SPEAKER_01: jakel what's it feel like to be a guest on your own podcast today i'm excited oh god so delightful SPEAKER_00: you did a great job by the way i really like um the punch-up to the formatting where you actually SPEAKER_03: put the questions in yeah i think it's because i want us to all agree on the stuff we want to grok on you know in a professional tv show they would have pre-interviews with everybody get SPEAKER_04: all their positions then they put the positions into the document and they you know they basically SPEAKER_06: do what was called a pre-interview or here's another idea you could do your job well i mean do your job how about that how about you try that yeah or you know or how about i turned you SPEAKER_08: three miserable into actual likable people in 91 episodes which nobody thought was possible i SPEAKER_09: actually think i'm becoming less likable the longer i'm on this show that's i think that correlates SPEAKER_11: with all of us all of our likabilities hello and welcome to the all-in pod i am your moderator for SPEAKER_01: today out of the hot seat doing the easy beat dave friedberg i'm joined today by our esteemed panel back from his european shopping spree our national treasure america's favorite dictator jamal SPEAKER_22: polly apatia jamal how are you feeling i'm feeling great lagged you're okay you're good yeah i'm a SPEAKER_24: little i've got i got a little head cold though oh well sorry to hear that hope it's not covet 2.0 SPEAKER_28: no i tested i'm coveted negative thank god okay also with us as usual from his emergency bunker ahead SPEAKER_01: of the u.s civil war the rain man david sachs how are you david good happy with the late start this morning i'm sure and of course everyone's favorite ski bum producer of the woodstock of tech conferences the one and done all in summit miami jason calacanis jason what's it like to be a guestie today oh it's so SPEAKER_31: delightful when you said you wanted to moderate that to me was chef's kiss i get to i get to SPEAKER_32: comment and not be the moderator i love it yeah so we're mixing it up a little bit today i'm gonna SPEAKER_01: take the lead jay cal is gonna sit back uh i'll say a couple words before we start because i think last week we got a little nasty uh definitely heard that from listeners um you know and so i want to kind of just address it real quick and then we can uh kick off the show i think it's important to say that none of us really started out doing this pod as a job or thinking that it would become a real regular thing right we started doing it for fun ad hoc from time to time and then it became this thing that people listen to and it became this thing that we started doing every week and people actually cared about it and suddenly became this real obligation it's almost like we got pregnant and had a baby and now it's like four men and a baby and so you know i think we all feel this like you know challenging obligation that we never expected to take on of like taking care of the show taking care of the pod and we all have like different points of view on what we want the pod to be and what we want it to become jay cal cares about you know getting up in the rankings and listening to the audience and ultimately has shared that he wants to monetize you know at points we've not always agreed on different points about that you know tamath has the things he wants to bring to the table sax has things he wants to talk about and so you know it's really difficult kind of running the pod managing the pod with four very different points of view very different perspectives on what it is we all want to kind of get out of this over time and i think it causes us to get really frustrated with each other we end up having real fights you know you have the biggest fights with your best friends uh you know you really let loose and lash out i think last week i listened back i was pretty contemptuous in my kind of retort to jay cal about hitting up on the inflation topic and i want to apologize to jay cal for doing that i think it was uh you know i think yeah i think it was a little rough but at the same time i just want to point out like you know we're going to keep doing the show um because i think you know as much as we all disagree as much as we fight and as much as we may even start to dislike each other and not get along i think it's really important that we keep doing this and i think restating that commitment and trying to do better is really important so you know we're going to try different stuff out try and find ways to find common ground and keep doing the the show productively with each other as one experiment this week i'm going to moderate and we're going to you know try and take it that way but you know i just wanted to say those few words before we kick this off guys because i thought it was important especially after the last couple of weeks i think it's been a bit of a struggle we've been having a tough time and i just want to be open about it and you know highlight that you know as an example you can fight with people you can disagree with them and you can still keep trying and i want to set that example i want us to keep doing SPEAKER_34: that so anyway just i would just like to say apology accepted and uh i thought that was a lovely opening SPEAKER_04: one thing i would just punch up there is the real reason we did this was because we missed each other we missed hanging out with each other and then this is you know something that's become more successful than any of us ever imagined uh it's got an audience size that is just you know hard to imagine how many people are listening to this which then does put a little bit of pressure on it we we want it to be great for the audience and i just want to say like i i don't take it personally when we when we battle on stuff uh even with politics and sacks and stuff like that i respect each of you you are each brothers to me i love each of you deeply uh and when we fight and things don't work out i look at it as like personal growth or progress towards some other goals that we each have the amount of support i've gotten in my career from david sachs and chamath uh has been unparalleled david sachs was my first SPEAKER_36: uh lp he encouraged me to create my first venture fund chamath supported me relentlessly in my career uh showed up for me every event i ever did and i tried to do those same things for them uh you and i SPEAKER_37: haven't done much business together freeberg but uh i'm enjoying uh the business that we've started to yeah starting to and i and i showed up for both of your uh events when you needed me yeah uh doing SPEAKER_36: some syndicates with you and uh i i love doing this each week i love doing this each week yeah it's SPEAKER_01: like like i think my point was it's a lot easier to be friends and have wine together and play poker together than it is to do a job together and this has become really a job and so you know you can have really good friends and then you try and start a company together or do a job together and you can hate each other i think it doesn't mean that you guys stop being friends or that we should stop doing the work i think we should still keep trying to do the work figure out a way to make SPEAKER_45: it work so anyway that was the point i wanted to make and that's the end of my my statements okay SPEAKER_46: those weren't prepared those are just a reaction to yours i don't know if you say anything but i doubt it SPEAKER_49: okay let's have any emotions right now exact what are you feeling yeah i mean samath do you think SPEAKER_50: grass-fed is better or the regular uh built-on SPEAKER_51: sax and i were texting while you guys were SPEAKER_55: we're hugging it out talking about different kinds of jerky SPEAKER_56: beef jerky while we were jerking each other off you guys were researching jerky great okay i was SPEAKER_62: recommending uh built on to him oh great awesome speaking of jerky let's get into adam human SPEAKER_01: hey oh okay so now hey hello okay so uh first uh thing to talk about today and i kind of wanted to take it in a little bit of a different direction than i think all the other tech media have kind of addressed this you know adam newman is back he raised 350 million dollars from andreessen horowitz there was announcement this week for his new company called flow which as we understand it is trying to develop residential apartments you know in the same sort of vibe quality and attention to experience as maybe was intended with we work uh and flow you know seems to have um started originated with adam doing a bunch of acquisitions of real estate with his own capital and now he seems to have turned this into a real business and raise money from andreessen so there's all the commentary and joking about andreessen putting this money in are they crazy as well as all the you know commentary about adam human how could anyone back him the guy was so awful the first time around let me just do a quick round the horn with you guys you know initial reactions to the to the adam newman deal and then i'd love to talk about founders having a second act because you know adam happens to be high profile so his failure was high profile but a lot of founders have a failed low profile first experience and come back and kick ass the second time around and investors have taken notice of that and so i'd love to to go there but maybe we just do a quick reaction jacal i know you've talked about this on your other show SPEAKER_02: maybe you can kind of give us your your quick commentary on on the opportunity of the transaction and what are people talking about with respect to this this deal happening you know people are SPEAKER_64: wondering why he's able to raise money and what i always tell founders is when you see these like SPEAKER_04: weird fundings and you can't get your heads around them it typically has to do with track record and credible audacity trump's prior blunders so uh say what you will about adam newman he is audacious and he has credibility people forget his origin story they only remember the masa yoshi-san four billion dollars and what happened and what he did with that and that was a complete clusterfuck it went off the rails he did all kinds of inside dealing and and it was it was madness but before that SPEAKER_37: he did green desk he was a bootstrapped entrepreneur and then he created the category defining co-working space which to this day when you say i need to get an office the first thing people SPEAKER_04: say is get a we work just like they say take an uber just like they say google it uh just like you know any other verb that we talk about and so it's very easy to dismiss him and say the tech industry SPEAKER_36: has no morals they just they'll back anybody he has a publicly traded company that's in the market right now he defined the category and he also put 300 million dollars apparently of his own money at stake to buy these apartments uh so i think it's uh i i would say the bet makes sense to me and i think it will make sense if we go into the bet which i'd love to hear everybody else's thoughts on it's an audacious bet because housing is one of the hardest industries to tackle and he already did it for commercial so why wouldn't he be able to do it for residential sacks did you see this opportunity in the market SPEAKER_01: didn't did you guys take a look at it or have any points of view on it no i mean we we don't write SPEAKER_71: 350 million dollar size check so it's just not something that we're going to take a look at for SPEAKER_75: that matter we don't really do non-software investments we don't do you know in the you know physical world type investments and i've kind of learned that doing anything in the physical world with atoms is 10 times harder than doing anything with bits so you know one of my takeaways over the last few years is you know we tend to like pure software models not even hybrid or tech enabled models because it really does take a 10x entrepreneur to do anything in the physical world so yeah we you know we software is kind of our knitting and we we like to stick to that uh in terms of you know andreason harwood's making this investment here's right or your larger topic of of repeat founders look most startups fail and most founders or good founders have an entrepreneurial streak in them and so you combine those two things and there's going to be a lot of repeat second time founders people who are fundamentally entrepreneurial and their first thing doesn't work out i think that that can be a positive thing to invest in because they've gotten some of their mistakes out of the way and they've learned from that experience so i think the question we would just ask is what were the learnings and did they conduct their failed startup honorably you know like if they right lie to investors or misled investors then obviously we don't want any part of that but i don't think most failures are like that and um and so as long as the founder i think conducted themselves honorably SPEAKER_76: had some good learnings it's certainly not a disqualifier for their next startup i mean chamath SPEAKER_01: you've been open in the past about startups that waste money and do the kind bars and red brick you SPEAKER_02: know offices and you know easy living at the office there's no better example of over-the-top exuberance as there was at we work right i mean does that indicate to you that this guy doesn't have a clue in terms of how to be prudent with investors capital and it's not backable or how do you think about it SPEAKER_80: i have a couple thoughts the first is that we work um is a really interesting business SPEAKER_82: but that business had been built many times before and it's called the reit and i think what adam was able to arbitrage was a period of time where he pitched a non-real estate investor a technology SPEAKER_83: company that was really just a real estate investment trust and that's why he was able to SPEAKER_85: get these incredibly heady valuations i think the peak valuation of we work was like 45 or 50 billion dollars but what happened which is that when we work ultimately went public the collective intelligence Chamath Palihapitiya: of the public markets imposed a reit based valuation model on we work and it is now a 3.6 billion dollar SPEAKER_83: public company and i don't think you can dunk on adam for that it's hard to build any kind of company let alone a 3.6 billion dollar company and he was instrumental in that so he should get some amount of credit but the reality was that he was pitching people that didn't want to hear about a business that was a real estate investment trust they wanted to hear about some technology and all of SPEAKER_90: these other things but ultimately when you stripped it away it was a reit now you started again and from the outside in not knowing anything because we don't know anything what it looks like is the beginnings SPEAKER_83: of another reit except focused on residential right so when you buy hundreds or thousands of apartments SPEAKER_93: but again same pig different lipstick the the the the issue at hand though is that again he has found a technology investor to buy a technology story and again time will tell whether there is a technology business here but if it ultimately is an amalgamation of a bunch of apartments with some sort of you know interconnected technology that helps enable a better community or what have you those kinds of reits have also been built before and reits are valued in a very structured way on this thing called ffo funds from operations and you know what the upper bound of valuation is which is if you go and you know look in the stock market the most valuable reit in the world is a company called prologis they have about a billion square feet under management they're about a hundred billion dollar company we work has about 45 million square feet under management there are 3.6 billion dollar company so if you just interpolate from those two data points on the residential side adam's gonna have to buy you know if you think an average apartment is 1500 square feet he has to buy you know 665 000 more apartments in order for that to be prologis scale you know i don't know to invest at a billion dollar valuation or 1.5 or 2 or whatever the number turns out to be makes sense if you think the upper bound is unlimited but if you think the upper bound is three or four billion the only reason to do it by the way it still makes sense for any reason to do it Chamath Palihapitiya: and this is why i think people get tilted because now this comes to my second point SPEAKER_90: which is that what adam newman is able to take advantage of is a very obvious powerful understanding of the venture capital business model that other founders don't especially the ones that dunk on him and let me just explain this we talked about this last week the only mistake i think that SPEAKER_85: softbank really made was a velocity of money mistake which is not setting the investment cycle of their vision fund to be 10 years instead of five while every other fund has a five-year SPEAKER_90: investment cycle too including ahs and so when you have tens of billions of dollars under management guys guess what they have the same problem softbank did except with just a different quantum of capital they want velocity of money and so if a founder comes and asks for 350 million dollars it actually Chamath Palihapitiya: in a perverse way makes their life easier because now that's saying yes once versus saying five or six times to people asking for 50 million dollars or heaven forbid 350 times for people asking for a million SPEAKER_102: dollars and so if you're if you're in that seat come up if you're the in the investor seat are you SPEAKER_02: you putting all that capital once with the one guy who's managed that money before or do you want to find the guy who has it or the gal who hasn't you have to understand the andreessen business model and SPEAKER_85: recent horowitz business model is to become blackstone but for technology you have like 30 billion aum now SPEAKER_90: right right which is still you know a drop in the bucket and something like that so if you look at Chamath Palihapitiya: blackstone right a trillion blackstone is a hundred plus billion dollar market cap company right built on three pillars credit private equity and real estate you can make the argument that technology is near is as important as those three categories and so you know if i think it's pretty obvious that andreessen is trying to build a publicly ownable security that represents all things in technology so again i don't think that they're necessarily out to generate massive returns for lps SPEAKER_90: companies they want to become a credible reliable institution for to absorb hundreds of billions SPEAKER_102: of dollars and so ultimately the objective you think is to index to monetize their their ultimate SPEAKER_90: goal is to ma is for andreessen and horowitz to monetize the equity of andreessen horowitz of the management company yeah that's the goal and that's a that's a by the way that's a laudable goal it's really hard to build a business they've built an incredible business and then they should SPEAKER_75: get credit for that sex do you agree well i mean they are they i think chamath's right that their stated goal is to build like a larger institutional vc type investor i mean doesn't andreessen have a portrait of jp morgan hanging on his wall or something i mean they want to turn vc from being like a little craft business it's something larger and more institutional so yeah i'm sure they jump at the chance to write a 350 million dollar check if they believe in the company but can i shift this conversation just for a second so i've done a lot of commercial real estate investing i think there are reasons to think that flow this new company could actually be better than we work and let me just explain so with we work you know if you talk to commercial office space owners landlords about we work like 10 years ago what they would have told you is yeah look that model is great but we want tenants who are high credit and sign long-term leases why because they're not worried about what happens in a bull market they're worried about what happens in a recession and they want to make sure they can cover their bank debt so landlords have always cared not just about rents but also about having high credit long-term leases what we work basically did SPEAKER_114: is arbitrage that of course it was a much better deal for startups because if you're a startup you don't have to go through a complicated process to sign a lease you could just go month to month at a we work and you'd be willing to pay a premium for that so we work's business worked great during an up market because they would rent space for say 50 bucks a foot lease it for a hundred and they would capture the spread the problem is the business was highly levered to a boom cycle and at the first recession or bus cycle all of a sudden they're going to have massive vacancy because everyone can leave and all of a sudden their rents go below their the rents are collecting go below the rent they're paying and the arbitrage goes away they magnified that problem by making two mistakes number one they signed a lot of top of market leases right they were signing leases at a hundred dollars plus per foot in hot markets and the other thing is they didn't seem to have a lot of financial SPEAKER_75: discipline you know i guess that show kind of makes fun of these sort of bacchanalian parties they SPEAKER_114: had and so forth like that you can get away with a lack of spending discipline if you're a 90 gross margin business like a google but when you're a real estate business who's got real cogs not having spending discipline is actually a problem so for all those reasons i think we were kind of contained the seeds of its own implosion inside of their model and they needed to manage or mitigate those risks a lot better that's not to say though that it wasn't a great product i mean for every story it was an amazing SPEAKER_37: product yeah i mean in the early days yeah so to your point they were taking under market like really SPEAKER_04: low uh cost per square foot space like in the tenderloin and then selling it for you know bryant and third street rents right i mean that was the arbitrage and it worked it's only they lost that discipline it sounds like in the second half of the company's history right what i think is interesting SPEAKER_75: about flow is that it's sort of multi-family these apartment type buildings those tend to be you know let's call it one-year leases anyway and they're owning them they're not leasing from a landlord they're SPEAKER_114: basically so chamas right it's basically a standard apartment replay where newman is going to create a consistent experience and brand across the country i'm not sure that's really been done before where there's like a brand for apartment living it's never been done yeah and so actually it's pretty simple in terms of measuring if it's going to work or not which is simply can adam newman deliver lower vacancy rates and higher rents and then you know buy apartment buildings at market prices so in other words that's the arbitrage is can he extract more rent and less vacancy from apartment units by creating this national brand and this experience but this is and hopefully do it with financial SPEAKER_83: yeah but this is my point everything you talked about is how we would actually do a tear down of any other reap that was looking for money david you know we would look at what is the ffo SPEAKER_127: ultimately it's like you know what's the implied cap rate and what's the ffo can you get paid for SPEAKER_111: owning this how much do you have to spend and can you get paid and this is where this is where i think SPEAKER_127: like you know trying to then you know so if if if on the if on the inside of it what what instead it was not that but it was pitched as some you know convoluted technology play it's a little bit harder to believe again we don't know the details so maybe this play right sure actually what i would SPEAKER_04: say building on uh sax and chamats if they are going to do 700 000 apartments you can actually put some numbers on this you know 700 000 apartments you think they can get extra 100 maybe 150 bucks out of a renter i think they could for like that experience right people pay a little premium they're not going to pay 300 more 400 more because then they would just get a larger apartment and you know they could spend that money because it would be better spent if they have 700 000 of those you're talking about a billion dollars in revenue a year that's what 700 000 apartments okay 10 times profits you know whatever 10 billion dollar valuation if interesting hearts is buying in at 1.5 or 2 like jama saying is probably correct somewhere in that range they bought 20 okay yeah maybe they get a six or seven bagger out of this but it's a six or seven bagger on a big number 350 it's not like a 20x or a 50x and you also get the branding which i would not under value here of being the firm SPEAKER_37: that backs bad boy entrepreneurs and is like willing to go there and support i think it's a real positive SPEAKER_83: for andresen it's like look yeah i do you know you you just raised a ton of money well guess what you got to put that money out because it's not as if they're going to think to themselves oh i really Chamath Palihapitiya: only want to run this fund over three years instead of two they're not thinking that they're like i want to keep going out because i think their business model works by taking as much oxygen in the room as possible which means to be actively fundraising always that's it's tied it's true of blackstone it's true of apollo it's true of carlisle it's true of kkr any of these publicly traded SPEAKER_85: investment managers they live and die by their ability to constantly be raising funds which implicitly means you have to constantly be writing funds the returns decay but that's okay because Chamath Palihapitiya: now you're feeding you're you know you're taking money from pension funds and other institutional SPEAKER_90: limited partners who are fine because their hurdle is like six or seven percent so if you deliver eleven percent you still look like a genius because you can absorb so much money so andresen wins by showing that adam newman goes and picks him and dreesen wins because they have the ability to write a 350 million dollar check and dreesen wins because they have 350 million dollars less that they have to actually put into the hands of other entrepreneurs now they can do it with just one check so it's a multi-faceted win for them and it's a multi-faceted win for newman i think there's also SPEAKER_02: brand value for the entrepreneurs that have had failed startups or issues with their first startup imploding and knowing that there's still a second bite at the apple i remember a survey and i just tried to pull it up but i couldn't find it so i may be wrong on this but first round capital years ago surveyed or did an analysis of all the investments they had made and i think one of the biggest predictors of success in a startup was that it was the founder's second startup and so if you've had failings the first time around you're more likely to have learned from those failings to improve your performance the second time around and so as an entrepreneur i look to andreessen horowitz after this investment and think you know these guys will still back you know great entrepreneurs even if SPEAKER_45: things went sideways or there was an issue the first time and you've got you know the ultimate kind of SPEAKER_01: case for that okay speaking of andreessen i'm going to move us along you guys wanted to cover this SPEAKER_02: topic not my favorite topic uh just because i want to be careful uh about i mean you guys decide what you want to say but um i'm going to bring up the uh the andreessen nimbyism thing in atherton you guys wanted to cover this right yeah thumbs up sure i mean i mean it's like okay well i mean everybody's talking about why wouldn't everyone's talking about it okay so during coveted mark andreessen wrote a um an essay uh called build and i'm gonna read an excerpt he says you don't just see the smug complacency the satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build in the pandemic or in healthcare generally you see it throughout western life and specifically throughout american life you see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities we can't build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like san francisco making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future and then last week uh mark and his wife laura submitted a letter to the town of atherton to fight against multi-family housing saying i'm writing this letter to communicate our immense objection to the creation of multi-family overlay zones in atherton please immediately remove all multi-family overlay zoning projects from the housing element which will be submitted to the state in july they will massively decrease our home values the quality of life ourselves and our neighbors and immensely increase the noise pollution and traffic sex i'm just going to hand the mic over SPEAKER_75: well i mean i'm happy to defend the residents of atherton on this i'm going to take the contrarian SPEAKER_145: standpoint but does anyone i was going to do the same i thought you guys were going to match him so SPEAKER_75: look i mean do we have a problem where housing is too hard to construct in the state of california yes and there's a bunch of reasons for that the permitting process is byzantine it takes years all those delays costs money the tenant rights movement has gone so far that landlords basically can't um you know it's almost impossible to evict anybody and that makes it so no one wants to be a landlord so no one wants to build these um multi-family uh buildings uh or or buy them and then you know you've got like all these SPEAKER_114: taxes so you're just in california in san francisco for example they just passed a six percent transfer tax where if we talked about on the show and they basically just took six percent of my home and there's like nothing you can do about it so there's a lot of reasons why people don't want to invest in more housing in california and i think that this atherton example is sort of cheery-picked because what this is is really zoning you know um there are these suburbs and it's not just atherton i mean you got the east bay as well where people live in these areas that are zoned for single-family residences as opposed to multi-family and that determines the character of the neighborhood now if you go buy a house in one of those neighborhoods with that zoning then that's what you expect to be the case i mean you have to spend more money buying a house in that neighborhood because you are investing in the character of that neighborhood so it is unfair to the residents of that neighborhood for a developer to come along and say hey i'm going to change the character of this place so i can make money i'm going to take a bunch of single-family lots turn them into multi-family SPEAKER_148: apartment complexes or something like that so i can understand why the residents would be against SPEAKER_75: that so i would differentiate between legitimate reasons for zoning and then things that the state or cities have done to undermine the market for housing basically creating frictions or impediments the market for housing now it is the case that as cities get bigger and need to free up land that you might need to rezone but the areas that you should look at for that should make sense right i mean i don't think you go off to atherton and change the character of that neighborhood so that you can buy five more units yeah i mean you should you should look at like why not look at the areas around say SPEAKER_76: public transit like the barts and so forth where you could basically go up around there and it would SPEAKER_02: make sense for the neighborhood i mean the example i would give to kind of paint an extreme picture is let's say you own a farm in the countryside someone buys the farm next to you and then decides they want to build a 50-story tall skyscraper next to your farm you you would have a serious objection because i think that the i mean look look at the town of venice in italy i mean you've been there recently but um you know communities local communities can define the character of their community by by by making zoning laws that you know allow a small city to remain like a small city i've also always been against this notion that we should allow any developer to build any size building anywhere they want in san francisco which has been an ardent cry from silicon valley progressives for years that we need to let them build let them build but at the end of the day i moved to san francisco 22 years ago and it was a small quaint city it felt like a small city and building skyscrapers made it more congested made it less inviting made it feel more industrial and it wasn't appealing to me as a resident and i think that residents need to have the right to define what they want their community to be the question it brings up then is where do you build because all residents everywhere would want to block family housing multi-family housing skyscrapers so i mean chamath i don't know if you have a point of view to counter what we're saying but you know how do we think about solving this problem at scale if everyone wants their local communities to remain quaint and interesting and not be built out SPEAKER_152: well i i think i think that's true for people who can afford really nice homes in the suburbs SPEAKER_85: right but there are a lot of people that live in highly dense housing in urban environments and i think that's where we need to focus first if you look at the data california needs to build three and a half million extra homes by 2025 that's a rule right that's like a so david's right like focusing on SPEAKER_83: a town with a population of 7 000 people is not going to solve the three and a half million homes we need to SPEAKER_85: build and it brings up a bigger question which is then who is going to pay for all the physical infrastructure that's going to be required let's just say you're able to actually double the SPEAKER_83: population of atherton to 14 000 well you know i i live near that area so what i'll tell you is atherton has uh bad flooding david you know sacks actually used to live near there too so sacks can can confirm this you know depending on when it rains huge pockets of water just collect everywhere SPEAKER_127: that infrastructure is bad there are no sidewalks right so you kind of walk just on the road Chamath Palihapitiya: it's a cart whipping by uh you know could pick you off at any moment now those were decisions that as david said the residents of that town made decades ago because of the lifestyle that it created and they traded away a highly dense urban environment whereas if you just moved a mile you know south there are parts of menlo park and parts of palo alto that are already in a situation to absorb SPEAKER_83: very dense housing where you could put that extra seven or eight thousand people pretty easily into much SPEAKER_163: what do you what do you do when those people in that neighborhood in menlo park say i don't want SPEAKER_02: another apartment building here i want it to be down the road in atherton right how do you resolve this conflict and i just want to remind everyone in september cal governor newson signed these bills right he signed 31 affordable housing bills which mandate by zip code and by city and by town the building of affordable housing to create equity in this problem uh or uh which basically means all these cities and all these towns are now scrambling to figure out how do we meet our state mandated objectives of new affordable housing in our zip code or in our town and by the way it's becoming a SPEAKER_83: real threat yeah i i mean look the and i think exactly as you said what will happen now is it goes to some state commission and i think that state commission can issue some sort of penalty or something so you know it's it's i think the the the residents will pay for that freedom if you will to to not have that building happen but again i just go back to it doesn't solve the crux of the SPEAKER_90: problem the crux of the problem is we need to solve this housing crisis in the order of magnitude of millions of homes okay and so millions of homes can only be absorbed mostly in cities so the real Chamath Palihapitiya: conversation and you know is i have more sympathy for the residents of atherton than i do for residents of the city of san francisco okay because there is dense housing in san francisco there already is an infrastructure social services that were designed and built there are sidewalks again simple example there are stop lights you know in san francisco that a lot of these towns don't actually have now again that was a decision they made 50 years ago and they would have to change that decision but my point is like there are there are places that are already shovel ready and the real question is why can't we build hundreds of thousands of units and so this is a good article to write because it's a tony neighborhood and you know there's a few thousand folks but i think the real issue won't get solved until we figure out how to green light hundreds of thousands and millions because SPEAKER_03: we are three and a half million homes short jay cal what do you think i mean are you well you know the SPEAKER_170: the truth here is that this is not about atherton this is every town every city in california is SPEAKER_04: fighting all development because if you fight the development well yeah you would obviously have less traffic and supply and demand your homes become more valuable the place that's fought it most of all is san francisco in the city where you cannot convert homes you cannot take your victorian and make it into a a town home and then if you look at what's actually happening here what they're fighting against SPEAKER_37: and you know this is the hypocrisy of it is you know these are townhomes this isn't like a 20 story you know giant apartment building they're townhomes and they're going to be three million dollars each and they're not going to be for scary people and criminals and ruining people's quality of life it's SPEAKER_04: going to be the venture partner or the receptionist not even the receptionist gonna be a venture partner it's going to be a cto at a tech company who's going to be able to buy this and then be that much closer to work and so it does reek of hypocrisy and there's a really simple solution here which is you know there are cal train stations up and down the peninsula there are you know in some places uh you have other municipal transportation along those corridors they should build up and they should build 10 story apartments etc redwood city did this recently we've all been there and seen the SPEAKER_176: apartments they're gorgeous they're six but jcal you're talking about you're talking about the exact kind of solution we need because instead of trying to solve a hundred units here or there redwood SPEAKER_85: city did an incredible job they solved it in the scale of tens of thousands of units and it completely SPEAKER_179: changed the downtown of redwood city it is awesome and it's awesome incredible and sort of afraid SPEAKER_170: of so what is it's afraid of this is nimbyism at its worst in my mind i'm not going to specifically SPEAKER_04: make it about mark and treason i think everybody you know has the right to live in the neighborhood they want they they get to state their feelings i think what we need to do is convince people and i think there's two really good arguments here number one do you want your chef you're saying SPEAKER_163: kids convince people to let their neighborhoods change is what you're saying to let them evolve SPEAKER_37: modestly to have homes that their own children or their own chefs and housekeepers and associates we all know people in the in the area who have bought apartment buildings for their nannies because you couldn't get a nanny well you couldn't get a chef so you you bought some unit in redwood city and you rented it for your nannies or whatever like we don't know people that have not everyone i do i know multiple or who have considered it and so that's the way you would convince nimby people to to evolve here and then there's a second one this has to do with work from home when you commute you know the issues of domestic violence depression drug abuse substance abuse alcohol abuse all of that goes way up and it's it's somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes of a commute you start to see people's quality of life seriously deteriorates and so if we want people to come back to offices which apple just mandated last week everybody's coming back three days a week like it or not tuesday thursdays and you pick the other wednesday you want to come to work i guess if we want people to come back to work well yeah we're gonna have to build some taller homes the ceos the founders of the companies the founders of the venture firms it's not about marketing it's about everybody they don't have to commute the office SPEAKER_36: is within walking distance or a bike ride of their office people need to start thinking about their nanny their chef their firefighter and their employees jason i i may have misread it but it SPEAKER_127: wouldn't have solved the problem for the nanny the chef the teacher no these would be three million dollar units no they wouldn't even be that because the way that it read because i read it said that it SPEAKER_83: you would have qualified it by building what's called an adu on your property yes so that's another solution so people would have built it for their grandmother or their in-law a lot of people are SPEAKER_127: doing that so my my point is the law the law as proposed was already hacked and so it would never Chamath Palihapitiya: have accomplished what you were saying i think the answer to what you're saying is what redwood city SPEAKER_85: did it's what towns all around the country should be doing which is like in and around particularly like transportation hubs you should be green lighting a lot of dense housing but jason those are not SPEAKER_90: adus that sit on a product no those are those are 500 and by the way those also required not just SPEAKER_85: the infrastructure but it also requires the financing and all of the you know the banks and SPEAKER_04: construction markets there to construct it that's not a problem in california the the opposition is the problem which is why the federal i'm sorry the state government's getting involved and superseding or trying to supersede what happens on a local level that's why gavin newsom is passing these things is because each town is refusing to do it but another possible solution is if atherton is so good at SPEAKER_37: blocking this stuff and they have so much money let them pay a penalty and have redwood city or san carlos or another neighborhood milbrae yeah that wants money and they want to build up milbrae is building because that's where the bart station ends is in milbrae just they're building up there well you're SPEAKER_197: describing like are all these contortions and what should be a more free market for housing SPEAKER_114: construction i mean the reality is we've done so many things to distort the market agreed with SPEAKER_75: these labyrinthine permit process processes that delay projects for years and years to um you know to SPEAKER_200: all the taxes and other yeah well because that's how they fight it they fight with all these SPEAKER_114: environmental stuff zoning is a little different yeah so the nimbyism factors into the permitting SPEAKER_148: process but but i would again i would differentiate zoning um but my point is just we've like so broken the free market for housing that we then come along and say see the free market's not working we need more government mandates look is this happening in miami no go to miami there are cranes everywhere they're building houston they're building multi-family or exactly so in these frankly red cities red states which are much more lightly regulated they're building a lot more but at the same time it's SPEAKER_170: not like and in new york which is constrained so you have to build up yeah but houston has no zoning SPEAKER_114: yeah new york city has always had a very non-sentimental view towards construction the city has always said okay if you want to build something bigger and better you can tear it down and start over i mean they have like air rights and so on that you have to respect but but new york city has never they by and large they don't constantly um label buildings as historic and say you can't touch them and things like that it's new york city has always wanted to keep being dynamic and growing um so there are other places that just don't have this problem and they're able to achieve this growth without building an apartment complex like in the lot next to you if you live in the suburbs and have a single family residence i mean right so i i just think like you know the the politicians in california have so thoroughly broken the market for housing and now what happens is you get an article like this that's SPEAKER_148: basically scapegoating the residents of a suburb as being the source of the problem when they didn't SPEAKER_34: create this problem they're just fighting to keep the status quo so they're perpetuating it i would say SPEAKER_114: but you know like so first of all i have no special love for afton trust i lived there for a couple years and it's kind of like a stepford community i mean i had to move back to the city yeah well i'm like you know somehow i'm just more comfortable stepping over dirty needles and excrement um you're SPEAKER_208: voting with your dollar i moved back to san francisco but masochist yeah but look it's like a really SPEAKER_81: weird place because it's like uh al pacino and the devil's advocate go ahead sex in addition to there SPEAKER_208: being no sidewalks there's literally no offices there's no grocery store there's no commercial SPEAKER_114: real estate of any kind there is no downtown there is there you know so i don't know like where the hook is that you would all of a sudden put an apartment complex i mean you're literally going to be building it in someone's backyard so the character of that neighborhood just doesn't support it and i think you know people coming together to form their own cities you know under the principle of subsidiarity should be allowed reasonable freedom to basically construct a city as they want in the SPEAKER_37: way that they want to live and there are other cities that competition friedberg there's other cities that competition houston has no zoning essentially so you can if you have a lot and SPEAKER_04: you want to make it into a school or a hotel or a restaurant you can do it and then outside of austin you you kind of have that same thing people build all kinds of weird compounds and stuff out there SPEAKER_194: so it's a competition between those cities and i think san francisco is losing yeah are you guys SPEAKER_01: following any of the startup cities that are being built where there's like a new city being built SPEAKER_45: from the ground up and any of those seem like cul-de-sac you mean i don't know the names of any of them but cul-de-sac is one yeah i mean are these real are these real projects are we going to see these emerging like next-gen cities that you know could be viable places to move to and live or is it really just about you know transforming some of these cities that are less regulatory and that's SPEAKER_82: ultimately what will win in the market you know part of why the the regulation has gotten so perverted in a lot of these towns is because you've been able to gerrymander how you know these public school districts get funded yeah and so you know why folks are so protective of of it is is again and and you know to to underscore one of sax's points this is much more prevalent in democratic states and democratic cities where you know coastal elites have really gerrymandered these school SPEAKER_83: districts and that's a large reason why they uh they don't want a lot of building they want to protect the tax base and they want to be able to funnel those specific tax dollars into a few schools for their kids and that's it yeah and so it's that it's actually a really good point SPEAKER_225: people don't know this undercurrent which is oh it is down the peninsula by the way this is the SPEAKER_90: dirtiest little secret in these democratic states again mostly democratic but if you look inside of california and a couple of other states how horrendously gerrymandered it is so that you can basically redistrict in a way to cordon off tax dollars to only then send to one or two public schools that sit inside of your area your zip code because that's what the law says it's a zip code SPEAKER_85: oriented scheme is perverse it's created incredibly horrible incentives for people so now david is right SPEAKER_90: which is that there's a there's a contortion of laws that come together that underlie some of Chamath Palihapitiya: these decisions that then manifest in a petition like this and etc they all need to get cleaned up SPEAKER_04: and chamath it's it's it's even worse than that because the same people who have rigged it so that all their tax dollars stay in their non-development community then they're overfunding their public schools they could have easily afford private but they're using all that money for just their SPEAKER_37: private school and the one in the town next to it east palo alto whatever they have no money and then these people have the audacity to fight against school choice so that those poor people can take tax dollars and then pick a better school so it's hypocrisy all the way up and down and you know i think this is why people are are largely moving to different places around the country and it's a SPEAKER_01: competition between states and cities okay we're gonna go from super local to global um you know this is a topic i wanted to talk about today because i want to bring together a couple of of threads SPEAKER_02: and get your guys's take on you know all of these things kind of coming together and what it means for foreign policy and um how things might play out on the global stage in the next um you know call it years to decades xi jinping it's been reported this week is taking a trip to saudi arabia you know this is just a few weeks after uh joe biden made his trip uh to saudi arabia i'll read a just an excerpt um he's going to end his more than two years of self-imposed in-person diplomatic isolation and his first trip is going to be to saudi arabia uh you know this is uh from unnamed SPEAKER_45: saudi sources so it's unclear this isn't an official statement uh this is just reporting you know SPEAKER_02: the wall street journal reported in march that after six years of negotiations china and saudi arabia are getting close uh for china to start paying um uh paying yuan uh for oil that they would be buying from the saudis um so there's an important kind of economic tie-up that may be emerging that that could affect the us dollar and the the importance of the us dollar on the global economic stage and meanwhile this week as well it's been reported that china is doing military exercises with russia inside russia so there is um an extension of china and their influence and their economic tie-ups and their military activity with both china i'm sorry with both russia and saudi i also want to highlight another important point that came out this week saudi aramco reported their earnings the largest earnings ever for a company 48 billion dollars of net profit in a quarter that is more profit than microsoft apple facebook and tesla combined in a single quarter it is the most profitable business and saudis have been very public about their intention of divesting their interest in saudi aramco which is their state-owned and state-run oil company and moving into other businesses over the past couple of months it's been reported that they've accumulated a nearly 100 billion dollar equity portfolio owning stocks like alphabet zoom microsoft and others it's also been reported that they own over 160 billion dollars of u.s treasuries so the u.s is very dependent in the private equity community in the vc community and in the public markets on saudi dollars saudis have been large holders of us dollars and now through china it looks like the saudis may be having a tie-up that brings them closer to china through this trade relationship with the yuan and the visit from xi jinping while china is actively exercising um you know their military inside of russia is the future a china russia saudi axis and should we be concerned and should we be changing any of our tactics on foreign policy david sachs as this um you know set of threads plays out uh over the next couple of months and and you know SPEAKER_114: going yes i think we do need to make some changes biden's backing away from this now but in his first year he declared the saudis be pariahs and he did push them into china's arms what was the point of that biden recently had to go to the middle east to basically beg saudi arabia to increase their production of oil so he's already acknowledged that policy didn't work and one of the reasons it didn't work is because simultaneously with declaring these allies to be enemies he basically restricted u.s energy production which is you know strategically undermined so and the u.s has military bases SPEAKER_163: in saudi arabia very strategic assets for the u.s military yeah let's listen and we sell them weapons SPEAKER_236: the u.s relationship with saudi arabia is always going to be complex they're a complicated friend to SPEAKER_114: have but it's much better to have them as a friend than basically drive them into china's arms and the reality is whatever you think about the regime there and how oppressive it is first of all we don't get to choose the people running these countries that's the lesson we should have learned over and over again from all these failed regime change operations second do we have any reason to believe that if that regime got toppled it would get replaced with something better i think we all know that if the regime there fell it would probably be replaced with something fundamentalist that we would like even less and certainly if another nation were to basically dominate the region like iran that would be worse for us as well so our relationship with them is complicated but ultimately they should be i think allies of the united states and we should not be working overtime to push them into china's arms and i think similarly with russia we've basically declared ourselves to be engaged in this proxy war with russia which strategically there's just nothing in it for us you can sympathize with the people of ukraine all you want yeah i mean it's dangerous you've said that in the past i mean i think the question is SPEAKER_02: does this china military exercise in russia indicate an escalation of our conflict with china to you um you know or is this something that you know just kind of par for the course in terms of SPEAKER_114: you know uh neighbors you know conducting mir scheimer just an article in foreign affairs talking about uh the ukraine war reminding us that it's still going on i think people somehow think that this war is just stable and it'll settle into forever war status kind of like like afghanistan these conflicts in the middle east that's went on forever it's actually very dangerous it can always escalate out of control and as long as it's going on i think we just have to remember that it's going on it poses a huge global risk and i would say that one of the things that again we should be aware of is this idea that even though we have problems and conflicts with multiple nations we still don't actually want to push them into each other's arms again the soviet union in china during the cold war being the key example i mean this principle of geopolitics goes back thousands of years to the romans right divide and rule you do not want to unite your enemies and what we've done here is we keep pushing them together you know china and russia historically have not been friends they share long borders together neighbors generally have problems with each other these are nations with serious conflicts or differences of interest and we've made it really easy for china yeah to to turn russia into the junior partner SPEAKER_02: in that relationship to moth do you think u.s foreign policy needs to change and that we're setting up this you know um axis of conflict um this this access of allies uh that we don't want to have the allies and you know would you kind of advise and and also you know do you get concerned about this oil yuan trade where there may be some you know economic tie-ups that that really could affect uh SPEAKER_152: uh you know the the dollar as a reserve currency look a couple things i i think it's really dramatic SPEAKER_83: to kind of paint it in these stark kind of like bipolar terms i think we are post all of that so i i understand how in the cold war it was easy to fall into binary definitions of good and evil one and zero SPEAKER_85: us versus them team a versus team b but in 2022 i don't think that's how things work anymore we're SPEAKER_83: in a highly interconnected highly global world it's very complicated uh dollar flows are real time they're massive cooperation is real time it's all over the world it's with every country so it allows SPEAKER_85: every country actually the first chance that they've ever really had to maximize their own potential for their own citizens and that's really what every country's goal is right and so in that lens look Chamath Palihapitiya: what just happened today gasprom said they're going to shut off nordstream one just for you know a few days right but as a result of that eu nat gas has just gone absolutely nuclear and just close at SPEAKER_110: all-time highs 14x 14x where it was pandemic right uh you know price per unit for year ahead so if SPEAKER_90: you if you so if you take a step back we are at max energy production with all of the capacity all Chamath Palihapitiya: around the world 100 plus odd million barrels a day okay global productivity absorbs that there is very little room right now to expand that without pushing the date in which that capacity is available SPEAKER_90: out until you know 2028 to 2030 so effectively a decade from now so if you're in this situation and Chamath Palihapitiya: you're a country with vast natural resources of which i'll just remind us america is one i think the SPEAKER_160: most important thing you can do for your own citizens is to monetize these petrochemicals now SPEAKER_90: get it out of the ground in a reasonable way sell them in the marketplace because there's demand for it Chamath Palihapitiya: take that money and reinvest it in your people and i think if you look at it that way the best run countries are responding to this moment in time like any company would how do you maximize demand SPEAKER_90: and sell the product you have to the most number of customers globally and so i think the middle east is doing an incredible job the us by the way by passing the ira finally i think is on the right footing Chamath Palihapitiya: because we can talk about this in a moment but the path to permitting and the path to clean up and by the way it puts fossil fuels on a level playing field with with clean energy alternatives emerging SPEAKER_127: alternatives yeah the best thing that could have happened okay so i think we're all behaving in a Chamath Palihapitiya: very rational market focused way and so i would focus less on trying to dramatically kind of resolve these things as a few countries versus everybody else i don't think that's what's happening yeah much more complex much more complicated than that but i think the simple explanation is people with resources in the ground of the country in which they rule have a responsibility if they believe that there's market demand to absorb that so that they can take the revenue that comes from it and SPEAKER_90: reinvest it in their people that is true for the united states it's true for saudi arabia it's true for every country in the world yeah i mean saudi arabia is clearly making these investments right not SPEAKER_02: just on yeah and by the way i mean like but also housing and new industry and education and then what do you do and saudi arabia is becoming much more liberal as a result too right the education SPEAKER_256: standards yeah and if you look at the investment like you know you didn't you you didn't need to go SPEAKER_83: to dave swenson and understand portfolio allocation although i think the guys in saudi are smart enough to have probably done it but if you're if you have a lot of money coming from one kind of business SPEAKER_85: and you need to make sure that you can diversify so that you can reinvest over a long period of time if you look at countries that had huge petrochemical related revenue flows the nordics what did they do SPEAKER_90: they stood up these huge sovereign wealth funds and those sovereign wealth funds went abroad and they bought all kinds of non-correlated assets to those petrochemicals that is the same thing that SPEAKER_259: saudi is doing financial security for their people but it's like it's like what is the furthest SPEAKER_127: uncorrelated asset from oil it turns out it's apple facebook meta and google tech and u.s u.s treasuries SPEAKER_111: yeah yeah huber yeah hey so jake let me let me ask this contrarian question for you because you you SPEAKER_02: often talk about the authoritarianism uh of these states saudi china russia you know it seems to me as we observe what's going on in saudi and maybe the case could be made in china to some degree although there are steps taken back but also in russia that the u.s influence the the economic and the political influence associated with these these foreign policy conversions could they maybe be driving these business these these countries to be more liberal you know we're seeing in in saudi now of course that women can drive that there's new industry that there's education that there's a technology industry booming that the you don't need to have a turnover of government and a turnover of what is often classified as authoritarian regime for the operating model to be influenced by the west in such a way that change happens more slowly and you do see liberalism emerge in these countries with better educational standards more equality more more human rights and so do you think we're kind because you often kind of paint a a picture that it's bad guys versus us you know do you not think SPEAKER_01: that we're making an influence on these places locally and that we're seeing well i would take SPEAKER_04: exception to like it's bad guys versus us i don't i don't think we want to create a legion of dictators and nor do i think that's what this is i would actually agree with sax we should be embracing these folks um and having strong relationships with them even though we are fundamentally different uh operating systems for our countries democracy you think we should be embracing you sorry you think SPEAKER_31: we should have a relationship with putin just a 100 i mean and we did right i mean uh obama was making SPEAKER_04: some progress on that and we we did some great work um when and obviously trump has a very very long-standing very deep we don't know exactly how deep relationship with uh putin and we did great SPEAKER_265: work with we i mean they did the he did his pageant over there i'm making some jokes they bought a lot SPEAKER_266: of apartments that was that was a joke okay go on just a little joke there but who knows we'll find out SPEAKER_31: over time i suppose okay but we did great work with china in terms of containing north korea's nuclear uh ambitions right and so there are things we can collaborate on i think the most important SPEAKER_36: thing though is that while we are embracing them building fabric between them communication trade whatever it is we are not relying on them and that's really what we have to look at when it comes to the kingdom because if not for the fact that the kingdom won the you know born on top of you know oil fields uh lottery we would not be uh in a deep relationship with this country they're living under a 10th century you know rule uh in terms of how they treat women gay people etc and the human rights is an important issue and we wouldn't have a deep relationship with them if we didn't have to do with the oil but we do and so what i think we really need to be focusing on here is maintaining great relationships with them yeah we don't want to drive them to each other's arms but to chamat's point i i don't think they're creating the legion of doom to take on the us i think they're just doing what's in their economic interest and we need to do what's in our economic interest which really is investing in nuclear investing in solar batteries wind and even bridge fuels and that's what's in the interest of the free world and europe exactly and if we are independent of them then we don't have to go over there and kiss the ring like biden had to do we don't have to you know deal with excuses SPEAKER_37: when they do horrible things like murder khashoggi or you know just this past week they put uh sama al SPEAKER_04: shahab in jail she's a phd student from the university of leeds she's now going to go to jail for decades because uh when she went back to saudi arabia on vacation this happened last week um gentlemen because she retweeted people and so these human rights violations the murder of khashoggi all these things add up the uyghurs etc and we'll have a better ability to negotiate and lead them as the shining city on the hill when we work on being that shining city on the hill and we're not dependent on them and that's really what i think we have to focus on is reducing the dependency on these countries i think we all agree whether it's medical devices ppe drugs making our iphones or or oil to keep us right and then sort of europe and that's where nuclear comes in speaking of reducing dependency SPEAKER_02: you know uh joe biden signed the inflation reduction act some people have said this is the most important bill signed in years if not decades uh by uh you know um passed by u.s congress signed by a president because it touches on so many points um that folks believe will really move the needle with respect to climate change chamath i think you made an interesting point in our group chat and i think maybe we should start there which is you know at the end of the day the systems of industrial production on planet earth were made in such a way that we never accounted for the costs of the external output of these systems meaning we can burn fuel put co2 into the atmosphere or put methane into the atmosphere in the case of animal agriculture and we get a low-cost product that we consume and ultimately no one specifically pays for the cost of the carbon going into the atmosphere which i and you know many scientists would argue is having an anthropogenic effect on um the warming of the planet and more catastrophic weather and and all these other risks that we're now facing and so the idea was you know first principles you should tax people for tax industry tax businesses for the production of atmospheric carbon that causes an effect that we're all going to have to pay to repair over time so you know is that a point of view that you hold chamath because you know you kind of brought this up in our group text but that's the that would be the the ideal scenario to resolve climate change is if you just tax carbon we kind of you know have our have a real solution here and that this whole bill is ultimately uh you know meant to kind of resolve the fact that we simply SPEAKER_85: cannot find a way to a carbon tax i actually think that what this bill did was killed the idea of a carbon tax i think it makes it completely unimportant and it'll never see the light of day why SPEAKER_83: i think it's because in the absence of what we did in the ira there wasn't a clear way of doing exactly SPEAKER_85: what you said which is letting people figure out what the equivalent trading price would be for burning a pound of coal versus you know generating the energy needed to run something off of nuclear there was no market clearing function for that and the reason is because you couldn't get an equivalent amount of capacity effectively available online so that they could compete one for one Chamath Palihapitiya: what we did through this ira was essentially use money to create so many subsidies and then to also green light the way that incremental fossil fuel projects would come to market so that now they actually going to be put on a level playing field in the broad open market so they can compete when that happens i think you will make those trade-offs better yourself and as a result i don't think that there will be a necessary offset mechanism that'll be required because this plan will still get us to SPEAKER_85: about 40 of the way there where we want it to be by 2030 which is still a pretty decent leap forward SPEAKER_90: there is no plan that gets us to where we all need to be anyways and i think that the appetite to go from this plan to where we need to be doesn't really exist so i think that we're just going to have to SPEAKER_85: kind of grit our teeth get through the implementation of the ira and realize that this is the beginning of a probably a hundred plus year project nothing's going to get solved by 2050 maybe you'll see something done by 2100 probably not it'll probably be a 2150 2200 kind of an objective and in that lens Chamath Palihapitiya: i think like a whole bunch of business models got turned upside down so i think carbon markets and carbon trading are not going to be the thing that we thought it was going to be i think stuff like direct air capture again are going to be toy projects off to the side i don't think that those are toes are not those are not going to be credible businesses totally like we thought they were going to be instead the raw tonnage of dollars will do what america was able to do for solar and pv over 2000 to 2022 which is just crush the cost per watt into the pennies so that it can be equivalent SPEAKER_176: to hydro coal and nuclear and put everything on a level playing field and then allow the market to SPEAKER_01: figure it out yeah i mean there's a lot of other stuff in this bill i want to highlight for you SPEAKER_02: guys i don't know if any of you looked at the cbo so the cbo the congressional budget office anytime the bill is being um voted on they do an accounting analysis on how much spending and how much revenue there will be as a result of this bill for a ten year this is actually awesome yeah i checked it out and i sent it so yeah if you look at every year for the next 10 years the cbo score for this bill is that we're going to spend an incremental we're going to increase the deficit by 330 billion dollars for the next five years and then we're going to decrease the deficit by 320 billion in the five SPEAKER_01: years after that so the net effect over 10 years is we're only spending 17 billion dollars on the uh on the bill and then on the revenue basis the expectation is we're going to generate 67 billion in revenue in the first five years and then another 20 billion in the in the back five years so this is actually SPEAKER_02: being accounted for and presented as deficit reduction and that's because there's 87 000 new irs agents being hired to go out and audit people and find new revenue and there's a 15 corporate minimum tax being imposed on all companies and what this means is that companies public companies private companies doing over a billion in revenue historically pay taxes on a book basis now they're paying taxes on a financial statement basis meaning the actual accounting that they present to their SPEAKER_83: shareholders can i can ask you guys a question how much was given to the irs 80 billion yeah yeah Chamath Palihapitiya: tens of billions yeah 80 billion how much do you think it would cost i don't know pick your pick to pick the most excruciatingly expensive third-party outsourcing firm you could okay to build an entire system to basically automatically review every single tax return and throw exceptions and machine SPEAKER_157: learn and machine learn what fraud look like or what misrepresentation let's say five billion dollars Chamath Palihapitiya: it'd be the most expensive it'd be the most expensive piece of software ever written and this is what was so kind of like that was the only part of the bill that made not a less sense to me i think like SPEAKER_90: if you put really smart computers on the case or gave it to deep mind at google and said can you guys build this system with machine learning and ai you'd be done tax and a simpler tax which i guess SPEAKER_232: this is trying to do but you know freeberg when i looked at this and you sent it my initial reaction Chamath Palihapitiya: was you know this uh old adage it'll be impossible for these guys to find 87 000 humans that want to SPEAKER_283: work at the irs number one by the way there's a funny video on the recruiting that's been going on for that but yeah go ahead yeah it's pretty good but i mean you know because they were asking for Chamath Palihapitiya: people who were ready to like have guns and like they put their body in harm and it's like at the SPEAKER_31: irs i was like that can't be real anyway the greatest this is what i got from this excel spreadsheet SPEAKER_37: the greatest tool for writing fiction is not microsoft word it's excel like there is no way this thing is netting out to zero like this thing's gonna cost us a fortune government is in shambles we don't know what we're doing i thought that the links you sent for the podcast with the pros and cons of the carbon tax was really interesting because it is so complicated when i heard these tax experts explaining how you would implement a carbon tax and the import and export and then how often it would have to be tweaked and then who decides what your carbon footprint of your watch is and and where did the minerals come from to make the watch and who gets paid on carbon it just seemed to me this is a SPEAKER_135: fool's errand it would be much better to just what if your watch is made from diamond and not carbon SPEAKER_265: well in that case you should just pay a million dollars because you are the latest coastal elite SPEAKER_31: and we should just start with yachts and watches what i realized was what we really need to focus on and you tell me what you think um friedberg instead of doing this carbon tax which seems SPEAKER_37: incredibly elegant but we all know is impossible to get consensus across hundreds of governments SPEAKER_04: and locales to to to negotiate this it'll never happen at least not effectively and in real time wouldn't it be a much better technique to do what we do in venture which is here are the biggest SPEAKER_37: problems in the world here are the which in this case would be the biggest emitters here are the best solutions here are the teams working on the best solutions let's give the teams working on the SPEAKER_04: best solutions money to work down that list and if it happens to be you know ships coming from china you know with a bunch of containers on and container ships we we measure that and you know the the thing i've learned after the first six months of investing in carbon because we have a syndicate now with molly wood who's working with me on um this climate syndicate we couldn't find a lot of SPEAKER_37: great investments you know that made sense that weren't you know asset heavy but then we started to find uh we found two great monitoring companies and they're monitoring air pollution and they're monitoring ship pollution and we made investments in both of those and that seems to be where we're at is we should be monitoring and figuring out where the carbon is and then trying to solve it based on which ones are the easiest to solve let me just say two things on that bill gates has done SPEAKER_02: a great job of this you can read his latest book or go to gates notes and he's done exactly what you described which is break it all down show what we should do and that's actually how he's investing his own money he's putting his money where his mouth is so there's a really good blueprint for this he's done the best job of anyone i've seen the issue with the carbon tax is you have to SPEAKER_01: come up with a consistent reliable way of measuring the carbon and then you have to do it consistently and broadly how do you miss you know if you miss one factory or another then you have to ratchet up the price over time so first thing is the challenge of how do you agree on measuring second is how do you agree on broad accountability third thing is how do you ratchet the pricing over time fourth thing SPEAKER_02: is how do you deal with the offshoring problem as soon as you start taxing companies in the u.s for carbon emissions all the production is going to go offshore where they're not taxing for carbon emissions and there's no way to account for what they're doing offshore and this has been the SPEAKER_296: challenge with china media and so on there is because part of your first problem yeah sorry SPEAKER_01: let me just hit the final one we'll come back to it but the final big one is just the equity and carbon tax people have said that the ultimate increment in cost of production is going to SPEAKER_02: adversely affect lower income people because they cannot afford the price of some stuff going up by 25 to 50 percent and it's really you know a luxury good a luxury um kind of privilege to be able to pay for the incremental cost of stuff uh to account for the carbon offset needed so that that's that's the set of issues that have been pushed back against the carbon tax and it's why it's been impossible to get implemented and to really get into market sorry go ahead no i was just going to say part of SPEAKER_83: the the problem in in in all of those issues if you offshore is still that there's people pushing for what's called the scope three accounting which is like you know you got to go back to your supplier and your supplier supplier and your supplier supplier supplier and where does it end it's impossible where does it end it's it's it's not credible so you know i think that the bill has actually cleaned up a lot of future question marks about what we have to do as a country SPEAKER_85: to go about doing our part for climate change and i think it probably creates a reasonable blueprint for everybody else and now they're going to have to do some version of the same thing and what's amazing is that if we actually pass this framework which is still yet to be written SPEAKER_83: around how to make permitting more seamless and efficient for these hydrocarbon projects it will really unleash a massive torrent of both revenues back to the united states it'll increase our national security and it'll allow us to really kind of put a dent in this thing because it'll pull forward the amount of uh competition that it creates to actually get off SPEAKER_01: those hydrocarbons which is a i'll tell you i got i i got a notice from someone who's an investor so there's a lot of climate tech funds now a lot of funds jacal you said you got a syndicate and carbon SPEAKER_02: but there's a lot of funds and a lot of investors that are putting a lot of capital just into early stage climate technologies um which travels everything from energy to materials to food uh to uh industrial and manufacturing and so on and i got a note from one of um these these these companies a startup that highlighted that the dollar 25 per gallon credit uh tax credit uh for uh you know clean production of fuel which can which has to demonstrate a 50 emissions reduction in the manufacturing process will now make this startup profitable and by the way you get an extra penny per gallon for every one percent reduction in emissions below that 50 threshold and so there's a lot of startups that i'm hearing about that their unit economic models were questionable before now because of this bill they are flipping profitable and so i personally think we are going to see a significant influx of venture capital and support for a lot of these climate tech and you know new energy material and manufacturing projects that otherwise may have been held back because the subsidy will kick start the question for me that i still don't have a good answer to is are they sustainable over the long run if this bill gets shut down or repealed and the funding sources stop and the subsidies stop do these businesses survive or are we simply creating regulatory capture models like we did with other energy products in the past and with food if you're SPEAKER_83: not contribution margin positive today free this bill in climate change and the bill is the only way SPEAKER_301: that you get there you're doa you just don't know great point yeah sax the biggest line in this bill SPEAKER_02: is the corporate minimum tax i don't know if you saw this but 15 minimum tax applied to the accounting profit reported by any company over a billion dollars and they're estimating it'll generate 313 billion of incremental tax revenue over the next 10 years do you have a point of view on whether this corporate minimum tax is going to cause an issue with startups and companies going SPEAKER_45: public or the valuation in the public markets or is this just you know hey this should happen it SPEAKER_304: doesn't matter i mean i don't know if you spent much time on this well no i mean i think the the SPEAKER_75: issue here is that why is it that these companies are able to pay so little taxes well the reason is because there's a zillion loopholes and incentives and tax breaks in the existing code that they're taking advantage of i mean these large companies have lots of accountants and lawyers they're not deliberately violating the law they're scrupulously adhering to it and taking advantage of it so it's SPEAKER_114: all these um tax breaks that they're able to use to pay no taxes well what does this bill do you talk about the the spending on climate you know the 386 billion most of it is tax incentives and some block grants so this is now the preferred form of you know quote-unquote spending in these bills are tax credits and incentives this is the way they're going to change people's behavior so in other SPEAKER_148: words the bill on the one hand is complaining that corporations don't pay enough taxes because there's too many tax breaks while on the other hand creating a whole slew of new tax breaks so there's a little bit of a contradiction there again why do all why are companies paying no taxes because of the last 10 bills tax breaks that we're supposed to move the behavior of businesses the consumers in a certain direction so just recognize that that's the case i think you also made a SPEAKER_114: really good point about the phantom deficit reduction here so like you mentioned and we see this in lots of bills all the excess spending all the deficit spending occurs in the first five years and all the deficit reduction occurs in the last five years something always intervenes to prevent SPEAKER_307: the the uh savings from taking place it's like startup projections right sex yeah it's like we're SPEAKER_114: we're i lost my sales guy we're cutting the budget next year you know and so just to give one example of this so this aca subsidy extension so this is the obamacare subsidies about 60 something billion a year they're extending it for three years but they're assuming it's going to die at that point as opposed to keep being extended and no one's going to want to vote to make that go away in three years just like they don't want to vote to make it go away now so if you extend that subsidy three years from now just that one item alone makes the deficit reduction of this bill go from 305 billion over the 10-year period to negative 155 billion so just that one item if you continue it and don't sunset it just that one thing makes this a hugely deficit not reducing bill but deficit increasing bill and so you wonder what problem is this bill really solving and they can't seem to agree on that i mean first they're telling us it's a deficit reduction bill then they're telling us it's a climate bill then they're telling us it's an inflation reduction bill it seems to me that if David Sacks: they're really proud of this and believe in it they would choose a name for the bill that actually SPEAKER_02: reflected what it was well all bills would be named something for everyone sex i mean like that's how all these bills get in order to pass a bill a bipartisan bill you got to give something to SPEAKER_312: everyone i mean but this is mostly you know this is mostly a climate related bill you know this is SPEAKER_02: mostly this is mostly tax breaks and block grants i mean there's a huge tax issue with the the irs agents and the corporate minimum tax but there's also a huge component on prescription drugs chamath i don't know if you spent any time looking at this but sorry just on the irs agent can i kind of say add SPEAKER_114: one detail on that yeah so the claim of the administration and the sponsors of the bill is that this would not increase taxes on any one sort of middle class and so the republicans i think this is one of the few politically smart things they did they introduced an amendment basically prohibiting these new 87 000 irs agents from conducting audits of anyone making less than four hundred thousand dollars a year which was what biden said you know he wouldn't increase taxes anyone below 400 000. that amendment was rejected on straight party lines so this idea yes it's called the crapo amendment it was 50 50 and vice president harris had to come in and make the tie-breaking vote so obviously they know SPEAKER_148: that there's gonna be a lot of net new audits on people making lessons yes exactly so the next time SPEAKER_163: my understanding of this is it's like small business owners people who run a small business and a service SPEAKER_01: business and are they really accounting for their books correctly are they really expensing the right things etc are they accounting for all their revenue yeah they're gonna get whammy by this SPEAKER_148: because look let's face it billionaires already getting audited you know elon had a tweet saying SPEAKER_208: listen i get audited as a matter of course every year you know these people already have so yeah dude SPEAKER_256: i use a big four accounting firm yeah i mean this is i mean the amount of overhead this is crazy i have a partner like anderson that is literally like you know coverage of fortune 500 company might as SPEAKER_326: well be in your office put them in your eye your your uh put them in your uh natty unit it's tons of SPEAKER_127: people i mean by the way sax sax is right like if you look at them you know the ultra wealthy i i think SPEAKER_83: it would be i would be shocked if any of those folks were actually evading taxes at all because it's impossible the way that this infrastructure runs like you know you're getting k-1s from blackstone David Friedberg: what are you gonna do you're gonna change that like totally you know like do you guys even know the pin number of your bank card i have no idea so it's so complicated yeah okay so so my point is Chamath Palihapitiya: i don't think that if there is if there is cheating of taxes it's happening at that level what's happening at that level are much more structural issues like carried interest which they decided not to touch or trust in a state law trust in a state law those are those no i don't think that this is my point it's not mistakes there's nobody with a pencil really filling out a k-1 for SPEAKER_37: bill gates dummy that's my point no i know but people can make mistakes what if a k-1 gets left off that's what i'm saying is when they find something it's usually easily SPEAKER_312: found doesn't happen doesn't happen jason when i get my tax return it's it's done by an accounting firm and i just sign it i don't i know i know that what i'm talking about is what are the irs SPEAKER_214: people are going to find is you know i'll tell you what they're going to find they're going to Chamath Palihapitiya: find a lot they're going to find a lot of middle class and upper middle class folks and they're going to have to focus on them because individually it may not represent a lot but when you multiply it by the number of people inside the united states and this is what the wall street journal and a bunch SPEAKER_90: of other folks have been saying now when you apply 87 000 people and task them incrementally with doing a job it's not going to touch these folks that are already audited it's going to touch the folks that are not audited and by and large a much much larger majority of middle income and upper middle income people are not audited which is why i think you could spend a lot less than 80 billion dollars and just build software that guarantees only those that should be audited are and uses machines to help SPEAKER_135: figure out these leaks or start simplifying the tax code because when you add this 15 minimum SPEAKER_04: friedberg what is that going to do to the strategy of a public company okay so we should show less SPEAKER_37: earnings put more to work oh we're not going to be able to depreciate this or you know whatever i mean it's going to create all these second and third order impact impacts that we don't know well i think SPEAKER_219: sax's point is important which is one that we don't yet have insight into which is what is this going SPEAKER_02: to cannibalize because ultimately if there is a minimum tax it doesn't make sense to pursue um incentives that create a tax break today and therefore those incentives won't be invested in whatever those incentives are i don't know what they are you know low income uh manufacturing zone development or whatever who knows um you know what they are um you know come and build your business here and get tax breaks etc etc local state and federal tax breaks um if those start to get written over then there's going to be really adverse effects and i think that that's something to watch i don't understand it well enough certainly i'm not an accountant but i i would be kind of uh worried about and keeping an eye on that front i do think the bigger question which is a biotech one the prescription drug price cap minimizes the profits that a number of pharmaceutical companies will be making it gives authority to go and negotiate prices this is the second largest line in the bill and there was a survey done by health affairs.org on an r d survey which said will you guys reduce your your investment in new drug development and i think that they came based on this bill and i think that they came up with some estimate that there would be um two uh the number two fewer drugs um that would be kind of you know made available per year because of reduced spending as a result of the price cap which basically reduces revenue which will in essence reduce r d investment you know uh guys like bernie sanders will say hey that's not true all that money's going to share buybacks and dividends uh and so on but it is a fact that those share buybacks and those dividends will still continue and if they are reduced so will the r d expense and if the r d expense is reduced fewer drugs will come to market and so you know there's also a question mark and people will debate this for the next decade which is how much will this prescription drug price cap actually have an effect on r d investment and ultimately on new drugs that come to market my personal opinion sorry let me just say my personal opinion is i don't think that this will have a huge effect i think this is an excellent part of the bill i think that the government should have authority to go and negotiate they're the largest buyer of these drugs and typically when the u.s government the federal government steps in to be the largest spender on a particular line the cost of that line balloons like we've seen in health care like we've seen in education and like we've seen in military and defense spending and so i'm hopeful that this will actually provide a more effective market force in allowing the biggest customer in the market to negotiate prices and that the the vcs instead of making 48 irr they'll ultimately make 28 irr on the investments SPEAKER_197: that they're making in biotech startups well hold on what what exactly does it mean for the SPEAKER_75: government to negotiate prices as opposed to the government just to fix prices i mean this is price SPEAKER_02: fixing well in this in this example it's the right answer if they're the largest single largest customer sacks right i mean you know and then they are the market i mean what's the right thing to do SPEAKER_75: well i mean you're you're saying that these drug companies are going to make a lot less money well obviously that's going to have a downstream impact in the willingness to fund new drugs new r d new SPEAKER_114: investment new r d yeah yeah now no one likes pharma companies so i'm not defending exorbitant profits or whatever but i don't really know what it means for the government to say they're negotiating i mean the government just tells you what it's going to be that's price fixing and these companies are SPEAKER_354: going to adjust yes the government will pay less money in the near term in the long term there could SPEAKER_01: be reduced investment in r d i think there'll be a balance of you know do you don't all governments SPEAKER_31: don't all governments i know that you're close to some of these uh drug companies don't all SPEAKER_04: governments negotiate um the purchase of these drugs and then if they don't like the price there are alternative drugs and they'll say hey listen your drug is too expensive compared to these other two solutions so we're going to buy this one primarily for our universal health care there's this interesting SPEAKER_301: thing that happens which is that there's a there's these drugs that are proprietary and under patent SPEAKER_83: okay these could be chemical drugs or they could be biologics okay and eventually what happens is when they go generic then folks will step in and make lower cost versions of those generics like you know i mean i'm on a statin i think a couple of you guys are on a statin like i don't it it's it's lipitor but it's not lipitor right it's a torvastatin it's like some generic drug that i just take okay as an example um and uh there's a lot of folks that make that and the cost of those pills basically go to zero but there's a bunch of categories particularly for biologic drugs where it's very different it's very difficult to make a what's called a biosimilar this is a generic drug Chamath Palihapitiya: so long and short of it is there's all these classes of drugs that kind of like stand alone without enough competition and i think there are two ways to solve this problem one is where the government steps in which i think is is good but the better way has already is already been happening in the united states so you know there's a non-profit which is a collective between a bunch of hospitals called civica and i think that's a really interesting example and what those guys do was they said we're just going to create our own generic drug manufacturer and we're going to make the drugs we want we're just going to make them super cheap and you know they're they're in the midst right now of completing a massive facility uh i think it's in virginia where they'll be able to make as much insulin as is needed for the entirety of america for no more than 35 bucks a dose that's gangster that's gangster it's just super gangster we'll make our own and by the way when california said they're going to make their own what they really meant was that they're going to go and rfp it out and my hope is that they end up going with somebody like civica who has the experience of actually building it otherwise it's just gonna california is just gonna waste hundreds of millions of dollars SPEAKER_46: proposal if you don't know what rfp is request for proposal yeah but there are these emerging SPEAKER_90: nonprofits that are basically doing the work of the government i think that's a better solution to what sax is actually competition right yeah it's kind of creates competition yeah competition we got SPEAKER_46: to move along because i think you're doing a great job friedberg right just one moderator to SPEAKER_01: another exceptional job you know i appreciate it i think one of the interesting things sitting in in your seat jacal is you see everyone else's face and you see the boredom and the annoyance that people SPEAKER_364: experience during the the pod watch the eye rolls right leave for a drink i think i think chamob is SPEAKER_22: eating funyuns uh sax is no jerky jerky jerky i've been eating jerky all day you shouldn't be don't tube it on the podcast please yeah no and i think that the um don't what the don't do it SPEAKER_37: jeffrey toobin on this podcast what is that no that's what was a cnn anchor who on zoom accidentally no he masturbated on a zoom call with his what the does that have to do with beef jerky you said SPEAKER_370: jerking and i just i said i was eating jerky dummy you said you were jerking something that's Chamath Palihapitiya: all i heard i'm sorry oh by the way so i am no longer fighting with phil humuth i oh my god SPEAKER_127: guys i'm still blocked no so i was so mad at him okay so you know i finish i finished this transaction Chamath Palihapitiya: i finished the transaction to sell the warriors you know this is a this is a six-month ordeal okay i SPEAKER_83: started in november right i'm starting to sell things i decide i'm going to sell the warriors i sell it to a large private equity fund in november december and then we had to wait for them to close the second fund and then we sold the rest of it and it closed in june or july and then i put out Chamath Palihapitiya: this tweet right like thanking everybody and thanking helm you the same line in which i i i'm like i thank peter teal and i thank joe lacob everybody is happy except for helm youth who calls me and is angry and he's like i i you know he had this issue with how it was characterized that how he had introduced me or something where he wanted credit for having done the first trade of the tweet storm he should SPEAKER_256: have been higher up or you know and i was like well phil what if it hadn't made me money would you have Chamath Palihapitiya: just made me whole like what would you have done like it's like you were like the architect of this thing anyways i was so mad i just said i'm not talking to this dipshit anymore i'm done with him i'm done i'm breaking up with him and he would call me when i was in europe and i would ignore and i would get this incredible enjoyment from just pressing to to voicemail he would send me text messages SPEAKER_377: ignore and then i i mean this is always happens this way i did it once and nat caught me she's SPEAKER_256: like why did you ignore his phone call and i said i hate phil i'm done with helmuth i told her the SPEAKER_273: story she got so mad at me and then i had to send this text i'll just read you the text because i Chamath Palihapitiya: think it's just so hilarious i was going to ignore you for the rest of my life based on your tantrum with me earlier this year but nat has convinced me to see where you are coming from in part SPEAKER_377: anyways we're good call me later he called me one second later i was waiting he had your text open SPEAKER_08: i just pictured that me amore he's your friend why do you gotta be you're such a jerk he's your friend SPEAKER_387: you have no friends all your friends are going away anyways i'm back in the good with me i'm back SPEAKER_22: of the good okay well you got to play poker um we do need to get a poker game before we wrap sax is going to give us instead of doing science corner we're going to do mar-a-lago corner oh tell us SPEAKER_393: what it's like sax yeah what is mar-a-lago like you've had your membership now for 18 months never SPEAKER_312: been there never been there but no i wanted i wanted to um i want to give a shout out to this SPEAKER_114: article because last week i took some heat because somehow i guess you're not allowed to question anymore the rectitude of the fbi the j edgar hoover's fbi we're not allowed to question anymore or a lot of people feel that way there was an article that came out in real clear investigations just i think yesterday and what it exposed is pretty amazing the group the unit within the fbi SPEAKER_148: that conducted the raid on mar-a-lago is the the same group that conducted the investigation into trump back in 2016 that lied to the fisa court that had its members as leaders peter struck were fired for basically wrongdoing whose members are actually under investigation right now by the special counsel john durham and you've got people who are on probation right now so this is the same unit that basically conducted the raid on mar-a-lago so i think there's still more to come out about this but it's just SPEAKER_114: amazing to me actually that christopher ray the head of the fbi americ garland the head of the doj thought that this wouldn't create the appearance of a conflict of interest or impropriety the fact SPEAKER_148: that you've got the same unit that previously was disciplined for wrongdoing in an investigation of SPEAKER_396: trump is the one conducting the raid on mar-a-lago so pretty amazing jay cal retort i'm sorry what SPEAKER_03: we're talking about um no i i'll tell you so brutal no i i just want to make a couple of uh child actors oh look at these problems they're on camera look at these props amazing good work SPEAKER_37: nice props beautiful and that's what you're seeing there hold on sex before you get back to trump what you're seeing there is a family unit this is when a family gets together and expresses love towards SPEAKER_407: each other but continue about mar-a-lago no that's wonderful that's wonderful that's wonderful you could take a picture of this and you could send it to your friends on christmas all right jason you SPEAKER_22: you are um you do not accept the real clear investigation report that maybe there is some SPEAKER_36: long term i'll um i have uh actually some feedback it's nothing to do with sacks i just think a lot of times i get positioned as sometimes when i'm moderating i like to challenge sacks last week i chose to stay out of it i let him go and i think one of the reasons people didn't like your comments last week sacks was other than you know jay or whoever being dead for 50 years putting that aside and it being irrelevant i think the reason people didn't like it was because i didn't come back at you and question some of the things you were saying and so i think they felt it was an unbalanced discussion they expect me to do that but i don't want to be pinned as the adversary to to sax's SPEAKER_37: positions in every case because i'm an independent i'm a moderate i voted republic i voted uh democrat my whole life i voted for both of those parties but i do think that what's happening here is you SPEAKER_36: know trump is under five different investigations he's got a career of doing disgraceful criminal fraudulent things and i feel very bad for gop friends uh i feel bad for republicans because they have to carry water for him and it's they they put themselves in this really difficult position of defending him and you know we've talked on this podcast about january 6th we talked about voter fraud my good friend one of my besties david sacks has said he doesn't believe that the election was there was election fraud and he doesn't he did he thought january 6 was disgusting i'm not speaking for you that's what you said and so i think you know the fact that the republicans feel the need to defend him constantly is one of the big problems here and i think on the other side the fact that the media is forcing republicans to defend him and creating this narrative and this hysterics like oh my god it's the sba espionage act he's doing espionage this might be very simple trump lied cheated stole his whole career from trump university to what's happening with you know the trump corporation now uh with the cfo and his non-profit this is his life is a history of grifts and crimes and unethical behavior what the gop needs to do is stop defending him and just let him go off into the sunset as sacks pointed out last week and that's what this podcast needs to do because there's no reason for me to sit here and do the left-wing talking points or for you know sacks to do the right-wing talking points the fact is first principles trump's a grifter he's a democrat SPEAKER_114: that's it my point is not to defend every shady deal that trump's ever done or even to defend trump at all my interest is having a doj and fbi that's not politicized and is not used as a political weapon or to pursue political targeting or vendettas and the reality is at some point we're going to move past trump as a country but the precedents that are created now are going to stick with us for a long time and the reality is we should not have an fbi and a unit within the fbi that SPEAKER_148: is pursuing these political vendettas and in this article by real clear politics the amazing thing yeah the amazing thing is christopher ray prohibited this unit from seeking warrants from the fisa court so he knew there was enough misbehavior last time to basically prohibit them but it seems to me that's a very narrow takeaway it seems to me that the takeaway should be we don't allow this unit to pursue trump again because they committed so much wrongdoing yeah it would be cleaner SPEAKER_415: to have a clean unit right why wouldn't they do that yeah if that's if it's true because that SPEAKER_64: is from a biased source and if it is true that would be good i mean real clear politics is kind SPEAKER_22: of like a politico look guys this has been a lot of fun jcal thank you for letting me sit in your SPEAKER_420: seat today yeah you did great awesome you know i appreciate that it was it was a lot of fun maybe sax would like to have a run in the seat at some point here he doesn't SPEAKER_22: but uh for your as your guest moderator for uh today i'm dave friedberg and this SPEAKER_429: is your all in pop thank you bye-bye david sacks i've been sourced it to the therapy SPEAKER_431: we need to get