all right everybody welcome to another edition of the all-in podcast we'll call this episode one we did a test and over a hundred thousand of you listened to the test podcast that we knew the audios if you did in a few days Tomas is already getting addicted to his statistics a new podcaster Lima to focus on something going up yes exactly our portfolios are getting crushed but the podcast numbers are going up there with a meaningless victory to be sure but we got a lot of positive feedback and we're all sitting at home in quarantine as you can see I set up my home office I got our microphone here and Shema tha's in his bedroom and dear Freiburg I think is in his wine room or something in his uh in his compound are you in the safe room is this the safe room Dave Freiburg is with us again he got a lot of great feedback and he's now on the Twitter you can follow him at Friedberg I don't know if he showed his Twitter down because he was getting harassed on Twitter welcome to the club are you in your safe room David yeah it's brutal on Twitter I don't know how you guys do it you put something up and everyone you know just goes after you it's hard you out there in the Twitter world the Twitterverse basically you have to mute and block anybody who is under a hundred followers and being an absolute jerk because it's likely a Russian bot you know being run out of like Manila or something like that they've got all these like sophisticated rings of people that they just hire for ten bucks a day to harass people online I mean I know it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory but it's actually true this large groups of bots who go after people and try to kick create chaos but okay we're sitting here it's today's Wednesday we did our podcast on Saturday the stock market has gone down another twenty percent since then I guess or so and we are looking like this is going to be a fifty percent correction or something like that we're now you know well past a 30 plus percent and on the good news front it looks like testing is actually occurring and that work on a virus work on treatments is occurring we can call them cures but treatments is occurring and quarantine in place is being taken seriously and I guess the biggest thing is that Trump has basically admitted that this is a crisis and he's taking it seriously Friedberg what is your assessment of where we are today versus when we taped on Saturday in terms of the resolution to this we are we overreacting reacting just enough or not reacting enough there's three things to consider the health the policy and then the markets on the health front it seems like we have done a lot in terms of containment and we're ramping up testing we are still not doing broad general general population testing which is necessary for us to truly understand the dynamics of this disease and also to understand the contagion of this disease and we need to fix that problem there's a task force of a hundred people out of DC being led by Jared Kushner and a number of people from the tech industry that are working on ramping up testing and doing broader general population testing the policy decisions are what get quite scary and that is all of the containment shutting down travel shutting down borders shutting down bridges and the economic ramifications of doing so are frightening I think I mentioned the other day that 48 percent roughly of the US workforce works in small businesses another roughly 10 percent work in travel another roughly 12 percent work in energy and you know you kind of add this up and you can quickly see why Steve Mucha and the US Treasury Secretary was saying that we should expect 20 to 30% of the workforce to be unemployed by this summer if we keep this up so that is a frustrating and staggering statistic and something worth debating whether that policy decision is appropriate relative to the potential life and health and and Health System impact you know which one is worse and then the market question is just I don't know how to address it but things go ahead afterwards I have eight things I want to say one more thing and it is I think the most important to come out today so the markets are [ __ ] we're all in trouble or you know yadda yadda the most scary thing is Ford and GM to shut down their plants today and the reason they shut down their plants is because out of fear of coronavirus and Auto Workers and the UAW basically forced them to do it the world lives on a 30 day food supply so if you stop food production today there would only be 30 days of food for the whole world to eat based on our calorie consumption per day and especially with an isolated border and we import a lot of food in the United States if that means that we are then going to shut down other factories the Ford GM shut down and we're going to shut down food production processing and distribution factories then we have a food security crisis and this becomes a real societal problem so the concern that I have with the factories being shut down today is the precedent it sets and the potential follow-on from there in the food system and one thing we can't stop doing is making a distributing food to humans in the United States or else we are going to have problems you're right but before we go there the good news is that these directives don't apply to national critical infrastructure and the food supply is covered within that so unless something cataclysmic happens those folks are still going to make sure that food supply is there I do agree with you that the issue that we have to contend with is that you know there may not be as much and in the you know 30th to 90th day that becomes a real issue if this thing becomes a very protracted problem this sort of brings us back David without being too alarmist about how we started and how you started really importantly at the beginning which is there is a small but very credible body of evidence that is starting to show and this is what you put out on Twitter and part of why you got you know attacked probably by the pharma Lobby but that shows that there is a there is potentially an enormous ly large asymptomatic spreader dynamic in this disease so can you describe that and what that may mean and why there's a lot of silver lining in good news that if it's true there are several data points that are showing us that there may be an unexpectedly high number of people that get this disease and don't have any symptoms and show it the historical data that we've gathered to date has been largely symptomatic patients and in some places like in Korea asymptomatic patients that had really close contact with symptomatic patients that were confirmed to be positive and in Korea in particular they found a large cohort nearly 40% of the infected population were people between 20 and 29 years old that did not exhibit any symptoms or had very mild symptoms had a runny nose and didn't even know that they were sick on the princess cruise ship it turns out that up to 50 percent may have been asymptomatic people were all tested on that cruise ship because there were so many people that were positive and through that data set that cohort we found a very large asymptomatic population 50% roughly the NBA players have now been tested and out of seven players on five teams so out of seven players on those five teams that have tested positive it seems like none of them are having any symptoms there may be one person who's having a cough but generally they seem one of I think it was Donovan Mitchell said I could go play a seven game series tomorrow so this data is really important and it hasn't been fully accounted for in the models and the predictions of the pandemic and the predictions of the fatality rate we're assuming that let's say 2% of people that get this disease end up dying and by the way that's also based on an age histogram that may not be appropriate for our particular cohort in the United States if you took that data and then you just did it based on the fact that a large percentage of people actually don't die but they end up just being asymptomatic it really changes the denominator and it skews the results a paper published showed that in China up to eighty six percent of people did not realize that they were sick or they were unreported they had mild symptoms if you take that high level you take that low level call it somewhere between twenty-five and eighty per se T six percent maybe even as high as eighty six percent of patients are asymptomatic which means that the actual fatality rate is much much lower even in a large cohort that gets infected here so we should be mindful of this new data that's emerging and worse Racing and acting from a policy basis as if 2 percent of people 3 percent of people 4 percent of people that get this are gonna die and that may not actually be true based on what we're saying in the last week I have a comment in a statement the comment is people will say David you can't extrapolate from an NBA player who may just be in peak physical fitness although I think your answer is going to be it's not clear that the that the disease is correlated necessarily with physical fitness for on physical fitness at all it just may be the strain and how your body processes but then the question is doesn't this mean that we need to have broad-based massive testing not just of symptomatic populations so not just the PCR test that we've heard a lot about but also these antibody tests so that we've know that people have had it and what's the status of that David what's the status evidence that that's exactly right tomorrow and by the way on the healthy NBA player point it's absolutely true people that are between 20 and 30 the average age in the NBA is 26 years old people that are between 20 and 30 years old generally seem to have no to mild symptoms based on what we saw in Korea the other datasets need to be taken into account so the NBA is an interesting anecdote sure and you could discredit it all you wanted saying that it's a highly correlated class and so on because everyone's together all the time but we could look at the data that came out of China in a paper that was published in the journal Science and a paper that was published in the journal Nature from Korea that showed very large percentages anywhere from 20 to 50 to 80% or 90% of people being completely asymptomatic across an age spectrum certainly very heavier weighted towards the younger age bracket from you know children all the way up to 30 or 40 years old you can be completely asymptomatic and so these are really interesting discoveries that have happened and so to your point we need more data we need to confirm that hypothesis because that's how science works so we have a hypothesis let's go test it the problem is we're not testing it and we should be as a priority right now because the policy decisions we're making are based upon a denominator that may be wrong so the correct action should be to go get those antibody tests go out into the population and start testing the unscented asymptomatic general population and see what percentage of people in these high-risk zones like Seattle and LA and New York and SF already have the antibodies to this virus meaning they've been infected with this virus and have not or are not showing any symptoms and that gives us a better sense of a how widespread this infection is and B the true dynamics of the fatality rate and the symptomology of this disease and how it may affect the people those IgG tests are being made on mass in China today they're being shipped to countries like Italy where they are in fact being used on the frontline they involve a blood draw and then they have this lateral it's there called a lateral flow assay in terms of how they're kind of tested the blood runs across a strip and you see a value and you have a pretty good sense at that point those kits cost a couple of pennies to make in China we could probably get a couple million of them I don't understand why we're not I don't understand why someone in the federal government isn't begging China and apologizing and appeasing to them to send us those kits there are a lot of people I know that have bought them on the Internet I have a bunch of people that I know have bought them they have been shipped in through brokers and they are not FDA approved they cannot be used for diagnostic purposes because of FDA guidelines that have the FDA regulates these things they can be used for research purposes but they may not be very sensitive and very specific and they don't have great testing on them so we don't estimate the sensitivity and the specificity to be 90 percent roughly 10 percent false positive roughly 10 percent false negative but for what we're trying to accomplish that's good enough we're not trying to give people a diagnosis of disease we're trying to run an epidemiological study and we should on the general population to figure out how many people out there are asymptomatic and have been infected that it's an important statistic that's missing and to your point if we find out that there is a large population of people that have actually felt this disease passed through them it's faster that we can sort of get people back to work out in the streets which is now probably going to be the most important thing we can do to just prevent a complete economic calamity yeah yeah there are there are Jason and sorry treatments Jim ops all right interrupt you but treatments are the other thing I think you're going to talk about that treatments are interesting let's talk about that right now because to me what's incredible is the again now what is emerging and and its small and scale relative to how amplified it may may should or should not be is you know Ren des vir is very different but it just seems like prophylactically even there's some data that's showing out of France that chloroquine seems to be effective these are these are solutions that are pennies to make and some of the some of the feedback that I've heard is that part of why the FDA the CDC the the federal apparatus is reluctant to embrace these things is in part because of pressure from those lobbies but that seems to me unfathomable in a moment like this so why do you think the government hasn't put out the CDC has zero directive right now on the management and efficacious management of this disease why is that okay what say you Qi and others have said and doctors around the country echo is that these treatments have not been clinically tested through a blinded controlled study and that is a very fair assertion generally speaking for doing good medicine but we are in a crisis state and in a crisis state you have to triage and you also have to triage policy and we should be considering creating policy and changing the way that we do policy under these extenuating circumstances if doing treatment can reduce fatality rates by up to 4x as Korean doctors have claimed it is worth taking the risk or perhaps it is worth letting the FDA say renessa vehicle Etra chloroquine and others are being widely produced widely distributed the government is mandating it and doctors and their patients can decide if and when they want to use it and let them take the risk without clinical trials and without data and the typical process of the FDA what's the downside of taking these drugs are they particularly dangerous I mean I've heard the colloquy gnomic perhaps incorrectly Cola quint chloroquine I've heard that this can be a little bit nasty in terms of side-effects so is there some major downside that I mean it's kind of like an off use of a drug right like this is an off use of a drug as opposed to it's an off use of a drug and some of the antivirals aren't even fully tested in humans so we don't yet know what the side-effects may be and also remember side effects can change based upon your health condition so someone that's in respiratory distress may have different side effects than someone who's taking it in a healthy controlled clinical trial so we're not really sure that's the argument that doctors would make is you know our first mandate is to do no harm and so they don't want to apply a medicine that might do harm and so that is the standard protocol and practice and process however again in a crisis state China and Korea said guys we're trying this thing and it's working and we're adopting it let's go for it and they race forward it could be that this is a good time for the United States to consider an emergency policy action where we make a lot of this stuff make it available and simply like doctors use their best judgment rather than have the FDA be the paternal state that makes a decision for the doctors or makes a recommendation to the doctors well what do we think the fatality rate actually is like David if you were looking at this and you had to place a bat and put a hundred percent of your net worth on it and be all in and have massive skin in the game where do you think the fatality rate here in the United States winds up being overall because the data that came out of Wuhan has been markedly going down as they get the numbers corrected who knows Chinese numbers you know censored by the government and maybe perhaps massaged - it's gonna be hard to tell what do you think the real fatality rate is the first fatality rate I heard was 5.8 percent out of China though based on the paper that came out in science over the weekend the wu hand data was estimated to be 1.4 percent and Wu hen was the worst data out of China the quote-unquote rest of China is still estimated at about 0.15 percent or 0.1 6% 0.14 percent something like that where's that versus like the flu every year or something or the normal flu 1.1 percent roughly yeah and so you know if you're looking at somewhere between 0.2 and 1.5 percent now in Italy I think they're at over 7 percent we talked about this on the last show but Italy is a much older population and their health system is completely overwhelmed so there's some confounding data that's confounding variables there that may be making Italy a very you outlier on a distribution of what's gonna happen here the United States has a population that's a little bit older than China but much younger than Italy so our health system is and our health system is generally more ICU beds per capita than Italy so so we should be in a better place the thing we don't know that does concern me about the health system the United States and the population in the United States is it seems that there may be a high correlation with severity of disease and a1c levels and and as a result the US has one of the highest obesity rates of any country in the world and highest diabetes rates and so we may have a population that has a very high percentage of people with a high a1c that may be at higher risk than say people in other countries I don't know that for sure but that is those are two kind of confounding statistics that may kind of make things a little bit worse if I were to put my money on this look I'm a betting guy I would be a little bit nervous at this point but I'd say it's probably somewhere between 0.15 and then call it 1.8% you know call it that's that's an order of magnitude I know so you know but you could do the math that's probably somewhere between one and ten times as bad as the flu and so that again leads to the big policy question about are the actions warranted is it let the health system crash so that's imperfect then flipped to you Cho moth you've heard his basically his line at you know 0.12 ten times the flu one point eight or something you know if we split the difference of those two it's 0.5 it's a point six point seven fatality rate is the reaction of sheltering in place and the economic turmoil it's causing worth it yes or no right now you guys need to keep talking I need to jump off for two seconds and I'm gonna run right back okay no problem and so what do you what do you think now if we were to look at your estimate David is it actually worth what's happening would we if you and I were making the policy or you I and a Chamath were you know the cabinet members as it were making this decision is this decision and the economy crashing and a potentiality of ten fifteen twenty percent unemployment and all the downstream effects would it be better to do what the UK was originally do which is just a bad let's get the herd mentality going and let's get the herd immunity immunity go I know this is like the most difficult question in the world but like we're here so let's look it's not binary right it may not lock everyone up and let everyone out the door it may be that you have a more nuanced policy where you say let's keep people over 65 years old give them the strong recommendation to stay home and make sure that you distribute chloroquine to doctors around the country so as soon as elderly people start having symptoms they maybe get some treatment but you know that's kind of an option you keep 65 year olds at home you do random general population antibody testing and once you hit a certain percentage of the population having been exposed to this thing it may be that at that point you say okay you know the over 65 limit is lifted or it may be that you know you do something similar to that at different age brackets have different containment recommendations you also do it with with random gen-pop screening you also do it with medicine being distributed so there's a nuanced answer to that where the policy should be a little bit more directed it should be a little bit more involved in terms of treatment testing and containment strategy and it doesn't need to be so binary right it doesn't have to be everybody stay at home if we get to the point where a population has very few people have had it then more people should stay home so it doesn't spread or and then if more people have it so if 50 percent of young people in San Francisco have it already we've got herd immunity then maybe we can start saying hey if you're over 65 you can go out but just stay out of restaurants or something is that what you're saying yeah once you hit like 50 to 60% of the population having antibodies to a particular virus you you know or like a flu for example you'll see that our not number drop well below one and then explain or not to everybody again just so yeah it's basically like the viral coefficient like for every one person that's infected or not tells you how many other people will get infected after them and so if it's 2.5 which is what some estimates say it is for coronavirus right now then for every one person that gets infected roughly two and a half people get infected and that number goes down as more people get infected because there's more people get infected there's less people to infect and the rate at which you can then infect other people also drop so your are not collapses and so at a certain point you have this kind of basis for saying hey guys what some okay now I got to step off sorry guys yeah no problem do you think so sure my team is incredible I mean what you are seeing in real time as we're doing this is literally like I've never seen this before we we should probably explain what what is going on so what is going on in the background is the markets are just completely torn now why are the markets important many people aren't invested at all in the stock market I get it but it is where liquidity and capital markets function and derived out of those capital markets is the money that then kids startups it hits the banks which then lend to small businesses it is the functional machine the undergirding of the US and the world economy and we are in a moment that I have really not seen since o8 where there are seizures in this market in extremely violent ways and so when I had to jump off the phone it was me trying to do my part to kind of help but also trying to make sure that you know we maintain full liquidity in times like this it's incredible now Jason on the assumption that you know Friedberg mahir may not come back I mean what dramatic podcasting we're dealing it I know well you know I mean people also have their kids at home so you know I might have to jump out and take care of the twins or are old so it is definitely having a psychological impact on everybody being home you've been home for over two weeks I've been home for a week I went out once to do a podcast on my office with just one person there what I said I wanted to do was start at sort of the ten foot level and I'd like to build up to the hundred thousand foot level and I think that'll be a good way of talking about what we teased and talked about a little bit in episode zero which is sort of these second and third-order dynamic befo before we go to that let me just I want to wrap up with David saying about what the change in policy should or could be so right now we haven't we're having you know this basically quarantined in some cases it's a hard quarantine some cases a little bit softer it's a recommendation and you know people are being told to you know stay at home it should this change and if under what conditions do we start going back to normalcy because I think that's what people want to know is when is this gonna end and under what circumstances I'm just talking about you know staying home well look if it were me I think what we would do is adopt some of the mitigation strategies of China and Korea and Singapore all of these countries have kind of showed us a way to deal with it now we have to decide that a short-term suspension of typical civil liberties is worth the trade-off now it's not worth it under the normal course under any any any imaginable way but if we had to trade off some of those civil liberties in the short course so that we could get back to normalcy I think most of us at this point and definitely all of us after another week or two of home isolation will do it and what I think it would entail is setting up zones that we would understand to be uninfected and what that means are people that don't have it or people that have antibodies and eventually allowing those zones to reopen so that we can actually have some amount of economic activity and what that will require is massive testing of the entire population testing testing testing I mean there should be lines and lines and lines it should be you know how we would have and we know by the way how to mobilize this it is no different than when we would go to vote right and you know we could all be told based on birth year right everybody go based on birth year your local voting facility there are phlebotomist there they can run these lfi A's they can and they can they can allow you to be in a safe zone or not a safe zone if you're found to be an asymptomatic carrier then you can self quarantine and socially distance and we can really you know nip this thing in the bud in a you know four or five six week time frame and yeah because these tests are available at such large scale and because these tests are so insignificant ly cheap if it were up to me I would mobilize the military in the National Guard I would mobilize or voting infrastructure I mean another way to do this with me why don't we just have the National Guard or doctors or whatever just go to everybody's mailbox put in the kits and then say you know we have your kit in here on this date and we'll go pick up the kids the problem with these lfi A's is that the amount of blood that you need you cannot draw by yourself it's not a what about the swab stuff I mean if we just did the swab testing we just said hey why your house the swab is a PCR test that's looking for RNA and the problem with that is that it's effective in a window it's uncomfortable to administer and less to be done right away for those that are in the process of viral shedding god if you are not in the process of viral shedding then that PCR test is effectively ineffective and what I'm advocating for is move past the PCR testing that should be done in an acute situation if you come into a hospital where you're exhibiting symptoms the more important thing right now is to find people that don't have it or people who are asymptomatic aliy spreading or those people that are immune because if we can re baseline the denominator as Friedberg said we may find some good news in that it's very much like the flu in terms of numerical distribution in which case we can make some policy changes and reestablish economic activity if it turns out that it's not at least we know that - hmm but right now we're in the worst place which is that we are in a situation of isolation and confinement in the absence of data and this is I think what's so what's so infuriating to folks is that we you know it's like Winston Churchill said America will do the right thing it's just that they'll try everything else first and I think that we are clearly on that path to trying everything until we do the right thing everything okay and I think it's political I think it's political poker as the reason one Freiberg everything okay just market trades really he's like literally you're trying to cover stuff and just it's a great time to tax law tax harvest losses man yeah if you've got companies that you're really religious about that you would love to own for a long time and you're underwater on them it's a great time to sell them take the loss harvest it and then buy him back in the next 30 days so David I have I have a list of eight things and what I told Jason is I wanted to start at the 10 foot level and end at the hundred thousand foot level okay and so I'm gonna tee up the first question for both of you guys and I have a view but all I'll save it to the end so question number one of these eight lists of interesting things to talk about which may be relevant for the folks listening what does this mean for startups and what should you do if you are a unprofitable I mean by definition these these companies are default dead what if what do you do if you're a startup CEO today yeah I think it's a great question I'm dealing with it like with about a dozen companies a day who are in this very acute situation you have to figure out how you have to look at the instrument panel and then try to like a pilot I use the analogy understand exactly how much altitude you have where the nearest airport is how much fuel you've got onboard so I literally told folks listen if you can close this money because a lot of people were in the middle of doing deals close it immediately so that's number one if you're if you got a deal on the table take the money number and some people do but most people don't and I'm already seeing people reach rating deal terms based and cut and backing out so I had one person back out of a deal on the syndicate calm an angel investor said because the market conditions I'm backing out and they had made the commitment they're backing on so you can see commitments broken so assume it's gonna that no money's gonna get raised for the next three or six months at a minimum and then you have to ask yourself well how do I keep this company alive I have people who are founders taking 80% salary cuts and then giving their staff 50% salary cuts and then that takes their six months of runway makes it nine so that's number one you have to just make the cuts and if you've chosen to be the founder of the company that that's that's your job is to get everybody to safety and better to have four out of five where three out of five employees lose their job and the company be alive to come back and maybe get some stimulus later then to have the company go out of business because you wouldn't make the cuts so you got to just take the medicine and that's really with first-time entrepreneurs they don't understand that and if they have an every business is different we have some companies that are subscription-based business or delivery based businesses they're actually seeing an increase in utilization increase of people trialing their software so I have one company that's a consumer subscription they had more trials this week than ever because people have free time so that company is going to be fine but you got to make the cuts David I'm not sure what your advice is or what you're doing in your portfolio yeah I mean look I'm on 12 boards four companies have been or are in the middle of term cheat or closing a deal so it's been an unfortunate timing for all this stuff what happens to those four companies key difference the term sheets yeah yeah very different things I mean we've got one that I hope we close on Friday we signed on fright last Friday that the final Doc's and money is not in the bank account yet I've got another one that's had a bunch of offers that got rescinded but they weren't like signed yet it's just all over the place and and I think you know one thing that's that's worth kind of paying attention to for every company is you've got to ask yourself firstly the hard question of going into this and coming out of this era that we're kind of now entering that is a very bleak and dark era economically where's your customer gonna be and what is your customer gonna be doing the customer model is changing overnight if you're a company that that's sold you know software into restaurants and restaurants are about to potentially go bankrupt or suffer absolutely loss of revenue and get you know debt payments restructured they're not going to necessarily be rushing to spend more money each month unless you can help them immediately save money if you're a company selling to consumers and you're selling to consumers that are gonna lose their jobs in the next three months or lending to consumers they're gonna be losing their jobs in the next three months you've got to be asking yourself the question what can I be doing with my business so you got to start with your strategy question and you got to make sure that your custom you got to think about where your customer is going to be and how you can adjust your strategy as a result the second thing I'd say is and I sent out a note to my CEOs and I was like guys you gotta you know cut your burn and then you got to cut your burn and you got to cut your burn if you've got burned you got to do everything you can to give yourself the greatest chance of survival and I think on the last all-in podcast Jason you mentioned having a you know 36 months of cash that's ideal but if you can get your cash back your cash to get you to an 18 month runway 18 I average Jim you should be you should be doing everything you can to number one kind of give yourself that breathing room even if that means creating milestones trading features creating revenue goals trading all the things that you're expecting to do survival matters more than growth right now David Sinclair who wrote the book lifespan and as a Harvard biochemists has highlighted that there's basically a gene the circuit genes as about seven of them in humans and the circuit genes get turned on or off and it turns out every biological organism on planet Earth has a circuit the circuit gene tells the organism or tells the cell to either grow or heal and this is a time for everyone to activate their circuit genes and stop focusing on growth and focus on healing it's really important to optimize your unit economics to make sure you know where your customer is to really reduce the burn to reduce the spend to reduce the push for growth and expansion and just make sure you've got a core business that you have a customer that you can make money from that customer that you've really got unit economics right and reduce your burn and give yourself that runway and extend your life so that's my that's my kind of well I think we got question one out of the way let me let me give you my my advice which is building on the the back of both of what you said but I'm gonna take it from a different perspective so let's look inside of a VC firm VC firms have limited partners and those limited partners are the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world family offices of well renowned individuals foundations university endowments nonprofits you name it and all of them are allowed to invest in this asset class because they themselves can prove that they're sophisticated and one way in which they do it is they they have what's called portfolio allocation theory they construct a portfolio of every hundred dollars they have and they say well I'd like to have you know 70% of that in liquid instruments and that I'm gonna have 60% in bonds and you know 40% in equities and then that 30% they'll take and they'll say you know I want to have a mixture of all kinds of different stuff some real estate some hedge funds some private equity and eventually when all of those allocations are done there's an allocation to venture now in the last few years what happened is all of these folks you know move the dial they push the risk meter so that the allocation into venture was upwards of seven eight nine percent of their overall portfolio now just to remind you guys you know basic theory monetary theory would tell you when you put money in into an illiquid instrument remember venture doesn't return money until thirteen years after it's done and you can't get it out it's not like a bond where you can go and instantaneously sell it in a second you have to get returns that are much better than the market because you need to be rewarded paid back for that illiquidity now in the last month what you've seen our portfolios get completely turned upside down if your bonds and equities before were worth $60 or $70 of that hundred it's now worth $56 it could be worth $40 what that means is that that other $30 needs to be worth much much less otherwise your portfolio model is completely upside-down and all of these limited partners become forced sellers as well so that can't happen so what is the my understanding is the last time this happened in 2008 LPS kind of winked to the GPS and said listen it would be good if there wasn't a capital call right now and then GPS not wanting to piss off their LPS the VC firms not wanting to piss off the endowments as an example said okay we're just gonna not make any capital calls right now while the market recovers so that your equities go up and the percentage of venture goes back down is that is that the likely scenario is LPS it's worse than that it's worse than that because right now these foundations and sovereign wealth funds are trying to just stay above water and as we get to the ten thousand a hundred thousand foot view I'll give you the picture of what's happening in their offices and again it's important because it is what make sure we come out of this reasonably well which is a properly functioning capital market and right now it is the most precarious that I have seen in 20 years so basically these LPS are gonna have to portfolio rebalance and they're gonna have to force venture capitalists to mark down their books so these are just gonna make that decision to say hey my investment in Airbnb slack or uber is worth X now I mean when they were private companies so not slack and not uber cuz they're public no but previously private yeah but but Airbnb can it be marked at thirty or forty billion dollars the auditors will probably say no the LPS will say that it's not the GPS will want to because it'll allow them to maintain their IRR as their rates of return and so what you're gonna have is when these when these markdowns are forced to happen which will take another six months venture capitalists returns will look terrible and so their propensity to be able to add bad dollars after good quote unquote you know to defend every company is going to go to zero right and and as you said Jason there's gonna be a pall on on activity so I don't think 18 months is sufficient I think you need at least 36 months w need to have three years of capital in the bank the worst thing that'll happen if you have 36 months is you think to yourself wow I was really conservative the best thing that happens with 36 months is you survive the distribution of outcomes would tell you there is zero point in taking the risk if you don't have to and this is why unfortunately it's going to be a very difficult process of recalibrating all of this stuff so for folks that are in these startups we're gonna have to go through an unfortunate period of pain and you know as as Buffett said you know rule number one of our business is to not go out of business rule number two is not to forget rule number one yeah all right I think it's well said and is there any chance well we're sort of at this you know street level on the front lines is there any chance that we contain this very quickly let's say under 60 days and that it looks like this virus mitigation through the various drugs we talked about actually starts to work if that happens in the next six days what what will happen to the markets it's gonna come there's a chance it could come roaring back what are the chances of a roar back it cannot come roaring back so let me explain to you what's happening right now in the capital markets so let's take a step back and first look at what what the Fed has announced over the last couple of days so and and here's why the Federal Reserve is important so the Fed basically acts as a market making and liquidity function in what's called the overnight repo market now that's an obscure market for the average individual on Main Street but let me roughly explain why it's and and at the end of it you're probably gonna have the same reaction as me which is what the [ __ ] [ __ ] what the [ __ ] [ __ ] okay but I'll explain it in English first you're an LP a limited partner and you give a hedge fund $1 and very much like last episode how I explained why hedge fund run levered the hedge-fund says well if I take this dollar you know the bank will give me some some amount of leverage on it but it would be much better if I if I was able to basically you know give them a an instrument like a bond or some sort of short-term commercial paper and then they'll give me more because they'll believe in the quality of the instrument okay so they go in the repo market and they basically do a transaction overnight where they basically you know buy some short-term commercial paper they use it as collateral and then they lever it up and then they go put it in the market that entire dynamic works as long as the repo function works every day every night you kind of go and you clean up your balance sheet you look at how much leverage you have you look at your leverage ratio you make sure that you have enough money and you go and you refinance your short term paper that keeps you know JPMorgan Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley lending to you but if that market ceases when the repo market ceases and there's no way for you to either buy or sell commercial paper buy or sell short term money market instruments and on the other side the markets are whipsawing up and down and so you're being margin called not being margin called being margin called not being margin called the markets start to really seize and capitulate and everybody is just losing enormous amounts of money and what I mean by everybody it's everybody it's hedge funds it's sovereign wealth funds its foundations its central banks everybody is losing money and if we don't figure out how to bring some calm into the financial markets it will leave all of these limited partners and all these other people with not just a lack of liquidity and a lot less money than they had before but this psychological pain of remembering what they just went through and that'll prolong what we have to deal with to get out of it right so you know this is why I think it's really important to understand that if we can nip the you know stage zero of this which is the disease itself in the bud and I don't mean by curing it and I don't mean with a vaccine I mean by testing and data yeah if we can understand and bound it then everybody's psychology can move to fixing the capital markets and right now how close we need it to be fixed how close do you think we are to having that mass testing done and then I think we all think we're gonna have a low mortality rate and then go back to normalcy is that something that's happening in 10 days 30 days or 60 days if you had to pick a number the the march back to normality David I don't see any action to get the testing done that needs to get done right now my mom got tested yesterday it seems like there are more tests out there this week than oh yeah Stanford Oh clean up the testing there's definitely PCR testing available now and you can probably get your results in three to four days on average although some labs are super backed up yeah my mom said she's gonna take three days or four days yeah but the the stuff that we're talking about which is the general population testing I'll keep saying it it's so critical that we do this to figure out how many people have already been infected and didn't know it we don't have that data that we don't even have a plan for and it's not on the radar the task force in DC is focused right now on increasing the throughput and the availability of PCR or just in time you know PCR test blood testing that's yeah yeah it's all blood testing it's just a matter of like like let me explain the the PCR test involved the RT PCR test involves taking blood and then there's basically six steps that you have to go through with it in a lab and it's done on like three different machines and the actual cycle takes 30 to 60 minutes at 30 to 45 minutes so by the time you have that backlog and you can multiplex it but meaning you can do multiple at the same time and you can kind of do different things but generally these machines are not highly automated there are new machines that are allowing us to automate more of these steps and making them go a little bit faster and do more multiplexing but it is still a multi step cycle to take the blood and turn it into a test result once you've and and try to measure it's available it's a it's content and so this takes this takes some time and so it's a chemistry lab it's doing this work so until we have a point-of-care solution which is like a test strip or something else and and these are technically possible it's just that they're not FDA approved and so they're not getting made and distributed here whereas China and Korea and Italy are using them out and they're made in factories in China even though they're not tested and approved in the normal way these in the plan though to have these untested tests online this week it's not what they're saying yeah but you people are buying them yeah but so I guess the question is when do you think we will have these you know the general population taking tests and we get like a large-scale testing like South Korea did I think I'll agree that's the part of the solution when does that happen unfortunately we're not parallel passing it we've put all of our resources into increasing the availability and throughput of the rt-pcr tests for acute infection cases and as a result we have everyone focused on this there was some lab work and some research departments I won't name them that we're working on doing this general population testing but they got yanked into the be getting the rt-pcr scaled up because oh my god were behind the curve we got to fix this thing so we got to get over this first hump I think once we get over this first hump then you're gonna see people distribute and work on this and I think getting over the first hump is happening in the next call at seven to ten days and so then it's probably another 30 to 45 days before we get these tests for general population testing more broadly distributed so call it 45 days out why don't we do this at the same time I mean why can't we parallel this this makes no sense to me we're there with similar tests and so many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that are banging their head on the wall asking this question I've done so many phone calls over the last few days of people being like what can we do how can we get these things made where can we go and everyone's just like flustered it's really frustrating anyway we've got a lot of individuals that we're trying to kind of collect together to do this work some folks are calling China today we're trying to see if we can get big bulk orders out of China we're just going to pay for it ourselves and then try and get some research labs to run that you know research universities around the country to run the experiments for us using these untested unproven you know not have you run one of these on yourself yet one of these unproven tests yet I haven't I actually a friend of ours I did one with video on with him this morning and so yes a mutual friend of ours a mutual friend of ours yeah and so and then I know lots of people that have them and have used them and I've seen them and I've gone through like you know I bought a bunch of them they arrived tomorrow and so I see you know we see we know how these things work they're actually from a reliable source you know these are not we know no one's actually done the testing to prove the specificity and sensitivity we're relying on a third party you know tested we don't really know but comfortable I keep hearing they're uncomfortable what's uncomfortable then they stick it very far up your nose is that they what people are or your you're referring to the rt-pcr test so what you're trying to do they're you're trying to get a sample of living virus on a swab and the best place to get that living virus for this particular virus is in your nose or in your backyard throat so they're taking a long q-tip and they're sticking it up your nose and they're sticking the back your throat then they put it in a little solution that will keep the viral RNA alive and then that's what they're shipping to the lab and that's what then gets so it's uncomfortable to have it that far up your nose is what they're saying that's why I keep saying it's uncomfortable I've had more uncomfortable things up my nose I'm sure it's fine you know it's a q-tip in your nose yeah yeah it's a q-tip way up in your nose so we actually think that math testing is a thirty to sixty day I think it math testing if in the worst case is 30 is 30 to 60 days of what I'm imploring anybody with any influence is we need to get this starting to happen in the next two to three weeks it needs to start happening in the next two to three weeks and you know this is this is where I would say there are a lot of other people other than David myself you Jason the people on our group chat buying tests for the mass population you know I just I just want to say something here which is it is incredible to see guys like Jack Ma step up and you know do what he can to send stuff here but I would say that thus far there's largely been an inverse correlation of contribution and wealth during all of this and folks that are in a position to help I think need to be more vocal you know we all can't just participate when the times are good take advantage of the bully pulpit when the times are good and then when times are complicated disappear and become anonymous its part in why I think you and I decided to just do these as often as we can yeah because at least we can think through the problems so that at least people can hear our voices and understand that we are thinking through as much as possible what to do I am literally calling folks in Wall Street all the time because what little I can do to assure them or be a market participant right now to maintain liquidity I need to do because in the absence of that participation we're gonna just create more and more havoc and I think it's important for other people who are in a position either monetarily or through influence or both to be out there right now doing something you know just called Friedberg right now they should give Freiburg a hundred billion dollars we'll go to China we'll get the test and we can do our own broad-based population study right now I would jump on that right now looking at the statistics as of today we obviously the total cases in China hit 80,000 with 3237 deaths they had only 11 new deaths yesterday and Italy 35,000 total cases 4,200 new cases and they added four hundred seventy five deaths yesterday with a total death count of two thousand nine hundred seventy eight so that is just stunning what's happening in Italy and it seems I don't know if the trendline is it's getting worse or not but it's it's a it's a horrific and awful situation they're completely out of beds their their triaging elderly people and letting them die in the hall so that younger people who have a higher chance of surviving can actually get oxygen it's just awful and they're having 3,500 new cases or they're at 3,500 yeah there are over 3,000 cases but added yesterday so there's really it's it is flattening but who knows if that's because they're just overwhelmed and they can't do the testing but the debts are something that seems to come down the last three days we're looking at different time series the number of people that died yesterday are in fact the number of people that died yesterday the number of people that tested positive yesterday doesn't tell you as much because the test results may be four days delayed and they may be ten days into their symptoms by the time they get tested and so on and so forth so the testing data significantly lags the infected population count likely and may not represent much of anything right so there it's very and it's also hard to know what the average fatality timeline looks like there are published reports now out of China and Korea that start to try and specify this a little bit but we are looking at different time series when we try and compare these things and so everyone be cognizant of that as you look at these numbers it's not simple apples and apples let's let's move to a slightly second and third-order Jason I think if we say sure that disease is just gonna be a [ __ ] mental quagmire we're gonna jump out the window yeah okay let's let's talk about something that Mark Cuban said which I really agree with which is that if we're gonna do bailouts they can't come where we also do things like you know allowing these companies to do buybacks where a CEO pay isn't curtailed you know it turns out that the airline industry which looks like is gonna be first in line for a bailout spent ninety six cents of every single dollar free cash flow they had on buying back stock which is only used to drive up earnings per share which is only relevant for CEO pay so they have you know they don't have the cash buffer they don't have the thirty six months of operating you know window that you know everybody should have their anomaly on trying to hit they blew it on trying to have their earnings per share go up by reducing the number of shares in existence errors exactly just so people understand if you can't if you can't earnings per share you know do you take earnings you divide it by the number of shares so if earnings can't go up just divided by the number of shares and earnings per share goes up lowering the number of shares yeah if you had a million dollars from earnings a million shares it was $1.00 per you get rid of half the shares it now goes up and and so now you know you have CEO P go through the roof but these companies are not any more resilient than they were before and so now they're in line for a bailout and I think the a large caucus of people across files are very clear that these things need to be wipeouts of the equity versus bailouts where you know folks who took advantage of the financial system here continue to get rewarded what do you guys think about that totally to me if you wipe out the equity though just pausing for a second and taking the other side of the argument I'm not saying this is the site I would take if you wipe out the equity would not some of the people who would hit that pain are shareholders from a retirement home or a retirement plan like CalPERS maybe own tension funds yeah pension funds etc so you know it does seem like if you wipe out the equity you could have some unintended consequences was eques holders but I think what the other side of the argument is we're gonna have to have there be repercussions for people running companies so close and recklessly to the cliff and there has to be some pain not reward for doing that and a bailout is a reward for operating your responsibly is that what you're saying Jamaa yeah I I think that actually you have to wipe out the equity and I think the reason why wiping out the equity is important is that it overwhelmingly does not punish the you know retiree in their who owns you know Boeing stock in their 401k Boeing has not been held by retirees in their full run case for years as a cohort of impactful investors massive large institutional pools of money on these companies these are the balance sheets of governments these are the balance sheets of foundations these are the balance sheets of a very few very very wealthy people and the reality is that for the broad-based population for the 350 odd million Americans in the United States how many of them do you think are really active market participants meaning for every dollar of value creation or destruction how much do they actually see I would guess it's less than 10 percent meaning 90 cents of every dollar are nameless faceless organizations in a financial infrastructure I think the lesson we have to we have to we have to tell and the place we have to move to is one of compassion of capitalism which is that we have been so hell-bent on the use of leverage on the use of these financial gimmicks on the use of accounting tricks to enrich a few at the sake of the many and this is the right time where you should nationalize some of these businesses and when they eventually do get taken back out and floated publicly all of those proceeds should go back to the United States Treasury who should then use it to reinforce Social Security and Medicare and everything else because we are going to run a Multi multi trillion dollar budget deficit to get out of this and to just give people some context here that the u.s. national debt is at 23 trillion dollars which is seventy two thousand dollars per citizen and one hundred eighty nine thousand dollars for each citizen who pays taxes and we've run our spending our D budget deficit is ability is a trillion dollars a year we're gonna talk about here I think a two to three trillion dollar stimulus package which will increase the national debt load by only ten percent so it does seem like we can manage that but boy was this a strategic mistake for us to run up a day during good times was it not it's it's it's even simpler than this like and and I hate to say this so bluntly but this eurozone is gonna collapse okay Japan is finished so there are two economies that matter there's China and the United States as of today and the great thing about that is in a set of two there's only one instrument of safety which is the United States dollar thank God in that world the United States has exceptional leverage exceptional exceptional leverage it is and it has always been you know the beacon the light on the hill etc now in a moment like this the United States has the most ability to reset how we think about things it could run five trillion dollar deficits tomorrow it could run ten trillion dollar deficits because it is still the backstop I'm not advocating for that but this is where I think you need bold decisive action and not piecemeal strategies I don't think a trillion dollars is enough I really think that if you think about what the eurozone will have to do and what's gonna happen to the US dollar we should be basically saying right off the bat at a minimum anyone who makes less than you know pick your number a million dollars a year every man woman and child every or every eighteen-year-old American man and woman should immediately get five thousand dollars forget one thousand two thousand five thousand and next month if we're still out of business five thousand and all of that does is just it's a trillion dollars it's two trillion dollars over two months and then you add another trillion dollars in all this you know small business loans and all the other things that's three trillion dollars that you can deal with because we're the United States and I think it's really important to keep it in mind I know that sounds crazy well I mean um people don't think oh you know blah blah blah you know budgets and deficits but it's not because everybody else is just as [ __ ] if not more [ __ ] well let me give you it let me give you an another perspective the GDP of the United States is twenty trillion dollars roughly every MutS assume the whole economy shuts down every month that were shut down costs us 1.5 trillion dollars so if we're gonna have the country shut down for say three months we're losing four and a half trillion dollars right there the problem is economic growth of the economy is actually a first-order function right so the the movement of cash drives the the future economy and so if we were just needing to fill that hole you would need to come up with a couple of trillion dollars and you would have the government going out and buying ice cream cones and paying Hair Salons and paying for dog walkers and you know paying for construction workers and paying for oil rig workers and basically basically employing and buying all of those goods and services for that functional equivalent of a twenty trillion dollar GDP that's what it would take to just fill the hole well that's if you're assuming no economic activity I mean we we don't think there's gonna there's going to be no economic continue with maybe let's say it's a third less act economic education in the shoe guys the shoe that hasn't dropped is this idea that everybody is at home working nobody's at home working that's a joke that's a lie okay because as David said companies are not you know self-contained units very few are many of them and most of them operate in a very interconnected socially dependent way with other companies they're your customers you are their customers nobody is doing anything right now there's nobody there's nobody evaluating the next great SAS tool guys come on and the other issue is just it's just leverage Jason right so we've also got to remember that a big chunk of the economy is levered meaning that there's debt and debt payments that need to be paid and so those income streams are now gonna be absent and so there's there's a there's a multiplier effect when revenue goes down the economic impact is actually multiplied and so you can't just fill the hole so and so it becomes a very complicated nonlinear kind of system that you have to try and fill the holes and you got to find the places where cash is missing and it's not moving the fastest and that's where you got to throw the money in the first like these repo markets and so on well and there's no doubt that the we all agree bottom-up is the way to do this so if we have three hundred thirty million Americans if you just have the bottom half get a thousand dollars a month that's call it a hundred sixty billion dollars a month it's only over the year two trillion dollars so if we just did that it gave everybody a thousand dollars a month that's twelve thousand dollars for the bottom half they're not saving that money they're gonna use it to still go to spend it in the market correct they're gonna pay their rat they're gonna go get dinner I don't think so where people are gonna who are laid off right now are gonna save the money well if you gave me $1,000 or you know somebody $1,000 when they're in their house on the sixth week of their home confinement what what you think they're I'm assuming that we're in week ten and we're we're not in stuff confinement anymore we agreed in the first third of the program that we're gonna get there in whatever it is 60 days 90 days yeah you know what I realized after wearing the same pair of jeans four days in a row I have too many jeans that's what I've realized and you know what I've also realized that the cotton shirts that I buy from H&M are [ __ ] perfect and I've complicated in my life with all kinds of [ __ ] that I've been buying because I thought it meant something and right now it means absolutely jack [ __ ] yeah I'd agree I'd agree with that perspective that's what's really interesting when you see your entire portfolio collapse when you see this belt tightening it's happening even amongst and we have you know what all three of us are lucky enough to be at the you know in the top of our careers on top of our income at this point in our lives but we all came from humble beginnings as well and if if the people at the top are belt-tightening and saying you know what I don't need to buy a $60 t-shirt I'm gonna buy a sixteen dollar t-shirt boy does that have ramifications across the entire economy and this reminds me very much of the recession they say as luxury goods would never rebound and sure enough the last ten years luxury rebound luxury has rebounded massively because it was not a psychological broad-based impact to people's philosophy and framing of how they viewed the world you think so I thought after the economic crisis last time people did say there would never be people specifically said there would never be luxury goods again and that these young people buying a condition I'm not talking about some prognosticating analysts you know the analyst is only is you know good as their own biases what I'm saying is the average person didn't really have to internalize a broad-based impact to their way in which they view what's important in their life this touches everybody and I think that there is an opportunity for us to really recalibrate what's important I think conspicuous consumption is unimportant you know helping each other is important taking you know unnecessary vacations because it drives your Instagram follower feed is [ __ ] stupid making sure that we can contribute the incremental dollar we have so that other people could get tested and get back to work that seems like a better use of your money in time yeah so no go ahead David good enough I think that there yeah there's just great perspective setting that that's that's happening that and is gonna happen broadly across the economy we've been fat and happy for a long time and at least a sub-segment of the population has been but we also have it really really well really good here in the United States there's a website I just recommend everyone check out and spend some time on it's called Dollar Street and you can go to gapminder.org slash dollar - Street and check out the the website it is unbelievable and it is probably my favorite website on the internet and Dollar Street is a project of Ola Rose Ling's wife all as the son of Hans Rosling that the great visual economist who told people's stories with visuals unlike the world and income and population and growth and so on and she went around and she photographed families all over the world and showed how much money they make each month and then showed all these common household activities and goods brushing your teeth the oven how do you what kind of clothes you have what in your closet look like what do you sleep on and it's pretty striking that half of the people don't have a toothbrush a quarter of people use mud off the floor to brush their teeth most people don't have a bed on planet earth right only the top 1% have a kitchen right I mean there's like these amazing statistics with photos that really help kind of illustrate this point and I think that I'm not saying that the extreme demonstration of humanity and the distribution of wealth income and prosperity and humanity is as relevant here but in all these photos everyone's very happy and they live a happy life and there's a great reset happen that that's happening that's underway happiness eventually finds itself when the Delta goes from being negative to being positive again when the Delta is flat or the Delta is negative people are getting into a worse condition things are bad so we're gonna bottom out here and then we're gonna you know no matter what state we find ourselves in we'll very quickly find ourselves back in a state of happiness and we'll all reset with respect to Jamal's point on hey maybe I don't need all these genes maybe I don't need all this and this and this but there's certainly like critical you know needs that people have and it's gonna be pretty apparent pretty quickly you know how the economy and people are gonna adjust to this this new world but there's gonna be a judgement the part of this that I think is actually constructive is I do think that we're gonna swing the pendulum back towards nationalized economies and and away from global economies because I think this is a way that politicians all around the world they'll characterize it in different political language you know some people will call it you know sort of like American exceptionalism if here on the right if you're on the Left you'll describe it in much more social terms but they all lead to the same outcome which is that what we have seen is that in the push to globalization we have created too much brittle infrastructure that doesn't work and that we are not resilient enough men we are hyper efficient and we are just in time and all of that is great and everything is super cheap but when we really need infrastructure to work whether it's tests or whether it's the government or what-have-you it just doesn't and I think resiliency will force us to be more nationally attuned and I think it'll be the right thing it'll cause all governments to think about their own food supply differently to think about their own supply chains differently it'll demand companies to be less profitable if it means that they can withstand these kinds of shocks and it's one thing to say that we could never have modeled you know sort of like this two or three sigma event we're dealing with but after the fact it's no longer a two or three sigma event and governments have to now internalize this and companies have to internalize it we are not going to act the same well just will be different look think about the iPhone and obviously medicine and respirators we've been talking about these things over the last you know couple of weeks as this happens we if if we do have a breakdown in relations with China if we let's say we stop importing stuff what would happen to Apple the most powerful and valuable company how would they ever be able to make iPhones again in the United States are they capable of making them now it depends it depends on who you're answering it for on behalf of the u.s. customer Apple should probably be forced to bring a lot of their production capacity back into the United States they should find a diversified global supply chain so that you have multiple suppliers in many countries in the world but they should rely more on America it will be less profitable but it'll be okay and it's the right thing yeah it's a hundred dollars what I read in the estimates was an iPhone would cost a hundred or a hundred and change more to make in the United States but if they did they wouldn't away have this imagination they make 5 600 oz per my phone anyway well by the way the real outcome is that you know and we were gonna do this anyways after this which is I don't think people are lining up to buy you know kind of irrelevant products anymore in a way where we are just slavish to things I mean I think it's important to ask ourselves like this is probably the most socially impactful world event the globe has had to deal with since World War two and it's probably really important to talk to somebody you know and if you don't know you can document and you can easily find the documents of people who survived the Holocaust or lived through the bombings in London etc their mentality was different as a result of it it changed their behavior in very positive ways right it was like the great advances in humanity happened after that would get refocused yeah you're less focused on things that are not core or critically important and Freiberg what do you think about that what this is showing in the healthcare system and the holes in the healthcare system the fact that we couldn't mobilize to deal with this after we did scenario planning about this after SARS we've done scenario planning we've had you know I sent to our group list the link of Bill Gates talking about this four or five years ago and how this would be an issue I sent a couple of links to people writing about closing the wet markets in China after the SARS outbreak I'm curious David what you'd think the holes in the healthcare system are that need to be fixed and what we can learn from this because I think we're now coming into the you know as we as we got through the virus we got through the economic second-order effects let's talk about positively what we're gonna learn because I think that's what's getting at is that there's a personal recalibrating of what matters maybe morality ethics focus in our lives David what can we learn from this on a health perspective what should we do when this ends there's no easy answer to that right nationalized health care systems in some countries you could say they're great my brother my family lives in London I was my brother yesterday and you know they tried to go down and get tested for a a tooth infection yesterday and like it's just brutal dealing with NHS in the UK you know people aren't telling great stories about NHS and they're not saying oh my god it's the best health system I love it health care is hard people want personalized care they want a lot of attention there's only so many doctors there's only so much beds when you start giving people good care costs a lot solving this stuff and and the R&D dollars required to enter markets is so you know so extraordinarily high you end up charging a lot for products and services on the back end it's a very complicated system and there's no simple answer I do think that we're learning and realizing pretty quickly that the US and we're gonna we're gonna do some post-mortems on this obviously as a world as a society one thing that's clear is the Chinese response in part was driven by a lack of bureaucratic red tape and an ability to manifest action and an ability to produce and distribute drugs and produce and distribute tests without needing approvals I think that's something that's gonna change in the United States it has to be regulatory burden on health care companies and pharmaceutical companies on testing and Diagnostics companies is extraordinarily high but the objective in the United States has been do no harm which means don't let anyone die through the action but it may be that many people are dying through the inaction and I think we're gonna maybe see a big shift in policy and allow right to try laws that are gonna be federalized so you know States can make decisions about right to try laws and doctors and patients can try drugs on their own discretion without having a federal oversight body perhaps the same will happen with Diagnostics and testing and you know that with respect to what the what services the government provides and doesn't provide you know I I'm not sure there's a lot of data on either side here that nationalized health care systems do and don't work so it's it's very hard to say what the right solution is is here you know and I don't think that you want to try and take R&D and put it in the government I think that's a terrible idea I think that there's a financial and a capitalistic motivation to find discover molecules get them tested and proved that they have a positive effect in human health and we need to move this toward personalized medicine which actually changes the construct and probably increases the cost of doing this about 10x we're already seeing this with stem cell therapies and CRISPR based gene therapies is they're so much more expensive in order to get that stuff moving faster we need to remove the regulatory burden and allow companies the ability to move quickly and make this stuff more affordable the more we the more barriers we put in front of companies the harder is going to be and if we try to do this with a top-down approach with the government deciding what did you are and beyond and what not to do R&D on we're gonna be in a [ __ ] mess so it knows that some of my points yeah I would say as well I think that there has to be you know after the great financial crisis we we smartened up about what the banks were allowed to do unfortunately we didn't really smarten up about what other financial participants were allowed to do and a lot of what we're seeing here is our excesses around leverage and credit and I think we need to fix those we need to tell companies that you know you can't put out certain amounts of debt we need to be a little draconian actually to reset this properly we need to tell you know market participants that you can't run 10 or 13 times levered you can't take a hundred billion dollars and make it act like 1.3 trillion and then blow a 50% hole in it you just you're just not allowed to do that I'm just sorry but nobody should be allowed to do that okay so if we look now on to politics which is the least fun to talk about in many ways but just on international relations I think it's worth discussing there's been a bit of a debate about what we call this virus and the relationship between the United States and China China went on a little bit of a propaganda campaign in the last couple days saying the u.s. that the u.s. created the virus Trump has now been trolling them actively talking about the Chinese virus I used the other day the one hand virus I didn't realize that that people consider that racist to say woman virus because we called it the Spanish flu we called it the German measles but I guess people are particularly sensitive to this topic now and I think there's a critical issue here that I don't understand why we're not talking about this but wet markets specifically trade in exotic animals the these viruses are contained in certain animals like bats which are you know together in flocks of like thousands and the viruses and then these animals in wet markets people don't know what that is you can you can google it if you've got if you're not squeamish but essentially in Chinese culture as I've read it in the Wall Street Journal and in the World Health Organization's advisements to cancel and to shut down wet markets and there's you nana team United Miss agreement on this and from the health officials that these have to be shut down the Chinese culture says we don't want to see meat in a package because we believe it's counterfeit and it's been frozen and then won't be as tasty and it won't have the same nutritional properties so you must slaughter the animal in front of us at least for some significant percentage of the population there it's a tradition and this is where these viruses have uniformly been generated from and now we have the President and China going at each other and we have to have this very delicate conversation I think David and I'm curious as to your position on this because it's now hitting like a ratio and you know in a and a bias against a certain culture is how this is being framed by the left which is just maddening because it's actually a culture it is a cultural issue that has to end just like our cultural tradition of shaking hands obviously needs to end or be deprecated in some severe way so David maybe you could talk a little bit about what you think the outcome here is on a political basis in relation to those wet markets and China and us relationships look I think China suffered heavily I'm sure they're good I've heard they're gonna shut down the wet markets but all I know is what I've read on the internet so you know I think they're [ __ ] awful and stupid and they should be shut down cultural you know dependence aside there's another issue in China apparently there's a huge amount of the impoverished communities in China are encouraged to actually grow and harvest rats I don't know if you guys are aware of this but there's a bamboo rat business when you grow these rats inside of bamboo and then you kill them and you sell them and so the the poorest people in China make money growing and selling rats rat meat and the Chinese government just in the last week have told them to stop which actually is a huge effect on many millions of families who are growing these rats so there's an economic effect but it's obvious that it's a terrible health effect but I'm not sure that getting rid of the wet markets truly eliminates or Radek AIT's the risk of a new viral outbreak right like I think I mentioned to you guys on our text stream the other day you know 40% of the bacteria in the oceans are killed every day by viruses this is a great stat that Jennifer Doudna uses in her book that on the discovery of CRISPR and there's 10 to the 28 bacteria in the oceans so half of them they all get killed every other day every two days by viruses there are viruses everywhere they are going to emerge they're gonna hit us the issue isn't necessarily where the source of the virus is coming from it's just that we have to have better testing and diagnostics and preparedness and treatment plans and an ability to motivate and mobilize ourselves to address pandemics like this in the future with respect to the relationship with China I'm not an economist I'm not a trade guy I don't really know the nature of the relationships though I'll leave that my might know my thought my thought on this is that this is not a question of you know what markets are no wet markets I think this is a question of if you are a an anchor participant of globalization in a global economy is there an expectation to have a common set of behaviors the lowest common denominator set of behaviors and high genes that everybody signs up for to be a you know fully fledged global market participant now the the pros of that is that maybe everybody decides to be a participant and to have lacks borders and you know free trade agreements that there can be no wet markets and a whole host of other things we all agree on you know whether we are ok with shaking hands or maybe it's namaste from now on or maybe it's bowing the problem with that on the other side is that all of a sudden you create a monoculture that strips away the individuality and the richness of every country and you know I I kind of think like like you know we could have attacked wet markets when HIV started to spread because it was you know as we understand it it was the emergence of the you know bush meat and raw bush meat and the killing of monkeys that had this virus that was then passed to humans etc etc that started the HIV epidemic so these things have happened before and it's not as if we shut down you know all of those markets in Africa they still exist in some form or fashion and as David said there are huge economic ramifications to to having these cultural edicts and it's very difficult I think for an American to demand China to do it when we're not willing to step up just like in other ways you know countries can demand us to lower our carbon emissions and we say we're not going to do it so there are implications and very difficult issues all over the place but I do think in general that if we move towards a more nationalistic economic dependency interdependency I think that it's probably the right thing to allow more resilience to exist and for cultural diversity to continue to compound because the world of just-in-time efficiency I think we're learning now was the wrong optimization for the world we need to optimize for resiliency and that means some amount of inefficiency it means more mom-and-pop shops I think that that's a good thing it doesn't mean everything is Amazon Prime now and Walmart I think that's ok it means that the iPhone is a little bit more expensive which means you upgrade every other year that's ok it means that companies like Google and Facebook and others are less profitable in the short term that's also ok all of these things are ok we just need to decide and now we need to move forward mm-hmm when do we what's our best estimate of when people will be allowed to go to a restaurant I think it's you know again getting back to what the people listening to this podcast probably care about most as we wrap up here in the in the second hour and thank you for tuning into the all in pod Freiburg is with us from what's the name of your incubator again David that production board the production board previously met Romano climate dot-com and shabbath property of social capital partnership when do we suspect people will be allowed to go back to work in the Bay Area in New York when will people be able to go and have a meal in a restaurant do you think this is May June or July or August when will maybe at equality of you I'm going crazy I'll give you my optimistic you know and then we can give the final word to David here's my optimistic view please I think that the emerging evidence will soon be hard to ignore that we have a denominator problem which means that we're not testing enough and that these IgG and IgM tests will come online at scale in the next two weeks and that we will establish DMARDs zones within cities and towns green zones if you will where people who are either negative or who have already gotten it have tested positive for the antibodies will be allowed to interact so I am telling you that it's within six weeks from now six weeks from now we'll be in restaurants and we may have to show our papers to somebody to get in or have our foreheads tested no no your Jews have to show your test result and have your passport or driver's license yeah I mean I know this sounds crazy I would much rather go to a restaurant in the next six weeks where I had to show my papers a little bit draconian sounds a little dystopian I would much rather go back to taisho couldn't have my goddamn ramen would show my papers and know everybody else did and then have everybody go through the you know a very simple temperature test on their forehead like I give to my kids when they're sick David you taking me over where the under at six weeks for when we'll all be at taisho can have me ramen I'm taking the under I'm taking April 7th or 8th April 7th or 8th and we're recording this I think on the 17th or the 18th I think and so you're saying we're just gonna be whatever 20 days out I - I'm taking the under but apparently I think it's uh neighbor four or five weeks David explained the under case just so and we can end on that but what's the under case because that's a great note den done yes so as we see the number if you look at the UW virology website and I've shared this with people on my Twitter account which I started doing yesterday which is at freezing have Friedberg I'm not sure I'm gonna stick with it I don't know if I have the stomach for it like you guys do but basically they're showing you know steady case loads of positives per day which again is delayed and if you look at the ICU availability in the emergency room wait time data which I think are better leading indicators of where we are in the cycle New York is about two weeks behind us New York is gonna be [ __ ] for a little while but I do think that the West Coast and with some travel restrictions is going to be able to reopen for business probably around April 7th or 8th because we're gonna see a dramatic decline at that point and we're gonna see a lower fatality rate than everyone's predicting and we're gonna start to have measures around washing your hands and masks because you can't keep station shut down for that long without literally never being able to open again so I'm kind of balancing the economic need against what I think the data is starting to show that hopefully we are seeing the second derivative turning negative now and so we start to see a slowdown in new cases and then we see a reduction in cases and I think that you know there's a huge distribution and what that model can tell you but I feel really good about Ghana April 7th or 8th I was getting enough confidence there ok it's safe to go outside again and by the way if we don't open up for [ __ ] business everyone's done forever alright that's what that's where I get the number and most importantly when do we feel comfortable playing cards again in person because I'm I'm starting to think that I want any other sounds crazy but at this point if the three of us were positive and we'd gotten through it already I would like to know that I think the entire poker group needs to get tested and the best possible scenario is that we're all inoculated we're not carriers anymore what blockers in the system and we can get back to playing cards because I am and I'm being a little facetious here but the chances are we might all have it right I mean it's it's a possibility it I am going bonkers being at home I am not designed for social isolation I'm going crazy Tomas do you like it yeah I mean I'm a pretty isolated person as a matter of course anyway so other than work and you know my doing this or TV I'm always at home yeah and but the one thing that I cannot live without is Monday pokers and I'll really tell you why it's like in a moment like this here's here's what I've realized I've realized just how much extraneous stuff I have in my life how much I don't need it how much I paid my time with things that are just not important and it's really allowed me to clarify like you know working on the next deal not important thinking about my status in society not important thinking about what other people think of me not important my health important my family and their health important and my friends I love my friends yeah and we're very blessed I I mean I I love the both of you that group saved me in some really tough moments in my life yeah and I hate not seeing you guys and being able to you know just touch and feel you on once a week it's that to me is brutal just to be clear this is a group when we define touching and feeling it we're talking about Kovach's love it's fine we make man love and make man love over the poker table and that's how men commune is by just shifting large amounts of money across the table I miss you guys too I'm going crazy I'm not gonna be high I don't think like you're gonna see me after this said and done I can't take seriously buying things I just think it's like what the [ __ ] is the point yeah I really take seriously that we need to fix the social infrastructure of the United States and in part do or do what we can to help as many people as possible right they had folks Jamaa Friedberg 2024 hey Dave free Bob you both thanks a lot for doing this Jamar thanks a lot for doing this follow at your mouth follow at Freiberg if you want to help out the podcast well there's no ads to click on because Tamar wants me to go broke on this no ads but I will say if you write us a five-star review on iTunes I guess that means we'll get indexed and follow Friedberg follow our mouths follow out Jason we'll see you all next time bye bye






all right everybody welcome to episode 2 of the all-in podcast with Jason and Chamath some basic ground rules here if you're not into speculation you don't like to debate you know like to question authority and you don't like to get a [ __ ] ton of inside information and I should turn the podcast off right now and go download the daily from the New York Times or all things consider or some other bullshit's but we're here to do speculating and talking about inside information and the real deal with me as always my co-host Jamal poly Hypatia if you don't know how to pronounce it poly hapa Tia Jamaat how you doing you holding up okay I am doing fabulously well we're in week four of our lockdown sheltering in place here you're losing your mind I'm not because I'm fortunate to be in the suburbs I think if I was cooped up in an apartment in the city I would feel a lot worse than I do right now but there's a lot of fresh air the weather's fine I turned is not raining as much so we get to see the Sun a little bit makes a big difference yeah can you imagine 15 20 years ago holed up in an apartment with three kids who are home from school like these people who are in a city they must be going insane I mean there's so much value to visiting New York but if you're stuck there in a quarantine lockdown I've I don't know what I do all right well we got a great guest today why don't you introduce our guest Gemma well we are really lucky here this is a person who I've known now for I don't know maybe 15 20 years what I would call him is one of my best show ponies I have ridden this [ __ ] up and down in everything he's done he has made me so much money it's like owning the publishing rights to the YouTube back catalogue this is how prolific this guy is it's like owning the Beatles back catalogue right you're like Michael Jackson is backwards he's bought so David sacks though no all kidding aside David sacks is one of the most incredible people that we know one of our closest friends big bit of a background on David he almost became a lawyer but dropped out of law school after going to Stanford and worked with Peter teal at PayPal and was the chief operating officer there left PayPal moved to Los Angeles unsuccessfully kept his virginity found way to not get laid as a movie producer in Hollywood seems to be impossible David found a way of doing it produced a movie one of the best known movies of that generation called thank you for smoking then move back up here started Jeannie pivoted started Yammer sold that for more than a billion dollars to Microsoft and became during that time frankly one of the most unsung heroes of company founders and was a prolific investor in some of the most well-known iconic businesses of this last generation Airbnb uber slack the list goes on and on and now is the co-founder of Kraft ventures which is essentially David's early-stage venture business where he helps a lot of really great companies get to the next level and frankly the level that he's been playing it for a while despite all of that again I just see him as a show pony yeah some money printing machine if you if he can get in on that fund if you can get in on those companies you're gonna do well Sachs is an operating machine welcome to the program Sachs Davidson welcome to the pods thanks for having me how are you holding up Sachs just personally family everything companies just generally psychologically how is this impacting you you know I think we're all fortunate to be safe and you know we we start paying attention to to the virus I guess on Infirmary because of Twitter tech you know there are a bunch of people on the tech ecosystem who started tweeting very alarming things and in February or even going this far back as like Jane xxx and I didn't know for sure if they're arrived but some of them were friends of mine so I your to get seriously and we started doing work from home I think I'm March first and we've all been kind of self isolated since then and fortunately everyone that's been safe and you know holding it pretty well saxy boot tell tell everybody on the pod power group chat and basically what it is what we do on that group chat and now what you think about it yeah so I mean basically our poker group and sort of extended poker group which is about I don't know it's probably about 20 players who rotated and out of our poker game we have a chat group and we used to just talk about cards and stuff like that but they very rapidly became a place to share information about the virus and responsible was going to happen and the remarkable thing is that whatever we talk about ends up becoming like it's like everyone else has figured it out about a week or two later and I think it has helped to stay about a week or two ahead of the curve on this thing has it has it generally been mentally reassuring or has it amplified your anxiety talking about it all the time in that chat well the usual thing is that we have people in that chat who are very optimistic that people are very pessimistic we have people in between and then we have people who swing around quite a bit and so I think you get like all the perspectives and I think I guess my view of the future is that very hard to try to figure out what's going to happen you have to think about it in terms of scenarios and so the year the chat group helps you know understand like what those scenarios you know might look like so where would you describe each of us then on the positive negative and then swingy you're you're in which camp are you swingy so so I think three basic scenarios are vu and NL and Jason I would describe you as as a V I think Jim auth is closer to the you which is the most pessimistic sorry that the L is the most pessimistic and then the us sorts or in between and I sort of swing between the U and the L but but I also understand the case for the V and and and and those initials really refer to the shape of the recovery to common how quickly will come out of this so David before we drill down into your beliefs on the future let's talk about the past what do you think this entire episode has shown us whether it's from a public health perspective or an economic perspective but how would you summarize your view of the world as it's been revealed to you in the past two months yeah I mean I think that what would it really should you know we live most of our lives during you know these relatively calm periods and then our lives get redefined by these you know epochal events and and you know we're not really wired for this this rate of change I think it was Lenin who said something like there there's some decades when nothing happens and there's some weeks where decades happen and and I think that's that's basically what's happening here and it feels like me a little bit the last thing that was like this was was was 9/11 where you know you woke up that morning so all the the Twin Towers coming down on TV and you realized that we were now in a different era and something like that's happening here as well just in slow motion what do you think the government did right and what do you think that the government did wrong well I mean you know limiting the flights in from through Wuhan or China was a good initial step but after that it seemed like the response was very slow and and and sort of disbelieving and kind of incredulous and and we've seen this basically everywhere the initial response of just about every country with a few notable exceptions in in Asia that had previous experience with SARS but but what we've seen in just about every country is that nobody believes it's going to happen to them until it happens to them and then even in the United States you know it's it's it's it's like no one believes it's gonna happen in their city until so in their social network gets gets the virus and then all of a sudden they take it seriously and so there's almost been this like it's like this slow-moving train wreck where you see it coming and people are just a little bit too slow to react and you know the problem is it's all about the doubling time so if the virus doubles you know every 2 or 3 days in the absence of any action at all maybe even doubles every day and in a very dense city like New York City just waiting two or three weeks can make a thousand ex difference in you know it's somewhere between I guess 10x of a thousand X difference depending on the doubling time whether if you wait two weeks or three weeks I saw an article on as much of articles now talking about well why has New York been hit so hard in California it has been relatively mild and and the articles were saying you know California only declared shelter in place one week ahead of in New York how can it be doing so much better and they're looking for all these different causes and explanations and you know even one week makes a huge difference if in New York New York's been hit about twelve times harder than California but if the doubling time is just two days one week is a 12x difference that's how the extra now exponentially allottee works and so like being a week button at you know or two weeks or three weeks behind the curve is incredibly costly how do you break down local government versus federal government in the action there and is America's architecture with states rights and powers a benefit in this case or is it a negative because we did see the blue states take it very seriously the red states to get less seriously the red states have a lot more distance between individuals the blue states tend to be coastal cities they're more dense maybe you could handicap for us the the spread of the virus with the layer on top of it of local governments and the political climate we're in yeah I think you know the decentralized nature of the American system is both blessing and a curse in this in this type of situation the the curse is that it's been very hard to create a unified national strategy where we're doing lockdowns piecemeal and and so that the lockdowns get sorted as people move around between areas that are not locked down and start new outbreaks very hard to control a virus that way you know we're also you know we're also not able to act in the in the authoritarian way that that we sought tryna act and move on to control the buyers for early on but the blessing of decentralization is that it's allowed you know the governors of states to react and its allow private companies to react and it's a lot of entrepreneurs to react and you see a lot of people helping in different ways and and and and that can be that can make up for having kind of a more ineffectual centralized response which isn't likely to work completely in a country the size anyway do you think that the health apparatus of the united states did its job and where do you think the areas of opportunity are to improve well the if you're talk about the health system it seems like the the health system has done a great job in reacting to the virus in terms of hospitalizations you know hospital adding hospital beds adding ICU capacity even in New York it looks like I think Cuomo just said today that they've got you know ICU capacity they've got hospital beds I think the hospital system has done a great job rapidly creating more capacity we haven't seen the situation like in Italy or even the UK where they're literally rational rationing ventilators and making horrible triage decisions about who's gonna get a better later and who's not you know we haven't seen those types of Horrors and in the US but but if my health system we mean the FDA the CDC the w-h-o which is part of the u.s. system but we do rely on them to some extent you've just seen I think you know amazing really malpractice or negligence if there are a pharma company I think that be sued you have to you know you have on the CDC website things that haven't checked it today but as of a few days ago or display ly not true I mean saying that you only needed a mask if you were actually taking care of a person with with with kovin 19 that that standing say a three foot distance was sufficient that was sort of an acceptable amount of social distancing even if the other person is coughing or sneezing and that's not true they're just saying things that weren't true and then you know on the you know the the CDC and the Surgeon General until basically the last few days we're telling us that mask didn't work were ineffective didn't and then now they flipped to recommending them but they're still not required and I just wrote a blog today that I published about half an hour ago I thought the best part of that blog post by the way it's up on medium and saxes tweeted and I retweeted it David is what you said at the end which is we're taking the most draconian measure quarantining people which we use this softer term shelter in place but it's a quarantine call it what it is you're not allowed to leave your house except under rare circumstances but we won't do the basic thing of wearing the mask it makes no sense in Jamaat I think you had a really interesting question early on here which I think we should all sort go back on one more time which is what what is this reveal right like in this kind of a crises and I love the statement of sacks where you know did some decades nothing happens and then a week you have a decade happen the thing that I am I think is the big takeaway for me is handicapping who you can trust and what people's agendas are and how they behave in a crises because there are a group of people building models and what is the motivation of somebody who builds a model we think about we all get pitched as investors or when we worked inside a companies we build models and we know the models mean nothing they're made by humans and what's the motivation of somebody building a model in today's climate that then people adopt that model and there's life or death what would you handicap which you go conservative would you go aggressive would you lean into people dying in the case of supporting the economy and so the mud is the model makers there's the government local and federal you have the media who are trying to get clicks in some cases you have a capitalists who are trying to you know protect their book and their bets how do we all look at and think about people's agendas and like the CDC having an agenda the local government and the model makers have an agenda sure mom maybe you could take that one yeah I I think that the masks issue is actually the most instructive thing in this whole debacle and the reason is that there was pretty obvious data very early on that it was something that had unknown but pretty useful upside and absolutely zero deleterious downside right so if you were thinking about risk management and I gave you some options option one is do nothing option two is here's some drugs that you can take prophylactically and I don't really know the either the efficacy or the long-term damage to a broad-based population of people taking them an option 3 was a piece of cloth over your nose and mouth yeah and for 10 cents and apparently at a minimum it prevents other people from smelling your bad breath but at a maximum it prevents projectiles of disease gladen spit getting in death earth-death vapor causing you to die yes and and we couldn't agree that that was a why he's why you know why is this and with the agenda here because they didn't want people buying up the masks and I'm not going to healthcare work no because I was never great at something this simple because it was never about the n95 masks you could have worn a cloth mask in a tea cloth could have covered it up and given you 70% efficacy this has everything to do with incentives and everything to do with your other question as well which is like you know how why do modelers behave the way that they do all of this is about being taken seriously and so to be taken seriously you have to understand the incentives in the game that you're playing so for a modeler and a forecaster the incentive is all around being conservative because that's how you're taken seriously there's nobody that has any upside in showing a model that shows 10,000 people dying all of the attention and the the gravity with which are taken and the attention that you get is when you first put out a model that shows that two million people could die which is what Imperial College did and that eventually you walk it back and you walk it back and after the actuals exceed the forecasts then the data converges on what actually happens and you see that these models were woefully inaccurate it's the same with why the CDC or the whu-oh are just so completely incompetent because the incentives in those organizations are essentially to play their game and that game is not one of public health but it's one of politics right and so you have these people fighting each other over political territory and the right to basically make decisions versus the actual substance and the validity of the decision David did that does that correlate with your thinking and then superimpose the media on top of that yeah I mean it's I think there's a couple of things going on one is that there is a huge culture clash going on between the people who need conclusive scientific proof before they're willing to recommend any course of action and then between other people who are willing to take a more experimental approach to try things to iterate the way that we do in start-up land when confronted with kind of an X you know company existential issues and and the latter approach is smart when you know there's a lot of upside and trying something and not much downside you know and the and the the the other approach of this sort of this scientific the pseudo scientific sounding approach where you're constantly demanding conclusive evidence it's actually people pretending to be smart you know as people who want to sound smart but it's actually a pretty dumb approach and so we've seen this like culture clash playing out over and over again you know and so experts should read it read it back to you David experts are afraid to do something experimental with low downside because they have reputations and they want to sound smart whereas entrepreneurs or maybe capitalists or other problem solvers or perhaps even gamblers are gonna say there's no downside here what's the downside to putting a mask on nothing let's try it the same thing with chloroquine and the z-pak very early on people were saying like Elon and other folks in our circle why not just do hold on a second hold on a second chloroquine let's not put that in the same category because it's a drug Jesus yes it's a drug for malaria okay but you have an on Monsieur evidence some no no taking it if you were it's sick already no we still don't know right let's be clear okay so masks is a wholly different thing this is why I said it that way yeah usually if the minute you start to add drugs you come off as a armchair epidemiologist and anybody a reasonably smart can poke holes in your theory and you sound like a [ __ ] [ __ ] you cannot sound like a [ __ ] by telling people to wear cloth over their nose in their mouths okay but the next step if you were in the hospital and you've been diagnosed and they said hey the doctor says you might want to try this there were people who were saying don't even try it and there was a direct correlation when Trump said he was behind it it seemed like the media and everybody were like this is the worst idea ever no but but but this is your point which is that the incentives of that game are to politicize things versus think about what's in the best interests in the public health interests of either the United States or the world but aren't we in agreement to try it if you were if you were in the ICU and they said hey you want to try this you wouldn't try it no but this is the problem is like the posture of the American in a political infrastructure is broken and moments like this shine a light on how broken it is because as David said all of the testing and iteration all of those things are must-haves in peacetime they are nice to haves in wartime right you don't have a time to walk around and test-fire a gun and make sure this works and that works the enemy is in front of you you shoot and you fire and you aim later yeah and in that posture we have to have a set of rules that contemplate giving people at the ground floor on the border of you know where their life is at risk the right to make a decision as well-informed as it can be about what they can try to do to save their life and doctors need to be equally empowered and you know we've effectively done that but we just did it in fits and starts and in that there is all of this noise that delays the right decision which is not that hydro chloric wind is good or bad but it's that here's all the published data into the hands of the doctor who can act read and understand it so that he or she and the patient can make a decision together yeah agreed Sachs what are your thoughts on chloroquine and the z-pak and and that whole sort of unraveling of this is the miracle it's not the miracle it's worth looking at and how that debate occurred let's say on the Twitter and then also in our stream when we were talking well Trump was not the first to embrace the potential of hydroxychloroquine in fact we were talking about in our chat group before you know became national news of course once he did embrace it it became a political football and a lot of people want to prove him wrong and so now it's hard to have a conversation about it without it becoming political but the you know the argument for hydroxychloroquine really started with some research papers that showed that it worked in vitro basically in test tubes against the virus and it worked against Soares you know which is a related sort of category virus I'm not I'm not an expert or anything this is just sort of you know me tell you what I what I know as a consumer of information and so it was not crazy to think this is something that should be tried in the context of koban 19 now we don't know if it's going to work or not I saw an interesting presentation by UCSF and they're a working theory on it is that is a hydroxychloroquine plus CPAC might have some impact in the first week of the virus when before peak viral replication takes place and this might help interfere with the virus replicating once you're in respiratory distress distress though it's in your lungs you have to you're into a different phase of this and they don't believe that they think you need to look at other things so so it sounded like this was a potentially valid treatment we one less affecting week two and you know by week three when you're at severe a RDS you know it's and you got to find other things so you know in terms of like what the right policy is you know this you know I be in favor of the right to I mean ultimately we should let patients and doctors make this decision together and and so you're not give the FDA did the right thing giving emergency trial authorization to doctors to be able to try this with their patients and and what I think is happening is is that there's you sort of rapid decentralized information sharing happening among doctors and hospitals and you know I think they're getting to the right answer here okay do we do we feel comfortable moving on to financial implications of this or are there things about the modeling on upside downside I agree with Jamaa that hydroxychloroquine is a little bit more complicated masts are sort of the really unambiguous 1peter laws it's just so easy there's so cool down just cloth it's been cotton right you literally could put a mat down our underwear yeah could use your own underwear and just put it across your face I mean this is what's so insane that David's right I remember having this argument with someone because on the CDC website as David said he would only recommend it not as a preventative measure for you but if you were old you should use a mask only if you were treating somebody with Kovac 90 then there's an element of these authorities trying to manage us you know I get you know I really hate that that I mean I do think that they thought about will we create a run on mass well you know that that that they don't want to tell us the truth because they're afraid of some of the consequences of telling us the truth and you know I hate that feeling of being lied to by public officials because they're trying to manage I'm willing to be infantile by people that are smarter than me yeah so can you give us a list of the four people you think are smarter than you go ahead mouth command I am NOT one of those four people filed by nameless bureaucracies and I think that Americans deserve to not be infantile I mean for the amount of money that we pay and the amount in taxes and the amount of power that we give folks the one thing that I'm realizing through this whole thing is like you know the it's it is true in some respect that the countries that had some level of authoritarian management did well but it's also true that the countries that had robust civil services filled with people who are at the top of their class also did well Singapore South Korea where it is a stature it's a point of pride to work for the government where it's some of the challenges Japan and so you know one of the things that I realize is like career bureaucrats really do infantile Americans in a way that's really unproductive and unhealthy I mean you know it doesn't surprise you and kind of like perturb you that the ex-head of the FDA is way more prominent and out front with his point of view than the current head of the FDA I mean what the hell is going on I think what we know is going on is I mean Trump was elected and he dismantled some of this and the system was Brian I heard it I think no I think that that's unfair and you know I'm I'm not I'm not a big Trump supporter but I think it's unfair to pin it on him the reality is maybe he defunded or under front of a bunch of things but the hollowing out of our institutions have been happening for 40 years and it's hot started with Reagan to be clear because we tilted the scales towards free market trickle-down economics where government was viewed as a stop for really smart people to inject themselves into industry at higher levels or it was a place that's you know capable people would never go because capitalism the way that it was structured was set up in such an aggressive tilted manner for those that were capable and unfortunately it hollowed out the government from people that were really strong of character in a broadly speaking kind of way and so what happens is that then bureaucracies form the incentives change and you get what you have gotten right now which is again it is a it is a point of argument on something as simple and frankly idiotic as a mask okay let's move on to talking about the economy and David you've been quite a heretic on Twitter because you decided to engage in the one conversation you're not allowed to have which is talking about people's livelihoods as opposed to their lives you can only keep one thought in your mind as far as the kind of woke far-left is concerned and the Twitter mobs you could only talk about people in life and death you can't talk about their livelihoods but you've been talking and starting a dialogue on how you would structure teams in a startup for how do we deal with the crisis versus how do we go back to work so explain how you would do this if this was a startup company if you were doing it on an entrepreneurial level and what you think the road looks like let's start with San Francisco Bay Area and then we'll extrapolate to the most acute area in America New York yeah well the big question that everyone's gonna be asking by the end of April is what now because I do think you're already seeing this in the New York data that quarantines work but that shouldn't be a total surprise to us historically quarantines have always worked to be quarantines were the way that people dealt with plagues when they didn't have any technology it's the problem is just there are credibly costly and if the quarantine goes on for months is their only way of dealing with the virus then you know we could be looking at the depression so that so the question really is you know once we've arrested the exponentially in the virus tonight I you know I think we have to do that first but once we've arrested the exponential 'ti the big questions going well now how do we get out of this and what I worry about is that the the daily update mentality you know I think it's great that our leaders are giving us these daily updates it's showing that they yes they're showing a bias for action which i think is good but I worry that we're not going to be ready it that this precious time that we're buying with quarantine is not going to lead to a better plan in May because no one's really were on that plan they're just working on sort of the triage the the the media response the making sure that that you know hospitals around the country have the ventilators if that's they need and we put in the order why is it David that people can't keep these two parallel processes in their mind at once you've been attacked viciously on Twitter the media attacks anybody who brings us up as like only caring about capitalism when in fact you need to do both plans you need to figure out how people get back to their livelihoods and we avoid a depression which would kill more people ultimately right I mean I think this consensus about that whether it's depression or suicide etc or people not be able to feed themselves or you know have nutritious food and healthcare so why can't people put these two things in their mind at once and then let's talk about the actual plan if you were planning and you were the mayor of San Francisco or you were in Trump's cabinet they said okay David you make the plan for the Bay Area to go back to work take us three or one two three and then we'll throw it to Jamal what what I would do is like I would do what I would do in a company for our product releases that have you know in a company I'd have a product manager for the 1.0 release and I have a different product manager for the $2 police because it's very hard for you know somebody to be all in on two different leases which have two different schedules so you know I think the team that we have right now that's basically concerned with the immediate response the the triage that you keep doing what they're doing make sure that you know the country's reacting the right way that has all the supplies they need that you know they're berating 3m into giving us more PPE or whatever it is but I think that there should be a separate team kind of a a you know as our for the 2.0 response which should be focused on how we create a new system that gets us out of lockdown but doesn't reach rigor the extranet reality of the virus and I think that look that person that team should be ready to slide the new system into place in May I don't know if it's beginning in May end of May or whatever but sometime in May they should be ready to slide that new system into place so that this precious I'm relying isn't wasted give us your one two three one is masks obviously I would think masses will no brain so that's number one give us your two three four if you if you're one of riff here a little bit yeah I mean the other elements the plan that people keep talking about it's it's you know rapid ubiquitous testing I mean you have and you have to have same-day results okay this this business of it taking two three four days in the lab the problem is if someone is infected they be passing it on during that time you don't you don't you don't isolate them in time so we have to have massive ubiquitous same-day testing along with contact tracing so that when you do find out that somebody's got it you can not isolate not just them but all their contacts that's the system that seems to have worked in South Korea and I mean that those seems to be the the pillars and and it's quarantining the high-risk during this first phase of the rollout with testing social distancing and masks that's that seems to be the no-brainer I would add fourth bullet point which is if you're obese diabetic asthma or some combination of those and over sixty and or over sixty you got to stay home now and you cannot be in touch with anybody who's out and about and part of that first wave to go back to society right we know that certain segments of the population are a much higher risk than others and so part of having a more fine-tuned response to the virus other than just shutting everything down would say we'll let the people who are at very very low risk go back out still wearing mass and having the right protocols and hygiene all that all that stuff but but but you keep the high-risk population isolated rather than shutting down the entire economy alright shabbath if you're on the board of directors and David was the star of the may plan to go back how would you what questions would you have for him and how critical can you be of his plan let's make this as if we were actually in charge to Moth Savage David plan well I I probably would push David to consider a more aggressive approach here and this is something that I've talked about before Jason you and I have talked about this on the podcast before but we need a biological patriot act I know that it's unpalatable for people on the left for certain reasons and people on the right for other reasons but it just doesn't matter what they think it was reported today by the way that the CDC and the task force at the White House is considering immunity cards but a much more beefed-up version of them these need to be cards that have you know some kind of chip inside them that are non hackable and issued by the government but you know my what I would push David to think about if he was the Czar of getting back to work is the following which is I agree with the broad-based testing I think that you need to have some kind of you know wristband that allows you to be inside of certain green zones inside in every single city or town in the country that allow you to you know someway be back to normal but there also needs to be red zones where you cannot we need to have a very very quick way of restarting a quarantine if there are hotspots that develop but all of it needs to be supported by broad-based testing and a biological Patriot Act we do need to have immunity cards and the simple basic reason is that it is the only way that one can prioritize the economic salvation of the US economy because I think once we have paid the cost from a public health perspective which we are doing at the end of this quarantine in flattening the curve or crushing the curve our immediate focus has to be in resuscitating the GDP of this country because otherwise the number of deaths and the number and the amount of pain that it that is caused by economic destruction will far outnumber the number of people that die from this which is tragic already and the only way that I can see for us to do that in a scalable way is with an immunity card a biological Patriot Act so I would be pushing David to think about that and rip the band-aid off and get that done and David I would also push you on thinking about quarantining not just at home but maybe by region and hot zone so if we know the New York corridor or the Northeast Corridor is severely infected nobody in or out of that corridor without a visa without and I know this is a very touchy issue well in terms of civil liberties but until we're through this I don't see why people from New York need to go to Florida without maybe a rare exception or you know something to that effect right so if we know we got California out of it or if SoCal is still in the thick of it but NorCal isn't maybe we have some level of testing required to get on a flight to come to San Francisco or to go to leave New York so those are two two punch-ups how would you look at those David as the new Tsar of getting back to work I think it's all on the table I mean I like the green zone red zone idea like I like using immunity information we've been talking in our chat group for I think a month about these blood serology tests I tweeted I took one of those tests weeks ago I think like three weeks ago before the FDA had even approved it and I tweeted about it so yeah I think all that I think the immunity cards I think we should use all that information I mean it would all be on the table for sure and I but but I think most of all these ideas that you tied together into a coherent system and I'm worried that our approach to date has been so ad hoc that we're not going to have a coherent system ready to go as a replacement to shut downs in May when we need it it's part of this you talked before about how you didn't like to be managed I think we all agree we're being managed and massaged because they really do not want to even talk to us about going back to work in May or what happens because they're afraid that we're gonna jump the gun and we're all going to just go to Crissy Field or you know whatever Park or Central Park just throw a giant party but people are not stupid there's a there is a certain self-preservation here that should be inherent in all these discussions which is you know any reasonable person watching the death toll in New York does not want to leave their house and so why can't well how much of the lack of discussion about this issue do you think David is because people are afraid to treat people like adults because they think they're gonna just go out to Crissy Field or you know Dolores Park no I think you're right that there was this long period of time where the authorities were just trying to get everyone to buy into the idea that the virus was dangerous they needed to shelter in place and and they didn't want to hear any views that that that appeared to be contradicting they were contradicting it you know I mean when the Imperial College study came model came out and they said that 2.2 million people would die in the US and I tweeted that I thought that number was insane was fear-mongering and I think you know that's turn out to be the case but you know people responded well well good I mean even if it is fear mom we need to make people afraid because otherwise they won't do the right things I guess that's true in a situation in which we're relying on everyone's voluntary compliance to engage in a quarantine or to wear a mask and I guess part of the response here is to figure out what what what action items should not be voluntary that we just need to do in order to get past this trip a few of that I think that getting back to work is going to be much much more difficult than people think I think that in the absence of a vaccine which looks like at best 18 to 24 months from now we will never get to a hundred percent of where we were before or at least the potential to be at a hundred percent and so I just think that over the next two years were in for a tremendous amount of difficulty and this is sort of where you know I'd like to shift the conversation I think that you know we've now poured between the United States government and the and almost ten trillion dollars we smeared it into the economy and only three cents of every dollar has gone into people's pockets and I think we're hoping that the other 97 cents somehow trickles down into their pockets in some way shape or form now when you look at that 97 cents half of it was you know things like propping up the commercial paper market propping up the repo market but it's also been things like propping up investment grade debt propping up high-yield debt and I have a real issue with this because I think that if we're gonna take two years to get back to normal and I really do think it's two years because Jason a lot of the fears that you expressed people will have as lingering doubts and will prevent them from being at a hundred percent which means businesses will not be at a hundred percent until you can get an injection and know that you're protected we're doing an enormous amount of damage because we're taking trillions of dollars and flooding it into the economy in a way that's just not going to be effective and I don't think that we're taking enough time to really think through these things so you know on the one hand while I appreciate the velocity or not the velocity the intention you know like I think Jerome Powell's commentary I applaud which is like you know he's saying all the right things which is we will do everything possible but the lending program to companies has been haphazard and difficult but Adi gets started in three weeks and some people have gotten money in week four of this I mean it's pretty incredible now you know the the numbers that I've read is that you know on average the loans are turning out to be sort of like you know in the tens of thousands and on top of that you know David and I talked about this in the group chat but the math makes it so that you're better off furloughing or letting people go then you are taking PPP which means that a lot of this money may never get taken and so you know but again all of that is still a small rounding error we're talking about less than ten cents on the dollar ninety cents of the dollar have gone into areas that will not really touch an average American citizen and I think that's just fundamentally wrong because the trickle-down theory of all of this you know was started 40 years ago and we can see now that it doesn't work David any thoughts on the stimulus well I think I think what's happened is that we have a 30% hole in our economy right now you've got you know like a 15 percent unemployment rate going to going to 25 or 30 maybe as high as that we don't know yet you've got a you know we think that GDP is gonna contract in the next quarter by a quarter to a third and so you've got this giant hole in the economy and what the Fed and Treasury are trying to do is plug that hole for a period of time until they we can get through this this health crisis and and if the crisis only lasts a few months maybe they can hold it all together but I do worry that if it lasts longer if the it's gonna slip out of their hands and and the result is going to be a cascade of defaults and bankruptcies and and effectively a great unraveling of our economy yeah I think that I think that though in fairness it's like this is where I think bankruptcy it's almost viewed as a four-letter word but it's not and in many ways the bankruptcy process could actually be the saving grace of American business in this moment and the reason I say that is that it allows in a bankruptcy these companies to discharge a lot of the debt and we could set up a mechanism where these bankruptcies could be done in a way where again similar to taking PPP you don't let people go you know a percentage of the of the cap table must go to the pensions if they have them a certain percentage of the cap table must go to employees and then the remaining percentage goes to the secured bondholders and so the existing equity holders and the unsecured bond holders would effectively you know not be made whole but in that all the employees would be and if you combine that with a ubi program where you put look they're in in the United States economy only eight trillion dollars is wages so you know we could do so much if we had given every United States citizen their absolute salary of 2019 right now we'd still have two trillion left to bail out companies and everybody could take a year and get paid like literally have a year sabbatical and be poor I think what it really does is it guarantees the chances or it maximizes sorry the chances of a consumer-led recovery like the United States has never been an economic system that's been vibrant because of government spending or other things we've always been vibrant because we've been consumer led its consumer consumption and its customers of companies buying products that they need or want that drive the economy forward and if you think about our largest customer base they are the US population and by guaranteeing their revenue so to speak you actually allow them to then spend once they get out of quarantine and you'll see them spend even in fits and starts in this way you know you could spend five hundred billion dollars buying a bunch of junk debt I really don't see as a reasonably you know said IV participant in the markets how it actually helps anything um I think all it does is it saddles you and me and all of our listeners with a bunch of toxic junk debt that eventually has to get sold by the Fed as David said in the grand unraveling and it would be my housing market what wouldn't it be more healthy David to allow a certain percentage of these companies the weaker ones to fail so that the stronger ones could then pick up those employees and there be some stability and I'm curious if you'd think that we're gonna be living in a world where when people have speculated about this maybe some the individual consumer changes their perspective and maybe people come out of this crises with a different worldview I don't necessarily subscribe to this but schmatta you do we've had this conversation and so I'm curious David if you think the American consumer will forever change and maybe they upgrade their phone half as much they you know spend less and and they basically live a more modest rural style and people maybe stay out in Tahoe or Colorado wherever they went during this crises where you thought well you're really talking about Depression era values and the problem is if we acquire those values via a depression that that would be a pretty bad outcome here so but yes that could happen you know I think we're I agree with Jim off is that I think that even though the federal government the Fed the Treasury have a tremendous amount of firepower in a situation like this it may not be inexhaustible and we have to kind of pick and choose and prioritize who's gonna get aid and and who's going to get bailouts and right now it feels a little bit willy-nilly you know and it feels like it under those circumstances the bailouts default to the people who are politically connected and powerful as opposed to the workers the pension funds you know the Main Street small business owner who's worked their whole life on a business and all of a sudden is underwater and I think you know it's it's it's gonna be very hard to get the VA to the right people look in the last four weeks in the last four weeks oh sorry in the last week this is an incredible set I apologize in the last week the amount of distressed debt in the US has quadrupled in one week to a trillion dollars right so as an example to David's point that's much more visible to Jay Powell or to Steve minuchin in the Fed and at the Treasury then than it is that you know thousands and thousands of nameless anonymous small business who owns this is not can you give an example of what that debt would be for the listeners we sure like I mean I mean so you know I mean a fallen angel today is Ford so we were not to pit we're not going to pick on Ford but we're just gonna point to it as a well-known company so this is a car manufacturer they employ hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in very important political States you know Michigan Ohio I think Tennessee probably but Ohio and Michigan obviously critical states and they you know issued debt into the market to fund you know building factories or buying equipment who buys that debt pension funds by the dead family offices by the dead hedge funds by the dead now those guys were giving out a coupon and they were playing let's just say four or five or six percent a year on this interest but now because of all this economic uncertainty people think that their ability to pay that back has gone way down and so now they have to issue debt at much higher interest rates and the existing debt has a much lower credit quality it's effectively like you having a credit card and you know American Express calling you and saying Jason I think the odds of you paying your credit card balances have gone way down so I'm increasing your interest rate to twenty four percent from seventeen percent yeah and then I get another credit card to pay it off and and so essentially what's happened is the Federal Reserve has decided to become that next credit card issuer well cuz they were wrong and of doing it for you they're doing it for companies but not for you and the question is is that okay well at some level companies like Ford should be saved because I think these are iconic businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of people and there are critical linchpins in the economy right because they have a massive supply chain Network and you know they're really important for many other things beyond just the economics that they themselves represent but there are better ways to help Ford you could lend Ford as much money as they needed to meet their short-term obligations similarly to the way that the Federal Reserve would allow a bank to borrow from the from their window and I think that that's a very reasonable approach the question is really when the Fed then basically acts as a buyer of last resort and obfuscates the price of these bonds and essentially is saying the Amer can tax payer will own these bonds for the foreseeable future if you think that at some point those bonds that you bought for you know ninety cents on the dollar are worth ninety cents on the dollar then everything is okay but if there's a chance that ninety cents goes to 70 cents the people that really eat that cost are us in the short term and our children in the medium and I have a silly question it's obviously not my wheelhouse corporate debt like this why wouldn't there be a clause that if they didn't pay back that 90 cents on the dollar that the American government bought it for it converts into equity in the company it's a great question because the Federal Reserve has chosen to go and essentially the equivalent of open and etrade account and step into the markets by themselves and just buy so they're buying bonds and they're buying individual bonds and they're buying indices that control or that have exposure to certain bonds what they are not doing is going directly to these companies and negotiating essentially saying I will give you four or five billion dollars and what I want you to do is retire that old debt and replace it with this new instrument and here are the terms of this new instrument the United States taxpayer gets you know 3% or 4% warrant coverage of the company yom-yom you know you must make sure that the pension holders are Nightrain or why wouldn't we have those clauses it's a basic blocking and tackling that you know seed funds have david sacks woody why is this not like a no-brainer well I mean I think we've got to get a good deal for taxpayers I mean Jim office said I've heard Mark Cuban say it pretty eloquently I heard Trump say that we have to get a good deal for taxpayers I just think that they're in such an emergency they're not really taking the time to do that they're you know they're dirty they're trying to do things they can do immediately yeah the the forgivable 'no sub this money to me as the thing i don't understand why is any of it forgivable why isn't any all of it just you know a ten year law or 20 year long loan that converts into equity over some tranches but jason this is why if you're if you're going to haphazardly fire trillions dollars out of a bazooka why not give more than three cents on the dollar to average Americans why not put it into the pockets of every single bank account you know you know who knows how much everybody made the IRS does and you know the IRS has a mailing address for everybody and the IRS either gets a check or mails a check every single taxpayer in the United States which I may also have direct deposit for half of the people and so you know there's nothing stopping us from saying well you know what why don't we do 10 percent 10 cents of every dollar why don't we do 15 cents of every dollar to Americans I really think this is the way that you limit the amount of waste that's going to happen so the the intention isn't wrong and we shouldn't castigate people for wanting to put money in the system as David said to plug the hole but we can't be so haphazard as to not think about the moral hazards were creating and try to fix them in real time and so this 10 trillion has already gone out the door but if the next trillion or - don't touch Americans I think it's going to create an enormous amount of damage we've only given people a few weeks of a lifeline and they need more and you you can't tell companies that they can have effectively a limitless lifeline but not the individuals because I do think at some point companies will find a way to get out of these loans and or break the covenants with not much repercussion ok I want to wrap with to sort of not doomsday scenarios but I want to touch on politics and I also want to know in the chance that this quarantine goes on for May and June in other words San Francisco says you know what we're gonna keep going and we're gonna get New York says we're keeping going and we're talking about not just April being in quarantine but May and/or June and we're looking at June 1st of July 1st what are the chances David that people say you know what I am a free person I want to take my make take my life into my own hands I want to make my own decision I'm going out I'm gonna go surfing I'm gonna do this and we have this social unrest and how do politicians handicap that in this new world I think that could happen I mean particularly among young populations who are not at risk as much you know for the relatively younger healthier people who don't have comorbidity factors could say look I've gotta one in a thousand chance or you know or less of dying if even if I do get this and I'm just gonna take that chance but it's all the more reason why I think we need a strategy to get out of lockdown that already includes the idea of letting out these these people who are a much lower risk and and isolates the people who are at higher risk and against the you have anything to add to that shimoff that kind of doomed a scenario or that virtuality well I think that you're very right Jason that I don't think we're going to get out of lockdown until June 1st at the earliest and I think that's in California I think nuisance posture is basically that if April looks like the curves are decaying it's gonna be mid May to late May before he lifts this thing I don't know if I see analyst and but but it's it's also important that that we understand like you know we just talked about companies the only entity that's in even worse shape than companies and people are states and cities and counties yeah they're dead is incredible they have no revenue and metal/rock massive costs and they're nonprofits and think of the you know the garbage collector the fireman the police officer the teacher these are like these are the backbones and the pillars of our community it's such a good thing that we were so resilient and we thought ahead and built up massive surpluses in our tax bases oh wait we didn't do that well they're they're worse there were some provisions to do that these rainy day funds but those are going to get exhausted and you know we're gonna have to bail those guys out as well so this is what I'm saying which is that when you're pumping in trillions of dollars haphazardly into the capital markets before you think about people or you think about the states and cities and communities in America I just think it's a recipe for disaster let me ask this even more simply David under what circumstance would you be willing to go back to our poker game on a Monday night and have six seven of us around a table sharing a meal and playing cards for six hours well if there was if there was a treatment for for the virus so that you knew that if you got it you weren't gonna die that would be a big deal okay that's actually there's a Russian roulette aspect to the virus right now or even if your odds are low you know you you still don't take the chance I think the next thing that would probably help would be that if we had this rapid ubiquitous testing so I could know that the people who are in the room with me are all tested we're all tested and we're all negative and you know they could repeat the tests on a frequent enough basis that we can all trust the result that that would make a big difference I think all right let's wrap with politics all of this is occurring in an election year bernie is out of the race Biden is doing a daily webcast Trump's ratings are through the roof as he is more than willing to let us all know in his abhorrent narcissistic way that his ratings are just tremendous right now in the middle of thousands of Americans dying a day but we have to touch on this because elections are how we govern and make these decisions is by who we put into these positions so what do we think and let's just make odds here odds that Trump wins again it's that Biden wins if you had to lay the odds if you had to give it a percentage or you want to set a line what what do you what are your thoughts David I always think that these things are basically a coin flip I mean this far out I mean right now it seems like you know Trump's ratings have never been higher he's polling relatively well and Biden just seems completely irrelevant but if we're still dealing with the virus by November if we've cycled in and out of lockdown if we have kind of an unresolved situation if the economy is in a very very deep recession or depression I think you know it's it's up for grabs shimoff I think that if if there is a v-shaped recovery of any kind Trump will win in a landslide right now we are in a v-shape recovery the market has come back o or not no we're not well if you use the market as well right now the market is the market is completely decoupled from Main Street and so what Wall Street does is irrelevant right now what I mean by recovery is what happens on Main Street okay because if you have 16 17 20 22 percent unemployment I mean you could feel the Prancing dog and he'll be Trump you know so I think that the president needs massive victory or so what does the game theory say the game theory probably says that he'll try to force people to go back to work as quickly as possible and if there is even a modicum a shred of evidence on some kind of you know therapeutic they'll you know drum it up like it's like it's secure and try to confuse people that there's a vaccine but I think he needs that because in the absence of that again I just go back to how difficult will it be to start real life I think it's going to be difficult and I think in that people won't have a lot of patience for the fact that you know the debt will have ballooned deficits will have ballooned trillions of dollars will have gone out the door and people will be meaningfully struggling going into election day I don't think that that helps Trump at all and you know by the way and we'll talk about this in our next podcast because we should probably we get an economist to talk about it but you know what is putting ten trillion dollars or whatever the final number is it'll probably be 20 trillion you know 1 1 x US GDP what does that do to the economy what does that do to long-term inflation like if you seen what's happened did not what Japan did and they went through a lost decade or two no I think the best better example is what happened in China which is a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus in 2009 and 10 and the results are basically a lot of fake growth and massive inflation and so you know it's probably useful to debate that in the next in the next pod and what are the chances I hate creates a lot of risk for Trump what are the chances of a dark horse candidate you are in on the 0 0 so it's Biden for sure yeah it's my chance barring a Biden health emergency I mean yeah he is yeah he's you know not a spring chicken so so either person either person gets the coronavirus it could be yeah well no I look if anything happened to you yeah yeah we should even talk about these possibilities I don't want to sound like you know it's all IQ no one wants this to happen but look I think Jim author's right they're not gonna replace the head of the ticket absent you know something health-wise happened what is your game theory then on how Trump will play this because in Jamaat's mind getting back to work earlier makes it seem like we're getting back to normal and he did that but a politician might also say you know what I think there's a chance of the second wave so I want to keep it closed until June or July first and then time it and I know this sounds incredibly cynical that a elected official would make health and economic policy decisions on their reelection but that is the reality we live in is it not sure of course I think the next big political debate is is gonna be around this what now you know we yes the quarantines of arrest is the extranet geology the the virus but now how do we get out of them and and you know Trump's gonna have to make it a decision about what and how we get out and he's gonna be eager to get out of lockdown - to restart the economy but on the other hand if he miss times it and we cycle you know the virus then takes off again and we cycle back into the other lockdown that's that's very dangerous for him politically - so he's got a needle to thread there I agree with Jim off that if if this ends up being v-shaped Trump is a shoo-in but if it ends up being a recession deep recession or depression if we end up then I think the questions gonna be does he appear to be more in the isaiah hoover or is he more in boulder of an FDR you know and explained how people have been able listening well I mean so so Hoover took took the blame for the Great Depression FDR gets elected in 1932 we're still into the Great Depression in 1936 but he gets reelected you know and because he's seen as as a man of action he does these fireside chats and he's he's doing things and and I do think that you know Trump kind of pivoted from initially being denied an iron a little bit flat-footed on the virus and now doing these daily briefings and I think the American public is giving him credit for action right now and so they obviously if those actions work I think he gets reelected and if they don't work the question is you know does he get blamed for that is it easy a Hoover or is he an FDR all right on that note encourage everybody to wear masks social distancing and for those people in the audience who are startups and investors keep keep the faith keep investing keep starting companies never a bad time to start a great company in my mind and Chim off any final thoughts here we are it's what is today's date is it I know it's April I think it's somewhere around the 10th am I even close it's Friday right April 10th let's let's just make a decision to be all in masks all in masks all in on masks and take it into our own arms we don't need to be told that these things make sense they make sense you're an idiot if you think otherwise David closing keep on track they ever thought totally agree thought that was my blog today we shouldn't have to make it the law but I mean I think we should because there's still people who aren't adopting it but it's the lowest-cost thing we can do and if you look at the Asian countries have controlled the virus every single person wears a mask when they go out in public every single person so simple no-brainer give people $4,000 fine if you're not wearing a mask give them a warning first in hand of a mask like literally the cops should have masks and they should hand them to stay put this mask on and if I see you again you get $1,000 fine the post office should put one or a number of these everyone's mailbox this is the first step to having a more fine-tuned policy than just warranty and if we can't even get this right then you know I I fear for for what's coming next if you it's a great execution idea the mail carriers every mail carrier leaves them and then you could also get the private sector do you tell every UPS FedEx driver the government gives them those masks Amazon Amazon or they just all have it hey if Jeff Bay somebody clipped this and said it's Jeff Jeff if you want to do a mitzvah give all these masks to the drivers and just leave masks when everybody's doorstep and forget about Trump and whatever government officials gonna drag their heels on it go ahead you do it Jeff Bezos and hey how great was Jack giving away a billion dollars I mean we saw him get barbecue straw social media but what a strong move huh and he's gonna be strong he put it in a Google sheet he's like here in the main dish you'd open I mean it's the strongest move ever it's like you know everybody you know I've always been very skeptical of philanthropy because I feel like it's you know a dalliance of the established rich in North America because they like to have their names on things and here's a guy who just basically pwned all of that I don't need a hospital with my name on it I don't need a building with my name on it here's a billion dollars and here's a Google spreadsheet to track it which means I'm gonna have zero and you know overhead and running it I mean it's it's so straw it's literally like he the only thing that could be stronger as if he connected it to a stripe account and like as he just as he swiped his credit card it's just it's just so strong it's what as zapier that tweets it he has a Google Doc which is set so that everybody could read it it off times I mean for a billion dollars it's just amazing he should start a slack instance with like each of those nonprofits having a 30 completely by the way he completely pwned The Giving Pledge in one fell swoop yes The Giving Pledge which nobody has any it's pretty opaque now it's like it's basically pretend you're gonna give your money away we don't need to know how much you don't really need to do it there's no accountability but we have this fun party once a year we can all hang out and you know parties each other I haven't cited spots like The Giving Pledge yeah so stupid it's like the sign of insecurity saxy poo thanks for coming on the pod Rain Man we appreciate it love you sexy food we love you sexy poo lobby Jake L love you to chew my bestie see we love you and everybody stays safe seriously and now I just want to clothes wear a mask wear a mask and to those people on the front lines the janitors the Google the Amazon drivers instacart people in the food bus you are their best it's amazing that you're doing what a sacrifice get the money to that yeah and I seriously give the Amazon let us tip those drivers in our get the money to them for sure double the pay okay we'll see you all next time bye bye








hey everybody welcome to the all-in podcast with Jason Calacanis and shimoff poly Hypatia we record this podcast well on on a really unique schedule to mouth what's our schedule right now whenever we feel like it basically it is whatever our significant others get so sick of us they kick us off and say don't come back yeah we get throw to the pool house we decide to pop up the podcast you're in Atherton I'm in the city in San Francisco Thank You Duke of discretion is there anything else you'd like to tell them why gate code you know we had two guests on that people just went absolutely crazy for the two they weren't available so we have two amazing David's in our lives David Freiburg and David sacks and they are super smart super effective at their work everything we're not come off and so with all we bring them back on the podcast and we'll do a little round table here and talk about life in the age of corona so welcome back to the podcast David sacks yeah good to good to be back with you and also David Friedberg thank you guys happy to be here all right fantastic so I just want to start off with our check how is everybody doing in this quarantine has everybody's mental health let's start with you sacks well as we might be able to see we've moved our bunker to undisclosed Mexican location you know and it's been great you know we you know I think it's really kind of sad because where we're at is is a tourist City that would normally be at peak season and it's just deserted right now all the construction stopped normally you see lots of you know hotels and houses being built and that's all stopped and there's no tourists so it's all just kind of cleared out but I think it's quite safe you know every worker that I've seen here since we landed at the airport - you know got transported to to this community where at I mean has been wearing a mask much more consistent than I think in the US and um you know I think it's been it's been fine now of course you founded the craft venture capital firm and people know before that you obviously did Yammer and sold that Microsoft for a billion dollars plus and before that you are the CEO of PayPal what's going on with your business are you actively investing and how is your firm running remote it's it's it's worked very well I mean we've always been super collaborative as a firm we were always we were already on zoom' and we were you know we share everything on the amur and so for us just moving to zoom wasn't that difficult we've done four or five deals I think since the whole kind of quarantine started I'm sorry sorry sorry did you did you say that you actually use Yammer now 2020 we're still using it oh my god is Yammer still hook available that's insane I mean it's kind of got a little bit buried inside of Microsoft but you can certainly still get it and no we love it I mean the whole firm kind of works works in the amur and it works very well for us and now what's gonna happen with this incredible office that you have this beautiful office you have in San Francisco and commercial real estate now that are you going to come back to work we saw Twitter and square the jack collection of companies they're not going to come back to their offices or work from home primarily going forward what are you gonna do well it'll be a great asset for us in the year 2025 or something like that no I mean we will eventually go back to work there I think that the team still likes having an office I think you know the idea that everyone wants to work out of like a small room and you know extra room in their house I think probably getting is probably a little overrated I think people would like to get back to the office but do we have to have one no I mean I think we've proven that we can do our jobs via zoom and you know we've done a lot of we've done like I said we've done four or five deals since the started where we haven't met with the entrepreneur in person you know it's all been done by a zoom nanus it's worked great all right trim off how are you doing what house which are a mental health like you know I get to see you once in a while on CNBC throwing bombs but how are you doing I was really excited for phase 2 of the shelter in place to start here in San Mateo County so that's been really good a new poker table that I had built arrived today which I'll be installing after this and what I mean by I'll be installing you'll be supervising I'll be supervising watching as people do real work watching and it's a beautiful table I saw the pictures have a digital infinity edge is it an infinity edge table no no no no but I'll send you a picture when it's all done but it just looks stunning and I really want to try to organize the game soon so that I can get you guys back into the into my little cave here yeah I am ready for this shelter in place to end I'll just be honest and I think that my sentiments are the sentiments of a lot of people it's it's really tough really really tough I I'm losing all my motivation to be quite honest it is weird to not see people even and you're an extrovert David you're an introvert and then David Freiberg also on the line David how are you handling all of this I'm fine I think one of the things that made a huge difference for me is the creating a rhythm in the day because there isn't one when you kind of normally get up and you go to work and then you come home at the end of the day from work that's a rhythm and you're you kind of get kind of adjusted to it so not having that a lot of people I've been hearing at struggling with that I was certainly struggling with it having sleep issues and I sit on about a dozen boards some of which have small companies some of which have a couple hundred employees and I've been hearing pretty consistently mental health issues across all the companies and I think it's just been really grating on people I think it number one kind of says we probably do need to be together and have social space as David said like being in the same office people really miss that and you get a lot of value from that and I've been getting up everyday in the last couple of weeks and going off-site going out of my house to go work we're actually working on another place and I have like a little office there and I go kind of work there and so that's made a huge impact honestly on my mental health being able to do that every day so just doing that's been been helpful I not everyone has that privilege but I think it speaks a lot to why we're gonna need to go back to offices when this is all done and what do you think about but what's happening with your businesses obviously you're running a startup studio I guess would be one way to describe it where you create companies and then spin them out what's been the business interruption if any we have a couple of hardware and lab companies that's most of what we've done and so those operations are paused so that's been really frustrating the teams have all found ways to adjust and work from home so our companies are not predominantly software based there's a lot of software but it's not predominantly software so it's been difficult on those scientists and engineers that work in a lab or in a physical environment that they have to go to to do their work the larger companies we have a number of food businesses that happen to be in the food supply chain one way or another frankly those businesses are doing fantastically well and there's been just this incredible success in the era of kovat on kind of a focus on fundamentals like food supply chain efficiency availability of things that people need and we were doing a lot in human health and we've kind of benefited from that so yeah I think there's kind of a mix for us but I think every business is bifurcated one way or another during this kind of moment of punctuated equilibrium yeah I think one thing I'd like to sort of talk about is we've had you both on the podcast early on at the start of the pandemic and I'm curious chum off now that we're here over two months in quarantine sheltering in place and a lot of information a lot of cards have turned over here right we've seen the flop I think we haven't seen the the turn and the river so to speak what is your assessment of what we were talking about you know a month or two ago and what we thought about this and what's become reality and what hasn't what are you more optimistic about what are you more pessimistic about your month let's start with you I think that we will have this pandemic or this disease within two years and so whether it's a combination of a therapeutic and a vaccine or just a therapeutic I just think that we're gonna kick its ass and so that's made me more optimistic I think that the thing that's made me more pessimistic though is the return to normalcy has been sort of cut on political lines and it's been so massively politicized I mean when David talks about the fact that you know you can go to a developing country like Mexico and all of a sudden you know everybody can get around the idea of masks it's because that there's a level of common sense there that trumps politics and in the United States that just isn't the case and so what you're seeing in in this crazy way I think is sort of the center left and the left probably sticking very firmly to the ideology of sheltering in place and a lockdown probably on the sort of hope that it gets Trump out of office and on the other side sort of the red states I think have basically said hey I would rather get sick from coronavirus and take my chances than the hundred percent chance of failure that I have in my professional life if you leave me at home for another week or month or what have you so that's been a huge disappointment of how political this whole thing is got and sacks you've been talking about like common sense procedures sort of same question to you what you first thought and you had been talking about you thought an l-shape recovery so we'll get into also the economy here but in terms of the disease what did you think two months ago that you don't think now and what do you think yeah well in preparation for this I kind of went through my Twitter feed to see what I was saying the last time I was on the pod and how well it was holding up and two months ago today I tweeted that pandemic but that under reaction caused the pandemic and overreaction will cause the depression and I think that's kind of where we are right now we still have this pandemic with us but now we're also potentially facing I think a potential because of the way were we're overreacting we're still in lockdowns in you know huge swathes of the country and no one can quite understand why I mean the original reason for the lockdowns was tobias time so that the hospitals wouldn't become overwhelmed like Italy well nowhere in the country did the hospitals get overwhelmed and we're still in these lock downs and and so you know I I think that it's long overdue for it to end now at the same time you know where I agree with Gemma that this whole thing's become politicized where you know the the people who generally want to get us out of lock downs don't believe in doing anything you know they're not even a lot of them already been willing to wear masks which i think is just kind of insane so you know where I come out on this thing is that I think we should end lock downs but wear masks and it's very hard to find anybody you know in the in the political spectrum who who agrees with that because you know one side wants to keep the lockdowns going indefinitely and the other doesn't want to store mass and it makes no logical sense obviously and if you think about our political system the left is so far left that the moderates on the left side don't have a place to live anymore and then on the right the Conservatives which I would put you in the group of who were you know looking for fiscal conservatives conservatives they don't have a home anymore either and so the most reasonable approach is clearly to start going back to work for people who are not at risk and who wear a mask yeah I think I think there's been since the last pod that we did together I think there's been three kind of major discoveries or sets of facts that have come out about the virus number one the official fatality rate has been over which is about six percent you know it's a very high fatality rate it's very scary but we now know that that's overstated by probably at least 10 acts because it doesn't take into account all the asymptomatic cases or mild cases that just never got tested and this is the fatality rate of people who contracted the virus right as exactly as opposed to people whose case the the the problem with the it's kind of a debate between the the IFR versus the CFR the infection fatality rate versus a case fatality rate the the problem with kind of the official CFR numbers is that only the people who got really sick or you never got tested and you know freiburg was the earliest person I know to start talking about the need for wide scale population testing and these plots are all G tests and other kinds of tests to establish what the real baseline is but regardless of like and there's been a whole bunch of different tests with different results I you know we don't know exactly what the truth is far is to this day but we do know it's probably closer to half a percent than to 5% so that's sort of discovery number one I think discovery number two is and we knew a little bit saw a little bit of this from the wuhan data but now it's really clear that witch populations are at risk and it's you know the data seems to suggest that people under 60 who are healthy don't have sort of pre-existing conditions or 50 times less likely to develop or there's there's a 50 X greater chance for those over 60 in terms of a of the you know having a really bad outcome and so for people under 60 you don't have these pre-existing conditions it's you know it's just not yes there's always you know examples to the contrary but it's not this this sort of gigantic risks and so for two-thirds of the population they don't have a huge risk and we're still locking them down I think the third thing the third study and not just study there's there's been studies and there's been models and then we've also seen practice is that wide scale use of mass or ubiquitous mass wearing is sufficient to control the virus meaning to stop the exponential 'ti of the virus we've seen you know in the Asian countries or Czechoslovakia other places even able to get the you know the so-called are not that the the viral coefficient to go below one with you know why skill use of mass and so we have a way to prevent the virus from going exponential that doesn't require lock downs and so the thing you know I I blogged about but the last time I was on your show was why would you do this to most severe thing these lock downs and not do this easy thing that's just merely inconvenient which is a mess Freiburg when you look at it and you're the I think have the deepest science clearly of the deepest science background of all of us what what how do you look at this pandemic now that we're 75 days into it here in the Bay Area and obviously you know they started in December it looks like in China what's your take on it now what did you get right early and what have you changed your mind about recently I'm actually fine when you say that I just pulled up the original w-h-o joint mission on Kovac final report and the date of this report by the way is February 20th so there was this big thing they published 40 pages long from the whu-oh and in it they highlighted you know the this fatality rate estimate inside of who Bay you know Wuhan and outside of who Bay they you know we knew from this data very early on that we were at about a half percent fatality rate and then you know we saw all of this other stuff happen with Korea and the princess cruise ship and the NBA players very early on we saw all these people that were roughly asymptomatic and we're starting to get to kind of explanations for why that is but from the beginning I felt really like you know this is gonna be a largely asymptomatic kind of spreading infectious vector what what I got wrong was when we went into lockdown I don't know CH amok if you remember this when we talked the first time on Jason's on your guys's podcast I asked you guys or you guys asked me when I thought we'd be back and I was like Oh April 7th we'll be back to work and I also had a bet going with you guys and I said we're gonna have less than 20,000 deaths in the u.s. I so overestimated the effectiveness of the lockdown and I think that was kind of you know one of the the more kind of like striking things to me is the quote unquote lockdown and I just sent the video to Nick you have it can you tear it up so basically I this is what I think has happened in the United States like pull this thing up I was in Berkeley on Saturday and I went to play to meet some buddies and we played frisbee golf on campus and had a beer some college buddies of mine and so I'm walking around in Berkeley and there is frat party after frat party going on no mast everyone's on top of each other you can see the video right here I took a video beer pong yeah they're all paying beer pong there's like girls and drinking and people are passing around bottles of vodka and there's no mask and this was the entire campus of Berkeley like and I think this is what's gone on like around the country so the belief that you could just kind of like lock away the virus I believe like oh my god there's it's so extreme it's so draconian we're gonna shut down the world and this thing is gonna get stopped in 30 days like happened in China that is not what happened in the United States of America like people want to be free people want to party people want to live their life they want to go to work they want to see their friends and family and they they're not used to being told no by the government and so I think that's been to me the biggest surprise is just like how ineffective the quote-unquote lockdown has been and I think it really speaks to the need that David mentioned which is this lockdown isn't binary you can't just say lock everyone down or let them all out you've got a nuanced your way to a solution which means like masks which means watching out for nursing homes which means temperature checking before letting people in the buildings of over 100 people like all the stuff that I think needs to be done for this to be kind of effective at you know tracking and tracing and we can't just assume that you know a quote-unquote lockdown is gonna keep people inside and keep this thing from spreading because the frat party as you'll see is the perfect representation of what what's really going on out there all right circling back around to you trim off what what do you think of what the two David's sort of outlined there in terms of the path forward and how we all handicapped what was going on well I think the reality is that by hook or crook we're gonna basically exit this lockdown sooner than we think because I think people just can't take it anymore so there's no point in having a shelter in place order if everybody's running around playing beer pong and so it's not doing anything and so you might as well get the productive value of the economy going again by letting people go back to work you know we we and just finding some simple ways that people can look past the politics and just do the right thing we're a goddamn mask and shut the [ __ ] up and go back to work it's it's really like I mean when you think about it it's like why is this such a big deal get everything you want and just put a little bit of cloth over your face I mean a lot of the folks that push back on this you know they're better off wearing the mask yeah I mean it is pretty striking when you watch the protest and you see a bunch of people who are you know obviously older and obviously zerbies so those are not the best looking knives in the drawer let's just put it that way if not definitely not and pickled dull and rusty I would say well I'm you know they're carrying guns and they've never served a day in the army I mean it's they're literally cosplaying that way this whole mass thing is not such a big deal just if you can wear a mask and get back to being productive and get back to a job I think you should be allowed all right so we had a big debate v-shape w-shaped you shaved a low shaved recovery I was in the I'm aspirationally v-shaped but I'm expecting a you sacks you were the AL and I think shimoff you were the the W the U or the L we've had a V how do you explain shimoff what is going on in the stock market because you said it was the end of days you said this is gonna be a disaster is it going to be disaster is this the end of the days and we've got some false rebound and this v-shaped recovery is not sustainable what how do you explain this inexplainable v-shape responsibility response there's two things to keep in mind first of all the economy is completely [ __ ] so don't don't question you know don't look at Facebook Apple Amazon Microsoft Google and a handful of you know internet SAS companies and kid yourself we have 30 million American men and women out of work that is every fifth person you see walking down the street does not have a job what happens when lockdown ends if we if with the lockdown ends in June as expected for mobility but how many people are hammers in the foundry pound yeah yeah no so so look here here's the thing that we've had we've had trillions of dollars of money printed into the system and when you print that money into the system which the Federal Reserve has done it hits the asset markets and it is basically stabilized the bond market and the incremental dollar sits in the hands of an individual who must put the money to work because when you look back on this this is not you know a random person managing their 401k the overwhelming majority money sits and that sits in the hands of hedge funds or pension funds or sovereign wealth funds or mutual funds they have a job to do and so you have to think about what is their incremental decisions so even if the stock market made no sense on any valuation metric the incremental dollar that they have which they're paid to put to work will get put to work and so what you've actually seen is a dispersion and what I mean by that is if you graph the S&P 500 index versus the unweighted S&P 500 index which basically means the first one ranks companies by market cap and gives the biggest companies more weight the other one ranks every company equally there's been a massive split a dispersion and what it really shows is that companies that traffic in bits so software businesses have a bid and companies that trafficking atoms have gotten completely decimated and they are literally worthless and so when you put all these things together the real economy is in the toilet there are tens of millions of you know men and women out of work the earnings power of real companies that do physical things in the world are cheaper and lower than they've ever been meanwhile the companies that have high velocity high margin software driven businesses have gone to the moon so it's unfair to look at 30 or 40 businesses and paint that as a as a v-shaped recovery it is a equity market that is buoyed by fed dollars that is not mapping to the reality of what's happening on the ground okay so Sachs you're you're pretty plugged-in to the you think about this a lot what do you think the recovery looks like is this going to be two three four five quarter recession is it going to be depression era like some people are apt to say what keeps you up at night thinking about the economy and what gives you hope well I it kind of depends if there are other shoes to drop so I agree with drum-off that you know the state economy right now is terrible and it's divorced from the financial markets because of you know all the money printing and interventions that the Fed and Treasury or you know have been doing you know one way to think about it is well the the stock markets denominated in u.s. dollars and if you know they just printed a whole bunch more of them those dollars are worth less and so you know the the price of the stocks are gonna rise but but yeah I think looking forward you know I it's probably going to be a two to three year process to get out of this unless some other shoe drops which could make it much worse Europe you're betting on two to three years to get back to let's call it single digit unemployment um we'll see we're at like what fifteen percent right now or something like that so you know thirty five million people get down to you know ten million again twenty million it's it's hard to say it's gonna take a long time to create all those jobs you know a lot of these businesses are not just gonna come you know racing right back so yeah I think it's probably like a two three or process to get back to some sort of you know and by the way the thing you have to remember is like look the unemployment numbers that we have had in the last probably seven or eight years so during Obama and Trump have been completely manipulated because the number of people that are entirely leaving the workforce is quite high and so you know it's not just a numerator problem we have a denominator problem too there are fewer and fewer workers that you know are willing to work because some of them just give up right or it's just not worth it for the pay that's available is another states open so the thing that we're gonna have to figure out is like how many of the people that are leaving the workforce may never come back and has a societal toll and weight that we all have to bear yeah there's gonna be a lot of people who maybe are in their 60s or maybe even late 50s they got 10 20 years left that they could be working in management sales whatever it is and they just say you know what it's not worth it I'm gonna go try to find a place to stay and maybe not rejoin the workforce early retirement or just capitulation yeah well and but you know remember I said about other shoes dropping I mean we we're still in the early I think we're still in the early stages seeing the repercussions of what you know but to three-month shutdown the economy you know what what that's gonna look like and so the you know the wave of defaults is just beginning and you know who knows what happens with cities and states and so on down the line I mean who knows you know does do the debt markets have kind of an inexhaustible you know desire for you know to buy US debt or could we reach some sort of saturation point and then that triggers the next you know set of crises so we just don't you know I would say like that the two to three our outlook is is the one that's kind of like what it looks like today but if there are these other big shoes to drop it could turn in something much worse I think Friedberg we're all in agreement that there will be a second wave of some type just depends on how big the spike is do you think there'll be another new york city level outbreak where we'll see you know 2,000 people 1,500 people dying in a certain region every day for some sustained period of time what are the chance of that happening Freiburg I don't know I mean I think going forward the you know the New York situation people's behaviors have been shocked so you know to the points earlier the most effective thing you can do is stop coughing on your hand touching a railing someone else touches the railing and touches their mouth I mean that's kind of how this goes you know there's been early on some weird like arrows stylized aerosolized a study that kind of said hey this thing spreads in the air and so on it's really you know you got to be in a closed kind of confined space if people are wearing asks now so the likelihood of the transmission happening at the rate that we saw in New York great paper out of MIT by the way that shows how this happened on the subway oh really identified I did identify the subway as kind of the primary vector that droves transmission in New York City that was always my thesis and I remember talking about it and saying how is this not obvious to everybody that 8 million people ride that thing every day or something like it's so I didn't make they did an incredible job proving it so it's not like people running in Central Park or spreading crota virus to each other's everyone in these confined spaces coughing in the air and then you kind of get this stuff and 20 people get on and off at every stop that's the other thing people don't realize is that it's not just a bunch of people it's not an aeroplane we have X number of people going in one direction for three four five hours this is 20 people getting on and off every five minutes it's almost like you couldn't design a better incubator for it and I don't think a city in the United States approaches the density that you have in New York so remember these are not deterministic factors these there's like a spectrum of a probabilistic spectrum here so you have a lot of people they have a certain type of behavior they're not wearing masks you kind of add these up and you end up with this really high kind of vector that drives this this rapid spread as we saw in New York City you know you're not gonna see that in Dallas you're not gonna see that in Houston you're not gonna see that in San Diego you're gonna have more of the slow steady burn as some risk is taken in the environment some risk is taken by frat parties and people not wearing masks and people touching their mouths but it's not gonna have the same sort of massive effect you saw in New York so I wouldn't expect us to have a New York style second wave I do expect there to continue to be this like slow burn going forward of new cases and it's certainly going to be more obvious now that we're testing a lot more and so Tremont at this point we're basically putting a price on life and saying hey some amount of deaths is worth taking the risk and as Americans a unique group of people in the world in how we look at personal freedom Americans are just making the choice hey listen if you don't want to take the risk stay home but the rest of us if we want to take the risk we're gonna go take the risk that's what this has come down to in your mind yeah I think that it's very difficult for Americans to envision a world where like you know their personal freedoms are infringed upon I mean it's sort of like kind of one of the founding principles of the entire country this is why I think that the the tragedy of this thing is that the the way to get everybody what they want is so simple as David said it's like you know above sixty five you stay home you work remotely under sixty five you temperature check and wear a mask and you know you're ninety five percent of the way there but it's become a left versus right decision to do it you know the mask wearers are still in a lockdown and the non mask wearers want to get back to work and basically like there's there's it's just it's just another kind of culture war between the left and the right it's it's really just shocking I mean I might for what it's worth you know if I was I am a betting man so I'll just tell you you know my line now is that I think that Donald Trump is overwhelmingly likely to win as a function of people's frustration and about the lock downs and I think that the Democrats best hope of winning in November is ending these things sooner rather than later it's amazing we're talking about a pandemic a once in a hundred year pandemic it looks like and we're literally looking at our reaction to it through the lens of this president being reelected or not like literally that's the determining factor on the advice we're giving to people we're telling people they can't go to the beach but they can be on an airplane they can't go to the Tesla factory but they can ride the subway I mean on a communication basis because they're any worse way we could have communicated this to the populace well the communication was bad but the I think the bigger problem quite honestly is that the Republican Democratic governors in the United States can't get on the same page and at the same time there's just a tendency to support Donald Trump or not support him in a very reflexive instinctive way that isn't helpful right now and and there just doesn't seem to be enough political wherewithal and courage to just stand up and do the right thing independent of what your what your political persuasion is so but but I think on the margin now I think you have different but very similar boundary additions to 2016 where there all these people that kind of like told you one thing and did another there all these people right now that probably are you know preference falsifying as we speak and you know they'll show up into the voting booth and they'll be angry if they're not back in their jobs especially if they've been laid off by his as a result of not being able to get back and they would blame that on the Democrats not the Republicans and therefore Trump gets his next term well because the the it's it's the democratic states that are pushing the hardest basically like you know you saw the craziness in Los Angeles but like you know Eric Garcetti was basically like we will enter the shelter in place and you know December of 2022 and it's like this is it's Los Angeles yeah it's not gonna happen you know players got a play I mean like this is just as unbelievable yeah well the that III do I agree the lockdowns the or the the unwillingness to end the lockdowns gives Trump an issue for November assuming this continues that supersedes the incompetence of the kovat response which is that you know our lives and livelihoods are not owned by politicians to you know meter out and give back to us in drips and drabs and as they see fit that is the issue that the lockdown crowd is is giving to Trump and I do think it will if it's still the issue in November it will supersede the the you know the initial unconference of the kovat response and what did you think of this whole what's the drug that Trump said he was taking David sacks I draw hydroxyl : yeah so what or Friedberg maybe you take it we talked about that early on and that I think you properly said like if you took it earlier this could be you know could has potential taking it later it's probably too late I think you nailed that on the pod last time why is this become such a political issue in what are your thoughts on that drug specifically and its potential efficacy look I'm not a doctor but it from what I understand is there is a so just so you know there's like side effects to this drug for a small percentage of the population and this drug can actually inhibit energy production in certain cells which can cause organs to dysfunction and it particularly shows up in the heart so people end up with what's called a long QT interval and potentially some heart issues that can be pretty dangerous and deadly depending on your body so it's really a little bit of an unknown there's also issues longer-term with with vision impairment can damage your retinal cells and cause vision loss so there's risk to this drug it's not like taking you know an Advil it is a it is a measured risk it's a low probability but the severity can be high and so typically with a scenario like that doctors and scientists like to see you know phased clinical trials and you kind of do you know randomized and you have placebo and testing and so that hasn't necessarily been done for this particular virus this particular condition and often the the design of those studies matters a lot so you could give it to a bunch of quote unquote Ovid patients but if it's not being given to Kovach patients either before or right as they're getting sick maybe it doesn't show the results that you would expect from a prophylactic treatment meaning you're getting it before you're really sick and that's where it may be the most efficacious and so some people are saying wait we don't know enough don't do it it's not worth the risk because of that small percentage high severity problem while others are saying oh my gosh it's totally worth the risk is the downside if you get coronavirus can be really bad and you know and so so there's a lot of room for debate here and when there's a lot of room for debate you usually kind of revert to some sort of base belief or some base kind of political point of view or something and I think that's what's going on here this isn't a clear-cut the Sun is yellow on this guy's balloon kind of conversation this is like I can interpret this a lot of different ways it does seem that like look this drug you know like a lot of has an effect in the same way that a lot of other that this drug might have on a lot of other viruses and this especially plus zinc you know and this z-pak this as if from icing which is an antibiotic together may be really effective and so yeah if you weigh the downside and the probability of that downside for a patient against what the potential upside would be depending on their risk factors now that we know those better for kovat you can make an educated decision and maybe just be left in the hands of doctors versus like have some national statement about it I don't know but yeah it's certainly a lot of room for debate and thus a lot of kind of you know political engagement on this Sax's there's a lot of talk about what the bay area looks like after this whether it's commercial real estate with Twitter and square going full work from home and people not wanting to work in cities what are your general thoughts on what the world looks like a year from now and maybe five years from now if there is going to be some permanent change what do you think it would be well there could be a big resource that I rescind emic it's something we kind of end up living with but you know so so look if it does I mean if you're like over 70 are you really gonna want to stay in a place like New York City or you don't want to go somewhere else and so I could imagine if this does become this long-term thing that's just endemic yeah we don't know if we don't have a vaccine I could see cities resorting where you know New York is people who are come full with ghovat risk and you know it's I think San Francisco's the the big issue with San Francisco is that there were always a bunch of reasons not to want to live there I mean that the city too seems like chronically mismanaged so he sees lots of poop the huge homeless problem you know public health issues with that there's there's a lot of crime there's and we were responded to properly so there's all these like reasons not to live there but the reason why people chose to live there is because the tech industry had a very strong network effect and you needed to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco in order to have access to these these jobs and opportunities and if those jobs opportunities are now available via zoom and you can be doing them from anywhere are people still gonna choose to live in San Francisco you know with you know with the the the cost of living and housing and apartments and all the rest of it that that goes that goes along with it so yeah I mean I think there is some chance that this whole remote work thing could break Silicon Valley's Network effect and that would be really bad for places like San Francisco which you know otherwise might not be the greatest places to live yeah I might thesis on this in terms of getting out of the recession I think remote work could lead to a level of efficiency and profitability in the companies that we have never seen before if you think just about every manager now knows how to manage remote workers right you learned that in like three four weeks you figure out how to manage people remote even people who hated managing people remote all these Gen Xers and boomers who are managing you know Millennials and earlier Gen Xers they now know how to do it and what they quickly learn is these three or four people in my team are crushing it these two or three people don't need to be here they're not actually adding any value so I think what's gonna happen is they're gonna cut the bottom people then they're gonna cut their office space now you've removed I don't know call it 30% of the cost basis of a business forty percent in its operating better and people are happier and then when you do hire somebody there's gonna be more talent available and you've just opened it up that you can hire somebody anywhere in the world without an office and you don't have to relocate them and you don't have to pay I don't know what you guys think the average additional cost is to be in San Francisco but I'm gonna say $30,000 so a $40,000 a year job or a $50,000 your job becomes a 70 or 80 something like that and if all that happens these companies are gonna be so profitable that they're gonna start growing and that leads us out of the economic downturn any thoughts on my my thesis that's not a thesis that's a hope yeah hopes not a [ __ ] strategy Jason yeah well I just think it's a potential way out I think it I mean what do you think in general about this trend of remote then drama I think it's great and I think that we're realizing that you know there's no monopoly on innovation and companies can be really productive remotely that most of the work in an office is busy work and politics and you can cut it all out and you can do the same amount of work much less time which gives you more time to frankly be with your family or take up a hobby or learn a second language or a third language I mean I just think it's so much better for people to realize like we got a you know it's it's not like you you know it's not it's not 1820 or 1920 it's 2020 so we're gonna live to a hundred years old like we have a long time to be in the grind and so you know working and accomplishing what you used to in half the time and not having to commute and being able to live where you want your people you like man that has a huge positive impact to your kids you your community it's just way better I just think offices are just complete kind of like it's all Shakespearean theatre at the end and cutting it all out is great and specifically San Francisco's just a complete cesspool dump of [ __ ] and so you know being able to just get out of that city all right everybody welcome to the you're listening to the Oliver I read on stats yesterday that were just so unbelievably shocking like the number of break-ins the number of number one in the country they're number one in the country did the the amount of disease that like communicable disease like typhoid and I'm like typhoid I was born in a country and scratched and clawed to emigrate as a refugee to leave a country that had typhoid as a disease welcome o to survive nothing to end up back in that in San Francisco thats brought it with you that's an absolute joke so yeah yeah I mean the idea that I'd never have to go to San Francisco ever again is oh my god it brings joy to me it is a it's an unmitigated disaster this and I think this will be part of the boom-bust cycle that you know David you were part of when you here at Stanford you know getting an office in San Francisco or having an apartment it was cheaper I think in the city than it was down in Palo Alto wasn't not well back in yeah when we move the amur to San Francisco which was 2009 I think we were able to get space for $20 a foot per year crazy that's what I paid 2007 I read it I read it I read a crazy article it was about the Kushner's and this building that they own that Brookfield Asset Management was gonna buy and and it said that they bought this building and so the Kushner's moved to like Park Avenue the General Motors building overlooking Central Park or something right it's a beautiful building and it actually quoted in there the price that they were paying and it was incredible because it was like a hundred bucks a square foot per year and I realized oh my god they're paying less for Central Park views in New York than I'm paying for a warehouse in Palo Alto not as a [ __ ] is going on this makes no sense whatsoever gotta be supply and demand right there and I thought to myself like this is this is crazy like California is so expensive the taxes are so high it's I think people are gonna leave in droves honestly what do we think of Elon selling all his homes and then actually saying he's gonna leaving you know move tests out I mean I don't think it's a practical reality to move Tesla out of out of California I think that the incremental facilities can be built wherever he wants him to be built based on where he gets a tax incentives well but I think the Tesla Freemont was a really good example of this sort of like cultural war that's going on this this political battle over lock downs and you know you had kind of a mid-level health the department bureaucrat in Fremont had locking their factory and saying they couldn't go back to work whereas if he was in Texas he could and then you know around the same time yet this whole like Chile Luthor thing in Texas where she was a small business owner you know owns a like a haircut place and she was basically put in jail for a week for giving somebody a haircut and there was like a you know dust-up over that so you know I I think that like you know the the country is certainly ready to get back to work and and if this is the political debate you know in November I'm not sure we'll be because six months is a really long time from now but there was it four or five months but if this is a political debate I you know this this will be the way that the Trump gets re-elected mm-hmm yeah I think there's gonna be some pretty significant benefits because the reaction you guys are speaking to it's not just about people moving but it's a reaction to a regulation and that could have some pretty profound effect that to benefit certain sectors and businesses and accelerate new outcomes one of the things that you know I have a strong belief in it's like I think in 20 years we could kind of eradicate all infectious disease the only thing holding that up is regulation because the science is known the engineering is basically there and it's simply a function of getting these things approved in getting across the finish line doing gene editing and humans for genetic mutations that cause harm to humans this is a technique that we've known for twenty years and there was a guy a patient that died in 1999 from one of the first AAV treatments that viral vector gene-editing treatments after that there was this clamp down and suddenly everything stopped and there was like no longer any progress in this space and they're just now starting to come back and there's a lot of you know really interesting technology that has been kind of hindered I mean you know not being able to put Tesla's out I think is the tip of the iceberg of what people are seeing regulation can do to business and look I'm I'm by no stretch you know a libertarian party card carrier but I do think and I see it in businesses that I'm involved in all the time that this you know incredibly onerous like overreaching regulatory burden and bureaucrats really hinder great new things from happening in the world and it's just become so friggin apparent how inept the people are that are making the decisions that are doing this to us are during this crisis and I think it could have a profound benefit on kind of deregulation and accelerating the adoption of new tools and new technologies that could really help us all so I view the positive side of this it's not just like everyone's gonna leave California like this inept bureaucrats and over-regulation everywhere let's talk to you politics for a moment shamatha you know you heard the president called the wuhan virus obviously there's no doubt that it came from there there is a debate was this something that was not created in a lab but that was being studied in the lab and accidentally got out and that's how the jump happened and there's some tension there between China and the US what do you think the global reaction is going to be and the fallout will be for China if any Japan is paying factories I read and help me subsidize them to move factories out of China so they can move that dependency we always saw the dependency on PPE and drugs being made actually in Wuhan in that area and how we don't have a supply chain that we can rely on for really mission-critical stuff how will we look at this Chinese relationship in the United States and globally post pandemic this is the beginning of the modern Cold War and so it's America versus China except that China is a much more worthy adversary for us than the USSR SSR was at their peak and the reason is because China has been making strategic investments for the last thirty years you know the biggest thing that prevents China from really going guns blazing broadside attack on the US is that the u.s. dollar is still the reserve currency of the world but even there China you know is trying to do a digital currency and a stable coin and these are all these state-sponsored initiatives that come from frankly just strategic decision-making to try to usurp the United States as the most powerful country in the world and so again it goes back to is this a political issue or is this an ideological issue or is this an exceptionalism issue or is just as the practical reality that we do not want another country being number one and can we all agree and if we can all agree then I don't think they'll win where do you where do you sit on it for you is it practical as an ideological completely practical I have zero like yeah you know I've been thinking about this a lot because I have not done any investments and I just did by first oh so it's been three months and I did it was a credit deal so it's not even equity and you know I was and I was reflecting on what what am I trying to do because I felt myself frenetically you know spending and working too much and you know looking at all these different opportunities and I realized wait a minute like my job here is not to win some finite game like this is not ending like a basketball game or a soccer match this is like I'm trying to be in this thing for 50 years so my goal is to survive and the reason why I say that is my ideology is very fluid I have to be able to adapt to market conditions as they change because if I want to be irrelevant you know person in the world and 50 years from now first rule of business is don't go out of business second rule of businesses don't forget rule number one run you know so in that context I think it's a very practical thing that we just have to deal with China and make sure that they do not use syrup America's standing in the world as the most important country of the world just for me it's ideological I just don't want a communist country I don't care but that is torturing their citizens as the number one how do you in the world I think it's really dangerous I have a real issue with this like I don't think you have the right to judge just like Californians can't judge Texans and Texans can't judge Floridians oh no it's that you're wrong you absolutely should judge people know are torturing people and not allowing people that freedom of speech yeah you should judge them actually actually to human rights violations I think you should judge people I I think that we there's there's a lot of that stuff in America that you stay silent no that's not true I am absolutely for cannabis anybody who's arrested for cannabis violations and low-level drug things I think we they should be let out of Freight out of jail just like JB Pritzker did in Chicago I mean and I think the death penalty should be repealed too because we don't apply it properly those are the number one and two things probably the United States that go against the human rights the Declaration of Human Rights and I'm actually very Pro fixing those things I was totally against waterboarding and I think that was the worst moment in my in American history hiya I honestly I honestly think that like China's gonna do China you know India is gonna be India and instead of getting caught up in our own ideology you should change it in your own country and then make sure that the other country doesn't win well and that's my point is do do you believe engagement with China leads them towards democracy and better human rights conditions for their citizens or not and I think the fool's errand that is an absolute it worked for East Berlin and it did work and saving Europe from the Nazis so that the boundary conditions are entirely different and China has proven that it works Europeans were genetically bred to be lazy oligarchs okay everybody I think we just got kicked out of the iTunes Store saxy poo yeah China hawk-dove engagement isolation where do you stand you heard Sharma say his position where do you stand yeah decoupling from China is gonna be a bipartisan issue now I think but both can it's now will be well Trump is gonna is gonna run blaming China for for what happened and I don't think Y is gonna be defending China in fact they're gonna try and pecking with the whole Beijing Biden label and he's Paul Guinea to try and out Trump Trump on on China so decoupling is gonna happen it doesn't really make sense for us to be dependent on China for our antibiotics for our medicines for our PPE for it you know any of these you know any of these products that are important for national survival I think all that stuff is gonna come back home I think you know trading with them for other things might be poison all things had to start fundamentally strategic the same way I think that can continue but you know the thing about trade is it creates interdependence and I don't think that this country's going to want to be dependent on China for anything strategic anymore two questions for you David what is China's liability if any at this point with this pandemic obviously if they you know didn't they withheld information or silenced whistleblowers that's a whole different level and then tick tock should we allowed to talk in this country should we if we're not allowed to have Facebook or Twitter in China take those questions either what do you want well the on liability I mean I think yeah the reliability is is huge I mean there's still a bunch of questions we got a answer around where exactly the virus came from but the the really fateful decision that I think China made is when they shut down travel to Wuhan to and from Wuhan you know with respect to other parts of China but they let people from Wuhan just kind of you know leave to go all over the world and so you know they weren't letting people from Wuhan go to other parts of China but they were able to come to the US and so I think they do have a huge liability but are we gonna hold them to it no I mean as a practical matter you know we're not gonna you know it'd be it'd be a mistake to to try and change the principal sovereign immunity and the courts but I think in terms of popular opinion they do have they're not there ways to there are other ways to quote-unquote punish them like I mean and the US is already doing it so you know for example the u.s. is limiting and constraining kua ways ability to get access to 5g and so you know it really forces China to either by European and American equipment which is essentially to say that you know the the five eyes will be able to basically spy into China or they have to basically you know storm into Taiwan and take over TSMC I mean so there are there are all these other gambits and strategies that one can take without getting ideology ideologically caught up and you know Chinese human rights because they're not going to change yeah I mean look all wealth comes from trade you know whether it's at the level of individuals or nations wealth comes from trade and so it'd be silly for us to say that we're just never gonna have trade with China but I think that you know trade also creates interdependence and so we're not gonna I don't think continue to engage in to depend on them for thing as an idol to our national survival and so you know that that's gonna be the change and the other thing is you know we're gonna demand that the trade be more reciprocal take the tic-tock example well you know what we're probably gonna happen is that the the tic-tock will probably be caught up in some larger negotiation and you know is the quid pro quo well test like SS all cars in China and tick tock has to operate in the u.s. maybe but you know III don't think tick tock it sort of falls into the you know necessary for national survival category so it really falls into the reciprocity you know principle and the question I guess will be are we getting enough in return to allow them to operate here and I think that's the way that all this commerce is gonna is gonna start working and that's the thing at least we can like confront our hypocrisy so Jason I don't disagree with you about how you know gross the human rights record is I just think it's a joke that we all sort of like cry foul like it's like the biggest thing in the world when we can't even clean up our own yard and then meanwhile we continue to trade with them that's just utterly utterly yeah so that's why I think we have to continue to work on cleaning our backyard while continuing to innovate and find our own backyard meanwhile win the game against China and winning the game is not basically pushing for human rights reforms it's making sure as David said we have a better trade balance and making and making sure that like you know that the critical parts of the supply chain and infrastructure that America needs for national security isn't dependent on a third party who have completely different incentives than we do and then there's also like soft things like why is the you know why are we taking American movies and changing the ends in order to have them sold in China like they're literally corrupting our art and that incremental dollar that Hollywood's getting or whichever you know person trading with China is getting I think it's not worth giving up what makes America unique and a leader in the world Freiberg you thoughts on China there's about a hundred and twelve million people in China that work in factories factories in China are purpose-built so they're built to make a thing and then they got to get retooled if you want to make another thing you take those two facts it's very hard to kind of replace China that's a source of production for a lot of what we consume in this country that's the reality so there's two ways you could go and then there's two kind of necessities and you end up with a matrix of like two by two you could be couple from China and basically recreate that same production system here in the United States and that just wouldn't [ __ ] be possible like we don't have enough people to work we don't have the ability to do that the cost of everything would go up by 5x we could invent new systems of production which we have the ability to 3d printing bio manufacturing all these other kind of really interesting ways of making stuff that could replace the old factories that are run in China similar to kind of what maybe Elon has tried to do with his automated you know factory with Tesla and so through automation through 3d printing through bio manufacturing you can kind of change the methods of doing this stuff if we could do that then we could be couple from China so the reality is like I don't know like how we continue to consume things at the you know it's a percentage of wallet chair for that come from China without rebuilding how you make stuff no but that's the whole point by the way I think the reason why that's valuable is that that's the best way for us to actually get back to an inflationary psycho as well so I completely agree with you it is incredibly inefficient it'll be incredibly costly but that's where I think you shift the balance of power so that instead of all the powers sitting on the side of Capitol you shifted to the side of labor labor demands for wages and then all of a sudden cost go up input cost go up prices go up inflation exists and that fixes a lot of our debt problems it fixes our deflationary supercycle it fixes a lot of things and so so if things got more expensive it would be good for vehicle yeah even but even look even with maximal like looked at replaced 112 million workers in China with some number of Americans you know I'm not sure you could make all the stuff you need to make here yeah I mean there's other countries too I mean I think people are moving factor Japanese or moving factories to Taiwan and Vietnam yeah yeah but if we create new methods of production which were uniquely positioned to do we can completely reinvent the wheel at a lot of industries and actually produce for the world yeah right now you know China exports physical goods the US exports of virtual goods and if we want to get into the business of making physical goods we have to just do it 10x better we have the ability to do that we just got to get the [ __ ] will so if I were to take three trillion dollars of federal money and you know Treasury bonds and hope that they don't turn into junk bonds I would basically turn that money into reinventing the systems of like how do we made stuff using these new technologies that the u.s. is uniquely positioned to capitalize on and you know I love this one read Burghley one u.s. we're having to make a could make the same thing that a hundred Chinese workers right there you go I love it that's and I think that's where we got to an hour into this Freiberg you win you got the best and the hottest tag you know a group is if we are gonna bring back manufacturing let's leapfrog it let's just go let's just you don't have to keep letting a make you know socks or iPhones but you know let's make the next automated factories and the 3d printing factories here and by a manufacturer anybody have anybody have anything they need to promote or plug at the end of the podcast anything they're working on that people should know about no but I love you guys I [ __ ] miss you I wanted to kiss all of you on the belt Wow just exactly what I was thinking sure Martha I was about to so back at you I've been I've been locked down for three months I'm lost my mind I mean this is May 12th for me and I think we all got to go to Mexico and see Sachs for a yeah let's add some friends come down and we play golf and no one wore masks within our little circle and nobody got sick and you know and you're all be tested we haven't been tested but we don't know any symptoms I got tested twice negative both times and it was a very weird thing because I'm think I'm Freiburg correct me if I'm wrong I would I should be rooting that I had it and it didn't do anything to me right totally by the way let me just say one more thing that's a really interesting finding this paper came out a few days ago that shows that 40 to 60% of the population that has never been exposed to SARS coronavirus to the current corn virus already have activated t-cells to the virus and the reason is that they've had other coronaviruses there were common cold and they've developed this immune response so this may explain why a large percentage of people are just so asymptomatic and totally fine it's a pretty astounding finding and so you could get checked for those other antibodies or you know B's B's activated t-cells and know if you're in a good position to kind of ward off the microRNA Larson that's another thing we should probably do that's 60% of people that already have this by the way that won't stop the spreading that person will still get infected and spread but they're you know immune response is such that they'll shut the thing down pretty quickly so would you call this like some parallel or shadow herd immunity or individual immunity its individual immunity and it's related to just process reactivity with other coronaviruses and so we've already developed it immune response to other Crona viruses that gives us seem like seemingly a pretty good response to this corona virus for you know more than half ok veedu population on a percentage basis how how much do we know about this virus just as we wrap up here if you had to state a percentage of like in two years we're gonna know a hundred percent or ninety percent about the virus whatever it is what do we know now we know everything about the virus itself we are very like like with any virus we know very little about how it effects a specific human based on their genotype meaning based on your health and your your genes here's what this virus is gonna do to your body and we're not going to know that in two years and we're not gonna know that we don't know that for most viruses for humans today the matching of genotype to genotype of viral but I've if we understand X amount about the HIV virus or Ebola what do we know now if you Jimmy maybe a bola would be the best one like we have pretty good knowledge of that after X number of years what do we know now and a percentage basis of course we had to guess I get we we know everything about the virus itself like 100 percent or okay about this yeah the human response to the virus and why it's called yeah these weird symptoms with different people and so on yeah I'd say we're probably I don't know forty percent thirty percent we've kind of mapped the outcome but we haven't mapped the progress to the outcome in the human body all right listen great job mouth great job David Sachs great job David Freiburg if you want to subscribe to the podcast type in all in with trim off and love you guys besties yeah all right shuffle up and deal can't wait to see that new table and let's get back to where you goddamn masks people wear a mask wear a mask okay be safe








all right everybody welcome back to the all in podcast we're here with Jamal Paula Hypatia David Freiburg and David sacks our usual usual foursome as we chop up the business news and what's going on and just as a point of order the frequency of the show is well don't don't ask as we feel like it as we feel like it correct so do not ask me to advertise on the podcast because Tremont band advertising and do not ask me when the next one is the next one is when trauma the sides he wants to go on a rant but well how are you holding up best EC best he's doing pretty well yeah and the family everything or have you come out of quarantine in any way so the first question I have for people is has your behavior change now as we go into I think what most people are calling phase two any change in what you're doing in the risk you're willing to take come off it's a really good question you know i i i've kind of ventured out a little bit but i just kind of put on a mask the only place i don't wear a mask is when i walk around my house just because it's you know i live in the suburbs and so there's just so much space between people that you don't really run into anybody but if I have to go to Walgreens or CVS or whatever I always bring a mask and gloves so I've got I've ventured out a little bit but you know nothing nothing meaningful to be quite honest and Saks you're still out of the country in an undisclosed location how are you feeling about what risks you're willing to take I you know small groups of people are you going out to a restaurant are you seeing other people how do you look at the risk you're willing to take personally I've adjusted my risk profile I think quite a bit so I mean that the the learning over the past few months was just that relatively that the fatality rate for say relatively healthy people under 50 without risk factors is you know fifty times lower then say you know someone under over 60 or someone who has risk factors and so I'm not being reckless but I'm willing to kind of rien social behavior among groups of friends and on the theory that you know all my friends have been locked down I was I was in total lockdown for two months sort of my friends and so you know I have several questions the first is I mean how will do you look like 90 roughly how old are you exactly so how does how did the risk factors apply to you second you have friends no there's three on this call Zach C Pugh I love you I miss ya no I mean you raise a good point I mean my physical age might be 90 but my lungs are only 48 years old so my my hopefully my my lungs are you know qualifying that under 50 category so you know I've been playing golf with friends you know I've I've kind of widened the the circle of people I'm willing to let into my quarantine basically so by a dozen by a hundred by about I've actually let in at not all at once but at different times probably about twenty people got it so you feel comfortable and those people you do ask them have you quarantined have you been wearing masks have you been tested or are you just like I kind of I mean I I generally know that people I mean now this may change over the next few months but everyone's been kind of under shelter in place and so if you were gonna start to socializing or with your friends this would be the safest time to do it because everybody has been sort of locked down to some degree and you know most places have been closed and so you know if your friends having gotten it they're probably pretty safe all right swinging over to you Dave Friedberg tell me what you think of Sachs's position obviously Tremont's still in quarantine you know venturing off to the store once in a while sacks opening up to you know 20 people or whatever in small groups playing golf outdoors but I'm assuming he's not having like an indoor party for 50 obviously how would you look at the risk he's taking and what risk are you taking Friedberg personally in your life I'm not too dissimilar I've got about eight buddies coming over to the pool this afternoon we're gonna do kind of like a Father's Day hang session but we're gonna be outside and I've done a lot of hiking without masks and going outside without maths I'm not really too concerned about outdoor behavior there was a good analysis done that showed increasing cases where they actually found the origin of where transmission occurred ninety seven percent occurred indoors so generally speaking like outdoor activity to me is like pretty reasonable to do so I'm pretty free with like doing stuff outside meeting friends outside hanging out by the pool and I've got a bunch of people come by and hang out and then indoor stuff I try and avoid so if I'm gonna go into a supermarket I'll wear or grocery store I'll wear a mask and I'll be in there as short a time period as I need to be and I'm certainly not going into restaurants and stuff like that but you would sit outdoors at a restaurant I would assume if the tables were six feet apart would you go to a restaurant and sit in the recipe yeah I'm not rushing to do that just yet there's just something a little bit weird about the way some of those are configured but generally yes like outdoor seems fine you know but like the way they set it up it's almost like you're exposing yourself to a bunch of people around you because they're pretty confined spaces if they're setting up these tables at and that but yeah sunlight and wind effectively will you know break apart the protein that that is the virus and and you will not have this kind of infectious viral particle and so that's a pretty you know well understood thing at this point and you know but it's not spoken about as much by public health officials because they don't want to kind of mitigate the concern and they don't want people to start taking off maps and you know taking on very risky behavior but yeah generally speaking I think kind of like outdoor behavior is pretty pretty safe and non non transmissible I the risky stuff I'm doing is you know we had a you know just having like folks come back to the house and that's where I kind of still try and draw the line which is having people in the house and you don't know where they've been and so that's a little bit concerning inside the house the spittle particles with Kovan 19 in of them if they did would be lingering that is what I'm sorry to be graphic but that is the concern correct Freiburg is that when you're outdoors the spittle would blow away and the dirt is right I mean it really doesn't happen so the liquid that holds the protein because the protein needs to be in a liquid to kind of maintain its integrity when that evaporates and it'll evaporate from wind or from Sun and that protein will degrade it becomes kind of a non-infectious particle at that point and so when you're inside and you don't have those mechanisms that particle can just float around in the air and that's how it gets spread and that's why in the tracing work that was done it shows like 97% of cases happen in an indoor environment just like this and I don't believe in the 6-foot thing I think it's [ __ ] like if you're 6 foot away from someone in a room people are coughing and that room gets filled with those particles over a one hour period it doesn't matter if you're [ __ ] six feet away or 20 feet away that stuff's in the air so this whole notion about like hey distance yourself in a restaurant indoor space it's like no that's actually not going to necessarily solve a problem maybe if someone immediately sneezed you'll avoid it but I mean certainly since active advocacy for mass he free burgers are you is that an aura ring your own yeah have you tried it yeah I I actually just bought it a few weeks ago and I've been using it to monitor my sleep but the there was an article that said that you know I think that all the NBA players are going to be given these aura rings as well because it can apparently detect coronavirus three days ahead of other people other other ways because it can see a change in your basal sort of body temperature yes so UCSF ran this beta with them and they developed this algorithm that they think it's pretty predictive so we'll see if it works in production but yeah that's the theory well there's also this connected thermometer that if you use it I forgot the name of it it sends all the data to a central repository and they've been able to predict it as well and this just when we look at how the government I think it's called rekt attempt wrecked attempt it has to go in your rectum yeah just whatever is going out of your rectum it goes right to who the government now it there and but this is an interesting thing when you think about low-cost ways to deal with this the amount of money we pour it into the system shamov is so great that if we just sent every single person in America and aura ring or one of these thermometers and said just take your Thurmont your temperature all the day we would know where the outbreaks were and that would be a lot less expensive than a lot of the stimulus we're doing to try to cure what's going on do you agree that we should maybe include that in some sort of approach look I think that I think the basic issue is that something really odd has happened in the United States and we were talking about this in our group chat which is that we have managed to find a way to politicize absolutely everything and you know some things for example like universal basic income or you know what is our national policy towards China those are political issues but things of public health when they get sort of distorted and viewed through a political lens or just idiotic you know we view masks as a political statement we view we would view these aura rings as you know people being afraid that the government was going to track them so we'll find every good will find a lot of excuses in order to blow up any good idea at this point because we can politicize anything and we do it better than any other country in the world you know it's an interesting point you make there and I'm gonna I'm gonna go to you in a second Sachs if you pull up my computer for a second Nick one thing I cannot understand when I watch the media or I watch this discussion and we haven't seen doctor foul Chi in about 60 days I don't know where they buried him but he's been put in a bunker somewhere but the number of deaths in the United States continues to go down massively now I know New York was a big outbreak and that contributes to it but at the same time if you look and you compare deaths to new cases you know the new cases has increased in some regions and testing has gone way up so in trying to interpret this data I don't understand why there's not somebody saying listen here's the newse debts are going way down testing is going way up and here's what we should take from that sax I think you and I are might be slightly different sides of the aisle when it comes to to politics how do you look at this in terms of leadership at a federal level and then the media and how you know to jamaat's point we politicize this yeah well I agree that that things get overly politicized and mass is a is a really good example it's just a really common sense easy solution you know I wrote a blog that we covered on this pod two and a half months ago saying that I thought math should be public mass wearing should be policy it should be the law little did I know that I was taking a left-wing position yeah did you lose any friends over that right still talking to you I mean I know you guys have me on the show as the the token right winger but actually I just appear at CNN just asked me to be on the show today to explain why mass should be policy so I I just thought that was a common-sense thing you know I'm normally very receptive to libertarian arguments but you know like like we talked about the boundaries of libertarianism are you know you only have the freedom to wave your arms until your fist hits my nose you know and something similar is true about in when your infectious particles hit my nose you know there there are reasonable boundaries to freedom there in the interests of other people's health and and you know that that blog a lot of public pronouncements about kovat if not aged very well over the last couple of months I think that blog actually is aged pretty well by comparison and because you just look at all the countries that have been successful at fighting kovat I mean Japan has 135 million people it's an old population and they've had under a thousand deaths South Korea 51 million people under 300 deaths you take a Western European nation like Czech Republic they had a huge kovat outbreak spike just like the rest of Europe they went all-in on mass wearing and they've completely controlled the viruses knocked out and so it's really crazy to me that we just can't get on the same page as a country about something as obvious and easy as mass wearing and it's because we the the the the left wants to get Trump out of office so badly and they're so triggered by him and they hate him so much whether that's valid or not we'll leave aside that they want to and then he wants to say no mask I don't understand his motivation what do you what do you think Trump is thinking and who's advising him that he should be anti mask I I think somehow it's for the right has become an act of defiance and I understand that to some degree because I do think that the lockdowns went on too long they with I think with 20/20 hindsight we would say the lockdowns weren't necessary if we had just gone all-in on a mass policy that's what they did in Japan right and so you you know the the problem the problem with kind of the the politicians in charge is that you know well backing up a second I think the right policy is to end lockdowns but where mass and the problem with the politicians is half of them didn't want to end lockdowns and the other half didn't want to wear masks and that's kind of the the weird way in which has become this political football Trump was trying to do this as an act of defiance what was the left trying to accomplish do you think what would be your cynical or charitable approach to what their reaction to this and locking down so severely well I just I I think that what was the purpose of lockdowns I think it was the I think the initial reaction was it was based on what happened in Italy right and so in Italy we had kind of had this worst-case scenario where the hospital system got overwhelmed you know tremendous fatality rate from the virus and then we started to see the same thing happening in New York and and I think you know blocking down briefly in New York to get a handle on the situation I think was justified I don't think again with 20/20 hindsight that we needed to do it anywhere else in the country if we had instead you know just worn masks do you think the left though perpetrated a perpetual lockdown this is the most cynical view that I've heard and I don't think you hear this often and that's part of why we do this pockets is to sort of explore these you know kind of takes that you hear on the inside but not maybe on CNN the cynical interpretation was they wanted to keep locked down to crash the economy to make Trump look bad to get him out of the office do you think there's anything valid to that argument I you know I I don't know I yeah I mean I don't it's certainly possible I think that it's possible though that the left just kind of under weights you know the economic damage of lockdowns you know I heard a lot of arguments about from from the left that if you wanted to end lockdowns then you care more about money than lives you can't put a price on a life which is literally what we do all the time like insurance health care we put up price on life free birth but but I was never in favor of doing nothing I mean I you know I was tweeting weeks ago that we should end lock downs but we're a mass and so my argument would be look at Japan you do more for lives and the economy by having a mass policy instead of lockdowns Freiberg what's your take on sacks estate no I don't disagree I mean I you know I'm not I'm not a great expert on kind of the politics and you know I can kind of comment on policy I think in terms of what I think is reasonable and not I certainly you know thought that the lock downs were unreasonable in the extent but then the problem was they weren't followed so they were all for waste so the worst of all the worst of all outcomes yeah but there wasn't all huge I liked until they actually went into effect there wasn't a huge amount of debate about theirs it was just like oh [ __ ] we better all go into lockdown what happens this is almost like the human conscious and unconscious mind like you know the conscious mind rationalizes what the unconscious already decided to do so everyone freaked out everyone had a great deal of fear we shut everything down and then the left and the right had their own rationalization after the fact you know what that meant was it good was it bad did we overreact and we under react should we have done more and so I feel like the narrative told a little bit too late here where we all kind of like have these commentaries about left and right Paul it's politics after the fact and you know I don't think it's really meaningful to be honest it's just almost like let's what's the windy what happened story with our own point of view based on our cried for whatever we sit in so trimethyl weird how do we get out of this now because the debts are going to hangover out we're at we're up the the genies out of the bottle look the reality is there is not a single country government that can tolerate future lockdowns because I think the populations will revolt and so we're going to have to deal with cases as they crop up and we're gonna have to deal with infection rates popping up and you know we'll have to deal with these bursty economic landscape today Apple just announced you're closing a bunch of stores and a few in a few states though I'm sure they'll reopen them in a few weeks but we're gonna be in this sort of start and stop mode now for the foreseeable future but it's just not possible to ask people now to go back into any form of quarantine or shelter-in-place I just don't think they'll do it right and people people only do lockdowns until there's some activity that they they want to engage in that they think is essential right and so you saw with the protests if you believe that the civil rights protests are essential you believe that you're out of lockdown and you know and if you want to go to a trump rally you believe that's essential and you're out of lockdown and so you know so everybody you know you have the case in Texas of the woman who wanted to open her air cut salon and so you know you were never gonna get good compliance with a lockdown plan in addition to the damage and destruction it caused it was never very effective because people weren't willing to do it and I think the big public policy mistake here was the politicians squandering their credibility on lock down so we're never very feasible instead of just going all in on mass and it would have been a lot cheaper I've yet by the way the other thing is we need to push mask-wearing back into a public health debate and you know Newsom yesterday gavin newsom the governor of california basically said masks are not mandatory in California the thing is you have to add fines if you don't wear them where you know people can be cited and fined and then the other thing and David you said this earlier is you have to be criminally culpable at some level if you go out of your way to not wear a mask and infect somebody and there is a a bunch of you know case law on how this can be true and so I think that you know we need to we need to solve these things because you need to have good hygiene around mask wearing and what the consequences are if you choose to not wear one well you know chop it's interesting you bring that up there was a there have been cases of people purposely infecting people with the HIV virus and going to jail for it and being liable for it so there is I think and I'm different different coughing in somebody's face versus having sex with them when you know you're infected what is the difference well that wouldn't have you saw this viral video of the the Karen which is a so many Karen's these days so many Karen's and Aunt Karen just like got upset that somebody was calling around for not wearing a mask in a cafe and she literally coughed on the person I know did you see that video how is yeah person not in jail I mean it's I think that was in New York right and I think it was New York and the woman didn't know she was being filmed but oh my lord I mean the great thing about the internet right now is like if anybody basically transgresses they are identified in about a nanosecond and I mean I saw that because on sound the Saturday morning she coughed on this person who was complaining about her not wearing a mask and within 15 minutes they had her LinkedIn they had contacted Weill Medical Center where she worked and then while put out a press release basically saying we had fired her you know for being a dummy well before the mask thing and so the whole thing now just gets so adjudicated and resolved so quickly it's it's it's incredible we basically moved to judge dredd now it's like the the social media is the judge the jury and the cops in this entire equation the one that I loved actually that that really actually frankly I look forward to was the the the cyclists in Maryland I mean you know you cannot go after kids touching another person's child and and women and like attacking them for putting up you know blacklivesmatter posters like and then to attack these but then again it was the sub community on reddit and it was amazing it was the actual like Maryland subreddit who knows what's going on in the Maryland subreddit on reddit what could they be talking about but they identified this guy and he was fired he was arrested and it all happened with him you know probably 36 hours but you got you guys know in that story there was another guy who was identified first and he's my lease officer and people went after him and he basically had his life ruined within those first 24 hours and he will God yeah yeah he went the guy the way they died was dystrophy a data right like he had they found a guy on Slavia who had promised whatever a guy was using stevia the app that does for the bike people and they monetize that app through subscriptions correct don't make fun of my dyslexia your mob bully me on my own podcast you say monetize on CNBC in front of millions of people it's a label you've tried to teach you how to pronounce that word for 15 years I know but I say it on purpose now and I lean into it now Moni is slightly pornographic later okay go back to your stevia story what is it wait right so so so what happened is this guy got in trouble and this is my point about the problem with the groupthink hivemind approach to these issues is you can end up not when you don't follow a predefined due process and you let the mob kind of rule over these moments bad [ __ ] can happen too and so what happened what happened to the cop the cop II like everyone started chasing him down and like you know his whole life got ruined every was like death threats and [ __ ] with him and all that sort of stuff how calling his employer calling people who no invited but they found his phone number they found to address a dacha turned upside down yeah and but basically like the fact that they found out that it was someone else doesn't resolve the fact that there are now hundreds of people after this guy and they don't pay attention that it wasn't him and you know due process has a role in a civilized society where you can actually create structure and resolve these things in a proper way as opposed to letting mob mentality kind of rule I mean otherwise you know this stuff can get it pretty ugly pretty fast as we saw as this being just a really you know pretty lightweight example but I'm not sure I'm a huge advocate of this like chase the guy down and then punish him at once and cancel this cancel culture is a little bit ugly right now you don't have all the facts in this stuff in a lot of these cases yeah there is definitely it's great that you can find criminals so quickly and I'm curious what people think and obviously you just don't want to miss target somebody so there's if you do find somebody's targeted like give the information to the authorities but you may not want to DOX them immediately and and try to ruin their lives before you actually know what's going on a lot of companies now Microsoft IBM and others Amazon I think are saying we don't want to we're going to take a pause on facial recognition I'm curious what your each of your thoughts are on law enforcement and we'll get into the law enforcement discussion and race relations here in this country and what we went through we look we we have been we have been we've been arming our police force mistakenly like our military and we've been doing it for you know decades now and it makes no sense there was this crazy tweet I saw today maybe we can find a OC tweeted out where she found this announcement from some like long tail Police Department somewhere who basically got a free armored truck carrier and you know they're they're they're driving it around town or whatever pulling it out of the garage it looks like downtown Baghdad and you're like I mean they're in like Fargo North Dakota wherever they are I mean like it's just so it makes no sense I don't think I don't think any of us thought that we wanted to apportion our tax dollars to build a second shadow army I think we all want an arm Navy and Marines and an Air Force we want you know aircraft carriers and f-16s and tanks and machine guns and all that stuff but we want them with our military and then we want cops I think to be extremely well trained I mean half the time you know cops are you know you ask them to be mental health counselors other times you're asking them to be you know CPR givers other times you're asking them to be criminal apprehend errs the job is too complicated they clearly can't do it they're poorly trained and then you arm them on top of all of that and you have this shitshow that we have today yeah it's not like there's an AED waiting somewhere for them to drive over where they need metal plating on the bottom of the vehicle that's not what they're dealing with every day at a minimum let's like look I I'm a huge fan of ending qualified immunity I think that doesn't make any sense I think we have to stop arming our police like their military don't train them like the military trained them like a different kind of service and we may need to go back to first principles to figure out how to actually train them properly to spot abuse to deal with mental health and just to be you know a little bit more patient and understanding and empathetic versus trigger-happy can ask you can ask you a question on that so a lot of the actions that police take when it comes to lethal action is defended by the notion that my life was under threat as a cop and that sources from the fact that we have a Second Amendment in this country where a lot of people are you know you know gun carriers in Orlando to have arms so our police force has had to respond with the fact that there are a lot of guns in this country with defensive principles and defensive mechanisms to defend themselves against the loss of life due to a gun and that makes the United States really unique in terms of the the circumstance versus if you look at the United Kingdom where they don't have a second Amendment right to bear arms the police aren't armed and the police behavior is significantly different you can look at this in any country where there isn't a right to bear arms do we not have a fundamental problem in this country that stems from the fact that the police feel or can justify that they're always under threat of loss of life due to arms being out in the Contra I think is a fabulous question the Contra example I would say is if look at Switzerland where the per capita gun ownership is really high Canada where per capita gun ownership is really high what I would tell you is there's a different kind of psychological training that police people go through before they're put on the streets and that is fundamentally different here the job as is defined to them here is different than it is in Canada or Switzerland where you know gun ownership levels are quite robust and I think it all comes down to incentives and the reality is is that there is a to your point David this amplification of this idea that everybody is armed which i think is fundamentally mostly not true in the day to day course of like living one's life but I think police people tend to be very amplified around that threat and as a result the unions have basically written contracts that protect their use of force the law is written in a way that protects their use of force and so all of it comes from to your point the defensive posture of fear but if you actually tried to train these people differently I think you'd have a different outcome because what I can tell you is the police in Canada do behave differently they don't reach for their gun every second it's an interest I think there's a very interesting example and I know we don't want to like just take one anecdotal incident and then you know make a big sweeping generalization with it but if you look at the gentleman in Atlanta who was shot in the back twice Rasheed Brooks Rashard Rashard Brooks Rashard Brooks this example to me is so a luxury of the problem they spent 40 minutes talking with this individual who was absolutely not a threat they had frisked him they knew he was not armed he was intoxicated he's in a drive-through of all the ways you could have dealt with the situation and I come from a family of police officers and I can tell you a lot of stories about cops letting people go obviously white people with warnings in this situation letting him sleep it off taking his keys letting him run away you know who it is you have his driver's license you have his car you have skis let him run away under what circumstances would you feel justified shooting a person when there were so many other options and I it comes exactly I believe Chamath from two things you pointed out one they're in a very defensive position into the training they're trained to use lethal force and if you're in a situation where you feel threatened you just shoot that's it and if you shoot you shoot to the center of the body to kill the person and in their training they're not trained to think how do i disarm the situation defuse the situation and what are the other options this person is obviously not a threat and you knew the Taser was fired twice I'm not saying the person should have resisted arrest I'm not saying the person shouldn't have aimed that the Taser at the person but they should be trained to protect life and defuse situations at all costs Jason like think about the incentives they should have been trained maybe to just walk into the Wendy's by this guy coffee and then drive him to the motel that he said that he was staying at yes or they should or they should have been trained to just write a ticket and say listen here's a you know here's a citation for being drunk because you did technically kind of drive and I'm gonna leave it alone they could have done many things that they chose not to do because the incentive was to you know project power in that situation versus project any kind of empathy and compassion right and and the selection of people who go into the police department and I come from a family of police officers and firefighters brother uncle cousin grandfather up and down the line Irish cops and firefighters big tradition of my family and I can tell you that there is a contingent of people who go into the police who are power-tripping or maybe didn't get wherever else they wanted to be in life and the job of seeing people in dealing with the bad stuff that you pointed out you know people in domestic domestic violence situations people who are mentally ill homeless addicted addiction problems all of that then trains these peoples to see the worst in humanity and then they just look at their job as just this dystopian horrible experience and they are in that defense of whereas we need to train people and I made this tweet where we should have a new class of police officer that is more like a Jedi Knight you know they get paid twice as much they have master's degree in social work of psychology and when that call comes in for an emotionally disturbed person a person who's intoxicated on drugs a domestic violence situation you don't want to send the average beat cop to that you want to send the Jedi no but Jason make it even easier like when you go in and again a 9-1-1 call and it's you know there could be it's it's it's somebody who's in sort of like mental distress or you're gonna do a mental health check why don't you send a really well-trained social worker absolutely and the reason is why don't we have a whole you know a whole force of social workers that we pay $100,000 a year absolutely and and that's what these police officer making and there is an argument to not have them armed there's an argument for them to be armed but maybe they're so enlightened and trained so well I think the training in the United States is in the low hundreds of hours in other countries it's thousands of hours I mean if a person has a gun I think police should not get their gun until they've completed maybe two or three thousand hours on the job in other words they get to their second or third year so the first year when you're a Probie why even have a gun why not just have them doing things without a gun and then when you get that gun maybe you need to have the equivalent of a master's degree you know maybe you need to have a level of training and we need to go to first principles like you're saying trim off and rethink this whole thing in any startup or any problem-solving you would look at the show me the thousand calls how did they break down what were the outcomes and if you look at the outcomes of dealing with mentally ill people or people who are addiction or domestic disputes the outcomes are things that police are not trained for that's got to be a very high percentage of these situations let alone the no-knock warrant which makes absolutely no sense I mean I think I think there's there's just a lot of look there's a lot of change coming I think that there's a lot of legislation afoot at every sort of level of government and I think the good news is that it's going to be hard for people to sit on their hands on I don't think it's going to be universally across the country but I do think that you know people will then again self select and want to live in places where you know sort of like the laws match their ideals and this is going to be an area of tremendous reform and change you know what's interesting about all of this is like if you actually go back to the Republican ideology it's interesting to me why Republicans aren't the first ones to try to embrace rewriting you know the union contracts and actually decreasing unionized power because that's sort of like has generally been 1/10 whole theme of Republican ideology but then as it gets applied to cops I think they kind of just abdicate responsibility so there's a lot of reasons where you could have bipartisan agreement on a bunch of these things but again I think we're we're we kind of like get caught up and we refuse to see the forest from the trees and want to fix these things but I suspect that a lot of these changes will happen just because they're so bloody obvious and depending on your ideology you can frame the same reason for completely different motives and get to the same answer yeah nobody nobody wants this Sachs what do you think about the union issue as our token right winger I think yeah I think I think the police unions have too much power all the public employee unions do I think you know just like the teachers unions have thwarted school choice and education reform I think we're seeing the police unions toward a lot of sensible reforms around the use of force you know I our our friend bill girl he's been tweeting a lot of great research that around police departments that are unionized there's a lot more complaints against them there's a lot more examples of the use of force and unwarranted use of force and so clearly there's a connection here between police unions and the forwarding of common-sense reforms and I saw someone someone tweeted this idea that you know the reason I know is taking on the police unions is because the Republicans see the word police and Democrats see the word union and they're both fans of those things and so who's who's gonna take them on yeah I mean and teachers unions is the same thing and the political system the political power of the unions is so entrenched that in order to get in office for in most cases you're going to need to have the support of those unions and if you don't they're going to tell people to explicitly not to vote for you yeah I mean well well look I mean you look at the cities that have had the biggest problems here I mean starting with Minneapolis and these are Democrat controlled cities these are not you know Republican controlled cities and the politicians are very much you know in cahoots with the big Union the unions there including the police and the teachers unions of all that and so you know both parties need to to be open to reform to your point David there's a there's a story that came out last or last couple of days about the DA in Atlanta who pressed charges against the two officers but the narrative was about how the DA is being investigated for getting a hundred and forty K in kickbacks from a non-profit tied to something and then he was claiming that his main opponent who's right who could could because these you know district attorneys are politically elected officials right where she had basically done a side deal with the police to not to not go after you know use of force in return for their endorsement and you know what a what a horribly messy like complicated growth situation irrespective of whoever turns out to be right there so to your point they've become so entrenched and it's just so low level that then you know what should be obvious justice basically just gets thrown away for what's expedient and convenient yeah well you know this is another example where like like with the mass I felt like there were you know I wasn't violating conservative principles I thought there really was a conservative principle I think with you know with with this example of the overuse of force by police you go back to what Lord Acton said which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely if there's no one standing up to the police unions politically they have absolute power and that's going to lead to corruption so I do think like Republicans should be looking into this now I think part of the reason and why Republicans want to defend the police's because we've also had these examples of looting and rioting and lawlessness you know after the the civil rights protests and I think that again we're kind of dividing up and into sides and there's too much justification of bad behavior on both sides because of what the other side is doing you know and I heard people on the Left justifying the the looting and rioting on the grounds that you know it was a legitimate expression of you know opposition is a legitimate protest as a legitimate expression of opposition to to the police violence and I think that that is wrong and I think it's wrong for people on the right to defend this police the successive use of force by police on the grounds that somehow it's justified because we need to control the lawlessness and the rioting and you know I think both are wrong and and we lack a federal leadership to not make this overly political but when Trump then tear gases with the military protesters to go to a photo opportunity you know it's sending the message that he want and he wants to be the law and order president now you're just charging things up instead of just going on TV and just saying something to bring people back to the concept that we're all Americans we're all in this together and we rise and fall together it's such an easy statement listen the protesters have valid concerns we need to work on this issue and yes if you see people doing any vandalism you have we have to stop them please make sure that doesn't happen because it it works against the very valid criticism and protests that are going on that need to go on and in the fact that the president can't say that is crazy well what do you guys think about what he has been saying and how Twitter and Facebook have basically taken different sides of Freiberg go ahead where Trump's been saying yeah should food should Twitter be censoring him / putting warnings on his posts when he's like crazy I think so yeah look I mean it's such a slippery slope and there's too much room for interpretation I'm just saying the obvious but you know if you're a platform you're a platform you you let the things get built on top of you sure you can have some some rules around what can be built but as soon as you start you know saying what is true and what is not true and you become the arbiter of truth you're no longer an agnostic platform and I think that you know that is a big dangerous risk to take because as you guys know something maybe and I think we saw this with the what's that Twitter accounts euro hedge was the pinnacle hedge they got an and then they came back because it turns out what they said wasn't necessarily as untrue with Twitter at first thought that they were saying was untrue so you know it was a great example of how you know a point of interpretation can very quickly kind of reverse course and you can look extremely biased in making that decision at that time when the YouTube took Susan Wojcicki took the what Jackie took the position at YouTube that we're going to allow people to talk about coronavirus if what they're saying is in sync with the World Health Organization yeah and by the way the World Health Organization I've had an issue with since well before Co vyd just from another life they I won't get into it but they've said some stuff publicly that was just flat-out [ __ ] wrong scientifically and invalid and it was politicized and we we kind of got to the root of the political driver behind it so I've long held kind of disbelief in the World Health Organization as a trusted source of scientific fact and to Sax's previous point you want to be able to check power and if the World Health Organization is this incredibly powerful organization who got it wrong with masks and didn't even you know like David Sachs is getting it right some venture capitalist in the Bay Area gets it right about mask in the World Health Organization gets it wrong well he's in Mexico but yeah undisclosed location but okay Sachs should they should they be putting labels and warnings on politicians when they say things that are consensus wrong yeah I mean call me old-fashioned but I'm very much in favor of free speech and I'm against censorship and you know fact-checking your politicians you don't like is is a is basically bias it's soft censorship I mean they're being very selective in who they decide to fact-check and you know there's no good way to do it right I mean there is no truth API that they can just plug in to fact-check people the way that you deal with with bad speech is more speech I think it's a line from Justice Brandeis that is the way historically that we have in this country that we've dealt with speech by people we don't like which is you have more speech and and I I don't think censorship or warnings is the right way to go mouth what do you think having worked at Facebook okay I think it exposes a couple things one is that the Twitter product is is still relatively brittle I mean like at least Facebook has a whole suite of emoticons to say something is a crock of [ __ ] you know and it makes you feel bad or you know makes you feel angry or thumbs down or whatever and so Twitter's reactionary feedback mechanism to its algorithms is very brittle and so if you were gonna try to algorithmically tune down the distribution of you know a trump tweet you know you could see where you could balance thumbs up or hearts in this case with other ways of signaling that this is either wrong or hate-filled or you know instigating and and I think like a little bit more self policing is probably the only scalable solution all of that said here's what I will say I think basically that Facebook is is becoming Middle America and Twitter is becoming sort of the coasts and you know Facebook is basically a product of Middle America plus kind of like countries outside the United States and fit you know Twitter's about you know rich coastal kind of people and you can see that the way that the content ABB's inflows and you know the kind of content problems like just for an example you know what is what is Twitter's latest content problem it was that Donald Trump tweeted a video from CNN that was doctored you know and it and it only showed a clip of a you know a black toddler running away from a white toddler and the caption was you know the chyron said something about racism it turned out to not be wrong blah blah blah what is Facebook's issue two days ago it was that you know the Boogaloo movement which is you know a bunch of people who believe in the militia and an impending Civil War principally use Facebook and Facebook groups to organize and they found out that they were distributing and you know driving you know viewers and usage and content so it just kind of tells you like and if you break down the issues and you know there's a there's a couple of people who tweet out the most popular tweets on Twitter versus the most popular content on Facebook what you see is the left and right distribution and so I think that the audiences are segregating themselves into into into using products that basically feed them what they want to hear well let me ask you a question about the leadership we you work directly with Zuckerberg for many years and we all know jack from Twitter from various projects what is Zuckerberg politics is he a secret trump supporter is just Peter Thiel who's on the board and your good friends would Peter Taylor and worked with Peter Thiel Sachs I'm curious what you think goes on inside the brain of Mark Zuckerberg in terms of making these decisions is he scared that Facebook has become dependent on the right and is that true moth that it is a right thing and is he right or left what is his politics I don't think that's the right framing I think that if you're running a big Network like this you have to remember the you you know you're one of the five or six most valuable companies in the world you yourself have you know 50 60 70 billion dollars basically the world is your oyster and what you've seen over the last five or six years is that there is an increasing regulatory headwind and if you basically play the game theory out you know these companies are gonna get regulated and they're gonna get over tax and they're gonna get kind of slowed down at a minimum and broken up at the maximum and so if you're running one of these companies I think the only thing you can do is hold on and so if you're gonna hold on there's no point in making any of these changes because it minimized the amount of cash you can make in the amount of you know support you'll have so you might as well pick a side SF effectively by doing nothing and waiting and I and I and I think that's that's largely what all these guys have decided to do they've essentially said we're not gonna sort of take a side here well no Twitter has taken a side Twitter because they're small enough they can survive they're not going to get broken up but if you're one of the top four or five look at the position they've taken the position they've taken is we have no position that's Facebook's position we have no position we're not gonna police adds no hold on it's also Google's it's also Microsoft it's also apples and it's also Amazon's and in fairness to Facebook all big five tech companies have said our position is no position and the reason is because that's the only thing they can do to keep that market cap and to hold on to the economic vibrancy of their businesses for longer sex why did Twitter and Jack actually take a position because this cannot happen if jack is not a hundred percent supportive of it he is the driver of it and the person who okay's it and then what do you think Zuckerberg bought didn't want to answer this but I want you to try to answer it what is Zuckerberg relationship with Peter TL and his thinking on a political basis in your mind without you know giving up your relationship with Peter about what is his politics and and what is their relationship well I I don't know exactly what sucks politics are and or not even exactly I have no idea what his politics are not remotely and I do remember the time when Peter supported Trump during the election and the rest of the board wanted to run him off the board so clearly it's not like I highly doubt Facebook as a bastion of right-wing thinking but why would Zuckerberg keep him on the board then in defiance of everybody else who hates him maybe he simply believes that supporting the Republican candidate and a presidential election is not grounds for removal from a board maybe he simply is not that intolerant I think I mean I'm gonna actually go out on a limb here and defend Zuckerberg a little bit which is my impression of what Zuckerberg is trying to do is simply maintain Facebook as a speech platform and you know if you're gonna be a speech platform you're going to be caught in the crosshairs of all these very controversial debates and you know people are gonna publish things that other people hate in fact even that the majority hates but isn't that the type of speech that the ACLU historically defended you know it feels to me like there's been a rise mainly on the left in terms of intolerance for speech they don't like that they consider to be 100 it sufficiently what yeah you saw that with the New York Times newsroom I think you tweeted a tweet storm from an opinion writer there is around the the Tom cotton editorial which you know it's not like I agreed with it but they kind of had a they basically fire the opinion page editor because they realized they published and by the way sorry just to build on your point the title which wasn't even written by Tom cotton was I would say an order of magnitude worse than the article if you read the whole article right but the title was really offensive wasn't even written by them who's written I think by the editor that got fired but the article itself was kind of bad but not nearly as bad as the title would she do this because Freiberg twenty years ago when we were all as Gen Xers coming up we were taught to defend freedom of speech this is a core tenant of a vibrant democracy and that you need to be able to read unpopular opinions in fact the KKK needs to be able to march down Main Street and we need to protect that ugly speech in order for everybody else to have it and here we have a you know an editorial which obviously none of us agree with is is is this an existential threat to America that we are now going to say freedom of speech is not a core tenant of the of the American experiment I'm just looking for the term that was used but what's the other New York Times opinion writer I forgot her name static maybe you'll help me but she talks about like a comfort culture or so basically we used to pride ourselves on a culture that enabled freedom of speech and and and that was that was cherished and heralded and what is cherished and heralded now is a culture that protects people from hearing offensive and scary things that they don't want to hear and that shift you know those of us who are Gen X which I think I am out born in 1980 into the Millennial gems II and beyond kind of generation has occurred and it is fundamentally changing the the nature of how we find truth and how we find you know coalesce around decisions as a society and we're excluding the things that are offensive and it's a little bit scary to think about from my point of view that you know we can't explore all options we can't hear all dissenting points of view this is certainly a very deep argument about how our society and our democracy operates but it is happening and so the point was like we are we are starting to shift towards valuing comfort over over freedom of expression and and that's that's just kind of the big the big change that's occurring and look we do live in a democracy so the votes are going to be what ultimately decides what happens here votes in terms of who's using Facebook versus Twitter and votes in terms of who's voting for what presidential candidate and what governor and what mayor and so we'll see you know it's it's it's it's it's a it's a sea change in how this democracy operate yeah I think it's a sea change going back very far because the the the whole principle of the Enlightenment going back hundreds of years was stated by Voltaire which is that I may disagree with what you have to say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it who today is willing to do that I mean that was the the idea that led to political liberalisation in the West it's really a unique feature of Western democracies and liberalism you go to anywhere else in the world I guarantee you people aren't defending to the death your right to say things they disagree with I don't think they're you know I don't think she's you're paying a recruit and is defending your right to hear things that they don't want you to so you know this is a very foundational part of of American and you know Western political liberalism and it's being challenged now and I think you know we should have more self confidence in our ideas to worry so much about Donald Trump's tweets which are ephemeral be forgotten very soon that we're willing to throw out freedom of speech well yeah I mean this is the thing I don't understand about labeling his tweets is you know I mean it's anybody not think that this guy is hopped up on adderall or a complete [ __ ] like or any of those things like we all know he's an idiot who just tweets 50 times a day and he's too scared you know that he's not gonna win his you know reelection and that he's a real he's a little a reality store so who do you mean by when you say we we all cuz it's a different way that I think you're saying that I think other people would be saying yeah but we represent right I mean that's I think the generational divide here is I don't know if it's generational I think there's a lot of dimensions across which these differences of perspective occur and I've said this for amongst our group for a long time but there's a huge difference between a rural population and urban population in the United States in terms of what their priorities are and I think that difference in priorities is unconscious and that's where things really resonate that Trump says and that really moved the needle for a lot of folks the priority of civil rights is not as it might be an urban center is not a priority in a rural center and in a rural population there's a different priority Trump no matter what how he says it the things he's saying are different than what I'm tearing from the urban population which is where the media comes from and so on and so forth and so Trump resonates with me I don't care if he sounds a little bit wacky I need wacky cuz it needs to be different then than standard and it's just there's a lot of divides here and a lot of dimensions across yeah I think I think that we absolutely should not throw the baby out with the bathwater we should never attack this very basic principle of free speech because we will never forgive ourselves if we do but then this is why I think we come back to we should be a little bit more resilient to build products and services that allow a little bit more texture in the discussion so that you actually can have free speech floor more in a more transparent way so David to your point you know how do you drown out you know hate speech it's with more speech well these products don't necessarily even enable that and so I do think that we have this you know sort of an issue where the products and services that billions of people use to consume their information and construct a worldview today they neither will allow things to be flagged nor will they increment the feature surface area so that you can actually have so then that's why I think people then get into this place where everybody feels cornered and nobody likes what's happening and so I think that's kind of what we're in I think that if we had a little bit more ingenuity and thinking by the folks at you know Twitter and Facebook it would go a long long way yeah I do think there's something I mean the conundrum of Twitter is simultaneously it's the main way I get my news information but I also see it as a huge source of groupthink and kind of mob mentality and so you you know the more time you spend on Twitter I mean I see a lot people saying the more unhappy they are and so you do wonder whether it's making you more informed or whether it's just making you buy into some sort of mass psychosis well it could be you could becoming more informed and you could be going into a psychosis which we have a lot of friends who are high-profile who like their behavior on Twitter is a separate thing than who they actually are right like they just lose their [ __ ] on Twitter and you know they the the is really a very strange place to be sure can we talk by the way could we just talk about this Bolton book I mean what the [ __ ] I mean he he did ask you jimping to help him win the election and he bartered buy soybeans to help me win the election I mean this is insane I think I think we need to we need to first of all you always got a look at the source here so I don't know how somebody commentator who's as far right as you could go well who was picked by Trump himself well he was a very weird choice for Trump because one of the main reasons why Trump won the Republican nomination as he promised no more bushes meaning an end to these crazy vo neocon wars of intervention and this guy bolton like he's right out of that playbook yeah yeah he's the like Hawk of hawks there's not a war he doesn't want to get us into he wanted to get us into our war with Iran they never made any sense for Trump to hire them in the first place so do you know why he hired him I stated in the book I've heard I've heard the explanation that he liked I think he said something like when when he sends Bolton into a room he likes it he like he thinks it strengthens this negotiating position because the other side thinks that they were about us is about to invade or something when born and it's also Trump was like I love hearing you talk eh just like FoxNews like that's the quote is so he literally picks people base I mean and he picked Ludlow right for his you know he picks them based on being TV personalities I just think this Bolton guy is like you know this is crazy war hawk who also is this kind of like a weasel and I don't know how he creates a 500 page book out of spending 17 months in the White House I guess he's writing down every I'm surprised it's not five thousand yes that should be like tokens Lord of the Rings trilogy I'm gonna put this other if he can produce the note that Pompeo gave him that said Trump is so full of [ __ ] that thing at auction I'm telling you now what do you each bid for it five hundred thousand dollars at least five hundred thousand if that note actually exists and he has it oh it's not I mean it's it's but I just think to me first of all it's a little ludicrous that this guy he is a bit of a weasel because like where were you during the impeachment a he made an economic calculation that his book was more important than the future of the country so first of all you know kind of go [ __ ] go [ __ ] yourself to that but the the other thing though is that you know be beyond his sort of like character flaws it's just the story after story after story it's just kind of from the bizarre to be absurd like Finland's a part of Russia England doesn't have nuclear weapons please buy so you you are part of me you are part of the nuclear powers UK really the United Kingdom has nukes Wow what if India gets um it but every every one of these insider tell-all books always makes the you know always makes the president look bad I mean it's not it's not a hard task was there anything though that was surprising to anyone the XI Jingping enough blockbuster vision thinking did catch me off guard that he was that brazen and kind of sad it's alright you I mean like like the fact that it was said but like the motivation the attention no to your point Mike my expectations are so low it's it's like teaching a kid to poop in the toilet for the first time you know as long as it doesn't poop on the floor even if he does it in his diaper you know everything looks like success as long as there is just not raw feces on my hardwood if he if he sat on the potty its success its success even if the pants weren't pulled down if he poops his pants everybody tell me about tell me about I just want to switch topics tell me about vaccines because it seems to me that there's like a growing Court of people and I'm not gonna put moderna in this camp but like maybe they did that were very opportunistically out there generating a ton of PR but what if you had to pick a time and a time frame and then a manufacturing time frame can you just tell me what was the over-under so we commit we can bet aligned on it so there's gonna I think there's gonna be a staged release of vaccines that'll probably believe it or not starting q4 of this year and there's been production ramped up going on in parallel to testing so you know to get these vaccines produced whether you're talking about the MRNA vaccine or you're talking about the viral vaccine like they did in China which they actually do have in production there's a bunch of different challenges with scaling up and ramping production and then you know what's called downstream processing and filtering and then packaging and all this stuff anyway it's a it's a big [ __ ] exercise so what's gone on is there's been a parallel effort to actually scale up production of these things before we've actually completed the testing them to make sure that they're safe and efficacious and as a result and some of this came out of that first or second stimulus bill some of it came from private funding and then other governments are just straight up paying for it and so there are a number of facilities that are actually ramping production right now if they don't worry if the vaccines ultimately don't pass muster just gonna be a write-off of a couple billion dollars and so theoretically we could have doses that are available for distribution to healthcare workers and frontline people in queue for this year's is what I would kind of set the over-under at but do you know do these vaccines are like flu vaccines which is like fifty sixty percent effective at best um yeah I don't really know the answer to that I would say that these things are probably pretty effective I would say the flu vaccine is just a high rate of mutation and also a low rate of utilization and a high rate of infection so we're gonna have a lower rate of infection probably a more moderate rate of mutation as a result and so we should be more in control if we get something that works with the current strains and the way that this this SARS Coby to the most of the vaccines are Deltora the seven I think major targets around the spike protein and in different epitopes across the spike protein and so you know your if you see a great degree of mutation across that protein it's likely going to be less infected infective and less effective as of that as a virus and so it'll go away and so I think that we've got a really good shot here what what are the odds that somebody politicizes the vaccine and America doesn't get it doesn't get it Oh place is a 100% yeah yeah I mean look we politicize [ __ ] Meisel 30% of people of kids now aren't getting vaccinated for measles which is crazy another's measles outbreaks happening in the US which is just you know mind-boggling so that's just happening in Marin where you are yeah that's it easy the highest percentage of graduate degrees in the country yeah no but I mean it's it's inevitable 'ti that they get SARS but David like how does how does the distribution of these vaccines work meaning like let's just let's just say that it's like Sanofi for example because I saw that the French government made a large investment and the Germans did as well to essentially like onshore a bunch of their you know companies who had promising vaccine candidates and so if you assume that there's a distribution of these vaccines let's just say the most efficacious ones in China are they just gonna dole this out to whoever's willing to buy it or they're gonna decide on a political basis how to basically give these and then when they come to the United States how do we know that it comes to Texas before it comes to Wyoming versus California versus New York so I think the ones that are getting federal support which all of them are pretty much at this point are you know going to be federally mandated in terms of distribution and it's probably some commercial agreement that none of us have seen in terms of like what that looks like so chocolate into the swing states where he's behind is what you're saying well I think this I think it'll probably be delegated down to Health and Human Services what are the chances that there's a trump logo on the side of the your Trump vaccine there's a Trump vaccine to save your life okay is a good point for us to kind of wrap around the horn choo moth and I think a lot of people were convinced that Trump was gonna sail into office now everything is showing you Fox News poll CNBC polls SurveyMonkey polls that Trump is very far behind especially in the swing states what are the chances Trump wins the election sacks I think he's well I think kovetz really hurt him because the sort of feather in his cap the thing it really I going for him was the economy that's been hurt but it's coming back you know the situation could look very different six months from now right now it looks pretty bleak because I do think that his reaction to the the crisis was seen as a very inflammatory but I think six months from now could be arriving a story five months so so you don't think he's gonna win right now but you're today if the election were today he would lose but you know the economy we're seeing a v-shaped recovery which i think is surprising all of us and if that holds up and we get past the civil unrest that we've had and you know peace offspring's so inflammatory on those issues i think that you know the situation could look very different in five months you got to remember the other thing which is Biden at some point is going to have to enter it to some presidential debates and you know doesn't know if he's gonna be there what you're saying cognitively yeah I mean that's to talk about but you actually think there's a cognitive issue yes or no probably yeah it's uncomfortable to say for some reason yeah but it's I mean at a minimum look I there's a problem with the way he speaks I don't know if there's a which is indicative of a problem with the way he thinks but you know like when if they're on stage for two hours in the debate I think we're gonna find out really quick and I and I think those debates are pretty unavoidable I don't think Bynes can go to figure out a way to get out of it so you know I think a lot of people think that he can just be propped up by a staff and they can to some extent but I think at some point you know we're gonna have to take a look at your Biden shabbath Trump wins Trump loses right now it's sort of 75 25 he loses okay I think that's gonna get closer to 55 45 as the date comes close I think it actually comes down to two issues number one is who does Biden pick as a running mate and can you lock up the the swing states with that running mate and number two which i think is probably going to play an enormous role if if the community organizing that saw the black lives matter movement get to this next level is avoiding and preventing voter suppression you know LeBron I think is about to start an enormous campaign with a lot of very well-heeled well-known celebrities to get out the vote but if there's a concerted effort to prevent voter suppression and get young people and people of color to the polls it's a Biden landslide but now we've gone from a trump landslide just six months ago in all of our minds to a Biden landslide Freiburg where are you at I still think Chrome's gonna win I'd say 70% chance Trump wins and I'll tell you why I think there's still there's not going to be structural improvement between now and November for the majority of people that voted for Trump in the last election there are going to be a large number of people in blue-collar and rural areas that remain challenged with their life and feel like they're missing out and they're missing and and this may even be true in inner-city districts but but the big kind of flip vote in the rural and blue-collar areas is gonna say I still need change I need things fixed and Trump is the agent of change Biden he has always been the agent of change and I'll tell you the other things that he's also a master of he's laying blame and so Trump is incredible at pointing a finger at some third party and saying that's the enemy I'm the guy who's gonna go defeat him for a year and I think that's what won in the election last time and I think it could win it might be elected again this time no matter what [ __ ] happens between now and November he will find a way to make the story about how some third party or some process or some deep state it's still responsible for that outcome that's keeping you down mr. blue-collar factory worker and I will be the person to vanquish that problem Biden is the old state he's the old guard he's the guy from before and we haven't changed anything in the last four years where people feel happy and secure about their lives I think to Sax's point if the economy was even stronger it may hurt Trump's chances sure a lot of folks might say great Trump's responsible let's give them a thumbs up but the more people are feeling pain the more they're looking for an agent of change and I think scrumpy against Biden is still gonna be that agent it makes me the deciding either tie or swing vote I believe Biden wins I believe Trump is absolutely lost his ability to win this because he made two critical errors two saxes very astute point he just complete blunder on wearing masks and leadership during kovat and complete blunder in terms of dealing with the social unrest which he could have acted as an reconciliation agent and he's his own worst enemy and couldn't do those two very simple things I think Biden wins big if he takes the following strategy which I will call the Avenger strategy which is it's not just about him he gets an incredible running mate to Tremont's point but not only that he pre announces his cabinet Avenger style and they start hosting hala Cuomo in New York daily briefings where they talk about what the country needs to do with a brain trust in a round table with five or six people pre-selected so you're not voting for Biden who might have cognitive issues and Sachs is correct he could fumble under Trump's greatest strength which is demolishing people in debates which we ourselves all watched we watched Hillary get absolutely beat up in those debates and that was our I remember those nights when we were watching about your house cometh and we our eyes opened right up like holy cow Hillary's in trouble here he's just really good at this type of maniac boxing that he does with little mark Rubio and everybody else here nightly but if he picks the right VP candidate and I want to know as we close here who is the VP candidate that you think he should pick Amy Klobuchar are just bowed out and said a woman is not enough you need to have a black woman so Chamath who is the ideal running mate Sachs who scares you the most since you know the GOP is gonna lose this time around who's the scariest for you and Freiberg who do you think you should pick give it some thought or you do not have a consensus choice I'll leave my statement to the end okay sack C poop you know like this and pick somebody you want him to pick cause it helps him lose well III don't know the the backbencher Democrat politicians well enough to say exactly I don't have a pick I would just say I would really like for him to pick a great crisis manager an operator somebody who's been there somebody who's been tested in a crisis because there's a very high chance that this VP pick will become the president given Biden's age and everything going on in the world and we've just seen crisis after crisis this year I think there's gonna be more shoes to drop and this person that we don't even know yet could very easily be the president itíd states in the next two years so I just hope you pick someone who is good at handling a crisis okay so that would mean Oprah perhaps God you just pick my five is that really her picture oh yeah yeah Oprah Winfrey I mean she would be she would be incredible oh my god what a wild every state oh she's incredible Oprah Winfrey for the win I mean if you're gonna pick somebody Biden Winfrey it's got a red got so many dunks a slam dunk I'm sorry better than Michelle Obama a.m. dunk better than Michelle Obama slam dunk I'm gonna email blinken and Evan Ryan right now Oprah Winfrey okay Freiberg you have a better candidate who's your choice provider III don't have I don't have a choice I mean I'm not gonna make a choice here but I I think the challenge he's gonna face is finding a black woman who can appeal to the blue-collar and rural vote in these areas where he needs to kind of win some win some folks over and so he's going to end up in these urban districts like the Atlanta mayor or like Kamala Harris and they're they're not gonna they're not gonna bring that vote so he isn't a little bit of a pickle here because the Amy Klobuchar hour helped him bridge the rural divide but you know he's got a he's got a I do I named this there's gonna be a bit of a search here the idea of going with Oprah because it just becomes she is such a reconciler now it doesn't fit the execution in a crisis to Sax's desire and I had actually just build a bigger business Trump I mean what do you but that is what is about to get to is I think she's so successful and she's such a great leader and so charismatic she would bring in better operators than Trump and pence ever could I mean look at the shitshow of people who came in and out of the cabinet it was one goofball an incompetent [ __ ] after another sorry to get a little frisky here at the end but I feel like we're at the poker game Trump's cabinet was in an embarrassment almost universally correct sacks well look I here's the problem with Oprah or if you want you know any other Hollywood celebrity a George Clooney or what have you they're just they're not used to getting beat up the way that politicians in our country get beat up you know they're used to having people catering to them they're used to having the star trailer and the star treatment and you know they tend to have a glass jaw and politics Pacifica's never been put in an environment where there's constantly assaulted Trump I mean was a celebrity but he was used to he kind of grew up in that whole New York tabloid environment and was used to punching and Counting embraced it in fact he was his own fake PR person he was ruling the post yeah it's you know said old saying about you know wrestling with a pig you know everyone gets dirty but the pig likes it I mean Trump is kind of like the pig who likes it you know mostly celebrities don't like having to get beat up you know they're used to being very popular and and that's why they tend to be I think tough picks politically is they don't they tend to have a glass jaw all right on that like free Biden winfrey love you let's play poker outside we'll see you all next time on the all end podcast bye-bye










hey everybody welcome to the all-in podcast this is our fifth episode as you know we regularly publish this podcast well every two to four weeks something like that and just to give you a little idea of how well this is going the podcasts peaked at number 10 in zag podcast even though we never publish it and we're only 400 so tell your friends about the podcast so we could be number one and just dunk on traditional media which is full of people who have us as the guests chasing number ten on what Apple Apple technology podcasts we literally raced I mean it went from like we debuted in the 20s then the teens and then boom we hit number 10 and I was talking to somebody in media who has us on as guest and I was like listen I formed a super team and we're now getting more traffic I'm sorry who are you talking to just like a mirror where you were just looking yourself I mean you are so [ __ ] arrogant after that shitty video what video are you buried - what oh my god you want me to say it tell the listeners you are a me just somebody an a how somebody made a cut of the billion times Jason mentioned he was an early investor in uber all right take it easy Virgin Galactic slash slack investor I don't I don't say anything I know the companies on the Chiron the lower third every time you're on CNBC everybody my problems I have too many unicorns to mention just one right they just go with one dimension they just go with PayPal and knows Peter T Oh David David I have a question why is there a picture of two pregnant men behind you for men to be impregnated this is a recent picture of Jason I on the golf course and I'm not sure who's more out of shape you look like you're about the class in fairness it's a hundred degrees it's a hundred and six degrees at 80% humidity and I kid you not this is the this was the second and third time I play golf this was the third time and I'm gonna just ask D frame David Freiburg is here of course he's our science friend buddy and shabbath property is here how many holes I want one of you to set the over-under on how many holes we completed each day the maximum number of holes we are eluded for okay Chamorro a lot of four and you're taking me over it was Sachs five five and there is a there's a there's a red door every five holes so that may have had something to do with it I took nine because I figured Jason was on his rights to the hot dogs well that's where the red doors were the hot dogs are you know you know why I said I said these two these two dorks with ADHD can barely make it an hour doing anything and so if you think an average Brown takes four hours and basically you know you get through four holes in about an hour and then you want to give up we got to the fifth hole I am addicted to golf now I don't know if you guys know this you can gamble on golf okay so I I the biggest match I ever played was as was a five hundred thousand million dollar NASA I don't know what at NASA is I lost I lost one and a half that's LS 750 K what what is it Matz that I bet NASA NASA is basically a gambling bet on a per hole basis not it we we had we had just a ton of fun and it was great because this was the first time I've ever it's the single best aspect of golf in my opinion if you gamble it makes that game one of the most incredible games because people with mental fortitude who cannot play it all can show up and literally make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars yeah we were playing for hundreds of dollars per hole so let's just leave it at that I thought we play hundred dollars holes so it was it was just for fun but man I I don't know about you guys do we have some we know if we know somebody who's got a membership in one of these places I'd love to go back out again but it was great fun and Shadow Creek come to Shadow Creek in Vegas we can play it's probably the best gambling golf course in the world okay I'm in so let's get to business for those of you who are tuning in for the first time Chimel Paulo Hypatia is my co here co-host here on the podcast we've been friends since we both did a very brief tour at AOL he then went to work for Mayfield which is a venture firm you might not have heard of he stayed there for about 27 weeks before going to work for Mark Zuckerberg he secured the bag then started his own venture firm it grew way too big and he kind of got bored having to manage 100 people so now he's running his home office venture firm and doing two deals a year the one you've certainly heard of is Virgin Galactic where he's taking people to space and he did ass back for that IPO B and IPOC are lined up from what I understand will correct me if I am wrong and he'll be packing two more companies once a year I guess we'll be the pace is that correct Chema among other things but yeah yeah and then David Sachs has now become and David Freiberg have become regulars we've decided we're gonna stick with this foursome as it goes because we're getting a really nice passing of the ball around topics and David Sachs went to Stanford with folks you know like Keith roboy Peter teal during an era where they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on Palm Pilots called PayPal it didn't work until they decided to move it to email I'm not sure who's idea who gets credit for moving it to email sacks sacks who decided like hey Adam silence is his way of saying me cuz it was it was an abject failure when you tried to send money between Palm Pilots Peter Thiel's original idea but then somebody woke up and said well why don't we just do this over email but he hasn't said let me tell you the names at PayPal he has not said yet musk teal Hoffman left chin silenced radio silence so far David sacks Jeremy Stoppelman Chad Hurley from YouTube cherry Stockman for Yelp anyway he was part of that cohort then he made a movie called thank you for smoking which was Jason Reitman first film jason reitman then went on to great success that film actually made money sachs was so absolutely depressed by how long it took to make one film and how painful it was he then decided to go create a billion dollar company and under three years called Yammer which Chamath made a ton of money on any cackles about regularly and then david freiburg is with us he is just the smartest kid at the table but somehow figures out how to lose tons of money to us in poker he created clara calm and sold it to monsanto he created Metro Mile and he created Itza which felt horribly but that just goes to show you nobody even remembers what Itza is but they do remember his giant multi-billion dollar companies and he now is running his own startup studio which is making incredible ly interesting companies can I talk about the one thats related to beverages or not not yet okay anyway there's a company related to beverages that is so game-changing I said no literally you can't say it he showed it to us under friend EA I just said can I talk about the beverage company yes or no I'm trying to give the guy goddamn plug here but anyway he says he can can't do a plug I'm not doing a plug but I'm teasing it and I think he's literally sitting on what could wind up being the greatest snow successful company of the entire group it's not period okay let's jump in I want to talk let's turn out the David you sold climate to Monsanto for a billion dollars back in the day when it was shocking to people that amount of money it still is but you know you were one of the first sort of quote-unquote unicorns and then you you know we're right in the front seat in Monsanto probably could have been CEO if you wanted I want you to talk to me about what is going on with Bayer Monsanto roundup and I want to use that as a jumping off point to talk about the World Health Organization so roundup is a molecule known as glyphosate and it's been used as a herbicide for decades and for decades it was very well studied the US EPA and the FDA and you FDA and global health organizations have studied it carefully because of its incredible use it is it biodegrades the core molecule glyphosate biodegrades you know in a couple of days and it is a very effective herbicide so when farmers grow stuff they don't want weeds growing in the field and roundup was a pretty effective way at getting rid of weeds so you could get more crop per acre or more yield per acre a long time people thought that roundup like many of the traditional persistent chemical herbicides was carcinogenic and people were concerned about that and as a result there was a lot of studying done in fact before I sold my company to Monsanto I spent a lot of time researching roundup and glide to say to make sure that it was safe that I wasn't selling my company to what everyone was saying was the devil at the time and from a scientific basis I felt pretty comfortable about the the data the studies the research that had been done when I was at Monsanto there was a bit of a political event that took place at the World Health Organization the World Health Organization runs a group called IARC the it's a Cancer Research Institute that's part of the w-h-o and there was a gentleman who was politically trying to get himself on that council to make the case that glyphosate was carcinogenic and years later a Reuters reporter identified how he was able to get this council to disregard a number of scientific findings and studies including the US EPA and other very wide broad ranging studies by international organizations and showing that roundup or glyphosate was non carcinogenic but the political process by which he was able to get on the council get that data excluded from a study and then get IARC to declare roundup or glyphosate a possible carcinogen or probable carcinogen then triggered a bunch of tort lawyers in the United States to start suing Monsanto and now Bayer because Bader bought Monsanto a number of years ago for causing cancer and the data is absent but the way the US court system works is if you have some probable definition and you can get a jury to say yes and the probable cause was there's a probable carcinogen label applied to it by IARC and this Reuters reporter years ago did a great job highlighting how whole thing was kind of politically motivated and and the data and the science from a broad range of scientists including the triple-a s a lot of scientific membership organizations very definitively and clearly show that glyphosate is non carcinogenic but you know it was super troubling and frustrating now look this doesn't bother me personally anymore I have no interest whatsoever but it turns out that these lawsuits are now gonna cost Monsanto and now Bayer which bought Monsanto somewhere between ten and fifteen billion dollars to settle this and this is all a function of some political hacking that took place at the w-h-o so for a long time I've had a bit of a concern about how the WHL operates and the process by which they do scientific assessment and validation and a lot of this has obviously become much more apparent with the coronavirus crisis and their response with respect to masks and treatment and so on so that's a little bit of the background I think you're referring to tomorrow and so you get your math if you want to know I mean like it to me I I think that this is such an interesting thing I I wanted to use it as this on-ramp to the w-h-o largely because it's like V inaptitude keeps compounding in that organization I just read that we still don't have a definitive posture on masks from the w-h-o and that they are finally ceding ground to the idea that the corona virus could partially be spread in air I mean this is so bizarre because it's the middle of July there are three million cases and half a million people who have died and we are still there and so you know when I saw that Trump pulled out of the w-h-o you know in this weird way the way he did it was kind of cartoonish and stupid and you know kind of an insolent child but the reason he did it was actually pretty reasonable because this organization is not a scientific or health body it's an academic body and you know you can see this in universities where all of a sudden things tilt away from facts and it tilts towards you know all kinds of very very very small points of sort of like political capital that people fight over and so these politicized organizations are incredible and to the point at which we saw you know this past week the report that well over 250 of their own scientists who they rely on said hey it's very clear that this is an airborne phenomenon aerosol tiny micro particles of aerosol when people talk when they sing when they cough when they sneeze all this obvious stuff floats in the air and if you ever closed air conditioned you know location like say a church in the south or a hotel or a casino it's not a good idea to be in there and it's especially not a bad idea bad idea to take your mask off so now the w-h-o is over - and Trump as you said in his just horrific ly comical way can explain as we're very clearly explaining that this is a political organization that is funded by a duopoly of superpowers that have many issues which we're going to get into today and we it's they're able to say who the duopoly is sex when you look at this being our token conservative here and you see the Trump win how frustrating is it for you that trumps delivery and it's persona when he is right and a person can't be wrong all the time I'm proof positive of that you you have to deal with the fact that he doesn't is such a stupid inane way that you don't actually get credit for the win well you know Trump is often the the bull in the china shop and you know kind of disrupts the status quo by throwing a grenade into it but frequently there there are good reasons why this house quote needs to be disrupted and the the New York Times laid out the case in a news story on who the the one that reported the scientists complaining that you were talking about it was just a straight news story but it almost came across as an expose because whose incompetence was laid out so starkly the fact that they were slow on mass and opposed them and I think kind of lied about them and then and to be downplaying the airborne nature of the virus in favor of maintaining this narrative that it's spread through touching surfaces or fomites which I think people are realizing now is much much less likely and so yeah you do kind of have to wonder whose side is is who on and the the New York Times article kind of suggests why they do this which is when they issue a declaration they have to think about the ramifications in all of their member countries and so what ends up happening is they sort of start with the policy implication or political result that they are thinking about and they kind of reverse-engineer the science and you know the article talks about how you know if who were to come out and and sort of be very clear about airborne transmission that could affect spending or you know political budgets and all these different countries and so they've been reluctant to do that so yeah it's a it's a it's a organization that's sort of political first and then reverse engineers the science to fit that and you know what this reminds me of it's like when you have giant investors on the board of a company the management team comes out and now they've got to present like a pivot or an acquisition or whatever it is and they're thinking well okay we've got this funding source these people own 26 percent of who this person owns 22 percent we've now got to present it to them and what are the ramp down stream ramifications luckily there's an alignment in a single company the alignment is we won't want the company's share price to go up but here in the world it is not equally aligned what is in China's best interest what's in the --use best interest and what's in America's best interest might be radically different and they are literally funding them correct your mouth well there's a they are there there's a there's this thing called sailor's law right which many of us kind of have seen play out which is that academic the the saying is something like academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small and in this interesting way the w-h-o has lost the script because they fight over politics who gets to say what who's being positioned and they lose sight of the real down street in my opinion the downstream implications of the things that they have because if they actually just thought from first principles and tried to be a truly independent body that said we are going to take the capital we're given from the countries that are supporting us and actually do the best and actually publish like what is the best thing to do for example in the case of coronavirus and be definitive and iterate we'd be in a much better place but a lot of what is allowed the posture around coronavirus to transition from a health issue to a political issue in many ways has been because organizations like the w-h-o and the cdc are political bodies and their academic bodies and so the incentives of the players within these organizations are not to necessarily you know project the right public health positioning they are at some level to think about their own career trajectory and the political machinations that happen within the organization that are blind to normal citizens like us that just consume the output and then so when you see something like an inability to give a definitive ruling on things like masks or you know other things you just kind of scratch your head and wonder is it that they're dumb and the answer is no it's not that they're dumb they're just motivated by very different things than public health all the time which might be including keeping their jobs and the fact that we had David friedenberg on this podcast and then Sachs you know chiming in after it surely after just definitively saying first principles why wouldn't you wear wet wear a mask what is the possible downside and Friedberg saying hey I'm getting some testing equipment we should just be doing mass testing Freebird when you look at this and how when we started the podcast I think in March or April we were very clear as people not in the with the exception of herself not in the health care space in any way why can't they what would be a better structure for the WHO and or is there a better structure than just a bunch of you know randos like us on a podcast very easily seeing through first principles that a 79 cent mask is a no-brainer that getting testing math testing and recording it every day and doing sampling what is the better solution here for governance or for dealing with these type of you know really large problems and ones that kind of have a clock that's the other thing about this problem is this this problem came with a countdown clock you had to make a really fast decision in order to protect yourself and we made a really drawn-out decision now we're paying the price I mean I think under the circumstances you outline you know you need leadership right so you need probably a country or some entity to step forward and lead with respect to being proactive and aggressive with action because any multinational oversight body or political body is gonna be kind of you know molasses tout it's gonna be stalled out with the the processes and the competing interest as you guys have highlighted so the libertarian argument would be let the free market drive outcomes and you know some folks will succeed and some folks will fail if we want all of humanity to succeed then you know the likely scenario is what we've seen with with world wars and such which is you need leadership you need one organization or one entity or one national body to step forward and say this is what we're doing and we're gonna lead and the world was absent leadership over the last six months historically the US has filled that void but that certainly wasn't the case this year and so you know it seems to me like you're not gonna find a political governing system multinational governing system that's gonna be successful in solving these kind of existential global problems overnight you really need someone to step forward and the u.s. is kind of leaving a bit of a gap this might be a good segue because the question next is who's gonna fill that gap going forward yeah so let's make that segue when you look at the the duopoly that currently is I would say on par now I don't think we can say we're the superpower anymore and that China is an up-and-coming superpower it's pretty clear they are an equal superpower I don't know if anybody here disagrees with that right now but if we have an edge it's a very minor one at this point how do we look at health problems with an authoritarian country where individuals do not vote and there is a god king who has recently said I will be the god king for the rest of my life for sure how do we manage this relationship with China Friedberg then we can pass it over so from a healthcare perspective let's start there for sure and then whatever other major issue you would like to then segue into climate change comes to mind trade comes to mind Human Rights comes to mind I would imagine the biggest the argument that your geopolitical commentators would make who are probably more experienced than experts in this than any of us would probably relate to you know the degree of influence you know the question of who has the most influence globally maybe kind of the way that you define who has the most power globally and so you know in the current circumstance you can look at trade balance between China and other nations you can look at trade balance between the US and other nations and you can look at the balance sheet the assets and and the debt owed and you're right I mean a lot of people are making the case that that we're kind of reaching a point of parody through some metric or some set of equations here and at this point there's there's going to be a jockeying for leadership globally in terms of influence and so that will have ramifications with respect to things that are global in nature like global pandemics and I think this is a really kind of key for a moment a flashpoint moment for us because we are facing that sort you know we did face that circumstance this year and obviously we took the raw end of the deal we've we failed most I mean we all concur on that we thought we did worst China is just like an extremely good example of focusing on strategy while the rest of us focused on tactics you know the last 20 years have been punctuated by the United States spending literally trillions of dollars on endless wars and unnecessary military infrastructure and all kinds of wasted pork barrel spending and programs that just have resulted in zero ROI for the United States and it's taxpayers and citizens and instead what it China do they basically went around the world and they used the equivalent amount of dollars and they said every war that the United States fights is a war that we can essentially be silent on let them do that dirty work and what we will do instead is we will go and basically buy and own large swaths of Southeast Asia large swaths of Africa which is you know the emerging labor pools that will drive GDP forward for us and what they've essentially created is not necessarily a voting bloc but a productivity bloc and that's what's so you know interesting and also really important to understand which is that China is fighting not an ideological war they're fighting an economic war and it is one where they are buying you know member states to join them with their capital and so we've kind of like not seen it and it's unfortunately happened right under our nose so now what we need to do is we need to sort of wake up to this reality and have a very aggressive point of view around what you know matter so by the way this is also why and I'll hand the mic to David after this but this is also why I think like we have completely wasted so much time focusing on you know all these other countries that just don't matter anymore and you know I don't say that emotionally I just say it practically like every single minute we spend on Russia is just the wasted time this is a you know country that just won't fundamentally matter in the world over the next 15 to 20 years large swathes of Europe you know they're ideologically aligned but they just don't matter the United States has to develop a really specific strategic viewpoint on the fact that it is US versus China whether we like it or not and it starts in things like public policy but it stretches to everything including capitalism technology intellectual property healthcare and this war will not be fought on the ground with guns it'll be fought with computers and it'll be fought with money yeah no need to realize owns and joint ventures sacks what are your thoughts here on this coming Cold War you know we beat the Russians in the cold last Cold War and to jamaat's point the only thing they have really going for them is they're incredibly sinister KGB style information warfare and the decreasing value of their oil and irrelevance which is why they have to do things like mess with us on social media I mean that literally I feel like it's like the last couple of dying techniques they've got in their playbook from you know the 80s as the KGB and they got a KGB agent running the country when we look at China how do you frame our relationship with them and what would be the best practice for the next ten years midterm well I think I think what you've seen just really in the last couple of weeks is a critical mass of scholarship and punditry declaring that we are in a new cold war with China and I think you know of all the momentous news events that have happened this year from kovat to you the riots and protests I think that the most newsworthy and historically important event will be the beginning of this and the recognition that we are now in cold war too so takedown court tick-tock is part of it I mean it's paradoxical about a dance app is literally at the tip of the spear I mean I think any tick-tock is sort of at the fringes I think the the Cold War to to David's point started when the United States basically embargoed Huawei from getting access to 5g technology and I know that sounds like a very sort of like thin thread that most people don't understand and we can unpack it in a second but in my opinion that sort of you know at the beginning of this year was when I started to pay attention and try to understand this issue more because it seemed like wow that's a that's a shot across the bow and declaring China as the clear you know sort of a clear and present danger for American sovereignty and the NBA tik-tok being cultural ramifications of that and which are differences he talks irrelevant who cares well it's it's is it in tax well what tick-tock and all we have in common is that the the sort of proxy battles of Cold War - will be fought between these sort of client corporations whereas you know Cold War one you have these you know sort of these proxy these sort of client states fighting these proxy wars cold war - you have more of these like client corporations fighting these proxy wars so you know it's that's the sense in which I think they're they're related the what tick tock shows is a company that's desperately trying to maneuver so they don't become one of the first economic casualties of cold war - they appointed a American as CEO they've pulled out of Hong Kong so they're not subject to to those regulations and they're desperately maneuvering so they don't get banned in the United States they want to preserve their market access but I think there's a very good chance that they will get shut down in the u.s. they've been shut down in India and today's July the 10th and right before we went on the breaking news was at Amazon basically asked all their employees delete to delete tik-tok because of a security threat so it's happening I think that tick-tock unless they basically have bike dance cell under 20 or 30% of the company and get it into the hands of Americans it will get banned and I think that there will be a massive destruction in enterprise value book can I tell you why tick-tock doesn't matter and or doesn't matter as much I think David you're right that it's sort of like collateral damage it it almost is like you know it'll exist but whatever the Huawei thing in my opinion is so important because it shines a light on two things the first is that you know what happened essentially as the United States told tsmc you know you cannot basically give Huawei access to the 5g chipsets and the 5g technology that they would use to essentially kind of like you know implement their spyware and then sell it into Western nations effectively and so then what what it does is it puts China in the posture of having to figure out how do they get access to this stuff and you know the most obvious answer is to invade Taiwan and take over tsmc and you know why would they do that well obviously that has huge geopolitical ramifications but they could only do that again going back to the first comment is because they've already bought so many nation states into their productivity bloc that it's still on a balance a worthwhile trade and it allows them to solve their version of Taiwanese sovereignty completely and definitively and basically say look we've we've now solved Hongkong you know Macau is already solved and now we're gonna solve Taiwan and put the whole thing to bed and now we have access to this critical technology that we need so that's why I think sort of like what happens with Huawei sort of what happens with TSM see what happens on 5g is so important because if you're going to force China you know to basically have to buy Western technology in order to get access to a critical piece of you know Internet infrastructure they're gonna be put to a very very difficult test about what they have to do and then they will have to be much more transparent on the global stage about what their ambitions really are and how far they're willing to go and I think that's you know that's a lot more important than you know a bunch of kids dancing to short videos well and and just just to add to that point you know so I think your mouth is right that these these sort of chips the 5g chips these other chips are that they're the new oil you know in terms of their geopolitical significance you know obviously all of our technology or our iPhones are advanced event weaponry it's all based on these these chips and and 70% of them are fabricated in Taiwan and and I think you know what one of the huge blind spots of American trade policy over the last thirty years is is kind of not to notice that that this key technology that's really the substrate for all of our technology for our economy has now been many it's now been moved and it's manufactured you know in Taiwan whose sovereignty China does not recognize and it's constantly you know threatening with the risk of being of being annexed so you know we have a tremendous vulnerability there and you know at the same you know II finally after about 40 or 50 years of declaring that we'd be energy-independent we've achieved that but now we have this new dependency on these chips that and Pharma and manufacturer I mean and we and we it seems like now manufacturing we're starting to realize hey Elon was right we need to be able to build our own factories and guess what American spirit American ingenuity American focus American capitalism we can do it we have the wherewithal to do it there's no reason we cannot make these chips here sorry I don't buy it that we're we're gonna be this dependent forever we just need to have the will and the leadership to say we're going to do this whether it costs us an extra 50 cents per chip and well the fact the fabrication of these chips is incredibly complicated I mean they're they're basically so let's buy the companies they're microscopic yeah and it takes years and like several years to set up the you know the facility to do this kind of fun why don't we buy those companies now why don't we just take it just Ramat spoink which was very clear which is hey this is an economic this is a ledger this is you know a cheque writing exercise to win this war why don't we take out our checkbook and buy fifty percent of these companies now and put them on the Nasdaq if they're not already there it requires real leadership at the end of the day it needs to be led by the United States government the reality is that you know lithography has gotten so advanced I mean like look I have you know companies that are you know taping out chips at like seven nanometer and I don't I don't have supply or diversity I don't know I can't basically choose you know nine folks to bid it out against of which you know five are domestically in the United States there are two right and so you know you kind of just deal with the complexity or the lack of diversity that we have and Jason your point is exactly right which is the first and most important decision here is one that's philosophical which is again saying that era of efficiency at the sake of all else is over and we are now moving to an era of resilience which inherently is more inefficient but in that inefficiency we will rebuild American prosperity because it rebuilds American industry and it rebuilds American jobs there's another example that I want to build on David's point which is let's all believe and a test that we all care about climate change for a second and we all want the world to be electrified okay well electricity and electrification requires two very very basic inputs okay one is a battery and the second is an electric motor right make sense so far yep well inside an electric motor there is one critical thing that you need to make it work which is a permanent magnet the permanent magnet spins around and that's how an electric motor works okay why is that important as it turns out that permanent magnets need special characteristics that are only provided by a handful of very very specific rare earth materials that we need to mine out of the ground and refine those materials actually exist in many places including the United States yeah we stopped mining for them but right now China controls 80% of the supply of rare earths they can choose how they price it they can differentially price to their own companies which means that the battery and engine manufacturers inside of China can now lead on electrification which means China can actually lead on climate change before the United States can unless we have leadership that says at a governmental level on down we are gonna make this a priority we're gonna fund it we're gonna make sure that their onshore mines we're gonna make sure that those mines are clean we're gonna build a supply chain domestically and we're gonna subsidize this is what governments do best it's not Act it's just incentivize on things like climate so I don't know Freiburg has spent a lot of time on climate change so he has a PS probably a lot of ideas on this but whenever you look at any of these things health climate food it all comes down to the United States versus China Strada versus tactics Freebird look I'm not sure I'm not sure I think that the Chinese action is as deterministic as we think it is or as we kind of frame it where it's China's got this grand plan they're gonna beat the US and they're gonna control things and make decisions that that hurt us I think a lot of this is China if you think about it less of that black and white there's a continuum and the continuum is one of influence and one of creating an environment whereby these things can happen so China for example made capital readily available for the agriculture industry to be able to buy buy assets and so the companies inside of China which aren't controlled the Chinese government isn't telling them what to do the Chinese government has set a policy that enables them to increase their prosperity and as a result increase the prosperity of the Chinese people you know when I was at Monsanto we were we'd bid for the largest AG chemicals company in the world based out of Switzerland it's called Syngenta and we bid like forty four billion dollars to buy this company and the largest chemical company in China called CEM China bid 47 billion dollars and acquired the business and they now own the largest add chemicals company in the world China also bought Smithfield and they bought they put a bunch of people in Canada hey free bird how much of that money do you think came from the CCP and and what involvement you think the CCP had in putting their thumb on the scale of making sure that transaction went that direction look I mean ultimately wherever the the capital comes from it's no less equivalent than what you would see in the United States where Treasuries fund the central bank which funds banks which fund lending to corporations which ultimately make but do you think the leadership said hey we're winning this at all costs so here's what happened in 2007 there was a CCP internal doctrine that was published and it's now reasonably well known and there was a speech that was given that started this aggressive action in agriculture and as a result Chinese citizens started moving to Canada and buying farmland in Canada they started moving Australia buying farmland in China they started building these facilities in Argentina and Brazil and Africa and the Chinese government set out you know a strategic objective and provided the capital and enabled industry and people to go after pursuing these interests but the CCP didn't say here's the roadmap it's not like here's the specific plan for what we need to do they had a general high-level kind of point of view that I think drove all that action and all that behavior and so you know it's I would say it's it's not as perhaps coercive as we might think it is in terms of the CCP wanting to target and attack us they're trying to increase their influence around the world they're kind of increased their own security and increase their own prosperity and at some point there's only so many resources globally there's only so much land so much magnets that you know they and they're winning in the markets and you know we're kind of crossing that threshold now where they're actually like a competitor you know the only difference between this is and it couldn't be my point is I just don't want to frame it as like I just think it's a it's a misstatement to frame it as China has this grand plan to come after the US and they're evil and that's what they're doing I mean you know this is where I think they're completely wrong David respectfully yeah in that I believe this is an ideological war and if you you can't diminish what's happening in Hollywood tik-tok and the NBA and other sports where China is explicitly saying if you put a villain in our in a movie if you talk about Tibet in a movie we are going to not play that movie and we're going to start funding your movies and so they are absolutely using the vector of culture and chamalla I think you're also wrong here where you're saying tick-tocks not important tick tock is something that a generation of kids absolutely are in love with and those kids are like hey boomers stay out of our platform and so and in the ideological issue here Freebird which I think that you're under playing is they want to win and they want to spread their ideology which is the ideology of authoritarianism they are not going to win Africa and then suddenly say you know what would be great for Africa if we made the entire continent democracies that's not in their best interest how's it different than Trump tweeting well Freiberg I think that it's it's inconceivable to me that the Chinese when they do this grandiose planning and they do that you know the political theater of having the thousands of people in the Chinese you know assembly hall once a year that you know in GG bing talks that they haven't developed a multi-faceted multi-layered plan that they're executing in part I think this is why is using ping essentially wants to be this ruler for life inside of China because he I think they have a 20 or 30 year plan and I do think it is to disrupt the United States and I don't think that they believe though which is the smart thing that there's one silver bullet I just think that they're gonna take a thousand shots on goal whether it's you know monopolizing the rare earths or you know figuring out how to basically put spying software in the hands of millions of Americans that's where I think tick tock is actually really important it's essentially a vehicle to spy and backdoor into Americans or whether it's you know introducing a digital yuan so that we can try to disrupt the you know the the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency of the world they probably have a list of a thousand tactics and they're gonna go and execute them and I don't begrudge them that I just think it's it's it's well-organized machine I just think we now need to counterpunch sacks yeah I mean so China is on a mission of national greatness I think the immediate goal is to is to assert its hegemony over Asia and to kick the u.s. out of that region but I think ultimately now they see in their sights potentially being the number one country in the entire world because of the because of the chaos that kovat has wrought over here I think and in fairness David the incompetence of Trump thus far I mean like you know it's it's not fair to think that the Chinese Politburo versus Trump and his cabinet are an equal match forget their political persuasion yeah I mean they clearly seem emboldened and you know just in the last few weeks and months we've seen the ending of the two systems and Hong Kong which was a 50 year commitment they made and I think the 1984 so they abrogated on that well it's a commitment that yeah you having to do that three or four months before our Trump is looking like he's not gonna be in office so talking about shots on goal this may be their only shot to do this and well there's the whole want yeah but just do they go after Taiwan in the next hundred have a window I think we have to be extremely clear that Taiwan is a red line for us and that we're committed to the security of Taiwan because if we show any hesitation or weakness there they will they will seize on that and would try to do that would Trump put his foot down because he did nothing when it came to supporting I think we need to attract away from any given President of the United States because they they change every four or eight years and I think we need to have a bigger discussion which is like I said over the next 40 to 50 years are we comfortable with do all duopoly power structure in the world which is the United States and China because that's effectively what we are today or are we the shining city on a hill once again and if so what are we willing to do to make sure that that's the case and I think that's independent of your political persuasion in your party right well the good news here is that both Trump and Biden are basically racing to sort of position themselves as the more hawkish candidate on China which is to say that this recognition of Cold War 2 is now I think bipartisan which if you want to sustain a policy in this country over say 40 years like we did in containing the Soviet Union you have to have bipartisan support for that and so it does seem like finally as a country I think we are kind of getting our act together on China I mean obviously there will be disagreements within that larger context but it seems like now people are waking up to the threat that that china represents to you know to America being that I'm one country in the world and I think yeah by the way I agree with I agree with Sachs I mean I think that's exactly what's happening and and what will happen here and and it'll certainly it'll be a big hill to climb I'll just highlight and I'll ask the question of chima you know per his point earlier let me ask you guys how many factories do you think exist in China take a guess 11 million to point eight million now how many do you think exist in the United States 150,000 close back to Norfolk 2000 and has about 83 million factory workers and we have about 12 so you know ch amok if we do end up in Cold War 2 where you know we escalate the tension and escalate the divide how do we end up you know having avoiding $2,000 $3,000 iPhones how do we get all the televisions we want for 500 bucks how do we do that given that you know to catch up with this production capacity will end up costing many tens of trillions of dollars of invested capital that China has invested over decades well this is such a brilliant this is a somewhat fabulous question and I think I don't have the answer but here's the way that I think about the solution you know the the thing that we had before was in my way in many ways like this kind of like perverted sense of globalism and I think that we we you know we thought that globalism equals utopia and that's not true it's actually more like a chessboard which means you have you know two different sets of colored pieces competing against each other and each piece on the board in many ways as a country so you know we can look at that as a Geographic skew and say like we need to really consolidate you know North Central and South America has a block as a productivity block and so David that's where we need to have more trade within those areas so that we can actually build up production capacity in places that can absorb and produce low-cost labor or low-cost items to compete with to china bloc that may be a solution I mean that is an incredible point Chamath which is why with the rhetoric with Mexico which would love relationship with us is so so dumb we're talking about factories they would love for us to put more factories on there and whatever country is good for this work our way down the peninsula yeah go to go down the peninsula go go to Honduras go to El Salvador go to Guatemala where your weii paralyzed they won't work yeah are screaming for work which is why they're trying to enter the United States the best ways to not build a wall take all that money and fuel it into production and manufacturing and warehouse in those places in which they're leaving in the first place and if we thought like China we would go ahead do it Freiburg sorry no you can't successfully sustain a cold war with China without global partnership and I think you know this notion of nationalism and isolationism in the United States will not work in a world where we are also trying to compete globally with China and are raising the stakes in a global cold war you can't have it both ways so you know either the the current administration policy needs to change I'd love to hear Sachs's point of view on this or you know or we need to have a change in administration and actually you know re-engage on it on a global basis with partner States well okay so I think that the the point about about well I think what what some people on the right would say is that being able to buy cheap goods at Target is not worth the hollowing out of the American industrial base that happened over the past thirty years and that was a catastrophic mistake and you know this is what got trump reelected was shattering that that blue wall in those Rust Belt states so I think we can kind of look back on that and wonder whether that trade-off was really worth it but moving forward I think the balance is gonna be to realize that trade does create wealth you know all wealth in fact comes from trade whether at the level of individuals or nations if it weren't for trade all of us would be subsistence farmers or something like that but we also have to realize that trade creates interdependence because I stopped making certain things in order to buy them from you and so in order to engage in trade we have to trust each other I have to trust that that you one day won't decide that your ability to manufacture antibiotics is strategic and you might deprive me of them in order to facilitate some geopolitical interest and so I think what we're waking up to with you know production of you know pharmaceuticals or n95 masks you know PPE and now chips is that we've had this real blind spot with respect to trade we've basically offshore so many of the elements are necessary for our national survival and I think those elements have to be brought back so that America is safe and independent but with respect to you know so many other things I think it's fine for us to get them through trade whether you know it could be a peril or toys or so many other goods that you know we do want cheap goods I want to do an only strategic I want to do a mental exercise we all for our living try to come up with 100 X 1000 X solutions whether we're creating the companies or betting on the companies when everybody to just think for a second of the United States as a startup company and a 10x 100x idea for how we can not only maintain our position but maybe become the shining hill where we actually lead the world towards democracy towards human rights I'm going to start with the one that I just happened to it hit me while you all were talking which is why I love doing this podcast because I get such inspiration listening to you guys you know pass the ball around we haven't added a state to the United States in a pretty damn long time what if we said to Puerto Rico what if we said to the Dominican Republic what have we said to indoors I mean and I don't want to make this into a exercise in colonialism but if we said you know what Puerto Rico how do you feel about being the 51st state because we're already 80% of the way there and what if we said the United States is going to and this is just a crazy hundred x idea we're going to start taking countries that maybe love democracy that would love to be part of the United States and and having a bridge towards becoming part of this block whether it's how Puerto Rico is Jason the United States can barely function as it is that's why I'm giving you the freedom to say this is a hundred x exercise as a start-up because if we put out crazy ideas like this maybe we can pull people towards thinking like the chessboard of how to play 3d chess or how to win the chessboard not just move the pawns back and forth well I think the first thing America has to do is is decide whether it wants to whether it still thinks that national greatness is important and whether it wants to compete to to be the leading power in the world because right now it seems like we're hopelessly divided and our guns are literally drawn on each other and you know you've got this all out assault going on on capitalism you have sort of canceled culture and America just seems hopelessly divided and I don't know if Americans still think it's important to be the number one power in the world so what are the thought experiment on how to make Americans realize this is important or if anybody else wants to jump in here with a 10x idea of America good well I I have an overlaying theory that I it this is sort of kind of me spitballing so bear with me but let's do it you know there's a there's this concept called the Overton Window right which is sort of like the the minimum ly viable acceptable surface area of dialogue at which case it starts to sort of you know get extreme I might I would theorize I would tell you that the Overton Window is the smallest that's ever been and there's basically nothing that you can talk about that is relatively benign without it being politicized and and there's no gradation anymore it's a very binary thing you're either in the Overton Window which for example would be like you know vegetables matter or looking both ways across the street matters and outside the Overton Window honestly is black lives matter as an example you know and it gets politicized on both sides masks you know if a balaclava when you're skiing because your face is cold is inside the Overton Window that same balaclava when you go to the drug store so that you can actually you know either prevent disease one way or the other is outside the Overton Window you know making sure that police you know are there to protect you in a time of need is now outside the Overton Window because it's framed in in the lens of police brutality so the Overton Window has shrunk so we we have very little surface area where we can actually all agree without getting into a fight Heidi like each other I totally agree with that I mean we have this we have this sort of epidemic of cancel culture going on and I guess Jason you recently experienced this oh my lord I mean for the love of God what happened Jason tell us what happened listen I I look at Twitter as a place to have vibrant discussions and you know ten years ago it was kind of where the Overton Window was most open you could have a discussion about anything and we had a discussion about you know my feeling that as a former journalist and we're doing random acts of journalism here that I just thought the New York Times was just way too biased and that they picked aside in order for their business to survive and I actually believe that I believe they picked the side of Trump I'm sorry the side of anti Trump in order to get subscriptions because their advertising business has been demolished by the duopoly of Facebook and Google this led to the circling of the wagons of the journalists which I was part of but listen it's pretty easy to hate me I understand that I'm a loudmouth and so now I'm getting piled on by the journal and and you were an early investor in who absolutely forget that let's forget I think that a third or fourth I they tell me the third or fourth anything so there's a journalist at said publication I'm not going to say her name because I don't want any harassment of anybody nobody does who said people are stupid for going back to work and they're idiots and I said you know this is a very convenient thing for a journalist who works behind a keyboard who makes $100,000 a year to say because those people are literally not going to be able to feed their kids if they don't go back to work and this led to her saying I was harassing and stalking her then I was in Clubhouse the new social network where you talk and the same journalist was in the audience and I said to the people who were talking just be aware there is a journalist in the audience because even though this is a private beta this could wind up being in the New York Times which it did not that discussion but another one that was covertly taped and I don't know it was covertly taped by journalists or not but it did wind up in the press anyway this whole thing turns into a giant fight and table house sounds like some dark S&M sex club in Berlin Hey no no that's here's what I think is most entertaining house H la us house club house yeah let me what I think it's most entertaining about this is that the the New York Times journalist was in this vicious battle with Balaji who's a Silicon Valley founder and personality and they were arguing and then Jason somehow comes running over and starts involving himself in this feud and it's like and it's like Balaji gets fouled but Jason takes the flop you know and all of a sudden then all of a sudden Jason's talking about you know how he's getting Doc's ball geez the guy who is like called out in the New York Times but somehow Jason Jason takes the flop but anyway so here's what's happened I'm only telling the story I'm not trying to get victim points give a [ __ ] about that it's July 4th I think I put the kids down for the nap we you know stakes are going on the grills [ __ ] great day and then I'm on the peloton trying to be just a little less fat so I can be less fat than Saks so that the photo that we're Sachs is using I just come out 5 percent less fat than Saks and I look and I had posted a picture of the tree line outside my house two of the beautiful blueSky on July 4th and I said listen everybody take a break from Twitter go spend time with your family which is what I was about to do a 37-year a private equity douche from Boston does a reverse image search on the tree line finds a bigger picture of the trees finds a picture of my pool based on that bigger picture in Google reverse image search and all these other tools and then DOCSIS me which basically means releasing your address he releases my address in my thread where ok because so i DM him and he's using his real name and he's got a LinkedIn profile and I said do you realize how dangerous this is he goes well you're stalking said journalists I said I am not stalking the journalist was she said you're stalking her so if you apologized to her and you take down the mean stuff you said about horror I'll take down your home address and I said a [ __ ] this is illegal number one and number two you gonna lose your Twitter account and then I said number three we're connected your boss because you have a you're using your public name your boss is connected to 14 people of which like half are very close friends of mine and I'm calling your boss and I have all these screenshots of you doc see me what do you think is gonna happen on Monday and I just gave him my phone number in this weakness sick to your face okay let me just finish the story I tell the guy here's my phone number he calls me I said hey I know that you're a kid I know that you did something rash but this is actually you know a kind of a dangerous thing because you know there's serious mental illness in whatever point 1 percent of the population there's millions of people in now involved in this discussion it could be a security concern for me I'm not gonna post your address please don't post mine delete the tweet he was I refused to delete a tree until you whatever and I said okay well I'm gonna call your boss on Monday we know these people in common she's going to fire you and you're gonna lose your job now I know you're only 23 or 24 and this doesn't matter to you and he goes uh I said how old are you said 37 I said you're 37 year olds are you married you said yeah I'm married I got a six-year-old they said now you want me to make you lose your job because you're so mad at me over nothing I said I don't want to call your boss on Monday and and tell them what you did because it will certainly result in you being fired and he goes oh I said you might want to go talk to your spouse about what you did and maybe get her perspective she writes me an apology letter we deleted it's all water under the bridge but I've been trying to tell people you have to be very careful when this gets too personal because there are your dog whistling two crazy people who then might do something crazy anyway end of story I backed off the whole discussion because I just don't want to I want to finish my second book and I want to do podcast with guys like you and have a great time with my life and not be involved with a bunch of idiots and if so I want to go back to this Overton Window concept for a second so again just my idea so you take the word matters the word matters is in the Overton Window nobody can argue that the word matters is offensive if you if you prepend that word with vegetables it stays in the over too window if you put looking both ways before you cross the street now cash we're still there going over to window if you say black lives as a term just without the word matters that's probably in the Overton Window sure you put black lives matters it's out the Overton Window and both sides politicized I think the left politicizes with this cancel culture and basically like an extreme form of political correctness and then the right politicizes by you know in in their way a vein of hypersensitivity and then a doubling down on this notion of an attacking of individual freedoms and free speech and in all of that both of these two groups miss the fact that they're both sort of the same and they they're they're wronged in the same way but they're both not listening in the same way right so if I have to put something in the Overton Window that would address the us-china Cold War thing here's what I would say we all need energy we all need food and we all need technology right we need to sort of warm our houses we need to feed our bellies and we need to be able to be productive in some way so that we can make money and I think that everybody in the United States can agree that on these three dimensions there are some really simple things that we could do that basically double down on us sovereignty and allow us to basically be more on the offensive so I'll give you a couple of ideas on the energy side is we need to continue to support energy independence and that will require subsidies and the reason why that's important in my opinion is that then what happens is it hastens and accelerates Russia and the Middle East not becoming relevant anymore because they are forced to monetize their oil sooner the Middle East probably disintegrates into 30 countries you know the Middle East was just a kind of a random exercise of you know basically Americans and Europeans after the war divvying up a bunch of things it has no sensitivity to culture or language or anything so that probably you know - in a very different direction and Russia itself and Russia becomes less important because they just have to monetize otherwise they will lose their only source of revenue so that's one thing on energy that I think we could do that I think is relatively politically acceptable and inside the Overton Window second is on food which is that we have to double down on creating a completely independent food supply inside the United States and there are ways again where if we don't need to be building tanks and having 90 trillion dollar programs for aircraft carriers anymore we could pour that money into US farms you know and give people like Friedberg a lot more money to go and actually make sure the united states has food security that in any situation and scenario we can feed the three hundred and thirty-odd million people inside of our borders and then the for the the third thing is on technology which is there are a critical bunch of inputs whether it's 5g chips rare earth materials or minerals things like cobalt and lithium which we need for batteries for climate change that we can go and basically co-opt because those things are concentrated in countries like Chile in places like in places like Africa where we can actually do a better job of instilling government governance and security so that's my Jason back to your thing these aren't sexy ideas but they would work and I think they would work by both Republicans and Democrats and it's non-controversial I'll even put punch up the food part there's no reason why you know the same way we made water and public schools you know kind of a given in the United States nobody really has to worry about going getting water nobody has to worry about getting a basic education learning to read let's say it's not perfect obviously why not make healthy produce and some amount of healthy food so affordable in the United States that it's essentially free right and then you think about food security like how are we still discussing food security with the amount of money and prosperity we have in this country make it free we've we've almost made energy free we have energy independence I'll say a Manhattan Project to make energy and food as free or de minimus as water would be just an amazing thing for us to rally around because then people can work on the next thing in their life their careers their family their pursuits Freiburg what do you think of the Overton Window and would you add something to it that we can all agree on that we could work on together and maybe unify the country as opposed to pulling guns on each other in the parking lots because of the color of our skin I'm reminded of a great moment in history when Will Smith and his friends blew up the UFO that came to attack Earth nothing brings us together like a common enemy so it could be that the unification is gonna be you know in part driven by this cold war - and creating a common enemy in China it's gonna work for both the right on the left and create a lot of opportunity of jama' highlights and manufacturing and food production as there's a lot of tools available to us I think we could all sit here and speculate and I could pitch and plug all the companies I'm involved in I think are gonna play a role but I do think it's it's that moment where you know we are gonna coalesce around a common enemy and well I would be good if you actually shared one or two of those projects you're working on if you can actually we think well I mean I think here what you're working I've shared this before but I do think biomanufacturing which is that the technology whereby we engineer the DNA of microbes and those microbes then make molecules for us in a big fermentation tank in the same way that we make beer or wine biomanufacturing can be used to make flavors and fragrances and now we're making materials like silks and plastics plastic equivalents and and more interestingly proteins for human consumption to replace animal proteins and the cost of production and the cost of energy associated with making these materials these molecules these proteins through bio manufacturing is literally several orders of magnitude less than the traditional technique which is just insane if you think about it in first principles basis of growing [ __ ] corn feeding it to a cow letting the cow grow up feeding it hundreds of gallons of water killing it chopping it up transporting it to a restaurant I mean the amount of energy that goes into making a pound of ground beef is insane and the the greenhouse gas emissions and so on so I do believe that there is a big wave of bio manufacturing as an industry that is coming on the US this century and it will hopefully by the end of the century be the primary way that we're kind of producing a lot of the molecules that we consume and that we use for clothing and materials so then that does what to factories because you know you did explain earlier they a number of factories if we can bio produce that's right only our steaks not only our corn so I mean we could bio manufacture steel plastics cars not so much steel but alternatives to leather alternatives to cloth alternatives to so close to clothes food so imagine instead of a traditional factory think about a factory historically being purpose-built so you build all these components to make one thing cement all this money making a giant machine that you put stuff in on one end and the same thing comes out over and over the other end and that's classic industrial revolution 1.0 and you know 20 century industrial revolution output in this century we are gonna build these giant printers they're not going to be single form machines that make one thing over and over they're gonna be systems that are giant fermentation tanks and in those fermentation tanks it's like you program them with software and the software in this case is genetic software you edit the genome of these organisms they take stuff on the input and they make on the output a bunch of different stuff a replicator like in Star Trek and if there was seasonality and people needed something over the summer for July 4th versus what they need in Christmas or in the winter and ski season the same factory makes that thing where 10 20 30 40 50 years from this having an impact on the economy yes and we're seeing it now I mean look the number of artificial animal protein companies and the funding that they're getting its I think highlighting investor interest and appetite in backing the capex needed to get this to become a reality right now perfect day just raised 300 million dollars this week impossible foods rates forty million dollars from the Qatar Investment Authority you know obviously beyond meat is where they're I mean these companies are using these techniques of genetic engineering to make microbes that make the proteins and the flavorings liquid 50 we put five hundred million into the PPP if we put 500 I'm sorry 500 billion and put 500 billion into this how much would it accelerate it pretty substantially and I think it goes from food to Pharma to materials and that's probably you know where you would see the be impact but again one system can make different materials can make different so we could be independent of other countries for food to Chalmers point and also Pharma which we are way to depend in correct on China yeah we're definitely a net exporter by the way you know our largest export partner is China so most of our soybeans in the United States that we produce and soybeans are grown on 160 million acres on the US and it rotates half-and-half each year with corn but about two-thirds of our soybeans historically get exported to China so we are already food secured from a net resource perspective it's just the rest of the infrastructure in terms of turning that stuff in the meat and other stuff is where we're you know we probably have to build up a little bit in transmittance sacks let's swing the ball over to you when you hear the Overton Window idea is when you hear about this bio chemistry slurry tank revolution that Freebirds working on how does that change or evolve your view of our relationship with China and the political mess we're in right now in 2020 yeah well I think Cold War 2 does provide a lens to rethink and reevaluate a lot of these domestic political fights and so for example are the big technology companies you know Google Facebook and so on are they these you know even when ah police that need to be broken up or are they the crown jewels of the American economy that needs to be protected from Chinese espionage you know is the free enterprise system this you know horribly you know oppressive racist thing or is it actually the engine of prosperity that's built this country you know is freedom of speech an outdated principle or is it something we we want to you know that that should be canceled or is it something we want to fight for and I think that you know when you start thinking about these issues you know in the you know through the lens of Cold War 2 it provides an opportunity to kind of re-evaluate them and think about what's really and and hopefully it can provide a little bit of a Unova unifying force in America not because we want China to be an enemy but just because we want to maintain a sense of national greatness and I you know it's not something I just want to give up on I have a question for Friedberg are our schools gonna be back in the fall because I cannot deal with my kids being at home yeah I think it's gonna be a mixed bag it seems like I mean if you follow this this is a political decision right it's not a scientific decision and so there are different politics around nationally that are affecting this and there are some schools that seem like they've got processes and methods of being comfortable some of them were just throwing everything out the window and say I don't give a [ __ ] if the kids got to go back to school and some of them who are being very conservative and saying you know we're not ready for that we can't take the risk so you'll definitely see a mixed bag I don't know where you're living Jamaa I don't know what's gonna happen per se but it's definitely a local apology Friedberg is it safe to send our kids back to a 10-person pod in a school in California I mean that's like asking if it's safe to cross a train track you know you can look left you can look right but yeah you're crying you know a busy train intersection during during rush hour right you know it's hard to say what level of safe is safe we know that kids are less susceptible to any sort of health risk themselves from the virus and it looks like there's a lot of studies showing that they're likely less the virus is less transmissible through kids especially kids under the age of 14 and so it seems like there's there's some theories that say that look it's these h2 receptors whereby the virus enters the cells really start to present when you turn 10 years old at a greater rate and you know it scales up to 14 and above 14 you're kind of an adult from an h2 receptor point of view and then there's the severity of the infection as we all know is really more of a significant issue for much elderly people so when you take those factors into account the virus is likely less transmissible amongst children therefore a bunch of kids get together they're not going to transmit it to each other and and it's likely going to be less severe even if there is an infection for kids the risk is just about are the teachers comfortable and what happens when they go home and there have been a number of letters that you guys have probably seen op-eds and whatnot written in papers by teachers saying I'm nervous to go back to school I don't want to teach this fall I don't want to take the risk for my health I take care of my mom or my dad or what have you and so there's a lot of competing interests let's go let's go around the horn of who's sending their kids back to school I'll start I posted on Calacanis comm yesterday that we've decided as a family that we're starting a micro school we put out a call for a teacher and you know just looking at teacher salaries they don't get paid particularly well in our society as we all know they're underpaid so we think we can come over the top and provide a you know a better financial arrangement for a teacher and then have one to five students and we're going to just create a micro school that's hard that's our current plan our kids did go to camp this summer in a small ten person or less pod and we felt that was safe everybody was tested and it was outdoors but for me being indoors at a school with 300 pods of 10 and I think the best teachers are not going to show up and are my kids don't learn over Xoom I don't know about your kids but it's not working so we're starting a or we're gonna roll our own school and hopefully find one or two families who want to chop up the cost with us or we'll we'll just pick up the tab and invite one or two families if they don't have the means to do it but what we're gonna we're going to go solo for 20 21 free burger mouths what do you thinking right now because we're only seven eight weeks out from this right we're less than two months I really think like look not everybody Jason is going to be in a position to hire teachers in fact most everybody won't be agree I think it's I want to send my children back to school I refuse to create some alternative reality for them I think it's really important that they are with their friends I think that we're not really thinking strongly enough about the social implications for you know children let's just say like you know you take an 8 year old or an you're old or a ten-year-old and you deprive them of their friends for a year I mean that's an enormous part of their life where they like a prison sentence they've been socially isolated you know I just think it's a really bad outcome so I think that obviously from a public health perspective we want to keep our teachers safe I just think that it's so important that we realize that you know we are going to impact an entire generation of kids I think that if you're 18 or 19 and have had you know 18 or 19 years of normal teenage them you know and and and growing up that it's okay if you miss a year or you have to you know do your first year of college remotely like it sucks but you can deal but I really worry about these kids in in primary school and middle school it's really unfair yeah I mean with our plan was to try to get to four or five students small bubble and then you know have outdoor the problem is than the Northeast I just got to school it's you're inside with a heating system of the clothes ventilation scheme that was built in 1920 and I think it avoids the real key thing which is like I don't think you go to school to learn as much as you go to school to socialize socialize I mean you learn as a by-product because everybody socializes not everybody learns right agreed and so there it's it's an enormous ly important formative experience for a child to be around 15 or 20 of their other kids and to be in the playground to deal with all the adversity that comes with normal life of a kid that's the biggest thing that I think we're depriving them of and I understand that you know there's an important reason to hold these kids back but I just want to appreciate that behaviorally and psychologically this is not gonna be for free hmm Freebird sacks what would you know I I guess I agree with both mouth and free bargain on this that the there are huge benefits to going back and the risk to kids are low in terms of getting it and also they're less viral if they do but Israel sort of a strong recent counter example where they recently open schools and now all of a sudden they've got a spike so you know we're gonna send our kids back but I expect it to be a little bit of a [ __ ] show I think that the schools will reopen and they'll do all this plan a there'll be all these like pods and half days and smaller groups and that kind of thing and then somebody's gonna they'll be like one case either a kid or you know one family and then all of a sudden they're gonna shut down again I guess I you know they're spending all this time planning but I wonder if they're really gonna have contingency plans for what happens when there's a case or yeah I think they'll just shut down it's just it it's too scary for a child to die or a teacher to die and people at the overreaction to it will be to shut everything down right and then we're gonna be back to our kids when we sent our kids to camp for the three weeks they went man it was just they were different kids right and such a mots point they did their little social animals they need to roll around like little baby tigers and and play and if they don't have that it dramatically affects behavior and we saw it in only three months I mean 12 these kids are gonna go mental yeah I think that basically where the country is at is that we're an undeclared Sweden you know we've basically that the virus has become endemic it's everywhere you know we've basically given up on trying to contain or stop it and and so now we're just on this path to hurt immunity and you know it's basically what Sweden did except we haven't declared that's what our plan is and so it's haphazard and but it's it seems like kind of were by default it is headed for herd immunity Freiburg as we wrap up here and I got one final question I want to do after this and then we'll wrap Freiburg what's your thoughts kids in schools I know you have kids I'm not sure the ages if they're like would be going back to it I think they're a little bit on the younger side so if you did have eight nine ten twelve year olds sending them back to school starting your own what are your thoughts yeah I mean I'd I would probably be a little ridiculous and send them and test them every other day at home and you know you can get this back to Dickinson test system now for 250 bucks it's a handheld device and these test strips cost 20 say the name of it again the vector Dickenson it's a vector with a V B BB ways that alright are they available yeah you can buy them through medical retailers and yeah the handheld device that they use in hospitals and stuff today it's 2 or 50 bucks and there's a little test kit that you buy it'll probably cost 20 to 30 bucks it'll be available next month per test or 15 to 20 bucks and it takes five minutes to get a result and so you literally could do it in the school yard before they go into the building yeah it's that you could test you I would test my kids every day if I had a my kids or my one kids in preschool the other ones do but you add I do a little pinprick on their finger in no no if you can just do a little swap in the nose so okay yeah deep no swab or you know halfway there's data that shows now that you can actually do a throat swab and you know get a pretty good reading on it so you know whatever the protocol is it probably me pretty non-invasive and you can get a result now that's expensive for most people you know that's not expensive for a school not expensive for a school that's right and so I think that company will do well with that testing system they've launched because it actually tests not for the RNA but for the protein is this a public company yeah and the stocks done well and and and this test does really well because a test for the protein not the RNA so it's actually a much you know much easier test scientifically to do you're not trying to pick up specific nucleotides or nucleic acids you're trying to pick up a protein and so it's yeah it's pretty effective all right yeah if the election was held today we always like to talk about this a bit they wanted SLOS when we talked about it we talked about Oprah last time that was our sleeper candidate I'm changing but I'm changing our yummy Duckworth Tammy Duckworth is now my sleeper vice presidential I'm with I'm with the Tomas on that absolutely 100 now who's gonna win if the election was held today Sachs I'll let you go first since it's the most heartbreaking for you Biden Biden strategy is working his strategy is basically to say nothing to be you know tied in his basement and and but it's working because even though he's a cipher I think people he's basically a protest vote against Trump and Trump you know is you know seen as very divisive and inflammatory and I think the American people at this point just want to push a button and make it stop and right now Biden seems like the make it stop button yeah okay and should Biden I'll add to the question to be a bit too will end on this to this double question who wins today and should buy it in debate Trump or is it better for him to just opt out of the debates and not risk it buy-ins would you advise well I think buying strategy right now I was working I don't know why he would change it I mean so he should not there's three debates on the books he agreed to should he do the three debates yes or no if you were advising him so I think he probably will not be able to to duck that these debates forever I think I mean it seems unlikely that you know if you are advising him would you tell him to do it or not I would I think I would tell him is strategy is working which is to say nothing and don't go to the debates if you can get away with it I'm not sure he'll be able to get away with it so I think eventually people eventually the American public will turn its attention to the election but part of part of the reason why his strategy is working is because Trump is running such a bad campaign in fact it feels like Trump hasn't even really started to campaign there's no logic to it for sure yeah well it's you know normally what the incumbent does especially when they've got a lot of money is they use this summer to define the opponent they start running a lot of ads seeking to define their opponent and and you know where are those ads where is that attempt to define Biden I mean I think it I think it's hard because you know cuz it's it's hard to define Biden as as a radical who represents these woke mobs Biden doesn't even know how to say the word woke correctly I think he's called him woke so that's absolutely right by my four-year-old who needed her diaper change right all right but but the fact that Biden is so clueless and seems like so out of touch actually helps them because I mean the way the way for Trump to win the election okay let's let's put it that way is to make the alternative to trump the destruction of Mount Rushmore right I mean if if Trump can somehow convince the American public that the election of Joe Biden means the ripping down of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and and Mount Rushmore and the destruction of capitalism that is the way for him to win that's the you know but he has to actually listen well yes he has to actually be able to tag Biden with that why didn't we tortilla why did Peter teal drop Trump he's you've got a 30-year relationship with Peter teal you talked to him on the regular why did teal drop him I don't know that he has I think you have to get him on the show to talk all right there you go good deflection best DC who wins and should he do those three debates Biden yeah yeah I think you can't get away from them I wouldn't make it a big issue because the debates are gonna be kind of this random crappy kind of experience you know I I don't even know whether they'll be in the same place I think they should try to make sure that they're not in the same place so that it's done almost over zoomed like you can you can [ __ ] the effort the the usefulness of these debates in many ways there really isn't much that can happen in the debates the reality is that people aren't voting for Biden they are voting against Donald Trump any chance Trump wins and they are voting against the sheer incompetence of him and his family and you know it's going to be very difficult for him to overturn it there is one thin path for him to win which is to absolutely shower America with money close to the election day so if there is a Multi multi trillion dollar stimulus bill that passes and it literally puts money into the hands of working Americans especially in the swing states it could work now the one thing I'll tell you is if you looked at the exit in Georgia it's scary because there were 230,000 I think more Democrats out of the exit polls in the Georgia primary than there were Republican now just hold the phone here for a second because under no calculus on electoral college did we ever have to think that there is probabilistically any chance that a Democrat wins Georgia and I think what this speaks to is a changing demographic longitudinally and this is not a racial thing meaning this is an age thing where these young people are very different politically and so if you think that there is an even remote chance that Donald Trump loses Georgia don't even worry about Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Florida because he would have already lost those in order to lose George also this pandemic and work from home is gonna result in people if it is a sustained work for me we have scarred the American economy guys and we don't reduce our extent of the injury because you know you know the extent of the injury when you get you know step out of the chair that first moment the cast gets taken off and you put a little pressure on the leg to see how bad it is and we don't know how bad it is except we know that it's pretty bad so you know I think that all roads kind of look like Biden I think the very narrow path that Donald Trump has is you know a Multi multi trillion dollar stimulus built directly into the hands of Americans Freiberg is he gonna win yes or no should he do the debates yes or no if the vote were to happen today he would win Joe Biden would win I think he's actually more likely to win based on news that just hit the wire which we haven't talked about today which is it looks like Facebook is gonna ban all political ads this year what yeah I do that obviously the Facebook invite for survival right now that ad camp amazing how a bunch of advertisers taking a one-month pause all of a sudden brings Zuckerberg to the table amazing how my my well-timed short thesis tweet plays Oh yum yum so I think that works that obviously works to Biden's favor all right that's the case and then - my point on the debate if I were Biden what I would do right now is I would go on Twitter and I would say release your tax returns and I'll debate you and I would repeat that tweet twice a day and love it the Thurber gets the dunk 360 Danza dungeon that's a card Eldersburg for free burger wins the debate this show is sponsored by nobody however I'm gonna ask my bestie see if somebody were to make a $25,000 donation to charity would you allow me to read an ad for 30 seconds during the pot at some point no but I'll match it to wherever you want to go no [ __ ] ads ever I love and I love you guys I miss you love you bestie see I love you love you free love you sacks was great playing golf let's get let's go off let's [ __ ] golf man I'm losing my mind we'll see you a little let's do a little small little NASA boys a little time you buy on the all in podcast tell your friends to tune in if they want to listen to something intelligent bye-bye








hey everybody welcome back to the all in podcast besties i have reunited it's been a bestie summer chamoth how are you doing you're back in america yes i am back in america back in america uh feels great uh good summer yes i had uh seven weeks in italy it was really incredible what is the vibe in italy post-pandemic obviously they had the the roughest of any nation i think except for china and wuhan um with cover 19. how's the psyche there no it's incredible because they're i mean they're so resilient they basically decided that they don't ever want to go through it again so everybody wore a mask and um people socially distanced there's lots of dinners outside no restaurants were really seating people indoors you'd walk into a store and you'd have to put some you know purell on your hands and wear a mask and there was like you know 40 50 cases a day and then i keep looking at the news when i was there 60 000 a day here i was it's it was just really it was sad and then on top of that to see the riots the fires i mean there's a you know it's been a disturbing summer here uh how are you doing david sachs you're back in san francisco and uh you got to spend a little bit of time in an undisclosed location as we we know from the last couple episodes of the podcast how is san francisco right now how has your bestie summer been uh it's been great um yeah i was i guess i can now disclose that my disclosed location was uh was mexico specifically cabo and that was it was a great place to be for a couple of nobody cares yeah exactly um but actually um it it it was great it was a great place to be in the early stages of the pandemic because everyone was wearing masks you know they did take it really seriously and there were very few cases and seemed like it was under control at least in the area i was and then um you know we came back to san francisco for for school for for the kids school which um you know i'm not sure we have to be here but um but that's that's yeah that's school actually open are they going to school or they keep pushing it out two weeks like my kids are yeah it's we don't they're not going in person yet but i think they keep trying to figure out when they're gonna be able to start doing that so it's all zoom based right now yeah which means no learning right i mean do you think these kids are actually learning on zoom or do you think it's just glorious a little bit i mean a little bit i think it's it's it's difficult yeah we gave up on it and free burger are you there i'm here barry yeah how's your bestie summer been uh during this crazy time i've been in the bay area i've been um crossing all seven layers of uh dante's inferno here in california moving from the outer layer of covid to the middle layer of california's proposed wealth tax to the uh inner layers of extreme heat smoke and the absolute central layer of pain more recently my three-year-old daughter decided 34 nights ago to not sleep anymore so um yeah we've been living living the life it's been glorious and um you know i wear a mask now for kovid and then i wear another mask on top of that mask for the smoke so we're just living the california dream what my parents immigrated here for you know paradise well i guess that's a good place to start and um just if anybody cares i spent uh you know i've been lonely and i tweeted i'm lonely and i got about 50 phone calls from people who are like i can't imagine j-cal being sad but i actually had a talk with my wife and i said what are the symptoms of depression because i i think i might have depression and i went through and i was like i don't have depression i'm just i have great empathy for all the people suffering and you know i just being isolated you guys know me very well better than anybody like i like to talk to people and it's been really difficult for me to be totally candid to be isolated like this and the podcast is is great and doing this podcast is great but man i miss people i just missed what are the what are the symptoms of your depression just before you were self-diagnosing i'm just curious i was i i was feeling like um just sad about watching the riots and watch people shoot each other and then watching you know the the the wildfires watching people die unnecessarily and then watching the madness for the election it was just all becoming like i wouldn't say overwhelming but it just made me very sad that you know so many people can't go back to work and then the stock market's ripping and it's a very i don't know how you guys feel but it feels very surreal right because in our world and i don't know how your portfolios and investments are doing you know a lot of the companies we've invested in as angel investors um are doing just wonderfully and we're investing more than ever but then you turn on the television it's like the doom scrolling is crazy so i had to just stop doom scrolling i think that was the key thing chamoth was just looking at twitter is that the trending topics is so depressing and just so overwhelming at times that i took three days off this weekend and went camping and i literally didn't pull up twitter and i felt much better so i think it's really twitter related like just opening up the trending topics i don't know if you did that on your holiday in italy but it really is a quick way to get depressed the best thing is that i was using it in a different time zone and so i was basically out of the flow and it makes a huge difference because then you're not in the emotional turmoil of people's immediate reaction and so you can just kind of uh move on and then also i just had a really fun summer because i really tried to detach and not use my phone i had a you know i kept my meetings to a few hours a day and then otherwise i was doing things yeah you you want to know you want to want to know my phone call to jaycal it's like hey jake al i i saw on twitter that you're you're sad and lonely it's like yeah yeah it's like are you suicidal it's like no okay goodbye but i do i do want to thank you david for having me down to cabo and we got to have some good times to watch some good movies uh gladiator extended cut was great uh some other movies that we watched could get us cancelled so we won't admit that we watched history of the world or any other mel brooks movies but we had a good time played a couple rounds of golf and that was good times uh but let's talk about california because i think you know we're all residents currently of california but let me just put it out there how many people on the call are considering uh leaving california anybody is that going through anybody's mind right now because it's going through um for well it's not for me um but uh i think that california is sort of emblematic of what could happen if you actually have um you know the legislative bodies plus you know the the top sort of political leader up and down on one ticket i mean you know you you basically have like massive rife incompetence and it's been compounded you never i mean you know if people who are democrats would have said oh the best thing that can happen for democrats is if you have you know local cities plus an assembly plus the state senate plus the governor as a democrat republicans would have said the same thing for republicans but as it turns out uh it basically creates the worst outcomes and so instead what you need is a little diversity of ideas and a little push and pull um but california is like a bunch of clowns in a clown car right now it's a joke but i'm not going to move now part of it i'm not going to move is i i've you know my taxes i've set up in such a way where california can't get access to most of my assets anyway so you know they can pounce in definitely yeah david how are you uh sax how are you feeling about california right now um and just the craziness in san francisco the homelessness problem in san francisco has become acute during this it's it's really well it's it says on top of it and it's it's a disaster it's a disaster um i mean i'm not uh i'm not leaving or anything but it's certainly a topic of conversation that's come up a lot and i do know people who have left um i know a couple of people who you know prominent people in the venture community who've recently moved to austin and it's a horrible time for the the city and state be proposing all these new taxes as just take one example because people are already realizing that because of covet and and this new sort of work from home and zoom uh business culture where you can kind of work from anywhere that people are realizing they don't need to be in san francisco or in silicon valley anymore to be you know in the technology industry and so at precisely the time that people were reevaluating where they wanted to be realizing that that could be anywhere california is now you know proposing to massively increase the cost of being here um so it's it's horrible timing and then you know you do have this uh sort of seemingly chronic uh issue in san francisco particularly with with the sort of homeless problem uh just seems to keep getting worse um and there's there's sort of this um weird hostility to technology and tech workers um here that i think it somehow uses a scapegoat to prevent the city from dealing with its real problems and what do you perceive those real problems to be in in the city um i mean you use the term homeless i think most people looking at the problem as one person candidly told me you know what we have is not and i wouldn't say who said this but it's a prominent person they said this you know jason the issue here is this isn't a homeless problem this is a junkie problem and the use specifically is that i'm using that term because that's the term to refer to people who are addicted to opioids methamphetamine fentanyl and that if you were to actually unpack what we're calling a homeless crisis it's actually a crisis of drug addiction and specifically fentanyl and i don't know if you guys saw we're gonna hit something like 500 overdose deaths this year we're like going to double last year and it's all fentanyl which is a particularly you know deadly drug so i mean how much do you think that is the problem david huge i mean it's it's you're right that homelessness is not the the cause of the issue that homelessness is the consequence of long-term drug addiction and mental illness i mean this is the it's the end state and uh you're right the city is it's not really tackling the underlying issues in fact it's kind of eating and abetting them i mean how many millions of needles does the city give away every year and that it only collects a small fraction of them with the remainder ending up on the streets um it's just it's bonkers and i think part of the problem is that we keep saying that until we uh it is that we can't demand any uh improvement in the situation in terms of homeless people you know we have this like poop squad in in san francisco that's literally cleaning poop off the sidewalks because um homeless people are using our sidewalks as as like a latrine basically as a bathroom and and what you keep hearing is that well we can't do anything about that problem until we solve the homeless problem and that's a and certainly we should try to solve that problem but it's a very long term you know difficult and tractable problem in the meantime we can certainly do things like demand that homeless people not do that yeah and the policing seemed to there seems to be a distinct issue with policing right now i watched the san francisco tenderloin twitter account david freeburg and they've arrested something like 260 meth meth and fentanyl dealers but we have a uh d.a chessa i believe his name is who doesn't believe in prosecuting any of those crimes uh related to drugs or petty crime freeberg what is the city turned into for you as somebody who's been a long-term investor in the bay area um well i moved here after i graduated college in 2001 and i loved san francisco it was it was a quieter city in a quainter city i honestly um over the years have found uh the traffic and the congestion and the buildup of the city to be frustrating i'm a little bit of a anomaly in this sense because i think a lot of people you know think that the city should continue to grow and progress and build housing and so on those are all uh you know fine objectives but i think the quality of life has degraded for some time in the city as as infrastructure hasn't kept up with the uh the changing pace of uh companies growing here and as a result we've kind of got this ballooning inflating budget that's been poorly managed you've got um i forgot the statistic but there's um some number of thousand people plus that are city government employees in san francisco earning over 300 000 a year um and so there there's a there's a chronic kind of bureaucratic issue um that is the cancer that has caused uh you know a lot of the follow-on crises that i think we're now experiencing acutely here in the city now in terms of leaving to your earlier question i you know um i was really like i've just been like everyone you know like that i caught kind of talk about the dante inferno layers it's also like for me growing up it's like a seven layer burrito it's like one layer of [ __ ] after another um start with the beans and in the middle you got the sour cream and um you know this city's just gotten um kind of and the state has gotten more and more difficult to live in and i and i was certainly thinking and talking to my wife like we gotta leave her family's here so we're not gonna leave the state but then i did a call last week that uh that i think 18 of us were on with governor newsom and um you know he made a couple of really interesting points that really did honestly reset my perspective you know i've tried to take a step back and think a little bit more broadly about the long-term opportunity in california the way this state operates uh right now it's the fifth largest economy in the world they ran a surplus their refinance their debt they've done a great job kind of managing kind of the fiscal gap that that's that's being created by the copic crisis um and you know governor newsome made a point like we have had the california exodus story that's percolated and cycled really for decades uh he pointed out an article which i've not been able to find but i've been looking forward from time magazine from 1959 that were like declared this is the year everyone's going to exit us out of the state and we hear it every couple years there's some crisis that precipitates the mass exodus and it hasn't happened because it is a great place to work it's diversified industrial base it's not just tech tech is a lot of the growth but there's a lot of industry here largest ag producer largest um large military aerospace industry and on and on and on uh this is a it's a great um diversified economy it's a great diversified cultural base it's by the oceans it's by the mountains it's an incredible place to live and work and i don't think any of us want to give that up and uh and the the media has done a great job kind of um magnifying these these small stories that aren't really a story governor and eusa made the case that this wealth tax proposal you know was one assembly member it didn't even get into committee it wasn't even really being considered but it kind of created this this press flourish and everyone got involved and everyone i know kind of freaked out about it and it became this kind of another catalyzing event but it wasn't really real so if we kind of broaden our perspective a little bit both in terms of space and time i think we get a little more kind of comfortable with like of all the places to live and all the places to work this is the best and you can go see some taxes and move to austin but i mean then you got to go live in austin you know whatever well it's it's it's the best it's the best you're right that is the best in terms of climate geography natural beauty uh resources and the industries that have developed here and have you know strong network effects but it's not the best politically i mean it's among the worst politically and it seems like the politicians are doing everything they can to mess it up i mean i almost wonder if there's like a resource curse issue particularly with san francisco where you know there's this thing in and um i mean this this observable thing with governments that um that sometimes you get a resource curse where if there's like a lot of oil in the country or something uh you end up with with a government that's not very good because people just spend all their time going to war to try and capture it and i kind of wonder if you know san francisco has been the beneficiary of being proximate to silicon valley this enormous like wealth creation prosperity job creation um ecosystem that had nothing to do with creating and i would say two things to build on what you're saying um the first is i think that when the economies in an environment are really really good all the really really smart people want to go into those economies and that leaves generally dumber people to do things like politics so uh and that's less true in places that have shittier economies uh yeah faster and and i actually think that that's that's practically true we may not want to think it and it may not may sound a little harsh but it's true and you know the the way that you reverse it is what singapore does which is you make the civil servants the highest paid people in the economy right and you treat them like knowledge workers and you say wow look i'm going to pay this person 250 300 000 a year you're shocked at the quality of the person you get that's the the first comment i want to make the second one though is is that unlike all these other times where i think people have been um you know sort of uh prognosticating the doom and gloom of california the the thing that's different now is that because it is such a dominant political environment for the democrats it's much easier to judge if they actually know what they're doing and if they are going to do things that are aligned with the sort of like the moral code of the party that elected them and so like let's just talk for example about the fact that uh we are not going to have police reform of any kind in california which is where you'd think would be the first state where people got their act together and said okay if we really believe that we need to reform police we can do it in our own backyards but that legislation is going to get blocked because uh californians have decided that they care more about the alignment to police unions than they do to the right of law into social justice for minorities and blacks that's crazy we should be the most progressive is your point on this chamath and the point is to say it explicitly is the politicians are in the pocket of the unions and because they're in the pocket of the police unions and the education unions we cannot make forward progress even though we're supposed to be the most liberal of all locations correct that's in summary yeah exactly the we we actually if we believe that we have you know up and down the ticket the ability to implement justice right at least justice in the vein of the democratic party and what that platform represents or for example all of the people that were out protesting okay uh during black lives matter during that entire movement i suspect the overwhelming majority are democrats slash progressives or you know let's just say the majority or at a minimum plurality okay but then the idea that then you have a state the most populous and the richest filled up and down the ticket with people who are theoretically aligned with those political values but then when push comes to shove and the legislation hits the floor it basically gets mothballed to me is inexcusable and disgusting yeah i mean look at the housing issue we just had a bill that was an incredibly simple bill i think it was 11 yeah sb 11 20. i know if you followed this one but i've been following it on the twitter and it was a very simple piece of legislation any single family home lot could have a duplex on it so you could have two homes on a single lot and they couldn't even pass that in a city where you know a firefighter a teacher etc cannot live within 90 minutes of where they work and they couldn't even pass that um well also there's there's also ab5 right i mean jason as uber's third or fourth investor yeah sure you got something to say about that right i think third or fourth but uh here we go to the vc bragg's controversy can we just yeah could we just can we just pin down exactly which one it is so you could just say you're the fourth investor or something like that it's so much better to say third or fourth and that was my obviously but um you know ab5 is another one look at all the careers in which you can be david sacks a freelancer and the high the more money you make the more you get to dictate your schedule but if you are poor and if you are in an entry-level job the california government will not let you even though 70 of drivers for these services want to be freelancers and the services themselves said they will put into a fund for healthcare like they literally uber you know dar is like hey we're going to put money into this lift is going to put money into it they still will not let people decide for themselves what shift they want it makes no sense i mean and and it trickled into like journalists too i mean there's they said now journalists can write if you if you write 30 articles a year for a single outlet you're technically considered an employee even though you're writing the articles on your own time with your own research and you're getting paid for successful art for good articles that are accepted and then there was this follow-on controversy about translators it's like well translators takes five minutes to translate an article so why would 30 articles apply to a translator and obviously when you have that degree of confusion and complexity something's off right yeah and it's such a it feels like virtue signaling yeah yeah well i think well i mean the reason why av5 happened is it was at the behest of the teamsters right they're trying to unionize the uber and lyft drivers and they can't do it unless they're employees and so you know the the author of the the bill lorena gonzalez who's sort of in their back pocket um you know that's why she put forward the bill and then the absurdity of it was that you know they realized after introducing it that it would ensnare all these other occupations like the writers and journalists and photographers and translators and yeah even like people like manicurists and so on right and so what they've been doing is they've been now modifying the legislation to exclude all of these categories and in the process they're kind of laying bare what's really happening here which is this is all about either basically shutting down or forcing uh uber and lift to comply with um with the will of the teamsters and it seems like the legislation blinked when uber and lyft said well we'll just shut the service down so what your thoughts on when that happens saks dude what do you think will happen who who will win this ab5 shutdown a showdown well that whatever they yeah they threatened to basically stop service and they got a stay i think from a judge uh yes so so 85 doesn't go into effect until november when and there's a ballot initiative that they're sponsoring to get 85 overturned so i think you know i don't i don't try to predict whether it's going to win or not but that to me is like whether if ab5 were defeated by a ballot initiative in november that'd be a really positive sign for the state of california i'll say there was um on this call with governor newsom last week he did point out that ab5 was more of kind of a law of inevitability as a result of that whole dynamics uh state supreme court decision where the uh you know the supreme court basically said look here's the criteria that defines an employee versus an independent contractor um you know they get to decide what work they do or what hours or whatever and there's like some set of criteria and they said look uber drivers and all these other kind of technically independent contractors don't meet those criteria fully therefore they are employees and as a result california assembly tried to and had to effectively codify what it means to be an employee versus an independent contractor and i'm not arguing for the case i'm just saying what was conveyed by the governor last week on why this ended up coming to bear now if they strike it down there's going to be some other law that's going to pop up because this of the state supreme the dynamics decision and that's kind of you know something's going to have to get written down so sax don't you think it ultimately ends up just being some sort of negotiated point between all of these industry leaders and you know the state to kind of figure out okay what's everyone going to compromise on to get something written down that's law i mean possibly i mean dynamex is not like constitutional it's not a constitutional decision so the legislature can do whatever it wants here you know and so if you were going to respond to dynamics you don't have to kind of enshrine it um so and i guess there there was certainly some question whether dynamex would apply to uber and lyft in in this way you know they could have made they could have made their arguments um in front of a court right okay look the problem is now and whatever applies to california applies to every state legislature how are these people supposed to figure this out i'm sorry but like you know who are we entrusting here to go and then all of a sudden understand the nuances of lift and uber and really understand the job that they do versus the translators versus the this person versus the that person versus the dynamex decision again i think 20 years ago i kind of would have believed that politicians were generally some of the smartest people um you know frankly amongst us um and it really did attract a certain level of intellectual person who cared about legislating but you know now basically you just have like you know jerry falwell juniors running around i mean these these are they're all just running around until they get caught on instagram and get fired i mean they're just uh they're not the smartest people that we're dealing with and so what was what was gavin newsom's answer to that that's really what i would you know the jerry falwell junior point didn't come up tomorrow but we can follow it does seem to me that if if they do become full-time this would be a tragedy for the people who are trying to just do 10 to 20 to 30 hours of gig work like what happens to those poor people who wanted to fill in between when they dropped their kids off of school and picked them up and just grabbed a couple hours here there as a second gig like if this actually does pass in their full time honestly guys honestly you guys are such you you're you're you're honestly look it won't affect them it'll affect the long-term profitability in the margins of the companies that have to hire them as full-time employees and they'll have to like you know make a bunch of rules and blah blah blah but it has huge operational implications and it has really terrible op-ex implications for a company but for the person that wants to work 10 hours json they'll still be able to work 10 hours so i think i think the point is that on a specific shift like they're gonna have to come in at a certain shift time i think the point is like the entire public markets who all of a sudden think that a business looks one way has to figure out that it's really a cost plus business and what it really means is you if you were comfortable with uh a 60 or 70 reduction in the market cap of some of these companies you'd be okay with ab5 and i think that's where the tension is where the people that made the law don't care about the market cap because they don't own the stock anyways and the people that are reacting to ab5 are the ones that own the stock and are really thinking about the market cap well but the drivers the drivers are mostly on the stock and they're against it the driver's own eight shares david i mean come on no no that's what i'm saying is they're not shareholders for the most part but this really does reduce their flexibility to contract for their labor no but i think what you're saying will happen which is that they will create a you know ab5 prime which is a modification that's neither this nor what it was uh but it seems that the tailwinds are pretty clear which is that we're moving to a place where these companies have to get built in a very clever way and even if they are super clever in capturing consumer demand the unit economics are going to be pretty shitty and i just think we have to own that and and probably what it means more than anything else is it's not a real venture kind of business and so you may be deficit financing it or building it in a very different way than we used to right but it doesn't have to be that way what you're saying is is i think that this law will have very adverse consequences for their business okay i mean i grant you that um but it's it's what why is the the state interfering in the relationship between uber and its drivers in this way when everyone's happy with it no but it's not i think what actually is happening is the state is effectively capturing the excess return of uber and lyft meaning i think if you just take a pure unemotional economic view at this it's like any other market if there's a huge amount of margin available and there are not many competitors what happens is somebody comes in to take the excess margin so you think that's the government that wants to take it and the unions want to take it absolutely yeah absolutely should we let them then dictate what hours people work the thought exercise that i would ask guys if there was in a market 90 different competitors for transportation would ab5 have been written past adopted and my answer to you would be that it would not have been so uber and lifts and doordash's success is what leads to people wanting to get cut and get a slice the oligopolist model of success where not enough other companies are pulled through got it well that gives us a good segue into by the way sorry last point on this yeah and the funny thing is the people who created the problem are the ones that hate it the most which are the investors because they pile in the incremental dollars into the winners trying to king make a winner through capital and now what's happening is their rate of returns are basically getting taken away and i think that in in in a weird way that's also kind of fair well i i i would just disagree slightly in the sense that just because this has big distributional consequences like basically who who makes the the surplus uh doesn't mean it also doesn't have a huge deadweight loss associated with it and whenever you prohibit people from engaging in the type of economic contracts relationship that they want to engage in you're reducing um surplus and so i so i hear what you're saying but and i think there is i think this is all about regulatory capture right this is the teamsters trying to capture a big piece of the value of uber through their politicians the legislature so you're right about that but i also think that we should care about it not just as uber shareholders but as consumers of the product because it's going to get worse well and also the products going to go away in certain jurisdictions i mean if freeburg wants to get an uber north of the golden gate bridge or in the east bay somewhere they're just not going to have the economics for some communities yeah to even operate the service so just like ubereats and postmates stopped delivering to treasure island a lot of the drivers were in their local communities at home with uber turned on and when they or doordash and when they got a call they would leave their house and that was part of the magic of it is you could just be sitting there you know netflixing or hanging out with your kids and then a good call comes in and then you leave your house that's why you would have that like one minute pause if you ever saw it you know in an uber ride where it's like why isn't the car moving it's because that person's at home and they were capturing the one ride every hour in their local you know suburban area but if you force them to be hourly uber's gonna say you know what it's not worth having an eight-hour shift in you know whatever suburb and and the service will go away and then guess who's gonna not have service and transportation i think sorry i was saying it was like sax's point like you know from a consumer perspective or chamat's point if you end up with 90 of these service providers and um i'm a consumer i'm less likely to order a cab or order a ride share service or i'm less likely to order food for delivery i don't want to deal with 50 [ __ ] apps i don't want to have to like go find the one app that has the contract with the one restaurant then the natural market dynamics the the way that the market naturally evolves is i want simplicity as a consumer i want efficiency that's what makes me want to use it more and when you take that away because you're interfering from a regulatory perspective and how that market operates the product sucks for me and yeah the shareholders ultimately suffer i i think to your point the way that that would probably get solved is you have people that are higher order in the consumer behavior that own these relationships that enforce basically uh a user experience for example facebook and google and apple essentially say we're abstracting all these services because there's 90 of you google says i'm going to put all of you guys on the map view um you know yelp says the same thing and essentially what opens what happens is there's some like open way where essentially a service provider can turn themselves on and broadcast into a network that says i'm available to do a for b and it all gets fixed now that's a future state which was the original idea of uber by the way was to make a marketplace like that and now uber is talking about doing a franchise exactly what you're saying chamath is let some franchisee take the east bay and then provide their inventory network i think franchising is a really really smart business idea and i think that particularly in transportation um and a lot of these services that have this natural dynamic to be local um where there are an infinite sum of many local markets i think it's it's like a burger king it's like a mcdonald's and the the company that moves to a franchising model and then figures it out i think will be a huge winner um and that will be in that will be a very asset light really operationally uh sophisticated very well run highly profitable business i think let's talk about the public markets um wait jason can we just talk about the police brutality thing in california i just want to get your choices it really it really bothers me that california like i bet you there's going to be states that are um diverse in its democratic and republican composition and some republican states uh that passed comprehensive police reform and california will be one of the laggards what do you think if you could wave a magic wand chamoth what are the one two and three things take a minute to think it through and everybody in the call can what are the one two and three things you would do to change policing in the united states i have my own list but i'm curious what you guys think and i actually put a tweetstorm out about my number one thing um what are the specific tactical things let's get tactical first uh i mean the first one that i've always been a big fan of as i've studied it at least from 10 000 feet is ending qualified immunity explain why and what that is you know qualified immunity is essentially that they're there there is this immunity that uh certain individuals have and that they uh that they're not subject to prosecution and so um you know they essentially have a carp launch to behave in ways that can be good in some cases very very bad in other cases gray in other cases yet there's no adjudication of their behavior and so you have to allow people with solid dispassionate detached judgment to be able to enter and say hey listen you are way out of line here and there are consequences for it and people coming in doing those jobs need to understand those consequences versus you have a carte blanche to basically do whatever you want and i think let's talk specifically about the mer well the shooting involving i won't say murder right now um because i think all the facts are not in but jacob blake was shot in the back um he was obviously not listening to the police the police then followed him to his car there's a discussion of if there was a knife on the floorboard and point blank they shot him in the back multiple times and i've heard both sides of this you know this person is not listening to the police this person is going into the car they're reaching potentially for a weapon and the cops had no choice it seemed to me that you know the training of a police officer might actually be that that was a legitimate tuning um but that means maybe they have to rethink policing because you could have easily taken that person down with it even the most modest of a chokehold or a tackle and when we see that it feels like that's the raw shock test right there of like how you look at shootings um in police when you saw that shooting i take it chamoth of j blake and i i saw it and i i just like i i i can't see these anymore they they send me off the rails for days uh but yeah i did see it yeah and so i mean when you look at something like that that's clearly training has to change because i i believe that based on police training and qualified immunity this is going to be considered even though it's shocking to see it i think it's going to be considered um you know an allowed shooting or yeah and there's not going to the person person's not gonna be prosecuted because the person was clearly not listening and there was a knife on the floor and he was going for it and you know it seems to me like we really need to change the actual training the average is six months of training so i think that's one of the top things that has to change is these these police officers have to be trained not to fire first but to to use other tactics so so for me the first one is that the second one for me which i'm a really big fan of is that there needs to be a new way to actually intercept 9-1-1 calls and instead of um deploying police officers we have a separate branch of people that we you know massively pay and train that are effectively you know social workers plus plus and negotiators yeah and and they should be deployed in all kinds of situations um where i think that what what people want is a de-escalation and i think that sometimes the words de-escalation and police don't really sync up and in most a lot of people's minds they think of escalation so people who are trained to de-escalate i think uh and so for example like you know all of the mental health checks all of the mental health issues could probably be domestic like this domestic disturbances would probably go into that category the the third one is i would very much rationalize uh drug use um just because i think the amount of low level offenses and arrests around drug use is antiquated for people's general views on drugs and i think that it needs to sort of correlate to how society views it and then um you know the the last two that i would give you is that there's a concept of no knock warrants that's how brianna taylor was killed insane it's kind of really scary the idea that we could all be sitting in our houses right now as we are and literally the police can just charge in i mean totally unnecessarily i mean she was being for some like low-level drug idea they're going to knock the doors in and of course the person's going to try to protect themselves that's their house sacks they knocked the doors in and they were plain clothes wearing police officers so people are coming and they did it at like midnight when she was asleep so yeah people busting into her house at midnight screaming making noise and not dressed as cops that's that's crazy yeah and then the last one i would give you is militarization of police um a lot of these ideas by the way are justin amash's ideas i i've retweeted and i followed but he was the one that put me onto these things um but you know like you have all this excess military equipment in the army that gets basically passed through and now directly sold into police departments especially post 911 we we basically militarized that so those are facts what are what are your ideas around policing and how we should change it you've heard shamans i i don't have more detailed ideas than than chamoth i think he's given some good ones um for sure i mean i think we definitely need better training and i think better oversight over the use of force um the the body cam idea jason you you tweet about i think that's pretty interesting too um i think you're right explain that for a minute the body cam idea i had was i asked does anybody know and you know does black live matter or another organization track which police departments because we could get a list of every police department that exists in some database somewhere do we actually know what percentage actually have body cams and what model they use and what percentage are working because one of the things that i think has happened this year is you know the live streaming and the live video and the number of smartphones out there has resulted in us being able to see what black and brown people have been telling us for decades which is they're murdered by cops and now we get to see it and you know when you see george floyd get murdered it's fairly obvious that's what happened we don't have a video they have the video of rhianna taylor getting murdered so that's from a cop webcam i'm sorry body cam so i was thinking we should just start with that as a basic which is every single cop car should have a 360 camera in every cop it should be a federal mandate and i don't exactly know how federal mandates were at sacks but don't you think there should be a federal mandate for just cameras and car cameras i think i think it's a good idea i think the use of cameras is a good idea um i mean maybe not recording the police officers when they're sitting in their car but every time there's like a clue you know like yeah they pull somebody over sort of you know like fourth amendment type search and caesar seizure type situation yeah i think it would make sense to have that on video why not yeah i mean you've got to think every police will behave better go ahead freeburg um there was a case the other day uh a young um guy i think he was 19 years old was shot in dc named dion k i don't know if any of you guys watch the body cam footage um and so he was a 19 year old black man he was shot he died um but in the body cam footage you can see that he pulls out this gun and throws it and when he pulls out the gun and flings his hand around he's got the gun in his hand that's when the cop shot him and so there was about a hundred protesters that showed up but it's largely become a non-story as a result of the facts associated with the body cam footage but i just want to propose something else that's a little bit more radical maybe my libertarian ideals kind of cross with my socialist ideals and forming this this concept but perhaps um you're a socialist no yeah i don't know i've never been accused of that but um if we uh if we trace back you know the uh these systems are really chaotic everything you're talking about is layers and layers of bureaucracy and ideas and [ __ ] we should do to manage the problem but there is kind of one common you know butterfly effect butterflies at the source of all of a lot of what we're talking about which is guns if there weren't any guns in the united states i would not feel threatened as a police officer i would never have any reason to feel threatened and i would never have any reason to pull a gun the reason i always make to pull a gun as a police officer is my life is threatened and in the absence of firearms i have no right to pull a gun and that's the case in like the uk for example where there are like no police officer shootings of civilians because they're never under threat of being killed by a gun so there's a simple answer which is get rid of the guns but you know a little too controversial and um obviously many layers to that argument um especially from kind of both sides but i would say um you know much much of what's going to go on now and in the future it's just chaos theory it's going to be building more layers of complexity it's more entropy it's more kind of associated complexity to try and resolve the underlying problem of all of this which is that we've got guns on the streets we've got guns in people's hands and therefore you know there's always this threat against every individual that their life might be taken by another well let me make a prediction right now there's not going to be any new gun control legislation for a generation um because of the the looting and writing that's going on uh gun sales are an all-time high i mean every single gun store that ammunition gets sold out you can't you can't get guns you can't get ammo and there are more first-time gun buyers in the united states the last several months than there's ever been um i mean the the ranks of the nra must just be swelling right now um and so so this idea that you're going to get gun reform i don't think it's going to happen people aren't going to support it and you know i think you know use the word i think idealistic i mean i i think it's like a little bit naive um to assume that you're going to be able to get rid of all the guns in the hands of bad actors there are a lot of people in this country who feel the need to have a gun to protect themselves um and you know the cops can't always get there quickly enough um and a lot of people feel the need to to have that for self-defense i also think the minimum amount of training for a police officer should not be six months i think they have to re i mean if we really want to have the society move forward and you know to solve our issue of race which is you know like the original sydney of america we're gonna really need to start thinking about making you know police go back to school for 18 months 12 months and rethink how we how we address this situation because it's just tragically unfair that one group of people's children has to worry when they're driving in a car and you know other people on this call don't have to worry right and you know uh that is just crazy let's um take a hard uh shift to the economy and then we'll go into um the election what do you think trump you've been talking a little bit about the economy and the stock market ripping again and we seem to have hit a pause uh but we did have like a massive rip with tesla and amazon tesla and apple i guess doing a stock split and we hit all-time records why are we hitting all-time records jimoth we have the most important thing that's happened i think in economics in the last 10 years um the federal reserve jerome powell gave this landmark speech and he basically said we are going to keep rates at zero for the next half decade uh basically and five years at zero yeah i mean quite honestly it could be a decade but they're gonna let inflation run before they basically match it with rates there's no path to any near-term inflation of any kind whatsoever um and so jason my honest perspective is you know you're basically going to get paid to be long equities because uh your risk-free rate is zero and will soon be negative and what are you supposed to do if you're an asset manager what are you supposed to do with you know your take california back to using california let's just say your calpers you're the california pension system and you have hundreds of billions of dollars then you need to generate five or six percent a year to make sure that your pension isn't insolvent and the government is paying you zero okay so that eliminates that option no treasuries for you you're long equities um and when everybody is in that situation you're overwhelmingly long equities and you know the you cannot fight the fed and so you cannot wait them out it's not like you can say oh don't worry they're going to change their mind uh they will change their mind but in reaction to market conditions that are out of your control so uh all of these opportunities in my opinion are generally buying opportunities and uh i'm generally bullish i'm more bullish now than i was before so you can't put your money into treasuries you can't put it into a savings account obviously you can't put it you you it doesn't seem like real estate or commercial real estate is a great bat right now uh so your options are private companies or public companies correct jama um i think it really is just public companies and i don't even think it's private companies so meaning wherever capital is constrained the returns um again these excess returns are getting eaten up um and so the the most unimpeded market for gains right now is the public markets i mean like no offense but i think that if you're a very good stock picker in the public markets you're generating better returns then uh sequoia benchmark name your best venture fund you know i see all these people spouting off uh on twitter about how good they are in the early stage markets it's all kind of small dollars and not that meaningful you know i'm on the call right i'm on the call i mean you're literally talking to the guys spouting off about hitting home runs saks what are your thoughts on this like private markets obviously is the op where we operate both david's free berg and sachs um and you're seeing great deals i think i i've invested in twice as many companies during the pandemic as i did before in the same six-month period what are you seeing in the private markets and what do you think what is your take on best cc's public markets exactly you know we saw some of the best deals that we've seen uh during covid and um you know i'm i'm very bullish about the state of entrepreneurship in the u.s i mean just the the number of interesting companies doing interesting things and the the infrastructure that makes it so easy for founders to get started and create new companies it's so much easier now to create a to create a company that it was 10 years or 20 years ago and of course it's easy to point all the ones that don't work or that don't seem like good ideas but uh but there's so many more experiments that are happening and i think it's gonna i'm you know i'm very bullish about that part of the the american economy and freeberg what are your thoughts on private markets and obviously you're building private companies you have unlimited capital to build them i take it given your track record i spend most of my time accepting rejections from my very close investor friends in my various projects so i wouldn't say that that ever becomes true i'll tell you the truth uh um still selling every day dialing for dollars but um no there are certainly more investors more capital more risk risk-taking um more kind of valuation extending than i think as um it was the case uh pre-covered i think jamaat's point is right though uh there is uh so so much more liquidity available through access to retail and international market um participants um in in a public setting than there is in a private setting and it is because of this liquidity premium and the easy access to putting capital in um it's just extraordinary how much as i've watched close friends and companies and companies i've invested in i'm sure you guys have done the same transition from private to public uh the valuation jump is extraordinary like on on a metrics basis right so whatever the metric might be you get public there is this flurry of of market participation as a result it drives up there's a multiplication you're be sorry can i just say something that's such a such an important smart thing that friedberg said so jason for example like all of us we're all still in the private markets and i'm not trying to take away from the private markets but what david said is so important if you used to look at a sas deal you'd price that sas deal 10 times ar right then there's a little bit of inflation you know uh the rates go up um the prices that people pay go up now all of a sudden we're paying 12 times 15 times now it's 20 times if you're growing a hundred percent rate every year so what's happened the market has become more efficient and the excess return is getting eaten up and so you're like okay well that's still really good and you wait four five six years and you think you're going to get paid the crazy thing is like once that company transitions to the public markets i mean all of a sudden if you actually turn the investor base over and you actually create a float so that public market guys can buy it they'll pay 30 times that's right 35 times 40 times so there's a massive multiple expansion so companies should be going public sooner if you think about this like if i'm trying to raise money for one of my companies i'm going to call on my 10 20 30 friends that i know that are investors in private markets and say hey guys do you want to look at this company and maybe i'll get two or three interested parties and maybe we'll kind of agree on what a fair valuation would be if i could take that same company and instantly make it available to a million investors and all i need to do by the way is raise 10 million dollars all i need is some small number of them to write a couple hundred dollar check and i'm able to fill that that round out the valuation as a result of the liquidity available in that market is so much higher because there everyone's gonna there's gonna be much more participation in bidding and so you know what i think chamath has tapped into with the spat vehicle and um what robinhood is realizing and and i don't think that we all talk about this enough but there's this massive massive massive market of international investors of small of international retail investors who are now rushing into u.s equities freeburg didn't we see that in the ico craze as well where you you i think if we took anything from the ico craze it was and the global appetite for risk and the dot-com boom before that and i think we have to give best ec a lot of credit here for leading the spak movement i mean what's your take on everybody copying you down this backpack champ at this point i had desktop metal as an early angel investment that just spacked um i co-led the place thank you yeah and they told me that thank you for the markup um and i've been hearing like i'm get if i'm getting inbound as an angel investor from i literally got a cold email from some high profile people they're like hey can you do you have anything for us to spack i mean this is like the third or fourth time people are coming down to my [ __ ] level of angel investing saying can you introduce us to the com guys can you choose something to rob in it i'm like i think you can go direct to them but what is your take on how many spacks have been created since you like literally single-handedly restarted the smack movement i think because i don't think you've ever got a record about this uh i'm really proud of what we did when we created this thing two years ago i said i want to basically create a new way of doing ipos i called it ipo 2.0 i reserved ipo a through z on the nyse i i hope um uh to fulfill that um and i think i will um but taking a step back for a second in the year 2000 there were 8 000 public companies in america on the american stock exchanges and in the year 2020 there are 4 000. so we've shrunk in half the number of public companies while at the same time we've you know 10x the amount of comp uh the amount of capital and the number of people so we don't have a large enough surface area in the public markets that's why companies are better off going public because they're going to have a much more receptive audience of people that are dying to own growth of any kind what's the earliest and the media and that people should go public well so here's the thing so like if you're like one of 30 companies in a venture portfolio that's growing at 50 plus percent you're one of 30. but when you go public you're one of one you know when you're growing 50 60 percent you you become very unique all of a sudden you're a sort of a one percent kind of a company you're an outlier and so you get treated you know incredibly well so that's the backdrop i think a company should be going public around year five year six um what revenue footprint uh about 50 million you know at 50 million and when they're doubling i think that they should be going up and you know it allows them to build capital slowly it allows them to basically contain control it minimizes dilution um i think it's a really powerful model and then on on the number of spacks what i would say is i think it's really good that the market is getting diversified i think what's going to happen is like the the thing with smacks is it's going to be no different than in some ways the banks that preceded us which is that there's going to be a distribution you can go to goldman sachs and that'll mean some one thing you can go to merrill lynch or b of a or ubs or jeffries it'll mean other things you can go to allen and company it'll mean yet another different set of things and i'm sure there's going to be a you know an organization that is all about cost some is going to be all about relationships um so i just think that's going to be the distribution my personal perspective it's probably us and maybe one or two other people who really dominate the space and i'll tell you the only reason why i say that i think it's going to be really important when these people try to get these facts done what they're going to realize is it's really hard and it's hard for a couple reasons number one is you have to marry operational insight and public market sophistication and the founder will get really smart about being able to figure out whether this person is just a financial arbitrager or if the person has enough operational experience to deeply understand the business why you have to translate it to the public markets well that's one huge thing that i think that people will um will start to will start to hone in on um anyways there's a bunch of other things but um are you now competing with what i want to sacrifice agree with the 50 million yeah yeah sure um i'm i'm cool with that you know i invest well before that so i'd be i'd be happy for you probably have a bigger portfolio 50 million dollar investment yeah it is it's great for for for me and jason and i you know i i think jamal deserves a ton of credit on this soul spac thing it is i don't know if all the listeners um are aware of this but this back thing's become a huge wave um there's a ton of people creating them kevin hart says a new one reed hoffman has a new one they're you know the east coast hedge fund guys pincus and um and then the east coast hedge funds like bill ackman whatever they're all creating them so tremoth has really started a wave here and i think the appeal of a spac to a founder i'll put in a plug of why i think it's a good idea for a founder to consider this is because you essentially what what founders are used to is doing you know private rounds right you agree on a on an amount raise an evaluation and it's a percent dilution and you're done that's it and it's simple right and and when you ipo and need to raise money it's not like that you have to then work with an investment bank they'll put together a book you do like a road show you do this whole dog and pony thing you don't know how much money you're gonna get at the end of that process or what the valuation is gonna be and then on top of that we know statistically bill gurley's published all the stats the investor banks are going to rip you off so you know so that what a spac does is it prices like a late stage private round you just agree with the spec promoter on a valuation and an amount raised and then on top of it you get kind of a direct listing along with it all of a sudden you start trading as a public company and so a spac is like a combination direct listing plus private round and i think that's going to be appealing to a lot of founders as they start to discover this more and more sax in a way you're saying it's going to feel more like doing a series d than it does at roadshow and yeah i think that comfort level for somebody like robin hood or com or data stacks or thumbtack or any of these companies that you and i are every company in your portfolio i'm just saying listen i got two ipos and i've got two ipos in two years this is i think this is going to be the new thing for an early stage investors is we're not going to count unicorns anymore we're going to count specs we're going to count public listings right and and i think that's the other thing by the way the other the other thing that i'll say to founders is one is i think you need to you need to think about do these people have the combination of operational and financial acumen in the public markets um and investing experience in the public markets and the operational credibility to describe the business and i think you can trade off one for the other if one is so deep meaning if warren buffett was doing us back you'd say well he has no operational experience but he's so credible in the public markets then you know that's all that matters but you need to be super super deep in one or have a really brilliant and thoughtful level of credibility in the publics meaning an early stage investor who isn't married to somebody who can basically say i know how hedge funds work i've made them money and i'm gonna make them more money and mutual funds etc is troublesome the second thing is for founders you have to really make sure you understand what is in it for the person that's doing this back i mean in every deal i write a minimum of a hundred million dollars personally and that's a lot and so i skipped in the game i feel very much at risk and so i take a lot of time to make sure these things go well and then the third is that for the spa person what i'll tell them is they're gonna find that there's a bunch of landmines um and i'm not gonna you know say it up front because i think it'll be fun for them to find out themselves along the way but these things are hard the first one took me two and a half years uh they're hard yeah they're hard they're hard hey let's uh swing to the election now um and uh talk a little bit about the flip-flopping we're all doing because we've gone from trump's a lock to trump's not a lock uh you know and we've had many different theories but here we are uh are we 60 days out now how many days till the election is it exactly 60 and then the first debate is september 29th yeah yeah so we're we're at the 55 of 56 days mark the taping of this and the first debate i think is september 30th so we're we're about three weeks away from joe biden and trump going at it what's everybody's handicapping now the mark the markets seem to be saying even money or a slight edge to joe biden uh what what are our thoughts i uh i think that uh i think biden's looked the crispest he's looked okay and so um is that actually encouraging or not encouraging i think it really is because i think he's a really good like i said he doesn't have to uh be better than donald trump he just has to not be donald trump for a lot of people and so you know he becomes a very good do no harm alternative because you know to support donald trump you have to have a view to support joe biden you can have no view um and i think that that in general that's a that's a demand maximizing thing to do so i think he's relatively well positioned it's the crispest i've ever seen him on television there's less stuttering there's less not stuttering but like less like mental gaps yeah you know the what do you think of the vp choice kamala i think safe so i i agree with tremoth that that was kind of the the take or theory on biden like a month or two ago is that he could just run as a protest vote against trump um and um and and that's why the basement strategy appeared to make sense is that he would say nothing do nothing go nowhere and just and just try to run as a protest vote against trump and i think that was working a couple of months ago when you know a covet seemed a lot worse uh b the economy seemed a lot worse we're now down to about eight percent unemployment we were at 13 or 14 um and uh c you know trump had seemed to kind of mishandle the the reaction to to floyd he seemed to be inciting it but now we have this this issue of the the looting and violence and predominantly democrat-run cities and i think you know trump has sort of found his sales pitch now um in opposing um the basically the the radical left um and these these mobs and and protests that seem to be uh you know causing uh tremendous uh unrest and uh looting and violence in our cities and i think it's i think it's a in combination with the improving conditions of the economy and covet i think it's a winning pitch for him unless biden finds a more compelling way of responding which he has not to date um i think you know somebody like bill clinton would know exactly how to respond i think he would you know just better instincts yeah well i think you know he would pull a sister soldier to use a term from the the you know political dictionary where you know maybe he would take this crazy new book in defense of looting and figure out you know and give a speech denouncing that i mean he would find somebody to his left who represents you know a fringe of the the left that he presumably doesn't support and find a way to distance themselves or denounce them like yeah maybe like antifa like you know the the anyone you know any of the leftovers in portland looting in portland i think there's a lot of targets nobody wants nobody wants to support that and so biden comes out and says hey we don't support that and it gives him that law and order vote but and he hasn't done he hasn't really done that i mean so two of my favorite political pundits right now are andrew sullivan and matt uh taibi who are you know very uh they're strong supporters of biden they're very anti-trump but they think he's failing on sort of this these issues uh because he's not he's not figuring out the right way to uh to denounce what's happening i think a lot of this has to do with when kids go back to school and the death rate uh of kovid and as i was tweeting and i got i got a lot of people angry at me um about tweeting this but i said i think this is a setup for trump to go into the first debate with you know well under you know six seven hundred deaths a day and then the next debate in october with you know call it three or four hundred that's a day and basically declare that he did solve kovid because we've been trending down for five weeks now and he started wearing a mask six weeks ago seven weeks ago july 11 was the first day he wore a mask a cynic would say he almost timed mask wearing which is obviously what we talked about in the first episode or two of all in podcasts was our discussion about why is wearing a mess so difficult for him and it seems like he slowplayed it he's you know he set his he slow played he hit a set on the turn and here he is like he wore the mask on july 11 he wore it four months late but guess what as chamath was saying everybody wears a mask and every and these things go down in italy we're going to come into the first debate what if it's 400 deaths a day and then the second debate it's 200 that's the day and then our kids are back in school in october which seems to be the case right all the schools are saying you know be ready for october to open and what if he actually does have a vaccine that has so much credibility or any of these high-speed testing machines come on i mean this could be a setup of all setups for him to just you know drop the microphone hey look the economy has had an all-time high and kova debts are at an all-time low well i mean yeah i think democrats are on fire that to me seems like the the trajectory i mean um we spent a long time on this pod talking about what a disaster uh san francisco and california are those are one-party states and cities and i think you know we're not just electing a person as president we're also electing a party and a movement and a governing philosophy and however much uh trump is um you know disliked by a lot of people i think a lot of people are looking at you know i i think they they may like joe biden personally and and think that he personally is safe but they don't like the movement and the party and the governing philosophy that is now associated with biden so if you had to put your entire net worth on it chamath biden or trump uh biden i think sacks entire net worth i i i would uh i predict trump at this moment wait you predict but you but you wouldn't put your entire net worth on if you had to i could see your hesitation you want trump trump to win oh sure but you would you wouldn't put you wouldn't put your entire net worth on him but yeah of course not you would put it this is this is about a 55 sort of thing so biden has a 55 chance of winning so even though you're voting for trump you are not going you would not put your fortune on fighting you you asked me who i predict right now i'm predicting trump you'll remember on the last part i predicted biden so it moves depending on what i see yeah i mean yeah and i'm going to go with yeah but it just knows jason i think i think a better way to get a better answer is not to force somebody to put their entire net worth on the line it's just okay who do you think is going to win who do you think is going to win sex how many times have to answer this question you think trump's going to win you actually yes yes i do actually really that's fascinating and it's free remember that i remember it's the first time i've seen it i think it's i think it's the same as it was last time for me and has been most of this process it's a coin flip and it still is a coin flip and uh there's a lot of noise between here and 60 days from here all right well then if we if we do think it's a coin flip freeberg what happens if trump is elected again some people think this is all institutions are broken forever america is broken forever hyperbolic that that's the perception on both sides right so the perception and the motivation on both sides is democracy is crumbling and the resultant action is to elect the the person you think will restore democracy the reality is both candidates to some degree might move us a little bit further away from democracy and um some might argue that trump makes us feel a little bit more like an autocratic dictatorial regime and some might say that biden makes us feel a little bit more like an aoc socialist regime it's not all the way as if we had bernie in the seat but um you know the the reaction uh isn't necessarily let's go back to the middle let's become a centrist government let's uh let's have good political debate and a good by the way the one show i've been watching a lot of lately just to nostalgia to chamoth's tweet earlier today make me feel better about life is west wing where you know jed bartlett is the president and he wants a great national debate we all want to have this intellectual exercise of coming to the truth and coming to the best decision for the nation and i don't think anyone feels like that's the case today nor will that be the case tomorrow with either of these guys in the seat and i think the the point then becomes well who's gonna better align with my values and you know um it is really a crumbling democracy kind of motivation i would guess if you were to survey people as to how they're making their choice if trump is elected freeberg do you feel it is an acute you know existential crisis for america as a democracy you personally i don't i don't think democracies end um with a bang i think they end with a whimper and i think that's been the case historically and you know no democracy has uh has lasted our our democracy in the u.s has has lasted longer uh than many um but democracies i'll just tell you my point of view on this democracies ultimately enable uh freedom of operation and free markets that um that result in greater progress than any other governing system the problem with progress is that progress is asymmetric you have some people who progress at a much greater rate um than than most and and it is that delta that motivates the end of that system ultimately while everyone in the united states or the average and even the bottom quartile of the population in the us is better off than they were 50 years ago in terms of income and health care and shelter and access to food and access to all these things they're the top one percent of the us is further ahead than the median and it is that delta that motivates the end of democracy and it is that is which is then perceived to be unfair about this governing system and that ultimately results in fascism or socialism and then fascism results socialism ultimately restricts anyone from progression and that's why fascism and socialism ultimately end up in in some sort of you know democratic outcome and it is a cycle and you know we're kind of in this you know awkward phase of trying to figure out what the hell we're going to be next and i don't think that awkward phase is realized in the next presidential term but it is going to be realized in our lifetime i think that that's a really good point i completely agree with that go biden go please win uh okay wrapping up here uh media selections uh of your bestie summer bestie book bestie tv show bestie binge what do you got you got a bestie book recommendation saks you got a bestie uh yeah my my recommendations will be a little different you know i've been i've been subscribing to a lot of newsletters on sub stack yeah and i found that to be pretty interesting and like i mentioned two of my favorite writers especially around um you know politics and election time andrew sullivan and matt taibi so check it out windows open enough to get to those two who are super polarizing they actually kicked andrew sullivan out of new york magazine for making other writers at new york magazine feel unsafe with his words all my favorite writers seem to have been cancelled at some previous publication and now they've set themselves up on sub stack so it is amazing how the overton window has closed uh besties do you have a bestie binge a bestie book or a bestie newsletter or a bestie podcast you want to share with the besties i would give a shout out to a book uh called americana which is about uh it's a history of american capitalism told in chapters for every call it like you know five to seven or ten year decade period it's really interesting for people into business it's written by a guy named boo srinivasan okay bestie freeberg what do you got best a queen of quinoa i took a week off and hung out at the beach and i've been to watched uh godfather one two and three as i've done several times in my past i also watched uh one of my favorite top five films of all time there will be blood by um it's just such a beautiful film it got me down yeah it got me down this research path on the standard oil company and i ended up first off i ended up reading all mario pouta's godfather uh which is very graphic and interesting but if you've seen the movie i don't think you get much more from the book um but then um i started reading ron chernow's um biography of uh oh yes rockefeller yeah and so i don't know if anyone's made it through that 727 page two i got about 500 pages in it is detailed it's detailed so it's not you know it's not probably um you won't gain as much from it as perhaps reading a wikipedia article but uh the standard oil the the era if you think about what technology is what we call technology in the us today in our world and and it's mostly software and now in increasingly biotech um you know there have been different eras of technology and different areas of monopoly uh and and just hearing the story of the railroads and standard oil and what took place in this country it's incredible and it's so analogous to what's gone on and and um the outrage and the dissent and the fake news that goes on about these people as they've been successful um you know it really is uh history teaches us everything and it's uh so i just you know um i just in the era of standard oil just learning about um the stories of that time and the people of that time this is one vote that's that's been um you know an interesting part of the tale besties i gotta go i love you guys love you too i'll see you jason and fried burgers i'll see you on thursday yeah stake it up let's go outside uh i'll just give my closing the fish that ate the whale a book about sam zumari who was the banana king and uh another uh interesting book you might like i love capitalism by ken langone who um you know built uh he built uh home depot and it's a pretty great story about both stories of capitalism and i think you all like them freeburg if you like the um yeah the books you were talking about yeah all right everybody we'll see you next time and uh don't forget to rate and subscribe and uh we'll be taping another episode in another five six seven or eight weeks hopefully earlier than that uh take care sacks take care free burger take care of chim off and we'll see you all next time on the all in podcast.






hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of all in the podcast episode eight besties are here to talk about tech economy politics the election and our lives in silicon valley uh welcome back to the pod david friedberg the queen of quinoa is here from an undisclosed j kell always always a joy yes undisclosed location somewhere in the midwest you you bailed on sf after the smoke you lasted how many days into the barbecue into the orange cloud i left on the wednesday of the orange cloud and uh took it was crazy took my kiddos and we're uh we're waiting at the fires in the uh in the midwest well it's beautiful the last two days here uh also from an undisclosed bestie location david sacks back on the program rain man is here yep definitely here good to be here all right well there you go man of many words and speaking of a man of many words off of seven keynotes this week talking about spax the uh prince of spacks chamoth paulie happened back on the pod how are you besties well we had a little bestie reunion which i think we can talk about your mouth invited us over to have an outdoor bestie reunion yeah and you gave one of them gonorrhea and you gave the other two well we it it's crazy to say but i literally had to call chamoth uh two or three days after he hosted ah so a socially by the way a socially distanced dinner outdoors social distant dinner outdoors wonderful we had some great ribeye fantastic uh cracked open a nice bottle or two of wine and the pork and but but then what did you do well then a family member of mine who shall remain nameless decided to go to a party in san francisco and possibly got the rona and he tested positive and then i had to get everybody in my house tested twice everybody came back negative but i had to call chamoth and tell him listen i i wasn't exposed but some members of my family were therefore i might have second hand exposure i took two tests came back negative two times in a row can i just say though it's really crazy like we have to develop all these new social norms and you're not sure what to say and you're not you're not sure how to react and it's like it's it must have been like when you know you got a call and it's like hey listen uh uh you know your girlfriend's like i may be pregnant or like you know somebody's like hey listen i have an std like you just like what i felt like that when i was texting the good child there's like three of us and i had to text with my tail between my legs i think i've been exposed i'm really sorry guys i think calcanus is the greek word for turd and the punch bowl you know it's all yeah it's so yeah exactly i don't know if we can tell the the code 13. oh i'm going to tell the code 13 story i wasn't even there but i think there's legendary jason jason jason calcanis gets invited by david sacks out of his benevolence to come to stay uh in hawaii at the four seasons and uh at somewhere some point during this week-long vacation christmas day you hear a shout from the pool from the lifeguard no no it was it was even before that we were sitting at the bar so me and jason and his brother-in-law were sitting at the bar having drinks and all of a sudden there's a commotion and the bartenders and the staff and you started hearing people on walkie-talkies saying code 13 code 13. and people are running people right we don't we don't know what to make of that we think it's a terrorist attack i mean literally the four seasons is on a high alert alarms are going off and then and then we hear okay well we were like we said to the bartender well what's the code 13 and he's like well it means that some kid you know uh crapped in the pool did a number two in the pool and we're like you know and then and we're like okay well you know it was jason's kids well so then then i started hearing something about like the sax kids and i'm like oh no sax code 13th yeah they thought it was us and then it turns out it was it was jacob's kid and we were we were never able to get a a a reservation but they have this again well what's so funny is like i i've been i went there at one point a few years later and it's a whole ordeal because they said so how do you guys deal with like you know a code 13 they're like oh go 13. you have to evacuate the whole hotel half the island gets sent away here's what had to happen this is on just to put the code 13 in perspective i i think my ten-year-old at the time was two years old my sister-in-law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody and the baby's not wearing a swim diaper and so basically a snickers bar floats out of the and there's the snickers bar in the pool and you guys have kids you know how big these things could get you're like how is that possible that uh you know like a movie theater size snicker king-size snicker pool is floating in the middle but this is on december 25th these poor people are spending three thousand dollars a night there is not a single chase lounge by the pool that's not occupied it is peak capacity at the uh four seasons hotel on the big island or wherever it was the pool has to be shut down for four hours a person has to get in with the hazmat suit retrieve the snickers bar king-sized snickers has to get out of here then they have to throw in every chemical known to man so much so that the pool is ruined for christmas day and that's the code 13 story all right getting back to our topics tick tock is on the verge of being banned from additional us downloads the commerce department has announced that will ban u.s downloads and business transactions with tick-tock and wechat somehow wechat got pulled into this on sunday this will um seemingly we're going to allow tick-tock to operate until november 12th so they got a little bit of a stay of execution uh but of course if they can't update in the app store that means there could be any security vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated and stephen attempting uh to push through a tick tock deal uh that'll enable retaining some chinese ownership um and there's some sort of agreement now with oracle will have some kind of an oversight board uh to do continuous third party audits what does this say uh chamath about uh where we're at and do you believe that you know a democratic uh leader let's say obama or biden uh would have taken the same approach here does it worry you that the government's getting this involved or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and saying hey listen uh we're gonna need to have some basic level of reciprocity from china if we're gonna allow you in our app sir you know i think i think it's kind of like um you know like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other and they're like turn left and you're like no no i'm gonna turn right and then you realize you should have turned left but then you keep turning right a few more times then you take a couple more lefts but then you end up at the the same place but it was complete [ __ ] dumb luck um i feel like we're going to end up in the same place here with tiktok which is that i think that the trump administration probably is doing this and donald trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power and you know american exceptionalism which i'm not sure is the right reason to do it but i think the outcome is right which is that um you know for years china has essentially been shut out to american companies unless you effectively just count out to these guys um and you know some companies have and some companies like you know google have not and other companies like facebook have been totally basically blocked from entering and so i think it's completely right it's it's it's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantages that that chinese companies have had and so you have to play hardball to create a different set of rules and i think this probably gets us to that place the reason why it's happening is probably more because the tick tock people played that joke on trump at the tulsa rally if you had if i had to guess yeah uh what do you think friedberg is this a good sign for america and the globe that you know in the democratic nations of the world that we're going to put a foot down with china and say hey some reciprocity or you're not going to be able to participate in our marketplace or is this a personal vendetta from trump or a little bit of both i don't see how it's um anything but uh a slippery slope forward in the escalation of um you know what's gonna be kind of transpiring between these two nations in the the next couple of years and maybe decades you know this goes back to the you know early 2000s when google and others wanted to enter china and china has for those who don't know china has this great firewall right the chinese citizens can't openly access the rest of the internet and china wanted to censor content and sensor um what their citizens are accessing um and so there's been a back and forth between the tech industry and china uh going back almost 20 years now to try and figure out how we can bring our services to china and then china launches a service that's very successful in the us in tiktok and um i think it's just a you know a part of the reciprocity equation which doesn't resolve anything it only escalates things so it's unfortunate but it's just kind of another step in the path that i think is inevitable in front of us here saks uh we'll give you the the final word here uh is this a good thing for humanity for international relations that china is you know having a little bit of a hand check here like hey there's going to be a limit to how you can operate in the west uh or is this a personal vendetta from trump and then what do you see going forward um it's it it's true that i mean first of all our social networks are not allowed over there so i don't think we need to feel bad about um you know not allowing their social networks over here but besides reciprocity or the lack of it um i think the deeper reason for this is just around data security and and how the you know and i think the the the ccp has given us adequate grounds here to ban not just tick tock but you know apps like that um because president xi himself declared this policy of civil military fusion which means that any business in china any business asset there including data can be appropriated to serve the the ends of the chinese military or the communist party and you know the the ccp has set up this vast surveillance apparatus over its own citizens it's um asserted um extra territorial sovereignty over former chinese citizens with meaning dissidents um so that the chinese diaspora anywhere in the world they've asserted sovereignty over that and um you know recently there was a pretty remarkable speech by the fbi director christopher wray describing you know operation uh foxhunt which is the chinese effort to track down and presumably ultimately punish chinese distance anywhere in the world and as part of that that the chinese have sort of weaponized ai and social media and so uh he also described i mean this is like pretty amazing i didn't you know that the the equifax hack which collected data on something like sense of data over 100 million americans the chinese were behind that um i didn't know that and um so you know it's it's true it's true that you know no one piece of data poses uh by itself a risk to to to the security of of america or americans but it's sort of the systematic collection and aggregation of the data and the hacking uh collectively that i do think pose a security threat and um and i think you got to stop right there zach actually an individual's data could absolutely be compromised if they have access to your uh passwords because through the clipboard they have access to your phone role if a young person had photos that were say compromising in their photo role the phone is you know basically given access to that they upload that now you could use that as compromise against a senator's child or against a senator themselves and this seems like an abstract thing but this is exactly what the chinese and russians have been doing for a very long time if you've seen the series the americans and you go back to the 80s to see the weaponization of you know somebody who is in the closet who was gay during that time or somebody was having extramarital affair you could compromise anybody with just sexual compromise and you hear we're giving access to hundreds of millions of people's photo libraries by the way clipboards by the way you just said something that's really scary which is like if you're if you're the chinese and you know they have the patience to play the long game uh you just aggregate and collect this thing for 30 years on the off chance that one of these people becomes important i mean what is the reason you got a manchurian candidate just you you just surveilled 300 million americans and just say uh you know what we'll take our shot i mean it's going to cost us a few billion dollars a year in storage who cares yeah i'm not like is is there really a case that what they're doing in the tick tock app i don't know how much you guys have read um some of the studies on on what they are actually pulling but is there really a case that what they're pulling is particularly different than what would be pulled by pretty much any other social app or photo sharing app on your phone there was some you know kind of insight that hey they were capturing the mac address but that was up until last november after november they the app kind of refreshed and stopped doing that and it was a hack that some number of apps out there were already doing but my understanding is the way that they've built the app it's the same kind of ad tracking type um approach that a lot of apps are taking i i think i think it's a naive position that because we haven't caught them doing something nefarious that they aren't actually doing something nefarious right now if you look at what uh mbs did to jeff bezos sending that um i guess it was a movie file or an image that then wound up hacking his wechat and his phone like yeah i think they've built the software i think it's purpose-built uh whether it's wechat or tick-tock to have these back doors there's no way the chinese government is not influencing that guys look if you if you had to bet david um what do you think the odds are between 0 and 100 with 100 being absolute certainty that there are foreign national spies that work at google facebook amazon microsoft that's my point it's is it i mean look i think that there are no but do you think it's 100 oh of course it's a hundred yeah i think at every one of them it's probably a hundred percent yeah at least one you know foreign national that has a connection to intelligence in china yeah it's probably a hundred percent 100 so my point is tick tock is 100 chinese 100 chinese so you don't even have to guess whether it's my point is like if if if there is some you know access to personal data that we're all concerned about being compromised at literally every other [ __ ] app company yeah every other app is not connected to you know but the point that champ just made is that they very well could be the fact is we as individuals have exposed all of our personal and private data to six or seven companies i think you're saying it'd be a really right thing it is a this is a canary in the coal mine for a bigger issue this is why i'm saying i think that you know trump is probably acting out of an expression of power but i think what we're realizing is actually this is about core fundamental privacy and the safety and security of each of us as individuals and it should start a bigger conversation like privacy i i really do think this privacy is the killer feature of the 2020s right um you know what david just said about like you know if you're if you're a chinese ex-national the idea that you're like look i've been a citizen of three countries the idea that the sri lankan government all of a sudden may not like what i have to say and can spy on me or you know root my phone or steal my data it really disturbs me like uh i'm sorry but no go [ __ ] yourself like i left that country for a reason yeah so i think i think the republican to watch on this as well besides trump i guess is uh there's a senator josh hawley who is um crazy well he's he he's sort of a critic of of big tech and i think he's got some interesting things to say but but in this particular area he is proposing legislation to regulate the types of information that can be collected by applications that are based in countries that are fundamentally hostile or adversarial to the us and that to me seems like the right policy because you know it's not just about tick tock it's about all the apps that collect information on americans that can be appropriated by you know the chinese communist party or russia or iran places like that and so i think we need a more holistic policy here than just banning tiktok and it may not be necessary to ban tiktok if you had the right limitations placed on them but um but but but i i do think this this this whole um sort of compromise solution with larry ellison and oracle that makes no sense to me this idea that you know ellison will own 20 of the company but nothing else really changes it'll still be based in china uh a chinese company they'll still be chinese engineers based in china who you know and they still own 80 of it i mean how how does that really address the the data center don't you don't you think david that that's just basically a way of just it's a wealth transfer to larry ellison which i think is amazing i mean if i could totally do it yeah it's bite dance it's no it's it's it's it's put it in your lap yeah no it's bite dance it's bite dance paying political protection money to larry ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process but and i but that's why i don't think it's going to fly i mean holly has already said that it's not good enough for him and so even if i think and it doesn't live up to trump's stated criteria even though he seems to be this is ultimately a syphilis ruling sex is that who's going to make the final call on this or does uh trump have sole executive kind of authority on on foreign security on security grounds to kind of block it does it go to cypheus i don't know that's a good question i think syphilis disapproves um m a right it has to it has to approve it yeah i mean so you're right i mean there are there are members of congress that are all going to need to be convinced to get this thing done well but cepheus approves mna i didn't think they could like block applications as of last year as of last year every investment um triggers cyphus it's it's a weird new thing that happened uh i was involved in a company recently that seemed secondary to the national security power that that trump may have so this is almost like a two-tier kind of thing one is to approve one is for um you know for trump to be cool with it uh national security terms and then second is the anti-trust issues if we just go back a second talking about the broad you know as chamoth called it kind of this canary in a coal mine you know i don't know how many of you guys use an amazon echo or a google home or amazon fire tv or a nest thermostat every every single every single one of them has ambient audio listening on it every single one of them even and another thing people don't realize is every speaker is actually a microphone as well as a speaker you can actually listen on any house speaker whether it's a sonos device or what have you and so we've got uh you know our homes are already wired um amazon fire tv runs on [ __ ] android um i mean there's a hundred ways into your home as it is it seems to me like there's a significant concern about how much data we are already exposing that's being highlighted here i don't think that there's you know it's sort of like playing uh that where you try and pop the hamsters in the game it's like at some point we're gonna realize these things are here everywhere and it's not just a company but it is how we are living our lives now and how technology is kind of um capturing every piece of information about everything we do this is this is i go back to this somebody will take this or many people will take this and run with it but i think that there is an enormous amount of money um that consumers will pay for the assurance of anonymity and privacy i don't really know how it's expressed david but like you know for example like if i could get a phone that was completely locked down and encrypted and um like a burner phone is what you're talking about and like a lot of people are now doing this they take a second phone they put vp vpns are the or the first step right and you're seeing like i tried i'm very popular well like i try to use signal i try to use facetime audio i'll even use whatsapp now just because these things are intend encrypted and i have nothing particularly important or interesting to say or hide um but i just don't like the idea that in the in the open wild um i'm ju i just feel very vulnerable to data breaches more than any other kind of breach i mean i had this conversation with somebody that was you know sort of helping me lock down uh my wi-fi network you know and for a long time i only had one end point and all of a sudden he's like look let's have a home and a guest but in that conversation what he was saying is um the the biggest form of theft isn't like burglaries anymore it's basically people just having packet sniffers outside your house um because they can get access to everything and anything and can i ask you can i ask you a question there's a there's a book by a guy named steven baxter was a science fiction book from years ago and arthur clark called the light of other days and these guys developed wormhole technology they could put it in any house and they could see and listen to everything and suddenly the technology became kind of ubiquitous so everyone could create a wormhole anywhere and see and hear everything so effectively information was completely transferable and free and available to everyone and the book kind of highlights how society changed in that context so in a world where you see where everyone is and what everyone is doing and saying there's no longer any notion of information asymmetry and the way people operate and behave changes because so much of our life is dependent on people not knowing things about us that we know so when you're when your employee is going to go interview for another job and they tell you they're going to the dentist you can say like hey that's not true and the guy says you know what i'm actually thinking about looking for another job because i hate working for you you suck so everyone starts changing kind of how they behave do you think that 50 years from now that's where the world heads do you really think it's possible to stop this train in its tracks and not end up in a world of what i would call kind of like hyper transparency where all information becomes kind of because it's already being collected everywhere about everyone and it's only i think it's rising exponentially people are going to start i i think that people are going to start turning their homes into like those skiffs you know sensitive compartmented information facilities you always hear about like senators going into the skiff kind of situation for private stuff i think like people are going to start taking this very seriously as they get compromised you know time after time and embarrassing and uh you can see with apple making it their marketing strategy apples you don't think society changes oh i think it's already changed already with like people getting their phones hacked and they're you know nudes being leaked people normalize that i think it makes the world a much shittier place because it basically robs us of our own independence and our fundamental right to privacy and i just think that's a really bad outcome and so you know what like i if if like the need for likes uh and tweets uh and followers uh leads me to a place where i lose privacy i would just say shut them all down now um because i think that people's self-worth is much bigger than what they understand it to be if they're willing to make that trade-off but yeah most people appreciate that well i i i would also i would also just add that just because there's more transparency doesn't mean that it serves the interests of truth like jason said earlier um this information can be used to create you know ops you know and right manipulate and um you know it's um and so um yeah i don't you know it look like like trotsky said just because you're an artist in war doesn't mean war isn't interested in you i mean this data can be collected to run operations on people uh that don't serve you know the interests of greater transparency i think i think people don't think from first principles on this topic this is sort of like the idiotic orthodoxy of silicon valley which is like they they wrap themselves in the flag of transparency like it means something but they have no real idea what it really means at scale and at the limit and right you know there's one thing about getting access to a [ __ ] looker dashboard who cares you know and but the word transparency is used for that the same way that it's used for david exactly what you just said and there are two completely different things they have completely different meanings and uh the latter's implications are so much more important and we need to think about this from first principles because i think people's inherent identity as human beings ultimately gets put at risk over time it should absolutely be the case that these social networks or anybody collecting data gives an op this is the way i would form the legislation if you are running a service like facebook twitter google for free and you're monetizing through advertising you must provide an option like what service to advertising services then i think you should be forced to give a option for whatever the amount of that monetization is a year to pay us a subscription so for example if facebook makes 80 dollars per person you lost you lost this uh monetization jason sorry i think let's it's it's over it's over next segment next time all right well just as we wrap up here on this segment kevin's sister might uh he's in the running apparently to take over for tick tock uh is that a good idea uh saks i think you know a system i i think it's a pretty it's it's a dumb idea unless the company literally becomes an american company i don't know why you've made this point in the context of kevin mayer like if if if he's working for bite dance he's working for the by dance board directors which reports the ccp it's just why would someone who's in his position want to sacrifice his independence to do that yeah it makes no sense i mean that's this is becoming the big test on everybody's moral compass especially hollywood which is changing the ending of movies to satisfy the ccp like literally the people who are the biggest virtuous signals in the world celebrities hollywood china china knows how to use its market access we don't we just threw open our markets to their products uh which caused you know us to lose our whole you know industrial you know manufacturing capacity we didn't demand anything really in exchange for that whereas in order to get access to china you have to say and do the right things or certainly to to not criticize them and so they they know how to use as we saw with the mba and the whole um daryl mori thing um you know they know how to use their market access all right well let's go on to the economy here we've been sheltering in place uh essentially for six months and now people are starting to talk about hey maybe we need to do another lockdown and obviously this uh economic challenge is being felt very differently in some places it's an opportunity obviously a lot of people with sas software and you know people who work behind keyboards are having a renaissance and a lot of the economy is pouring into their keyboards while restaurants retail and anybody who has to work in the real world is part of what's becoming essentially a permanent unemployed class that perhaps is starting to look like a dry one of ubi what are your thoughts chamoth on this permanent unemployment situation um i i have a i have a bunch of thoughts here let me just go kind of give you the stream of consciousness like um jerome powell gave a speech i think it was two or three weeks ago in jackson hole um and he basically said like look the federal reserve is taking a completely new posture on rates and um you know they they basically clarified that in explicit detail just um uh just a few days ago uh and they basically said we're keeping rates where they are until at least 2023. you know my personal views for rates are going to stay basically at zero for the next half decade and i think it's probably pretty likely that we're going to see rates stay at zero probably a full decade so what does that mean okay well a typical recession what happens is you don't know where the bottom is right things sort of sort of decay they get a little bit worse they get a little bit worse they get a little bit worse then things bottom out and then you know you start to grow and you can use interest rate policy to kind of help navigate how soft the landing is as well as how fast the recovery is that's sort of like classic economics and how bankers and the markets and all these folks used to work and it eventually would trickle into main street now we just have none of those things we have rates zero they're not going to go anywhere they're not going to go up they're probably not going to go down they're going to kind of just stay where they are that's one thing second is we priced in the bottom which was the first month of the coronavirus we took the markets basically assuming oh there's no growth and now we've priced things back as if they'll recover the rating agencies are out to lunch they've basically said you know what i'm going to look out till 2021 or 2022 give me a reason to justify not to downgrade you so that you can continue to raise more debt which by the way is free um so you have all these dynamics where i think the capital markets are in an expansive mood and an expansive mode and in that i actually think there's a real bid to uh employment because there isn't really that many ways now you can without just getting completely ripped apart put money to work and so the the the real earnest capital allocation strategy that's left for most ceos is to actually buy things invest in things try more things and all of those i think lead to net employment so in general i'm kind of constructive and bullish and i don't think that this idea that there's a permanent unemployment class sticks around freeberg what are your thoughts obviously a lot of americans work in retail um you know we obviously uh have all these restaurant workers who are out of work and travel is uh now hitting the end of the furloughs at a lot of these um different arrow lines et cetera what's your thought on this unemployment middle america catastrophe well i don't think um happiness comes from you know absolute standards of living i think happiness arises from one's relative standard of living whether that's relative to how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor and and seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy it's otherwise society decays so the notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined and inflation-adjusted uh basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent which is you know some sort of decay societal decay we have to resolve the the opportunity framework for people which is how do you give people an opportunity to kind of progress in their lives and earn more over time and have access to you know doing more with themselves while they're here on planet earth i mean that's just what humans need so um you know maybe there's a short-term fix but i think we've got some structural things to fix to kind of enable opportunities and and give people kind of an inherent uh you know kind of stepladder in life i heard a really dark theory a few years ago which is if we do this we're going to resolve to a world where we're going to have a bunch of people playing video games because then the only way you can get people to feel like they're progressing in their lives is to give them more medals on their video games and give them a higher ranking and score and that's where society kind of gets to to kind of keep people psychologically kind of satiated and it's a pretty dark you know sad place if that's where we end up it's like a bad episode of black mirror but we've had a few episodes of black mirror this year so you know it sounds like ready player one uh with a masters were playing video games instead of actually going out in the world totally sax what what's your thought on you know just the next two years let's say and how this all shakes out and this will give us a good segue into the coronavirus and where we stand right now with this potential second lockdown and the impact that might have psychologically on people and also on the economy there's not going to be a second lockdown it doesn't make any sense and even if there were people aren't going to support it certainly any of the red states aren't going to do it i guess the blue states may they still haven't you know sort of unlocked down so maybe that gets more protracted in places like california but um but it we're not going to go back into lockdowns and people won't support and i think the thing that we basically figured out that should have been obvious months ago now is that um coronavirus is really like two different diseases in terms of its effects on on people so for elderly people and for people with risk factors it's very dangerous you know i'm very worried about my parents and you know for people in that group they have to take you know extreme precautions but for young healthy people without risk factors it's um it's not been that deadly it's it's very unpleasant it's a very bad two weeks but you know for example if you look at the data now on uh on colleges coming back there's been some reports that the virus is spreading like wildfire on college campuses that's true but hospitalizations and and deaths have not gone up and so because it's just not that um it's just not that deadly to to to younger people and so i think this idea of shutting down the whole economy to protect people at risk is just seems like overkill and i think if we had to do it all over again we wouldn't have done lockdowns we just would have protected at risk people we've still consistently had a thousand deaths a day we thought this might go down what are your thoughts on americans just being okay with that um that basic death toll sex well i mean any deaths is is obviously bad and tragic and um you know and statistically there are going to be people who who die even who are in the you know lowest group so for sure but you know but we've had about 200 000 deaths the original estimates from this virus were two to three million so um it's i guess my point is not that it's not bad but it's you know but that it's um you know much less deadly than i think was originally thought there's an argument that that's not deaths directly attributable to coronavirus right and that um the vast majority of of those folks had co-morbidities and that you know the primary driver this is an argument many have made i'm not gonna take a strong point um but you know 85 percent plus of folks have significant comorbidities um and you know this virus may be um kind of has a contributing factor to their death but if let's assume everyone in the united states had coronavirus today then every death that was reported today would be reported as a coronavirus death um and so they're testing a lot of folks um uh you know in the hospital finding that they have coronavirus it's un you know it's very difficult to then prove that the reason that they died or the sole reason that they died was coronavirus if you had to pick a percentage free bird where would you put it half of all the deaths if you just guess but that's my point is i don't think it's one thing right i'm not sure that it's someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus and they've also got severe diabetes heart disease cancer they're on chemotherapy i mean you could list the other things that they might have what caused their death you know you can't as a coroner it's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death but when they test that person and they find that their chronovirus positive their that number is now being counted in the statistics that say that was a coronavirus death that day and coronavirus is so prevalent in the united states right now it's such a significant part of the population it's also very difficult to say hey guys like you know these deaths are so i'm not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus that is absolutely happening but it's very difficult to say what is the net effect on life right now uh we're still learning a lot about how this virus interacts with different people based on their genetics and based on their disease state and and other factors let me ask you one more way for you free burger then i'll give it over to chemoth which is freeberg and your estimation as a scientist and somebody who's a i would say a man of science on the call here uh are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021 and what's your best outlook for a return to normalcy if you had to pick a time when it feels like we can go to a warriors game or play cards regularly or go to the world series of poker wendy do you have a a time period where you think that could possibly happen it's all politics and social behavior it has nothing to do with science like after 9 11 there were no more serious like terrorist attacks on the united states but our [ __ ] lives changed dramatically we go sit in tsa lines and you know get our asses swabbed when we get on an airplane now and that's still going on 20 years later so i'm i'm pretty sure there's a lot of change that's here to stay in the u.s because of coronavirus and will be even after everyone gets vaccines and the deaths drop below 10 a day and yada yada so um yeah i'm i'm not convinced that this is like hey here's the date we're all going to be out of it and then we're safe because people are psychologically scarred behavior has changed businesses have changed the landscape of how we work as a society has changed and that's not going away so it's it's it's not like we're going to go back i think it's like we're going forward into a different world where we operate differently much is what happened after 9 11. what's your take on that shamath i think that uh david's right that you know were it but for coronavirus i think a lot of these people that died would still be alive and so you know i don't think it really matters how much of the blame we're trying to ascribe to it it's just that it was a meaningful non-trivial contributing factor so these deaths are avoidable and we have to deal with that the second is i don't think what we know what the peak to trough looks like because we haven't really gone through a real full-blown flu season yet you know coronavirus came to america at the tail end of the winter and it's going to be i think tough to figure out what it's going to do in october november december january or february when it's really cold in many parts of the united states and you know whatever effects again we still don't know it in totality but whatever effects the warm weather had in muting it or whatever mutation muted it may change so i tend to think it's another 18 to 24 months of this posture but freedberg is really right which is like this is what's so sad which is when you could point a finger and look at somebody and say you you're the cause it was much easier to react and create rules and create boundaries as uncomfortable or as inconvenient as they were and live by them and because this is more nameless and faceless it's impossible um so all right well here's some good news i was able to acquire uh i've been on a little investigative journalism kick asking people if they have access to rapid testing uh kits i.e they have them in korea and i was able to get and i'm curious your thoughts on this friedberg the rapid response liberty coven 19 igg igm test cassettes and they cost 15 to 20 bucks each and they take 10 minutes they're easy to use um i mean i've had those since march and they cost 50 cents each so so these are now officially available though in the united states you had those from some other country correct i got from china and i got from the us and i got from korea um and and these things are just made everywhere dude and they're like they're these are the um accuracy right yes yeah the so there's a paper that was published at ucsf um i i got an acknowledgement because of my donations to support the research and it showed that it these tests have actually very good specificity and the sensitivity is is going to be call it 85 but these are antibody tests and and further research has shown that not everyone has the same antibody response after getting infected and there's a relationship between how severe the disease is for you and and various other factors so and these will only show up typically you know days to weeks after you get infected the antigen tests which are the more common kind of ones that everyone's looking for now are these tests that can actually find the virus itself and so they'll take a swab of your nose or some saliva from your mouth and see if there's any virus in there and it's a much much lower sensitivity than the pcr test which is the expensive you know lab test but it can be done on a stick and it's a good enough thing for letting people in to say a football game um and our a good friend of ours just texted me and told me that they're doing this at the ut austin game they're using this antigen test to let people into the uh the football game today so um or this weekend so it's getting kind of more widespread yes and so when we have those tests at scales what will the world look like for burke i don't know just like the tsa you'll get swabbed and you know these things it's great business to be in by the way if you guys you know want to spack a korean uh antigen test business these things are going to sell like crazy there's a company that um i heard of through a friend which had it's an israeli company i never followed up on it uh which was a effectively a breathalyzer um which would be could you just imagine that would be incredible right right you just well the reason we've talked about this in our chat group there are there are startups like um uh was it quadell hemodius q who've got these little you know two or three hundred dollar little handheld readers and the cartridges are basically mouth swabs or lower nails nasal swabs you know cost 10 bucks and i think you know i think they'll be they're going to be rolling out over the next few months and assuming we can scale the production of them i think they will be everywhere and uh you know i don't think it'll be a government mandated thing so i don't think the government will get its act together but it'll be the kind of thing where you go shopping at a store or whatever and they'll be early adopters or a restaurant they'll start using it people will realize well wait i don't want to get swapped three times a day so then they'll get some sort of like receipt or voucher they can take with them to the next place and so i i think you know i'm like actually like i think i'm more optimistic than you guys about covid right now i think that whether it's because of these rapid tests or because of treatments coming or just this fundamental fact about comorbidities again not absolving not not saying that covet isn't serious but this is the fact that we've learned that it's um you know that it's it's really deadly primarily for people who have comorbidities i think for all of these reasons i think kova is going to be a distant memory by next summer i really do i think um i think behaviorally too what's that do you think behavior changes as well like businesses and movie theaters yeah sports yeah i think i think people we i think people will largely be back um to what they were doing last summer or by next summer um i think we're gonna have like you know call it a six-month period where you know we we do these rapid tests just to make sure um and um but but i but i think as the case rate starts dropping off um things will kind of revert back to to where they were i mean the the question to ask is kind of you know which trends were there before covet and have been accelerated like i would say the move from like death of retail the shift to e-commerce that feels to me like it's here to stay but um you know food delivery things like that but there was no trend of people not going to sports games anymore you know and i think like stuff like that will just snap right back i don't know i don't know about you guys i'm still like feeling [ __ ] up by the whole thing you don't really realize how much your psychology has changed until you kind of reflect on decisions and behaviors like there's still a fear factor that i think needs to kind of be ironed out but um you know we'll see how long it takes for people it's just like it's so different when you're so used to just waking up and hopping on zoom for work and avoiding people and putting masks on when you go walk your [ __ ] dog i mean it's like yeah you know it's gonna be hard to kind of change out of that overnight well i think there's i think this idea of the greater flexibility around working arrangements the ability to work from home i think offices will become a little bit more like co-working spaces for a single company where people come in three days a week and work from home a couple days a week i think there'll be a permanent flexibility but uh but i also think that people want to get back to work and they want it back to offices and they want to interact with people and i think everyone's going to be excited to do that again it's not like everyone's going to be working from home forever um so i you know i think again i next summer is kind of my my date for when things are back to back to normal uh well this has been certainly uh driving a lot of our politics right now you probably saw the book that came out with the tapes of trump saying that you know he was trying to play it down sax as a lifelong republican what were your thoughts when the republican presidential candidate the republican president said uh hey i'm trying to play this down when he was at the same time saying it was deadly serious does that make you worry about trump as a candidate and what do you think that's gonna how that might play into the election it must have been disappointing for you to hear your candidate trump say at the same time this is deadly and i want to play it down well trump trump's leadership on this has been a little bit erratic for sure um and by the way let's go back and remind the viewers here that in the first pods we were doing back in april i think we kind of nailed what the right policy response should be i wrote a blog on april 2nd talking about that mass should be required that that was the right response but we also said that lockdowns very quickly after the start of lockdown said that it was um excessive you know and that what we should do is be going all in on mass not lockdowns i certainly would have liked to have seen trump get that right several months earlier um that being said let's not forget everybody else who got this stuff wrong too i mean you look at cdc um you know or w-h-o we had talked about this on a previous pod uh i mean w-h-o um was was also uh unclear about mass and and fouchy i guess now retroactively saying that he didn't think that mass were necessary because he's trying to prevent a run on supplies i mean the whole the whole response of the health care establishment they were all they were all like really bad and so i have a greater degree of forgiveness for people who made mistakes back in march or april but what i think is hard to forgive now are these people who are promoting the wrong policies now that we know so much more and i mean at this point i would think i think that kovit is covet policy is a net plus for trump in this campaign because the other side of it is um is is these permanent lockdowns you know this is an article in um was it foreign policy saying that we need to go back to lockdowns and i think biden said that we need to have lockdowns again and you know his policy would be to listen to the experts but all these experts again were wrong about so many things and and so you know again i think this this idea of permanent lockdowns if that is the alternative to trump will help trump win uh and so you don't think that this woodward book and and that kind of stuff plays into the election or the debates in the coming weeks i think it's sort of priced into the stock you know i mean look if it weren't for kovid i think that if you go back to like january february when trump gave that state of the union speech his ratings were the highest they had been the economy was on fire um you know he kind of it looked like he was on cruise control to winning re-election and then covet happened and you know um and his ratings went down to the to their lowest point and um and so i think he already paid the price for you know the the let's call it inconsistent leadership that um that woodward described so i think that's priced in and now the question is if the economy gets good enough fast enough um and the other side is on the side of lockdowns and trump is on the side of reopening um you know i again i think covet policy becomes a net plus for him chamatha 538 has in its simulations 77 wins and 100 for biden you think that's accurate yeah i mean i i think that until uh the debates i think that this thing is basically where it's been for a long time um and if if biden flubs the debate and basically comes out as um you know intellectually too inconsistent to be voted in by a plurality of americans he's done for and trump's going to win so he can't have these you know verbal gaffes and basically seem like he's a you know a senile octogenarian if he does come off that way he's going to lose um but if he doesn't then look many of the moments you see him now he's actually pretty crisp um that probably gets the job done because like i said i think more people just want a non-trump alternative um than want the trump alternative even within the republican party and look like preference falsification can cut both ways all the people that said they weren't going to vote for him but then did um you know there's also probably a cohort of people that now feel obligated when they came out of the woodwork as supporting him now they just feel like it's easier to be publicly supporting him but then in the you know they may go the other way so it all kind of works in both directions um but i i still think on the margin uh biden is the biden is the favorite and you know how different will the world look chamath in your estimation under abiding presidency we get to january 1st how different does the country feel is it going to be some great relief is it going to be some great joy like when obama won no no what do you think all these things are emotional overreactions in both directions um the reality is that if you if you actually graft substantive policy that affects your everyday life the magnitude of the impact of the presidency has been shrinking since the 1980s i think the most impactful president of our lifetimes our lifetime so you know 70s onwards was reagan and it's basically been decaying ever since um and uh so i think you know i think that the the job of the presidency is mostly window dressing except for foreign policy that matters less and less and i'll tell you why that matters less and less because all the things that the president used to you know really govern like foreign policy was a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things for example our entire posture on the middle east which has been a [ __ ] [ __ ] show or our entire posture on russia was in part because of uh our energy policy and in a world of sustainable energy those entire regions are uh not important anymore so we can let them basically fend for themselves they're going to they're going to devolve because they're going to have to suck out all the oil out of the ground to try to monetize it before wind and solar and everything else become the dominant form of of energy and so if you take energy policy off the table all of a sudden the national security interests to care about large spots of the world go to zero right so so then there's less and less than the presence of it's pretty pretty pretty short isn't it yes so so my my my point is the surface the surface area of the impact of the president is shrinking and it shrinks as technology like if you think about it what is driving foreign policy and national security policy changes over the last 10 15 years definitely over the next 40 or 50 is technology right if we get if we get for example if we get any form of like carbon sequestration uh at scale broadly available um you're going to have a complete resurgence of western economies if that technology is invented in the united states or western europe freeberg quickly you'd think that biden is going to win and then what do you think the country feels and looks like into abiding presidency and then let's move over to energy and sustainable energy and carbon after that i don't know um you know i'll say the same thing i've said in the past i i don't think um the notion of a sense of relief is is realistic i don't think this is about uh people think it's about trump but trump is the product of what it's all really about um and so i'll just you know kind of highlight i think you know biden is is a column instead of thinking about things as democrats and republicans and left and right if we think about it as kind of populism and free marketism and in the middle of centrism you know we're probably taking a notch toward centrism and at the end of the day the march towards populism seems to be continuing and you know whether trump is kind of the product of that march or maybe the next one will be elizabeth warren or aoc it's kind of the same thing in my opinion um but i i think that's the bigger kind of concern is um you know how do we again keep general generally keep most people in the united states feeling like they can progress in life feeling like they can find happiness in life and feeling like there's opportunity for them to kind of you know achieve their objectives and if they don't feel like they're getting it they're going to try and wrap it all up and unions will continue to scale and aoc will become the vice presidential nominee in 2024 and yadda yadda uh freebird what are your thoughts on the wildfires global warming and the politics of all that and then we'll go to uh cancel culture with eusex um california has 33 million acres of forest land it's about 100 million acres in total land so for us to make up about a third of our land um so far we're burning three and a half million so about 10 of our acres um when we burn an acre we release uh about 15 of the carbon that's stored in that acre into the atmosphere so thus far if you do the math on that we've released about as much uh co2 as we've as the california cars release in a year by the wildfires um and the politics we're seeing play out so it's it's it's a significant problem but over the last 40 years we've added about a quarter a ton of carbon to each acre per year um and the reason we've done that is we haven't kind of you know lit fires and managed the forests and cut down trees and there's been all these restrictions in california so there's an argument that some are making that this is about forest management and then there's an argument that others are making that this is about climate change and dry weather and hot weather causing the fires and the reality is it's both but it's as everything else in this country right now becoming highly politicized that um and you know trump visited newsome in a very kind of symbolic gathering this week i don't know if you guys saw the packet that was handed out to trump it was awesome it was like 24 point from was i mean you guys got to see it it's awesome the little packet he got awesome and then and then used some sat like exactly six feet from him with a mask on and trump sitting there without the mask on i mean it's such a [ __ ] political circus um and uh you know i think all things are true and all things are false and we can move on uh well the the the the debate on the fires is i mean what it's the debate has has become sort of uh climate change versus forest management you know that's sort of the debate about it and like most of these debates you don't necessarily have to choose there can be an element of truth on both sides um you know regardless of how much climate change has caused these fires we've done a very very poor job in the state managing them and you know this idea that we can just fix global warming and or wait you know not have good forest management until you know and just kind of wait for global warming to be fixed is um i mean that's a really stupid idea so regards of how much climate change is to the cause of this i think we need a much more competent state reaction to you know to to the fact these fires do you believe in global warming david sacks i believe in the you know in greenhouse the greenhouse gas theory and that yeah that it's you know that man-made co2 emissions are going to have an impact on the environment i think that you know what's a little bit hard to know is the exact timing and magnitudes of some of these things but i agree with what elon said which is that we're running a very high risk experiment here um continually putting out you know co2 greenhouse gases into into the atmosphere why is it so difficult for the republican party and i feel like you're almost straining and couching your words there david that you believe in global warming you believe in what elon's saying it's not worth doing this for risk why do republicans seem to have such an aversion to just saying hey global warming is a thing and we need to fix it because because because democrats wrapped those words around them like a flag and so it became a political issue um like with everything else i mean i i think so so again as we have this false choice now of whether you want to save the environment or save the economy and um and the problem is i think i think that a lot of republicans don't want to concede the issue oh hey little guy a lot of problems don't want to concede the issue because they're afraid it'll lead to something like the green new deal and so what we need to do is figure out um some responses to the problem that don't require us to destroy the economy right and for you if we did incentives if the if the country spent incentive sacks to get solar on roofs and stuff like that you wouldn't be opposed to it would you um you mean like taxing carbon emissions or just giving discounts on putting solar in subsidizing solar for people's houses or maybe the middle ground of creating more nuclear reactors which seems like something that neither party can agree to hold on little guy sorry i got it got a little podcast okay sorry no problem yeah um look i think i i think to the extent that um carbon emissions are uh an externality the traditional way of dealing with this is you would internalize the externality by placing some tax or penalty on that um but so look would i rather tax carbon emissions than something else yes i mean but the only way you're going to get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one-for-one tax reduction in other areas right because there's a there's this other larger debate about whether you know what else should be taxed what about you chamoth what are your thoughts on solving global warming and this polarized sort of republican democrat if you're for a global if you're if you believe in global warming you're not a republican there's a i i think that um this is the most correlated thing with a healthy economy because i think that whoever solves climate change or the set of solutions that solve climate change first of all they'll be uh unbelievably economically successful they will employ enormous numbers of people um and they'll have a really profound legacy in the world so uh the the question is how to do it and i think the problem is right now there's there's as david i think actually puts the best lens on the topic which is right now we don't even have enough canonical data so that there's a single source of truth that we can all rely on and have not having to judge it as climate change i think is an important step which would just mean having a longitudinal measurement of temperature and you know having a longitudinal measurement of everything from pm 2.5 to pm10 to you know uh carbon methane all of the other normal sort of emissions nitrous oxide all this stuff so that then you can just understand what men and women as part of the human race are doing to uh [ __ ] with the counter factual because the counterfactual as if we were just like living normal chill lives and so once you understand that then you can figure out how to at least mitigate that back to what the counterfactual would have been or do it even better i think the best thing again we talked about this in a pod a couple weeks ago or a couple couple months ago the best thing that governments can do is introduce incentives and i think the the most meaningful incentives here are not at the consumer level but they're more upstream so you know if you take something like cement you know cement which is responsible for i think 20 of all the carbon emissions is a really pernicious industry because you know they all they are very local they operate within 300 local kilometers of every place where you ship cement to make concrete and whatnot um and when you look at sort of where the emissions are um they're at a very specific part of the chain which is effectively impossible to mitigate so you have to have a level of material science um you know improvement to really move things away from cement altogether well just knowing that you're going to have to have the incentives that a government creates to pull that forward another example is when you look at like manufacturing all the [ __ ] that we all love you know i don't care whether you like [ __ ] normal pants or hemp pants you know when you go back and you look at how h m makes those pants there's our high temperature processes that are burning fossil fuels they're emitting all kinds of really terrible junk into the environment and so it doesn't matter whether you're vegan per se you know you're not going to go around unclothed you're not going to not use spoons right so all of that the totality of all of that we need to completely reinvent high temperature manufacturing that's not going to happen unless the government steps in because like for example take something as simple as steal you know it's a tragedy of the commons right i mean basically is if if if no individual can make an uh a major impact uh maybe they won't freeberg you think we have all the technology we need to do this and it's really just a matter of incentives and deployment right now in terms of global warming or stemming global warming is that a correct statement that we have the technology we just haven't deployed correct correct and i think it's 100 percent it's unpacked well what i will say is we have the science the um the engineering and the resourcing uh and then the market are the are the kind of unresolved right and so resourcing is capital the market can be created artificially by putting in place government subsidies or having the government be a customer or you just have to wait a long enough period of time if you listen to um the tim ferriss interview with coke uh which one was it charles coke he talks about how ultimately consumers will vote with their dollars if climate change is real and global warming is starting to have an effect on planet earth and we're seeing that right we're seeing people make a switch to a vegetarian diet we're seeing people buy teslas we're seeing people make choices for sustainability so the free market is resolving and will resolve climate change is the argument that some libertarians might make um and then i think be it is that true in your mind freeberg do you buy that i think it's i i i'll be honest with you i've been [ __ ] shocked by how many people are choosing to pay a premium for vegetarian meat alternatives i was wrong on this i bet against these companies eight years ago i didn't bet against them but i chose not to bet for them because i made the argument consumers will only buy stuff that's cheaper and taste as good and i was wrong um millions of consumers are going to burger king and buying a veggie burger now which wasn't the case and we're seeing this across the world yes out of a crisis of consciousness right like you're saying that's right it's a it's a behavioral change wow because they yeah that's what they want in the market that's what they want to spend their money on they want to spend their money on having a nicer world it's just like when people will spend a premium amount of money on a nice suit it makes them look good and feel good it's the same sort of notion i i feel good when i'm buying a tesla i feel good when i'm buying a veggie burger instead of a meat burger knowing that it is harming my people around me i couldn't bring myself to buy a carbon-based ice engine uh recently i was thinking about you know if i'm in tahoe and i need to go off-road or there's no conditions i need to have a car for and i want to i'm picking up the model y with the dual engine and putting snow tires on it as opposed to getting the new you know jeep wrangler or the uh the new defender but whether it's biomanufacturing or um you know uh synthetic meets um or i think we're not just in a point where we have to create luxury markets i think we are going to disrupt commodity markets um and i think we're going to do that this decade and it's going to blow people's [ __ ] mind um when everything you're eating looks tastes and and feels the same and it's cheaper and it was just made in a more sustainable way using bioengineering which is kind of you know the ability to to write the physical world with software except it's realized through genomics and it's it's an incredible thing that we're doing how much of this is the generational shift i mean gen x seemed pretty absorbed with our own projects and a little bit of consciousness but these millennials are now getting into their 30s and they're 35 years old these the oldest millennials and they seem to be incredibly focused on the environment and doing what's right this is a generational shift in your mind freebird no i i think this is just the slow march of of humanity's ability to master our world in technology and uh you know uh look let me just give you a scenario chamath kind of says we're going to decarbonize the atmosphere if we could build an algae or a seaweed from scratch or using some basis and use software to resolve what's the right sort of seaweed to create that will grow like crazy in the oceans when it gets heavy it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and it literally just pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and drops to these 40 000 foot or you know 4 000 foot deep kind of wells we have already built around 70 of planet earth we have the tools to do that again the engineering and the capital to do that and then the market for is there a market for that it doesn't if if governments are like it's a crisis let's put a billion dollars into this like we did in the apollo program we will get that done in five years i mean there's just there's no shortage of tools and science to be able to resolve that sort of a problem today much like we're about to produce a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months after discovering the virus which is unprecedented so our ability to kind of read genomics and write genomics and as a result create biological machines that can do things in the physical world and self-propagate gives us this incredible toolkit humans never had at its disposal before and it will be the way that will resolve climate change and it will in the meantime we're going to bridge the gap between here and there by creating these nice luxury markets by the way here's a and so on here's an incredible example so when you look at sort of where um you know methane is a really problematic greenhouse gas and most of the methane emissions are from cows but it's from enteric fermentation which is you know fancy language for burping and what's incredible is there are now efforts to use crispr to genetically engineer um you know cows that don't necessarily have that same gut biome you know dynamic so that you're burping methane that there's also feed that you can actually give a cow that'll minimize methane emissions burping by 30 or 40 percent all these things are to your point david they're they're so fantastical if you think about it but they're possible today and we just need to organize and get us kind of like a center of gravity around these things and they'll happen can we get can we get jason the uh human version of that does it also cover tooting does it work for flatulence uh interestingly chris sacca tweeted about investing in a company called running tide which grows kelp and uh will suck carbon from the atmosphere i mean it just sinks it to the ocean floor and they're selling carbon offsets by putting seaweed on the ocean floor so such such a no-brainer right i mean like the ocean is so big and it's this per and like it's not getting in the way of land well you don't have to go figure out licenses and rights you got you got to basically get carbon to go into the ocean and so then you basically need an organism that can grow and self-propagate quickly and radically accumulate uh biomass in the ocean and then figure out how to get rid of it so the best way to get rid of it is have it sink it's got to be some sort of seaweed or kelp or algae and you just put it in the open ocean and it'll propagate i mean that's just such a great obvious us and there's a thousand scenarios like that that i think you know we're gonna kind of creatively uh come up with and results nuclear not even on the discussion freeberg i'm curious like is it just too tainted the work i've done the work i've done on nuclear it used to cost something like some number of dollars to get a nuclear power plant through the regulatory barriers in the united states and now it is so cost prohibitive it's something like 10 billion dollars now from maybe you know 100 million uh you know two decades ago there's something about the regulatory barriers yeah well there's a huge there's a huge nimby problem right i mean who who wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard nobody i mean nobody wants it jason but but i agree with like the larger point here that the solution to the problem is ultimately going to be all these new technologies these innovative solutions not making people feel bad for consuming and you know being alive um you know you you look at tesla and it's moving the whole world to electric cars not with a government mandate but just by creating a better car and so it's ultimately going to be technology companies you know increasing the solution set um and giving people new choices that's how we're going to ultimately solve the problem and interesting in the news new scale is creating small nuclear reactors and they just got approval this is a the portland-based new scale powers they had a small modular reactor that has been approved by the us department of energy for a site in eastern idaho we'll see if that ever comes online but it does seem like small nuclear reactors could solve part of the nimby problem in that they're smaller so if something were to go wrong we would have some ability to contain uh or have a smaller footprint in a disaster-like situation let's wrap with the overton window uh chamath talked about it closing and saks uh there was a good article the taxonomy of fear uh that you started with the group tell us a little bit about that article a taxonomy of fear by emily yuff i think it's yeah what's her name yeah she's a writer for the atlantic who wrote this again it's called taxonomy of fear and persuasion i think it's an important article what it does is analyze uh cancel culture and the language that's used to cancel people and um one of the you know one of the things she diagnoses is what she calls safety ism which is anytime somebody doesn't like um what you know an idea or what somebody else is saying they claim that their safety is being threatened by that idea and it's kind of invoking these magic words that hr you know has come up with where you know if anyone is is creating an unsafe work environment or an unsafe college campus well the the source of the problem has to be removed immediately and so this is the the language of cancer culture and you know the problem with it is that it doesn't really matter what the intent of the person was or um you know intense sort of irrelevant or whether the objection is reasonable or not you know whether it it it causes uh it whether actually you know threatens anyone's safety and so there's an example of this when um 50 prominent sort of writers intellectuals wrote a letter to harper's magazine including jk rowling and um matt iglesias who's a co-founder of uh vox and so there was a you know there's a trans writer uh there's a writer on who's a trans uh person uh at vox who claims that her her safety was threatened but because one of the co-founders had signed this letter the letter didn't discuss trans issues it was simply the fact that uh iglesias had signed it along with jk rowling and so jk rowling apparently is is um you know yeah i i miss this part of harry potter but apparently the the trans movement is yeah heart position women who were born uh women who were born biologically female are different than women who transition right so right and that's her position but her position is being attributed to glaciers by association yeah exactly and so yeah i would be like saying that i'm in support of trump just because i'm on this podcast with you sense to be clear yes it's contamination it's contamination by association um you know cancer culture and uh this one everybody being scared of words and this will be if if trump wins in november it'll be because this whole thing um just gets too much for too many people there is a massive plurality of people in the middle who think this overreaching sensitivity by the extreme left and the extreme right are uh are just completely out to lunch and um 100 percent agree and and i and i think that by the way the extreme left and the extreme right they should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless [ __ ] wits anyways all of them both of them on the extreme light like when antifa and the alt-right are fighting with each other it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow um thanks for tuning in to the all-in pocket i i mean i mean most people are in the middle most people don't need to have this like us or them you know it's it's it's like uh you're not allowed to have an opinion like i actually learn more from people that i disagree with just by hearing them and not trying to judge them and i think that most of us as well have our views that are sort of moderately in the middle so for example there was a usc professor that got sanctioned because he was trying to he was teaching a language class and he used the chinese word for that which sounds like the n word and i think he didn't preface it correctly or what have you but then you know he apologized he was suspended and folks wrote a letter now everybody has a right the the people who felt uh offended have the right to write the letter the administration had the right to react and then i think people read that article and think to themselves is this actually the uh has the pendulum swung too far or not and and mark my words if people feel that the pendulum has swung too far they will elect donald trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a [ __ ] about any of this stuff so that would be the bellwether no that's exactly right so i think it's really important i think that there's a large part of the country that feels that trump is a shield not a sword that he is their protector against this this type of cancel culture and i know trump seems like an instigator and he's very threatening to a lot of people on the other side but again to these people he's more of a shield and i think it's it's not just the fact that he speaks out and denounces cancer culture that makes him a hero to these people it's his his superpower is his uncancel ability it's this you know it's the fact that the left has done everything they can to try and get rid of this guy to impeach him what have you yeah and he's and he keeps surviving and so it's it's his very you know uncanceled ability that makes him such a hero to these people and i think this is the thing that the the left or the media doesn't quite understand is that denouncing trump in ever more hysterical terms doesn't you know it doesn't work because it kind of feeds it actually hurts it actually hurts it adds more right it adds more people right to his cohort who say you're overreacting right and hystericalness of overreacting like i tweeted i've been on this you know mini uh tweet effort to tell people listen there are chromebooks in the world they're very cheap 90 of the americans are excuse me on the internet at high speed and there are so many online resources for you to get ahead in life go try to be a marketer go do khan academy go learn ux and design these are the clearest paths into the technology industry and i get hysterical liberals who say people don't have access to the internet people don't have access to chromebooks and people don't have the free time or the motivation to improve their lot in life and it's like are you who are you talking about because ninety percent of the country has access to the internet and uses it uh already and if you go and do a search for a chromebook on ebay use one you could find one for 50 to 150 bucks so we have this narrative that people cannot rise up and people cannot improve themselves and every time i say i believe people can improve themselves people say that i'm uh like a racist that i believe that people could improve themselves and it just makes me further away from the democratic party it makes me further away from the left that i think i think this i'm going to put out a crazy um idea which is that i think if donald trump wins in a meaningful way in november i don't think he will but if he does the actual silver lining for for everybody is i think the republican party will disintegrate and the democratic party will disintegrate and in its place i think you'll probably have three or four parties and i think that that would be amazing so it's the burn it all down vote which was peter thiel's idea in the beginning was like i think sacks and teal when they coordinated this trump election it was all burn it down burn it down right sex that was your star chamber discussion with teal would you want guys wanted to burn it all down i think you're trying to i think what you're doing is contamination by association there yeah to college just because thiel right when's the last time you talked to peter till no peter's a friend of mine but i don't but again and and i agree with him about some things i just agree with him about other things but this is it you did this idea but but this idea that we can't hang out with people you know or or that hanging out with people means that we must endorse every view they have like why is it even relevant that you know i'm friends with peter look we are like for example we're friends in our group chat with a couple guys who are very far right we're not going to name who they are but i would say that i think that the group chat is better off for them being able to say what they believe and push back and just like there's a bunch of us who are in the middle and we waffle back and forth between the left and the right and then there are folks that are more on the far right our far left uh or on the left so i i just think that we forget that there is enormous value in the diversity of thought um and and people think that there is uh some sort of safety and conformity and in fact i will tell you um that's actually the exact opposite you're more likely to be in conflict with someone that you are very similar to because eventually you will always end up competing for the exact same resource and that resource becomes scarce if you are actually spending time with people that are divergent and different from you you actually end up not competing for the same resources because you're one second you're built differently so there's just less conflict so this is why multi-party systems work this is why you have less fighting when there's you know in canada and um and europe than you do in the united states because the united states tries to reduce things down to two choices and so we we all of a sudden like just glom into these pools that are seemingly similar and we just end up hating each other freeburg any final thoughts on canceled culture yeah i think it's just gonna be bad i i totally i totally agree with jamaat that if trump wins the election this will be the reason um that the same thing happened when the republicans overplayed their hand with bill clinton right and it was said at that time that you know clinton was always very fortunate in who his enemies were um because no matter you know what he did wrong or how badly he screwed up his enemies always made too big a deal of it they overreacted and it played into his hands and i you know i have to wonder if that's what's happening right now with this whole cancel culture yeah all right well we'll leave it at that we've gone over an hour uh if you're listening to the all-in podcast and you'd like to advertise uh it's not possible there's no ads on this podcast and if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast that's also not possible there's no guests so send your advertising and guest requests to tomorrow org breaking news right now there is a tech crunch story that just broke while we're on air can't stop wound stop social capital just filed for its fourth spac uh if you're into spax no that's not the that's the that's not the article the article oh the article is launched is spack and it's back as he spacks the world with spax yeah we just announced three yeah oh you just announced number three no no three three d e and f oh d e and f got approved no yeah they're filed out with the sec now yeah and when would d e and f be available for people to buy shares in it then is that like that 60 days uh 15 days oh okay great all right well there you have it and then you confirmed that the second spec was open door right is that confirmed where is that that was announced on tuesday yeah congratulations on that thank you how do you feel about all these people stealing your thunder with stacks i think it's i don't know it's great no it's it's great i think it's growing the market it's good for entrepreneurs it's amazing i mean what this is going to mean that companies with 50 to 150 million will be able to go public on a clear path i hope so i i've said this before we've gone from eight thousand public companies to four thousand in 20 years so let's uh reverse the tide let's go back double the number of companies that's right i mean we should think we should have gone up you would think it would be in interest rates it has to yeah yeah all right well here we go uh please for the love of god somebody convinced calm robin hood thumbtack and data stacks to go public because i've got kids to put their school uh all right everybody for bestie c the rain man himself david sacks and the queen of quinoa freed burgers this is the all in podcast we'll see you next time bye bye love you besties






hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another all-in podcast we just got the show notes and i'm ripping them up because the president has the rona we knew this was a possibility we had an incredible docket brewing but as fate loves irony we found out on wednesday night i believe just in a brief timeline here wednesday night uh hope hicks is a personal assistant uh got the rona and then of course um president trump announced late last night that he in fact had the rona and that his uh wife melania also had the coronavirus so with us today to discuss all things tech politics and coronavirus david friedberg david sachs and bestie c chamoth paulie hoppatia are with us uh i guess maybe we'll just drop it right to you freedberg you you are our um science kid here in the class uh what is when we look at the president's um physique he's clinically obese technically i'm not saying that to be cruel but he's a 74 year old who's clinically obese and snorts adderall we don't know that that's just a claim um but seriously what what is the prognosis here and then my i understand he's now got a experimental treatment was just announced an hour ago uh the taping of this on friday afternoon and of course we wish them all the greatest speedy recovery et cetera but let's get right let's get into the facts here i think the the overall mortality rate for um someone of his age is then call it the two to four percent range right and for someone with with you know he's not known to have diabetes or high blood pressure but generally you can kind of say there's some risk factors may be associated um so a couple points but the reality is the treatment that he got is one that's not available to the public and is effectively like creating these uh you know uh taking these antibodies to the coronavirus and he got a eight grams of this immunoglobulin therapy um that is basically a bunch of antibodies that'll eliminate the virus and they're not um widely available they're not publicly available these treatments but uh you know uh based on the early trials and the general experience with using synthetic and you know polyclonal antibodies for uh infectious uh disease like this it's pretty effective and he should kind of uh you know recover pretty quickly i would imagine so him dying would basically be a two-out or him getting this special treatment makes it a a one outer if we were talking about this in poker terms uh chamath when you when you look at this turn of events and you saw the news what was your first thought um that it's now basically a hundred percent guaranteed that we will have all of the most transparent data about coronavirus um soon so for example you know we we've been in this position where we've been debating hydroxychloroquine we've been debating these um you know all of these different uh regimens um and the reality is the president of the united states if he doesn't get the absolute top-notch care um we're all in some ways [ __ ] so it's it's probably likely that he's going to get the thing that folks know to work and then it'll be hard for everybody else to not want to ask for that and then it's going to be even harder for everybody to then not get some version of it and so i think probably we're going to de-escalate a little bit of mass stuff of testing stuff of you know what the right course of care is and you know frankly i'll be honest with you i hope you know i i wouldn't vote for him but i hope he's well um i don't want anything to happen to the guy um and i hope that he recovers and it you know he kicks it in the ass and that um whatever he took to get better everybody else can get it too all right sax coming around the horn here talking about the political ramifications of this you were feeling that uh trump was likely to lose uh but here we are with the october surprise and i hate to make this uh handicapping of the election but this certainly is gonna have some impact so with your rain man mind and when you go through this deck of cards here what does your brain how do you assess this as uh the rain man is this un going to be a net positive for his election um results a negative neutral handicap this for us in your mind you must be thinking through this and and again disclaimers we all want him to get better nobody wishes him out i'm sure some people do but i'm saying i'm seeing a lot of uh glee frankly on on twitter yeah a lot of people saying i told you so or karma's a [ __ ] or something like that yeah um you know sort of implying that trump getting this was was a moral failing you know um and uh so you know certainly a lot of people are kind of reveling in it um i think he was certainly careless i mean he didn't wear masks he said he didn't like to wear a mask so well i mean do you wear a mask inside your house no but if i was in walking around at a a debate or something like that if i was on an airplane with 20 people yeah i would wear a mask actually i mean you know there were certainly a lot of precautions around the president i mean more than most people i mean any of us could get it from anybody yeah you know um if you know our wife happens to go out to meet a friend for lunch or something like that and then brings it back so there's almost no amount of carefulness you can do to completely avoid this unless you're willing to kind of lock yourself alone somewhere um so i just you know this idea that somehow getting cove is a moral failing is is what i would take issue with it's not um it's not altogether unlike the crazy things that um the religious right was saying in the 1980s like you know about aids like when you know jerry falwell said it was god's punishment or something like that trying to imply that the gay plague i mean let's just call it what it is they basically said they implied somehow that this was um you know some sort of uh just comeuppance you know or something like a retribution from god contribution exactly exactly and and you know the virus doesn't know who it's infecting obviously it doesn't target sinners or whatever and so i just think that um you know this all this this sort of gleeful um sort of blaming us going around um is is inappropriate and i think it could really backfire if um if trump rapidly gets better i mean if trump is better in say a week um and is hitting the campaign trail again you know what what previously will have appeared to be a moral failing could it could now be argued would be a moral strength since he you know overcame it so easily and um you know so i think that if if he rapidly recovers from this and hits the campaign trail again it's going to make him look strong i think that if he has a hard time with the virus if it's innervating the way that i think it took out boris johnson i mean i've heard british commentators say that boris johnson's just not not even the same doesn't have the same level of energy even now than he did behind before the virus then i would think he could really hurt trump in the last you know this campaign look we i think we all know people um i'm sure you guys do i do who have gone through this and they all say the same thing which is this thing really sucks now there are all these people that say oh it's like dancing on tulips or daffodils i've never encountered a single person like that i see that um i see that maybe on twitter or a friend of a friend but all of my friends who've gotten it they have really struggled through it some of these people are older some of these people are younger some of these people are healthy some of these people are not and consistently they say the same thing which is that there's a couple of days where it literally feels like your chest is being uh pounded inside you you can't move you're just in pain and then afterwards the aftermath is you're at you know 50 60 70 percent of your lung capacity like it it does for a couple of weeks i mean doc says a friend of ours and he was very public with his experience he tried to avoid it as best he could he got hit with it he got hit hard and he said he felt like he was gonna die it was the worst thing he's ever experienced i i have friends that that still complain two three four months after the fact that they're at 50 60 of cardiovascular capacity and you know these these people that i that i'm specifically thinking about were really healthy going into coronavirus and so i i don't know i just think it's something none of us want um i don't think you would want to wish this on anybody of course not yet you know especially frankly the president of the united states has a role um and so i think folks just need to sort of like class up here um and hope that we figure out that he a gets the best care and then b we all know what it is and then c that we can get access to it too that's that's i honestly i think that's all we should be wishing did you see did you see the letter they published and what he's getting so they go ahead and read it go ahead and read the free breakfast the doc the doctor published it was not too long ago right jason i saw it on youtube it just happened like an hour ago i tweeted it yesterday so he got he got eight grams of polyclonal antibodies this is the regeneron formulation so basically they've isolated the antibodies that neutralize coronavirus that patients have presented in their body and then they use recombinant dna technology to produce those antibodies synthetically so it's a bunch of antibody proteins and then they turn it into an injection into a formula that they can put in your body and you now have effectively neutralizing antibodies so they gave him eight grams which is a pretty high dose and it gets it you know goes in intravenously you can have sometimes an allergic reaction to that but it seems like he was fine from that because they didn't announce an allergic reaction and then uh you know the the antibodies are now in his bloodstream and they bind to the virus so any virus that's floating around immediately gets wiped out it gets eliminated from the body so theoretically this is the way we should treat all infectious diseases that's right and i do think that by the way i do and i've written about this i think that is the future of infectious disease is we're all going to get a polyclonal cocktail every year instead of getting a flu shot you get a bunch of antibodies to all the new stuff that's emerging and it wipes out this david just think about this there was so much raging debate that got politicized between the left between the right between different folks of people who believed in different things around what the right course of care was there was no single source of truth i'll just say this again when you treat the president of the united states and he gets better that is canonical single source of truth i'm sorry but there can be no debate after that that the smartest people with the access to all of the research i mean let's be clear you don't think a call went out last night before they deployed the nuclear warhead stuff to all of the um r d labs and all the big pharma companies and said what do you got and the answer came back at the top of the ticket was this regeneron cocktail yeah they had they definitely have made that call before to prep for this but yeah totally agree now um when you say it highlights what the future of infectious disease treatment is and should be which is that all of us should be getting a booster shot every year of synthetically produced antibodies uh that will counteract any new infectious disease floating around in the world and we're getting to the point in the next 10 15 years that that should be reality for everyone yeah it highlights that but it also highlights that in the absence of the most powerful man in the world getting the sickness that we're all gonna basically [ __ ] and point fingers about what the right solution is and so it can't be the case that the next time there's a crazy illness that's floating around in society we need to go and target you know five or six of the leaders of the g8 plus the pope plus this plus that beyonce heaven forbid you know what i mean like this is crazy yeah this can't this can't be how we find single source of truth yeah well i think if i think politically speaking i think there's a lot of upside here for trump if he does get better in a week i mean if these polyclonal antibodies work then and he emerges from the white house you know if it is a fiddle in a week he's going to say the cure is here you know i was right you don't even need a vaccine the cure is here it's over and um and all the i told you so's might might flip around would that be from the truth david well if the police anybody's work i mean then it's just a matter of scaling them can it be scale freeberg is this easily scalable yes um but by the way i'll just point out the challenge with this is a lot of people uh north of 15 will have uh because antibodies remember they're a protein and if your cells didn't make that protein they look like a foreign protein when they show up in your body and so very often when you get a foreign antibody treatment like this you will have some sort of allergic reaction because your body will react and attack that protein and so it's not as simple as just saying hey we should just scale this up and give it to everyone because the clinical trials that are going on with it are to figure out what percentage of people what's the right way to treat people what's the right way to protect them from anaphylactic shock all that sort of stuff that comes along with this sort of thing so it's not that simple we're making it out but you you would admit that many of those questions the answer the answers to many of those questions must have been well in hand because there's just zero way oh regeneron's been running these trials since march 100 yeah 100 that's right they what they i i can tell you for sure when trump got this treatment i guarantee they gave him benadryl and they gave him um a steroid shot and they probably gave him a little bit of cortisone or they had it on the side because that's kind of like the standard sort of regimen you would use when you get this sort of um you know synthesized or or convalescent plasma type treatment and uh you know he comes out of this thing on the other end and he's fine um but uh but but that treatment regimen is required so you know you sit down in an id booth and you get a [ __ ] id and you get shots to go along with it so it's not as simple as just shipping it out to everyone's home and giving them that treatment you know and only am i correct that only 300 or so people have gotten this to date is that correct with the trial i don't know the answer to that i know that convalescent plasma which is call it the poor man's version of this treatment which is instead of synthesizing the antibodies you're taking the actual antibodies from other people that have had coveted and recovered you're isolating those antibodies and you're injecting them in other people's bodies so that is what convalescent plasma is it is effectively a soup of all the antibodies from recovered patients polyclonal antibodies is the synthesized version of those isolated antibodies where we use fermentation systems and bioengineered cells to make those antibodies then we isolate them and we and we use it is there any chance that the president would make a bad decision here because he would get to dictate his treatment as a powerful person like steve jobs did tragically i saw a doctor saying this is one of the problems with powerful people is that they actually can you know make a bad decision because doctors will let them have too much of a saying is that possible in this situation you think i think the answer is no because they didn't put out a letter saying he got bleach and uv light in his face so i think he's fine so he didn't go with his own treatment protocol and and also you're going to have chemo no i was just gonna say and also you know it it eliminated all of the other less nonsensical but equally sort of question mark treatments and so you know i think they went right to the answer which would only have been really possible if the best docs basically said this is what we're doing and i think david mentioned this earlier that it had been decided well in advance i think that's a good insight yeah there's a there's a protocol that was written down months ago vetted and re-vetted probably every week or every month as they get as they got more data and so the minute it happened there was nothing to talk about and and i suspect that that is probably what happened because there is no way you'd want to be you know it's kind of like being a pilot like you follow a systematic set of rules to deal with the overwhelming majority of boundary conditions and this seemed like a pretty obvious boundary condition you would have wanted to have a protocol for well in advance so okay so i want to just do one handicapping here sax i'll have you take this one off the bat because this was the chatter on twitter number one uh the first two i think are just crazy conspiracy there is he got it on purpose or he's lying put those aside for a second you can answer them if you want to but the third one is hey what happens if he's incapacitated and cannot run or god forbid he died uh and so if he's on a ventilator if he cannot leave the hospital he's an icd it's not even a question the 25th amendment deals with that yeah yeah so it goes to pence and if pence cannot do it for whatever reason but he's i think he's okay i was actually going to refer to the election though what happens to the election if in the next three four weeks he's in icu what happens then oh that i don't know well that's what i was trying to make a change to his ballot if they wanted to but i think if he's in the icu he stays on the ballot so we would literally have an election with him on a ventilator or him i mean if he was unconscious could he could people still go vote for him i think this is a possibility i think these are very low probability outcomes i think the most i think the most likely outcome here is that because he's got the best care um he's you know it's it's probably like at least 50 that this is over for him in about a week um and it redounds to his political advantage i think there's probably a 40 chance that you know he's got more like a three or four week case which i think would hurt him because he's gonna be able to campaign and then there's maybe like a five or ten percent chance of something more serious i wonder if he's got if he even if he recovers in a week the odds are pretty high that he'll have you know a long tail of fatigue right and so if he he doesn't change his if he changes his strategy and and just does things remotely and whatnot doesn't do rallies anymore um you know and and he he doesn't really come out and say he's fatigued but but there's this behavioral change does that change things do you think i think he needs to be able to campaign and hold these rallies i think that's an essential part of his uh election strategy but also it's always been his way of you know going over the heads of the media that hates him and talking directly to people and rallying his base and field testing his ideas there was that period when during lockdowns when he just stopped doing rallies for several months and it really felt like he was adrift um so yeah i think if he can't do rallies i think you know that could easily swing the election a couple of points and cause him to lose i think saxipoo's 100 right i was in indiana last week and uh there were a bunch of folks in the neighborhood where i was staying and i i was walking my dog and they were walking their dogs we were all kind of walking side by side and they all were ramping up to go to a trump rally they were super excited about this this moment to go hear what he has to say they were they sounded like they were kind of in this undecided camp but they wanted to go to the rally to hear what he had to say and kind of experience that trump moment um it was a real kind of ground level um i think um proof point for your uh for your statement around like you know people really need to feel and because that's a big part of his uh his kind of mo is that groundless it is and i think it was it was one of the reasons why his um no one saw his election coming in 2016 is if you turned on the tv and just listened to the commentators i mean aside from maybe fox it seemed like everyone just hated him but if you attended the rallies you would see that he was reaching a lot of people tens of thousands of people at each event and he was flying around doing three events a day uh tremendously energetic just um so yeah i think it's it would hurt him a lot um but look if he's back on the stump a week from now you're probably gonna see all sorts of people on the right saying you know i told you so and god healed him and you know he must be the chosen one or you know who we we we could be uh we could be seeing a weekend at bernie's moment here even if he's just tired they'll prop him up on a big stick and hold him up in front of the crowds and then put him back in the airplane and fly him back home i think i'll know if he's if he's too tired because you know he gets up there and he talks for like an hour and a half i mean right he's done two or three yeah it's like an hour and a half is short for him yeah so is it possible we could be talking about trump having less energy than biden in a debate which i think is a good segue here are there gonna be two more presidential debates and what was our take on the absolutely embarrassing [ __ ] show that we saw on tuesday night which was supposed to be the topic today that we're going to lead off which was the debate which seems unimportant now it feels like a year ago how do you expect us to comment on something that happened so long ago it was 72 hours ago i mean come on people oh my god it feels like it's like years 2020 is so exhausting i think i've aged 30 years in one year it's like three decades that debate that debate was just a dumpster fire um you know the way that i thought about it was wrong yeah not true i mean imagine no no i agree it was a disaster for trump it was a disaster for trump go ahead sacks explain because he's your boy um are you now not going to vote for him after that just to clarify for the audience uh i'm not i'm not pro-trump i'm just just voting for him i'm anti-hysteria i always support the side that seems least hysterical to me at any given time did you vote for trump last election yes or no or would you be comfortable even saying that i think you'd be surprised if i told you who i voted for really but okay so on to the debate um i think both biden and trap biden and trump both had a trap to avoid i think biden's trap was appearing senile i think trump's trap was appearing unhinged i would say that biden avoided his trap and trump did not um by constantly attacking biden interrupting him uh it was counterproductive i mean what you want to do with biden is let the man talk he's a gaff machine you know let him talk let him say things that will get him in trouble instead by constantly interrupting him trump kind of let him off the hook and um so it's now look i mean both of their bases uh you know it's like it's like a sporting event there's gonna root for the side they they already came to you know to support uh but i don't think trump helped himself with a few percent of independents who are still out there you know looking to make a decision i think you're totally right it was um it was really surprising because if he had just left him to his own devices you would have let it play out but i thought biden to be honest there were some moments he was fabulous so i thought he was excellent on race i thought he was incredible in the moment that he basically stood up to trump about his son hunter and he looks in the camera and he basically says look i love my son my son's had troubles and i support i mean amazing and so like in those moments it's so hard to not see that guy as presidential and i don't mean like it's easy for democrats or people that are voting for him like me but i think if you're a republican you got to look at that guy and say man that is a decent dude he did in certain key moments he did fabulously well and in other moments where there were traps he actually got billed up because trump kept interrupting and joe was smart enough to stop talking so that it amplified the sense that trump was interrupting him trump to me seemed pathetic and scared that was my like he's scared of losing he felt like a bully who had been like laughed at by the whole class like nobody takes him seriously like the moderator what's his name um chris wallace chris wallace the moderator was kind of like what what are you doing sir please i think chris wallace i mean i know people were critical of him but chris wallace is like sir please just trying to appeal to like basic decency and trump just not getting it me trump looks so bad it's just i think confirmed with people say the demographic he has to win is white women in a lot of these swing states i mean i don't think women want to vote i'm not going to speak for women here but my understanding is women don't like guys like that who interrupt constantly and who are belligerent and badgering and they kind of like a great dad who defended to your point chamoth you know his son and said hey listen my son's got problems my other son died i really think i really think and i and i and we talked about this a little bit before but the surface area in terms of policy between the republicans and the democrats now are virtually non-existent so look if you unpack foreign policy they both hate russia they both hate china they both need india and the middle east is irrelevant because we're moving to a carbon neutral alternative energy world they also don't need russia as an example so all of this stuff that used to matter before in so much of the foreign policy that dictated how americans would fight wars spend money you know incite democracy protect certain leaders it's all out the window and they both think about it the same way because the surface area is so uh similar that's not what about what about the economy so number two economically they're so similar because they both want to spend trillions of dollars just under a different label you know one is sort of under a green new deal and the other is called an infrastructure bill or whatever it is and then number three they will both have the same federal reserve that is tied to the hip of treasury who has already committed to be trillions of dollars a year in hawk backing up all the debt that basically exists and so if you put all these things together it's a popularity contest and this is why i think joe biden has an advantage because in a popularity contest where you're just picking the figure that you would you know either have a beer with or feel the most comfortable with there's an element of this which is like it's just a decent human being it's easier for biden to get that across than it is for trump and when trump behaves that way it just violates some simple rules of decency like they were in the debate against hillary clinton he didn't act this way and he was more um uh he it's it was like watching like a show like you were kind of like tuning in to see um what the theatrics would be or in the debates in the primaries in 2016 against the republicans it was theatrical here it was just it was it was just kind of not it was it was pretty sex in that way sax you think the democrats put up the right candidate because if you did put up elizabeth warren if you did put up a bernie sanders or god forbid both of them at the same time it would be a very stark contrast you would have the socialist ticket that wants to you know ban the billionaires and stop capitalism and kneecap it and uh spend a bunch of money uh on redistribution of wealth and here biden doesn't he's never said redistribution of wealth he's never said ban the billionaires he's pro-capitalism feels like a safer bet to the majority of americans did they did the democrats actually do a good job putting biden up there i think so um i think he is the most now that we know he's not senile i mean i think there was some real question about that going into the debate i think he proved in that debate that he's not um and you know he's always kind of had the decency card that jamal talks about um now that we know he's not senile i think he he's he is the the democrats most electable candidate because he is more centrist than certainly an elizabeth warren or some of the other candidates that you mentioned elizabeth warren would have moved the the election to be about substance and if this in many ways strategically no but think about this if you basically converge on roughly the same strategy with different labels you make the election one of style and there are a lot of people who really want decency back in the presidency more so than they want anything else because they already come into the election with a level of skepticism that policy a won't change that fast and b to the extent it changes doesn't affect them and so you know for years we've been electing people we like and this is probably the most extreme test of that idea i think i think there was like i mean like if you think about that debate you could probably simplify it down into the audience being part of three camps they either know who they're voting for trump they know who they're voting for biden and then some folks who are kind of maybe they're changeable and for the folks that are changeable there's a diversity of objectives right there are some folks who care about the decency some folks who care about policy but at the end of the day i think um you you go into this debate with an expectation of trump and an expectation of biden and i would say that trump was flat to down relative to expectation and biden was flat to up and so um that's where i would kind of give the the the ticker to and sorry i don't want to interrupt but i just want to read you this headline president trump will be admitted to walter reed medical center on friday uh for a few days yeah i read that and that hold on a second well his doctor said it's because they're out of an abundance of caution they just want to have him in a place where he can be treated if and as he needs it that maybe you buy that a cover story i think that look if you don't buy that i think he's in trouble uh jason that's that it is it is very strange when you get a treatment when when you get a treatment like he got today you know eight grams of uh immunoglobulin therapy like that it sucks uh i've had this treatment i've had uh immunoglobulin therapy before and you get knocked out you you're on all these steroids you're on all this anti-allergy stuff you are a mess for a day or two and you know you want to get like ivs and stuff that they give you all sorts of stuff to go with it i got to imagine that after getting that therapy he's going to need to be in some degree of care and i would imagine it's probably better to just do that around doctors and with all the equipment than trying to you know kind of bring everything into the white house so i don't read it as negatively but um well i mean do you do you think it could be like an anaphylactic you know you might be having some reaction yeah totally like i said a large percentage of people that get these antibody therapies have um some sort of allergic response it's all the way from anaphylactic to hey i'm having my throat's closing hey i feel i'm getting flushed i'm getting a fever there's all sorts of ways that this can kind of present so the the world is changing so fast that we can't even complete a podcast without it being obsolete can i tell you one other thing um what did you guys think about the fact this is a little morbid so you can we can choose not to talk about it but the stock market basically did nothing today on the news that the most important person in the free world theoretically um i think you just answered your own question i could chime in on this one i don't think that people perceive that trump is good or bad uh for the economy either way and that the economy is separated now from politics because they think biden or trump are going to have the same policies which you said before they have the same policies so why does it matter if trump were to tragically die it would not make a difference in the american economy it's not going to affect people buying iphones it might shake people psychologically but i don't think in a massive way because he's almost out of office so i think it's all baked in that's why the market did join what do you think i want to disagree slightly with the idea this election doesn't matter um i think it will matter a lot if uh the democrats win the senate as well as the presidency because then they will have one party control and they can pass much legislation as they want and i think a lot of things will get signed and i think the biden presidency could be very consequential at least for two years um while all this legislation has passed even if you know he's not you know out in front saying very much um i mean the significance will be in the in the pen to sign the legislation if the republicans hold on to the senate but biden wins the presidency i agree with you that it's not going to be a tremendously consequential election because we'll have gridlock and divided government again and so i think a lot hinges on whether biden wins with or without the senate i i don't disagree with you the only thing that i will say is that i think that biden will drag the country especially if it's a you know up and down democratic ticket back to the 80s and 90s more to the sort of the george baker school of diplomacy and governance and i think that if i and i don't know him to know this but i think that if he really were to have a legacy i'm susp i i would suspect that part of again because he's mentioned that you know why did he run he said the pivotal moment was like charlottesville and trump's reaction to charlottesville i think biden is really moored by this concept of decency and i think that if if he were there and he thought to himself i'm going to be here for four years because that's the right responsible thing to do but no more um i don't think that you're gonna see a bunch of crazy legislation pass i think biden's gonna say guys this is what i expect to do by the way did you because and i and i think i would bet on that because of what he said at the beginning of the debate he's like uh i am the democratic party i don't know if you guys remember that yeah i do remember that that was incredible that was so that was a that was a very darth sidious emperor move when he said no no no he was i think he was trying to basically say like firewall the extra the far left or the far left the socialist left and say that rhetoric is not what i was elected on i was elected on my platform i am the party this is what i believe and everybody else will have to toe the line and by the way in the end that's not such a bad thing yeah it's amazing i i i agree i think that that was a really important moment for him is for him to say look i'm in charge here because the republicans have been making the argument that he's a trojan horse for all these like far left elements aoc aoc and so it was very it was very important to come forward and say no i'm i'm the one leading this ticket now that being said and i think it would be a great thing for the country if biden brought the democratic party back to more of a you know bill clinton to you know obama type centrism or you know center leftism i guess you could say as opposed to this sort of like crazy you know woke marxism or maoism whatever you want to call it um yeah but i'm i'm very skeptical that he will because i think biden has always positioned himself throughout his career as being at the center of the democratic party and i think he moves as the democratic party moves i agree he's not going to be all the way to the left of the democratic party but those left elements will drag his sort of center to further to the left and we'll end up with sort of a compromise and i think at the end of the day if the democrats win congress he'll sign whatever they they pass i'm not so sure i really i really i'm not so sure the the white house is uh not that far away it looks like it's a 30 minute drive from walter reed sending a helicopter is that normal because he drove there last time would that be indicative of this as an emergency type situation sending marine one as opposed to just driving there for 20 minutes there'd be a lot of liability if he had an actual medical emergency and they were just like yeah we're gonna send him for a few days out of an abundance of caution the fact that they said out of an abundance of caution i think you if there is an emergency you you can't get away with saying that oh you can for sure they would lie i don't know it'll come out you're saying the trump administration is above lying about situations if he's unconscious they gotta swear pension yeah there's a lot of reasons why you gotta be careful i'm not saying he's unconscious i'm just saying it it's not even unconscious marine one like i'm just thinking out loud here is sending a helicopter for a 20 minute ride then a motorcade like seems a little i mean i would take a i would take a helicopter to the 7-11 if i had a helicopter fair enough you're taking a helicopter that is something i would say okay uh let's this is i think a good jumping off point to an interesting discussion that blew up on twitter earlier this week which is we can't keep up with all the politics the the rhetoric the vitriol and this polarization so uh coinbase co-founder and ceo brian armstrong wrote a letter saying hey listen if you uh want to talk about politics that's fine not at my company anymore we're going to have a no politics rule no debating the stuff and we're going to be ultra ultra focused focused i'm sorry at work and you can check your politics at the door when you read this sax you've come out in support of brian armstrong uh what was your take on his position about leave your politics at the door when you get to work right well i think i think what brian so i did i did compliment it um his his manifesto and i i think are you an investor i am i'm a small investor in coinbase um and uh and and i'm friendly with with brian and so i i certainly you know liked the idea of defending him against unfair attacks but um i also genuinely liked the manifesto and i think you know his argument kind of boils down to three components i think number one that having these debates on every issue whatever the issue du jour is pulls the company's focus away from its core mission which he really emphasized and um you know that mission mission is challenging enough in its own right um second he was saying that in something i've said before as well which is just that politics is just increasingly divisive in our society it's just inherently divisive and therefore it's uh corrosive to team cohesion and the more you have of that in your company the worse it is for you know the team and i think the third thing he he mentioned which i thought was really interesting is that the freewheeling debate of or discussion of politics you know like like that we're having here but we kind of have our own little safe zone here it risks uh hurt feelings or misunderstandings that can become hr issues because people can then complain about they feel unsafe they feel unsafe and they report to and so that's a further destruction moments in this podcast i'll be honest there's a couple of moments well i think well i think one of the reasons why this pod sort of works is because we're all we're all friends and uh we've created a safe space for us to have these conversations but the workplace is very different it's not you know and and what i read brian trying to do is to reimpose a true safe space by saying leave your politics at the door now i think he's been deliberately misconstrued by by critics who want to say that well you have to leave your conscience at the door you know that's not true he's not saying that you can't have your own political views or contribute to causes that you like but you just you got to do it on your own time kind of like mr han said in fast times at richmond high you know like do that on your own time um and and that makes sense to me i think like i mean look i think about this from the point of view of one of the employees working at one of these companies that doesn't want to be a party to the debate um if i'm an engineer at google or coinbase i go into work and i am captive right i don't have the option of not showing up to work if i go to a rally i have the option of saying i'm going to go to this rally and walk away because i don't like the speaker or i'm going to go to the rally because i want to participate in this dialogue or this debate i can't do that at work so it's unfair for work which is a place that i as an employee have to go to every day to be a forum for people to express themselves on political points that i may or may not agree with but more importantly may or may not want to actually be a party to the discussion around um and i think that's the most important thing to note here is like it's not about enabling the free speech of the employees that want to debate it's about the protecting the workspace for the employees that don't want to debate and don't want to be exposed to that um and that's really important as chamath is a person of color who um you know have i'm sure some has some strong feelings about what we've seen in terms of police shootings or maybe in your own personal life experience facing racism uh again as a person of color what are your thoughts on the workplace is it is it possible for you to leave that at the door that was the criticism i think i saw from the you know people who were supportive of blm and they said the background here was they were trying to get brian to explicitly say black lives matter and to you know have the company rally behind that um and that he didn't he didn't want to have that be part of the work environment and that he was offering people four to six months severance if they would leave if they don't like the new rules so what are your thoughts i think that this whole thing became a quagmire unnecessarily i think that he showed um a lot of naivety um and frankly like um you know a little bit of stupidity really um it was really poorly written um and that's why it's been so misunderstood and misconstrued in my opinion i think a lot of what he had to say was valid but when it was so poorly presented and you know the the essay was like eight minutes and it was rambling and the mission was like you know 97 down on the you know and it's just like it was a convoluted [ __ ] mess so if i had to do it again if i were him or if i was his advisor and he had asked me you know to proofread the essay what i would have said is more of the following which is our mission which is you know i think to create financial liberty or something something like that you guys can find out what it is for the whole world is unbelievably important we will talk about every issue through the lens of achieving our mission and we will be disciplined about saying which things matter and which things don't so for example if somebody says listen i really believe in spaying and neutering dogs the right answer shouldn't be hey shut the [ __ ] up it says okay um how does that allow us to maximize our users how does that allow us to achieve our mission why does it allow us to achieve our mission and if you ask the question why four or five times in the very first principles way you'll get to the answer so i would have rather said we are going to train people how to understand what builds up to our mission and what is otherwise something that you should leave at home and in that context there are a lot of things actually that are political that need to be brought especially into a company like coinbase which is working in crypto which is all about eliminating the financial barriers of people that don't have access to it like you are trying to dismantle an extremely exclusionary part of the economy and so there are potentially many movements that matter and those movements in countries in which you will want to gain users may look like political movements well and that was jack dorsey's point he uh so i just think yeah so i just think it was a it was a it was kind of a too super it was very silicon valley-esque reaction it was emotional um it was a little insecure and it to me it missed the mark because there was a lot of validity in what he was saying but presented in an kind of in a lens of you know silicon valley [ __ ] and it was not well thought through so if he had rewritten it and he had said 99 of what he said but through the lens of why we're going to think about a first principles way of defining how everything ladders into the mission he will train his employees instead what he created was a schism and a decision point and i'm not sure that that's how you maximize value in 2020 as a ceo because at the end of the day you have to deal with an entire population cohort that is that are in their 20s early 30s teenagers that will eventually want to work for you and whether we like it or not they're different and one of the things you need to do if you're going to run an enormous company is understand the psychology of your employees understand the psychology of how movements and decisions are organized and then play to win and it's no different than anybody else if you want to be in the job you know to be the starting point guard for the warriors you got to know how to [ __ ] pass the ball and if you're going to be the power forward you have to know how to do a certain set of things that are different than that and so i would sort of have framed it there because i think there was a lot of goodness in what he said but presented in a pretty shitty manner i think it's good he brought up the topic i do think there's a tactical issue here and he he could have laid out the ground rules for i think to your point jamal of how we should talk about uh politics at work and what are the ground rules i think the number one issue here which people don't talk about is that slack and email and forums inside of companies have created a massive distraction and when somebody goes into the random channel which is built into slack and i know this is in the weeds but i have seen this happen at multiple companies now slack infects a company somebody creates a room about a topic whether it's trump or police violence or immigration whatever it is and then people want to sound off on that and now you've got an electronic form where people are talking about highly charged issues that makes people feel unsafe and so what i told my companies was um the two companies i run you could talk about politics if you want to go for a walk with somebody and have coffee or lunch and you want to have a two-hour discussion about it go for it please do not put this in electronic form because it's a massive distraction uh and there'll be a record that could create downstream human resources issues to your report sex i have a suggestion and this is an organizational design experiment and maybe somebody listening will implement at their company allow 100 free form debate about anything one condition you literally need to have a soapbox and like in the 1880s hyde park in london yep you put the soapbox someplace in a safe space where you can go and you can talk and people who want to listen will listen and people who need to work can work and people who don't want to listen don't have to be forced to listen what's the a literal place in your office you put the soap you have a soapbox you grab it you put it on the ground you stand on it and you say it and if you're not willing to do that then right you know are you saying that there's no digital version of that because people could what i'm saying is that two things one is the digital version is actually training people to ask why why does it matter now the reason why it's important to ask that is because somebody may say i'll use jason's example that he loves we need to support the uyghurs in china the best way to do that is to proliferate our software in the following way because it will free them from ensavement of the chinese and it'll give them access to financial independence wow i mean okay that seems to be paying off the mission so if you would if so you gotta give freedom for people to come up with these ideas because it may the first version of this idea may may not actually be what the final version is in the final version maybe the killer feature so i in the digital forum in the slacks it should be why respect and that's a very respectful question it shouldn't it should not be in any digital forum because it leads to chaos because we see that on twitter and what's happening is the twitter derangement that we all suffer from is now infected inside the community the communication system that runs the operating system of the company go ahead exactly yeah that that's the thing yes i do i do agree with jake on this one so so look i mean chamath is right that i'm sure i'm sure trumath would have written a better letter but i think we understand the gist of what brian was trying to say and actually i thought it took a lot of courage to to write it and what he's basically saying is that politics has become so divisive in our society that that i mean it'd be nice if we could have these reasonable debates the way that we're having this discussion inside companies we didn't have to have these artificial restrictions but we do we have to you know it's the same reason you know that we have the separation of church and state is because people couldn't stop killing each other over religious wars and so finally we had you know the treaty of westphalia to stop it and what brian's basically proposing is a is a treaty for the workplace because we cannot get along around politics but david he is the ceo of an 8 billion dollar company could he not have hired somebody to edit that essay okay well i mean look i i just to me it's like if it's meaning if it's seriously well thought through and it and if it was as important as westphalia you would probably have a couple proofreaders corporate corporate version okay it's not it's not historical it could have been polish for sure here is jack dorsey's response and i'll have you guys respond to it i think it's in your wheelhouse in terms of what you said chamoth bitcoin aka crypto is direct activism against an unverifiable and exclusionary financial system which definitely affects so much of our society important to at least acknowledge and connect the related societal issues your customers face daily this leaves people behind i think he's right you have to view this problem not through the lens of your own emotions not even through the lens of the frustrations of your employees you have to help shift the discussion to say why does this achieve our mission and just constantly in a thoughtful respectful way ask why and by the fourth or fifth why it will either be something that doesn't matter and you can dismiss it quickly or something that actually is rooted in fact and probably is something you need to pay attention to and maybe the way that the conversation started was probably not with the right language that people given the chance would have framed it differently okay the worst take uh according to the internet's uh twitter's ability to ratio people which is when you get more comments than likes um which is not normally how it works people are actually taking the time to explain to you how bad your take was as opposed to liking it is what a ratio is if you don't know um goes to dick casolo uh who's a friend of ours me first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution i'll be ha i mean and that's that's enough to get you ratioed and have this thing go supernova i mean mike cernovich is retweeting this and losing like his mind over it you know that the former ceo of twitter is inciting violence he's a comedian as well um to costello so i think he's joking here and but he adds the punk the exclamation point i'll happily provide video commentary yeah here here's here's here's my uh disagreement with with dick and with jack is ultimately the societal value of a company doesn't come from whatever platitudes or political statements its co makes but rather from the quality of its products and the impact of its products and in that sense dick and jack are living in a glass house i mean twitter is a sewer of political diatribe and polemical hate you know it's i don't know anyone who feels better uh you know after spending time on twitter you know if facebook is like cigarettes you know i i don't know what twitter is i mean it's like fentanyl or something yeah so so ultimately you know maybe jack should spend his time figuring out how to make twitter into a less socially divisive product instead of you know because just issuing woke plates is not going to do it i agree with the i agree with that i don't think platitudes does it all i'm saying is you have to view it through the lens of i want to become the most relevant company possible and achieve the most impact and i think that there are a lot of times where some of these issues when presented politically underlying it is actually some feature or some capability or some way of seeing the problem that unlocks more demand that can help you win and not knowing a priori what the answers to those questions are it's important to train people on a framework versus say you can't talk because i guarantee you what will happen is somebody with some killer feature will be too scared to say something because they're not sure how to say it well and you and i both know because we've seen many companies that have gone through that cycle those companies decay and die yeah i think it'd be great if a policy like this wasn't necessary i mean it's i i agree it's suboptimal but i think it's it's caused by the fact that people just can't get along around politics anymore friedberg what is your take on ultimately how coinbase winds up the year or two after this do they get more resumes of hyper-talented people who want to embrace a politics social issue free workplace or do millennials and you know gen c and this next group of talented folks say i don't want to work for somebody who doesn't want to talk about these issues at work and then at the production board where you have a factory where you build uh companies do you have some rule around this yourself or thoughts about how you run your companies i think the more clearly you define culture the more successful your company will be and right or wrong about whether or not you enable the debate in the discussion and how you define the forums for kind of political discussion within your company the fact that there is a clear definition and delineation around this point i think removes the uncertainty and i think he'll do exactly what he's hoping to do which is to get people to leave and to attract other people that better fit with that cultural model i want to put my game face on i want to go to work and i want to win the game i'm here to play i'm not here to [ __ ] around i'm not here to do other stuff i want this job because i believe in this mission and i want this company to succeed in what it's trying to do and i think other places that allow people to run around and you know do things that they may or may not appreciate other people doing or and you have this kind of low definition kind of culture where some people are happy some people are unhappy it all kind of you know slows things down and and i wouldn't kind of encourage anyone to um to let that happen i think it's really important to just define how it is you want to operate be really clear about the rules and the boundaries and then um that i agree with as well i mean i think it's very much within his right and i think it took i do applaud his courage in doing it i just think that it misses the mark because i think it was too emotional i think he could do a 2.0 version and just keep building on the manifesto and say hey based on the feedback i got here's how we're going to do it no discussion here on the election reid hastings put out that fantastic uh powerpoint that i think we all know really well the cultural playbook from netflix and he when did he put that out like it's almost a decade ago no two decades ago was 2000 2001 and he's continued to refine it right if you look at there's recent iterations of it and they continue to kind of do a better job of defining um you know uh how do they intend to operate uh with people um and i think it's it's only continue to reinforce the innovation that drives that company into the hundred billion dollar plus valuation it's earned yes and if you if there's one important thing which is that there's a meaningful difference in the average age of a netflix employee and the average age of a silicon valley company now that may be also part of it as well i i think the one thing that brian could clarify is that you don't have to check your conscience at the door you it's not we're not saying that you can't have political views you're allowed to say things on twitter or take political stands or donate to whoever you want it's just that the company itself is going to be a demilitarized zone you know we're not going to bring we're not going to bring these contentious divisive debates that really aren't related to our core mission inside the company so we can all work better so we can all work better as a team towards the reason that we all joined this company but that's totally fair but you know while i'm saying all i'm saying again i'll just say it again that is such an important thing to say you could have had it proof for it a couple times you didn't could have been could have come across the way you're saying it it didn't have to be written by gpt3 you know what i mean also i think that it was a the the dunk he did afterwards where he's like and by the way if you don't like it here's four months severance get the [ __ ] out that was a pretty uh aggressive move as well all right i don't know how you guys feel i think i kind of like the gangster nature i like it i think it's i think it's great it's like if i'm on the team and i believe in what he just said i feel great that he's flushing this [ __ ] out and if i don't agree with it it's like [ __ ] yeah i'll take it you know like it's really clear and i think the clear-cut definition of culture is what every company needs to kind of pursue and it's an ongoing pursuit and you can always do a better job with it and culture is what you choose not to do as much as it is what you do right i'm not going to talk about politics i think is totally right it takes a lot of courage to say here's what i believe and if you don't if you don't believe in it then it's okay for you to leave and here's a severance package that takes a lot of courage so i applaud him for that yeah i mean look it's a free country and we all have limited time we should all go work on the mission that is most important and inspiring to us and coinbase has a very specific mission that brian's defining he's trying to find it clearly and if that mission is important and inspiring to you then go work there and if it's not then go work at the place that you know where that you know where the mission does inspire you and it may be a startup or maybe you know a political organization whatever it is go go do that thing that's most meaningful to you that's kind of my interpretation of what he was saying all right as we wrap here it was hard for me to interpret because it was so poorly written well also i mean it was also like a huge bomb on twitter and people's reaction to it was based upon i think how they feel at this moment in time and a lot of people feel this is why i'm sorry but communications is important how you say things what you say yeah style is really important yeah whether it's take the time get it right yeah all right so 2021 is going to be upon us before we know it and i wanted to wrap here with each of your feelings on uh the economy uh technology and politics economy technology politics how do you feel uh about 2021 are you optimistic pessimistic neutral on those economy politics have you guys ever been to magic mountain or disneyland you ever get you get in one of those log rides and it's like raging rapids or roaring waters or whatever they're called sure and it's just [ __ ] like you hop in and this thing just takes off down the river i mean i don't know nothing summarizes not better for me but in so many ways is that where i feel we are right now we've all jumped on a bunch of [ __ ] logs and we're shooting down this rapid river um and i think a big part of what i'm feeling and chamath is in the middle of this but there's this extraordinary velocity of capital right now and um when i say that i just mean capital is moving in large amounts very freely and that creates like once in a generation kind of opportunity it's in part because the fed has dropped interest rates to zero so there's all these trillions of dollars moving markets there's a change in an outlook and the world is being shifted in so many ways this is this really amazing moment that i think we can all be afraid of because we're on a [ __ ] roaring rapid on a log trying to stay afloat but um there is so much happening uh in in these markets that we kind of operate in there's never been a better time to get your business funded or to take your company public or to get customers to make quick decisions and change their behavior whether they're a consumer or an enterprise customer money and decisions are happening at a money's moving at a faster pace than we've ever seen and decisions are happening at a faster pace than we've ever seen that's my general sentiment i don't think it stops going into 2021 there's just another kind of floodgate about to open with this election one way or the other um but the these we're in the middle of this kind of raging rapids right now and it's uh it's it's a pretty um it's a pretty scary but also kind of exciting kind of time so it's so well said quinoa i really agree with you i i think that it's kind of like if you used to take um a second to make a one dollar decision and a minute to take a hundred dollar decision the amount of money being flooded into the economy now allows you to uh make a hundred dollar decision in a second right so like the order of magnitude of the mental barrier that it takes um has changed and uh i agree with you i was thinking earlier this week that um it's a really incredible time to be alive for one very in one very specific way which is obviously there's stuff that's happening that's really turbulent but there is a chance that a bunch of us can really um like change things in a meaningful way and um and i find it exciting so i'm generally like i'm super bullish uh on the economy i'm super bullish on tech um and i think i'm actually kind of like reasonably optimistic about politics i think that we're gonna find our civility soon um and uh and i don't know why that's going to happen or how it's going to get triggered um but i think honestly like the election of biden um will go such a long way to just um you know just showing what is rewarded and then to figure out how to reward the folks that were supporting trump in the first place for purposes of economic um you know pushback could be a nice de-escalation in fact and maybe an olive branch if biden can bring that republican party into the conversation yeah and sac sacks had this really beautiful thing that he posted on twitter which was like you know a lot of san francisco's dysfunction is really going to spread wealth throughout the rest of the country because a lot of cities that were shut out of all these tech gains will now see it and now you can imagine uh all kinds of people there's a guy that i you know follow on twitter he he he lives in bowie maryland he's a engineer at vmware um this black guy and he was just talking about how he got promoted and he's now a principal engineer and you know and i just thought like this is really [ __ ] cool like there's gonna be all this redistribution of opportunity all around the country um and that'll happen because of coronavirus because of people's frustration with california because you know of a handful of us how fed up we've gotten with the culture of silicon valley including by the way right what brian armstrong wrote which was which again still very important um and so we'll all be better off for that so i don't know i'm pretty optimistic sax tech economy politics 2021 well i i'm i'm super bullish about you know how about the entrepreneurial energy in the american economy um it's it's it's a hundred times greater than when we started out our careers in this business you know 20 years ago in terms of the number of companies that get funded the ideas the tools that are available the funding i mean when you think about it this might be the first time in human history where money is chasing the like throwing money at the ideas i mean throughout history until i'd say the last 10 20 years ago you know the people who had no money but had great ideas have always had to go hat in hand to go find the capital and now it's going it's completely the other way around there's so many vcs and they're all racing around trying to find the people with ideas and um it was worse than that sax they had to go give their ideas to a big company and take a salary right like so tesla you know nikola tesla the original inventor didn't profit at all from his ideas you know um and so that was pretty common and um and so just this just how entrepreneurial the u.s economy has become i'm very the new economy is completely taken over and i'm bullish on that i think the the you know the the tweet that smoth was referencing you know i said that san francisco's loss is going to be america's gain the rest of america's gain because middle america was really left out of the new economy it's just not where it was taking place and so you know globalization really gutted industrial america and cultural america they didn't get to participate in the enormous wealth creation of the last two or three decades and i think you know on i guess you know because of what san francisco has done in terms of driving out companies i think the companies are going to be you know tech companies are going to be all over the us now yeah totally it's so it's [ __ ] awesome should be uh super interesting uh and so uh let's just lay the odds as we wrap here on biden winning biden 65 35 approaching 70 30. okay david's you gotta you got a handicap for me on fighting winning what do you think sax well i mean the the betting line is is like somewhere in the 60 to 70 range and so you'd have to say that the the betting markets are probably you know pretty accurate i guess you know probably there's a 70 chance of him winning if i had to bet on that line i'd probably take the 30 underdog because i think you know there's alway things are so in so much turmoil right now that anything can still happen so you think there's a chance that trump could win yeah and it's probably bigger than 30 percent yeah it's probably bigger it's slightly bigger than what the betting markets are giving them credit for free what are your thoughts probably right yeah i don't have anything to add to that all right uh any speculation that we want to end with chamath uh on the uh i just noticed that a meal from uh uber is doing a spec mark pincus is doing his bag everybody's doing specs now any speculation on uh what we're gonna see in that market nope god bless them and i love you all besties all right besties back to the grind back to the garage and we'll see you next time you know what to do share this podcast with your friends if you'd like to advertise on the all in podcast you can't um and so uh the best you can do is write a review or clip it and we'll see you all next time on the all in podcast bye bye








hey everybody hey everybody welcome besties are back besties are back it's another all-in podcast dropping it to you uh unexpectedly because there's just so much news surprise bestie pods but dropping a bestie it's not a code 313 we're not dropping any snickers bars today just dropping the bestie oh no he's got a megaphone because we hit a new law in terms of people needing to be heard oh my god by the way um and his chief of staff called me he felt like he only got 62 of the minutes in the last two podcasts versus the rest of us and so i'm dealing with his agent a little bit it's like the uh the debates where they count the number of minutes into daniel is daniel grinding you for more than just grinding no i go for i go for quality over quantity absolutely okay uh well this week's going to be i mean what a complete disaster of a week um it's the other way to explain what is it every day is a dumpster fire it's so here we are we're three weeks out from the election and somebody's emails have a democrats emails have been leaked again potentially but last time we had an investigation by the fbi and then that might have infected impacted the election this time we have a whole different brouhaha apparently hunter biden who loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem this this is you know he's a seriously obviously troubled individual um but he brought three laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up according to this story in the new york post so the new york post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown um and this these laptops were somehow the hard drives me he never picked them up that's a little suspicious the hard drives wind up with rudy giuliani and the fbi uh and anyway what they say is that hunter biden which we kind of know is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals i don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays 50 000 a month but it's obviously gnarly stuff but the the fallout from it was the big story i went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story uh so the literal new york post was banned by twitter at the same time facebook put a warning on it so let's just put it out there um you know sax your guys losing pretty badly in this election and so we'll go to our token geo peer what do you think is this let's let's take this in two parts one what do you do what do they think the chances that this is fake news or real news or something in between and then let's get into twitter's insane decision to block the url yeah i mean so so first of all so i i think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved i think the new york post story stinks i don't think it uh it it meets sort of standards of journalistic integrity we can talk about that but then i think you know twitter and facebook overreacted and i think that the story was well in the process of being debunked by the internet and it was like twitter and facebook didn't trust that process to happen and so they intervened and now i think there's going to be a third mistake which is that conservatives are looking to repeal section 230 we should talk about that and so each one there's been a cascade of of disasters that have led to this this dumpster fire but starting with the story it is it is um very suspicious first of all these disclosures about hunter biden's personal life they didn't have to go there was completely gratuitous to the article it was sleazy and then of course the story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense even today uh giuliani was was making up new explanations for how it got there um it's now being widely speculated that this was the the content came from the results of a hack maybe involving foreign actors that this whole idea that it came from this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair shop and forgot to pick up um i mean so that that's now you know i think that would have been the story today if it weren't for um facebook and twitter making censorship the story and then the final thing is you know this story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with i mean the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a barisma exec and joe biden and um the buying campaign is denied that that joe biden never met with this guy and so it wasn't ever this smoking gun and um and and that makes it all the more um apparent why facebook and twitter sort of overreacted it was almost like they were trying to overprotect their candidate that's the thing that obviously looks crazy like they now have given the gop the right the extreme right the belief that the the technology companies are now on the side of the left whereas last time they were on the side of the right i think right facebook was supposed to be on the side of the right last time so chabot you worked at facebook famously for many years what are your thoughts well jack came out last night and basically said that the reason that they that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking and doxxing or some i think that was basically the combination yes a combination um and then facebook today came out and said you know before we could take it down it had been distributed or read 300 000 times um i mean look if we just take a step back and think about what's happening here there are more and more and more examples that are telling i think all of us what we kind of already knew which is that this fig leaf that the online internet companies have used to shield themselves from any responsibility those days are probably numbered because now exactly as david said what you have is the left and the right looking to repeal section 230 and so and by the way two days ago i think it was clarence thomas basically put out the entire road map of how to repeal it and if you assume that amy coney barrett gets you know put into the high court in a matter of days or whatever um it's only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those guard rails that that clarence thomas defined and it'll get you know fast-tracked through to the supreme court but if i was a betting man which i am i think that section 230 is their days are numbered and facebook twitter google all these companies are going to have to look more like newspapers and television stations okay so before we go to your freedberg i'm just going to read what section 230 is this is part of a law basically designed to protect common carriers web hosters of legal claims that come from hosting third party information uh here's what it reads no provider a user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider so what this basically means is if you put a blog post up and people comment on it you're not responsible for their comments or if you're medium and you host the blog you're not responsible for the comments of that person is that person it makes complete logical sense the entire internet was based off of this that platforms are not responsible for what people contribute to those platforms that's how publishing works now look at the internet's paper but again let's build on this when that law was originally written we had no conception of social distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically pumped content and and increased the volume on those things so what you have now is really no different than if you know you created a show um on netflix or hbo or cbs and put it out there if that stuff contained you know something that was really offensive those companies are on the hook did they make it no did they distribute it yes and it's the in here but here's the difference but it's the active act of distributing it you cannot look at these companies and say they are basically holding their hands back they have written active code and there is technical procedures that they are in control of that are both the amplifier and the kill switch but isn't this a bad analogy netflix shouldn't it the analogy be the person who makes film stock or the person who makes the camera or the person who develops the film not the person who distributes it no because that a limited amount of shows on netflix you can police all of you can't police everything written netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish just like you know a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish they are clearly publishers um but the the communications dcx section 230 the original distinction i mean if you want to think about like in offline terms for a second you've got you've got this idea of publishers and distributors right that's a fundamental dichotomy a magazine would be a publisher the newsstand on which it appears is a distributor it shouldn't be liable if there's if there's a a a a libelous article contained in that magazine you shouldn't be able to sue every single newsstand in the country that made that magazine available for sale that was that was the original offline law that was then kind of ported over into section 230. it made a lot of sense without this i mean i think it was a really visionary provision it was passed in 1996 without that every time that somebody sends an email that you know potentially created a legal issue you know gmail could have been liable freedberg is it what's the right analogy when people post to the internet is that the is the analogy or film stock is it the newsstand or is it the publisher so remember like what saks is pointing out is this was passed in 1996 so think back to 1996 when you would um create some content right in the term around that time with user generated content right you guys remember this like the early days it was like the big switch ugc and it was like the big sweeping trend was like oh my god all this content is being created by the users we don't have to go find content creators uh to create you know a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites so users could create content you know blogger was an early kind of user generated content service you could create a blog post you could post it and people would show up the problem with blogger or the challenge was distribution or syndication right how do i now i've posted my content how do i as that content creator get people to read my content and you'd have to send people like a link to a website a link to a web page and you click on that link and then you could read it what chamath is pointing out is that today twitter and facebook make a choice about and and youtube make a choice about what content to show and so you know i think the analogy in the offline sense via the algorithm is what you're saying to be via the algorithm and uh you know youtube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on they'll keep you on youtube longer and make more money from ads so it keeps the cycle going and so they optimize con and it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala in your brain it's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured and not just boring ordinary stuff and so this sort of content which the new york post sells a lot of um is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally because of the way they operate now if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers using the offline analogy on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking down the street hey you guys should check these out you know top of the news is hunter biden spoken crack with a hooker people would you know probably stop but i think the question is should they be liable now in in i think 2000 uh the digital millennium copyright act was passed and um that act basically created a process by which folks who felt like and it was related to copyright but i think the analogy is similar if you thought that your content was copyrighted and was being put up falsely or put up without your permission you could make a claim to one of those platforms to get your content pulled down and i think the question is is there some sort of analogy around uh libel content or false or misleading content um that maybe this evolves into law where there's a process by which platforms can kind of be challenged on what they're showing um much like they are with the dmca take down notices so the problem the problem comes back to the code if you explicitly write code that fundamentally makes it murky whether you are the publisher or the distributor i think that you have to basically take the approach that you are both and then you should be subject to the laws of both if for example twitter did not have any algorithmic redistribution amplification there were the only way you could get content was in a real-time feed that was everything that your friends posted and they stayed silent you could make a very credible claim that they are a publisher and not a distributor which by the way is the way it originally worked and it was why they were falling behind facebook as you well know because you worked on the you can algorithm actually you cannot click but you're you're not a distributor when you literally have a bunch of people that sit beside you writing code that decides what is important and what is not you can debate but you can debate which signals they decide to use but it is their choice well but but if the signals are the user's own clicks then i would argue that's still just user generated content no no it is a it is a signal david but that's not the only signal for example i can tell you very clearly that we would choose a priority stuff that we knew you would click on it wasn't necessarily the most heavily clicked we could make things that were lightly clicked more clicked we could make things that were more click less clicked but my point is there are people inside the bowels of these companies that are deciding what you and your children see and to the extent that that's okay that's okay maybe we've actually solved this problem saks in that if we said if you deploy an algorithm that is not disclosing how this is going then you are ergo a publisher and if you uh are just showing it reverse chronological archron as we used to call back in the day with the newest thing up top that would be uh just so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230 we should be talking to these politicians about algorithms equal publisher so the publisher at the new york post is the same as the algorithm i like this as a better framework well yeah so so senator tom cotton you know who's a republican he tweeted in response to the new york post censorship look if you guys are going to act like publishers we're going to treat you like publishers so that that's not modifying section 230 that's just saying you're not going to qualify for section 230 protection anymore if you're going to make all these editorial decisions i would argue that these decisions they're making about censoring specific articles and by the way it's a total double standard because you know when when trump's tax returns came out a week or two ago uh where was the censorship of that that was wasn't that hacked material i mean that was material that found its way to the new york times without trump's consent by the way so were the pentagon papers i mean you cannot apply this standard this this idea that we're gonna prohibit links to articles yeah but you're proving the point these people are no no i know i know well well hold on i'm saying i'm saying if they make editorial decisions they're publishers i think there's a way for them to employ speech neutral rules and remain distributors so i would be i would i'd have a little bit of of an issue with you i would say the reason why they're going to fall into this trap becoming publishers is because of their own desire to censor their own biases they can't i don't think that's what it is i think it's purely market cap driven if you go from an algorithmic feed to a reverse chronological feed only i can tell you what will happen in my opinion which is that the revenue monetization on a per page per impression basis will go off by ninety percent ninety percent for sure people wouldn't people that is the only reason why these guys won't switch because they know that for every billion dollars they make today it would go to a hundred million in a reverse chronological feed because you would not be able to place ads in any coherent valuable way there would be zero click-throughs and the ads would be just worthless otherwise they should do it now if you could keep all the revenue and you could be reverse chronological right and have the same market cap just do it and be under safe harbor so that you're not attacked every day how fun is it to be sitting there and being attacked every single day by both sides and by all the libertarians in the middle the reason they don't do it is because of money let's just be honest that's the only reason they don't do it but it's all market cap driven maybe they should go back to this kind of the straight reverse crown feed and maybe you're right that the algo i mean i think you probably are right that the algorithms um are make the situation worse because they kind of trap people in these bubbles of like reinforcement and they just keeping fed more ideological purity and it and it definitely is fueling the polarization of our society so i'm not trying to defend i mean i think maybe you have a point that we should get rid of these algorithms but but just to think about like the publisher aspect of it going back to the newsstand example let's say that the guy who works at the newsstand knows his customers and pulls aside every month the magazines that he knows that his clientele wants and in fact sometimes he even makes recommendations knowing that oh okay you know chamath likes you know these three magazines here's a new one maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside for you that would not subject him to publish reliability even though he's doing some curation he's not involved in the content curation uh i i would argue that if the the algorithms proceed in a speech-neutral way which is just to say they're going to look at your clicks and then based on your own revealed preferences suggest other things for you to look at i don't think that makes you a publisher necessarily and i think if it was but if you if you do if you do put your finger if these engineers are putting their thumb on the scale and and pushing the algorithm towards certain specific kinds of content that may cross over no no no you're being you're being too specific and it's it's not that extreme and it's not as simple as you're saying the reality is there are incredibly intricate models on a per person basis that these companies use to figure out what you're likely going to click on not what you should not what is exposed to you not what you shouldn't but what you likely will and that's part of a much broader maximization function that includes revenue as a huge driver yeah so the reality is that these guys are making publishing decisions and right you are right david you know the law back in the day it didn't scale to the newspaper owner but you know what in 1796 you know colored people were three-fifths of a human and we figured out a way to change the law so i'm pretty sure we can change the law here too and i think what's going to happen is you should be allowed to be algorithmic but then you should live and die by the same rules as everybody else otherwise that is what's really anti-competitive is to essentially lie your way to a market advantage that isn't true just because people don't understand what an algorithm is that's not sufficient to me but they're not actually in the content creation business right and so what's the uh what's the the definition of a term publisher in that context because in all other cases publishers pay for and guide and direct the editorial creation the content versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that context here's the problem let's take for example uh instagram reels can you manipulate content through reels yes now as the person that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people's copyright or you know offensive or wrong or whatever and then you yourself distribute it to other people knowingly the reality is that the laws need to address in a mature way the reality of what is happening today versus trying to hearken back to the 1860s and the 1930s because things are just different and we're smart enough as humans to figure out these nuances and that sometimes we start with good intentions and the laws just need to change well ironically chamath you're making a point that clarence thomas made justice thomas made in his uh filing recent filing where he said that that if you are acting as both a publisher and a distributor you need to be subject to publish reliability which means peeling back section 230 and moreover you may not even be the primary creator of the content if you're merely a secondary creator if you're someone who has a hand in the content um then you are you're a creator you're a publisher and therefore you should lose section 230 protection that is basically what he said if you if your argument is that the algorithms make you a content creator effectively and the tools algorithms and tools well the other thing is you know what you have because david but you also have monetization guys right there's monetization involved in the youtube example they are helping you we're having a serious conversation jason let's not let's not go off in that no i'm just good no but but it's jamal i mean this goes back to the politics may make strange bedfellows point um i mean i think a lot of the conservatives are actually making the point you're making which is that these social media sites are involved in publishing i don't want these guys involved in any of this [ __ ] because i don't trust them to be neutral over long periods of time so do you trust their decision to pull down q anon groups and zero just like just like it took it took years for us to figure out that holocaust denial was wrong anti-vaxx was marginal q anon was crazy like wearing masks was a good idea right i mean i i don't want these people in charge of any of this stuff and to the extent that they are i want them to be liable and culpable to defend their decisions so chamel your ideal non-profit social media service would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse that's right that's not what i'm saying david what i'm saying is that you have to be able to live with the risk that comes with you know playing in the big league and wanting to be a 500 plus billion dollar company there is a liability that comes with that and you need to own it and live up to the responsibility of what it means otherwise you don't get the free option what if they didn't take a hand in it and they follow the dig the reddit model and it's just up voting that decides what content rises to the top suspect i suspect that so reddit has a just a different problem which is this sort of like uh you know a decency problem and a different class of law who are we to judge decency right i mean like in in the vein of like editorialism like they're taking no hand in what content rises to the topic they did ban certain topics so they did recently but like like assume they didn't right and it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic it's very hard to pin i think it feels like a platform to me i think it's very hard to pin a section 230 claim on reddit as easy as it is youtube facebook and twitter and so if youtube reverted to just hey what people are watching right now rises to the top and that was the only thing that drove the algorithm you would feel more comfortable with youtube not being it's not comfortable this is what i'm saying it's it's what i know all i want to know is what am i getting when i go here and if what i'm getting is a subjective function where they are maximizing revenue which means that i can't necessarily trust the content i get as long as i know that and as long as there's recourse for me i'm very fine to use youtube and twitter and facebook what i think is unfair is to not know that there's a subjective function confuse it with an objective function go on with your life end up in this state that we're in now where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing barbs and you have no solution maybe i just want to be stimulated like i remember the day when i would go to facebook and twitter and it was boring as hell it's like just [ __ ] random [ __ ] that people like here's a picture like show me the best stuff you know like like and now i go to facebook and i'm like [ __ ] addicted because it's showing me this and there's like [ __ ] that i've been buying online and the ads keep popping up and i'm like oh this is awesome and i keep buying more stuff i think all of that is good but i it's all it all should be done eyes wide open where in these corner cases the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred they should have some legal recourse and they should be they should be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate all that wait hold on let me just ask just one question david would this be uh alleviated if the algorithm was less of a black box if we could just say hey no we need these algorithms to be so that's not a solution and then what is this and then and i want to hear david's about that and then also labeling because facebook labeled stuff and if labeling stuff hey this is disputed from a third party that feels to me like that would have been a better solution in the twitter's case all right let me get in here so i half agree with tremoff okay so the half i agree with is i don't want any of these people meaning the social media sites making editorial decisions about what i see censoring what i can look at i don't trust them i don't want that kind of power residing in really two people's hands mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey i don't i don't trust them and i don't want them to have that kind of power but that where i disagree is if you repeal section 230 you're going to make the situation infinitely worse because section 2 what is the response of these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low-level employees basically millennials to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory might cause a lawsuit they're going to be taking down content all over the place and you know what will happen that's gonna be a worse world no you know what'll happen those companies will lose users lose engagement and new things will spring up in its place around these laws that work how will they how do they lose audience i mean i think what will happen is you have a torrent of lawsuits any time somebody has a a potential lawsuit based on you know like trying to police speech at a dinner party like this never existed at i don't think the goal is to work backwards from how do we preserve a trillion dollars of market cap so what if that's what i think that's what i don't think that's what we're doing so for me i i'm trying to work back from how do we preserve the open internet but i think this is exactly what it's saying which is here's a clear delineation in 2020 knowing what we know you know person entrepreneur who goes to y combinator or to launch to build the next great company here are these rules pick your poison and some will choose to be just the publisher some will probably create forms of distribution we can't even think of some will choose to straddle the line they'll have different risk spectrums that they live on and that's exactly how the free markets work today there's nothing wrong with that maybe the only like disagreement here is that i think that code can be written and algorithms can be written in a speech neutral way so that the distributors don't cross over the lines becoming publishers i fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers the reason why the new york post should be really taken off they should be platforms and they cross the line i would say that this this newer post story is the reason why people are up in arms about it is because what twitter and facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry and if a publisher like the the new york post puts out a story that doesn't meet the standards of twitter and facebook they're going to censor them that is a sweeping assertion of power they're picking and choosing who they don't want to give distribution to yeah we all we all agree on that piece they should not be the arbiter that is what is triggering but that is what is triggering the conservatives in particular but everybody but especially conservatives to say they want to repeal section 230. nobody my point is nobody is safe and it's less about um i actually think that there's a nuance point to this which is it's less about what they think is legit or not as much as what they think is important or not they chose to make this an important article they chose to kind of intervene in this particular case when every day there are going to be hundreds of other articles that are going to be actively shared on these platforms that are by those same standards false with you know some degree of equivalency false which shouldn't be on the platform absolutely and it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude um regardless of the reason in the background because there are many articles like it that aren't being excluded um and that alone speaks to the hole in the system as kind of well it's because it's because they they have too much power and they're unaware of their own biases they can't see this action for what it so clearly was it was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of employees at twitter and facebook to to protect the biden campaign from a story that they didn't like i mean because if they were to apply the these standards evenly they would have blocked the trump tax returns for the exact same reason by the way is about to block you so he can keep the biden campaign strong and not have your i i would say i've been red-filled actually the last 24 hours have been repelling for me i i i gotta say david i agree with you because like i thought i thought that both things were uh crossing the line like meaning either you publish them both or you censor them both and there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side but to choose one and not do the other it just again it creates for me uncertainty and i don't like uncertainty and i really don't like the idea that some nameless faceless person in one of these organizations is all of a sudden going to decide for me knowledge yeah and information that to me is just unacceptable the journalistic standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere right like at that point like what what is true what is not true what is opinion what is not opinion what is what you know how do i validate whether this [ __ ] laptop came from this guy or this guy or this guy it's a slippery how are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles a day standards would be the answer yeah and your look has lower standards right and so let's look at how slippery the slope has become just a week ago i mean literally a week ago mark zuckerberg put out uh a statement explaining why facebook was gonna censor a holocaust denial why he really went on a limb huh david well it's i think wow no no no no no not brave no no no but my point is my point my point is he actually put out a multi-paragraph well-reasoned statement multi-paragraph your three paragraphs about the holocaust is bad wow congrats you're you're not listening to my point my point is that he took it seriously that he was gonna censor something and i think you know people can come down you could be like a skokie aclu liberal and oppose it or you know you could say look common sense dictates that you would you would censor this but he felt the need to justify it with you know like a long post how and then one week later we're already down the slippery slope to the point where you know facebook's justification for censoring this article was a tweet by andy stone you know like that was it it was a tweet that was the only explanation they gave by the way one of the reporters pointed out that if you were going to announce a new policy you probably wouldn't want it done by a guy who's been a lifelong democratic operative you know this was just so and so it just shows that once you start down the slope of censoring things it becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more and and this is why i think these guys are are really in hot water whatever whatever um you know whatever controversy there was about section 230 before and there was already a lot of rumblings in dc about modifying this they have made things 10 times worse i mean as as someone who's actually a defender of section 230 i wish dorsey and zuckerberg weren't making these blunders because i think they're going to ruin the open internet for everyone super blundered i'll tell you it was an even bigger blunder or an equal blunder for me last night i don't know if you guys had this experience but i was trying to figure out what the consensus view on the biden hunter biden story was and i went to rachel maddow and the last word and anderson cooper and there was a media blackout last night i couldn't find one left leaning or cnn if that is even in the center i don't think they're the center any more than the left i couldn't find one person talking about buy and i was like all right let me just see if i tune in to fox news and fox news was only discussing the binding story and so this now felt like wow not only if you were one of these you know folks on the left who's in their filter bubble on twitter and facebook they're not going to see that story and then if they tuned in to rachel maddow uh or to anderson cooper or you go to the new york times it's not there either and then drudge didn't have it for a day you're bringing up something so important so think about what you're really talking about jason there was a first order reaction that was misplaced and not rooted in anything that was really scalable or justifiable then everybody has to deal with the second and third order reactions the left leaning media outlets circle the wagons the right leaning media outlets are are up in arms nobody is happy both look like they're misleading and then now if you're a person in the middle for example what was frustrating for me yesterday was it took me five or six clicks and hunting and pecking to find out what the hell is actually going on here why is everybody going crazy but that bothered me you know uh and so i just think like again it used to be very simple to define what a publisher was and what a distributor was in a world without code without machine learning without ai without all of these things i think those lines are burned we have to um rewrite the laws i think you should be able to choose and then i think if you're trying to do both by the way the businesses that successfully do both will have the best market caps but if you're trying to do both you have to live and die by the sword yeah it would be interesting also if i don't know if you guys have done this but i switched my twitter to being reverse chronological which you can do in the top right hand corner of the app or on your desktop because i just like to see the most recent stuff first but then sometimes i do miss something that's trending whatever but i just prefer that because i have a smaller follower list now um but to friedberg your point you kind of like the algorithm telling you what to watch so a potential solution here i think i like it rationally by the way i'm just saying like as a human humans like it i like it like i like to be stimulated with titillating information and uh you know interesting things that for whatever reason i'm gonna you know click on again you like that experience of jumping down the road my point is all humans are activated and the algorithms the way they're written they're designed to activate you and keep you engaged and activation naturally leads to these uh dynamic feedback loops where i'm going to get the same sort of stuff over and over again that that it identifies activates me because i clicked on it and therefore i'm gonna you know continue to firm up my my opinions and my beliefs in that area but i think doing these stuff that i don't believe showing me stuff that's anti-science because i'm a science guy showing me stuff that's anti-science showing me stuff that's [ __ ] that i consider [ __ ] i'm not going to read it anymore so if i'm reading just random blurtings by random people in reverse chronological order it is a completely uncompelling platform to me and i will stop using it and that leads back to kind of the you know tomos point which is that the ultimate incentive the mechanism by which these platforms stay alive is the capitalist incentive which is you know how do you drive uh revenue and therefore how do you drive engagement and and that's to give consumers what they want and that's what consumers want all right let's let's give sax his victory lap he predicted last time that uh there was a possibility that trump would come out of this like superman and would do a huge victory lap and sure enough he considered putting a superman outfit on under his suit and he did a victory lap literally around the hospital uh putting the secret service at risk i guess um and then did a mussolini-like salute from everybody from the top of the white house i mean you nailed it sacked you came out it was very ill duchy no but it was it was it was it was very predictable it was you the media was making it sound like trump was on his deathbed you know because the presumption is always that the administration's hiding something he must be much sicker than he's letting on if he says he's not that sick it must be really bad um and so for days and days they were talking about how trump was you know potentially had this fatal condition and by the way he deserved it you know it was a moral failing he was negligent and so it he it's not unlike really what the right was doing constantly accusing biden of senility you know and then biden went into that debate and then blew away expectations um and so the same thing here you know the the media set up trump to kind of exceed expectations but but but i do think you know it is um noteworthy that trump was cured so quickly with the use of these you know clonal antibodies that we talked about last time and we talked about it on the show two weeks ago and it was a combination i guess of regeneron and rem deserve and the guy was out of there in like a couple of days so um you know it's like the the media doesn't want to admit anything that is potentially helpful to trump but you have to say that at this point we have very effective treatments for kovid they may not be completely distributed uh yet uh trump obviously had access to them that the rest of us don't have but it feels to me like we are really winding down on the whole the whole covet thing and i asked a question is it has have they published the blow by blow tick talk of exactly what he got when um no they haven't right i would love i would love to have that because i think all americans deserve probably yeah they know they know what his dosage was and they said what day he got it on the rem death severe he got several doses it said what days he got the antibody treatment i i just want to print that out and keep it as a folded in my pocket just in case we know what to take now we know what to take if we get sick right yeah well the question is can we get it but even independent of that right like um i think people love um anecdote it's very hard for people to find a motion and find belief in statistics and you know if you look at the statistics on covid you know you go into the hospital 80 chance you're coming out and you know the average stay for someone that goes in a lot of people are going to the er and they're getting pushed back out because they're not severe enough and i think the anecdote is everyone that gets covet dies the statistics show that that's not true and you know whether or not trump got exceptional treatment he certainly did um it's very hard to sax's point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to keep people at home and and manage kind of and create this this expectation of severity of this crisis etc um it's very hard for people to kind of then say hey like you know he's got a 97 percent chance of making it through this and he'll be 90 chance he'll be out of the hospital in three days when it happened it was a shocking moment um and it really hit that narrative upside down right like it was just like well can we show that there's a tweet recently providing the statistics on what the real infection fatality rate was for covet um yeah it's about half a percent 0.4 and that's across you know the whole spectrum but like in anyone under 75 years old you've got the numbers right facts right but it's here let me pull it up it's on uh we we tweet i think bill gurley first tweeted it and then i retweeted it i thought the ifr was like point one if you're young and it goes all the way up to like point four if you were above 75. it's way way less than point one wait yeah it's it's it's it was um i thought the ifr was a lot less than that that ifr is also distorted you you know based on the zero prevalence study that was just published you can take that number that's published and divided by about three uh three to five uh to get the true ifr because not everyone that's had covet is registering as a positive infection because they had cobin got over it so there was a paper published in in jama a few weeks ago where they took dialysis patients and they measured and they get blood from these dialysis patients and they measured covet antibodies in these patients and they showed that in the northeast 30 percent of people 27 point something percent of people have already had covet uh it's an incredible fact wow and in the west uh the number is close in western states they've kind of got it all written up in this paper and they did a great job with paper it's about three percent um but in aggregate across the united states it's a this was a few weeks ago so nowadays it's it was a 10.5 percent i think so it's probably closer to 12 now if people have already had covet and so then if you assume that number right i mean that's 30 million people and now you look at how many people have died we haven't gotten the deaths wrong right because everyone that's died from covet we've recorded that death we know that numbers right it could be a little inflated right people who died with covetous exactly conservative and assume that it's right right i mean if i look in the united states it's 217 thousand 270 cases but the real cases is 30 million 30 million and that's where you that's where you end up with this like you know adjusted ifr true ifr of 0.1 yeah like very very 0.1 0.07 or 0.7 sorry um by the way my my tweets aren't loading right now so i think trump just odd took the tick tock decree and he just crossed that tick tock and put twitter and he just shut twitter down what what what is the tick tock thing done yeah who knows that was like three weeks ago it doesn't matter anymore was there a second debate there's tonight there's going to be two town halls um trump refused to do a zoom with or you know a zoom debate talk about the power of zoom a virtual debate he wouldn't do ostensibly because he's not good when he's not interrupting somebody would be my take on it so then he went to nbc which he made 400 million dollars i guess from the apprentice and nbc let him take a time slot directly opposite biden tonight to do his own town hall so they didn't even stagger it which nbc which is responsible for saving trump is getting absolutely demolished by their own actors and show runners on twitter so i think nbc is going to come out swinging tonight in this town hall to try to you know take down trump as maybe their penance that's my prediction for it but how do you watch biden if biden is up against trump like that's like watching paint drive versus watching like you know some maniac running down market street with a samurai sword on meth i'll be uh i won't be watching either um i cannot wait for this election to be over how many days until november 3rd we are like 18 in a wake up 18 days my gosh maybe 18 yeah let us just get this over with yeah yeah i know we're all sick of it i i do feel like i mean it's the polls are now showing that biden is up by as much as 17 i mean things have really uh continued to break his way i think to your point jason um about trump being more watchable i think that's sort of trump's problem is he just can't help making himself the center of the news cycle every single day and to the extent the election is a referendum on trump i think he's going to get repudiated if the election were more of a contest and people would weigh biden's you know positions as well i think trump would have a better shot because i think he does have some blind does have some weaknesses but um the whole reason why biden's basement strategy's been working so far is because trump just eats up all the oxygen and he's making a referendum on him which i think he'll lose if he keeps doing it that way yeah you know what they say saks what got you here will not get you there what got him into his office was the ability to take up the entire media channel during the republican runoff and just be able to demolish everybody was entertaining that is exhausting it's now exhausting i want to change topics i would like to ask david to explain his um tweet related to prop 13 or 15 yeah yeah yeah so um so i saw that that mark zuckerberg had contributed 11 million dollars to try and convince the people of california to vote for this prop 15 which is the largest property tax increase in california history what it does is it chips away at prop 13 by moving commercial property out of of of prop 13 and it would then tax it almost called fair market value as opposed to the the cost basis of the property it would have a lot of unfair consequences for property owners who've owned their their commercial property for a long time you know if you're a small business and you've owned your your store or whatever for 20 30 years all of a sudden you're going to get your taxes are going to get reassessed at the new fair market value um but you know i just think there's the the the larger prize though is that the the you the california unions uh the the government workers unions want to chip away at prop 13 this is the first salvo first they're going to strip out commercial property eventually they want to they want to basically repeal all of prop 13 and i just think it's like so misguided for billionaires to be using their wealth in this way because profit 13 is really the shield of the middle class in california and it's kind of no wonder that frankly like tech belt wealth is so just increasingly despised in this country because tech millionaires are funding such stupid causes to explain this to people who don't know in california if you bought your house in 1970 for fifty thousand dollars the one percent tax you pay on it is five hundred dollars that house might be worth five million today if it was in atherton and so you're still paying what would have been a fifty thousand dollar tax bill is a five hundred dollar tax bill so they're starting with commercial spaces and jason i'm sorry backwards and you can pass it off to your kids at that cost basis yeah so this is why you have two old people living in a five bedroom right it caps the rate increase of the the tax increase every year there there's there if you didn't have if you no hold on if you didn't have proper please explain to people if you didn't have prop 13 anybody who owned who's owned their house for say 20 years would have a massive tax bill all of a sudden and probably would have to sell their house just about anybody who's middle class who's been in california for for more than a decade or two probably could no longer afford to live in their house but the reality is people are mortgaging that asset sacs to access capital that they're using and investing in different things whether it's that's fueling the economy right so i mean the libertarian point of view might be less taxes is good because in this particular case that building can still be used by that resident uh to buy stuff uh they can take a mortgage out and they can go spend that money versus having that money eaten up by property taxes which just goes well yeah so so so i i understand that if you were to design the like perfect tax policy it wouldn't look like prop 13 or you know or you know and maybe prop 15 in a vacuum if you're just like a policy wonk trying to design the ideal tax policy it might look more like that but the real problem in california we're not an under tax state it's a massively taxed state and and there's never enough you know the beast always wants more and so what i would say is look if you want to reform prop 13 do it as part of a grand bargain that creates real structural reform in the state of california what i mean by structural reform we got to look at who controls the system and it's really the government employee unions who block all structural reform and who keep eating up a bigger and bigger portion of the state budget so we've talked about this on previous pods that the police unions block any kind of police reform um you know the the prison unions block prison reform you've got the teachers unions blocking education reform and school choice if you want to talk about systemic problems in california look at who runs the system it's these these gigantic unions and a bigger and bigger portion of the budget keeps going to them every year they're breaking the bank and by the way it doesn't get us more cops on the beat it doesn't get us more teachers in the classroom what it's buying is lots and lots more of administration along with a bunch of pension fraud and so what i would do is i would say look we need some structural reforms here we need some caps on the rate of growth in spending we need some pension reforms in exchange for that as part of a grand bargain you might get some reforms to prop 13 but just to give away one of the only cards we have in negotiating with these powerful special interests for no reason i just think it's dumb you know do you think that zuck was tricked or what do you think i think he's probably got look i don't really know but i don't know how anything can suck and i've defended him on this podcast a lot basically on on the speech issue but i think what it is he's got some foundation and he's got some pointy headed policy wonk sitting there trying to analyze what the perfect tax policy is and it probably looks more like fair market value than like cost basis and they're not thinking about the larger political sort of ramifications which is we the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public employee unions and we do need structural reform and we can't just give up one of the only cards we have which would be you know trading reform on prop 13. and zuck doesn't already commercial real estate yeah well even if so i i i i i would venture to guess that maybe sax does i don't know i mean no no no hold on let me i i do but let me explain that this doesn't affect me because my cost basis is fresh yeah all the all the commercial real estate that i've bought in california has been the last few years it's probably underwater i mean it's certainly not above my cost basis um so ice doesn't affect me it affects the little guy it affects the small business who's owned their property for 10 or 20 years and again i'm not arguing that we couldn't come with a better tax system but what i'm saying is the bigger more pressing need is structural reform totally no i mean look i totally agree the bloated monster of socialism is coming for us and it starts with the unions and it evolves and it's just tax average salary i don't know if you saw this go viral in the last couple weeks on twitter average to average salary in san francisco 170 thousand dollars not a tech worker city employees yeah of city employees i saw that like 170 000 was the average salary i was like oh wow tech people are doing good they're like no no that's the city employees 19 000 administrative employees in the city of san francisco city of 800 000 people 800 people with a 14 billion budget the state of california is converting the entire middle class into government workers because if you're a small business owner you're getting squeezed by more and more taxes you're getting driven out of the state people leaving the state now exceeds people immigrating into the state so the the private sector middle class is leaving and this public sector sort of public sector middle class of government workers is being created and like i mentioned it's not getting us more cops on the beat it's not going to get more teachers in the classroom what it's getting is a giant number of overpaid administrators and bureaucrats that is a big structural problem the you know private sector unions are very different you see when a private sector union goes to negotiate they go negotiate against ownership or management there's someone to oppose their unreasonable demands not all their demands are reasonable just the most unreasonable demands but it with a public sector unions they're negotiating against the politicians and they are the largest contributors to those politicians and so there's no one and the politicians need them for their votes right they're like they're going to deliver whatever number of teachers police officers exactly the unions feed the politicians the politicians feed the unions that is a structural um that is a structural problem and and these unions the unions will never be at peace you can never buy them off it's why democracy always ends in in the state like it's it's just an inevitable outcome i um i had no idea about any of this until um i'm glad i asked you about that tweet that's really i i actually learned a lot just in that last little bit uh i have one other thing i want to ask you guys about which is the amy coney barrett confirmation hearings whether you guys have watched them and what you guys think um and i don't know whether these are just um cherry-picked clips or whether she's playing dumb or i i really don't want to judge because i want to know more but i just want to know what you guys think of uh going into this um you know the i'll say something about climate change because look i'm i i i spend a lot of time looking at data and research on climate change and certainly feel strongly that there's a human caused function of global warming that that we're actively kind of experiencing but i think everyone kind of assumes you have to take that as truth i think one of the the key points of science is you have to recognize your ignorance and you have to recognize that science is um you know kind of an evolving process of discovery and understanding i don't and she's getting a lot of heat for what she said about i'm not a scientist i don't know how to opine on climate change and i heard that and actually gave me a bit of pause that like this this is exactly you know what i would expect someone who's thoughtful to say not someone that's trying to act ignorant and play to the right um she didn't say i don't think climate change is being caused by humans and i think like everyone kind of wants to jump on her and every it's like become religion i just want to point out that climate change has become as politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we talk about and we all kind of assume that if you do or don't believe in climate change you're left or right you're evil you're good um and i i think like it's very easy to kind of just go into hear those hearings and assume that but i wouldn't say that her answer necessarily made me think that she is ignoring facts and ignoring the truth i think you know she's kind of pointing out that this is a process of science and there's a lot of discovery underway so i i don't know i mean that was one point the controversial point that i thought i should make um because i am a believer and i do think that climate change is real i do think the data and science supports it but i do appreciate that someone recognizes that they may not have the skills yeah the few rather than just assume what the media tells them to believe yeah the few the few clips that i saw of the confirmation hearing my takeaway was basically you know any candidate on the left or the right comes in extremely well coached and they're taught basically how to evade meaning there's a go-to answer amy coney barrett's go-to answer was um listen as a judge i'd have to you know hear that case on the record i can't opine on something hypothetically you know she had this very well-rehearsed answer and a lot of the answers to the questions from the left were that um and uh you know the questions on the right were um more soft polish um so i couldn't really get a sense of it now the the thing that i take kind of a lot of comfort in is that you know when we saw john roberts get confirmed to the court um it was supposed to be 5-4 conservative with john roberts and basically what we learned was now john robertson you know some critical decisions he is willing to basically you know uh make sure that things don't change that much um including obamacare yeah exactly you you don't you don't know exactly how they're gonna vote on these issues you really don't roberts was the deciding vote in upholding obamacare gorsuch uh extended gay rights well beyond anything anthony kennedy ever did that was a big surprise and so we don't really know exactly how she's going to vote the reason why amy coney barrett rockets to the top of trump's list quite frankly is because of how dianne feinstein treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings which is she where feinstein attacked her catholicism it was and it was so ham handed it was so poorly done that it made barrett a hero instantly on the right and it rocketed her to the top of this list but but we don't know how she's going to vote based on her catholicism you know which is the future isn't it david because the lifetime appointment means they like tenure they can go with what they think is right so that that is kind of a good feature of the supreme court do you think they should be like a term well i i think it's a little crazy that decisions as important as you know the the the right to to choice or something like that um hangs on whether an 89 year old uh cancer victim can hold on for three more months you know it seems very arbitrary to me and therefore these supreme court battles become very um heated and and and toxic and there's been a recent proposal by democrats that that i would support which basically says listen we should have an 18-year term for supreme court justices that's long enough and each president should get two nominees like one in the first year and then one in the third year and so you basically have one justice rolling off every two years and one coming on and so you have nine justices and so every two years adds up to 18 years that proposal makes a ton of sense to me and um and so you know you know that when you vote for a president they're going to get two supreme court picks that feels less chaotic than this that would be that'd be a much better that's a great idea that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea i think it's a i think it's a fabulous idea i i took solace in the fact that when they asked her the uh for what's protected in the first amendment she couldn't name all five things that i could i was like what about protests did you miss that one and i thought that was like a i mean it's a gotcha moment obviously uh and it's not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny and obviously she justif jacob well i just thought that was like it's also like pretty interesting i think they invented the word unconfirmable for jkl you got a right to have your own pistola but you shouldn't have a shotgun boys free burgers has a hard stop at three uh the the uh the fact that she left out protest is interesting i do think let's let's just end on the election uh and our little handicapping of what's gonna happen and getting out of this mess i do think one of the stories coming out of this is going to be female voters i have the sense and i know it's anecdotal that trump has just alienated and pissed off so many women and that the threat of the supreme court thing and with uh rgb dying uh this has made women feel so under appreciated and attacked especially with trump um uh you know in terms of how he treats women and things he says about women and then you had the constant interruption by pence of the moderator and kamala like i think all of this is going to add up and when we do the postmortem on this losing all these women as voters is going to be and as well as uh the black vote and people of color this is going to be a big part of it so i think that trump's going to lose and it's going to be a landslide what a roundabout way to say the same thing you've been saying for four months yeah oh way he's disrespected women listen i i don't know uh i think biden is uh is is on the path to an enormous victory right now well that's what the polls that's what the polls say certainly is that it looks like a buying landslide i um and i guess that makes sense i think trump's running out of time to change the polls um every day that goes by he's basically got like 19 ounces or 18 days he's got 18 outs every day that goes by where he isn't able to move the poll number he loses an out right and so we're going to get closer to election day he's only going gonna have like a three outer or something um so yeah i i mean look obviously i understand the polls i still somehow think i know it sounds kind of weird but i'm just not sure americans are ready for this reality show to end i mean we know it's jumped the shark okay but the kardashians the kardashians lasted for 19 seasons i just don't know if america is ready for the trump reality show i think part of the appeal of trump last time around was the the message of change and he's not delivering a message of change anymore and i think that's where he's kind of lost the narrative um and the excitement of building a wall and changing everything and draining the swamp like he's just like keep draining the swamp or keep building the wall and uh people don't love that he's also um he also i think is coming across as not being he's looking weak by not being willing to be challenged and that came across clearly in that debate he last time around he got on stage and he just knocked everyone down but by not letting biden talk by not kind of engaging on any of the topics he looks just um he looks like he just doesn't want to have a shot at it and it just comes across as bad so i don't know these are all contributing factors i think to what's going on chances of a pardon by pence he resigns he pardons himself pence player it's him zero zero you go two you won't resign um well uh we wouldn't see that unless he lost the election if he loses during the last duck during the lame duck period if he lost maybe 20 20 yeah because at that point he's got nothing to lose right right that i think it's i think it's like a i think it's 50 50 he just goes for the full family pardon uh all right all right love you guys i gotta go all right guys uh love you guys and uh hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon yay soon talk to you guys later bye






hello everybody welcome uh we are live at the all in headquarters and the all in podcast is now live we have 63 people watching already and bear with us while we get the besties on the line i'll be doing my introductions in just a moment after i tweet this but it is an eventful night and we had to start early because it's looking like this could be another shocker and i am not uh being facetious here i am not uh happy about this obviously but uh trump looks like he's been underestimated again this is not a blowout um we are going live early um this could be a shocker folks okay so uh with me early on the pod is regular david friedberg uh david you're watching this early action and what's your early uh reaction to what we're seeing um you know trump's moved we there's no nothing definitive yet but uh he's moved uh in the results and he's moving markets we're seeing forex markets show a sharp indication um that trump has a real shot at winning here treasury markets and as phil hellmuth will share with us betting markets as well so it's more it is more of a nail biter um than a game seven of the warriors cavs so here we go there's a hell of an ale biter guys and i'm just gonna say this uh the uk markets had it first they he was five to two uh you could you could get trump at five to two two and a half to one then it hit five to four and i thought that was quite crazy you're watching cnn you're watching these networks and they're saying oh my god biden's winning this no they're not even in the right neighborhood i'll never watch a network again on election night and now the market from five minutes ago 368 million pounds wagered 368 million pounds trump is now a three to ten favorite okay so for people who uh phil who are not gamblers if you bet that's three thousand dollars you bet three dollars no no jason you have to understand if you bet 13 okay you don't get 13 back you only get uh 10 back okay now if you want to bet biden it's seven to four so if i bet seventy dollars uh if i bet forty dollars i can get seventy dollars back on biden now the shocker is right around 6 28 p.m uh the betting odds the markets were have been in biden's favor for three straight months i've been live posting them on my twitter all day the worst i saw was uh was trump was a was biden was minus a dollar 25 still a big favor to win and then boom and uh you know there are people in my house that are actually crying uh you know i'm very more much more in the middle of this thing but all of a sudden uh trump all of a sudden it was five to four then it was even and then all of a sudden trump was nearly a a two to one favorite i'm getting live information from my friends right now um i'm seeing that uh that it's uh it's a little bit lower on some of these sites um i saw 267 that's for a 200 bet so he's a pretty big favorite um i saw the lowest i've seen is 217. but jason if you're watching the odds and i put some stuff on my twitter it's amazing how it went from you know minus 1.70 you know all the way down minus the 30 then it came all the way up to minus 1.70 this is crazy and and i've seen this movie before in 2016 actually okay so we all know that you need 270 electoral votes to win and that there were a couple of states that were critical uh for trump to win uh and it seems like those states that trump was critical to win um he has now won so let's bring in david sacks uh david we just turned on the live stream and boy is this a turn of events that i don't think any of us except for maybe you but you were very pessimistic on the last maybe three or four all in podcasts you're watching these results come in the betting markets have totally flipped to trump what are you seeing and what can we expect tonight what are you looking for yeah i mean it's looking just like a 2016. i mean you're right that i was looking at the polls in the last few pods that we've done and there was no way to say anything other than you know trump was the uh was the underdog but at the same time i still thought that um trump had a really good shot because i was watching both candidates on youtube all the time they both were doing live events i wasn't watching it with the commentary i wasn't watching the clips i was watching trump do these rallies i was watching biden do these parking lot events and i would see trump do four or five events a day flying from tarmac to tarmac on air force one having these huge crowds i saw him do this event in butler pennsylvania over the weekend it looked to me like there was tens of thousands of people there um and i remember trump saying a line like you know this doesn't seem like a second place crowd and you know it's one of those trump lines but you know it did put in my mind this idea you know he's got a point um whatever the polls say we're seeing tens of thousands of people show up at these events who are fanatical i mean just fanatical for trump and so you always had to think that he had a chance of pulling off an upset just like 2016. i will say what i said on our text earlier donald trump ate the covid virus and killed it with his body and then he stood in front of the white house and ripped his shirt off and let us all know that he is our leader he did not get elected he claimed victory beginning in 2016 and he has not and will not let go since then and i think it is that cult of personality that um cultural personality draws so many people in that are just um you know feeling like they need change and they need leadership and they don't need something from the old school and he uh he stood up and he showed us that this whole thing is it's a fake covet is a fake government is fake the people are fake the media is fake i'm getting some late numbers i'm getting some late numbers here you guys um he's now at minus 1.59 to win pennsylvania and they took every other number off the board however if you're a biden person jason the number is only 2.17 right now um so uh oh wow the polls are posters were miles off on this and this is just amazing and it seems like from what we're hearing from the reporting is that the pollsters did not understand uh the latin or i guess latin x is a way to describe um a group of people who actually don't think exactly the same i've always had a a weird um understanding of this term latinx which seems to come from the woke left but cubans puerto ricans mexicans these are different countries they're not all the same venezuelans venezuelans the this is not a monoculture uh just because they all speak the same language and we're seeing something very different happen in florida right now where male uh cubans maybe are voting very differently than what pollsters expected uh bestie chamoth is now fresh off a tight haircut and he's here on the pod hear me uh we've got bestie phil as our first bestie guestie of the night bestiep how are you best dp shamath you and i we shouldn't talk about this this is about politics but you and i were just filming high stakes poker in las vegas on friday night it was great to see you bestie is there any indication you can give us besides i mean of course there's a presidential election that is going to determine the future of humanity but more importantly how did you each do in the high stakes poker game the biggest the biggest the biggest part of the night was around 400k maybe 500k played between me and dir yeah and he won he did not win the hand oh my lord won that one and uh it was i think it was beautifully beautifully played i think doug polk will definitely do a short video clip on it uh i did a i did a very uh very sneaky three bet pre-flop turn check um river over bluff and got him to call oh my lord a little set bomb i'm guessing but here we go uh jason i can't wait uh since i'm here to promote promote promote everything i promote uh you can only watch these episodes of high stakes poker a lot of players favorite show you can only watch them on the poker go app they're coming out december 16th meet you moth phil ivey tom dwan ben lam a lot of your a lot of your heroes take it away oh well can't wait can't wait to uh and i have a subscription to that all in um i'm sorry the poker go app it's it's well worth it uh david sachs you have one of your i'm recording friends on the pod why don't you introduce uh one of your consulting friends and and uh we'll have him tee up what we think the possible scenarios are and where we're at right now at this very moment it is 657 in california yeah so michael newman works for me as a researcher and um he's uh as a political scientist i guess you could say and i've known him since college and he's very uh steeped in these uh a lot of these races i don't know if he's yeah i have been obsessively following politics since uh the reagan election of 1980 so i i i i wasn't alive then so no i'm afraid i'm uh i was only 10 but i was already uh a political obsessive and as you can imagine a real hit with the ladies as well so tell us what what are the key states we need to focus in on here and which one of them uh have enough reporting for us to sort of put them in a column and then move on and understand the path to victory for trump or biden yes well i mean uh depending upon which network or news organization you're following they're either calling calling a lot of states or they're being very conservative about their calls i mean nbc has still not called florida for trump but there's really no path for biden to win that state uh so you can put that safely in the trump column he has just taken the lead in north carolina after trailing all night we got about 88 of the vote in now and i suspect he's home free as is the republican incumbent senator there can i can i can i just can i just ask a question i mean isn't it typically the case that the counts from the most populous urban areas come last and those tend to skew more democrat than republican that sometimes happens uh it depends on the state some states have their rural areas come in last one of the things that has changed the vote in north carolina is as the early vote came in as the in-person early vote and mail-in ballots came in the last counties that reported that early vote were the rural counties that's why early on it looked very good for biden and now it looks like uh it's trending away from him wait a second north carolina according to the new york times and according to cnn right now is favoring slightly biden 49.7 to 49.1 percent for trump with 84 percent i don't think that's i don't think that's quite current i think they're up to about 88 but again yeah it's very close what's interesting is uh biden had five potential states where he could have knocked trump out florida georgia north carolina ohio and texas yeah florida's off the table the others are still on the table but none of them are trending biden's direction at the present time so he uh yeah so far trump is is staying in the hand as uh as you poker players would would say he's uh he's uh he's getting the cards he needs to stay in the to stay in the game uh but we still have the river to play and the river would be in this case michigan wisconsin pennsylvania texas had an early lead for biden which was crazy to see right now it's got donald trump at fifty point three percent buying at forty eight point three percent guys again so that's starting to normalize i i i go back to this one very critical thing the reason why michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania right now are trump is because you count the when the county is counted you can pass the votes and you can report and if you have 25 000 people in a county versus allegheny county which has like i don't know hundreds of thousands or a million plus people it just takes longer yes no i listen i don't characterize michigan wisconsin pennsylvania at all i think one of the reasons why michigan right now looks so red is because they're counting today's vote first a lot of these other states that like florida that had the option because their legislature allows them to do this they counted all that early vote in advance and they dumped it in one big pile as soon as the polls closed in the in the various counties so that's why you saw early on a blue mirage there what you're seeing in a place like michigan right now is probably a red mirage because it's it's today's vote which was going to skew trump uh because of the because of the way he presented it to his people he uh florida was the one state uh thank goodness for his uh sake that he encouraged people to vote early and by mail in the other states he encourages people to vote today so here's a here's a stat in pennsylvania i'm on the um secretary of state's reporting dashboard they've counted uh only 12 of the mail-in ballots um which is and the total mail-in ballots is 2.5 million yeah um which is huge right and they've only it should be a majority of the vote i would imagine yeah yeah and they've only and they've only counted 24 actually sorry they've only yeah they've only counted uh a handful of precincts at this point a quarter of the precincts right so here's something i don't understand so uh nick carlson from uh was it like business insider he just tweeted um minutes ago that north carolina biden is ahead with 99 of the vote counted and biden has a less than 0.2 percent lead but it's 9 000 votes but that i mean that's that would be a huge problem for trump north carolina listen i think a loss in any of those five states florida georgia north carolina ohio or texas is probably by the way guys i just want to give a shout out to nothing who's listening here all the way from sri lanka he's listening he just texted me okay by the way guys right now the odds are three to one on the betting market so i mean obviously the networks i realized are completely useless i stopped watching them a long time ago when they had biden way ahead in florida and the odds were ten to one against right now if you want to bet trump is a three to one favorite on and there's been billions of dollars bad in england australia all over the world he's a three to one favorite it looks like it's real to me and just a and just a just to build your side of the case uh nasdaq futures ripping s p futures falling and the 10 and 30 year falling remember ripping these are all pro-trump trades and the euro the euro collapse the euro dollar falling uh falling sharply once the markets turn towards trump well here's what they're reacting to is wisconsin michigan and pennsylvania trump is all up big time now but again that lacks a very basic understanding of how county reporting is happening in these highly populous you know or these sort of sort of these these uh bimodally distributed states where they have a bunch of suburban and rural vote that's fast account and the big places for example like you know you're not going to see milwaukee and green bay report until probably close to midnight so the question is why are the betting markets so pro-trump then what do they know that we don't know i will say this let me say this jason i mean if you're like they're you're talking about billions of dollars right and so all you had to do was design a system to figure out how to calculate votes earlier and make a couple hundred million dollars okay these are the smartest people in the world there's hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars at stake they obviously do it ten times better than any other site than any other network so this information i mean i give a friend of mine posted hey i'm laying two somebody knows something that we don't know while trump just on bovada trump just moved to minus 600. yeah he just took michigan unbelievable uh it looks like he's ahead in michigan but again we have to see detroit and there's there's a bunch of places in michigan let's let's let's let's the north so here's the north carolina secretary of state dashboard and they're showing uh two-thirds of the counties and you can actually see by county when you go onto their their dashboard the um you know the larger counties are partially reported most of the smaller counties are fully reported um 63 total with um you know biden ahead by literally a thousand votes right now across 2.522 million to 2.521 million wow but what percent reported is that i mean uh it's 63 of the counties have completely reported and so the remaining counties if you look at the reporting status the remaining counties that are partially reported there's a mix of rural and some of the urban counties you know durham's in there partially reported uh so there is a mix it's not durham should be a biden county the research triangle is uh upscale well-educated professionals that i think are the the backbone of the democrats uh coalition in a state like north carolina now they have um absentee votes that are counted and they have so far counted 3.3 million absentee one-stop votes and a million votes by mail but that's how many came in it actually shows that only five oh i see yeah okay that makes sense trump trump is now ahead in ohio two thirds two thirds of the votes post the link into the zoom chat so nick can pull it up on the screen please um i i need to get an understanding of something very basic here for the audience who's not degenerate gamblers are is there a chance here phil and chamath gambling experts both that people had put early money on biden and are now covering or hedging some of those bets is that a possibility here yes okay jason jason the line is minus a dollar minus four ten on pinnacle right now let me just double check that source so what what phil is saying jason is like yes there's going to be a bunch of essentially covering now that covering will swing the line but i think what phil is also saying is when a line moves this violently literally what we've seen in the last 35 minutes is both the equity markets the currency markets and the betting markets flip 180 degrees from where they have been not just all day but frankly where they have been probably for the last few months that's what i was saying for three months straight uh right now biden has been a favorite anywhere between three to one favorite at one point all the way to maybe you know 50 favorite and all of a sudden today the lowest i saw was a dollar 35 and i was kind of shocked and the next thing you know boom trump's a three to four to one favorite so and and i'm looking at cnn and i'm looking at these networks and they're still they still abide in the head and i'm like wow what is going on they're waiting that's that's the next thing we need to take care of jamal there's a business for you is somehow we can deliver the right data on elections quickly there you go sex yeah well i think the betting markets know something we don't know because um trump is just you know if you look at like the live stream on twitter or the new york times or something trump just slightly took the lead in ohio but that's the state he's supposed to win in north carolina it looks like with over 99 reporting it looks like he lost by 9 000 votes by the way a 9 000 margin would probably trigger an automatic recount of north carolina and there's like a hundred thousand absolutely ballots there i don't know if those have been counted yet okay so let me let's put let's pause for one second on this everybody north carolina is one of the four or five states trump has to win in order to have a victory right michael i i absolutely agree with that uh he had to have those five florida north carolina georgia ohio and texas okay so we have florida he's got now there's four left there's four left georgia's a very slow counting state we really don't know all of atlanta could be out for all we know so we leave georgia on the side so now we've got four states we can work with north carolina is in biden's pocket by just a hair yeah that could change and it would trigger a recount which would take days to weeks yes another three states let's go through them systematically one by one michael okay uh ohio uh was the biggest surprise of the night when biden built an early lead there although again a bit of a blue mirage based upon uh the fact that the mail-in vote and the early vote came in so strong for the democrats this year uh because they emphasized it and the republicans kind of fought against it but michael michael with 49 of the vote in ohio okay he had a right now biden had a massive lead and he had about a 400 000 vote lead would have to be correct and when you look at the betting odds he was five to one underdog to win the state so something doesn't add up there and you can you can say all right some of that is all the early voting went for biden we know that to be a fact but there's something else there okay i'm just looking at the uh results for ohio we'll stay on ohio for one more moment and then we have another guest who just jumped on ohio is currently showing donald trump with two point rounding it up 2.4 million votes to 2.2 million slightly rounding up for joe biden 52 to 47 with 78 reporting does that mean we feel comfortable with trump uh winning ohio unless all of cleveland is outstanding i would say that's a trump state yeah okay we now have john cohen on the line john is a uh member of the survey monkey team john welcome to the all in pod can you hear us thank you so much i i'm sorry i didn't hear what was going on i don't i don't know how much you've been disparaging pollsters so far um so we were waiting for you we're waiting to get here tell us as we start what your prediction was earlier today well we're very clear to say that we're doing measurements not predictions okay that said the measurements that we are doing clearly pointed to biden advantages across the board but we didn't have we so far we have no surprises you know we had florida had been trump plus two basically all week going to dead even um you know coming into election day itself we don't know where the final votes will be most analysts think that it's in trump's camp it may end up there but it's super close we had georgia close we had north carolina close although and north korea had been closing it had been a big biden lead it was down to under two points um with the senate you know kind of even closer than that in some of our data so you know so far there's no obvious surprise here like damn the polls were really wrong certainly ours you know it's our it's early though we're not declaring victory on those obviously there's a lot to watch but nothing really to surprise um you know us given the numbers so far what about ohio and georgia so we had ohio pretty consistently in trump's camp we had him up four so it's trending that way now we had as close as two points for trump i mean again i haven't mentioned the word margin of error that's in my professional obligation and duty to mention it it's around three points i believe two and a half in ohio so close but we always had it in trump's camp again biden that wasn't part of biden's you know any of the past the victory that the campaign was counting on so you know no big deal but we went from having a early night to now we're for sure in for a really late night here john um let me ask you the one of the most basic questions that i've had which is what did we learn from 2016 and tell me what exactly did people try to fix like what was the thing that everybody got wrong and what changed well the biggest thing that polls fixed was how they adjust their polls by education what we see in polling no matter how they're conducted whether online as we do a surveymonkey or still on the telephone which most media posters do is you get people with more formal education to answer those surveys in far greater proportions than you do people with lower education so the biggest thing you've got to do and we'll look we always did it so we weren't in the among the state pollsters who kind of failed i think um you know kind of negligently to really adjust by uh education at all we always had just education but we what we failed to notice in 2016 was there was an increasing gap between those with postgraduate degrees and those with bas they've always been both to pro-democratic group but the gap in 2016 was abnormally large a fix to our polls which i just point out weren't you know kind of were actually standouts in the in the upper midwest in terms of showing it as a close race not clear clinton victories we broke apart post grads and grads into two distinct categories and that released kind of about a point and a half of unforced air in our polling for 2016. so that's fixed we've used it to good effect again this time around we weren't showing what all the other national polls were showing we've had this between a four and six point national lead again we'll get quickly into why national results don't matter but you all know that all too well everyone knows that all too well but we've had it kind of more narrow and that plays out in the states that i mentioned we had florida tied not a 4.5 and five point five and it vanished elsewhere you know but we'll see how it plays out in the midwest we also had wisconsin what was our final margin there i think it was you know kind of nine and nine and a half points not the 17 points that you saw from my former colleagues at the washington post and abc news so we've always had it a little bit tighter but again it plays how it's going to play out in these states and so far no surprises but the night is early and i'm i have a healthy dose of pulsar's paranoia jamal i don't know if that answered your question well enough but that was the main thing people did it's really helpful but now take off your poster measure you know chief research officer hat for a second and put on just the american hat um what does it mean when you know we had effectively a repudiation of the establishment in 2016 and despite everything that's happened over the last four years we may be on the brink of another repudiation again if you you know where you're there to measure the pulse of what's going on but less in sort of measurement speak and just more in just plain american english speak john what like what's going on if this happens again see you're absolutely right there's something major i would also like to caveat it we are looking once again at if trump wins is because of the electoral college like he is going to lose the popular vote there are still far more americans and american voters who voted today and you know kind of over the past several weeks who would prefer joe biden to be president so again we can't characterize with the broad brush the american voting population when this is about effectively i hate to call it a quirk but this is about our system of vote tallying and the president you know to pull back your point about kind of there is something major here the fact that many people you know some of us might be friends with can't understand why this isn't a hundred to zero race fail to understand that the president's base isn't small it is you know we've had it 44 to 46 approving of his job performance for many years now like he has a completely durable solid floor he also has a high ceiling right so he was never going to win the popular vote this time around but he had a chance at that electoral you know squeaking out another electoral college win because he's been so stable you know this is the president who you know kind of oh trump now had an nc thank you for uh the chat window so i think you're right that we need to understand more about what is the componentry of that 45 percent that they would support trump when the other 55 percent are so deadset against him and see it as something really wrong with the country so we still have two countries no what have you guys done to though understand the people that are voting for trump better because i think that they are protesting and they're protesting a lot and i think that you know if we didn't listen to them 16 i think it's almost criminal to not listen to them in 2020 so what are they what are they saying what are they rejecting or what is it that they want because at the end of the day you know i think his incompetence can't really be debated competence versus incompetence i think what we can debate is he's a vessel and in that i think that it's incredibly important what's happening irrespective of what happens today because we were supposed to walk into a landslide we're not as you said we're going to be in a nail biter what is what are what are they using him as a vessel to communicate to everybody else that's a really good question some of that will depend on you know a closer analysis of the surveys ours where we talked to more than a million voters and the exit polls are being deducted by two separate organizations today but what's the what are the story lines that come out of the election you know one of the things that's being reported early is there's a much tighter hispanic vote in florida than many early polls you know predicted how will that play out as we start to get votes you know coming out in texas how is it being arizona see arizona looking positively for um biden and mark kelly in the senate you know in arizona you know is it is it really hispanic votes that are driving some trump strength in these states or you kind of visit the obsession that the news media has had for the past four years around the kind of trump middle-aged white male voter with less than college education who has been displaced by you know technological and industrial trends over the past 20 years i think it's going to depend on what that voting coalition looks like for trump and it's more diverse than i think we've been focusing on before i think i think you're saying an incredibly important thing i think that that was a ruse and i've always thought that that was [ __ ] it's not some undereducated rube that's running around voting for this guy um i think that there are there are people up and down the the age spectrum the socio-economic spectrum and this is what i mean by he has become a vessel for so many different messages and i think we really have to start figuring out what the hell these messages actually mean because um if biden loses to your point maybe in florida it's a repudiation of socialism okay but in pennsylvania it's going to be something else in michigan it's going to be something else in ohio it's going to be something else for him to keep winning right um and and i just don't think that there's a consistent idea and it's very dismissive to say that i'm not saying you are but i'm saying you know that idea that it was an out-of-work ex-factory worker you know in rural ohio that was protesting this is going to be much bigger than that because even if biden wins the popular vote until we figure out how to rebalance balance the electoral college in a completely you know new way or just get rid of it all together we're going to have to live with understanding how some folks in these extremely pivotal states um are pushing back are they pushing back on political correctness you know that's one thing that i've always thought i think that there's a huge vote here against um i think those are the under reported uh lockdowns are the i think the biggest one of the biggest drivers no go ahead john go ahead john i was gonna say one of the components here that we have to pay a lot of attention is gender right kind of you know the storyline for a long time and and you think about you know kind of republican democratic politics is that you know you talk about black voters and hispanic voters talking about them as if they're monoliths what we have seen consistently over the course of the year is that trump does much better among black men and hispanic men than he does among black women and latinas and that is just kind of like you know whereas black women are 95 5 you know he nears 20 among black men it blends into the what we've the 90 10 we've already seen look but look these these are measurements these are measurements i don't think they're telling you the whys of anything and i think for the wise you have to go a lot deeper i mean first of all let's let's talk about the lockdown issue can we just pull up that tweet nick i mean so this is what i said back in may this was like months ago before the election even hit you know which is if the woke left insists on permanent lockdowns trump will have an issue that supersedes the incompetence of covid response because i think you know we all we all agree on that which is whether our lives and livelihoods belong to politicians to meter out and drives them drabs as they see fit and this was back when elon was being shut out of his factory in fremont and then there was this hairdresser named shelly luther in texas who was basically um put on trial for opening up her hair salon and the the judge wanted her to to grovel and beg for forgiveness and this was the beginning of the rebellion over lockdowns and it was so obvious back then that lockdowns weren't going to fly they weren't sustainable they were too politically unpopular um they weren't going to work and and by the way if it was something a cause that the left agreed with like you know a blm rally or something like that then you were allowed to do it you know it was that whole standard around um you know doing things that were essential and so you know this insistence on lockdowns even after the public had really repudiated them i think was a major issue for for trump and it was crazy to me that biden was still insisting on lockdowns you know still i mean that is his official position um i don't think it's the only reason why he's in trouble right now but i think it's a big one i think if he if trump reaches the blue wall again of michigan wisconsin and pennsylvania lockdowns is the biggest reason why because those are three states that had extensive and still have extensive lockdown it hurts it hurts people i'll here i'll read you a tweet and i won't name who it's from it's from a farmer in um in the corn belt who's well followed on twitter believe it or not there's a whole ag twitter community and he says well it's the day does this country turn down the road to be like venezuela or do we continue on the road of capitalism and um he's had this acute um feeling that he's kind of vocalized on twitter for for months now on how painful the locked lockdowns have been on him and his family and his business and on the community and uh it just feels like overreach to a lot of people that the recognition that um you know the left might be using to justify the decision is just not there that the the impact the near-term impact that folks are feeling is what's there and that's driving a lot of behavior right now boys all markets are now up everything is green dow futures s p 500 futures nasdaq futures oil is up gold is down and there were some guys that made some heavy bets against the dollar going into this thinking we were going to have massive inflation with biden policy coming up and some big fund managers that went really big on on shorting the dollar this last week um and the dollar is up right now yeah the dollar by the way we should we should make sure at some point tonight to talk about these very important senate races because it's not just trump versus biden that there's also a bunch of hitler taking luber one in colorado again luber one in colorado but there have been some you know some of the republicans who look to be in big trouble like lindsey graham have uh have pulled it out and have won and um so it's looking like the senate is still very much in play i would say as big a favorite as biden was the senate shifting from republican to democrat i say that was considered as equally big a favorite and that that may not happen now so we should make sure to talk about that at some point north carolina right now is 49.8 percent to 49 for biden 2.6 million versus 2.58 ohio is at 2.4 to 2.2 51 52 to 47 trump is beating biden i um i have a question for john cohen john um let's go back to um sort of your understanding as you've been measuring different trends have you measured um people's sympathy towards lockdowns on a state by state level and then second question is have you measured people's sympathy to cancel culture at a state by state level and by the way you're on mute so if you want to just take yourself off yeah thank you we have not done anything on cancel culture we've done a lot on the coronavirus we've been tracking that actually in three countries since uh mid-february and we have a state-by-state look and what's interesting is we ask the question like this is primarily an economic issue or a primary health issue and those two have been running neck and neck but healthy kind of more people on average say it's a health issue than an economic one trump with trump's supporters overwhelmingly say the crisis is one that's financial not health related so there's always been that but it's been like a 45 55 gap there so we've been measuring it state by state but there's a solid core of people and it gets to david's point about why what are they focused on what is the what is affecting them and their you know pocketbooks it is the you know lockdowns and the kind of clamping down and what is this economic crisis not a health care one even though that's what we all say that they should follow there was there was a there was a fantastic line that the democrats coined which essentially said something to the tune sexy poo you'll tell me if i get this wrong but it was socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the for the rest of us is essentially sort of their grab bag phrase for um for this election cycle and sort of to frame a lot of policies but when you have in these states again if we say this cuts along socioeconomic lines but then maybe bleeds into um college and even you know uh graduate level educated folks is there a vote here for um rugged individualism and just leave me the [ __ ] alone there certainly could be i want to go back to what david said about measuring versus the why because i mentioned gender to point out a big difference that we're seeing across racial groups across the levels of education but i'm you know we're polling every day so you guys have the right why question you know send it to me you know sent to xander we'll we'll ask it you know we pulled 9 000 people today on you know kind of their willingness to accept the results and so we'll be putting that out tomorrow we have a we'll have an exit poll running uh every day from here on to certainly until we get a result so if you have the question you want to ask send along we'll we'll get to the data at the state level all right john we very branch appreciate you coming on the pod and uh we will be checking surveymonkey's amazing data as we go um i'm going to switch now and just john john thank you and xander thanks for do for hooking that up thanks john thanks guys and we'll have some more bestie guesties coming up some fan favorites from the twitter and the poker group i just want to point out right now that it's very interesting to see that fox has biden at 129 electoral votes and trump at 109 and um some of the other networks have it much lower how do the networks make these decisions of when to call a state because it's too early according to many to call florida but we're sitting here with a pretty clear understanding of where florida is at does anybody have any thoughts on that of well i think they're erring on the side of extreme caution because of the strange year that it is and the fact that there is all this we had a hundred over 100 million votes banked early through the mail or through early in-person voting and nobody sure how many more mail ballots there according to one side i looked at there were still 27 million ballots outstanding now some of those are redundant ballots like david's father-in-law who got three ballots in the mail in pennsylvania and a lot of those are probably going in the trash but there could be another five to ten million of those to come in that are postmarked by today many states will accept them after the election as long as they're postmarked by election day so they're probably being very very careful that they don't make a premature call of course they all have ptsd about what happened in 2000 when they first prematurely called florida for al gore then prematurely called it for george w bush and we spent the next 37 days trying to figure out what the hell happened in florida so uh i think they're going to err on the side of extreme caution across the board although uh i feel like the margin in florida at this point is feels insurmountable now right that's florida florida's over florida's over it's about now it's about it's about ohio by the way the betting markets have just moved again big time so donald trump was at minus 600 now he's minus 250 on bovado phil what do you think about that yeah he's snapping back i will say let me let me address what jake jason was talking about a few seconds ago and that's it you know basically florida even the new york times had them at at 6 00 p.m at 95 percent to go to trump at 95 that was a new york times site my wife and i looked it up and the batting odds had him at over 10 to 1. this was at 5 30 this was two hours ago so i mean i just think there's a huge inefficiency with with the way i think it was over as soon as the miami-dade dump showed that biden only won the early vote by nine points i mean hillary won by 29 in 2016 and she lost the state so how much of this do we think has to do with tax policy people in florida are retiring we have the aoc gang we have come on elizabeth florida it's his beloved state he has a place okay so so hometown favorite mar-a-lago i get that but you have so many retirees and we we have this bifurcation of how taxes should work in the united states so i just want to open that up for the entire group to discuss of art are we seeing old people are we seeing people who are concerned about taxes because we have had a flight in the last couple of years of people from high tax states to low tax states is this about taxes do you think let's start with you friedberg no one wants to pay taxes the [ __ ] like no one's gonna raise their hand and say i want to pay taxes but i mean there's a moment where taxes don't matter if well but romney romney was in favor or taxes and he you know he didn't win any any of these elections like the way that trump looks like he's going to i think that the the traditional republican messages message of taxes is sort of necessary but not sufficient trump obviously brought a whole set of issues that previous republicans hadn't had abroad and i think that you i think you have to look at 2016 separately from 2020 and so starting with 2016 i think the big issue that trump that no republican really had ever figured out except maybe pat buchanan 20 years ago was the trade issue with china you know we forget that in the 1970s when the great chinese economic reformer deng xiaoping decided to open up the chinese economy the average chinese was making two dollars a day and today their economy is is roughly the size of the us now you know what was the reason for that well we had a bipartisan consensus in this country for 30 or 40 years on the part of both clinton's and both bushes that we should you know open them we should welcome them with open arms and we opened up our market to chinese products we brought them into the world trade organization but but that was the start that was the start of that was the the killer app or the killer issue that trump figured out and that's what shattered the blue firewall in those rust belt states i mean if you're going to try and figure out going back to 2016 why trump won you have to explain why he won michigan so you're saying our jobs they took our jobs but what i'm saying the manufacturing jobs went out and the fentanyl came in i mean that's his argument and um that was a killer argument i mean and the proof is in the pudding it's the proof is that he won these states that hillary thought were so in the bag that she didn't even bother to campaign there so that was the big surprise at 2020 and the issue of taxes well no no no let me explain what's going on in 2020 in my opinion okay this is not a partisan explanation but i think that after the loss in 2016 look in business we know that when you lose when you make a mistake you make a bad investment or the company does something wrong you analyze what you did wrong right and then you figure out what changes to make the democrat party did not do that what did they do they blamed facebook they blamed it on russian interference they never really analyzed why they lost these rust belt states and made changes instead what they began was this hysterical denunciation of trump um you had this sort of um you know you sort of had this this sort of um you know media culture uh tech uh industrial complex who decided that trump was a an illegitimate president and you know and so what they did is they went all in on impeachment they went all in on this russia stuff and in the process they created this enormous backlash and i think that 2020 if 2016 was an economic repudiation of the elites 2020 is a cultural repudiation of the elites that is the big issue in 2020 yeah i uh i tend to i tend to i'm sympathetic to david's view i don't completely agree with all of it but um just to build on something you said i don't think jason this has anything to do with taxes um i think that in florida the if we if we end up really getting to the bottom of what happened i think there's a lot of people um older people that probably lived through some version of mccarthyism and immigrants who actually fled really shitty totalitarian countries who were like you want to do what here and i think that there was a lot of people that basically are giving a very clear signal which is i'm a democrat but if you push me to the brink and talk about a socialized nanny state i'm going to vote republican so to david's point i totally agree to david's point if there was an economic repudiation of sort of traditional globalism in 2016 and donald trump ends up carrying the day and today then it's a repudiation of sort of these cultural manifestos and norms that we're swinging to now the the answer to that may be to say change the electoral college because it doesn't represent the majority or the plurality of americans i hear that but in the same way that you know we've said for years now that the republicans will have to change to win the electoral college or to change to win what's evolving in terms of people's perceptions on social policy uh it may actually be the democrats that also have to change if this doesn't swing hard back in biden's favor so and chamath when you when you make that statement i think what's particularly prescient is the democrats believed that because of the demographic shift from white americans to people of color latinos black americans that they were just going to win all of them this is this is the best this is the problem with the stupidity of the establishment like if you take a thousand brown people and put us in a room what i will tell you is just in case here's a [ __ ] memo for all you white people out there we're not all the god damn same okay and if you put a thousand black people here's the memo now for the democratic and the republicans they're not all the same you can take a thousand hispanics and it turns out they're not all the same so maybe you know you can take a thousand straight people a thousand gay people they're we're not all the [ __ ] same so maybe what this means is that we've moved past color and now ideology and social policy and economic and monetary and fiscal all of these things that the totality of how a rational well-developed makes person decision maybe that's at hand and before if we historically only thought you know older white men and white women could do it maybe now it actually applies independent of color and gender yeah i absolutely agree with that and i would add to that that um uh if if trump's victory in 2016 laid waste to the republican establishment if he wins again tonight it will lay waste to the democratic establishment and the theory of the case that they've had for 20 years the sort of uh chair uh emerging democratic majority case that they just had to sit back and let demography become destiny and they could just graft an identity politics onto the same neo-liberal economic agenda they've been pushing since the late 1980s and it would all just somehow magically produce majority results in the country they are going to have to go back to the drawing board and and i think get more populist themselves and come up with some kind of version of politics that is isn't it it's more in the bernie mold it needs to be left but not woke isn't it going to be socialism it's it probably is going to be socialism but it doesn't mean that it's not like if you lay waste to the center you know you're left like i mean that's basically what happened to the republicans and now if you're saying the same is going to happen with the democrats this time around you're going to have aoc running for president in four years and i mean she won't be the right brand though because she's woke you guys you don't need uh aoc we need a charismatic democratic candidate somehow sharon brown keeps getting elected in in increasingly red ohio as a old-school gravely voiced irish labor democrat and somehow bernie ignited a movement as a very old-school uh gravelly voiced jewish democrat neither of whom gave a damn about identity politics really they were principally concerned with inequality and uh income redistribution i uh i wanna i don't wanna see that happen but i think that's the only path forward for the damage hold on let's let me go to phil because phil had something he wants to add there and then we'll go to youtube yeah i wanna say that we needed for the democrats and uh they just needed to i think they needed a very they needed a charismatic powerful leader with a lot of charisma i mean i know that you know the i was hanging out with one of the trump guys that was with him on the plane in the 2016 election he said that you know he outworked hillary there's no doubt that he outworked biden i mean this guy's going to seven rallies a day um showing up with a ton of energy and he has you know like iran he has a lot of charisma also i can't help but think that you're talking about repeating repeating repudiating sorry i'm getting that word wrong um to me this is all about i think a lot of people are really scared of socialism okay and i think it's just like even the young people that you know even the young people you know who say that they love it they're looking at their path to the future and and with and you know they can they can still do great things there's no doubt you can still be a 20 year old and and make a billion dollars by the time you're 30 or 40 and i think with socialism that goes away i think that um look i uh i i think if trump does win um i don't think what it means is that you need a a person that's at the extreme left to win i actually counterintuitively would say the ob the opposite which is that you need just a more credible centered person now that may only be possible if the democratic party cleaves in two and the reality is the republicans may actually quasi cleveland ii independent of whether trump wins or not anyways and we'll see as david said how some of these senate seats break because if that goes in a different direction you know for example if trump wins but we have you know a democratic tie in the senate maybe that's not possible um but um i think that would say a lot around um the need for pragmatic but more youthful leadership okay i want to go around the horn right now what is your gut telling me who is going to win given what we know right now everybody give it a thought uh when you're ready look into the camera and i will call on you michael you're looking into the camera who's gonna win if you had to pick one right now michael give us your best guess with this podcast because that would tell me a lot but uh uh i increasingly think trump is going to win okay phil you're looking in the camera who do you think's gonna win we've seen this movie before um except that hillary was actually five to one favorite last time and i watched these numbers go straight up and now i'm watching the same thing it seems like although i will say this uh you know saks has been posting some stuff within our channel about the numbers popping up and down i'm getting texts and they are popping up and now but still the lowest i've seen is 2.5 to 1 i think trump wins trump wins who do you got sax well i'm going to assume the betting markets know something um i'm still a little bit unclear on north carolina um because i saw some tweets that fein had wanted by a few thousand votes but the um the the north carolina website is showing um that actually trump's ahead about like 70 000 votes so i'm not sure who to believe um and uh well yeah look i'm gonna i'm gonna go i'm gonna i'm gonna go with what the bad markets are saying which is trump and um you know i thought that he i thought he had a much better shot than the polls were reflecting and that's what it's looking like what do you got for you berg donald trump took on coronavirus for us he killed it he is our true leader and he will prevail here in the united states of america tonight at least the betting markets are telling me and the treasury markets and the s p futures are telling me that donald trump's gonna win but i do think that the fact that this guy has never conceded defeat to anything in his life gives him a huge leg up and he uh you know he's he is like steve jobs he warps reality and he tells everyone i am going to win i have killed coronavirus and it happened um wait like a jedi knight it's like a jedi yeah all right four or four so far picking at uh exactly 7 45 p.m california time chamath who do you have at this point if you had to shove your chips all in uh i still think the path is um um uh i um i think it's biden and i have the advantage of some information which is that they just announced breaking news they aren't counting mail-in votes in philadelphia tonight and i am going with so so we don't know uh pennsylvania tonight so if it's down to a few thousand votes philly i think is gonna break i think you can count that as three or four hundred thousand votes yeah and if oh it should be it should be five hundred thousand it should be five hundred thousand well then five hundred thousand would carry the state for joe biden yeah they've been they've got so a hundred thousand so they've got so i'm gonna i'm gonna stick with biden here because i think that uh that philadelphia vote count is uh crucial it turns out that it may it may come down to philly by the way what an incredibly poignant place for the election to be won and lost the city of underdogs the city of rocky uh i i think we can safely say that biden is going to win the popular vote and it might be by four points five points which means that there is a discrepancy uh between the popular vote and electoral college we're going to hear a lot about that because uh i i am going to go with bison because my heart is going to be so broken this country picks this sociopath to run it for another four years after his absolute failure to content to do even the most modest things to battle coronavirus and the strife he has caused between americans and his personal style is so heartbreaking to me that i don't know that i can believe in america if they put this absolutely sociopathic person who has the least amount of character of any other human being anybody on this call has ever met in their lives it would be a complete absolute utter disgrace if he makes it into office for a second term what do you really exist hold on it's an existential threat to the entire planet and humanity and democracy across the world if this country puts that maniac into office again for four goddamn [ __ ] more years i'll make up for that's my personal feeling i can't i don't care what the statistics say right now in my heart i cannot give that man even a benefit of the doubt if he wins garbage if he wins is fouchy the first guy fired oh i think you can count on it and challenge you and christopher ray the fbi director and right and increasingly maybe bill bart too and somehow bill barr is not enough for the sync shred of credibility or honor is gone i wanna i wanna just say to to jkl i um i really empathize with how you're feeling because i have never as a person that has been a citizen of three countries when i moved to america in 2000 i have never really i mean you know edge cases yeah i've felt some racism here obviously you know i've but i've never felt so unwanted and i remember 2016 for the first time in my life feeling a level of insecurity i had never felt before because i was so afraid i didn't know what it meant for donald trump to be elected four years later um you know in in so many ways uh it's like two realms of a coin you know um i leave my house and uh you can just see that there's just so much pain and divisiveness i come back into my little world and things seem to be really great and that's a really really terrible feeling to have jason so i i know exactly what you're talking about i wanted to tell you guys um you know i there was like a i i've always been sort of like okay bryden's gonna win biden's gonna win biden's gonna win and then there's a weird thing that i did and you guys can see it in the fec filings but i gave a million bucks this year in the elections but i gave 750 to the senate and i gave 250 to buy and i didn't understand why i did it um and i and i and i explained it to nat as she's like why did you do it that way and the best way that i could explain it is i i think that there are so much i don't know about what is driving the vote for president that i wanted to make sure that you know there are checks and balances and the best check and balance was to you know make sure that there was actually some senate um check and balance on biden i mean on uh on trump so you know i'm i'm going to jason i'm going to accept the result um i'm going to try to figure out what the [ __ ] i don't know because this is yet another layer of i clearly don't know what the hell is going on um think i can tell you pretty assuredly guys uh any result that's called tonight i think is going to be uh incomplete because they're not going to call pennsylvania because they're not going to call philly and so if there are in fact three no i think the the exact math is about 350 000 votes that show up in philadelphia a gap of 350 000 votes that show up in philly um biden will do what he needs to do by the way how many people live in philly does anybody know how many registered voters friedberg is it is that billy there's a lot of it's supposed to be like half a million votes coming in there and i think they've counted a hundred thousand um and so i think it'd be more than half a million usually the dims uh margin is about half a million the margin yeah philly is uh i want to say our fifth or sixth largest market they've actually got it lifted it's a pretty significant population that link i sent you there nick and then if you click on uh click to view precinct reporting you can see the data right now sorry it's tough to read yeah i mean we care about allegheny and then what else do we care about you care about philly and you care about those immediate suburbs outside of philly like box county and chester county and um there's a there's four or five ringed suburbs of philly that used to be the uh centerpiece of country club republicanism they're the the counties that elected arlen specter to the senate but over time as the republicans moved right they moved more toward the democrats michael do you know why they're going to stop reporting um mail-in ballots tonight why would they do that they just probably just uh to go home and sleep for a while before they pick it up tomorrow pennsylvania unfortunately and michigan as well are states that aren't allowed to start tabulating until all the polls are closed uh that's why those uh states in the sun belt we were all looking for uh to be a early bellwether because look at that guys 4.81 this is unbelievable unbelievable what what are we seeing here what's unbelievable so what that means jason is that uh in philadelphia there are 176 precincts okay of those only 82 have reported the their ballot tallies so you have 95 of the precincts in philly not reporting if you take michael's framework and say there's a swing of 500 000 votes if it goes historically democrat as it has in the past you attack on five hundred thousand net new votes to um to abide and you know and uh he uh he ekes out a win yeah he it goes blue probably in that scenario yeah so then it becomes about but remember though if trump is holding um if he manages to hold michigan he could lose pennsylvania it wouldn't matter he had a little bit of a margin he had what he had 306 electoral votes last time so if he holds everything he had minus pennsylvania actually he could lose michigan too as long as he carried wisconsin he has it has to have one of those two but i think wisconsin's difficult so for all of our uh listeners and watchers in new jersey they legalize recreational pots so go out and get yourself some cheese yeah i'm gonna i'm i just took four gummies after my little tirade there because the two xanax weren't working so that's going to get really strange for me in about an hour just to go back the reason i mean are we going to crack a bottle of wine or what somebody got i already got one yeah this is mostly coffee but trust me there's some irish whiskey michael i guess i'm speaking to you but it looks like i'm seeing reports of the sound of arizona pennsylvania michigan and wisconsin unfortunately all four of those states are going to probably take at least a day arizona three days i think to count maybe not this year because so much of the vote was early maybe it'll move faster but they are notoriously slow counters so settle in it could be the weekend before we have a result wow okay so let me just drop this if we don't know tonight what is going to happen over the next week and we're going to be we're going to be we're going to need a lot of gummies jason no i mean joking aside i think everybody's going to be tense jay i think i don't i don't think you're going to see a lot of action one way or the other i think that people i think people in america are incredibly good people i think that folks are just going to sit tight and hope that the folks whose job it is to do their job do their job um i i hope you're right chamath but when i see a group of trucks surrounding people's cars when i see people bringing guns on both sides horrible people on both sides bringing guns militia style to specifically taunt each other when you see people getting shot in the street chasing each other down over politics this is something that has not happened in our lifetime i mean phil's very old so he kind of remembers the 60s but for the rest of us under 68 we we have not witnessed americans shooting each other in the street over politics we have not witnessed people taking people out of their lives because of politics and this is got trump's fingerprints on it from you mean since this summer i mean what about all the looting and rioting and protests my point is when trump got in office his character and his ability to trigger people his ability to abuse people his rhetoric put everybody on tilt i'm not saying people looting stores are correct but what i'm saying is george bush and ronald reagan your heroes bill clinton obama other people's heroes on this call there was a there was a a kindness in our differences and when people conceded they conceded with grace and this individual this horrible human being bush wasn't and we had a mutual respect for each other that this deranged individual has removed from america so jason i'm not going to defend that's going to happen in the next week because i'm not i'm not sure each other leading up to this i think the next week should be incredibly violent you are fake news thank you for that you are fake news now look uh jason i'm not going to like disagree with you about any of that um i the the only thing i would add though is i do think that the media has been a co-equal partner in sowing this chaos and divisiveness because you know we used to have a media that thought its job was objectivity and neutrality yes and they ripped the umpire jersey off their back to go after this guy trump and um and why do you think they did money it's very profitable trump trump has made big money aside picking a side is is definitely more profitable you get more subscribers it might also be that they were absolutely suffering from trump derangement syndrome from the fact that the person lies and that he wants to separate children from their parents at the border yes but they're supposed to they have a job to do they're supposed to be neutral there's supposed to be a rational contribution to trump yeah but exactly but but the reason why trump is doing well or better is because the opposition to him is increasingly irrational and um and people have voted for trump to to basically give the middle finger to you know to the to the media who you know again who are taking sides to these big tech sensors you know who don't want us to read things that are critical of trump um you know and so on down the line i mean i i tweeted earlier i mean rich lowry had a great post explaining why if trump was gonna win why you know why that would happen and it's because he's the only middle finger available to these people and uh you know i don't disagree with you he's not being no one's voting for trump because of his integrity perceived integrity oh no or um integrity it's the first time i've heard integrity in the same sentence as trump i thought you're i'm agreeing with that point um i'm saying they're not voting for him because of that they're not voting for him because of even a second term and they're voting for him in order to to stop cultural forces they don't like i have two things to say decidedly by the way two things to say um according to um the national political writer for the philly inquirer jonathan tamari his tweet of 7 35 p.m said actually it was even greater than we thought there are still 2.2 million mail-in ballots to be counted in pa about 87 percent of the total so if that's true then we have that and philly number one the second thing i wanted to say is that if you actually look at the psalm counts right now in pennsylvania it's 371 591 votes that separate trump and bible wow so it's uh you know not that much guys if 2.2 million votes are outstanding yeah but if it's if it's two if it's let's see sixty percent or two third kind of to one third slash forty percent and it's not let's say it comes in under that right they probably counted a couple hundred thousand already i mean it is still pretty close yeah um really close let me um let me ask jamaat do you think that part of the reason we're seeing futures markets jump and the dollar jump and um uh and all the kind of uh obviously correlated assets moving the way they are is not necessarily because of a trump win but because the risk of a hung election seems to be coming out of the system right now that it seems like we're gonna have a much more clear outcome here than we thought we would florida is going to be much more clear that's always a worry state um georgia is going to be clear obviously we've still got pennsylvania to kind of figure out here but it seems like this is going to break one way or another whereas a lot of folks were concerned we'd end up in the court fighting overhanging chads for months and there was concern in the markets for months about that um do we think yeah no i think that people were basically look there's a reason to be long biden in the markets which is essentially that there are certain sectors of the economy that would have done very well those sectors of the economy were probably slightly different than trump's under a trump regime the reality is that corporate taxes broadly speaking are not going to go up and so you know you can forecast higher earnings power for every stock and so everything goes up i think what's happening right now is more of that relief trade of maybe trump was winning so you could be kind of long everything blindly um but you know the real canary in the coal mine was like if you looked at tech futures tech futures was just going bonkers when they thought he was going to win because they will probably disproportionately benefit of just having to pay no taxes because they pay no taxes today um i um so so that's like kind of like what i what i think is happening on on that side i mean trump is very pro-business that's why the markets are ripping right i think i don't know i mean i feel like there was a real concern like there was a a non-zero case here call it a 30 case that we were gonna get stuck for a few months with uncertainty and litigation about where this election was gonna go i think i think it's fair to say that we we still we we could still have that david because we don't if if this goes to tomorrow i think it's fair to say that that the game theory would tell you that tomorrow whoever loses pennsylvania should ask for an immediate recount right right and i don't know what the pro they have to i don't know what the process for that is if whoever loses um arizona should ask for an immediate recount you know whatever is possible under the law i think both biden and trump will exercise because let's face it this is the highest stakes possible and so you would hate to not if it's a margin of a few thousands of votes or tens of thousands of votes or even a hundred thousand votes and you're allowed to do a recount so um if that's the case tomorrow morning if we go to bed in another hour and a half or if we finish this thing in another hour and there is no winner uh clear winner i think markets will be back to sort of modestly risk off tomorrow so david your thesis is that your thesis is a clear winner the market's ripped either way i think yeah clear winner it's just like there was a lot of grinding expected here that was going to cause a lot of you know trepidation and bouncing for a while that folks were concerned about and if you feel like you're going to have a clear election outcome or whether or not it gets litigated if you feel clear about where it's going to go because it's 55 45 you know i'm sure they're going to ask for a recount good news for everybody it makes sense look i i think the market does not want those trump tax cuts repealed stocks just ripped after um trump passed those corporate tax cuts so um if either trump wins or the republicans hold on to the senate then that would be a reason for the market to rip doesn't mean it doesn't mean trump has to win but it but but if we have divided government gridlock so between the two of you the best best possible scenario for the market is if trump clearly wins okay i think i think we have another investigation is it the case if we look at the senate races um i don't know if anyone i don't know if there's an easy way for us to pull this up but we have to go pull that up david and i just want to introduce our next bestie guest brad gerstner is here right now multi-billion dollar i believe you would call it a hedge fund or a fund yeah and he invests large swaths of money in the american economy has a very is he the best travel investor of all time jason calganis he's up there but um he certainly i would i would guess brad with covid and airlines being grounded this has not been the easiest year for you so apologies no brad brad just made 10 billion dollars on snowflake he's fine uh snowflake man brad uh what's going on tell us what's going on what do you know well um kyle um it's a um it's a fascinating night i mean all markets are ripping we've had a massive reversal in the nasdaq a massive reversal in the bond market um and it it appears that you know everybody's now who is worried about a trump victory is now celebrating the trump victory um you know one of the things people didn't understand about a clear biden victory is the underlying concern in the bond market right if there's one thing to explain the expansion of multiples in the market this year is the fact that rates have collapsed right so the 30 and 10 year went from you know a couple hundred basis points 20 months ago to basically 50 basis points in august of this year we've seen them back up about 40 percent over the course of the last couple months we see them backing up again tonight the fact is the the market is seriously concerned about higher rates which are the result of both a turbocharged economy too much stimulus on top of you know uh vaccines and prophylactics for covid and so you know if you ask me you know we get all excited about the election we get all excited about stimulus and tax policy but the biggest elephant in the room is the fed in rates that's the 80 to 90 factor in the market this year in q4 of 18 and so what i'm what we're looking at you know we see the the nasdaq now up 350 bips the future's up 350 bibs so that says trump's winning we're not going to break up the tech companies we see the s p starting to rise again and we see the bond market falling saying that we're going to have lower stimulus right in the market um so you know i i i've heard i've heard y'all talk about you know a clear victory certainly is better than not a clear victory uh but you know not withstanding our own [ __ ] anxiety that we have to live with for the next four years in the short run the market is clearly voting on um you know is is voting that trump is a palatable alternative um and i would tell you to keep your eyes on rates as much as you are on the market brad more than uh a great manager of money you're actually a great human being but you're also very wired into the dems um what are the dems getting wrong if they lose today well you know first this is an upset already tonight let's call it this is a massive upset relative to expectations win or lose the reversal in in the betting markets the reversal in the stock market you know it's just earlier tonight it you know a well-known organizer's house uh on the democratic side there is despondency this is a massive upset uh by trump and once again a massive misread by the progressives and organizers in the democratic party you know i had my 84 year old mother out here from michigan over the weekend and i'll tell you that ordinary people are made to be to feel bad about themselves by people living in these parts the sanctimony that exists in urban areas you know and coastal elites is just it's you know this is what we're seeing people vote against right the idea that you're going to close down the state of michigan not allow people to take their boats out on lakes this is just you know not something that people are willing to tolerate and i think more than anything else tonight you see a protest vote against sanctimony um and this is just ordinary people saying that you know let us live our lives don't act so much smarter than us um you know and you know i asked my 84 year old mother you know who she voted for she goes don't ask me who i voted for that's none of your business right like that's her way of telling me right that uh you know that she's frustrated by how people in san francisco make her feel living in michigan i think that's i think that's brad that's so smart but david sacks before you talk he's talking about you well no look i mean i'm on twitter and i echo technology extremely i mean it's usually vcs basically they can't comprehend how somebody could have a political opinion that's different than them without that person literally being evil i mean i see this on twitter over and over and over again i'm like really yeah but but but but this is like most of silicon valley and i'm just like look i mean political opinions are like [ __ ] i mean everyone's got one and to think that yours is a lot prettier than everybody else's and it's a bit ridiculous um oh welcome everybody to the podcast if you're just tuning in well the family hour just ended there we go wait brad brad can i ask a question sure what um like what what do we do yeah you know for me listen a trump victory the reality is we've learned to tolerate the anxiety over the last four years and i think the market's fully prepared to uh to manage its way through another four years of trump so i think that's you know the reason we're seeing the the futures react the way they are is it's a whole lot of nothing i mean the fact of the matter is asking how do we get off of our horses if we're on horses the social elites well i mean um this is going to take a complete rewiring right like an abandonment of um you know the i mean listen you you and i all know the exodus of people out of the bay area right now right the fact of the matter is like pragmatic politics in the democratic party in the state of california vacated long ago and you know that is not a recipe for victory it's not a recipe for victory at a national level it's not a recipe for victory or tolerable victory at a state level i think we're going to have the single largest migration of economic uh the single largest economic migration in the history of this country the convergence of covid which allows people to work from anywhere and the risk of changing tax policies in states like california is going to cause mass economic migration and i think that people are voting with their feet and they're voting with their wallets and they're voting you know tonight in in loud numbers no matter where this where this comes down this is an upset and a defeat for what democrats expected to occur tonight do you buy the framing brad that this is about political correctness versus cancel culture yeah i think that's i think that's a big part of it i mean like you know um i think it comes out it's it it's amplified this year because of covid but it comes down to something very simple which i talked about um you know sometimes my sister likes to call me fancy pants right she's like oh you fancy people who live in san francisco you have all the answers right this is just the way that people in indiana and michigan and ohio they're made to feel every day you know they'll sit around watching fox news these are not people who are racist right chamath i heard you say earlier tonight the idea that trump could pull what he's polling and yet if you talk to all of our friends they would have you believe that it was just a small band of you know racist pickup drivers carrying trump flags i mean they are their head is in the sand yeah this is this is ceos yeah you know these are business owners these are small business owners these are farmers these are old people these are young people i mean the the millennials you can't find a millennial in the state of indiana or michigan who supports biden right you can't find them and i mean just to add to that point about what they think about people in san francisco why shouldn't they think that when tech giants and the people who work at these big tech companies like twitter and facebook are asserting a right to censor articles that they don't like and trying to assert a power over what the american people get to see and read i mean what a campaign issue that was for trump in the last two weeks i mean whatever twitter and facebook thought they were doing to protect or help the biden campaign i mean what a blunder i mean to give trump the issue of censorship in the last two weeks and then the extraordinary thing you know we had that that congressional hearing in the senate commerce committee that i wrote a blog about and the amazing thing is right on the heels of that after that hearing when we heard jack dorsey get that you know he just got grilled he got ripped apart by the senators twitter doubled down on censorship after that there's an article by jonathan turley talking about they censored a whole new batch of accounts and so if anything you know it'll be really interesting to see i think you know if you think back four years ago facebook was really for whatever reason became the scapegoat for the election i think this time around it's going to be twitter because they have been so arrogant and they're assertion of their right to censor viewpoints that and if the republicans hold on to the senate um and or the presidency i think you're going to see jack dorsey become the poster child for this new censorship that they're going to target and the paradox friedberg is that had they just let that new york post story be tweeted because it's the new york post this is i mean you may not like the new york post it may have assorted past or reputation but if that had been a new york times story washington post story or an msnbc story or a cnn story it would not have been banned because it's a rupert murdoch new york post story and because it was salacious somebody mid-level inside of twitter decided to ban it how much you of that do you think plays into what we're seeing here tonight freedberg which is this is not uh a small event this is a large group of people saying i don't want anything to do with the democratic party anymore i just think back to 2016 and um you know everyone has their own priorities their own individual things that matter to them and i remember in 2016 or leading up to it i spent a lot of time in what we call kind of the rust belt and the farm belt um if you'll remember this was around the time of kind of the transgender bathroom um you know movement yeah yeah yeah and this was felt very much like a coastal elite um topic of interest if you're in the rust belt in the farm belt you're like what the [ __ ] how is this possibly something people are spending time on and arguing about and thinking about and the disconnect between the priorities of the individuals that live in the vast part of the united states versus what they read about and hear about others treat as their priority um i think is what partially helped support trump getting elected in the first place because the things that matter to them that they felt were highly consequential um were completely unrelated and not being paid attention to while other folks you know that had the money and the power in the big cities were focused on social matters and social issues and liberal decisions that they thought were inconsequential or shouldn't be a priority and i think that fast forward to 2020 and it hasn't moved in the right direction it's moved in the wrong direction where the the the disconnect is no longer a passive difference of priority it's actually become an active interest moving against you and so if you live in the corn belt or the rust belt or vast parts of rural america to your point you're now not only feeling that there's this disconnect but you're also feeling like this point of view is becoming um overwhelming and stopping you from having a point of view and i think whether your point of view is rooted in fact or not you can base that however you want um it just feels like it's becoming a silencing effect and not just kind of a a you know ignoring the effect and i think let me yeah let me just jump in here uh i wanted to come back to this but i want to just jump to something that bogut just tweeted andrew bogut thank you for this um detroit philadelphia and milwaukee are all planning to post vote counts tomorrow as they work through absentee backlogs so if we look at the counts that really could mean that phil you know uh pennsylvania wisconsin and michigan are either too close to call or not even yet ready to be called until tomorrow morning um i think let's take a pause here and let's go through what the swing states are and where they stand at this very moment arizona is an important toss-up state correct let's pull up arizona nick uh let's all just take a moment to look at arizona we're gonna go through about six or seven of these states and just get our bearing right now because when we did the quick survey about 45 minutes ago four of us believed trump was gonna win two of us believe one of us emotionally and of us somewhat emotionally believed hold on before you start this i just want to read a tweet um two two tweets number one from nick bilton when do we get to vote on when we fire nate silver and the second one wait the second one which is even funnier he's named nate silver because all his picks come in second place oh ouch wow i mean i i was tweeting you guys before the election i mean the nate silver thing was a joke first of all he was saying that biden was 90 favorite and at the same time he said that if trump won pennsylvania then he would become the favorite but you knew that trump was a few points of the margin of error in pennsylvania so how can you be a 90 favorite but some but but but pennsylvania is sort of neck and neck i mean even his own internal projections weren't consistent with each other i mean here's mate silver one of the best sports predictors in history he's been an absolute genius he stepped into politics and now you guys are lashing yeah but this this is the worst case of analytics since uh tampa bay pulled their picture in the sixth inning of uh the world series i mean i if we look at what's happening it's very clear that there are people who are either lying to the pollsters because they're embarrassed about their choice or they may actively be trolling the pulsars so when a pollster calls them they lie to them to have this exact moment happen just like the tick tockers all registered for a trump event so now we have a level of trolling going on at a national level i think there's a simpler explanation and that's that we're not all trolls i think the simpler explanation is that pollsters are empiricists and they're experts and uh like a lot of experts you you can kind of you can kind of interpret the trump phenomenon of of over performing now two elections in a row is a kind of revolt against the experts uh and they don't see their biases uh the way they should they're they're blind to certain things there's really no excuse for how bad they missed this one because michael they may have been experts yesterday but they're not experts well this is i mean this is what trump does this is why people support him in spite of the fact that i don't think anyone disagrees with jason's opinion of his of his character is that they love sticking it to the to the eggheads you know right yeah brad what happens to um media like what happens to how we conduct ourselves like do you do you read the new york times tomorrow and think wow i'm going to trust the times i'm not saying you did before but i'm just using it as a generality to sort of ask the question like what happens to media no i think i i think our belief in you know all of these polls and all of these mainstream press i mean this validates the arguments effectively that trump has been making right that you've been told lies that these polls were lies that everybody was trying to manipulate you i mean it's this is a validation of those who are flipping the middle finger at washington and at the coast and they're saying we're not going to be told how to believe how to think how to vote um how to wear masks how to wear masks and you know it's a dangerous side to this 100 it's the end of expertise i mean who who can we ever trust i mean and this is putin ironically it's the experts who got mass wrong remember that at the time that i was saying that we should wear masks the who was saying we shouldn't so they were lying they were deliberately lying to keep uh ppe from being overrun by so the experts have done a horrible job on covet too jason i mean look i think that's yes but now the cynicism of trump and his approach to absolutely undermine fauci and say to and admonish people wearing masks while on stage is a level of danger and and is in is a little different that's insane so know that mass work you actually were a proponent of it yes of course math should never become a poor question trump last week said don't wear a mask no he never he was he literally made fun of a person wearing a mask let's just run through issue okay um right it should have been a bipartisan response and it's unfortunate it became a political issue um but uh and i'm not not forgiving that and it took trump way too long to get on board with mass i think right around the time my blog was published a few days afterwards first he said it was optional you could do it if you want it took him about another three months to actually say that master a good idea i agree that had he just gone all in on a mass policy i think this would not even be a close election i mean that was probably the single biggest blunder that he made politically this year um 100 agree okay so we agree on that but but but look but you're missing the other half of it which is what is our cova policy going to be today and the reality is that joe biden and all these blue state governors are still on the record as being in favor of lockdowns and in fact they are doing lockdowns the only reason why michigan and wisconsin but i say especially michigan would ever be in play tonight was because of lockdowns absolutely i agree yes this is a resounding rebuke of lockdowns let's uh just zip through these real quick arizona pull it up nick arizona here we are buy it in 54 if we round up 45 for donald trump 75 looks like arizona is going to uh biden next up let's take a quick look at iowa um iowa 64 percent in and we're in a essentially a dead heat with yeah i was going to trump jason i was going to trump you can see how that numbers come down yeah as the uh election day vote starts to trickle in that's going to trump so they were one of the states that did the um drop off ballots mailing ballots first yes i think i think that's fair to say yeah okay ohio critically important let's take a look at ohio while we're here uh ohio wow that's really flipped hard with a commanding lead yeah you can kiss that one goodbye yeah ohio north carolina we are now within one can we just all agree if we were i mean right if we're momentum investors i mean this thing is this is a disaster for biden right it's a disaster this is a disaster for biden and on top of this all our talk is about the presidency they're not going to get the senate either no no uh tillis is running ahead of uh trump in north carolina so i think he's home free and well the vote in maine is not fully in yet there's only about 41 percent collins has a 40 000 vote lead which susan collins keeps her seat that is the biggest that that is like the mega upset the democrats were already they were targeting her two years ago after she voted for kavanaugh yeah okay the best that as we think through this by the way just keep this in mind cnn right now shows i mean cnn's head must be up their ass or we don't know what we're doing but they show 192 to 114 biden um oh yeah because they call them california that's right they called california when the polls closed so that's 55 that went yeah okay north carolina here we go uh we we or we did north carolina i believe yeah we're at uh 95 reporting and trump has a a lead that looks like he's yeah and unless there's a lot of charlotte out i think that north carolina is over and that by the way that uh percentage is outside the recount uh window i think you have to be within one percent okay let's take a look at georgia for a quick second we said that michael do you know if we've counted north carolina's mainland i think that i think they were all dumped at the outset right north carolina one of the reasons why we were watching them tonight is that like florida they can count in advance and so they dumped they dumped a bunch right at the outset here by the way i just got it by the way i just checked the betting lines trump is over a three to one favorite to win the election right now the later at the later it goes the more significant that is wait why did it come down to 200 on bovado that's the lowest it's been i just got three to one on one of the sides oh this has two to one yeah that's the lowest um if you assume that biden takes arizona trump takes north carolina south carolina georgia let's go let's give him pennsylvania wins arizona uh if biden wins arizona he could lose michigan so georgia is currently fifty-four percent declared that biden won arizona oh well okay that's a quick call uh items has to take pennsylvania okay so now this is what i'm saying this is why this is in place so if you assume biden takes arizona so that's now on the table now if you say that trump takes north carolina south carolina georgia pennsylvania florida texas ohio et cetera he still needs to pull out a victory in michigan wisconsin or minnesota otherwise get this or nevada well actually nevada wouldn't be enough nevada wouldn't be enough yeah otherwise let's go to minnesota guys hold on guys hold on just let me finish please it's going to be if trump so if that happens trump needs to win one of michigan wisconsin or minnesota otherwise it's 270 268 biden wow okay so here's minnesota let's just pause for a second biden with uh biden's got a 56 to 42 with 54 percent in so there's a lot more to come in but i think michael you would agree that's a bridge too far i i never thought minnesota was in play uh the republicans the republicans put a brave face on there uh and they are making some gains in the rural areas but minnesota was never in place okay time to go to wisconsin time to go to wisconsin let's take a let's pause here we got to do this step by step everybody wisconsin 51 to 47 donald trump with 54 percent that too i think feels like a bridge too far or do we not know if they did we don't oh you know i think wisconsin is another one who's probably counted their election day vote first so no so still very much alive in wisconsin yeah exactly milwaukee doesn't come in until tomorrow morning yeah michigan we need to take a quick look at michigan and then we're almost done okay here's michigan donald trump at uh trending to 55 to 44 for biden only 44 percent are in and let's be clear is this um detroit tomorrow okay is that michigan detroit yeah that that that wayne county vote is very low yeah look at that 28 percent a lot of more lot more votes there okay so we don't know about michigan michigan is very much up in the air that's that's a pretty good margin for trump there but i would say it's very much up in the air but by the way if you put arizona in biden's column he can lose michigan let's take a look at pennsylvania one more time actually and trumath is right he could lose he could lose either michigan or pennsylvania and still he could have trump needs to win michigan wisconsin one of michigan wisconsin or minnesota so basically forget minnesota if destroyed so okay so then if detroit doesn't show up and milwaukee and green bay don't show up trump wins pennsylvania does that assume that he wins pennsylvania yes if i give you if we give him pennsylvania so again this is why i think guys um it feels like biden as i said i'm a little shaky on my prediction right now actually i think the the betting markets are showing uh it's tightened almost to even and let me ask brad a question brad if the betting markets are saying it's almost even and the analysis we just did isn't missing any information yeah why are the um futures markets still trading up one and a half points and why are things still you know i i think that listen the the the stock market's ripped the last two days assuming that biden's gonna win and i think what the markets are starting to uh price in is that this is not going to be a blue wave there's no mandate here for massive tax reform there's going to be a divided senate it's going to be hard to pass legislation that's going to be overly onerous that the stimulus package is going to be smaller not larger which is why the the rates are backing up so i think from a i think from a public markets perspective the idea that we're going to have some checks and balances in place it can live with either the the devil we know uh or it can live with biden but it doesn't want biden with elizabeth warren as treasury secretary so democracy survives i i think scenario three is starting to look very possible a biden and a republican senate and uh i can sleep soundly with that i don't i don't know we're gonna have to i mean you guys i don't know what odds you're looking at but uh but i mean 1.9 is i mean that's like that's a huge significant right there it's still good i give you that but uh i don't know those those numbers it's moving fast i want to take it it's down to 180 yeah i want to go back to this topic um that that brought up um okay guys look we'll have a winner and it's going to be closage um but think of how many people um like isn't there any empathy for all these people that are that just feel so completely shut out of the system like what do we do tomorrow like irrespective actually of whether trump wins or biden wins i think brad's right we're to basically get you know nothing much is going to happen at that level but what do we do at the like on main street like what are we doing to close the gap between folks so that you know this entire cohort like literally i don't care whether biden wins by the popular vote by five million or seven million you're talking about tens of millions of people bill gurley is now on the line uh another one of our best i guess these bill thanks for joining us you heard the question being teed up here this is neck and neck this is not something anybody at least pollsters came anywhere close to predicting and chamat's question i think is a really valid one who is got a greater chance of bringing the country back together and maybe leading from the middle and maybe healing this wound because this has been the worst four years i believe in any of our lifetimes in terms of the anxiety and the anger between people who used to be able to what a loaded question totally well i want to know bill's opinion because by the way bill gurley is the best coach jason jason is the best venture capitalist in the world phil stop hijacking our [ __ ] broadcast go ahead girlie so thanks for having me on i you know i think you guys have done a really good job of breaking down why people have mis-estimated this thing there was a you know there's such a royal urban split there was a there was a really good new york times daily podcast about two weeks ago where they interviewed uh rural democrats in in pennsylvania that had switched to trump and and all the voices they echoed were very similar to what brad walked through with his mother and so i do think there's a a true lack of empathy for the the center states and the rural areas from the coastal elites and i'd say part of breaking any of it down would be somehow trying to separate that i think a bigger issue that has really been on my mind lately is just how tribal everyone's gotten and i i've i've come to believe that the way you can probably just ruin your mind the most is to just join a tribe and quit thinking about things and the number of people i know on both sides that have run off to their tribe is shocking to me and and it's just not a way to go about being smart because you know and and if you anyone that makes fun of a you know a religion that's extreme or something it's all the same [ __ ] like you're just believing dogma for the sake of it so i one of the things that i worry about about a trump victory is is just very tactically in my life and maybe it's part of living in california but a whole bunch of people and things that i want to get solved become more manic if he wins like my kids school and the companies that i work with and and covert quite frankly i i think that we can't get past covet with trump because the tdsers are so convinced that it has to be problematic and it's just you know so i don't i actually i don't know the exact path to solve it but i i do worry about just being in a world where everyone hates each other and it just doesn't seem solvable that way well th this is why i think you know uh this this scenario which uh we've called the soft landing where let's say you had a biden victory by two electoral votes the republicans hold on to the senate um i think the radical left gets a big um i'd say rebuke um or a shock and we have basically divided government in washington but it takes the whole temperature down because you know trump gets replaced by biden but you've kind of got you know basically joe and his old pal metro and a power sharing arrangement in washington it could be a really good situation for the country for the next four years you know temperature would go down there'd be kind of this you know healing process if you will um but you know there wouldn't be a whole lot of new sort of legislation that we have to worry about i think we would get what we want which is the ability to ignore washington for four years yeah but we wouldn't get a solution to really what ails us which is the fact that there's all these people that just feel completely shut out and i that really bothers me at some very basic level which is like i just think like you know i fought my family my parents just escaped some third world [ __ ] [ __ ] to go to canada and you know canada gave us a lot but it still wasn't enough for me i crawled and scratched to get into the united states things work out but i don't feel like i have a right to all of a sudden um i don't know just like look down on other people or make people feel like [ __ ] or not allowed so you actually think chamoth that biden is going to do that or do you think bine's going to be no but jason i think middle ground no who who no with the republicans in the senate what i'm saying is independent of what happens we're going to have basically we're going to have a photo finish and what i think what brad said is right the the fact that we're in a photo finish means that there are a lot of people in pain and i think we have a responsibility to get our heads out of our asses and stop this sanctimonious holier-than-thou [ __ ] i agree with brad when he says that it really hits the nerve with me because i feel like there are a lot of people we work with them all it's rife within the tech culture and all these [ __ ] bags think they know what they're talking about all the time and we're doing a disservice to so many americans and we need to wake up and that's what bothers me the idea that there are so many people who feel like they're just getting so really bothers me that bothers me so i i i can ignore trump i'll ignore his [ __ ] because honestly he's done nothing he will do nothing he is a complete [ __ ] void um but whether it's trump or biden in a 270 268 election the fact that so many people still use this guy as a vessel um i don't know that makes that makes me more upset i think some people i think a lot everyone thinks has some degree of empathy to the problem i think there are different points of view on the solution which is where this stuff gets realized the one point of view is we should have less government involved in our lives and our businesses and the other point of view is we should have more support and help from the government and that's where things diverge very quickly it doesn't feel to me like anyone in politics is necessarily ignoring what you're highlighting and i don't think anyone in america does from the rich to the poor to the left to the right yeah i think the solutions are miscast because for example like what are we supposed to do like with our higher educational institutions the people that are churning out all these folks that are meant to go and collaborate and find middle ground i mean i clearly like all of this says our educational facilities are completely failing from grade school all the way through to high school um community college college grad school it's all just a contrived piece of [ __ ] right we are completely putting out one in two people for failure okay so that much is clear so i don't see politicians fixing that on either side of the aisle what i mean honestly what are we supposed to do well i mean i might just might i just suggest that um two things um number one i think in these results that you see there's a you know there is extraordinary frustration right with this with the state of affairs the fact that trump in the middle of covid after four years of torturous anxiety-inducing tweets could even be in a neck-to-neck race to win this election tells you right how devastatingly bad people feel about how how they're being treated i think that you know i said recently i mean we have to redraft the social contract this idea we've been living under a social contract drafted post-world war ii um that you know it's pre-technology revolution we have a concentration of wealth today in the world and in this country like we've never seen and we have uh republicans that are set in their ways who say you know no no no universal health care you know no reform of the education system you have democrats who are demanding that you have universal basic income i think you have to have um pragmatic smart younger politics i mean the fact that we have two old white men i mean neither of these folks is on top of their game i mean neither of these like this is i mean you could you compare biden to pete budage i mean buddha judge is buddha jizz walks into the lion's den of fox tv and tames the lion every night every night right let's get pete bootages solving some of these problems let's get some younger ideas on the republican side solving these problems but we're going to have to re-architect architect that social contract no doubt about it um you know and i i think the second thing is that you know to me this is going to be a wake-up call to the nominating processes in both parties but but let's be clear mike pence right has his road map um you know for you know how to win the election indiana governor right he's going to tap into the same fears that trump tapped into i mean these fears aren't going away right the exacerbation of the wealth disparity is going to increase not decrease we see it every day out here and so i think you're going to have to have you know the democratic party who nominates people and puts people you know forward who can you know who can tap into this brad who do you like if it wasn't biden who would you like buddha judge he's a south this was the you know an openly gay mayor of my hometown in indiana you think he can sell right who fought who fought in afghanistan and who goes on fox news every damn night right and has a conversation that leaves republicans saying oh that guy's pretty smart right yeah i i agree that he's a tremendous political talent do you think that he's pragmatic enough brad or he he would he would end up veering more towards uh you know sort of like politically correct leftist socialist agenda and then have the same result i think that there is a there's been a doctrine in the in the democratic party that to win the primary you gotta veer to the left right you got to contend with bernie you got to contend with elizabeth warren but ultimately that's a losing strategy in in the election and so i think you're going to have the emergence of a middle of the country governor middle of the country mayor somebody like pete um who's gonna run you know on a smart younger pragmatic democratic ticket um i think that's a winning formula i mean i think that's the clinton formula um you know obama was a bit of an anomaly but the clinton formula was a conservative pragmatic form of of uh democratic party leadership i mean i suspect that in the next three or four days i'm going to get a call from the democratic leadership figuring out how much they can count on me and my message to them is you guys can go [ __ ] yourselves until you figure this out because to your point brad it is absolutely shameful that we're in no no i'm serious that we are in i know you are that's what i love well but chamoth i mean what you should tell them to do is go form a dlc remember the demo democrat leadership committee that bill clinton formed so remember what what bill clinton did you know when he won in 92 we had three straight republican presidential terms ronald reagan incredibly successful president then his successor basically reagan wanted bush won a third term for reagan but he was a weak candidate and clinton came in there what did he do he triangulated he tacked toward the center um and you know he he actually passed a lot of bipartisan legislation david david david let me make this even more blunt okay um my million bucks will grow to 10 million dollars a per election to 50 million dollars per election as i get older okay so if these [ __ ] want a single goddamn dollar for me what i want first is a root cause analysis to understand what is actually going on so to your point before you fix it you need to be honest and identify the problem well i mean i i think that i think it's it's because that the issue that trump ran against was that joe biden was a trojan horse for radical for a radical left that really owns the democratic party right now that's what he ran against bill gurley what do you think the issues are that if we were going to try to have a great reconciliation between these two parties between middle america and the coastal elites where you have spent you know large swaths of your life i think perhaps you're the only person here who has lived in both places middle of america he's from indiana okay but i trust your judgment on these issues what what does the what does the what are the coasts need to understand about the people who believe who when who live between the coasts and what they're trying to express to us and how can we as coastal uh occupants and citizens do to kind of bridge this gap other than just moving to austin and getting the hell out of california which is devolving which is what i feel like doing at this point well dude i have two comments on this one you know having having listened to you know as much as i can on on all the of the the voter conversations including this call um i'm not 100 sure that that these people feel unrepresented i think a lot of them want to be left alone and so part part of what's being engineered or what they fear is being engineered is someone sitting in a city with views that are very different than them telling them that this is the world they have to live by and i think the lockdown fit in with that but a lot of other things too that the the daily podcast i mentioned you know there was this guy just saying what is what does nancy pelosi know about what i want in my day-to-day life you know and so there is a notion of being left alone brad's story about his mom was like hey we're fine here like don't don't bother me and so there's a there's a difference between trying to solve a problem for them and being empathetic to their point of view and and i would say um having spent a lot of time in these areas and being a slow talker and sometimes uh made fun of for that there is a there's unquestionably a uh a type of social bias against rural americans in in urban cities there's just no doubt it's it's the only joke you're allowed to tell without getting rebuked in other words we can make fun of the rednecks and we can oh absolutely all day long all day long we can we can do a bill gurley impersonation or no they're either they're either idiots well i mean if we and this is the thing that i don't understand when i grew up and i'm curious other people's opinions here and i'll let anybody who wants to jump in on this it feels like the lessons i was taught in the 70s and 80s which were america is strong because we're a melting pot we take the best of all the cultures and we try to make our own out of it and that you get to make choices for your life and in your city town and state that don't have to be the same as the ones we make in new york so if you want to have a handgun and you want to put it on your waistband in texas or wherever and in new york city we don't want to have handguns in the city because it's a little bit more crowded we can we can have that difference and we can co-exist and i don't know when we lost this script that what makes america great is the differences and that people living in different parts of a very large diverse country can have different opinions about you know abortion and and what month abortion is allowed to occur at or the owning of a gun or you know how tall a building can be built when did that get taken off the table and who took it off the table you know who took it off the table was these hysterical libs the and i think the hysterical as much as this far right trump you know uh you know flags on pickup trucks surrounding other cars is absolutely horrible to watch i i have equal disdain for hysterical libs trying to tell somebody who lives on a ranch that they can't have a gun when they've never even been to a goddamn ranch and they've never had to use a gun to protect their family because that a cop coming to your ranch is going to take 45 minutes and that's what america needs to get back to is respecting each other's different lifestyles whether you're an atheist or you're devoutly catholic viva la different roles let people live their goddamn lives i think it's an astute point bill j cal can we run down california next yeah i'm very curious how prop 22 is doing jesus the god damn people are allowed bill can you tell everyone what prop 22 is and why yeah please why why yeah but and and and and it would transition to a whole bunch of conversations about politics that i i feel more passionate about than who gets elected which is if you know in order to solve the problems that everyone's upset about with an inequality and whatnot i think you have to have massive innovation and you have to have job growth and i don't know of any waves in history where you get a whole bunch of improvement in in standard living for broad swaths of a population without being positively aligned with job growth and what the where i'm going with this is my biggest concern about washington i used to say the main reasons silicon valley works is because it's so [ __ ] far away from dc um and it's because regulation is the friend of the incumbent and it's the it's the opposite of innovation it locks in things and it's very resistant to change and um matt ridley's new book how innovation works goes through this over a very very long period of time it's it's fantastic and he talks about why europe's gotten stuck in like the top 50 market cap companies in europe there's no new entrant in 30 years or something like that um because of this anyway prop 22 is a california proposition reaction to a law that was put on the california books called ab5 to the best of my knowledge and this is consistent with the editorial groups at the l.a times the san francisco chronicle and the san diego tribune is that it was written entirely by a union the seiu who has no representation over over drivers or gig workers whatsoever they represent service industry workers um and they would like to represent uber drivers but they don't today and i i think i think about this like a bunch of people living in nevada trying to pass a law for the citizens of california unfortunately because of regulatory capture which which i think is unfortunate on both sides of the aisle the union's able through a woman named lorena gonzalez is able to get the state to pass a law that that basically targeted gig workers which was this new job type that has all these fantastic benefits anyway um immediately thereafter there were several industries were like oh we don't want this for us so them and their unions and constituents started calling on sacramento with lorena gonzalez and and and carving them out one by one so by the by the time ab5 was set to be put in action there were over 100 industries that have been carved out because it was a stupid law written just to target a single industry and it was written with political donor dollars now in a moment that i would say is completely outside of my realm of what i expected um all of the newspaper all the editorial boards for all of the major newspapers in california came to the conclusion that this was a bad law that this was crony capitalism written with donor dollars and they all got behind prop 22 which is because we have this ballot initiative in california is a way for the voters to tell sacramento that they're full of [ __ ] and that looks like what's happening right now sorry for the long answer no no it's it's a great answer and what what's particularly infuriating about this and listen you and i are both um you know investors in companies impacted by this is that it's there's a group of people who've been exempted from this and the list of people exempted all seem to be just slightly more powerful and slightly better paid um sales people uh fishermen psychologists uh surgeons dentists engineers architects lawyers etc and if this had passed or if it still does pass because we're only at 15 or 20 percent of people have been counted so far but it's looking like prop 22 will pass well in one of the businesses i run inside.com we had to uh tell all of the freelancers we were hiring who are writers that they would lose their gig work with us because they can only write five stories a year or ten stories a year and vox one of the big publishing companies which is incredibly left leaning as left as it gets they stopped hiring people in california and they fired and laid off all their california freelance writers nick and what this does to people who are doing gig economy 70 of them are working part-time nick can you go back to uh can you i need to switch topics nick can you go to georgia please for a second uh a little little late-breaking data uh over 400 000 votes outstanding in atlanta and the suburbs um how close oh my god it's a statistical dead heat if you add back in 400 000 for all by now i'm just saying that's not where it's going to be but uh yeah yeah i mean atlanta atlanta should go 70 percent by oh sure it will yeah maybe 75 80 but i guess he'd have to be 100 to zero instead catch up uh if i'm being that right anyone anyone here cynical enough to think that there's some operative in these states holding these on purpose so that they can be the center of importance tomorrow no i just think it's it's almost midnight on the east coast and people are tired and they're gonna go home and uh have a [ __ ] shower and a shave and uh start again tomorrow that's the reason gurley is so successful he always girly always knows how to diagnose the individual and he motivations diagnose the [ __ ] out of it by just thinking about what one guy's motive is and then he's figured the whole thing out he makes a billion dollars overnight master of self-interest bill gurley here's the truth here's what it comes down to so trump needs to win two out of four of these states nevada pennsylvania wisconsin or michigan and um he's got to win two of those four so it's got to be probably pennsylvania and michigan or pennsylvania and wisconsin but he's got to win if he loses nevada he needs to win two out of those three uh rust belt states or he wins nevada plus like a pennsylvania yeah this is gonna be this is gonna be really michigan's gonna go to trump this is going to come down to pennsylvania um and really to the to the philly suburbs i was reading on twitter uh election official in michigan says don't expect results before friday that's crazy well and by the way i mean so so but let's just think for a second how extraordinary it is that trump looks like he might win michigan i mean just to go back to the you know the theory of the of the case that we were laying out earlier um about how china about how trump picked up this this china trade issue four years ago and and and this this time he combined it with the lockdown issue um i mean it's really amazing that that state is leaning trump right now michigan michigan was two issues it was uh you know working class democrats feeling like trump's standing up for them with respect to china and it was locked down and lockdown wasn't it was an overwhelming issue uh you know for my for my friends and my folks in michigan for sure can we go back to prop 22 for a second jason because i think that this is um you know this is a uh an issue of extreme importance you know one of the things that bill didn't say is you know we're talking earlier chamath brought up you know what's the third way you know we we we've we've built a social contract on the back of kind of w-2 tight employment for the better part of the last 70 years we now have a massive part of the economy this gig and it's not just this is all freelancers this is all part-time workers and postcovid this is just a massive portion of the economy and the idea that we're going to tie all benefits to w-2 it's just totally asinine it's got to be re-architected and what prop 22 does is say it's ic plus it's independent contractor plus benefits right it's this idea that we don't have to tie benefits to w-2 employment right so the nonsensical no argument against prop 22 that this was an abandonment of the employee is just that it combines flexibility with benefits and you know from my perspective you're gonna see if prop 22 passes which i think it will tonight it's going to be the architecture that new york and many other states follow they're certainly not going to follow the disastrous ab5 example um but we also know that it's not sufficient just to have uh a bunch of workers with with zero healthcare and you know and so i think that this is a uh you know hats off to doordash instacart you know uber and lyft trying to trying to design something that is a middle way and you know chamath if we don't have politicians designing a middle way right then we need leadership out of the business community design in a middle way well that so you just said something so so profound and i was gonna i would like to build on that i think what california shows is that um if you have a completely democratic up and down ticket and it veers too far to this coastal naval gazing socialist nanny state then it requires money and companies to basically level the playing field because the republicans can't do it and it's possible to fight back and what's interesting to me is nobody ever talks about or or maybe they do and i don't just don't hear it about how the equivalent happens on the right um it'd be interesting to know if you guys know of any states where there's just republican up and down the ticket and they just veer into such a detached laissez faire where the whole state needs to get corrected by for-profit organizations but it's it seems like we're setting up for democrats versus companies and people moving to republican states to have low taxes and to be left alone well you know it's a sensible set of outcomes in california right i mean do you guys not agree that the uh the the yes on prop 22 and saks it looks like your commercial property tax proposition that zuck helped fund may not pass it's oh thank us we don't know it's a point one percent differential yes which i don't know i agree it's look the california ballot initiatives are looking really good right now it gives me a lot of hope it gives me a lot of hope about the state because the most anti-economic the most let's put a business on friendly ballot initiatives looks like they're going down starting you know with the win on prop 22 that's huge but then prop 15 you know we talked about that on a former um episode of the all-in pod this was chipping away at prop 13 which is the great shield of the middle class in terms of property taxes i'm not saying you couldn't get a better tax regime that would tax commercial property fair market value but you sure wouldn't want to give that card away without demanding some structural reform in exchange for it which is why i thought it was just so stupid for you know tech billionaires to be funding you know these these ballot initiatives for higher taxes you know this is definitely looking like like a sensible kind of middle ground outcome where a lot of folks who were concerned about california swinging all the way left and chasing uh business and enterprise out of the state um you know maybe kind of getting reeled in and i think it gives some hope and gives some pause uh to a lot of folks who are trying to build businesses in california to recognize that you know hey there there is a thoughtful populace here um totally agree and this is this is a great outcome tonight i feel i i personally feel really good about i i i agree if this sticks it it's um it it is because the the big the big issue with california right now is that we've got you know people we've got net migration out of the state because it's just so hard uh for for the middle class to live here and to build businesses here i hope what we hear you know if if we're fortunate enough for prop 22 to pass i hear we i hope we see a coalition among these companies come together and really promote this as a national architecture for a third way for independent contractors free agents across the country uh to have a living wage and benefits it's totally detached from w2 employment i really do believe um a bunch of people on this call will were helpful to an uh an effort i launched around the board challenge you know it's high time for the social consciousness of corporate america to take the leadership position and because it's not coming out of washington and there's so many issues that the solution lies among us and we got to stop spending our election nights wondering when somebody's going to deliver us from ourselves we got to start delivering ourselves i think it's a very how do you think you resolve that union i mean like you know girlies girl are you still with us yes how do you resolve things with the unions after this i mean if prop 22 passes is there a uh coming to the middle ground with unions and are unions always just a kind of directional vector you know they're always like a force on the system they're not an absolute or objective right they're uh they're just always pushing in one direction i mean what ends up happening with the resolution with unions or is it just a constant back and forth to try and manage the impact they'll have on policy politics tax free market etc so from from my point of view the if you if you think about citizens united which a lot of people are upset about i think rightfully so uh because dc is so money oriented like it's coin operated and a lot of people have vivid awareness of it being coin operated on the right through corporations this is why the most heavily regulated industries are the hardest to break into hardest to innovate against what what i think they missed is how much of its right is is his regulatory capture on the left and the difference that a union has versus a company is it's a natural monopoly and so it actually has more power to write regulation than a company does um but and it's going to be around every single election cycle so if you listen to them you know you get what you want and the you know people have pointed out that the um the gentleman or he's not a gentleman the the individual that that that killed george floyd probably wouldn't have been on the force if it weren't for the union protecting him because of the stuff he had done before but and this goes back to the red and blue and blindness of just being dogmatic to your party most of the people i know that are heavily uh prescribed to the to the democratic tribe refuse to acknowledge that one of the big problems in police reform comes from the unions and and you can't see those things unless you take yourself out of that single place um i will tell you the california situation i think is deeper than than maybe what brad talked about there the the rule the law that's causing more companies to leave from my perspective than ab5 is something called paga which was passed about 25 years ago but has finally reached momentum where it's causing problems for companies and this was a law passed by um litigators with donor dollars in sacramento that lets any lawyer bring a case on behalf of the state against the company and so they they're basically like local sheriffs just running around bringing claims and of course they'll settle every time the the the supposed victims are getting about 10 percent on average on packet claims and once your company's been shook down on three or four packet claims by a lawyer who's only going to give 10 cents on the dollar to these people that used to work for you you finally just throw up your hands and say you know i don't need to hire someone here i hire someone somewhere else costs twice as much to hire someone here and so i i do worry that if any state or country wants to move forward in in our new economy they can't just be completely anti-business anti-tech um that i have a strong point of view on that but like it won't work you're gonna grind to a halt hey jay jason can we go back to the senate has anybody prepared to i'm getting a read from my analysts who are live blogging to me that the senate is almost certain to go republican at this point with iowa maine and north carolina going republican that would do it and michigan and montana both in real danger for democrats but even if they lost both of those um you're going to have 51.49 to republicans in the senate hey brad why are markets trading down a bit right now from where they were um i still have it at uh you know nasdaq 280. so i'm not i'm not prepared to call that down i just think that's what they did yeah it's bouncing and both and bovada i guess which is the um nevada just came back up they stopped taking action now they've got trump uh minus 150 is that how you say it and joe biden plus 115 so to if you put a hundred dollars on joe biden you win 15 is that right and if you oh you're 100 you win 115. you win 115. right you probably win 15 115 is very close jason and donald trump if you were to put a hundred dollars in you make 150. is that right phil hellmuth you definitely know a 150 to 100. exactly got it okay i think the more surprising thing at this point is it's almost you know i'm certainly going to uh live to regret this but it appears at this point that the market's going to be up tomorrow almost either way and if you look at what the market was saying last week uh you know just yet another surprise um the market is celebrating the fact that this is a close election um but you know if it's a uh if it's a contested transfer of power and we have a you know there's there's certainly a lot of room for uncertainty uncertainty to still be injected into this but it likes the fact that we whether it's biden or trump uh who pulls out the presidency is certainly liking the fact that it's going to be a close election right now just to give people an indication fox news has joe biden at 227 electoral votes and trump at 204 the new york times is at 213 and 136 for trump the senate on the new york times is 44 dems 45 republicans and i don't know how we're supposed to tr who we're supposed to trust here there's a senate the senate on fox news is 45 democrat 44 republican so this is a dead heat which i think could lead us towards the great reconciliation which is if trump comes out of office biden becomes the elder statesman biden reaches across the aisle we have a massive balance of power in the senate everybody's forced to work together in order to get anything done am i correct in my reading of this as a non-political expert well what you're describing is the great gerontocracy we'll have 78 year old biden negotiating 79 year old mcconnell and schumer is what 74 75. pelosi's over 80. cindy hoyer her deputy is over 80. so who do we have in the death pool because two or three of those are dying in the next four years oh so i don't mean to make it dark but i mean just looking at mcconnell and his bruised hands and lips and everything uh something's eating him alive i'm not exactly sure what it is but uh that's a bad bad scene yeah is that on the betting markets phil that's not on the betting markets and by the way the other direction you're talking about trump who's 74 negotiating i mean you know it's it's we've got to get younger in our political leadership across the board uh it's there it's ridiculous who who had a better chance of beating trump would bernie elizabeth warren or booty judge would one of those three if you had to pick one of those three and i think it's one of those reads or you could pick your other which one would have performed better brad you said i was brad on mayor pete for sure i'm with brad on that one yeah so bill you believe mayor pete would have had a better performance he would have been more inspiring he would have been more energy i i think that there is a lot of people that want what brad talked about which is someone who's who's rational and calm and and centered and i also think that if you look at the history of of presidential campaigns um most americans favor an outsider and i i attribute that to personally to them feeling like washington's on the hook and been bought and you know biden would be an outlier for a lifetime senator there was a lot there was a lot of excitement around obama there was a lot of excitement about reagan who came you know from hollywood there was a lot of excitement about clinton so you know a lot of governors a lot of a lot of first-time senators is what you tend to see and so pete fit that mold why some youth and some charisma would be nice uh and and david of the two davids and michael who do you think would have put up the best fight because tonight if biden does win and it's feeling maybe like that it's going to happen so it's clearly a jump ball here it's any it's coming down to the last 30 sec last minute of the game if biden does lose who would have been the candidate that would have beaten trump if there was another one who would have had the next best chance david's well biden's still looking pretty good right now so i don't know that there i don't know that there was somebody better but i do agree that i always was most impressed with buddha judge out of the candidates in the sense that i thought he was the most articulate i thought he was the best debater i thought he was the best on tv and he knew how to reach for the center and he had the kind of obama thing of having identity politics working for him but without making a big deal out of it um and um and so yeah i mean what you mean by that mr sachs well he's he's gay he'd be the first gay president but he's not making that an explicit part of the reason to vote for him and but it would have been a first and his voters would know that but he doesn't want to you know he doesn't want to run on the idea of identity politics and so so he's not leading with that he's not leading with it i think that's a smart way to play it it's you know obama was obviously being an incredibly important first but he didn't lead with that as the reason why you should vote for him um so to a certain extent hillary did lead with that hillary was going to be there i'm with her you know her was the slogan yeah and i think a lot of people did want to make that first but i think you have those votes you need to make the case to everybody else so yeah i think he he's a great political athlete and um you know someone's got probably a bright future in the democratic party i'm seeing some people on twitter say that biden's now becoming the favorite but i just checked betfair it's uh basically 1.1 it's very close now kind of crazy this is going to come down to one this is going to come down to pennsylvania and michigan and it's going to take days to do those counts and we're probably going to end up in the courts who would have done a better job here look i mean the market already voted right it voted for for biden he is the the leading candidate i don't know if anyone else would have outperformed biden at this point i think you know the next in line was a very different ideology and that's bernie and um you know bernie really is the contrast to um you know the points that we were making earlier you either think that the way forward is to have the government leave me alone or to wrap me up in a blanket and give me a hot cocoa and rub my feet and bernie sanders is the you know the guy in middle school who runs for class president and tells you the vending machines are all going to be free if you elect me um and that's a broadly you know like everyone votes for that guy and let me uh let me ask you a question brad that i build off of david i just think the mayor pete by the way let me just say i think mayor pete is a great articulate thoughtful guy and he's certainly appealing to those of us who want to have a thoughtful well-articulated response to the problems we're facing but i think that there is a guttural kind of you know innate um drive that folks want they either want free [ __ ] or they want to be left alone and you know you you're going to need to appeal to one of those two motives brad how would you have voted had your choice been and i'm going to go around the horn on this so everybody gets a chance to think about it except really brad brad if you had the choice yep elizabeth warren slash bernie hardcore socialist let's go with bernie since i think he's even more on the socialist side or trump could you have conceived of voting for trump over bernie or would you have voted actually voted for bernie sanders take your time and you can think out loud when you answer no i mean i i have to say that um you know i have a nine and 12 year old boy boys and um the conversation we had is it's not just about what you stand for it's about how you stand for it character it's character and i just couldn't tolerate uh trump's character either in my own life my own level of anxiety or or standing for that you know and and telling my boys that that's a okay way to lead and so for me i was willing to vote against my own interests and taking comfort in the fact that four years under any president is not enough to really change the arc of uh of of the country um but to send a signal that you know how you lead matters in this country and uh a rejection of this form of leadership yeah but brad if you didn't think that bernie sanders policies would actually i mean if you thought they would actually pass everything you wanted to do you couldn't conceive that of voting for trump yeah i mean you know again like i would just say that i would have bet that the system that we have would have been slow enough in moving that that bernie would not have been you know that when weighing those two evils right that you know again for me socialism versus trump are your twitter i can i can tolerate the mean-spiritedness perhaps myself um but you know like i'm trying to you know i think it is important that we we say that like this is not what we stand for this is not a an honorable way to lead and and certainly when it comes to sitting around the dinner table every night and talking to them about the way i expect them to behave in their form of leadership you know that that mean-spiritedness just didn't work for me would anybody else like to answer that question or is it just well i'm not going to disagree with any of that but i would just like to point out i'd like to ask a question actually which is if if this president was so bad that he had to be impeached why wasn't that a campaign issue i don't remember being mentioned once by biden that trump was impeached you would think that impeaching the president would be something you'd want to make a major campaign issue so i just think this idea that trump is the only one who's dishonest and unethical um you know that whole russian insane hoax that they put us through for years they put this whole country through before the guy even took office they were trying to delegitimize his election i mean come on you can't just look at trump's behavior which i agree is outrageous and not look at the other side and say they're doing the same thing and this is like a they're they're sort of like co-equal partners in this chaos that's been uh created david let's suppose they're co-founders in chaos let's be candid all these politicians that we've had to live with in our lifetime are grifters we know that and their kids are grifters putting that aside do you think there is any chance that the russians have not bought an inordinate amount of apartments from donald trump at extraordinary prices are you just making that up or i mean i'm just going with my gut right here yeah qed case in point because you feel it you can now make an accusation that the president has received bribes from the russians i mean come on well we know and actually i i want to i want to bring up the election we all know putin interfered with the election and we all know he interfered on behalf of one candidate okay i i i honestly unless you don't trust the cia unless you don't trust the fbi unless you don't trust our agents really i mean you believe you're still holding the russians every election we've ever had jason we have bob mueller with a team of like 18 like pitbull democratic prosecutors and 50 specialists what happened to matthew fbi agents let me finish who investigated for two years and they couldn't find any collusion i mean and you're still hanging on to this this insane fallacy and you're wondering why the american people are turning against why they're willing to vote for trump again come on can't you see the insanity of the other side well i mean i did see manafort go to jail and pay a 25 30 million dollar fine and i did see that trump's kids took the meeting with the russians to try to set up a secret back channel so while they might not have been smart enough or effective enough to actually collude there certainly was a lot of graph going on this is this is this is on the level if not worse than the whole hunter biden hard drive story which i thought was 100 which i thought was a ridiculous story an attempt to smear up biden come on for you to lay this integrity issue on trump alone which i agree there's some truth there and not lay it on his democratic inquisitors in the senate who put in the house who put us through this impeachment hooks for two years come on we're starting to sound a little like am radio let's get it we did go there no sax is a free thinker i like this he's a free thinker but it's like you guys but we're but this word impeachment this entire campaign all sacks is saying is own both sides of this uh can you say the word impeachment impeachment i just said okay there we go i was wondering what happened to that word you know normally no i know nick can you please throw georgia back on the map please are you guys seeing this that that now they're tipping georgia back to uh biden who is this is insane where well they're also saying that arizona may have been prematurely called for biden so arizona may be back in play for trump that was really weird that they called arizona so early wasn't it and only fox only fox has done it i think yeah nick where do you have how do you have georgia reporting right now how much is in right now uh yeah click on georgia just for a second we have 81 percent yeah the times had it flip on at 9 13 p.m i have a screenshot which shows biden plus four and then north carolina is now just trump plus 1.1 michael well in arizona when they show that everybody's reporting it's precincts reporting right it doesn't show uh mail-ins or by precinct or mail-ins or at the state level well a precinct will have both mail-ins and uh election day votes and when they and when they say 81 of precincts reporting that doesn't mean that 81 of precincts are finished reporting it's a very misleading uh number because what it means that 81 percent of precincts have reported what they have but it doesn't mean they're finished counting necessarily right so you know atlanta is probably the precincts in atlanta have probably reported some vote in fact we we see that when we click on it but there's obviously a lot of outstanding vote in georgia there could be outstanding vote uh in some precincts in north carolina as well and they at this point once you get into the 95 and above range they do tend to be uh urban centers that are that obviously have a lot more vote to count it gets late at night they go home uh they finish in the morning or three days later if you go zoom in on arizona please 76 percent of voting reporting i mean how is this possible 54 basically i don't know but in all those things you're going to have the intensity you had around hanging chads in dade county you're just gonna have like massive tension and drama around counting each of these last things yeah we're gonna have five floridas you knew 2020 would do this on the way out the door yeah so so arizona they counted all the absentee ballots for the mail-in ballots first but the in-person voting hasn't been counted yet so you can't call that state if they haven't counted all the in-person because trump's going to do better with you know election day ballots i agree it's pretty premature well it depends on whether they're considering phoenix is part of that right okay why is nevada only reporting one percent yeah local news there are now groups of people gathering at oakland city hall so they they go there when like what night aren't they riding in oakland i mean come on in berkeley they smashed a pizzeria window they do it every other week hey hey guys i wanna i wanna just discuss an idea i have that might be a little bit cheeky but since jkl and i were getting into it before i kind of wanna i want to talk about it a little bit um okay let's do it which is i i've called the trump derangement score um which is if you go to twitter that yeah trump derangement score which is if you go to twitter and search trump from your username it'll show you how many tweets you've you've published that you've posted that mention the word trump and um so i did this before the show to see which bestie had tweeted the most and see what the score was and my sense is like if your your score is like zero to ten you haven't really paid a lot of attention to trump it's probably like very healthy and then if you're in like the 10 to 30 range you're paying a little bit more attention but this could be a normal interesting here it comes here hold on if you're in like the 30 to 50 range i think you pretty much are infected there's two strains there's kind of the magus strain and then there's the resistance strain but clearly you've tested positive for trump derangement syndrome and then i would say there's kind of like an advanced level where um you can't even count how many tweets there are you've got to like scroll and like you keep scrolling and you can't even get to the bottom and that's that's like a level of infection where you need to immediately quarantine yourself and um so anyway i i i did this and uh anyway the winner actually was freeberg freeburg only had he had a score of one he literally only had one tweet mentioning trump for the last four years i only had eight but in fairness five of them were posted yesterday to advertise this this pod so um my one was during this podcast by the way yeah jamaat at 20. i had 12. you had about 20 about 20 yeah and then jkl you you were in scrolling territory i couldn't even i couldn't even count i gave up well i i feel for you i really feel for you that you're hurting over this election like you know i don't like i'm not trying to make fun of you or see you hey guys guys another just another quick update here that um uh dekalb county fulton county and cobb county in georgia are pro-democrat they're huge uh and they're at 31 58 and 70 and if you play these out there's somewhere between 400 and 500 000 uh potential incremental votes for biden which would eke out georgia for biden potentially according to just this last just looking at fox news i think that they're trolling the libs because they have trump at 210 and they have joe biden at 237 uh the the new york times has let me just make sure i'm refreshing here and have the latest data 213 to 145. so fox is aggressively calling electoral votes at a level that the new york times is is far behind like behind by 50 at least a hundred what what is the explanation of this wow uh i this is i mean this is that's um msnbc 205 electoral votes for joe biden which uh nbc has been the most conservative overall what happens if it's tied it can tie right we still have that scenario on the table 269 269 uh uh yeah there's probably a way to to get there uh let's see well interestingly uh biden did not get that one district in omaha nebraska that he had targeted that obama won his first time that would give you one electoral vote in in nebraska nebraska and maine both you get you get uh two for winning the state and you get one for each of the congressional districts so while while biden was not going to play in overall in nebraska he had a shot at omaha and that 270 268 scenario we talked about earlier could have potentially been 269 269 if that omaha district was in play but the polling really missed michael just to jump in uh bg girl girly's gotta hop off boys say bye girl thanks for having me i appreciate it speaking of bill gurley uh how about texas i mean i think i think texas is definitely going to be republican right michael yeah that one's trending far away from biden he looks like he's down about 500 thousand how many points is that no one's called that yet right it's bizarre that florida and texas are still listed as uh uh right so that could explain what jkl's looking at between the disparity and yeah i don't blame fox if if fox called texas i don't blame them but i think arizona yeah that might that might that would explain your difference jacob texas and florida yeah fox yeah that's 60 67 votes right there yeah that explains it yeah so the new york times has not called florida or texas the new york times had florida at 98 percent i think it's like 99.59 or something right if you add uh 38 for texas 29 for florida you're 67 67 until the 145 puts you at 212. and joe biden at 2 13. which was one point difference ralph warnock and kelly loffler and a runoff for the senate seat in georgia that's just incredible i mean hey guys a comment and then a question uh looks like the washington post is projecting that california approved prop 22. yeah um so there is a uh that's the first one is that due to uber speaking right now i think right do we have to try is not speaking yet but he's he's getting applied to speak the implied volatility on uber stock at the close today was 14 but by the way every ballot initiative in san francisco the city level ballot initiatives passed one of them the prop h was good all the rest were a disaster so stanford so the the state-level ballot initiatives were pretty good news for california but san francisco okay not much so you know in in terms of what we were talking about earlier about creating a more busi business friendly environment unfortunately what happened in san francisco i think california as a whole is positive with prop 22 prop 15 failing um but every single crazy ballot initiative in san francisco pass so it's just getting crazier and i don't know if you did this in your household but with my ten-year-old brad i went through my wife and i jade we we went through each of the uh ballot initiatives as many as we could we listened to little encapsulations of what they were and we talked about the stem cell one and i just thought why is california which is losing all of these businesses adding to the tax burden stem cell research and why isn't that being done by the private sector if there is a huge prize to be had with stem cell why would we have california send billions of dollars on this when we're losing all the this government i'm wondering uh you know how how people thought about something like that like the stem cell did you vote for that david to continue to have california flip the bill for stuff by the way just before you answer david i took the pages of the ballot initiative and i use them to keep my white truffles from developing humidity i mean basically the truth of the matter jason is that when when i don't understand a ballot initiative i just vote against it and i didn't really understand that the stem cell balance initiative or why even why if that was a spending priority why it couldn't just be handled by the state you know the legislature i didn't understand why that needed to be a ballot initiative so you know i feel like ballot initiative like i'll support them when this in the state legislature does something wrong like 202 is a perfect example where you know lorraine or whatever the had this tremendous amount of power passed this crazy ab5 and the people had to overrule that um so i feel like that's where like these balances make sense is when you want to overrule the legislature but you know it's kind of crazy for to be passing these laws directly when you know we don't know that much about them concur i mean the founders had this vision of representative democracy not direct democracy and that's generally a good idea so jason i don't know you have to kind of like what director the results that direct democracy has produced tonight the initiatives may be saving us from ourselves since we don't have in this state unfortunately a viable republican party to represent us uh this the initiatives may be our last line of defense well i think i think you're right in terms of overruling things but like in in san francisco you know every single about initiative path and i think most of them are well there's no saving san francisco we all knew that well i don't like hearing that come to l.a baby we got a few more years at least um what is the consensus viewer seems to be the markets are still up nasdaq futures up 280 still what what causes us to wake up tomorrow or the next day and have the futures down three four five hundred bits there's there's one thing and so far it hasn't happened and if we avoid it we're going to fade a really big out here um which is trump declares victory right now i think that is the disaster scenario because i think biden's gonna get up there he's not going to say much of anything he'll be very kind of down the middle you know kind of let's take a wait and see approach we're waiting until tomorrow there's a lot to go grind it out blah blah blah but if trump comes out and says we won we're done let's move on it's going to be uh panic because look i mean he's you can't certify georgia apparently right so you know there's a there's a path where there's seven or eight states that have to go through on a meticulous recount i think this thing is back to a coin flip i mean trump now has to win georgia michigan and pennsylvania in order to win the presidency if biden wins any one of those three states he wins he has to be a three for three in georgia pennsylvania and michigan three four three and now well but we're saying that may they may become ungod um so if if he loses georgia he loses if he loses pennsylvania he loses michigan he loses assuming he's already um lost wisconsin and um and arizona so hey guys biden's coming out but my analysts just run this analysis if biden wins ann arbor and detroit by the same percentage as 2016 that's 420 000 biden incremental votes versus the three hundred thousand current trump lead right just implying he wins michigan we feel good about where we are we really do i'm here to tell you tonight we believe we're on track to win this election we knew because of the unprecedented early vote in a mail-in vote that's going to take a while we're going to have to be patient until we the hard work of tallying votes is finished and it ain't over until every vote is counted every ballot is counted but we're feeling good we're feeling good about where we are we believe one of the nets has suggested we've already won arizona but we're confident about arizona that's a turnaround we also just called it from minnesota and we're still in the game in georgia although that's not one we expected and we're feeling real good about wisconsin and michigan and by the way it's going to take time to count the votes we're going to win pennsylvania come on there it is talking folks in philly allegheny county scranton and they're really encouraged by the turnout of what they see look you know we can know the results as early as tomorrow morning but it may take a little longer as i've said all along it's not my place or donald trump's place to declare who's won this election that's the decision of the american people but i'm optimistic about this outcome and i want to thank every one of you who came out and voted in this election and by the way chris coons and the democrats congratulations here in delaware hey john you're the gov yeah like the whole team man you've done a great job i'm grateful to the poll workers to our volunteers our canvassers everyone who participated in this democratic process and i'm grateful to all of my supporters here in delaware and all across the nation thank you thank you thank you and folks you heard me say it before every time i walk out of my grandpa's house up in scranton he yelled joey keep the faith and my grandma when she was laughing oh no joey spread it keep the faith guys we're gonna win this thank you thank you thank you oh my god well there you go guys before before before we just i just want to give a big shout out and thank you to brad gerstner um thanks brian incredible investor and person and thinker thank you bg for uh being on the call thanks for having me guys really appreciate it incredible and thanks to bill gurley who stepped in and phil hellmuth uh this has been a great first time effort uh we we we had uh i think about 4 000 of you at the peak here and and certainly five or six thousand over the night this was an experiment i think a successful one um and of course i'm speaking about this country america what a successful experiment it has been jason jason you can unclench your your nether regions because i think we're going to be okay you think we're going to be okay yeah it's very tight anyway see you guys good night thank you yeah all right thank you i'm changing my prediction to scenario three biden president let's do that as we rap besties i'm still sticking with biden i'm still sticking with biden okay trump just tweeted that i will be making a statement tonight a big win so we we're either in scenarios well i mean two three and four two three and four are all still four just for i don't know if the viewers remember scenario one was a buying landslide that's clearly not happening two was um was basically um what was was um trump pulling a big upset that's still on the table i'd say probably 49 chance for right now 40 45 chance uh then you've kind of got the scenario three was the soft landing where biden wins the presidency but the republicans take the uh the senate and i think it's probably like the 51 and then scenario four was the [ __ ] show that was a totally inconclusive outcome and here we are here we are so i mean the reality is i think this thing i mean i think it's probably at the end of the day 51 49 in favor of biden right now but we probably have at least three more days and maybe a bunch of court cases yeah this could this could be really bad i mean we may not know who the winner is until december and this may require another supreme court case i think we'll know within a week who won but it's going to be a it's going to be a white knuckle kind of week yeah well no i think we're gonna know it tomorrow yeah exactly i think we're gonna know tomorrow i'm with trump i i i guess you know i guess based on the electoral map i'd say it's 51 49 in favor of biden at this moment okay so sax wants biden to win uh friedberg where are you at the end of this [ __ ] show i was known as 2020. i was looking at which island in hawaii i want to go to i'm looking at austin and then just to uh look at our final the dots are getting a little better for trump i wonder yeah who the hell knows yeah this has been an incredible evening i feel better about the market reaction i feel like you know those of us who operate businesses and try and build businesses and you know have employees and all the stuff i mean i'm disappointed in san francisco it's a [ __ ] [ __ ] show of the city but uh i feel good about the fact that markets are taking this well and it you know means businesses will continue to operate and find funding and shout out bill lee in hawaii muthi what's your pick and then j cal and then we're we're going to bounce yeah i have to go with the math i think trump a dollar 60 is pretty significant so i have to pick that direction and i'm going by all right everybody this has been a special edition of the love you besties thank you michael thank you thanks for having me i enjoyed it thank you later guys the poker table soon hopefully soon yes bye bye






hey everybody welcome to another all-in podcast this is an all bestie no guestie episode of all in the last time you heard from the besties it was election night and it was a [ __ ] show a [ __ ] crazy [ __ ] show let's be honest i mean we if we go back and look at that historical document we had moments where we thought trump was gonna absolutely crush then we had moments of confusion and now here we are and i think we have to give a couple of uh bestie kudos to uh first off chamoth pointing out pennsylvania was gonna be big and then second when we went through the possible scenarios of who wha what could possibly happen a big giant blue wave uh trump winning it all and then maybe something in the middle option three came through and that was sexy poo nailed it i think that was your assumption saks the soft landing the soft landing yeah so why don't we just for the people who didn't tune in live sorry jason can i ask you a question sexy poo sexy was that your um like projection or was it from that from that guy who lives in his dad's basement his mouth yeah newman uh you and i worked worked together on on those takes but yeah the the take that we thought was was possible but probably unlikely but could represent a really good scenario was the the soft landing where you get a split decision and i think that's what the american people voted for um you know you had the democratic frame on the election was that we needed a return to normalcy and decency the republican frame was at the radical left could not be trusted with power and voters basically said they were both right they sort of surgically removed donald trump while thwarting the radical left's dream of total control in washington and what the electorate seems to be saying is they want the parties now to work together instead of voting for extreme ideology but tbd sacks i mean georgia's still up for grabs they're gonna go after it hard right i mean they just they filed in pennsylvania yeah so i think there's a series of core challenges we can talk about i think that they're unlikely to prevail very very unlikely i think joe biden will be the next president um we can kind of compare this to you know uh bush v gore uh from 2000 and if you you want to compare trump's case to gore's case it's weaker in every respect i mean first of all with bush v gore uh gore only had to overturn one state which was florida whereas trump has to now contest and overturn three or four states simultaneously second you know gore was within a few hundred votes of bush it was extremely close trump is no closer than about 12 000 votes in in georgia that's the closest one third you know um gore uh or or bush never trailed uh gore in in any in any recount and um and and trump has that problem that he's never um and he he's very far behind gore as well so you look at those three things and you'd say you know gore couldn't overcome it and he had a closer situation than this and of course i'd say finally you know a w had uh the velvet hammer james baker working for him whereas trump frankly has rudy giuliani who's throwing press conferences in the parking lot of forces and landscaping between a dildo shop and a crematorium uh i mean you can't make this stuff up i think somebody was tweeting you know it's this is perfect because you know they were saying they wanted rudy to [ __ ] off and die so it was so appropriate that this press conference was held between a dildo shop and a crematorium so you know it's not exactly the a team that trump's got playing for him here in in the courts but i mean david bossie by the way david bossie who's in charge of the whole thing david bosse is not even a lawyer and then he gets government so now he's on the sidelines i mean just there's so many angles we can take here um including the fact that am i correct that trump's campaign advisor got covered like the day after or he's no no mark meadows staff got it but david bossie who's in charge of this whole recount process got coveted as well okay so i want to just shift us now to what could have so many things went right for the democrats but there was also something very clear here that happened which is the what i call the uh hsp the hysterical socialist party of america i think was dealt a a death blow if you look this was very close and so you know even if we want to talk about the electoral college et cetera these are still very low numbers i believe if the pfizer news comes out last week trump wins or if any combination of aoc by aoc bernie or warren were in any way involved in this election process and weren't pushed to the side the squad was squashed because we knew that if they got any kind of play trump sells into victory so when we look at what happens going forward and i'll i'll let any one of the three of you take this what does this say about the hysterical socialist party the hsp the squad the bernie bros what does this say about them well you have a you have a look you have a you have a loud group of people on both sides and the reality is that both extremes of both parties actually after this election have very little to stand on that's unique because if you think about what the plurality of americans want is actually just a common decent centrist do no harm alternative and they're going to pick that more times than they're not going to pick it it's only when things get extreme like in 2016 in order to send a message will they do it um and until it's resolved they tried to do it again now so we should actually talk about that i don't think that this was you know a runaway it was way too close on too many dimensions that actually matter for the future prosperity of america but that being said what does it mean for the future i think the future is like a pete butterjudge must be high-fiving you know the people in his camp right now because a common decent thoughtful centrist uh platform will win for example like let's just say you believe in gay rights guess what you don't need to be at the fringes to believe in that that's mainstream you believe in like a reasonable form of healthcare that's mainstream if you believe in climate change it's mainstream you start to go and tick off the things that the extremes would want to believe there's very little room for them to stand on so one party is going to be basically about like a federalized nanny state and the other party will be a bunch of conspiracy theorists crazies and i think it's going to force more and more people to the middle i think that's the future to me that's that's a much safer place to be than i think where we could have been if you know trump had won or if the extreme left had basically been um been validated with a candidate that won right and i would add to that that the the proof of that the proof of the elector's desire to attack towards the center is you look at the down ballot uh elections so you know in the senate the republicans are still holding on to a majority pending the florida um runoff but the the democrats failed to take out susan collins tom tillis steve daines these were three incumbent republicans who were way behind in the polls heading into election day uh they didn't come close to taking out lindsey graham or mitch mcconnell despite their names gee get out of this one alive explain that susan collins no lady g lindsey graham oh i see you know uh lindsey graham they said that it was neck and neck and he actually ended up winning that state by like 14 points it wasn't close uh the polls were wildly off and um and you saw that across across the board in the house too democrats expected a gain of 10 to 15 seats instead they've lost about 10 seats they failed to defeat a single gop incumbent the gop house members ran about two or three points ahead of president trump um and that and then the democrats were completely shut out in texas which was supposed to be going purple there were eight open gop seats democrats won none of them so this you know so anyway i'm providing some support to the idea that this was a split decision election the voters voted to remove both of the or to voted against the extremes of both parties so friedberg when you look at this you see i think an absolute um just people don't want to deal with trump anymore how much of this do you think is trump derangement system as uh syndrome and what got trump into office eventually taking him out which is the guy just takes up too much oxygen in the room and that's coming from me and the guy is just incredibly annoying to have to deal with day to day that's also coming from you and that's also coming from me free burger i i think we've i think we've been at a rave for four years and everyone's like coming down from the mali and you're not going to go to a marilyn manson concert like right after being in a rave like you want to go sit in the parking lot and you just want to chill out a little bit and we all just want to like have a beer and relax you know like i mean i think that you need some 5 htp and a banana you just yeah you you want to go sit in the 7-11 parking lot at four in the morning and you want to like go get a [ __ ] sweet cappuccino smoke a cigarette and relax like it's been it's been too much and i think it's like everyone's just kind of ready to chill out a bit and so this whole [ __ ] swinging back to the you know to the concert across the road sounds just as bad as what we've just been through so let's just you know let's just live our lives a little bit and you know we'll come back in four years and figure out how to [ __ ] things up again i think that's kind of the psyche that's right i think i think voters want a presidency they can forget about you know i think trump's um sort of achilles heel as he demanded too much of the voters constant time and attention there was like this psychic cost to it it obviously antagonized the other side and drove turnout for the democrats but um but it seems like voters are saying look just leave us alone we want to just forget about what's happening in washington for four years and now they can because you know pending the georgia runoff it looks like you know mitch mcconnell and joe biden will have to be in a power sharing arrangement and nothing gets done unless the two of them agree and by the way just on that there was a great uh tweet by paul graham he said the day after the election something to the effect of it feels like some background process in my computer had was just killed that was consuming five percent of my cpu and it's and it's operating system spinning wheel of death but it's it's david is so right it's like you know it's been this omnipresent thing in all of our lives over the last four years and uh it's just exhausting and you know there wasn't that much value that came from paying so much attention and worrying so much and so it's just a great opportunity to come off the sugar high and reset ourselves and take a nap i think that's a various due point chamath in that what what it was gained from this trump derangement from this trump sucking all of the attention and constantly uh tweeting and you know i think the big win here freeberg is if you look the proof is in the pudding trump we we find out on saturday morning that trump is uh you know has lost and biden has won and 48 hours later we find out pfizer has 90 efficacy on their vaccine obviously these two things are highly correlated biden has already delivered the vaccine in just 48 hours and then today we got the rapid testing has been approved by the fda i mean look at this by if at this rate biden's going to cure global warming by the end of the year look um first off i i think it's a little um it is pretty paradoxical that yeah the vaccine news came 48 hours yeah and i don't think it's paradoxical i mean that was crazy i mean you know there's supposed to be an october surprise not a november surprise i think if trump has any legitimate argument about being done dirty in this election it is over this vaccine news because you know the chinese announced that three hours after bayes declared president pfizer announces it a day after uh bayern's declared president i mean you know when trump went around this the um you know was campaigning saying a vaccine was mere weeks away everyone thought that was [ __ ] but as it turns out he was telling the truth and if those guys had announced it jason like you were saying two weeks before the election it might have changed this thing but you guys that might have a hundred percent 100 and this is not something he can go to the courts it's not like he can go to the courts and get the election recounted overturned because of this so it's not something that's legally actionable but i do think that on this news alone trump in four years will be able to claim on some level that this was a stolen election but couldn't the same be said about hillary's uh email server right so like one night news came out like oh and it was like timed around the election and i do think that there was a concerted effort to not let um you know the progress with kovid get in the way of the election in any way you know bias it either way and i think it's like pretty reasonable and fair to say like let's just not make this part of the news cycle leading into the election and this was expected like if you guys go back a couple of podcasts like um you had a prediction on when we would have a vaccine i i think i predicted end of september because of the way that they set up the uh the production cycle in parallel with the testing cycle and the way that they were fast-tracking a lot of the testing in a way that wasn't normal um for this sort of a development and um it was it was gonna happen this fall if i'm an executive at one of these companies i don't want my vaccine to become a politicized event right like i just want to be like i think it's it's the reasonable thing to say like let's just put it on hold let's deal with it all after the election we're still moving forward we're not holding anything up in terms of production and getting this thing across the finish line it's just the announcement of where we are so why make that part of the new cycle you know um and i think like people learned their lesson with hillary's server last time it's like this one used you know bombshell drops in the news cycle spins up and she loses the election everyone blames her losing the election for that coming out no one wants to be culpable for that right i'm a pfizer exec i'm just trying to make [ __ ] medicine like i don't want to be on the hook for said another way someone's winning or losing an said another way chamoth nobody wants to go to a warriors finals game versus the lakers and have the refs call you know decide the game in the final couple of minutes so do you think chamoth this is if you were running pfizer if you were on the board of pfizer and you have this information and you know it can come out in this two-week window at any time what decision would you make chamof well just imagine that the vaccine was 90 ineffective and it was announced two weeks before the election um you'd have an entire cohort of people saying this was meant to basically sabotage the election in the other direction so the point is it's a no-win situation the only answer is to wait until after the election um because that's the only way that you can actually say you know we were not um we were being impartial so um i'm sympathetic to this idea that uh all the news had to wait two or three days um or maybe it was two or three weeks now knowing in advance what the answer was obviously you can read into that but i think even if it was 90 percent ineffective it should have waited till after the election as well exactly i i i just think that i don't get the sense that you do agree with that saks well let's put this way i mean we we know from our time working at large companies that it takes them weeks to even approve a press release and so pfizer had this news weeks ago now i understand their reason for not wanting to appear to be influencing the outcome of the election so i that's why they held on to it i think everybody saw the way that facebook was scapegoated four years ago for the election and no one wants to no corporation wants to put themselves in that position of being accused of affecting the election outcome one way or another i'm sure that's why they did it as opposed to a conspiracy against trump but you know this news was available i think we'll find out weeks ago and so i guess you'd have to blame or or there'd be some culpability on the part of trump's election team or you know his his head of the fda or what have you they must have known some of this information and you would think they would have done a better job getting it out there no he did say at every rally it's just around the corner it's just around the corner we're around the corner and and we all thought it was [ __ ] you thought it was [ __ ] we thought it was [ __ ] right and you know why we thought it was [ __ ] well because trump trump does have a tendency towards hyperbole hyperbole on trump's most honest day he's hyperbolic on trump's average day he is lying incessantly so if anything if he was right and he was right that we were turning the corner and the vaccine was coming and it was going to be beautiful a beautiful perfect vaccine and everybody was going to get it he's paying the price for being a liar for four years right but it's the kind of thing right no no no boy who cried wolf well and so does the media by the way but but yeah look i i in order for a piece of news this big to be believed before the election it can't come from a candidate and it's it's it's pretty amazing that none of this news got out there through some other source you would think that some of the people on the health care task force that trump appointed might have been you know surfacing this or paying attention to it maybe pfizer did a really good job of hiding it i don't know but um it is pretty amazing that it didn't come out sooner well the the other crazy thing is like you know even the pfizer team didn't exactly know what was going on the chief the the head of vaccine research she said we're not part of the federal government's uh you know warp speed program and then uh two days later pfizer was like actually we are part of the warp speed program it's just that you know we're a supplier the whole point is that um i'm not sure that pfizer actually knew two weeks in advance david i think that they were probably trickling stuff together and they probably had a sense of it at the end of the last week i'm surprised it didn't leak to be quite honest that's the more shocking thing which means that um um it was probably something that uh uh very very very few people knew about well the ceo the ceo put out a statement saying that he would be first in line to take the new vaccine which i thought was you know a great statement because a lot of people were questioning whether you know how real it was or how rushed it was but in order for him to do that and and in order just to get like a press release announced i don't think that's the kind of thing that comes together in the you know one or two day period between uh the announcement of joe biden winning the election and their and their announcement so you know i i just think they had to know weeks ago i just want to say to my greek brother alberto borlas the ceo of pfizer a great greek who has led to the saving of the world saganaki is on me if you uh if you if you take 90 efficacy and you assume at most in the united states 40 percent of people will take the actual vaccination you'll have 36 percent of the population covered which is still not enough to get the r naught less than one is that correct free berg what do you think no i don't know i'm not an epidemiologist i'd have to what i mean does it sound directionally correct to you that people in the states are going to take it i mean i think you don't take it isn't this like uh everyone who's high risk will take it yeah and as of about two months ago you know it was estimated that 30 percent of people on the east coast had already developed um uh immunity due to the seroprevalence studies that that showed um antibodies on the west coast it was much lower closer to three percent you could estimate based on the growth in cases since then and assuming we're kind of missing a bunch we're probably on a national basis we're at 10 back then on a national basis you're probably up to 20 right now of um americans have already been effectively immunized by getting the virus so you know if that's true then you're at 55 and you're getting pretty close to a um you know an ability to kind of inhibit this thing from um uh from spreading rapidly again so how do we each feel i'll just go around the horn how do we each feel about the covet 19 end game when will we see all schools open all nba arenas open with no distancing give us a quarter in 2021 when in america enough vaccines will have been delivered and distributed and rapid testing that life goes back to let's call it 85 percent of normal i don't think you ever get there i mean it's like we talked about this a couple episodes ago but it's after 9 11 you know the tsa emerged and american travel never went back to the way it was before um and i think there will be a lot about the way we live that's going to be you know kind of permanently scarred and permanently changed here for a while whether it is taking people's temperatures at football games wearing masks and you know farmers markets who knows there's going to be all these weird rules they're going to pop up they're going to last for years regardless of how much immunization takes place regardless of how cheap and available testing is we're going to have this scar for a long time um in terms of how we live as a society i don't think we should kid ourselves that we're gonna go back to quote unquote normal um and i do think kids are gonna get tested and schools are gonna be like this friggin you know almost like tsas now uh you know kids are gonna go into school and get tested regularly and they're gonna do all sorts of stuff that we would have never dreamed imaginable in a free country a year ago um and i think that's permanent um i think you know we're gonna you're already seeing people going nuts at bars and restaurants and people that have had it are out there partying and living their life again um so there's certainly don't you think if you get the vaccine you're just gonna be like yolo i've had enough of this yeah but i don't think that that systems are going to change uh back to normal i think systems have changed to the point that we've now got a way of living that we think is safer that we think is we we are now kind of inhibited because of this system you agree yeah there'll be a lot fewer it's what dave chappelle said on saturday there will be a lot fewer mass shootings the pandemic has done a great job of keeping the whites at home we watched it all you [ __ ] three out of four besties watched it together all you all you guys go down your mass shooting rampages you know the whites are at home they're frustrated but they're at home thank god uh so i think there'll be some advantages well i mean but let's talk about it your mother does does 2021 mean let's go back to school 2021 september no problem no i think free burger's right i think that the best we'll get back to is sort of this 80 state and i don't think it happens until probably 2022 and maybe 2023 but probably 2022 because you have to remember like we have to ramp up now billions of vaccine production like it's a this is a non-trivial path from here to quote-unquote mass market and uh that takes a long time i think we have to figure out how we're going to administer it by the way it's and and the way that the pfizer vaccine works and maybe these other folks is you get the shot and then you know three months three weeks later i think you get a booster so you have to take two cycles of this thing um and it's not gonna last forever and it's not gonna last forever so this is uh freeberg's right it's the beginning of a very different way of living um i think i think that the the good part about it is that um you know we've made a lot of changes that makes our lives a lot more efficient the bad part about it is we're even more detached from our neighbors and you know we're probably even more likely uh to be a little bit uh more separated if we don't make an effort to be together sacks do you buy this because i get the sense that you might be more optimistic than free berg yeah cha cha i guess i guess i am i think covet is going to be a distant memory by next summer i think we'll have one to two quarters of transition but i think that once the vaccine's widely available plus the treatment of the testings for the people who slip through the cracks um yeah i i tend to think things are going to snap back very fast and kovitt will just be this bad memory a very distant bad memory and i think in fact i think things may bounce back the other way everyone having been cooped up and afraid of getting some life-threatening illness are going to come out of this really wanting to party i think the whole world's going to be like tel aviv for you know a few months or something and um yeah i mean i really do think it's going to bounce back i think to the point politically where a few years from now people could ask wait why why was it again that trump lost you know um you know th this covet thing will be it will be so in the rear view mirror that will wonder why we were so afraid of it i think this is uh i'm going to go with david's sax's position here because of the simple fact that we had 130 000 confirmed cases you know up until this election period the last week or so and deaths still not spiking it's a little just a minor uptick you know we had a day with like uh i think maybe 1500 but still staying in that you know thousand range even with case of spiking and i think that we were so incompetent with test and trace in this country that we didn't see exactly what happens in an authoritarian country or a country that is lucky enough to be an island and has easy borders which we almost do i mean we basically have two borders we're like two-thirds of two you know 50 percent island but hawaii taiwan japan and australia all quarantined people on the way in they tested them and they had extremely extremely low death counts and extremely low case counts with the vaccine being half as effective as you know they claim and rapid testing which some of us have know some of us know people who have experienced rapid testing at homes that combination i believe is going to make this go so low and the people who are high risk are still going to be scared staying home i think like david come the summer of next summer people are going to be at a rave with freeberg's you know custom-made molly or whatever he's making during this downtime going absolutely bonkers i think burning man next year becomes like the the greatest burning man ever it'll be it'll be the burn of of of all burns why was let's shift a bit over to uh the economy what a rip did we see when that pfizer i mean the election and pfizer this week led to a huge rep obviously there's a little bit of cyclical movement the tech stocks were the big winners now people are starting to buy disney back up to 140 i guess people assume the parks will reopen what's our outlook for the stock market in david sacks's you know scenario three you know i don't say gridlock government but forced to compromise government what do we think the markets look like the next two years i think you have to go out saxophone no glasses well i was gonna say gridlock is great for the markets um but both when bill clinton was president with a republican house and when obama was president and there was a republican house and i guess uh center for a period of time gridlock is great for the markets especially given the amount of stimulus that's taken place i mean you had the trump tax cuts especially those corporate tax cuts really set the market on fire and then you've got this pumping by the fed and the treasury all the stimulus money for kovid i mean those conditions and then why is gridlock good we didn't explain that here well because explain to somebody who doesn't understand why gridlock is good why good luck is good well because it creates predictability for business and it means that washington's not going to get in the way and do something to screw up the good times i mean we have fundamentally you know great underlying conditions for economic growth which is we have now pretty low taxes and we had this for better or worse we had this tremendous amount of stimulus fiscal stimulus what we know historically is over the past hundred years right since the 20s independent of republican administrations or democratic administrations you know more progressive less progressive more conservative less conservative during world wars not during world wars the markets go up eight percent a year so the do no harm solution is that things inflate naturally by eight percent especially if those things are public stocks so you know the markets love the fact that there's uh nothing that could theoretically get in the way of that natural eight percent and then when you layer on top of it as david said uh all this free money that's just like rocket fuel jet fuel um but you know but you saw though that there was a rotation right there was a rotation out of these high growth software names particularly the work from home bid kind of got crushed you know i mean i think zoom was off 25 over two days or some crazy thing like that um meanwhile sort of all of these theme park stocks and cruise lines and airlines all of a sudden ripped so i mean look the reality is the scary thing about all of this is if any of that stuff actually comes to pass we're going to see inflation and the reason is because if you start going out and spending a bunch of money on tickets and vacations and flights and this and that and pumping money into the economy and taking all that stimulus money and putting it back to work prices will go up um and by the way that's not such a bad thing for the economy which which needs a little bit of it so um all of this is i think generally very very good news freeberg do you have a position on what you think will happen in the coming let's let's i would think the midterm is what people care most about so that would be let's call it two to six quarters there's one potential speed bump still which is what i mentioned at the beginning which is georgia uh the the democrats could still win both runoffs in georgia for senate and they could um because kamala harris would then have the breaking vote it would be a 50 republican 50 democrat senate and and the vice president would uh would break any ties the question is if you have that same turnout where do the libertarians break because i think the libertarians were almost two percent of the vote well i think yeah what's interesting is um the i don't know if you guys have but i've gotten emails from a lot of people asking me to donate money for this uh uh runoff campaign in georgia i think god i got so many so many i i i think i think we're gonna see literally the biggest um the the biggest funding for a senate runoff race in history by far don't you think saks like probably north of 100 million dollars being spent maybe 100 to 200 million dollars being spent on advertisements in georgia to try and get people to go vote one way or the other the democrats think they have a real run at this they think it's make or break two years to kind of get their you know um uh history changing policies in effect republicans think it saved the the nation time so everyone's rushing to georgia right now um so the markets are going to have a very close eye on what's going on over there i think um i'm you know i'm very nervous about it um if the democrats look like they're getting much more money into the state and they're actually going to you know get people to the polls and um to the voting booths and actually get into this runoff on january 5th and actually flip uh get both of those seats to be uh um to be blue uh it's gonna be a very different market environment i mean you could see the market drop by 30 40 percent uh in the next six we have we have a situation where it's 4848 there are two seats up for grabs those two seats are in a runoff these and i want to get into the exactly let me correct that jason it's 48.50 yes the republicans have a 50 to 48 advantage with two open seats in the runoff actually sorry one one seed is open the other it has an incumbent purdue who's facing ossip purdue won in the last election he got like nine point nine percent fifty yeah if you get fifty percent you get to this runoff in january georgia the only place that has this where you have to get to fifty in order to win yeah it's crazy it's crazy so weird is this just they want the extra attention or who came up with this idea this seems just like every state's got its own history it's crazy it is one of the unique things about living in the united states of america as opposed to america let's talk about exit polls uh well this is what's incredible here let me tee this up for you so in in 2020 um biden got 80 of the black vote trump got six this is aggregate so we can break this down by men and age group and you can it looks even uh even more interesting latinos biden got 67 trump got 22 percent of the latino vote between the ages of 18 to 34 so boomers oh sorry pardon me uh gen z uh and millennials again i would have thought 100 biden it was on it was 62 percent biden 23 went for trump one in four uh amongst women uh and again you know we thought ah okay uh you know suburban women are breaking biden 80 20. it turned out biden got 58 percent of women trump got 35 of all the female vote and the coup de grace whites with a degree um again you would have thought this would have been 80 20 90 10 and said it was 53 biden 38 trump so this really was uh something if we look at this if we look back on this the pollsters were completely wrong in thinking once again that these groups of people are monolithic the the and then i think the most the most mind-boggling to me and and i had a candid discussion about this was um the term latin x is a a catch-all term for people who are of latino spanish-speaking uh descent and what somebody told me who is in this latinx group is that it's the most insulting thing they've ever been told it's almost as a term like the term saying oriental to describe people from asia you're just grouping us all into one thing people from cuba venezuela and mexico all think the same this is the absolute you know end game of identity politics which is we have to put you in a corner we own you we own your opinion and you belong to our party whichever party it is oh you don't have a degree you're a gop hillbilly oh you you're latinx okay well then we own you you're a democrat david what and and i know that this is an area where you know uh you have a lot of expertise what are your thoughts well as it turns out um promoting socialism to people who fled cuba nicaragua and venezuela to escape it uh turns out not to be a great uh election strategy and um and so yeah it's this this idea that latinx is is one block it's not it consists of a bunch of different of immigrants from a bunch of different nations and the ones who fled socialism are not eager to reenact it in the united states the republicans flipped two house seats in south florida where there's a lot of cuban americans and even in the um the heavily uh mexican-american counties uh in along the rio grande and texas uh trump improved uh let's see it looks like he improved um 59 and 30 39 respectively over his 2016 showing so this is not just some fluke of the exit polls um it seems like trump really made progress in a lot of these groups that seemed to defy their you know what what the promoters of identity politics the way that they wanted them to vote um gay americans were another one i think trump improved his share of the gay vote from 14 in 2016 to 28 um this year so um i mean really it's pretty amazing people are not voting the way that they're supposed to vote um trump also improved from 12 to 18 with black men and four to eight percent of black women i mean those are still pretty low numbers but there was improvement there and i think part of the reason is that not all of the african-american community is on board with defunding the police well i also think what it means is identity politics is a stupid strategy forget whether you're offended by it or not at this point what's clear is it's a stupid [ __ ] strategy it doesn't work it's a path to losing because the more and more you do it the more and more you're going to disenfranchise individuals who want to be judged sort of of sound mind and body right i mean if he took a thousand sri lankans and put him in a room and said i'm going to judge you as a sri lankan vote i would tell you to go [ __ ] yourself you know i would be deeply offended by that and this is where i think the radical left is going to have to retool because their theory of how they take power in america is always that demographics is destiny that you know as the country simply becomes more diverse we're gonna they're automatically gonna vote for us and there's a lot of data in this election to show that that's not what's gonna happen you actually have to run on issues that people care about let's think about this in the context of internet advertising right the the the world prior to internet advertising you had um you know uh channels and you would have an audience that was estimated to be made up of some demographic set on that channel and you would buy an ad spot on that channel and that's who you would reach and so you would create a message for that now today we can create personalized ads and personalized messages and uh internet advertisers are much more thoughtful about targeting targeting based on psychographic profiling behavioral targeting and i think that's where politics has to head in the united states it's kind of keeping up with this personalization of both products but also of media and ads and um and i think that's what we're going to see if you listen to james carville who's like you know a classic kind of democratic campaign advisor um and he did a podcast just leading up to the election and if you listen to this podcast these guys are very old school it's like the whites are going to do this and the blacks are going to do that and the the college educator are going to do this and the others are going to do that and they don't realize that the segmentation that's possible today i think reveals a lot more about the character of the uh of the population they're basically i think it's such an astute point freyberg they're basically living in the level of granularity of network tv it's like cable tv yeah it's like they got to cable tv and they're like okay bet espn nascar and guess what like like the world is much more complex individuals have found their own personal voice and they found their own personal voice through social media through instagram through this ability to kind of define themselves not fit within a cohort and i think that's what maybe they always did feel that way and we just had never had the technology to get there yeah but i think it's i think it's also about people like people have complex points of view you know the four of us sit here and none of neither of us none of us identify as a party anymore we all identify with with um certain uh points that we think are important to us individually and then we have a point of view on those points and i think that's the case for the majority of the population in the united states i don't think people are like i'm just a [ __ ] democrat no matter what and i'm a republican no matter what people care more deeply in a more complex way and i think politics needs to resolve to that um and and that's going to require a shift in how you communicate how you message how you get feedback how you drive um uh blocks for voting and uh it's gonna it's gonna uh you know be a really interesting change over the next 15 to 20 years and it may be what saves the republic i i think this is an incredible observation it might be the observation of the episode and i just want to point to a tweet i did because i this is this election has really led to me doing um two things one i've been just thinking deeply about what do i actually understand about americans in america um and then i also you know there's all these red pills around so i decided i would crush up a red pill and i would just you know put a little on my finger and i try a little red pill for a second uh and everybody told me i've been repelled now on twitter and that i'm a trump fan i am not i hate the guy i think it's horrible but i i did this quick survey here i said if you voted for trump i want to understand what percentage of your vote vote was based on the combination of a canceled culture b identity politics c socialism d coastal elites telling you how to live explain other issues that contributed in a reply i.e spending immigration sc the supreme court et cetera and i just said zero percent one to 25 26 to 50 at over 50. and and i got 12 000 votes go ahead and look at the results not the replies but go ahead and vote it doesn't matter which one you pick over 50 of people who voted for trump and i know this is unscientific it's my followers but it's definitely feels directionally correct the people who felt 26 to over 50 percent was part of the cancel culture identity culture was what they were trying to communicate with their vote well this is this is such an important thing because i think this is what we're fighting over the every single 70 of them no every single election going forward like if you if you put this on top of the 70 odd million people that voted this kind of roughly makes sense which is that you know there's probably about 20 million people who will completely vote democrat no matter what and 20 million people who will completely vote republican no matter what their their just eyes are closed their ears are closed they don't care but when you take those people out there's this enormous amount of people in the middle who have the ability to vote a split ticket you know and as and as as saxxypoo said like they'll vote uh a democrat into the white house but then down ballot they'll vote a bunch of republicans and they'll just make sure there's a balance of power so they've been telling us about this kind of centricity for years and so if you want to win an election you do two things part one is you understand this dynamic that centrism wins and part two is what friedrich says which is you understand that we need to enter sort of the google cpc world of political advertising and really cater not just the ads but also the message to individual people and stop the um you know the cat the gross high level categorization which isn't working anymore yeah and and and jason let me can i add um that the connection between cancel culture in this election so you know obviously the pollsters got everything completely wrong and again again and but the reason is because of cancel culture so in exit polling 45 of republicans with college degrees expressed fear that their careers could be at risk if their views became known compared to only 23 democrats saying that and so there were these you know quote unquote shy trump voters who are afraid to tell pollsters what they really think now it wasn't the trump voters that you think of when you see the pickup trucks and the convoys go by or the rallies sort of the those those were the voters from 2016 who weren't counted it was sort of the non-college blue collar voters the michael moore uh you know people who turned out for trump and big numbers and weren't properly counted four years ago the pollsters actually counted those people correctly this time the people they completely underestimated was actually the white college vote who swung for a lot of swung from democrat to republican they voted for trump because of this issue and they were afraid to say anything about it because they're afraid of getting canceled and by the way they they are every other person everybody listening to this podcast works with and so deal with that one right exactly anybody who's not actively virtue signaling on twitter for biden is a trump voter i'm not sure that's exactly correct but roughly i think it's wrong roughly you know if people aren't exp if people in tech aren't explicitly endorsing uh biden on twitter they're probably closet from voters it is going to be very interesting for people to go back to offices because now we have had a resolution and identity politics cancel culture and extremism on both sides hysterical and trolling trolling republicans hysterical libs this has been a loss for both of those parties and now the pandemic is ending we're going to be back in offices at some point i mean what is office culture going to be like are people going to go with the brian armstrong let's just get work done here let's not talk about politics it's just too charged or not um it's going to be a very interesting it's every it's every comp it's every company's right you know it's every company's right to care about what they want to care about every board every ceo every controlling shareholder and then it's every employee's right to vote with their feet about whether that's okay or not and i think that look i i mean the whole brian armstrong thing again just to say one of the most pathetically poorly written you know pieces of english prose i've ever [ __ ] seen you know he's a crypto in fairness my dog my dog is my dog he's not a coder he's a she's a ceo my dog slamming his her paw on the keyboard would have created a better prose than that but he was coming from a reasonable place he had the right to say what he said um the problem is that it's so antithetical to what you're allowed to believe for example living in san francisco um but i think that that's going to change because you can't ignore every other person telling you that there are meaningful economic issues that matter and that the prioritization and the policing of these you know sort of high-value social signaling issues are no longer a priority and i think that what's going to happen is there will be room for a party that focuses on that uh and a group of people but they will be relegated just like on the other side uh that will happen to the republican version of that as well i i just think this whole thing to this honestly for me it was it seems like such a tight election it is but i really think the huge winner here is centrism 100 i i i i agree with that and i i would say that this election proves that brian armstrong was right because the average american is tired of these highly charged political situations and the last thing they want to do is have these conversations at work where they can get reported to where they can offend their co-workers and get reported to hr they can make them feel unsafe they don't want to have these conversations at work certainly by the way only five percent of coinbase's employees took armstrong up on that offer to leave so the number of people who actually want to have a politically charged workplace is very very small they're just the noisiest they're the squeakiest wheel i mean and that was a ridiculous deal i mean what did he say six months and we invest he made it really attractive to leave if you didn't agree with this possibility was that was that written because i couldn't figure that out yeah it was written it was an attractive deal to leave if you wanted to leave and ninety-five percent chose to yeah did i say it was poorly written i didn't understand it because it was so hollywood so anyway so 95 percent stayed so my point is just the number of people who actually like this highly polarized politically charged situation in which we're all arguing with our friends over politics and children are divorcing their parents because they're not woke enough i mean people don't want to live in that kind of country anymore and i think this is the thing that joe biden really got right in his campaign i mean this is why i mean this is the only way that his basement strategy could actually work and results in him getting elected is people actually do want this return to normalcy do you know who the biggest loser is going to be coming out of this i think not when you think holistically about the ecosystem it's going to be the media because they have made an absolute fortune over the last four or five years picking aside what is the point of watching rachel maddow january 20th what is the point of tuning into fox news or reading the hysterical opinion page of the new york times all of these places that were being propped up by either trumpism or anti-trumpism are now going to find themselves where they started which is not a job without a job and we just wanted you to tell us the news and terrorism straight there was a great new york times have an opinion page rip the opinion page out of the new york times rip it out of the wall no no no no no no i i no i disagree i think the opposite happened which is that opinion page was meant to be where people could have an opinion so that everything else was fact and the problem is that all the other pages became opinion as well and nobody told anybody but yes i don't think that but nobody can tell the difference and look at that nobody can tell the difference that's right they can't tell the difference and look at that expose about how barry or barry weiss was run out of the new york times it basically the activists ran her out um and the the reality is activists have completely captured the new york times and cnn and msnbc and there is and they always had fox and the new york times they always had fox but but now we have no objective neutral media and so who's going to call the election i mean you complain about the fact that trump is sowing dissent but who is the universally trusted uh spokesperson for neutrality the way that walter cronkite was when he could just declare it and that's the way it is and people believe that's the way it is who did the best job freedberg that night when we were doing that let's reflect on the live stream i have two questions for the live stream number one who is your bestie guestie who who did you think added the most as a guestie and why and then number two we're doing we're doing whatever what we're gonna do we're gonna do a poll a human valuable before i got a lot of feedback on the guesties there's a little girly people can i say one more thing on this stuff brad before before we go there uh there was a there was a really good article in the new york times about maggie haberman right and maggie who's a fantastic journalist but built an entire career it really amplified came to a head in 2016 um and she just scoop after scoop um about trump but the most impelling thing about that whole article was somewhere near the you know a third of the way from the bottom uh she's like look uh at the end of the day uh she said something like i'm dispensable and i know it and it was the most honest thing because it's like despite her popularity and despite sort of you know how big of a stick she carries the reality is sans trump uh there's just nothing to do there's nothing to leak there's there just is not nearly as much to do i did just put in the um the chat here the washington post fox news the hill basically like the full gamut of um of uh of uh media opinion have highlighted that the media generally is the biggest loser of the uh of the 2020 election and i think i i think they've just lost the um uh the faith of their audience and um you know it's it's i mean it's this access point i don't know how many people were you're either looking for objective and you've lost it or you're looking for opinionated and you feel like you're um you know your aligned opinion setting media partner has betrayed you um you know the fact that fox called it for uh for trump and trump's now saying fox is is is a liar the fact that the new york times doesn't feel like they're being objective anymore and they're you know they're running people out of the uh out of the newsroom in general i just feel like we've been disenfranchised um and i think that's uh that's something that's going to be really hard to kind of recover from and resolve and for the love of god can somebody please get i i don't want you to break any laws but however if we could read the slack channel of the new york times reporters leading up to the hundred days of this election that would become the greatest best-selling book of all time to watch the new york times writers bicker with each other sax i mean we could do 10 hours on that no problem let's talk about okay bestie gasting guesties what did you think of our guests i thought they were all great i thought they're all great are we now becoming uh media critics we're gonna now yeah who do we like our own podcasts what are you going for are we why are you yeah jason wants jason wants to throw youth under the bus go ahead jason no no no no no no oh contraire does anyone have a video they want to share person on the podium youth in his place that it was not the it was not the point guard in this case somebody pulled a draymond and pulled she held you at the side and said stop you gotta pass the ball i do you think brad did a great job he had some great insights i think bill gurley had some great insights which i think was just a great really good job of getting some people to rotate in i enjoyed it yeah i thought it was really well everyone was great i'll give a shout out to my bestie newman he was better he was better as a political analyst and all those jokers on cnn and fox and msnbc the dude with the with the map and he kept touching the map and yeah it's like that guy gets paid to do that i can't believe he gets paid to do that i'm gonna get my daughter on cnn she can do that when's the guy on cnn who does that john k john king john king god bless this guy because i don't know how much adderall he's on but i i turned it on at 8am and he was zooming into pennsylvania and he's like oh well of course in 2018 this time 2016. he's like let's zoom out and let's go back to arizona of course in arizona this place i was like is this guy a geography teacher i mean he was amazing and just the dexterity he looked like he was tom cruise a minority report with the fingers i don't know i don't know if i'd call him tom cruise i don't look like tom cruise but the minority report pinch and zoom in and out it was incredible when uh when when does trump call this thing that's a great question well i think he has to run out these core challenges which will take a few weeks but i i predict by thanksgiving um but it may have to go up to the supreme court but he's gonna he's gonna dot the eye dot every eye and cross every t that he's got legally um but he's got like we talked about the very beginning he's got a huge uphill challenge i'd i see the court ultimately ruling against him or throwing it out what is the point david what is it well because why shouldn't he doesn't he's not gonna win no i don't i don't know that he he knows that he he i think it's his right to exhaust every legal uh possibility and let's remember al gore didn't concede for 37 days after the election so i certainly think trump is within his rights over the next few weeks to run this out in terms of what the point is i mean other than the obvious attempt to challenge it legally i do think this is partly a branding exercise by trump um it's a marketing exercise i don't think he's going to come up with enough malfeasance to overturn an election but i do think he'll probably produce a lot of smoke and this is about protecting his brand as a as a winner and you know if he kicks up enough um you know examples of voter fraud or or what have you he'll always be able to say you know years from now that this was it was a stolen election and when you combine the fact that kovid really did drive this this election you could call that chinese election interference if you want the fact that the vaccine is now here already you could call that um you know some sort of election interference he's going to have enough arguments where if he wants to run four years from now um i think he probably gets the republican nomination again what what's the percentage chance chamath that he runs again in four years zero um free berg trump yeah i think he's gonna be making so much money he's not gonna know what to do with himself he's not going back to that [ __ ] torture support your house if you think about the white house like some terrible blumhouse production movie set he's like [ __ ] that i'm not going back there it was awful where is he going where is he going he's going to go to china he's going to shanghai is he going to he's going to launch it you're going to be in new york he's going to buy a law firm because he's gonna need a law firm to keep everyone at bay and he's gonna be probably printing a hundred million bucks a month you know put it at dubai saudi arabia i think yeah i think i think he's definitely gonna launch a media business and uh he'll he'll try to become king maker i think i think he will become a king maker republican politics he will launch a competitor to fox news but it will also be fox news hybridized with a grassroots movement like the tea party and every republican will need to go get his endorsement or they will be primaried by the trump party and i i would not put it aside more could not disagree more i think he's a disgrace i think he will be i think that's not what david said he's gonna come not you david i'm talking about trump i think dave is incredible uh no i think the stuff that comes out after this the deluge the number of sdny suits all the griff and the graft it's all coming out not only is he not going to be a king maker he will not be able to get the backing for this network it'll be breitbart light and it'll be shut down within 24 months he'll fail so miserably that when he walks into a restaurant it'll be like game of thrones shame shame well i i don't i don't i don't think so i think that it's very likely that the donald trump that runs for president in 2024 is donald trump jr oh god no he's horrible the whole republican party has to start over let's end on this pompeo did a press conference is the state department currently preparing to engage with the biden transition team and if not at what point does a delay hamper a smooth transition or pose a risk to national security there will be a smooth transition to a second trump administration all right we're ready the world is watching what's taking place here we're going to count all the votes when the process is complete there'll be electors selected there's a process the constitution lays it out pretty clearly the world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today successful today and successful with the president who's in office on january 20th a minute afternoon will also be successful can i can i just say i don't disagree with the position they're taking it's not immoral it's customary and traditional to concede your election but you know december 15th is the date that congress ratifies the electoral votes uh to determine who the next president is going to be um and these guys are just taking a a very kind of pragmatic um legal line that is not immoral in a way they they believe that they have some case on on what the vote should be the votes are all very close yadda yadda i'm not saying that he's gonna win or by any chance but i don't think that um folks saying like let the votes be counted and let congress do their job of having the states tell them who their electoral votes are going to is uh is an inappropriate position to take i sound like i might sound like some conservative you know trump head but i'm not i think that um these guys i'm what i'm just saying is that these guys aren't that immoral in in kind of asking for that for that you know sorry i also think at the fringes of the republican party this is what you keep all these militia folks and all these other folks at bay is just you show a really methodical um you know um stepping away from the spotlight and i think that this is yeah honestly it's this is a very deliberate safe calming thing to do cause i think there's there's been nothing about the trump administration from 2016 through to this very moment that has been customary or traditional and so i don't know why we all expected him to step in and say like i can see like the way that we've been doing it it would be worse it'd be worse if he had conceded and all of a sudden was holding a bunch of protests and rallies all over the country that but he's not doing anything illegal no one has any legal requirement to concede and um you know and i think as long as these guys on december 15th which is the date that we should all be watching and waiting for as long as these guys do the appropriate thing at that point then um you know that that's the only point in which i would have any sort of concern or worry about what's going on with the transition in the government but sorry i think this is about saving face and saving brand a sexy passenger he'll he'll be out by december 15th meaning right it'll this will all be done yeah i agree and look let's remember that al gore was able to challenge the election result for 37 days without being hysterically accused of undermining democracy so let trump have his day in court it'll play out over the next few weeks i expect that the obstacles he has has to overcome are are too large and he will lose these lawsuits it might go to the supreme court it would not be a bad thing if the supreme court were the ones to make this decision uh they're one of the last institutions that still trusted clearly the media are not and i think that you know trump will accept the result he may not concede but he will accept the result when it comes from the supreme court is there a non-zero chance that he could win on a recount he would have to prove systemic fraud because it's not like florida where there's just one state and a few hundred votes he's gotta overcome over twelve thousand votes in at least three states so that's the issue is is it it's a percent on its sacks if you had to lay money on it oh i mean it's like some ten percent chance i think except 10 chance 1 in 10 you'd give 10 to 1 odds no i'm saying it's under 10 i'm saying it's a very small well here's the thing so bush v gore the um the supreme court ruled seven to two i mean you would have thought it was nine to zero um so clearly there was some sympathizers in bush v gore so hopefully you know it's something like seven to two and um you know we move on i i believe if it gets the supreme court it will be at least seven to two if not eight one or nine zero just because i think trump has a much harder case to prove in florida the issue was simply whether the recount should be allowed to continue james baker went to the supreme court to stop the recount that was in process uh because of the fear that the local corrupt election officials basically steal the election for gore that you know but but but bush was always ahead in that election there was never a time when bush was behind um biden is now ahead in every swing state that matters trump has to now overturn that result in at least three of those states i don't know how thousands of votes by tens of thousands of i just don't know how he does that he has to prove some sort of systemic fraud that took place across the nation that and and look i think from like a marketing or branding standpoint he'll be able to create a lot of smoke i think they will actually find quite a bit of misconduct because i don't think our elections are perfect but will it rise to the standard that the supreme court is going to set for overturning an election i don't think so i don't think so i mean they'll probably find it on both sides there's got to be some crazy well the other trump supporter who has 10 ballots they signed and there'll be some crazy liberal who did this the nuanced issue is whether they can do a constitutionally valid recount by you know the time necessary as well so the longer that this lays on then they'll be forced to basically say no to that also because otherwise it will be effectively throwing out an election and so uh as we wrap here san francisco's uh continues to devolve revenue down 40 percent in terms of taxes budget is double what it's been uh just a few years ago crime is going crazy walmart is closing their stores and leaving because of walgreens i'm sorry walgreens we don't have a walmart here um and there's 20 there's more homes on the market now than there have been too much of anything is a bad thing if you eat too much broccoli it's a bad thing you know what i mean so too much of a single party monoculture is bad whether it's republican or democrat you need a diverse centrist plurality and in the absence of that many cities that veer in one direction or the other will decay and die and san francisco is going to be the tip of the spear for the left's version and there's been a bunch of cities that have already been the examples of the rights version so you know what um apparently the water is warm and they want to join anybody else freedberg i can't i can't find a lot to disagree with there i think san francisco we're basically an atlas shrugged i mean the uh you know half the storefronts are closed they're boarded up uh the city is completely surrendered to the criminal element you can't park your car anywhere in the city without having it getting broken into they won't prosecute people for crimes including uh increasingly violent crimes um the uh you know the the the the city is about to go bankrupt and the entrepreneurs are all disappearing they're all leaving i mean it's right out of the shrugged yeah i mean it's it's the uh the action is the wrong action right so san francisco the biggest disappointment of election night for me was the new business taxes that were passed um for san francisco businesses um and and there was also this like um for for 99.9999999 of people they're going to shrug and say i don't give a [ __ ] but there was this new tax of six percent for homes that get sold over 10 million dollars now uh if you're a successful entrepreneur an investor or a ceo of a company in san francisco and you know it's it's like a slap in the face um you add the business tax with that kind of high-end property tax and it's almost like an invitation to leave the city and some people are nodding their heads wait this six percent is on leaving or buying uh transaction when you sell so you literally six percent off the top uh when you sell a home the city basically just took six percent of my house yeah this the city just took six percent of my house it is now tax they're now a part owner of my house yeah it's an estate tax and so there are people like there are people in san francisco uh who we all know how much warning did you have before they took your bedroom yeah i mean um there's a london breed put some people in sax's third 13th bedroom on the third floor and they're all living there right now but i mean it's okay i got like wings i don't even know about it's like totally it's like richie rich's house or something so nobody cries nobody cries for super rich people and you know but it was so short-sighted is the point right right exactly i'm not complaining about the taxes on me but it's going to do tremendous damage to the city people are not going to want to move here and we yeah yeah i look i've built businesses in san francisco since 2006 and i will not build another business in san francisco and i hear the same from other entrepreneurs if you're going to build a business do it in the south bay do it in the east bay do it in the north bay or do it in austin or la or somewhere else but this is just not a place to build businesses the city is basically saying we don't want you here now that would be fine and dandy if the city was being conservative in the way that they spend and if they were actually reducing their budget and you know kind of reducing the the city's activities the problem is these these uh taxes diverge with the budget because um the taxes are now going to go down because businesses are leaving people are selling their homes they're not going to buy expensive homes anymore and um we are seeing a budget crisis san francisco i think is looking at a 1.7 to two billion dollar budget shortfall this year um i mean like where's that money gonna come from this is a city with eight hundred thousand and we have and there was that expose in the san francisco chronicle talking about how there's over twenty thousand city workers making over a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year 000 yeah yeah what are we getting for all of that the evidence is not apparent um and this is where okay look i'd be happy to give the city six percent of my house and pay all these high taxes if we actually got something for it but the city just keeps getting less and less livable uh yes city budget in 2013 so we have a fiscal crisis a fiscal crisis and we have a livability crisis that i think is even worse um and that that's a huge problem and let's be frank san francisco was always the accidental beneficiary of silicon valley if you will san francisco was the accidental billionaire it was silicon valley that created this enormous wealth and all the jobs and the the companies it wasn't san francisco policies or politics that created any of that it just so happens that silicon valley got big enough it started around stanford it got big enough that san francisco as the nearest metropolitan area really was a beneficiary of that and and you know because they never really did anything to create the conditions for that prosperity frankly they took it for granted and now that the rug's been pulled out from under them i don't think they're really going to know what to do local local san francisco politicians treated silicon valley success as a grab bag and uber set up here and twitter and square and salesforce and san francisco politicians put their hand in the honey jar and took as much as they could and um it's now backfiring because new businesses don't want to set up here entrepreneurs don't want to operate here and as sax is pointing out the you know the the rapid kind of inflation has caused this tremendous decline uh in in the quality of service there's zero accountability zero checks and balances so san francisco is in for a really frank a scary reckoning and a lot of people are really worried about it and it's like a very real problem it's not like oh the city's [ __ ] haha like a two billion dollar budget shortfall um you're either going to have to cut a lot of jobs of public employees or you're going to have a city that's going to go bankrupt and you know bonds are going to get defaulted on and at the same time you're going to have this mass exodus of people and businesses and it is a it is a very kind of unwinding not right now um so it's it's a scary moment i don't think there's a real great answer for for what to do it's more nuanced but i think it i think it will happen mark my word san francisco will file for bankruptcy in the next 10 years wow i mean pelosi is just looking you know pelosi held out a major city filing for maybe 15 maybe 15 years but yeah remember a big part of what pelosi held out on the big thing she held out on in the stimulus negotiations uh last month was for local and state governments to get bail out support uh in this stimulus package and she's acutely aware she lives one block away from me down the road here she's acutely aware of what's going on in san francisco and the solution may not be to bail out these cities and these states um if they're going to continue to operate the way they are because it's um so the state needs to break in order to rebuild well you need to cut budget i mean any of us running a business know like you know if you have a little revenue coming in and you're spending too much where the [ __ ] the money coming from you can't just keep going to big papa in dc and asking him for more money what about masayoshi-san maybe he'll he consider coming in or maybe it's back maybe should we do it i really francisco listen i i think chamath traumath is right about san francisco being the proof of what happens when you have a one-party system and i i really hope that the the tech community the tech liberals who are listening to this podcast they're not going to listen to me because they probably you know think i'm too conservative but you know tremoth is pretty liberal and um you know he makes the right point and you know we cannot have a one-party system that remains healthy for very long we need the pendulum to swing back towards the center and um you know i really hope that yeah power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely as you've as you've said many times yeah it's true that's yeah lord acton said that we this is literally what the dark knight batman series is about it's literally about not having a basic standard of policing and allowing criminals to run a city we've turned into a goddamn comic book like you have to arrest people who commit crimes okay and and i'm sorry if that hurts your feelings and one of the things that's beat people up yeah you're right and one of the things that's like the comic book is the sense of fatalism you know it's like everybody knows san francisco is broken but nobody thinks they can do anything about it that's really the tragedy of it that is the tragedy and you know what if any of us i've said it before i'm like i know exactly how you can stop all these car break-ins you there's a thing called the bait car you put 10 bait cars out you put cameras in them and now that einstein has spoken boys i love you i love you all i miss you all i just can't wait to see you again and uh for those of you who would like to advertise on podcast the advertising rate has been set at 10 million dollars a year for however many episodes we we do i will read the ad at the end of the show if you give 10 million dollars to the charity of chamot's picking which apparently is going to be san francisco i think that'll balance point seven percent of the budget uh follow friedberg on the twitter follow david sacks follow champion if you like the show tell your friends and write a review or don't we don't care we just do this because we like hanging out with each other we'll see you all oh and if you want to be a guest on the show we don't accept any guest recommendations for the love of god i don't know how many people are begging to be on the show it's there's room enough for four people maybe on a live show bestie guesties you're not getting your ceo of your whatever company on the show period end of story and i cannot introduce you to chamoth to spack your company enough of that love you besties






hey everybody welcome back besties are back and it's a bestie spax giving congratulations to the queen of quinoa his second company david freeburg announces today hours before the taping of this special thanksgiving pod that he is taking metro mile public through us back and that best ec and here is the quote that as only chamath can tweet buffett had geico i picked metro miles i would just like to say that's how you move markets uh lebron james has three rings uh freeburg tell us what is metro mile uh and um well this isn't a self-promoting podcast is it i mean no no but i think it's just you know it's your second company i started the company in 2011 when i was running climate when i was the ceo there and um you know we were climate was offering insurance at the time we learned a lot about the insurance markets and figured like hey you know telematics or connecting cars to the internet is going to be a big deal and we're going to be able to completely change the auto insurance industry so we set up this company i was the chairman from the founding in 2011 and you know been been chairman and i've been an active investor in the business in every round since then um so the business has built some uh you know really compelling uh value proposition for customers and you know it's got really good unit economics and it's um you know needed its last round of capital to get profitable and turns out you know as we were thinking about that this summer that a stack was a really good path for the business given the inflection point it's at um and the basic premise of the business is instead of paying for insurance by month or time period the innovation here is you pay per mile yeah insurance today is like you know you fill out a form and you get a price for insurance you pay that rate for six months of coverage but you know depending on when you're driving and how much you're driving you should be paying a different price right so we we kind of changed the model to a rate per mile and so if you don't drive you save you know so the average customer doesn't drive a lot with metro mile they save 47 over what they were paying with like geico or progressive reassurance uh and you do that with that odb port it's like a little plug-in device and increasingly we're actually doing it directly by connecting to cars direct through ford and a couple other big automotive oems now have this ability to send the data directly out of the car because they're all internet connected now so um so that allows us to just basically you know see how many miles you're driving and the rate per mile is what we bill you each month times the number of miles you drove on your on your car and you you didn't mention how you drive i think that was a controversial concept for a while you know if you speed if you're right is that on the roadmap yeah that is part of it today but frankly 70 of the price difference you get in auto insurance is from the number of miles you drive and only 30 percent is really in this variance around behavior you know most people are generally pretty good drivers so believe it or not so the real variance in terms of you know your risk to the insurance companies how many miles you drive so that really is the predominant factor so if we can accurately track that now what's interesting is like in a world of autonomous cars where you're like turning on the car to be autonomous or fully self-driving at some point you know it's on and off you should be getting a different rate for those miles right so if the car is if your tesla is on autopilot on the freeway that should be safer than you on the freeway you shouldn't be paying as much even better you can you can kind of think about how this moves into a world where everything is dynamically priced and dynamically built usage priced yeah usage price and that and also fair so you know if you're a good driver and you're driving well or if you're using autonomous features you shouldn't pay as much and ultimately that translates uh you know into a truly kind of more dynamic service and that's really where the world has to go because those low mileage drivers or those good drivers or those drivers using autonomous features should be paying considerably less so they'll start using our service and that'll force the other guys to raise their rates and it creates this huge you know kind of market mode um great we're in that we're in the we're in the very early days i mean it's like the first inning still so we're you know we're we're just getting going chimav you chose to do a pipe um with the spac explain to the audience what a pipe is people don't know and what you loved about metro mile sure um i think the uh what what is a pipe a pipe is a a private investment in a public enterprise and basically what that means um is that uh you're making the round bigger right so it's kind of like sequoia does your series a and invest 10 million i would come in and put another 10 million and now your series a is 20 million um same terms as the um as sequoyah's round except you're now just grossing up the amount of capital um why are why is that helpful well what it does is it allows somebody to price the deal so in this case david's back sponsor priced the deal did the diligence and decided to underwrite metro mile at that price and then they came to me and said hey um you know do you want to come and join this round essentially and um i got to know the business um a lot of things that david said basically are true the the thing that i will say is like you know everybody talks about um the value of machine learning right and data oriented learning um the most obvious thing that you can do is if you learn on top of a huge subset of data especially out in the real world like driving data or any other kind of information is you should be taking risk on top of it and this is why sort of these next generation insurance companies to me are so interesting because it's probably where you're going to see machine learning um be used that just massive massive scale because you're just gonna reprice risk and make it as david said much more dynamic so anyways they showed it to me i um i really like the the product the metrics are uh really amazing and so um i joined it's great i'm really excited for i'm really excited for uh friedberg yeah congratulations great jamaat and i've never worked on anything together so it's awesome we're doing our first project here on the all in podcast together all right so it sounds like a brilliant idea and i'm just pissed so i'm not part of it i know i'm feeling like i i read i read that like you're from me and sax yeah jason do you know about this i don't know anything i get i'm the latest cut out of it first we're both out of it i need to get my beak wet you two we got the wet thorpe can't get my beak you two narcissistic besties have been have been running around all day touting every single unicorn you guys a bit of fun and robin hood i missed my allocation or uber or whatever yeah all right new bestie rule new bestie rule everybody gets a slice even a little tasty poo everybody gets their beak like the old neighborhood like the old neighborhood back a little share let's jason why don't you start an angel listen ticket for every all-in podcast listener yes all in podcast syndicate it will be on the syndicate.com ageless but yeah okay yeah we'll do it we'll do with us into kit.com all in podcast and then we'll aggregate all these uh subscribers can i just say twenty percent carry and you guys can suggest ideas we'll do zero carry and we'll allow all the listeners to participate in our deals which i think would be pretty cool um yeah listen i love how every time you loop my business into this whether it's podcasting or syndicates you take out the money and the process i tell you what i have an idea how about we spec this week in startups and uh you do it for no participation i'm the father of growth you know how you grow by making things free you want to maximize demand just make it free by the way uh on this topic uh sexy poo had this incredible tweet this week which was basically like wow this is like my 95th uh unicorn that went that filed to go public i mean literally every single unicorn that filed the speak tickle public sacks was an angel investor which is incredible but the best follow-up to eat was zach weinberg the co-founder of flatiron health whose tweet was i just want to congratulate myself on nothing for having not been a part of any of these companies i would like to congratulate myself for making no bets and taking no risk and getting no reward no i thought i thought zach's tweet was the best sex don't you find it tiring like all these investments that you've made like don't these guys call you and want to do meetings and chat all the time i mean you know this has got to be like a huge amount of effort right well not not not i mean not just put the money in and turn around well you know if you're not on the board your obligation is basically to respond when somebody asks you for something and as an angel investor it is a little different when you're actually like leading around and you're a board member i was making these investments back in 2012 2013 that's when these seeds were planted right these were 50k 100k 250k checks right so the responsibilities proportional to the dollar amount so somewhere a little bigger than that actually but um i mean i've written i've written checks you know seven figure checks in some of these companies well sex according to your personal balance sheet that we got from your accountants this week yeah phil hellmuth we see here a transaction for houzz is it true you did the series b of houzz the entire series b no no i heard it was you led the series no no nea led that round i mean i invested a lot as an individual i did co-lead um the series b or c of atapar um that was one that i did as an individual that's incredible yeah that's amazing gonna be huge i have no idea what that company is but that sounds awesome they manage funds they do portfolio software yeah it's coming up on you know 100 million i'm just kidding i'm totally kidding i'm totally kidding let's start the pod jkl where are we gonna start well i mean i think now that we've also promoted exactly well i'm just happy to hear that that jason was cut out of your deal as much as me when i yeah when i read about it on twitter i'm like i better not be the only best to cut out this thing all right you're right you're totally you're right you're right it is it is getting awkward now because people who watch this podcast assume that we do everything together like literally they're like well you guys go grocery shopping together you go on vacation together you guys live in the same time house yeah it's that's not how it works um i i think the first thing we should we should talk about is just this amazing uh moment in time when because of science you know in this podcast started during the pandemic we have had as predicted by freeburg who gets to take two victory laps he said by the end of the year we'd have vaccines and they would have because of this mrna if i remember correctly 90 95 efficacy and sure enough the week after trump uh wins i'm sorry loses sorry sacks he lost actually um the week after trump lost i know you didn't vote for him um the week after he lost modern a pfizer then the next week moderna and then the next week oxford and i understand johnson johnson is about to announce something and all of these have 90 to 95 percent efficacy and that they're going to be 40 50 and 60 million doses in december january and february just from the first two in america alone so friedberg if you were to put a number on when herd immunity hits because probably 20 or 30 percent of people have had it 20 30 percent of people have um some natural immunity how long is this going to take and could we be out of be doing this from you know a warriors game next year when are we going to be able to do this in person i think i don't know if it was test yeah i don't know if it was fouchy or someone that's closer to the operation shared that they do think they can get 70 of americans immunized by may so um my may yeah so you know if you'll remember a few podcasts ago i think i tried to explain a big part of the budget that went into this operation warp speed was to parallelize production of these vaccines while they were being tested and so we've been scaling up the production and the manufacturing of these and if they weren't going to work we're just going to crash them right a couple billion dollars who cares it's a good option for the american people so we've got a ton of doses that have been produced it's about packaging and distribution now and that's you know supposed to be kind of underway with the plan to be that on december 11th or 12th when they uh give the emergency use authorization these doses start showing up uh we went all in we basically went all in blind like we just shoved the chips in and said we're gonna make these vaccines even you know if they're not like it's more like a spray and pray um angel investment portfolio you know we we bought uh a but we bought like four different things or five different things we made it bets in all of them and hope that one of them pays off and it turns out they're all going to pay off so you know or or chunk of them are going to pay off and we get to have them ready you know in time to kind of make a difference here now all that being said if you look at the case numbers in the us right now we could be as high as 30 percent of the american people have already been infected with coronavirus based on some estimates so as of the june 30th paper that was published from those dialysis patients and they did a pretty good statistical interpretation of looking at antibodies in people's blood they estimate 10 of the american population was infected by coronavirus as of june 30th and then if you look at the number of people that have been infected since then and you apply this similar sort of multiple that you would assume based on tests you know there's an estimate that we could already be up to 30 percent of the u.s population has been infected wow and therefore immune and they're theoretically mostly immune let's just say that right and so sure there's anecdotes and so on but yeah let's just say generally yes immune and so you combine that with these vaccines starting to roll out and we get you know a pretty kind of comfortable position in terms of the pandemic and hopefully a couple of months here and that's why the market's going nuts and that's why everyone i mean i don't know about you guys but i got some conference invites this last week for conferences for next year that have been canceled this year and we're being put on hold yeah so oh wow people are starting to lean for what time frame third quarter or fourth quarter uh summer july yeah so people are now assuming that and they're booking hotel spaces based on it that is extraordinary sacks you shared this new york times story why don't you summarize it for the audience and i'd love to get your thoughts in addition to this as to what this recovery might look like if in fact we have more vaccine than we need and even you know a reasonable number of americans take it and don't believe that it's a conspiracy theory by bill gates to control and the illuminati and all that stuff yeah i mean this new york times story is pretty remarkable it's called politics science and the remarkable race for a coronavirus vaccine this came out i think it just came out today in the new york times actually sorry it's published it published november 21st updated november 24th um and it's pretty remarkable it describes the effort by operation warp speed by the administration by pfizer by maduro and that kind of gives you the behind the scenes play-by-play and reading the article you have to come away thinking that the trump administration did a pretty good job with this whole warp speed project um i don't know if the new york times uh realizes that it's making the trump administration look so good or maybe they don't care anymore because he's he's lost the election but the article does make um the administration look very good i mean competitive first very confident first of all they shoveled money to the right people they you know they offered fiser money pfizer didn't want it or need it but modernity did so they got a few billion dollars moderna uh they parallel processed a bunch of different attempts here so that if one company failed the others might succeed there was a sort of a reaganite cutting of bureaucratic red tape wherever they could there were examples in the story of a drug company needing something some supplies or what have you and they would call the administration and they would you know make it happen and then finally the administration didn't do anything to um to kind of mess with the science you know um in fact they describe how this the um this new experimental mrna technique that they used to generate the vaccine they had the code for that within two days they actually had the vaccine sort of printed if you will within weeks and really what took all this time were the human trials with you know the three stage human trials which the administration did not do anything to speed up and probably the irony of ironies the supreme irony is there's a story there's a there's a bit in the story it actually begins with the uh this guy slowly who's the head of the trump administration's effort to produce the vaccine he actually slowed down the moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren't including enough minorities in the you know in the in the trial and that cost him three weeks if it weren't for those three weeks the modernist vaccine would have happened before pfizer and it would have come out about a week before the election so you gotta wonder like trump has got to be pulling out his hair about um what about about about this twist of fate david how does it attribute credit for warp speed and i'm going someplace with this so i'm just asking you the question well i don't the article's not trying to attribute credit they're just kind of describing the behind the scenes of of how pfizer moderna came up with their vaccines and um it just but but in in describing you know pfizer modernity did the work of creating the vaccine but in describing the ways that warp speed contributed they did things that were only helpful and nothing that was harmful and so in that sense it made the trump administration look quite good yeah i think the point is that the warp speed folks which is probably the least well-known working group working on coronavirus to the rest of the public is because it was a lot of wonky insiders it was sign of almost proving the exact opposite of what trump typically does which is you know some idiotic nepotistic leaning where it's his daughter or it's his son-in-law running around um you know completely and effectively you know uh doing something um where they become sort of front and center for taking credit um in this case it was just a bunch of policy walks you never heard about the project we only know about warp speed because a handful of us have talked about it um and it turns out to actually have been good because they knew what they were doing and they do enough to to not try to seek the credit and just get out of the way i mean it it proves almost the antithesis of how the trump campaign you know managed their time in the white house well i mean i you have a point where you know i was kind of reading this article wondering you know where was jared kushner because if kushner knew about this there's no way he slows down the moderna vaccine by three weeks um i mean that might have made the difference right there and whether trump wins or not can you imagine the effect on the election if the vaccine had come out one week before november 3rd decide i think trump would have won decidedly if he had a vaccine or two out with 90 percent but i think he had no credibility even though modern and pfizer were saying late november and he said the the vaccines are around the corner his whole tenure was based on so much lying he was the boy who cried wolf he's he was the president who cried wolf by the time he told the truth and he was telling the truth about the vaccines he it was like oh my lord he he told the truth in the final three months can i give you the opposite david of that which is that if modernity basically says hey guys we have a vaccine that works for white people and a disease that's you know disproportionately killing blacks and you know hispanics and brown people uh native americans um and all of a sudden people are like wait what the maybe they would have gone into georgia and they would have just crushed them even more and then you would have actually had the senate flip too so you could have had a whole kind of distribution of outcomes there in a different case because you could have had an angry reaction as well we don't know um i guess well yeah i mean i i think it's ironic that an administration that was constantly accused of white supremacy probably lost the election because they slowed down this vaccine trial group to include more minorities no i know but i think what we're saying is it wasn't the actual administration it was somebody it was somebody that actually knows what they were doing we call that redemption in the movie when the person actually loses because they did the right thing it's kind of redemption free book when you look at these mrna vaccines you were educating us about them last night um and also for a long time uh tell the audience just one more time how um these work briefly and what the potential for them is in the future because i think a lot of us now are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel this is going to be over we're going to be at conferences or going traveling to europe or whatever it is next summer but we all are all going to be scarred for life thinking you know when is the next coronavirus just like for a decade we were on pins and needles when is the next 911. so this is going to be scar tissue uh for a generation or two of people when the next covid comes how quickly will warp speed 2.0 go yeah it's it's a it's the right question um because our approach to doing vaccines may have just changed permanently um so you know every cell has your dna and dna basically codes proteins uh every three letters of dna makes an amino acid codes for a specific amino acid there's 20 amino acids the way that dna turns into proteins is through rna so rna is kind of like a mirror copy of your dna it floats into these things called ribosomes in your cells and outcome proteins and those it's like a printer right and so those ribosomes make your proteins using those amino acid sequences coded by the rna so the way that the vaccines work historically is you'll get a dead virus which is basically the protein of a virus your immune system then learns to kill that or that protein oh man jesus my dog your immune system then learns to remove that protein from your body uh and that's how you develop this memory uh your immune memory to a specific protein and so they put this dead art vaccine virus in your body and hopefully your immune system learns a good response to it mrna basically puts the rna in your body that codes for that protein your cells then make that protein and because it's making a lot more of the protein in a more consistent you know way theoretically the idea is your body develops a much more robust immune memory and immune response without it overloading your system with all the immune cells trying to wipe that protein out right away and so on the challenge is you're putting rna in your body and we've always been worried about we don't know what the side effects of mixing rna in your body would be is it going to change your dna is it going to change your genetic makeup is it going to cause other delicarious side effects so this technology this capability this knowledge has been around forever i'm not forever but for you know a long time and the idea has always been we could use rna in this way but you know no one wanted and we've used it in animals and we've used it in plants and we've seen the capabilities of using rna to do different things like this but this is a big leap and so uh you know we kind of left forward here getting to the point that we felt comfortable with you know rna as a treatment like this and it's um it's working so in theory in the future as sax points out you could take any virus or any bacteria you could read its dna you could do that in an hour then you could take chunks of that dna and code rna force that your body makes those proteins and theoretically produce an immune response so that that's the that's the science of like how do you how do you create a new magazine i think that's the amazing part is the way it's described you know in this article is that it's almost like laser printing or 3d printing a vaccine it's kind of like the equivalent of that you just take the genome of the virus and you know boom you've got the vaccine and then all the other delay is about human trials and testing of it but imagine if that there was the next coronavirus is 10 times as deadly you know something that says spreads as contagiously as smallpox and as you know as deadly as ebola or something like that we could have a vaccine the next day you know like you could we could have a challenge david would be as we'd have it the next day like we did here but we would be going through this three-phase trial and so i want to take a moment here and talk to chamoth about something which is challenge trials um in the uk they will start doing challenge trials for those people who don't know what a challenge trial is essentially they expose you to something dangerous i.e a virus like covid and then they give you the vaccine and then they give you uh the virus as opposed to how we do a three-phase trial which is you give the vaccine to 30 000 people and placebo to 30 000 and then you come back three months later and see how many people got infected and it takes time and money whereas challenge trials only take risk on the individuals who are part of it chamath hundreds of people in the science community signed a letter and in the uk they're going to be doing the first challenge trials in january the united states is not doing these i'm certain china is um do you think it's a moment in time where we need to think about the ethics and morality of challenge trials specifically and then if so how do you execute them with that how do you execute a challenge trial without it being unfair um or too dangerous for people obviously you're not going to just go into a prison and say hey anybody want to get 10 years off the sentence join the challenge trial that seems morally bankrupt but we let people climb mountains without ropes so right well i think this speaks to a whole bunch of other issues that we've talked about on the pod before you know another example of this was section 230 before when we talked about it we had a body of law that was created in a moment of time that essentially was about framing and understanding a specific pathway and a way to use technologies that today look archaic and we have to rewrite the laws in order to just compensate and understand for where we are so if i if you double click on trials as an example you know if you have a solution for a rare disease you can go in a specific pathway with the fda and get breakthrough and fast track approval but if you for example have uh you know a novel immunotherapy cancer drug you probably you cannot you know you have to do a multi-phase trial a typical three-phase trial you have to solve for very typical things like fatigue etc etc all these things slow progress down now in a world where we were somewhat flying blind 40 or 50 years ago we didn't have you know things like crispr we didn't have you know a real understanding of the genome we didn't have delivery mechanisms like cartie you would say okay yeah we should be really really careful but i would say that the more you know the more you can ease up on the rules because you can actually empower people with a lot of information and it shouldn't take a disaster scenario for us to be iterative and experimental so i think the challenge trial is really important i think the concept of them make a lot of sense i think a lot of government should employ incentives to figure out who is eligible and why but if you're a healthy adult male or female and you want to participate in a trial for whatever set of reasons you should be allowed to do so and companies that want to run those trials should be allowed to run them similarly if you want to find a complementary pathway through regulatory agencies to get drugs to the starting line you should be able to do those too and i think what we have to do is multi-path um these compounds going forward because i think that's where you accelerate all these technologies ability to actually solve these diseases freeberg why is it so controversial that um a rocket ship company uh or you know people who want to climb on mountains without ropes or or a rocket ship coming like there are experimental pilots we have astronauts they they take unbelievable risk we send thousands of troops into harm's way for many different reasons many of which sadly die and they volunteer for those activities those people are volunteering and compensated but when we look at science and we look at a challenge trial scientists say this is morally reprehensible to compensate somebody for taking risk when that's exactly what we do in the army we do it with police officers and we do it with astronauts help us understand how scientists think so differently than say war i don't know if it's scientists as much as it is you know regulatory framework like the some people would call it a nanny state and you know there are things that the nanny state assumes individuals uh don't have the capacity to understand the extent of the potential loss or the or the nature of the risk this is true for angel investing right you have to be a qualified investor to invest in a private company without appropriate disclosures and it's true in a lot of other contexts so um you know to to give people the authority to make decisions like this it seems like my i have no point of view that i'm kind of making here but it seems like the the the the government assumes or the elected officials assume or the populist assumes that there are things that people aren't really equipped to make decisions on because they can't understand the risk because they're not qualified and that and they get excluded from those activities but sacs is the uh issue how should we reframe stuff yeah yeah well i think how should we frame it yeah i think assumption of risk is is a is a really good principle and it is a way for people to engage in potentially harmful behaviors just because the behavior is is potentially harmful doesn't mean you don't get to do it um in the united states you're allowed to do things that are manifestly harmful to yourself like smoking well you know even worse if you're an organ you can now do all kinds of hard drugs i mean you can assume that risk for yourself so you know if in portland oregon you can now take heroin openly in the street with no consequence but you can't participate in a trial that could basically cure a cancer that's insane to me i'll tell you what's the script yeah i'll tell you i'll tell you the flip side of it um you're allowed in nevada to play roulette i mean what the [ __ ] like you know it's got a negative expected value statistically factually for individuals but the individual doesn't have the capacity generally speaking that's playing roulette to recognize that every dollar they're spending at the roulette table is likely going to be you know taken away from them like there's some percentage of that that's going to be taken away there's a five percent edge for the house on that uh on that game and um and so we make the argument in some cases that people don't have the capacity to understand risk but in other cases it's okay for them to not have the capacity to to take risk and i think that there is this notion of what some people call regulatory capture that probably encompasses both of these which is that there is some degree of profiteering that has created some set of laws that kind of manifestly capture that system in a certain way so there are profitable casino enterprises that say let's get people to spend their money in a risky way that they don't understand and that becomes the law and then people in nevada are allowed to do that there are also pharmaceutical companies that will say we need to have huge regulatory burdens so once we make that big investment and we get patent approval and we can lock in that drug we can charge a lot of money for it so i would argue to some extent that the regulatory capture associated with the profit hearing that happens on the back end in pharmaceuticals has in large part driven the structure around risk taking in in drug trials particularly in the u.s i mean you can go get whatever drug you want over the counter in mexico right i mean we have a very different system um it's the most it also happens to be the most expensive in the world and the the rationale is well you're the most protected right well the dr drug infrastructure here has created to your point because of regulation the entire um you know cro industry which is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry which basically is um essentially a retardant of r d velocity right its entire job is to slow things down create these double-blinded studies by the way and so many of these studies are not even double-blinded they're not even actually scientifically rigorous they get basically blown apart after the fact so what are they really in the business of doing it's because they're exploiting a business model that was created by laws laws that were written by regulators regulators that were in the hands of lobbyists none of those folks truly understood at the time but especially today what's really possible so um you know it it does not make sense in the united states of america just writ large simply put that you can buy alcohol and drink yourself into the ground buy cigarettes and smoke yourself to death you know jump pull away your money gamble away your money where your negative ev or open you know openly do illicit drugs but you can't participate in a thoughtful trial backed by scientific research in fairness jamath you can get away with smoking fentanyl uh in san francisco and oregon but it is illegal to use that plastic straw so be careful folks the laws are very clear here that plastic straw is going to get you in a lot of trouble i don't know what the fine is but it is i mean it would it wouldn't be so crazy if it weren't true but to your point like you would actually get arrested for having a plastic bag then you will for having fentanyl in san francisco absolutely they'll they'll arrest you for the bag that the fentanyl is in but chester boudin will not arrest you for the fentanyl in the plastic bag uh stacks we've totally lost the script but uh chamath sort of bridged this with the 230 um discussion of common carrier and hey you know uh we we had great intent with this law but nobody saw social networks becoming this dominant addictive et cetera so we need to be more nimble as a government in changing these regulations whether it's straws fentanyl challenge trials or 230 you wrote a blog post about it after we had our 2 30 discussion a lot of people started talking about it have you come to some conclusion as to an exit ramp for 230 or a way to maintain it without you know throwing the baby with the bath water yeah yeah well okay just can i make one concluding thought on sure of course so the reason why innovations happen so fast on the internet is because of you know one word permissionless right permissionless innovation nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to go get permission from someone in the government you know repeatedly that's really what makes a difference you know mark zuckerberg as a you know sophomore in college can just build his project larry and sergey as phd students can just build their project ship it start you know getting users and they don't have to get the permission of a regulator whose incentive by the way is just typically not to get fired by approving something that might rebound on them in some you know in some bad way and to keep their job yeah keep their job i mean imagine if you know imagine just taking like a random example when elon launched starman remember where he put the like he launched the tesla into space and there's like a astronaut in there and it was like this kind of really cool moment i assume he just did it i assume he didn't get permission from anybody to do it but could a moment like that have really happened if he did have to get permission no way it'd be like making its way up through the chain no one would know what to think of it no one would know whether they could be the one to approve it and then what if something goes wrong what if the tesla comes back down to earth and you know turns into a meteor or whatever those the scenarios that be running through their heads nobody would have allowed it right and so when you just let entrepreneurs do things like good things happen right and that's why we've had so much progress on the internet and in so many of these other areas we've had much less progress because you know what what a system like that selects for is your ability to go lobby regulators as opposed to just building your project and shipping it i think that um one of the things that maybe happens is that you know we we're all expecting or maybe some of us i have definitely some version of a new deal and some grand bargain and i wonder maybe whether the new deal and our sort of like our version of fdr over the next i don't know 10 years is the person that actually says guys we're going to have a wholesale rewrite of the regulatory infrastructure to account for technology just period we're going to start someplace reasonable and small and we're going to make common sense reforms just observing the times as they exist today right and we're going to go and systematically try to make these industries a little bit more resilient a little bit more entrepreneurial you know a little bit uh less corrupted by regulatory capture and lobbyists and laws that just don't make sense 100 years later i mean it'd be great if we could do that the reason we can't is because how do you reform the law without the lobbyists getting their fingers in it right and and the problem is there's no there's no lobbyist for the company that doesn't exist yet right for the founder for the entrepreneur who's got an idea in their head but they haven't built their company yet there's nobody representing that person in washington right and what happens is you get new regulations in washington some agency gets created they reach out and touch an industry now every player that's affected has to create their own lobbying you know not true and david what do you think about this what if the the advocate for the entrepreneur or the uncreated company an uncreated product is really the same as just individual civil liberties and rights how are they really that different because really what it's doing is saying the entrenched organizational infrastructure that runs my life gets deconstructed and then power gets pushed down to be the individual that's tantamount to the same thing i think well we we have seen some we have seen some pushback well i mean there is some silver lining here if you look right now the citizens of california obviously people have been fleeing and we've been talking about california and the one party system here causing so many problems but we did have prop 22 uh pass and we now have 900 000 people have signed to recall governor newsom uh and these seem to be some pushback against this sort of nanny state uh where people can't make decisions and then additionally uh today the sec announced um that they will allow gig working companies to give stock to employees as part of their compensation up to 15 of their compensation in fact uh hester um uh how do you pronounce her last name it's not pierce um you can't pronounce the word pierce purse first person no it's spelled pierce but a hester purse is worth following on the twitter e h-e-s-t-e-r-p-e-i r c e hester purse i had her on my pockets this week in startups and she um they're they're really getting aggressive in changing the accreditation law so anybody's gonna be able to be an accredited investor you become sophisticated through a testing mechanism and now they want to let gig workers get by the way sorry here's a perfect example of um a regulatory body and infrastructure that actually has changed with the times i think the sec in fact i think we maybe we talked about this a little bit the last time i actually think one of the best trump appointees has been jay clayton um and i actually think jay clayton has done an incredibly good job and a lot of what he's done is just deconstruct this kind of nanny state and say people can become educated and make good decisions for themselves and because it's in some it's an area that's relatively benign i.e investing people kind of just let it happen without a lot of pushback and everybody kind of generally supports it democrats support it republicans support it and the outcomes are really good to your point jason which is in a world of zero rates how do you expect any just you know average ordinary middle american who just works a decent job to save for their retirement to actually make enough money well they're going to have to get educated and they're going to have to find a way of putting their money to work in in uh in assets that have a better return which literally was illegal up until very recently you were systematically letting the rich stay rich and you were blocking the poor from having an opportunity to advance like what if apple store employees could get their paycheck and say i want to take my paycheck 70 cash 30 you know restrict restricted stock units at this discount like we could let apple store employees make you know a million dollars after five or ten years of working there 10 20 years from now and have generational wealth change david sacks you had comment well i was going to astromoth do you think this type of deregulation is going to happen in the biden administration yes what you're discussing is like a very really kind of classical republican reaganite idea right i i agree and and i think what's going to happen is you're i think you're going to continue to see deregulation in areas that are benign and non-controversial so i think the sec um the fcc i think all of these places you'll see movement i think you'll probably actually see a lot more choice and deregulation effectively in in medicare and cmmi i think those places will move first and then i think it'll be up to some leader politician to then really rally the troops on some higher order bits um and one of the biggest higher order bits would be sort of around the broader healthcare infrastructure um social security education education is probably the biggest one that's that's like the it's just too sacrosanct for the democrats you cannot get elected without the teachers and so unless there is a startup that completely disrupts teacher pay and teacher compensation um then the public school teachers unions will continue to dominate a lot of the federal and uh state policy for the worse unfortunately freeberg if you had one um regulation or series of regulations or regulatory body you would most like to see change for the good of humanity and you know americans and the rest of humans on the planet what would it be um uh probably health uh yeah it's probably the drug process the drug development process you know there was a um a gene editing uh program that ran and someone died this was what year was this 97 99 and they basically halted all gene editing programs for 13 years you know how many people died during that time it was [ __ ] it's a crazy crazy um uh fact uh where you know they're the um you know the one death is too many rule um you know basically doesn't take into account the uh the kind of broader implications um on the downside so yeah i think that one's probably pretty important but you know there's a good interview if you if you want to hear some interesting thoughts and uh again uh not trying to be an advocate for any political point of view but um charles coke goes on tim ferriss have you guys heard this podcast interview i've listened to it yeah yeah and he highlights a couple of really good examples about this regulatory capture problem like if you're poor and you want to become a hairdresser and you know start a salon or go work in a salon and make money cutting hair the cost and the burden for you to go get the necessary approvals from the cosmetician association is too burdensome for you know the average person who's poor needs to become a hairdresser and it's just insane that you can't just go be a hairdresser um the government government needs to ensure that people don't get bad haircuts it's worse yeah you could you you can you don't need a license to be the engineer that writes the machine learning code that either drives a car autonomously or that you know uh helps propel disinformation in the social network but you do need to have a license to give someone a buzz cut oh that's a bingo statement right there yeah i mean in fairness i'm i am checking out sax's new haircut here and i'm kind of thinking so there should be more regulation there might be i was practicing without a license you work i mean yeah did you do that you can't see the result of this one you're so you're so white and pale you're you're blending into the background shade it's impossible to see where your skin ends your hair starts and the shade but i feel like the the regulatory if you think about the framework you know it extends into education too like you can't go get an entry entry-level job without a quote-unquote college degree how [ __ ] useful is a college philosophy degree to someone that's trying to get an entry level job working at x y or z bank right like it's um it's a bit absurd that the structure is set up so that there are whether it's you know government or not but there is effectively a hurdle um which is this alternative to regulatory capture but it's like call it embedded system you know capture it like uh there is a significant kind of hurdle that you have to get through that costs a lot and the point of entry has gotten too high for most and it really stalls things out and it's gonna cause more damage than good well and it's also been completely disconnected from the reality of your employment potential people are going into debt for two hundred thousand dollars in a liberal arts degree that provides no skill that is do we all agree that that makes sense like does anyone on this in this group argue for needing a bachelor's degree for everyone no i don't think i i think i think it's useless what do you guys think of isas income sharing agreements these have become kind of lambda school does them a bunch of other schools david you saw a startup we just invested in that's doing them and i think you liked them at the demo day we did uh with kraft maybe you know this idea is who should take the risk for an education and when you look at an isa an income sharing agreement what they're saying is uh the school takes the risk they let you come to school for free they give you what would be the equivalent of let's say a fifteen thousand dollar coding camp or growth marketer uh risk then you pay double that amount over five six seven years as a percentage of your income but if you don't get income if you don't break 50k a year you don't have to pay it back if you decide to go back to school or your income drops below 50 you don't have to do it can you imagine if a college had to make that promise they should do it they should start in college sports but they should do it imagine you you know duke basically went recruited kids and said listen we're going to pay you to come to duke we're going to get you educate educated we're going to teach you how to play basketball better than anybody else and we're going to take five percent of your future earnings yes or no you're not going to have to go to boosters you're not going to have to take money you're not going to have to do any of this stuff on the side but just be your best learn to play the game we'll get you a reasonable education we'll give you a good infrastructure and we take five percent of the back end with the so you could cap the upside right or maybe maybe there's no cap and and but why do we always have to care about all of this like it's like you know it's like whatever maybe it's five percent for the rest of your life you're going to pay the government 50 you get nothing in return so if you pay 5 and you get coach k to teach you how to shoot a jumper it's better than that right so why why isn't it possible and i remember how people had this unbelievably paternalistic allergic reaction to income sharing agreements when they were first talked about they called them indentured servitude and modern compared to slavery and it was like oh my god oh so insulting to but it's no different than signing a contract with an agent to represent you when you first start out in any industry music or or sports or uh film or whatever one you could sign an agency agreement where the agent is your rep for 10 20 years right i mean some of those agreements can have long tails on them and that's effectively the same you know look at what's happening look at look at uh we can talk about this in a second but like you know did you see what happened with chappelle the last couple of days where yeah let's go did you watch the video i loved it yeah the video was incredible video was incredible so the the the quick story on this is chappelle basically did um he had a request he went to netflix and he said take down chappelle show netflix took it down and he did a little stand up it's on his instagram it's like 18 minutes it's it's fabulous as most chapelle stuff peaks peak chapelle and he basically told this story which essentially the punch line is like you know he signed a contract where he just got completely [ __ ] and he's like this is happening every single day in so many markets and so the idea that then you have actually a different market which disrupts something by actually creating transparency and something reasonable is all of a sudden completely immoral makes no sense to me so there's abuses happening all the time that is but the the contract that chappelle signed was indentured servitude he doesn't even have the rights to his name he cannot they took his name and likeness right yeah this is a perfect tie back to the earlier statement about uh you know do you have the appropriate kind of um understanding of the risk you're taking or the benefit that you're getting um i think kanye's been doing this whole thing about he doesn't own the masters to his music originally right at the moment that he signed that contract when he signed over all the masters you know the master recordings and all the future revenue rights to his music he was getting paid a ton of money in his mind at that time he said oh my gosh i'm getting whatever it was let's say it's five million dollars i'm getting five million dollars the most amount of money i've ever seen it is absolutely worth me giving over the masters of this music and the future royalty rights to this music for 12 songs or whatever it is for me to get five million dollars today and i can live an amazing life and it will change everything for me who is to say that he was not um you know of the appropriate sound mind and understanding to decide in that moment to take that five million dollars and give up all future royalties to his music well chappelle's chappelle's argument was the people who are in that ecosystem are all friends they're all working together and they've commoditized the artist and they collude to do this kind of uh and decide limiting deals and i think what makes silicon valley so special is that we collude the other direction we want people to have equity participation and we want the social contract of silicon valley is i'm giving you equity i hope your your penny stock becomes worth fifteen hundred dollars and that you create multi-generational wealth and you become an angel but i don't know look if i if i'm an angel investor or want to be an angel investor and some schmo tricks me into investing in his shitty company and i just lose twenty thousand dollars but i didn't know how to determine whether that company was shitty or not because i've never done investing before my book is it for the government to regulate that circumstance and say you know what you need to be a quote-unquote qualified investor to be able to discern a good company for a bad company or [ __ ] from not and it's going to mean for these contracts right like i mean so you know we're making the argument i think for the the you know the regulatory framework for preventing people from being able to have freedom of choice and i think like earlier you know that the case was made like people should be able to make have freedom of choice at any point why should the government kind of step in and make a decision for me i think that they're i'm not i'm not advocating advocating for government intervention my only point is that there are morally reprehensible things that are happening today using contracts and that you know something like an income sharing agreement actually rights the ship in so many ways that's definitely the burden of capitalism ultimately you know it devolves to that right where like oh you're sick you have cancer pay me a million dollars i'll give you this drug so hollywood's a little bit of its own beast where there's all these gatekeepers and the gatekeepers are always trying to get control over you know the creative product and so yeah like you know signing contracts with those sharks is always a dangerous thing to do um i think silicon valley is very different we have much more of a culture of of equity i think the income sharing agreements are much more in that vein and i think they're a great idea for like any trade that demonstrably increases your earning power right so the beauty of lambda school is they pay for you to get an education being a coder it then increases your salary and they get a piece of that that's like a win-win for everybody i think where this goes if these isas are successful is that every trade that's valuable will get its own isa type school and then that gets peeled out of a university education so what's left for colleges to do it's basically you know all the stuff that doesn't add value they're museums they're basically like these monasteries again right they go back to being monasteries not places where you get skills we need to set we need to celebrate vocational capability because i think like you know we have we have so celebrated this mythical bachelor's degree and it just means [ __ ] nothing it's like it doesn't learn a trade and that's just as frankly that should be as respected or more but in the american culture you don't do that right now i've never understood that if you go for example to different countries around the world europe's a good example actually of this because it's the closest analog in terms of quality of living to america there's a real celebration of uh people who choose vocational traitcraft because there's an entire educational infrastructure that you can onboard yourself into you can become a skilled person and you can have a really good decent life and there's pride in the work and there's pride in that work and in america you know you covet this piece of paper the piece of paper is really just a scam that allows you know administrators to basically pay themselves millions of dollars and or run an asset management business as a the trojan horse of that purpose um it just doesn't make any sense and so you know i don't know it's i just think it's i just think the most amazing thing about these companies i've i've been digging into them because i'm looking for more to invest in and um these companies these uh companies that are the trade schools that are basing themselves on isis and there are ones who are doing welding and plumbing and all kinds of different things and there are isa platforms that are providing isis to any school that wants them and doing like the sort of aws of isis anyway these um for what this firm told me was inside of one of these trade schools they spend 50 percent of their time on placement 50 on education and that out of college they spend 99.x amount of time on uh the education and less than one percent on placement which kind of attracts right i mean when we went to college i don't know if it's changed much but the career services center was like this two-person office like in the worst part of campus and they don't when you're doing an isa if you accept more people who are unqualified and can't aren't ready for the education are not motivated for it it works against you because they're not going to pay back the isa so you then get sharper you know you sharpen the blade of who gets accepted you start accepting the right people these colleges they would accept anybody who would come in and take the loans that was your qualifier is did you pass your loan the isa as a service idea is a brilliant idea i would invest in that i like that idea as an investment way better than running one of these uh schools you know that that's basically issuing the isis themselves but how amazing is that that we live in a country where people are willing to you know as a movement now people are willing to fund your education because they know it's going to increase your earning power and then they'll get paid on the back end that's like fantastic and like that's all like happening all that innovation is happening right now without the government needing to get involved or a big government loan program and the historic people getting saddled people calling it inventory literally like the voxes and the new york times of the world and uh is having a 250 000 debt that you've got to pay down and you can never get rid of in bankruptcy for the rest of your life yeah that's real indentured service i think the problem is that you know east coast left-leaning um editorial publications um they have to themselves justify their 190 000 um bachelor philosophy from oberlin college so you know if you if you take that you know oberlin is the number one listener base we have on this podcast yeah you just lost yeah but you're right once you've taken out every valuable trade and and move them from a university where you've got to pay a hundred thousand a year to a an isa where it costs you nothing like what's left it's just gonna be people studying philosophy oh yeah people intersectionality intersectionality standards they'll be studying the past they'll be studying the past yeah what a disaster to collapse upon itself all right as we wrap up here um let's just take a moment to think about what some people are calling the big reset um it's thanksgiving uh we have a change in management in the country which is is obviously polarizing so i'll put that aside but i think what's happened with these vaccines in science is truly miraculous and let's face it a lot of people is a lot of pain and suffering this year a lot of people lost their jobs a lot of people lost their restaurants a lot of people are suffering from mental illness some people are having to take care of their kids and get to know them i mean it's been hard for a lot of people sorry about that sex i wasn't trying david do you know your children's names now yeah i do now what's it like to spend three hours with one of your children he's got flash cards in front of him right now there's pictures on the back the names on the other side so anyway i was trying to be sincere the kids would even occasionally run into my office during coved you know yeah they want to talk to you and hug you and show affection crazy they're like excuse me sir who are you i'm your father actually i am i thought i was just working for my office and all these kids show up and tell me it's their home so well we i just wanted to announce to the all-in uh audience that we have upgraded friedberg and sax's chips just last week uh chamath and i pushed the update for the joy 1.7 update and uh how's it been going to the two davids now that you have a third emotion we now have emotion of joy do not use it it feels good and warm inside body do not use it all in same day spread it out over a month hey david did you think that trump uh actually resigned two days ago was that was that was that the equivalent of a like or the concession tweet it was acceptance of um you're talking about when they he authorized the gsa to release transition funds to biden yeah i mean that that that that was his concession right there um that that's that's basically what you're gonna get out of him that's his acceptance of the of the election result so after anger he's now went into bargaining uh and then he was depressed and now he's accepting well what basically happened is you you know you had rudy and sydney powell and you know that legal team going to court to try and challenge all these rules the wack pack yeah try to go to court to challenge all these rulings i think rudy was like one in 35 meaning i think he won one ruling and lost 35 so it was going very very poorly so like you versus alan keating go ahead yeah but yeah that's a whole separate story we'll get into but uh but the thing that really like ended it was when sydney powell came out with this elaborate conspiracy theory that actually trump lost the election because um communist code writers had effectively you know infected this the software that was running the election and somehow hugo chavez was behind this even though he's been dead for seven years hugo the republican governor of georgia and secretary of state were in on it anyway it was so wild and crazy that basically the narrative just cracked and so then you had like steve schwartzman come out and then sort of the republican business community and and pat toomey you know republican senator from pennsylvania came out and they all just said look this is this is ridiculous and so that that was the moment i think at which th this narrative that the election was stolen kind of cracked is and i think she kind of she did everyone a favor by being so like off the reservation that it just brought the whole thing to like a meltdown sydney powell always whenever i see her i always i i just think that she's one second away from her dentures flying out of her mouth and hitting the camera i mean that's your crazy aunt that's the crazy aunt of thanksgiving like she said she was gonna release the kraken and i guess she meant the i think she might smoke i think it was the hair dye running down rudy's face yes exactly that's the crack rudy's the kraken i mean i'm glad that it was a total meltdown it was a total [ __ ] show i'm glad the gop finally after trump's defeat decided with 55 days left to go that they would take a stand against well let me let me tell you why let me tell you what i think is going to happen now is i think that this new york times article we talked about the top of the show about the fact this operation warp speed that it was a big success i think that the best narrative for trump if he wants to maintain this idea that he was robbed is not that he was sort of legally robbed with fake votes or fake voting software but rather just that if these pharma companies have put out the news a week earlier yes it would have meaningfully changed like and i think he has an amazing story there i would agree it's kind of yeah and it's kind of like you know um when you have like a major sporting event there's like a bad call by the refs and all the fans basically said oh we were robbed well you can't get that like result overturned it is what it is you lost but you have a talking point forever that you lost i mean if you go to saint louis or whatever and you mentioned there's an asterisk yeah there's an asterisk yeah yeah when the national lebron association suspended draymond in that series there are all these sporting events with asterisks by them i mean like you know if you go to st louis and mention the name don denkinger you know people will know what you're talking about the i think the car he was he the saint louis cardinals lost the 85 world series because of a first base umpire's call or at least that's their view of it right and so i think you know what what trump can do is is say that look we were robbed because we never got credit for the vaccine now if i i do think the economy is going to bounce back really strong next year because of the vaccines right i think you got to say that if these vaccines end covert in the next three four five months 2021's gonna be a great year so if trump hands biden these vaccines and the economy does well next year but something bad happens between now and four years from now he'll say i handed this guy everything on a solar platter he screwed it up and that'll be his narrative for four years from now good could happen i'm just saying what do you what do you think about um what do you guys think about the pick so far janet yellen for treasury secretary is great thank god elizabeth i do think the biggest challenge we're gonna face is um is this monetary policy issue i mean the dollar is is you know in decline we printed 30 of the us dollars in circulation in the last six months and everyone's cheering that the dow is at 30 000. it's like well you know there's 30 more dollars so everything's gonna inflate so i think there's a lot of work to do it's great to have someone sitting in that seat who understands economic policy really clearly and and the title monetary policy uh yeah i think the picks so far have been have been really um really top-notch tony blinken friend of a couple of hours for secretary of state he's a star um yellen's a dove which i think is really good for just you know did you guys know the chief of staff sacks do you know who this guy he's been like biden's aid for a long time kind of is that the deal he was the founder of revolution with steve case yeah yeah he comes from a venture background all of biden's picks have been people who've been long-time washington hands who he's had personal relationships with for a long time he really seems to value that personal loyalty and they've also been kind of you know nice and boring safe experience i think he's delivering on kind of what he promised to be which is a present we can forget about yeah just tone it down that's gonna be a caretaker president yeah what do we do without trump to talk about on this podcast because it's been about 34 we're going to need a new topic to rotate in here we might need to put in little netflix um as we wrap here um what are you thankful for and what are you most looking forward to next year um vis-a-vis just it's been a rough year um i mean listen it's been nice for people's equity portfolios of course um but it's really what do you hope for america for humanity for yourselves your family for your friends you know what are you thankful for um and uh i'll let you freedberg it looks like your processing unit has delivered a result so let's hear it the emotion bank has been cleared uh it i look i don't think that this year was any uh any cup of tea for anyone so i think like everyone you kind of value your friendships and your family so it's uh it's been uh it's been a year you know going into covid i was in the office every day spending more time at home being closer to my children i know their names by the way sex i'll teach you how to learn them they're it's been it's been actually really special being at home a lot and being with the family a lot and realizing like how much that stuff matters and how being close to everyone matters because when you're in the run of the life before you kind of get knocked back and just put everything in perspective you miss those moments so that's been really special and important to me this year in a really kind of personal way and just having friendships right i mean it's great for us to all be able to to talk as we do every day and have people you can kind of connect with even if you're not sitting in person i do think that everyone realizes they need that so anyway it's been a it's been an insightful year money aside it's yeah i was [ __ ] terrorized at the start of this year about money and the end of the year here you go finally there it is it's all a [ __ ] roller coaster sold the first company and now you got the second ipo congratulations mazel sacks has your processing unit overloaded with this question or are you going to be able to articulate something thankful for and appreciate it i i i agree with with all the things that freeburg said um you know the flip side of working from home all this time is you do get to spend a lot more time with the kids um i personally have i like this shift to remote work where i can do a meeting from anywhere you know you don't have to go to the office that's been kind of kind of nice upside i think i think we've probably all learned how self-sufficient we can be i have learned how to give myself a haircut apparently you guys don't think i've done a very good job with it but um well it's better than you have long hair yeah so yeah but look i mean i'm thankful for um you know knock on wood we all have our health and um you know and uh it weirdly the the economy silicon valley is doing still doing great technology is doing great still the future and i think the country is even though covet is kind of at its worst right now i do think it's going to get rapidly better as soon as these vaccines come to market so i do think we'll we'll work i do think 2021 will be a much much better year chemoth um in this really crazy way i actually now am pretty thankful um for what i've learned during the pandemic i mean i wish we didn't have to go through it but um i think that it was the most psychologically stressful period of my life um just to be so isolated from everybody um and i learned something about myself recently which is that uh in psychology it's called repetitive com compulsion which is sort of like you know you repeat the sins of your father or in this way you know i repeat these tired ways of behavior from my teens and my 20s that were just unproductive and in the day-to-day life of just running around and going to meetings as david said like flying around go to a meeting go to the office go here go there you can make a lot of excuses for shitty behaviors that you carry with you um and so what i'm really thankful for is in this lockdown i've been forced to really find the things that that i don't really like about myself and try to fix them um so you know uh i'm i'm really thankful for that because i think uh hopefully everybody has something positive to look at at the end of this and that's definitely one thing for me it's very touching and actually quite appropriate as we wrap here because sax and free broke and i had some things we don't like about you chamath that we wanted to bring up you kind of knocked one off the list already so we got four more to go it's good you're doing this work we were planning an intervention for this end of the pod but you got to open the door so here we go you know i'll wrap up was just saying you know family and friends are the obvious you know things that you appreciate at this time i i am thankful also for the hope uh that we've seen from uh you know what we can do collectively as a society when we put our minds to something warp speed comes to mind uh these frontline workers i mean we we really maybe have seen what a global uh rec a challenging problem being solved can do and hopefully that can translate into something like nuclear disarmament a sustainable energy global warming et cetera and so i think on a on a macro level the most macro levels the species us humans as a species have now had an enlightening moment just like world wars uh and you know hiroshima and nagasaki kind of changed people's perspective the entire world jade and i were talking about that the other day how the people looked at the world differently after those uh horrific bombs went off i i think after this bomb goes off we're gonna look at the world and say hey we can solve problems right and maybe we can be proactive about that and then finally i think for the people suffering from mental illness uh who maybe i was callous and made fun of uh or maybe just didn't relate to i can relate to now because i've felt depressed i have felt anxious i have felt exhausted from this right and it's the first time in the 49 years i've been on the planet that i ever would say i felt depressed i didn't understand what that meaning was when sax would tell me how depressed he was i just never never hit me i'm joking he never said that but uh it's a good joke i am joking but i i you know i think for people suffering from mental just get help and and you know talk to people and and i think this really opened my my eyes to that and of course this podcast uh you know and and our podcast was the best thing that that in one of the best things in my life that came out of this whole period i think for me too um and you know i've heard that from a lot of the people who listened to it and i'm sure if sax and friedberg had a fourth emotion they would they would agree frankly i think this podcast has been doing nothing but costing me money you know because i painted you out to trump support god knows how many you are not a trump supporter yeah god knows how many deals i've lost because jason keeps trolling me as a trump supporter and then on top of it i get cut out of the only good bestie deal if you would i thought at least i would get this best seat deal and you guys cut me out of it uh okay listen i just want to be clear sax is a conservative and a republican he is not a trump supporter he did not vote for trump this time he'd not vote for trump last time he does not support trump's behavior you can't out what he's voting dude sorry but he told me he didn't vote for him well he did it which one which one of us which one of us is going to try to hire jared kushner as a general partner uh no definitely not if you are saying most likely because now you're reinforcing the theme that's actually if you had to pick actually if you had to pick a venture fund that is most like the higher uh as a gp andreas anything from are they still around founders fun no i don't think peter wants to share the spotlight uh okay um i go in jason don't do anything to get a press release i don't think that guy needs a fun to go work at true yeah he'll just go buy another no he did get three middle east peace deals done so but you know david by the by the way by the way i mean talk talking about inheriting incredible dividends but is it the most incredible thing that um you can come in and get middle east peace done but if you really unpack middle east peace do you think that middle east peace would have happened if the cost of solar was not cheaper than the cost of oil honestly be like if if if you if you didn't see an end in sight to oil do you think that the middle east peace i don't think so well i i know what you're saying which is that if the middle east wasn't becoming less strategically relevant to us you know that that creates degrees of freedom i think but um yeah that's had profound benefits for silicon valley too right like i mean all of a sudden that went into the vision fund and the the money from qatar and the money from like all these sovereign wealth funds in the middle east has funded a lot of venture funds has gone into direct late stage rounds in a lot of companies and it's really been a great boom for silicon valley people can make fun of the companies getting overfunded and the nonsense that's gone on all they want but like money right it filters out into more angel investing it filters out into more venture lps and it ultimately gives the motivation this ecosystem so i i i think that the damage to oil has been great for silicon valley the most incredible dividend of climate change is peace it's like it's a it it has made radical islam a failed startup you know a hyped series a that couldn't raise its series b it's made you know sworn enemies over thousands of years cooperate together all for what reason because you got to pull the oil out of the ground now and monetize it because otherwise the cost of wind and you have to divert solar yeah and you have to diversify because otherwise the cost of wind and the cost of solar is going to make pulling the oil out of the ground economically and feasible within three or four years yeah already can't do it all right they took saudi aramco public they started selling off their shares and they invested that capital in tech and other stuff around the world and that's it's been helpful but there is there is a another factor at work which is the fear of iran is now greater than on the part of saudi arabia and israel that their fear of iran is is now greater than whatever mutual hostility they used to have and so it's it's kind of bringing people together that way but you got to give kushner credit for still getting those deals done you know no one thought he could do it i remember everyone was blocking him i agree he's not he's not a [ __ ] and he's not um he's the opposite of an abrasive guy and he's very thoughtful and apparently very uh i don't know if you guys know him personally but he's supposed to be very smart and um i'm sure that wherever he ends up next he's going to do very well and he's going to get invited to be in a lot of places yeah no it's clear he did a very good job on the middle east stuff yeah by the way how crazy is it that trump delivers on hottest economy ever peace in the middle east and three vaccines for coronavirus and he's still lost who would you well it does go to tell you what what people think of character yeah character if you watch how he tweets but he tweeted himself out of his if he acted normal sacks he could actually take those victories if he stopped the personal attacks if he stopped the grifting he would have won he could he could have been he actually it would have been more than one if he could have been raymond if he could he could exactly what i was thinking if he came in in 2016 calm cool and collected with the team where there was dial down the insecurity and dial up sort of the intensity of actually calling people out for not passing progressive change he would have been elected in a landslide people would have said well on the way in we were afraid but after four years the guy could have been magnanimous is what you're saying yeah and uh it was a real missed opportunity for him i still think much of trump is he's a wwe superstar and that's what people voted for it's why jesse ventura got elected governor of minnesota that's why arnold schwarzenegger got elected governor of california the average you know person that's looking at that guy versus you know the old dude that doesn't talk and you know saying some weird stuff about policy it's like oh man that guy looks awesome let's put him in office like this is going to be [ __ ] fun and if he turned it down when he got in office he'd be much less appealing i think to a lot of people i think well then my caricature of himself that makes him so so appealing then i'd like to go i'd like to go on the record with my 15-year projection then or uh which is that the rock is gonna run for president uh i i think you know the iran situation just to put that in perspective david if you look at the age distribution on the chart i just put in the chat it is just extraordinary how young that country is the median age is i think 20 or 29 years old and the they're barely holding on to power there and it is going to flip into a much more progressive society um than it is now they are barely holding on when you look at how many 25 year olds and 30 year olds there are in that country who are drinking and watching tv and they have the internet and they're watching porn and they're gambling i'm sure and buying bitcoin and doing all this crazy stuff that country's barely holding on it's going to be a crazy civil war and let's just hope they don't have nuclear bombs when that civil war yeah guys guys guys like being being like extremist it's just like it's just a bad product market fit now you know it's just like not worth it there's there's no money to fund it nobody cares that much anymore everybody's moving low nps score yeah would you recommend extremism to a friend or family member too all right uh this has been another all-in podcast for bestie c the rain man david sacks and the queen of quinoa on his coming out party today ipo coming up for metro mile congratulations to friedberg congratulations to chamoth on the pipe sax and i we're gonna have to figure out a way to lick our wounds and wet our beaks let's put our thinking caps on and over the break find a deal we can exclude these two from we gotta we gotta get in early get thirty percent of a company and then we gotta have chamoth spack it and freeburg do the late stage deal with all this metro mile money yeah and we'll see you all next time on the all-in podcast that was [ __ ] great best one yet yeah you guys want to see something funny you guys see that video my wife just sent me that's my uh dog taking a [ __ ] on your driveway sex wait i don't see it oh man where is it i want to see that deuce can you take a [ __ ] on his model x oh my god and we'd all have code 13. oh no everybody we rolled over the credits






okay besties are back besties are back going around the horn rain man david sacks calling in from an undisclosed location suffering through two code 13s in one lifetime and david friedberg is here the queen of quinoa spacking everything in sight living the life calling in from a nondescript ritz-carlton room it appears to be and of course the dictator himself chamoth poly hopitia tackling like a fool welcome back everybody this is what you pay for with your subscription to the all-in podcast brought to you by slack uh if you didn't own slack shares raise your hand it's been an incredible uh week um on a number of levels we're going to talk this week about uh salesforce buying slack trump and section 230 uh the coinbase the ongoing coinbase saga uh freeberg found some interesting science that could save humanity and of course the trust fund socialists in the new york times who hate their parents for giving the money uh let's start off let's start with off the most important thing what is that shirt undershirt combo you're wearing i mean look it's just it's you have buttons on buttons break the layering rule you can't you can't fool us if you're going to layer properly you can have only one layer of buttons but to have two layers of buttons that's not how it works jkl went in and got it oh no layers are for players not me no he's like an almond milk cappuccino and he's like i like how that barista dress is and i'm gonna wear that from now on wait a second can i ask a technical question can can i have buttons i can't have buttons on buttons but can i have buttons and then a zipper up like with the no you can't do that either um listen had a weird aversion to buttons ever since he spent the time in italy did you was he button-shamed in italy i wasn't i was a little button-chained but i'm looking at sax's buttons on his collars which just makes no sense saks is wearing the same brooks brothers shirt that he graduated high school in at brooks he owns 17 of brooks brothers at this point from the number of blazers he's bought there all right let's get off to it we've insulted each other i don't think freeberg's taking the brunt of anything yet anybody have any uh chop busting they want to do with free burgers that's just sort of built in no freeburg took the tablecloth that i used for a picnic in the summertime and made it into a shirt you know you have to be frugal at this time and also free bird cares about the environment he's not going to just land a picnic it was a hemp based tablecloth and so i knew it was going to get taken and stolen i love how i choose to spend my time with you guys it just pays off here we go all right can we kick this off all right let's kick it off with our advertisement for nobody because tomorrow will not let me make any money off of this podcast uh and thanks again for the suggestion that we launched a syndicate with no carry now a bunch of [ __ ] on twitter are like hey when is the all-in syndicate starting i'm like never i need to make a living i need to get my beak wet and this week i'm sorry but i think a an all-in syndicate would be super super disruptive and cool i'm totally fine with running it as long as we can have the 20 carry and i'll manage the whole thing we got four people on the call four or five we each get five percent carry but we gotta make a living here not everybody's made a chima not everybody's got spacks a through z or had all of their slack shares bought i think we'll kick it off with that chamath we saw this week in fact just two days ago salesforce in a record transaction for a sas company i think it's the highest ever paid for a sas company 27 billion dollars 27.7 billion dollars for slack which has only been public for just over a year i think you were i think did the series be in slack right after they did their pivot at social capital i don't know if that was in one or two but phil hellmuth is serious about it it was a series b in tiny spec but it was the series a in slack and um there's a really important story which is that um myself and raco um who's my partner at social capital we've worked together now for my gosh i think it's probably 15 years um wrote a really great memo justifying the investment in slack and it had to do with one thing and one thing only we ignored the revenue and ar i mean it was fine and nice and good but the single biggest thing that we were attracted to was something that we looked at and which was called inter-company edges and even back in 2015 or 16 when we did this original investment there was this dynamic where people across companies were communicating via slack channels and i was completely stunned by this idea because that was effectively a substitution for email because the only way you communicate across companies today is by email you know david is at craftventures.com and he emails me at socialcapital.com and i email jason inside.com that's how we communicate across across businesses except now all of a sudden you could be messaging and having a much more real-time interface that to me was incredibly disruptive and it justified the entirety of the real forward-looking investment thesis now fast forward five years later and these guys have more usage on a daily basis than facebook which is stunning because you know these guys have 10 million daus and facebook has 2 billion so it just goes to show you the quantity of traffic and and the the volume of information and theoretically you know productivity that's happening on slack and so i'm not sure what salesforce bought i actually think that you know you can make a case why it's a shame that it got bought a very strong one in fact but what they did get whether they know it or not is an inter-company edge effect which is the most disruptive thing to email and in the hands of salesforce and that sales team i think it has the ability to really be a very disruptive um force for good in enterprise software all right so sax this is a natural um passing of the ball to you and the baton because you did yammer sold it to microsoft for a billion dollars and obviously slack was the mobile successor to the desktop version of yammer and you got a lot of your fingerprints all over this but the fact is you did a tweet storm about it slack is an unbelievable success stewart is a great uh founder you know he sold his first company flickr for 30 million this one for almost 30 billion so that's pretty nice but there was one failure and you pointed out in your tweet storm explain what the one failure if you could pick out of the hundreds of things thousands of things they did right there was one thing they did wrong that uh to jamaat's point would have resulted in them remaining an independent company that could have become worth more than 27 billion yeah it was it was a slowness to embrace the idea of enterprise sales and and by the way let's put this in context i mean stuart and the slack team did a phenomenal job 30 billion dollar exit um seven years of just about flawless execution so i don't want to and also you know i was an investor in the company so thank you to sir for letting me invest i'm definitely don't want to sound like an ingrate or a critic i mean they just they did a phenomenal job but if you were to nitpick just one one little thing that i think they could have uh done faster it would have been embracing enterprise sales the big learning from yammer uh you know we learned this at yammer from 2008 to 2012 is that enterprises don't self-serve right they don't self-close bottom up sas products are phenomenal for generating top of funnel basically generating leads but you have to have sales people close the deals and enterprises don't just kind of pull out a credit card and self-serve you they need a sales person and i think there was um something in the df dna of snap slack that actually i see really very commonly uh in the dna of of sort of product e sas companies product e sas founders which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales and they want to believe that they can just be entirely product driven and and what i see and across the board as they all come to the same realization that that we had a yammer which is we have to have a sales team and i do remember you know back in 2014 the whole yammer sales team was basically rolling off um because of you know microsoft acquired the company in 2012 and there's an integration period and by 2013 2014 they were all looking for jobs and i remember you know my my former cro i think was interviewing at slack and it would have been such a perfect thing for them because he had just learned all the lessons of how you layer on kind of an enterprise sale on top of a of a bottom-up product and they just weren't ready to to make that higher yet and so look if you're going to nitpick look 30 billion outcome no one's criticizing but if you're to nitpick you know um it's it's an a plus regardless but you know this would be the one thing you could you could say well congratulations all around to everybody involved especially phil hellmuth who was an lp in one of chamot's fun so if you need insights on slack or any of the inside information you can just follow phil hellmuth on twitter at being the greatest or i am the greatest or i'll always be the greatest one of those twitter handles is but but jason you basically came to the same conclusion in your emergency pod right i mean i did i hadn't seen your i think you tweeted him after the emergency pod but uh yeah it just seemed to me this company unlike zoom uh should have been able to grow quicker and if you look at their numbers they had 87 companies that had were spending over a million dollars you put a rabid sales team on that product and they go in like benioff does with his sales team i mean he was just hyper aggressive at just putting huge numbers out there and saying you have to pay us this much money so much so that i don't know if you remember elon getting into a public spat with him where he's like salesforce is horrible software get it out of the organization he basically banned it because they came to him with the bottom up people using of salesforce and said hey you owe us this amount of money and elon was like fu banned forever from inside of our organization we'll build our own software we don't need it and they didn't have somebody and stewart didn't have that dna i think to say aggressively we need to charge what this product is worth and you saw that in i think one of their strengths and weaknesses which was they only build you for people who were actively using the product now that's a beautiful awesome feature it makes you not scared to use it but on the enterprise level i mean that seemed to be like maybe one of those non-cutthroat things that maybe were holding them back david do you have any insights on this or should we go on to alpha photo it's um it's a it's really important to remember the the mechanics and the game theory around m a especially you know big game hunting when you're doing 30 billion dollar acquisitions um it's also kind of true at billion dollar levels but less so um but the bigger the acquisition gets you have to remember that there's an asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers and the question is who does the asymmetry favor right because you could look at this acquisition and say wow salesforce is crazy for spending 30 billion dollars and somebody else may say wow slack was really stupid for selling it for 30 billion dollars right the reality is that i think that there was asymmetries on both sides i think that what slack probably saw and i don't know because i've been off the board now for more than a year um but i think what they saw was as david said just um you know a level of sophistication and scale and ability to cross-sell an upsell that was needed for enterprise scale either you overcome it with precision and speed or you overcome it by going the same pace as somebody like microsoft but with an equivalent product portfolio so that's that's sort of one realization that that that slack had but in in the case of you know um salesforce what they probably had was a realization that they couldn't go wall-to-wall inside of a customer because they didn't really have a product that was useful or usable to every single individual inside of an enterprise and so both of those two things create asymmetries there's a level of fear inside of slack and there's a level of fear inside of salesforce both of them are about the fear of disruption and then the question is who gets the better of the other person in the middle of the acquisition right so the deal could have probably gotten done at you know 22 billion it probably could have also gotten done at 45 billion um and that's again to a combination of um how well you play poker in that moment right who blinks first and the quality of the bankers this is like two people having top pair on a very textured board it's like pizza and they're just raising versus each other yeah that's who i play them because like it's similar also to like how microsoft bought linkedin right because if you think about what happened in linkedin if you remember when that happened it was almost to a t very much like slack linkedin had a one bad quarter they got decapitated by i you know and i owned it at the time in the in our public fund it got decapitated by like 50 60 70 i mean something insane for missing numbers by like a few pennies okay and all of a sudden it took a lot of the wind out of their sales internally it didn't change the user momentum at all because you know the users that were signing up for linkedin didn't care what the stock price was yesterday today and tomorrow but it all of a sudden created a fear and i think microsoft was able to exploit that fear and within a year this company was bought for 25 billion dollars not dissimilar you know slack had uh you know a hiccup and they got re-rated the stock bounced back um but i think that if salesforce was smart they probably created you know sort of like a white knight kind of bid that said listen you need enterprise scale and the ability to cross-sell and upsell i can give it to you and slack probably said listen you need to go wall to wall so i understand why you need me and you know the price is what the price is good free burger if you look at the pricing right so slack normally the way these big ma you know public company m a deals get done is the board has to approve the price and they have to say this was the right deal for us relative to other options and one of the ways you assess that is you look at where the share price has been historically and if you're getting a premium to where the share price has been historically let's say 30 40 percent higher than it's ever been then the board says great that's a good deal we should take it because we've got a long way to grow into that value in this case the deal was done not at a very high premium to where slack traded just in the summer uh is that right chamots it looked like it peaked it's basically if you look at the 10 premium right 10 premium yeah 10 premium yeah we we opened the direct listing at 40 or 41 and then this was at 45. right and so there clearly was a a sense of weakness from the board which is um i think why the salesforce stock traded down afterwards because if they were willing to sell at that small of a premium the forecast internally is probably feeling not that strong and then people translate that into hey salesforce bought something that's not that strong um you know there's there's something a little bit amiss but but obviously to your point they're missing a lot of the cross-selling and the synergy that that that i think it's a huge slam dunk acquisition and i go back to the this uh idea of intercompany network effects um i think they exist and i think they're real and i think that the slot the the slack um product team's ability to innovate around that was not as fast as it could have been but it was still very unique and i think it was um it was a true moat and you know the the tragedy is we won't see what the terminal value is if they were um left alone to execute and in this weird way like i've always struggled with why microsoft was so overly obsessed with slack because if you looked at the team's product it was much more directly competitive with zoom and to this day still remains much more directly competitive with zoom than slack but you know there we have it and if you look at the revenue um slack was doing 800 million run rates and we rounded up to a billion and yet salesforce at 20 billion uh so five percent revenue to revenue and then they got 10 of the company so in that way if you look at on a percentage basis which is you know how you might look at the facebook instagram and and whatsapp is what percentage of the existing entity did they get right the science growing size scoring about 60 a year and salesforce is growing about 22 something like that the other thing is the president of salesforce's uh brett taylor who uh was our cto at facebook who i worked with and so i think brett also understands network effects really well um and you know by the way in in this interesting twist of fate benioff was the under bidder i think for linkedin and so um you know we've uh we've seen mark around the hoop on these you know social network network effect business tool um acquisitions before and finally also twitter he was running he was hanging around the basket with twitter and then they also brought his name up for tick-tock which made no sense so i think benioff is just looking at this like if if google and microsoft and apple are too scared to buy things because of antitrust well i'm under the radar of the antitrust trillion dollars so i'm i'm the only one right he's uh he's under the radar because he doesn't have a play in this sort of communication or collaboration space and so therefore there are no anti-trust issues um if microsoft were to do it it would definitely be scrutinized because you could argue that they're adding to their existing dominant market share and and collaboration um but benioff's dream has always been at least since he uh you know launched chatter to compete with with us when we were doing yammer this is back in 2010 2011. is he his dream has always been to have a product that could get him onto every seat in the enterprise you know his current product set has is departmental i mean you've got kind of the crm product for sales and they've got the support cloud for customer support and they've got the marketing cloud for marketing and so he's gone department by department but he's never really had a sort of pan like or cross company yeah something that the entire company would use like a specific login system right and slack is that central login system but when you when he came up against you it was very you know benioff you're friendly with benioff benioff came at you so hard he threw three or four hundred engineers at chatter he took out full-page wall street journal ads he tried to poach her people he tried to make the product free he made it personal against you after you would not sell to him true or false david sacks i don't i don't think he made it personal but uh it was definitely do you feel personal um did he tell you now no no no no no it he did that's i understood what he was trying to do that's your way of saying no i mean if we had sold to salesforce like we we ended up so what i would say is yeah we got in like a very it was a very competitive situation he didn't beat us um you know i was that he fell does that product even exist yeah um it's sort of like a feed inside of the the crm product it didn't really succeed as a standalone collaboration product and so we won that battle but it definitely i would say it scared us enough to sell to microsoft um because you know the what did we we were about to we were about to enter a new stage of competition so here's what happened is he launched his product to kind of be a clone of yammer inside of salesforce but he was initially charging fifteen dollars per seat we were charging like five and so they massively overpriced it and and the event and then they they were on this like slippery slope or they kept lowering the price to compete better with us and then finally they realized that they should just give the thing away for free as a strategic move um and that was when we decided to sell to microsoft is we didn't know we knew we had a better product than chatter but we didn't know how it would go if we were up against a free chat tell us honestly how much did he offer what was the meeting like where he made you the offer we yeah so yeah so here's i'll tell you the back story i mean this hasn't been public publicly revealed but um here we go in service of the all-in podcast go ahead go ahead david give us some ratings and services trying to get us from number three to number one on the charts um no you know it's funny we launched uh yammer at the techcrunch 40 conference that jason as you know you were the co-founder of and benioff was like a judge he was a panelist and he was raving about it and you could just you know from from the moment we launched he was raving about it you could see the light bulb go off with him and um he realized that like social was going to be it was you know at the time obviously social was big with consumer social networks but he saw the potential of social or collaboration inside the enterprise and so yeah i mean like i think a year later or something they were interested in buying the company for around 250 million dollars the big issue for them though was that benioff had a bunch of like engineers who wanted to build it in-house and so they they they actually i don't know what would happen if um if they you know didn't want to build it themselves but but basically they vetoed doing a deal and so they ended up building chatter and they threw the 300 engineers at it and they basically spun their wheels for a few years and um anyway it turned out to be much better for us because we end up selling the company for five times as much to microsoft um you know if we had sold to salesforce in like 2010 it would have been a much smaller deal um but yeah that i mean he was very interested from the from the get-go all right folks so you have a breaking news in the background on what actually happened congratulations to stewart and the team i want to ask a question did you guys um keep all of the shares you you originally invested in um to the exit here just to set the context for folks you know you invest in a company it's a small startup it's actually over 30 billion for every share that i owned half of it were half no uh yeah for of of of a hundred shares that i owned per every 100 that i owned um 10 of them i sold at 38 right at the direct listing um i want to say 40 of them i sold uh in the mid-20s and uh the rest of it just got taken out at this price so your dollar cost average to the you know whatever high 30s maybe 40 or so yeah i don't know my exact i mean i i i sold some and i still own some so um you know i definitely got my my beak wet from this acquisition but but uh no but look i i think i probably sold you know more than half of them you know um and that was a mistake and you know one of my biggest learnings as an investors has been to let your winners ride you know my biggest mistake as an investor has not been the losers it's all it's been selling the winners prematurely yeah uber as well david uh and i sold some uber before but i kept a lot of my uber maybe most of it or half of it i think anyway uber facebook i mean facebook you know when they ipo'd it was worth 50 billion we all thought that was like unbelievable i mean because it was over a 50x return but um what's the lesson just never sell anything if you can help it i uh i served on my facebook in 2014 and bought amazon and tesla i think that you have to be able to sell for two reasons liquidity and moral obligation yeah i mean that's an exaggeration i mean you can never it's it's people need to be able to sell but to the extent you can hold on uh just don't sell everything you know always you know keep um yeah keep saying think about the people who were at apple in the 80s or microsoft in the 80s or amazon in the 90s a lot of those people got frustrated holding the shares for so long and i think keeping at least 20 of your shares forever you know could be amazing there was somebody told me had never sold a single share of i don't know if that's a true story or not i told you that you can't be okay okay anyway more breaking news what we should do is we should do a um we should put beeps in there nick i was told had never sold a share of and then we just let everybody react to it this way nobody knows what we're talking about i i do know that has not sold a single share and it has only sold shares of the fund capital calls which is an incredible statement to fortitude and vision incredible lord incredible it's by the way by the way it's not always worked out because he did the same with those didn't go as well yeah i mean look you you have to diversify when when you've got all your eggs in one basket in one company obviously you have to sell some shares but um you know one of the things i've just learned over the last 20 years is probably people ask me what's your biggest regret or learning or whatever it's just selling too early is like one of the biggest mistakes you can make look at paypal paypal is now a 250 billion dollar company we sold it in 2002 for 1.5 billion we thought that was a great deal at the time and we sold it for less than one percent of what it's worth today and the product's basically the same you know is the lesson never sell if it's a winner ride it you compare okay hold on hold on i'm gonna put a final nail disc off and then we're gonna go to alpha fold there's a great quote by warren buffett which is um if you know what you're doing the best thing you can do is be as concentrated as possible nobody ever got rich in their seventh best idea and i think that that basically sums it up but you have to be in a position to have the ability to have that kind of portfolio allocation and i think that's hard free birds explain alpha fold please uh okay let's explain give me two minutes on i'll explain proteins and then the importance of proteins and then alpha folds so um the numbers to remember are 4 3 and 20. there are four nucleic acids that make up your dna we all learned this in high school biology sets of three a c t and g combinations define an amino acid there are 20 amino acids um and a protein is a string of amino acids so in your body and every cell there are these organelles they make proteins by reading the dna taking out a copy of it and turning it into amino acid chains and that's what we kind of call proteins but what's interesting is when you make a chain of amino acids so there's 20 of them that you could put in each point in the chain it doesn't come out as a long chain what happens is those amino acids the whole thing collapses and it turns into a very specific shape and the shape of that protein is what defines its function so pretty much every biological function across all life is uh is undertaken by proteins doing something some proteins like hemoglobin in our red blood cells will has a very specific little pocket where oxygen molecules stick into the pocket and then it moves the oxygen from your lungs to your cells it's a pretty amazing protein to exist uh and it specifically is shaped to do that exact function there are other proteins that can for example rip apart other molecules break a molecular bond there are other proteins for example that can take nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it into plants cells that the plants can then use to grow there's an incredible you know a set of potential on the nanoscale of what you can do with proteins and we see that in life and we're just shocked and odd and amazed by it every day but in order to figure out how to create proteins that do specific things you have to know how do those amino acids turn into the shape that the protein ultimately takes and that's what's called protein folding um and so the hard thing is um and you know why is this important it's important because we can easily read dna and therefore we can figure out what amino acid sequence is being made to define that protein but what we don't know really well is what is the shape of that protein and therefore how does it undertake the function that we see it taking in biology and if you think about the reverse of this the reverse of this if you have a function you want to undertake in biology you can design a protein to do that function for you for example bind to a specific point on a cancer cell um or you know take carbon out of the atmosphere or pretty much anything else your your mind can kind of imagine on the nanoscale proteins can be designed to do the challenge is how do you write the code which is the dna to make the protein that does that thing well we don't know how the code turns into the shape and that's what folding the folding problem is so the folding problem there's a data set and the data set is what's the three-dimensional shape of a protein and then what's the dna code that defines the amino acid sequence that makes that protein and how do you figure out how to predict the shape of the protein from the amino acid sequence it has been an impossibility and um again if you think about this chain of amino acids they each have little um you know uh electrical spaces and and the way that they bind to each other it's very complicated you can't just deterministically define it you know we don't have that level of understanding on a quantum scale so what alpha fold has done is they have now been able to predict from a sequence of amino acids what the protein shape will ultimately become by learning from a database of hundreds of thousands of structural protein shapes that have been defined through really really really um difficult uh you know scanning microscopes and other techniques to really try and scan a protein on a microscopic scale and then looking at the the dna sequence and figuring out okay what's the relationship and the accuracy of their predictive model now is within the range of error of the microscopes that are being used to actually scan and measure those proteins so that's incredible because now theoretically you could come up with a design for a protein and you could actually build that protein by writing the amino acid sequence and that protein can do any number of things you want to do and this has been a difficult problem that's been intractable by humanity and we've been challenged by it for decades um for this machine learning breakthrough to kind of be realized in literally less than three years i mean the these guys were at a score of 40 last year and this year they're at like nearly 90. which is incredible and so now um you know we can now predict what the shape will be from the from the dna sequence and and this is going to unlock this ability everyone's now going to take their model if they license it or whatever they do with it or people are going to go learn using the same techniques that deepmind used um but it just means that it's possible and then scientists will go away and they'll say you know what i want to do this particular thing on a microscopic scale let me design in in three dimensional space of protein to do that thing okay now let me go figure out how to make that protein by writing the dna code which is really easy if you can use this algorithm to solve that for you and it is literally dollars and pennies to make proteins we can write dna on a computer we can get printed dna sent to us in 48 hours in a fedex envelope for a dna printing facility we can put it in a microbe and we can get that microbe to make the protein for us in a day the lab cost any high school biology class can do this now so by being able to actually figure out what dna to write based on the objective function of what we want the protein to do it's going to unlock this universe of things we can do in medicine in environmental science we can do things like break apart p-e-t plastics we can do things like fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and getting rid of fertilizer plants we can create all sorts of new um you know food solutions health solutions environmental solutions any chance you can make a pizza that doesn't have carbohydrates because that's what i'm thinking about here is is there a way that you can make a healthy pasta or pizza or something like that but in all seriousness what do you think the early wins will be out of this technology and is this a theoretical win that will benefit from in 20 years or is this a serious breakthrough that we're going to benefit from in the near term like no i think one or five years both are true this is an incredibly important advancement in machine learning um but the reality is that you know google will still have to spend a deep mind will have to spend a lot of time refining it and then they have some really big ethical challenges ahead of it how do you expose this technology to whom and under what conditions and it's the same situation that openai has with gpt3 although a lot of people i think you know the scale of the computer science challenge maybe was a bigger win in gpt3 because it was a much more open space and i think this is a much more specific sort of almost expert system in a way um but the the downstream commercial implications of this is just enormous um and so just think about this like this is where like you gotta you gotta love companies like google the fact that they exist because from you know page rank in 1999 to cpc ads in 2003 and four um we have alpha fold in 2020. and that to me is just that's just this is an argument against breaking up tech because only a tech company with this amount of resource knowledge can then go spend a billion dollars on deepmind i mean alphabet's burning four to five billion dollars a year on their quote-unquote other bets line and people give them a lot of [ __ ] for it but i mean you hit any one of these things and it's a hundred billion dollar payday i mean look at youtube youtube's easily a hundred billion dollar payday on a billion dollar bet billion six oh no that's it that's a 250 to 500 billion dollars applied semantics a lot of people missed this but applied semantics was 100 million dollar bet and that's the entirety of adsense initially android android um is this is this the first commercial application of deep mind because until now you know they've had alpha zero it's been so there was a period of time a lot of people i don't know if uh let me just think about this for a second because alpha zero alpha was really good i want to be careful about this but i do think people could not disclose no but i i do think i do think it was disclosed that they've used deep mind uh to improve ads quality and improve um uh youtube viewing and as a result of that you get the number of hours per day of the average user on youtube to double or triple ad revenue goes by three x and i think in one quarter google was able to generate something like an incremental 15 billion annualized revenue from deep mines and you know what that deep mind actually did on youtube it sent everybody to the alt-right info wars and ben shapiro congratulations be careful when you send people's minds with artificial intelligence maybe you just argued to break them up yeah but i i understand stacks that it's being used broadly across the products at google in in in in now now in a much more careful way is my understanding i'm look i'm a i'm i'm a big ally of alphabet i'm a big fan and i love you know they were and i used to work there and i'm very close to people there so i know who used to be on the board and was the major backer of that company deepmind founder's fund founder's fund elon musk too and he begged them to not sell to google because i mean 400 million 400 million exit was a steel 40 or 50 scientists i think yeah absolute steel no elon i mean elon has publicly said that he thinks deep mind is like the greatest threat to well he thinks ai is a great start to humanity and of the people working on ai deep mind is the furthest along and therefore most dangerous he tried to stop he i mean he told me straight up like when he's been very public about this since that he he said i'll give you an unlimited amount of money to not sell to google he's friends with larry page too but he said don't sell i want you to be independent i want you to keep working on this but he said that when he saw the ai there become aware that it was an ai that that was when he was like wait a second no wait dude deep mind is not the alpha's alpha fold or alpha zero is not self-aware that's it i felt it was becoming self-aware that it knew what it was i don't know if that was just elon you know just sort of no it's not it's not self-aware so i mean i've watched anything yeah i mean the amazing things that deepmind has released prior to this were games right they had this um this chess ai called alpha zero which rapidly became not just the best chess um it only beat every human in the world it also beat every chess engine because computers became more you know better at chess than humans a long time ago because of their sheer computational power but uh alpha zero plays like a human but with kind of that same computational power and so that created a whole revolution in chess engines and then they also did that with a game called go they created alphago and basically every single game that you can think of uh deepmind's created you know an alpha whatever alpha version that um destroys both humans and computers but this is the first thing they've publicly announced that that seems like it will be available to others eventually that could have tremendous social impact imagine the government trying to understand this can you imagine them being brought before like senators well these are these are these are the new weapons of mass destruction i mean let's be honest like if if somebody else had had alpha fold and probably somebody does and just hasn't said you know i mean google actually values transparency so that's the only reason why we know um imagine what they could do as friedrich said it's like you know the the opposite of this is basically to design um a specific protein that basically um you know destroys organs or there are proteins called prions which are the scariest thing known in biology in my opinion a prion is a protein that it actually finds similar proteins and based on its shape it gets those proteins to change and it becomes like a virus and prions actually um are there's an extremely uh sad series of diseases that are related to prions where your body expresses a protein in the wrong way and then that protein itself gets other proteins to change and creates copies of itself and it spreads um it is a fascinatingly scary um biological phenomenon but you know there are extremely scary things you can do with the designer protein capabilities basically you could make a bio weapon that would be similar to what the aliens and prometheus and aliens were doing the engines even much worse even much worse this is why i think they're going to spend years before so this is why back to that earlier question it'll be years before this sees the light of day because um they are they're smart enough to know what they've uncovered and i think they did they did the right thing by talking about it because i think there's a lot of really amazing r d but the reality is that google for the next 20 or 30 years will have layers and layers of oversight because you know it's not like you're going to allow a company to enrich uranium in mountain view without oversight and this is the equivalent it's just a we're we're buying time until governments realize that they have to do that they have to do it but let's also remember the protein data set they trained on is publicly available you know anyone can access this and with the you know i should catch up in machine learning you know capability to deep mind uh infrastructure wise theoretically you know someone could could i i think it's it's an inevitability that in the next 24 months someone else will write this right now i think what deepmind has done is showed that specific um techniques of learning can overcome limitations in compute but to your point david like we're accelerating silicon at a fast enough speed where you know if like if you can throw 5 10 50 100 500 pet ops at a problem uh you're you know you can run you know some really really old version of tensorflow and probably get to the same answer yeah i actually think they published uh i'm gonna find it while you guys are chatting but they published um what the compute needs were on running this uh i'll find it in a second uh i'll tell you let me make one sort of slightly descending point on the whole wmd thing i mean look obviously the you know who has access this technology needs to be controlled um we do have to make sure it doesn't get into the hands of bad actors but the reality is there's plenty of existing wmds out there that have been around for a long time that bad actors could get their hands on um they could already make you know extremely dangerous viruses in a lab they could you know take something that's as contagious as smallpox and make it as deadly as ebola or something like that and it's these new technologies that provide a way for us to combat those those wmds because you know technology has a tendency to become democratized um you know um was it uh 75 years ago the us was the only country that had an atomic weapon now what like close to 10 have you know nuclear atomic weapons and so um you know these these sort of nefarious technologies get democratized anyway and we really need some of these new technologies and new abilities as a way to combat them it's like last week we were talking about the ability now to basically print um you know a vaccine using this mrna technique within two days you know you can imagine you know if if someone tried to use a bio weapon create a new virus we could print a vaccine the next day um those are the kinds of capabilities we're going to need to fight the spread of wmd i think you're right it's just that you then have a law of large numbers problem meaning you know the previous problem before is you had 180 190 200 state-sponsored actors so if you had a one percent you know rate of people who are just bad you're talking about two states now when you talk about five billion people getting access to code that's basically running an aws or gcp instance someplace and you have a one percent you know bad guy rate all of a sudden that one percent really matters and i think that's the problem it's just the law of large numbers david applied to very very small rates of immorality but i mean you can already do very scary things with you know recombinant dna taking dna from one organism putting in another and setting that organism out and you know uh theoretically you could have designed a virus that would spread throughout humanity and cause a lot of death right i mean there's a lot of this uh capability people would have found that out because like you can't run these labs and you're not gonna get you know monkey models or mouse models it's like there's there's a trail of breadcrumbs there that is easier to track wouldn't you agree than just running an instance in a simulation on gcp sending it someplace to then have a protein printer that comes in a fedex envelope too and you have to hire people as we saw in iran with you know their chief scientist being whacked by whoever accidentally whacked him with 60 people like you need to have the brain power to do this once you have the brain power to do it you can track that brain power and we had uh for the last i think it's like since we even tested nuclear bombs we've had these special planes flying around the globe looking for the signature of nuclear uh detonations or any kind of nuclear fallout and we've been flying those forever uh i think i think i think i think biodefense is going to become probably one of the biggest industries on planet earth starting in the latter half of this century because you're going to get to a point where um digital biology is like a tool just like software was in the 80s where suddenly everyone could access it everyone could use it everyone could do stuff with it you have this ubiquity of scary [ __ ] happening hackers everywhere hold on freebird didn't we have that as well and those same claims about nuclear power and we've been able to for 100 years with nuclear close to 100 years nuclear and particularly with nuclear in particular there is a material problem you have to source and refine material to do something scary with biology you don't you can do this anywhere you can do it on your desktop at home and you know it's getting easier cheaper faster and you can use software and a printer and you know a cheap sequencer and do stuff do we believe that china has this freeburg yes china for sure yeah i mean look this is yeah i think today's head of deep mind or behind hundred percent 100 so here's the stats that deepmind put out it took um the equivalent of 100 to 200 gpus run over a few weeks uh to build this model that is i don't i don't care how advanced deepmind is at this point um so you know if that's the model then someone else can replicate that uh you know someone else that's what happened to to alpha zero the d minor chess engine after they proved it now there's a whole bunch of uh chess ais yeah a lot of startups replicating this alpha fold uh technique and then using that to go do drug discovery and you'll see 50 startups getting funded 12 to 18 months from now based on some novel protein idea um and i think that this we got to get our beach wet on this and the iss everybody go to this is getting ridiculous everybody's good slash all in but but we should create a protein we should create a we should create a protein folding syndicate yeah absolutely here it is everybody go to thesyndicate.com all in if we do this i'm collecting the emails now uh no but i i will i will i will make my first series of bets less on the application and more on the protection i think biodefense 30 years from now is going to be so important if you want to invest with the best ease can there is there going to be a protein that prevents rudy giuliani from farting i mean what is going on saks let's throw to you as our resident right wing uh joking sacks don't take it so personal we know you didn't vote for trump we know you did a write-in vote for tucker carlson let me ask you have you have you or have you not had dinner with tucker carlson um i call all in uh i i've actually uh yeah i um no i don't think i've had to know with tucker but into a party with tucker carlson no but let me let me get uh here's what's happening is well i feel my dream of gridlock in washington for the next four years is slipping away um you know the the you know i described this as sort of like it was kind of a dream scenario that you would have um a divided uh congress and the republicans you know they won 50 they won 50 seats in the senate in november and then you know because of this stupid rule in georgia that you have to you can't just win you have to win by having over 50 um the republicans would have had uh 51 but now these there's a runoff for these two open seats and the republicans were ahead in the polls at the time they were the more i think it was mostly it's based on the candidates being more popular than the democratic candidates but now because of all these antics around the election the democrats of both democratic candidates have pulled ahead and so it's yeah they are now both democratic in the last couple of last week or so um ossop is ahead of purdue by about two points which is a stunner because purdue has already beaten him before he beat him in the november election he's i think a better chance though right and the the most margin right but warnock is seven points ahead of uh loffler so that one is outside the margin of error he's clearly uh beating her and um it you know and now it looks like purdue's in danger too the republicans just need to win one of those in order for us to have you know divided government of washington which i think tends to produce better results than giving one party all the levers of power um but but this is this is the crazy thing and so i think even from trump's point of view you know i think this is a branding exercise to you know prove that he didn't lose the problem is yeah how's that going well it's not working and it looks like it's gonna cost republicans the senate which is something that i think he won't come back from so if i was advising the president i would tell him to drop this you know these these legal challenges they fired sydney powell from the legal team which i think was a good decision because of her crazy wild allegations but now rudy's out there doing the same stuff judy giuliani giuliani the answer that i gave you is they didn't bother to interview a single witness he was adjusting he wasn't waking up the genie he was he was tucking his pants in laying down in the bedroom having a drink with a russian underage age i mean rudy is just i mean fresh off his his guest starring appearance in the borap movies i mean it's like he's uncredited yeah it's like he's reenacting my cousin vinnie or something in these um in these hearings yeah um how many things it's gonna cost republicans the senate yeah i think they're it's so amazing like the democrats basically have now have a stone cold free roll because there is a very good chance that these guys are going to um win these two senate seats which would just be absolutely incredible absolutely so so republicans are definitely figuring this out rich lowry had a great call he's a editor of national review he's on the right but i think provides very good objective political analysis he's his last column sounded the alarm bells about what was happening in georgia and look if the if the issue in the georgia runoffs is are these antics if it's rudy and sydney powell the republican's gonna lose the seat both seats if the question of the election is whether democrats should have a free hand to ram through whatever legislation they want then i think the republicans win so the question is what is that election going to be about and the longer that rudy stays on the stage making these crazy wild allegations the worse it gets for republicans when is the georgia runoff election i think it's january 5th or 10th it's one of those two january 5th i think my gosh would anybody hear if they had gray hair and i know we have three gentlemen on the call who have gray hair uh freedberg somehow you're you're you're you might be maybe i've answered this question just not on his head would any of you dye your hair if you were a 79 87 year old rudy giuliani no my hair is white and getting whiter it's like it is what it is it's a passage of time i would just move on david would you consider t just taking that gray right out of your hair because you have the euro the silver fox as it stands would you ever consider it you just you can see the decision i've made but um look that's not i mean it's yeah i mean that was just like a meltdown i mean a literal meltdown a little literal meltdown and uh it was so like representative of the moment the the congressional republicans want to use a hook to get rudy off the stage i mean they cannot wait to get him off the stage and uh but if they don't stand up and just tell trump to shut this down i think i think it's coming it's coming so yeah oh wow so the republicans are going to stand up to trump with four weeks left in office wow what a profiling courage freeberg are you dying your hair do you have gray hair and are you actually dying or have you not hit the gray yet just tell us right now it's an emergency pod no it's the truth david are you dying you're here yes or no this is it there's so many ways to have an opinion on whether trump um is allowed to pre-pardon himself and his kids oh that's exactly where i was going yeah sex well yes our right wing he could definitely pardon his kids i don't know that there's a open legal question whether he can pardon himself can you pre-pardon um what does it mean pre-pardon in this definition you mean i don't in the future i don't know you can only pardon for a committed crime right i mean that's traditionally not part of it right well you can pardon for things that happened in the past um i don't think you can pardon for things that happen in the future and you can find it you can what's a blanket party no i don't think you have to define it i think you could just do a blanket pardon um the i would advise trump not to do it if i were one of his advisors and the reason is that he can only pardon for federal and the big problem the trump family has right now you know the southern district of new york these mad dog prosecutors who are democrats this is you know i don't approve of it this is this is to me this to me this is the criminalization of political differences i don't i think it'd be great if he could pardon because i do think that those guys are again they're trying to criminalize political differences but but pardoning doesn't solve the problem with the southern district of new york and biden has already said that he doesn't believe in having any uh having these uh having like a federal investigation of trump and so i don't think i don't think trump has anything to worry about federally i think the problem is god can i just say this it's just so [ __ ] decent and classy like isn't it refreshing it's actually boring but isn't it just wait what are you talking about biden is just so decent who's biden like i haven't seen that guy has he worked for us he's been great no i mean like he's well he's disappeared no he doesn't disappear he's just not crazy he's bidet biden biden has done a really has done a few really smart things i mean in his acceptance speech he did what churchill advises you to do in victory which is be magnanimous he's made the right sort of sounds towards reconciliation i think saying that he didn't believe in going after trump criminally i mean look i i don't think that would have been a good political move anyway because it would have created a backlash but it was a smart uh thing to say and so he and then i think the other smart thing he's done is uh which is very biden anyway which is he's got an establishment all the way for his cabinet he has not put he hasn't named any totally crazy progressives to his cabinet yet that the republicans could latch on to for the georgia runoffs and so biden's doing a very good job right now of appearing non-threatening and doing nothing to nothing to blow up his honeymoon he and his advisors have run a perfect perfect flawless flaw it's been flawless i mean david you just nailed it like all of all the things he could have done to potentially put the senate at risk or to potentially give republicans sort of something to hang their hats on he has given zero space right like he has not created a single opening so you you would have thought that coming into this election cycle the way that trump tried to paint biden was like this you know uh gaffaholic and instead he has just been picture pitch perfect roxanna well i think i think i think he's a he's a gaff machine when he speaks spontaneously which he has not done i mean every time i've seen him speak since the election has been reading off a teleprompter but i think that his campaign has run a really good they have run a good strategy um and now look it helps that the press doesn't really challenge you uh it's like it's like weekend at bernie's except it's like presidency at bernie's you know it's like four years they hit him in a basement he only reaches out to teleprompter hold him up put him in the on the stage yeah the press let him get away with it i mean no other candidate could have gotten away with a basement strategy but the press was so determined to go after trump that they really gave him a free pass on what biden believed and what he was going to do but look biden has run by biden has run a very good campaign and a very good transition and really i think the biggest mistake he made during the campaign was not declaring definitively that he would not try to pack the supreme court that was his big mistake and what happened the voters split the ticket to give the senate to the republicans so that biden wouldn't be able to pack the court and so he wouldn't be able to do it anyway and i think maybe his administration has learned from that mistake which is don't do anything or say anything that's going to give republicans something to latch on to to say that biden's really a radical we got to stop him and anyway so to now george is in play and biden could win the senate that's a perfect insight sax because what you haven't seen as well is you haven't seen kamala harris out there all that much because that's something republicans could glom on to and you haven't seen aoc bernie sanders or elizabeth warren they are persona no grata they are not involved in this wow they are m.i.a they are m.i.a and they the democrats won't bring them up and you have bernie sanders like hey wasn't he supposed to be oh george of like elon omar wants to cancel rent and mortgages i mean they're throwing that classic and they're throwing everything out there just to see if anything sticks right now yeah but biden biden has really given uh bernie sanders and that wing of the party the hi-hat in the in these uh cabinet choices in fact he just named uh a woman to to be the head of the uh of omb the uh the you know the budget director who has a huge twitter feud with bernie sanders and the bernie the bernie folks are up in arms about it i don't think she's gonna get through um but but yeah i mean biden has really um stiff-armed a lot of the progressives associated with the hysterical left i mean it's a why would you want to associate i just want i also think it's historical i think it's an appeal to the rights of the right i mean he is appealing to the right to some extent right i mean like by by not putting those people in place i think he's never understood never writer he's never going to be able to appeal to the trump base but what he's going to be able to do is prevent the republicans from from sort of labeling him as a radical and therefore and therefore you know went over those independents that he needs and by the way back to back to trump for one second i apologize because i wanted to ask you david i mean the other thing that could tip georgia is this whole craziness where trump is like i'm gonna veto the the defense bill unless we repealed section 230 and if you're you know a military person in georgia you're like wait a second um you're going to leave my brothers and sisters in arms basically lollygagging without any financial support because you don't like twitter's tweet policy it's gonna seem kind of crazy yeah it was it was one of these like classic trump moves where you feel like i think he does have a good point with respect to the social media companies i do think they've been engaging in censorship they've overstepped their bounds they are they they do deserve some sort of comeuppance or control i personally don't think that repealing two to eight uh two third was it 280 um is the section 230 is the way to go um it um for a bunch of reasons that we could get into if you want but um but but yeah it was one of these like reflexive trump trump you know tweets and you heard republicans in in the senate were very very quick to shoot it down um and you know there was an article in politico where um republicans were quoted well anonymously saying they're pretty sick of this [ __ ] that was the quote and so yeah i mean i think that republicans on capitol hill are kind of ready for for for those types of antics to be over okay should he uh or will he pardon himself and the kids like i mean i guess that's what it comes down to and then well i think we should i think i don't i don't i don't think so and i don't think it'll matter because i think biden will leave him alone and it will not help his biggest risk uh and this is by the way why they tried to get jay clayton to resign from the sec and move over to the southern district of new york because they thought maybe he could run some kind of interference but i mean i think the state ags will want a pound of flesh here and if i were if i yeah just if i were advising trump and and advising him on how to maximize his legacy it would be you know pardon pardon people in the administration been treated unfairly there's no need to pardon yourself um i don't i don't think he has federal exposure and i would and i would tell him that you know if republicans lose these georgia senate seats that he will be blamed for among the base for a long time and that i think will be hard for him to get past uh in four years and so it's very important i think for him to make sure that that at least purdue wins his election yeah what do you guys can do can i ask another question what do you think is gonna happen with um so trump is trying to make his case um but no one's listening twitter keeps putting up his fraudulent you know uh um this is just disputed claims thing and he's been pushing newsmax and oann do you think those become viable and real kind of media businesses now and are they actually gonna steal an audience away from fox news 100 percent it's already happened it's just the increasing fragmentation of media right cable networks don't pick them up do they uh the cable companies i've seen i've seen newsmax newsmax has a cable channel my theory is this entire twisted like crazy right alt-right mania just fades into oblivion and the party reinvents itself no no because they can't win they can't win david they can't win with this brand they did they did win they did and they will not in the future because they just lost their the republicans won like 10 or 12 uh seats in the house they've almost got the majority back in the house they almost certainly will win back the house and retire nancy pelosi in two years during the midterm election i'll put money on that right now they held the senate local elections they held the senate presidency again with this strategy you think they can win with the demographic shift with trump in 2024 really yeah uh because people want to go back to that level of crazy people people don't want the they don't want the crazy but this idea that the issue set that trump ran on and one on is dead i don't i don't agree with that yeah those issues are still there you'll have a better branded face and a standard bearer for those issues and if you say it in a less crazy way and you're generally less crazy i think that it will resonate with a lot more people than have already proven that it resonates with it already resonates with 70 million could it resonate with 75 and could they overtake the white house it's not inconceivable so i think i think we can't all of a sudden say this is signed sealed and delivered it's a fata complete and all of a sudden it's just democrats the rest of the way dave is right the down ballot results for the democrats were not good and it's a sign that moderate centrism is the only winning strategy if you really have a strategy where it's like i really want to win and not just me but my party and generations of people after me you have to run a centrist campaign which is why they're retiring the aoc elizabeth warren bernie bro contingent right so well yeah there's there's a house member that group of crazy right there was a there was a democratic house member i think elizabeth spamberger um who almost lost her uh seat i think in like a virginia like kind of a swing virginia district there was a big uh call of the democratic house caucus and she was just laying into pelosi and the leadership there because she was basically saying don't ever mention defund the police again you know if you want me to win my my swing district next time do not mention this ever again and she was just this was all in the washington post you know they um the the call was leaked by about a dozen different press out outlets which tells you there was a lot of unhappiness among the house members who almost lost their seat because of these like radical ideas the other the other thing is and you know unless all of a sudden the the folks that are in their 20s and 30s are radically different than many many generations before them the reality is that they will as they get older and wealthier generally speaking get more conservative and we are about to go through over the next 20 years 30 trillion dollars of wealth transfer and so you know i mean you can wear good segue but buttons on buttons on flannel but at the end of the day when you're you know mom and dad pass pass away and all of a sudden you know you have four five six seven eight million bucks and you have to think about your children and your children's children i tend to think people generally do very predictably get more conservative and so again another reason why you can't count on um a stayed interpretation of progressivism it there will be progressivism i think it just will be a different form of policy and it'll just be more moderate and centrist and it'll be normal uh which is a perfect segue to the new york times story that came out on the friday after thanksgiving november 27th the rich kids who want to tear down capitalism socialist minded millennials millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money lately sam jacobs and i'll read just a little bit of it has been having a lot of conversations with his family's lawyers he's trying to gain access to his trust of 30 his 30 million trust fund at 25 he's hit the age where many heirs can blow their money on her brain businesses or stable of sports cards he doesn't want to do that but by wealth management standards his plans are just as bad he wants to give it all away i want to build a world where someone like me a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars is possible a socialist college mr jacob sees his family's extreme plutocratic wealth as both a moral and economic failure his parents must be very proud first of all sam jacobs sounds like an idiot and he shouldn't have any money so hopefully he gets his wish why did his parents give him 30 million dollars this trust fund should be like given to somebody who deserves it like yeah but but what what's saying what sam jacobs wants doesn't mean that sam jacobs gets to decide for everybody else and just because that he wants to live in a communist country he can go and find one and the reality is like you know we just talked about alpha fold well guess what you know there's four of us on this on this podcast today that over the next 20 or 30 years are more than likely going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in protein design and uh i don't do that with any um sense of um shame um and i'm glad that stuart butterfield made me you know a lot of money because it's going to go go back into the world in positive ways and you know maybe if my children are taught properly they'll be able to take a small piece of that and they'll decide that you know there's uh something else that's important to them but the reality is that everybody should be allowed to make their own decisions and i don't want somebody like him especially a 25 year old [ __ ] telling me or my kids who even though they're you know under the age of 15 are probably smarter than him what to do david when you read this article uh if you did read it uh what were your thoughts um especially in regards to parenting and thinking about our own kids because what i started thinking about i was like oh my god what if one of my daughters wants to take her trust fund and just throw it into the wind i really don't want to comment wait hold on i just want to say one thing the part that's completely reasonable and that i respect is this this 25 year old seems to have come to a decision what i find completely unreasonable and you know just completely lathered with insecurity is his need to then project it and say it has to be true for everybody else as well and and the the grand arcing statements of how it should never be just completely betrays you know what we've learned in how society functionally works like if you want democracy the only sort of economic philosophy that's been partnered with with democracy to work well as capitalism and so if you want to change one you're gonna have to change the other and just the fact that you know with all of his education the hundreds of millions of dollars you know didn't get a course in civics to understand that is kind of sad i just before you go david i have to read one comment because it's so deranged that it almost seems like it was part of a script to like some billions or secession um heirs whose wealth have come from specific sources sometimes use that history to guide their giving there's that's in new york time saying that pierce still a hunt a 32 year old socialist anarchist marxist communist or all of the above has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather's outlet mall empire when i and this is uh mr uh mr i'm sorry mx i've never seen that before abdullah hunt how do you pronounce max hunt how do you pronounce mx mx de la hunt takes non-gendered pronouns has anybody seen mx i've never seen that that was the first time yeah that's the first for me so i guess it's so you can say so you don't have to say mr or miss or missus it's like latinx where you just can group a bunch of people into one thing got it right um this is what uh mx de la hunt says i'm just trying to figure out how it's pronounced maxis hunt de la hunt um taking a shot jason you're you're not showing respect for his pronouns i don't want to get canceled it just is kind of hard to pronounce mx i don't mean to laugh but i need i need somebody to tell me how to pronounce mx.com um but this is the quote that is so insane when i think about outlet malls and i think this is what we all think about when we think about outlook walls when i think about outlaw malls i think about intersectional oppression what's the first thing that comes to mind freeburg when you think of an outlet mall certainly it's intersectional compression or a subway i just can i just point out like the um the new york times has become a little bit sensationalist like you know if you were to ask statistically what percentage of people that are inheriting wealth are going to be stupid like this the answer would probably be pretty low but they find the one or two characters like this and they build the story around them and then people extrapolate that as if that is the persona of the entire population of people that are going to inherit some degree of wealth and that becomes the story and i'm just so sick of it like i don't read the new york times anymore and look i love the new york times i would read it every single day i still have it on my phone i still pay for my subscription but i'm so sick of the narrative being written by the author's objective and then they go and find one or two facts that meet that narrative and rather than speaking about it statistically and saying we surveyed a hundred people that were wealthy this is how many and if it was sixty percent of them saying i'm gonna go give away all my wealth and do crazy [ __ ] great like that's the story but again but picking picking and picking an individual and building the narrative around that individual as if that is the game but david and that's the point like what they do is they don't even talk about people who want to give their money away what they do is they create these caricatures around this like judgment judgment it's it's all about this like judgment it's like it's virtu it's like i am holier than everybody else because of these decisions that i made and i just find it so offensive now here's can i just tell you i had my physical last week and i have a doctor in l.a who's superb and he's he's in many ways sort of a philosopher king to me he's been incredibly important in my life and you know dr agus i talked to his name his name is christian renna uh at lifespan medicine but uh anyways um and here's what you're and i talked to chris about raising kids and chris has seen you know thousands of people over the course of his you know journey as a primary care physician and he's seen the kids of these folks and etc you know he he boiled it down to me it's like um you know your job as a parent is to make sure that your children have incredible tools married with incredible habits and so some of these things are very simple like food and you know how to eat and self-care and exercise but some of these things are really important which is a world view empathy and he uses this word which is called awareness and awareness is this idea that you understand the world around you and that's an incredibly difficult thing for parents to be able to teach their kids but it seems like if you could give them that that's independent of anything other than time and care right it doesn't matter whether you're rich or you're poor it doesn't really matter whether you're black or white you can really teach the concept of awareness and empathy and then the other thing that he taught me was you know there's a really big difference between folks like you me meaning guys like me who grew up poor and who are focused on the generation of money right meaning making money and some of you make it some of you don't but you're living in this existential threat that you feel is hanging over you and so you go out and you make it and a lot of it is driven by this insecurity you've had since you were young but make no mistake your children's lives is harder than yours and it's about the utilization of money and whether they want to give it away or whether they want to use it you have a responsibility to teach them whether you're giving them a dollar a million dollars or a billion dollars and this is where i think somewhere along the way these kids as parents you know may or may not have done the best maybe they did the best they could but somewhere along the way these gaps are are obvious at least in the telling of the article and this is where i go back to if you're really going to talk to about something like this which actually is quite important because again we're going to go through the the most enormous wealth transfer in the history of the world in the next 20 years 30 trillion dollars that could so talk about that if if enough people took their inheritance and decided to eradicate student debt it would be three percent of what's going to be inherited over the next 20 years think about it so obviously you can do some incredible things but it's not framed in the right way it doesn't promote the right kind of discussion and all it is is salacious reporting that makes these kids look like caricatures and by the way remember that money today is invested somewhere so to pull that three percent out would have a kind of triple kind of rippling and kind of um probably deleterious effect on on amazon no no forget about that factories family but this is this is my point also is i think that there's a responsibility to these stewards of capital right they they may be you can call them wealthy all you want but they really are the people that pull the strings and where money's moving um and there's uh i think you know to your point kind of a degree of responsibility that inevitably has to kind of sit with this uh this group um here's the problem with it is if they just want to give their money away to a charity that they thought was worthy and that and they were willing to live like you know monks or something and not need money that'd be fine you know we could respect that but the reason why they're in such a hurry to get rid of this wealth is because they feel like money itself is ill-gotten that wealth itself is is by definition ill-gotten it must have come from at the expense of somebody else right you only could have gotten that wealth by ripping people off and that is the thing that that's the idea that's really pernicious about this sort of like socialism movement is they don't really understand that the way capitalism works you only get rich by selling something to somebody that they want that makes their life better right i mean all of us are engaged in the creation of new technologies and new products and that makes the world better and people are willing to pay for that and that's what creates value and and that's what creates wealth and it's really just kind of sad that people you know are in this it goes beyond this article on these trust fund kids but this whole uh condemnation of capitalism and this attack on any you know billionaires or whatever um the problem with it is it doesn't recognize the way that value is created for everybody can i um can i give you a quote um from walter williams who uh just passed away who's a very famous uh economist prior to capitalism the way people amassed great wealth was by looting plundering and enslaving their fellow man capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow men and that's really true and some are along the way folks folks have lost the script and have all of a sudden gone back to pre-historic capitalist times and um i think that we don't have enough good examples of constructive capitalism that prove that this is not a bad word yeah exactly yeah i love the walter williams quote um just to give another example jeff bezos just gave 10 billion dollars to uh climate change teddy what's the kid's name teddy schaefer or something like that the journalist has been writing him on twitter i think he works for vox or something like they have basically been attacking bezos since he made the announcement that he hasn't done enough and it's like 10 billion dollars is the largest contribution ever made to a single cause i mean obviously right bill gates and how did he do foundation right and how did he do that because he created amazon which has created enormous value for all of us imagine if one of these kids in the article instead of just giving their money away by the way it looks like there's a bunch of organizations that have sprung up to scam these kids out of their trust fund it's sort of you know a fool in their money in their money are soon parted there's a whole bunch of of scam artists who are trying to scam these kids but uh yeah i mean they're definitely getting scammed but imagine if instead of just getting scammed out of their money they were to use it to create a business that created a new product or technology that served people then maybe they could turn that 30 million into 10 billion like bezos did and and if they lost it they would have done it in the pursuit of something really grand and so nobody would actually instead of virtue signaling instead of virtue signaling on the new york times yeah like these guys were so glad to be in the new york times to dunk on capitalists and dunk and literally dunk on their own parents think about that you hate your parents so much you have to go to the new york times and tell them how much you hate them i mean i don't know how this changes well by the way speaking of virtue signaling in the new york times can we talk about the new york times writing that hit piece on coinbase all right i mean if you want to go there i mean this is the first rail of the podcast but we've been talking about brian armstrong just to set the table here brian armstrong wrote a memo he said oh no politics by the way by the way jkl i just posted an image for nick to put up here just to to don't don't tell me it's a code 13 that says this is not a code 13. it's to reinforce your point about the you know the virtue of capitalism you know this kind of dates back to these are three three images three charts from the year 1500 to today and energy use has grown 115 times well so this is basically uh a measure of population consumption and production right and so the the capitalist incentive has driven um the ability while population has grown 14x over the last 500 years it's driven um a nearly 10x increment in what is available for humans to consume uh per capita during that period of time i mean think about that that was driven entirely by industry and so industry has enabled and production has increased by 240x so we have a surplus of goods on planet earth and a surplus of access to goods because of the capitalist incentive over the last 500 years and whose right is it to say that that was wrong and all of the people that are employed by it and live within that mechanism and who are no longer living in poverty who are no longer slaves all of a sudden 50 000 people convert you signal because they're sitting in their warm homes in america telling everybody else to [ __ ] off i mean i find it kind of a joke i mean i i would like you to go and live you know where i was supposed to live before i emigrated right sri lanka no heater no roof no food etc they should go to north korea you go come to sri lanka i can show you you go to an outhouse okay you sit there you squat to go to the bathroom okay um there's no [ __ ] three-ply you know uh bamboo you know press-free toilet paper to deal with um you know you you literally what you know you clean yourself with your hand you brush your teeth with coal i remember we used to brush our teeth with [ __ ] coal okay we have a well for water and so you you have all these people in these situations where all we wanted was to just give a chance to run the race and the people that were born with a silver spoon in their mouth who had the chance to run the race turns around and tells guys like me no you can't and it [ __ ] infuriates me yeah i want to blow up the racetrack by the way yeah i want to just get rid of the internet i mean [ __ ] about you it's a serious [ __ ] you to these to these like they were profited and they benefited from democracy and capitalism and now they want to revert back to a system where everybody who's in that space they're trying to get into this system they don't understand what feudalism is because there are so many layers removed through their [ __ ] filtered lenses and you know country clubs and [ __ ] vacations and all this crap that they have no idea what it's like and i'm telling you i am first generation of having escaped that [ __ ] and i don't want anything to do with it but the point is capitalism has allowed not just the us but many other countries to change their course in life um stephen pickner's for all of the controversy he creates his books on um you know what humans have really achieved during this great kind of era of capitalism and industrialism and how we've changed our course on planet earth uh improved human health improved longevity improved calorie access to calories improved access to shelter to medicine um it's all because of a an incentive a market-based incentive system and it is very very powerful it is the most powerful force we know as a species and it's allowed this incredible acceleration exponential acceleration of possibility for our species also from the article a great quote elizabeth baldwin a 34 year old democratic socialist from cambridge massachusetts she plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy an apartment and raise a family enjoying the sort of pleasant middle-class existence denied to many people of color in the united states what is that i mean that's just i don't know i just i i don't think let's just move on let's talk about brian it's so dumb they they see they see the world in a zero some way where you know anything they have means that somebody else must it must have been taken away from somebody else they don't really understand the way that value is created by an exchange and by people creating new things um and you know and and that's what technology is all about you know it's creating news i mean there was a time when everybody didn't have access to clean water now we take that for granted there's a time when everybody have access to affordable food and electricity and by the way look at how we started all of this is driven by capitalism and look at how we started the conversation today alpha fold i think is the realization of one of the greatest capitalist enterprises in history if not the greatest you know alphabet and they're still getting started and the output of that is going to be an incredible new tool for drug discovery that is going to extend human lifespan in an incredible way there was a window of time where folks who are really really good at bitching and complaining had a window of opportunity to [ __ ] and complain and what happened was they were not able to seize power and then just in the last few months literally i think we are nailing that coffin shut because as you said david you're gonna have to all of a sudden like look at companies like google and look at things like affifold and reject them and i don't know how people do because everyone will need something that that company will create now and that alpha fold will be responsible for we are all going to need a vaccine these are all coming from for-profit companies that thrived on top of r d you know all of it was funded by past drug profits from other things and so you know we're going to have to really look at ourselves in the mirror and say did we not want that did we want to just die on the street to prove a point and i don't think anybody actually wants that i mean what is your what is the ultimate criticism of amazon they made you know iphone chargers five dollars well the point is 40 you can't have your cake and eat it too you can't actually you know complain about amazon on the one hand complain about no action on climate change on the other complain about this complain about that complain about the other thing then you're just a [ __ ] whiner and nobody wants a whiner around because they're not additive they're not useful you don't learn anything from a whiner all right so looking at the uh new york times uh versus coinbase the foul new york times fake news sorry i'm just we'll talk about talk about whining this is more virtue signaling uh whining by the new york times and actually the look this was clearly a hit piece because they don't like brian armstrong's decision to make coin base in a political workplace if any workplace has chosen to be political it's the new york times there's a lot of examples of that the fact that they ran barry weiss out of there they ran mario weiss out of the newsroom they ran james bennett out of there for publishing a an op-ed by tom cotton remember that he got kicked out he got forced to resign because he published one op-ed by a republican senator okay this is the most close-minded group the most close-minded political workplace and here they are lecturing a silicon valley company that in their view isn't tolerant enough i mean it's ridiculous but the but the and it was obvious that it was a hit piece the stories the the examples in the article were years old um you know the uh they weren't even reported to hr violation as violations at the time so there's you know it's it's people cooking up things that weren't reported as problems at the time but the but the really interesting thing about the story i think is that is the way coinbase reacted to it by preemptively announcing that it was coming which really made the new york times reporters really irate you know they called it extremely enough reporters were upset and they threatened that they would no longer the journalist said if you guys are going to front run our stories we are not going to call you when we have a story and i responded to that and i was like are you serious like you're literally going to lose what little integrity you have left crazy about fact checking because there's an amazing somebody wrote a pre-emptive blog post about it i'll say this about i'll say this about uh brian armstrong i have a lot of respect for him for making a stand i think every ceo has that right and uh i'm glad that at the end of the day the employees at coinbase were given a humane way of making a decision to be on the same page with him or not i will also say that i thought that essay was not goal written and that uh given the chance i could have rewritten that for him in a much better way i've maintained this the whole time um but i i think he's in the right here wrap it up tell us what you think well okay that's that's that's interesting that your mother's um it's interesting to hear your support for brian so we've talked about this has become a recurring topic on the pod um but anyway i think you know the important thing is the way that i think the tech community fought back against this hit piece and it was the like you said jason the front running of the story somebody's uh a a wag on twitter had a had a great comment saying you know um he basically said you know i try to walk out you i agree with the new york times on this i try to walk up to somebody and kick him in the nuts and they cover their groin you know how dare they you know uh how unprofessional of them it was a slow motion kick to the nuts yeah exactly and so coming sunday it's right but it was day but on sunday we're kicking you on the nuts so yeah the new york times the coin base just covered its groin so the new york times can cover kick him in the nuts and um and of course the reporters all went hysterical about that but it you know but but but it was a really brilliant pr tactic by coinbase because what it did is it almost like released a spike protein you know by by sort of a pre-announcing new york times story it created this spike protein that trained the immune system of silicon valley to be ready for this pathogenic new york times story and the the story just really fell flat it didn't go anywhere yeah it was um and they did the same thing with the away ceo she was too hard on people in slack all of these stories to go full circle involve some leak from a slack room so if you're a ceo or you're managing anybody don't have any difficult or legal issues discussed on slack just go for a walk with somebody talk to them face to face because you're going to get destroyed all right listen everybody this has been another amazing episode we had 10 more stories we wanted to get to that we weren't able to get to uh but while we were doing this i asked my crack team sorry at the syndicate whoa what was that to set up the syndicate.com slash all in so i'm not saying we're doing a syndicate yes we are we're going to figure out how to do something we're going to do something to let the people who listen invest alongside us we're going to figure it out in 2021 at some point but you have to write a review on itunes no you just got to sign up just got to sign up at the syndicate.com all in if we do a folding protein company or a unicorn in the isa space maybe everybody who listens to the all-in podcast gets to wet their beak for the rain when david speak what you're the beak let your feet the t-shirt guy that listens to us we love you uh there's a code there's a word but wet your beak or what the beak we have to figure out which one's better i think we have a new i think we have a new tagline for the pod what you're being wet you're right and code 13. these are great merch opportunities for anybody who wants to go do merch you can go do merch on your own we don't care we're not in the merch business put it up on your own website love you guys love you besties uh so for bestie rainman the dictator paulie hoppetea and the queen of quinoa himself metro mile founder spacker piper laying pipe and spacks everywhere i'm jason calaganis for the besties we'll see you next time which could be in a week or a month who knows on the all in podcast love you besties




hey everybody welcome back besties are back for the all-in podcast the queen of quinoa freeburg is here the dictator chamoth and of course rain man david sachs and it's been a big week here in silicon valley with airbnb and wish both going public for over a hundred billion dollars combined anybody get their beak wet on that one oh hey guys oh what how are you david yeah i might i might have gotten my be quiet on on a couple of those so oh a little bit well uh you know what in celebration of your recent victory with airbnb wish i will oh no i can't zoom in on my merch but i've got my unofficial wet your beak mug so for those of you wondering we have to uh get a little bit of housekeeping out of the way at first here uh the merch has gone crazy have you guys been watching merch on twitter of course anybody anybody my favorite market i got some of those mugs i think they arrived today they look great it's amazing and you know the best decision we made was was not to let you sell t-shirts jason because you would have you would have you would have uh milked this for every every nickel you could and said and instead we we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it i mean they're literally i know that hurt you i know that hurt you a little bit i mean the the problem i'm having here no advertising i'm picking up all the production cost here i'm sending you guys equipment you maniacs lose the equipment every time you go from one of your estates to another estate i'm sending equipment to four different places anyway we've got a special very special episode for you today we are doing drum roll please we're gonna add some sound effects to this afterwards we're gonna do the bestie awards today so we're gonna go through the biggest winners in politics and business and cultures and of course the losers the flashes in the pan the best business moves the stupidest business we got a lot to get through um but just in terms of housekeeping again the all-in syndicate is up and running i think there's four thousand people have applied in 10 days let's just talk about the market cap of airbnb wish for that matter what round did you invest in airbnb uh seriously was that the founders fund around yeah yeah congrats thanks oh that's so yummy but to be honest that was already over a billion dollar evaluation correct yeah it was it was i mean it's still like 80 or 100 x it's like a 40x right 48 it's like a 40 it's like a 40x or something like that so thank you thank you thank you brian chesky thank you peter thiel peter led that round and um brian was looking to include founders in the round uh and in addition to it being led by founders fund and so peter introduced me and that's how it happened wow fantastic i did not get my big wet on that but i did mention airbnb on my podcast and that you know i've been trying to get brian on the podcast for i don't know a decade and i said you know i know you guys want to have him on the pod i've asked him like literally every year for 10 years but i don't think he likes me and then he emailed me said i listened to the podcast i like you and i was like oh okay great will you come on he's like i'll come on so he's going to come on this year i think which will be great right for this week and certainly well i think i think uh brian and the whole team really did a masterful job of uh navigating through the whole kovic crisis i mean everybody forgets how negative the publicity was people were talking about airbnb as covid roadkill back in april i i tweeted a cnbc headline from back in april wondering whether airbnb was even going to survive and they navigated the crisis they did have to cut head count but they made the company much more profitable uh but they also did um great things for uh both the renters and the hosts um at the company's expense they refunded something like 250 million dollars to the to to to users who had cancer reservations but they gave the money to the host to keep them afloat so they really did a great job navigating this whole crisis it's a pretty great company he obviously cares deeply um it was very uh hard i think for him to cut all that staff at that time right it was kind of a tough decision but they were very generous in how they did it yeah so congratulations on getting the beak wet sacks and uh chamath i got a bunch of inbound uh you had file to sell some shares of virgin galactic i saw you tweeted about it and you wanted to be transparent people asked for you to address it on upfront on the show so go ahead yeah i have a lot of uh projects that i um intend to fund in 2021 i'm probably going to put another i don't know i think the forecast was almost 2 billion dollars to work and uh i needed to manage my liquidity for this year and make sure that you know i could continue to make all those investments and fund my fund all of the other things that i need to do and that's why i did it and you're still a significant shareholder i assume and you believe in the company yeah i mean uh i remain completely committed to that business um you know i i it would have been better if i could have sold something else but it's not quite possible and when we're entering it when we when you leave the tax year you just have to make these decisions to lock in some gains against other losses and um would have loved to have uh i've not had to do it but i needed to manage my liquidity and so i sold you know it's a small portion of what i own so yeah that was sort of my point this is the state small portion of what you own and i mean this is something that you know in poker and in business you got to manage your chip stack and you got to manage your bankroll so today we're gonna do the besties uh this is our first uh attempt at talking about uh uh it's our award show for 2020. let's leave it at that let's start out with the biggest before before we hold on hold on a second um how much weight did you lose because it's either that you're still fat and you have it wait wait it's either you're still fat and you have an incredible camera or you've actually lost weight and this reminds me by the way oh and i'd like to tell a story no no no no four years ago oh my god here we go jason jason and i make a weight bet okay just don't say the dollar amount it was like you know it was like i think it was like uh ten thousand dollars a pound whatever and uh jason jason he would get ten he was about to do and this is incredible jason comes to us five years ago and says guys you won't believe it i'm doing a show on nbc uh a reality tv show that's true pilot and with not please beat that out okay beep that up don't get canceled oh my god that guy that guy seems like a train wreck but okay that's fine you're going to do this pilot with people don't nbc an nbc and don't you need to you know be in fighting shape and he said yes i need motivation so i said here's motivation let's make a weight but you need to be under 190 pounds and i'll pay you ten thousand ten thousand dollars a pound that you're underneath you pay whatever thousand pound over yeah it was like six months later and we're hosting i'm hosting a poker game and i realized oh my god this is the last this is the last day of the bet the day before well we started the day before and then the last day of the bet is midnight yeah i wait till midnight and i jump up and i'm like wait ben and so i say jason you gotta be under 190 190 2.5 or 193 pounds yeah he literally goes ash and white and he says more white than i am now okay because i just ate and i was maintaining my weight he says he says okay okay that's fine he had been eating pizzas and then he says he says freeburg you won't believe this he goes guys i just need five minutes before the weigh-in and then he goes to our guest bedroom and crosstalk that's not true what is that there was no 13 in this story fabricating now he tried he tried to leave after eating all that pizza and cheese and nachos and everything anyways he loses the weight bet and he says jamal this is completely unfair i'm not gonna pay you he was like 196 pounds i'm not paying you this money like one pound over and he said uh this bet is not over until midnight the f obviously yes obviously yes 24 hours in fair enough so i said all right fine jake i'll find he goes home he literally takes every diuretic known to man come on and then he loses two pairs of sweatpants and sweated it out i checked in with this guy 10 times this day he walked like 12 miles he took four shits you know i sweated it out steam room he lot bath he did a colonoscopy he did a colonoscopy to his credit he lost five pounds by midnight and he did drop it but then i said then i said you know what because there were two different weigh-ins uh we were gonna go play in a poker tournament so we went and played in the poker tournament i said chamath buy me into the poker tournament whatever we win we'll chop it up if it happens so we just made it into a friendly thing um and obviously but great now that story is out there and now i'm going to everybody's going to be on twitter with the code t-shirt and i hope somebody in the all-in-army does the t-shirt that just says 192.5 and we'll all know what it means which is the way that the one idea was 193. 192. which is crazy that i'm one it was 193 anyway here we go getting into the categories our first category is the biggest winner in politics biggest winner in politics i'm going to ask you gentlemen to raise your hand if you have a strong feeling on this i'll call on one of you who's got a a big winner in politics go ahead chamoth joe biden toe body okay going down the limb there i mean let's be honest there's nobody bigger and actually if you wanted to abstract it what i would say is centrism was the big winner and uh and it kind of feeds the losers which is sort of the extreme left and the extreme right but i would say that centrism and joe biden were the huge huge huge winners well i'll give a i'll give a um an orthodox pick which is uh xi jinping the chairman of the chinese communist party you would have thought he would have had a bad year starting off with you know kovid uh starting in his country at the beginning of the year but he wasn't evil they you know that a global plague came from china but they were able to kind of uh they were able to use a a very gullible wh o to launder uh responsibility for the catastrophe and they took advantage of the crisis to build more client states and asia and africa with promises of vaccines and and money and finally his uh biggest global nemesis uh trump and then you know pompeo lost in the election so you have to say he came out on top at the end of this year free yeah i i um i put i have the exact same answer as saks i put the chinese communist party as a whole actually and i feel like um on the world stage they're uh they're strengthened uh in in the post-covered world so i had yeah because she went from the famous quote in the debates there was a little girl in california who was bust to school that little girl was me where she took on joe biden and then she winds up getting the vp slot and i think she winds up actually becoming president and will be the first female president of the year of the of the history of the united states and that could happen in the first term or if joe biden doesn't run for a second term and they do a halfway decent job kamala plus pete bootage edge is a pretty great ticket as well who's the biggest loser who's your biggest loser chamath impossible uh donald j trump okay the obvious answer stream left the extreme left and the extreme right got it i'll i'll i'll i'll i'll agree with that but i'd also add uh nancy pelosi the speaker of the house uh her impeachment of trump at the beginning of the year went absolutely nowhere wasn't even an issue in the election and her majority in the house has almost completely disappeared she lost a dozen seats i think the um the the i think she's down to about four or five seats as a razor thin majority in the house and she's set to lose more in the midterm elections i predict that she is set to not be speaker anymore in two years and headed for retirement okay freeberg you got one biggest loser i have i have the uh institution of american democracy is the biggest loser of 2020. i feel like we're coming out of this year with like no belief that our election was valid for a vast majority for for a sizable minority this country that um some democrats believe that the election was fraudulent now too i mean if you say something enough times everyone believes it so um you know here we are coming out of this year where with a crippling um lack of faith in our electoral system and uh it's scary that american democracy is being fundamentally questioned by its own constituents so um so i think that's the biggest loser i i had i had uh two choices here one of them was already said i said the hysterical left as my runner-up bernie and warren just dismissed by biden and kamala they they are not even part of the discussion anymore and they didn't even get cabinet positions so the hysterical left and the socialist communist party is out of the democratic party thank the lord but my biggest loser i have to say that this is the worst run of any politician i've ever seen in a year which is rudy giuliani under investigation for les pardes and eager fruhman then the bogus lawsuit elections then farting during a hearing then doing the barat shirt tuck i don't know if we have feelings on if that was a tuck or if he was trying to wake up the genie and then he bleeds hair dye then he starts bleeding hair dye wake up the genie and he got covered no then he got covered and he's do you think you had a shitty year i think there's gonna be the fans of the show are now registering domain names of things we say the upside for him is that donald trump's campaign is paying him twenty thousand dollars a day in legal fees no i think it was two hundred no it's 20 grand a day oh it's only 20. that's his going rate for making a a fool of himself i have a i've ever feeling that rate was adjusted when uh rudy couldn't get uh the case to the supreme court well we all know that trump pays his bills on time so it shouldn't be a problem right all right uh now we're gonna have some more fun biggest winner in business biggest winner in business freeburg you want to lead us off you haven't let us off yet i'll take this one i think that the biggest winner in business this year is a company that started a few years ago called moderna this company had a ipo in december of 18 at seven and a half billion dollar market cap it traded between four and five billion throughout 2019 and all of a sudden covet hits and this becomes a vaccine candidate uh driver for moderna and the stock shoots up it's worth 60 billion today this company has not had a product that's gone to market prior to covid and they struggled uh getting this business um i wouldn't say struggle but they they never really had a an application for their mrna technology they looked at it for years iterating and pivoting this business and covid un like a lot of other businesses really gave them an unbelievable uh kick and i might even say i shot on the arm i shot in the arm and tonight they got approval from the fda and they're going to be shipping starting to on monday i think saks who you got for the biggest winner in business we're moving on a good pace here elon musk uh our friend rose to become the six second richest man in the world ahead of bill gates uh and you know right on the heels of jeff bezos uh his company tesla had something like a 8 or 10x gains over a 500 billion dollar company of course the products are awesome it joined the s p 500 and spacex is doing amazing as well uh we saw the launch of starship the other day and i have just been mesmerized by all these unboxing videos for starlink which you can see on youtube and it is just magic that you can unbox this little satellite dish plug it in and you have broadband internet from space so um i think you know elon seems to be on track to be uh not only the world's richest man but the world's first trillionaire wow big uh big uh big ups there to e uh chamath what do you got for the biggest winner in business of 2020 yeah i have to agree with saxypoo uh elon is the elon basically has had over the last 10 or 15 years an incredible amount of challenges that he's overcome he's had an incredible amount of haters he's had probably had to deal with stuff that most of us would have broken under and uh he just fought through it and the guy just basically bended all the haters until he crushed their souls and i just think that that's incredible absolutely so elon musk is the hands down the biggest biggest most obvious winner of 2020. that's the obvious winner um i'll give a couple of runner-ups here um i thought also on the runner-ups uh after elon zoom beating skype slack video google hangouts and fixing all their china issues and getting to a hundred billion dollar valuation is notable obviously amazon did a great job um because of the pandemic uh and then just as an oddball out there i just thought adam silver in the nba bubble was an incredibly bold project that was executed so well and was such a delightful business moment and also a cultural moment that you know you had the nba shutting down during the pandemic remember that dramatic night on a thursday night and they cancel the games and then they do the bubble and it works and that gave me hope that we could get through the virus so those were some of my other runners-up all right the biggest loser in business in 2020 go ahead chamath facebook and google exiting the year with umpteen anti-trust lawsuits um i think morale must be pretty brutal over there there's no amount of money at some point that people are willing to get paid to walk in the door every day and just have to do have to deal with those kinds of accusations and so um for all the good in the world that they do um which so it just must be really tough that they have to deal with it but uh those guys are i think are the biggest losers in business what do you got sex the small business person um you know whether it's restaurants retail hospitality what have you small business people really took it on the chin this year i agree with dramath about you know companies like google and facebook losing esteem in the eyes of the public for good reason censorship and so on but tech still our you know stocks are at all-time highs the politicians got to keep eating at french laundry but it was a small business people who got absolutely decimated by these lockdowns which don't even work and so they are the big loser of twenty twenty free berkeley i'm a little more vanilla than the rest of you guys i went with amc entertainment holdings talk about a [ __ ] business in covid restaurants at least you can do takeout you can't take out a movie from amc they're they're shut down all over the country their creditors are telling them to declare bankruptcy it's a total [ __ ] show no one's gonna go back to the movie movies you don't think they come back i don't think they go i don't know what the hell like amc's gonna do what do you do with all those theaters they're awesome i love going in the movies but i'm not going to the movies for at least another year so and it's sad because honestly like movies are a big part of my life always have been and it's sad to see movie theaters you know they're gonna come back strong they're gonna come back stronger i think amazon will buy one chain i think netflix buys the other and then with your membership you get to go and see all the range of stuff and maybe even see like queen's gambit in the theater it's such a great experience right yeah yeah i would have loved to see queen's gambit in the theater totally there's so much you could do with theaters and i think there's an opportunity but man did those guys get screwed this year well i always thought they should do an extended edition so imagine if when hbo or one of those did you know game of thrones if they had it out the day before in movie theaters or the week before uh or two days before and they did an extra 10 minutes people would love that my biggest loser was of course same as david uh real world businesses absolutely demolished and the government after that first stimulus which was incredible trump did an amazing job of just dropping buckets of money whether it was that pp loans and ppe loans whatever the ppp loans ppp loans all this stuff was incredible and then what complete utter [ __ ] and incompetence from our government that they couldn't get the second one done it's absolutely [ __ ] infuriating that the democrats and the republicans these selfish [ __ ] couldn't get another billion dollars dropped who was that and here we are in december that [ __ ] needed to drop in august or september not december it's just absolutely disgraceful it's they're i'm just disgusted that they couldn't even get some more money to people who are suffering unemployment and these restaurants a hundred thousand restaurant closures by the end of 2020 it's just unconscionable that the the stock market is ripping and we can't get just some money in people's pockets just drop the money to infuriate and we're sitting here at the taping of this that it might actually happen um okay biggest winner in culture who's got a big winner in culture anybody got one i got the um the black lives matter movement and i think it um i think it was such a like meaningful um and impactful uh um kind of shift in how people were thinking fundamentally about behavior in society it's still persisting you know there's corporate action there's state action there's regulatory action um and i think it's uh it's a meaningful movement that's going to persist i think it came at a time when we all felt like you know a lot of people felt locked up in their homes people were angry people were frustrated with the system and um just uh it just was a very poignant moment uh especially occurring during covid that it really took hold um and i think it's gonna last and i think that the uh the movement itself is gonna spawn a lot of change yeah i think it's well said david who do you got uh in culture uh baby yoda uh star so you went pop culture on that one yeah star star of the mandalorian show uh that his his ascent uh icon status uh helped disney get 86 million subscribers for for disney plus uh which just blew away expectations and uh has established disney plus as the main rival to netflix do you think netflix uh you think disney will pass netflix correct i don't know if they'll pass them but they're now certainly going to be a major rival to them i think that i think they passed them okay chamath who do you got i would pick a combination of fortnite roblox and among me which i think has for at least um a lot of high school and middle school uh kids but i may be a lot of adults the only form of social interaction that we've had for an entire year what a great what a great selection and and i think it's important to understand how much lonelier we all would have been and how much more mental illness and depression we all would have dealt with if we couldn't have even just talked to our friends and i think that there's something really beautiful that those games did for people that's a good one that's a good one i i went with podcasting i think on a cultural basis joe rogan and what's happening in podcasting these long-form discussions even this podcast um has become just an amazing amazing movement and people are having better discussions and i consider it the antidote to what's happening on social media when people hear us discussing stuff on this podcast they feel like they ate something nutritious they had a great salad they had some healthy food and then when they're on social media and they consume the same tweets that we're doing they feel like it's junk food right and so i think that podcasting long form discussions listening to each other maybe you know republicans and democrats left right everybody listening to each other and podcasting is just such a great meeting medium for discussion who is the biggest loser on a cultural basis in 2020 mr david sacks the media starting with the new york times and other sort of elite media they rip the umpire jersey off their backs to go after trump well they got him but at what cost half the country will never trust them again this makes conspiracy theories more likely it makes cultural divides deeper and they've been revealed to be corporate journalists journalists who subscribe to and serve an agenda of their corporate masters they've lost the public's trust freedberg what do you got on the biggest cultural loser uh climate change it took a back seat this year um it you know it had momentum as a as a cultural meme it's uh it's lost its uh its luster and it's been shadowed a little bit this year with blm and uh and covid and lack of faith and institutions and all the other stuff that's been going on do you think that people now when they see the collective response to kovid and the pen uh the the vaccines and us our ability with science and technology to solve the pandemic we will have a newfound appreciation for coordinated global action on global warming david preber i think are you asking me i think um i think the uh i think the faith in institutions has eroded tremendously this year the who telling people not to wear masks and then telling them hey masks are good uh the efficiency that hits the um i think just a global warming movement as well yeah i think the lack of faith in institutions as well as in the media makes it really difficult for things that require a coordinated effort uh and a coordinated cultural shift uh to take hold um you know are really challenged in this new kind of model where where you don't know what to believe and you don't believe institutions and you don't believe old school and you don't believe states and you don't believe you know anything structural anymore so it's it's a scary it's a scary kind of moment i don't know i think climate change is going to have momentum with the new administration at least coming into office in the u.s but um but generally like institutional guidance is is lost at celester traboth what do you got business culture wokeness i think when you now look at the realization of what we've gone through um people have realized that you know you can you can be extremely anti-racist and think latinx is just a stupid label you know you can be an entirely complete 100 000 million percent supporter of lgbtq but think that you know all these complicated pronouns aren't really necessary and i think that people are coming to a point where you can have um nuance and i think that that's really important i think that this whole cancer culture and wokeness was um incredibly corrosive um and i think that that they lost i i think it's actually a great um i think it's i think it's a great point you're making chamath because on the last episode i fumbled the word mx which none of us had ever seen we all laughed about it and then i just had this little thing i was like okay i guess this is when i get canceled because i laughed at the fact that or i mispronounced it right and the fact that i thought even for a second that mispronouncing this term mx which i then did research on and i said does anybody know how to pronounce word mx on twitter so i figured i would preempt the dropping of the um podcast by bringing it up on my twitter and people are like are you trolling i'm like no i'm asking and i found videos and it turns out there is an actual controversy in the trans community where mx some people believe means mixed am i xed other people think it's um mx as x the variable as in the variable x and so they're having their own debate they're figuring it out that's great everybody loves them everybody supports them but the fact that i mispronounce it you know yeah well jason can i tell you can i tell those people that are struggling with whether x equals anything or x equals mixed hum just to touch upon friedberg's point um the human race has caused eight percent of all the species in the world to go extinct and we have put another 22 percent of every single other species at the at the brink of extinction at the same time we have now expanded our footprint to touch 75 of the earth's land surface so until somebody fixes those problems i don't actually want to know what the x stands for yeah i mean we we're this idea that we're going to count until we put until we put it until we put stimulus checks put the [ __ ] stimulus checks into people's hands get these small businesses back to work then you can tell me what the x stands for yeah okay my biggest loser on culture was the same exact as you david we're thinking similar i have taken the red pill you gave me i crushed it up i've been snorting these the red pill like crazy people think i'm turning into a republican but i thought mainstream media and late stage journalism sacrificed objectivity specifically to get subscriptions and they used the anti-trump feelings and they worked them and got the the ratings from them and they literally used that new york times as the is the the best example i think the work you guys use for best example is canonical of like using their anti-trump feelings to get people to take out their wallets and subscribe everybody realizes it they drove out barry weiss they drove out their editor of the page from making people feel unsafe with their words and then new york magazine drove out andrew sullivan and then glenn greenwald gets leaves his publication i mean anybody who descends inside of one of these publications they canceled them inside of a publication for an opinion on an opinion page it's crazy okay let's keep everything moving here biggest turnaround in i guess this is biggest turnaround anything but i did business i'll lead off with mine my best turnaround was airbnb they laid off 25 of the company in july 1900 of 7 500 employees they cut their marketing budget by 800 million and then the ipo five months later uh and they had raised a billion dollars at an 18 billion dollar evaluation according to pitchbook and now worth 88 billion a week after the ipo that is a turnaround of all turnarounds david who did you have this is where i had joe biden he finished fourth in iowa fifth in new hampshire no candidate has ever bombed that badly in the first two contests and gone on to win the nomination biden roared back in south carolina and then won big on super tuesday and wrapped up the party nomination by march uh biggest political comeback ever who do you got freeberg i got airbnb as well i mean from yeah and here's the here's one of the craziest stats they're sitting there in q1 with a great business revenue dropped 67 in q2 can you just imagine the experience of 67 of your revenue going away in one quarter uh cash burn skyrockets and just having to respond quickly and still maintain integrity with your customers and your employees as a leadership team i mean it was an incredible leadership um uh demonstration it's a five alarm fire right i mean it's literally you got to get everybody out of the building here we go sensor censorship censorship existed in in draconian and the dark ages of our of our journey as a country and in the world and it came roaring back this year the amount of people that have been muzzled stifled the amount of fact and science that literally just gets judged willy-nilly by our distribution points like facebook and twitter and medium it's really scary so censorship made a roaring comeback in 2020 i i like it i like it a lot okay now we go on to the biggest flash in the pan you can interpret this any way you like what do you got sexy poo the w-h-o the w-h-o nobody knew who the dub the world health organization nobody knew what the who was before this year then they have become you know somehow this global authority on covid despite getting everything wrong they initially said that we didn't need to wear mass they didn't update that until june 5th this was about 10 weeks after my blog saying that you know mass were a good idea they got the method of transmission wrong they were saying that transmission mainly occurred through fomites which is contagious surfaces instead of respiratory particles they initially said that lockdowns worked then they modified their policy on that because of its impact to marginal groups and so the who has just gotten everything wrong this year and despite that fact you now have to chamas point google youtube and even sites like linkedin or nextdoor are now censoring people's statements if they contradict the who apparently without irony because nobody has contradicted the who more than the who itself i look forward to next year when nobody cares about the who anymore great freedberg what do you got flash in the pan uh i put hydroxychloroquine you guys remember that was good it was gonna it was gonna save the world for a minute or two and then you know here we are and uh so i'm just gonna leave it at that yeah here we okay yeah everybody knows you may have heard of hi joe quinn okay miracle some people say it's america i took it it's great what do you got it's a flashlight it's actually quite related to this and i thought that she was marvelous but i do think she will disappear off the scene which is sarah cooper which uh you know basically in the last month of the campaign um kind of just disappeared and now is uh i don't think uh anybody knows who sarah cooper is and probably in a year from now won't but for for the pure for the for those dark months of the pandemic her mockery of trump was some of the funniest stuff on twitter that i know oh sorry cooper's amazing yeah she she got a netflix and i don't think she'll be a flash in the pen i think she'll come back um i would have loved to pick um who was the press secretary for um with the southern accent for for trump sex sarah huckabee sanders yeah huckabee she but i think she was gone in 20 by 2020 so i can't pick her but she was amazing at defending trump she's like you all are dumb and trump is smart and he has a 150 iq and he owns mar-a-lago and he has a jet and his jedi and you are the fake news media and i don't care what you say america public know what you say and trump is amazing in bed he was banging porn stars when y'all were jerk i mean he's just she would defend him i that's who i want as my pr person she defended him for all time my biggest flash in the plan though i think you need a pr person yeah i don't need a person i got this we got this podcast now we don't need the press or pr we just go right to the audience um nicola trading at 34 billion dollars they took your precious spax chamoth and they perverted it with a [ __ ] milton who was on my podcast and couldn't answer basic questions it's now worth 6 billion i predicted it will be worth 60 cents i kid you not this company will go to zero is my prediction if you are buying companies and i made jason jacobs you were gonna scare all founder all founders ceos are gonna avoid coming on your podcast now no no no no i i'm delightful but for this kid um no he's under investigation the thing's a disaster they're obviously riding on elon's coattails he couldn't make a decision it was hydrogen powered cars or electric trucks or whatever and uh the companies in chaos and i i made a rule which is if a company has not released their product and it's worth over a billion dollars be careful because it could be a fraud um or it could be a disaster that's my biggest flashlight nichola um biggest breakthrough freeberg you want to start us off on this one i have an idea i think i know what you're going to say i'm going to say alpha fold you know that we talked about in the last podcast i think um alpha fold feels to me like what arpanet was which was the origins of the internet you know uh back when it was first installed and no one really kind of grappled with the ramifications of what would emerge and i think you know once we have the ability to design proteins to do things um a lot's going to change in the world of medicine and human health and longevity and the kind of environment and it's going to be pretty powerful so i'm excited about alpha fold creating a foundation for for humanity's ability to do those things what do you got a hundred percent alpha fold by uh there's not a close second to be honest okay saks well as a as a close second i guess i would i would mention the mrna vaccines which we talked about on the show the ability to basically print a vaccine in two days and hopefully they'll follow our advice about challenge vaccines so the next time we have one of these pandemics challenge trials challenge trials we can uh we can respond much more quickly and then just quickly in politics i thought the biggest breakthrough was uh pete butterjudge he made the unlikely leap from mayor of south bend indiana to being the first credible openly gay candidate for president he won iowa sort of uh along with bernie sanders and was a very close second in new hampshire uh he's going to be uh the the um he's going to be director of the transportation department in the binding administration i i want to just point something out on your sorry jkl but um you know the mrna vaccine technology has been around for like 15 years and regulatory barriers and regulatory constraints have largely kept this stuff from coming to market and it's interesting how you know in a year where we have this pandemic emergency we can take this technology that has been around and has been available to us for so long and suddenly you know all the regulatory barriers get dropped and things come to market to change the world i think it's a great highlight of like what's possible when some regulatory constraints are diminished a little bit and technology is really allowed to flourish and see the light of day um and you know we all act so surprised that this technology works but it's been here for a while it's pretty uh pretty astounding that it hasn't worked or hasn't been allowed to work in the past in a previous just an observation i think it's worth yeah i think it's a really valid one because it wasn't a breakthrough that occurred this year the breakthrough was they broke through the regulations you said you wanted to wait and see some people get the vaccines first um and then that led to some accounts on the twitter saying are you still anti-vaccination and i i had to correct them you've never said you were anti-vaccination to be clear i'm not antibiotics not at all no no no you said you wanted to yes no no i think my point is um i think a lot of people are going to latch on sorry let me just be really clear i think a lot of people are going to latch on to the small number of cases that are going to be amplified of people having adverse reactions to this you know new technology vaccine in alaska the other day like two days ago there was a nurse who got the vaccine and she had a really bad anaphylactic reaction to it she had to be given epinephrine twice to survive and she came out and she was fine but it's that storytelling that's like you know they they assume it should be some small percentage of people will have some reaction to this thing but that is the storytelling that will keep people from doing this and i think that is the the biggest kind of concern and that's why you've got guys like mike pence doing the the vaccine tomorrow you know he's going to do it on live tv and uh celebrities like ian mckellen doing it they're they're trying to kind of create wait are we going to see mike pence's naked shoulder and bicep on television because mom actually mother's going to give it to him because if if a woman doctor gave it to him it would be kind of like cheating because she stuck something in him you know and it's just not right um uh okay uh i can't wait to take it if anybody doesn't want their vaccine i will take it because i'm losing my mind and quarantine i mean for the love of god uh smartest business move chamath i think uh 2020 was uh the year of this back i think that it is uh it is it's an incredibly it's done it's it's done something really really really important in the capital market so that uh can you give child his bestie award now jkl yes accepting his best award give it to him by himself himself would you like an accepted speech the smartest business move i would like to thank the smartest business move me saks what was your smartest business move or the smartest business move in business well i i'd like to thank chamoth for the smack thing too because i was in open door and uh i was in porch and both of them are spacking this year so oh i think i'm in desktop metal i'm going to go with we have to agree thank you for the best in business you've wet you've wet all of our beaks so yeah i mean i mean actually if you think about it i i've done uh six deals this year are we still talking about me are okay we have to he's been nominated three times but this is the only besties won i really wanted to be in that reality show with you and i mean talk about dodging a bullet we went with this trailer to the top five studios they all wanted it in the room nbc says we'll take it in the room the the head of nbc says we'll take it we taped the pilot and then beeps whole career life blows up and thanked the lord that show didn't get on tv because i it would have been executive produced by beep uh and yeah that would have been bad so uh no reality tv for me uh i had i had another smart business move i just wanted to point out which was salesforce buying slack i think it's brilliant for them i think they're going to look back on the 10 they paid of their capital for slack and i think slack will be more important than salesforce ultimately in business it's a huge the most important brand there what a crown jewel what a great what a great move by benioff and and brett taylor and i just think what a great asset would be better for them than youtube is for google or instagram is for i think i think it's on that level actually i think it's of that order of magnitude where the importance of those assets to those companies slack will be the sales force cost cost 20 times 30 times as much though so less upside but less upside but but in terms of like lock-in and value and you know the prevention of churn uh over time i think it's gonna be huge i mean it could be at some point the company is slack sales force like slack will be the preeminent brand there dave did you go for this for smartest business move i i agree i agree with both the ones you've already done okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna rattle one off real quick i got i think people missed this but at the bottom of the market silverlake did this massive debt deal into airbnb which if you'll remember is reminiscent to me of warren buffett you know giving five billion dollars to swisserie and goldman sachs and he earned a 12 coupon and got warrants in both those companies and it just paid a tremendous return for him silverlake swooped into airbnb in april gave him a 12 debt deal for a billion dollars and they got warrants that the warrants today are worth um about 1.4 billion dollars and this debt is probably worth three times what they put in so in like five months six months these guys have basically turned a billion dollars of debt into four billion dollars of value uh it was an incredible deal incredibly gutsy if you think about what we were all feeling in early april about the market and where the world was headed we had no [ __ ] clue for these guys to swoop in and do that i thought it was super impressive the other one i i i had a couple on this because i just i want to rattle these off bill ackman bought a [ __ ] s p put sorry bought an s p put for 27 million dollars that he sold for 2.6 billion dollars he bought he bought credit default insurance on a whole strip of default insurance yeah but he turned a 27 million dollar insurance instrument into 2.6 billion of returns for his fund and he still didn't sell his portfolio in fact he bought at the bottom and i mean the the the foresight this guy had going into the down market ahead of march he saw that the market was going to tank because of kovid um he made a bet on it it was a tiny bet for him but man to turn 27 million at a 2.6 billion in like 60 days or 90 days unbelievable and then he bought stock and his companies at the bottom um what a gutsy investor and then i was like anything was there anything fugazi on that with where he had gone on cnbc and talked and he did this whole big you know longer yeah he did it afterwards but i think he's i think he's great i think he's great yeah i think it was it was incredible and my third one which we don't talk about a lot is larry ellison bought a billion dollars of tesla stock less than two years ago that is now worth over 10 billion dollars and he did it he joined the board and um you know you put your money where your mouth is and you take ownership and um you know i don't know much about larry but uh there was a lot of naysayers about tesla saying they were bubbly and overvalued at that time and it was really cute he did it in the middle of the tesla q shorting movement and now he can buy not just lanai but he could probably get kauai to go with it he could buy another island anyway those were three gutsy bets that i thought were worth highlighting that that just really impressed me and and you know it's when the markets are down when you're facing the abyss when everyone else is telling you you're wrong and you make a big bet like that um and it pays off that's the kind of stuff that i think returns are made from and characters built and those are those are just really impressive moves for me that there's a lot of impressive moves this year the tide went out and came back in real quick so there were some dumb business moves as well sax you got a dumb business move that was a highlight for 2020 the city of san francisco biting the hand that feeds it for years these politicians have been [ __ ] on the tech community acting like the tech community was somehow a parasite on san francisco well you know now because of covid congratulations the tech community has the option to leave you have a lot of people leaving and there are gigantic budget deficits for the city the schools have giant budget deficits it's not clear how they're going to close these things and it's looking that more and more like it wasn't tech that was a parasite it was the politicians who are the parasites and nobody uh knows how to fix the city of san francisco anymore yeah okay uh dumbest business move chamath um i think it was one i think it was probably for me um the governor of california's handling of um well i guess that's more political than business but um well no i mean it did impact businesses so i think you're you're i think that i'll allow it i'll allow it i think that i think that what he showed was how naked partisanship was in decision making that had that should have been based on science in fact and the quality of the decision making just eroded every single decision that he made and then now you know as david said it's kind of like you have this just just you know um you have this moment where it's like you know the justi cake moment where he's eating at french laundry and the day after he's basically shutting the whole world down again it's it's very frustrating so so i think he also was shutting down beaches right and then you know the stay-at-home orders and not letting people leave their house and go to a beach or eat outdoors all that is send them inside they're gonna have a party inside their house well there's a great tweet stupid there's a great tweet that said um you know i'm not allowed to go to the store i'm not allowed to go to the shopping center but i'm gonna take my child on a walk and if anybody stops me i'm just gonna tell them i'm taking her to the nail salon and the reason is because you couldn't walk to the park but you could you could go to the nail salon and so you know this tweet was just reminiscent of just how arbitrary and random this stuff was and it had just so many downstream ink packs so i think that was a huge fail nobody loves hypocrisy i picked my smartest business move with salesforce buying slack conversely i'm picking my dumbest business move with slack's board selling slack this is the stupidest thing i've ever seen i understand they felt like maybe uh it was a great deal but i would have much rather them see seeing them do what i can honestly to be honest with you i mean i left the board and i just don't know why i wish i could have gotten the call because i would have bought it yeah i i agree with you i think network effects are incredibly unique assets they're very very rare i think we've all been around them we've worked in them david has david the other david has i have jason you have it is the single most incredible moment momentum driver and you know sort of tailwind and when it exists you just never give it up and so i agree with you i would have bought slack if i could have if they would have given me a shot we ride our winners and you appreciate network effects if you look at what jeff lawson did at twilio he started with much less i think uh he started with nothing started with twilio jefferson grid and segment their market cap has gone 12 it was it's 12x market cap they went from 29 a share to 365 a year in three years they're at 60 billion slack should have been buying other companies with their equity and they sh and they should have built and rolled up all of the other hub spots or whatever else is out there by zendesk whatever i'm not sure that the m a strategy was the hard part i just think that it's when you're in the bowels of these companies as we all know it's super hard right so i mean i don't think you can fail stuart uh and the team but i think that somewhere along the way just the realization of how special and unique that network effect was um didn't happen because it would have given a different team a level of energy or comfort to kind of really go for the brass ring as you said and but you know hopefully they'll be able to execute it at salesforce okay did i get everybody's dumbest business move my dumbest business move was myself um so i will take uh i will take pictures of the award for being a schmuck is me and anyone else that [ __ ] hedged or shorted the market or sold during the dip in march uh i learned the most valuable lesson i've learned in my investing career to date you just want to invest in whole chairs and great businesses and not try and time markets because that's always a loser's game and a fool's errand um and i think you know worrying about the market going down or up as long as you hold shares and great businesses it doesn't matter trading is not for me it was stupid um and i just feel like a lot of people learned that lesson this year i've heard a lot of people that kind of freaked out and got out of the market and then they regretted it and tried to get back in it was too late and yada yada i um i read a document um that someone wrote um for me um and she wrote this incredible quote that i had never heard from buffett and i'll give it to you friedberg because it's right it's very uh apropos of this buffett had this statement which is that you know it's not about timing the market it is about time in market and i just think that's so that's so beautiful because it's so simple but it basically summarizes exactly what you said which is get in close your eyes and if you if again unless for liquidity you just don't ever sell yeah it's a fool's errand to try to time the market sit on your hands ride your winners uh and and he always said listen if a business is on if i own this business and i love it and it's at a discount i should want to own more of it i believe that was another buffet i don't know the exact quote uh let's go to smart's political move and we'll go to our token uh republican david sacks for that well uh well it's it's it's yeah it's funny you identify me that way because uh my my smart the smartest political move goes to congressman jim clyborn uh democrat of south carolina for endorsing joe biden just before the south carolina primary uh a number of people on the buying campaign were panicking they wanted him to do it early because biden had bombed in iowa and new hampshire and uh clybourne kept his powder dry and endorsed biden at the absolute perfect time it caused by him to win south carolina and that led him to sweep on super tuesday jim clybourn was the king maker of 2020 without him joe biden would not be president wow okay who you got freeburg smartest political move of 2020 was joe biden staying quiet hanging out in his bunker and letting trump do his own damage end of story i feel like i feel like if you know that biden knew that it wasn't his election to win it was trump's election to lose and i think he let him go out and lose it and um and that to me was uh smart advice and and smart action yes so he just checked and he's just he just he just slow played aces he hit his set he just checked and he watched him fire uh who do you got chamoth smartest political move smartest political move which you will not see until 2022 or 23 but laid the groundwork this year and i thought it was brilliantly done was nikki haley who i think will be the republican nominee for president in 2024 and she did an unbelievable job of tricking trump to believe that he was her supporter then getting distribution and then basically subtly telling everybody that she thought that he was an idiot and i thought that she was brilliant in so she didn't look like a rat leaving the ship she looked like you know a rebel or something getting off i think i think if you want to find um somebody to consolidate center-right politics in 2024 uh my money would be on nikki hilly all right i went with the smartest political move i also went for the long game pete buttigieg going on fox recently i think he did obviously a masterful job you had that sax earlier but he started going on fox and basically being really spicy with them and supporting the hell out of um biden and then he gets himself this secretary of transportation and i think he's set up to either be the vp or the presidential candidate uh in the future and he's i think he's going to be one of the bright stars i also would uh i think andrew yang it did nothing happened for him this year really i don't know but i felt like he also is my understanding is he's going to run for mayor of new york that was another amazing political winner in all of this i don't know if anybody has feelings on either of those i love i love andrew yang i think he's uh fabulous uh he's coming on the podcast pragmatic centrist smart capable competent um good listener he attracts it he attracts a plurality of people yeah and i and i think he's spoken out against uh cancel culture and so you know whenever i see somebody in the left speaking out against cancer culture and censorship like the way chamoth has that definitely to me elevates them in my book are you saying chamoth is someone from the left well it's amazing how much we agree on you know well i mean i think that there's you have this left and right definitions which have become very hard to understand and i think what we have to get back to is the american principled idea of freedoms and opportunity right and and and i don't think either of the parties actually were representing that properly dumbest political move of the year i think i know where everybody's going to go with this but i would like rudy giuliani rudy giuliani's press conference at the sex shop i mean just i mean how amateurish is that group of people the four seasons gardening we're gonna be at the fourth was they were they trolling us and trying to get press for it i don't understand that one unbelievable rudy truliani for the dumbest political move saks what do you got i have a feeling i know what sac's got well i got i got a tie here uh between uh one was uh defund the police you know as a political slogan the whole country you know the blm movement had the whole country on its side uh after the you know the george floyd video came out everybody was in favor of sensible reforms to control the use of force by the police and then they they introduced the slogan of defund the police and it scared voters across the country into voting for uh republicans in congress and it probably cost joe biden not the presidency but uh congress and the my my tie the other half of that was uh donald trump refusing to wear a mask or to endorse mass uh he finally did it but it was two or three months too late if he had just gotten on board with mass it would have been a very easy thing to do uh politically personally uh that could have made the the margin of difference he might still be president if he had gotten on board with mass about three months earlier freeberg what was your dumbest place i actually yeah i put making masks political more broadly um both the left and the right pointing fingers about masks i mean this is like a human life issue and um you know uh kind of shaming the republicans for not wearing masks and making it about we're the right guys you're the wrong guys everyone should have avoided pointing fingers and avoided um not doing it because the other side was doing it and it should have never ever been allowed to become political it was pure science it was about saving lives and i think both sides are to blame um for you know the democrats tried to make the republicans look bad because they were advocating for masks and they shouldn't have done that and the republicans should not have tried to avoid wearing masks because the democrats were telling them to wear masks and it was just a total cluster um really sad and you know could have made a big difference for thousands of lives i too put trump not advocating for masks as my dumbest political move i believe he nailed the stimulus that first stimulus where he just dropped the 1200 checks and the ppp and everything he obviously nailed uh you know the operation lightspeed and the vaccines he didn't get credit for it um i don't know if that was political or not that they dropped them the week the weeks after the election i think it was i'm i'm i'm a little bit cynical about that but my god is there nobody that this man would listen to um and they must have all been telling him in unison hey [ __ ] put the mask on we'll win the election the in july and august the numbers started to go down precipitously and everybody fauci everybody with half a brain was saying second wave is coming wear masks and he refused to take that stance and not only to that he doubled down like the [ __ ] he is and started doing rallies this person is such a complete idiot grifter and just imbecile that he couldn't see the clear path to victory and he was tempting fate and of course he winds up getting coveted i mean the idiocracy of the moment is just so profound he absolutely would have sailed into that second term we were sitting here on this very podcast and we all believed he was going to sail into the second term when the market started ripping back and the coven numbers went down and because of the stupidity of not wearing masks thank god we got him out but to the families who lost loved ones he's a murderer period we're moving on best political theater into his body and then taking the polyclonal antibodies to heal himself and show the american population that it's just not that bad it was the best stunt the best act the best theater i've seen and um uh you know i i don't know what what the hell else uh could have beaten it this year i mean the guy literally literally it could be he buckled himself in you know buttoned up his jacket he stared out the lights in his face he was glowing he had the antibodies rushing through his body he was healing his body he was on speed man i thought i thought the best i thought the best political theater was when the democratic leadership did like the colin kaepernick one knee in kinte klotz at the in the rotunda congress can somebody nick you just throw the picture of that up there i mean i mean half of them or some of them are so old they couldn't get down on them we picked them back up they all hit their life alert they got the life alert i've fallen i can't get up like 20 life alerts i've never got off in the same room but the kinte cloths were just so over the top like you didn't need the kitten they really weren't kidding my best political theater is um i i don't know who this congresswoman is but i am falling in love with her um her name is katie porter oh my god she takes out a whiteboard she just she's fabulous no she's so great she she owns people with that white board it's the greatest she basically does math and people are just i mean she's done this now two or three times where she just takes people down and she did it to mnuchin like she was like is today tuesday and he's like you know today's tuesday she's like can you tell me if today's student she just destroys people um like i i just never seen anything like it um and uh she's awesome so best political theater for me i don't know uh david did we get yours well um yeah i mean so i thought the the the french laundry photos you know the all these politicians uh violating their own lockdown policies uh was some with some pretty good uh theater yeah the actor theater yeah you had you know you had you had uh gavin newsom and uh london uh bri dining at french laundry you had nancy pelosi going to that hair salon any republicans do something like that well um i i would i would tell you if i knew of anybody trump rallies the republicans but yeah but the republicans haven't been supporting lockdowns so um you know look if there was a republican who was how about the rose garden uh supreme court where they had a super spreader event at the white house but they weren't but but that wasn't political theater because they weren't violating their own policies oh they were saying that people could take the risk um got it okay i i i'm i'm picking these um politicians because because they're happy yeah it's the hypocrisy uh the one i loved the best out of all the hypocritical politicians was the one who was like please stay it was the governor of some place colorado or something and he's like please stay home with your family do not travel for thanksgiving it's gonna be too dangerous and then they find out he did that tweet while at a southwest gate going with this family to thanksgiving and they literally have pictures of him on his phone and the picture was timed at the time stamp of the tweet if i have my understanding correct i forgot the guy's name but there were so many of these yeah well let me give you another one there was uh la uh the la county supervisor uh sheila cool cast the deciding vote to shut down outdoor dining in los angeles only to be photographed eating at uh for nayo in santa monica two hours later so it's just completely hypocritical and um you know this is why there could be a big recall next year in california i think we have to put political theater as one category of just loathsome political theater because we're going on to worst political theater and the stuff we've seen has been pretty horrific i'm going to lead us off with my worst political theater which was the banning of tick tock was absolutely the right thing to do and then they just handed it off as like a gift to oracle to make money and maybe be their server farm i don't understand we were supposed to ban it and get the [ __ ] out of the app store and that was just terrible political theater anybody else got more political theater that we'll put in our loathsome political theaters well you uh jason just so you uh understand that i'm being uh politically even-handed this is where i had rudy giuliani and his uh tour of self-immolation right from from the press conference in front of the crematorium to the the the hair dye meltdown to the is a foreign video all right we need to hold on hold on i'm gonna make i'm gonna call an audible i'm calling an audio here we're gonna have a new category to get it covered worst rudy giuliani moment can we have a giant what is the worst thing the worst giuliani moment oh i think i think the saddest moment was the uh in the borap thing that was sad because you just felt you just felt like this is an old broken man yeah um it was creepy and it was just sad he was like desperate and he was creepy and it was but giuliani's the worst though was was actually if you listen to the testimony when he farted uh it was really terrible it was really terrible actually if you listen to the testimony you're just like what is this guy saying it's out of control well the also i think we have to cut into here the poor woman sitting next to him who's clearly in range i mean she's in the blast zone he rips it he rips it and she looks him she gives him side eye but she is so like scared to react to such an obvious carpet bombing that she just keeps a straight face but her eyes go poop that was unforgivable must have been a stinker i mean it was loud it had resonance if it was yeah um can i can i give one can i give one other example and i don't know whether this is best or worse theater um but um but the the the the congressional uh hearings with the tech ceos where the senators grilled all the tech ceos and it was definitely it was definitely political theater but on the other hand they all deserved it and there's going to be more of it next year okay political theater because i thought what was so depressing about it was how little the congressional um the congress people actually understood of these businesses and they went off on rants and and tirades about you know you're blocking republican voice on twitter and you're doing this and none of it actually focused on you know the the monopolistic practices that was the intention of the hearing in the first place when they actually got into those points when they tried to talk about how the ad networks work and how targeting works they didn't have any clue i mean it was really inside these companies don't even know how it worked and they built it i mean these things no i'll tell you like i just i just think it's really sad that um that that folks in congress um honestly are so disconnected from understanding technology and understanding you know modern business practices um and they can't actually you know tackle the real issues um and it neither does the squad i mean aoc didn't understand what a tax break was i mean so yeah even the young ones don't understand stuff i mean we just we're getting the worst possible representation okay now we're gonna go to lightning round with our final two categories uh best meme uh for me it was the funeral dancers uh followed up by michael jordan i took that personally and i of course loved chamat's mix-up that one of you maniac all in army members made uh who do you got for who got best memes and he got a best meme tuban forever a cautionary tale about what not to do on a zoom call yes yes that would be okay arguably in political theater let's say no uh anybody else got a meme best or worst i like the funeral dancers but uh the answers are pretty great yeah david anything for you i just want to say to everybody that's listening i really hope that you guys have an incredible holiday and um we can put this year behind us and i hope for all of you guys that have gone through hard times just know that um you know hopefully you got some friends to talk to and family to see and talk to and we love you and we really appreciate that you take the time to listen and guys i just want to say to you guys i love you guys with all my heart thank you for helping me get through a very difficult year uh back at you and uh i was very touched by the uh birthday present you sent me last week that was just oh you want to tell them what what you got you want to tell them what you got big boy i mean listen i don't want to chamoth i i get a big crate at the house it was i was born in 1970 and he got some of the best ones from 1970 and put them in a box and you know i i literally had to put them on a shelf and say do not drink these these things cost as much as the tesla's in the driveways i mean some of these bottles are ridiculous and uh i hope to crack them all open with you guys at the house in happy honestly happy happy 50th birthday big boy it's a big big muscle well you know i was it was a little bittersweet obviously you know i was gonna have some kind of party or anything like that and then what made it particularly hard and challenging was my birthday was on saturday and my friend tony shea died on friday uh on that day and i had been dealing with tony shea being in a coma for the fives for the no for ten days before that and then i found out that that afternoon that they uh tragically had to pull the plug um or i assume that's what happened i shouldn't say that i don't speak out of a turn but uh this has been a shitty year and i really hope uh that anybody out there who is suffering from mental illness uh or struggling in any way call a friend and i think the reason this podcast uh has resonated with so many people and i hear this from people when they listen to the pod is our friendship and they and they they they hear us talk and they hear us laugh and they hear us joke and the value of friendship and the love and the joy and people just can't believe uh when chamat says and and men say to each other they love each other and they can't believe that sax almost is able to say it and they and people think by episode 25 stacks will be able to say back to us but we'll try right now we'll see if we can close 20 20 21. we're all going to say i love you david sacks and then let's just see if this can work i love you david sacks and i love you david sacks back at you we'll take it we'll take it i love you guys love you guys happy holidays love you guys see you guys the new year bye bye besties






we'll let your winners ride rain man david sacks and they've just gone crazy with it 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 we need to get murky all right and we're back and thank you to young spielberg with the all-in 1.5 extended edition remix we're going all in that was thank you to the super fans that was really incredible actually we're back we're back yeah shout out young spielberg with us the dictator chamoth paulie hoppetea the rain man himself david sax is definitely an excellent driver and his dad lets him drive in the driveway and the queen of quinoa spectacular david freeburg is with us we did an emergency pod we just had all agreed we're taking a nice break nothing's gonna happen over the new year this is the down period and 2021 is going to be delightful and simple and then all hell breaks loose we could start with the vaccine we could start with the capital we could start with georgia now we have to start we have to start we have to start with the capital we have to start with the capitals all right so let me just run through the series of events that occur here there's a certification process correct sax that goes on where the electoral college gets counted and somewhere at 10 am trump had a rally of thousands of supporters you were not there david correct you weren't at this round he was in quote-unquote miami right i think he's in the miami hilton on pennsylvania avenue right now and he put up that fake miami background but the truth is let's be honest here um trump came out at 10 a.m and had a rally jason can we just take a step back for a second doesn't david sacks look like elliott gould in ocean's 11 right now he is a silver fox and are you i mean you were very public about being in miami over the new year you took your talents to miami and we see this background um so we can assume that dictators in his uh pool house poker room we know that freeberg's in a ritz carlton somewhere based on the furniture he's in his ritz carlton uh office and sax based on your background are you in miami right now yeah are you still there yeah i still i'm still i'm still here okay but david did you meet me or not i i haven't i actually met him i did meet him i went to like a tech uh event the other night and he was there so were you wearing masks at the tech event were you wearing a mask they it was they were like no no i'll tell you there were masks indoors and then there was like coveted testing inside and then you could graduate to the outdoor patio part where people generally weren't wearing masks so were you in conversations with people with no masks on is that what you're saying at this yeah but you know everyone's been like covet tested like a zillion times and it was outdoors and you know i'm willing to meet with people outdoors you know i generally don't do it indoors but i'm yeah i'm that i i've said that's my policy starting several months ago did we can we rewind to april with that photo of sac do we have it where he was in the ski mask and the goggles and the helmet and like the biohazard suit and like how things have changed he's like i'll go to miami and have a chat with someone yeah you could you could you you could definitely do uh how it started and how it's going uh split photo for it but but look you're like sharing a banana split with someone like you know like well because on ebay and alibaba buying ventilators for his home triage center well i mean we had people from the who saying in march that the you know that the case the infection fatality rate was like 7 you know and the two big things we learned after that were number one that there was a huge distribution by age right and so somebody under 50 without comorbidities had a much much much lower risk and then also the thing we learned is that the there's there's maybe a 10x difference between the infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate i mean you guys know all this yeah and so so once we learned those things um i mean i you you know i think a rational person takes things like that into account i changed my policy with respect to covet you know and and now especially that we have uh you know easy access to tests which weren't available you can get tested before going into a event so i i have a question to add on to that do you own a fur chewbacca outfit and were were you in washington dc yesterday with more paint on your nipples do you have a podium do you have a neck to waste a tattoo are you standing behind a podium let me hide the the viking horns that i've got stashed away here all right listen there was a great there was a title can we title yesterday's event national lampoon siege of the capital i mean it was like animal house like you know yeah there was a great there was a great tweet by somebody saying this was uh this was like the storming of the bastille as perpetrated by the cast of animal house and there was another there's another great tweet saying uh the capital now appears to be under the control of a man in a viking mask the best one was i have lost all respect for nicholas cage's ability to steal the us constitution apparently yeah whatever copies left all right so let's just go through the chain of events here and it was it was absolutely surreal because trump literally went out to a mob of people and said i want you to march down pennsylvania avenue and show the gop what it takes to have courage et cetera mike pence apparently told trump that he was not going to go to bat for him in the ceremonial process of counting the votes and lo and behold you're watching this you know the objections going on to the electoral account and you see the secret service come rushing in and it becomes a you know very serious situation and when you watch some of the videos it is truly terrorizing that thousands of people overwhelmed the police and i guess i want to start with people's opinion on trump's culpability in inciting what was very dangerous behavior four people are dead um so you know while we're joking about the cosplay outfits a woman who was a an art and trump supporter who is a vet who did four tours uh from what i've read and i shared the video with you before literally you know as they broke into the building was trying to breach another area of the building and she's climbing through a window and gets shot apparently by the secret service or the police and dies and so it's all fun and games until four people are dead and now somebody's lost their wife daughter sister jason i mean there could have been 400 dead there could have been fourth house absolutely yeah i mean this could have become a shootout at the okay corral i can't understand why the police showed the restraint they did i mean when you see them getting surrounded i don't know if you saw the one they didn't they didn't show restraint jason there was no police when you look at the amount of um security that's typically there and has been there for other situations and then you compare it to the amount of security knowing for a month and a half that this was coming it's um it just doesn't make any sense to me so i'm a little i'm a little dumbfounded that you know you couldn't have seen this facebook group called you know hashtag storm the capital which had tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of members in there plotting and scheming selling merchandise called storm the capital you know these guys were wearing printed sweatshirts that they had time to make and nobody knew about it and nobody thought to reinforce um the security and barricade it and make sure that you couldn't go from the protest site to the cat i mean i it just seems like there's some level of complicity that needs to get found out here but there was a there was an interview i saw with an xdc police guy who said that i think folks were told to tamper down uh the police forces were told to tamper down on managing crowds and protests and riots following the controversy associated with blm a few months ago and spraying folks with pepper spray and water and all the physical techniques that were used were so um outraging that that there was just more of a systemic concern about being too aggressive with protesters and as a result they went too far the other way uh it's it's not about it it just happens to be friedberg that when black people protested and brown people they got the tear gas and beaten with batons and then when the white people uh stormed the what the the capital in the same area they got uh walked down the steps and escorted out with a stern warning to not do it again i mean this is hypocritical and insane i i i don't know why you have to go there particularly um it it looked to me like what happened is that the capitol hill police simply got completely overwhelmed uh you look at these you know giant this is a rally on the mall that turned into a mob well first it kind of turned into a tailgater then it turned into a mob and then it turned into an insurrection it kind of stumbled forward into progressive uh phases of uh of stupidity and disaster but it's it looked to me like the capitol hill police simply got overwhelmed they they obviously were unprepared they were surprised i think by this and i saw video of tons of tear gas being used i saw people getting tear gas like crazy and i think there was reports uh this morning on twitter that the whole area in front of the capitol there was covered in that light film that remains after tear gassing so i don't think they were really pulling punches too much and i also think that uh that there will be prosecutions i think that uh the these people were captured on video there's a lot of talk on twitter and everybody is in favor of finding out who they are applying facial recognition and uh bringing charges so i think there will be a lot of charges unlike let's say the the blm protest this summer i don't remember anybody getting charged based on video of people writing or looting and then i think you know the the the final difference actually with the blm protest is that if you've watched fox news at all in the last 24 hours the condemnation of what of the storming of the capital of what happened has been across the board both right and left everybody across the political spectrum has condemned it nobody is apologizing for it nobody on the right is looking for root causes to explain the reasons why it happened everybody is just condemning it and saying that it should never have happened and the people who did it should be prosecuted and so i don't see any kid gloves here being used um you know either physically or glove sex is when you see officers being chased up the steps and uh or taking selfies you know which is one instance i don't want to just say that's the only indicative thing but when people are breaking through windows and just kind of being let go i mean they were obviously overwhelmed but i'm surprised more people didn't get shot let's just tackle this head-on in terms of the race issue well i have a i have a question for david before i make my statement david do you think that if this were black and brown people storming the capital would there have been more or less than four deaths honestly i think would have been the same i just uh disagree yeah i disagree i really disagree and i'll tell you why um i think you have the best of intentions wanting to think that way but here's the way i see it i see a president that basically instigated a group of people who are fundamentally disenfranchised let's face it like there are there are a lot of very very reasonable republicans and a lot of very reasonable democrats the fringes of both parties are functionally mentally [ __ ] we know this okay and so what you see are extreme on both sides who are just completely lost and looking for any excuse and so you have a president in the tail end of his presidency an anonymous presidency basically call them out nobody who actually had a job or anything to do could show up right so you had all these people show up it's a wednesday yeah it's a wednesday during the day i mean and what do you think happens they're there they're all frothed up you know um eric trump frothing them up donald trump jr frothing them up trump frothing them up giuliani frothing them up and all of a sudden as you said stumbling into degrees of of craziness and stupidity to storm the capital and i just think to myself how could a president instigate this kind of action number one the second thing i think about is when black athletes peacefully protested uh something that they had the fundamental constitutional right to protest in the president's eyes they were sons of [ __ ] white people that stormed the [ __ ] capital the people's house yep were called patriots by the president's daughter and she and then we're told that they were loved by the president himself to me it's just an enormously stark contrast of a double standard i think that beyond the persecutions of the people i actually feel very bad for the people that stormed the capital i feel like these are folks that are on the fringes who just need a vessel and trump is a vessel and then he instigates them and runs away you know what i mean he's a character he's lost these are less that these guys commit the crime and now they're going to go to jail i feel like the the culpability has to go all the way back to trump to holly to cruz these guys are those are the real scumbags in all of this freebird what are your thoughts on this and then i'll go back to sax and let him respond yeah i don't i don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if this was a black lives matter and and it was black people involved or brown people involved in um in the same sorts of activities you saw yesterday that you would not see more shootings i don't think that's an unreasonable uh position to take obviously um i think there's this other circumstance which is that event preceding this one as i mentioned i saw an interview with the dc police former police direct director of the police or some i forgot what his title was where he highlighted that you know folks were kind of instructed to stand down following the blm controversies and so i think that's also kind of a reasonable point of view and uh what about the president's culpability i mean i think that's one issue that's gonna have to be addressed post and i think we have to figure out what life post trump is going to be like because this is a level of chaos that nobody to sax's point all people condemned it's um yeah there's a there's a there's a theory which actually takes its origin from from hitler where uh hitler used this term the big lie and uh you know the theory is that you can create political propaganda by saying something that's so outrageous it is so improbable that people say there's no way this thing keeps getting said over and over unless it's actually real um and this is sort of like the q anon pedophile ring in the pizzeria or the fact that the election was stolen from you it is such an outrageous statement um that that it seems to people uh that it only has to be true um because it is it is such an insane thing and if it is it's so insane and i am so incited by this thing so this is kind of a you know acknowledged as being uh you know a political propaganda technique that goes back a long time by the way hitler used it as a way to to use it as almost like a double bluff uh to blame the jews um uh in in germany which was um uh you know an unfortunate kind of origin of the term but um uh but the term is used a lot now and saying like these sorts of events are ridiculous now what's gonna happen going forward i don't think big lies go away you can try and mute them on twitter and meet them on facebook or mute them on reddit but whether it's q anon or whatever is next this is becoming kind of a standard form now because of the way media is distributed anyone can say a big lie and it gets a lot of listeners and trump is totally culpable for that he made some [ __ ] up he made a bunch of claims i mean if you guys haven't seen lindsey graham's speech yesterday it is absolutely worth watching that he gave late last night i saw it i saw it and he's like he's like i asked for the for the show me the eight the ten give me ten people that claim that they voted and they were under eighteen he's like they gave you one give me anyone that that uh was in prison or died and they gave me zero and he's like goes on and on for a couple minutes about how none of what was said about what happened in the election was true and it was all false and he's like this is all just not true um and so i think trump is culpable for creating a falsehood and uh and uh you know having a megaphone and you know there were certainly of violence that is i think where the rubber is going to meet the road trump's going to be out of office in two weeks or less one way or the other do you uh and let me just take it to sacks um sacks i want to give you the time to respond to the the issue of uh the double standard uh in terms of race and blm and then also do you sacks if you're on biden's team coming in do you advise that you prosecute trump or investigate trump for this insurrection yes or no okay so just to tie off on the the blm issue i i just you know i just normally don't think that race is the issue here um chamoth look i i don't know at the end of the day what the fatalities would have been if it had been a blm protest that that went awry but i will stick to what i said before which is i predict that you will see more prosecutions come out of this of the people who are involved i'm talking about the people who stormed the capitol then we saw from all the the blm protests over the summer i mean i don't remember any prosecutions coming out of videotape of people being caught recorded looting and rioting and i predict you will see more here and again i think another difference again the extent there's a double standard uh i you know i remember a lot of left-wing news networks um calling the writing and looting the summer peaceful protests which they clearly were not you even had a book called in defense of looting and i don't hear anybody defending the storming of the capital nobody on the right so look to the extent there's a double standard i don't know that it accrues to the the blm side of this but look i think that's kind of beside the point and not not the real issue here i mean jason to your question of is trump responsible yes i mean clearly 100 100 yes because he he is the one who who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months two months ago right after the election there was an article published in the spectator called deplorables don't riot it was actually a pretty good op end it was written by a conservative and the conservative's point was that you know all these windows and shops have been boarded up in anticipation of potential riding and looting with the election and all these conservatives are saying well who's do you know who are they afraid of you know not not us not the maga folks well then the theory was deplorables don't don't riot and and and the right was was proud of that two months ago and now we are seeing that well no the deplorables are rioting why is that what what changed over the last two months and what changed is the constant feeding to this group of people this idea starting with trump but then perpetuated by you know different right-wing media organizations and other politicians who sort of were you know trying to curry favor with trump uh they were constantly pushing for this idea that the election was stolen so that these people on the mall who then riot and storm the capital believed that the election was being stolen from them so you know ultimately that responsibility goes is trump's so to be clear and reflecting back to you you're saying trump incited sedation is that the right word well sedition sedition doesn't seem like the wrong it doesn't seem like the exact right word to me i mean riot it was it was certainly a riot now now did now look i mean you're talking about prosecuting a legal case uh you know if you want to look at the legal standard for incitement it has to be you know provoking people to take an imminent lawless act uh i think i think he lo if you want to see this mob as a gun i think he loaded the gun he pointed it in a certain direction but did he tell them to storm the capital no not specifically i think therefore it'd be a very hard case to prosecute but i think you know prosecuting him in a court of law is is sort of unnecessary and redundant i mean i think that in the eyes of the public politically he has i think most people see that he's culpable and i even think of his political career i think he's i think he's disqualified himself from being uh a candidate you know at a national level again i mean if you look okay again just go back two months ago look at how much has changed two months ago just in the day or two after the election trump had narrowly lost but there was talk of him starting a new news network to rival fox there was talk about he could even be a candidate again in in 2024 it was not off the table i think now it's it's clearly off the table and you've seen it it's partly because of the georgia runoffs which we should get to but again the republican candidates at least one of them had won that election two months ago and now they lost and that has a lot to do with trump's antics in the meantime of is just feeding this constant you know lie about the stolen election right i think there's a really important question about you know sorry but is it worth um prosecuting trump uh post fact um you know does that do more harm or good for for the country as a whole certainly there will be a lot of people that would get great satisfaction of putting trump in prison a lot of people are calling for that but um we really do need to question the um you know the incredible divide in the nation and what's the best way to heal the divide the objective shouldn't be pursuing justice uh it should be about moving forward i'm not suggesting don't prosecute trump but i i think that it's worth it's worthy of noting that you know there is another way of framing this whole thing which is what's the best thing to do going forward though on the flip side you could even make the case that one of the best things joe biden could do today or tomorrow is to announce a federal election uh review commission uh to actually look into wrongdoings at the state level with a 500 bipartisan yeah 100 yeah i mean it's a slam dunk case anyway if biden did that and he you know he basically embraced the the notion that a lot of folks are really angry about and said i'm listening to you i'm hearing you let me show you and at the same time they did not prosecute trump and you know let him go go off into the distance and do his own thing maybe you start to kind of you know heal the rift a little bit but right now everyone's kind of inflamed and there is this like how do we prosecute him what do we do when he's you know do it you know and we're just continuing to kind of escalate the dialogue and increase the rift i just yeah so i look i think prosecuting trump at this point first of all legally that might be a difficult case to prove because of the need to prove that the um that he was trying to provoke uh an imminent lawless action you know if he had been at the barricades you know pushing people forward yes but so i think legally it'd be a tough case and i think it would be it like you said it'd be unnecessarily uh divisive and partisan i don't know why we need to go there i mean at the end of the day any politicians stock and trade is their credibility and popularity and trump has fundamentally damaged the perception of him i think even among the right i have a huge issue with this and i'll tell you why it's because the folks that are now going to go to jail were instigated by this guy and the folks that were there in many ways were brought they were cajoled they were instigated to travel from groomed to travel there to take the time out of their lives to basically then get fed this rhetoric and in a moment of just crazy mob like mentality to act out at the behest of the leader of the free world there has to be a consequence not just to those people because they in many ways are not the person to prosecute to the extent that you are going to put some of these people in jail which we look like it looks like we're going to and by the way let's be honest there is no inconceivable way that these people get charged with a misdemeanor that's not going to stand right and the worst perpetrators of this when they get put in jail will get put in jail for five to ten years minimum and so what are we going to do when we look at ourselves in the eye and say these poor americans at the end of the day who were instigated by this guy and he yet again gets off scot-free while hundreds of americans who were basically in a peak of craziness fed by this guy does something and goes to jail and you have hundreds of lives and hundreds of families ruined even if we don't find a way to basically put trump in jail for this i can 100 guarantee you i will bet a million bucks that now the southern district of new york gloves off every single state that can go after this guy gloves off and to the extent that joe biden had any incentive to basically like let this go away at the federal level gloves off in my opinion i really i really really need to say let's let's say that folks do go after trump what does that do if he gets put in jail or he you know gets uh there's some criminal proceeding brought against him what does that do to the 50 percent of the nation that truly support him and truly care about him i don't you know i don't like like the balance of justice versus unification you know i think we're talking actually about 25 percent of the country i think i don't even think it sounds right or whatever it is like there's obviously a big voting block and a big block of the uh potential blockchain i think i think i think of the 70 million people that voted for donald trump i think there are half of them who would equally vote for a normal centrist candidate romney and nikki haley didn't necessarily believe in donald trump then i think there's the other 35 million and i do think that there's a spectrum of those 35 and i think that you probably lost 10 or 15 million of them after the events of yesterday where they just threw their hands up in the air and said hey it would really only inflame 20 million is what you're saying correct and i think i agree with jamal right and those 20 million people are you know sad to say concentrated in about 10 states that don't functionally matter economically or otherwise um and so about the balance of justice versus unification certainly it sounds like you're saying ways heavily towards justice right like more more folks will benefit from seeing him come to justice or would perceive justice then i think what it will allow i think it'll allow the republican party to recenter itself i think that's better for politics i think it's better for governance it's better for america i think it allows a lot of people to basically wake up out of this haze that they've been in four years and say wow wait a minute enough enough like i was on a really bad bender i did a couple things i really regret and i need to recenter myself how do you not find this turning into a tit for tat berlusconi italy brazil israel kind of phenomenon where you know future leaders are then attacked and challenged and taken the best the best tweet i saw on this was this woman tweeted out that uh the following she said when the democrats lost in 2016 they knitted pink hats and donated to planned parenthood no they didn't no they didn't they invented a ridiculous russian conspiracy theory they david that like 10 people went to russia the russians no one went to jail you're like the last person you're like the last person who still believes in this well listen i still believe that they tried and i still believe i don't know that they succeeded but i think mueller spent two years investigating this tens of millions of dollars 25 fbi and uh yeah those are all gop talking points the fact is manafort went to jail for something completely unrelated you must be the last person who still believes that trump won in 2016 because of russian interference i think that they i think he asked the ukraine for help and i think he asked the russians for help and i think that he would have gladly accepted the help now is it was it a a conspiracy no it wasn't a conspiracy never this is the problem with your russia talking point is that you're trying to just say because he didn't get prosecuted which he's probably not going to get prosecuted for this either the guy was a serial offender okay and they were trying to get information from wikileaks and they were trying to get the the hacks and so i don't know why you can so clearly see what he's doing david when he incites this violence and then you don't see that he would he has no moral backbone or character and that he wouldn't accept foreign aid it's not that bastard here here's my view okay here's my view is that when you lose an election as a candidate you have to look in the mirror and ask what you did wrong okay trump failed to do that two months ago instead of just taking the l and you know and he he could have blamed it on the fact that vaccine was one week late i mean there were there he you know instead of just accepting the loss he invented this conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and he's basically like freiburg said been pumping it month after month and you know his enablers you know have have perpetuated it until we had this you know total breakdown and storming of the capital but again you know where was the democratic reassessment of why they lost in 2016 who on the democrat side looked in the mirror and said you know we shouldn't have lost that election you know what did we do wrong they didn't do that instead they blamed it all on russian interference or facebook you know all of a sudden facebook went from being a darling to being a scapegoat and there was uh russian ads being bought with rubles and tons of link forms confirmed done by the russians in order to uh ferment anti-hillary sentiment i mean no it actually happened it's true it's true i don't know affect the election nobody could know that but it didn't yes we can because yeah it did it did some effort so now you're admitting there was russian interference so you were before saying there wasn't and now you're saying there was i'm talking about i'm talking about why somebody no no it's not because here here's the here's where you're being misleading is yes is it true that there was some fsb operative somewhere buying ads on facebook yes hundreds of them hundreds of them out of billions of impressions okay it was a microscopic number of total impressions of the election and the people who actually looked at those ads thought they were absurd imagine some operative hold on let me finish my point imagine some operative in moscow trying to influence the american election by buying ads on facebook did they try yes look foreign intelligence services are trying all the time okay but was that they didn't try they did try yes okay and did trump and his family ask them no there was no help there's no proof of collusion there was no proof of collusion okay okay that's what we need to take the meeting okay no that's what mueller he spent two years investigating it and found no collusion look so my point is again we're getting off on a rabbit hole here but my point was when when you as a candidate lose an election you have to take responsibility for that that was not done in 2016. it was not done certainly in 2020 by trump it is the problem with both our political parties that they would rather invent conspiracy theories and lies then acknowledge why people are rejecting them yeah i agree with this i i would say this but that is not the point david you are right okay somewhere along the way we got stuck worrying about the pronouns that we use and which bathrooms should be or should not be transgendered while the american middle class was completely gutted from pillar to post that is what's created the boundary conditions for this every single time there's been an insurrection or an uprising or a revolution in america it has never been about ideology it has always been about economics always and economics is the tip of the spear in this country whether we like it or not it started with the boston tea party you know it continued through the civil war it has always been about that topic so we all let it happen we all have a responsibility to fix it that though is a topic i think for another day because that's the grand arc of what we need to do in our generation and fix this inequality gap meanwhile we do have this tactical issue which is you have the leader of the free world in my opinion and i think in a lot of reasonable minded people's opinion instigating essentially at a minimum a riot and at the maximum some form of like treason it idiotic form of i don't i mean the problem is it's just it is just like it's just it's incomprehensible what it is i've fallen on the side that we need to prosecute him now i was i was 50 50 on this but i'll tell you what's tipped me over is you know if we don't prosecute him there's this sort of like unfairness to it i think that's a very good point you made chamoth but i also think that he is go we need to wake people up from this fog they've been in to friedberg and i don't i think we have to free the the republican party to get back to some more version that is reasonable like you are sacks i would rather see the party the republican party has is is already rejecting trump so just look at what's happened in the last 24 to 48 hours even after this storming of the capital okay you had republicans who who were just hours before objecting to the electors they basically were saying no i've changed my mind who is that lindsey graham but not ted cruz not that other kelly there are a few other ones who switched sides uh you had ex you had excellent speeches by lindsey graham and then romney i agree with that they spoke very very eloquently and just today elaine chao resigned as secretary transportation i think that's mostly significant she's david she's a missionary party yeah look i think i think after georgia the republican party was already blamed trump for that and now after the storming of the capital they're ready to be done with him this idea that you need to prosecute trump to end his somehow end his relation with the republican party i think it will just backfire um i don't think that's what the point is i think the point is that nobody is above the law and when you when you lead you know what look the thing with the people that attended this rally is in any other situation and jason you said it earlier these are our veterans these are the people that are like working good jobs they're trying to just keep america going they've always believed in american exceptionalism there was nothing wrong with that it was just perverted by this [ __ ] scumbag yep he is a complete piece of [ __ ] [ __ ] scumbag he's garbage and i think that's why you have to prosecute him i think you have to make an example of him i know that they with nixon they took a different approach but i just think he's too dangerous to leave unprosecuted because every time he has some bad behavior whether it was the ukraine whether it's you know russian we can debate what level they wanted to engage with the russians or you know in the case of this uh riotous behavior you know i think he's not gonna stop that's the thing that i fear is i don't think he's gonna i would rather i would rather take every single person arrested and give them zero days in jail and add it all up and give it to trump well i i wouldn't i mean i i agree with you to to some degree that they were victims of this two-month propaganda campaign to convince uh the right that this election was stolen i think a lot of those people who are storming the capital they were there not to steal an election because they were thought they were there to prevent the ceiling election and so yes they they have been duped by a lot of people including you know leading with with trump but including a lot of other people who should have known better uh but but that being said they did make the decision to hop the barricades smash the windows go into the capital there's some personal responsibility absolutely yeah we can't that's the tragedy of this woman like but let's talk about this woman for a second and i think it's important to look at this specific case this is a person who's a veteran and she was inside the halls already and was trying to breach another area and she was just shot dead by secret service they might have been protecting the vp they might have been protecting nancy pelosi or mitch mcconnell who knows um but they shot her dead yeah i saw it on video i mean it's on video it's unbelievable and it i mean coming from a law enforcement family i can tell you that's a clean shooting if she was breaching and they told her do not come in here we're going to shoot you and they were protected the secret service is protecting an asset they're allowed to shoot you like you can't jump that and she's a military vet she's from the air force i mean what is in her mind how wound up was she by trump and by this propaganda that when they told her do not breach the second door inside by the way you just said the key word you cannot be spun up in all of this by giuliani he's a [ __ ] [ __ ] you know he can barely like not wet his pants yeah you know you're not going to get spun up by sidney powell the only person that can really catalyze this is the person that has the respect that comes with sitting in the seat that's called the presidency of the united states and he's the only one he's the only one we all know this because if giuliani was running this rally and said let's go storm the capital nobody would have done it we all know this look yeah what do you think about this woman david like think about the psychology of this person for a second the humanity of it you know i'll say something i think um man politics is um isn't the problem it's kind of a manifestation of the problem if you think about how crazy it is that i posted a tweet about this the other day because i've been thinking about it a lot i think it's so crazy that you can show people a tv ad or a facebook ad and get them to change their mind on what to vote like um people are kind of shown stuff and the bigger problem is this kind of reductionism that's um that's kind of enveloped all of this you know if you go back a hundred years i guarantee you people were having deeper more civil conversations about differences of opinion and ways to govern and um and and laws uh to govern us and i think like you know it's so easy to put a 30-second kind of reductionist ad in front of someone uh incite their kind of amygdala to to respond and change their mind about something or push them in some direction and i think that's the bigger issue with like what's been going on is people are kind of being pushed all the way to one side or pushed all the way to the other side um through this you know this this very kind of simple process there is no dialogue to decide what candidate to vote for or dialogue to decide um what path to take it's it's all insidious like lock his ass up you know kill them like everything has become extremely binary um and the gray scale is really the reality and unfortunately we've kind of really hurt ourselves in this tribalism over objectivism kind of approach to how we uh talk as a society and how we debate and as a result people are pushed over the edge and i think this is a manifestation of that broader problem which i think is probably linked to the internet and short attention spans well this is going also why uh i think the gop has just been completely you know but it's not just the gop dominated now that what i'm saying they're all they they which i think is a good segue into georgia but you can share the same about aoc and you could say that aoc is doing the same to the democratic party and they're they're you know equally frustrated with this extremist point of view or elizabeth warren or bernie sanders and they're you know none of them got the nomination though right none of but they could have and they were close and it was like hey look give everyone a million dollars okay great like and tax the rich 90 great like it's easy to say and and my point is by the way i think the root of a lot of this is um is people are programmed to be unhappy right that's how you instigate people to take action the the bottom 10 percent of americans make more money and have a better position in life than the top 10 percent of kenyans and it's an incredible statistic if you think about it go to dollarstreak.org or dollarspeak.com and you can actually play around and see what different people live like around the world yet in the us we are told at every strata whether you're wealthy or or not wealthy relative to others in the united states that you should be better off and it is um you know happiness is the difference between expectation and outcome and everyone's been set an expectation beyond what they currently have and as a result through programmatic work that is done on people in the united states we are being told you should be unhappy oh and by the way here's the short-term solution to resolve it and it's driving an incredible amount of um of behavioral shift and it really threatens democracy as we saw this week and you guys will remember my my big loser for the political loser for 2020 was the american uh democratic institution and i think we saw that uh this week on the on the heels of that can i ask you guys what you think of this basically pelosi has told pence you have to invoke the 25th amendment or they're going to take up impeachment what do you guys think about that i think it's the right thing to do how do you do i think they have to be there has to be a backstop against you what do you mean you could do something crazy you could still well here's the thing i i i tweeted at free bahar about this if you are impeached uh successfully you can't run again um so i think that this is a um a way to put the nail in the coffin of trump even having the ability to run in 2024 which i think is why the democrats are on the right side of history on this one that's my personality maybe they sign a non-prosecution agreement with him if he resigns and that that's kind of the final you know i mean that's what i would like to see but jason why can't you trust voters to make the right decision in 2024 i i um do i trust voters i it's not about trusting the voters it's more about do i think there should be ramifications for somebody's behavior that's that's my fear is that if he keeps getting away with stuff he could do something even more violent or dangerous as chamod said earlier it's a miracle that a hundred people weren't shot dead and this wasn't a firefight i mean if somebody takes out a gun at any moment during that and people start shooting we could have hundreds of people americans dead not just the four who died and i think trump is absolutely capable of doing something in the last 14 days if he did this 15 days out why wouldn't he do something else seven days out or three days out he's a maniac i mean this is insane deranged criminal lunatic behavior it's completely possible that he could do something more dangerous in the last 14 days i know that that sounds crazy but look at what we saw yesterday i think i i think there is like a white knuckle element to the next two weeks i think we're all kind of white knuckling it to you know to see what's gonna happen uh we have 300 hours to go till biden has sworn in and i've got to admit like i i'm counting down the hours you know it's too insane nobody wants everything everybody's feeling everybody's feeling that um that being said i i just think that i'm more on on fr freeberg's point of view on this that we have this insane level of partisan warfare in the us it's gone to like a whole another level and i just and and and trump has definitely made it worse and the storming of the capital is the you know is the zenith of it it's the apex but look the other side's been doing it too and the question is just how we de-escalate this insane person in the de-escalation chamath isn't biden like being elected i think it is yeah i think it is it's like we picked the most boring candidate who has the most milk toast middle of the road approach who who lindsey graham likes and who travel the world with i mean lady g loves him well to the extent that biden has a mandate this is it i mean and he talked about it in his victory speech that night which was which was was quite good it's about bringing people together um now look i mean the the the issue one of the issues is you can't ignore the fact that democrats for the last four years have waged this insane partisan war against trump i mean let's not even go into the merits but you had this two-year mueller witch-hunt you then had this uh impeachment uh you know crusade which look if there was a lot of validity to the impeachment why wasn't it used as a campaign issue last year i just think everybody knows let me ask you a question everybody knows that was hyper partisan and and my point is that yeah look i mean i think it's a good thing if biden can de-escalate things that that is that is i think why he won the election is that he was seen as more of a sane alternative let me ask you a question saks do you think it would have been do you think if trump had been impeached for the ukraine uh interference and pence had taken over we would not have seen what we were seeing yesterday and the country would have been further along to healing uh so you know no i mean pence would not have invited or asked all of his supporters to come to the capitol to oppose the accounting the the counting of the electors i look that was a unique trump thing for you know he could not accept the loss and had to keep pushing and pushing and pushing on this idea that he that the election was stolen okay so it would have been a good idea no no it wouldn't no it wouldn't because if you had if you had impeached trump no well first of all he was impeached okay but if you had voted for victim if you had removed him from office the senate had voted to convict over a phone call okay and look i'm not defending the phone call i'm not saying the phone call was perfect okay i know trump says it was perfect it was not a perfect phone call but you can't remove a sitting president for that okay look it was unseemly or whatever i think we all know what he was trying to do in that phone call but you can't remove a sitting president over that that was hyper partisan and so no the country would be much further apart today if you had done that and and so the question now is well how do you bring it back together and i think i understand where where where tamatha's coming from i think that trump deserves morally culpably uh i think he he has a repudiation some repudiation but but i don't believe in locking him up or or prosecuting him that's only going to make things much more crime for this crime we we don't even know what else is out there i mean i think yeah there's other issues out there let's talk about georgia let's let's i think we've nailed the trump i mean unless anybody really feels like continuing to talk stacy abrams is a genius i mean my gosh she should be in charge of everything yeah can we get her on the vaccine rollout well trump that's incredible it's incredible stacey abbas did an incredible job on the democratic side mobilizing turnout um but the reason why the republicans lost georgia is frankly trump i mean trump costs them georgia two months ago purdue beat ossoff in that election he won he won he won and and he's beaten him before i think he is uh i mean he's not the most wonderful candidate but i think he is a better candidate and he lost because of these antics over the last two months culminating in that insane phone call that trump had with the georgia securities we talked about rather right i mean should he get you to fight for that sacks can't you just find me 11 000 votes look i i just think you know which one is more prosecutable sending people to the capitol or asking them and begging them to find him eleven thousand votes which one is more prosecutable to you saks since you're gonna be framing us let's wait jason hold on let's let's move on let's move away from the whole trump goes to jail for a second i just wanna i think it's important to talk about georgia because i think david you're going to make a point yeah exactly i mean look i think we're getting hung up too much on the legalities and let's just talk about what's right and wrong you know which we is what we can agree on and let you know lawyers and prosecutors figure out the legalities um ramesh panuru from national view had a great quote about georgia he said that purdue and loffler could have survived any two of these three being unimpressive candidates georgia shifting purple and trump being a maniac and unfortunately you had three out of three and that's why they lost if uh it was a great is a great quote uh you know you had the raffles burger call you know can't you just find the 11 000 votes the day before the election or two days for the election i mean that had to push swing voters and undecideds to the democrats and the other thing is that purdue and loffler weren't able to make the best argument that they had which is if you vote for us you end up with split you you prevent the democrats from having all the power in washington so unless you want to give all the power in washington to a single party you need to vote for us that was the best argument for voting for them because there's a lot of people in this country who believe in splitting their ticket because they don't trust either party which is kind of where i'm at um but they were unable to make that argument effectively because trump was still hanging on to the idea that he was going to be president no i think david i honestly i think this comes down to the intelligence of the candidates kelly lofter is a [ __ ] she's an idiot david perdue's a good old boy he's an idiot they're just stupid this actually speaks to a bigger problem which is the republicans could do so much better if they could actually find younger more vibrant intelligent people and instead they find these [ __ ] morons i don't know where they find them but you know they pulled kelly loffler out of some like backstage dallas beauty pageant and just kind of like fluffed her up and tried to get her to run she's a [ __ ] loffler loffler was a mistake loffler wasn't a mistake [ __ ] idiot did you read the story about her with the wnba but i mean george i mean it's unbelievable georgia georgia is full of so many incredible politicians and they found that idiot that that was a huge mistake if they just voted or yeah i mean the governor made a huge mistake they put they appointed her to the last two months uh i so i agree that she's a particularly weak candidate but the republicans only needed one of these two elections and purdue had beaten assaf before i agree with you he's not necessarily the greatest candidate of all time but he has proved better than ossoff in the past including november and the reason why he lost two months later is because what's transpired in the last two months biden has acted presidential and trump has done what he's done and that that made all the difference and and that by the way is why you're seeing the republicans breaking from trump they were already on their way to breaking with him and then you had this david story of the capital what are the implications for josh hawley and ted cruz i i think i think this was a blow to them because i think that what they were doing in terms of uh opposing the the the electors uh everybody knew it was sort of cynical and theater it was theater it was performative theater designed to curry favor with trump so that he might endorse them in 2024 for the nomination and it was it was it was optionistic and the problem is it backfired horribly and you know people now see it for what it was and so yeah i think it's gonna ultimately they tried to do something optionistic that they thought would help them politically and i think it's gonna hurt them but wait i have to ask you guys do you guys know the backstory of loffler and the atlantic dream the wnba team it's tears honestly jason i'm going to get so angry because she is just a complete piece of [ __ ] please don't i i'm you can bring it up i i think she just don't think saks and friberg are aware of this but i think she's a complete piece of [ __ ] she basically tells the story it's basically she was anti-blm and she was writing letters to the nba wnba to not allow the players to to be vocal about black lives matter with the you know after the killing of um the murder of george floyd and uh so what the team did if you look at that story is they backed warnock uh they got on the call with him they refused to say her name and uh they rallied the support of warnock uh who ultimately uh beat her and they refused to say her name i just ever again if you the players are saying if you want to see courage the women that play in the wnba are some of the most incredible people yes these these are women that have basically stopped their athletic career stopped fame you know stopped all of the attention in some cases stopped fortunes to work on behalf of criminal justice reform to basically overturn you know uh unjust convictions these women are incredible and then to be suppressed to be able to say what was on their mind kelly loffler is a piece of [ __ ] and they basically wore these vote warnock t-shirts every day at every game i mean imagine and then now they're i think going to be forced to go to those women yeah i give them uh sue bird i think is the uh was the leader of the whole movement yeah bravo to her all right moving on from politics i think we have to talk freeberg about the deployment of the vaccine um i i did a quick poll on twitter and twitter and the american people have asked that friedberg the queen of quinoa be responsible for the vaccine distribution going forward really i'm in let's do it uh i would what did you i would get that vaccine into everyone's arms in 75 days i mean it was you would be such a stone cold yeah that would be amazing yeah i don't know free freebird what would you do differently and maybe you could describe you know we were supposed to be at a million a day we're at 350 trending towards 400. we did 1.5 million in 72 hours according to fauci at one point uh right after the new year so we're kind of like halfway where we need to be what would you do differently because the rollout seems we have more than 50 percent are on the shelves still in arms it is a wartime scenario when war is happening you don't go home at 5 00 p.m and wake up at 9 00 a.m and clock out for an hour for lunch and you know you don't uh oh well don't run too fast you know you might trip you don't do any of that we've created incredible disincentives in the system by in fact cuomo put out a million dollar fine if uh if you get your vaccine out of line i mean think about the disincentive that creates now people are more scared about giving the vaccine to the wrong person then they are incentivized to give the vaccine to the right person and the reality is this is a group game this isn't an individual game it's not about who gets vaccinated first and you'll live and you'll die we all need to get vaccinated as a group so that we all have immunity so that this virus stops spreading it doesn't matter if you're individually vaccinated it matters if we're all vaccinated because that's the only way we're all going to get out of the economic slump that is truly damaging this country right now and so the first step is create a military style operation figure out how many feet on the ground you know it's all a rate based system right how many are you running per day and then how do you achieve that objective and over time you have your target rate per day you would scale it up over 75 days or whatever your rollout time frame needs to be and you would say this is how we're going to get there we need this number of people giving shots this many minutes apart and then you go figure out where you're going to give the shots and who's going to give them get the vaccines to where they need to get to take over all the gymnasiums and all the stadiums and all the open sports facilities around the country people can drive up stand in line get a freaking shot and 65 year olds get priority for the first 30 days and then after 30 days your 65 and over crowd loses their priority and it's open season for who wants to get a shot you stand in line you get a shot walk in you got 3.8 million nurses in the united states you go contract 500 000 of them you give them a huge friggin one-time bonus to come and run this program you run 24-hour shifts in the gymnasiums around the country people come in they get shots they get out takes three minutes if you're feeling weird if you have risk of allergies you go sit in the other room you wait for two hours and there's a bunch of roaming nurses keep an eye on you and you get this thing done that's it this is not that complicated and we can leverage the national guard to create the infrastructure to support these lines and get these things done we can go recruit there are plenty of nurses associations you can go people can work overnight shifts and get paid triple overtime get extra bonuses for doing this is a great way to kind of create an economic stimulus around this we can get this entire country vaccinated in 90 days and the way that uh israel is doing it is a great model you know when they run out describe that yeah so at the end of the day if uh you know when you open when you take these things out of deep freeze you're at risk of them spoiling at that point because the mrna is very um you know can break and so it needs to be really cold and then you gotta give the vaccine very quickly otherwise the mrna can degrade and it's not effective and you have to defrost it in order to give it yes you defrost it then it's sitting there now you got to give it within a couple hours and if you've got extra juices complicated what they're doing in israel is they're looking outside they grab the pizza guy that's on the bicycle truck on the bicycle cruising by they're like do you want a shot come on in they give them a shot they grab the next guy you do not need to track everyone that gets a shot you do not need everyone to show their id to get a shot you do not need to x y and z all the disincentives that create friction in the system of rolling out the vaccine need to be completely eliminated there's no qualifying criteria except maybe being 65 and over for the first 30 days and we've prioritized politics um over health and safety we have made it the case that the teachers should get the shot first because the teachers unions created an uproar in california and said they're not going to go to work unless they so now the teachers are going to get it and the essential workers are going to get it which are people that are working in stores and warehouses and other stuff and meanwhile the people that can actually die from this 15 likelihood of death if you're over 85 are not getting it because they're not technically an essential worker so the prioritization where we've tried to create these artificial politically motivated systems for defining who gets the vaccine and who doesn't is absolutely killing us and literally killing us 4 000 people died yesterday in the united states and so the system has [ __ ] up the incentives we've and don't bleep that out because that's exactly what it is the disincentives we've created are destroying um the rollout um the uh the governor's getting involved in creating models of prioritization that are politically motivated are killing us and and we should centrally plan this thing ward production act make a [ __ ] ton of the stuff grab it all get a hundred million doses distributed into gymnasiums around the country get the nurses in there get the national guard it should have been federal i mean that's the key this should have been effort central planning is sometimes needed to get [ __ ] done we did it with the war production board during world war ii we did it with the manhattan project we there have been countless examples where we've had to centralize planning for a massive short-term event and this is one of those events and this needs to be um prioritized and organized centrally and it needs to have the right-minded people on this not kind of people that are you know political operatives and not people that are working nine to five um well the good news is this is this is a war and we need to go win the [ __ ] war i mean trump trump has time he said he's at camp david this weekend so i think he can put some attention to it saks can i ask a question freeburg so you know uh what do you think about just using markets to distribute the vaccine it's a great idea i think you know you have to get the incentive such that kind based systems are the incentive right because the objective here is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible so take that being your objective and then figure out look you guys are going to get a thousand dollars per person vaccinated in the first 15 days and then you're going to get 500 and then you know whatever the transition is and then anyone can sign up to buy doses at a at a cost so they they have skin in the game right that's an alternative so let walgreens and cvs buy 50 million doses and then they're incentivized to get them rolled out as quickly as possible let them do the work sure um and frankly if a few people have anaphylactic reactions across the country that's just the reality in war you have some casualties this can't be perfect it has to be good enough to win the war um well by the way when somebody goes into anaphylactic shock just to clarify that yeah you get an epi shot it's not fatal if you have an epipen that's right and so um so you know when you get a uh when you get a um uh you know a vaccine if you get one of these vaccines 40 to 60 percent of people are gonna have some sort of reaction you can have a fever because these are these produce a ton of proteins in your body relative to what you would normally you know kind of experience with it with a dead vaccine there's a lot of vaccines in your body there's a lot of protein in your body your body reacts to get rid of that protein you produce all these antibodies very quickly so you end up having a fever you end up having some some allergic response or headaches or flushing or whatever so everyone's going to have a lot of people are going to have some sort of thing so one of the concerns is they want to have nurses available and they want to have this feel like a controlled medical environment but again the reality is we have to sack it up we have to accept the fact that people are going to be uncomfortable it is not going to be an easy simple vaccine like you get the flu vaccine at walgreens it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable you may not have five or six nurses surrounding you and getting all the tlc that americans have become used to getting every time we you know brush our freaking teeth and uh and we're gonna have some people going to anaphylactic shock and they're gonna get epipen shots and and you know um and we shouldn't be charging 1500 for epipen shots that's another you know important point but i think the market based model could work as well so hasn't israel done this right i mean israel they moved the old people to the front of the line but anybody can get in line if they've got extra doses that day they just keep sticking people they keep jabbing people until they run out all day long till they run out that's right and so they're probably at 20 of the population by now yeah so i i'm sure we all agree with everything you're saying it speaks to an enormous amount of political incompetence i mean it's really really just unbelievable why we just don't have smarter people in charge of these things but zach i just want to ask you because you know there is the conservative argument on this which is um you know states the federal government shouldn't be doing everything and states need to kind of manage their populace and manage you know what what goes on locally you know what is the conservative i'm not asking you this and i'm not attacking you i'm just asking like what is the conservative argument for not doing central planning and central um organization around vaccine distribution and delegating it to states and you know are are there you know do you think that there's a case against um you know for that that's pretty strong in within the republican party and within kind of conservative rights i i i i think if there's a conservative point of view on this it would just be that let markets distribute the vaccine they'll do a much better job i don't you know i think whether it's federal or state the question is who's more incompetent and i'm not really sure um i mean i i think the problem right now is that when you make vaccine distribution fundamentally political then the debate becomes about exactly who's what is your position going to be exactly in line as opposed to just running the most number of people through the process as quickly as possible we're getting ourselves so twisted up in knots over making sure that the exact right person is in line that we're having you know vaccine go to waste yeah just to put that in context 21 million plus doses have been distributed in the united states 5.9 have made their way into people's arms in other words there are 15 millions over 75 percent of doses have not gone in people's arms and in california we have distributed 5.85 of the population's vaccines but we've only put 1.3 in people's arms so we are literally uh 4x where we should be we're at 25 of where we should be it is absolutely unbelievable that this is happening and if the government if the government's if the government stopped trying to do anything except you know look it it did operation warp speed that actually did help get vaccines done faster but if you just that was just money to your point sacks all they did was create a market where they basically pre-bought all the vaccines whether or not they were going to work and then funded the market to go and produce them early that's all that it was so to your point that operation warp speed for everyone thinking it's a massive centrally controlled effort it was a market-based incentive they put it wasn't the manhattan project is what you're saying they put up a couple of millions yeah they put up a couple billion dollars and said to all these pharma companies go produce the vaccine and if it works we'll buy them if it doesn't work throw them away but let's get production going and that was it can i can i use this as a segue like i mean what we're seeing is sort of we have a bunch of elected officials we give them you know an enormous amount of responsibility they also get this implied power and then you just you see sometimes in these acute moments they're totally derelict then i just want to move off of vaccines for a second then you get an elected official who is not acutely incompetent but it seems broadly grossly and consistently incompetent and i want to talk about chessa boudin and i i want to use sax's article which to be very honest david was probably one of the most incredibly well-written things well done you have ever created i don't know jason do we have show notes can we put it in we'll put it in the show notes yeah we'll put a link in the show notes um it is so [ __ ] good what you wrote if everybody folks who are listening have a chance to read david's killer d.a the killer d.a um but it basically you know starts with a profile of this young woman seemed like an incredible woman that was killed by this uh drunk driver uh but anyways david do you want to talk about it yeah i mean so for the last with let's say for the last couple of months i've been following the san francisco uh a couple of san francisco police department accounts on twitter and i was noticing these extraordinary tweets which are getting retweeted a lot about how they kept uh arresting and then having to let go of all these criminals who are committing burglaries and other crimes and you could see the frustration of the police department boiling off these tweets and you know basically they are sub-tweeting this new district attorney that we've had chase of boudin who was elected uh he's been in office about a year he's elected the end of 2019 and so i started doing a little bit of research and then we had this horrible new year's eve killing of this you know uh wonderful young woman uh hannah abe who came to america from japan for college and stayed here for work she was just 27 years old she gets killed by uh by by a a criminal someone who was released who was paroled by chase abudeen uh back in april he had been in jail for armed robbery uh chase uh released him as part of a plea bargain and then he was arrested five more times for stealing cars and other crimes most recently two weeks ago and the d.a refused to press charges and that that's the reason he was out on new year's eve he stole a car and then there was this hit-and-run where he killed hannah and another woman and so you know i had already been noticing this issue and so i started doing some some research and i have a research assistant helping me with this is the only way i could put something like this together and we went pretty deep and we realized that the death of of hannah wasn't just an accident or an act of negligence by this d.a it was part of an overall philosophy of decarceration that he has but he his his background is very interesting he was a child of parents who were in the weather underground who when he was just a baby committed armed robbery and were part of the murder which is david yeah david say the words they were domestic terrorists yeah they were they were that's right they were domestic terrorists uh they participated in an armed robbery against the brinks truck which is these were domestic terrorists that were competent when compared to what we saw yesterday in the capital like these are highly capable domestic terrorists to be clear i don't know i don't know how capable they were their their robbery results in the death of two police officers and a brinks guard and they were put in prison his mother spent 20 years in prison she's now released her his father is still in prison uh for almost 40 40 years and he's described in interviews how his earliest memories are visiting his parents in prison and how this shaped his entire political outlook and he became a public defender which i think was a pretty good place for him i think if i were an indigent you know criminal defendant i would want someone like chase of beauty on my side and but the problem is he ran for district attorney and he simply doesn't believe in prosecuting huge numbers of crimes uh you know certainly property crimes burglary shoplifting vandalism and those crimes have absolutely spiked in the city you know a 45 increase in burglaries in one year 35 percent increase in stolen cars 30 increase in homicides crimes are through the roof because he simply doesn't believe in putting people in jail well you know can i just say this can i tell you sorry let me just uh point out there's a there's a little bit of a history to um to this notion that da's should change the criminal justice system there's a ted talk uh by a guy named adam faw sex i don't know if you've seen it or if any of you guys have watched it i i i was at the ted conference the year that he spoke but this guy um basically thought you know he made the case that it is the role and the opportunity for the district attorney for the prosecutor to change the criminal justice system from the prosecutorial side that you can um you know kind of demotivate jail and and and other kind of um you know mechanisms of punishment uh and and push for uh for a rehabilitation program as an alternative and that the district attorneys can take this this roll on of changing the criminal justice system and it created a little bit of a mini movement and there was a lot of attention and follow-up after he gave his ted talk and i think san francisco in large part picked up on the uh the momentum coming out of this and other similar sort of stories about the d.a can really change the criminal justice system and chesapeake really kind of capitalized on it in principle a lot of people are motivated from a good place when they elected him which is it is unfortunate a lot of people get trapped in a life of crime and the fact that they're in and out of prison is a result of the fact that they're put into the criminal justice system in the first place and parole is really harsh on people and all these other reasons why people's lives are ruined for simple mistakes and if they get an opportunity in life they can fix themselves and they can come out um in a better place so there is a bit of an origin story it's not just like san francisco said let's get an anarchist to brda and destroy the world and kill us all like i think it came from a good and true place where this all kind of originated but obviously the experiment has gone severely awry in san francisco and his particular methods uh and his particular actions have certainly caused far more harm than anyone has seen any good as that's what we pointed out they've started a recall effort for him too well i think that i think the danger is not that you have um an enlightened political philosophy i think that's actually quite great then that we can experiment i think the danger is both on the left and on the right where people cathartically deal with childhood trauma through their job and you know i don't know what jessa boudin has gone through and i feel very bad that he had an incredibly hard life um or complicated or maybe not i don't even know but i wouldn't want to know that he's trying to deal with his own experiences through his job because that's not his job meaning you know you don't want an activist d.a i think you want a d.a that's enforcing the laws and what you do want is you want to elect politicians who change the laws to reflect our values yeah that would be a better through line i think and and really i mean if you look at what's happening in san francisco i think we've conflated income inequality which people in san francisco are very tuned into with essentially junkies people who are addicted to incredibly hardcore drugs that are very hard to get off of and we've had more deaths from overdoses of fentanyl than we've had from kovid by a magnitude of four or five i mean it is bedlam on the streets of san francisco and if you don't enforce a basic rule of law what happens is the price of drugs gets cheaper more available more people try them more people get addicted and then more people come from other places because they know you have the lowest price on drugs and the price of drugs is inversely correlated with prosecution of drug crimes so prosecution of crime so this is why san francisco is spiraling and most drugs are purchased from criminal funds so you know criminal activity goes up to fund the drug purchasing so that that's the vicious cycle that's driving san francisco and there's a recall going on and then in related news gavin newsom is now up to a million signatures in his recall which i think is two-thirds of the way there yeah they have until mid or late february they're going to get the votes and i think i think the question you know friedrich and i talked about this just on a phone call he and i caught up a couple days ago i think it is time guys for us to find an incredibly centrist thoughtful candidate and put them into the recall race um against uh newsome burke had the best idea which was kim kardashian which i think is incredible because she is very smart she's very likable she's got enormous distribution she's like uh she's about to become a lawyer you know that'll be the amazing the best platform for kardashian to run for president look it's pretty clear you know recognition influence fame is what gets people elected you know not the best policy and not the greatest experience from jesse ventura to arnold schwarzenegger to donald trump robert ronald reagan i mean these are celebrities who i would argue in the case of jesse ventura arnold schwarzenegger or maybe even donald trump as well their celebrity was kind of you know it had hit it's it's it's media-driven apex and and this was a second act and you know perhaps someone like that is a great fit here uh kim kardashian really fits the bill but um uh you know i that's just a shot in the dark but i do think someone like that needs to go up because if you put politician up again it's another one of these rolling events and for uh you know for the populist to kind of really find appeal it has to be a recognized person you know broadly recognized and liked person um governorjason.com i'm not ready to run for political office i'm 50 and when i'm 60 i would consider it actually but not right now i wonder what i've got to hop to i think we all got to hop but i was going to say one thing which is the beginning of today's podcast was probably the punchiest it's ever been and i think it just speaks to the fact that there was so the bar was so high for trump to have done something that would have actually gotten us to actually argue and interrupt each other you know because we've been so incredibly like loving and protective of each other for four years on this topic but it literally took an armed insurrection for us to finalize the these well i mean i think it's good for people to see sacks maybe and i or chamoth and sax or whoever disagree on some of these cases or friberg you know doesn't believe in prosecuting trump i think we actually had a split ticket there where saxon freeberg felt like we shouldn't prosecute trump and chamoth and i were in the prosecute trump one but i think we're all struggling with these issues all americans are struggling with these issues of how do you deal with a black swan event i think that's what's so unique about trump is and i think david you could speak to this is i don't think the system was designed for his level of crazy right like our system is based on norms and traditions and trust just like venture investing is and we see this in venture investing some founder goes off the jumps the fence and all of a sudden you know yeah i mean we still i would say our system performed pretty well in terms of being stress tested and well look we still got two more weeks you know i think we're all kind of we're all kind of white knuckling it right now yeah yeah hopefully nothing else happens but but look if if trump's goal was a coup you know i think it's a strong word but if it like it totally failed i mean he didn't come close to no uh to succeeding in a coup um the opposite in fact the opposite he again we talked about how i think his he destroyed his popularity over the last two months he he impacted his earnings by negative two billion dollars yeah so uh but but but you know but to this point about us agreeing or disagreeing you know i saw a whole bunch of uh fans of the pod like at mentioning me saying i wonder what saks is gonna say about this i don't know what like yeah and i'm kind of like like what do they think i'm gonna say like they think i'm gonna be supportive of this i mean you know like i i i think somehow you jason you've programmed the viewers that i like i'm somehow like the the trump the trump guy uh you know because you're always trolling me as the trump supporter i mean i i would believe that russia was a hoax and that would have been treated the same climbing up those steps we all know that's not true some of these are self-inflicted wounds of your own gonna take some ownership there boys boys i gotta hop okay i love you very much happy new year happy new year our best i will say one thing before we meet next time i guarantee you some highly unexpected and highly impactful thing will occur please know can we get back to talking about spax or the bachelor we didn't even even talk about uh my spac today oh yeah yeah anyway okay give it a plug go ahead and snap no i mean just explain to people he doesn't need to plug it double today it's insane all right we'll explain why poe ipoe is merging with sofi um it's an incredible company led by an incredible ceo anthony noto um you can read a little one pager on my website but um anyways guys more importantly to all the listeners out there happy new year to all of you guys let's make 2021 kick ass yep um i love you guys you i miss you i'll see you guys soon play poker soon oh look there's somebody yeah i got it interrupted i got to go all right we'll see you all i got introduced next time check us out young spielberg take us out young spielberg to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like it's like sexual tension that they just we need to get back i'm going on






hey everyone hey everyone welcome your illustrious moderator jason calcandis has been purged cancelled he's been canceled we canceled him for his constant interruptions and low iq comments we decided that the minimum iq required to be on this part of this you know 150 he did not make the cut and so now it is just me chamoth and freeburg he is uh jason is away he is actively implementing our jerk off to win strategy to solve the pandemic and free speech hey everybody hey everybody it is an emergency podcast episode 16 hit number two in the uh rankings on the apple itunes podcasting store clearly we hit a nerve it's been an insane week and the dictator dictated that he was not satisfied with doing our podcast once every two weeks and so here we are on a sunday the queen of quinoa rain man himself david sacks and the dictator chopping it up for you the loyal confused angry infuriated audience of all in it's the craziest week of our lives jason plea please don't describe to the audience the characteristics that describe yourself okay this has been a crazy 72 hours can anybody remember us a week that has been more crazy in their life with the exception i guess 911 the financial crisis i'm trying to think of this level of crazy i think i think we should start with what happened after the last all-in podcast between you and saks over text we should get it all out there we should share it publicly and i think no no no no i think yeah i think no we should i think it's worth doing we we talked about this before you joined us and uh chamoth and i are having an intervention and uh you know i i'm going to say something real quick i think it's worth highlighting that one of the things that i think we have the opportunity to do as a group is to kind of elevate the conversation a bit and not frame things as being black and white and not frame them as being one or zero or partisan or left or right and everyone on this in this conversation has nuanced opinions about a lot of different topics and when you sum up all those opinions it doesn't define a left or right person or democrat or republican i think that's what makes us you know a compelling and interesting group to talk to sax has been characterized as the trump guy he took offense to that um and in particular the heated conversation you guys had last time and i do think it's worth kind of sharing that with everyone and letting you guys reconcile publicly yeah have a group hug yeah and and reframe kind of how we talk about each other and how so that we can kind of set a bit of an example on on how to do this well i can sorry you can start david i'll i'll i'll start because objection you're the aggrieved yeah i mean so look i i think that that j cow does an amazing job moderating the pod and it's a difficult job um and you know the the the so i so i don't want to um you know this is not something i'm trying to blame him for but i do have an objection to being labeled in a certain way i think anybody would you know we we don't want to be misconstrued and and we want to be able to characterize our own views we don't want to be labeled a certain way now i think jason has sort of branded me as a trump guy because frankly it's amusing to him um i think he's mainly trolling me and but the audience doesn't necessarily understand that i mean if you go back and look at my twitter feed or my blogs i haven't written about trump for years i mean i haven't said anything really about it that's not my agenda um you know and i think it i don't have a pro-trump agenda but i also don't have a pro-resistance agenda i've described my position as anti-hysteria sometimes that means criticizing trump like it did in the last pod sometimes it means criticizing the resistance so i just don't like being labeled a certain way and i think jason and i sort of you know kind of resolve this um you know if i label my politics just you know jason calls me the conservative i think that's more accurate but the question is you know what am i conserving exactly and i would describe myself more as like a 1960s style liberal you know i'm a believer in free speech you know aclu style um believer in king's dream of a colorblind society you know if you know i'm against all these you know foreign wars and interventions if i had been around the 1960s i would have been protesting vietnam that's kind of more where i'm coming from and i guess the reason i'm a conservative now is because the political debate has moved so far away from that but if i'm trying to conserve anything it's really the liberal victories of the 1960s so in any event i i don't think that qualifies me in any way as a as a trumper per se and um i just don't want you know jason making jokes to somehow um have the audience get the wrong idea because i want to be heard and i know trump's an extremely polarizing figure and the second you tell somebody you're frankly pro or con trump the other half just doesn't even stop doesn't even want to listen to you um and so my views are more complicated than that okay well thanks for everybody for tuning in to the all-in amazing episode 17. thanks to our sponsors um listen uh i think what makes this podcast great is the diversity of opinion and the respect that we show for each other if my breaking chops uh which is as everybody knows here uh my superpower in life and talk along with talking has pigeon holed you into being something you're not or if you felt i've taken a cheap shot at you in any way uh i apologize and it was not my intent my intent is to keep the conversation flowing to entertain the audience certainly but not at anybody's expense david and certainly not yours because i do consider you one of the best friends i've had in my life and one of the most supportive people in my life and anything we all feel that way about each other that we go to bad for each other and support each other i do think that this highlights and dovetails with what we and i've given it a lot of thought actually i've really spent since the last podcast a lot of time thinking about your position david and where you're coming from and then also where the people who maybe you know you maybe agreed with some of uh trump's victories and certainly you're a conservative i don't know if you voted for him or not or if you're willing to say if you did i'll put that aside for a moment but i do think that we're all seeing in our families in our lives and now as a nation what is the off-ramp here to the people who supported trump up until this coup attempt uh and this ugliness and then how do we reconcile it right that is the grand reconciliation here is the thing that has me very concerned because we're a microcosm david you and i are you know unbelievably close friends uh for a very long period of time and we struggle with uh i think uh trump trump is as i was saying in our group chat earlier it's like the trolley car problem like people will be pulling up how do you deal with trump as the example of you know what do you do if the trolley car you know it's going to kill one person or five and do you you know the breaks broken kind of situation it's and i think jack and the platforms also have a difficult task do you leave this person up after what we saw on wednesday and a lot has changed since wednesday can you say something i'll leave it at that and then i'll throw it to your mouth i don't want to no jason here's the thing i think that um we all have views i think the thing that i respect the most about saks is that his views are independent of the candidate du jour and i think his views quite honestly are in many cases the most well reasoned and well thought out because he's frankly you know one of the smartest people in our friend group if not probably the smartest so i think what it speaks to is the fact that you can have these momentary sort of pauses where you have these people that are so polarizing that you forget that there are legitimate views on both sides i mean i would characterize my political views as in some cases like deeply conservative meaning get the government out of the way they're a bunch of incompetent [ __ ] buffoons and on the other side on some issues i think that they should be extremely interventional like in healthcare or in climate change because it's just so dire and there needs to be a public mandate in order to drive change i don't know where i fit anymore especially because it's harder to be nuanced as friedrich said at the beginning without sounding like a complete crazy person because one word triggers the other side against you so i think the thing that i just want all the listeners to appreciate not just amongst the four of us but also amongst their own friends is having a little patience and tolerance here is really important because we cannot become the worst of ourselves especially because of a single person who will be rendered with an enormous asterisk beside his name and by him i mean trump for the rest of our natural lives and so let's just not allow what one person has been able to do to malign all of our like natural ability to just not be completely stupid quite honestly so um i just think it's important to realize that we all have completely completely nuanced perspectives they're all worth listening to and i would just tell people don't fall for the simple easy out to assume that you know being a conservative means you're a trump supporter or being a liberal means you're not a trump supporter because i think that there's issues in which you know frankly look let's be honest the the wall street journal opinion by uh was it lisa lasser what was her name lisa uh amy lassell somebody um sky posted into the group chat nick can you find it i can't remember it sassel or lasso is her last name anyways oh kim strassel kim strausel journal yeah she she had a paragraph intro where and again i wasn't a trump supporter have never been a trump supporter i do have those some sympathy to some of the things he did and the way that she described his four years although you know she was selective it was impressive actually you know meaning getting the rhetoric right on china getting the rhetoric on trade right um the deregulation that he's created in some ways so there there is very much a reasonable narrative up until the capital storming where the glass was definitely half full and it could have legitimately been viewed half full and it was just a matter of opinion because he was just such a crazy person and his style was so shitty i think the thing is david said this on the last part after storming the capital it is very clear 100 categorically this guy is just a complete piece of [ __ ] and so now the people that stand with him are extremely isolated and so i just want us to remember that there there is probably something to learn from everybody he actually did some reasonable things intelligently well until he [ __ ] self-immolated himself um and so let's just not give in to our basic instincts here and i think there's a lot to learn from uh i think the frustration of a lot of people is some people saw this coming and some people you know when peter thiel said things like hey you know don't take trump literally and all this kind of stuff some of us were taking him literally and some of us were very concerned and people were saying oh you're being hyperbolic he's not hitler he's he's not dangerous you know what uh [ __ ] he is dangerous and you should take him literally and i think a lot of the folks who enabled him and who thought it was funny um who weren't on the other side of his vindictiveness his dog whistling uh and the anger and the violence he put out into the world and he consistently did this you know he he he started by saying you know get that person the hell out of here like i would in the old days the cops would have thrown him down the stairs kind of thing he he is like tony soprano or any other mob boss who knows how to incite people to do dangerous things without having the culpability himself as you pointed out chamath he he might be the one who gets off scot-free while they're rounding up all these people and you got this prediction right like yeah these people are going to go to jail there's multiple felonies he's not going to get off scot-free he's not well i mean do you think he's going to jail and do you think the people who broke into this you think you think trump's going to jail yes oh my lord i'm i'm not i'm not sure about that but i i i do think that you know like i said last time uh trump is now the first uh sitting president to cost his party the presidency the house and the senate since herbert hoover uh jason if you're right about trump i mean the voters have certainly been able to see that and they've punished him and his party at the polls i do think that whatever you do to trump individually at this point is sort of redundant with that um you know he has now cost his party uh any share of power everything any share of the power in washington so can i ask you a question david when i made that point about peter thiel and the people who supported him early do you have any regrets in your own thinking about being supportive of trump in his early years you're coming at this from a place i've never even come at it from which is i'm not like a partisan person uh when trump won the election in 2016 my first reaction was not is this you know har right or wrong i don't it's you know what side am i on my my first reaction was why did this happen you know i tried to understand it you know i read you know the the hillbilly elegy author um you know i was you know my my surprise at that happening caused me to ask questions and you know what i think became really clear is that trump won despite his manifest you know flaws because of a uh because of the failure of the elites i mean he he was you know he's a sort of outsider populist and the country was trying to send the a bipartisan i should say bipartisan elites and what was that message that to chamas point for the last 20 years uh the bipartisan consensus in washington has been to feed this chinese tiger into the wagon is now potentially on the cusp of supplanting us as the sort of richest economy in the world we have admired ourselves in these forever wars in the middle east i mean again these were things that both democrats and republicans got us into so my reaction you know was first and foremost to try and understand it and then once he was in the presidency you know i didn't see my job as being to be part of some crazy resistance i mean there needed to be a rational opposition to trump and there was never a rational opposition um people would basically object to anything he said just because he said it which ben made your side and i'm going to say your side the conservative side i wouldn't say your side the conservative side dug in because they were like well the left's being hysterical not not really i mean if you've been reading national review for the last few years and especially the last two months there's been plenty of criticism of trump well i was thinking more ted cruz lindsey graham all these people who said they would be never trumpers became right in line trump supporters and they're in their partisan they're they're politicians they're part of the the party for people who care about ideas what i would say is i didn't change my ideas one way or another because trump might happen to agree with one of them freeberry what's your take i don't like talking about trump well that is kind of i think where we where we're getting to this is that look what's the off ramp here friedberg um what's the end game you guys remember how the emperor came to power in star wars it was palpatine turned the republic against itself and then he emergency powers emergency powers um look i i what i to sax's point like i care um more deeply um i care very little about trump the person um and i care more deeply about the motivations of people that that want a person like that um in power and i care more deeply about the way the dialogue is happening um to resolve ideas and to resolve to decisions in this country right now um that is why i think that you know my vote last year in our last two podcasts ago which seems like 10 years ago was that um the biggest political failure of 2020 is the institute of american democracy and it's only gotten worse in the last two weeks and i think that the mechanism by which we have debate is lost it's from everyone from the republican to the democratic leadership uh it is attacking and finger-pointing and there is no um resolve for forgiveness um there is no everything is all about justice and winning and there is no resolve for objectivity and discovering the truth and doing the best thing for people not the best thing for party and doing the best thing for country and that's really easy to say and really really hard to do as i think everyone is realizing because as soon as you say let's bring the country together half the country raises their hand and says but i want justice and we can't come together until we have justice and so at what point do you break the cycle you know revenge never ends until someone steps down first and says you know what i give up i'm not gonna i'm gonna end up in the losing position but at that point maybe reconciliation can begin um and i'm more concerned about the the heat the temperature and everyone says turn it down but no one's actually turning it down um and so you know the legacy of trump i i i honestly care less about i care much more about going forward how do we resolve to decisions that aren't all about the democrats overrunning and i you know i was i was actually upset about georgia because i do think it's a problem if you have a one-party state and we don't have balance and we don't have a forum for conversation we don't have a forum uh you know for for coming to uh to kind of you know objective sentiment that that's best for the people um and so i you know i'm much more interested in flipping the conversation away from trump and trying to think about you know going forward what are the things what are the forums what are the mechanisms that we can have to to create equity in the country to create reconciliation to create balance in decision making and to turn down the temperature so that chancellor palpatine doesn't become the evil emperor and that we don't lose to china and you know all the things that are kind of emerging as being the unfortunate outcomes yeah we have three or four major wars we need to solve the pandemic china wealth inequality global warming chamoth uh do you think at this point in the podcast we should walk through what's happened since wednesday vis-a-vis you know trump being de-platformed or do you think we should uh talk a little bit about and skip to reconciliation i think we have a fork in the road here as the moderator i'll just ask chamoth maybe you could pick which direction we go well i think it's important to talk about what happened um and i'll frame this in the in the context of peter thiel he has a philosopher that he's talked a lot about renee gerard and um you know basically the the girardian philosophy is essentially that you know people come into conflict because they're extremely similar and you know they effectively want the same things and they're competing for the same sort of essentially scarce resources and the way that you resolve that is through some sort of cathartic sacrifice right meaning like there needs to be a grand crime a grand act and i think that we're at this point to friedberg's sort of earlier statement where you got a choice which is you either throw democracy under the bus or you actually throw djt under the bus and you don't have a choice and that and that and and sort of like it's not just even the united states it's almost like sort of democracy as an institution's hand was forced um this past week and so it is probably important to look at what's happened in the last few days through that lens which is you know it's it's almost like people first were shocked and then now we're in the midst of that reflexive reaction to what is a simple choice which is you can basically forgive the guy or you can re-affirm the institution which means to sacrifice the guy and i think that's the thing that's happening in real time and it's going to be i think over the next few weeks a super messy conversation because you're going to have a bunch of dumb decisions you're going to have a bunch of overreaching you know you're going to have a bunch of um dramatic sort of bellyaching on both sides you know there was this thing today where devin nunes was like screaming about how he had lost his 3 000 followers on par or three million followers on parlor but he was saying it on fox news which is distribution to millions of people and so can i ask a question about this reality now we're all facing do because the event that occurred on wednesday we are all still trying to process and new information is coming in as we you know as people get the videos and and as we let the dust settle the dust is settling i'm curious sax do how do you look at what happened on wednesday do you view it as a coup do you because some of the information that's come out about they were trying to get to pence and that they wanted to kidnap people and then you that dovetails with the kidnapping schemes that were going on uh and there were pipe bombs and a police officer was beaten to death with a pipe and his skull was crushed or something we don't have all the details yet fire yeah a first thing where she was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher some of the videos i've seen of police being dragged um you know that counteract the selfie police you know so many different things occurred on wednesday i think we all have to just think about what happened on wednesday how do we each feel about what happened on wednesday i'll go to you first sex and not because i'm framing you as anything just because you haven't yeah no i mean i already said i i already gave my thoughts in the last part that it was outrageous it was a travesty um it was a rally that turned into a riot that turned into you know some sort of insurrection i guess you could call it it was it was a rebellion against authority um i think coup is potentially a strong word uh because it wasn't nobody ever had their hands on the levers of power i mean the fate of the republic was never in question i know there were even you know people tweeting about how the uh the these marauders whatever you want to call them almost got their hands on the elector's ballots i mean yeah but we all know how they're voting even if they had gotten them uh we would just have gotten new ones i mean that was sort of a ceremonial thing but look it was it was an absolute outrage but i do think that there is um a thing happening now uh called threat inflation where you know using language like you know going from riot to uh insurrection to now coup it there is a a type of inflation happening that is then used to justify the reaction by the other side to it which is now you know the basically the ending of freedom of speech um which is really i think the big thing that's happened since the last pod is really the reason why we are having this emergency pod i think is because of what's happened there i think the emergency power was just to make sure that the pod wasn't ending because of you not getting in a big fight i think that was people's concern the beatles were breaking up yeah well that's true look uh just keeping the pot together you know with with four big egos on it you're right it's hard it is like the beatles you know one day it's gonna break up but but not but not yet not yet uh but but i wanna i wanna tie in this issue with you said what you said about the off-ramp okay which is you know what is the off-ramp from this look everybody understands i think regardless of what side political spectrum you're on that we are caught in a cycle of insane hyper-partisan warfare and tit-for-tat retaliation and that is the thing that we need to uh that is the ledge we need to walk back from okay but the problem that everybody has is that they can only see the other side doing it you know they can't see themselves doing it this is a two-way street both sides are doing it and that's how de-escalation works is both of us have to concede something yes and unless you can see when your side is doing it we're never gonna break the cycle now the thing that is happening right now now what trump did was absolutely outrageous and i think it it brought him to an ignominious end in american politics he will pay for it in the history books if not in a court of law okay but now what has happened is the next step in the tit-for-tat retaliation what the the stormy of the capital has now been used to implement a sweeping attack on free speech you know the the twitter employees who sent that letter to jack who've been demanding this for years have finally gotten their way and there is a widespread purge going on and not just of trump not just a permanent ban on trump and then a whole bunch of other people you know conservatives there are now liberal accounts there's an account that i wasn't even aware of called red scare they're basically you know pretty pretty much on the left no one can say exactly what it was that got them banned i guess they had steve bannon on their podcast they are suddenly banned from twitter nobody knows why oh i subscribe to the red scare podcast it's actually uh it's called the dirt bag left they're kind of like socialists um intel trying to be public intellectuals and it's it's oddly compelling i'll leave it at that um but they are now banned from from twitter they somehow got let's pause for a second on djt getting banned from twitter this is close to 100 million followers it's a billion dollars in value he just had the pga say they'll never you do a trump golf course again so the ram the real world ramifications for trump are he's his businesses are going to be devastated his platform is gone but and i was very pro trump staying on twitter i thought it was insane to think that the president of the united states would have their twitter handle removed that seemed crazy to me however crazy it's a crazy concept that being said trump knows how to dance right up to the line on the terms of service and i think here's the thing here's the thing i think there's imminent danger and i think what we don't know is what is concerning to me the fact that all of these services have turned him off i believe is indicative of wednesday was under hyped and that they really did intend to kidnap uh folks and blow off bombs and the proud boys uh founder was arrested days before with you know selling large magazine weapons i i think that they wanted to kill and kidnap people um and perhaps even like hang the vice president honestly crazy but honestly honestly jason that's what i think is going on with twitter i think they told i think they showed them the receipts jason stop i honestly like let's not [ __ ] fear monger like we're we're no better than anybody else without [ __ ] we don't know any of that crap and the reality is that if they were doing that they they are not stupid enough to do it on a platform where you basically follow anybody you want okay like i mean if that were the case then [ __ ] uh isis would be using twitter they don't use twitter they use telegram live streamed storming of the capital these people are not smart we've established that i i i anyways i look can we just let's just like let's not do the left version of q anon okay let's not have now the last version of the crazy conspiracy theories here's here's i think what is worth talking about we really reflexively all of a sudden um started to push back on free speech in a way that doesn't make any sense meaning i really was surprised like why are these silicon valley companies reacting now like if you had a reason to do it uh it had been building for years and years and years and in many ways it was kind of like this random moment and and i mean random because i just don't think that you know everything up until that point was not equally sort of violent disgusting under the same lens that that moment was and so had you had a reason to ban him you would have banned him already but then doing it in the way you did and then having this cascading effect on folks on the left and the right just getting basically pushed out the door to me was just completely reactive and not rooted in anything it didn't to me it didn't make any sense it it it's it's i don't know i was i was very frustrated and and a little taken aback well can i can i jump in you like jump in on that because yeah and tweeting a lot about this and then the last thing is like they let donald trump hit a one-outer like he was painted in a quarter to be a complete demagogue and instead now it has been wrapped in a free speech issue where now more people are talking about free speech than what a scumbag he is how did we let that happen big big big tech blundered into it again i mean we had a unanimity across the political spectrum that what happened at the capitol was wrong and donald trump was responsible for it and chamath exactly like you said the topic has now changed to censorship by big tech which is a real issue i mean look our freedom of speech is a shrine in the constitution in the first amendment of the bill of rights it's the first [ __ ] one okay it's the one the framers the constitution cared about the most because free speech is not just uh necessary and important for democracy it's the reason why we have our freedom is so that we can think and speak and worship as we please and that is legitimately under threat um you know what what big to end and by the way it's not just the permanent ban on trump you had simultaneous to that it was it wasn't just the banning of all these accounts you also had the d platforming of parlor which is sort of the twitter alternative by google and apple at the same time and in amazon and so you're talking about really de-platforming not just trump but millions of people and so the the amazing thing is that we've had this sweeping appropriation of power by you know half a dozen oligarchs who now have the right to determine what we see and read and people are cheering because they hate trump so much they can't see that the biggest power grab in history has happened has happened okay i want to say something on this because i'm not sure i really fully agree i i think that the point that saks is making um about freedom of speech applies to what you're legally allowed to say saks we're talking about private services that um you know a user chooses to use and the service provider chooses to make available to that user in a market um space and in that context it feels to me like everyone has a choice of where to go and what services to use and frankly if there aren't good services to use so and there's a lot of people that want to use one the free market will resolve to create one and we're already seeing that with signal being the number one app on the app store today that emerging new platforms will win in a marketplace where old service providers are no longer catering to the market demands for a service um i'll also say that can i respond to that one yeah and then i'll make one more point but go ahead yeah so i understand the first amendment only applies to to government okay it doesn't apply to private companies but but here's here's the thing is that when the framers of the constitution wrote that freedom of speech was something that took place in the in the town square right you would go to the courthouse steps and put down your soap box you could speak to people gather or crowd that is why the right to assemble is part of the first amendment is because assembling is tantamount to free speech where do people assemble today online on these monopoly network services like a facebook like twitter and again it's not and and to your point couldn't they go to some other site well they did they went to parlor guess what happened the operating systems just banned parlor and so you know i hear this there's an open there's an open web sax you know you don't need to go to apple's app store or google's google play you can put an app on android you just don't need to do it through google play and if you don't want to use apple's you know os you can use another phone and by the way and everyone can access the internet the internet is free and open and anyone can create a new network node on the internet and anyone can put any information they want on that node provided it's within the the the boundaries and constraints of the law and they can make it available to anyone else maybe for now but you can't use aws and google might not make you show up in search results you could turn your imac you could turn your imac at home into a into a web server and you could make it available on the internet if google and amazon and apple have censored you at the operating system level and removed you from google search results how in the world is anybody supposed to find you yeah people have been removed from search results let me just i think it's important so so i do think that there's still an open market and there's an open internet that people can access information freely and use the internet freely without being dependent on a handful of you're right highly scaled services and highly scaled platforms but there's certainly a marketplace and an opportunity for for innovation there i'll also say that the um the platforms that made these decisions to ban these accounts and kick people off um are not doing so uh uh under the demand of law and i think that that is a really and so i think to some extent uh you know i'm probably on your side in this context but um the standard is not a legal standard the standard is a judgment it isn't it is a it is a moral or some principled standard that is sitting above and beyond the legal standard that they're required to comply with this is the point and this is really scary right because at that point it becomes a subjective decision about who you kick off based on your interpretation of what they said and what they intended when they said it and that leads to the infinite slippery slope and it's you nailed it one [ __ ] thousand percent that is the exact issue it's not necessarily about free speech it is that when you have accumulated power and you effectively have a quasi-governmental organization that gets to operate in the free market when it wants to but then operate like a quasi-governmental monopoly when it wants to all of a sudden the power becomes in the shadows right there is a random vp someplace who actually controls this decision and the problem is today if a politician does something or a political body or a government body does something you have redress right you can sue that entity you know who it is there's a pathway through the courts through the law through the constitution the problem with this is all of a sudden it becomes murky and look you flip a coin 50 of the time guys you're going to get your way the other 50 of the time who the [ __ ] knows what will happen and you may be completely on the wrong side of it and this is i think the problem let me i just want to read you guys something there was a there was this manifesto or memo this woman who was a former facebook data scientist sophie zhang she wrote i'm just i'm just going to read this because i think it's uh it's really interesting here the 6600 word memo written by former facebook data scientist sophie zhang is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in azerbaijan and under honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion in countries including india ukraine spain brazil bolivia and ecuador she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes though she did not always conclude who was behind them she said in the three years i've spent at facebook i found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and cause international news on multiple occasions now let me just stop there replace your united states with all those countries and we care but there are people in all of those countries where you know those countries mean more to them than what's happening in the united states that's right and that represents the problem that's the social the the social suasion that is influencing the leaders of the tech companies are largely their democrat employees that live in the bay area and um that's a big part of why the decisions are being made in the way that they're being made and the priorities are being set is because as you pointed out i think it was saka put it on twitter and jason you've talked about this but talent is everything in silicon valley and if your employees tell you they're going to quit working for you or they're not going to do their jobs you're going to take that to heart and there's not a lot of influence or suasion that you know citizens of bolivia and you know uruguay can have with executives at facebook and twitter but people in the bay area have a [ __ ] clue about the politics in azerbaijan or bolivia does any one of us have a point of view and and i think that's that's that's the point is like it's like as soon as you add judgment to the equation um you know you're going to be wrong with some people and you're going to be right with some people versus using an absolute standard and if the issue is that the law if the law doesn't define the absolute standard then you need to go and change the law i think there's going to be a couple of free market solutions that come here because you even as difficult as this decision can be you layer it onto it somebody who is completely insincere and manipulating the system um on purpose and to your point david in the last podcast is sitting in the present united states seat you know it carries different weight and if you look at the words that trump used or rudy used you know we want to have uh combat trial by combat you know is that somebody's got to make a judgment call is that an incitement to violence or do you just look at what occurred after they said the words it's a very difficult thing to do there are free market solutions that will emerge bitcoin is something we've talked about it's an incredible run nobody's controlling that there is master don and plenty of other peer-to-peer software that will be deployed i predict and that will put up uh competition now for these services and it will be impossible to ban those peer-to-peer uh uh platforms and so we'll have some products emerging one universal truth this information wants to be free so if there is an opinion if there is a voice if there is information so there'll be a free market response to parlor being shut down i i sincerely believe that a lot of these decisions are being made not just at the behest of the employees i do agree they have tremendous power and i've said that obviously many times i think what's going on here is people believe that trump and we and you said it yourself david there's gonna be a white knuckle 10 days uh and i don't know if you still believe that there's a chance on the 17th or 19th or whatever that there could be more unrest i actually think a lot of people woke up and said i don't know if i want to give this guy the ability to say the next three or four crazy things that make people show up um at a person's home or you know the dog whistling and you know if if trump's comments on wednesday at that rally and rudy giuliani's and donald trump juniors the people who really incited this uh and they're gonna face some amount of civil and and criminal charges i believe um if they did that on twitter or facebook or youtube or periscope or whatever it happens to be and then this happened would those platforms have some liability especially after you know what's happened i think that they're just in part of this is covering their asses i think they should have just done a 30-day ban not a permanent ban so at least they would have the cover of saying listen this is too heated we're going to pause for 30 days and then we'll reassess it february 1st or february 15th right well so part of the problem here is that there is no policy right the policy is public outcry and if there's enough public outcry and there's enough pressure or letter writing from the employees or there's enough saber-rattling by the people who are going to run the senate judiciary committee next year or the language was so clear it's but there is so so three months ago i wrote a blog post um about the so the policy that i thought the social media companies should take i said for moderation and what i said is there actually is a moderation policy consistent with the first amendment that could be implemented because the first amendment does not protect many categories of basically dangerous speech uh there's like nine major categories it includes incitement of violence it includes you know trying to uh you know uh uh trying to provoke a crime it uh it includes fraud it includes defamation there are many categories of speech that aren't protected by the first amendment and social media companies could have said listen this is our policy is we're going to try and be broadly consistent with the first amendment but if somebody goes outside of those lines then we'll remove it so there was a way to to your point jason i think there was a way to remove some of trump's treat uh tweets for incitement consistent with the first amendment but that's not what they did you know that and maybe that would it said what they did is a lifetime ban combined with rounding up you know twice the usual number of suspects combined with a de-platforming not at the account level but at now at the application level by google apple and amazon and none of this has been explained there is no policy what it is is a no i mean there's a hold on what it is is an appropriation by oligarchs no no there is a policy the problem is as we've just discussed it's an interpretation that must occur and the interpretation of wednesday's comments on a tweet might be okay yeah they're borderline but not enough to shut us a countdown and and these folks know how to do it when when rudy giuliani says i want a trial by combat or you know if trump says you're not gonna have a country unless you fight and you have to fight and we're never going to accept these results is that inciting or not so well the policy that that that i want is something broadly consistent with the first amendment uh because but in those years and those phrases i just told you is that are those inciting or are those on the border line if you were making the decision right so you know putting my lawyer hat on for a second there's questions of law and questions of fact okay and we can debate what you're describing are questions of fact what i'm trying to say is well what what is the law what is the policy that we're talking about would say those were not direct incitement no there is no policy these social media companies don't have any policy they're making it up as they go along based on what would you do what would you do with trump's comments from wednesday if they were in tweets yeah i'll tell you so first of all i would have implemented a a moderation policy broadly consistent with the first amendment and then certain tweets that were inciting violence while there was rioting on the capitol i would have been okay taking those down i would have taken those down where i think and and i think even doing something until the inauguration if you think that trump poses a threat think i think that's okay i think that's okay so you would have been fine with the 30-day ban or something well like a 10-day ban or whatever but a lifetime ban that like on what basis on what constitutional grounds do you justify that and look i know it's a private company but my point is this idea our free speech rights got privatized okay the town square got digitized and centralized we used to have thousands we used to have town squares where people could convene all over this country we had a multiplicity of newspapers all that got replaced by a handful of tech monopolists our free speech rights got digitized if they take away our ability to speak we don't have free speech rights who do we appeal to when we get cancelled by a google or apple what court can we go to there is right you have to create a computing process by the way i think this is the best argument for having an internet court and um if you think about the standards that are being applied they're being applied haphazardly randomly um by by these companies in response to to near-term market forces you know what what is everyone saying they have to do um or what are their employees rallying securities law well there's there's a there's privacy laws that say what you you know that companies the digital companies cannot take certain types of data and you know why not have um laws there are hate speech laws out there as well and why not be more specific and then let an internet court adjudicate and make the decision about what to take down and what not to take down they are as they are very responsive to warrants when there is a criminal act underway and so why not let an internet court be responsive to take down requests or to where do you think chamoth good idea no it's it's mandatory and again it centralizes it centralizes the standards right so you don't have to have ad hoc random decisions and let if what sacs is saying is true it creates a standard that everyone has to abide by and that every consumer can trust them to abide by first first we need a bill of rights right first we need to say that we as citizens have rights that the court can defend can defend that is the problem we don't have any rights these companies are acting willy-nilly canceling people depriving them of their speech rights and don't tell me that you can still speak you know somewhere if you get if you get cancelled here's the thought exercise and i want everybody listening who's on the left to think about this exact issue your favorite social media company is trying to get a really really big deal closed and they you know are trying to curry favor with a bunch of brands and a bunch of governments and those governments and brands let's just say it's in india right huge market 1.2 billion people they say you know what we're um a little tepid on abortion and so the deal is you need to dial down any ad from planned parenthood you need to prevent planned parenthood groups from amplifying from being able to fundraise think about that exact issue now and ask yourself is it okay because there's a lot of people that are you know pro-choice that listen to this and the and you i'm sure right now your blood is [ __ ] boiling but there is no distinction between that decision and what happened over the last few days there's none it's arbitrary it's random it doesn't necessarily make any sense there is no way to readdress it then that's the biggest problem with all of this thing it's just there's a concept that uh newspapers have an obsman and the new york times had went up until i think 2017 and then they got rid of it because i think it was causing too much headaches but it's a person who sits who works for the organization but has complete independence and sits outside of it to comment on these kind of situations and i think that's what these companies no these jason they have these things but those are fig leaves and those are just meant to basically no they don't they don't have it it's a distraction politician because it's not it's not uh jason they have a [ __ ] council facebook has a council which is not transparent they don't say here's our decision making and talk to the public directly about it i think yet you can look to securities law there are some examples in securities law which i think are really interesting which is that um a cfo and a ceo has to certify quarterly results right meaning for people who have issues with a company and with the statement of their earnings which is the sort of atomic unit of value creation and financial reporting they have a mechanism to redress it because you're certifying that something is true right you're certifying a set of decisions have been made an audit has been done you know the software works you know the blah blah blah what is the version of that for all of this other stuff which is that you know where where are the people who are they actually that make the decisions you can't point to jack and zuck and say those guys are the decision makers i think in these examples what you have to point to is there was a petition of potentially several hundred or a few thousand engineers and depending on how important they were they may have gotten their way that's crazy guys well and trump served it up to him i mean if you if you know and then the worst part is no but the worst part is these people who are probably very left of center completely [ __ ] the left and then they basically let donald trump off the hook because now we're gonna completely be talking about free speech whereas the odds that donald trump would have gone to jail and been prosecuted was basically in my opinion a [ __ ] stone cold lock and then now after this happened there's a bunch of those people who are going to basically like him and ha and now they're not going to necessarily go along with it exactly 100 100 percent and and jason so good [ __ ] job guys you got the exact opposite of what you wanted exactly and here's the thing jason you're right trump's outrage gave the censors the excuse to impose this that's the way that censorship always works if you are censoring somebody popular it would never happen censorship always starts by censoring some outrage that everybody agrees should be censored and no one even notices that what's happening is you're handing power to a group of people that they can now use against you in the future censorship always starts as something you like and it ends as something you don't like when it finally gets turned against you what is the policy of the people who are now canceling willy-nilly it's cancel culture by the way it's not the first amendment well i think you got to not say willy-nilly after trump incited riots if there's enough public it might have been an overreaction but i think it's the proper reaction you agree it's the problem 60 000 followers is like i mean like it doesn't like what's going on it makes no sense jason i mean you used to be a member of the press no one believed in the first amendment more than you and you're listening no cause you to pull your punches on these on censorship no no i i'll be totally clear i think they should have an obudsman i think they should lean towards allowing speech i was anti-kicking trump off the platform when the entire left was asking for it to be and you can look at the receipts i've been saying for four years it's insane to take potus off i actually in my heart of hearts believe that there is imminent risk in keeping him able to communicate with this group of people and there should have been a 30-day timeout for him and i don't think it should have been indefinite it should have been a 30-day timeout and i think we should do what folks said i don't know who said it on the last part or i heard it somewhere else like actually if we actually were to audit some of these claims and create an independent council to audit the election that might be a way to heal things and i think giving trump said that who's that free brexit yeah so i think that's like a power move as well um but i i'm still pro freedom of speech i think there's imminent danger and i don't think it's willy-nilly this is where i think sometimes you get you you miss and you uh misrepresent yourself david um and we started this off with me misrepresenting you but when you say it's nilly it's not willy-nilly we just had this act of you know treason and this violence uh at the capitol it is not just willy-nilly jason jason you have an over-reaction i agree but it's not willy-nilly jason you have to admit though the entire world had donald trump in a corner debt to rights and he hated energy and he hit him it's a bad strategy to de-platform to this level i agree and then to include the reason they're going after parlor by the way is that this guy lynn wood threatened he said that they should take vice president pence out and shoot him and i think that actually but they literally didn't take it down without that that was incitement to violence and un under the first amendment you can clearly prohibit that i would have and parlor didn't take it down they dragged their feet and he said it's a metaphor to go take pence out and shoot him and this is donald trump's lawyer or one of his lawyers previous lawyers that in my view that doesn't just that doesn't justify what's happened what i mean by willy nilly is why has red scare been taken down so left wing i don't know why why is dan bongino been taken down he's like a fox commentator i've heard him i mean he's sort of you know i don't know he's kind of a pretty middle-of-the-road fox type guy i don't really know what he did we have no transparency into why people are being taken down i can't go evaluate for myself what they said to see if it you know if it warranted censorship and then cynic might say that this overreaction was playing into the hands of the chase jason what happened controlled senate congress jason what happens if it's like a a big pharma company who wants to do a big ad buy on facebook says hey guys you got to really dial down uh anti-vaxx content now i'm not an anti-vaxxer but do i at some level believe in their right to talk about being an anti-vaxxer absolutely i think it's insane but should they have a right to do it absolutely absolutely i'm a fan of the labeling i thought the labeling was the right direction to go in where if but but saks you did talk about how for the last 60 days trump fermented this insane conspiracy theory so i guess the question is do you think that insane conspiracy theory or the question we have to ask all of ourselves i'm not pinning it on you and you know i'm i'm sensitive to you being pinned as a person for all of trump's bad behavior but we you did say and you just say this is a two-month process of indoctrinating people into thinking this was all stolen and then they put labels on it and then the capital gets stormed so i think these companies are being put in a very uncomfortable position which is at what point do you stop this maniac uh if he's lying constantly we we were talking about these challenges on the pod for the last couple of months and we were laughing i mean we were laughing at how ridiculous they were and how ridiculous the the things that you know rudy was doing and um you know it was crazy so look not to his supporters well but here here's the thing one of which is dead or four of which are dead i understand and here's the thing democracy takes work i mean we have to you know we have to spend the time to actually dispel these views and you know it would be nice to be able to wave a magic wand and just censor the things that we don't like but here's the thing none of us has a monopoly on the truth and you know we knew what the truth was in this particular instance but there are other cases where we don't and and the question is really who has the power to decide so you know just i'll tell you just a real quick story you know when i went to law school all those years ago the very first class that you know that that i had in law school was this very arcane class called civil procedure which is about what court you take a case to okay and you know i was kind of wondering why is this like the first thing we learn in law school and i'll tell you the reason why is because the first question in the law is who decides is jurisdiction who has the power to decide an issue and here's the thing i would love for lynnwood to be canceled and to not be able to spout these insane theories but who are we going to give the power to to make those decisions and what we've done this week by we had this feel-good moment i you know at least in in the tech community of being able to say donald trump banned for life and all these other people we hate but we have now handed this enormous power to this big tech cartel and it's not going to end here this is not the end it's the beginning look i i i don't think that the um the leadership at big tech want to be in this position um you know i i think it's easy to blame the individuals zak uh jack susan um sundar whomever um you know i i worked at google when it was a small when it was a private company um you know chemoth knows uh work with zuck i think we've all had experience with these individuals and i think one thing having spent time with all of them i can tell you is that um i believe that all of them want information to be freely available and accessible um and that's a really core principle and the challenge that they're facing is that there is um you know as we talked about this social pressure uh to move away from that core principle because there is always an argument to be made and there is no universal or unifying kind of court of law that says this is the way things should um should be done by law and as a result the the pressure is what changes the behavior and that pressure will change the tides will will shift and um and it's uh it's a it's a very kind of um ugly circumstance but you know i think characterizing the individuals is being in charge of this sex or you know trying to um to handcuff to to make them feel like they should be handcuffed in some way um is uh you know is is a bit of a mischaracterization and we saw that even um in the congressional hearings last july uh just what an absolute joke it was to see congress try and question these folks because the answers they have i think were reasonable and rational as we all know as technologists like congress doesn't understand this stuff the biggest observation to me is that the law hasn't kept up with the internet and um you know if you look at how the the dmca was written the digital millennium copyright act shortly after it was written youtube uh with all this user generated content saw a lot of copyright content show up and they would get a takedown notice which is the legal process by which you remove copyright content and then as soon as they took it down someone else would post the same content and then someone else will post the same content and then suddenly you know viacom sued google because they were like look our copyrighted content is being continuously displayed on your site on your platform and that's because the mechanism defined in the dmca did not keep up with the law the biggest issue i think is is a legal one which is you know how do we create laws and how do we create a uh private industry meets government court uh body uh governing principles that you know allows these arbitrations to operate just one sentence i mean apply first amendment obligations to these um monopolists that's what my blog post was about i'll i'll tell you where this could go in a bad direction is if you look at if you think about what social media has become i would put it on the top of the list that includes other critical national resources that any country has so for example if you look at in bolivia you know as it turns out bolivia has incredible access to lithium right and lithium is like an engine we all knew that we want to medicate trump with lithium is that what you're saying no lithium the the the input into into lithium-ion batteries um but it also turns out that at every step along the way bolivia's basically nationalized every single private investment of a lithium mine um in countries all around the world there's you know numerous examples of this privatization turning into nationalization when something becomes important enough and norway part of i think what we're struggling with here is you know there's going to be this crazy push pull in in social media what do you think happens if you know uh india actually says hey you know what you're going to have to nationalize the rails of whatsapp or the rails of facebook if you want to be in my country why is that so inconceivable i think you're right that that's that that is a second order that that is a second order consequence of censorship that nobody even thinks about you have the leaders of many countries across the world using twitter as a as a channel do you think they are now going to want to rely on that given that twitter can censor them at any time they're going to hand that lever of national power to jack dorsey no way they're going to look at this i mean not even jack dorsey david somebody in like the bowels of the user you know user user access group some some rando vp someplace is going to stop the president or the prime minister of a country and communicating to their people exactly exactly and this is exactly the kind of second order consequence that the people who who i think engage in this feel-good moment of censoring trump didn't even think through didn't even think through this is exactly why the best solution would have been a temporary pause on these accounts to let the dust settle but any of these completely fundamental decisions that you can't go back from what is the technical difference between saying it's banned forever and it's banned for ten days today technically it's not a decision yeah but exactly what david said you feed into this emotion just like the people that stormed the capital fed into their emotion and then you wake up the next day with this hangover and you realize to yourself what the [ __ ] did i just do and i think that's that's what we're gonna have to sort out now is you cannot unscramble this [ __ ] egg because irrespective of whatever happens in the united states there are two to three billion monthly active users daily active users on these products they all report to different people and none of those people that they report to are jack dorsey and mark zuckerberg they are the presidents and prime ministers duly elected individuals of these countries and so you're not going to allow these two private citizens to disrupt power we we have so much information we don't know about what occurred this past week i think it's it's all going to get investigated it's going to be like a 911 commission all over again or ukraine etc um and and i think that's why applause would be really good to find out exactly you know trump's been telling people to come to this rally it's going to be a hell of a show and it's going to be incredible and you've got to be there on the 6th it's going to be out of control you know how how how much did they know right like that's what i really wanted how much did they know about what was going to go down and why are these people carrying zip ties and pipe bombs you know like this could have been a lot worse i think that's why people are responding uh this way and i saw something today that i thought was i'll let you pick it up from me freeburg but i saw something today that i thought was uh particularly interesting and in dovetails with reconciliation which is what the country's got to do in 2021 and 22 we gotta reconcile this [ __ ] because it's bigger fish to fry like you know china and the pandemic and global warming uh one of these people at the airport who was coming home from the rally is now on the do do not fly list they're taking this group of domestic terrorists uh is how they're putting these american citizens who got whipped up into a frenzy by trump and giuliani they're calling them domestic terrorists now uh some of them maybe maybe some of them are just you know got caught up in the wrong mob they're on the do not fly list this guy couldn't get home and he's freaking out and then i don't know if you saw lindsey graham with 20 of uh the people who were going home from the rallies chanting at him that this is never going to end and and that seemed like a very volatile situation and so the escalation continues go ahead freeberg i'll tell you like it feels to me like this past week has been um nothing but fuel for for both sides because there isn't a black and white um circumstance here and there isn't a black and white um objective truth about uh you know what took place and what motivations were and and what the connections were when i was 16 years old i went to a rave in downtown l.a and for new year's eve you did and right before how old were you 16. and um and the rave got shut down half an hour before midnight because there was some illegal drug being widely circulated for free so you guys can watch videos of this on youtube it's called circa 1996. and we and everyone the cops came in and they shut down the rave it was outdoors in downtown l.a and we rioted and so everyone left the rave and like i i i participated i think i'm past the uh the period where they can prosecute oh my god seven thousand yeah i participated in the no don't say that don't say that on the show you you were you witnessed i witnessed um participated in the sense that i was there and um and i saw all this all this activity but when you're standing next to these people there was absolutely no thought around what to do and when and what the next step was and i think if you watch the videos yeah if you watch the videos of the capitol there's a lot of videos on youtube that you can watch now and you can watch the interviews of people coming out of the capitol building it's like what were you doing in there we were fighting for you know it's a revolution right i mean we're taking back the country and then some people were saying well we're trying to stop the certification of joe biden and other people were saying we're taking over the capital there was no uniform sense of what the objective of the mission was and there was many interpretations if you look at all the parlor messages that have been copied and published now online there were many interpretations about trump's words and rudy giuliani's yeah parlor and so everyone has a different point of view and i think that's the biggest challenge we're going to have is we're all going to try and you know get to the truth and everyone's going to cast this as a different point they're going to take what happened they're going to take some set of events that happened and they're going to highlight that this is what the connections were and this is the reason why it happened and this just creates fuel it doesn't create um you know there is not going to be some objective outcome here we're all going to feel better no one's going to feel better at the end of the day um and and we've basically just thrown a whole bunch of gas on a fire that was already what do you think um that was my point was just like it's all it's all great no my behavior yeah i mean yeah it's crazy um burn or whatever photos you took um uh sax what do you think of this vp you know pence and trump and their relationship vis-a-vis pardons in this end game here because it does seem like pence was upset uh obviously at what occurred and that trump didn't even call to check on him and what was going on and then a number of these people because there are q anon people there there are you know i'm sure antifa people there but it was mainly trump folks um they wanted to capture the vp that was for some of them the explicit purpose of this was to get the vice president and to hold him accountable and you know so there are some speculation to do bodily harm to him what are your thoughts on that i think one of the most insane aspects of what trump did was the way that he denounced uh pence who's been the model of a loyal vp i mean certainly the other side has uh criticized him for that uh for being sort of almost a toady uh no one could have been more loyal than pence to trump the last four years and penn simply told him look i don't have the power to cancel this vote of the electors you know and for that fact you know just for speaking truth about that trump denounced him in front of this this mob and and made him a target and that is one of the more insane aspects of what trump did and uh you know i uh truck no sympathy for that um again this was an act of of demagoguery and uh this is an intimate esn for for trump's presidency uh but even in terms of like you know i want to go back to what freeberg just said about how he got kind of caught up in this in in that mob i think that that was true i think for 90 something percent of the people who are there is they went to this trump rally and protest and it turned into a riot and they got caught up in it um and then in addition to that there were i think hidden in that crowd some serious agitators who were there to carry out violence in mayhem and had crazy plans you know hanging my pens shooting pelosi i mean there really were you know a small number of those people i don't know what the percentage is probably one or two percent what does he think it's about the majority sacks what are you doing what do you think will happen if they actually did shoot pelosi or they did hang pens it is a possibility but no but see that's threat inflation what you're doing right there jason is exactly what you're what no i think it actually could have happened what if one of the people who died was the senator yes it could have happened but here's the problem people are acting as if everything that could have happened but didn't actually happened or may still happen at a later date that that is what i call threat inflation and it's the biggest tool the sensors have for seizing power because it it convinces you yourself said these people had those plans so we we do have to think about it i mean the first time we were trying to blow up the world trade center it didn't come down david but the second time it did come down i i understand but by constantly beating the drum we needed to inflate that threat didn't we but but by constantly beating the drama of these threats no no wait a minute stop no we we did not need to do anything there was a national security apparatus who needed to do it their job isn't to inflate threats their job is to investigate a politically get to the bottom of [ __ ] and fix it they [ __ ] failed on 9 11. okay yes we know that conclusively so talking about it and amping people up jason doesn't do anything a better a better example of threat inflation would be the iraq war remember that we got to go absolutely that was threat inflation threat that whipping people up you know and making them worse i'm just talking to three of my besties and asking you what you think about what would have happened if a senator died i think it's a valid it didn't close to happening but it came close this this is the thing that is is convincing people helping convince people to give up liberties that they should want to hold on to i'm just asking you i'm not i'm not saying everybody and i'm not saying we need to be on edge that this is going to happen every day of our lives we can't live in fear like that but that's almost what happened there are people who went there with that intent actually we don't we don't we don't we don't know any of this now we're now we're no better than anybody else you had you had a maniac who was a vessel he basically spilled over there was a small fraction of the people that probably came to that thing with ill intent and then there was a large number of people that got pulled into the undertow all of their lives will be ruined because of one individual okay and at the end of the day there was in my opinion one singular person to blame donald trump and then a handful of people who were his accomplices uh josh hawley ted cruz rudy giuliani we know who all of these characters are in this terrible play and then there were all these people that were caught in the undertow and i would rather just deal with it that way because it actually allows us to have some sympathy i i felt sympathy yeah so all i'm saying is let's just get back to the core issue at hand something bad happened and then something really really stupid that is actually even worse also happened and by that you mean the banning of trump on all platforms for all time no that that there is a there it there was uh an arbitrariness to the decision making around free speech and i'm telling you guys i know that you may think banning him from twitter is so much lower than this attack on the capital and i'm telling you it's not because the slippery slope of event event number one is so obvious the prosecution of that is so obvious the law is so completely clear but we've shifted now into this realm where things are arbitrary where things are gray and it's a worldwide problem there are 180 some odd countries in the world right that these sites operate in with 180 different leaders multiplied by you know two or three political parties each like there are now hundreds and hundreds of people who are trying to figure out some chess games it's so i just think that we've made i just think we've made the problem so much worse yeah i i agree and and um you know earlier today uh our heated conversation extended to one of our friends in our chat group who was telling us that you know there's a group of sas companies that are talking about the platforming parlor as well from just using ordinary software as a service and other sites like it and you know and and again it's a little bit like it's just like the censorship thing it's like a red scare it's like a red scare it's like a really scary podcast the actual red scare that are yeah like joe mccarthy exactly we're literally going to go after anybody who writes a screenplay who works for a communist socialist meeting but let me ask you guys how much do you guys so i think that there's severely um there there's a severe amount of pressure on the leaders of these companies to do well by their employees and that employees are all bay area based and bay area base is a very heavy uh democrat um area 90 plus and so so so this is the argument a lot of um uh you know conservatives make which is that tech companies in general uh as a result act in the best interests of of of um uh you know of the um the liberal uh movements sac and chamoth i mean and jason do you guys think that it is an employee-driven um kind of uh set of actions that we're seeing and that the motivation is is in part to kind of appease the employees of these companies in fact i think that more than 70 or 80 of the impetus for these last-ditch efforts was internally driven and this is where i think it's a complete crisis of leadership because if you had just gotten up in front of your employees and said guys if we do this we will shift focus away from what actually is the problem so i think the right solution is temporary ban while we evaluate while we strengthen policy like some [ __ ] [ __ ] statement and allow the legal court system to do their job instead they acted like vigilantes in a way that basically appeased nobody and all of a sudden shifted the focus away from the person that all these hundreds of employees wanted to basically have you know been found guilty and pointed to one individual they all wanted one individual to be held culpable and now he's not going to 100 and and and the proof of that is the fact that these employees have been calling for this policy for years and now they finally got the excuse to do it and so i agree i mean jack is leading twitter from behind the mob runs twitter now and they have for some time and to freebrook's point it's like padme um padme i guess the great the great american star wars settings this is how democracy diced with thunderous applause yes that's exactly right everybody's clapping over this censorship i mean the prequels are underrated i have to say i mean if you watch revenge of the sith it's definitely i don't know the last three were the best but um the last three were the worst but anyway but hold on a second i just want to get saxophone i'm just going to add so so such math is 100 right there's one thing i would add to that though which is if uh just a few months ago we had this senate hearing on section 230 yes and both jack and zuck were berated by the senators most notably senator blumenthal who was basically arguing for censorship he was telling him you got to crack down and so i also think there's not this pressure from below there's pressure from above these guys know who's coming into power in january and i think especially zuck who has to be terrified of being broken up right now he yes exactly so he is thinking about how do i modify and appease these politicians who now have the power and can break me up and i gotta use for him it's too little too late they're trying to break you up anyway you're gonna get paid up anyway and by the way i now agree with it i gotta say you know on previous pods i've defended these tech companies but i've come around they are too powerful and they are using their powerful their power in too indiscriminate away without power and can i say it more bluntly the better but can i say that let me just let me just point something out you didn't say that before it affected the conservative movement's ability to have a voice right hey don't calacanas sacks yeah no well i mean no but i want to point out like i mean like and and a lot of people are having this reaction which is once it affects and i just want to point this out once it affects you personally that's when you take issue with the way that the system is operating right now you know a lot of people make make fun of this but a few months ago or weeks ago there's a porn website called pornhub and visa mastercard and discover stopped processing payments for them because the new york times put out an opinion article about hold on david david how do you spell that p-o-o-r the electronic frontier foundation was the only organization that really made a stink about this this behavior from these monopoly payment processing networks stepping in and blocking their ability to run as a business not on any legal grounds and not on any grounds based on some court making a decision and it was an opinion piece and suddenly everyone's waking up because now trump is being silenced and this is and this is why no no no no no no unregulated exactly like bitcoin you're going to yeah jason let me respond to that so um so first of all porn has always been in a separate category the supreme court has said that you can regulate it according to community standards and so i support the ability of facebook or twitter or whatever to regulate it according to their standards that's perfectly consistent with the first amendment i personally am not that upset about trump per se being censored i'm upset about this new vast policy of censorship including de-platforming not just trump but parlor i mean you're talking about millions of people and the fact that they're conservative is not the reason if this was happening to a liberal app i promise you i'd be acting the exact same way for me free speech is the most cherished value that we have it's the first amendment of the constitution it's the first right in the bill of rights that's the thing that has me upset this is not a partisan thing uh and so to your point freeburg you asked us what do we think is going on here uh at these companies i think there's three things and we just heard two of them and and saks stole my thunder because i was gonna say i think that zuck who i believe i'm very cynical about i think he is thinking how do i p's the left now after having appeased trump for all these years now trump's out of office now how do i appease the left okay i have to ban him for life and remember trump was uh zuck was the first to give the lifetime ban not jack so zuck who's previously been in trump's corner is now not um the third factor so the first factor is obviously the employees second factor is uh getting broken up and appeasing all these senators i think the third one is uh i think that there could be information that we are not privy to that they are privy to that me that is leading them to overreact here no i'm going to disagree yeah i'm going to disagree too yeah it would it would not have come out in that way it would have said we are you know uh pausing the account we're suspending the account it wouldn't have been this next step of saying your d platform forever i think in jack's it would have been necessary if it was a real security issue no it was not the other thing i'll say can i just say one thing which is that i've been in the bowels of these companies i helped build one um my team was probably the most instrumental in getting one of these things to real mega scale i think that these companies are complicated enough that everybody needs to realize that it is beyond the capability of any one person to manage in a reasonable way and these businesses are they're too broad-based they exist in too many countries with too many different standards that ultimately all comes back to one unified code base if facebook was actually 182 different products on a country by country basis and twitter was the same there was actually be a path here right and each one had a country level ceo that actually had power maybe this could be different but the problem is that if all roads go back to menlo park in san francisco and you're putting the power in the hands of 15 or 20 000 people over a multi-million line code base it's an impossible task for even the smartest of the smart people these companies need to get broken up uh i think we're all going to agree on that i do think you guys are missing a piece of them for another point you guys are missing a piece of information i'm just going to read to you what uh from the washington post twitter specifically raised the possibility that trump's recent tweets could mobilize his supporters to commit acts of violence around president-elect joe biden's inauguration and analysis that experts saw as a major expansion in the company's approach um and so they specifically cited that they said they were and the tweet that they were concerned about was this one uh that got taken down very quickly american patriots will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way shape or form and then he announced right after that that he's not going to the inauguration so what twitter believes is that that was some sort of a dog whistle to go do violence at the inauguration and that's what they said in their lifetime ban is they felt trump was uh doing that so just to point out you you could interpret it that way and you could also interpret it the other way and that exactly which is the problem of trump yeah he knows the problem of it's the problem of using judgment right and not yet can i ask you a question would you be supportive of um platform level open architecture so for example that you know the messaging infrastructure that supports facebook and twitter um have to be unified in a way um so that there is that was originally called like there was rss i mean there's a lot of open communication protocols that exist out there i mean signal has made an attempt at doing this as well with with their approach and open sourcing everything um i'm just thinking i'm just asking what is the technical solution if not to break them up to make them more uh predictable portability of your profile i think you could pass a law i mean like we do have a government we can pass a law so you can pass a law that says if you're going to operate a communication platform here are the rules you have to abide by and here's how you have to and now you're a regulated entity and you could regulate them and you could even create a regulatory body to oversee them and make sure that standards of free speech are applied universally and and in an absolute way um you know and you can give them a chance to correct right here given that it may be so technically difficult to break them up that may be one of the points of one of the paths of resolution and we're gonna find out the next two to three years because i don't think that anyone on the left or the right likes big tech as they call it uh and the way it's operating today but i think technically having been in these organizations it is impossible to break them up and i will say something controversial i also think consumers benefit from the scale that they operate at and i don't think that they should be broken up and i think that there's economic value to having google be the scale of ted and amazon being in the scale it's at facebook being skilled at and it doesn't harm consumers i think it helps in aggregate in terms of pricing and service availability um but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated in a way that everyone can kind of feel like there's some absolute universal standard applied um but i i know i'm in the minority on that yeah i would say um my my view about antitrust used to be that it was all about consumer harm and i've actually come around to more of the the liberal point of view on this which is it can't just be about consumer harm it's also got to be about power and not just market power but democratic power and the fact of the matter is these companies have just gotten too large and too powerful and they have too much influence on our democracy and it's incompatible with you know a country democracy so what do you think what if they got regulated like a utility sacks so like we have regulatory bodies for utilities for both telecommunications and for power and energy what if we had a regulatory body for internet services well yeah i mean first and foremost i want a an online bill of rights you know i want to know what my rights are online that these techno this cartel of tech monopolies cannot take away from me because something is a right if it only if it if it can't be taken away and right now it can all be taken away you know your online identity your right to participate in the public conversation can be taken away with no explanation by these companies we have no rights and like what would you do if your online presence is taken away like that is a huge part of the modern world what is going on in trump's mind do you think right now having lost his ability to communicate with a billion people you know like he had this ability to control the conversation and now he's i mean i don't even know if people will put him on air uh that's why i think something is brewing um with him you know he is not gonna sit tight and and wind out the last 10 days here um you know whether it's some ad hoc press conference he calls tomorrow and just rants on tv or he tries to declare some you know pass some law without congress's approval or does something i mean this guy has never proven himself to be able to sit quietly and to not be in the spotlight or to be told that he's wrong and all three of those things are being imposed upon him right now so he is squirming like uh like a cat being put in the bath also it seems like they're doing some last-ditch stuff pompeo lifted restrictions for u.s taiwan contracts i don't know if you saw that that was a little bit of an interesting thing that was slid in the last couple of days a little little jab to the chinese on the way out where do you think sax last 10 days the zip tie guy apparently got arrested yeah i want to know what's going on with him i mean these guys having zip ties with them is just no but this is incredible that how systematically they've been able to basically get you know a lot of these folks i mean jason i will tell you i will tell you the one thing we got going for us is the deep state i mean thank god for you know folks who are loyal to the constitution and to the rule of law in this country and the fbi is incredible and are um you know our the uh the the the the civil servants who have been career civil servants in government as much as we make fun of the bureaucracy and the [ __ ] that goes on it's great to be an american and to know that there's um you know that there's these uh these folks out there looking out for for this is like being in the final stages of a stress test it's like the final well by the way as i predicted on the last part i said there would be major major arrests you know everyone was saying that that that these protesters being treated with kid gloves compared to blm and i was like just wait there's going to be a rest and sure enough they're rounding up these people quick a lot of charges i think the most genius thing was i don't know who who said it was a honey pot but the the parlor post yeah that said you know it was incredible sex but like um sax pointed this out so i'll give him full credit for this but there was a parlor post where it was like the title of the person was like you know office of the uh the president's pardon attorney and you know send me your name and phone number and email if you want to be pardoned for what happened in the capitol and name the crime you committed so yes and then i just set up the website riots amnesty.org please go to capitol rise amnesty.org and tell us what you did and uh if you outline each of the crimes you outlined that you did you will get amnesty for those crimes you have to outline in detail what you did and give us any photographic and video proof you have of your crimes the reason i suspected that was a honeypot is because um jimmy carter pardoned uh you know after the vietnam war he pardoned everyone who had dodged the draft as part of the vietnam war he did that as a blanket pardon without naming any names so it seemed very suspect to me that trump would need individual names and and crimes to build a part in them that was ceremonial right that was like a healing a wound move by jimmy carter it wasn't no one was going after that because we weren't prosecuting those sure sure sure and so but it was never litigated so it became a precedent i think i i do think that trump probably i mean this would be a very interesting court case but i do think he could issue a blanket pardon everyone on the mall that day it's possible i'm not saying you should i think it's a terrible thing and that would be torture escalation as opposed to de-escalation sex being our our lawyer and our historian you know what is the the origin of the presidential pardon how is that even legal and how did we end up in a place in this country where any law could be superseded by the president telling you it's okay for you to break this law and pardon you after the fact or even before the fact it's it's it's uh it exists because it's in the constitution the framers of the constitution put it in there i i don't know what their thinking was i've never really studied that it is a almost a residue of or a vestigial monarchical power that somehow was included in the comments incredible right i mean like the intention of it my understanding was to um correct injustices that occurred so that it would be a backstop against somebody who was by the judgment of the one guy it relies on you know people buying into america right and i think that's the trump stress test and i can't wait till we don't talk about this guy anymore i'd love to see an amendment getting rid of the pardon powers i i don't know i never feel good about it well they are thinking the court should be where you should adjudicate the you know appeals and such but all right well listen we've beaten this today can i can i end on something um let's end on something uplifting i took um uh a bunch of spax public uh at the end of last year and on friday um one of the vehicles that i'm the ceo of merged with sofi um and i want to tell you something about the ceo of sophie anthony noto um and i think he'll be okay because he's shared this story a couple times but uh his parents got divorced when he was three years old he uh grew up on welfare food stamps um sort of free lunch kids until middle school um went to the um the west point um was it a all-star stock analyst was the cfo of the nfl was a cfo of twitter then the ceo of twitter um and uh you guys know my story but you know uh ended up in the united states after growing up in canada after escaping a civil war i grew up on welfare and i said to anthony uh what are the odds that two kids who grew up that way could have ended up in a moment where we were part of doing something really amazing that you know for each of us was a meaningful accomplishment and he said only in america and uh only in america this is let's keep that single best [ __ ] country in the goddamn world 100 um and it's worth fighting for and it's worth having these debates and i think it's worth doing the pod and so i'd like to see american constitution keep the pod going stop jason the american constitution is the most incredible [ __ ] document because that is the foundation all of these things are built it's just the most amazing thing so i am really glad that we're all having this conversation and i would just say guys keep the faith let's put the light back on donald trump uh i would have as much sympathy as possible for as many of those folks in the capital maybe not the folks that were intending to do harm maybe not zip tie guy but there's a lot of other people that are that just got caught in the undertow i would try to have sympathy for them um and i would really don't lose focus now people donald trump josh hawley ted cruz stay [ __ ] vigilant i would also love you guys think about doing something for someone else this week yeah yeah that's all let's all do something nice exactly yeah i love you guys all right love you besties love you saks love you sex love you sexy poo come on sexy say it god damn it this is the time you're good say it and they've just gone crazy with it besties we need to get these








hey everybody it's me jason calacanis welcome welcome hey everybody it's me jason thank god trump's out i hate trump and i love myself and they've just gone crazy everybody happy days over here again champagne cottage bottles popping both again happy days are here again yay sax is so happy trump's out of office he gave an amazing speech about how great biden's inauguration was welcome to the all-in podcast oh my gosh with me today in our post inauguration after glow is the dictator the queen of quinoa david friedenberg and riding the blue wave diving in no more red pills the blue wave is david rain man sax is with us david how did it feel to watch biden's inauguration speech which you said hit all the notes and i see you wearing blue today let me have a sip of my woof click oh and tell us you've got the blue jacket the blue shirt and the blue headset on you've ridden the blue wave tell us how you feel with biden in office i'm going to drink my viv jason i'm just happy to see that uh that you're happy ah and uh it's it's does this mean does this mean that i that uh your trump derangement is over you're uh you've gone uh cold turkey you're on the wagon and uh yeah i'm just happy i'm just happy to have my friend back and uh not have you part of this uh this trump derangement zombie horde that uh that you've been in for the last few years i uh i'll tell you two quick stories um the first one turned out not to be true but there was a new york times alert that came out this weekend saying that um they were gonna lift the travel plan and um for uh for a moment i was like i i was a i was a little in shock and you know my my i'm canadian my family's in canada i haven't seen them in a year my mom is 80 years old i haven't seen her in a year um and then the second was on the day the inauguration biden signed an eo um i guess that that you know starts to get basically um create a path to citizenship and there are um you know two women in my life who i i think are just lovely lovely people who i've never been able to hire and uh and now this gives us a path to hire them and compensate them and the way that we wanted to and so in in these moments i started crying and uh i i've probably had three or four moments and i realized like holy [ __ ] i have had so much pent-up emotion waiting for honestly just like a normal average day um and like simple humane good things and i'm not i'm not trying to sort of jump on the biden bandwagon i think that he's got a lot of work to do but but i i do think that just at a level simple basic level of humanity it was a different it was a big sea change how did you take it freeburg i'm curious did you cry as well i observed the inauguration it was interesting i didn't upgrade your firmware sorry we were supposed to push the two david firmwares for the ability to cry but did you feel any emotion of the three emotions we've given you in your programming did any of them move at all i don't remember i mean i don't remember the origin of my non-emotional um uh characterization uh jason but um yeah i think it's just based on every interaction we've ever had with you but continue right i guess that makes sense so um i feel like the biden um the biden moment uh on on inauguration day um it really did feel like a sigh of relief because so much of trump love him or hate him has been driven by a degree of tension right i mean he came in uh to office on the premise that he was going to drain the swamp i mean that's kind of a very kind of active um you know position he's going to go in he's going to change things and and i think you know the biden tone is like let's take it down a notch let's all take a deep breath and i feel like that that generated a collective side relief i'll also say that i watch that with the eyes of someone who voted for trump um i didn't vote for trump uh but um i don't think i voted this year uh i can't remember it was in the middle of pandemic but um i basically feel like there's a lot of folks it's easy to say let's unite the country um when you're on the winning side and when you're not and you're sitting there and your guy got kicked out of office and your guy claimed that he got kicked out because of fraudulent activity and you're one of the 46 percent of americans that are already disapproving of biden's performance in his first two days of office uh you don't look at that as a moment of relief you don't look at that as a moment of um of respite and i feel like there's a little bit of a missed point of view in terms of how we're all covering it and talking about it it certainly feels good to take the tension down and take take a deep breath and have leadership not be putting the tension out there but there's a lot of anger and disappointment still festering out there and i think we need to be very cognizant of why and what we can do and it would have been nice to see biden not just say let's unite but actually step over the line and declare some of the policies and points of view of the other side as being valid and and engaging more directly on those points versus saying we'll all work together in the future and we're already seeing and we're already seeing this rift with mcconnell and others in terms of how to deal with the filibuster in a unified senate um and i i just don't think that we're there so um yeah yeah sax what are you what are your thoughts and then we'll go to youtube yeah i mean look i'm not gonna swoon over an octogenarian reading cliches off a teleprompter i'm sorry i just can't do it now that that being said uh you know the the the inauguration speech struck all the right notes of you know reconciliation lowering the temperature coming together these are the things you're supposed to say at an inauguration these are the presidential layups if you will it's kind of a weird thing that trump could never quite get these layups in uh biden did what he was supposed to do and um and i agree that there is a sense of relief in the temperature being lowered and uh and this and the the situation washington feeling a bit depressurized and so i think he deserves credit for that that's all for the good i think the problem biden's going to have is not just sort of um the trump right opposing him but the uncivil warriors in his own party you know uncivil warriors i think was the most memorable line in his speech there are people i think you know on the left who aren't really on board with the reconciliation agenda i mean shortly after the election you had aoc proposing a truth and reconciliation commission right uh to go after everyone from the the trump era i don't think that's exactly the kind of reconciliation binds talking about you have i think the repressive hand of big tech playing into this revenge agenda by acting as a speech cartel and now we have the rest of the tech stack jumping on board with the the speech cartel you had an announcement from a whole bunch of finance companies paypal stripe square that said they would uh cancel the accounts and by implication livelihoods of anyone connected to january 6. well what exactly does that mean i mean there were many thousands of people at this rally on the mall only a few percent of them breached the capital an even smaller percentage engaged in violence but everybody who was at the mall and really everyone in the maga movement is quote unquote connected to to that protest so how many degrees of kevin bacon are we going to play in acting out these reprisals and i think the worst part of all is that now we have in congress a bill put forward by adam schiff that basically would create a domestic patriot act to uh to create giant new surveillance powers for the state to go after people they they deem to be traitors and seditionists and domestic terrorists and you know i actually tweeted a letter by rashida toleb of the squad opposing this it's the first time i've stood with the squad i was proud to because the last thing the state needs right now is is more surveillance powers and this idea that we're fighting a war against fellow americans based on basically political dissent that's not going to create reconciliation that's going to lead to the next step in this um horrible tit-for-tat game just to build on this for a second um there was a rasmussen poll that came out today today is friday january 22nd so two days after the inauguration and biden's disapproval rating is 45 and you know all of a sudden you can think again as you said three days ago you know a lot of people were on the losing side and are now on the winning side and today um a lot of people that were on the winning side are quote unquote on the losing side and you see how reflexive the reaction is it's like an auto hate right it's like auto disapproval and so if that's the case it just it just begs the question how much room and how much tolerance will we have as a society if we start to go after folks that is you know that effectively have an enormous amount of political dissent are there fringes of both parties that need to get basically found out exposed and put in jail whether they're antifa on the left or you know the far right extremists on the right absolutely but hopefully the fbi already has enough power to do that and that's already their remit and what we're not gonna have to do is pass an enormous number of laws i mean i've said this before like the patriot act was so crazy because it was a foreign actor and a foreign event on domestic soil that created it but you know between the pandemic and now it happened in the capital a biological patriot act a domestic patriot act these are all in the offing and i think what we're going to have to do is again it sounds cheesy but find the common ground so that we can expose who are at the fringes of both parties who are the real crazy people round those folks up and deal with them with the laws that we have today because otherwise the unintended consequences for the overwhelming majority of the americans who are just normal folks is going to be a little scary i thought a really interesting reconciliation moment happened with the woman who stole nancy pelosi's laptop i don't know if you guys were have read that story but this woman who stole the laptop and was considering selling it to the russians or something she's 22 years old she's obviously was misguided in doing this and the judge basically explained to her that she was releasing her to her mother's you know care and that her mother would go to jail if you know she did anything further um but she said listen you know you're a beneficiary of the constitution you are getting a speedy trial you are getting representation and she used it almost as a civics lesson and i think we had a discussion maybe two episodes when the pod got a little hot um which was great for ratings by the way and for our relationships and it resulted in a reconciliation dinner that we had a little a little uh wives dinner our wives brought us together for dinner to just make sure everything was on the well chamoth brought us together for dinner uh um i mean it was it was a good thing because frankly jason i was starting to hate you just just a little bit uh but but i could feel the hate you know and uh chamoth uh being uh empathetic as he is recognized the situation and uh so we've decided to do you know at least a quarterly besties dinner to make sure that uh yeah that the contentiousness does not get out of hand and interfere with our friendships which are more important than our politics ultimately that's what we all hope is comes out of this podcast which is a deeper understanding of reconciliation of of issues that we disagree on and breaking bread having a meal or having a civil conversation even if it gets a little heated keeping it civil is important i thought that this is the way to handle it a lot of these we're going to be able to use some amount of judgment on the people who storm the capital and say okay this person's misguided they took a selfie this person broke windows and then this person you know through a fire extinguisher a cop and we have to make sure that the justice system is deployed in in a fair way and more surveillance and and more investigations i don't think that's the solution i think more surveillance more investigations absolutely because i think the fbi has the power today to do that and i think they should they like i said they should find every single person involved find the appropriate crime make sure that they're punished but the idea of passing broad sweeping surveillance powers over every american citizen is [ __ ] nuts bonkers and by the way all that's all that's going to do is create these honey pots for foreign governments to want to attack anyways because if that capability exists it exists in code on servers somewhere and folks in china and other places will want to find out where that is and they will be attacking it all day long and so the last thing we need is we're already leaking enough information uh about ourselves online willingly and unwittingly um i don't want there to be a honeypot that's the first thing the second thing i just want to say is i thought it was incredible um what mitch mcconnell did just back to your comment jason about making sure folks get the right adjudication i think mitch mcconnell set the stage to have donald trump impeached and the reason i think that is this was the first time he was completely unequivocal which is that donald trump provoked all these folks and i think what it allows the republican party to do is to get together under closed doors you know behind closed doors circle the wagons and say it's either him or us we choose right now and i think what's going to happen if i had to guess is that that allows a lot of people to break ranks and support the impeachment in the senate that's going to start on monday and i think there's a real chance now that that this impeachment goes through and he gets convicted i think it's worth just thinking about the implications of that um if you did that there are there are trump loyalists there aren't really gop loyalists um and uh i guess there are gop loyalists but there are a lot of trump loyalists that are not loyal to the gop at this point and sax you know correct me if i'm wrong but if trump does actually create a fringe party does create a a patriot party as he suggested he might um you could see up to 20 million americans joining that party and you know that would reduce the ranks of the republican party significantly and then kind of my understanding is in political theory what would result is you always have a balance in the parties and so the parties kind of adjust left or right to create that balance ultimately it's just kind of the organic way this this works in order for the republican party to gain um it you would probably see a lot of membership move over the republican party which means that the democratic party is going to move further left and um you know think about the implications of that if trump does actually if they do actually kick trump out of the party and he does set up a french party you will likely see the democrats move further left creating a much more um kind of conflicting story for some of the centrists than what they're telling today of what's going to happen in the future and that's a very different america in the next two to three years that could be created if they took that risk and i think they have to associate that calculus when they're making this decision you know you can talk about justice and wanting to kick him out of the party but the implications of him leaving the party are rather profound oh it would fracture the republican party it would be i guess the best historical analog would be when teddy roosevelt left the the party uh to form the bull moose party he actually fractured the republican party and that allowed um i think woodrow wilson to win the presidency uh beating taft um yeah i mean the republicans would basically lose every election um from now until trump is no longer you know a force in american politics if he created i guess the or they'd have to they'd have to move left right i mean in order for them to gain you know more people they'd have to get the centrist democrats they'd have to move left and that'll give the democrats the ability to move left yeah i mean it it's it's a it would be a dream scenario for for the democrat party um i'm surprised i'd be surprised at the end of the day if if if enough republicans went along with this to to fracture the party but um look i i understand that on some basis you know trump trump caused what what happened at the capitol he convened everybody he rabble roused but i think that um frankly if you have a trial i think the question we have to ask is like what agendas does this serve does this serve a reconciliation agenda or does this serve a revenge agenda i mean the guy's already out of office i thought we cancelled the trump reality show and this is like bringing it back for another season because this trial is going to be a [ __ ] show just like all things trump you have a trial in the senate and it's going to turn into a total farce okay and you know look i think cosmically trump was reckless he was responsible but when you actually look at the legal definition of incitement it's actually very hard to prove incitement so now trump's going to get his lawyers up there and they're going to be pushing back on this and it's going to consume the country for months and i just think we should be moving forward right now the government's already going to be first three days and done all right why would it take months i'm curious you're just saying you overhang from it they're going to start at mid-february right it's not going to be three days this goes on until the trial's over i mean it's it'll be at least a week of of uh discussion right sex so saks is it do you think the gop preventing trump from being able to run again is worth the year the week of animosity let's call it i i don't i think we should just move on as a country um and i you know at the end of the day i think that's what's good for biden's agenda i mean this will become very consuming what's good for the gop though if you're if as a person who would align themselves with republicans mainly i would say what do you think is best for your party the party you're part of just moving on just moving forward what if trump comes back and gets the nomination in 2024 i mean i think that is definitely a risk you you take um but i think that that risk um i you know i'll leave it to the voters to decide what what makes sense um interesting i i think that the only salvation for the republicans is to repudiate trump and and i actually agree with um with uh friedberg i think that this creates the opportunity for this i think trump wants to call it the patriot party to be sort of center right i think democrats probably ebb over time you know center left and then the republicans actually are this interesting power broker because they can actually tack to the middle and be centrist you know about a social safety net combined with you know small government if you could somehow tiptoe and and and balance on that line i think that is the winning strategy that people want but i think that's that's my point is the republican party is going to have to move left in order to create balance between the two parties again because they're going to lose 20 million voters to the patriot party and that's the profound shift that's going to happen and when the republican party moves left the democrats are going to move further left and so maybe i don't think that moving that far left is a really winning strategy for no but i think i think friedrich is right so as an example i i think i can say this but like i i had a call this week with um the mayor of miami francis suarez what an unbelievably impressive guy holy [ __ ] [ __ ] this guy is amazing um what he's done in miami is incredible um i mean the gdp growth is like chinese gdp growth ten percent eight percent six and a half percent he's running fiscal surpluses you know crime is down down down he's done an incredible job this guy is a fundamental centrist you know and when you talk about what his beliefs are i was like what is this guy is he a democrat is he republican i was like he's like honestly i'm a centrist you know and and so my point is if whoever tacks to the middle we'll find the ability to attract incredible leaders that i think are are our next generation set of leadership so in that way trump as a change agent uh sax was a success in that he broke the system and this was peter thiel's kind of concept when he put him in and i know you don't speak for peter but peter's idea was hey this person's a change agent he's gonna be this you know drain the swamp person maybe that didn't happen but he has basically made everybody reconsider what party they want to be part of and what they actually want on the political agenda and now we're so we've never been more focused on politics and how our country runs in our lifetime have we well trump you're right that trump was a classic disrupter you know keith rabboy has this line about founders that uh disruption is created by disruptive people and trump was you know one of those very disruptive people i mean it just to take two examples i mean he created a total realignment on our views around china i think it's now a bipartisan consensus that you know we should not keep feeding china uh and making you know keep feeding that the chinese tiger and turning into a dragon um everyone seems to think now that that some reappraisal is warranted and the other the other big issue was the forever wars of the middle east you know i think trump first created a realignment within the republican party when he said no more bushes he met no more of these stupid foreign wars and i think that was an important realignment um so yeah i mean he's been a very disruptive figure i think that um everyone's breathing a sigh of relief because we've moved on i think that he unnecessarily was incendiary and sort of pressurized the situation but i think the best thing at this point is to move forward and not keep rehashing the trump era speaking of rehashing um i don't know if you guys know about what is happening with facebook but they have an oversight board they created last year in the spring and the oversight board is not to do the day-to-day policing of facebook and instagram and whatsapp activity but it is to be a place where people who have been have had content removed or have had their account suspended to appeal they have taken the trump case as it were and given it to their supreme court which is the oversight board and the oversight board is uh going to make a judgment based on should trump get his social media accounts back they have complete autonomy from facebook they are funded by facebook with 120 or 130 million over the next six years so they're getting like 20 million dollars a year to run this they've got a really amazing bench of intellectuals public intellectuals and and they're sort of above facebook in this regard what do we think uh should happen to trump's social media accounts should he have a path to reclaiming them and would this uh board that exists as this of budsman as i talked about in the last episode what do we think of this process and do we think maybe twitter and youtube should join this oversight board let's separate these two things and actually jason you just framed it perfectly let's separate the two issues one is is any of us comfortable with a random set of people that some people will like and other people not like making these decisions on our behalf that are not necessarily trained to make these decisions i mean these aren't elected trained judges or lawyers that sit for a bar exam these are just you know private citizens ultimately at the end of the day um i think that if you allow this to happen at scale there's going to be a bunch of decisions that you'll be okay with and support i think a lot of people probably are cheering when trump got blocked but if you can abstract it away and think about all the people that you actually care about what if the administration was on the other side and now all of a sudden you know these people to curry favor with the administration went in a different direction and people that you cared about got blocked it is an untenable situation and i think this is the slippery slope that the framers never intended i don't think it should be people like this making any decision like this and in many ways it's a it's a fig leaf for these companies to pretend they're doing the right thing while they're really shirking the real responsibility friedberg you agree it's hard to say on the specifics so i think we should just take a broader point of view on this which is how do tech companies um create independence in the platforms that they're building so that they don't get scrutinized as monopolists and so there are several examples of this being done both successfully and not successfully across the tech ecosystem google made android open source and by making the android operating system open source they were able to have their own forked versions that they were able to install on phones with partners like htc and samsung and others that they could then have their search engine be the primary search engine so the entire android operating system is available for anyone to work on for anyone to fork for anyone to use and then google's iteration of that open source platform and google's contributions which they were making regularly allowed them to kind of have a great commercial outcome without being the owner of the operating system having learned from the mistakes of microsoft in the past facebook tried to take a similar approach with libra and it was a total [ __ ] show and a disaster and i don't know where it is today but they tried to create this also independent board um to provide oversight uh and to you know to kind of do the you know all the open source work on the libra currency and facebook was going to then use that on their platform as their kind of you know token uh cryptocurrency solution um and obviously there was so much scrutiny because no one believed the independence and i think we're hearing the same thing now about the facebook oversight board jack dorsey is now taking the same approach with blue sky which is meant to be this um open sourced um you know independently managed um social media protocol system and so twitter would effectively become an application layer on top of this open sourced approach to how do you decide what goes on social media how do you decide what's inappropriate and appropriate and what technology protocols are available for everyone to use and what business and and um arbitration protocols are available for everyone to use in an open source way and we'll see where jack goes with blue sky he seems to be doing a better job messaging and organizing teams of people to work on this and i don't see the pushback that facebook is getting with their oversight board so unfortunately a lot of these the big tech platforms in order to avoid the monopolistic allegations and the allegations of control and influence uh they're creating independence uh independent systems and that's hit or miss and i don't think we yet know i think in the next year or two we'll see how blue sky libra the facebook oversight board and some of these other platforms what would you do david platforming what would you do let me just put it to you if you were in charge you were the ceo of facebook or twitter would you have a path to reinstating trump yes or no yeah let me just get freebergs would you yes or no reinstate trump oh yeah 100 we should have a path to it i i think be like i've said in the past having some objective i think that number one i don't think it was inappropriate for them to kick him off the platform from a legal perspective i don't sacks and i might disagree but we can probably argue for an hour but i think from a freedom of speech point of view they're private companies with private accounts and they did what they wanted to do was it the right thing to do um i don't think that was the right thing so yeah give him a path to getting his account back free and so i think you need to create an objective system and you need to give everyone whether it's trump or whoever else everyone has to have the same set of standards that they're held to and then a universal approach that anyone can appeal and okay but that's the approach but knowing what trump did on january 6 would you let him back on your platform if you were ceo is the question i'm trying to get out of your freebird but okay david you go yeah i mean so so here's the fundamental problem is that the town square is now owned by facebook and twitter the town square got privatized and our speech rights are now in the hands of mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey as a practical matter i mean you do not have speech rights in the modern world if you get d platform by big tech and until now there's been no way to appeal their decisions we have had no transparency into their decisions so i think facebook creating this appeals board is a step in the right direction but you know they're calling it their supreme court but i'll tell you my supreme court is the supreme court you know at the end of the day we all know that the most important part of a trial is jury selection and zuckerberg is still picking these 20 people and you know actually just in case in point he picked the top he picked the four and the four pick the next 16 and then they don't have an ongoing um ability to pick the next ones and they have some amount of terms so just to give you that okay well fair enough and like i said look i don't want to criticize this move on its own because it is a step in the right direction we need an appeals process when people get cancelled okay um that part is good but but what i would like to see like i said my supreme court is the supreme court and they've spoken to this issue and i would like to see these social networking monopolies apply a first amendment standard a speech policy broadly consistent with the first amendment and sometimes that will mean allowing speech we don't like but it will result in a greater level of speech protection for all of us well it wouldn't just reach back on the platform no but hold on a sec if you're gonna go by that standard the problem is with this oversight board concept is that it completely violates exactly what the supreme court is meant to be which is a country-by-country set of governance and standards and laws like i'm just looking at the oversight board people right now these people look incredibly well credentialed emmy palmer of israel catalina botero moreno of colombia nigat dad from pakistan helle thorning schmidt from denmark catherine chen from taiwan jamal green from the united states alan rusbridger from uk andreas sagio from hungary and it goes on and on how are we supposed to adjudicate a set of standards at a national level like when when we have the are all these people from all these different countries supposed to opine on u.s constitutional right of free speech and have it the idea would be they would use some global standards but then also take into consideration local standards that's what they their stated purpose is and why they're so diverse the setup for that though jason is that then you know when when there's a you know the hindu nationalist bjp party has a specific point of view and so when modi wants to get elected there's going to be specific kinds of free speech laws there you know poland's going to have a different point of view and they're not going to respect what's happening in the oversight board case in point australia passed a potential law or is considering passing a law which is basically around if you know treating facebook and google uh as quasi publishers and that you know they're i think that they have to pay some kind of royalty now for articles that are shared or published or whatever and google said i'm out and then facebook said i'm out too um and so what does that mean for you know 200 million people you're out what does that mean you're out you can make money when the getting's good and all of a sudden you build this public infrastructure when the country's rules change i i actually respect that more than trying to create some of this broad holistic governance committee because i think it's a [ __ ] show you can't cherry pick which laws you want to observe and respect and and then which laws you don't you know i i think trimath makes an excellent point about how difficult this is going to be to implement let me propose an alternative that actually comes from a former law professor of mine at the university of chicago richard epstein he made the point that he wants to apply common carrier regulation at least in the u.s to these monopolies and the example he gives is that the railroad monopolies could not deny you service based on your political views and you know this is this is a um this is a real issue imagine you know going back in time you know we had the lincoln douglas debates for example the way that lincoln and douglas went around the country was by train imagine if some railroad magnate some oligarch said mr lincoln i don't like your views i'm not going to give you passage on my railroad monopoly the common carrier rules would have prevented them from doing that and what epstein suggests we do is a if you're a essentially a um a monopoly a speech monopoly in the in the us one of these platforms that has uh you know gigantic network effects you have to apply the common carrier uh rules it's an interesting concept i think let's move on to um the economy uh and it'd be interesting we'll monitor obviously what the this oversight board does we're going to monitor uh what's going to happen with this uh january 6 uh sorry jason the last thing on this is you could you can tell if you if you graphed and i'm sure somebody uh listening to all in can graph and tweet this but if you graphed the price to earnings ratio of big tech as all of these issues have come out like you know if you looked at a time series of their pe um and you put on their you know things like george floyd things like the capital riots you know all of these things that have created these um flash points issues around free speech flashpoints the the massacre in new zealand and christchurch that was live streamed on facebook all this stuff what you'll see is at least capitalism is voting that these companies will not be allowed to be companies much longer so the smart money is betting that they're going to be regulated and something's going to change it's going to be a quasi governmental organization exactly that the level of regulation at a government but government level um is going to be so onerous as to make these companies quasi nonprofits that work on behalf of countries they're going to become utilities right they're getting they're going to get regulated like utilities at some point or they're going to have to adopt some governance like we've talked about or other options will emerge and i think what jack is doing with the is it blue sky is what they're calling it blue sky yeah yeah what they're really doing with blue sky is saying your profile and your data is going to be stored on some blockchain or some decentralized system like bitcoin or like any other peer-to-peer service which means it's not on their server twitter just pulls all that data together so we would all have our own domain names and calicanus.com or saks.com profile dot whatever the html equivalent is let's just call it dot social you know your sacs.social url would be your profile on facebook twitter and everywhere else and when you post it to it it would post to facebook and twitter therefore they could say we don't actually host this stuff we're just pulling it together which then destroys their business model champ's point what do we think as a little aside is going to happen with the tick tock case now that trump is out of office and biden is in office we sort of alluded to china sacks being a super important thing that we all have consensus on now what should happen with tick tock and do you think biden will go after tick tock and say hey we got to get this out of here because it's you know essentially spyware and jack ma was just resurfaced and let's just talk about china for a second yeah i think the sad reality is that the whole tick tock thing is going to get swept under the rug um i think there'll be no restrictions on tick tock i think what we need the issue with like with uh banning tick tock though is that it's just one place where china can collect data on all of us i mean the reality is there's thousands of places and so you know i do think that taking some action on tick tock is warranted but it would it it is a little bit of selective enforcement but what i would like to see is some guarantee some assurance that um that tick tock is not is collecting data in the way they're saying they're collecting it and that there's not um sort of spyware uh within the app and i don't think we know for sure whether there's spyware or not i'll say it i'll say it slightly differently i've maintained this for a while but it is inconceivable that inside of big tech in every single company that you define big tech is not at least one spy from russia china india israel pakistan saudi arabia did i tell you guys i had a spy working for me a climate no you got arrested did i tell you guys about this no tell us the story it's public so i'll share it we had a data scientist um named hightower great guy uh worked on our remote sensing team and worked on our nitrogen model which predicted nitrogen content in soil and was very deep in the in the in the code base and everything and shortly after i had left i found out this so climate just for the audience my company i started and ran was acquired by monsanto in 2013 which is a big seed company a lot of people know it for other things and um and so i left and i found out that the guy quit went to the airport and the fbi intercepted him at the airport and they found tucked into his bag a thumb drive and he had downloaded all of our code base for our nitrogen models and he was taking them to give them to the chinese government and so he's in jail right now he's in prison in the u.s right now but this was like the most non-descript super nice scientist data scientist guy uh you've ever met like you would have had zero suspicion and um and it turns out this is the point how many of those exist in facebook and by the way it was so easy for him to get access to our code base and he pulled all the stuff down and he had the whole model and you know there's a lot of uh articles about what happened in our case um but you're right it's happening all over the place and um and i don't think that we fully appreciate like how much of america's ip is stored in software uh and data and how accessible that is to employees inside of these organizations and that the security is not adequate uh to protect that data and that ip and then the crazy thing is like you know when just to connect the two dots here on this jack muffin like when you saw that video where like you know basically he was forced to you know um show field team okay i'm okay and you know this is all about the chinese party held captive my gosh like i mean these are all quasi-governmental companies alibaba exists uh because of the largesse of the communist party in xi jinping if that wasn't clear after last week i mean and so to your point like you know if any company gets a hold of of us user data or otherwise it's effectively the chinese government getting a hold of that data yeah we don't need proof david when jack ma disappears and then comes back and looks he looked nervous on that video i'm no expert but he did not look like he was the jack ma who was giving speeches and inspiring people and i don't know what this does to entrepreneurship in china but i mean who in china is going to start a company now and want to be the next jack ma or jeff bezos no i think i think jason it's even simpler what happens it makes it makes entrepreneurship even simpler meaning for those entrepreneurs that thought that there was a balance between financial imperative and moral imperative there's no balance you can flush the moral imperative down the [ __ ] toilet they china will allow you to get super rich and super successful as long as you super toe the line and that's the message right it's like what uh putin did with uh kordakovsky in russia it's like he basically told all the oligarchs you work for us now and uh and it worked that's basically that it worked that's basically the message uh from the ccp to jack ma and to every other entrepreneur in china is you work for us now and by the way civil military fusion was part was was a policy expressly announced by president xi you know one other data point on this i think is really interesting is that biden just announced that he was keeping on christopher wray as the head of the fbi um christopher wray gave a speech back in july at the hudson institute about um the counter espionage efforts uh that the fbi has engaged in and he was saying that the fbi has more cases now related to uh to chinese uh counterintelligence he said that the fbi is opening a new china related counterintelligence case every ten hours and two days and two a day and of the of the nearly 5 000 active fbi counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country almost half are related to china so this is directly from a speech he gave in july so i think it's really interesting now at the time that he gave the speech you know a lot of people were saying well this is just trump's more of trump's china baiting but i think that by biden keeping on chris christopher wray there's a continuity of policy there and i think you know focusing on tick tock is probably the wrong thing we need a more comprehensive policy to deal with counterintelligence well it's a good start though to say if you hit scale we're not going to let you operate here and we want reciprocity adding to this uh outgoing secretary of pompeo and is the day before the inauguration uh tweeted i have determined that the people's republic of china is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in china targeting the uyghurs muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups that's quite a bomb to leave the day before and i think this signals we are going to keep resetting this relationship and what an incredible opportunity for us to bring factories back here bring as we've talked about here manufacturing back correct freeburg that's what i think oh let's keep going let's kick it off we got we got three three million factories in china i think we've got less than a hundred thousand in america let's go and it will be so glorious it will be so [ __ ] glorious i mean think about this right look think about the amount of money like at the end of the day what is a government's purpose is it to run a profit no you know that's our job right is it to run at break even i would actually say no i think it's to basically promote the prosperity of current and future generations of its citizens and so you should be investing so if this is the you should be an investment so if we're going to be printing you know trillions of dollars and you know we should talk about the stimulus bill because biden's going to rip in another 2 trillion which i think is the perfect segue and by the way and then after that there's going to be this it's amazing infrastructure bill put the money to work let's reclaim a bunch of this capability on shore and let's re-build america okay uh freeburg you looked at the um 1.2 trillion dollar stimulus package that biden is proposing how much of that goes towards rebuilding factories in america well none so so remember yeah but it's 1.9 billion yeah it's 1.9 trillion 1.9 trillion yeah absolutely and so just to put that in context you know wall street has talked about there were going to be four um four massive stimulus bills you know since last april may i think they've talked about this and we're seeing this come to to fruition now and jamal correct me if you've heard differently but there's always been the expectation we would have the big first stimulus which we had last march then a second stimulus people have been waiting for the state stimulus or the local government stimulus which this one now it captures and then the fourth program was always going to be infrastructure and we haven't seen details of the proposed biden infrastructure plan yet but i'm pretty sure it's going to have a lot of green energy uh stuff tied up in it but let's just let's just hit the numbers right so in 2009 post financial crisis to keep the global economy from collapsing um congress passed an 800 billion dollar aid package 800 billion was extraordinary at the time and we had never seen anything like it tarp and um last march if you'll recall we passed this emergency two trillion dollar package you know more than 2x what we had during the financial crisis and now just in december right before the year wrapped up congress passed another 900 billion dollar package and now we're talking about this 1.9 trillion dollar package getting passed so we've eclipsed anything you could have ever con considered possible um in terms of fiscal stimulus at this point the m1 money supply which i sent the link out ahead of this for has gone up by 75 uh in just the past year and now if we break down the 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus bill um you know a huge chunk of it and this is what wall street's been waiting for is 350 billion dollars is going to state and local governments so think about san francisco or the state of california um the city of chicago the city of new york all of these folks have seen their revenue decline and they've had to run massive emergency programs where's that money coming from they haven't been able to raise taxes they've had to put a hold on on receipts and so this is meant to bridge the gap at the local level and this is really important because so much of capital markets still very much fund local and state governments through municipal bonds and those bonds if they start to default are going to have a dangerous rippling effect in the economy so bridging the state and local government budgets with this 350 billion dollar package turned out to be um you know an absolute need and the republicans prior to the the election were pushing hard against this and saying let those states fail they're mostly blue states let those cities fail they're mostly blue cities they're mismanaged they're they're being stupid about how they're operating so this is a big deal there's 160 billion for covid fighting some of which you know i throw up on 20 billion dollars for vaccination which equates to about 150 dollars per person they expect to vaccinate which is an extraordinarily high cost if you actually think about it on a first principles basis it's ridiculous how inefficient they're going to be at this 50 billion dollars for testing 40 billion dollars for protective gear and supplies and what this indicates to me is so much of what goes on in government government spending is skating to where the puck used to be not skating to where the puck is going and it's almost like by the time this money gets deployed i'm not sure we're going to need as much protective gear and supplies i'm not sure we're going to need as much testing if we can actually get the vaccinations done in the next 90 to 100 days and much of the country starts to recover from this you know you've now got 150 billion dollar program sitting out there that doesn't need to be out there and it's a waste of money what we should be doing is taking that money and investing in biomanufacturing infrastructure so we can more quickly develop and deploy vaccines in the future what would it cost to build a factory just back of the envelope that was capable of making the next you know let's call it one two billion vacancy shots one two yeah it's it's not a lot so let me i'll give you guys the unit economic build and you can do the math at home four grams per liter is the expected yield of a um of a biomanufacturing facility and a leader is like you know how many liters of water do you have in a tank you can build half million liter facilities for a couple hundred million dollars and that's four grams per liter every seven days and us vaccine or the the antibody therapies that we've seen the antibody therapies are about two grams and that'll save someone's life uh the the vaccines are a fraction of a gram and so you can start to kind of do the math on how just a few billion dollars invested in building some of these biomanufacturing facilities that are modular and can be very quickly reprogrammed to make a new molecule can be used to support the future vaccine supply chain and the future anti-antibody therapeutic supply chain which is critically needed in this country and if i were to take 160 billion dollars for covet fighting give me 10 of that and we'll be ready for any virus in the future and we'll be able to print out vaccines for the whole country within 30 days um and so a little bit again of this is not really forward thinking it's scientists and doctors saying what they need what they're talking about is last year's need they're not thinking in terms of what the industrial supply chain needs are going to be in the future on an ongoing basis for this country at this point i'm not seeing it and so i feel a little bit let down by that and i hope that the infrastructure programs that are going to be proposed in the next in the next bill will start to encompass some of that work paradoxically it's going to cost a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear weapons so we're literally going to spend a trillion dollars over the next decade open upgrading our nuclear weapon is that is that true that's nutty that's what i i'm reading a headline right here um here's my here's my little wish list for this infrastructure build i think um when you look at some of the most compelling work that's happened in the developing world so like if you're going to go and you know build a massive water facility or an energy installation um a lot of people are worried hey listen i have to deal with you know local currency risk i have to deal with you know corruption i could have the government you know take away this facility from me without notice the rule of law may not be strong and the world bank has this mechanism where you can basically go and ensure you know for i think it's like one or two percent of your project costs the whole project and it really makes things work i would love to see the us government effectively create a program that is similar but different in the following way there are some enormous things america needs to do where the ip exists with our allies and there is an enormous fear what would happen if that ip leaked specifically to china one example is if you believe and you care about climate change and the making of batteries um there's an enormous amount of ip that sits with the japanese um that you know if we could license and work with as a country we could build factories all over the country and we would be the leader in climate but that'll take the us government to basically work bilaterally with the japanese government to basically say listen if it takes the nsa to [ __ ] protect this [ __ ] we will do it um but you can run them they we could just give them their sovereignty and those facts you know these are these are these are for-profit companies that are you know relatively risk-averse they're not going to rip in 10 million bucks to 10 billion dollars to build you know a cathode plant in the u.s i would other people would um but that's my hope in the infrastructure bill is that we take some of these things that have worked in the developing world and we use it to grease the skids in how we rebuild america it would be [ __ ] glorious and also just think about how much a nuclear power plant costs it's like six to nine billion dollars to build a nuclear power plant and we haven't built many new ones and we're on the way there but if part of this trillion dollars we could build 10 more of those energy independence would uh continue in global warming would go down uh anything to add there dave it looks like you want to come well i just did just one final word you know the um the the the great senate leader uh everett dirksen famously said that you know billion here are a billion there pretty soon you're talking about real money and now we're talking about a trillion here and a trillion there and these are really big numbers uh and i think we should be very concerned about debt and deficits no one's really talking about this yet but all of this money has to be paid back at some point um well what's the worst that can happen david let's actually do that i'm i mean i'm asking the question in a non-joking way what is the worst that can happen oh i mean crisis inflation inflate well not not just so inflation because the government will eventually have to monetize the debt by printing more money the dollar stops becoming the world's reserve currency maybe bitcoin becomes the world's reserve currency maybe something else does um it could be lead to you know very severe to basically a debt crisis in the future what would that look like for companies and citizens of america well if you're middle if you're middle class your savings get wiped out you know if you so so if you're super rich the reality is there's already been tremendous asset inflation so there's already been a lot of inflation but frankly if you are very rich and own assets in the stock market you're you're sort of you're protected you know but if you're a middle-class person with most of your savings in your bank account that money is not worth a lot less or your home yeah you get destroyed by that yeah it's really very sad so if you are in equities and the market is on a rip you know paying an extra couple of million dollars for your second home is not a big deal because your equities have gone up more than that or equal to that and if you're right somebody who get makes income we have uh a separate issue well look this is this is a this is a bigger issue but but and i think we should talk about this at some point because this is what the grand fallacy of technology was supposed to be like you know if you if you break down capitalism into its two most natural states you have labor and you have capital right you have workers and you have owners and the biggest problem that technology did was it drove a wedge and it created an extremely small owner class and an extremely massive labor class and so the reality is that a very few very a handful of people can can get extremely wealthy by being owners of these next generation assets and then everybody else is essentially you know rendered as labor um and so this wealth inequality just grows and grows and compounds um and so we have to figure out a way yeah how's that different than the past because i think it's got i think i think technology accelerated that dynamic well i think jumping in on this i mean i i think that technology creates bigger winner take all outcomes and that's fed into inequality but the good thing about tech or the tech ecosystem is that frankly we have option pools right we have broad-based ownership of these companies if you go work for a google or facebook or whatever um you get all these brands yeah that's what 10 000 people that's 10 000 people that's no one and they're and they're replacing 2 million jobs with 10 000 people i mean this is this is why we need to have a hundred percent participation in the markets by everybody in the country joe greenblatt who i had on my podcast recently is a proponent of this chemotherapy so you tweeting about it when you're born in the united states we should put five thousand dollars in a 401k that you can't touch until you're 65 years old that is in whatever index funds and every person born gets that 5 000 and cannot touch it and then we see where it winds up it doesn't solve the problem that a lot of people have to climb up a hill first right they take on a lot of debt to get education to put themselves in a position to ultimately be able to generate the income to do that and i think you know sure give them 5 000 in the beginning but it's not going to get them where they need to be but it does solve one portion of the problem which is they don't have participation and we could take out the wondering what your retirement is going to be like i think both of you are right i think like there needs to be um something that allows people to have a line of sight to savings like a lot a lot of about being invested in in anything where you own it whether it's real estate or whether it's a piece of artwork or whether it's stocks and bonds so many people don't even know how to begin and don't understand the concept of ownership and so they are stuck in being in the ghetto of labor and i think like one of the biggest things we can do is you can give them the taste of ownership so that they understand that difference so that they want to be an owner yeah okay number one yes and then to david's point number two is we still have a responsibility to educate people so that they can actually have skills that they can monetize and we have a responsibility to do that and right now we make it so [ __ ] hard and we trick people because like we we send them down the path of getting a 200 000 art history degree and then they end up working at a starbucks and then which is impossible to monetize i mean it's free you can't monetize that you can't by the way by the way what you're saying is the reason i think retirement accounts were set up in the u.s was to shift away from pension fund models where people were getting a fixed income at retirement and shifting them to a model of equity and ownership in the markets where they could participate actively on a tax-free basis um but obviously it hasn't done enough you know i think the big difference between the industrial revolution the first and second industrial revolution and where we are with software in the last two to three decades is the capital required right it's very little capital to build a highly valuable software business it required a lot of capital to build oil infrastructure and railroad infrastructure and factories and so to your point you get extraordinarily different outsized returns today than you did a hundred years ago as an owner versus labor the and the bridge to try and give people ownership through retirement accounts certainly hasn't been enough so so to your point to your point david i saw this study it was [ __ ] crazy i'm going to get the exact numbers wrong but the trend is accurate when um when when people used to actively manage their 401k there was a very small participation rate but the mean return was off the charts and the amount of dollars as a function of their paycheck was off the charts call it you know 50 60 cents of every theoretical dollar you could put into it the minute that we went to passive and that you know you could sort of trickle money in the number of people that participated literally more than doubled but then the amount of that max dollar went off of a cliff and so the the problem that we've had is we haven't taught people you know we've misdirected some of them to say have a 401 k it replaces your pension as if it's the solution that's still not the solution um and we need to have ways of teaching people how to actually manage it it's not that hard and the basics can be taught very simply but right now we are massively exacerbating this wealth gap the way that we behave and that all of this money that's going to go in this 1.9 trillion whatever how many trillion comes afterwards is frankly for the few that are smart enough to take advantage of it will be amazing but it'll still push the overwhelming majority of americans who are stuck in labor deeper and deeper into that ghetto and they'll never get up it is definitely every little bit helps right like if you have the 401k that helps and then you know educate people and i think if we gave everybody an isa at birth or an i you know an income sharing agreement for these 20 professions and the government provided why jason why is it that you know for example if to invest in a startup you either have to have more than five million dollars or more than you know a million 200k a year it's not more than they're going to change it and so if you're if you're a product manager that's like really really talented or if you're like you know somebody else who's just got a you know a phd in nuclear biology and frankly is you know is decided to teach for sixty thousand and you can't participate even though you have the intellect to judge like we're just like kind of like compounding it's even worse than that the person who's changing the accreditation laws at the sec and working on this said i cannot i'm writing the accreditation laws and because i make 150k a year or whatever it is under 200k i can't participate and i'm the one responsible for the law that person must be one of the most sophisticated people in the world it literally is the most sophisticated person in the world when it comes to accreditation and that's why we need to move to sophisticated investor not accredited and just some test and if you did that every single uber driver lyft driver post mates driver airbnb host uh or a person who used the cash app or paypal would have said i can as one of the first users i have access to buy shares i'm just going to say this i'll buy them this problem has to get fixed because i think in the next 10 i think in the next 10 and 20 years the united states is going to [ __ ] re-emerge like a phoenix and the reason the reason is going to be because of innovation around climate change and agriculture and biotechnology and technology these four areas are going to recast gdp but what that also means is that if we're going to create you know 20 or 30 trillion dollars a year for the next 10 and 20 years 300 500 trillion how the [ __ ] do we make sure that more than 18 people participate absolutely great well so i agree with a lot of what you guys are saying but i can tell you every single one of the companies that i've invested in are looking to hire people right now they cannot hire people soon enough it's their biggest challenge and it's not just coders it's sales people it's marketing people it's hr people it's every every role in their company they have trouble trying to hire the right person and and and they give options to all those people so it's not just a small number of founders getting equity uh this is basically a new category of call it entrepreneurial labor it's labor who gets ownership in the company that's never existed before and really what this comes down to is we need more people participating in the new economy if you participate in the new economy then you get ownership and if you're in the old economy then you really are stuck in labor and so we need to do is spread the opportunity that that technology represents to more people across part of the minimum wage maybe we should have a minimum equity participation so we have the minimum wage over here but if you're working for an entrepreneurial enterprise why not get a minimum you know participation in equity because the free market takes care of that i mean if you have the right market it hasn't taken care of it david no it has no no the free market has i agree with david the free market has the problem isn't that how does a person working at walmart ever participated in the walmart appreciation that's the point they will they will leave and go to a company that gives them equity and that's why you'll see this this that's convenient to say but if walmart's the only job within an hour of their house it's not they got to have the right skills jason and so this all comes back to education you know we gotta yeah who are in rank and file jobs the 30 million truck drivers cashiers etc have equity participation as a right i think i think you're saying something different should they absolutely should the company that does that be created absolutely will they be rewarded with all the people that want to work there absolutely so now somebody should go and start that [ __ ] company okay i just think it's an interesting concept i mean we do have a minimum wage why not have a minimum jason participation you know the same woman that ran elon out of california lorena gonzalez she's doing another thing just proposed a new bill like do you want her to basically pick the equity thresholds because that's what you're saying uh well no let's pivot let's put it to california okay let's pay over to another disaster california so the recall is uh well uh on its way they need to get 1.5 million signatures we're at 1.1 or 1.2 but we actually really need two because there's some verification process that goes on so in all likelihood we will see gavin newsom recalled we agree on that yeah i'll tell you this the stats i heard there's about a million call it a million million one signatures they've seen about an 85 percent verification rate today uh saks correct me if i'm wrong on this they're getting they're getting about 200 000 signatures a week um they're you know the cost for marketing and attracting people to get these signatures is coming in at like three to six bucks a signature so it's really not a lot of money's needing to be spent to get this done and um you know even if the verification rate drops to 75 or 65 you're still on track at this rate to hit the recall target by march 17th which is the deadline and so it appears highly likely they're going to get there sax am i right on all that uh yeah i think they're at 1.2 million uh signatures that's what i heard and they're trying to get they're trying to get to 2 million to have a buffer so that you know they that you know they don't get pushed under the but 1.5 is the number they need yeah they need 1.5 million certified signatures seventy percent of the way they are according to the website recallgavin2020.com which think i think i think they will get there i think they'll get there and then their uh and then the recall election would take place about four to five months after uh after that there's a a couple of months where it moves through the finance committee the recall election has to be budgeted and then um newsome would have the opportunity to set a date within i think 60 to 80 days roughly so i think we're looking at july for a a recall election and sex how how do you get um how does a candidate get on the ballot because champ um is asking for a friend wait a second i want to be on two that can should we have all four besties be on yeah we should we're probably going to have four kardashians on there so we might have four besties on there um kardashian yeah so the uh it's it's it's stunningly easy to be a replacement candidate we should expect there'll probably be about 150 replacement candidates on the ballot every every third tier seedless celebrity is gonna you know like you know back to gary coleman did it like you know 20 years ago all every single celebrity that you're talking about yeah to try and boost their cue rating uh i'm sure we'll see kathy griffin on there i mean what she'd been doing um and so it's gonna be a farce can we deal with celebrities by the way can we talk about why he's getting recalled because i do get this question a lot from people in tech and out of tech and i just want to highlight some of the reasons i've heard and i'd love to hear why you guys think he's you know why there's this push against him but from people within the tech community i've heard that the ad hoc lockdown rules have really pissed a lot of people off in terms of when businesses are allowed and not allowed to be open and kind of the responsiveness and the guiding principles around this during covid obviously the you know the inability to fight against the tax rate but no one wants to be publicly saying that um the failed vaccine roll out the failed testing um you know saks jamal jason what what do you guys think is the reason he's getting recalled what are the top five hypocrisy is number one i think it's the hypocrisy of going to those restaurants and then making people not go to the beach which is crazy and then i think number two is the virus we've only deployed 37 of our doses in california and that makes us you know of the major states that are putting out a lot of these vaccines uh one of the worst performers uh second yeah we're talking about florida and new york are the other large states and they're at 56 49 and 50 we're still stuck at 37 california the cradle of innovation and technology and this bum he's a bum 37 percent deployed we should be leading should be 70 percent he's a bum can i get it wait wait it's it's new some derangement syndrome oh my god i'm just going to get a viral clip i'm trying to get a bottle of clothes you guys know you're besties jason just has a problem with anyone in authority you know i know it's the hair it's a problem it's the hair is too good french laundry the hypocrisy and then get to work so personally personality personality for you is the biggest driver is that right jason no it's it's literally the performance of their washington dc west virginia north dakota south dakota all 66 to three percent of their vaccines employed they're double us now it's smaller states but still we're goddamn california here's what i would say as a list um number one we're the most heavily taxed number two we are we have some of the worst infrastructure in the country we have some of the lowest and poorest performing schools in the country we have the highest homeless rates for veterans in the country we have the worst preparedness for climate in the country um and so it's basically just a complete bungling at every level and so and then the fourth or the then the last which is the biggest one is we have now created an inhospitable culture for innovation and the biggest problem with that is if these climate jobs and these technology jobs and these biotechnology jobs pivot to more accepting and progressive um local and state managements like austin texas and miami florida we lose these things forever this is a multi-generational decay that we're starting and so if we care about the state i love california i love san francisco i love how eclectic and unique and different it is i was always happy to pay 10 11 12 13 14 because it was worth it now i don't know what we get for it and so i think we i think i think he should get recalled i just think he's he's trash and yeah and just to just underscore the point on lockdowns um we now have certainly more cases we have more deaths and we have more deaths per capita than florida despite the fact that florida has no lockdowns and a much older population and so i was just in florida a few weeks ago like um you know like chemoth was saying you know suarez the mayor there has created really a land of the free i mean it's really unbelievable you can go to bars you can go to restaurants there's no lockdown whatsoever they don't have as big a problem as california does right now why do you think that is because well because i think that the last scientific basis yeah i think the lockdowns only forestalled the problem um eventually the virus finds a way around them and i also think the thing that's happening in florida is that okay so my aunt lives there she's in her 70s she's not going to bars and restaurants because she knows she's highly at risk and so just because the government doesn't lock down doesn't mean that people don't take sensible precautions on their own and so and so i think that what's happened is that people are going out to bars and restaurants are low risk and they're keeping the economy going over there and instead in california we have this very draconian lockdown policy and has put all these small businesses out of out of work no no it's worth it it's not a draconian lockdown policy it's a whip saw at oh it's open okay great now go and invest in a bunch of cat-backs to make sure there's outdoor dining oh hold on you're closed what is that that's just that's just stupid tons of restaurant bar owners in san francisco spent on average 30 thousand dollars building outdoor seating for their facility only to have it all shut down three and a half weeks later incompetent i mean can you imagine being an owner of that business what the it's unfair no i mean you would literally they're going to kill themselves people will lose everything and there'll be suicides depression domestic violence and then this guy's having dinner at french laundry during the whole i mean it's just such a watch i just got a note what about that he will he's he's actually been banished from being at the french laundry apparently it's been renamed the sri lankan laundry and some notable sri lankan billionaire has bought the french laundry french laundry by the way they got a 2.6 million dollar ppp lawn that got forgiven so you know there's a there's a lot of heat on the french laundry as a whole what does it cost to go to french laundry 800 a person anybody who wants who's listening to this who wants to go to the french laundry stay at home pour a bunch of salt on whatever you're gonna eat okay melt a stick of butter in the microwave stick a butter in the microwave drink it and then basically take fifteen hundred dollars light it on fire you've been to the french laundry you're welcome here's what you do take a really great steak trash and throw out percent of it that places and put the cube in the middle of a big large plate that is that that's not even nouveau riche it's just nouveau stupid oh i got trash meanwhile people are down in like texas getting like a a brisket burrito for four dollars but i think california really needs to fix this we need to figure out what's going on and i just want to ask one more question of you guys you don't think that this um you know because i was having this debate with my family about newsome and i was telling them about the perspectives i was hearing from tech people and why everyone's so against newsome and i've heard all these different things that you guys have shared today and you know they're very you know and i'm hearing a lot of people kind of making the counterpoint like this is a very um difficult time it's been an impossible year for everyone everywhere so first of all you know new sim was dealt a pretty difficult hand to play and at the same time we are all psychologically primed to look for grass being greener on the other side i think a big part of you know certainly there's a lot of people leaving california my belief for texas and florida primarily because of taxes and then you justify it with all the things that are wrong with california but we're all really primed right now um with this notion that that it's a difficult place to be but we're also really having a shitty year we've had this pandemic businesses have been shut you know everyone's sick the economy is having issues i mean you know this was a really difficult hand that's been dealt well i i don't buy that as an excuse for newsome i mean look it is true that we're going through a very difficult time but the reason i don't buy that as an excuse for newsom is because this is not april or may of 2020 when we thought the fatality rate was seven percent right and you know lockdowns could lock downs could be justified then but we now have so much more data we've seen that states that did not do lockdowns like florida and texas frankly have been no worse off than those that have done very severe lockdowns and so what is the point of continuing with this facade um and that is what i think we can legitimately blame newsome for is the failure to learn and to change courses based on data to adapt and where is the last briefing on most of the spread is not happening at businesses it's happening in homes and in california we have a particularly difficult problem because of multi-generational family homes especially in the latino communities that have been hardest hit by kovit and the um the transmission just with diabetes as well but yeah the transmission rate in those communities is three to five x what it is elsewhere um and i think you know and that is not a result of businesses being open in fact those communities are also suffering the biggest hardships because businesses are closed well by the way this goes to the vaccination strategy just being so idiotic like you know if you wanted to be equitable then why weren't we just rolling through and basically getting those families to be vaccinated first independent of age you know you're you're you yeah apparently those are all these vaccination sites nobody shows up i spoke to sfdph uh department of public health about this last week and they told me that they cannot get those communities they're very non-trusting of the vaccine and they're having a real struggle getting people to sign up to take the vaccine the problem is even if that is the case the problem is you should not be holding up vaccines for one community then get everybody else vaccinated so they overheat you cut the head off this [ __ ] transmission over 60 gets it that's it there's nothing to discuss let's wrap it up everyone everyone gets it but you allocate a certain number of doses to you you basically have like a tsa pre-check line if you're over 60 or you're in certain communities you jump to the front of the line and that's it but everyone can stand in line and put [ __ ] shots in arms because everyone i know that's over 65 can't even get an appointment and it's [ __ ] um and the whole thing is it's incompetence so i think but i think what sack said is so right it's like in these moments jacal uh and friedberg like a light gets sean on the ability for people to figure things out and then you know what the intellectual capability of these people are and like look we saw the intellectual incapability of trump because we all stopped this guy could not adapt okay and um and so we are now seeing the intellectual incapability of gavin newsom and i just think they're they're part of the same lot they're just kind of you know people who are um in over their head and they're beholden to people who got them there and their number one concern is staying in office which means appeasing a bunch of special interests uh speaking of special interest david sachs is still on tilt about uh conservatives being uh canceled uh david you wanted us to wrap with this uh wilkinson cancellation so every uh podcast we're going to have a right winger who's canceled and david's justification for putting them back on the platform god david well actually so yeah this is this is this is the uh issue of the week with david yes yes it's well this is actually it's not a it's not a left wing it so this is the issue to draw on social media right now is that a writer named will wilkinson was just fired from his job and canceled but here's the thing it was he's not a conservative he's actually a liberal what and it was a yes and it was a right-wing tweet mob that got together to get him fired yes and so how did you get this mop together to get him cancelled explain it uh yeah so we're back everybody so much for the wives dinner my gosh yeah i'm gonna need another wives dinner well no i look i i feel the need to speak out on this because i gotta make it really clear that i do not support cancel culture when perpetrated by the right against the left i think it's what did he do okay so he posted a tweet making a joke that maybe was important not that funny basically saying that if we want unity the one thing that like the trumpers and the bind supporters can agree on is hanging pence you know it's what it's hanging lynching minecraft lynching senses what's that do you use the word lynching or hanging he said he said hang i think no i think he said i said hang on maybe a taste and it's inciting violence on the march because it's in poor taste yeah well no look it it's it's a it's a it's a joke that's not actually that funny and maybe in poor taste what he's referring to is the fact that the you know that there were people on january 6 who were going after mike pence right that was sort of the joke anyway look he that's not the point he deleted it he apologized for it his bosses still fired him for it nobody believes that he was trying to incite violence okay i mean come on we all know that was not inciting violence but um but the mob pretended that he was in order to create its phony outrage and then his bosses have to uh pretend that caterpillar doesn't yeah in order to appease the mob and they pretend like it was incitement to violence so they can fire him and then he even had to pretend that he was inciting violence because he had to then objectively apologize for it and there's this that's the thing about cancer culture i really don't like is just it's just so fake and phony we all have to pretend and things that aren't true in order to pacify some you know tweet mob whose outrage is manufactured anyway and i don't like seeing the right doing this um and that's what i tweeted about and then we had all these people on the right responding to me saying an eye for an eye you know you know the left deserves this too now they're gonna get a taste of their own medicine and the problem with that is look you know you're you might win this particular battle but you're losing the war because you're now buying into the premise of cancelled culture you're now buying into this idea that we need to economically cancel people who disagree with us and i i really reject that it's certainly bad timing to say lynch or hang whichever word he used obviously lynching is a much worse word uh after people were chanting hang mike pence but he was making a commentary on that the joke didn't land and when the joke doesn't land you need to just take ownership of that and say that you shouldn't be canceled you just say it was a poor attempted humor i apologize right and jason you know better than anybody else is when a joke doesn't land so yeah i mean here's one thing to learn about comedy people don't remember the jokes that don't land they they remember the ones that land okay everybody it's like investing in startups it's like you've got a lot of losers to find the few winners absolutely that's my i'm a volume guy you know that uh governor moth.com governorsacks.com governorfreeberg.com and government sorry can i just say jason jason if if newsom is recalled i i would like to put my name on the ballot and my my commitments are quite simple i just want to i'm going to cut the taxes to zero and i'm going to basically create an incredibly pro climate change um jobs and pro tech jobs and pro biotech jobs economy and i'm going to raise teacher salaries and i'm going to give everybody a school can we maybe maybe maybe on the next episode we can all uh declare that we're running for governor and present our platforms oh let's do that let's do that next friday all right go to governor.com love you besties love you saks back at you we'll let your winners ride rain man david besties we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless we need to get i'm going on