E123: Trump indictment, de-dollarization, should VCs back Chinese AI? RIP Bob Lee

Jason Calacanis said Google’s Panda update crushed Mahalo from roughly $10 million in revenue to $500,000 almost overnight. He said Google throttled traffic to major content sites and that his contacts inside Google stopped returning his emails afterward.

Calacanis and David Sacks, despite sharply different views of Trump, both treated the Manhattan indictment as unusually weak. Calacanis hoped Alvin Bragg had unrevealed evidence; Sacks argued the legal theory was stretched and warned that a weak first prosecution could damage public trust in stronger cases later.

The panel rejected the idea that China-Brazil trade in local currencies proves rapid de-dollarization, but split sharply on the longer-term risk. Chamath Palihapitiya emphasized the yuan’s dollar peg, while Sacks and David Friedberg argued U.S. debt, sanctions and reserve seizures could gradually encourage countries to diversify away from dollars.

They connected America’s fiscal problem to pensions and commercial real estate, not merely federal borrowing. Sacks cited severely underfunded public pensions, while Friedberg noted pension funds hold office-property assets and debt, meaning a commercial-property decline could deepen pension shortfalls and eventually increase pressure for government support.

Their proposed fiscal paths diverged dramatically: Friedberg expected higher taxes, spending restraint and hoped-for productivity gains, while Chamath doubted a dramatic crisis would arrive within their lifetimes. Sacks favored austerity and entrepreneurship; the group repeatedly returned to AI as a potential productivity engine capable of expanding economic output.

Chamath interpreted Saudi Arabia’s decision to publicize its venture-fund investments as a deliberate pitch to become a premier global source of capital. With U.S. endowments, family offices and other limited partners constrained, he argued Saudi and UAE sovereign capital had an unusually favorable opportunity to attract top funds.

The hosts drew a much harder line around strategic technology flowing to China than around ordinary commerce. Chamath argued U.S. investment in advanced Chinese AI deserves restrictions analogous to CFIUS scrutiny, while Sacks said his practical rule is avoiding capital relationships with governments Washington treats as adversaries while continuing non-strategic trade.

Bob Lee’s killing became the episode’s clearest example of the hosts reaching a broad institutional conclusion before investigators had identified a suspect. With no arrest yet announced, Sacks explicitly guessed the case likely resembled a random attack by a mentally ill homeless offender, and the discussion quickly expanded into a sweeping indictment of San Francisco governance.