E33: Apple’s hypocrisy, America fails math, crypto’s regulatory correction, Clubhouse, UFOs & more

David Sacks disclosed that he was incubating Callin, a live-audio app built around call-ins and the asynchronous recording Clubhouse lacked. He said it was already on TestFlight, planned to launch within weeks, and was raising $10 million with commitments in hand while reserving room for his co-hosts.

Clubhouse’s pandemic surge was already collapsing while its private valuation reached $4 billion despite zero revenue. Downloads rose from 2 million in January to 9.5 million in February, then fell to 2.7 million in March and roughly 922,000 in April; the hosts also said they had heard Twitter’s reported $4 billion offer was real.

Chamath Palihapitiya said Facebook transferred intellectual property overseas, and he was later subpoenaed in the IRS dispute over that transaction. He described the fight as turning on whether Facebook undervalued the IP when transferred, a structure that could shield tens of billions of dollars of future taxes.

Apple hired Antonio García Martínez despite knowing about his bestselling Facebook memoir, then removed him after roughly 2,000 employees petitioned over passages from it. The hosts’ strongest criticism was procedural: Apple had vetted the book before hiring him, yet reversed course before he had meaningfully performed the job.

Chamath described a Facebook culture that once force-ranked employees and sought to remove the bottom 5–10%, before the company became too large to continue. His broader operational argument was that technology companies can grow their businesses without continually expanding headcount, yet Silicon Valley often confuses organizational growth with business growth.

Jason Calacanis said he was already sitting out many venture rounds because valuations no longer made sense on traditional metrics, while selectively overpaying for companies he strongly believed in. He expected falling public growth-stock valuations to work backward through late-stage investing and eventually reset prices across venture.

The panel’s most concrete crypto thesis was that institutional adoption would push U.S. cryptocurrency toward regulation rather than disappearance. Sacks said major Wall Street institutions and endowments were already allocating capital to crypto, while Chamath argued it would increasingly be bought, sold, reported and taxed like other financial assets.