Dueling Presidential interviews, SpaceX’s big catch, Robotaxis, Uber buying Expedia?, Nuclear NIMBY

Summary

Podcast Summary: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Episode Title: Dueling Presidential Interviews, SpaceX’s Big Catch, Robotaxis, Uber Buying Expedia?, Nuclear NIMBY
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg
Date: [Knowledge Cutoff: October 2023]

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1. Dueling Presidential Interviews and Election Analysis

Overview:
The hosts delve into the recent presidential debates, specifically focusing on the interviews of Donald Trump on Bloomberg and Kamala Harris on Fox. They analyze the impact of these interviews on public perception and the momentum of each candidate.

Key Points:

• Perception of Interviews:
  The group discusses how the media often portrays the interviews based on political biases, leading to polarized opinions. Chamath observes that both candidates' performances are interpreted through partisan lenses, questioning if these interviews will genuinely sway undecided voters.

  "Everyone on the left says Kamala did an amazing job on Fox... and everyone on the right's like, look at him."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [03:15]

• Effectiveness of Candidates:
  David Friedberg critiques Kamala Harris's performance, suggesting she failed to provide substantial answers and primarily aimed to minimize the interview's duration. In contrast, Donald Trump's interview is praised for its engagement and ability to handle adversarial questioning.

  "I think Kamala... wasn't particularly persuasive. So I think that what you saw there was somebody who just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible."
  —David Friedberg [05:06]
  "Trump is someone who relishes walking into the lion's den and doing those interviews."
  —David Friedberg [05:57]

• Polling vs. Betting Markets:
  The hosts compare traditional polling methods with betting markets like PredictIt (referred to as Poly Market), noting discrepancies in how momentum is captured and predicted.

  "If for sure you knew the election was 5,149, the betting markets would swing to 100."
  —David Friedberg [02:32]

Notable Quotes:

• "Is it already baked at this point? Like, is anyone actually going to change their view based on these interviews?"
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [04:15]

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2. SpaceX's Rocket Catching Achievement

Overview:
The conversation shifts to Elon Musk's SpaceX and its recent milestone of successfully catching a 23-story rocket with precision. The hosts express awe at the technological feat and discuss its implications for the future of space travel and economics.

Key Points:

• Technological Marvel:
  The successful catch of the Starship booster by SpaceX is hailed as a significant achievement, showcasing human ingenuity and the potential for reusable rockets.

  "Technically, the achievement of this... is an absolute marvel of human ingenuity."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [16:30]

• Economic Implications:
  Chamath breaks down the cost reductions achieved by SpaceX, emphasizing the dramatic decrease in the cost per kilogram to launch materials into space—from $10,000 to approximately $1,000, with aspirations to reach $10.

  "This is like a thousand x reduction in cost. It's incredible."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [21:06]

• Future Prospects:
  The discussion highlights how these advancements make large-scale space colonization, such as establishing a base on Mars, more feasible and economically viable.

  "If you can get the cost per kilogram down to 10 bucks over the next couple of years, we can get materials to Mars and set up a colony."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [21:12]

Notable Quotes:

• "I thought it was pretty strong. But I will say, like, generally, neither candidate seems to be introducing a new message."
  —Jason Calacanis [06:23]

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3. Robotaxis and Tesla's Innovations

Overview:
The hosts explore Tesla's advancements in autonomous vehicles, particularly the development of robotaxis and the aesthetic evolution of Tesla's models. They discuss the potential societal impact and the integration of these technologies into everyday life.

Key Points:

• Tesla's New Models:
  Discussion about Tesla's new robotaxi models, blending elements from the Model Y and Cybertruck, and their futuristic design.

  "It's the hybrid of like a Model Y and the Cybertruck. So I kind of really love the aesthetics of it."
  —David Sacks [22:33]

• Operational Potential:
  David Sacks envisions various applications for robotaxis, including mobile homes, emergency shelters, and disaster response units, highlighting their versatility.

  "You could send 100,000 of these to the parking lots at Walmart to help people displaced by hurricanes."
  —David Sacks [25:05]

• Tesla Ownership Experience:
  Chamath shares his personal experience purchasing and test-driving a Tesla, praising the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature and performance.

  "I use FSD and it was like really impressive. So super impressive."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [26:32]

Notable Quotes:

• "If you can put them right back into place and just go again, you're spending 10 bucks a kilogram to put material into space."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [16:30]

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4. Uber's Potential Acquisition of Expedia

Overview:
The podcast addresses rumors of Uber exploring a bid to purchase Expedia, analyzing the strategic fit, potential synergies, and financial implications of such an acquisition.

Key Points:

• Market Reaction:
  Initial reports indicated Uber's interest in Expedia, leading to market fluctuations. However, these talks were later dismissed as preliminary.

  "They said this was like very preliminary third-party talks and that there's no serious talks going on about this."
  —David Sacks [25:00]

• Strategic Synergies:
  Chamath outlines a financial rationale for Uber acquiring Expedia, projecting cost savings and EBITDA growth through cross-selling and operational efficiencies.

  "Expedia could be smarter about how they build vacation packages and personalize them for families. That's where they can make real margin, like 20, 30%."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [35:26]

• Skepticism and Counterarguments:
  David Friedberg expresses doubts about the practicality of integrating Expedia into Uber's ecosystem, emphasizing user experience and the likelihood of success.

  "I don't think Uber customers want to be cross-sold on booking a hotel... it's a completely different state of mind."
  —David Friedberg [37:00]

Notable Quotes:

• "Orlando space Monday,"
  —Jason Calacanis [29:10]

• "It's just a completely different state of mind. I just don't think that there's much opportunity to cross-sell that."
  —David Friedberg [37:00]

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5. Big Tech's Investment in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Nuclear Power

Overview:
The hosts discuss the increasing interest of big tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in investing in small modular reactors (SMRs) for nuclear power. They debate the feasibility, safety, regulatory challenges, and societal acceptance of nuclear energy as a solution to growing energy demands.

Key Points:

• Investment Trends:
  Amazon announced a $500 million investment in SMR projects with Dominion Energy, aligning with Google and Microsoft’s investments in nuclear power to support their data centers.

  "Amazon just announced a $500 million investment in three nuclear power projects... Microsoft is reviving one of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plants."
  —David Sacks [43:00]

• Necessity vs. NIMBYism:
  Chamath argues that nuclear power is essential to meet the increasing energy demands driven by GDP growth and AI advancements. In contrast, David Friedberg highlights the "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) sentiment that hinders the construction of nuclear plants near communities.

  "To meet the energy demand without nuclear, we are severely limited."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [56:32]
  "I'm not saying you can. I'm just saying I don't want one near me now."
  —David Friedberg [52:06]

• Safety and Technological Advancements:
  The discussion touches on historical nuclear incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, with Chamath pointing out advancements in reactor technology that mitigate meltdown risks. Jason Calacanis counters by questioning the operational reliability of SMRs, emphasizing that many are still theoretical.

  "There have been three incidents... it's a lot more complicated to explain to people what happened and why."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [60:36]
  "SMRs don't work yet. We have theoretical ways in which we can profile and model that they work, but we don't have a functional one."
  —Jason Calacanis [63:00]

• Regulatory and Geopolitical Implications:
  The hosts explore how the adoption of SMRs could impact U.S. energy independence, geopolitical relations, and competitiveness in the global AI race. They debate the role of regulatory bodies and the potential for local opposition.

  "If China races towards 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, and we're sitting here at 20 cents a kilowatt-hour, what's that going to do to our economic competitiveness?"
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [66:13]

Notable Quotes:

• "We're putting copper everywhere to move Internet signals around... This efficiency gain that's going to be realized over the next decade is just incredible."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [22:16]

• "Nuclear power is a luxury belief because you're going to put these things in pork communities and so it's never going to affect your life."
  —David Sacks [70:22]

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6. Concluding Remarks and Election Anticipation

Overview:
As the episode wraps up, the hosts briefly discuss the upcoming election, their anticipated attendance at election night events, and share personal remarks, maintaining the podcast's signature blend of insightful discussion and camaraderie.

Key Points:

• Election Night Plans:
  The hosts express their intentions to attend election night events, particularly at Mar-a-Lago, discussing the logistics and their excitement for the outcome.

  "We have 200 episode meetups happening... and we'll see you next time. Bye bye."
  —Jason Calacanis [77:42]

• Personal Updates:
  Chamath shares his recent purchase of a Tesla, highlighting the performance and features that convinced him to make the switch from Audi.

  "I bought my first Tesla... It was really impressive."
  —Chamath Palihapitiya [26:32]

• Final Thoughts:
  A lighthearted exchange about the nature of the podcast and the upcoming election underscores the hosts' camaraderie and shared investment in current events.

  "We resolved our issue. We got the compromise here."
  —David Sacks [69:35]

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Conclusion:
This episode of the All-In Podcast offers an in-depth exploration of current political dynamics, groundbreaking technological advancements by SpaceX and Tesla, strategic corporate maneuvers by Uber, and the contentious debate surrounding nuclear energy investments by big tech. The hosts provide a balanced mix of analysis, personal insights, and spirited debate, making it a valuable listen for those interested in the intersections of economics, technology, and politics.

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

Freeberg's channeling Tim Walls over there.

[David Sacks]

I know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He's as exciting as Tim Walls.

[Jason Calacanis]

Got your flannel on? Do you know what a venture capitalist is, Free?

[Freeberg]

Oh, he's shilling Super Gut.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, as of last week, when J. Cal decided to turn all in into a commercial, I was actually going to do a Super Gut background. We're launching Super Gut nationwide in Target this week. Any target in the United States you can go into and pick up Super Gut. You can buy the GLP1 booster. You can buy the prebiotic shake.

[David Sacks]

I have that, actually. Is that the chocolate or do you have the milk?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Is that the chocolate?

[David Sacks]

I mean, I like.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This one's chocolate.

[David Sacks]

Okay. Mocha's good, too. All right, let's get started.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Thanks for the support, jkow.

[David Sacks]

I appreciate it. Of course, of course, of course.

[Freeberg]

We're cutting all this out.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No way. That's why I do this.

[Freeberg]

Next time, plug a company. I have a steak in.

[David Sacks]

We'll let your winners ride Rain Man David Sack.

[Freeberg]

And instead we open sources to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

[David Sacks]

Love you, Queen of Kinwa. Also all in Election night Live stream is coming November 5th. You can watch Live Sax will be hosting that. We're doing it. You're hosting it. Your team said you're doing it. And so you'll either get to see.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Are you not going to Mar a Lago, Sax?

[Freeberg]

Well, if things continue to look good for Trump, I might go to Mar A Lago.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. Okay, so you're maybe not commit sex. You're a maybe if you go to Mar A Lago. You're excused.

[Freeberg]

I can live stream from Mar A Lago.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That would be amazing. Absolutely amazing.

[David Sacks]

I'll go to Mar A Lago. That'd be fun.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

If it looks good, I'll go. So maybe that's just go. Of course I'm invited. I talked to Jared.

[Freeberg]

If things look as good as they do right now, then I think I'm gonna have to go tomorrow.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think we should all be in Mar A Lago.

[Freeberg]

It's gonna be a unique experience.

[David Sacks]

Oh, my God. Can you imagine being in Mar A Lago and he loses.

[Freeberg]

Oh, my God. That's why that would go. Unless this thing is in the bag, it's gotta be too big to rig. If it's too big to rig, I'm gonna mar a lag.

[David Sacks]

Too big to rig.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you guys think Poly Market is, like. Why do you think it's different from the polls? Are we talking about this today? Poly market's showing like 60, 40 or 65. 35 now, right?

[Freeberg]

Yeah, because they're measuring different things. I've explained this before. Poly market is people betting on the outcome. So 58% think Trump's gonna win, whereas the polls in a particular state show the percentage of how each person's going to vote. So if for sure you knew the election was 5,149, the betting markets would swing to 100.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But let me ask you this. So Nate Silver's model, which takes the poll from each state and builds in a kind of a Monte Carlo of, you know, super poll, like a supermodel for the whole country, why is his estimate 50, 50 right now while the poly market is betting at 60, 40.

[Freeberg]

It'S possible he's laggy in his estimates.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Got it.

[Freeberg]

In the betting markets, the betting markets seem to go based on momentum. So it indicates the swing and momentum and then the.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How do you think they're going to change after the interviews the last couple days, Trump on Bloomberg and Kamala on Fox. Do you think those are going to change anything?

[David Sacks]

I don't think so. I think it's all baked in now.

[Freeberg]

Well, Trump over the past few weeks seems to have had a surge owing to the fact that Kamala's interviews generally don't go well. So I think she started off a little behind, started doing interviews to catch up, and now she's a lot behind. I don't think the bear interview is going to help her.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, let me ask you this. So my observation, as I don't know, I'm not like a super political person or whatever, a party oriented person. I looked at a lot of the media on both sides, and it seems like everyone on the left says Kamala did an amazing job on Fox. She defended herself, she showed her skills and her competency, and then everyone on the right is like, she embarrassed herself, she fell apart. And then the same thing happened with the Trump interview on Bloomberg. People are like on the left, they say, look at how he couldn't handle the interviewer and he fell apart and all his lies were exposed. And everyone on the right's like, look at him. You got a standing ovation. It's almost like everyone's just kind of like self asserting their beliefs that they already hold when they judge these people on these interview shows at this point. Is it, Is it already baked at this point? Like, is anyone actually going to change their view based on these interviews happening?

[Freeberg]

Well, the question is, what appeals to that small sliver of independence? Yeah, the question I would ask back to you is, if the Bret bearer interview was going so well for Kamala, why was her staff on the sidelines waving to try and end the interview that apparently they had, like, four people waving and trying to cut the interview off?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Who said that was the case?

[Jason Calacanis]

He did it.

[Freeberg]

So, yeah, it was like in Rocky 4 when Apollo Creed's corner was, like, yelling, throw in the damn.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Throw it in the towel.

[Freeberg]

Throw in the damn.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Throw in the towel.

[Freeberg]

They couldn't wait to get off the stage after 26 minutes. I just think that if it was going that way. Allegedly.

[David Sacks]

Allegedly, yeah.

[Freeberg]

I don't think Brett Barrett's gonna lie about that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't know why he would lie about that. That makes sense.

[Freeberg]

Why would they get her off the stage after 26 minutes if it was going so great? I'm not saying it went as horrible as some of the partisans on the other side are saying, but I don't think it went that great.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you give her any credit for going into the lion's den like she did?

[Freeberg]

Well, I think that she went. She did the interview precisely to get the talking point that she does adversarial interviews because that talking point was earning them. And so you saw, like, all of her fans in the media were saying, well, see, she can walk into the lion's den. But again, she did the shortest interview possible. I don't think she answered the questions directly. I think she filibustered a lot. She deflected a lot. I don't think she was particularly persuasive. I don't think she convinced anybody. So I think that what you saw there was somebody who just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. To check the box on. Okay, does adversarial interviews. Trump, on the other hand, he actually likes doing these things. The Bloomberg.

[David Sacks]

There's no filibustering there, right?

[Freeberg]

Well, no. He's christened his answer.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No filibuster.

[Freeberg]

Come on.

[David Sacks]

Anecdotes.

[Freeberg]

You can do the weave. You can do the anecdotes, but he's also very good at coming back on the interviewer when they get adversarial. And the audience was with him. They gave him a standing ovation. He went for 64 minutes compared to her 26. I just think there's no comparison. I think Trump is someone who relishes walking into the lion's den and doing those interviews. I think Harris did it because she felt like she got back.

[David Sacks]

What do you think, Chamath? You see it or no? You have any Opinion.

[Jason Calacanis]

I watched the whole interview. It was clear in the interview he mentioned the fact that he was being waved off and then he said it after the fact as well. That's not alleged. I think that that did happen. I would say two things. I thought that she was composed and she maintained her cool. So I think from a stylistic perspective, I thought that she did. Well, from a substance perspective, it was pretty lacking because if you actually listened to the answers, there was just a ton of non answers and they were two very basic questions that I think a lot of people, even if you're not a swing voter, I think would probably want to know the answer to. Meaning did she have any regrets about what's happened in the last three and a half years? Did she have any regrets about what she's done on the border? Has she not noticed that Biden was wavering before he was hot swapped? I think that you could have predicted that these questions were going to come. So I think I was surprised that there wasn't a crisp answer that they had practiced for that. The second thing I'll say is then David is right. Everybody then gets very tribal in how they interpret it. I think I saw one tweet from Elon about how all of the newspapers characterized her interview with Bret Baer as quote, unquote, testy. And it was sort of like that was the way that the mainstream media framed it. I suspect if somebody looked at how Trump's interview with Bloomberg was analyzed, it probably had some similar verbiage that was repeated there as well. So I think you are right, Jason, that the mainstream media can't be trusted to tell the truth. I would just encourage people to watch it. I think, like I said, stylistically I think she did well and remained composed. Substantively, I think it was non existent.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, it would have been nice to have another debate between these two.

[Freeberg]

She still can't really explain how she's different than Joe Biden other than the fact that he's a white male and she's a woman of color. So beyond just sort of the superficial differences, she can't explain on a policy level what she would do differently. She's had so many opportunities to say that. They asked her on the View, they asked her on Stephen Colbert. Bret Baer asked her in his way. And she still can't explain what she would do differently. And I think that is the fundamental problem she has in her campaign is voters still don't know who she is or what she would do.

[David Sacks]

Yeah. What did you think of J.D. vance saying he Wouldn't have certified the election. They seem to be going after him on that over and over again. Sex.

[Freeberg]

You're the only person talking about that.

[David Sacks]

No, no. Literally every interview they've been chasing him down the hall, asking him. I'm not the only person. I may have started it. But what did you think of him saying he wouldn't have started that is.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Kind of like when he's in a combative reporting moment. That is the question he gets a lot.

[Freeberg]

That's not the interview I saw. I saw him. The interview he just did with Martha Raditz was she was saying that Trump was accepted. No, no.

[David Sacks]

The question I asked you Sachs was. I asked you Sachs about certified January.

[Freeberg]

You're the only one who's fixated on it. No one.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No one.

[David Sacks]

What do you think?

[Freeberg]

No one who is persuadable, who doesn't have tds, cares about that topic anymore.

[David Sacks]

What do you think, Friedberg, about him saying he wouldn't certify January 6th?

[Freeberg]

It's not what they're asking. JD if you want to talk about interviews that JD Vance has done, talk about the one that's actually going viral right now. And that was the interview he did with Martha Raditz where she starts saying that, you know, we've only had a few of these apartment buildings taken over by foreign gangs. And he's like, do you realize what you're saying? You know, there's no comeback from that he destroyed her.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It was very compelling what he did.

[Freeberg]

And every interview he does is like that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. I mean, she was basically saying that she spoke to, what was it? The city manager. And she's like, he said only a handful of buildings have been taken over. And J.D. vance was like, what do you mean? Yeah, only one handful of buildings. Like, isn't that anything more than zero? Like, too much or anything more than one is obviously a problem. Like, it was just such an obvious rebuttal to the narrative that they're kind of over exaggerating a particular issue. I have no data on this, but he was very compelling in that response. I thought it was pretty strong. But I will say, like, generally, neither candidate seems to be introducing a new message or seems to be introducing new content. They're just kind of standing up, you know, kind of repeating things that they've said, showing that they can handle and manage different kind of combative reporting tactics. And that's kind of what's going on. And everyone seems to have made up their mind. I see a lot of people on both sides say again, this side. This person did great. My person did great against this combative reporter, and the other person did poorly against their combative reporter. And everyone's kind of biased in their view. It just feels like this election's baked and we should just go to the polls and be done.

[David Sacks]

Yeah. What did you think, Friedberg, though?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But there's no October surprise coming out, right? Saks, Chamath, Jake.

[Freeberg]

Three weeks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Anything can happen, but there hasn't been anything, Right. Like, that's kind of a shocking moment yet this month, but.

[David Sacks]

Free break. The question I was going to ask you is, since you're not like hosting Trump, you know, fundraisers, do you think, what did you think when J.D. vance said he didn't think that Trump lost the 2020 election? Does that concern you at all?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There's no, there's no way to answer this with, with the kind of clean framing I think you're looking for. What I saw from JD Is that he wants the reporter and the people that he's talking to, and I hear this from him, to zoom out a little bit and recognize that there are significant control and control systems and biases that he believes and others believe are strongly affecting the election process and as a result, the election outcome. And I think that that message is lost because people want him to say Trump lost the election. You're not admitting it. You're bad. But those people also aren't hearing the point that he's making, which is that there are biases. And we heard these biases, by the way, with Democrats in prior elections as well, where they highlighted that they believed that there were biases with respect to misinformation being amplified on social media. And then the next election cycle, they were able to step in and influence what was being changed on those social media platforms. And so there's this big kind of war, media war going on. That's why I through social media platforms, and I think that that's what both sides are highlighting is their big concern. And now there's this other big concern about is there appropriate voter verification that the people who are voting. And it's a question to ask that shouldn't be dismissed. It is a good question to ask.

[David Sacks]

It's a great question.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

As a person who doesn't have a strong bias for a political party here, I feel like I want to hear answers to those questions. What is the structure of how the way that most people are getting their media today, which is through social media platforms? What is the mechanism for censorship? What is the mechanism for filtering for moderation and be public and transparent about it. And then separately, what are the mechanisms for deciding who gets to vote and how they get to vote? And I think those are both really good things to ask.

[Jason Calacanis]

I would just like to take a step back and say that that was one of the most incredible answers I've ever heard. Freeburg. Unfortunately, it may not land for the reductive masses, but it was exceptionally powerful and thoughtful. Thank you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I'm here for Chamath. I'm here for you.

[David Sacks]

Well, I mean, independent of who wins, we need to get this rules of elections really tight starting next year. I think make it a federal holiday, require people to have id. That doesn't seem like such a big deal. I don't know, Sachs, what else should happen? Federal holiday.

[Freeberg]

Make it right. Now you've got Biden's DOJ is literally suing the state of Virginia, which is required by Virginia law to clean the voter rolls of illegal immigrants. And they've been doing that. And Biden's DOJ has sued to stop that. In California, like you said, we now have a new law signed by Gavin Newsom to make it illegal to ask for voter id. So Democrats seem to be undermining the integrity of elections, not fortifying it. So when you ask why do Republicans distrust elections, maybe it has something to do with the way that Democrats are acting. But I agree with you. I think that cleaning up the voter rolls, having a minimum standard for voter verification is something that I think should be done. According to the Constitution, the states basically run their own elections. But it doesn't make sense to me that in a one party machine politics state where basically one party controls the state, that they could set up a system that effectively entrenches their power forever in federal elections. It just seems to me that the federal government has a compelling interest that must be constitutional in ensuring a minimum standard of honesty in federal elections. So I think it would be great to do something about this next year. I think that if you want people to stop questioning elections or engaging in election denial, you need to make the elections above reproach. So let's do that.

[David Sacks]

So anyway, Heritage foundation, which is obviously right leaning, has a bunch of election fraud cases they've been documenting and they basically cannot come up with like actual evidence that this is changing any election results. But we should make it above reproach. I agree.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right.

[David Sacks]

Our boy Elon had a big week. Tesla unveiled two new concepts at its We Robot event. And Elon Elon caught a 23 story rocket. The Starship here's the robo taxi and the robo bus. Both of them look really awesome. And he caught one of the. I think this is the fifth starship or the fourth launch.

[Jason Calacanis]

Fifth.

[David Sacks]

The fifth. Right. And then.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Incredible.

[David Sacks]

Look at this. It's unbelievable. It's like chopsticks catching, whatever your issues.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Are with Elon and his politics, just to appreciate, and we can talk about why this is so important in this segment. But technically, the achievement of this, like, skyscraper falling out of the sky and perfectly aligning itself to go into that chopstick catching device, it is an absolute marvel of human ingenuity. I mean, just. And the work and the effort that people put into this over, you know, several decades, it's just such an incredible feat. Look at this thing. I don't know if you guys were as emotionally moved by this as I was.

[Jason Calacanis]

I thought it was incredible. I think I probably watched this 100.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Times totally from every angle.

[Jason Calacanis]

Every angle.

[David Sacks]

And so the reason this is so important is because these things cost a lot of money. And when they land here, you can clean them up. And I guess his goal is to have them take off again after he fills them with propellant an hour later. Friedberg. So on a science basis, this is extraordinary. What? You know, if this works and you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Start lifting, you don't want it to have feet. A, it's heavy, and then B, you have to lift them up in a way that just complicates the entire refueling and cycle time process. So by catching it, you put it right back into place and just go again.

[David Sacks]

Unbelievable. You just catch it and go again.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I can kind of walk through these numbers. So obviously the big objective over time is how cheap can you get it to put material into space? We need a lot of material to go into space if we're going to do things in space, particularly if we're going to go build a colony on Mars. And so this shows you, over time, the cost per kilogram, which is the key metric in this industry, to launch material into low Earth orbit. And you can see here how SpaceX has dramatically reduced the cost. I remember when the small sat era began in the 2010s. Do you guys remember all these startups that were starting to build, like little small sats and put them up to do imaging and comms and stuff? When this took off, it was about 10,000 bucks a kilogram to put a small sat into space or to put material into space. And then SpaceX has dropped the cost to the point that it's now close to $1,000 a kilogram. So a 10x reduction in cost in just the last decade or so. And that's why SpaceX just dominates the launch market. But Elon's always said that $1,000 a kilogram is too high. But his objective has been to get the cost down to 10 bucks a kilogram. Because at 10 bucks a kilogram, you could launch what some people estimate is needed to get to Mars, which is about half a million tons of material and people to set up a colony on Mars. And it actually becomes feasible to get half a million tons of material at 10 bucks a kilogram. So if you look at this new starship and Starship heavy Booster, it's about 150, 200 ton payload. The booster holds 3,400 tons of propellant. And the cost of that propellant is pretty low. It's only about a million dollars in fuel. So then if you can get the cost of the booster and the starship down enough, and you can reuse it enough, and you amortize the cost of making that device over the lifetime of the device, the cost per launch comes down, and that's what brings the cost per kilogram down. So the booster, there's a group called Payload and they do estimates on this. So I won't speak out of turn in terms of like having inside knowledge, but the Payload has estimated that starship and the booster cost about 90 million bucks today. And they think that they have a path to getting it down to 35 million. So if you can reuse that thing 10 times, that's a $3.5 million cost per launch, plus a million for fuel you could easily see. And this thing can launch 200 tons. That's how you start to get to 10 bucks a kilogram over the next couple of years. But it was critical to be able to reuse that heavy booster. And that's what Elon just demonstrated. It's we can actually catch that heavy booster, refuel it and launch it an hour later. And if you can do that over and over again, you're spending 10 bucks a kilogram to put material into space. You can get fuel into space and then get those starships to fly off to Mars and deliver all this material, including setting up a base that would allow you to actually make more fuel on Mars, because everything we need to make fuel is on Mars. So it's the beginning of the next series of really important milestones that will hopefully get humanity onto Mars. It was just so amazing to see it come together. The economics are legit. I mean, this is like a thousand x reduction in cost. It's incredible.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, it's going to be amazing. And they're going to do some, I guess, new stuff with Starlink, some even lower earth orbit satellites that go even faster and have less latency. So that's going to be super exciting.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Starlink's apparently. I mean, I know everyone here is a shareholder in SpaceX, but Starlink's running at 4 million subs right now. That's like 100 bucks a month. 4 million subs. And if you do the math, I mean, how many people have ISPs that are slower than Starlink? Right? How many people have cell phone providers that they're paying roughly the same amount that aren't as good as Starlink? If we can get satellite to phone and you can get Starlink more broadly available, this could be 100 million subscriber business. I mean, this could be the largest businesses on the earth.

[David Sacks]

It could be the largest subscription business in the history of humanity. I think the largest ones right now are like Netflix, you know, 250, Disney +150, Verizon, 100 million. So yeah, it could be hundreds of millions of subscribers. It could even be.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's crazy.

[David Sacks]

And could be the first 500 million subscriber product in the world.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We could look back one day and be like, why did we run all this copper wire everywhere? We don't need it.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, obviously crazy. Especially if it can get.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It would be like crazy that we were like ever. I mean, the whole nutty thing about this past week, it's like we could look back one day and be like, why did we ever drive cars? And why do we ever have copper wire laid all over the Earth to like move Internet signals around, you know? This efficiency gain that's going to be realized over the next decade is just incredible. Just incredible.

[David Sacks]

Chamath, any thoughts on the Robo Van or the Cyber Cab? The Model 2, I guess some people are calling it, but it's, you know, the Cyber Cab specifically not calling it number two and doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. I would have bought two of those immediately if it had a steering wheel. I want to drive it. Yeah, it looks like the hybrid of like a Model Y and the Cybertruck. So I kind of really love the aesthetics of it.

[Jason Calacanis]

So beautiful.

[David Sacks]

Yeah. You like?

[Jason Calacanis]

My reaction was actually, I don't know, just seeing these releases now over 10 or 15 years plus of knowing him, nothing, it's, it's, I guess it's like not that surprising. Maybe it's, it's weird to say like I just expect him and his teams to figure it out. Like they're just all so good. It's. And the thing to remember, it's not just him that's incredible but he attracts a kind of technical and operational wonder kind people for sure. And that's just, that's just a really special thing. So I had that reaction which was I was really proud and happy for them.

[David Sacks]

For the team? Yeah, for sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

For the team and for him. These guys are like incredibly fearless. Failed bigly, right?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you're going to fail, fail bigly.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then the other thing that I thought was crazy was how many people were trying to dunk on him this weekend. And that surprised caught me off guard because I think that they were personalizing a lot of anxiety that they are feeling through these companies successes which didn't make much sense to me.

[David Sacks]

Well, in fairness he did hurt some people's feelings with posting of memes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, I mean it makes no sense. Like the guy's like going to save 30,000 road debts a year in the United States with self driving and people are losing their minds over a couple of memes or who he's voting for for president. I don't think you have to worry about that. You can just look at the products, they speak for themselves. Anything. Sax, Any response on the Tesla front? Any thoughts on the bus or Optimus?

[Freeberg]

I mean they're both very exciting products. I don't think I've got a lot to add.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, I love the bus Friberg. I think that thing could become like mobile homes adus and you could just send them to your.

[Jason Calacanis]

Can we buy them or no?

[David Sacks]

Well no, not right now, but I think that might be.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Mom's gonna put all his kids in one.

[Jason Calacanis]

I need it for all my kids.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, well see if this was a platform like the Mercedes Sprinter vans have become that you see a lot in Europe, then you could buy an empty one of these. It's got enough battery life to last a month. And then let's say you had your in laws over and there was one that was set up as like a one bedroom. You could click on Airbnb or you know, Tesla Airbnb, press a button and the thing could drive to your driveway, you could rent it for a week and then it could leave. Or let's say a thousand people or 10,000 people were displaced because of a hurricane Freeburg. You could send 100,000 of these to the parking lots at Walmart. Which typically does a good job in feeding people and getting them supplies after hurricanes. Since those are so ubiquitous, you could put 100 of these in every parking lot and have a place for people who are fleeing natural disasters to stay. So I thought that was like the most compelling product of the whole thing for me was the possibility of a sled, like a skiff that you could do anything you want with would be really exciting for society. So congratulations to the team. And it's going to take a while, but I could see them having that robot also, I think.

[Jason Calacanis]

Congrats to Amid. He just got promoted.

[David Sacks]

I saw that. Yeah, he's in charge of all AI.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he's in charge of all manufacturing and sales in North America now.

[David Sacks]

Oh, okay. Well, there it is.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shout out to meet Afshar.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I mean, listen, guys, I have big news. I just bought my first Tesla.

[David Sacks]

Oh, you did? Did you go with a plaid Model S, Model S?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Plaid? Yeah. I test drove it for two weeks and sold itself.

[David Sacks]

And are you using the fsd? I use FSD every day.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I use fsd and it was like really impressive. So super impressive. I've tried Tesla a couple times over the years and I never really, never really worked. For me, the quality just didn't feel like what I like, given what I had before the car wise.

[David Sacks]

You were an Audi guy, right?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But Audi guy. Yeah, always loved Audi.

[David Sacks]

Audi guys. Yeah, that's. That's like a thing, right?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's. It's a big milestone. I really, I thought the FSD was the selling and then the speed on the plaid is just insane. It's better than my RS7. Like I.

[David Sacks]

It's incredible with all of my Teslas, I put it in show mode because when it's in that plaid mode or whatever, like coffee goes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's my favorite. I love it. I get on the back.

[David Sacks]

But if you have passengers, the kids in the backseat will get like literally nauseous because it's too fast. You got to be careful with the passengers there. So fast.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It was awesome. It's awesome.

[David Sacks]

All right, well, there you have it, Robo Taxi star. We didn't get to it last week. We almost put the show back a day or two just to do it. In other news, Uber is exploring a bid to purchase Expedia. Breaking news. This was dispelled as we got here on the show. They said this was like very preliminary third party talks and that there's no serious talks going on about this. Financial Times reported that advisors were trying to look at if a deal Structure would be possible between Uber and Expedia. Expedia's got a $20 billion market cap. They popped 8% on the news, obviously. Uber, on the other hand, trading at 170 billion market cap or so, that dropped 3%. If you didn't know Daro was the CEO of Expedia from 2005 to 2017, he's still on the board. And it looks like this was a trial balloon. You know, Uber's two biggest businesses, rides and Uber Eats, but they also do freight and train bookings. Dar's been pretty clear. He wants to create a super app like you have in China or some other markets. Expedia's got a lot of cool products. Hotels.com, orbitz, Travelocity, or. And I think the most interesting one, Friedberg, you and I were talking about, this is VRBO Vacation Rental by owner. It was like Airbnb before Airbnb existed. And if you look at this chart, since Dara left, the Dara effect, Expedia has gone exactly sideways. The revenue has grown modestly. What do you think of this deal? Chamath? I'll just go right to you with this one, since you like to. Stupid, stupid. Okay, there you have it, folks. Reason number one, it's stupid. And reason number two, it's stupid.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, this is a $20 billion market cap business. You probably have to pay a control premium of 50%. So the question is, if you were going to spend $30 billion today in the public markets, what would you spend it on? And I think the most important lens that you have to use to answer that question is what reinforces a moat that I have while also being inoculated from the risks of AI. And I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data. So the problem that Expedia has is the same that booking and a bunch of these other folks have, which is that the principal heartbeat of the company, flight information and other things, are licensed to them by third parties. And so what they are is a UI in a front door. I think it's way too early in the evolution of AI to know that that's safe. And in fact, I think a more reasonable assumption is that those things are pretty fragile. And part of what may explain the doldrums of the stock is that I think people are anticipating a world where, for example, I don't know if you saw, but Perplexity launched something this week. It's just in test mode. They whitelisted me into it. But it's basically a checkout concept. So you tell Perplexity what you would like it to buy and then it will go and complete the transaction for you. So in the example of flight bookings, you could go directly to United because a Perplexity will just show you all of the flights, they'll show you the exact prices, and then it'll go and execute that for you with your payment method. In a world that looks like that, where these companies have the money to pay for the data feeds, the existing v1.0 generation UIs I think are in trouble. So it would just be a very bad capital allocation decision. Now, that's okay to get things wrong, but not for $30 billion wrong. You can probably do it for a couple hundred million dollars wrong or maybe even a billion dollars wrong, because you can absorb that as a 150 or 60 billion dollars company. But 30 billion is too big of a price to pay for that kind of risk.

[David Sacks]

I would agree with you. And there's other things they could buy, like we ride or pony AI and a bunch of these AI companies that are doing self driving. So why not double down on that? Freeburg. The one thing you and I talked about was kind of vrbo, which is a very cool marketplace and that feels directly in the Uber kill zone. What do you think about them just maybe carving out and buying VRBO and having an Airbnb contemporary?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, just buy Waymo. Why don't they just go to Google and give them $30 billion of Uber stock and just carve in Waymo? Isn't that a better idea?

[David Sacks]

I think that's what's going to happen. I've been hearing rumblings of that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So I think that Dara knows Expedia better than anyone. He ran the business for what, a decade or so and so he knows how that business operates. And so if he's looking at this thing and the stock price has been flat roughly since he left in 2017, if you look at the underlying financial performance, you could kind of start to construct a rationale for buying Expedia this cheap. And it would be very accretive to Uber, even if there are these big strategic risks on the horizon. So just to give you some numbers on it all, Uber has got about 150 million monthly active users. Expedia has about 45,50 million customers a year that use the service and pay for stuff. So there's a real opportunity to think about the Uber customer base that's installed as being almost an opportunity to market to them. Expedia services and cross sell. So Expedia on an annualized basis is spending about 8 billion a year in sales and marketing and about 720 million a year in G and A costs. So. And they're running about 3 billion EBITDA right now run rate. So if you cut about half the GNA in an acquisition because you don't need all the people that overlap with Uber's people, and you cut about 30% of the sales and marketing dollars because you can cross sell into the Uber install base, you could see a scenario where you could increase Expedia's EBITDA by 75 to 100%, maybe getting it as high as $6 billion. And while Expedia's market cap trades at 20 billion, this is off of obviously the recent news that they might get acquired. If you assume a 40, 50% price premium to the last 90 day average of the stock price, which is kind of typical or common for a deal like this, they're probably paying 26 billion for the company and they got about 4 billion in net cash. So you're kind of paying about 22 billion enterprise value to buy Expedia. So 22 billion of enterprise value and if you can bump the ebitda up to 6 billion a year, that's a pretty low multiple. I mean, you could kind of see yourself rationalizing this just from a financial basis that you're paying four times EBITDA to buy this thing. And Dara knows this thing and he would have great command over what needs to be done over there. And he would have a great sense of what to change and what's gone wrong. And there's a lot of interesting assets inside of Expedia. VRBO is a great one that's been under monetized and underutilized. I don't know if you've used the UX on VRBO versus Airbnb. There's obviously some influence Dara could have with people that he knows well that could go in and fix that interface and make it a better service. And even as AI starts to step in and hotels maybe integrate better with agents and so on, and they show up in a more ubiquitous way. There's other things that Expedia does, like build vacation packages and travel packages that are high margin products that they sell that are a little bit different than what you're used to with just booking a flight, booking flights makes no money for anyone. But vacation packages is where all the money's at. And so theoretically Expedia could be smarter about how they Build vacation packages and personalize them for families. And that's where they can make real margin, like 20, 30% margin. So I could see a story where this all starts to click for the board at Uber saying maybe it makes sense. Dara knows what he's talking about. We could buy this thing for four times pro forma ebitda. This could be hugely accretive for us. So I think that's why this is happening, why this conversation may be happening. That's just me trying to understand.

[David Sacks]

I think it's a good steal, man.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What the rationale might be.

[Freeberg]

Could you just go back and explain how would they drive up EBITDA so much?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So they're spending about 8 billion billion a year run rate on sales and marketing at Expedia right now. And Uber's got 150 million active installed users that are using this, the Uber services every month. So the idea would be customers. Yeah, beyond actually paying customers. So if Uber could cross sell some number of Expedia services to their installed base at Uber, which they could test and you know, do a little experiment and see if it works, they may be able to reduce the marketing dollars that Expedia is spending to acquire customers through other third party sources like Google and Bing and other places. So there's a rationale.

[Freeberg]

That's where I think the logic breaks down. I don't think Uber customers want to be cross sold on booking a hotel. See, this is where I think, like MBA thinking is very different than product thinking. Like an MBA looking at this would say, well, you know, Expedia and Uber are both in the travel business. Their apps both involve booking trips. So we can cross sell Expedia from Uber and then cut Expedia's marketing budget. I think that's how an MBA would sort of hand wave over it. I think the way like a product manager would look at this is to say, what does the user want to do? And I know that when I use the Uber app, I just want to basically make a couple of clicks, set my destination, get my car, and then move on. And there was a product initiative a few years back at Uber where they tried to capture the user's attention during the ride. And they, you know, they added.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, they had that whole ad thing, that ad campaign, making a ton of money.

[Freeberg]

It's actually printing. It was like an entertainment stream or something inside the app. No, but they dialed it way back because I don't see it anymore. It was just clutter.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Would you trust Dara's judgment on the Saks. Like, if Dara were to think about what the Uber user would want and he could rationalize some percentage of them they could cross sell Expedia services into. I mean, ultimately, I think it's. It's his decision, right? Like.

[Freeberg]

Well, what you're describing is basically a private equity play. Like, Dar is going to come in as like a private equity buyer effectively, and he knows the business and will run it to reduce cost, may boost some revenue. And maybe there is a justification for that. But if you're trying to justify it based on cross selling. I don't think users of the Uber app want to be cross sold when they book a taxi. Okay? They just want to be able to affect their transaction as efficiently as possible. And just to finish the point I was making on that whole entertainment stream that they had, they dialed that product way back because it got in the way. You'd be in the Uber app trying to figure out how to change your destination or something, and all of a sudden you're being shown like some entertainment product. It's not what users wanted. And it was always kind of a banana's idea to think that just because the user books an Uber, that you own their attention during that ride. Because during that ride, you're really competing with every app on the iPhone, right? I mean, and that's the problem is you want to get in and out of the Uber app. It's about transacting efficiently.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What about not the moment when you're, when you're riding in an Uber, but the moment when you say, as an Uber user, hey, I need to book travel, I gotta go on a vacation to Austin.

[Freeberg]

I'm never gonna think to go on my Uber app for that. The only time I open.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But what if they put that feature in there? What if they had a tab that said book your travel here?

[Freeberg]

You know, when I open the Uber app, when I want to hail a taxi, that's why it's like, I'm ready to go.

[David Sacks]

But there are a large number of people who maybe don't have a, you know, an assistant to book their hotels in advance.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And like, that would be most people.

[Freeberg]

J. Kel, I would not think to go into Uber to do that. It would just be clutter.

[David Sacks]

Well, no, but they already have a Hotels.com partnership. And then the Uber one membership's been growing pretty nicely and the advertising is doing a billion dollars a year. Year. And that is just a money printing machine because you know that this person's in an Uber black, you know, that they're going to the Four Seasons. Like these users who are, you know.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They have a real ad business at Uber.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Freeberg]

The more Uber tries to promote some unrelated product. And what I mean by unrelated is it doesn't help you get to where you're going that moment. It's clutter in the app.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What about Uber Eats X? Yeah, working pretty well.

[David Sacks]

It's working great. Yeah. No, the cross promotion's working.

[Freeberg]

That is highly related to this. Basically booking a car to pick up some food.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Freeberg]

It's still the taxi business, basically.

[David Sacks]

I think the hotel's integration is good.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think there's something here. We have gone through a cycle where apps and attention were highly consolidated with a few. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and apps are very narrow features that are really well described. Okay. So that's sort of where we are. That's why we have the billions and billions of apps in the App Store. The question is, does the pendulum swing back to these super apps? And I think the big question is not whether it swings back to the super apps, but whether there's a new substrate that puts itself between the user and all of these services so that they become data oriented services. And this is where the question is. If you rely on an agent or you rely on a beefed up version of search, whether that's ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, why would you care where all of this stuff was done? You're not going to care. And this is, I think the big mistake in this thinking is that that real estate is actually much more fragile than I think we all think it is. And I think a much better way to think about this is in the future, none of this UI real estate is actually worth anything. The question is, do you have a data asset that's valuable or do you do a service that's valuable? Because agentically there'll be all of these unemotional bots and workflows doing this work for you. So I think Sachs is right in the sense that whether it's there or not, it won't matter. Could he run it like a private equity business where now Uber Corporation owns two services? Sure. But you're probably just better off for these agents to go and cannibalize all of search because you'll be able to just get a data feed for what Expedia has to create Expedia for a few million dollars or tens of millions of dollars. You don't need to pay 20 or 30 billion dollars for this.

[David Sacks]

Yeah. The thing that I've talked to Dara about is when they said, he told me when they do something that's adjacent to what they're already doing, it explodes in terms of engagement. So like they're doing like teens and rental cars and then package delivery. And every time they do one of those adjacencies, it just takes off with the membership. And to your point, Freiburg, they have those 150 customers who have their credit cards in there and man, it just, it's explosive. So that's what I think they're doing.

[Freeberg]

A vacation is an adjacency to ordering food.

[David Sacks]

I think hotels would be, I don't think flights would be because I think the flights work really well with the existing apps. But things where you have proprietary inventory like VRBO or hotels, I think those would be very powerful. And those have 20, 30% commissions which are in line with the commissions that Uber's already getting. And the commissions on things like flights is very small, like a couple of dollars. So I think for hotels and VRBO would be brilliant. For the other stuff, I'm not so sure to your point, Chamath.

[Freeberg]

Well, just to finish my thought.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Freeberg]

Was that you'll notice that Uber Eats is a separate app from Uber, right? I mean I know you can get to the eats part within Uber, but they created a separate app for a reason. Is because whether you're using Uber Eats or Uber, the goal is immediate gratification. I want to get to where I'm going. I don't book it six hours in advance. I call it right now. And the most important thing to me is wait time. This is why Uber is beating Lyft is but you do on the wait time is lower. Same thing with food. I'm not thinking about booking my dinner right now. I'm not going to do it in advance. If you browse through the restaurants, the most important piece of data they show you in addition to the rating is the number of minutes it takes for it to get to you. So those apps are all about immediate gratification and that's why you don't want other things getting in the way of them. Now, I guess the claim is somehow you're going to be able to cross sell the booking of a vacation or a hotel that you have to think about days or weeks in advance. It's just a completely different state of mind. I just don't think that there's much opportunity to cross sell that. Or to use technical jargon, I don't think the attach rate is going to be high.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What about the brand value sack. So because you know those people are going to another app to book their flight in their hotel. What if that other app was called Uber Travel?

[Freeberg]

There might be some value in that. I can see that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think that would be the rationale where I could see the Expedia brand.

[Freeberg]

Yeah. So maybe what you could do is take vrbo, rebrand it as Uber Hotel or Uber Travel, whatever you want to call it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Exactly.

[Freeberg]

And then maybe you could push people to download that app.

[David Sacks]

Well, the thing I, you know, I would. The counter I give to this, you.

[Freeberg]

Could quantify the value of the installs. Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you could quantify because Expedia is spending on it every year right now.

[David Sacks]

I use the Bonvoy app to book hotels, I use United to book my flights and I use Uber to do my rides. And obviously for eats, when you are using it, there's a tab up top and the UI is quite nice. In Uber where it's rides and eats right next to each other, I could see a third one like hotels or travel being right there and all of a sudden, yum, yum, you just get all that inventory right in there. And I frequently will book my hotel and I'll book my ride for the next day in advance on Uber and I do those things and then when I get to my hotel, I'm ordering food to my room. So I think this actually could work really well as a third tab in the app for travel. And you could actually, because when you use eats in the Uber app, it's its own tab and it's the exact same experience. I believe in super apps and they just launched a bus that's like a bus service in New York for 18 bucks to go to JFK. That's really awesome. I think we're a little bit disconnected because we don't book our own travel, but. Okay, let's keep moving here down the docket. All right, this big tech investing in nuclear power is off to the races. Chamath. Amazon just announced a $500 million investment in three nuclear power projects. All of these are focused on SMRs. Those are the small modular reactors. Amazon is working with Dominion Energy to develop a small modular nuclear reactor near an existing nuclear power plant in Virginia. In total, Amazon plans to invest 35 billion in Virginia based data centers by 2040. And they want to power these by SMRs. And this is a big trend. Google is purchasing energy directly from Kairos Power, another company building SMRs. Microsoft, as you heard, is reviving one of the Three Mile island nuclear power plants. So this is kind of interesting, Chamath. We went from nuclear not being on the table, everybody being against it. The Germans shutting down their reactors post Fukushima and now big tech is the customer for these with AI and they're putting down very large deposits and payments to build them in America. And I haven't heard any opposition. Maybe you could just speak to Chamath. What we've seen here in terms of opposition to these versus the opportunity. And everybody's writing checks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, well, they're not writing checks. So this is what. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here, but these press releases need to have an asterisk on them. So in the hierarchy of deals. Right, Just to unpack this for a second, there are deals where you give me X and I give you money. That's not what this is. Then if you degrade that kind of deal structure in a lot of heavy industry you have deals that are called take or pay, which is there is something that's working and you need to basically take this or you need to give me the monetary equivalent of what I'm selling you. That's not what this is. What this is is sort of this conditional obligation where the beginning of the deal starts with a very important statement which is if it works and if these approvals happen and there's a whole bunch of nested ifs, then payments can happen. So while these are important deals because they show that there are potential buyers at the finish line, what it doesn't do is solve the two things that you need to get to the finish line, which is the actual risk capital to finish building these things and technically de risk them and then the regulatory approval that you need to make sure that they're allowed. So I think that these deals are good. I think it's a great signaling. But I think it's important to understand the nuances of these things. These are not things where there's money really trading hands. And until that you see that where irrespective of what happens, the balance sheet is investing from an Amazon or a Google where there's corp Dev folks writing $100 million or billion dollar checks into these companies, it's not yet quite there. This is more the step before which is sort of can you create some marketing and some buzziness to hopefully induce somebody to then rip in billions of dollars of risk equity capital.

[David Sacks]

Freiburg, your thoughts on SMRs and these customers showing up and then I guess you could comment on the nature of the deal structure. Here because some of them are contingent on the nuclear power plant turning on. Some of them do have deposits is my understanding. We'll look that up and fact check it. There could be a range of deals here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I don't know the nature of the deals. I did I think talk about this a year ago. It was also my prediction for the year was to by the uranium stocks predicated on what I think is a really important point which is as GDP per capita grows, energy consumption per capita grows. And if you looked at the projections of GDP per capita in industrialized nations, there was no way, there is no way to meet the energy demand. And this was even pre all this crazy AI buildout which is probably part of the GDP growth. But there is no way to meet the energy demand without nuclear. There is not enough solar, geothermal or wind buildout potential that's happening that the stopgap measure is going to have to be and probably the right long term solution is to have a significant amount of baseload come from nuclear. And so what's the fastest way to do that nuclear build out? Well in China they have the regulatory authority and the mandate stated they're going to build 300 gigawatts with 300 facilities or whatever the number is. And that's what they're doing. Very large facilities that make a gigawatt of power each. In the US it seems that because of the regulatory structure here and the way that utilities are regulated and the way that the states have authority on the environmental laws and all the other things that it might be the fastest path to solving this energy gap problem is smrs. And that's why we're and these things produce tens of megawatts. So again a gigawatt is a thousand megawatts. And you know, we need to kind of probably grow our energy production in the United States by several terawatts over the next decade or two. So this SMR may be the fastest path. Now that could change meaning we could end up seeing much larger facilities get built out if there's regulatory change in the US and there's more availability. But fundamentally we are going to need to use uranium to make electricity to meet the demand of the growing the GDP that it seems we're going to be growing it. I think this is just such a necessity. It's great to see the SMR is getting some attention. I just don't know if they're actually going to get turned on, how long it's going to take. And I don't know what this election cycle is going to bring in terms of regulatory change. I think we talked about it with several of the candidates when we were doing the interviews.

[David Sacks]

Sax, if we are able to get a bunch of these SMRs built here in the United States, maybe if Europe follows suit, what would this do on a geopolitical basis to our relationship with the Middle east, our energy independence, and of course, the AI race to, you know, general intelligence? I'll let you take it whichever direction you want to go.

[Freeberg]

Well, I don't think we're going to, because I don't think anyone wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard. It's really simple. I mean, no matter what the benefits are for AI or for America's global competitiveness. I just don't think your typical community wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard. And I don't think it matters that much if it's a small modular one either.

[David Sacks]

So you think they'll get blocked by local communities?

[Freeberg]

Yeah, and probably for good reason. I mean, I don't want a nuclear power plant in my backyard. Do you? I feel like this has suddenly become a little bit of a luxury belief where liberal elites are always talking about how we need to have nuclear power now, but they know they're not going to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard. So it's easy for all of us to genuflect about what a great idea this is. But let's face it, these things are going to be built probably in poor or working class communities and inevitably there's going to be some accident. I mean, you can tell me how safe they are too. You're blue in the face. I don't believe it. You know, planes aren't supposed to fall out of the sky either. And it does happen. And you know they're going to set up one of these power plants somewhere and you know, it's probably going to have a DEI program and something's going to happen. I mean, something's going to happen and then the fallout is literally going to fall out on the people in that poor community. So I don't think this is gonna happen.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This show really has a diversity of views, doesn't it?

[Freeberg]

Yeah, it's like, yeah, look, this is a perfect example of liberal business elites demanding something that isn't gonna affect them. It's not gonna affect them.

[David Sacks]

Your take on a non binary trans lesbian with purple hair, whatever you're thinking, putting a small nuclear reactor 200 miles outside of Austin, Texas. Go put your tinfoil hat on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Freeberg]

How close do you want it? To your ranch. J. Cal.

[David Sacks]

I mean I think there's plenty of land outside of the triangle here in Texas where there is no density and you could put one and I'd have no problem with there being one. A hundred miles, 200 miles.

[Freeberg]

Who's going to work there? Who's going to service it?

[David Sacks]

I mean literally you would have to. It doesn't take that many people to service these. So yeah, until something goes wrong, I think there's plenty of space in the United States to put these. And maybe Freeberg, you could talk and educate us on the safety here. Do you believe what Sachs is saying? That it's going to have a meltdown and he doesn't believe it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Point of view, to be honest, is the point of view that will be held by a large number of people just like they have been with a lot of other.

[David Sacks]

Is it the right point of view though? Tell us from a science perspective.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, no, no, I don't think it is. I think that the same argument would have been made around. We shouldn't have airplanes at all because they can fall from the sky. We should keep everyone on the ground where they're safe. Why would you want to get on an airplane? Why would you want to have airplanes flying over your home? We should all ban airplanes flying over our home. They could crash in our home. It's the same sort of argument. And the reason I'm not going to argue the point is because of the point I made earlier which is that it ultimately becomes an economic necessity that for us to meet all of the demands of AI all of the demands of industry, we want to re industrialize the United States, et cetera, et cetera. We need to increase electricity production capacity on the continent and there is no way to generate enough electricity on this continent fast enough using other means than there would be if we just got these systems set up.

[David Sacks]

So you believe that of necessity that's your take.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think globally this is the case and we're seeing it in China now whether the US ends up becoming a.

[Freeberg]

Lot of worry about a NIMBY problem.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's right. They don't have to.

[Freeberg]

What we're going to do.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, that's right. And here. And we may, we may end up.

[Jason Calacanis]

China is the M in nimby. My yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And we may be the. We may end up being the Luddite state and we'll end up just saying, you know what? We're not going to adopt new technology including now in like gene editing and cell cell therapies and I'll go through the list of new technology sats, I think there's. You could make the argument that there's a low probability of a high risk event, but the fact is that the progress that it enables is worth so much more than the risk that we would be taking on.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's a simpler solution to all of this without having to go and create these reactors, which is I don't think that we have a very good grasp of the material science, broadly speaking. I don't think we really understand how to build next generation materials. I don't think our specialty chemicals capabilities are all that strong the way that they're going to be over the next five or ten years, just with better compute. So I think that there's going to be a lot of interim steps that increase the generally available energy density without going to nuclear. I think there's going to be a lot of businesses to do that that'll be much safer, easier to regulate, easier to test, easier to underwrite. And I think the government will get behind those. So I'm not as negative as you are on the only solution being nuclear.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The countries and the businesses that have a lower cost of electricity and a more abundant source of electricity will end up winning as the economy continues to progress towards a much more kind of digital state and an automated state over the next decades. So if we're going to be slower, we're going to suffer the consequences of that as a country. So we'll see how it plays out. I just think that economic incentives will ultimately drive, hopefully a change.

[David Sacks]

Would a possible solution be to give an economic incentive to the people who would be in the surrounding areas? Obviously these things could be 50 or 100 miles from, you know, anybody's homes. But even the people who work there or people who might have, I don't know, some homes that were near it. Could you give them, no taxes, et cetera, essentially give them incentives to allow this to go through? Friedberg, in your mind, do you think that kind of incentive would work? Taxes or some kind of payoff or subsidy?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm not sure. I haven't thought much about like what the incentives or subsidies would be.

[Freeberg]

You're going to have to give them an incentive because no one's going to want to live within 200 miles of one of these things.

[David Sacks]

What would be the Nutty Burger?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Right. I think that people have a very deep fear of, you know, what is deemed to be cataclysmic technology. I do think a lot of this was rooted in the evolution of the atomic age. Where we basically have these nuclear warheads mounted to missiles that can travel at 20 times the speed of sound and land on your city and wipe out your city. I mean, that. That is also nuclear technology. And people conflate the two as being similar. And even Three Mile island, there were, you know, no deaths. It was a shocking, scary thing for people. But statistically speaking, and historically speaking and technically speaking, it's a lot more complicated to explain to people what happened and why and why now is different. And no one has the time for that. No one wants to hear that. They want to hear a very simple. Do you really want a nuclear power plant in your backyard? No way. What about you? No way. All right, let's vote to stop it.

[Freeberg]

And they're right. I mean, you compare it to commercial airlines, but commercial airlines, that's a technology that's been around for what, like 100 years?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Dex, do you have any data on the safety record of nuclear technology? Because I'm not sure you do. I think my point is, like, you're just making statement out of here.

[Freeberg]

The data, where's the data?

[David Sacks]

Let's do it. Let's do it right now. I mean, I think this is an important discussion. I'd like to.

[Freeberg]

Actually, my point about commercial airlines is we've had that technology for over 100 years. It was honed and refined over many decades, and commercial airlines now have become.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is. This is going on almost 100. This is going on 100 years of use. Right.

[Freeberg]

You know that there have been incidents every decade or two, and that is why.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

True. That's not true. You're saying something that's not true.

[Freeberg]

The reason nuclear has been discredited is because of Three Mile island and Fukushima.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It has not been. First of all, it's not been discredited.

[Freeberg]

Chernobyl. I mean, these names live in infamy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's social fear mongering, like you are doing right now with no data and no facts to try and make it a political issue that drives everyone to one side, shut their minds down and not listen to the actual facts and data. And this fear mongering is what keeps us from being competitive, which keeps us from having progress. You talk a lot about people talking about Elon Musk.

[Freeberg]

Listen, listen. I'm just saying I don't want one near me now if they're. Hold on a second. I'm not saying you can.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There were 26 deaths at Chernobyl.

[Freeberg]

I'm not against doing it somewhere where the community is in favor of doing it. So if you can find a place that wants to do this, I would not stop it. Just to be clear. I'm just saying I don't want one year. Meaning.

[David Sacks]

Let's get to facts.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Jk, Just give me a second.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Freeberg]

I don't think you're going to find many takers, even among poor communities.

[David Sacks]

It's a great adversarial point. Let's go to the facts.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There's 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries around the world. Since the time that we first had nuclear reactors, which has now been almost a century, There have been three incidents. Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. At Three Mile island, there were zero deaths. At Fukushima there was one death and at Chernobyl there were 46 deaths. The fallout from those events has been that we shut down energy production, we shut down nuclear reactor technology, and we fear mongered our way into losing the most abundant available.

[Jason Calacanis]

Can I just ask a question of energy? Do those deaths actually include the second and third order effects of all this radiation?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

At CHERNOBYL There were 15 people who got thyroid cancer, 35 operators and first responders who got radiation sickness and then the background radiation effects. There's a lot of kind of noise around this, but it's not a significant number as you may otherwise think. Same with Fukushima.

[Jason Calacanis]

Why is it that whole region is still uninhabited?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Then they had a radiation event. There's radioactive material that has covered that area that will be radioactive for a long period of time. Now to understand what happened there and why that won't happen again requires talking about the difference in the technology between Gen1, Gen2, Gen3 and Gen4 systems. A lot of what's being rolled out now are these Gen 3 nuclear reactors. And the Gen 4 systems, which we highlighted a little while ago, do not have a meltdown possibility. Right. We talked about this, the one that went online in China in December. Those new systems, the Gen 4 reactors, cannot melt down. You cannot have an incident like you did with the Gen1 and Gen2 systems. And the Gen3 systems are abundantly safe. China is building hundreds of them. It is a totally like understandable science. If we want to spend the time looking at the data and understanding the engineering and the material science work and all the effort that's gone in billions of dollars over decades. The biggest stumbling block and the biggest wall has been the fact that people have this fear mongering activity that they tell people, just dismiss it. It's too scary. We don't want it in our backyard. Let's move on to the next opportunity. That's what's killed it.

[David Sacks]

And if you just put these things 50 miles away, the radiation, even in the meltdowns didn't go past those, is my understanding. So even if you want to just the easiest steel management, the new systems don't melt down.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You don't have that possibility.

[David Sacks]

And the SMRs, I am in 100% agreement.

[Jason Calacanis]

These don't even work. These SMRs, they don't work.

[Freeberg]

That may be another point. How can you say for sure what the safety record's gonna be?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, that's just to be clear. SMRs don't work yet. We have theoretical ways in which we can profile and model that they work, but we don't have a functional one that people can look at and inspect as part of that. We haven't been able to test how they fail. Those are also theoretical. So I think let's put Somers off and let's just be very accurate. We don't have a functioning working version of one because they don't work yet. Maybe they'll work in the future. Let's hope that they do. What you're talking about, Friedberg, is a step before that, which is the Gen 3 reactor, which has a different.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There are some Mars operating in China, Russia and India today. And there's about 65 being built at this moment. Right. So. And that's outside the U.S. so that's why the U.S. is kind of observing, trying to catch up and adopt these technologies that are being used by, call it economic competitors and economic partners around the world. It's important for economic prosperity in the US for us to have a degree of competitiveness in electricity prices. If China races towards 5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, and we're sitting here 20 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, what's that going to do to our economic competitiveness?

[Jason Calacanis]

We are at 5 cents in the generation and you're saying solar.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

We can fix that tomorrow. We already, we already rely on a nuclear reactor that works. And to Sax's point, it just happens to be millions of miles away. So it can. If it goes, we're all going to go anyways.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. The scalability of solar in terms of getting us to a terawatt of production capacity is the limiting blockchain that in order to get to a terawatt.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that's a. Material science problems. I don't think that's. You don't need to.

[Freeberg]

It's not such a bad thing that other countries are taking the early adopter.

[David Sacks]

Risk that would be. That's decades in the making sense. But if China runs away with this and they have so many of these running and then they're able to power AI and solve problems we're not, we're going to have to get our act together and start standing these up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't think limiting every navy submarine's got a nuclear reactor on board.

[David Sacks]

That's how we have so much space in this country. These things could be 100, 200 miles away.

[Jason Calacanis]

But I don't think it's a limiting factor in our ability to innovate. I don't think it is today in these data centers. Certainly it's not the limiting factor in our ability to innovate. It's not the limiting factor in like for example, we're asking us to charge.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Up every car every night with electricity with a battery rather than using gasoline.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me just make my point. So we just saw OpenAI launch Strawberry. Is the reason why Microsoft or Google or Meta not responded with their own version. An energy problem? No, we're still rate limited by innovation and just raw intellectual horsepower and capability. Meanwhile we are trying to solve the energy problem and people are taking different approaches. There's storage that's coming online very aggressively. The solar capability itself is ramping up aggressively. We're also forcing these utilities to actually be deconstructed so that there's more efficiency in the energy markets. All of this if you unpack why it costs 20 cents a kilowatt hour. It's not because of a generation problem. It is not. It's graft, it's corruption, it's old legacy infrastructure. All of it can be replaced in a much simpler and safer way. So I think by the time that you are rate limited by energy, you'll have a plethora of solutions. My issues with the SMRs is the ones that are promising these next gen whiz bang performance characteristics. They're all theoretical. Friedberg. So even when you say there are SMRs working abroad, there's no like next generation reactors working abroad. They don't work. Where is an example of these modern next generation reactors actually working? Where?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well we Talked about the Gen 4 one that went live in China. There's several SMRs in several countries that are active producing power.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can call it a small modular reactor. What I'm talking about, these next gen materials, the things that Kairos and these other guys are trying to. Where is a functioning working version?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They have them. I mean like we have one in India, we have one in China. I'll show you the. I'll send you links to them here. There's about 50 of them that India is actively building right now. And they're. They're competitive with Kairos. Right. They all have kind of common design concepts, but they're different companies anyway. I'm just saying, like they're getting rolled just.

[David Sacks]

Friedberg, maybe you can educate us. In the distance, it could be from a city reasonably, in terms of building a grid to move the energy from. Could it be 200 miles from a major city? 300, 100. What's it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's it. Put it wherever you want. You can put power production wherever you want, but it has to move it through copper. As long as you got the copper to move it. Right. You move the electrons.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, I'm just trying to think reasonably. Move it is, I guess, what I was getting at, but.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[David Sacks]

Well, there you have it, folks. A good debate here on the all.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

A good debate. A good debate. Still love you all.

[Jason Calacanis]

We'll lay copper from some country that has an SMR all the way. All the way.

[David Sacks]

It's funny you said that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Washington State.

[David Sacks]

I was just thinking like, if Canada and Mexico have economic incentive to do this, or they're more bold, maybe they build them in their countries and they'll be selling it to the United States. They'll take the. I mean, if you're Kairos and you can't put this in the United States, but you could put it in Mexico and then come up with a way to get it past Trump's border wall.

[Jason Calacanis]

You may be able to put it into the United States, but we won't know until we know it works. Just. I'm sorry, I keep going back to this tricky little issue. If it doesn't work.

[David Sacks]

Well, I mean, I think Friberg. I'm with you in that. The. Even with the disasters that have happened, Those are. With Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors, there hasn't been one in a long time. And the fallout from that, I believe.

[Jason Calacanis]

I believe those. Spin those up Right now, these Gen 2, Gen 3 reactors, do them all day long. I think that they're very safe. They're very.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The three and four, the threes are.

[David Sacks]

Always 100 miles from my backyard.

[Freeberg]

No problem.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

104, that's producing China, is producing a gigawatt of power.

[Freeberg]

Would you want 10 miles outside Austin?

[David Sacks]

I don't think you should put it 10 miles outside of any city. I know that they're doing that in India. They're doing that In China, I would think if you look up the footprint of Fukushima, I mean, that was a complete disaster. They put that below sea level. They told them not to put it there and they put it near a bunch of people who were living within miles of it. Single digit miles of it. There's no reason for this to be any closer than 50 or 100 miles. And I would be totally fine with it being 50 to 100 miles from where I'm on my ranch right now. Absolutely no problem with that.

[Freeberg]

I think this is a classic luxury belief where it's easy for you to espouse this for everybody else, for the nation, because you know the downsides aren't going to fall on you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No. But 50 miles away from where we use them and maybe everyone will be safe. Would you be comfortable with putting them in the desert?

[Freeberg]

Yeah, but in that case there won't be.

[David Sacks]

Okay, then we're done.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's how we're running wind and geothermal today. We're putting these sites in random places and solar and then we're running cable and we're producing solar just because they.

[David Sacks]

Don'T want it to be an eyesore. Right. That's why we're doing that with solar is we don't want people to look at a giant solar thing.

[Freeberg]

Like I said, I'm not against doing it. If you can find a community that's willing to do it and if you put it where there's no humans, then yeah, that's going to work.

[David Sacks]

So there we go. We resolved our issue. We got the compromise here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Here we are solving world problems. Yes.

[David Sacks]

I'm going to get my guitar and we're going to sing Kumbaya sm.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

To work at this place, you better.

[Freeberg]

Get some robot employees.

[Jason Calacanis]

I can't wait for you guys to lay millions of miles of copper cabling. Now.

[David Sacks]

I'm fine laying.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'll lay that pipe, genius.

[David Sacks]

You need me to lay pipe, I'll do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Genius.

[David Sacks]

No ditty.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Sachs, do you want to go visit a nuclear power plant?

[David Sacks]

Let's go.

[Freeberg]

Yeah, how's that going?

[David Sacks]

Any progress? Sachs is not interested in any progress. Okay. If we can go back to the 50s, that's what he wants. Let's get started.

[Freeberg]

You're like virtue signaling.

[David Sacks]

I'm virtue signaling because I'm pro nuclear.

[Freeberg]

Yes, it's a luxury belief. You're promoting something.

[David Sacks]

Nuclear power is a luxury belief. You heard it here first.

[Freeberg]

Because they're going to put these things in pork communities and so it's never going to affect your life.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They're putting them next to data centers. Everything is identity politics in, like, Oregon.

[Freeberg]

Like, it's easy for you to say, oh, I support nuclear. Look how progressive I am. Look how smart I am. You haven't internalized the downsides.

[David Sacks]

I just want taxes, identity politics for you, Sax. Everything you see through the lens of.

[Freeberg]

Poor and rich, everything I'm defending, you're going to put these things in poor communities.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You're genuflecting sacks looking after the poor, looking sac. Mr.

[Freeberg]

I'm being realistic.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Robin Hood over here. Robin Hood.

[Freeberg]

The right of communities to say no to this. You are my favorite.

[David Sacks]

You're my favorite African.

[Freeberg]

I'm defending the right of local communities to say no to your science experiment. Okay. That's what it comes down to.

[David Sacks]

Freeberg so good is trying to put this episode 200. I love it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Wow. This sums up the whole the 200 shows sack.

[David Sacks]

Let me ask you a serious question.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's not serious when you start like that.

[David Sacks]

If Trump loses, what's the next four years on this pod going to be like? What are we going to do here?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He's moving to New Zealand.

[Freeberg]

There's going to be lawfare all over the place.

[David Sacks]

Absolutely. They're going to come free him.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do you really think so, David?

[Freeberg]

Yeah, I do. I mean, look, I'm definitely not at the top of the list. Elon's at the top of the list, right? So he has no choice but to go all in. They're already doing lawfare against him.

[David Sacks]

It's ridiculous.

[Freeberg]

But I think the point is just that if they're not defeated, they're going to keep doing it because there's no downside for it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I will comment on the California Coastal Commission ruling that was based on Elon's political tweets, which is why they stopped additional launches out of Vandenberg. First of all, how the California Coastal Commission has authority over Vandenberg and the operations just seems to me like there's something wrong. The Coastal Commission was set up with the coastal act in 1976 in California as a way to give the beaches back to the people and the public and create a commission to regulate building along the beaches. It has since grown into effectively, a much larger entity with much more authority, which potentially, after the Chevron ruling in the Supreme Court, may get peeled back and may get dialed down. We'll see what happens. But as of now, they have the ability to block launches out of Vandenberg, which they did. And in their decision, they said it was because of Elon's political Tweets again, starting at the beginning of the show, about the success that they had with the Starship this week. It's incredible. It deserves to be recognized on the merits of what they accomplished. But to bring in his political tweets to make a decision about the progress of SpaceX and allow public space to be used to further that cause and further that activity seems to me abhorrent, and it's ridiculous. And it's exactly what's wrong with the bureaucratic morass that a lot of these institutions have grown into.

[David Sacks]

And this was going to be for.

[Jason Calacanis]

Pro or con smarts?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Exactly.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I'm serious. Do you. Do you think they're going to be cons?

[David Sacks]

What the Coastal Commission does is they.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They block.

[David Sacks]

They block everything, and they do pictures of the entire coastline. If you build, like, a shed on your beachfront property, they will know it. And they come to you and they're like, no sheds. You cannot build any structures on the beach. They're just, like, really, really important.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's a values decision that the state of California made in 1976. The state of California, the citizens, voted and said, we want to preserve the coastline. And I think that that's a reasonable value for them to assume and vote for. And it was a majority vote. And so they established the Coastal Commission. But how the Coastal Commission extended into having authority over Vandenberg and launches from there for SpaceX, to me, is part of this kind of administrative growth. Like we see all these administrative bureaucracies get started that have a very simple objective, preserve the California coastline. But now they have authority to determine whether or not launches can happen. And Air Force Base, and this is.

[David Sacks]

One person at the Coastal Commission referenced his tweets, and the vote was 6, 4 to increase these. So who is this one person?

[Freeberg]

Nobody did it in an official context. I think she was, like, retweeting it. There's, like a tweet from her.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, this is when I'm donating.

[Freeberg]

She was taking credit for it. I mean, in a way, she's proud of it. She said the quiet part out loud. So in a way, she does a favor, which is she acknowledged that all of this lawfare against SpaceX and Elon is political. She basically pleaded guilty to it. Look, she's proud of it because she doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. She thinks this is her job, is as a bureaucrat. She's supposed to punish people who tweet things that you're not supposed to say. That basically is what it comes down to. And I mean, this is the truth about Lawfare. They're using the agencies of the federal government to exact reprisals against their political opponents. And if there's not. If there's not a punishment for that, it's going to keep going.

[David Sacks]

And they filed a. Elon's filed a lawsuit, and it's a 6, 4 decision. So I think, by the way, the.

[Freeberg]

Biden Harris administration could stop that. They could say, no more Lawfare, but they don't do that because the tone was set from the top.

[David Sacks]

And Trump is saying he's gonna be a dictator and he's gonna do a bunch of lawfare when he gets in there. So both of these sides gotta settle it down. That's exactly what he said. This has been another.

[Freeberg]

That's another misquote.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, Jake, you can't wrap a show like that. That's just not cool.

[David Sacks]

I'm just trying to wrap up so we can move on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, then don't make a sly comment like, just do something else. Talk about something else besides Trump at the end. Like, just give it my opinion.

[David Sacks]

I'm not allowed to give my opinion on the show.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What are you grateful for right now in your life?

[David Sacks]

I'm grateful for you doing all the work on the events and making them spectacular.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm really excited for Saks Live from Mar A Lago.

[David Sacks]

Oh, God, I will totally go to Mar A Lago for election night. Can we get a booth there?

[Jason Calacanis]

You keep saying it. It's not clear you would be invited.

[Freeberg]

Yeah, exactly.

[David Sacks]

Of course I'm invited.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Trump loves me. Jerk.

[David Sacks]

With everybody.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Neither you nor I gave the hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket to go to dinner with probably.

[David Sacks]

Trump loves me. He enjoyed his time.

[Freeberg]

Very selective. It's for friends.

[David Sacks]

Okay, I'll do it remote. That's fine. You can do it remote. You don't want Jake out there. It's fine. Go with me.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wait, when is he.

[David Sacks]

I don't want to be.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't want to be at a.

[David Sacks]

Party I'm not invited to.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's in true. It's in two weeks and three days.

[David Sacks]

Four days.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Freeberg]

November 5th.

[David Sacks]

Please.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's like, just waiting every day for it to drop. Whatever.

[David Sacks]

I just hope whoever wins wins, like, significantly.

[Jason Calacanis]

So we significantly.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, Please win by 30. Electoral no, 40.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No Supreme Court decision.

[Freeberg]

Right now, the only candidate who looks like he could get a landslide is Trump.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, definitely.

[Freeberg]

Otherwise, it's gonna be very close. So you're rooting for Trump if you want a landslide.

[David Sacks]

I mean, I'm going to. I'm going to reveal my vote on the election special.

[Freeberg]

I will have to be really hard to figure out. I'm sure the audience will be held in great suspense by that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you guys vote yet? Did you guys vote yet?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I got my ballot on my I.

[David Sacks]

Got my ballot on the desk here. Yeah, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. All right, everybody. This has been another wonderful episode. Oh, meetups. There are 200 episode meetups happening. Thank you to all the fans who got together, take pictures and share them on social and ention us allin.com meetups every couple episodes, fans get together around the world and talk about their favorite bestie and it's typically freeburn. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love you, boys. Bye bye.

[David Sacks]

We'll let your winners ride Rain man David sack.

[Freeberg]

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

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Love you west Queen of quinoa.

[Jason Calacanis]

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.