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. With us again today is the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, living a modern 1950s aesthetic lifestyle.

This is the House of Tomorrow, the House of the Future, from the original 1955 Tomorrowland at Disneyland.

Wow, and you have a NASA hat on. This is amazing. He's in full geek-out mode.

Yeah, I didn't—this is the haircut I told you guys about last week, because you couldn't blow-dry yourself properly.

That's right. Properly. I told you this would happen to you. It's exactly what your mom said would happen. Look at the continuity. He told you that you could never match the blowout you got last week, and here we are.

I did my best. It looks ridiculous, but stylish in a way.

And with us again, your chairman-dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. He's ready to go to the inauguration, take his victory lap, and take an enormous amount of credit. Chamath, 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.

Oh, nice. And you'll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning. Were you at Mar-a-Lago?

No, I was with a friend in an undisclosed location.

With a friend in an undisclosed location. Okay, sounds great.

And joining us for the first time, one of my oldest friends, Mr. Mark Pincus, or, as we like to say, Marcus Pincus.

Why do you always take credit for these guests being only your friends? The rest of us are the ones who call them and say, “Hey, do you want to come on the show?” Then you're like, “My old friend.”

I've known him longer than you.

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

Yeah, we met when you were doing Silicon Alley Reporter in the 1990s.

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

It's true. I'm his landlord.

You should report Friedberg to Gavin's gouging police and see if you can get some relief.

Let your winners ride.

David, we open-sourced this to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. We'll get right to that in a minute.

The price gouging continues. If our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to price gouge, it would be 100% Friedberg. But let's be clear: The real gouging is the Presidio Trust, which is charging an amazingly high rent—over $100 a foot. Then Friedberg was actually giving me a pretty good deal.

He was getting a pretty good deal. I was paying $120 or $130 a foot, all in, for real estate in the Presidio, and we just weren't using the space.

But it is the most expensive real estate.

It is nuts. Quite an office.

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 up close. They reinvest in things like restoring natural habitats, cutting down eucalyptus trees, and archaeological digs.

Right, right. 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—which are gorgeous, like the generals' houses, with 3, 4, or 5 bedrooms—is that they would have 1 bathroom for 4 rooms.

I asked, “Can you put in another bathroom?” They said, “You cannot change anything. These are historic landmarks.”

Mark Pincus was a serial entrepreneur and social-networking pioneer back in the day. He founded Support.com, and if you wasted some portion of your youth playing FarmVille, he was one of the original app creators at Zynga. He also created Zynga Poker, which famously led to him asking me, “Hey, would you like to be an investor in Zynga Poker?”

I said, “How does it work?”

He said, “You play for virtual coins.”

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.” Of course, he turned it into a multibillion-dollar company. That was another $25 million angel investment I missed.

But Mark, you were also an early social-networking investor. You were involved in Facebook as an investor and LinkedIn. You were early on those, 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.

Wow.

I think of that as the beginning of all this. Then Reid and I put up the first money for Friendster, and we were lucky enough to invest, along with Peter, in the first round of Facebook.

Wow.

We were among the first on Twitter. You pick the right body of water, even if your boat doesn't thrive. You place 5 bets, and you hit a couple of them. It works out just fine.

You owned the SixDegrees patents, didn't you? The original social network in the 1990s, in Web 1.0, was a company called SixDegrees. They had a bunch of patents, and I believe you bought them and then sold them to Facebook.

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 Friendster—they would have blocked the whole industry.

We paid $750,000, which was a lot then, and we were accused of being patent trolls. We never got that opportunity. We just sat on them. To this day, I own half 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 during this last election? He was very vocal for Kamala, and you obviously became vocal for Trump. Those are pretty diametrically different views on the future.

It's interesting, because Reid and I really started the whole journey into bigger national politics together. We both sat down and had lunch with Biden and made big contributions a little over a year ago, in December 2023. Then I had my red-pill moment, and I went in a very different direction. It started with questioning the Democrats.

Hold on. Can you double-click into that? What was your red-pill moment? Was there 1 specific thing, or was it more of a trickle of things?

It was both. The wall starts crumbling, and then it comes down all at once.

For me, it really started early in 2023. I started reading Pirate Wires and Mike Solana, and I thought he was a little crazy at first. He wrote an article about how Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets, and how 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.” Then, 4 months later, it was in the New York Times, buried in the middle of the paper.

I kept seeing stories like that, where he would be early. I started feeling uncomfortable and queasy about what was going on with the mainstream media. Then, in May of last year, 2024, I read an article about Trump's speech in Charlottesville. This has been well covered, but the article said that when he said there were “good people on both sides,” it was completely propaganda and did not accurately reflect what he said—that he had denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech.

So I went and watched the video. That was my red-pill moment. I think it was for a lot of people, because it wasn't just the media or politicians spinning it. That was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump.

Then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time. You see Obama talk about it. You even see Biden bring it up again at 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 thought, “Okay, now I have to go back to first principles, look at the primary data, and listen only to people's original speeches.” I realized I couldn't trust the mainstream media. As soon as I started questioning the Democrats, I started getting a lot of shame, anger, and hatred.

The other thing that was part of this journey was that my chief of staff parted ways with me after 9 years in April of last year. 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 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. Second, I connected with this whole new audience of techno-optimists. I think you guys have probably talked about it.

That brought me down this path, and eventually I came out publicly for Trump 2 days before the election. It was only because that's when I completely got there. I was trying to be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time.

My daughters turned to me that Sunday and said, “You're going to vote for Trump. We know it.” I said, “Yeah, you're probably right.” They said, “Then you have to go say it on Twitter.” My daughters were really in this with me.

It was on the front page of the New York Post on Election Day that I was coming out for Trump. Not that I'm such big news, but maybe it was their news peg. What I love about my New York friends is that they did not care. They were all pro-Mark, and they texted me, saying, “Oh, that's kind of funny.” That's one thing I love about New York: They didn't care.

Back to your question about Reid: What I love about him is that he was already getting messages from people saying, “What's going on with Pincus? He's going off the rails. He's becoming a Trumper.” I'm sure you guys have gotten a little bit of that, too: “What's wrong with him? We have to bring him back into the fold. Should we lock him up? Is he crazy?”

I had a lot of anxiety about talking to Reid about it. Finally, we got on FaceTime, and he said, “I just want to start by saying I'm Team Mark.”

I said, “I'm Team Reid.”

It gets a little awkward, but Americans can get along even if they disagree radically about a candidate. That's probably where we need to get to, especially now that Trump is going to be in office in a couple of days.

What I love about Reid is that we followed that with a 4-hour dinner. He said, “I never questioned your principles. I know you're a highly principled person. I just want to understand what those principles are, and I'd like to convince you to change your mind.”

Hold on 1 second. You said something almost in passing, but I want to double-click on it. I think part of what Silicon Valley gets wrong is that we don't embrace the tism.

We're all a little socially uncomfortable. We're awkward. I wouldn't say we were the coolest people growing up. There's this virulent form of blockers—you called it a chief of staff—and I think these people can be very detrimental. They represent a filter between your true self and everybody else, and there is this game played around being a gatekeeper.

I do think executive assistants and administrative assistants are valuable. The reason I can say this is that my EA went on maternity leave, and I experimented with a chief of staff and so on. Now I use a service called Athena, and I have a guy who works with me in the Philippines. It costs about $3,000 a month, and I can honestly tell you this guy is the single most effective administrative support I've ever had.

What he doesn't do is offer all these opinions on what I can say or do. I think that, when you look at a lot of these big companies, including Zuckerberg's current transformation and what you just spoke about, there are all these interlopers who 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.

It's part of what I know you guys have talked about with Zuck coming out as less “based,” or his seemingly more authentic self, and sharing more about himself. I can relate to it, because I think we all go through this struggle as you start to become more of a known person inside and outside your company, with people around you taking the edges off.

I think we're now in a time when authenticity is having a moment, which is great for me. Reid said to me early on, “If you Google me, you'll see that there are lots and lots of bad things written about me.” My high-school quote was, “Some people have tact, and others tell the truth.” I've always been committed to being honest, even if it's nuanced and 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. My competitors did, too.

I think that now, with long-form podcasts and the fact that we can communicate directly in a lot of ways, we're seeing a change. Elon was the first one to directly defend himself. Do you remember when he fired his whole PR team?

There was none of that infrastructure between him and everybody else. Do you remember when he would be on Twitter, post-PayPal, trying to correct the story? He would write long diatribes. Then, when a New York Times reporter said something negative about a Tesla, he would go off for weeks about it.

It seemed a little crazy and deranged, but then you started to see that it worked. We were told, “Don't defend yourself. If something bad is written about you, you're going to prolong the press cycle and make the journalist angry.” Now we're unshackled.

I teach a class at Stanford. I taught 2 back-to-back classes on Monday, and I looked around and saw half the placards said “she/her” or “he/him/his.” I got a little pang of, “Do I have to watch what I'm saying?” Then I thought, “No, I don't. I'm unshackled. I'm just going to be Mark, unfiltered.”

It's the better version of ourselves. 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 toward being authentic.

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

Come on. Was it in the afternoon?

Did you have concerns about that?

He was sharp as a tack.

That was the thing that broke me. I'm not saying I'm full MAGA over here, but I thought, “Wait a second. Are you guys lying about this? How long has this been going on, and how deep is this cover-up?”

I had no horse in that race. I had nothing to lie about, and I certainly don't now. I'm really not a Biden fan or protector. I'll tell you my exact observation.

There were maybe 5 of us with Biden and a few of his finance people. They had it in the Tennis House, which is how they found a way to have a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House. They found some loophole.

We'll see if Trump does that.

It was a long lunch. It must have been 1.5 or 2 hours. I'll tell you the good and the bad.

The part I was impressed by was that he kept the conversational thread. He was engaged and kept the thread the whole time.

When you say “sharp as a tack” or “kept the thread,” that's how we talk about our 90-year-old grandparents.

I'm just saying, in reality, he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of dementia. We were impressed that he was able to follow the conversational thread and then say, “Okay, let me say it differently.”

Jason, would you have had the same bar if it were Jamie Dimon sitting across from you for a 2-hour lunch?

No.

So, 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 think he's mentally unfit.” I wasn't shocked.

I did think, “Okay, this is someone who's being handled and managed by the people around him. He's being told to show up here and say this.” He was not on an obvious script, though. Famously, he did a fundraiser at a person's home where they brought in a teleprompter for him to speak.

Wow. You didn't hear that?

I didn't, actually. That's new information.

That's crazy.

In fairness, there's an issue called sundowning. People in that age group are good during the day, and then the sun goes down, their brains are exhausted, and that's when you would see it. That's what they said about the debate.

But for me, the coronation of Kamala—and not actually having a speed-run primary—was anti-democratic and anti-American. What happened to merit? What happened to having a process?

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

Before we get into the DOGE—we have a lot to talk about—what do you think the Democratic Party does from here? Everybody seems lost and adrift. We're not hearing from them, aside from a little pushback at the Senate confirmation hearings. What do you think happens? Is there any hope for this, and who leads them out? Shapiro? AOC?

The logical thing my rational brain would say—and I think we have to be careful about applying logic to political parties, especially the Democrats—is that they're going to find authentic people to put up against these other candidates. They might put forward Fetterman types who are more centrist and more trustworthy, because they're authentic in their flaws.

That's what my brain would tell me. I think there will be a little of that. I believe the party will move more in that direction. I don't think corporate candidates are going to fly anymore with the electorate. Managed corporate candidates communicating through sound bites can't do long-form conversations like this. I think that's over.

But I don't think they'll go as far as they should. They won't go as far as I think we would intelligently advise them to go.

Interesting. We're certainly going to find out over the next year or 2 what their direction is when they get to the midterms.

One more thing: A lot depends on what we see. If DOGE starts to get real popular support—and I think you guys talked about this last week—the more that this FDR-style Trump agenda and these people get popular support, the more isolating and lonely it's going to become, 2 years from now, to still be saying, “California, Gavin is going to protect you against these people.”

If they're doing things that are popular, continuing to say you're protecting people against them won't fly.

That's a great jumping-off point, because Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass seem like their careers are ending. They're in the last stages of trying to get a little more pragmatic, as people might say, just being super candid.

Let's get into an update about the absolute tragedy occurring in Los Angeles. The death toll is now at 25. About 12,000 structures have been destroyed, mostly people's homes. It's 40,000 acres—60 square miles. San Francisco is about 7 miles by 7 miles, so this is a lot of space. It's bigger than all of San Francisco.

The Palisades and Eaton fires are still burning, and as of Wednesday, 80,000 people were under evacuation orders. A couple of our friends lost their homes, but they survived. The stories of people losing everything are tragic: every memory, personal document, photo, piece of art, and everything they've collected over a lifetime.

I just had 2 conversations with people, and they were in shock. The estimates of damage are currently between $135 billion and $150 billion. This is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. According to reports, it's 10 times more costly than any other wildfire in history.

You might remember the Camp Fire near Paradise, California, about 3 hours north of San Francisco. That one was $12.5 billion, just to level-set it. Now people are talking about what the recovery and rebuilding effort might look like.

California leadership has disintegrated across the board. Gavin—I almost said Gavin Newsom—has disintegrated.

You've had traffic to Dad.com with all of this, right?

Dad.com is currently going to redirect to Gavin Newsom or Karen Bass. I don't know which one is more disgraceful.

It's an incredible troll that you redirect it every week to whoever you're mad at.

Who would be more disgraceful in this situation, Gavin or Karen Bass?

I think it has to be Karen Bass, just for being out of the country.

It would be funny if every week you gave an award and redirected the website to whoever deserved it. Before this, it was Jake Paul for that Tyson fight.

The stakes have gone up.

Gavin Newsom is now doing executive orders. One of them makes it illegal to make unsolicited offers to impacted homeowners for the next 3 months. I don't know what the point of that is. The other eliminates Coastal Act review of permits for houses along the Pacific Coast Highway, I suppose.

He also wants to extend key price-gouging protections, quote, “to help make rebuilding more affordable.” Gouging is defined as raising the rent or price of other goods and services by more than 10% from the last marketed price, but it could be as little as 5%. It's just not clear.

Then Mayor Bass created a snitch hotline to report any kind of price gouging in rents. We've started to see people naming and shaming Zillow and Redfin listings, where you can see the previous history of what they were asking for a home or a rental. Obviously, the free market is making rental homes double in price.

Friedberg, we talked a bunch about this, and I know, Pincus, you may not be 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. What are your thoughts on rebuilding this area? How will it happen, especially given what we brought up last week—and what went a little viral—which was your talk about putting your thumb on the scale with insurance?

This is one of the concerning things here: The free market wasn't previously allowed to function with insurance, and now it's not being allowed to function with rebuilding.

California has price controls, or a mechanism for controlling price changes, on insurance, housing, and services. Now they've added this non-solicitation rule. All 3 are very challenging to an appropriate market recovery.

The insurance issue is a longer one. If you want, we can talk about it. I have a couple of notes on the history of how we got to this point. I think it's going to be one of the biggest burdens going forward, and it could lead to a pretty significant long-term effect on housing prices in California because of the way the insurance market is structured and regulated in the state.

What do you think, ultimately—TL;DR? Do you think prices are going to go way up here? Do you think it's 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 construction is already so expensive and difficult.

I think the governor did a good job suspending the permitting requirements for the Coastal Act for affected homes, as well as CEQA review. Those are very important suspensions.

But he also put in place this executive order for price gouging. If you pull up the note, he said California Penal Code Section 396, which prohibits price gouging during a declared state of emergency, will now extend indefinitely in this region.

The language in that penal code says businesses cannot raise the price of essential goods and services by more than 10% above their pre-emergency price for a specified period. In this case, his executive order is indefinite. On an indefinite basis, you cannot raise the price of goods and services. That 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 and contractors to the Los Angeles area, you have to allow the market to do its job. If I'm a plumber operating in Sacramento or Phoenix and I think, “I could make some money if I go to L.A.,” you'll see an influx of service providers and goods to support the rebuilding effort.

That's the way the free market should work: There's an opportunity in the market, people show up, and they say, “Great, I can make money. I'm going to come here and do this work.” As more people show up, they begin to compete on price. Eventually, the cost normalizes and you find the new fair-market value between the bid and the ask.

The people saying, “I'll do the work,” are the ask. The people saying, “I need people to do the work,” are the bid. You find a price. The benefit is that you increase the supply of goods and service providers, including contractors.

There's a home-building deficit in the United States right now, so this is an amazing opportunity. Builders can move to L.A. and build homes. We can get a rapid reconstruction effort underway, except the governor just said we can't pay people more than 10% above what they were getting paid right before this happened, on an indefinite basis.

Then Karen Bass created a hotline. You can go to L.A. 311 and report people if they're trying to charge too much, and the state will come investigate you to determine whether you're charging too much.

I understand the strong moral imperative to say, “We have to stop price gouging. We don't want people to get hurt.” But the second-order effect is that you're hurting the market and the rebuilding effort, because you're reducing the incentive for people to come in and fill the void that is necessary to accelerate the development of 15,000 homes in a very short period of time.

The alternative is that people will be sitting around. I already spoke to a couple of friends who were affected, and I'm sure you guys have, too. They said, “I've tried calling architects and contractors—people who live in this area—but I cannot get anyone to return my call.”

There are not enough service providers down there. You're going to end up waiting 6 or 7 years to get your home rebuilt. You own a lot, but you don't have a home to live in. Then there's this other rule that says you can't take unsolicited offers on the home.

If you want to pull that one up, the governor said it's illegal to make an unsolicited offer on a piece of real estate in one of these affected ZIP codes. I don't know why he did that. He keeps referencing what happened in Hawaii, as if there were people who were taken advantage of and we need to protect the citizens of Los Angeles.

I'm pretty sure that having an increase in the number of offers coming in for real estate increases the market and drives buying behavior. Ultimately, having more liquidity makes it easier for people who own burned-down lots to sell their lot, take their insurance check, move to another neighborhood, and go somewhere else. Otherwise, they're going to have to wait 6 or 7 years to build a home.

I think you're a little bit off the deep end with some of this, because I don't think you're being totally fair in representing what this executive order says. That's coming from me, and I am not a Newsom fan. I think he is completely and totally incompetent.

I'll take the other side of this. I read the executive order, and I actually think it's somewhat reasonable. I didn't connect it to the real-estate market, because if you scope out a little bit from this moment in Los Angeles, the problem is that after natural disasters there is a spike in fraudulent activity. People try to take advantage of the situation to make money.

For example, after hurricanes in Florida, people pose as contractors. They come in, offer inflated prices, and provide poor-quality work. Especially when you're trying to speed up the process and there are fewer checks and fewer people involved, you can have pressure tactics that work against the best interests of the person trying to rebuild.

The order is hyper-specific to unsolicited offers in a very specific handful of ZIP codes. It is time-boxed for 3 months. It says that making an unsolicited offer to an owner of real-property located in the named areas, to acquire any interest in that real property for less than the fair market value of the property on January 6—before the fire started and before the home burned down—is prohibited for 3 months.

The reason I think he said that is because of exactly this problem. There was a crazy story from KTLA about people called “fire chasers,” essentially wildfire scammers. They're like ambulance chasers, but during fires.

My point is, I don't disagree with his incompetence. I think he is totally out of touch. I think there is a broken cartel running the state that is going to drive it into complete disrepair. You can't say a state with a $322 billion budget is already bankrupt. It's teetering on a path from which we won't be able to return, and we can debate that.

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, has a specific window, and is time-boxed so that the worst behavior by other people is roughly managed and mitigated until we can figure out a better answer.

You're saying that unsolicited offers on real estate can drive fraud, based on what you talked about. But this does not prevent somebody from buying.

Let's talk about services separately, because he has a separate executive order. This does not prevent anybody whose house burned down from listing their lot. You could sell it for a dollar.

That's right.

So it's not right or accurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market. The idea that you cannot sell isn't what's in this executive order. The idea is that 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 and figure out where your kids are going to go to school.

They're just making an offer. What's the pressure tactic? Why can't someone make an offer on your home? You want people to bid up the price.

David, here's what's going to happen. There are people in the middle of all this stress who are trying to figure out how much money they can get. Somebody shows up and underbids what true price discovery could be a few months from now.

You don't know whether you still have to pay back your mortgage. There will be a nonzero number of people who make a mistake. I think it's good to try to stop that. It doesn't absolve him from his incompetence, but I think this was reasonably good.

What about the services piece, Chamath? The fact that you can't increase pricing on goods and services by more than 10% for an indefinite period—don't you think that creates a disincentive for service providers to come into the state and address this?

Obviously, it does. This grand ideal that the free market will solve everything isn't necessarily always true. It's great in theory and reads well in a textbook, but real life is messy. Right now, we're in the messy part, and we're in the most critical part, where the abuses will be highest.

I suspect that in 6, 9, or 12 months, the free market will sort all of these things out. If a governor can implement some checks and balances to protect people who are probably totally dazed, I think that's reasonable.

I've spoken to some of our friends over the last few days, including their wives. I'll say this in a horrible way: One person said to me, “The number of people who have reached out to me with condolences—if you had asked me 2 weeks ago why so many people would reach out with condolences, I would have thought that one of my children had died.”

That's what he said, and it completely struck me. It's not on that same level, but the amount of emotional turmoil these families are going through probably approaches that. I don't think many of these people are in a condition to make good decisions right now.

I almost think a cooling-off period benefits everybody. It allows the free market to work a few months from now. We're only talking about 90 days.

No, the services rule is indefinite. That's what I think is frustrating.

Let me bring Mark in here. Mark, you've heard both sides of this debate. If you had a lot in Pacific Palisades that burned down and people started making unsolicited offers—you're sophisticated; I've known you for more than 20 years—do you think it's reasonable to put a moratorium on people making these lowball offers?

We'll get to the construction piece second, but what do you think about unsolicited offers?

What bothers me is the presumption. Maybe Chamath is right, and you're getting me to think about it more than I was, but I'm pretty much where Friedberg is. We're treating these people like children. We're saying they're not capable of making good decisions, so we need to protect them from themselves.

We're saying we don't want them to know that somebody is willing to pay a certain amount for their property, because they might take it and regret it later. That's kind of what Chamath is saying.

No. In a narrow window, you may not have the best and clearest ability to make the best decision for yourself because you're dealing with so many other crazy issues in your life. You could still say no.

You could say no. But there's one side that bothers me, and it feels like what we've had from the Democratic Party forever: this big, wise overlord who's going to protect us from ourselves and our worst natures.

On the other hand, you're bringing up something, Chamath, that I hadn't thought about and am thinking more about now. People could be taken advantage of at the margin because they're in what feels like a dire position.

If they think they're in a dire position, they might really be in one. For example, let's say you haven't heard back from the banks that own your mortgage about whether there will be a moratorium on mortgage payments. You're trying to juggle paying for an extra rental and this house, while figuring out where to send your kids to school.

Somebody shows up and says, “I'll buy this from you.” I think there are many people who would otherwise be able to make a much more rational decision who may make a panic decision in that moment.

If you give people a 90-day cooling-off period, it at least shines a light on whether all of this government and other infrastructure can actually do something for these people. I do think there is a moment at which you can't govern these things, and all I'm suggesting is a very narrow window of time when people's feelings of desperation are at their highest.

I think this is a decent thing to do. There is some precedent for the state doing things like this. In most states, there is a cooling-off period with marriages and divorces. You have to wait 3 days to file either way—to get married or get divorced.

Let's talk about the construction process, Friedberg, because I think that's the most important one. We're going to rebuild, but if you don't pay a premium to get somebody to leave another market and come to this one—which is what's going to be required—there simply aren't enough construction workers in any state.

Now you're competing with another state.

This immediately triggered the debate—and I would say the courage—that Travis had around surge pricing for Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and a bunch of other companies that were virtue-signaling. They said they didn't ever want surge pricing, and therefore there were never cars on the road on Friday and Saturday nights, during inclement weather, snowstorms, or New Year's Eve, when people needed them.

If you want to increase supply, we believe Uber should have availability. Lyft took a different decision: “We're going to have no surge pricing,” and they simply weren't available.

What do you think about that piece, Pincus? Should the free market allow people to say, “I'll pay you time-and-a-half to come here. I'll pay you double time to work Saturdays and Sundays. I'll put a couple of RVs in the back if you want people to live on the construction site. If you hit these dates, I'll pay you a bonus”?

That doesn't seem wrong to me. If somebody has the ability to pay an incentive for someone to move from another state, what are your thoughts?

I agree. I'm pretty much a free-market believer. Outside of guardrails like Chamath mentioned—and maybe I like the idea of cooling-off periods, because it makes sense—when it comes to service providers, you have the opposite problem right now.

You need to incentivize a huge construction force to come to Los Angeles, and the cost for them to get there and find housing for themselves is going to be even higher. Or they're going to have to travel a greater distance every day.

I think this could have real unintended consequences and stop the wheels from turning on rebuilding all these homes. It would make things much more complex. So I agree.

Chamath, final thoughts on the rebuilding and the free market in that regard?

I think this is where government ineptitude is at its worst. We need to dismantle this regulatory state that makes doing the right thing impossible.

Specifically, the thing Newsom did was create a time expectation for when things will get permitted. I think he said 6 months. The problem is that this shows how insane the state has become.

Even if you get a permit within 6 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 3, 4, 5, or 6 years. It's going to be insane.

The example of the complete incompetence of the California state government is what happened after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. They rebuilt Interstate 10, which is a critical artery, in 66 days.

They didn't just permit it. They didn't try to get the California Coastal Commission to approve it. They didn't wait for a Sierra Club lawsuit about the sage grouse. They rebuilt it.

You know what's possible in California if tradespeople are allowed to go to work. They can build incredibly complicated things, safely and quickly.

This is where Newsom doesn't understand how the real market works. If you look at that example, the real question is: What has changed? Technology has gotten much better since then. People are more skilled. There are more people able to do more of these jobs.

Why does it take 6 months just to get a permit when, in 120 days, you could rebuild an entire highway? Similarly, why aren't we saying that we expect these homes to be built in the next 3 years? Get these kids back in their homes and back in school.

They offered a $200,000-per-day early-build bonus on that program back then. The state declared, “We need this freeway reopened, and here's the date.” It was about 144 days, and they said, “You'll get a $200,000 bonus for every day under 144 that you deliver it.”

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

The really interesting thing here is that there are regulations that could be put in place. This is a unique opportunity to do that.

There was a home that wasn't burned in Pacific Palisades, and the architect talked about some of the design decisions. You could have stone landscaping around your home, gravel, and other measures. You could use new materials and avoid overhangs. You could have vents into your attic, which is where a lot of homes have embers enter. Many of these homes are wood-built; none of them are concrete or brick.

There should probably be additional regulations about building things that are fireproof. If you had 100 homes that were all fireproof and built to withstand this, they could act as a natural break. You could also reduce the amount of vegetation.

There are probably a series of things that should be added in terms of regulations while getting rid of the regulations that are slowing you down.

Also, allowing people to park their mobile homes in these areas to provide housing for construction workers would be critical. California blocks that kind of thing. When you need temporary housing in California, you can't do it.

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 3 images I want to show you to bubble this up for everybody who isn't necessarily living in California and is consumed with what all of this means. There's a bigger trend across the country that's worth putting out there.

Chamath, do you want to show the first chart from FEMA?

This is a graph, by locality, all over the United States, where FEMA assesses the disaster risk of living in a given area. What you see is that there's some risk on the Eastern Seaboard, and there's a lot of risk—and growing risk—on the Western Seaboard.

The 2 most complicated states dealing with this are clearly Florida and California. This isn't a problem focused on just 1 little area. It's a problem across the country.

If you double-click a little further, there's a company called CoreLogic that publishes a lot of real-estate data. Here's a chart about the Western United States that focuses on wildfire risk.

I was shocked when I saw it. It includes most of California, Nevada, Arizona, parts of Texas, and Washington. I didn't even know the fire risk went up that high. This is a huge portion of the Western United States.

The last chart is also from CoreLogic, and it assesses the value at risk. In California, $750 billion—or three-quarters of a trillion dollars—is at risk across about 1.26 million homes that face moderate or greater fire risk.

In Colorado, it's about $141 billion. In Texas, $88 billion. In Oregon, $45 billion. In Arizona, $36 billion.

The point is that everything you said, Jason, now needs to be scaled out. There needs to be a national-level conversation. This can't be a bunch of city planners making codes and laws in a little municipality.

What this shows is that we have a multitrillion-dollar risk to a lot of people in the Western United States, specifically around this issue. It has to be addressed through building codes.

All right, really interesting. In New York, finally, congestion pricing has been put into place. I've been waiting for this my entire life.

Here's the math: It went into effect January 5. This congestion-pricing concept exists in London, as everybody probably knows. Basically, if you're below Central Park—which is 59th Street in Manhattan—and you enter between 5:00 a.m.

And 9:00 p.m., you're going to get, on your E-ZPass, a charge of $9—cheaper than a bacon, egg, and cheese in Manhattan these days. If you're going clubbing in Manhattan between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., it's just about $2. It's going to increase to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031. Trucks pay more; taxis pay less.

The results have been awesome. Wait times to get onto the island are down 50% across the board: Lincoln Tunnel, down 46%; Holland Tunnel, down 63%; Williamsburg Bridge, down 35%. It's just an awesome effort. When I lived there, man, as a resident, the traffic was nuts. You can have emergency services move a lot faster, get rid of noise pollution, and obviously get rid of air-quality pollution from internal-combustion engines. It's great for cabs, pedestrians, and 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? Are you in favor of this?

Yes. More generally, since the pandemic, what's been on my mind a lot, living still in San Francisco, is that I wanted to start a social network called Still Here. It would be 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, because we never leave our homes.

I walk around this city at my own risk, and I like cities. I feel like cities have lost the point. They've lost the plot, like why we still live in cities or value them. I feel like we have to go back to first principles and think: Why did we move to cities in the first place? What was the value supposed to be? Is that still the deal we're getting, or does there have to be a new deal?

We used to live in a city because it was economical; we were closer to our jobs. Then we lived in a city because there was a high density of things that we wanted: culture, people, restaurants. The best cities really were the ones that were 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, and San Francisco started to feel like this gigantic retirement community. It's all these people who still live here because their kids are in school, maybe, or because they grew up here.

A lot of our friends left and went to Austin and other places. We started—I don't know about Chamath, but I think our family has a conversation probably twice a year: 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.

I think cities need to innovate aggressively to be better. They have to compete with the other options again. They have to make it fun to be there and fun to work there. I think it's great that Daniel Lurie is mayor of San Francisco, that he's putting smart people around him, and that they're trying to rethink some of these core problems. But also, how do we make San Francisco fun again? I love things like congestion pricing. I think now is the time to try every new innovation that you ever thought of, see what sticks, and figure out how to take this tax—not literally; I mean, New York has a big tax—but this tax on all of us, whether it's that you can't walk across the city, that you don't feel safe, or that the good side of it, being fun to be in, is gone. The deal is off.

I also hope Daniel Lurie and other smart mayors benchmark themselves and 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? You've got to reinvent these cities. Sorry to sound cliché, but you've 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. The companies can make their employees come back to the office, but it'd be really nice if the employees wanted to be there. You can't make people live in California.

I'm in favor. Chamath, any thoughts on Mark's point about making cities fun again and joyful again? It sounds like a pretty good platform.

I think he's right. San Francisco sucks. It's trash. I never go there.

Yeah, it's terrible. And the reason that you don't like to go there is that it's dirty, it's disgusting, there's crime, there's grime—everything just sucks there.

Friedberg, your thoughts on Gotham City? Did Chamath ever come to the Presidio? Have you ever had him in the Dave's office?

I have come to your office. I've come to Dave's office. I've gone to Peter's office there. What I do is, I don't even go through the city. I go all the way around. I drive through the East Bay, up through Berkeley, and I come—

I'm just kidding.

No, no. I just think that the city is very poorly managed. The quality of many cities is poor because they're poorly managed. There's a common through line in these poorly managed cities: All the things that you say, there's no will to do. There's no will to keep crime at bay. There's no will to make 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 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 state and leading the state.

You're 100% right.

Sure, 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 the state 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 not really like their hands are tied because there's so much permitting. You're right: They've made a decision. The decision in California, and in San Francisco specifically, was that we're going to cater to fentanyl dealers and junkies, that those people were going to get a stipend and a hotel room and be allowed to take a superdrug on the streets—thousands of people with no recourse. Listen, I'm pro-drug. I'm not pro-fentanyl and meth. These things are superdrugs.

Let's make it less about San Francisco. Let's talk about middle Ohio, and let's talk about Palmer Luckey. He did this really awesome interview. He's building a new Ohio plant, but the question and answer from the interviewer is exactly what Pincus has talked about. The interviewer says, “Was this the only state that could guarantee the 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 JobsOhio, with a lot of the politicians here—not just 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 an 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 have 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 they can come in and work with you.’ Our customer, the United States Air Force, obviously has a huge presence here in the form of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. 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 are some states that are really good at pushing you out and slowing you down, and there are others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up. That's what Ohio was fantastic at.”

Yeah, states are competing for elite companies, and there's a willpower—there's an intention. If they want to make it happen, they'll make it happen. Just like Gavin did. Gavin could have theoretically—I don't know—signed an executive order to override the Coastal Commission on a lot of things, even his desal plant. I don't know why he didn't just force that through. If we had desal, maybe there'd be more water to fight the fire.

I think the important thing to note is that cities have a right to be what they want to be. You guys might find this surprising, but I'm not necessarily of the belief that every city should cater to progress, acceleration, enterprise, and industrialization.

When you go to Portofino every summer, Chamath, you would probably stop going, and you'd be disappointed, if you found out 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 remember when I first moved to San Francisco 25 years ago. It felt like a smaller European city. It wasn't overrun with technology companies at the time. The charm, the quaint nature, and the smaller buildings of San Francisco made it a beautiful, fantastic town.

I think 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 Francisco a small city by the bay. That frustration has manifested in a lot of ugliness over the last couple of decades, in addition to all the silly, stupid policies that just make no sense whatsoever. They're rooted in people thinking that this is a good solution in the short term, but it creates extraordinary damage and harm in the long term.

Separate from that, I do think that cities have a right to be what they want to be.

I just want to interject as a fellow San Franciscan for a long time. That's the normal tension that's been here all along, and that kind of makes the city culture great. You want to have this creative melting pot here, but there's another side that has come into play in the last 10 or 15 years: this progressivism side, which we saw with Chesa Boudin. I think it's a different virus. That's the ugly silliness I meant when I was saying that. Let's put that aside. Let's put San Francisco aside.

Does a city want to attract and build an industry? Does it want to attract and build enterprising companies? Or does it want to be a small, quaint town? Does it want to stay with no—

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

Portofino doesn't do that, right? Because it doesn't make those promises. It's not asking you to elect people who are trying to do it.

Not every city is making that choice, though. Why are we lying to everybody? 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 that the cities that promise progress and don't deliver—San Francisco promises it, London promises it, New York promises it—these things are chaotic messes.

It's not the trade-off of, “Oh, well, Portofino 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 it a totally different way.” They both claim to have measurements of how it's going to be great.

My point is that 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 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 for any kind of operational position she ever held. You want to read her résumé? It's tragic. Just tragic. I would, like I said last week, not send her to get my lunch, because you know that order would be totally screwed up.

She is so unqualified, and you had this perfect person, Rick Caruso, who literally—you can't script this—built Palisades Village. In 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 and taking meetings. I don't know what the connection was between Los Angeles and what its citizens needed 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, whom you didn't vote for as mayor, did the right thing. Vote these people out. Recall Karen Bass. You can do it. We recalled Chesa Boudin. You remember on this show, David Sacks—he's a Republican entrepreneur and venture capitalist and a good friend of mine; I'll introduce you guys if you haven't met him—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 and they're not thinking in your best interest. You have no choice, citizens of Los Angeles, but to get these people out immediately. Every day they stay in office, they're going to cause more damage to your family, your property, and your city. Recall them now.

Didn't James Woods post a petition on Change.org that I saw on Twitter? It was already over 90,000 names. I signed it, though I don't live there.

You have power. The people of California don't understand how much power they have. Gavin Newsom, I just told people on Twitter, Chamath: Every time Gavin tweets or Karen Bass tweets, 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 them. It worked in Brooklyn. Shame worked.

I don't know why people think they have no power. You can literally go in there and do things, and one of the things you can do is recall them.

TikTok's future is in question right now. The ban is about to happen unless the parent company, ByteDance, divests by January 19, 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's only hope is the Supreme Court blocking the law.

What do you think, Mark? Do you think it's Chinese spyware? Do you think they should be forced to divest? What do you think the repercussions will be?

Here's what's so hard for me about this. On the one hand, part of it seems so obvious, from not just a national-security point of view but also a fairness point of view. It's insane if you think about it that there's a Chinese company arguing in court for protections under our Constitution and freedom of speech when none of our companies have those kinds of rights in China, much less the right to even operate there if they're not majority-controlled or in line with censorship or whatever else.

On the one hand, it seems like a no-brainer. But what you're starting to see come up in the last couple of days—even one of my daughters, who's a major TikToker, is saying it—is the law of unintended consequences. We could see this ban, especially if they don't get to a deal with somebody, and the 170 million Americans, many of them younger Americans, who rely on this suddenly feel like it's censoring them and taking away their freedom of expression. It could backfire in a lot of ways.

We're already seeing memes where they're going onto these other apps, like RedNote, 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 to force it to divest and sell it 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 and play, 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 delete the app.

Of course they get it back.

Of course. Kids are right around it. What do you think, Chamath? What's going to happen here?

I mentioned this to President Trump, and I really think this is true. The reason there was so much bipartisan support for the bill as it worked through Congress is that I think they were briefed on just how severe the security vulnerabilities of this app are. I don't think we've seen anything in modern history that is this controversial yet has been so almost unanimous.

Yeah.

There's something happening in the app that they've been briefed on that makes them take this posture. When I listened to the Supreme Court arguments, I didn't hear a very compelling reason why this ban should be overturned.

I agree with Mark that we have to find a suitable home, and I think we'll probably find one. I think it probably happens under the Trump presidency. 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 there's a fair-market-value deal here for that asset. Whoever the buyer is will be in the total catbird seat. In order to get a deal done with the federal government, I think you're just going to get a buy-it-now price that's very cheap.

The other thing that I'll say, on a totally separate tangent, is that when I started hunting around, TikTok's real-time recommendation algorithm was open source. The learning method—Nick, do you want to throw it up here?—is called “Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table.”

This is an incredible paper. The cleverness of what these guys have built cannot be underestimated. What's incredible is what they describe in this paper, which I think frankly a lot of social apps would benefit from understanding. They didn't take a monolithic training approach for recommendations. They figured out how to do it in real time and make it collisionless. It's incredible. This paper is a tour de force.

It makes me realize that, despite the political maneuvering around this hot potato, there are some people who have been working in that app or in the parent company who are truly technically talented. It's a shame that they're going to get thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak. People should know that there are technological innovations inside ByteDance and TikTok that are truly amazing feats of computer science. This is an example.

It doesn't, though, change the fact that I think enough of Congress and the rest of the security apparatus know that this is a mechanism to spy. I think you both nailed it. Isn't China saying that, if this does get divested, they're going to keep either ByteDance or the algorithm? Or are you saying it's open source, so it doesn't matter?

This was an example of describing the methodology. It's not functionally open source yet, but I think that open-sourcing it doesn't solve the problem.

Let's say Pegasus was able to reverse-engineer or build penetration attacks into WhatsApp that were imperceptible to everybody until it happened to Jeff Bezos and other people. You get these state-sponsored attacks on your phone, and then you call the FBI, 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 that the attack vectors get incrementally more and more sophisticated is the problem. It used to be that there was a PDF payload. Then there could just be an image payload. Now it's any payload, and you don't even have to click to open it. All of a sudden, it just roots your phone.

These are extremely sophisticated mechanisms that are enabled by a very few, very talented people. I'll put “talented” in quotes, but when those talented people work on the wrong side, you have to act. Open-sourcing it won't solve this. These exploits are known to a few, and I think that if they're known to the NSA, this is probably what was disclosed to people under confidentiality that caused them to reach this conclusion.

I think people just need to wake up and realize that the Chinese government does not have Americans' best interests at heart. There is no concept of reciprocity, as you mentioned, Mark. That's the number-one reason to do this. Number two is what you pointed out, Chamath: security.

If you think about the two biggest imports from China right now, it's fentanyl and TikTok. They want to make us addicted. They want to impact our society. They want to divide us. This is a massive psyop that's going on. It is a psyop, and it is spyware. It's been proven that they spied on journalists. These are bad actors. It has to go.

I was super excited when I saw the possibility that X would take over TikTok. The reason I say that is that I do think 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 it's much safer and it's governed by an American—that, to me, would be the compromise.

I think the app should go away, but if you can somehow give creators a path to restart their content-creation capabilities on X, I think that's actually a pretty good one.

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's STEM content: science, technology, engineering, and math.

I've not noticed that.

Take a look. I don't know if it's just mine and they're microtargeting 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 TikTok? It 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 airs, 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 U.S. It seems like both the Democrats and 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 6 months of the Trump administration. I'm obviously speculating, but it feels like there's going to be some workout here.

China is in a lot of economic distress. I don't know if you guys have followed the stories about the deflationary challenges that China is dealing with. Chinese bonds are trading at below a 2% yield now, which is kind of unprecedented, and there's a real concern that China is in a very significant economic deflationary spiral. They're in a very weakened position economically at the moment.

The United States seems to be in a position of strength. Given the rhetoric, I would imagine that this administration may try to work out some deal that provides access to the Chinese market in exchange for the U.S. minimizing the tariff effect on Chinese importers to the U.S. There could be something that eases the tension with China and creates mutual economic value in the first 6 months of the administration. We'll see.

It's a great point. Trump is a great negotiator. That's probably his greatest strength, and he's great at saber-rattling. We're strong; they're weak right now. A grand deal could be an awesome outcome.

I think that was one of my contrarian predictions.

Oh, no, that was my stock prediction. I picked the Chinese tech stocks.

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

Here's a chart for you: Companies are not hiring as many MBAs. There's a recent spike in unemployment among MBAs from top business schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. I'm not sure. Pincus, did you go to Harvard?

Guilty. All the learning that's helped me in my career started later, after I got out and got my first product-management job. That's when I started learning things that are useful to me today. While I was there, I learned a lot about how to sell to corporate America and how they think, but I've gone back to HBS for decades trying to recruit from there.

In the beginning, when I had Support.com and it was going to go public, they told me the kids would have to be a vice president and own 3% of the company to take a job with a startup like mine. This was just before the company went public. There was a little bit of a renaissance period where some HBS people were excited to join Zynga, probably because they thought it was going public. They were a little more risk-on at that point.

Now everyone's open to jobs. My take is that there's this fundamental imbalance: People go and get an MBA because they're de-risking their careers. You go to HBS or Stanford, and you're guaranteed this high salary and this kind of great job for life. The reason to go there is to take the risk off.

That's in fundamental opposition to where we are in our economy today, in my opinion, or where the most interesting sectors are. Those kinds of jobs have dried up. 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.

These people are smart and qualified, but there's this mismatch. They are fundamentally risk-averse, and so they're not going to do that. When it says they haven't found jobs, part of it is that they're going to have to fall further. They may have debt or have to pay back this expensive degree, but I think they've got to get to a point like I was at when I started my first company, Freeloader. I happily had very little to no opportunity cost because I had torched my career by that point. I was fired or asked to leave every job, so there was kind of no turning back.

Can you imagine being Mark Pincus's boss? That's almost as hard as being Chamath's.

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

Right. Great quarterback.

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. You probably thought so too, then, about my company.

The question is, maybe we're going to get a new equilibrium where the guaranteed opportunities for these people start to come down. Consulting firms, right? They all go to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or whatever. Even the class I taught on Monday at Stanford said everyone wants a job at Meta or Google. That's the get-rich-quick place.

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. Part of what's in this data is probably that a lot of these people aren't taking jobs because they aren't finding jobs that meet this high expectation for pay and opportunity.

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, “That's not going to be my risk-off trade, and I'm not going to be guaranteed 100%,” then why go in the first place?

I would advise people today, depending on the 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. That's going to be the beginning of learning.

Chamath, what are these things called when these MBAs graduate, raise a bunch of money, and go buy some real business?

Search funds. That's not happening anymore.

Yeah, that was the thing.

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

There was that one deal out of Stanford GSB. The guy founded Asurion, which is, you know, $10 billion. That guy would have founded that company outside of Stanford. He could have gone to Timbuktu State University and he would have been fine.

That speaks more to the cleverness of that one individual than to the 99,000 other terrible deals that have been done.

Let me say something that builds on what Pincus was saying. I think this is an interesting window into the future of AI, in the sense that companies are slowly internalizing that the first place AI disintermediates is actually middle management.

You thought it was the customer-support person. Maybe you thought it was the engineer, the designer, or the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it's the middle manager. It's the functionary who's basically acting as cartilage inside of this organization, who 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? 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. It created all of these really dysfunctional org charts in a company.

When you're a system of record that sells something—let's make it up: “Hey, I'm the best general-ledger software.” A CEO says, “Great, implement that,” and all of a sudden it's, “Well, you're going to need a CFO.” 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, and a head of the other thing.” Then the CEO says, “Okay,” and those people hire.

What happens is that software sprawl is really what created those jobs. Somebody else says, “Here's a customer-relationship-management thing.” Great, so then you hire a CMO and a CRO. Those people build infrastructure.

My premise is that if you look inside the 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. That's why organizations are this bulky. Now, when you have all of these new next-generation businesses 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 don't think this is a commentary on the people. The people are probably quite smart. But I do think this is a warning sign that people should not go pursue these degrees, because as Pincus said, you're not taking the trade of least volatility. You're actually taking on a lot more volatility than you probably thought you should be taking on by going to a place like Harvard or Stanford.

The collapse of the MBA program could be the beginning of the unwinding of the higher-education market.

Why?

I think this is the easiest one to discard first in an age of AI, automation, and self-learning. I've been thinking a lot about this. I have young kids—my oldest kid is 7 years old—and I think a lot about whether it makes sense for my kids to go to college.

When I think about going to classes as an undergraduate, there was certainly a social experience, and I learned a lot working at a lab when I was there and doing other things. But those were on-the-job experiences. I do think the social experience and practical experience can be gotten outside of the college infrastructure, this educational infrastructure.

I cannot tell you guys how much time I have to spend thinking about this. I just had a great idea. I just had the best idea ever: the All-In MBA. Let's start our own MBA.

I don't think—I think that's the whole point. 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: Anything you want to learn, you have—

Have you guys heard about what Jony Ive has done with his kids?

I'm pretty sure they skipped college and just went to work directly with him and his design firm.

Exactly. I'm taking him out to lunch because I want to interview him about it. By the way, your daughters and my daughters want to start a podcast together. Pincus, do you know what they want to name it?

Oh, no. I don't know if I should say it. I didn't hear the name.

I think Chamath's daughters are in on this as well. I think it was another friend's child who came up with the name.

They wanted to call it the Nepo Pod.

Chamath's got a couple of kids.

I'm here for it.

Pincus, you get to see two different things here when AI comes up as a topic. Friedberg finally has a best friend, and Chamath finally has a lover who will do exactly what he tells it to. It's absolutely perfect.

I just had Aarush Selvan, who's the product manager at Google doing deep research, on This Week in Startups yesterday. This product is nuts. They designed it to basically be one of these $1 million or $5 million reports you pay for from these consulting firms that hire MBAs, and it does a better job. It's more accurate, and it's done in 5 to 10 minutes. This thing fires off—

Have you used Deep Research yet, Jason? I keep hearing you talk about it, and I'm such an idiot about this stuff.

It's on desktop only. You can't use it on mobile. Gemini has it too, and you have to pay $20 for it. Grok 2.0 is doing something similar. When you put your query in, it decides all the second-level queries that should be asked. Then it checks its work and asks what's missing.

It fires off a spider that crawls 150 pages in real time. Then it asks questions about the data and says, “What's missing from this?” All the questions you would get from your manager if you were working at Boston Consulting Group—“You missed this, you missed this, can you double-check this, can you find more detail on this?”—it goes and asks those follow-up questions.

Now you can do a cron job where you say, “Take my research and every week do an update on it. Fill in information and tell me the differences.” Instead of just buying a Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey report, you build it and have it automatically refresh in your Google Docs and update you on what's changed. Grok is doing it as well, except Grok has all the tweets.

Did you see that now, at the top of the page—I think it's only in the dedicated Grok app that they launched last week—it shows you all the tweets and all the web pages it indexed for that query.

This is like putting somebody on a week-long research project. Like I said, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to do this, and it costs a massive amount of server capacity because 200 to 300 queries are occurring behind your one query. It's nuts.

I don't know if you guys have been using Advanced Voice on ChatGPT much. Lately, anytime I come across an interesting topic, I end up talking to ChatGPT for an hour or two. I'll be in my car driving to work or to a meeting, or I'll go for a walk down to the coffee shop, and I'll say, “Tell me about what happened during the Ice Age with respect to how quickly sea levels receded.”

I start to gather information, and it's basically like your own personal tutor. You end up seeing a future where the real world becomes the lab environment that is created in a very short window and a small amount of space in a college environment. You're in some applied setting, and that applied setting basically becomes the real world. You've got college in your ear. You've got your tutors, your educational experience, and the capabilities you're learning, and you learn more in real time.

I think that's what AI is going to take us to, which is basically going to destroy much of the value of higher education. This MBA piece is probably just the first step of many that's ultimately going to erode the value of education.

Lately we've been talking to all the guests about UFOs and UAPs. Welcome to the conspiracy, Mark. Do you have a point of view on UFO and UAP phenomena?

I do. I guess everyone else does too, so I won't be that weird an outlier. First of all, I don't believe in UAPs or 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 where we're going to break our current understanding of physics and our physics laws. I've been looking for that moment, and one of those areas is UAPs. I've become more and more curious and have been digging more and more.

I started working with a friend who made the movie Icarus on the idea of a Netflix docuseries. I thought it should be funny and have somebody like a Larry David character narrating it. He came back to me and said he was making a documentary about the fentanyl crisis and how China has dumped it here. He said, “You've got to meet with me and this guy.”

While he was working on that, he was interviewing a former Department of Defense contractor who had worked for them for decades. The contractor said, “I've got a lot on fentanyl, but I have this whole other thing to show you about UAPs.” He'll just tell you his claim.

They came and met with me, and we had to meet outside and put our phones in Faraday bags.

Faraday bags?

Faraday bags. It was a good setup, if nothing else. Jason Calacanis

Let me guess: all the drone videos look like they were shot on a 1968 camera.

Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Mark, just explain this. The United States is simulating war games—what is it doing exactly that's causing these drones to show up?

He did not tell me what the games were or what the exact triggers were, but he said different things would trigger different ones. He had tons and tons of video of them and had classified them.

I'm just telling you what he told me. He said different things would trigger different ones, and he classified them. Some of them were aggressive from an electronics and communications perspective; they would take out electronics and communications.

He and my friend were interested in putting up a couple of people and a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film it. I thought about it. I even had him go meet with Reed, but I didn't move quickly. Then he went dark on us and stopped responding.

Some friends of mine went to a gathering related to multiple things around this, and they said this guy was there and had summoned one of these. They said it looked like a large drone. My friends showed me some pictures that they took, which were really grainy because it was at night.

Come on. Stop.

I'm not making this up. I'm just telling you.

One piece of advice with this documentary-film stuff: You know how to make $100 million in documentary films, Pincus?

Start with a billion.

Start with a billion. You're the mark in all of this. This guy needs a million dollars to finish his house in Canyon, and you're the way to do it.

I didn't fund it.

Good.

All I'm saying is that I think there's a possibility that some kind of drone is showing up. I'm not saying it's even from a nonhuman maker.

I believe it. I'm looking, to be honest, for a reason to believe in this. I know my bias. I'm very sympathetic when I hear these stories. I listen way too long to podcasts about this stuff.

How about this: Are we convinced that there has been absolutely zero unidentified object inside some vault buried deep somewhere, either in the U.S. or in some national government somewhere? Are we guaranteed that the odds of that are zero? I say no.

Let's do our Fermi paradox. Friedberg, what is the Fermi paradox? Why, if there are aliens, haven't we seen them? Quick round.

I'm not saying that. My point is that there is a UAP that has been unidentified sitting inside some vault somewhere in a state government in the world.

So your position is that aliens have come?

No, stop saying “aliens.” You're making the whole thing seem ridiculous when you say aliens. I'm not saying that. Let's 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.

With billions of planets, logic would make you think that one has come already. With billions of habitable planets and species out there, somebody must be ahead of us.

The other conclusion of the Fermi paradox is that, statistically, we are the highest a society has ever gotten. We have yet to send our probes out to the rest of the universe.

Although we have sent probes to Uranus.

All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in. This is All-In. I need young Spielberg to make us a jingle for Dad.com. Mark Pinkus, you're amazing. Thank you for fitting right in with your besties, and top bro on the baby, congrats. Looking forward to seeing you this weekend.

And by the way, programming note: We're all going to be at the inauguration and various parties this weekend, and we'll be doing some live episodes of the All-In podcast, probably Sunday/Monday timeframe. Go to youtube.com, subscribe to the All-In podcast, turn on notifications, and follow us on x.com, the All-In podcast. 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.