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

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight? What is your celebrity doctor giving you?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:04)
Tell the truth.

**David Sacks** (0:05)
Did you get that new shot? People on Twitter are like, your Twitter account is sounding a lot more like Jake's account. I'm like, I think we're on the same diet. I think that's what's going on here.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:14)
Here we are.
Hey! Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All-In Pod with us today. Of course, the Queen of Kinwok and from from his castle in Italy, the cackling dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, nice gardenias, and back from his big, big battle, his brawl, unblocked and undefeated, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks.

**David Sacks** (1:03)
And judging by the comments, I'd say dominant.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:06)
Oh, you read the comments?
Just another sign of your obsession with how you're perceived. I never read comments. Rule number one, don't read the comments. We're not doing it again.

**David Sacks** (1:17)
It shows because you're not listening to the comments, so it makes sense.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:20)
Oh, OK. Go ahead. And you got your whole troll army. How many people have you hired on your social media team to troll me from anonymous accounts on Twitter now to prove your points?

**David Sacks** (1:29)
Now you're paranoid, too.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:31)
I'm not going to.

**David Sacks** (1:32)
Don't be paranoid. Don't be paranoid. Anyway, look, we've patched things up.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:36)
It's patched up.

**David Sacks** (1:36)
Don't break the peace. We have detente.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:40)
All right.
So Friedberg is busy writing tweet storms now about the drought in California, which seems to be just going to be a really bad year, basically. So Friedberg, walk us through it. How bad is California's drought going to be this year?

**David Friedberg** (1:59)
So the drought is already very bad.
I put out a lot of tweets at two in the morning last night, I think. I drank way too much caffeine yesterday. I'm in the mountains and the only way I can avoid having headaches is drinking caffeine all day and it was a mistake.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:11)
It kept me up all night. You're sure it's not the ****?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:17)
Maybe you're so excited about this **** that you just can't sleep. You dropped the needles.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:23)
Nick, you can beat this out.

**David Friedberg** (2:25)
Nick, you got to edit this shit out.

**David Sacks** (2:26)
No, no, keep that.

**David Friedberg** (2:28)
So the big tweet storm I put out at two in the morning last night kind of highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018-2019 that showed how North America, particularly the western half of North America, is in this mega drought that we haven't seen in 500 plus years. And since that paper was published in 2019, conditions have only worsened. We talked about this a few pods ago, but the snowpack level in California reached 0% throughout the entire state by June 1st. That has never happened before. Temperatures in British Columbia, as you guys know, reached over 120 degrees for several days in a row last week, which has never been seen in history in British Columbia. You know, there was a paper published today that estimates that over a billion animals and life forms were wiped out in the coastal region of British Columbia because of this heat wave.
And the temperatures in California are obviously excessive as well, not as bad as they were last year. But what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than we've ever seen at this time of year in history. And so this all sets us up. And the other kind of big consequence, the high temperatures is causing an increased demand for air conditioners. That's the big variable in power demand on all grids. And the low snowpack means that we're not getting hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power is down by 70% in the state of California over where we were in 2019 because there's no snow that's melting causing the rivers to flow. And about 11% to 15% of our state's electricity comes from hydroelectric power. So we're going to have more power demand, we have less power available, we have extremely dry forests.
And so this is setting us up for a number of possible disasters this year. And so rather than just trying to sound the alarm bells, what I'm pointing out is that there may be some things that we should be thinking about doing to try and get ahead of some of the consequences of these big risks, like having enough masks for people to breathe outside so we don't have to shut down schools and shut down outdoor work and all the things that might happen, having community centers that have power available, the state is scrambling to find excess power on the grid right now. But it just highlights that there's a moment here that is almost like where we were going into COVID.