Transcript of Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom's Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All In podcast, the number one, Finance, Technology, Business, and Maga Podcast in the World. When that's again today, it is the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg living a modern 1950s esthetic lifestyle there.

This is the House of Tomorrow, House of the Future. World's Fair. The original 1955 Tomorrowland at Disneyland.

Well, and you have a NASA hat on. This is amazing.

He's in full geek out mode.

Yeah. I told you guys about this haircut last week.

Because you couldn't blow yourself properly.

I told you this would happen to you.

It's exactly what you're I'm not said. What happened?

Look at the continuity.

He told you you could never match the blow you got last week. And here we are.

I did my best.

I mean, it looks ridiculous, but stylish in a way. And with us again, your chairman dictator, Chamath Polyhop, Ezea. He's ready to go to the inauguration and take his victory lap and take an enormous amount of credit. Chamatha, are you looking forward to your victory lap?

I was in Florida earlier this week. I came all the way back so that I could play poker with my friends and see my family and children. Nice. I'll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning.

Were you at Mar-a-Lago?

No. I was with my friend in an undisclosed location.

With a friend in an undisclosed location. Okay, sounds great. Joining us for the first time, one of my oldest friends, Mr. Mark Pinkis, or as we like to say, Marcus Pinkis.

Why do you always take credit for these guests being only your It's not that much.

The rest of us are the ones that call them and are like, Hey, do you want to come on the show? And then you're like, Hi, my old friend.

He's my old friend. He's longer than you.

I don't know about that. Is that true? Back to AOL?

Yeah.

Well, we met when you were doing Silicon Alley, right?

Repartor, yeah, in the '80s.

I've been collecting rent from Mark Pinkis for the last year.

It's true. My landlord.

You should whistleblow on Friedberg to Gavin's gouging police and see if you can get something your Let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sass. I'm doing all in.

And it said, We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys. I'm the queen of Kinwauna. We'll get right to that in a minute. The Price Couch continues.

If our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to Price Couch, it's 100% Friedberg.

1,000%.

But let's be clear, the real gouging is the Presidio Trust, who's charging an amazing increasingly high rent, like over $100 a foot. Then Friedberg was actually giving me a pretty good deal.

He was getting a pretty good deal. I was paying like $130 a foot or something, $120, $130 a foot all in for real estate in the Presidio. We just weren't using the space, but it is the most expensive real estate. It is nuts.

That is quite an office. My Lord.

The Presidio Trust manages that federal land, and they get to keep all the money and reinvest it. It's probably the only profitable operation in the federal government.

I used to be on the board, so I saw it close up. They reinvest in things like restoring natural habitats, cutting down eucalyptus trees, archeological digs.

It was really interesting. I looked at one of those houses to rent when I was first moving up to San Francisco. The only problem with those houses, they had these gorgeous houses that were like the general's houses, like three, four, five bedrooms, but they would have one bathroom for four rooms. Can you put another bathroom? It cannot change anything. These are historic privileges, so, historic landmarks. Mark did Freeloader, Tribe, Social Network back in the day, support. Com. If you wasted some portion of your youth playing Farmville, he was one of the original app creators or Zyga Poker, which famously, he said, Hey, would you like to be an investor in Zyga Poker? And I said, How does it work? He said, Oh, well, you play for virtual coins. And I said, Mark, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You've taken all of the money out of the game. It's never going to work. And of course, he turned it into a multi-billion dollar company, and that was another $25 million angel investment miss on my part.

But Mark, you were also early general social networking. You were involved in Facebook as an investor, LinkedIn, weren't you? Yeah.

I think the first social media investment I made was Napster. I sent the first check. The first $100,000. I think of that as the beginning of all this. But then, yeah, Reid and I put up the first money for Friendster, and then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook, the first round of Twitter. So pick the right body of water, even if your boat doesn't. Tribe didn't work.

But you placed five other bats, so you hit a couple of them. It works out just fine.

You made the right macro.

I believe you own the 6 Degrees patents. The original social network in the '90s in Web 1.0 was a company called 6 Degrees. They had a bunch of patents, and I believe you bought them and then sold them to Facebook, yeah?

No, we didn't sell them. Reid and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them or even Friends Store, that they would have blocked the whole industry. So We bought them. We paid 750K, which was a lot then, and we were accused of being patent trolls, and we never got that opportunity. We just sat on them to this day. Actually, I own house and Microsoft owns the other half.

Are you still close with Reid, Mark?

Yeah, very close.

How did you guys reconcile your differences in political views in this last election? Because he was very vocal. Kamala, you obviously became vocal Trump and very diametrically different views on the future.

Well, it's interesting because Reid and I really started the whole journey into bigger national politics together. Where we both sat down and had lunch with Biden and wrote big checks a little over a year ago, December of '23. And then, it won't bother you, but I had my red pill moment, and I went a very different direction, which started off just questioning the Democrats.

Hold on. Can you actually just double click into that? What was your red pill moment? Was there one specific thing or was it more of a trickle of things?

It was both. It's like the wall starts crumbling and then it comes down all at once. For me, it really started early in '23. I started reading Pirate Wires and Mike Solana, and I thought he was a little crazy at first because he would write these articles. One he wrote was about how the Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets, and the New York Times photographers would ask them to take the swastikas off for photos. I said, That can't be right. That can't be true. And then four months later, it was in the New York Times, buried in the middle of the paper. And I kept seeing stories like that that he would be early on. And so I just started feeling uncomfortable and queezy about what was going on with mainstream media. Then in May of last year of '24, I read some article that talked about Trump's speech in Charlottesville, and this has been well covered, but where he said there was good people on both sides. The article said it was completely propaganda and not accurately reflecting what he said, that he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech.

Then I went and watched that video, and that was my red pill moment. I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn't just the media spinning it or politicians spinning it. That was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump was that speech. Then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time. And you see Obama go to even see Biden bring it up again in the beginning of the DNC. It's one of their pillars, and they clearly know that they're misrepresenting things. For me, that was beyond uncomfortable. I was just like, Okay, now I got to go back to first principles and look at the primary data and listen only to original speeches by people, and I just realized I couldn't trust mainstream media. I started to question the Democrats. As soon as I started to question the Democrats, I started getting a lot of shame and anger and hatred. The other thing that happened, that was part of this journey, is that my chief of staff parted ways with me after nine years in April of last year, and he was the main person protecting me from myself on Twitter.

He was the one who would say, Stay in your lane. Nobody wants to hear what you think about politics or San Francisco or anything other than your area of products and investing. With him gone, I just started tweeting whatever I felt and thought. Sometimes I got it wrong or it was a little too emotional. But first of all, it was really fun. Then second of all, I found I got connected to this whole new audience of people who are these techno-optimists. I think you guys probably talked about it. And That just brought me down this path that eventually I came out two days before the election publicly for Trump. It was only because that's when I completely got there. I was trying to just be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time. My daughters turned to me that Sunday and they said, You're going to vote for Trump. We know it. I said, Yeah, you're probably right. They said, Well, then you have to go say it on Twitter. My daughters were really in this with me. That's great. Anyway, then it was on the front page of the New York Post on the day of the election that I was...

Not that I'm such news, but maybe it was just was their newspeg that I was coming out for Trump. I'll get back to your read question, but what I love about my New York Times, about my New York friends, is that they did not give a fuck. They were all pro Kamala, and they texted me, and they were just like, Oh, that's funny. But it's one thing I love about New York. They didn't care. Back to your question on Reid. What I love about Reid was he was already getting pings from people saying, What's going on with Pinkus? He's going off the rails. He's becoming a Trumper. You guys, I'm sure, have gone down this road.

I got a little bit of that, too, about Shemá in Greenberg.

Yeah. Me. They're like, What's What's wrong with him? We got to bring him back into the fold. Should we lock him up? Is he crazy? And so Reid was already getting these. I had a lot of anxiety about talking to Reid about it. And finally, Reid and I got on FaceTime, and he just said, I just want to start by saying, I'm team Mark. And I said, I'm team Reid. It gets out a little...

No, Americans can get along even if they disagree politically about a It's probably where we need to get to, especially now that Trump's going to be in office in a couple of days. What was it like when you had lunch with Biden?

Okay, well, just to finish the read part, sorry.

What do you know from?

What I love about Reid is that we followed that with a four-hour dinner, and he said, I never questioned your principles. He said, I know you're a highly principled person, and I just want to understand which principles it is, and I'd like to convince you to change your mind. But anyway, so he was the best.

Hold on one second. You said something almost in passing, but I just want to double click. I think part of what Silicon Valley actually gets wrong is that we don't embrace the tisum. What I mean by that is everybody, we're all a little socially uncomfortable, we're awkward. I wouldn't say that we were the coolest people growing up. There's this virulent form of cost blockers, you called it chief of staff, I think that these folks can be very detrimental, which almost represent this filter between your true self and everybody else. And there is this game that's played about being a gatekeeper. I do think that executive assistants are valuable, administrative assistants are valuable. The reason I can say this is that my EA went on maternity leave I had, and I experimented with the chief of staff, et cetera. And now I use Jason's service called Athena. I have a guy that works with me in the Philippines, and it's about 3,000 a month. I can honestly tell you this guy is the single most effective administrative support I've ever had. What there isn't is all these opinions on what I can say or do. I think that when you look at a lot of these big companies, if you look at Zuck's transformation or what you just spoke about.

There are all these interlopers that seem to get in the middle of you and people's perception of you. I don't know if you have any comments or reactions to that idea.

Yeah, it's part of where... I know you guys have talked about Zuck coming out as Lisa's based or his seemingly more authentic self or sharing more about himself. I can relate to it because I think we all go through this struggle as you start to be more of a known person inside your company, outside your company, and you have people around you taking the edges off. And I think that we're now in this time. I think we're having... Authenticity is having a moment now, which is great for me because Reid said to me, If you Google me, you'll see that there's lots and lots of bad things written about me. A lot of it is my high school quote was, Some people have tact, others tell the truth. I've always been just committed to being honest, even if it's nuanced and it's not an easy sound bite. Reid said to me early on, You need to pick what the easy narrative is or the press is going to make it up for you. He was right, and they did, or my competitors did. I think that now with long-form podcasts and there's just more And the fact that we can directly...

In a lot of ways, Elon was the first one to directly defend himself.

You remember when- Well, he fired his whole... Do you remember when he fired his whole PR team? He fired all those people. There's none of that infrastructure between him and everybody else.

But do you remember when he would be on Twitter all the time, post PayPal, trying to correct the story and just write long, long diatribes? And then when a New York Times reporter said something negative out of Tesla, he just went off for weeks about them. And it seemed a little crazy and deranged. And then you started to see that it worked. And we were told, don't defend yourself. If something bad is written about you, you're going to prolong the press cycle. You're going to make the journalist angry. We're now unshackled. I teach this class at Stanford, and I taught two back to back on Monday. And I looked around and I saw half the placard said, She, her, he, him, his. I got a little pang of like, Oh, do I have to watch what I'm saying? No, I don't. I'm unshackled. I'm just going to... This is just me, and I'm going to be Mark unfiltered, and it's the better version of myself. Anyway, I'm glad that Zuck feels like he can present more of his complete self out there now. I think we can get into it later, but I have a lot of thoughts on how the culture is going to move more towards base.

Back to the other question with Biden, that lunch you had, did he seem like he was all there?

Yeah, come on, Martin.

Was it in the afternoon? I mean, did you have concerns about that? Because that was his sharpest attack.

Was he really sharp as a tech? Was he really sharp as a tech?

Well, that was the thing that broke me. I mean, I'm not saying I'm full mag over here, but that was like, Wait a second. Are you guys lying about this? How long is this and how deep is this cover up?

I have no horse in this race. I didn't have a horse in the race, so I had nothing to lie about. I for sure don't now. I'm really not a Biden fan or protector. I'll tell you my exact observation. We had this long Lunch. There was maybe five of us with Biden and a few of his finance people. They had it in the tennis house, which is the way they found that they can have a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House. They found some way We will see if Trump does it. Some loophole, right? Yeah, the loophole. I was impressed. It was a long lunch. It must have been hour and a half, two hours. I'll tell you the good and the bad. The good, the part I was impressed was he kept the conversation thread. He was engaged and kept the thread the whole time. When we say sharp as a tack or kept the thread, that's how we talk about our 90-year-old grandparent or something. I'm just saying the reality to me, he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of dementia, but we were impressed that he was able to follow the conversation thread and then say- Okay, let me say it differently.

Would you have had the same bar if it was Jamie Dimon sitting across from you for a two-hour lunch?

No. Yes, It was, wow, your grandfather is holding up really well. Your grandfather was able to have a whole lunch and hold the conversation. But I didn't walk away saying... I have to admit, I did not walk away saying, I think he's mentally unfit, but I did. And I wasn't shocked, but I was like, okay, this is someone who's being really handled and managed by the people around him, and he's being told to show up here, say this. But But I will say he was not on an obvious script, which I know, I think, famously, he did some fundraiser at Vinodes House where he was reading a prompter the whole time. So he wasn't reading a prompter. Yeah, that was it.

At a person's home, they brought a teleprompter for him to speak. Wow, that's weird. You didn't hear about that? I didn't. Actually, that's no information. That's crazy. But I mean, in fairness, there's this issue called Sundowning. People people who are in that age group, they're good in the day, and then the sun goes down and their brains are exhausted, and that's when you would see it. And that's what they said about the debate. But for me, that was the coronation of Kamala and not actually having a speed run primary. That to me was just anti-democratic, anti-American, and just what happened to merit and having a process here. That's when I felt like the party just collapsed on itself.

I'm glad you're here. Let's jump in.

Okay.

But let me ask you a question before we get into the docket. We got a lot to talk about, obviously. But what do you think the Democratic Party does from here? Everybody's like, They're lost in a drift. We're not even hearing from them. Maybe a little bit of pushback, I guess, at these Senate hearings right now for confirmations. But what do you think happens? Is there any hope for this? And who would lead them out of this? Shapiro, somebody, AOC?

I think that what my intelligent front of brain would tell me, the logical thing, which I think I want to say is one lens that I think we have to be careful not to just apply logic here because it's hard and the Democrats. The logic would say, Oh, they're going to find based, authentic people to put up against these other ones, the Phedermen types, that they're going to put those people forth who are more centrist and also are more trustworthy that they're actually authentic in their flaws. That's what my brain would tell me. I think there'll be a little of that that the party, I believe, will move more that way. I think that the corporate candidates aren't going to fly anymore with the electorate. I think that the managed corporate through sound bites, can't do a long form, things like this, I think that's over. We can get into that later if we want. But I think they won't go as far as they should. They won't go as far as what I think we would intelligently advise them to do. That's as much as I can figure out. That they should do that, but they won't.

Interesting. Well, we're certainly going to find out in the next year or two what their direction is when they get to the midterms, I suppose.

One more thing, though, on it is a lot of it It depends on really what we see. If DOGE starts to really get popular support, I think you guys talked about this last week, that the more that FDR style, Trump and people get popular support, it's going to become a more and more isolating, lonely place in two years to still be like California, Gavin, everyone's saying, Don't worry, we're going to protect you against these people. If they're doing things that are popular to still saying you're protecting against them, I think won't fly.

Well, that's a great jump off point because Gavin does seem, and Karen Bath seem like their careers are ending, and they're in the last stages of trying to maybe get a little bit more More pragmatic, based is the word people might use for that, just being super candid. But let's get into a little bit of an update here about the absolute tragedy occurring in Los Angeles. The death toll is now at 25. 12,000 structures have been destroyed. It's mostly people's homes. It's 40,000 acres. That's 60 square miles. I think San Francisco is seven by seven miles, right? So this is a lot of space. It's bigger than all of San Francisco. The Palais and Eaton fires are still burning. As of Wednesday, 80,000 people were under evacuation orders. A couple of our friends lost their homes, but they survived. But the stories of losing everything are It's just tragic. Every memory, all your personal documents, photos, art, whatever that you've collected over a lifetime. I just had two conversations with people, and they were just in shock. The estimates right now of damage are between $135 billion and $150 billion. This is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet.

It's 10 times more costly than any other wildfire in history. According to reports, you You might remember the Camp Fire near Paradise, California. That's about, what, three hours north of San Francisco, northeast? That one was 12.5 billion, just to level set it. Now people are talking out, and we'll talk about here today, what the recovery and rebuild effort might look like. California leadership, Disgraciad, across the board. Gavin Newsom. I just... Disgraziad. Gavin Newsman.

Have you had traffic to discracead. Com with all of this?

Yeah, right now, disgratciad. Com is going to be redirected to Gavin or Karen Bass. I don't know which one is more disgraceful.

I mean, it's an incredible troll that you just redirected every week to whoever you're mad as to.

Who would be more disgraceful in this situation, Gavin or Karen Bass? I think it's got to be Karen Bass for just being out of the country.

I think it would be quite funny if every week you actually gave an award and redirected the website to the person that you believe.

Okay, I give it to Karen Bass this week. And before that, it was Jake Paul for that Tyson fight, and thediscrazia. Com, but the stakes have gone up. Gavin is now doing executive orders. One of them is to make it illegal to global offers to impacted homeowners for the next three months. I don't know what the point of that is. The other one is to eliminate the Coastal Act's review of permits for the houses that are a loan PCH, I suppose. He wants to extend key price gouging protections, to help make rebuilding more affordable Gouging is defined as raising the rent or price of other goods and services more than 10 % from the last marketed price. But it could be as little as 5 %. It's just not clear. And then LA mayor, Karen Bass, created a hotline to report on any price gouging and rents, which we've started to see. People are now naming and shaming Zillow and Redfin listings, where you can see the previous history of what they were asking for for a home or for rent. And obviously, the free market is making rental homes double in price. Friedberg, we talked a bunch about this.

And I know, Pinkus, you've got, I don't know if you're comfortable talking about it, but we had a whole conversation about your getting dragged by the Coastal Commission in Northern California. Friedberg, maybe kick us off here on what your thoughts are on rebuilding this area, how this will happen, especially with what we brought up last week, and I think went a bit viral as your talk about putting your thumb on the scale with insurance. I mean, this is, I think, one of the concerning things here is the free market not being allowed to progress previously with insurance and then now with the rebuild?

Well, California has got, at this point, price controls or a mechanism for controlling the change in price on insurance, on housing services, and now they've got this non-solicitation rule. All three, I think, are very challenging to, I think, an appropriate market recovery. It But the insurance issue is a longer one. If you guys want, we could talk about that. I've got a couple of notes I can bring up on the history of how we got to this point. But I think it's going to be one of the biggest burdens going forward, and it could actually lead to a pretty significant effect in long-term housing prices in California because of the way that the insurance market is structured and regulated in California. But if you want, we can talk about that.

Up or down, what do you think ultimately, TLDR, do you think prices are going to go way up here? Do you think this is going to take 5 or 10 years to rebuild these homes? We've never seen this many structures go down at this price point in a constrained area where just construction is so expensive and hard.

I think the governor did a good job suspending the permitting requirements for the Kothel Act for Affected Homes and the CECWA review. Those are very important, I think, suspensions. But he also put in place this executive order for price gouging. If you pull up the He basically said, California Penal Code Section 396, which prohibits price gouging during a declared state of emergency, will now extend indefinitely in this region. In the language in that Penal Code, it says that businesses cannot raise the price of essential goods and services by more than 10% above their pre-emergency price for a specified period, and in this case, his executive order is indefinitely. On On an indefinite basis, you cannot raise the price of goods and services, which generally applies to consumer goods like food and emergency supplies, but it also applies to building materials and services related to housing work. If you want to attract builders, if you want to attract contractors, if you want to attract electricians and plumbers to go to the LA area, you have to allow the market to do its job. If I'm a plumber operating in Sacramento or in Phoenix, I'm like, Man, I could make some money if I go to LA, you will see an influx of service providers and an influx of goods to support the rebuilding effort in Southern California.

That's the way the free market should work, is there's an opportunity in the market, folks show up, they say, Great, I can make money. I'm going to come here and do this work. As more folks show up, they begin to compete on price, and eventually the cost normalizes, and you end up finding what is now the new fair market value between the bid and the ask, the The people that are saying, Hey, I'll do the work, there they ask, and, Hey, I need people to do work, that's the bid, and you find a price. But the benefit of that is you increase the supply. You increase the supply of goods, you increase the supply of service providers, of contractors. There is a home building dearth right now in the United States. This is an amazing opportunity because they can now move to LA, build homes. We can get a rapid reconstruction effort underway, except the governor just said, We can't pay people 10 % higher than what they were getting paid right before this What happened on an indefinite basis, and then Karen Bas created a hotline, you can go to LA 311 and report people if they're trying to charge too much, and then the Stasi will come and investigate you and determine that you're charging too much.

I understand that there's a strong moral imperative and incentive to say, We got to stop price gouging. We don't want people to get hurt. But the second order effect is you're actually hurting the market and you're hurting the rebuild effort because you're reducing the incentive for folks to come in and fill the void in the market that is necessary for us to accelerate the development of 15,000 homes in a very short period of time. The alternative now is people are going to be sitting around, and I already spoke to a couple of friends, I'm sure you guys have, that are like, I try calling architects, I try calling contractors, people that live in this area that have been affected. I cannot get anyone to return my call. There is not enough service providers down there. You're going to end up waiting six, seven years to get your home rebuilt. Now, what do you do? You own a lot, you don't have a home to live in. Then there's this other thing where we can't take unsolicited offers on the home. That was the other executive If you want to pull that one up, the governor said, It is illegal to make an unsolicited offer on a piece of real estate in one of these affected zip codes.

I don't know what happened in Hawaii that makes the governor keep referencing the Hawaii story as if there were people that were taken advantage of and we need to protect the citizens of LA. But I'm pretty sure that having an increase in the number of offers coming in for real estate in one of these affected areas increases liquidity in the market, it increases the buying behavior, and that will ultimately drive prices up, and that will ultimately make it easier by having more liquidity for some of these folks who owned burned down lots to be able to sell their lot, take their insurance check, move to another neighborhood and go somewhere else because they're going to have to otherwise wait six or seven years to build a home.

Hold on. I think you're a little bit off the deep end with some of this stuff because I think you're not being totally fair in representing what this EO says. That's coming from me. I am not a Newsom fan, okay? I think he is completely and totally incompetent. But I'll just take the other side of this, which is that I read the EO, and I actually think it's somewhat reasonable, and I didn't connect the dots with the EO and the real estate market. The reason is that if you read all of what he said, the EO is hyper-specific to unselective unsolicited offers to a very specific handful of zip codes, and it was time boxed for three months. He said, making any unsolicited offer to an owner of real estate property located in the areas and encompass by, and he names a bunch of zip codes. I think there was like one, two. There's like 12 or 13 of them. Okay. So unsolicited, okay. To acquire any interest in real property for an amount less than the fair market value of the property on January sixth, so before the fire started.

Before the homes part down.

And he said, That's prohibited for three months. That's it for three months. And the reason I think he said that is that if you just scope out a little bit just from this moment in Los Angeles, the problem is that after natural disasters, there is a spike in fraudulent activities. And there are people that try to take take advantage of that situation to make money. So for example, after hurricanes, we saw this in Florida, people pose as contractors. They come in and they offer inflated prices, they offer poor quality of work. And especially when you deregulate for that moment, where there's less checks, there's less folks involved because you're trying to speed up the process, you can have a bunch of pressure tactics that work against the best interests of the person trying to rebuild. On the wildfire side, there was this crazy thing, nick, I'll send you the link from KTLA that talked about these folks called fire chasers, which are essentially like wildfire scammers or ambulance chasers, but during fire. Okay, so- So my point is, I don't disagree with his incompetence, okay? And I think he is totally out of touch. I think there's a broken cartel that runs this state that's going to drive this state into just complete disrepair.

He was grossly negligent. They're already You can't say a state that has $322 billion budget is already bankrupt. It's teetering on a path where we won't be able to return, and we can debate that. But my point is, I just think, despite all of this, he's grossly negligent. Karen Bass is grossly negligent. The California cartel is breaking this state. But on this specific narrow thing, I will give him his flowers. I think it was a decent, smart, good thing. It's narrowly focused. There's a specific window here that's time boxed so that the worst behaviors of other people are roughly managed and mitigated until we can figure out a better answer.

You're saying that unsolicited offers on real estate can drive fraud?

What you talked about, if there is a person that is... This does not prevent somebody from selling- By the way, let's talk about services separately because he has a separate EO on services. This does not prevent anybody whose house burnt down from listing his lot. That's right. You could sell it for a dollar. That's right. I think it's not right and it's inaccurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market. The idea that you cannot sell isn't what is in this CEO. The idea is some person shows up out of the blue and applies a pressure tactic to you when you're in a very stressful situation trying to deal with your insurance brokers, trying to figure out where your kids are going to go to school.

But they're just making an offer. What's the pressure tactic? Why can't someone If you make an offer on your home? You want people to bid up homes.

Because, David, here's what's going to happen. There are people that in the middle of all of this stress are trying to figure out how much money they can get. Somebody shows up and underbids what the true price discovery could be in a few months from now. You don't know whether you have to still pay back your mortgage. There will be people, it will be non-zero, that will make a mistake. I think that it's good to try to stop that. It doesn't absolve him from his incompetence. But I think was reasonably good.

What about the services piece, Chamat? The fact that you can't increase pricing on goods and services by more than 10% for an indefinite period. Don't you think that that creates a disincentive for service providers to come into the state to come and address the- Well, obviously it does, yeah.

This grand ideal of the free market will solve everything isn't necessarily always true. It's great in theory, it reads well in a textbook, but real life is messy. Right now, we are in the messy part, and we are in the most critical part where the abuses will be the highest. I suspect that in six months and nine months and twelve months, the free market will sort all of these things out. So if there's a governor who can implement some checks and balances to protect these folks who are probably totally dazed, for example, we know some of our friends. I've spoken to them over the last few days. I've spoken to their wives. They're in shock. I'll say it in In a horrible way. One person said this to me, and I'll just quote him, The amount of people that have reached out to me. If you had asked me two weeks ago, why would so many people reach out with condolences? I would have thought that one of my children had died. That's what he said to me, and it completely struck me with, it's not on that same level, but the amount of emotional turmoil that these families are going through probably approaches that.

I don't think many of those people are in a condition to make good decisions right now. I almost think cooling off period actually benefits everybody. It can allow the free market to work in a few months from now. We're only talking 90 days.

No, the services thing is indefinite. That's what I think is a little bit frustrating. Let me bring Mark in here.

Mark, you heard both sides of this debate. If you had a lot in the Pacific Palisades that burned down and people started making unsolicited offer, Lucena, you're sophisticated. I've known you for 20 plus years. You're very sophisticated, obviously. But do you I think that's a reasonable thing to do, to put a moratorium on people making these low bid offers, and then we'll get to the construction piece second.

But what do you think of these- Not low bid offers, unsolicited offers.

Yes, unsolicited offers. What do you think of that?

I think what bothers me about it, there's a presumption, and maybe Chamath's right in it. You're getting me to think about it a little more than I was, but I'm pretty much where Friedberg is that we're treating these people like children because what we're saying is that they're not capable of making good decisions, so we need to protect them from themselves. And we're saying, So we don't want you to know that somebody is willing to pay X dollars for your property because you might take it and you might regret later that you took that. It's what Chamath is saying.

No. In a very narrow window where you may not have the best and clearest ability to make the best decision for you because you're dealing with so many other crazy issues in your life.

Sure.

And you can still say no.

You could say no, but you're presuming there's one side that bothers me that feels like what we've had from the Democratic Party forever, which is this big, wise overlord that's going to protect us from ourselves, from our worst natures. Then on the other hand, you're bringing up something, Shabbat, that I And it's something I hadn't thought about that I'm just thinking more about now, which is, well, maybe people could be taken advantage of at the margin because they feel like they're in a dire position. But if they think they're in a dire position, they might really be in a dire position, so they might really- Well, for example, let's just say that you haven't heard back from the banks that own your mortgage about whether there's going to be a moratorium on mortgage payments.

And so now you're trying to juggle paying for an extra rental and this house while you're trying to figure out where to put your kids, and somebody shows up and says, Hey, I will buy this from you. I think that there are a lot of people who would otherwise be able to make a much more rational decision who may make a panic decision in that moment. I think that if you give people a 90-day cooling off period, I think it at least shines a light on whether all of this governmental and other infrastructure can actually do something for these people. I do think that there is a moment at which you can't govern these things. All I'm suggesting is a very narrow window of time where people's feelings of just desperation are at their highest. I think that this is a decent thing to do.

There is some precedent for the state doing stuff like this. In most states, there is a cooling off period with marriages and divorces. You have to wait three days to file either way, to get married or to get divorced. Let's talk about the construction process here, Friedberg, I think that's the most important one because we're going to rebuild.

If you don't pay a premium to get somebody to leave another market to come to this one, which is what's going to be required.

There are simply not enough construction people in any state. That's right. So now you're competing with another state. That's right. This immediately triggered the debate and dare I say, courage that Travis had around this issue with surge pricing for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar and a bunch of other folks who were We're signaling, we're like, We don't ever want to do search pricing. Therefore, there were never cars on the road on Friday and Saturday nights when people needed them, or during inclement weather, snowstorms, or on New Year's Eve. And he said, If you want to increase supply, we believe Uber should have availability. Lyft took a different decision. We're going to have no search pricing, and they just simply weren't available. So maybe, what do you think about that piece, Pinkus? You think that the free market and people should be able to say, You know what? I'll pay you time and a half to come here. I'll pay you double time to work Saturday and Sundays. I'll get a couple of RVs, put them in the back if you want to have some folks live on the construction site, and if you hit these dates, I'll pay you a bonus for hitting it.

It doesn't seem like any of that would be wrong to me for somebody who had the ability to pay an incentive for somebody to move from another state would be at a here. What are your thoughts on that?

I agree. I mean, I'm pretty much just a free market believer. And so I think other than guardrails, like Chamath saying, and maybe I like the idea of cooling off periods. It makes sense. But outside of that, when it comes to service providers, yeah, you have the opposite problem right now, which is, like you're saying, you need to incentivize a huge construction force to come to LA And the cost for them to get there to find housing themselves is going to be even higher or the amount of distance they're going to have to travel every day. So I think this could have real unintended consequences and just stop the wheels from turning on rebuilding all these homes, which just make it way more complex. So I agree.

Jamal, any final thoughts on the rebuild? And the free market in that regard?

I think this is where the government ineptitude is at its worst. I think that we need to dismantle this regulatory state that makes doing the right thing impossible. Specifically, the thing that Newsom did was essentially create a time expectation on when things will get permitted. And I think he said it was six months. The problem is this is what just goes to show you how insane the state has become. Even if you get a permit within six months, and this is where I do agree with Friedberg, getting service people in and being able to build something to spec safely is going to take three, four, five, six years, and it's going to be insane. The example of the complete incompetence of the California state government is if you contrast and compare this with how the state was able to respond in the North Ridge earthquake. The crazy thing, which I thought was incredible, was after the 1994 North Ridge earthquake, they rebuilt I-10, right? Which is like, that is like a crazy artery. In 66 days. Guys, they rebuilt it. Not they permitted it, not that they were trying to get the California Coastal Commission to a pine on it, not a Sierra Club lawsuit about the land grouse, they rebuilt it.

So you actually know what's possible in California if tradesmen are allowed to go to work. They can build incredibly complicated things with safety, with speed. This is where Newsom, I don't think, understands how the real market works. Because if you looked at that example, the real question you should be asking is, Well, what has changed? Well, technology has gotten way better since then. The people are more skilled. There are more to be able to do more of these jobs. And so why does it only take six months to just get the permit when in 120 days, you could just rebuild an entire highway? Similarly, why aren't we saying that we expect these homes built in the next three years? Get these kids back in their homes and back in school.

You know what they did on that? They offered a $200,000 per day early build bonus on that program back then. So they basically... The state declared, We need this freeway reopened, and here's the date. It was like 144 days. They're like, You'll get a $200,000 bonus for every day under 144 that you deliver it.

So clever.

Show me an incentive. I'll show you an outcome.

Exactly.

The really interesting thing here is there are regulations that this is a unique opportunity to put in place. Nick, if you can pull it up, there was a home that wasn't burned in the Pacific Palisades, and the architect talked about some of the design decisions there. Having stone-scaping around your home, gravel, et cetera, and using these new materials and not having overhangs, and then having vents into your attic, which is what a lot of homes have, and the embers get into the attic, there's an overhang, and they're not using... And they're all wood-built. None of this is concrete, none of it's brick. California is all wood. And so they probably should add some regulations about building things that are fireproof. Because if you had 100 homes that were all fireproof and built to withstand this, that would act as a natural break. If you didn't have as much vegetation, so there's probably a series of things that should be added here in terms of regulations while you're getting rid of some of the ones that are slowing you down. But let's pivot over to... Oh, and then finally, allowing people to park their mobile homes in these places to have housing for construction, to your point, Mark, would be super critical, and they block that stuff.

When you need temporary housing in California, you can't do it.

By the way, I want to hear what Friedberg has to say about insurance, but let me connect the dots between what you said and what he's about to say. There are three images I just want to show you guys. To bubble this up for everybody that isn't necessarily living in California and is consumed with what all of this means, there's a bigger trend across the country that I think is just worth putting out there. So, nick, do you want to just show the first chart from FEMA? This is basically a graph per locality all over the United States where FEMA tries to assess the disaster risk for living in a given area. What you see here is that there's some risk in living on the Eastern Seaboard, and there's a lot of risk, and it's growing, for living on the Western Seaboard. And the two most complicated states that have to deal with this are clearly Florida and California. So that's one, which is this is a problem that isn't just focused on this one little area. Then If you double click a little bit further, there's a company called CoreLogic. They publish a lot of real estate data.

Here's a chart about the Western United States that just double clicks into wildfire risk. I was shocked when I saw this. This is, first of all, most of California. This is like Nevada, this is Arizona, this is parts of Texas, this is Washington. I didn't even know the fire risk went up that high. But this is essentially a lot of the Western United States. Then the last chart goes through and it actually does, CoreLogic does an assessment of the value at risk. In California, it's three quarters of a trillion dollars that are at about 1.26 million homes that are at moderate or great risk of fires. In Colorado, it's about 141 billion. In Texas, it's 88 billion. In Oregon, it's 45 billion. In Arizona, it's 36 billion. The point is that everything you said, Jason, now needs to get scaled out, meaning there needs to be a national-level conversation. This can't be a bunch of city planners making code and making laws in a little municipality. Because that problem, what that shows you is we have a multi-trillion dollar risk to a lot of people in the Western United States, specifically around this issue, that It has to get dealt with by code.

All right.

Really interesting in New York. Finally, New York has put into place congestion pricing. I've been waiting for this my entire life. Here's a map. This went into effect January fifth. This congestion pricing concept exists in London, as everybody probably knows. Basically, if you're below Central Park, which is sixth Street in Manhattan, and you enter between 5:00 AM and 9:00 PM, you're going to get on your easy pass, a charge of but $9, cheaper than a bacon, egg, and cheese in Manhattan these days. If you're going clubbing in Manhattan between 9:00 PM and 5:00 AM, it's just like $2. It's going to increase to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031. Trucks pay more, taxes pay less. The results have been awesome. Wait times to get on the island are down 50 % across the board. Lincoln Tunnel, down 46 %. Holland Tunnel, down 63 %. Williamsburg Ridge, down 35 %. It's just an awesome effort. When I lived there, man, as a resident, the traffic was nuts. You could have emergency services move a lot faster. You get rid of noise pollution. You obviously get rid of air quality pollution for ICE engines. It's great for cabs, great for pedestrians, and great for bike riders.

The only people really complaining are selfish and entitled people who drive their cars into Manhattan. That's at least my position on it. Opponents are saying it's a money grab for the transit authority because the money from this goes to make public transportation better. What do you think, Mark? You're in favor of this?

Yeah, I think more generally, I feel like Since the pandemic, what's been on my mind a lot, living still in San Francisco, I wanted to start a social network called Still Here. It's like, Oh, you still live here? Me, too. Some way for us to come out of our houses and notice that you're here and I'm here, but we never leave our homes. I walk around the city at my own risk, and I feel like cities have lost the point. They've lost the plot. Why Why we still live in cities or value them, but I feel like we have to go back to first principles and think, why did we move to cities in the first place and what was the value supposed to be? And is that still the deal we're getting? Or is there it be a new deal? Because we used to live in a city because it was economic. We were closer to our job. Then we lived in a city because there was a high density of things that we wanted, cultural people, restaurants, And the best cities really were the ones that are fun to walk around. Then we got to a point where it's not safe or clean to walk around.

You don't work in the city anymore. San Francisco started to feel like this gigantic retirement community. It's just all these people who still live here because their kids are in school maybe, or they grew up here. A lot of our friends left, went to Austin and other places. And we started, I don't know about Chamath, but I think Dave, but I think our family has a conversation probably twice a year of, should we move? Why haven't we moved? What's wrong with us? There's this questioning going on around cities, and I think it's a good question. And I think cities need to innovate a aggressively to be better. They have to compete with the other options again. They have to make it fun to be there, fun to work there. I think it's great that Daniel Loury is mayor of San Francisco, and he's putting smart people around him, and they're trying to rethink, first, some of attacking these core problems, but also, how do we make San Francisco fun again? So I love things like congestion pricing. I think now is the time to try every new innovation that you've ever thought of and see what sticks and figure out how do you take this tax?

Not literally. New York has a big tax, but this tax on all of us, whether it is that you can't walk across this city, that you don't feel safe, or that the good side of it being fun to be in, the deal is off. I I think... And also what I'm hoping Daniel Loury does and other smart mayors is that they benchmark and they say, who's doing it really well around the world, whether it's dealing with homelessness or things like congestion pricing, Who's innovating and doing it well, and why aren't we doing it here? I think you got to run these, you got to reinvent these cities. Sorry to sound cliché, but I think you got to take a startup mentality and say, you're not going to live on your incumbency anymore. You've got to reinvent this. We can't make companies come back to work, come back to the office. The companies can make their employees, but it'd be really nice if the employees wanted to be there. You can't make people live in California. So I'm in favor.

Yeah. Chamath, any thoughts on Mark's point about making cities fun again and joyful again? Sounds like a pretty good platform.

I mean, I think he's right. San Francisco sucks. It's trash. You never go there. It's terrible.

The reason that you don't like to go there is?

It's dirty. It's disgusting. There's crime. There's grime. Everything just sucks there.

Yeah. Friedberg, your thoughts on the Gotham City that- Did he visit you in the Presidio?

Dave, did Schmoth ever come to the Presidio?

I have come to your office. I've come to Dave's office. I've I went to Peter's office there. But what I do is I don't even go through the city. I go all the way around. I drive all through the East Bay, up through Berkeley, and I come on. Really? No, I'm just kidding. No, I just think that the city is very poorly managed. Just the quality of many cities are poorly managed. I think that there's a common through line in these poorly managed cities. All the things that you say, there's no will to do. There's no will to keep crime at bay. There's no will make usable spaces for people. There's no will to invest in the arts. So what do you expect? There's more money collected by these cities, but there's just more total grift, corruption, and waste.

I really like that you got to this will point, because whether we come back to the Coastal Commission or not, or talk about California or San Francisco, I don't think it's really about the red tape. I think it's about the willpower of the people who are running the tape and reading the tape.

You're a hundred 100% right. Did you see this thing? I have to read this to you because this is really stunning. Sorry, Mark, keep going, but you're 100% right.

Sure. Okay, maybe in one case, Gavin can override the Coastal Commission. But it doesn't matter if you cut their red tape by 90 %. As long as there's any tape that they can use, the people running both the staff there and the people on the board have stated on their website that their policy is managed retreat. They drew a new map of the California coastline. If that's their intention, they're going to look for anything they can to stop and obstruct you. So it's really not like their hands are tied because there's so much permitting.

You're right. They made a decision. The decision in California, in San Francisco, specifically, was that we're going to cater to fentanyl dealers and junkies, and that those people were going to get a stipend, a hotel room, and be allowed to take a super drug on the streets, thousands of people with no recourse. Listen, I'm pro-drug.

Okay. I sent you guys a- Legalization, but not fentanyl and meth.

These things are super drugs.

Let's make it less about San Francisco. Let's talk about middle Ohio, and let's talk about Andrew. Hallmer Lucky did this really awesome- Shut up. Shut up. Really awesome interview. Nick, I just sent you the link to it. He's building a new Ohio plan. But the question and answer from the interviewer is exactly what Pink has talked about, which is Will. The interviewer says, Was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline that you needed. Here's Palmer's answer.

Was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline?

I think that they were the state that gave us the best shot of hitting that timeline.

Look, we've really engaged well with Jobs Ohio, with a lot of the politicians here, not just at the at the state level, but the local level.

Like you said, we're hiring 4,000 people here in direct jobs, a lot more jobs than that in indirect capacity. It's the largest single job creation event in Ohio history. It was a state that told us, We have the workforce, we We're a million people who are capable of working in this facility within a 45-minute drive. We're willing to work with you on higher education to help train people so that they can come in and they can work with you. Our customer in the form of the United States Air Force, obviously, is a huge presence here in the form of Wright Patterson Air Force base. Really, all the stars aligned to make Ohio a great place for us to do it and to do it fast.

Speaking candidly, as someone who is from California, there's some states that are really good at pushing you out and slowing you down.

There's others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up, and that's what Ohio was. Fantastic. States are competing for elite companies.

And there's a willpower. There's an intention, and you know that if they want to make it happen, they'll make it happen. Just like Gavin just did. Gavin could have, theoretically, I don't know, signed an executive order to override the Coastal Commission, even his desale plan. I don't know why he didn't just force that through. But if we had desale, maybe there'd be more water to fight the fire now.

I think the important thing is to note that cities have a right to be what they want to be. You guys might find this It's surprising, but I'm not necessarily of the belief that every city should necessarily cater to progress and acceleration and enterprises and industrialization. Look, when you go to Portofino every summer, Chamath, you would probably stop going and would be disappointed if you found out that they were building a giant glass tower apartment complex and a giant office building right by the Portofino Port. That's just not the character of what that city wants to be. I do remember when I first moved to San Francisco 25 years ago, it felt like a smaller European-like city. It wasn't overrun with technology companies at the time. It was the charm and the quaint nature and the smaller buildings of San Francisco that made it a beautiful, fantastic town. I think that part of the challenge of San Francisco has been this diametrically opposed viewpoint of progress from the technology sector and a desire to keep San San Francisco, a small city by the Bay, and that that frustration has manifested with a lot of ugliness over the last couple of decades.

In addition to obviously all the silly, stupid policies that just make no sense whatsoever. They're rooted in people thinking that this is a good solution in It's not in the short term, but it creates extraordinary damage and harm in the long term, separate. But I do think that cities have a right to be what they want to be. And I think that you- But, Dave, I just want to interject as a fellow San Franciscoan for a long time, just as long, is that that's the normal tension that's been here all along, and that makes the city culture great.

You want to have this creative melting pot here. But there's this other side that I think has come into play in the last 15, 20 years or 10, 15 years, which is this progressivism side, which we saw Chesa with. I think it's a different virus that's come in.

That's the ugly silliness I meant, I was saying. But let's put that aside. Let's put San Francisco aside. I do think that a city can and should be what it wants to be. Does it want to attract and build an industry? Does it want to attract and build enterprises companies? Or does it want to be a small quaint town? Does it want to stay with no high rise?

That's a false trade-off. The problem is that people in government at every level sells the former, doesn't actually even give them that nor the latter. What they give them is is a dysfunctional hellscape instead.

Portofino doesn't do that, right?

Because it doesn't make those promises. It's not asking to elect people that are trying to do it.

Yeah, not every city is making that, though.

Why are we lying to everybody and why are people falling for these lies over and over and over again? There's a moral clarity in telling the truth. Portofino doesn't try to do that.

But I don't think the point is- You're saying that the cities that promise that and don't deliver.

Is that where you're- San Francisco promises it. London promises it, New York promises it. These things are chaotic messes. And it's not the trade-off of, Oh, while Paris has found a way to stay quaint. That was never on the ballot. Some person comes up and says, I'm going to spend X billion dollars a year. Then another person shows up and says, Actually, I'm going to spend in a totally different way. They both claim to have measurements of how it's going to be great. And my point is, none of them are rooted in the real world. Nobody knows how to actually run a business. All the money gets wasted and nothing happens. It neither stays quaint nor does it advance.

If you were When you were living in Los Angeles, you had the opportunity to have Rick Caruso, who built so many amazing experiences and shops for the citizens there, and you picked Karen Bass. I looked on her Wikipedia page, looking for any operational position she ever filled?

Do you want to read her resume? It's tragic.

I mean, it's just...

It's tragic.

I would, literally, like I said last week, not send her to get my lunch because you know that order would be totally screwed She is so unqualified. You had this perfect person, Rick Caruso, who literally, you can't script this, he built the Pacific Palisades village. When the days before there was going to be a fire. Do you know what he did? He hired water trucks to park on those streets. You can find the picture, nick. Pull it up. He hired firefighters and people to protect the village that he built. Karen Bass was in Ghana, partying, taking meetings. I don't know what the connection between Los Angeles and their citizens and what they need to get done in Ghana after she promised she would not do this global globe trotting, which she apparently has a track record of doing. She left and stayed there knowing this was all coming. Rick Caruso, who you didn't vote for mayor. He did the right thing. Vote these people out. Recall Karen Bess. You can do it. We recall Chesa Boudin. You remember on this show, David Sacks, he's a Republican entrepreneur, venture capitalist. Good friend of mine. I'll introduce you guys if you haven't met him.

He started a recall Chesa Boudin movement. I hired a journalist to cover the victims of crime in San Francisco. Chesa Boudin was out in 18 months. You can recall these people. They're unqualified. Take action. Start a recall. They'll tell you, Oh, it's not a good thing for continuity, whatever. These people are not qualified. They are not thinking in your best interests. You have no choice, citizens of Los Angeles, but to get these people out immediately. Every day they stay in office, they are going to cause more damage to your family, your property, and your city. We call them now.

Didn't James Woods post a petition on change. Org? I saw on Twitter, I signed it, though I don't live there. And I think it was already over like 90,000 names.

You have power. The people of California don't understand how much power they have. When Gavin... I just told people on Twitter, Chamoff, every time Gavin tweets or Karen Bess tweets, just reply with the word, resign. Hundreds of people are doing it now. Shame these people into resigning.

It's a very mature way for you to affect change.

You know what? It worked in Brooklyn. Shame worked. I don't know why people think they have no power. You could literally just go in there and do things. And one of the things you can do is recall them.

Okay, do we have anything else except your polemicals left on the docket?

All right, TikTok's future is in question right now. The ban is about to happen unless the parent company, ByteDance, divest by January 19th, which is this Sunday, TikTok will be banned in America. Google and Apple are going to be forced to remove TikTok from their app stores, and Oracle, TikTok's cloud provider, has to stop providing hosting services and cut ties, assuming ByteDance doesn't come up with a last minute deal, TikTok What's his only hope is the Supreme Court blocking the law. What do you think, Mark? Do you think it's Chinese spyware? Do you think they should be forced to divest? What do you think their repercussions will be?

Here's what's so hard for me about this. On the one hand, part of it seems so obvious from both not just national security point of view, but also just fairness. It's insane if you think about it, that there's a Chinese company that's arguing in court for protections under our Constitution and freedom of speech when none of our companies have those kinds of rights in China, much less the right to even operate there if they're not majority control controlled or in line, like you guys talked about with censorship or whatever else. So on the one hand, it seems like a no-brainer to me on this case. But what you're starting to see come up in the last couple of days, I'm even hearing it from one of my daughters who's a major TikTokeer, is the law of unintended consequences here is that we could see this banned, especially if they don't get to a deal with somebody. And then the 170 million Americans, many younger Americans who rely on this, all of a sudden feel like this is censoring them, and it's taking away their freedom of expression. And it could backfire in a lot of ways.

We're already seeing memes where they're going on to these other apps. There's this Chinese- Red Book? Red Book, which is even worse. I think that one is owned by the Chinese government, and so we're driving them there. The best outcome, I think, would be forced to divest and sell to another American company. But if that doesn't happen, I'm nervous about a real backlash.

I'm delighted, Chamath, that our kids are going to go out play and have friendships and stop scrolling on TikTok. What you describe sounds awesome.

I literally get on their iPads and phones when I sometimes allow them to have phones and just delete the app and then they go get it back.

Of course, of course. Kids are out around it. What do you think, Chamath? What do you think is going to happen here?

I mentioned this to President Trump, and I really think this is true. The reason why there is so much bipartisan support for the bill as it worked through Congress is because I think that they were briefed on just how severe the security violations of this app are. Because I don't think we've seen anything in modern history that is this controversial, yet be so almost unanimous. So I think that that's an important data point. There is something happening in the app that they've been briefed on that makes them take this posture. And when I listened to the Supreme Court arguments, I didn't hear a very compelling reason why this ban should be overturned. So I do agree with Mark that we have to find a suitable home. And I think that we'll probably find one. And I think that it probably happens under the Trump presidency. And whoever gets their hands on it gets their hands on an incredible asset that they will be able to buy extremely cheaply. Because there is no way that there is a fair market value here deal for that asset. Because whoever is the buyer is in the total catbird seat.

And in order to get a deal done with the federal government, I think you're just going to get basically a buy it now price that's very cheap. The other thing that I'll say, though, on a totally separate tangent. So when I started hunting around, TikTok's real-time recommendation algorithm was open source, the learning method. Nick, do you want to just throw it up here? It's called Monolith. This is an incredible paper. The cleverness of what these guys have built cannot be underestimated. What's incredible is what they What they describe in this paper, which I think, frankly, a lot of social apps would benefit from understanding, is exactly how they built it to essentially not take this more monolithic training approach for recommendations, but how do you do it in real-time? How do you make it collisionless? It's incredible. This paper is a tour de force. It just makes me realize that despite the political maneuvering of this hot potato, there are some folks that have been working in that app or in the parent company that are truly technically talented. It's a bit of a shame that they're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

People should know that there's some technological innovations inside of ByteDance and TikTok that are just truly amazing feats of computer science. This is an example. It doesn't, though, change the fact that I think that enough of Congress and the rest of the security apparatus know that this is a mechanism to I think you both nailed it.

Isn't China saying, though, that if this does get divested, they're going to keep either ByteDance or Chinese government saying, We're not going to give over the algorithm, or are you saying it's open source? It doesn't matter.

Well, this is an example of just describing the methodology. It's not functionally open source yet, but I think that open sourcing, it doesn't solve the problem. The reason is, let's just say that you're Pegasus. Pegasus was able to reverse engineer or build penetration attacks into WhatsApp that were imperceptible to everybody until it happened to Jeff Bezos, to other people, where you get these state-sponsored attacks on your phone, and all of a sudden you're dealing with this attack vector that then you call the FBI and they take your phone and they help you deal with it. It's happened to a bunch of people. It's happened to me twice. The fact that these things can happen and then the attack vectors get incrementally more and more sophisticated. It used to be that there was a PDF payload, then there can just be an image payload. Now, it's any payload. You don't even have to click to open it, and all of a sudden, they just root your phone. These are extremely sophisticated mechanisms that are enabled by a very few very talented people. Talented, I'll put in quotes. But when those talented people work on the wrong side, you have to act.

So open sourcing, it won't solve this. These exploits are known to a few. And I think that if it's known to the NSA, this is probably what was disclosed to folks under confidentiality that caused them to get to this conclusion.

I think people just need to wake up and realize the Chinese government does not have Americans' best interests at heart. I There is no concept of reciprocity, as you mentioned, Mark. That's the number one reason to do this. Number two, what you pointed out, Chamath, with security. If you think about the two biggest imports from China right now, it's fentanyl and TikTok. But here's what I will say. They want to make us addicted. They want to impact our society. They want to divide us. This is a massive psyops that's going on. It is a psyops, and it is a spyware, and it's been proven they spied on journalists. These are bad actors. It has to go.

I was super excited when I saw that there was the potential that X would take over TikTok. The reason I say that is I do think that if you can take the video content of TikTok and the graph of creators, but have a different app and a different substrate be the delivery mechanism where you know that it's much safer and it's governed by an American, that to me would be the compromise. So I think the app should go away. But if you can somehow give creators a path to restart their content creating capabilities on X, I think that that's actually a pretty good one.

Did you guys notice in the app, Friedberg, that the left-hand tab because you have following shop and for you, they added a left-hand tab all the way over that stem, and it's just science, technology, engineering, and math content.

I've not noticed that.

Yeah. Take a look. I don't know if it's just mine and their retargeting me because they know I'm such a fan of stem, but I think it's for everybody. Any thoughts, Dave, as we wrap on the TikTok?

Seems like they're going to strike a deal. Chuck Schumer today is calling for a delay in the ban. I'm sure by the time this episode something will have been worked out to create some space for them to get a deal done. But I think they want to get a deal done and keep TikTok active in the US. It seems like both the Dems and the Republicans are pushing for it. This also leads to what I think will be the grand deal with China, which I think will happen in the first six months of the Trump administration. I'm obviously speculating, but it feels like there's going to be some work out here. China's in a lot of economic distress. I don't know if you guys have followed much on the stories of the deflationary challenges that China is dealing with. Chinese bonds are trading at a below 2% yield now, which is unprecedented. There's this real concern that China is in a very significant economic deflationary spiral. There are We're in a very weakened position economically at the moment. The United States seems to be in a position of strength. I would imagine, just given the rhetoric, that this administration may try to work out, again, some deal that's going to provide access to the Chinese market in exchange for the US minimizing the tariff effect on Chinese importers to the US.

There could be, I think, something that eases the tension with China and creates mutual economic value in the first six months of the administration. We'll see.

I mean, it's a great point. Trump is a great negotiator. It's probably his greatest strength, and he's great at saber-rattling, and we're strong. They're weak right now. A grand deal could be an awesome outcome.

I think This was my contrarian prediction, I think. Oh, no, this was my stock. I'm with you. This was my stock prediction. Yeah, this was like my... I picked the Chinese tech stocks. Yeah.

Same. I've been loading up on Alibaba a couple of Chinese names with The same bet.

Hey, guys, here's a chart for you. Companies are not hiring as many MBAs. This is a recent spike in unemployment among MBAs from top business schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. I'm not sure. I think, Pinkus, did you go to Harvard for your idea?

Guilty.

Guilty. And you've also stopped working. So you're represented here on the chart. Yeah, at the moment. You still have a job, I think. You still work. What are your thoughts on this? Are MBAs out of vogue? Are they opting out? What's your theory here?

Well, so yes, I went there. I would say that all the learning that's helped me in my career, I started later after I got out. My first product management job was really when I started learning things that are useful to me today. I think being there, I learned a lot about how to sell to corporate America and some How do they think things. Then I've gone back to HBS for decades trying to recruit from there. In the beginning, they would tell me, the kids, when I had support. Com and it was going to go public, they said, I'd have to be a vice President, own 3% of the company to take a job with a startup like you. This was just before the company went public. There was a little bit of a renaissance period where some HBS people were excited to join Zyga, probably because they thought it was going public, but they were a little more risk on at that point, and now everyone's open to jobs. My take is that there's this fundamental imbalance that people go and get an MBA because they're derisking their career. You go to HBS or Stanford, and you're guaranteed this high salary and this great job for life.

So the reason to go there is to take the risk off. That's in fundamental opposition to where we are in our economy, in my opinion today, or where the most interesting sectors are. Those kinds of jobs have dried up. And the kinds of jobs that I think should be interesting to MBAs are more like Go find a Y Combinator company and join a founding team as the business person or whatever. And these people are smart and qualified, but there's this mismatch that they are fundamentally risk averse. And so they're not So it says they haven't found jobs. Part of it is I think they're going to have to fall further, or this might happen, so that a part of it, they have maybe debt or they have to pay back this expensive degree. But I think I think that they've got to get to a point like I was when I started my first company, Freeloader, I happily had very little to no opportunity costs because I had torched my career by that point, torched my resume. I was fired or asked to leave every job And so there was no turning back. Can you imagine being Mark Pinkus's boss?

I mean, that's almost as hard as being Tremont.

Yeah. I always say I'm a great team player as long as I'm running the team.

Right. Great quarterback. Yeah.

So I had no opportunity cost when I started my first company, which looked like it didn't have a chance in hell of ever making it. So you probably thought so, too, then, about my company. So now the question is, maybe what's going to happen is we're going to get a new equilibrium where the opportunities for these people start to come down, the guaranteed opportunities, and a good thing happens.

Consulting firms, right? They all go to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, whatever.

The class I taught on Monday at Stanford, they said, everyone wants a job at Metta or Google, and that's the get-rich-quick place. And I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore. And they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management. Those jobs have dried up. What's in this data probably also is a lot of these people aren't taking jobs. They're not finding jobs that meet this high expectation for pay and opportunity. So So I think it's a good thing. It also probably is going to reduce the demand to go into these MBA programs, because if you're thinking, well, that's not going to be my risk off trade. I'm not going to be guaranteed.

100 %.

So Why go in the first place? And I would advise people today, depending on what industry, I'm biased, but I'd say, go get a product management job somewhere and make enough that you can afford to live on it. And that's going to be the beginning of learning.

Doing these chamoth... What are these things called when these MBAs graduate? They raise a bunch of money to go buy some real business. Search fund?

Yeah. That's not happening anymore. Yeah.

That was the zane of the moment.

None of them made money.

None of them made money. It turns out these MBAs don't know what they're doing.

Oh, yeah. So when they take over the business run by a family and some matriarch or patriarch for 50 years to get it to 25 million, 50 million.

I don't know, dude. There's that one deal out of Stanford GSB, the guy founded Asurian, which is like It's billions of property money.

Yeah, but that guy would have founded that company outside of Stanford. He could have gone to timbuktu. Com University. Discratziad State, and he would have been fine. Discracead. Com MBA. That speaks to more about the cleverness of that one individual, not the 99,000 other deals that have been done. Let me say something that builds on what Pinkus was saying, which is I think that this is a interesting window into the future of AI in the sense that I think what companies are internalizing slowly, that the first place that AI disintermediates is actually middle management. You thought that it was the customer support person. Maybe you thought it was the engineer. Maybe you thought it was the designer. Maybe you thought it was the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it's the middle manager. It's the functionary that basically is acting as essentially cartilage inside of this organization, has less and less to do in a place where AI-enabled systems are making a lot of decisions on behalf of businesses. If you take a step back, how did that evolve? Well, it started because of what I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

What the software industrial complex will really be known for after it is dismantled and gone is that it created all of these really dysfunctional org charts in a company. Meaning, when you are a system of record that sells something, let's make it up, Hey, I'm the best general ledger software. Okay, and a CEO says, Great, implement that. And then all of a sudden, it's like, Well, you're going to need a CFO. But then the CFO comes to you and says, Well, you actually need a head of FP&A, a head of this, a head of that, a head of the other thing. Then the CEO says, Okay. Then those people hire. And what happens is the software sprawl is really what created with those jobs. Somebody else says, Here's a customer relationship management thing. Okay, great. So then you hire a CMO and a CRO. Those people build infrastructure. My premise about this is if you look inside of any org chart of any company, you can map those jobs to some clunky old piece of software that was sold to them. Maybe it was 10 years ago, maybe it was 20 years ago. But that's why orgs are this bulky.

Now, when you have all of these new next-gen businesses that are ripping all of that software out, the middle management layers that used to manage that software are no longer necessary. That's why you're not hiring MBAs. I think that this trend is only going to grow. I don't think that this is a commentary on the people. The people are probably quite smart. But I do think that this is a warning sign that people should not go and pursue these degrees because I think, as Pinka said, you're not taking the trade of least volatility. You're actually taking on a lot more volatility than you probably thought you shouldn't be taking on by going to a place like Harvard or Stanford.

Friedberg, any thoughts as we wrap here about this MBA chart?

I think the collapse of the MBA program could be the beginning of the unwinding of the higher education market.

Why, Seymour?

I think this is the easiest one to discard first in an age of AI and automation and self-learning. I I think that... I've been thinking a lot about... I have young kids, so my oldest kid is seven years old. I had to think about that for a sec. I have so many kids now.

Isn't it great, by the way? I go through this all, I don't know. I have to go. I have to be like, What's my kid's birthday? It's hard.

Jamal has a busload of children.

When you have five, you can't- I just had a fifth.

I have a fifth.

I think I got five. Wait, five, five, and you're at four days?

No, I have five. I have to really think about all the birthdays. Fourth on the north on the west.

But yeah, I would say I think a lot about whether or not it makes sense for my kids to go to undergrad. I think about going to classes as an undergrad. Certainly, there's the social experience, and I learned a lot in working at a lab when I was there and doing other stuff. But those were on-the-job experiences. I do think that the social experience and the practical experience can be gotten outside of the college infrastructure, this educational infrastructure. I cannot tell you guys how much time I spend. I just had a great idea.

I just had the best idea ever. The all-in MBA. Let's start our own MBA program.

I think that's the whole point is people should get back to an apprenticeship type model or a self-learning model. Everyone's got their own personal tutor now. That's what I think people aren't realizing is anything you want to learn with AI.

Have you guys heard about what Johnny Ive has done with his kids? I'm pretty sure they skipped college and they just went to work directly with him in his design firm.

Exactly.

I'm taking him out to lunch because I want to interview him about it. I think that's such an interesting-Exactly.

We should have him on to talk about it.

By the way, your daughters and my daughters want to start a podcast together, Pinkus.

Do you know what they want to name it?

Oh, no, I don't.

I don't know if I should say it.

I don't know. I didn't hear the name. I think Chamant's daughter is in on this as well.

I think it was another friend's child who came up with the name. They I wanted to call it the Nepo pod.

Jamal's got a couple of kids that can go on that, too.

I'm here for it. No, I think Free Bird, you nailed it on this one because I just had a Roosh Selvin, who is the PM at Google doing deep research on this week in Startups yesterday. And this product is nuts. And they designed it to basically be one of these million dollar or five million dollar reports you pay for from these consulting firms. That MBA is right. And it does a better job. It's more accurate. It's done in 5 to 10 minutes. This thing fires off. Have you used deep research yet, Mark?

No, and I keep hearing you talking about it, and I'm such an idiot about this stuff.

It's on the desktop only. You can't use the mobile. And then Grok 2.0 is out.

Oh, because I asked Gemini how to use it and it couldn't tell me.

It's only on desktop, and you have to pay 20 bucks for it. And then Grok 2.0 is doing something similar. When you put your query in, it decides all the second-level queries that would be Then it checks its work. So it's firing off a spider that goes and crawls 150 pages in real-time. Then it asks questions about the data. Then it says, What's missing from this? So all the questions you would get from your manager if you were working at Boston Consulting group where they tell some young MBA, Hey, you missed this, you missed this. Can you double check this? Can you find double click on this? It goes and does those follow-up questions. And now you can do a cron job where you can say, Take my research and every week, do a update on it and fill in information and tell me the differences. Instead of just buying a Boston Consulting or McKinsey or whatever report, you build it and then have it, and the deep research is coming out of this. It's going to automatically refresh it in your Google Docs and then update you on what's been changed. And Grok is doing it as well, except Grok has all the tweets.

So when you use Grok now, did you see now at the top of the page it says, and I think it's only in the Groch app, the dedicated app they just launched last week. It shows you all the tweets and it shows you all the web pages that it indexed for that query. So this is like putting somebody on a week-long research project. And like I said, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to do this, and it costs a massive amount of server capacity to do these real-time, 200, 300 queries are occurring behind your one. It's nuts.

I don't know if you guys have been using advanced voice on ChatGPT much, or do you guys use the voice Lately, anytime I have come across an interesting topic, I end up finding that I just talk to ChatGPT for an hour or two. I'll be in my car when I'm driving to work or going to a meeting, or I go for a walk down to the coffee shop, I'm like, Okay, so tell me about what happened during the Ice Age with respect to how quickly sea levels receded. I start to gather. It's basically your own personal tutor.

I finally have a best friend, Mark.

I think that basically you end up seeing a future where if people are put into almost like the real world becomes the lab environment that is created in a very short window and small amount of space in a college environment where you're in some applied scape, that applied scape basically becomes the real world and you've got your college in your ear. You've basically got your tutors, your educational experience, your capabilities that you're learning, and you learn more in real time. I think that that's what AI is going to take us to, which is basically going to destroy much of the value of higher education. I think that this MBA piece is probably just the first step of many that's going to ultimately erode the value of higher education.

Did you guys see that fleshlight that can actually be synced to a video you're watching? No. At CEO, that's pretty crazy.

Can we go to the UFOs instead of sex toys? We get it.

Or show us the Show us the video, Tomas. No.

It's also AI.

Did you get one?

Of course, he's about to show us from his hidden folder.

I saw it on X. It was like a summary of the top 10 things from CES, and it was a fleshlight that would gyrate based on the actual contortions in the video, which was using AI- You don't want to get in one of Chamov's guest rooms tonight?

I'm a little nervous.

It's interesting, Pinkus. You get to see two different things here. When AI comes up as a topic, Friedberg finally has a best friend, and Chamov finally has a lover who will do exactly what he tells it to. This was absolutely perfect.

So, Mark, lately, we've been talking to all the guests about UFOs and UAPs.

Welcome to Conspiracy.

You have a point of view on UFO, UAP phenomena?

I do. And I guess everyone else says, too, so I won't be that weird an outlier. So first of all, I'll just say, I don't believe in UAPs, UFOs, and I don't not believe in them. I'm just curious about it. I've had this theory that something is going to happen, that we're going to break our current understanding of physics theory and our physics laws. I've been looking for that moment, and one of those is around the UAPs. I've been more and more curious and digging more and more. I started working with a friend who made the movie Icarus on the idea of a Netflix docuset series. I thought it should be funny and have somebody like a Larry David character narrating it. But he said maybe, maybe. He came back to me. He's making a documentary about the fentanyl crisis and how it documented how China has dumped it here. And he said, You've got to meet with me and this guy. While he was working on that, he was interviewing a former DOD contractor who had worked for them for decades and said, I've got a lot on Fentanyl, but I have this whole other thing to show you about these UAPs.

He'll just tell you his claim. So they came and met with me, and we had to meet outside and put our phones in.

Fairway bags. Faraday bags. Faraday bags.

So it was a good setup, if nothing else. And he said, he claimed that in running these war games for the Defense Department, it inadvertently was summing these UAPs, these drones. And he had tons and tons of video of it and classified them. I'm just telling you what he told me. Let me guess.

All the drone videos look like they were shot on an 8-millimetre, 1968 camera. Wait, wait, wait.

Hold on, Jason. Mark, just explain this. The United States is simulating war games.

Yeah.

What is it doing exactly that's causing these drones to show up?

He did not tell me what were the- The games. What were the exact triggers? But he said different things would trigger a different one, and he classified them, and he said some of them were aggressive from an electronics and would take out electronics and communications. Wow. He was interested, and my friend was interested in saying, Okay, can you put up a couple of people a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film this? And I I thought about it. I even had him go meet with Reid and didn't move quickly. Then he went dark on us and stopped responding. Then some friends of mine went to a gathering at a bar. It was on multiple things related to this. They said that this guy was there and that he summoned one of these. They said it looked like a large drone. My friends showed me some pictures that they took, which was at night, and they were really great. Come on, stop.

Come on, stop.

I'm not making this up. I'm just telling you just one piece of advice with this documentary film stuff.

You know how to make $100 million in documentary films, right, Pigas?

Yes, Start with a billion.

Start with a billion. You're the mark in all of this. You're just a mark. This guy needs a million dollars to finish his house or something in Topanga Canyon. Fair. You're the way to do it.

I didn't fund it. You're the mark. I didn't fund it.

Okay, Good.

All I'm saying is that I think that there's a possibility that there is some drone that's showing up. I'm not saying it's even from non-human making.

I believe it. I believe it. I am looking, I'll be honest, because I am looking for a reason to believe in this. I'll be honest. I know my bias. I am very sympathetic when I hear these stories. I listen way too long to the podcast on this stuff.

I watch- Are you donating to Alex Jones?

No, but- Are you a subscriber? No, but I... Okay, how about this? Are we convinced that there has been absolutely zero unidentified object inside some vault buried deep somewhere in either the US or national state government somewhere? Are we guaranteed that the odds of that are zero? And I say No, it's not zero.

Okay, let's do our... What is it? Fermi paradox? Friedberg? Fermi paradox? If there are aliens, why haven't we seen them?

Quick around the room.

I'm not saying that. I've already done my point on this.

I'm just saying there is a UAP that has been unidentified, that is sitting inside some vault somewhere in a state government in the world.

So your position is the aliens have come.

No, stop saying aliens. It's being covered up. But you make the whole thing seem ridiculous. Ridiculous when you say aliens. I'm not saying that. I'm saying- Okay, visitors from another planet. No, stop with the visitors. Let's just put it this way. A vehicle that doesn't have to have anything inside it. A vehicle could be autonomous and unmanned. Are the odds exactly zero? No.

But with billions of planets, it would... You know, logic would make you think that one has come already, right? That's with this billions of inhabitable and species out there. Somebody must be ahead of us. But the other conclusion of Fermi's paradox is we, statistically, are the highest a society has ever gotten, and we have yet to send our probes out to the rest of the universe, although we have sent probes, Friedberg, to Uranus. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in.

This is all in my desk. Disgracead. Disgracead.

I need a You need some march. You need some march. Young Spielberg to make us a jingo for our. Mark Pinkis, you're amazing. Thank you for fitting right in with your besties. All the top bro on the baby.

Congrats. Looking forward to seeing you this weekend.

All right. We will see. Oh, and by the way, just programming note, we're all going to be at the inauguration of various parties this weekend, and we will be doing some live episodes of the All In podcast, on Sunday, Monday, time frame, and we will see you on the live stream. Go to youtube. Com, subscribe to the All In podcast, put on the notifications, the bell, and then follow us on x. Com, the All In podcast. Then, again, subscribe and then just turn on notifications. You'll get a notification when we go live on those two platforms. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

Love you, boys. Bye-bye. We'll let your winners ride.

Rainman, David Sack. I'm going And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Westies.

I'm going all in. Besties are gone.

That's my dog taking a relationship to your driveway sex. Oh, man.

My haberdasher will meet me as well as something. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just used to...

It's like this sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

What? You're the bee. What? You're the bee. What? You're the bee. Bee.

We need to get merches.

I'm doing all in.

I'm doing all in.