Hurricane fallout, AlphaFold, Google breakup, Trump surge, VC giveback, TikTok survey

all right everybody welcome back to the number one science politics technology and business podcast in the world for five years running we're about to hit our fourth anniversary here episode 200's coming up and a bunch of lunatic fans are getting together you can join them allin.com meetups holy cow we got the domain name Allin fantastic go to allin.com meetups and uh Hey subscribe to our YouTube channel we're going to do some sort of crazy event for the million subscriber party we're like 300,000 away gentlemen this is nuts huh you imagine this thing made it to 200 episodes wow we have allin.com how much do we spend on this this is great guys I negotiated it I got it it took me two years and I got a sick deal on it I don't even want to say because I you know I don't want to change it but I think I got it don't say I'll just say you leave it out I got it for or so and that's a million doll domain just so we all know five letters in the dictionary so good for Branding good job J thank you my friend yeah now we have allin.com tequila oh I love it exactly exactly and you can yum yum yeah I got you sax.com didn't I you have the domain nam.com I negotiate that for you wow we have all the way back to episode one this is incredible oh the new website yeah this is great oh can I tell you if I website all allin.com allin.com that's our website it's like this thing is real yeah it's like a real thing after four years we got our sh together this looks great here we go and I want to give a shout out to podcast AI one of our um remember those fake all-in episodes that became a startup podcast Ai and they built our website for us so shout out to the team over there all right ladies let's move on and uh I am of course your executive producer for life and the moderator the all in podcast and if I may just a tiny plug if you're a found found ER we are having our ninth cohort of founder University it's a 12we course I teach on starting companies what you stop I'm just giving a Qui plug for found University I I need to get a plug because I go to AR one and buy Super gut bars $3.99 you can pick them up this afternoon let your winners [Music] ride and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with love you speaking of that your people use me in an ad freedberg so don't talk about plugs a few weeks ago when I shouted out that glue AI was hiring Engineers we had like a 100 applications just from that from glue AI looking for engine plug on the show yeah for glue AI yeah right that's awesome for glue Ai and if you haven't tried super gut free Berg's team literally made an advertisement with me talking about super gut it didn't tell me and we're still hiring so okay well there you have it so go to founder. university to apply for my 12we program check out I'm running a GoFundMe tr get a new yeah go to GoFundMe freberg for what more Xanax to deal with your panic attacks all right let's get started everybody enough of the shenanigans hurricane season is upon us as freeberg had predicted hurricane Milton made land fall on Wednesday evening along the west coast of Florida as as many of you know it's been downgraded it it started as a category 5 potentially then a category 3 and then it looks like it's a category one now so I guess these things are quite random leading up to Milton though 6 million Floridians across 15 counties were ordered to evacuate that's a lot of people moving out and it was a pretty powerful storm it ripped off the roof of the Tropic Canfield in Tampa so far the death toll is at 4 but it's expected to rise sadly and just two weeks ago hurricane helain swept through six Southern States killing over 220 people tragically devastating Western North Carolina and entire towns were wiped out these are also beyond the tragic human losses are economically staggering in terms of the losses ACU weather estimating the total economic damage could be between 145 and 160 billion from Helen and Moody estimates the property damage alone could be as high as 26 billion tons to get into here FEMA starlink saving the day tons of stuff but free uh back on episode 182 you predicted this would happen what's causing all this and let's just start with the science angle I guess before we get into the other political and um insurance issues well I think if you'll remember when we talked about this a couple months ago the sea surface temperature was at kind of a record high in the Atlantic and warm oan temperatures Drive moist air up that evaporates the warmer the air the faster the evaporation and that starts to cause the movement of the air which drives ultimately the hurricane and then the hurricane sucks up more warm moist from the ocean and it creates a feedback loop so the more energy you have in the ocean the more likely you are to accelerate wind forces in storms and that's why you get these massive hurricanes that suddenly form seemingly overnight go like in the case of Hela that hurricane went from a c 2 to a c 4 or C 5 in like 48 hours because of the energy that's stored up and 90% here's an interesting stat 90% of the energy that we get from the Sun is absorbed and stored in our oceans the other kind of fact that's playing into this if you pull up that SC that nature article and this is something that I think you guys may remember we talked about so this was an article that came out a paper a science paper that came out a couple of months ago and in this paper these scientists identified that removing sulfur dioxide from cargo ships that travel across the oceans is actually causing accelerated warming in the oceans and the reason is that the sulfur dioxide forms cloud formations and those as they travel across the oceans and those cloud formations reflect sunlight and in the absence of those cloud formations that sunlight makes its way into the ocean and you get more ocean warming and by their estimation removing sulfur dioxide which causes acid rain and that's the reason it's been pushed to be removed and they started removing it in 2020 2021 from cargo vessels by removing sulfur dioxide we are now going to see a doubling of the rate of warming of the oceans in the 2020s and going forward let me pause there for a second just to make sure people understand what you're saying emissions from cargo ships block sunlight which then of course reduces the heat absorbed by the oceans and so we're now choosing between pollution of the air or overheating of the oceans am I correct in summarizing that that's roughly it and um what is the pollution again sorry I just understand dioxide go yeah that goes into the fuel of cargo vessels and a couple of years ago they started to implement these mandates that sulfur dioxide no longer be used in the fuel as a result when sulfur Dio oxide is emitted from these vessels it goes into the atmosphere and it actually triggers cloud formation so now you have these clouds that are forming and Nick's going to pull up this image right now yeah here you can see that so all of these tracks are these cargo vessels moving across the ocean and as they move across the ocean they create cloud cover that cloud cover actually reduces the warming in the ocean because it reflects sunlight so now that sunlight energy gets absorbed into the ocean so this is another driving force that some people are now speculating maybe accelerating the warming of the oceans that we're seeing which drives these extreme storm and and hurricane events and so this becomes a more frequent event now a lot of people can I ask you a question does that mean that we're mean reverting meaning if we improve the quality of the fuel source that are used in shipping doesn't that then mean that we're reverting back to what would have happened in the absence of these dirty fuel sources yeah so in addition no no I'm asking I'm asking you the question is that true or not um so yes we are no longer reflecting as much sunlight and so for several decades we had bad fuel sources artificial we had artificial cooling effec we had an artificial Cooling and now we take but that's counter to The Narrative of what we all think is happening oh well the argument is that we've actually been warming the atmosphere which we have been we can see the data that shows that everywhere all over the Earth not just about sunlight coming in on the oceans and not just ocean warming but the the atmosphere is warming the planet is warming and so this is by by blocking the sunlight above the oceans we were artificially dampening that effect and we were reducing the amount of heat energy that was getting into the oceans so now by taking that away we're seeing the heat energy in the oceans accelerate and now the oceans are getting much much warmer the pollution was good turn out it the Paradox here is that it was creating a blocker for sunlight and to your point shth exactly like shouldn't we just be going back to what was normal but at the same time in the same system we had heated things up so this is a multifactored system uh that we're dealing with freedberg and I guess the takeaway from all of this is that we got to be really careful with what we do with the environment right well I mean let's talk about economics right so what how much real estate do you guys think is on the Florida coastline what's the real estate value sorry fre can you just anchor this like was it that it was supposed to be a category five and now it's category three when it hit land right so what happens typically When Storms hit land is they no longer have that hot ocean pumping energy back into the storm that keeps the feedback loop going so the storm cycle starts to break down all hurricanes when they hit land they start to break apart and so the category which measures the wind speed actually reduces this is just a natural thing that happens but this was a category five hurricane when it made landfall I believe it was category four so you know it was a massive hurricane we should not dismiss it because my understanding was Helen was Cat 4 when it like hit North Carolina but I read yesterday that what happened yeah what happened with Helen was it was is cat three when it hit Tampa or something is that not right yeah yeah so that's right but what happened when helain hit North Carolina it was not a cat four uh what happened is as that storm moved Inland it hit the the mountains and the first Mountain it hit are on Western North Carolina that area is elevated there's mountains there so when a heavy hot storm runs into cold mountains all the moisture dumps out it's like it runs into it and suddenly everything precipitates out of that storm and that's why some parts of Western North Carolina got like 18 some high some people measured as high as 30 inches of rainfall in a couple of hours so this insane dumping happens when that hot air hits cold hits a cold region and suddenly everything all that warm moisture precipitates out and dumps to the ground so it ran into a mountain it's effectively why everything fell out in North Carolina wa wait so you're saying that it wasn't Democrats who basically uh right blame me who did it I thought Nancy Pelosi cast a spell or something and well isn't there a lot of geoengineering conspiracy theories uh going on in your cohort I mean what's your I don't think so but venod wants us to be very clear that we need to we need to stop all this disinformation that somehow Democrats were behind that storm well there are we can assure everyone that it was just online that there's a ton of um geoengineering being run by government agencies to drive these think people aren't taking that seriously well I mean the or the origin of this though freeberg is people have done experiments for decades on trying to control the weather or you know alter the weather and and they're doing that in the Middle East by seeding clouds and creating more rain we saw that with the Dubai floods they said that that might have been caused by overseeding of clouds which they're doing there and then there have been experiments just to you know for the crazy laser people conspiracy the theist on X there actually have been experiments with lasers you know being shot into hurricanes and storms correct are you Alex Jones is that what we're doing well no I'm not saying Alex Jones I'm just saying that's the origin of where people are kind of building on this there have been okay so so let's just talk about the the hurricane the amount of for you to debunk it is what I'm doing here yeah putting particulates in clouds to accelerate precipitation is I mean we've done that for hundred years you know you can do you can increase the precipitation rate when there's already clouds that have formed but that has nothing to do with creating 200 M hour wind speed that requires an extraordinary amount of energy all of this energy that the oceans are like giant batteries and when a hurricane gets going that battery is accelerating the hurricane and the hurricane sucks up more power from the battery and it creates this incredibly dynamical system there is no human created Energy System that can for form a hurricane a hurricane is an extraordinarily powerful natural phenomenon that arises from the amount of energy that can come out of very very very hot oceans relatively speaking so you know that's really where these hurricanes are coming from now they're going to be more frequent if the ocean temperatures remain elevated as they seem to be and continue to be elevated and this can be a function of generally the temperatures warming on Earth generally the removal of sulfur dioxide generally these alino linia Cycles there's a lot of factors but it seems to be the case that we are having a very significant trend of continuously warmer oceans and those continuously warmer oceans means that we're going to have what used to be called a one in 500e storm which is what Asheville is being termed at one in 500 year these sorts of storm events can happen every couple years and we're now looking at one in 100y Year events happening every 2 to three years in the United States with the uh the hurricane activity that we've been seeing I think a lot of conspiracy theories are built on actual experiments that happened this one project storm Fury I'm sure you know about was to try to modify hurricanes by putting in some chemicals that would uh freeze them and dull them so they're they're kind of building on break it apart yeah break it apart so you know there there there have been experiments here with altering weather altering hurricanes but that doesn't mean it's Putin Pelosi or you know the alumin so let's get let's get back to Brass talk so let's talk about the economics so there's there's 500 billion to a trillion dollars of real estate value on the Florida coastline and what used to be a one in 100 Year event the average Florida homeowner historically has been paying about 1% of the real estate value in insurance so now if your real estate is likely to be wiped out one out of every 20 years instead of one out of every 500 years the cost of insurance gets to the point that it is untenable for most people to pay for their insurance Florida has a stateb reinsurance provider called the Florida hurricane catastrophe fund and this fund issues debt to meet its coverage demands because it reinsures insurance companies in order to in incentivize them to come into the state and underwrite home owners you should explain the loop here which is you go and get a mortgage the bank says you need to get insurance if I'm going to lend you the money to buy the home so then a bunch of insurers need to decide that they're willing to underwrite that area and then when they give you that insurance they then want lay that risk off and go to reinsure is that the cycle that's right and what's happening is they would normally underwrite that risk they would say this is going to cost you're going to lose the value of your home every 100 years or every 200 years but now the models are showing because of the frequency of these sorts of hurricane events and the severity of the hurricane events that maybe you'll lose the value of your home once every 20 years or once every 30 years and no consumer is going to be willing or able to pay that much for the insurance on their home so the state over the last several years has had to step in and effectively subsidize the insurance and now the state reinsurance vehicle only has statutory liability maximum of7 billion in a single Hurricane Season now I think they got lucky with Milton today but some were estimating that the Milton losses were going to be in excess of a hundred billion bigger than Katrina it's likely as of this morning the reinsurance um websites are all saying it's probably a 40 to 50 billion loss event still exceeds the state's reinsurance capacity so you can kind of think about Florida State's reinsurance thing being effectively bankrupt it doesn't really have the capacity to underwrite the insurance anymore so the real question for everyone is is the federal government going to have to step in and start to support the price of homes because if they don't well it's a terrible precedent to set because if you do it for Florida then you'll have to do it in Texas and Louisiana and missia with wild CIA Arizona there's there and Texas there's going to be no way to create a clear demarcation of who gets a bailout and who doesn't which which will mean that everybody will get a bailout or nobody gets a bailout that's right and if everybody gets a bailout and if you think about how systematically unpredictable at least in the southern states the weather is you're going to be talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year probably the total value of all mortgages in home homeowner mortgages in Florida is $454 billion and those people typically have you know a debt to equity ratio probably on the 50-day 80% range so if the value of your home dips by 25% because everyone starts selling their homes leaving Florida or they can't get insurance then the people that live in Florida most of them have their net worth tied up in their home are going to see their personal net worth wiped out or cut in half so it's not just an economic problem it's a social problem that now there are so many people that have put their entire net worth into their home the value of their home is written to a point that no longer makes sense given the frequency at which homes are going to get destroyed that's probably the reason why they'll have to do it because they'll exactly but then that calculation will have to happen for every single homeowner in every single state at where this is this is an issue yeah wait free are you saying the entire Florida coastline is no longer economically viable no it's totally viable it's just the question is what are you willing what price at what price will you pay 5% of your home value for insurance every year you know will you pay 2% 3% if the expected life of a house is 20 years then no that's not that's not viable it becomes very very untenable well it used to be one in 500 year now it's proba does this apply to the entire Coastline or just parts of it well I mean you saw that the range at which these events can happen is all over the place and the and the challenge is the events are getting more significant because of this warm ocean weather that we see this warm ocean temperature only freberg is that now people are building the first couple of floors in highrises in Miami and homes on stilts with concrete and with resistant you know saltwater resistant material so there is a counter to this so we might be looking investment in climate resilience that's right yeah so it might actually be an opportunity to upgrade all these homes to resistant ones uh using another set of Technologies but the bailout is really interesting to sacks because Florida's got a lot of Electoral College votes doesn't it like I I hate to bring this back to politics but you know promising people bailouts is how these politicians seem to be getting votes these days yeah but is anyone talking about a federal bailout I mean is that this is something you're predict free BR is saying is that there's a there's a pretty obvious parade of Terribles here where the question will have to be answered one way or the other because if you only have a17 billion reinsurance fund and there's 50 billion of damage somebody's going to have to come in and cover the Gap and if it's the insurance companies expect your insurance premiums to double or triple that's right and that's what happened in California and by the way State State Farm left a lot of California this is what I was going to say most of these big insurance companies have already done the calculus to realize that these regions are no longer profitable enough to justify the downside risk that's bigger problem so then the the ones that are left are insolvent reinsurers or insurers that are just funding short-term arbs because they know that the odds are they're going to get wiped out so they'll price gouge effectively so you know a different example is that here where I live in Meno Park we're not in a flood plane we're not in a fire region none of that stuff but in order for us to get home insurance you have to now go through a risk assessment and in our specific case we were like hey what should we do with our roof and they were like you got to take the roof off if you want home insurance we're like well home insurance is probably a good thing to have was it a wood Shake roof on your house it was a be you saw our house it's a beautiful wood Shake roof and we had to remove it and the two choices were a $350,000 like iron materials yeah or or like 70k for composite and it's like this is insane and yeah the cost of insurance was just egregious in the absence of going in one anyways we ended up getting the for most homeowners when the cost of insurance gets to a certain threshold you don't have budget for it you can't afford it and so that's a lot of why the insurers leave they'll underwrite anything at any price but they just know that most consumers can't afford it here's some other interesting statistics related but unrelated in the early 1900s the City of Phoenix Arizona averaged 5 days a year of temperatures of 110° or warmer by the 2010s Phoenix averaged during the 2010s 27 days a year where the temperature was 110 or higher since 2021 Phoenix average plus days 42 days and in 2024 it's been 70 days so far this year that the temperature is over 110 so this is affecting and so there's there's increased risks in California with wildfires increased risk with hurricane there are a lot of these factors and I have friends that work in reinsurance and in the insurance markets even even if you don't get affected by a wildfire or disaster when that that article was in the Wall Street Journal it I think it said that the the number of average days above a hundred was like hundred something yes and right and the Prof they profile this retired woman who is an insurance adjuster or something and the whole point of the article was not that her her house was destroyed or at risk but the cost of electricity has gone just absolutely skyh High even with solar pan even with storage you need to basically lean on the grid and the grid now just charges you an exorbitant amount of money and so these these folks were paying thousands of dollars a year so if you imagine the the trifecta you have all of this climate risk that could destroy your home you're paying an enormous premium for home insurance and then you're paying an enormous premium for electricity from the mainline power utilities it's it's not sustainable yeah and just for back FEMA manages something called the nfip national flood insurance plan and it's historically about 50% cheaper than private flood insurance they have 4.7 million active policies providing 1.3 trillion in coverage but they instituted a new risk assessment system and that caused rates to increase and yeah it's uh because of all this the policies have decreased over the last couple years meaning less people have flood insurance at the same time that these things are getting worse and so yeah this is a really tough issue I wonder if this is an opportunity chth if you think about historically how Insurance worked it worked in communities where people would help each other out and do barn raising kind of events when somebody had a problem so if we just put on our entrepreneurial hats here if you look at the cost of insurance if a hundred different people bundled the cost of their homes together put money into some sort of platform like an Uber Airbnb Marketplace and there was some management structure here of self- insurance because I know some people are doing self- insurance for healthare at their companies for this kind of thing do you think there's going to be a new business opportunity here exist Jason it's called a mutual and those are like a good chunk of the industry are mutuals where it's uh the shareholders are the members and they all share the risk and the ownership the problem is those things work because have broad Geographic coverage if you had to go just into Malibu and self-insure the rates would literally be the greater than the value of the home right no one would pay into it so you actually if you do proper underwriting what's happened in the last couple of years is all the reinsurance companies and all the insurance companies have had to reer write the rates that they charge for insurance because the frequency of a disaster has gone up and the new price that they should be charging is so high it doesn't matter how the capital structure is set up it's simply there's there's one big event that's going to cause a big wipe out for a large number my personal belief is I think that the the real estate markets in some of these places are um meaningfully mispriced and specifically what I mean is that they're massively overpriced that's right because I think when you actually account for the climate damage and the long-term Financial stability of the insurers and the reinsurers I don't think that many of the markets that have seen the crazy sky high prices I'll name two to be specific West Palm Beach and Malibu so both ends of the coasts these things just don't make sense and I think people view these things as Investments but on the west coast when you deal with things like soil erosion and other things I think it's a there's it's a Calamity waiting to happen and I think on the East Coast when you factor in the extreme weather conditions even Jason your comment about rebuilding these homes in a more foolproof way doesn't it because it you won't be able to rebuild the entire State there's a lot of people that just can't afford it there's a lot of folks that will not have adequate coverage so I just think these are disasters waiting to happen unfortunately yeah it's uh and saxs there's a movement right now a lot of people even of means are renting their homes and so in the real estate market what are your thoughts on that just renting versus buying now becoming like a something that you know people in the in the top half of homeowners or potential home owners are now electing to not own their home and rent have you been mon honestly I hadn't heard that I mean the the trend that I thought was happening was that you had these big funds like black rock or whatever buying up huge numbers of homes and then running them to low-end homes yeah lowend or medium yeah you know to families I thought that's what was going on I hadn't heard that that's the high end of the range that people were running well if you think about it like there's there seems to be a cap when you have a $10 million home of what you can possibly rent it for and it's it's the the the prices are now making more s to keep more sense to keep your money in the market or in other places and then rent I'm just hearing are are you long real estate in Florida or Coastal California if you could or do you treat them differently I think they're different but Florida's like I mean I don't know how you do the math on I just don't know what you do on a trillion dollars of real estate value with half a trillion of mortgages when you have real exposure on loss more frequently than one in 100 years they're to your point they need to be repriced and how do you repic those homes in the significant level that they need to be repriced without causing massive economic and social consequence that's what's that's what's kind of I think challenging me in thinking about what's the path here so is a was a good thing that I sold sold my Miami place last once again Sak makes a great trade pretty awesome well done SX top ticked it again well done Saxy poo just like beep I really love I love that house on the you love that house where do you think I stayed when I was in town you're so selfish I lost a I lost a place to stay I mean the yacht access alone being able to get out on the bay and get on a boat the ski do all this great stop H all right let's uh let's keep the freeberg train going here huge news Alpha creators just won a Nobel Prize in chemistry two members of Google's deepmind AI research team Demis hassabis and John jumper received this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry they both work for Google's deep mine as you know and freeberg again all in getting there first explained what Alpha fold was back on episode 14 in December of 2020 that was almost four years ago freeberg maybe um you could explain did we did we predict that they would win the Nobel Prize at the time I believe you did we'll go check the receipts using search Eng it was it became it became much more likely that they would win the Nobel after they won the Breakthrough prize I mean just to just to point this out but yeah yeah shout out Yuri M shout out Yuri and Julia and Julia because when those guys won that award for 2023 and you you heard the extent of what they've done it was almost like obvious that they were going to win a Nobel after the fact so I think the really interesting thing is actually in this community I think the Breakthrough prize is actually meaningfully more relevant and a positive directional indicator to breakthrough science well it's kind of like winning Sundance or can you win the Palm Door you become a favorite to win at the Oscars right in the Academy Award so that's actually interesting the Regional or more industry Centric award could lead to the next one so freeberg just explain to us why this is so important before we I just think it's much more rigorous than the Nobel I think the Nobel can be a little bit gained I think oh interesting okay what do you think freeberg explain to the audience why this is important and and what's transpired we talked about it four years ago there's been a long challenge in Biochemistry on understanding or predicting or visualizing the threedimensional structure of of proteins because remember proteins are produced by long chains of amino acids and those amino acids are kind of create like a bead beaded necklace and then the whole necklace collapses on itself in a very specific way and that three-dimensional molecule that big chunky protein does something structurally physically and so trying to understand the shape of a protein is really hard I mean we've used kind of X-ray Imaging systems to try and identif it and tried to build models to identify how does that quote protein folding work how do those amino acids collapse on each other to create that threedimensional construct and if I don't know if you guys remember in the early 2000s there was a Stanford folding at home distributed computing project do you guys remember this yeah it would use people's machines and extra CPU like the set at home project to precisely yeah exactly right yeah so it's like it ran on the background of your computer it used your CPU Cycles when you weren't using your computer and it tried to model protein folding and so this has been a a problem that folks have tried to tackle with compute for decades to figure out the 3D structure this is so important because if we can identify the 3D structure of proteins and we can predict them from the amino acid sequence we can print out a sequence of amino acids to make a protein that does a specific thing for us and that unlocks this ability for humans to create biomolecules that can do everything from binding cancer to breaking apart pollutants and Plastics to you know creating entirely new molecules to running in some cases like what David Baker did at University of Washington he shared the Nobel Prize creating micro Motors mini motors from proteins that he designed on a computer and so this becomes I think this great like big Holy Grail in Biochemistry and the alpha fold project at at Deep Mind inside of Google solved this problem and and by the way since since then they've come out with Alpha fold 3 they've launched a drug Discovery company called isomorphic Labs where they're basically basically predicting molecules that will do specific things for a Target indication and then they use the alpha fold models to actually design and develop those molecules and there have been literally dozens of companies that have been started since Deep Mind was published and probably several billion dollars of capital that's gone into companies that are creating new drugs creating new industrial biotech applications using this protein modeling capability that was Unleashed with Deep Mind a number of years ago so it really has transformed the industry it'll be a couple years before we see a transform the world but uh it's it's it's an exciting kind of thing yeah not to um virtue signal here but those are plus-size proteins now freeberg they don't like being called chunky you got to call them plus-sized proteins plus- siiz proteins yes one one really difficult technical question for your free B is there any way for you to take this amazing breakthrough uh and make saaks interested in it is there any possible Vector here for it relate to Sachs and get him off his BlackBerry right now Blackberry I think he's playing chess with TL and JD Vance is watching them play chess I think that's what's going on right now it's really hard I mean the poor audience here is watching saaks looking down all right let's keep this train moving here enough of the shenanigans anyway congrats to the teams the very I mean it's just great and David Baker at the baker lab in University of Washington also breakthrough Prize winner yeah what's interesting to me is like these two nobels these guys but also Jeffrey hinton's you know you're really seeing now the convergence of the hard sciences and computer science totally in a really meaningful way and I think that that's so interesting and cool I think in the group chat chth you had an interesting hey maybe there should be a computer science award for you know a Nobel computer science award and uh I actually think it's the opposite now which is that it's amazing to see folks using computers to improve our understanding of the Natural Sciences and I think that that's a really great place to be so what Demis and John and David are doing in the life science is amazing What Jeffrey Hinton you know did you know TW 30 and 40 years ago and 20 years ago in terms of training deep neural and that's also really amazing in related new all computer based yeah all computer based and in related news Benny off just nominated himself for excellence in CRM management so congratulations to Benny off on nominating himself for a what is that com a why are you attacking Benny off a the audience what did he do wrong it's a joke they're just jokes have you not learned anything from the people that attack you it's not an attack it's a joke Ben off has done so much for philanthropy just ask him if you dude he's doing the best can doing a great job how I got Dr with exactly can you people have a sense of humor about no but it's not even it's not even funny if you had said something else I mean okay give me a give me a funnier nobell go ahead go runs a 300 billion market cap he's chomping the bit to come back on the Pod and explain why AI is not going to disrupt SAS really oh we see he wants to be back on the he's texting me he wants to come on we'll check in we'll check in in a hundred billion dollar sh he had his chance that chance is closed he shot his shot and it did not land that door was when he insulted our guests about not being able to afford dis when he called you all in people pores oh my God now you're piling on anybody coming to dream Forest 2025 okay let's move on sorry anyways leave Benny off alone J it's like leave Britney Alone that famous meme leave Benny off alone so how many new enemies do you want to create I just just jokes they're just jokes this when you thought was running out of feuds you know I'm not in the feud with anybody I'm making stupid jokes the reason people tune in is because you laugh and learned did you guys see that that tweet that uh somebody suggested throwing a conference with all of J Cal's haters Jason con jcon jader jader convention what is it called Jers Jers yeah J yeah J haters Jers yeah I'd like to shout out my Jers they're just jokes folks I love you Mark I'm Penny off oh come on the Pod zck I think somebody could launch a successful Summit just doing that it's like it's like a readymade audience and they're clearly passionate clearly passionate all the YC Founders will be there keynote day one Palmer lucky keynote day two David Sachs I think it would rival the all in Summit in terms of The Passion of the fans three of us would show would be so devastated I think it's hilarious i' have to Benny off I like Benny off what I don't I'm trying to make enemies with Benny off he's just got to have a sense of humor oh my gosh Megan Kelly special chat Megan Kelly and fmer lucky wait does Zuck hate you too why did zck oh my God Jal was just so I was brutal to Zuck in the early days brutal yeah why well he just anyway we'll get to it later but you're right like you know throwing a conference for Jay haters would just be like a ready made Jers Jers that is an underserved and passionate demographic it would be bigger than passionate demographic just just look at Sax's replies Community with shared values hey man if I can get 25% of those ticket sales I'm in let's go all right let's keep the train moving here we have an update on the doj's antitrust suit with Google looks like they're going for the breakup as chamath predicted you remember the Bloomberg report back in August we covered it on episode2 Google is found liable for maintaining a monopoly in Search and digital ads now the doj is working on the remedy right okay they're guilty so now comes time for the remedy and the doj is quote this from Bloomberg considering asking a federal judge to force Google to sell off parts of its business and according to this filing the doj is specifically considering structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome Google Play That's the App Store on Android and Android itself to Advantage Google search 32-page document released by the doj Lays out several options and we'll go through them and talk about them here the obvious one terminating Google exclusive agreements with Hardware companies like apple they're the default search engine there for 30 or 40 billion a year Samsung that's a layup uh separating Chrome and Android my God that would be drastic ripping that out of the Google ecosystem prohibiting certain kinds of Data Tracking that's a layup as well or other behavioral and structural changes for the company I'm going to pause there freedberg and get your thoughts on this as a former googler and you interviewed Sergey at the summit but I don't think we talked to seray about this because obviously he would not be able to talk about it so what are your thoughts here on a potential REM I think we've talked about this I mean look I've shared in the past my belief that companies that are big that have excess Capital that then invest that excess capital in R&D can be a net benefit for all of us look at Bell Labs Bell Labs had a monopoly on through their association with AT&T with developing radar microwave the transistor integrated circuitry information Theory everything that is the basis of the internet Computing even nuclear technology and so on it's because they had this extraordinary Capital flow from the scale of the business and they were able to invest in R&D similarly Google Acquired and invested for many many years in Deep Mind and we just talked about how demison team won the uh uh the Nobel Prize for the work that they did and they by the way published the protein structure for 200 million proteins for free out of that service I just want to zoom out for a minute and talk about the fact that this isn't about you know whether Google has a monopoly in search that prohibits competition or in ads that prohibits competition but are do is it really worth penalizing any company that's big particularly do we lose the benefit of those big companies investing in technology that pushes us forward Google also invested in whmo for years and years and years which arguably spurned and drove investment from many other companies in self-driving technology and if Google hadn't done that would self-driving have taken off the way it did I don't know same with Kitty Hawk and Larry's investment in EVs and that that spawned a lot of evall investing and similarly if you think about Amazon and their investment in AWS where they were burning cash for many years that turned out to spawn arguably a lot of interest and investment in cloud and so I I don't think that these big companies are bad just because they're big I think we should take apart the monopolistic antitrust actions and behaviors that they take and then identify ways to remedy those behaviors verus just saying or that's big should be taken apart because there is a tremendous benefit to be gained from the R&D dollars that they all put into things that you know move the whole industry forward and I think that leadership's important to need it otherwise if you got a bunch of startups that are trying to get $10 million checks from VCS I'm not sure they're going to build AO and I'm not sure they're going to build Amazon Cloud and I'm not sure they're going to build a deep mind you know protein folding company and publish it for free so I don't know that's just my point of view onam what's the likely how we should think about this stuff jth you kind of nailed this one pretty good with these predictions tell us we'll be sitting here five years from now what will have occurred unfortunately not what freeberg just said it'll be the opposite there'll be some form of forced remedy I'm sympathetic to freeberg argument I don't think that it's really a good thing in the end because I do think there are some incredible examples of Google specifically reinvesting in a way that's really added value in the world I think the problem though is that the Technology Innovation cycle has gotten too elongated so you're not seeing creative destruction be the natural force that keeps all of these companies in their own swim lanes and so they are allowed to become two and too profitable and I think it becomes an obvious Target for politicians I think that's a really good observation there about the timeline of this because if you look at this I have started now and I know many people are starting their search Journey on Claude and chat GPT every day I'm doing 30 40 50 queries and follow-ups per day I force my entire team to do that as well and so just as there's an actual viable competitor to Google this action has reached I don't know the halfway mark this is going to wind up being completely meaningless saxs if chat GPT does build a viable competitor coexist that siphons off search am I wrong here well it is ironic that frequently the government takes actions on these monopolies at precisely the moment they're subject to the greatest disruption totally same thing happened with Microsoft in a way but it was still a good thing that the government acted when it did because there was a risk of Microsoft porting over its desktop Monopoly into this new era of the internet I think it's still a good thing to be looking at breaking up Google I actually think that would be good at the end of the day it might even be good for shareholders this thing should be probably three separate companies like we've talked about in our previous show but it is true that Google is facing the most existential threat to its search Monopoly and it is Monopoly in the form of open AI at this point in time I have one final thought here and piece of advice for Sergey and the team over there and and I told Sergey directly they have to get good at making apps to go use chat GPT you take out the app and it's a wonderful beautiful experience when you go try to figure out how to use Gemini it's like shoehorned into search results and then it's like some subdomain that's why people aren't using it Go by The Domain in chat.com and make a dedicated app just for and I kick ass you're 100% right you suck at apps we said this when when you asked about the bare case of open AI if the doj is going to go after Google and by the way the interesting thing Jason and I mentioned this to you is that in the same article that floated the trial balloon about this remedy of a Google breakup the headline in the Wall Street Journal which I think was very purposeful said Google and meta so I think that they have given their brothers they being the powers that be at Washington will probably want to take a run at both of these companies they'll start with the one that they think they can disassemble the quickest and then they'll go to meta afterwards my strong advice to meta and Google is if this is going to happen you got to go out kicking and punching and fighting and scratching and I think the most thing is what you just said Jason which is you are the front door through the internet and there is this completely new emerging technology and where is the same response to chat GPT that you had to X or that you had to Snapchat or that you had to Tik Tok because if it's going to happen it's going to happen and then you might as well just go for it yeah build the apps make them kick ass make the chat G PT alternative and get it to billions of people yesterday that would be the most logical Game Theory thing to do to build up a pool of users that you will rely on when the doj tries to come with some consent decree or whatnot so this is the time to build up the Assets Now as aggressively as possible yeah and uh selling YouTube would be the ultimate I know that the ad Network you pointed out free bar are connected but if they distributed if they SP out I'll give you I'll give you something about the ad thing can you imagine $500 billion going into Google's coffers in YouTube shares they have 500 billion in cash chamal I had a I talked to a company he a CEO of a of a public consumer facing company and this was in the context of some 8090 stuff and he said that he and and two other CEOs the three of them you guys would all know these are very big companies the three of them combined are particularly large and they said they've had multi-year road maps to try to build a reasonable set of tools in advertising and it's been impossible and partly why is that the the tools that the big folks offer are so good that they just cannibalize and run over the entire market and so what they hear from CMOS is we would love to advertise on your company your site but a your tools are substandard and B even though your inventory is cheaper you just don't give us the same scale and breath that we get in these other big places I'm not saying that that's either right or wrong but through the lens of probably what the doj sees is when a lot of these folks write letters to them talking about what they're going through this is what they're saying and I suspect that if you could actually have a more fragmented Market in some of these key Market markets it's going to be a little bit easier for these smaller companies to have a business now you could say well tough luck you tried and you couldn't build it I get that argument and I and I think that that at some point that is legitimate but the problem is if you're public and you're trying to make your company profitable what do your engineers want to work on they want to work on consumer facing forward features and so what always falls off the list it's the stuff at the end the tech yeah and so anyways it's this recursive negative Loop that a lot of these other companies are in in the shadow of these big companies that I think is going to cause the doj to try to do something you know this is a great setup for m&a it's a great setup for IPOs starting to look like and this is a multi- Administration case that's been going right I think this started under Trump went into Biden and is now going to continue on to Trump or or Harris so what are your thoughts here Sachs well in terms of the political environment for m&a next year yeah yeah I mean so obviously it depends which administration's in power a lot of Democrats you know prominent Democrats in Tech like Mark hubin or Reed Hoffman have been making the case that if kamla is President she's going to be much more hospitable and friendly towards m&a and they've been saying explicitly that they want Lena KH fired well in response to that AOC just came out and said we're gonna have a Throwdown if you do that so I don't go I would not expect a substantial difference or Improvement in the in the regulatory permissiveness uh towards m&a if uh if we have a democratic Administration if that if you have Trump in office next year I think that there there will be an opening up of of m&a I think the Republicans have their own issues with big Tech but those issues tend to revolve around censorship and bias and search results and llms things like that as opposed to bigness per se so I think it will be easier to get m&a done next year if you have a republican Administration absolutely I am going to be printing money in a trump Administration it is going to be obscene how many m&a deals and IPOs are going to occur there is such a huge backlog but I do think there I do think the Democrats want to get this moving as well and I I was talking to Reed Hoffman uh and you and Peter teal in the Illuminati meeting and they voted 190 to2 to replace lenina Con in the Illuminati meeting chamat why didn't you make the Illuminati meeting last week I'm shocked that you weren't there I'm not I'm not inv to that people don't know that you're being fous Jason oh really they don't understand that I'm joking about the Illuminati they often don't they often don't well I'm sorry to the low IQ listeners who don't know that the Illuminati is not real oh now now you're insulting the audience no I'm insulting the ones who believe there's an Illuminati he's trying to sell tickets to the Jad trying to sell tickets to the jader ball with buck nasty Zuck nasty J cow is the biggest hater in the tech industry you ever see the haters ball sacks I have not SE Chapelle show no Cham it looks like between the time we mentioned it on the Pod it's it's actually happening here it is the jader ball is happening there it is lenina David Sach wait why am I there well because you're a headliner you're you organizing I think you're the host I'm gonna be a keynote you're the I'm the I'm okay wow I'm the MC there look there's there's Zuck nasty and there's Palmer lucky you guys don't know this bit from Chappelle the haters ball from Chappelle oh my God it's the funniest bit on shabelle show it's literally I mean I saw a lot of Chappelle Show I never remember God just show the real picture Nick um on the Chappelle show they have all of these pimps who have a yearly convention which is their player haters I've seen this I've seen all they do is sit there with like a toothpick in and they hate on each other make fun of each other I've seen it is the Fest bit in the history of the Chappelle show all right let's keep the train moving here CRV is giving back or maybe not calling down 275 million from their LPS Charles Riv Aventure shout out to my pal George Zachary and Greek brother from CRV historically they invest in early stage startups they did door Dash air table Twitter back in the day they had two funds that they raised back in 2022 billion dollar early stage fund and a 500 million growth fund sometimes people call that an opportunity fund or a Select Fund the New York Times reported CRV is going to give back about half of that 275 million to investors or technically probably not call it down the four Partners at CRV gave an exclusive to the New York Times so either getting ahead of this story or uh maybe you know who knows what the motivation here is but the reason they gave is that the market conditions for late stage have worsened dramatically and that the valuations are still too high yes the rent is too high and that there aren't any exit options as we just talked about with the administration no IPOs no m&a and that VC map doesn't work in the late stage so I'll just stop there there's a bunch of other notes here obviously this isn't the first time this has happened I think Founders fund cut the size of its eighth Fund in half from 1.8 billion to 900 million they didn't actually give the capital back to VCS like they're saying CRV did here again I'm not certain if that's what's happened or not they put the extra 900 million into its ninth fund if they decide to raise that which I'm assuming Founders fund will if you have any thoughts on this I I guess Trend we got two stories here so I don't know Trend P did this and he gave back quite a large piece of his fund a couple of years ago and then CRV just did it I I want to make sure I get the citation right I think it was Thomas lefont at kotu who said this it was really powerful it made a huge impression on me which is that the NASDAQ creates about $800 billion of Enterprise Value a year and he brought that up in the context of private markets have to exceed that in order for it to be a real viable alternative to just owning public indices and so if you factor in il liquidity risk and the duration you have to probably generate I don't know a trillion $1.2 trillion dollars of Enterprise Value in private Tech every year that just seems like it's really hard to do where is all of that value getting created so I think that Venture need to go through a phase where it rationalizes you know this is sort of what I said at David's LP day which is I think that LPS have made a couple of very big mistakes and I think the biggest mistake that they've made is by smearing too much money across too many General partners and I think if you had to redo it a it's probably a lot less money in total but B and the example I gave there was instead of giving $50 million to craft and $10 million to somebody else you're better off giving $60 million to craft and not even having that other GP because that GP makes everybody's life complicated they overpay they Mis pay they're probably not supposed to be a GP in the first place and so they force returns down and then when you contrast that again to a public market that is systematically creating $800 billion dollar of Enterprise Value a year this is an incredibly tough game and it's getting much much harder so I think that if you just take a step back these are the right things to do because you're much better off having a smaller pool of capital that you can concentrate into the things that matter you're probably better off having smaller teams versus bigger teams and you're probably better off trying to forge LP relationships where they're not doing 50 fund Investments because it just makes the entire industry lag public liquid Alternatives and I think that that's just not good peanut butter getting spread a little bit than there any thoughts uh freeberg on this trend if we can call it that or is this like maybe they're reacting right as the market is changing and valuations are getting more reasonable and the exit opportunities are getting more reasonable it seems like this was the right reaction two years ago but maybe it's the wrong reaction now what do you think freeberg for a venture firm to return Capital they need to have at least one or two big Winners and so if that winner needs to be a 10x or 20 X or 30X of the fund because most of the investments in the fund are not going to work you need to be able to enter at a reasonable price and there needs to be enough opportunity relative to the capital trying to invest in that opportunity out there for to make sense so in a market where there is excess Venture Capital where valuations are at a premium and where you don't see the exit path the m&a or the IPO events that make sense that you can actually realize that model you should take less capital and make fewer Sher Investments and I think that that's what some folks have realized they don't want to be chasing um you know highly valued inflated opportunities and they don't want to be putting Capital into tier b or tierc opportunities just for the sake of deploying Capital this is a really interesting moment where you can kind of see who are the the right folks in terms of thinking longterm in Silicon Valley longterm in terms of building an investment practice in private Venture and maybe who are folks that are trying to build their AUM stack and folks who have done reasonably well like Founders fund has probably the most exceptional track record in Silicon Valley as a venture firm they are very cognizant of the market conditions and I think that they're being very smart by the way the other thing I've heard from LPS is they're similarly trying to find more concentrated Capital themselves so they're trying to put more Capital to work in fewer managers and so there's a real weat from the chaft moment happening in Silicon Valley venture right now what I think a couple years ago was hey everyone's going to go do a startup a few years ago became everyone's going to go do a venture fund and now I think the froth that has occurred because of that is being cleared out and to just explain this math before I get Sax's thoughts on this if this was a $500 million fund let's say they were putting $25 million into each we'll take management fees out of it $25 million into each opport Unity at a billion dollar valuation they would own 2 and a half% obviously of those firms they need to get probably a 30 billion power law exit of 30X ax in order to just return the fund there'll be some dilution obviously along the way that's why it's not 20x and the number of companies that go from a billion to 30 billion per cycle is incredibly low Uber coinbase Airbnb I it's a really short list huh sax and recent history I mean look just just go back to the crb thing you said at the outset of the conversation that this was either a growth fund or an opportunities fund that makes a really big difference explain please because well an opportunities fund typically exists to back up your winners in other words if the Venture fund is producing some big Winners the opportunities fund exists to deploy more Capital into those into those companies as opposed to growth fund which is you'd be underwriting brand new companies from scratch typically an opportunities fund is limited to companies that you're ready an investor in through your Venture fund so that makes a big difference I mean if CRV has a billion dollar Venture fund and only a $500 million opportunities fund it may just be the case that they don't need all that Capital to back up the winners they can do their pratas out of the main fund so I I suspect that that might be what's going on I actually think this is a pretty good time to have a growth fund a lot of the the yeah well because a lot of the uh crossover Capital has left the ecosystem okay a few years tigers and that sort of cohort yeah well tiger and and um SoftBank are still around but there are other very large investors hedge funds and so on who had come into the ecosystem with billions of dollars a few years ago and now they've left and some of those funds that you're talking about like tiger used to be $10 billion funds now they're $2 billion funds right they've been right sized they're not violently doing I mean the tiger deals my understanding was they weren't joining the board in a lot of the cases and they were Outsourcing the diligence and that was a pretty violent Pace I don't know what this is the best time in probably five years to have a growth fund H interesting but to to your point about the size of the Venture fund the bigger the Venture fund the bigger the winner that you need to make that payoff obviously yes and so because of the power law so to take an example I don't know let's say you've got a billion- dollar Venture fund let's say that at IPO you own 10% of whatever that that winner is and because of the power law your your fund performance is really determined by your best outcome right yep so in order to take a$1 billion Venture fund and say deliver a 3X you know so three billion of returns and your best company you own 10% of that implies you have a $30 billion winner in that fund and there are precious few outcomes where you have a $30 billion IPO right yeah I me very count them on two hands the last cycle like I just did you got you got Uber you got Robin Hood you got coinbase strike will eventually come out you got SpaceX well that was two cycles ago so I mean yeah you're going to need to have a meaningful ownership position and a massive company in order to make a fund that big payoff the the data that I think LPS look at shows that smaller Venture funds tend to perform better for this reason 50000 million funds so yeah I personally want the pressure of a billion dollar Venture fund that would be really hard as a five or $600 billion Venture fund you kind of need to have or or want to have like a decacorn outcome to make that a great fund but to have to have a $30 billion plus outcome it's it's even more difficult moving on Pew just published uh some really interesting research on Tik Tok uh if you don't know the Pew study they've been doing it for decades it's very well respected um and uh bipartisan or nonpartisan 4 in 10 us adults aged 18 to 29 are now regularly getting their news from Tik Tok here's some charts for you to take a look at as you can see the younger generation is really spending a lot of time on Tik Tok and getting a lot of their news there I know this because uh yeah I I've talked to a bunch of kids about this and people that use Tik Tok 52% are regularly getting their news from the platform and that number has skyrocketed compared to other social platforms take a look at this chart here's X 59% of people say they get their news at X it's really a news platform so that makes total sense you look at Facebook it's you know 48% right now Reddit 33% YouTube 37% in 2024 Instagram 40% but Tik Tok 52 up from 22% so it's no longer just dancing and this is the reason I think many people in the government were concerned about the attack Vector that the CCP would have in the United States they still control the company for services like Snapchat LinkedIn and WhatsApp and next door it's below 20 below 30% get their news from there there sure truth social there uh sacks 57% of people get news there and Rumble 48% so what what's your takeaway from from this just sax looking at it and this impact that Tik Tok has is this concerning on a national security level since the algorithm is a black box and you could tweak it if you really wanted to to Really change sentiment and um young people are obviously very impressionable on this platform and they're big users of it well I thought there was other data in the study that should calm people's fears that Tik Tok would somehow be used as a political weapon so in the same survey you're talking about 95% of adults that use Tik Tok say they use it because it's entertaining so that's the main reason people use it and only 10% of accounts followed by us adults post content related to political social issues okay that's posting and the main reason right sure yeah but so so basically 90% of the accounts that get followed aren't even posting political or social issues they're there for entertainment as people watching Dance videos as people yeah watching I I mean I the main thing I use it for is to watch wrestling highlights so uh you're a wrestling guy yeah I'm a wrestling fan what yeah you're into this Kabuki theater of wrestling this new information I get my WWE on on Tik Tok because I don't to watch the whole yeah favorite are you a Hulk Hogan guy are you an Undertaker guy Vince McMahon I mean Jimmy Jimmy Superfly snooker who are you Andre is I know all those names but uh I like I also love the Road Warriors uh Ultimate Warrior I loved I I was a huge wrestling fan that was the one thing that my dad and I bonded over we would watch wrestling every Saturday did you ever watch the the specials on Saturday night like the oh yeah oh those are so that that was the era of Hulk Hogan for sure Saturday night's Main Event Randy Savage Savage Savage is great Savage yeah I mean look my my all-time favorite was Stone Cold Steve Austin Stone Cold is great I marked out the hardest for Austin he was he was anti-woke before antiok became a thing totally this is crazy you guys are into wrestling I'd say flare number two for me wait wait hold on have you gone to a wrestling did you only like the WWF at the time or did you like the NWA as well that their moments when when Hogan turned heel and joined the the uh was it the NWO that was like a big moment I'm a big uh Andy Kaufman wrestling fan that was my only interest is when when Andy Kaufman came in there and uh trolled them but have you Kaufman yeah that well that was like in the 1970s wasn't it or it was the late his 80s remember he was on with Jerry Waller and he he comes to a wrestling match Sach in the South and was where I grew up in my hometown of Memphis right so he goes there and he gets in the ring and he says all of you rednecks I want to show you some new inventions this is called soap and this is called a washcloth and you used it to clean yourself and he's like just mocking the southern accent and Jerry law remember Jerry laa smacks him and on Letterman oh it's the greatest it was a huge deal I mean where I grew up because that this was like on the local news yes when I grew up in Memphis there was no professional sports teams okay all we had was the Memphis State basketball and and uh wrestling every Monday night at the mids South Coliseum that was it that was like professional sports in Memphis you also had probably like some state fairs or you know like best goats best sheep or something Lawler was so popular that he could have been elected mayor in fact I think there was talk at one point of him becoming mayor wow I mean the intergender champion Andy coff did you guys like mouth of the South Jimmy Hart oh yeah course he was amazing he was like the main heel manager for a while yeah okay this is before the WWE took over I guess it was called WWF back then but they were all these little Thoms and kingdoms and Midsouth wrestling was like one of those kingdoms and Lawler was like the king of it and then you had all these guys come in and out and wrestle fredberg you ever watch wrestling and what do you think of this Tik Tok survey I don't watch wrestling okay very good and Tik Tok survey anything where are you no any thoughts looks like they gathered some reasonable data okay there you go there's there's your hard point my point was that it's mostly an entertainment app where people go to watch Dance videos wrestling Clips style influencers and so on and I think that this idea that it's somehow a propaganda tool around you know programming our youth I think that's a moral Panic that's been exaggerated what do you think the odds are that Tik Tok is hacked to allow you to passively listen even when the app is not being used zero you think it's definitively zero no like 5% I think that's very unlikely yeah because some someone said that that was that was a there was some code that enabled that in the early version of the app and then some other people audited it and they said they did not find evidence that there was any technology and Apple's got a very good audit system for this did those same people audit WhatsApp and then it turned out that it was they passively listen yeah does WhatsApp passively listen yeah it's one of the it's one of the most well-known breaches well maybe they do maybe it's maybe I'm 100% certain that the CCP is using it because they the people have tracked already journalists using it so if they've already done it it's 100% now I don't know about the passive listening but any thoughts on 50% Plus young people getting their news here shamat any news on that I mean obviously we don't have evidence that it's being used currently to manipulate people but it's over 50% of young people are now getting their news there or say they're getting their news there I bet more than 50% of young people are getting their news from podcasts and those podcasts get chopped up and clipped and then people watch them on Tik Tok yeah for sure I bet that's how it's happening there are a lot of people who think this show is a Tik Tok show and they don't know it's a big show yeah we'll have to prepare for a bre New World in the following way there was an article I think it was in the Wall Street Journal that said that Russia and Iran were paying low-level Street criminals to create chaos okay and I and I read that article and I thought okay well what does this mean if you actually extrapolate this which is that the hot Wars are very complicated not worth doing these disruptive fissures are the better way to sew chaos and it occurred to me then that tying this back to something that we saw before it does make sense for a lot of folks to sponsor a lot of longtail content that say a lot of different things I think that that just is pretty obvious and so I think that if you put these two ideas together it stands to reason that a lot of people will be paying influencers a lot of money to create all kinds of content that is specific to a perspective that they have and then on top of that if you can algorithmically amplify one over the other you know you're you're going to have issues is it the biggest issue in the world probably not probably wouldn't swing an election but it would cause chaos and we just had the the southern district of New York Target that Russian Russia Today was giving $10 million to four podcasters didn't even know they were getting paid by the Russians they just picked them because they like their opinions and they gave them 100,000 an episode to to promote Pro Russian positions if the Russians were actually doing it it's the stupidest use of $1 million ever because great those podcasters already had their own channels they're already putting out lots of content and this other content is a drop in the bucket I think Jamal the issue with what you're saying is just there is so much content out there already people create it for free people create it you know because they're they have a career in it there's a whole long tale of influencers there is so much content out there already through podcast through websites it's all being chopped up that trying to do it as some sort of disinformation strategy I think is very hard to do because it's just when there's billions and billions of of Impressions any effort that you try to engineer ends up just being a drop in the bucket I agree yeah it's defin it makes sense in theory but it makes sense in theory it's very hard to do in practice Yeah the goal is not to win any specific argument it's to create mistrust in the entire news ecosystem in the information system so that people give up trying to figure out what the truth is and that's what the Russians doing that on their own the mainam media lies so much that's what's creating the distrust as are the Russians paying off podcasters okay let's how is1 million going to accomplish anything if that story is even true great question great question may I answer it conspiracy theory not a conspiracy theory at all these were very low-level mid like you know tier B CD podcasters if you give them $100,000 per episode they can spend more money buying cameras promoting their shows hiring people so you're just finding people and dropping money on their head so they can do more of the same so it's a very smart strategy in fact I think I think it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard they took podcasters who are already successful and paid them to release content through a less watched Channel That's the yes it was it was just more about getting the money to produce more content and then they in the these guys are these guys are already live streaming like 247 oh there's a puppy oh here he goes freeberg trying to win more people over with his puppy love unbelievable this guy is absolutely ridiculous unbelievable all right listen let me give saak some red meat here he got he got his little steak Tata with my Russia Today story got your little amus BGE and now I give you your Tomahawk you ready saaks you want your Tomahawk you want it rare here it comes 2024 election update the betting markets and polling indicate a really tight race but maybe Trump is surging this week poly Market which is a betting Market has Trump 55 to 45 versus kamla Ki another betting Market 5248 Trump bada and points bet those are offshore booking and poly Market is also offshore 5248 Trump Nate silver friend of the Pod his algorithm has it 5347 KLA real clar polling that's an algorithm has KLA with a two-point lead New York Times Sienna comma with a three-point lead Reuters ipso pretty well trusted uh three-point lead for kamla NPR PBS Maris pole has com with a two-point lead so sportbooks and Betty markets are favoring Trump slightly while the polls are slightly favoring comma Sachs I sliced it up nice for you you got nice 10 slices of meat here which slice you going for well I think your recitation of the polls there kind of mixes up a couple of things there's popular vote polls and then there's Electoral College which goes state by state if you look at pretty much now all the main pollsters you look at Tony Fabrizio you look at real clear politics they're now showing that Trump is winning the electoral college right now he is up in almost every swing state including I think Michigan which is pretty surprising clearly there's been a huge swing towards Trump over the last week or two and look there's still 25 days to go so anything can happen I don't want to overstate this but yeah this is a good example right here showing thatal college is is 296 to 242 what is fabrio he's just a republican pollster but his accuracy is pretty high I've never heard of it FAO well another guy who I think is more neutral is Mark Halprin who is a pundit who has been very accurate this election cycle remember he's the one who broke the scoop that Biden would be replaced by Harris and he even said exactly when it would happen and uh he predicted it down to the day he was exactly right about that and if you follow his account he is now saying that both Republican and Democrat insiders that he talks to are both saying the same thing which is their internals are now showing Trump ahead in every swing state or almost every swing state and uh things seem to be breaking Trump's way right now again there's 25 days left but if you're wondering why is Harris all of a sudden doing interviews it's because their internals started showing that she was in trouble so they decided to get her out more and or is it the other way is it that the her Howard Stern interviews or whatever are causing her to lose votes well yeah exactly well so you know which one is it do you think because I don't know when I don't have the dates of all these polls versus that no I think it's it's what I predicted a couple of months ago it's the Doom Loop so what I said two months ago is that if Harris gets behind she's going to have to abandon this sort of basement strategy of not doing interviews she's going to have to start doing interviews the problem is she's not good at interviews and if she does more interviews she's gonna fall further behind in the polls and it could cause a doom Loop so that's where we appear to be right now I said that on August 30th okay shamat your thoughts I think that Donald Trump is basically stuck to his strategy which is he is a generational retail politician I just heard parts of what he did with Andrew Schultz another great sort of you know podcast I think David's right that the editing and the massaging of the Kamala hara's talking points are galvanizing the people that have already decided and turning off the people that have already decided to vote for Trump and she's losing the folks in the middle and so this is what's causing her to have to be out there and and she's gonna have to deliver a very crisp message and I and I think that right now it's been a little bit lacking which is why you're seeing the polls at least the Electoral College which is really what matters at this point turn Trump so she's going to have a bit of an uphill fight between here and November the other thing I'll say is that if you've seen what's happening in the appet court it's not clear whether the the Trump case is going to get overturned before the election but if that does that could be very meaningful momentum for him and then I think the third thing is that we should now Buckle in because if the last two elections are any guide there are going to be a bunch of spanners in the works between now and November the wait what did you say spanners spanners in the works yeah what does it mean what do you call it wrench in the system you mean like an October surprise you mean like some crazy turn of events okay freeberg any uh thoughts here would you like to shck test this and see what you want in the numbers or do you have some objective thoughts here what what's your what's your take you know there's on the polling data or yeah where we're at in the election you pretty open-ended here you can look at the you can make a note on overall what you see between the betting markets and the polls and that disparity you could just talk generally about where you think we are you could talk about coma on Howard Stern and doing a bunch of interviews with friendlies where you at right now I didn't see her interviews okay I saw some excerpts on Twitter oh boy yeah let me just follow upon a point jth made Jam said that she had to be crisp if you look at any of these interviews they're the opposite of crisp she's asked softball questions by by like Stephen Cole bear saying why are you running for president how are you different than Joe Biden yeah and she doesn't have good answers she starts free associating she gives these very long-winded answers that don't go anywhere she says she can't think of a single way she's different than Joe Biden when when pushed on that it's very strange these are she definitely did the most favorite shows I wish she would do some challenging shows I think she's got to do Joe Rogan all in and um what would be another good podcast for her do your moth if she really wanted to like do the adversarial thing or something more do adversar do an adversarial just come to Allin come and have a conversation come and have a normal conversation here yeah no I'm just thinking like it seems like ZX if she comes and has a has a conversation you'll be respectful yeah this whole idea that I didn't treat Cuban respectfully is nonsense just watch the tape I don't think he thought that I know somebody somebody asserted that no I mean I the all if you look back on every single presidential related one we did here they were all respectful and they were all conversations I think the Cuban one dipped because of both of you into a bit more of a debate and it was a lot more crossover than the other he wanted that that's what I agree back to him he likes to come out he likes to do his thing that's exactly what if you look at all the other ones I'm trying to think of a moment where it if you look at the other Dean B Phillips Chris Christie VC boring gotta go love you guys see you later this has been another amazing episode The Allin podcast episode 199 make sure you go to allin.com meetups make sure if you're starting a company you go to founder. university if you're an engineer please go to I'm doing whatever okay please David Sachs make sure you go to um super gut glue AI if you're an engineer and if you like potatoes go to aal.com and order your potatoes pre-order a subscription I mean if we're doing sell some let's sell some super 890 890 go to 899 we'll see everybody next time on the all in byee Let Your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you [Music] Queen besties are that's my dog taking a your driveways oh myit meet we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] somehow we need 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