"America Is About To Crash Into A Brick Wall" | David Friedberg PT 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu – “America Is About To Crash Into A Brick Wall” | David Friedberg PT 2

Date: July 3, 2024
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: David Friedberg (with contributions from Chamath Palihapitiya)
Duration: ~85 minutes

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Overview

In this installment of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu engages in a deep and dynamic conversation with David Friedberg (joined in parts by Chamath Palihapitiya) about some of the most pressing issues facing America today. Themes include the cultural and economic crossroads confronting America, the evolving perception of wealth and entrepreneurism, the prospects for scientific and technological innovation, and the regulatory and psychological hurdles blocking progress. Friedberg offers detailed insights into where the U.S. and global society sits: between a potential new “Dark Age” and a possible Enlightenment driven by rational thought and technological adoption.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cultural Values, Wealth, and Innovation

• Changing Perceptions of Wealth
  • Friedberg highlights how, historically, the U.S. celebrated innovators and successful entrepreneurs, but argues that in recent years, public sentiment is shifting towards skepticism and even vilification of the ultra-wealthy (00:23–03:50).
  • Social media amplifies wealth gaps; people compare themselves negatively to billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, missing the broad social good their companies have provided.

"People can buy stuff and have access to a toy for their kids for $8 and it shows up on your doorstep tomorrow... but this guy’s got $200 billion. That's unfair." – David Friedberg (03:26)

• The "Have and Have Not" Dynamic
  • Friedberg explains how relative comparisons drive much of social and economic policy—everyone feels like a have-not compared to someone else and acts politically to close that gap (04:14–06:28).

2. Societal Crossroads: Dark Ages vs. Enlightenment

• The Fork in the Road
  • There’s a risk society rejects risk-taking, technology, and empiricism in favor of safety and regulatory stasis, threatening to stymie progress in ways akin to the historical Dark Ages (07:40–09:41).
  • The Enlightenment alternative is to favor rational discourse, empiricism, data-driven decisions, and the embrace of risk for the sake of progress.

"We’re at this very weird intersection between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment... Do we want to stop innovation because we’re fearful of progress?" – David Friedberg (08:14)

• Role of Media and Narrative
  • Friedberg warns that lack of data-driven, rational debate in politics/media perpetuates unempirical beliefs—distrust of facts and expertise stifles innovation (09:41–12:00).

3. What We Celebrate: From Creation to Victimhood

• Changing Role Models
  • Bilyeu and Friedberg lament the shift from celebrating entrepreneurs, scientists, and hard work to idolizing influencers and victimhood—a cultural change that may hinder future aspiration and progress (21:52–25:13).

"If I ask you the question today, what do you think we celebrate today?" "Victimhood, unfortunately." – Tom Bilyeu & David Friedberg (23:50)

• Optimism about Youth
  • Despite worries, Friedberg maintains optimism about America's capacity for entrepreneurship and innovation, provided enough young people continue to pursue achievement (07:40–09:39).

4. The Future of Technology: Energy, Health, and AI

• Fusion Energy (26:34–29:01)

  • Friedberg explains the physics of fusion energy and its transformative potential: "If any one [fusion plant] works... using just two swimming pools of water, [we could] power all the energy needs of planet Earth." (28:45)

• Gene Editing & Rejuvenation (30:42–37:24)

  • Describes gene therapy breakthroughs already curing cancers and blindness; hundreds of products in human trials.
  • Breakthroughs in “epigenetic reset” could one day allow us to reverse aging at the cellular level.

• AI as Productivity Multiplier (37:25–40:25)

  • AI empowers individuals with unprecedented productivity: "I can just say, ‘Hey, I want to write a book today...’ and by the end of the day, I’ve written a novel."

5. Adoption vs. Rejection of Technology

• Path to Acceptance

  • Friedberg asserts that tangible benefits drive adoption—once gene editing or AI directly benefits people, opposition drops (40:25–42:49).
  • Early resistance is often from the privileged, while those with less embrace technology for progression.

• Social Splits and Cultural Backlash (42:49–45:27)

  • Chamath foresees a coming divide: those who embrace tech augmentation and AI become “cyborgs,” while “puritans” reject them, driven by fear or ideology.
  • Tech rejection often comes from wealthier societies; in poorer communities, tech is eagerly adopted as a means for social climb (45:27–49:40).

• Example: GMOs and Gene Editing

  • Friedberg uses the history of GMOs—initial promise, consumer resistance, and regulatory burden—to illustrate the challenge (52:01–60:06).

"Gene editing is being treated in a very different way than GMOs... but there’s still always the risk of consumers coming along and saying we’re messing with nature again." – David Friedberg (58:39)

6. Regulation and Cronyism: Cellular Meat Case Study (61:05–70:21)

• Friedberg outlines how lobbyists and regulatory capture have been used to halt cellular meat in states like Florida—even though the FDA deems it safe.
• Regulatory and cultural opposition, not technological feasibility, stalls progress.

"Classic regulatory capture, classic cronyism... Freedom of speech: as soon as you let it happen once, you allow it everywhere." – David Friedberg (67:51)

7. Media, Civil Discourse, and Political Polarization (73:27–78:07)

• Friedberg observes that healthy disagreement (“besties never always agree”) on the All-In Podcast is a model for civil discourse—argues for focus on facts and empiricism over personal attacks and tribalism, and worries about blanket guilt-by-association in politics.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Dark Ages vs. Enlightenment
  "Do we want to stop innovation because we’re fearful of technology, because we’re fearful of progress, because we don’t want people to accumulate wealth, because we hate success, because we want the government to do stuff for us?" – David Friedberg (08:15)

• On Social Media’s Fallout
  "Social media made all these promises... It clearly has not done that. If you read Jonathan Haidt's work, it's causing some sort of disturbances that cause [kids] to struggle with anxiety, depression." – Chamath Palihapitiya (42:49)

• On Regulatory Capture & Cellular Meat
  "Why stymie the innovation? ...because the ranchers are there and they're saying, we gotta protect our industry. This is classic regulatory capture, classic cronyism." – David Friedberg (67:51)

• On Technological Progress as Social Mobility
  "What we generally see is this aversion to new technologies mostly being held by the privileged wealthy class, those who don't need it, and quickly adopted, eagerly adopted, by those who will progress because of it." – David Friedberg (46:41)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:26] Friedberg on Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and the underappreciated benefits of innovation
• [09:41] Are we heading for the Dark Ages? The loss of empiricism in society
• [23:50] What do we celebrate in America? The rise of 'victimhood' over achievement
• [26:34] Deep dive: Fusion energy and the future of abundant, cheap power
• [30:42] Gene editing, gene therapies, and the science of rejuvenation
• [37:25] AI as a productivity unlock and economic multiplier
• [42:49] Social skepticism, the split over new technologies, and generational divides
• [52:01] Explaining GMOs, gene editing, and societal fear
• [61:05] Regulatory capture, cellular/lab-grown meat, and the politics of innovation
• [73:27] The value of civil discourse and the pitfalls of political groupthink
• [78:15] First principles thinking: how Friedberg breaks down and solves problems

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Conclusion

This episode is an incisive reflection on the intersection of economics, technology, and culture in America’s current moment of reckoning. Friedberg warns of the perils of regulatory overreach, the dangers of empiricism’s decline, and the societal split that could arise over adoption of new technologies. Yet, he also conveys hope—citing the ongoing entrepreneurial spirit, the promise of revolutionary innovations in energy, health, and AI, and the importance of civil debate and first-principles reasoning. For listeners seeking both clarity and inspiration on how to navigate and shape the future, this episode is a must-listen.

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Find David Friedberg on:

• Twitter: @Friedberg
• All-In Podcast (wherever podcasts are found)

Listen to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu for more discussions that challenge assumptions and break down current events, technology, and cultural shifts.

Transcript

[David Friedberg]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[David Friedberg]

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[David Friedberg]

Learn [e-mail] Explore Platinum Terms apply. With the Blue Cash Everyday card, it's easy to earn 3% cash back on groceries at U.S. supermarkets, U.S. online retail purchases, and U.S. gas stations. That's how we grow our family's little nest egg. Learn [e-mail] Explore BCE terms and cash Back Cap apply. You could ask yourself, what do we celebrate? My income isn't going up as an individual. I'm not making more money, but this guy's got $200 billion. The US doesn't know pain. Like, we have no idea the. There's a world where we embrace technology, where we say we're not going to be fearful of loss, but we're going to embrace the risk because the upside is worth it. We can go to the moon, we can go to Mars, we can cure cancer, some people will die, but we can do it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And there's a cultural tradition of celebrating people that do great things historically. Why do you say that? Because this, I think, is why I'm bringing it up.

[David Friedberg]

This has changed.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Tell me about it.

[David Friedberg]

Well, I think that this disparity in wealth that arises from successful entrepreneurism and the majority of Americans, if you look on an inflation adjusted basis over the last 10 years, have not seen their incomes rise. And so going back to my original point, happiness is driven by changes in income. So when we got social media, when we got, I mean, look, there was always media, but now there's like so much more access. I get to see what Kanye west is doing every day. I get to see the plane that Kim Kardashian is flying in. I get to see what Justin Bieber, like, how much he's spending on his new Lamborghini. Like, there's an element now of insight that I have as a citizen. I never had. And we always had ultra wealthy people in capitalist societies. There were always people who have outsized returns. Someone who figures out how to make a, a golden goose can start making more golden geese and more golden geese before anyone else figures out how to make golden goose. And so they get this outsized return. They get this incredible outcome in a capitalist system. But I always look at Jeff Bezos because he's like, so many people have such a negative view of the guy, but the guy gave us this ability to get whatever we want tomorrow at a fraction of the cost of what I was paying, even at Walmart. Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Like the technology and the innovation and the investment that they made, they kept reinvesting every dollar they made. And people thought they were crazy because they were never making money. And he's like, I'm going to keep investing, I'm going to keep investing. And he created this infrastructure that has unlocked value for everyday consumers. That people can buy stuff and have access to a toy for their kids for $8 and it shows up on your doorstep tomorrow. Or lower priced food or like this thing that you wouldn't otherwise be able to buy because no stores in your neighborhood sell it. This incredible unlock in prosperity, that's a definition of prosperity for individuals. But he's bemoaned for having $160 billion and hanging out on a yacht. Like Milei said, we should be celebrating. This dude, he's a superhero. What he did, what he did for if, if what he did wasn't valuable, he wouldn't be worth 160 billion. There was no cronyism. This guy didn't go in and steal wealth. He didn't go in and like steal a mine and pull all the diamonds out of the mine and, you know, prevent the local people from accessing the diamonds. This guy built a business, he innovated. And that's what has happened countless times in the United States over the last 250 years. And the reality is that individuals don't necessarily pay attention. Because now we're all used to Amazon, we're all used to our iPhones. So the change in benefit we're getting, it's 10 taken for granted, I think. But my income isn't going up as an individual. I'm not making more money. But this guy's got $200 billion. That's unfair. I think the world is made up of haves and have nots. Everyone thinks that they're a have not relative to some other have, and everyone is a have to some other have not. That simple fact is what drives all social policy, all of politics, all of the economic, all of the economy, everything. Because it goes back to my point about desire. If I'm a have not relative to someone else's have, I see what they have that I don't have. I want to tax them I want to get them, I want to compete with them in the market. If I am an entrepreneur, I want to go get the market share they have. I want to get a politician to take their stuff away from them. And if I'm a have and there's a have not trying to get me, I want to vote for a politician that's going to protect my assets and I want to vote for a politician that's going to give me freedom to continue to have stuff. And I'm going to have conflict with the person that is a have not, that says that they want to have what I have because it's my thing. It's not their thing. I worked hard for it, I deserve it. So that dynamic is what drives all of this. And I think that it goes back to the point earlier about government spending. The have nots vote to get what the haves have or to take stuff away from the haves. And. And then the government is the agent by which we can all accumulate our power to exercise that action. That's where government programs come from. And the haves are viewed as bad by the have nots, particularly as it relates to individuals with wealth, when individuals are not seeing their income grow. And so today, unfortunately, I think successful entrepreneurs are viewed cast in a negative light generally. You know, Elon has gotten very, like, socially active. He's got very politically loud, but he's an incredible entrepreneur who's built these amazing cars that everyone wants. And he's got this platform for communication that he wants everyone to be able to access without restriction, which is unique. And his entrepreneurism is not celebrated. It's viewed as a threat. It's viewed as something I. This guy has stuff. He has power is what politicians see as power with this open platform. He has success with his car company that the other car companies don't have, so they want to pass legislation to hurt him. He has wealth that individuals don't have, so they hate him. He's viewed as a right winger because he doesn't agree with my policy. And he has the ability and the megaphone to be able to say that because he's wealthy. So he's negative. He's an evil character now, largely. So I think that's what we've kind of seen this. And if you go back to the 50s, I mean, look throughout American history we've had some folks that we've bemoaned, but there was a lot of cronyism in the early days. I don't think there's as much cronyism Today I think that there's just a lot of have, have not dynamics that are driving this.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, so how does that play out? Because this strikes me as something that if it goes too far, Lenin, the bad guy, had a very useful quote which is, if you give me one generation of young people, I will completely change the world. Meaning that whatever values and beliefs you inculcate them with will completely become their entire worldview. And so if we raise not one, not two, three, four, I don't know how many generations of people that vilify the successful. Well, then people aren't going to aspire to be the successful. So how do you think this plays out?

[David Friedberg]

I could argue both sides. So I could say that we head down a socialist tunnel if we're not careful where we want to make sure that everyone has equal outcome, which is what Milei warns against, when the reality is equal opportunity, everyone has access to participate is what really drives success and drives equality. And as long as there are some young people that will step out and build businesses and innovate and build new technology and participate, we do have enough of that spirit in the United States still. So I'm very optimistic about US Entrepreneurism. I could be worried about the loud voice of the mass saying we need to revolt and return to a equal outcome. We need to get to an equal outcome society and redistribute all the wealth and redistribute all the assets and redistribute all the access and so on. But I think that there's still enough young people that succeed through entrepreneurism that they can become beacons and lights for the, you know, for, for making sure that folks don't fall that way. We need to shine light and support and, and applaud. So I, I, I don't have a great answer for you on this because I think you could see things go either way. I mean, I think generally I have this worry that we're at this very, and this is a broader scope point, that we're at this very weird intersection of choosing between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment, which I've said on my show. Do we want to stop innovation because we're fearful of technology, because we're fearful of progress, because we're fearful of the downside because we don't like entrepreneurs, because we don't want people to accumulate wealth, because we hate success, because we want the government to do stuff for us and not individual companies. That's the Dark ages. And if that wins the day, why

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

would that be the Dark Ages?

[David Friedberg]

So well, I'll just say another thing about this. One of the ways that this gets supported is the absence of empiricism, fact, data, because as Malay points out, all the data shows that entrepreneurism, that capitalism is better than socialism. He said this. The data is there. Economists will show you you're not going to compel someone that socialism is better unless you leave out all the data that supports that capitalism is better. Okay. So you have to have an absence of information. I'm gonna. Let's get. I can wax a little too philosophical here because it ends up going on too much of a tangent, but I do think that there's this element of human beliefs that allow us to do incredible things. Like we have to come together and believe in something as a group to accomplish a mission, to build something. Like, we all get together and like, let's build a house. I believe in the vision of that house. So I'm going to build that house with you. It takes more than one person to build that house. We all have to work together. So the belief allows us to accomplish the building of the house. But that also then opens up room for humans to believe in things that aren't empirical, that aren't supported by data, that maybe take us down a different path. And so we can believe that the data is right and good, or we can ignore the data and believe in something else. And so I do see a lot of alarming behavior, things that worry me, particularly on media and from politicians, where they say things that aren't true and then people believe them. That's what happened in the Dark Ages. And whether it's the monarchy or the church at the time or whatever group was in power, they told people something that they were told to believe that allowed them to maintain their status. And then we ended up saying, no, the sun revolves around the Earth. The Earth doesn't revolve around the sun, despite the data that this crazy guy is talking about. Ignore the crazy guy. His data's wrong. What we're telling you is right. That's the Dark Ages. We ignore empiricism, we ignore fact, and we don't make progress. And the Enlightenment is that we get into a more positioned rational thought mode where let's use data to make decisions. Let's look at the performance of a government program to decide whether or not we want to keep doing it. Let's look at the results of this experiment. Let's make sure that data guides us. Let's make sure that we have a principled, rational thought about discussion about what we should do. And that's not what we hear from politicians. I don't hear anyone standing up there. I mean, I think Vivek probably did the best job of this. Like he actually came out and gave facts about and figures about the size of some of these government programs and what they were doing and the success or failure of them. Milei has shown this. There's a world where we embrace technology where we say we're not going to be fearful of loss, but we're going to embrace the risk because the upside is worth it. We can go to the moon, we can go to Mars, we can cure cancer, some people will die, but we can do it. We just have to be willing to do it. We can look at the data and iterate and iterate and be successful. Or this stuff is bad, this technology is bad, this idea of capitalism is bad, the celebration of the entrepreneur is bad. And I think that's like this like moment, this crossroads that we are at and we have. I don't think it's like we just go one way or the other. I think we have that choice every day. But I think like we should really take a hard look at like are we launching new science, new technology, supporting innovation, supporting entrepreneurship, supporting free markets and allowing the individual that has the brilliance and the ability to narrate and the ability to bring people together to succeed, or are we saying let's stymie that, let's shut it down, let's use false facts and falsehoods and the absence and regulation and you know, all this other stuff to kind of keep things from progressing. And we have this moment where like there's, you know, there's this crazy set of things happening right now in science. Most people don't understand it, they don't get how crazy it is. But like we are understanding how to reverse aging in every cell in our body. And there are several multi billion dollar private companies doing this. There are several multi billion dollar private companies building fusion reaction systems to create unlimited energy at effectively free production cost coming from ocean water. Either of those two things happen. Humanity's trajectory changes completely. We could live forever or whatever. We could live for hundreds of years. We could have infinitely free energy. And going back to your earlier point, with infinitely free energy, I could actually make gold out of dirt. So that system does start to exist when energy costs decline. We have AI, we have this ability for all of human knowledge to be encapsulated in a device that I can keep in my pocket and it can answer any question for me. And do anything for me using knowledge work. And I can spend all my time pursuing my vision of the future and creative pursuits and things that I'm interested in doing without all the tedium of dealing with data and dealing with knowledge and dealing with labor, because machines can do that. For me now, there's all these kind of, like, moments that we're kind of like just coming up this curve right now. Yeah. And every one of them, there's an effort to stymie them with regulation. There's an effort to denounce the technology as being too risky, it could kill us all. It's too dangerous. We shouldn't be doing fusion. We shouldn't be doing AI, we shouldn't be doing, you know, or we need to be doing it carefully, which means the government has to come in and control and regulate it, which means that all of the innovation is going to be stymied. That's the Dark Ages. Right. That's where we miss out on all of this upside. And I think we're not accustomed to taking risk anymore as we were when we were pioneers in the west, in the United States, because the people that were pioneers in the west, in the United States, had nothing to lose. They had nothing. They had a backpack, a satchel, and a horse and a wagon and ox, and they made their way Oregon Trail style, and they got a piece of land and they built something. Today, we have so much to lose. I got two cars and a suburban driveway. I've got, you know, my, my kids. I've got my ira. I've got stuff. So I don't know if I want to take the risk of dying from this new thing. I don't know if I want to go to mar. Like, you know, going to Mars is cool, but I don't know, it's interesting.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think that part of what's at play here is ideas. So I think ideas, what people will often think of as culture and momentum, those are the two things that really matter. And so when I, I, I am a default optimistic person, and I'm becoming a little bit more optimistic in, in the narrow, acute moment that we're living in now. But if you had asked me a year ago, I was getting pretty pessimistic about the direction we were going from an authoritarian perspective. Elon didn't own Twitter yet. People didn't seem to want any freedom of speech. We were just coming out of COVID where I thought people acted like ps, Psyopaths. It was just bananas in terms of people giving up all of Their freedom in exchange for safety. It was just. It was a very strange time. And when I think about the ideas that have people in their grips, the ideas are not necessarily the ideas of old. So I will say that he's a very controversial figure now, but it's somebody I have tremendous respect for, which is Winston Churchill. Now, he grew up a man of means, but despite that, he was so in the grips of a set of ideas around the greatness of England and Britannia that he was. So, for people that don't know his story, he has a really fascinating moment in World War I where he fights and fights and fights to get into politics, finally gets into politics, gets assigned to forget the name of the place, but it was a naval station. And he ends up messing up massively, and it completely destroys his career and everybody. This is World War I, remember? The guy that's later going to be famous for World War II is like, I'm done. I no longer have a career. I've made a. An extremely big public mistake. And. But he doesn't go wallow in it. Instead he goes, I want to immediately be put on the front lines of World War I and I'm going to earn my way back into the government. And so they put him on the front lines of arguably one of the most gruesome, bloody wars ever. This is trench warfare. And he said to his mother, it matters so much to me to have a reputation for physical courage. Meaning I'm not. I'm not brave. At a desk where, you know, it's like quite easy to be brave. I'm. I'm getting shot at and I'm brave. And so he used to do, like, all these, like, really dangerous. They were just like routine, sort of you walk the perimeter thing. And people didn't want to go with him because when he would get shot at, he would just stand there and people are like, what are you doing? And he's like, by the time they've shot at you, you either got hit or you didn't. And so he's like, now the danger, you know, it's passed. And so we just had this attitude of like, I'm not going to be cowed. I know what we're here for. I'm going to get this done, I'm going to lead. I'm going to show people what it's about. That is a guy who had everything to lose. But what he was focused on was somehow some way the idea got planted in his mind that what mattered was self respect. And when I look back in history and look very much. These could be the blinders rose colored glasses that I wear about my own life. But so I grew up middle to lower middle class and my parents were just like, all right, we can't give you money. In fact, I graduated college with debt. Can't help you there. But my dad was obsessed with kids. You're going to learn work ethic. And so from the time I was 12, I worked in a door factory, then a paint factory, then a paint warehouse. Like just doing all these horrendously physical labor jobs that I did not enjoy in the slightest. And my dad just kept saying, but you're going to know how to work when other people don't. And you need to respect that and you need to understand how that's going to serve you. And so of course that ends up. I remember one of the earliest we. We got a video of this, but it somehow got lost in the sands of time quest starting nascent. Of course, everything is hard. And I had learned how to drive a forklift back in the paint warehouse days. And when all of our equipment showed up, we realized, oh, my God, we don't have a forklift. We have no way to get this equipment off this truck. And we're all like, oh, Everyone else was looking around saying, how are we going to do this? And I was like, guys, I'm actually a certified forklift driver. And they're like, what? And so we borrowed a forklift and I was able to get all of our gear off the truck. And I looked in the camera and I said, dad, wax on, wax off. You told me that all these skills would come in handy one day. And so. But that set of ideas drove me. And it was the desire to get good at things that I wasn't good at, to earn a reputation for being the hardest worker in every room that I was in.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[David Friedberg]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[David Friedberg]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[David Friedberg]

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[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. And then I remember when I first got on camera, I was telling people all the time, hey, you should go out, work for free, learn something, exchange. Instead of trying to optimize for money, optimize for knowledge and connections.

[David Friedberg]

Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And I would just get lit up, oh, Tom. Like, these people are just being taken advantage of. Of course you say that because you're rich. And I was like, hold on, do you know how I got rich? Like, I wasn't trying to maximize my dollar. I was trying to maximize knowledge and connections. And so there I can feel that a spirit has changed in some way and that people are no longer in the grips of the same ideas that I was raised with. That it was just the water in the 80s to be the hardest working person in the room, to strive for more, to, like, pick your biggest dream and go for it. To celebrate people who are successful and to, like, my whole life, until it actually happened, I was the temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Right. Yeah. I'm broke today, but I'm not going to be broke forever. And so that whole spirit has been exchanged for what you lay out. Yeah.

[David Friedberg]

Like, people just expect.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Correct.

[David Friedberg]

So that worries you?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That worries me to no end. And my default stance is that this is a pendulum that swings and it only swings based on pain. And it will keep going in one direction until it is absolutely intolerable and we will swing back. And the reason that I do this show is that what you need is not just pain. You need pain plus an idea. And so when you have a good idea, hopefully if you have somebody that can articulate that idea well, that you don't have to be in as much pain before you change course. But, yes, when I look at Trump Biden as the nominees for 2024, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is a group of people who need enough pain to go. This is ridiculous.

[David Friedberg]

Yes. Yeah. I mean, there's also, like, what do we. You could ask yourself, what do we celebrate? Like, in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, we celebrated people working hard. We celebrated entrepreneurs and scientists having breakthroughs. If I ask you the question today, what do you think we celebrate today?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Victimhood, unfortunately.

[David Friedberg]

Victimhood.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You've had it hard.

[David Friedberg]

Celebrity. Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But that gets A bit of a mixed bag, but yes.

[David Friedberg]

So I think that's the indicator for you. And if that's what we pronounce, if that's what we celebrate, that's what we manifest. The problem is like, I think the, the, the folks who do get recognized, like it used to be movie stars were like, great success, business, you know, business tycoons were lauded, lauded. Now it's a celebrity who did a lot on Instagram. And the problem is that's out of reach for everyone. Like it. This does it. That's what everyone aspires to. Is everyone like, I think that was the number one thing out of a recent survey. Coming out of high school is like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Social media influencer. Because that's what we celebrate. And I think that the challenge then is like, well, people that are building businesses in other ways, people that are making stuff, scientists. It becomes a very hard thing to kind of relate very obvious things as to why we're not really seeing people pursue those interests. Because it's not really what we celebrate as much.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. So my hope is that we can begin to celebrate some creation, innovation, risk taking, people that are bold success, people that pull it off. Like, when I look at Elon Musk, I get it. Like, I get why some people don't like his politics. Fair enough. I mean, it's, there's a bit of a sort of boyish troll nature to his, his ongoings on X, but at the same time, he is, he is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. As far as I know. There might be somebody that's done even more, but holy hell and up. I'm thinking of Bezos right along side of him. Bezos is amazing, but when I look at the way that Elon has been able to replicate it in just wildly different companies, it's. It's pure insanity. And doing it from an engineering standpoint is really, really breathtaking. But of course, like you said, they're being vilified. Okay. To really begin to tease this out. Walk me through. Where do you see the key areas of innovation that you think have the shot at pulling us out of the debt spiral that could reinvigorate people, get them excited, create a life of, I'm assuming, energy abundance or just dropping costs on things that people really care about is going to be a key part of that. What, what's going on that we should be really looking at?

[David Friedberg]

Well, there's not much to act on or to know about. There's this free. There's this option, it's like a call option that the price is like 10 cents right now on. On things like fusion energy, right? So fusion energy is this whole new way of creating energy. You can take heavy water molecules. It's like water with an extra neutron. And if you get them moving fast enough, if you get hydrogen moving fast enough and you get two of them together, they fuse and they release energy, and there's a net energy output. So you got to get them moving fast enough and close enough. So high energy, high density. So the way we do that is the same way the sun does it. The sun is a giant plasma fusion reactor. Plasma means that all the electrons have spun off the atom, and all that's left is the nucleus, the protons. Two protons fly into each other. When they fuse, they end up forming helium from hydrogen and in the process release some energy. And then there's all these other fusion reactions that happen in the sun. And all that energy is released in the form of what's called neutrinos, as well as light photons, as well as electrons that kind of come out in these plasma releases that come out these jets. So the energy from the sun heats us, right? Those photons drain us. They drown us. They're heating us. And we're just getting a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of all the photons coming out every second from the sun that's just going to run these fusion reactions for billions of years before it runs out. And everything's been fused together. We can now do that, or we are trying to do that on earth in a controlled way by creating a plasma where we take these atoms and we spin them around, and we spin them so that they're going so fast. And then we use a magnet to try and squeeze them so they're super close together. And when they're close together, they start to fuse, and we capture the energy that comes out. And all the physics of doing this took us decades to understand and figure out and start to build little engineering systems. And in the last decade or so, there's been a bit of a renaissance and acceleration in fusion technology. We don't have anything doing it today at scale, but there's a lot of companies, there's about 70 companies now that have been started up that are doing fusion reaction systems. And if any one of them works, theoretically, you could take water from the ocean and using just two swimming pools of water, power all the energy needs of planet earth on all of our systems today. Isn't that crazy?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Whoa.

[David Friedberg]

So that's fusion it's not here today. Everyone's always like, it's a decade away. It's always been this kind of thing that people are like calling bullshit on all the time. But the underlying engineering is improving, the underlying science is there. So this could be a reality in our lifetimes. And then you could see fusion reactors everywhere, which drops the cost of power and increases the availability of energy dramatically. That's super interesting. You know, everything largely can be replaced with energy. In terms of cost. You can make more stuff. If the cost of energy goes down, you make more and more stuff at a lower cost. You can make new materials, you can run computers. I mean like the power of energy is a huge driver for economic prosperity and growth. And historically energy consumption has increased per capita as GDP per capita has gone up. So we've demanded more energy as we've become more prosperous. And so that's only going to grow if we want to have a prosperous society. We need to make a lot more energy. And if you look at where GDP is projected to grow by the end of the century, which is totally random like math, and you project where population is going to grow by the end of the century, the GDP per capita demands that we have to increase energy production on Earth by something like 3 to 10x. 10x plus. Some people would say how are we going to increase energy production by 10x on this Earth? We can't. So we need a new paradigm, we need a new system. So that's the argument for fusion, why it's potentially game changing but still a ways away. Gene editing is a game changing technology. So we're using this ability to use proteins to change, to go in and alter genes for human therapies, for destroying cancer, for creating new cells, T cells that can go in and destroy cancer.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How much is this happening right now with real human cells all over the place.

[David Friedberg]

So there's tons of gene therapy products on the market now. There's, there's two categories. There's gene therapies where you actually go and alter the genes in cells, where you have DNA errors, you have problems with your, one of your genes. And there's a lot of these diseases that people are born with where one of their genes has a letter that's wrong and a gene is just a, a sequence of DNA, it's a bunch of letters. And every gene makes a protein. That's what genes are, they're just the code to make a protein. And there are these little things in our cells called ribosomes. They take a sequence of the gene Take the a copy of a gene, and it's like a little ticker tape. It sucks it in and it prints out a protein. So ribosomes make proteins, millions of them a second in every cell, just pumping them out. And they come from the gene expression that happens off the DNA. So genes are the code for proteins, and then proteins are the machines that do everything in life, in biology, proteins stick stuff together, they rip stuff apart, they assemble new molecules. So the genes make the proteins that make everything. Proteins are like little robots in biology. They make everything. So when there's something wrong with a gene, when there's a letter that's off, the protein can be dysfunctional and you can have a disease. So we now have this ability to go in and change that sequence of that genome in your cells and improve it for all these different conditions that are being addressed now. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger. For the ones who get it done. There's a separate area of medicine, which is cell therapies, where we're taking cells and then editing the DNA of those cells to get them to go and do something in the body. And then we stick them back in the body, and they go and kill cancer cells or they go and repair something. And so there's about eight or nine of those products on the market today for cancers. And people that get these cancers get this therapy. Cancer's gone. It's unbelievable. So we reprogram a T cell, we stick it back in the body, and it goes and destroys the cancer. By the way, that's 15 years old technology. The stuff that's going on now is like light years ahead of that. And it has to go through clinical trials and regulatory approvals and testing and all that stuff. But the stuff that's coming to market over the next couple of years, there's over a thousand cell and gene therapy products in testing and trials right now to come to market.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Are you aware of any that really show promise?

[David Friedberg]

Lots, I mean, things that can cure blindness again, lots of cancer therapies, lots of autoimmune therapies. Everything you can think about in terms of human disease can be addressed by Some Cellar gene therapy product that's in trials right now. Very likely. And then the other stuff I mentioned earlier, which is actually changing the. The epigenetics. So not just the genes, but changing which genes are turned on and off in a cell can actually make the cell super young. This was discovered by a guy named Yamanaka. He won the Nobel Prize for this. You have all these cells in your body. They all have the exact same DNA. The only thing that makes one cell different from another cell is which genes are turned on or off. So I told you earlier, genes are just making proteins. If some of those proteins are turned off, that cell looks like a skin cell. And if other proteins are turned off and other ones are turned on, that cell starts to look and act like an eye cell or a muscle cell or a heart cell. So all the cells in our body are different because of the genes that are turned on or off. So Yamanaka figured out that if you turn off all the genes, if you turn on all these genes using this thing called the Yamanaka factor, it's basically four chemicals you apply to the cell. They're proteins. Then the cell acts like a stem cell, like an original cell from the embryo. And you can then use that cell and turn it into any other cell and make new eye cells or make new skin cells or all this other sort of stuff. So creating stem cells using Yamanaka factors and working with them in research is what all biologists and life sciences research are doing today. That's like, common practice. People don't realize this, but later it was discovered that instead of resetting the cells back to being like stem cells, you could partially reset them. So a slight changing in the dosing of the factors and putting different factors in caused the cells, instead of acting like a stem cell, they actually reset all of their epigenetics, which genes are on or off, back to how they're supposed to be when you were first a kid. And suddenly those cells start to work like when you were young. They're more youthful, they have more energy. They are not spending all their time trying to fix up all the mistakes that the cell's doing. What happens is the reason we age is as we get older, the stuff that turns genes on and off in our cell degrades. And so the gene regulation of a cell is wrong, and the cells become dysfunctional. And when the cell becomes dysfunctional, our skin wrinkles, our eyesight goes, our hearts start beating slower, our liver doesn't do its job, our kidneys don't do its job. So all those cells are slowly not doing their job as well. The muscles don't move as fast. But if we could reset those cells so that the genes that are turned on and off are correct again, then all those cells will work perfectly. You have everything you need in your body. All the DNA is intact in all your cells. All your cells are normal cells. They just have the wrong genes turned on or off. So if we can reset that, suddenly all the cells act young. So there are several companies that are doing this work that have shown progress, that it looks like there's going to be a path at some point in our lifetime to actually rejuvenating cells in our body, which is just an insane thing to think about. We see it in labs, we see it working in mice, we see it working in other animals. It's just a matter of time before we get all the pieces together and create therapeutics around this. Imagine becoming like a young person again by popping a pill or taking some treatment. So that's another area that's super interesting, is this, like rejuvenation and then gene editing being applied. Like, the work I do is mostly in agriculture, working in plants. And we're totally changing a lot about making plants more genetically diverse and increasing the yield, improve the performance, the health, the growth, how quick the plants grow. Humans use half of our land to grow stuff, you know, to grow animals or to grow crops. We have the ability to actually improve the quality of all those crops, make them grow faster, bigger, healthier. And so we've developed a system for doing that. And so that's another. So, you know, this whole technology area is super interesting. And then obviously AI, everyone talks about AI.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So tell me, what are your thoughts? I think that's an important one.

[David Friedberg]

AI is just an unlock for people. You know, when some of the tools first came out, I remember I used to use Adobe Photoshop as a kid. I would do like, a lot of graphics and like, stuff in Photoshop for fun or for work. I would, like, go out as a kid and like, do jobs for. With people and stuff. And I got Kai's power tools. Do you remember Kai's power tools? I don't know if you ever use Photoshop. It was like this, this plugin for Adobe photoshop in the 90s where it could do filters so you could blur your photo or you could pixelate it or sharpen it. And it was statistics applied to the matrix of pixels. So each pixel is a number, it's a matrix, it's got a row and A column, and each one's got a number. And basically you could apply a statistical function to that matrix of numbers and it would change what those numbers were. And when you look at it visually, it looks like the photo got blurred or the photo got sharper. So it was incredible. Like, you could use statistics to do stuff that people that were previously using Photoshop had to go in pixel by pixel and change. And they were just kind of looking at it, and then they change it and they look at it. That's what AI is. It's this statistically driven unlock for us where our productivity goes through the roof, where instead of going in and changing every pixel, I can just say, hey, I would like to write a book today, 300 pages, and it's about government involvement in markets. Go source all the data for me, aggregate it in my style, and then I want to go in and edit it with you. And by the end of the day, I've written a novel. Like, that's the unlock that AI provides. Individuals can have more freedom and can be more productive and create more stuff. And again, going back to our earlier point, the cost now of being a writer, a copywriter, goes down. The value of being a copywriter goes down. So the income for the copywriter goes down. But the ability for someone to now create a hundred novels a day increases output. And so the economy grows, the market grows, and so that copywriter can go become a novelist and they can write a hundred novels a day. And so now there's more novels for everyone. And so the consumption goes up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That one feels more inflationary than that consumption will go up. But so the big thing that I wanted to get a sense of is, okay, there's a lot of really amazing things happening in technology, but I think it needs to be married to your earlier point. Are people going to reject this? Are they going to embrace it? So let's take the ones that you laid out on the table. So gene editing, I think that's huge. You've got gene editing inside the human, you've got gene editing inside of the plants, you've got AI. And the impact that those are going to have. Those three feel very germane to the argument of, are people going to embrace these, are they going to reject them? I'd love to know your take. Do you think that we embrace these? And as much as you can give it to me however you want, but as much as you can hew to what you think will actually happen, knowing the way that humans respond would be incredible.

[David Friedberg]

So I think seeing the Benefit is the unlock, right? So in human health, we see the benefit of these tools because people's diseases are being cured. So suddenly the concept of gene editing, or the concept of using gene editing to create new therapies, which sounded scary in the first place, and everyone was against. Suddenly it's like, wait, my uncle got cured from cancer with one of those therapies. This is awesome. And I think that we're seeing that. So that term is no longer an evil term because consumers can now see the problem with technology is it's always ahead of the curve. The AI stuff shows up. People talk about it. Terminator 2 came out 30 years ago, right? People see all these things before they realize the benefit from them. And I can tell you, if someone got their energy bill cut by 75%, they probably wouldn't complain as much about having a nuclear power plant 100 miles away from their home. They'd be like, wow, that's pretty amazing. And then you understand all the protocols for safety and all the regulatory systems that keep you safe and so on. And in human therapies, we're seeing all these lives being saved, and we're not hearing tons of stories about people dying from gene therapy. So the attitude shifts, and the benefit is there. So I think that's what happens over time. And unfortunately, in the early days, there's a lot of this, like, wait, don't go too fast, slow down. Make sure this works. Make sure the benefit is there. Make sure the downside is understood and protected, and there's decent systems to do that. But it's not viewed necessarily as an innate good until people realize the benefit, and then it becomes a little bit more naked. Like, if I tell you antibiotics, it's interesting if you fast forward, like, antibiotics. Like, people died from infections all the time before we had antibiotics. Now we got antibiotics. You get an infection, you take one, you live. Kind of take that a little bit for granted now. Now people are like, antibiotics, they wipe out your gut. Biome, like, it's. I generally try and avoid them, just to be clear. Like, I don't think they're great, but if you're going to die from an infection, you got to take a fucking antibiotic. Yes, I need an antibiotic. So. So I think that there's also this, like, element of at some point, maybe we get to take things for granted a little bit too much and we forget about. Like, once you're on the other side of that curve now, it's like, I. I could, you know, I could start to talk bad about it again.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You know, it's like, it's interesting. I have a slightly more negative. Yeah, I try not to ever say jaded, but yeah, perspective on this. So I think we're going to go through something very weird over the next three to five years and it's going to be largely driven by technology and some of the promises we thought it would deliver but didn't. So if you look at what happened with social media, social media made all these promises is going to make you feel connected. It clearly has not done that. If you read Jonathan Haidt's work, it's like increasing rates of suicide among young kids, causing some sort of disturbances that cause them to really struggle with anxiety. Depression also gave the government a way to manipulate people. And so now people have this really jaundiced eye toward. They still use it, but they have a really jaundiced eye towards what it is and how it can be used to weaponize against you. GMO foods become this incredible unlock that allows us to feed the billions of people that we thought were just going to collapse the planet. And you know, Malthus was going to be right and everyone was just going to die. And, and it didn't happen. And it didn't happen largely because we make huge innovations in agriculture which allows us to feed people with things, require less water, are more hearty, resistant to drought, plague, so on and so forth. Absolutely incredible. And yet you have people that are like, I won't eat GMOs, I won't let it touch me. No way. This is bad. This is horrible. Monsanto, I know your last company was bought by Monsanto. People just think of it as the Death Star, the evil empire. So there's like all this AI. I mean, don't even get me started on people are going to reject that. I, I think with AI and NeuroLink type things where you're augmenting the human body, I think there's going to be a true bifurcation and there will be puritans who are like, I'm pure. I don't have any augmentations in my body. I don't use micro technologies, which of course would be tied into conspiracies and all that. Don't augment my body. I don't use AI. AI. I don't engage with it at all. And then you'll have people that go hard the other way. I've augment with everything that I can get my hands on and I don't have real friends. It's all AI. My wife is AI all my friends are AI et cetera, et cetera. So and, and I think that you're gonna start to see in the next three to five years the beginning of that split and then where is that in 15, 20 years? I think is gonna be pretty dramatic. Now I think the people that don't embrace new technologies will end up being relatively small. But uh, but whether they, it's just sort of a disdain for each other or whether that actually erupts into localized violence, I don't know. We'll see.

[David Friedberg]

The split you define is probably easier to think about in terms of people that are wealthy and have the luxury and the privilege of not adopting a technology and those who aren't where the technology enables them to progress. Um, so I will buy a handcrafted clay plate set for my family that cost me like 80 bucks for four friggin plates because it's like this was made by this artist. And don't you love her work? She's so great. She's got a studio in Oakland. Love her work, you know, she's so great. And we talk about the artist and I pay a premium for that. Most people can't afford $80 for four plates. Most people take advantage of the technology, the plastic plate that they can get at Target where they can get four plates for two bucks because that's the majority of the world, even ex the U.S. right. There was this great website, I don't know if it's still up, called Dollar Street. I don't know if you've ever seen it but they went out and took photos of what it was like for people and how they live every day. Their common use items based on their income and their wealth. How do you cook your food? How do you brush your teeth? How do you store your food? And some people are using a propane burner to cook their food. And then you go to an upper class family and they've got like a, like a gas stove in Norway, you know, like they did this all over the world and it's really incredible to see. And you realize how much that person that's like living in a hut, doesn't have furniture, sits on the floor, would benefit from having access to the Internet on a mobile phone. The mobile phone and the AI could create an unlock for that person like you and I could not imagine. For you and I, we could spend five minutes or have an assistant of ours search stuff on the Internet for us. But for that individual with nothing, this would be an incredible unlock for them and a benefit for Humanity. So what we generally see is this aversion to new technologies mostly being held by the privileged wealthy class, those who don't need it and quickly adopted, eagerly adopted, by those who will progress because of it. And then there's this weird thing that happens where the wealthy have the luxury of having non technology assets in their life. Having a handmade clay plate, I don't want to buy a. I can have someone make a clay plate for me. I can buy organic, I can buy non GMO and feel good and tell my parents and my family and everyone we're eating non GMO tonight. Honey, we can do it. Or I'm going to get this handmade painting rather than a $2 poster to decorate my wall. The technology for the printing press and whatever that made the $2 the poster for 2 bucks is an incredible unlock because someone can now put a beautiful poster on their wall. But because I'm wealthy, I can have someone make something by hand with oil or the barista that makes me the special coffee for 8 bucks as opposed to using $2 Folgers instant or 30 cent Foljo's instant coffee at home, which the majority of people do. So I think there's like a luxury premium that associates itself with non technology assets that we will continue to see and you'll start to observe it in your life. There's a lot of stuff that's like dtech that we're like paying a premium for and we feel good about it. It's authentic, it's genuine, it's more real. And we create this narrative as a luxury class that we can and should buy that and afford it and show it off to each other. But for most people, like progress is enabled by technology and so they're quickly trying to progress in life. I don't want to be living, I don't want my kids living on the hut floor. I don't want my kids, you know, having the same job I have. I want them to progress. And so we're going to use these technologies to help us do that. And so I think that's really important, particularly in this, like if you're wealthy and let me define wealthy, like, you know, the average per capita income around the world is probably somewhere between six and $15,000 a year. And large percentage of the world population are making less than $6,000 a year. Large percentage. Think about that for a second. So like anyone living in America is better off than the best, you know, the top 1% in most of the rest of the world. And so We've created a lot of luxury goods categories that we pay a premium for that disassociates from technology. It's a weird psychological thing, but it's

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

like, you know, it's utterly fascinating. So to me, this feels like wealth in and of itself has this sort of self limiting effect. Uh, the wealthier you get, the more likely you are to not have kids. So the more that you're struggling, the more kids you're likely to have.

[David Friedberg]

I think that's. There's another study that shows to your point, the more wealth you have, the higher your calorie consumption goes. And then you become obese. And then after a certain income threshold, you start to diet and you start losing weight and then you're on these crazy keto diets. And all the stuff that our friends and cohort like live in is like, eat less. I was so funny. I had some friends come over on Sunday and I was like, you guys want me to grab you a snack? We're have some wine in the backyard. And they're like, wait, you're still eating? Like, it's like the trendy thing is to not eat now. And I think that that's like representative. In a lot of the socioeconomic data, you see incomes rise and then obesity rates climb, diabetes climbs. And then super high net worth people, higher income people, suddenly they get really healthy and they go to the gym and they, they can afford to do all these things.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So the self limiting thing is kind of funny. And in the diet space, that actually makes sense. But when I think about wealthy countries giving themselves a ceiling that they sort of smash against and then another country will come behind. To your point about the people that right now they don't have, and they are, they don't want their kids living on a, you know, the dirt floor of a hut. And so they're going to adopt this stuff, whether it's whether GMO foods have a potential downside or not, they're, they're going to take it because it helps them capture wealth.

[David Friedberg]

Wealth.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But what I worry about over here on the wealthy side, you know, and I don't mean that you have to have a ton of money. I just mean you're living in a wealthy industrialized nation like America, where now all of a sudden everybody has the luxury of being afraid of wanting safety over innovation. And so they regulate this to death and this ends up not moving forward. One of the things that got me thinking about this is what you're doing at Ohallo. I know how bizarre people get about GMO foods. And so using that as a litmus test, how do you think that's going to be embraced in the weird countries? Western educated, whatever. I forget what the other ones are, but do you think that that's going to get slowed down through regulation, or are people going to adopt that?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I mean, do you want me to explain it? So I'll just talk about GMOs for a second. You know, the way plant breeding, which is the process by which we make better plants that grow bigger in our farms, the bigger the plants grow, the more food they make, the lower the cost of food, the more the farmer makes. Right? You want to get more stuff grown per acre. It's better for the farmer. They put less in, they get more out, they make more money, it's better for consumers. The price of food goes down. That's the progress of human civilization going back 23,000 years. And plant breeding. Historically, we just kind of picked the biggest plant and then we took the seeds and put those back in the ground. And then we picked the biggest plant next year and we took those seeds and put it back in the ground. We kind of just had these observations and we got really good at observing physical characteristics of the plant. I want it to have deeper roots so it's more drought resistant. I want it to grow faster early in the year so that it avoids the frost, the risk of frost. I want it to grow bigger seeds so I can get more food out of it. And so that's called the phenotype, or the physical characteristics of the plant. And plant breeders started to breed for specific phenotypes, picking the plants that had those sort of characteristics and then making new seed out of that. In the 90s, we got DNA sequencers. So then we realized we could actually look at the genes that are making those physical things happen. We saw the gene that makes the seed bigger, the gene that makes the root deeper, the gene that makes the plant grow faster. All of those genes we could see through DNA sequencing. So now we're getting like an insight into what's actually causing those characteristics. So then plant breeders started to breed plants based on the genes that they were seeing. Rather than plant the seed, waiting for it to grow and then measuring it, you could just look at the sequence of the DNA from that seed and then just figure out which seeds you want to plant and which plants you want to cross together. And so this was called molecular breeding, which means using DNA and an understanding of the DNA of the genes of the plant. And then this idea of GMOs came around. And the idea of a GMO or transgenic crop is that you take the DNA or a gene from another species and you stick it in that plant. And now that plant will make a protein that does something new that it doesn't natively do. So one of the original ideas was to put a protein from a bacteria called Bacillus therogenis in corn. And by doing that, that protein that that corn would now make causes rootworm to die when they eat the corn. Rootworm is this worm that kills all the corn plants. It eats them up. And so cornfields get decimated if you don't get rid of the root worms. And prior to this, farmers were going out and they were spraying fields with insecticides seven times a year with toxic synthetic chemicals to kill the worms. And by getting the corn to make this protein, this one protein binds to the stomach lining of a worm, doesn't affect humans or any other species. We can measure that. We can see that. So just affects the worm. The worm won't eat the corn anymore and the yields will go up, and you don't have to spray the insecticide anymore. So that was like, that's called BT corn. It's still every corn planted in the world today is BT corn. That's, you know, got this trait in it, and that's a GMO trait, meaning it's got the gene came from another species and it was stuck in there. There was another one where they put a gene in rice to make golden rice so the rice would make vitamin A so it could help cure river blindness for people in South Asia that aren't getting enough vitamin A. So now when they eat the rice, they're actually getting vitamin A while they eat it. And that gene isn't native to rice. You have to put that gene in there to get the rice to make vitamin A. But again, people got worried about messing with nature, messing with genes. But humans have been breeding plants. We've been relating to nature, taking winners out and throwing away losers since 23,000 years ago. So breeding has been a big part of what we've done as a species. And this idea that humans are just going to sit around and wait for stuff to fall off a tree or wait for animals to die, and then we'll eat their carcass. That is the true natural state of things. Any aspect of farming is humans intervening and engineering our planet and getting involved in making the things we want to make. So GMOs got this bad rap. They went really south. People Hate them. They're highly regulated all over the world. And the consumer mindset is these are bad. They're doing things that we don't understand. They're doing things that are bad for the planet. There's all these other rationalizations for why they're bad. And there are. We can break each of them down, but we don't need to like go through all. We can talk about all the claims that have been made, but I've tried to explain generally what they are. And we can measure what they do. We can measure the protein that they're making. We can measure whether it's good or not for the plant and for people and for the planet and species and so on. Gene editing came around. And what gene editing is, is it's not about taking DNA from a foreign species and sticking it in a plant. You basically apply a protein to the cell of a plant and when you apply that protein, it causes a change in one or two or a couple of letters in a gene in that plant. So you're not introducing foreign DNA, there's no foreign DNA inserted. You're not creating non native genes. What you're doing is you're basically telling the plant, I want to create this gene that the plant already makes. You want to make a slight change so that rather than make breeding cycles for hundreds of years to try and get that change to happen in that gene, you can specifically target that change and make it happen instantly. And it created this unlock, it creates this unlock for cancer therapeutics, creates this unlock for treating human disease. And it creates this unlock for making those physical traits happen in plants that we would otherwise have to spend thousands of years breeding the plants to, to get to happen. And we can have it happen instantly. These are traits that already exist in the plant. These are genes that already exist in the plant. And you're basically turning them on or off or making a slight change to them that would otherwise happen naturally. So gene editing is being treated in a very different way than GMOs. The regulatory environment on it is very different. In the US you can file a form, say there's a gene edited plant. The government says, we've signed off on it. There's no new DNA introduced. You can go to market with it, it takes a couple of weeks. Whereas GMOs, it's like many, many years. All these agencies have to get involved. There's a lot of approvals. So gene editing has allowed all of these new programs to launch that are allowing plant breeders to create better, healthier, bigger plants. That have better consumer traits, more nutrition, using the DNA that's already in the plants. You're not changing anything. You're not bringing in outside DNA. You're basically just turning traits on or off that are already in that plant. You just don't have to try and do it randomly through breeding. So that's the magic of that, that basic technology. And so it's being look looked at differently. But there's still always the risk of consumers coming along and consumer groups saying we're messing with nature again and again. You got to go back 23,000 years to see like humans have been breeding plants messing with nature for 23,000 years. When we first started breeding corn, it was a little grass. It was this big and it had some seeds at the top of the grass. And now corn is 12ft high and the corn cob is this big. And. And so breeding over 9,000 years created modern corn. And the original natural corn was just a grass that was that big. And that's the fourth largest source of calories on Earth today is that corn plant. So this has become. And it's the way we feed animals for animal agriculture, which, you know, we could talk about another time. Um, but that whole system I think is where, you know, people don't really have the full context of this. And when you hear a sound bite that's pretty negative on, you know, you want to believe it. You're like, it feels good to be against the technology. It feels good to be against Monsanto, be against the man, be against the big system. And that goes back to my point earlier about it's easy to fall into the dark ages trap where we say, let's stymie this technology. Because there's a lot of reasons why people are able to kind of cast it in a negative light without actually having that context of the benefits. And it's really sad. Golden Rice never took off. It was like an incredible product, make vitamin A for a billion people in their rice source. But people were nervous about, we don't understand, because people don't understand genetics, they don't understand DNA sequencing, they don't understand how the system work. They don't understand how it does this. It's scary, you know, and similarly, AI, which is basically just a statistical process on a matrix of numbers, is similarly scary. Like when you break these technologies down, I think it's important to do this sort of work where we talk it a long way about.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you have any dystopian fears about AI?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I was in Vegas and I was a little hungover. And I was kind of like sitting there in a cafe a couple months ago, like a year ago, and I saw the, like some kid had a drone and I was looking at all the people around me and I was kind of in this like, weird state and I was like, man, like, what if that drone just like AI'd like just shot everyone? Like it was this random thought I had and it was like, why did I think that? That's crazy. A couple weeks ago, China put out this video of this military dog. Have you seen this thing?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The swarms.

[David Friedberg]

Isn't that crazy?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Uh huh.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. So I look at that military dog and I'm like, dude, they put a machine gun on the back of the military dog. And it's got the AI vision. It can run autonomously. It can run disconnected from the network, so it can run on its own, compute at the edge. It's got its own computer on it. And you could see China making 10 million, 100 million of these. And then they just go out in the field and their job is just to wipe out people. Dude, that is dystopian.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It is a literal black mirror episode.

[David Friedberg]

So there is dystopian fear. Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, it is. So who. Okay, so I very much want to see people adopt these technologies. I am for sure a techno optimist and find myself extremely compelled. I won't be an early adopter of things like augmenting my own body, but when I really think about where this all goes, I'm far more compelled by the technology than I am fearful of the downside. However, humans, if we got as scared as we got over Covid, which had a. I mean, less than 2%, I don't think anybody argues that death rate. Like, I just don't see people continuing to do good calculus in terms of the long term advantage of the, of this. So. But you did say something that gives me hope, which is that there are people that are struggling that they'll adopt it out of necessity. Like they, they couldn't in good conscience not bring it to their country because their country's struggling. So it becomes a. Does this become an interesting tale of leapfrogging where countries are adopting some of this stuff even though other people might be afraid of it. And I'll, I'll put one on the table. I'll be very interested to see how the community reacts to this. But cellular meat, which I think is really interesting, but I think is going to get massive pushback. So I think cellular meat will probably get more pushback than GMOs ever did. Can you tell people what cellular meat is? And do you think I'm out of my mind with that?

[David Friedberg]

You're 100% right. It's been banned in Florida already, and there's seven other states that the state legislatures are looking at bills to ban it. And there is now talk in the US Senate of putting together a bill to ban it. So to make a calorie of beef takes 30 calories of energy from the rest of the food system to feed the cow, to make the corn, the water, all the stuff that goes into growing the cow, processing the cow, transporting it, et cetera. There's an incredible amount of energy to make one pound of beef. And that's the way the system works today. So the question is, scientifically that people have been asking is, can we take the cell from the cow that makes the cow's muscle the muscle tissue, and then can we get it to just grow the muscle in a vat, in a. In a. In a giant, what they call bioreactor? Like you make beer like a, Like a brewery, like a fermentation tank.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Interesting.

[David Friedberg]

So you pour sugar in, you pour energy in, and you get those cells. You'd make some of those changes to the cell to get it to suck up the sugar water and double and double and double and grow muscles. That's a simple way of describing it. You also have to put proteins into the vat to trigger those cells to grow, to make them think that they're supposed to be growing. You're trying to make sure that there's no disease in there, that there's no bacteria that enters. There's all these steps in trying to make this work. So theoretically, we have all the tools we need to grow the muscle from the cow, without the cow, and use less energy, use less carbon, lower footprint, and theoretically, as it scales up, lower cost. So instead of paying six bucks for a pound of ground beef, you pay three bucks for a pound of ground beef. If these systems work right. Because all you're doing is putting a cell in there and then feeding it sugar and some sort of nitrogen source, because nitrogen is needed to make protein. So that's the concept. And people have been talking about this for 20 years, and they've been working on it. And there's now dozens of startups working on this. And some of them are making fish, chicken eggs, milk cheese, cows, goats. There's one that's doing foie gras, there's one that's doing Japanese eel. I mean, there's all these companies that are focused on these different animal products, and they're all taking different cell lines and iterating on the manufacturing process to try and make the same thing you would otherwise get from the animal, except made in a bioreactor and in a tank. And it's the same cells, it's the same protein, it's the same everything else that you would otherwise be consuming. So the FDA started approving these. They started reviewing them, and they're like, okay, we got it. We've analyzed it, we've studied it. There's millions of dollars that have gone into regulatory review on these things. They started approving a couple of them. Each one of them has to go through regulatory approval in the US and as they start getting approved, cattle ranchers started saying, this is messed up, and you're going to destroy our industry. You know, cattle ranching, just so you know, there's about 100 billion acres on Earth. 70 billion acres are water. 30 billion acres are land. Of that 30 billion acres, 15 billion are where we grow stuff. 3 billion is crops, 12 billion is animals. So we have, like a lot of ranch land, a lot of pasture land on earth where we have animals grazing. So this is a big industry in the US Too. We have a lot of ranches in the US A lot of people make a lot of money growing cows in ranchland. And so there's a big industry, a big lobby that would be threatened by this new technology. So they showed up to Governor DeSantis signing ceremony, like the ranching industry, and they were all happy. And he was like, we're protecting the ranchers. We're saving the industry. And they stymied the adoption of this, what people called lab grown meat. But it's basically grown in a fermenter tank, meat that you could otherwise buy elsewhere because the FDA has approved it, it's legal, it's been regulated, it's been tested, all this stuff. And DeSantis, like, basically stood up and said, we're doing regulatory capture. You know, forget the tech companies. Forget the fact that it could save people money. Because now meat can be cheaper. Consumers can have a choice. They don't have to buy this stuff. They think it's junk. They think it's disgusting. They think it's evil. They don't have to buy it. They could still buy beef. So why stymie the innovation? Well, because the ranchers are there and they're saying, we got to protect our industry. This is classic regulatory capture, classic cronyism. And so it's enabled By a fear of the technology. It's enabled by the fact that they're editing cells and putting them in vats and lab grown meat. And we don't want that putrid stuff growing in our. And Desantis put out like a picture of one of the tanks that grows the meat. And then he's like, look at how they're growing this. It's disgusting. And then someone else put out a picture of the exact same tank, which is making beer that we all drink, or like making cheese or making yogurt or like all the other stuff that we eat. It's the same tank anyway. So that's what's going on right now. And it is. You're exactly right. It is sweeping the nation. There is a fear and a concern about the technology that allows and enables the regulatory capture and the lack of innovation and progress. And if we could make the cost of food 50% cheaper by allowing this technology to proliferate and it worked and people liked it and they were willing to buy it, then the market will work. And if the product sucks and it doesn't taste good or it's more unhealthy for you or all the other things that are bad, consumers will not buy it and they'll stick with beef. But now they're stopping the market from even being able to discover itself. And so regulatory capture is underway in this system that feels really unfortunate to me and everyone in tech. Even I'm a vegetarian. So, like, I'm not going to buy any of this stuff anyway. So I don't care. From a consumer perspective, you wouldn't need

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

it even if it was.

[David Friedberg]

I have no interests, I have no desire because it doesn't appeal to me. I don't know. It's like, steak is tasty.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Dave?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. I've never had it crazy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The first time I heard you say that, I was like, I must have misheard that.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I was raised vegetarian, so it's weird, like. And so, yeah, I don't know, but maybe I'll try it for sure. But it's not like something I desire. Right. But I could see a lot of people saying, I just like beef. Why mess with it? So it's okay to let this regulatory capture, but as soon as you let that happen, it's like freedom of speech. As soon as you let it happen, you allow it to happen everywhere. That people can do regulatory capture, but you should let the market figure it out. Let consumers try it. Let people see if it's good. Let people see if they could. These Guys can't even make this stuff cheap enough today. It's like 100 bucks versus 3 bucks. They got to get this thing super cheap before it even works. So we got to like let this thing get tested anyway. So that's the sort of example of where stuff can get shut off. Then California passed an AI bill to regulate AI. There's like 26 billion flops. I don't know how they define this thing on like the models need to be approved and reported. So if you write software that's over a certain size, you have to report to the government now. So we see a lot of this sort of, to your point, kind of pop ups of like concern are we really like preventing the progress and the innovation that will help address the economic issue and benefit people. I mean, imagine all the people that can't afford to eat beef every day. I mean, remember like in China there's a billion people living on less than 6,000 bucks a year and now they're making 30,000 bucks a year. It's incredible. In 30 years they've had that transformation and they used to eat meat one meal a week on average. Now they eat meat five meals a week. So there's a luxury that has, you know, kind of arisen. But think about all the people that can access that meat, that if you can make a lower cost meat and you know, because you don't need to grow the animal and grow all the feed and use all the land, everything, the cost can come down because you're growing it in a, you know, in a fermenter tank. There might be a pretty good market for this. It could help a lot of people get access to stuff that they want and progress. So again, it's great for the rich people in America and the Floridians that want to support the ranching industry. But you know, these businesses aren't, these businesses are mostly going to benefit other people like other technologies do.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, we now at least have a way to get out of some of the regulatory capture. We have a way to avoid some of the censorship and mal information misinformation, all that stuff. Let the market decide. As you said, with independent media podcasting, which you are a part of, with the all in podcast. And so I do have to know there was one point. So I'm an avid listener of the all in podcast. But there was a point where you and Jason, it seemed like, had so much beef. Do you guys actually considered ending the podcast?

[David Friedberg]

Are you talking about this morning?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh no. Did more kick off what's Happening. David Freeberg.

[David Friedberg]

It's endless. It's endless.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What's the beef between the two of you?

[David Friedberg]

I kind of never was trying to be on a podcast, so this was not something I set out to do. My friends were trying to do a podcast, Jason and Chamath. And then they invited me to talk about COVID at the beginning, and I said, sure, I'll talk about it on your new podcast on YouTube or whatever. And then it became like the four of us, with Sachs joining. And there have. Every week for years, I've questioned, should I keep doing this? For various reasons, because it's not a motivating, it's not motivational for me to, like, go put myself out there and do this sort of thing. So that wasn't something I wanted to do. And then. So then when I run into conflict or disagreement on how we should do things, or let's just make sure we're doing the right thing by my standards or by my point of view, which might be just a different point of view, I get frustrated and I'm like, this is not worth it for me because I never really wanted to do it. So it's easy for me to kind of say, let's get out of here. But, yeah, I mean, look, Jason's obviously one of my besties, one of my good friends, and we butt heads a lot. I really care deeply about some things that he wants to be involved in, and that's caused a lot of conflict on various things like our summit and our show and so on. But we kept at it. I get a lot of benefit when I hear people on the street say that I said something that inspired a change in their life. And when I hear that, it makes me say, okay, it's worth it. It's worth doing it. I really believe that to your point earlier, people have this ability to control their own destiny, and they have to put the effort out and they can change their lives. And there's. People have to build equity in themselves, was the comment I had made on this one show. Which means make sure that everything you're doing is increasing your leverage next year. You get more for less next year, which means you can do more and progress your life versus just being in a service business or doing a service where you do the same thing over and over again. But there's no progression. There's no equity, there's no new skills, there's no new training, there's no leverage. There's no value that's being created as you do that. And it's a really important point that I think people need to take into account in thinking about their careers and their career decisions. And I had made this comment offhand at one of the shows and there was this guy who I saw who had told me it changed his life. And he went out and did a, like, real estate class and, you know, started kind of changing it, like what he was doing. I said, that's the reason I do the show.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, people are in the grips of ideas. There's no doubt. Now you guys have started playing around in politics. Do you worry about that at all?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I don't like the politics because you've heard my point of view today. I feel like it's a false choice. When I look at the candidates for president, for example, it's a false choice. I'm not sure I hear either person saying the thing that I think I need to hear, which is, we got 33 trillion of debt and we're running a $3 trillion annual deficit. What are we going to do? That's the number one thing we have to figure out before we talk about all the 50 other things that everyone cares about, because otherwise there is no ability to do all the other things. So for me, and then I think so much of the machinations are just so boring. It's just gossipy. I don't care about so and so. Yeah, they all have good sons, they all have bad sons, they all going to prison. I get it. Like, you know, like, it's like one guy, the whole thing, it's just, it's not as interesting to me. I care much more about like the bigger picture stuff. And so when we get into the details on who said what at what trial, it's like I, I kind of tune out. But you are right. I get a lot of calls and a lot of emails from friends being like, are you're associating yourself with Trump supporters now? What is wrong with you? This kind of blanket association problem where people are like, oh, you're friends with that person. They're throwing a fundraiser for Trump. Why are you still on that show? Why are you platforming Trump? And my friends are my friends. They're interested in politics. They're giving money to this guy. They also gave money to the Democrats. They also gave money to other candidates in the Republican Party. I'm not judging them. I don't care what they do with their time. If they want to talk about it, we'll talk about it. I won't have much to say because I don't think there's much insight I can provide or much analysis I can do. So that's it. But I do get a lot of this. And it actually makes me say to people, why do you care who I'm friends with? Have I expressed something that you disagree with? If I've expressed something you disagree with, we should talk about what I said that you disagree with. But you shouldn't immediately associate my opinions with the actions that a friend of mine took. Pretty messed up. And it shows me a lot about how people think now. Like, I'm only going to hang out with people that think like me or talk like me. I don't have any interest in engaging in discourse with people that think differently than me. And I think that's wrong. I think we got to be, like, fully engaged and fully conversational with all aspects of the discourse on these matters that are important.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Agreed. And apparently they don't want you to associate with people that think differently than you do. So even once removed, people have a beef, which is pretty crazy. Do you guys think part of the magic of the show is that you don't always agree?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, yeah, I've definitely heard that. That, like a lot of people say in comments and stuff, we get comments like, it's great to see people have civil discourse where we don't go to the attack of the other person. Sometimes we might make that mistake because it's human nature. But, like, if you think about media, the feedback loop is, say something controversial and activating, like the consumer, the viewer is activated. I said something like, screw you, Joe Biden's dying. Look at him, He's a dead corpse. Weekend at Bernie's. I attacked the guy that's activating to someone that agrees with me. So then they tune in more, and then the viewership goes up. And so then you say that again, you say more stuff. And so media has this, like, interesting evolutionary curve where the feedback loop that drives the limbic system response in the viewer, you know, ends up dominating the media. I mean, Rupert Murdoch learned this early on where he had that gossip trade rag in London, you know, and it was. It was normally. I think it was originally, like, just general news. And then he started doing more of the celebrity gossip, and then he sold more and he sold more. And people, like, activated by it. They're like, oh, this is so titillating. I'm so into it. And then he sold a ton, and then he just kept doing more of it. And so there is this aspect, I think, that we need to kind of be cognizant. Of that, you allow the discourse to happen where you don't just attack the other person or attack the target and you dialogue about the facts. This goes back to my point about, like, enlightenment. Like, what is the empiricism? What does the data show us? What's the analysis we can do on that data as opposed to the ignore the data, talk bad about the person, get everyone excited, and now we all agree that person's bad, but we didn't actually talk about any of the data. So, like, I'm a big believer, like, we should be talking about the facts of the matter and, like, debating around that both sides. Like, both sides should spend an hour on a debate stage talking about how we're going to resolve this fiscal deficit and debt problem. And if you don't think it's a problem, then tell us why. Articulate why.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How do you think through a problem? So obviously you're starting with facts, but, like, how do you build up? Are you building up towards a moral conclusion? How do you think about that?

[David Friedberg]

I don't know how to general. I mean, I'm a first principles thinker, so I try to be.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And when you say that, do you mean you start literally at physics?

[David Friedberg]

So if someone says, like, we recently had this thing at my company, we're trying to build a greenhouse or build a lab building next to our greenhouse, and we got to get all this stuff done, and we got six weeks to do it. And everyone's like, well, the GC says it takes three months, four months, five months. And I'm like, well, why? You got to always ask why? And then when you get their assumptions, like, the assumption is the GC knows, like, they're the source of truth. Turns out the general contractor is not the source of truth. General contractor does things their way. So when you get into it, it's like, well, they work six hour shifts. They work five days a week. I'm like, well, let's pay someone to work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Okay, well, now it works because the source of truth was not that general contractor. We need a generator. The electrical guy says it costs 180 grand. I'm giving you exact examples of stuff that's happened. My team's going to kill me for this. But I was like, why do we need. I just went on the website and I found a Home depot generator for eight grand. Why am I spending 100 some odd $1,000? Like, because the electrical guy said that's how it costs. I'm like, well, you guys know what the amperage is, you know, like we need a three phase generator. Here's one that'll be delivered in 10 days. We don't need the electrical. Well, why does he say that? Well, he gives a service guarantee. Well, do we need that? Let's ask that question. Well, it turns out we could save 100 some odd thousand dollars and if we need the service, it'll cost us a lot less than 100 grand. Okay, yeah, we should probably switch to that. And so I'm just giving you some examples of always asking why and getting to the source of truth. A lot of people talk about Elon's definition of first principles, which is physics, because physics are the fundamental source of truth. Like you eventually go all the way back there, but when you ask people why enough times, you end up getting to the ground fact, the ground truth that you can then build from to make the right decision or come up with the right solution for a problem. So that's often how I like to think about these things. People have a shorthand, for example, like we need to run plant breeding cycles for one of our crops. And they're like, well, it'll take three years before we'll be commercial. And I'm like, you're just using the approximation because that's the way everyone in the industry does it. They take three years to do it. Let's figure out what they're doing and what we could do differently to get it done as fast as possible. Okay, we can get it done in 12 months. When you break the problem down to every step in the process that's needed, rather than use the shorthand approximation that the way other people do it is the source of truth. And we say, let's figure out what are the steps. We can come up with a new way of doing things with shortened timelines, 24 hour cycles, et cetera, et cetera. Suddenly we can get it done in a third of the time. So for me, first principles thinking is all about asking why and getting to the source of truth. What are the absolute facts, the data that you know is true, and then building the answer or the solution from there.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I think that's really smart. I tell people that one, you're trying to map based assumptions so there's some base assumption that's driving that you need this generator and of course you're going to want the service contract, so they just pencil it in. But to your point, when you actually understand how things work and if you can get to the essence of the thing, that becomes really important that's right. So that's why I tell people, look, you're, you're not going to spend your time actually thinking up from physics, but that really is the game that you're playing. And so if you ask, can this be done in six weeks if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it is possible. Now, you may not have the skills, the talent, or the desire to do the things that you would need to do in order to get it done, but at least you'll know what the real problem is. Oh, the real problem is we're up against the generator. We're up against that contractor is not available for a month or whatever. And so, okay, now I actually know the problem set. And once I know the real problem set, then I can solve the problem. Yeah, but so often people just, they're reactive to the thing that they're given instead of understanding its nature and then figuring out where we go. All right, I want to know the besties ranked in order of poker ability. What do you got for me?

[David Friedberg]

Sachs doesn't play very much. I gotta be honest, he's been like, pretty absent from our poker game. And Chamath's game has changed a lot in the last year, year and a half, he's been changing up his game

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

for better or worse.

[David Friedberg]

I think he's just grinding out more like he's, he's more like careful and consistent. He was very, like over the top aggressive, kept pushing the envelope. Back in the day, like I told him this, I said his games changed a lot. But he's also been training with a, with a. He's been, he's been practicing and doing work on his game. I know that he shared that. So he's doing, he's doing well. And JCal is kind of like a little knit. Like, you know, knit means that he sits around and waits for the right thing and then he takes in and he doesn't bet anymore. He kind of just goes home with his money. I give him about that, so you can give me credit for that. And I'm. I'm probably not too dissimilar. I don't play enough. I think this year. I haven't played very much this year, so I'm not giving you a great answer. Everyone's different. Sax is just mia, so I wouldn't even rank him anymore. I don't even know the last time he played. He's too busy electing the next US President. So, yeah, I mean, I, you know, if I were the. One of the problems with the Game also is there's a lot of, like, randomness that comes into our game with our other players. So we get. The game changes a lot depending on who's in the game. Sometimes we get these crazy aggressive players who are friends of ours who just don't care about how much they're winning or losing and they'll go as aggressive over the top as they can. Sometimes it's a smaller game, a little more careful and strategic. People are tired. So the game style matters. Some of us perform different, better in different game styles. Like Chamath does well in the big games. I don't play the big game. The big over the top games. Like, Chamath knows how to play those games better than I do. And I'm much better in the more, like, normalized, like, strategic, where you. Where you can do a better job game theorying, like, where people are at. Like, theorizing where people are at. So.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All right. The political answer for Mr. Friedberg. All right. Where can people follow you? This has been incredible.

[David Friedberg]

I don't post much. I have a Twitter account, a Twitter handle, Friedberg. That's it. Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And the all in podcast.

[David Friedberg]

And I'm on the all in podcast where.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Where podcasts are found.

[David Friedberg]

Everybody click subscribe and click the notifications button. I've learned to say that that's good. When.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

When you get to smash the subscribe button, then I'll know you smash this. You've really made it.

[David Friedberg]

I think we're. We said we're going to do a party. I don't know if we've announced where yet, but it'll be in Vegas. So we're gonna do a party in Vegas when we get to a million subs. Which was never a goal for us, but we realized recently we should probably set that goal.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, 100%. You're the people that follow your show will love it.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. So we're gonna do a big party. It'd be fun.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I like it. I look forward to it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

[David Friedberg]

Peace. Thank you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

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[David Friedberg]

left on the clock.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.