All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom's Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs
Sat, 18 Jan
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(0:00) The Besties welcome Mark Pincus! (3:53) Mark's background (6:02) How Mark got red-pilled for Trump, maintaining friendships despite political differences (23:21) LA Wildfires update: Newsom's EOs, market impact of price controls (51:32) Congestion pricing in NYC, fixing broken cities (1:08:33) TikTok ban: origin and potential outcomes (1:19:15) MBA hiring downturn (1:34:37) Conspiracy Corner: Mark's take on UFOs and UAPs! Follow the Besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Mark Pincus: https://x.com/markpinc Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.piratewires.com https://x.com/micsolana https://www.athena.com https://nypost.com/2024/11/04/us-news/tech-billionaire-mark-pincus-reveals-hes-voting-for-trump https://x.com/TheTechnXMedia/status/1878459564980392410 https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EO-N-4-25-Rebuilding-Final-signed.pdf https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EO-N-7-25-_-Land-Speculation-1.14.25-bl-_GGN-Signed_.pdf https://x.com/MayorOfLA/status/1878630125786566664 https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/nyregion/congestion-pricing-nyc.html https://x.com/friedberg/status/1652334973586915328 https://x.com/markpinc/status/1878575249505333606 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T72DfPEBn0A&t=29s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-14/china-discusses-sale-of-tiktok-us-to-musk-as-one-possible-option https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/harvard-mba-employment-rate-job-hunt-difficulty-addfc3ec
Chapter 1: Who is Mark Pincus and what is his background?
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In Podcast, the number one finance, technology, business, and MAGA podcast in the world. With us again today is the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, living a modern 1950s aesthetic lifestyle there. This is the House of Tomorrow, House of the Future. World's Fair. The original 1955 Tomorrowland at Disneyland.
Well, and you have a NASA hat on. This is amazing. He's in full geek out mode. Yeah. I told you guys about this haircut last week. Oh, because you couldn't blow yourself. That's right. Properly. I told you this would happen to you.
Chapter 2: What was Mark Pincus's red pill moment regarding politics?
It's exactly what your mom said would happen. Look at the continuity.
He told you you could never match the blow you got last week. And here we are. I did my best. I mean, it looks ridiculous, but stylish in a way. And with us again, your chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. He's ready to go to the inauguration and take his victory lap and take an enormous amount of credit. Chamath, are you looking forward to your victory lap?
I was in Florida earlier this week. I came all the way back so that I could play poker with my friends and see my family and children. And I'll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning. Were you at Mar-a-Lago? No, I was with my friend in an undisclosed location.
With a friend in an undisclosed location. Okay, sounds great. And joining us for the first time, one of my oldest friends, Mr. Mark Pincus, or as we like to say, Marcus Pincus. Why do you always take credit for these guests being only your friends? The rest of us are the ones that call them and are like, hey, do you want to come on the show? And then you're like, hi, my old friend.
Is my old Pincus longer than you? How about that? Is that true? Back to like AOL? Yeah. Well, we met when you were doing Silicon Alley, right? I'm a reporter, yeah, in the 90s. I've been collecting rent from Mark Pincus for the last year. That's true. My landlord. You should whistleblow on Freebrook to Gavin's gouging police and see if you can get some of yours back.
Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sasson.
We'll get right to that in a minute.
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Chapter 3: What is the current situation with the LA wildfires?
The Price Couch continues. If our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to Price Couch, it's 100% Freebrook. A thousand percent. But let's be clear. The real gouging is the Presidio Trust, who's charging an amazingly high rent, like over $100 a foot. And then Freeberg was actually giving me a pretty good deal.
He was getting a pretty good deal. I was paying like $130 a foot or something. $120, $130 a foot all in for real estate in the Presidio. And we just weren't using the space. But it is the most expensive real estate. It is nuts. That is quite an office. Man, Lord.
The Presidio Trust manages that federal land, and they get to keep all the money and reinvest it. It's probably the only profitable operation in the federal government. I used to be on the board, so I saw it close up. And they reinvest in things like restoring natural habitats, cutting down eucalyptus trees, archaeological digs. Right.
It was really interesting. I looked at one of those houses to rent when I was first moving up to San Francisco, and the only problem with those houses, they had these gorgeous houses that were like the general's houses, like three, four, five bedrooms, but they would have one bathroom for four rooms. And I'm like, can you put another bathroom in? It cannot change anything.
These are historic privileges, you know, historic landmarks. Mark did Freeloader, Tribe, Social Network back in the day, support.com. And if you wasted some portion of your youth playing Farmville, he was one of the original app creators or... Zynga Poker, which famously he said, hey, would you like to be an investor in Zynga Poker? And I said, how does it work?
He said, oh, well, you play for virtual coins. And I said, Mark, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You've taken all of the money out of the game. It's never going to work. And of course, he turned it into a multi-billion dollar company. And that was another $25 million angel investment miss on my part.
But Mark, you were also like early general social networking. You were involved in Facebook as an investor, LinkedIn, weren't you?
Like early on? I think the first social media investment I made was Napster. I sent the first check, the first $100,000. I think of that as the beginning of all this. But then, yeah, Reid and I put up the first money for Friendster. And then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook. Wow. The first one on Twitter, so...
Pick the right body of water, even if your boat doesn't. Tribe didn't work. But you placed five other bets, so you hit a couple of them.
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Chapter 4: How does congestion pricing impact NYC traffic?
And I was trying to just be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time. And my daughters turned to me that Sunday and they said, you're You're going to vote for Trump. We know it. And I said, yeah, you're probably right. And they said, well, then you have to go say it on Twitter. And my daughters were like, oh, that's great with me. Yeah.
So anyway, and then it was on the front page of the New York Post on the day of the election that I was this thought that I'm such news, but maybe it just was their news peg that I was coming out for Trump. And But I'll get back to your Reid question, but what I love about my New York Times, about my New York friends is that they did not give a .
They were all pro-Kamala and they texted me and they're just like, oh, that's kind of funny. But it's one thing I kind of love about New York, they didn't care. Back to your question, on Reed, what I love about Reed was he was already getting pings from people saying, what's going on with Pincus? He's going off the rails. He's becoming a Trumper.
You know, you guys, I'm sure, have gone down this road. I got a little bit of that, too, about Shmaz in Greenberg.
Yeah. So you're like, what's wrong with him? We got to bring him back into the fold. You know, he's, he's, should we lock him up? Is he crazy? And so Reed was already getting these. I had a lot of anxiety about talking to Reed about it. And finally Reed and I got on FaceTime and he just said, I just want to start by saying I'm team Mark. And I said, I'm team Reed.
And it gets out a little, you know, awkward. But Americans can get along even if they disagree politically about a candidate. It's probably where we need to get to, especially, you know, now that Trump's going to be in office in a couple of days. What was it like when you had lunch with Biden? Yeah. Okay. Well, just to finish the restart. Sorry. Wait a minute for him.
What I love about Reid is that we followed that with a four-hour dinner, and he said, I never questioned your principles. He said, I know you're a highly principled person, and I just want to understand which principles it is, and I'd like to convince you to change your mind. But anyway, so Reid was the best.
Hold on one second. You said something almost in passing, but I just want to double click. I think part of what Silicon Valley actually gets wrong is that we don't embrace the tism. And what I mean by that is Everybody, we're all a little socially uncomfortable. We're awkward. I wouldn't say that we were the coolest people growing up. And there is this virulent form of blockers.
You called it chief of staff. I think that these folks can be very detrimental, which almost represent this filter between your true self and everybody else. And there is this game that's played about being a gatekeeper. I do think that executive assistants are valuable, administrative assistants are valuable.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of a potential TikTok ban?
And I've always been kind of just committed to being honest, even if it's nuanced and it's not an easy soundbite. And Reid said to me early on, you need to pick what the easy narrative is, or the press is going to make it up for you. And he was right. And they did, or my competitors did. So I think...
that now with long-form podcasts and there's just more, and the fact that we can kind of directly, and a lot of ways, Elon was the first one to directly defend himself. You remember when- Well, he fired his whole, do you remember when he fired his whole PR team? He fired all those people. There's just like, there's none of that infrastructure between him and everybody else.
But do you remember when he would be on Twitter all the time, post PayPal, trying to correct the story and just write long, long diatribes. And then when a New York Times reporter said something negative about a Tesla, he just went off for weeks about them. And it seemed a little crazy and deranged. And then you started to see that it worked.
Like he actually, and we were told, don't defend yourself. If something bad is written about you, you're gonna prolong the press cycle. You're going to make the journalists angry. And so we're now unshackled. I teach this class at Stanford and I taught two back to back on Monday. And I looked around and I saw half the placards said, you know, she, her, you know, he, him, his.
And I got a little pang of like, oh, do I have to watch what I'm saying? Like, no, I don't. I'm unshackled. I'm just going to, this is just me and I'm going to be Mark unfiltered and it's the better version of ourselves. So anyway, I, I'm glad that Zuck feels like he can be, he can present more of his complete self out there now.
And I think we can get into it later, but I have a lot of thoughts on how the culture is going to kind of move more towards base. Back to the other question with, Biden, that lunch you had, did he seem like he was all there? Come on. Yeah, come on, Mark. Was it in the afternoon? I mean, did you have concerns about that? Was he sharp as a tack?
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Chapter 6: What challenges are MBAs facing in the job market?
Well, that was the thing that broke me. I mean, I'm not saying I'm like full mag over here, but that was like, wait a second. Are you guys lying about this? Like, how long is this and how deep is this cover up?
I have no horse in this race. I didn't have a horse in the race. So I had nothing to lie about. I for sure don't now. I'm really not a Biden fan or protector. I'll tell you my exact observation. We had this lunch. There was maybe five of us with Biden and a few of his finance people.
They had it in the tennis house, which is the way they found that they can have a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House. They found some way. We'll see if Trump does it. Some loophole, right?
Yeah, the loophole. And I was impressed. It was a long lunch. It must have been an hour and a half, two hours. And I'll tell you the good and the bad. The good, the part I was impressed was he kept the conversation thread. He was engaged and kept the thread the whole time. When we say sharp as a tack or kept the thread, that's how we talk about our 90-year-old grandparent or something.
So I'm just saying the reality to me, he was not... he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of dementia. But we were impressed that he was able to follow the conversation thread and then say, you know, okay, let me say differently. Would you have had the same bar if it was Jamie Dimon sitting across from you for a two hour lunch?
No, no. So, so, so yes, it was, it was, wow, your grandfather is holding up really well. Like your grandfather was able to have a whole lunch and hold the conversation, but it wasn't, I didn't walk away saying, I have to admit, I did not walk away saying, I think he's mentally unfit, but I did, but, and I wasn't shocked.
But I was like, okay, this is someone who's being really handled and managed by the people around him. And he's being told to show up here, say this. But I will say he was not on an obvious script, which I know, I think famously, he did some fundraiser at Vinod's house where he was reading a prompter the whole time. So wasn't reading a prompter. Yeah, that was it.
At a person's home, they brought a teleprompter for him to speak. Wow, that's weird. You didn't hear about that? I didn't, actually. That's new information. That's crazy. But I mean, in fairness, there's this issue called sundowning. People who are in that age group, they're good in the day, and then the sun goes down, and their brains are exhausted, and that's when you would see it.
And that's what they said about the debate. But for me, that was the... The coronation of Kamala and not actually having a speed run primary, that to me was just anti-democratic, anti-American, and just what happened to merit and having a process here, right? That's when I felt like the party just collapsed on itself. I'm glad you're here. Let's jump in.
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Chapter 7: What are the opinions on UFOs and UAPs?
So he said, making any unsolicited offer to an owner of real estate property located in the areas encompassed by, and he names a bunch of zip codes. I think there was like one, two, there's like 12 or 13 of them. Okay, so unsolicited, okay? To acquire any interest in real property for an amount less than the fair market value of the property on January 6th, so before the fires started.
Before the homes are down. And he said that's prohibited for three months. That's it, for three months. And the reason I think he said that is that if you just scope out a little bit, just from this moment in Los Angeles, The problem is that after natural disasters, there is a spike in fraudulent activities. And there are people that try to take advantage of that situation to make money.
So for example, after hurricanes, we saw this in Florida, people pose as contractors. They come in and they offer inflated prices. They offer poor quality of work. And especially when you...
sort of deregulate for that moment, where there's less checks, there's less folks involved because you're trying to speed up the process, you can have a bunch of pressure tactics that work against the best interests of the person trying to rebuild.
On the wildfire side, there was this crazy thing, Nick, I'll send you the link, from KTLA that talked about these folks called fire chasers, which are essentially like wildfire scammers. They're ambulance chasers, but during fires. So my point is, I don't disagree with his incompetence, okay? And I think he is totally out of touch.
I think there's a broken cartel that runs this state that's going to drive this state into just complete disrepair. He was grossly negligent. You can't say a state that has $322 billion budget is already bankrupt. It's teetering on a path where we won't be able to return and we can debate that. But my point is, I just think, despite all of this, he's grossly negligent.
Karen Bass is grossly negligent. The California cartel is breaking this state. But on this specific narrow thing, I kind of will give him his flowers. I think it was like a decent, smart, good thing. It's narrowly focused. There's a specific window here that's time boxed so that the worst behaviors of other people are roughly managed and mitigated until we can figure out a better answer.
you're saying that unsolicited offers on real estate can drive fraud, what you talked about if there was a person that is it this does not prevent somebody to talk about services separately, because he has a separate EO on services.
This does not prevent anybody whose house burned down from listing his lot. You could sell it for a dollar. So I think it's not right and it's inaccurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market. The idea that you cannot sell isn't what is in this EO. The idea is some person shows up out of the blue
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