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

all right everybody welcome back to the Allin podcast the number one Finance technology business and Maga podcast in the world with us again today is the sulate of science David freeberg living a modern 1950s aesthetic lifestyle there this is the uh House of Tomorrow House of the future world at the original um 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 I told you guys about this haircut last week because you couldn't blow yourself that's right properly I told you this would happen to you it's exactly what your M said would happen 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 poly hop he's ready to go to the inauguration and take his Victory lap and take an enormous amount of credit shamad 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 I'll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning were you at maral Lago no I was with my friend in a 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 Pinkus or as we like to say Marcus Pinkus why do you always take credit for these guests being only your friends 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 my old think longer than you I don't know about that is that true back to like AOL yeah well we met when you were doing silicon alley right reporter yeah in the 90s I've been collecting rent from Mark pinkis for the last year it's true my landlord you should whistleblow on freeberg to Gavin's gouging police and see if you can get some let your winners [Music] ride [Music] David we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it Queen we'll get right to that in a minute uh the price couch continues if our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to price couch it's 100% free BR th% but let's be clear the real gouging is the predio trust who's charging an amazingly high rent like over $100 a foot and then freeberg 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 uh 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 my Lord the prio 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 I saw it close up and they they reinvest in things like you know restoring natural habitats cutting down eucalyptus trees right you know archaeological digs right right it was really interesting I looked at one of those those houses to rent when it was first moving up to San Francisco and the only problem with those houses have these gorgeous houses that were like the General's houses like three four five bedrooms but they would have one bathroom right for four rooms and I like can you put another bathroom and cannot change anything these are historic privileges so you know historic landmarks marked it freeloader tribe social network back in the day support.com and if you wasted some portion of your youth playing Farmville he was one of the original app creators or Zinga poker which famously he said hey would you like to be an investor in Zinga poker and I said how does it work he said oh well you play for virtual coins and I said Mark this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard you've taken all of the money out of the the the game it's never 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 like early General social networking you were involved in Facebook as an investor Linked In weren't you like ear on yeah I I think the first social media investment I made was Napster I sent the first check Wow first $100,000 I think of that as the beginning of all this but then yeah Reed and I put up the first money for friender and then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round Facebook wow the First on on Twitter so yeah like pick the right body of water even if your boat doesn't tribe didn't work but but you placed five other bats so you hit a couple of them it works out just fine you uh I believe you owned the six degrees patents the original social network in the 90s in web 1.0 was a company called six degrees and uh 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 Reed and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them or even Friendster that they would have blocked the whole industry so we bought them we 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 half and Microsoft owns other half are you still close with with Reed Mark yeah very close how did you guys reconcile your differences and political views in this last election because he was very vocal kamla you obviously became vocal Trump and very kind of kind of diametrically different views on the future well it's interesting because Reed and I really started the whole kind of journey into bigger National politics together we both sat down and had lunch with Biden and made wrote big checks uh a little over a year ago December of 23 and and then you know won't bother you but I I had my red pill moment and I went a very different direction which started off just questioning the Democrats hold on hold on can you actually just double click into that what was your red pill moment was there one specific thing or was it more of a trickle of things it was both right it starts the wall starts crumbling and then it comes down all at once so for me it really started early in 23 I started reading pirate wires and Mike salana 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 in the New York Times photographers would ask them to take the saskas off for photos and 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 that he would be early on and so I just started feeling uncomfortable and Queasy about what was going on with mainstream media and then in May of last year of 24 I read some article that talked about Trump's speech in Charlottesville and this has been well covered but but where he said there was good people on both sides Ides and the article said it was completely you know propaganda and not what he actually not accurately reflecting what he said that uh that he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech and so 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 like one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump that speech and and then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time and you see Obama go to you even see Biden bring it up again in the beginning of the DNC and it's one of their pillars and they clearly know that they're misrepresenting things so for me that was just that was beyond uncomfortable I was just like okay now I got to go back to First principles and look at the primary data and listen only to original speech by people and I just realized I couldn't trust mainstream media so I was I became I started questioning the Democrats as soon as I started questioning the Democrats I started getting a lot of Shame and anger and hatred oh the other thing that happened those 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 and he was the one who would say stay in your lane nobody wants to hear what you think about politics or San Francisco or anything other than you know your area of products and investing and with him gone I just started tweeting whatever I felt and thought and sometimes I got it wrong or it was a little too emotional but first of all it was really fun and then second of all I found I got connected to this whole new audience of people who are these kind of techno optimists I think you guys probably talked about it and that just brought me down this path that eventually I came out two days before the election publicly for Trump um and it was only because that's when I completely got there and I was trying to just be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time and my daughters turned to me that Sunday and they said you're you're going to vote for Trump we know it and I said yeah you're probably right and they said well then you have to go say it on Twitter and my daughter's like really in this with me yeah so anyway and then it was on the front page of the New York Post on the day of the election that I was uh this not that I'm such news but maybe it just was their news Peg um that I was coming out for Trump and but I'll get back to your re question but what I love about my New York Times about my New York friends is that they did not give a they were all proa and they texted me and they're just like oh that's kind of funny but it's one thing I kind of love about New York they didn't care back to your question on Reed what I love about Reed was he was already getting pings from people saying what's going on with pinkis he's going off the rails he's becoming a Trumper you know it's you guys I'm sure have gone down got a little bit of that too about shamas in freeberg yeah me like what's wrong with him we got to bring him back into the fold you know he's he's should we lock him up is he crazy um and so Reed was already getting these I had a lot of anxiety about talking to Reed about it and finally Reed 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 Reed and it gets out a little you know a a but well no Americans can get along even if they disagree ically about a candidate is probably where we need to get to especially you know now that Trump's going to be in office in a couple of days what was it like when you had for Biden yeah okay well just to finish the read part sorry but no problem what what I love about Reed is that we followed that with a 4-Hour dinner and he said I never questioned your principles he said I know you're a highly principled person and I just want to understand which principles it is and I'd like to convince to change your mind but anyway so was hold on one second so I 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 tism and what I mean by that is everybody we're all a little socially uncomfortable we awkward I wouldn't say that we were the coolest people growing up and there this virulent form of blockers you called it Chief of Staff I think that these folks can be very detrimental which almost represent this filter between your true self and everybody else and there is this game that's played about being a gatekeeper I do think that executive assistants are valuable administrative assistance are valuable the reason I can say this is that my EA went on maternity leave I had and I experimented with a chief of staff Etc and now I use Jason service called Athena and I have a guy that works with me in the Philippines and it's about 3,000 a month and I can honestly tell you this guy is the single most effective administrative support I've ever had and what there isn't is all these opinions on what I can say or do and I think that when you look at a lot of these big companies if you look at zuck's current transformation or what you just spoke about there are all these Interlopers that seem to get in the middle of you and people's perception of you 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 and I can relate to it because I think we all go through this this struggle as you start to be more of a known person inside your company outside your company and you have people around you taking the edges off and I think that we're now in this time that I think we're having authenticity is having a moment now which is great for me because Reed said to me I I've if you Google me you'll see that there's lots and lots of bad things written about me and a lot of it is my high school quote was some people have tacked and others tell the truth and I've always been kind of just committed to being honest even if it's nuanced and it's not an easy sound bite and Reed said to me early on you need to pick what the easy narrative is or the Press is going to make it up for you and he was right and they did or my competitors did so I think that now with long form podcasts and there's just more and the fact that we can kind of directly in a lot of ways Elon was the first one to directly defend himself you remember when well he fired his whole do you remember when he fired his whole PR team he fired all those people there's just like there's none of that infrastructure between him and and everybody else 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 diet tribes and then and then when a New York Times reported said something negative about a Tesla he just went off for weeks about them and and it seemed a little crazy and deranged and then you started to see that it worked like he actually 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 and so we've we're now Unshackled I I teach this class at Stanford and I taught two backtack on Monday and I looked around and I saw half the plaque her said you know she her you know he him his and I got a little Pang of like oh do I have to watch what I'm saying I'm like no I don't I'm Unshackled I'm just gonna this is just me and I'm gonna be Mark unfiltered and it's the better version of ourselves so anyway I I'm glad that Zuck feels like he can be he can present more of his complete self out there now and I think we can get into it later but I have a lot of thoughts on how the culture is going to kind of move more towards Bas back to the other question with Biden that lunch you had did he seem like he was all there yeah come on was it in the afternoon I mean did you have concerns about that that was sharp as attack that was thing that broke me I mean I'm not saying I'm like full mag over here I was like wait a second are you guys lying about this like 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 like the exact my exact observation we we had this lunch there was like maybe five of us with Biden and a few of his Finance people in they had it in the tennis house which is the way they found that they can have a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House they found some way we'll see if if Trump does it hole right yeah the loophole and and it was I was impressed it was a long launch it must have been hour and a half two hours and I'll tell you the good and the bad the good the part I was impressed was he kept the conversation thread he was engaged and kept the thread the whole time when people you say sharp as attack or kept the thread that's how we talk about like our 90-year-old grandparent or something so I'm just saying the reality to me he he was not he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of dementia but we were impressed that he was able to follow the conversation thread and then say you know but okay let me say it differently would you have had the same bar if it was Jamie Diamond sitting across from you for 2our lunch no no so so so yes it was it was wow your grandfather is holding up really well like your grandfather was able to have a whole lunch and hold the conversation but it wasn't I didn't walk away saying I I have to admit I did not walk away saying I think he's mentally unfit but I did but 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 say this but I will say he was he was not on an obvious script which I know I think famously he did some fundraiser at vod's house where he was reading a prompter the whole time so wasn't reading a prompter yeah that at a at a person's home they brought a teleprompter for him to speak wow that's you didn't hear that I didn't actually that's new information that's yeah crazy but I mean In fairness like the um there's this issue called Sun Downing people who are in that age group they're good in the day and then the sun goes down and you know their brains are exhausted and and that's when you would see it and that's what they said about the debate but for me that was the the coronation of comma and like not actually having a speedrun primary that to me was just anti-democratic anti-American and like just what happened to Meritt and like having a process here right that's when I felt like the party just CED I'm glad you're here let's jump um okay but let me ask you a question before we get into the doc we got a lot to talk about obviously but what do you think the Democratic party does from here like is everybody's like this they're lost in a drift we're not even hearing from them maybe a little bit of uh push back I guess at these Senate hearings right now for confirmations but what do you think happens is there any hope for this and and who would lead them out of this Shapiro somebody AOC I think that what my brain my kind of 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 parties and and the Democrats but the logic would say oh they're going to find based authentic people to put up against these other ones like the kind of Federman 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 is 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 and we can get into that later if we want but I think they won't go as far as they should so so they the they won't go as far as like what I think we would intelligently advise them to do so so 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 oh one more thing though on it is yeah and a lot of it depends on really what we see and if if Doge starts to really get popular support this whole 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 you know California Gavin everyone saying don't worry we're going to protect you against these people if 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 a great jump off point because Gavin does seem and Karen bass seem like their careers are ending and they're in the last stages of trying to maybe get a little bit more pragmatic based is the word people might use for that just being super candid but let's get let's get into a little bit of an update here about the absolute tragedy occurring in Los Angeles the death toll is now at 25 uh ,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 7 by S miles right so this is a lot of uh space it's bigger than all of San Francisco the Palisades and eaten fires are still burning and as of Wednesday 80,000 people were under evacuation orders couple of our friends lost their homes and uh but they survived but the story of losing everything are just tragic every memory all your personal documents photos art whatever that you've collected over a lifetime I just had two conversations with people and they were just in shock the estimates right now of damage are between 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 uh you might remember the campfire near Paradise California that's about what 3 hours North of San Francisco Northeast that one was 12.5 billion just to level set it uh and now people are talking about and we'll talk about here today what the recovery and rebuild effort might look like California leadership disad across the board Gavin I just disad Gavin new have you had traffic to dad.com with all of this yeah right now dad.com is going to be red director to Gavin or Karen bass I don't know which one is more disgraceful I mean it's it's an incredible troll that you just redirected every week to whoever you're mad is that yeah who would be more disgraceful in this situation Gavin or Karen bass I think it's got to be k for just being out of the country I think I think it would be quite funny if every week you actually gave an award redirected the website to the I give it to this week and before that it was Jake Paul for that Tyson fight and the disad but it's the stakes have gone up Gavin is now doing executive orders one of them is to make it illegal to lobal offers to impacted homeowners for the next three months I don't know what the point of that is and the other one is to eliminate the coastal acts review of permits for the the houses that are along PCH I suppose and he wants to extend key price gouging protections quote to help make rebuilding more affordable gouging is defined as raising the rent or price of other goods and services more than 10% from the last marketed price but it could be as little as 5% it's just not clear and then LA mayor bass created a snitch hotline to report on any kind of price gouging and rents which we've started to see people are now naming and shaming Zillow and red fin listings where they 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 freeberg we talked a bunch about this and I know Pinkus you've got we had 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 freeberg maybe kick us off here on what your thoughts are on rebuilding this area how this will happen especially with what we brought up last week and I think when a bit viral is your sort of talk about putting your thumb on the scale with insurance I mean this is I think one of the concerning things here is the free market not being allowed to progress previously with insurance and then now with the rebuild well California's 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 look the insurance issue is a longer one if you guys want we could talk about that I've got a couple notes I can bring up on the history of how we got to this point but I think it's going to be the one of the biggest burdens going forward and it could actually lead to a pretty significant effect in long-term housing prices in California because of the way that the insurance Market is structured and regulated in California but if you want we can talk about that or up or down what do you think ultimately you know tldr like do you think prices are going to go way up here do you think this is going to take five or 10 years to rebuild these homes I mean we've never seen this many structures go down at this price point in a constrained area where just construction is so expensive and hard so I think the the governor did a good job suspending the permitting requirements for the coastal act for affected homes and the squa review those are very important I think suspensions but he also put in place this executive order for price gouging and if you pull up the note Nick so he basically said California penal code section 396 which prohibits price gouging during a declared state of emergency will now extend indefinitely in this region and in the language in that Penal Code it says that businesses cannot raise the price of essential goods and services by more than 10% above their pre-emergency price for a specified period and in this case his executive order is in definitely so in 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 so 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 and I'm like man I could make some money if I go to La you will see an influx of service providers and an influx of goods to support the rebuilding effort in Southern California 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 and as more folks show up they begin to compete on price and eventually the cost kind of normalizes and you end up finding what is now the new fair market value between the bid and the ask the people that are saying hey I'll do the work they're the ask and hey I need people to do work that's the bid and you find a price 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 dir right now in the United States so 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 happened on an indefinite basis and then Karen bass created a hotline you can go to La 311 and report people if they're trying to charge too much and then the uh you know the Stacey 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 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 a lot you don't have a home to live in and then there's this other thing where we can't take unol offers on the home that was the other executive order so 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 that happened in Hawaii that makes the governor keep referencing the Hawaii story as if you know that there were people that were taken advantage of and we need to protect the citizens of LA but I'm pretty sure that having an increase in the number of offers coming in for Real Estate increases maret increases buy behavior and that will ultimately drive and that will ultimately make it easier by having more liquidity for some of these folks who owned burn 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 yeah I think you're a little bit off the deep end with some of this stuff because I think you're not being totally fair in representing what this EO says and that's coming from me I mean I am not a Nome fan okay and I think he is completely and totally incompetent but I'll just take the other side of this which is that I read the EO and I actually think it's somewhat reasonable and I didn't connect the dots with the EO and the real estate market and the reason is that if you read all of what he said the EO was hypers specific to unsolicited offers to a very specific handful of zip codes and it was time boxed for three months so he said making any unsolicited offer to an owner of real estate property located in the areas encompassed by and he names a bunch of zip go I think there was like one two there's like 12 or 13 of them okay so unsolicited okay yep to to acquire any interest in real property for an amount less than the fair market value of the property on January 6th so before the fire started and before the home bur 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 advantage of that situation to make money so for example after hurricanes we saw this in Florida people poses contractors they come in and they offer inflated prices they offer poor quality of work and especially when you sort of deregulate for that moment where there's less checks there's less folks involved because you're trying to speed up the process you can have a bunch of pressure tactics that work against the best interests of the person trying to build on the Wildfire side there was this crazy thing Nick I'll s you the link from KTLA that about these folks called fire Chasers which are essentially like you know Wildfire scammers they're ambulance Chasers but during fir okay so so so my point is yeah I don't disagree with his incompetence okay and I think he is totally out of touch I think there's a broken cartel that runs the state that's going to drive this state into just complete disrepair he was NE already you can't say a state that has $322 billion budget is already bankrupt it's it's teetering on a path where we won't be able to return and we can debate that but my point is I just think despite all of this he's grossly negligent Karen bass is grossly negligent the California cartel is breaking this state but on this specific narrow thing I kind of will give him his flowers I think it was like 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 by let's talk about Services separately because he has a separate EO on services this does not prevent anybody whose house burned down from listing his lot you could sell it for a dollar that's right so it's not it's I think it's it's not right and it's inaccurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market the idea that you cannot sell isn't what is in 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 they're just making an offer what's the pressure tactic it's why can't someone make an offer on your home you want people to B up David 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 nonzero that will make a mistake and I think that it's good to try to stop that it doesn't absorb him from his incompetence but this I think was reasonably good what about the services piece jamat 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 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 6 months and 9 months and 12 months the free market will sort all of these things out so if there's a governor who can Implement some checks and balances to protect these folks who are probably totally dazed like for example we know some of our friends I've spoken to them over the last few days I've spoken to their wives H I'll say I'll say it in in a horrible way one person said this to me and I'll just 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 make good decisions right now so I almost think a 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 no the uh the services thing is indefinite that's 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 listen you're sophisticated I've known you for 20 plus years uh you're very sophisticated obviously but do you think that's a reasonable thing to do to put a moratorium on people making these low bit offers and then we'll get to the construction piece second but you know what you offers unsolicited offers yes unsolicited offers yeah what do what do you think of that I think what what bothers me about it there's a presumption and and maybe chim's right in it you're getting me to think about it a little more than I was but but I'm pretty much where freeberg is that we're we're kind of treating these people like children cuz we're 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 dollar for your property because you might take it and you might regret later that you took that is kind of what chamath is saying no in a in a very narrow window where you may not have the best and clearest ability to make the best decision for you because you're dealing with so many other crazy issues in your life and you could still say no you could say no but you're presuming there's there's one side that bothers me that feels like what we've had from the Democratic party forever which is that this this big wise Overlord that's going to protect us from our selves from our worst natures and then on the other hand you're bringing up something chat that I I hadn't thought about that I'm just thinking more about now which is well maybe people could be taken advantage of at the margin because they're in they feel like they're in a dire position but 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 and I think that if you give people a 90-day cooling off period I think it at least shines a light on whether all of this governmental and other infrastructure can actually do something for these people I do think that there is a moment at which you can't govern these things and all I'm suggesting is a very narrow window of time where people's feelings of just like desperation are at their highest I think that this is a decent thing to do you know there is some precedent for the state doing stuff like this you know in Most states there is a cooling off period with marriages and divorces you you have to wait 3 Days To to file either way to get married or to get divorced let's talk about the construction process here freeberg because 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 uh the debate and D I say courage that Travis had around this issue with surge pricing for Uber lift and side car and a bunch of other folks who were kind of virtue signaling were 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 you know inclement weather snowstorms or on New Year's Eve and he said if you want to increase Supply We Believe Uber should have availability lift took a different decision we're GNA 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 doesn't seem like any of that would be wrong to me for somebody who had the ability to pay an incentive for somebody to move from another state would be out of line here what are your thoughts on that I agree I mean I'm I'm pretty much just a free market believer and so I think other than guardrails like chamat saying and maybe I like the idea of cooling off periods it kind of 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 for 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 I think this could have real unintended consequences and just stop the just stop the wheels from turning on rebuilding all these homes which just make it way more complex so I agree J final thoughts on the rebuild and the free market in that regard yeah 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 so specifically the thing that Nome did was essentially create a Time expectation on when things will get permitted and I think he said it was like six months the problem is like this is what just goes to show you how insane the state has become even if you get a permit within 6 months and this is where I do agree with freeberg like 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 and the example of the complete incompetence of the California state government is if you contrast and compare this with how the state was able to respond in the North Bridge earthquake and the crazy thing which I thought was incredible was after the 1994 Northridge 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 app on it not a Sierra Club lawsuit about the Upper Land grous they rebuilt it so you actually know what's possible in California if if Tradesmen are allowed to go to work yeah they can build incredibly complicated things with safety with speed this is where Nome 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's gotten way better since then the people are more skilled there are more people to be able to do more of these jobs and so why does it only take 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 the state declared we need this freeway reopened and here's the date it was like 144 days and they're like you'll get a $200,000 bonus for every day under 144 that you deliver it soever w 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 you know have having Stone scaping around your home gravel Etc and using these new materials and not having overhangs uh which and then having vents into your uh addict which is what a lot of homes have and the Embers get into the addict there's an overhang and they're not using and they're they're all wood built you know 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 a 100 homes that were all fireproof and built to withstand this that would act as a natural break and if you didn't have as much vegetation so there's probably a series of things that should be added here in terms of regulations while you're getting rid of some of the ones that are slowing you down right um but let's pivot over to oh and then finally like allowing people to park their mobile homes in these places to have housing for construction to your point mark would be super critical and they block that kind of stuff so when you need temporary housing in California you can't do it by the way I want to I want to hear what freeberg 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 and 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 so this is basically a graph per locality all over the United States where FEMA tries to assess the disaster risk for living in a given area and what you see here is that there's some risk in living on the Eastern Seaboard and there's a lot of risk in 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 so then if you double click a little bit further there's a company called core logic they publish a lot of real estate data here's a chart about the western United States that just double clicks into Wildfire risk and I was shocked when I saw this this is first of all most of California this is 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 and then the last chart goes through and it actually does core logic does an assessment of the value at risk so in California it's three4 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 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 yeah because that problem what that shows you is we have a multi-trillion doll risk to a lot of people in the Western United States specifically around this issue that 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 math this went into effect January 5th this congestion pricing concept exists in London as everybody probably knows basically if you're below Central Park which is six stage straight in Manhattan and you enter between 5:00 a.m. and 900 p.m. you're going to get you know 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 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. it's just like two bucks it's going to increase to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031 trucks pay more taxes pay less the results have been awesome weight times to get on 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 live there man as a resident the traffic was nuts you can have emergency services move a lot faster you get rid of noise pollution you obviously get rid of air quality pollution for ice engines uh 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 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 uh it's like oh you still live here me too some way for us to like come out of our houses and notice that you're here and I'm here but we never leave our homes I walk around this city at my own risk and I like the cities I feel like cities have lost the point like they've lost the plot like why we've kind of we still live in cities or value them but I feel like we have to go back to First principles and think like why did we move to cities in the first place and what was the value supposed to be and is that still the deal we're getting or is there it have to be a new deal because we used to live in a city because it was economic we were closer to our job and then we lived in a city because there was a high density of things that we wanted cultural people restaurants and the best cities really were the ones that are fun to walk around and then we got to a point where it's not safe or clean to walk around you don't work in the city anymore and San Francisco started to feel like this gigantic like retirement community it's just all these people who still live here because their kids are in school maybe or they grew up here you know a lot of our friends left went to Austin and other places and we started I I don't know about chamat but I think or 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 and so there's this questioning going on around cities and I think it's a good question and I think cities need to innovate aggressively to give to be better they have to compete with the other options again they have to make it fun to be there fun to work there I think it's great that Daniel lurry 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 ever thought of and see what sticks and and figure out like how do you take this this tax not literally I mean 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 that the the good side of it being fun to be in you know is that the the deal is off and so I think you know and I also what I'm hoping Daniel lurry does and other smart Mayors is that they Benchmark and they say who's doing it really well around the world whether it's dealing with homelessness or things like congestion pricing who's who's innovating and doing it well and why aren't we doing it here I mean I think you got to run these you got to reinvent these cities and you know sorry to sound cliche but I think you got to kind of take a startup mentality and say you're not going to live on your incumbency anymore you've got to reinvent this and we can't make companies come back to work you know come back to the office I mean the companies can make their employees but it'd be really nice if the employees wanted to be there um you know and 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 pretty good platform I mean I think he's right um San Francisco sucks it's trash they never go there yeah it's terrible and 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 freeberg your thoughts uh on the Gotham City that did he visit you in the Dave did chat ever come to the Presidio I have come to your office I've come to Dave's office I've come to I've gone to Peter's office there but what I do is I I don't even go through the city I go all the way around I drive all through the East Bay up through Berkeley and I come I'm just kidding no no no I just think that the city is very poorly managed and just the quality of many cities are poorly managed and I think that there's a common through line in these poorly managed cities all the things that you say there's no will to do there's no will to keep crime at Bay there's no will to make you know usable spaces for people there's no will to invest in the Arts so what do you expect right there's more money collected by these cities but there's just 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 of the people who are running the tape and reading the tape you're 100% right did you see this thing I have to read this to you because this is really stunning I sorry Mark keep going but I you're still th% right you know because sure okay maybe maybe in one case Gavin can override the coastal commission but it doesn't matter if you cut their red tape by 90% as long as there's any tape that they can use the people running both the St 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 to stop and obstruct you so it's it's really not like their hands are tied because there's so much permitting you're you're right they' made a decision and the decision in California and San Francisco specifically was that we're going to cater to fentol 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 here's I sent you guys a I sentation but not for fentol and meth these things are super drugs yeah let's make it less about San Francisco let's talk about middle Ohio and let's talk about Ender Palmer lucky did this really awesome shout up really awesome interview Nick I just sent you the link to it he's building a new Ohio plant but the question and answer from the interviewer is exactly what pink has talked about which is will the interview says was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline that you needed and 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 Eng well with jobs Ohio with a lot of the politicians here uh not just at the state level but the local level you know like you said we're hiring 4,000 people here in direct jobs a lot more jobs than that in a direct or sorry 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 they can work with you uh our customer in the the United Air for United States Air Force obviously it's a huge presence here in the form of right Patterson Air Force Base so really all the stars align to make Ohio a great place for us to do it and to do it fast and speaking candidly as someone who is from California there's some states that are really good at uh pushing you out and slowing you down and there's others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up and that's what Ohio was fantastic yeah states are competing for elite companies and there's a willpower that's that 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 right you Gavin could have theoretically I don't know signed an executive order to override the coastal Commission on lot even his diesel plant like I don't know why he didn't just force that through but if we had diesel maybe there'd be more water to fight the fire now so 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 surprising but I'm not necessarily of the belief that every city should necessarily cater to progress and acceleration and enterpris and industrialization look when you go to Pino every summer chth you would probably you know stop going and would be disappointed if you found out that they were building a giant glass tower apartment complex and a giant office building right by the Portofino Port like that's just not the character of what that City wants to be and I do remember when I first moved to San Francisco 25 years ago it was it felt like a smaller European like City it wasn't overrun with technology companies at the time and it was a 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 kind of opposed Viewpoint of progress from the technology sector and a desire to keep San Francisco a small City by the bay and that that frustration has manifested with a lot of kind of ugliness over the the last couple 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 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 Dave I think that's just I just want to interject as a fellow San Franciscan for a long time um just as long is that that's the normal tension that's been here all along and that kind of makes the city culture great and there's you want to have this creative uh Melting Pot here but there's this other side that I think has come into play in the last 15 20 years or I don't 10 15 years which is this progressivism side which we saw Chessa you know with and I think it's it's different virus that's the ugly silliness I meant I was saying but like let's put that aside let's put San Francisco aside I do think that a city can and should be what it wants to be does it want to attract and build in Industry does it want to attract and build enterprising companies or does it want to be a small quain town does it want to stay you know with no h that's a false trade-off the problem is that people in government at every level sells the former doesn't doesn't actually even give them that nor the ladder what they give them is a dysfunctional hellscape instead well Cino 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 not every City's 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 there's a moral Clarity in telling the truth bino doesn't try to do that but I don't think the point is you're saying that the cities that that promise that and don't deliver that your San Francisco promises it right London promises it New York promises it these things are chaotic messes mhm and it's not the trade-off of oh well Parris 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 is is 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 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 uh living in Los Angeles you had the opportunity to have Rick Caruso who built so many amazing experiences and uh shops for the citizens there and you picked Karen bass I looked on her Wikipedia page looking for any kind of operational position she ever felt it's you want to read her resume it's tragic I mean just it's tragic she 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 dis so unqualified and 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 and 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 and Ghana after she promised she would not do this Global you know uh Globe trotting which she apparently has a track record of doing she left and stayed there knowing this was all coming Rick ruso who you didn't vote for mayor he did the right thing vote these people out recall Karen bass you can do it we recall Chessa Boudin you remember on this show David Sachs is a 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 Chessa 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 interest you have no choice citizens of Los Angeles but to get these people out immediately every day they stay in office they are going to cause more damage to your family your property and your city we call them now didn't James Woods post a petition on change.org that I saw on Twitter it was already I signed it though I don't live there and I think it was already over like 90,000 you know names I mean you you you have power the people of California don't understand how much power they have when Gavin new I just told people on Twitter jamou every time Gavin tweets or Karen best 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 you you know what it worked in Brooklyn shame worked I don't know why people think they have no power you can 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 pical left on the docket all right Tik tok's future is in question right now the ban is about to happen unless the pairing company bite dance divest by January 19th which is this Sunday Tik Tok will be banned in America Google and apple are going to be forced to remove Tik Tok from their app stores and Oracle Tik tok's cloud provider has to stop providing hosting services and cut ties assuming bite dance doesn't come up with a last minute deal tick Talk's only hope is the Supreme Court blocking the law what do you think Mark do you think it's Chinese spyware do you think they should be forced to divest what do you think their repercussions will be here's what's so hard for me about this on the one hand part of it seems so obvious from a both not just National Security point of view but also just fairness like it's insane if you think about it that there's a Chinese company that's arguing in court for protections under our Constitution and freedom of speech when none of our companies have those kinds of Rights in China much less the right to even operate there if they're not majority controlled or in line like you guys talked about with censorship or whatever else so on the one hand it seems like a no-brainer to me that on this case but what you're starting to see come up in the last couple days I'm even hearing it from one of my daughters who's a major Tik tocker is the law of unintended consequences here is that we could see this band 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 a sudden feel like this is censoring them and it's taking away their freedom of expression question and it could backfire in a lot of ways and we're already seeing memes where they're going on to these other apps like there's this chines book red book which is even worse right I think that one is owned by the Chinese government and so we're driving them there and so so I'm the best outcome I think would be forced to divest and sell to another American company but if that doesn't happen I I'm kind of nervous about a a real backlash I'm delighted jamath that our kids are gonna go out and play and have friendships and stop scrolling on T talk what you describe sound 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 K are right around it what do you think Cham what do you think's GNA happen here I mentioned this to president Trump and I and I really think this is true the reason why there was so much bipartisan support for the bill as it worked through Congress is because I think that they were briefed on just how severe the security violations of this app are because I don't think we've seen anything in modern history that is that that is this controversial yet be so almost unanimous yeah 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 is a fair market value here deal for that asset because whoever is the buyer is in the total cat bird seat and in order to get a deal done with the federal government I think you're just going to get a basically like a buy at 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 Tik tok's realtime recommendation algorithm was open source the learning method yep 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 and what's incredible is what they describe in this paper which I think frankly a lot of social apps would benefit from understanding is exactly how they've built it to essentially not take this more monolithic training approach for recommendations but how do you do it in real time how do you make it collisionless it's incredible this paper is a tour to force and it just makes me realize that despite the political maneuvering of this hot potato there are some folks that have been working in that app or in you know the parent company that are truly technically talented and it's a it's a bit of a shame that they're going to get sort of throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak so people should know that there's some technological innovations inside of bike dance and Tik Tok 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 spy I think you both nailed it isn't China saying though that they're going to if this does get divested they're going to keep either bite dance 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 was an example of just sort of like describing the methodology it's not functionally open source yet but I think that open sourcing it doesn't solve the problem and the reason is so let's just say that you're Pegasus was able to reverse engineer or build penetration attacks into WhatsApp that were imperceptible to everybody until it happened to Jeff Bezos to other people right where you get these state sponsored attacks on your phone and all of a sudden you're dealing with this attack Vector that then you call the FBI and they take your phone and they help you deal with it's happened to a bunch of people that's happened to me twice so the fact that these things can happen and then the attack vectors get incrementally more and more sophisticated it used to be that there was a PDF payload then there can just be an image payload now it's any payload right and you don't even have to click to open it and all of a sudden they just roots your phone so 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 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 interest at hard I mean the there 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 your mouth with security and if you think about the two biggest imports from China right now it's Fentanyl and Tik Tock here's what I will say want to make us addicted they want to impact our society they want to divide us this is an a massive scops that's going on it is a scops 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 Tik Tok and the reason I say that is I do think that if you can take the video content of Tik Tok 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 sort of like restart their content creating capabilities on X I think that that's actually a pretty good one you guys notice in the app freeberg that the left hand tab um because you have following shop and for you they added a leftand 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 they're microt targeting me because they know I'm such a fan of stem but I think it's for everybody any thoughts uh Dave as we wrap on the Tik Tok seems like they're going to strike 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 Tick Tock active in the US seems like both the Dems and the Republicans are pushing for it so this kind of also leads to what I think will be the grand deal with China which I think will happen in the first six months of the Trump Administration I'm obviously speculating but it feels like there's going to be some workout here China is like 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 kind of unprecedented and there's this real concern that China is in a very significant economic deflationary spiral so they're in a very weakened position economically at the moment the United States seems to be in a position of strength and I would imagine just given the rhetoric that this Administration may try to work out again some deal that's going to provide access to the Chinese market in exchange for the US minimizing the Tariff effect on Chinese um importers to the US so there could be I think something you know that eases the the tension with China and creates you know Mutual economic value in the first 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 one of my this was my contrarian prediction I think um oh no this was my stock this was my stock prediction yeah this was like my I picked the Chinese tech stocks yeah same I I've been loading up on Alibaba a couple 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 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 FIA guilty guilty so and you've also stopped working so you're represented here on the chart yeah you still have a job I think you still work what what are your thoughts on on this are NB out of Vogue are they opting out what's your theory here well so yes I went there I I would say that that my all the learning that's helped me in my career started later after I got out my first product management job was really when I started learning things that are useful to me today I think being there I learned a lot about like how to sell to Corporate America and some how do they think kind of things and then I've gone back to HBS for decades trying to recruit from there and in the beginning they would tell me the kids would when I had support.com and it was going to go public they said I'd have to be a vice president and own 3% of the company to take a job with a startup like you and this was just before the company went public there was a little bit of a Renaissance period where some HBS people were excited to join Zinga 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 drisking their career you go to HBS or Stamford and you're guaranteed this High salary and this kind of great job for life so the reason to go there is to take the risk off that's in fundamental opposition to where we are in our economy in my opinion today or where the most interesting sectors are 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 ycombinator company and join a founding team as the business person or whatever and these people are smart and qualified but there's this mismatch that they are fundamentally risk averse and so they're not so when it says they haven't found jobs part of it is I think they're going 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 that they've got to get to a point like I was when I started my first company preloader I happily had very little to no opportunity cost 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 kind of no turning back so uh can you imagine being Mark P's boss I mean that's almost as hard as being trats yeah I always say I'm a great team player as long as I'm running the team so right great quarterback yeah but yeah so I had no opportunity cost when I started my first company which looked like it didn't have a chance in hell you know of ever making it so you probably thought so too then about my company but so now the question is maybe what's going to happen is we're g to get a new equilibrium where these the opportunities for these people start to come down the guaranteed opportunities and a good thing cons firms right they all go to McKenzie Boston Consulting Group whatever even I just the class I taught on Monday at Stanford they said everyone wants a job at meta or Google and that's the get-rich quick place and it's I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore and they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management so those jobs have dried up you know part of what's in this data probably also is a lot of these people aren't taking jobs they're not finding jobs that meet this High expectation for right pay and opportunity so I think it's a 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 riskof trade and I'm I'm not going to be guaranteed 100% so why go in the first place and I would advise people today you know to depending on what industry I'm biased but I'd say go get a product management job some where and make enough that you can afford to live on it and that's going to be the beginning of Learning doing these chth what what are these things called when these NB graduate they raise a bunch of money to go buy some real business SE fun yeah that's that's not happening anymore they yeah that was like the thing none of them made money none of them made money turns out these NBAs 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 there's that there's that one deal out of Stanford GSB the guy founded assurion which is like you know 10 B it's billions that guy would have founded that company outside of Stanford he could have gone to timbuk 2.com University disad State and he would have been fine that speaks that speaks to more about the cleverness of that one individual not the 99,000 other sh deals that been 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 disintermediate 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 as essentially cartilage inside of this organization has less and less to do in a place where AI enabled systems are making a lot of decisions on behalf of businesses and if you take a step back how did that evolve well it started because of what I mentioned a couple weeks ago 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 or 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 okay but then the CFO comes to you and says well you actually need ahead of fpna ahead of this ahead of that ahead of the other thing then the CEO says okay then those people hire and what happens is the software sprawl is really what created those jobs 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 so my premise about this is if you look inside of any or chart of any company you can map those jobs to some clunky old piece of software that was sold to them maybe it was 10 years ago maybe it was 20 years ago but that's why orgs are this bulky and now when you have all of these new nextg 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 and I think that this trend is only going to grow so I don't think that this is a commentary on the people the people are probably quite smart but I do think that this is a warning sign that people should not go and pursue these degrees because I think as P 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 freeberg any thoughts as we wrap here about this NBA chart the collapse of the MBA program could be the beginning of the unwinding of the um higher education Market why s more I think this is the easiest one to discard first in an age of AI and Automation and self-learning and I think that I I mean I've been thinking a lot about I've I've have young kids right so my kid my oldest kid is seven years old I had to think about that for a sec um so many kids now and um isn't it great by the way I go through this all I don't know I have to go through I have to feel like what's my kids birthday Jam has a busload of children when you have when you have I just had a fifth think five and you're at four days no I have five I can't I have to really think about all the birthdays fourth on the way but yeah I would say I I think a lot about whether or not it makes sense for my kids to go to undergrad and I think like about going to classes as an undergrad I certainly there's the social experience and I I learned a lot in you know kind of working at a lab when I was there and doing other stuff but those were like on the job experiences I do think that the social experience and practical experience can be gotten outside of the college infrastructure this Ed educational infrastructure oh I I cannot tell you guys how much time I I just had a great idea I just had the best idea ever the Allin MBA let's start our own NBA I don't think I think that's the whole point is people should get back to kind of an apprenticeship type model or a self-learning model everyone's got their own personal tutor now that's what I think people aren't realizing is anything you want to learn with have you guys heard about what Johnny I has done with his kids I'm pretty sure they skip college and they just went to work directly with him and his design firm exactly and like I'm taking him out to lunch because I want to interview him about it I think exactly 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 they I don't know I didn't hear the name I think Jam daughters 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 Jamal's got a couple kid I'm here for it no I think freeberg nailed it on this one because I just had arouche Selvin who's the pm at Google doing deep research on this week in startups yesterday and this product is nuts and they designed it to basically be one of these like million doll or $5 million 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 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 Gemini how to use it and it's only and you have to pay 20 bucks for it and then grock 2.0 is doing something similar when you put your query in it decides like all the second level queries that would be asked 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 Consultant Group where they tell some young MBA hey you missed this you miss this can you double check this can you find double click on this it goes and does those followup question questions so 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 so instead of just buying a Boston Consulting or Mackenzie or whatever report you build it and then have it auto and the Deep research is coming out this it's going to automatically refresh it in your Google Docs and then update you on what's been changed and so and grock is doing it as well except grock has all the tweets so when you grock now did you see now at the top of the page it says and I think it's only in the grock app uh 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 you know two 300 queries are occurring behind your one it's nuts I don't know if you guys have been using advanced voice on chat GPT much or do you guys any the voice and So lately anytime I kind of have come across an interesting topic I end up finding that I just talk to chat GPT for like an hour or two and I'll be like in my car like when I'm driving to work or going to a meeting or I go for like a walk down to the coffee shop I'm like okay so tell me about like what happened during the Ice Age with respect to how quickly sea levels receded and I start to gather and like it's it's basically like your own personal tutor I finally have a best friend Mark and 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 like in some like 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 and 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 and I think that this MBA piece is probably just the first step of many that's going to ultimately erode the value ofation did you guys see that Fleshlight that can actually be synced to a video you're watching at CES that's pretty crazy no can we go to the UFOs instead of sex toys we get it show us the video show us the video it's also 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 it was like a summary of like the top 10 things from CES and it was a flashlight that that would gyate based on the actual contortions in the videos which one's guest rooms tonight I'm a little nervous f interesting Pinkus you you get to see two different things here when AI comes up as a topic freeberg finally has a best friend and chth finally has a lover who will do exactly what he tells it to it's absolutely perfect so Mark lately we've been talking we've been talking to all the guests about UFOs and UAP welcome to conspiracy you have a point of view on UFO UAP phenomena I do and I guess everyone's everyone else say too so I won't be that weird an outlier so first of all just say I don't believe in uaps UFOs and I don't not believe in them and I'm just curious about it and I've 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 our physics laws and so I've been looking for that moment and one of those is around the uaps so I've been more and more Curious and digging more and more and I started working with a friend who made the movie Icarus on the idea of like a Netflix docu series I thought it should be funny and have somebody like a Larry David kind of character narrating it but he said maybe maybe he came back to me he he's making a documentary about the fentol crisis and how it China documented how China has dumped it here and he said you've got to meet with me and this guy I came while he was working on that he was interviewing a former DOD contractor who had worked for them for decades and said you know I've got a lot on fentol but I have this whole other thing to show you about these uaps and he he'll just tell you his claim his claim so they came and met with me and we had to meet outside and put our phones in Fairway bags faay bags faay bags so so uh it was a good setup if nothing else and he said he claimed that in doing running these War games for the defense department it inadvertently was summoning these uaps these drones and he had tons and tons of video of it and classified them I'm just telling you what he told me let me guess the Drone all the Drone videos look up they were shot on an mm 1968 camera wait wait wait hold on hold on Jason Mark just explain this so so the United States is is simulating war games yeah and what is it doing exactly that's causing these drones to show up he did not tell me what were the the games what were the exact triggers that but he said different things would trigger a different one and he classified them and he said some of them were aggressive from an electronics and commun would take out electronics and Communications wow and he so he was interested and my friend was interested in saying okay can you put up a couple people um a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film this and I thought about it I even had him go meet with Reed and and didn't move quickly and then he went dark on us and stopped responding and then some friends of mine went to a gathering at and what they it was on multiple things related to this and they said that this guy was there and that he summoned one of these they kind of said it looked like a large drone and my friends showed me some pictures that they took which were really it was at night they were really gra 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 a hundred million dollar in documentary films right Pinkus 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 a canyon fair and you're the way to do it I didn't the Mark I didn't find it okay good so all I'm saying is that I think that there's a possibility that there is some kind of drone that's getting that that is showing up and and I'm not saying it's even from you know from nonhuman 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 I'll be honest like I know my bias I am very sympathetic when I hear these stories I listen way too long you know to the podcast on this stuff I watch are you donating to Alex Jones no but are you a subscriber no but I I okay how about this are we convinced that there has been absolutely zero unidentified object inside some Vault Buri deep somewhere 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 let's do our fir uh what is it fmy paradox freeberg fmy paradox why aren't the if there if there are aliens why haven't we seen them quick around the I'm not I'm not saying done my point on this there is a UAP that is that has been unidentified that is sitting inside some Vault somewhere in in a state government in the world so your position is the aliens have come no stop saying you but you you you you make the whole thing seem ridiculous when you say aliens I'm not saying that I'm saying okay visitors from another planet no stop with the visitors just 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 okay is 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 there billions of inhabitable planets and species out there there must have somebody must be ahead of us but the other conclusion of ferm'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 send probes freeberg to Uranus all right everybody thanks for tuning in this is all disad disad I need I need a I need um young Spielberg to make us a a jingle for disad a.com Mark Pinkus you're amazing thank you for fitting right in with your besties uh and top bro on the baby congrats congrat looking forward to seeing you this weekend all right and we will see oh and by the way just programming note we're all going to be at at the inauguration various parties uh this weekend and we will be doing some live episodes of the Allin podcast probably on Sunday Monday time frame and we will see you on the live stream go to youtube.com subscribe to the Allin podcast put on the notifications the bell and then follow us on x.com the Allin podcast and then again subscribe and then just turn on notifications you'll get a notification when we go live on those two platforms we'll see you all next time byebye love you boys byebye will let your winners ride Rainman we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love queen [Music] of [Music] Besties my dog Tak driveways man oh man myit we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all this useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow we need to get merch [Music] all I'm going [Music]