as you guys know i get panic attacks at the dentist but she was able to navigate me through where i didn't i only sweat through half my shirt you have panic attacks at the dentist no but i sweat profusely and i get very nervous why what is that about we all have weaknesses jason we all have weaknesses this is my achilles heel my achilles heel is a dentist really yeah i don't like going to the dentist either no the dentist really freaks i don't know why it freaks me out sex have you thought about i had a really bad experience when i was a kid you know tell us more about your childhood drama have you ever seen the movie marathon man it was kind of like that [Music] is it safe is it safe all right here we [Music] go [Music] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome again to another episode of the all in podcast episode 37 with us today on his noble crusade conquering europe chamath pali hapatia calls us from uh a castle somewhere i don't know i can tell by the light switches you're in europe and joining us again the two ais ai number one david sachs and ai number two david friedberg are here uh and of course i'm j cal do we wanna get right into the show or i don't know jeremiah if you want to talk about the the dueling ai's in the group chat debating the nature of the pod i mean one guy told the other guy or one robot told the other robot to [ __ ] this is what we know it's the singularity but it's when the robots are arguing with each other see you don't even know because you don't have any emotions you told free bird to [ __ ] off oh that's kind of true alcohol content no no no i just think that um we i think the format of the pod is working and i don't think we need to turn it on its head that's all i think my so just gonna do this i'm so tired and out of it right now but but let's do it um our just for the listeners um benefit on our little group text where we do our incredibly well prepped rehearsal for this show by texting each other maybe for four minutes a week but the day the night before she told each other for three hours mostly other stuff is covered over the group chat but we were um kind of debating maybe throwing in a spin and you know doing a little group q and a kind of format sax doesn't like it and we were kind of joking with sax that he loves getting his sound bites in and then turning them into little short sound bite video clips with his bff henry belcaster and putting him on twitter and promoting him around the internet and my point of view was i don't think that this show should be about getting to the sound bite that this show should be about something very different which is elevating a conversation and creating the context for people to make decisions on their own and that is to give people multiple points of view and all of the data and consideration when there's a big topic or a big debate underway and it's too easy for us to take a sound bite and then use that as the narrative to try and influence people to do things or to have a point of view and i think that is largely the problem we've broadly had in the twitter social media era is we are very reductionist we bring things down to kind of a one sentence or 140 character statement and then we use that as an emotional pivot point for people to get them to go on one side or the other side as opposed to recognizing that many of the topics we we address are called that is the way things are done i get it and here and here is saks's response that is a valid point freedom however humans all need to be led they are sheeple we need to tell the sheeple what to think and to get into office jason i would like to cut to uh a segment the new segment that i call chamoth does a dramatic reading [Music] so freebird did say this now a dramatic reading from the group chat i will be playing all characters starting with myself freeburg free burke rants up to which i say i'm down with that david sacks you keep trying to [ __ ] with the format of the show if it ain't broke don't fix it [ __ ] off [ __ ] you [ __ ] yourself my response i'm down with that oh no am i going to be able to respond here yes okay exactly your defense okay you're running for office we know no no look i think that um the the friberg position on many issues often comes down to the idea that this this issue is so complicated it's so nuanced we can't have a definitive take and i just reject that i think it's true for some issues i think it's great to have the conversation but i think there are many issues where it is possible to have a definitive take to come down strongly on one side of it and i think the audience wants us to do that i think it's a little bit of a cop-out to say oh we're just going to table all the issues so the audience can say no the audience wants to hear us give our point of view and i didn't like seek harry uh henry belcaster out he found no he's you just talk to him seven times a day and direct every frame of the animation let him go let him go no henry henry you know is one of our super fans started making these videos okay i ignored like the first ten and then finally i was like okay i gotta like see what this guy's into right you did too you slid what is this about like i hope it's to promote his business or something because he's just spending way too much time on this anyway so now henry does run his like videos by us as a courtesy but he comes up with them he chooses what takes he wants to run with and he puts it all together sometimes i'll have a note for him i'll say you know oh my god whatever he's never sent me anything you're gonna get a hold of you he's coming to me me and jason are on a throne jason don't pretend you're not you're not on the channel yes yes the three yeah because he says is it okay for me to do this and we're just like go ahead but then david's like well actually if we could change this and cut this word and david's like oh you don't need any editing just let the chips fall where they may and then he's like machiavellian back there like he scorsese changing every [ __ ] frame of henry belicaster animated gift mate i i just think it's a courtesy that henry's running it by us and you know david are you paying him no have you given him any compensation okay well no separately i after finding out that henry and then his partner dylan they've got like a it is a business for them okay so i said listen you guys are doing great work i think she does great work by the way yeah i said listen um why don't you guys start doing like product videos or videos for startups you can do the first one for uh call in so they're working on a video for that i think we're going to pay them like five grand and if it's good it'll be great for their business i want them to be successful no but let's get to the point let's get to the point about you know reducing the the conversation to sound bites and i want to respond to your point about not taking a position on things but okay so i feel like um first of all within this group there are hard ticks within this group of four people so there are heart takes already in the show and um i think that it's important in many debates and many of the topics we cover there is more than one side to the story and we can have our formed opinion but i think understanding what the other counterpoints and encounter arguments might be is critical to get people to actually get to that opinion themselves as opposed to just telling them this is the single point that you should believe nothing else matters and so i i really think also many of these conversations are generally two two sides of the same coin and many more often than not if you zoom out there are shared values and many of the things that we all argue about broadly a society and i'm not trying to get too kind of philosophical here um but if you kind of distill things down to different points of view with the same set of values or recognize that there are actually different values you can come to a point that allows people to think more progressively and you know achieve a point of view on their own and i think that's critically missing today broadly in society that so much is all about like the good and the evil good and bad them and us and we don't recognize that in moments where there are shared values we're just sitting on you know both sides of the same coin or recognizing that sometimes having different values doesn't necessarily make someone evil it makes them different and that's why i try and kind of elevate the conversation a little bit and why i care so much about this point because i really think it's worth everyone getting a broader perspective on everything that they're addressing so that they can kind of go into things eyes wide open now sax i will say on nearly everything i actually fundamentally agree with you on many of the points on the show and so it's a little bit kind of you know gets a little echo chambery for me to kind of agree with sax like that's it i think it's also worth highlighting why there are other points of view and why there are other arguments to be made out there and for me i certainly have strongly held opinions um and uh you know i i just don't think that it's worth getting to my opinion without taking the broader context of the conversation did you notice that freeburg got a little emotional there i think that was a little actual emotion is tuned out right now i was confused i am confused okay let me let me try and find someone hold on let me just ask you one question about this because this is getting i mean we're kind of in the dugout right now and i don't know if this is fabulously boring to people or not um but do you frequently hold back your opinions on the show because you don't want to influence people or you're afraid of being canceled or having an adverse effect to your business as it has to david's business i don't give a [ __ ] about that no i care more about um uh the uh the path to an opinion um no and i care more about like achieving the objective so what i mean by that is if you just say this is my opinion take it or leave it the other half that has a different opinion doesn't change their opinion if you if you zoom out for people and you say here's the broad set of facts and circumstances and why different groups have different opinions it ends up being a lot easier to actually get people to see what may be the better path forward listen if you want to get meta i have formed my opinion on many of these matters i don't think stating my opinion changes anyone's mind i think zooming out and giving people the broader perspective so they can get there themselves is the way to kind of achieve change okay guys enough we're onto the subject this is we can walk and chew gum at the same time here's the point i think that dave david sacks has opinions they are strong opinions but as i've known him for 20 years they're also weakly held and he changes his mind and i think that's powerful david friedberg and i've known you for a very long time as well is great at explaining things all of it is additive so let's all just keep yeah and of course of course um you know i support having a nuanced conversation that gets all point of views out on the table the point of the pod is not to you know engage in sort of sound bites it's just that what henry creates is the result of a conversation he boils it down from 30 minutes into one minute i think that performs a service for the audience maybe gets our takes out there in a way that you know um that that more people can hear them so i think that's just you know but do you understand freeburgs i mean i feel like i feel like i'm a couple's therapist here but do you understand friedenberg's position david yeah he doesn't want people to look at the podcast as reductio a reduction down to a 60-second clip or a 30-second clip of someone else he wants them to hear the full discourse yeah well that's great well then they can listen and do that but i mean realistically a lot of people don't have time to listen to the full 60 minutes they made sense to the clip but look i think if there's a meta purpose to me being on the pod i think it's to expand the parameters of what people think they can say because i actually i agree with freeberg that the debate is shut down in a lot of contexts and we want to open it back up and you know your overturn window needs to be reopened yeah like look at what happens the whole frank slootman thing last week where he puts out a pretty mild statement about supporting diversity but not to the point where it's it jeopardizes merit you know there was a giant uproar over that he has to walk it back and issue an apology there was no the ceo of snowflake yeah there's no there's no discussion or debate there that was a shutting down of the conversation because one side of the debate is basically engaging in moral indictments against the other side they're not really interested in having a serious debate about the issues i think that my metapurpose in speaking out on the pod about all these issues that i think are just common sense you know is is just to kind of reopen the debate yeah i mean it is that merit versus diversity and what is the point of a business and should the business be compromised or throttled i think that's a very hard thing for people to say should we throttle this business so that we have diversity should we slow down in order to have more diversity we can't find the right candidate but we have a candidate here who's a white male but yeah we already have seven people on this right we've talked about that my my point in giving that example is just to show how shut down the debate is because the day after slootman said ceos are having this conversation in private they're telling me this and they're afraid to say it publicly the very next day he walks it back and issues an apology kind of buttressing his original point that people can't say what they really think so in my view like part of the reason why the all empot is successful is we're getting issues on the table that people want to talk about but feel they can't and i think freeberg brings a very valuable perspective to that conversation but my goal is kind of if i have a medical besides expressing my point of view it is to expand like you said the overton window all right so speaking of the overton window new york city has voted for a basically universally both on the democratic side and on the republican side for a tough on crime mayor 70 percent of san francisco feels worse about crime in a separate poll um and eric adams is the current borough president a former nypd uh officer and he is looking like he because of this stacked voting which can take a little time to figure out who will become the mayor of new york but he has 32 percent of first place votes among 800 000 democratic voters this guy is a a really decent centrist moderate human being um grew up where he was affected and touched by crime decided to fight through that wasn't you know complaining became a police officer did that you know eventually borough president has done that runs for mayor he goes on television he gives an interview where they say what is your perspectives on stop and frisk and the answer he gives was pretty specific which is that you know i believe in stopping um and investigating potential crimes or some such right uh jason you can probably find the exact well i mean having been in the uh you know a new york city police department family um the and living in new york during stop and frisk they left out a key word it was stop question frisk so in high crime areas where there were a lot of shootings or guns they would do stop question and then possibly frisk obviously all policing techniques can be abused but his feeling on it was when deployed correctly stop in question is a great technique and i can tell you when i lived in new york previously 70 80 percent of people including people of color including people from the toughest neighborhoods were in favor of this this was universally seen as a huge success at the time because they were taking guns off the street illegal guns constantly because somebody would hop a turn style or there would be people hanging out on a street corner and cops would come up and say hey you're hanging out here at three in the morning what's going on but the problem the problem is that he gave a pretty reasonable answer yes and then they tried to cancel them yep and he would not allow himself to be cancelled he went on the breakfast club and all kinds of other media outlets and explained his position and they couldn't cancel him which is how they really thought it was an incredible testament to what we're going through right now which is right now nobody knows what to do to solve the things we feel we've tried the radical right version of a candidate it didn't work we're now wondering to ourselves while we have a custodian in the white house whether we go to the radical left that's probably not going to work either because unfortunately in san francisco i mean unfortunately it looks like the the the progressive left or the radical left is really really judgmental um and none of these folks have really done anything and so they they are easy to complain it's almost as if they know that they what they want won't work so they don't want anything else to work and so they just want everything to devolve into chaos that's a shame and so you know people tried to literally lie about what this guy said on television that was taped no no i did it five times and clarify i am not by the way they were there were people jason i don't know if you saw that the art the the video length there were people holding a press conference in front of his office literally screaming about stop and frisk when he never said stop and frisk he said stop in question is a reasonable strategy if somebody if we think that there is the potential of a crime and the fact that people could not have that conversation and had to go to basically this guy needs to either quit or be completely removed from his ability to run for mayor yes it's insanity yeah and uh you can people seem to have lost this ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their mind uh which is you could be for criminal justice reform you could be against police violence um and you could be for strong policing of violent crimes and law and order and what seems to be happening in both cities new york san francisco and other places where crime is getting acute is um that they uh people are voting here's here's two other to be safer here's here's another conflicting thoughts uh you can believe um that you know uh asians are awesome but you can also believe that the uh coronavirus may have come from the wuhan lab and believing the latter doesn't mean that you're supporting asian hate i'm just going to put that out there right okay can i chime in on this um on this uh on the um on the addams win because i think this is this is huge news do you have your notes from harry to make the clip okay go look i mean eric adams is going to be the next mayor of new york city um and i think there's like three big takeaways from from this number one crime is the issue that i've been saying on this pod that it is for at least six months it is the number one issue when people do not feel safe in their homes and in their neighborhoods uh you know nothing else matters and here comes uh this really underdog candidate he is despised by the uh sort of the progressive left and sort of the elites of the democratic party and he wins i mean he this is a huge underdog victory he's only a former cop he still carries a gun i mean he is packing and that sent a message to the electorate i am going to be tough on crime i'm not standing for defunding the police and deep prosecution and decarceration which are the hobby horses right now the progressive left i'm going to protect you and the city and the voters were eating it up even in the democratic party so number one crime is the huge issue and i think it's going to reverberate throughout america for the next few years number two it showed how out of touch these sort of progressives these and i'd say predominantly white progressives are how out of touch they are with the constituencies they claim to represent um you know the the mostly uh black and latino neighborhoods who voted in large numbers for eric adams were having none of this sort of elite woke progressive thinking around decarceration deep prosecution um they are interested in real solutions for the problems that they see not engaging in this sort of like action identity there's actually an interesting nugget in what you're saying which i think you can broaden out which is the the radical left i don't even call them the progressive left because that would mean they were making progress in their thinking i think it's just this radical left they seem to be white rich affluent people yes and they seem to be super totally they're super guilty about something but they're all totally disconnected from what actual people of color want they're totally discussing like they're speaking for a group of people who maybe are like that's not actually my position i want my kids to be safe on the way to school i want guns off the street if somebody you know and i think that i want to read the quote that he had because this is really important is to go to the source material not the headlines from let's face it the radical left is running these news uh publications and they're determining how they frame him and here's the question uh from vanity fair so you think there is a way to use stop and frisk that isn't abusive it's a reasonable question and his answer well there's a word that's missing in there it's called stop question and frisk so two o'clock in the morning you look out your door you see a person standing in front of your house he places a gun in his waistband you go to call the police i hope that police officer responds he needs to be able to question that person what are you doing with that gun if we're telling police officers you can't question people we are jeopardizing the safety of the city i mean this is the most common sense logical right framing of the discussion it's not like they're saying just pick a random person on the subway and say empty your pockets and get up against the wall like the gestapo you know somebody called something and you questioned people in the area we've seen this in san francisco that you've got these you know social justice crusaders who claim that they're helping minority communities and you see an increase in the number of victims from those communities and what eric adams said is listen we can't just care about the cops abusing their power we also have to care about violence against these communities when it's perpetrated by criminals and people responded to that to that message and i think this the the final point that i think that the eric adams win represents is that twitter is likely win like likely win okay fair enough is that twitter is not real life okay eric adams has 14 000 twitter followers yang has two million okay yank him in fourth okay and you know yang was sort of the darling of the you know sort of the twitter elites you know he's sort of i mean look when he first got into the democratic primary for president he was a little bit of a breath of fresh air but ultimately he kind of adopted the generic progressive positions on things that did not resonate with the people of new york they wanted someone tough on crime and so i think you know eric adams he had another great quote i think on election night he said social media does not pick a candidate people on social security pick a candidate okay great line and and i mean and so here's the thing is i think we all are distorted in our thinking based on what this like very loud but ultimately small number of voices on social media says and i think it's not just politicians by the way i mean it's it's not just eric adams who won because he ignored twitter i mean biden won because he ignored twitter right i mean biden was not on twitter and he was able to win the democratic primary for president so you know i think there's a lesson here for politicians which is like twitter modern moderates can win anything and everything as long as they show up and they do the work but if you to your point spend all your time trying to curate your twitter image all you're going to do is validate a bunch of people that really at the end of the day are trying to punch up right if you think about all the people that are spouting off trying to cancel trying to judge there's a there's a great there's a great quote in many drake songs which is like these people have more followers than dollars and what he's trying to say is like you make them important when they don't need to be important totally now now do ceos right you've got ceos of some of the biggest companies in the world like tim cook like frank slootman who are making their company policy based on what this small number of loud voice on twitter are saying it's ridiculous i mean i think the eric adams win is a watershed because it shows the emperor wears no clothes these these very loud progressive woke voices ultimately do not have that many supporters and all people have to do not not listen to them not when it goes into the privacy of the ballot box you have a lot of people again similar to the to the to the to what we saw in the in the trump election in 2016 where all these people quietly said oh i cannot support trump and then one in two people went into that ballot box and said [ __ ] you to everybody and this is the exact same thing that's playing out except the opposite which is now if you are not completely progressive at least in your posture and your vocabulary there's this threat of being cancelled and so you adopt this stuff almost to make your life easy but when push comes to shove and we see it here in new york city and we'll probably see it all over the country you get into the ballot box you're going to go for somebody moderate and reasonable that does the simple things that you want to get done and by the way they tried to cancel the new york times tried to cancel andrew yang because he um had made uh very i he basically said you know that uh mentally ill men uh who are addicted to drugs basically are um punching people in the face and you know we need to address that and the new york times framed it really interestingly and i'll read you the tweet watch andrew yang's response to a question about how he would handle mental health during when wednesday's new york city mayoral debate uh drew fire on social media from people who said it lacked empathy or understanding and when you look at that framing he said how he would handle mental health he wasn't talking about mental health generally and broadly he was talking about people suffering from mental health on the streets who were homeless who were addicted to drugs and who punch people on the face right massive subset yeah but they framed this to attack him then let me just finish the other way they framed it it drew fire on social media so instead of saying this person said this they literally the new york times is trying to get andrew yang canceled and to get more people to subscribe uh by being part of the woke mob yes literally their twitter handle does that he i could find ten times as many people who said yeah we can't have people who are mentally ill and violent on the street punching people it was andrew yang's it was andrew yang's single best moment of the campaign is he talked honestly about the risk to the public of mentally ill people living on the streets and attacking people it was his single best moment the reason he did it is because he saw the traction that eric adams was getting on the safety issue and if yang had done that from the beginning of the campaign he might be the next mayor yeah let me let me read this from here yang cared too much ultimately his achilles heel was caring too much about the very online voices on twitter like the new york times and we've just seen that eric adams has proved is all a house of cards nobody really cares what they think here's the here's the quote from eric adams if the democratic party fails to recognize what we did here in new york they're going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they're going to have a problem in the presidential election the brooklyn borough president said america is saying we want to have justice and safety and end inequality and we don't want fancy candidates we want candidates their nails are not polished they have calluses on their hands and they're blue-collar people common sense common people they've returned to common sense freeburg i had uh cc jew on um this uh thread where somebody said they found missing sequencing of the kova genes that were submitted to a database did you have a chance to review that at all um i did and since you sent that it's become a little bit of a story a lot of people have kind of picked it up and followed up on it because it did ignite quite a bit of interest so the story is a guy named jessie bloom who's a researcher at the hutchinson cancer center in seattle and has been studying um you know covet as a lot of scientists have kind of shifted their attention over the past year but has a background in virology he was uh trying to pull some early genomic samples that that may have been taken from patients early in china so what this means is you know when patients kind of um in the early days were emerging as potentially having stars cov2 they were swabbing them and then doing a genomic read of the rna they find from the virus in that swab and around the world a lot of scientists contribute to this openly available genomic database um and they contribute their whole genome samples when they when they run studies and so on so other scientists can use it in the future for research and what this guy found was that there were a few dozen of these samples that had been on this genomics database that were now missing and they had been pulled down and using a little technical sleuthing he realized they had been pulled down from the directory but the raw genomic sample read data was still available on the google cloud so he used the google cloud api to pull that actual data down from the servers and then ran a study on it it turns out the the interesting kind of intrigue around this story is why did that data get get deleted who deleted it and it turns out the only way it gets deleted is if the original kind of authors go in and make a request to have it removed and these were some random scientists in china who had and so in the days following this publication of this guy so this guy published this on a pre-print server called bioarchive so it's not a peer-reviewed journal uh it basically is a place for bioarchive is a place where uh biology scientists can submit uh early versions of their research papers or to get a new finding out really quickly and then the world can kind of study it and you don't have to wait for the journalistic kind of cycle of getting things approved which is which is common now um and so he put this thing out there and everyone's kind of questioning well okay where did these samples go it turns out that these chinese scientists had submitted them and now it has shown uh or it has come out that apparently some um us officials made the request to have it taken down after being asked to do so by some chinese officials uh to pull this data down and so there's a really weird kind of intrigue going on right now around this whole story now so so that's kind of thread number one which is why was this request made to pull this data down what was the motivation etc thread number two is what does the data show us and what the data shows us unfortunately is a little bit inconclusive so a guy named trevor bedford just put out a tweet um earlier today uh analyzing this he's a he's a world-class virologist also works at the french hutchinson center in seattle um and he basically highlights that in the early days of the sarsko v2 explosion in china you can really identify from a genomic variant perspective two lineages of the virus that means you know we're trying to get back to origin or patient zero and it turns out there were kind of like these two families of the virus that were emerging and even with that new data you could kind of reconstruct the family tree in such a way that the wuhan meat market could have been the origin meaning the root virus could have come out of that wuhan market or the wuhan meat market could have been one of the two branches of the tree that emerged early on so there may have been an even earlier origin and wuhan market was just one place where it started to take off so you know he said look he still thinks that it's about a 50 50. you know there's no clear evidence one way or the other based on these newly uh uncovered samples but you know there is still this question of does the wuhan market kind of paint the patient zero story or is it one of the places where the explosion happened and patient zero was in fact much earlier than wuhan market i i will say a couple episodes ago i kind of made a comment you know with respect to the origin of this virus that i don't know don't care and and i just want to clarify because i know that some people kind of reached out to me about that i didn't really uh my my intention with that statement was that this was really meant to be um i think a little bit more of a canary in a coal mine for us broadly about you know hey what we should be looking forward to is what's next not just absolutely what happened in the already let's move on to the next thing is what you're saying not being callous that it doesn't matter yeah i think i think what's more important is that we need to get prepared for how do we prevent these things happening in the future and and what are the um you know the key kind of checkpoints we have around us in the future because one thing i am most concerned about is a huge step back but i'm concerned about our normalization of cancel um you know we kind of have started to cancel people but we've also you know these shutdowns have been normalized and the normalization where shutdown is the response to an emerging variant or emerging virus is really scary because you know how is society going to function properly when there's going to be a proliferation of these viruses a proliferation of of risks uh with new technologies being made available to us and then shutting down becomes our immediate response well how do you feel about shutting down borders friedberg as the first course of action if everybody in unison had shut down the borders in february and said no intercountry travel you know it would have obviously been devastating for the airlines but it might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks there was no way to stop the the pandemic once the genie's out of the bottle the genies out of the bottle and we saw this in states that had lockdowns and states that didn't have lockdown it's where we saw equivalent but why wasn't taiwan and australia and those kind of places that are islands that lock down why were they spared i i don't know if you can really say that they were spared um and i don't know if you can really say that people are happy with the the life that they led for that year right i i think what we need to solve for is how do we have these vaccines come to market much faster and be much more variable in their efficaciousness because we are going to have a lot more of these kind of emerging variants over the next couple of years with stars cov2 but also with potentially engineered bugs that form to be careful about question for trimatha saks then um in friedberg's sort of analysis there um and what was explained uh on the web about the these new sequences the us was allegedly involved in taking this down with the chinese if the usa and i'm just creating a hypothesis here just to do a little game theory if the u.s was allowing china to take this down what would the game theory be if the u.s was involved in dare i say a cover-up or being opaque like the chinese have already been proven to be why would the u.s do that tremoff what would be the possible theories and sacks why did why did the nba shut down daryl mori but that may not be um that made it sorry that may not be national policy jake all right so like a scientist an american scientist or an american official could have made that request it doesn't mean that it was a conspiratorial process to remove this stuff yeah no i want to jump the gun i want to jump the fence and say if in fact the some u.s people were involved so to your point it could be an individual covering it up or it could be an organization in america or it could be you know some set of organizations but saks you wanted to well look i i don't believe the wet market theory precisely because there is a cover-up i mean the wet market theory was the official ccp who party line about where the virus came from if that was the case why wouldn't they just throw open the gates to investigators let them go into the wuhan institute of virology um you know why why all the cover-up why and wouldn't they shut down all wet markets maybe i mean but yeah and maybe the logical competition but why why obstruct the investigation why um ask these american researchers to delete these sequences of um dna or whatever and in terms of why would the researchers do it because they were asked to and they've got a relationship why would americans be if in fact they were why is it just why is the who been carrying water for um the chinese government they get their paycheck from them no because i think the the who is stupid i mean that's well they've all got all these you know institutional incentives they all work together and um you know there's money involved there's sort of relationships involved there's bureaucracy involved um and then there's a level of incompetence yeah so it could be incompetence could it also not be that uh we funded that laboratory in some way right we had given some money towards it that's i think established yeah the functional resources i think it's a if look i i am a better person and then on our face if they were in fact doing this so i think we don't want a little or we don't want to be in conflict with them because no i think americans in the west might demand we be in conflict with china no no i think it's i think it's what friedrich said which is like look uh what seemingly a low-level request is made to basically delete an entry in a table you do it you know not thinking anything of it uh it i think it's pretty clear that this was something that leaked out of that lab the thing that we will never ever know is how and why and whether it was purely accidental or something more nefarious than that and i think this is why to friedberg's point we just have to put a pin in all of that and move on and try to figure out a way where we set ourselves up so that the the next time for example the like you know we we hear about the delta variant now we're going to hear about other variants in the fall it's going to be a tough winter we cannot shut down yeah i think we need to know what happened here in order to inform our plan for the future so i think to your point walking and chewing gum at the same time why can't we do both yeah well i mean think about it if the so so i've never i've never heard anyone seriously argue that the lab leak was intentional i mean i think because that would have posed i think a risk to china itself but but let's say let's say it was an accidental lab leak um what what that suggests is look the chinese knew everything about this virus for months while we were all here pulling out our hair trying to figure this thing out what is it who does it affect you know what are the risks we're all having these debates in the united states and trying to get to the bottom of this and they knew everything about it and they were they weren't telling us but hold on freeburg i mean the i think i think i i read this somewhere but moderna had characterized the vaccine 48 hours after getting an email of the dna sequence of the anyone can do that yeah within within 40 so so this was done in january as soon as we got yeah but if they did make it to david's point why don't they tell us how they made it it it took months it took months to understand the pathology of the virus right yeah it's it's that's not what matters jkl you can read the code it's very readable you can read the code within a day and then you can pick the area of the spike protein which we already knew about and you can say let's go build some you know target so how they got there doesn't matter is what you're saying freeberg how they how they created it how they got i mean the you're saying you're asking how the chinese edited the virus in a lab is that what you're saying yeah how they was just like a three-year project is this the 17th version they worked on or the second you know like there's so many things jason you're speaking about you're characterizing this as if it was a designed weapon is that what you're saying well i'm i'm saying it was designed not as a weapon but they were doing what it studied evolutionary function research yeah gain of function means that it there so there is a gain of function in plain english fredberg so so when they say neurology in virology they're going to study what changes in the genome might do to biology to an animal to a biological system and that study gives them insights into how a virus may evolve or how certain parts of a virus may affect humans ultimately in different ways and so understanding viruses and really important when you're studying viruses is you want to understand where they're headed not just where they're coming from and so to understand where they're headed you may make genomic changes and study how those genomic changes affect so they enhanced can i use the word enhanced or solved you could say evolve you could say enhanced you could say engineered but um but very much it's about understanding where the changes in the proteins and the virus can affect biology in different ways in the future so that we can better understand you know what these viruses are capable of and prepare ourselves we found out the implications of covet 19. and thank god we didn't have to find it out for 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1098. you know what i mean like yes so that's my point freeburg would it not be helpful to open kimono look at every single enhancement they made and what the results of those were like they did something in that lab for the last couple of years who's got that information they knew the name is the same the name is the same thing what this database thing uh represents is look there was a cover up here and that cover-up has fingerprints and the information is leaking out and we are seeing more crime and and more information is going to come out i actually disagree with you guys that we're not going to learn more about what happened we're going to learn how we're going to learn we're going to learn a lot more and it's going to get worse and worse it's going to be but sex where does it head so like let's say we discover that was my original question question let's say we discover that there's an accidental lab leak out of the wuhan institute of virology a scientist got infected left the lab gave it to her boyfriend people spread it in the street suddenly became a whole pandemic what what do we do what do you think the response is do you think americans basically now impose sanctions on china and we and we lead to a cold war like where is this all headed what are the motivating principles of politicians who are going to respond as that evidence comes out yes that's what i want to know okay number one i've said it before we've got to reassure the whole pharmaceutical industry we cannot be dependent on china for our pharmaceutical supply chain our antibiotics our ppe that is insane um second of all i mean we got to be more realistic about the nature of the regime that we're dealing with they knew everything about this virus for months while we were trying to figure it out where does it take us like let's say we find out that to be true where does this what happens next decoupling decoupling here and here's another thing that i think needs to happen which is that but i guess that's sorry one sec but doesn't decoupling happen either way like why do we need all this because there is such a motivating principle on on both sides of the aisle to decouple from china and there is a motivating principle no there isn't there is a reason to not decouple it's called money there is a group of elites who do not want the decoupling to happen from the nba to iphones apple the nba and disney do not want to decouple they want to integrate these two societies so that we can make money i'm not sure the decoupling is my theory of what people are scared of no okay people are scared of a decoupling i just want to say two things i don't think that there's like a group of elites that want that to happen necessarily because i think that their lives are complicated and what they would love to have i think is actually two end markets you have to remember if you go from one global market to a duopoly market and you're a seller of services you actually have more pricing power and a duopoly than you do in a monopoly into a monopoly so you know if you're disney theoretically and you have the ability to differentially price two different pieces of content you're going to do that so i i tend to think in general it's better for economic systems to have this bifurcation so the i just want to go back to the the thing that i wanted to define bifurcation you're saying two different markets but what if there is hey we're going to sanction we're not going to send disney movies where they're not going to let disney and nba and like they don't like google and twitter and or iphones are not going to be made there and apple's going to start making iphones and vietnam and pakistan and sri lanka i actually think what happens is it accelerates democracy because again you have an enormously difficult and thorny issue inside of china which is they have a cataclysmic demographic bombshell going on they have we have the average age in china versus the average age in the united states is now the same yep which is an unbelievable thing because china was facing policy china was 15 or 20 years younger in the early 90s when all of this offshoring started to happen in full scale by the end of 21s by the end of this century china's population i think is projected to shrink to about 700 million people so they are in a hugely difficult demographic situation where there's no young people people are getting older and older and older and so there's just going to be a lot of upheaval you just saw by the way people cost a lot of money too much much more money japan china just you know relax their one child policy to two then within a month they relax their two-child policy to three and they're gonna be paying people to have kids i mean just like we give tax incentives well and now they're uh they're floating a policy which says unlimited kids okay so so that's why you can just i just want to go back to what uh one of the practical things we can do coming out of wuhan as all this new data comes out is instead of vilifying china or trying to enter some cold war which is stupid we should just go and reshore everything as sac suggested one thing that you can say is wherever there is this kind of research happening in the world every single variant needs to go to some basically open source repository that virologists all around the world can basically watch what's happening in lockstep well right what the [ __ ] was going on here then yeah they deleted it it was deleted but to be clear that is exactly the principle and that is exactly what goes on within the academic and research communities worldwide there's very open and cooperative dialogue with academics around the world about these matters and generally that is absolutely true in the way things are done because scientists don't care about politics they care about you know human health and progress answer this question please is every single variant of covid that led up to covet 19 well characterized and well understood by a broad class of scientists and virologists all over the world or yeah or a small subset of people the the plurality of which we're working at the wuhan lab for virology we didn't know the argument goes you don't know that you have sars cov2 in those early days and so you see some people getting sick and then suddenly you put your head up and you're like wait a second that's what's going on here that's not what i'm about my point is you're not you're not running a genomic sequencing on all those people in those early days no no i'm asking something you have this original virus that you've been testing and mutating and you know reprogramming you're testing you're basically doing a massive monte carlo simulation on an original virus are all the intermediate instantiations of that virus well characterized okay that's my point yeah okay if they were publicly available wouldn't that be super dangerous also also by the way like wouldn't it make sense then if if you were doing these iterations of these viruses that that the dna sequences should go to places like pfizer and moderna where you are mandated to create vaccines just in case well we are going to enter a stage here in the next decade where we will have vaccine printers around the world they're going to be small bioreactors they're going to be able to effectively ship code to them they're going to print vaccines there's several companies pursuing this i'm just i'm just going to go over this i like your idea though i'm just going to be interesting this system is immature naive and inefficient and i think what if that's something that we can fix that's why what matters most in my opinion and based on the comments i made a few episodes ago is that we need to focus on how to get there versus trying to trace back the origins because i think honestly tracing back the origins is just going to put kindling on a fire that's already burning and so my my this this this has been my point about this whole like you know blame china we want to get to a point where we can quote unquote blame china for this but the decoupling and the onshore there is already enough motivation there and there is already on both sides of the aisle there is already kind of an obvious trajectory that we're headed this way i'm not sure this is a catalyst maybe or it's a little bit more kindling we're already headed there and it doesn't actually answer our forward-looking question which is how do we secure our future and how we secure our future is really where technology and industry and and some of these free burgers let me let me build on chamat's idea what if the mrna vaccine creation and the research laboratory were the same facility and you had a cross-disciplinary approach where they're making stuff and then they're curing it next door in real time so that they can trade notes why would that be a terrible idea it seems like a brilliant idea you could just you could just transfer the date from the research and print the vaccines with the people that are really good at making vaccine right you don't need to have an intricate understanding of the biology to actually be effective at making vaccines right no but isn't there something about scientists who are cross-disciplinary sharing space and having collisions building relationships isn't that part of the science process that's worked over the last couple years you talk about how in synthetic biology and all this you want the mathematicians computer programmers you know and the biologists in the same area and the chemists resolving to a world where we have very cheap very fast and distributed production of vaccines is an engineering problem and the the engineering work is what is kind of being undertaken now by several companies and will be fueled by this uh this new um uh bill that biden's trying to get past this infrastructure build is a ton of money and therefore and as that happens that engineering process is effectively think about them like printers and they can take code and that code allows the that printer to not print whatever you want to print the question of what you want to print is going to be determined by the research that's being done over here which is okay here's what we're discovering here's what we should print here's what we should protect against and why but i think that there's a separate engineering exercise which you know let's let let's build this distributed production system i'm going to go on a limb and say these labs are immature naive and unsophisticated in the checks and balances that exist and i think we've seen that and we need to fix it and you need to do something more than just have a bunch of folks that are focused on science going ham in whatever way they want all right so just to wrap sax anything else on this as we put a cherry on it well i just you asked the question what do we do about china i think that is a question that's a generational question we're going to be asking that for totally for decades it's this is an area where we need freed bergy and nuance because it's something that we're going to have to navigate as a country for for decades a really good book about this is the thucydides trap by graham allison who's a harvard professor and he discusses different strategies we can take he quotes uh lee kuan yew who is the you know president of singapore who has a great quote about this he said lee kuan yew said that the size of china's displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance it is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player this is the biggest player in the history of the world that was that was the lee kuan yew quote um so we were dealing with this issue even before covet but i do think that kovid has unmasked this regime a little bit and caused people across both sides of the whole spectrum to look at this regime i think more realistically all right so in somewhat related news uh apple obviously building all their phones over there and now having servers and data over there um has led to a lot of scrutiny of big tech but the more pressing issue is the anti-trust bills that seem to be fast-tracked on wednesday u.s house judiciary committee discussed six six proposed anti-trust bills uh one bill uh sponsored by a democrat from rhode island uh would call for apple to allow third-party app stores seems reasonable and provide iphone technologies to third-party software makers so i think that means maybe opening up imessage which would be delightful i'm not sure exactly what they mean there and so apple and tim cook is in a panic he apparently called nancy pelosi and said can you pump the brakes just to give you an idea of what's going on here um apple's uh revenue even though it's a small percentage of just 10 uh of their 274 billion dollars in uh 2020 revenue it's obviously pure profit profit margins got to be in the notes here it says 75 but i would think it's even more clearly services and the app store inside of apple is i think analogous to the aws for amazon is a money printing machine that's growing really fast uh what do we think about apple being forced to put other app stores on their phones just like you can on your android phone i support it i've been blue pilled on this issue actually that's what the that's what the commenters on of our the all-in fans have said is that why sacks taking blue pills on this issue um and and look the reality is because i'm not in the business of um of helping two trillion dollar uh market cap companies i'm in the underdog business i'm in the business of helping the entrepreneur get started with a new company and the fact of the matter is is that apple has the market power the same market power greater than microsoft did in its heyday with the windows monopoly they are total gatekeepers of what applications can be built on these ios devices and windows windows you could win it was open i mean it was open they already have an app store yeah right so this this proposal by uh representative right so this proposal by representative sicilian the democrat from rhode island would allow the side loading it would basically loosen the grip that apple has over the apps that can be loaded onto apple devices it would at least uh you know create some degree some potential no it would create a tremendous competition and it's very easy to execute great jamaa uh um i i think you said it really well i am also in the underdog business so i think the the faster they've rammed this thing through the better off it'll be um the thing that is important to recognize is that apple will make this argument that well look there's always android and also look there's the open web and that's structurally not true for a couple of reasons the overwhelming amount of development at least in silicon valley and broadly speaking in tech starts on the iphone sure um and it's only then as an afterthought almost i mean you have to remember it took snapchat three or four years of being a public company before they actually had a reasonable android app right and so android is has always been sort of the low rpu afterthought even though it has meaningfully more users they're just not as much revenue per user and so exactly and so you know it's kind of a baseless argument the overwhelming revenue the north star for developers where all of the venture capital money goes into is the funding and developing ios apps and in that world view ios is a complete monopoly and uh breaking up the ability for them to basically dictate a 30 take rate um and also loosening the technical guard rails i think is a huge step forward there's only one thing that i would say however apple has done an incredible job with privacy locking down the phone sandboxing instances and we'll have to find some technical alternative to fortifying um oh no actually they don't chamoth actually i think what they do is when you go to your settings you say unlock iphone you now are not protected apple is not responsible you've decided to sideload stuff and it's basically like putting your mo your phone into jailbreak or dev mode where they are not going to support you that's the way i think apple should execute it is that would be like they're you know if you want to load anything you want when you get viruses and your privacy gets hacked it's not on us you just essentially although we have one warranty for people who are not jailbroken and side loaded and one warranty for people who decide to jailbreak their phones what's what's incredible to me the other the other point on this is how quickly these guys pass this bill and actually oh actually all six and then how reasonably well they were written i mean this is one topic where sometimes you know politicians can really kind of get it wrong or they can get lobbied in one way or the other and these bills come out they don't make sense i mean if you have to remember where how far we've come you know wasn't the first antitrust thing where like some guy asked zuck a question about like a model t ford or something i mean it was just so stupid they were so dumb and they've gone from there to this it's really incredible how fast they've caught up i think this is just a terrible precedent and i i think if you guys um weren't going to make money by weakening apple and alphabet you guys put your free market hats on you'd kind of acknowledge that this is just we were not angel investors we did not do the series of either of those companies fredberg yeah i i recognize that and i think like if you guys have if you guys had a bunch of shares in alphabet or amazon or apple your your opinion would be a little bit different but um i'm just observing exactly what you think i have shares i have shares on amazon and facebook yeah well look i i think in this particular case he's in the process of selling them you know at the end of the day if if apple and alphabet didn't make incredible products for consumers and focus on consumer happiness they wouldn't be as successful as they are and much of if you remember kind of the early days of the apple app store ideology it was about curating apps and curating the quality of those apps so that the quality of the overall iphone experience would be superior to anything else out there and consumers would love it it wasn't about blocking out competitors and blocking out rivals and blocking out other platforms it was about making something that consumers would absolutely love and the same ideas freedberg they blocked third party uh book stores and uh book readers they blocked browsers they wanted to block experience vlc and open source players they did that because they wanted you to use their own products basically they set standards on the app store and as long as you met those standards those apps got in there so youtube's in there uh google chrome is in there you know i've got chrome installed on my iphone i think it's a better browser it took them years years and they realized they had to give that up they had to give up the browser because that's what wanted no the only reason that chrome is there is because of the amount of money that google pays apple for search yeah look and that was a quid pro co in that search deal i will bet you dollars to donuts if that's the only reason yeah i don't think apple i don't think apple is that dumb i'm pretty sure that these guys recognize that if consumers want something they better give it to them and if consumers wanted a bunch of shitty apps on the phone that didn't work and broke down all the time you will then go through the process of jailbreaking should you be able to jailbreak your phone and hack it freedberg i don't i don't think that i should be telling apple how to make their friggin hardware they should make their hardware and i as a consumer in the free market should decide if i want to buy it or not and if i would oh it's not a free market it's a monopoly i can go buy a freaking samsung or i don't know if htc still makes phones or you know nokia or blackberry i guess these guys are all dead because their products suck but okay at the end of the day if there's an alternative out there i will buy it and if you guys want to go fund a hardware company that builds a software platform on top of the hardware and maybe i'm not a monopolist now i know why you didn't want to say your opinion you're a goddamn robber no it's really it's really interesting that free book actually on this issue is actually the the free market um monster red pill no and ever and everybody else is sort of blue pill but but david you're right i'll point out that red pill blue pill like you know the books i think it's better for startups i don't particularly have a lot of trust or faith that these big companies when they get this big are particularly well run or have the best interest of the broad market in their minds and so yeah i'll be honest with you i hope these companies get broken up i think it's great for what we do i think it's great for entrepreneurship i think it's super uh phenomenal for the innovation cycle we could be a part of um and i would hope to participate in that and make a bunch of money i think the best the best way to destroy a monopoly is to build better technology that disrupts them and that has always been the case throughout history and anytime government gets involved and tries to break up a monopoly in a way that is not natural to the way the market forces might demand you end up declining an innovation standard we have to disrupt apple we have to disrupt amazon we have to disrupt alphabet using technology if we want to have an advantage to go in the market and by having government come in and intervene i feel like it ends up being like like like you know this cronyism which which ultimately affects markets in an adverse way here's the problem is that the developer network effects around an operating system monopoly are insuperable they you you cannot overthrow them there are now thousands and thousands maybe even millions of apps have been developed on the ios system and uh no competitor can ever get that kind of traction it is the windows monopoly all over again and by the way microsoft and windows might have dominated the internet if it weren't for the government coming down with the whole netscape litigation netscape didn't survive but it kind of it kind of froze microsoft in its tracks and prevented them from dominating the nascent internet and so you know i think that turned out to be a good government intervention uh in terms of allowing innovation to move forward and by the way just on the sicily proposals i think part of the reason why they make so much sense is because we can't break up apple how would you break up apple right i mean apple sells one product which is ios on different sizes the only way to break up apple is to force them to use their opera let their operating system be licensed to other hardware that's not breaking them up so uh it would certainly create downward pressure on their margins if dell could make a competing apple desktop okay fair enough what i'm saying what i'm saying is there's no natural fault lines within apple like there are at amazon or google right yes amazon could spin out aws very easily google could spin out youtube or maybe enterprise instagram apple's yes of course so so what that means is because you can't split up the company if you want to address their power the only way to do it is with proposals like side loading i feel like you're you're either looking at a capitalist monopoly or you're looking at a government monopoly so if you think about what's happened in financial services in the united states the the regulatory burden on being a service provider in the financial services industry is so high that it is very difficult for startups to come in and compete and look at what emerged bitcoin right i feel like there is always going to be a consumer innovation model that will supplant the monopoly and you can't just say hey the government's going to come in and sideload or or break up these big businesses what ultimately happens when you do that is you create a regulatory burden that makes it equally difficult for competition to arise over time or to reduce innovation that's going to benefit consumers this is the princess leia uh you know basically theory the the tighter you squeeze the more galaxies slip through your fingers and maybe tick tock uh and snapchat are examples of that with facebook but there aren't many and i don't know who's coming up to fight against amazon at this point um so shopify and shopify is crushing it and they're incredible and they're going to create this long tail of stores that ultimately could end up competing really effectively with amazon and we've seen it right and and and consumers choose it and this because just because shopify is making a lot from sas revenue does not mean that the majority of goods are not going to go through i will tell you the consumer the the consumer experience on shopify stores is fantastic i mean we all don't realize it but we're buying a ton of stuff from shopify stores it's pretty good it's pretty good and it has forced innovation you know and and i will also highlight that one of the benefits of these scaled businesses is that they end up having the resourcing to fund new and emerging businesses that otherwise wouldn't be fundable i don't think that aws would have emerged and therefore google cloud and all these other alternatives wouldn't have emerged if amazon went yeah it didn't have this incredible chromium open source project and think about the industry that emerged around android but nobody david nobody's nobody's suggesting to have broken these thing up in 2007 but it's 2021 and things have changed i don't know what's down the road that we're going to miss out on right i mean i i guess my point is like you know let the consumer make the decision as opposed to create regulatory burden that over time has its own what is the downside to allowing somebody who wants to put an app store on their iphone what's the downside freeberg what's the downside to letting me have amazon's app store or android app store and me to pick that i want to just have one subscript set of subscriptions and i prefer the android store yeah why is that bad i'm not making it personally the apple argument is absolutely quality of the the quality of i think you i just think it's a little bit short-sighted for us to all jump to say let's break up big tech like the quality of what no no no no overlapping i think it's incredible and and the new products that have come out is just mind-blowing and you know we all kind of miss the fact that these are the beneficiaries of scaled businesses and you know you can't really see a startup we are not saying break up big tech we're saying get rid of the 30 app store fee because that negatively impacts our portfolios let's be clear here this is screwing with the margins and a lot of the companies we invested we want that take rate lowered i mean this is if apple just made the take rate 15 this entire thing goes away epic games feels great spotify's feel great that's what they should have done when you over play your hand and then all of a sudden you create a group of enemies from netflix to spotify to epic games that was apple's big mistake they should have given those people a lower rate and just slowly lowered the rate which is what everybody's doing now with creator percentages and i think that's what youtube should do now the 45 percent they're taking just lower that to 30. just give up a little bit of the take rate and and people will be feel more reasonable about what you're taking can i can i bring in the that sub stack article by antonio garcia martinez i want to end the apple segment on on um on agm's article which was called bad apple although a great article great art yeah i mean it was it was unbelievable but david was so i just want to let people know how excited david was about this david i think is like ready to be in a full-blown bromance with antonio i mean which david are you talking about i'm talking about you sacks you are are you in love with antonio it's a big pause oh oh we lost upon zoom when i asked him if he's in love apple came in and they press pause pause on the stream he's frozen look at this look at the frozen look at his eyes look how he's he that's the look of love did you read that article of love i thought it was really well written too it was well written he's a really really good writer but here's the thing he is getting paid probably three hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand dollars to write on stubstack after getting fired and after getting a giant settlement from apple whatever that's gonna be so he is making out like a bandit but i thought the funniest part was like i'm not being um silenced here because i'm now being paid to talk about apple for the next year my sub sack um but he i thought his most salient point was steve jobs would not have been able to exist in the apple that exists today he would have run out of apples what do you say he would have been cancelled what i mean steve jobs would have a hundred percent david you broke up us if you were in love with antonio you just you i think you got no money off yeah exactly no look i think um i don't agree with everything agm writes but i do think he is a fantastic writer with a lot of interesting perspective and that ending of that article the reason i want to mention it is it kind of goes to freeberg's point about how much innovation how much innovation is there really at apple now that the that the genius who created it is gone and he he ends his article by saying when apple launched the mac computer in 1984 you know they famously ran that super bowl ad that featured a solitary figure flinging a sledgehammer into a big brother-like face spewing propaganda at the huddled ranks of some drab dystopia and then agm says the tech titans nowadays resemble more and more the harangue figure on the screen rather than the colorful rebel going against the established order whether it be hiring policy or free speech silicon valley has to decide whether it becomes what it once vowed to destroy the reality is the great genius who founded apple is long gone it is run by hr people and woke mobs it's run by a supply chain manager exactly and and and so there is no more innovation there they are just a gatekeeper collecting rents and you know freeberg you're right to raise the issue of what's going to create the most innovation but the thing that's going to create the most innovation is letting entrepreneurs create new companies without needing apple's permission i will tell you something i think that over the next decade because of exactly what you guys said that apple is run by managers who don't want to see loss but aren't driven to gain you're going to end up seeing amazon particular and apple likely as well lose to the likes of shopify and square and stripe shopify square and stripe are all formidable threats to amazon over time and now that bezos is actually going to step out and it is going to be run by a bunch of managers and you have these founders of these three companies still running all three of those businesses and all three of those businesses are going to be incredible competitive threats from different angles on amazon that is where innovation wins and you will see it because leadership driven by founders at those businesses could take them to compete directly with these guys and you don't need the government to come and intervene all three of them are building and are going to continue to build better experiences for consumers and for merchants that could end up disrupting the answer i'll give you a different take i think that all four companies are going to win including amazon yeah they're going to continue to win and i think what it shows is that shopify and stripe and square had to have very precise entry points in markets and in many ways the things that they are allowed to do is still quite constrained because amazon exists i think that that's fine that should be allowed but i don't think that's what's going to get you know legislated and then litigated over the next 10 or 15 years it's a handful of very specific practices that constrain what folks can do i think the app store is a constraint the algorithmic nature of facebook's newsfeed and google search are constraints and people are going to test those things and i think that in testing it you're probably going to do what the government was successful as sac said in 2000 which is just slow these guys down you have to remember at some point there were probably more doj lawyers inside of microsoft than product managers and everything if i remember correctly from a feature perspective had to go to the doj for approval for some time that's probably the best thing that can happen to these companies which is you completely gum up the product infrastructure then you know friedrich you're right the human capital equation changes people leave it's not that fun to be there they go to startups but again you needed the government to step in and they're not going to necessarily solve it but they can really slow down the overreach of these companies for the next 20 years and i think that that's net additive for the world here's here's my prediction i think the pirates are assembling themselves whether it's coinbase saying we're not going to have politics at work or antonio and the end of cancel culture the end of taking the hysterical left or the historic or the trolling right seriously i feel like that is ending and this great like nightmare of hysteria uh and is going to end and the overton window is going to blossom and open up and people are going to be more innovative and accepting of new ideas and be reasonable and not cancel people who wrote something five or ten or two go go reasonableness let's go reasonable well-reasoned all right everybody uh this has been another episode of the all waiting podcast uh nobody uh what am i doing today yeah what you are you inviting us somewhere no i'm just wondering oh is this a flex are you using are you gone or did you get an electric electricity it's 8 30 pm for me so i got to go hang out with my family um i've got the accelerator and a board meeting and that's it i'm in the mediterranean general area yes i'm actually conquering europe but i did again i just want to say i did go to the dentist and um i filmed pretty good overcame sex are you hearing about people moving back from miami this like little thing going on about people saying no people are so happy here yeah do you think you're gonna end up living there uh no i mean we'll see maybe no maybe did you did you get orthopedic did you get orthopedic shoes when you bought that shirt oh my god did you join a golf club are you in a retirement community right now guys i'm i'm on a i'm on a diet i predict by the end of the summer i'll be thinner than jason yeah is there a weight check coming uh and let's go next episode show your decks again i'll show mine and wait do it do it do it dexter please i think i'm 194. okay 195 something like that and what's your height five foot three five nine what are you you do look thinner yeah i think i've lost about five pounds already i'm about 185 right now and what's your height for five nine oh we're the same height and you weigh 10 pounds less you look good are you on any pharmaceuticals to lose weight no i'm doing i'm doing intermittent fasting i'm doing no carbs and i'm trying to be as plant-based as possible so go sex nice yeah good for you you do look better you do look better you feel good more energy yeah i mean i yes i was getting like just that extra five pounds like kind of tipped me over i think i got like another 15 to go but you think you could be 170 oh yeah yeah yeah that's my goal have you cut back on drinking yeah we had some incredible wine last night you know what i thought you were a vodka guy can't you just do like a vodka and soda and be good i don't want to give it i can't give a wine you know i can't wait till we play poker and drink some more tomos wine and it's so fun oh i can't wait either love you love you saks love you harry love you harry videos back all right this has been the all-in podcast brought to you by nobody and uh if you'd like to join the all-in chat you can join our imessage group uh the first ten people it's ten thousand dollars a month we're gonna monetize by allowing ten people to be in the it's only like 300 bucks a day to begin i got to figure out a way to monetize this all right we'll see you all next time bye-bye [Music] and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] where need to get mercy's








is is jkl here i can't see him maybe i've been blocked i don't know i'm getting static on the left i can't hear anything i can't hear you why do the two fat guys have to ruin everything i mean get your [ __ ] together youtube we have [Music] [Music] if you'd like to skip the bestie twitter drama and get right into the episode jump to 20 minutes and 48 seconds hey everybody hey everybody we've got a great show for you today what a treat this is going to be here at the all in podcast we cover everything technology business market politics science and of course the besties emotions and their feelings i'm dave friedberg the king of canola joining me today are the guys that used to be besties first joining us from berlusconi's palace the pied piper of spaxx himself welcome you look great today thank you and uh from one of his many houses the uh sas bully himself david sax and of course our former moderator and host the one and only the internet famous the bronx bully jason calacanis everybody j-cal welcome you're looking great you look like you're ready to do a little uh jabbing a hook so for those of you joining us today that haven't been following on twitter i'm sorry did you get kermit the frog to host the show i mean jesus christ that opening was the worst most painful thing i've ever heard it it really was not very good okay well welcome sax and j cal not really feeling great about this you can't it's a failed experiment already i thought the opening was good good job free bird i think you're doing well it's a [ __ ] four of 10. stop pre-judging his performance it just began and interrupting already stop interrupting stop interrupting calcaneus so the moderator is moderating and j cal has to take the money the dreamers and block him i'm gonna mute him thank you so gentlemen welcome as we know over the past week there has been a twitter feud between jason and um david sacks and i'm going to give you guys a little bit of this background for those of you who haven't followed online which i'm assuming is the vast majority of you but there's a twitter account called all in stats and they publish an analysis showing that j cal has been talking a lot on our podcast and saks uh you know kind of quote tweeted and said you know here is statistical proof of jason's piss-poor moderation of the all-in-pod j-cal if you were moderating correctly you would be fourth place in airstein enter airtime instead of tied for first your job is to facilitate discussion not dominate it stop interrupting and let the grown-ups talk j-cal immediately jumps up with a response maybe you could start your own pod with peter thiel and keith or boyce and have tucker carlson moderate sac says i know it's rough doing 10 years of this week in startups and never getting to number one then chamoth friedrich and i do it effectively on the first date on the first take but this is why you need to stick to your lane and stop talking over us oh my god so brutal sex jay cal then responds with a niche podcast about just startups is never gonna be number one it's not for a general audience like all in by design number two sure trash the guy who has relentlessly supported you for decades because you're obsessed with your stats and forget about the quality of the conversation then j cal blocks david sacks on twitter publicly sax tells everyone jay cal blocked him and this whole thing escalates and snowball so the besties have they broken up are they gonna get back together is this podcast gonna continue my mom sent me a text this morning has the pod disintegrated jason pulled out question mark question mark question mark the drama ensues so gentlemen um i leave it to you saks with your opening remarks and then j-cal you may respond i'm here to moderate this opening of today's all-in pod so we can kind of get past this and hopefully get the besties back together and continue our conversations that i think many people find valuable and are super helpful and useful for us and for our listeners saks please well i mean i i can see on jason's face that he's he's hurt that by my my tweets um you know i uh maybe he should go first and explain what's so hurtful i mean look the reality is about this show that you know breaking balls is part of it we've been doing it for you know a year and a half and nobody does it more than jason and then all of a sudden you know he's on the receiving end of a couple of mean tweets and he's like the schoolyard bully who finally gets popped in the nose and goes running to the teacher and he can't stop bawling so you know where is it that somehow the word piss-poor crossed a red line for you after all of the you know ball busting you've been doing for the last year that somehow that's out of bounds and now you're gonna block me and potentially end the show in our friendship so explain that to me big baby all right number one i want to talk about the statistics in my role on my perception of you david is that you got a taste of fame and celebrity and it's gone to your [ __ ] head and you're out of your ego is out of control you now have stopped doing your job every day and you are obsessed with your statistics and how you're perceived on the pod as seen by your obsession and your bromance with henry or harvey bell cast or whatever you're sitting there obsessing over what percentage each of us talk none of the other besties are reading all in stats or getting obsessed with henry belcaster and how they're perceived on the pod you have taken a championship show which i pulled together with my decades of experience in team as the point god i am the chris paul of moderating the reason this show is number one is because i created a super team there are four people on this podcast who bring a lot to the table and you have asked for decades for air cow i will not pull out a list but the time that you were going to get cancelled because of b and the other time that your company was in the beep because the beep was investigating it you called air cow you called an air cow you can't deny it and nobody has benefited more from my skills in media than you are are you speaking in an accent i'm not speaking in an accident i'm getting uh this is when i get upset what he's getting for he's getting for clubs he's controlling it okay i'm just bringing the ball up court and i [ __ ] pass the ball to everybody i am white chocolate on this team i am the professor i am chris paul okay and i pass the ball now if you want to be a point guard like me and throw crisp passes that make the audience laugh and make them cheer and bring down the whole goddamn stadium well sometimes i'm going to do a no-look pass it's going to hitch in the back of the head or it's going to bounce off you can't [ __ ] cry about it constantly david and if you're looking at the minutes i have to read the story and prep the story so i can put it in your lap which i love to do i love my role here and you're taking my min account which is at least two-thirds moderation and you're saying that's indicative of me being pissed poor now if it's all a goddamn joke that's fine but you're messing with my business my business is podcasting and performing if you got a problem with me as the moderator you have my [ __ ] phone number you can call me but don't go out and start some fight with me and then go start hanging out with henry belcaster when i'm your boy okay and then everything with you is about your call-in clubhouse killer and we've got to move the pond to that you're getting out of control david you need to realize we started a podcast that went to number one instantly and be grateful about that and stay the course the end i'm done well all right good all right so can i respond so first of all j cal i agree you put the the super team together for this pod you're an indispensable part of it i'm not questioning that you know i don't think we should i don't think well let me come to let the adults talk let me first uh let me i'm actually saying some positive things about you before i get into my uh critique okay so look you deserve credit for putting this thing together along with with chamoth uh it wouldn't be the same without you you do bring an element of entertainment to it uh lord knows if it was just freeburg moderating all the time it'd probably be extremely boring so um look i although we're gonna give him a chance today so who knows um but rough start and it's not that i was angry or upset or concerned about my air time or any of that stuff i was frustrated okay because your moderation i have a couple of um concerns about her or i guess complaints okay one is that you do tend to interrupt and i'd say you interrupt not true more than the others false okay and specifically not true let's talk about the issue the the issue where this came up was eric adams issue last pod okay so you didn't even go to me this this issue the eric adams issue is all about the crime issue what the audience doesn't know is that you went to chamath like three times then you moved on and we had to come back i said no listen i raised my hand to get back into the conversation we edited that part out you skipped over me completely i don't know how that was good passing where was the dish okay to me okay let me explain to you can i respond to that sure you've got three people on the team who can score i come down the court i pass it sometimes there's two open guys you're the guy who was open who didn't get the pass and now you're walking down the court complaining no instead of keeping your head in the game this would be like not going to freeburg on a science issue all right sorry i understand any chance for you to defend the cops beating up criminals i understand that's your wheelhouse no time when it comes to that i'll make sure i it would it would be it would be a concern i agree with you i agree with you it's an oversight i can't hit every perfect pass you're expecting perception so then it's a missed pass and now you're upset about it okay okay so then so then i basically say listen i want to talk to this issue i have three points to make i'm not through point number two before you're interrupting me and taking the ball away the specific reason why i said i have three points is to telegraph to you don't interrupt me [ __ ] i got three points to make okay what do you do you cut me off in the middle of point two how is that good moderation i don't think you do that to chamof or even freeburg this really is about this really is about chamath versus you and my relationship with each other i love you both the reason why i brought up the all-in stats okay is not cause i'm concerned about my air time but but to show you i'm a little concerned no because i i they broke down that i was like fourth in their time and so the only point about that is why are you giving me the hook when i'm not talking too much if i were talking too much if i were monologuing it'd be a whole different story but you're yanking the mic away from me in the mid sentence before i even had a chance to finish and there's and there's one more thing okay which is as soon as i bring up any concern with the moderation where do you go you start calling me tucker you know you start labeling me in this way okay it's like just like a year dinner with tucker in the world you're proving my point where do you go where are you joke yes but why i'm trying to keep the show entertaining and keep it moving part of keeping the show entertaining moving is keeping you guys from monologuing i have to cut you off and make jokes a year and a half ago at the beginning of the pod we had to have the last time we had a sort of session like this it was because you kept trying to paint me as the trump supporter which is not my agenda okay now did you vote for trump now you're trying to hang did you tuck her label on me why aren't you saying hey let's hear from george will let's hear from william buckley the reason why you're choosing those labels is because you know they are anathema to most people in silicon valley and you're trying to stigmatize me with them no that is you're trying to are you reading from your notes are you reading from you're trying to hang that album over my neck okay and that is you're trying to anatomize me in in the in the view of most people silicon valley you're calling that's not what i'm trying to do i'm trying to tell me but you are causing the audience to pre-judge my message my points before i've even had the chance to see what i'm trying to do by attacking i'm trying to make a joke of the left to me okay the result of that is the audience is going to prejudge what i have to say and probably a third of the audience will never want to hear what i have to say because you've pre-labeled and pre-judged me that is a serious problem and that is [ __ ] with my business that is [ __ ] with my business a lot more a lot more than me calling out your shitty moderation on one show oh sorry no it is shitty moderation oh okay i thought it was great now we're back to a big shitty moderation let me ask you you know what you're doing did you know what you're doing did you have photography you know what you're doing have you had dinner with tucker answer the question i'm going to mute both of you now okay i'm in the moderator do you want to weigh in on these two idiots and talk a little bit about how we can do this show forward and at this point i'm thinking about vetoing the publication of the show so we could just have this conversation offline this was this is so [ __ ] pod because this is just this was paint this was this was so stupid nick edit all this nonsense and make it 30 seconds and move on hey guys this is a really important powerful thing that we accidentally stumbled into i'll make two points david does get labeled and i don't think it's fair and jason does an excellent job of moderating and sometimes i think that jason does get excited and in getting excited you know he's also not just there to moderate he's there to contribute as well and so i think that if you look at the the number of minutes as a guide it's not going to be accurate because he does have two jobs to do whereas the rest of us only have one and david does bring an enormous amount of clarity to what he says in a very fair way and it is unfair to him that he gets basically slathered with uh here's the crazy guy on the right so i think what i would just say is just let's just tone it the [ __ ] down and calm down okay we're at a million [ __ ] people a week we could be at 10 million people a [ __ ] week and we could [ __ ] own the distribution of our ideas to millions and millions of people let's just stay the course and calm the [ __ ] down well i i agree with all that actually i i agree i'm 100 in agreement i want to address the labeling issue i want to address the legal issue i am joking nine out of ten times when i talk about trump because it's hilarious and your relationship with tucker i think it's hilarious that you're part of the keith reboy and and teal thing and and i don't think it's damaging for your business at all and i think people are telling me i'm purple viewed we're moving to the center here so i believe that we're doing something noble by bringing all these voices together it's all a big joke and you know what i don't care what you say about me on twitter i know i'm good at what i do there's nothing you could say that can change that why'd your accident change i i think in general you are good at what you do and i and i and the reason why two of the top 10 tech podcasts go open at your [ __ ] podcast player don't tell me to get my [ __ ] shoe shirt number four and number eight no nobody's saying that so i think i think what what david's literally what he said that's literally what he said what he's doing right now is showing why i had to tweet which is he won't take a note i can't tell the guy hey listen you gotta know for me it's not gonna happen on twitter you got my [ __ ] phone number well it doesn't happen in private either we know that you could [ __ ] call me oh really you're gonna take a note in private chat with you i've tried we've had this conversation before we had this specific conversation about the trump thing a year ago we haven't talked about trump in six months you're back to all your bad habits can we just hear an apology from one to the other and tell them yeah yeah i'm absolutely willing to hear sax's apology tell him what you appreciate about him and what you like about him go ahead yeah go [ __ ] christ is this therapy all right i unblocked [ __ ] sacks and i'm following him enough thank you move on we move forward apologize to each other all right sorry you tweeted that [ __ ] sex i'm sorry david apologize to him let's just move on jason tell sacks you're sorry for labeling him and you know you'll be more conscientious in the future please i'm sorry that i brought up your relationship with tucker and that i labeled you a trump disciple i don't even need an apology i just want him to recognize me too so i'm trying to be the bigger man [ __ ] it i take it back okay i unblocked you and you're followed i unblocked you and you're followed that's enough sex his feelings were hurt by you telling him that his podcast sucks and piss poor piss-poor okay look you asked you asked me to have ten of your founders on the podcast in the last two years i counted your team is in the [ __ ] mix trying to get people booked on the show we're not gonna we're not gonna keep it going you've benefited from this relationship as well so thank you for this i never said i didn't thank you all i've ever said is thank you to you all right we good look my frustration over your moderation boiled off into a couple of tweets last week i did not mean to hurt your feelings i was just trying to give you a note okay if you would take the notes in private i would give you them to you in private i do think that overall you're a great moderator your contribution to the show is absolutely necessary and essential never disputed that i think we should keep doing the show um i didn't expect you to block me honestly i didn't expect your feelings to be so hurt by what i said and um so yeah look i apologize for that all i wanted to do was give you a note and i would appreciate if you could try and respect my note not mischaracterize it i think you know what i'm saying right i just want the chance to be able to present my views without the audience prejudging them because you know that certain labels will not go over well with our audience okay it'd be like introducing chamoth as the michael milken of spaxx okay there is that out no i mean i'm not saying he is collaborating no i'm saying it would be as if you did that right you understand what you've been doing if you labeled him that way i don't think that is a fair label in fairness i thought the labeling and the joking about you being the token republican was a meta joke about the fact that silicon valley doesn't have too many of you and teals and reboys et cetera there's a small i think the whole point of what we were trying to say is silicon valley's heads up their ass i agree so maybe so maybe the problem maybe the problem we've we've identified is all these left-leaning people are just sniffing their own balls basically running to a cliff sweating so yeah a lot of my views like on free speech are the old center left exactly and now you're for universal healthcare look at you i haven't moved the whole world's gone crazy i mean everyone supported free speech until five minutes ago okay that's what i went on tucker to discuss you were a free market about uh education and you were free market about about health care and now you're like i mean we should have health care and safety i i am i am a believer in in markets all right jason let's start go let's [ __ ] start the shot three two hey everybody hey everybody the all-in podcast is back besties unblocked with us again the rain man himself david sachs and david freeburg the queen of and from his italian hideaway gallivanting in italy chamoth paulie hepatia the dictator big news for besties this week robin hood has filed their s1 and paid a fin refined 70 million dollars for outages and misleading customers multiple days of outages back in march 2020 we talked about here and poor communications around options trading risks robin hood's s1 highlighted some extraordinary uh growth during that period as we discussed on the pod 18 million funded accounts and they're on a two billion dollar run rate 522 million dollars in revenue in the first quarter up 4x and uh monthly active users have more than doubled 8.6 million accounts to 17.7 million uh just for in the last year revenue is up 300 percent any thoughts on robin hood's s1 obviously i'm an interested party it's the largest fine ever i think of this type but on the other end yeah yeah so it should be a black eye for the company but the reality is that they're happy to pay the fine and just move on so they don't have this issue hanging over their heads anymore and now they're going to be able to ipo at like a 50 60 70 billion dollar valuation and so for them it's just sort of cost of doing business i think there's something a little bit off about that but um that's kind of how it works freeberg anything i mean congrats to you jake how looks like you're gonna do really well with this deal huh it will return roughly this one dl will do three or four times the value of the first fun the launch fund one which was uh 11 million did you invest in the seed round or the a or what round did you invest in i think it was the seed round um and so what's your multiple going to be on a 50 billion dollar market cap you know uh it would be 500x amazing amazing congrats big boy yeah it's a congrats jake allen i'm happy to see that you're successful your success is finally catching up to your ego and so i think here we go your net worth is catching up to your weight size congrats oh my god uh well actually between this and the composition uh i'm uh you know listen it's a long way to go before we distribute obviously but that first fund i did which came after the scouts fun my sequoia scouts portfolio my only advice to you jason is talk talk to a few seasoned gps like gurley fred wilson and figure out the right distribution strategy one of the biggest things that i see these folks do is early-stage venture investors thinking that they're public market investors trying to time the market trying to figure out how to do distributions and it never works which means do you hold the shares for another year or two or you distribute them i would distribute that immediately book the win move on yeah you know it's interesting a lot of the top firms that i'm in are holding their shares and i i had a firm that had uh square and they held some number of them until it's 7xed and then distributed so i guess technically they get to book that win what are your thoughts on that sax of when to distribute and how are you doing in your fund yeah i mean it's a good question um the the reality is that you know let's say that you're in your four or five a 10-year fund you could hold the shares for another five years and if the shares go up over that five year period you'll you'll do better so i think the question is on irr your your numbers will look better well i mean you're you're compensated on the absolute amount of return that you generate and so it might happen if you distribute the shares and then if you're in carry and you just hold the shares you'll realize the same gains you know you're not saying well it depends what happens to the stock price i guess i guess what i'm going to do but hold on a second if the stock were to go 10x and you get 20 of those shares if there were 100 shares you had 20 if it 10x you're still getting 20 percent right shamaf so it nets out to the same if you hold the shares yourself personally this is why i think that if you're in the business of running uh a multi-fund business i think you're better off generally and i think again if you talk to the best firms out there they typically will not try to guess what's going to happen in the public markets they distribute and they move on to their next fund um and then because you have to remember the irrs you know you go through these rough patches it decays quickly and all of a sudden something that looks great can start to look not so great and the example of that might be snowflake or something going down after it went public and if you had distributed it you would have booked the win at that high multiple yeah and then then you're thinking to yourself wow i hope it goes back up and then you're like well when do i distribute it's all these are all not things that venture capitalists should be engaged in they should be there to help build the next the next david versus goliath i think the the count argument to that is if you really believe in the company and think you understand it better than the public markets do or or because you've been on the board and you have information you know if you hold it for another yes there's gonna be ups and downs but let's say that you plan to hold it for another four or five years um yeah you'll still get the same 20 25 carry but um the point at which that carry will crystallize would be at like a much higher level and so essentially you're preventing your lp's from selling is what you're doing and so you may get an extra turn of your fun by doing that how do we feel as lps david freeburg but there's sorry there's also isn't there like a um i'm just trying to pull up the goldman sachs report they did in 2019 where they analyzed 4 500 ipos over a 25-year period and i think that and i could be wrong on this but if i remember some summary of this i'm trying to find it so i can't find it right now um but that they basically highlighted that ipos as an index generally outperformed the market over some period of time whether it's one year or three years and so if you have access to those ipo shares assume you're a venture investor you can beat the smp by 10 15 points just generally without having any thought about the business itself or the company itself um and you know participate in 20 carry on the upside from there or 25 carrying the upside from there um and so generally the rule of thumb becomes well you shouldn't distribute right away you should hold is that not kind of a common dogma amongst gps nowadays well look at square look at square i mean square at all like most of the appreciation happened in the public markets i think sequoia held on to their square shares did way way better because nobody sold effectively for several years and the best firms do this right i mean like you you hear from gurley and others that you know they hold onto these shares for years and you know a good business going public has a much better chance of performing well as a public company than you know just tracking the s p uh after an ipo regardless of the valuation it exits at well how do we feel as lp's chamath your lp's in a lot of terrible women 15 terrible no offense to any gp out there but i don't think they're as good of a public market investor as i am so give me the shares i'll manage it myself uh and get out of the way um i i give money to a lot of to your point a lot of gps because i want private market exposure i don't want them speculating in the public markets for me i do that for myself and so i would rather just get the shares and make my own decision um you know a lot of foundations for example are in this situation where they're there to fund programs so if they have a you know multi-hundred million dollar position in a great company and they can't fund a program or the you know a hospital system can't do what they need to do because some gp is speculating in the public markets i think it's insane so give you give give give the lps the money and move on it's not your job otherwise you should run a generalized fund and both people don't because they can't generally how do you guys when you are a large owner in a company that goes public or just say the pool of venture investors or owners in a company that goes public and the lock-up is expiring you know typically six months after the ipo and you can now distribute your shares to your lps do those um you know investors take note of or have concern about the impact it might have on the stock price when they're making those distribution decisions typically i think they think about that but a lot of these lps particularly the non-profits they're forced day one sellers the minute that they get the stock they're just putting it in like as soon as the stock gets distributed everyone's selling and the stock takes a hit right and yeah you know what there's something happening i mean uh this is speculation um that i don't have so just you know take it as that but my understanding was some investment banks went to the uh and chamath might know the background on this went to some of the major lps in the world i'll leave it at that and said hey you have a position in i don't know this cab company um it's going public it's fully valued or it's very well valued would you like to collar your shares before that and we will take them off your hands uh and and and lock you into a certain price for some percentage of it basically end running the gp's decision making process of course there's there's a lot of that that happens this is why i'm saying i think the gp is better off if you're in the venture fund business be in the venture fund business do a great job at that raise funds distribute cash do what you're supposed to do but please don't try to do some it's kind of like asking you know the firemen to also operate on you no i don't want that take me to the hospital and let the doctor do the job i think it's a very valid perspective i think it's probably the baseline that vcs should operate from but i do think there are exceptions where if the vc's been on a company board for a while it feels like they have they understand the company better than the public markets especially during the first two years as a public company when the markets can be really choppy and the company's trying to find its level and people don't really understand it i think there is an argument for the vc having expertise in in that initial public run then they might be doing their lp's a favor by holding but but look i i think tomas point is well taken also uh companies are going public earlier so this is going to become a bigger issue because it's an easy decision in year 11 if you were an uber investor and airbnb investors say okay it's been 11 years we're going to give you your shares but if you're in year five and the company goes out so early you know you could make an argument hey maybe we hold it for two or three years just going back on the previous topic jkl the um the finra news on robinhood right so finra just so everyone understands is not a government regulator it's a entity yeah it's called a self-regulatory organization and these sros are basically they have a board and a you know a bunch of people that run them but they're pooled and managed by all the participants the private participants in the market so goldman sachs and morgan stanley jp morgan and all the banks they are all part of the finra sro and so the way that these sros are set up is to avoid government regulation and to avoid government intervention in markets and allows the markets to effectively self-regulate themselves in a way that everyone in the market is kind of keeping an eye on each other and making sure that this is being taken care of and i think one thing to take note of from this fine is that it telegraphs that finra and the markets in general the market participants in general may be rather concerned and rather worried about government intervention um in some of these new markets and emerging fintech practices because they wanted to say look we put the gauntlet down on robin hood we made them pay the biggest fine ever we made them pay 70 million dollars stay away we're taking care of it because the concern everyone's had is that aoc and elizabeth warren and a bunch of people on capitol hill are waving flags saying we need to step in we need to regulate these companies we need to regulate these practices we need to protect consumers and so this fine really signals that the market is a bit concerned that the government is going to come in and start trying to tell fintech companies how to practice and how to operate and generally tell all market company you know market participants how to operate which is a very scary prospect for them so to me this was really this this was really big news about what telegraphs the backdoor conversations are you know that are going on with market participants right now what you're almost saying is that this is a benefit to robin hood to pay the largest fine because it it says to the you know to the politicians look we've already been punished in this you know maximal way you don't need to layer it on top so in a way it's better for robin hood that they paid 70 million instead of 10 million yeah and it's not it's not by the way it's not even for robin hood i think all the market participants jp morgan goldman sachs they all have huge you know tech teams and they all have acquired fintech companies and they are all trying to go digital and everyone is worried about the government intervening and changing how this business is transforming because as soon as the government gets involved it's going to slow down the transformation it's going to you know make things much more challenging and i think that everyone's trying to keep the government at bay while the great digital transformation of markets is underway um and and i think that's like the biggest signal from this this finra fine and there's there's some interesting nuances there that they brought up something like the confetti so when you buy something on robinhood it used to explode confetti gamification they're like oh we're going to take that out and you know if you go to vegas they've got bells and whistles going off everywhere when you place a bet and so it is a little bit of window dressing i think it's also interesting that you bring up the self-regulatory organizations there's two other equivalents for people who are thinking about this the mpa motion picture association which was formed back in 1922 because people had the same fear about movies and valentini i think was the the guy who really uh changed uh how movies were perceived in the pg-13 era allowing a lot more violence terminator those kind of movies and then you had a similar thing happen in the video game industry in 90s does robinhood still have like the lawsuits with like uh massachusetts uh there's like 10 other lawsuits class actions etc about um no no but these are more like with with government entities right like like didn't massachusetts try to stay deter state attorney general yeah something like that i think right yeah i don't know um but the other one that was very interesting was the um esrb which is the entertainment software ratings board because video games like mortal kombat and those and doom were you know had to self-regulate right um so either you regulate yourself when champ was asking a question about lawsuits that robin hood i know i was trying to deflect come on man can we move on to the delta variant because i'm supposed to be hysterically afraid of getting covet now because i've been vaccinated people keep talking about there's this delta variant it's spreading and then i'm hearing one set of information which is if you're vaccinated it's not an issue and then uh other folks are going on tv saying this is gonna be like we're gonna have to put masks back on in california i can't find any data about how many actual cases there are but according to the usc dc 46 percent of the total u.s population has been vaccinated now uh and new york new jersey california oh well above 50 some people are in the 60 percent of adults 70 of adults florida is still trailing but i can't and people are saying this is going to become the dominant variant free break how should we look at the delta variant if you're vaccinated and then how should we look at it in terms of are we going to go through mandatory masks again which people are starting to signal already in certain uh coastal cities yeah so trevor bedford's a great guy to follow on this uh he's a epidemiologist virologist who um on twitter on twitter yeah trv rb is his uh twitter handle and so he's aggregated a bunch of good data so there was a paper published two days ago out of the uk where they are trying to estimate the um uh you know the reproduction rate of the delta variant um and it looks like it's about 1.3 that means for every person that gets infected with the delta variant of the sars kobe 2 virus one that's the r knot you're talking about that's that's yeah some people call arnold yeah and so um it turns out that you know that number is higher than what we saw with the original south kobe 2 which i think is probably closer to 1.1 or so and so um you know what that means is this variant is much more infectious right it could spread through the air the proteins could last in oxygen much longer and not degrade all these different reasons why it might be kind of more infectious and there are some cases of people that have been vaccinated but this is not the predominance of what we're seeing that have tested positive for having this delta variant but are having mild to moderate symptoms there aren't at this point a lot of people there's not a lot of data to indicate that this is actually kind of like a lethal risk or fatal risk to people that have been vaccinated in case in fact that seems to be not true and one way that that data is kind of demonstrated right now is there was another analysis that was done where they showed what is the reproduction rate of this variant based on what percentage of the population has been vaccinated by state and they showed that you know for a state that's had maybe thirty percent of its population vaccinated the r naught is closer to one point three five when sixty percent of the state is vaccinated the r naught is just at one and so there's this you know um unco you know uh negatively correlated kind of relationship between how many people have been vaccinated and how much this variant is transmitting and that makes intuitive sense right like if people are vaccinated they're not going to get infected the virus isn't going to hop from person to person to person now when you do the analysis of what percentage of the u.s population is unvaccinated and how reproductive this virus is a lot of epidemiologists are saying that the models indicate that we could see up to 10 percent of the u.s population now get hit with this variant and what we don't know is what percentage of people actually had you know stars kobe 2 in the first run around last year um but we are seeing this this variant pop up now the the fatality rate doesn't appear to be much higher than what we saw with stars cov2 the first time around and um and so there's no indication to say like hey this is going to be much more lethal so when you combine those factors it seems like at this point you know the the death rates in the u.s are remaining flat uh and stable while we are going to see and may expect to see a continuing upsurge surge up in terms of the number of cases are we going to require masks this goes back to kind of my previous point about i think we've kind of normalized ourselves to masks and shutdowns and lockdowns and all the stuff that we did last year thinking that it had an effect a recent paper showed that lockdowns had no effect on the reproduction rate in the united states because at the end of the day what if a government says lockdown or government says put masks on people still have a tendency to do whatever the hell they want to do and at least in the united states that is the case that is not the case likely in asian countries where we did see an effect of lockdowns and masks but in the united states these uh these restrictions obviously had adverse economic effects but didn't seem to have a strong epidemiological effect based on a recent paper that i will share uh in this thing so so what are we going to do i don't know i feel like we've normalized math we've normalized blocked we've normalized these responses but sars code v2 is going to be here forever and it is going to cycle through variants and that's the concern right in the world let me let me make a prediction i think that what at the end of this thing what i think i have come to the conclusion of is there was a lot of unknowns that got perverted into hysteria and mania by a handful of organizations to basically sequester power and what we realized is that these people were incompetent and they didn't know what they were doing because you ended up in the same place with all of these different distributions of actions and so now i think when you have this other variant i think there's a growing sensation by a lot of people not just americans that the cdc the who whoever it is is probably at best guessing and at worst making it up and the ultimate result is their this it's almost as if they like being drunk with power and so i think the last part of what you said freeberg is what i really agree with which is that this is not going to be tolerated anymore and the reason is because they are also politicizing science and what they're doing is when they don't know they're making poor guesses in the name of science which is just as bad so you know i don't know what's going to happen with the delta variant maybe a lot maybe a little but as far as i can tell i think people are tired of uninformed impacts to their lives and they're not going to put up with it anymore saks chances california goes back to lockdowns or some sort of mask mandates uh well well they are they're they're imposing mass mandates in doors in places like la and you have the teachers unions the the national education union is now putting down all these conditions on going back to school in the fall so i think you could be in a situation where we do not have they will call it school reopening but we will not have five day a week in person learning and the schools the public schools that have it are going to have all sorts of insane restrictions and conditions like making kids who really aren't at risk for covet even even the delta variant they're going to force them to wear mass they're going to enforce this ridiculous social distancing they're talking about making the kids who aren't vaccinated sit at a separate table like the outcasts i mean it's insane what they're talking about doing so why is that insane david not to interrupt you but i'm just curious if i want you to unpack that because so so look i i'm pro-vaccine you know i think adults should get vaccinated i don't think my kids need to get vaccinated um i don't think that is a wise policy to to force kids to get vaccinated they're at very low risk for getting the virus they're very low risk for transmitting the virus if they get it and even if they get it they're at almost no risk for it being harmful or you know to cause serious illness or death and so to impose all these restrictions on kids it's like we're living in a time warp you know back to last summer we didn't know as much about the virus i mean to jamaa's point they're imposing all these restrictions which are just unscientific and it really seems like the real point is to create excuses for the teachers not to have to go back to work and you know you know a school system is borked when the truancy is on the part of the teachers not the students the students want to go back the teachers want to be truant it's like they want to be on permanent vacation forever it is a really broken system by the way let me just highlight um you know to support uh the concern that i think people like like people that saks is kind of speaking to might be having a research letter was published in the journal um of the american medical medical association two days ago a lead researcher with a guy named harold walsh and this paper is going viral amongst kind of the um you know the the scientific and medical community right now and what these guys did is they measured the carbon dioxide content of children's lungs um from wearing masks and so they were trying to identify like is this a risk to children to actually be wearing masks health-wise and the results are pretty scary it turns out that you know um in in in air in in ambient air 0.07 by volume is carbon dioxide when a normal and then they measured kids you know randomized control double blind you know here's your enough double blind but randomized control there's kids that have masks and kids that don't the kids that don't have masks their carbon dioxide when they exhale is about 0.28 percent when you have to wear a surgical mask your carbon dioxide increases to one point three percent um and uh you know when they looked at this in a more detailed way it turns out that it could be as high as three point eight percent and so this starts to reach a medical level that is concerning for doctors that having these kids wear masks for hours a day could actually be having an adverse health effect because it is increasing the carbon dioxide content of their blood because you know their lungs aren't strong enough to breathe all this carbon dioxide out it builds up in their body and so there is a now a counterpoint that is being made by scientists and doctors that maybe the benefit of the safety we might get from kids wearing masks and spreading the virus is um outweighed uh by the uh the cost of their health as a result of wearing these masks and to ask kids to wear masks for eight hours a day or five hours a day for nine months a year we're just now waking up to the fact that there may actually be consequences to this and i'm not making a struggle it's like it's like it's like it's like child abuse so we sent our five-year-old to a summer camp in la okay and the camp is outside and all the the adults are vaccinated okay but they're making the kids wear masks and it's no fun you know and they can't play sports the way they need to and we just said the hell with this and we took them out now what i don't understand is why people aren't laying this at the feet of gavin newsom this is a hundred percent his order you know all he has to do is say listen we don't need these rules anymore it's kids it's outside and all the adults are vaccinated what is the point of this and you know and i think we have this recall election now that's been scheduled for mid-september you know right now it looks like nuisance going to cruise to to to winning but if we had a candidate in california who could say listen we need five day a week ins you know in person schooling in the fall no exceptions all the teachers need to go back to work or they're going to need to be looking for new jobs we're not going to kowtow and give in to all these unnecessary unscientific restrictions okay because newsome will not make that guarantee i think they could they could basically steal this thing we don't have anyone standing up saying that and i think the closer we get to the start of school if we don't have that kind of five day a week instruction i think parents are going to be up in arms about this i think they will be and i think what we're going to prove is none of these folks really know what they're talking about and so they will make it up and someone will have some shred of evidence about something on either side of any topic and all it'll do is obfuscate and confuse and the end of it will be somebody imposing something onto you that will have a negative impact on your life but for their benefit in the teachers for their benefit like i don't want to go back there's i mean listen i want to say all teachers don't want to go back to school i know a lot of teachers want to go back to school and teach kids and take the masks off because it's insufferable no you there is a contingency you can say the union and separated from teachers exactly yeah i don't think it's all teachers it's some percentage of teachers but i think we're going to move david freeburg quickly if i'm wrong here we're going to move to a two-class system here if you're vaccinated you get one set of rules and if you're not vaccinated you get another and this is where david i think kids who are over the age of 11 or 12 who do get vaccinated they shouldn't have to wear a mask at school but then well sorry can i just say something this is what the insanity of this thing is it's like okay we're going to throw around again we're probably going to use the word equity when we make these new rules but then fine why don't you just create a school that has everybody in it who is vaccinated well sac state i don't even understand i don't understand this because all of us are vaccinated so our we don't need to worry about it so in other words we're going to impose restrictions on people and force kids or whoever to get vaccinated to protect whom if all the adults are vaccinated we're not protecting anybody all we're doing is protecting i guess unvaccinated adults that makes no sense to me well they're taking the risk right i mean if you're choosing to not get the vaccine at this point friedberg you're taking some significant level of risk or some moderate level does the government have a responsibility to protect that person i don't think it matters what i think matters is remember like the societal responsibility is not and cannot be to protect every individual the societal responsibility is to make sure that society functions and um and if we take a zoom back and i just want everyone to reset your brains go back to march of last year and we were talking about the surge of deaths in hospitals and hospitals were going to be overwhelmed and that was the reason we needed to go into lockdowns and the reason we needed to stop the surge even if this delta variant is highly infectious there are enough people and people vaccinated in the united states at this point that this delta variant is not going to crush our hospital system it's not going to cause massive amount of fatalities which is the reason we went into lockdowns in the first place all of the concerns that we had last year that rationalized a lot of the extreme behavior that we undertook no longer exists and we are now talking about continuing those those behaviors under a different set of standards and the set of standards is now i can't put a teacher at risk i can't put an individual at risk and even if that individual got infected if the fatality rate is so low i can still say well they could die therefore i can't have them exposed right and that has become the new standards what i think saxon that that article kind of talked about is heroism you know you get to a point if you're if you're fighting a war on a battlefield and you're like well i can't let any of my soldiers die we can't move down the field you're not going to move down the field you're not going to win the war and i'm not saying that this is a war the point is society has to progress the economy has to progress people's lives have to progress people have to be educated life is about progress and if we halt progress because of the concern that any individual might get harmed because of the progress of the group as a whole we will not go anywhere and we've created a new set of standards that i think creates that very reality and it is frightening let me let me let me put a finer point on this which is just this coat this delta variant is just more covered fear porn okay this is the third variant of concern where they've been you know running around alarms saying that you know we have to worry the truth is is it more transmissible yes it is going to i think sweep through areas of the country in the fall that aren't vaccinated but the question is how does it perform against the vaccines and so far the vaccines are holding up the the variants none of the variants have really punched through the vaccines in a meaningful way i think the stats on pfizer were it's it was it maybe reduced the effectiveness from 95 to 88 or something like that but it wasn't a material difference if you were double vax with pfizer you are protected against the delta variant and so this is just more fear porn that they keep popping i'm in agreement with you and i think this reminds me of when we were growing up in the 80s they tried to scare us about sex and hiv and were you not going to have sex if you were in your 20s in the 90s and into the 80s no you learned about hiv you learn to use condoms you learn that you you probably couldn't do uh you know what people did in the 60s and 70s which had many many partners you maybe had to have fewer partners maybe longer term partners but you could you could take your own risk by putting on a condom you could make that decision for yourself here i think there's a group of people who don't want anybody to make any decisions for themselves and in this case the vaccine is wearing a condom if you're wearing a condom like your chances of getting hiv go down dramatically it's just a known fact and we're at 263 people on average dying a day how many of those fredberg do you think are with covid versus from kovit if you had to take a guess i have i have always i i hate doing this because then people think it's like an inhuman analysis but the way that um actuaries or economists would kind of take a look at this sort of decision tree and this sort of data is the number of life years lost okay um so imagine someone is going to die tomorrow if someone's going to die tomorrow and they catch covet today and they die a day early you have lost a life day and everyone yes that is absolutely devastating and it is awful emotionally but like when we're making big decisions we have to think with the data and so um if someone catches covid and they and they lose five years and they die five years early then they statistically would have died that's five life years lost when a child dies you are losing 68 life years right that is an incredible loss of life is one is one way to kind of think about this statistically and so um you know part of i think what's been missing in the equation and it's easy to tell the narrative by speaking about people that have dead that have died that tested positive for covet when they died is it now speaks to the fact that this is a binary experience and there's a binary number of lives lost but the statistical the data-driven exercise which may sound inhuman and may sound awful but again we have to make these decisions using data if we're going to make large decisions that are going to impact everyone in a meaningful way is to look at the number of life years lost and i think if you were to do that you would still find that the vast majority of deaths associated with covet are very elderly people who are already very close to dying and that's why we are seeing the fatality rate so low right now in the united states even though covet is still spreading with the delta variant it is because almost 90 of people over 70 have been vaccinated and as a result the people that are most at risk of dying are well protected and we are not seeing a significant loss of life associated with this terrible virus the terrible virus is still spreading but the life loss is still not there now someone might raise their hand and say well we don't know the long-term implications of long-term ramifications i would raise my other hand and say show me what the data is that says that there are those long-term implications ramifications because i can say the what-ifs about anything and then implement any policy decision i want by just saying what if and we don't know we have to say we do know here's the data in order to make a tough decision versus saying we need to be you know protective and use the protective you know principle of um of precaution or the precautionary principle and be really careful in these circumstances because at this point the impact and the damage associated with some of our practices to quote unquote guard against covid and and you know protect people it's turning out their real consequences to those decisions all right freeberg final question on kovid uh should you wear two condoms in other words should you get moderna and pfizer or j j and pfizer there are studies coming out now to say one plus one equals three there is some super effect of getting two i am looking into this i'm thinking i'm gonna get a second vaccine i might get to get a modern or a pfizer a j j just don't make it don't wait don't waste the vaccine shots let them go to other countries you know not needed not needed even though the studies are starting to show it gives you increased i mean do you need your tests do you need your tesla to go from 180 to 185 miles an hour i mean like you know that's a good point i mean look everything we learn about the vaccines makes them look better and better the protection lasts longer than we thought the um they're more effective against variants than people were afraid of and now we learn that there is even more protection by sort of this mix and match idea so the vaccines have worked there are still i think a couple of groups in america that are very vaccine hesitant um evangelicals and african-americans are the two groups that was male republicans it's it's more like evangelicals and so in a place like mississippi where you have large numbers of both the vaccine rates only like 29 30 it's actually pretty low in a place like that you could see the delta variants sweep through in the fall and you could see a lot of cases i you know let me let me buck your uh labeling categorization of me jake by saying that i don't think the leaders on the right are doing anyone any favors any of their voters any favors by not coming out and saying look the vaccines work you know i think trump could do a lot of good by coming out and just saying listen i got the vaccine i'm pretty sure he did right he did he did and so you know i think if you are in one of those groups you know and certainly you're over like 40 you should be getting the vaccine i mean not to harp on this but what did trump say when you suggested you come out publicly about it nobody's listening to it nobody's no it's fine nobody's listening to me obviously i mean it it is very weird that trump spent massive amounts of money on the vaccine and now doesn't want to take credit for project light speed by telling everybody to get it i think he's got what is your other issues i think he's got a lot of other issues on the plate to deal with including an indictment that just landed yesterday so maybe you know maybe he just doesn't know what to focus on because he he sees his uh his budding empire unraveling before him did you see the report that said that trump was extremely thrilled by the fact that his cfo was indicted for two reasons one is it kind of indicates that they didn't have enough to go after him and two is it's going to make joe biden look bad and his administration look bad uh because it looks like they're being kind of prosecuted and persecuted now but that he views this as a positive and and he's thinking about it as a way to kind of stage a 2024 run well i didn't i didn't see that particular story but i do think that maggie tweeted okay well what the charges show i think is that they got nothing on trump directly um i mean this turned out to be a big nothing burger after years of investigation just like the whole russia thing and so 15 15 felony counts trump was not let me finish trump trump was not named they didn't get close to trump all they got was they're trying to charge the wesley high muzu cfo with basically receiving certain perks as compensation t and that was tv violations it was crazy yeah this is penny annie's stuff it does look like persecution rather than prosecution and what they're trying to do is they're going after this guy wesselheim to squeeze him to try and roll over on trump well good luck with that that's about as likely to happen as uh putin releasing the p tapes not going to happen sorry jacal trump is getting away one thing i would say i think that i disagree with respectfully is um this is a 15-year uh tax avoidance scheme that included more than t e included people getting their tuition paid for for free and free apartments so they just would be and then hold on they then knowingly did this and changed the books knowingly so they caught them going into their accounting and changing to hide it and so the cover-up worse than the crime this is an explicit way to not pay their taxes this would be if all of us took our personal residences and our kids private school tuition and didn't pay taxes on it it's significant jason so the the total amount for example that this guy got in uh tuition reimbursements over this 15-year period was about 375 000 the total amount of some other rent perks that he got was for about 1.6 or 7 million the total amount of value that i think his son got you know was spending a thousand dollars a month in a trombone department when you add it all up for a guy that was accused of you know being in cahoots with russia this and that and everything you pinch the cfo for a few million dollars of effectively again t e let's just say that he did it you know some of these checks came directly from trump it i think i agree with david it's a bit of a nothing burger and it really does look like it's politically motivated and the reason is because these kinds of chargers are typically not brought these are things that typically result in a civil penalty a restatement and you just kind of move on you know nobody nobody's trying to send somebody to jail for you know getting for miscategorizing or i have a theory because we don't have full information and they weren't investigating this stuff before trump became a politician why weren't wh this if this been going on for 15 years why didn't this investigation happen five six seven years ago i could tell you why his um the daughter-in-law of weisselbergs uh was uh received a lot of these perks and then she dropped a dime and gave all the documents to them my theory on this is because we don't have complete information yet i think that they have other i think they have this bigger tax uh case around making the assets look um smaller when paying taxes and inflating the value of the assets when getting loans and i think they want to get that and the way to get that is to flip weiselberg because trump does not use email and communications i think that that's what's going on here um but yes you're right they're trying to they're trying to flip him look the the kgb had a saying show us the man we'll tell you the crime okay they decided we're gonna go after trump this is entirely political they weren't interested in him five six seven years ago once he got into politics they became interested in him he became the man and now they are trying to roll up and flip all these people and try to get them to turn on trump and give them something these democratic pit bull prosecutors they are going to make trump look like the victim here this will rebound i think in a negative way it is a really stupid thing that they're doing i mean this this could have happened in so many different ways the guy was finished and washed up right he was in his little hovel in florida you know no twitter account you know in the one no twitter account no access to his base um the one time he actually showed up in new york two or three weeks ago i don't know if you guys saw the photos he looks so disheveled so old so broken let the guy wither into obscurity but instead you pin these charges you create an entire press cycle you're going to rally so many people on the right and actually a lot of people in general who feel like wait what are we doing as a country why don't we just let it just be done with this guy i don't ever want to hear about him ever again and instead we're kind of like bringing it all back front center i just think it's a bad look what do you think about the insurrection commission do you think that that should um should be disbanded as well because you think that should that should be pursued yeah because that's not necessarily about trump that it is about a whole totality of things that really will lead into the fact that we have a lot of far right organizations that need to be understood we have one far-left organization that needs to be understood all in the same light which is that these folks are destabilizing force to democracy and so yeah you got to get to the bottom of what the hell happened sex do you do you think the insurrection commission is going to be equally kind of politically motivating for uh for trump's face and for folks like that well i just think that you have to decide as a country whether you're going to keep relitigating you know what happened in the previous administration i mean if we're going to go back and keep this going you know we're going to go back and look at why did the fbi used the steele dossier to go to a fisa court to spy on members of the trump campaign and there are 17 misrepresentations in their uh in their petition to the fisa court i mean there was clear misconduct there we're going to go back and relitigate that and go after people and punish them look maybe we should okay but i think that this is the thing about politics everyone just wants to move forward we're in a new administration now whatever misconduct occurred i think the punishment was paid at the ballot box i think it's just time to move on and uh and i look i know there's going to be a lot of partisans on both sides who just want to go re-litigate and punish their enemies forever but you know i think the american people just want to move forward yeah what do you mean are you in the far what are you in the far left want to do well i'm not on the far left i mean i i think that there is a i do think that there is a bunch of gamesmanship here i think this is a a chess board that on the left they're saying if we we if we have a chance to take trump out of political life we need to do that because the cost of him getting re-elected in 2024 is too great and so what we're talking about here is you know what is the best path to doing that and you know chamats right like just letting him fade into obscurity he may not want to run again because he's so old and it's so painful to be president he's 75 i mean he's going to be 78 or no 17 he'll be the same age as biden going i mean this is ridiculous both of these two guys are one-term presidents i think that is abundantly clear i think the question is what is biden's transition plan you know does he actually only stay two years and transitions to takamala i don't know but there's no way that he's running for a second term either he does not look healthy i think that much is at least and i'm saying this as you know a centrist democrat he doesn't look completely fit um and it's only going to get worse and this is the most incredibly stressful job in the world neither of these two guys are our long-term solution it's time to let it all go right it's like we had four years of just chaos we now get to have four years to catch our breath it's time to find the late 40s to mid 50s centrist normal people again and we have three years to do it who do you think that is on the republican side and tomorrow who do you think it is on the democrat side who's going to run for the next election cycle because just this morning by the way an article came out that um highlighted that several insiders in the white house are completely like up in arms about how uh chaotic uh kamala harris's office is which is basically a way of starting to shoot her down right so if you think about the the motivation here someone in the white house is starting to shoot kamala harris down which means they're starting to weaken her a little bit in terms of whether she could actually be a good replacement for the next term i don't know if that's truly the motivation but that's typically what these sorts of stories indicate so if not her if not her who on the democrat side and you know if not trump who on the republican side in the next election cycle because those folks are going to start to pop their head up right the well i mean i think the i think the person who has enough credibility to take a shot it's not clear that she will but if she did she would be really serious and she could actually get people to be relatively normal as nikki haley on the right but ron desantis is going to be the right candidate correct and she's kind of normal desantis is definitely the early front runner um there was a straw poll in which he was the first republican to actually run ahead of trump in a straw poll for what four or five years and uh so yeah it looks like uh he now he's running for re-election in florida in 2022 so that's on his plate and but i think it looks like he's going to sweep to victory he made the right decisions on lockdowns this is the central feather in his cap that before any other governor really he looked at the data saw that to freeburg's point lockdowns don't make a difference he went back to normal the state benefited you look at per capita covades in florida it's middle of the pack which is actually a really good result given how many old people they have so he did a phenomenal job i think setting covet policy in florida and he did it in the face of a hostile media that was just tearing him limb from limb and so he stowed that he only can find the right policy but that he's got the spine to stand up for it and i think as a result of that yeah he has galvanized early the republican base if he wins re-election in 2022 by uh by a strong margin i think he does become the putative front-runner for 2024. very similar in a way i think to the way that that george w bush you know he he basically won re-election in texas two years before he ran for president and on the heels of that victory he was able to make the case look i just got reelected very popular in a huge state of the country you know i should be the front-runner i think desantis is in a similar position what do you think about nikki haley's sex i think nikki haley is sort of popular with the establishment wing of the republican party but she does not bring together both the the sort of the establishment wing with the populist wing and what desantis has been able to do is get the business republicans and the establishment republicans to get behind him as well as the populist trump base loves him and that's that's the um that's the combo you got to have i think to to win the republican nomination and so nikki haley i think you know everybody who sort of reads elite media is going to over index on her but if you go to the the straw polls and the rallies she's not just not going to perform in those polls there's a very interesting article on politico though over the past week about how desantis is being very careful not to do anything to upset trump and i think he understands is he the vp candidate with trump you think well that that pre-assumes a lot of things happening i mean look we don't know what's gonna happen i think that you know the the number one way to resurrect trump is what chamas said is to keep poking that bear to fill him with the the rage to to sort of counter punch and come back i think it would be better however for a new generation of leaders to look we have we're being run by a gerontocracy right now so i mean just biden is 78 pelosi is 80. schumer is 77. mcconnell is 80 and trump is 75. and that's today okay in 2024 all those people are going to be in their 80s or just about who will even be alive i mean feinstein will be 91 or 92. it's time to have a new generation of both parties why are we being run by this gerontocracy what a joke do we want to move on to the drought and impending uh death and or the facebook ftc dismissal oh that was incredible and also at the uh ftc got two gut punches in a row uh and then you know amazon writes this petition to recuse lena khan it's like that's why she was hired incredible she was hired because she's an expert on amazon the the amazon the amazon letter was actually extremely well written and basically said i know that she's in charge of basically finding fairness and fairness seems to be that we will get legislated but we believe that it's unfair to us so please take her out of the mix i just think it was fantastic i mean it's incredible it's like isn't this the point of having her in the job it's like we've hired a new prosecutor who specializes in organized crime and the gambino crime family has petitioned to have them exactly refused refused from doing any organized right there their argument is that she should be recused because she published um articles yeah that amazon should be broken up and they're saying she's already prejudged the situation there's no way this is gonna fly there's no way she's gonna get recused but i think what they're trying to do is put an argument on appeal so that if lena khan does break them up somehow they can then go appeal to the supreme court or wherever and this is basically reserving an argument they can make later so just to highlight the ftc um brought this case against facebook saying that they're a monopoly in their monopolistic practices or damaging the market the dc federal court threw out the case and they basically said that the ftc failed to demonstrate in any way that facebook has a monopoly over anything because they kept using the 60 market share term and they're like 60 what and the ftc was never able to give them data or facts to indicate what facebook has a 60 share of there are other social media services or other advertising platforms there are other content sites that are all um in aggregate much larger than facebook and so the case was dismissed because there was no demonstration at all which is why of the traditional definition of a monopoly and then elizabeth warren comes out two days ago and says we need to rewrite the laws uh the anti-trust laws entirely redefine what it means to be a monopoly redefine what this this impacts and so i think the big question is how much of a priority is it going to be for this administration and for this congress before they're out of session and we end up with a split congress again to step up and rewrite anti-trust laws at this point is this really a high priority question um or is it going to get that's why khan is being brought in is to take another approach like we talked about on the last episode which is you know the harm is competition uh and not uh the monopolistic power but downstream competition as chamath uh eloquently explained on the last pod the irony of the elizabeth warren uh statements was that she released them on twitter not her facebook somebody dunked at her like she's talking about the monopolistic powers of facebook on twitter right right you have an alternative it was the point um i mean how big of how big of a like legislative priority is this going to be for democrats because this could be real if they rewrite the laws it could be impactful to amazon apple facebook google you know huge it's a huge priority there's six bills that just got passed in the house is going to the senate and i do think moving fast this is one of the areas where you could actually get some bipartisan agreement in the senate you remember it's a 50-50 senate all it would take would be a few democrats to defect and they wouldn't be able to pass anything but you got 21 republicans who supported lena khan so you know that says to me that legislation is likely i think it's going to go through i think we are going to see some some big changes and in fairness to lena khan this ftc lawsuit that got thrown out was brought before she got there she didn't have a chance to shape those arguments they have 30 days to refile it'll be really interesting to see how she handles this hot potato now whether she brings the lawsuit in a different way in the next 30 days or whether she lets it drop but i do think that of all the big tech companies the argument for breaking up facebook is the weakest because it's true like it's it's harder to say definitively they have a monopoly in social networking when you've got twitter you've got snapchat you've talked to reddit you've got you've got linkedin you've got so many other companies in social media but but that does not mean that the argument against amazon google and apple isn't strong those companies are clearly monopolies or duopolies in their spaces nobody can effectively compete with them their network effects or monopoly scale effects i think that facebook's monopolistic impact probably tends towards some form of information distribution but it's a very technical argument that has to be framed accurately on the one side or it's how they've aggregated long-tail advertisers on the other but to your point david on the idea of social networking i don't think they're a monopoly in the lease well also they're re-litigating the approved acquisitions of instagram and whatsapp i kind of feel like if you bought these things and you approved it what is it nine years ago and seven years ago yeah they said they said if you guys had an issue that you know the state's attorney general that filed the suit against the instagram acquisition and whatsapp they're like if you had an issue with it you should have filed the suit years ago you waited too long and clearly there's you know you know other motivations like just because google was successful buying youtube doesn't mean you can go back in and unwind youtube because they did a great job building youtube 99.999 percent of youtube success is because of google not because youtube they took a small team and they rebuilt that whole thing and they scaled the heck out of it let me ask you a question to sacks if these companies paid more taxes and got out of the censorship business uh do you think they could you know maybe take a little wind out of the sales yes yeah of course look the only reason the only reason those 21 republicans have now gotten on board with regulating the power of these big tech companies is they see those big tech companies using their gatekeeper power to restrict free speech and it's all one-sided and it's partisan against you know their side of the aisle because these companies are populated generally speaking by people on the other side of the aisle and so you know big tech if they had just reigned in their own impulses to want to censor the other side they would not be in the hot water they're in right now because it seems like facebook is starting to backtrack on the trump ban well they haven't twitter and i think i think they got a big problem now no look i think they should have been doing this over the last couple of years what they thought could never happen all of a sudden became arbitrary and the thing that they did was they started to legislate a private company started to legislate power and that's just a third rail issue the minute you do that you have every government in the world saying you're saying to themselves wait a minute i am only focused on this one thing right i don't take a huge salary i've been grinding at the low levels of politics for 40 50 years to get to this exact place and now i have a bunch of hipsters in menlo park telling me what i can and can't say to the people that i worked a lifetime to basically be able to govern over i mean i you know yeah you can't it can't stand yeah so i think a big mistake that zuckerberg made goes all the way back to 2016. facebook basically bought into the disinformation argument they apologized for it what zuck that was the time for zuckerberg to fight he should have said no listen was the fsb were these bad actors on facebook yes but when you look at the total number of impressions and page views it was like a drop of water in the ocean we're not the ones who caused this election to go the way it did obama used facebook very effectively in 2008 and nobody has examined us then and that was the time to fight that was the time to fight and to your point david he actually should have been even more he said the reason trump got elected was not me but it was obama you know he could have really gone on the attack and he would have done himself well hillary hillary just ran a bad campaign if hillary had just campaigned in wisconsin it would have gone a different way in 2016. so what zuck should have she had an idiot team she had an idea she had a terrible team and they were bad at everything including facebook including social media so zuck should have said listen don't blame us for the fact the campaign was bad at social media you put victory into the jaws of defeat uh let's uh end on this u.s sprinter case i think it's super interesting you're a sprinter richardson test positive for marijuana and is suspended a month putting her tokyo doubt uh she is the gold medal favorite in the women's 100 meter uh and she could miss the games after testing poverty positive she said she smoked pot when she found out uh in oregon legally when she found out her mom had died um and it's on the united states doping agency announced this result on friday her explanation is so [ __ ] heartbreaking i mean what are we doing here well there was there was this is similar to the golfer who was about to win the pga and got kicked out on the final day because he tested positive for kova without anything outdoors he's outside guys i cannot imagine a worse drug for a sprinter than marijuana yeah i mean for healing great but i mean you're gonna like run the hundred meters and it's not a performance enhancing drug what this is is this legalism these bureaucratic legalistic technicalities gone wild in this case or this runner in the case of the golfer i mean it's like it's like the bureaucrats enforcing the rules have completely lost sight of what the purpose these rules are the spirit of the rule is super important um and there was a professional snowboarder and his name was ross galati from canada and he wanted a medal and they took his medal away because he had thc in his uh system and disqualified him and then they went back and gave him his medal back i believe and so this is heartbreaking and ridiculous and i i i'm not going to watch the i love watching the olympics i watch a lot of the olympics i really enjoy it um i think it's awesome and i'm just not gonna watch this this year [ __ ] it i i just i'm so offended by this like you want these people to take like opioids for their pain uh and suffering or you want to take some antidepressant i mean jesus christ jason look i'll also say like in in our friend group we have a handful of nba players and i don't i don't think you remember this conversation or maybe you do i think we were all together when they talked about the up until uh marijuana was more widely used in the nba yeah the pills that these players were given literally borderline opioids crazy ripped their stomach apart ripped everything apart you know created dependencies and all of a sudden you had a natural alternative and people are going to judge folks for taking i mean these guys are brutalizing their bodies for enter for effectively our entertainment and then we don't give them a reasonable way to manage their pain it's outrageous and everybody else is smoking a doobie during halftime or taking a gummy on the way home to sleep i mean it's so hypocritical and it feels like i mean this country just feels like it's being run by a bunch of bureaucratic technocratic leaders weenies and whether it's whether it's we should give them a wedgie and throw them in the locker that's what we should do with this whoever put this person they get a wedgie and get thrown in a locker i knew you i knew you were a schoolyard bully jkl i'm not a schoolyard bully but i do think the hall monitors you know those people you were a wall monitor did you volunteer to be a home monitor be honest no no no no you were in the chess club i liked our chess game sax yeah okay this is how i knew this is how i knew that jake out wasn't real i knew i knew i had heard him okay i knew he was genuinely hurt but i knew he would get over it when i got i saw my push notifications or requests from chess.com he started a chess game with me so i'm like how did i play because i'm a neophyte he couldn't have easily he couldn't be away from how easy was it to beat me as a 1200 player to my 600 yeah well the chess.com analysis said that uh i was never i was never in any danger but uh i thought you played pretty well and uh yeah give me a tip what's my tip well you you didn't castle fast enough you let me you left you let me get that bishop out yeah you let me trap your king in the center and then you know it was a but that but you did good you did good all right i knew i was okay with you when i got to chess.com i think we need a vegas trip maybe we're all just a little cooped up maybe we need to go to vegas do a quick 48 hour run this weekend should we do a little 48-hour vegas run all right everybody this has been an amazing episode so i'm officially unblocking saks and um i even followed him love you chamoth love you sacks love you free birthday jkl i have something to say to you as well which is i appreciate you i i rain man david sacks and they've just gone crazy [Music] one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] your feet [Music] what are those pants dude these are my swim trunks whoa swim trunks ah there they are the internet famous legs i mean these legs are actually but much much bigger look look how big they are oh please tell me you're recording nick look at how big these are








what did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight what is it what is your celebrity doctor giving you tell the truth people people on twitter are like your your twitter account sounding a lot more like jake out and i'm like i think we're on the same diet i think that's what's going on here [Music] and they've just [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in pod with us today of course the queen of quinoa and from his castle in italy the cackling uh dictator trim off paulie hoppetea nice gardenias and back from his big big battle his brawl unblocked and undefeated the rain man himself david sacks and judging by the comments uh i'd say dominant oh you read the comments just another sign of your obsession with how you're perceived rule number one don't read the comments we're not doing it again it shows because you're not listening to the comments so it makes sense oh okay go ahead and you've 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 now you're paranoid too all right i'm not going to don't be paranoid don't be paranoid anyway we've patched things up don't break the peace we have dayton all right so freeburg is busy uh writing tweet storms now um about the drought in california which seems to be uh just gonna be a really bad year basically so freeburg walk us through it how bad is california's drought gonna be this year so the drought is already very bad um 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 like the only way i can avoid having headaches is like drinking caffeine all day and it was a mistake it kept me up all night you're sure it's not fair maybe you're so excited about this that you so you know the 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 you know north america particularly the western half of north america is in this you know mega drought that we haven't seen in you know 500 plus years and since that paper was published you know um in 2019 conditions have only worsened i we talked about this a few pods ago but like the snowpack level in california reached zero percent 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 um 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 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 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 percent 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 gonna have more power demand we have less power available we have extremely dry forests um 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 um these big risks like you know 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 um you know it just highlights that there's a moment here that is almost like where we were going into covid it may not happen but the probability is high enough that something bad may happen that we should probably start to get prepared for it you know we should probably be talking about the things we're doing to get prepared for it and we're talking about and we should be talking about the things we're going to do to make sure that communities are safe and people are safe and businesses can keep operating because if the state of california has 150 aqi which is the air quality index workers can't work outside and all the outdoor work which employs three million californians has to shut down and you know you kind of start to add these things up it's like what are we going to do as this happens not if this happens and we should kind of be planning for it and i don't see much happening in terms of planning and preparation and talking about the opportunity history rhymes because if you remember uh and this is all going into a recall election in the fall uh this was a different but kind of equivalent setup where you guys remember we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when uh gray davis was recalled and then schwarzenegger just swooped up out of nowhere and you know people thought ah that there's no chance and people were just frustrated because the quality of life took a measurable step backwards uh in the intervening six or nine months before the recall election and so it'll be really interesting to see how gavin newsom manages all of this because if he can't get the state's act together and you have all of these issues at hand and a credible candidate emerges um you could have some really interesting political fireworks in september a big part of this correctness from wrong friedeberg is that we live in essentially like a lot of desert area here in california and we just haven't invested in the desalination plants we have one that's come on since 2005 and i think there's another one in socal that was mothballed and they during the last round wanted to open it up again but we now have one in carlsbad the uh clawed bud lewis carlsbad desalinization plant that is now i think that cost us a billion bucks but israel correct me if i'm wrong is now they charge three times as much for water than we do so people take water seriously and they actually monitor their water usage and they have desalinization and they have more water than they need per capita well desal doesn't really solve a number of these problems that i'm highlighting you know the probability of the the forest land on the west coast not just in california but all up and down the west coast catching on fire is very high no number of desal plants is going to put out those fires when that happens the air quality is going to get really bad you know like we saw last year i don't know you guys remember i escaped to lake michigan last summer when the the remember yeah and it was um it was insane you know it doesn't desal plants don't solve the air quality problem where people can't work outside your kids can't go to school et cetera et cetera um desal plants don't solve the problem of hydroelectric plants which require snowpack to melt to get rivers to run to turn those turbines to generate electricity for the state nuclear would solve that though nuclear would solve that certainly and so you know the point is we're kind of reaching this apex of are we going to do climate change adaptation are we going to have um you know kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're going to start to put in place for these risks that we face and more importantly from an acute perspective in the near term what are the actions we should be taking to protect communities and get ahead of this problem so it's not a scramble after the crisis which is what we typically do with these sorts of criteria we're not investing in infrastructure if we put in some nuclear power plants if we did more desal and we did more forest management or put more fire breaks into you know all this i'm talking about the simple solutions like those three things would be massive wouldn't they well those are long-term solutions i'm talking about like for this summer this summer is it even solvable we need community no but we need to prepare for what is going to happen this summer so when communities get run out what are we going to do you know do we have community centers set up where people can get water and power do we have masks available so that outdoor workers can keep working in the state you know all of these things that we could be doing to get in front of the inevitable consequences of these risks i think are things that we should be actively if you're in california you should order your air purifiers now we ordered six more of these conway ones that we used last year that were amazing get in there we have the n95 maps we ordered them already and we're gonna put in a power generator which i know not everybody is able to do but you can buy a portable one for as little as three or four hundred bucks i think now so portable generator in case you lose power stock up on everything else we need those solutions like i think there's gonna be a big kind of power generator push right like distributed power's always been something that's the whole point of solar you get the solar on your roof you get your own power um but how are you going to keep your ac running when it's 120 degrees outside if you have no power you know that that's kind of a very scary um circumstance of heat waves and it's um it's something that we should have a real plan around and if i were the governor or if i were kind of california leadership or leadership up and down the west coast you know the western governors i'd probably be running a daily press conference starting now saying let's just get in front of this problem and talk about what are the risks we're seeing what are the problems they're seeing and what we're doing about it just so people feel reassured because you know scrambling after a crisis doesn't make anyone feel better you know showing that we're prepared and we're taking action to get in front of this crisis which is not 100 certain but it's a greater than zero percent probability is something that could helpfully kind of reassure and start to put the pieces in place um for the near term by the way just just for those that don't really appreciate how interconnected everything is the basics the science basics on drought as i learned about them were really really incredible so you think okay well how how is all this stuff connected it turns out that you know as we have warmer and warmer temperatures yeah i didn't know this freeberg you probably do this but it accelerates soil evaporation and then there's this really terrible feedback loop that starts which is you have drier soil which means you have less vegetation and then as a result you have less what's called evapotranspiration which means there's less regional precipitation and then this whole thing just starts to spin and spin and spin you have warmer temperatures that results in less snow pack the snow plaque the snowpack melts earlier and we have a situation now in the united states which is just incredible i saw a graph which is one of soil moisture and it shows basically the western half of the united states is in the first percentile of soil moisture looking back over many many decades so well and then all of that vegetation dries up and then no jason we're well even worse than this we're in a position where you know we are threatening our own food supply and just just just to put a uh a finer point on this it's not just the western half of the united states that's now suffering from this it's brazil it's the mediterranean and southern europe and it's large parts of africa you add up all those number of people there are many countries there that are actually self-sufficient which will then no longer be will have to import food that food quality is you know questionable at best in some cases so we're in a really tough position here and saw it's isn't this all solvable with technology i mean if we just tax people a little more for the water usage if we really invested in the desal plants if we really invested in nuclear we could actually flip this whole thing the same way it's spiraling in the wrong direction it could spiral in the right direction two things on the water side i've been looking at water investing for a while there's a there's a real problem which is you know when i when i looked at this uh my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities largely it it evolves around owning water rights right and then basically selling them back to the state and when states get in difficult situations the problem is i think it's politically intolerable for let's just say somebody like me um to own those kinds of waters yeah i think i think it's i think it's no bueno the the idea then that i had was like well maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so that we can guarantee water for people in certain states maybe that flies i'm not so sure that's the government's job that's the government's job but then they're not doing their job but they're incompetent they're unfortunately not uh not as skilled as you'd want them to be on this stuff sax how would you spin this uh out of this death spiral and into abundance is there a way well i mean the the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event i mean this is entirely foreseeable drought conditions have existed in california for a long time in fact 200 years yeah well and even maybe going back millions of years i mean geologists have found evidence that you know millions of years ago you would have millions of acres of california burning every year and so drought conditions have existed for a long time has climate change amplified that and made it worse yes but this is entirely foreseeable we know we're dealing with these conditions and in fact back on his first day in office in 2019 newsom held his very first press conference about this issue on emergency preparedness for fires but the problem is there's been no follow through and so um news you know to go back to chamas point about the political ramifications here you could have a gray davis like situation with the recall where all of a sudden newsome goes from being the favorite to potentially losing because of fire season um but by the way i mean the whole reason why the the recall election is happening in september now instead of october november is because newsom is precisely worried about the gray davis scenario and there this recall is supposed to happen in the october november time frame they've moved it up to september because newsome thinks there's a higher chance of fading the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner the problem for him is that fire season now starts in august and so we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens and this thing could boom rang on him but back to the point about you know newsome held this press conference back in in january of 2019 and the problem is there hasn't been any real follow through on forest management so you know newsome was recently caught in a lie saying that you know they had basically treated 90 000 acres this is what this uh article i'll put in the chat said in reality that only really treated about 11 000 acres even 90 000 would be inadequate right they're not doing enough and the way um you know i talked to a very prominent person who knows california politics well and knows all the players and what he said is look the fundamental problem is that gavin is not operational right he's fantastic at fundraising he says all the right things at press conferences but but not everything is about running for reelection and the problem is he has not managed to this outcome and and so now we're in the situation where to freebird's point we're going to be scrambling after the fact now what is newsome's excuse going to be it's going to be you know climate change it's going to be global warming it's kind of the all-purpose dog ate my homework excuse for anything that goes wrong as eakin is blaming on climate change but the reality is we knew about climate change climate change something we have to live with even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward we're not going to be able to reverse the effects it's already had and so we need leaders who will step up and and get much more aggressive about preventing this problem i think my and by the way my tweet i didn't mention climate change at all i got you know i don't think that that's even the point the point is we are facing acute conditions on the in the western half of the united a number of st and severe consequences those acute conditions you know you could blame them on climate change and say that they're part of climate change it doesn't change the reality they are here today and we have to deal with them um and i think yeah we have a we have a couple of things that are that are uh going to happen here in short order that i think can make this thing accelerated a little so there's a uh an organization a a department in the united states government that's not very well known called the u.s bureau of reclamation usbr and they are the ones that will make formal assessments of water levels and there's a really important assessment that's going to happen in lake mead at the end of this year and the reason why it's critical is that if the u.s bureau of reclamation measures lake mead under um a certain threshold they can declare a tier one shortage and what that means just practically speaking cutting through all the you know jargon is that initially the state of arizona will be denied around 600 000 acre feet of water next year what does that mean that's about 15 of the demand for that state and so you're going to start you know to deal with these sort of like rolling i don't know what we're even going to call these water out scenarios where uh it's not just about watering your lawn that's not going to be possible it's going to be a whole bunch of other things now there is a solution and this is where california can come to the rescue for most of the western united states if they really want to or at least for the rest of california which is there is an enormous untapped groundwater uh aquifer in southern california which is the size of lake mead um it's an incredibly unique thing it's actually owned by a public company and the whole goal was okay well let's just build a pipeline right from the aquifier to deliver drinking water to folks that you know are lacking water and this has been a multi-year you know bordering on multi-decade slog because of california politicians because water has become highly politicized no one wants to pay the full cost for a commodity that they frankly view as a right but then they don't want to step in to do the work to actually make it reasonable and viable so this whole thing is just again that david as you said the dog ate my homework and now we're really playing with some very complicated things that are really out of the control and intellectual capacity of the of frankly state governments which is the interconnectedness of weather temperature water our soil our food supply it's uh i think what's so frustrating about this is this is so easily stoppable and we are not doing the blocking and tackling the free throws the basic things if you look at just monitoring our water usage i invested in two companies one of them didn't work out but both of them were to monitor water usage and what we learned was at a campus like stanford they have like four water meters like they're not going down to the building level in some cases there'll be like four buildings on one water meter and you can very easily at each sink at each you know shower head you can put a device that cost 25 bucks installed it just wraps around the the the water the the the pipe and it could tell you how it's flowing and we lose 20 30 percent of our water to leaks nobody is monitoring their usage because there is no cost to it to chamat's point and then you look at these crazy insane almond and other uh agriculture in the the middle of california they are using flood irrigation which i'm sure friedberg can give us an education at versus what you know the trip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in israel and other places so we look at water as like to chamots point some crazy god-given right that we can just splash it everywhere we can take 20-minute showers and then we allow how crazy is this we allow the bottling of water in california we allow these companies to bottle water and then sell it and we don't even monitor our usage we have well we are so entitled it is gross nuisance biggest donors uh who who's that family that grows all the almonds or whatever whoever they are the resnicks the resnicks single biggest do them in the teachers unions oh linda resnick and those palm people with the palm stuff it's total political corruption right i mean they get it's chinatown it's literally the movie chinatown yeah well i think so to this point about why aren't politicians solving the problems i mean to make a meta point there's a great tweet from thomas soul or the person who manages the thomas soul account where he said no one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems they're trying to solve their own problems which are getting elected and re-elected that's number one number one stay in office that is their right goal three is far behind and and that that's basically the situation we have is i think newsome actually is a little bit like trump not in his personal style but in that he thinks he can talk his way out of problems and he's not going to focus on solving a problem when he can just spin his way out of it by the way i just think you guys should know the you know because a lot of people talk about residential water use that is also kind of an acute and local problem where depending on your water supply how much water you have available to your community but in terms of aggregate water use the vast majority of water in california is used in agriculture it's about 10x what is used for residential applications so california agriculture by the way it's not a bad thing it's a huge part of our economy uh that water has generally been fully available in aquifers people bought that land with rights they paid a premium for those rights to those aquifers this is a very complicated problem uh in california and that you know supports a large part of the california economy so you know you can't just kind of blow them away but 90 of water use in california is associated with ag and it's not just a generally we need to save water problem it's very specific to a region and a community and their particular water source on whether and how much you need to save versus do you have abundant supplies and so on um and so it's it's a little bit more complicated but yeah but we should be focused on abundance freeburg if if you look at the new nuclear power plants that you know bill gates has invested in and then you look at desalinization which is an energy issue we can desalinize for roughly two or three times the cost that we're getting more water for now so just put a nuclear power plant next to a desalination plant and you're done great that's a 20-year project and you've got why is it a 20-year project china does it in two you're going to need to be more bold in this country it is completely ridiculous that we accept that everything has to take 20 years we need this now where's the leadership that says [ __ ] it let's do it immediately let's set a goal of two years to build 10 of these spend the [ __ ] money i'm not sure it solves our acute problems it solves long-term problems associated with climate change and energy we can't do both we can't do both let's do both sure we should do everything but right now the you know the the conditions indicate that there are some specific things that we can and should be doing to kind of support the state in terms of what's going to happen in the next year or two and yes we should also be funding long-term projects that create water security and energy security for everyone in the united states but sac to your point and by the way if you guys ever want to read an interesting book about how the grid operates um there's a book called the grid uh and it talks about how the electrical uh power grid system was built in the united states and how inefficient it is and all the problems there are a lot of structural problems that need to be solved not just you know dropping in cheap power saks who is the good operational candidate that you've seen that's running for governor of california in this recall is there someone that stands out in your mind because i i don't seem to hear anyone talking about hey there's a good alternative to gavin newsom at this point yeah i mean we don't a clear alternative has not emerged yet um you know i guess the and part of the problem is that because there was no republican primary you haven't sort of consolidated the opposition to a leading candidate there are a couple of i guess interesting candidates on the republican side i need to spend more time getting to you know know them i mean i have never met them or talked to them but the the two who are i think mentioned quite a bit are uh this guy falconer who's the mayor of san diego who is sort of a socially liberal republican and then there's a state assemblyman named kevin kiley who who i think says a lot of interesting things and he just announced he's running there's another guy as well john cox but he got trounced by news in the last election i think it's time to let somebody else take a shot against him and then of course you've got caitlyn jenner but i think people are still trying to figure out if her campaign is real or how real it is um so yeah look we the the opposition has not consolidated against newsome the way it did with schwarzenegger you know back in 2001. i'm voting i'm voting republican just to create a counterbalance i don't care who it is and i'm not a republican i'm an independent but i'm voting across the board i'm just going to go to republican for every position in california and i'm going to just run my finger down and check every single one how does it feel to be a radical trump supporter listen talk to us about nuclear and what we can do to get to reverse what these hippie dippy well-intentioned no nukes concert set us back 50 years and let's be honest a lot of the climate change problems we have today we would not have if we had invested in nuclear yeah i i said theory well i sent her on an image uh nick maybe you can stick it in the show notes or something so that people can see but if you if you look at if you graph the construction of nuclear reactors from the 1960s 1960s to today essentially what and you color code them by country what essentially you see is uh a transition from the able from the frankly from countries that basically were just right at the that leading the pack and it was really the united states building building building and then two things really happened there was three mile island and then there was chernobyl and there was an incredible over reaction to not really understanding either the cause and or the remediation to two events now could you imagine if there were two airlines that crashed and we stopped flying how basically we would have you know [ __ ] the progress of the world and now you impose it on something like nuclear energy which is consistently proven to provide an enormous the abundant cheap and clean form of sustainable energy and it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before so for example if you look at the power consumption for desalination it's off the charts quite honestly okay that's why people say that it can't be done credibly if you look at even just like the amount of energy that's required to clean water and to you know sanitize water and make it drinkable the the the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent but the the implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it but jason you are right which is that if we have small forms of sustainable abundant energy that can be basically hyper localized and located where we can do these jobs the jobs to be done it's transformational now why doesn't it happen it doesn't happen because the same folks who really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change which is the progressive left are not really willing they are intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear they don't do the work they make a br bland sort of broad-based prognostication about how we need to do something about climate then they will point to solar and wind without really understanding the contamination of the earth that we do in order to mine the rare earths and the actual metal and mineral inputs that are required for solar it's yes nuts but it sounds better right it sounds better it sounds better oh we're using air in the sun and it's like if i could show you what what tailings are and like the dirty after effects of mining copper and nickel out of the ground which is what we need for batteries and how countries like indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean dumping it faster that they can get their hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt um to us so that we can make batteries you would actually say to yourself if you knew all these facts you'd actually say to yourself you know what maybe nuclear isn't so bad and maybe i overreacted to it you want to understand this you just have to look at the laziest group of individuals and society the french they want to take the laziest route and do the least amount of work and have the most amount of leisure sorry to our french listeners 70 percent of the energy in france is from nuclear they figured this out they said how do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited elections 70 percent nuclear they're so smart well the the the french are actually smart because after fukushima because after fukushima what happened is if you had you know sort of like woke politicians germany a bunch of germany they completely unwound their entire nuclear agency which which was insanity insanity and so now here they are they're writing laws faster than they can make them up they're basically pivoting entire industries to try to now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications to the earth that they are going to create the net consequences if they had just stayed the course on nuclear they would be in a much better place and and to france's credit they were like what the [ __ ] are you people overreacting about again just think about this guys we stopped flying after two airline crashes where would the world be where would the world be i mean be pragmatists here do we want to deal with high energy prices and brownouts and all kinds of problems and rolling blackouts or do we want to put this issue behind us if we just go on a manhattan project literally to make new nuclear we would be this issue would be behind us and we could focus on something else like education it's so dumb the very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress it will get bogged down in litigation and bureaucracy these are the last two things that should be in front of science and physics especially when it comes to energy independence i just think it's it's freeberg any way out any way we can get people to what's the best way to convince the american public to embrace nuclear and force our politicians to do it open your mind and think for yourself right please well uh marc andreessen had a good term uh he said we're living in a vitocracy as in the word veto um i think he it was an interesting interview with um antonio garcia martinez on his blog anyway um yeah they were talking about the inability of the us to build anything anymore especially when you compare us to some you know place like china and you whether you want to call it nimbyism or vitocracy there are just too many people in groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening but we got us we got to stop letting our politicians off the hook by making excuses you know just because there's climate change doesn't mean that the politicians can't do anything about it i mean welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy right like a democracy over time doesn't reduce the number of laws it has every year politicians need to do their job and they create new laws as new laws accumulate like things get clogged up right like when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government a state government or federal government that makes it easier to do something i get that but where where does it say in the constitution of the united states that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic yeah that's that's not part of what being part of a democracy is i by the way i wanna i wanna talk about that for one second there was this thing that i sent you guys in the chat and nick hopefully you post post that in the show notes as well but there was a study that was done about cynicism and it went back and it did like a qualitative assessment of more than 200 000 people and their attitudes and their measured iq their measured literacy their measured numeracy and their measured earnings and here's what they found cynicism is associated with lower iq lower literacy lower numeracy and lower earnings the idea of cynical individuals being more competent appears to be a widespread yet largely illusory lie so i think yeah i think this makes sense i mean i i was shocked by that study because i actually generally think cynical people must be smarter because they're thinking more rationally and maybe i'm being emotional it turns out they're [ __ ] stupid well here's the thing there's cynicism and then there's people who are cantankerous and not content and i think people sometimes conflate those two things if you look at the constant constant pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy it means that you just stop thinking for yourself as a protective mechanism right but but the people we know uh who have changed the world and who they seem to be they're not cynical they're not cynical they're actually delusional and optimistic or they wouldn't have started a company to make electric cars you know or you know whatever piece of software or climate.com or synthetic biology you have to be a radical optimist i mean and we're literally trying to attack our incredible capitalists who are actually solving these problems while our politicians can't get their [ __ ] together and make desal plants and nuclear plants the private market seems like the only solution sacks well there's an old saying that uh pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich and uh yeah i mean if you think about it if you think about it you know pessimists don't create companies right they're they're no they throw rocks they become journalists they become shitty posters on twitter they become critics yeah anton ego right sax what do you think about this idea that uh you know if we get into the throes of it uh for water the folks that own water rights i think that this is going to be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some point just going to say sorry i need it back it's mine yeah during an emergency for sure for sure but i mean i i i i hate to i hate to use the words um i agree with j-cal but but you know look there's not a shortage of water in the world right i mean the world is mostly water so it is a function of building desalination plants if that's what we need there has to be a solution for that problem and freeberg's right that maybe it does take a decade or two to put in all place all that infrastructure but then why didn't we start 10 years ago you see we should be starting a program where we convinced the american public that abundance would lead to them having more freedom and our country being stronger electrical abundance with nuclear water abundance with desalinization and agricultural abundance with those previous two because if you had unlimited nuclear energy and you had unlimited clean water the price of agriculture would go down and we'd have more free food for everybody or lower cost food i'll tell you i'll tell you a theory i have on this um and it's basically an anti-science theory which is that um you know culturally we've kind of developed this anti-innovation anti-science mentality broadly speaking across uh kind of modern culture in the united states if you remember coming out of world war ii and i think it has its roots in the cold war um you know out of when world war ii ended you know we were all in it together you know this country everyone bought the same stuff we all had rice krispies every day we all kind of you know we're excited about our our homes that look like everyone else's home on the block and technology was empowering all of this right there was a space race on um there were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts of amazing things there were chemicals that were creating new drugs for humans and new applications for agriculture that was making an abundance of food and increasing lifespans and so on but then what happened in the late 60s and 70s is we realized we got ahead of ourselves and um you know there was uh cancer from ddt there was uh you know three mile island there was um a number of um pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the environment from chemical companies and we started to wake up and say like wait a second all of this technology that we thought was so great and was giving us this extraordinary abundance it turns out it's really risky and can cause massive unknown consequences and if you watch i think i talked about this in our podcast once but one of my favorite videos to watch there's a video on youtube from the disney channel history institute and they show the history of tomorrowland at disneyland when tomorrowland opened in 1955 every ride was all about adventuring into space and like traveling into the human body and they even had a ride from monsanto where you would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff and it was all about this amazing abundance and technology and the guy the narrator on the video says beginning in the late 60s early 70s we changed all the rides and the rides all became about the fear of technology it was all about aliens attacking earth it was all about um captain eo was like you know the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things even star tours was about a robot that went awry and the robot doesn't know what it's doing so it drove us off course and we had to survive the robot and so everything became you know subconscious or subliminally a little bit this negative technology sentiment and i think that that still persists you know there is an asymmetry people take for granted the abundance over time because you get used to it but you feel the acute pain of the loss when technology goes awry and then that becomes the social conscience and i think we're still grappling with that and i i don't know how you reverse it are we not experiencing this right now everybody with kovid where there's one group of people who are like oh my god the science we were able to deploy in covet and get through this so quickly is so promising that the world's going to be better net net after the pandemic even with all the suffering you could make an argument that that suffering is going to lead to more prosperity and there's another group of people who are like the delta variant let's get our masks back on uh and people want to take the cynical route on as an individual i don't want harm done to me or my kids or my environment that's that's the i think the general kind of conscience right and i don't care about the abundance because i've basically taken it for granted and so now i find myself as an individual saying you know what we shouldn't do nuclear because look at what happened in fukushima forgetting the fact that you've been living off of free electricity practically for decades or whatever the you know the case free water and free water and all these things and i think the the abundance that technology delivers to humans because humans are only programmed to recognize change they're not programmed to recognize absolutes uh there's a lot of good socio us an example psychological that give us an example like if you know if you go to the store every day and you're used to just getting a one dollar can of coke you don't say oh my god i feel it's an amazing world i live in i get a one dollar can of coke you never praise that one dollar can of coke now if you went to the store and the can of coke went up to two dollars you'd be like what the heck why does coke cost so much and so um you know so we habituate but we habituate to the great things about the price of coke dropped to 50 cents you're like okay that feels good and then you get used to the price of coke being 50 cents and a few weeks later if it goes up you're upset but you're not as happy on the other way so human emotion is kind of asymmetrically you know defined by these negative consequences and i think over time you accumulate these negative consequences as your core psyche and you have an aversion to doing you know innovative things as a whole not all people but as a whole that's how we operate um and it's why technology kind of gets land-based over over time this is the most frustrating thing to me chamoth is that we have so many amazing things happening in technology and nobody will 10x or 100x on them from the uh government perspective or the public i had a company called zero mass on my podcast which i think is now called source and you're aware of this company maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydro panels would make if we just embrace this technology well i mean source is an incredible incredible company um basically there's a there's a guy who runs a cody friesen who when he was at mit basically um developed a uh essentially a material a membrane that can absorb the ambient um water that's in the atmosphere um and basically allow you to collect it and to separate it into its components and to basically create potable salinized or potable drinkable water in a panel that looks like a solar panel so you put these solar arrays everywhere and out of the back you put a little pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and and it spits out water it's it's an incredible thing and he's able to go and rewire schools and and the thing is he can go anywhere because again he doesn't need anything right you literally put it on your roof it's incredible and it makes you if you i think he told me at the time when i interviewed him two or three years ago he said you could put two of these on your roof and get like four cases of bottled water a day no matter where you were on the planet and by the way he's moving to a place which is really cool he told me this i'm not sure if i'm allowed to say it but i'll say it anyways are you saying this might be beeped no where he is no he'll have an eventual app where you can kind of direct the hydro panel to make the kind of water that you like so if you love avion or if you love um fiji water or if you love smart water or you're on the voice right specifically because it's the most expensive i love i love smart water i i i have a very gratuitous reason why i remember when i met jobs he drank smart water and i thought it's good enough for him he's good enough for me i'll tell you when i knew i just gotta copy people like you gotta copy the good ones and i was just like this is a personal anecdote this is when i knew chamoth made it we used to play poker in his garage in his little 3000 square foot palo alto house in berlin whatever he had this little tiny house and we're in the garage and he's like look i'm putting up a flat panel i'm going to like paint the walls no we had a little uh you had a little uh easel and you'd write on chalk how much you oh you know then chamat's like i got a new house he's got his new house we come over he's like jacob you want some water i'm like yeah i'd love a glass he's like oh jay how do you want a bathroom yeah it's like a glass of water and uh he goes oh and he walks over to iraq and in the rack like you know those things you push wine on there's a rack for water and there is voss in the glass bottles there is avion in glass bottles old and you're not like the avion that you get at the regular supermarket like somebody sourced the avion bottles that restaurants have and then he had the smart one i mean they're sixteen and then like i just wanted a glass of water but okay i'll take the avion in the glass bottle it was delightful sax i got three different bounce passes i can give you just where you want it do you want cancel culture do you want chesabudan or covet what do you want or covet i can give you any of these i can i'm ready to pass i'm talking about any of those sound good to me i mean i the the it might be time for a chase update because we haven't done that in a while the killer d.a the killer d.a yeah oh by the way i just want to say i found the journalist you know the journalist sacks don't say her name and she is setting up her llc and the 60 000 we raised from the gofundme is going to go to her to cover the da's office for the next six to twelve months in a newsletter website right and just to be clear because i think people kind of misinterpreted what you're trying to do there with the gofundme jcal yes this is not for opposition research this is not no this is not digging up dirt this is reporting on uh on public policy on what should be public facts with respect to what the da's office is doing how chase is performing in his job isn't it interesting though how the left journalist when i hired an investigative journalist to cover criminal justice accused me of hiring an oppo researcher and these are investigative journalists and i told them explicitly i'm just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in san francisco there's no oppo research here and they insisted on saying i wanted to get into chess's personal life and i explicitly said that's not what this is for well let's face it there aren't too many journalists anymore who are investigative who are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials they're too busy pushing a narrative they're engaged in agenda journalism and actually we saw a really good example just to tie into to what's happened what happened over the past week is you had this story in the san francisco chronicle which is basically pure propaganda uh from you could see the the um the passing from chaser to this reporter of this this farcical uh claim that crime is falling in san francisco uh i mean this claim is so preposterous we this is the same week we saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of neiman marcus you know with with every handwriting yeah exactly and so you know plus you had the vibe it's scary yeah you had the viral video of the the guy going into cvs and just you know it wasn't even shoplifting it was did you see brian sugar's uh video of the person who broke into his house stole his kids ipads and everything while they were in the house right and cyan banister who had another home invasion just tweeted home invasions are now um not prosecutable crimes in san francisco well no what they're doing is what cyan reported about her case is and by the way her case is in the public eye okay so it's very brazen for the d.a to be doing this but what they did is they dropped the home invasion charges and they're just treating it as basically a a theft of you know a few hundred dollars you know that does not capture the violation of breaking into someone's house and how dangerous that is but i originally i thought okay why is the da's office doing this originally i thought well maybe it's just because you know chase doesn't want to incarcerate anybody but it's more than that you see if they drop the charges down to petty larceny then he can include it in a different stat you see home burglaries are up by some gargantuan amount like 50 year-over-year they want to be able to claim crime is falling it's now they're juking the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious crime and then what they do they're shaping the stats they're juking the stats you ever watch the the show the wire that's where this expression comes from is you know first the the politicians get held held accountable to the statistics then they realize that then they start manipulating the facts and that's what's basically so dirty it's so dirty but but the next step in the process is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters i mean the fact that they keep repeating these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they won't prosecute them right then they mischaracterize them and then they never say 85 of the commuters coming into san francisco are no longer coming into san francisco and target announced like walgreens that they are either closing stores or reducing the hours because they can't deal with the crime and they're saying explicitly this is the highest crime we've ever seen in any of our stores and then this crazy communist are they communists on the left here cvs walgreens and target are all closing stores or reducing store hours because they understand the hit to their bottom line but you have this mantra it is it is communist like where it's like the commandments written on the barn in animal farm where it is propaganda that's so at odds with reality it's just absurd okay it's farcical it's farcical but then how do they enforce it what they say is anybody who questions this narrative is a bad person is in fact a clan a racist and a klansman so so this is the other thing that happened over the past week is that you had this is crazy but basically michelle tandler who is a moderate and as nice a person as you could ever find concerned citizen concerned citizen san francisco born and raised yes who tweeted that all of her friends are thinking about leaving the city and then in response to that you had this this senior policy advisor to chase abu dean who works for the da's office named uh kate chatfield attacker basically implying her views were you know were kkk values for for for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in san francisco so she gets attacked by the way uh this this chatfield person the top of her profile is the clenched fist of the communist revolution jkl so this is who's running the da's office but but look it's not just trolling and it's not even just slander it's i think an abuse of power for someone in the da's office to go after and attack a concerned citizen like this okay but this is how they enforce can you read the tweet that she did you have that there because she basically is the people who have experienced home invasions are concerned for the safety of their families and what this uh woman did michelle i believe is her name she just said like people are scared for their families and then kate chatfield referenced birth of a nation and compared her to oh our wives are not safe because of black people and that's a kkk everybody knows everybody understands the representation yeah the original name of birth donation i think was the clansmen yeah yeah it's like a kkk piece of propaganda wow but it's really outrageous she just blocked me kate chatfield blocked me wow this is a public policy advisor who is now hiding her account well why i mean a public official should not do that i mean they should and so this set you off let's be let's be honest i know michelle taylor she worked at yammer you know and i didn't i thought it was out of bounds for uh not just a public official but someone in the da's pro office who what did you do well you went into revenge mode let's be honest you got a little bit you were a little bit tweaked i donated another fifty thousand dollars to the recall chasing campaign and you dedicated it to kate yeah you said this is for you yeah because look this is threatening every american should have the right to criticize their government without having its law enforcement arm come down on them and so here you have a legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the da's office is coming down on them that's not acceptable i think i need to break some news here i didn't want to talk about this publicly but i'm so outraged now that i think i should let this out so while i after the we in the weeks after i started that campaign to hire an investigative journalist for chess's office this is breaking news i haven't talked about this publicly but i'm gonna break it now do you know who contacted me the da's office you know what they contacted me about they were investigating a startup that i had invested in i won't say which one and they wanted to interview me about my involvement with that startup because that startup uh had some complaint from a downstream investor who felt that they were committing some type of fraud or problem coincidence are are you serious i'm serious this is literally becoming chinatown they literally tried to intimidate me and i didn't want to bring it up and i talked to the person on the phone the the the person from the da's office who was investigating this and he's i was like do i need an attorney for this why are you calling me because and he's like well you know we just want to talk to you about this and i was like yeah no like we have a bunch of questions and i just said you know what uh subpoena me i'm not you know file something and i'll come in with my attorney to talk to you but i'm not gonna talk with you on background no so they literally tried to intimidate me you know what and i kind of let them because i didn't want to make it public but i'm making it public now you should make it public because it's public now we'll begin and this is two weeks after i said let's hire the journalist it's intimidation tactics that's intimidation i will not be intimidated chessa all right but what you can see here is okay look i mean i was intimidated now that i think about it like i didn't do anything wrong here i put 50k i put 50 or 100k into a company that didn't work out and now some other investors complaining and they're trying to tie it back to me somehow but jason did you of course you're going to be intimidated the chief law enforcement officer of san francisco is basically trying to make you the target of an investigation because of what you said publicly of course that is intimidation guys isn't it possible that they're just interviewing you about a fraud claim i mean like what this could wait hold on but think about the timing free bird it's two or three weeks like three weeks a police officer drove past my house last night yeah free bird okay wait it's the first and only time i've ever been contacted by a law enforcement officer over an investment i'm sure it's just a coincidence stop committing fraud 350 investments yeah listen chasa has not had time he's almost two years in office now and he has not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial not one but his office has time to run down whatever they're trying to run down with jake out they don't have time to prosecute the the home invader who broke into cyan banister's home or brian's or brian's they don't have time to do that but they somehow have time to contact jake out he tweeted the video let me explain what's going on here there's two things going on i think one of which is becoming very well understood but the other one is not the first one is the gothamization of san francisco we understand that crime is out of control cynicism and resignation people are just kind of given into it it feels like san francisco has become gotham city these viral videos of the robbers brazenly committing daylight theft they're beating up ups drivers in the street they're beating a ups driver because there is no consequence okay but there's a second thing happening which is the orwellianization of san francisco government and san francisco politics you not only have the crime you've got the brazen lies about the crime you've got this insistence on this animal farm commandment that crime is falling and if you question it you are a black person and you're a klansman and then they get their the you know the kate chat feels to push this out and then they get academics to back this up okay there are now they get their friends in the media and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence and then the final step is that the rich virtue signalers pay these people off they pay the protection money who's paying off the dustin moskovitz's the mike kriegers the reed hastings and you know even actually the biggest contributor to chaser right now is a guy who's under sec indictment for the ripple scandal oh no yeah chris chris yes exactly so people who need to curry favor either because they're they've got their own problems or they just like to virtue chris laurel chris larson is chess's biggest campaign oh wow that is dark brian sugar released the video and that person's not going to be prosecuted i mean that is the crazy part you get somebody on camera and they won't prosecuted them and people forget these are organized gangs that are doing this this has been proven this is not a poverty issue these are not poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent it's organized gangs right did you realize that 47. did you see the getaway cars for the nema marcus heist yeah they're all like the mercedes they're driving great beautiful cars with their license plates off this is like mob behavior and if you give criminals trust me i grew up in a criminal environment in brooklyn if you give criminals a window they will figure it out you give them an opportunity if you give them something to hack they will hack it period and you basically have green light of them okay listen it's enough of us complaining about this uh i am going to stop complaining about this and i'm moving either let's do this i'm moving to texas or to florida i'm making the announcement now hold on is that for sure jkl listen i you know i'm in a partnership and my partner doesn't want to be here anymore and i'm half and half so i'm not sure why i'm here anymore i mean i think california's my position right now is california is going to be on a decade-long slide and i'm working for 10 more years i decided i'm 50 i decided i'm going to go to 60 i'm going to try to invest in 100 to 200 companies a year for 10 years and then i'm done so why would i spend 10 years in a place that is on a death spiral can this be reversed in our in the next decade how does it feel how does it feel to be completely red-pilled i'm purple pills i want to live in a pear i want to live in a reasonable place and it seems to me that austin and miami are purple you know and they're not communi i don't want to live in a right-wing place alt-right and i don't want to live in a communist place i want to live in an american place i want to live in a place where americans can talk about issues without being villainized period that's that's what people feel about this pod you're not being villainized just give me a break all right just be you people really want to know if you went to dinner with tucker can you just make that statement that you didn't have dinner with jacob what do we got next you just made what have we got it was a joke why can't you admit if you did or not listen i have 15 minutes we gotta go covid uh delta people are panicking but the numbers keep going straight down pfizer says israel says maybe pfizer is 65 instead of 94 65 seems pretty great we at any risk well okay let me jump into this because i've been affected personally by it um so yeah on the last pod i did i get to give the stat which was that um at that point that the best data we had even a week ago was that the the pfizer vaccine was holding it pretty well against the um delta variant it had reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88 that's sort of the numbers i think uh on monday israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of pfizer against delta had been reduced to 64 now it that's against you know getting symptoms and testing positive it was still 93 against serious cases requiring hospitalization but that 93 is down from you know 99 plus so there has been reduced effectiveness by delta it's um it is a little bit concerning and as if to underscore this point someone very close to me ju who was double backs with pfizer just test a positive he did test positive yes so he he woke up yesterday morning with um with cold symptoms he had um sore throat runny nose but he's fine and a slight fever which then graduated into a headache he went and got tested and he tested positive for covet so i think he's fine what city was he in when this happened l.a okay let me ask a question to friedberg is it not the best possible situation i know this sounds like a stupid question but i am the lowest iq guy on the pod is it not the best situation to have the pfizer or whatever have this amazing then to get a mild case of kovid and then be doubly protected is that in some way an ideal situation if there is no long-haul covid it's not really clear if that's going to make a difference you know again like remember acquired immunity uh is on a spectrum right so a virus can get in your nose starts replicating and if you've got a ton of antibodies that immediately get to your nose it'll shut down that virus before you experience anything if that virus gets in your nose and starts replicating and you've got a kind of you know your antibodies to that specific virus um you know aren't as concentrated it's going to take your body a little bit longer to fight off that virus but you're still well ahead of the game as a way to think about it and so you know to some extent what we're seeing most likely is this delta variant um having a greater escape velocity from people that have been vaccinated than you know the alpha variant or any of the other variants we've seen um and so as a result you know people are getting to date luckily knock on wood mostly mild and moderate symptoms and only a minority of people uh that are exposed are getting um you know that condition but it's being tracked really closely i mean like like zach said in israel they have now said that you know if you're uh vaccinated with fizer double backed with pfizer you're now 64 um you know effective and you're you know that that means that if you're exposed to covid there's a chance you can actually get these symptoms but the hospitalization rate and the fatality rate is still way way low because you have built up enough immunity you've built up enough antibodies to have a good strong defense to keep things from getting out of control and so knock on wood right now we're still looking good in terms of fatality and hospitalizations but there's certainly you know what do you think of this situation and jamaat are markets kind of worrying about this because i'm kind of wondering like as as market participants see this stuff are they trading it in a way that's like fearful and does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple days and weeks i mean i think that there's a very good chance that um some politicians are going to try to use this uh for another shutdown in the fall i thought yeah i think you're right and i think the teachers unions the nea and the aft are already putting all sorts of demands on going back to school i don't think this date so first of all i think we have to be intellectually honest that this is a bad data point this is really the first bad data point that we've gotten until now all the data's been good the protection from the vaccines last longer it had been completely holding up against the variants but this data point from israel is not a great data point i want to see more of them uh more data yeah but i don't think that um this by itself wait a second didn't israel only get to like 55 60 vaccinated oh no they're they're way higher no no they're way higher than that yeah half of the infections they're seeing in israel are children that were not vaccinated and then the the other hats are the other half are adults um and so if you look at the adult infection rate it looks like it's something around um 15 percent uh of uh you know these k or yeah i i forgot the number but there's some uh statistic that shows that it's not uh the majority being vaccinated that there are unvaccinated people that are uh look we're gonna probably we're gonna probably need a booster and we're probably going to be on a cocktail but beyond that i think we need to make a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal yeah 100 i'm done i'm not there there will be both there will be boosters for sure right like this fall yeah yeah exactly and i think the the the question about this this data is does it warrant a change in policy and i would say not yet you know 100 not yet i mean we the whole policy idea was icus being filled and if you look at the stats in the united states at the debts we are now at a seven day average of under 200 i think it's 150 debts per day some again i'll ask you free break how many of those are with covid versus from kovacs yeah it's unclear but like israel hasn't had a single death in two weeks from covet right so what are we talking about despite this increase in numbers it's it's still uh right it's not it's not what the media likes to portray which is variants punching through right i mean it's not like delta varian is just sweeping through israel okay there is a slight increase in cases and we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the u.s i mean delta variance can become the main the dominant strain if it isn't already look it's mostly sweeping through areas that have not been vaccinated but there are now cases i'd say mostly mild cases of people who have been vaccinated i mean i think it's all the more reason why if you're an adult you should get vaccinated we really do need all adults barring some sort of um you know highly specific immune condition that where you you need to be on some sort of different treatment but almost all adults in the us really should get me vaccinated otherwise we're going to have keep having these variants sweep through i'll tell you i had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday who's a research specialist and well-known in this space and he pointed out that the evolutionary cycle of this virus is a function of how many people are not vaccinated because the more bodies the virus has to hop the faster the more evolution it can get the more it evolves right yes and so um you know certain virologists and epidemiologists will model this where they will highlight kind of the epi the evolutionary rate of the virus as a function of unvaccinated people getting infected every day and so the more people that we get vaccinated the longer the timeline it takes for the virus to evolve and get to a breakthrough variant and so we need to accelerate and continue to push people to get vaccinated worldwide to reduce the available pool for evolutionary um success of the virus yeah it's it's to put it in maybe layman's terms all these unvaccinated people are basically like a giant petri dish for the virus to keep to keep mutating and we do need i think like a marshall plan to help all these other countries get vaccinated i mean i think we have enough vaccines in the u.s but what have we done to help all these other countries it directly benefits us if we reduce the size of that petri dish this delta variant came from india why there's like a billion plus people there who you know for the virus to mutate on i mean obviously with the petri dish that big you're going to get a variant now there's a new variant coming out of peru which looks potentially scary now these are not full breakthrough variants yet but to freeberg's point is just a matter of time you guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country i mean it's just mississippi in terms of mississippi and alabama alabama exactly can you imagine mississippi and alabama 33 come on get your act together what is it i mean it's going to whip through those places and you're all going to die you're going to kill your grandparents is that an evangelical movement issue is that it's it's it's well we talked about this the last pod there's two groups in america who are most republican men oh no let's be more specific it's evangelicals and african-americans those are the two groups who are most you keep saying you keep saying and then what does how do you pronounce it eventually evangelicals it's actually male republicans why can't no that's you're not being specific enough yeah guys i gotta i got i gotta run love you free bird love you guys we love you free see you later love you big boy let your winners ride rain man david sack and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music] we need to get back








this week we're going to play our favorite new game show guess who's got covid yes that's right somebody on the Pod somebody's got coded it's not the Me Oh No you're ruining the game oh sorry so here's the game person who got covered have they been vaccinated or not okay all four of us have been vaccinated we covered that on our previous spot so everybody's vaccinated double vacs did we all get Pfizer I was Pfizer Pfizer Pfizer Pfizer okay so Pfizer across the board we got quads and this is a breakthrough infection has anybody taking a z-pack after a night of party [Laughter] lasted 39 episodes that was good that was good okay so number one clue number one this best a breakthrough infection Outdoors at a restaurant number one got it Outdoors number two got it from somebody who was also vaccinated number three this bestie does not fly commercial and he's not a fan of being interrupted and he is not an Evangelical David the Breakthrough vaccination David sacks I'm glad that uh am I getting a breakthrough case of covet is uh is comedy fodder for you somehow we'll let your winner slide [Music] [Music] foreign what happened and then how you felt yeah okay so what happened and we're glad you're safe obviously obviously we wouldn't be joking you're still losing weight you lost five pounds so yeah yeah so you may want to read some of the beautiful text messages we sent you when we found out this week yes Jason what would you say Jason you said it uh I was just like wow big about who we could recruit for the fourth spot Keith or a boy we get Peter teal in here I said that I really really hope you didn't die but if you did I would love to have your plane as a support plane for my plane I was thinking you know what I might be pro-san Francisco if you die I could I might want all right well sorry guys I'm gonna live sorry Jason I'm gonna live here's basically what happened okay is um so Tuesday of last week I had dinner with a few friends and then my friend just we're out outdoors in a restaurant yeah I'll tell you exactly where we were at matsahisa in La which happened in the outdoor parking lot yeah yes the outdoor parking lot area which is a covered outdoor area so you know these like covered areas are effectively inside because it traps the air in there but at any event we had dinner there um the next day he woke up with a fever and sore throat he went and got a covet test he tested positive he is also double vaxed with Pfizer okay so and and I reported this to you guys last week on last week's show so I went out right away on Wednesday got a covet test was negative I repeated the test on Friday was negative and then Sunday rolls around and I wake up and I got a fever I don't really have a sore throat but I've got kind of a I'd say an occasional dry cough and I've got and I've got some sinus congestion David mild fever or like like 99.9 or like 102.1 it topped off at about 99.9 it's apparently a fever yeah really fever but I mean it was definitely there and I took Tylenol and it brought it down to the low 99s and uh so any event first thing Monday morning I went and got the covet test and sure enough I had covid uh they can't confirm that it's Delta variant but they think it is because that's what's like exploding in LA right now and so yeah I mean look I mean the good news is it's very mild I mean I'm it's now Thursday and I feel like I'm like 99 recovered I don't have a fever anymore are you 10 days in now this no no no no this is the you know I came down with symptoms on this past Sunday and it's now Thursday so I am and when were you exposed Tuesday night so I was but yes you're right it's about 10 days you're convinced that was the only way you could have gotten it right yeah because somebody else at the dinner got has symptoms now too ah so it's a super spreader at matsuhisa yeah yeah basically but it shows you how virulent this new Delta variant is I mean you've got there are four people out that night plus the person who who had it and two out of the four basically got it and we were all vaccinated including the person who had it and of course he didn't know he had it he didn't have any symptoms till the next day so um and you know I got it I got it five days after exposure it's that five days is like clockwork you know did you um did you have like a pulse ox did you measure any of these other things did any of that stuff change at all yeah I mean I've have the pulse ox meter and it's been around 95 so it is Dallas yeah you should be like 98 right yeah it is down slightly it is down slightly and if you go to 92 or 93 they say go to the emergency room I think and and did you self-isolate from your family yeah I did but we were lulled a little bit into a a place of overconsciousness yeah well I remember I got I got kova test on Wednesday and then Friday and they're both negative I thought we were through it so I was at home and um and then and then so my 11 year old got it even though I was isolating this thing is I mean this thing is so contagious so you know what I've read is that Delta variant is 60 more transmissible than the UK variant which was the alpha variant the alpha variant was 60 more transmissible than original covid so you're looking at a transmissibility you multiply those together of two and a half times the original and the original covid had an R naught of two to three so you multiply two to three by two and a half times and you're looking at five to eight and you know explain to the audience what that means in terms of reality it means the r naught is uh how many people does the average infected person transmit before they know they have it and can fully self-isolate and so you're going from the original Cove it was two to three Delta variant might be like eight we're getting up into like smallpox territory with this thing and it's all the more transmissible because um you know vaccinated people can get it you know the the Israel data that we talked about in the show last week was 64 Effectiveness that Israel reported that the effectiveness of Pfizer had gone from like 95 to 64 in terms of preventing infections so you have maybe a third of vaccinated people can get it and then they can spread it without even knowing they have it so I think we're at the point now where if you're not vaccinated you're gonna get you're going to get the Delta variant we're seeing now cases explode you know all over the country even in LA county they've now had a um the five-day average of cases has jumped 500 in one month so pretty and Jason you've tweeted this if you are not vaccinated you are choosing to get the Delta variant at this point I mean this thing is extremely transmissible that's what uh there was a great tweet by Scott Adams the guy who the cartoonist who I wouldn't who listens to the Pod by the way who does this into the pot uh he had a he had a really great quote he's like um uh today is either Wednesday yeah for uh those that are vaccinated or uh yet another day where the unvaccinated amongst you are likely to get uh coveted something like that right was that the two yeah basically today's Wednesday for people who are vaccinated or it is the day you're gonna get you know the the virus yeah we gotta stop stop messing around with this thing now here's some here's some good news actually is um and so on on the the Wednesday when we found out that my friend had tested positive but again I was still negative I had no symptoms I had nothing um I told my wife she had gotten one shot she hadn't gotten the second shot and we were on the fence about whether my 13 year old should get the vaccine they both raced out that day got vaccinated we did not get the virus so they had basically call it three or four days of the of the vaccine to trigger an immune response in their system and it protected them they did not get sick sir and and David did you take anything else like prednisone you took nothing no steroids nothing nothing the only stuff I so my friend did take uh he did get prescribed prednisone my doctor thought that was unnecessary or a bad idea for me all I took okay was Tylenol to control the fever and I took Flonase to reduce the sinus congestion look I mean I don't want to overstate this it was a very mild cold for me and that is why I think everybody should run out and get vaccinated what did you pair it with like a Pappy Van Winkle or did you go with a screaming eagle has such a [ __ ] wine list you probably drank this like random swirl that's why you were drinking some like uh nigiri sake in all likelihood Freeburg last week I was uh asking you or maybe it was two weeks ago I was considering getting the moderna because I was like I think getting two of these things will boost you into the high 90s you said I was crazy uh has your position changed on that yes okay explain because this is the one time I'm ever gonna be right about science a week before you so I I think that I think the data up to that point didn't necessarily um kind of validate that additional level of action but now it does and I think new data is coming out so I saw uh an executive from a pharmaceutical company a few days ago okay who broke down some statistics that they looked at in Israel and what they were identifying was that of the newly infected cases in Israel of people that are vaccinated uh nearly two-thirds of those people were vaccinated in January about 30 percent were vaccinated in February and less than 10 percent were vaccinated in March and I'm just approximating and I'm and I'm I'm just kind of transcribing you know uh from kind of what I remember him saying and so he said you know the more recent vaccinations we're not seeing breakthrough cases breakthrough infections so the the more recently you're vaccinated um the the less likely you are to have this and then I I met with a a pretty well-known virologist a few days ago as well who highlighted for me that we are seeing antibody titers decline over time in people but there's other studies that are showing which means that the antibodies against covid in your blood after you get the vaccine slowly go down over time so we're seeing that we knew that right we knew that to some extent but there was another study that showed that memory B cells B cells are the immune cells that make antibodies and they remember the antibodies to make and they were worried are we losing those B cells in the human body and another study found actually they're in your lymph nodes so they they went in they pulled them out and they identified look that these B cells are persistent we are having a persistent immune memory to covid when we get exposed to the vaccine or the virus and um and so you know those two data points both of them kind of said I think we're going to need to do a booster very soon for everyone and we're going to need to get a third shot if the tail Freeburg seems like it's like six months yeah it sounds like he was saying that you're going to see an efficacy drop to that kind of two-thirds level after about six months of your after getting your your vaccine and you know he said look this Delta variant is virulent but you know the more pressing kind of point isn't that it's this variant that's breaking through it's that the efficiency of these vaccines at this point looks like it's such that we're gonna need to do boosters now Pfizer went to the White House this week with some of this data and they presented it to the White House and the White House said uh if you guys follow the news I I I'm hearing this I'm I'm repeating what I read in news reports at this point but what they said was uh you know we're not ready to kind of commit to doing booster shots for a couple of reasons one is there are a lot of people out there that haven't had their first shots um and uh we're seeing the people that are having these breakthrough infections almost universally not always but very very large majority having very mild symptoms and not getting hospitalized and the death rate is still very very low in other words the vaccine did its job the vaccine didn't didn't prevent you know an infection meaning that the virus starts replicating in in a way that's uncontrolled in your body but that your immune system had enough of a defense to keep it from causing severe disease in your body 99 of the people going to the hospital are unvaccinated right exactly and so we're seeing that that great success still with the vaccine but they are seeing and there are now studies that you know I think referenced to your earlier point that you know if you put a different RNA strain um RNA sequence into your body which moderna and Pfizer have slightly different you know sequences you end up creating different antibodies and having more diversity of antibodies uh can kind of provide greater immunity so it's almost certain we're going to get boosters and that we're going to end up seeing them hit the market next month yeah is the is the booster different than the original so for example if I get a Pfizer booster and am I only basically getting still an expression of that RNA strand that I'm supposed to basically like is it the same formulation the same dosage so so both of those options are still up in the air and so we may still get the same vaccines that we were getting before you could go get a modernist shot you could go get another Pfizer shot of the exact same RNA sequence that you got before or they may introduce some new ones and so all the Pharma companies are proposing both approaches and they're pursuing both pads right now and we'll see where we end up and what about swapping between an RNA approach and a traditional vaccine approach so getting J and J plus moderna or Pfizer versus like there's a lot of a b testing we need to do to figure out what is the most efficacious this is exactly like the this is reminds me exactly of HIV where it took 10 years for them to figure out what cocktail actually worked the best and now look HIV is I mean it's it's it's kind of level yeah nothing it's really not that not that bad the way that we probably for those of us in our 40s have it emblazoned in our mind is how bad it is versus how bad it is it was a death sentence it seemed like a death sentence and today it's kind of more it's more manageable than frankly it's a chronic disease now that's manifest yeah it's like having diabetes or something yeah I have another crazy statement here which is that if you take the the case fatality rate of covid and um now you think about the fact that there's going to be call it 60 of America that's vaccinated and then every six months we'll be getting boosters and then you have the petri dish on the other side of the 40 where you'll just be ripping through variant after variant after variant eventually it stands to reason that if 40 of Americans remain unvaccinated two or three years from now the odds that there will be a strain that is the killer strain that does meaningful damage to those people I think is basically a hundred percent and if you think about a case fatality rate that's meaningfully high what you're effectively going to do is start to call these people from the earth and that is a crazy idea but that's what folks who choose to not get vaccinated are setting themselves up I mean it's the quintessential you know uh is that just about probabilities like am I getting something wrong here probabilistically isn't that that's what I'm concerned about and it's not just Americans not getting vaccinated it's the rest of the world I mean even if we got to externally extraordinarily High vaccination rates in the U.S there's going to be large you know numbers of people outside the US who never get vaccinated will continue to be a petri dish uh to give you to you know comparison the common cold has 1800 variants that's why we can't get vaccinated so you know we're on the Delta variant right now I think they actually have numbered variants up to Lambda we're going to run out of the letters of the alphabet really soon you know how long will it be until there is there are these killer variants that that I mean look I mean that could punch through that can punch through the the vaccines it's pretty scary actually and I would say that um this is like quite a come down off where we were just two weeks ago you know where we thought the Pfizer vaccine was still 95 effective now at 64 effective I mean look I I do want to like underscore that the the vaccine worked in the sense that what I got was super mild I mean it was really just like getting a cold I mean I didn't need to take anything more serious than Tylenol but uh but it does show that the virus is mutating really fast it's highly transmissible and uh I'm not sure you still have it you still have it right I still have it yeah yeah so when will you get tested to figure out when you don't have it anymore I'll probably go in tomorrow you know because it feels it feels to me like I'm about 98 better freebrook is there is there any data um about the pattern of people who are vaccinated getting this thing like is there remember how like you know there was early data that showed you know women had a different immune response than men and like people who were what was it O positive or you know a certain blood type effectively had inborn immunity I haven't heard her read anything like that um and so this is still an emerging issue I think um you know by the way I was vaccinated a few months ago guys like I mean I'm like saying you're three years right when was your second shot basically like a few months ago yeah it's uh mine was in March yeah one thing I think it's worth highlighting just to reinforce the vaccine importance um you know the virologist the Infectious Disease guy I met with was telling me that um you know one way to think about this is the more opportunity the virus has to replicate the more opportunity it has to evolve and so when you're vaccinated and you have a mild case and your body recovers in a few days um just to give you guys a sense the difference when someone that's not vaccinated has coveted and they've measured the viral load in the nodes from day one when they start having their infectious kind of presentation to day four which is when they Peak the viral load is 10 to the eighth higher okay that's like a hundred million times higher and so that's a hundred million times more viruses that are being produced on day four than were being produced on day one when you were already showing symptoms so every time a virus is being produced and is replicating within your body uh it's getting a chance to mutate the important point he emphasized was what matters most is we get the most number of people on planet Earth vaccinated as fast as possible because the faster you can get more people vaccinated the fewer opportunities you give the virus to replicate and find itself a mutational path that can ultimately break through all these vaccines and and cause real severe loss of life um and so the you know the presentation that sax kind of described is encouraging in the sense that it likely means that the virus did not create that there wasn't that much of a viral load or a huge viral load relative to what there would have been if he wasn't vaccinated um and so even though he did have an infection um you know the virus didn't get as much of a chance to spread to other people it didn't get but it did but it did because my friend who I got it from after one having dinner one night he was double vax with Pfizer and it might you know my 11 year old daughter got it yeah it's for her again it's just like a cold yeah but um so this thing is highly transmissible and what is it it changes it changes the equation I think on some policy questions so yeah that's what I was going to ask you what does it mean for the fall what now what so two weeks ago I thought that because I was vaccinated I didn't need to care whether other people were vaccinated because the you know up until that point the data was you were 95 plus you know Effectiveness so why care if other people get vaccinated now we can say for sure that that unvaccinated people can or vaccinated people even can get other people can get you sick even if you are vaccinated so I think it absolutely changes the equation on so for example colleges were acquiring students to get vaccinated to return in the fall like before I didn't think that necessarily made a lot of sense because if you wanted to protect yourself you just get vaccinated but now it makes sense right because the college needs to get to herd immunity to protect everybody against you know potentially right Delta variant right so I do think it changes the equation quite a bit and I think we need to make a big push here to get everyone back are you then in fact sex for vax passport ports which as a you know uh libertarian I think is I think part of your political I think everybody on this call has kind of got a little libertarian like you got to make your own choices here but does it change your thinking about that I.E employers uh colleges uh city-state workers teachers are either get vacs or don't come back to the office and you're fired well I'll tell you I I don't like the idea of government uh having the power to to stick a needle in your arm but I do think that employers workplaces schools I think it's very reasonable for them to say if you want to come back to the workplace you have to get vaccinated because your unvaccinated status creates a risk it creates an externality for everybody to be able to fire you if you're a teacher should they be able to fire you if you are a bus driver if you're a pilot yes okay here's the craziness this is a a self-inflicted wound we are down to only 700 000 vaccines being given a day we peaked we had the ability to do five million shots a day at the peak back in April we hit over 5 million shots in one day in the United States and that's a country where you know whatever 270 million adults you know were able to get it in other words two percent of the pop adult population in a single day could have gotten it now we're down to 700 we have over a billion vaccines sitting on shelves eighty percent of Democrats have received one shot compared to 49 percent of Republicans 27 percent of Republicans say that they won't get vaccinated under any circumstances compared to three percent of Democrats answering that question the same way and an additional nine percent will only do so if required again three percent of Democrats said they would only do so required so that's 36 percent are opting out forever I get it but it's because we allowed it to become a position meaning it's not it's not like anybody has a position on breathing breathing is not a political position right it's not like I choose to not breathe or drinking water or trying to you know like these like eating three meals a day if you can uh we have allowed the most basic of issues in this case you know Collective Public Health to be politicized in a way and that is entirely the government's fault it's the government's fault and it's the media media and the media because the media's exacerbated it so that they can have power people on the conservative side of the spectrum have learned to distrust the media and big corporations because and government because they've been lied to so often most recently yeah right most recently with like the lab League Theory and so you know there's this suspicion on the right like what aren't they telling us you know um now look I think we got to get over this I think you know we need to get everyone vaccinated for all the reasons that free Brook said or look everyone's going to get Delta variant I mean maybe this is the good news is that we can rapidly get to herd immunity by everyone getting Delta variant well that's the inevitable outcome for any infectious disease right a highly infectious disease is either you can vaccinate or everyone's going to get it uh and it's gonna you know I mean you've got a Delta variant maybe than whatever the you know whatever the more dangerous deadly one is yeah let me just highlight what I'm most concerned about I I am most concerned about what's what's happening with sax it's just anecdotally speaking I'm not going to speak to the I'll speak to one statistic but like anecdotally speaking I'm hearing this happening more more frequently I don't know about you guys other friends other people you know but a lot of other people I'm hearing about their double facts that are now getting covered so as that starts to happen uh the implications for the economy I think are pretty significant um because I think people whether there's a policy change or not people are going to get scared again and people if we're not kind of enforcing economic lockdown people will go into social lockdown and we're going to revisit uh you know more of the behavior we saw over the past year where people are going to be nervous to travel uh people are going to be nervous to fly people are going to be nervous to go to restaurants and you know the downstream consequences of everyone kind of locking up again even if the government doesn't enforce lockups uh could be pretty catastrophically are you feeling that way yourself Freeburg in other words am I going to lock myself up are you going to go to dinner are you going to go to travel to Italy or to you know Japan or you know would you go to Disneyland with your kids how is it affecting you your personal Behavior being a man of science uh so so my personal circumstances are a little different right now uh not not to get into it um uh just with my uh you know my wife's pregnant and we're moving houses and so we've got a bunch of reasons why we're not traveling and and exposing ourselves unnecessarily right now um but uh I I would say that at this point uh you know if all other things being equal would I go to Disneyland with my kids I would probably wait right now six to 12 weeks to see what happens here if I'm feeling that way now I think a lot of people are going to be feeling that way in in the next four weeks as they hear about more friends getting covered now you know the good news is the hospitals and so so I am most concerned we were in a very very very very delicate economic recovery right now and you know we have put out so much money to stimulate this economy everyone is so walking on like the razor's Edge to keep things you know growing we were afraid of inflation lumber prices today by the way are lower than they were when this whole kind of inflationary thing started and everyone was freaking out about it so um you know lumber prices are lower than they were at the start of the year which is you know like a lot of this kind of inflation risk has kind of come out of the equation already so the markets have taken that pricing out and now we're going to be in a circumstance where people might cancel their travel people might cancel their their restaurants people might stop going to the office again stop you know getting in the car etc etc so I am most concerned about like the psychological effects of of what we're seeing what these breakthrough infections the frequency of them now if you look at the Israel data Israel had zero deaths for two weeks they're now averaging about one death a day and despite this you know huge increment they're getting about I think 500 breakthrough infections a day right now so that is good statistical needs right statistically these breakthrough infections are not fatal they're not causing hospitalizations they're they're you know if you kind of did the math going back a year and said these are the actual statistics of covid people would be like okay no big deal let's move on it's a it's a tough kind of uh virus but because of the circumstances where we we are kind of under these these feelings that this is a fatal disease and could cause uh fatalities um those statistics don't matter the fear is what matters and people are going to start to behave quite differently I think in the next few weeks I have a slightly different point of view here but um I think Freeburg you're you're I think you're right in some respects um but I don't think it's going to come from people I don't think people uh I think people are exhausted and they want to go back to life as normal yeah and I think this summer was a window into some amount of normalcy for a lot of us and I don't think we really do want to go back um and so I think what's what's really going to happen is there's going to be essentially some form of class Warfare and instead of Rich versus poor and left versus right it's sort of between people who believe in science and then the you know ideologically dogmatic who refuse to get it and that's going to play itself out economically I agree with you there's going to be meaningful forms of economic discrimination against people who um are unnecessarily compounding risk for the rest of us who want to deal with it ideally touch wood as a common cold like David said and move the [ __ ] on and if we are prevented from doing so because economic policy and Health Care policy has to constantly get re-rated for a cohort of people who could protect themselves and everybody else but chooses not to there is going to be a real pushback on that the second thing that I think is going to happen is politicians proved that if you give them a window to seize power they will do it and I think what's really going to happen in the fall is if there's even a small modicum of risk which there will be as we just talked about yeah it exists now yeah I think it's the politicians that are going to want to jump all over this and say okay guys you know lockdowns here you can't do this you can't do that so literally just giving you some just at the big grand reopening California's back you could see him locking it back up in September oh that's the best way to it's the best way to Snuff out any chance of the recall going against them is that even if you were angry you're not going to be allowed to basically it'll be a massive form of Voters oppression well I think that that too that would backfire pretty bad you saw the flip-flopping that he already did actually on schools where the the government of California basically said hey you know we're going to mandate a mask policy in the fall and then Newsome came out because people freaked out and said uh actually no each local municipality can figure it out based on you know what it what it means for them the point is guys um free Brook is right these things aren't going away we have a cohort of people who will continue to allow this thing to become worse than it has to be and I think that there will be economic repercussions and discrimination against those people for that and I think economically we are going to take a step back because politicians will try to slow the economy down again and there is definitely from the right not to get political here but they've been pretty silent about encouraging people to get vaccinated and um you know at CPAC and other places people were cheering the anti-vaxx movement Mitt Romney came out uh we don't control conservative media figures so far as I know at least I don't that being said I think it's an enormous error for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be taking vaccines look the politicism politicization of vaccination is an outrage and frankly moronic Mitch McConnell came out and says a polio victim myself when I was young I've studied that disease I took 70 years 70 years to come up with two vaccines that finally ended the polio threat as a result of operation warp speed we have not one not two but three highly effective vaccines so I'm perplexed by the difficulty we're having finishing the job this is where you can expect the politically correct companies to act first because they're the woke mob will force some action on this issue whether you like it or not but this is this is where the next petition will come from Apple where the two or three thousand employees who are vaccinated Etc who have people with you know um people in their households with with uh who are immunologically suppressed and they're going to say hey guys this is crazy well that that petition might be the first application that would make sense because those employees are directly impacted by other employees who come to the workplace unvaccinated unlike you know the issues around Israel or Antonio's book whatever that they shouldn't have taken a position on wait a second you're saying Antonio's book wouldn't make them feel safe and getting coveted would make them unsafe yeah actually actually yes yes yes in the workplace is a real safety issue uh not you know not whether somebody wrote a book five years ago so so I think they do I think employees do have a right to say to their employers listen are we going to be a vaccinated workplace or not because it does impact their risk but but Jason's your question about should people change their behavior in light of this news Okay in light of the fact that we now are learning about some reduce effectiveness of the vaccines here's what I would tell people sitting where I am this is not a big deal I mean for me okay it was not a big deal it was like a mild cold I am not gonna change my I'm gonna go back to normal like my pre-covered behavior uh and I would tell you like if you're double vax I don't think you need to be that afraid of this because you know my doctor said they are seeing a bunch of these breakthrough cases but they're all very mild it really is like getting a cold I'm not changing my behaviors I made my I made my decision my risk assessment is if I get it um then I'm doubly protected uh and I'm not going to wind up in the hospital I'm going to focus all my energy on riding my bike and and taking my kids out and having a good time I'm not going back in lockdown so I think that's right for you but but here here's where it gets a little bit complicated is my parents who are in their 70s and one of them has an immune condition that's what they should do and I said listen if I were you guys I would not be going to public places I'd be masking up they're asking me if they should go on a trip and I said no I would actually if I were you I would lock down until this blows over because they're at elevated risk and so yeah for me getting covid was like a mild case but for them maybe it could be more serious so all it takes is 10 of the population acting like what you just described you recommended to your parents sex for there to be economic ripples associated with this um uh this this breakthrough kind of condition for a while and that's where I have the most concern is again like you know we're kind of you're not concerned about the deaths Freebird you're concerned about the economic impact and the psychological scars that are now in place I will explain I I sent you guys a link to the Reuters article where they covered the press conference with the prime minister of Israel the other day and um basically they are taking what they're calling a soft suppression strategy um where they're encouraging Israelis to learn to live with the virus involving the fewest possible restrictions and avoiding a fourth National lockdown that could do further harm to the economy and he said implementing the strategy will entail taking certain risks but in the overall consideration including economic factors this is the necessary balance and so it's a it's a it's a very kind of pointed position that they're coming to I think the U.S government the federal government's going to have to come to the same one but we have different states and different local governments that are going to act differently and because we've you know we have authority um vested in those different jurisdictions you could see different public policy officials take different positions and what we're talking about if San Francisco said restaurants have to go back to 25 capacity it would decimate these already struggling small businesses and there's no more stimulus dollars available and so you kind of think about this or 10 of people cancel their vacation plans what's that going to do to Airlines and hotels so again my concern is are we about to hit a wave of economic ripples that aren't necessarily tied to what is the right thing to do from a policy perspective or a science or health perspective but really the psychological effects of the scared and concerned saying you know what there's more money available that you know we got bailed out before we'll get bailed out again let's Implement a shutdown let's Implement a lockdown let's not go to work it's whatever the the decision tree you may have as a business owner or policy maker well there's an important Point here which is listen kovitz can be with us for a long time we're going to need to make really smart cost benefit analysis decisions in how to deal with it we can't go back to lockdowns because they didn't work and they're extremely expensive we spent 10 trillion dollars battling covid last year we cannot do that again we don't have the the bullets and are going to keep firing at this thing like that we got to start making Intelligent Decisions zeroism is not going to work this idea that the premise of zeroism is that we can stamp out every last message of covet that maybe that was even a possibility when vaccines were 99 effective but now that they're not there's no chance of stamping out covet so we have got to learn we've got to like the Israel example we've got to learn to live with this thing and make smart cost benefit decisions but I also think you know this is kind of a disaster for Humanity we now have this new category of illness that's rapidly mutating we don't know what the end of it's going to be like I said there's 1800 variants of the common you know what though David is causing the these symptoms by the way has anyone noticed how many different symptoms this virus causes in people there's over 200 uh well they've worked on it for a long time David In fairness yes exactly everyone knows it's a lab engineered virus that's now a plague on Humanity this is really a disaster this is gonna I think permanently impact human life expectancy I mean this is this is a serious problem we could have avoided this entire thing here in the United States at least if people just took the win how frustrating is this that we would probably have cases down to a thousand a day and debts down to 10 a day like Israel if we had just gotten everybody to take one of the billions of excess vaccines sitting on shelves and in CVS's and Walgreens across this country how stupid are we we don't have the collectivism to to make those actions if you think about what's happening in Israel did two different examples in China collectivism manifests as like basically a top-down you know uh form of governance okay in in Israel collectivism comes from a need for state level security right I mean I've traveled to Israel a lot I have worked there and it's crazy when you see how people cooperate together the minute you hear the uh missile alarms right and so there there is a way for people to do cost-benefit analyzes in Israel because it's a matter of life or death and they've been trained to do that so either it's imposed on you like in China or people Bottoms Up can understand these trade-offs like in Israel we are in a very different place where literally what we have are three things that are in conflict with each other Jason we have politics and the desire for power we have the deconstruction of Power by social media and then we have the traditional media trying to stay relevant that's a toxic thing that's spinning around and spinning around and spinning around trying to allocate this very ephemeral thing called power and influence and we don't know how it works anymore and so we cannot get our [ __ ] together half the people care about vegan [ __ ] milk the other half the people care I mean it's it's we are in a alternate universe as bad as we are Europe and even Japan have done even worse because I mean we our our government was fairly efficient about the distribution of the vaccines in Europe they've just completely botched it um same thing in Japan so we are not the worst on vaccination rates yes it should be better but um well we are those people capturing the opportunity David we have the opportunity America America is the most exceptional country in the world it has been for hundreds of years it should be for several hundred more there is no excuse for this country to have [ __ ] this up this badly I've spent enough time as as you guys have in Europe and in Japan it's understandable why those countries are in the positions they're in it is not understandable by America's in the position so dumb it's like it's like having a 20-point lead and you just with like eight minutes to go and you just screw up and you lose the game so stupid all right do we want to move on to the billionaire Space Race yeah I think that's positive news this company go uh what's it called Virgin Galactic there's a company called Virgin Galactic and they take people to space it's two hundred thousand dollars stock seems to be doing pretty well um anybody have thoughts on Richard Branson getting to space I don't know let's just randomly go to somebody no congratulations in all seriousness congratulations I cried Nat and I start the SEC transcript public statement here we go no Nat and I uh watched it together you cried and it was emotional uh and it's emotional because you know I mean being a little bit more on the inside how hard they worked I mean we've all been there where we're all toiling in obscurity where there are moments where everybody thinks that what you're doing either is crazy or isn't going to work or is going to fail and there's a moment where you just have to push through it right and find people that believe in you I think I came in very late to that but I had the opportunity to find these incredible people believe in them help them give them Capital which was essentially oxygen right that's oxygen for a company and then to see them achieve it it felt so special to be a part of it so yeah I mean I was really emotional um and it was it was beautiful um so I don't know I think this is the beginning of the beginning um I tweeted this out but basically if you think about and there's other stuff that we can't talk about with some other companies that we are all involved in David and I particularly but here's the point guys between sending people and making us an interplanetary species by creating pervasive internet access and by enabling us to safely and reliably transport people either point to point suborbitaly or basically into space we are completely reimagining how the human race can work and I think that's incredible and to be a part of that is really special there was a lot of people who got very negative on Twitter I noticed there was a lot of people that said you know no like you know maybe now we can deal with I don't know child hunger or you know hey why are all these billionaires doing this out of the other end I took a step back and I thought my gosh a people are increased there's a small virulent cohort of people that are incredibly negative and B doesn't even know what they're talking about because you're talking about issues of State responsibility and confusing it for what private citizens are doing to advance a set of technologies that I think have broad appeal so those are my thoughts I mean I was I I watched every minute of it and I thought it was incredible just to add to that um yeah I want to I want to take the part that all the naysayers and the negativity I mean chamoth is right all the very online people immediately came out attacking this extraordinary accomplishment an act of Bravery by Branson I mean this is a billionaire he doesn't need to be risking his life launching himself into space I mean this is a courageous act you know he's putting his his um his life where his mouth is and you had all these very online people but you had one CNN commentator basically said this was bad for the environment you had uh another one saying that calling him a tax sheet then there was another whiner who said what about all the starving children in the world I mean it just went on and on like this and Mike Solana had a pretty funny tweet summing up the sort of the left's um argument thusly he said number one this is their argument according to Solana one money is evil two therefore people with money are evil three therefore things people with money care about evil I mean that is basically the level of sophistication everybody's got the argument that's being made it's it's that that's the argument that the left is Right everybody's a bond villain right but here here's the problem is that first of all we do get tremendous benefits out of these innovators who are pushing the boundaries of Science and Technology and Engineering um you know Branson actually went on Stephen Colbert show and defended it he said he said listen uh I think they're not fully this is Branson he said I think they're not fully educated to what space does for Earth is connecting the billions of people who are not connected uh down here he said every single spaceship that we've sent putting satellites up there monitoring different things around the world like the degradation of rainforests monitoring food distribution even monitoring things like climate change these things are essential for us back on Earth so we need more spaceships going up to space not less so you know they're really just kind of ignorant about the benefits of Technology and what do they want to do with the money anyway you know we've got all the yes we do have all these problems on Earth but so many of our problems are not a problem of underfunding we have tons of money going to the problem of homelessness in California it just keeps getting worse because we have the wrong approach we have on education we have very the wrong ideas organization we have the wrong execution fix the operating details it's not a money issue exactly take education in California we have very high levels of per pupil spending and our test scores keep going down why because we have unions controlling the schools there's no competition we're getting rid of testing we've eliminated day testing we solved that problem we spent more as a percentage of GDP on Healthcare than any other Western country in the world yet the life expectancy of white men which is basically the top of the Pyramid of healthcare is now sub 80 years old what is going on all of these if all of these negative naysayers could actually just get into the arena and try to do something right instead of watching whining instead of a professional Winer class they have no ideas they have no ideas they have no executions they just have gripes and no ability to execute apparently yeah why don't they come up with new programs actually Test new programs at a hyper local level to see what works okay can I tell you why can I Can I Tell You Why these sort of like leftist whiners are not motivated to actually do the hard work meaning even even if they have an idea for Education the precondition to working on an education program or a healthcare program is they may need to spend four or five years in the bowels in obscurity just learning pay ing their dues they don't want to do that either because they grew up in a culture of kindergarten soccer everybody gets the gold star everybody gets to touch the ball everybody gets to be at the front of the line and they're not willing to put in the work because the minute they realize how much actual work is demanded of progress they run away because they're scared and the reason they're scared is because somewhere along the way somebody tricked them that it was not actually about trying it was actually about succeeding and that is the biggest failure that we could do to people is all of a sudden tricking them to believe you have to have it to work so they'd rather be called monitors critics failure is just as good because you're one step closer to succeeding somewhere along the way Unfortunately they were not taught that incredible secret hiding in plain sight Friedberg what do you think of the Space Race and the hall monitor Winer class if you guys look uh I was going to send these statistics earlier but if you look at the amount of venture capital money that's gone into um uh into uh private space companies space technology companies I think it was a few hundred million dollars call it three to four hundred million dollars pretty consistently from 2011 through 2014 pretty flat and then in 2015 I think this is when SpaceX started to kind of create a lot of momentum and hype that private companies can't actually build businesses um in kind of call it the space industry the number jumped to 3 billion a year and then it was a little over three and a half billion in 16 and then it jumped to almost 5 billion and 17 it was a little bit down in 18. 2020 it's climbed to almost 10 billion and in q1 of this year I think we're at 2 billion uh Venture Capital money going into private space companies so there's clearly um a great deal of momentum in this industry the question is always what's the market at the end and so if you break out how do these companies make money one is to provide services to governments you know launch services and then taking people to the space station and what have you and SpaceX has obviously built a tremendous business in that there has been obviously a lot of interest in tourism um and I think it's uh you know we're seeing this first breakthrough with um with Virgin Galactic and we're going to find out over the next couple of years is there a tourism Market historically there's been an interest in a market for a visual uh satellites but you know if you look at some of the financials of companies like Planet labs they did a few Acquisitions in space Imaging and the revenue hasn't really taken off there and then mining was always this other question is can we go out and mine you know Rare Minerals from space and that one is just you know if you do the math on it it's so far away it's impossible to kind of model so I think over the next and then finally it's Communications and Communications are cheaper to run on Earth if you're in cities versus you know the the SpaceX model is to reach rural areas that it's going to be more affordable to do this through space um and so you know there's um there's obviously a ton of momentum and a ton of interest in uh in private companies getting to space everyone right now it seems is trying to figure out what's the market right what's the how big is the market how big is the business and you know how quickly can you actually see that Capital turn around into real Revenue um so you know there's this kind of Market question that I think is still outstanding in terms of you know the opportunity uh if you go back to like the 15th century I think something like 60 to 70 percent of ships Maritime travel uh you know uh got into shipwrecks you know the uh and you know that's around when um you know we sailed across the Atlantic or the Spanish sailed across the Atlantic are funded no or they or they disappeared or they disappear I mean they basically crashed it didn't work it was a one-way trip sometimes to the bottom of the ocean if you were sitting in Spain in 1450 and someone said hey these ships it's going to be a great business we're going to build lots of ships and we're gonna go out maybe we'll get trade routes going maybe we'll discover new land maybe we'll make money maybe we'll take people on trips on these ships you would be like this is crazy half the people are dying there's no Market on the other side so you know we are and yeah you would have been totally wrong yeah and you are in that 15th century moment right now with the space industry would anyone in the space would anyone a ship business in the 15th century have been able to predict Carnival Cruise Lines or been able to predict Evergreen ships taking stuff from China to America with these huge shipping crates would anyone have been able to predict um you know uh going down to the bottom of the Atlantic I mean like all of the technology and the entire industry that kind of came out of that um you know that that set of pioneering activity in the 15th century transformed the planet transformed the economy uh transformed humanity and um you know it's very it's very hard it's very hard to sit here today and say hey I know where space is go where the space industry is going I know what's going to be possible but I can tell you that if history is any predictor of the future um you know this pioneering work that's going on which is burning tons of money and and everyone's kind of questioning whether there's businesses here it could transform our species once again so um yeah David your 15th uh Century shipping example is so beautiful full three things that came out of that which I think we all value One Insurance to tort law and Carrie exactly and three was basically how they did risk management so that you know each ship would take a little piece of everybody else's cargo so that some of the cargo would always get to Marketplace of the merge Lloyds of London marketing places yeah Lloyd to London emerged because of the the maritime insurance that was required and the and almost all PNC Insurance can trace its roots back to Maritime Insurance during that that era wow and so so these these ancillary industries that emerged were like surprising right it's almost business models emerge because you had to figure out how you do the Arbitrage here and carry is the perfect example people don't understand the Venture Capital Carry we get 20 of the profits was designed so that people with ships the captain would get to say we get 20 of whatever makes it there now you're aligned whatever makes it there you get 20 off okay I'm gonna I'm gonna go through that storm and I'm gonna try to get it there and we don't there's so many unknowns but just looking at the one thing you know starlink um I was doing a little research today about internet penetration we've got you know close to five billion people on the internet now but a very small number of them are on broadband it's like 20 30 somewhere in that number it's hard it's hard to get an exact number there but if you think about what's going to happen to humanity we're talking about billions of people who did not have access to broadband and they are going to go from not having you know if you think about what we went through in the west when the internet first came out and we got our first Broadband connections you know to find us like DSL or whatever we had libraries we had books we had colleges we had stores everywhere Barnes and Noble so the internet was unbelievably transformative but we were in a modern society now you go to the developing world and they're going to go from you know not even having running water in some cases in their homes or electricity or you know variable to having broadband and they're gonna have access to YouTube Circa 2022 2023 they're gonna have access to you know MIT courseware or brilliant.org and all of this information and shopping we're going to take a billion or two billion people and give them Broadband instantly within a decade this is going to change the the face of the planet I think that that's the Revolution and it's not just Starling doing it there's like three competitors to starlink obviously starlink's got the biggest lead yeah before SpaceX doing this and and and and there were others there was a company called o3b it was uh stood for other three billion and they had raised a ton of money to do this I just I I by the way I just want to speak to like a trend that we've seen and and also speak to the the quality of elon's leadership um so many companies have tried this Google talked about it for years well Project Loon was a follow-on to what we talked about early on at Google which was putting up satellites and ultimately Google had a satellite program that was killed in favor of buying a company called Skybox and Skybox was this Coastal adventurers back startup that was trying to make a smaller scale startup and if you guys will remember around the early 2010s um there were a bunch of startups that emerged that were all about building small scale um uh satellites that could go up into low earth orbit and do things like Imaging and Communications and a bunch of these companies were banking on the fact that the cost per kilogram to get your payload into space was declining pretty precipitously so they were like let's make super cheap commodity you know space Imaging or space communication boxes put them in space and after a couple of years they'll fall out of orbit and burn up but it doesn't matter if we can get enough use out of them and they cost so little to put into space and they cost a little to make let's put hundreds of them is a company called Planet Labs that that does this that's I think going public via SPAC now they again they've been challenged with building the business and imaging but there was a Google bought a company for I think half a billion dollars called Skybox trying to do this which it was like Imaging slash comms and they had a bigger refrigerator size box that they were trying to put up ultimate ultimately Google's Google's found that out to Planet labs and the whole thing kind of you know became Imaging but I I just want to highlight that this has been a big trend for a while and it speaks to the quality of Elon on his leadership because the fact that this guy did what 20 other 30 other people have tried companies have tried to do for the past decade or so and he said you know what instead of just providing the uh the infrastructure to get all these devices into space we're just going to build the actual devices get this thing up and just go crazy with it and put our Capital into it um and it's really impressive to see because it's such a no-brainer and people have been talking about this this opportunity for over a decade and these guys just have absolutely rushed the field and they could build an incredible business uh out of this and you know the two most important companies in Satellite Communications are starlink and swarm uh and swarm was a company that I seeded and sax did the series a and the if you talk to the founders of that company you know they'll give you this use case in I think it was in 2014. do you guys remember there was a like a Malaysian Airlines flight that just disappeared yeah disappeared 370. yeah Malaysian Airlines flight 370 and it was like 230 240 people that passed away and the the most you know indelible question that I remember from this was um we we couldn't track it and not to myself how is that even possible how do you how do you lose how do you lose a flight in the middle of the Earth it's not possible it turns out it is because our internet coverage is so sad that it only covers small areas and it it it made obvious that like you know we should live in a world where there is absolutely pervasive internet access everywhere every single little shred inch of the world should be covered and saturated that should never happen you know the people should be able to have closure they should be able to go and get that plane recover the bodies give them proper funeral these are simple things but they're human things that we should be doing as human beings right and just think about the iot internet access enables this and the idea that we can't do that is shocking and so hey I agree with you fever we uh elon's incredible and I think that um within the next five years we'll probably have pervasive internet access everywhere in the earth and that's that's transformational you know the the second most valuable private company in space is um also a company that you know uh uh I invested in led the series a called relativity space and their idea which I think will help everybody that wants to go to Mars and other places is why don't we just 3D print the Rockets and why don't we 3D print the engines and why don't we make that functionally useful because it basically takes the cost of a rocket and divides it by 10. and these printers are small enough where you know you can actually send them to and dismantle them and take them with you to Mars and set them up there and all of a sudden you can print the parts that you need to get back to Earth as an example um so I think that additive manufacturing has an enormous upside here in space um and I think that that's another area that's going to be really really anybody read Andy Weir's Hail Mary yet the guy who did the Martian he's a science fiction author it's really great because you don't actually know what you're going to find out there I think that's one of the things that you know to to freeburg's point what do we find out there what if we find a compound out there that like plutonium has some attributes that we could leverage in very small amounts to create unlimited energy or unlimited prosperity in some ways there are there are things that can exist that we have not been exposed to and of course the probability is there are many things that we have yet to be exposed to 100 yeah look I don't subscribe to to uh to that thesis um I'll I'll tell you um I'll tell you why and and this maybe also speaks a little bit to some of the counterpoints against um the space industry getting the attention and resourcing it has relative to call it other places to allocate capital and human resourcing um and that is like the tools that we have in science and engineering today as a species uh continues uh to expand at kind of a geometric Pace our ability to convert any molecule into any other molecule is basically fulfilled now it's a function at this point of how much energy and time it takes to do that work so almost all industry the function of Industries to convert molecules from one form to another and we have tools ranging from Hardware engineering mechanical engineering and more recently in the early 20th century chemical engineering and in the 21st century biochemical engineering those tools are allowing us to invent discover and convert molecules and even in some cases kind of Elemental forms that into nearly anything else we want to produce and the technology is accelerating in such a way the set of Technologies compound that if you think about 100 years from now 200 years from now 500 years from now the human species theoretically for very minimal time and very minimal energy should be able to have something that looks Akin today to the Star Trek replicator you basically type into a device what you'd like to make and it makes it it for you in a few minutes and you could just like Mr Fusion and Back to the Future too you could put any input you want into the thing you could throw in bananas and cans and whatever and out comes this thing you want to make so as the human species evolve towards that capability and we don't need to get into the details that's just like the general trend line it becomes less relevant that we need to go get other molecules or go get other things from extra planetary sources the planet earth has you know on the order of 10 to the 23rd atoms um you know two-thirds of the surface is water there's so much that is like unexplored and untapped from a resource perspective within this this spaceship that we're already on that the argument would be made that our technology is allowing us to effectively recreate all of our fantastic dreams right here where we live today and you know first thing we're going to have to do is fix this planet and fix the ecosystems that that are kind of at risk but as we progress and as these Technologies progress we can do these extraordinary things that we don't necessarily need to rely on extra planetary travel and colonization in order to achieve those objectives so so that that's that's the that's the optimistic counter argument yeah but we keep finding things like these molecules and Titan's atmosphere Etc that we can't explain and we're finding those two telescopes let alone we get out there I mean we might be able to create them sure yeah but we're going to discover them in other places we they may be beyond our human comprehension that these things could even exist David there are interesting things we're seeing there for sure and I think um you know there's a I think I mentioned this book before uh it's so esoteric and difficult but uh it's called Uh every life is on fire by this guy named Jeremy England and he highlights how all of evolution is effectively predicted by statistical physics and the energy bath and the molecules within a system um create a structure of molecules that you wouldn't see except for that condition meaning that over time the complexity of that system evolves to create an equilibrium with the energy uh that it's uh that it's covered in so what we see on planet Earth he argues is organic molecules in what we call life which are these molecules that are really good at copying themselves to absorb energy and dissipate energy so the molecules and the energy state of you know Titan is different than what we see at Earth so the way the molecules have evolved there are so different than what we've seen on Earth and you can see these incredible concepts of what we we wouldn't call life today but really could be defined as life there and so there's certainly a lot to learn and a lot to explore it doesn't mean that we're Limited in terms of our ability to kind of realize those things here on planet Earth but uh you're absolutely right like exploration is the core of being a human right and for people who don't know Titan is one of the it's the largest moon of Saturn and it's got its own really weird dense atmosphere that's icy and slushy and we don't even we we can't even comprehend half the stuff going on there yet would any of you guys take the Richard Branson um uh trip would you do the uh you know like next week or or two year I guess at what point would you be comfortable taking it two months I'm sure you've take you're you're sorry I can't answer for sacks the answer is no 600 and 600 and something so how many flights more would you want to see you would want to do 10 more flights 20 more flights no I feel I feel really confident that we know what we're doing the this flight was so critical because it was about figuring out what it was like to have passengers in the back and how they'd all behave when you had multiple folks and I think once that readout is done and Richard apparently took a bunch of notes um so you know we'll uh we'll be starting commercial Ops I think uh you know the next two or three quarters so wow yeah well I mean if if I had a 500 million dollar super yacht like Jeff Bezos that's where I'd be hanging out I don't think I'd be blasting I would be blasting myself into space but I mean look more power to him I mean they got you know they certainly uh he's doing those yeah he's doing both yeah Jacob would you do it I you know I my my theory is with kids I kind of think differently about it but if I was over 70 like Branson certainly I would do it yeah I would have to have that conversation with my spouse and my kids and say you know hey this opportunity exists they've done let's call it a hundred flights uh somewhere in that neighborhood I would I think I would feel pretty comfortable doing it but I would want to check in with my my family and kids and see if we were all in sync on taking that level I I stopped riding motorcycles as an example I think that flying in space tourism in the next year or two will be a safer than riding a motorcycle and then eventually it'll be safer than you know driving a car or something it's it's quite possible I was I was watching a space show with my daughter she's three years old on the couch the other day and then she um she was like oh space it looks so fun and I'm like make you know I said do you want to go to space and she said she looked back at me and she said I want to go to space with you and it made me cry and it was the first time I'd ever thought like man first time you'd ever cried first time I ever cried yeah I just uploaded that to his firmware yeah crying but I was like what are these water particles on my chin but I was going down my head like no desire I would say before she said that to go to space but it was a um poignant moment that like man this like moment of like inspiration of like going to space is something that like I think is going to inspire um you know a generation and and I told my daughter I said you know you are going to go to space uh I hope I could be there with you yeah yeah can I give you an idea two different ideas but they're roughly related when each of your kids turn 18 um buy them a ticket to space so that they become an astronaut which I think is like a beautiful kind of an idea where like you know what an incredible present to give somebody as they mature into age you know if you if you read if you if you basically have heard all these astronauts have said you know what the the overview effect like when you're above the Earth looking down it has this completely transformational effect on your outlook on life and the planet and so you know to the extent that that's a quantifiable thing to give that to your child seems like an enormous gift or or um when everybody's of age or whatever where all of you guys go as a family so that the whole cabin is your family that would be really cool too either those ideas I will do one of those too hold on a second Shabbat there were four people correct in this fight if I remember this one there's four passengers yeah okay wait a second there are four besties how are you not setting up a flight for the 100th episode of all in to be on Virgin Galactic can you imagine watching David cry and be so scared I mean I could pretty much guarantee obviously you guys have to buy tickets but I can pretty much guarantee you that if the three of you decided to buy tickets I I'm pretty sure I can organize that we all go on the same flight that would be ratings that's all I need is to be entombed with you guys for eternity you know can you address the Von Carmen line controversy around you know what's the right point to be in space because it came up a lot this week in the news I didn't want to kind of came up by one person well no no there was people talking about on the news and stuff like maybe you can just blue origin being lame honestly that's so petty by Bezos so sure maybe just share what happened and kind of uh you know the point of view on this be awesome but basically the question is what defines space right so um if you if you just like start from the bottom from um uh ground level right you have the trophosphere right so you have like the first kind of like 10 20 kilometers or so right then you have the stratosphere right that's where like a lot of like weather balloon activity happens that's at 50 kilometers then you have the mesosphere right that's where you'll see things like meteors and stuff then you get to basically the Carmen line which is around I don't know 100 kilometers or so there are a bunch of countries that either have no opinion or point to this kind of group to Define what the beginning of space is and they defined that at about 100 clicks which is I want to say 62 miles okay then there's the United States um and the dod and NASA Etc and we uh Define it at a different level 50 odd miles and so in the United States you need to pass the U.S regulatory body's definition of what the threshold of space is to be considered an astronaut um there is other countries that would then point to a different line the Carmen line as the line um I think the point is it's all Much Ado About Nothing I think in the end I think virgin stated that they went to 52 and a half or 53 and a half um you know things are iterative so over time you'll folks will get higher and higher but the point is okay and what you basically go into space you get to see the planet you get to feel microgravity you know you get the benefit of the overview effect whether you're at 52 and a half I'm guessing you'll get the same effect at 58 or 60 or 61. and then you come back to earth um so I thought it was kind of a little cheap and unnecessary because there's not there's there's nothing experience wise that changes right I mean like the not my understanding yeah blue origin did a tweet from the beginning new Shepard was designed to Fly Above the Carmen line so none of our astronauts would have an asterisk next to their name for 96 of the world's population space begins 100 kilometers up in the Internet it's just like why would they do that the days before the Richard Branson goes up it's just totally classless it shows that Bezos has a competitive shriek which is just not graceful I would say um and I think there's a little bit of bitterness there and then you look at Elon what did Elon do he went he's so classy he went and he took a picture with branta and he went to support him and wrote a congratulatory tweet Elon does not feel he's in competition but for some reason Bezos you know Bezos had to like draft and approve this specific tweet from Blue origin and I just thought it was classless and just stupid Jeff really made you look so bad Elon Elon was so fabulous I mean it just shows you like what a Class Act he is and what he cares about which is like he cares about advancing um humans and our ability to do things that are incredible and inspiring and when other people do it he's not zero-sum about it as you said Jason he was there he was supportive um it was just lovely to see I think Bezos is still uh stung for when Elon said he couldn't get it up meaning he couldn't get his couldn't get his rocket into space so so I don't know if that was that was too classy of Elon well it was funny yeah well I don't know if you guys have seen Jeff's rocket kind of small this rocket is I mean it's Jason now you're doing it it's got a tiny rocket just so we uh put a pin in it Melvin Capital the people uh who uh went to war with the Reddit Traders or vice versa lost five billion dollars couldn't happen to a nicer group of people I mean they're down which is just singing and of itself in this kind of up Market but then to actually quantify it they lost five billion dollars fighting a bunch of self-proclaimed ours I wouldn't say the words I don't get canceled but they call themselves ours on Jason you can say it there you're not calling them that they call themselves that they call themselves that yes all right listen love you besties uh sax we're glad that you're safe and you're uh healthy no thanks to you I didn't put any jokes in there I have so many jokes I'm gonna save them I mean honestly my thought on your recovery is no comment I'm just jealous you're gonna lose another five freaking pounds because oh yeah I'm down to 178 by the way come on stop are you really yeah manorexic I can't even break one when uh when are you gonna stop was there a bet or no no bad I would probably lose that bad that'd be like me playing Saxon chess it's just not uh Jason what are you tipping the scales at right now 190 one 190 and you're about to come to Italy and basically you're gonna gain 15 pounds for sure no I'm doing one meal a day one meal a day that's it one meal a day that's it I'm eating one meal a day how am I gonna turn down the food but what if you eat for three hours in that one meal I just I try everything I'll just try and then I have discipline now just like I stopped using Twitter I'm stopping Twitter can I tell one funny story about Jake Owen Italy talking about discipline okay so we were there in Italy when was this Jake out a few years ago whatever this is a long time ago is this when we were in Venice yeah you were with Jade and I was with with Jack that was a great story and we went to some ice cream place right and so we all had we all had these like ice cream gelato with like two scoops or whatever on there so Jason finishes his in like five seconds it would like just disappear and then he walks up to Jacqueline and just like goes like like that and and then one Fell Swoop he ate the the ice cream it was like it was like a bulldog it was like a it was like a bulldog just eating your ice cream but how good was that fish that we got remember that restaurant I found yeah Rod I mean we still talk about that place yeah that was like one of the best meals I've ever had I've been having a gelato guys every day every day but they're so small that's what I love about this about the Italians it's a little it doesn't feel like there's like a lot of preservatives and stuff in there no it's just like butter and sugar heavy cream whatever it is it's so good it's so good it's so good how the tomatoes right now I can't wait to be incredible incredible I mean I eat them I bathe in them I rub them on my face what about the mutts you got the moots how's the burrata and the Moots he's gonna gained 15 pounds you're going to turn down this food I don't know how you're going to say no to the pasta you'll have Pasta lunch pasta dinner you're just gonna you're gonna go crazy I'm gonna just have two bites of everything two bites of six different pastas and by the way by the way the the the the the the biggest the best kept secret is the Italian the quality of Italian white wine is outrageous really it's outrageous we should play some cards and drink some wine I think we're going to play no how many how many calories are in the white wine shramas calories I I mean I have no idea but you know look the thing in the summertime here is you end up walking so I end up walking a lot or bicycling a little bit blah blah blah at the end of the day like you're burning through everything I gotta say this e-bike I got I got a rad power bike no no no the whole point is to not have a motor that powers it you [ __ ] lazy back no no what you don't understand is because you have the motor in it your mouth you ride your bike normal but then like let's say you do have dinner or something like that or you want to go to dinner 10 miles away or 50 miles away you might not take your bike it's too long of a ride with these electric bikes instead of going 10 miles on the way there it takes your 10 Mile ride and just puts you at 25 but you're still burning the same number of calories it's like augmenting I really think that electric bikes are going to change cities like in a major way they're already starting to in Europe and in China but all right everybody we'll see you next time on the all-in podcast love you sex back at you sucks I hope I hope you get better feel better thank you thanks guys yeah I'm better I'm ready better don't worry about it and wait Freeburg you have nothing to say computer it was nice to check off the box for my social interactions for the week I will now go back down 75 minutes of social interaction powering down in three two one Mama we'll see you next time let your winners ride Rain Man Davis and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] is [Music]








sacks i am gonna give you a thousand dollars each to the charity of your choice for every correct answer [ __ ] it ten thousand but you have to answer you have to answer in real time and you can't [ __ ] around okay no stalling this is this is to any charity chooses included tucker carlson 2024 okay you have to give the answers right away you cannot [ __ ] think about this here we go three two one first middle and last name of your children and their birthdays go um stopping for time already no you're already stuck okay go dude oh you can beat these out nick go ahead go so is uh january no year what's the oh uh 2008 [Music] uh is uh october um uh 2010 and then little guy little man first name little yeah you're trying to stop me with the little guy little man uh he was born october of uh 2016. all right that was a struggle i got it i got it there he got that that's all that matters is he got there it is so you're gonna give that you're gonna give ten grand yeah ten grand each two all right so it's 30 grand to tucker carlson for president desantis 2024 i said charity [ __ ] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to your favorite podcast the all podcast where we talk about the economy technology politics and well basically anything that's in the news with us today again the queen of quinoa himself david friedberg how are you doing david i'm hanging in there today all right people are looking for the dog where's the dog monty he's sitting here on the floor monty come here come on come here come on monty all right and from a random palace somewhere in the world the dictator himself chamoth polly hoppity how you doing see uh i'm doing great you know i i got another dog uh while you were in italy uh i went to um the breeder that i got aki from and uh she had a three-year-old that was not really you know ever gonna become a breeding dog or whatever so i adopted the three-year-old he has a parasite so he's been pooing everywhere everywhere that's great information for the call over all over the castle all over the castle fantastic liquid poop by the way uh but we finally diagnosed it today and he's going to the to the vet um to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body uh okay thank you for that information and i don't know nobody cares you no nobody cares how you were doing i thought you were just going to say great i didn't know we were going to go straight to diarrhea we got a new dog too you did and it's also it's been kind of a disaster the kids were like dad we found this like i think you know golden that is really calm you know like she's just super low energy and calms like perfect for us i'm like i don't know i think that's just like the puppy is kind of asleep you know like it's gonna wake up they're like no no no this is like a special dog it's like really well behaved whatever so anyway we get it sure enough like a week later the puppy wakes up and she's eating everything in the house destroying everything it spit yeah so now we're wait is that dog number two or three for you it's dog two with the dog one was a rescue dog who's great so dog number two is now getting trained all right david sax is with us of course the rain man himself and in related dog stories i put all the girls to bed and then i hear screaming i get up i run outside literally the new bulldog who's nine months old maximus went on you know one of his running fits one of my daughters falls out of bed gets like a bruise on her like lower back and she's wailing the other daughter feels terrible about it and then the dog decides that he is going to projectile vomit everywhere all at the same time you guys have had these moments where like it's just completely utter chaos it's chaos it's just chaos it's cat dogs plus kids equals chaos uh chaos so but get would any of us have it any other way i love the combo of dogs and kids it's just the best it's pretty gross dogs are amazing especially when you bring in a new dog or a puppy into the house it's chaos but it's a really beautiful chaos well you know what i think also is like think about how overrated everything in life is people like oh my god this place with the pasta in italy it's the greatest life-changing thing and all this movie was incredible it's the best movie ever made and it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever it's great or whatever but i think kids and dogs are underrated universally have as many kids as you can possibly biologically have and can economically afford as much one opinion and uh the more dogs the better i love dogs yeah all right uh i think we should start with the cova cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions touching on people's freedoms and it's hard to know where to start here but i think facts are always a good place to start here in the united states we had gotten covert cases you know to that 12 000 a day average it was pretty amazing and it looked like it was gonna go straight down smooth sailing um and we had had deaths down at around uh i saw some seven day averages where we were at 150 200. now the weekends are kind of weird um in terms of reporting but the seven day average today is at 248 in other words it's been flat for a month when you do this on this is according to the new york times statistics and google you can search for google and you'll find these they have some great data that they'll just put right in the search result however cases have gone from this 12 15 k a day average soaring in just 30 days to 60 2000 a day and a 7 day average of 40 000 so we're basically tripled the number of cases cases trail traditionally debts by something in the neighborhood of 10 days uh i think i'm correct friedberg so what do you think is actually going to happen here we're going to we're going to get up to 10 100 000 200 000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated yeah you know the current logic on this is that there will be um because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even more infectious variant of covid the people that are not vaccinated are um starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from so um yeah we will see deaths climb and i think like we talked about last time we're starting to see even gavin did an interview yesterday in california talking about how you know there it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions uh behavioral restrictions mass mandates etc so there's going to be a set of reactions and i think as we talked about last time we saw the market start to react to the potential of that on monday and then very interestingly kind of reverse course on tuesday and everything came back when everyone was freaked out on monday after they saw the weekend's data which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the u.s but i think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are going to die therefore we're not going to see you know um uh political leaders uh force restrictions that are kind of uh going to damage the economy and we're going to start to walk what i think israel is calling the golden line which is balancing the economy with the the health of the citizenry so um so you know we'll we'll see uh it's going to come down to policy but i think from a death perspective there will absolutely be a rise in depths now as unvaccinated people are the gonna be the bulk of those deaths and and this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated well and then sacks this becomes now a great raw shock test of what do you see uh in this data and in this moment because it's a pandemic as many people are saying now i think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated so people have chosen to opt in to this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it you were part of it even as a vaccinated person but you're feeling great you're back to a hundred percent so what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mass mandates what's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated well i think we need to differentiate between public policy and private behavior so you know after last week's episode where i said you know delta variants real there's going to be huge spike in cases um unfortunately i thought we had this thing whipped you know a few weeks ago now i think the data is showing something different you know everyone there's a lot of commenters saying saks you've turned you've been blue pilled no it's you know i i think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the the policy conversation around it um i think that the difference now from last year i mean there's a couple of things one is that we do have vaccines so i think for most people getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table the other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work and so lockdowns don't work if you know if they ever did they they they they we now know looking at from what different states did last year that they don't make a difference there's no reason to go back to that policy but also i mean i would even say on mass it should be wait do we know that i mean is that i think so are we sure of that yeah i think so because um the thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions so in florida they didn't have mandates but people who are at risk took you know extreme precautions they would either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high quality mask by contrast in california we had the most severe lockdowns but they were never really feasible so there's 10 pages of exceptions people didn't really abide by them and then on top of it you know you have all these mass mandates but if somebody wears like a sock loosely affixed to their face does that really protect them you know so you know people if they're if they're not interested in complying with these mandates they do it in a half-hearted way i'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place um so the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is going to be we know now so much more about the risks that we all face uh than we did a year ago um and so just let private citizens decide i mean i'd even say on va on vaccines i mean look i'm pro-vax i don't really understand where the anti-vaxx people are coming from but i'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated you know on this show who don't want to get vaccinated you know if they don't want to send those doses to the developing world where they're desperate for them let me ask you trump do you do you agree with sax's position that listens citizens are just going to have to make their own decision here leave everything open and let's not have the economy collapse again and people people are smart enough to make their own decision and is this framing of this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated the correct framing wow i'm really of two minds there's there's the part of me that says that um you have to give people the right to make their own decision the problem is that in this specific case there's so much transmissibility and um as a result of that how this thing can mutate that i think that public health has to take a priority over any individual individual's rights in in this very specific narrow narrow case because the delta variant is so transmission transmissible people are going to have to lose some freedoms is one of those showing a vaccine card when you go to an arena you wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops to be unvaccinated as an example i mean and and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the petri dish of the unvaccinated you're increasing everybody's risk and this is where i think individual freedoms as long as there's a trample on collective freedom then i think live and let live but i think on this specific issue uh i think that it's it's it's unconscionable to be in a situation where um we are fighting basically a time function where at a certain amount of time you're going to have a variant that that is you know basically will overcome all the vaccines we have will uh kill enormous numbers of people including the vaccinated will literally shut the economy down and that's a probabilistic event now and i don't like the fact that i'm susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for medical or religious reasons they're just watching fox news and just spouting off i agree that we're at risk there but we're also at risk from accident vaccinated people in the rest of the world so delta variant came from india the lambda variant i think the wrong came from peru i mean the fact that matter is unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential petri dish for the virus so i'd rather i mean this is why we need to send those unused doses that by the way are at risk of expiring we now i mean there was a tweet about this recently there's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the u.s that are going to waste right now we should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated specifically to mexico and canada and canada's i think this uh month going to even though we got off to a massive head start going to uh eclipse us in terms of the percentage of accident let me ask it more pointedly should a t should teachers be public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation airplanes or you know take buses you know long-haul buses uh long-haul trains uh and then third should you be forced to show a vaccine card to get on to go to sporting events or concerts let's go through those three so your personal freedom ends you're going to be forced if you want to go to group behaviors if you want to participate in a public construct if you want to consume a public resource or if you want to provide a publicly funded good then it's the broader public's rights that um are superior to your individual rights otherwise work at a charter school where it's not required watch the [ __ ] concert from home or drive your car use a bicycle or take an uber the end sounds what do you think and then freeburg so i i understand that argument i would differentiate between public and private requirements because i i don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm um so what you might said you could stay home or you could take your bicycle well sure so is that reasonable that you don't get to go to a warriors game because you're unvaccinated yeah i think you know the warrior stadium is is privately owned the team is private so i think that i think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their employees and what about airlines because that is you know a gay it's there's a limited number of them yeah i think so airlines should be able to force it now what about school teachers they can't force it but they can set the requirements for you to board their planes you know okay now what about public schools should if let's do teachers and students should teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in because you said if they don't come to work in the fall on a couple episodes back you're fired well why wouldn't they want to get a vaccine the whole debate with the teachers unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many so i don't think that's a serious issue now requiring the kids to get vaccinated is um that that would be the real policy question and um well let's tackle both should teachers be forced to get the vaccine yes or no you just kind of brushed over yeah you force it for no i mean i think it's important to just to just you know pinpoint this like forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to you know work at the school i just want to highlight the precedent it sets right which is um you know you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in their arm if someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot does that mean then that they you know should lose their job as a public servant well no i mean no i'm i'm saying that i i look i i i said it's not a big deal but like if there's one or two teachers that say you know what it is a big deal to me i have a different i have a set of reasons why i don't want to get shot i i think those teachers that's an assumption of risk i mean if they've decided they're going to assume the risk then you know don't come crying to us when they get sick well the argument is that was your choice the vector of exposure right that they could have petri dishes they could be the vector that gets kids sick in all of these situations there's an always a very um obvious and justifiable exemption for religious and medical reasons to not be vaccinated not just for this but for anything else so i struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a [ __ ] clue about science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate for them where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves they probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors but on this one specific issue they narrowly say you know what i'm an expert enough because i'm watching this television show i've made a decision that to me makes no sense uh yeah look i i actually agree with you i'm in the camp of that everybody barring some you know um highly specific medical condition that renders you ineligible should be getting vaccinated so i agree with you about what the right answer is but i do think that when it comes to government it's it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to government to force people to engage in you know behavior they don't want to engage in can you i think that's a real question private organizations are different we all agree on private organizations but we we do have to make some decisions on public transportation and we do have to make decisions about teachers and we're going to have to make decisions on students so um could you bench the teachers uh who or otherwise penalize them who are not vaccinated you know there are sometimes where you know a cop or a teacher is put in a you know not in the classroom not on the beat for whatever reasons uh sometimes disciplinary but for other reasons could you just say listen if you're not gonna get vaccinated you're going to not be in the classroom you're not gonna you'll be a remote teacher and we're just gonna create two classes here i don't i don't think i don't i don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get vaccinated but but i um look i think the virus is everywhere now it's just endemic and so to single out like one particular group and saying you're going to lose your opinion so you're saying teachers should not be forced i'm saying that i mean if they work in a private school the private school could definitely require it public only now we all agree on private you're saying i think it's i think it's a really complicated question because i think there are clear public health benefits to everyone getting vaccinated but i also don't really like empowering government to force you because look it's like everything else the government may be right in this particular case but what else is it going to do with that power and you know i don't like giving government that power so look it's a complicated question i don't you know it's not um i would i'd probably err on the side of not letting government force people to do it but but look i i think it's a close call i do think it's a close call chamoth forced a teacher cfa accident or not yes and the reason is because these kids are already being left behind even when school is functioning normally and you can see it in the test scores you can see it in our readiness you can see it in our ability to actually do the jobs that are required we are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic and now you introduce a reason for folks to basically check out and not appear i what do you guys guess how how many years were lost in these 15 months when kids were at home i would say not 15 months no it's more two years two and a half years three years depending on what grade they are what did did your kids miss graduation did they miss senior prom did they miss their sats i mean what did they miss in terms of yeah i mean chamoth has a good point which is that if that that when government is the employer requiring it on their employees because it leads to better outcomes for that institution that is a little different than government just mandating that you jason calcano's private citizen have to go get a shot in your arm right i mean so there is a slight difference there like military for instance right the military probably wants to vaccinate everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation they're not like you know incapacitated by an outbreak of covet right so i can i i think there you know we're getting into shades of gray here from a public policy perspective you know i i don't want uh teachers missing school because you know for weeks at a time because they didn't do the obvious thing getting the code vaccine so look i i think there are some really good poly policy arguments there but i think again the the one place where i'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said listen you private citizen not an employee of the government has to go get vaccinated um as much as i would like everyone to to to get vaccinated i don't want to give government that kind of power president biden could legally require military members to get vaccinated but so far he has declined to do so july 9th new york times friedberg where do you stand on this chamat says he's all in your teacher you get vaccinated at the end saks is kind of close but is a little concerned what do you say freeburg i mean another way to frame it is that there's a new qualification for a job like you know there's qualification to be in the military you have to have certain physical capabilities jason i don't know if you would qualify um i don't think i would i don't think i can do like for for totally different reasons your inability to fight or throw a punch would be no maybe j cal could eat the enemy trust me i would be great in the military i'm going to be here he'd be like clemenza he'd be cooking the meatballs or something private joker private a donut there's the i think the reason their sensitivity to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs and then you're telling them that in order to keep your job you have to go get a vaccine now if we were to have zero teachers today and we were starting a public school system from scratch and you said here's one of the qualifying criteria to be a school teacher you have to have an education degree you have to have maybe a master's degree in education you have to have appropriate qualifications and training and certification oh and by the way you also have to have a vaccine if that becomes a criteria i think people find it less offensive it's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go get a shot in order to keep your job um and that's the complicating thing that i think people are trying to wade through i don't think i don't think that if you were to say like look it's obvious that the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do push-ups or whatever the the criteria might be but if you impose that on people that were already in the military and then you're going to kick a bunch of them out people would be up in arms about it if you had a bmi requirement yeah and that's the concern i think that arises with you know imposing these kind of um you know personal body uh criteria upon you know specific jobs when people are already employed in that job um and it's there's there's absolutely no answer right like if you're gonna do it you're gonna have incredible backlash and trouble and pain um and if you were to and we're not in a circumstance where we can build these organizations and these institutions from scratch look there's a lot of social issues where you know particularly on the liberal side people do not want the government uh prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures right well um you know i'd say it's even more invasive you're talking about people transitioning or you know or the issue of abortion you know very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not have the right to legislate what happens with what's happening what happens with my body right well force it you know giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is you know that is that is invasive and um so i do think there are like rights implications to that but i want to be very clear if you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share then you need to sign up for the compact that we all sign up for that's that's my over arching argument the the thing with abortion where i'm on the other side of the issue just to be very clear is like it is a woman's body i don't think i have any right to dictate what she does i don't understand what she goes through i don't understand what situation she's in i don't think i have the judgment to do that it should and it doesn't have an impact on the collective and her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a probabilistic chance that i may die it does not right but when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me or mutate yeah i'm not saying that i have a say but i do think i should have a say if you're then all of a sudden going to consume the same resources that i consume where i've signed up to that compact for public health based on all this here's where i come to what if we gave teachers an off-ramp listen if you um you you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom if not you're going to get a one-year buyout or whatever one month or two months for every year of service so if you've been with us for 20 years you're gonna get 20 months of pay and or you could say if the virus is spreading at under this rate in other words you know we we've got under one percent of the population infected or whatever the the criteria is then you can come to work in the classroom but if this thing is spreading you're out and that's it and there's an off-ramp here to to david's point unless there's an arrow like look i i do think you can be a conscientious objector for legitimate reasons again like we we have these very specific definitions for religious or for health specific reasons that you ch that you don't get vaccinated i think those should be respected it's not that cohort of people we're talking about it's everybody else that right now wants to not think for themselves and as a result put everybody else and themselves in danger yeah i i think the most compelling part of your argument shamath is that where is the health externality right that that that each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting you know multiplicative contagious particles and this is why i was in favor of a mass mandate at the beginning of the pandemic is it's not just an individual decision your your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick so you know this is why i i do think it also wasn't very expensive correct sacks i mean was your other point yes exactly potentially high benefit for very low cost i think we're but but but the thing that maybe i didn't necessarily take into consideration is you know people complied in such a half-hearted way i mean i do think the mass makes a difference if it's an n95 quality mask that you put on correctly right right but when people just strap a sock to their face it's loosely fitting and they don't give a [ __ ] i mean does that really make a difference i mean i'm very skeptical let me ask you a question sax and then we'll go to freeburg and then we'll flip to the next topic if we were on our third pandemic or let's god forbid a second pandemic starts a totally different one you know ebola type or something and we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a higher rate does your calculus change tax because sure because because the the uh the downsides that the cost of you know not not imposing those more restrictive regulations goes up considerably i mean definitely my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that that if you're vaccinated you're call it 95 likely to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table and so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk you know it's like it's like smoking in a way where when i made the movie thing for smoking christopher buckley told me you know he's the author of the book and he said look there's something uniquely american about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful right the main character and thank you for smoking as a spokesman for big tobacco and he's engaging in political spin but his argument is look people have the right to engage in this behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them maybe america is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that but i do um i you know look that is that is um that's freedom is letting people do stupid things you know and um and so we have to weigh the benefits of of freedom against the against the costs and by the way sorry can i just say something um smoking is a perfect example because as you know there is now um a non-trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled um secondhand smoke both the smoker but also other things condo boards other places where all of a sudden you didn't choose to [ __ ] have you know tara and nicotine my dad worked in bars where people it was a cloud of smoke for 30 years 30 years right they told him he was essentially a smoker it's not it's not just the detrimental activity at the time remember we've socialized the cost of treatment for people uh through public health systems and because of that it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone that's now got to pay the price but the government is so omnipresent all of our lives there's always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make and to toma's point i mean everybody uses government services to some degree so that alone can't be the reason i i do agree that the no no but david what about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an hour like it's illegal that's illegal but but i think i think your mother is right that the smoking example is a good one because we do regulate secondhand smoke because there's an externality there's a health externality to everybody else if you smoke in a public place and so we restrict that but we don't make smoking illegal we don't stop you from doing it in your own homes or in private places and the argument is listen if you want to do something that's harmful primarily to you that's your choice as an american you know and i know people a lot of people don't like that actually this is a this i posted a tweet that i got just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it should be censored just because the behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required right it's a completely reasonable tweet yeah i thought it was a pretty inoffensive anodyne tweet just reminding people that just because again something is is positive doesn't mean you force people to do it and just because some behavior is harmful you don't you don't ban it i think smoking is a great example of that right we let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them because freedom is a value in and of itself um for this i was attacked as a selfish [ __ ] by um by this other pod and i i really like swisher and professor cold takes professor what cold takes that literally made um an index of all of professor g's you know takes that macy's would be incredible and amazon will lose its money and yada yada he's kind of obsessed with youtube chamath prof g yeah who just got his show canceled on bloomberg but they were a little kara swisher was called sacks an [ __ ] well triggered it was bizarre that they would get so triggered by this inoffensive tweet but i think what you see here is an example of the way that the woke mind thinks which is well hold on i don't think kara's woke are you kidding me she's like that she's like the madame du farger the woke revolution she's always was this character in the french revolution who admit the names of the next person to be guillotined and uh she was you know one of the the the leaders of the sans q laws no look cara is constantly ginning up the mob to try and you know guillotine some no non-woke person yeah i don't think that that's true that's true i think she's kind of moderate you're trying to you're trying to curry favor with her so you don't know we're not there no no she i mean she did get it right you are an [ __ ] i mean you are an [ __ ] she got that she got that she's not old and failing well you are kind of old you look dope you look cool she's effectively saying we're all [ __ ] because i think all of us have talked about this you're [ __ ] i'm an [ __ ] yeah i love it own it [ __ ] it i'm not what's your other choice being a whiner on the sidelines what we've said on this show is that we have a moral imperative to get to get back to normal do we not that is what we've said and for that she's basically saying that that is a let the meat covered position right that we are basically we don't care if people get sick and die because of covet that's not true you know we just have about liverpool here i think we should make people get vaccinated yeah and you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated i asked you saks if there were three more variants and this was an acute situation you said you would force oh look if we had if we had a variant of covid that was as deadly as ebola and as transmissible as delta variant it 100 percent changes the game there's no question about willing to change the government's ability to put a shotgun based on it's a benefit it's a yes it's a benefit cost analysis and that's reasonable but look i give freedom a lot of weight and part of my calculation is the fact that i can get vaccinated to take to most likely take the most serious risks off the table so while i i am impacted to some degree by other people's choices i'm much less impacted now that we have functional thinking about this i still have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're using you're viewing this as a linear problem this thing is transmutating and so i know but there are still billions of people all over the world who are unvaccinated and we'd be better off focusing on getting them a marshall plan for the vaccines all these unused doses we're wasting our breath in the united states trying to get these vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people to get vaccinated did you guys see that um uh emmanuel macron of france uh you know basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places going into bars and cafes they basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated and you did it in a public address on tv 22 million people watched it and then after he did this suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20 000 a minute they got four million people sign up to get vaccinated i mean in france what's the point of being alive and then let me throw a wet blanket on uh the framing of this on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible i have been to like three events over the last month or two where i was required to be vaccinated and i literally just took a photo of this index card that i got from this person and sent it to them which i could go make at kinko's or i could print at home it's like there's i don't my point is i don't think that there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about how are you actually going to know that people going to the warriors game are actually vaccinated how are you actually going to know they did it at madison's work and they they literally had you pull out your id and they matched your name to your vax card and i think printing out a vax card and faking it if it could be a fine could be a ten thousand dollar fine and so you would do it like anything else you could you could make a bogus driver's license it's not digital right there's no there's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated who's not so so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like here's this piece of paper that says i'm vaccinated i think that you're you're never going to really close the hole on this thing now you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in france which is you just announce the restrictions you announce these rules everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up but i you know i'm not sure this actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society uh over the next uh you know short while i mean maybe over time we digitize all this stuff but we'll see yeah i mean the best the best case scenario is that because delta is so transmissible we get to hurt immunity because all the people who didn't get vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing crosses that because we have 60 of adults in the united states have had one shot or more uh which is why debts probably aren't going up because that's like 75 percent in people over 60 i think so freeburg in your estimation as our science guy with what we have like 30 million people who've been infected uh that we know of you got to triple that number right because there's people who we don't know and then you have 65 you have 60 percent so we got to be in the range of 70 have been exposed or been vaccinated so when does it kick in or are we experiencing you know um herd immunity right now with these low debts um we talked about this before but there are um you know there's a spectrum of infection right you're you're you you can have viral replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know because you've got enough antibodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus before your body even you know you start to feel symptoms and there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time and you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation all the stuff that follows and so you know in terms of how you measure this stuff it's really difficult to say that you're going to stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to be to have been exposed as we've seen even when you have a broad and diverse antibody pool in your body because you've been exposed to a vaccine we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant and so the rate of transmission slows the rate of severe infection goes way down and so on so it's not as binary as hey we hit herd immunity and now we're done it seems this is you know as we talked about earlier and as i think everyone is coming to terms with this is going to be an endemic virus and that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way causing sometimes severe sometimes you know modest outbreaks for likely a very long time no matter how many people get it no matter how many people get vaccinated because you have different levels should we ignore it at what level should we just say listen that is the steady state how many cases a day how many debts a day do you think is the steady state that we should just say we just go to work and ignore it i am a brutal cold-hearted libertarian on this point and i have been since we first talked about this last year i've always been of the mind that we need to balance the um the the follow-on life effect from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual loss of life right so you can never go i i i really think this point about zeroism and this term about zeroism is an important one you can never get to zero cases what is the acceptable number of cases and what is the cost to keep that case load down the balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision put a number on it but it's about saving lives right so like there are a certain number of people whose lives are going to be ruined who are some of them will commit suicide some of them won't be able to earn an income again their businesses are going to get shut down what is the economic cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life versus what i'm saying is what is the number we had an average of 250 deaths 250 000 case known cases a day at the peak we had a peak deaths of 4 100 a day we are now at 200 people dying a day and you know 30 000 cases is there a number at which you say let's just focus on getting back to work and is that number where we are now i'm trying to get it yeah again i wouldn't simplify it to those data points what i would do again i would look at you know at what age are people dying how many life years are we losing and how can we address the acute populations that are at risk and the acute populations that are that are potentially going to be exposed manage those populations differently than you manage the broader population that has a lower likelihood of risk of death and a lower likelihood of fatality and the restrictions that you then impose to you know start to manage uh the risk and the exposure to different populations gets weighed against the saving of life and the loss of life in both circumstances so it's it's not easy right it's it's and everyone wants to sum this whole thing up to like how many deaths a day is appropriate that's not the right answer right because well you're saying how many that part of it is so obvious right that and we should have known this last summer the obvious part being that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's the most at risk and what do we do with lockdowns we literally locked down the entire population every business it was completely insane we should have focused it on protecting the most at-risk populations isolating the sick or the people at greatest risk not everybody it was just insane and um i mean i can't believe we're still having that conversation a year later can i uh before we move on to the next topic can i read the best can i read the best best comment from sax's tweet so sax's tweet just because an opinion is wrong it doesn't mean it should be censored just because the behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited and just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required the best response goes to distantly social rumple whose full name is at wendell shirk who said this message brought to you by the generic self-serving platitude alert network we now return you to your regularly scheduled episode of the bland soap opera with the pablum sisters well yeah i look there there's there's an element of truth to that which is i i almost didn't tweet it because i thought it was too much of a platitude but the fact that people on the other side got so triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to to tweet it is they think that if you're calling for any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy you're basically a selfish [ __ ] i mean it's insane i mean they want to stay in this world of zero s covis restrictions forever we've got to move on we're 45 minutes into covin so we got to move on but i think if this is in the influenza plus or minus hundred percent zone we got to pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society and you know local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks but i kind of think if this is within you know 2x of our yearly deaths from you know influenza and just the normal cold i think we move forward as best we can do we want to go to china cuba i think just real quick before we move away from this i really want to just highlight the deep mind announcement from this morning because i think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on okay so this morning you know deep mind which published alpha fold and we talked about this a few uh owned by google it's their ai art it's an air owned by google and they basically took protein structure and uh tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of uh the dna or rna that codes the amino acids that make up the protein and so again like when you have a string of amino acids they combine and they fold into a wave it's really hard to predict and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein and then it does something in the body and historically we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body so this morning deep mind incredibly published a database with the predicted structure of every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this this capability that they now have what does it mean in english and so you know what this means is we now have a physical model of every protein that human dna can make and that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does how it does it and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins and how certain drugs can affect those proteins and how we can alter human health by making new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways so it's an incredible data set that was just published it's almost like you know releasing the rosetta stone in my opinion uh in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body they did it for 10 other species and they said that they're going to publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have the sort of data set around for which they expect will achieve over a hundred million unique proteins in this database over the coming months freely available and searchable and let me just explain and i know i'm on a monologue here so i'll win the monologue it's a good one it's a good one um but let me just explain why this is relevant the delta variant what it is is that you know the the the sars cov2 rna sequence is about 30 000 base pairs long 10 of those or about 3 000 base pairs make up the spike protein which is the protein at the tip of the cove virus like the coronavirus that gets into the cells and you know for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus there's about one nucleoside mutation one of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves and we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein and so we suddenly discover empirically and you know by looking around suddenly all these people are getting more infected than we're getting infected before we look at the genetic code and we're like oh here's the changes that happened but we could have with this capability from alpha fold predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human h2 receptors on the cells and getting into cells and what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the sars cov2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible more deadly all these sorts of factors because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair and so this tool that was released today i think highlights that over the next decade these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally and it gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them uh with new drugs and new variant models and new um vaccines well ahead of the oh my god we just got hit with a nuclear bomb let's clean up the mess kind of in the future so it's an exciting day an exciting moment would they have been released this david if it hadn't been for covid coming out do you think deepmind just pivoted their entire group because they have about a thousand people i understand and by the way they pay something in the order of six or seven hundred thousand a year on average and there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year so just think about the scale of what google is spending on this you guys know that they probably sh shifted a large number of people to work on this you guys because i have long deep roots at google and um i will tell you that the value system of people there you know the press and the public will think what they want but i think that the value system of people there drove them to realize the importance of this work that they're doing with alpha fold and it is important for humanity and it's important for the health broadly of people they could have kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that and i think the importance of this discovery and this capability um was uh was realized and is published for that very reason there's a lot of work that deepmind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending and all this stuff and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for google per year based on those capabilities and then there are these things that benefit all of us and by putting this out publicly it's a great good for humanity and uh you know they're they're making it freely available and searchable um and so i i don't think that covid kind of instigated this because they've been working on this for a very long time since before kovid and this is a very hard biological problem that is key to understanding biology and how biology works that's been going on for decades they've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available um and you know there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database i mean this is a this is a mitzvah uh to society to humanity does it change the fact that google is spending uh well over a billion dollars a year in deep mind and doing projects like this does this change any of your thinking about breaking them up tremoth or you know how we look at big tech that's a good question no we learned something very disturbing about big tech this week actually um this is quite a bombshell that jen pasake dropped from the white house press briefing we got to talk about this she just sort of casually mentioned that oh yeah by the way the administration is flagging posts for a social media company for big tech companies to take down to remove accounts they're talking about specific accounts and posts yeah and she just kind of met just casually mentions oh yeah the big tech companies are very you know eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these accounts accounts she even said that when one of these companies takes down an account the rest should do it too implying that the white house is providing the central coordinative role in the censorship global block list yeah let me let's let's take the most charitable view here i know that it's very easy to make this a left versus right there censoring yada yada trump got banned but if somebody was saying this was microch this was an account that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine would it not be how would the and it was hitting scale you know what would be the way for the white house to inform social media that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was trending the white house or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position but this is different this is the white house coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies well they're not behind the scenes they're saying they're doing it right here to everybody correct correct the behavior was behind the scenes but pasaki just admitted it which is why it's such a bombshell look even the aclu if you were president and there there was an account on facebook youtube twitter that was saying there was a microchip from bill gates this is a this is a blatant violation of the people's first amendment would you then tell them how would you you are allowed your the first amendment gives you the right to say things that are untrue it is not the business of government to declare what is true and what is false okay even even hold on even the aclu came out of retirement we hadn't we haven't heard from them for the last year during any of these parts of the aclu yeah we haven't heard from them during the past year during all this um activity that's been going on with the counts being blocked and ghosted they finally came out of retirement to say that that this is a dangerous violation of people's first amendment rights you cannot have the government saying what is true and what is false and then denying people the right um to express their opinions based on what the government thinks is the truth and by the way there's been a very subtle change here in the language that's being used if you remember what the argument used to be that we have to stop disinformation does uh now it's shifted to we have to stop misinformation so those two things are very different it's kind of like that well it's kind of like the difference in the term equality versus equity they sound similar but they actually mean very different things so disinformation is actually a campaign of a purposeful purposeful campaign of propaganda and lies usually put forward covertly so it's the fsb you're some intelligence agency putting out whatever putting out disinformation usually under false accounts so in that case we can say no you can't do that because you can't engage in deception around who you are right but misinformation is simply information that's being put out that frankly you disagree with okay and or it could be discernibly wrong wait you're you're kind of framing that work it could be you're putting out information like there's a microchip in the vaccine that is explicitly known to be wrong look the the lab leak theory was considered misinformation by these same people three months ago okay but let's take the specific example of there's a microchip if it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine would you be okay with the white house contacting social media coming saying hey you got these accounts that are saying there's a microchip you might want to look into it they're not saying take it down they're saying take a look into it that's not the white house's business do i believe in the microchip theory no of course not it's absolutely ridiculous but it is not the business okay who to ban and who to block list i think they didn't tell them to ban i think they told them to be aware of it go ahead chime off i think your framing's wrong sex guys no no swasaki said that when one site takes it down they should all take it down and then biden on top of it comes out and pours kerosene on the fire by saying that social media sites are literally killing people well yeah by allowing by allowing this misinformation so here we go let's be honest is the president of the united states using the bully pulpit to call social media uh sites mass murderers by virtue of allowing people to have free speech trump never used language that intemperate i don't remember him ever calling this is the exact reason you you can't have a strangle hold on distribution because it will get perverted and then we either have people we like or people we don't like in these positions of power or people we like or people we don't like regulating and it's constantly flipping and we're all just doomed and bound to get [ __ ] over so back to the thing that friedberg brought up before i think alpha fold is incredible i think google has been an incredible company they make money hand over fist they waste an enormous amount of money and all kinds of trash so it's good that they were actually able to do something useful here i generally think that companies like google and facebook and amazon unfortunately do not allow the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society they're just too big tremoth makes a great point which is we've got these big tech monopolies who've become gatekeepers over content okay and what the administration has done and their allies in congress is hang a sword of damocles over the heads of these big tech companies they've appointed lina khan to be the enforcer at the ftc they've got their six bills in congress right now they've held congressional hearings around taking away section 230 protection which is very economically advantageous for these big tech companies so they position the sword perfectly over the heads these big tech companies threatening to break them up and rein them in and then jen pasake and the white house go to them and say we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with this is misinformation okay that is a huge danger to free speech it's basically like the administration saying to these big tech companies nice little social network you got there it'd be a real shame if anything happened to it look at what's going on don't you want them broken up i do want them broken up but what i don't know which is if you want them to hold the sword or do you not want them to hold the sword i actually want the sword to come crashing i actually want the sword to come out swing the sword not hold it over and then use it for extortion yeah that's actually a great explanation then freedom yes i'm trying to moderate here freeburg do you give a [ __ ] we've talked about this spent all day on his phone he has not dialed into this puzzle i'm with you guys i thought we just went over the alpha fold stuff way too fast i mean the arguing over freedom of speech is happening and all of this debate freedberg at the same time that we are making incredible life-changing moments for humanity two different companies went to space last week with civilians and then we are basically uh defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on the planet and we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would save everybody's life and let us continue on and people are dunking on bezos for not reading the room i don't know if you saw this freedberg but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room etc progress technologically um will only arise with capital so you can assume that that progress you know it's not like someone stumbled into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbles into a cave and discovered alpha fold uh there are years of toiling and labs like edison did making the light bulb um edison had to raise a ton of money uh to get that light bulb uh project off the ground if you guys haven't read uh i'm trying to remember the biography there's uh uh wizards of something um it's got wizards in the title it's a good biography of medicine and um uh you know and and i feel like we're at this moment where the wizard of menlow park yeah i think that's the the wizard of oz park that's right and the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at alpha fold or at waymo uh or what bezos and elon are doing um is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work you're not gonna get a bunch of kickstarters to fund a spacex like project or a you know blue origin like project and so i think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on multiple billion dollar bets and like chimoff said waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of ten of them but if that one billion dollar bet works it's worth 500 billion dollars and that money continuously gets reinvested and look at what google did with waymo they put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone woke up and said my god self-driving is real it's possible and it kick-started an industry and i i just feel like the amount of money and not to mention the fact that like these are free markets so these businesses google you don't have to search on google you don't have to buy from amazon but everyone benefits from searching on google everyone benefits from buying on amazon and the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so good and so i don't feel like these guys are um screwing people over you can consider the small business model as being like you know hey maybe we shouldn't have had small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point distribution was going to be economically advantaged by being centralized and therefore all consumers are going to benefit by centralizing is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market but same with what happened with the taxi industry technology will force these evolutions the capital accumulates and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined um on a smaller scale but go ahead show up yeah no i do think sympathetic to what you were saying i do think that if you look at every platform innovation that's ever happened so whether it's you know we go from no print to print you know to newspapers to radio to television you've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized monopolistic or oligopolistic kind of early outcomes and either through legislation or through innovation then the pendulum swings to decentralization that's typically happened right and you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that so it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things and everybody says the argument is well no because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock-in but i think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the china and the china shop and you have to just start all over so it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody and obviously we want things like alpha fold to exist and we want things like waymo to exist the question is how should they exist and if they come out of the goodwill of google it is just so easily as likely that some other person let's say it wasn't sundar and ruth peratt but two other people who didn't like it these things could have been very different forms and shapes and not existed at all and i think that's the arbitrary nature of it which is not necessarily free market capitalism that doesn't benefit us should we chamoth be upset that bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from amazon he had a bad press conference let's just be clear at the end of the day he has wanted to do this his entire life he built an incredible company he was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it he's invested billions of dollars in other things 10 billion dollars in climate change his ex-wife has invested you know six billion dollars just last year alone in all kinds of good works so those two individuals because of their success i think will generally do and have done the right thing let's not get that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just was well i think you said it you know the thing that he said around uh you know i just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this it sounded flippant and it didn't really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on charlie rose right so if you if you actually played those two things back side by side you'd say is this the same person one was thoughtful extremely respectful the other one was now maybe he was just amped up i mean i could see him and so and so he just wasn't thinking about it but you know honestly like look he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say we're assuming you're coming back so here are some [ __ ] talking points why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to earth and let's just make sure we nail this and put our best foot forward that is where i think he probably has some regrets based on how people reacted this bezos space flight was a real rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left but the criticism was very different you know the critique i heard from the right was that uh he's having some sort of mid-life crisis and the rocket looked too much like a phallus okay fine whatever that the criticism from the left was um it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise you could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that you know why was he doing this with his own money you know if this had been a nasa flight i don't think they would have had a problem with it and so you see here that even though bezos has been so much more effective using his own money uh to do this that the leftist reflexively hates that uh and and and and they kept saying well how dare he use this money the money could have been used on something else so much better well what do you think of that argument yeah i think it's wrong in a couple of respects it basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest inventors and i don't think that's true you look at these social programs they want to keep doubling down on they're not working you know these programs our policies towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding there's a tremendous amount of funding in san francisco they're spending 60 thousand dollars per tent per year they're spending 300 000 in social services per homeless person per year lack of funding is not the problem the approach is the problem we spend something like twenty five thousand dollars per pull per pupil in california schools the test scores are going down so you know these people who are criticizing bezos don't know what to do with the money they don't know how to spend anything they're not good at executing however bezos or elon these are two of our greatest inventors let them go let them go because you know they are pushing the boundaries and i do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result of what they're doing with this new space race it's also super uninformed if correct me if i'm wrong here but they were saying that they they should have been doing more initiatives on earth if you actually and they were kind of talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space and number one uh the the rocket ship fuel my understanding in these is less than the what happens in a 747 so put that aside and then second elon has done more for global warming with tesla than anybody in the and the battery packs i think in modern society i can't think of somebody in the private sector who's done more and then has there ever been a get there's never been a gift of 10 billion dollars to one cause let alone one cause which bezos gave which was climate change no no nobody has done it also hasn't you would know chamoth i thought richard branson had done a lot for globe warming i thought he was very involved in the carbon uh credits space i think that we're witnessing something that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong but want to just have a chance to be on the field and try and have the freedom to do so and that just literally infuriates a certain class of people it proves itself out by what david said we are not in a funding crisis we are running 10 20 trillion dollar deficits you know or sorry uh 10 you know hundreds of billions of dollar deficits 10 20 trillion dollar debt levels that are increasing every year we have a surveyed of money we print money whenever we want we don't have a shortage of money we have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money and in the absence of people being able to do things they would rather other people not do things not because it's not the right thing to do but because it makes them feel impotent right and and so what what is what is driving that i think you there's a real contempt for private initiative and and jason you're right you see it in the hatred towards elon nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than elon i mean even the best gifts period end of story i mean the bezos gift to some philanthropy i don't know if that's going to make a difference or not you're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue but it's indisputable that elon the electric car industry would not exist without elon and yet there is contempt and hatred for the fact that he did this through private initiative if they became because he does it in a way that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally they don't like that he says what he wants they don't like that he does what he wants they don't like that he dresses the way he does they don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough it's not about the look people it's also about the money that's the wealth that's been accumulated too well no no hold on i don't think that's what it is at all no i actually think what it is is psychological it is nothing about money i think what we are witnessing and i think social media has just blown the cover off it is a psychological awakening that people have which is that they were comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders and they just believed the world would function as it should now you see people migrating through this membrane achieving enormous amounts of success basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude and it breaks people's brains because they don't like it because now they think why didn't it happen to me why not me and the thing is because you're not capable and at somewhere along the way hard working you're not dedicated you didn't try or you didn't try they didn't act with agency i mean look every day every day the greatest thing that i've learned about the public markets now having been you know purely on the early stage technology side building running then investing is i get a mark every day right now to do both businesses i get a score scorecard every day and some days i really think to myself maybe i'm just not good enough today and i say to myself that is true today and then the the difference is tomorrow i have a choice which is i wake up and i decide am i going to go back at it or not and i'm going to game and i'm not going to hate on other people who had a good day today just because i had a bad day and that's what i think we're going through we're going through and social media allows it to happen and it allows you to put it out there you can hide behind a screen name you can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent-up frustration watching journalists doing it of course of course because these journalists are doing it too they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use the difference is journalists do it with a real screen name under the guise of journalism everybody else does it with a fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolling in order to do something really great like bezos or like elon you have to believe that you have agency over your own life you have to believe that you can accomplish great things you have to you know act with with purpose and is that really what we're teaching kids to uh today in schools what we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors it's some intersectional framework we're not teaching them about earned success we're teaching them about privilege which is you know is presumptively ill-gotten and it's all about a transference of privilege and um and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims but no one's talking about how you actually create changes successfully abundance right abundance it's all a negative sum it's always a negative sum game free bird go ahead i dance back to the kim kardashian sex tape i think that there was this moment where someone who was didn't do anything didn't have a career wasn't doing anything work wise but was kind of a pseudo celebrity for being a celebrity it's like the paris hilton nicole richie era right like uh folks who don't really have much to talk about except that they're the ones that people are talking about and then that sex tape turned her into a superstar and then she became a billionaire a few years later and so um you know there there is this kind of poignant moment i think where folks are like wait a second you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country you don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame therefore the ex the kind of assumption is hey you know what there are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do and the rest of us don't um and i do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those those moments and makes them very big and kind of then that becomes the assumed standard when the reality is i mean all four of us worked really [ __ ] hard all four of us came from nothing i don't know about sax but i mean the rest of us his dad was an immigrant doctor from south africa and he moved to south asia i'm just doing 80s well i mean i mean i think all of us graduated college deeply in debt and then we all worked our way out of debt and we all found ways to work really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country and to build value and to build businesses to realize those returns and we don't start out as elites we were never elite we were always the struggling you know immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we fought and we had grit we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort and i think that that's not really and so did bezos and so did elon and i don't think that there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them like maybe in you know the british the days of the british monarchy these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have and i think that that and i think that that's so important because people miss that point and they think that kim kardashian or the random bolt of lightning or the elite is the kind of endowed upon people in a way that's unfair they're misreading the situation everyone else is missing out yeah they misread the situation so a couple things kim kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape but [ __ ] if she's not an incredible business person because from there to now that's execution totally there's a lot of there's a lot of toiling hard work good decision-making she [ __ ] nailed it was i lucky to have actually joined facebook versus myspace yes but when i was there did i [ __ ] hit the cover off the ball god damn yes you know was i lucky to have started social capital and be able to raise capital sure but then did i have to help find a team coach that team work with them make good investments that's [ __ ] hard and i think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work that there's all kinds of levels of success that you can be proud of all kinds of different accomplishments what i loved is when friedberg used us and elon and bezos in the same sentence because i catch myself where i'm ashamed sometimes or i'm like i am not as good as those two guys so how dare i use my name in the same sentence as their name and then i think wait a minute what the [ __ ] am i quibbling over like this is insane in any way shape or form we've all made it sure there's different degrees but it's beyond that it matters at this point and this is what i think we're living in a society where it really distorts you so if how do we change it how do we change people from thinking that it's random and that you can't do it because there are a group of people who but there are a group of people who believe the system is rigged i cannot become chamath and i'm stuck i'm stuck in a rut and i can't get out i can't get out how do we change that belief yeah the whiners and the complainers and the haters are stuck in a massive run and i think the thing that happened and i said it last part i'll say it again and maybe i'll just say it every [ __ ] pod it is not about winning and losing it is about trying and learning and that is a huge thing it's about a learning mindset it's about this idea that things are changing so [ __ ] fast the only thing that i can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn because things will constantly be changing underfoot but what do you say to the single mother with three kids who who is in a town where the the factory is shutting down and she's losing her job and she doesn't have the resources to move she she is not the person that hates elon musk or jeff bezos i will [ __ ] do because aren't there institutional ruts in the united states yeah i understand these are two completely different topics my point is if you go online it is filled with p a small cohort of people that are positive and then a large cohort of people that are silently trying to just gain information and a small vocal minority of bitter people who can't do [ __ ] and all i'm talking about privileged people well who knows if they're privileged but i'm just saying they're getting paid a hundred thousand to work at the election i just think that these people have been check boxers their whole lives they tried to play the team sports they were told to they went to the schools they tried to do the the cfa the mba the this or that nothing worked for them they work in an environment where they don't feel any equity actually this is where equity is important they feel disenfranchised and they're angry and as a result they just want everything to be different so that nobody wins because they can't win but if they were winning they would be the first one to say shut the [ __ ] door behind me i'm convinced of it 100 yeah the irony is that the people you're talking about all went to these elite institutions and and they imbibed these ideologies and philosophies and i think the people who have been successful went to those not in all cases but they went to those places and then rebelled against it or just shut it out here's what we should do here's what we should do we should all contribute 5 or 10 million bucks into a into an llc we should call pegasus we should use pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on twitter and then index that to linkedin to figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just publish a new database of all the haters well i mean it's how funny would that be i i it's very interesting because i'm watching a group of these complainers leave traditional mainstream media because i'm focused on journalists because i was one and i'm watching them leave journalism a small group of them and become entrepreneurs on sub stack or their own products and i feel like there's a little group of them who are realizing holy [ __ ] i can make a million dollars if i apply myself and i quit the new york times and i go start my own publication right and i actually say something interesting and differentiated not just towing the party line at the new york times exactly there's a whole little there's a little crack here in this like i'll say i'll say they are just as successful as elon musk and jeff bezos the the financial quantum may be different but i bet you the personal [ __ ] satisfaction quantum is the same and this is a little key this is the key you could be running a 500 000 your business and you could feel like a million [ __ ] bucks yeah you have a nice house you have a nice family you employ a couple people you provide a good life you do what you want to do when you want to do it the sense of freedom that comes with that and agency and agency is the same as them and maybe in some ways the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these guys would because they're so you know scheduled and people are coming after them all the time one of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart hard working and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself you will be successful in this industry you know over two decades i mean i've just seen how could you not you have such tailwinds at your back there's so much value being created we saw over the past year more money more lp dollars have gone into venture capital by far than any other year and more money more returns is coming out that's why more money is going on no i'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful just by showing it right and and you said that but the first part is the critical part you just said who are not prone to self-sabotage there is an enormous number of people who are prone to self i was one i am still one but i broke yourself yourself your ego he blew up his that's firm but i think he blew it up because there was creative destruction i think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start oh he's talked about it publicly he said it but the blowing up of when how do you reconcile the blowing up of the firm chamoth whatever number of years later this is all old news it's like you know the amount of success and capital and money that we've made is undisputable and uh i've made it under all kinds of weather conditions so you know it all kind of speaks for itself but the problem is again if you ask an average person i don't think they care i don't think they know i don't think they have an opinion if you ask some you know i'm interested in how you reconcile or look back on it now it's so much distance i'll tell you from an outside perspective how i reconcile chamath's decision there is i think that as you become more successful your tolerance for doing stuff you don't want to do really goes down zero it goes to zero hundred dollars about this got to a point where he didn't want to be doing it and he blew it up zero by the way that that that is a characterization as well that you know sometimes in in your career you have to make it and in your personal life you have to make a tough decision and there is there is no good outcome there is no good way there's no grateful way to do it but there are these moments where you got a rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side and you're gonna have to make a tough decision to get out of the way i said to myself a long time ago that if i was ever lucky to actually be wealthy enough where um my wealth would change by um meaningful amounts every order of magnitude i would do something different um and so you know you can do the [ __ ] math so there it is it's interesting being friends with you and watching it and then also i hate to give you know any credit there it is but being friends with phil hellmuth and watching him set outrageous goals for himself in poker i just thought you know what you got to set some outrageous goals for yourself and that's how i sort of broke through as i just said the minute i want to be number one at everything i do i want to be the largest syndicate the most jason prolific investor the minute i realized that i was basically going to become you know a billionaire because of my facebook stock i [ __ ] quit and the craziest thing about it is i left so much stock on the table it's like two three billion dollars of [ __ ] stock i couldn't care less and then and then you know once i figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just investing in companies at a small scale but now you can you know control companies and really allocate and shape how economy flows i made a different set of decisions and now i'm here and if i increase it by another order of magnitude i'll make a different set of decisions and that's poorly understood by folks because again it doesn't map into a world view but the point is it maps into something that keeps me whole and sane and it allows me to not be zero-sum about everybody else's success and that's what i think we need to teach people try stuff it's okay to fail because that's as long as you're not self-sabotaging yourself david said it so well you will eventually be successful what have you learned david you know in this next chapter being an investor capital allocator that me yeah david you well just yeah no it's what i said i mean just well i mean the thing that's happening right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger it's just an explosion there's an explosion in the number of unicorns explosion of the amount of funding that's available explosion and the amount of returns being generated there are now so many vcs that vcs are literally throwing money at people i mean any half-decent idea now gets funded the idea that somehow this ecosystem is elitist or exclusionary it's absurd right i mean you've got micro vcs now who no one has to go to sand hill road anymore right i mean there are so many ways there's nobody on hill road it's a ghost town remember a traffic jam i went i went down there the other day and there was no traffic jam i was speaking at stanford and literally i was like i got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that sandhill road because it was at 8 30. right i zipped down central road to stanford there was two cars the the tech ecosystem is so osmotic it's so permeable in terms of allowing new people and in fact it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it can't hire enough people even in the worst economic conditions and yet when it comes to talking about social and political talking about opportunity in social and political terms the only thing you ever hear is that you know the ecosystem is somehow elitist or exclusionary and that's old that's old news that that might have been valid 15 20 years ago i know when i went to santo road for the first time 15 20 years ago it was a bunch of white partners who went to stanford or had a mbas from you know harvard but that's not the case now it's a bunch of people with rolling funds and micro vcs and syndicates totally and everything in between if you're so wrapped up in in being a social justice warrior that you've just missed that there is like basically infinite opportunity you know then it's on you you're sabotaging yourself and then five ten years later you're still stuck in that role and then you become bitter and then you become better to jamal's point free brook how hard was it for you to leave google and what was that like i was at google for two and a half years uh i had gone through i joined before the ipo i was like a couple hundred employees just under a thousand employees and then we went public i got this huge bonus from sergey to stick around uh when i was thinking about huge i mean for me it was like um seven figures it was yeah it was a couple thousand shares of stock and like 250 000 of cash and i gave it up um you know be worth a lot of money but i just felt like and i learned so much at google and i had such an appreciation uh for the team there in the company and by the way i worked at google and all of a sudden the company went public and i could buy a house i mean it was an incredible moment for me and and and i suddenly felt what jamaat talked about which is this freedom in my life suddenly i had hit that that next plateau of wealth where i now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth and i could leave or i guess i had over a million dollars of net worth and i could now leave and go do something i wanted to go do with my no i had a couple hundred thousand dollars and i could go leave and do what i wanted to do which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions and um and so i honestly felt like really fine just leaving all that money behind i left i left millions of dollars behind uh for when i left google after being there for two and a half years to start my company um and you know it was a struggle right like i mean as you guys know building a business which i did from 2006 to 2013 um was a nightmare every day was a nightmare i i say uh in entrepreneurship i said this publicly before but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards and one out of five days you take a five step leap forward so at the end of a week you're one step ahead of where you started but your existential memory is that you're failing every day every day and suddenly you wake up and seven years have gone by and you're like oh [ __ ] we've got an amazing business and someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars and um if you don't have the grit and the guts uh and the determination to push through those those daily battles and deal with that that hardship uh you know and i don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of google felt right for me i think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right for me um and so it was the right it was the right call for me obviously it worked out but you know still i i make choices in my life in terms of what do i want to do do i want to go live on a yacht or have some luxury or do whatever and i prefer to just make great businesses and turn science into into commercial opportunity and that's how i choose this that might never and i just wanted to send this out to the whole panel do you ever think you know having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at this age and then just you know kite board or do whatever do you ever think about retirement and not going into work [ __ ] no okay yeah you wanna do you feel you wanna work harder yesterday yesterday as an example was an incredible day because i was able to um bicycle with nat and uh the youngest to go get a gelato i had a kickoff meeting for i had a kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible uh in batteries where you know starting from scratch series a co-founders me and the other into the other director and we're starting literally starting and i remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or 40 times and it's the best feeling [Applause] and then i and then i had a call because i'm trying to put a you know more than a billion dollars to work in a different battery idea and i thought to myself god like i'm so [ __ ] lucky um and it's it was a grindy long day and i had never felt more thankful so why would i you know you could and i don't know i i feel just so blessed saks you ever think about hanging up um or are you more motivated to go to work every day are you annoyed yeah i mean the thing that's giving me the most energy right now is we're in uh a private beta on call-in near this app that we incubated and um i mean it's better it's it's good and it's getting better every day and i'm really enjoying tinkering on it and i feel like you know i've you know it's kind of like a tinkerer by the way you're a good product that you're good you're good at the tickling you know we tried to hire sax's vp of product at uh facebook what yeah what would that have paid him i used 2 000 sacks no no because i did yammer instead and you know yammer was successful and i got to be my own boss and that was better you know so i don't know if i probably wouldn't have made as much money but look i've done like you guys i've done made lots of decisions that made me less money if i just stayed at paypal for 20 years my stock would have been worth many many billions right that's why i tell people don't sell everything let your winners ride at least partially yeah i mean look my i was an investor in facebook if i just kept all of that stock that'd be worth a billion dollars today so it's pretty crazy well sell some just don't sell everything that's my new philosophy yeah so your point about your point about what gives me enjoyment i mean i'm really having fun tinkering with this app and you know what it's like it's like it's like a new season if you're in like the nba or something it's like can we make a championship run can we get one more ring you know and so you're like you know it'd be like saying to somebody hey you already got you know to a nba an nba champion hey you got three rings why do you want a fourth you know and it's like are you kidding me while i'm still in this league well i'm young enough and healthy enough to make a run at one more at one more ring how could you not want to do that you know you got to go for it i've got to go forward i can see you where you're engaged which is great to see all right listen it's been an amazing episode uh we will see you all next week if you like the show thanks the end we're not going to be something everybody go try to do something anything possible try it just try outside your comfort zone read something that you wouldn't have otherwise read love you guys but yeah i love you guys love you back see you soon love everybody listening to everybody i mean literally if you're listening to this and you are buying into this that the system is right neutral don't be a troll don't be a douche like the system is not rigged if anything the system is rigged for you to participate and succeed join the party the system is malleable the system is if you want to change the world the system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right way you can make it you can make a a dent you can uh who is this who is this little search hey look how happy you are who's the best dad where's your dad all right we'll see you all next time on the all-in podcast bye bye we'll let your winners ride rain man david and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] 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 that they just need to release [Music] your feet we need to get mercury [Music]








pick up your phone dip hello sax yeah i'll be ready in like two minutes okay let's go splash some water on your face take a couple of whatever you need some and uh let's go we're waiting okay i'll be here okay hurry up is your chance to get max air time are we really gonna report that you listen freeberg's out that means you're gonna get by default 33.3 percent of airtime it's gonna be your biggest week [Music] every man [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast with us today the dictator himself jamal polyhapati the rain man david sacks i'm j cal and the queen of quinoa quit the show where is it here he quit the show i think i think he quit so we're looking for a science person if you know anybody email all science guy at the all-inpodcast.com if you want to apply for the science position here no uh he couldn't make it he was uh he's moving he's moving he's moving i guess we can say that without invading his privacy but he's not going to be able to do a show anyway because there's so much going on uh and i think we should start with this do we want to start with the covet stuff again for the third episode in a row or do you want to start with china and then back into kobe oh govind i think we should just do covet quickly because i think you know as much as the audience complained about it we got a lot of comments saying why are you talking about kovitz so much we were ahead of the curve i'm predicting this whole new delta wave you know we told people what was coming i think it was a useful service so people might not want to hear it but it was i think i would say we were probably two weeks ahead of the it was very impressive i think that we've gotten a couple things actually right the a couple weeks ahead of other people yeah so yeah i mean it was pretty obvious that this was going to race through the places that had low vaccination and having the breakthrough cases is i don't think anybody anticipated that and the thing we didn't yeah over the last week on twitter i'm seeing this big debate on whether vaccinated people can spread the delta variant and i'm like guys didn't you see the show two weeks ago we covered this yeah i got it i was vaccinated i got it from someone who is vaccinated this is known you know delta variant has slipped the vaccine it still prevents the most serious cases generally speaking we need to see it as a spectrum of protection rather than completely binary but uh yeah absolutely you can get it and pass it on if you're vaccinated like we know that and we said we told the audience that three weeks ago the other thing we predicted was you know that this is going to be incredibly disruptive and it's going to create another debate of lock and potential lockdowns and mask mandates and most of all we discussed and you know we had i think a pretty vibrant debate between all of us about under what circumstances does your decision to not get vaccinated impact everybody else vis-a-vis the petri dish of the next variant that's coming uh hopefully that'll be less uh deadly less contagious which is tends to be how these things go uh but we also predicted some people are just gonna start requiring vaccines vaccine cards and we we mentioned what's happening in france and i don't know what examples you've seen this week yeah i thought last week when you made vaccine passports the main issue i thought i i well let's put this way i think that was actually turned out to be great moderation because what has been the big issue all over the world since the last episode vaccine passports you saw it with naftali bennett in israel they are not taking any of this vaccine hesitancy there's nine million people in that country eight million are vaccinated they're telling the last million you gotta go get vaccinated he has laid down the law saying enough is enough a billion people have gotten vaccinated uh it works and for the last million of you who haven't gotten vaccinated if you want to attend any function with more than 100 people if you want to go to synagogue if you want to go to a sports game if you want to go to the mall you have to be vaccinated or you're gonna get tested that day at your own expense um everywhere you go it's gonna be so they're gonna make it a real pain in the ass until you get vaccinated you then separately had roger goodell basically doing the same thing in the nfl saying to players you well first of all all the coaches have to get vaccinated there was an anti-vaxx coach who got fired and then they don't have as much power with the players because the players have a union but goodell said to them listen if you don't get vaccinated you're going to get tested every day that you go to work and if the team if there's an outbreak on the team and you guys miss a game you're going to lose all of your salary we're not going to put up with apparently there's a game last year during the um during uh kovid where it was a ravens um uh steelers game and half of the uh one of those two things the ravens half of the first string was out with covid or they were in isolation protocol because they're around players you know obviously if you're in a locker room one player gets everyone's gonna be exposed right so it turned out to be like one of the the worst games uh that the nfl put on last year and get all saying we're not gonna put out product like that anymore if you are the reason why the team misses a game guess what you and all of your teammates are going to lose your salary and since there's only 17 games in an nfl season you're just hearing about real real money so you had goodell doing that and now you have facebook and google basically coming out saying in order to go back to the office you have to be vaccinated now it's a little bit of the soft it's sort of more of the the iron fist beneath the velvet glove because they are offering testing so if you don't get vaccinated you can get a test every time you go to the office but unlike israel which is making you pay for it you know you know facebook and google are so rich they're going to pay for it so basically what you're saying seeing here is that government is not in the u.s it's not representing the mandate uh federal workers um otherwise you have to get tested weekly this is beyond now debatable um i think the funny thing is the republicans i think somewhere along the way realized oh my god we're going to lose the midterm elections they have found a way to find a single modality and behavior to steal defeat from the jaws of victory you know i think that the republicans were probably trending to basically win back the house and now i don't think that's the case um and you have a bunch of these um red state governors who are literally flipping their right now trying to figure out how to get their folks vaccinated many of these people may not even be able to vote come midterms because they're either going to be dead or still sick i mean uh it's it's uh we've learned a lot um and at this point you're being left with folks there again there are people who do it for religious reasons i get it there are people that you know are going to sort of like live off the grid and live by themselves i get them too but the folks that want to be a tax on the system or use public resources i don't understand and uh they're basically going to get singled out and discriminated against and the carrot and the stick method here i think is going to work because we saw a bunch of people sign up to get vaccinated in france once they said listen you can't go to a cafe or a bar and i think that a lot of the people who are not vaccinated are probably enjoying going out and having a life danny meyer the restaurant tour in new york from union square cafe and gramercy tavern one of the most famous restaurateurs of all time announced on cnbc this morning that he'll be requiring vaccines for all staff and customers what do we think of that restaurant saying you've got to show a vax car like the way in if i love it listen to me if i'm gonna go in and i'm gonna spend two or three thousand dollars on wine and then a couple of thousand bucks on a tip i don't want some who's gonna get me sick there it's bad enough that i still may get sick and and by the way danny meyer's restaurants are not like you know you know uh red robin these are extremely high-end the idea that you can get a communicable respiratory disease and spend five thousand dollars is untenable untenable non-starter sacs i mean listen you you've you it's very interesting last episode i felt like you were really trying to balance your belief in freedom uh and people being able to make decisions themselves with you know the reality that we can't be close forever how has the last week changed your thinking and what do you think of the danny meyer i i like what danny meyer did in this sense he wants to create a certain experience for his clientele and he knows that his clientele are more likely to go dine in his restaurants if there's a vaccine policy at his restaurants he's not saying the policy for the whole country he's sending it for his establishment he has every right to be able to do that and he believes that will help his bottom line and he's probably right about that similarly roger goodell same thing i mean he took a tough line because he knows that if he wants the nfl to put out a great product every week they can't be cancelling games because of covet outbreaks uh you know they can't have the first string players out with covet so he made a smart business decision i think people should have the freedom the right to do that now i still have let's call it a reservation about government requiring it not because i don't see the benefit i definitely see the health benefit but just because i don't like giving government the power to you know stick a stick a needle in your arm if you're a government employee i do think the government has added power we talked about this last week they can make it a job requirement and you know what's interesting in california california said if you're a state employee you got to get vaccinated but the one group they singled out were the teachers because you know gavin newsom has no guts to stand up the teachers union whatsoever and i find it so ironic that early in the pandemic we had this big debate about whether the teachers would go back to school in the fall and the teachers union said we won't go back unless we're first in line for the vaccine well guess what they got that now they're saying they're not going to go back if you make us get vaccinated i mean you can't win and they're moving the goal post i mean people over the goal post they want to work from home they it's kind of ridiculous it's one group that needs to do it most and they should be the one it's kind of like the army and teachers and healthcare workers they should be given a mandate if you want this job you must be vaccinated you cannot be in the army in the military and not be vaccinated because we need you in close quarters on a helicopter to go whack osama bin laden we can't have a covet outbreak in the navy seals when we gotta go i'm okay with that i think i think every employer has the right to require it if they believe it's going to impact job performance now i want to go back to the point that your mother made about the midterm elections i i because i there's a part i agree with and a part i disagree with so the part i agree with is that the republicans were cruising to you know a midterm slacking and now um the uh the whole vaccine hesitancy issue i think there was a prospect of that causing damage to the republicans not because most republicans are vaccine hesitant but rather because republican politicians were not out front enough on getting vaccines but look there's a difference between reality and perception here's the reality every single republican governor every single one has been vaccinated and has supported the vaccine mitch mcconnell is vaccinated sports vaccine kevin mccarthy put out a statement you even have the house minority whip um scalise get vaccinated on on live tv why had he not been vaccinated because he already had covet and he didn't actually think he needed it but he got the vaccine anyway to basically double down you had sarah huckabee sanders come out and say that she was getting the trump she called the trump vaccine yes please if put the trump logo on it right i mean she understands right like this is probably you know operation uh light speed or warp speed or whatever was probably the biggest operation operation up the midterms that's what the republicans should call this yeah well so so look i mean the republican politicians in the main support vaccines the problem is that they were being a little bit too quiet about it and as a result of that you had the fringe people the marjorie killer greens and so forth they were occupying too much air space around this issue um and you know frankly you know right now i think that i think the democrats are going to keep thous i wouldn't i wouldn't actually go that far but because i think that i think the republican problem was not that their vaccine hesitant but rather that they were just being a little too quiet about it um yeah but now i think that's changed i mean there is not a single major republican politician who isn't strongly in favor of a vaccine if the republicans can get their actual act together and actually get these uh you know and jason does joke about it but i do think he's bright in a certain way basically like this this group of republicans largely um who refuse to get vaccinated then they may be able to pull something out but i think that it's going to have to require a little bit of backtracking and showing up as you said by the mainstream republican political groups and they just have not done a good job there's a really simple off-ramp for them new information new strain new approach listen we didn't anticipate delta would happen this is ten times more it allows people to save face basically they can save face they got a perfect offer listen there's new information here this thing is even the cdc hasn't officially changed their policy yet um i mean it's coming right we know it's coming they've always been behind the curve we've predicted the policy change on the show anywhere from two weeks to two months before they actually do it um but look on the vaccine i don't discern a difference in position on the vaccine itself between republican governors and democratic governors they both are advocating it they're both allowing private organizations to require it but none of them to my knowledge have either had the the guts or the temerity however you want to see it to actually require it oh i love that word temerity not really used not used enough and just putting a cap in this before we move on to what's going on in china um we talked about implementing this and how do you implement it well we don't need to have a national registry people have vaccine cards you bring your vaccine card you show it and then of course people go to well what happens if you uh create a fact can anybody create a fake vaccine card yes of course you can but the fbi has put out a statement now because the lollapalooza the music festival they are saying do not buy a fake vaccine card because if you want to have no mask at lollapalooza you have to show your vaccine card and they said the fbi is uh tweeting about this uh it's illegal it endangers yourself and those around you and it's a federal crime that could lead to hefty fines or prison time oh my god yeah so show us your papers just get the facts just get the vaccine folks becoming a darwin award this is quickly moving into darwin award territory we are i talked to my doctor and i was like i want to get the moderna or j and j which one should i get and they're like you got the fives already i'm like yeah i want to take a second like i don't think that's going to make a difference i was like i think it's totally going to make a difference this was like when we got off the pod last week and they're like yeah i was like well just give me the third shot of fisher then and they're like well that's not necessary either i'm like i don't care if it's not necessary i want it give me the third shot of fives and then i open up drudge report yesterday and it's like third shot of vaccine pfizer in israel or whatever they're just gonna start giving people a third shot yeah i just want to get ahead of the customer you're exactly right but by the way there's one other piece of news that came out that i think is very positive on on covid which is the availability of these oral anti-virals the pills that you can take when you get an early case of it right so it's like what they have for tamiflu with the flu like no one should ever die of the flu because tamiflu is like completely effective at stopping it provided you take tamiflu early in the case so i think that you know with the reduced effectiveness of vaccine what we're going to have to do is supplement the vaccines and the boosters with home testing and then you know these oral antivirals so that you get you you take a test you discover you got coveted and you immediately get prescribed you know one of these these uh pills and the pharma companies are coming out there's like three different pharma companies coming out with these oral and antivirals and if freeberg were here he could tell us all about it yeah free break explain the science behind this you know what the science can go itself hey danny meyer chill a great bottle of white burgundy because i'm coming baby let's go baby ready to go oh my lord uh all right the the china situation has been perplexing to me you know my position was always be careful working in china or investing in china we're investing in chinese companies because they could change the rules at any time and change the rules they have in the past a year we talked about obviously and financial uh and jack ma going mia bite dance the ceo and founder uh stepping down as ceo amid chinese regulations and all the scrutiny and then we have dd last week being pulled from the app store in an unprecedented penalty where you're not allowed to download dd and the existing users can use it and then on top of that all the educational companies this week were told that they uh cannot operate as for-profit companies and these companies have gone public in hong kong and in the west uh and this has caused such an acute effect softbank uh is clearing a bunch of its uber position to cover their losses in dd uh and then there is the story of larry chan who is a chinese education entrepreneur he was worth 15 billion in january now he's lost 99 of his net worth according to bloomberg he uh founded gautu taichidou or techchito which is a chinese online tutoring firm as we know education is huge uh in china that company uh gow2 peaked at 140 a share in january and has fallen to three dollars a share big sorted story there 10 cent lost 100 billion in market cap in three days earlier this week as china crack down on what they call the monopoly in music right so while we debate what happens with the monopolies here in the united states china just literally told them and here's the quote from the bbc article the company and its affiliated businesses have been told that they can no longer engage in exclusive deals over music rights and must dissolve any existing agreements within 30 days i mean this would be like biden just saying the app store is now open you have to let other app stores in apple or you know just coming down and saying to amazon you can't sell amazon basics anymore in 30 days no more amazon basics at the site what are we what do you think the end game is here is this a because china seems like they are very deliberate and they plan in centuries what is happening here there's the short term and the long term i think what's happening in the short term is that the same thing that we are talking about in the united states that saks is you know very eloquently basically i think led most everybody in just really framing for a lot of people is this idea that um you know we have privatized free speech and we have put the distribution of information into the hands of three or four founder ceo oligarchs that's also true in china and when you look under the hood of the major internet companies there's four or five guys that are in charge and so i think that in the united states politicians feel increasingly uneasy with those folks having power because it's applied indiscriminately trump gets banned trump may not get banned this person gets distribution this article is considered misinformation that article is considered disinformation this article is suppressed it's a dangerous place to be um and in china they were just like enough's enough so i think the short term as it relates to the internet companies was basically a realization that we are not going to allow any more devolution of power from the chinese communist party to and into the hands of these internet entrepreneurs so that was that was sort of like the so it's a move out of fear they're scared they're gonna lose their power base not scared i think they're just smart and they were like we're not gonna allow this to happen so they don't have to deal with section 230 or any law like that i think it was just a realization that we want them to understand who was boss right and so there was a wave of resignations there was uh now all of this market cap upheaval and this is now where we get to sort of like the appetizer and i think in the appetizer what they're basically saying is we will control how money is made and who makes money and and i think that that sets up the really difficult thing that i think happens which is about the long term so in this in this thing what's happening right now is china very firmly telling everybody we are firmly in control there is no private market and there is no capital market without our approval and that's a really big statement um and in fact it was such a big statement that um i think the chinese uh security authorities then had like a conference call at goldman sachs jp morgan all these folks were invited and you know the vice chairman basically his quote was something to the effect of we promise that any more changes will at least let you know not hey there's nothing nothing to see here or there's nothing more to come it's just more that as we decide new rules we'll make sure that we give you guys enough warning so it's very much firmly saying we know exactly how money is made we will decide who makes money in what way and we're going to make sure that you know all of this wealth creation happens under terms that we define and i think that the set up for the long term the long term in china is complicated it is an enormous demographic time bomb we've talked about this before by the end of 2100 china's population will shrink from 1.1 1.2 billion people down to about 700 million people right so they had very progressive quote unquote under their framework laws of one child policy to basically make it economically viable in the 60s and 70s there was such a number of people those people were able to get great jobs in the you know 80s and 90s and 2000s and now they've realized oh wow we made a huge miscalculation because now there is just not enough people and so china's going to shrink and i think that honestly i think xi jinping probably thinks the simplest way to solve this is to basically nationalize a lot of the economy over time and so i if i was a betting man which i am general but i'm not in china because i just don't understand the market it's superb it's a rich casino it's a stupid place to bet i'm not going to say that i just think that i don't know the market well i think they changed the rules of the game hold on let me just finish what i'm saying i think that what we're start what we're starting to see is the beginning of nationalizations and i think it's going to start in technology universe because those are the critical assets that the chinese need to own for the future so that's in my opinion what's happening i think it's really important what's going on there um and uh yeah i don't know saks when you look at this we've been talking about you know this these two great competitors america and china and who's going to win how does china win if this would seem not having a vibrant entrepreneurial you know socialist communist hybrid is this the end of that experiment and now it's just going to go all national and then doesn't that make it easier for the west to win if china is just going to say we're going to we're going to operate everything and they don't have a competition of ideas if they go that far i think it's really interesting actually to compare what's happening in china with what's happening on the us in the us because on the surface both countries are having this debate about whether big tech needs to be reined in broken up controlled we're having that debate in the u.s and obviously they're having some version of it in china but it's a little bit like the the civil rights debate right where you know we have our civil rights issue in the u.s and you know they have shinzen you know they have uh the uyghurs you know it's like a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the way they react and i think there's i would say there's three main differences here between the chinese approach and the us approach number one data privacy we have a concept of separation between private companies and the data they control and the data that the us government can get its hands on and the us government typically has to get a warrant and go through a corporate scene to get that data what china is doing they've now passed a law basically saying all these companies your data belongs to us if we want it we get it they're taking operational control over the data and you know they're going to use it okay that's a big difference number two i think that china seems to be really worried about these big tech companies not just in terms of whether they might engage in anti-competitive practices or consumer harm sort of those conventional anti-trust concepts in the united states but they're concerned about these big tech moguls becoming power centers in china and you saw this with jack ma right i mean clearly the ccp had a problem with the way that jack ma had become a figure that people rallied around him they looked to him they cared about what he had to say and all of a sudden yes the ant ipo was put on hold but it was more than that right um you know this was not just like you know what the sec would have done all of a sudden jack ma disappears he goes into some sort of house arrest he comes out three months later looking kind of emaciated uh you know they are putting the the fear of god in you know these big tech moguls in a way that we would never do in the u.s i mean look i don't want tim cook to engage in anti-competitive practices but i don't want anything bad happening to tim cook i don't think the guy should be under house arrest if he wants to donate his money to political causes and speak out as a private citizen he has every right to do that and i'll defend his right to do that no matter you know how much i want you know apple to be reined in that they don't have that that again that separate concept in china and i think the last thing that's going on here that's different is you saw china put the kabosh on there are 34 ipos of major china uh chinese tech companies that were scheduled to ipo in u.s markets and they have sort of shut that pipeline down and what it appears to be to they appear to be saying is that you know we've talked about reshoring strategic industries back to the u.s like pharmaceutical manufacturing they seem to be saying we are going to reshore the ipo business we do not want you uh big chinese tech companies ipoing on american markets on american exchanges we are bringing that business back to china and that is why i think you're seeing you know giant ripple effects now because i mean such mom's point about decoupling we now it looks like are going to be decoupling our financial markets and um you know that's why you're seeing you know gigantic hits the valuation that's a would you would you agree with me that the decoupling of these financial markets might be in the best interest of humanity and ultimately the decoupling of these two economies if we don't see eye to eye about human rights and how to treat people maybe it's good that we have a little more distance between the two markets i mean it's hard to know if engagement is the better process but it doesn't seem like the chinese communist party wants to have anything to do with democracy anything to do with free markets they want to control all the markets yeah i mean you could see um but you know in a way the product that the us was exporting to china was was our financial markets and not an in in i think a good way right so that i think the bad version of this is when china is able to buy up ownership in critical strategic centers in the u.s and that affects people's speech rights over here but this is not china buying up ownership in the u.s this was china acting as a consumer of u.s financial markets and um and i think i think it's different right when we're selling products over there that helps correct our trade balance right this is why i don't have a problem with elon selling cars over in china's he's helping our trade balance okay but so but they're kind of canceling that they're kind of saying we're going to reassure this industry we want to have a domestic you know this is creating a mono economy right it's like it's going to blur the lines between public and private ownership and it's going to basically make it one huge pot from which the chinese government can can take and put it back into as it deems fit for the broader success of china as a whole right so if you're a ceo and they don't like you you're going to resign right if you're a company and they're worried about your propensity to be a little too frisky on your own they'll rein you in i'd love to use cyber security law or something else but the point is that i think that we shouldn't take this as free market regulators having their way this isn't lena khan implementing you know some laws this is a top-down decision to nationalize large parts of the economy starting with technology and i know that for some people that may seem unfathomable but if i'm a betting man which i am that's what i would bet on that this is the beginning of the beginning of an attempt to pull these companies in i mean what david said is true the chinese government owns the data of chinese companies so at the end of the day the chinese government also owns the users and it also owns the revenues it just hasn't told you yet yeah in a way it's like the chinese government in our our government is trying to officiate the game fairly and create a really competitive vibrant game and i think what the chinese government just said is the game's over like there is no game yeah no there's a game it just has it's what is the game because it has an uber ceo it made a bunch of ceos general managers in a large corporation that report through a reporting chain to one person xi jinping but there's no more game in terms of building companies and investing in china like how is the west ever going to trust how is goldman sachs or sequoia you know launching a venture firm there or retail investors or hedge fund investors how are they ever going to want to participate in that market because so look for example when you invest in china right or if you set up a fund you know there are two pools of capital right there's the local remember denominated investment vehicles and then there's the us dollar denominated investment vehicles and they do that to segregate where the capital comes from so it's not too difficult for the chinese government to basically say you know what i'm going to actually make a constraint on dollar inflows so that you know the renminbi denominated investment funds that are from chinese investors into chinese companies needs to be above a certain percentage call it two-thirds right or call it 80 they can make all these decisions because these are all just rules that are completely under the control so i i think that people who don't think this is going to happen are probably not looking at the setup the setup seems to be directing itself towards that outcome and it by the way it makes sense for what xi jinping wants to do from no no that's not my question my question is why would masay yoshi-san or another entity ever invest in china because you looked through the risks and you got completely enamored by the population and the tam but what i'm saying now is why would they do it again or are they not going to do it no but there are there are boundary conditions that would say that even before this you would have had to reconsider the population is shrinking there's a different demand side pull that's happening right older people need different kinds of services than younger people there's not enough younger people there's too many men there's not enough women so there's not enough couples there's not all of these demographic issues ultimately will get reflected in the economic reality which is that smart investors would put money in china differently over time anyways but i think that this is a bigger thing as david said which is if that's coming to pass you want to control the pipes because you want to control how that information is presented to people your citizens so that they don't get pissed off and then you might as well just own the economy own the business i see this as being amazing for american tech companies because i don't see who would ever want to be an entrepreneur whoever has a great idea and wants to pursue it in china i just wouldn't do it no i disagree with you and and the reason i disagree with them we don't have access to their markets anyway what company has access to their market the difference is young smart chinese people for decades have been staying in china in part because it was more they could more relate culturally to jack ma than they could to jack dorsey okay that's just i mean that just makes sense sure okay and i understand that and then the second is we uh like a lot of uh like sorry like the opposite of some other western countries that canada closed our doors why would the next jack ma start a company if they saw jack ma disappear that's my baby because you know what if you're coming from china and you can you can only make a billion versus 45 billion i think you still take the shot okay i think j cal is is right in the sense i don't think it's gonna be like a binary decision where all of a sudden everyone just stops doing business in china but they're gonna be hedging their bets i mean if you were a chinese billionaire looking at this landscape your your your priority has got to be to get some wealth outside the country beyond the control of the ccp you're going to be buying bitcoin you're going to be trying to get your money overseas you have got to be very nervous about what's happening buying homes in palo alto absolutely i mean look i think what president xi is doing is fundamentally redefining the bargain between chinese entrepreneurs and the government and here here was the original bargain right the great chinese leader and economic reformer deng xiaoping basically set the bargain you know 40 years ago and what and basically the bargain was this we're going to open up the economy and let you the entrepreneur get rich we're going to keep all the political power so as long as you don't mess with us politically you can get as rich as you want that was the original bargain now president xi is saying there's a new bargain there's a new boss in town and here is the deal that economic interest in china be subordinate to national interest those national interests are defined by the ccp and i run the ccp for exactly they just got layered there is a new ceo that they report to this actually makes me very hopeful actually i think this is going to be like a spiraling down of their economy i don't think it's going to smile i don't i don't think so i mean who's going to change them who's going to invest in their economy everybody guess what because if you want a shred of lithium if you want a battery if you want nickel if you want anything to happen you need to work with china they are incredibly smart and thoughtful they have been strategic while we've been running around you know complaining crying talking about the kindergarten soccer game they were doing the hard work they were doing it for decades and until we find solutions that can work around them we need to work with them i think they just throttled innovation and they just shot themselves in both feet i think they're going to regret this decision i would come out in the middle and say they've just attached a discount rate that now every investor has to consider political risk when they invest in china because the future is very uncertain the bargain is getting changed and if you're an investor you now have to take you're taking some huge positions i agree with david i think that's a better way i would refine what i'm saying by saying it's a distribution of risk where it's closer to russia now than it is to the united states yeah and then i think there's a there's literally an act called the mcginsky act maginski act what is the act that bill broder's lawyer maginski oh yes um because basically in russia they were just killing people and taking their businesses i mean this feels like the equivalent in china yeah i mean they literally that was bill broder's uh lawyer who was tortured to death and i i just don't see anybody wanting to invest there anymore and it just does make the bitcoin in hindsight it does look like they shut down bitcoin a couple of months before making these actions so your point david they probably anticipated that people would start shipping their money out using bitcoin and so they banned bitcoin and now they're banning ceos from having too much power that was probably a sequential event that would be very smart on their part you know can't leave very smart what does this do to like the sequoia capital china the masayoshi-san investing heavily there tencent investing here all the chinese feel very active in the united states investing in companies all the chinese lps are are fine all the chinese gps are fine all the chinese companies are fine i think david's right it's just a discount factor i do think it affects global dollar flows and i think it's hard for um a western capital pool to allocate money into china without doing a little bit more work and applying a higher discount rate yeah i i have to believe that the conversations happening in these firms that have made gobs of money in china over the last couple of decades it has to be are we living on borrowed time how much more time do we have before china says that chinese profits chinese return on investment are going to go to chinese individuals and companies under our control because that's that's the direction it all seems to be headed yeah and how quickly can i get my get out of these positions i mean how do you even get out of these positions if this is the other thing i don't understand if they're going to reverse some ipos how does that mechanically happen are they going to just say it's a buyout it's a second second transaction and they'll just do like a a buyout so if massion hassan owns some amount of dd they say here's the here's the price per share that we pay you here's your cash give us a share ciao that's incredible a forced sale at whatever price they determine ah no i mean like i think these things will operate more efficiently than that because you have a distributed shareholder base so you know china can't force a shareholder of dd to sell the shares because it's listed in an american stock exchange but they but if dd does go private the way that you know the news reports are saying somebody's going to have to backstop that capital i suspect it will be a chinese organization so they will take dd private again and then buy out all of the shareholders who bought from by the way if that does come to pass i think that is the that is an obvious signal that we're moving into sort of a more a nationalization of critical resources and china has determined that internet resources are critical and i think that that's right if i was in their shoes that's exactly what i would do as well does this mean that we should be uh kicking out chinese companies from operating in the u.s i.e tick-tock et cetera no but i do think that tick-tock needs to get carved out of bike dance and it needs to have a completely american cap table but that shouldn't be a government edict that should be something that the bike dance investors and board are scrambling to do right now because otherwise that equity value may go to zero bike dance should be a half a trillion dollar company it probably is a couple hundred billion dollar company now which means that it probably lost half of its market value that's crazy crazy yeah i think i think there's a few things for us to worry about there um i mean i i i i like the idea of out competing china by having freer and more open capital markets and allowing anyone in the world to invest in our companies i think the issues with tick tock are more around data you know we know now that any data that by dance has belongs to the chinese government this isn't just a tick tock issue it's any company any us company that's doing business in china look it applies to zoom okay look zoom we're on zoom right now zoom hat is not a chinese company but it has a giant engineering team in china what are the data implications for that yeah they stopped routing their servers to remember they had some servers routing through china but i do think they're going to have to shut down and sell off whatever their assets are in china that's going to be untenable to have a communication platform you know it's it's kind of like huawei right we don't allow huawei to operate and we're going to have to do that with software right there's been a big crisper breakthrough 65 year old man named patrick doherty uh was suffering with a disease in which his protein was misshaped misshapen uh building up in his body destroying important tissues such as nerves his hands and feet he watched the same disease kill his dad uh and here's the quote had watched others get crippled and die difficult deaths from this disease and it's a terrible prognosis he entered a trial utilizing crispr the gene editing tool and researchers reported the data indicating that the experiment treatment worked well the study doherty volunteered for is the first in which doctors are simply infusing the gene editor directly into patients and letting it find its own way to the right gene in the right cells in this case the cells in the liver making the destructive protein the advance is being held not just as not just for amyloidosis patients but also as a proof of concept that crispr could be used to treat many other much more common diseases it's a new way of using the innovative technology to my thoughts i think this is a really important breakthrough and what it allows us to do now is see a world where look if you if you think about the two different paths of the following idea you're going to make a solution to a problem if if the problem was an internet company or you wanted to make a product what you would do is you would go to amazon web services you'd be able to consume a whole set of abstractions and then you would build a light amount of programming which is essentially like the application logic of your app right i think a lot of people listening understand that idea because that's what they do here what we're getting to a place is now soon we're going to be able to view biological problems in the same way so we're building all these small little building i don't want to call them small but building these very important building blocks that is very much akin to the building blocks we needed to put together the first set of computers to put together ms-dos all of that allowed us to create windows windows allowed us to actually access the internet and there was this in-serie autumn development of things that happened and i think that we're on the verge of that and that's what these kinds of breakthroughs really show us which is that you can view so for example you know in a different company they they've created these mrna gate arrays logic gate arrays so if you're you know a chip designer you would understand how to basically create electrical function in part using you know gate arrays but if you reduce a biological function to the same idea now that same person has a translational ability to solve a different problem that they didn't have before so i think what we're saying is that we're seeing this platformization this awsification a biological tool chain with things like crispr and all the other modalities that need to stack on top of it so that the next person can view it as a programming problem and i think that that's the really exciting path that accelerates a lot of this development but this was an enormously important breakthrough because it validated a lot of what crispr was beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that that up until now was basically what it was known for and a lot of investment had gone into companies that were trying to do things but this was the first really important one [Music] the funny thing about intelli is that it's been public for like seven eight years and it's just been toiling toiling toiling toiling and then you know the last little while obviously it's gone absolutely crazy because of this breakthrough yeah and related new cr in related news crispr creates its first genetically modified marsupials after years of using the gene editing technique crispr to genetically modify everything from vegetables to labs rodents researchers have used it to edit one of the hardest target chats marsupials the mit technology reports i guess it turns out they're very hard to edit and we're now editing more stubbles and changing things like their hair color so brave new world freeberg was here the freeberg ratio would be off the charts all right wrapping up we have pretty incredible just just one thing to add to that i mean i think what it what it shows is that these covet vaccines are just the first product the first breakthrough product of this mrna technology there's going to be a lot more and what i wonder about is you know this this category of vaccine huston people they're kind of like you know in the in the technology world you have kind of a spectrum of early adopters late adopters luddites you know people are actively against technology yeah well i mean luddites are even laggards yeah yeah ludics are even more violently opposed i think the original luddites um i think the original luddites were in england they lost their jobs at some factory and so they broke in to the factory with sledgehammers to destroy all the machines that replaced their jobs so yeah there's clearly a spectrum and what i wonder about is that if you're on sort of the luddite end of the spectrum with respect to biotechnology i mean are you going to have a materially worse life because you're not getting the benefits of all these vaccines and all these treatments and i mean kova could just be the first example of this well i mean if you build on it it's sort of like we're going to create a two-class society one that is not only dealing with all the maladies and cancers and and living longer but we haven't even started to think about well taking somebody who's already in great health and what can you do for them so oh you know what uh you can be two inches taller you could add 10 iq points you could run faster you could have higher blood oxygen whatever i mean we could we could genetically modify people to stay underwater for 10 minutes and be you know better processors of oxygen like other mammals are you could have superhumans i mean that that's basically where this is going yeah and that unlocks a whole nother level of ethical and moral considerations but you're right there could be a group of people who are like i don't want to touch any of this and they die at 60 70 80 years old and then we got another class of people who embrace this and they have 20 more iq points and they live to 120. no i mean it's it sounds funny but and like science fiction but that is in the realm of possibility in our lifetimes there's a lot of great science fiction written about this whole sort of transhumanist idea a book series i really like is uh nexus by ramez nam who actually was a developer at microsoft and you know then became a writer and he writes with i'd say a high degree of sort of accurate accuracy and specificity about these technologies and how they might evolve um people should be sure to check out that book jason be honest if you could actually increase anything in your body through this gene editing what would it be just throw anything out there but the first thing is anything out there anything i would increase my muscle mass 100 percent increase my muscle mass by the way there's a percentage of fat would go down not in reality in absolute terms but just in percentages so this crispr thing was a public company called intellia therapeutics but i want to throw a shout out to another startup that seemingly i think may have had a breakthrough this week called form energy and the reason why these guys are interesting is that they've built this incredibly massive long duration battery out of iron now why is that important we have really simple ways of harvesting iron from the earth it is literally everywhere everywhere you look iron exists it's not so true for nickel it's not true for cobalt it's not true for manganese it's not true for lithium it's not true for all of these other specialty chemicals that we need in order to build batteries but these guys have solved a very complicated technical challenge that'll allow you to store energy cheaply which has huge implications for electricity and grids and so big shout out to these guys at form uh because if if if it looks like what they said they did is true it's a really important breakthrough that'll have some important uh ramifications it's a lot it's amazing by the way to see progress now you wake up and you read these things and you're just like god this is incredible that there are people working away on that really matters it's almost as if there's like one group we talked about cynicism in a previous episode recently there's one group of people whether you're in the founder circles or capital allocator or a journalist covering the space uh who understands it there there's a a technical you know explosion going on here an innovation that is going to solve a lot of problems and they have another group of people who think that all these problems are intractable i'm kind of looking at this you know what happened with kovid and i was talking to my wife about global warming and i was like feels to me like we can solve global warming like it feels like it's very much in our control and there's another group of people who feel like it's over and don't have kids because the whole planet is going to go on we're i mean uh i think elon tweeted this out um and i think we've talked about this now with respect to china but you know we have an enormous problem in the world in general which is that unless our birth rate is positive and accretive it has huge implications to progress right if you just like if you eliminate or you decrease the denominator of the global population the odds that there's another elon musk or jeff bezos that are created are just lower and so net of anything else a declining population rate particularly in western countries has huge detrimental effects to the world and so all the folks that think that they're going to solve the ecology of the world by not having kids it's a little misguided the thing to do is to actually have a positive birth rate find technological solutions to this problem and allow what we've been able to do which is a rising populace to basically be motivated to work and solve problems and i think that we have to be very careful about that because if people don't get this right they're going to take the wrong solution it's not going to be a solution at all and it's going to make the problems even worse could you imagine if the population of the earth shrank in half what it would mean in terms of productivity services the health care requirements that are needed the cost of providing those things the economic viability of countries will go away it would be a disaster yet there is a group of people who feel we should do exactly that and not a small group of people yeah well they think that i think i think the mistake is in thinking that human consumption is the problem um and specifically with respect to to climate change or global warming no you you can't see it that way because look humans in order to exist need to consume and we're going to emit carbon as part of that process the important thing to focus on is energy production are you shifting to clean production not because you're never gonna be able to shrink your consumption enough to to basically eliminate carbon emissions um it has to be done on the production side and one of the interesting things that's happening now i think we should talk about is in europe they're creating this new carbon trading plan i think china's even trying to set up one of these markets and so they're creating these new um you know marketplaces to trade carbon permits and i think the most exciting part about this is that it gives an incentive for um for innovators to create new technologies that actually take carbon out of the atmosphere uh they're called negative emissions technologies because what happens is if you have a technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere you can now sell a permit on the exchange that gives somebody else the right to emit that carbon and now those technologies those those um those nets the negative emission technologies it's unclear whether they really exist yet but no one's going to create them if there's not a customer for them and that's what's really cool about these new tradable permit schemes is they create a buyer for for for those nets and i think that's ultimately how we're going to solve this problem of climate change we're not going to do it through reducing human consumption like we're going to go back to the stone age if you don't want to emit carbon it's about moving to clean production of energy and creating uh negative emission technologies yeah let me just build on that for a second there's look there's a bunch of cap and trade systems china basically has a terror a carbon tax system in place the big thing that none of these folks have gotten to yet but i think if you look at the laws in europe they're going there is the idea of a carbon tariff and i think these carbon taxes if they actually exist properly will look like a tariff what does that mean let's just say you're britain and you want to import a volkswagen from germany if britain has a carbon tariff that says basically you need to account for all of the emissions that went into making this car and i'm going to assess an import duty that basically maps to that um i think that that's where the world is going and that's probably david to your point it's going to be a really big value unlocked because the amount of money that will get both made but also destroyed in that process will be incredible and that's where we have a chance to really reimagine consumption in a different way like there are just so many categories i saw this interesting stat if you look at cpg companies right companies like procter gamble clorox and you compare them to the places where they sell their goods like walmart and target every single major big box retailer has basically declared a net zero emission strategy in the next five to ten years not a single company on the cpg side has actually any plans to do anything meaningful anywhere near 2030 2045 2050. and when you look under the hood those companies like png and clorox are enormous emitters enormous so even though you walk into a target in amazon and you try to make yourself feel good thinking thinking to yourself i'm buying something that's zero emissions it's not true it's basically that amazon will will bear the cost of getting to net zero but the products that you actually consume are horrible for the environment and the amount of you know um fossil fuels that went into it and the amount of plastic that will then get put into the ocean it's tremendous and so moving slightly more aggressively beyond these cap and trade systems into something that looks more like a tariff i think could be really important for the world and we're going to need to do it there's and there are multiple ways to do it i don't know if you guys saw elon backed this the uh x prize carbon sequestrant sequestrant project which is a 100 million dollar prize and you can do this in multiple ways you can do it at the factory and there's the one trees.org i don't know if you saw that where they're trying to plant a trillion trees because that's the original way to uh sequester this carbon so there's going to be like three or four different ways to do this and if there's an incentive to do it yeah that um is going to help for sure part of why there's such political disagreement over this is because you look at approaches like the green new deal i mean i think they understand the the problem but what they're proposing is always on the consumption side it's basically politicians picking and choosing how people are going to consume carbon whether it's you know cracking down on private planes to you know factories i mean again taking us back to the stone age nobody wants to no no one sane i think wants to support that kind of totalitarian principle that the politicians get to tell us how to consume but this is this is why i think these these market-based solutions where you say look carbon emissions are obviously an externality if you want to emit you need to basically pay the correct price for carbon emissions and we use the the money that you pay as as some sort of whether it's a tax or whether it's buying a permit we use that money then offset into negative carbon emissions it's a market-based system where the government controls the externality but they don't dictate how people get to consume carbon and i think that's the right balance and we don't really have that type of balanced conversation in the u.s yet because you've kind of got one side that says they want to save the planet but they want to control everything and then you've got the other side saying well look i want to save the economy because your plan the green new deal is going to destroy it what we need is is again a market-based solution to this and i guess the criticism of a market-based solution is you're basically giving people a way to a the most cynical interpretation would be you can pay to pollute you can just you can pollute all you want and just pay a fine essentially but that's not the right way to look at it you're actually offsetting somebody else is capturing what you put out there and it depending on the rules of the road if you had to capture 50 more than you put in you could create a formula there right i mean there could be some formula that over time there's been a lot of fraud in this market like um you know people sell these carbon credits from you know certain forests and there's this joke which is like there's been a tree that's been sold like 80 billion times because it's like you can't really verify you can only really estimate the amount of carbon sequestration that you know for example a tree actually does in the first place and so there's been just a lot of um unfortunately you know fly by night uh unreliable non-trustworthy ways that this market has evolved people have been waiting for decades for this carbon trading market to really step into high gear which is why some folks think the more aggressive plan will just be introduce tariffs and let the market david to your point sorted out jeremiah what do you think the prospects are for these negative emission technologies i i can't believe that a solution as low tech as planting trees is going to solve the problem yeah yeah so the question is what do you what do you think assuming we create the market the demand for negative emission technologies the permits to emit what do you think the prospects are technologically that innovators are going to come up with these solutions i do think that we are a couple of breakthroughs away from these things being non-issues so i'll give you a couple of examples if you look at like i'll just use batteries as an example because where i'm spending a lot of time when you look back and like you ask yourself like how did we decide to make the batteries the way we make them um you know was it some like you know broad survey of every single chemical composition and all these different structures and we realized that you know a composition of nickel and manganese and cobalt was the right thing to do or lithium and iron and phosphate was it turned out that it was mostly like a handful of people decided and we all just been iterating around the edges ever since so one of the solutions to a lot of these problems is to actually go back to first principles the problem is that as these industries get built up and you know this you have so much um pp e like so much equipment so much investment in physical capex that's happened the idea of switching platforms is almost impossible because it's not economically viable so we are in this situation today where a bunch of solutions have been proposed david to solve that problem right the problem with carbon capture and other other things and negative emission technologies is that they're extremely expensive they're very inefficient they require an enormous amount of energy themselves and it's not clear that they work so what's happening one is that there's been some pretty novel innovations in moving people past some of these basic problems by looking at the periodic table to try to find different ways of solving things like energy storage which has huge implications to climate but the second is that we are pushing the boundaries of physics in different ways as well and that's where there's going to be the potential for an enormous breakthrough specifically around superconductors so what is a superconductor it's something that allows an enormous amount of energy to basically trans through it now we have this issue which is that you can actually create superconductors in highly controlled environments that are extremely extremely cold but they have incredible performance characteristics that would revolutionize power and energy transmission and storage people have been innovating in bringing that up to room temperature in that breakthrough which i think you will see in the next 20 to 30 years it's just a complete sea change of how we think about this whole problem so i think the short term we're innovating in the periodic table in the long term we're figuring out how to bend the laws of physics and i think that those are those are probably the two most practical solutions to a lot of these things that remove the constraints that we've created and again the constraints have been completely human defined which is the sad thing they were not necessary from the start we could have made very different decisions had we known these problems were going to be as big as they were you know the way that we make plastic didn't have to be this way right the amount of petroleum that we use it didn't have to be in this specific way but this is where we are and there are direct air capture technologies dac which is basically an energy issue you can literally suck the carbon dioxide out of the air and again another another issue of material science because the the substrates that you use tend to be relatively inefficient and sort of really activate them you're pumping a tremendous amount of energy through there that's the issue is can you give the energy and i think when we talked about the small reactors uh the small modular nuclear reactors if energy is free or it's solar based you could you could kind of get a virtuous cycle going here that's essentially what superconductors allows you to see is a world where you basically have limitless free energy it sounds like the thing that we all agree on is that this problem is ultimately going to be solved by innovation and this is the problem i have with so many of the political proposals is you know our ability to innovate is a function of the size and scope of our economy and the incentives and rewards for innovation and the freedom for entrepreneurs to do their thing and if you crush that yeah you know with government mandates you won't get the innovation we need to get out of this problem we can easily innovate our way out of it and it requires some individual to say i want to dedicate my life to it and then what is the motivation to do that and who are the capital allocators who are going to give them the billion dollars to create this i spent a bunch of time so i'm the capital allocator that'll give billions in fact i did a survey of the superconductor space as an example and here's what i found of the of the four folks that i found uh who are all each individually doing things in superconductors that i think are incredible they're all immigrants every single one were not born in the united states you could you they are so happy to be here they feel so lucky and they don't understand why everybody complains all the time yeah complaining is i there's a disease of constantly complaining about stuff and if you count the number of times you complain every day and it's more than two or three times a day uh you need to get your head examined you're probably just talking yourself into anxiety problems stop complaining start building i mean these problems are solvable there is an immigrant in in the united states right now that will figure out how to conduct electricity without resistance it will transform the world and we are so lucky that that guy came here to to this country and we have the chance to give the guy a billion dollars one of my favorite movies is uh whack the dog with chris and robert de niro right yeah and dustin hoffman plays this producer character yeah and every time there's a setback he's like ah this is nothing i remember when we made this movie and three out of the four lead actors died and we recast the movie it's like this is nothing yeah and you know and that's sort of his catchphrase is he's got this can-do attitude where no matter what setback happens he just makes it he's like oh this is nothing we got it and you know and that's kind of the attitude you need if you want to be an entrepreneur is there's gonna be so many setbacks you gotta be like ah this is nothing can you figure out a way around it yeah this one of the guys that are working on superconductors showed me his data for the last 10 years and what's interesting david to your point is he had a four-year period where he took a huge step back where basically like you know he had this superconductor he's like it works at you know i'm just gonna use simpler numbers here but like you know minus 300 celsius he got it all the way up to minus you know 100 and then it went back to minus 200. for four years could you imagine the mental devastation and i said how did you deal with it he goes ah you know basically he's like ah it's nothing yeah and thank god for that guy it's interesting i just listened to quentin tarantino's on a podcasting tour because he's got a new book he he wrote a novel out of the once upon a time in hollywood characters and i just started listening to it it's fantastic uh listen on audible and uh [Music] brian koppelman from the moment interviewed quentin i listened to it yesterday on my bike ride and he was just talking about how he just never gave up and he had written true romance and then he wrote um what was the other one he wrote at that time natural born killers natural killers yeah and he was just talking about how the first movie nobody would do then he wrote the two screenplays and nobody would do and then he got to our dogs and you know they tried to scrape together eight hundred thousand dollars and he kept asking like why didn't you quit why didn't you quit he's like well you know i just i figured it out like i figured out i had a voice and then nobody would buy my scripts because i was trying to do something innovative and they were reading the scripts and they didn't understand what i was doing in terms of innovating on how a movie would be with you know how he does with pulp fiction he changes the time and tells the storytelling in a non-linear fashion he's like nobody understood it but every time i read it i realized i had a voice it was my voice it was getting better and better and then people you know i sold those movies and then he kept building them and it was very inspiring to think about that take of like he just didn't give up and he just totally looked at his work and he found his he found his own value in his own work improving even without the external you know it's a it's a fantastic story it's like one of those classic you know hollywood or entrepreneur stories he's working at a video store for years and you know he would start recording he was uh making his own movie and he would uh film on the weekends and then you know he made a few hundred dollars every week basically and then he would rent the equipment on a friday because then they would only charge him for one day because it was the weekend so he could basically record the entire weekend and so he'd go off and record and and then he'd have to go back to work and he started making this movie you know one weekend at a time for like two or three years and then he finally put he didn't even have the money to get the film developed so finally after three years he gets the film develop and he's unfortunately it sucked it wasn't what he was expecting but during that time uh he wrote true romance which then got bought he sold that screenplay that gave him a little bit of money then he wrote reservoir dogs and then he met lawrence bender and you know bender went out read the script it was like holy that's amazing they raised the you know million or so bucks to make the movie and then that kind of launched everything and uh yeah it's it's one of these you know amazing rags to riches stories um you know they're kind of rare and or they're more rare in hollywood they occur all the time in the tech such industry interesting point he said uh they're like you would never let you make that movie now and you know in another conversation i think i listened to three podcasts with them uh joe rogan brady cineless and then brian koppelmans and all three of them are tremendous but uh i think in the bretty cinel and in the joe rogan one he's like oh they would never let you make that movie he was like you can just make it i just made it i did you not see the last two films and how politically incorrect they were and you know i don't care what bruce lee's you know fans think of how i portray bruce lee he was a he was a bad actor he was a terrible you know human being to these folks and he his basic thing was everybody keeps waiting to ask for permission and he's like i'm just going to make my movies and uh let the chips fall where they may i'm not going to be censored i'm not going to censor myself and i'll make my 10 movies and that's it game over i'm going to tell it right a story i want to tell this uh poker story i get one last thought on tarantula yeah you tell your story tarantino's success with reservoir dogs i think it came out in 1991 that really inspired me to want to make movies um because i saw that somebody could make a movie outside the system for so little money and that's why i made thank for smoking um and we have another we have another independent movie coming out next year about several dali which you know finally got made after about 15 years so um yeah i mean he's inspired a lot of people and he shows what can be done uh this is a rags to riches story that involves j-count so uh i get invited i get invited to the harvard business school to give a speech first and last time i was invited because i was disinvited jason after that what happened but well the back two rows walked out in the first five minutes wow incredible it was incredible like we i get invited to do this thing obviously it's in boston it's in winter time right jacob it was it was winter and it was boston it's like not a great trip so sax you know i was like okay jacob what are we gonna do to spice this trip up and we invite big al oh okay and uh we get on the plane and big al says oh you want to play a little poker i said absolutely and i turned to jake allen i said jason do you want to play he's like i said you know you guys can play against each other and i said jason why don't you deal he's like i'm not interested in dealing and i said j kyle i'll give you ten percent of whatever i win i was like shuffle up he deals the game for six hours from l.a chinese poker to boston i smash big al i smash miguel smash uh i smashed him and then we go into the thing we have like a nice dinner blah blah blah we go out we have the thing at the at harvard where i said something like you know i think an mba is basically worthless it's just not a good use of your time i think you should be out building things the back two rows walked out they were completely offended and uh i did the speech it doesn't matter i get back on the plane and we're flying back and uh at some point i realized i said jason what's the tally and jason says i'm up 40 000. and i said excuse me you're up for and it turned out that i was smashing him smashing smashing anyways the long story short of it was that we circled for a few times and then we finally landed and jkl won fifty five thousand dollars but that's circling so you could win more okay here's what you don't know through the pack of cards at jason and said i never want to see you ever again i never want to have you play poker sure guys i went to the pilots and i told them i'll give you five grand if you can make this flight last another hour and they were like yeah we got a circle they got we just kept circling i was like i gotta get another hour in he lost five hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a stupid trip he never even wanted to come he just came he didn't wanna go to the best michelin star restaurant in boston oh my god in boston it's so stuffy by the way it's so stuffy and so stuffy they take themselves so seriously and they're trying to you know bring you know 18 courses to us and you know big owls are big guys he's called big al for a reason i mean he's a linebacker and they say the big he's like i'll take this i want a steak what do you think he's like oh there's a steak included in the prefix you should do the tasting manure it's like oh yeah tasting money it let's go i'll put more truffles on it like it's not truffle season sorry he's like okay we'll make it truffle seasoning anyway he start bringing the food and he he wants to eat a steak and they bring him like you know what i was funny sees in a movie where like they pulled the tin and it's like a like a small piece of meat that's like giant giant shaffer comes flying off a piece of parsley and that's it the steak was the size of a pack of wrigley's gum i am not kidding they took like a beautiful steak and they just made a little rectangle out of it he takes his fork he puts it on and he holds it up to the woman he goes where's my steak and he puts the whole thing if you ask him about the strip he's like i lost so much money yeah he's like i didn't eat it was cold and but it was cold it was the worst trip ever this is a horrible trip ever and he is like the woman's like well how can we make you happy he's like bring me a steak well sir we gave you a steak point the steak container how many steaks how many steaks are you going to afford now that uh robin hood just went public congrats um yeah you know it's right now it's my third biggest win uh ubercom and then this one and you know time in market i i think robin hood going out at 30 billion there's a chance this could go 10 20 30 x from here i think it could be a trillion dollar company someday 22 million members even through all the craziness that we talked about on this podcast uh you know they're learning they're fixing things and 22 million people using the product and they're gonna launch so many other products as part of it and all these young people getting financially literate i know it's a double-edged sword but i kind of feel like this generation balance it's it's it's better balance is important i mean can you imagine if we were in our 20s trading derivatives and options and just trading stocks all day i wanted to do that but it was too hard you had to get a broker it was 35 dollars a trade when i started trading and you had to call charles schwab and put it in order all the things of all the things i could have done online in my 20s and 30s uh trading stocks what didn't end up being high on the list but you didn't play right but that's what these kids are doing like for them this is you know in the same zone a lot of them as sports betting wagering playing poker for money they're they're learning i don't know how you feel like investment strategy well i mean if you make a lot of mistakes early in your career when you're making 100 bets or buying a tenth of a stock that's true you know it's small stakes and you're going to learn a hell of a lot so i think the education part is you can only learn by doing right sex i mean you just really can't learn in a you know anything okay listen there's been an amazing episode even without freeberg uh we miss you freebird come back next week uh let the conspiracy theories abound but freeburg just was busy he couldn't make it and we all wanted to we missed each other so we wanted to see our besties we love you freeburg and we love you freebird we love you for your bird back at your favorite and we'll see you all next time on the all in podcast bye-bye rain man david and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy besties [Music] we need to get back [Music]






he's optimizing the view now i'm optimizing for shade actually i'm trying to get out of the oh christ you look like a look at that i mean this dip showed up he showed up to my beach club yesterday and it was basically like someone had taken a mummy and then wrapped a mummy inside of a white sheet and then presented him at this point at this place oh he lathered in his like spf 500. and so i laughed at one point i said at one point let's go for a walk and this had the nerve to grab his cell phone and a battery pack for the cell phone i forced him to leave the phone he felt naked then i made him take off his shoes and socks and then i tried to get him to take his shirt off we got almost all the way there yeah that makes sense all right everybody here we go three two three [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to everybody's favorite game show guess who's not in italy with us today david sacks wearing sunglasses with the view of an ocean clearly on a nautical vessel and i'm in an old apartment in the center of florence and chamoth is at his hideaway somewhere in the countryside and friedberg is in front of a abstract piece of art two people high on crystal meth trying to break into his car in san francisco i'm no longer a san francisco resident i'm proud and sad to say after 20 years of living this city i have relocated still in a not to a nondescript location still in california but uh you're in the bay area enough i'm in the bay area so with us again obviously raid man the dictator and back from a week off the queen of quinoa what ha tell us uh queen you had a big week you had a some nice ink come out some press about the production board raising some monster round and you took the week off give us the feedback what was it like taking a week off from the pod and uh now you're getting press and you're becoming a public figure uh what's it been like for you the past week and tell everybody what went down with this new fund you know my strategy was to take a week off from the pod and then have the ratings go up and then i could quietly and nicely exit um as the as a member of the cast but uh unfortunately i've been drawn as al pacino said just when i thought i was out i am back in so uh it's i missed you guys i actually listened to the all in pod for the first time ever last week you guys did a great job you've been complaining these other last 41 times without even listening to it you know um i will say i listen to it while we're on it but this was um actually really interesting because that's big of you you're actually listening while we're taping we we do it ourselves i hear the whole freaking thing in real life so listening to it i found it really entertaining and i uh i think i have a better appreciation it's less about some of the points and facts we make which i've been pitching and complaining about the topics and you know where we go with the conversation and stuff but it's just generally just nice to just hear everyone you know kind of shoot the anyway good job so you're saying you're a fan of of the all in pod i might get a wet your beak mug from one of our outfits i have one i haven't i actually use it you sent me a whole gift basket from the kid who's paying for college based on our ip it's all good um no so we yeah we announced our tpb funding last week too which i have been running the production board for four years now a little over four years it's been my primary vehicle where i've been primarily incubating new businesses and making some investments from the balance sheet uh you know we've raised several rounds of capital over the last few years we've never talked about it publicly we've never done press around it but um as you guys know the primary reason for going public with it was really just to gain recruit interest in the work that we're doing so we really want to see great people be made aware of the work we're doing at the production board and each of our individual businesses so we could start to um you know at least get get get folks knowledgeable and aware of us so when we uh reach out and and folks are interested in thinking about what else they might want to do with their careers and their lives you know were hopefully there for them so that you know it was great i mean it's nice to kind of share what we're doing we also shared five of our businesses that we've incubated several of which have been stealth up until now uh you know one of which jason i think you've kind of referenced in the past our molecular beverage printing company canna so that one's kind of starting to emerge a little bit more now after several years of r d and work so we're kind of making progress now and i'll uh hopefully have more to share over time in terms of what we're doing but we're excited and it's great to have great investors come in yeah it's a great piece in cnbc by ari levy uh i guess you gave him he's a great journalist by the way like old school legit journalist yeah and i think fan of the pod how did you pick ari to be the the vehicle for this to use a pr firm where you just decided i'm going to share it with this one person we had a mutual person who's npr who introduced us i didn't want to go do a broad pr thing so i was just kind of like um let's get you know i was going to do my medium post which i wrote was like a blog post and that was the primary content and then it was like let's just find someone good who can kind of at least you know push people to that content that can speak well to our business and you know he was recommended i've never met him before great guy so you know we just wanted to kind of get that one piece done anyway he did a great job he said he i think he's been on your show right but if you're you're he's shown my show he's been on this week in startups yeah and i i see him when i used to go to cnbc i would you you walk down uh at one market you used to go there trim off too and you walked down like a row of journalists and as you go to get on set i don't know this time to youtube one or two of the journals will intercept you and try to get a story so he would always tell me hey i heard that travis at uber was this or whatever uh but great job on the inc it's great to see you uh you know raised 300 million there was a lot of references to larry and sergey and google maybe you could tell us what how much uh who who led the round this 300 million dollar round and what's google's involvement when i first started the production board it was my i had made personal investments with my own money and started some businesses with my own money and i had a series of dinners and conversations with larry page about like doing something together with alphabet i knew larry from my google days obviously um and uh you know we ended up kind of after a bunch of conversations with folks at the level below kind of saying let's i didn't want to manage a fund and i didn't want to go work at alphabet so the idea was i would set up a holding company kind of a permanent company that like any business has a balance sheet with cash on it and can do stuff with that money and alphabet invested in the holding company they put some cash in and this was four years ago and they became a minority shareholder and had a board seat and i set up a board and so that's the work and then we've raised another round since then and then we just raised this round we announced last week and so our you know the round was i think uh i don't know if we announced but it was kind of co-led by blackrock we had um you know morgan stanley koch industries bayley gifford allen and company um foxhaven arrowmark just a bunch of really high quality long-term institutional investors alphabet put more money in the the gates family office called cascade has been an investor with us for a while so they all put money in into the round and um you know it's it's great because we can use that capital to build new businesses and support some of our existing businesses so some of our businesses are really hard deep tech companies we don't want to have to go rush out and raise venture money or and we don't want to have an incentive to try and mark the asset up and you know get a good mark on it so really we can use some of our money now to support some of our businesses until they're ready to go commercial or until they're ready to raise outside capital if that makes sense for them not always going to make sense um and so we have so you and you own 100 of every business that comes out of here then you find a management team as we discussed and then spin them out chamoth what do you think of this venture studio approach which has only really worked for bill gross from idealab and maybe john borthwick with beta works in new york and i guess science maybe worked as well with dollar shave club but here you have you know i think fredberg a great um entrepreneur as well uh doing this what are your thoughts on this studio model going long uh in in building companies in a studio system well i think it means a lot of different things to different people so i'm not sure honestly what a venture studio is that's different in somebody else's view than what freebrook is doing but what i will say is that the different thing that he's doing which i believe in is you have to become uh extremely hyper focused um you know i think that there was a moment where if you look at when idealab was really successful or when beta works was really successful in the case of idea labs they had a very specific prototypical web 1.0 business betaworks had a very prototypical web 2.0 kind of social business they all work because these guys were experts in those things and so i'm pretty bullish on what friedberg's doing just because he's not trying to boil the ocean he's being very specific around you know synthetic biology and i think that that is probably what got other people excited because then not only from friedberg's execution capability which i really believe in but then now think about it if you're an investor i don't want to put my money into something that all of a sudden looks like nine other things where all of a sudden it creates a lot of correlation that i didn't really know existed especially when i'm investing hundreds of millions of dollars it's a very big deal that a lot of investors have and so when freebur can very legitimately say look i'm you know explicitly focused in this thing and then he also said and friedrich you may want to talk about this and this is the only thing i'm going to focus on it gives an investor a lot of confidence because it's like here's a really smart guy who's done this before he's going to stay in this swim lane and do something really specific here and now i can understand how it fits into the rest of my portfolio so i think that there is a lot of value for um investors in a bunch of different ways so i don't know i'm i'm super excited i appreciate that i mean i think like one of the things that mattered to me jason and the way i kind of frame it like a lot of people think oh venture studio it's about how many things you crank out that's like y combinators model for me it's not about how many businesses you start it's about absolute value creation so you know you have to do the the things that you have the resourcing to do with the objective being to drive business value as a whole so that means doing one thing doing three things doing five things it's not about how many things you know whatever the right balance is it's not about just cranking out businesses because each one of these things we have to continue to be active and we need to continue to build and when we start a business we reserve a good chunk of the business as equity for the team that works on it so it's not like we're 100 owners right we've got to get the right people they've got to feel like and act like owners in that business with us you wind up owning 50 or ballpark 40 what do you think it actually varies quite a bit so you know without getting into too many details i mean you know when we start the business we're the majority owner and in many cases when we've brought in other investors over time we get diluted down to become a minority owner so 30 or something like that like as if you did the series a or something but but in many cases we end up being um you know we want to continuously fund some of these businesses um because it may not make sense to bring in outside investors and and we'll continue to be the majority owner and but we create an independent board we make sure that the the team feels like it's an independent business and we give them a lot of infrastructure and tooling finance hr legal facilities uh support recruiting support etc and obviously templates for how to succeed and and play books and so on so that's a lot of what i would call our platform value amazing another bestie housekeeping by the way david sacks is an investor in tpb i don't know if you guys knew that invested around ago so good good job saks good job saks is that another unicorn for me technically yes look at you uh well in other news uh sax this is like the victory lap uh episode saks you announced you're closing 1.1 billion dollars with a b in craft's third fund and explicitly talking about focus to chamot's point explicit focus on marketplaces and sas uh maybe you could explain uh how long it took you to raise the 1.1 billion i think the first phone was 300 million the second was 600 million so you're basically doubling each time almost i mean the first time was 350 second fund was 510 this one is 1.12 billion it's going to be 612 million for venture which is c series a series b and 510 for growth and yeah we are focused on sas and marketplaces i kind of run the sas practice and my thesis is really the same as it was when i was doing yammer which is apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software make it go viral inside companies uh sort of sell it bottom up through the average employee as opposed to top down through the cio uh and then the other gp in the fund jeff floor is focused on marketplaces he was the founder ceo of stubhub which was one of the original e-commerce marketplaces on the web and uh so he leads the marketplace practice and those are also you know i would say along with sas marketplaces are the best kind of internet businesses to to create and so we've just decided to focus on those two areas and that's kind of enough for the world for us and in related news your project call-in which is a podcasting plus casual audio application has been doing great in beta yeah and uh i'm proud to announce that uh we had a small allocation for our syndicate the syndicate.com which is my syndicate and then the all-in syndicate which we created as a lark uh between those two syndicates my syndicate had 900 requests to invest over i think seven million dollars we had a small one million dollar allocation and we basically did a lottery uh so something like one in i don't know seven or six got in and then the all-in syndicate also filled up and then the all-in syndicate no carry no fees everybody gets a free ride thanks to david sacks and uh that's our first all-in syndicate chipping away at my core business and eating my lunch thank you and that the all-ins that they all unsyndicated is is going to be 250 000 uh 250 1 000 checks with no feet no carry and um the company is paying the administrative expense of that we just want to let you know 250 of our listeners what their beaks yeah so and uh is it open yet sex like can anyone download the app and use it yet no it's still in private beta we're going to open up soon you know we'll certainly getting better i was looking at it the other day it's getting really tight i mean can i talk a little bit about it or do you not want to keep it yeah go for it yeah well i mean here's the genius of it um and i mean that sincerely uh not just because you gave me an allocation but um clubhouse when you go to clubhouse if you miss the great conversation it's gone and clubhouse has really bad audio quality and the rooms are and there's really you know there's clubs as a concept but in call-in uh everybody creates a show then the show is syndicated to an rss feed like a podcast so you can basically start your own podcast with no staff no post-production you just talk and then it goes out to an rss feed so we're thinking david and i of doing like a post uh show after all in like two days after just to talk to the fans and do like a little private group thing but it's kind of like a really nice overlap of podcasting and um yeah well i was going to say it's it's basically long tail podcasting using social audio as the gateway drug to you know to long tail podcasting uh because is a company worth 4 billion yet we have we internally marked up the round four times like jason horowitz did with clubhouse let me ask let me get your mouth in the conversation jamal what do you think of a venture firm making a seed investment at 100 million then a billion then at 4 billion for a product that you know it's largely sideways this is like internal three bets and marking it up 10x and then 4x so 40x lift over three rounds what do we think of this i think the best venture firms shouldn't give a about any company and i don't think that they really do if they're very savvy they should be doing exactly what andreessen um you've seen the articles about tiger you've seen all these other folks the real question is maybe if you want can you please explain what they're doing and what they're doing is to me if you understand the investing landscape makes a ton of sense which is technology used to be the small niche and so we used to only get you know when i started social capital there was probably 25 to 30 billion dollars a year flowing into venture just in 2011. fast forward a decade we have like 120 billion dollars a year going into tech and it's going up like crazy and if you're the best brands you're going to get the overwhelming amount of interest from people who want to get into the asset class as the asset class expands right so if all of a sudden you know you decided to invest in private equity when private equity was going bonkers you're not going to take as much of a shot on an emerging manager you're going to want to take a shot on blackstone or kkr right and that's what's allowed those folks carlisle to scale aum just unbelievably blackstone i think is under management exactly half a trillion dollars now at blackstone similarly there are these indelible brands in venture and when everybody realizes they need to be long tech they jump in now when they do that you have to understand who these people are there are two things that matter one they are people like pension funds and their hurdle rate meaning you know what are they trying to do better than in terms of it of a rate of return is in the low to mid single digits that's really important to know nine percent ten percent not even but not even not even five percent six percent okay and then the second thing you need to know is that these guys have so much money that they would rather when they spend an hour meeting with you they'd rather give you a 50 million dollar check than a 5 million dollar check a 5 million dollar check just compounds their problems so if you put these two things together it makes a ton of sense for companies like andreessen to now focus on the velocity of money raise a fund put the money to work raise a new fund in a very systematic way that everybody can understand and can predict so that andreessen can tell their lps on a calendar guys i'm going to be back to you in 18 months guys i'm going to be back to you in a year and be able to scale the capital and i think if you if you look at it in that framework it explains and recent it explains excel it explains sequoia and by the way it's a brilliant strategy because these guys still make two and a half percent on the money they end up returning the market beta meaning what the average market would do anyways plus a little bit of alpha right so they'll still do a little bit better than the market which means they'll be able to raise money infinitely so if i'm just using the public market or the venture market it's a venture market no but that'll decay right so that'll decay down to the two to 10 or 12 but my point is it's still better than the five or six percent these pension funds and other folks need to earn so today the goal of every fund that's successful that has a brand david's included should be do good deals make sure you're in things that that can work and the thing that david has which other folks know is david can help make things work when they're not necessarily obvious but then pound the money in and then raise more money as fast as you can because then you know it helps the investor that's what they want and they're happy to pay you and then for you the gp you start to make enormous fees and the whole cycle works so for and recent i think that's the calculus it's like if i can put 100 million in that's 100 million less i have in my fund now i can go i'm 100 million closer to raising the new fund okay now the criticism has been freedberg i'll go to you it's bad hygiene for the same firm to mark up the same product three times in this case you know um clubhouse what's in it clubhouse so is that a warning sign for you that it's a bubble or it's kind of the the worst case i've heard is like marking up your own book self-dealing whatever how do you look at that issue freeberg and then i'll go to you sex well if it were spacex you would look like a genius so you know i think we can criticize it until what's up or what's that and sequoia has done this many times where they've been the lead in multiple rounds in the company and they have high conviction in the quality of a business and they don't want to bring other investors in and when you have high conviction and you can continuously buy more of the stock and buy more of the company and be a bigger owner and then it works out you look like a freaking genius and so i don't want to criticize the investing style of these guys i mean time will tell if they made good bets or not as a whole you can kind of make the case maybe that they're trying to be asset managers and drive assets under management up and gain more fees but i think lps are a little shrewder than that they'll kind of take a smarter look at that at the end of the day the guys that are known for doing this like sequoia and founders fund and others have had incredible returns by doing exactly this so the strategy does work and you know you just have to have to do it with the right businesses and that i think that will you know demonstrate the quality of your investing acumen all right sax any further thoughts on that the marking up your own book is that something you plan on doing with this new fund and having the growth and how would you look at hey call in starts getting some traction does that mean your growth fund is going to go mark it up and take that those shares or do you think that it's better hygiene to have the market price it well i guess it just depends i mean the growth fund does give us the ability to double down at a later stage on our own early stage companies but you do have to be really sure when you do that because it does you know it certainly raises questions if you're wrong right that you wouldn't have with any other investment so it just it definitely raises the stakes you have to be really certain i guess but you know if colin's a big hit do we go raise you know a growth round yeah and now i think what we might do in that case because we incubated it is we'd let somebody else lead the round and then we would participate so you have some third parties setting the price because we incubated the company and frankly that's what we did with the round that you just participated in is craft participated but we did not set the terms it was actually uh gold crest and sequoia co-led the round with craft when you incubate a company like that let me ask another technical question because the audience last week or in the week before really responded well to us talking about this as opposed to covet and delta variant uh which we'll talk about at the end of the show for those people you can basically turn off the show at 50 minutes or 75 minutes when we talk about the effect of the pandemic but uh and i'm hoping you're thinking right now about who's not in italy i hope we'll get back to that again when you incubate a company like that who owns the original founder shares craft the organization david sacks the individual came up with it what's the inside baseball there so it's sort of all the above and uh we meaning craft uh have a deal with our lps that's called an lpa limited partner agreement and one of the things that was negotiated when i found a craft four years ago was the terms on which craft would incubate deals and um and so it's all predetermined what i get as a founder what what our funds get what the lps get so there can be no argument about it later and uh this is this i call it well we've actually done now we have a few incubations in development you know for me it's really important to scratch that product itch you know i'm originally a product guy and um and i you know i love investing in helping companies but occasionally about i'd say maybe once a year i get a product idea that i think is worth developing and so this gives us the ability to incubate it so we did it a few years ago with a crypto company called harbor we ended up selling that company to bitco which just announced the largest uh acquisition of a crypto company uh galaxies acquiring it for something like 1.2 billion so anyway so harvard i think um will work out uh you know once that deal closes and collins the second one there's a couple other things that are still you know they're too early to talk about but um but i think colin will be the the second one to to launch chamoth as an lp in a lot of funds what do you think when somebody comes to you and says i want to in my lpa my limited partner agreement have the ability to incubate these companies that a good trend bad trend how do you think about it i think it's great i mean i don't really you know push back on a single chairman in the lpa because i'm only doing it mostly to support people and so whatever terms they want they get from me and you know kind of just like let them go and hope they get lucky you know i have a very different approach to to these kinds of things because i'm not necessarily trying to compound my capital i'm just there to sort of enable folks and you know take one percent of the fund or sometimes a little bit more if i really have an asymmetric view on a specific thing that they're doing but otherwise i just take one percent sign the thing and you know wish them wish them the best and then try to support them and that's all i'm trying to do if i believe in what how they're investing and the deals they've done uh you know however they do it is fine with me i want to go back to something which is i actually think it's not a question of hygiene it's really a question of governance because when you do these things and you mark these companies up the real question if a company stops working is they tend to have too much money and then they tend to not have enough governance and the reason is because governance typically comes with board diversity and board diversity comes with more and different investors who have different you know puts and takes at any given point in time that diversity is very helpful to keep everybody on the same page and to actually get a decent outcome when things aren't working as much now when things are working obviously nobody cares you know because like you can just have jim getz on the board of whatsapp with john and it's all kind of said and done it's not been to the right so as we're saying when things are when things are good nobody complains yeah no and you know this may be a good jumping off point for uh you know we wanted to talk about xymogen today can i say one thing before we get into zymogen which is just look i think there's all sorts of new models now with with just sort of tech and the money going into tech the venture capital exploding there's all these innovative new models and i think it's all for the good a studio that i think is great is uh what um uh jack abraham's done with atomic you know they've produced multiple unicorns out of there because jack is just a phenomenal idea guy he's like a 10x idea guy so he then as part of atomic comes up with the idea and then brings on a operating partner and that model works for them and then you know he just partnered with keith raboy on open store and keith decided to become the ceo and keith is still a gp at founders fund so we're seeing like the blending of these models you know it used to be that you made the decision to become a vc and your career as a founder was just over it was like this line that could ever be crossed again and now you're seeing the blurring of these lines and look i think it's good for everybody because frankly when you know keith or you know what i'm doing with call-in we remind people that we're still founders and product people and you know not just sort of semi-retired guys and frankly it's like it's good for what we do as investors i mean we saw it with uh mike spicer who is a partner at sutter hill he incubated it started and was the original uh head of snowflake uh which was a map and before that he's this is his third so you know right he did pure storage he did snowflake i think he did lace works incredible he's incredible he's just money it's just just just folks that don't know snowflake you know it's an enterprise software company they make software so he's a venture capitalist he started this company while working as a venture capitalist they brought on a great ceo and some incredible guy later who's frank slootman who's a legend and the company just went public last year i think or the year before and they're worth 82 billion dollars today um and so it really highlights that while this guy is still operating as a venture capitalist and a gp he's been able to generate incredible returns for his fund um and and build amazing businesses at the same time so i mean spicer spicer is a perfect example because i i've known him since like the early 2000s and at one point spicer started this um consumer company called bix and i was like we were like an investor i was a small investor in bix and uh and it got i think it required by yahoo and it was always curious because like spicer was clearly the smartest one in the room and it's like he was kind of grinding this consumer thing and then he left yahoo went to sutter hill and he basically said you know what this i'm going back to my roots because before that he was a pretty traditional enterprise guy and he just crushed it it's kind of like michael jordan was finally like ah baseball i'm going back to basketball and it's like reed hoffman and neil bustery at greylock right i mean these guys are incredible operators business builders and they continue to do that work while uh while being partners in the vegetable we have three directions we can go moving on zymergen zymergen's so interesting i think we should do it okay let's do zymergen i agree all right so for people who don't know zymer jim went public uh 31 dollars a share in april uh traded as high as 48 shortly after that um i had the uh ceo on my podcast and uh i was confounded trying to understand the business you had told me i had asked you for some questions free berg and you gave me some choice statements of what to ask which can i say no i don't think so okay anyway you gave me some choice questions i didn't ask them exactly the way you said them uh but here is the quote of what happened on tuesday uh zymogen stated the following zymogen recently became aware of issues with its commercial product pipeline that will impact the company's delivery timeline and revenue projections accordingly the company no longer expects product revenue in 2021 and expects proven product revenue to be immaterial in 2022 they also announced that the founding ceo josh hoffman who was on this week in startups to maybe a month ago stepping down as ceo will be replaced and zymogen stock then dropped 70 percent on the news i don't know if this was a spec or not softbank hype though it was a straight ipo in the stock right 80 yesterday 80 a day after going public three months ago yeah so i think freeberg a good way to start would be what did they say they were going to do and then why has this happened so zymergin and a couple companies like them started around the same time which is around 2014 uh 2013 2012 that era 2015 even and um the the promise of these companies is truly to be everyone wants to be this platform for synthetic biology and what that means is they can take cells and in a smart way edit the cells and get those cells to make things that humans need and so you can kind of think about making materials like silk and leather and plastics and you can think about making food like egg proteins and milk proteins and so on and you can think about making industrial products uh you know enzymes and things that might be used in laundry detergent other applications and so for years you know we've gotten dna sequencing cheaper we now have dna writing and editing cheaper we've now got other tools to basically screen sell so we have these the set of tools where these synthetic biology platform companies popped up and said you know what we're going to put all these tools together and build a platform for editing sales and doing a better job of making things and we're going to get into all these markets and zymergen when they first started were like several other companies like them as services business so they would go to big partners like dupont and say hey let us make a new enzyme for you pay off 25 million up front and then we'll get a royalty on the back end when that product eventually goes to market and they did that for years they went after insecticidal products they went after plastics and materials and all sorts of stuff and as is the case with a lot of deep tech it turns out it's really friggin hard you know these tools might be there but like we saw with the clean tech era where everyone thought they could make oil from sugarcane you know 20 years ago using the same sort of approach to get the unit economics meaning can you make the product cheap enough it's really really hard that means you've got to get these sales to be just perfect and you got to get the systems to be perfect and so at the end of the day they went through a lot of customers at xymer gym that paid them tens of millions of dollars and zymergen didn't have anything at the end of the projects to say here's something that works that you guys are willing to pay for that you're gonna go take to market because it really wasn't that compelling the unit economics weren't good enough and it didn't really have big breakthroughs for any big industry and so zymogen like other companies in the space pivoted and said you know what we're going to now be a products company so we're going to make our own products instead of just being a services company and as they started to get into that they decided that their first big product would be this kind of you know plastic for for um for for cell phones or whatever protective film and in the meantime what happened is it takes so much money to do all this r d to run all these labs to have all these robotic arms that they have that are moving test tubes around hundreds of people building and running these labs and um and so they've had to raise money and in order to raise money as you guys know you have to kind of hype a story you have to say look we're gonna change the world we're reinventing everything we're using synthetic biology to rebuild everything yada yada and the story resonates with me because i truly do believe that the potential is there but the timing and the sequencing of these things is hard as is the case with a lot of deep tech companies when you get too far ahead of the curve and you start saying i'm going to do x y and z but you can really only do a b and c today you raise money saying i'm worth billions of dollars you raise hundreds of millions of dollars and the hype has to keep stepping up and they eventually got into the trap that a lot of companies got into which is taking money from softbank and softbank said here's 400 million dollars at a 3 billion evaluation a few years ago and they said great let's run at it let's be a product company and they burnt through a lot of that money and suddenly they didn't have any products to show because deep tech is hard it took a lot longer than anyone thought and what will you know we better try and craft a narrative and get public and so they did that they got public and um you know a lot of what they had been telling people was coming was coming it's going to be here soon didn't really work so they had to pivot the business they had to become a product company they kept telling folks they were going to be x y and z months away uh and they were gonna be able to hit these targets on the product and it turns out it was always a little bit a little bit further away a little bit further away and then boom they have a big board review recently and they look at the product pipeline and they look at where they are and they're like oh this really isn't gonna work and the whole thing you know falls apart because everyone was banking on this massive return and everyone missed the story which is that they've been doing this for many years and had to eventually abandon and pivot away from their business because no one was willing to pay them for it so truly they never found product market fit in their first generation of their business and they never found product market fit in the second generation of the business and it's really worth taking a watchful eye based on this this learning which is just a fundamental basic premise for starting a company do you have product market fit and can you make money from your product and if you can't answer those two things there isn't a business and then the third thing is how valuable is the company as a function of how much you can grow and so you know um they really hadn't even gotten past phase one and everyone kind of wanted to believe the hype so it's a bit disappointing to see but it's really going to impact the industry broadly because now people are going to say a lot of synthetic biology companies are smoking mirrors and they're really not there yet so a lot of folks in the industry are really concerned right now so to dovetail this with the previous discussion sacks funding your own company over funding of companies we talked about hey if it goes well like whatsapp did uh well you're a genius but if it doesn't go well and you get ahead of your skis you don't have product market fit and you've raised a bunch of money then somebody becomes the bag holder no jason it's it's even it's even bigger than that it's it's not just that it happened just in the private markets and we then you had jp morgan and goldman sachs take them public and then they raised you know another half a billion dollars in the public markets and then they shut the bed right and we seen the same thing this is the same week that nicola founder who went out by spack and was going to compete with tesla and ford there he's now under indictment for lying and selling shares also known as security fraud probably going to go to jail i had him on the podcast that was underwhelming so saxon we look at these which is it should we on a hygiene basis be throttling these companies and have milestone-based financing or or is this the sign of a top in the market that people are able to go public people are being given large amounts of money by softbank and these things probably people should pump the brakes yeah look softbank is engaged in a style of investing that we would never engage in it's absolutely antithetical to the way that we invest right they're making 500 million dollar seed investments in massively overvalued companies you know we we are one of the reasons why we like sas and marketplaces at craft is they're very milestone based i mean we you know if we invest before you have a functional product it's going to be at a seed valuation you know like a 10 cap 10 million dollar valuation not in the billions uh like you know like zymergen uh and you know we're gonna in order to do a series a by and large we need to see some revenue you know um and then you know if we're gonna do a growth round we need to see more revenue and more customers and so you know you you show incremental progress you know we're we're engaged in milestone based investing where the amount of money you raise and the valuation you're able to get scales with the amount of proof that you have delivered you know to investors about the company and the crazy thing about these like spectacular implosions and they're usually around deep tech is because these entrepreneurs can tell a story and people just seem to suspend belief and don't demand any proof for years and years so it was thera knows it was nikola and alzheimerjin and i think by the way deep tech is it's it's not that we should dismiss technically difficult problems we should engage and fund and build great businesses that are technically difficult how much should we fund them for how many months or quarters yeah but or i mean what's important is you know what is the representation that's being made and i think there's only one hype man on planet earth that is good enough to pull this off uh and actually deliver the goods at the end of the day it's probably elon like because you know he funded these businesses that were deep tech businesses tesla and spacex for many many years he was able to get investors excited he funded them himself he felt like he fought himself for but remember most of the capital i mean he put in some capital but the vast majority billion no with tesla he put in 50 million and went bankrupt he went bankrupt he was living off a 200 000 alone from a billionaire friend of ours yeah yeah no no no beep that part out you're not allowed to say sorry sorry sorry elon only self-funded the first couple hundred million of these companies he delivered revenue very early on you remember at tesla he first developed the sports car right the roadster and that was really 150 000. he sold 100 in advance not dissimilar to uh virgin galactic's playbook right and maybe that's an important lesson right like in deep tech uh you can't just say i'm going from zero to one with billions of dollars over decades you know that that's a government-funded program well or you can if it's your own and that's what say that's what branson did so at bezos when i showed up richard had spent 1.1 or 1.2 billion of his own money and i thought i mean at some point in the game it's that's that's skin of the game i mean bezos has been funding blue origin for 20 years right i think they take necker and mosquito island if he if that doesn't work out i mean there was also quibby that's another story yeah quibby it didn't even involve deep tech it didn't require any scientific breakthrough it just required some marketing proof that people were interested in that format and they just lose a billion dollars well basically katzenberg along with meg whitman who was kind of a weird choice to be a co-founder because she's more of like the like the late stage ceo you bring on to take the company public once it's already working she's not really like a she's not a product innovator no she's not yeah but katzenberg katzenberg is though right katzenberg's obviously very creative and so they came up with this idea he knows talent so they came with this idea to build a studio they put a billion dollars into creating short 10-minute videos the problem was there's no proof that the market was wanted that format they should have spent five or 10 million proving that the format made sense and then spent a billion dollars if it worked and um you know i just i i don't understand why why um founders or really investors kind of put up with these types of stories look at wework same thing yeah there is not a shred we were about a shred of evidence that there was an economically viable model there and yet billions and billions of dollars went into that company before the bottom line well it actually in fairness disagree i disagree on that one too much because the first couple years was economic viable it just wasn't a software business they had great gross margins it just wasn't scalable like software exactly there's no leverage in the model it was just purely like go lease something for x dollars and then sublet it for x plus y you know x plus y dollars and and it worked it just like how do you scale that and then they got ahead of their skis and did all sorts of crazy stuff to get the tech valuation hold on a second but it's not like you can just go to the store and buy it off the shelf like there's a tech valuation thing you can buy other people had to believe it as well and those other people were also pretty credible smart people were they the later stage people do you read the we work book the later stage ones i think we're like we're like evading the thing that that we're not saying which is that as much as we all want to believe that we're all doing incredibly incredibly diligent work there are a lot of examples where belief trumps logic and even the smartest people just look past the obvious and we just talked about four pretty obvious examples in no world should a credible tech investor not be able to do a simple valuation or see a business model and brazenly believe a real estate business is a tech business at the same time there should be no world where you know your pitch something that is just so incredibly grandiose from a technical perspective and be and the reason you invest is actually because you don't understand it because if you did you'd be more critical that's insane well you this is the thing people reverse examples these examples exactly that yes they're suspending disbelief and they're not doing the basic tenets of investing which is milestones talking to the customer these are blocking and tackling i think it's more than jason it's greed it's criminals let's be honest this friday some of it's fraud so re read the quote read the quote from the u.s attorney of manhattan who said milton with respect to nikola lied about nearly every aspect of the business people like that need to go to jail okay big time in jail big time the startup world the investing world only works if investors can trust the information and the financial statements are being given by operators because we have to make decisions quickly and if they give us bogus numbers how are we supposed to make educated decisions well some people don't want to do diligent sacks people don't want to do diligently we look at metrics we always look at metrics okay we look at um look we can get we can do the metrics in one day churn we look we look at arr we look at net revenue retention we look at churn we look at cac and we look at your financials we can do it in one day okay it's not an invasive process we can decide very very quickly because we know what numbers we're looking for and how to read the statements so the question for you when the founders say i have a competitive process we don't want to do all that has that been happening in today's crazy market where people say the train's leaving the station and we can't do diligence we don't have time for this are you ready has that happened to you in the last six months in in a sense but we say to them listen here's what we need and if you give us these numbers today we can make a decision within 24 hours so and there's no reason we can't and by the way they have those numbers and if they say they don't have those numbers they're too incompetent to be funded because these are all the course ass metrics that you should have to be tracking your business so we would never make an investment without seeing the sas metrics for a sas business yeah let me just step in for a second because i think there's two camps one is businesses companies that operate a business and what you're talking about it makes a lot of sense you could have looked at the business metrics of work and made an assessment of the quality of that business or nikola or nikola well on the other hand or if you have this on the other hand you have companies i'm saying not their notes and not nikola because those are not businesses yet those are still in technology development they're deep tech so what happens is the founder the ceo the management team they put together their own representation of the metrics that they believe should matter and then they try and show how those metrics translate into value over time so there's no revenue there's no customers there's no profits what they're saying is we can in the case of zymergen we've got x number of experiments we can run per day and as a result those experiments should translate into y discoveries per year and those discoveries should translate into z dollars of revenue per year and that's where the pyramid gets built and the same was true of nikola the same was true of a lot of these companies where they say we can do x therefore we're worth y and it's that sort of narrative that investors then say my god the story is so compelling if you're right i want to believe it i want to put the money in and i want this thing to work and therefore i'll fund this thing um and i think and i think that's what we've seen continuously it started with the cleantech industry and now we're seeing it increasingly with all magical companies magically and in a lot of these cases by the way i will also say nicola it's you know it's easy to do that but it shouldn't be a representation that the entire set of opportunities is a false narrative absolutely there are many great businesses in biotech that actually do deliver the goods and they turn into incredible companies there's a synthetic biology competitor to zymergen who i spent a bunch of time with i'm not going to say the name of the company and they and i and i asked them uh what gross revenue simple question what's your gross margin what's your revenue what are your cogs what's gross margin and i got an asterix laden answer what does it mean astrix lighting answer it's kind of like adjusted ebitda adjusted for what speak english that's what you got to tell them speak speak english this is like when i would come home my dad said where's your report card i say you know it's interesting my report card yeah i don't have it so where is it i passed and then i you know again it's still shocking to see the number of people that will still do these deals and look maybe it all works out in the end but i tend to think like if you can't present things simply and you can't explain things simply that's on you however if then you still do that and you still have good intentions maybe you don't but then investors toe the line the problem is there's this momentum thing that happens among investors as friedrich said where the fomo kicks in and some of the smartest people become some of the dumbest people no they are suspending disbelief like you would not believe in the industry right well because it's not their money i mean look at the end of the day why does it happen meaning how can a zymogen ipo happen like this or nikola like meaning if you look under the hood in the s1 i was trying to find it in the s1 was there somebody that actually did like some due diligence into highline clearly not was there was there a synthetic chemist or a synthetic biologist that basically helped clearly not um did everybody say that that was okay clearly yes you know um did i don't know anybody get under the hood of nicola uh and actually like look at the engine make sure the thing worked i don't know by the way people did there just were enough people that didn't that they were able to get a financing done right and i think that that's the important point is there's enough private markets i'm talking about two public market examples you're not allowed to have sex sequester diligence when you're going through an ipo yeah it's not how it works by the way i i like do you guys know the difference between humans and animals there's one there's one distinguishing characteristic that that that i think uh making choices making narratives narratives narratives stories this all comes down to narratives like there are dolphins that can communicate with one another there are monkeys that sit in a tree and they can warn each other about approaching predators meaning that there are other species that can communicate what humans can do that no other species can do is create a narrative to create an ethereal belief in something that does not exist and get others to believe in pursuing religion democracy the financial institutions the monetary system a business like this they're all the same it's all about someone saying hi alive nichola yeah no exactly and i think in all these cases by the way this is the cliff notes version of sapiens everybody yes yes let's know it's version of sapience i have a funny thera-nose story um if you guys want to hear it let me just finish this one point like there's a fundamental premise which is humans want to believe and so when you have a barnum type person show up when you have a you know a compelling narrative and a compelling deliverer of that narrative whether it's a religious leader or or a presidential or a government leader or a business leader and you want to see what they're selling come to reality you want to write a check you want to put your time or your money into seeing that thing come reality no no i i fundamentally look at you're you're missing a key point it's not their money so stop saying that go ahead they would not put their children's education account into these companies they're putting other people's money they're putting other people's money this is the key thing not enough skill and they always put their time into these companies for the same reason people join their money people trade off money and time all right my point of people will take their time they're giving up the opportunity cost of working somewhere else to go work at these companies david david i honestly i really disagree with you here the reason why somebody goes and works at this company because they believe there's positive signaling from a soft bank okay so these people are smart they think this money must mean it's real they think i'm now going to commit my reputation and my time to get options because obviously these folks must have done their work how i'm not making the mistake and that's the lie because those folks are not doing the work you're both making sense there's a group of people no there's a group of people placing bets who are placing bets of other people's money you would do different diligence let's be honest the zymogen ipo the traditional ipo would have been entirely different if they had to write if the underwriters were at risk for their own net worth it would be and if their stock was locked up of the management teams for five years or ten years i do agree with that point i do agree with the point you're making foreign sacks from a boat go yeah i'm not i'm not disagreeing with chamoth but the the point the point that resonates with me that friedrich said is actually the book sapiens really did impact my thinking as a vc which is you know yuval harari makes this point that it's narratives that kind of define you know humans and that's what binds us together in societies and frankly the vast majority of narratives throughout human history have just been wrong but they still worked as good stories binding people together and i kind of and i kind of applied that to vc which is the vc process revolves around a pitch it's a narrative session where the entrepreneur goes up there yeah and presents a narrative and then everyone debates the narrative and decides whether they buy into it and you know after reading sapiens i'm like this whole process like is stupid how do i get out of a narrative driven investing philosophy and that's where i'm back to look i understand sas i know what the metrics are supposed to be um also listen to the pitch i want to hear it but to show me the numbers first and at least i can get to a decision that's somewhat grounded in reality because i think most of what the vc process does is just measure a founder's ability to tell narratives and that may be correlated with their ability to do marketing but it's not correlated with whether their idea is fundamentally correct or not it's fine in the seed state it's fine in the seed stage i think yeah i think there will be the least amount of fraud when you either have um irrefutable metrics or the investor has to invest their own money yep that's the gold standard everything else is just you know catch's catch can and you're just gonna have a bunch of trash yeah here's how i'm handling at the early stage saks you because you get to meet my companies uh i have told them to craft their narratives around their traction now because i know that all this performative stuff is nonsense so when you meet those companies they do a three minute pitch it's the majority of it is here's the product here's the traction and i accept people based on traction and then i give them more money as the traction goes up and we bet four or five times on the same company based on metrics and i tell them all you're coming to the accelerator here's 100k if you want more money from us we'll keep giving you money if you can grow 10 or more per month on real metrics period and we will keep giving you money forever right and i like these launch um like demo sessions that you do with us because now you force them to base their presentation around a chart so at least i can see some metrics and the other thing we do similar to you is i always start with a product demo our motto is show me the product not a powerpoint because the same powerpoint can describe 10 or 100 different products it can describe a product that might be great it can describe a product that sucks totally so show me the product and now at least i'm grounded in what you're doing and i'm not just listening to some story by the way i'll i go back to this i still think that funding narratives makes a ton of sense in the early stage cd i rip i rip in 50k to 5 million dollar checks all the time i could care less if it sounds reasonable i'd take a punt at it right but the minute that i'm writing a 100 or 200 or 500 million dollar check i pay attention yes because it's my money it's my money and and go back to this when it's not their money you're going to see this thing riddled with fraud you're going to see cases like this stuff constantly and the person that pays the price where i do agree with freeberg is the employee because they mistakenly think that these folks must know what they're doing but the reality is it's not it's somebody else's money they don't really care they're just doing a job they want to get paid themselves and so this is how these success you got you guys let me just give you some specifics on the zymergen scenario so they're going to go public right leading up to their ipo the stocks at 31 bucks and the ipo so if you're an employee and you have stock options in xymerogen you have the option to exercise your stock options any time which means you buy the stock at your strike price and then you can sell the stock later when the ipo is over so a lot of employees you know exercise their stock options meaning they put their own money up to buy the stock at ten five bucks four bucks whatever it is and they actually owe taxes on the difference between their exercise price and the fair market value at the time that they exercised so if the stock goes public at 30 bucks and they exercise they got to pay taxes as if the stock was at 30 bucks and then they end up in the situation where um they can't actually get liquid and so there was a lot of employees that got really screwed on this transaction when uh when zymergen went public because they thought the company was going to be worth you know 10 20 30 40 50 and now the stock's at eight bucks uh and they're gonna actually owe money to the irs and they paid for their stock option so it's a it's a it's a brutal scenario when it plays out for employees and i just feel really bad for a lot of it really really great you know um smart people that work there uh that take a massive hit on this thing i i hired two more researchers on my team just to do diligence at the syndicate and i would say between 20 and 30 percent of deals that look great when we get under the covers and look at the diligence we look at the cap table we look at the revenue we look at the accounting we asked them who's doing their accounting we asked them for bank statements we asked them for incorporation docs we asked them for ip assignments this is like the basic blocking tackling 20 to 30 percent do not pass diligence and we find stuff that is crazy i had one founder give themselves a loan and then we didn't know about it and then we find out about it later they they did a loan and the company owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars had another one where they were presented their uh revenue is reoccurring and it was a a it was a cruel basic it wasn't accrual based county was a cash-based accounting and i'm like yeah what is going on here you you're basically lying and you're misrepresenting your company don't do that it's called securities fraud when you make a representation don't ever bend it or exaggerate it just tell the truth period what's the thera-nose story jamal i need the thera-nose story and then i'll give you a follow-up story the uh theron story is so i had i had a couple i had a very famous investor tell me this was like 2015 2016. uh and i said guys you know we were just talking i said what do you like what do you like like you know we all kind of talk like that at some point whenever we interact you know um and he said this company theranos you have to maybe it was 2014. anyways 2015. theranos theranos theranos and uh i i said are you an investor and he said no but i wish i was it's incredible and i tried to get an introduction and i thought okay this is um uh this is gonna great story interesting i couldn't get an introduction but then i find out who the board is and instantly i get turned off so in my mind i had a very negative impression because the board was literally not all 90 year olds and i thought what do 90 year olds know about you know uh blood testing and you know basically building a tricorder and at that time you know i think i told the story before but i had burned about maybe 50 75 million bucks on six different startups trying to do this like you know in situ kind of like you know finger prick blood testing blah blah blah so i was really fascinated with the space a year and a half later a guy that i work with at facebook a very senior guy says to me i'm thinking and i was trying to recruit him to come work at one of my companies as ceo i'm thinking of going to theranos and i said just go to the interview and tell me what happens uh before i you know try to convince you to not go he goes into the to the interview to be ceo of this company they don't let him pass reception they interview him in a makeshift room outside of the meeting and he said well can i you know go inside and you know when do we have a follow-up interview you know i'd like to meet some of the team i want to see what it is and uh they said no no we're good here's your offer letter do you want to join well can i see the device can i try it i don't know no we're good let's go and i said to this guy i said how can you join this company i mean it's not like you're you're coming in as like a junior flunky you know you're coming in as the second or third most important person in this business you haven't been past reception you don't even know what's past reception you don't even know what your office will look like you don't even know if you like the office furniture at that basic level think about everything else that comes after that and then you know what happened happened so what a disaster william perry former head of secretary of defense henry kissinger we didn't just it was like it was a bunch of grand poobah types that's how you knew it was a red flag if you got one of those guys you got one guy like kissinger on your board it's okay if they're all like that it's a problem problem huge red flag i go on cnbc i just had uh john kerry roo from the wall street journal who broke this thing wide open on my podcast and i started getting all these inside tips about theranose and one of them was that elizabeth holmes and bahwani who was the ceo were in a relationship together they lived at the same address all this nonsense and i checked with kari roo and i'm like hey is this true and he's like yeah that's true yeah i was like why don't you report it's like i'm just chasing it down whatever it'll be in the next story so i go on cnbc and i was like listen when there's smoke there's fire if they had the device my game theory is if you have the device you show it if you don't have the goods you don't show it period end of story i think my gut tells me this is a total fraud it'll be zero and they're like oh and i was like yeah and you know when the ceo and the ceo are in a relationship that's bad and they're like what and they didn't know this and i like they're like are you sure and i'm like yeah that's what people are telling me i don't know if it's true or not i don't know first their knowledge but that's what i think is going on so this whole thing blows up calacana says this blah blah blah cnbc that night i got invited to bib's house in the valley for movie night we've all been to that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i walk in there's zuck there's this famous person there's this googler that person it's you know it's 50 people and the celebrities who are in the blockbuster movie are there i think it was the movie arrival but i'm not going to make any i don't want to give away whose house it was i go to the secret movie night i walk in i get greeted and i kid you not 15 feet in front of me looking directly at me is elizabeth holmes and i get with like 10 feet and she just looks at me snarls and walks away it's like the most uncomfortable moment of my life clearly a giant scam and fraud and she's going to go to jail too by the way she's going on trial this month august i believe she'll be on trial it's taking way too long i hope she goes yeah i mean the justice system's a little bit screwed okay we're we got to wrap up i guess you have a pretty good you have a pretty good track record of calling out these frauds i think it's a service to the community yeah i agree you're one of the few who actually does it you got any other budding frauds well you called out ripple right oh let's not go let's go easy on the ripples there's some people who are friends with people well i think while you're back it off i'm not backing off i just don't want to lose a member of our little quartet here but i will say uh that my my fraud of the moment the one that's making my spidey sense go crazy is tether usdt these these guys are i mean this feels like it is going to be a 60 billion dollars oh okay this is the crypto thing there's a crypto stable coin the idea is they said it's one dollar in u.s currency one dollar per tether always and then over time we find out maybe they don't have a dollar in their bank account for each one the new york attorney general finds them 18 million says you can't work with anybody in new york they say we're not a fraud and i'm like well what about the attorney general who said you were a fraud and they're like yeah yeah no no that was a misunderstanding yadda yadda i'm like there's no misunderstanding you know what we should do you know what we should do we should get all the fans the all in pod we're going to declare a certain time and date where and we encourage everyone who's in tether to pull out a tether to stress the system and see what happens yeah let's stress test well the problem is you don't actually own your tethers that's the other scam it's like eight or nine of these offshore unregulated crypto exchanges not the ones in the united states that are highly regulated like coinbase this is offshore and there are white what i've been told is you can create an exchange yourself with white label software and pop up your takeout you're on right now yeah there's some other people i want to call out there's some other people i want to call out so let's move on to it oh scott galloway oh no no free he's small potatoes but is it a small potato irrelevant doesn't look like thirst and hell the third on his uh he does he dies yeah all right so jason's in florence chama uh chamath is at his estate i'll tell you where i am actually jake i appreciate this i'm on a boat uh outside elba which um is the police it's where uh napoleon was in prison i'll actually i'll show you the the prison where he was where he was kept i think you can see it if i get to the right spot you know what we put the nicola founder in there and we'll put uh elizabeth holmes in there same place can you see that the uh just see your ugly face or whatever and your beautiful yacht [Laughter] how much are people going to hate us three of us are in italy in august it is like the stereotypical work hard and you'll be understanding too of course of course i'm staying in an airbnb it's costing me 350 euros a night for four bedrooms i feel pretty good about myself i'm the center of florence i think it's you you're spending about the same amount on your boat right 350 400 euros a night per room yeah i got i got the airbnb deal talk talk to us about after pay sacks okay so well first i mean if we're going to call somebody out first i want to call out paypal okay what's going on there i actually wrote a blog post about it um called the no buy list basically paypal is creating the equivalent of a no-fly list with respect to their search terms well for anybody who they put does they deem as deplorable or undesirable basically they're working with the adl the anti-defamation league and the southern poverty law center splc to create lists of people and groups who they are going to ban their accounts now let me i got to say this the adl and the splc are storied institutions that did great work combating both anti-semitism and racism but they are now under new management and new leadership and they have greatly expanded their missions the adl was originally about stopping anti-semitism now it's about uh basically opposing extremism or white supremacy and you know in any of the places they find it and so for example they've taken positions on u.s supreme court nominations um i mean it's like they've gone very very far afield um of their original mission splc has gotten sued a number of times for putting people on these lists they put sam harris at some point on the list they put another human rights person on this anybody who challenges any or has any guest on their podcast that they the southern poverty law center doesn't like they right they basically blacklist them right right and the list has become very expansive they become very expansive so so here here's the problem is you now have look before this was just some ivory tower you know uh non 501 type thing where they would basically it was hyperbolic rhetoric they would basically call these people and groups names but now paypal is operationalizing these banned lists they're turning it into a no buy list they're saying we're gonna cut off your account and that's very dangerous because we've already seen the precedent with speech online that we had a bunch of social media companies banning people from participating in online speech now what paypal is potentially doing is banning people from that from financial access and losing your right to speech is bad but losing your right to make a livelihood is even worse and i think republicans in congress need to say to dan schulman first of all it'd be great for him to haul him up there in front of congress to a hearing like they did with jack and zuck and sundar haul him up there and say to him in no uncertain terms we see what you're doing we don't like it we oppose it we're gonna get on our hind legs and fight this uh if you try to deny americans their right to access the new economy we see no reason for your company to get any bigger we're going to oppose every acquisition you ever do and we may not be in power today but one day the tide will turn we will get control of congress and at that point you know um you know elephants have long memories so you know we're watching you and you know it's been a long time since republicans thought of their role this way for the last few decades they've been very lazy or fair with respect to the economy but there's a very successful republican president on mount rushmore teddy roosevelt and he's on mount rushmore because he busted up the cartels and the oligarchs of his era and he fought for the rights of the of the common american to make a living that is the playbook that republicans need to follow right now okay henry belcaster you got that clip it right here let's get some animations on top of it let's go all right square has bought after pay for 30 billion which represents a large portion of their outstanding equity it's an equity-based deal what do we think freeburg they issued a third of their stock um uh to buy this company so basically square's a public company they you issued shares to after pay shareholders and after pay only represents about four percent of squares revenue so they gave away a third of their company to increase their revenue by four percent that that's the pessimist view of the business now if you kind of think about square they've got two businesses that are equally sized one is like a consumer business uh this cash cash app yep yeah and they do a bunch of stuff including crypto in there and then they have another app uh another set of tools for merchants which is businesses on the other side so it's a mark it's becoming more of a marketplace business and the idea is that this after pay deal can solidify their ability to basically be a lender to their consumers and provide a tool to merchants to increase sales because the way after pay works it's a buy now pay later product these have been around for a long time and you can basically make a purchase uh online without having to put down a credit card or to pay for it and they instantly run a credit check on you and instantly offer you credit to buy that thing and then you pay in installments over time and so it allows people it allows websites and businesses to get more consumers to buy stuff because it's really easy for them to buy stuff if they don't have the money today right and by the way this this yeah this business this business content has been around for a long time there's a company called bill me later that was bought by paypal in 2008 for a billion dollars and it was a similar thesis right so the thesis you know what's old is new again the thesis is if you can provide these tools to merchants they will get more sales and paypal on the other side would make more money because consumers would spend more through the system um and and i think that's the same model with square but most important so we're seeing square consolidate the marketplace dynamics in their business they're also effectively stepping up and competing and making sure they're locking in the competitive advantage they have with having this two-sided marketplace against emerging competitors like a firm uh and so far enough was the original yeah the public capital markets will always reward great growth strategies the minute that they announce this deal this the market cap of square went up by almost 25 the deal is free free now what i repeat they just acquired a 30 billion dollar company for free which is what happened with whole foods and amazon here is the secret hiding in plain sight that and not enough ceos understand about the public markets and so for the ceos out there listening there are two ways for you to get constantly rewarded by the public markets number one is what square did which is to incrementally acquire feature after feature after feature the thing with buy now pay later is that it is not a company it has always been a feature and it's a feature of a much larger financial services platform and i think square is proving that and everybody else over time will realize that goldman sachs and apple are about to do something there with buy now pay later as well for themselves they already apple already does it for the phones so the idea is that this is just a credit feature that should be on every single major network i wouldn't be surprised if whatsapp and facebook had a buy now pay later feature amazon overtime everybody needs to have this feature you can't build a company around it and so if if square can basically continue to acquire or build adjacent features that consolidates the financial services stack for their consumers the stock market will reward these guys they'll be able to grow and buy things for free for the next five or ten years the second way that corporate uh that companies can get rewarded in the public markets is if you look at your costs and you flip them from a cost or an expense into revenue and the gold standard is amazon so if you guys look back i'll just give you a very quick example because it's incredible in 2005 year end 2005 amazon they had eight and a half billion of sales two billion of net profit their two biggest costs there was product and shipping so what did they do they started amazon kindle they started amazon basics they started amazon fire they started amazon echo and all of a sudden that whole thing shrank their gross margins went up then on the operating expense side amazon was spending six percent of revenue on fulfillment they started a fulfillment business they were spending five percent of revenue on technology they started aws they were spending two percent of revenue on marketing they started amazon prime they started they were spending two percent on payment processing they started amazon payments so if you look at any company like this square i think stripe is another part of me uh shopify is another great example where you can see the path to growth if you can see folks acquiring adjacent features or if you can see folks taking expense lines and turning them into revenue lines these are in my opinion sure bet companies that compound forever in the public there's great network effects if you think about financial services for consumers i would argue there's five general categories there's banking lending trading crypto and insurance and i think in order of retention meaning how long a customer is likely to stick with a service provider it's banking then lending then trading then crypto then insurance and in terms of profit generation per customer per year it's trading then crypto then lending then insurance and then banking and so what we're seeing is a lot of these financial services providers to consumers in the digital world replacing the old school world by starting to consolidate these categories in a smarter way than the old school offline companies have been able to do banks need to make money through overdraft fees they make 30 billion a year in overdraft fees so if you make banking entirely online and make it free you retain a customer and then you can make money by offering them lending trading crypto some of these other services and that's certainly the trend i have a big thesis and a big belief that over the next decade we're gonna see those five categories start to merge and you're gonna have three to five super powers that are gonna offer a consolidated stack of services and the unit economics are gonna change because they're gonna focus on getting the high retention products to be cheap and free and then they're going to make money on the high margin product the canary i completely agree with you and the canary in the coal mine is who will be given a federal banking license because that is the only gate that the authorities have to king make who those consolidators will be and that's an easy thing that can be unemotionally assessed or amazon just buy one you have to apply no you have to this is an incredibly arduous process to get a federal banking license to be cleared by the federal reserve what if amazon water bank you have to get it approved jason you're not listening to me these are regulatory things i'm asking a question for the audience you cannot acquisition versus applying okay so even if you want to you can't just buy a company like you bought whole foods so for example uh i think square now is a federally licensed bank uh and i believe that at the federal reserve recognizes these guys they can borrow when they can borrow money at the discount window at the discount rate um as startups get more successful and can get there those will be the ones that will do what david said because it doesn't matter how many users or how much momentum you have if you cannot get a federal license to operate you can't consolidate so you can be a vertically specific great business but eventually you have to sell e-trade morgan stanley is a great example where you know in the absence and an inability to expand you have to sell yourself because the cost of capital um eats you up the the the comment on this by the way the most obvious one here which i think is interesting is the shopify stripe debate because if you look inside the p l of shopify an enormous line item now about 350 million bucks a year is what they're paying to stripe and you know there's going to be a lot of pressure over time to figure out what these big businesses want to do with respect to their payment strategies and and do it themselves because they may be able to save a lot of money unclear can i be like the lone voice of dissent on this after pay thing oh go ahead yeah well look it's clear the market loved it jamaat is right about that it's sending a signal to everybody in the in the industry in the finance industry that consolidation is going to be rewarded it seems like finance is going to go the same way that media did where you start to see studios in hollywood all get gobbled up by big tech players sort of the final convergence of digital analog you're clearly going to see that in banking now too so as a as a business person and as an entrepreneur i respect and admire what jack dorsey has done with square but as an american i'm definitely concerned about this accumulation of power and we now see jack is the first person i don't think it's there's ever been anyone in american history who holds in his hands the right to deny people's speech on a on a major speech platform and the ability to deny them access to a major consumer payments platform now he doesn't have dominant market share in either one of those no he's got less than 10 in each but but he's an influencer and we saw that twitter was the first site to kick off trump and then in the wake of that every other tech platform did it and square after january 6 cut off the accounts of everybody who was involved or connected to it whatever that means and a bunch of other players in the fintech stack did it so we now have this issue of financial d platforming paypal is already well down that road what will jack dorsey do i don't know i mean on the one hand why don't you start up why don't you buy or start or incubate your own that's protection freeze free you're not going to ban people from calling so you win just start your own square competitors saxon stop complaining jason look these companies have gigantic network effects paypal is over a 300 billion dollar mark cap company if all of them if they back those 10 if they knock 10 of people off you get them now you got your now you got your beach head stop complaining it is not it it is it is a non-argument to claim that a cartel of gigantic fintech companies that have monopoly scale monopoly network effects acting together that is not a threat to people's rights to have a lot of say it's not i'm talking about how you can make money from it i'm just talking your book like you're just not making money for me it's not about making money for me this is no i know but it is an opportunity like who's to stop somebody from creating isn't parlor back and isn't there some other like um right wing or more conservative twitter that's booming right now i heard there's another one kara swisher was talking about i'm predicting right now that financial d platforming is gonna be the big hot potato political hot potato over the next year this is the next wave of censorship and what i agree with republicans what the republicans on the ftc on that board need to ask jack dorsey right now is will you import the twitter block list over to square or will you keep these things separate bestie gusty jack can i just say something sexy poo i think you're right but if you just want to make a lot of money um and you have to have some financial stock ownership over the next few years i think the the way to do it is just to kind of like figure out which of these emerging companies have or are about to get or have disclosed in their earnings that they're filing for licensure and i think you want to own those things because the the key thing is like when you get these licenses you just get a cheaper cost of capital it just allows you to out compete and outmaneuver and then all of a sudden you're competing with these big lumbering incumbents who just don't have the access to the same flexible technology and they're running code that's you know 40 50 years old then the policy decision becomes much more complicated because i do agree with you that there's going to be platforming or de-platforming issues that happen the good thing about this that it is highly fragmented and that there is in no clear path at least that i see for two or three folks to have 25 to 30 to 35 ownership that already happened sort of in credit cards and i think we've learned our lesson from that it hasn't happened since i hope it remains that decentralized but what what i think the the reaction of the stock market to square buying after pay is now everyone's gonna be looking at that and going wait a second i can spend you know a quarter of the market cap my company and have no position no but david my point that's not what they're saying what they're saying is hold on a second these companies are features and we want to have folks who are licensed and capable to consolidate what freed brooks at these five categories and if you look inside a square they have an incredible lending business they have incredible merchant services business they have a you know a pretty decent and emerging crypto and trading business right so they're putting all the pieces together that's what they saw and they're licensed right but who are the big winners in this wave of consolidation going to be at the end of the day it's going to be square it's going to be stripe it might be it's going to be paypal it's going to be the big online companies not the offline legacy banks it's the same same thing that happened in hollywood the only studio that didn't get gobbled up by a tech company is disney right so it's gone eighty percent because they became a tech company and they become a tech they became a tech company so i think their whole business they're gonna they're gonna catch up to netflix and then they're gonna roll netflix they're going to roll right over netflix the reality is that there is something about big tech that wants to de-platform people the legacy analog offline companies were never this moralistic uh towards their customer base they never d d platformed and banned people the way that these are they limited they limited their moralizations and their high horse to the oscar awards in the enemies you're correct jake jacob i'm going to do a i'm going to do a a crazy wine dinner tomorrow night uh and it's about 45 minutes from you you should take a car um have them wait eat dinner and then drive back all right i'll try i got i i'm i'm doing i'm going to see david which you know for me as a lifelong dream every time i i'm going to go see david because not david sacks david you know the the statue of david which to me is like looking in a mirror my whole life i looked at that you know that body small stubby schlong i get it but why don't you i have so many tours i'm doing in florence maybe i'll zip out let's see maybe i'll zip out but i'm going to see you next week it's 45. the question is freedberg what are you doing get on a plane and come see your besties you're the only person not in italy you come for three or four days i know you got a pregnant wife i know you got to let you're moving all this stuff you gave up on san francisco let me go talk to her just come for three days three days get get her some presents and uh maybe get some extra help with that they're all just sitting there in italy hanging out having mine are literally having the best time but they're living their best lives right now they're like oh we're gonna take a tour eventually do they wanna get some hours in i mean no okay i'll set my plane it's united i'll send united for you jacob why don't you come visit me tomorrow you don't need to see a museum you know you don't want to spend time in museums why are you having a great time with my girlfriends in florence i'll see you all my mom's here you know like i have a lot of people here for two days and hang out for two days with us what are you doing 48 hours it's not a big deal bring everybody all right anyway love you guys i love you besties all right y'all congratulations jake allen rob congratulations on robin hood okay thanks guys all i gotta say is is my first fund my little 11 million dollar fund right now you know we'll see what happens a long way to go once again i'll have a top five percent one percent fund the first fund i did with sequoia with the scouts was like 150 cash on cash who knows this first fund i did with you guys backing me uh thank you for supporting me that 11 million dollar fund could be five six jacobs 567 x could be who knows we'll see go big cash on cash yeah you know it's a good feeling it's a good feeling yeah thank you for the problem we're proud of you saxy poop nice week forever everybody wait did you have any wins this week aside from spending a lot of money on wine chamois is there any spectacular news that we need to know well i think dave david can confirm but i think uh i probably made a billion dollars this week all right there you go oh something's going okay so there must be a smack coming brace no no no no no no no no oh something's getting sold all right we'll find out next week we'll see you all next week all right bye bye love you guys love you guys love you besties love you italy of course everybody's favorite the queen of quinoa the science conductor himself david freeberg all the data all the sockets says go do whatever you want to do go into a nightclub sweaty robbing beast nothing else [Music] themselves as opposed to just telling them this is a single point that you should believe [Music] nothing else matters so much is all about like the good and evil them and us and we don't recognize that in moments where there are shared values we're just sitting on both sides of the same coin or recognizing that sometimes having different values doesn't necessarily make someone evil nothing else nothing else oh no i appreciate it i appreciate you i appreciate you i appreciate you you you i appreciate you i appreciate you i try and kind of elevate the conversation a little bit and why i care so much about this point go into a throbbing ring of course everybody's favorite the queen of quinoa the science conductor himself david freeman the quality of the show he calls it the if freedberg talks a lot it's a great episode go into a throbbing ring all the data all the time do whatever you want to do go into a nightclub go into a robin red sweaty nothing else nothing else nothing else nothing else








[Music] this is why the all-in pod is falling apart is we got one bestie who thinks he's [ __ ] hemming away we got another one who thinks he's italian nobility we got another one all he wants to do is geek out about science and discuss nothing topical i mean you guys are a total mess and you [ __ ] i'm present i've been present present i've been waiting for two weeks social media i'm coming in hot i've been waiting two weeks to go off three two one [Music] rain man [Music] david source it to the fans and they've just gone [Music] crazy okay everybody welcome back to the all in podcast we took two weeks off for vacation uh with us to vacation from cation uh saks is off his boat and ready to go uh after the tremendous boat episode friedberg who david why are you working from an irs office [Music] [Laughter] dave sanchez has joined a call center which call center this is david sacks from the call-in app can i set up your podcast for you please better [ __ ] get here by tonight okay yeah you better play [ __ ] cards bestie this is better you better [ __ ] show up this last year mr beast is showing up mr beast is gonna play cards and he plays eight queen eight off suit to crack phil it's gonna be very entertaining all right i'm flying back this afternoon it's mr beast alan muth this is gonna be [ __ ] fireworks you're eight seats locked up wait what time does it start [ __ ] seven to seven a.m no it's good is your uh is your guesthouse taken no you can stay in the guesthouse if you want great here we go no we started we stayed in the shop david we started this is the ship yes david we start at six but uh we're gonna break for dinner as normal at seven so get here by [ __ ] i'll come i gotta have dinner with my kids i haven't seen him in a month so uh all right just so you do you remember their names and there's three of them okay yeah yeah there's three i'll come after dinner okay all right okay good good here we go uh first topic of the day is no you didn't do the intros [ __ ] all right three two no no you already did that part just introduced the you started with sucks and you didn't say myself did you become the director okay sit down scorsese all right with us again the dictator himself chamoth paulie hapatia back from his italian castle fresh off his italian castle retreat uh one button up maybe we should call you the duke instead of the dictator yeah because you've really taken this this italian nobility thing to heart you know jason invaded my my castle he ravaged my toilets he literally had he co-opted the butler he co-opted the chef and when he would bicycle his best life i'll be totally honest for a while he would bicycle he would bicycle back to the to the house the gate would close and they would scurry out with two little cokes a huge glass filled with ice i was so confused when i was like what's going on he's like uh mr jason mr jason mr jason what percent of your book did you write jkl um well a non-fiction book typically 60 000 is the target so i'm going to write 60 and then try to edit it down to 50 and i got the first 10 done okay i'm sorry on the on the plane as well as at my house jason read us the intro i'm not going to say what they're about or the title of the book the first couple chapters it's [ __ ] amazing both the idea no no no legit the idea is amazing the title is fantastic and what he's written so far is exceptional i was genuinely like it's great it's really really great well a lot of it was informed by the discussions we've been having here uh of course back in the mix is friedberg the queen of quinoa uh in front of some kmart artwork um that he purchased for his new house uh how are you doing queen uh how do you feeling about your decision to not come to italy with us yeah queen i want to talk about it hey can we uh can we tell our best italy story oh my god i don't know what the best there's a lot of best italy stories well i want to tell two stories and one of them is the joke i didn't make at the speech which i thought was the best [ __ ] joke and i want to just get your reaction so i'm just gonna tell it okay so just to give a little background here our friend's 50th birthday two of our friends had 50th birthdays me and our other friend and so we were in uh italy for a week as a group playing cards and celebrating those two birthdays the joke i didn't make was the following joke which is all right guys i just want this is for friend number one redacted yeah redacted yeah uh i just want to call out the elephant in the room you know there's really someone very very famous amongst us uh oh you know he's known uh to be one of the richest men in the world he's known um you know to really uh love rockets he throws you know up rockets all the time um the despotic leader of north korea is here kim jong-un everybody and i point to dc wow you can't tell that joke because because it would in context of you know obviously it would have been a very yeah uh all right and uh yeah it was just a great trip i have to say uh yeah my italy story is that so the second birthday is j cal the first birthday is a friend to remain nameless the second birthday redacted the second birthday was j cow's 50th then we find out that jkl's birthday was actually like six months ago six months ago no november 28th yeah nobody nobody cared and frankly none of us went to italy for jake how's birthday we went from the instagram guys we went to the other guy's party yeah jake howe's birthday is like coveted he keeps trying to bring it back in different variants and no one wants any part of it so on the last night the last night of the trip we had the j cow birthday party and what do they serve pizza i mean like because it's on j cow's dime i mean the rest of the week we had this like magnificent well you throw my birthday party for me snacks you didn't even throw in any bread sticks i mean he was like he just door dash domino's we had truffle pizza unlimited truffles it was delicious i think it was the best meal i think you're just a little jealous because the dinner you hosted maybe didn't hit the notes you wanted to hit sax oh my god are you serious we brought in i mean he flew in a [ __ ] troop from blasphemy he flew to circle food i was talking about the pizza versus you know by the way i just want to say that that whole circus thing in this in the water uh i got so mad at one of my kids because it was so dark and the kids were in the pool yeah he kept diving yeah and i kept saying stop i can't see you and so i was just like he never none of the kids should have been in the pool i agree with that and the truth of the matter is you know my five years old was in the pool too and all i could do was keep an eye on him keep in mind i was so worried about it i was playing lifeguard with my friends i didn't enjoy the show for that reason yeah me too they had the time with their lives yes they loved it and actually that was that was definitely worth it and the day before i want to give credit to saks because saks and i went down to that restaurant and we made them open up the wine closet we rated it we found the best three bottles of wine and we brought them back for everybody and then and then i'm not sure if you remember this we taped an episode of call in in which uh i was a little drunk yeah i was drunk i was confused yeah so anyway the whole world can listen to us drunk on call in in uh we're launching on september 2nd so nice congrats yeah that's gonna be a big deal and uh congratulations to the all in syndicate members who wet their beaks and to my syndicate members uh people don't know this but it was the absolute record we've ever had for any syndicate i believe at the end of the day we had 150 slots and we had 950 people apply sacs amazing we had a million or so in allocation and i think we had seven million in demand i yes i'm really excited about this product it's the best game you've been involved in creating it's better than yammer it's better than paypal spicy take wow daddy daddy got a little tasty poop sex don't hurt your um don't hurt your elbow patting yourself on the back there but go ahead continue you got a little product manager elbow there paddington don't dislocate your triceps feedback we've gotten from users has been incredible i mean it's just the reactions tell you what's good about it here's here's what i think you nailed um as a person who's been in podcasting for over a decade um the critical aspect of this is when you pop up your club or room on call-in it creates a podcast out of it with an rss feed and you can go listen to the previous show so if you are listening to this and you wanted to create your own version of all in you could do it on call-in just get three of your knucklehead friends and talk about your adventures on boats and private jets and drinking fine wine wherever you are and you can start your own podcast yeah it's not really expensive why not included right it's not the key insight it's not about the room it's about the show you know like everything we think of as social audio is really just a feature of creating a show creating a new podcast and uh so anyway people really like it i'm very excited september some shows have been created in the beta this is the thing that's blowing me away is like well over a hundred i think maybe a couple of hundred if you go to the show directory you and and the cover art that people have created is really elaborate you know people are really getting into it i've said this because you're a phenomenal you're a phenomenal uh product builder so i think this is really exciting yeah under underrated product builder i would say but it's just interesting that this doesn't exist somebody should have made this already like there's zen casser and riverside for recording podcasts there's libsyn for hosting them what uh what's happened as a as a protected minority i'd like to ask this question what happens what's happening to clubhouse um i think it's irrelevant i'll be talking i don't want to dunk on founders but um i think that they uh why can't they just do these features it sounds like i mean i'm for sure i think they will copy it at some point yeah but but i think that so it's a good it's a good question and i really think there's different visions here so i mean i've listened to their founder talk about his vision and it's very much about creating this live serendipitous type experience like kind of like a cocktail party and that's fine we're not doing that we're creating long tail podcasting is what we're doing and my experience is informed by what we've all been doing on the show for last year and a half which is podcasting right and the thing that i've seen that i didn't know until we did the all-in pod is how much work goes into what j-cal does behind the scenes it's incredible we got nick doing six hours of post-production on the show i want to automate all that work away so anybody can do what we do and that's like a very different vision no offense nick no i mean not everybody is gonna want to put the type of post-production into this they don't have you know i've got six people on our podcast team like it's not everybody's got that infrastructure so over time you'll build that i believe it uh it'll turn out great all right let's get to our first um topic here uh while we were away the united states started the process of leaving afghanistan after a 20-year war uh in which i think it's pretty safe to say that was an unwinnable war and uh we have failed like the russians did saks had a uh tweet uh that was a well getting a little bit of play on the old twitter what we're seeing before our eyes is the collapse of the american empire because the people in charge are completely corrupt and incompetent but we can't talk about that because insiders can never criticize other insiders the larry summers rule did i tweet that you did um yeah i mean you might have had a couple of drinks and then sorry he actually didn't he just texted that in the group okay so that was a confidential text to our thought to our group that we're not supposed to even say exist well no it's okay don't beep it it's okay i mean it's it's it's true it's it's not exactly what i tweeted but it's similar to things i've been tweeting and tragically uh yesterday um isis k which is an afghan affiliate of the islamic state claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings outside of the airport and that tragically killed over 100 people 90 afghan citizens and 13 american service members i guess you know we're not here to talk about wars it's not exactly in the mandate but everybody wants our opinion on this so let's get started saks you have strong opinions we'll start with well it's yeah i mean how can you not talk about this this feels to me this is one of those events where you know i was glued to my tv for days i think i was in france at the time the taliban overrun overran kabul and yeah it was you know the afghanistan war has been going on for 20 years no one's been talking about it it's just this thing that's been happening in the background but all along we've been assured by the pentagon that we're winning hey you know don't worry about this we got this and then you wake up one day and all of a sudden we've lost the war and the taliban's overrunning the country and you're like what is going on here you know not only is the the botched withdrawal incompetent the fact that we were lied to for two decades about what was really happening the the idea that we had created you know we were how many times were we told that we had created this afghan army it was 300 strong we spent you know two trillion dollars in the country uh you know being and we were told the whole time that we were building institutions there uh that you know that we were creating a democracy in the middle east that uh we were even you know um promoting gender equality and uh lecturing the taliban on toxic masculinity or something like that and then we find out one day that poof the whole thing was just kind of a lie it was this giant debacle and now we can't even get our uh we can't even get our civilians out of the country not only that but we we've seen 12 people 12 american servicemen and women killed yesterday 13 trying to protect the airport uh almost 100 um afghans uh now we'd only have to not only contend with the taliban whose positions i don't think any of us know about but we also have to deal with isis k which is like some you know offshoot affiliate of isis run by a guy who was actually summarily killed by the taliban but that didn't clearly stop anybody the the level of honesty just to say the the the lying that we've been doing on this topic is just utterly um it's really really scary you know how could we have gone 20 years 2 trillion dollars 2 400 american lives and counting and found a way to just basically waste all this money and tell ourselves these lies for so long and it turns out none of it was true um and then the back half of it is that we look like a little bit of a country that's sort of in decline because we can't even figure out an orderly withdrawal it's not as if you know this thing came out of the blue out of nowhere this was a negotiated withdrawal so we had months to plan for this you know and we had months to do the right honorable moral thing for all of these for for all of these people that helped us in that country just to give you a a small anecdote you know the day that kabul was overrun you know the democrats were actually tweeting out about uh celebrating librarian day that's what they were focused on jason and i on the way back you know i we flew back with my with my mom and my sister we stopped in toronto to drop them off and the planes beside us jason do you remember this yeah i think i think brett or paul were telling us my pilots were telling us these planes uh have been going back and forth saving refugees in afghanistan it's like wow what an honor to just be beside these these amazingly heroic men and women and you know i don't know jason if you saw but as we were refueling they came and boarded and they were getting ready to leave again meanwhile that america cannot get even to a point of view on the topic and i think that's what's so shameful it's like not only did we spend the money not only did we lose all these lives not only didn't we have an orderly withdrawal we couldn't even at the end guarantee the safety of americans or do the right thing for all these people who risk their lives to help us fight clearly a useless war freeberg you have lots watching all this i know you don't like when we delve into politics too much but what do you yeah you have any thoughts you want to add yeah i don't know if it's about politics as much as um i kind of use a little bit of a startup analogy like america never really found product market fit with what we were trying to do in afghanistan there's some fantastic um gallup polling that's been done in afghanistan uh over the past uh 15 20 years already and they've actually had people on the ground pulling there and most recently which has been consistent for over 10 years polling shown that 87 to 90 of afghans said that the government is corrupt this is the government you know put in power put in place by the united states 90 say businesses are corrupt and if you go back to a poll they ran in 2010 the question was in general which of these statements comes closest to your point of view sharia law must be the only source of legislation 56 of the afghan population in 2010 believed that to be true and another 38 percent said sharia law must be a source of legislation but not the only source that leaves just seven percent of people that think that sharia law should not be is it sharia or sharia sorry sharia law should not be part of the um legislative process uh in defining the afghan laws and constitution and so um you know it's really telling that you know it's almost like when you when you start a company and you try and create a product and you sell it to a customer base you got to figure out what the product is you got to make sure the customers want it and then the the idea for the startup works the problem here is our views as a nation and maybe western democracy doesn't necessarily fit with what that market wants and we can certainly make the case that we believe that our ethics and our values are superior and provide more of an opportunity for individual freedom and liberty things that we believe should be available around the world but if the market's not buying it the customers don't want it you're really just raising a ton of venture money trying to create a product that no one really wants and at the end of the day you're you're trillion dollars down and you have to shut the thing down and it goes bankrupt and that's effectively what went down here and if you look at the history of afghanistan remember they were in the soviet afghan war in the 80s nearly the entire decade of the 80s then the taliban came along and provided a degree of stability in the 90s and then all of a sudden this al qaeda 9 911 war began um you know after taliban had been in power for a year and it's been 20 plus years of strife and 20 years of strife and challenge where the population have increasingly viewed the government to be corrupt businesses to be corrupt and here's a really interesting statistic um which also came out of this polling that gallup does over the last 10 years the percentage of afghans that are happy with their present household income has gone or are not happy sorry with their present household income has gone from 60 to 90 9 out of 10 afghans as of last year were not making enough money to make ends meet so you put all of these facts together you've got this long history of strife with this you know company effectively coming in trying to tell you how to run your government how to run your your country that doesn't match with your beliefs on on your your the way you think a government should be built you've got all this turmoil that's happened historically you know it really was um i would say to some degree this inevitable failure of a startup that got over funded that never found product market fit that never really got off the ground certainly the exit strategy on how do you wind something down in this case and it certainly relates to human lives and the tragedy of the partners that we had on the ground um was was totally mishandled but the broader picture here is like i think it's more corrupt than that i think that we basically engage in a two trillion dollar wealth transfer from the people of the united states the citizens of the united states to the military-industrial complex that's what we did well i mean i have two points i want to i want to build on from from yours freeburg and now yours chamath which is the original mandate here was to go and get rid of al-qaeda and to also you know kill osama bin laden and to not have uh the taliban giving safe harbor to al qaeda that quick that mission got accomplished in large part in the first year or two and then uh when we finally got to osama bin laden in pakistan i think it probably would have been a better idea to understand this is an unwinnable war get in there destroy the taliban leave and then say if you come back we'll do it again but we're not going to stay here for 20 years to your point freeburg and try to create a revolution if the people are not ready for it i think that we have to start looking at our foreign policy and saying we do need we do have a better view of human rights clearly than the middle east uh and certainly afghanistan and we do want to promote human rights around the world and freedom we're not doing that we're not we're not we're not freedom fighters of democracy or justice we should be we are led by motives of revenue and profit i know that but we should be and when we went and we kicked the nazi's asses and we beat japan when you know they were trying to dominate the world we were doing it to stop communism and i think when you look at nation building and these these kind of revolutions to friedberg's point they have to want it as well so we should be working with the countries that are teetering on going from authoritarianism to democracy and we should take the high ground and we should be the more authority of the world because if we're not who's going to be i i agree with that part but i think the right thing to do is just to open our doors and say you know what we're here there's a draft right and the smart and the capable and the willing we're willing to basically bring uh inside of our borders so that they can work on our behalf and that's what other countries i think get right about all of this stuff like again as a canadian um you know the canadian perspective of this is not that you deploy troops and you get embroiled in these you know debacles over 20 years and thousands of lives and trillions of dollars it's the exact opposite they're there to support humanitarian efforts right they're there to send peacekeeping forces as they need to but otherwise their real response is to actually then open the borders for folks that want to be there who are then wanting to trade up jason to those values because that's the simple way to self-select instead of saying i'm going to impose my version of democracy over there i'm actually going to show you what our version looks like over here and if you want to come the doors are open certainly being an example is step one and we i think do that largely well but we do need to sometimes intervene and i think that's the question here is when is it just to intervene when there is human rights on the line and the country is teetering on authoritarianism or democracy like where is that line the just cause here was to go get osama bin laden because he attacked us and we should have gotten out of that country as soon as we realized that bin laden was no longer there i mean that was basically after the battle of tora bora and if we didn't leave then we certainly should have left after we got bin laden in around 2010. so what were we still doing there we were engaged in this exercise of nation building which by the way we spent six trillion dollars on nation-building exercises in the middle east between afghanistan and iraq uh for what for not this is why the electorate is in such a foul mood how many of our domestic disputes are caused by the fact that we squandered that six trillion dollars that's more than uh biden's entire domestic agenda um you know so we wasted all this money to freeberg's point we never understood the culture there and to jamaa's point it was a giant money funneling operation to defense contractors there was a great piece of reporting by an independent journalist named michael tracy and he talked to frontline grunts about the wasteful spending you know they would send 12 humvees to some local afghan partner only two of them would ever get there the other 10 would would break down and disappear and no one would even know where all the money went it was like an unbelievable orgy of wastefulness and um you know one other important detail on this there there's a a a guy who i think should be much more famous to all of us uh his name is john f sopko he's the special inspector uh general for afghanistan reconstruction uh that short for cigar he was appointed by congress about 13 years ago to look into what was really happening in afghanistan and to report on quote unquote lessons learned from the afghan war and so for 13 years sapco has been very quietly diligently interviewing people from everyone from front frontline troops to commanders about what's really been happening in afghanistan and he's been releasing these reports that everyone in dc knows about but nobody in the country knows about let me just read you these are just the chapter titles from his latest report okay oh jesus just the chapter titles harmful spending patterns resistance to honesty personnel struggles willful disregard for critical information incorrect theories of change poor understanding of local context and by the way that includes ignoring things like the sexual abuse of young boys by afghan warlords who are our allies okay which the new york times reported on we completely swept that under the rug okay that's just a table of contents okay from one of his latest reports which is about 100 pages complete incompetence on our in our government complete waste the pentagon was telling us the whole time i mean while this guy sopco the cigar you know the special inspector general was telling us the truth of what was happening you've got the pentagon telling us and the elected leaders the whole time that we're winning this war that things are improving they had all these uh bogus metrics to prove it and you know and so it's just it's a systemic failure but sex what would be their motivation to say it's not working look i i think i think that oh right we'll be the motorbike you can't you can't fix what you don't measure and so basically like if you want to lie there there you have it we have that now for 20 years of lying let's talk about the metrics because this is actually an important point but this is my point it's like what what's what what's the objective for them to be measured what's the objective in that case know the objective is to demonstrate leadership the objective is to basically say you know what this is really not working and this is about putting yourself in the position of a person whose child is over there okay if any of our children were there who signed up because they thought they wanted to do the right thing and and and you know be in the army or the navy or the marines found themselves in afghanistan got killed god heaven forbid and then that body comes back and there's this report comes with it which is effectively what it is okay this is the coda to the death of two point you know 2400 americans and two trillion dollars i would be so heartbroken i am heartbroken just thinking about this like this is not that's not what we're about so we can't keep doing this and we can't keep lying we can't rationalize lying anymore right well i agree with that and let me just speak to the point about the metrics because the problem was not that we didn't have any metrics the problem is that the metrics were bogus now why is that well first of all the mission was very unclear it's not clear how you measure the success of transforming a country to afghanistan like afghanistan to our values i mean what what really are the metrics for that so what the military started doing is not measuring outputs but measuring inputs so you have you know the commander's on the ground saying well today we trained a thousand new afghan troops okay but what they don't say is that over 90 of those troops are illiterate and 85 of them are on drugs i mean and this is what the journalists who are on the ground when they would do the interviews with these you know with these uh you know frontline commanders or trainers they would find this out now why wasn't this in the report well because the military is a culture that's based on advancement it's basically the pentagon is a big country club it's a big insiders club there's a dogma the dogma was we're winning the war and if you want to advance in that organization you're not going to be the one you're not going to be the skunk at the garden party who tells the generals that they're full of [ __ ] you're basically the guy who gives them the metrics they want to hear and then their boss the the person who's the boss of the front line guy is going to improve things 20 percent he's going to shade things another 20 and then the next guy in the chain of command shades sings 20 and by the time you get all the way to the top the chairman of the chiefs is telling biden we have a an army that's 300 000 strong these guys are going to take over the country we're not going to have a problem we're going to have plenty of time to get our people out and that is why we had a lackadaisical withdrawal strategy these guys thought they had all the time in the world because systemically they've been bullshitting themselves about having a 300 000 man afghan army and then you know when you actually look under the hood of this thing there is no army is this basically a bunch of kleptocracy i think what happened at the end of this thing is even more dangerous for the future on top of everything you said david which i agree with is that what we basically said is that we will engage in whatever cover-up is necessary because we're not willing to lead and talk about the mistakes we've made and to do the things that are necessary to really fix it and that's what's really [ __ ] sad because as he said as you said saks the minute that you knew that uh bin laden wasn't there we had a choice then the minute you knew that he was already dead we had a choice and the choice was to do the [ __ ] right thing and instead what happened was we got caught up in virtue signaling we got caught up in personal advancement we got caught up in the grift we got caught up in graft we got caught up in corruption we got caught up in the you know military industrial complex and here's here's where we are and the crazy thing is biden had a moment where he could have stepped in and said you know what guys i'm looking at all of this data here's the new plan and he didn't do it either let me ask you a question if biden had run an orderly exit and then it spiraled into taliban and reverted back to what it was how would you feel about all this sex i think i think that would have been that's the goal right trump wanted to get out yes and biden both wanted to get so if you just executed twice as good or 50 better there'd be no problem here we all want to be out correct yes that that decision the decision to get out was a seventy percent popular decision when biden made the decision in april and then they didn't when trump made it last time because he did a bipartisan to get out let's not pretend otherwise it was clearly the correct decision to get out but here's where biden screwed it up okay and there's some blame that needs to be apportioned to biden into the to the generals and we don't really know who screwed it up but collectively they did the big mistake the original sin of this withdrawal is that they pulled out of bagram airfield at the beginning of july okay they didn't just pull out they literally ghosted the afghan i mean they pulled out in the middle of the night without telling anybody the afghans uh army who are our allies woke up the next morning and the americans were just gone and the electricity had been turned off i mean this was unbelievable and so the problem is we then lost our air superiority over the country we lost our ability to conduct close combat air support we lost our ability to do a mass evacuation okay we basically gave up our central military asset in the country before we got the civilians out before we got our allies out and there were 18 000 of these so-called civs the special immigration visas these are the afghani uh translators and helpers who are embedded in our combat unit units we the the state department meanwhile was totally caught up in bureaucracy slow walking their applications those 18 000 translators are now stuck there okay they have 50 000 dependents we're talking about spouses and that so they have no way of getting out and then the final thing that just takes the cake is that we gave a list to the taliban of here's our biggest helpers when if they go to the checkpoints we want you to let them my lord so there's basically an assassination this is your kill list i mean this is really unforgivable and it's and it's and this was it's not like this was unknown okay there was a bipartisan working group of both democrats and republicans who wrote a letter to blinken at the state department back in may saying we are afraid of about the safety of our afghan allies you need to get them out now the state department is taking too long processing the special immigration visas you're totally caught up in red tape bureaucracies solve this problem blinken did nothing he was another deer caught in the headlights they could have also just uh instead of making people fill out all these forms and all this red tape i heard one commenter saying like the right thing to do in situations like this is to just get everybody out put them in a holding uh location and then process them there in other words if this person says they're translating their family and they have you know relatively good paperwork get them out put them into that holding pattern and then figure out how to process them later we got to wrap on this discussion get to some other topics but the interesting thing to watch here is what's going to be the future of afghanistan and i don't know if you guys saw the financial time story but china is watching this uh like a hawk and they russia are just sitting there laughing well china is even worse they have aspirations of partnership in this region with pakistan already and afghanistan and building super highways and expanding their train network and having their own silk road essentially to to get to the middle east from china and this is going to be the uh axis of the united states authoritarianism by biden asked putin if it was okay for us to stage military resources from you know from from from close quarters in asia and uh putin was like no go jason i think what you what you just pointed out is the motivating factor for um having a presence in this and other similar similarly situated territories around the world yeah a lot of people assume it's about imperialism and imposing kind of american democratic principles and ideals i think that's the way the narrative is sold internally here at this country but the truth from the intelligence community and i think the folks that maybe are a little bit more thoughtful and long-term thinking about this sort of stuff is that the absence of an american presence in certain parts of the world will enable um the uh the success of what we would consider competing states globally and you know there is still that unanswered question ultimately of how do we compete on a global stage given what is currently a very negative view on our having a presence overseas a military presence overseas a physical presence overseas in these sorts of territories and it begs the question of does that really set us up for challenges and failures in the 21st century as a nation state um as the other global players in particular china you know take advantage of these openings yeah well i i agree with that and let me just let me just say why china is so smart and we are so dumb china is going to afghanistan right now and cutting deals with the taliban to build a highway so they can get to the rare earth minerals which afghanistan is rich in and they're going to use the super highway they're going to build to get that out and feed their economy that is how they're going to spend their capital in afghanistan meanwhile we spent over 2 trillion we have nothing to show for it you know they go abroad in search of rare earth minerals we go there to lecture people on toxic masculinity it is absurd okay now the the president well you know what sex it's a little too cynical we were also protected we were educating women don't they them it's very important that's right we go there to lecture people on their pronouns no that that's just far too cynical we went there to protect some people who wanted democracy and to allow women to read and to be oh i'm sorry we just flushed that we just flushed that right down the toilet sorry i know that we do we do not conflate that we just want elections but david david is right we knew that the minute we pulled out we were casting 50 percent of that population to a complete state of stasis that was completely not known so what are you saying sacks that we should have stayed there with some presents well this is this is like the argument in vietnam we should have just told the truth we're leaving we don't have a plan and this is going to risk all women it's going to risk people that helped us and we are not sure what's going to happen but you know what we decided we're leaving that was the truth remember remember the vietnam war we killed two million vietnamese to make the country safe for democracy you know what the vietnamese at the end of that we'd rather have our two million people back we see these wars in terms of ideology we think we're going there to spread democracy they see it in terms of nationalism all they see is a foreign invader trying to impose their values that's why they don't buy into what we're doing and by the way the whole idea that we're going to plant madisonian democracy in the soil of the middle east that was a 20-year folly that cost us trillions and one of the reasons why there are no madisons over there there are no madisons there are no jeffersons there are no washington's who is going to take up that cause what we had in afghanistan is this president ghani who's a crook who was off on the first helicopter with millions of our dollars that is how stupid we are it's the last place we should be trying to do democracy there's other places where it's teetering and we can probably be more helpful the american president john quincy adams this is back when america had a rational foreign policy he said america does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy that used to be our foreign policy now we involve ourselves all over the world to impose our values for no reasons it is costing us a fortune and it has led to the crumbling of the america of of american wealth and power and it completely erodes our trust in institutions particularly the institution of the federal government and we're left just scratching our heads saying if not these guys then who is going to say what is that what are we doing if uh chamath and uh sacks if you're don't know if you don't want to support democracy in the world what happens to taiwan in your world this signed taiwan's death war i'm sorry but you should just assume we should just let taiwan go no my point is the following taiwan will when the when prc has the right window be under complete chinese control and we because of how we have executed this and how we've executed the rest of our middle asia strategy means that we will not really engage and the reason is because it will be an enormous food fight inside the united states where all of these past experiences of us [ __ ] this up will come up should we defend taiwan except by the way the difference is we're not going to we would not be going to war with a bunch of like [ __ ] tribal people in the mountains carrying sticks and ak-47s from the 80s this is china so if we can't beat and win in afghanistan i mean we also what are our jed i mean i'm sorry guys but the chances alone it's not worth it with a group of japan south korea australia and the eu we should be defending taiwan in my mind what do you think freeburg should we try and defend taiwan when this inevitably leads to the chinese government finding their window as chamath is predicting again i don't think that the motivating factor could necessarily be imposing democratic principles as the priority if you were to to to actually weigh that decision you would realize that you should probably have a presence in some latin american countries you should probably have a presence in central africa where there are authoritarian regimes that are doing terrible things but we don't have a competing global interest there to defend against well it should be clear taiwan is right now democratic so we would be defending a democracy free brook jkl's asking a specific question if china invades taiwan do you think the united states should get involved on a principles basis or do i think the united states will get involved either one yeah i mean i think the challenge is the escalation with china right so that's going to be the big calculus it's really about what's the what's the long-term cost certainly on a principal basis you'd say let's go defend the weak and go protect them because they share principles and ideals with us but the the backlash the challenge would be if we were to do this global trade would stall there would be um massive issues at home with people saying that we're getting involved in an overseas war all of the reasons that from a political perspective it would stall our economy it will cause all these you know i'm kind of speculating a bit here but the actual cost isn't just about sending a few thousand troops over and surrounding the island and protecting people it's actually much more severe than that and if you were to weigh it it could be that we end up with 25 30 million people losing their jobs over the next decade because of the economic fallout that occurs um in our doing that and so on and so forth and a lot of american prosperity that we get to enjoy um you know kind of kind of declines and so that's the real calculus and i don't know how to do that calculus but i think that is the calculus that is being done by the intelligence community to figure out the answer to that question let's swing it to saks to do a little bit more of this calculus because what we're talking about here is not giving up an authoritarian state right that wants to be authoritarian we're talking about a democracy on the risk board yeah it would be taken and flipped from a democracy in like hong kong has been flipped i think it's a i think it's a very important distinction that taiwan is already a democracy they got there on their own they've done a lot of hard work building that country since uh that basically that the country became separate from mainland china i think in 1945 it's never been under the control of the ccp it's uh it's a free enterprise system it's democratic capitalism there are basically 24 million free souls who live on that island and if we show any weakness and we frankly already have by what we've done in the middle east if we show any weakness they will fall under the boot of the communist regime so i think it's there's a big difference between trying to plant democracy or nation build uh verse in a country that's never had it before in thousands of years and basically being friends and allies with a country that already is a democracy and just wants to be free and i think our message to china should just be we like things the way they are we don't want them to change that's it we have a policy of what's called strategic ambiguity to taiwan it basically says that we may come to the defense of taiwan or we may not and i think we should just continue with that policy i think our message should just be we like the status quo we don't think it should change let's leave things alone i think that that's fine but i think we need to be investing hundreds of billions the trillions of dollars we wasted in afghanistan could have been better served building an infrastructure in america for chips and semiconductors and a bunch of these critical components because then it would give us a lot more bargaining room to uh actually be able to play out that strategic ambiguity more fully i think the reality is that despite the policy framework the practical economic reality is that we would be engulfed in a war if if taiwan were taken over by china because as friedrich said our economy would ground to a halt because those critical assets are linchpins for how massive swaths of the american economy work yeah i'll tell you one thing we should be making plans for i don't know if our military is competent enough but we've talked on this pod before about how what 70 percent of the advanced chips come out of taiwan companies like tsmc if china takes over that island i mean those chips are the new oil right we're going to be dependent on them in a way we never should be for our supply chain you're right your mouth we never should have gotten this dependent but frankly our military needs to have a plan to sabotage those chip factories because we can't let them fall under the control of the ccp um i don't know if they're confident enough to do that but but if taiwan falls it needs to be a poison chalice for the ccp we're going to need to make some decisions here because russia with crimea and the ukraine and their ambitions and then china taking over hong kong and looking at taiwan i mean i think the lesson here is if you're a dictator and you are allowed to take over other regions and other you know countries you're not going to stop it's the nature of dictators and we have to at least put our foot down you know afghanistan's a [ __ ] show but these other places we're flat-footed right now jkl we're still i know that's why this is a serious problem so and so we need to we need to sort of like re-center ourselves and get momentum you know you to use a poker analogy we basically just bluffed off half our stack with the jack eight off suit and then and then when you get the ace king suited you have no chips to play with yeah right you know and you're just like yesterday credibility basically 911 911 put us on tilt okay and we've been losing pots for the last 20 years and now we just lost the big one and the question is to jamaa's point are we going to lose the rest of our stack or we're going to go take a walk around the block like mute recenter or something time to recenter on the re-centering thing china is going in the opposite direction in a way that could actually help us meaning like you know it's uh it's a pretty scary set of things that's happening over there but it's also a kind of instructive about how we could recenter ourselves because there's they're actually enacting the laws that we all talk about we've been talking about for seven months but they're actually willing to do it and they and so if american policy makers would actually should we pivot to what's going on over there with the china or should we go to robotics uh let's let's finish china and then we can and then and then we can talk about china is continuing their uh crackdown of tech companies uh and has proposed a ban on foreign ipos uh the wall street journal had some exclusive reporting today i'll just read a quote and then hand it over to chamath china plans to propose new rules that would ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from going public in the us people familiar with the matter said and in addition to that uh under these new rules they are looking at the algorithms that are being run uh and different services and making them transparent and the chinese government will basically control the algorithms that have caused so much chaos here in the united states with facebook and twitter and youtube and then finally they're going to close the loophole on v i e's champion want to explain what this means from a market perspective today's a really big day um because of these things jason as you just said so let me just break this down because i think it's interesting for us to all learn about this together so one thing is around the technology which i'll talk about in a second which you just talked about and then previewed and then the the second is around the capital markets and the money flow and that and this is a really big deal so what is a vie because you're going to hear this a lot a vie is what's called a variable interest entity and what it is is just a massive workaround so essentially what happened was uh a vi was a legal business where you know an entity had control of a company okay through a contract but not through equity so it's kind of like you know saks like i had a contract with colin that said i can dictate you know who does what etc but i don't own any equity now the the company that completely ran afoul of all of these things was enron and back in 2001 enron went [ __ ] ham as we all know they had a bunch of these vies and they used it to basically shield a bunch of losses and do a bunch of shady things so then there was a bunch of accounting laws that were introduced china on a completely separate track around that same time was like hey listen we want to control our economy so we're going to prohibit foreign ownership so just for all you guys to know china to this day does not allow a foreigner to own a piece large sections of the chinese economy okay so as of 2018 which is the last updated list as far as i could find it there are 33 sectors of the economy where china says you cannot be a foreigner and own any equity you have to have a local partner no you cannot own any equity except if you want to start a business there you have to have like a partner like yahoo did so all technology companies fall under this all data companies any education company any media company so you can imagine it's basically every part of the economy that matters and so with because of all these restrictions you know the chinese internet companies were like hey hold on a second i need to get access to the capital markets what do i do they dusted off the vie structure and they basically created all of these um you know caymans holding companies and that's where all the american investors would go and buy equity from or contribute equity to and so you know 10 cent alibaba baidu dd.com jd all of these folks have these vis and what's interesting about these vies is it's written clear as day but not a single investor seemed to care but in the prospectuses of these chinese companies they were clear it doesn't mean you actually have a claim on the assets it doesn't mean you can actually make a demand of management i mean if you saw this in an american prospectus you would not put a single dollar into these companies but in fact the exact opposite happened because people were greedy and chasing the money and and these risks by the way came back to bear because jason i think you were the one that gave the example of the chinese tutoring guys where you know overnight this guy lost 99 of his net worth i think this was a one or two pods ago the way they did that was that they cancelled the vis they said online tutoring nope sorry these things can't exist anymore and so essentially we have the situation now where uh vis are part of 58 companies uh massive chinese mega cap companies that are in the huge indexes in in the united states these 58 companies account for two trillion dollars of market cap we are we are we are now in a situation now where the chinese government basically says for online tutoring we're going to cancel the vis in a bunch of other areas we're going to start with regulation we could cancel the vis later and so we've essentially put the capital markets in my opinion on pause and so now let's transition to this in china capital markets in china i think now are the most volatile they've ever been essentially the people's republic of china the government the ccp chooses how and who will make money and they are basically putting their foot down in a big way in the capital what happens to the 1.62 trillion in existing shares that have been bought by people around the world would there be some way to unravel that or a tender offer you're going to have to de-list these adrs i don't exactly know what would happen i think what's unprecedented you have capital loss jason because when they canceled the online tutoring vis the stock prices basically went to zero so you could eviscerate two trillion dollars of market cap tomorrow if they decide you know what that vie for alibaba by the way nick i'll send it to you but it's a it's a thing of art if you look at the vie structure for baba i mean it is a [ __ ] babushka doll of nesting entities and this or that i don't know how any investor who bought shares in alibaba actually took the time to understand what they were actually buying they suspended disbelief because they were greedy so so the point is that's happening okay so the the capital markets are now i think getting uh really constrained the complement to this is that they're starting to now introduce legislation as a prelude in my opinion to canceling some of these vies in the most important area that we care about which is tech so jason to your point the chinese cyberspace watchdog today or yesterday i think it was they just published a list of draft regulations that will now become law i'm just going to read this to you so let me just just fyi for you guys so let me just give you a sense of them users must be provided with a convenient way to see and delete all the keywords that an algorithm uses to profile them number two providers providers shall not record illegal and undesirable keywords in the user points of interest or as user tags and push information content to them and they may not become discriminatory or biased based on that information users must be informed that algorithms are being used on them to recommend content or products to them and they must be allowed to opt out and see completely generic non-personalized results the algorithm recommendation shall adhere to main this is incredible to mainstream values i don't know what that means they must harmony in china they must actively spread positive energy and promote the application of algorithms for the better providers shall regularly review and evaluate and verify these algorithms models and data with these watchdogs these watchdogs will now start to increasingly take board seats on the comp on on chinese companies so you put these two things together it is a typical moment in china tech it's a takeover yes yes i mean so so some of those provisions sound like you know privacy regulations we might want to adopt over here completely but i think we should focus on the one towards the end that you mentioned the algorithm recommendation service provider shall adhere to mainstream values actively spread positive energy and promote applications for the better now how do you actively spread positive energy i mean as a business person under that regulation like what does that even mean i mean it basically means it means what you're not spreading david it means you're not spreading a protest in hong kong it means you're not talking about the uyghurs it means you're not talking about tiananmen square you're not creating social unrest this is a way for them to say you know positive energy means don't criticize xi jinping or the ccp or bring up topics that are in the no-fly zone like the weakers well they're they're they're going to have content moderation guidelines yeah they're bringing it all under their control that's what it's about i mean these this is the type of thing that despite all of our problems makes me very happy to be an american yeah can you would i would say though that the first part of what i said about their regulations to me seemed really intelligent and i think americans would want that and if american policy makers would actually just suspend disbelief for a second go to the chinese website meet nick we can put a link into the into the show notes of where the regulations were published and actually try to implement those laws i think we as americans we'd all want most of them except that one yeah well that's what the devil does they mix the lies with the truth in order to get you to be convinced to give up your freedoms friedberg what are your thoughts i'm getting increasingly convinced that this idea of like decentralized blockchain based government governing might work in the 21st century i just feel like they're the you know we keep hearing more about the overreach and the ineptitude of uh centralized institutions like uh ccp and the u.s government and you know i'm not hearing anyone that says man you know this is a great well i think we're seeing great progress no but free book i think i think the ccp is actually pretty good what they do we may not agree with them but i think they're pro i agree with you i agree with you generally yeah but i do think it creates an incentive and a motivation also because if you don't agree with their their principles you know you're going to find yourself looking for an alternative so you know i don't know which this is probably not the right time or forum for this conversation we should probably do it on another show but we should talk about um some of the innovations uh blockchain innovations that that are taking place and jk i know you spent a lot of time on this as well but you know it'd be worth kind of talking about the notion that you know can you see um governing move to the blockchain um and what does society look like in maybe the 22nd century if this becomes a reality and how do we how does the world kind of evolve there well in the crypto world you would put in some effort you would have some skin in the game and you would because of your processing power your nodes on the network would get some votes so it'd be like in a democracy how much money you had or how much work you produced you had some sort of say which kind of sounds like ours i mean imagine if the u.s government instead of you know having some folks go to congress and say i want a trillion dollars and spend 25 years in afghanistan you know it was more of a distributed decision-making process where data was available in real time metrics were used to make the decision and the folks that actually contributed dollars uh to the network ended up being the ones that made the decisions based on how many dollars they've contributed or based on some other principle of decision making that doesn't kind of aggregate institutional ineptitude uh which is kind of part of the issue we've seen here well so i think that brings up an interesting point which is you know when we talk about all the ways that we could have spent these trillions of dollars better than nation building here's here's the fundamental problem i agree with that i mean i wish we had spent the 6 trillion that we spent on nation building in the middle east i wish we had spent that at home domestically on our own priorities but here's the problem is i think what afghanistan and specifically the military industrial complex shows is how good these special interests get and extracting money from the system while providing so little value you know we spent so these contractors spent or we they they charge so much to basically deliver so little in afghanistan do you really think it's going to be much different for the trillion dollar the 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill that's coming you know and if we create it they're licking their lips they're looking at yeah exactly the the people the the groups are going to get that money who are gonna feast on that trillion dollars are people who their skill set is lobbying okay that is what they spend their time doing sorry no listen and if you are really good at lobbying why would you even waste your time trying to get good at delivering value you're not that's your business's lobbyist that is your value yeah that is your skill set exactly so this idea that we can basically spend a trillion dollars on some domestic innovation program the problem is it'll never go to the right people never go to the innovators the best thing we could do is just not spend the money quite frankly so smaller government or how about how about this not a government that's uh 20 trillion dollars in debt i don't know how it's like smaller or small government to if we were to save 6 trillion would still be 14 trillion in debt it's not a small government i think the good jumping off point here might be the supreme court eviction moratorium uh in the supreme court not upholding it and what are your thoughts on that sex because it does relate to this never-ending free money train no repercussions of personal behavior and you know spending insanely forever it seems like we're never going to stop with the stims yeah i think the supreme court threw out uh biden's eviction moratorium as unconstitutional look i think it's great you know the the government should not be uh preventing eviction you know especially not the federal government i don't understand how this is supposed to work i mean all you do look i don't want to see anybody get evicted but the reality is you have to pay your rent and if and if there are groups of people who can't pay the rent and the government decides that uh that those people should be helped the right way to help them is to give them the money to pay their rent not just to tell landlords sorry like you can't collect rights give more stimulus to those people yes it's a taking it's a clear taking from landlords to say that oh your tenants don't have to pay you anymore how does that make sense well how do we unwind the free money train because there's 10 million job openings right now that are not getting filled and then we have unemployment starting to unwind or the bonus unemployment run and then we have all this uh free rent concept or just you don't have to pay your rent at some point it feels like we have to let the free market come back and maybe people can't pay their rent so they go take one of the 10 million jobs i know that sounds cold-hearted you've talked about this before in california we have a labor shortage in california because we've basically run a controlled experiment in the uh ubi the universal basic income where we've basically been paying people not to work or paying them regardless of whether they work guess what they don't take jobs and so we actually have a labor shortage in california despite having high unemployment at some point the government's gonna have to say to people like look covet is not an excuse for shirking your adult responsibilities you know we all have a responsibility to go to work to pay our rent you know to pay our parking tickets and covet has been this excuse for suspending you know this this sort of normal life and the problem is covet's gonna be around forever it's like the cold or the flu it can't continue to be this excuse for people not working not paying rent not doing what they're supposed to be doing i think on top of that though i think jason maybe you want to talk about this i think on top of that we uh are amplifying that by taking people's agency away and we are prop 22 and prop 22 is a perfect example of that which you should talk about but when you put these two things together on the one hand you have a government that basically wants to subsidize uh opting out of the system and then you have a set of laws that if they're not unwound reinforce that dynamic and you put these two things together and folks just want to sit on the sidelines yeah let's get free burger by friend you want to talk about the prop 22 um supreme court decision et cetera yeah there was an appeals court um an appeals court that overturned some elements of the california prop 22 which was a heavily lobbied california proposition lobbied by uber and lyft and other businesses that have built effectively marketplaces for independent contractors like drivers and delivery people and so on the seiu which is a big employees union had um you know fought very hard to pass legislation in california that made it effectively very difficult for people to operate as independent contractors enforcing companies like uber and lyft to treat them like full-time employees or to treat them like employees and so prop 22 was to counter the union-funded legislation um which basically provided more freedom and flexibility to workers where there weren't all these very arbitrary random rules that if you're a writer you can be an independent contractor but if you're a driver you cannot you know all this nonsense that took place because the unions were trying to increase the scale and scope of their union base um and so prop 22 was passed in california after much spending and lobbying and it passed by a pretty decent margin and then this court ruling basically in the appeals court overruled the constitutionality of some elements of prop 22 which brings into question whether that prop 22 is actually going to hold in california therefore are all these people who are drivers for uber delivery people for doordash and all these companies that are creating like thumbtack and you know all these companies that are creating marketplaces for individuals to have flexible work to go and work where they want when they want to find gigs to find you know short-term jobs to find you know tasks and projects that they can run are they now going to be seeing that those marketplaces stop working because when you have to start treating those people like employees the flexibility and freedom of those marketplaces enable stalls out and and kind of you know as we're already seeing so it's super nasty and the implications are that we're now seeing um you know we're now facing once again this crisis of you know our basically lower income people people that want to have flexible labor going to be restricted from having access to gig jobs because the unions want to force everyone into a full-time job which you know as our friend bill gurley pointed out it's kind of like an archaic element of yeah the 19th and 20th century i mean this is like let's play at school from uh bill gurley and here it is there's one big issue that i don't think is talked about enough which is you know that if you polled the drivers they're not looking for any changes they're really happy with the flexible work product if you look at the voters of california they stepped up and voted and made it very clear in a state that voted two to one you know in favor of biden they came down very strong 60 40 that they didn't want this to happen and there's one uh entity that's really been pushing this the whole time going all the way back to e5 and that's the seiu it is a single union but to call them a single union understates it because they are the granddaddy of special interest groups i i sent along some data maybe you can put on the screen they spend more money lobbying than any other organization in our country and have for many many years they only represent 2 million members but oddly those members are in hospitality health care and government services they're not even in this industry so they're taking the dues from their members and using it to fight these battles because they want to expand their footprint what they're really after is putting 400 420 which is the minimum member union fee for the 2 million they have they want to expand that to these drivers so they don't actually want to help them they want to add to their costs um but they're the they're the they're the one that's been pushing this the whole time and i i think it's worth just saying one thing on this which is um you know this is uh really kind of a question not about california and prop 22 but it's a question about what is work and all the tech companies that are enabling a new form of work globally people don't want to have 40-hour week jobs people don't want to have to go sit at a desk all the time people want to have flexibility in their lives they want to have gigs technology enables us to quickly find short-term jobs short-term opportunities to work on things and make some money and figure out how we want to build our lives in a more flexible way figure out how workers want to build lives in a more flexible way across all industries and it's really uh frankly you know a non-progressive policy to say that everyone has to be pigeonholed into working you know full-time 40-hour week labor jobs be employees and not have the flexibility of running their own business in their own way with the with their own time and choosing what they want to go do and work on and so this sort of legislation and this sort of battle is a really important one for defining the future of work in the united states which will ultimately represent the future work globally and the craziness of all this david is that uber drivers lyft drivers door dish drivers etc are getting paid a fortune now because there's a labor shortage and these ride sharing companies have given a minimum 21 an hour fee so i don't know exactly what's going on here but it seems to me like it's a union grab because everybody else who's affluent or rich real estate folks uh you know doctors whoever can be freelance but if you're a rideshare driver or a freelance writer you don't get to be and uh it seems just incredibly unfair it is and you know one of the best things about covet i think for all of us is that we learned that we could do our jobs from anywhere we didn't have to go into an office we didn't have to work the standard whatever nine to six hours we could be anywhere we had flexibility and i mean i think it's one of the lasting consequences of cova that's actually been very positive for a lot of people and here you have the government basically trying to take away and prohibit freelance work flexible hours gig type jobs these are the sort of modern flexible working relationships that people want why are they getting rid of it because of lobbying pressure from the seiu which only has two million members is not even a big union but they got lorena gonzalez in their back pocket she passed ab5 in california the people at california didn't want it remember 58 of californians said we don't want this so they overturned it in this ballot initiative and now you got this activist judge basically you know um inventing these species grounds for overturning prop 22 which is what the people want so it's ridiculous and you know the common thread to me on this show that i've come to realize about american politics is just the degree of special interest corruption and you know people are used to thinking in terms of left versus right it's not there's a special interest corruption that pervades everything you've got this union that is destroying freelance work and flexible working relationships because of corruption because it benefits them you got defense contractors in afghanistan who are just looting looting the pentagon and the federal budget because it's in their interest you've got these special interests of both the right and the left this is the central problem in american politics and you know what they do to cover up the naked self-interest is they disguise it in a kind of work virtue signaling so they'll start you know talking about you know how what they're doing is for the benefit of these drivers when the drivers don't even want it and to build on that i'd say you know my great realization from having this conversation with y'all every week is that we are starting to propose a nanny state in which people have no agency even if they want to have agency over their life and career you are taking it away and then if there's no repercussions to people's behavior and they have no agency they become you know uh disenfranchised from society and why are they going to participate and then what kind of society do we have if people can't make their own choices and you see it also in you know uh accreditation laws and you see it where only rich people can invest and now you're seeing it with this freelancing where you know my dad would have loved to have an extra shift or two to make extra money and he's not allowed to 80 of drivers want flexibility they're willing to participate on things that ultimately um on things that they think matter but don't necessarily solve the core root cause problems the people right now in america i think are focused too much on symptoms meaning you know uh they want to fight for the right hashtags they want to fight for the right pronouns they want to make sure that you know this person gets cancelled for things that happened eight or ten years ago and i think what they don't understand is these are all symptoms and this is this is not what solves the problem right we have a water crisis in america we have a food impending food crisis as we shut off the water we have a climate crisis that's engulfing the entire nation we're still in the middle of a pandemic that we can't control we have an economic system that's fragile that's dependent on a country who's sometimes our friend and sometimes our foe in china these are huge transformational issues that we can't get organized around and so instead we spend our time at the edges on the symptoms and we think the symptoms are if we get the pronouns right everything's going to come together and everything's going to get fixed the looting will stop the graft will stop the corruption will stop and it turns out actually it emboldens those people to say hey wait a minute i'm tricking these people everything that i wanted to happen can happen let them focus on the pronouns while i continue to loot the american treasury for another trillion dollars that's where we are yeah and the perfect the perfect representation of that is gavin newsom he represents both of these trends he is one of the most corrupt governors we've ever had there were as soon as covet happened they suspended uh all sorts of um you know the the process for contracting so that his uh campaign contributors could get all these special contracts he cut a sweetheart deal to pg e to absolve them of liability for all the fires they've been causing and on and on it goes the the 12 billion to the homeless industrial complex and then he disguises it with all this woke virtue signalling and so you know i would just give a shout out to the recall campaign the election is on september 14th but the ballots have gone out if you want to send a message to the political class that this special interest corruption has got to stop let's cut the head off the snake here just vote to recall gavin newsom on question one period all right you guys want to end on uh jeff bezos um let's let's let's talk about the ai bot first and then and then bezos all right so um if you haven't been watching boston dynamics uh tweeted a video which will play right now as i talk over it and um it's basically their robots which have been picking up heavy objects and walking around doing parkour if you don't know what parkour is it's basically people jumping off the side of objects and flipping and doing balance beams and vaulting themselves all around it is basically in france yeah but from heights and jumping over things as well and the french are like parkour experts yeah i mean it's i think uh parkour is french for jumping uh i made that up but uh uh no uh absolutely uh i have never seen him we'll show that before i have seen him so drunk that he's on the floor but never seen him do parkour but this robot looks more dexterous than any of the terminators we saw in the films and then adding to that oh if you didn't know boston dynamics got bought by google i'm sure freeberg has some inside information on that and then they uh got sold again softbank had bought them and now they uh are owned by uh hyundai the south korean hyundai the south korean automaker because apparently the softies that google didn't want to be involved in uh government contracting with robots i.e making soldiers of the future which obviously i don't know the chinese i wouldn't characterize the whole story like that i mean remember like there was well google bought boston dynamics in 2013 and remember boston dynamics have been around for over a decade prior to that they spun out of mit like in the 90s i think um and they were had always been working on you know advanced neural nets being applied to kind of you know automation systems so you could get things to mimic real life um and the idea at google this was when they had set up google x and we're starting to kind of do a lot of this you know moonshot type tech tech investing as a separate entity outside of the core google and it was like leveraging their cash flow to start new projects the idea was let's you know build this into kind of a next-gen robotics platform they had andy rubin who previously started and ran android um company was called danger google bought it turned into android um run the run the unit and they made several other acquisitions they rolled them all up into this kind of robotics platform they had spent i think 400 million on boston dynamics and hundreds of millions more on these other companies um and ultimately i think the challenge was less about like you know who does or doesn't want to do contracts with us but it was more about the fundamental question that is still the question mark today uh which is do we really need general purpose automation or do we need special purpose automation for industries for customers right where do you find product market fit do people really need a robot that does parkour or do they need an automation system that can lift boxes and pack in place things or an automation system that can move things from point a to point b and so if you're solving for a customer's problem you typically find that the special purpose automation solution is a more elegant cheaper solution that you can get to market right away like building an automated little truck that moves things around or building a machine that lifts and put this wood is in the right place between narrow ai and general correct and this is exactly the same question jkl is like you know is um you know is general purpose ai really what the market needs or are there specific applications of neural network or machine learning technologies that allow us to solve for the problems that customers have without needing to replicate the human being so when you're lifting boxes you don't necessarily need all the other things that humans have right you don't need to mimic a human when you're moving a package you don't necessarily need to have four legs to do it you can have it on four wheels and just have a simple system that moves it around and so you know i think softbank you know massason had this whole belief with vision fund one when he raised the hundred some odd billion dollars that you know the singularity where machines were going to be smarter and better than humans in every way intelligence and dexterity and all these things we're about was about to kind of we're about to pass that moment and this was part of that core thesis he had which is this is going to be the robotics company and i think as we've seen they can mimic parkour but they can't do all the other things humans can do and if you're you know trying to get a machine to do something that a customer needs it's really not parkour let's be honest they can't even walk a dog because they wouldn't know how to deal with the edge cases uh if the dog had diarrhea i think there's core p at boston dynamics that's certainly critically valuable for businesses that are in special purpose automation which hyundai is there's going to be a great set of applications for leveraging that ip into some of the existing product lines and customers that they serve so in related in a related story elon then uh revealed the tesla bot plans at his ai day he's in a couple of these ai days and i think they're primarily designed um to get ai talent which is some of the hardest developers to find in the world um and they said that their tesla bot will weigh 125 pounds five eight so i'll be a half inch taller than it um but it will weigh significantly less than me and it will move up up to five miles per hour and can carry 45 pounds uh elon said the reason he was doing that is so a human could easily overtake it in case it becomes sentient which was quite entertaining uh chamath you think this is what are the chances elon has a robot like this and um it's operating the real world i saw a bunch of journalists dunking on him that this would never ever happen which is kind of hard to believe when there's a million tussles on the road yeah no comment and i think uh it's awesome oh okay can't comment all right leave it at that uh sax you have any comments on this um you worked with elon at paypal yeah i thought it was a little bit of a surprise that he was working on uh a robot um but uh you know obviously this has been an interest of his he's talked a lot about it and so it kind of makes sense uh it's just another innovative thing he's doing should we talk about elon versus bezos on the spaceship yeah well i just wanted to let people know by the way the robot going at five miles an hour it's not as outlandish as i think some of the journalists and idiots out there who don't build anything in the world who were kind of dunking on him like we're saying if you think about those cars going 65 75 85 miles an hour on the road processing the world doing a neural network machine learning on the fly to figure out where the car should go a robot going five miles an hour is an easier task i think all those people dunking on him should have just taken a step back and actually asked the question am i just being really insecure right now and if so why am i making fun of this guy who just seems to be you know firing on all cylinders and maybe it's maybe it's me maybe you know maybe maybe maybe i'm writing this article out of my own insecurity maybe i'm feeling a little impotent you know and also to to dunk on on a guy for the version one or even the version 0.1 of a product is so ridiculous i mean i remember the version 0 of tesla now look at the company i mean you know it's about iterating that's how you get to products so it's just so stupid and short term and by the way on the current product capabilities and his his his style of doing these things i think makes a ton of sense when when you know he started with starlink it was the same reaction people were dunking dunking dunking too slow too expensive not going to work and what you find through these events are really technical people building companies that could help him want to be a part of the mission right and so you know for whatever it's worth it's like i think starlink's gonna be a real thing i think this is probably gonna be a real thing i think great companies will get absorbed into this these efforts i think uh i think it's great and i really think the people that are just so low like there's like this loathing going on i just don't understand what do you think will differentiate the um opportunity for success with larry page owning and running um boston dynamics then masa owning and running boston dynamics and then elon trying to take on the same project from scratch you know why were these other two kind of well-capitalized influential businesses that have attract rate partners not been able to turn boston dynamics into kind of a successful business but but you guys believe elon will if i had to just categorize them i would say uh larry is absent and is sitting on a 100 billion dollar fortune with no idea what to do um i think one of the seven islands yeah i mean he's just absent so he's irrelevant um i don't think anybody knows what the [ __ ] he looks like um i mean we do uh but uh you know he's frittered away enormous potential i think i think masa is a master capital allocator but not an engineer and i think elon is the most important technical product and business mind of our lifetime i think the answer is even simpler he's the customer of the robot so he understands what the spec should be because he has so many robots working in the factories so he's gonna buy the first thousand to go colonize mars or work at a space station to build [ __ ] in space and he's gonna have them working in the tesla factory and for the boring company carrying rocks out of tunnels he's the customer of course he knows and masa wasn't the customer master was looking to increase uh whatever the money he do but it's also it's also skill set like masa of course he's an incredible visionary and investor but he's not going to be the guy in the engine room making the robot larry now in fairness to larry page he could be that good and there was a moment in time where larry was that good and frankly better than elon uh but that window has closed and it's well passed and now you know it's kind of like the player that just keeps getting better and better i think that's elon musk great sax your thoughts i mean nothing to add to that i think you both made great points i mean the amazing thing is that elon is still working so hard doubling down coming with new ideas new initiatives i mean it's working harder than ever when most people are you know doing most people would do what larry did you know go buy an island or seven and yours and hang out you know yeah all right bezos is lost his way um and he left his position as ceo of amazon to focus on blue origin and then he um sued nasa over the moon program accusing nasa wrongly evaluated its lunar lander proposal giving all the funds to spacex he then did a series of like infographics talking about how terrible spacex's plans were um this lawsuit has delayed spacex's work on the project according to the verge i don't know if that's true or not uh amazon urged the fcc to dismiss the newly submitted plans for spacex to launch another cluster of satellites uh to power starlink uh elon tweeted turns out bezos retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against spacex uh which is hilarious um how sad is this that it's a huge miscalculation in the following way which is that in order for jeff to achieve his ambitions he needs deeply technical people and this is the simplest way to basically turn them off because this is not what technical people do what do technical people do we don't we don't take our toys and run from the sandbox crying like a [ __ ] we stay there and we keep iterating trying to make things work yeah we don't act like patent trolls i have a new avenue slogan for you jkl go ahead winners do and losers sue winners do and loser sue okay folks there you have it it's the all-in podcast we're back we're back from a big vacation make it happen yeah make the banger make the banger all right everybody what's your free bird you have any thoughts on these uh on the lawsuit i feel bad for beijing's i feel like he's just getting so beat up on this ship it's um it's honestly it's a little disappointing because i think he's got all the right intentions he's an incredible engineer obviously an incredible operator i'd love to see him and elon succeed in the work they're trying to do as well as all the other startups that are pursuing this i am concerned about frankly the lack of commercial readiness for this industry i feel like in terms of the hype cycle we're at that early point where the the investment dollars and the number of companies exceeds the market demand and therefore there's this fight over the one or two customers which is basically nasa and the federal government and it's creating this really nasty set of circumstances because that's where the money comes from that's where the customers are right now and so they're all fighting over one or two customers and you know elon filed suits um against the you know federal agencies when he lost contract no no he did that when they bid them i get it i get it and slightly still i get it but still like i think at the end of the day um you know bezos uh is willing to put his money where his mouth is he's offered to put up a billion dollars or more to fund this i'd love to see multiple companies simultaneously going to the moon multiple companies simultaneously going to mars but rather than have you know single contracts with one customer or have you know private industry figure out ways to make money from this and fund it uh it's the challenge is it's just it's another product market fit question right the market is one customer today um yeah but bezos is almost 60 years old he's got 150 200 billion dollars it's gonna cost him two or three billion dollars one two three percent of his net worth to do all this just [ __ ] do it bezos and stop crying and you're right he may end up doing that yeah a competitor no but he's losing the human capital that's required so there was there was a huge cycle about uh this one person who was like the the leader of the of the lander project who just quit and went to spacex my point is other engineers don't want to see that this is the way to win compete he's got he's got a roll out of that hole now yeah build iterate and solve build iterate solve it certainly seems the case that his um pr stunt with shooting himself into space didn't do him any favors either you know it's almost like everyone sees the great work elon does when he does these pr events and he gets all this attention and publicity and gets positive press and accolades and then bezos does them and he's like oh jesus has no besties there's no bestie taking bezos aside and they're not being true besties they need to tell him when he's got something that's a blind spot he and the blind spot here is he was dunking on richard branson and being like oh you didn't go to the right height here's an infographic stop with the [ __ ] infographics bezos what are you 12 years old and you're like going to the teacher with like a drawing like i i should technically get an a plus and i should be singing the solo for the choir practice and like some other person is like got the solo you get the [ __ ] solo next year basis bezos offered you a huge um consulting feed jaycal would you be his bestie um consigliere for sure for sure by the way i i hired this [ __ ] nut he flies back with me i mean he literally ate everything on the plane and then what are you talking about and then hold on i love you you were eating this tiramisu let me focus on the tournament he said to me you have some great toiletries in the back i said yeah sure you know there's marvis there's great toothbrushes and then out of his pocket he pulls some scope bottles that he had to go for four more in my bag until 2022. generic it's the real scope this [ __ ] was looting i looted looting i looted all your lactate we all take advantage of sea people oh my god this this other guy this [ __ ] fredberg once was so buried he got so [ __ ] mad he grabbed all the lactate in my you know a little medicine cabinet and he ran out then came back he was angry and he was like i'm so [ __ ] angry because he had lost a big pot right during poker then he took all the pistachios and shoved i'm gonna get back 37 dollars in like oh my god so sad so sad all right wait free you want me to prepare the house you want me to prepare the the the yeah i think about it i think yeah i think so i think so that'd be awesome if you could do that oh my god i'll bring some tests some binax tests yeah yeah yeah i mean just as an aside bill gurley was talking about this we talked about this early in the pandemic why don't we have [ __ ] one dollar test freedberg why does everybody not have a hundred dollars everywhere now tests are literally lateral flow strips they cost pennies to make it's how much did it cost to buy 20 bucks why is it a dollar why couldn't biden or trump get that done is it some grift graft greed yeah should have michael jordan on to talk about this he's uh the uh the guy to talk about it but um i mean if people were taking those every day we could i think you guys may remember this i tweeted about this over a year ago like last april where we could actually print these antigen tests for pennies in the u.s i mean when we had that like whole emergency authority thing we were making masks and liquid oxygen tanks and all this [ __ ] we should have been printing antigen tests on strips of paper we have the facilities in the us to do it and we could have made you know 100 billion 50 cent tests um and made them just free and available to schools to work places to everything it's absolutely insane people can't be freelance riders or drive an uber for two hours a day in california exactly we can we can mandate that but we can't mandate a 25 cent 50 cent test and put them in everybody's [ __ ] mailboxes i'm on fire now it's [ __ ] stupid everything is so dumb everybody's a grifter in this government incompetent [ __ ] i would like to go to uh war with uh fiji because it's beautiful um i'd like an island and i think that fiji probably has a lot of them well fiji is not better than the french people just because i think it's a little closer yeah um yeah so you go there and spread pronouns um also i'd like to go to war with iceland but only in the summer time because i hear it's beautiful i'm occupying tuscany you'll need to build a bagram in all these places just to accommodate all the private jets they're going to come in i mean but just in closing let's just let's just say thank you to the amazing people of italy for having water the greatest country for adults to go on vacation in what an incredible country florence is amazing tuscany is outrageous beautiful venice is incredible everything is delightful i love sardinia i love you italy i love you so much [Music] and it said we opened sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release your feet [Music] david sacks you come to me from your boat in sicily hand my daughter's wedding day sax you come to me and you ask me not to interrupt you so that henry belicaster can make a clean cut of your speech well you can stop by acting like a man david sacks i gotta interrupt the podcast oh you didn't let me finish my dog you wanted this pot one of this part on this podcast who's the director who's the producer i'll get you this part but someday sax i'm gonna ask you for a favor sax i'm gonna ask you for an allocation and all in in your calling app i'm going to ask you to lead the series b and on that day i expect the valuation because measure it with what i've done for you today [Music] david sucks [Music] it's a pretty good bit look at uh don canole over here






hold on let's see if we get saxon all right guys i guess sax isn't i guess sax is blowing it off because he's too busy okay we'll start with that let's start start without sacks okay three two [Music] and it says [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to the all in podcast with us today the queen of quinoa on fire in california which is also happens to be on fire sadly uh and the dictator chamoth polyhapatia uh david sachs will not be joining us today he's too busy with his uh call it all in app oh i'm sorry it's actually calling he put a c in front of it nobody collected the arguments it's callan callan callan his calendar debuted this week um but saks will be uh if you're a sax stan i think sax is uh no we've done one show without free break now we're doing one with outside yeah this will be the tax free episode it is a tax-free episode all right so we got a lot of time here i'm here all too eager to take credit for call in on twitter so don't pretend like you're not part of it now yeah yeah i can't believe it this guy is complaining i'm leveraging the style licensing of the term all in to sacks and gotten paid like seven million dollars in equity for him using our name oh my god i gave you guys so many shout outs you know during the show i know he did because i listened to his uh interview with uh emily chang and i listened to his thing with um axios with dan primack he's very david had a very good uh uh he was magnanimous presentation and then he was really magnanimous and kind so thanks sexy poop and i i gave so much credit to j-cal i said that if it wasn't for jacob i never would have done this whole podcasting thing because it was too hard i never would have figured it out and then you gave me a shout out because like of organizing it so that we could all be friends on uh i like that i appreciate it very nice i have i actually haven't listened to it but give us a for those who don't know david sacks has created a podcasting slash casual audio app it's called call in it's available for download for ios uh just coming out of private beta my understanding is uh you're at somewhere around ten thousand uh folks yeah i mean there's a lot of sign ups yesterday i haven't got all the latest numbers yet but um but yeah no it's it's you know it's taking off all the reviews of it have been sort of rave reviews people are really excited about it fantastic but yeah look the concept is we're combining social audio with podcasting we call it social podcasting you've seen these apps where people create a room and they have these many to many conversations they tend to be ephemeral no one really records or saves them and the quality of the conversation is it's a little bit chaotic but we've taken that concept and put it in the service of creators who can now essentially like record their pod in front of a live studio audience they can bring up the we call them callers they can bring up people from the audience one by one to ask their questions it's much more organized and structured it's not a free-for-all to try and grab the mic and then once you record the episode you can then go into post-production and the app can edit the transcript in order to edit the episode and then you publish it and you can share it so is it like so it's basically like only fans but audio it's only fans but for people who jump off at it's my birthday today god damn all right happy birthday chamath we're going around the horn here everybody's patting themselves on the back uh let's all take a moment to say what we like about your moth okay great let's get back to the episode that was quick what do you know i was thinking about uh you know what birthday present do i get for chamoth and then i was like gee what do you get for the dictator who has everything i don't i don't know what does kim jungle in need exactly let's hey guys wait there's actually an answer to that question apparently madeleine albright once got kim jong-un a basketball signed by michael jordan for his birthday so apparently that is yeah apparently that's what you get a dictator access you get them access to people they wouldn't normally have or a bone saw a very very very old uh french burgundy uh ideally white but the white doesn't hold up as well but you know if you go back it i mean i wonder if you could drink like a yesterday i had the two the two fills deutsche and muth at my house and we had uh we drank 1996 salon no sorry 1997 salon clothes and then we drank a bottle of 1996 paul rogers or winston churchill champagne fabulous only champagne last night let's have us we could also get you some planonium uh plunonium if you want to uh no guys guys i don't want to take out some enemies i would like you to come and play poker next thursday you [ __ ] and then i was just bring a bottle of uh bring a really nice bottle of wine or champagne we'll drink it that's fine oh my god i got cases of terrible wine i'm gonna bring them no you [ __ ] did you hear what this [ __ ] did oh my god shows up this piece of [ __ ] showed up last week and he's like here are these fantastic bottles and i looked at this like 1985 caymus and i'm like that's not a good year right in the right of the garbage it gets better it gets better he has two bottles and so he gives him to joshua and joshua looks at them and joshua doesn't know what to think and he looks like i'm like just like you know and so josh was like wow david thanks freedberg this is incredible i appreciate it and then freeburg does the [ __ ] most brutal thing open it open it josh was so appalled he opened it and poured it on cherry i threw it out he took it right to the other garden no he said where did you uh find this he goes oh it was in my basement in the hot tempered humid [ __ ] san francisco weather for 10 years yeah i had no idea so i moved you know i moved like two weeks ago and i went to the basement to like get all my boxes and i'm like i've got like hundreds of bottles of wine that i have not seen in years and i started getting not temperature controlled right next to the furnace they weren't lying flat i'm like these things are all like they're all corey they're all they're all cool and there's like stuff in the 80s from the 90s yeah so josh took them and poured them over the arugula salad he didn't want to see any arugula no he didn't really remove the [ __ ] vegetables and herbs in the garden he basically cleaned him in the drain shield do not bring any more wine to my house oh my god i'm bringing wine for your dog if your dog's coming back with nat my dogs are coming back today yeah they're flying backwards all i have to say about that game is thank god mr beast has a hundred million followers oh youtube wrestling r.i.p mr beast all right you know by the way i don't want to say give a shout out mr beast is [ __ ] incredible what a great deal what an incredible entrepreneur what a great human being yeah um i mean for 23 years old to be that sufficient 23. 23. this guy i thought he was guy this guy's clearly on track to being an enormous figure in culture oh he's going to be a [ __ ] multi-multi-billionaire determined hard-working smart kind good clever ambitious great and his ideas he's creative and he's just a good human mystery was one of the most impressive people i've met in a really really really long totally agree i mean he and i had been texting for a long time on twitter and then and then just on text but then to finally meet him and we had talked on the phone and we had zoomed before i'd never met him in prison but what an incredible oh why don't we have him as the bestie gusty on the path he totally like he totally with the group too and he was great just funny you know what we should do is we should all round everybody up we should fly to uh to greenville where we should surprise him yeah yeah do a little game at his channel oh here's an idea what we could do is we could tweak phil hellmuth and just re have a game and replace phil in the game with him as our new bestie oh my god that's awesome let's replace the music who replaced the kind of like a better bestie in many ways okay by the way are we skipping next week to record at the symposium on monday or are we going to do next week and then also do monday no double down okay i double down yeah let's double down all right listen to cover good um good notification we're doing our first all together recording of the all in pod a week from monday at the tpb symposium no reason the production board the production board no reason to publicize it but i'm excited because it works it's a closed event what is the purpose of the event i just get together a bunch of scientists investors entrepreneurs and ceos and um it's a day of science talks mostly and then some business talks on the next day but we're having a really fun event the night before with poker our friends are all coming to play poker and we're going to record we're coming for the science day i'm there for the full year i'm staying for the science day too i want to learn so the poker night is going to have poker and we're gonna record the all in pod live or together in person for the first first time yeah that should be really cool um and for those of you wondering you know we're going to do our own all in summit which will be probably like a hundred or two hundred iconoclastic people uh and we're going to probably do that in the first quarter or second quarter of next year uh postman we gotta choose a date you know my people are going crazy because you won't give them a date well right now i think we should do it in uh here we go in rome okay so italy rome stocks wants miami i'm telling you guys they're hotels sickest hotel in the world and i'll tell you why the people you have never seen these people ever people are amazing amazing tremendous people they are great it attracts the hottest people i i mean it's [ __ ] right we're not doing it based on aesthetics we're doing it on ideas chamomile it's not just aesthetics but people aren't going to go to rome you know miami the good thing about miami is we know it'll be open no matter what right you know we can't count yeah we can host our own super spreader event fantastic no i mean we're uh host the uh the code conference kara swisher's conference is at the end of the month and sky and brook and i are hosting our poker again and i was like is there any way this conference is going to occur and if it does occur what happens if they're i mean obviously everybody's going to be vac everybody's going to be mac masked i don't know if they're going to do testimonials all right you think everyone should be mass at the conference they're going to be unless well they're going to be because it's indoors and there's a breakout event amongst the vaccinated which can happen between delta and zetta too you're uh you're you're going to be forced what do you think sacks well i just think how do you effectively have a meeting with people whenever indoors when everyone's wearing a mask i just think that's and i indoors not during the dinner and stuff look i mean i think for poker but we are testing everyone on entry all three days okay that that makes sense to me right we do a rapid test at the door and so but then once you've done the test and someone's negative why would you need a mass once you go in i don't know about it every day the stupidest thing is they do stuff like make you wear the mask but then take it off for dinner like what you you can't get kovu when your mouth is full i mean how does that work it makes no sense that's the whole that makes no sense put your mouth let's do risk assessment here and then take it off when you sit down three feet away it's it's security theater well let's do let's do risk assessment none of us would go to an indoor event if it wasn't fully vaxxed correct would anybody attend an indoor event of this nature hundreds of people if they didn't have a vax requirement i would yes i don't you would i i well i mean what i would care about is i wouldn't attend it if people weren't all being tested on the entrance okay well i'm trying to do just on yeah to eliminate um transmission so for you to go to an event you would have to be vac and tested that day morning of rapid test yeah look i mean i think in general everyone's kind of standard it's like makes your vac because it reduces the likelihood of transmission but still like it's not stopping transmission clearly i'd rather what i care more about is is point of um entry testing which is what we're doing at our symposium i just want everyone to get tested upon entry what would you do let's talk about something important okay all right listen i think the most interesting thing going on in our industry this week is elizabeth holmes trial has begun um jury selection uh started this week and it's going to cover 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud over false claims she made about the blood test results from theranos um they uh have now selected a jury of 12 northern california residents consisting of seven men and five women it took two days to question around 100 potential jurors about their answers to a 28-page questionnaire that included news outlets they read what news outlets are at if they knew any witnesses and had any negative medical experiencing experiences and it was complicated um to get these because it is impossible to not know about it and now it seems the uh interesting thing is elizabeth holmes uh who worked on this company for two dec close to two decades and was involved in this fraud from start to finish is now uh taking the position that she uh was under the control of her business partner sunny bowani uh and that he had been abusing her and controlling her what are your thoughts on and so he's being tried separately by the way they're gonna be tried in sequential order so whenever this trial ends then he gets to um get tried what are your thoughts on uh if she will be convicted and her defense strategy i i think this is more this is like less about the specific um evidence against her as much as it's um and it's much more right now about the um whole silicon valley fake it before you make it um approach to entrepreneurship and you know we all hear this from um you know all the entrepreneurial kind of advisors and you know experience stories of experience and stories of success that in order to kind of achieve success as an entrepreneur you really have to oversell and promise and create an incredible narrative about where your business is headed and in many cases that gets ahead of you now the public the general public that doesn't operate within silicon valley with as much breadth as we do i think they hear the stories of the adam newmans and we work and the collapse and elizabeth holmes and this this trevor milton guy and nicola but um there's thousands of these other sorts of smaller stories where a vc rolls his eyes where the first board meeting after raising money is like wait a second we're actually going to be half our forecast when we raise money or the numbers are going to be way below or the product doesn't actually work as we presented it sorry i don't think i've ever funded a company where that hasn't been the case exactly and so i think that's the that's the the the big question right off is like does this trail does this trial kind of indict the way silicon valley operates and the storytelling models and the narrative models there are examples of these people getting a little too far ahead of their skis and maybe you can argue they could perceive something to be non-fraudulent while other people can you know kind of perceive it to be fraudulent but don't we see this kind of broadly in silicon valley and doesn't this kind of bring up a question on like are all startups now and is the industry going to have a shift as a result of this trial in terms of behavior as investors and as entrepreneurs and how you tell stories how you diligence etc etc this is this is only going to get meaningfully worse um i don't know if elizabeth holmes committed fraud or not i think that you know these folks will be able to figure that out in detail but here's something that i do know pretty precisely which is the amount of money that's trying to get into silicon valley is going exponentially up yeah and as that happens you guys now see it every day where there are firms whose entire business now is just to literally write a check every day they're closing deals every single day they're doing zero diligence and so what that's going to create is an incentive for founders particularly those whose backs are against the wall or who's doing something that's highly speculative and hard to diligence to stretch the truth to get the capital and it's impossible for guys like us to actually step in and do diligence on a lot of these companies even if you actually have time but then if the competitive dynamic is such that you don't even have the time because somebody else beside you is going to rip in a check with by just meeting somebody um and you know quote unquote having done the work on their own which is impossible because they're not you don't have access to somebody's you know financial books this problem is only going to get worse and so i think we as an industry just have to realize that there's going to be an incentive to lie there's going to be an incentive to stretch the truth and it's because of the amount of money that's available and yes the lack of diligence that's happening sax is this an example uh in the case of elizabeth holmes of somebody being delusional as a strength or somebody committing fraud as a crime it's probably both now look i think you guys are giving a little bit too much credence to the media narrative that theranos is a quote-unquote silicon valley failure the truth of the matter is there was no major silicon valley vc firm in fact not even a minor one that invested in theranos as far as i know there is no vc on the board of theranos we've talked about this before it was a bunch of kind of grand poobah types and there was no one who actually had the technical competence to do diligence and so elizabeth holmes isn't so much an example of silicon valley as somebody who was selling silicon valley she was selling the promise of silicon valley she was selling the idea that this was going to be a deca corn or a centicorn to people who are too unwitting to know and i see you know tim draper a lot people are really hanging their hat on to the fact that tim draper wrote a seed investment to elizabeth holmes i you know that that really is very different you know when you write a seed investment apparently elizabeth holmes was like a neighbor of his she their daughters were friends is my understanding and she clearly was an impressive person you know she came across impressively in person she obviously cast a pretty big reality distortion field to a lot of you know smart people so you know she's the type of person who you would write potentially a sea check to just based on you know a talent bet the fact that she that later chose to engage in and fraud i don't think that's like tim draper's fault and it doesn't make this like a silicon valley fraud again um you know show us the vc firm that was hoodwinked by this um but you are seeing david this trend of the the firms coming in and not doing diligence not having audit rights not having information rights not doing proper diligence and basically relying on the previous investors right how troubling is that and what are you doing to protect crafts lps yeah so so look i think there's a big difference between going into uh a board meeting and finding out the projections were inflated because like frankly we all take projections with a grain of salt right but versus the founder lying about the past right so people are always going to put the rosiest picture or they're going to puff up what the future is going to look like and it's up to you as the investor to determine if that's true or not but they cannot lie about the past they cannot lie about what their revenue was last year what contracts they signed before you invested that is fraud right and that is what that's where elizabeth holmes crossed the line she wasn't just painting a rosy picture of you know what the technology would look like you know years from now she was lying about their capabilities at the time people were investing that is the line you cannot cross um look we conduct diligence we you know try to look at wheat financials we try to make sure that the numbers are all true um you know frankly we're not investing in things that involve a tremendous amount of technical risk a lot of technology risks so we always use the product before we invest the idea that the product would be faked i think it would be hard to perpetrate that kind of fraud with the sas company but um so look i mean that's interesting you bring that up i just dropped a link into the uh zoom chat co-founder and former ceo of palo alto based startup technology company headspin charged with securities fraud and wire fraud and uh this guy lachwani 45 from santa clara county basically was lying about their arr in assassin's company and this is they raised a bunch of money so this is an example of something happen in every company yeah it can happen at yeah i think i don't think you're inoculated just because you invest in sas my point is if you have a person that's willing to rip in a check a hundred million dollars three hours after meeting you asking for no diligence at some point david your back is gonna be against the wall because you're gonna have to justify to your lps why you aren't in some of these theoretically good deals right and some of them will become fraudulent they'll just turn out to be it's just the laws of distribution so it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma you're saying i mean if you don't do how do you you have to get deals done and you're up against people who won't do diligence no it actually comes down to something different which is then you have to differentiate with real brand meaning if somebody really wants you on the cap table they will absolutely slow everything down to get you correct so for example like let's let's assume like it's mike moritz i'll use up there is nobody in the world i think who's not a complete buffoon [ __ ] who wouldn't slow his process or her process down to get mike to be on their board and so if you're willing to basically just scuttle an entire process um and just take the fastest money i think it actually says something that there is more risk in backing somebody like you than somebody that wouldn't slow down so or right so then you know the problem is there's fewer there's fewer and fewer mike morrises in the world you know i think saks is one of those people i think peter thiel is another kind of person you know bill gurley is another kind of person so there are these people in our industry where i think that you will um slow things down and i do think allow these folks to do diligence and i think there will be less fraud in general for that cohort but if your platform becomes one that's just about ripping money in and i think the late stages are roughly this they're all it's all brand independent because the money's the same the valuations are the same freebird freebird doesn't it introduce the risk of the retail investor you know we're seeing more retail participation via syndicates um you know via um you know one-off investments online kind of marketplaces and also specs where the retail investor relies on you know some of these kind of bigger institutional or perhaps some name that gets some carried interest in an investment doing the diligence and if the activity level is going up and the dollars are flowing in and the margin of error is increasing you know is there not some inevitable kind of sec backlash and consideration around how are private companies ultimately raising money um and how much they are disclosing and we kind of face this i can uh yeah regularly yeah i can address this as a syndicate lead you know we only take accredited investor money at this time and so anything that happens is with obviously sophisticated people the top four percent of americans investing in companies and in our diligence now we have seen a spike in what i'll call um uh massaging uh or painting the picture in a way that i'm not comfortable with and we have maybe tripled the amount of time we're putting into diligence now because i really care about my reputation and maybe 20 30 percent of the companies we wind up after initially wanting to invest maybe giving them an offer getting an allocation um in recent history 20 30 percent were winding up backing out during the diligence process because uh their revenue was not software based there was a hundred thousand in consulting revenue for me it's like if you're gonna you know make these kind of decisions early on in the company i think it's indicative of future fraud or future um moral ethical issues so we're sitting out in a lot of cases there are uh public platforms now republic and seed invest which i know are also increasing their um diligence process because there's so many newcomers to the space and i think there's a level i'll be quite frank here of entitlement amongst founders that is being um let's say uh encouraged unintentionally by the lack of diligence that's going on people are not taking the process as seriously as they did 10 years ago or even five years ago well let me yeah look i i i agree i think the the diligence you're doing is really good and um and here's where i agree with with chamoth um so we have seen this trend in our industry of the private equity money coming in in greater volumes and greater you know earlier and earlier and faster and faster right and it started with you know you have these um like frankly like public company investors were looking at the uh i the value at ipo relative to the last private round and they saw wow there's like 2 3x mark up here for one year those are phenomenal returns let's arb that by getting into the last private round then they look at the second last private round they're like wait there's a big return there so they keep moving earlier and earlier to r about that return but to jamaa's point it's just they're applying a financial model where they're not in the diligence business they're just um and and i think they just see like fraud is a cost of doing business right something they can that's exactly model out with the portfolio but but the only reason they can model it out that way and have the fraud be an acceptable and predictable sort of cost of doing business is because you had these firms in our industry who actually did diligence at the seed at the series a right yes and now and now the private equity guys they're moving so early they're actually even now doing the they're moving all the way to series a so no one's doing the diligence and so so so that is that is a risk i think because it might actually change things and this is where bringing back to elizabeth holmes i think it's important here that there's a conviction i think she should do time this was clearly a major fraud big time fraud and even if she didn't directly perpetrated on silicon valley vcs i think the message to the industry would be absolutely horrible if she gets away with it and frankly i'm a little concerned she's going to get away with it um you know because she is incredibly charismatic john kerry was saying on a cnbc hit that don't underestimate her charisma and ability to snow people and this bengali defense and she just had a baby which you know people don't want to discuss because it seems like it's sexist but she is a svengali herself who will manipulate people in the i like the way you say that she's a strange like uh i think you mean sven golly but yeah right now what do you handicap her likelihood of conviction i i think it's probably like a 50 50. and i think so so here's here's the thing when she was running this company she wanted everyone to believe she was steve jobs she even did the media tour with the turtleneck she wanted everyone to know that she was a jobsee and micromanager who made every decision was responsible for the success now that she's on trial she wants us to believe that she wasn't calling the shots she wasn't the person 9 voting power in the company yeah look yes you know this is sort of the the romy and michelle's high school reunion defense where she wants us to suddenly believe that she was sort of like you know this sort of ingenue who didn't know anything and um you know but she might get off because she kind of looks like lisa kudrow you know um she's gonna go up there and pretend to be lisa kudrow or something you know like somebody says it's super offensive that she wants to get up there and say that she was this abused woman i mean for women who actually are abused for her to get up there and say she's an abused woman and she perpetrated 20 years we don't know whether she was abused or not and if she was it may or may not have implicated in what she did which we don't know whether she did because again thank god for the laws in america she is presumed innocent so let's let's all just like i think i think what david where i agree with you is the following which is we do need to know that uh you know investors we all sign up for expressing the fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of our lps or on behalf of our stakeholders okay there needs to be some equivalent standard that founders are held to and there needs to be consequences for lying particularly about the past because in the future you say i'm just projecting but in the past you're right you have to be able to realize on what's given to you like look when we do diligence in a company we are given everything that they have right we talk to their lawyers we talk to their lawyers lawyers in some cases in the public markets all of this has to be transparently published so that we can come to our own conclusion sometimes those conclusions are right sometimes they're wrong but we can at least know that they're not lying to us the minute that it turns out that they were fudging the numbers that they gave us you're making you know the best decisions you can you're assuming that it's great data but if the data is fudged you're [ __ ] and so to the extent that she did that then she should be punished because we needs that standard she this is this goes beyond money she was switching people's results she was saying that she was giving them a blood result on her incredible varanos machine and she was running it to the back and and running it on an average machine yes and she so she was taking investors putting their blood into her machine the theranose machine then taking them for coffee running it to an abbott machine and giving their results i mean this was the definition of a premeditated deliberate and multi-year fraud i put her at eighty percent likelihood of guilty and i put the over under at 32.5 months served i don't know what the take down 32.5 well i i hope you're right because uh yeah i mean i'm a little worried that uh she's gonna figure out a way to pull the rug over people what what are our kids gonna get in jail if we were chinese right now and they played video games basically i think you would you would do harder time uh so moving on the consequences is to the chinese internet companies no what's the consequence to the kids if they're caught on video games no you're not you're oh companies have to turn it off right right right all right here we go china bans young people from playing video games this is for kids who are under the age of 18 they are now restricted from playing games on weekdays can only play for three hours most weekends and these were set as a response to china's physical and mental health being affected by gaming according to reuters uh it limits um i think they're doing what all american parents would want our government to do for our kids i i don't disagree with that uh gamers are now penalized if they don't obey and the gaming companies will be as well gaming companies will have to prove they have an identification system in place like requiring age range i am sweating who they're texting who they're talking to what game they're playing the new game they want to download [ __ ] that this is the only thing i've ever said that would make me want to move to china this is one rule this is the most incredible thing i've ever heard and i and and they're so smart by the way what's so beautiful is they they send fentanyl and tick tock to us so that we get addicted to that [ __ ] totally i know what they're saying and they're like no you guys are going to learn stem so that you can you know take over the world it's beautiful it's brilliant yeah i would say like everything about china is is a measured decision right the the the politburo the decision makers are not sitting there randomly shooting from the hip based on intuition and saying hey i think we should stop video games they seem bad for kids there is clearly evidence and data and statistical models that are driving this decision and their objective function is improve the health the longevity and the economic prosperity of our society as a whole i'm sorry did you get this statement from china what are you doing continue comrade you got i'm pointing out these guys are these guys generally don't make decisions based on someone's kind of like flippant intuition they make decisions based on what they believe to be in the better interest and i'm not saying it's right or wrong but in the better interests of economic prosperity and i think we all know it intuitively we can certainly read reports but in the united states we value individual liberties above all else and so we don't find ourselves in the circumstance it seems foreign and scary and crazy but again it's another um in my opinion it's another tool we're going to get to something else this century yes that's true but let's let's be clear we we don't we don't value individual liberties that's not true that's just what we tell people but that's not totally true and you know that's a i'm not gonna go there but yeah well i mean we are literally sitting here fighting there's a group of individuals who are fighting to wear masks uh or not have to wear a mask rather not have to take the vaccine and at the same time and i don't know if we want to go there uh we are denying a woman's um david sacks are you in support of texas's abortion ban no we're let's no no i think it's a stupid law and i'll explain why in a second but just on the the china thing for a second um this is i'll be a dissenting voice here this is like if we had given tip or gore dictatorial powers i mean this is insane they're gonna they're gonna determine how many hours a kid can play video games i mean look i i get the the potential benefit but this is incredibly intrusive into the lives of citizens and i'm not sure that video game playing is all together a negative thing you know i think it's mostly our kids go through a phase where they play a lot of games and they grow out of it and you know you talk to developers computer programmers they all went through some phase where they were like hyper addicted to video games it you know builds hand-eye coordination it builds um sort of uh you know computer uh literacy so i'm not sure it's like that look obviously if someone does nothing but computer games their whole life that's a problem but as a phase that a kid goes through i agree with you because i used to play three hours of [ __ ] zelda a day when i came home because i was like no because i was a latchkey kid because i was a latchkey kid and i didn't have anybody to take care of me uh i don't think david though that that's what kids are getting when they're playing four hours of [ __ ] call of duty every night four hours these kids are playing ten hours by the way i think there's i think china has another motivation for for this ban which is they've got a lot of because of the one child policy right they've got a radical uh misbalance of you know male to female ratio they've got a lot of young males without romantic prospects in that country basically they have an insult problem it's a giant insult problem i don't think we hear much about it um because they control the media but i wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of just random violence out there and the last thing they want to do is have these in-cells playing fortnite and call of duty shooting people five hours a night and then getting their brains wired that way that might be playing into this decision i don't know well again you're just validating the mental health aspect they've studied the mental health implications of these video games and they said i'm not arguing for the ban i'm arguing for the fact that china has certainly done something to indicate they have some data that indicates why they should make this decision it may be you're right it may be about kind of you know growing getting people to be more romantic and get out of the house and go get married and have kids and whatnot but there's certainly a and remember their objective function is always about longevity and economic prosperity so you know there's something that's making them say that we can increase economic prosperity increase longevity by doing this and that outweighs the whatever the detrimental social and other effects might be um and you know i think there's something to read into it but no matter what every big decision they make has some degree of competitive advantage for them and you know those kids if they're not playing video games they're going to be do some doing something else like i don't know programming computers doing biotechnology in a lab figuring stuff out on the internet writing the next cryptocurrency i don't know but there's going to be some advantage that's going to arise out of the the time and the and the productivity that's going to be generated by this and i think that's the calculus that they're undertaking here i'm not saying no no we all agree they're thoughtful the question is what is this going to do for this generation if they don't play video games are they going to be more productive are they going to be you know they'll be they'll be good drones for the the collective you know you're right exactly and that's that's the downside here is even if they get it right in this particular case how much freedom do you have to give up how much state surveillance is there in the enforcement and how many other insane policies will they forced on people with this mentality of you don't get to live your life individually you got to stay this is actually i think your best point sex is that i think what could happen here is you can overplay a hand and by squeezing people too tightly you can't play video games uh you can't run your own companies you're gonna get replaced you can't practice your own religion you you can't say what you want be a journalist these things could add up and and they could you know piss off a young group of people who do what happened in tiananmen square or in hong kong and they could be dealing with uh you know their own revolution and what if it's video games revolutions have started over similarly seemingly actually i think you know maybe it's a small chance five percent or ten percent you know creating a lot of social unrest do you want to be all right should we go to texas you guys want to talk about that i mean i have social unrest i'm going to lose my mind here all right here we go sb-8 creates a private cause of action that enables texans to sue those who perform or aid and abet the performance of abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected the ban comes two years after abortion restrictions were proposed in georgia mississippi kentucky and louisiana the previous propositions were spoken out publicly against by progressive tech companies companies with a female customer base and women led businesses that proposed bill never became law uh sax you want to just uh frame for us the the legal sort of case here uh yeah let's go to well do you want to do you want to go back and actually frame uh roe v wade and and planned parenthood versus casey i think those are important to understand what the hell's going on here sure okay well so you know row obviously gave women the the right to choose um you know the reproductive freedom over you know invalidated abortion laws very very in a very very sweeping way casey sort of modified roe it upheld it but modified it saying that the state could impose some restrictions as long as it didn't place an undue burden that was a key term undue burden on a woman's right to to choose and i think what was at issue in that case was um i think it was pennsylvania the state of pennsylvania imposed a waiting period and some consultation with an advisor and so it delayed the abortion but it didn't restrict or it otherwise eliminate it right yeah so so so casey casey roe as modified by casey is really the under is really the law of the land right now which is the undue burden then texas comes along and do you want to explain this law yeah so this law is regards to what you think about abortion it's a really um bizarre law because what it does is it doesn't just ban it it doesn't ban abortion outright what it does is create a private right of action basically a right to sue uh in civil court anyone who aids and abets an abortion after about five or six weeks so six weeks basically after a fetal heartbeat can be detected so which is about six weeks into the pregnancy and the way the law works is that um okay so point one abortion providers are prohibited from performing abortion if they can detect fetal heart tones um again that's six weeks there's no exception for rape and incest i think that's really explosive politically um and horrible do you think it's horrible as a human yeah i'm curious your personal position yeah we'll look let's get that let me just explain the law so the the law puts the onus of enforcement on private citizens not government officials okay they do that to avoid to make it harder to legally challenge this under roe and casey okay so what that what the government has done here what texas has done is it gives private citizens the ability to sue abortion providers or anyone who aids in a bet someone to to get an abortion so it could be an uber driver it could be a friend who simply drives someone to the abortion clinic it could be a person who provides financial assistance it could be a secretary who works at the abortion clinic they can all be sued now under aiding and abetting and here's here's really the the the person who had the abortion cannot be sued but but anyone who ate it and about it can be that's how they're getting around the the right to choose and here's the craziest part is the citizens who choose to sue don't need to show any connection to the person they're suing and uh they don't even have to live in the state right so there's no connection to them there's no personal injury to them but they're basically suing under a personal injury under a civil right of action and if they succeed the law states that they're entitled to at least ten thousand dollars in damages in addition to their legal costs so if they win their illegal guests got legal costs get paid but if they lose they don't have to cover the defendant's legal fee so they just get a free shot here which is also i've never seen a loser pay a rule like this i mean there are loser pay rules but they're symmetric so we have an asymmetric loser pays rule but i don't think we've ever had a civil law like this where um where somebody can sue where there's no injury to them there's no standing here this is the thing that's fundamentally i think at odds with our entire legal tradition and i think regardless of what you think about abortion this law will eventually be invalidated by the supreme court or a lower court on that ground that they're allowing people to sue without standing um and and it's a horrible precedent because can you imagine if with what the what texas is basically doing is deputizing private citizens to enforce in civil courts a prohibition that they cannot or will not pass directly is this the best they could come up in your hold on let's let's just state a couple more uh facts like this was an extremely well thought out law um i think that they the the pro-life faction in texas clearly had some very smart constitutional thinkers that were able to navigate around roe v wade and planned parenthood versus casey to get something written that could be passed in a way where you know samalito just basically punted and said we're not going to give a stay and so this is going to have to meander through the course there is still a risk that it could just get kicked down to texas and it could remain a state issue which there is a big risk and if that's true then you know other states could basically take iran at copying this this law what i what i wanted to talk about was if you bring it all together you know friedberg said something about like you know we really value personal freedom and this is where i was like cynically like actually that's not true this is an example in my in my opinion of where this is just like we are very hypocritical where you know if we talk about a vaccine mandate you know there's just a an entire fiery you know up in arms of people usually typically in the same states that are very anti-abortion that are like you know you know tread on me lightly you can't touch my body you know i have the right to decide but when it comes to this topic they abandon all of that and they go to the extreme opposite side which is the government mandates and to be able to say that to 50 of the population that just because you were born with reproductive organs that you're treated different specifically you know a uterus ovaries in a vagina you're treated differently than a man to me just seems absolutely insane and just like fundamentally just erodes this idea of equality like at just a very principled level and the even worse thing is that then you know the corporations that actually used to be on the front lines of helping to drive social justice so far have been completely absent right you have to remember in 2019 when we had these very repressive abortion laws i think he was in mississippi or alabama you had all of these companies come out and say hey no not here not under our watch then when you had all these voter suppression laws in georgia right you had all these companies come out and say hey absolutely not not on our watch we will leave the state if you implement these things but so far what you've seen in this law is complete radio silence in texas and this is you know you have to remember texas is the ninth largest economy in the world right in the world so you have every single kind of company from technology to otherwise who have chosen to either start or relocate their businesses in the state and i gotta think that you know these employees and these leaders of these businesses should be saying something and they haven't said a damn thing freeberg you have thoughts and then we'll go to esx um look i feel like um everyone has a limit to what they believe um defines individual liberty um you know should everyone have complete freedom to the point that they can take a gun and go shoot anyone that they want the answer is no i think even the most die-hard libertarians would argue that there's some degree of what is it jon stewart mills sex um you know you should have the ability to do whatever you want within your sphere of influence as long as it doesn't intersect with a sphere of influence of others and so the philosophical argument that i believe the pro-life movement made which is really a different point of view on values is that the sphere of influence of a fetus exists at some point in time and therefore shouldn't be invaded by the by the by the mother now i'm not speaking obviously my point of view my point of view is extremely pro-choice um just to be very clear but the argument is um is i think one that we we all kind of blush over and assume that it's it's about taking away a woman's right without recognizing the voice on the other side which says that there is a a right to to life by a fetus at a certain point in time and so to me there's almost like this principle debate that arises and it probably certainly falls more along religious lines than it does along on a religious spectrum than it does on a um a kind of a libertarian spectrum or a spectrum of liberties um that that kind of defines that crossover point for people but clearly texas is a really interestingly confused state right there's this argument about individual freedom but now what comes across is a highly kind of conservative point of view with respect to the freedom of a pregnant woman um and so you know i don't know if there really is an easy answer it certainly seems to me nowadays that the pro-choice movement is the majority the the pro-life movement is the minority and maybe i'm off on that side you probably know better um but you know i'm not sure this truly does set a precedent that becomes kind of a widespread recognition of a new way of addressing kind of the pro-life movement or giving the pro-life movement some additional movement i still think that the pro-life movement remains a minority and um and over time that that will you know there'll be perturbations but there'll certainly be some resolution over time in favor where are all the politically correct people where are they where are they right now where are all the politically i mean like i guess they are they were happy to get mike richards or whatever the guy's name was fired from jeopardy last week but where are they now when we really need them but are you really saying there's not enough outrage about this i mean i'm seeing a ton of outrage on social media yeah i see everything i see nothing i see i see a lot of useless virtue signaling i don't see anything that's actually i think what we're talking about here is the leadership of companies and leaders in my big companies there's gonna be a million person march within 45 days okay well let me let me go back to chamas point about whether you know he called this this um this bill smart in the sense that it was really thought through i agree that it's a deliberate attempt to circumvent roe v wade and heart make it harder to sustain a legal challenge against it but i don't think this is smart i think it's stupid philosophically politically and legally for the even for the pro-life movement so philosophically i think the problem here is they're creating unlimited standing to sue across state boundaries by somebody who hasn't even experienced harm i mean this is so far from what conservative jurists and legal scholars have always professed to believe i mean i remember 20 years ago tort reform and ending frivolous lawsuits was the absolute bedrock plank on the you know of the republican party so they're just throwing that out the window here with unknown consequences for hold on a second for example why wouldn't this be used to circumvent people's second amendment rights why wouldn't you just create a private right of action to sue anyone who couldn't you know ate and abetted um a gun crime you know so i i i think this is going to boomerang on conservatives second here's what i wait okay but let me get to the um political stupidity of it and then henry belcaster wanted this as one piece so he didn't have to do so much editing no look finish no luck the wall street journal has a great editorial today okay this is the wall street journal editorial page is a great piece this is from uh and they basically say look they said sometimes we wonder if texas is a journey attorney general kent accident is a progressive plant that's the guy behind this his ill-conceived legal attack against obamacare backfired republicans in last year's election and lost at the supreme court now he is leading with his chin on abortion how about thinking first so they're pretty clear this is going to get overturned and frankly then politically this is just handed this is you know democrats already having a field day with this so biden said this law is so extreme it doesn't even allow for exceptions in the case of rape and incest i mean look he's right about that and gavin newsom the polling for him is now going through the roof because all he has to do for the next uh 10 days is talk about right to choose in this texas bill and he's going to cruise towards defeating the recall because it's basically you're talking about something differently than i was what i what i'm saying is something very specific if you go back to roe v wade it was written by a man first of all which you know we can debate whether that makes any [ __ ] sense um but harry blackman went to the mayo clinic and lived there for like six or eight weeks reading medical textbooks and came up with this trimester framework and again i'm just gonna go out on a limb and say i don't have a [ __ ] clue what's going on in a woman's body and i don't think harry blackman did even though he was much smarter than i and was on the supreme court okay and then casey tried to clean this up by going to this fetal viability thing so we we have this law that was really kind of ill-conceived but was kind of going in the right direction but it was really a very first form of judicial activism we tried to clean it up in the early 90s but it's always been an issue where eventually what's really been happening is we've been pushing this to the state's right issue and i think that the cleverness of this bill and it's dangerous but it was very well thought out this was not a random thing where two haphazard [ __ ] got together and wrote this bill david i think that this was methodically planned out for years and they are [ __ ] though it's totally gonna backfire on them it's not going to it's going to let for example we now have an activist supreme court who may actually not opine on this on the validity of the issue but say this is a states right issue if this stays in texas and doesn't get outside of texas you will have this specific thing hold and stand and i think that that's a very bad precedent to have set i think that these folks planned this out and i don't think they thought that it was an easy way to overturn it and i think that's why when everybody was waiting with baited breath for alito to basically stay this he didn't listen i think there there's a lot of hysteria and hyperbole on social media right now saying that roe v wade's been overturned the supreme court is overturned i'm not saying that yeah i i guess who don't know anything yeah i i i i but but they're saying that because the supreme court ruled on very narrow procedural grounds that it wasn't ready to hear about the texas law because a harm hasn't been committed yet but they haven't said they won't look at it in the future i believe they will i believe that this law will be found unconstitutional not necessarily do you think that companies not not necessarily because of abortion but just because no i don't think they're changing the legal definition of standing in a way that flies against everything we know about how the court system works i just i i think ultimately this is too clever by half by the by the state attorney general i think it was i don't think i think he's a st he's a he's a tool all right do we want to move on and talk about uh apple allowing people to uh link to their own websites the the apple thing is really big news because it kind of goes to show you that you had you had a pretty progressive legislative framework in south korea i don't think it's particularly a huge market for apple because the most of the most of the um app activity i think is android more than it is apple um but they basically just seeded the market and by deciding to basically conform to this law then they started with these reader apps and allowing uh payments um it's the beginning of the beginning for you know the app stores to be deconstructed and opened this uh just so people understand um apple said it would uh allow media apps to create in-app links to sign up pages on those companies websites allowing the likes of spotify netflix to bypass the iphone maker's cut of subscriptions now of course you can use spotify and netflix on your phone but you may have probably people haven't experienced this because they've already become members of it and did it on their site but you can't actually pay through your phone and you can't sign up through the app they're not they were technically not allowed to link to it so this is a small small concession only to media folks so what do you think saks um well i think trumath has kind of said this is the beginning of the end um i think there's some truth to that um look i think the the the root of this is the fact that apple has this 30 rake uh on any in-app purchases and like bill gurley said it's a rake too far right just because you can charge 30 percent doesn't mean you should charge 30 ultimately this is why the whole ecosystem has been up in arms they formed an industry coalition to challenge apple that resulted in a lot of legal challenges lawsuits and a lot of these companies like spotify and tile they testified against apple uh in hearings um so i think this 30 rake has ultimately backfired on apple it's created a huge backlash and now they're paying the price they've already had to roll it back for these so-called reader apps so you know if what you're doing is buying a subscription to say netflix netflix will now be able to redirect you to their website you can buy it there and then consume the content you know on your ios app without uh apple getting a sp you know part of the split but this now opens the door for uh this type of thing to apply to uh to games as well where there's a lot more in-app purchases like like fortnight right so um i i just think this is a case where you know what's the old line that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered uh apple has been a hog and now it's getting slaughtered yeah by the way i want to point out like this is a really interesting experience of the free market you know clearly consumers and the developers on the apps in the app store ecosystem were vocal and angry enough that that um that this behavioral change from apple the structural change kind of came to bear it didn't require regulatory intervention i just want to point out how important and relevant that is that you're the market is functional the market is functional and having the government and regulators come in and you know people complaining to the senate about google and apple monopolizing them out of their businesses ultimately gets resolved when enough there's enough kind of collective mass from the consumer slash partner that says to the the the big incumbent player we're not going to play by these games anymore by these rules anymore i gotta think lena khan being appointed did make apple think modest concession that yeah if you're a spotify or a netflix or audible we're going to let you buy through the ass i mean do you want a little regulation and police and anti-trust don't you think this is a nice win for the free market yeah i do well look i i don't think monopolies are i i don't think letting monopolies do whatever they want is free market okay i mean a monopolies end competition they will squash innovation they will you know they will basically uh get in the way of permissionless innovation so i you know i'm in favor of writing in these monopolies and the two big issues i think with apple and google well apple especially is number one side loading of apps so the idea that they have total control over what app what apps get loaded onto your ios device people want the ability uh to create alternative app stores that already exists for android right so i think that is coming for apple apple claims is a security issue but it is i mean what they should do is if you click on lo side load apps it should just give you a warning you are no longer protected by us you know you're you're subjecting yourself to phishing scams your information and buyer beware and then people can make their own decision i've always thought that would be the best decision for what i like about this is i think this gives apple the ability to now just compete against uh everybody in the app store uh without having to have this um you know well we're partners with you they are not partners with people in the app store they watch the app store and when something great comes and emerges they will copy it they just do it slower than facebook so apple music studied spotify and they created their own apple product apple tv plus now with ted lasso is competing against netflix they watch netflix and i signed up for apple arcade for my daughters because i didn't want them to be paying for um like you know in-app purchases i'd rather just have the games be stop upselling them and that's been wonderful for five or ten bucks a month to have that and i pay for the news product so now they can just compete against everybody directly i think all of these media companies are going to be video games podcasts tv shows and music so i don't know if you said netflix is going to be doing podcasts about their shows and video games i think amazon will be video games content it's all going to be one thing and disney plus will have games built into disney plus i bet in that subscription price so the consumer's going to win ultimately you know i i think monopolies are good because monopolies are just like lazy and it's easier to innovate and compete against a monopoly to be honest than it is to compete against cronyism when there's kind of embedded kind of government regulation that prevents emerging competitors from competing effectively it's a lot harder to win than against some slow big uninnovative monopoly um and well yeah go ahead well here's here's the the counter argument so i agree with you that big slow lumbering monopolies can be great to compete against but here's the problem when they control access to an ecosystem when they're gatekeepers that's the problem because now you have to go to them and they're going to be slow lumbering and stupid in terms of of allowing you to innovate and when they see you becoming a threat they'll squat you that's the problem if these guys didn't control platforms that would be one thing but they control the most important platform there is which is the operating system so i i just think that you know this is microsoft and windows all over again except there's two of them right there's ios and android and in microsoft's example you could load whatever software you wanted they were just bundling they weren't saying you couldn't load net uh netscape they're just saying we're gonna give you internet explorer with the operating system so this is even worse i mean right yeah microsoft was actually pretty open by comparison but but there is like a version of bundling here what spotify said is look when we have to pay 30 and apple music doesn't have to pay anything we can't compete with that you know and they have a point there yeah it's it's a completely valid point uh california's on fire this is what the third or fourth year in a row uh this has gotten acute for the bay area people are now making plans as freiburg mentioned on the last spot i think that there's or two pods ago there's like two or three weeks of the year maybe even a month where you just can't really be outside and do stuff northern california you can't you can't be outside have you ever this yeah three or three of our friends have been evacuated because you know they moved up there in the middle of the pandemic they had to come down they said it was raining ash you know one of our friends homes is is literally threatened um it's it's it's just like and then the fire season is moving up earlier and earlier in the year you know my kids were in camp in tahoe this this july and they had to be evacuated and fortunately for us you know we had a really good friend of ours a neighbor here whose kids were also they can't be able to drive up in the um but my god like that was um you know there's there's about what's going on there's about eight trillion dollars of real estate value um in california and you know if you assume a tenth of that is exposed in the middle of this kind of dense fire um uh these dense fire regions let's say it's let's say it's a trillion dollars there's a trillion dollar the real estate value that you cannot insure anymore so i had an idea about this freeberg i i was looking two or three years ago when these fires started maybe it was four or five years ago now for a blanket that could go over a home could be installed or dropped over a home with helicopters i know this sounds crazy but is there a material that's light enough that you could put it on a helicopter and drop it over one of these yeah well why doesn't the startup exist i mean this would be amazing imagine if these homes had on the roof some sort of a system that when fire or heat got there it just deployed the blanket and protected the home like i don't know if you guys know this but right now in marin county in california it's nearly impossible to get fire insurance and um this is becoming kind of a predominant factor in california particularly in all the areas with lots of forest land there's 100 million acres of forest land in california so if a trillion dollars of real estate is actually exposed to fires and you can't get fire insurance ask yourselves the question what's going to happen when hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate literally goes up in smoke or um or gets sold off who ultimately bears the cost where does that cost have its economic flow and that's just the tip of the iceberg of the effect that may arise as these things start to take hold you know we had this huge upswing in real estate in tahoe as everyone moved out of california and went to tahoe during the pandemic now we're seeing tahoe real estate sell off like crazy this happened in wine country in sonoma and napa county last year after the big fires they had there and so there are counties where you start to have these massive fires causing this massive real estate sell-off and or the real estate burns and it's uninsured and guess what happens fema steps in right the federal government steps in and ultimately the federal government's going to have these like katrina events four or five times a year that we're going to be underwriting losses for people's real estate that's valued in a way that doesn't account for the effects of climate change you know i started a massive shift in economic value that we're gonna someone's gonna have to pay for over the next decade and this is just the the beginning of it all of my is my strong belief i i tweeted this out about maybe six or seven months ago but with uh another with this fabulous entrepreneur named david soloff i co-founded an insurance company called ott risk and you know we've been trying to build models and price um this kind of insurance climate insurance you know social media kinds of like disruptions civil unrest insurance things that are very typical uh atypical sorry and uh to your point freeburg it is really really hard to try to forecast what's going on in a way where you can actually ensure these things with the margin of safety and so just as the as a person who would be the provider of this kind of insurance what i'm telling you know what i'm learning is man these and we're negotiating multi-hundred million dollar policies with these big corporates um and you know for example like you know they want uh pandemic insurance if there's the next delta variant or whatever and i have to shut down my facility and here's my economic loss i want to you know you to ensure that and okay uh it's impossible and so i can only imagine what it's like then and the ground floor somebody to just buy some insurance that says if my house burns down yeah it's uh it's very hard so this kind of parametric insurance doesn't exist which means that if you live in any of these areas like i basically i think what it means is that climate change is going to ravage um uh suburbs and it's going to ravage these sort of like far-flung communities because um nobody's going to want to step in there and ensure the parametric risk that allows people to live their cities my last company right climate corp we were what we started out in 2006 we offered parametric weather insurance online and so it was all about our mission was to manage and adapt to climate change and so you could buy weather insurance online and you underwrite the risk and the way you underwrite risk like this and and auto insurance and any kind of insurance you look at past data you build a statistical model that's represented by the past data and the frequency of certain things happening and that's how you price the insurance the problem now is the past data has absolutely no bearing on what's going on and so you have to basically create more fundamental deterministic models of fires which is something no one's really good at no one has any ability to do because we've never seen this kind of environment before we've never seen hot year after hot year dry year after drier and so there's no historical data to draw from to build the model so all the insurers throw their hands in the air and they say we can't take on that risk we don't know how to price it and when they don't do that i'm telling you the government's gonna end up having to step in and pay people money for the lost home or the government's gonna have to say the reality here is that we can't afford to do this and you can't build homes there and what's talk about functioning markets i think what we're realizing is the market now is so convinced that global warming is real and you can't deny it that we just can't insure for it therefore we're going to have to make serious societal changes and that's part of this process insurance being denied for hurricane zones and insurance being denied for fire zones is part of the process of people accepting the reality that we're not doing enough yeah jacob the problem is not that it's going to be denied it's that you're not going to be able to get it and if you are you're not going to be able to afford it um and so so it's not even that people are really open to writing the kind of cover that allows you to go and safely live in lake tahoe 10 or 15 years from now and that that's the shame of it so we have these beautiful places that i think are just going to be under duress and under pressure and it's going to force everybody to live more and more in the major metropolitan areas which is you know i'm not sure that that's what everybody wants it's going to change building i mean we saw now in florida and other places you know louisiana other places that are flood zones nobody builds on the ground floor anymore everybody builds you know on stilts and they put a a car garage underneath it because it's getting flooded i have friends in new york this week and i'm here and i had to change my flight to come to new york for the wedding that i'm going to i had to change my flight because last night we're going to be flying into this craziness here they got three inches of rain in one hour uh 15 people my understanding has died in basement apartments because they couldn't or they didn't get out in time it's kind of hard to understand but i guess people stayed in their apartments while they were filling up with water and then did you see the did you see the video of like the the flood waters ripping into the new york subway yeah it's crazy oh my god new york is not built for this so now new york's gonna just basically have to say you know what all the basement apartments all the basements that exist they're not livable you can't live in a basement anymore and when we build new structures the first floor is going to be built like they build them in miami which is for water to flow straight through them and the garages underneath are designed to accept massive flood waters i've been spending a lot of time on water recently and the the thing that i learned this week which i not the thing that i learned but a great way to summarize this for folks listening if they don't understand climate change changes the areas that are hotter get hotter the areas that are drier get drier and the areas that get wetter get much more wet and so when you have a period of dryness or heat it's going to be extreme and when it rains it's going to be so extreme and we're just going to get buffeted back and forth between these two extremes and this is only going to escalate over the next 20 years or 30 years because we have so much embedded pollution that we have to work our way through forget all the new stuff but all this embedded pollution has a cost and we're just starting to begin processing that pollution well welcome to the all in depressed episode i mean [ __ ] depressive wait this is my goddamn birthday guys what the [ __ ] happy birthday yeah really happy birthday women's rights are being uh taken away the planet is on fire new york is underwater uh covet is not ending nobody can sure insure anything and uh yeah i don't know man the market's ripping there's lots of money coming into climate change investors and entrepreneurs are more optimistic than they've ever been you know there's a backdrop of challenge but with challenges opportunity and i think people are pursuing it like nuts right now and it's pretty exciting i like the way you say entrepreneurs because i say it entrepreneurs but you say it entrepreneurs you've got an e and a you tomorrow i mean entrepreneur yeah but very it's a very literal pronunciation of it yeah look i i think sharon you're a real shren galley of the word uh gully are you gonna monetize something now sucks monetize your new app monetize colin yeah leverage the uh yeah that's that's the good news here colin is doing really well who's on fire the great the jewel of california i'm calling that ten thousand downloads i um look i think i think that uh in terms of processing all the the bad news i i do think we have a tendency to underestimate how much political partisans sort of whip things up in any event should we should we end with this rogan thing i actually think it's a pretty good issue to talk about joe rogan got coveted um he was i think they mis-framed what he said i actually saw the original quote where he said should a young person uh take the vaccine this was in the very early days of the vaccine or should they wait a little bit and see if it's safe i think was his position not one i agree with but i don't think what he said was absolutely crazy his quote was if someone has an ideological physiological reason for not getting vaccinated i don't want to force him to get vaccinated so and then he got it and he had to cancel some shows i think there's something kind of funny here but also kind of serious here about the way the media covers news like this first of all the media is positively gleeful whenever they can report that somebody who expressed any vaccine has sincere skepticism gets covered right it's almost ghoulish i think um look i i'm vaccinated i'm really happy i got the vaccine i think it gave me it helped me have a much much milder case of cover than either was would have had so i'm pro-vaxxed or whatever but but here here's what the media does and the craziest headline i saw about rogan was that rogan is taking a horse dewormer referring to ivermectin right now look i i don't know whether ivormectin is a helpful treatment or not i think you got to do a double-blind study to figure that out but i also think that it's very dishonest to be describing ivormectin is a horsty worm i mean the the person who invented ivermectin intended as a treatment for humans humans do take it as a treatment against certain parasites it also happens to have a benefit in deworming horses but this is one of its applications so to describe this drug as a horse dewormer as if it was the only thing it does the purpose of that is to make anyone who thinks that ivermectin is a possible treatment to make them look ridiculous right and you know so why why is the press doing that well the agenda is the press decided that vaccines are good okay i agree with them about that but they but this is where it goes off the rails they decide that anybody in in pursuing that agenda they have to make any alternative vaccine which would be any therapeutic treatment and anyone who would take that therapeutic treatment look ridiculous and this is where i think the media has crossed over into total dishonesty they're doing the same thing with monoclonal antibodies which actually i think are treatment that works but anyone who is expressing support for this all goes back to the polarization with trump right he what was the um drug that he was so was a big proponent of that didn't actually work hydroxychloroquine so i think it's back to that uh what do you think friedberg um are you have any opinion on joe rogan getting dunked on another anecdotal story it's interesting to observe how much we've kind of as as with a lot of things when i say we i mean like society each of us reading social media the internet media itself uh kind of orient things along a spectrum right and wrong black and white left and right uh i feel like vaccination and vaccines have similarly become you're either vaccinated and you're good or you're not vaccinated or you're bad or the opposite is true and it's pretty clear there's tons of evidence that vaccination while it may reduce kind of the um the severity of covid you know there seems to be a much less protective effect with respect to transmission particularly with this delta variant now and that's just a fact you know you can say oh my gosh i'm vaccinated therefore i'm safe it's like no you're also exposed to delta as someone who's unvaccinated in terms of catching it and transmitting it to other people there may be less severity and there will be less transmission one interesting fact by the way is that there's much much much less time when you're vaccinated um you get affected with delta when you're actually infectious yeah incredibly um incredibly reduced amount of time from like 10 days to like one to two days um but still that is a very infectious kind of variant and so it's spreading but it's almost like we're blaming people that aren't vaccinated for delta spreading delta's spreading because it's a really effective virus at spreading it's like a story and uh this orientation around like you're you're the reason that delta is spreading is completely false and everyone tries to then fit the story into that narrative you know the joke yeah right don't you think there's like such a strong agenda the guy got infected it sucks like it has nothing to do with it was he vaccinated or not he was vaccinated i don't know who cares like the point is it's not about i mean he didn't do anything wrong in the sense and he's not to blame this delta variant is infecting people saks got infected with delta he's he's back no i mean i i think you're i think the point people are trying to make here friedberg is that he's been kind of people believe that with his platform he should be more pro-vax because vaccines there's no downside but but j cal look don't you agree there's such a media agenda here like once they decide what the agenda is going to be in this case it's provacs and i'm not saying that's wrong okay i'm just saying that the way the media works is first they decide what the agenda is going to be then they distort everything to fit what their agenda is so for example ivermectin's called a horse dewormer and and the logic here is completely tortured they just don't want there to be any therapeutic alternative to vaccinations they don't want to give a process they don't want to give credit to potentially and the same thing's true now look i'm not saying ivermectin is an effective treatment i have no idea but there's no need to distort and demonize it before we even know what the truth is by the way i wouldn't i wouldn't um use the term agenda i know that that's a commonly used term that the media has an agenda i would argue that the media has a narrative and i would secondly argue that that narrative isn't necessarily defined by the media or by some set of people in control but that that narrative is in effect defined by the consumers that consume the media and then whatever they click on they vote with their views and so the more views the more clicks the more dollars you spend on certain media outlets and certain writers the more those writers get more stories to write and the more the consumption happens and so my point of view is that the consumer ends up ultimately being the writer of the narrative and the definer of the narrative and the storyline starts to fit that narrative versus feeling like we maybe felt years ago that oh my gosh there's a few people this cabal that's in control of the media and they're running everything and they're telling us what to believe and see i think we vote i think consumers vote with their dollars they vote with their views and as a result that that is the narrative that gets written yeah they were not supposed to be tribal they were supposed to be objective that was the concept of reporting is to just report the facts and let the not when it became a consumer product well now it's well it's always been a consumer product but now it's just become so hard to run those businesses right yeah the more you sell the more the more money you make and it's got you know what it was supposed to be subscriptions were supposed to inoculate the reader the writers from this that oh we're getting paid for subscribers therefore we don't have to worry about clicks anymore now because you will lose your paid subscribers if you don't give them what they want yeah i'm going to predict right now our down votes on youtube are going to be in the six to ten percent rate has happened so we've covered we have covered you're not paying coven like this is going to be our worst rated evidence but it was a good discussion between the the four of us all right everybody for the rain man david sacks please download the all in app uh just put a c in front of all in and you'll find it in the app store congratulations to the uh folks who got into the syndicate and thank you to saks for allowing uh thanks all in syndicate to uh participate and lead the series b we're going to be leading the series b sachs gave us uh the ability to lead the series b 45 [ __ ] turned 45 45 never felt 45 you look good by the way we have a show called all in after party on call-in where we you know we've done a couple episodes including we introduced our wack pack um you know so sort of in between so like actually what we should do is all the fans of the show if you like all in and you want a little more bestie go to the after show go to the go and sign up for all in after party we have 400 subscribers already after one day on the app that's pretty good yeah that's good i mean be great for those especially if the wack pack gets in there i i talked to our guy who does the uh merch the bestie merch guy he said he's made like five or six grand on merch in the last quarter he's paying his way through school on it that's so great yeah i'm happy for him all right uh freeburg we'll see you at the uh production board closed event nobody can get in sorry if you want a ticket it's not available chamoth happy birthday happy birthday steve thanks guys all right we'll see you david wait saks this is where you say happy birthday you [ __ ] yeah happy birthday i love you besties uh an emoji i don't think sax has ever used an emoji i mean i i i have i have 10 years of text messages with this [ __ ] he's never used a single emoji once no that's all right and congratulations to producer nick who is getting married yeah a great [ __ ] decision see on the other side you [ __ ] dumb ass congratulations nick and rachel and rachel congratulations guys rachel you're going to get half of the call in stock that nick has yeah congratulations you got half of his advisor shares to to call in all right we'll see you all next time bye bye we'll let your winners ride rain [Music] and they've just gone crazy [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just just like this like sexual tension but they just need to release [Music] your feet [Music] waiting to get murky [Music]








j cal looks like he's going to a night at the roxbury absolutely he looks like joey i'm a joke i mean you look horrible thank you thank you really [ __ ] here we go [Music] thanks for coming this is the production board symposium 2021 tell us just a little bit about why we're here david and what this is and what it represents for the production board the production board symposium second ever thank you all for being here we're excited we have uh [Applause] an amazing group of um science uh scientists engineers folks from academia from business from the investing community some of our investors so we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple days um and thought we would uh chase half of you away by hosting the all-in pod tonight so um here we go great uh okay so first up in the news rolling stone uh amplifies false ivormectin story you were following this chabot what do you think this uh ivormectin controversy and you want a little give a little summary of what the issue is before we talk about the hypocrisy of it well on september 1st oklahoma news station k4 ran a story and published an article on ivermectin overdoses backing up rural hospitals the article was titled patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural oklahoma hospital hospitals and ambulances uh first line of the article quote a rural oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the home dewormer medication ivermectin to fight covenant 19. causing emergency rooms and ambulances to back up on september 3rd rolling stone amplified the story in its own article the only problem was they treated they tweeted it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold it turns out the picture was people waiting for vaccine shots back in january not gunshot victims waiting to get into the hospital yeah the story is totally false you understand that right well i didn't want to say fake news but i know beyonce it was it was beyond fake news this was basically a doctored up conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at rolling stone look there you tell me if the the science of this is wrong the whole the whole premise is ridiculous so ivermectin basically as far as we know because we don't know that much acts on a handful of uh specific characteristics one we know to be glutamate which we don't really express in the same way as like [ __ ] worms and so yes technically it can be used as a dewormer but there are four or five other ways in which it acts which we don't know anything about because we haven't taken the time to do a broad-based double-blind study so i think the fairest thing to say about iverbecten is we don't know what it is and so neither the people that propose to use it as a solution for for covid nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from the basis of fact but then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea that you know people aren't getting vaccines they're going to use this other thing they basically doctored up an article that wouldn't be so bad because nobody reads rolling stone right it's kind of a it's like it's kind of it's an ancient brand nobody's going there for medical people but then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really really smart who amplify it rachel maddow amplifies it jimmy kimmel does it on a comedy skit and then all of a sudden there's this enormous outrage but the problem is you can't put the genie back in the bottle when it turns out to be a completely fabricated lie and then all the people that are purporting to basically push this lie who now have been outed have no consequences because they're on the left screaming at the right and what happened when it was the other way around we basically started to put people in boxes we basically kicked them off these platforms and again so you have this compounding building double standard that to me is the whole the worst part about it david when we look at uh the ivermectin story we also saw joe rogan got coveted that was a big haha moment for a lot of people um and he took ivermectin as part of his treatment and then people started amplifying that he was taking a worm uh drug around this pandemic yeah i mean look this is really a media story you had rolling stone publish this article based on a single source you have this one crank basically saying that emergency rooms are turning away gunshot victims and people having heart attacks okay and all they had to do all rolling stone had to do was call up any one of these several hospitals they immediately would have refuted the source but they didn't do that they also could have simply googled the number of toxic ivermectin cases to find out if it was even plausible statistically that you could have ivermectin overdoses flooding oklahoma hospitals but they didn't do that either why didn't they confirm the sources because the article was too perfect it confirmed all of their priors their first prior was about ivermectin they've been waging this war on ivermectin claiming it's a horse dewormer when it's actually that is one of its purposes but it's not the only one it was a it was a drug designed for humans is used against parasites now as jamasa we don't know whether it's effective against covid they got to do the double blind studies then we'll find out but that was sort of their first prior and let's face it the second prior was that this is in oklahoma right and so rolling stone wants to believe you have all these maga idiots out in oklahoma eating horse paste okay and that's why they love this story so much and that's why rachel maddow loved the story so much and she then starts spreading it okay and after she gets called out including by say glenn greenwald as of last night she had not taken it down now why because she knows there are no consequences for misinformation and lying why because twitter and facebook do not punish people on the left for misinformation that is some penalty they only meter out for people who disagree with their cultural and political biases that gets the get out of jail free card i don't i don't even think it's secret i just think these people all are part of the same cultural sort of mule you they all have the same political and cultural biases and there is never look where is the twitter warning the twitter label on the rachel maddow post even now saying that this tweet this article is misinformation uh it doesn't exist because it's inconvenient let's talk about the science of i think i would pay for 40 dollars for all in podcast live it's dynamic it's like it works yeah by the way you're on the show so okay i'm here too um tell me the last time we heard a news story that didn't have bias to it what was the last general thing that was reported that we didn't feel had the angle that then elicited emotion either love or hate or alignment or not um have that reaction to the facts the only reason you are in the wall street journal just now about like the the democrats proposal on taxes i have an emotional reaction to it but it's fact-based i've got a hundred is it really was it my reaction or no the story yeah they just said that they the the house proposal now is to move the cap gains rate to from 20 to 25 the corporate tax rate from whatever it was to 26 and a half but it's my point is there are articles written by folks who just want to get the facts across and let you judge whether it's good or bad who knows time will tell then there are folks that basically manufacture [ __ ] because again i think and i think is matt taibbi that said this because it creates moral mania drives the narrative drives the emotion but it's the last grasp of the power of journalism that's all they have left at this point is just to basically make it a complete [ __ ] free-for-all and in it they still have some kind of relevancy i have these old new york times uh newspapers like the whole year printed from like 1936 through 1944 it's cool thinking this huge book and i'll you know we'll but you must have been out all the time but you didn't have time to read those yeah i mean but you flip through these things they're like they are they are just like old like ticker stories you know it had absolutely no like narrative attached to it there was no like these are the people almost the implicit right and wrong right the implicit morality of every decision that's being made of everything that's being reported on i have a feeling the only thing that's going to be left in like 10 years is the economist and then like the mob rule in the metaverse and that's kind of incredible i mean you also have podcasts where people can discuss these things and maybe a more um honest traits there's a few great podcasts like that mr and mr anti-facebook what do you think about this wall street journal article that says that there's a secret cabal that basically gets to get out of jail free card on facebook and nobody else does millions of people though it said right yeah that's a lot you work there it's exactly the point i've been making right which is that there's two sets of rules if you are part of the in crowd if you share the cultural biases if you're part of the same class whether it's you know socio-economic or political or whatever that of the people who are doing the content moderation doing the censorship you get get out jail free card the rules are different for you you can be rachel maddow and post an article that's complete [ __ ] and even after the entire twitter sphere calls you out you don't post a correction but you don't get labeled you don't get censored but if you're on a different part of the political spectrum you do i mean there's two sets of rules yeah i mean i think i think it's insane i mean this is exactly what i think people have been saying for a long time when people say oh you know it's algorithmic it's not really human controlled there's there's no real intervention and then you find out there's actually literally something called cross check which its definition is check the hue you know check the algorithm and override it with my own bias that's the that's the definition of what the feature is well i mean in whenever we start down this censorship route like who gets to decide and then what is their motivation and even if they have pure motivation there's no way to you know not but assume the platforms die assume everything de-platforms and decentralizes and then like all media is through substance or through the colon app or through other kind of media well decentralized uh crypto based exactly so there's no longer a platform there's no longer a sensor model what's gonna end up happening people are gonna click on the stuff that they want to hear confirmation bias it's going to become more extreme it's going to become you know even more heated there's going to be splintering of media creation as there is right now that we see today right every every element of the spectrum will be kind of produced and you're going to end up clicking on the stuff that creates the greatest emotional response because that's what people like to consume how does a citizen who wants to inoculate themselves from fake news bias how do you recommend they go after science and how do they they have to learn the stuff for themselves they have to try to become an expert themselves it's hard like anything that's hard right i mean there's there's got to be a will i don't think that that's really um it's it's not to be discouraging i just think that it's a lot easier to not do that right it's like it's a lot easier to consume ice cream all the time it's a lot more fun to consume ice cream all the time and to kind of plan your diet eat healthy and work out and all this sort of stuff and i think that's really where you know media like a lot of things is headed as we create these kind of feedback loops that are all because everything's digital everything ends up becoming feedback i bet i bet you i bet you if you look inside because like now some rabid politician will get a hold of this facebook crosstrek thing i bet you um if you look and graph the number of people that were essentially whitelisted from being able to say whatever the hell they want versus what was popular on facebook you'd see a left versus right distribution very clearly you'd basically see because if you look at it now i think there's a i can't remember his name but he's a he's a former new york times reporter that tweets out every day um the top 10 links that are shared on facebook and it's like a [ __ ] train wreck it's like one normal article and then it's like nine like right-wing infowars it's a train wreck every day and so if you're you know a hipster sitting in east menlo park you know at some point like the cuffs and your jeans are rolled up too tight the [ __ ] shirt cuffs are rolled up too tight you know um and you're just freaking out and then you're like we need to create something what do we call it and we're like cross check you know and then all of a sudden what happens is you just start introducing people hoping that then the list that gets published every day on twitter changes but then what happens actually is you find the exact opposite thing happens that people are so like they sniff out the [ __ ] they're like what is going on here but then they double down and then next thing you know ben shapiro's nine you know eight of the ten top stories every day on facebook and that's how you have donald trump and everything else next topic well go ahead well it's gonna i mean i don't wanna do it themselves yeah look i i think both sides are capable of both sides of the political spectrum are capable of spreading misinformation and [ __ ] and you have to vary your information diet right i mean if all you do is participate in you know the right wing or left-wing echo chamber you're going to buy into the ivermectin hoax you're going to be story here from rolling stone or whatever it is so you have to make an effort to again to vary your information or the uh lab leak theory theory exactly but we now have five of these during the pandemic alone right right but see what what i object to is the fact that the censorship rules only seem to apply to one side of the spectrum is look both sides are capable of spreading misinformation but only one side is being censored why because the people running these powerful tech companies agree they're like you know 90 plus percent of that political persuasion that is not healthy raise your hand if you agree with how many people uh agree with sacks that trump should be reinstated on all platforms all right there you go people agree that the tech platforms have a political bias how many disagree with that statement nobody's interesting wife is the chief business officer facebook thanks for that who couldn't see that because i don't know do we have the audience on yeah no no no no no everyone yeah everyone except for phil dwight and these are silicon best described as silicon valley to barney so that's why you have to raise his hand no but to be clear for people listening phil's wife works 100 percent he's got to say no it's okay it's okay 99 but everybody else here agreed with that and these are all people who are silicon valley they know so how many of us are democrats i mean we're all mostly democrats i would guess how many people voted democrat in the last 11 years how many are not democrats how many people voted for trump raise your hand nice and high no nobody said that nobody no literally there's only that's very interesting seriously here's a question i have okay so we are we are firmly going down because i think it's pretty it's pretty clear to me i'd be willing to make the bet that the media is on the side of vaccine mandates okay they want the top down control and the sense of theoretical safety that a vaccine mandate gives them in their own little bubble and so that's why i think they support this and i think you know blowing up ivermectin was kind of a method of many that they've undertaken to do that whether we believe in vaccine mandates or not but now it's coming it's coming in the la school district it's you know biden is trying to push this thing through the bls this is going to be a very very big deal what do you guys think is the right thing to do on vaccine mandates irrespective of all we're going to hear over the next government government or private employer mandates or both well we should let's walk through it i'm seeing both uh for the gov government employees let's start with that yeah or the government mandate look it goes through the bls it says any company public or private that is a hundred employees or more well i mean i think we all agree that people in the military or people in health care they should all be vaccinated or they shouldn't come to work correct do you agree with that but that's also not not even enforceable like sorkin andrew ross sorkin tweeted out like he had to take his kid to the urgent care and he walked in and the doctors weren't wearing masks or something yeah i read that and said something about like not being vaccinated it doesn't matter or blah blah and he like well that goes to enforcement but i mean the military has said you have to carry i thought wait you brought your kid to the [ __ ] urgent care don't you first need to know what's wrong with the kid you can't prosecute this person's opinion on masks and vaccines before you figure out what's wrong with your kid well what do you think sex military military health care teachers the i think the crux of the issue is whether employers should be able to require that well there's two issues one is whether um employers should be allowed to require it which i think everybody agree not everyone but but most people i think agree that private employers and you could lump the government with this should be allowed to test or their employees or require their employees to be vaccinated if they want to and or at least i would support that part of it is let private enterprises require vaccination if they want if they decide hey in order to come back to the office you got to be vaccinated for everyone's safety they can impose those rules now the question is do we need to go beyond that to have a federal mandate and it's not that i'm anti-vaccine i just think that's like an awfully authoritarian thing to do and it raises a bunch of questions so for example i have a friend who owns a chain of dry cleaners okay he's got over 100 employees mostly minimum wage in a bunch of different locations about 20 of his what is his ethnicity what does that have to do with anything just curious sri lankan anyway so he's the third most famous sri lankan american yes anyway so he's got 100 employees about 20 of them are anti-vax and they will not get vaccinated okay so they will walk out if you know if this is required hold on but he can't run his business if there's a 20 walkout he just can't do it okay so now we get to the soft part of the mandate which is well instead of requiring the vax he can do a weekly test well we did that outside here who's going to pay for those tests who's going to administer them is it like you know they had a nurse out here with the full you know uh you know hazmat yeah the hazmat thing so you know that's not cheap so how who's going to pay for that who's going to do that what's the documentation around that going to be is that get logged into the computer system what kind of proof is it does it require a trip to the lab or is this something we can do in five minutes i mean look if we had done what freeburg said a year ago on this pod we should do which is have these one dollar five-minute tests be available everywhere then maybe that sort of rapid test out would make these mandates more palatable but we don't have that yet um you know there aren't enough of these it turns out we still need it even with the vaccines because no vaccine is going to be 100 effective and with right but my point is since we don't really have that solution operationalized you know having a hard vax mandate on a 100 million employees of private enterprises you know that's going to cause i think chaos in the economy what if we get a variant david or trump if we get a variant god forbid that is more dangerous than delta let's say it spreads just as fast but it's five times as deadly does that change your thinking about this mandate and where do you stand on the mandate no i i think the mandate in this very specific narrow instance makes sense and i think what we should be fighting about is how we actually write it so that it's not wholly expensive and the reason is because we know that there is a probabilistic distribution of outcomes where a non-trivial percentage of them results in a variant that is deadly and so we can understand the math and we can understand a sense of time to figure out that if we don't do something and if we don't get to some amount of control around what this is we're all in really big trouble so because of that specific thing i just think this is where you know look the president has the ability to invoke the war measures act to do all kinds of things that are super normal and you know we would never say that those abide in normal times and we've created a framework for him to be able to do those things in non-normal times and then revert to normal i think this is one of those cases just because i don't think the economic consequences and the social consequences if we let this thing uh continue to compound and continue to mutate it doesn't make any [ __ ] sense we're not learning anything we uh could have used the warm mandate act across two presidencies to demand some companies make a dollar test we have 75 80 tests approved in germany they're down to two or three dollars why has the fda not gotten us to that level that germany's at and why haven't we done the war mandate act i mean we have like a constructed capitalist model of like let the free market tell the government what is the right thing to do and so then they invite abbott and they invite the the guys in and they're like you know the white house they have a consortium meeting and everyone's kind of a little bit chuckling about this like oh this is awesome it's another two billion dollar payday which is what they just got i don't know if you saw uh the the write-up today but the federal government is paying walmart for the difference between the wholesale cost and the retail cost so that consumers cannot now go buy abba tests at the wholesale price at the store two billion dollars taxpayer money gone when we could have had a bunch of smart scientists get together at the white house with a bunch of engineers take over a freaking factory and on a piece of paper print 8 billion [ __ ] tests and then chop them up and distribute them for 50 cents and instead we have this problem where we're like depending on the korean supply i kid you not of the test kits that are like plastic that's where they make all the like pregnancy test kits and all this stuff and these um this like the commercial model is like tell us how you want to make these tests tell us what the right model is and of course you end up with a thirty dollar test when in germany you can go buy a 50 cent test at any liquor store um and so it's it's constructive it's straight up corruption and if you go back like you know i don't know if you know the the production board's named after the straight into the microphone named after the war production which was um set up during world war ii what's that it's pretty humble yeah um took the war out you know um but it was uh but the idea was like how do you take a system level uh design approach uh to solving kind of big problems and um one of the issues that we had during world war ii was a supply chain problem on making tanks and planes and so they put together a bunch of smart people deutsche knows this better than anyone because he was a lie back he was alive and he was you can look at the old photos they're sitting in the front guys you have the hammer before he does he made it in the factory floor old as [ __ ] and um and there was basically a con coordinated effort it's fine today by the way sorry the kim happy birthday happy birthday um but there was a coordinated effort by engineers at the top down to design a system for making these things cheap and fast and that's an approach that i think we lost right like we kind of gave way to this model of yeah laissez faire like you come in you tell me what you think we should do okay that's a good idea let's take photos and we're out and that's it like we don't have a wartime mentality right now we haven't had a wartime mentality since covet hit everyone's continued to try and parade around and get reelected and you know earn votes we're not taking this we're not acting we're you know like every every time kind of a business or a government or any organization goes through a phase it goes through a wartime phase or a peacetime phase we should be acting like we're in a wartime phase and we're not can answer your question if you may three or four of us basically pronated up some money could you go and print eight billion of these [ __ ] tests in the u.s you cannot get them approved without the fda i'm not asking for approval i'm saying could you do it 100 and how long you could buy some old freaking paper mill and in three months i mean you know this this actually people in this room who could do this in um now isn't there a framework with an fda that basically allows you to effectively experiment on yourself there's a compassion there's a it's for drugs it's for therapeutics not for diagnostics so you're saying that if i want to you can't build my own test and use it if you want to build a if you want to build a diagnostic test that tells someone whether or not they have an illness you have to get fda approval in the united states so that's also just published before some pretty statement is regulatory capture like is one of the biggest issues and in related news by the way another insane statistic just sorry they're up i saw this today i forgot someone we know tweeted this the who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the us healthcare system 300 to one yeah i saw at 301 yeah 900 to one today oh my god and that is up from five to one in 1970 by the way think about it can i just build on what you said 900 to 1. your initial tweet said 300 to 1 and it ended in 2010 right before obamacare passed so from 300 to 900 was all obamacare yeah regulatory sacs is shaking his head which by the way uh nothing against obamacare because i think like coming as a canadian i actually believe in subsidized health care and i think the the principle of obamacare was great but there was one fatal flaw which is it basically said okay you know what you're capped at the following margin and the minute that people said wait a minute i can only have a 20 gross margin what do you do you just jack up prices to basically jack up revenue because if you can only take 20 percent you're going to take 20 of a bigger number than a smaller number and so it completely burned the incentives for any healthcare company in the united states to do anything other than just basically walk prices up and it's funny because if you look at the stock prices of these companies you you would have made more money being along united healthcare than you would have been uh owning facebook google any of these other tech companies in the last decade crazy stat uh speaking of regulatory capture tesla uh got left out of this new tax credit or proposed tax credit insane four electric cars i don't know if you saw that but tesla wasn't invited a couple of months ago to biden's ev summit elon responded like i wonder why i wasn't invited it turns out it's because they're not a union shop their employees make much more money than union employees make uh and but now as a punishment but hold on as a punishment the twelve thousand dollar credit that they're giving to or they're proposing to give to all ev manufacturers is only if you have union employees it's 4 500 less to tesla so literally two massive regulatory captures and corruption go or maybe no i mean i don't have much more to add to that i mean you hit the nail on the head i mean this is to serve the unions it's not to serve uh clean energy or the ev industry i mean a little bit for uv but it's mostly for the unions the um [Music] on the one hand what we do is we say that climate change is this existential issue but then when the rubber meets the road if you look inside the infrastructure plan today we unveiled basically how we're going to do all the tax credits and again it's just an enormous amount of just sloppy um regulatory capture we're doubling and tripling credits in certain places we're disallowing credits in other places when you follow the dollars what happens is you can map it to companies those companies tend to be mostly public large balance sheets large lobbying efforts and it's not necessarily the most important companies that matter so if you know if i said to you what are the most important companies in climate change you'd probably say well maybe it's direct air capture maybe it's nuclear maybe it's some other thing that basically helps you go to a different place and where does all the tax credits and tax dollars go sun run sun power these are companies that basically you know have this oligopolistic hole stranglehold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes across the united states and it's not to say that that job isn't important but to basically explicitly block other people out because all the chatter today on um you know or some of the chatter today was around just if this bill passes as written you're gonna see these stocks rip and so obviously the positive reinforcement loop of wall street and hedge funds getting behind these companies their market cap goes up the amount they allocate to lobbyists go up and then all this [ __ ] just continues to cycle through the system free break how far are we away from small nuclear reactors and fusion just from a science perspective and then on a regulatory basis i don't know enough i mean yeah i i look i mean from what i've seen there there are great technologies that you know we should be able to kind of realize my understanding and speaking to investors some in this room and i know champs looked at this area a lot is um you know there's the the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear um technically it seems like there's great breakthroughs there was an announcement from a group this past week cfs yeah on a new um super conducting magnet system that they spent years designing this is a bill gates backed company anyone here an investor no john and uh basically it enables like the tokamak plasma fusion based systems uh to be kind of reliably produced now and so they've they've had a proof of demonstration of this uh of the superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma which is like 10 million degrees celsius in a little donut that spins around and that plasma allows you to kind of pull energy out that can be used for you know effectively you put a bunch of material in this thing runs and more energy comes out than you put in it's magic and so you know this has been a theoretical kind of concept for decades uh getting the superconducting magnet system to control the plasma in a very small space using a very small kind of system was proven and now they think that they're you know call it four or five years away you know by the way everything in nuclear is always four or five years away so four or five years away with a grain of salt uh from kind of having a demonstrable kind of uh system so there's technologies that are clearly like on the brink or proceeding nicely but as we know um a lot of a lot of these sorts of technologies similarly are kind of regulatory burdened we're about a hundred degrees away i think from a from a operational functional room temperature semiconductor and superconductor sorry and you know i've told a team that i'm working with on this project i don't want to go into energy generation or unless we can do it in a small form manufacturing thing that can be adopted broadly but if you try to go and you know basically build some distributed energy resource out over here that powers cavallo point it's impossible because you run into these people who don't really understand the science won't take the time and you know we've taken so many steps backwards from nuclear that it's probably just going to take decades and it's going to take some cataclysmic climate change event where the only way out is this super abundant energy source where you're willing to basically say ah [ __ ] it we're [ __ ] otherwise by the way if you if you were to go to mars today you wouldn't be pulling a bunch of [ __ ] you know oil out of the ground and burning it and you know rotating uh you shouldn't i mean and you wouldn't necessarily i mean you'd be using you know solar at the beginning but you wouldn't necessarily rely on solar the you know the cost of material to transport from here to mars to yield the best energy potential would likely be some sort of nuclear power source right um as it is in a lot of military so that's your question sax elon was saved by obama i mean just kind of like having we were there even meaning like you know it was in that moment he was able to get that deal with daimler he was able to get these you know tax credits the the auto bailout you know all of that stuff but then it seems like we're in the middle of a democrat administration and they may go out of their way to basically try to [ __ ] this guy i just think it's like become a special interest free-for-all there was an article today that the national deficit year to date is 2.7 trillion and i think that we're on october 1st fiscal year so there's one more month so it'll be about 3 trillion last year was over 3 trillion because of covid there haven't gotten to the infrastructure bill yet that's going to be another 1.2 trillion on top of that the democrats are saying they want another three and a half well not all democrats but thank god for joe manchin but another three and a half trillion and you know most people can't even really say what's in that three and a half trillion dollar bill i mean it's we're at 28 trillion something like that of national debt i mean and it's all just like special interest plunder well i mean if you look at the results the results aren't there correct yeah and then on top of that um well you know i i understand i mean with respect to obamacare okay that's a major item on let's call the democrat wish list was to give everyone health care and we didn't even get there okay but you can sort of understand that but most people i think even on the left can't really say what the big ticket item is that's going to be delivered for this three and a half trillion that is proposing to be spent so um i mean it's just it it's just become this like you know special interest freeberg we talked about not having a wartime stance with the pandemic we don't have a wartime stance with global warming or extreme weather whichever term you want should we yeah yeah i mean yeah we're burning money i don't know like a drunken salary what's going on right now and actually a lot of what we're going to talk about this symposium over the next day or so is that there is effectively now a raging free market appetite for these solutions um the capital is pouring in the entrepreneurship is blossoming ballooning the technology is advancing so you know to some degree folks might say you know this is going to get solved but there are major infrastructure solutions that are needed for us to accelerate the outcome and win the the war and those infrastructure solutions aren't going to get funded by softbank and they're not going to get funded by chamath they're going to need to get funded by the type of dollars i mean keep keep you keep building your book like you are you will fund them in the next decade but saks you know kind of speaks to the kind of numbers that i think you know are necessary here i mean you think about how much money we spent on covid without any results over the last year it really begs the question if we were kind of to take an roi based approach to where we spending these dollars this would probably be the first on the list and by the way the private market and jobs will benefit and what happened in this this bill this infrastructure bill has passed um this past year that's now been you know uh more kind of definitively drafted is a bunch of infrastructure jobs that are basically giveaways they're not actually solving problems with climate change they're not pushing technology forward they're not creating uh these alternatives that we're talking about they create 10x and 100x outcomes they are yesteryears solutions and they're not going to move the needle enough and so i you know look i do think like it's unfortunate but the climate change war production board is needed to kind of get the kind of dollars motivated that are needed to create the kind of infrastructure to solve these problems um despite the free market appetite the free market appetite by the way fuels the outcomes but it still needs uh it needs something behind is it possible just as we're having this discussion here we're looking at an incompetent corrupt government that is filled with grifters who are bought and sold and then on the other side and causing problems that's a that's a mouthful i wouldn't say that people but i i disagree that people are corrupt and grifters i i do think that really yeah i i do think that there's a lot of good motivations i just think that this is the government yeah look there may be corruption but i don't think that that's the the universal truth right people are generally you you know you we've all met politicians right which one is it it's it's it's a it's a point of perspective right and there's a what's your perspective my perspective is that they're all being told by their constituents what they want and then they're doing it or by lobbyists or by lobbyists but are they supposed to listen to a lot at the end of the day the way that the the system is set up is people get reelected by doing what they're the people that are going to vote and put the dollars and put the votes out for them are asking them to do and that's the way that this has kind of resolved itself so and by the way when the war when when wars happen you know when i guess when a war happened in the 20th century that wasn't the driving force the driving force was existential and it was we have to win the war and that's that that really needs to be the mindset we all need to adopt today which is an existential mindset we need to win the war and it can't be about what my constituents are telling me what the lobbyists are telling me so despite this either incompetence graft or if you're more charitable you know it's a complex problem to solve despite all of that we have massive entrepreneurship in the country we have massive capital allocation uh at a extreme violent rate in fact a lot of that money is coming from all this money being pumped into the system so in a way do you think the only solution we have chamoth is entrepreneurs in startups who are getting large amounts of money to solve these problems because it's not going to happen by government obviously we have a ton of great entrepreneurs and i think that we're doing things we're doing we're okay so this is this is if you look at the internet in the 20 years that we've been grinding in the internet we've had an incredible tailwind that helped us which is all these people much like the folks in this room but in different companies 10 or 20 years earlier than you are now abstracting parts of the stack so that the rest of us could use it right um and so you know i remember 2006 we were racking and stacking servers at facebook in santa clara me adam deangelo like and i was like what the [ __ ] are we doing and i remember in 2008 when adam deangelo he was our cto at the time left he started a company called quora d'andre's like i'm building on aws and i thought he was a [ __ ] idiot i thought who builds on aws you build your own data centers now if you said that to somebody you would be the idiot right so if it's that or if it's the tooling and the tool chains that we've been able to build on top of all of that abstraction and simplification has allowed an order or frankly probably even maybe two orders of magnitude of entrepreneurship to come that's also now happening in biotech so all of that is an incredible progress the problem now is we used to be a part of the economy that was an afterthought we were over here politicians didn't need to understand they didn't need to take the time their first reaction is denial because it basically pushes up against power and that really freaks them out but now we're at a point where we are so integral they need to understand it better here's a perfect example last week illuminous patents expired so if you're in the business of healthcare and if you're in the business of like you know crispr gene therapy any of the stuff that actually a lot of you guys are involved in you would love for the fact that you know next-gen sequencing could have a thousand flowers boom bloom 90 different methods the cost of a sequence goes down to a penny it's not possible today because you have to go through one methodology you have one company to work through you have one set of reagents or a set of reagents that one company sells and it's basically cordoned off that can't change because of technology because they can then sue you go to courts and they win and so this is where you have to interface with the government and they just need to get smarter because otherwise there's only so much innovation we can do before their historical legacy things like patents and ip come and bite you in the ass sex what do you think is entrepreneurship alone and capital allocation by aggressive you know thoughtful and bold uh capital allocators enough to solve the incompetence in washington or the graft well it's going to have to be and i mean here's the good news bad news okay i had a tweet that kind of went viral so when afghanistan happened you know we spent two trillion dollars 2500 american casualties 40 000 wounded and what have we gotten out of it the chinese are about to take up residence in bagram in our splendid air force base and uh the taliban are one of the best equipped armies in the world that's basically what our two trillion dollars got us and china's going to build a super highway right by the way they're going to extract did you see the thing where like the taliban were flying around in our helicopter helicopters no it was fake apparently yeah apparently apparently the helicopters that were left behind are non-functional so let's just clear that up that's not true yeah there's more blackhawks than any other army in the world except for us um i mean haven't you seen all the photos of them they're all decked out in our uniforms it's incredible yeah oh yeah they got our night vision goggles photos on the internet no no no there was reporting itemizing the inventory the cache of weapons we left behind it was gigantic all right let's get to the question now the good news bad news okay so that that's that's the bad news that's what two trillion dollars of government spending got us um the the good news is i went back and i looked at how much money has been invested in the venture capital space over that same 20-year period that we were in afghanistan and it roughly tallied up to about two trillion dollars i didn't know that actually i just i added up the charts and about and most of it was in the last five years because it's actually been a huge acceleration in the amount of money coming into vc over the last several years the softbanks the tigers and so that you've had these late stage funds the mega lane stage funds so the truth is for really way less than i'd say a trillion dollars of you know early stage like true venture money we've been able to create the entire technology ecosystem as we see it today i mean not entire i guess go back 20 years there's five years in the late 90s so the the the private enterprise system has accomplished so much with relatively so little money you compare the efficiency of it you almost wonder how did we squander so much money in afghanistan it took active looting by many different forces to basically squander i mean think about like literally have to burn money every venture back company every stage in the last 20 years that's how much money we spent in afghanistan i mean how much of that money went to line the pockets of private contractors and you know warlords we were paying off i mean it was a giant kleptocracy okay so but the good news is look what we got for the same amount of money here you know and not just here every every private venture back company so i do think we are capable of accomplishing great things but with relatively small amounts of investment and thank goodness for that because that's the only thing that's producing anything in our society but um but i mean it's true right but but look at what washington's about to do they want to stomp on all this innovation i mean they want to jack up the cap gains rate to the same to higher than ordinary income i mean that is the return on investment for the for the for venture capital for the kind of investment i'm talking about i mean they want to make it punitive now that's not going to pass thankfully because we got joe manchin but that's about it by the way i will i will contradict myself and agree with sax i do think there will be a hundred x thousand ten 1000x 10000x breakthrough that will resolve a lot of the challenges we face as a species on planet earth over this century so we're optimistic i'm 100 optimistic i'm actually this might that's my the the title you gave it away the title of my talk in the morning uh tomorrow morning um yeah but yeah yeah i do and by the way my talk says absolutely nothing about the government and we went railing against the government now everyone's kind of feeling sad and we sound like a bunch of old guys sitting at the starbucks talking yeah talking about the government how they suck um but at the end of the day i do think that um the ingenuity of uh the human spirit and science will resolve the problems that we face today jesus christ and we are not gonna end up we're not going to end up developing on the government to solve the problem all right i want to talk about one other by the way we should kind of be able to take questions uh from the audience so if you have a question i'm going to jump out there um should we do that now because yeah just end with the ccp uh is now moving to break up alipay's business this is after jack ma uh went on a holiday to learn how to oil paint thoughts chamaf well i think this is sort of like one other step in what we've been talking about for a while which is that china is basically becoming a completely vertically integrated government where the public and private sector has no real clear delineation and i think that that actually has a lot of implications to us because they export an enormous amount of technology and building blocks to us and we have no recourse if those guys either change their mind and this is sort of what pulls us into this next very complicated phase of uh geopolitics because for example if they decide to cut us off you know in our they will invade taiwan i've said this before but i think that they will and we will have no choice except to deploy troops into taiwan because in the absence of the silicon that we need from tsmc and a couple of other manufacturers there we have zero capability here this is why you see intel i mean for any like any second when you guys hear an intel press release that says they're investing 90 [ __ ] billion dollars do you not think where does intel come up with 90 billion dollars right this is a pull through from us government because it allows us to start to rebuild an enormous amount of critical infrastructure that we've left to other people so you know china is systematically decomposing and basically destabilizing all the china internet companies they're going to control and inbound all of the critical resources and we're gonna have to have these really hard conversations unless this is again why i go back to i don't believe what you said entrepreneurs are not enough of the solution we need the government to step in with intelligence not with anything other than that they don't need laws necessarily they just need to understand the problem and then or get out of the way in some cases or step in and for example like you know allow the regulatory regulatory capture to be disrupted but they won't do it because special interests and by the way special interests what do they spend you know if you try to donate to a [ __ ] congressman four thousand dollars two thousand five hundred dollars like these people aren't spending 80 million dollars to defend an 80 billion dollar business they're spending 80 000 and that's why we can't have progress that's crazy to me sacks your thoughts on china's recent actions to basically deprecate entrepreneurship it's it's a continuation of the trends we've been talking about on the show like math was saying i mean they're bringing these um entrepreneurs these their moguls uh their their oligarchs under their thumb under the thumb of the ccp and xi jinping they're consolidating control and power and money and it's also about the data that was another part of the this new law is they want to get their hands on the data that um all the credit data of every single person that uses alipay all throughout southeast asia that's [ __ ] crazy and they also control and everybody's tick-tock you're talking about yeah we get there at the same time yeah it's crazy it's crazy if you were running the chinese government wouldn't you do the same i would do everything that they're doing which is why it's crazy to us that we are sitting here allowing it to be done to us that's what the crazy the crazy right there's nothing there's nothing about what they're doing doing is not illogical right what we are doing is illogical because we should have a reaction to these things we should have a point of view it can't be tacitly sticking our head in the sand all right who's got a question for one of the besties okay let's try and make it a tight question talk up the book john of course these bills are incredibly wasteful but you're you guys are engaged so how come you're not looking through them and saying this piece i like this piece is messed up because it doesn't sound like you've read them either to be honest with you i haven't read them i rely on these summaries that i get from my team and to be honest with you the legibility of these things are incredibly low and the problem is every bill that gets written now it's almost like it goes through a process if you take a two-page bullet point bill which is really what senators or congress people understand and approve and then out comes the other end two thousand pages that are undigestable so you're absolutely right i don't i rely on these summaries i have zero idea what's really in there let's take another question yeah um i'm alex philippenko you did this poll of whether the media are right winning leaning or left-leaning and the overwhelming majority said left-leaning but do you think that that's in part because for four years we had been fed so many lies and so much misinformation from the extreme right [Music] david that question was directed to you [Music] i mean look i think there were plenty of polls if you go back like 10 20 30 years there's a media organization there's a guy named brent bizzell who is doing studies of media bias and if you were to actually look at how people in the media voted it was 90 plus percent democrat i mean it's it's been it's been a thing for a long time and now it came to a head i would say during the trump administration because the the press i think in going after trump gave up something important which is they gave up their objectivity i mean they flatly would i mean it was you know whether you want to call it trump ranger syndrome or whatever i mean they now saw it as their duty not to report objectively both sides but they would just flatly declare uh things that trump were saying were false you know you still see this today i'm not saying that all the things he said were true maybe he did say false things but normally if you wanted to say that one person's saying something false you would get a source on the other side and then you would quote them and then that's how you would basically construct the article and you had the press basically almost really become unhinged and i think they they kind of rip the empire jersey off their backs um to in order to chase after trump and i think you know ultimately they got him um trump was a one-term president but i think that it's really contributed to the polarized media environment we have now any way to get that referee jersey back on the press no no sex well how i mean they you know the problem is the journalism and media have changed so much the nature of press has changed yeah right it's fragmenting and splintering much like everything else there's um yeah we talk about this at some of our companies i keep referring to our companies because i know a lot of people are here today but you know we talk about the fragmentation of food brands for example or the fragmentation of people's kind of individual media selection the same is happening in the press where you know you're now kind of going to pick and choose the five articles you want to read as opposed to buying one of three newspapers and reading everything in that newspaper each day and i think that's fueling this which is not necessarily in my opinion i've said this before not necessarily a constructed or designed decision of the quote-unquote press but it's more a phenomenon that arises from the individuals that consume the media and they make selections and that selection bias ends up driving the clicks and the votes and the counts and the prints of that particular form of media and guess what we end up choosing the stuff that triggers us more and makes us feel some stronger emotion and then it creates a feedback loop and that's where this is coming from and i think it's enabled by the internet not necessarily bad actors at platform companies but it's it's inevitable in a decentralized world or a platformed world that's why and also part of the story is advertising went away as an option as google and facebook took over those markets so they went subscription and how do you get subscribers you pick a side you can't really go down the middle i want to feel something emotional when i click and buy and spend 99 cents or whatever like it's not i just i don't want to like be bored to death everything is so stimulating in this digital world like i want to be stimulated right so there's a really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to this which is um they they ask you know people on the left to the right what do you think the country's biggest problem is um on the left the number one answer was trump supporters you know so you know now on on the right it was a little bit more varied it was the taliban it was china you know um it was what should we be most concerned about objectively from each of you what do you think the top three things we should be concerned about i think as americans i i don't think the right answer for either side is like the other half of america i think i think that happens because you haven't varied your information diet you're sitting there watching one station on cable news and you're being fed you're being basically being fed this stuff that the others demonizing the other side right and you know the other side is you know is being otherwise all right let's take two more questions nico uh chamoth this goes back to a point that you made about entrepreneurs not being enough and bringing the government i think a lot of the topics covered are bringing a lot of government uh support um or involvement so um from y'all's perspective how do we bring in uh maybe new incentives on the government side to bring in younger people smarter people people who are going to make better change than what we may be seeing today i mean if you look at country countries like singapore their solution was to elevate the role of government to be so high from a societal value perspective it was an incredibly respected role it was well compensated and it was a thing that was a real jumping off point to other positions of true influence here we started with that idea so like you know when you think about what's what played out in the 1940s 50s and 60s i think we had a lot of that but then the problem was we had a handful of things that completely perverted the cycle the cherry on the cake i think was citizens united that basically just tore the band-aid off and we are where we are where it's not clear today that the most intellectually curious people are in government nor does it even get its fair share okay so what do you do about it i think that there's an element of it which is you have to play the game on the field which is folks like us what i would encourage all of you to do is if you're in a position to actually accumulate political power you have a responsibility to do so and it is directly correlated with money and so as you find com found companies and you get liquidity you have a responsibility to be engaged because you will have a louder voice i'm not saying that it's right i'm not saying that it's fair but it's a game on the field the more you spend the more time you get with all these folks and you should use that beyond that we have to find a way of orienting them so once you get a seat at the table i think it's about showing them that there's these nuanced laws that are a lot less sexy than they want to talk about but that actually have real impact sex what do you think of senators getting paid like ceos would that help solve the problem if people could look at it and say well you paid a half million dollars in that job or a million dollars in that job would we draw a different caliber of person um i wouldn't be opposed to that i wouldn't be opposed to people in government that the top people making more money i don't know that though that that really would be the thing that attracts a higher i mean i think most of those people go into it for for power and um you know the problem isn't that they're not smart i mean some of them i guess aren't very smart but you also have the lack of um you know they since they can't make money when they're in they have to figure out how to make it on the way out you know yeah before yeah probably absolutely giving them a pay increase is not something i would be opposed to um i mean it's something that's hard for them to do because it's easy to campaign against politicians who want to pay themselves more but yeah i'd rather pay them more salary so they're less beholden to the special interests when they get out of office um but i don't think that by itself is gonna solve the problem let's take another question so my question is how do we get both sides to agree right we want to get back to the truth and in science and economics we have a way to measure the truth in science design scientific experiment and you measure it against reality so you both sides can agree what's reality in economics you either make money you don't make money right you can measure it against something so what can we do to get back to both sides agreeing on what is true i mean i think the challenge is it takes more than 15 seconds to walk someone through the experimental design and the outcome and the and the action to be taken as a result same with any i mean i i don't know what the viewership is of the economist but i'm pretty sure it's been going down zero right but this is why markets work better thank you for my subscription then politics right this is why markets work better than politics because freeburg in order for you to pursue what you want to pursue you don't have to convince a majority of the country to support it you just need to find one person who's willing to fund it you know you raise the money so and and the same is true for every startup and that's why progress is made by startups and not a lot of progress is made by this is actually why by the way that's why i don't think any of us spend time in politics even though we talk about it all the time no but because it influences our decision making i think politics has done more to rekindle my interest in all things technology and specifically web 3.0 and d5 than anything else because these last four years have completely convinced me that we need to find a very decentralized way of building the future it's going to be ugly though i am i i am confused i mean i am convinced that the next 80 years is exactly that like you know in the physical world there's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen in the social world it's going to be related to this defy decentralization movement that's underway and it's underweight because of what we're hearing about happening in china what we're talking about happening in the u.s and you know i mean i don't know i won't give the context i was hanging out with some people the other day they were they were uh working on my house and they um they were telling me every single one of them were trading criticisms uh every single one of them were trading crypto and the whole conversation you're really expensive on the whole the whole the whole conversation was about crypto and i don't trust the us dollar and everything's inflating away and i i think politically we're not really awake to the fact that this is a broad meaningful social movement it's playing out with crypto bubbles and nfts and other nonsense but those are short-lived bubbles those are little feedback loops frothing is happening as the tide rises um and i do think that that is going to be kind of the big pushing force david is why china said no more crypto what are your votes that's the big battle and by the way everyone's going to end up saying that let me come back to crypto just one point on on movement so there's political movements and then there's kind of uh economic movements like private initiative i wrote a blog post called your startup as a movement in which i compared being i said a good start founder is an evangelist for their cause it is almost like leading a political movement you have to go out there kind of have a stump speech and evangelize people to your cause which you know is ideally a larger mission than just whatever you know benefits your company right this is why elon has been able to um you know frankly why he's been able to sell uh so many cars without spending a dime on marketing is because he creates a much larger movement than just what's good for tesla right but the the difference i think between uh sort of a private movement and a political movement is this is that when you're successful as the leader of a company everyone imitates you so now because elon's successful everyone else is trying to introduce their own electric cars whereas in politics whenever you start a political organization you know an equal and opposite organization will spring up to oppose you and it's just very hard to get anything done maybe that's the way it should be because we don't want people imposing their political will on us but this is why i i am a big fan of startups and smart young people pursuing startups and not politics what do you think about decentralized crypto you know finance uh in america should we should we allow it should we tax it we should clearly allow it because um this whole crypto stack this whole uh decentralized finance stack that's being built could very well be the future of finance and we certainly want to be ahead of that curve maybe there's some bubbles in here in that but i think what's really interesting there's certainly a lot of really smart engineers coders entrepreneurs who are going to that area and so i think it'd be a mistake just to discount it i think we want america to be on the forefront of that technology wave just like every other technology wave i'll make a prediction my prediction is in the next 20 years the d5 movement will catalyze a movement against the open internet and it is because state actors will compete with private actors for this battle between centralized institutional state-based control systems like i want to have a know your customer if you want to buy crypto in the us versus all of these offshore places where i can go and sign up get a bunch of money and trade forever and never pay the irs a cent and live my life in the ether and the open internet will start to get threatened we've seen this in the past where proxy servers and dns servers got you know requests from the doj and take down notices and if that starts to happen where all the servers and all the fiber lines that are running in and out of the us and elsewhere start to get kind of tackled like china has a closed internet um you could start to see this become a really ugly battle that starts to play out and i think we're not too far i mean i don't know if you guys agree but i think the open internet is kind of going to be the great battleground to resolve this well the original battle was over information and now it's over money and the dollar well i think there's a really interesting point there which is you know i remember the late 90s early 2000s where the big technology investing wave was all about connecting people and goods into seamless global networks and that's where all the investment went today and and behind that was sort of this utopian idea that the internet was going to break down barriers and tribalism and remove geographic borders and create a single connected world well what what exactly is the bet on crypto today it's a bet that fiat currencies are going to collapse and deteriorate be undermined by money printing the u.s dollar will stop being the world's reserve currency most likely that individuals need to be protected against the rise of the authoritarian state these are the big themes of crypto and if you think of major technology investing waves as essentially a prediction market on what smart people think the future is going to look like it's pretty scary that we're going from a utopian technology investing wave to a very dystopian technology investor destroys capitalism you know if you think about what capitalism is it's not just a return on investment but it's the tonnage of dollars right so anyone who's a big investor here um i'll pick out jan because he's done an incredible job you know you're putting more and more dollars in for more and more dollars out that's the pressure brad you know these guys are under enormous pressure to get tonnage of dollars through the system in a productive way and so you know these guys are at the forefront um but when you look at you know most of the projects on solana they're seeded with a few million dollars and these are 60 80 billion dollar market cap projects um and so i don't know how capitalism survives in that world number one number two governance goes completely out the window because you're essentially replacing um a set of norms that we've all agreed to about what a company is it's an llc or it's a c corp that is incorporated with laws there is recourse for you you can go to these places and sue them now it's a dow it's a bunch of rules written in a blockchain here's how it all works here's how i make my hr decisions here's this here's that here's the other thing um and then you basically decompose everything into a service where it's recursive you cannot build with me unless you make yourself buildable to others okay so when you add all these three things together i think to me it's the most incredibly positively disruptive force i have seen i think it will destroy wealth i frankly couldn't give a [ __ ] um and i think it's better for the world let's take a final question thanks jason um and maybe to connect some of the dots you know i think the the power of the individual perhaps reflected in crypto has never been greater relative to the power of government right thomas friedman talked about super empowered individuals 20 years ago um whether you're a terrorist or whether you're a capitalist the power of the individual is is is never been greater the four of you started a movement earlier this year around what was going on in california right a lot of people got excited about the recall about what might come next i think where we fail as entrepreneurs where we fail as allocators is we had no strategic plan for california we have no strategic alternative plan for america the parties have platforms why don't we put together a strategic plan for this state a strategic plan for the country that brings in these folks the production board is a strategic plan for winning world war ii right and so to chamas point that it's incumbent upon us to get involved i think it's incumbent upon us to step up what it means to be involved it's not hire a lobbyist in dc it's not you know just show up and vote but i actually think that the voice that you have carries a lot of responsibility and i think that i would have liked to have seen the all-in step up and do something to catalyze a strategic plan for california right not necessarily endorse a candidate but let a candidate stand on top of that strategic plan if we really think about decentralized right i'll let you wrong i'm really honest with you why didn't you run for governor you're supposed to run for governor yeah you [ __ ] it up we don't we don't have as four people our act together we are still learning because we are like anybody else in a startup you stumbled into some success there's about a million people that will listen watch consume this a week and all the polling or all of the data that you pull it's like new york san francisco dc we don't internalize that and use it for any strategic intent they're still if i could just to be honest with you they're still infighting bitching complaining you know all kinds of [ __ ] nonsense where if you saw the inside of it you'd be like hey [ __ ] wake the [ __ ] up get a plan together and act we don't have that brad and we disagree on a lot that's okay but what we but we we can't get we can't get away from ourselves we are learning how to do that um and we've had a bunch of instances where we've had to come together and say hey our friendship is the most important so let's [ __ ] sort this out and we've always been able to sort it out we're going to get pushed to what every other you know startup founder story gets pushed to which is now what are we just going to sit here babylon for another [ __ ] 3-4 years through a pandemic and you know maybe you get to 2 million views 3 million views maybe spotify gives you a deal and you can make 10 20 million bucks a year who the [ __ ] cares so you're right we have a responsibility to figure out if we are four reasonable voices in the sea and people are attracted to those voices what do we use it for and we've talked about it but we haven't put pen to paper and finalized by the way we spent about 90 minutes a week on this podcast and then i also think we've also tried to experiment a little bit david and i collaborated on getting chessa boudin recalled but in different ways david sacks david sacks literally helped them start a recall chesabooting campaign gary tan who listens to the pod started his own with democrats and then i tweeted anybody want to donate for an investigative journalist to cover chester boone's office because we couldn't find anybody covering it 60 000 showed up for that gofundme page and we just gave it to a journalist who started this week and she's reported in the first 10 days on three different like tragic cases in san francisco that have not been followed up on by the dea's office so that was just a little you know example of dipping our toes and obviously chamath you know being uh pushed to run for governor caught fire like we thought that was a joke it was literally somebody who listens to the pod put the website up he tweeted as a joke and then all of a sudden it's on cnbc but the best thing has been the feedback we've gotten from people like you brad and everybody in the audience bill gurley a lot of other people here and uh we have thought about hey what do we use this platform for in terms of making change like that and i think that that'll be your tool it's the right question and the right challenge brad it is appreciate it i appreciate it all right david we should let everybody get to pizza i want to say thanks to the besties to jay cal jamal sacks yeah and um just thanks for listening to the show thanks to friedberg if um you want to make things truly uncomfortable uh david loves to give a long embrace a nice hug tell him come on you're his favorite family this [ __ ] he there's another friend who shall not be named who is a side hugger nobody likes us who likes a side hugger anybody side hugging you want to get the full frontal hug when you full frontal hog with sacks give it to him but i had to force him today because he comes into you like stand up i'll show you he comes in like this and then he does this the hip hug like he does he does kind of to him yeah it's called asparagus so nice to see you it's called that's burgers looks like he's going to a night at the roxbury absolutely i mean you look horrible thank you thank you really [ __ ] horrible okay i appreciate it is that your fault here we go all right let's wrap it up all right uh well this has been the all-in podcast and enjoy your time at the [Music] the conference and they've just gone crazy [Music]








where were you on thursday were you in l.a i was at home i i got like a family to do well family have you you met them what were they like were they everything you expected me i had to meet the new kid he's 19. what's his [Laughter] major winner [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast yes we made it to episode 47 in three episodes it'll be episode 50. no plans to do anything other than just trying to record this every week for you the loyal audience with us again coming off an amazing event a live event on monday uh tuesday and i don't know if it went into wednesday but david freeburg's the production board event we uh recorded our first live all in it seems like it went uh well on an av basis and the audience seemed to enjoy it what was the feedback freeberg so you know half the room were scientists and they'd never heard of this podcast before and they were like what the hell did we just show up to it's like these who are these four guys on stage drinking this wine talking about politics for an hour and a half um but and then dropping f-bombs and dropping off bombs and uh there was a little bit of uh kind of seasoning we had to do afterwards to get everyone kind of comfortable but no actually it was fantastic people loved it you guys were the highlight um and i thought it was super fun to do that in person i don't know what you guys thought it's cool energy it's super cool it was great and with us again of course uh david sacks the rain man himself and the dictator chamoth paulie hapatia what did you think uh saks of the live event format uh obviously half the audience were fans of the show half warrant which is i better than putting people randomly into it but i i'm glad that the people who are not fans of or have never heard of the show didn't walk out we didn't have walkouts so that was good yeah i mean look we were slightly more palatable to them than andrew dice clay or something like that but uh [Laughter] it was a good change of pace i mean i think some people commented that the lighting the production values weren't that great they seemed fine to us at the time but uh so we're gonna have to do better on that next time and other people speculated that we took we're easier on each other in terms of debating topics because we were in person i didn't feel that while sitting there but you guys tell me if you think that was true i thought you know we got a better read on each other in person and we had more dialogue than we normally would over a zoom i don't know if you guys felt the same very good i i think so and then i i kind of like the evening podcast the glass of wine there's something about it like you're just like a little yeah you're coming in for a landing yeah coming in for a nice evening the little cards after it could be a thing it could definitely be good i could definitely make harlem 2012 a uh a regular part of taping this pod the problem is we taped too early on a friday right if we could change the taping to like happy hour or something like that it might work better oh my god harlan 2012 uh what is it that's a good bottle of wine oh my god j cal knows that look at him pretending that one pretending that's the it's the one with the round label i know it i know i'm looking at it right now oh my lord some of those go up in value those things looks like as high you guys think we could like record after playing poker for two hours so you're two hours into the wine and poker and then you record wouldn't work no way no way maybe two i think the wine yes poker no yeah i think uh for a first time the audio was great so that's you know job one is to get the audience consumption happens that way to do like a line of light in fredberg's face for all commentators you know it was my goal i actually got up and fixed that like no one else of the crew you know the dozens of people working there did anything about it my wife stood up and fixed the curtain dude without al you would be nowhere be nowhere in life she's she's she's a great person what what what was the empty seat about between me and chamoth i mean there was an effort that was if we wanted to bring up a guest so unfortunately all the people's names that were written on that piece of paper our quote-unquote besties did not show up on time yeah right exactly nobel girl girls didn't come and die and they all showed up at like nine o'clock yeah there might be a reason for that yeah it actually was the back channel sky date and the back channel was sky dating and somebody else waited outside because they knew they might get pulled up i got that from uh you're gonna have to beep his name out yeah it's your first time saying his name on the sky he's not going to no he's not going his name mentions are you kidding me he's been on my pocket he's been on this weekend he's one of the first 10 guests that was the last press appearance he did was 11 years ago he literally does not i mean everybody knows who sky dating is earthling everybody of our generation but it's amazing how um you know quickly the tech the tech crowd you know moves on so true there's a there's a famous story actually when um when mark andreessen met um mark zuckerberg for the first time zuckerberg didn't know that you know andreessen had created netscape i'm not even sure he knew what netscape was i think he said something like i created mosaic and he's like what's that oh right right yeah yeah so it's like yeah look in the tech industry we're all concerned about the future no one pays a lot of attention to history do you guys feel like last generations uh entrepreneurs and investors at this point well some of us are still currently creating things freeburg i can't mention the name of the app as per our anti-promotion rules but i have recently there's not a lot of kind of long careers in silicon valley right a lot of people kind of have because you're creating products well you consistently kind of if you have asymmetric success right you have these kind of like big bursts and then you know it's a it's a different kind of life you don't go kind of push again for the next hard entrepreneurial project typically not everyone obviously uh and then you end up seeing like a generation kind of die out like you know web 1.0 and web 2.0 and then you know you don't see them again you also see some adventure yeah i think i think there's a lot of truth to that that um and i worry about this with my own kids that i think deprivation creates motivation especially to do something as hard as create a company creates motivation welcome to david sax's infomercial no no i mean look i think you know people are coming to my tent that leads to fornication [Music] you know our friend beep has a has a saying that that sort of became famous when elon then repeated it which is that uh creating a startup is like staring into the abyss and eating glass and it is really hard to create these companies when they're successful and so not a lot of people want to do it again once they've reached that point and um you know it does take a certain amount of um like i said deprivation you know to do this which is why giving everybody the participation trophy and trying to make people's lives as easy as possible i mean yes you want you don't want to deprive people on the one hand but on the other hand it does often lead to to good things totally agree we're seeing a bit of a dry run of this if people believe that you know they have ubi or the government's going to take care of them i would be fine with ubi you know everybody getting a little bit of money and if it was a safety net the only thing i worry about is it seems like a little bit of money if you're clever means you could never work and then what happens to those people in society right like well i just i think it's anti-compassionate because what you do is you kick out the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic success when you basically pay able-bodied people not to work i mean they need those entry-level jobs that may not pay much better than the ubi are an important stepping stone to where they get to next in their career and i think it's it's demotivating and we've already seen in california we've been ubi ubi's not going to pay you to go to college but amazon will as an example so you're absolutely right there's a the the gi bill you know there's all kinds of examples where in history we've used you know entry-level jobs as exactly as they're meant to be an entry-level opportunity and on-ramp to work your ass off and to make something of yourself if you if you all of a sudden let people opt out of it then it's going to be a very um it's what they're not going to realize is by the time they get old enough where they will want to have some kind of purpose it'll be too late because then activating yourself in your 40s and 50s to essentially start your life is really hard i'll give you an example of this like you know right now i you know i would say i'm like fairly fluent in italian um that's pretty impressive but i uh but i started uh taking italian lessons and you know the last four or five percent of a language is brutalizing right because it's like it's every little grammatical thing you want to get it completely right and it's very um demotivating for me sometimes because i'm like god why the [ __ ] am i doing this um i don't have to i can get it by just speak it but i've made a commitment to myself uh same thing in biotech you know i got introduced to it by friedberg and and obviously nat and and now i'm trying to learn and it is a it is a grind and i think it's so easy to quit now you take that to the extreme and some random person that doesn't have necessarily the ability to fall back on the success that you know so we've all collectively had and you have to start from scratch my god it's it's really tough it's really tough at our age it is just hard kids are screaming in the background you're trying to manage all the stuff it's impossible so you think it's easier when you're in your early 20s yeah be careful what you wish for but why is it easier when you're in your early 20s isn't it always a grind to learn something and push yourself to develop yourself i mean well you have nothing so the theory is you have some motivation to get something right because you're going to climb up the mountain because like staying at the shore means you can go wash it out to sea or something hours hours hours and hours and hours to my 20s and 30s like it was like 10 to 16 hour days i couldn't have every day of the office is that different today yeah i i don't work in the same way i did before because i i'm trying to do a different job um but i've earned the right and i've now put myself under pressure to do it differently because i have a different job to do right but when i was in my 20s and i was a pm you know grinding out a product or you know writing a feature spec or you know building a model and trying to put all these things together uh it was so much thankless work i learned a ton uh and it was all worth it right i was about to ask you do you regret it or not yeah no look this is the thing about work this is the thing about work-life balance that the people are always complaining about people are working too hard don't realize is that yeah you want to think about work-life balance but but across your entire life i mean one of the things you'll do in your 20s is work much harder to set yourself up to where you want to be in your 50s and so chamath doesn't have to work as hard in his 50s because he worked much harder earlier in his life and now he's got the skill set where he can delegate more um so yeah i think we're you know we really shortchange people when we tell them as young people that they don't need to work hard or in the extreme case of ubi that we're actually paying people not to work that's not developing the right habits they're going to make them successful later on and in fairness though if you look at minimum wage and you look at entry level jobs many of them paid too little historically these companies like mcdonald's i know it's a free market but we're paying very little we're talking seven eight dollars an hour and no benefits and you know this is kind of unnecessary greed in my mind and i think that's what my personal job was at i made an hour yeah i made four dollars and 25 cents an hour in 1996 as my first job cleaning cleaning a pool yeah 250 for me when i worked at fordham's uh fordham's computer center i think it was four two no three three dollars it had gone to but when i started in the workforce in 88 it was 250 was the minimum wage what was the minimum wage where you were dude what was it like in that 19th century it sucks yeah tell us when i when i when i was working at when you killed the federals no i remember when i was in college i worked at a bar um and uh i mean i was there drinking so much i finally was like why don't you just give me a job so i might as well make some money while i'm sitting here and they pay me seven bucks an hour that's why i did my senior year oh pretty good yeah pretty good that's a pretty well-paying job seven bucks a month one of the other problems but one of the other problems of ubi that larry summers has been he's the former u.s secretary of treasury he's been on the record about um is the inflationary effect so you know there are pretty smart economists like himself who kind of highlight that as you give people everyone you know ten thousand dollars a year first of all it's gonna cost 10 trillion dollars whatever the estimate is to kind of fund that sort of program um and you know suddenly the cost of a burger goes from 49 cents to 99 cents or 99 to 1.99 because there's uh you know much greater demand on that kind of area of the economy for consumption and so you see an inflationary effect which trickles its way through and so what ends up happening ultimately is by pumping more of that money in for free without productivity coming out of it you effectively see inflation and so it wipes itself out um and so this is kind of one economic theory on ubi is that it can actually just end up being within 10 years completely useless and pointless because then the basic costs of living climb so much that you need to raise the ubi again to give people basic living expenses and so it becomes this kind of nasty runaway effect so it's not really sustainable is one argument that's made against ubi but you know obviously different point than what we were kind of saying a moment ago anyway i think people i think people don't know what they want and if they get it they're going to um i think of look a form of a form of ubi does make sense and i do think we need to subsidize folks but you know i think maybe it's probably just a fancier word for welfare i grew up on welfare and i can tell you that i don't think our family benefited from it um psychologically we benefited from it socioeconomically because we needed it to not starve um but the the knock-on effects of you know when you're in that loop of again being in your 30s 40s and 50s not finding purpose you know which my parents had to struggle through uh coping you cope with alcohol you cope with depression the knock-on affects your kids i don't think we want to see that and so when people think about ubi i think they need to understand that you know we've run a long experiment in this thing called welfare you know what welfare does a lot of us have felt it and uh there needs to be a better way because if you just let people opt out i don't think you really understand what happens over long durations of time when you're not doing anything oh it's getting really weird right now right i mean the fact that restaurants are closing that have customers but they can't operate and so we're starting to actually see the effect of it you know in some sense what's the open job stat right now it's like 9 million open jobs in the us it's been bouncing from 8 to 10 million yeah there's more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people right yeah or unemployment's unemployment is high but uh unfilled jobs is even higher yeah we've somehow moved away from a political consensus we had in the 1990s that i think made a lot of sense when bill clinton passed welfare reform with you know a lot of republican support is look we need to have a welfare system we need to take care of people who either can't work or can't find a job for for a good reason there needs to be a social safety net but if you're an able-bodied person who can find a job you should be working and um and that that that welfare reform they passed in the 90s did lead to a lot of people finding meaningful work which i think resulted in happier lives and somehow we've moved off that political consensus um that everyone kind of agrees yes social safety net but but able-bodied people should work to now we have this elite it's really an elite ideology of ubi which is look we're going to pay people not to work um which i just think is sort of like un-american isn't it also like a little insulting being like you know what don't even bother working you're making too little money we'll just give you money it's it's yeah it's like it feels insulting to people's dignity i'll be honest like i wouldn't want to take it i would rather go out and be i was a waiter or a bus boy i'll go be a waiter or a bus boy and make enough money to pay my rent and yeah one of the things you wanted for free yeah one of the things you hear is well your job's gonna be replaced by a machine anyway it's not productive work so why don't we just pay you to sit back and you know take yourself out of the economy well like you said the unfilled jobs number shows that even with all the automation that's happening in the economy and that's a trend that will continue there's still a need for you know human labor and i think there always will be and um and it's a little bit too soon to be throwing in the towel on the idea that entire groups of people can't productively work does everybody believe able-bodied people should work and not get free money it's not that it should or shouldn't i think the question is what's uh what's in folks's best interests well that's what i mean yeah but yeah so is it in best people's best interest our phrase is what you're saying is in people's best interests i think the i think the point where we're going to go wrong is when we couple ubi with um actually having to work or not work and i don't think that's the right idea i think we have to do a decent job of letting people find the things that they want to work on because everybody can find something that they want to work on and that shouldn't exclude you or disqualify you from getting ubi so that all that does is then just raise the general standard of living i think that idea is better the problem is when we talk about ubi what we are talking about it is in the exact way jason that you said which is letting people opt out so i mean think about how privileged that is to there are places in the world where there's not enough jobs and people are like wait a second an american has to be fulfilled with their job selection in addition to getting a job it that just seems like the height of entitlements like sometimes you just need a job because you need money to pay your bills right but you're saying if you get product if you get job job candidate you know citizen fit you the uptick will be better ubi is a benefit it's like universal health care we don't we don't make a decision about universal health care based on who does or does not have a job and so uh ubi should basically be about evening you know the bottom few rungs of economic viability so that everybody has a reasonable um ability to have a decent life that's a nice idea i think that makes a ton of sense but coupling it to having to work or not work where some people say oh great i can take this money and not work is the wrong way to figure this out we're talking politics why don't we shift to the the recall yeah all right uh so uh post morten on the uh newsome recall he he uh secretary of state says the recall cost over 300 million obviously um gavin knew someone in landslide hold on the 300 million point let me just take care of this real quick okay because i saw this all day on social media you know what yeah it did cost 300 million dollars but all the people crying about that clutching their pearls about the 300 million never said a word about the 30 billion the 100 times greater edd fraud that was perpetrated by our state and by our one party rule of the state and the recall process and the ballot initiative process is the only check we have on elected leadership in a one-party state so listen i'll start clutching my pros about the 300 million when they start uh talking about the 30 billion but look let's shift to the result of this what are you wait what are you referring to i'm not sure i know enough about this is this is the this is the edd fraud where 30 billion basically went to anyone claiming unemployment uh insurance and 30 billion and fake claims were paid out that process was so poorly administered so i mean people were just creating fake addresses they were just sending in claims from anywhere and um and 30 billion went out so so look i mean that's the kind of incompetence and corruption that we have in california so zach your point is that because it's a single party state where the state where the democrats have super majority in the assembly and obviously have the the governorship that the only mechanism for the minority the republican party is to kind of run recall not even not the republicans citizens i mean look let's remember how the um how the recall and the ballot initiative uh came to be that process it actually came from progressives early in the 20th century who said we need the people to have some direct democracy because special interests might usurp the uh the the electoral process and right and and get control over all these elected representatives and frankly that's exactly what's happened in the state of california but the people who you know have that power are progressives and so they want to amend or abolish the the recall process but so look i think 300 million once every 20 years to put the fear of god into politicians is not is money well spent in my view even if this particular recall wasn't close there are much greater examples of waste fraud and abuse that the people complaining about this should be wanting to tackle and i'll believe them about the 300 million when they complain about the 30 billion but look this was a total shellacking for supporters of the recall and i i do think that whenever you suffer a defeat i think it's important for you to think about what went wrong you know and and certainly as a supporter of the recall i think it's worth doing a post-mortem um i think you know any political party when it loses needs to do some some introspection and so what went wrong well i think a couple of things okay so if you if you go back to the polls a month ago or so it was a dead heat we even had that shock pole that newsom was down by 10. and then what happened well the republican party basically consolidated their support around larry elder prior to that you kind of had this amorphous blob of five different candidates who didn't have a lot of name recognition they were pretty moderate they were a hard target for for newsome to shoot at once the republican party consolidated around elder it provided a very uh convenient and rich target for for uh newsome to shoot at and so you'd have to say that tactically the republican party made it made a mistake there now i understand why they did it i mean elder is smart he's charismatic he appeals to that base uh but he's not the moderate candidate that like a schwarzenegger was or that i you know chamath i wanted you to run and so falconer was sort of that candidate and so you kind of had a choice on the republican side between a moderate candidate who wasn't very charismatic which was falconer and a very charismatic candidate who wasn't moderate and it really played into newsome's hands and he was then able to nationalize the election in in the wake of that so he branded i think somewhat unfairly he branded elder as a as a trumper and he ran against trumpism and even biden came to california to denounce elders as a trump clone which look there's a lot of things you may not like about larry elder i don't think it's fair to call him a trump clone but that's what they did and so they demonized him and so if you look at the issues that newsom ran on they were all national issues he was you know talking about what was happening in texas with abortion uh and he he talked about covid we should come back to that one because i think that is a state issue too we should talk about it but he started talking about issues that were really more national issues he and and so the the recall moved away from the issues that had galvanized supporters in the poll just want polls just one month ago which were homelessness crime schools and school closures and lockdowns and news was able to very effectively change the subject well you got everybody back to school right if people didn't go back to school it could have been a different result i think the recall was very helpful in that in in that i mean if you remember do you think policy has shifted because of the recall sacks at this point and doesn't that ultimately kind of benefit the issues you were most kind of concerned about look the 300 million was worth it just to get businesses open and just to send a message to the the education unions that they could not keep schools closed for another year i you know if you look at when newsome relaxed the lockdowns it was at every step of the recall process when when the recall finally got enough signatures to get put over the top he all of a sudden started liberalizing the lockdowns he knew they were very unpopular and he gave up on that issue and he got the education unions to stand down on the issue of school reopenings i think because he was facing this recall so look i think that the recall was worth it just just for that but um do you think things could have been different if there was a fringe candidate like i don't know a sri lankan billionaire uh that was you know not kind of this this hardened republican that they could yeah yeah i i blame i blame chamoth for this i think i think a candidate like chamoth could have won okay a democratic centrist obviously i'm joking i don't i don't blame you chamath i understand why you wouldn't want to run but but i'm saying a candidate like chamoth which is who i supported or a candidate like schwarzenegger remember schwarzenegger when he ran in the early 2000s he was pro-choice and pro game gay marriage at a time that gay marriage was not very popular he was socially very liberal you have to take those issues off the table because california is not going to vote he was a pro-life candidate i think he was pro-gay marriage before the clintons yes he was very early on on that he was he was socially very liberal and very tolerant and you got to be in california in general do you think the unions in california you know which is an issue that's been talked about a lot on this pod have been weakened because of the recall and the voice that kind of rose up during this period of time or do you think that nothing's really changed kind of long term i i think it's i i think it's a long-term project for to get the public to see that the education unions are like any special interest which is that they will pursue their interest at the expense of the general interest and they have to be controlled again like any special interest i think because teachers are rightfully very popular people haven't realized what the union bosses are up to i think that that has been exposed because of covet and the school closures to a much much greater degree and i think that's that's a good thing well i mean if you look at the recalls happening locally too with chesaputin and the san francisco school board it seems like now the citizenship is saying oh we do have a recourse it's called doing a recall and stating our opinion very strongly and then attempting to removing people and yeah i think that does change people's behavior you can be sure chesaputin is thinking about outcomes a little bit more now than the implications of this recall i think are really important um and i think it plays out in who runs uh in two years when um newsom is up for re-election and absolutely it'll change who runs on the democratic side in four years uh assuming new some wins you have to remember there have been a massive degradation in the quality of life uh the most populous state in america which represents the fifth largest economy in the world under one party control right so there is not a single law that cannot be passed there's not a single program that cannot be implemented there's not a single idea that can't be pursued yet we have had an absolute decline in quality of life under that rubric and so when people really come to terms with that that's i think when there's a sea change and i hope the sea change is not necessarily a democrat or republican thing it's back to centrism and i think it's checking special interests exactly what sac says and realizing that just because you use a different name like union or something else you're still a special interest and you need to actually be focused on the interests of the general public our kids the environment water quality and if you can't walk into a state where everybody up another ticket is on your same team and get [ __ ] done it's a really tough uh report card yeah i'm just super uninspired by these guys like where is their audacious plan for california has anybody stated like an audacious like here's what this state is no i mean no and that's what's possible we could be the best economy with the greatest education system and we can build a million units should that be should that be the role of the state government i mean like you know should or should well they're in competition they are they're in competition with with florida and texas they have to compete for business and citizens and if it's not done at the state level we're going to have to rely on the federal level and we know that that doesn't work because we have 50 states that are increasingly more diverse every day so the whole idea with the constitution and the founding fathers was like we have this incredible startup but over time i think we've decided that you know this startup is an umbrella organization of 50 other startups it's a holding company and and there'll be these small little you know rules and differences amongst these 50 states and that'll allow us collectively to thrive so you put out a tweet oh sorry go ahead no i just want to i think we want to believe in that idea like there is no savior you know what i mean there's no savior for 350 people and there's barely a savior for the 60 million people in california but it's not going to happen by just throwing your hands up in the air and expecting some president to come around because that's just too hard each state has to act like the citizens and be you know just rugged individualists who are self-sustaining uh and resourceful and this state is not self-sustaining resourceful or ambitious and it's falling behind texas and florida and other competitors so zach you were in a competition you put out a tweet saying often or miami are you are you in the active transition phase or where are you at well i don't know i mean we'll see i think the trend line in california is not good i think what you've already seen in the days since the recall is that gavin newsom has now laid out the strategy for all progressives uh in like even from san francisco to anywhere in the country of how they're gonna run and what they're going to do is this that no matter how bad things get in terms of crime in terms of homelessness in terms of quality of schools in cities and states that they have complete control over they're always going to campaign against trump and trump-ism and they're going to demonize and authorize whoever the candidate is on the other side as a trumpist whether they are or not that's going to be the playbook from now on and this is where i think the attacks against larry elder were very unfair is before he even had a chance to define what he was about you had publications like the la times calling him the new face of white supremacy i mean was it was like unbelievable but black klansmen yeah they basically try to make him out for your black which look he is not okay larry elder's a libertarian maybe his politics are not in the mainstream in california but he's not a black landsman but look this is what the progressive playbook is going to be for the next two decades which is to demonize anybody who stands up to them as basically being a a trumpist and um and and the irony of it will be that they will have total control over over the the problems that people really can care about crime schools homelessness and um and somehow you know that they what news improved is that you can whip people up into you can stir their their partisan political tribalism when you do that right that's why it's effective is he gets people just to see blue and um and he gets a free pass on these issues that just a month ago people were very dissatisfied with now i i do think it's very very important that our republican party not play into this and there was a very good editorial i think there's something to say how come the republicans are still pursuing a trumpian you know their stream they're stupid they are they look they're so dumb it's a really stupid strategy and there's two things they gotta fix right away okay so number one rich lowry from nashville view had a police a piece in politico where he said that this election uh the stolen election myth has become an albatross for republicans they have to get off that um i think it's it's ridiculous that's gonna bring him down between two and the other thing is this anti-vac stuff i mean you know voters completely forgot about the way that newsom locked down this state and then broke his own lockdowns why because he's provacs even to the point of vaccine mandates whereas uh the republicans were not and frankly i think chemoth your instincts on this were were right on which is people given a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti-vax position they will take the the the vax mandates speaking of instincts uh you want to go to the uh this week in facebook's dumpster fire sure sure uh so i i mean where to begin uh this all started um on tuesday 2016 at the last time of course graduate school of business okay well we'll get to your victory lap in a moment but just to queue up this past week on tuesday the wall street journal reported that facebook conducted in-depth research on the impacts of instagram on children's mental health from 2018 to 2020 but they never made the research public nor did they make it available to academics or lawmakers who requested it you will remember that last year or earlier this year facebook started floating the idea of instagram for kids so in addition to having this research which they didn't share and here is the slide from a presentation it seems like the wall street journal has somebody inside of facebook giving them everything literally but here is the quote from presentation slides from 2019 internal facebook presentation slides we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls teens blame instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression this reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups according to the wall street journal uh and uh instagram obviously is a juggernaut over a billion monthly active users and over 40 of them are under the age of 22. this is a really interesting issue because we are this is probably the first example of a broad-based public policy public health issue that tech has created not necessarily amplified right or exacerbated but actually created it now we're going to have to deal with this before i i want to issue you guys how would you define that issue well i think it is a public health issue if you have mental illness a large percentage of a cohort of our population uh subject to mental health issues and eating disorders that's not a good place to be right i don't think that's what we want as a healthy society in a healthy society our daughters and it's probably by the way it's probably not more than just our daughters it's probably our sons and daughters that are going through these issues the question is now about you know is it really a public health issue if you know about it what responsibility do you have to do something and before i apply i just want to give you guys a little bit of data and just get your reaction i actually want to go back to what's called the tobacco master settlement agreement and the tobacco master settlement agreement was entered in november of 1998 originally between the four largest u.s tobacco companies philip morris rj reynolds brown and williamson and lauriard okay and the attorney generals of 46 states and essentially it was an agreement that basically said okay we're going to net all these medicaid lawsuits together we're going to hold these folks responsible for the downstream implications of the product that they've been selling our kids and our you know adults population without the proper disclosures et cetera et cetera et cetera the pres the the what happened before this tobacco msa in big tobacco though was there was about eight or 900 private claims that were filed from the mid 50s all the way to the midnight david knows all this because he he made a movie about this the reason why i think this is interesting is that whether it happens in the united states or someplace else when i read that article my immediate thought went to the tobacco msa because i was like well okay there's a public health issue that may or may not have been covered a cover-up you know it's definitely may or may not have been covered up there could be criminal liability there's probably civil liability if you're you know a mother or father who's lost their kid to an eating disorder or to depressed suicide anxiety bullying suicide and i think like i think the article in the wall street journal yesterday was about like human trafficking i mean these are some gnarly horribly complicated gnarly issues to me that's how i can edit the dots so i just love to hear well i mean who's the jeffrey weigand in this case i mean this is literally the movie the insider like somebody's leaking these documents out there's a deep threat inside facebook yeah well yeah and that's what the brown and williamson was really about is that somebody had the studies from the 70s of when correct me if i'm wrong david when the tobacco industry knew and did nothing and covered it up and then they had the whistleblower so do you feel this is exactly analogous sax or how close to analogous are we taking too big of a jump here well this this idea that social media is as bad for you as cigarettes has been around for several years now and i've always wondered whether that was a hyperbolic claim i mean it can it really be the case that using facebook is as bad for you as lighting something on fire and sucking its carbonized ash into your lungs i mean i just you know i yes i think there's like a kernel of truth here in terms of yes it does exacerbate body image issues but i don't believe that facebook or social media created those issues um i mean these issues existed before and what facebook does is connect people in a more intense way than they were connected and so it might intensify some of the social dynamics that already existed but i don't know that it created them and if you're gonna blame facebook for this there's a lot of other places you could blame too i mean why don't we be why don't we blame the met gala you know like um you know look at all those well we have had actually blame on the fashion industry for making unrealistic body types and the magazines and they stuff my kids can't wear the full body stalking to school that kim kardashian wore to the met gala or whatever i mean and they're upset about that so should we ban the met gala or i mean let's look at all advertising i mean all advertising just about focuses on unrealistically beautiful people and what about tv and movies i mean hollywood tends to cast people are better looking or even the people reading the news off teleprompters i mean so this like body image and self-esteem issue is everywhere in our society and i think what social media does as it does in so many of these cases is really just hold up a mirror to our society and it's it's not and yes there's a lot of bad stuff happening on social media but that's because there's a lot of bad stuff happening in our society well let me i you know here's one thing david the i there there have been other industries that have influenced this but i don't think that they were as pernicious and as frequent in their use of as social media you know when reading a fashion magazine or watching tv like slightly different than an interactive version of that that you might use for five hours a day like tick tock or instagram and i just dropped in an image into uh the the zoom chat there about suicide rates in the united states and this chart you'll see goes up to 2018. and right around 2006 when we were at 11 percent uh eleven suicides i think per ten thousand per hundred thousand uh you'll see from 2006 to 2008 we go from you know 10 or 11 basically suicides per 100 000 americans all the way up to 14. a 40 increase but what's your that correlates directly with social media becoming part of what we're doing here but what's your connection to what's happening i mean is that among teens i mean what what is that this is overall suicide rate so i just think social media and the anxiety it produced could be actually having it i'm open-minded to that can i clear up one thing saks i think that um your argument would be reasonable if the first part of your argument uh made more sense and to me it doesn't and when you don't think that smoking and looking at your screen for an hour a day are the same let me just in from my perspective explain to you why they are the same whether or not you're ingesting something into your lungs or whether or not it's your eyes at the end of the day you're still activating physiological pathways okay there are specific chemicals that are being created through smoking specific chemicals that are created through how your brain and your mind is reacting and all of these things when you're bathed in these chemicals for long periods of time have known deleterious consequences some manifest in tumors which then result in cancer you die lung cancer cigarettes but what we're learning is some of these things result in long-term imbalances of these critical hormones and chemicals you need in your brain to stay healthy and that results in anxiety or the propensity to overeat or the propensity to then throw stuff up and so i would be careful about not assuming they're not physiologically the same i actually think they're more similar than different at a core physiological level it's just that we're not used to the fact that something that that is equivalent to looking at a screen could actually do that to you i guess the question is what's the what's the what's the threshold for regulatory intervention if um if someone did this at the scale let's say there was a social network that was had a hundred thousand users and people were actively using the social network every day and having body issues or whatever the you know the the concept that's gonna find that claim might be we're about to find out you know are we gonna end up creating kind of a regulatory frame across all of these things and i think that this goes also to the point of scale because um at the end of the day if you end up starting a business and you're not successful you don't really kind of find yourself in the sort of framing of well what are you doing wrong all of the the companies that scale the assumption is they did something wrong in order to get to that scale you know roloff both of um sax's former colleague and and obviously famed investor now at sequoia capital um said that uh he always he only invests in businesses that pursue one of the seven deadly sins because those are ultimately the things that consumers kind of increment their consumption of there has to be a seven deadly sin driver uh you know underscoring the success of any business that sells two consumers and if that is actually true people aren't making kind of altruistic purchasing and consumption decisions they're making decisions based on envy and based on greed and based on gluttony and all of those drivers we kind of you know are effectively kind of related back to these physiological drivers right and so like yeah no two things can be right what you said can be right but i think what also can be right is are we really willing to bet that now there are not 50 individually ambitious politically ambitious state ag's licking their chops reading this stuff wondering how many kids in their state may have suffered from an eating disorder or anxiety and blame it on one of these apps of course are we convinced that not a single lawsuit will get filed are we convinced that there's not going to be any class action and by the way that's just the united states what is somebody that's sitting around a you know around a table of politicians desks in you know germany belgium uh france thailand they're going to find their issue in this treasure trove of content that's being you know continuously drip fed out to the public i guess my point is that this is today's issue and business success ultimately over time in consumer markets will always ultimately be driven by products that have at scale deleterious effects on the consumer market and those deleterious effects will be a result of some sort of kind of addictive or negative kind of consequence that arises when folks use these things frequently and the market figures out how to optimize the utilization of products to increase revenue to increase profit and that's what a free market does and i'm not saying it's right or wrong i'm just pointing out that there isn't in my opinion something unique here i mean you know coca-cola is the largest beverage company in the world they sell 40 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of water and everyone buys that and they feel great from that and the sugar creates this addictive problem now we've got an obesity epidemic i'm not blaming coca-cola but that's the general trend in cpg over the last 50 years increasing sugar increasing salt and then the difference the difference is that this is not sugar which is a generic compound this is for example no different than when purdue pharma started to make fentanyl it's a really great drug it has incredibly superior advantages it's used for a lot of very important things when that spilled over knowingly to a level of abuse and i don't think it was a lot of abuse but there was enough that essentially was overlooked in in the building of a business it started with state ags who stepped in and then it basically ultimately drove a federal agreement states agreements a master settlement agreement around fentanyl and then purdue essentially disgorging all the profits that they made so you're right free markets should act in however way they're going to act but when those free market operators themselves are producing data that shows that oh [ __ ] hold on something could be going wrong here um then i do think that politicians will step in regulators could step in i mean what's crazy here is you know the fda could actually act like if the fda is willing to act on joule what is the difference if the fda says they feel like let's just assume that somebody in the fda says we feel like we should have a responsibility to think about mental health and eating disorders but that's the slippery slope right what's the threshold right at what point do they say no we're not touching this and at what point do they say yes we are touching this because at the end of the day any successful consumer product will have some degree of deleterious effect exactly and well and this is why we have to have some perspective about it so in preparation for the segment i asked my 11 year old uh girl daughter um i know jake how you don't think i talked to my kids but actually i made no joke no joke i was thinking if you were the father she was like who are you why are you in my room so the first thing she said is who are you and the second and after i said i'm your dad and the second thing she said the second thing she said is i don't use instagram i'm like okay well what do you use she said tick tock i'm like the worst so i'm like what do you what do you use tick tock for and she said well i watched uh dance videos and i'm like well the i've been reading press articles that say that the only thing on tick tock is sex and drugs and that it's you know it's it's bringing you into a vortex of that and she said i don't i don't watch i watch dance videos and then smart as a whip she said the only people who end up watching that are the ones who keep indicating she didn't use word preference but she basically said that they keep getting that stuff because they like it and they keep getting fed more of what they're watching so look i think we have to have a sense of perspective about this at the end of the day products like facebook and instagram are ways for people to share content and consume content from people they follow i mean that's basically it now is there a lot of bad [ __ ] on there yeah because there's a lot of bad [ __ ] in the world and should facebook be trying to control this stuff absolutely um but i don't at the end of the day think it's it's uh it's cigarettes if they banned kids from using tick tock and instagram until they were 16 years old would you be opposed to that because i don't let my kids use it and i have an 11 year old anywhere near we have a complete moratorium no social media is our rule i can't believe you let your kids use social media i mean i'm not passing judgment but i mean like all they use it for is to watch dance videos so um but i think sax's point is an interesting one which is you know based on what your daughter said that that is effectively what's going on it creates an acceleration of the natural evolution of these markets that historically may have taken call it 50 years for everyone to want to watch you know mtv didn't emerge for 60 years until you know there was kind of radio um and television broadcast signals and then everyone said you know what i want to watch rockers dancing on stage and go nuts and whatever the kind of consumer demand was that eventually evolved there what's happening in social media is within seconds you make evolutionary votes on kind of what you want in a media cycle and then all of a sudden a few hours later you're getting exactly what you want over and over again and you can't say no and that that's effectively what digital media generally social media in particular has some nuances to it but digital media generally has enabled is an acceleration of the natural consumption trend that we see with humans which is they eventually want to go to one of the seven deadly sins and that's what they kind of get stuck with we've definitely talked about the danger of getting trapped in in an information bubble and and a feedback loop and i do think that is a danger of these products but so is cable news i mean you know you look at twitter it's an outraged machine and people get trapped in a cycle and they only want to they either follow people to get outraged by them or just because they want to kind of self-indoctrinate themselves but that is basically why people watch cable news as well i mean it is an outrage machine your friend tucker or rachel maddow on msnbc they're both feeding different uh variations of of outrage and um so so my point is look i don't think these problems are unique to social media i think they pervade hollywood and the entertainment industry and even the news industry um maybe look maybe we should put warning labels on them at the end of the day we don't prohibit cigarettes we have an assumption of risk argument we put warning labels on them maybe we need warning labels on these instances influencers right you put it you put it behind a counter and there's a strict prohibition on people under the age of 18 being able to use them and when it looks like you know companies like jewel were trying to circumvent those things or make it appear more valuable basically to hook kids at a younger and younger age when they weren't capable of making those decisions um they were held liable so okay so there's a really interesting topic there which is should people under the age of say 16 or 18 be prohibited my original question products yes 100 percent 100 percent look if you if you think about 16 or 18 16 or 18. let's uh 16 100 18 16 100 and then up there needs to be a way of opting up because i think 16 year olds are quite sophisticated but here's the thing we are living longer and longer than ever it is very likely that we're all going to generally live to our hundreds it's not the end of the world for these kids to have to wait an extra two or three years until their literal physiology is a little bit better form so that they have better antibodies to this [ __ ] and i think that if we as a adult population aren't necessarily going to take responsibility for these kids i think we're doing them a huge disservice you don't let your kids run around wherever they want you don't let them hold guns whenever they want you don't let them do a whole bunch of things that they may think is okay but you know could have really bad consequences and so if you know that this stuff is happening i think it's very different to look at a 22 year old and tell them what to do or not to do that's not what we're debating but what that data was about was about long-term systemic health issues to a large percentage of girls that's really [ __ ] up and a lot of the research that's come out i dropped a couple of links in the chat you know i haven't read the studies but um they're starting to show a correlation between suicide rates and depression in young kids with social media and it does skew towards females the theory is uh females are uh more adept or more frequently in uh dynamic or complex social uh situations in other words cyberbullying type situations where people use the social media to just kind of blow each other i mean look i think you guys have a real point with respect to ages 13 to 16 because i don't think you're allowed to use social media or at least the terms you prohibited under age 13. we all know that's a joke you and i have had to build products that have to you know abide by copper laws and we always just kind of laugh at it because they're [ __ ] right okay fair enough but what i'm saying is i think you guys have a real issue that needs to be explored around what's the usage uh for ages 13 to 16. but look what i worry about with these things is you're always playing whack-a-mole right i mean you basically ban social media and all of a sudden these kids because they're very tech savvy they're going to find themselves on text groups and text chats and they'll be in signal and you won't even be able to see what they're doing i mean at least on social media that the whole point of that though that makes sense to me because i remember when i was growing up and we all wanted to smoke it was a pain in the ass to get cigarettes so most of us just said it's not worth it but yeah you're right a handful of people found a way to get the cigarettes to sneak behind the school to smoke them that's fine but that's very different than jewel walking into the middle of the lunchroom and passing out berry flavored vape pens yeah coconut peanut wow that's baby basically insane well that's crazy obviously that's going to be created packaging if you look at the paper why do you have a creative outrage around jewel and berry flavored vape look why do you care about jewel um or why should we generally care about jewel and not care about soda companies making 40 grams per 12 ounces of sugar which is truly dangerous and damaging to the health because we've been drinking soda for a long time and we've already accepted it so it's too late to accept it we essentially essentially long time and then we had this kind of you know tobacco moratorium that's now kind of well you know shut out smoking but free break if you say if you said right now covid uh is a disease of the old and the obese you would be cancelled like somebody tried to say that that's recently the guy no but the point is you're talking about like people are very sensitive about this obesity thing and the second you say like we need to monitor you forty percent of americans with type two diabetes or whatever there's also personal freedom and do you wanna drink a coke zero exactly water and so if you have personal freedom why should some regulator tell you what social media tool you should or should not use right if we're talking about what are you going to do with a 13 to 16 year old what are you going to do with the and 11 year old that's the best part of your argument that's the best part of your argument is when we're dealing with minors i could i could see the argument for more restrictions and and potentially support them depending on what they are i think that's something what about ideas what about minors not being able to drink soda you have to be 16 year old to drink soda i mean that's actually that's where most diabetes and obesity is rooted in this country i'm open-minded to that position actually i know it sounds crazy but no i think that that that makes sense drinking coconut cola makes no sense if we have a crazy obesity if we can actually show that so let's ask the question though so let me let me ask you let me ask a second-order question about this which is freeberg is right that drinking sodas for 13 year olds has got to be as harmful or more than using facebook okay so why do we never hear about that i would argue that there's something else going on here with this massive amount of attacks on social networking companies there's a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media because they've been disrupted by facebook by these social media companies and so they're working money they took their money and they're looking to publicize any article about the negative effects of these companies which they're not threatened by coca-cola they're not going to publish those kinds of studies so i just think that there's an argument that perhaps i'm not saying you're wrong i think there's absolutely truth in what you're saying it's all a matter of degree though and perspective and i do think that the traditional media has an incentive to blow this out of proportion a little bit because they have an agenda is what you're saying yeah absolutely and i think i think people in power look i think there's a positive thing about social networking i mean because we haven't said one positive thing about it okay social networking overall enables us to stay in touch with people we care about friends family and allows us to receive information from people we want to follow okay we never talk about those positives i find it an incredibly convenient way to consume things okay so we never talk about that but but here but here's why is because social media is fundamentally a democratizing force right it enables people to coordinate in a much more democratized way than they ever had been able to before i do think that is threatening to people in power and given the chance they would like to suppress it um zuckerberg gave a speech a few years ago about social networks being the i think called the fourth estate with the third estate being the press and in the same way that that there are people who want us in power who want to censor the press i do believe that there are people in power want to censor social networks because they don't like the disruptive democratizing force that it represents and there is a lot of positive to that in the world you're i think you're mixing up a lot of things there so yeah you're right and i don't think any of us are saying cancel these companies and remove them from the internet i think what we're saying is there are very specific ways in which certain features are built that they are expressed in features that are now apparently according to their own work and exploration are linked to mental health issues so i think the point is people should now decide whether to your point we should ignore it because the good vastly outweighs you know what's a third of girls who the [ __ ] airs right i mean they're chicks so whatever uh or you say uh actually this is a really big problem and so let's step up and fix it because somebody needs to protect these people and when you're 16 or 17 or 18 do whatever you want like we let people do today you want to drink a coca-cola every day get diabetes you can do that nobody tries to stop you right you want to smoke a pack of smokes a day you can do that nobody stops you but we do a lot of other things to try to help kids i think i think if we're only talking about ages if we're talking about the minors the the kids i think you and i can find agreement on this issue i think but but i do think that the demonization of social media goes well beyond that but look i think you've got a great point with respect to the kids do you guys believe and this is a theory that's been growing that tick tock run by the chinese government is trying to reprogram ethics morals and doing psychops basically if there's on our children no jay there's something bigger than that i mean i think all of you guys probably upgraded to 14.8 ios this week i hope if you haven't and everybody listening if you haven't please go upgrade it but you know the israeli spy firm nso had apparently created a zero click exploit for the iphone where you could turn on the camera and the microphone and basically spy on folks completely unaware and you know jason and i were talking about this and and and i think jason you were the one that said you're like yeah we've been living with that with tick tock for years it's not as if you know nso just licensed it randomly to the saudi government i mean this tool has been available for a while so to your point but do we think that the chinese government tick tock are trying to program our children to be more deviant and to create social unrest and no you don't think that they're trying to steer them with the algorithm towards bad results because they're not letting their kids play video games wall street did you see the wall street journal article that i just sent to you guys wall street journal article basically created a bunch of kids accounts and then did searches or what started to go down a rabbit hole and just with one keyword search you know these kids went into deep you know kink bdsm this is a this is a pretty straightforward weighted tree algorithm okay so like when you start on a branch of a tree and you keep clicking on those things that's what you'll get this is no different than how facebook's algorithm works how google search algorithm works for you once you start behaving with clicks or swipes or likes they use that as a feedback loop and they basically weigh the next set of results so david's daughter is right if you click on sex drugs and rock and roll that's it's not all you're going to get but it's going to be a large percentage of what you get because the algorithm in a blunt way assumes that that's what you like yeah so i'm not sure that this is repeating anything that's so im you know it's pretty obvious that that's how it should work if they want to have maximum utilization well you know the thing that's slightly different about tick tock is you know in facebook or instagram you build your feed and twitter and then it serves it up algorithmically on tick tock it uses the entire corpus so if you do one search for a keyword now it's not just a subset of what your friends posted in some ranked order it's the entire corpus of like long tail and so what they show in this tick tock is like how quickly a child who just types in one key word can be have their feed be 90 drug use and you know sadomasochistic whatever you're into uh sex i don't know if the content is obscene then it should be taken down to begin with okay and um look my takeaway from this conversation is that uh we need to do something different for kids i don't know if it's a it's a flat out prohibition or what but but but yeah but look so so the tick tock algorithm thing if you want to keep seeing more and more content related to something fine the algorithm is going to give you more and more of what you want as a consumer but maybe for kids there needs to be some guard rails around that and we don't direct we don't direct kids towards certain kinds of content around you know sex or drugs or violence i have to constantly remind parents like youtube kids should not use youtube because it goes really to crazy dark places and there's kids youtube and kids youtube they add each and every video now you still get some of that consumption and unboxing of things and your kids will ask you to buy a bunch of stuff but you're not going to get straight up sex violence and you know everything i'll tell you what does happen my uh i i put kids youtube on my kids my four-year-old's ipad and then the other day she said she saw some like scary horror thing on there and she couldn't sleep and she woke up in the middle of the night because you know if we're not doing our job as parents curating the content and curating what our kids are doing and we're leaving it to this app uh we're totally left and uh and that that's what i realized i did my laziness in like just thinking like oh there was something she wanted to watch i put the app on there and didn't pay attention for a few weeks and all of a sudden she had gone down the rabbit hole found something scary i use a i don't know if you guys use this but i use an app called custodio it's with a q q u s t u d i o and you can kind of like lock down all these devices and then at the end of every week it gives you an email of all the app usage and all the links that these that my kids clicked on or just my oldest one he's the only one that has a phone but that's nice and you had a discussion with him about that like hey yeah it's a privilege to have this and yeah it's going to tell me what you do i agree it's still super super hard but this is why i think you need to have some blunt force instruments right now and my blunt force instruments are you're not allowed to have um well the ones that we've they're not allowed to have tick tock snapchat facebook instagram twitter yes hard no and the only reason we allow youtube is because a lot of the school links are the videos inside of youtube and so you can't lock it down but that's why i use this custodio app to see what they're watching on youtube even then though it's not perfect by the way this thing that just came from the pentagon there's a total friday news drop i mean talk about a friday news drop i don't know what we don't know what you're talking about u.s military acknowledges kabul drone strike killed 10 civilians including seven children we knew this they're just confirming something that had been exposed new york times did excellent reporting on this excellent reporting by the new york times that was incredible journalism i mean did you guys see that they were like watching frame for frame of like a video then they were like going to google maps they were comparing colors of cars they were looking at sides of buildings uh incredible reporting by the new york times it was really the i mean it's obviously a tragedy was the final debacle of our afghanistan involvement this was a foreign aid worker who actually he was there as an aid worker and um they had him on video loading up his car with uh plastic jugs of water and somehow they thought these were explosives or something like that and he was doing his errands and then he comes home and they hit the the car with you know a massive uh missile from one of these reaper drones and it kills him as well as um you know it's basically 10 members of his standard family including seven children now the i i mean i i think i understand why this well we don't exactly know why this happened and i think it needs to be investigated obviously the military in kabul was on high alert because we had just had that bombing at the airport and it was the bloodiest day for america in afghanistan i think we had three 13 soldiers killed a few days before this but but it just shows the kind of mistakes that we can make even fighting drone warfare you know the idea was the term casualties of war exists for a reason like this is how war works you cannot do it perfectly it's messy everybody innocent people dies that's why war is the worst thing but how did we should be the last resort right and how do we ever think we're going to win hearts and minds in this country by you know like we we made two we talked about this it's like they're they're not interested in democracy like in the way we want them to be and the west wants them to be we by the way that's forcing it down their throats is not gonna work we we could have maintained a base there there were better ways to exit but let's fix the schools in california first yeah i think that's i think that'll ultimately i think people are going to forget those images of people on planes and just think thank god that's over i think now that there hasn't been 20 you know and hopefully there's not another 911. all right uh let's wrap with um ellen powell wrote a piece for the new york times uh op-ed section section on uh sexism in tech using the elizabeth holmes trial as the main example um she was also on tech checks the nbc show and discussed her op-ed uh quote holmes should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of theranos and it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged ver serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing and bad judgment she uses travis kalanick and adam newman as examples of men who have engaged in questionable unethical even dangerous behavior in tech without much legal penalty and that they both went on to start new companies her main example however if bias is tech executive kevin burns who is the former ceo of jewel j-u-u-l uh who helped the e-cigarette vaping company raise uh 12 billion dollars but he left jewel amidst a lot of legal blowback and just this past week with a bunch with a bunch of cash with about yeah i mean of course you get the secure the bag on the way out adam newman too um and uh don't drop that don't drop the bag you have one job to do don't drop the bag yes run um but don't do not drop the bag so i mean she meant she mentioned other stories like uh juicero if you guys remember this company um a couple years ago they raised 100 million dollars pre-launched right it was a juicer that you know was supposed to enjoy my juice from my juicer oh yeah the claim that they made was that inside of the packets was like fresh vegetables and this thing squeezed the fresh vegetables and fresh juice juice came out and it turns out that the bag was just filled with juice and so no no i think the bag was filled with shaved vegetables or whatever but you could squeeze the bag you could squeeze it would squeeze the bag so that it was already pre-juiced is what um you know uh olivia zolowski who's now it uh uh she basically put they she she kind of made a whole video and put on bloomberg they had juice in these packets and they were telling people what they thought fresh juice yeah so they could have opened the drawer sorry sorry they could have put it into a machine and paid seven dollars the juice then took that juice put it in a bag yeah that was supposed to be fresh vegetables sold that as fresh vegetables to then get juiced i charged eight dollars a bag for this stuff um were invested in that who invested in that who wrote a hundred million dollars google ventures anyway a lot of people would like to kind of say it was a huge it was a huge like you know better for the planet story but it turns out that the hardware didn't work and then they ended up kind of faking it until you make it it's very similar to their notes in the sense that there was a piece of hardware that made a claim that wasn't necessarily true and granted no lives were at risk in this particular case but some might argue lives were at risk in the case of jewel but i think you know you see this a lot more in these kind of hardware and particularly in life sciences companies um you know there's a business like like zymergen's a good example right it's very hard tech very deep tech uh josh hoffman did an incredible job fundraising raise a 400 million dollar round from softbank took the company public then they go public and a few weeks later they're like oh wait sorry we don't actually have any product or any revenue and we talked about this a few months ago a few weeks ago and the stock completely collapsed there's another company called berkeley lights which went public and uh yesterday scorpion capital one of these short sellers put out a 160 page report on these guys showing that berkeley likes his product actually it's a hardware life sciences hardware that cost 2 million they've sold it into all the pharma companies and scorpions saying look this thing doesn't work it's a total fraud like there's no the machine doesn't do what they claim it does okay but so to allen powell's point is there a double standard or not right and so these were all run by male ceos and nothing happened to them and um are they all white as well um yeah yeah they're all white all right first of all let's take it easy on the white guys two months it's three on the white guys on the bottom no i'm asking a qualifying question it is um so here's what i'll ask is i mean is this a surprise that white dudes will get a hall pass i don't think that's a shocker yeah it's considered it's considered entrepreneurial failure but when it comes to the woman that everyone i think was excited about seeing succeed because she was a woman it becomes fraud and i think well you know there's two different things yeah is it free book is there two different things between you know where she obviously misled people in a premeditated way and lied to them like taking their blood sample and then putting it in a fake machine then doing it in the back on an abbott machine and then bringing the results back and making it on her theranos edison machine i mean this is literal wire for a securities fraud in these other cases is it people who are ambitious if you look at the juicer oh it's kind of like this is a stupid idea that got over funded he put he put juice in a packet and told you no no he put he put chef shaved vegetables in the packet and then used hydraulics which is actually real that's actually not correct watch the video that olivia put on bloomberg a few years ago which i just showed you pictures of it i mean maybe there's a different one what they showed is that it was already squeezed yes there was shavings in there but it was already squeezed like all right well that guy should go to chat like take it all back i mean it was like it was like a crazy story when this came out and everyone's like oh my god like it was a standard like hardware is really difficult you know novel hardware technology is really difficult so you fake it till you make it in some cases you launch a product it doesn't even work um you know and and there's just and this isn't just in hardware it's also in life sciences you see this a lot where you ship a product i would probably say that if if regulators believe that those ceos tried to commit fraud they would have done challenges right maybe they still will they should follow up with those folks so why do you think they went after elizabeth holmes because it was actually illegal i think there's i think there's one really important there are two things at play in theranos which is different number one is the kinds of investors that were involved here are extremely powerful folks not necessarily you know technology capable but very very well-known highly connected people in the establishment and the second was that they were operating in a regulated market which has very strict laws look i've tried to build competing products to theranose for years i've been pretty public about this i've tried five or six times they failed every single time i couldn't even get out of the starting line you know these tests would never work without with a single drop of blood it just didn't make any sense the only version of this problem that has been solved well is the ability to detect cell-free cancer dna in blood right using a very small quantum of blood companies like garden and grail have actually done and built a great business out of it but it requires extremely sophisticated machinery sold to them by illumina and others so if you're operating in a regulated market the bar is higher there is a lot more scrutiny and then on top of that i think she compounded it by including folks and raising capital from folks that may not have actually known and been able to diligence and so that's the cycle of fraud that may or may not have occurred there and she has to or they have there's a burden to prove that it's very different i think over here in an unregulated market where you can just kind of build whatever you want and if smart investors look nick just put in the group chat so um the investors in juicero were google ventures kleiner perkins thrive capital i mean these are all very sophisticated folks that um you know made a decision and um you know it's probably not the case that they were lied to i understand why they made the juicer oh mistake because at the time fresh pressed juice using hydraulics was a thing and this guy said that's what i'm going to do i'm going to use hydraulics i'm going to squeeze the vegetables so you get the best stuff i understand why they fell for it because my my wife jay was buying that pressed juicery juice in l.a you remember this trend it's pure sugar that stuff is pure sugar well it's vegetable juice too but it would cost like 11 because they would use so much vegetables and i saw these presses they used it's incredibly inefficient but the juice tastes really great but the thing i have a problem with that with ellen pow's story is she brings up you know uh the uh harassment stuff and uh you know this is an issue of gender et cetera but on this week in startups i've been covering fraud after fraud i don't know if you saw app annie got an fcc finder yesterday what happened jason because i saw that annie they told people who were using their analytics products building apps there's like 8 million people that they would never sell their data except in aggregate and then they went to wall street people and said here's actually we'll sell you the data um and you can trade on it and so yeah yeah so i don't think that's like insider trading exactly but it might be but anyway it's like that's the whole point of that that's the whole point of reg fd the whole point is if somebody knows something if you're a financial actor jason and you know something so like if if all of us were sitting around a table um you know when somebody said something about a random public company if that's not public information if that's not known two things have to happen number one is i when i receive it must not do anything with it and that second that person who disclosed it needs to then file an 8k and say oops i accidentally said this right so there's nowhere where this is an end around around things like regular fd i think that's a really big deal well and then i guess the question is like what happens with people who use planet labs or whatever to you know to satellite images of the target parking lot or put people as spotters outside of starbucks and count the people coming in and out is that public information that's public but if you have terms of service that says one thing yes and you're violating that but then you may also be violating reg fd so they haven't gone after people for on the other side of the trade for securities fraud but they charge him with securities fraud he pays 10 million bucks i think he's in the penalty box can't be um you know run up be a public officer for three years then we had headspin i don't know if you saw that sas company but headspin was involved in just basically straight up lying about their sas software then you have tether the stablecoin they've been banned from new york by the doj they've been banned by the canadian regulators for the first two crypto exchanges there and supposedly the doj is investigating them and then there's about five icos in new york that have been prosecuted already so i know ellen's saying like they're not processed but i'm seeing them all the time yeah they're just not right the press is not obsessed with them because let's face it elizabeth elizabeth she was weird i mean the voice there's a lot of peculiar things about her that you don't see in other folks who are boring right by the way what you just said is was part of the sexist claim that ellen made which is that we talked about her dress and how she dressed and how she talked we don't talk about that kind of stuff when it comes to other entrepreneurs and are they of course they did adam newman they were talking about him being a hippie walking around with bare feet being six seven every profile she's she's wrong in that case every profile of andy newman talked about his personal life and his wife is married to what's her names no buenos paltrow's cousin yeah so ellen's 100 wrong on that one yeah and did it didn't elizabeth holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately styling herself in the fashion of steve jobs with the black turtleneck and the glasses i mean you know she she portrayed herself as the next steve jobs i mean it was part of the grift so yeah exactly now did gender play into it yeah but i think not necessarily in the way that ellen powell thinks in this sense that the media wanted to believe so badly that the next steve jobs was going to be a woman that they kind of looked past what should have been staring them in the face i mean look if a man had gone out there wearing the black turtleneck and the john lennon glasses or whatever they would have said who is this clown i mean yeah exactly but they suspended they suspected you have to dress up as steve jobs in the next episode of free birthday you can make it work can we all do it can we see let's do a halloween episode where we all show up i'll do elizabeth holmes for halloween episode but no but that's like a nested steve jobs so like you're going to be elizabeth we should all do our own versions of it elizabeth and steve jobs i i think saks you're entirely right i think i think you're right i think this is the way that gender has played into it is that there's a lot of people who really wanted the elizabeth holmes story to be true and frankly she used that yeah in order to perpetuate her fraud she may not have used it but she was definitely influenced or she benefited no no she used it she definitely used it i want to ask you guys kind of a controversial question um you know because this story made me think a lot about some of what's gone on in businesses that i know of and where i know that there is to some degree fraud and misrepresentation happening by the ceo and founder and this is a little known secret in silicon valley or a little spoken of secret um which is that you know more often than not if you know about fraud at a company in silicon valley you're encouraged to keep your mouth shut because the idea is at the end of the day if they're gaining lots of capital and you know more capital floats all boats and more money will rush into that market and so if there's businesses that you're competing with that are committing fraud rather than raise your hand which then people say hey look if you're going to raise your hand and claim fraud and talk negatively about another company people are going to start doing that about you and they're going to start doing that about your portfolio um and so you guys know this right like you're discouraged from calling out these sorts of moments when you see them in silicon valley because there is the perceived kind of look we're all in a club together we're all in it together we got to be careful not to talk smack because then capital will stop coming in people will come after you and we're much more of kind of a supportive open community but there is have you guys experienced that i have with at least two companies in the last year and you know i've kept my mouth shut because and by the way i don't think there's necessarily harm going on but i know of misrepresentation but the investors are like look we'd love to see these guys succeed because that would be good for you in this way because then you would be more money flowing in and yadda yadda and there's always a narrative around why you don't want to do this you know why you don't want to call these things out i called it out and i've still got a crazy founder denouncing me years later i mean look i i hate who has an sec enforcement against him yeah exactly a sanction um so yeah i mean look i you you're right freeberg that there's very little upshot to doing it um but but look i i hate but we have to distinguish between fraud and sort of uh puffing okay here's the thing that i think you know ellen powell's kind of missing is when she criticizes all these founders who are visionary and evangelical and and promoting something that ends up not working that is not fraud i mean every startup we ask the founder how are you going to change the world what is your big idea what is the big dream and then they lay out this really pretty unrealistic set of things unrealistic in the sense that it comes true maybe one out of a thousand times right every startup their founding mission is a bit of an over promise and just because it doesn't come true doesn't make it fraud i think that a lot of people out in the non-silicon valley investing world would interpret that as fraud because the founder told them something that ends up not happening not ends and this is why you really it's very dangerous to take money outside of silicon valley because people don't really understand this distinction okay just because it doesn't work out and what you said ended up not being true does not make it fraud what is fraud is when you lie about i've said it before when you lie about the past and what elizabeth holmes is accused of doing by these prosecutors is again lying about the present-day capabilities of her product and actually falsifying documents she actually falsified documents that is the fraud that is the line you cannot cross they change blood test results listen said another way sacks elizabeth holmes vision of taking less blood and letting and doing more tests with it and being more efficient is a completely valid thing to pursue chamath just said he pursued it five times and failed completely completely failed tens of millions of dollars burned in a pile but what we all buy into here is what if it does work more than a thousand times what we would elizabeth did was she lied about the results and she said how did she lie about the results she lied about real people's blood test results like actual civilians well i have some empathy for elizabeth jobs in the following way when i was told when i uh i think i told the story i was asking an investor hey what's the hottest company around this is in you know 2013 or 14. he said theranose and there was no way to get connected to the company so then i was like you know i had heard just the bullet point one drop of blood full characterization of your you know be able to do a blood test etc i thought this is an incredible idea but because i had no way of getting connected now thank god that turned out to be a good thing i was like well [ __ ] it i'll just start my own version i'll figure out how to do this and and and jason as you said it turned out to be much much harder than i thought and five different iterations five different teams and you know phds from mit stanford everything we couldn't cal tech we couldn't figure it out so it's not wrong to want to believe that something is possible and it's not illegal to do that but as david said the minute that you try to you tell lies about the past in order to basically then change the future in a way that shouldn't happen that's real that's really unfair yeah it's uh what do you think of the defense that balwani uh this fengali defense i saw kara swisher and some new york times reporters and other reporters were basically not buying it um and we talked about this last time didn't we yeah yeah i'm just curious if you have been following the trial i i think it's hard for somebody who in the moment took credit for every decision for every piece of press for claim to be the jobsee and micromanager to all of a sudden now turn around and say no that wasn't me making the decisions i was under the spell of somebody else i think that's a tough argument to make yeah also i think uh you know this is going to come out but she actually fired balwani so if she fired him how was she you know it's harder to do the schwangoli defense i think um well but maybe they were both guilty maybe it could be an answer all right listen we'll close on this mailchimp has sold to intuit for 12 billion dollars in the largest bootstrapped acquisition ever uh we all know mailchimp uh and we all know quickbooks it's a huge deal i have one issue with this and i don't know if it's true or not but apparently none of the employees have any equity yes and that was what i was about to get to employees didn't have equity however um and i've known mailchimp for a while uh for over a decade been using the product i know the founder had them on the podcast before have they been a sponsor of your pod they sponsored in the first year i think or two um and were you an angel investor i was not i tried to be and he said we're never gonna ever raise money and um he said he was never ever gonna sell and he was also never going to sell i i they gave 12 billion reasons to change his mind exactly they gave him uh the 20 uh my understanding was employees got a 20 cash bonus and they were amongst the highest paid uh you know in the industry so their plan was instead of giving people some big reward at the end they were just distributing cash basically they were just distributing cash so if you had 100 if you were 150k developer you got 30k on top that's not an unreasonable way to run a business that has no outside investors that you know and employees know that going in they didn't go in with the expectation of equity they went in with the expectation of a high salary and a big bonus and they got it i do that a few companies few companies that i own i do that but what i also do is i let them buy into the company every year i just think that it's a good principle to have like an ownership in the business i think you should be paying a lot of money and we should pay cash bonuses for for achieving results we do that but then what we also say is if you want to buy equity come and buy it but you're probably right from a performance perspective tomorrow i don't think it's necessarily a moral obligation to do that right how this guy wants to run his business up to him you know people made the choice yeah i mean people that work at your house you don't give them equity in your house right i mean you own the house you give them cash or people who play for a basketball team are not allowed to get equity in the team but in other countries right i think in soccer you can yes but i think one of the best things about silicon valley is the fact that there's a there's a practice of giving broad-based options to everybody in the company and there's all those great stories about the chef at google who got rich and the secretaries at microsoft who got rich and that is a beautiful thing about the techies it's wonderful you never and you never hear about that when all the press is doing is writing stories about greedy vcs and all that kind of stuff they they talk about vc but they don't bring up the point that in these non-vc companies the employees never end up with anything someone who came from nothing can afford a beautiful home and have their life taken care of forever because they work really hard at a great company that worked at and that's that's the most common story and it's never reported but yeah and by the way look there's there's nothing wrong with bootstrapping your company so congrats to this mailchimp founder for doing it i mean certainly you know like as a investor i have no desire to describe what yeah just explain what bootstrapping is sex really strapping is just when you don't raise outside money and he did it himself and he basically found the prophets yeah he founded the company with the prophets which is just amazing but but but here here's the thing about that is uh he did this he started the company back in 2001 at the nadir after the dot-com crash and there was very little money going into new starts back then and he managed to create this so kudos to him but the environment now is very different if you look at the amount of funding that goes into startups i mean it's now in the hundreds of billions every year and so if you have this mentality of i'm going to bootstrap it you're probably going to lose to a competitor who's simply willing to raise money and pursue that same idea with more funding now look i'm not in the business of pushing money on people who don't want it i'm just saying realistically the times are different now if you can bootstrap a business great go for it but i do think that if you're in competition with someone who can raise vc money you're going to be at a disadvantage hard to compete your son yeah what about aoc what she wore to the met gala tax the rich she wrote it she attacks the rich dress to the met gala dave portnoy dave pornoy had the best tweet about this which is she's about to go have the best night of her life partying her ass off with all these rich people and she's wearing this taxi rich it's total hypocrisy uh this is classic socialism where they do this uh virtue signaling while being friends and hanging out with the people the owners of capital they're purporting to deride and frankly it's just like the mass things i mean you've got the servant class working at the met gala wearing masks uh while every while all the uh guests of the the gala are don't have to wear a mask i mean it's like them all over again well she she uh she also dropped some merch you can buy attacks the rich there's an official aoc team can't believe that that's true that's what makes it the most awesome she goes to the thing and now she's selling 58 sweaters t-shirts sweatshirts a 58 sweatshirt a 28 dad hat a 10 sticker pack 27 tote bag it's like a hat for dad's like for us you know oh yeah attacks the rich dad that's the rich yeah wow i didn't know dad hat was a category i know dad jokes and dad bods i've never saw a dad hat dad fantastic fantastic yeah i thought it was kind of gross is it wrong to buy some of this i i think that it's kind of cool actually i mean the tax the rich hat is pretty funny it's pretty cool oh my god if you were attacking a sweatshirt i think if the best thing is if i bought this sweatshirt and wore it around wearing on cnbc do your next scene if you were attacking the rich hat on cnbc that would be peak chamoth i think that would be peak that'd be great get it signed by uh all right anybody got any plugs anybody have plugs the the craziest thing about that dave portnoy tweet was that it got fact checked can you believe that it got fact checked i mean it was just mind-blowing that this is what when you say fact check they put a factory check they put a warning label on it oh god so the morning warning uh liberals and socialists at twitter don't agree with this tweet right no exactly warning somebody in the outcrowd dave portnoy is criticizing somebody in the in crowd that by definitely additionally definitely gets a seat at all in summit right he definitely is the is the uh hyper mechan fake story uh from rachel maddow is that fact checked or no no she posted some update or other but begrudgingly presenting other information but i mean the story should have been completely retracted and it wasn't no i'm just curious whether there's a fact check double standard no there's oh absolutely there is no fact check on that for some reason the rachel maddow tweets when unfact checked as far as i know they're still on fact checked you know what you should wear the get the rich hat and then get your buy the hamptons uh shirt and wear those on your next what a great combo tag can i show you guys a great piece of merch hold on sorry i'll be back in a second yeah oh he's going but can i just say i don't know here we go it's merch for the beep app i don't i don't look good in hats no you don't no no i've wanted to wear a hat for a long time but i just it just doesn't here we got good on me let's see this is my favorite piece of merch which is somebody made oh buzzies like friends that's fabulous absolutely great wait can we just say by the way there's a person that did make a besties merch site none of us knows who he is but there's an incredible thing that he tweeted at us right j-cal which is he's paying his way through college yeah he puts a note into it he he told me he made like five grand over the summer right and so you know he's probably making like 30 grand a year off of merch if you're anybody's interested in some besties merch we don't make a single dime from it but there's a young hard-working dude paying him paying his way through school i don't know it's uh bestie apparel he's bestie apparel right that's the apparel bestiapparel.com we don't really want to encourage too many people to go crazy doing this but this is our guy i guess and uh i mean he's paying his way through school for him yeah and i think they did um you know the the the shirts that people wore on their all in bar crawl came from that uh but i really want to do the i want to do this on the rich i'm buying this tax the rich sweatshirt boys and the t-shirt and the sticker pack i'm going for all of it you got me aoc you got me on the hook do they have a men's bikini uh with taxidera rich on the back side for you for when we're in italy i would buy that we could how about we get matching speedos should we do our walk i always threatened to buy a speedo she always says oh we have to buy speedos next time we're in italy and we have to do our bestie walk from peer-to-peer on the beaches of italy in a speedo can you imagine if that image got leaked of us in speedos i did i did the best to walk with sex all right boys i gotta go i gotta eat lunch all right love you besties love you guys take care we'll let your winners ride rain man and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release [Music] we need to get back [Music]








guys my [ __ ] dog is in jail joker's in jail joker got in jail again okay so he's been jailed in italy he was jailed in palo alto when will that dog learn i've spent quality with my dog he's out of control why did he got jailed because he's a runner he went to he's a runner he's a runner he's a track star he uh the the we he we send him to like a you know like the dog walker where he goes and runs around and they come pick him up but then they the guy opened the vendor anyways he gets found they they're trying to call me um because i guess my number is on the thing which i hadn't realized you don't pick up can't reach me well i'm in dc in new york and uh they put them in the kennel and we get this picture and nick you can post the picture but you know because i sent it to you poor poor joker and dog joe he's a great dog but he is he's wait is he back did you get now he's back we got him back but he's bad he's out of jail again honestly he's only going to learn if he goes to jail you should get a little tag for him those little uh remote tracking that's not i mean it could scrape but it doesn't stop him from escaping that dog there's something wrong with that dog remember when jax came over yeah was like growling i punched he's not been trained we have to trade him i mean i i i get it he hasn't betrayed but he's so cute did you train that dog to hate white people that dog is a little racist [Music] [Music] all right everybody welcome to another episode of all in the podcast that you've been listening to for 48 episodes here we are on the precipice of greatness 49 episodes in with us again today the queen of quinoa your science ambassador david friedberg also on the pod the rain man himself definitely his dad lets him drive in the driveway david sacks and batting cleanup the dictator himself chamath paulie what did we all think of last week's pod with biology i felt it got cut off too soon i was getting into a groove with biology and i'm trying to figure out how to pick that up with him because i thought that we were getting into some pretty interesting discussion towards the end and we obviously ran out of time jamaat had to hop off so uh it would it would have been great to keep that conversation going apology i really do think there's a big question mark on like how does the decent centralized web or decentralized social networks in particular work with respect to kind of that you know recommendation application layer which is effectively what search solved on the internet um and so i'm i'm curious to keep the conversation going and seeing you know what this means i made the decision to end the pod because chamoth had to go sax had to go there was a hard stop and i was like i don't want to keep this going without the other besties and people were very upset they thought i um shut it down abruptly but we had a certain amount of time and we can always have them back so everybody relax but i did look at the stats we each came in with our you know whatever percent pro rata and he had double so he had 40 and we all had basically which is right for a guest i think i felt right didn't it feel right i think it's important to hear what when folks come on what they have to say um he's a really smart guy and you know you can kind of just let him go and riff for a while um and then just react to him so i think it's it's lovely to hear such a deep thinker think out loud quite honestly yeah and even if you don't agree with him i don't agree with him on a lot of his points about you know decentralized everything i think centralized works for you know many things better i'm curious sax you know looking back on it where there are moments that you felt maybe you disagreed with him more or agree with him more and wanted to lean into a conversation obviously it's very hard to have five people on a pod and only get a certain amount of air time etc well look i think um i think biology is a great guest to have on once in a while i mean it does kind of turn the pod a little bit more into a ted talk uh definitely have that vibe but the the fans liked it and i mean biology should have his own show i mean he can go for a while i mean he's got a lot to say for hours yes and he has he has and and i think he should do his own show because there's definitely a huge fan base for it and uh and if people want more biology i interviewed him for about an hour on purple pills which is kind of the the i don't know if you were called solo pod solo show that i do where i occasionally interview people on call download call in and go check out purple pills uh so yeah you know i gave biology a little pep talk coming in saying hey listen it's a round table discussion and i've interviewed you before and you can kind of tip into the monologuing and explaining very big picture things so just try to pass the ball a little bit here and i think he he did adjust his game a little bit but it's you know it's hard to have somebody like that on i think you pointed it out zach said it's more like a ted talk for him we're having a conversation and he's used to being interviewed and i think that is a that's a transition but you know um it was fine let's move on yeah okay so i think we'll start off with something we talked about on episode nine which was coinbase's ceo brian armstrong wrote a very controversi very very controversial blog post uh exactly a year ago coinbase is a mission focused company at the time he was dealing with a never-ending debate inside his own company about black lives matter about social justice and any number of issues and he said listen the company is mission focused our mission is to you know make people more financially independent literate etc and we're going to ban any discussions on our electronic communications you can do things on your own time and it was quite controversial at the time we had a good discussion i re-listened to our discu i really listened to our discussion on that pod and we all universally felt like it was the right move well he went ahead and uh picked up the hornet's nest he did not have to talk about this ever again everybody had forgotten about it and he grabbed the hornet's nest ran into the end zone and spiked it jason can you well before you do that can you say how many people left as a result of his blog post and all do you know those stats because i think i don't have those there was a big article about it this was i think i think it was worth him doing a follow-up post this was the one year anniversary of his blog post and he was kind of giving us the status update and what he basically said is that the policy had worked um so you gotta so first of all should we just review what the policy was the policy was that they were gonna declare the workplace to be politically neutral that people would leave their politics at the door they would not have sort of extraneous political conversations at work that doesn't mean you couldn't support whatever causes you wanted on your own time or tweet whatever you want on your own time but while you're at work they would declare it to be sort of a political dmz like a demilitarized zone basically all he was doing was reasserting the old center the old etiquette of hey when you go to work you you're not engaged in you're politically heated yeah you're paid to work you're not there to engage in political activism so that was the policy and of course uh the the the woke mob became completely hysterical about it uh as it turns and so then what happened is that brian offered everyone a very generous severance policy if they didn't want to stick around certainly policies yes extremely generous they made it really easy then generous right they made it really easy for people to check out if they want to check out well only five percent took the policy people yes and then on the heels of that there was a gigantic new york times hit piece against the company the usual disinformation and slanders um against the company and then now we have this follow-up piece and i think what brian basically reported is that today coinbase is a more aligned company because everyone who's there wants to be there for the mission that's what they focus on when they go to work he talked about how they had hired top talent away from other companies i mean basically he put out the bat signal and people came running because you know we have they wanted neutrality they did not want it people are voting with their feet yeah they're fed up with the politics and distraction and and i think the employees were secretly relieved that he declared this policy basically he took the heat on himself for the larger benefit of all the employees who just wanted to be there and work and not have to wonder whether they're doing something right or wrong because they're on the wrong side of a political issue friedberg nailed it when he said uh in our episode 9 which you go back to freeburg you may not remember your comments but you said what about the employees who just want to come to work and don't want to engage in political speech now you're infringing on them to force them to be participate in these discussions and they don't have a choice because they need to feed their families need to go to work and so freiburg i think you take a little victory lap there he says in this tweet storm i'll just read the third part of it one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers since my post we've grown our head count about 110 doubled it while our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved in some metrics so all of the hand ringing and pearl clutching that this would have a negative effect on the company has turned out to be wrong go ahead chamboth and then freeburn i mean if you want it's like i think it's important to set the context for what this is there is a um a productivity war going on inside of um institutions around the world and what's happening is that people's personal beliefs are bumping up against what the mission and um goals operational goals of a company are or a university or all these other places and so this is probably the first big example this is a what is a 50 60 billion dollar public company um 50 billion dollar public company that basically said enough's enough this is our mission everybody else um basically just needs to shut the [ __ ] up and i think that that's very important now if they then go off and actually crush their goals that's the one missing piece in all of this because when that happens then you can write a through line through all of this and say okay this is in part what allowed them to do it so i think that the the the folks that you know uh were really up in arms still have uh one small straw in the fight which is that if these guys don't achieve their goals they'll point to this as one of the reasons why but diversity is strength or if you know like yeah you're suppressing free speech you know that argument but i think if brian then goes and delivers a couple of knockout quarters and a couple of knockout years then you know what he will be able to say definitively which no one can refute is we leave our politics at the door we define our okrs and then we go and we build things that people need as a company and then you go off and you can do whatever you want and i think that that's very powerful for uh many companies and institutions friedberg you heard my recap of what you said last i'm not sure if you remembered or you re-listened what are your thoughts today i think it's um it's worth just noting less about the particularities of what was said and the particular issue at hand here and i i would look more to kind of brian's um leadership style as an excellent example of defining and creating strong culture culture in an organization can give that organization what it needs to succeed it puts everyone aligned in a specific way on how we make decisions how we operate it doesn't matter what his particular beliefs and opinions were what to exclude what to include in the dialogue and the discourse and the model for discourse within the organization i think what matters that he put a line in the sand and he said this is what we're gonna do this is what's in and this is what's out and organizations that do that and do that effectively generally win they win more they do better the teams are aligned the teams are more unified and i think that definition may sometimes be controversial and you'll notice that as companies get bigger go public they're larger they bring in professional managers and the founders ceo steps out they generally don't do that right they generally try to not do that definitional work because they're trying to minimize loss and not kind of take the bet on maximizing long-term gain and doing the things that they think culturally define or will enable success long term so i i think it's a great example of leadership generally on how you kind of can um can be very vocal about defining a strong culture elon calls it i think elon calls it corporal speak what happens most companies when they get bigger they gravitate towards corporate speak and then what happens is some cohort of employees who are really good just feel trapped in this kind of morass of mediocrity and by the way look at elon's um you know call it attrition rate right by the typical large-scale public company corporate metric of like how many people are leaving per year you'd say oh my gosh something's up with that organization but it really speaks to a strong culture there's a company that's famous for this called bridgewater associates you know run by ray dalio 100 billion dollar hedge fund one of the best performing investment vehicles of all time and they have incredible culture i've talked about ray dalio's book principles before and some of the work he's done on this where he is so adamant about getting culture right within the organization how you operate that they almost have i think a 30 attrition rate after the first year of people that come in because they not only try and screen for these elements of what they consider to be the right cultural fit for their organization up front but then they also screen people the heck out of the door if they're not a good fit and and i think elon has a similar sort of model and you know i think brian the way he speaks about the organization is a similar model and it's about defining the lines it's about being very crystal clear about what's in and what's not whatever as a ceo and a founder whatever you believe you need to believe in it strongly and you can communicate it clearly and then communicate it and then let people vote they vote with their feet they don't get to vote whether to change it they just get to vote whether they get to stay or whether they go and i think that that's a really smart i think that's well said yeah i think there's one other issue here jake allen this goes back to your point about why did brian have to bring this back up was it unnecessary did he spike the horn assess in the end zone here's why i think it was necessary if you go to point seven and eight of his tweets storm he says it was the most positive reaction i've gotten from any change i've made in the history of the company which is saying something how could something be so negative in the press that turned out to be incredibly incredibly positive with every stakeholder 95 percent of of employees privately all the investors were telling him it was a great thing and then what he says is the only sense i can make of it is there's a huge mismatch right now between people's stated and revealed preferences and we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up so to me this is the point of this tweetstorm i'm bringing up now is without people like brian standing up and saying what the truth is that look everybody wants this they're just afraid to articulate the principle uh we we keep um we keep encouraging this climate of fear and you know the alternative to coinbase you know one of the other companies we've talked about is apple i mean you can basically choose to be coinbase or apple what has apple done they booted out antonio garcia martinez because of a passage in his book that they knew about and ever since then the company's been roiled by boycotts and petition writing from the employees about some new calls every couple of weeks and eventually that'll show up in the operating results of the business it's just a matter of time right and so so why why does that go on i mean i'm sure most employees at apple don't want to be you know constantly roiled by these like petition campaigns uh but they have to put up with it because everyone's so afraid to speak up and that's why it's important that what brian did we have to basically recognize that this woke mob who's cowed everyone to silence is maybe five percent of these companies and if everybody just acts like brian the problem will be over well we know we know what the trail of breadcrumbs is right now and i think we should probably you know shine a light on it which is that that five percent is uh exactly the same as donald trump they just exist on the left you know and there's a there's more and more research that shows that just as much as we thought they were right authoritarians they're also left authoritarians and this is what we're seeing that that the craziness that you know everybody decries on the right actually also exists on the left and they just put a button on that before we pivot to the next story armstrong was very clear that the mission is about global wealth inequality so staying focused on that in his mind is the the high order a bit and will result in the most great change so paradoxically or ironically you know all these woke people attacking coinbase coinbase might do more for wealth inequality and justice in the world if they stay focused than if they try to tackle everything and you know this is a road to nowhere for apple i think saks you pointed this out about how if you were running apple you would fire anybody who does the petition because i'll tell you where apple is about to to basically land by enabling all of this woke mob inside their own company by coddling them addressing them and not keeping them focused they will eventually get to the fact that china is you know has three million uyghurs in a concentration camp and those uyghurs are proven to be providing through slave labor equipment and components to companies that eventually make their way to apple products ergo apple supports slavery and that's what the employees will eventually get to and that will cause chaos but there's something even closer more closer to home that that's probably true or could be true i don't know it is true um but you know the fact that apple had the the most important security leak in their entire software career just a few months ago is also quite important like you had a because why is it so you had a zero so the ios 14.8 exists because of why because a researcher or a set of researchers in toronto discovered that there was a zero click exploit in ios that allowed you to basically turn on the microphone turn on the camera you know grab anything you needed from iphones it was the most secure device until two months ago when it turned out it was actually the most insecure device so i tend to think i tend to think those kinds of technical mistakes happen when people take their eye off the ball and i think people take their eye off the ball because they're demoralized with dealing with distractions sex yeah i mean i think it's the whether it's the uyghurs or the security issue it's a good example of uh the employees at apple see the spec in somebody else's eye but not the log in their own i mean that's that's the the principle and um and they would be much better off focusing on dealing with their own internal issues um but but let's go can we go back to that article that your mother referenced about the authoritarian anything you got anything else on this issue do you want to before we we sag way over no i thought this is a really great article do you want to explain it jay cal yeah i'll just give you a quick overview and then you can dive right in since you put on the docket psychiatrist and rother sally satell uh hopefully i'm pronouncing that correct wrote an article for the atlantic entitled the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians on the left the main point here is that trump's presidency sparked a ton of research and coverage of authoritarianism on the right but mostly ignored the left with some researchers even suggesting that the left wing that wet left wing authoritarianism isn't real in an email to satell a social psychologist from rucker said the following uh for 70 years the law the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism has been found exclusively on the political right why is that one reason left-wing authoritarian authoritarianism barely showed up in social psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole sex well actually chamoth put this on the docket so dude do you want to introduce what you liked about it the reason i saw this and i thought it was so interesting was basically we had an entire body of research trying to understand why some folks are attracted to these authoritarian figures like trump and overwhelmingly all the research at the time said they only exist on the right and you know you and all of this started after hitler and so there was all this research around the you know social and attitudinal uh reactions to hitler and how he came to power and then all of the iterations of folks like him on the right afterwards and so people put trump in that category and then they said it can only exist there but as it turns out when this person did this research and she surveyed 7 000 people and all of this data was very well summarized in this atlantic article which i'm sure we can post in the show notes that folks should read lo and behold it actually exists on both sides so as it turns out the extreme right and the extreme left are exactly the same they're moral absolutists they believe in themselves and themselves only and they believe anybody else that outside of where they are is fundamentally in the wrong and if you actually look at that and see how trump behaved in his presidency and now how you see how the left names and shames you factually find a lot of commonality so the reason i found that article interesting is that it actually says again what we've been saying which is coming down the middle and finding you know reasonable compromise is the only way forward because this minute you start moving in either direction you are the same and that person is an ugly person that we don't want around let me give the money quote and then get your feedback freeberg the similarities in the study included quote similarities between authoritarianism on both sides left and right preference for social uniformity check prejudice toward different group different others willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior cognitive rigidity aggression and punitiveness toward perceived enemies outsized concern for hierarchy and as chamath pointed out moral absolutism uh freebird i think authoritarian figures resolve when a population feels uh insecure so i mean we talked about this last pod but i do think that you know the notion of freedom emerges after the comfort of security has been provided and i think the absence of security drives people away from the drive towards freedom like when you have a feeling of insecurity with respect to kind of your ability to get a job i mean remember hitler rose to power when unemployment um you know post weimar republic was skyrocketing people you know couldn't get jobs they couldn't afford food and the authoritarian figure was going to provide the security needed i think to resolve the concerns that the population had and then you know people latch on to that so you know there are moments in time when i think authoritarianism can emerge with different forms of resolution it doesn't necessarily mean that the authoritarian actor needs to take a left or a right point of view they're just going to give you a path to security when you're feeling insecure if you don't feel insecure you're going to say that's ridiculous so countries that are wealthy countries that are privileged with the opportunities that maybe the united states has are less likely and less inclined to fall in in you know in favor of authoritarian leaders and then as we slip backwards economically unemployment wise etc we're more likely to be uh to be in favor of of those sorts of actors um and so i think that you know we'll see him but don't you think it's crazy that we actually uh didn't think it could exist in one end of the political spectrum and now it does you have a point in that or no i never really understood the whole like hitler is purely a right-wing guy like he was a you know a socialist and he was trying to enable like you know socialized services and socialized systems for people you know in a lot of political circles that would be argued as being a very kind of left point of view um and so i i don't know if it yeah let's go beyond let's go beyond hitler you're right the the nazi party was a national socialist party that's what that's what the name of the party was but there's also stalin pol pot mao i mean if you're paying attention to history you know that there's been authoritarianism on the left not just the the right and so but you know in the universities and in the media they only want to focus on the right-wing version of it and i think what this study does is it up ends 70 years of dogma that that you know authoritarian authoritarianism is only to be found on the political right i mean it's obviously can be found on the political left as well and you can see that in cancel culture in speech restrictions in uh these um very aggressive covet mandates that are now happening you can see it in the um the sort of the um the ghoulishness anytime somebody in the right you know uh dies from kovid i mean there's there's always some uh chortling on the part of the left about this um the harsh penalties for non-compliance i mean right now rigidity is the one that stands out for me like there is just on the left they make a decision amazon is bad and they cannot move off of that right david like what about what about willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior and what about aggression and punitiveness towards perceived energy cancer culture that would be connected to me it begs a good question which is um what socialist regimes have come to power without an authoritarian figure has there just none they're all revolutionaries right actually the study has a really good point about this which is they they say that um the researchers described what they called anti-hierarchical aggression so one of the traits of authoritarianism is is they call it an outsized concern for a hierarchy but you know leftists think that they don't believe in hierarchy but actually they do they believe in an anti-hierarchical hierarchy which is they want to turn upside down the social hierarchy and they're willing to justify the the ends justify the means in other words if you can turn the hierarchy upside down they'll let you do anything and it's actually pretty scary that's where the sort of the revolution comes from here's a practical thing jkl about what you said which illustrates this point even further right now we have a three and a half trillion dollar bill um kind of meandering um through congress and you know it's very much a question mark about whether it gets past or not and one of the elements that's in there is free community college now when it passes if it passes there's a lot of support that that's something that the government should do it's a good thing but if you're a private company like amazon who just announced that they will give you free college they're still a bad company and and this is the example of this intellectual rigidity that doesn't actually see the forest from the trees what do you really want do you want the process where you control and you meter out progress or do you actually want the outcome where somebody can get a job where they make 15 or 20 an hour and also now get college paid for yes much better the latter yeah much better if the government didn't have to provide i'd love i'd love it if the government could pay for it but i'm really glad that amazon is in a position to pay for it as well but if you start to become absolutist and say well no it just needs to be top down and metered out this way and any private organization that wants to try to do it is still bad i think that's where that rigidity holds us all back it's unnecessary here's where i see the rigidity hm off is they keep saying gig workers are bad nobody should be allowed to be a gig worker and david had a great interview with the ride-sharing guy on call-in and in which they talked about the fact and this is somebody who is super pro advocate of drivers said listen 80 of people do not want to do shift work they do not want the government dictating how they work and i talked anecdotally with an uber driver said he's making like 70 bucks an hour during peak hours they were fighting to get minimum wage for drivers now drivers are making twenty thirty forty fifty dollars an hour uber rides have gone and lift rides massive competition free market works well and and they can't take the win they still are so rigid on the left that they're demanding whatever that woman's name is who is you know in the pocket of the lorena gonzalez lorena gonzalez in the pocket of the the unions how cynical are they the victory is upon them people are getting paid five times more three times more than minimum wage and they still want to screw them the takeaway for a lot of people should be that your spidey senses should go up when folks present solutions as a choice of one source only ah you know one thing when things just cannot can only happen in one way and it's the way that i feel the most comfortable yeah your spidey sensor should go up and you should think to yourself really is that is that really the only way like can't we have choice can't we have different ways of solving this can't maybe we can run an experiment and see what happens go ahead sex well i think your spidey sense should also go up whenever somebody is basically saying that speech needs to be censored for some higher purpose you know uh that that that whatever people are trying to abridge and take away our rights and our sort of long-held values uh our freedoms you have to start getting concerned and there's always a reason why they want to do it in the study the quote that the the left-wing authoritarians agreed with was getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called right to free speech so there's always some higher reason the means always justify the the answer always justify the means um but but that's that's what you have to look out for is when they're taking away your right to speech another fun proof point um fun because it's dave chappelle uh uh that you can listen to or watch to see a flavor of this left-wing authoritarianism is called redemption song which is a little clip he put out recently and the the entire clip is more about him getting his body of work back from comedy central but the part in the beginning talks about um folks on the left that really tried to dunk on him when he got coveted and you should just listen to his reaction and how he frames it because i think it's pretty powerful and again it explains that extremism on both sides they actually end up looking the same yeah aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies and i think that applies to anyone who anyone who defies it that whatever the conventional wisdom is on kovit there's another another example in the study of uh that that the people who the left-wing authoritarians agreed with the statement i cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative so you know you've got these social groups that are completely uniform and by the way there's been like studies for a long time showing that uh liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to be upset if their son or daughter were to marry someone of the opposite party so this has been this has been turned up in polls for a while but this and you've seen it on universities and college campuses right but there's this idea that you know anybody of the other uh political side is just suspect you know morally suspect needs to be shunned uh needs to be expelled um like those are the people you have to be concerned about yeah you can't be friends i can't be friends with you sacks because you voted for trump it's just ridiculous people have this no but it's i think it's the derangement to give the other side of this i think trump was so extreme and so trolling and so great i mean if you think about his super power it was to troll the left and put them into such a deranged mindset that they did actually become that which they hated most right but he he did he did troll the left but but here's but here's the thing is that we only hear uh in the media about the authoritarianism of the trump administration how many times were they screaming fascism during the trump years and and now today and of course you know if you go to msnbc it's it's january 6 all day all the time that's all they want to talk about but you there's a total blind spot with respect to the authoritarian tendencies of the left which we see right now in covit policy i mean it is getting so extreme right now and i mean freeburg you posted uh the breaking news that just announced via press conference gavin newsom is now implementing mandated coveted vaccines for all public k through 12 schools in california starting this fall wait wait these students yeah all all eligible kids in all in all public schools in all public schools in order to go to school in california you have to have a vaccine i mean kindergarten kindergarten well i mean they're not eligible yeah if it's when they're eligible yeah they're they're they're going to be eligible very soon i mean look i i i so so we have a 13 year old an 11 year old and a 5 year old the 13 year old got vaccinated she wanted to we supported it the 11 year old wasn't eligible she didn't get a vaccine she got coveted for me it was a mild case and our five-year-old isn't eligible for the vaccine he never got coveted now if if and when a new vaccine comes out that our five-year-old is eligible i don't think he needs it i mean i'm not anti-vaxx i mean i'm glad i got the vaccine i'm glad you know is he going to school my thirteen-year-old got the vaccine yeah i guess the question is do you if it is safe do you want them going to school catching it spreading it and you want them to not have to wear a mask how can you say conclusively what's safe for a five or six year old at this point it's a little hard their bodies are developing and yeah you need some time i mean do we really need to mandate this i mean why why can't parents make up their own decision because of other people in society who would be impacted i mean you also see this you know look i think i think vaccines maybe are complicated debate because vaccines do actually provide protection let's talk about these mass mandates which i supported at the beginning of the pandemic because it's all we had to fight it but you take an example like san francisco still has these stringent mass mandates the mayor london breed was caught out at um dancing singing screaming but in fairness to her it was tony tony tony yeah i mean that's when she stopped her defense she was like she was basically like it's tony tony tony guys what do you want me to do here i'll risk the covenant which is i mean what do you want to do what do you want her to do what do you think about let me ask this question what she said when she got caught was actually correct which is we should be out supporting restaurants we should be out supporting nightlife adults should be able to make their own decision about the risks they're willing to take the problem is she's not willing to give the rest of us that choice right and we can all make our own choice and by the way look the idea that the cove is not to get you where you know once you take off your mask when you get to the table you know we've talked about this right yeah you wear the mask and the mater d stand to the table then you take it off to eat and drink and the cove is somehow not going to get in she was saying she was like i listen they were like you weren't eating we have you on video you weren't drinking she's like it's unrealistic for an adult to put the mask on and off in between sips and bites and i was on a flight and i was flying coach as opposed to business class recently and when i was in business class i was eating and drinking there was no entire foreign language so far you're speaking what are you saying anyway most people pay for a plane ticket and then they get on an airplane so but the interesting thing was when i was in business class i was eating my meal i was drinking no issues i had the mask off for whatever 20 minutes i was eating and drinking when i was in coach same situation the flight attendant was going up and down the aisle and while people were eating and drinking if she didn't have the mascot she was kind of being like uh a whole monitor saying please put your mask on in between bites and i was like okay yeah and when we supported this mass mandate way at the beginning of the vaccine we all thought the government's going to distribute n99 or at least n95 high quality 3m mass right you never got those i mean we never got those testing kits i know and people people are like walking around wearing these cloth mat these loose-fitting cloth masks it's ridiculous it's like the covet goes you know through the bottom over the top through the site you go right through it i mean like it doesn't do anything and yeah you're the lone ranger yeah how's that work i mean i look if you wear a high quality like you know ppe type mask i think it might be helpful but you know it's a marginal benefit once we have vaccines oh by the way just as we end this what do we think of um andrew wiggins well you can't comment on this maybe because you're an owner on the team but a number of nba players uh high profile ones in fact in new york and california where you're not allowed in the arena if you're not vaccinated are now deciding to sit out their home games so kyrie irving being the highest profile one is refusing to get the vaccine and he will be getting paid he's got a 200 million dollar contract max player i think he gets 40 50 million a year um he's gonna give up half of his salary to not 20 million a year to not get the vaccine at least and leave his team to not play with him in home games what are our thoughts on mandating nba players who are playing inside an arena to be vaccinated do you see draymond's interview i did what did what did they have to say about this he said he said he's so [ __ ] strong isn't he yeah he was like this is ridiculous that we don't like respect each other's like we've made this so political and it's all like antagonistic as opposed to he went meta recognizing that there are differences and people have differences of opinion and respecting them and embracing each other for those differences rather than like attacking each other and finding fault in each other and forcing them yeah and it's a great point but um i don't know i mean i don't think that this point is any different than the point about you know mandating a vaccine for anything any workplace any school i mean if you're going to mandate if you're going to mandate vaccines for workplaces and mandate vaccines for schools you know the mba is going to you know not be kind of excluded here it's what it is right just happens to be a bigger paycheck and a higher profile stage i think as a matter of policy the the right policy is to let private employers decide whether they're going to require vaccination or not i think i think private organizations have the right to do that if you know if a restaurant tour wants to say that we are going to be an all vacs restaurant you want to you know they're only going to take clientele who are vax that should be their right to do it if another restaurant says we don't care people can go to that restaurant if they want you know i think that the free market can sort of sort this out i don't know that we need the government imposing it if the mba decides this is what they want to do they can't it has decided well i mean what i wonder about is how necessary it is um i mean given the fact that you know all the players are young and healthy um and if they want the vaccine they can get the vaccine look i'm really glad i got it you know i think it but but i just you know if it given that everybody is vaccinated now who wants it i just you know what is the point of forcing that last 10 of holdouts to do something they don't want to do i mean this is where i think the authoritarian i would resist the authoritarian impulse freedberg is there a new pill that's coming out uh i saw a story today about this i don't know where to cover that i'll go to unicorns first uh merck published some results uh on this uh basically um antiviral pill it effectively uh inhibits rna replication uh in viruses and it's kind of uh it was designed to be kind of broadly applicable it was you know discovered at emory university years ago and they were testing it for influenza and then even priests pre-covered they were testing it on other kind of coronaviruses asars and mers and so the the data that they just published shows that there's a 50 percent reduction in hospitalizations 50 percent uh in hospitalizations for uh for people that are the test positive for a sars cov2 infection and then they start the pill within some number of hours you take a few of these pills i think they said five days right yeah within five i think well they did the test on like uh it was effectively yeah four or five days that's right um and you end up reducing the number the percentage of people that end up in the hospital by 50 now you know uh so the idea is that for countries that don't have access to vaccines you can very cheaply make this chemistry it's a cheap molecule that you could theoretically produce at scale and you could ship it all over the world and countries that don't have you know broad scale vaccination programs they can make these pills available quickly and cheaply and then you know as people get uh infected with stars kobe 2 they just pick up this pill you know put it in every pharmacy go grab a couple and then the hospitalization rate goes down we don't yet know if it reduces the transmission rate so there's a lot of question marks on like does this actually solve the problem of the pandemic it's certainly another instrument to blunt the uh you know the impact pronounce the name of it it's malnourished the government um by the way there wasn't a lot of people in the study no one that took the pill died people that didn't take the pill did die uh in the in the infection in the infected population because they split them right they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill the people that had the placebo there were deaths no one in the group that had the pill um the actual pill died and so um you know so so theoretically we don't yet have enough data to know but there's also a big question on the side effects typically these uh anti uh uh viral the rna kind of um blocking drugs have other side effects they're usually pretty mild but um you know so so there'll be a little bit more studying but generally people view this as a super big positive it's another instrument i'm gonna make a i'm gonna make a prediction here we go i think that the combination of vaccines and what is equivalently tamiflu for covid which is effectively what this is is the one two punch we need so that this basically is rendered um you're missing the three you're missing a key piece there the testing you must have testing to know that you have to take this uh but i i think that that's a i think like the testing is it's not efficient but solutions exist my point is if you have a combination of all these things this is like a flu which means that there'll be less ability for folks to not show up to work which means that most of the economy will get back going and i think then we can get back to really addressing what are all that 10 or 12 trillion dollars how does it show up in the economy that's where the inflation comes from that's for all this other stuff so uh i'm i'm pretty excited by what i read today but now my mindset is going to 18 months from now midterm inflation i think that's going to be what it's all about we ordered 1.7 million courses of this i'll call it's a we can just call basically this is the equivalent of a z pack so called as the mpac um if this uh hits i've taken probably 1.7 million z packs a million that's just on the way back from vegas hey um so i mean this feels like the end game and they are going for emergency use so let's keep our fingers crossed this would mean the stock market's going to rip jamuth i know i think the stock market um is in a little bit of precarious position because if you have to if you have to reposition yourself for inflation there's a lot of tech stocks that will get just absolutely obliterated like well when when you when you when you have inflation so the the order of operations inflation means prices go up the the government sees prices going up and they say how do we control that they raise interest rates so that the cost of borrowing goes up so that then less money is being spent right so that we become a little bit more restrained when you do that then all of a sudden people have to think about how much money you're going to make in the future because if you're not investing as much in the future you won't make as much in the future and when you discount all those dollars back there's less of them and so all of a sudden you start to think about oh my gosh well i want dollars today not dollars 10 years from now that really puts a lot of pressure on tech stocks because we trade on multi-year valuations in the future so inflation is very bad for technology stocks inflation tends to be good for companies that make money today why because if i get a dollar today i can put it in this in the you know bond markets or i put it into a savings account and i can get more interest than i would have otherwise and then separately you also want to own things that are physical and real because those have more value so all of that has to then get worked out into the economy and we have to make a bunch of economic decisions so we so now the solution for that in all of those cases though is still if you're a hyper growth company you'll be okay so if you're growing more than 50 60 a year you're fine but if you're growing 20 or 30 and you're kind of a middling business and rates are going up and inflation is going up you're in a very very very precarious spot and um saks what do you think okay well there was there was a great article in the wall street journal over the past week called university endowments billions in the golden era venture capitals basically talking about i mean these these university endowments are like gaining 50 year-over-year there's been like nothing like it before there's so many unicorns being created there's and if you there's a separate article in i think pitch book as well about the rate of unicor or crunch base yeah that the rate of unicorn creation i think last year it was like one every few days now it's it's more than one a day bonkers and so you know we're getting multiple unicorns now created every day this year it's just this golden era of vc this engine of wealth and prosperity creation so that's the good news and and to connect this to a point we were talking about earlier if the the radicals on the left would just allow the golden goose to keep laying golden eggs we're going to have enough wealth and prosperity to pay for all these progressive programs in the long run but they're not willing to wait and so you have in washington for example i think a political program that really could upset the apple card i mean you're talking about a three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill it'll probably get brought down to somewhere between one and a half and two then you got a 1.2 bill trillion dollar infrastructure bill they've already spent one point nine trillion on a coveted relief bill this is after the six trillion what would you like would you advise it should be the amount spent well okay good question so last year the federal government generated record tax receipts the most revenue it's ever raised and it was about 19 and a half percent of gdp when bill clinton left office he bro boasted about the fact that government spending was only 18 and a half percent of gdp last year it was about 30 percent of gdp my theory on this is that if you have uh government spending as a you know share of the economy at around 20 percent from a tax and spending standpoint things basically work okay but as you try to go up to 25 and 30 it starts to break you have too much deficits and debt too much money printing too much taxation too much inflation you become more brittle and you start to you basically are you know unhealthy you're killing the golden goose and so you know all we have to do is let the economy keep ripping 20 of it is gonna is going to be government share and you'll be able to fund more and more progressive programs over time as society gets richer and by the way this this um prosperity that's being created in the tech ecosystem it's available to everybody who has a good idea i mean this is not so so as we all know so it's not just government that's creating advancement and uh economic opportunity for disadvantaged people the tech economy's creating it as well and what i worry about is is why are we taking so much risk in upending this whole system that is working quite well well the other thing is this is all in the face of there being 11 million open jobs there's 1.4 jobs for everybody who's unemployed so the idea that in some ways society is broken and people can't be employed now these might not be there's a greatest job there's only four million there's only four million people looking for work there's 11 million outstanding jobs yeah i mean it is bonkers friedberg do you think this is sustainable what are your thoughts on spending and turning over the apple cart as sax is saying the longer you guys have me on this podcast the more likely it is you guys are gonna unmask me as a die-hard libertarian um i will not let my tendencies um you know come out in full force uh the spending is ridiculous and there's a lot of waste so i mean i'll just leave it at that what i think is interesting though is this unicorn creation system uh this unicorn creation machine you know it's worth highlighting because i think that that crunch based article showed that these unicorns in aggregate were worth like what one and a half trillion dollars or something um and those so those are all private companies three point four trillion dollars so is that the amount of both bills 3.4 trillion is the total market cap of all the private unicorns not just in the us but the world and right now in washington they're talking about three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill same size can you imagine governments spending basically the entire value of the tech ecosystem in one year it's bonkers right and so this but by the way i mean like i think that that 3.5 trillion you can kind of think about that as being the future economy of the future of global economy right so the entire uh i just pulled up the latest uh quarterly stat but the entire uh market cap of public u.s companies uh today stands at 47 trillion dollars the top 500 or about 38 trillion dollars so you know these private companies that are kind of the emerging tech companies are you know call it ten percent or you know eight percent uh of uh today all public pub today of all public companies today and you know it used to be the technology company started in silicon valley sold technology to traditional industries what's happening in silicon valley today and over the last 10 years or so is that technology quote unquote companies are becoming the next industrial companies they are replacing profound incidents and so this is like what we saw you know airbnb is a hotel chain without hotels uber is you know a transportation company without vehicles doordash but even more importantly there's an entire emergent class of life sciences companies of novel hardware companies and these businesses are leveraging their core technology competence to create an advantage in replacing an old model of doing industry they're not selling it to the old school company and so i think that the you know and people are freaking out about you know some of these big investors like tiger global coming in and writing crazy checks if you take an index of the three and a half trillion dollars today and said you know what these guys today are gonna be worth more than the 46 trillion dollar market cap of all the other public companies that's it today in the next 20 or 30 years that's a pretty good way to kind of place your money over a 30-year horizon i'm going to go ahead and put as much money as i can into the index of the private companies and expect that they're going to be worth more than 46 trillion in 30 years i'm going to make a 10 bagger that's a retirement fund for my family and so it makes a ton of sense i think that these um you know these unicorns given the advantages that are inv you know kind of uh evolving from software and like sciences and so on do end up kind of playing out uh it's going to be ugly and that when what will happen is you'll end up seeing the asymmetry you'll see the like oh my gosh there's something that's a thousand x you know 100x return it'll become a 100 billion dollar public company or two billion dollar public company and then there'll be a bunch of them they're going to die um and people are going to focus on the depths and say this was overhyped the bubble is over but the reality is the index of companies today i would be willing to bet 20 to 30 years from now it's worth more than the 46 trillion dollar of all the public companies today so chamath one of the things we're seeing here and you're playing a small part in it or a large part depending on who you talk to we now have over 6 000 publicly traded companies on u.s exchange no we have less than four thousand we have about thirty eight hundred okay uh no we had thirty six hundred in 2016 according to the research i have here according to mortgage watch six thousand public trading companies and u.s exchanges so they could be counting the pink sheets and over the counters which is we're seeing dramatically more publicly traded companies many speculative ones or ones where you're getting to buy in in year four five or six obviously you're part of that with uh you know all the different ipo as through what are you up to now what's the yeah we have six tech specs we have four biotech packs you know i mean i've started or invested in a bunch of others that have gone public um so let's look at this through the lens of the the public markets as well my mac review is exactly what friedberg said we are much better off with as many technology companies being birthed and being viable because over the long arc of time those companies will rebuild things that are today inefficient and broken in a better way and the world becomes better the question is for a lot of people well what if the wealth isn't better because it's only you know a fraction of the number of people with a very specific skill set that then the other people don't have that i think is a valid argument but then there's a different way to attack this problem which is you could actually do something really meaningful around corporate interest rates and corporate tax policy that would then get it right so like even if those those thousand companies if you assume that that 3.4 trillion dollars 10 x's that's 34 trillion of eventual market cap right that's going to be supported by trillions of dollars of earnings but maybe those things only have a million or two million employees but there's eight billion eight you know odd people in the world well the way you get the money into the government's coffers so that they can reallocate it to everybody that doesn't work at those thousand companies is through sensible tax policy that goes after the companies because those companies will still do the job right it's not like you're going to choose to not work at a you know world-beating startup in a mission that you care about because of the corporate tax rate nobody's going to do that right so i think this is where like if you if you if you actually um take a step back and think of the bigger picture the answer is right in front of us we just choose not to listen this is why you know again what trump did was kind of stupid you know he focused on corporate tax policy cutting it unnecessarily and now what we're doing is we're fighting over tax policy and part of the reason why this bill isn't going to get passed is because of corporate tax policy and trying to raise it again but really what we should do is actually raise it leave personal rates roughly where they are you know elon even said when when asked by kara swisher this week he's like i paid 53 taxes what about you yeah and it's going to 57 and you know it's 53 57 61 who cares sure whatever that's all and he has to the point he made was listen the pro public article was really disingenuous they said he got a tax refund and they didn't they never explained well that's because he overpaid his taxes massively the year before so they're selectively pulling information and the fact is he said i will be the first money into spacex and tesla i'll be the last money out that is something we want uh more founders to do which is never sell their shares and be have more skin in the game sorry i i'm sorry i disagree with that i think that's a that's a bunch of [ __ ] malarkey why if you choose to not sell so be it okay but look at the good that bill gates has done by selling down microsoft so i mean yeah shouldn't exist the bill gates foundation shouldn't exist no no no the reproductive protection it had to be paid some he did that when he hits his 60 years old i'm sure no you know no he started to do it when he was 40 years old jason and he wanted anyone sold paypal and he was able to use that money to reinvest in tesla i think elon's putting all the money back into two companies that are solving two major issues he wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't sold in the first exactly my my point is let's not conflate the problem if you generate wealth i think that you should be bound morally bound by society to put the money back to work he chooses to put the money back to work by reinvesting so aggressively into the things that he's doing that's laudable yeah i think that's virtuous yeah i agree but it's not the only way bill gates took a different path which is to basically take all those profits sell it down to then be able to go and put it into the gates foundation people will take multiple paths the point that's the same among all these people is there's a moral obligation they feel to do the right thing for the future then we're in agreement so let's just celebrate that not some tactical thing about it by the way one other point i'd make like you you said that you know we should tax the the wealth creation and distribute it there's another way to get that redistribution of wealth which is to enable access to the investments earlier by public pension funds by the endowments by the places where people by the retirement funds where you know a broader swath of the population you know have savings sitting right and they use the accreditation we've historically kind of forced the narrative that everyone in the united states needs to have a home and have 80 90 of their wealth tied up in a piece of real estate and then we end up with these massive kind of inflationary bubbles to keep that value that book value kind of growing for them the reality is if that money was put more productively into building businesses via retirement funds that had access to venture capital the public pension funds already do but they should they probably under allocate to venture capital today relative to where they're putting over here we talked about the endowments they're looking at look at that that's another way by the way if that was the model you wouldn't need to tax right by the way one of the brilliant provisions in this reconciliation bill is they're actually disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative assets including startups and and insane venture capitalists insane that is so wrong so friggin wrong yeah what that's in there taking pension funds and saying you can't have access to them you as an individual through a 401k or ira cannot invest in alternatives yes partly in response to that well they should just make it a cap don't you think they should cap peter thiel's um i think why why cap anything who's this who's this episode because it was against the spirit of it the spirit of the wrath was let's let's discuss this as a specific issue i'll see it out for you saks uh peter thiel put his facebook stock in his roth and yeah you're supposed to get that tax free so you can have a great retirement he did that as an end run around paying taxes on the facebook investment that became worth billions of dollars reportedly so now they're saying you can have a roth but anything above 50 billion you got to pay tax on because the goal here isn't for you to use it as a shelter against some massive uh venture gains sacks yeah i i don't have a huge problem with them putting a cap on the benefit of these accounts however my my issue with what's in the bill there's a couple of issues one is like we said they're disallowing investments and alternatives which i just think is bad for savers why would you want to do that second is the treatment of what happens when you exceed the cap and right now what they're saying is you have to distribute out all of those funds and then subject subject them to immediate taxation at ordinary income rates which is confiscatory because you could have made the investment outside the retirement account and paid locked long long term capital rates if you do go over it should be yeah long-term tax of course yeah and and furthermore it's even worse than that because what they're saying is let's say that you do have an alternative like an investment in a startup or a venture fund you have to distribute it out and pay tax on that even though that investment is not liquid right so you should be able to take it out and just be treated normal cap gains and not have to liquidate it do you think well what it's going to do is it's going to get it's going to give people an incentive it's going to warp the incentives for saving because what it's going to say to people is you want to do well but not too well right because if you hit the cap you're not subject to a confiscation you get penalized yes it should be so neutral yeah exactly i think situation work is you have a cap at any distribution above that you basically that becomes the basis for future taxation all of this can be summarized more simply i think that we have unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish line and stagger the starting line right because all of this still doesn't apply to rich people no this is rich people rich people can do all of these different things they can set up these out-of-state trusts they can set up generation skipping trusts they can be you know qualified um investors they can have qsbs deductions and so what this will do unfortunately is entrench the kind of wealth gains that peter thiel was able to generate in a very visible way that will just piss everybody off and i think instead you got to go back to a different um to a different litmus test so i jason you have been the strongest advocate for letting people participate in the economy i have always agreed with that we need to figure out how we can make sure it's important that it isn't abused but that's the best way is to educate folks about financial literacy so that they can actually be a part of it even the starting line let everybody be able to put stuff into this stuff and learn about it i mean what peter did essentially was put lottery tickets into his you know non-tax retirement fund lottery tickets being buying stocks in private companies early but regular americans aren't allowed to do that so rather than retroactively try to penalize peter because you disagree with his politics or because he did it too well i think it's better that everybody be allowed to be an accredited investor and do what peter did which is everybody should be able to take their 401k or their roth and be able to buy the next linkedin uber so if you were a civilian and you took an uber or you used linkedin to hire somebody in year two and you had an opportunity to buy those shares you should be allowed to buy it because you're a human resources person or uber driver and you realize this is a great service that will change the world doesn't take a genius to figure that out uh freeberg yeah look i mean the the downside is you see speculative concentrated bets that white people out and that's the reason the protective provisions are in there so i think there are probably sensible ways of managing that um you know around uh you know qualifying you know pools of these investments in a way creating indexes against them etc uh and maybe that's the right way to provide access but you know giving individuals uh that maybe you know don't have the right kind of point of view uh on a particular investment the ability to put all of their capital into that investment generally i would say go for it the problem is we've socialized you know uh protection right so and this is the same with healthcare in a model for governing or model for a state where you provide socialized care for people through healthcare socialized healthcare or you provide socialized support for people through you know the social security system and other services like that um it's difficult to say okay the government's going to be your backstop and is going to provide the support for you and we're also going to let you take risky behavior and that's where i think the two have to go hand in hand if you want to get rid of one you got to get rid of the other um and so because otherwise we all end up paying the cost of the person that takes the you know outsized risk and then we all end up having to foot the bill for that person taking that risk so if we're all going to be there to protect that person we have to tell them you can't take unnecessary risks okay hey um saks let me ask you a con conspiracy theory here peter thiel supported trump when trump was teetering on the access hollywood tape and he went to bat for him he gave him a big donation at that time then obviously did the republican national convention and was a key intellectual uh influencer in his election plan now the democrats are in and suddenly the focus becomes this one outsized roth ira and we're going to rewrite the law so that peter thiel has to take 5 billion or so is one of the estimates that i saw online on cnbc out of his ira do you think this is specific vindictiveness on the part of the democrats to try to attack specifically peter thiel i know he's your best well yeah i mean he does feel and i'm not i'm not a peter teal apologist but this feels vindictive and personal so yes and no okay so what i would say is there have been proposals over the last i think going back to maybe even 2014 on providing some restrictions or caps on the you know these these iras and the roth iras um however there's never been a proposal as punitive and retroactive and confiscatory as what they're doing here and specifically it's the fact that they're going to force peter to distribute out everything above the cap and then tax it as ordinary income i mean that that's just changing the rules that part i think is directed at peter and i've actually heard that staffers on capitol hill are calling this the peter thiel provision so let me just confirm that part for you so what i would say is i think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts but the way they're doing it is so punitive i think it is motivated by political revenge against peter chamoth what do we think of the number of unicorns being created in the private markets obviously when a company hits unicorn status i think they're going to start buzzing around and maybe knocking on your door and stacks and boards might start thinking about that these companies sometimes have 10 million dollars 30 million dollars in revenue 50 million in revenue and they're becoming worth a billion dollars do these valuations make sense writ large and are you concerned that this is a bubble i don't think there's a bubble okay explain why there's not a bubble in early stage private companies well i think it's because of what we just talked about which is that these companies by and large are growing at incredibly fast rates and they are replacing legacy incumbents that are growing very slowly or not at all with and who who have basically won for a long time with inferior products and so as these superior products with more nimble organizations get capitalized to go to market they're just going to win and so i think what we're seeing is a wholesale replacement of the economy from the old to the new and so that's why these companies will do well and i think it's going to be a a really powerful force in the world because like the world should be a little bit more efficient and fairer when you have all this modern technology working on your behalf so i'm a real supporter of all of this i think there's going to be even more and i think you know the the thing that we have to be comfortable with is whenever something goes from a fringe thing which is what venture capital was jason when all of us were you know first in silicon valley 20 years ago to you know today in 2021 we're sitting here uh this is going to become a fundamental part of the economy and when that happens uh there'll be more and more money the returns won't be as good that'll be okay but there'll be a lot of progress and so you know we're going through the same transition that private equity did in the 80s and 90s that venture that hedge funds did you see all the different venture capitalists who are retiring bichon from spark the kid from uh lightspeed a bunch of other folks obviously our friend bill grimley is stepping up why don't you call me jeremy jeremy jeremy's 50 he's 50. yeah am i doing something wrong here i'm like busy creating a venture firm at age almost 50. you're always people you're on the wrong side of this distribution i mean what what do we think's behind this they just made too much money and they're getting money or is it because it's too competitive now it's too hard they're moving to wyoming i would say it's slightly different than this i don't know i don't know i mean i know all of those guys but i don't know what their motivation is but what i would say is i tend to think that the mindset of venture has a relatively short half-life and i think it's about 15 years and i think that there is a and because you know company building is roughly a 10-year arc you know like when you get into something early and so i i i think that there is like a newness whenever you start i don't think it matters what your age is and um then there is this sort of like uh death march that sets in by year eight or nine and then you try to see it through to returning the capital and making sure all the employees and and uh founders you've been invested with land the ship and and i think what these guys did was get to that place and say okay i've had this 15-year beautiful arc do i want to do another 15-year arc and for a lot of people um it won't make much sense and then also i think your patience to do it goes away right because it's like you guys know what it is it's exhausting it is exhausting it's exciting the amount of drama i'm dealing with right now in my portfolio is bonkers the the the bad i don't know if you're seeing the sax but the amount of shenanigans bad behavior fraud uh lying backstabbing is that an all-time high that would be your portfolio jkl yeah no it's like no it's literally three companies i'm literally dealing with three companies with drama out of 350. i think it's one out of 100 is probably fine but i am seeing all kinds of shenanigans even in the diligence phase i'm seeing it jason i meant something more tactical which is like for example you know yesterday we're starting something really ambitious in batteries and i have to sit there for an hour and we have to go through ordering the equipment setting up the lab getting you know human resources and there's only so much of that that you have the energy to do after a certain amount of time it's important work you have to do it right but it feels uh a little low leverage now for that ceo it's everything and so you have to be on top of your game to help that person and i think this is where i appreciate their honesty in basically saying guys i don't have that level of detailed focus in me anymore and that's important because in the next generation of folks who want to put in that 15-year journey you need somebody committed you need somebody who's super committed yeah and i do think there's a difference between being a partner in a large partnership where you kind of have your portfolio of companies and you know to chamas point you're going to be on that arc with them and then kind of building a firm from scratch where like quite frankly i would go crazy the way that you know you're dealing with jason and chamoth is saying i would get burned out if i didn't have a team right so we now have like a pretty big team how many to well just on the investment team i think we've got about 15 people and and then we now have a bunch of operating partners so you know we were looking at what andreessen harwich has done with services you know we had this big debate in the venture community for a long time about whether venture firms should operate it should offer services and operating partners and andreessen you know went hog wild with that they've got like 200 people doing it and i think they've proven that it works in the sen i don't you know it's not totally clear how much value they're delivering but it clearly works in the sense that founders would like the services if they can get them it's great marketing but it may not be it's great it's it's great it's great marketing if you're a great founder when you were a great founder you wouldn't want andreessen horowitz telling you how to run your hr and doing your marketing for you yammer right but so what we've done is what we've done is focus on bringing on not 200 people but an expert in every functional area that a sas company might need because you do want access to an expert when you're setting up the department you want to go talk to the digital marketing person or the legal person or you know or you know we have an executive briefing center now so we do believe that there is a version of the services model that makes a lot of sense and we are building that if i had to do all of that value add myself yeah i would i would burn out yeah i mean i think it's a very good point i literally last week launched thesyndicate.com syndicate just for the same reason so i can build a group of individuals who are focused just on that and who have that domain expertise but they're the great founders do not want you up in their business so i i i'm concerned with like that that's why we have like kind of we call it a teach them how to fish model where we don't want to do the work we want to give them an expert as a resource who can meet with them show them show them some best practices coming to you expecting you to do the work because that's what think happens sometimes is that although can you find us a developer and i'm like no but i can talk to you about finding developers but i don't have a recruiter on staff do you have a recruiter yeah we actually do now we have three recruiters on staff so um so you're paying a half million dollars a year to recruit for your companies that's a big basically basically that's a big advantage is it working are you actually landing developers yeah i mean look we can't freeze and i don't give a [ __ ] about any of this all right well anyway this is us in the weeds so you want to talk about some okay well just to upload up a level for a second yeah i just want to go back to this like golden era point when we're talking about venture capital because look obviously in the weeds we're going to talk about our problems but i really think that what's happening here with a thousand new unicorns being minted every year is just unbelievable if you look at the number of billionaires in the us i just googled this there were 614 billionaires in the us as of october 2020. now there's probably more i don't know let's say there's a thousand well if you're mincing a thousand new unicorns every year how many billionaires is that creating i mean how many millionaires more importantly how many people who are making 50 to 250 000 a year before they join the ecosystem and now are worth millions will buy homes hire people start in the next let me just give you guys the counterpoint to that which i'm not necessarily arguing but i'm this is what i think the narrative is which is that those businesses that are kind of you know accumulating wealth and accumulating revenue are effectively destroying the old economy and shutting down companies and shutting down there's 11 million job openings that's [ __ ] i don't i don't i don't believe it's a zero-sum game yeah i think there's it's it's created by destruction it is disruptive right so there is a there is kind of a temporal flux and there's a flux of people across from the old economy to the new economy and it's that's flux that i think creates the great uncertainty and the great yes heartache that everyone's trying that's the hand ringing that's the hand this is why it is so important to get corporate taxation right because if you're going to replace gdp dollar for dollar don't focus on the fewer employees that work there focus on the largest number possible which is the revenue that these employees are helping to generate for these companies so if you had much much higher corporate taxation you can play around with all the personal taxation you want but if a lot of people do get shut out of the economy you're not going to make nearly as much for the government as you would by taxing companies more chamath should there be a backstop because we know tax law is so sophisticated and if you're intelligent you could make it seem like you didn't make any money because you're investing you're distributing yada yada should there just be a hey listen whatever you want to do with your taxes is fine but x percent of your top line revenue is your base tax and you cannot get around that should there be something like that there's a couple things that this tax bill attempted to do which could be really powerful if it does get passed i think that corporations should pay a large tax i think that they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on r d and i think they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on basically benefits for their employees and i think that would do a lot to level the playing field then i do think that you can have much higher individual taxation but you need to make it simpler because there's too many easy ways like that propublica article showed for you to play games for individuals to not pay taxes and so you got to simplify all of this stuff because it's too complicated so if you're rich enough to hire a fleet of lawyers you will work your way around it yes period and they and they repealed it as part of the the amt was for corporations was repealed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act i think i don't know where that stands but it does seem like a lot of companies because i don't know how that makes sense jkl i mean like some businesses run high margin some are low margins some are losing money some are over investing it's complicated i don't have the solution that's why i'm sort of saying well one of the i think one of the optics issues here is you know people are like that company didn't pay any taxes that company sells this many iphones that companies yes because they're they're doing what tax laws were designed to do which is to encourage investment uh so how do you fix it give me a solution freebird i don't i think that once businesses are mature and they start dividend in cash and making distributions and they're profitable that might be the time to tax them i'm not sure why would they ever do that if they had an army of people saying hey you don't have to you don't want to change the point if they're investing in growth they're creating jobs and they're growing the economy and that's what we said was fine i don't think they're creating as many jobs as you think but they are growing the economy that's why you have to tax the corporation because that's the effective proxy for taxing gdp yeah look i i would be all about let me just i'll wear my libertarian hat again for a second but like i would be all about taxation if i felt like my dollars had a positive roi where they ended up and the problem right now is like government spending is set up in such a way that it's effectively been gamified and people extract capital from the government and my dollars are not getting a positive roi for me or for society i would rather have them which is why you left let's be honest that's why you left san francisco i mean it's just that's spending more time i left san francisco i've got a family and i and i need a backyard so that's a little bit but it isn't part of it that you are san francisco is a separate degree of incompetence like but yes you're right they're spending more than ever and it's getting worse san francisco's a whole another a whole other nightmare jake out well like i'm just speaking california in general right now whether it's the state level or the federal level it feels to me and i think it feels to a lot of people that dollars aren't being spent in a way that's generating a return for the taxpayer and i think we all feel that way and i think that's what's frustrating it's not about how much one's being taxed it's about how are those tax dollars being spent and are they being spent in a way that secures the future of our nation of our people of our livelihoods etc and making you know giving everyone access to opportunity what's hap what's happened what's happened is we've created things like student loan programs and you know housing programs and infrastructure programs that are literally just giving away money to private companies that are profiteering off of government spending right and it's cronie as our favorite professor scott galloway says it's one thing i really do agree with it it is that there is this notion of crony capitalism where the united states and state governments even local governments as seen in san francisco california all the way up to the federal level are spending money in a way that i think we all feel um is benefiting some disproportionately to most now if there was a high degree of taxation and everyone was benefited in a meaningful way and those programs were well managed and capital flowed meaningfully to to support everything we want to support great i think everyone would raise their hand raise two hands and say tax the heck out of me let's make that happen but that's not what happens and i think that's the primary aversion to high taxation sacks you get the final word yeah i mean look what i'm worried about is taxes are going up big time no matter what happens in washington spending is going up big time we now have peacetime deficits that are the biggest that they've ever been the deaths the national debt the peacetime national debts the highest has ever been uh we have a looming debt crisis in china we have supply chain shortages what could go uh i mean you know there's a lot of things here that could upset the apple cart and i what i'm afraid of is we're going to look back at this year the thousand unicorns being minted and say that really was the golden era and everything happened and after that we really screwed up sex you sound like the old guy at starbucks it says that every generation and complains about the last generation on the golden era and it's all down how much does music suck today normally normally i will say how impressive it is that ten years ago none of those unicorns existed and it is likely the case that three trillion dollars of value was created via private funding and private companies over the last 10 years so all these entrepreneurs all these employees anyone working at these businesses anyone involved in these businesses should be thrilled about the fact that you from xero created three and a half trillion dollars of value in 10 years that's extraordinary yeah i'm not i'm not trying to create nostalgia about the past i'm talking about the present and trying to preserve it because i'm seeing some storm clouds on the horizon yeah i would like to play the best song from tony tony tony as we leave yeah okay everybody we're heading out this one's for you london breed [Music] state state approved entertainment you can take off your mass for this entertainment it's so good you guys watch uh squid game anybody watch wig game no we have lives nobody watched my game okay my kid my kid's been talking about that should i be letting them watch the squid game or is that no it's the most violent uh korean horror dystopian uh show ever watched they're going to be scarred for life hey as a follow-up did you uh did you stop your kids from uh from tick tock did you take your kids off tick tock they told yeah i went in there i'm like kids what are you watching [Music] i'll tell you in a second [Music] yeah so did you take your kids off tick tock yeah i went in there i was like kids what are you watching they're like dad get the hell out of here yeah they said tell us our names and he was like okay i'll be right back jack if you could tell me to turn it off tick-tock by my name i'll do it david's like see you later the conversation was what do you guys watching on tick tock i hear it's all sex and drugs they're like no we're watching dance videos i'm like okay go ahead i trust you the dance videos are literally like absolutely uh sex and drug based every single one of them it is so devious oh stop it is not that you're so exaggerated i am so not exaggerating literally the if you listen take the most obscene lyric to uh obscene hook to any rap song that's what trends oh my god it's so true guys every generation says the same about the natural it's unbelievable right no but it is like explicit listen whatever i mean like you know um i just want to pearl jam and you know all the way back to the beach boys and shaking his hips yeah exactly yeah but i mean no this when i say it's explicit it is literally expensive you just don't get the youth j-cal you don't understand them i i think i understand it a little bit too well anyway you do not see you listen i oh hey guys are we going to do the all in summit or not i actually went to the code conference and i was like this was amazing to get back out you got to stop talking about ideas and actually just doing them what are you talking about we created this pot i'm just trying to get buy in jason just do it okay all right i need your buy-in we have a voting system here we're going in miami miami okay first year second year italy not so here's how it's going to work 250 tickets 200 for purchase 50 for scholarship all in summit three days miami saks and i are off to the races more people bro why do you have to keep it so exclusive you're just so excited what is it i want to invert the top top-down hierarchy to what i want to be a left-wing authoritarian what is it that i have to believe that is what you are a left-wing authoritarian i just want to be rich and powerful i don't care what party i money status am power yeah let me tell you let me tell you why i like this idea is because to the points we're talking about with coinbase earlier we you know we have these conferences in the tech industry and they're frankly run by people who hate tech in the tech industry and people who have successful tickets right exactly and so the i see these tech founders going up on these stages and subjecting themselves to these interrogations by people who hate them and i'm like what are they doing like it makes no sense i'm putting up a form i'm going to let people take deposits i'm going to pick a month and we're going to go how many people went to the conference guys you went to this week uh i the code conference i think was probably three or four hundred by design it was a third or half how much how much tickets i i didn't actually buy a ticket because i didn't want to be in the conference itself because i was concerned about a breakthrough virus but i did host the poker game with skye and brooke tickets i think are 8 000 for code and i think ted is up to 10 or 15. so maybe how much are we charging we made like twenty seventy five hundred seventy five hundred we're charging seventy five hundred so two hundred and ten tickets and then fifty scholarships for people who wouldn't be able to afford it so the the gross revenue here so we want 1.5 million and what's our cost going to be cost will be a million and what so wait so we're get so we're making profit on this deal no i'm making a profit we spend i may be very clear we spend what we i am buying the wine and you will shut the [ __ ] up okay so then it's going to be it's going to cost 2 million so it's going to make 1.5 i don't know if he's going to win no it's gonna cost i want a wine budget so that everybody that comes is it feels like they've had an exceptional food and beverage experience is gonna spend half a million dollars on wine no joke so then it has to be 10k a ticket but you know what the people who are coming can afford it they don't check out we're not privileging you with some profiteering i'm not profiteering off of it honestly the reason i want to do it most is i want to play poker for three days and i want to have us the four of us interview the most iconoclastic interesting people and i want to do it for the fans so that some number of fans get to come who wouldn't normally be able to come to a conference at this level and i just think it would be a blast it'd be fun to get together okay stop talking about it and do it okay i'll do it all right i want to make sure everybody's bought in i mean so get you [ __ ] on the side i'll set a date okay not not the first week of february because i think i have a i think in march april march april also not the third week of february because i think i'm skiing in europe just [ __ ] can you just give up you're not gallivanting around europe and other places bro i'm i'm grinding every day here you see what i'm doing it's like i'm [ __ ] working hard too i mean it's crazy right now it's like the i've never seen the market like this i mean it is bonkers enjoy a lot less what's that enjoy it while it lasts exactly all right everybody we'll see you next time for the dictator champ polly hopper tia for the rain man david sacks and the queen of quinoa david friedberg i'm j-cal and we'll see you on episode 50 bye bye [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] we need to get these [Music]








our daughter's head has dropped because the our doctor she she felt the head and she was like yeah it's it's hey chamoth whose head has gotten bigger uh yours or your daughters [Music] what do you mean don't quit your day job sex yeah it sucks that didn't quite land that didn't last he's trying out material total flaw we are not in rhythm you know why it's mercury retrograde our 50th episode is gonna suck because of this here we go three two let your winners ride [Music] rain man [Music] david source it to the fans and they've [Music] all right the facebook whistleblower hearings occurred and facebook um where's your hey everybody hey everybody here hello everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast episode 50 we made it to 50. nobody expected us to make it here we are we've made it and everybody is uh thrilled uh to be here with you and thank you for the support over the first 50 episodes episode closer to getting cancelled one episode close man how great would it be to be canceled and never have to work again oh that would be wonderful okay so uh francis haugen uh revealed herself on sunday night on 60 minutes and then appeared we don't get our own personal interests or no we're done with that unbelievable mercury retrograde mercury retrograde mercury retrograde doesn't the audience know us by now after 50 episodes with us again this week is the rain man himself david sacks and the queen of quinoa david friedberg i love the intro of course the dictator chamoth paulie apatina and i'm your boy jacal sacks i gotta say i think i think your aum is positively correlated with the bags under your eyes if you mean it's getting bigger i mean yes they're happy they're heavy good lord they're heavy dragging you down that's where you're hiding all that solana in your [ __ ] under your eyes you better clear that salon position what's your lock up 24 months [ __ ] no he's trying to sell it to me on text message yeah of course we're negotiating discounts i just had the foundation hey you're [ __ ] the whole thing up bro you don't you don't think you keep i'm holding anything without a discount everything is a discount everything's discounted you want to clear that position in an llc are you saying i got a billion dollars of solana no bro i'm saying i have one but you know i brought it at a discount but you're holding correct ish yes okay yeah me too well i mean if something appreciation in an asset that you've invested in early something you need to you know at least clear a position of and lock in a win i mean what what's enough 100x 500x you gotta at some point bank a win right well i think you have to put things in a bucket of like is it an investment or is it something that represents uh an idea that you love so much if it's the latter you should never sell if it's the former yeah you got to manage risking or rather you know is it a trade or is it something you want to own by the way let me just clean this up because um solano was not a direct investment for us what we did is we invested in um in a crypto uh venture firm called multi coin capital this is back in 2017 we realized like crypto was becoming like a full-time job for us it was a total rabbit hole and we were like we don't have time to figure out this like 24 7 trading stuff but we met kyle and tushar who were these two young guys we met him through vinnie lingam actually and they were creating multi-coin capital and we actually invested we gave them a million bucks at a 20 cap to help set up their firm and then we invested in their they had both a venture fund and a hedge fund and they were like the first money into solana so that fund i mean it's like a 100x fund it's just like bonkers crazy and so as a result of that we are um indirect beneficiaries of this huge increase in solana it will end up being about you know a billion dollars of i think solana for us in terms of returns but um but it's the multi-coin guys determine the trading decisions on that yeah and so people who don't know solana is a programmable you know ethereum uh competitor i guess and it's at 50 billion dollars so market cap it was trading at a dollar not long ago and now it's at 164. it's an ethereum competitor basically for you know a smart contract platform and there's a lot of people i'd say smart money in silicon valley who are betting on a flipping where solana could ultimately overtake ethereum as the preferred platform but even if it doesn't overtake ethereum it you know it's the number eight cryptocurrency right now you know it could go there's a lot of people betting it'll go to number three or you know what have you additionally it is a fraction of a penny for a transaction uh and it can do many more traction actions than ethereum so it's you know technically should be much cheaper if you're buying nfts right now you're probably spending you know tens of dollars you know uh in fees on ethereum whereas if you did those same nfts which some people are starting to do on solana they would cost a fraction of a penny correct david or chama yeah i think the the platform is is known for being a faster cheaper you know blockchain really really congratulations and if vinnie lingam's instagram is any indication he did pretty well because his instagram suddenly turned into a world tour on private jets yeah he's like which which pro which island should i buy and well like vinnie uh was sort of like a i don't think he's full-time multi-coin but he was sort of a venture partner to kyle and tushar and he helped set them up this is back in 2017 he helped bring us in as the first investors and i mean for us it was sort of a founder bet combined with a like a team like sort of a space bet like we knew the cryptocurrencies were starting to be traded 24 7. we knew it required more of like a hedge fund skill set than what we had and um so we made you know we made a bet on those guys and man strategies right sax is if you are lp in new fund managers uh which i've done a couple of times now you get to learn from them uh and basically dive into a data set of a new market right i mean it's like one of the nice things about being an lp in a fund is you can place a small bet whether it's 50k or 500k or 5 million whatever it is you you get like this meta education of an entire sector correct yeah but i think you know we didn't do it to learn from them although we have it's more that we realized that crypto was like i said becoming such a rabbit hole like we realized we would either need to do crypto full-time as a fund or we would need to like partner with people who actually did yeah and you see that with like a lot of vc firms now is they're creating like specialized crypto funds or at least they have specialized crypto partners there's so much to know about the crypto world it's a hard thing to invest in unless you're like totally focused on it i've struggled with that like i've tried to go deep on a couple topics and like i realized holy [ __ ] i've been in this for like four to six hours just trying to learn this stuff and i'm not like there and then i feel uncertain about making any decisions i i totally get it i mean you got to have folks like working on this and the the pace is changing um so rapidly uh you really need to kind of be up to date on what's next you know what the other issue is when you look at crypto people use the word crypto as if it's like that's all there is totally crypto is like that's like distributed computing yeah right ecash cryptography uh you know financial modeling or building new economic systems chemoth there's business model innovation there's technology innovation there's economic innovation it's distributed computing innovation yeah infrastructure infrastructure hardware i mean there's there's quite a lot of uh layers of activity are you spending time in crypto yourself or do you have people doing it for you or how are you kind of yeah we have look we have we have a lot of it um a lot of a lot of everything so yeah we have things but did you go deep yourself to mop like how do you spend enough time to really get up to speed on all the goings on i cherry pick and i snipe and uh opportunities where i get intellectually curious and jump in but a lot of the credit goes to my team there's a couple folks that spend a lot of their time in it and you know we've we've had a couple people do extremely well for us you know similar similar to david's story back in the day you know i invested uh in barry silbert and uh decent market barry silver yeah and uh you know dcg is now i don't know i'm guessing a 20 billion dollar company maybe more i don't know so how does it mechanically work with your team they they are investigating opportunities and then they come to you and bring you you know hey we'll do a meeting and i'm going to share four with you and then you say hey let me get on the phone with that guy do you basically go deep go deep when something shows up no so so basically what happens is they have carte blanche to do whatever they want and what they're typically doing is they're working with entrepreneurs to seed projects and you know to to to get projects off the ground and then at some point when those when those projects become large enough then they'll issue tokens and you know we'll get a certain allocation of those tokens and so we've done that for you know call it i don't know some number of projects that we think are valuable then along the way you know they'll have certain views on bitcoin they'll have certain views on ethereum they'll have certain views on solana and will make capital allocation decisions they tend to have the ability to do whatever they want and then what i tend to do is just think about when it gets above like it to me i need to see the chance to make at least you know in the rough justice around you know 500 to a billion dollars and then i'll get involved but otherwise they just kind of run the whole thing let me ask you guys a question here you know when you look at the market caps of these projects it seems like things are changing uh cardona or cordana is number three now and uh tether still remains number five xrp still number six but so i would encourage people to not look at it like that i think looking at it as a rank list betrays what it is so you know i'll give you a simple example let's like compare the the fate of two projects or actually right now there's a distributed form of um discord that's being built discord the chat app yeah in a completely distributed way with an integrated crypto wallet because if you look at discord it's really two cohorts of people there's gaming and there's crypto right so those are the two big ones yeah so you know that's an example of a really interesting product that has some real potential then if you look at something like diesel diesel is a decentralized social programming framework then if you look at something like helium that's completely about building a large distributed you know connection of um of onramps to the internet so internet connectivity so those are three completely different ideas with three completely different paths to success if to invest in those tokens you you have to believe in three totally different sets of things yeah so to look at it on a rank list and just buy something because it's cheap it's stupid don't worry no no that wasn't really my question my question was you know we we have an extraordinary number of the public who've invested in bitcoin and ethereum as number one and number two and those projects feel may be stagnant when compared to the dynamism of what i'll call you know the projects launched in the last three or four years because they're at the different no no but you're talking about confusing again that's what i mean those are layer one protocols right meaning they are at the core substrate of how all of crypto is going to work then you have these other projects that build on top of these things in different ways or build around them so my point is if you don't have if you don't want to take the time to understand which layer twos you want to own and which layer ones you want to own and why i think you're much better off i i understand your point my point etf or something else because there are there are ways to own these things so for example david david solana is does not need ethereum to exist so my point is do we do we see a day when this you know the past decade has been about bitcoin and ethereum do we see a day when maybe people stop buying those and start buying these new ones anything's possible but here's here's the evolution of our thinking i mean the first step was realizing okay we need to own bitcoin why because you know there's now enough evidence where what like a decade we're more than a decade into this nobody has been able to essentially counterfeit a bitcoin it is you know new money it is it is better money so if you so i'm not going to convince people right now of the argument for bitcoin but if you believe in it that's sort of the first step is you realize you really need to have one to two percent of your portfolio in bitcoin in the event that fiat money sort of becomes debased and eventually moved to crypto then you realize well wait a second bitcoin is just one application of blockchains there's a bunch of applications of blockchains so maybe we need to own not just sort of you know digital money but we also need to own the underlying blockchain platform and that leads you to ethereum then you realize that there's a bunch of competitors to ethereum and it's still very early days and one of those guys might ultimately displace ethereum as a blockchain platform then you realize that there's all these applications on top of all these blockchains and so you know the conclusion i come to after all of that is i can't figure all this out and well maybe i could if i was willing to go back to school and like make this a full-time job which i just don't want to do i mean i'm lazy and that's why i focus on sass like that's what i know you're killed investor yeah like i'm not going to reinvent myself it's like you playing hold'em versus plo right right right exactly so but this is why we partner with multi-coin capital so what i would just say is like the idea that you as an individual investor are going to like you know pick off the one cryptocurrency here or there to invest in i mean that's going to be a lottery i would i would find a manager basically who is really good who has a track record who understands this stuff our approach is to hire very young extremely technical computer scientists and mathematicians to basically do the work that's that's working yeah and you know one of the things that i think these guys do and the reason why it is very helpful for them to be computer scientists is these are all open source projects so they go look at the repos just go look at it go look at it and actually see the changes being made and this is like do you realize there's only 12 people who are actively working on solana in the but you need to look at all the code check-ins you need to look at the velocity of the code check-in so you can see like how many projects are being created on these platforms the white papers are also really exceptional like if you if you read these white papers they are they're they're they're really incredibly thoughtful and and well written and you can really understand what their goals are and you can make some informed decisions there but again if you're not going to be in the business of being in this ecosystem because i think david's right everything is moving so fast um what's successful today could be just a dog tomorrow and vice versa that i think speculating in this market will um not only will it be super volatile but more than likely you're going to lose all your money so i would encourage people to not speculate in crypto i would encourage you to figure out an elegant way of having an abstracted bet if to the extent you care about it and by the way in the uk for example there are ways where you can own publicly traded mutual funds that give you exposure to this it's just simple yes yes yeah but there are mutual funds of credit do the work find these mutual funds just own those things and let somebody else do the hard work because it is too it's too hard some of the other investments we made back in 2017 2018 time frame one was a company called bitwise which was creating an etf for crypto so it's a uh a a monthly rebalanced portfolio of i think the top 10 cryptocurrencies and you could buy it they finally got approved by the sec and you can buy it like a uh like with a ticker symbol from your e-trade account exactly so that was that was pretty incredible to see the progress they've made and then the other big bet we made was just uh institutional custody back in 2017 we invested in bitco actually bill lee helped found that company uh many years ago and then that became last year uh galaxy announced a deal to acquire them for i think 1.2 billion largest crypto acquisition to date the thesis there was just that crypto would go more institutional and i think we're starting to see that now where endowments and so on are realizing they need to have some portion maybe one or two percent of their portfolio in crypto and so it's unrealistic look we have two almost three trillion dollars of market cap in crypto it's unrealistic for folks to expect people to be able to be living in discord channels and doing all of this work i think what that means is that the sec is going to be asked increasingly more often to approve simpler on-ramps for this stuff and now in the last week by the way we had a pretty important two things happen both jerome powell and gary ginzer basically said crypto's here to stay and you know we're not going to ban this stuff and so hopefully what it means is that you get some etfs passed in the united states you know grayscale is one there could be more and i think that stuff makes it much easier for folks to own this stuff well clear regulation would be a great thing for the industry for people to buy into it and removing some of the let's call them i don't want to say bad actors but people who are maybe questionable like tether you know i don't know if you saw the bloomberg story yesterday but you know a bloomberg reporter basically found out that tether he got the list of what tether owns with their stablecoin and it looks like they're giving a lot of loans to other crypto projects and own a lot of chinese paper in that they are basically making the float on 69 billion sweeping it which then incentivizes them to take risky bets because they get paid on them and it's anything but a stable coin if you think about it from that regard it's i don't know the details on tether i won't speak to that but i'll say that any stable coin if it's not 100 backed by dollars if that's the currency that's going in and out or yeah other hard currency that's not a stable coin right you know a stable coin is supposed to be a service it's not supposed to be a a speculators currency it's basically just supposed to be a mechanism by at the on-ramps and off-ramps of the crypto ecosystem you can convert your dollars into a temporary uh again stable coin that will hold its value so you can a poker chip that you can use to then buy bitcoin or ethereum or whatever yeah usdc usd uh c jeremy alaire's circle competitor from circle just said that he would switch to a hundred percent to what you're saying cash cash equivalents it guys this is this has always been a money market fund it should be right treated like a money market fund and it should be regulated and managed like money which was tethered original vision and then they flipped the script because i think they got greedy and now they own i think that's what because they weren't regulated by by the way by the way it speaks to the role of regulation like you know a lot of people have trust and faith because they make some claim but there's no regulator actually checking on their claims the only people that want regulation are two ends of the spectrum so young and so disruptive where they want rails to operate legally and so big and so over the top that they want to basically entrench themselves for the rest of their lives that's it no everybody in the middle doesn't really want regulation well what's a uh what's a what if you're a crypto company or if you're a big tech you both want regulation yeah well but there are some narrow cases like again you know if if if a stable coin is going to say that we are just a money market fund we're 100 dollar reserve it is really nice to have a regulator somebody we trust to go in there and put the stamp of approval on it trust it that is a valid role i think for a regulator in traditional financial markets you have these self uh regulating bodies um i i think it's finra is a self-regulating body right and so you know somebody's self-regulating bodies should be formed in the crypto community i don't know if they're doing this i'm so naive in this space but certainly would make sense to have an sro form that that does self-policing effectively within the community rather than try and bring in a government regulator here's the thing if you police yourself you can uh really uh define the execution uh and the ramifications of that policing if you have 30 call it competitors and cooperators in the in the market space doing this together it can be a highly effective model for creating a system of trust and reliability and not having to you know bring in you know call it outside incompetence to overseeing the rules and rights yeah another area we need standards is around the token cap tables for these projects right so how much how much of the token cap table goes to the founders what are the rules around them selling what are those investing periods and what are the disclosures around them selling in public markets we have 10b5 so if you're an insider who runs these companies you have to disclose when you're selling there's no similar rule for crypto i think there probably should be right like if you own the if you own the token and you run this project as publicly traded and the public can buy it you should really probably have to disclose your your sales yes and maybe um you know these it's very strange because they're running foundations and i had a crypto person on from a music crypto project and he said they had like three or four hundred million in this project in panama i was like who's on the board of that and he's like i can't say why can't you say and he said security reasons i was like well anybody who's on a public board has to be public and of course they have you know people who are on the board of ge or ibm or amazon they have security issues like they deal with their security issues that doesn't mean they don't disclose who they are he's like yeah i'm not comfortable saying who they are and it's like okay well they sold three or four hundred million i was like how do they give that money out i'm like he's like i'm not sure i'm not on it i'm like what like there's some organization in panama that's uh it was really weird and i think one thing that i'll say positively about about these crypto founders is that they uh will never allow a single venture investor to clog up their cap table number one they do a great job of creating these large broad syndicates of participation when they seed their projects and then you know a lot of it goes into treasury where then they issue coins as needed and i think that that strategy actually is very pro employee and pro ecosystem so you know when we see these projects all these companies tend to raise you know three four five million bucks it all tends to be at like 30 million pre and it all tends to be uh distributed so like you know you know it's us andreessen sequoia and it's like you know we put in 200 grand each or 400 grand each you know that's why you're forced to then go into the market if you believe in a project and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy into it after the fact and i think that that's very um very powerful it's a really important dynamic that if it comes back to uh traditional venture could be really disruptive why well could you imagine a sas founder that basically all of a sudden says all right you know what i'm raising a six million dollar series a you know craft can take 500k sequoia you can have 500k um you know blah blah folks and then you raise 6 million bucks that way and you never allow anybody to have more than call it you know a few percent of a company so the fact that it's like a it's like a mini ipo it's like a private ipo on sand hill road yeah and then your board construction looks entirely different and then as a result you know founder protections probably go way up employee protections probably go way up it's like governance goes way down uh no i actually think what will happen is you're less likely in a round like that to be okay with some dork dingleberry joining your [ __ ] board you're going to actually point to some industry expert and say this person is joining my board she does xyz job at such and such a startup and then the investors say wow well that's a pretty great advocate for the business go ahead and do that another thing i learned about this whole token space was when i talked to anatoly from uh solana when they sold their three or four hundred million uh tokens to fund uh the company because they consider them utility tokens not shares they paid taxes on it so the irs is getting massive amounts of tax revenue well think about it they're selling the token it's supposed to be for utility well therefore it's a taxable event that actually was really smart that is showing i think some wisdom because there's a lot of founders who want to have their cake and eat it too which is to say they want to say that these are utility tokens um and and they don't pay tax and then when they later get traded they want to say that they're not you know they're not securities but so when does the tax get paid i think it's really smart to pay the tax up front to establish that this is a corporate sale they're basically paying the corporate tax right yes that is what is because this is this is the problem is if if you wait until they're traded publicly and then say no no no they're they're utility focused on security tokens the government's going to ask you well why didn't you pay corporate income tax when you sold them right so that is actually showing some perspective i think uh could somebody look that word up for me four-sidedness jkl okay great awesome it's so great that you have the two producers on either side of you right now feeding you vocabulary words well done so here's here's um you know uh another question with this if the majority of people sacks um just put your legal hat on for a second if the majority of people who bought a token in a a project we'll call it the you know acme crypto project they buy acme coins if they're buying them and they have absolutely no interest in using them for the utility and they say i bought these as a speculative device and the founder says there are utility tokens but let's say 70 percent of the people who bought them said i didn't buy them for that reason they just came out right and said i bought this to speculate on the price what should the government do should they deem them a security or should they deem them a utility token i think that's a complicated question but i i think that there should be an opportunity for these cryptocurrencies to establish themselves as utility tokens because they are they do serve a purpose they are designed to be part of a system right they're not just objects of speculation and by the way even if they were we don't we don't treat baseball cards as you know as as sort of as security so it wouldn't necessarily make them a security just because they're speculated on they actually do serve a function in a designed computer system so i think what's important here is that there's a safe harbor where these crypto companies know what the rules are and if they if they can basically meet the criteria such as by paying corporate income tax when they sell the tokens and other things like that that they won't later be deemed to be engaged in an unlawful sale of securities i think the i think the important thing is just that entrepreneurs founders know what the rules are so they can abide by them and not be and they don't right now well so they don't get surprised later they don't get whammied but with basically you know because they are building something legitimate here you know right but it would seem to the sniff test if the people buying the tokens have no idea have never written a line of code have no use for them uh i don't see why that's relevant i don't see why that's relevant well because they're profiting off of them as if they're shares and unlike baseball cards which you can't sell a thousand baseball cards for an increasingly uh you know you know in a in a very instantaneous way you would have to put them in an auction yeah you could say a lot of friction there'd be a lot of friction certainly like yeah uh freeberg what do you think if the majority of people buying a token are doing it to speculate can the founders say it's a utility token and then those people who are trading it like either baseball cards minted coins whatever analogy shares you want to use are in it for the increase in the value should it be a security and should they have to play by the rules we play at in the traditional venture startup game i mean the question is what's the utility so i mean if you can demonstrate some utility then maybe that's the uh the and this will probably be litigated at some point right i'm sure there'll be enough capital sloshing around here that someone will say you know what we believe strong i mean we're seeing this happen with ripple already but um someone will litigate this and we'll get some clear definition on you know what statutes are going to be referenced and what those statutes might say with respect to the how this ties to the definition of utility and then that'll become hopefully a standard that people can kind of look to to guide them in the future but it's definitely the wild west right now and everyone's going to try it the reason i bring it up is because gensler was sort of floating this argument chamath what do you think i think that um you can't wipe three trillion dollars of value out of the world and so so pragmatically hard to do got it so it's here to stay and it's too institutionalized now so you know there's just way too many organized pools of capital that are now speculating inside of this entire ecosystem you know i saw a tweet today there was a there's a firm i think like called jump trading or something it's like a high-speed frequency trading organization and they tweeted out some pictures where you know they're they're uh they hired a bunch of folks to start a jump and they did a coding bootcamp on solana that was their onboarding as an example so when you have people in high finance you know really vested in this thing and you have three trillion dollars of value that'll go to 6 trillion and then go to 10 trillion this can't go away so that's why i think powell and genzler had to say some version of that on the record which is you know we're not going to ban this stuff because they know it's not possible so i think david's right you have to create some rules make folks and let folks pay their taxes you know i remember for example like i did this bitcoin transaction in 2014 or something i bought some land i used bitpay i transferred some bitcoin bought the land blah blah i was like you know whatever but whatever yeah i mean i i i left i mean i i owned a lot at the time so it wasn't that big of a deal but my point is finding a way for me to pay my taxes was a huge deal i remember and you know we filed the tax return and we tried to make sure that we paid our taxes these are very complicated even if you want to be conformant to the government it's impossible right now so they just need to create some rules where folks can say here's what i own here's what it's worth tell me how much i owe you and we're all willing to pay or not maybe we're on i'm i am because i just think it's like make sure that we can we can trade around it hedge it structure it do the things that we would normally do with any other risk assets right now that's very hard and when you own lots of this stuff it sits in your balance sheet and you just take these enormous swings and you're just like god you can't do anything around this stuff and that's not a viable financial market that doesn't yeah to be specific about against lorcet i just looked it up here you know he compared utility tokens with you know laundry mat tokens or tickets to the opera and he said entrepreneurs are choosing to perceive their tokens as utility to sidestep regulation um and that here's the quote there are highly speculative investment tokens for people who are trying to save or speculate for the fut their future and that's why i think it's appropriate to bring them inside the investor protection perimeter i agree with him i also agree with you chamoth that this is a can of worms that i don't know how you put the genie back in the box but he's he's partially right i mean he is partially right on some tokens but he's not completely accurate on some other tokens i think it's on a case-by-case basis and it depends listen i think anybody who is buying these tokens right now knows that they're engaged and in financial speculation this idea that people in middle middle america are going to blow their retirement savings on crypto i don't i just don't know but if they know if they're doing speculation then it should be a security no no david i think you're totally wrong i totally buy it look at the quarterly returns uh the filings of earnings from companies like robin hood and how much and square and how much money they make from crypto and look at their audience that's totally not true but don't you think that audience skews really young and they're getting their like covet stimulus check and they're yoloing it into meme stocks or crypto what does that have to do with well because you're making it sound like they're going to blow their retirement savings okay well if you're talking about a 25 year old who's got 5 000 retirement savings maybe but they still got you know they still got 40 years of work ahead hold on a second wait no they don't this is going to be the least hard-working generation of our lifetime why no no not not because you're not hardworking why there's 70 trillion dollars that boomers have that they are about to pass down to these folks on average between 2 and 3 trillion a year for the next 30 years also they know how to do gig work like they're so smart this generation they know how to do projects for five grand and float themselves you're gonna take one entire turn of the world's gdp and give it to a hundred million people in america over the next 20 to 30 years that is what is actually going to happen so yeah look i think i think of course they're going to keep yoloing this stuff yeah look i think i think we're getting off on like a little bit of a tangent here my point my point is not that there shouldn't be investor protections but rather that i think we also need to balance another important objective which is to create a hospitable environment for innovation and the fact of the matter is that you've got a lot of brilliant young entrepreneurs computer scientists building this financial infrastructure of the future with crypto it's not just speculation there is a lot of code being written it has functionality there's a purpose to it we don't we don't necessarily want to interfere with that to to them every starter has to do their securities though david all the other startups that are not in crypto are playing by the rules so it's crypto people get a pass it's unfair i agree with jkl people make this claim and i just think it's so specious do you think that you would have made a single professional decision in your life based on tax rate have you ever made a single like i'm going to start this company i'm going to make this product you know i'm going to change this job i just think that most i'm not talking about paying taxes i think it was smart for for example solano to pay corporate taxes on their token sale i think everyone should pay their taxes that's not what we're talking about here um and i'm not saying that gensler shouldn't prescribe regulations i think that part of the purpose of those regulations should be to give entrepreneurs predictability to be able to give them a safe harbor so they can build what they want to build let me make one final point i'm just saying from my perspective i just think that if you have clear sensible taxation that's 90 of what this industry needs and i don't think it will it will change anybody's real motivation to work inside this ecosystem just like just like entrepreneurship doesn't change when capital rates capital gains rates look i i've paid i pay taxes um at you know on on my crypto sales like it was any other investment since the beginning no that's not the issue the issue is when you're a company and you're raising money should you be allowed to not follow securities law because you say it's a token freedberg uh when you look at this an nft company came out last this past week that was selling shadow shares in startups and anyone in the world could buy a shadow share in a private company like stripe etc in this fantasy football league they wound up shutting it down or changing it because they didn't want to trade on other people's intellectual property they were concerned about that but just looking at it the public in america 96 of them who are not accredited cannot buy shares of stripe in the secondary market but you can buy nfts in it and speculate on the nfts which are accelerating from you know a thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars in these different clubs um how is it fair that crypto companies get to not obey basic securities laws freed berg well it's not a security there's no underlying asset okay it's a collectible and nft is clearly a collectible jkl uh okay i don't know when you legal i don't know for people to sell them and they're appreciating i mean i do agree with something different it sounds like art to me yeah you could go draw a piece of uh a picture of stripe and put it on a piece of paper and go down to downtown wherever and stand in front of the burrito shop and try and sell it than a security but they're acting as securities in relation to the fundraising of these projects so i think that's the change not everything is a security yeah there's no secured interest you don't have any secured interest it's literally just a uh like an image a figure i was just offered a giacometti sculpture but i turned it down how much 60 million is not going to comment on the price yeah i have to say no was stephen cohen selling it not commenting on the seller i bet stephen cohen was selling it that was the record deal uh stephen cohen bought that giacometti sculpture a few years ago was like the highest uh price ever paid at auction for a piece of art media can i can i just tell you my problem with with it i i took the price and i divided it by the height in centimeters and it just tilted me is price per square inch of metric and it is in my head in 2016 15 stephen cohen paid 141 million dollars for the giacometti sculpture lom odo or deut uh incredible and i think you're right it's about 12 inches tall or something it looks like it was done by a uh 12 year old oh my god stuff oh jacal cal you're gonna stop yeah this is the billionaire equivalent of uh of cr of crypto and nfts right totally totally i don't know what scam this guy's running but that looks like anyone can raise their hand and say i have an independent objective assessment of the value of anything in the world um and you can look at it from high to low and this is all um effectively subjective it looks like it was a sculpture that was in a giant fire and that somebody pulled out of the ashes it's a beautiful piece if you want to read a little bit of art history yeah you can understand a little bit about yakimati's work but it's um it's a 70 inch piece not 12 inches sorry and um yeah his work is all about kind of like how do you capture the essence of the form anyway this is a that's super ridiculous it's like somebody made something out of mud somebody showed it into a clay oven i have a very funny stevie cohen story so this is like 10 years ago at art basel in miami and uh the day before the art fair opens it's called the furnace people and so uh you know uh it's like a day where you can go and see the the stuff the day in advance and you can you know kind of buy stuff or whatever and uh it's very funny it's kind of like um you know like when walmart does like a black friday thing like everybody lines up and then they open the doors and we all run in and i was standing side by side we were right at the front of the line and i noticed that he had these uh this was my first time there he had new balance running shoes and i thought what is he doing but then when the doors went open they just took off and started running and i was walking wearing normal loafers and then i realized i should have been wearing running shoes you don't own normal loafers you were wearing italian loafers uh i missed that the balloon dog guy it's like the it's like the running of the bulls it was it was the running of the bulls i missed out on everything running of the billionaires i got to the things after and i was like oh sorry i sold it to stevie cohen christ i had blisters on my feet it was brutal do you guys know we haven't even started our agenda i'm [ __ ] moderating this three two all right facebook let's start our show i'm sure everybody by now has seen uh francis haugen uh on 60 minutes and testifying uh she seemed incredibly credible well spoken and had very common uh sense non-extreme views about what should be happened what should happen with the research that facebook has been funding that shows like other media forms uh instagram and facebook have a really terrible effect on young people specifically young girls and uh body dysmorphia uh which seems to be the one thing that is landing pretty well her suggestions were not to break up facebook hers was to have a regulatory body and to do soft interventions if you don't know software's questions her suggestions were worse than breaking up facebook well soft interventions let's get to that uh include things like hey in order to retweet the story on twitter you probably should read it first she thinks she wants to reform or she's an advocate for reforming section 230 in relation i think to the algorithms uh and the idea here would be that the algorithms are making an actual editorial decision uh which is something that i remember in the youtube early days they said we will not feature your videos uh that you're making but we will have the algorithm pick them because that keeps our safe harbor uh zuckerberg came back and uh wrote a uh spirited defense uh basically saying why would we do this research if we didn't care the people at this company care uh a ton sacks and the uh uh entire peter thiel cobble of you know acolytes and friends are coming on strong as uh pro facebook i'll have him uh talk about that he thinks it's uh facebook uh it's uh laughable that people are addicted to facebook yadda yadda so uh who wants to go first you chamoth or sax well look let me let me say a couple things i think that um i think zuck's the title of zuck's uh internal uh company post could have been titled uh which basically is his way of saying this is ridiculous and i don't believe it the the thing that she asked for in substance is a little different than what the doj did with microsoft in 2000 but in form is actually quite similar which basically is like gumming up how the internal product development would work inside the company and you know the most damaging thing you already saw which is that they had a bunch of planned product releases and then they put them on ice and i think this is really where unfortunately the most damage gets done because engineers won't really tolerate that for some amount of time right they'll put up with it initially but you know you've had uh i don't know i think like a 20 reduction in stock price so you had you know you lost 200 billion dollars of market cap there's probably going to be more turbulence in the company you can sustain and get through all of it as long as the engineers hold the line but if you basically slow down and put a pin in their ability to generate code and to put out features on the margins enough people i think will get frustrated and leave and i think the way that she you know what she is asking for was tantamount to that and i think that's the really destructive part of of what could go on here so they need to get this pinned down quickly get in front of regulators get some laws passed whether it's section 230 or whatever that's the path to salvation for facebook sex what do you what do you think i see you're basically saying this is like ridiculous and silly on twitter mike salan is saying that uh obviously peter thiel is on the board of uh facebook and you're gonna have to you're gonna have to give me time to unpack this jkl without getting hysterical because there is there's a lot of historical i want i'm getting i'm literally throwing it to you in a non-hysterical way you think that this is there's nothing to this let's understand what this really was okay you have this so-called whistleblower who is working with the staff of the senator committee giving documents to the wall street journal and then appears on 60 minutes in this great unveiling 36 hours later she's testifying on capitol hill that does not happen the senate committees do not operate that fast this was coordinated she's got a democrat a well-known democratic operative named bill burton working for her she's got a team of lawyers she's got a pr team this is coordinated by who this is a coordinated hit okay by anti-facebook forces starting with the senate judiciary committee who want to regulate who she's working you're already interrupting jason i'm asking you who you said working with somebody i don't know who it is just let him make this argument and then just stop let i want to hear what he has to say okay what is the purpose of this testimony first of all we can go over the details of what she said i don't think there's anything new here this is all the same arguments we've been hearing from these same sort of forces who want to regulate facebook whether it's the um whether it's the senators on the committee who've hauled up zuckerberg no fewer than four times to lecture him about the need for more censorship uh or it's these forces in the media who basically want facebook it's all about you know having more censorship but in any event there was nothing really new there um what this really was was corroboration and uh of of of the same talking points they've been hearing for years and where and what it's all leading up to is there's a very important part of her testimony which is this is really the crux of it is that they that she proposed and what blumenthal wants he's the chairman of the senate district committee is a dedicated oversight body this is in this clip okay with a power to oversee social media platforms so what we have here is the government is now going to have a new agency they're saying like the ftc then she said a regulatory home where somebody like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like this and and hoggins said right now the only people in the world who are trying to analyze these experiments to understand what's happening inside of facebook are people who grew up inside of facebook or pinterest or another social media company basically people with her experience i mean i have to admire the hutzpah i mean she's basically proposing that she be made zuckerberg's boss okay that a new oversight board be created by the government which she would be appointed to which she presumably would run and this board is now going to uh prescribe regulations and rules for social networks in terms of how their news feed is going to run that is what was proposed on capitol hill that is what this operation is all about so it's about her getting a job and being uh lording over facebook is your claim no i think i think i think i think the purpose of all this is to create new regulatory oversight social networks i simply would note that she has proposed herself as somebody who would be on the sport which is pretty amazing but what this is really about is that new oversight power and is that a republican or a dem are you insinuating it's democrats who want to regulate this or all politicians want to regulate this because they're scared of facebook having too much power which i think we all agree facebook has too much power in in the public you've had the leaders you've had the leaders on the senate judiciary committee now for months calling up zuckerberg and dorsey and other social media leaders and basically lecturing them on the need to censor more to take down more material that is their objective this is not a conspiracy theory on my part this is expressly what they've said okay now until now is it left or right or both we come to that i think the republicans are a little bit confused on this issue but let me get to that so what you've heard until now is uh is that is is a tax on the supply side of the platform so what they've advocated is de-platforming people with heterox heterodox views dissenting voices and they have been de-platformed in large numbers obviously it started even before trump but certainly the sitting president united states was de-platformed youtube just took down a million coveted videos because they disagree with official position on covet so until now the censorship has been on the supply side of the platform what they're advocating for now is censorship on the demand side of the platform which is we're going to rewrite these news feed rules okay we're going to rewrite them because we can't give people what they want they're making these algorithms sound like they're these incredibly evil sinister things all the algorithms do at the end of the day is give the user more of what they're looking for okay that is not good enough for these politicians they want to rewrite that's not actually what they said they want to rewrite these rules to determine what people see no no what they said about the algorithms was that the algorithm had a multiplier on it and that this multiplier of people resharing it re-engaging the content would lead people and this was statistically proven in facebook's own research that things that were either misinformation or that were supercharged uh you know a polarizing issues they would rise quicker which then gave people not what they wanted in their feed they gave people what would increase the length of a stay on facebook or on youtube or on twitter for that matter and they think the antidote for this is to maybe not allow things in the algorithm to go viral because what you're doing is saying things that are either misinformation or polarizing um or will make things go to the top of the list and maybe we don't want that as a society let me intervene with a with a point of view on this because i think you're headed down a path that um to me i i don't think actually speaks to what's really going on it sounds like there's some sinister arc uh you know architecture here that's driving this outcome if you've never said that yeah well i mean it's implied because it's like oh well they're they're multiplying sinister stuff what do you do i'm saying they're just care about length of stay on the site my belief is they just wanted to care about revenue yeah so that's my exactly my point they they care about what consumers want to consume and consumers demand what they want to consume so think about media in the old days right we used to have books that an author would put out every year and so the author would get feedback on the book and so it would be one year on that feedback cycle then magazines would come out magazines would come out every month and so every month the magazine would get feedback on what sales were and they would make decisions editorial decisions and they would iterate tv shows came out every week newspapers came out every day cable tv came out every hour and they could adjust their content accordingly in the internet age the media is getting a much more kind of instantaneous feedback cycle and the call it publisher or editor or curator of that media ultimately ends up putting in front of the consumer more and more of what they want as a function of what they're choosing to watch and what we're calling kind of these algorithms quote unquote are really just the same thing that editors and publishers and others have done in the past which is looking at what the consumer votes by what they choose making decisions to put more of the things that they want in front of them the consumer consumes more of that and here's what's messed up we're getting a very ugly look in the mirror and what humanity and what citizens and what individuals actually want to consume and choose to consume and get turned on by and that is what's making this all so ugly and when we see that we don't like to accept the fact that maybe that is just what humans are attracted to and what humans want to consume at scale and we end up wanting to blame someone and i could argue and i think others could argue that these algorithms that are effectively just recursive optimization functions they're recursively trying to figure out what do people want to consume and then giving them more of what they want you keep saying solving for those very specific needs and use cases and and i don't think that those algorithms are necessary go ahead why is it not want i i i i'm interested in that unpacking it no the i everything free brooke says it's absolutely right but it's not the word want it's not what they want it's what they will react to the most and sometimes what they react to the most subconsciously want i don't know but my point is that there's there's a i guess i don't i don't use facebook but they went from thumbs up and thumbs down when i was there to like this nuance like there's likes there's tears there's angry shares but there's also analytics data on engagement right like on how long someone's watching a video or what i saw in there was that there was an amplification of things that were more extreme emotional reactions right now and and the point is that i think everything you said is absolutely right the algorithms are amplifying i think all i would say is i would restate what you're saying is these algorithms tend to amplify the things that are the most extreme and elicit a reaction yeah those reactions aren't necessarily the things that you want those are the things that you will react to the most and that's why the algorithm wants to serve that's why you see that the top 10 things that are reshared the most often tends to be very extreme right fundamental emotional responses are typically associated with things that i think we call hedonism and the things that you can ignore your emotional responses and take another course of action we typically call altruism or what have you this is a kind of a common reason why people would want to watch a comedy or watch a horror film because there's some emotional response it's not a universal response and people aren't rushing to the theater to watch documentaries they're not rushing to the movie theater to be like oh i want to be informed and educated on something that's factual and interesting they want to go and have emotional experiences and that's how humans are biologically wired and the same is happening in these short forms of media these little tweets or david do you understand that they won't show murders and porn on facebook so they're making an editorial decision to say hey we're not gonna every night on the local news if it bleeds it leads that how long has that been the motto in media so i'm remembering i'm listening to haagen on 60 minutes i'm hearing her describe a corporate profit-making machine that tries to get more reach more ratings by fueling polarization and division and i'm thinking is she talking about cable news that's what she's talking about isn't she is she talking about the new york times did she talk about the traditional media because every single thing she said about how social media fuels polarization and division applies to the media and yet those same voices in the traditional media are the first ones howling about facebook and calling for its regulation it is completely hypocritical because the real purpose here is not to reduce divisiveness or polarization or society the regulations on facebook will not do that it is to seize control and influence over the machinery of social networking why because the news feed now controls the flow of information in our society don't you think the damage has been done though meaning in the sense that if you [ __ ] facebook's product velocity and you shrink the surface area of the areas in which they can operate isn't that more damaging than any regulation no people will just stop using it and then they will find another place together on facebook i've already stopped using facebook okay i don't find it compelling at all and i'm not really on instagram either i i do find twitter rather compelling and i'm probably more addicted to that than other things yeah he's addicted off the rails probably not very good for me okay but but here's the thing i think i think all of us on this show right now none of us find facebook particularly addictive in our own behavior okay i think we understand in our own behavior that facebook is sort of like a mildly diverting amusement that occasionally yields information sometimes it's useful okay we understand that it's sort of like a news feed with a lot of noise okay in our own usage but somehow we've bought into this larger narrative that in everybody else's uh usage that somehow this is a brainwashing machine that is pumping people full of disinformation and warping their thinking in other words there's a sharp dichotomy between how we perceive our own usage and other people's usage and what i would submit is our own usage is what we know and what we know to be true and what we believe about other people's usage is simply a narrative that's been fed to us over and over again by the traditional media who hate facebook because it's disremediating them that is what's really going on here you may be right i'll i'm saying something different which is getting apart from all of that stuff what's happening practically on the ground right now is that is a company who has to now slow way down and what i'm saying is that's not dissimilar to what microsoft had to do which was there was this 10-year period at microsoft where they really couldn't innovate and that's really how the government solved the microsoft problem yeah they made them less aggressive right they gummed up the internal machinery so that microsoft couldn't really be there for the next few major so for example we just spent we just spent 40 minutes talking about crypto what do you think the chances are that you know facebook now can land a really compelling crypto project right they got totally shut down with libra right i mean they went after it and the regulator stepped in and it's too bold for them to launch that after what happened it's it's zero you know with their behavior in other arenas i think that like microsoft uh back in the the late 90s i think there are real and legitimate concerns about the power of these big tech companies about how uh power how big and powerful they've become about their ability to crush competitors i think those are all legitimate and in a weird way if this government scrutiny slows those companies down that's not an altogether bad thing but i am concerned about that i'd say separately just because these companies do deserve to be scrutinized more i do think that we have to see that the people who are engaged in this really coordinated hit campaign against facebook they have other they have another agenda and that is to control the flow of information online it is to control online discourse it's already been happening over the past year with censorship on the supply side of the news feed and now they're trying to control the demand side i think we have to be extremely wary about this well david isn't you you've been on the other side of this because on previous podcasts you've talked about facebook being too influential having too many users and now you're saying well these tiny little news networks that get a couple of low millions he has a he has an issue jason with the way in which they're going after facebook okay i get that he thinks it's a coordinated hit fine but you also have had an issue with facebook having too much power to take somebody off the platform or to promote certain ideas yeah so which is it it seems like you're a little bit um both can be true no it's perfectly it's it's no it's perfectly consistent i've expressed concerns about the way in which facebook is is de-platforming people it's samara summarily silencing them and ghosting them it's it's engaged in censorship i've expressed concern about that but we should understand that the people in the senate judiciary committee who hauled up who had this hearing who featured and spotlighted haagen and turned her into this great hero their agenda is even more censorship they they are complaining about the fact that facebook is not censoring enough and that is what their real agenda is i i do think it should have been disclosed that hagen does stand to gain financially from whatever happens you know i don't know that that's been confirmed that there is a whistleblower reward here so we'll have to wait and see about that i haven't heard there's no reward until there's a fine but chicago is right that she qualifies if she's a whistleblower she qualifies for what a 30 portion of or some very large percentage would define b here though what would the fine be how would that be frame off this whole thing is just getting started they're going to be they're going to be actions and there will be settlements from those government actions and the the and facebook as you all know will pay any kind of fine to put this behind them you're the one that said jason they spent 5 billion just so that they wouldn't subpoena zac and cheryl right that's what you said last week we talked about that last week yeah so i mean i yeah i think there's a fine coming but let's let's be honest i i do not think lena khan uh or gary gensler or any of these other folks are going to be in the business of making a quick decision nor the doj nor any of these other folks they're going to want to really take their time to figure this out but what i'm saying is it's not the ultimate result of it because i again i go back to like if you look at what happened in 2000 in microsoft the substance of what microsoft had to agree to was was ultimately not as bad as the way in which it was implemented which is that you know my understanding was like microsoft had to submit feature reviews to lawyers at the doj who would then approve you know updates and upgrades to their code base for things like windows that's what caused them to miss an entire wave of compute and so this is the this is the point which is i think practically speaking the beginning of what microsoft went through facebook is going to have to navigate and so the faster they can try to say all right folks you're right you caught us let us tell us what to do maybe actually the the better path because it allows them to get past it because the longer this this this period of like gray stretches out i think is is actually the worst outcome well let's go through what we each think would be a possible solution here to allowing free speech to occur on facebook but maybe not having the things that you know fake news uh you know misinformation you know maybe lowering down the rhetoric and the charged nature of the algorithm freyberg do you have any common sense solution here that might address both sides of the issue freedom of speech and maybe things being amplified to 100 million people that are fake and and just simply not true we've talked a lot about this notion of like decentralized social networks i mean we haven't talked a lot we've talked a little bit about it but um if you end up putting a regulatory hammer down on facebook and twitter and telling them what consumers and remember these guys aren't media creators they're platforms effectively for search discovery and access so you as an individual can discover third-party content on their platform if they start putting the regulatory hammer down on these quote-unquote platforms telling them what they can and cannot make available to their users there will be another platform that will emerge and that platform may end up being in this kind of decentralized model and in that decentralized model you're not going to have the same degree of regulatory oversight and that system will end up solving the same use case eventually consumers will get what they want which is you know what your mother calls kind of this emotional response eliciting this emotional reaction they will consume it until they you know achieve one of their kind of seven deadly sins objective which is what's driving the emotion underscoring their decisions on what to watch what to consume and uh and there will be an alternative so you know go ahead and play whack-a-mole you'll play whack-a-mole for a few years maybe a few decades but at the end of the day digital technology in a connected world will drive consumers to exactly where they will naturally find themselves which is consuming ever more of the things that create this emotional response in them the consequences are unfortunate um you know i don't know what the right solution is you know we've we've to some degree put a regulatory hammer down on things like uh smoking and in some places things like sugar things that have kind of a you know uh an obvious effect on our physical uh health uh these other things that we're seeing now are having an effect on our mental health and i think that there may be kind of an emerging regulatory regime around mental health standards and how much of things can be consumed and i think what we're seeing is the leading indicator of this is what's gone on in china because china is the nation that i would say is probably at the forefront of research and understanding of what the consequences are of consuming more or more of media and content that causes an emotional response to you and what happens down the road isolation loneliness suicide rates go up unhappiness etc it certainly is the consequence but it's not a function of any individual company's misconveyance of content to consumers it's just a function of where these systems end up going because of the way humans are biologically wired and so i guess my my first concern is maybe we end up in a decentralized system that ends up replacing all of these tools and this just doesn't end or you end up being worse or yeah and it could be worse or you end up having these kind of regulatory regimes emerge that would be better a decentralized solution is actually no better in one no it's better in one key way which is that it's fundamentally harder to create the exact same network effect and density that you can have with one monolithic closed system so you're much more likely to actually have a very fragmented ecosystem of hundreds of different solutions depending on what of the sins you want to feed or you know what of the feelings you want to feel at any one time i think it's a big assumption that it would be a fragmented network if you did replicate facebook on a decentralized platform and then some piece of misinformation came out and it trended all the way to number one like say the january 6 insurrection no no no no no no no no no no no there's nothing to that there's not one network there's no understand let me finish my point if one network became so large and there was nobody who could turn off something what if people said hey there's a riot going on at the capitol and more people showed up with more guns right you have nobody to sit there and say hey don't go to the capitol turn those trending posts off go ahead sex okay so let's let's talk about this problem of misinformation okay i think there's an old mark twain quote saying that the a lie can travel around the world faster than the truth can put on its shoes okay correct there is a problem of falsehood spreading online i agree with you there the question is what you do about it and the problem we have right now is that is that truth isn't that by the beholder there is no uh truth api and so at the end of the day it's the people in power who get to decide what is true and what is false if you give them the power to sense their misinformation example we just saw we talked about in this program the rolling stone ivermectin hoax provably false story and yet rachel maddow still had it up on her post she was not sanctioned by msnbc twitter never told her to take it down and she was not fact checked however the hunter biden laptop scandal or story which came out in the new york post a couple weeks before the election turned out to be a provedly true story and yet it was taken down by facebook and twitter at the end of the day this term of misinformation is just another vector for partisan attack and it will be used by whoever we give the power to to decide what misinformation is so what is the answer then to this point of falsehood spreading online well at the end of the day the answer to bad speech is more speech you try to create a free marketplace of ideas to let to let the good speech ultimately uh drive out the bad feature prove that it's wrong that's the best you can do that's the best you can do in a free society yes but we've this is the first time a free society has had social networks that can reach a billion people instantly in you know an hour so i think there's one differentiator there that we must think of if somebody defames you on a social network they are absolutely liable i mean you can sue them okay but i think and you should and i think we've talked about canceled culture people are destroyed before they even get their day in court i think i think that's being destroyed for something different i think if somebody it's because it trends if it didn't if it couldn't trend to so many people it wouldn't leave lead to the cancellation and destruction of somebody's life you've talked about that many times yourself if if somebody libels you i think they should be you should be able to sue them and i think we could actually we could have a libel regime more like the uk where it's easier to prove these cases in court and people are much more careful about defaming other people i would be very much in favor of that okay because defamation is not free speech but the question really is about really we're talking about non-defamatory statements that somebody in position of power has decided is not true many of these statements are subjective dave portnoy got labeled for his subjective opinion about aoc's dress why did that happen and why is that kind of labeling only used to protect one side of the political spectrum so i mean that that's what's really going on here let's end with this uh has anybody watched chappelle's the closer i did incredible i i watched it pretty incredible i mean fearless fearless is a word i was really um i think that he slightly missed it because i think he could have really actually called out cancel culture and wokism more i think he kind of left it a little bit to me where i was like a little i don't know i just i just didn't think they were as good as his other ones and i felt like he didn't really make the point he wanted to make it was a little convoluted somebody who can actually stand up and and actually you know be more satirical and tell the story of why all this cancer culture and defamatory statements and judging people doesn't make sense but then did he seem he didn't he didn't get the job done i felt like well dude let me ask you this about the performance did he seem qualitatively different than you in that the other times he seemed very light on his feet you know having a good time being a comedian and this time it felt like he was personally hurt or he was it wasn't comedy it was less it felt less comedic i agree it felt like he had an agenda he was hurt he wanted to get some stuff off his chest and there were some jokes in between which is very different like the percentage of jokes on this is like 20 and the like heavy on max max and then the other ones were 80 jokes 20 social commentary this felt like he um he was actually really hurt and like i don't want to say bitter but just fed up maybe frustrated he had a chip which made it interesting to me you know in the in the early 2000s chappelle for me was really important because he was an advocate for minorities and i felt seen and protected by chappelle and [Music] i thought that was really important and then his his comedy was just so sharp oh yeah and i i said i just think that it was a little bit of an opportunity lost yeah i i think if he had really actually taken the you know it to its conclusion he would have actually there was just too many uncomfortable moments in that thing it was super uncomfortable at times and i you know i really would like to see it again um because you know if you just think about his career you know him talking about police brutality him talking about race in a very fearless you know entertaining but also informative way and just being a truth teller yeah this was uh so uncomfortable at times i agree with that i need to watch it again and i need to let it sit because i always take it it's on netflix it's the last contract yeah i mean this could be i almost felt like he was trying to break netflix because he does seem to have a he does seem to have a streak in him where he's like okay i'm gonna i'm walking away from comedy central and he does seem to burn the boats it felt like he was burning the boats with netflix to me i don't know if you got that vibe where he was like this is the last one i'm being canceled after this [ __ ] y'all i'm out um and he has that i mean he torched it sacks i mean you're gonna watch this thing oh now i'm definitely watching it i have not seen it yet but i'm definitely watching i'll watch it tonight i give it a 50 chance that netflix takes it down well let's watch it quickly though there were there were everybody was screaming for for him to be de-platformed everybody was screaming well then i i like it even more you know one of the ironic things about these warning labels i've noticed they've started become a badge of honor where you know if if the if the hall monitors a twitter are trying to label your tweet as as uh you know being incendiary maybe it's just interesting right it's a buy signal it's a yeah exactly so you know um i was listening to uh antonio garcia martinez interview uh camille on um on call in and they they labeled that i mean just the post about they were gonna have a conversation you're saying the link to it was even flagged as like oh my lord i think there needs to be a netflix for a comedy where it's only subscription and it's owned by the comedians like if dave chappelle were to create his own netflix i think it gets 10 million paid subscribers over the first two years overnight no overnight overnight okay so wait a second how do we wet our beaks on this if we go to chappelle and we say hey listen here's 25 million dollars we'll set up the tech team um i'll ask i'll ask them this weekend i think that yeah you get k heart you get chappelle you get seinfeld you get um now do you get louis ck in there or ck what's his name i never found that guy funny that guy never did it for me but i mean anyway you know who's funny you know what's funny have you have you had this asian guy ronnie chang he's on uh he there's a great netflix special on him he is [ __ ] funny and then jo koi jo koi is very funny yeah i think ronnie chang taped his own special hassan minhaj he's legit but i mean i this would be a great way for them to just control their destiny and not have to worry about cancer culture because i think a lot of the folks who are on well they are probably the last line of people that actually will be the defenders of free speech yeah it's pretty scary as much as i think facebook should be more thoughtful about their algorithm uh you know back to you know circling netflix and censorship back to the facebook issues i just think facebook should say hey listen we've throttled the algorithm so that any one piece of content can only reach this many people over this period of time and yeah sure that's going to lower our time on site or whatever but we want things to have a little bit of time to spread and get fact checked does anybody think that that's a good idea to say just you know if you're trying to cancel somebody instead of it going to number one on trending topics before the person has a trial the algorithm would just take a little bit of time to propagate content here's what i can tell you conclusively if facebook wanted to solve these issues in the ways that the government expects in their head for these problems to be solved facebook market cap would be 250 billion dollars and they'd have a million people working there at the company so this is not an issue of whether it's possible the question is is it right and does it actually get at the solution or does it just as friedberg said create whack-a-mole someplace else and so you know i don't know what obliterating three-quarters of a trillion dollars of market cap will do but i suspect that the government is going to want to find out sacks you think that throttling the the velocity of the algorithm so that news doesn't spread as fast and violently or which could be misinformation could be valid information do you think that's a possible solution look i i think that at the end of the day we're disclosing algorithm maybe with both facebook and twitter you only see stuff from people who you're following or you're friends with it's actually not true what do you mean if things they will insert stuff into your twitter algorithm now that's adjacent to you and facebook will do that i mean well maybe maybe if people respond to someone who you're following but i've never seen anything in my twitter feed other than an ad that's not from somebody i follow so you know trending topics no i mean not my feelings the explore fee oh okay no but you the explorer feeds right there and they are surfacing things in your feed now that are not people you follow but what they're really doing okay is there's a universe of people who you're following or you're friends with and you could just see all that content in a reverse chronological feed but that would be too much it'd be overwhelming originally worked yeah exactly and i get it and that was fine i didn't i liked it okay but as you're following thousands of people now there's too much content and so they will simply surface the tweets that you're most likely to want to interact with i don't believe by the way that those tweets are necessarily the ones that make you angry i think i think for some people it is clearly but it's not certainly not the case in my case what i would say is it's more refined than that it's the tweets that you think are interesting it's the tweets that perhaps express a sense of outrage that agrees with your sense of outrage it's a little different than anger but it's it's basically the subset of content that you through your reveal preferences have have shown facebook or twitter that you know that you care about the most and that's basically what they're doing they're giving the consumer more of what they want and i think that we've blown this thing so far out of proportion i mean yeah if there's an analogy that it's addictive but i think that it's been blown so far out of proportion we've exaggerated the fear beyond any reasonable recognition by the way i think the i think the reason that that tweet was flagged i'm guessing is that in the tweet uh camellia says he's going to talk about critical race theory and that may be why conversations foreign this can be intense that's all i think because he says the gloves are coming off it looks like two people fighting or whatever i just think it's sort of ridiculous um you know like this is where like the warrior is a little patriotical yes it's a little condescending like people like this [Applause] you is my oh boys i love you happy 15th episode and what's going on with you friedberg and sax that you're you won't make the journey down to the poker game is this like some sort of david uh protest here i will come back i will i will start playing again if we get if we get the game going on like a regular time or is it what the [ __ ] is on your screen are you talking nothing going on okay yeah you have nothing going on saks all right i'll start you know i'll start making i'll stop evading your family stay in the city come see your [ __ ] friends play some cars give me some money we're not playing blo yeah no plo i mean we did at the end just to get skye's money but he just keeps guy there for another 30 minutes since he was flushing cash good sexy poo we beat him up with skyfall when you crumble actually the new uh i'm really excited to see the new daniel craig double 07. i can't believe that can you still rent a midtower movie theater for like 50 bucks yeah uh 300 bucks so yeah it used to be not it was 99 during the pandemic it was awesome 300 now 300. i haven't done it the last two times i went with the girls because it was first run movies and the theaters were pretty empty but it's 300 if you get like 10 of your friends to come it's like basically five of your friends to come it's worth it i mean that's 60 bucks each and yeah i mean it's or we just go to taxes theater he's got the sax's theater is better because you have a chef there who will make food but yeah and for those of you asking about the all in summit saks and i are leading the charge for a february or april we got a couple of locations thank you to everybody who sent us location ideas two days uh 250 people 200 paid tickets 50 by scholarship and you can go to the all in website when we have information we will post it there but we're just in the planning phase right now but we're thinking two days right boys yeah two days for one summit and then five hours of content something like that a day we each interview people yeah and then we're done okay and miami is the host city and we'll draw a high card for who picks the next city chuma you said you're picking something in italy i'm to probably pick my rover venice romer venice i'm going to probably pick new york for mine or austin and then freeburg where would you pick napa or something marin county oh wow where everybody wants to go great go to anti-vaxxer town [ __ ] you friedberg moran county wow what a destination i'm a free book where would you pick um so who are we doing miami first is that right miami's first then we draw a high card for the next city who gets to pick next city each bestie picks for four years each party picks one if we go twice a year even better i mean i'd probably split it between uh london and uh london and somewhere in hawaii oh yeah hawaii's inspired choice can you imagine 250 degenerate london's great iconoclastic but london would be we would take over miami is freaking out run over annabelle's boys i bring you out to annabelle that's incredible that pride that members club is i think the most over the top thing i've ever seen you're you're referencing something that no one knows what you're talking about yeah nobody knows what you're talking about is that a nightclub yes it's a nightcraft well no it's a private annabelle's no you have to have members clubs in london because because you can't drink alcohol after like 9 00 p.m unless it's a private club yeah all right we'll see you all next time on the all in podcast here's to another 50 everybody first 50 done love you guys let's get another 50 in the books let your winners ride rain man david sacks we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need [Music] we need to get back [Music] i'm going on [Music]








yesterday the game went off the chain it was it's we started off at 500 and a thousand and then we were like ah these 500 chips are so annoying then we started to play a thousand a thousand then it was a thousand two thousand that said one thousand two thousand four thousand then one two four eight then one two four eight sixteen one two four eight sixteen thirty two thousand coming around oh my god how much lose what was the big winner and big loser how much i'm not gonna say just tell us how much out eight hundred i put at minus eight hundred minus seven don't don't say these [ __ ] names bro how'd you do i didn't okay oh oh oh okay you can tell that your mouth lost because when you ask him how'd you do and it's like just he goes from the super effusive talking about the game to just like one word fine okay fine okay how was your night he's like look i [ __ ] 42 million dollars for breakfast it was fine here we go three two three [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast 50 episodes down and uh yeah we'll definitely get three or four more in before the band breaks up uh with us today again uh from an undisclosed location david sacks the rain man himself chamoth paulie hapatia the dictator and the queen of quinoa david friedberg how's everybody doing how's everybody feeling how's everybody's week going really great yours just just great awesome i uh i i feel really good i um i feel super grateful oh really your poker game last night yeah the stock market's up today it feels great it's been a good week it's been a good week i feel so much equanimity mark is up four percent uh freeburg how are you doing my wife went to the um hospital three times this week all three times thinking she was in labor hey um are you how how did i i mean we're we're two centimeters dilated we're still waiting here i mean we are there too and we're just waiting any day like literally any hour um so we were we get action on this can we can we bet who's gonna come first or i think i think fredberg's gonna come first because it's his third it's the only it's allison's third it's not second yeah yeah so we can lay odds two to one what do we get i'll i'll take the over under on what day is it today today is the 15th we're getting induced on the 26th that's 11 days or not i'll take the over under on the i think you'll render on uh the 21st that you're setting the line i'll set the line at the 21st of october i'm going over i'll go over for that this is for nat book it okay yeah for now yeah under what do you got sacks over under on the uh 21st 26 is the expected date where are we betting on we're pretending that pay attention when analysis children are born and when their children are trying to get action aren't you guys a little too old having kids i mean are you even going to see them graduate exactly you got a vasectomy i mean some of us are a whole bar mitzvah younger than you exactly so you snipped i would if anybody was snipped i would guess it would be saks are you are you snippy snippy is this the type of vital information you think the audience wants to know yeah i think they do actually i think that's a yes i think he's been snipped chamoth is definitely not stamped nope you can you can burn's nuts you want to come over here and uh inspect that conduction inspection i don't think i don't think you can visually understand that let's let's it's not visually understandable yeah freeberg's definitely not snipped as proven by his wife being pregnant i don't think you say snip bro i think you should say vasectomy you know ah i'm just you know i think you say snip snip i think stocks has been snipped that's actually a good bet we could book it on sex being snipped okay listen a lot of topics to get to i think we were trying to get to this topic last week uh there's been a supply chain uh interruption right now there's some shortages obviously of key components like microchips we all know this according to car and driver the top three models impacted by the chip shortage where the ford f-series pickup trucks cheap cherokee suvs and the chevy equinox suvs basically a lot of the cars uh that have advanced driving systems are now removing them i was looking at getting an suv for the winner and i was looking at the cadillac escalade and they took self-driving out of the 2022 model or the autopilot basically because they can't get the chips um and we all know why this is happening obviously covid uh and then also on top of it demand so people are buying second computers third computers places like dell are having an apple are selling a lot of desktops a lot of laptops and there's also a labor shortage so the labor force obviously here in the united states is much smaller than it was uh we all know that people are raising salaries to try to get people to come back to work they're turning off the bonus unemployment uh early in some states we're here in october this is all supposed to be turned off by now so i guess i'll start with you chamoth in terms of uh the markets here uh what do you think is happening and is this an acute risk or just something that will pass i think the well this is where i think i kind of generally disagree with the market i think that most people are under the impression that these are short-term um kind of contractions and expansions and that this is just a thing that needs to get worked through the system as we readjust to a post covet world blah blah i think it's different and the reason i think it's different is if you just look at one thing and one thing only which is that we have a massive labor shortage in america and there is an incredible stat that i saw which was the average hourly earnings of non-manager people in hospitality and travel and the average salary the mean salary was around 20 some odd dollars an hour and it's now 33 bucks an hour and so what that to me says is that we are going through a really sustained period where you cannot get people to do the work that needs to get done biden had to call the port of la and try to get these guys to be open 24 hours a day the president of the united states is calling a local port trying to get it to stay open but why can't they stay open because you have long sherman you have all these unionized folks who will expect to get certain levels of compensation which they deserve in order to do that work 24 7 but then all of that is going to get put through the system and if you still have millions of jobs that needs to get done in order for the economy to function the only efficient way that that's going to get resolved is by raising salaries and those are consistent and persistent those things are not just like oh you know what i gave yes i did say 50 bucks an hour but now i'm taking you back yeah you can't take that back that's going to be that's so and then so i tend to so that that's one thing and then second so there's people right so labor capital i just think it's getting more and more expensive to get folks to do work and then there's the raw materials that you use to make anything and everything that i see is that stuff is going bananas and so i put these two things together and i'm like i think this stuff is here to stay i'm really kind of a little bit of a you know and i and i had not worried and you you can see in every episode before this i was always consistently like there is no inflation you can fade the inflation trade now i'm kind of positioning myself to uh hedge myself in this situation all right freeberg uh we've seen the pictures uh on of the long beach uh and the los angeles uh ports there's just ships out there like i think 70 or 80 is where it peaked at uh in july i don't know have the latest data here of when it updated um but is there not a silver lining here that if people are making more money then we're gonna increase the size of the middle class and we're gonna ex you know increase upward mobility and that it is a double-edged story it's great that we increase the middle class but then they're going to want to buy stuff so people are now making 35 bucks an hour and they were making 20. now they got more disposable now they're going to go on amazon and buy more stuff and it's going to accelerate this problem is it not the challenge is the rate of change this is what the fed tries to manage and you know there's a white house economic advisory committee that's involved in trying to figure out what's going to happen here because the current estimate is it's going to take at least a year or probably a year to work through the current log jam and the global supply chains and during that period of time as chemical points out what's happening is the cost for goods is climbing because people have to charge more because there's limited inventory and people are bidding up the the value of that inventory as they do that the businesses um end up needing to get more labor and so they have to pay more to hire people if they pay more to hire people those people end up demanding more and the cycle can actually go the wrong direction where you have an inflationary spike that persists how do you taper that inflation it's not necessarily great for economic growth if you can't produce the stuff and it can actually cause these runaway kind of effects in the dynamic system of supply and demand when you have these these these things clogging up the the system for supply so um so so it is a real risk and it is the biggest thing that um you know the white house this economic task force is kind of trying to figure out right now is where's the balance lie where you can um you know basically try and taper this inflationary effect that's being caused by this log jam in the supply chain without causing economic disruption by rising it by raising interest rates um and so it's a really uh kind of complicated you know second and third derivative formula that needs to kind of be resolved and that's why so many of these little elements are so important to get right by the way rates by the way central bankers around the world have raised rates the only place that hasn't gone up is europe ecb and the united states of federal reserve so and let's be honest you know europe and the united states we absorb labor and materials from all around the world right we are the net importers we are the net ultimate buyers of last resort of all of these things and so if you're seeing inflation in those other you know supply-driven economies they are going to come on shore they're going to hit us in the face i think prices are going up the other the other free market argument that could be made is that these um these current trends will accelerate a trend towards more automation of uh low-cost labor because it now will make sense for businesses to invest in the capital in the capex um in the infrastructure and ultimately for technology companies to build that that tooling uh to support that infrastructure that will automate jobs like working in fast food like doing local delivery like doing factory assembly um like moving things across the country and trucks so self-driving trucks um uh you know factory automation biomanufacturing additive and 3d manufacturing and 3d printing these are all industries that could benefit from the fact that labor now for kind of you know traditionally low income work has gotten so expensive that it starts to make sense to switch to the technology alternative which historically may have been too expensive but now starts to make economic sense to businesses this is and so there's a number of these automation industries that may significantly benefit and that ends up ultimately being deflationary and the market comes into balance so that's another way to kind of think about the macro on what may play out here there's a bigger risk here than just inflation i mean there's also a risk of of stagnation or stagflation because it's not just that prices are going up and workers wages are going up which could be a good thing but goods and services aren't being produced so i mean i know like my own experience i recently ordered a tesla when i got a tesla a couple years ago like i got in two weeks it was like almost instant this time they wanted me to wait two months and it's got an alert that's going to take two more months beyond that so we have no idea and if if you know tesla doesn't get most the money i don't think until i actually take delivery of the car right that's when you make final payment so now they can't book that revenue and those earnings and tesla isn't even the car company that's most affected by this you know the big um you know traditional american auto companies like ford are even more affected so if companies cannot deliver their products you that can cause an economic recession and i think like these are major storm clouds looming on the horizon now what is the cause of this i mean i think it's it's um it's multifactorial a lot of things that jamal said i just want to really highlight this port issue there was a great uh tweet storm by zach cantor earlier in the week where he said the supply chain crisis is a clever rebrand it makes it seem like there are grand exogenous forces at work rather than the unions holding ports for ransom while dozens of ships pile up working just two shifts with a two-hour break in between the country at their mercy uh and he goes on to elaborate on that and that is why they're allowed to do that but but to terma's point uh this is why biden felt the need to to get involved so um that the problem is if you read the fine print on this story of biden announcing that the ports of la and long beach will open 24 hours which they clearly need to to get the goods to market if you read the like the bottom part of the story everyone's announcing their intention to go 24 7 but there is no date certain for when that's going to be it's a negotiation with the union so chemoth to your point they are going to have to negotiate with the unions um you know initially it looked like the story was that biden was going to use his sway his his clout with the unions to basically push them to take a deal but i don't think he's really done that everyone's just announcing their intention to negotiate well you know if the ports are holding the whole country hostage like this that could cause a recession i think that's gonna rebound i think they're running 24 7 now aren't they sad long beach and la are both running 24 7. well i just posted this article that came out um i mean like yesterday and it says it was published uh two days ago and it said there was not a date certain for when this oh it's updated october 14th which is yesterday and if you read the bottom of the article it says they have not determined a date for when 24 7 operations will start they've just merely announced their intention oh yeah i'm just going to go 24 7. the biden administration says it's not really they announced it as if it was a done done look unless biden is willing to listen i mean chamathi writes that they're entitled to negotiate but here's the thing i mean they're holding the whole country hostage now they're holding the economy hostage so at a certain point if their demands are unreasonable it's it's i think proper for the president united states to step in and say guys this is ridiculous you have to go back to work we're going to make you know we're going to help negotiate a deal here that's what reagan did with the air traffic controllers the air traffic controllers union shut down the whole commercial aviation system reagan got involved said you cannot shut down the account this way you must go back to work yes exactly so i think biden is probably going to have these longshoremen are or the ports i guess they're not striking they're just not doing an extra shift but he couldn't do it if they're doing two shifts if they're doing two shifts two hours a day that's like withholding that's that's like a partial strike wait they're doing two two hour shifts or two exactly eight hours eight hour shifts they can't be doing two hour shifts for two hours read what zack canner posted he said that they're working just two shifts with a two hour break in between okay but those might be two eight hour shifts with the two hour break in between is how i read that no no he says read the the tweet here he says uh before any changes uh this coming week the longshore routine at the ports involved two shifts 8 am to 4 pm and 6 pm to 3 um an overnight shift to 5 hours is available but it is up to 50 more expensive and rarely used so basically you're talking about yeah it's an 8 to 4 pm shift with a 2 hour break or 6 pm to 3 a.m so basically yes so it is um for that six hours that's two six hour shifts they should be running it like you know elon runs the tesla factories when they're building which is 24 hours a day overlapping shifts just getting off urgency here they're gonna have to pay them some reasonable overtime but they can't the unions can't hold the whole country hostage and look if biden unless buying steps in to solve this we will have a recession so it will oh this could be a recession i think it's bigger than just the ports i don't think reopening the ports is is the entirety of it i think there's a lot of other things going on i mean jake out to a point you've made we had four million people drop out of the labor force last month i mean that was unbelievable so yeah the unemployment rate looks great but the number of people actually going to work is significantly lower i mean that was a huge shock to all the economists seeing that many people drop out there's still too many people who essentially are being paid not to work in one form or another and that is hurting the economy you also have this issue in in china which is very interesting this was i think covered in the new york times about how dependent chinese factories are on coal and uh which you know is a bad thing obviously that's not a clean energy source but because of restrictions on coal it's actually started to impact manufacturing over there we can debate where that's a good thing or bad thing but it's contributing to the effect i suspect that china has woken up to this and they will they're not going to shut down their economy because of concerns about clean energy so i assume this is a very temporary decision um and then of course you have the whole issue of covet restrictions i mean there were a lot of international covert restrictions which wasn't just the us that where they were shutting down factories or creating you know a lot of rules that got in the way of keeping factories open um they were doing this internationally and there's a lot of regulations around seafaring as well because of coveted restrictions so you have this pileup i would say of of regulations ultimately i'd say with covet as the origin that have now caused this um supply chain crisis and unless it gets fixed it could absolutely cause a 1970 style stagflation type recession next year tribata you buy that do you think we could have a this combination of people refusing to go to work or just opting out and saying like yeah it's even if you pay me 35 or 40 i'm just not interested i have enough no i don't have teas and i don't want to go back to work i i actually think that's exactly what it is there was this really interesting um tweet that i saw on twitter hopefully nick you can find it but it was some kid that basically said you know i'm growing up in atlanta and there's a bunch of kids that i used to run with um you know who would otherwise be in the streets right causing all kinds of trouble and these kids are now at home like specking nfts and like you know posting on tick tock or whatever it's just a completely different reimagination of like labor and time spent and and that's just this very small example and so that maybe touches retail or maybe touches you know quick service restaurants but there's all these different things where now that at the end of this pandemic people are making very different decisions about their time and how to spend their money and again i'll tell you again there's a lot of people you got to remember how many people in the united states have died or are dealing now with some reasonably important health issues at the back end of virus half a million people a million people i want you to keep in mind what i told you guys before there is 770 trillion dollars that has to get transferred down from all these baby boomers down to these people in their 20s 30s and 40s and don't think for a second that they're not making different optimization decisions around perceived wealth so i just think inflation is here i think the labor shortage is going to get worse not better i think we're gonna have to pay people more to get out of it i think prices are going up input costs are going up energy costs are going up um so this is it and i mean i think i think that probably the fed and the ecb are really raising this time next year they're probably in a really really tighter posture what do you think freeburg we should also remember that there are going to be some responses from sorry free bird glassing tech stocks in the [ __ ] toilet why because no multiples no no but no no bueno for no cash flow growth stocks yeah yeah and rising everybody everyone's going to start buying yield when yucky poops wait let's explain this to the audience why freeburg why why um i mean once interest rates go up you'll see that dividend yields will go up which means stock prices go down because people will expect a higher return because if i can buy treasury bonds and make a few points of return on my money and i'm going to have to buy a stock i'm going to want to i'm going to demand a few more points of dividend yield on that stock and so so so the price technic you know the price for stocks will typically go down to match the yield that you're going to get from these more growth free investments to be more precise a stock is either uh mature note about cash today or effectively a promissory note about cash in the future the thing with tech stocks is we tell everybody the same thing your money is going to come 30 years from now because we're going to be a monopoly by then and every dollar that i have today i'm going to reinvest into r d and engineering and in a in an environment where interest rates are zero you're happy to do it because you're like well great these guys are investing at way better rates than zero which is what i get from you know my bank and so i want facebook and google and amazon and all these startups to be putting all this money in the ground on my behalf but when interest rates start going up they say no hold on a second i need more money up front less money in the future because the future becomes more uncertain and that's the big trade-off for tech companies where they get really pummeled okay well is there a number in terms of interesting there's a class of tech companies right like amazon sorry like microsoft oracle google where you are actually seeing an apple you're getting dividends and you're getting share buybacks where the cash is coming out of the business and those are the mature businesses that also still happen to have growth attached to them and i don't see how portfolios are going to shed those assets um you're going to shed the more speculative hey you know we're not yet at a point of maturity we're still 2030 whatever yeah the guys that are investing and there's no kind of line of sight to true cash flow coming back to the shareholders but look at at the end of the day the point i was trying to make earlier was that um there is going to be a response right so we've seen remember when the pandemic kind of set in and everyone started ordering from home amazon rushed out and hired a hundred thousand local delivery drivers they bought all these trucks and they built their own supply chain infrastructure for last mile delivery to get products to people's homes and we're now seeing on the other side walmart home depot target and other big retailers integrating their supply chain to get product into stores and so they're starting to buy trucks hire people pay them significant you know wages to be drivers on staff for them rather than contracting to these third parties that are saying oh we don't have any inventory we don't have any trucks we don't have any drivers we can't do anything for you now and so the response is think about it you're a product company you're tesla tesla just went out and did this massive deal in caledonia to source you know some mineral that they need to make batteries or to make their uh their their cars i can't remember exactly what it was but you're you're increasingly going to see the businesses that have a balance sheet step up and actually start to integrate their supply chains rather than full stack more more resilient kind of this disparate set of service providers each of which is only kind of is all typically operating at max capacity and then they can't kind of respond to these sorts of jolts to the system and so we're going to see a lot of investment i think by businesses that make product or deliver product to the consumer as they try and integrate the supply chain problem themselves and that may take some of the strain off the system and some of this inflationary risk out of the equation we'll see over the next couple of quarters but certainly in this last earnings report i saw some statistic a very large percentage of earnings reports spoke directly about supply chain disruption affecting the forecast for the business and the ability for the for the business to meet their forecast goals and that's just hurting everyone okay so they're gonna have to do something about it if they're resourced to do it right all right so saks though there are some silver linings here companies become more resilient uh they become more automated they build a full stack they build their own factories we're seeing uh you know ty the taiwanese semiconductor company is doing a 7 billion project to build a new factory in japan funded by the japanese government so we're seeing a lot of redundancy redundancy and we're also seeing the middle class grow if people are making 35 bucks an hour 40 bucks an hour and they're getting health care and they're starting to have uh overtime and other concessions being made that builds the middle class it sounds like we're solving some problems uh as well as you know dealing with this i i guess what you call absolutely inflate looks and inflation is a good thing i know people think it's a it's like a really bad terrible thing there are certain kinds of inflation that are really productive we we have had to find a way to fight the bad parts of technology technology's great nine you know nine out of ten things it's amazing efficiency you know uh all these great characteristics that it gives you but one crappy externality of technology is that it's deflationary you can do more with less and that's fundamentally not great for earnings it's not great for labor participation it's not great for all these things that people you know are really upset about today so it's great for the individual company getting those games i actually think it's kind of like it actually balances out the natural pace of of technology which is like you have the natural ability to just actually have cheaper faster better this inherent efficiency that's building up on one side of the ledger but then what's great is on the other side of the ledger you actually have you know labor being able to balance it out and i think that that's a really good thing because they can demand more to do the rest of the work that's not covered by tech so that's important what are your thoughts about this expanding middle class isn't it a great thing that you know people are saying i'll stay home instead of making 12 bucks an hour it's an unfair wage it's not a livable wage and then all of these companies are saying you know what okay well they created so quick the big companies they went to 18 to 35 an hour instantly they always had the money to pay more they just didn't need to increasing wages in real terms is a good thing i think you have to ask why the wages are going up is it going up because of increased productivity which is a good thing or is it going up because of inflation if it's going up in um if it's going up because of inflation then the wage gains are somewhat illusory because all the products that consumers want to buy are also going up in price all we've done is sort of is uh devalue the dollar so we have to we don't know yet whether these um but we do know that inflation is actually very high we don't know exactly if these uh wage gains are permanent or just a function of that um but let's go back to this inflation point for a second i think this is actually really important we're at something like a 5.1 percent inflation rate it's just about the highest um since the late 70s early 80s now we have this threat of a supply chain crisis this is you know this is potentially right we have a supply chain crisis people can't sell cars right this is the recipe for stack 2.0 now the ques now i think there's an assumption that if inflation persists the fed will simply just fight it they'll increase interest rates somewhat and they'll control it but i actually think that the degrees of of action that the fed can take here might be more constrained than people think i just want to flag so one of the primary sources i use for the the national debt is this website fred.stlewisfed.org it's a good website that has a lot of charts by a branch of the of the fed so they have this chart we've seen that federal debt as a percentage of gdp is at sort of all-time peacetime highs you know we're now we were at 100 for a few years and now because of covid we just rocketed up over 120 percent we're close to 140 now the argument by mostly liberal economists that the debt didn't matter was because the debt service remained very low on this debt so we had a huge increase in debt but because interest rates were so low uh the the the the debt service was still very very small and i think you know they have a good piece on this website about this as well that i'll just post here in the notes but um i think i don't know if you guys remember back to um a pod we did in may where we talked about stanley druckenmiller came out swinging against the fed and he warned about this very situation i just want to like i want to just read this this article that we covered back i think in may it feels like an eternity ago but remember when we just talked about this what rocket miller warned is that if yields on the 10-year treasury rise the projected level of 4.9 which is simply the historical average the government spending would be close to 30 percent of gdp each year simply paying back interest expense compared to two percent last year unless it monetizes the debt which experts think is unlikely and drunken miller released would have horrible implications for us dollar so in other words we now have this enormous debt the only reason why debt service payments aren't crowding out the entire federal budget is because we've had interest rates at historically abnormal lows zeros basically yeah so how exactly is the fed gonna fight inflation if they jack up interest rates to where they should be say 4.9 percent then the entire federal budget will be going to working against themselves right it's like you're the bank and taking the loan at the same time this is like somebody who gets a variable interest mortgage and they get five 10 years into their mortgage and then all of a sudden they go from interest only and some low interest rate and then they have to pay market rate and they realize they can't afford the home we might not be able to afford the budget we're putting out there is what you're saying sacks well i'm saying the fed may not have the tools all the tools they want to fight inflation if it comes back or i mean it's going to be politically very unpopular i mean can you imagine the pressure the fed will be under not to raise rates if it means that all of these discretionary programs basically have to be cut that we have an austerity mode in the federal budget how are we going to pay for all this debt service yeah and then the first thing they're going to think about is hey maybe we should cut military spending since it's the largest at the time when china is doing sorties in and around taiwan and the south china sea and we've got you know six you know navies doing coordinated uh sailing there which i think is a adjacent issue here historically historically great powers that want to remain great don't owe over 100 of their economy uh especially you know when a lot of it's held by uh foreign powers i mean that is a situation that makes us fragile not anti-fragile right because if we hit a crisis if there is you know some unforeseen military conflict what what glass do we break now in case of emergency we've already spent we're already at we're in peace time and we have wartime levels of debt and now inflation is making a return and the fed is going to make some really tough choices about whether to control inflation and essentially impose austerity on the on government spending or whether they monetize the debt which will lead to a runaway depreciation of the dollar neither one of those things is a good situation how would we have reduced our austerity well they can't but but again if debt service rises to thirty percent of the federal budget where's that money gonna come from you have to raise taxes and cut spending you have to do which is why and i think this is joe manchin's point you know if you've been listening to joe manchin talk about the current reconciliation bill and he says look 3.5 trillion doesn't make sense we don't know what situ what situation we're going to confront in the future we don't know what crises are coming we're going to reduce our ability to tackle all those future problems by overspending right now that's been joe manchin's argument and looking at this risk of stagflation in the forms of the supply chain shortage and this 5.1 interest rate number you'd have to say that if we want to preserve any flexibility next year to raise interest rates uh you better be really careful about how much debt you incur now agree yeah look when when when druck said that the 10-year break even was sort of you know at a five-year high at the time um we're back there now um look i i'm just gonna i i said this on cnbc i'll just say it again i think it's coming i don't think it's a short-term blip and i think that we are in a period that will resemble the late 70s and i think that you know you kind of want to be risk off and not own risk assets um and by the way it is hard okay because like we are all all of us all four of us both risk all we're both risk on and all we own are risk assets that are you know it's one thing to say let's take risk but you could take risk and like lower of all things this is this is like taking risk in the most risky thing that's what we all do and at a time when people have run up the valuations of private market companies to a level that just nobody can understand i mean look i think you got a year to 18 months to kind of clean this stuff up meaning like as market participants we can you know we can shuck and jive and get everything into a decent place but it's coming um and i hope i'm wrong but um i think we'll look back on this and we'll say we said it probably eight to 12 months before it really reared its ugly head but it's coming uh freeberg any thoughts on what's happening in taiwan and what uh you know even a modest conflict there would do to markets given how to sax's point this is the opposite of antifragile we are in like full fragility here i mean this is like you know a tray full of champagne glasses on a boat in rough seas at any point we could trip and everything comes crashing down does it feel like that to you freeburg or do you feel like we're gonna be able to navigate this i mean i don't know about taiwan but i think we're just going to keep inflating our way out of this mess like remember like that that's what we did last year and um it's what we'll do again this year the the the biggest um losers in that equation are the um the middle class uh because uh you know the middle class actually owns assets that are now going to be worth less um folks who are not in the middle class that are below the middle class don't own assets so it doesn't really affect them they just make higher wages but stuff costs more so they'll be fine and then you know wealthy individuals will end up getting taxed away uh to fund some of this and i think that's the inevitable kind of way that the equation balances right but i mean think about how much tax rates are about to go up right now in this reconciliation bill we haven't even gotten to like any of these crises by the way we don't know for sure if they're going to happen i think we could describe these things as storm clouds right now that are very much on the horizon multiple storm clouds they're converging right and if they do materialize in the way that we're talking about what weapons do we have left in order to fight them what weapons of fiscal policy what weapons of monetary policy we're already going to have taxes on an all-time high yeah yeah well we're going to have to tax money no we're going to print money and we're going to pay ourselves we're going to go to the central bank it's what you said we're going to monetize our debt and that is going to go up that is i mean remember the top um marginal tax rate was what 70 80 percent in the uh 60s and 70s i mean you know that's likely where we're going to go back to well i think we're already going to be back there as a result of the reconciliation we've already done yeah but we've already we've already broken the glass in case of emergency we already you're gonna you're gonna see some of these wealth taxes get chased down you're gonna see the top marginal tax rate go up 70 80 you know i mean i think that's the way the equation balances it's not like the world's going to end we're going to solve it by taking assets away from some and we're going to inflate all the all assets like that sounds pretty bad yeah yeah i mean 78 if you by the way it's not going to affect you it's not going to be going to work it will affect most people it will affect most people even though they don't think it will because it's going to affect the quality of our economy i'm just trying to predict what's going to happen sax i'm not saying this is the solution to our problem i mean i think the solution to our problem is technology but you know the question is does that come to market fast enough say more about that oh i i feel like we need a deflationary set of technologies that can like mitigate all of these effects right so software automation self-driving trucks things that take the labor force because people don't want to work low-income jobs factually and you know now that there's america now that there's in america now that there's a world where people don't have where people have other options because other jobs have been created because we pump so much money into these other industries we're seeing people migrate away from low-income jobs like driving a truck for ten dollars an hour or working at mcdonald's for eight dollars an hour and so to fill that gap and avoid the economic collapse that will occur in those sectors of the economy you need to automate and you need to find solutions that can replace the labor with some alternative technology solution that actually allows the product to be fulfilled to the consumers that demand it um or you're going to see rates go up like you're going to be paying twelve dollars for a hamburger because you're gonna have to pay everyone twenty five dollars what would either you can take it i'm sure you're both going to have opinions here but um we've been battling over immigration and nobody even seems to understand how many people are coming into the country or under what system should we not tie the number of jobs available you know over the trailing x number of months a year's quarters to how many people were bringing to the country and couldn't we solve this by allowing five million people a million people whatever it is per year a half million people in to take those low income jobs and utilize that uh group of people to you know get businesses back on track i think it's too convenient to say that these are all low-income jobs i don't think that's necessarily true um and i think that it then starts to introduce a whole bunch of other constraints in the system these are folks that then need health care these are folks that need child care these are folks that need you know that they are also attacks on resources as well right we are all tax on the natural resources and the infrastructure of our country and so you know it i don't think that that's the solution necessarily to that specific problem what if the jobs that were the people that are coming in we have enough people here to do the work but then we do it what we don't have is the market clearing price for that work to get done and so what i'm just trying to say is i think that the simpler and more obvious solution is to raise salaries until you get people to fill these jobs and i think that it's happening and so i do think that over the next year or two or three you're going to see you know labor rates basically go back up and employment rates go back down and salaries go back up and inflation go back up all of these things are going to happen together that's the solution i think immigration is it is a solution to a completely different problem which is which is that we're not competitive like i've i really so you're talking about bringing an elite highly educated technical people look i i really think that running a country should really be like running a sports team you know and recruit the best talent and you should really be recruiting the best talent you should be looking at game film you should be coming up with plays you should be running and testing those plays you know you should have different plays that you run in the first quarter versus the fourth quarter different plays when you're on the goal line sure you know and and i think that like when you look at professional sports one thing is that they don't see color gender sexual orientation they see ability to be performant statistics and statistical excellence yeah and then they go seek statistical excellence and and and if you translate that to a country my simple rubric on immigration is every year there's a draft and america is the free place every free agent wants we're the yankees yeah with the warriors yeah i [ __ ] the yankees we're like the warriors okay these are trash jesus christ who historically has won the most we're the new england patriots okay the cheaters we're the chicago bulls we're the you know we we are the team that everybody would want to play for it's up to us to have a good gm and a good president of the team at a good front office that just picks off all these smart geniuses this should be i think your great point here chamoth is you're saying let's take the emotion out of this immigration and let's make it a point-based system which by the way the point-based system is what australia new zealand the uk canada all do and americans don't even know what the point based system is saks what are your views uh as somebody who i've heard leans a little bit to the right on opening up immigration or maybe sweeping all this amazing talent globally who have the highest statistics go i like jamaa's sports team analogy we want to get the biggest stars from all over the world to come to the us i mean i think that makes sense i think you know this so-called immigration issue gets so confused with so many different things i mean first of all there's immigration and then there's border security right and immigration or just having a border period and so many people think that if you're get pro-immigration you basically can't have a border i mean that makes no sense um you know we need to have a border and uh we need to have actual like have an actual immigration policy shouldn't just yet be like okay you make it across i i i like president or if your guy ron desantis becomes president what should his what will you tell ron situation i like what you're saying i like what you're saying with a point system having it be skills based i mean that makes sense right the republicans do that they've been so emotionally tied to this issue because of trump can they actually you know tie themselves to something performance-based and be non-emotional about it can they change their position i think trump actually did endorse like a more skills-based immigration system i think that i i don't know the republicans are the ones being emotional about it i mean the people who are your sides are clearly super emotional the side that i think is like insane are the people who don't think we need a border i mean you clearly have to have a border yes and even obama came out recently made a statement that you have to have a border because the the the progressive left had gone so far it's almost like they wanted to be whatever trump was doing they wanted to do the opposite of you know it's like pull the 180. and so it's almost like the buying administration policy became to stop doing whatever it was that trump was doing including finishing the wall i don't i don't really understand why that was like such a problem yeah building a wall also seemed like ridiculous we could just it's just one piece it's just one piece of the solution but to stop it in mid construction let me ask you a a question it broke this week that you're hosting uh a fundraiser for ron desantis you got a little bit of blow back from that uh from the woke uh you know in the san francisco crowd but in terms of your influence with somebody like that do you think you can actually influence them to get ron desantis to listen to this episode and maybe talk about the point-based system and change the framing of that do you think you have enough influence to do that i don't know i mean i don't know exactly what his position on immigration is that's not that that's not like the set of issues that's um that i respect him for i mean the reason why i wanted to support desantis is that he was the first governor to end these insane lockdowns and um i mean this is back in it should have been obvious to everybody by may of 2020 that the lockdowns didn't work and he was the first one to to roll them back and um and florida did very well especially considering that they have so many old people in florida so you know on the whole not what i have done everything exactly the way he did it now you know but nobody did it perfectly no he is but is he is he a trump supporter and a trump acolyte or is he distancing himself from i think i honestly i think that like point of view is coming from the point of view of somebody who's not in the republican party it doesn't have to deal with the dynamics of winning support in the republican party that's what i'm saying yeah so you you have to basically toe the line with trump to get the nomination i don't i don't see it as towing the lie and i just think look i think he's his own person he's the governor of florida he's setting policy over there um he can be supported or not based on what he's doing in florida i think like trump is the issue that everybody on the other side will want to talk about but i don't think it's relevant to what he's doing i don't think he's relevant to what he's inside of the republican party over this and should we support trump but i wouldn't say i wouldn't say it's a civil war but there definitely is some some conflict and yeah i mean i hope it resolves and look i think elections are always about the future i don't think people want to relitigate the past and i think that and i think that the republican party be wise i think to find a candidate of the future and not try to rehash or relitigate the past um another good reason for me to support desantis i think he is a future looking future-oriented candidate um i do think that look i'll say it the stuff i hear trump doing now in these speeches where he's relitigating what happened last year um and and attacking other republicans like mcconnell because he doesn't because they failed his personal loyalty test um it's a little bit like what he did frankly in georgia with the runoffs where yeah he sewed so much chaos that the republicans lost a seat the purdue seat that they had won on election night and they had that runoff and you have to say that a huge part of the reason for that was the was trump uh attacking raffles burger and and all the the georgia gop because he thought they were insufficiently loyal to him and then you know you had the whole the tape come out of can you just find 11 000 votes i mean i think voters in georgia punished the republican party for that by by giving that seat to the democrats that is the that that margin created the democratic majority which will now give us probably an incremental four to six trillion of spending and tax increases that we wouldn't otherwise have had so i i do think these elections are very important and it would behoove the republicans look i'm not i'm not like one of these never trumper people who i i'm just not obsessed with trump period i just think the republicans need to run a future looking candidate not a backwards-looking candidate in 2024. and i think desantis could be that guy it's very very early to say i mean the first thing he has to do is run for governor for re-election in uh which i think is next year's 2022 so i will support him for that all right you guys have anybody read the the ted surrenders memo yeah this is great we should definitely jump into this we talked about uh the chappelle performance uh sax and uh freeborn did you watch it did you watch it oh god what nerd you haven't watched oh my god you guys are culturally bankrupt what were you guys doing this week like [ __ ] beakers and like you know you were just like are you like in like some laboratory doing like saturdays i haven't watched it yet but i don't need to watch it to know i support it he doesn't have to click on the link all right so there's almost nothing chappelle could say to make me want to cancel him i mean and by the way i've seen a lot of chef chappelle and i love chappelle so i think i understand that just what he was doing but i i do need to see it still but look he should not be canceled it's ridiculous i don't think he is he's going to survive but here's what goes beyond this um let me uh read you from it so everybody knows that the name of the special he did was the closer it was released on october 5th a lot of outcry from glaad and uh advocacy groups and actually people inside of uh netflix there's been some resignations there have been some people who contribute content to netflix who are now saying they'll not work with the company and um it's really interesting ted sorrento sent a memo to the entire company on monday and he's this is the second one he sent and he says we know that a number of you have been left angry disappointed and hurt by our decision to put dave chappelle's latest special on netflix very interesting opening uh he's he's addressing their feelings just this is a master class and a memo because in that first part he just addresses i understand you feel that way with the closer we understand that the concern is not about offensive to some content but titles which could increase real world harm so now he's framing their argument as it's not because it's defensive it's because of real world harm you've brought this up before sax the real world harm concept with um apple and uh antonio while some employees disagree we have a strong belief that content on screen does not directly translate into real world harm it's not exactly true uh we'll get into that the strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last 30 years especially with first party shooter games and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries uh and so he goes above and beyond just talking about offensive material uh adults can watch violence assault and abuse or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy without it causing them to harm other stand-up comedians often expose issues that are uncomfortable because the art by nature is highly provocative as a leadership team we do not believe that the closer is intended to incite hatred or violence against anyone for our sensitive content guidelines so basically he says you know if you don't like it change the channel if you're a customer you can cancel your subscription or if you work here and you don't like it you don't need to work here but is this the end of cancel culture this combined with brian armstrong's positioning sax this is your i don't i don't think it's the end of it uh for the simple reason um let's assume that this comic had not signed a 60 million dollar deal with netflix let's say he had signed a sixty thousand dollar deal okay or six million yeah or six million or whatever and uh and and he didn't have the legions of fans that that dave chappelle had do you think that sarandos would make making the same decision i mean i think that's special by you know by a a a netflix comedy by dave smith would be swept under the ruggle right now we that would never see the light of day uh i think the same thing was true with joe rogan and spotify right i mean uh spotify made a 60 million deal with rogan uh the employee oh 100 million the employees all protested and spotify is too tall for rogan but they had every economic incentive to do so i don't completely trust these companies that if it wasn't massively in their bottom line interest that they would have stood up for free speech i suspect that if it was you know they would not have they would not have i think he said in the email sticks and stones is one of the most watched you know piece of content we have and this the closer was like top four or five in america uh over like the last few weeks so there's a huge economic incentive and and and reid hastings said the same thing when he posted the other co-ceo into a group forum which said listen our job is to please our customers and all this data says is that we've pleased our customer right and i think in the case right and and i think to me that's him putting his foot down and saying we're going to make the content we want to make i don't think i don't think it's a principle i don't think it's a super pro look i i don't want to i don't want to look past it because i think that it's so rare to get a memo like uh sarandos wrote where he's defending artistic freedom or freedom of speech or what have you i mean it's so rare to ever see that that i don't want to gain say it too much but i also do believe that this sort of special treatment is really reserved for the for the artists the creators like a chappelle like a rogan they're basically too big to cancel i mean these companies have spent too much money on their programs to just summarily cancel them they also again like i said have legions of fans who would rise up and protest if they were canceled but i don't think but i don't think these companies would make the same decision for the the middle the mid-level creator and in a sense rogan and chappelle they're post-economic right i mean they've made so much money that they're free to do what they want and they've got a big enough audience to protect themselves from these companies but it's the little creator who's still on their way up who can never take the kinds of creative risks that chappelle is taking or that well they can take it they just can't do it on netflix but i i the tone of this to me sound sounded like a manifesto and a the end of the discussion from dad like we're doing this if you don't like it get off the ship but this is the way the ship is going that's the way i read it and i think spotify did a similar thing with um joe rogan to your point which was hey listen there's some content out there from like alex jones or some people who are just conspiracy theorists they took down those episodes and joerg was like i don't care i got paid um but yeah it does feel to me like this is a tipping point when you put brian armstrong joe rogan and chappelle together that corporations are going to say you know what the mob is fine you can have your opinion but your opinion stops where we have to run a business freeberg what are your thoughts i think i think netflix has a appreciation for artistry certainly evident by the money they've spent and the product they've put out and i think good artist and good artistry is um uh you know can be provocative it's designed to make you change your opinion look at things differently think about things differently and be challenged in the norms of you know your everyday life and i think that's um that's important in art in all forms um and that means seeing and being exposed to and um being engaged by things that you don't normally get exposed to and engaged by and i think that's what chappelle is fantastic at and i think that's what other great art is great at and um and i think that as long as netflix maintains that ethos that artistry does that and the good thing is people appreciate it and they uh they appreciate that that form and they appreciate being challenged in that way and i think that as a result the market will as reid hastings identified continue to demand it and as much as some people might be offended it's the fact that it is offensive that i think makes it good um so let me ask you and i think that they appreciate that let me let me know i hope you're right about what this means i mean let me be really clear i mean i hope it goes down exactly the way that you're saying because that that is what i want to believe is happening i'm a little bit skeptical that this is a little bit more of a bottom line motive because they got so much money at stake they can't afford to cancel chappelle but i hope you're right that i hope you're right that it's a statement of principle and they will apply that principle to lesser-known artists who can't protect themselves as much and you know hopefully this is kind of like you know what it reminds me of is the jon stewart lab the the the wuhan lab leak moment where you had jon stewart go on um colbert's show and he all of a sudden he made it okay to talk about the lab leak theory it was like you couldn't talk about it before you cracked the overton window off yes exactly and so hopefully chappelle will do that for this like woke cancellation mob is to finally get everybody to realize oh like we can stand up to this chamath is the overton window uh on a go forward basis do you see it closing more staying where it is or perhaps even opening there's a there's a really great philosopher this is uh this is my maybe my one and only grand tribute to peter thiel but he he is um he's a huge supporter of a philosopher named renee gerard and uh i agree with a lot of a lot of that uh a a lot of renee gerard's philosophies and basically it's called memetic theory and the idea is you're born without preferences and then you kind of just copy what's around you and so what the other person wants is what you want and that's what ultimately leads to a lot of conflict and the only way to resolve conflict is is with a huge grand sacrifice of some kind okay and if you think about it here if you're going to really put you know cancel culture if you're gonna kill it there needs to be some just massive escalation and conflict around this idea that allows us to resolve it in one way or the other in one direction or the other and i don't think this is it i think it's not big enough quite honestly i think it's a little bit sort of like you know there's folks like us that love comedy and we're willing to keep it in a very strict box which is let people say what they're gonna say be shocked with it and don't take it on to yourself and don't you know and go and reflect it into the world it's entertainment and you can you know it's like i choose not to watch um violent stuff because i don't like it i find it i find it very offensive or you know i don't play first person shooters i find it really unsettling you know grand theft auto i found it really outrageous and other people will feel like that about chappelle my whole thing is we should all be allowed to make those judgments because i think we're all still pretty rational people at the end of the day and do the right thing in the normal world but this isn't the thing that's going to get this uh issue to be resolved so i don't know how it comes there needs to be some huge escalation around this thing i suspect what happens is it actually just uh dissipates and goes away and the reason is because everybody who's much younger than us has such a huge digital footprint that they've created through their whole life there is so much [ __ ] that's out there god yes that they just have no choice but to let everybody else off the hook we we are in a very different situation because we were doing some [ __ ] shady stuff always on the down low oh he's hidden whoa easy there but that that's how it was our child you're largely anonymous you would roll deep and you would just you would pretend you would not you know and now the culture is very different and i think with that comes a lot of acceptance every you know every kid at some point may or may not be on tinder bumble rhea you know grinder whatever so there's going to be a body of that content that's up every kid will have said something crazy you know on tick tock and all of this stuff will be there and so you'll have a choice which is if you're going to hold me accountable i'm going to hold you accountable and so it's mutually assured destruction and i think that's what causes cancer culture to go away in time it's the last vestige of very guilty people of our generation fascinating what do you think freeburg is the overturned window opening closing or about i think i think what jamaat is saying is right i um i think i've referred to this book called the light of other days before when we talked i think so right yeah um the book is like all about this notion of all information that's available to everyone everywhere and societal norms completely change people no longer find things offensive and they no longer and everyone basically shifts to a mode of much more kind of open dialogue because you know keeping things behind closed doors and then positioning one person against the other completely changes when you can see everyone's cards all the time um and so i think yeah generally we're headed that way i don't think we're gonna information wants to be free more information is being generated about each of us all the time i don't think that we're headed in the opposite direction kind of back to a victorian era i think we're going in the other way so there's going to be blips and starts um uh that that'll kind of you know be setbacks on that general trajectory um so yeah i do think it's it's it's a moment you know it's a moment in time right now um where this is happening i mean look at the two examples we've discussed brian armstrong and uh coinbase that was about essentially black lives matters and talking about social justice at work and this one is about trans uh and trans rights and essentially i don't want to say poking fun at or you know uh discussing uh i mean it basically says in it that he's team turf if you were to take two organizations that standing up against would be the most challenging and difficult i think those are the top two no i guess so that i mean that's why i think this is the mo this is the most telling is that you have two different organizations saying hey we're going to put our foot down just for a background netflix had a very strange um i didn't see the actual film so i won't make judgment on it but it was a very strange uh trailer for a film called cuties which was really over sexualizing young girls like eight nine ten-year-old girls and they didn't take it down um in the united states uh netflix but uh they did that was in france it was in france it was a french movie yeah and they have a different view of kids and sexuality and yeah uh i think people found it a little dark uh here in the united states but they survived that one as well uh or they weathered that one as well so i think what people are finding is if you put your foot down at a certain point i think what the axis says is right then they've these guys have realized that if we have this very specific message around artistic freedom and we never violate it because that's one of those things where if you take that hill you have to be there forever right you can't have asterisks around that idea but by doing that they basically dominate the content production game in hollywood which then allows them to feel the most content at the cheapest average price which then makes churn less and customer acquisition higher and they're already the largest media company in the world and they're only going to get bigger you know their netflix says what 200 million subscribers they're gonna get to a billion subscribers it's just inevitable and so for them i do think it's a very rational business position to take which is that i have to appeal to a billion people over the next you know seven or eight years you don't have to watch everything on netflix you do not have to listen to every album netflix is a [ __ ] mess i mean they should spend 10 minutes and improve the ui so you can actually find something my god it's so bad i and you know he he basically surrendos made the point that you know along with chappelle show they are funding a ton of content by people of color probably more than anybody and trans people it's a big focus of what they're doing at netflix and it's you know it's essentially to sax's point more speech is better than less all right do we want to go tether fda chaos well why don't you take uh why don't you do your reverse victory lap because after all your victory lap for me but no bro it was the exact opposite it is not a it's a [ __ ] fraud come on can you please stop saying that apparently the cftc went in did the work and is naturally now refuting what you thought was the case jason okay why don't you just how about i read you the quote from at least june 1st 2016 to february 25th 2019 together misrepresented to customers and the market that tether maintained sufficient us dollar reserves to back every usdt in circulation with the equivalent equivalent amount of corresponding fiat currency held by tether and safely deposit and tell their bank accounts uh in other words they told everybody they were one for one they were not they lied to the public and that's why they're getting a 41 million dollars that's why they're banned from new york and that's why they're banned from trading in canada i think and they're supposedly a department of justice um these guys are shady as f am shady do you have a do you have an economic interest in tether no crypto he does no no i i can anyone have an economic interest in tether all it is is a one for one tokenized dollar well no it's not that's what they claim it is no i know you're you're right that it should be and we need an audit to establish that it is and they won't audit they'll do an attestation when they did their attestation all they have to do is show a document that says there's money in an account they don't have to show how long that's been in the account certainly this certainly feels like a security to me and i would think the sec should get involved in uh stable coins are the number one thing on gensler and the scc's mind right yeah i mean they they make a claim of a secured interest in something unlikely this is like crypto this is the easiest part of cryptocurrency why is it easy why because because look at a bank account you audit it you're done it's it's a tokenized dollar that's it it is not actually i'm not even sure it's a security it basically is a digital representation of a dollar industry sitting in a bank account somewhere it's a money market yeah it's a money market in funds they're securities and they're regulated at securities okay fine but my point is you know there are complicated securities and then there's securities that aren't complicated this is definitely the least complicated complicated that this company only has to their own attestations like six percent three to six percent in cash in a bank account and the rest is in highly volatile corporate uh paper here's the point that i was trying to make to you in the group chat oh when a company who's got billions and billions and billions of dollars of some stable coin whatever or something that you think is zero okay it's a multi multi-billion dollar market um tens of billions oh sorry tens of thousands seventy billion in tether out there and and and could you imagine if they like let's just say if there were 70 billion of tether and like you know one billion of securities that would be a fraud of gargantuan proportions right we would be talking about we would be if they siphoned the money out for their own use beyond talking about fines what i found comical jason is your claims make it seem like bernie madoff enron level corruption craziness hold on okay and the fine was 42 million which is like who [ __ ] cares 42 million and it was between them and another firm so either the cftc completely got the fine wrong and they missed a zero or two zeros or this was not nearly as big as you thought it was i'm shocked shocked that jacob got overly excited about some perceived hopes uh yeah jason didn't fully understand something and got very emotional about it look here all right that's it that's it i got it here's here's the best case scenario for making sense of jkl's points which is it's possible that tether the company behind tether has all the money they've just not chosen to keep it in dollar reserves and so they put it in corporate bonds and a whole mishwash of different things to get the float to get the flow my guess is that tether is solvent i don't think it's it lacks solvency but uh but i personally would feel better about any stable coin if it was 100 dollar back i think it should be which is what jeremy miller is doing at um circle i had them on the pod this week i hope they bought the get lab uh ipo uh well i mean the the the issue here is they also co-mingled funds which is what got full tilt in trouble the user's accounts with their money in it was mixed with the operating capital so they were using the deposits to operate the business which is the biggest no-no they were co-mingling the funds that people thought were backed uh and bitfinex and tether were the same company that's why they both got the fines at the same time they've also been banned from doing any having any customers in new york and they've been banned in canada and there's apparently a doj wire for it so i think this is the beginning of the end not the end of the beginning okay that's my personal belief i was just wanting to get your reaction to what seemed like a really pathetic fine for what could be a 70 billion fraud i mean facebook got a series of speeding tickets too i mean i think that that's i mean that's a big issue for our government is that billion dollars what's that they paid like five billion dollars or something right they're a trillion dollar company i mean it's nothing five billion is a big number not in relation to their market cap and how much cash they throw off 42 million i mean that's a tax payment it's a quarterly tax payer for for you champagne for us uh or maybe for sax he's doing pretty well too yum yum all right uh do we want we promise we do some questions should we do a couple of questions sure i mean we would also talk about the fda and oh my god the fda my gosh free bird do you want to leave this freeberg you want to tell us about the chaos at the fda well i don't think it's chaotic like you guys think it is um i'll make that counter why don't you why don't you make your chaos point first and then i'll make it i don't know that's not my point it's just kind of the uh what people yeah people are perceiving this so like you know there's been a couple of these um changes in recommendations now all of these recommendations that um and you know the these statements and approvals that have come out of the fda are predicated on these independent advisory panels that are put together to look at research data assess the research data and make a recommendation on what they think is appropriate so we saw this happen with the pfizer booster shot a few weeks ago where initially the advisory panel which again is made up of independent doctors and scientists who generally don't have any sort of economic interest in the outcome here they voted 16 to 2 against everyone getting a booster shot and then they voted 18 to 0 in favor of everyone 65 and over and those at risk of getting a booster shot and then recently there was you know similar sort of consternation around the modern and they ended up looking at data that indicated that maybe a half dose which is 50 micrograms instead of 100 micrograms would have a reasonable amount of efficacy relative to the side effect risk for people over 65 and therefore they made a recommendation to approve that as a booster which the fda is now approving and so again the way this process is run and i think it's a good process is independent advisors of doctors and scientists come together and the one that recently came together was around this generalized use of aspirin as a heart attack deterrent because it thins the blood and limits the risk of people getting heart attacks but it turns out that such a a large percentage of the population or large enough percentage of the population we're having bleeding issues where your stomach bleeds i don't know if you guys have this but you know you take ibuprofen or nsaids your stomach can bleed that was causing more of a problem for people than they were seeing in the data in terms of a reduction in heart attack effects for people that were not highly at risk and so they revised the recommendation and said hey let's give people that are only at risk and over a certain age aspirin not just blanket give it to everyone over 40 or 50. and so it took in account new data and i think this is an important point science is messy right by definition science is about gathering data forming a hypothesis testing again iterating restating your hypothesis and it's it's designed to be circular it's designed to be a learning system not designed to be a system that defines absolute truth and absolute fact and it's good to see the fda doing this work and it's good to see scientists reviewing new data and changing their recommendations and you know we've seen this in in health we've seen this in in the food system in the usda changing their diet guidelines and people used to be told don't eat dietary cholesterol it turns out saturated fat is what causes cholesterol in your blood so there were a lot of changes that that kind of emerged as new data was gathered and really tried to eat a lot of carbs remember the all-carb diets yeah and then they learned that they made a change in their stays yeah wait wait can we bring that back i'm starving i used to eat pasta every day first it was rice in my tens and twenties oh i've seen you eat rice oh the shoveling of rice so freeburg i mean if we're gonna be just intellectually eating pizza if we're gonna be intellectually honest about this the fact that you know official health officials can be wrong about positions they've maintained with i guess seemingly total certainty for decades and now they can revise those positions i mean doesn't that lend some credence to some of these like anti-vaxx arguments when they say well gee i'm i'm skeptical about injecting our mrna into myself think it's a totally different you just got the episode banned on youtube we just got a warning i'm glad i'm glad i got the vaccine i got the pfizer vaccine um and i think look it could have saved my life i mean i had a very mild case of delta yeah one of the first breakthroughs because so but but it was very mild and i think that was because i got pfizer i think the risk return was completely worth it and but but i can also see why people with like five-year-old like kindergarten age you know want to get in might not want to get it for their kids when the upside is absolutely you know tiny given that it doesn't really affect five-year-olds very much and the downside is not there's no problems how is that any different than the aspirin thing it might no i don't i don't wish you had gotten really sick yes you are no but there's a bunch of people on the left i don't i don't um i don't disagree with the framing that that um here's what typically happens the scientists or the fda panel will say based on the data that we have this is our recommendation on what should happen and then the framing that that people then assume is oh this is what they believe to be absolute truth and with absolute certainty this is what we have to do and i think the translation layer to the general population is such that this is the ten commandments i came down from mount sinai and this is what i'm saying it has to happen and the reality is it is based on data and that data changes over time and i think that your point is right there is no absolute certainty that the pfizer vaccine is going to be absolutely perfect for everyone and it's going to absolutely reduce the risk more than it um increases the risk for people five years old and younger um and it's a it's a very fair point that like but the problem as we've seen on all sides is that the framing is that these things are binary and they're not right there's a probability distribution of which is defined as the risk and the the things that might go wrong and the probability distribution of the benefits and then people assume that it's just binary yes i think you're making an excellent point there i just want to underscore let me kind of translate what you're saying is that the the people at the fda are in these positions who actually understand the science make a cost-benefit analysis and what they're saying and approving it is that the costs outweigh the risks sorry the benefits outweigh the risks the broad population there's a broad population okay by the way that's why i got the vaccine i don't know for sure that there's no downsides in 10 years all i know is there's an upside immediately and i benefited from that so i was very happy to take it but in any event instead of this complicated cost-benefit analysis the media translates that into good bad it's almost like a moral case and then the politicians translate that into laws and rules and if you question the rules you're now a bad person because you you've opposed the quote-unquote good side of the argument i mean for example gavin newsom just signed a bill in california saying that if you are a public school child elementary school kindergarten you have to get vaccinated in order to go to a public school even though the vaccine doesn't even exist for them yet i mean you could be pro-vax which i guess i would consider myself to be clearly provacs i mean i got it my 13 year old got it i support it i think it's a smart decision but to require a five-year-old to get it in order to go to public schools well you can also wait until we get the fda data here's a question for you friedberg um you know having this um one of the complaints has been the fda restricts progress i mean i think actually peter thiel had this position for a while that we should uh you know so just get rid of it and disband it what do we think about having the fda being framed as these are recommendations and then each state gets to make a decision with their local fda so then if colorado or texas or florida had a difference of opinion about psychedelics about vaccines they could run it's a really important matter of ethics yes what are your ethics that you believe um you know should be the guiding principles for how the government plays a role in individuals making choice about their health and their body and so if you believe that the government and this is there's no right or wrong here it's simply a framing of what you believe if you believe that it's appropriate for the government to make the decision about what's safe and not safe for you as an individual to do then the fda should stay in place and they should have their criteria of when they're ready to make a recommendation there's enough data to define the benefits and the cost of a particular thing that you might put in your body and then telling you yes you should or shouldn't do this if you and if not they're going to take their time and and figure that out now if you don't believe that then yes the fda should be disbanded and drug companies will go around and they will tell people take this drug it will save your life and people will take it and there will be there will be people that will suffer from that there will be people that will have or maybe something in between there will be people and and remember like the criteria for the fda is do no harm so you know that is the criteria for a doctor in general it is a very difficult criteria to meet when there are costs to a drug or cost to a therapy or treatment when people get chemotherapy for cancer there are awful deleterious side effects to their body but the benefit of saving their life and getting rid of the cancer having at least a shot at doing that is great enough and the fda has made a judgment call that that cost and that benefit kind of created an equation that says this is an approved drug now and that's really their goal and if they don't have enough data and they haven't taken enough time to figure that out they don't feel comfortable approving a drug and making that recommendation but then if you let them get out of the way and you let individuals make choice you could see this being a disgusting free-for-all where drug companies will hawk snake oil on people and a lot of harm will be caused and that's that's the counter argument and i'm not saying one is right or whatever i was thinking there might be something that really comes down to what is the role that you want i mean it's really that what is the role that you want any government whether it's states or the federal government to play in deciding what you can and can't do with your body and what you can and can't put in your body and ultimately what companies that are making products for you can and can't say to you about the benefit and the cost of that product and there's no simple solution right i mean like look at kyrie irving i mean he's he basically is 200 million dollars not every individual is equipped to look at the data and make a judgment call on their own and so the question then is what authority will they look to and if the alternative authority that they will look to is not as good as a research team of 18 scientists then they're probably going to end up getting bad advice do you think that's really all right what do you think the aldrich kyrie retires i think it's 60 right now i think he's giving up 200 million dollars because he won't get back 200 million extension he gets paid like 30 or 40 million dollars a year he refuses to get the vaccine he said the reason he's not getting the vaccine is because of all the people who don't have a choice the pilots who are being forced to get it or not go to work so he is a privilege he says and he wants to make this decision for everybody else he also believes that the earth is flat stop that was a joke he said i don't think it was a joke where are you getting that from jacob uh typing kyrie irving flat earth he talked about how do we know the earth is actually around and he basically is yeah two days later he came out and he was like you guys misinterpret anyways that's neither here or there he's oh he's what he's unique and wacky he sounds like i don't know so i would i wouldn't make that decision why are you so pejorative like i know i know you're still a member of the media you have like a vestigial tail here is that you just bought in to the framework that freeberg laid out which is the media takes complicated issues cost-benefit analyses and turns them into right first of all he didn't come to the knicks he didn't come so now he's bad now he's back to the knicks he sounds to me like a man of conscience no man of conscience who's willing to stand up on principle turn down 200 million dollars i got the vaccine for free i sure as hell wouldn't turn away 200 million dollars not to get it so i mean 200 million to not take it would you have taken would you have not taken it yeah i think so i think i'm not taking it for 200 million there uh there was a i heard a great story yesterday at the poker table one of the guys was telling me uh it's his backgammon teacher and he says his backgammon teacher or is it you know good backgammon teacher and a magician blah blah 20 years ago he was asked um to get female breast implants for a year for a hundred thousand dollars he did it and he kept them for 20 years um that's quite a free roll so you know the bar for people to do the par for people to do things is really not that high uh is really what what i took away from that story and what i take away from this story is so let's go around the horn no but kyrie is willing to draw the line on something that he believes in and it's going to cost him 200 million dollars there's a lot of things that come with all of that noise um he should be allowed to make that decision in my opinion um and i don't i don't like the way that he's characterized because i think this is a good human being he's a phenomenal basketball player there's no phenomenon could you imagine how strongly he feels about this if he's willing to walk away from the game that he loves and that's you know been an enormous part of his life why why is it so important to foist on kyrie irving the need to get vaccinated i mean it's because in new york city in indoors you have to there's a vaccine requirement and he can't play at home games he could play in texas or houston so they've talked about trading him to houston but then when he went to new york and you also can't practice with the team in new york new jersey i guess massachusetts there's a bunch of states where you can't go indoors without a vaccine they're in close proximity to each other you get the idea i just think we're turning a good thing into which is the vaccine i generally think it's a it's a great thing that i got done so quickly it's a miracle of science and i think it's helped a lot of people i mean all of us i mean it's the thing that's going to end the pandemic largely already has but we're turning into a bad thing but why were we demanding that these holdouts like every last person must get vaccinated what about what about a flight attendant should a flight attendant be forced if they're on a tiny house or should they be working somewhere you get so much protection by being vaccinated yourself that i don't think so you don't believe in mandates now well i think private companies have the right to to nba is a private company i know i get it so but i'm just i'm just starting to really question here whether it's truly necessary to get every single one of these last holdouts i just there's something un-american about imposing on free people this decision they can't just make up their own mind you in a previous episode said you were in favor of it if people were dying at a higher rate if it was more accurate well hold on you did say that you said if it was killing kids and a lot of people were dying if it was favorable if it was some sort of like ebola like yeah of course it'd be a whole different cost benefit analysis exactly um but look what i said and i think this is still my position is that government shouldn't require shouldn't stick a needle in your arm i think private businesses can do it um or you don't use that service so how much would it take for you to get b cups uh implanted for a year for one billion dollars would you do it only b's i'm not saying like a strong d or something like just like a modest because no i mean is that a real story from us yeah send you the link it's there's a huge article about it it's in wikipedia as well yeah that's an old story listen you've already someone's got b for that i've lost 16 pounds i'm good i'm good i'm i'm just like a perky a right now b-cups be gone this show has gone off the rails um we promised the audience we take two questions the first one is for friedberg and the first question comes from daniel nielas he says alphaphone made great progress in predictive protein folding is there anything similar for chemical synthesis could a similar system finally predict a less energy-intensive pathway to ammonia then the haber bosch process for example i don't think this is right this is a this is a great question when molecules interact a molecule is a bunch of atoms stuck together and there are electrons and protons that make up that molecule and therefore there's this kind of variable electric potential energy potential that surrounds that molecule and it's very difficult today to deterministically model how two molecules might interact with one another in physics and um it turns out that that resolves using quantum physics and so today we can't really kind of put two molecules together and say here's what happens when you put these together and have a computer program very quickly and easily solve that quantum physics is involved and we don't have a good way to simulate quantum physics in binary computers so um one of the theories and and there's been some work on this in on the research basis creating the framework for it is that we can use quantum computers to simulate the quantum states of molecules and use that to figure out how molecules might interact with one another and as a result you could kind of see us creating simulations that resolve certain enzymes or proteins that might break apart molecules or stick molecules together or other molecule combinations that might cause something to happen the haber bosch process which is being referred to was discovered through trial and error in the early 20th century by a german physicist an engineer and they realized that if they compressed atmospheric um air to 200 times atmospheric pressure and ran it over an iron catalyst with electricity it's zapped it broke apart the nitrogen bonds in the in the atmosphere in the air that was compressed and trickled out ammonia which is uh nitrogen and hydrogen um and so this was like this amazing invention and it saved the world and fed the world there's a great book called the alchemy of air if anyone's interested in hearing about this um but it was through trial and error and we got so friggin lucky as a species that we figured this out using quantum computing in the next 30 years hopefully we'll be able to deterministically um model these these behaviors on a molecular atomic level and as a result kind of build new systems to make things um and that'll be an incredible um kind of tool kit for humans uh that'll advance a lot of science and a lot of engineering uh forward i'm still really strongly of the belief and this goes back to your point earlier i'm sorry i'm going on a bit of a ramp yeah it's great in a hundred to 120 years from now i do think we'll all have a a replicator in our room and that replicator will make all the things we want to make nearly instantaneously with very low energy and very low cost um and there's an oregon a new brand oregon the next car you want to make i mean we could see and by the way this is a crazy concept it's not just about oh you know quantum stuff or whatever was described in star trek in but the general principle that you can locally make things and locally make things cheaply with very little energy and very little input changes the whole supply chain model we're seeing this increasingly with new technologies with 3d printing and biomanufacturing you start to put these all together and you take a non-linear track out in the next couple decades and you get to a point that all this nonsense we're talking about where we're mining stuff in one place and making it another and shipping and combining it all another support exactly sex you're gonna be able to print a conscience [Applause] all right here's a question for saks matty or i guess me and also chamath uh and i guess all four of us maddie chavis asks between being a vc founder angel corporate employee which has been the most fun rewarding and why what advice would you give someone early in their career hoping to be be like you multi-channel investor thought leader when they grow up sacks well i didn't i didn't become a vc until after i had already done a few tours of duty as a founder and operator so i mean my recommendation would be to get involved in startups first generally get some operating experience and uh that would serve you well startups or even bigger companies i i just think getting getting some reps inside of an organization is critical i tell everyone that uh that's coming out of college or early in their career it's important you go get that perspective and work at a bigger business i mean i spent a few years at google and you know it was a thousand people when i joined grew to 10 000 by the time i left but like i learned so much just in that role and seeing successful products successful models for operating a business um it was really uh impactful for me long term and then you go and make all the mistakes as a founder building a startup you know and a lot of people end up with bad confirmation bias if they work at a startup that didn't work out and they think and all they can draw from is a failed model for operating um if things didn't which was your favorite which you know role has been your favorite to date freeberg you know when i was an executive at monsanto it's really nice to have that private jet that would come out and take me places they had a whole security requirement i already have that anyway [Music] what was your favorite sex my favorite stint uh yeah well what's i mean obviously what we did at paypal has gone on to become a legend and then you know paypal i was the founder ceo he led that to a unicorn exit so you got to say those would be the two best professional experiences i was joking about the private jet thing i honestly like to me and i sex i'm sure you know and the rest of you guys can feel the same but like making a great product and selling that product and you know working with a customer with that product is honestly like the most rewarding thing you can do it's like you know getting your hands dirty and actually delivering something of value in the world there's nothing more rewarding than that i mean all the financial engineering and making money and all the nonsense that goes on is really kind of a zoom out of that but that's really where reward comes in um yeah i feel that way too i was joking about the private jet too nick caught me miss speaking so yeah it was that the first experience of paypal the second experience was yammer you may have to do something which is your favorite private jet that you have yeah which to defend myself on stealing uh toiletries on chamot's plane no don't don't defend yourself don't do it it was a mini bottle of scope i drank half of it what do you say how many did you take put it back in the drawer on your plane i took a truth true story i did take the half bottle of pappy them you took my pappy van winkle it was like a half left that's a five thousand dollars i'll tell you actually i'll tell you a funny story about it i posted a half bottle of papi so blame me yeah okay so here i got to tell you this funny story so i was growing up i was going on you didn't take it was going on i was going on a business trip with um a couple of uh you know friends co-workers who they're actually founders now of a company i backed anyway we were going to like an event in i think it was in atlanta so it's like a four-hour flight so they at you they opened the liquor drawer or whatever and saw the time framework and um they asked like they could have uh sure take whatever you want and then i went in the back and and went to sleep so but by the time we land like four hours later the entire papi van winkle like stash has been they've gone through it and it's like yes all these different types of papi you've got the papi 23 you've got some of these you've got some of these antique antique ones so they asked me you know they've never flown on a private plane before they asked me you know say hey sax how much did this flight cost and i said it cost about six thousand dollars in jet fuel and about eight thousand dollars in papua new guinea pour the pack into the jet oh my god it costs more than uh i'm from around the way i'm leaving with something i'm leaving with something you know like if i'm i'll be on a pj i'm gonna leave with something i think we've found a way to end this podcast in the moment insufferable way possible um highlight it make it the opening all right four the queen of quinoa david friedberg for rain man david sacks and the dick and also we're playing we're playing next week at sexy blues places we're playing at the mausoleum no we're playing at the museum nobody knows where the mausoleum is nobody knows where the mausoleum is but it was worse i've been docked so many times we better get security [Music] coming don't bring his all right we'll see you all next time bye bye later we'll let your winners ride rain man david sacks we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow we need to get back [Music] going on [Music]










only sacks can lose 20 pounds and look worse sacks you know with with all with all these gains and all your funds i would really love for you to cash them out and buy a belt ask your wife or your house manager to help you find slim fit shirts at the uh the local macy's you'd literally look like you're wearing a parachute i've never i've never worn scene fit stand up for a second stand up i can't i'm not i'm not wearing pants oh my god can somebody call hr are you really not wearing pants i got no i got i got shorts on no that's not true are you really wearing shorts yeah i am no he's not he's lying no i'm not put your leg up show us that pasty leg no [ __ ] way oh my god oh my god how big are those shorts that's him he's like dom de louise and he lost 100. change your wardrobe oh my god those are like two toothpicks sticking out of a tent it's like somebody set up a circus tent and didn't tie down the ends he's wearing a parachute and a circus tent oh my god [Music] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast with us today again yes uh with us again today the dictator chamf polly papatia and the queen of quinoa david friedberg in front of some bad art and from the mausoleum a schvelt fighting weight minus 20 pounds the rain man himself david sac you guys gave me the motivation i mean this podcast you needled me for months and i'm like okay i'm gonna lose the weight so i've lost it what was your peak weight in the last 12 months i think i was at in the high 190s and i'm down to about 172 now so it's about 25 pounds wow since since about april or may that's really great bro that's fantastic i mean honestly your family thanks you i thank you as a friend too no but seriously keep it around longer really [ __ ] great i'm really i'm really proud of you exercising too thank you or you just cut your diet it's it's uh i i'm doing the same exercise regimen i was doing before which is just running occasionally but um but it's all diet it's all diet it's it's frankly severe calorie restriction and your your unique product has been very helpful but is it really severe calorie restriction thanks for the plus i think so yeah we were talking about munich for the syndicate on the call-in app the other day hold on i'm allowed to plug i'm allowed to plug you just need to be unique so you could put a call in plug you know you're violating the rules of the road that i wrote down it's not a violation of the rules because i'm not a shareholder in unique i don't have any interest in that but are you negotiating a deal no but no i'm not funding munich no i haven't but free book can i invest we should actually throw that one in the syndicate if you guys want uh yeah munich's great i i did it i lost some weight on it sexy poo what's your uh what's your uh basal calorie burn did you calculate that i'm not what does that mean like you're a steady state calorie burn on a normal day like if you're not exercising or whatever like yeah based on your height your bmi your weight all that stuff yeah i did i did look it up and i think it's around 2000 calories a day but but the thing that's super interesting yeah there's a calculator online where you can enter your your height weight and age and it'll tell you how many calories that you burn every day so if you want to lose weight you need to consume fewer calories than that it's that simple everything else that people do around weight loss that is not that is basically some sort of game you just have to consume fewer calories than you're burning but the thing that's really interesting about that calculator is that the number of calories you can burn every year actually changes as you get older it goes down so the reason why people gain weight as they get older is because you're in a habit of consuming a certain number of calories every day but you know as you get older like every year you can consume say 50 fewer calories a day something like that and that basically becomes fat if you can if you consume at the same level so you have to cut your consumption down as you get older or you will gain weight and in addition to your metabolic fitness meaning like you know having your exercise level stay up to increase your metabolism overall you can also add muscle mass a lot of people lose muscle mass over time muscle burns more calories per day just to kind of keep functioning so the more muscle mass you have the higher your basal and you lose like half a pound to a pound a year after 40 is that correct directionally uh free breath i don't know but that sounds about right yeah yeah that's what i read that is about right and i think it's because this dynamic where people are just consuming the same amount but they don't realize that they can't burn it and so it becomes fat you know so in my case first of all you got to get your caloric intake down to 2000 just to get to steady state and that can be a challenge but if you really want to lose weight you need to burn you need to basically consume a few hundred calories less than that and if you can consume 500 calories less than that per day that's considered rapid weight loss and then you can actually see the results which is very motivating yeah so i like the idea of just going for the like significant the 500 calories where are you you're at 1500 calories a day yeah i mean i think so i mean i haven't like precisely measured it out but i've been trying to go for and they said did you skip a meal is that how you get to the minus 500 calories yeah i will either skip breakfast or i'll do a very light breakfast um and then for lunch i'll do like something entirely plant-based like like suit like a vegetable soup of some kind and then when it comes to dinner it'll be a more normal dinner but no carbs no two dinners one bottle of wine yeah wow no no you have a good system yeah vegetables first yes then fish then poultry then red chicken meat so so it's it's not you're not like entirely all one thing or another you're not like all vegan which would be hard you're it's not like you're all uh there's no red meat or something like that you can do a little of everything but you have to have a weighting and the weighting is based on what foods have are the most calorie dense so the mistake that i think people make and i think it's one of these trick diets is like with these protein like the south beach type diet or the paleo diet right where they're trying to trick their body into ketosis and all they do is eat a lot of red meat but those steaks have a lot of calories in them yeah so it only works if you do it perfectly where you totally trick your body and keeping your body in ketosis forever is just not sustainable in my view it's hard so i think you're a lot better off just eating less calorie dense food and steak is very calorie dense so you know again you're trying to speak first then fish i i rarely eat beef uh but i get to eat it uh today and i'm having steak night dre's coming over for dinner and in the season he whenever i text him and i say hey what do you want for dinner draymond's always like fish fish fish fish fish and i said bro i i get to eat steak so [ __ ] rarely uh and today we're having steak i can't wait my mom's gonna get to when you get to it's because you're on some diet basically no no i do i just observe that i don't eat meat any more than once a week maximum and right now i'm probably averaging once every two weeks maybe even once every three weeks and to your point it's much better i i do these uh scans you know you can do these kind of body scans to know what your your total water weight your total muscle weight your total weight your total body fat all of that stuff and your basic metabolic rate and i just kind of track it like once a quarter just to see where it is um and i i agree with you like i've really found that uh i can't eat red meat anymore like it's like it just really [ __ ] me up but it's so good right it's so good yeah oh my god it's so good the other one other trick is that you should never consume calories like in liquid form right you should only be drinking water tea coffee things like that that don't have any calories people go to starbucks in the morning and they they drink 100 calories yeah 400 plus calories then they have a you know cinnamon roll or whatever or banana at the start yeah i mean that's it i mean you're gonna be gaining weight on just from going to starbucks in the morning there's no now if you do an americano with a splash of almond milk or something that's like 5 10 calories that's fine but um you you have to stop drinking calories and then the one exception is like last night we did poker we were drinking wine so that's fine you know i didn't because i thought the wine was [ __ ] yeah the whole game was horrible let me just tell you all the things that we're doing okay number one i [ __ ] came all the way up the stairs last night normally hosts sacks over the top number one is over the top in air quotes number one nobody arrived on time because nobody respects you enough to show up on youtube oh jake j kell and i played heads up for an hour before anyone else showed up we were there from seven to eight just playing heads up it was fun it was fun i took all the freeberg's money i owned three percent of munich you as the host didn't show up till 9 30 and you spent all of the time on the phone trading outside in the room trading japanese bonds are doing whatever you were doing talking to peter that showed up at 10 30. you know the game was basically randomly in the muck half the night nobody was observing any good decorum run it once run it twice there was just nothing going on you had stale fish okay just sitting there rotting stinking up the whole [ __ ] room you know you had 2013 colton which is not even a good year just fyi okay 2012 okay 2015. do that i mean so anyways i thought it was a disaster i stormed and up and i left he did rage quit and it was great because we're playing plo finally sacks loses all this money may i respond but i did have three bowls of ice cream which i regretted this morning all right sex in your defense why were you why did you leave your guests for three hours while you talked about your own home bro it wasn't it wasn't three hours you guys were being well attended too i made sure that you were well attended too and then i had to duck out well attended to what are we preschool what do that what are you talking about executed actually a couple of trades so what were the calls well you know crypto is like a 24 7 market these days crypto never sleeps so david sacks has to excuse himself um yeah i got wired at 800k uh hong kong gold had to uh yeah so okay so first of all the food was amazing we had like this incredible we had this incredible you didn't eat it you had brussels sprouts you had the brussels sprouts you ate none of that i'm on a diet i did eat the sushi there's like this incredible sushi spread we had so much sushi mostly didn't get eaten then we had pizzas got the best late night pizzas from two different pizza places got delivered there was more than one pizza per person in terms of selection it was tony's napolita you had pretty great homemade caramel sauce poured over tomorrow no dulce de leche that was great yeah props to the chef put dolce de leche on the vanilla yeah and the colga in 2013 estate nine is a fantastic ball of wine that i i had another ball of it earlier this week we just lost 42 of the audience they are now on the youtube comments saying why are these people why do we listen to this pod every week and here here's here's the reality moth is you were very quiet and sort of sullen the whole night from really the time you got there kind of true you didn't really participate in the conversation and skye hypothesized that the reason why you were so withdrawn is because you were upset that the game had moved from your place to my place and you thought somehow i was trying to hijack your game which is not true we do a game at my place maybe no no no i told this guy no no i told i told sky text already i said hey guys we normally run the game thursdays at my house i'm happy to come up but it's harder for me because that's almost due right so you were upset from the get-go that you were no i wasn't i told i told him that pretty friedberg and sacks have not come to the last three games at champa's house is there something going on here is it just the commute i think the commute is hard i mean in fairness to you guys give me a charge i only missed the last game i went i went well sax hasn't been coming and i know he's in he's in town is there something going on stocks where you can't no it's any more you haven't i mean it's either the commute or sometimes i'm out of town you know so you were in town the last couple times i don't know i think you're kind of you and chamoth maybe need to go for a walk okay i'll come i'll come the next what's next game whenever the next game is you should come but i mean what are you doing staying home playing chess with peter thiel on your ipad i mean come on both me and freeburg are about to have kids we cannot oh the game is over no no no for another couple weeks yeah we're gonna revert back to that terrible covet app ipad app playing poker where like everyone can talk to each other oh the chinese app that was uh fixed with a bunch of people colluding everyone was so angry yeah well we'll get it back in the next one let's start our show let's start let's start the show uh first up in uh spackland uh donald trump has done a spec and it's for his trump media and technology group uh and he's launching an app called truth social which you can preload i guess in the app store you're allowed to pre-order stuff now that was kind of an interesting feature um the company will merge with the spec called digital world acquisition corporation ticker symbol currently dwac it's led by somebody named patrick orlando uh who is a florida-based investment manager i'm not making that up uh i don't know if orlando is actually his name um he founded a sugar trading business and built two energy distribution businesses allegedly uh or supposedly um friedrich said maybe he's a real estate guy who knows the stock peaked at 157 a share uh this morning friday morning so the stack started at 10 bucks it started at 10. so that's 16x before dropping back down to 100 it's become a bit of a meme stock on wall street bets trading was halted it puts this at something in the range of a you know well over a 10 billion dollar market cap and there is literally no technology no team and a bunch of technologists looked at the source code just by doing view source i think on the on the web pages and uh there's an open source project i think called master dawn or master tan i don't know i think it's mastered on um that they seem to have just copied the code from it's it's like a distributed version of twitter and it seems they just cut and pasted the code and didn't even change the license you know like the gpl license we were supposed to give credit to who wrote the code so no business no team no ip no users no money no office no nothing it's basically uh it's an nft this is an nft basically it's an exchange traded nft it's exciting donald trump the value of everybody the value of this thing is like closer to donald trump is closer to 20 billion because there's a 1.7 billion dollar value if they hit certain stock prices according to the press release they put out but there's not a good sec filing on it so at 1.7 that means he got 170 million shares which are now worth let's say at 157 dollars a share donald trump has effectively 20 plus billion dollars oh so he's finally a billionaire and he's finally a billionaire of equity value in his stake in this actually a billionaire and i think this and this is the absolute like penultimate nft it is traded against a caricature that is a one-of-a-kind completely rare this is gonna all of his quote-unquote media ip is going to be licensed into this stack and so if you want to own a piece of it this is the way to own it and people are trading it like an index on the donald trump um uh character it's an it's an index on that i think it's a it's an index on the right i think it's an index on an alternative to fox news to traditional media the traditional media it's a huge [ __ ] you to actually the mainstream media i think this is good twitter oh my god it's going to tilt the hell out of like the folks that write at the at the new york times my god shaq dorsey's tweet by the way no i gotta i'll i'll put it in the chat but he kind of um he made a comment on it after there was a screenshot i mean let's be honest it's a grift i mean this is just this is the ultimate peak rift in the peak bubble of our lifetime period i think it's a vote like peter thiel said yesterday you know like bitcoin is a vote against the establishment this is a vote against the establishment all right what are the chances that an actual app launches sacks like and when would that actually happen when can this uh crew of [ __ ] actually write a line of code and actually release a product you know how hard it is to release products yeah that's a good question i mean what they're saying is that they're going to launch a new social network i guess twitter style called truth social and the primary interface will consist of a feed of short posts from users you follow sounds familiar however these posts will be called truths instead of tweets and reshares will be known as retruce wow so that's what's coming and um the the the slide deck that's available on the company's website list twitter facebook netflix disney plus cnn iheart media google cloud amazon web services as some of tmtg's current and future competitors so basically you know trump is proposing an alternative to all the traditional media and social networks that have basically banned him but i do think that the trading here does represent there is i think a groundswell for for social media platforms that are not controlled by big tech and you know there's trump has 70 million tech voters sorry 70 million voters of those probably 30 to 40 million you would say are would be fans of his on social media he's been banned from twitter and facebook and this is his response he's going to create his own platform i don't know whether ultimately be successful but i think what you're seeing here is the demand for alternatives to you know sensorious platforms that are controlled by big tech so if he has 30 million real fans chamath what number of them would download the app and participate in the first year he had a line he had 90 million followers on twitter jacob which doesn't count but that's half of the twitter registered account 70 million people vote for him so what are the real fans not just republicans who don't want hillary i don't think that's the way to think about this i would i would view this as differently than this what's in what's insane is you have this entity here which is essentially a cash shell that's now basically you know 300 odd million dollars of cash plus what looks like 18 or 19 billion dollars of brand value like of intangible goodwill and the sum total of that is is what the total market cap of this thing is so if it is 18 billion then that's what it is what this allows them to do and this is where it kind of gets interesting is these guys what it shows me is they could come back and actually raise an enormous amount of money they could issue you know a secondary stock sale they could do a convert they could raise billions of dollars because the demand is there and then with those billions of dollars they could actually do something really meaningful they could go and acquire an existing app jason call it they could acquire engineers in a product that already exists they could maybe hire yeah they could acquire a traditional broadcast outlet and give trump uh you know a way to short-circuit his launch of a fox competitor so i actually think this is a huge vote i think david's right it's a vote against censorship it's a vote for trump it's a vote for the right it's a vote for alternative uh voices and as a result i think a lot of folks in the mainstream who have trump derangement syndrome are now going to be you know reawoken and in complete full tilt for a while yeah it's pretty tilty uh tmtg plus will be uh you know it's terrible branding but the tmtg plus is going yes you're already tilted i'm super i'm not telling you i mean i think the whole thing is just a super grift i don't think they'll ever get a product out the door if they do i think they get to maybe five 10 million users they're going to write it up they've got they've got a 20 billion dollar market cap they could do whatever the hell they think it's all people just manipulating the stock like they could like said they could turn that into into cash they could sell i mean they could turn it off i don't think they can get the 20 billion trump today in one day is worth more than two times the new york times can you imagine what's going on in the new york yeah and that's just brand well let's see i mean not all these stacks stay at 150 a share you know so so jacob i i think you're right that people outside the tech industry really underestimate how hard it is to build technology products that are any good you know that have a good ui they're delightful to users it does require real talent and if you're not sort of from the industry you don't even know what kind of talent you need to hire however i think jamaat has a really good point that with this kind of market cap they could acquire their way to a portfolio of assets like for example okay rumble right now has become the alternative to youtube among yeah not just conservatives but anyone who's who's been de-platformed there's a lot of leftists now there's locals.com that you invested in local yes exactly i invested in locals which is dave rubin's thing so but but just to take rumble for a second because it's kind of the youtube competitor you know they've got something like 30 million uh users plus it's a very it's a it's a pretty big and growing audience but there is locals there are other assets and you could and i think the last valuation of rumble i think it was announced when peter thiel actually invested i think it was around a 500 million dollar valuation even if you paid a gigantic premium to that i mean if your market caps 20 billion you could spend 2 billion on that you could spend 5 billion on that yeah you know by the way sorry just to dispel this idea you don't need good ui if you have the right feature set and reddit is the perfect example where they've always been on the side of free speech and they've always been on the side of allowing people to vocalize and pursue their own passions even if some of those things were really you know for the mainstream uh beyond the pale their ui is terrible but they have thrived because that single feature dominates any desire for elegant ui and so i think what you're going to find over this next iteration of these apps is how valuable free speech is and there are enough examples whether it's rumble or reddit or others that show you that the ability to not be censored dominates 4chan discord they're all very it's going to it's going to tweet it's going to tweak oh my god the heroes uh data analysis and marketing during his you know 2016 campaign and they did get that guy pascal or whatever and they figured out cambridge analytica so they did figure out how to get some tech people right sax to you know can i just say one thing the other super tilty thing is people will want to fade this trade and you know we're going to be they're going to know they're going to be silently wishing for this thing to crater and i think there's going to be a lot of profit taking on this because i think it's very speculative but i think we will all be shocked at the actual closing enterprise value when this thing despacks because it will despack and we're all going to kind of scratch our heads thinking how did we not see this i mean i didn't see this i would have never and there's going to be at least a billion dollars of cash available when they do their second at least at least i mean they can do whatever they want yeah they're going to have more more cash available to them to invest i mean he is he is firmly back in the game and by the way one of the comments scaramucci made this morning it's a very astute one which is i'm rooting for the stack because if this actually does despack at this valuation donald trump is not running for president again because he's now got a 20 billion dollar media business or 20 million of equity value in this new media business that he's gonna keep running sacks what do you think uh that could be a win-win for uh the republican party but you know you're buying the stock you're joining the board saks is leading the b yeah i mean i i i think chemotherapy is a good point that sites like reddit have shown that you know like a beautiful ui is not necessarily the feature that users want in every case i do think you still have to have some tech talent involved in order to produce a good product just to give you an example so this product wasn't supposed to have its soft launch until next month but somehow some users found a way to access the site and they were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement so one vandal claimed the at donald j trump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles so no now i would just submit that you at least need to have enough tech talent to prevent something like that from happening yes i mean maybe it wasn't a vandal i mean maybe trump posted that photo to himself i don't know it's not it's not impossible it's not proud but yeah but but anyway my point is they still have to assemble the tech talent to build this or i like the idea better of just acquiring the the collection of assets that they need and i think you're right i think it's multi-faceted i think it's a social network a lot twitter i think it's probably some sort of video do not underestimate the number of people in wall street who are uh on the right and who will help these guys make very good decisions even if they do it sort of you know quote unquote clandestinely meaning they'll never be on the cover of helping them do a big m a or whatever but there are there are a lot of those folks that will help make sure that this despacks cleanly that they have access to capital that they know how to go and raise and tap the markets and what's beautiful about the public markets and you can say this is you know an issue but it's not in this case is that you know you can go on and basically support this guy in a way that's relatively anonymous because it's not like you have to disclose that you own this stuff if you're if you're a private investor so i think that uh he's back in the game in a big way and i think this is going to really shake up the media landscape if they can execute well they just need to think about this as an m a vehicle not as an engineering and product creation video yes 100 percent agree 100 percent agree would you sell call in for a billion dollars in equity value at a hundred dollars a share to these guys today yes i can answer on his behalf yes yes is that what you were doing i'll take the 20x no no i'll take 20 x in eight months jkl you want to be my agent i think you have a quicker line to trump no no no no uh i think actually this might be like to peter till's point like maybe don't take the product uh literally but take the market cap seriously uh because this is a lot of if they can keep even a five billion dollar market up i do agree that does make them dangerous in terms of buying assets and i do think they can get the first five all of these right-wing services get five to he gets five to ten million people to sign up for him even his like signal he was at like a million you know very quickly he's got like a signal or telegram group i think and he got you know he could buy maybe he could buy ben shapiro's daily caller that's a big media brand on the right that people listed yeah the number one and keep keep bench up here there to run it because trump needs operators and the more disruptive thing isn't to buy stuff on the right it's to buy stuff in the center or even stuff on the left again it's it's very hard if you're a public company it's impossible actually if if trump media group now has a currency and tries to acquire assets the directors have a fiduciary responsibility to actually vote in favor of that deal because they're not allowed to look at who the buyer is and say no we don't want to do that so if he puts out a reasonable fair market offer price you know of the closing price plus 30 35 percent there is not a single public market director in the world i don't care how democrat tick they are or how much of a donor they are they'll always vote the deal because otherwise they will get personally sued and that's the liability in public markets so i would be very careful about this thing this thing is going to get really serious really quickly i wonder if there's a tentpole [Music] media personality that he could acquire in the same way spotify got joe rogan and netflix got dave chappelle back to there's somebody they could offer a hundred dollars they shouldn't do that they should do what sax just said which is that you know that that list of like the dumpster fire on facebook every day which is like dan bonigno and ben shapiro and blah blah he should just go and get all those guys yeah that's what i just said round them up but i wonder if there's like a comedian you know like you know bill mars obviously hates him but then is there somebody in the middle who is like a notable comedian on the right sax i'm not fully vetted on your all right buddies but who's who's in that alt-right cohort that well i think there's there's comics who are willing to be politically correct and non-woke um so i think what's his name like bill burr or something like that is isn't he net team netflix but yeah i wonder if a bill burr he hates trump though i think or but i mean who's the guy who got cancelled for exposing himself leah louis c.k louis c.k i mean i'm not saying he's conservative right but um you know no no he's available he's highly he's available so i mean actually one thing to think about is you know trump got all these people to do like the monthly 25 reoccurring subscription and we got a little bit of trouble for that because people didn't know they were signing up for it but i wonder if he could get a million people or five million people to pay ten bucks a month for the saks yeah absolutely if there's something there behind the the curtain i mean if it's nothing but like i don't know a newsletter of his like extemporaneous tweets i don't think so but if there's real content there from people they care about why wouldn't they wait a second what if he just did every friday night a rally on a video service where he just did one of his two or three hour stand up routines and had different people come up and talk like his pillow guy and all of his other weirdos i think this could be like i think this could be like the oprah winfrey network where she may like anchor the temple show or something but there's a lot of other creators on the network i think that's the opportunity yes the question the question quite frankly though is whether he's operational enough to actually drive to these outcomes i think it's very easy for us to imagine what you could do with 20 billion dollars and his media brand and the question is just does this get executed that way now does because it's not going to be a real estate sugar guy from florida that's going to manage this thing to an outcome does twitter then let him back on the platform if he has this competing platform does facebook how does that know i think at that point they have the perfect excuse not to let him back on which is like hey we're not censoring him because he's there's an alternative they don't want to let him back on in a way i guess you have to ask yourself if twitter had let him come back on and gave him his platform back after like a six month or a year time out would he even be doing this no he says in he has a press announcement where he says that i mean he says here that trump media and technology group's mission is to create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the big tech companies in silicon valley which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in america this is what's given him the opportunity is their censorship their censorship just created a 20 billion dollar war chest i mean the most tilting thing of this whole conversation is it's worth twice as much as the new york times i've been saying on this show for over a year that censorship backfires in ways you can't expect they never think through the second and third order consequences of their censorship it's like when angela merkel came out and said hey like wait did did twitter just de-platform a head of state why are we depending on them i mean there's all these second-order consequences they never think through and now they're coming back to bite them in the ass yeah i mean forcing people to get vaccines is now leading to whatever percentage of people just retiring or this you know or not coming back to work and that's causing a bit of bedlam in the economy as we talked about all these authoritarian tendencies create a backlash of some kind and if our ruling elites would just have a lighter hand there'd be a lot less tension in the country we had an interesting discussion last night at during uh but i think it was on the other side of the table so maybe you two didn't hear it but we were talking about is biden gonna run again in 2024 and what would that look like and i just said i i can't imagine biden in a debate three years from now like he he doesn't seem i don't want to be derogatory here but he doesn't seem very crisp the last time four years later so what do we think chances of biden running in 2024 chances of trump running in 2024 with all this information and what would that look like zero and zero you're zero zero free berg do you even care nope yeah i didn't think so right look i mean i i think trump's going to run this 20 billion media empire and he's going to be happy doing that i think if it's not biden it's going to be a proxy so um it's not going to be too far off uh in terms of what the you're deep in this uh sax you're hosting uh as people were talking about on twitter uh and you tilted all of san francisco or ninety percent of it you're hosting desantis for a fundraiser it's his first fundraiser for his re-election as governor he hasn't said anything about his plans in 2024 it's way too early for that um do i think biden or trump could be on the ballot i think it's 50 50 for both of them all right but i would like to see but look instead of having two 80 year olds running against each other i would like to see say two 40 something or just younger leaders you know giving america a real choice all right where do we want to jump off to now venture capital venture capital because clearly sax is is having extraordinary liquidity events uh at 11 o'clock at night on a thursday night that freeberg money is not made it's simply transferred from one perception to another from one perception to another there's a wall street uh speech saks was like in his uh he was doing monologues from wall street last night he's leaving he was leaving the poker table to go to into his soundproof chamber that oversees his estate next to the poker room and from there he was on his phone screaming pacing back and forth doing deals gecko style he had his 300 pound trader next to him he was placing orders and um something's going on in the market i mean sax you know do tell but clearly the uh the venture liquidity um uh waterfall that's going on right now is playing into well it's a lot of it it is bonkers wait yes we got to show that chart we should talk about let me just highlight this highlight the statistics jkl because it is truly extraordinary how much liquidity venture firms are having this year all right well just to look at um the value of u.s venture-backed companies that went public or were acquired 290 billion 280 billion in 19 and 20. and then uh this year uh 2021 so far we're at 590 billion it's literally doubled but if you look back it was about 110 billion in 2018 so we are now five six x where we were five years ago uh and this is again the value of u.s venture u.s venture-backed companies that went public or required so the liquidity is bonkers and we're seeing that in real estate uh you know jets being bought whatever the vc industry has experienced three years of record-breaking exits uh this is a twitter user who tweeted it 2021 is obviously smashing all those levels yeah i mean for for the last until the last three years for the previous 15 20 years the exits per year were in this 50 to 100 billion range then they've jumped up to 600 billion in the last year and in the previous two years it was 300 billion each so yeah i mean it's just more money has has been made or distributed out in the venture capital industry in the last three years i think the previous 20 years combined at least the last three years yeah that doesn't that doesn't even factor in what's happening in crypto right and crypto is just like i'm sure there's something here coinbase is in here no like like like in my portfolio as an example like you know like venture returns which have which have been excellent across the board so forget mine just everybody's venture value kind of like slowly ticks up over time right because like you know you're doing this work and then that work gets valued and then somebody else comes in and raises a new round and you know you you hopefully can defend your pro rata yadda yadda so i it it does create a lot of compounding value but it's you know and and it's relatively fast but compared to crypto it's unbelievably slow whereas in crypto you know quarter over quarter you have these swings that i've i've personally never ever seen like i was telling you this story yesterday we owned something which i'm not going to tell you what it is but um it's a crypto thing and uh our nav i had to mark my book up a billion net asset value on that asset i had to mark it up because you know we have to submit to our auditors and just keep it an accurate sense of what our book value is a billion dollars in a quarter i've never seen that in my entire investing career and here's how what it does to me and my whole team i have a budget for next year of how much i want to spend instantly that number goes up and what it really means is i'm probably just going to be getting the same ownership but i'm just going to be paying more for it and if i'm going through that i think everybody's going to go through it what it's going to do is it's like all of this all of these returns are great all of these increases are great but i'm not sure that there's going to be that much more progress there's not necessarily going to be that many more startups because it's just harder and harder to find good things in the same for the same number of gps in a place and costs are going bananas salaries are off the charts i don't know if you guys saw but stripe for example there was a tweet about how stripes starting to pay like starting engineers 280k i don't know if that's true or not but there was a tweet in twitter and i thought to myself my gosh like 20 years ago a starting engineering salary was 50 60 k in the bay area and so you've seen this incredible price inflation so it's actually quite good again it's sort of what we talked about yesterday all of these gains eventually come back around and get recaptured and so i think that you're starting to see the beginning of this really incredible cycle of wealth transfer essentially so the funds may make it but it's going to come back to you let me ask you a question about the crypto stuff is there any worry there that these valuations match reality because my you might have a very small float on these a lot of excitement and they're not actually products being used by customers in the real world here's the thing i because it's an internal permanent pool of capital i have no legal requirement to actually mark okay um but the reason we do it is because we want to track nav nav and book value okay and you know i compensate my team based on how well we compound book value but you're right it's a huge um problem because i don't know how to get liquid on these things and so you see this thing sitting on your your balance sheet and you're like what do we do with this how do you move it around you can't you cannot and so i would rather there's a there's a great guy uh he was an early pioneer private equity and um he had this phrase which he said like you know the best way to mark up a deal is right at the end so if you put in you know 10 million dollars into a series a if you could be allowed the best thing to do would be carry that at a 10 million value right until the minute you get liquid because then you don't go through the psychological uh roller coaster ride of having to go through these marks because then when these marks come back down jason to your point there'll be there'll be a quarter where we give back that billion dollars of that uh maybe you know i mean what what do we all do it's a huge mind [ __ ] let me ask a question about valuation saks when you're doing yours because this came up when i was doing mine and marking my funds if a secondary transaction occurs and somebody buys com or you know slack or whatever it's then when it's a private company at ten dollars a share but the last time you purchased it or there was a funding two years ago it was at two dollars a share where do you put the valuation at what the secondary market is trading it at or what you last paid for it or somewhere in between those and who makes that decision sacks what is the best practice on this because secondary market transactions people are actually making a transaction right but is that as good as a venture firm you know plopping down and enjoying the board no it's not so first of all you don't want to be making these decisions ad hoc you want to have a policy so we have a written policy and there's a process for amending it if it ever needs to be amended and what our policy does is it just uses the most the most recent preferred round to give us the value of the shares and then there can be adjustments based on market conditions like we know that it's usually on the downward right like the company we know has had a huge problem they're not going to fundraise again so there's not going to be a new market anytime soon it's a zombie company perhaps yeah there's gonna be some company we can we can mark it down but basically speaking we use preferred financing valuations to set marks only now we do sometimes buy secondary shares and there's a methodology for bringing value on them usually it's basically what we buy them at and um if we somehow otherwise own common we'll use the 409a that's what we do yeah yeah it's i think it's severely really clean policy you want to be conservative in these because nothing no you're worse yeah i think you have to be accurate not concerned accurate yeah well i mean you could be yeah i guess the question is like you could see somebody playing some games where you know you buy you know some shares at the you own shares in the company you buy some shares in secondary and now you've got two marks right the embedded risk in venture capital has always been the following which is that you have money that goes into the a and there is an incentive today especially because so much money is trying to come in where you want to drive as much growth as possible because then the b is at such a large step up that the irrs look amazing and then the c looks greater than the b so then everybody's quote unquote making paper money which allows you to create more incentives to raise more capital the problem with all of that is that if these valuations ever turn out to not be real or there's a valuation reset or there's inflation or the public markets don't value growth stocks it takes a long time for it to work its way through the venture ecosystem and all of this liquidity will probably make it even more you know violent when it does happen because it'll eventually will happen we'll go through a re-rating like the year 2000 who knows when it is and what the catalyst is but that's the real uh downside of not of all of this is that it'll eventually have a valuation reset that's going to be and to make this super real for people u.s venture capital funds have raised a combined 69.1 billion in 2020 uh edu passed to 2018 um and a couple of these were because of and dressing horowitz doing a pair of mega funds with 4.5 billion in commitments recently and so uh it's been just a tremendous amount of funds being made and then to give you an example clubhouse went from 100 million to a billion to 4 billion in under 18 months in valuation led i think each time by andreessen horowitz so what you're saying in an example like this or in your hypothetical example and i'll just make it a real world one if they take those and by the way these are 20 20 oh one 20 20 sets i don't know what the 2021 stats are so those are old stats there's probably many more i think actually i have the updated stats funds have raised 96 billion uh for 2021 that's the most update in fairness to all of the venture capitalists i think that they're doing exactly what they should be doing and in fairness to all the crossover funds right now is the time to be putting maximum money to work as fast as possible not necessarily intelligently not necessarily in a concentrated way but the real game if you want to play it at the institutional level is to just put all the chips on the table and then go back to the store and get some more chips as quickly as possible put them all on the table come back and get more so that when it all you know is said and done you have as many dollars working and the worst case is you will return the average return of the market and if that happens to be good you look good if it happens to be crappy you'll be no worse better worse off than anybody else but meanwhile you will have collected enormous fees and so that's the point in the cycle we're at and i think that anybody who's doing it makes a ton of sense i think it's it's a really logical thing to be doing the ones that have had big liquidity events are also retiring i mean we're seeing across the board gps of these ultra successful funds that have returned 5x plus taking their ki yeah and they got their carried interest and they share their 20 25 share in that and they walk away but if if you look at the value of all global public equities it's about um it's about a hundred trillion dollars and so if you're seeing let's say that we're raising a hundred billion dollars a year of venture capital in these funds and then you're making a two and a half x average market return which is not normal right let's assume that's the normal cycle we're in right now um that's 250 billion dollars of liquidity realized in a year out of a hundred trillion dollars of global public equities that's only a quarter of a percent of the disruption of public equities and think about it technology is set up to disrupt all of these old-school businesses that are public and mature and scaled and that's what the 100 trillion dollars represents so it's actually you know kind of looking at it statistically it's not that unfounded that we're only seeing a quarter percent market cap disruption of public equities each year because those public companies aren't disrupting each other generally maybe to some extent they are they're getting disrupted by new companies that are emerging um new startups and so i don't think that this is like necessarily the you know the peak it may kind of be the beginning of a continuing disruption cycle that we're going to see kind of persist for the next decade or two especially as more of the old school industrial businesses which make up a bulk of that market cap start to get disrupted not just by software but also by automation by esg angle investing by um life sciences and all these other kind of technologies that and these interests these market interests that are going to disrupt those old industries i think we could even see an acceleration from here so um you know i don't i don't think that this is necessarily peak frenzy bubble low interest rate fueled outcomes i think this may be kind of part of a longer term trend that is statistically probably not that big a deal sacks are you concerned about this peak bubbly market or do you think you know like chamot said push all your chips in and raise as big of fun as you can and you know if the game is going to be played at these high stakes you want to be at the table well i i like what freeberg said i think it's a super interesting point that this could just be the beginning look we we live in an age of accelerating technological progress so why wouldn't the returns from that accelerating technological progress also be accelerating you know we we had this thesis 20 years ago when the internet first started that you the new economy would replace the old economy it took a few years longer than people thought but we are fully there and the number of new companies being created now is just exploding there a lot of this the this liquidity that's being generated is being now pumped into the next set of funds which will go to founders they'll be able to create more companies they'll be able to keep more of those companies um because there'll be less dilution and then a lot of this wealth is trickling a lot of the vc money is trickling down into the competition for salaries so anybody really anywhere in the world who can learn how to uh write code can now you know make a six figure plus salary because of remote work so all the salaries all over the world are equilibrating so i mean this is an incredible pathway to prosperity for i mean certainly the united states but really the whole world for humanity for humanity it's really positive assuming it keeps going assuming it's not just totally liquidity driven and you know i don't know exactly you know how all those macro forces will play out but um but i mean this seems very positive overall the other the other thing it'll lead to just quickly is a change in who has political power because you know ultimately you know money is the mother's milk of politics and and the people who are making all these returns will eventually fund politicians and uh and you know yeah well yeah i'm one of them yeah but look i think there's two kinds of like i'd say prototypes politi uh politically speaking for people in the technology world you've kind of got the the sort of standard woke progressives who are funding a lot of this crazy stuff like the incarceration cities whatever we talked about that before but i also think there's another prototype that's less loud and they feel that they're they kind of keep their views more to themselves which is i call them liberalitarians who are sort of liberal on social values but libertarian on economic policy they don't like government regulations certainly if they're in the crypto world they don't like government regulations they can see how they create you know friction to progress and they believe in markets and um and they i think they're going to want to fund politicians who support that those types of things so you know i could be very positive uh politically in that respect what's interesting i just want to build on what you built on what friedberg said which is i think the best point you made was look on a global basis of the opportunity for an individual somebody who is you know graduating high school college they're 18 19 20 years old because of remote work anybody can work from anywhere technology companies have unlimited resources and they need an un a never-ending supply of developers or even a sales person a marketer you know back office etc and they can work from anywhere on the globe and make a six-figure salary you know whatever 50 60 70 80k for one of these entry-level jobs in sales and all the information on how to get those jobs is available for free from startups that have put open courseware online or very free courses yet we're looking at this massive technological change and the new york times's position is that technology is destroying humanity and polarization of wealth is destroying humanity what we're actually uncovering here is all of this money being invested in these companies is giving an opportunity for people around the world to get high paying jobs totally and actually can i can i can i mention a really interesting item in that was just in politico today which is about um al sharpton was lobbying in congress against changing the carried interest treatment so remember you know all of us in vc make our compensation in the form of uh carried interest explain what it is well it's basically you know if a fund is in profits that you know the vc will get the vcs firm will get say 25 of the upside after they pay back all their lps that's called the carried interest because of the way that these partnerships are set up that is treated as a capital gains as opposed to ordinary income assuming it meets the holding periods of the underlying assets so there's a big debate about whether you know vcs and private equity people should be paying ordinary income or long-term cap gains on those returns al sharpton was lobbying against changing it because in this political politico article he was saying that it would impede the efforts of black entrepreneurs to build lasting wealth if you jacked up the tax rates because there's a lot of fund managers and you know who who are black who are making a lot of money now and they don't want to be subject to this change in treatment so that was super interesting you know this tech boom is not it's not exclusive i mean the the tech industry gets this rap as if it's this highly exclusionary place it's not i mean three of the people on this pod right now are immigrants so you know the wealth that's been created is not going to traditional centers traditional it's not going to the errors of you know northeastern you know families or something who've been sending their kids to harvard and princeton for generations it's going to entirely new people who haven't had this kind of wealth before anyway that's interesting another positive externality of this wealth all these massive gains that uh folks who have invested in venture capital have gotten has caused one really interesting positive change so amherst which is a really exclusive liberal arts college in the uh northeast made so much money their endowment is so flush with cash they basically eliminated legacy admittances which means if your parents got in you were 70 percent likely to get into amherst an equivalent kid whose parents didn't go to amherst had a less than six percent admit rate right so a huge disparity basically said if you're a legacy kid that exists you know we all know this it exists at harvard it gets it at all these ivy league schools but amherst is now so has made so much money through vc investments as an example they're like we've canceled admittances so there's there are there are some really positive things that are happening with all this money that's being made al sharpton's rationale aside um anyone's going to get wealthier if they're paying less taxes so i think you know you're broadly yeah you're going to see a bit of a focus on that point obviously which is why freeburg california was massively in the bonus in terms of budget surplus and cash because of this issue and they were spending money like trunk and sellers yeah i mean i i just think you're going to hear a lot of positioning for you know the case and by the way i think that you know building individual wealth creates this is obviously a philosophical point but you know it creates a greater path to prosperity for more people uh through the spending that they'll underdo in growing the economy than you know than not so i i don't know i mean i feel like the al sharpton point is a good one to kind of make but it's it's a broader one than that well i think so to in my view the broader point about the sharpton thing is that it shows that we talk about this group of rich people the the wealthy the millionaires and billionaires as if it's a static class of people at least this is the progressive attack it's not i mean what sharpton points to is that this group is constantly changing there's new people getting rich so when we talk about the rich if it's new people getting rich what we're really talking about is success and if you really want to ban people getting rich i mean you're talking about banning success our country can't be successful that way we're not going to be able to outcompete china if we're preventing success and by the way we can't fund all these progressive uh programs if we are you know hamstringing success so um you know i think this what we've created here with this highly entrepreneurial free enterprise system that's funded by venture capital this is the golden goose of the american economy and the most important thing is that we don't break it saks it might just be we may have underestimated its power is what we're sort of realizing collectively here today is that we've always thought that this thing is hitting all-time highs this might be the beginning right like it feels like this is getting bigger and you know and going at a velocity that is different than even when we came into the industry if you know the amount of exits the amount the scale of these companies the coin bases the robin hoods the ubers the slacks i mean these are giant companies making huge international impacts i think it's either that or this whole thing is a liquidity driven bubble so it's one of the two it's it's both it's both well i also think the the sharpton thing is a very interesting point that we can go back to maybe episode 25 or 20 when we started this podcast which was trump got massive support from the black and hispanic community because of this entrepreneurial freedom uh upward mobility pitch the republicans were making that's the perfect pitch for the republicans not this divisive divisive you know shut the border down but more hey we want everybody to support it and i thought how crazy is this michael che did you want to just edit on this and i'll give it to you michael che was on the breakfast club when our friend was hosting snl and he said i don't know i think white people just don't like their billionaires for some reason uh it's weird because we love our billionaires if oprah or tyler perry was coming we'd be excited about it and i met michael che there and michael j was really excited he's a fan of elon's and like it was a really great conversation they have so true it's so true like why are we hating people who are changing the world and helping right because it's not we it's it's frankly it's white woke progressives they're crazy they're the crazy bonkers we have to get purple i think conservatives and what you call woke progressives um are the same i don't think it's about a political affinity i think it's about people feeling like they don't have the opportunity that others clearly were able to realize and it is amplified and magnified by a social media that that basically shines a light on the success that people have had in a way that we've never had in history before and it creates a great deal of feeling like i'm missing out and i'm being left out and that's what's driving a lot of the discontent on both the left and 100 it's not it's not a political point of view i think it's a social point of view and the great progress we've had and the great success we've had as a society over the past couple of decades is now being realized through this media in a way that's kind of driving emotional conditions for people that haven't had the same level of success maybe if they stop tweeting and complaining and just learn some skills like uh if you're still complaining on twitter as the only colored person on this pod what i'll tell you is i i it's very rare that i meet a colored person that hates a successful other colored person just doesn't exist guys tell us more it's just one of these things where you know we were we are all grinding we all know how hard it is to be on the outside looking in if any one of us makes it there's a lot of support i mean we see that yeah that's just what that's just i'll just tell you that's what i felt like south african jews don't feel that way no i mean we see that in the incoming emails and tweets to you chamos you you are inspiring people in india pakistan sri lanka we see it constantly they come up to you at events and they're like hey if chamath can figure this out i can do i'm about to do this thing in africa and i'm going there in december i can't wait and you know we're thinking of just doing a couple of like lectures and talks and stuff do it lectures and talks and these this these places are going to get rammed with people and it's like it's beautiful to see like yeah i just think that minorities like don't hate on other people that are successful it's just not you're going to africa in december yeah why don't we do all in africa what are we doing like where are you going i got some stuff i'm getting email constantly by people who are starting startups in africa i want to go i've never been i really want to go you can come with me in early december if you want i'm in i'm a hundred percent i haven't got anything to do here's the thing that i wanted to talk about before what is crazy and this is jason to build on your trump comment we may be facing a situation i'd love to get your guys's reaction where donald trump in his first two years of his presidency may actually have gotten more done than biden will get done in his first two years and i just want your guys's reaction and thoughts on uh how that possibly could be because we have a democratic president we have a democratic congress and we may not get anything done i i can speak to that here's your okay sex with the wind up i i can't believe that the way the progressives have done this reconciliation bill it's been crazy okay look from the beginning they've been saying abide in the administration the democrats have been saying we want to do the biggest package of tax suspense it's a great society okay but here here's the thing if you want to do lbj type things you got to have lbj type majorities they've got a 50-50 senate and a three-seat margin in the house lbj when he passed the great society he had like 69 senators he had a filibuster super majority filibuster proof super majority in the senate he had something like 150 more seat margin in the house that is the kind of margins you need to pass great cellulite programs so instead of having i'd say ambitions that were reasonable the administration coxes with the progressives they come together with this for over four and a half billion of spending three and a half in the social welfare 1.2 trillion of infrastructure and they wanted even more okay and then they've been trying to jam this thing and they never went to the center of the party to cinema to mansion and said hey what are you guys willing to do and so somehow i think they thought they could just jam this thing through over the objections of these votes that they absolutely need and i think there's really this mentality on the part of the progressive left that i think they're so used to jamming people with speech codes and cancellation and censorship and covet mandates that are not passed by legislatures but have been imposed by edict i think they're just used to jamming people and they think they're going to shame people on twitter like these senators like manchin like cinema into voting their way guess what it doesn't work that way twitter is not the real world eric adams showed that in new york you won that election exactly dave chappelle is dave chappelle has a 95 approval rating okay the critics hate him the whole progressives hate him guess what you know how many people were actually at that dave chappelle protest like three dozen okay the progressives don't have the votes what they should have done and by the way their their conduct through the whole thing has been insane aoc has basically been saying if you don't give us everything we want we're not voting for your one another these guys have like ace jack off and they're sh they're putting a shot their head saying hey unless you give us three and a half billion we're not gonna vote for one billion really you're gonna do that how does that make sense we know call their bluff we know progressives will vote for every penny they can what the what biden should have done if we had a more hands-on president who actually wants to get things done he and he knows this from his time in the senate he should have gone to those swing senators as a group and said hey what can we get done here not to aoc and pelosi they can't deliver the promise of biden i'll say you know as somebody who voted for biden i'm a little disappointed was he was supposed to be moderate and he was supposed to bring people to the center and it doesn't feel like he's actually to your point job you asked us what we think i have i'm not regretting because i trump had to go it was too much chaos there was just too much risk having him in there so i am glad i voted for biden but i am unhappy that he cannot build consensus down the middle and get the far left to just you know pump the brakes i i understand they have passion for certain projects but just get something done moderately and in a phased approach why does this have to be so huge and confusing do you know what taxes are things three times saks is exposing what we may not know which is that progressives are very loud but they may not actually represent a plurality of people so for example in the netflix protest i saw a video and there was about two dozen people you know and one person actually had tweeted hey i never even showed up to the office yet but i've been showing up to walk out of the office but then what happened was there were some other people that showed up and in the middle of the protest they had a sign that said you know jokes are funny i like jokes and then everybody started chanting that then a black woman got up and she started to say black lives matter and then everybody got confused and started to chant black lives matter and then they were all looking around each other trying to find direction in this protest and it became somewhat directionless and i think this is what you know we're we're now realizing is that you know remember what like as managers and corporations we've all heard this term the squeaky wheel gets the grease but it may actually be the case that the squeaky wheel shouldn't get the grease because it's a head fake and we're to get lost in misdirection another example of this there's a guy dorian abbott and i wanted to talk about this as well this is a guy who's an acclaimed climate professor okay let me just give you the whole story i'm just going to read to you because i think it's interesting the first couple paragraphs of the story from the new york times mit invites geophysicist dorian abbott to give a prestigious public lecture this autumn he seemed a natural choice he's a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life then a swell of angry resistance arose some faculty members and grad students argue with that dr abbott who's a prophet university of chicago had created harm by speaking out against aspects of affirmative action and diversity because in videos and opinion pieces he wants people and members of groups rather than as individuals he basically favors a diverse pool of applicants selected on merit so but he said his planned lecture at mit was about climate science and to help people understand climate change and would make no mention of his views on affirmative action but his opponents uh argued that he was infuriating inappropriate and oppressive and so they canceled the lecture now here's the question i have here that's another example of all of this stuff are we better off with let's just say there's a hundred grad students a hundred brilliant minds at mit being pushed to think even more specifically about climate change by an expert who can do that or are we better off finding some more middle-of-the-road person who maybe not be as intellectually ambitious around climate change but has a whole bunch of other views not related to climate change that are more palatable and what does that do for all of us including probably all these people who probably want a solution to climate change but who have now held back the ability to teach these kids what do we do what do we think about that kind of stuff and this is where again the squeaky wheel in this case did get the grease but are we actually better off in this example friedenberg diversity of thought drives successful outcomes all right thanks for coming in for the all-in podcast we're telling you [ __ ] you already know i mean like what are we talking about for yourself people listen to a bunch of opinions and if somebody says something you don't like or challenges you know that's an opportunity for you to learn or grow or for you to make a blog post or do your own stand-up special or give your own talk that challenges their debate like we do here every week right but the same thing happened with that what's that ultra conservative young guy sax who went to berkeley a few years ago and they blocked him from joining the campus no no the um greek name greek name indianapolis milo yiannopoulos he's the right-wing guy the gay provider here we're talking about an expert in climate change giving a lecture about climate change to grad students who who could then go and solve climate change for the call of the world i mean this is mit and you you chicago which are probably two of the smartest institutions of people in the world right he's not saying anything politically offensive it's just that his unrelated views uh they view they think are anathema and therefore they're gonna protest and block him and of course you know they always use the language of safetyism which is oh well if you allow this person on campus it threatens my safety really this person's a physical threat to you no he threatens my self-conception really he said something that you know he's going to talk about something that defends you know it's just that uh you know he said things that that that threatened my view of the world so my safety is jeopardized i mean this is this is literally the language that's being used now um i mean friedrich's reaction to it is yeah this is so obvious that we don't even need to discuss it but it's not so obvious that it's not taking place it's happening it's happening it's happening you know what i find the most disappointing about the whole netflix situation is i thought dave chappelle you know even though maybe the special wasn't as funny as other ones i thought it it made you think in such a just incredible way and i always actually read that i looked up the transcript and i read the transcript so i could think more about it and try to form an opinion about this turf issue and trans people and you know people punching up punching down and comedy it made me think and then the entire discussion about this is just people walking out and no discussion about what he actually said and that to me is just a little bit of a tell like if you are so upset about what he said well where is the transcript of what he said break it down sentence by sentence and tell us exactly what he got wrong and why so that we can continue the discussion the netflix walkout and how this thing has unfolded the reason it's so unproductive is because they're not moving the discussion forward they're not actually listening to what chappelle said and spoiler alert if you haven't seen it yet i'm going to talk a little bit about the what was in it he talked about his friendship with a trans person who was a comedian and how he and she had these incredible discussions and learned a lot from each other and how she was dragged on twitter and a lot of tragic outcomes and i'll leave it at that but there's no discussion about his relationship with that woman who had a tragic fate and the substance of what he said did you notice that chamoth that there's no discussion about the actual words and points that dave chappelle made that shows you that this is a disingenuous or a broken discussion yeah i just i just think that um the problems that we have as a society are really big freeberg talked about it we have inequality problems we have climate change problems you know we have problems of sort of like systemic health issues these are all fixable and i think that this other stuff is getting in the way of people getting organized to solve those issues 100 and i think that that frustrates me i would have really i'm not sure i agree with this guy's views on affirmative action let me just be clear i'm kind of i think on the margins affirmative actions actually it levels the playing field and so i support it um but i also start with the fact that if this guy is a brilliant geophysicist and he's already proven that i would want my kids to be taught climate science from him sure i don't i don't think he's out there to try to like peddle his affirmative action views you know to a bunch of other physicists i don't think that's what he's doing no that's not what he's celebrating not his life's work and so i don't care i would want all of those really brilliant kids at mit to have to be one step closer to proposing a solution to climate change i think that's a pervasive global issue and i mean we don't have the ability to prioritize these things and and that's what's just so sad we're not gonna have an honest conversation about climate change because we can't have that expert give us talk and i don't think we're to jason's point i don't think we're having an honest conversation about the chappelle special i don't think any of us believe that chappelle hates lgbtq people or i don't think anyone in the audience thinks that and i think you have to deliberately misinterpret what chappelle is thinking and or saying in order to believe that his message is hate i don't think it is now what i think the chappelle special represents a threat to is perhaps this idea of intersectionality that all of these oppressed groups have to be on the same team what he seems to be saying is there's a group of what he's kind of making fun of is that there's this group of sort of pampered rich white uh lgbtq people who have made enormous progress i mean doesn't he say at one point in the special that you know i wish i wish my community you know black people could have made as much progress in 40 years in terms of acceptance as this group has and yet this group now wants us to immediately adopt all of their language and sensibilities and and punches down talks down to us if we don't i mean that's kind of the point he's making is he's kind of revealing a little bit of a rift between these between these two groups that are supposed to by the way if you saw the if you saw the clip of the protest that rift was actually in display because everybody got confused about what they were supposed to support because you had one set of chants and then you had jokes or funny chants and then you had blm chants from completely different cohorts of people and it just became a chaos well i mean everybody's opinion must be put through the lens of how many oppressed groups they're from you know obesity i'm black i'm gay i'm trans i'm short whatever i mean like how do we have how do you even navigate a discussion intelligently if i have to say okay you're sri lankan but you're rich chamath and friedberg's got asperger's but he's really smart on my side what do we mean he's like just make your point and let's have a honest discussion about it and why are we so upset about this special when in china you know we've got a million people uh uyghurs being sterilized and tortured and then i don't know if you saw this week xi jinping is saying like he wants to get rid of the [ __ ] people a [ __ ] man in is the term he's using in china right they literally thought they were media rules against effeminate men yeah i mean why are we not protesting that well we saw this in the middle east as well the real threat to lgbtq people is or these authoritarian governments that really want to oppress you know they want them people and murder gay people yeah i mean chappelle is not the the threat i i think i think chappelle had to be silenced because what he's saying is actually very heretical to the work progressive left which is that not all of these groups on the same page and they again they believe in this idea of intersectionality that all of these groups have to basically be on the same page and actually the more oppressed groups that you're part of the more elevated you are and so this idea that there could be a schism actually is something they want to silence yeah i mean chappelle's quote i don't disagree with the trans movement i just agree with the way they're going about it was his kind of point and he said i mean again let me speak on as a as a as a colored person who grew up in a minority family you know i would love to tell you that my parents were super super open-minded but that would be a lie um and you know i love them to death and i think they tried their best but you know they came with a ton of [ __ ] baggage and a ton of stereotypes and you know i don't think that my parents would have been the most supportive of other minorities whether it's color or sexual orientation ever and it was a it was a lot of like very complicated conversations to explain to them how to see the world differently and you know that's what happened when you pluck them out of a third world country and drop them into canada and you know i think that my parents came far a very long way i remember you know when when i first started you know dating my ex-wife it's like it was a very complicated thing for them to see me dating uh an asian woman very complicated they didn't understand uh and then it was like well do you want me to marry uh or date sri lankan and they were like yes but as long as she's not muslim and it's like what the hell are you like what are you saying this is and and so i'm just trying to tell you that this idea of intersectionality it does play out in a lot of our lives because we all come from families especially our aging parents oh my god yeah our um my grandparents there were some my i mean like i love myself i'll be honest with you they're you know they try their best but man the thing that's got me particularly saddened or tilted or just you know um the thing that just sort of hits me is we've made so much progress in so many ways as a society yet we don't celebrate that and we seem incredibly focused on marginal issues to your point jamal that are not global warming that are not education that are that are not um you know uh international um relations and geo politics you know like there's economic empowerment there's so many things that we could be focused on that would actually make change than arguing about cancer and it would unite kevin hart on the office but it would unite people that's what i think so that's what i think is such a great opportunity if we all collectively came together and focused on a bigger enemy right climate change climate change i think you'd find people to be much more accepting of each other because we would have a common shared goal and then we would find commonality in achieving it yeah so j cal bill maher invented a word to describe what you're what you're saying which is progressive phobia which is it's the reluctance to admit any progress because of the fear that if you do admit progress then that means that you don't you will lack a justification for all these you know progressive programs that people want and so they have to make the situations always seem as dire as possible in order to scare people into a certain agenda um but yeah there's a you know unwillingness to admit how much progress we've made in so many areas the time they tried to cancel me was because i said on twitter isn't it amazing that every single skill you want to learn right now and including the high-paying jobs is now available for free on mit courseware and anybody can learn the stuff for free and you used to have to pay 50 000 a year and get accepted into these you know ivy league programs but now all that information is free and all we need to do is expose people to it and give them the motivation the time to do and they were like how could you say that you know people are not able to do it and i was like and then a bunch of people replied who were people of color or people who were poor and said i actually learned to code on the mit website i learned artificial intelligence i learned i got my degree in uh you know social media marketing or whatever at this website udemy that website other treehouse and all these people are saying yeah i learned all these skills and i went from making working at walmart to making 60k a year 70k a year and then there was this big fight like are you going to cancel me for saying there's more opportunity now than ever i i hold that position there is more opportunity now for you to learn a skill and get a high-paying job than in the history of humanity the system is more fair now than ever yeah i was going to say argue with that in the in the world of in the world of uh progress there are some amazing innovations every day this week and i put this in the chat and nick you can post the article there was a gentleman in at the nyc ny nyu langone center of medicine who transplanted a pig kidney into a human and had that human kidney or basically had that pig kidney not get rejected now this was a person that was brain dead and i guess you know the family you know god bless them donated this person's body to science effectively they were kept alive but then they were able to transplant a kidney in and they were able to see the urine production and creatinine production and all of a sudden now there is a chance that we could actually use pigs genetically engineered pigs as a basis for us to basically get kidneys hearts lungs that is incredible freeberg so so to your point saks that is happening still every day and we don't talk up enough about it because we're up in arms about dave chappelle freiburg tell us you know if that in 10 years what that looks like and the impact it has in society if we take that pig transplant and we just 10x it from now put a couple billion dollars behind it what does it look like in a decade well i think there's other techniques that are being developed that you could actually generate actual human organs using um you know basis of induced um these induced pluripotent stem cells and i regardless of the path i do think like availability of organ transplants um uh it's gonna go up like crazy the big infrastructure and technical challenge we still face is uh we've got to build these these uh gmp facilities uh to make all of these uh cell-based therapies not just kind of organs but also other cell-based therapies that are becoming kind of the mainstay of the future of medicine personalized medicine for humans and so there's also this kind of tremendous infrastructure opportunity we've talked a lot about we've talked a lot about infrastructure in biomanufacturing broadly and other life sciences opportunities but there's a tremendous infrastructure opportunity to build out facilities that can produce these you know these these therapies and the therapy can be an organ or a cell-based therapy that can target cancer in your body or or what have you um and so you can kind of think about look we've resolved the science now we've also resolved the engineering the next step is to build it right and so this is like you know the build decade or the build decades globally for where the intersection of software and biology has enabled these incredible breakthroughs in human health and manufacturing and food and now the infrastructure needs are there i've said this before i do think this is where we are have the biggest gap in terms of infrastructure needs and the biggest opportunity to kind of fill those needs and if we if i were to kind of be in congress or be president i would say this is the number one priority for an infrastructure bill because once you get this going it's going to change lives and it's going to change the economy so high speed rail costing us 50 billion 100 billion versus this yeah yeah we could build it down to gms facilities or a bunch of biomanufacturing facilities a lot of stuff that we could build that would um you know pay back within years and have a huge outcome uh private markets maybe we'll meet this demand but i think you gotta you gotta kickstart this stuff uh the economics are gonna be unfeasible for a while if you wanna get um a car t therapy which is a type of therapy that's person you know personalized car t therapies today your cost is about 450 000 you know a local university here i was speaking with one of their um their lead doctors the other day they've built their own gmp facility at a cost of 50 million dollars and they can now get the therapies down to 40 000 per patient but they can only serve 250 patients a year using that kind of 90 cost reduction so you can kind of see like as you build these systems and this is built locally by a university right it's not built for industrial scale these guys aren't commercial operators of these facilities so if you start to build these facilities from a commercial point of view and you can bootstrap some of these things in this infrastructure cost um very quickly the cost becomes so low that you see these technologies proliferate and i think we should see that both you know this organ transplant one is a great case study um cell-based therapies biomanufacturing all sorts of uh opportunity you keep saying gmp facility sorry good manufacturing yeah it's you know if you're gonna make cells that are gonna go in your body there's incredibly stringent requirements on the safety and the cleanliness and the practices that go on in that facility so these quote-unquote gmp facilities have a very specific criteria of how you how you build and how you operate them they're just highly they're high quality facilities is what you're saying yeah think about like a clean room to make semiconductors except in this case you're making cells that you're putting in your body so you gotta be really careful um all right everybody it's been 70 minutes 75 minutes 80 minutes uh anybody have any last minute plugs for products that they want to disguise as a compliment to another bestie i still think we should launch bestie coin the all-in coin and monitize the online podcast we were talking about this at poker live no monetization no no more nfts can we mft ourselves no bestie coin would be incredible i think i want to tell you about this guy lee jackie who's known as the lipstick king in china um he did a 12-hour live stream on wednesday on taobao 250 million people tuned in he sold 1.7 billion dollars of product so basically the equivalent of the entire adult population in america watched this isn't that incredible that is amazing that is just incredible so that's qvc and as if in two and a half times the people who watch the super bowl it's two and a half super bowls chiaki the lipstick king the lipstick king guys we haven't had monty on the show in a while let me bring him up oh monty get him to the mic oh monty yeah uh for those of you asking about the all in uh summit we are looking at locations in miami and we will have news shortly if you want to uh sign up for the email when are we doing this thing uh we're gonna look at march april may but we're gonna do a we're gonna do an la show in january we're gonna do a live all-in podcast at the upfront summit uh mark sisters event in l.a uh but that's like a closed event and then the all in summit you can go sign up for email updates summit dot all in podcast dot co summit dot all in podcast dot co we're not looking for volunteers we're not looking for event planners we have all the spaces in miami we could possibly know every single person's emails thanks to the fans for giving us every piece of information right now it's just about date states dates we gotta find a two-day date and then whatever place we use like feyena the new world uh the jackie gleason theater there's so many great facilities there that have reached out to us once we pick the facility we'll know what the facility capacity is some of them can fit 2000 people some can fit 250 when we figure that out then we'll figure out ticketing and and get people there this time next week both friedberg and i may have kids ah that's muscle so are we are we skipping next week no no i'm actually not giving birth i don't know about you but okay no we gotta get pictures and yeah it's gonna be incredible well congratulations guys and if this africa trip is coming i guess this african trip is happening i can't wait do you what countries are you thinking of tagging along of course listen this is about my life i have my own what's the point of having my own schedule i get a couple of friends who are traveling the world doing interesting [ __ ] i'm i'm the ultimate wingman your motto is private jet will travel i'm a wingman a professional wingman as a service kenya nigeria ghana and there may be a couple of other places wingman has a service that's if you need to somebody fun with you for a couple of you know touchdowns takeoffs wingman has a service he's leaving with something i'll bring sunny as my body double you go to the actual events i can't wait actually i'm super excited i would that's going to be fun yeah ah man get your passport let's get the cut deck of cards oh actually you know that would be great you can we can do a couple fireside chats big fireside chats with 100 we'll take it on the road yeah for sure all right everybody bye boys i love you uh good luck bro good luck to allison and for the queen of quinoa rain man david sacks ride to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] we [Music] we need to get [Music]