LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland

27:32The entire public service is riddled with this. The entire private service is riddled with this, which is that we've lost the script about what is important. So it's yet another example. She's probably quite a capable person who if was just allowed to focus on fighting fires and savings people's lives would probably do a good job. But if you had to add all these other things that are not germane to that task, then people will get frustrated and projected onto her. It seems like a lot of projecting going on here to Muffy Agri. All of that said though, I think you got to go back to how did these fires start?

28:08How did they grow out of control? And again, I think that these winds didn't come out of nowhere in the sense that they caught everybody off guard. This has happened before. That area has gone through this exact moment. Yes. Yes, they were laws that were proposed, they were vetoed. So that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick Caruso who were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took proactive and protective measures. Could those proactive and protective measures not be taken more broadly through LA County? Of course they could have.

28:48Why were they not? And here what we're seeing on the screen is recruits those villains. Let me ask a very specific question. Pacific houses. How much money, and we know the answer to this, how much money did the government of California spend poorly as it turns out on homelessness? There's about 21 billion dollars and illegal immigrants. I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions. If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas, is, what would the outcome have been? Maybe there still would have been a fire. Maybe there would have been damage.

29:23But it's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now. Yeah, I think what you're getting to here is we can confirm Les Beans didn't cause the Santa and the winds to cause these fires, obviously. But there is an issue that I think many people in the public, especially in California, who voted for this very leftist liberal ideology, are now starting to realize is, hey, wait a second, what are the priorities here, Sian? What are we focused on and what should we be focused on? And it's very easy to be focused on DEI and maybe things that aren't as important homelessness and move budget there.

30:01But at the same time, they wouldn't give her $17 million. They cut the fire budget. She tried to fight it. Well, that's not clear. Now the counter narrative is that she actually got an extra 50, Jason. Okay. So we're in a breaking news environment. So we'll see what the truth of It winds up being here, but I think the point remains the same here, which is, is prioritization and what we focus on out of whack in California? Oh, that a doubt. I think diversity is good unless that's all you have, and I'll just simplify it like that. But, and I think it's very sad that somebody could be very qualified and be in a position, and we now have to question whether or not they were hired because of DEI.

30:43And then it comes down to prioritization. Like when you're dealing with a organization like a fire department whose main job is to protect the public and put out fires and save people Any amount of time as we know is a valuable precious resource that's being spent Trying to roll out these programs or You know, it goes beyond just who you hire. It's even the the thought police of how you think you know It's so pervasive within an organization that you you are you die from the bureaucracy of it And if anything went wrong with DEI, it was that they didn't have their eye on the prize of fighting fires.

31:21And instead, you know, they're focusing on something that truly doesn't matter. So you can be as diverse as you want to be and not be able to put out a fire and then it just really doesn't matter, right? Because you're not training people. You're not spending money on things that matter. You're not having the discussions that matter. And that's where I think that does fall apart and it has a place there. But I go back to what Jamal said, though, it really comes down to prevention and learning from our past. We seemed to have a very short -term memory. And we forget very quickly because we rebuild and it looks pretty again and everybody forgets.

31:55And we just don't have the ability as a society really to think long anymore. And that's a real problem. And I think we should learn from this fire. I really hope that what comes out of this is a shift in political leanings in this state. I think more moderates are going to come to their senses. As we've seen with the election and the outcome, and I think the state might shift some, and we might actually get some policies that... You're so right. You're so right. When are we going to get tired of all this late -stage progressivism? It's like these litany of excuses, the people that are in charge have failed us yet again.

32:34Exactly. Exactly. We have wasted so much money on so many things that don't move the needle and then the things that they needed to do, they didn't do. And then they point the finger at climate change. It's a joke. At a certain point, you have to wonder, are we using politics and the purpose of it to make people's lives better and to have a high functioning society or is it a way to a virtual signal or to carry your virtual signals. Yeah, and I think what people are starting to realize is in an acute situation, whether it's our budget deficit, whether it's schools, whether it's safety from climate, or non -climate induced disasters, you do need to have competence.

33:16And this is the RICRUSO is such a competent executive that when he ran for office there, the fact that he didn't get that job is just absolutely crazy. And you saw the mayor come in, and she wouldn't even address, she wouldn't answer any questions from the press, not even thoughts and prayers, or we're thinking of this, or we're gonna get it done. It just seems like we're hiring non -executives to work in functions that should be high performing executives. This is an operational role. Let me maybe bring something that ties these three things together, but it builds on critically what's siancin.

33:52There are so many people here that are good, hardworking people that lost their homes. For many of these folks, it could be the most single and only financially securing asset that they have. For other people, those that are family -age, they have kids now beyond the financial damage that are totally displaced. Where will these folks go? There was a comment by Adam Krola, a commentary where he said the real test to Science Point will be how they internalize and metabolize this because it now affects them personally and they have to go and wait three years to build building permits to rebuild. Now that's assuming that they can even get a reasonable amount of insurance coverage which touches Freebrook's point.

34:44This is the real tragedy. That is the actual tragedy multiplied by 120 ,000 or 200 ,000 families. And the real question is how much of that was completely avoidable. And I think there is a reasonable amount of it that could have been. That's what really sucks and that's where you cannot take your finger off the scale and forget. And yeah, when it lands on your doorstep, quite literally here, they are not going to be able having in this exact area I can tell you when you try to pull a permit to do anything. As I was explaining with my roof, the regulations are deep and expensive and time consuming.

35:24I don't believe the count, we talked about the California coastal commission on a recent episode, freeberg. What are the chances that the California coastal commission even allows these people to build those homes in those locations on PCH Friedberg. I was talking to Jamat about this earlier today because the California Coastal Commission was created by the voters directly in 1976 and that commission has authority that exceeds legislative action. So you would have to basically go back. My understanding is you'd have to go back to a state vote to rescind the powers of the California Coastal Commission.

35:59So they have effective complete authority over deciding what does or doesn't get built on the coast because their objective is to preserve the coast for the use of the community and restore to its natural habitat. So anytime there's a request or a permit request, it can take two decades, three decades sometimes to get anything approved if they ever approve it at all. And so the California Coastal Commission, any property that touches the beach front in California, they have this kind of, you know, God -level authority over and they're basically all political appointees that sit on the commission.

36:31to my question, Freeberg, what are the chances? They allow the millionaires on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu to rebuild those homes, or do you think they slow roll it? And those people are all 50, 60, 70 years old. They'll never be able to rebuild their homes. The Kafka can just slow roll this and say, you know what, nature returned it to its natural state. I think we should talk about insurance. This is a great segue. Yeah, yeah, there's perfect segue. Yeah. This is the key point I wanted to say about insurance. So going forward, yeah. All of this property that sits in climate sensitive zones or weather sensitive zones, whatever you want to call it, like we've talked about on the coast of California, of Florida, and hurricane centers, and tornado centers, where the frequency of loss is going up, they're priced as if the frequency of loss is what it used to be, which is, like, let's say you buy a home for a million dollars, and the probability of your home getting wiped out by a natural disaster is a one in a thousand in your kind of situation.

37:29So you have a 1 in a thousand chance of your home getting wiped out each year. So your price for insurance on that million dollar home should be about 10 ,000 bucks a year, one tenth of 1%. So 10 ,000 bucks a year for a million dollar home sounds expensive, but it is what you have to pay for home owners insurance. But now let's say that the probability shifts to one in 20 years. So now you've got a one in 20 year probability of your home getting wiped out. Are you gonna pay 5 % of your home value? No. And if you have a $10 million home, are you gonna pay $500 ,000 a year for property insurance?

38:02No. Now, what's happened is the insurance companies have these models. They're called Cat Models or Catastrophe Models. It used to be two companies. One was called RMS, the other one was called Equacat. And I used to work in this business, so I know it pretty well. And then all the companies started building in -house models and now there's startups that make models. And these models have shown that there are increased probability of complete loss in a region because of the increased probability these crazy weather events happening. And so the price of insurance should go up. Here's the problem.

38:29There are 50 state insurance commissioners in the US. In order to sell insurance in a state, you have to have the insurance carrier and the policy approved in that state. And the states determine what rate or what price you can charge for insurance. So the state insurance commissions have a couple of goals. Number one is to keep all the insurance companies solvent. So they want to you know, check the financials of all the insurance companies. Make sure they're not writing too many policies that they won't be able to pay out. The second thing is they want to make sure that the insurance companies aren't ripping consumers off.

38:59So they have control over the rates and they don't want the rates to go up too much in any given year. So they're controlling rates and keeping them down. And then the third is they're supposed to make sure that consumers have access to insurance. And the third is a very hard thing to do. If you're trying to keep companies solvent, so you can't write too many policies and you're saying, hey, you can't raise prices. And meanwhile, the probability of loss has gone up So the insurance carriers are like, what choice do I have? So earlier this year, a state farm pulled out of palisades. They stopped writing fire insurance in palisades.

39:29They canceled 1600 policies in the exact neighborhood that just burned down. What about the timing of that free burn? That was three months before. Six months before it. By the way, it's not just six months before. But yeah, but it's not, it seems crazy. But as you know, in Tahoe, a lot of the policies have been canceled in crazy timing. It's a crazy coincidence. And remember in wine country we had a lot of white bouts. All of Santa Rosa was burnt out a few years ago. You guys remember that? And so they started pulling out of there. So a lot of the carriers are generally pulling out of California because when they go up to the DOI and they're like, hey, we need to raise rates by, we need to double the price of insurance.

40:04We need to triple the price of insurance. This is now a one in 20 year event. The Department of Insurance says, no, no, no, we're not going to let you charge that much to consumers. And then the carriers like, okay, we got no choice. And they exit the market. Here you can see right here, 1600 policies canceled. This has been a big driver is the departments of insurance has made it very difficult to find this free market outcome. But at the end of the day, one of three parties are going to end up eating the cost of the change and probability of loss that has occurred. It's either the homeowner because they're going to end up losing the value of their home in a loss or they're going to end up needing to write down the value of their home when they sell it to someone who will take on that risk, which means the price has to come down.

40:42or number two is the insurers and there's not enough insurance capital out there to cover all these losses. So all these insurers would go bankrupt or the third is the taxpayer. One of those three is going to end up eating the loss that's about tax payer. Tax payer. Yes, somebody's going to lobby somebody, but hey, we're sitting here, Tremoth, in the age of doge and saying, hey, let's make the government smaller. In fact, Dave, you and I were talking about at some point, gangs of New York and the fire departments being totally great. We talk about that. timing that we were talking about that two or three weeks before this happened.

41:14But when we look at making government smaller, well, that means that these kind of situations would put citizens more on their own. So let's counterbalance what you think, Chimath, about who should be responsible. We all espouse, I think, free market ideology on this program and as executives. And in what we do every day, should the people who own these homes going forward who decide to rebuild them here, they have to pay 5 -10 % of their value of home every year, should their home prices collapse because it's too hard to build there and should the free market take over this risk, or should it constantly be put on the other 329 million Americans who are going to have to be on the brunt of what happens to the million people affected in this area?

41:55Well, I mean, should a very strong word. The cap on the insurance reimbursement is about 3 million is my understanding. David, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that's right. the houses in the palisades are anywhere from, call it one million on the low end to maybe 40 or 50 million on the high end. The average is four and a half. In that sense, I would say there's nothing for a million these days. Yeah, it's gotta be three or four million. Right, but the median is probably more instructive which is probably seven or eight million. So, my point is that folks will get less than half their home value back.

42:27They're gonna have to come up with some amount of money to then rebuild, but the cost of rebuilding a 7 ,000 square foot house in the Pacific Palisades is probably at least a thousand square foot. So that's seven years cash. Exactly. So now all of a sudden these people have to come up with a lot of money. Exactly. And that's post tax money. So you might as well double it because California is just so egregiously burdensome in terms of taxes. So the individual homeowner is not going to be in a position to rebuild. I think that the liabilities of the insurance claims are going to be so massive that the state's going to look to the federal government to build them out.

43:09My parents just got evacuated. I got to call them and just there's just there's a new fire literally right. There's a new fire called Kenneth fire. It just took off and it's at their house. So just give me I'll be okay. Don't do your thing. Oh wow. Gosh, almighty. We're talking about, hey, maybe less government. Hey, maybe spending less. Now the same group of people, maybe who were saying, hey, we need to spend less and and reduce the size of government or saying, hey, well, why is in California more prepared? Well, being prepared obviously means more money and more taxes. So you have now these two competing ideologies here, but to the question of who is responsible, it is economically gonna make no sense to rebuild unless you can get that insurance.

43:52It is a coveted place to live, but because of the construction costs have gone absolutely parabolic in California because of regulations, You're talking about $14 million in income to build a $7 million house and maybe you're just better off selling a lot for a million dollars and letting it be somebody else's problem going for it and just taking the two or three or four million dollar loss, who should pay for on a go -forward basis underwriting these homes? Yeah, I mean, a lot of these people paid for, I was reading stories of 30 -some odd years into insurance thinking that their house wouldn't burn down and then of course it gets canceled two weeks before their house burns down and then the one time they need it, they don't have it.

44:33And part of this is, I mean, a huge part of it is what Friedberg was talking about are the regulators. And so the free market solution is the only solution. If you look at, I have an investment in a company called Kin Insurance and they specialize in direct -to -consumer insurance for areas that are plagued with natural disasters. So their number one state out of the 11 that they serve as Florida, followed by Texas, which you know has tornadoes and things like that. And how they're able to get into these places and do insurance is the pricing is according to, you know, the construction of your home and all of these various things and also weather models and using data science, things that are not allowed in California if you can believe they're not.

45:14So you're not allowed to use a weather model to price in, you know, your decision making for insurance in this state. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, you should be rewarded if you put the resources in time into your home to make it a weather proof, fire proof. Fire proof. Even earthquake resistant, right? This is more regulations that were layered up in here to try to create equality. In the fact is, it's now working against the system. In Tahoe, to your point, they give us explicit instructions around homes. Put stone and pebbles around your home. Cut the trees and bushes down around your homes.

45:55Do this over here. You're premiums. So go that. So when you do that. And if you do that, if you do that, which might cost $10 ,000 a home, you should, it would keep these from jumping from one to the other in most fire situations. Freeberg, your back is everything OK. It's not OK listening to your 70, something your old parents evacuate their home and try and pack their cars with all their stuff in a matter of minutes while a fire creeps on their home is a pretty hard -to -stating thing to listen to. Yeah. What are they saying? They're trying to get out of the house. They're throwing everything in the car.

46:29There's a vacuum. It's like, if I'm looking at the video right now, the fire is like right by their house. It's insane. It's literally like blocks away from their house. God. This is f***ing nuts. This is the house I grew up in in LA. I'm so sorry. I mean, it blocked away. And I'm like, you know, what do you say to them? Like, throw all the photo albums in the cars, what I said, throw the photo. Like, just grab the framed photo of my mom's trying to grab all her life. That's the number one thing that everybody misses and is mentioned in every interview that I've seen is Photos like grab all the photos grab all the out of it.

47:02She's like, you know, she's grabbing her jewelry and stuff And I'm like grab the photos like we're the last generation that we'll be thinking about this issue of grabbing the photos Yeah, fascinating. I just want to say like you know as we wrap up this segment, you know, obviously we're thinking about everybody there. This is complex This is not the fault of a lesbian firefighter or the Ukraine or any of these other issues This is leadership and nature and preparedness. So there are big issues around climate change. You want to believe it. You don't want to believe them fine. Put that aside. But I can tell you that when I saw Karen Bass, get off that flight.

47:37Play the clip, Nick, of Karen Bass here. Because it's a short enough clip that we can play it here for the audience. I'm assuming you all three of you saw this clip. Of her being absolutely unwilling to answer a single goddamn question about what's going on? This is the opposite of leadership. Just 10 seconds of this. The opposite is an apology for being absent while their homes were burning. Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor? Have you nothing to say today? Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?

48:16I mean, I have zero sympathy. You took the leadership job. I don't give a sh** if you're in shock. You're a leader. You just, you sold yourself as the leader that you were gonna service these people and you don't have the dignity that the honor to just answer the questions. It is the, that is absolute, the worst leadership I've ever seen under fire. I mean, ask your guys a question. Disgraceful. What do we do? I mean, I'm not sure if you're gonna answer You fire them all and you vote for Recruisaux, you vote for executives who know what the f*** they're doing and know what you're doing at crisis because they've been under fire before, because they've run a business before, because they've seen s*** hit the fan.

48:56This person, I don't know her, I don't know her history, but I'll be totally honest. I wouldn't trust her literally to pick up my lunch. If she can't answer one or two goddamn questions and give a placating answer to a reporter, hey, it's an intense situation, we're working as hard as we can. She can't even say two goddamn words to the people who voted her in. And for anybody who voted for this level of a competence, it reminds me of exactly what we went through in San Francisco when I was living there in the Bay Area when you put someone like Chesa booting in or London breed or this entire clown car, Aaron Petsker, all these disgraceful discreetly out the Marxist lunatics who would rather a virtue signal, dopey Dean Preston, the whole lot of them, you vote them out and you vote in executives.

49:41And it doesn't mean a Republican executive. It doesn't mean a Democrat executive. It means an executive who's run something in their life before. Whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's Trump, whether it's recruits, so it doesn't matter their ideology. It matters their effectiveness. And if you vote for an effective people, you're gonna get situations like this over and over and over again, so use your f**king brains and vote for executives who've done something in the world. This is why I've changed my position on rooting for Trump now. I was a never -trump where everybody knows that, But he put executives around him this time round and I am rooting for those executives to do which right for the American people and Solve big problems not make them worse It's infuriating to mouth.

50:21What do you think? I Think we need to have a wholesale Replacement of the people that govern the state of California. It's just not working. Close up And I think that the citizens that live in California need to do some real soul searching It is beyond party politics. So I think what has happened in California is people vote for whatever vessel has the name Democrat beside their name or Republican beside their name. And I think that you have to go back to first principles and do a better job of picking the people to represent us because the people that are in positions of power just don't fundamentally know what they're doing.

51:04They're not capable. And the fact that then what we have to deal with are sort of lies and distractions to excuse and competence, I think is unacceptable. I think we pay way too high of a price. And like I said, you are now dealing with hundreds of thousands of families whose entire lives have been totally disrupted and ripped away. And I hope that we learned something from this because we didn't learn from it eight years ago and we clearly didn't learn from it when a different natural disaster in North Carolina. Will we find out that folks said, hey guys, is there an outlier natural disaster event?

51:47Obviously it's not going to be the same thing in North Carolina, but could a different form of something happen here? What could it be? Are we prepared? I'm sure we'll find out that they didn't do that. maybe they had different meetings and they were all about other total distractions or things that just didn't matter. So this is what we need to do. We has a populace in this state need a reset otherwise we deserve what we get. And go, Diane, you agree? Yeah, I think Democrats need to reclaim their party. I think there's a lot more strength in the middle and they've let this woke ideology, I call it woken -perialism, like a religion, take over in place of actually doing things that matter to the people that elected them that pay taxes, that pay their paychecks and everything in between.

52:43And it's time that people really look in the mirror. I've got so many moderates coming to me saying, people call me a Republican and I'm far right and I'm a Nazi and I'm like, yeah, welcome to the club. It's at some point you've got to stop letting them run the board and stand up and say, you know, enough's enough. You know, we're not building some railway that's never being built. We're not solving homelessness with billions and billions of dollars. We're not doing this stuff anymore. You know, we do need real executives to your point, Jason, you know, to run things that understand how things are, how it works and, you know, the best use of funds.

53:20Because right now it's misappropriated. It's a crisis of competence. I mean, I think we all see it. These are incompetent people. By the way, it's not just, it's not just the leadership, it's also legislative action that's going to be needed to fix a lot of the policies, the regulations, the way infrastructure operates in the state. And that requires three things to change. Number one is the California State Assembly. Number two is the California State Senate. And number three is to put things in front of the voters that they can vote on to make the wholesale change needed to rescind some of the bad decisions that were made over the last three decades in the state that has led us to this point.

53:59And I think that it's going to require just like what happened recently in the national politics, a state politics organizational effort to say, let's take a look at the composition of the state assembly, the state senate and what are some of the votes that need to be done by the citizens to make the necessary changes in the state to try and get the world's fit largest economy to start acting and looking like it. Because right now it's sort of like a weirdly disabled third world country type operation with the wealthiest resources on planet earth and it seems pretty f**ked up. It's almost like once people have it all that's when they want to give it all up.

54:37That seems to be the moment that the state has just passed. Now maybe it's time to go reclaim it and build it back. Well said. I mean, and as we said in the segment, there are so many common sense tactical, strategic things that these people could be doing, that they should be doing, that they're not. And there needs to be a full -blown investigation. You kind of alluded to this earlier schmoth. But if there is, if this is dereliction of duty, then we need to look into this in a very deep fashion. And to the people of California, you have more power than you know, my friend who used to be on this podcast once in a while, he and I collaborated on Chesa Boudin being taken out as this DA in the Bay Area.

55:19I know some other people here were involved in it as well. And you can recall somebody. So recall these incompetent lunatics, recall them and replace them. You can't, it's scary, but you can. You know, they, they, they, they send all their people after you, they threaten you. It gets personal. I was signature number one. And I had to deal with the deluge of that stuff. But to be honest with you, I've never been happier to do something and get civically engaged. I think it's so important that everybody starts getting involved in their local government and their state government and the national government because you can't just expect people to do the work for you and expect it to turn out well.

55:56And I think that's kind of the mistake that we all made. If we want to take some responsibility, the tech industry as a whole did not get as involved as we ought to have in the past. And I think we should get more involved in the past. Why did for 20 years, while we were all in the Bay Area, or other people, you know, we just took too busy building companies. I think we were busy building companies. And I remember, if I remember correctly, the only person I remember getting involved in local stuff was Ron Conway. Yes, and he would try to get everybody involved and we were all just like you know There's people who are smart that do that sort of thing and they're gonna do their thing and they're running stuff And we're just not gonna get involved and there a lot of people would say I'm not political I don't I don't do politics.

56:39I don't you know They didn't get involved until it affected them kind of like the houses burning down it affects them and You know like they're that saying the first they came for so and so and I didn't speak up Yeah, that's what's happening here. And I just really think that people need to realize it's now affecting them and it's now time to make a change and elect better leaders. Here's a framing. If you're paying 50 % tax in California, you're a shareholder of an organization known as California Inc. You're on the board of that company. You're paying the salaries of the people there. You have a say.

57:15Recall these people, start a recall of Newsom, start a recall of Karen Bass, just do it. I'm not doing it. I don't have time for this. I'm in Austin. But y 'all in California who is still in California, start a page, recall, new, some recall bass, and you have the power to do it, and you will succeed. I guarantee it. Now is the moment to strike. There's other news we should get to. I hate to say thoughts and prayers, but literally I've been thinking about this all day long. I have a lot of friends. My friend Mark Suster lost his home. I used to play cards with Jimmy Woods and you know, I just feel terrible for everybody who's lost their homes and then their kids and their schools are burned down as well.

57:52All those great schools and Pacific Palisades are gone. I could see developers coming in and being like, dude, if I could buy all these lots for 80 % off, I will. Well, that's what's going to happen. They're going to sit on them. Yeah. They're going to just sit on them and wait for people to forget like they did in 1962. Or 60 % of the world will do that. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. He should be running the place. I'll give you another California Department of Insurance stats. So after the California Department of Insurance wouldn't allow the rates to rise like they should from a free market perspective, they had to set up their own insurance program called the Fair Plan for homeowners.

58:25It has about $220 million a capital in it, and then they bought about $5 billion of re -insurance. They have about six billion of exposure in Pacific Palisades alone. This is a bankrupt, just like I told you guys about in Florida, the State Insurance Commission tries to step in and fill the market gap that they create by regulating rates. And then they don't have enough capital to actually fill the gap because the reason the rates want to go up is because the thing costs more Then the state is willing to miss starting it. They're putting their thumbs on the scale and they're distorting it even more They're driving real -time.

58:56They're driving real estate value up because they're not allowing the cost of insurance of that real estate To naturally float and so by driving real estate values up the economy looks good They make property taxes income comes in but at the end of the day the bill is gonna come to you and in the case of Florida and in the case of California, either the state government or the federal government is going to step in and pay the difference. And at some point, taxpayers are going to look at the fact that they're paying some percentage of their income to support someone else's home value, and they're going to say enough is enough.

59:28And enough of these sorts of events start to happen, and then the legislative change, I think will happen that says, this, it doesn't make sense, we have to make a change. And I think we're getting pretty close after the series of events. All right, this has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. Let's move on to our next topic here. Zuck just fired Meta's third party fact checkers and he is going to embrace the community notes model from Twitter slash X, which predates Elon's ownership of the platform and is an open source project for those folks who don't know. Tuesday he made the announcement on it in an Instagram video.

1:00:04He published a blog with a bunch of details and he made the signal that he was going to move the trust and safety team out of California, which he feels maybe was too far to the left as we were just discussing in the previous story, and move it to the great state of Texas. And here's a quote from his comments. In recent years, we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressures to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. If you remember back in August, Zuck sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining how the FBI and Biden administration have pressured Facebook into censoring posts about COVID and Hunter Biden.

1:00:51You'll also remember that Zuckerberg has over three billion members to his platform and had no problem banning Trump from the platform after January sex a lot to talk about in this topic, Sion, what's your general take of Zuck going MAGA? How do you interpret his - I actually think - Change apart. I actually think deep down inside he always has been. You know, I go back to the beginning days of Facebook and when there was social networks that were competing back at the time was my space, the only political party you could be was Republican or Democrat and then along came Facebook and he added this third option called libertarian.

1:01:34And I would like to go to the way back machine at some point and find his profile because his profile said he was a libertarian. So when he started Facebook, that's where he leaned. So I think he's always been a free speech person. I think he's always, this has been deep in his heart. I think what happened was he had enormous success. They grew very large and he had to become neutral or he thought he did. And so I think what we're seeing with Zach right now with his change in his, you know, even how he appears with a gold chain and how he's dressing and everything that he's doing is him going back to his roots to be more authentic.

1:02:09Because I think he hasn't been authentic for a long time and that was a big critique that people had of him. You know, there was like, when he talks, he's like a robot. And I think what we're seeing is him coming out of his shell and I don't know if fighting helped it or what helped it. But, you know, I do think it's the best thing to do and all the platforms need to do it and should embrace it. And it can be game though. Community notes can be game that we saw it with our saw report that you know, Kamala's campaign or I don't know if they directly work for her or what happened, but they did take over community notes on X and start manipulating them.

1:02:45So you have to be really careful, you know, how you run a community, but in general, I'm all for it. I think it's the right move. It's but one signal. It's one system for trying to get to the truth. It's not the only one fact -shacking is another one. And having no system is another one. Traumat, you're obviously an alumni. You worked side by side with Zuckerberg in the pivotal years of building the Facebook platform, which are taken on what Sian said and what do you attribute Zuckerberg's massive 180 here? I would start by saying I think he's a phenomenal businessman. I mean, I think the result speak for itself.

1:03:20But I also think that that is exactly what explains the shift. In many ways, you have to make that shift. I think it's fair to say that in the Obama and Biden administrations, when the winds were blowing towards censorship, they were part of that machinery. And that was the value maximizing function for Facebook shareholders in that time. Because if you pushed back against that, it's not clear what would have happened to Facebook in other ways. And so I think the decision, whether he morally agreed with it or not, almost didn't matter. It's the leadership of the country in which I operate is telling me it's going to go this way.

1:04:01I go that way. Once the Biden and Obama administration sort of went to the wayside, there's a very interesting picture that Donald Trump put in his book. and I just I sent it to Nick and I think it sort of explains the last week's events relatively well. So I'll just read it. This is a picture of him sitting in the oval and it says Mark Zuckerberg would come to the oval office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful lock boxes in a true plot against the president in jcal alcaps. Okay. He told he told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook, but at the same time, and for whatever reason steered it against me.

1:04:46We are watching him closely. And if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as well others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election. Now that's what I put in the book. And then he was asked about this quote at a recent press conference. Nick, do you have the link to that? He's colorful, Fred Berger. Did you notice Donald Trump, a little bit colorful? Essentially, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg's move to free speech. And he was, essentially, he was asked, do you think it was because of your threat? And he goes, yeah, probably. Now, what's their news conference?

1:05:24And I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they've, honestly, I think they've come in a long way, meta. I think he's redirecting responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past. Probably. Probably. Well, there it is. But again, the lens that I would put on this is, now the winds are blowing in a different direction. And I do think it's the value maximizing function. I think Elon didn't make a value maximizing function. He made a moral decision. He did it when it was unpopular and where the winds were clearly blowing in the opposite direction. Now that those winds have changed and it's clear Trump won in early November, the decisions you make in January are more reflective of the new conditions on the field coming into the inauguration.

1:06:06But I do think it's the smart, value -maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders. And I think it begets a broader point. I think the thing is when you see Elon operate, he's a complete outlier in many dimensions, but I think the one dimension where it matters the most is that he acts morally and in the best interests of what he believes humanity benefits from. He's always done it. He was willing to torch $44 billion when he bought Twitter in order to do it. And so he does these things from his own perspective. I don't think there's any other CEO that leads this way. And I don't think they should necessarily.

1:06:45I do think that, you know, Mark's a good person, but his intimate feelings Should be known by his wife, his children, his friends, his family. I don't think we as shareholders have any right to know necessarily Elon is different and I think it creates an expectation that maybe we'll get that from everybody else But I wouldn't conflate everybody else with him. So I think that this is a smart business decision. It makes a ton of sense and As you can see he was basically told to do this So he complied free your thoughts on Zuckerberg Making this decision if Kamala Harris had one Would he have released a statement or added dino white to the board of Facebook?

1:07:31Probably not Okay, there you have it folks pretty straightforward here Kamala wins. He would not have done this He is Jumping in front of a marching band and he is the band leader now. He's got his baton and he is a front runner and if you open the dictionary and you look it up. But I mean, it's a smart business move. I think if you're a meta -sureholder, I think you're happy to see it. Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with it, Jake Heller? You're just saying it's a different character. Oh, yeah, there's a tremendous amount wrong with it. It's called moral integrity, having an ethical compass, having Hutzpah, having an own sense of what's right and wrong in the world, which he does not have in my estimation based on his behavior here.

1:08:11Hold on, that's not fair. You don't know because, again, what I'm saying is, I mean, no. my estimation. No, but Jason, what I'm trying to say is Elon shares who he is in a 360 degree way with the world. So we know where he stands. And all I'm saying is what Mark does or doesn't believe really isn't known to us. It's probably known to his wife and his family and his board. I doubt his board even knows actually. Some of his close confidence, some of his confidence. Let me be clear. I'll even, it's it's a happier challenge to me on it. I base people on their actions. His action was to be the greatest censor in the history of humanity.

1:08:46There's no human being who's censored more humans than him. That was his decision when it was a popular decision, whether it was popular or not popular, not popular, Jason, necessary for maximizing his business in that moment. He does it on the address. His business would have been just as vibrant if he had a spine and he just said, this is what I believe. And I think he's over optimizing based on what he thinks. everybody else around him wants. And I don't know, I didn't, I've never worked with him. I don't know him personally. You're right on that front. But he banned Trump for two years. The president of the United States, I said at the time, I don't know that you can give a permanent ban to the president of the United States.

1:09:26When he had the opportunity to reevaluate that decision, you know what he did? He punted. He created a third party organization to make the decision for him and deflect it. Zuck created the oversight board. He's so spineless, he decided I'll create and and give $150 million to this board to make these hard decisions for me, instead of me making the decision. He has God -voting shares of that company, Chimoff. He controls it with an iron fist, and not only does he control it, but an iron fist, he has put protection, presisions in that, so that his children could take that $3 .3 billion platform and own it forever.

1:09:59And he punted to them and said, I don't wanna make these decisions. What I saw when he did that was, I don't want to be blamed for these decisions. and that is a lack of courage and morality in my estimation. And then the second he is threatened by Trump, he makes the opposite decision. And if he's making his decisions, strictly on maximizing money, I don't respect that. I think he should make the decisions based on what he think is the moral, what is the point of being a billionaire or worth 100 billion or 200 billion? If you don't get to say, I have you money, I'm gonna do what I want. And that's what I think is his moral failure.

1:10:34And anybody giving him his flowers or champion him for this, I think it's just political expediency and I think it's disgraceful. That's my period. That's my feeling. Sorry. I have my own opinion. What about the fact that he was dragged in front of Congress many times over and people that could put him behind bars pulled him to his face many times and this has all been kind of been coming out over the last couple of months that government officials were directing him in a way that feels like do this or you will be prosecuted to do the following things, to act the following way and to moderate your platform in a way that we are telling you to moderate it or you will find yourself behind bars.

1:11:12Do you not think that there's some degree of inherent complicit kind of role that certain government officials and folks in power had in driving some of those actions that maybe he had to do it to survive and to keep the company alive? Not to mention a violation of our constitution. No. Not at all. He could have just hired lawyers and fought it. He didn't put up any fight. The second they told him to roll over and ban Trump, he did it. Zero fight from him. He has no... Do you know that for sure? Because I just want to make sure I ask you. I'm just basing on his actions. Like I told you, you're basing it on his actions.

1:11:45Right. But I just want to make sure... He was not a major jail for banning Trump. If he didn't ban Trump or he gave him a six months suspension, he would have been just fine. I'm just trying to get you to take a fair point of you, which means like, let's make sure you're thoughtful about the fact that this is not a dumb person or person, let's give him the benefit for a minute. He's not a good person or being a great business executive. I'm just saying, let's just assume he's not dumb and let's say that S. I .N. points out and as he's kind of highlighted points in his history, he actually does have certain beliefs and certain systems that he would love to kind of embrace.

1:12:14I've said this many times before, all of the founders of the big tech companies were all big free speech advocates. That was a big part of the open internet and the movement of the open internet when a lot of people got involved. And that was a big part for him. And I don't know like, you know, if you really think at some point he flipped his switch and said, I don't care about the open internet, I now want to have a closed controlled internet. Or if he recognized or was co -wurst into controlling moderation on the platform because of the reach that he had. And he said, the only way I can have any degree of openness is to do the following.

1:12:41And I will say that my experience is similar in Google when Google had to exit China, they initially went to China with a closed internet, with a closed censored model of search, because that was the way they had to survive to offer a business in China, they didn't morally agree with it. They didn't think it was ethically correct. Did they launch that? But it's when they... But when Sergey killed the deal, when Eric Schmidt proposed it. Well, that deal went live. There was a... Let me just make sure I get this all correct. No, they didn't go live. Sergey Brin, because of his upbringing in Russia, he went to the mat and said, on a moral basis, we're not going to China.

1:13:15And I've talked to Sergey about it. He did not want to go in there and compromise his own ethics. That's right. You're at full stop. So I don't think that You're not right and I just gonna make sure that when did it when did because the dragon pro it was I'm just dragon There was a there's a long history to this okay. Let's let's say I come in here I want to make sure I get this right but go ahead sign obviously he's a brilliant business man But I do think underneath it all he is a human being and I think his fighting in the arena and this fighting stuff that he does Actually did change him and this happened long before or the first amendment staff started to appear, I think our free speech, I shouldn't call it first amendment, but I do think that the government did interfere, and after January 20th, we're gonna find out some interesting stuff and we'll get to the bottom of, how did the government pressure him to censor things?

1:14:07And I think he's getting in front of that because it is gonna come out. And I think that this is a huge part of why he is getting more involved is because it's going to be revealed just how much the government coerced him. And how much he acquiesced? Is that sort of what you just said? Yeah, I mean, this is why I think the fighting actually helped. I think he learned to stop acquiescing. Wow. I actually think it's interesting. He put up a fight. That is where I started seeing the change in him and started noticing it. And so did the, you know, he's, he's so many more fans and people who are looking to him as a leader in a different way now because he's actually starting to express who he is.

1:14:41And like what kind of music he likes nobody ever knew that they thought he was just a robot He doesn't like music. He hired a whole PR team to craft this is my understanding, but Anyway, I don't know that much detail. I don't I'm not involved in his personal life like that But I just I always love to give people the benefit of data. I guess that's just me And I do think that people people can change and I'm hoping that he is actually gonna stay on this side We we want more leaders like him to believe in free speech of course of course I mean, listen, Reddit had, by the way, they all do. And I've never met, you know, an internet business executive who didn't come from kind of the open internet philosophical doctrine by background that that was a big motivator for all of us.

1:15:24Because the internet took away the control, took away the power, took away the censorship, took away all these things that other kind of communication systems had vested in them. And the internet threw an open protocol allowed anyone to share anything with anyone else. And obviously laws and all this other stuff that happened since then has made that far more difficult. And I will revisit our conversation, Jason. Google's China with sensor search results was live for four years before they canceled it. So they launched in 2006. They censored results. They complied with the Chinese government requests and eventually in 2010, they killed it.

1:15:58And you could argue it was because of philosophical reasons, but fundamentally, it never actually got a lot of users in China. There were more users on by do. So my Google had separately made an investment by using that one. And I think it was Gmail was the moment I think it became, if I remember correctly, 20 years ago. But I think it was YouTube. Oh, is it YouTube? Because one of the other services, they started saying, hey, we need to know these people's names who posted this, who sent this email, we want full access into it. And that's where they drew the line. Because it wasn't just a passive search engine, right?

1:16:26It was actually like roundup dissidents like Yahoo! Famously did. Yahoo! Yeah, Google claimed there was a hack that happened because on their servers in China and so they were just no longer comfortable operating. How about this guys? Yeah. However we got here, we're here and we should all be happy that we're here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'll take the win and we just kind of move forward. I mean, taking the win as a good way to do it. Well, it was a better place because of his decision. Yeah, exactly. I think we all agree on that. I mean, what's the point of having an open platform and you can say things in - Why do you call them spineless?

1:17:02Like why go after the guy? Why? Because you can judge a person when they're put under pressure to make the right decision. I think what Jason is expressing is sort of what I was trying to say, and I probably said it poorly. I think there are some of us who look at the way that Elon runs himself in his company, as a sort of world -beating technology CEO. And then that sort of sets the bar. But I think that that bar is impossible to meet. And I think part of it is because of Elon's genius, the other part of it is his success, the other part of it is his influence. But there is an element, Jason, a fundamental moral risk taking that he takes that has been rewarded over and over again.

1:17:47That no other CEO has had to make and when they have, they've largely failed. And so I understand where you're coming from, but I would give a lot of folks the benefit of the doubt here and say, it's not clear what they believe then versus what they believe now, but the destination is very good. And we're in a better place for society. And hopefully we can maintain these norms independent of who's in charge after Trump. Hi, I'm super happy he's making these decisions. I believe in freedom of speech. I'm, you know, I think he's going to have to deal with advertisers next though. I mean, that's one thing that X doesn't have to deal with as much.

1:18:21And that's going to be the second problem he's going to have is not just the government, but do advertisers want to be next to some of the content that's about to appear? And when he loses tens of billions of dollars in personal net worth, will he make the same decisions? We'll see. But I can tell you, if Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position. I think he is terrified of Trump and having his company broken up and he's doing this strictly to a piece Trump, which I think putting Dana White on the board is another signal that's one of Trump's good friends.

1:18:54He's just trying to get closer to the party and trying to make up for lost time for when he supported the censorship Trump and other folks. I think he would make the opposite decision, but to your point we're here. I'm glad he said would you would you meet Zuck in the octagon? That's the most important question. No of the day. No definitely not. He's guys. He's 10 15 years younger than me. He killed me Not a not a chance what I meet him in the octagon, but I wish him well. I wish him well Would you mean Palmer lucky in the octagon? Let's not start And we just wondering I just wondering just wondering I actually literally challenged him He he wanted to send the mountain he wanted to pick Somebody to fight for him tray from founders fund and I said no Unless tray was wanting to do I would you guys ever watch the old TV show American gladiators I would like I would like you and Palmer to have an American gladiator style tournament like maybe four or five events and You kind of get that being incredible.

1:19:50Put up a million dollars for charity. I'll totally do it. If we, we'll put up a million dollars these for charity, I'll do it. We made sure, let's get the door out there. I think that this could be the show of the pieces. This would be more exciting than the accelerator. I will tell you. Absolutely. Make it more ratings than it. Yeah. You could actually call it American Gladiators. It would be a great show. There you go. American Gladiators, the CEO edition. This is the business edition. And they're going, Sasha, all right, listen, Nvidia going consumer, let's talk about it. Nvidia made a big announcement at CES, they made a lot of them.

1:20:25One of them that was particularly interesting was this $3 ,000 personal AI computer for researchers. It's awesome. It's called Project Digits. And it's essentially like maybe Arduino would be a way to look at this like a personal device, but it's powerful enough to run LLM's on. They're also going after physical AI like robotics and self -driving as we said here on the award show a lot of people in the panel were predicting this year would be the year of Robotics and the announced that they're going to have driver assistant chips and maybe build worlds for people to simulate Which net net at the end of the day.

1:21:02I think freeberg puts them on second It would put autonomy partners on second or third base in terms of creating technology by incorporating it into the chips and into their stack So, Sian, what do you think of these announcements and some of the other ones he made? I know you were excited to talk about this. Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about it because I think I've been trying to figure out how they justify their valuation over the long run. And, you know, I'm not a public market person, but I am fascinated with NVIDIA. And, you know, their cloud GPU business is definitely a majority of their revenue.

1:21:37So I think a lot of what we're seeing is them trying to grow into that and trying to expand in case, you know, the music stopped. Now, I don't actually think the music's gonna stop. You know, it's insane to me. We haven't even barely touched what AI is going to do and change and all of the various things that are gonna come from it. And, you know, the early adopters cannot use cloud without getting shut down because of scaling issues. And I don't think those are artificially created based on the type of investing I'm doing. And so, I'm very bullish on Nvidia. It is interesting, it's an interesting thing to go consumer.

1:22:15And the thing that really hit me was the fact that he declared Tesla one of the most valuable companies in the world in the long run. It's interesting that he got behind Toyota, but at the same time, I don't think of a, there's one single car company out there that has the kind of data that Full Self Drive has and Tesla has. Yes. So if they enter the Robotaxi market, I actually think they should buy Uber. Then it's kind of, you should think Tesla should buy Uber. Oh, yeah. I think they should buy Uber. That would be about 10 % of Tesla's market cap at this point. They paid a premium. There might be 15 % so it would be very similar to the one that's available.

1:22:52It's kind of hard to believe, but it's true. Yeah, it is true. Yeah. And then you launch that Robotaxi service and maybe there's some sort of secondary aftermarket solution, kind of like comma AI or something like that that you can do for people's cars, where you can actually get anybody's car into the fleet and start self -driving. But it is true. This is going to be the largest breakout in robotics we've ever seen if Waymo's any indicator. And, you know, I read somewhere I think that Amazon or somebody was looking at it. I don't know what was going on with Waymo. But, oh, lift. Amazon was going to buy lift.

1:23:27Yeah. That makes no sense, right? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And would the point be, I do think you're correct. I think we can delivery or something like that. I can't figure out what their play is there. Well, it's not, and it's also not global. But, you know, looking at the Amazon and Waymo Tesla and Uber, I think Waymo plus Uber, Amazon plus Uber, or Tesla plus Uber defines who number one is, right? Because you would have a global footprint and for the five, 10 years, maybe 10 years, it takes to roll out taxis globally. You could have people draw, I mean, It's a really interesting thought process you have your sign.

1:24:02Imagine if there was an inter -marry step where they sold less Teslas this year or slightly than last year. You could just keep producing lots of model wise and give them to the Uber drivers, keep reinforcement learning going while the taxis and regulations get set. And then you would be able to put another instead of selling 1 .8 million Teslas. You could sell 3 million Teslas, 4 million Teslas to Uber drivers get all that data and have the safety driver in while each region decides if they want robotaxies wear, how, et cetera, your thoughts, Shema, on Nvidia's dipping their toe into maybe taking the bottom 30 % of the stack of self -driving.

1:24:43I don't have much of an opinion on that. To be honest, I think that sort of along the lines of what I said on the prediction show, I think that way more and Tesla are going to run away with this market. And I think it's going to force a bunch of consolidation in the traditional auto Okay, we M's. I think the interesting thing is that they really doubled down and created a pretty decent test bench for robotics. I thought that was pretty interesting. So I think that reinforces what a lot of smart people including, you know, what Freeberg and Gavin also spoke about just in terms of the long -term future for robots.

1:25:17I think that that was cool. I was a little confused by the low -end PC. I don't understand what the point of that is. Maybe it creates some crazy deep -in market where you can buy GPU and then contribute to some distributed network and allow some distributed workload to run on that, I guess. I don't know. I think it's a toy, a hobbyist kind of device that becomes like a bridge. We see this often in technology where somebody creates, even the original PC is let's face it. They were kind of like toys and hobbyist devices, Arduino's and the original drone. But toy on a hobbyist. Yeah, I guess the point is a toy to do what because if you're trying to do inference like Everything is telling us that we are reaching the limits of training and That's an LL Right, so what's going is let's not yeah, let me get to yeah, so so in this world of AI that we know it today There's training and there's inference and right now we think that there's training that's at a limit And so now the market shifts to inference.

1:26:22So if you're going to buy this jacked up personal computer, what are you going to use it for? My suspicion is some sort of test time compute use case, which is an inference use case. But it's not clear to me why that's a better solution than all of the AI accelerators plus tensors that are now just prolifically being exposed to the market, whether it's Amazon exposing what they've done, whether it's Google exposing what they've done, a whole litany of startups exposing what they've done. So I was just confused. I don't really know what the whole point is. What do you think, for your third - Like I said, the robotics thing was interesting if the market develops in the way that they think.

1:27:07So we're talking about maybe two or three different pieces here, Freiburg, which one do you think is super interesting? them be this $3 ,000 sort of GPU for your desktop that you attach to your computer, you get to play with things locally, do you think that's promising? Where would that go if you had to guess? So I think the bet he's making is it's not just LLMs, which is predicting text, but you know, we've talked a lot about machine vision models, graph neural nets that are being used for weather forecasting. there's now these kind of genome language models that are trying to predict genomic output for biotech applications.

1:27:47There's also going to be kind of real -time machine vision and robotic response. Like we're working on this at O 'Holo and we're trying to figure out what's the right kind of runtime environment for these sorts of systems that are going to be using a machine vision and a robotic kind of response type system. And there's a lot of these industrial applications that are emerging. Let's say you're running a robot in a warehouse. Do you really want that robot in the warehouse to be sending data to the cloud and waiting for a model to run in the cloud and getting a response? The probability is you want to have that at the edge of the network.

1:28:19You want to have something local. And I don't think he necessarily has a strong point of view on what the types of models and industrial applications will be. But the bet he's making is that the models are good enough and now the chips are good enough that they can actually realize real -time responses using machine vision, using real -time input, and then respond quickly with a local model running, whatever that model is, to drive some output in the industrial setting, and that there'll be a lot of these sorts of applications, whether that's making predictions for biotech research, or whether that's for running robots in warehouses, or building new research models, or maybe you could strap this PC on the back of something, like a car, a tractor, a lawnmower, a humanoid robot, or any other set of applications.

1:29:04Explain to the audience, Freiburg, why having the computer at the edge is beneficial for those folks who might not know. If you're taking in a lot of data and then you have to run a lot of data in a model, it's a lot faster to run that model locally. Like when Tesla runs self -driving, it's not sending the video images from your car to a server a thousand miles away and then letting the server decide how to drive your car. the car is running its model and what to do with respect to the video imagery in the car. It's local because the ability for all that data to get processed in the car means that you don't have to wait for the internet to transmit data back and forth.

1:29:40You don't have lag time. You don't have the 60 millisecond or 100 millisecond response time. You don't have it losing your phone connection and then not knowing what to do. Exactly. Or the connection drops or waiting for a server to come online or a server breaks in the data center. Everything is local. So if you strap this like, you know, Nvidia computer, which is basically plug and play, you don't have to have like hardware expertise. You could strap it onto the back of a humanoid robot or run research applications locally. So I think that there is going to be some really interesting use cases, whether it becomes a replacement for the Apple, you know, Macintosh Pro, Studio device, whatever.

1:30:15Maybe we'll see. Mac Mini 4, yeah. Mac Mini 4, but a lot of people have pointed out that actually the compute on this thing for $3 ,000 a lot of max out of the, out of the field. So I just can't have an operating system in the traditional sense. Sam, when we look at startups, I remember when you and I started investing, two of the driving forces was free storage, free bandwidth and cloud computing. It drove a lot of ability to get a product to market very quickly, effectively, et cetera. But in fact, well, I have on all these startups that are being originating now in 2024, 2025. Look into your crystal wall and how do you think they'll grow the footprint of them?

1:30:56How is this going to accelerate the start -up scene? I actually think we're going to see a Cambrian explosion of creativity and development of different things. And some of them are going to be stupid ideas and some of them are going to be great. But I think it's going to make our job especially at the seed stage of investing harder and harder. There's going to be so much. There's just going to be a lot of people that have similar ideas at the same time that can execute quickly and Do things that break next speeds that they've never been able to do before and You know, I think the winner is going to be hard to figure out.

1:31:27It's going to be harder and harder Yeah, and it might be that you know, I've been thinking about this like do you invest in competitors? Which is something I never used to do, you know Do you take a bet and index an entire category that you're interested in? You know, what is the approach at seed and precede because I think of an idea and I'm like like, wow, that's really neat. And then I go and look out there and there's 30 people working on it. And that didn't used to be the case. And I think part of it is we've really unlocked a tool that allows people to do things that would have been cost prohibitive or gives them the ability to think, gosh, I could be an entrepreneur and I can try this and I could do this.

1:32:06So I'm seeing people experiment and do all sorts of things. As far as the startups, some of the AI stuff is just a feature. It's just table stakes at this point. It's like a chat or whatever. That doesn't really matter. But then you're seeing people reimagine games and reimagine even things down to your kitchen appliance, etc. I do think it's going to be very, very difficult. I tend to sit out a lot of hype cycles. So I invested in power and compute, lithography, kind of all of the things that are going to be underneath all of this. And so I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to participate in until it starts to get to a steady state and you kind of can understand what's next because the rate of acceleration is just so great.

1:32:57That it's just kind of unclear to me sometimes, especially when it comes to these consumer applications, consumer -facing things, it's just really hard. Well, when we were picking a famously Uber, you had to pick between Sikar, Lyft and Uber. There were three people doing it, and it was pretty clear who was the most qualified amongst those three. Now to your point, if you want to be involved in tax plus AI or legal plus AI, you might And it was tradition in Silicon Valley to not bet on competitors. There were some notable exceptions. When you run an accelerator, like I do tech stars or a recombinator, you are bound by that because 50 % of the company's pivot almost by design.

1:33:37So I think you just have to, I think, at pre -seed because people pivot, you just have to tell people like listen, we have a lot of pivoting going on. People are gonna run into each other. I can't just bet on one thing, right, in a space. But I think that's a reasonable compromise. If all the founders are gonna keep pivoting to each other's businesses, how can the investors you can keep track of that? It's like being aircraft, traffic control of 10 airports at once, it's just not feasible. Let's be a good. You wouldn't think it, but there's still a lot of spreadsheet companies out there. You think you'd run out of them, but there's still out there.

1:34:08You look at, and I think this is where AI's really going to make a difference, RFP proposals for governments. Something that takes like 30 days and it's manual and you have to submit these horrible documents. You can ingest your entire corpus of all of your previous bids and submit them at a breakneck speed now and win more contracts, that becomes like a national defense company at that point. And so I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting things where a lot of crushed is going to disappear and that'll be a really interesting wave that I'm looking forward to. Yeah, in fact, Jamal has made a big bet there with his time, with his software startup that he's created.

1:34:48All right, let's end on the United States of America growing from 50 to 60 or 70 states. Trump has been riling off some ideas around this. Trump was your take on it. I know we got to get wrapped up here. So we'll just do a quick lightning round on it. I mean, I thought it was really interesting and I was just caught off guard at how the media tried to portray it as Trump being Trump. Goofy, whatever. Colorful. But I think like what I've realized, even with the California Fire thing, the guy has this prescient way of, he may not say it in the way that it works for some people, but he's just really on top of this stuff.

1:35:32So I just said, Nick, a thing. So I started to learn a little bit more about why he wants to take over Greenland. And it really comes down to one very basic idea here, because of climate change and other things, the Arctic ice shelf is melting. And the more and more it melts, it opens up a shipping lane in the northern passage for a lot of critical goods. And so if you had some sort of strategic agreement with Canada and Greenland, you effectively have this monopoly control over something that could become as important as the Panama Canal. And so I think if you look across the world, the control of maritime shipping lanes becomes this really critical strategic military and economic asset.

1:36:23And so the reason why he's trying to find a way to initiate some sort of a discussion between Greenland and Canada is exactly this reason. And I think it's sort of like a bargaining gambit, the way that he started, but it's really smart that he's trying to get this done for the United States of America. because meanwhile what you have is China militarizing very aggressively, Russia militarizing very aggressively and what you don't want to have happen is those two countries take control of that northern passage as the ice sheet melts. So I just thought that was important. Having the cable business executive thinking about the future of business and shipping and logistics pretty pretty big win and I just love the idea.

1:37:04I know what's smart. I mean let's give Trump credit. But so smart as like somebody was doing this work. Yeah, got it got it in front of him. Yeah, and he was smart enough to say hold on a second This is really important. Let me tweet it and then the way that he initiates it though Kets even more attention because if he basically tweeted Hey guys, I have this really interesting idea to gain more leverage in a north -earned maritime shipping lane Nobody would have paid attention absolutely nobody would have and now we're all talking about it And now there's an opportunity for millions of people to understand why and be supportive of it It's pretty smart.

1:37:38It's pretty smart. Any thoughts on expanding the United States or a couple more territories? States, I love it. I would love to have 60 states in our lifetime. I mean, let's pick one in the Caribbean. Let's pick one in Europe. I think we should have an open invitation. But Jason, that's not what he's doing. I think he's, I know I'm big of business issues here. I understand this is very strategic this one, but I'm just thinking the next time. No, I would like to get Cuba. Maybe Portugal. I don't know who 80 % of people say I'm what either in the country want to join. It's very strategic. If you look at the Panama Canal, I believe either end is operated in control by China.

1:38:11We are at war with China, whether we like to admit it or not, in my opinion. And so this is very strategic. He has a very strange way of communicating as you pointed out, but I think it's brilliant. And I actually think we should add to that. I've always thought that we should open up and add more states and extend that invitation to Taiwan. I would might be controversial to even say India, but I do think that we, there's a lot of countries out there and people who really, really resonate with what it means to be an American and the freedoms that come with our subscription fees of this country.

1:38:51And so I do think that it would be great for us to expand. And I don't know what he's thinking or how he always got behind the scenes who motivated him to do it, but I really think it's a great idea. Freeberg, what do you think about hopped in imperialism? And this incredible concept of expanding our territories in the 21st century. Again, I don't know how to read it. I have no insight information. There's clearly some posturing as we've heard many times when Trump makes a declaration like I'm going to put on 100 % tariff on every car that's imported or I'm going to charge you 2000 bucks in Mexico for every time you ship something here or I want to do X or Y or Z, it's not the literal statement that matters as much as kind of the vector and the magnitude of the vector.

1:39:38He's clearly trying to begin negotiating for some change. I don't know what the ultimate kind of strategic endpoint is meant to be here, but clearly there's something. I think Jamal might have a good read on this and seems to make a lot of sense. We have a military beach there and we also protect it and we we occupy it already which is interesting Right we somewhat yeah, we somewhat abandoned all that in Greenland But there is a lot of that infrastructure still sitting around you guys a question I started I listened to Lex Friedman's interview the totally off topic, but I Listen to Lex Friedman's interview with Graham Hancock.

1:40:12You guys ever heard of this guy? Yes Have you read any of his stuff or watch any of the shows? I'm not no, okay, so So he's got this belief that there was this like ancient civilization on earth, not like sci -fi futuristic, but like an advanced human civilization and that's where the great pyramid of Giza was like there was a smaller pyramid that was built there and a lot of these other kind of like historical places were built and then they were built on top of later, but that a lot of these like this advanced civilization was wiped out during the last ice age, there was a very rapid kind of freezing event that happened over a period of about 1200 years and that's one that's great kind of ice age era civilization that's wiped out.

1:40:58But what I didn't realize and so I went down this really crazy rabbit hole in the last week, unlike how much of planet Earth, how different planet Earth was just 12 ,000 years ago during the ice age. Have you guys spent any time on this? Like, similar rabbit hole with the green canyon. And it's like the first of all like how the planet earth has changed in such a short period of time blows my mind But like the sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today Just 12 ,000 years ago and there were humans on earth at the time and So all of this this area that we look at as like like Malta the island of Malta was the southern tip of like a continental stretch that went into Italy So it was all part of one great landmass.

1:41:41And there's all this area that was actually part of that landmass that now sits under that ocean there. And there's these like, like, ruts in the ground for moving stuff and buildings and all this other crazy stuff. And we have no idea like what's actually under the ice in Greenland, what's under the ice in Antarctica. There's all these parts of Earth where humans very likely had some, this is so off topic we could cut this from the show. No, I think it's incredible. It's so crazy that there's all these parts of Earth and especially like in the oceans as we start to kind of explore There's actually like large humans potentially advanced civilizations that lived in these areas Not like science flying around you.

1:42:18The Atlanta stuff that was actually like an advanced civilization And then humans lost a lot of this ability when the this like period of freezing happened over 1200 years And then a lot of it was preserved in legends and myths that showed up in later How? kind of archaeology and later How do you explain the pyramids? I think he has a really interesting idea. I think we had Gavin explain it last time. Say, I'm welcome to get Spirits in Quarter. So somebody sent me an email and he said what they did was they flooded the area. And then they put it in the rocks and they put it in the rocks. I've heard this.

1:42:51But you know what, you know what, I'm often talking about this too, because when you remove all that crust, because we actually were talking, we just didn't use the guy in the brand of day, it's just like your anus. When you break away all that crust, what did they find in your anus for you, Burke? Mike, Mike, my brother, my brother. You got it. You led to the joke. It's great. It's great. Oh, we finally got there, folks. This has been another amazing episode of The All in Podcast. It's different. Yeah. I can't say anything other than Cyan, you were great for a first time out. You got to the conspiracies.

1:43:23You rocked it. You got to interject more because it says vibrant panel, but for a first time out, very So before you go, do you have an alternative explanation for the pyramids, Sian? Yeah, Sian, what do you do? And what are UFOs? I've looked into, I mean, UFOs is the only one that I usually come back to because, you know, if you look at putting logs underneath and trying to roll them or you look at flooding an area, all of this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And so, and then, you know, the fact that there are other civilizations that also have pyramids that are stunning and feats of engineering as well, things like Stonehenge, etc.

1:44:01I mean, there's just things that defy explanation. I don't know if you've ever tried to make a catapult, but it's really hard. It's really hard. And so like, we just did not have the technology, or at least we can't find any definitive way that it happened. And so I do think there is a possibility that there was a more advanced civilization here, or we were visited. And I think about that a lot. I think it's mutants. I'm going with the X -Men theory. I think there were mutant human beings who had the ability with superpowers to build them. It could be that. It could be that. It could be. I mean, why not?

1:44:35Why not? Matter and alchemy or something like that. Who knows? This is this is what we've come to now. We get conspiracy corner at the end of every program. We try to figure out unsolved mysteries. Welcome to unsolved mysteries. And oh, just a little housekeeping here as we wrap our friends, Our partners, dare I say, at Polymarket have done a solid freeberg check this out. We talked a little bit about our long debates here on the program. So Chema, we created a market here. The magnificent seven shrinks below 30 % of S &P 500 in 2025, 44 % chance is what people in the real world are putting volume on that.

1:45:16I see $11 ,000 already in volume. and then Freeberg, you came up with one, which was will, I guess we did this one together, but I think it should be really under your name. Will US National debt surpass 38 trillion in 2025? And then third, talking about immigration, we got a lot of passion around this topic. Trump's team and Trump himself said they're gonna deport 15 million Americans, 15 million immigrants rather, from America, I said, hey, let's create a market for will Trump deport 750 ,000 or more people in 2025, 38 % chance. For those of you who don't know, Obama, I think, did two million people in eight years, so this is not like a partisan thing.

1:45:56This is just a practical thing. So anyway, go to Polymarket. Look at the creators. You'll see under that tab that all in has a bunch of markets. We're doing this in partnership with our partners who've partnered with us in a partnership at Polymarket. Hashtag .com. Well done. Okay, bye bye. Love you guys. So I thank you. See you on the mountains. That was super fun. Thanks, science. Ah, thank you. What like your winners ride? Brain man David Sack. I'm going on a win. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, I squeed a kid. I'm going on a win. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what?

1:46:38I'm a rocker. Besties are gone. I don't think I know it's your driveway setbacks. I don't know. Oh man, my hamlet is actually a meaty uplift. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all just like this sexual tension that we just need to release that out. What your beef? What your herbivore beef? Beef, what? We need to get merch. I'm going all in.

1:47:12I'm doing all in.