real estate and the employees. And I think that's what we're gonna see in the very near future is Duncan. David Friedberg (00:42:20): Yeah. I will also, I will predict. Yeah. No. I apologize. You're doing it Jason Calacanis (00:42:24): at Eatsa. Right? Were you doing? Yeah. David Friedberg (00:42:25): We had automation. I actually worked on an automation project with Jonathan at Sweetgreen and Starbucks. And Chipotle. So I knew them all. Yeah. And then the Chipotle CEO got fired, we were gonna roll out automation with Chipotle, and he got fired. And Niccol came in and our deal blew up. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:42:41): It killed the deal. Jason Calacanis (00:42:41): So explain how that might work and impact a business, like, unpack a portion. David Friedberg (00:42:45): Oh my god. So it was gonna take out basically, these businesses today are running at, call it, 30% EBITDA margins at peak performance. That's like Chipotle's best class. By taking out labor, you could probably take out another 20 points of cost which could translate into lower prices for consumers, higher throughput, lower wait times. All of these kinds of experiential differentiators are going to be significant. Certainly true for Starbucks, certainly true for Sweetgreen, would expect that with Laxman Narasimhan coming in, you'll see some experimental stores. As you point out, Jake, how that'll be more highly automated, but we'll also I think one of the first things you're gonna see from Laxman within the first year at Starbucks is a reduction in the complexity of the menu. This is something he's done historically. And he focuses like he did at Taco Bell. He creates a couple of key highlight products and creates these innovative product ideas. And then those become the banners that bring people into the store. But it's a simpler menu with kind of more attractive, interesting products that bring people in. And then if you couple automation to reduce some of the cost, you can bring that labor cost down. Speaker 5 (00:43:46): So Jason Calacanis (00:43:46): Yeah. And this is a key point. You know, the order complexity is what's killing the baristas there. There's 4 David Friedberg (00:43:53): There's 4 quintillion ordering options at Starbucks today. And so the expectation has always been that that is what brings people coming back to the store. But what Laxman has shown in the past with Chipotle and with Taco Bell, you can actually have a simpler menu with a few points of customization. You don't need to have infinite customization around everything. Jason Calacanis (00:44:13): What Steve Jobs did, right, with his four quadrants when he took back over. He was like, listen, what's business, what's consumer, what's high end, what's low, what's portable, what's desktop? I forgot what the four quadrants were, but he did. And if you look, Friedberg, to your point, of the cost savings, right now, the majority of orders in Starbucks, I believe, are coming in through the app. And what I was told, you know, in some of the buzz I heard from baristas, was that they are prioritizing mobile orders to punish the people online to get them to download the app, because that gets rid of cashiers. And McDonald's has no cashiers in a lot of restaurants. Right now, you just order at a giant touchscreen. So the cashiers will be gone, the cooks will be gone, and eventually the baristas will be gone, and it'll just be, well, the cashier David Friedberg (00:44:54): The cashier problem also creates a wait time problem because it's a serial ordering process. Everyone stands in line. They order one at a time. And there's only one, and so the baristas Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:04): All of these are really good points. I just think that the CEO would not have gotten fired had he just moved the forecast down by 20 percent when he came Speaker 5 (00:45:11): in to see Jason Calacanis (00:45:12): me? Also, did you see this incredible clip of him saying he doesn't want anybody working past 6 p.m.? Nick, play this clip. This is, David Friedberg (00:45:17): like, the Starbucks CEO? Jason Calacanis (00:45:20): The previous Starbucks CEO, I mean, this clip is so brutal. David Friedberg (00:45:24): We should talk about this in the context of Eric Schmidt's interview as well, Jake. Show the clip, and then let's talk. Jason Calacanis (00:45:30): Eric Schmidt David Friedberg (00:45:31): and talk about work culture in America. I think this is a really important Speaker 5 (00:45:34): point. Jason Calacanis (00:45:35): Fantastic, side quest. Let's do it. Alright. So now there's a big culture thing going on here, Friedberg, of hard work in corporations. I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt at Stanford. They took this talk down. And Eric Schmidt is walking the comments back, but here we go, folks. This is the money clip from Eric Schmidt. Speaker 6 (00:45:52): Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the startups, the reason startups work is because the people work like hell. And I'm sorry to be so blunt. Speaker 5 (00:46:08): But the fact of the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:08): matter is if you all leave the university and go found a company, Speaker 6 (00:46:15): You're not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week. Oh, Jason Calacanis (00:46:20): can you show the Starbucks clip? David Friedberg (00:46:22): Can you show the Starbucks goal? David Sacks (00:46:23): It's self-evidently true. I mean, he's basically making a point similar to what I said about Google being so large that employees can hide. And not do very much and, you know, they can kind of David Friedberg (00:46:33): It's not just it's not just Google. It's pervasive. Sure. Of course. Jason Calacanis (00:46:37): Yeah. Let's pull up the Starbucks CEO. Speaker 7 (00:46:41): I'm very disciplined about balance. If there's anything off at 6 p.m. and if I'm in town, it's gotta be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family. Anybody who gets a moment of time off of that, better be sure that it's important because if not, it'll just wait for another day. David Friedberg (00:46:56): This makes me so uncomfortable just hearing that. I feel Jason Calacanis (00:46:59): totally. I mean, retire, bro. Just retire. David Friedberg (00:47:02): What does America value? Is the real question. Does America value success, Speaker 5 (00:47:05): performance, or does America value comfort? And the problem is American work culture David Friedberg (00:47:05): has shifted to value comfort. And that is the inevitable outcome of decades of extraordinary success. Speaker 5 (00:47:19): And now the performance culture is losing David Friedberg (00:47:19): to the comfort culture. And I think you guys are putting a lot of things together. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:29): The problem is that I don't think that that's the truth, actually. I think that this guy's clip sounds very inauthentic. I think what probably happened is the PR and policy group of Starbucks said, hey, listen. Here's the average age of your employee. And here's what they value, and he probably spouted some politically correct nonsense to try to inspire the troops. I think a lot of CEOs do this. Like, I think we're seeing in modern media today that a lot of CEOs have actually become the least version of their authentic self. They are being packaged by people to dress and act and say things in a certain way. And I think what happens as a result of that is that you have wayward culture where nobody knows what people stand for. That's when the corrosiveness of folks not working at all or having jobs at two different companies comes in. Like, that's a total moral and ethical breach that happens because people think Speaker 5 (00:48:31): it's acceptable. And I think people Jason Calacanis (00:48:31): think it's acceptable because it's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:48:31): not in the talking points of how the CEOs are trying to package themselves to tens of thousands of employees. Jason Calacanis (00:48:44): So you think this was a PR design genuflect? I like that insight. Sacks, your thoughts overall. David Sacks (00:48:50): Well, it could it could be a genuflect. I don't know. Look, I Speaker 5 (00:48:54): would say that there are a lot of Americans who do feel that way about work, but I think it's not appropriate in in two cases. David Sacks (00:48:54): Number one is if you're ambitious and you really want to rise in your organization, then you gotta have more of the J Cal attitude, which is I'm gonna be the first to work and the last one to leave. And I'm gonna show my boss and make it promoted. So if you wanna be ambitious in your career, that's not a good attitude to have. And then on the other extreme, if you're the CEO of the company, your attitude has gotta be. I'm 24/7 with this shit. You know? It's like, I'm always online. I'm always reachable. The buck stops with me. Now, obviously, you're gonna cut out time to be protected that you can spend with your family, but your attitude's always gotta be that I'm available. You know, I don't turn off my phone. I don't do any of that stuff. I just think that if you're running an organization, you can't take this attitude that, oh, at 6 PM, I'm switched off. Speaker 5 (00:49:50): You know, David Sacks (00:49:50): it just doesn't work that way. Jason Calacanis (00:49:52): Yeah. Especially if you're David Sacks (00:49:53): running one. Speaker 5 (00:49:55): Yeah. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:49:56): I mean, if you're David Sacks (00:49:56): not an appropriate thing for someone like that to say when he's the CEO of a multinational corporation. Jason Calacanis (00:50:01): Yeah. I think that is the key insight, Sacks, I'm with you on this, which is leadership starts at the top. If the leader says, hey, listen, don't bother me after 6. I'll talk to you at 9 a.m., then that's just gonna go through the entire organization, and it's already hard enough to run these organizations. Now if you run a lifestyle business as your local cafe and you want to do that and you're running it at even, that's fine. This is a publicly traded company with shareholders with massive competition who could get taken out by all these other brands that are trying to compete with it. You have to have this is a war. We are at war. We have to figure out how to lower prices. We need to grind every nickel from, you know, the supply chain, rent, we have to renegotiate contracts. And then, you know, just to speak on the work ethic issue, this country is in a very significant war about going back to work and work ethic. You mentioned overemployed and the ethics around that, Chamath. Speaker 5 (00:50:55): And then there's a group of Americans, and I've been studying this a bit, that are opting out of Jason Calacanis (00:50:55): capitalism or hacking capitalism. There's a very interesting movement. It's called FIRE, Financial Independence, Retire Early. And if you look at the two subreddits, overemployed and Speaker 5 (00:51:10): the FIRE subreddit, young people are saying, capitalism is there to be hacked. And my way of Jason Calacanis (00:51:10): hacking it is I'm gonna have two jobs. And I had a startup come to me and say, we've got this great engineer literally from Google who wants to work for us, and he's making $400K. We can get him for $150K. And I said, oh, wow. That's great. Why would he do that? Is he independently wealthy? They said, no. He's keeping his job at Google. He says it takes 10, 20 hours a week, and he's gonna work 60 hours a week for us. And I said, is that ethical or legal? And they're like, I don't know. That's why we're asking you. These are 20-year-old founders we had backed. And I was like, this is incredibly unethical, and you're gonna get us in a lawsuit. Don't do it. But that is what you know, the give and take. And if you look at what happened with Dell this past six months, have you been following that Friedberg, the Dell story? No. It's pretty incredible. They told everybody we're coming back to office. People were like, yeah. I don't wanna come back to office. Okay. Reasonable. You think you do a better job at home. I get it. What they said was you wanna be work from home, you can't get a promotion and you can't get a salary increase. And do you know what employees said? Okay. I don't want an increase. I don't if my choice is stay at home and have no salaries, and I don't care about a raise. I don't care about a promotion. Then they said, you know what? We're cutting 12,000 people. You have to come back to office. Jay Penske and his company told everybody have to come back to office. So now that, you know, you have this era of being fit and you don't need to spend any people from AI, I think everybody is coming back to the office unless you are part of the 20% of truly elite workers. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:40): Even then, though, I struggle to understand why anybody who has any ambition would think that they're going to achieve the same amount of stuff working by themselves than they will Speaker 5 (00:52:54): by working with a group of colleagues that Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:54): you respect in a physical space together. Well, influence our culture. I don't know. But I'm saying, like, when you look at the great things that the world needs that we are building and should be building, I don't see many good examples where those things are done in a remote way. I see a necessity of people to be together, whether it's to design something together, to talk about something together, to debate something together, to learn from Speaker 5 (00:53:24): each other, to grow as a person, and you're robbing yourself Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:24): of all of that. And so I just think that it is a short-term optimization that a lot of people will regret, not necessarily in the moment, but when their career doesn't go where they want to or the company they work at doesn't go where it should go to or is capable of going to, they'll start to look for a scapegoat. But the real reason is that they've abandoned the idea that they need to be together. And I just think that that's a tragedy. And it turns out the best of our companies, like, when I rank my portfolio, the ones that are doing the best are in totally different industries, but the single consistent theme is we are all back together on Thursday. Jason Calacanis (00:54:15): Isn't that interesting? Total sense. David Sacks (00:54:17): It's much more productive Speaker 5 (00:54:19): because I think David Sacks (00:54:19): Innovation happens as a team. You need collaboration, and it's way easier to do that when everyone is together in the same place. There's more room for spontaneity, more spontaneous interactions. The reason why Steve Jobs designed the spaceship campus in that famous circle was because it maximized the opportunity for serendipity. Right? Like, there's no The labs have the David Friedberg (00:54:44): same thing. The labs have quads that you had to walk through to go from meeting to meeting. So everyone interacted at the intersection. Jason Calacanis (00:54:50): And the technical term for that is collisions. And there's been a lot of research on random collisions, and I agree wholeheartedly with it. David Sacks (00:54:58): Yeah. And look, I just wanna underscore this point. I think there's nothing wrong if somebody says, look, my family's the most important thing in my life. I only wanna work 40 hours a week. I'm gonna do a 9 to 6 job with an hour lunch break. That's 40 hours. Don't call me after 6 p.m. You can design your career that way. But that is not a career that's gonna enable you to either run a company as a Speaker 5 (00:55:20): CEO or be a founder of a startup or be on a track to David Sacks (00:55:21): one day being a founder or a CEO. It's just not compatible. I mean, it's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:30): Or even just a senior executive. David Sacks (00:55:33): Right. Exactly. So you have to decide what track you're gonna be on, and I think there's a lot of millennial Gen Z types who are confused about this, and they have the entitlement of saying, well, I wanna just do the 40-hour-a-week thing, but then I also expect to rise rapidly and be an executive and be a founder or be a, you know, a CEO Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:50): one day. Speaker 5 (00:55:51): And that's David Sacks (00:55:51): that's not gonna work. Jason Calacanis (00:55:52): Yeah. It's not gonna work. And, you know, in fairness, I think a lot of young people have not been mentored because they came up in the COVID generation, and we're now four years later, and they just haven't had the chance to be mentored or be in an office. And a lot of senior executives and CEOs are not coming to the office. You know, a part of my move to Austin is I'm building a theater to record the podcast in, and I'm building an incubator space, and we're moving back to in person. I grandfather the existing employees, and I'm only hiring people in person now. Because I feel something very big has been lost in terms of meeting with founders in person and young people seeing me interact and my other senior team members with those founders in person during a pitch meeting, during a product jam session, during a fundraising review. Gotcha, man. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:56:39): Can I just say something about mentoring? I also think mentoring can be described as capital M mentoring and small m mentoring. Capital M is where some person is assigned to you, and they're going to imbue some magical phrase or saying or thing, and all of a sudden, everything is gonna work out for you. That form of capital M mentoring doesn't exist and has never worked for those that have tried it. The thing that's really productive is small m mentoring. And that happens when you model behaviors of really smart people and really capable people, really ethical people. And again, that happens because you're seeing them on a day-to-day basis, not just in the meeting, but in the gaps between meetings. And they'll include you in certain things, or you'll have lunch with them. And this is what I mean by all of these people that are looking for an accelerant in their career, they've robbed themselves of the most powerful accelerant possible, which is capable people to surround themselves Speaker 5 (00:57:38): with, Jason Calacanis (00:57:48): Yeah. I think it's so well said. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:49): They're going to look back on these decisions, and they're going to regret them. Jason Calacanis (00:57:54): I agree 100%. And one of my first jobs working at Land Systems, my mentor Mike Savino, was always working late. He was trying to move up in the organization, and I wouldn't leave before he left. And then he would walk by and he'd say, it was in New York City. Hey. What are you working on? I'm saying, oh, I'm reading these Novell networking books. I'm trying to get my certification. I'm trying to learn more. I wanna get out of hardware and get into software. And he'd say, oh, gonna get some dinner. You wanna come? Now he was four levels above me in the organization. I was the lowest; he was second to the highest. And then I got to go to dinner with him. And then I got to hear about all the big clients. I got to hear how, you know, they were doing the pitches, and then he started including me in the pitches. And all of a sudden, I went from four degrees from him to reporting into him. And that's how I learned, you know, look at the person on the left, look at the person at the right. I was, I don't think I, yeah, I was actually. I was a certified network engineer. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:45): I was a certified Novell engineer as well. I did it when I was, like, 16. Shout out Eric Schmidt. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:58:51): Yeah. I mean, if you had that in the nineties, you could make, you know, 50, 75, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:59): Well, the person that helped me a little and mentored me, he's like, listen, man. I'm not gonna tell you how to do pitches or whatever, but I'm gonna teach you how to install this. I'm gonna teach you how to manage it. And that was mentoring, and that was really valuable. And I sat beside this guy. Jason Calacanis (00:59:16): We have a Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:16): huge difference on the crew. Jason Calacanis (00:59:17): Absolutely. And if you want to be a freelancer, be a freelancer. Okay. Let's go to our little election update and some news about Kamala. And a little bit of socialism coming. So here's how I set it up today. We'll see how this goes. 2024 election update is here. I'm gonna do two things, gentlemen. I'm gonna just tee up the latest polls. And then I asked our crack All-In research team to just give me the top, you know, couple of issues in the principals' own words, the principals being, you know, the press on either side and the four people who are running for office. So let's just go through the numbers here. Nate Silver, a friend of the pod, now has Kamala Harris at 57 percent favorite to win the electoral college. There's your first chart. If you can compare this to what happened with Biden before the hot swap. Trump had a 73 percent probability to win the electoral college. So that is the swing of all swings. And, obviously, a lot has happened since then as well as the assassination attempt on Trump. Massive swing for Harris, as you can see, in Nate Silver's chart. He's doing something called Silver Bullets, and he's not at FiveThirtyEight anymore, but this is the most telling chart. You can see Biden-Trump there, and it's a it's almost a clean sweep in red. And then you go to Harris-Trump and the shift has been a 100 percent blue. Pretty dramatic. Harris has flipped, according to Silver, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Virginia. Here's a couple of quotes, and then we'll get into it. The bigger critique from Republicans this past week is that Harris will do interviews. God, it's just ridiculous that they have not sat for interviews. And meanwhile, Trump is doing every podcast and Twitter Spaces on the planet. But the big news is that this might have changed by the time you listen to this podcast. Everybody knows we tape on Thursdays for the world's number one podcast, and it comes out on Fridays. Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported that Kamala Harris will propose the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging for food and groceries on Friday. Speaker 5 (01:01:17): We're Jason Calacanis (01:01:17): gonna I'm gonna hand that off to you for your burrito detail. Oh, I'm gonna throw up. Take it easy. Sorry. Just we're we're gonna get there. You're gonna get your, you're gonna get your rare vegetables in a second. So, the other I'm gonna get your Speaker 5 (01:01:34): I'm gonna get your You're a vegetable. Jason Calacanis (01:01:36): Chastise me. Speaker 5 (01:01:36): Alright. From the J.D. Vance corner, he is questioning, Jason Calacanis (01:01:37): Tim Walz's service. Here's the quote. Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? When was this Paris campaign in responding in his 24 years of service? The governor carried, fired, and trained others to use weapons in war innumerable times yadayadayada, a lot of back and forth there about that issue. But let's get to, and there was an incredible, two-hour Spaces. Audio was a little rough, but the content was great. Elon had a conversation with Trump, and they talked about nuclear power. Elon offered his services two or three times to Trump. Sacks to do efficiency in the government and maybe cut some costs, but that's what happened notably in the last week. Friedberg, what's your take on this reported by Speaker 5 (01:02:31): the Washington Post, and I think confirmed by Politico, move by Kamala Jason Calacanis (01:02:39): Harris David Friedberg (01:02:39): Thank you for asking. Cheers. Thank thank you for having things Jason Calacanis (01:02:42): out. Yes. Yeah. I unequivocally hate socialism. Socialism destroys innovation, destroys productivity, and destroys individual liberties. David Friedberg (01:02:56): Agriculture and food markets have insanely competitive dynamics because there are commodity markets. There are tons of competitors. There is no monopoly in making food. There is no monopoly in making CPG products. There is no monopoly in retail. There is no monopoly in grocery stores. It is a small margin, highly competitive, highly fragmented, free market, and the free market works in that everyone is always competing with each other, creating new productivity improvements, and as a result, over time, prices come down, except when the government intervenes and gets involved. So I would argue that the real cause of price inflation in food is not the supposed price gouging by corporate players in the ag and food industry, all of whom are deeply competitive with one another. But rather, is the result of the inflation associated with government spending and stimulus coming out of COVID. Nick, exhibit 1. The Fed balance sheet. From COVID to today, the Fed balance sheet grew from $4,200,000,000,000 to $7,200,000,000,000, a growth of 70%. The Federal Reserve went out and they bought assets and they issued debt to banks and introduced liquidity into the system. If you go to the next slide, as a result, the M2 money supply increased from $15,000,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000,000, since COVID, a 40% increase. K. So now there is more money in the system, so the cost of everything should go up, which is exactly what we've seen. We can walk through a couple of the other commodity price charts from the St. Louis Fed. Here is the price of electricity. As an example, the price of electricity has gone up a little bit less demand to money supply. But the truth is when you start to actually look at ag commodity prices over time, what's happened is there was certainly a boost coming from COVID, but the competition and the challenges in overproduction in the ag markets have started to hit and started to bring prices back down. So here's the price of strawberries. Strawberries today are selling for less than they were pre-COVID. Potatoes are now back to where they were pre-COVID. Now let me give you some statistics on some of the supposed price gouging companies in the industry. David Friedberg (01:05:05): Kraft Heinz stock pre-COVID was 29 bucks a share. Today, Kraft Heinz stock is 34 bucks a share. 2019 revenue of $25 billion, 2023 revenue of $26 billion. EBITDA in 2019 of $6.1 billion, EBITDA in 2023 of $6.3 billion. There's not a lot of profit gouging. In fact, Kraft Heinz has not been able to keep up with the inflation. Starbucks, which we just talked about, their stock was at $90 pre-COVID. And today, 93 bucks, 2019 revenue of $26 billion, operating income of $4.1 billion, 2023 revenue of $36 billion, but operating income only 5.9. Margins have come down in Starbucks. Nick, if you pull up the McKinsey chart, Jason Calacanis (01:05:48): this is a study of David Friedberg (01:05:48): the grocery industry, the state of grocery in North America 2023 by McKinsey. Accelerating pressures on profitability to cope with the pandemic's upheaval, grocers have had to dramatically increase CapEx, increase supplies. As a result, they've seen a significant impact on margins. Here's the margin profile pre-pandemic. And today, gross margin has declined by two points from 47.6 to 45.6. EBITDA margin has declined by 1.5 points. And now let's just go to the final chart, which is CPG companies, the companies that make food and sell it to consumers. As you can see, during the COVID era, the 3-year rolling TSR has declined since COVID across the board. So food companies are seeing food prices come down. So farmers are really suffering. Labor costs have tripled since the pandemic, but they're still having to sell products at the same price. CPG companies have lower margins and supermarkets have lower margins. So there is nowhere in the ag or food supply chain that we are seeing fundamentally price gouging or profit-taking happening. What has happened is the cost of labor, the cost of moving stuff around, the cost of fuel, the cost of electricity, the cost of goods has all risen with inflation because of the increase in the money supply and federal spending, and the stimulus associated with the Federal Reserve buying assets onto their balance sheet. So, arguably, I would say that trying to step in and cap prices will reduce competition, and as a result, will reduce investment in improving productivity. And we have seen this countless times with every socialist experiment in human history that has started with caps on food, and it has resulted in bread lines like you see in the image behind me today as we can see in Soviet Russia. This is a mistake. It is a problem. It is anti-American. It is anti-free market. It is anti-innovation. It's David Friedberg (01:07:36): And, ultimately, it's anti-liberty. And I cannot stand it. That's my rant. Jason Calacanis (01:07:42): Okay. Thanks for coming to Friedberg's TED Talk. Chamath, are you nodding strongly in agreement? This is just dumb and pandering. Am I correct? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:50): There is no sustainable solution to inflation if you cap what a company can charge because Speaker 5 (01:07:57): what they'll do is they'll just stop producing. They'll manage to the margin that they'll they'll just Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:05): stop. And the reason they can stop is that they would rather contract and maintain their profitability than lose money. And then what happens is there's less products in the market, and so the prices go up. So I think it stands to reason that the Harris campaign has access to some reasonably smart people. They also have access to really smart people like Speaker 5 (01:08:28): Larry Summers. And so I think if they just make a few phone calls, Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:33): they'll figure out that this is a really terrible idea. Jason Calacanis (01:08:36): Sacks, any thoughts? Overall election and this specific issue. You take it either way you like. David Sacks (01:08:41): Yeah. So this story was reported by The Washington Post and by Bloomberg and others. So it appears to be more than just a rumor or conjecture. I mean, these are publications Speaker 5 (01:08:53): that are apparently well-sourced in the Harris campaign. So I think it David Sacks (01:08:53): is fair game for us to comment on this policy proposal that she apparently will be coming out with. Look, I think Friedberg is right about the policy. The idea of price controls Speaker 5 (01:09:10): is widely discredited across the political spectrum. David Sacks (01:09:10): I mean, I think virtually all economists agree on this. This was tried extensively in the 1970s, not just under Jimmy Carter, but Nixon tried wage and price controls. And Gerald Ford had this whole program called Whip Inflation Now where they were turning out these buttons called these WIN buttons, and then Carter extended it. That's why we had huge lines at the gas pumps because we had price controls on gas, and those lines at the pump went away almost overnight when Ronald Reagan came in and removed the price caps on gas. So we've tried price controls before. It didn't work, and it is remarkable that she would be proposing here potentially as her first major policy proposal on the Speaker 5 (01:09:59): economy to go back to this 1970s era failed policy. And I think it's really tipping David Sacks (01:09:59): her hand in terms of where her economic proposals are gonna come from and what she really thinks. Keep in mind that throughout the Biden presidency, he rhetorically would blame corporate greed for Speaker 5 (01:10:19): the rise in inflation we saw as like David Sacks (01:10:19): a scapegoat because he didn't wanna blame himself for all the spending. But she's going further now and actually instituting this as policy. Jason Calacanis (01:10:31): Yeah. And so just to be clear with everybody, we don't have the actual policy here, but it's been reported. Seems like it's true. Maybe it's not. Maybe they step it back. We don't know the details of this at all. What we do know is it's been tried before. What we do know is there are times when you could, like, in an economic emergency, like, during, what was the giant hurricane or wars? You know, you can keep your eye on this. But the truth is, as we just talked about with Starbucks, you know, Sacks is like, I got a free cup of coffee or close to free. I make my own cold brew, shout out Café Du Monde because I don't wanna pay $8 run. The market responds. And when you put your thumb on capitalism, when you put 12 thumbs on capitalism and on the scale, all kinds of weird behaviors occur, it does not work. And consumers can just simply opt out. They can eat breakfast at home. Speaker 5 (01:11:23): They can Jason Calacanis (01:11:23): brown bag their lunch. And that's a David Friedberg (01:11:25): great point. Jason Calacanis (01:11:26): Then companies are gonna be like, holy People are not buying $8 coffees. Let's make a cheaper happy meal. David Friedberg (01:11:33): To support your point and what Chamath was messaging on our chat, look at Walmart stock up 7% today. Because they offer lower-priced solutions to consumers and Dollar General and Dollar Tree rallying as well. When the market competes, consumers benefit, and there are companies that will win. And the companies that try to price gouge and the companies that try to charge too much will lose. Starbucks has been trying to charge too much for sugar water. They have a real problem they are now tackling. Walmart is trying to bring value to consumers. They are winning. That is how free markets work. When the government steps in and says, here's how much margin you can make, or here's how much prices should be. It ruins everything. And the entire incentive structure goes away, and you end up with bread lines. Jason Calacanis (01:12:18): what do you got? David Sacks (01:12:19): Well, there was a really interesting story in The Wall Street Journal this week called Kamala Harris's Economic Team and Agenda Start to Take Shape. And it was interesting because it said here in the first paragraph that the challenge of her economics team is, quote, differentiating the candidate, which is Harris, from her unpopular boss, which is Biden, without abandoning his policies. And the problem that they have is that for the last three and a half years, there has been no daylight between Harris and Biden. And in fact, Karine Jean-Pierre said exactly that in the article. There's been no daylight. They've been highly aligned. Now in response to that, what the campaign has been trying to do is, a, not say anything about policy. Just try to redefine the candidate based on biography. She's done no interviews with the media. She's done no sort of unscripted speaking appearances. And the media has cooperated with this so far. The most egregious example was that Time magazine cover story, which was this really gauzy profile that was a hagiography, even though she refused to even do an interview with Time magazine in that story. So strategy number one has been just to kind of hide from the media in terms of what she would really do. Strategy number two was adopting some of Donald Trump's most popular policies. So she just announced no tax on tips. She was, I think, widely kind of criticized for being a copycat on that. And now we finally have strategy number three, which is to tiptoe into the campaign with her own original proposal on price controls, which I think is being roundly criticized, but it shows where her policy instincts are coming from. I mean, this is somebody who has always been on the progressive left. When she was a member of the Senate, GovTrack rated her as the most liberal member of the Senate, even to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and you're now seeing this come out in her policy proposals. So, look, I think she's definitely gotten a bounce in the polls over the last few weeks because of this favorable media coverage, but it's a sugar high based on something that's not substantive. David Sacks (01:14:25): I mean, she didn't put forward any proposals. And I think that now that she finally is putting out policy proposals that can be questioned and analyzed and criticized, I think this is going to be the beginning of, I would say, a big correction in her campaign. David Friedberg (01:14:40): Jake, how do you agree? You've incurred strategy is off at this point? And is it starting to prefer to put out these proposals? Jason Calacanis (01:14:47): I remain undecided, moderate, left-leaning moderate, have voted Republican 35 percent of the time, 65 percent of the time, and I've been studying the strategy here. Her strategy is crushing Trump. So, obviously, it's working. Now we I'm I don't like it. I think everybody should be doing debates. I was really upset that there wasn't a debate or a speedrun primary. I don't like the fact that Trump and Biden skipped out on the primary debates. I think they should be forced to do debates, forced to do interviews. And so on that front, I hate what this is doing to democracy. Now pragmatically, running out the clock as a strategy and not defining your positions Speaker 5 (01:15:28): too much and just, you know, selling the vibes is Jason Calacanis (01:15:28): a brilliant strategy and it's working. And, you know, as Trump said, the VPs don't matter. What she did as VP doesn't really matter. What JD Vance thinks as VP doesn't matter. VPs don't matter. You're voting for the president. The VPs get in line. Trump's positions JD Vance flipped a bunch of his positions to align with Trump, and I think Kamala did the same when she worked with Biden. That's your job is to align with the president. Now that she's her own pro and Walt is gonna flip to her. So I think they're putting out moderate vibes. I think they're kinda socialist, I think they're not as socialist as Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, but they're not moderates. But they're pretending to be moderates, and that is working as a strategy. They are demolishing Trump. And then Trump is getting bad advice around him, I think, you know, if I were to handicap this on a wrap up, it would be just one more minute. I think Trump was so good on all in. He was so good at the RNC for the first half of his speech when he is presidential when he has a big open tent, I love him. I think he's great. And I think he's, like, world positive. When he goes into grievance culture, when he goes after the race stuff like he did with the Black journalists, when he goes after gender or does the gender stuff and the cat stuff. I hate that stuff. Moderates hate that stuff. Women hate that stuff. And the moderates and the women in the swing states will decide the election, and Trump's campaign is floundering right now. They have to get a they have to flip it back to that Trump 2.0 I described many times where he's serious, presidential, not bullying people, not doing the insult comic thing. This going after woke, it's going after cat ladies. It's just gross and not necessary. So I think, you know, maybe Trump after the RNC, after the DNC will go back to Trump 2.0, that would be much better. And I think Trump has a chance of winning. If he does that, if Kamala goes moderate, I think she's gonna win. Jason Calacanis (01:17:20): So that's my strategic take. I remain undecided as a voter. David Sacks (01:17:25): But you just said she's a socialist, not a moderate. Jason Calacanis (01:17:28): I think in her heart, she's between, like, if you had Clinton and a great question. If you had Clinton and you had, you know, Bernie Sanders, I think she kinda falls between the two. I think she's pretending to be a moderate to get votes. Right. You know, just like Trump will pretend to be super right wing to get the, you know, or acted up, but he's kind of a moderate too, socially. David Sacks (01:17:46): I think Trump is the moderate in this race and she's much more moderate than she is. I think that actually is true. Look, I think that she's pretending to be a lot of things. She's pretending to be a moderate when really she was the most liberal member of the Senate. She's pretending to be a change agent when, really, she's the incumbent. Keep in mind that she has been in office now for three and a half years as part of the Biden-Harris administration. And she was perceived within that administration as their emissary to the left wing of the party. I mean, remember that when she was put on the ticket, Biden was perceived as the moderate, and she was perceived as the person on the left, and she was gonna basically help consolidate those votes. So she's pretending to be a lot of things that she isn't. And the reason why David Friedberg (01:18:25): it's working is because the press is fully cooperative in David Sacks (01:18:25): letting her run a campaign without doing press interviews, without doing unscripted appearances, and the press Speaker 5 (01:18:38): frankly is embarrassing itself by revealing themselves to be effectively DNC operatives. And that Time magazine cover story was just David Sacks (01:18:38): the latest example of that. I do think that this strategy can only work for so long. I think that the media is starting to feel a little bit embarrassed. They're starting to get a little bit ashamed about the fact they're letting her just give them the Heisman, and I don't think she can run the clock for three months without doing interviews. I just think that I think she can do this for another week or so. I think that they're gonna run this playbook through the convention, but eventually she's gonna have to start doing interviews. And she's gonna have to start putting out more substantive policy proposals. And I think the fact that this price control proposal is their very first one that they've put out. I think this shows that this is not gonna be easy for her. David Friedberg (01:19:27): It certainly jolted me awake, Sacks. I'll tell you that. Speaker 5 (01:19:30): So David Sacks (01:19:30): Yeah. I mean, this idea that she can pretend to be a moderate and just run on vibes with no interviews and no subsequent proposals. I don't think it's gonna work for three months. I think she's gonna reveal herself. David Friedberg (01:19:40): I think an educated voter base is gonna wake up to that. And particularly in that independent segment, there's gonna be a lot of acknowledgment that maybe these are gonna be the right policies. Jason Calacanis (01:19:49): I think they're preparing their policies, and they're gonna drop them after the DNC. Chamath, what's your take on strategy? And then we'll move on to Science Corner. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:57): Any thoughts? We're in the middle of the relief rally that Biden isn't in the race. I think that we had a different version of a relief rally when everybody realized that President Trump hadn't been assassinated. So these are the pendulum swings, I think, of an electorate that still hasn't been given a clear definition of A or B. In this case, I think what's happening is there's a lot of testing of language and ideas and concepts that both sides are doing. And I think we will not know where this election Speaker 5 (01:20:33): is going to go until after September 10 and that first presidential Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:33): debate because I think that these big issues will be put to the test. The journal assessing the questions will corner both candidates. Both of them will have points of view. And then I think they'll have to go into these five states that matter on these five issues that matter. And I do think that this will be one of those issues because this is a very aggressive proposal that has a lot of implications, and that has a lot of historical context of never having worked, literally never. Jason Calacanis (01:21:08): So it's it's dumb. We we haven't seen it, but it it seems dumb on its face. And just to be clear, there is no proposal. We're just commenting on reports of a proposal. Rosa will probably come out on Friday this weekend. So you can read it for yourselves, and and we'll talk about the actual proposal. If there is one, who knows? It could be bad reporting. Could all be cap. Friedberg, do you want to talk about Boeing? David Friedberg (01:21:30): Well, I wanted to just highlight the the the Starliner project and Chamath Palihapitiya (01:21:34): Okay. Unbelievable issues. Unbelievable. Jason Calacanis (01:21:37): Give us an overview, and then let's let's let's let's chop it up as we wrap. David Friedberg (01:21:40): Two NASA astronauts flew on the Boeing Starliner capsule June 5, and they docked with the ISS, and they're now stuck on the ISS. And they might be stuck there until February because the Starliner has a number of technical issues. Astronauts cannot get back in the Starliner and just fly back to Earth. NASA's kind of evaluating the options here on what to do and whether to put them on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in February to get them back. So I just want to talk a little bit about the history of this project and provide a little context before we highlight the particularly acute story of two astronauts being stuck in space right now, which Speaker 5 (01:22:20): is an incredible story. So this is a next-gen space capsule that David Friedberg (01:22:21): was designed to take people to and from low Earth orbit basically to the ISS. And NASA, if you guys remember in the 2000s, decided to stop making their own vessels, and they're going to start using third-party contractors. So they went out and had a competitive bidding process. And ultimately in 2010, they gave both SpaceX and Boeing the winning contracts to develop these commercial crew transportation capabilities. SpaceX obviously developed the Crew Dragon capsule, so it was unveiled in 2010 as the CST-100, Boeing's first commercially developed space capsule. The company would take on all the financial risk for developing it with a fixed price contract from NASA of To date, by the way, Boeing has taken a $1.6 billion financial hit on the development of this program. SpaceX, by the way, won a $2.6 billion contract to develop the Crew Dragon capsule. And just to give you guys a sense, the Crew Dragon capsule has flown 13 missions thus far to the ISS. And this was the first crewed mission flown by Boeing, both of which got contracts at the same time. So originally, it was gonna be a 2017 launch timeline, and I just wanna hit on some of the history of the Starliner problems. 2016, it was delayed. Jason Calacanis (01:23:40): Just to confirm, you said it was $4.2 billion that contract? David Friedberg (01:23:43): That contract with Boeing to develop the Starliner capsule. So the first issue arose in 2016 when there were design problems, the first crewed flight was then pushed back to be scheduled for 2019. In 2018, they found issues with propellant leaks, which led to more delays. 2019, a test flight parachute failed. December of 2019, they had their first uncrewed test flight, and there were software errors that would have caused destruction of the spacecraft. This led to NASA and Boeing submitting 80 different changes that needed to happen before they did their next uncrewed test flight. So they then pushed that all the way out to 2021. Boeing ended up saying that it cost us half a billion dollars to do that. Then in August of 2021, 13 propulsion system valve issues were discovered on the launch pad. The flight was aborted and the capsule was returned. They eventually got it up again in space in May of 2022 and it docked with the ISS. And it returned back to Earth, even though one of the parachutes failed. When it returned to Earth, it still made it down. This again led to the 2023 first crewed launch, which means people are in the capsule. This was originally supposed to be in 2017. And they kept pushing it back because of more issues with the parachute system, and then they finally got it launched on June 5, 2024, with two astronauts on board to go to ISS and come back. On the way, they discovered that five out of the 28 maneuvering thrusters, which is how they can move this capsule through space to get it to dock with the ISS and ultimately make its way back to Earth, were malfunctioning. They have now discovered five helium leaks. Helium is stored in a pressurized system to actually control those thrusters and make it move through space. And now they may not even be able to get this capsule to fly off of the ISS. So on June 28, NASA announced that while the Starliner is theoretically capable of returning the astronauts to Earth in an emergency on the ISS, the capsule is not approved to fly until these thruster issues and the leaking helium are figured out or better understood, and they have now pushed the decision to the end of August. David Friedberg (01:25:52): It would be massively embarrassing for Boeing if these two astronauts had to be rescued by SpaceX, if its Crew Dragon capsule had to find its way up to the ISS. They hopped on and they came back to Earth. Clearly, a massive problem, but it's certainly a personal and a human story now with these two astronauts stuck on the ISS. Jason Calacanis (01:26:11): And then you've David Friedberg (01:26:12): had a lot of comments on Boeing in the past, but, I mean, does this feel like a continued underscoring of the issue? Is that Boeing? Jason Calacanis (01:26:19): And just to be clear, Chamath, the statistics are three for Starliner, two unmanned, one manned, and then for SpaceX with the Dragon, they did 118 with NASA, three commercially with other passengers. Yeah? David Friedberg (01:26:35): Yeah. So the NASA Cargo Dragon, which only has cargo on it, not people, has completed 9 successful missions to and from the ISS. There are 6 more planned, and they've obviously done 13 missions with the Crew Dragon. And by the way, don't know if you guys know this. This is a surprise, but exciting to share that we are gonna have a Crew Dragon capsule from SpaceX at the All-In Summit in LA parked on the lawn. You can actually go inside and check it out and take a little tour. It's gonna be amazing. So thank you to the SpaceX team for bringing the Crew Dragon capsule. Chamath? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:05): My gosh. I mean, where do I begin? Look, Boeing is these 3 very complicated businesses that try to live as one. So you have a commercial airline business. You have a defense business. And you have the space business. I'll be the first one to say that I think it's extremely difficult to be good at any one of those three things. And the probability of getting all of those three things right is basically next to impossible. That's just a general comment, and I think that specialization is better. The second thing that I'll say is that I observed this company about five years ago, and I wrote about it in my annual letter and part of the reason why I wrote about it was there was a quote. I'll never be able to judge what motivated Dennis Muilenburg, whether it was a stock price that was going to continue to go up and up, or whether it was just beating the other guy to the next rate increase. He said he added later if anybody ran over the rainbow for a pot of gold on stock, it would have been his. Who do you think said this? It was the incoming CEO of Boeing. And I was so flabbergasted because I'd never seen something like this. So in a company Speaker 5 (01:28:14): where safety has to be the number one priority, to have an individual that's characterized Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:15): by the incoming CEO as solely focused on their compensation plan, sort of explains why there's all these fissures in this company. Because again, back to that famous Charlie Munger quote, show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome. If the incentive is safety, and world-class engineering, that's what you'll get. But if the incentive is earnings per share growth, then that's what you will also get. And Boeing was a darling of the stock market for a very long time. And now what happens is Speaker 5 (01:28:53): underneath the other things that actually should matter, like safety, are slightly deprioritized, and then you have these issues. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:54): I really hope these two people get back safe. It seems like they're doing a lot of experiments, and they love being up there, but it's a little bit unacceptable that they have to be there until February. But I do trust that if Elon has to go and get them, SpaceX will do a great job, and they'll be home sooner. Jason Calacanis (01:29:21): Sacks, one of the great things about this. Thank God NASA gave two contracts out of, hey. Give him one. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:28): You know? Oh my God. Could you imagine if that was lobbying? You Jason Calacanis (01:29:30): would be asking my questions to go get them. And then, like, you know, we're in a little I don't know if you've been watching this. Speaker 5 (01:29:36): This is David Friedberg (01:29:36): what I thought we could discuss. It's like, Jason Calacanis (01:29:37): you know, is David Friedberg (01:29:38): there a benefit in having to? Jason Calacanis (01:29:39): Dependent on Putin at this moment in time when Ukraine is making massive gains into Russian territory. I know this hasn't come up all that much, but that would be really dangerous. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:48): But by the way, just back to what Friedberg said before, sorry to interrupt you before you go, Sacks, but why is this even possible? It's exactly, as you said, JCal, we have competition. But why is competition possible? It's because of what Friedberg talked about before. We didn't have a set price. The government didn't come and say, you will build it for X, and I'm only doing it one time. Speaker 5 (01:30:05): The free market was able to solve this problem, Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:06): and it turned out the more capable solution was 40% cheaper than the one that they thought was going to work. And the one that was 40% cheaper was also on time, and the other one was unreliable, and this other one's seven, eight, nine, ten years delayed. David Friedberg (01:30:29): It's 100% some off. That's a perfect example to such Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:32): A every day of the fact that these other ideas just don't work. Jason Calacanis (01:30:38): Yeah. I think we've pretty much beaten that capitalism is the greatest force for innovation and lowering prices. Sacks, your thoughts on this situation? David Friedberg (01:30:46): Humanity. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:30:47): Yeah. God forbid, people will get air conditioning at a lower price, you know, and smartphones, etc. Sacks, your thoughts here? David Sacks (01:30:57): Yeah. I mean, look, if we're talking about capitalism, I think about what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said, which is capitalism is a process of creative destruction. And the creativity happens in the early days when you've got a founder who's creating a startup and the business gets big, but then it gets older and the founder goes away. And the company can drift and become bureaucratic. And sometimes it can renew itself. And maybe you get a Brian Nicholson, maybe to save it, and sometimes it doesn't. And the companies that get old and don't renew themselves eventually fade away, and they get destroyed and replaced by other startups. It's a system that has worked incredibly well in America. That's the basis for all of our prosperity and innovation. When you compare that to the political process, it's very different. I mean, the political process kinda has this knee-jerk resistance to change and innovation, and it has an impulse to control things. It wants to control prices. It thinks it can solve problems with this Speaker 5 (01:32:00): mandates, and it doesn't reform itself. It creates new bureaucracies David Sacks (01:32:00): and never gets rid of them. I mean, we create new departments. They never go away. They just keep getting bigger and bigger. There's never any creative destruction. It's just like Speaker 5 (01:32:12): a blob. David Sacks (01:32:13): It's a one-way ratchet of your credit growth. So it's really clear what creates prosperity. And I do think we have now reached a point where the government has gotten so big and so out of control and so expensive that it actually is Speaker 5 (01:32:27): threatening this engine of creative destruction. And at some point, I David Sacks (01:32:28): think voters are gonna have to make a choice about whether they're gonna try and rein in the government and create more room for capitalism and innovation or they're gonna allow it to get overtaken. Jason Calacanis (01:32:44): I love your capitalism quote and it reminds me of the Winston Churchill one, which I'm sure you've heard: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. It's a Speaker 5 (01:32:54): That's a great quote. It's pretty natural. Jason Calacanis (01:32:54): It's strong. Man. He Speaker 5 (01:33:01): I'd like Jason Calacanis (01:33:02): to hang with that dude. That's the guy I would like to hang out with. David Sacks (01:33:05): Gotta hang out with. Jason Calacanis (01:33:06): Teddy Roosevelt. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:33:07): Oh my gosh. Drinking love Speaker 5 (01:33:09): to go. Jason Calacanis (01:33:09): Drinking with Teddy to cars, guns. Wow. I like to go. Churchill took David Friedberg (01:33:14): a bath every day. Jason Calacanis (01:33:15): Friedberg, please don't bring up this whole thing about baths because then you're gonna make me pull out my phone the three or four times you called me from the bath, and I took a screenshot. I literally, Friedberg's in the bath. He lights candles. He takes a picture of his pale stems, and he sends it to me and calls me from the bath, Chamath. David Friedberg (01:33:34): You can't see him. It's always ours. Jason Calacanis (01:33:36): I have PTSD. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:33:37): He's called me from the bath. I know he's in the bath because you hear this kind of, like, echoey kind of You know, so it does and it's like, oh my god. You're in the bathroom. Yeah. It's like it's calling you that he's in the bathroom. David Friedberg (01:33:49): Sacks, I will call you from the bath. I'll call you later. Right. Jason Calacanis (01:33:52): It's so disturbing. David Sacks (01:33:53): I mean, that invasion of Russia that you're talking about. It's not what you think it is. David Friedberg (01:33:58): So yes. We haven't had a, a general fact update in a while. I actually wanna hear your take on this. Like, what is Jason Calacanis (01:34:05): the real story? Yeah. Tell us. David Friedberg (01:34:07): Yeah. What is the real story with the Ukraine counter invasion into Russia. David Sacks (01:34:11): I think you're falling for a lot of hype. I mean, what's happening is that the stage of the war is that the fighting is Jason Calacanis (01:34:18): in the Donbas and along a 1,200 David Sacks (01:34:18): kilometer front in Ukraine where the Russians have just been pounding the Ukrainians. The Russians have more soldiers. They have more artillery. They have more air power, and they have air superiority. And they've just been annihilating the Ukrainians. I mean, Ukrainian casualties according to some sources are somewhere between 30,000-60,000 a month. It's massive and unsustainable. So what Zelensky did is he basically threw this Hail Mary where he took some of their best forces, their best reserves and had them attack this undefended part of Russia, Kursk. And, yeah, they took a few hundred miles of undefended territory, but there's nothing strategically important there. And now Russian air power is basically creating significant casualties among those forces and the Ukrainian forces are now trying to figure out what to do. I mean, they're basically running around this part of Russia, like headless chickens trying to figure out where they can dig in and find some defensive fortifications. I don't know what Zelensky is trying to accomplish. I guess it's kind of a PR offensive. A lot of people have been fooled into thinking that this is somehow a game changer in the war. It's not. All Zelensky has really done is take some of his best troops away from where the strategically important fighting is, have them attack this part of Russia. And over time, Russia's just gonna mop them up. Did the Russians get caught with their pants down? Yeah. I guess they did. Is that an embarrassment to Putin? I guess it can be spun that way. Does it change the outcome of this war in any way? No. It's not. And what we're on track for is at some point, probably next year, Ukraine is gonna collapse. I mean, their position in this war is unsustainable. And taking some of their top troops, feeding them into Kursk where they can be easily picked off by the Russians is only gonna accelerate that process. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:08): And then, Sacks, what about Nord Stream? What we just found out about David Sacks (01:36:13): Well, the Nord Stream story is very strange because we're on our third or fourth explanation here of what happened. I mean, it was pretty clear that somehow the U.S. was behind it, and they've been blaming, you know, first, they said that the Russians did it, right, which makes no sense. That'd be like the Russians shooting their own legs off. That was the first cover story. Then they kinda went with, I guess, a Ukrainian did it from a yacht. I guess that's the story they're on now. Jason Calacanis (01:36:42): Yeah. The Wall Street Journal report, just to give people the background of why we're talking about this. The Wall Street Journal reported that Germany's investigation into this, you know, the people who were impacted by it. Here's the quote. The holding was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for the country. The Ukraine operation costs around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. Well, the small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers, one was a woman whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise. So you're saying you don't believe that German report. David Sacks (01:37:18): Well, no. So this report about that yacht being used and how a Ukrainian was like the mastermind of this? Yep. That report is not anything new. This has been out for, I don't know, at least six months. I've always been skeptical about this. The thing to understand about the Nord Stream pipeline is that it was a massive structure surrounded by huge amounts of concrete on the ocean floor. And blowing this thing up required some significant expertise in underwater demolition. I'm just very skeptical that could be accomplished by six guys on a yacht under Zaluzhny. I mean, the Ukrainians have never had a navy. This just doesn't seem like something that's in their wheelhouse of capabilities. It always made more sense to me that the U.S. was involved somehow. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:38:07): But how do you think an article this detailed that points to the Dutch intelligence community, the German intelligence community, American intel. How does an article like this with this much detail then get written and put into The Wall Street Journal? How does that happen? David Sacks (01:38:26): I think intelligence sources wanted it to happen. I mean, they have to get their sources from somewhere. Right? And I'm just saying that this story about Zaluzhny and the yacht is not new. This has been out there for many months. Look. I mean, it could be true. I mean, I guess I don't know for sure but I guess I'm also just saying that I'm a little bit skeptical about this. I mean, Seymour Hersh had other reporting from different sources who claimed that the U.S. was behind it, and President Biden himself at a press conference said, that if Russia invades Ukraine, we will bring an end to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And when a reporter asked him, how will you do that? He said we have ways. We'll get it done. And, similarly, Victoria Nuland warned at a press conference that Nord Stream 2 will not move forward if Russia invades and then lo and behold, the pipeline gets blown up. And if you're comparing which of these two forces has the capability to do something like this, I know for sure that the U.S. does. Ukraine I'm just a little more skeptical of. Jason Calacanis (01:39:22): Just to give you some facts, to introduce some facts here. It was only 260 feet or so down where they blew it up. I've dove to 130, 140 feet many times. You can easily dive 300, 400, 500 feet. This is not difficult. I could dive to 260 feet with, you know, one day of training. And I've done half of that, and I have only dived 25 times in my life. So this is easily accomplished, Sacks. And so this sounds like it's dead on. I mean, I know you don't want to. David Sacks (01:39:54): What about the explosives? Jason Calacanis (01:39:55): Yeah. It's very simple. I mean, you're literally attaching it to a bike and you hit boom. I mean, these people are The Ukrainian people are in the face David Sacks (01:40:04): of amount of explosives to do something like this? Jason Calacanis (01:40:06): No. It does not. In the face of Ukraine defending itself against Russia, one of the greatest militaries on the planet, Chamath Palihapitiya (01:40:14): This idea that Speaker 5 (01:40:15): that same group of people who have held Russia at bay for Jason Calacanis (01:40:15): two years plus can't go down 260 feet and blow it up is ridiculous. They could easily do this. This is not a difficult task. Super easy for the Ukrainian army. David Sacks (01:40:28): I don't think Speaker 5 (01:40:29): you're in David Sacks (01:40:29): a position to know. I don't think you're in Jason Calacanis (01:40:30): a position to know. Because I have facts. 260 feet down. I've dove to 130. It's very easy to go 260. CNN. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:40:37): That's your facts. Jason Calacanis (01:40:38): Yeah. I mean, it's it's just all reality, Chamath. I'm sorry. Is the most biased person in the world when it comes Speaker 6 (01:40:43): to just Speaker 5 (01:40:44): hysterical to hear him. And, Jason, Jason, Jason, Jason, you what you just said was it here Jason Calacanis (01:40:44): are the facts. It's 260 feet down. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:40:53): I've gone to half that, so it's possible. So they do. Jason Calacanis (01:40:56): That's what you just no. No. He's saying it's too it's it's Sacks' pretty Speaker 5 (01:41:01): premise is this is too this is beyond the Jason Calacanis (01:41:01): capability of the Ukrainian army. That's ridiculous, Sacks. Speaker 5 (01:41:08): A lot David Sacks (01:41:08): of people think that. Jason Calacanis (01:41:10): Well, a lot of people are dumb then. It is the stupidest concept. You're also an explosive expert as well. I'm an expert at watching Ukraine. No. No. He was just asking firecrackers because Speaker 5 (01:41:22): he knows Chamath Palihapitiya (01:41:22): what he's talking about there as well. Jason Calacanis (01:41:24): Dude, I bought pineapples at the quarter stick of dynamite when I was in Brooklyn. David Sacks (01:41:27): Six guys on a yacht did this. Jason Calacanis (01:41:29): Easily. Easily. Six Ukrainians, these are hardcore mofos. You you think these Ukrainians are not hardcore. They were pro they probably did it drunk. They did it drunk. I bet you they were half in the bag when they blew that up. That's why Russia can't beat them. David Sacks (01:41:46): I've also read the Seymour Hersh story, and it just makes a lot more sense. That's all I'm gonna say is it just makes a lot more sense to me. And by the way, I've never taken away anything from the Ukrainians as a fighting force. Speaker 5 (01:41:56): I mean, clearly, they are fighting bravely, and they are hardcore. David Sacks (01:41:56): I've never taken that away from them. And I'm certainly not saying that they're incompetent or anything like that, and they've definitely been massively plussed up by American weapons. Jason Calacanis (01:42:09): And you'd like to see them win versus Russia and get Russia out of their country. Right? David Sacks (01:42:13): I would like to see America stay out of other people's wars, and I would have liked to have seen them agree to a peace deal that would have avoided this Jason Calacanis (01:42:20): war. Okay. Who would you rather win the war? Russia or Ukraine, if you had to pick. Who would you rather David Sacks (01:42:25): see win? I don't think America should take sides in other people's wars. I think we should stay out of them, and I think we should agree to peace deals when we can and not sabotage those peace deals. Jason Calacanis (01:42:33): Yeah. One for peace deals too. I'm also for democracies beating autocracies. Okay, everybody. This has been another amazing episode David Sacks (01:42:41): of canceled elections. Jason Calacanis (01:42:43): This has been another amazing episode of the All-In Podcast. For the Rain Man. Yeah. David Sacks, the one and only Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, getting Speaker 5 (01:42:52): ready for the All-In Summit sold out. Jason Calacanis (01:42:52): Great speakers. Lots of surprises for y'all. And our chairman dictator, so rested, so Speaker 5 (01:43:03): tan, working 15 hours a day in Italy, and we'll talk about wine. I have a I have something that something Jason Calacanis (01:43:03): that I have something for Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:14): Around 80, 90 that I'll be able to talk about. Hopefully, Zoom is. Jason Calacanis (01:43:18): Oh, yum yum. Oh, woo. I just had a little bet ski in it. Alright, everybody. I am world's greatest moderator and the executive producer for life. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:26): Love you, boys. Jason Calacanis (01:43:27): See you next time, everybody. Bye bye. To let your winners ride. Rainman, David Sacks. And it said. Speaker 5 (01:43:32): We open sources to the fans, and they've just gone crazy. Jason Calacanis (01:43:33): Like that. David Sacks (01:43:46): Like, what airliners were. Speaker 8 (01:44:00): We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just pieces. It's like this, like, sexual tension, but they just need to release them out. Speaker 5 (01:44:12): Me. Where. Jason Calacanis (01:44:14): Did you get Murphy's artifact? Speaker 5 (01:44:15): Doing all of it. I'm doing all of it. Jason Calacanis (01:44:26): And now, the plugs. The All-In Summit is taking place in Los Angeles September 8-10. You can apply for tickets at summit.allinpodcast.co. And you can subscribe to this show on YouTube. Yes. Watch all the videos. Our YouTube channel has passed 500,000 subscribers. Shout out to Donnie from Queens. Follow the show at x.com/theallinpod, TikTok, theallinpod, Instagram, theallinpod, LinkedIn, search for All-In Podcast, and follow Chamath. He's at x.com/chamath. Sign up for his weekly email, "What I Read This Week," at chamath.substack.com and sign up for a developer account at console.grok.com and see what all the excitement is about. Follow Sacks at x.com/davidsacks and sign up for Follow freedbergx.com/freedberg, and Ojalo is hiring. Click on the careers page at ojalogenetics.com. I am the world's greatest moderator, Jason Calcanis, if you are a founder and you want to come to my accelerators and my programs, founder dot university, 1 shot close slash apply, to apply for funding from your boy, Jake, out for your startup, and Check out Athenawow.com. This is the company I am most excited about at the moment. Athenawow.com to get a virtual assistant for about $3000 a month. I have two of them. Thanks for tuning in to the world's number one podcast. You can help by telling just two friends. That's all I ask. Forward this podcast to two friends and say, this is the world's greatest podcast. You gotta check it out. We'll make you smarter and make you laugh, laugh while learning. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.