E39: West coast super drought & climate crisis, Nuclear virtue signaling, chaos in SF & more

Jason Calacanis 0:00 What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight? What did- what is your celebrity doctor giving you? Tell the truth. Did you get that new shot?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:06 No, it's like, people- people on Twitter are like, "Your- your Twitter account's sounding a lot more like Jake account." And I'm like-

Jason Calacanis 0:11 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:11 ... "I think we're on the s- I think we're on the same diet. I think that's what's going on here."

David Sacks 0:14 (laughs)

Narrator 0:16 (instrumental music plays) In three, two- Let your winners ride. Rainman, David Sacks. And they said we open sourced it to the fans and they have just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Quinoa. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The All-In Pod. With us today, of course, the Queen of Quinoa.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:42 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:42 And from his castle in Italy (laughs) , the cackling, uh, dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, nice gardenias, and back from his big, big battle, his brawl, unblocked and undefeated, the Rainman himself, David Sacks.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03 And judging by the comments, uh, I'd say dominant.

Jason Calacanis 1:06 Oh, you read the comments?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:07 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:08 That's just another sign of your obsession-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:10 Oh, like you don't.

Jason Calacanis 1:10 ... with how you're perceived.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:11 Like you don't. Like you don't.

Jason Calacanis 1:12 Don't even. I never read the comments.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13 Don't pretend. Don't pretend.

Jason Calacanis 1:14 Rule number one, don't read the comments. We're not doing it again.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17 Well, it shows. It shows because you're not listening to the comments, so it makes sense.

Jason Calacanis 1:20 Oh, okay. Go ahead. And- and- and you got your whole troll army?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:23 But look, we have, we have-

Jason Calacanis 1:23 How many people have you hired on your social media team-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:26 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:26 ... to troll me from anonymous accounts on Twitter now to prove your points?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30 Now you're paranoid too?

Jason Calacanis 1:31 I'm- I'm not gonna-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:32 Don't be paranoid. Don't be paranoid. Anyway, look-

Jason Calacanis 1:34 All right, he's not gonna let me.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:35 ... we've patched things up.

Jason Calacanis 1:36 It's patched up.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:36 Don't- don't break the peace. We have detente.

Jason Calacanis 1:39 (laughs) All right. So Freeburg is busy, uh, writing tweet storms now, um, about the drought in California, which seems to be, uh, just gonna be a really bad year basically. So Freeburg, walk us through it. How bad is California's drought gonna be this year?

David Friedberg 1:59 So the drought is already very bad. Um, I put out a- a lot of tweets at 2:00 in the morning last night, I think. I drank way too much caffeine yesterday. I'm in the mountains and like the only way I can avoid having headaches is like drinking caffeine all day and it was a mistake. It kept me up all night. But-

David Sacks 2:12 You sure it's not the (beep) ?

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:16 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:17 Maybe you're so excited about this (beep) that you just can't sleep-

David Sacks 2:22 Because you're on pins and needles. (laughs)

David Friedberg 2:23 Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, you can bleep this out.

David Sacks 2:25 Nick, you gotta bleep that out.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:26 You can bleep out beep.

David Sacks 2:27 (Laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:27 No, no, keep that. Keep that.

David Friedberg 2:29 So, you know, the- the- the big tweet storm I put out at 2:00 in the morning last night kind of highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018, 2019 that showed how, you know, North America, particularly the western half of North America is in this, you know, mega drought that we haven't seen in, you know, 500 plus years. And since that paper was published, you know, um, in 2019, conditions have only worsened. Uh, we talked about this a few pods ago, but like the snow pack level in California reached 0% throughout the entire state by June 1st. That has never happened before. Temperatures in British Columbia, as you guys know, reached over 120 degrees for several days in a row last week, which has never been seen in history in British Columbia. Um, you know, there was a paper published today that estimates that over a billion, um, animals and life forms were wiped out in the coastal region of British Columbia because of this heat wave. Um, and the temperatures in- in California are obviously excessive as well, not as bad as they were last year. But what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than we've ever seen at this time of year in history. And so this all sets us up... A- a- and- and- and the other kind of big consequence, the high temperatures is causing an increased demand for air conditioners. That's the big variable in power demand on all grids. And the low snow pack means that we're not getting hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power is down by 70% in the state of California over where we were in 2019, um, because there's no snow that's melting causing the rivers to flow. And about 11 to 15% of our state's electricity comes from hydroelectric power. So we're gonna have more power demand. We have less power available. We have extremely dry forests. Um, and so this is setting us up for a- a number of possible disasters this year. And so rather than just trying to sound the alarm bells, what I'm pointing out is that there may be some things that we should be thinking about doing to try and get ahead of some of the consequences of these, um, these big risks, like, you know, having enough masks for people to breathe outside so we don't have to shut down schools and shut down outdoor work and all the things that might happen, having community centers that have power available. The state is scrambling to find excess power on the grid right now. But, um, you know, it- it just highlights like there's a moment here that is almost like where we were going into COVID. It may not happen, but the probability is high enough that something bad may happen, that we should probably start to get prepared for it. You know, we should probably be talking about the things we're doing to get prepared for it. And we're talking about... And we should be talking about the things we're gonna do to make sure the communities are safe and people are safe and businesses can keep operating. 'Cause if the state of California has 150 AQI, which is the Air Quality Index, workers can't work outside. And all the outdoor work which employs three million Californians has to shut down. And, you know, you kind of start to add these things up. It's like, what are we gonna do as this happens, not if this happens? And- and we should kind of be planning for it. Um, and I don't see much happening in terms of planning and- and- and preparation and talking about, uh, the opportunity.

David Sacks 5:19 History rhymes because if you remember, uh, and this is all going into a recall election in the fall, uh, this was a different but kind of equivalent setup where, you guys remember, we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when, uh, Gray Davis was recalled and then Schwarzenegger just swooped up out of nowhere and, you know, people thought, "Oh, th- there's no chance." And people were just frustrated because the quality of life took a measurable step backwards, uh, in the intervening six or nine months before the recall election. And so it'll be really interesting to see how Gavin Newsom manages all of this, because if he can't get, uh, the state's act together and you have all of these issues at hand and a credible-... candidate emerges, um, you could have some really interesting political fireworks in September.

Jason Calacanis 6:09 A big part of this, correct me if I'm wrong, Friedberg, is that we live in essentially, like, a lot of desert area here in California and we just haven't invested in the desalinization plants. We have one that's come on since 2005 and I think there's another one in SoCal that was mothballed and they, during the last drought, wanted to open it up again. But we now have one in Carlsbad, the, uh, Claude "Bud" Louis-Carlsbad Desalinization Plant that is now... I think that cost us a billion bucks. But Israel, correct me if I'm wrong, is now... They charge three times as much for water than we do, so people take water seriously and they actually monitor their water usage and they have desalinization and they have more water than they need per capita.

David Friedberg 6:53 Well, de- desal doesn't really solve a number of these problems that I'm, I'm highlighting. You know, the, the probability of the, the forest land on the West Coast, not just in California but all up and down the West Coast, catching on fire is very high. No number of desal plants is gonna put out those fires. When that happens, the air quality is gonna get really bad. You know, like we saw last year, I don't know if you, you guys remember, I escaped to Lake Michigan last summer when the, the smoke hit.

Jason Calacanis 7:14 Yeah, we remember the threats, yeah.

David Friedberg 7:16 Yeah. And it, it was, um, it was insane. You know, it doesn't... Desal plants don't solve the air quality problem where people can't work outside, your kids can't go to school, et cetera, et cetera. Um, desal plants don't solve the problem of hydroelectric plants which re- requires snow pack to melt to get rivers to run to turn those turbines to generate electricity for the state. So, you-

Jason Calacanis 7:36 Nuclear would solve that, though.

David Friedberg 7:38 Nuclear would solve that, certainly. And so, you know, uh, the point is, we're kind of reaching this apex of are we gonna do climate change adaptation? Are we gonna have, um, you know, kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're gonna start to put in place for these risks that we face? And more importantly, from an acute perspective, in the near term, what are the actions we should be taking to protect communities and get ahead of this problem so it's not a scramble after the crisis, which is what we typically do with these sorts of crises?

Jason Calacanis 8:04 Yes. W- we're not investing in infrastructure. If we put in some nuclear power plants, if we did more desal and we did more forest management or put more fire breaks into, you know, all this.

David Friedberg 8:15 I'm talking about the simple solutions like having community centers-

Jason Calacanis 8:17 But those three things would be massive, wouldn't they?

David Friedberg 8:19 Well, those are long-term solutions.

Jason Calacanis 8:21 Yes.

David Friedberg 8:21 I'm talking about, like, for this summer, we should have c-

Jason Calacanis 8:23 Oh, this summer? Is it even solvable?

David Friedberg 8:24 We need, we need, we need, we need community s... No. But we need to prepare for what is gonna happen this summer. So when communities get run out, what are we gonna do? You know, do we have community centers set up where people can get, um, water and power? Do we have, uh, masks available so that outdoor workers can keep working in the state? You know, all of these things that we could be doing to get in front of the inevitable consequences of these risks, I think, are things that we should be actively pursuing.

Jason Calacanis 8:46 So if you're in California, you should order your air purifiers now. We ordered six more of these-

David Friedberg 8:52 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:52 ... Conway ones that we used last year that were amazing.

David Friedberg 8:55 Get N95 masks.

Jason Calacanis 8:55 And I'm doing... We, we have the N95 masks. We ordered them already.

David Friedberg 8:59 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:59 And we're gonna put in a power generator, which I know not everybody is able to do, but you can buy a portable one for as little as $300 or $400 bucks, I think, now. So a portable generator in case you lose power, stock up on everything else.

David Friedberg 9:12 We need those solutions. Like, I think there's gonna be a big kind of power generator push, right? Like, distributed power has always been something. That's the whole point of solar. You get the solar on your roof, you get your own power. Um, but how are you going to keep your AC running when it's 120 degrees outside if youhave no power? You know, that, that's kind of a very scary, um, circumstance of heat waves, uh, and it's, um, it's something that we should have a real plan around. And if I were the governor or if I were kind of California leadership or leadership up and down the West Coast, you know, the western governors, um, I'd probably be running a daily press conference starting now saying, "Let's just get in front of this problem and talk about what are the risks we're seeing, what are the problems we're seeing, and what we're doing about it," just so people feel reassured because, you know, scrambling after a crisis doesn't make anyone feel better. You know, showing that we're prepared and we're taking action to get in front of this crisis, which is not 100% certain but it's a greater than 0% probability, is something that could helpfully kind of reassure and start to put the pieces in place, um, for, for the near term.

David Sacks 10:07 By the way, just, just for those that don't really appreciate how interconnected everything is, the basics, the science basics on drought, as I learned about them, were really, really incredible. So you'd think, "Okay, well, how, how is all this stuff connected?" It turns out that, you know, as we have warmer and warmer temperatures, uh, I didn't know this, and Friedberg you probably do know this, but it accelerates soil evaporation. And then there's this really terrible feedback loop that starts which is you have drier soil, which means you have less vegetation. And then as a result, you have less what's called evapotranspiration, which means there's less regional precipitation and then this whole thing just starts to spin and spin and spin. You have warmer temperatures that results in less snowpack. The snowplack- the snowpack melts earlier. And we have a situation now in the United States which is just incredible. I saw a graph which is, uh, one of soil moisture and it shows basically the western half of the United States is in the first percentile of soil moisture looking back over many, many decades. So-

Jason Calacanis 11:09 Well, and then all of that vegetation dries up and then becomes-

David Sacks 11:12 We're in a position-

Jason Calacanis 11:13 ... fodder for more fires.

David Sacks 11:14 No, Jason, we're in a p- well, even worse than this, we're in a position where, you know, we are threatening our own food supply. And just, just to, just to put a, uh, a finer point on this, it's not just the western half of the United States that's now suffering from this. It's Brazil, it's the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and it's large parts of Africa. You add up all those number of people, there are many countries there that are actually self-sufficient which will then no longer be, will have to import food, that food quality is, you know, questionable at best in some cases. So we're in a really tough position here and Sol, it's-

Jason Calacanis 11:49 Isn't this all solvable with technology? I mean, if we just tax people a little more for their water usage, if we really invested in the desal plants, if we really invested in nuclear, we could actually flip this whole thing. The same way it's spiraling in the wrong direction, it could spiral in the right direction.

David Sacks 12:02 Two things on the water side. I've w- I've been looking at water investing for a while.... there's a, there's a real problem, which is, you know, when I, when I looked at this, uh, my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities. Largely, it- it- it revolves around owning water rights, right? And then basically selling them back to the state and when states get in difficult situations. The problem is, I think it's politically intolerable for, let's just say, somebody like me, um, to own those kinds of water rights and to-

Jason Calacanis 12:30 To be a water baron, yeah.

David Sacks 12:32 ... I think, I think it's, I think it's no bueno. The- the idea then that I had was like, "Well, maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so that we can guarantee water for people in certain states." Maybe that flies, I'm not so sure. Um-

David Friedberg 12:45 That's the government's job.

David Sacks 12:46 That's the government's job.

David Friedberg 12:47 Yeah.

David Sacks 12:48 Um, but then they're not doing their job. And so-

Jason Calacanis 12:49 But they're incompetent.

David Sacks 12:51 They're unfortunately not, uh, not as skilled as you'd want them to be on this stuff.

Jason Calacanis 12:54 Sax, how would you spin this, uh, out of this death spiral and into abundance? Is there a way?

David Sacks 13:01 Well, I mean, the- the- the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event. I mean, this is entirely foreseeable. Um, drought conditions have existed in California for a long time. In fact-

Jason Calacanis 13:14 200, 200 years, yeah.

David Sacks 13:15 Well, and even maybe going back millions of years. I mean, geologists have found evidence that, you know, millions of years ago, you would have, uh, millions of acres of California burning every year. And so drought conditions have existed for a long time. Uh, has climate change amplified that and made it worse? Yes. But this is entirely foreseeable. We know we're dealing with these conditions. And in fact, back on his first day in office in 2019, Newsom held his very first press conference about this issue on emergency preparedness for fires. But the problem is, there's been no follow-through. And so, um, News- you know, to go back to Chamath's point about the political ramifications here, you could have a Gray Davis-like situation with the recall, where all of a sudden, Newsom goes from being the favorite to potentially losing because of fire season. Um, but- but by the way, I mean, the whole reason why the- the recall election's happening in September now instead of October, November, is because Newsom is precisely worried about the Gray Davis scenario and they're ex- this recall was supposed to happen in the October, November timeframe. They've moved it up to September 'cause Newsom thinks there's a higher chance of fading the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner. The problem for him is that fire season now starts in August. And so we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens and this thing could boomerang on him. But back to the point about, you know, Newsom held this press conference back in- in January of 2019 and the problem is, there hasn't been any real follow-through on forest management. So, you know, Newsom was recently caught in a lie saying that, you know, they had basically treated 90,000 acres. This is what this, uh, article, I'll put it in the chat, said. In reality, they had only really treated about 11,000 acres. Even 90,000 would be inadequate, right? They're not doing enough. And the way ... Um, you know, I talk to a very prominent person who knows California politics well and knows all the players and what he said is, "Look, the fundamental problem is that Gavin is not operational." Right? He's fantastic at fundraising. He says all the right things at press conferences-

Jason Calacanis 15:23 Great hair. Great hair.

David Sacks 15:24 ... but- but not everything is about running for re-election. And the problem is, he has not managed to this outcome. And- and so now we're in this situation where, to Fryberg's point, we're gonna be scrambling after the fact. Now, what is Newsom's excuse gonna be? It's gonna be, you know, climate change. It's gonna be global warming. It's kind of the all-purpose, dog ate my homework excuse for anything that goes wrong is he can just blame it on climate change. But the reality is, we knew about climate change. Climate change is something we're gonna have to live with. Even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward, we're not gonna be able to reverse the effects it's already had. And so we need leaders who will step up and- and get much more aggressive about preventing this problem.

David Friedberg 16:08 I think my- my ... And by the way, my tweet, I didn't mention climate change at all. Like, I- you know, I don't think that that's even the point. The point is, we are facing acute conditions on the- in the western half of the United States right now that lead to a number of significant and severe consequences. Those acute conditions, you know, you could blame them on climate change, let's say that they're part of climate change, it doesn't change the reality. They are here today and we have to deal with them. Um, and I think ... Yeah?

David Sacks 16:34 We have a- we have a couple things that are, that are, uh, gonna happen here in short order that I think can make this thing accelerated a little. So there's a, uh, an organization, a- a department in the United States government that's not very well known called the US Bureau of Reclamation, USBR, and they are the ones that will make formal assessments of water levels. And there's a really important assessment that's gonna happen in Lake Mead, um, at the end of this year and the reason why it's critical is that if the US Bureau of Reclamation measures Lake Mead under, um, a certain threshold, uh, they can declare a tier one shortage. And what that means, just practically speaking, cutting through all the, you know, jargon, is that initially, the state of Arizona will be denied around 600,000 acre feet of water next year. What does that mean? That's about 15% of the demand for that state. And so you're gonna start, you know, to deal with these sort of, like, rolling, I don't know what we're even gonna call these, water-out scenarios where, uh, it's not just about watering your lawn. That's not gonna be possible. It's gonna be a whole bunch of other things. Now, there is a solution and this is where California can come to the rescue for most of the western United States if they really want to, or at least for the rest of California, which is, there is an enormous untapped groundwater, uh, aquifer in Southern California which is the size of Lake Mead. Um, it's an incredibly unique thing. It's actually owned by a public company.... and the whole goal was, okay, well, let's just build a pipeline, right, from the aquifer to deliver drinking water to folks that, you know, are lacking water. Um, and this has been a multi-year, you know, bordering on multi-decade slog because of California politicians. Because water bec-... has become highly politicized. No one wants to pay the full cost for a commodity that they frankly view as a right, but then they don't wanna step in to do the work to actually make it reasonable and viable. So this whole thing is just, again, as David, as you said, the dog ate my homework, and now we're really playing with some very complicated things that are really out of the control and intellectual capacity of the, uh, frankly, state governments, which is the interconnectedness of weather, temperature, water, our soil, our food supply. It's, uh, I think, I think-

Jason Calacanis 19:01 What's so frustrating about this is-

David Sacks 19:03 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 19:03 ... this is so easily solvable-

David Sacks 19:04 It's crazy.

Jason Calacanis 19:04 ... and we are not doing the blocking and tackling, the free throws, the basic things. If you look at, um, just monitoring our water usage, um, I invested in two companies. One of them, uh, didn't work out, um, but both of them were to monitor water usage, and what we learned was at a campus like Stanford, they have, like four water meters. Like they, they're not going down to the building level in some cases. There'll be, like four buildings on one water meter. And you can very easily at each sink, at each, you know, shower head, you can put a device that costs 25 bucks installed. It just wraps around the, the, the, the water, the, the, the pipe and it could tell you how it's flowing. And we lose 20%, 30% of our water to leaks. Nobody is monitoring their usage because there is no cost to it, Cham- to Chamat's point. And then you look at these crazy, insane almond and other, uh, agriculture in the, the middle of California, they are using flood irrigation, which I'm sure Friedberg can give us an education at, versus what, you know, the drip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in Israel and other places. So we look at water as like, to Chamat's point, some crazy God-given right that we can just splash it everywhere, we can take 20-minute showers, and then we allow... How crazy is this? We allow the bottling of water in California. We allow these companies to bottle water and then sell it, and we don't even monitor our usage. We have-

David Sacks 20:36 Well, Newsom's biggest donors-

Jason Calacanis 20:37 We are so entitled, it is gross.

David Sacks 20:40 Newsom's biggest donors, uh, who, who, who's that family that grows all the almonds or whatever?

Jason Calacanis 20:45 Whoever-

David Friedberg 20:45 They are the, the Resnicks.

David Sacks 20:46 The Resnicks. Single biggest do-... Them and the teachers' union, single biggest donor-

Jason Calacanis 20:49 Oh, Linda Resnick and those palm people with the palm stuff? I, I don't know them.

David Sacks 20:53 Of course. It's, it's total political corruption, right? I mean, they get-

Jason Calacanis 20:56 It's Chinatown. It's literally the movie Chinatown.

David Sacks 20:59 Yeah. Well, I think... So to this point about why aren't politicians solving the problems, I mean, to make a meta point, there's a great tweet from Thomas Sowell or the person who manages the Thomas Sowell account, uh, where he said, "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They're trying to solve their own problems." Uh-

Jason Calacanis 21:18 Re-election, yeah.

David Sacks 21:19 ... which are getting elected and reelected. That's number one, number two.

Jason Calacanis 21:21 Stay in office. That is their only goal.

David Sacks 21:23 Whatever is number three is far behind. And, and that, that's basically the situation we have, is I think Newsom actually is a little bit like Trump, not in his personal style, but in that he thinks he can talk his way out of problems and he's not gonna focus on solving a problem when he can just spin his way out of it.

David Friedberg 21:40 By the way, I, I just think you guys should know the, you know, 'cause a lot of people talk about residential water use, that is also kind of an acute and local problem where depending on your water supply, how much water you have available to your community. Um, but in terms of aggregate water use, the vast majority of water in California is used in agriculture. Um, it's about, uh, 10X, uh, what is used for residential, um, applications. So-

Jason Calacanis 22:07 Yeah.

David Friedberg 22:07 ... uh, uh, California agriculture... By the way, it's not a bad thing. It's a huge, uh, part of our economy, uh, that water has generally been fully available in aquifers. People bought that land with rights. They paid a premium for those rights to those aquifers. This is a very complicated problem, uh, in California and that, uh, you know, supports a large part of the California economy. So, you know, you can't just kind of blow them away, but 90% of water use in California is associated with ag. And it's not just a generally we need to save water problem. It's very specific to a region and a community and their particular water source on whether and how much you need to save versus do you have abundant supplies and so on. Um, and so i- i- it's, it's a little bit more complicated. But Sax-

Jason Calacanis 22:43 Yeah, but who, who do you-

David Sacks 22:44 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 22:44 ... focused on abundance, Friedberg. If y- if you look at the new nuclear power plants that, you know, Bill Gates has invested in and then you look at desalinization, which is an energy issue. We can desalinize for roughly two or three times the cost that we're getting-

David Friedberg 22:57 Again, like-

Jason Calacanis 22:57 ... our water for now. So just put a nuclear power plant next to a desalinization plant and you're done.

David Friedberg 23:04 Great. That's a 20-year project and you gotta build-

Jason Calacanis 23:07 Why? Why is it a 20-year project? China does it in two. You gotta be-

David Sacks 23:10 We need to be more bold in this country. It is completely ridiculous that we accept that everything has to take 20 years. We need this now. Where's the leadership that says, "Fuck it, let's do it immediately. Let's set a goal of two years to build 10 of these."

David Friedberg 23:24 James, I'm not sure. I'm not-

Jason Calacanis 23:24 "And then spend the fucking money."

David Friedberg 23:26 I'm not sure it solves our acute problems. It solves long-term problems associated with climate change and energy insecurity and w- water insecurity.

Jason Calacanis 23:32 We can't do both? We can't do both? Let's do both.

David Friedberg 23:34 Sure. We should do everything. But right now, the, you know, the, the conditions indicate that there are some specific things that we can and should be doing to kind of support the state in terms of what's gonna happen in the next year or two. And yes, we should also be funding long-term projects that create water security and energy security for everyone in the United States. But Sax, to your point... And, and by the way, if you guys ever wanna read an interesting book about how the grid operates, um, there's a book called The Grid, uh, and it talks about how the electrical, uh, power grid system was built in the United States and how inefficient it is and all the problems. There, there are a lot of structural problems that need to be solved, not just, you know, dropping in cheap power. Sax, who is the good operational candidate that you've seen that's running for governor of California in this recall? Is there someone that stands out in your mind? 'Cause I, I, I don't seem to hear anyone talking about, "Hey, there's a good alternative to Gavin Newsom-"

David Sacks 24:20 Right.

David Friedberg 24:20 "... at this point."

David Sacks 24:21 Yeah. I mean, we don't... A clear alternative has not emerged yet. Um, you know, I guess the... A- and part of the problem is that because there was no Republican primary, you haven't sort of consolidated the opposition, uh-

24:33 ... to a leading candidate. There are a couple of, I guess, interesting candidates on the Republican side. I need to spend more time getting to, you know, know them. I mean, I have never met them or talked to them. But the, the two who are, I think, mentioned quite a bit are, uh, there's this guy, Faulconer, who's the mayor of San Diego, who is sort of a socially liberal Republican. And then there's a, uh, state assemblyman named Kevin Kiley, who, uh, who I think says a lot of interesting things and he just announced he's running. There's another guy as well, uh, John Cox, but he got trounced by Newsom in the last election. I think it's time to let somebody else take a shot against him. And then, of course, you've got Caitlyn Jenner, but I think people are still trying to figure out if her campaign is real or how real it is. Um, so yeah, look, we ha- the, the opposition has not consolidated against Newsom the way it did with Schwarzenegger, you know, back in 2001 and that's, that-

Jason Calacanis 25:32 I'm voting, I'm voting Republican just to create a counterbalance. I don't care who it is and I'm not a Republican, I'm an Independent, but I'm voting across the board. I'm just gonna go to Republican for every position in California and I'm gonna just run my finger down-

David Sacks 25:46 Wow.

Jason Calacanis 25:46 ... the Republican line-

David Sacks 25:47 How does it-

Jason Calacanis 25:47 ... and check every single one.

David Sacks 25:48 Jacob. Jacob.

Jason Calacanis 25:48 (laughs)

David Sacks 25:48 How does it feel to be a radical Trump supporter? (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 25:51 I, listen, I, I'm not for

Jason Calacanis 25:53 Trump but Chamath, talk to us about nuclear and what we can do to get, to reverse what these hippy-dippy, well-intentioned, no-nukes concert set us back 50 years and, let's be honest, a lot of the climate change problems we have today, we would not have if we had invested in nuclear.

David Sacks 26:11 Yeah. I, I sent around-

Jason Calacanis 26:13 It's infuriating.

David Sacks 26:13 Well, I sent around an image. Uh, Nick, maybe you can s- stick it in the show notes or something so that people can see it. But if you, if you look at, if you graph the construction of nuclear reactors from like the-

Jason Calacanis 26:23 Oh, this is a great image, yeah.

David Sacks 26:25 ... 1960s, 1960s to today, essentially what... And you color code them by country. What essentially you see is, uh, a transition from the able, from the... frankly, from countries that basically were just right at the, at leading the pack and it was really the United States. Building, building, building and then two things really happened. There was Three Mile Island and then there was Chernobyl. And there was an incredible overreaction to not really understanding either the cause and/or the remediation to two events. Now, could you imagine if there were two airlines that crashed and we stopped flying? How, basically, we would have, you know, retarded the progress of the world? And now you impose it on something like nuclear energy, which has consistently proven to provide an enormously abundant, cheap, and clean form of sustainable energy and it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before. So, for example, if you look at the power consumption for desalination, it's off the charts, quite honestly. Okay? That's why people c- say that it can't be done credibly. If you look at even just like the amount of energy that's required to clean water and to, you know, sanitize water and make it drinkable, the, the, the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent, but the, the implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it. But Jason, you are right, which is that if we have small forms of sustainable abundant energy that can be basically hyper-localized and located where we can do these jobs, the jobs to be done, it's transformational. Now, why doesn't it happen? It doesn't happen because the same folks who really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change, which is the progressive left, are not really willing. They're intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear. They don't do the work. They make a br- bland sort of broad-based prognostication about how we need to do something about climate, then they will point to solar and wind without really understanding the contamination of the earth that we do in order to mine the rare earths and the actual metal and mineral inputs that are required for solar. It's-

Jason Calacanis 28:41 Yes.

David Sacks 28:41 ... nuts.

Jason Calacanis 28:42 But it sounds better-

David Sacks 28:43 It's nuts.

Jason Calacanis 28:43 ... right? It sounds better.

David Sacks 28:44 It's nuts.

Jason Calacanis 28:45 It's, it's better optics. Oh-

David Sacks 28:46 Oh, the sun-

Jason Calacanis 28:46 ... we're using air and the air-

David Sacks 28:48 ... the sun-

Jason Calacanis 28:48 ... the sun, water.

David Sacks 28:49 ... and it's abundant.

Jason Calacanis 28:49 Yeah.

David Sacks 28:49 And it's like, if I could show you what, what tailings are and like the dirty aftereffects of mining copper and nickel out of the ground, which is what we need for batteries, and how countries like Indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean, dumping it faster than they can get their hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt, um, to us so that we can make batteries, you would actually say to yourself, if you knew all these facts, you'd actually say to yourself, "You know what? Maybe nuclear isn't so bad and maybe I overreacted to two incidences."

Jason Calacanis 29:20 If you wanna understand this, you just have to look at the laziest group of individuals in society, the French. They want to take the laziest route and do the least amount of work and have the most amount of leisure.

David Sacks 29:32 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 29:32 Sorry to our French listeners. 70% of the energy in France is from nuclear.

David Sacks 29:37 It's nuclear, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 29:37 They figured this out.

David Sacks 29:39 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 29:39 They said, "How do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited electro..." 70% nuclear! They're so smart!

David Sacks 29:48 There's a... Well, the, the, the F- the French are actually smart because after Fukushima-

Jason Calacanis 29:50 They're smart!

David Sacks 29:52 ... because after Fukushima, what happened is, if you had, you know, sort of like woke politicians-

Jason Calacanis 29:58 Germany.

David Sacks 29:58 ... a bunch of Germany, they completely unwound their entire nuclear agenda.

Jason Calacanis 30:02 They shut it down.

David Sacks 30:04 Which was ugh, which, which was insanity. Insanity. And so now, here they are, they're writing laws faster than they can make them up. They're basically pivoting entire industries to try to now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications-

Jason Calacanis 30:21 Yeah.

David Sacks 30:21 ... to Earth that they are going to create. Whatever-

Jason Calacanis 30:23 And yet the net-

David Sacks 30:24 They have just-

Jason Calacanis 30:24 The net consequences.

David Sacks 30:25 If they had just-

Jason Calacanis 30:26 Yeah.

David Sacks 30:26 ... stayed the course on nuclear, they would be in a much better place. And, and to France's credit, they were like, "What the fuck are you people overreacting about?" Again, just think about this, guys. If there was two-

Jason Calacanis 30:36 The pragmatism is delightful.

David Sacks 30:37 If we stopped flying after two airline crashes, where would the world be?

Jason Calacanis 30:43 ... where would the world be? I mean, be pragmatists here. Wha- do we want to deal with high energy prices and brownouts and all kinds of problems and rolling blackouts? Or do we want to put this issue behind us? If we just go on a Manhattan Project, literally, to make new nuclear, we would be, this issue would be behind us and we could focus on something else, like education. It's so dumb.

David Sacks 31:09 The very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress, it will get bogged down in litigation and bureaucracy. These are the last two things that should be in front of science and physics, especially when it comes to energy independence. I just think it's, it's crazy.

Jason Calacanis 31:27 Freeberg, any way out? Any way we can get people to b- wha- what's the best way to convince the American public to embrace nuclear? And force our politicians to do it?

David Sacks 31:38 Open your mind and think for yourself.

Jason Calacanis 31:40 Right.

David Sacks 31:40 Please.

31:41 Well, uh-

Jason Calacanis 31:42 Read a book.

David Sacks 31:42 Marc, Marc Andreessen had a good term. Uh, he said we're living in a vetocracy, as in the word veto. Um, I think it wa- he, it was an interesting interview with, um, Antonio Garcia Martinez on his blog. Anyway, um, yeah, they were talking about the inability of the US to build anything anymore, especially when you compare us to some, you know, place like China. And you, whether you wanna call it NIMBYism or vetocracy, there are just too many people and groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening. Um, but we gotta s- we gotta stop letting our politicians off the hook, um, by making excuses, you know, just because there's climate change doesn't mean that the politicians can't do anything about it.

David Friedberg 32:25 I mean, welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy, right? Like, a democracy over time doesn't reduce the number of laws it has. Every year, politicians need to do their job and they create new laws. As new laws accumulate, like, the things get clogged up, right? Like, when, when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government, a state government or federal government that makes it easier to do something?

Jason Calacanis 32:48 I get that, but where, where does it say in the Constitution of the United States that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic? That's, that's not part of what being part of a democracy is. I, by the way, I wanna, I wanna talk about that for one second. There was this thing that I sent you guys in the chat, and Nick, hopefully you, you post, post that in the show notes as well. But there was a study that was done about cynicism, and it went back and it did like a qualitative assessment of more than 200,000 people and their attitudes and their measured IQ, their measured literacy, their measured numeracy, and their measured earnings. And here's what they found. Cynicism is associated with lower IQ, lower literacy, lower numeracy, and lower earnings. The idea of cynical individuals being more competent appears to be a widespread, yet largely illusory lie. So I think we have to teach people- See anec- anecdotally I think this makes sense. I mean... I was shocked by that study because I actually generally think cynical people must be smarter, 'cause they're thinking more rationally and maybe I'm being emotional. It turns out they're fucking stupid. Well here's the thing. There's cynicism and then there's people who are cantankerous and not content, and I think people sometimes conflate those two things. If you look at the people-

David Sacks 34:11 But constant, constant pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy. It means that you just stopped thinking for yourself as a protective mechanism.

Jason Calacanis 34:18 Right. But, but the people we know, uh, who have changed the world and who, uh, they seem to be-

David Sacks 34:25 They're not cynical.

Jason Calacanis 34:25 They're not cynical. They're actually delusional and optimistic or else they wouldn't have started a company to make electric cars, you know, or, you know, whatever piece of software-

David Sacks 34:35 Right.

Jason Calacanis 34:35 ... or climate.com or synthetic biology. You have to be a radical optimist. I mean, and we're literally trying to attack our incredible capitalists who are actually solving these problems while our politicians can't get their shit together and make desal plants and nuclear plants. It, it, i- the private market seems like the only solution. Sachs, how do we solve this?

David Sacks 34:56 Well, the, the, there's an old saying that, uh, pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. And, uh, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 35:07 (laughs)

David Sacks 35:07 (laughs)

35:08 I mean if you think about it-

Jason Calacanis 35:09 Oh, I love it.

David Sacks 35:09 If you think about it, you know, pessimists don't create companies, right? They're, they're-

Jason Calacanis 35:13 No.

David Sacks 35:13 It's, it's-

Jason Calacanis 35:13 They throw rocks. They become journalists. They become shit posters on Twitter.

David Sacks 35:17 They become critics. They become critics, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 35:18 Critics. Anton Ego.

David Sacks 35:19 Right.

Jason Calacanis 35:20 Tatooine.

David Sacks 35:20 Sachs, Sachs, what do you think about this idea that, uh, you know, if we get into the throes of it, uh, for water, f- the folks that own water rights, I think that this is going to be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some point just gonna say, "Sorry, need it back. It's mine."

35:36 Yeah, during an emergency, for sure.

35:38 For sure.

35:39 But, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I hate to, I hate to use the words, um, "I agree with J-Cal," but...

Jason Calacanis 35:46 (laughs)

David Sacks 35:48 But, you know, look, there's not a shortage of water in the world, right? I mean, the world is mostly water, so it is a function of building desalination plants if that's what we need. Um, there has to be a solution for that problem, and Freeberg's right that maybe it does take a decade or two to, to put into place all that infrastructure, but then why didn't we start 10 years ago?

Jason Calacanis 36:09 You see, we should be starting a program where we convince the American public that abundance would lead to them having more freedom and our country being stronger. Electrical abundance with nuclear, water abundance with desalinization, and agricultural abundance with those previous two. Because if you had unlimited nuclear energy and you had unlimited clean water, the price of agriculture would go down and we'd have more free food for everybody, or lower cost food.

David Friedberg 36:39 I'll tell you a, I'll tell you a theory I have on this. Um, and, and it's basically an anti-science theory which is that, um, you know, culturally, we've kind of developed this anti-innovation, anti-science mentality

David Friedberg 36:50 broadly speaking across-... uh, kind of modern culture in the United States. If you remember coming out of World War II, and I think it has its roots in the Cold War, um, you know, out of, w- when World War II ended, w- you know, we were all in it together, uh, you know this country. Everyone bought the same stuff. We all had Rice Krispies every day. We all kind of, you know, were excited about our, our, our homes that look like everyone else's home on the block. And technology was empowering all of this, right? There was a space race on. Um, there were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts of amazing things. There were chemicals that were creating new drugs for humans and new applications for agriculture that was making an abundance of food and increasing life spans and so on. But then what happened in the late '60s and '70s is we realized we got ahead of ourselves and, um, you know, there was, uh, uh, cancer from DDT. There was, uh, you know, Three Mile Island. There was, um, a, a number of, um, pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the environment from chemical companies and we started to wake up and say like, "Wait a second. All of this technology that we thought was so great and was giving us this extraordinary abundance, it turns out is really risky and can cause massive unknown consequences." And if you watch, uh, I think I talked about this on our podcast once, but one of my favorite videos to watch, there's a video on YouTube from the Disney Channel History Institute, and they show the history of Tomorrowland at Disneyland. When Tomorrowland opened in 1955, every ride was all about adventuring into space and, like, traveling into the human body, and they even had a ride from Monsanto where you would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff, and it was all about this amazing abundance and technology. And the guy, the, the narrator on the video says, "Beginning in the late '60s, early '70s, we changed all the rides." And the rides all became about the fear of technology. It was all about aliens attacking Earth. It was all about, um, Captain EO with, like, you know, the, the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things. Even Star Tours was about a robot that went awry, and the robot doesn't know what it's doing so it drove us off course and we had to survive the robot. And so everything became s- you know, subconscious or subliminally a little bit this negative technology sentiment, and I think that that still persists. You know, there is an asymmetry. People take for granted the abundance over time because you get used to it, but you feel the acute pain of the loss when technology goes awry and then that becomes the social conscience, and I think we're still grappling with that, and I, I don't know how you reverse it because-

Jason Calacanis 39:12 Well, you know what, Freeberg?

David Friedberg 39:13 ... people are so sensitive to this.

Jason Calacanis 39:14 Where ex- are we not experiencing this right now, everybody, with COVID where there's one group of people who are like, "Oh, my God. The science we were able to deploy in COVID and get through this so quickly is so promising that the world's gonna be better, net net, after the pandemic." Even with all the suffering, you could make an argument that that suffering is gonna lead to more prosperity. And there's another group of people who are like, "The Delta variant, let's get our masks back on." Uh, a- and people wanna take the cynical route on that.

David Friedberg 39:45 As a, as an individual, I don't want harm done to me or my kids or my environment. That's, that's the, I think the general kind of conscience, right? And I don't care about the abundance because I've basically taken it for granted. And so now I find myself as an individual saying, "You know what? B- we shouldn't do nuclear because look at what happened at Fukushima," forgetting the fact that you've been living off of free electricity practically for decades or whatever the, you know, the case might be.

Jason Calacanis 40:09 And free water.

David Friedberg 40:10 And free water and all these things.

Jason Calacanis 40:11 (sighs)

David Friedberg 40:11 And I think the, the, the abundance that technology delivers to humans because humans are only programmed to recognize change. They're not programmed to recognize absolutes. Uh, there's a lot of good sociopsychological and evolutionary psychology on this.

Jason Calacanis 40:22 Give us an example of that. Give us an example of that.

David Friedberg 40:24 Like if, you know, if you go to the store every day and you're used to just getting a $1 can of Coke, you don't say, "Oh, my God. I feel, it's an amazing world I live in. I get a $1 can of Coke." You never praise that $1 can of Coke. Now, if you went to the store and the can of Coke went up to $2, you'd be like, "What the heck? Why does Coke cost so much?" And so, um, you know, it, now, but, but, but, but here's the thing.

Jason Calacanis 40:45 So we habituate, we habituate to the great things in our life.

David Friedberg 40:48 If the, if the price of Coke dropped to 50 cents, you're like, "Okay, that feels good." And then you get used to the price of Coke being 50 cents, and a few weeks later, if it goes up, you're upset, but you're not as happy on the other way. So human emotion is kind of asymmetrically, you know, defined by these negative consequences, and I think over time, you accumulate these negative consequences as your core psyche and you have an aversion to doing, you know, innovative things. As a whole, not all people, but as a whole, that's how we operate, um, and it's why technology kind of gets land based over, over time.

Jason Calacanis 41:18 Uh, this is the most frustrating t- thing to me, Chamath, is that we have so many amazing things happening in technology and nobody will 10X or 100X on them from the, uh, government perspective or the public. I had a company called Zero Mass on my podcast which I think is now called Source, and you're aware of this company. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydropanels would make if we just embraced this technology. Well, I mean, s- Source is an incredible, incredible company. Um, basically there's a, there's a guy who runs, a Cody Friesen, who when he was at MIT, basically, um, developed a, uh, essentially a material, a membrane that can absorb the ambient, um, water that's in the atmosphere, um, and basically allow you to collect it and to separate it into its components and to basically create potable salinized or potable drinkable water in a panel that looks like a solar panel. So you put these solar arrays everywhere and out of the back you put a little pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and, uh, and it spits out water. It's, it's an incredible thing and he's able to go and rewire schools and, and the thing is he can go anywhere because again, he doesn't need anything, right? You literally put it on your roof- It's incredible. ... and it makes you, if you... I think he told me at, at the time when I interviewed him two or three years ago, he said, "You could put two of these on your roof and get, like, four cases of bottled water a day no matter where you were on the planet." And by the way, he's moving to a place which is really cool. He told me this. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say it, but I'll say it anyways. Are you saying this might be b-

David Sacks 42:56 ... now where he's gonna-

Jason Calacanis 42:56 Is it a beep candidate?

David Sacks 42:58 No, he'll have an eventual app where you can kind of direct the, the Hydropanel to make the kind of water that you like. So if you love Evian-

Jason Calacanis 43:06 Oh, alkaline?

David Sacks 43:06 ... or if you love, um-

Jason Calacanis 43:08 Dial it in?

David Sacks 43:09 ... Fiji water, or if you love Smart Water or, you know-

Jason Calacanis 43:12 You're on the Voss, right? Spec- specifically because it's the most expensive one?

David Sacks 43:15 No, I, I love s- I love Smart Water.

43:17 (laughs)

43:18 I, I, I have a very gratuitous reason why. I remember (laughs) when I met Jobs, he drank Smart Water and I thought, "Mm, it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me." (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 43:27 I'll tell you when I knew Chamath made it.

David Sacks 43:28 (laughs)

43:28 I just gotta copy people. Like you gotta copy the good ones. And I was just like, um-

Jason Calacanis 43:32 This is a personal anecdote. This is when I knew Chamath made it. We used to play poker in his garage in his little 3,000 square foot Palo Alto house.

David Sacks 43:39 Little old-

Jason Calacanis 43:40 And then-

David Sacks 43:40 In Burlingame, Burlingame.

Jason Calacanis 43:41 In Burlingame, whatever. He had this little tiny house. And we're in the garage and he's like, "Look, I'm putting up a flat panel. I'm gonna like paint the walls."

David Sacks 43:48 No, we had a little, uh, you had a little, uh, easel and you'd write on chalk how much you owed-

Jason Calacanis 43:52 Yeah.

David Sacks 43:52 ... you know?

Jason Calacanis 43:53 Then, Chamath's like, "I got a new house at (beep) ."

David Sacks 43:55 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 43:56 Bleep, he's got his new house. We come over. He's like, "J Cal you want some water?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'd love a glass of..." He's like, "Oh J Cal, you want a beverage?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'll take a glass of water." And uh, he goes, "Oh." And he walks over to a rack. And in the rack, like you know those things you push wine on?

David Sacks 44:10 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 44:10 There's a rack for water. And there is Voss in the glass bottles. There is Evian in glass bottles, all... And you're, not like the Evian that you get at the regular supermarket. Like somebody sourced the Evian bottles that restaurants have. And then he had the Smart Wa- I mean there's 60... And I'm like, "I just wanted a glass of water, but okay, I'll take the Evian in the glass bottle." It was delightful. Sacks, I got three different bounce passes I can give you just where you want it.

David Sacks 44:35 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 44:35 Do you want cancel culture? Do you want Chesa Boudin or...

David Sacks 44:40 COVID?

Jason Calacanis 44:40 What do you want? Or COVID. I can give you any of these.

David Sacks 44:43 I can read-

Jason Calacanis 44:43 I'm ready to pass.

David Sacks 44:44 ... I'm talking... But any of those sound good to me. I mean-

Jason Calacanis 44:47 All right.

David Sacks 44:47 ... the,

David Sacks 44:48 i, the, the... It might be time for a Chesa update because we haven't done that in a while.

Jason Calacanis 44:52 The killer DA?

David Sacks 44:53 The killer DA, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 44:54 Oh, by the way, I just want to say I found the journalist. You know the journalist, Sacks, don't say her name. And she is setting up her LLC and the $60,000 we raised from the GoFundMe is gonna go to her to cover the DA's office for the next six to 12 months in a newsletter website.

David Sacks 45:09 Right. And just to be clear, because I think people kind of misinterpreted what you were trying to do there with the GoFundMe, J Cal.

Jason Calacanis 45:14 Yes.

David Sacks 45:15 This is not for opposition research. This is not digging-

Jason Calacanis 45:17 No.

David Sacks 45:18 This is not digging up dirt. This is reporting on, uh, on public policy, on pu- what should be public facts with respect to what the DA's office is doing, how Chesa is performing in his job.

Jason Calacanis 45:32 Isn't it interesting though how the left journalists, when I hired an investigative journalist to cover criminal justice, accused me of hiring an oppo researcher, and these are investigative journalists?

David Sacks 45:43 Well, they told-

Jason Calacanis 45:44 And I told them explicitly, "I'm just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in San Francisco. There's no oppo research here." And they insisted on saying I wanted to get into Chesa's personal life. And I-

David Sacks 45:53 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 45:53 ... explicitly said, "That's not what this is for."

David Sacks 45:55 Well, let's face it, there aren't too many journalists anymore who are investigative who are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials. They're too busy pushing a narrative. They're engaged in agenda journalism. And actually, we saw a really good example just to tie into, to what's hap- what happened over the past week, is you had this story in the San Francisco Chronicle which is basically pure propaganda. Uh, from, you could see that the, um, the passing from Chesa to this reporter of this, this farcical s- uh, claim that crime is falling in San Francisco.

Jason Calacanis 46:33 (laughs)

David Sacks 46:34 Uh, I mean, this claim is so preposterous. We, this is the same week we saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of Neiman Marcus, you know, with-

Jason Calacanis 46:44 With every handbag.

David Sacks 46:45 ... w- yeah, exactly. And so, you know, plus you had the viral-

Jason Calacanis 46:48 It was scary.

David Sacks 46:49 Yeah. You had the viral video of the, the guy going into CVS and just, you know, it wasn't even shoplifting. He was, is-

Jason Calacanis 46:56 How... Did you see Brian Sugars-

David Sacks 46:58 ... filling up Garbage bags.

Jason Calacanis 46:59 ... uh, video of the person who broke into his house, stole his kids' iPads and everything while they were in the house?

David Sacks 47:05 Right. And Cyan Bannister, who had another home invasion, just tweeted-

Jason Calacanis 47:08 Home invasions are now, um, not prosecutable crimes in San Francisco.

David Sacks 47:15 Well, no, what they're doing is, what Cyan reported about her case is... And by the way, her case is in the public eye, okay? So it's very brazen for the DA to be doing this. But what they did is, they dropped the home invasion charges and they're just treating it as basically a, a theft of, you know, a few hundred dollars. You know? That does not capture the violation of breaking into someone's house and how dangerous that is. But I, originally I thought, "Okay, why is the DA's office doing this?" Originally I thought, "Well, maybe it's just because, you know, Chesa doesn't want to incarcerate anybody." But it's more than that. You see, if they drop the charges down to petty larceny, then he can include it in a different stat. You see home burglaries are up by some gargantuan amount, like 50% year over year.

Jason Calacanis 48:02 Oh.

David Sacks 48:03 They want to be able to claim crime is falling, and so now they're juking the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious crime. And then what they do is-

Jason Calacanis 48:13 Wow. They're shaping the stats.

David Sacks 48:15 They're juking the stats. You ever watch the, the show The Wire? That's where this expression comes from, is, you know, first the, the politicians get held, held accountable to the statistics, then they realize that, then they start manipulating the facts. And that's what's basically been happening.

Jason Calacanis 48:29 So dirty.

David Sacks 48:30 It's so dirty. But, but the next step in the process is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters-

Jason Calacanis 48:37 I mean, the fact that they keep repeating these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they wouldn't prosecute them-

David Sacks 48:47 Right.

Jason Calacanis 48:47 ... then they mischaracterize them, and then they never say, "85% of the commuters coming into San Francisco are no longer coming into San Francisco, and Target announced..."... like Walgreens, that they are either closing stores or reducing the hours because they can't deal with the crime-

David Sacks 49:01 Right.

Jason Calacanis 49:01 ... and they're saying explicitly, "This is the highest crime we've ever seen in any of our stores." And then, this crazy-

David Sacks 49:08 Right.

Jason Calacanis 49:09 ... communist... Are they communist on the left here?

David Sacks 49:12 C- CVS, Walgreens, and Target are all closing stores or reducing store hours, um, because they understand the hit to their bottom line. But you have this mantra. It is, it is communist-like, where it's like the commandments written on the barn in Animal Farm, where it is propaganda that's so at odds with reality, it's just absurd, okay?

Jason Calacanis 49:32 It's farcical.

David Sacks 49:33 It's farcical, but then how do they enforce it? What they say is, "Anybody who questions this narrative is a bad person," is in fact a Klansman-

Jason Calacanis 49:41 Racist.

David Sacks 49:42 A racist and a Klansman. So, so this is the other thing that happened over the past week, is that you had...

Jason Calacanis 49:48 This is crazy.

David Sacks 49:49 Basically Michelle Tandler, who is a moderate and as nice a person as you could ever find.

Jason Calacanis 49:55 Concerned citizen.

David Sacks 49:56 Concerned citizen.

49:58 San Francisco born and raised.

50:00 Yes. Who tweeted that all of her friends were thinking about leaving the city. And then in response to that, you had this, this, uh, senior policy advisor to Chesa Boudin, who works for the DA's office named, uh, Kate Chatfield, attack her basically implying her views were, you know, were KKK values for, for, for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in San Francisco. So she gets attacked. By the way, uh, this, this Chatfield person, the top of her profile is the clenched fist of the Communist Revolution, J Cal.

50:34 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 50:34 By my Lord.

David Sacks 50:34 So, this is who's running the DA's office. But, but look, it's not just trolling, th- and it's not even just slander, it's, I think, an abuse of power for someone in the DA's office to go after and attack a concerned citizen like this, okay? But this is how they enforce the-

Jason Calacanis 50:51 Can you read the tweet that she did? Do you have that there? 'Cause-

David Sacks 50:54 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 50:54 ... she basically is... The, the people who have experienced home invasions are concerned for the safety of their families. And what this, uh, woman did, Michelle, I believe is her name, she just said like, "People are scared for their families." And then Kate Chatfield referenced Birth of a Nation and compared her to, "Oh, our wives are not safe because of Black people." And that's a KKK-

David Sacks 51:23 Birth of a Nation.

Jason Calacanis 51:23 Everybody knows Birth of a Nation.

David Sacks 51:24 Birth of a Nation is, is-

Jason Calacanis 51:25 Everybody understands what Birth of a Nation is.

David Sacks 51:26 Yeah, the original name of Birth of a Nation I think was The Klansman.

Jason Calacanis 51:29 Yeah.

David Sacks 51:30 Yeah, it's like a KKK piece of propaganda.

Jason Calacanis 51:32 Wow.

David Sacks 51:33 But it's really outrageous.

Jason Calacanis 51:34 She just blocked me. Kate Chatfield blocked me. Wow. I just realized.

David Sacks 51:38 This is a public policy advisor who's now hiding her account. Well, why... I mean, a public official should not do that. I mean, they should be-

Jason Calacanis 51:45 And so this set you off. Let's be, let's be honest. This set you off.

David Sacks 51:49 Well, and I, I, I know Michelle Tandler, she worked at Yammer, you know? And I didn't... I thought it was out of bounds for a, not just a public official, but someone in the-

Jason Calacanis 51:57 Crazy.

David Sacks 51:57 ... DA's pro- uh, office who has the power-

Jason Calacanis 51:59 So what did you do?

David Sacks 52:00 Well, I just-

Jason Calacanis 52:00 You went into revenge mode, let's be honest.

David Sacks 52:02 No, no, I di-

Jason Calacanis 52:03 You got a little bit... You were a little bit tweaked.

David Sacks 52:09 I donated another $50,000 to the Recall Chesa Campaign.

Jason Calacanis 52:12 Whoa! And you dedicated it to Kate.

David Sacks 52:15 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 52:16 You said, "This is for you."

David Sacks 52:18 Yeah, because look, the... this is threatening. Every American should have the right to criticize their government without having its law enforcement arm come down on them. And so here you have a legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the DA's office is coming down on them. That's not acceptable.

Jason Calacanis 52:37 I think I need to break some news here. I didn't want to talk about this publicly, but I'm so outraged now that I think I should let this out. So while I... after the we- in the weeks after I started that campaign to hire an investigative journalist for Chesa's office, this is breaking news. I haven't talked about this publicly, but I'm gonna break it now. Do you know who contacted me? The DA's office. Do you know what they contacted me about? They were investigating a startup that I had invested in, I won't say which one, and they wanted to interview me about my involvement with that startup, because that startup, uh, had some complaint from a downstream investor who felt that they were committing some type of fraud or problem. Coincidence?

David Sacks 53:27 Ar- are, are you serious?

Jason Calacanis 53:29 I am dead serious.

David Sacks 53:29 This is, this is literally becoming Chinatown.

Jason Calacanis 53:32 They literally tried to intimidate me. And I, yeah, I didn't want to bring it up and I talked to the person on the pho- the, the, the, the person from the DA's office who was investigating this. And he's... I was like, "Do I need an attorney for this? Wh- why are you calling me?" 'Cause... And he said, "Well, you know, we just want to talk to you about this." And I was like, "Yeah."

David Sacks 53:48 No.

Jason Calacanis 53:49 They were like, "We have a bunch of questions." And I just said, "You know what? Uh, subpoena me. I'm not..." You know. "File something and I'll come in with my attorney to talk to you, but I'm not gonna talk with you on background. No." So they bas- literally tried to intimidate me. You know what? And I kind of let them, because I didn't want to make it public, but I'm making it public now.

David Sacks 54:05 You shouldn't make it public because-

Jason Calacanis 54:06 Oh, it's public now.

David Sacks 54:07 Well, because-

Jason Calacanis 54:08 And this is two weeks after I said, "Let's hire the journalist." It's intimidation tactics.

David Sacks 54:12 It is intimidation tactics.

Jason Calacanis 54:12 I will not be intimidated.

David Sacks 54:13 That's intimidation, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 54:15 I will not be intimidated, Chesa.

David Sacks 54:17 All right. (laughs)

54:17 But what you can see here is... Okay, look-

Jason Calacanis 54:19 I mean, I was intimidated.

David Sacks 54:21 (laughs)

54:24 So, so... (laughs) Yeah, of course you were!

Jason Calacanis 54:24 Now what I mean is, I'm like, "I'm not gonna have me intimidated again." (laughs)

David Sacks 54:30 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 54:30 But now that I think about it, like, I didn't do anything wrong here. I put 50K... I put 50 or 100K into a company that didn't work out, and now some other investor's complaining and they're trying to tie it back to me somehow?

David Sacks 54:39 But Jason-

Jason Calacanis 54:40 Fuck you.

David Sacks 54:40 ... you, of course you're gonna be intimidated. The chief law enforcement officer of San Francisco...... is basically trying to make you the target of an investigation because of what you said publicly. Of course, that is intimidation.

Jason Calacanis 54:52 Guys, isn't it possible that they're just interviewing you about a fraud claim?

54:56 (laughs)

54:56 I mean, like, what... (laughs)

54:57 Oh, really?

David Sacks 54:57 Could...

54:58 Wait, wait. Hold on.

Jason Calacanis 54:58 (laughs) .

54:58 But think about the timing, Friedberg.

55:00 AM radio.

55:00 It's two or three weeks after-

55:01 Like, conspiracy theory. Like...

David Sacks 55:03 No, it's not.

Jason Calacanis 55:04 Two or three weeks after?

55:04 You know what? I gotta, I gotta, I gotta tell you something. A po- a police officer drove past my house last night.

55:09 Yeah. (laughs)

David Sacks 55:09 Friedberg. Okay, well... (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 55:11 Wait, it's the first and only time I've ever been contacted by a law enforcement officer over an investment.

David Sacks 55:16 I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Jason Calacanis 55:18 Stop committing fraud.

55:19 350 investments.

55:21 Yeah.

David Sacks 55:21 Listen, Chesa has not had time. He's almost two years in office now, and he has not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial. Not one. But his office has time to run down whatever they're trying to run down with J.CAL. They don't have time to prosecute the b- the home invader who broke into Syanne Bannister's home.

Jason Calacanis 55:41 Or Bryan's.

David Sacks 55:42 Or Bryan's. They don't have time to do that, but they somehow have time to contact J.CAL.

Jason Calacanis 55:46 He tweeted the video.

David Sacks 55:48 Let me explain what's going on here. There's two things going on. I think one of which is becoming very well understood, but the other one is not. The first one is the Gothamization of San Francisco. We understand that crime is out of control. Cynicism and resignation, people are just kind of giving into it. It feels like San Francisco has become Gotham City, these viral videos of the robbers brazenly committing daylight theft. There is no punishment-

Jason Calacanis 56:10 Beating up UPS drivers in the street.

David Sacks 56:11 There is-

Jason Calacanis 56:11 Beating a UPS driver in the street.

David Sacks 56:13 Because, because there is no consequence, okay? But there's a second-

Jason Calacanis 56:15 Of course.

David Sacks 56:15 ... thing happening, which is the Orwellianization of San Francisco government and San Francisco politics. You not only have the crime, you've got the brazen lies about the crime. You've got this insistence on this Animal Farm commandment that crime is falling. And if you question it, you are a bad person-

Jason Calacanis 56:33 Are a Klansman.

David Sacks 56:34 ... and you're a Klansman. And then they get their, the, you know, the-

Jason Calacanis 56:37 Ridiculous.

David Sacks 56:38 ... the Kate Chatfields to push this out, and then they get academics to back this up. Okay? There are now, they get their friends in the media and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence. And then the final step is that the rich virtue signalers pay these people off. They pay the, the protection money.

Jason Calacanis 56:57 Who might that be? Who's paying off?

David Sacks 56:58 The Dustin Moskovitzs, the Mike Kriegers, the Reed Hastings, and, you know, even, actually, uh, the biggest contributor to Chesa right now is a guy who's under SEC indictment for the Ripple scandal.

Jason Calacanis 57:12 Oh, no.

David Sacks 57:13 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 57:14 Chris?

David Sacks 57:14 Chris, yes, exactly. So people who need to curry favor either because they're, they've got their own problems or they just like to virtue signal-

Jason Calacanis 57:23 Chris Larson.

David Sacks 57:24 ... they fund-

Jason Calacanis 57:24 Chris Larson is Chess's biggest-

David Sacks 57:26 ... they fund this Orwellian campaign.

Jason Calacanis 57:27 Oh, wow. That is dark. Bryan Sugar released the video and that person's not gonna be prosecuted. It, I mean, that is the crazy part. You get somebody on camera and they won't prosecute them. And people forget, these are organized gangs that are doing this. This has been proven. This is not a poverty issue. These are not poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent. It's organized gangs-

David Sacks 57:49 Right. Did you see the getaway cars?

Jason Calacanis 57:50 ... who realize Prop 47-

David Sacks 57:52 Did you s- did you see the getaway cars for the Neiman Marcus heist?

Jason Calacanis 57:54 Yeah, they're all like-

David Sacks 57:55 The Mercedes, the Infinitis.

Jason Calacanis 57:55 They're driving great, beautiful cars with their license plates off. This is like mob behavior. And if you give criminals... Trust me, I grew up in a criminal environment in Brooklyn. If you give criminals a window, they will figure it out. You give them an opportunity, if you give them something to hack, they will hack it. Period. And you, you basically have greenlighted them. Okay, listen, it's enough of us complaining about this. Uh, I am, uh, gonna stop complaining about this and I'm moving either to-

58:23 Let's do, let's do COVID 'cause-

58:24 ... Texas. I'm moving to Texas or to Florida. I'm making the announcement now.

David Sacks 58:27 Hold on. Is that for sure, J.CAL?

Jason Calacanis 58:29 Listen, I, you know, I'm in a partnership and my partner doesn't want to be here anymore and I'm half and half, so I'm not sure why I'm here anymore. I mean, I think California's... I, my position right now is California is gonna be on a decade-long slide and I'm working for 10 more years, I decided. I'm 50. I decided I'm gonna go to 60. I'm gonna try to invest in 100 to 200 companies a year for 10 years, and then I'm done. So why would I spend 10 years in a place that is on a death spiral? Can this be reversed in our, in the next decade? I don't know.

David Sacks 58:57 J.CAL, how does it feel-

Jason Calacanis 58:58 Yes.

David Sacks 58:58 How does it feel to be completely red-pilled? (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 59:00 I'm purple-pilled. I want to live in a per- I want to live in a reasonable place.

David Sacks 59:04 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 59:04 And it seems to me that Austin and Miami are purple. You know?

David Sacks 59:08 Yes.

Jason Calacanis 59:08 And they're not communi- I don't want to live in a right-wing place, alt-right, and I don't want to live in a communist place.

David Sacks 59:14 Alt-left place.

Jason Calacanis 59:14 I want to live in an American place. I want to live in a place where Americans can talk about issues without being villainized, period.

David Sacks 59:21 That's the way I feel about this pod.

Jason Calacanis 59:24 And when people...

David Sacks 59:24 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 59:24 You're not being villainized, Sas. Just give me a break, all right?

David Sacks 59:28 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 59:28 Just be... You, people really want to know if you went to dinner with Tucker. Can you just make that statement that you didn't have dinner with Tucker-

59:35 You just, you just made that up.

David Sacks 59:36 You just made that up.

Jason Calacanis 59:36 What do we got next? What do we got next?

59:36 It was a joke. Why can't you admit if you did or not?

David Sacks 59:39 No, I... Listen, I, I, I-

Jason Calacanis 59:40 Friedberg and I have 15 minutes.

Jason Calacanis 59:42 We gotta go.

59:42 COVID, uh, Delta, people are panicking, but the numbers keep going straight down. Pfizer says... Uh, Israel says maybe Pfizer is 65% instead of 94%. 65% seems pretty great. Are we at any risk?

David Sacks 1:00:00 Well, I, okay, let me jump into this, 'cause I've been affected personally by it. Um, so yeah, on the last pod, I did, I g- did give the stat, which was that, um, s- a- at that point, the, the best data we had even a week ago was that the, the, the, uh, Pfizer vaccine was holding up pretty well against the, um, Delta variant. It had reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88%. That's sort of the numbers. I think, uh, on Monday, Israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of Pfizer against Delta had been reduced to 64%. Now, it, i- that's against, you know, getting symptoms and, and testing positive. It was still 93% against serious cases requiring hospitalization, but that 93% is down from, you know, 99% plus. So there has been reduced effectiveness by Delta. It's, um, it is a little bit concerning. And as if to underscore this point, someone very close to me ju- who was double-vaxxed with Pfizer just tested positive.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:58 He did test positive?

David Sacks 1:01:00 Yes.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:00 Oh.

David Sacks 1:01:02 ... so he, he woke up yesterday morning with, um-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:06 Huh.

David Sacks 1:01:06 ... c- with cold symptoms. He had, um, sore throat, runny nose, um-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:10 But he's fine?

David Sacks 1:01:11 ... and, and a slight fever, which then graduated into a headache. He went and got tested and he tested positive for COVID. So, I think he's fine.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:18 What city was he in when this happened?

David Sacks 1:01:20 LA.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:21 Okay. Let me ask a question to Friedberg. Is it not the best possible situation... I know this sounds like a stupid question, but I am the lowest IQ guy on the pod. Is it not the best situation to have the Pfizer or whatever, have this amazing... then to get a mild case of COVID and then be doubly protected? Is that in some way an ideal situation if there is no long-haul COVID?

David Friedberg 1:01:44 It's not really clear if that's, um, gonna make a difference. You know, again, like remember, um, uh, uh, acquired immunity, uh, is on a spectrum, right? So a virus can get in your nose, it starts replicating, and if you got a ton of antibodies that immediately get to your nose, it'll shut down that virus before you experience anything. If that virus gets in your nose and starts replicating and your, you've got a kind of, you know, uh, your antibodies to that specific virus, um, you know, aren't as concentrated, it's gonna take your body, uh, a little bit longer to fight off that virus, but you're still well ahead of the game is a way to think about it. And so, you know, to some extent what we're seeing most likely is this Delta variant, um, having a greater escape velocity from people that have been vaccinated than, you know, the Alpha variant or any of the other variants we've seen. Um, and so as a result, you know, people are getting, to date luckily, knock on wood, mostly mild and moderate symptoms and only a minority of people, uh, that are exposed are, are getting, um, you know, that condition. Uh, but it's being tracked really closely. I mean, like, like Zach said, in Israel they have now said that, you know, if you're, uh, vaccinated with Pfizer, double-vaxxed with Pfizer, you're now 64%, um, you know, effective and you're, you know... That, that means that if you're exposed to, to COVID, uh, there's a chance you can actually get these symptoms. But the hospitalization rate and the fatality rate is still way, way low because you have built up enough immunity, you've built up enough antibodies to have a good strong defense to keep things from getting out of control. And so knock on wood right now, we're still looking good in terms of fatality and hospitalizations, but there's certainly-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:21 Chamath?

David Friedberg 1:03:21 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:23 Wh- what do you think of this situation?

David Friedberg 1:03:24 And Chamath, are markets kind of worrying about this? Because I'm kind of w- wondering like as, as, as m- market participants see this stuff, are they trading it in a way that's like fearful and does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple of days and weeks?

David Sacks 1:03:36 I mean, I think that there's a very good chance that, um, some politicians are gonna try to use this, uh, for another shutdown in the fall. Uh, for fuck's sake.

1:03:46 I don't know. I don't see... I think you're right and I think the teachers' unions, the NEA and the AFT are already p- putting all sorts of demands on going back to school. I don't think this date... So first of all, I think we have to be intellectually honest that this is a bad data point. This is really the first bad data point that we've gotten. Until now, all the data's been good. The protection from the vaccines lasts longer, it had been completely holding up against the variants. But this data point from Israel is not a great data point. I want to see more of them, uh, more data-

David Friedberg 1:04:15 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:04:15 ... but I don't think that, um, th- this by itself won't w-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:18 Wait a second. Didn't Isr- Israel only get to like 55, 60% vaccinated?

David Sacks 1:04:23 Oh, no. They're, they're way higher than that.

1:04:24 No, no, no, no. They're way higher than that.

1:04:26 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:04:26 Half of the infections they're seeing in Israel are children that were not vaccinated. And then the other half are-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:31 That's what it is.

David Friedberg 1:04:31 ... the other half are adults. Um, and so if you look at the adult infection rate, it looks like it's something around, um, 15%, uh, of, uh, you know, of these cas- or it's i- I forgot the number, but there's some, uh, statistic that shows that it's not, uh, the majority being vaccinated, there are unvaccinated people that are, um-

David Sacks 1:04:50 Look, we're-

David Friedberg 1:04:51 ... that are the providers of this.

David Sacks 1:04:51 ... we're gonna probably, we're gonna probably need a booster and we're probably gonna be on a cocktail, but beyond that I think we need to make a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:03 Yeah, 100%. I'm done. I'm not-

David Friedberg 1:05:05 There, there, there will be-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:06 Period.

David Friedberg 1:05:06 ... booster, there will be boosters for sure.

David Sacks 1:05:08 Right.

David Friedberg 1:05:08 Like this fall. Yeah.

David Sacks 1:05:09 Yeah, exactly. And I think the, the question about this, this data is does it warrant a change in policy? And I would say not yet. You know?

Jason Calacanis 1:05:16 100% not yet. I mean, we, the whole policy idea was ICUs being filled. And if you look at the stats in the United States at the deaths, we are now at a seven-day average of under 200, I think it's 150 deaths per day. Some-

David Friedberg 1:05:30 Israel-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:30 Again, I'll ask you, Friedberg-

David Friedberg 1:05:31 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:31 ... how many of those are with COVID versus from COVID?

David Friedberg 1:05:34 Yeah, it's unclear.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:34 And-

David Friedberg 1:05:34 But like Israel hasn't had a single death in two weeks from COVID, right? And so this-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:38 Yes, so what are we talking about here?

David Friedberg 1:05:39 ... despite this increase in numbers, it's, it's still, uh, you know, pretty low-

David Sacks 1:05:42 Right, right. It's not-

David Friedberg 1:05:43 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:05:43 ... it's not what the media likes to portray, which is variants punching through, right? I mean, it's not like Delta variant is just sweeping through Israel, okay? There is a slight increase in cases and we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the US. I mean, Delta variant's gonna become the main, the dominant strain if it isn't already. Look, it's mostly sweeping through areas that have not been vaccinated, but there are now cases, I'd say mostly mild cases, of people who have been vaccinated. I mean, I think it's all the more reason why if you're an adult you should get vaccinated. Um, we really do need a- all adults barring some sort of, um, you know, highly specific immune condition that we're... you, you need to be on some sort of different treatment. But y- almost all adults in the US really should getting vaccinated, um, otherwise we're gonna have, keep having these variants, uh-

David Friedberg 1:06:34 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:06:34 ... sweep through.

David Friedberg 1:06:35 I'll tell you, uh, I, I had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday who's a research specialist and, and well-known in the space. And he pointed out that, um, the evolutionary cycle of this virus is a function of how many people are not vaccinated. Because the more bodies the virus has to hop-... the faster the- the virus kind of-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:54 Yes, the more evolution it can do.

David Friedberg 1:06:56 ... The, the, the more it evolves, right?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:57 Yes.

David Friedberg 1:06:57 And so, um, you know, uh, certain virologists and epidemiologists will model this where they will highlight kind of the epi- uh, the evolutionary rate of the virus as a function of unvaccinated people getting infected every day. Um, and so the more people that we get vaccinated, the longer the timeline it takes for the virus to evolve and get to a breakthrough variant. And so we need to accelerate and continue to push people to get vaccinated worldwide to reduce the available pool for evolutionary, um, success of the virus.

David Sacks 1:07:24 Yeah. It's, it's, it... To put it in maybe layman's terms, all these unvaccinated people are basically like a giant Petri dish-

David Friedberg 1:07:31 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:31 Exactly.

David Sacks 1:07:31 ... for the virus to keep, to keep mutating. And we do need, I think, like, a Marshall Plan to help all these other countries get vaccinated. I mean, I think we have enough vaccines in the US, but what have we done to help all these other countries? It directly benefits us if we reduce the size of that Petri dish. This Delta variant came from India. Why? There's like a billion-plus people there who, you know, for the virus to mutate on. I mean, obviously with a Petri dish that big, you're gonna get a variant. Now there's a new variant coming out of Peru which looks potentially scary. Now these are not full breakthrough variants yet, but to Friedberg's point, it's just a matter of time.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:09 You guys wanna guess the bottom two states in the country? I mean, it's just-

David Sacks 1:08:13 Mississippi.

David Friedberg 1:08:14 In terms of vaccinations, right?

Jason Calacanis 1:08:15 Mississippi, Mississippi and Alabama.

David Friedberg 1:08:16 Alabama.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:17 Exactly.

David Friedberg 1:08:17 Yep.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:17 Can you imagine Mississippi and Alabama, 33%? Come on. Get your act together.

David Friedberg 1:08:24 What is the big, um-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:24 I mean, it's gonna whip through those places and you're all gonna die. You're gonna kill your grandparents.

David Friedberg 1:08:29 Is that an evangelical movement issue? Is that-

David Sacks 1:08:32 It's, it's, it's... Well, we talked about this in the last pod. There's two groups in America who are most vaccine-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:36 Republican men.

David Sacks 1:08:37 Oh, no. Let's be more specific. It's evangelicals and African Americans. Those are the two groups who are most vaccine hesitant.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:43 You keep saying evange- neve- You keep saying evange... What is it? How do you pronounce it?

David Sacks 1:08:48 Evangelicals.

David Friedberg 1:08:50 Evangelicals.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:50 Evangelicals? Evangelicals? It's actually male Republicans. Why can't you just be like-

David Sacks 1:08:54 No, that's, that... You're not being specific enough.

Narrator 1:08:56 Oh, yeah, baby.

David Friedberg 1:08:57 Yeah. Guys, I gotta, I gotta, I, I gotta run.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:59 Love you, Friedberg. That's fun.

David Friedberg 1:09:00 Love you guys.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:00 We love you, Friedberg.

David Friedberg 1:09:01 See you later.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:01 Love you, Big Boy.

Narrator 1:09:04 Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Satterfield. I'm going all in. And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wes. Ice Queen of Quinoa. I'm going all in. Let your winners ride. Let, let your winners ride. Let your winners ride. Besties are back. Cold Turkey. That is my, uh, dog taking a shit in your driveway, Sax. Oh, man. Oh, man. My advocate actor will meet me at Blitzer. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy 'cause they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet your beak. Wet your beak. Wet your beak. Your beak. Beak. (laughs) Wet your... We need to get merch. Besties are back. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.