Welcome back to the all in podcast the number one business technology and political podcast in the world. I am your host Jay Cal Jason Calacanis and with us today, three of my besties.
You got David Friedberg cackling over there. He is your sultan of science previously known as the queen of quinoa but he sold the quinoa business made a killing in quinoa.
Also with us back from Italy back from Italy,

Shema Paliha Patia,

he's at 67% button. And he's not happy about it, but the hair looks great.
He's still got a little sea salt from the yachting. I think I'm going to try to keep my hair long.
Let's see what happens. Did you bring any of the sea salt back with you from the Mediterranean, put it in a a little bottle to spray or no no but i do have some mineral oil oh okay great and have you

showered in the last week or is it still you got the mediterranean glove every day i should show

since i've gotten back see that's the problem you were you don't have you don't have the sea to use

as a natural you know disinfectant and deodorant exfoliant exfoliant also yeah look how many buns

he's got going i know it's just tragic beginning i feel uncomfortable for your neck i mean it's like

Thank you. exfoliant exfoliant also look how many buns he's got going I know it's just tragic I feel uncomfortable for your neck I mean it's like creeping all the way up your neck looks like a prisoner we'll let your winners ride Rain I buttoned two buttons.
Back in business mode. He's in business casual mode.
He went from casual to business. Okay.
And with us, of course, the Dark Knight himself.

Yeah, the Rain Man, David Sachs.

And we have a bestie guestie for you folks.

Friend of my other pod this week in startups, Reid Hoffman is here.

And you know him as a venture capitalist board member at Microsoft.

And you were the co-founder or the founder of LinkedIn.

I don't know if you had a co-founder.

Co-founder.

Co-founder of LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. He's got his own podcast, Masters of Scale.
And he and David Sachs work together at PayPal. Reid, welcome to the program.
And give us a little story. What is your fondest memory? Or the most quirky memory? David Sachs.
And all those weirdos. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to use the word weird anymore.
I get banned on X. All of those unique personalities at PayPal.
Tell us about that moment in time. And do you remember the first time you met David Sachs? Yeah, I met David because Peter had known him from Stanford and hired him in.
And, you know, David very quickly, because he, you know, has a strong learning curve as he plays these things, kind of got the instinct of what the game we were playing with PayPal was. And it's part of the reason why I think, you know, each of the execs have had, you know, kind of key contributions to making, you know, kind of PayPal successful.
And David's was this kind of like maniacal focus on the kind of the cycle of how the product worked on eBay. And like there was just a whole bunch of stuff I learned from him.
It's part of how I track, you know, kind of, you know, people I respect is what do I learn from them. And that was one of the things that I would say I learned from David at PayPal.
That's nice. David, tell us your first memory of meeting Reid Hoffman.
Would you remember where you were? Do you remember the conversation? Yeah, I think when we met through Peter, you know, and Reed. I think Reed was on the board of Confinity back then and then joined full-time.
What were you, like 28, 27, 29? No, I mean, let's see. This would have been… I guess I would have been 27 when I first joined PayPal.
27, 28, I guess something like that. Yeah that yeah 99 so whatever that was yeah in any event i mean i'll just return the compliment you know paypal had all these existential issues where you had these larger entities trying to kill us visa mastercard ebay who else oh the lust goes on city bank yeah and uh reed was was kind of our emissary who kept all these dogs at bay and managed to, I guess, be friends with them, I guess, to some degree, even though they wanted to kill us.
And Reed was kind of in charge of making sure that these existential issues didn't blow up on us. And they didn't.
So we got pretty lucky there. It's the Will Rogers line.
It's politics is the art of

saying nice doggy while you hunt for a stick. Tell us like a moment read that is incredibly memorable to you from that PayPal era, you know, some existential moment or one of the more difficult or funny moments, late night moments that would be indicative of that era and whatever was in the water that drew all that talent to one place?

Well, part of it is that, I mean, this is, you know, among the things I was learning from Peter, was that Peter and Max recruited just a tremendous focus on, like, intense learning curves. So, you know, it was one of the things that Peter later is like, okay, I guess you have to interview for being on sports teams and so forth, because this teamwork thing does matter, but like high performers.
And it was kind of like a, like, and that was part of the reason why there was such intense, you know, kind of innovation and capability. You know, probably the most stunning memory I had at PayPal is we're all young.
We're all, first time we're kind of doing a startup that matters, kind of making this stuff happen. And we do this merger with X.com.
And pre the merger closing, Elon is saying, oh, I got got the ceo bill harris he's the best ever that's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to x.com and the merger you know and then after um the merger literally the first meeting i had with elon is bill harris a complete disaster we need to fire him right away like before we get to the first board meeting we need him fired and i'm like uh elon you need to talk to peter about this well i mean he is decisive that's for sure uh all right well let's get into we want you know we're going to go a little bit mullet here friedberg we're going to start with business and uh then maybe we had a we had a fun meeting about that topic at a place in Palo Alto that no longer exists called Antonio's Nuthouse. Yes, exactly.
Yes, the legendary Antonio's Nuthouse. And when Bill eventually did meet his demise at PayPal, it was called the Nuthouse Coup.
He got whacked at the Nuthouse? Were there pool tables in the back? You whacked him or in the boots in the front? Well, he wasn't whacked. He was whacked at a board meeting, not at the Nuthouse.
But the planning went down. Certain plans were formulated at the back of Antonio's Nuthouse.
Antonio's Nuthouse is, yeah, the most unhygienic bar in the Bay Area. And then that's a pretty low benchmark.
Let's just leave it at that. We will start with some business here, talk a little AI.
And then since two of our panelists have a passion, we'll do the party, political parties, at the end. Everybody knows that Ree was a co-founder of Inflection AI and as a general partner at Greylock and one of the founding investors also in OpenAI.
There's a good story there, I'm sure. And we just got results, Reed, from NVIDIA.
Results were good. They beat across the board.
Stock was down after hours. Analysts said probably profit-taking.
Putting that aside, we've never seen a chart like this in the history of business, I would say. Data center revenue, $26.3 billion, 87% of their revenue now.
You remember NVIDIA started obviously with video games and didn't have a major data center business. That has exploded.
Net income, $16.6 billion. Gross gross margin 75%.
And here's your chart. On a total basis, Nvidia's revenue scale up is basically unlike anything we've seen.
But if you look, their Q quarter over quarter revenue over the past couple years, things are starting to cool off significantly after that giant boom. And Bree, what's your take on NVIDIA's just incredible run here?

Is it sustainable? Things are starting to cool off significantly after that giant boom. Reeve, what's your take on NVIDIA's just incredible run here?

Is it sustainable?

Will they have competitors?

And do you think this build-out, this massive build-out we're seeing from startups to sovereigns,

you know, to Microsoft, which you're on the board of, Google, Apple, etc.,

is this sustainable and is this going to keep going?

Well, I got asked that question unsurprisingly by many public market investors over the year. Yeah.
And I said, basically told them to say, Hey, look, it's sustainable for two years, which for you guys means forever. Yeah.
Eight full quarters. Yes, exactly.
So that that's infinity, right? In terms of time. You know, NVIDIA has a very sharp, you know, kind of lead on the importance of the chips for the training clusters.
You know, they're effective on inference. But I do think that as you kind of scale the demand, there'll be a lot of inference chips coming in.
You know, I think, Chamath, you're invested in one of those. Oh, yeah.
And I think there's going to be a bunch of those kind of coming in, and the bulk of the demand will be on the Infront side. And then NVIDIA will have this challenge of, do I try to keep my prices and my margin? Or do I do what, why we like competition? Do I have to respond to the competitive market? And that I think will will play out, you know, start playing out probably in a year, two at the latest, and then kind of go.
So I think it's not sustainable. The pure heat is not sustainable.
But I think it's, you know, NVIDIA has got a very strong position. And, and, you know, I definitely, I would recommend people not be short on NVIDIA.
Yeah. So, yeah, there's growth left.
Competition is coming. And this is probably not the type of stock you would want to short at this moment in time.
Freeberg, what are your thoughts on this build out as well as the software build out that's occurring? And when do you think we're going to see some competition come into the space? I don't know if there's competition in the buildout. I think we talked about this in the past.
I don't know if you guys saw these quotes this week or recently on, we don't think about this buildout in terms of ROI. Gavin Baker in conversation on Invest Like the Best, is that the name of the podcast? Yeah.
I think referenced some conversations he's been having with the leaders of these companies regarding the build out is so important, because ultimately, if you create this, quote, digital God, the, you know, return is how many trillions. So it doesn't matter how many 10s of billions you're spending each quarter right now, you have to get there, you have to make sure you don't miss the boat.
I guess, Reid, a question for you. You're on the board of Microsoft still, right? Yes, indeed.
Has Microsoft or Satya publicly talked about how they rationalize the investing principles associated with building out AI infrastructure in the cloud? Is it ROI-based? Like, hey, in the next two years, we're going to make this much additional incremental operating profit? Or is it like, hey, we got to get this thing working? Right, right. To be more precise, is the investment driven by ROI? Or does everyone just say, this is so strategic, we just have to win it, and we'll throw all the resources we have to at this? Well, so, well, one, board members speaking for Microsoft is, you know, is forbidden.
So I'm not speaking for Microsoft, I'm just speaking for me. Right, right, right.
Two. I guess, yeah, all.
All cloud computing platform companies, what's your sense on how they're thinking about it? It's just one of the principles in the Microsoft thing is the company speaks for itself. Board members don't speak for them.
But I think Satya is the best public market CEO of our generation. I think he is stunning in kind of blending combination of strategic insight with also kind of being, you know, kind of return on capital, you know, sensible risk-taking, etc.
And so the actual thing between your guys' questions in terms of, because I can comment on how Satya thinks with this stuff, is he's both thinking about, like, it's a platform change and you have to be there for the platform change, for productivity, for cloud, et cetera. And, OK, let's rationalize the capital to when are we expecting revenue? How do we get revenue sooner to have that as a good productive cycle? How do we, you know, be not trying to, you know, just spend like drunken sailors, which is easy to do.
Right. But but to to be targeting, you know, kind of business outcomes.
And it's part of the reason why, you know, they're like, like, you know, he's very focused on what are we doing with office? What are we doing cloud? What are we doing with, you know, as opposed to like, you rarely hear him talking about AGI or never digital gods, because it's kind of the question of, I am, I am focused on this in a business sense. And I think that's kind of the way he's doing it.
But there is obviously a, you know, kind of a, it's hard to predict the future when it's novel and unknown in platforms. And it's part of the reason why you have all the hyperscalers now, you know, kind of fully engaged and intelligently engaged.
Because if you say, well, if even it's just the new platform by which, you know, kind of software, everything with a computer unit in it, whether it's a phone or a speaker or a computer or anything else, anything with a kind of a CPU or a GPU gets more intelligent, like you can't miss out on that platform. And so that's, I think, the thing that's motivating everybody.
But there's obviously, you know, how to do that smart is one of the things that, you know, everybody is, I'd say obsessing about every week. What do you think about the open source movement versus closed source? You were one of the original donators to OpenAI.
You were originally on the board. And there's a couple of ways to go with this question.
But I just want to start with, forget about the corporate structure over there. We'll get to that in a second.
But I want to talk specifically about open source. Meta is obviously far behind OpenAI, far behind Google, Microsoft.
So they went open source. When you're behind, you go open source, I guess is the idea here.
But they're making some big progress. Who do you think is going to win this ultimately? An open source provider of LLMs or proprietary closed source like open AI is? And it's confounding to say open AI is closed, but closed AI.
Yeah, look, from the very founding open AI, I was never claiming it was going to be open source. I was claiming it was going to be once safety, open access, and not differential or controlling access for that.
And I think they stayed true to that principle, which is, I think, what the genesis of the word open is there. And look, I think the key thing is there's going to be winners all over the place.
I think there's going to be winners in the open source side. And, you know, I don't know if Lama is going to win from its open source thing as much as it's just trying to say, hey, we're training these models, so we're going to, you know, put them out there because our closed system, closed loop, you know, doesn't require selling for tokens and so forth.
But there's also, you know, Mr. All and other folks who are doing competent models.
And then I think that the, but, you know, there'll be wins in different ways. So it's not like, I think, like, for example, you know, I think there's going to be a bunch of different startups, they're going to win, whether it's coding agents, or, you know, kind of very specific applications within medical or other kinds of things.
And I think they will, you know, generate big companies. And I think large companies like, you know, the hyperscalers are going to succeed as well.
Now, in the pure model competition, the question is, when do we start seeing an asymptote to scale? And my guess is, and, you know, kind of the GPT landmarks is each order of magnitude, my guess is the soonest will be GPT-6. And it may even be after that.
And that's part of what the bet that OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers are all making is that return to scale. And then that has a lot of downstream effects, because even if you say we can train smaller models to do effective things, part of what's going to be really instrumental for training those smaller models is the larger models.
So, like, even if there's a bunch of smaller models that are specifically capturing other kinds of market opportunities, which is part of what I've been doing and investing in AI since 2014, 2015.

There's going to be a set of those things that are all a whole bunch of startup opportunities. So I think that the A versus B is a good dramatic framing, but it's really on which specific opportunities because there's going to be wins and opportunities across them.
uh sorry just real quick. Do you think there's one LLM or one foundational model, Reed, that effectively does everything, like a meta model that starts to take most of the market? Or does different versions of smaller models or small agents that kind of network together end up being the best solution for specific applications and verticals? Like, how does this evolve over time? Like everyone's got this concept that there's a god model that does everything and wins.
And whoever gets the god model wins everything. But the reality of software and principles of biology would indicate that you'll see like smaller network things that are better at doing things than any one big thing.
And I'm curious to hear your point of view on the philosophy of that.

Yeah. I think the mistake that people make is they think precisely it's like the one model to rule them all.
It's like Sauron's ring. And actually, in fact, already today, like,

for example, one of the things that happens with all the model providers at Microsoft and OpenAI,

which I've seen, is sometimes sub in like GPD 3.5 as it was before to see what the

I'll see you next time. Like, for example, one of the things that happens with all the model providers at Microsoft and OpenAI, which I've seen, is sometimes sub in like GPD 3.5 as opposed to 4 to see what the answers are because there's a cost of compute.
Even as you learn and bring the cost of the compute of the larger models down, the larger models are always going to be a lot more expensive. And by the way, they're going to be more expensive kind of probably loosely on the order of magnitude.
Right. So it's like, well, it's 10x larger.
It's 10X more expensive. Totally.
And so when you're trying to say, hey, I'm trying to make business models work. Language translation, right? If I just want to do language translation, I don't need a massive model.
I just need a model that's really good at language translation. Exactly.
And so what I think you're going to see is networks of models and like kind of traffic control and escalation and all the rest. And agents are not going to be one model.
They're going to be blends of models. And that's one of the reasons why you say, well, there's actually, in fact, a lot of room for startups because it's not like we say, well, we take GPT-7 and we just serve it for everything.
It's like, well, it's going to be super expensive. And there's a whole bunch of things about like serving it more cheaply.
And like, for example, one of the really great technical papers that I love from Microsoft is, you know, all you need is textbooks. It's like you can train very specific models on kind of like high quality data, along with, by the way, the larger model helping train it, that all of a sudden you have a functional smaller model.
And, you know, the question will be a blend of these things. So I think the multi-model approach is, I think, going to be, you know, quickly universal.
What is your take on IP in this new era? We see OpenAI, and you're not on the OpenAI board anymore, right? So you're independent of that, even though you made a big donation at some point. Donation and investment.
I led the first commercial series.

Got it. So you're an investor in it and you donated to it.
Actually, let's start there. What's up with that corporate structure? How do we make sense of that? Something's a non-profit, you donated to it and then you invested in it and everybody's making money and selling and secondary at 100 billion.
How does that work in the world? So, so it's, it's a 5-1-C-3 is the governor thing. That's what started.
And, you know, when, you know, kind of Elon and Sam were starting this and said, look, we need, you know, philanthropic support. And we're trying to make sure that there is like open access to AI, which is going to be an instrumental technology.
And we've got some great technologists who want to come do this. We started as a 501c3 for doing it.
That persists, as far as I know, till today. Then one of Sam Altman's pieces of genius was that he kind of said, look, we're going to need scale capital.
And I'm trying to go out to raise, and the commercial round was $600 million. I'm trying to raise $600 million in philanthropy, and it's not working.
So I have this idea, which is the 501c3, which is doing this kind of research mission of AGI for Humanity, is also producing commercial benefits. And we can create initially an LP, which has a kind of a revenue right on the commercial things that investors can invest in.
And, you know, you know, Reid, it'd be really helpful if you led this, because, you know, and I was like, well, but you don't have a go to market plan, you don't have a product plan, you know, business plan. Yeah, but, you know, like, we, we need to show that we're actually serious with the business.
And I said, Alright, fine, I will, I will lead it for my foundation. You know, because even though none of these things we like to see as investors were there.
But I was like, Look, okay, I'll lead as investment, I'll manage it as an investment, but I'll do as an investment for my foundation, in order to do this. And, and what, you know, So, you know,.
And that was kind of as we were beginning to get into, like kind of, we hadn't seen anything. They were still doing Dota and robot hands and a bunch of those.
So it was like, we're betting on the scale thesis of generating something magical. And so we hadn't seen GBD-3 yet.
And of course, once that started coming, then it was like, well, we need a bunch more capital. Let's do a strategic connection and let's talk to all the hyperscalers and let's work out a deal by which one of them invests in us.
And then the Microsoft OpenAI deal came together with converting the LP into a subsidiary of the nonprofit, kind of saying, look, there's all kinds of benefits that both OpenAI and Microsoft can get from a business deal. And so that's what's led to, you know, the structure, you know, that I was familiar with before I left the board.
Do you, what did you think of Elon's first lawsuit? And then he dropped it and then he refiled.

Where do you think he's coming from?

Well, what is the, you know, I'm not very charitable about those lawsuits.

You know, I would like to be because, you know, Elon's one of the entrepreneurial heroes of our time and generation.

But I think it's the,

I think it's, you know, frankly, I think probably the most charitable thing to say is sour grapes.

Because, you know, for example, I know Sam offered him as much of the investment round as he wanted,

right? Like he could have done the whole thing, he could have let it, you know, it was kind of like,

hey, look, we still love you. And he was like, no, it's not a company that I control.
It's going to fail. So I'm not interested in investing.
And I was like, OK. Right.
And so now you're getting these lawsuits that are like, you know, like I was misled. And it was like you were offered everything at every opportunity other than converting OpenAI into a company that you completely owned.
And so, you know, I think it's without basis, without merit.

But why do you think he would have dropped it and then refiled?

Where do you think that comes from?

Is there new information, do you think?

I think it was a jurisdiction, Jamal.

Oh, that makes sense.

I didn't track that.

But Reid, I mean, Elon put in the first, what, $44 million,

and he doesn't have any shares.

Yeah.

I, by the way, put in $10 million at the same time, and he doesn't have any shares. Yeah.
I, by the way, I put in 10 million at the same time and I don't have any shares from those 10 million. But do you think that he kind of got screwed because he doesn't have any shares? I mean, at the time he put in the 44 million, it was never going to be a for-profit.
Now it's a for-profit. A lot of people are profiting, you know, assuming the paper mark ends up being realized.
So he doesn't own anything. I mean, if you were the seed investor and put up 44 million in something, and then everyone's making money and you don't have any shares, forget about the legal technicalities.
Wouldn't you have a feeling of being screwed? Well, look, I can understand the emotion of that, but like, it's not like Elon short of money, right? And so if you go, look, I'd like to have shares like I did invest in the other thing. I didn't get any shares for the 10 million that I put in.
And by the way, it's not just legal technicalities. It's actually really important that you're not doing private enrichment off philanthropic donations.
And so, you know, it's it's. But isn't that what's happened? No, from a viewpoint of they're held separate, right?

And so, you you know and the 501c3 continues to to control the um you know kind of control the kind of the the the mission and destiny and so forth and so the question about its mission is still is still things, and you're essentially investing in that mission.

And you recruited people on that mission. And so I think that the – I think, like I said, sour grapes.
Okay. So let's get into some political stuff.
First, I want to get the IP question. Then I want to talk about Lena Kahn.
So how do you think about IP in this, you know, briefly in this new world, opening eye and New York Times can't come to terms. New York Times caught them red handed cookie jar, according to their lawsuit, having indexed a ton of their content.
It's pretty crystal clear that their content's behind a paywall. And that's how they make money.
I also subscribe to ChatGPT. I give them 20 bucks a month, maybe 30 bucks a month for every employee in my firm.
And I get New York Times content from there all the time. I will ask it what is the wire cut I think is the best choice in chat GPT, I get that.
And then I get the answer. And I don't need my New York Times subscription.
I don't visit the New York Times anymore. Feels pretty clear cut to me.
But how do you think about IP? Should an LLM be able to ingest whatever they please, or should they be required to get permission in advance and pay a royalty to content creators, Reid Hoffman? Well, as a content creator, too. Look, I think that it tends to be a little bit of a, we do want content creators to benefit economically from the work.
It's part of the reason why we have copyright. It's part of the reason why we have payrolls, you know, other kinds of things that I think are very important.
And I think it's a complicated thing that needs to be sorted out. Now, that being said, I think we also want to say that we can train these models like, you know, like training is like reading and like reading things is, you know, like when something's available to be read and you've engaged in the right economic thing for reading it.
I think that's a kind of a reasonable fair use thing. Now, maybe we update the terms of service.
Maybe we update, you know, copyright law or things to say, OK, that now changes. You know, I think we don't want to forbid changes in the future.
This is one of the problems we get. It blocks innovation when we do that.
It blocks innovation in Hollywood. It blocks innovation in music.
It blocks innovation. So you want to allow some new changing landscape.
And I think this is a changing landscape that arguably is reading. So I think that both of those things are true in terms of what do we want to sort through.
I think that one of the reasons why this is kind of like, you know, over like when I give advice to, you know, various news organizations and say, look, don't try to hold out for money on the training side of things, because, you know, we're going to create synthetic data. We're going to do all kinds of other things that are going to mean that no one's particular data is really going to matter.
What you should be is on freshness, on brand, on other things, and we should work out ongoing, sustaining economic arrangements like that. That would be my two cents, you know, suggestion for it.
And I do think we want to design an ecosystem that includes that. And, you know, when I was involved in those conversations at OpenAI, they agreed with that.
Microsoft certainly agrees with that in terms of, you know, how do we make sure that economics are fairly apportioned and so forth for, you know, what we're doing for, you know, this phase of, you know, and ongoing, but like, you know, there's a current new technological wave that's coming and how do you do that? So, you know, that's a messy answer, but unfortunately, it's a messy subject. It's a pretty messy subject, yeah.
Before we move to politics, I just wanted to actually ask you about inflection. So is it still running? Yeah.
And so what basically happened? There was some transfer payment from Microsoft and a couple of the people. And then it seems like whatever that deal was, a little bit seems to have been copied by Google when they did this character AI thing.
So just trying to get a sense from you, are these deals to structurally avoid FTC scrutiny in terms of the building blocks of it? Or how, how did you think about it? And what is the, what is the pattern and the trend on these things? Well, the thing I think that's happened was, you know, very early days, you had things like, you know, we're doing an agent. And if Pi had launched before ChatGPT, it'd probably be in a different circumstance.

But like ChatGPT got the, oh, my God.

Pi is the inflection AI product.

Pi is the inflection agent, yeah.

And so by the time that Pi, we got the trend right and the interest of the market right, but we got the timing, you know, too late happens with startups. So it's like, OK, we need to pivot.
We need to pivot from a B2C model to a B2B. And we have a unique model, but let's sell that to other people who already have audiences because we're not going to be able to easily grow our audience.
And then, you know, once we had that as a conversation, there were employees like, well, we want to do the direct agent thing.

And that's what we want to do. And we will go somewhere in order to do that.
And we're like, OK, how do we fund this and how do we make that work and how do we make it work for investors? And we said, hey, there's a deal structure that could work, which is, you know, with a, you know, kind of outside party, you can get paid enough in a non-exclusive IP license and an ability to selectively hire folks. and then you can dividend some of that out to investors.

So investors, you know, get back a, you know, kind of a one X, and then kind of a ongoing position. So, you know, as investors, it's great to have a kind of optionality on its B2B business in order to play that out.
And this is a structure that works for everybody in this pivot to B2B. And that's essentially the structure that we did.
I see. Great pivot, Chamath, into Lena Kahn.
I think one of the things that is quite paradoxical about your relationship with David Sachs is you both agree on something in politics, which is Lena Kahn and her concepts around future competition and maybe how she's running this issue for the United States is leading to basically a freeze on the market. We're seeing weird deal structures like some of the ones we're talking about here that could have just been acquisitions.
And I'm curious your thoughts on what she, you know, this sort of breakup of Google. Now we're seeing that emerge at the same time that they're facing the biggest existential crisis of their career, which is language models competing with them.
And I mean, I would say half of my Google searches have already moved to, you know, you know, chat GPT like services. So what's your take on Lena Kahn's approach to M&A? And what impact if it's continued and sustained? Will that have on capital allocation? Because I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market, but it seems to be completely gone.
Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen so what's your take so it was funny because i kind of made an off the cuff you know kind of remark about lena khan which turned into a whole news cycle i saw you on cnn where they were like are you telling kamala and biden what they have to do and i'm like no because i don't believe in that kind of corruption of politics.

The only way she's going to learn about it is she asked me or she watched this television show. And so she's done a good job on the price cartels.
She did a good job on the anti-competes, both of which I think are very good for competitive markets. The problem is I think she has a misunderstanding of these large tech companies.
And, for example, on the M&A thing, you know, her theory is you got to prevent the aggregation of power. So you got to, you got to fight every acquisition of note.
And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment because it's like, okay, part of the returns is if I'm going to invest in something that might be competing with, you know,

one or more of the large tech companies, I need to have acquisition exits as part of being able to

fund enough capital to really make that acquisition, you know, that investment possible

work. Because if it doesn't work, I want to be able to at least recover my capital by an investment.

So the right way to look at it is, is there competition amongst the top tech companies?

because if one of them is like squashing

Thank you. return, recover my capital by an investment.
So the right way to look at it is, is there competition amongst the top tech companies? Because, you know, if one of them is like squashing all the other ones, that's a problem. If we're five large tech companies heading to three, then I'm much more sympathetic to our point of view.
But we're actually five heading to 10, right? Or five to seven heading to 12. Because like NVIDIA is now in the mix and others, I think, you know now over 500 billion yeah so yes and so you have this ability so the thing is is they're competing on the acquisitions just like they're competing in the micro in the marketplace and if you're trying to quell the whole thing because your theory is like like they should just you know the startup should just be able to grow up to compete that actually means that those will never get the capital that they need in order to do that, which means you're actually having the opposite of your intent, right? What you're doing is you're actually making there be less competition because, you know, capitalists can't say, if I'm going to put $100 million, $500 million, a billion dollars into this company, I at least have a chance of getting my capital back, or I can possibly create a competitor.
And that's, that's the reason I was speaking out against it as an expert. It was interesting.
I saw you and it was a Jay taper tapper who kind of grilled you on I thought you did an exceptional job of just saying, Listen, I made a donation. This is how I feel about it.
But obviously, he's going to do what she wants to do. And that's just how politics works.
So I thought that was actually pretty well done. And I actually appreciate you fighting for more M&A because it would be great for the industry.
Zach, you want to throw up a political topic here? You want me to? Just to stick on Lena Khan for a second. So I agree that her approach has been overly broad and has had a chilling effect on M&A.
And so, Jcal, like you said, we've lost those base hit acquisitions that I think are important to the venture capital market that help new startups get funded. I mean, if the returns on risk capital go down, there's going to be less of it.
That means there'll be less startup innovation. So I agree with Reid on that.
The area where I'm not sure we agree is, and then where I do agree with Lena Kahn is I do think the big tech companies have too much power. I do think that they are monopolies or have monopolies.
And I do think they need to be controlled. I just think that, you know, I wouldn't prevent them from doing any M&A whatsoever.
I'm curious if Reid like agrees that, that the big tech companies have too much power or agrees with Lena Kahn on that.

And I guess specifically, do you think any big tech companies should be broken up?

If so, which ones?

I mean, I would actually entertain that idea of deconglomerating or breaking up some of these big tech companies.

Do you agree that big tech is too much power or not?

I think it's TBD. But the reason I'd take the opposite point of view would say no.

The thesis for no is that they are very strong American companies that get, in most cases,

over half their revenue from overseas. They create technology platforms that beneficially differentiate the US versus, you know, many other countries in kind of global circumstances like the internet and other kinds of things.
I think that they are competing ferociously with each other. I mean, you know, Jason just mentioned that, you know, it's kind of like, look, we've already got like chat GPT competing with Google search, and other kinds of things.
And I think it's competitive pressure, right? This is, I think, what capitalism is about is competitive pressure, that essentially creates the thing. And that's the reason why like, if it's, if we were shrinking, like it was Google, Uber Alice, or I actually, frankly, think that the, you know, everyone likes to talk about, you know, Google,

you're like, I think that the prime candidate

is likely to be, and I'm speaking as an individual

and as a venture capitalist here,

is Apple with the App Store, right?

Okay, so wait, so that brings up an interesting point.

One of the things we've talked about in this pod

is that we shouldn't shut down M&A,

but the FTC should limit

anti-competitive tactics

by these big tech companies.

Apple, really good example

because they drive everything

through the app store.

You're not allowed to do side loading.

They want to take,

what is a 30% piece of any sales.

You're not even allowed to have a link

inside an application to drive

the user to the website. Yeah, you're up now.
Would you at least want to crack down on those anti-competitive tactics? Yeah, no, for sure. And look, especially when we all know it's nonsense.
It's like, look, you could just give the consumers the option to allow sideloading. You could just say, it's technically very simple to do.
And you could say, look, we don't want you to sideload because we view it to be safety and security, but we're giving you the option, right? Fine, give people the option, right? Reid, were you surprised that then the first target where there was like some successful antitrust pushback was against Google versus Apple? And then second, do you think that there's a chance, like a meaningful chance that the government tries to break Google up? Or do you think it looks something maybe more similar to what happened to Microsoft? So I think in mandating breakups, you know, like I think is a, look, I think we should operate through competitive networks and competitive ecosystems. I think it's part of what's smart about capitalism.
And I think mandating breakups is only when essentially capitalism is failing on specific things. You want to do the least the least you can to get back to competitive networks in terms of how you're operating.
And so, you know, you say, hey, look, iOS has this kind of monopoly. And you say, there's no side loading.
You have to use App Store. You have to use the payment mechanism, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
It's like, well, that quells a ton of startup innovation. We all know this as investors, because we look at anyone who's prospectively doing a business like this and say, no chance.
It's, you know, you're not going to succeed. And so then you then you say, well, what's the least thing that we can do? Right.
And, you know, a classic antitrust, like, well, let's break off the app store from Apple as well. Right.
Unclear that that would really fully work. You know, that's like socialism mandating how the thing should work.
Let's try to get it so that we allow competition to determine these things. And like, for example, saying, hey, like you have to allow consumers the option of sideloading.
You have to allow consumers the option of installing an alternative app store. Right.
Like that kind of stuff. I think, you know, what's the minimal stuff? I think that's the kind of intervention we want to have, because I think there's all kinds of benefits that come from.
But why do you think that the case against Apple has made less progress than the case against Google? I think it's kind of, it's less politically easy, right? Like, it's kind of like everybody loves their iOS phone and, you know, there's less of a blue and red, you know, kind of combo tackle where, you know, the blue feet, people are like,

hate big companies. Apple's less offensive, basically.
Yes. Yes.
More stylish. They're

prettier. I kind of like your approach, though, with the app store.
If you were to think of least

harm to the ecosystem, Epic Games has their own app store for games. They charge 88%.
They give,

I'm sorry, they give developers 88%. They only take 12.
And forcing Apple to allow

Thank you. own app store for games, they charge 88%.
They give they give eight, I'm sorry, they give developers 88%. They only take 12.
And forcing Apple to allow, you know, a startup to do an app store would solve the entire problem. And it seems like that's where it's going to go.
And all five of us would invest instantly in an app store that would say, 0% take rate, and all advertising based what a great idea that would be yeah read i have a question a few weeks ago you said something to the effect very publicly that you had had a one hour or multi-hour lunch with biden and he just seemed like super on his game and then he was kind of dumped was that just a moment in time where he was really great with you? Or how do you reconcile that with Pelosi and all of these other folks and what happened to Biden? Well, like most of us, I was pretty dismayed by the debate performance. Because when I talked to him, like detailed, thoughtful analysis with no notes on Gaza questions about AI, you know, and what kinds of things, you know, what did I think about what the progress, you know, the thing they were doing with the voluntary commitments, the executive order, and, you know, what kinds of things should happen in the future and all that kind of stuff being on the game.
A little slower, right, than, you know, a 50-year-old would be, but, you know, like, cogent and totally worth it. And then you kind of looked at the debate, and went, oh, my gosh, this is a disaster.
And so it was like, look, is the debate a one-off thing? Were you ill? You know, like, trying to reconcile the two and, you know, spent a little bit of time trying to figure that out to to what was going on, because it was it was the first time I'd seen something like that. And, you know, you know, I don't you know, I'm not enough of a D.C.
insider to know exactly what the set of conclusions were other than I, you know, I plotted, you know, Biden for having the kind of integrity to go, look, I'm maybe I'm ill, maybe I'm old, maybe I'm slower. But, you know, the it's about the country more than it's about me, because I'm, you know, not, you know, it's, it's important to be about the country, not about yourself.
I'll step aside. And ultimately, his decision, there's nothing that anyone could force Pelosi couldn't force it anyone else.
It's ultimately his decision, he came to that decision. So, you know, I applaud that.
Do you think that they should have run an open primary after that? And would Kamala have won an open primary? Well, it's hard to know. I mean, I think they were definitely leaning towards an open primary and then all the people who would be the most natural contenders all endorsed Kamala.
So, and by the way, you say, well, kind of democratic process. It was like, well, there was a democratic process that picked the Biden-Harris ticket,

which turned into the Harris-Waltz ticket. And so that's not anti-democratic.
But I think if you look at the sequence of events, it was kind of like, well, you know, we're going to sort out, you know, what we're going to do. And then, you know, all of the key folks, you know, Shapiro and Whitmer and everyone else all endorsed Kamala.
I was like, okay, let's just, let's get back to, you know, kind of the choice of two candidates. And so I, you know.
Do you feel the voters felt, Reid, do you think the voters felt left out? The Democratic voters? Well, I mean, from post-fact, it seems not, right? With the level of kind of energy and all the rest, it seems that, you know, like with the pure polling and kind of level energy and kind of what's going on. They're happy with what they got.
Yeah, they're happy with what they got. I would have liked to have that speed run.
Do you think it sets a bad precedent that there were these back room conversations? Obviously, the staff of Whitmer, Moore, Shapiro, their office speaks with Democratic Party leadership, speak with big donors. And there was effectively a coalescing that took place over a period of time that said, we should all stand behind and endorse one person instead of infighting and creating a split in the party.
And does that not set a bad precedent that there is a small group of people in either party that in a primary process effectively get to nominate their candidate, get their candidate to become the nominee? And therefore, there's only two people for the country to choose from. And as we have seen recently with RFK Jr.
and the lawsuits against him, in being on the ballot in different states, it makes it very difficult, maybe for the people to have their choice. And is that a bad way for democracy to work? And I just love your philosophical view on this.
I'm like, what's the best way for democracy in the United States to work? So for the president, for the president, yes, we do live in a republic. All right.
And there, there is various, like, you know, some people have much more influence than others, whether it's media platforms, whether it's, you know, economics and ability to spend, whether it's, you know, a history and a brand and, and, and other things. And so, you know, this melee and kind of, you know, whole integration set of things.
Now, ultimately, you know, voters are going to decide in November, right? So, you know, people do have a, you know, and I think that staying to our democratic process is what's really key. Like, you know, people go on the polls, you know, I think we should want to live in a country where everyone does, you know, everyone who is, who is legally allowed to vote does vote.
And I think that that's, you know, ultimately a good thing. Now, you know, are there things that I would like to change? Sure, I'd like to change.
I'd like to have ranked choice voting. You know, I'd like to have open primaries.
There's a set of things like, like, actually, my principal frustration in all of this stuff is, you know, what's what's one of the fundamental things the two parties agree on that that that that shouldn't be is that there should be only two parties. Right.
And I think that's I think that's something you you need to fix and you can't fix it. But unfortunately, I think with independent candidates, because the whole system is really set up for, you know, kind of two parties and independent candidates are almost always spoilers one way or the other.
I mean, like on the RFK stuff, I understand there was a bunch of Democrats who were trying to, you know, prevent him from getting on the ballot. I actually prefer him on the ballot because I actually think his his his anti-vax stance, you know, really fit very well with with Trump.
And so I think he was going to take more from trump do you want to address that reed because i think there was a rumor that you were funding some of these lawsuits to keep him off the ballot or whatever like have you spent any money to try to impact rfk one way or the other i wouldn't be surprised if we look at all the money that goes to all the different organizations if organization x kind of had some kind of ballot thing my my voice instruction was always like no no don't do that that's anti-democratic but you know you can't control everything just like you invest in a company and ceo sometimes the dumb ass that you right can't do anything about because you give you give money you give money to to folks that then execute their own strategy so you can't control on the ground tactics right yeah so there's that happens that you're like no don't do that right well okay that's a good um that's a good segue because let's talk about the five cases against trump there are five lawsuits jay cal i don't want can we just stay on this talk for a second i think this is important Okay, so in Michigan and Wisconsin, you had Democratic groups.

They f***ed. lawsuits.
Hold on, J. Cal, can we just stay on this topic for a second? I think this is important.
Sure, of course you can. Yeah.
Go ahead. Okay.
So in Michigan and Wisconsin, you had Democratic groups, they fought RFK Jr.'s bid to get on the ballot. Okay, they failed.
Now he wants to get off the ballot, but they won't take him off now that they think that his presence hurts Trump. And at the same time, Michigan's trying to remove Cornel West and Wisconsin's trying to remove Jill Stein.
So I'm curious, do you think there's any principle on display here besides naked partisan hackery? I mean, basically, the Democrats fought having third parties on the ballot when they thought it would hurt Biden. And now they want to keep them on the ballot when they think it's going to hurt Trump, except for those third party candidates who they still think will hurt Harris.
So is there any principle here or is this just partisan hackery? I think it's, you know, I frankly, you know, think that everyone who follows the legal process to get on the ballot should be on the ballot. And, you know, we should follow the legal process.

I'm very much of a legal process kind of person. What I'm opposed to is like, you know, calling Raffensperger and asking for 11,000 votes.
Right. Which is not legal.
Right. So.
So, like, yeah, sure. Is that is that bad? And do I advocate against that? The answer is absolutely yes.
But it's, you know, follow the legal process. But if the Secretary of State of Colorado throws Trump off the ballot, for example, is that legal process if it's then overruled by the Supreme Court? Or can we just say, substantively, that states shouldn't be removing candidates from the ballot? That's anti-democratic.
Well, but you want them to remove RFK from the ballot. No, that's not what I said.
Oh, okay.

I'm just trying to figure out.

No, no, no.

The rule is that, well, first of all, I don't think that Democratic groups should be suing

RFK to keep him off the ballot.

And that's what he said is that Democratic groups were suing to keep him off the ballot

and they were trying to exhaust his resources so he couldn't mount an effective campaign.

And some of those groups you funded, right? So maybe you didn't know what they were doing. But in any event, I consider that to be anti-democratic.
RFK is now trying to remove his name from the ballot. I think as a candidate, you're allowed to do that.
And those same groups that once fought to keep him off the ballot are trying to keep his name on the ballot. Because now they perceive, yeah, because now they perceive the political calculation to be a little different so i'm like so i don't see any of this as being democratic this to me is just partisan hackery isn't it so can't you agree with that look yes fundamentally from a viewpoint of like look for example my my direct actions and yes there was you fund a whole bunch of different groups and you have different groups doing different things but you funded funded them to do this thing that you were thinking of and things happen.
It's just like companies. You know, my thing was actually, in fact, making people aware of of RFK's anti-vax, you know, statement, his anti-science stuff, because I thought that would be relevant in the polls in November.
That that was the actual strategy that that I believe. And I think that would differentially hit Trump more.
And so therefore, it would be a spoiler, right, as these independents are. I have no problem with drawing attention to issues, but I do think fundamentally it's anti-democratic to sue third party candidates to the point where they can't be on the ballot.
Okay, let me ask you directly, Cornel West. There's an effort right now to remove Cornel West from the ballot in Michigan.
Do you support that or would you oppose that? I mean, is that democracy? By default, I would oppose it. I don't know any of the details.
Okay, fair enough. Reid, I have a question for you.
It's more of a statement, actually. Maybe I'd just love to get your reaction.
One of the most divisive issues that we have right now is people's position on October 7th, Israel-Palestine. There is a sense that there's a growing kind of like virulent strain of anti-Semitism in America.
A lot of people point to the extreme left as where that's really gestating. There was thoughts that Josh Shapiro would have been an exceptional candidate, but one of the large reasons why he was not really meaningfully considered was his religion.
I just want you to comment on the broad issue and whether you see it in the Democratic Party, whether you see it in the Republican Party, whether you see it at all.

Just give us a sense of where we stand culturally on this issue.

Well, so like I know Josh Shapiro, I think he's great.

You know, I've had I've broken bread with him and, you know, he was meaningfully considered.

You know, I think that the you know, I think we should be so lucky that he would, you know, run for presidency someday, some year. You know, I actually didn't know Walt at all.
And, you know, was initially kind of surprised because, you know, I was like, oh, I thought it was probably going to be Shapiro. And I was like, well, you know, I think it was, you know, probably a close call down to those two.
And, and it looks like, you know, you know, in making decisions, I think, you know, Harris, you know, made a good decision with Waltz. So, you know, I think it's a, you know, now on the, on the anti-Semitism topic, I do worry that, you know, broadly, we're seeing, you know, kind of more rise of anti-Semitism.
And that's extremely important to fight, you know, because I think and I think there are people in the, you know, it's a weirdly like there's some lefties who are doing it and there's some righties who are doing it. It's both a blue and a red issue in different shape.
And I think it's very important that we, you know, we stand against that as a country. And so, you know, I've been, you know, kind of mostly just trying to say, hey, look, we've got to be anti-racism, anti-Semitism and also anti-genocide.
And we've got to figure that out. What do you think of Kamala's handling of that issue in her speech? She basically seemed to, I don't know, say both sides it, but she said, hey, you can believe that the people of Gaza should be treated more humanely and that, you know, Israel has a right to defend herself.
What did you think of her handling of that? I think that's rational, right? Like you should be anti-genocide, both of Palestinians and of Jews, right? And like, it's obviously a very, very thorny topic. Yes.
Right. So I think, you know, saying that I'm going to try to protect civilians on both sides, anti-genocide, I think that's a human caring place to be looking out for people.
Reid, do you think that generally speaking, Marxist socialist principles are taking a firmer hold on the Democratic Party? And kind of those principles are starting to showcase not just in the cultural phenomena that Chamath is referencing, but also in some of the policy making that's going on. And concepts of equity rooted in concepts of social justice ultimately rooted in marxist principles emerging from the industrial revolution what about price fix so so as an example the price gouging you know price caps on food proposal the concept of a wealth tax not necessarily the unrealized capital gains tax but separately a tax on wealth, all of these concepts of the degradation of power structure through policy.
And in part, some have argued that the anti-Semitism arises from these principles and that the Jews are considered a privileged and powerful cultural class. Is that not being observed? Do you not think that there's some tendencies that are emerging in the Democratic Party and may be influenced by a louder far left and that far left is becoming more loud and better represented in the party? Look, I think we should speak out against both the far left and the far right.
I think it's important to do both. And so, you know, since, you know, I'm playing the Democrat here on this conversation, I'll ask you guys to play the, or especially Sachs, play the Republican and speak out against the far right too.
but the short answer is yes there are amongst the extreme

left that's not everybody in the Democratic Party

but the extreme left there is

some like

misunderstandings about

why it's important to do defend you know kind of anti-genocides like from the river to the sea it's like yeah that's a genocidal statement don't use that one right you understand what language you're using and and to be like look the you know we've had a great genocidal moment with you know world war ii and we're still trying to recover from it. Two, you know, questions be like, look, we've had a great genocidal moment with World War II, and we're still trying to recover from it, to questions around what I think is a foolish wealth tax, even though it's, by the way, narrow to like 80%.
And then on the price gouging stuff, one of the things is I started scratching at it. It was interesting.
I think think this week Kroger said, yes, we did actually artificially raise prices to profit from the pandemic. And, you know, and yeah, you should stop price gouging.
It's not quite the same thing as price capping. And apparently there's laws that affect even in Florida, right, or in Texas, where some of, you know, you guys are living.
So, like, it's kind of, you know, it's like, okay, I need to understand this issue in more depth, but I don't think it's as simplistic as the political headlines are having it. Well, but the reason why Kamala Harris proposed the price fixing proposal, price gouging, whatever you want to call it, was in response to inflation.
In other words, we've had 20% erosion and purchasing power over the last four years. Harris needs a response to that.
So she came forward with this new economic proposal. So it's in that context this came up.
This wasn't some proposal by the far left of the party, unless you consider Kamala Harris to be far left. I actually do.
But okay, fair enough. But my point is just, this is her proposal.
And it's in response to inflation. I mean, you don't, you understand what causes inflation, right?

It's like the government printing too much money.

It's not greedy corporations

raising their prices too much.

I mean, do you agree with that?

Look, I agree that you have to have good monetary policy,

and so I think we probably agree on that.

And I think some printing of money

is part of the normal functioning economy,

but too much is bad.

And I don't think, look, I think price,

look, part of the reason why

we just talked about antitrust stuff earlier

Thank you. of the normal functioning economy, but too much is bad.
And I don't think, look, I think price, look, part of the reason why we just talked about antitrust stuff earlier, you do have to look at places where there's a possibility of kind of commanding stuff from your privileged position. We all agree that monopolies have to be controlled.
No debate there, but that's not what's caused the inflation, right? Because we've had inflation of commodities, not just monopoly products, but commodities like just food staples, eggs, chicken, stuff like that. Driven by fuel and labor and all the other inflationary underpinnings of those markets.

And I think we tried to highlight that.

I don't know if you saw Elizabeth Warren's interview on CNBC where she got taken apart because she made some claims about profiteering by Kraft Heinz. And the CNBC anchors pointed out, you're actually incorrect.
Kraft Heinz has seen a reduction in profit over this period of time. And so like there were factual inaccuracies in these belief systems.
But you know, for me, it feels a lot like the government setting prices in free markets is one of those steps towards socialist principles that worry me the most. Yeah.
And look, I generally speaking, as I was saying earlier, I'm like, like, make sure the network sets sorts it out versus, you know, centralized control. Totally.
Totally. So so it's kind of like you have to look at is there a place where you're like going, OK, that's the reason I like focused, her words were price gouging.
And if you're focused on the kind of gouging side of it is like, oh, there might be a market inefficiency that you're essentially correcting. Then that's, I think, the same kind of thing we were talking about with like the FTC and the Apple App Store and so forth.
If it's like, I'm just going to set a fixed price on eggs, right? That's a bad idea.

And by the way, there's bad ideas, like the wealth tax thing that I disagree with. Her economic thing also had housing, which I think is a good kind of thing to kind of lower costs for Americans and kind of make that kind of stable work.
Like, I think she's been good on immigration. I think the's the the Lankford cinema bill which was from you know the the the Republican side was something they were fully prepared to endorse and you know Trump killed it because he wanted to campaign on it it's like look we care about the actual running in the country and so you look I think there's a bunch of good things but if you said do I defend price capping the answer is not independent principle by itself.
And by the way, are there people lefties? Like, you know, a lot of what Elizabeth Warren says about capitalism, I disagree with, right? I mean, I could disagree with you on the border. I think, you know, Kamala Harris used to be considered the border czar that's gotten scrubbed.
I don't think she's done a great job on that. But whatever that I want to go back to issues that affect Silicon Valley, 25% unrealized gains tax uh it seems like most of silicon valley almost all of it is either disagrees with this or is up in arms about this i think jacal you would you said that this is disqualifying for me for sure yeah so i mean do you agree that a large unrealized gains tax 25 would be a disaster for silicon Valley and the whole startup ecosystem ecosystem? Or I mean, how do you come down on that? Well, as I understand it, on that taxes that's proposed is you have to have 80% of your net worth liquid.
Yeah, if 80% or more is illiquid, then no, you get to defer the tax, but there's a penalty.

Yeah, you get to defer the tax, but there's a penalty.

That's right.

Look, I think it's definitely

a quelling impact,

and it's definitely stupid,

and definitely shouldn't happen.

Okay.

You know, so it's stupid.

I think we got your position on it.

It's stupid.

Yeah.

I want to finish.

We all agree on that,

but then why isn't it disqualifying

the way that J. Cal says?

Are we just supposed to hope that Kamala Harris doesn't do what she is saying she's going to do? Yeah, I'll tell you why. I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats have realized that there's actually very little difference on a lot of the major things that they actually talk about.
So what they're both being forced to do is realize that because the centrality of a bunch of the things they say are the same they each have to go to their flanks to get the n plus one vote and so kamala goes to the left and spouts all this stuff that seems so exist or socialist or communist because she has to get those people to vote for her ultimately Ultimately, I think what ends up happening is most of the stuff in the middle has a decent chance of happening. The stuff at the fringes, I think they get put up, sacks almost as like a sacrificial lamb.
A good example, I think, is like all of this stuff that's happening with the student loan reform. A half a trillion dollar plan, it gets shot down by the Supreme Court.
This new plan, another hundred billion dollars, not even being heard yet by the Supreme Court. So I think they know this.
I mean, it's not like the Biden administration is dumb. The Trump administration is not dumb either.
So I think what they're doing is- Yeah, I mean, deporting 10 million people would be an example on the right, and taking away a woman's right to choose would be the other one. Yeah, and by the way- But you keep bringing that up but trump has said that he would veto he would not support a national ban oh no but i'm talking about already doing it he already he already overturned movie way i'm talking about that yeah and by the way just returning the issue to the states it's not outlawing abortion and by the way at the state level in austin at the state level texas well but that's they can't make a choice here they have not had ballot initiative there just about everywhere there's been a ballot initiative the pro-choice forces have won and besides that's a state issue now jacal not federal yeah no it's a state issue and trump succeeded in taking away a woman's right to choose in texas but one thing by the way look in the spirit of the all-in podcast i wanted to be clear about like there's there's there's stuff on the on the dems and some of their economic policy for the far left people that you know kind of you know they're advocating for that i'm opposed to you know sacks i'd love to hear from you what parts of trump's thing you're opposed to there we go well look i mean i have been consistent on this pod for years that i thought that the let's's call it the extreme pro-life side was not good for the Republican Party, and I've been opposed to it.
I don't think it's what J. Cal says.
I think that overturning Roe v. Wade did not abolish abortion.
It basically returned the issue to the states. And if you look at the referenda that have happened, they've pretty much all gone the pro-choice direction.
So I think that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has actually allowed the country to sort of sort out that issue, although it's not completely sorted out.
But look, I would not support a national abortion. I would not support refederalizing the issue.
I think there's a lot of issues about war and peace where I do not support the, you could say, the establishment neocon strand within the party.

I do not support the, you could say the establishment neoconstrand within the party. I do not support all these interventions.
I do not support these forever wars. And there is a big debate in the party about that.
Now, one of the reasons why at the end of the day, I support Trump is I know this will strike some people as counterintuitive, but I think he is the moderate within the Republican

Party. He's a moderate on abortion.
I know, J. Cal, you're still bitter about that extreme court case.
However, he's been very, very clear that he will not support national abortion ban. Moreover, he took the abortion language out of the Republican platform.
I think he's the moderate on issues of war.

He was the first Republican candidate

to run opposing Bush's forever wars. So I give him credit on those things.
On style, he may not come across as a moderate, but those are style points. I think on issues, he is the moderate.
The issue I have with Kamala Harris is I don't think she's a moderate. So know.
So like just to take this 25 percent unrealized gains tax first, when this issue came up, we were assured, well, she doesn't really believe that, even though it was in the Democratic platform and it was in the Biden-Harris budget. Then people said, well, maybe it's part of her platform, but it's not a priority for her.
and we just had one of her like top economic advisors come out on i think it was cnbc

defending it and her campaign confirmed that she supports it. So now the argument has become, well, she supports it.
It is really part of the platform. She would do it if she could, but she's not going to be able to do it.
I just don't think that's a ringing endorsement of a candidate. I don't think you want to support a candidate because they're not going to be able to do what they really want to do.
Do you think she's a moderate or do you think she's a socialist, you know, going to take the country very far left? By the way, what Sachs didn't address is Trump's tariff policy, which is also inflationary, almost equivalent to the price gouging, you know, food price caps. I think that they're both inflationary and they're both bad policy that's my personal point of view but i thought it was going to go but yeah anyway yeah honestly i'm not i'm not sure what i what i think of that proposal um you know i guess it depends on the details what do you agree i'm not endorsing i'm not opposing it but but but just just back to this point that should we support kamala harris even though we oppose all the policies that her campaign says she supports? Because it seems like that's the argument now is that Silicon Valley is expected to support Harris even though she wants and her campaign is confirmed.
She wants a 44% capital gains tax. She wants a 25% unrealized gains tax.
These are things that I think the vast majority of Silicon Valley considers to be disastrous for the startup ecosystem. Should we support her in spite of those things? And why? Look, the information did an actual data poll as opposed to us being talking heads saying, we say that Silicon Valley does X or y and you know the informations poll showed that there

was you know much broader support for the democratic ticket than the republican ticket

is that the thing that ron conway just tweeted he might have i don't know no no no that's that's

different that's different that's a subset yeah that's that's a that's a different group that's

a group to counteract you and chamoff uh throwing us fundraiser for trump it's like i think where that came from.

So,

but the,

the,

the, the, the, the, the, the the information, a news source that ran a poll, you know, did it objectively, ran the whole thing to try to answer the question, came out with more folks in favor of, you know, the Biden-Harris ticket than Trump did. Why do you think that is? I believe that.
Why do you think that is? Well, because look, taxes is an important issue. And I think if you ask any Silicon Valley business person, they say, look, lower capital gains, promote long-term investment.
Ask me, that's what I would say too. But, you know, you kind of go, well, what actually, in fact, you most need for business is stability, rule of law, not grifter capitalism, where it's like, you know, give me a ability to launch my

own NFT, you know, etc, etc. You know, that's what they go, we want that.
And by the way, we can navigate a higher tax rate, it'll be less fast on growth and everything else, but we can still invest, create businesses, you know, etc, etc. But we can't do it with, you know, kind of a corroding the rule of law.

I think both, David, both you and Chamath spoke out against the January 6th stuff. I'm curious where you're on that now.
It's still top of mind for me. That's the reason why the kind of the rule of law thing is my red line, not a tax policy.
Well, let me ask you about that formally here. There are five cases against Trump.
You have the insurrection case, you have the New York taxes case, you have the hush money against trump you have the insurrection case you

have the new york taxes case you have the hush money case you have the eugene carroll case uh

and um what am i missing there oh and the uh documents case you funded uh like peter thiel

funded the gawker case uh the eugene carroll case uh which trump lost and uh just to ask you

why did you choose to fund that and do you believe trump sexually assaulted eugene carroll

Thank you. which Trump lost.
And just to ask you, why did you choose to fund that? And do you believe Trump sexually assaulted Eugene Carroll? Well, it's kind of not relevant whether or not I did or not. What I funded was an ability to have, you know, kind of a woman who doesn't have power, who's being threatened by a rich man with a lot of money and power to try to silence her, to have her day in court where 12 everyday Americans, right, can come to a judgment.
And their judgment was that there was an assault and there was slander about the assault. And they did it twice.
And so that was the reason I funded it. And, you know, I think that that's important.
We, you know, the laws apply more importantly to rich and powerful people than it does to poor people.

That's that's the important about the thing I love about America is a rule of law system.

And I think that's what's most important.

And that's what's really fundamental. That's my red line relative to the kind of lines in the sand that we're talking about.

And, you know, that's, you know, that's the reason why in the various kind of lawsuits where that seem to be that that's what's being emphasized, then, you know, I'm happy to support them. I don't see how it's rule of law, when you have a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who's elected on a promise to get Trump, he then takes what are at most a bookkeeping misdemeanor that's passed the statute of limitations, that's expired.
And he turns into 34 felony charges on a legal theory that was never explained to the jury. And then basically Trump is convicted in a sham trial by a hyper-partisan New York jury system

so that Democrats can then run on the branding

that he's a, quote, convicted felon.

So there are four other trials.

We got your take on the first one.

What do you think of that one?

Hold on.

I don't think it's rule of law.

I don't want to get Reitz's feedback, too,

but let me just finish my point.

I don't think it's rule of law

when Trump is prosecuted on a documents charge that Biden himself is guilty of. He's got all these documents in his garage for decades, which the judge has thrown out.
And we've seen a bunch of these lawfare cases where Trump has ultimately prevailed. The judge has thrown it out or he's won it on appeal.
So that seems to me like abuse of the legal system for a partisan political goal, not rule of law.

Okay, so Reid, there's four other cases, two of them Trump's been convicted in, two of them are outstanding. What's your take on the four cases? You've heard Sachs' take.

What's the two that he's been convicted, J. Cal? What's the other one besides the Alvin Bragg case?

There's three. Alvin Bragg was convicted, and then the Trump organization with the CFO committing tax fraud.
He was convicted in that one as well. Or the Trump organization was convicted.
And people say that's lawfare by Letitia James. So guilty, guilty, guilty in those three of five.
So what's your take on the four that we haven't discussed yet and heard your opinion on Hoffman? So, look, I think it's, you know, it's definitely possible to have some

versions of lawfare, although I think most people use the term when it's the legal process and the

law enforcement that they don't like. You know, I think that in the Bragg case, you had, you know,

you know, indictment and 12 jurors, there's jurors, I think, as I recall, one of the jurors said he got that juror got their principal news from Truth Social. It was a unanimous conviction.
I think that, you know, you have Vice President Pence, you know, comes out and says, you know, Trump asked me to overturn the election illegally. Right.
That's your own vice president. So I don't think that that kind of suggests that there's this rampant political persecution, that there's a lot of fire where there's all this smoke.
It doesn't mean that every single thing, you know, kind of- Democrats are trying to put Trump in jail for 700 years. These cases are still outstanding.
They want to put him in jail, Reid. Do you think Trump should go to jail? I think if he broke laws that says he should go to jail, I think the laws apply to powerful people as much as they apply to everyday people.
Right. So I think why were these cases? Why did they wait for two years on these cases so they could bring them in an election year? Actually, I don't think if you look at the like, look, speaking factually, Trump's lawyers are always trying to delay the stuff, right? I think they were trying to follow every legal process.
And Trump's lawyers keep asking for deferrals. Maybe he wants to campaign this year instead of being stuck in a courtroom.
Look, after January 6th. This was last year and the year before, asking for deferrals, setting out trial times.
Like, all of the stuff was from his side trying to delay it. If it got delayed into this year, that's a bad judgment on his part.
Jack Smith just filed new charges, new charges. And all this stems from January 6th.
In the wake of January 6th, Merrick Garland's Justice Department did an analysis of whether Trump could be prosecuted for incitement, whether he incited that mob. And the legal memo came back and they said, no, we don't have a case here.
It does not meet the legal bar for incitement. Then it was reported by the New York Times that Biden thought that Merrick Garland was basically being a wimp and they need to go after Trump.
So the hyper-partisan DA or prosecutor Jack Smith was hired and he came up with a novel legal theory that somehow Trump had perpetrated a fraud on the American people, never been seen before. And since then, he's been prosecuting Trump and seeking to put him in prison.
And when the Supreme Court just kicked the legs out from under his case with a recent decision, he just refiled charges. I don't understand how anyone can look at this and say, yeah, look, what happened on January 6th wasn't great, but the DOJ looked at it.
It wasn't criminal. But yet they've been pursuing this guy, seeking to put him away for the rest of his life, seeking to interfere with this election, seeking to deprive the American people of a choice.

On a separate track, you've got Democrats in states like Colorado literally removing Trump from the ballot.

Okay, Reid, your thoughts.

So, look, the first thing is January 6th, I think, is a red line.

I think it's you did incite a riot, whether or not the legal. Then we're not prosecuted for it.
Let's let Reid finish. Yeah, you know, I was.
Fair enough, go ahead, sorry. Right.
So I think it was the, you know, there was an incitement of a riot. I think that the rioters went in and, you know, killed police officers, were looking to kill Vice President Pence, you know, from the court testimony.
Courts are the best proxy that we have for finding truth in the stuff. It's one of the reasons why, you know, by the way, and when, for example, the Supreme Court says, no, that's great.
That's legal process. I just have to fact check that no police officers were killed.
Where are you getting that from? I think there were there was one died from his injuries and and you know very soon after and then no no there was there was one cop who had a seizure later it wasn't part of the the riot no police officers were killed as a part of the riot i just have to fact check that it's just not true well and then there's the the one who committed suicide too which is a question of you know i don't know how you can attribute that yeah so anyway so you got the you know the the the storming of the capital um you know he says these people are uh american heroes he's going to pardon them he's going to hire them into his administration right and if that's not encouragement for other people doing similar things you know wait he's going to hire january 6 rioters? He's going to hire them? Yeah. I haven't heard that.
Well, we'll get you the Trump speech. There's all kinds of wonderful things in Trump speeches.
Let me just move to one thing. So, Reid, I think this has been an amazingly robust conversation, and I think you, as always, as long as I've known you now for 20 years, have been really intellectually honest.
I want to ask you a favor, which is, can you stay for 10 extra minutes and talk with us to Bobby Kennedy? And the reason I want you to do that is I think that there is a bunch of misinformation I asked you about these things. I think it's important to hear maybe from Bobby and just for him to know what you said, because I do think it's important to hear it from the horse's mouth.
Can you just give us like five, 10 minutes so that we can do that? Because I think it would be an important thing to do. So when is that? No, just right now.
Just we're going to. We're rolling into an interview with R.F.K.
Jr. It wasn't designed this way.
It was on. It's just the last minute R.F.K.
Jr. who's on vacation said that he would talk to us about what it was like to kind of withdraw and all this sort of stuff.
And so we booked it right after you, but he's in the waiting room. I'm fine to do it.
I mean, it's totally your choice. It's one of the things I like about your all in podcast is, you know, kind of like, let's let's try to speak truth.
OK, right. So, hey, Bobby Kennedy is here.
Mr. Kennedy, it's great to have you on the All In podcast for a second time.
May I introduce you to Reid Hoffman, who you may know of, but I don't think you two have ever met. We have not.
Pleasure to meet you. Likewise.
Pleasure. Mr.
Kennedy, you dropped out of the race. Perhaps you could tell us, and I was quite disappointed about it.
I really wanted to see a third party candidate get into double digits again. I just want to commend you on the effort that you put into it.
Maybe you could tell the audience why you as a reported never Trumper joined the Trump team and dropped out. So Jason, I, you know, I'm not actually, I haven't actually terminated my campaign.
I suspended it. We've taken ourselves or we're trying to take ourselves off the ballot in about 11 states.
So we'll remain on the ballot in 39 states. And the all red, all blue states will be on the ballot in the states where we felt we were going to hurt President Trump with a polling show that we're getting off.
They're mainly the battleground states. Ironically, now, the same people who have been trying to get me off the ballot for a year or since October are now fighting to keep me on the ballot in those days.
So that's one of the sort of ironies. I, you know, it became clear about two months ago when the, when it became clear that I was not going to be allowed on the debating stage.
And I pretty much had a shutout in the mainstream media. So the mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, in 16 or 17 months, I had only two live interviews.

Ross Perot, during his 10-month campaign, had 34 interviews.

And then, you know, all of them were very, very much aligned with the Democratic National

Committee.

And so when they did mention my name, which was pretty often, it was accompanied by a lot of defamations and pejoratives and mischaracterizations, et cetera. I never really had a chance to reach those audiences.
The audiences that I was reaching, I was dominating in. I was beating all the candidates among independents, which is now the largest demographic.
I was beating them among young people. So your audience was supporting me.
The audiences that were listening to long-form interviews, I was dominating. But in the older audiences, which is a critical baby boomers, people who really should have been for me because they are people who from my generation who remember the kennedy administration they were part of camelot they also i was very very popular with them for many years when i was the environmental champion alone and i should have had good inroads but I was never able to communicate with them because they watch, they get their news from the mainstream media.
And if you're living in that information ecosystem, you're going to have a very, very low opinion of me. I mean, if I was getting my information from those networks, I wouldn't vote for myself.
And President Trump, you know, reached out to me through this guy, Kelly Maynes, who's a food advocate, say food advocate, about three hours after the shooting at Butler. I got a call from him, and he asked me if I was still interested in the, specifically in the VP slot, and I said no, which I would not have taken the vice president slot.
And he said, would I be willing to talk to the administration, to President Trump, rather? And at first I said no. And I talked with some of my family members, including my kids.
And I then sent Kelly Means a note saying, you know, I'm interested in talking. And I got a call almost immediately from President Trump.
I spent about, I don't know, 30 minutes on the phone with him. And we met the next day in Minneapolis.
And then we met again more recently. We had continuing talks with him.
And we met again more recently for a very, very intensive and long meeting at Mar-a-Lago with some of his family members. And during those meetings, during the first meeting, we talked about the

idea of having a unity ticket, where I would remain on the ballot, where we would ally ourselves

on certain critical issues, but we would be able to continue to criticize each other on the issues

that we did not align on. And President Trump was very happy with that arrangement.
And the issues, the critical issues on which we agreed, and I was really stunned to see the level of his commitment to those issues was one, ending the three issues that really got me into the presidential campaign.

One was ending the war in Ukraine. The second issue was ending the censorship.
And the third issue, and most important to me, was addressing the childhood chronic disease epidemic and these connected issues about soil health and the corruption in our regulatory agencies by usda and fda nih cdc and hhs which have become sock puppets for these for the big pharmaceutical big ag big food processing industries that they're supposed to be regulating. He was very, very much aligned on those issues, and it gave us essentially a beachhead in which to construct this, an alliance.
Bobby, let me ask you a question. I just want to go back a little bit because I just want to make sure I heard it properly.
When Callie called you, was it to be the VP on the Trump ticket? And did you, was that asked and did you consider it? And why did you say no to that, but then said yes to this? Well, I had no interest in being a vice president. If you're a vice president, it's a, you you know i grew up in politics and vice president's a worse job in washington you have no budget you have no staff except what your budget actually all comes through the white house so if the president if you do something that uh offends the president he can literally you know he can take away your plane.
He can take away your staff. And the only thing you really have is the Naval Observatory, which is the official residence of the vice president.
And he can essentially put you under house arrest. And, you know, I have very strong views on issues.
And I, you know, I felt like if I took that that job i'd be on house arrest probably on day three so i you know i um i was not i was never interested in that reed had to run but let's just thank him for appearing on the pod and i thought it was a great conversation and i thought i thought he approached it in good faith and kudos to him for stepping into the lion's den so he was great yeah sorry bobby keep going so bobby let me ask you a question um you are reportedly a never trumper you there's massive fallout you cited personally for you as a resident of malibu uh the extremely talented woman you're married to based on everything i can tell maybe not a fan of trump so this is maybe causing some domestic and some local town issues for you tell me about your journey from a never trumper all your friends are i think never trumpers to now joining with trump that's got to be a hard decision no yeah it was a very hard-wrenching decision but you know i i would my whole kind of journey was over the past uh 17 months was uh was just it was kind of a series of um a very very difficult uh transitions you know away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was, you know, the party, my family is one of the central pillars of the Democratic Party.
My family has been in the Democratic Party since 1848, since my great-grandparents came over, and my great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. His contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was a state senator and political boss in Massachusetts.
My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was FDR's treasurer. He was the first head of the SEC.
He was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, deeply, deeply immersed in Democratic Party politics.
All of my uncles, Joe Kennedy, who was a delegate to the 1940 convention, who spoke there, was a featured speaker, and then was killed in World War II. So my uncle John Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.
My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, who was one of the longest, I think the second or third longest serving member of the United States Senate, is his name on more bills than any other senator in the United States of history. And then, of course, my father, who was attorney general, and a sort of walk away from that party was, you know, I guess it was very, very difficult for me.
And I was actually the last person in my campaign to see that, to understand the necessity that that the democratic party was not going to allow me to uh to compete fairly that they you know they had rigged the system against us in ways that were really quite extraordinary they had just walked away from democracy they were canceling primaries they had uh they had their candidate, and it was going to be President Biden, and I was really a nuisance to them. And so my voice was not allowed out there.
And so that was difficult. And then leaving i i declared independence in october and and uh joining trump uh president trump was yeah that uh i burned a lot of bridges i burned my boats let me put it that way clearly clearly is definitely um a challenging thing to to go from your family being the bedrock of the Democratic Party and Trump being, you know, obviously seen as an existential risk by the Democratic Party.
So what should Americans know about the state of politics and fairness in America based on what you've learned? What do you want the American people to know about the process of selecting a president? Well, and, you know, I do want to say that I feel like I didn't really leave the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party left me and left the ruins of the infrastructure that I think my uncle and father had, that had made them Democrats. If you went down a list of all of the priorities that Robert Kennedy, that John Kennedy had, I would check every box.
You know, they were anti-war, they were anti-censorship. they they were against the corporate control of of our country um the this this corrupt merger of state and corporate power that now has emerged as a dominant governing model in our country um the democratic party has changed demographically when i i grew up in a Democratic Party, that was the party of the

working class in our country, that was a party of small businesses, that was the party of the poor. In the last election, President Biden got roughly half of the country voting for him, But that half controlled 70% of GDP.

And President Trump got a... half of the country voting forum but that half controlled 70 percent of of gdp and president trump got about half the country voting forum and that half represents about 30 percent of gdp so we've had this inversion where the democratic party has become the party of of elites, and I would say very insular elites.
And the Republican Party is now the party of the poor, the working class. And it's been, you know, for me to watch that, I've been on the front lines of watching it.
And, And, you know, the values that held the Democratic Party together are no longer there. It's held together by a sense of tribalism, a sense of, and a great, great sense of what I would say orchestrated fear of Donald Trump.
It's the only value that really dominates any discussion. If I talk about censorship to a Democrat, they'll say, yes, but Donald Trump is going to become a dictator.
If you talk about children's health, they'll say, never mind that. Donald Trump is the only thing we can worry about.
If you talk about, you know, about the history of the Democratic Party's opposition to war, they'll say, forget all that. The only thing we can focus on is Donald Trump.
And that's a very, very dismaying, and I would say dangerous form of orchestrated tribalism. And one of the other features of the Democratic Party is this need to control, this mistrust of the plebiscite, mistrust of the demos.
You know, demos is a Greek word for people, and the Democratic Party doesn't trust the people. That's why they have to get rid of elections.
That's why they had to get me off the ballot. I did something everybody said, all the pundits said could never be done.
So I got on the ballot in every state. I got a million people that signed their signed signatures petitioning me on the ballot.
And the Democratic Party strategy, rather than to use the $3 billion it had, amplify a message and inspire people and talk about a vision and the virtues of its candidates. Instead, use that money to try to get me off the ballot, to get Cornel OS, get Jill Stein to use the courts, to use the enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, to try to rig the election.
And it ultimately comes down to this mistrust of the people, which we're seeing now all over. We're seeing kind of two big forces emerge.
One is a populist force, and the other is a force of control, of ironclad control. We saw Europe has already fallen.
You saw the arrest of Pavel Durov last week, which was extraordinary. The arrest of the guy who founded Telegram because he was hosting political dissent.
And, you know, the European Commission is already openly censoring content. So they did not need to arrest him.
They can take off whatever they want. They went through the trouble of actually, and probably with U.S.
encouragement, catching him when he happened to land for a refueling stop in France. France has this extraordinary tradition of free speech that began with the French Revolution, and then again in the 1880s, they passed all these incredible laws.
Their commitment to free speech is as robust as that in the united states

and yet now you know and then and then two weeks before that you had this crazy european commissioner thierry uh breton saying that he uh ordering ordering elon musk and i'd interviewed donald Trump, a president of the united states the the nominee of a of one of the two major political parties and the world is not allowed to hear his point of view yeah it's extraordinary but that is what's coming to this country and you can already and a democratic party is that the party of control and it's the party of not trusting the people let's bobby let's talk about something then let's assume that this election goes in the direction of now your preferred direction which is donald trump wins what role would you play and what is your agenda what is it that you want to accomplish? And explain, make America healthy again in that context, maybe. I mean, it's the three issues ending censorship, and that's pretty easy to do.
You can do it with a series of executive orders ending the Ukraine war, which is complex, but I think done very, very quickly. And then

the food issue now,

it's the food, it's medicines,

it's corruption in the regulatory

agencies. But would you be a secretary

in that administration? Would you be

a special advisor? There is no

deal in terms

of me getting a particular post.

There's just an

understanding that

Thank you. deal in terms of me getting a particular post.
So there's just an understanding that there would be some kind of co-governance. And the Trump people have already demonstrated their good faith by inviting me to be on the transition team as one of the co-chairs.
And they've done something really wonderful, which is to bring Tulsi Gabbard in, who shares a lot of my views on this issue as the other co-chair. And I think that's a signal that they're sending, that they are sincere about, you know, making a commitment to these issues.

What should parents know about your thoughts on how to raise kids in a healthy way, make

America healthy again?

Are there any vaccines that you would say you would advise parents to take for their

kids?

And how should they look at the industrial food complex?

You know, if you were sitting with us as parents, you know, just just having lunch what would you tell us we should do with our own kids i mean the big problem is you can't really trust the government to tell you the truth the agencies are all compromised they all have very very bad uh conflicts almost all the people for example on the on the, on the food recommendation committees at FDA are people who are part of the food industry. And the same is true on the pharmaceutical side.
The people who are making decisions about what's good for you are actually people who are making huge amounts of profit on those recommendations and so you can't really trust that the recommendations are are in your best interest and you know what we know is that there is no more profitable there's no bigger profit center or industry in this country than a sick child you know they and a sick child is a lifetime customer a lifetime consumer of very very expensive products and you have this alliance between a food industry and the pharmaceutical industry to keep our children sick get them addicted you know in the 70s and 80s um the the tobacco industry was under attack and the two biggest tobacco companies and out um and bought all the big food companies rjr tabisco you're referring to yeah and craft and you know so you had Philip Morris by Kraft and they took

a lot of the

scientists

from

the

scientists

from jr tabisco you're referring to yeah and craft and you know oh you had philip morris by craft and they took a lot of the scientists from the tobacco industry who are experts on making products addictive and they put them to work on making food addictive on making ultra processed so adding ingredients that um that make food uh uh that destroy that they the satiability of food

so that food doesn't fill you up so you're always craving more. And those products, many of them are products, you know, we have almost 1,000 chemicals in our foods that are banned in Europe and banned in other countries.
And those products are products that have been introduced by chemists

that did not exist before in the body, does not handle them well.

And, you know, we're seeing this explosion in chronic disease.

When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. You know what the budget was for chronic disease when my uncle was president six percent of americans had chronic disease you know what the budget was for chronic disease and when my uncle was president zero there wasn't any drugs for it it was no uh there was no expenditures on chronic disease today is 4.3 trillion dollars it's five times our military.
And the people who are making money are the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, which actually you would think insurance companies would want people to be, well, they actually make more money if they're sick. The hospital is the medical cartel.
The people we trust to make advice to us about our health are actually compromised. And that's the difficult part.
You've got to unravel that corporate capture. Freeberg, when you hear this, some people might say, this sounds like a grand conspiracy theory.
But much of it rings true to I think many of us who are parents watching kids, you know, and watching the prevalence of obesity, watching pharmaceutical drugs to counter that and all the money that's made from it. And then seeing when people eat clean, and they're healthy, maybe there there's less there.
So Freeberg, when you hear Bobby's position here, as a scientist who sold a company to Monsanto climate.com, and who's working on food today, what rings true about what Bobby's saying? And what do you disagree with? Yeah, there are aspects of industrialized food and processed food that are bad for people. And I do agree should be it should be changed.
I don't I know a lot of people that work at the USDA, a lot of people that work in other government organizations that don't make a lot of money.

They may or may not have worked at other companies, but I think that there's no economic incentive for them to do harm or wrong. I think that the real and so I don't think that there's a constructive design on doing bad things by any individual.
I think that there is an unfortunate circumstance where people eat bad stuff,

stuff that tastes better, they like it more, it sells better. And the economic incentive and capitalism is to make more of that stuff and sell more of it.
And as a result, the stuff that people like that isn't good for them, they buy more of and the companies make more money. And so they continue to invest in selling more and more of that stuff.
And this goes in most processed foods, It's terrible. It's not good.
And so I do agree that much of this processed food industry is very adverse to health. But I don't think that there's a grand design by individuals that are malicious in their intent and trying to do it.
I think that there are people that are doing their job on, hey, this is what the market wants. Let's give them more.
You're talking about in the government. Right.
Yeah. I'm talking about in government and private industry.
You don't think people in private industry are trying to make addicting foods? No, no, I think that, yeah, the point is, like, if people buy more of it, they're like, let's sell more of it, you know? Yeah, okay. And I, you know, and if that were illegal, if it was illegal to say, hey, this sort of food product should not be made.
But look, alcohol fits the bill too, right? And we keep making alcohol and sugar fits the bill, the more sugar, Coca Cola didola did a study years ago where they um they kept increasing the amount of sugar in coca-cola until they maximally got sell through so some kids like 60 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of coke some kids like 30 but the perfect level was at 42 grams and so that study was done by the scientists that worked at coca-cola and then they said that's product it sells, it'll sell the most. And that's the incentive inside of that company.
That's how that company operates. Now, you could ask yourself the question, is that evil? Is that bad? We now know that sugar in general is bad.
The executives at Coca Cola at AB InBev and other places are trying to make alcohol free, sugar free alternatives. So there's a lot of push by these people.
Unilever has tried to make a big push towards good food. Nestle's tried to do the same.
They've all made these stated commitments to improve the health of the food that they produce. But it is quite difficult to be successful in doing that and returning money to shareholders.
The shareholders are like, where's the money? So I think this is the key point you're making. I think your clean food effort and I took me a decade to unravel me eating everything in sight and lose the 40 pounds.

But Chamath, when you hear, you know, sort of this back and forth between Bobby and Freiburg,

what's your take on it in terms of and also the European lifestyle that you live for 10

weeks of the year?

What's your take on what should happen here and how Bobby can be successful?

I think what Bobby says rings true in the way that I live my life and I just see it demonstrated on my own body. You're right, Jason.
You know, my wife's Italian. She runs an Italian company.
She works Italian and American hours for 10 months out of the year. And for those 10 weeks, we go there and we flip schedule.
But when I'm there, I'm consuming Italian produce that isn't packed in plastic. I go to a local fruit store, I go to the local fish vendor.
And my body changes. And I know that because the people that see me when I get back, they always comment, oh, did you lose weight? Oh, do you look thinner or this or that? and what's interesting is I actually do a body composition before I leave and after.
I've done this for seven years now. And I can tell you that my weight doesn't change that much, but my body composition is completely different.
And I don't know what it is except the things that I'm putting in my body that's different. And so I see it and I'm running an A-B test every day.'s the price what's the price of the food chamath like is it more in italy like you pay more do you think well i've already commented on the fish is outrageous yeah um but but there are ways to eat at a materially lower price than there is here and the access to the ultra processed food is different there you can't get the stuff and when you and when you do find that stuff it doesn't have the same you know glycemic and metabolic load on your body i'm curious what you think of you know ozempic in this category of drugs breaking the cycle i think you've been against them or they certainly helped me with half of my weight loss i know sacks had a a good experience as well.
And he's been public about it. What are your thoughts on that? Because it does seem when people take the take the GLPs which exist in your body, that they I'm sure there's more research that needs to be done.
They do break this habit. I know anecdotally with me, I don't crave the foods I craved previously.
And it did kind of rewire my brain and how i look at food even when i'm off of it so your thoughts on those and those potentially being a way to break the cycle yeah so and this goes to david's point that you know this is we need to have cheap food and that that is kind of a an outcome that is an admirable or virtuous outcome the problem is that food isn't cheap. It's cheap on the shelf, but it imposes costs on the rest of us that were the externalities that we're paying elsewhere.
So when I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Over a 40 or 50 year career, one case.
It was essentially non-existent disease. Today, one out of every three children who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic.
When I was a kid, the autism rates were between 1 in 1,500 to 1 in 10,000 Americans.

And that is still true in my generation, 70-year-old men. In my kids' generation, according to CDC, it's one out of every 34 kids.
Some states, like California, it's one out of every 22. 77% of Americans are now, or 74% adults are obese.
Half our kids, obesity, when, you know, 100 years ago, if you were obese, you could get a job in the circus. It was so unusual.
So we're now, and who's making profit now? Ozempic. Ozempic's not going to you can obesity is absolutely and diabetes are absolutely treatable by good food that's the cause now ozempic is a good profit center for it had for um for pharma there's a bill now which has been paid for by the company that makes it, which is the biggest company in Europe, Novo Nordisk.
In Denmark, where that company is, they do not recommend it. The treatment of diabetes, the standard of care, is diet and exercise.
but that company's entire value is based upon the projections of care is diet and exercise but that company's entire value is based upon the projections of what it's going to sell in the united states and it has and that company is pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying to pass this bill that will make medicare pay for it for every american who's obese that could be 74 percent of people are now eligible i think it's 1500 a week the cost of that will be three trillion a year if you took three trillion a year a tiny fraction of that you could buy organic food three meals a day for every human being in the united states so wouldn't that be a better expenditure of our money and you know i what i would say is the you know the food producers it's not a conspiracy it's just people following perverse incentives and there are conspiracies i mean when i sued on monsanto we got emails that showed that the head of the pesticide division, Jess Rowland, for a decade at EPA was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, sabotaging studies, creating false science to hide the curtsogenic nature of Roundup. So there are those kind of instances throughout the federal government, but mainly it says perverse incentives.
Almost all, almost close to 100% of our food agricultural subsidies go to processed food. I mean, go to commodity agriculture, which is the feedstock for processed food.
Oh, and if you look at... for mostly for me if the industry controls through lobbying and through you know all these other mechanisms for corporate capture controls the expenditures in the food stamp program so 70 of the food stamp program goes for processed food 10 goes for sugar drinks like coca-cola which are just diabetes machines so why are we poisoning poor kids in this country for the school lunch program the same thing almost 80 i think 77 of food lunch program is terrible foods that are actually poisoning our children And, you know, don't we, you know, don't we care enough about our kids to say,

we need, you know, we want to care about them.

We want to make sure that they're not sick.

They are the most precious things in our country.

Shouldn't that be the focus?

And, you know, whatever we're doing to make them so sick.

When I was a kid, 6% of American kids had chronic disease today 60 is that not an alarm is that not you know something that we should all be concerned about i will i will agree on um an important point uh you know the the food stamp program the snap program provides food stamps to support 42 million amer. 42 million people rely on food stamps.
It costs $120 billion of federal money per year. And as Bobby said, the number one product bought on the food stamp program is soda, canned soda.
And there was an important debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda.

By the way, Bobby, you and I probably agree on a lot of things. It's definitely a lot of things we don't agree on.
But like these aspects, I think, are just no brainers. There was a debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda should be allowed as a purchase on the food stamp program, or whether it should be fresh fruits and vegetables and grains and other things.
and ultimately there was a food lobbying effort to made that kept canned soda on the food stamp program. And it is, again, $120 billion of annual federal spend with the biggest line item going to canned soda to, you know, feed 42 million Americans.
And the connection is completely direct, high sugar, high glycemic index, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions arise from that connection. So definitely aligned with you on the misincentives and the disincentives in these programs that have been created.
And they only expand every year. Bobby, can you comment on when people talk about revamping the food supply, one of the things that sometimes is not allowed to be said is that focusing on organic food and produce can exclude certain communities.
And so there's like this DEI filter that preferring that is almost racist in some way. Like, can you just comment on that whole vein of thinking and your thought on that? Yeah, I mean, I think feeding people poisonous food is racist.
And by the way, the NAACP gets huge amounts of money every year from the food industry. It may be one of the biggest, I think Coca-Cola is the biggest supporter of NAACP.
So a lot of the NGOs that are supposed to be concerned about the disproportionate impact on minority communities of federal policies have actually been bought off and bought into the process. And, you know, a lot of times those are the voices you hear saying this is racist.
What's really racist is poisoning black Americans because these are communities that are food deserts. The school lunch program is the, you know, oftentimes those communities, the biggest access that they have to food, and we're giving them poison food.
You know, many of these communities have no grocery stores. You know, they're no big, like, they definitely don't have whole foods.

They don't have access to those kind of foods.

Shouldn't we have national policies that make sure our people are healthy? And, you know, they use, of course, market dynamics, but also supports. We're giving billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies for farmers to addict farmers to growing commodity agriculture, which is bad food.
It's low in nutrients. It's high in chemicals.
It's high in pesticides. And, you know, we need to change these perverse incentives so that and feed America.
You know, how how can anybody argue with this how can anybody say that we should not have healthy children that we should be giving people food that is hurting them it's just it doesn't make any sense sacks any questions for you for bobby about democracy what went down with biden the fairness of the democratic party i know you've got some strong feelings on it, so I just wanted to give you your red meat in your window here. I'm sure a lot of it's confirming for you what he's saying.
And, you know, I'll be honest, I think what the Democratic Party did to you, Mr. Kennedy, was absolutely abhorrent and disgusting, and it really is infuriating to me, especially what the mainstream media did.
And I'm glad that we got to have you on early on our podcast, at least to let some of your ideas get out there. But let's give Sax's red meat here, because you joining Trump is a wild card.
I don't think any of us saw coming. Well, let me pick up on those themes, J.
Cal. First of all, I want to commend Bobby on running an upbeat and positive campaign.
You know, you were, and still are, the most articulate and powerful champion of free speech over censorship, civil liberties over the surveillance state, peace over war. You've spoken about the issue of chronic health, which, to be honest, is an issue I didn't know that much about, but I think you've put it now on the political radar screen in a way that it's not going away.
So I think you ran a very noble and effective campaign. And I think, like you said, it was a campaign for the soul of the Democratic Party.
You know, I think you represented issues that in the days of your father and President John F. Kennedy,

these would have been Democratic Party issues.

How did the Democratic Party respond?

They effectively ran you out.

They did not give you the chance.

They conducted lawfare to keep you off the ballot.

They didn't let you debate.

I heard your running mates say they even tried to infiltrate your campaign.

And all the while, this party was claiming to be the party of democracy. I find that incredibly hypocritical.
I think that if they had given you the opportunity to debate, I think we now know what would have happened. I mean, we saw what happened when Biden actually debated Trump is there's a complete implosion of Biden's campaign.
We discovered that indeed, the Democratic Party had been hiding his condition for a long time. And when he was finally forced to debate, didn't have a teleprompter or script, it became extremely obvious.
What happened then? They basically put in a new nominee who's never been voted on. Kamala Harris has never received one primary vote.
It was done through a process that was opaque. We still don't know how it went down.
I have to disagree with Reid that Biden did it in a voluntary way. Biden went kicking and screaming.
I mean, he basically said publicly over and over again, I'm not leaving the race. I'm in this race.
He tweeted it. He said it.
He said only God Almighty could get me out of the race. And then it was reported that Nancy Pelosi went to him and said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
You said God Almighty. She might be God Almighty.
But the point is, there was nothing Democratic about this. And now we have a new Democratic Party nominee who refuses to do press conferences, refuses to do solo interviews, refuses to take questions from the press, who's hiding herself effectively.
And yet this party, again, claims to be the party of democracy. I find it just almost maddening or galling, again, in its hypocrisy.
And I don't see how everybody can't see through this. It's just not the way that democracy is supposed to work.
And I certainly don't think that the people engaging these tactics can be cloaking themselves in all this highfalutin rhetoric of democracy. It's just absurd.
And so I feel like I'm in the place that you are, Bobby. You know, as viewers of this pod know, I did not start off supporting Trump.

In the primaries, I supported you in the Democratic primary, and I did fundraisers for DeSantis and Vivek.

And that was in large part because I think of the job that DeSantis did as governor.

But when it came to the general, the realization that I came to is that Trump is the indispensable figure in our current politics for marshalling this populist energy to resist this hypocritical elite authoritarianism that wants to engage in censorship over debate, that seems to want to protect and defend this surveillance state over anything it wants to do, that wants to keep all these wars going, even when they don't make sense, when we could have found a way to negotiate a diplomatic end to them. And so I'm kind of delighted that you've kind of come around to this opinion too.
I know you have your reservations about Trump. I'm not saying that Trump is perfect.
I mean, I think he's human. I mean, he's a flawed vessel.
But at the end of the day, he is the choice that represents, again, these populist forces resisting authoritarianism. Sorry, this is more of a statement than a question, but I'll let you react to all of that.

Well, let me react to the last thing you said about President Trump.

I think if President Trump wins, that people are going to see very different President

Trump than they did during the first term.

I think he's changed as a person, and I've known him for, you know, 30 years. I've sued him, litigated against him, and had a friendship with him even when I was litigating against him, and by the way, successfully against him.
But I think he is, he's focused on his legacy. He said many interesting things to me about what he did wrong the last time and about how he filled his, you know, he had no idea he was going to win.
He had no idea how to govern. And people descended on him the day that he got elected and said, you got to appoint this guy, appoint this guy.
And he said, you know appointed a lot of people I shouldn't appoint, I know who they are now. He also said something interesting to me, he said the Democrats, one of the big sort of fulcrums of their terror of Trump is that he's going to implement this Heritage Foundation you know blueprint which is called on Project 2025, and he brought this issue up to me, and he said, you know,

they all... He's going to implement this Heritage Foundation blueprint, which is called Project 2025.
And he brought this issue up to me and he said, you know, they're always telling me I'm for Project 2025. I never read Project 2025 until they started accusing me of it.
He said, I was written by a right-wing ass. That's what he said.
He said, there are left-wing assholes and there are right-wing assholes and it was a right-wing asshole who wrote that thing. And then he started going through it.
So I think he's interested in his legacy now. He wants to leave behind some accomplishments and he wants to make our country better.
And I think he's, you know,

he's listening to a wider range of voices

and as he's preparing to govern right now.

And, you know, I'm going to be on the transition committee

picking the people who are going to govern.

Tulsi's going to be there.

There's going to be a wide diversity of stakeholders,

but he's listening to more than just that kind of narrow right-wing band that people are terrified it would be great if you could get to him because you know he he really did present well on this podcast and had like a very good moment in that first half of the rnc and then he started defaulting back to and i know a lot of it's like myself hate this about him and it's a big part of why we don't like him is he goes back to incel comics goes back to race goes back to gender you know and it's just like dude we that trump 1.0 is what people don't want they don't want chaotic trump they want you know post assassination attempt trump and it's just so infuriating well a lot of people feel that way jay con i. And I think at the end of the day, you and others are going to have to decide, do you want to support the candidate who has the right policies, but maybe there's style points that you don't like about him? Because I think that the things you're talking about, the mean tweets and so forth, at the end of the day, I think they're stylistic things.
I don't think they go deep to policy or how he would govern. Or do you want to support a campaign that is running on vibes and joy, you know, that has the superficiality that you like, but there's nothing underneath it.
And when we do learn something underneath it, when we actually learn a policy, then all the people who are supporting her have to say, oh, well, she's not really going to do that do that she's not going to do that so the best thing you can say about her campaign is that she's not going to accomplish the things that she says she wants to accomplish good basis on what you want for a president good news is i'm in texas so i can put in my my bobby kennedy vote as a protest vote and it doesn't make a difference and i can I can I respond to the other part of David's question to me sure they um and you know I think to me the most troubling thing about what's happening now you have you've had two democratic candidates who've not been able to give unscripted interviews which is extraordinary I mean my father and uncle were so proud of you know the States, our capacity to engage in debate, to defend who we were in the world, to defend a vision of our country, to articulate it to the rest of the world, to be the leaders of the free world and have a command of the facts and of knowledge and to be eloquent. And how can you be a leader in the world? What does the rest of the world think of us right now i mean what could they possibly think we have two democratic party candidates who are not able to explain themselves in an interview and i built it's bonkers the other day something yeah really i think point in which is if you want it if you want job of handling the nuclear code, you got to do an interview first.
And how can you go 30, 39 days without talking to the press, without being able to defend your record, to explain who you are to the American people? And if you talk to Democrats about this, and you can get past the anger and past the vitriol on this kind of wall of tribal resistance to any new knowledge coming in, or any contrary facts, what they'll say is, well, we're not really voting for Kamala. We're voting for the apparatus.
And you ask the next question, has that apparatus served you? You know, has the open border served you? Has the $35 trillion debt served you? Has the endless wars served you? Has the destruction of the American middle class the highest inflation rate in the generation? Has any of actually you know has that apparatus produced something for the united states that you're so proud of that you want to blindly vote without knowing who you're voting for anyway that that's i mean and uh kamala and waltz will do an interview with dana bash tonight uh the night we're taping on Thursday. So we'll see, maybe she'll miraculously do 10 podcasts and she'll be dynamic.
But it certainly doesn't look good that they filibustered with Biden and gave him only most favored nation interviews. I do respect the fact that we've had so many great candidates come on this pod and have 90 minute, two hour discussions.
I'm very proud of the work we've done here. And Bobby, you were a key piece of that.
And we really appreciate you coming on early and having these debates and coming here today to talk about it just means the world for you to come back and talk about this wish you great success with make America healthy. Again, I think it's incredibly noble, independent of how I feel about Trump, January six, abortion, any of those issues.
I respect the fact that you want to make America healthy again. And I wish you great continued success with that.
And we will see you all next it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wes.
I'm queen of kinwine. I'm going all in.
What, what, your winners lie. What, your winners lie.
Besties are gone. Go 13th.
That's my dog taking an ocean drive away. Sex.
Oh, man. Oh, man.
My habbitasher will meet me at play. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just

it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release them

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