SPEAKER_00: sacks i am going to give you a thousand dollars each to the charity of your choice for every

SPEAKER_01: correct answer fuck it ten thousand but you have to answer you have to answer in real time and you

SPEAKER_03: can't fuck around okay no stalling this is to this is to any charity chooses included tucker carlson 2024 okay let's go you have to give the answers right away you cannot fucking think about

SPEAKER_00: this here we go three two one first middle and last name of your children and their birthdays go

SPEAKER_05: um first

SPEAKER_08: stalling for time already no you're already stuck okay go do you know you can beat these out nick go ahead

SPEAKER_12: go so is uh january no year what's the year uh 2008 is uh october 2010

SPEAKER_18: and then little guy little man you're trying to stop me you're trying to stop me with the little guy little man the little guy the little guy

SPEAKER_21: the bubby uh he was born october

SPEAKER_27: of uh 2016. all right good you did it you did it all right that was a struggle i got it i got it

SPEAKER_30: he got there he got there that's all that matters is he got there it is it is so you're gonna give the you're gonna give 10 grand yeah 10 grand each to uh 10 grand each so it's 30 grand name 30 grand to

SPEAKER_36: tucker caulson for president de santus 2024

SPEAKER_52: i said charity asshole hey everybody hey everybody welcome to your favorite podcast the all in podcast where we talk about the economy technology politics and well basically anything that's in the news

SPEAKER_54: with us today again the queen of quinoa himself david friedberg how are you doing david i'm hanging in

SPEAKER_56: there today all right people are looking for the dog where's the dog monty he's sitting here on the floor monty come here come on come here come on monty all right

SPEAKER_55: and from a random palace somewhere in the world the dictator himself chamath palihapiti how you doing

SPEAKER_61: see uh i'm doing great you know i got another dog while you were in italy uh i went to um

SPEAKER_00: the breeder that i got aki from and uh she had a three-year-old that was not really you know ever gonna become a breeding dog or whatever so i adopted the three-year-old he has a parasite so he's been

SPEAKER_67: pooing everywhere everywhere that's great information for the call over the all over the castle all over

SPEAKER_00: the castle fantastic liquid poop by the way uh but we finally diagnosed it today and he's going to the

SPEAKER_70: to the vet um to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body

SPEAKER_73: uh okay thank you for that information and i don't know nobody cares you nobody cares i mean i asked you how you were doing i thought you were just going to say great i didn't know we were going

SPEAKER_79: to go straight to diarrhea we got a new dog too you did and it's also it's been kind of a disaster the kids were like dad we found this like uh i think you know golden that is really calm you know like she's just super low energy and calm it's like perfect for us i'm like i don't know i think

SPEAKER_81: that's just like the puppy's kind of asleep you know like it's gonna wake up they're like no no no no this is like a special dog it's like really well behaved whatever so anyway we get it sure

SPEAKER_79: enough like a week later the puppy wakes up and she's eating everything in the house destroying everything it's been yeah so now we're wait is that dog number two or three for you it's dog two with the for dog one was a rescue dog who's great so dog number two is now getting trained

SPEAKER_55: all right david sax is with us of course the rain man himself and in related dog stories i put all the

SPEAKER_84: girls to bed and then i hear screaming i get up i run outside literally the new bulldog who's nine months old maximus went on you know one of his running fits one of my daughters falls out of bed gets like a bruise on her like lower back and she's wailing the other daughter feels terrible about it and then the dog decides that he is going to projectile vomit everywhere all at the same time yeah you guys have had these moments where like it's just complete utter chaos it's chaos chaos it's

SPEAKER_00: cat dogs plus kids equals chaos uh chaos so but would any of us have it any other way i love the combo

SPEAKER_84: of dogs and kids it's just the best it's pretty great it's dogs are amazing and kids especially when

SPEAKER_00: you bring in a new dog or a puppy into the house it's chaos but it's a really beautiful chaos well you

SPEAKER_84: know what i think also is like think about how overrated everything in life is people like oh my god

SPEAKER_03: this place with the pasta in italy it's the greatest life-changing thing and oh this movie was incredible it's the best movie ever made and it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever it's great or whatever but i think kids and dogs are underrated universally have as many kids as

SPEAKER_00: you can possibly biologically have and can economically afford is my one opinion and uh the more dogs the

SPEAKER_84: better i love dogs yeah all right uh i think we should start with the covet cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions touching on people's freedoms and it's hard to know where to start here but i think facts are always a good place to start here in the united states we had gotten covet cases you know to that 12 000 a day average it was pretty amazing and it looked like it was going to go straight down smooth sailing um and we had deaths down and around uh i saw some seven day averages where we were at 150 200 now the weekends are kind of weird um in terms of reporting but the seven day average today is at 248 in other words it's been flat for a month when you do

SPEAKER_96: this on this is according to the new york times statistics and google you can search for google

SPEAKER_98: and you'll find these have some great data that they'll just put right in the search result however

SPEAKER_58: cases have gone from this 12 15k a day average soaring in just 30 days to 62 000 a day and a seven day average of 40 000 so we're basically triple the number of cases cases trail traditionally debts by something in the neighborhood of 10 days uh i think i'm correct friedberg so what do you think is actually going to happen here we're gonna we're gonna get up to 10 100 000 200 000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated yeah you know the current

SPEAKER_105: logic on this is that there will be um because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even more infectious variant of covid the people that are not vaccinated are um starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from so um yeah we will see deaths climb and i think like we talked about last time we're starting to see even gavin did an interview yesterday in california talking about how you know there it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions uh behavioral restrictions mask mandates etc um so there's going to be a set of reactions and i think as we talked about last time we saw the market start to react to the potential of that on monday uh and then very interestingly kind of reverse course on tuesday and everything came back when everyone was freaked out on monday after they saw the weekend's data which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the u.s but i think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are going to die therefore we're not going to see you know um uh political leaders uh force restrictions that are kind of uh going to damage the economy and we're going to start to walk what i think israel is calling the golden line which is balancing the economy with the uh the health of the uh citizenry so um so you know we'll see uh it's going to come down to policy but i think from a death perspective there will absolutely be a rise in deaths now as unvaccinated people are the going to be the bulk of those deaths and

SPEAKER_106: and this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated

SPEAKER_84: well and then sax this becomes now a great raw shock test of what do you see uh in this data and in this moment because it's a pandemic as many people are saying now i think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated so people have chosen to opt into this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it you were part of it even as a vaccinated person but you're feeling great you're back to a hundred percent so what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mask mandates what's your take on the

SPEAKER_111: pandemic of the unvaccinated well i think we need to differentiate between uh public policy and

SPEAKER_79: private behavior so you know after last week's episode where i said you know delta variance real there's gonna be huge spike in cases um unfortunately i thought we had this thing whipped you know a few weeks ago now i think the data is showing something different you know everyone there's a lot of commenters saying sax you've turned you've been blue pilled no it's you know i i think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the the policy conversation around it um i think that the difference now from last year i mean there's a couple of things

SPEAKER_81: one is that we do have vaccines so i think for most people getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table the other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work and so lockdowns don't work if you know if they ever did they they they they we now know looking at from what different states did last year that they don't make a difference so there's no reason to go back

SPEAKER_79: to that policy but also i mean i would even say on mass it should be wait wait do we know that i

SPEAKER_81: mean is that i think so are we sure of that yeah i think so because um the the thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions so in florida they didn't have mandates but people who are at risk took you know extreme precautions they would either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high quality mask by contrast in california we had the most severe lockdowns but they were never really feasible so there's 10 pages of exceptions people didn't really abide by them

SPEAKER_116: and then on top of it you know you have all these mass mandates but if somebody wears like a sock loosely affixed to their face does that really protect them you know so you know people if they're

SPEAKER_81: if they're not interested in complying with these mandates they do it in a half-hearted way i'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place um so the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is going to be we know now so much more about the risks that we all face uh than we did a year ago um and so just let private citizens decide i mean i'd even say on on vaccines i mean look i'm pro vax i don't really understand where the anti-vax people are coming from but i'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated you know on this show who don't want to get vaccinated you know if they don't want to send those doses to the developing world where they're desperate for them let me ask

SPEAKER_117: you chamath do you do you agree with sax's position that listen citizens are just going to have to make

SPEAKER_84: their own decision here leave everything open and let's not have the economy collapse again and people people are smart enough to make their own decision and is this framing of this is a pandemic of the

SPEAKER_00: unvaccinated the correct framing wow i'm really of two minds there's there's the part of me that says that um you have to give people the right to make their own decision the problem is that in this specific case there's so much transmissibility and um as a result of that how this thing can mutate that i think that public health has to take a priority um over any individual individual's

SPEAKER_121: rights in in this very specific narrow narrow case because the delta variant is so transmissible

SPEAKER_124: transmissible people are going to have to lose some freedoms is one of those showing a vaccine card

SPEAKER_00: when you go to uh an arena that you wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops to be unvaccinated as an example i mean and and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the petri dish of the unvaccinated you're increasing everybody's risk and this is where i think individual freedoms as long as it doesn't trample on collective freedom then i think live and let live but i think on this specific issue uh i think that it's it's it's unconscionable to be in a situation where um we are fighting basically a time function where at a certain amount of time you're going to have a variant that that is you know basically will overcome all the vaccines we have will uh kill enormous numbers of people including the vaccinated will literally shut the economy down and that's a probabilistic event now and i don't like the fact that i'm susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for

SPEAKER_130: medical or religious reasons they're just watching fox news and just spouting off i agree that we're

SPEAKER_79: at risk there but we're also at risk from accident unvaccinated people in the rest of the world so delta variant came from india the uh lambda variant i think the wrong came from peru i mean the fact the

SPEAKER_81: matter is unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential petri dish for the virus so i'd rather i mean this is why we need to send those unused doses that by the way are at risk of expiring we now i mean there was a tweet about this recently there's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the u.s that are going to

SPEAKER_79: waste right now we should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated

SPEAKER_84: specifically to mexico and canada and canada's i think this uh month going to even though we got off to a massive head start going to uh eclipse us in terms of the percentage vaccinated let me ask it more pointedly should a t should teachers be public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation airplanes or you know take buses you know long-haul buses uh long-haul trains uh and then third should you be forced to show a vaccine card to get on to go to sporting events or concerts let's go through those three

SPEAKER_134: so your personal freedom ends you're going to be forced if you want to go to group behaviors

SPEAKER_00: if you want to participate in a public construct if you want to consume a public resource or if you want to provide a publicly funded good then it's the broader public's rights that um are superior to your individual rights otherwise work at a charter school where it's not required watch the fucking concert from home or drive your car use a bicycle or take an uber the end sacks what do you think and

SPEAKER_79: then freeberg so i i understand that argument i would differentiate between public and private requirements because i i don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm um so well what you might say you could stay home or you could take your bicycle

SPEAKER_140: well sure so is that a reasonable that you don't get to go to a warriors game because you're unvaccinated

SPEAKER_111: yeah i i think you know the warrior stadium is is privately owned the team is private so i think

SPEAKER_81: the i think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their

SPEAKER_142: employees and customers what about airlines because that is you know a gate it's there's a limited

SPEAKER_03: number of them yeah i think so airlines should be able to force it now what about school teachers

SPEAKER_145: should they they can't they can't force it but they can set the requirements for you to board

SPEAKER_98: their planes you know okay now what about public schools should if let's do teachers and students

SPEAKER_03: should teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in because you said if they don't come to work in the fall on a couple episodes back you're fired well why wouldn't they want to get a

SPEAKER_81: vaccine the whole debate with the teachers unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many so i don't think that's a serious issue now now requiring the kids to get vaccinated is um that that would be the real policy question

SPEAKER_151: and um well let's tackle both should teachers be forced to get the vaccine yes or no you just kind of

SPEAKER_105: brushed over yeah you've forced forced no i mean i think it's important to just and to just you know pinpoint this like forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to you know work at the school i just want to highlight the precedent it sets right which is um you know you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in their arm if someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot does that mean then that they you know should

SPEAKER_111: lose their job as a public servant well no i mean no i'm i'm saying that i i look i i think

SPEAKER_105: you said it's not a big deal but like if there's one or two teachers that say you know what it is a big deal to me i have a different i have a set of reasons why i don't want to get a shot i i think those

SPEAKER_81: teachers that's an assumption of risk i mean if they've decided they're going to assume the risk then you know don't come crying to us when they get sick well the argument is that was your choice

SPEAKER_161: the vector of exposure right that they could potentially petri dishes as they could be that they could they could be the vector that gets kids sick in all of these situations there's an

SPEAKER_00: always a very um obvious and justifiable exemption for religious and medical reasons to not be vaccinated not just for this but for anything else so i struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a fucking clue about science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate for them where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves they probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors but on this one specific issue they narrowly say you know what i'm an expert enough

SPEAKER_164: because i'm watching this television show i've made a decision that to me makes no sense yeah look

SPEAKER_79: i i actually agree with you i'm in the camp of um that everybody barring some you know um highly specific medical condition that renders you ineligible should be getting vaccinated so i agree with you

SPEAKER_81: about what the right answer is but i do think that when it comes to government it's it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to government to force people to engage in

SPEAKER_116: you know behavior they don't want to engage in can you i think it's a real question private

David Friedberg: organizations are different we'll agree on private organizations but we we do have to make some decisions on public transportation and we do have to make decisions about teachers and we're going to

SPEAKER_84: have to make decisions on students so um could you bench the teachers uh who or otherwise penalize them who are not vaccinated you know there are some times where you know a cop or a teacher is put in a you know not in the classroom not on the beat for whatever reasons uh sometimes disciplinary but for other reasons could you just say listen if you're not going to get vaccinated you're going to not be in the classroom you're not going to you'll be a remote teacher and we're just going to create two

SPEAKER_111: classes here i don't i don't think i don't i don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get

SPEAKER_79: vaccinated but but i um look i think the virus is everywhere now it's just endemic and so to single out like one particular group and say you're going to put you down on your opinion so you're saying

SPEAKER_81: teachers should not be forced i'm saying that i mean if they work at a private school the private

SPEAKER_175: school could definitely require it we're talking about public only now we all would be on private so you're saying i think it's a really can you down on it yeah i think it's a really complicated

SPEAKER_81: question because i think there are clear public health benefits to everyone getting vaccinated but i also don't really like empowering government to force you because look it's like everything else the government may be right in this particular case but what else is it going to do with that power and you know i don't like giving government that power so look it's a complicated question i don't you know it's not um i would i would probably err on the side of not letting government force people to do it but but but look i i think it's a close call i do think it's a close call

SPEAKER_179: chamath forced the teachers to get vaccinated or not yes and the reason is because these kids

Chamath Palihapitiya: are already being left behind even when school is functioning normally and you can see it in the test scores you can see it in our readiness you can see it in our ability to uh actually do the jobs that are required um we are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic

SPEAKER_00: and now you introduce a reason for folks to basically check out and not appear i what do you guys guess

Chamath Palihapitiya: how how many years were lost in these 15 months when kids were at home i would say not 15 months no

SPEAKER_183: it's more two years two and a half years three years it's also this psychological starring depending

SPEAKER_54: on what grade they are what did the did your kids miss graduation did they miss senior prom did they miss their sats i mean what did they miss in terms of yeah i mean chamath chamath is a good point which

SPEAKER_81: is that if that that when government is the employer requiring it on their employees because it leads

SPEAKER_116: to better outcomes for that institution that is a little different than government just mandating that you jason calcana's private citizen have to go get a shot in your arm right i mean so there is a slight difference there like military for instance right the military probably wants to vaccinate everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation they're not like you know incapacitated by an outbreak of covet right so i can i i think there you know we're getting into shades of gray

SPEAKER_81: here from a public policy perspective you know i i don't want uh teachers missing school because you

SPEAKER_116: know for weeks at a time because they didn't do the obvious thing getting the code vaccine so look i i think there are some really good policy arguments there but i think again the the one place where i'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said listen you private citizen not an employee of the government has to go get vaccinated as much as i would like everyone to to get vaccinated

SPEAKER_191: i don't want to give government that kind of power president biden could legally require military

SPEAKER_84: members to get vaccinated but so far he has declined to do so july 9th new york times friedberg where do you stand on this chamat says he's all in your teacher you get vaccinated the end sax is kind of close but is a little concerned what do you say freeberg i mean another way to frame it

SPEAKER_105: is that there's a new qualification for a job like you know there's qualification to be in the military you have to have certain physical capabilities jason i don't know if you would qualify um i don't think i would i don't think i could be like for for totally different reasons

SPEAKER_197: your inability to fight or throw a punch would be no maybe jcal could eat the enemy

SPEAKER_12: trust me i would be great in the military he'd be like lamenza he'd be cooking the meatballs or

SPEAKER_204: something private joker private pile a donut there's the re i think the reason there's sensitivity

SPEAKER_105: to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs and then you're telling them that in order to keep your job you have to go get a vaccine now if we were exactly if we were to have zero teachers today and we were starting a public school system from scratch and you said here's one of the qualifying criteria to be a school teacher you have to have an education degree you have to have maybe a master's degree in education you have to have appropriate qualifications and training and certification oh and by the way you also have to have a vaccine if that becomes a criteria i think people find it less offensive it's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go get a shot in order to keep your job um and that's the complicating thing that i think people are trying to wade through i don't think i don't think that if you were to say like look it's obvious that the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do push-ups or whatever the the criteria might be um but if you impose that on people that were already in the military and then you're going to kick a bunch of them out people would be up in arms about it yes if you had a bmi requirement yeah and that's the concern i think that arises with you know imposing these kind of um you know personal body uh uh criteria uh upon you know specific jobs when people are already employed in that job um and it's there's there's absolutely no answer right like if you're gonna do it you're gonna have incredible backlash and trouble and pain um and if you were to and we're not in a circumstance where we can build these organizations

SPEAKER_81: and these institutions from scratch look there's a lot of um social issues where you know particularly

SPEAKER_79: on the liberal side people do not want the government uh prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures right well um you know i'd say it's even more invasive talking about people

David Sacks: transitioning or you know or the issue of abortion you know very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not have the right to legislate what happens with what happens

SPEAKER_81: with what yeah what happens with my body right well force you know giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is you know that is that is invasive and um so i do think there are

SPEAKER_00: like rights implications to that but i want to be very clear if you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share then you need to sign up for the compact that we all sign up for that's that's my over arching argument the the thing with abortion where i'm on the other side of the issue just to be very clear is like it is a woman's body i don't think i have any right to dictate what she does i don't understand what she goes through i don't understand what situation she's in i don't think i have the judgment to do that it shouldn't have an impact on the collective and her decision to carry or not

Chamath Palihapitiya: carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a probabilistic chance that i may die it does not right but when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me or mutate yeah i'm not saying that i have a say but i do think i should have a say if

SPEAKER_220: you're then all of a sudden going to consume the same resources that i consume where i've signed up

SPEAKER_84: to that compact for public health based on all this here's where i come to what if we gave teachers an off-ramp listen if you um you you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom if not you're going to get a one-year buyout or whatever one month or two months for every year of service so if you've been with us for 20 years you're gonna get 20 months of pay and or you could say if the virus is spreading at under this rate in other words you know we we've got under one percent of the population infected or whatever the the criteria is then you can come to work in the classroom but if this thing is spreading you're out and that's it and there's an off-ramp here to david's point unless there's an

SPEAKER_00: arrow like look i do think you can be a conscientious objector for legitimate reasons again like we we have these very specific definitions for religious or for health specific reasons that you that you don't get vaccinated i think those should be respected it's not that cohort of people we're talking about it's everybody else that right now wants to not think for themselves and as a result

SPEAKER_218: put everybody else and themselves in danger yeah there i think the most compelling part of your

SPEAKER_81: argument jimoth is that we're is the health externality right that that that each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting you know multiplicative contagious particles and this is why i was in favor of a mass mandate at the beginning of the pandemic is it's not just an individual decision your your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick so you know this is why i i do think it's it also wasn't very invasive correct

SPEAKER_28: sax i mean was your other point yes exactly the potentially high benefit for very low cost

SPEAKER_116: i think we're but but but the thing that maybe i didn't necessarily take into consideration is you know people complied in such a half-hearted way i mean i do think the mass makes a difference if it's an n95 quality mask that you put on correctly right right but when people just strap a sock to their face it's loosely fitting and they don't give a i mean does that really make a difference i mean i'm

SPEAKER_84: very skeptical let me ask you a question sax and then we'll go to freeberg and then we'll flip to the

SPEAKER_58: next topic if we were on our third pandemic or let's god forbid a second pandemic starts a totally different one you know ebola type or something and we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a

SPEAKER_81: higher rate does your calculus change tax because sure because because the the um the downsides the the costs of you know not not imposing those more restrictive regulations goes up considerably i mean definitely my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that that if you're vaccinated you're call it 95 likely to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table and so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk you know it's like it's like smoking in a way where when i made the movie think for smoking chris buckley told me you

SPEAKER_116: know he's the author of the book and he said look there's something uniquely american about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful right the main character and thank you for smoking is a spokesman for big tobacco and he's engaging in political spin but his argument is look people have the right to engage in this behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them maybe america is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that but i do um i you know look that is that is um that's freedom is letting people do stupid things you know and um and so we have to weigh the benefits of freedom against the against the costs and um by the way sorry can i just say

SPEAKER_00: something um smoking is a perfect example because as you know there is now um a non-trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled um secondhand smoke both the smoker but also other things condo boards other places where all of a sudden you didn't choose to fucking have you know tar and nicotine right bartenders my dad worked in bars where people it was a cloud of

SPEAKER_54: smoke for 30 years 30 years right they told him he was essentially a smoker it's not it's not just the

SPEAKER_105: detrimental activity at the time remember we've socialized the cost of treatment for people uh through public health systems and because of that it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone that's now got to pay the price but the government is so omnipresent

SPEAKER_81: all of our lives there's always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make and to tamas point i mean everybody uses government services to some degree so that alone can't be the

SPEAKER_237: reason i i do agree that the no but behavior david what about people speeding on highways at 125 miles

SPEAKER_81: an hour like that's illegal that's illegal but but i think i think tamath is right that the smoking example is a good one because we do regulate secondhand smoke because there's an externality there's a health externality to everybody else if you smoke in a public place and so we restrict that but

David Sacks: we don't make smoking illegal we don't stop you from doing it in your own homes or in private places

SPEAKER_116: and the argument is listen if you want to do something that's harmful primarily to you that's your choice as an american you know and i know people a lot of people don't like that actually this is the this i posted a tweet that i got just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it should be

SPEAKER_84: censored just because the behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required right it's a completely reasonable tweet

SPEAKER_79: yeah i thought it was a pretty inoffensive anodyne tweet just um reminding people that just because again something is is positive doesn't mean you force people to do it and just because some behavior is

SPEAKER_81: harmful you don't you don't ban it i think smoking is a great example of that right we let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them because freedom is a value in and of itself for this i was attacked as a selfish by um by this other pod and i i really think our swisher and

SPEAKER_94: professor cold takes exactly professor what cold takes they literally made um an index of all of

SPEAKER_84: professor g's you know takes that macy's would be incredible and amazon would lose its money and yada yada he's kind of obsessed with youtube jimath prof g yeah who just got his show canceled on bloomberg but they were a little kara swisher was called sax and well triggered it was bizarre that

David Sacks: they would get so triggered by this inoffensive tweet but i think what you see here is an example of the way that the woke mind thinks which is well hold on i don't think kara's woke are you kidding me she's like she's like the madame dufarge or the woke revolution she's admitting to far

SPEAKER_116: madame madame dufarge was this character in the french revolution who had knit the names of the next person to be guillotined and uh she was you know one of the the leaders of the sans

David Sacks: culottes no look kara is constantly ginning up the mob to try and you know guillotine some

SPEAKER_255: non-known non-work person i don't think that that's true i don't know that's true i think she's kind

SPEAKER_259: of moderate you're trying to you're trying to curry favor with her so you don't know we're not no no she i mean she did get it right you are an i mean you are an she got that

SPEAKER_263: but you're not old and failing well you are kind of old you looked old you look old she's effectively

SPEAKER_22: saying we're all because i think all of us have talked about that we're assholes i'm an

SPEAKER_266: asshole yeah i love it own it i'm not a whiner what's your other choice being a whiner on the

SPEAKER_116: sidelines what we've said on this show is that we have a moral imperative to get to get back to normal do we not that is what we've said and for that she's basically saying that that is a let them eat covid position right that we are basically we don't care if people get sick and die because of covid that's not true you know we just have about here i think we should make people get vaccinated

SPEAKER_230: yeah you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated i asked you uh sax if there were

SPEAKER_276: three more variants and this was an acute situation you said you would force oh look if we had if we

SPEAKER_116: had a variant of covid that was as deadly as ebola and as transmissible as delta variant it 100

SPEAKER_124: changes the game there's no question about it willing to change the government's ability to

SPEAKER_227: put a shock based on it's a benefit it's a bit yes it's a benefit cost analysis and it's reasonable

SPEAKER_116: but look i give freedom a lot of weight and part of my calculation is the fact that i can get vaccinated to take to most likely take the most serious risk off the table so while i i am impacted to some

SPEAKER_22: degree by other people's choices i'm much less impacted now that we have but you're thinking about

SPEAKER_280: this you're i still have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're

Chamath Palihapitiya: using you're viewing this as a linear problem this thing is transmutating and so i know but there are

SPEAKER_116: still billions of people all over the world who are unvaccinated and we'd be better off focusing on getting them a marshall plan for the vaccines all these unused doses we're wasting our breath in the united states trying to get these vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people to get vaccinated did you

SPEAKER_105: guys see that um uh emmanuel macron of france uh you know basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places uh going into bars and cafes they basically put all these rules in

SPEAKER_283: place that you have to be vaccinated and he did it in a public address on tv 22 million people watched it

SPEAKER_105: yep and then after he did this suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20 000 a minute they got four million people signed up to get vaccinated yeah after they can't go to a cafe i mean in france what's the point of being alive and then let me throw a wet blanket on uh the framing of this on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even make sense or is possible i have been to like three events over the last month or two where i was required to be vaccinated and i literally just took a photo of this index card that i got from this person and sent it to them which i could go make at kinkos or i could print at home it's a lot of effort there's i i don't my point is i don't think that there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about how are you actually going to know that people going to the warriors game are actually

SPEAKER_124: vaccinated how are you actually going to know they did it at madison square ground they they literally had you pull out your id and they match your name to your vax card and i think printing out a vax

SPEAKER_230: card and faking it could be a fine could be a ten thousand dollar fine and so you would do it like anything else if you could you could make a bogus driver's license my point is that it's not digital

SPEAKER_105: right there's no there's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated who's not so so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like here's this piece of paper that says i'm vaccinated i think that you're you're never going to really close the hole on this thing now you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in france which is you just announce the restrictions you announce these rules everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up but i you know i'm not sure this actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society uh over the next uh you know short while i mean maybe over

SPEAKER_235: time we digitize all this stuff but we'll see yeah i mean the best the best the best case scenario is

SPEAKER_111: that because delta is so transmissible we get to herd immunity because all the people who didn't get

SPEAKER_77: vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing turns out are we to

SPEAKER_185: that because we have 60 percent of adults in the united states have had one shot or more uh which is why deaths probably aren't going up because that's like 75 percent in people over 60 i think so freeberg in your estimation as our science guy with what we have like 30 million people who've been infected uh that we know of you got to triple that number right because there's people who we don't know and then you have 65 you have 60 so we got to be in the range of 70 have been exposed or been

SPEAKER_58: vaccinated so when does it kick in or are we experiencing you know um herd immunity right

SPEAKER_105: now with these low deaths um we talked about this before but there are um you know there's a spectrum of infection right you're you're you can have viral replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know because you've got enough antibodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus before your body even you know you start to feel symptoms and there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time and you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation and all the stuff that follows um and so you know in terms of uh how you measure this stuff it's really difficult to say that you're going to stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to be to have been exposed as we've seen even when you have a broad and diverse antibody um pool in your body because you've been exposed to a vaccine we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant and so the rate of transmission slows the rate of severe infection goes way down and so on so it's not as binary as hey we hit herd immunity and now we're done it seems this is you know as we talked about earlier and as i think everyone is coming to terms with this is going to be an endemic virus and that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way causing sometimes severe sometimes you know modest outbreaks for likely a very long time no matter how many people get it no matter how many people get vaccinated because you have different levels should

SPEAKER_54: we ignore it at what level should we just say listen that is the steady state how many cases a day how many deaths a day do you think is the steady state that we should just say we just go to work and

SPEAKER_105: ignore it i am a brutal cold-hearted libertarian on this point and i have been since we first talked about this last year i've always been of the mind that we need to balance the um the the follow-on life effect and from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual loss of life right so you can never go i i i really think this point about zeroism and this term about zeroism is an important one you can never get to zero cases what is the acceptable number of cases and what is the cost to keep that caseload down the balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision put a number on it it's about saving lives right so like there are a certain number of people whose lives are going to be ruined who are some of them will commit suicide some of them won't be able to earn an income again their businesses are going to get shut down what is the economic cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life what i'm saying is what is the number we had an

SPEAKER_124: average of 250 death 250 000 case known cases a day at the peak we had a peak deaths of 4100 a day we are now at 200 people dying a day and you know 30 000 cases is there a number at which you say let's just focus on getting back to work and is that number where we are now i'm trying to get an

SPEAKER_287: idea yeah again i wouldn't simplify it to those data points what i would do is do we simplify again i would

SPEAKER_105: look at you know at what age are people dying how many life years are we losing and how can we address the acute populations that are at risk and the acute populations that are that are potentially um going to be exposed manage those populations differently than you manage the broader population that has a lower likelihood of risk of of death and a lower likelihood of fatality and the restrictions that you then impose to you know start to manage uh the risk and the exposure to different populations gets weighed against the saving of life and the loss of life in both circumstances so it's it's not easy right it's it's and everyone wants to sum this whole thing up to like how many deaths a day is appropriate that's not the right answer right because well you're saying

SPEAKER_116: how many that part of it is so obvious right that and we should have known this last summer the obvious part being that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's the most at risk and what do we do with lockdowns we literally locked down the entire population every business it was completely insane we should have focused it on protecting the most at-risk populations isolating the sick or the people at greatest risk not everybody it was just insane and um i mean i can't believe we're still having that conversation a year later can i uh before we

SPEAKER_00: move on to the next topic can i read the best can i read the best best comment from sax's tweet so sax's tweet just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it should be censored just because the behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited and just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required the best response goes to distantly social rumpel whose full name is at wendell shirk who said this message brought to you by the generic self-serving platitude

SPEAKER_246: alert network we now return you to your regularly scheduled episode of the bland soap opera with the

SPEAKER_116: pablum sisters well yeah i look there there's an element of truth to that which is i i i almost didn't tweet it because i thought it was too much of a platitude but the fact that people on the other side got so triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to to tweet it is they think that if you're calling for any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy you're basically a selfish i mean it's insane i mean they want to stay in this world of zeroes covet restrictions forever we gotta move on

SPEAKER_124: we're 45 minutes into covet so we gotta move on but i think if this is in the influenza plus or minus 100

SPEAKER_84: zone we gotta pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society and you know local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks but i kind of think if this is within you know 2x of our yearly deaths from you know influenza and just the normal cold i think we move forward as best we can do we want to go to china cuba i think just real quick before we move away from this

SPEAKER_105: i really want to just highlight the deep mind announcement from this morning because i think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on okay so this morning you know deep mind which published uh alpha fold we talked about this a few uh uh deep mind is owned by google it's their ai arm it's it's an ai arm owned by google and they they basically took protein structure and uh tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of uh the dna or rna that codes the amino acids that make up the protein and so again like when you have a string of amino acids they they combine and they fold into a wave it's really hard to predict and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein and then it does something in the body and historically we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body so this morning deep mind incredibly published a database with the predicted structure of every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this this capability that they now have

SPEAKER_151: what does it mean in english and so you know what this means is we now have a physical model

SPEAKER_105: of every protein that human dna can make and that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does how it does it and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins and how certain drugs can affect those proteins and how we can alter human health by making new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways so it's an incredible data set that was just published it's almost like you know releasing the rosetta stone in my opinion in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body they did it for 10 other species and they said that they're going to publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have the sort of data set around um for which they expect will achieve over a hundred million unique proteins in this database over the coming months freely available and searchable and let me just explain and i know i'm on a monologue here so i'll win the monologue stat it's a good one it's a good one um but let me just explain why this is relevant the delta variant what it is is that you know the the the sars cov2 rna sequence is about 30 000 base pairs long 10 of those are about 3 000 base pairs make up the spike protein which is the protein at the tip of the covid virus the coronavirus that gets into the cells and um you know for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus there's about one nucleoside mutation one of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves and we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein and so we suddenly discover empirically and you know by looking around suddenly all these people are getting more infected than we're getting infected before we look at the genetic code and we're like oh here's the changes that happened but we could have with this capability from alpha fold predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ace 2 receptors on the cells and getting into cells and what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the sars cov2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible more deadly all these sorts of factors because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair and so this tool that was released today i think highlights that over the next decade these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring um that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally and it gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them uh with new drugs and new variant models and new um vaccines well ahead of the oh my god we just got hit with a nuclear bomb let's clean up the mess kind of in the future so it's an exciting day an exciting moment would they have been released this

SPEAKER_124: david if it hadn't been for covid coming out do you think deep mind just pivoted their entire group

SPEAKER_185: because they have about a thousand people i understand and by the way they pay something in the order of six or seven hundred thousand a year on average and there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year so just think about the scale of what google is spending on this

SPEAKER_52: you guys know that they probably shifted a large number of people to work on this you guys know

SPEAKER_105: i have long deep roots at google and um i will tell you that the value system of people there you know the press and the public will think what they want but i think that the value system of people there um drove them to realize the importance of this work that they're doing with alpha fold and it is important for humanity and it's important for the health broadly of people they could have kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that and i think the importance of this discovery and this capability um was uh was realized and is published for that very reason uh there's a lot of work that deep mind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending and all this stuff and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for google per year based on those capabilities and then there are these things that benefit all of us and by putting this out publicly it's a it's a great good for humanity and uh you know they're they're making it freely available and searchable um and so i i don't think that covid kind of instigated this because they've been working on this for a very long time since before covid and this is a very hard biological problem that that is key to understanding biology and how biology works that's been going on for decades they've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available um and you know there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database i mean this is a

SPEAKER_84: this is a mitzvah uh to society to humanity does it change the fact that google is spending well over a billion dollars a year on deep mind and doing projects like this does this change any you're thinking about breaking them up chamath or you know how we look at big tech that's a good question no

SPEAKER_79: because how do you afford this yeah where does it where does this kind of we learned something very disturbing about big tech this week actually um this is quite a bombshell that jen pasaki dropped from the white house press briefing we got to talk about this she just sort of casually mentioned

SPEAKER_116: that oh yeah by the way the administration is flagging posts for a social media company for big tech companies to take down to remove accounts they're talking about specific accounts and posts yeah and she just kind of meant just casually mentions oh yeah the big tech companies are very you know eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these counts accounts she even said that when one of these companies takes down an account the rest should do it too implying that the white house is providing the central coordinative role in the censorship global block list yeah

SPEAKER_124: let's take the most charitable view here i know that it's very easy to make this a left versus right

SPEAKER_58: they're censoring yada yada trump got banned but if somebody was saying this was micro this was an account that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine would it not be how would the and it was hitting scale you know what would be the way for the white house to inform social media

SPEAKER_29: that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was

David Sacks: trending the white house or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position but this is different this is the white house coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies

SPEAKER_132: well they're not behind the scenes they're saying they're doing it right here to everybody correct

SPEAKER_22: correct the behavior was behind the scenes but pisaki just admitted it which is why it's such a

SPEAKER_132: bomb show look even the aclu if you were president and there there was an account on facebook youtube twitter that was saying there was a microchip from bill gates this is a this is a blatant violation of

SPEAKER_116: the people's first amendment tell them how would you you are allowed you're the first amendment gives you the right to say things that are untrue it is not the business of government to declare what is true and what is false okay even hold on even the acl i'm not done even the aclu came out of retirement we hadn't we haven't heard from them for the last year during any of these hard to be the aclu yeah we haven't heard from them during the past year during all of this activity has been going on with accounts being blocked and ghosted they finally came out of retirement to say that that this is a dangerous violation of people's first amendment rights you cannot have the government saying what is true and what is false and then denying people the right to express their opinions based on what the government thinks is the truth and by the way there's been a very subtle change here in the language that's being used if you remember what the argument used to be that we have to stop disinformation does uh now it's shifted to we have to stop misinformation so those two things are very different it's kind of like that well it's kind of like the difference in the term equality versus equity they sound similar but they actually mean very different things so disinformation is actually a campaign of uh purposeful purposeful campaign of propaganda and lies usually put forward covertly so it's the fsb you're some intelligence agency putting out whatever putting out disinformation usually under false accounts so in that case we can say no you can't do that because you can't engage in deception around who you are right but misinformation is simply information that's being put out that frankly you disagree with okay and or it could be discernibly wrong wait you're you're kind of framing that

SPEAKER_03: right it could be you're putting out information like there's a microchip in the vaccine that is

David Sacks: explicitly known to be wrong look the the lab leak theory was considered misinformation by these same

SPEAKER_52: people three months ago okay let's take the specific example of there's a microchip if the if it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine would you be okay with the white house contacting social media companies saying hey you got these accounts that are saying there's a microchip

SPEAKER_58: you might want to look into it they're not saying take it down they're saying take a look into it

SPEAKER_210: that's not the white house's business do i believe in the microchip theory no of course

SPEAKER_192: not it's absolutely ridiculous but it is not the business of government to be telling social media

SPEAKER_237: who to ban and who to block list i think they didn't tell them to ban i think they told them

SPEAKER_22: to be aware of it go ahead chamoff i think your framing's wrong sex no no saki said that when one site takes it down they should all take it down and then biden on top of it comes out and pours

SPEAKER_116: kerosene on the fire by saying that social media sites are literally killing people well yeah yeah by allowing by allowing this misinformation so here we see now let's be honest he's a president this is the president of the united states using the bully pulpit to call social media uh sites mass

SPEAKER_225: murderers by virtue of allowing people to have free speech trump never used language that intemperate i don't remember him ever calling my god american companies go ahead chamot speak let

Chamath Palihapitiya: you not speak this is the exact reason you you can't have a strangle hold on distribution because

SPEAKER_218: it will get perverted and then we either have people we like or people we don't like in these positions of power or people we like or people we don't like regulating and it's constantly flipping

SPEAKER_00: and we're all just doomed and bound to get fucked over so back to the thing that friedberg brought up before i think alpha fold is incredible i think google has been an incredible company

SPEAKER_218: they make money hand over fist they waste an enormous amount of money in all kinds of trash so it's good that they were actually able to do something useful here i generally think that companies like google and facebook and amazon unfortunately do not allow

SPEAKER_374: the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society they're just too big

SPEAKER_144: trump makes a great point which is we've got these big tech monopolies who've become gatekeepers over

David Sacks: content okay and what the administration has done and their allies in congress is hang a sword of

SPEAKER_116: damocles over the heads of these big tech companies they've appointed lena khan to be the enforcer at the ftc they've got their six bills in congress right now they've held congressional hearings around taking away section 230 protection which is very economically advantageous for these big tech companies so they've positioned the sword perfectly over the heads of these big tech companies threatening to break them up and rein them in and then jen pisaki in the white house go to them and say we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with this is misinformation okay that is a huge danger to free speech it's basically like the administration saying to these big tech companies nice little social network you got there it'd be a real shame if anything happened to it look at what's going on don't you want them broken up i do want them broken up but what i don't want

SPEAKER_379: so which is it do you want them to hold the sword or do you not want them to hold the sword i actually want the sword to come crashing i actually want the sword to come crashing down swing the sword not

SPEAKER_380: hold it over and then use it for extortion yes that's actually a great explanation then free

SPEAKER_151: i'm trying to moderate here freeberg i've do you give a shit we've talked about this

SPEAKER_01: freeberg has spent all day on his phone he has not dialed into this podcast with you guys i thought

SPEAKER_58: we just went over the alpha fold stuff way too fast i mean the arguing over freedom of speech is happening and all of this debate friedberg at the same time that we are making incredible life changing moments for humanity two different companies went to space last week with civilians and then we are basically uh defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on the planet and we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would save everybody's life and let us continue on and people are dunking on bezos for not reading the room i don't know if you saw this friedberg but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room etc progress

SPEAKER_105: technologically um will only arise with capital so you can assume that that progress you know it's not like someone stumbles into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbles into a cave and discovered alpha fold uh there are years of toiling in labs like edison did making the light bulb um it edison had to raise a ton of money uh to get that light bulb uh project off the ground if you guys haven't read uh i'm trying to remember the biography there's uh uh uh wizards of something um was it's got wizards in the title it's a good biography of medicine and um uh you know and and i feel like we're at this moment where the wizard of menlo park yeah i think that's the wizard of menlo park that's right and and the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at alpha fold or at waymo uh or what bezos and elon are doing um is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work you're not going to get a bunch of kickstarters to fund a spacex-like project or a uh you know blue origin-like project and so i think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on multiple billion dollar bets and like chamoff said waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of ten of them but if that one billion dollar bet works it's worth 500 billion dollars and that money continuously gets reinvested and look at what google did with waymo they put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone woke up and said my god self-driving is real it's possible and it kick-started an industry and i i just feel like the amount of money and not to mention the fact that like these are free markets so these businesses google you don't have to search on google you don't have to buy from amazon but everyone benefits from searching on google everyone benefits from buying on amazon and the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so good and so i don't feel like these guys are screwing people over you can consider the small business model as being like you know hey maybe we shouldn't have had small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point distribution was going to be economically advantaged by being centralized and therefore all consumers are going to benefit by centralizing is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market but same with what happened with the taxi industry technology will force these evolutions the capital accumulates and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined um on a smaller scale

SPEAKER_61: but go ahead yeah no i do think sympathetic to what you were saying i do think that if you look at

Chamath Palihapitiya: every platform innovation that's ever happened so whether it's you know we go from no print to print you know to newspapers to radio to television you've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized uh monopolistic or oligopolistic uh kind of early outcomes and

SPEAKER_218: either through legislation or through innovation then the pendulum swings to decentralization that's

Chamath Palihapitiya: typically happened right and you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that so it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things and everybody says the argument is well no because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock-in but i think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the china and the china shop and you have to just start all over so it's likely that we're going to move to

SPEAKER_218: a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody and obviously we want things like alpha fold to exist

Chamath Palihapitiya: we want things like waymo to exist the question is how should they exist and if they come out of the

SPEAKER_218: good will of google it is just so easily as likely that some other person let's say it wasn't sundar and ruth peratt but two other people who didn't like it these things could have been very different forms and shapes and not existed at all and i think that's the arbitrary nature of it which is not necessarily

SPEAKER_124: free market capitalism that doesn't benefit us should we chamoff be upset that bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from amazon he had a bad press conference

Chamath Palihapitiya: let's just be clear at the end of the day he has wanted to do this his entire life he built an incredible company he was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it he's invested billions of dollars in other things 10 billion dollars in climate change his ex-wife has invested you know six billion dollars just last year alone in all kinds of good works so those two individuals because of their success i think will generally do and have done the right thing let's not get that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just put why was it horrendous well i think you said it you know the the thing that he said around uh you know i just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this it sounded flippant and it didn't really acknowledge the

SPEAKER_218: incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on

Chamath Palihapitiya: charlie rose right so if you if you actually played those two things back side by side you'd

SPEAKER_218: say is this the same person one was thoughtful extremely respectful the other one was now maybe he was just amped up i mean i could see i think that's what i think he was super high absolutely

Chamath Palihapitiya: on cloud nine so to speak you know and so and so he just wasn't thinking about it but you know honestly like look he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say we're assuming you're coming back so here's some talking points why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to earth and let's just make sure we nailed this and put our best foot forward that is where i think

SPEAKER_79: he probably has some regrets based on how people reacted this bezos space flight was a real rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left but the criticism was very different you know the critique i heard from the right was that uh he's having some sort of midlife crisis the rocket

SPEAKER_116: looked too much like a phallus okay fine whatever that the criticism from the left was um it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise you could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that you know why was he doing this with his own money you know if this had been a nasa flight i don't think they would have a problem with it and so you see here that even though bezos has been so much more effective using his own money uh to do this the left just reflexively hates that uh it and and and and and they kept saying well how dare he use this money the money could have been used on something else so much better well what do you think of that argument yeah i think it's wrong in a couple of respects it basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest inventors and i don't think that's true you look at these social programs they want to keep doubling down on they're not working you know these programs our policies towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding there's a tremendous amount of funding in san francisco they're spending sixty thousand dollars per tent per year they're spending three hundred thousand dollars in social services per homeless person per year lack of funding is not the problem the approach is the problem we spend something like twenty five thousand dollars per pupil and per pupil in california schools the test scores are going down so you know these people who are criticizing bezos don't know what to do with the money

SPEAKER_225: they don't know how to spend it any better they're not good at executing however bezos or elon these

SPEAKER_403: are two of our greatest inventors let them go let them go because you know they are pushing the boundaries

SPEAKER_116: and i do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result

SPEAKER_295: of what they're doing with this new space race it's also super uninformed if correct me if i'm wrong here

SPEAKER_58: but they were saying that the they should have been doing more initiatives on earth if you actually and they were kind of talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space and number one the the rocket ship fuel my understanding in these is less than the what happens in a 747 so put that aside and then second elon has done more for global warming with tesla than

SPEAKER_185: anybody in the in the battery packs i think in modern society i can't think of somebody in the private

SPEAKER_58: sector who's done more and then has there ever been a get there's never been a gift of 10 billion dollars to one cause let alone one cause which bezos gave which was climate change nobody nobody has

SPEAKER_185: done more so hasn't you would know chamath i thought richard branson had done a lot for global warming i thought he was very involved in the carbon uh credits space i think that we're witnessing something

Chamath Palihapitiya: that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong but want to just

SPEAKER_218: have a chance to be on the field and try and have the freedom to do so and that just literally infuriates a certain class of people it proves itself out by what david said we are not in a funding

Chamath Palihapitiya: crisis we are running 10 20 trillion dollar deficits you know or sorry uh 10 you know hundreds of billions of

SPEAKER_218: dollar deficits 10 20 trillion dollar debt levels that are increasing every year we have a surfeit of money we print money whenever we want we don't have a shortage of money we have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money and in the absence of people being able to do things they would rather other people not do things not because it's not the right thing to do but because it makes

SPEAKER_415: them feel impotent right and and so what what is what is driving that i think you there is a real

SPEAKER_116: contempt for private initiative and and jason you're right you see it in the hatred towards elon nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than elon i mean even the best end of story period end of story i mean the bezos gift to some philanthropy i don't know if that's going to make a difference or not you're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue but it's indisputable that elon the electric car industry would not exist without elon and yet there is contempt and hatred for the fact that he did this through private initiative if the government he does it in a way

SPEAKER_218: that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally they don't like that he says what he wants they don't like that he does what he wants they don't like that he dresses the way he does they don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough it's not about the look people it's also about the money that it's the wealth that's been accumulated too well no no hold on i don't think that's what it is at all no i actually think what it is is psychological it is nothing about money i think what we are witnessing and i think social media has just blown the cover off it is a psychological awakening that people have which is that they were

Chamath Palihapitiya: comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders and they

SPEAKER_218: just believed the world would function as it should now you see people migrating through this membrane achieving enormous amounts of success basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude and it breaks people's brains because they don't like it because now they think why didn't it happen to me why not me and the thing is because you're not capable and at somewhere along the way working you're not dedicated you didn't try or you didn't try they didn't act with agency i mean look every day every day the greatest thing that i've learned about the public markets now having been you know purely on the early stage technology side building running then investing is i get a mark every day right now to do both businesses i get a scorecard every day and some days i really think to myself maybe i'm just not good enough today and i say to myself that is true

Chamath Palihapitiya: today and then the the difference is tomorrow i have a choice which is i wake up and i decide am

SPEAKER_218: i going to go back at it or not and i'm not in the game and i'm not going to hate on other people who had a good day today just because i had a bad day and that's what i think we're going through we're going through and social media allows it to happen and it allows you to put it out there you can hide behind a screen name you can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent-up frustration one has

SPEAKER_428: journalists doing it of course of course because these journalists are doing it too where they're just

SPEAKER_230: so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use the

Chamath Palihapitiya: difference is journalists do it with a real screen name under the guise of journalism everybody else does it with a fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolling in order to do something really

David Sacks: great like bezos or like elon you have to believe that you have agency over your own life you have to

SPEAKER_116: believe that you can accomplish great things you have to you know act with with purpose and is that really what we're teaching kids to uh today in schools what we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors at some intersectional framework we're not teaching them about earned success we're teaching them about privilege which is you know is presumptively ill-gotten and it's all about a transference of privilege and um and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims but no one's talking about how you actually create

SPEAKER_22: change and success abundance abundance it's all a negative sum it's always a negative sum game

SPEAKER_105: freeberg go ahead i dated all back to the kim kardashian sex tape i think that there was this moment where someone who was didn't do anything didn't have a career wasn't doing anything work wise but was kind of a pseudo celebrity for being a celebrity it's like the paris hilton nicole ritchie era right like uh folks who don't really have much to talk about except that they're the ones that people are talking about and then that sex tape turned her into a superstar and then she became a billionaire a few years later and so um you know there there is this kind of poignant moment i think where folks are like wait a second you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country you don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame therefore the ex the kind of assumption is hey you know what there are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do and the rest of us don't um and i do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those those moments and makes them very big and kind of then that becomes the assumed standard when the reality is i mean all four of us worked really hard all four of us came from nothing i don't know about sax but i mean the rest of us yeah his dad was an immigrant doctor from south africa and he

SPEAKER_231: moved to the deep south as a jew i'm just joking i mean i think all of us graduated college deeply in

SPEAKER_105: debt and then we all worked our way out of debt and we all found ways to work really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country and to build value and to build businesses it can be done to realize those returns and we don't start out as elites we were never elite we were always the struggling you know immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we fought and we had grit and we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort and i think that that's not really and so did bezos and so did elon and i don't think that there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them like maybe in you know the british the days of the british monarchy these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have and i think that that and i think that that's so important because people miss that point and they think that kim kardashian or the random bolt of lightning or the elite is the the kind of endowed upon people in a way that's unfair they're misreading the situation everyone else is

SPEAKER_01: missing out yeah they misread the situation so a couple things kim kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape but if she's not an incredible business person because from there

SPEAKER_443: to now that's execution totally there's a lot of there's a lot of toiling hard work good decision

SPEAKER_01: making she nailed it was i lucky to have actually joined facebook versus myspace yes but when i was there did i hit the cover off the ball god damn yes you know was i lucky to have started social

SPEAKER_218: capital and be able to raise capital sure but then did i have to help find a team coach that team work with them make good investments that's hard and i think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work that there's all kinds of levels of success that you can be proud of all kinds of different accomplishments what i loved is when friedberg used us and elon and bezos in the same sentence because i catch myself where i'm ashamed sometimes where i'm like i am not as good as those two guys so how dare i use my name in the same sentence as their name and then i think wait a minute what the fuck am i quibbling over like this is insane in any way shape or form we've all made it sure there's different degrees but it's beyond that it matters at this point and this is what i think we're living

SPEAKER_181: in a society where it really distorts you so if how do we change it chamath how do we change people from

SPEAKER_03: thinking that it's random and that you can't do it because there are people who are no it is okay but there are a group of people who believe the system is rigged i cannot become chamath and i'm stuck in a

SPEAKER_446: rut and i can't get out i can't get out how do we change that belief the whiners and the complainers

SPEAKER_218: and the haters are stuck in a massive rut and i think the thing that happened that i said it last pod i'll say it again maybe i'll just say it every pod it is not about winning and losing it is about trying and learning and that is a huge thing it's about a learning mindset it's about this idea that things are changing so fast the only thing that i can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn because things will constantly be changing underfoot but what do you say to the single mother

SPEAKER_105: with three kids who who is in a town where the the factory is shutting down and she's losing her job

SPEAKER_218: and she doesn't have the resources to move she she is not the person that hates elon musk or jeff bezos

SPEAKER_231: i will but what does she do because aren't there institutional ruts in the united states yeah yeah

SPEAKER_218: i understand these are two completely different topics my point is if you go online it is filled with p a small cohort of people that are positive and then a large cohort of people that are silently trying to just gain information grind it out yeah and a small vocal minority of bitter people who can't do and all i'm talking about privileged people well who knows if they're privileged but i'm just saying

SPEAKER_237: i think they are they're getting paid a hundred thousand to work at the i just think i just think

SPEAKER_01: that these people have been check boxers their whole lives they tried to play the team sports they were told to they went to the schools they tried to do the the cfa the mba the this or the that

SPEAKER_218: nothing worked for them they work in an environment where they don't feel any equity actually this is where equity is important they feel disenfranchised and they're angry and as a result they just want everything to be different so that nobody wins because they can't win but if they were winning they would be the first one to say shut the door behind me

SPEAKER_79: i'm convinced of it 100 yeah the irony is that the people you're talking about all went to these

SPEAKER_116: elite institutions and and they imbibed these ideologies and philosophies and i think the people who have been successful went to those not in all cases but they went to those places and then rebelled

SPEAKER_01: against it or just shut it out here's what we should do here's what we should do we should all contribute five or ten million bucks into a into an llc we should call pegasus we should use pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on twitter and then index that to linkedin to figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just publish a database of all the haters well i mean it's how

SPEAKER_94: funny would that be i i it's it's very interesting because i'm watching a group of these uh complainers

SPEAKER_185: leave traditional mainstream media because i'm focused on journalists because i was one and i'm watching them leave journalism a small group of them and become entrepreneurs on substack or their own products and i feel like there's a little group of them who are realizing holy i can make a million dollars if i apply myself and i quit the new york times and i go start my own publication right and i

SPEAKER_347: actually say something interesting and differentiated not just towing the party line at the new york

SPEAKER_230: times exactly there's a whole little there's a little crack here in this like i'll say i'll say they

SPEAKER_218: are just as successful as elon musk and jeff bezos the the financial quantum may be different but i bet you the personal fucking satisfaction quantum is the same and this is the key this is the key you could be running a 500 000 a year business and you could feel like a million fucking bucks you have a nice house yeah you have a nice house no you have a nice family you you employ a couple people you provide a good life you do what you want to do when you want to do it the sense of freedom that comes with that and power and agency is the same as them and maybe in some ways the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these guys would because

Chamath Palihapitiya: they're so you know scheduled and people are coming after them all the time one of my big takeaways from

SPEAKER_81: being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart hard working and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself you will be successful in this industry you know over two decades

SPEAKER_116: i mean i've just seen not how could you not you have such tailwinds at your back there's so much value being created we saw over the past year more money more lp dollars have gone into venture

SPEAKER_225: capital by far than any other year and more money more returns is coming out that's why more

SPEAKER_470: money is going in i'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful just by showing right

SPEAKER_01: but the first part is the critical part you just said who are not prone to self-sabotage

SPEAKER_218: there is an enormous number of people who are prone to self i was one i am still one but i

SPEAKER_473: broke how do you self-sabotage yourself your ego he blew up his firm

SPEAKER_441: that's true but i think he blew it up because there was creative destruction i think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start over he's talked about it publicly he said it

SPEAKER_58: but the blowing up of when how do you reconcile the blowing up of the firm chamoff whatever number

SPEAKER_61: this is all old news it's like you know the amount of success and capital and money that we've made

Chamath Palihapitiya: is undisputable and uh i've made it under all kinds of weather conditions so you know it all kind of speaks for itself but the problem is again if you ask an average person i don't think they care i don't think they know i don't think they have an opinion if you ask some you know blister interested

SPEAKER_132: in how you reconcile or look back on it now it's so much distance i'll tell you from an outside

David Sacks: perspective how i reconcile chamoff's decision there is i think that as you become more successful your tolerance for doing stuff you don't want to do really goes down it goes to zero of course

SPEAKER_432: chamoff has got to a point where he didn't want to be doing and he blew it up zero by the way that

SPEAKER_287: that is a characterization as well that you know sometimes in in your career you have to make it

SPEAKER_332: and in your personal life you have to make a tough decision and there is no good outcome there is no

SPEAKER_105: good way there's no graceful way to do it but there are these moments where you got a rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side and you're gonna have to make a tough

Chamath Palihapitiya: decision to get out of the way i said to myself a long time ago that if i was ever lucky to actually be wealthy enough where um my wealth would change by um meaningful amounts every order of magnitude

SPEAKER_61: i would do something different um and so you know you can do the math so there it is

SPEAKER_185: all right it's interesting being friends with you and watching it and then also

SPEAKER_03: i hate to give you know any credit there it is but being friends with phil helmuth and watching him set outrageous goals for himself in poker i just thought you know what you got to

SPEAKER_148: set some outrageous goals for yourself and that's how i sort of broke through as i just said the minute

SPEAKER_185: i want to be number one at everything i do i want to be the largest syndicate the most jason prolific

Chamath Palihapitiya: investor the minute i realized that i was basically going to become you know a billionaire because of my facebook stock i quit and the craziest thing about it is i left so much stock on the table it's like two three billion dollars of stock i couldn't care less and then and then you know once i figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just

SPEAKER_218: investing in companies at a small scale but now you can you know control companies and really allocate and shape how economy flows i made a different set of decisions and now i'm here and if i increase it by another order of magnitude i'll make a different set of decisions and that's poorly understood by folks because again it doesn't map into a world view but the point is it maps into something that keeps me whole and sane and it allows me to not be zero sum about everybody else's success and that's what i think we need to teach people try stuff it's okay to fail because that's as long as you're not self-sabotaging yourself david said it so well you will eventually be successful

SPEAKER_96: what have you learned david you know in this next chapter being an investor capital allocator

SPEAKER_111: me yeah david you well that's what i said just yeah no it's what i said i mean just well i mean

David Sacks: the thing that's happening right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger it's just an explosion there's an explosion in the number of unicorns explosion in the amount of

SPEAKER_116: funding that's available explosion in the amount of returns being generated there are now so many vcs that vcs are literally throwing money at people i mean any half decent idea now gets funded the idea that somehow this ecosystem is elitist or exclusionary it's absurd right i mean you've got micro vcs now who no one has to go to sandhill road anymore right i mean there are so many ways

SPEAKER_314: there's nobody on sandhill road it's a ghost town remember the traffic jam i went i went down there

SPEAKER_185: the other day and there was no traffic jam i was speaking at stanford and literally i was like i got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that sandhill road because it was at 8 30. i zipped down sandhill road to stanford there was two cars the the tech ecosystem is so osmotic it's so

SPEAKER_116: permeable in terms of allowing new people and in fact it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it can't hire enough people even in the worst economic conditions and yet when it comes to talking about social and political it's talking about opportunity in social and political terms

David Sacks: the only thing you ever hear is that you know the ecosystem is somehow elitist or exclusionary and

SPEAKER_185: i think that's old that's old news that that might have been valid 15 20 years ago i know when i went to sandhill road for the first times 15 20 years ago it was a bunch of white partners who went to stanford or had a mbas from you know harvard but that's not the case now it's a bunch of people

SPEAKER_407: with rolling funds and micro vcs and syndicates totally and everything in between if you're so

SPEAKER_256: wrapped up in in being a social justice warrior that you've just missed that there is like basically

SPEAKER_116: infinite opportunity you know then it's on you you're sabotaging yourself and then five ten years

David Sacks: later you're still stuck in that role and then you become bitter and then you become bitter to

SPEAKER_496: jamal's point freebrook how hard was it for you to leave google and what was that like i was at google

SPEAKER_332: for two and a half years uh it had gone through i joined before the ipo i was like a couple hundred employees just under a thousand employees and then we went public i got this huge bonus from sergey to stick around uh when i was thinking about huge i mean for me it was like um seven figures it was yeah it was a couple thousand shares of stock and like 250 000 of cash and i gave it up um you know it'd be worth a lot of money but i just felt like i learned so much at google and i had such an appreciation uh for the team there and the company and by the way i worked at google and all of a sudden the company went public and i could buy a house i mean it was an incredible moment for me and uh and and i suddenly felt what chamath talked about which is this freedom in my life suddenly i had hit that that that next plateau of wealth where i now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth and i could leave or i guess i had over a million dollars of net worth and i could now leave and go do something i wanted to go do with my no i had a couple hundred thousand dollars and i could go leave and do what i wanted to do which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions and um and so i honestly felt like really fine just leaving all that money behind i left i left millions of dollars behind uh for when i left google after being there for two and a half years to start my company um and you know it was a struggle right like i mean as you guys know building a business which i did from 2006 to 2013 um was a nightmare every day was a nightmare i i say uh

SPEAKER_105: in entrepreneurism i've said this publicly before but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards and one out of five days you take a five-step leap forward so at the end of a week you're one step ahead of where you started but your existential memory is that you're failing every day every day and suddenly you wake up and seven years have gone by and you're like oh shit we've got an amazing business and someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars and um if

SPEAKER_332: you don't have the grit and the guts uh and the determination to push through those those daily battles and deal with that that hardship uh you know and i don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of google felt right for me i think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right for me um and so it was the right it was the right call for me obviously it worked out but you know still i i make choices in my life in terms of what do i want to do do i want to go live on a yacht or have some luxury or do whatever and i prefer to just make great businesses and turn science into into commercial opportunity and that's how i choose to spend my time ever

SPEAKER_185: and i just wanted to send this out to the whole panel do you ever think you know having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at this age and then just you know kiteboard or do whatever do you ever think about retirement and not going into work no okay yeah you want to do you

Chamath Palihapitiya: feel you want to work harder yesterday yesterday yesterday as an example was an incredible day because i was able to um bicycle with nat and uh the youngest to go get a gelato i had a kickoff meeting for i had a kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible uh in batteries where you know starting from scratch series a co-founders me and the other into the other

SPEAKER_00: director and we're starting literally starting and i remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or

Chamath Palihapitiya: 40 times and it's the best feeling uh and then i and then i had a call because i'm trying to put a you know more than a billion dollars to work in a different battery idea uh and i thought to myself god like i'm so lucky um and it's it was a grindy long day and i had never felt more thankful so why would i you know you could and i don't know i i feel just so blessed

SPEAKER_512: sacks you ever think about hanging up um or are you more motivated to go to work every day are you

SPEAKER_111: annoyed yeah i mean the the thing that's giving me the most energy right now is we're in uh a private

SPEAKER_79: beta on call and you're this app that we incubated and um i mean it's it's it's it's good and it's getting better every day and i'm really enjoying tinkering on it and i feel like you know i've you

SPEAKER_430: know it's kind of like you're a good tinkerer by the way you're a good product you're good you're

SPEAKER_220: good at tickling you know we tried to hire sax's vp of product at uh facebook what yeah what would

SPEAKER_390: that have paid him i use two thousand sacks probably billion days right seven billions probably

SPEAKER_79: 2007 regret not taking that gig no no because i did yammer instead and you know yammer was successful and i got to be my own boss and that was better you know so i i don't know if i probably wouldn't

SPEAKER_116: have made as much money but look i've done like you guys i've done made lots of decisions that made me less money if i just stayed at paypal for 20 years my stock would have been worth many many billions right that's why i tell people don't sell everything let your winners ride at least partially yeah i mean look my i was an investor in facebook if i just kept all of that stock that'd be worth a billion dollars today so i mean it's pretty crazy well sell some just don't sell everything that's my new philosophy yeah to your point about to your point about what gives me enjoyment i mean i'm really having fun tinkering with this app and you know what it's like it's like it's like a new season if you're in like the nba or something it's like can we make a championship run can we get one more ring you know and so you're like you know it'd be like saying to somebody hey you already got you know to uh nba an nba champion hey you got three rings why do you want a fourth you know and it's like are you kidding me while i'm still in this league while i'm young enough and healthy enough

SPEAKER_342: to make a run at one more at one more ring how could you not want to do that you know you gotta

SPEAKER_185: go for it i gotta go for it i can see you where you're engaged which is great to see all right listen this has been an amazing episode uh we will see you all next week if you like the show thanks the end we're not gonna try something everybody go try something do something anything possible try and

SPEAKER_332: fail just try read a book outside of your comfort zone read something that you wouldn't have otherwise read love you guys but i love you guys love you back to see you soon i love everybody listening to

SPEAKER_124: love everybody i mean literally if you're listening to this and you are buying into this that the system is ready a troll don't be a troll don't be a douche like the system is not rigged if anything the system

SPEAKER_230: is rigged for you to participate and succeed join the party the system is malleable the system is

SPEAKER_116: if you want to change the world the system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right

SPEAKER_550: way you can make it you can make a dent you can uh who is this who is this little oh hey look how happy

SPEAKER_295: you are who's the best dad where's your dad dad all right we'll see you all next time on the all

SPEAKER_564: podcast bye-bye rain man david sacks i've been sourced it to the us queen of her feet

SPEAKER_567: we need to get