SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome to the all in podcast this is our fifth episode as you know we regularly publish this podcast well every two to four weeks something like that and uh just to give you a little idea of how well this is going the podcast peaked at number 10 in tech podcasts even though we never publish it and we're only four hours so tell your friends about the podcast so we can be number one and just dunk on traditional media which is full of people who have us as the guests

SPEAKER_03: jason number 10 on what apple apple technology podcast we literally raced i mean it went from

SPEAKER_00: like we debuted in the 20s then the teens and then boom we hit number 10 and i was talking to somebody in media who has us on as guests and i was like listen i formed a super team and we're now getting

SPEAKER_04: more traffic i'm sorry who are you talking to just like a mirror where you were just looking at yourself

SPEAKER_07: i mean you are so arrogant after that shitty video what video are you referring to what oh my god are you oh look you want me to say it to all the listeners you want me to say hold on let me just

SPEAKER_11: somebody made somebody made a cut of the billion times jason mentioned he was an early investor in uber all right take it easy uh virgin galactic slash slack investor i don't i don't say anything

SPEAKER_14: i know they put it companies like they just put it on the chiron the lower third every time you're on

SPEAKER_16: cnbc everybody my problem is i have too many unicorns to mention just one right so they just

SPEAKER_13: go with one to mention they just go with paypal and nose peter teal uh david david i have a question

SPEAKER_07: why is there a picture of two pregnant men behind you on zoom we now have the technology for men

SPEAKER_25: to be impregnated this is a recent picture of jason i on the golf course and i'm not sure who's more out of shape are you on the first hole you look like you're about to collapse

SPEAKER_30: in fairness in fairness it's a hundred and six degrees put his hands under his shoulders and

SPEAKER_32: holds him up it's 106 degrees and 80 humidity and i kid you not this is the this was the second

SPEAKER_03: and third time i play golf this was the third time and i'm going to just ask d frame david s d frame david freeberg is here of course he's our science friend buddy uh and chamath polyhapiti is here how many holes i want one of you to set the over under on how many holes we completed each day the maximum number of holes we completed four okay chamath set a lot of four and you're taking the over it

SPEAKER_25: was sax five five and actually and there was a there's a there's a red door every five holes so

SPEAKER_40: that may have had something to do with it i took nine because i figured jason was on his rush to the

SPEAKER_42: hot dog stand well that's where the red door is where the hot dogs are yeah you know why i said i said

SPEAKER_44: these two these two dorks with adhd can barely make it an hour doing anything and so if you think an average round takes four hours then basically you know you get through four holes in about an hour and

SPEAKER_03: then you want to give up we got to the fifth hole i am addicted to golf now i i don't know if you guys

SPEAKER_44: know this you can gamble on golf jason i i the biggest match i ever played was this was a 500 000

SPEAKER_50: million dollar nasa i don't know what a nasa is i lost i lost one and a half bets i lost 750k

SPEAKER_47: what is a nasa type bet nasa nasa is basically a gambling bet on a per hole basis got it we we had we had just a ton of fun um and it was great because this was the first time i've ever uh it's

SPEAKER_44: the single best aspect of golf in my opinion if you gamble it makes that game one of the most incredible games because people with mental fortitude who cannot play at all can show up and literally make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars yeah we were playing for

SPEAKER_53: hundreds of dollars per hole so let's just leave it at that in fact we're playing a hundred dollars a hole so it was it was just for fun but man i i don't know about you guys do anyway have some we know if we know somebody who's got um a membership in one of these places i'd love to go back out again but uh it was great fun and uh it was come to shadow creek come to shadow creek in vegas we can

SPEAKER_44: play it's probably the best gambling golf course in the world okay i'm in um so let's get to business

SPEAKER_00: for those of you who are tuning in for the first time uh chamath palihapitiya is uh my co-host here on the podcast uh we've been friends since we both did a very brief tour at aol uh he then went to work for mayfield which is a venture firm you might not have heard of he stayed there for about uh 27 weeks before going to work for uh mark zuckerberg uh he secured the bag then started his own venture firm it grew way too big and uh he kind of got bored having to manage 100 people so now he's running his home office venture firm and doing two deals a year uh the one you've certainly heard of is uh virgin galactic where he's taking people to space and he did a spac for that uh ipo b and ipoc are lined up from what i understand he'll correct me if i am wrong and he'll be spacking two more companies once a year uh i guess will be the pace is that correct chamath uh among other things but yeah yeah um and then uh david sax has now become and david freeberg have become regulars we've decided we're going to stick with this foursome uh as it goes because we're getting a really nice passing of the ball around topics and david sax um went to stanford with folks you know like keith roboite uh peter thiel during an era where uh they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on palm pilots called paypal it didn't work until they decided to move it to email i'm not sure whose idea who gets credit for moving it to email sax

SPEAKER_60: um sax who who decided like hey i don't know silence is his way of saying me because because

SPEAKER_00: it was it was an abject failure when you tried to send money between palm pilots peter thiel's original idea but then somebody woke up and said well why don't we just do this over email

SPEAKER_09: what he hasn't said let me tell you the names at paypal he has not said yet musk teal hoffman levchin silence radio silence so far david sax uh jeremy stoppelman chad hurley from

SPEAKER_00: youtube jerry stoppelman from yelp anyway he was part of that cohort uh then he made a movie called thank you for smoking uh which was jason reitman's first film jason reitman then went on to great success that film actually made money sax was so absolutely depressed by how long it took to make one film and how painful it was he then decided to go create a billion dollar company in under three years called yammer uh which chamath made a ton of money on and he cackles about regularly um and then david freeberg is with us he is just the smartest kid at the table uh but somehow figures out how to lose tons of money to us in poker he created climate.com and uh sold it to uh monsanto uh he created metromile and he created itza which uh failed horribly but that just goes to show you nobody remembers what itza is but they do remember his giant multi-billion dollar companies and he now is running his own startup studio which is making incredibly interesting companies can i talk about the one that's related to beverages or not not yet okay anyway there's a company related to beverages

SPEAKER_63: that is so game changing i said no literally you can't say it he showed it to us under friend da

SPEAKER_65: i just said can i talk about the beverage company yes or no i'm trying to give the guy a goddamn plug

SPEAKER_68: here but anyway he said no so you can't do a plug i'm not doing a plug but i'm teasing it and i think he's literally sitting on what could wind up being the greatest most successful company of the entire

SPEAKER_44: stop stop stop period okay let's jump in i want to talk let's jump out um david you sold climate to monsanto for a billion dollars back in the day when it was shocking to people that amount of money um still is but you know you were one of the first sort of quote unquote unicorns and then you you know were right in the front seat of monsanto probably could have been ceo if you wanted i want you to talk to me about what is going on with bayern monsanto roundup and i want to use

SPEAKER_75: that as a jumping off point to talk about the world health organization uh so roundup is a molecule

SPEAKER_77: known as glyphosate and uh it's been used as a herbicide for decades and for decades it was very well studied the us epa and the fda and uh usda and global health organizations have studied it carefully because of its incredible uh use it is uh it biodegrades uh the the core molecule glyphosate biodegrades um in a couple of days um and it is a very effective herbicide so when farmers grow stuff they don't want weeds growing in the field and roundup was a pretty effective way at getting rid of weeds so you could get more crop per acre more yield per acre um a long time people thought that roundup like many of the traditional persistent chemical herbicides was carcinogenic and people were concerned about that and as a result there was a lot of studying done in fact before i sold my company to monsanto i spent a lot of time researching roundup and glyphosate to make sure that it was safe that i wasn't selling my company to what everyone was saying was the devil at the time and from a scientific basis i felt pretty comfortable about the uh the data the studies the research that had been done when i was at monsanto there was a bit of a political event that took place at the world health organization the world health organization runs a group called eye arc the uh it's a cancer research institute that's part of the who and there was a gentleman who was politically trying to get himself on that council to make the case that glyphosate was carcinogenic and years later a reuters reporter identified how he was able to get this council to disregard a number of scientific findings and studies including the us epa and other very wide broad-ranging studies by international organizations showing that roundup or glyphosate was non-carcinogenic but the political process by which he was able to get on the council get that data excluded from a study and then get ir to declare roundup or glyphosate a possible carcinogen or probable carcinogen um then triggered a bunch of tort lawyers in the united states to start suing monsanto and now bayern because bayern bought monsanto a number of years ago for um uh causing cancer and the data is absent but the way the u.s court system works is if you have some probable definition and you can get a jury to say yes and the probable cause was there's a probable carcinogen label applied to it by iarc um and this reuters reporter years ago did a great job highlighting how this whole thing was kind of politically motivated and and um and the data and the science from a broad range of scientists including the uh triple as a lot of scientific uh um membership organizations very definitively and clearly show that uh glyphosate is non-carcinogenic um but you know it was super troubling and frustrating now look this doesn't bother me personally anymore i have no interest whatsoever but it turns out that uh these lawsuits are now going to cost monsanto and now bayern which bought monsanto somewhere between 10 and 15 billion dollars to settle this and this is all a function of some political uh hacking that took place at the who so for a long time i've had a bit of a concern about how the who operates and and the process by which they do scientific assessment and validation and a lot of this has obviously become much more apparent with the coronavirus crisis and their response with respect to masks and treatment and so on so that that's a little bit of the background i think you're referring to tomorrow

SPEAKER_44: and so go ahead if you want to no i mean like it to me i i think that this is such an interesting thing um i i wanted to use it as this on-ramp to the who largely because um it's like the ineptitude keeps compounding in that organization um i just read that we still don't have a definitive posture on masks from the who and that they are finally ceding ground to the idea that the coronavirus

SPEAKER_09: could partially be spread in air i mean this is so bizarre because it's the middle of july there are

SPEAKER_44: three million cases and half a million people who have died and we are still there and so you know when i saw that trump pulled out of the who um you know in this weird way the way he did it was kind of cartoonish and stupid and you know kind of an insolent child but the reason he did it was

SPEAKER_72: actually pretty reasonable because this organization is not a scientific or health body it's an academic

SPEAKER_44: body and you know you can see this in universities where all of a sudden things tilt away from facts and it tilts towards you know um all kinds of very very very small points of sort of like political capital that people fight over and so these politicized organizations uh are incredible and to the point

SPEAKER_84: at which we saw you know this past week the report that well over 250 of their own scientists who they

SPEAKER_00: rely on said hey it's very clear that this is an airborne phenomenon aerosol tiny micro particles of aerosol when people talk when they sing when they cough when they sneeze all this obvious stuff floats in the air and if you have a closed air conditioned you know location like say a church in the south or a hotel uh or a casino it's not a good idea to be in there and it's especially not a bad i bet it's especially bad idea to take your mask off so now the who is over two and trump as you said in his just horrifically comical way can explain as we're very clearly explaining that this is a political

SPEAKER_53: organization that is funded by a duopoly of superpowers that have many issues which we're going to get into today um and and we it's they don't have to say who the duopoly is sax when you look at this uh being our token uh conservative here and you see the trump win how frustrating is it for you that trump's delivery and his persona when he is right and a person can't be wrong all the time i'm proof positive

SPEAKER_85: of that you you have to deal with the fact that he does it in such a stupid inane way that you don't

SPEAKER_88: actually get credit for the win well you know trump is often the the bull in the china shop and um you know kind of uh disrupts the status quo by throwing a grenade into it um but uh frequently there there are good reasons why the status quo needs to be disrupted and um the the new york times laid out the case in a news story on who the the one that reported the the scientists complaining that you were talking about it was just a straight news story but it almost came across as an expose because whose incompetence was laid out um so starkly um the fact that they were slow on mass and opposed them and i think kind of lied about them um and then uh and then to to be downplaying the airborne nature of the virus in favor of um maintaining this narrative that it's spread through touching surfaces or fomites which i think people are realizing now is much much less likely um and so yeah you do kind of have to wonder uh whose side is is who on and the the new york times article kind of suggests why they do this which is when they issue a declaration they have to think about the ramifications in all of their

SPEAKER_90: member countries and so what ends up happening is they sort of start with the policy implication or political result that they are thinking about and they kind of reverse engineer the science and you

SPEAKER_88: know the article talks about how um you know if who were to come out and and sort of um be very clear about airborne transmission that could affect uh spending or you know political budgets in all these different countries and so they've been reluctant to do that um so yeah it's a it's a it's a organization that's sort of political first and then reverse engineers the science to fit that

SPEAKER_03: and um you know what this reminds me of it's like when you have giant investors on the board of a company the management team comes out and now they've got to present like a pivot or an acquisition or whatever it is and they're thinking well okay we've got this funding source these people own 26 of who this person owns 22 percent we've now got to present it to them and what are the ram downstream ramifications luckily there's an alignment in a single company the alignment is we all want the

SPEAKER_00: company share price to go up but here in the world it is not equally aligned what is in china's best

SPEAKER_03: interest what's in the eu's best interest and what's in america's best interest might be radically different and they are literally funding them correct from off well there's a they are there there's a

SPEAKER_44: there's this thing called sayers law right which many of us kind of have seen play out which is that academic the the saying is something like academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small and in this interesting way the who has lost the script because uh they fight over politics

SPEAKER_72: who gets to say what who's being positioned and they lose sight of the real downstream in my opinion the downstream implications of the things that they have because if they actually just thought from first principles and tried to be a truly independent body that said we are going to take the capital we're

SPEAKER_44: given from the countries that are supporting us and actually do the best and actually publish like what is the best uh thing to do for example in the case of coronavirus and be definitive and iterate we'd be in a much better place but a lot of what has allowed the posture around coronavirus to transition

SPEAKER_72: from a health issue to a political issue in many ways has been because organizations like the who and the cdc are political bodies and they're academic bodies and so the incentives of the players within these organizations are not to necessarily you know project the right public health positioning they are at some level to think about their own career trajectory and the political machinations that happen within the organization that are blind to normal citizens like us that just consume the output and then so when you see something like an inability to give a definitive ruling on things like masks or you know uh other things you just kind of scratch your head and wonder is it that they're dumb and

Chamath Palihapitiya: the answer is no it's not that they're dumb they're just motivated by very different things

SPEAKER_84: than public health all the time which might be including keeping their jobs and the fact that we had david friedenberg on this podcast uh and then sacks you know chiming in after it shortly after just definitively saying first principles why wouldn't you wear wear a mask what is the possible downside and friedberg saying hey i'm getting some testing equipment we should just be doing mass testing friedberg when you look at this um and how when we started the podcast i think in march or april we were very clear as people not in the with the exception of yourself not in the the healthcare

SPEAKER_03: space uh in any way why can't they what would be a better structure for the who and or is there a

SPEAKER_00: better structure than just a bunch of you know randos like us on a podcast very easily seeing through first principles that a 79 cent mask is a no-brainer that getting testing mass testing and recording it every day and doing sampling what is the better solution here for governance or for dealing with these type of uh you know really large problems and ones that kind of have a a clock that's the other thing about this problem is this this problem came with a countdown clock you had to make a really fast decision in order to protect yourself and we made a really drawn out decision now we're paying the

SPEAKER_75: price i mean i think under the circumstances you outline you know you need leadership right so you

SPEAKER_77: need probably a country or some entity to step forward and lead with respect to um being uh proactive and aggressive with action because any multinational oversight body or political body is going to be kind of um you know molasses out it's going to be stalled out with the the processes and the competing interest as you guys have highlighted so the libertarian argument would be let the free market drive outcomes and you know some folks will succeed and some folks will fail uh if we want all of humanity to succeed then you know the likely scenario is what we've seen with with world wars and such which is you need leadership you need one organization or one entity or one national body to step forward and say this is what we're doing and we're going to lead and the world was absent leadership over the last six months historically the us has filled that void uh but that certainly wasn't the case this year um and so you know it seems to me like you're not going to find a political governing system multinational governing system that's going to be successful in solving these kind of existential global problems overnight uh you really need uh someone to step forward and the us is kind of leaving a bit of a gap this might be a good segue because the question next is who's going to fill that

SPEAKER_99: gap going forward yeah so let's make that segue when you look at the the duopoly that currently is uh

SPEAKER_53: i would say on par now i don't think we can say we're the superpower anymore um and that china's an up-and-coming superpower it's pretty clear they are an equal superpower i don't know if anybody here disagrees with that right now but um if we have an edge it's a very minor one at this point how do we look at health problems with an authoritarian country where individuals do not vote and there is a god king who has recently said i will be the god king for the rest of my life uh for sure how do we manage this relationship with china friedberg and then i'll we can pass it over from a healthcare perspective let's start there for sure and then whatever other major issue you would like to then segue into climate change comes to mind trade comes to mind human rights comes to mind i would

SPEAKER_77: imagine the biggest the argument that your geopolitical commentators would make who are probably more experienced and experts in this than any of us would probably relate to you know the degree of influence um you know the question of who has the most influence globally um may be kind of the way that you define who has the most power uh globally um and so you know in the current uh circumstance you can look at trade balance between china and other nations you can look at trade balance between the us and other nations and you can look at the balance sheet the assets and and the debt owed um and you're right i mean a lot of people are making the case that that we're kind of reaching a point of parity through some metric or some set of equations here and at this point there's uh there's going to be a for for leadership globally in terms of influence um and so that will have ramifications with respect to things that are global in nature like global pandemics um and i think this is a a really uh kind of a key flash moment a flashpoint moment for us um because we are facing that so you know we did face that circumstance this year and obviously we took the the raw end of the deal we've we failed most i

SPEAKER_47: mean we all concur on that we did we did worst china is just like an extremely good example of

SPEAKER_44: focusing on strategy while the rest of us focused on tactics you know the last 20 years have been punctuated by the united states spending literally trillions of dollars on endless wars and unnecessary military infrastructure and all kinds of wasted pork barrel spending and programs that just have resulted in zero roi for the united states and its taxpayers and citizens and instead what did china do they basically went around the world and they used the equivalent amount of dollars and they said every war that the united states fights is a war that we can essentially be silent on let them do that dirty work and what we will do instead is we will go and basically buy and own large swaths of southeast asia large swaths of africa which is you know the emerging labor pools that will drive gdp forward for us and what what they've essentially created is not necessarily a voting block but a productivity block and that's what's so you know uh interesting and also really important to understand which is that china is fighting not an ideological war they're fighting an economic war and it is one where they are buying um you know member states to join them with their capital um and so we've kind of like not seen it and it's unfortunately happened right under our nose so now what we need to do is we need to sort of wake up to this reality and have a very aggressive point of view around what you know matters so so by the way this is also why um and i'll hand the mic to david after this but this is also why i think like we have completely wasted so much time focusing on you know all these other countries that just don't matter anymore and you know i don't say that emotionally i just say it practically like every single minute we spend on russia is just a wasted time this is a you know country that just won't fundamentally matter in the world over the next 15 to 20 years large swaths of europe you know they're ideologically aligned but they just don't matter um the united states has to develop a really specific strategic viewpoint on the fact that it is us versus china whether we like it or not and it starts in things like public policy um but it stretches to everything including capitalism technology

Chamath Palihapitiya: intellectual property health care um and this war will not be fought on the ground with guns it'll be fought with computers and it'll be fought with money yeah and i think we need to realize that

SPEAKER_03: loans and joint ventures sax what are your thoughts here on this coming cold war um you know we we

SPEAKER_53: we beat the russians in the cold the last cold war um and to chamat's point the only thing they have really going for them is they're incredibly uh sinister uh kgb style uh information warfare and the decreasing value of their oil and irrelevance which is why they have to do things like mess with us on social media i mean it literally i feel like it's like the last couple of dying techniques they've got in their playbook from you know the 80s as the kgb and they got a kgb agent running the country when we look at china how do you frame um our relationship with them and what would be the best practice for the next 10 years midterm well i think i think what you've seen just really in the last

SPEAKER_88: couple of weeks is a critical mass of scholarship and punditry declaring that we are in a new cold war with china um and i think you know of all the momentous news events that have happened this year um from covet to um you know the riots and protests um i i think that the most uh newsworthy and historically important event will be the beginning of this and the recognition that we are now in cold

SPEAKER_110: war ii um so tick tock tick tock is part of it i mean it's paradoxical that a dance app is literally

SPEAKER_44: the tip of the spear i mean i think i think tick tock is sort of at the fringes i think the the cold war ii to david's point started when the united states basically embargoed huawei from getting access to 5g technology and i know that sounds like a very sort of like thin thread that most people don't understand and we can unpack it in a second but in my opinion that sort of you know at the beginning of this year was when i started to pay attention and try to understand this issue more because it seemed like wow that's a that's a shot across the bow and declaring china as the clear

SPEAKER_57: uh you know sort of the clear and present danger for american sovereignty and the nba and tick tock

SPEAKER_116: being cultural ramifications of that which are different tick tock's irrelevant who cares well it's

SPEAKER_88: is it irrelevant sax well what tick tock and huawei have in common is that the the sort of uh proxy battles of cold war ii will be fought uh between these sort of client corporations whereas you know cold war one you have these you have sort of these proxy these sort of client states fighting these proxy wars uh cold war ii you have more of these like client corporations fighting these um proxy wars um so you know it's um that that's the sense in which i think they're they're related um the what what tick talk shows is a company that's desperately trying to maneuver so they don't become one of the first economic casualties of code cold war ii they appointed a american as ceo they've um pulled out of hong kong so they're not subject to um to those regulations and they're desperately maneuvering so

SPEAKER_90: they don't get banned in the united states they want to preserve their market access uh but i think there's a very good chance that they will get shut down in the u.s they've been shut down in india and

SPEAKER_44: today is july the 10th and right before we went on uh the breaking news was that amazon basically asked all their employees delete to delete tick tock because of a security threat so it's happening i think that tick tock unless they basically have byte dance sell under 20 or 30 percent of the company and get it into the hands of americans um it will get banned and i think that there will be a massive destruction in enterprise value but can i tell you why tick tock doesn't matter or doesn't matter as much i think david you're right that it's sort of like collateral damage it i'd almost is like you know it'll exist but whatever uh the huawei thing in my opinion is so important because it shines a light on two things the first is that you know what happened essentially is the united states told uh tsmc you know you cannot basically give huawei access to the 5g chipsets and the 5g technology that they would use to essentially kind of like you know implement their spyware and then sell it into western nations effectively and so then what what it does is it puts china in the posture of having to figure out

SPEAKER_72: how do they get access to this stuff and you know the most obvious answer is to invade taiwan and take over tsmc um and you know why would they do that well obviously that has huge geopolitical ramifications but they could only do that again going back to the first comment is because they've already bought so many net nation states into their productivity block that it's still on a balance a worthwhile trade and it allows them to solve uh their version of taiwanese sovereignty uh completely and definitively and basically say look we've we've now solved hong kong you know macau was already solved and now we're going to solve taiwan and put the whole thing to bed and now we have access to this critical technology that we need um so that that's why i think sort of like what happens with

SPEAKER_44: huawei sort of what happens with tsmc what happens on 5g is so important because if you're going to force china you know to basically have to buy western technology in order to get access to a critical piece of you know internet infrastructure they're going to be put to a very very difficult test about what they have to do and then they will have to be much more transparent uh on the global stage about what their ambitions really are and how far they're willing to go and i think that's you know that's a lot more important than you know a bunch of kids dancing to short videos well and and just uh

SPEAKER_88: just to add to that point um you know so i think jamath is right that these these sort of chips um the 5g chips these other chips um are they're the new oil you know in terms of their geopolitical significance um you know obviously all of our technology our iphones our advanced event weaponry uh it's all based on these these chips and um and 70 of them uh are fabricated in taiwan and um and i think you know what one of the huge blind spots of american trade policy over the last 30 years is is kind of not to notice that um that this um key technology that's really the substrate for all of our technology for our economy has now been many it's now been moved and it's manufactured uh you know in taiwan uh whose sovereignty china does not recognize and is constantly you know threatening uh with with the risk of being of being annexed so um you know we we have a tremendous vulnerability there and um you know at the same you know we we finally after about 40 or 50 years of declaring that we'd be energy independent we've achieved that but now we have this new dependency on these chips that um and

SPEAKER_03: pharma and manufacturing i mean and we and we it seems like now manufacturing we're starting to realize hey elon was right we need to be able to build our own factories and guess what american spirit

SPEAKER_128: american ingenuity american focus american capitalism we can do it we have the wherewithal to do it

SPEAKER_53: there's no reason we cannot make these chips here sorry i don't buy it that we're we're going to be

SPEAKER_00: this dependent forever we just need to have the will and the leadership to say we're going to do this whether it costs us an extra 50 cents per chip and well the fact the fabrication of these chips

SPEAKER_88: is incredibly complicated i mean they're uh they're they're basically so let's buy the companies

SPEAKER_131: they're microscopic yeah and it takes years and like several years to set up the you know the facility to

SPEAKER_03: to to do this kind of why don't we buy those companies now why don't we just take it to chamat's point which was very clear which is hey this is an economic this is a a ledger this is you know uh

SPEAKER_128: a check writing exercise to win this war why don't we take out our checkbook and buy 50 of these companies now and put them on the nasdaq if they're not already there it requires real leadership

SPEAKER_44: um at the end of the day it needs to be led by the united states government um the the reality is that you know lithography has gotten so advanced i mean like look i have you know uh companies that are you know taping out chips at like seven nanometer and i don't i don't have supplier diversity i don't know i don't i can't basically choose you know nine folks to bid it out against of which you know

SPEAKER_72: five are domestically in the united states there are two right and so you know you kind of just deal with the complexity or the lack of diversity that we have and jason your point is exactly right which is the first and most important decision here is one that's philosophical which is again saying that era of efficiency at the sake of all else is over and we are now moving to an era of resilience which inherently is more inefficient but in that inefficiency we will rebuild american prosperity because it rebuilds american industry and it rebuilds american jobs there's another example

SPEAKER_44: that i want to build on david's point which is let's all believe and attest that we all care about climate change for a second and we all want the world to be electrified okay well electricity and

SPEAKER_72: electrification requires two very very basic inputs okay one is a battery and the second is an electric motor right makes sense so far yep well inside an electric motor there is one critical thing that you need to make it work which is a permanent magnet the permanent magnet spins around and that's how an electric motor works okay why is that important um as it turns out that permanent magnets need special characteristics that are only provided by a handful of very very specific rare earth materials that we need to mine out of the ground and refine those materials actually exist in many places including the united states yeah we stopped mining for them but right now china controls 80 of the supply of rare earths they can choose how they price it they can differentially price to their own companies which means that the battery and engine manufacturers inside of china can now lead on electrification which means china can actually lead on climate change before the united states can unless we have leadership that says at a governmental level on down we are going to make this a priority we're going to fund it we're going to make sure that they're onshore mines we're going to make sure that those mines are clean we're going to build a supply chain domestically and we're going to subsidize this is what governments do best it's not act it's just incentivize on things like climate so i don't know freeberg has spent a lot of time on climate change so he has a he has probably a lot of ideas on this but whenever you look at any of these things health climate food it all comes down to the united states versus china strategy

SPEAKER_75: versus tactics freeberg i'm not i'm not sure um i'm not sure i i think that the um chinese action

SPEAKER_77: is as deterministic as we think it is or as we kind of frame it where it's china's got this grand plan they're going to beat the us and they're going to control things and make decisions that that hurt us i think a lot of this is um china if you think about it less about black and white there's a continuum and the continuum is one of influence and one of creating uh an environment whereby these things can happen so china for example made capital readily available for um the agriculture industry uh to be able to buy uh buy assets and so the companies inside of china which aren't controlled the chinese government isn't telling them what to do uh the chinese government has set a policy that enables them to increase their prosperity and as a result increase the prosperity of the chinese people um you know when i was at monsanto we were we bid for the largest ag chemicals company in the world based out of switzerland it's called syngenta and we bid like 44 billion dollars to buy this company and the largest chemical company in china called chem china uh bid 47 billion dollars and and acquired the the business and they now own the largest ad chemicals company in the world china also bought smithfields and they bought they put a bunch of people in canada hey freeberg how much of that

SPEAKER_84: money do you think came from the ccp and and what involvement do you think the ccp had in putting their thumb on the scale of making sure that transaction went that direction look i mean ultimately

SPEAKER_77: wherever the the capital comes from it's no less equivalent than what you would see in the united states where treasuries um uh fund the central bank which funds banks which fund lending to

SPEAKER_141: corporations which ultimately make but do you think the leadership said hey we're winning this

SPEAKER_77: at all costs so here's what happened in 2007 there was a ccp um internal doctrine that was published and it's now reasonably well known and there was a speech that was given uh that started this aggressive action in agriculture um and as a result chinese citizens started moving to canada and buying farmland in canada they started moving to australia buying farmland in china they started building these facilities in argentina and brazil and africa um and the chinese government set out you know a strategic objective and provided the capital and enabled industry and people to go after pursuing these interests but the ccp didn't say here's the road map it's not like here's the specific plan for what we need to do they had a general high level kind of point of view that that i think drove all that action and all of that behavior um and so you know it's i would say it's it's not as perhaps coercive as we might think it is in terms of the ccp wanting to target and attack us they're trying to increase their influence around the world they're trying to increase their own security and increase their own prosperity and at some point there's only so many resources globally there's only so much land so much magnets that uh you know they uh and they're winning in the markets um and you know we're kind of crossing that threshold now where they're actually like a

SPEAKER_142: competitive you know the only difference between this is and i couldn't disagree sorry my point is

SPEAKER_77: i just don't want to frame it as like i just think it's a it's a it's a misstatement to frame it as china has this grand plan to come after the us and they're evil and that's what they're doing i mean

SPEAKER_53: you know yeah so this is where i think you're completely uh wrong uh david respectfully yeah in that i believe this is an ideological war and if you you can't diminish what's happening in hollywood tick tock um and the nba and other sports where china is explicitly saying if you put a villain in our in a movie if you talk about tibet in a movie we are going to not play that movie and we're going to start funding your movies and so they are absolutely using the vector of culture and chamath i think you're also wrong here where you're saying oh tick tock's not important tick tock is something that a generation of kids absolutely are in love with and those kids are like hey boomers stay out of our platform and so and and the ideological issue here freeberg which i think that you're underplaying is they want to win and they want to spread their ideology which is the ideology of authoritarianism they are not going to win africa and then suddenly say you know what would be great for africa if we made the entire continent democracies tell me that's not in their best interest how's

Chamath Palihapitiya: it different than trump tweeting well freeberg i just think that it's it's inconceivable to me that the chinese when they do this grandiose planning and they do the you know the political

SPEAKER_44: theater of having the thousands of people in the chinese you know assembly hall once a year you know

SPEAKER_72: and xi jinping talks that they haven't developed a multi-faceted multi-layered plan that they're executing in part i think this is why xi jinping essentially wants to be this ruler for life inside of china because he i think they have a 20 or 30 year plan and i do think it is to disrupt the united states and i don't think that they believe though which is the smart thing that there's one silver bullet

SPEAKER_44: i just think that they're going to take a thousand shots on goal whether it's you know monopolizing the rare earths or you know figuring out how to basically put spying software in the hands of millions of americans that's where i think tick tock is actually really important it's essentially a vehicle to spy and backdoor into americans um or whether it's you know introducing a digital yuan so that we can try to disrupt the you know the the the use of the us dollar as a reserve currency of the

SPEAKER_72: world they probably have a list of a thousand tactics and they're going to go and execute them and i don't begrudge them that i just think it's it's it's well-organized machine i just think we now

SPEAKER_88: need to counterpunch sacks yeah i mean so china is on a mission of of national greatness i think the immediate goal is to um is to assert its hegemony over asia and to kick the us out of that region but i think ultimately now they see in their sights potentially uh being the number one country in the entire world because of the because of the chaos that uh covet has wrought over here um so i think

SPEAKER_44: and in fairness david the incompetence of trump thus far i mean like you know it's it's not fair to think that the chinese poly bureau versus trump and his cabinet are an equal match forget your political

SPEAKER_88: persuasion yeah i mean they clearly seem emboldened and you know just in the last few weeks and months we've seen the ending of the two systems in hong kong which was a 50-year commitment they made in i think 1984. um so they abrogated on that well it's that commitment that yeah you happen to do that

SPEAKER_53: three or four months before trump is looking like he's not going to be in office so talking about

SPEAKER_03: shots on goal this may be their only shot to do this and well does that mean they go after taiwan do they go after taiwan in the next hundred days where they have a window i think we have to be

SPEAKER_88: extremely clear that taiwan is a red line for us and that we're committed to the security of taiwan because if we show any hesitation or weakness there they will they will seize on that and um

SPEAKER_47: would trump do that would trump put his foot down because he did nothing when it came to supporting

SPEAKER_44: i think we need to extract away from any given president of the united states because they they change every four or eight years and i think we need to have a bigger discussion which is like i said

SPEAKER_72: over the next 40 to 50 years are we comfortable with dual duopoly power structure in the world which is the united states and china because that's effectively what we are today or are we the

Chamath Palihapitiya: shining city on a hill once again and if so what are we willing to do to make sure that that's the case and i think that's independent of your political persuasion and your party right right

SPEAKER_88: well the good news here is that both trump and biden are basically racing to sort of position themselves as the more hawkish candidate on china which is to say that this recognition of cold war ii is now i think bipartisan uh which if you want to sustain a policy in this country over say 40 years like we did in containing the soviet union you have to have bipartisan support for that uh and so it does seem like finally as a country i think we are kind of getting our act together on china i mean obviously there will be disagreements within that larger uh context but it seems like now people are waking up to the threat that uh that china represents to uh you know to america being the number one

SPEAKER_105: country in the world and i think yeah by the way i agree with i agree with sacks i mean i i think that's

SPEAKER_77: exactly what's happening and and what will happen here um and uh and it'll certainly um it'll be a big hill to climb i'll just highlight and i'll ask the question of chamath um you know per his point earlier let me ask you guys how many factories do you think exist in china take a guess 11 million 2.8 million now how many do

SPEAKER_75: you think exist in the united states 150 000 close about 250 000 and china has about 83 million factory workers and we have about 12. so um you know chamath if we do end up in cold war ii uh where you know we

SPEAKER_77: escalate the tension and escalate the divide how do we end up um you know having avoiding two thousand

SPEAKER_75: dollar three thousand dollar iphones how do we get all the televisions we want for 500 bucks how do we do

SPEAKER_77: that um given that you know to catch up with this production capacity will end up costing many tens

SPEAKER_09: of trillions of dollars of invested capital that china's invested over decades well this is such a brilliant this is a fabulous question and i think i don't have the answer but here's the way that i think about the solution you know the the thing that we had before was in my way in many ways like this kind

SPEAKER_44: of like perverted sense of globalism and i think that we we you know we thought that globalism equals

SPEAKER_72: utopia and that's not true it's actually more like a chess board which means you have you know two different sets of colored pieces competing against each other and each piece on the board in many ways as a country so you know we can look at that as a geographic skew and say like we need to really consolidate um you know north central and south america as a block as a productivity block and so david that's where we need to have more trade within those areas so that we can actually build up production capacity in places that can absorb and produce low-cost labor or low-cost items to compete

SPEAKER_03: with the china block that may be a solution i mean that is an incredible point chamath which is why

SPEAKER_172: the rhetoric with mexico which would love to have a deep relationship with us is so dumb dumb we're talking about factories they would love for us to put more factories on there and whatever countries

SPEAKER_72: forget forget let's work our way down the peninsula yeah go to go down the peninsula go go to honduras go to el salvador go to guatemala where uruguay paraguay they want work yeah are screaming for work which is why they're trying to enter the united states the best way is to not build a wall take all that money and fuel it into production and manufacturing and warehouse capacity in those places in which they're leaving in the first place and if we thought like china we would go ahead do it freebrook sorry

SPEAKER_77: no you you can't successfully sustain a cold war with china without global partnership and i think um you know this notion of uh nationalism and isolationism in the united states um will not work in a world where we are also trying to compete globally with china and are and are raising the stakes in a in a global uh cold war you can't have it both ways so you know either the the current administration policy needs to change i'd love to hear sax's point of view on this uh or you know or we need to have a change in administration and actually you know re-engage on a global basis with partner

SPEAKER_88: states well okay so i i think that the the point about um about uh well i i think what what some people on the right would say is that um being able to buy cheap goods at target is not worth the hollowing out of the american industrial base that happened over the past 30 years and that was a catastrophic mistake um and you know this is what got trump re-elected was shattering that that that blue wall in those rust belt states um so i think we can kind of look back on that and wonder whether that trade-off was really worth it um but moving forward i think the balance is going to be um to realize that trade does create wealth um you know all wealth in fact comes from trade whether at the level of individuals or nations if it weren't for trade all of us would be subsistence farmers or something like that um but we also have to realize that trade creates interdependence because i stopped

SPEAKER_90: making certain things in order to buy them from you and so in order to engage in trade we have to trust

SPEAKER_88: each other i have to trust that uh that you one day won't decide that your ability to manufacture antibiotics is strategic and you might deprive me of them in order to facilitate some geopolitical interest and so i think what we're waking up to with you know production of of um you know

SPEAKER_90: pharmaceuticals or n95 masks you know ppe and now chips is that we've had this real blind spot with respect to trade we've basically offshored so many of the elements are necessary for our national survival and i think those elements have to be brought back so that america is safe and independent but

SPEAKER_88: with respect to you know so many other things i think it's fine for us to get them through trade

SPEAKER_186: whether you know it could be apparel or toys or so many other goods that you know we do want cheap

SPEAKER_03: goods i want to do a strategic i want to do a mental exercise we all for our living try to come up with 100x 1000x solutions whether we're creating the companies or betting on the companies

SPEAKER_84: i want everybody to just think for a second of the united states as a startup company and a 10x 100x

SPEAKER_03: idea for how we can not only maintain our position but maybe become the shining um hill uh where we actually lead the world uh towards democracy towards human rights i'm gonna start with one that i just happened to it hit me while you all were talking which is why i love doing this podcast because i get such inspiration listening to you guys you know pass the ball around we haven't added a state to the united states in a pretty damn long time what if we said to puerto rico what if we said to the dominican republic what if we said to honduras i mean and i i don't want to make this into a uh exercise in colonialism but if we said you know what puerto rico how do you feel about being the 51st state because

SPEAKER_128: we're already 80 of the way there and what if we said the united states is going to and this is just a crazy 100x idea we're going to start taking countries that maybe love democracy that would

SPEAKER_03: love to be part of the united states and and having a bridge towards becoming part of this block

SPEAKER_189: whether it's how puerto rico is jason the united states can barely function as it is um

SPEAKER_03: that's why i'm giving you the freedom to say this is a 100x exercise as a startup because if we put out crazy ideas like this maybe we can pull people towards thinking like um the chess board of how to play 3d chess or how to win the chess board not just move the pawns back and forth well i i think the first

David Sacks: thing america has to do is is decide whether it wants to uh whether it still thinks that national

SPEAKER_88: greatness is important and whether it wants to compete to um to be the leading power in the world because right now it seems like uh we're hopelessly divided and our guns are literally drawn on each other um and uh you know you've got this um all-out assault going on on capitalism you have sort of canceled culture and america just seems hopelessly divided and i don't know if americans still think it's important to be the number one power in the world so what's your thought experiment on how to

SPEAKER_193: make americans realize this is important or if anybody else wants to jump in here with a 10x idea for

SPEAKER_44: america go ahead i have a well i have an overlaying theory that i it this is sort of kind of me spitballing so bear with me but let's do it you know there's a there's this concept called the overton window right which is sort of like the the minimally viable acceptable surface area of dialogue at which case it starts to sort of you know get extreme i might i would theorize i would tell you that the overton window is the smallest it's ever been and there's basically nothing that you

SPEAKER_72: can talk about that is relatively benign without it being politicized and and there's no gradation anymore it's a very binary thing you're either in the overton window which for example would be like you know vegetables matter or looking both ways across the street matters um and outside the overton window honestly is black lives matter as an example you know and it gets politicized on both sides uh masks you know if uh a balaclava when you're skiing because your face is cold is inside the overton window that same balaclava when you go to the drugstore so that you can actually you know either prevent disease one way or the other is outside the overton window um you know making sure that uh police uh you know are are there to protect you uh in a time of need is now outside the overton window because it's framed in a in the lens of uh police brutality so the overton window has shrunk so we we have very little surface area where we can actually all agree without getting into a fight ideological trying to cancel each other i totally agree with that i

SPEAKER_88: mean we have this we have this sort of epidemic of cancel culture going on and i guess jason you

SPEAKER_200: recently experienced this oh my lord i mean for the love of god what happened jason tell us what happened

SPEAKER_03: listen i i look at twitter as a place to have vibrant discussions and you know 10 years ago it was kind of where the overton window was most open you could have a discussion about anything and um we had a discussion about you know my feeling that as a former journalist and we're doing random acts of journalism here that i just thought the new york times was just way too biased and that they picked a side in order for their business to survive and i actually believe that i believe they picked the side of trump i'm sorry the side of anti-trump in order to get subscriptions because their advertising business has been demolished by the duopoly of facebook and google this led to the circling of the wagons of the uh journalists which i was part of but listen it's pretty easy to hate me i understand that i'm a loud mouth um and so now i'm getting piled on by the journal and and you were

SPEAKER_47: an early investor in uber absolutely don't forget that don't forget the third or fourth i i don't

SPEAKER_03: hear you they tell me the third or fourth anyway so um there's a journalist at said publication i'm not going to say her name because i don't want any harassment of anybody nobody does um who said people are stupid for going back to work um and they're idiots and i said you know this is a very convenient thing for a journalist who works behind a keyboard who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year to say because those people are literally not going to be able to feed their kids if they don't go back to work and this led to her saying i was harassing and stalking her then i was in clubhouse the new social network where you talk and the same journalist was in the audience and i said to the people who were talking just be aware there is a journalist in the audience because even though this is a private beta this could wind up being in the new york times which it did not that discussion but another one that was covertly taped and i don't know if it was covertly taped by a journalist or not but it did wind up in the press anyway um this whole thing turns into a giant fight uh and clubhouse sounds

David Friedberg: like some dark snm sex club in berlin no no that's here's what i think is most entertaining clubhouse

SPEAKER_204: h-l-a-u-s house clubhouse yeah let me what i think is most entertaining about this is that the the new

SPEAKER_29: york times journalist was in this vicious uh battle with uh bology who's a silicon valley founder and personality and they were arguing and then jason somehow comes running over and starts involving himself in this feud and it's like and it's like bology gets fouled but jason takes the flop you know and all of a sudden and all of a sudden jason's talking about you know how he's getting docs bology is the guy who was like called out in the new york times but somehow

SPEAKER_213: jason uh jason takes the flop but anyway so here's what's happened i'm only telling the story

SPEAKER_03: i'm not trying to get victim points give a fuck about that uh it's july 4th i they i put the kids down for the nap we you know steaks are going on the grill it's a fucking great day and then i'm on the peloton trying to be just a little less fat so i can be less fat than sacks so that the photo that we're sacks is using i just come out five percent less fat than sacks and i look and i had posted a picture of the tree line outside my house to the beautiful blue sky on july 4th and i said

SPEAKER_216: listen everybody take a break from twitter go spend time with your family which is what i was about to

SPEAKER_03: do a 37 year old private equity douche from uh boston does a reverse image search on the tree line finds a bigger picture of the trees finds a picture of my pool based on that bigger picture and google reverse image search and all these other tools and then docks me which basically means

SPEAKER_128: releasing your address he releases my address in my thread where okay because so i dm him and he's using his real name and he's got a linkedin profile and i said do you realize how dangerous this is he goes well you're stalking said journalist i said i am not stalking the journalist well she said you're stalking her so if you apologize to her and you take down the mean stuff you said about her i'll take down your home address and i said hey dipshit um this is illegal number one and number two you're going to lose your twitter account and then i said number three we're connected your boss because you have a you're using your public name your boss is connected to 14 people of which like half are very close friends of mine and i'm calling your boss and i have all these screenshots of you doxing me what do you think is going to happen on monday and i just gave him my phone number in this

SPEAKER_03: and hold on hold on wait go ahead okay sorry go ahead let me just finish the story i tell the guy

SPEAKER_00: here's my phone number he calls me i said hey i know that you're a kid i know that you did something rash but this is actually you know a kind of a dangerous thing because you know there's serious mental illness and whatever 0.1 of the population there's millions of people and now involved in this discussion it could be a security concern for me i'm not going to post your address please don't post mine delete the tweet he goes i refuse to delete the tweet until you whatever and i said okay well i'm going to call your boss on monday we know these people in common she's going to fire you and you're going to lose your job now i know you're only 23 or 24 and this doesn't matter to you and he goes uh i said how old are you he said 37 i said you're 37 years old is you married you say yeah

SPEAKER_128: i'm married i got a six year old i said now you want me to make you lose your job because you're so mad at me over nothing i said i don't want to call your boss on monday and and tell them what you did

SPEAKER_00: because it will certainly result in you being fired and he goes oh i said you might want to go talk to your spouse about what you did and maybe get her perspective he writes me an apology letter we deleted it's all water under the bridge but i i've been trying to tell people you have to be very careful when this gets too personal because there are your dog whistling to crazy people who then might do something crazy anyway end of story i backed off the whole discussion because i just don't want to i i want to finish my second book and i want to do podcasts with guys like you and have a great time with my life and not be involved with a bunch of

SPEAKER_50: idiots end of story um so i want to go back to this overton window concept for a second so again

SPEAKER_44: just what my my my idea so you take the word matters the word matters is in the overton window nobody can argue that the word matters is offensive if you uh if you prepend that word with vegetables it stays in the overton window if you put uh looking both ways before you cross the street

SPEAKER_72: matter okay we're still there stay in the overton window if you say black lives as a term just without the word matters that's probably in the overton window sure you put black lives matters it's out the overton window and both sides politicize i think the left politicizes with this cancel culture and um uh basically like an extreme form of political correctness and then the right politicizes by uh you know in in their way a vein of hypersensitivity and then a doubling down on this notion of an attacking of individual freedoms and free speech and in all of that both of these two groups miss the fact that they're both sort of the same and they they're they're wronged in the same way but

SPEAKER_44: they're both not listening in the same way right um so if if i had to put something in the overton window that uh would address the us china cold war thing here's what i would say we all need energy we

SPEAKER_72: all need food and we all need technology right we need to sort of warm our houses we need to feed our bellies and we need to be able to be productive in some way so that we can make money and i think that everybody in the united states can agree that on these three dimensions there are some really simple things that we could do that basically double down on us sovereignty uh and allow us to basically be more on the offensive so i'll give you a couple of ideas on the energy side is we need to continue to support energy independence and that will require subsidies and the reason why that's important in my opinion is that then what happens is it hastens and accelerates russia and the middle east uh not becoming relevant anymore because they are forced to monetize their oil sooner the middle east probably

SPEAKER_44: disintegrates into 30 countries you know the middle east was just a kind of a random exercise of you know basically americans and europeans after the war divvying up a bunch of things it has no sensitivity to culture or language or anything so that probably you know goes to in a very different direction and russia itself and russia becomes less important because they just have to monetize otherwise they

SPEAKER_72: will lose their only source of revenue so that's one thing on energy that i think we could do that i think is relatively politically acceptable and inside the overton window um second is on food which is that we have to double down on creating a completely independent food supply inside the united states and there are ways again where if we don't need to be building tanks and having 90 trillion dollar programs for aircraft carriers anymore we could pour that money into u.s farms you know and give people like friedberg a lot more money to go and actually make sure the united states has food security that in any situation and scenario we can feed the 330 odd million people inside of our borders and then the fourth the the third thing is on technology which is there are a critical bunch of inputs whether it's 5g chips rare earth materials or minerals things like cobalt and lithium which we need for batteries for climate change um that we can go and basically co-opt because those things are concentrated in countries like chile in places like in places like africa where we can actually do a better job of instilling government governance and security um so that's my jason back to your thing these aren't sexy ideas but they would work and i think they would work by both republicans and democrats

SPEAKER_03: and it's non-controversial i'll even punch up the food part there's no reason why you know the same way we made water um and public schools you know kind of a given in the united states nobody really has to worry about going getting water nobody has to worry about getting uh a basic education learning to read let's say it's not perfect obviously why not make healthy produce and some amount of healthy food so affordable in the united states that uh it's essentially free right and and then you you think about food security like how are we still discussing food security with the amount of money

SPEAKER_128: and prosperity we have in this country make it free we've we've almost made energy free we have energy independence i'll say a manhattan project to make energy and food as free or de minimis as water would be just an amazing thing for us to rally around because then people can work on the next thing in their

SPEAKER_00: life their careers their family their pursuits freeberg what do you think of the overton window and would you add something to it that we can all agree on that we could work on together and maybe unify the

SPEAKER_191: country as opposed to pulling guns on each other in the parking lots because of the color of our skin

SPEAKER_75: i'm reminded of a great moment in history when will smith and his uh friends blew up the ufo that

SPEAKER_77: came to attack earth uh nothing brings us together like a common enemy um so it could be that the uh the unification is going to be um you know in part driven by this cold war ii and creating a common enemy in china is going to work for both the right and the left and create a lot of opportunity of chamoff highlights in manufacturing and food production as there's a lot of tools available to us i think we could all sit here and speculate and i could pitch and plug all the companies i'm involved in that i think are going to play a role but uh i do think it's uh it's that moment where you know we are going to coalesce around a common enemy and um well it'd be good if you actually

SPEAKER_164: shared one or two of those projects you're working on if you can i actually would think well i mean

SPEAKER_75: very much to hear what you're working on i've shared this before but i do think biomanufacturing

SPEAKER_77: which is the the technology whereby we engineer the dna of microbes and those microbes then make molecules for us in a big fermentation tank in the same way that we make beer or wine biomanufacturing can be used to make flavors and fragrances and now we're making materials like silks and plastics plastic equivalents and and more interestingly proteins for human consumption to replace animal proteins and the cost of production and the cost of energy associated with making these materials these molecules these proteins through biomanufacturing is literally several orders of magnitude less than the traditional technique which is just insane if you think about it in first principles basis of growing corn feeding it to a cow letting the cow grow up feeding it hundreds of gallons of water killing it chopping it up transporting it to a restaurant i mean the amount of energy that goes into making a pound of ground beef is insane um and the and the greenhouse gas emissions and so on so i do believe that there is a big wave of biomanufacturing as an industry that is coming on the u.s this century and it will hopefully by the end of the century be the primary way that we're kind of producing a lot of the molecules that we consume and that we use for clothing and materials

SPEAKER_03: so then that does what to factories because you know you did explain earlier the number of factories if we can bio produce that's not only our steaks not only our corn so that also mean we could bio

SPEAKER_77: manufacture steel plastics cars not not so much steel but alternatives to leather alternatives to cloth alternatives to um so clothes to clothes food so imagine instead of a traditional factory think about a factory historically being purpose-built so you build all these components to make one thing so you spend all this money making a giant machine that you put stuff in on one end and the same thing comes out over and over the other end and that's classic industrial revolution 1.0 and you know 20th century industrial revolution output in in this century we are going to build these giant printers they're not going to be single form machines that make one thing over and over they're going to be systems that are giant fermentation tanks and in those fermentation tanks it's like you program them with software and the software in this case is genetic software you edit the genome of these organisms they take stuff on the input and they make on the output a bunch of different stuff a replicator like in

SPEAKER_53: star trek and if there was seasonality and people needed something over the summer for july 4th versus what they need in christmas or in the winter and ski season the same factory makes that thing we're 10 20 30 40 50 years from this having an impact on the economy yes and we're seeing it now i

SPEAKER_77: mean look the number of uh artificial animal protein companies and the funding that they're getting um is i think highlighting investor interest and appetite and backing the capex needed to get this to become a reality right now uh perfect day just raised 300 million dollars this week um impossible foods rates 400 million dollars from the qatari investment authority um you know obviously beyond meat is where they're at i mean these companies are using um these techniques of genetic engineering to make microbes that make the proteins and the flavorings we put 50 we put 500

SPEAKER_234: million into the ppp program if we put 500 i'm sorry 500 billion and put 500 billion into this

SPEAKER_75: how much would it accelerate it um pretty substantially and i think it goes from food to pharma to

SPEAKER_77: materials and that's probably you know where you would see the uh the impact um but again one system can make different materials can make different so we could be independent of other countries for

SPEAKER_03: food to chamat's point and also pharma which we are way too dependent correct on china yeah we're

SPEAKER_77: definitely a net exporter by the way you know our largest export partner is china so most of our soybeans in the united states that we produce and soybeans are grown on 160 million acres in the u.s and it rotates half and half each year with corn but about two-thirds of our soybeans historically get exported to china so we are already food secure from a net resource perspective it's just the rest of the infrastructure in terms of turning that stuff into meat and other stuff is where we're um you know we probably have to build up a little bit of infrastructure sacks let's swing the ball over

SPEAKER_234: to you when you hear the overton window ideas when you hear about this biochemistry slurry tank revolution that freeberg's working on um how does that change or evolve your view of our relationship with china and the political mess we're in right now in 2020 yeah well i think cold war ii does provide

SPEAKER_88: a lens um to to rethink and reevaluate a lot of these domestic political fights and so for example are the big technology companies you know google facebook and so on are they these you know even monopolies that need to be broken up or are they the crown jewels of the american economy that need to be protected from chinese espionage um you know is the free enterprise system this you know horribly um you know uh oppressive racist thing or is it actually the engine of prosperity that's built this country um you know is freedom of speech uh an outdated principle or is it something we we want to you know that that should be canceled or is it something we want to fight for and i think that you know when you start thinking about these issues uh you know in the you know through the lens of cold war ii it provides an opportunity to kind of reevaluate them and think about what's really important um and and hopefully it can provide a little bit of a unify unifying force in america not because we want china to be an enemy but just because we want to maintain

SPEAKER_19: uh a sense of national greatness um and i you know it's not something we just want to give up on

SPEAKER_44: i have a question for friedberg are uh our schools going to be back in the fall because i cannot deal

SPEAKER_77: with my kids being at home yeah i think it's going to be a mixed bag it seems like i mean if you follow this this is a political decision right it's not a scientific decision um and so there are different uh politics uh around nationally that are affecting this and there are some schools that seem like they've got processes and and methods of being comfortable some of them who are just throwing everything out the window and say i don't give a shit the kids got to go back to school and some of them who are being very conservative and saying you know we're not ready for that we can't take the risk so you'll definitely see a mixed bag i don't know where where you're living chamath i don't know what's going to happen per se but it's definitely a local policy is it safe friedberg is it safe to

SPEAKER_246: send our kids back to a 10-person pod in a school in california i mean that's like asking if it's safe

SPEAKER_77: to cross a train track you know uh you can look left you can look right uh but yeah you're you know a busy train intersection during during a rush hour you know it's hard to say uh what level of safe is safe um we know that kids are less susceptible uh to any sort of health risk themselves from the virus and it looks like there's a lot of studies showing that they're likely less uh uh the virus is less transmissible through kids especially kids under the age of 14. um and so it seems like there's there's some theories that say that look it's these ace 2 receptors whereby the virus enters the cells really start to present when you turn 10 years old at a greater rate and you know it scales up to 14 and above 14 you're kind of an adult from an ace 2 receptor point of view and then there's the severity of the uh infection as we all know is really more of a significant issue for much elderly people so when you take those factors into account the virus is likely less transmissible amongst children therefore a bunch of kids get together they're not going to transmit it to each other and um and it's likely going to be less severe even if there is an infection for kids the risk is just about are the teachers comfortable and what happens when they go home and there have been a number of letters that you guys have probably seen op-eds and whatnot written in papers by teachers saying i'm nervous to go back to school i don't want to teach this fall i don't want to take the risk for my health i take care of my mom or my dad or what have you um and so there's a

SPEAKER_53: lot of competing interests all right so let's go let's go around the horn of who's sending their kids back to school i'll start i posted on calacanis.com yesterday that we've decided as a family

SPEAKER_234: that we're starting a micro school uh we put out a call for a teacher and um you know just looking at teacher salaries they don't get paid particularly well in our society as we all know they're underpaid so we think we can come over the top and provide a you know a better financial arrangement for a teacher um and then uh have one to five students and we're going to just create a

SPEAKER_03: micro school that's our that's our current plan um our kids did go to camp this summer in a small 10 person or less pod um and we felt that was safe everybody was tested and it was outdoors but for me being indoors at a school with 300 pods of 10 um and i think the best teachers are not going to

SPEAKER_53: show up and our my kids don't learn over zoom i don't know about your kids but it's not working so we're starting up are we're going to roll our own school and hopefully find one or two families who want to chop up the cost with us or we'll we'll just pick up the tab and invite one or two families um if they don't have the means to do it but we're gonna we're gonna go solo for 2021 freeberg trimoth what are you thinking right now because we're only seven eight weeks out from this

SPEAKER_50: right we're less than two months i i really think like look not everybody jason is going to be in a

SPEAKER_44: position to hire teachers in fact most everybody won't be agreed um i think it's uh i want to send my children back to school um i uh i refuse to um create some alternative reality for them um i think it's really important that they are with their friends uh i think that we're not really thinking strongly enough about the social implications for you know children uh let's just

SPEAKER_72: say like you know you take an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old or a 10-year-old and you deprive them of their friends for a year i mean that's an enormous part of their life where they like a

SPEAKER_44: prison sentence yeah they've been socially isolated you know um i just think it's it's a really bad outcome so um i think that obviously from a public health perspective we want to keep our teachers safe um i just think that it's so important that we realize that you know we are going to impact an entire generation of kids i think that if you're 18 or 19 and and have had you know 18 or 19 years of normal teenage-dom you know and and and growing up that it's okay if you miss a year or you have to you know do your first year of college remotely like it sucks but you can deal um but i really

SPEAKER_116: worry about these kids in in primary school and middle school it's really unfair yeah i mean our plan

SPEAKER_84: was to try to get to four or five students uh small bubble and then you know have outdoor the problem

SPEAKER_03: is in the northeast i just i just think it i just haven't gone to school it's you're inside with a heating system with a closed ventilation system that was built in 1920 and i think it avoids the

SPEAKER_72: real key thing which is like i don't think you go to school to learn as much as you go to school to uh socialize socialize i mean you you learn as a byproduct because everybody socializes not everybody learns right agreed and so there it's it's an enormously important formative experience for a child to be around 15 or 20 of their other kids then to be in the playground to deal with all

SPEAKER_44: the adversity that comes with normal life of a kid um that's the biggest thing that i think we're depriving them of and i understand that you know there's an important reason to hold these kids back but i just want to appreciate that behaviorally and psychologically this is not going to be for free

SPEAKER_25: hmm freeberg uh um sacks what's your latest thinking i i i guess i i agree with both schmoth and

SPEAKER_88: freeberg on on this that the there are huge benefits to going back and the risks to kids are low in terms of getting it and also they're less viral if they do um but israel's sort of a strong recent counter example where they recently opened schools and now all of a sudden they've got a spike so um you know we're gonna send our kids back but i expect it to be a little bit of a shit show i think that the schools will reopen and they'll they'll do all this planning there'll be all these like pods and half days and smaller groups and that kind of thing and then somebody's gonna they'll be like one case either a kid or you know one family and then all of a sudden they're gonna shut down again and i guess i you know they're spending all this time planning but i wonder if they're really gonna have contingency plans for what happens when there's a case or

SPEAKER_262: that's exactly what i think happening yeah i think they'll just shut down it's just it it's too scary

SPEAKER_53: for a child to die or a teacher to die and people the overreaction to it um will be to shut everything down right it's and then we're going to be back to our kids um when we sent our kids to camp for the three weeks they went man it was just they were different kids right and to chamat's point they they they're little social animals they need to roll around like little baby tigers and and play and if they don't have that it it dramatically affects behavior and we saw it in only three months i mean 12 months these kids are going to go mental yeah i think that basically where the

SPEAKER_88: country is at is that we're an undeclared sweden you know we've basically the the viruses become endemic it's everywhere you know we've basically given up on trying to contain or stop it and um and so now we're just on this path to herd immunity and um you know it's basically what sweden did except we haven't declared that's what our plan is um and so it's haphazard and um but it's it seems

SPEAKER_234: like kind of we're by default just headed for herd immunity freeberg as we wrap up here um and i got one final question i want to do after this and then we'll wrap freeberg what's your thoughts kids in schools i i know you have kids i'm not sure the ages if they're like would be going back to a uh i think they're a little bit on the younger side so um if you did have eight nine ten twelve

SPEAKER_267: year olds sending them back to school starting your own what are your thoughts yeah i mean i

SPEAKER_75: i would probably be a little ridiculous and send them and test them every other day

SPEAKER_105: uh at home uh and uh you know you can get this vector dickinson testing system now for 250 bucks it's a handheld device and these test strips cost 20 bucks say the name of it again the vector

SPEAKER_271: dickinson it's a vector with a v b b b wait how do i are they available uh yeah you can buy them

SPEAKER_75: through medical uh retailers and uh yeah the handheld device that they use in hospitals and

SPEAKER_77: stuff today it's 250 bucks and there's a little test kit that you buy it'll probably cost 20 to 30 bucks it'll be available next month per test and or 15 to 20 bucks um and it takes five minutes to get a result and so you literally could do it in the schoolyard before they go into the building yeah so you could test you i would test my kids every day uh if i had you know my kids are my one kids in

SPEAKER_53: preschool the other ones but you gotta do a little pinprick on their finger right no no if you could

SPEAKER_77: just do a little swab of the nose so okay kind of yeah deep nose swab or or you know halfway there's data that shows now that you could actually do a throat swab and you know get a pretty good reading on it so you know whatever the protocol is it'd probably be pretty non-invasive and you could get a result now that's expensive uh for most people you know that's not expensive for a school not expensive for a school that's right and so i think that company will do well with that testing system they've launched because it actually tests not for the rna but for the protein is this a public company yeah um and the stock's done well um and and and this this test does really well because it tests for the protein not the rna so it's actually a much uh um uh you know much easier test scientifically to do you're not trying to pick up specific nucleotides or nucleic acids you're trying to pick up a a protein um and so it's uh yeah it's it's pretty effective um all right yeah if the

SPEAKER_234: election was held today we always like to talk about this a bit the audience loves when we talk

SPEAKER_84: about it we talked about oprah last time that was our sleeper candidate i'm changing i'm changing

SPEAKER_50: i'm changing tammy dockworth tammy dockworth is now my sleeper vice presidential i'm with it i'm with

SPEAKER_234: the chum off on that absolutely 100 uh now uh who's gonna win if the election was held today sacks i'll let you go first since it's the most heartbreaking for you

SPEAKER_88: um biden biden's strategy is working um his strategy is basically to say nothing to be you know tied in his basement and um and uh but it's working because even though he's a cipher i think people uh he's he's basically a protest vote against trump and uh trump you know is uh you know seen as very divisive and inflammatory and i think the american people at this point just want to push a button and make it stop and right now biden seems like the make it stop button yeah okay and should

SPEAKER_03: biden i'll add to the question uh there'll be two we'll end on this this double question who wins today and should biden debate trump or is it better for him to just opt out of the debates and and not risk

SPEAKER_88: it what would you advise it well i think biden's strategy right now is working i don't know why

SPEAKER_84: he would change it i mean so he should not there's three debates on the books he agreed to should he

SPEAKER_88: do the three debates yes or no if you were advising him um so i think he probably will not be able to to duck uh that these debates forever i think i mean it seems unlikely that um you know if you were

SPEAKER_189: advising him would you tell him to do it or not i i would i think i would tell him his strategy is

SPEAKER_88: working which is to say nothing and so don't go to the debates if you can get away with it i'm not

SPEAKER_29: sure he'll be able to get away with it because i think eventually people eventually the american public will turn its attention to the election um but part of part of the reason why his strategy is working is because trump is running such a bad campaign in fact it feels like trump hasn't even really started to campaign um there's no logic to it for sure well it's you know normally what the incumbent does especially when they've got a lot of money is they use the summer to define the

SPEAKER_88: opponent they start running a lot of ads seeking to define their opponent and and you know where are those ads where is that attempt to define uh biden i mean i think i think it's hard because um um you know because it's it's hard to define biden as as a radical who represents these um

SPEAKER_29: woke mobs biden doesn't even know how to say the word woke correctly i think he's called him woke um so that's it's actually i was woke last night by my four-year-old who needed her diaper change right all right but but the fact that biden is so clueless um and seems like so out of touch actually helps him because i mean the way the way for trump to win the election okay let's let's put it that way is to to make the alternative to trump the destruction of mount rushmore right i mean if if trump can somehow convince the american public that the election of joe biden means the ripping down of george washington and abraham lincoln and and mount rushmore and the destruction of of capitalism um that is the way for him to win that's you know but he has to actually um listen well yes he has to actually be able to to tag biden with that why did peter teal why did peter teal drop trump he's you've

SPEAKER_03: got a 30-year relationship with peter teal you talk to him on the regular why did teal drop him i don't

David Sacks: know that he has i think you have to get him on the show to talk all right there you go good deflection

SPEAKER_246: best dc who wins and should he do those three debates biden yeah yeah i i think you can't get

SPEAKER_44: away from them i wouldn't make it a big issue because the debates are going to be kind of this random crappy kind of experience you know i i don't even know whether uh they'll be in the same place i think they should try to make sure that they're not in the same place so that it's done almost over zoom like

SPEAKER_72: you can you can cripple the effort the the usefulness of these debates in many ways there really isn't much that can happen in the debates the reality is that people aren't voting for biden they are voting

SPEAKER_44: against donald trump any chance trump wins and they are voting against the sheer incompetence of him and his family and uh you know it's going to be very difficult for him to overturn it there is one thin path for him to win which is to absolutely shower america with money uh close to the election day so if there is a multi multi-trillion dollar stimulus bill that passes um and it literally puts money into the hands of working americans especially in the swing states it could work now the one thing

SPEAKER_72: i'll tell you is if you looked at the exit polls in georgia it's scary because uh there were 230 000 i think more democrats out of the exit polls in the georgia primary than there were republican now just hold the phone here for a second because under no calculus on electoral college did we ever have to think that there was probabilistically any chance that a democrat wins georgia and i think what this speaks to is a changing demographic longitudinally and this is not a racial thing meaning this is an age thing where these young people are very different politically and so if you think that there is an even remote chance that donald trump loses georgia don't even worry about minnesota and pennsylvania

SPEAKER_44: and florida because he would have already lost those in order to lose georgia also this pandemic and work

SPEAKER_151: from home is going to result in people if it is a sustained work from home we have scarred the american

SPEAKER_72: economy guys and we don't know the extent of the injury because you know you know the extent of the injury when you get you know step out of the chair that first moment the cask gets taken off and you put a little pressure on the leg to see how bad it is and we don't know how bad it is except we know that

SPEAKER_44: it's pretty bad so um you know i think that all roads kind of look uh like biden i think the very narrow path that donald trump has is uh you know a multi multi-trillion dollar stimulus bill directly

SPEAKER_50: into the hands of americans friedberg is he going to win yes or no should he do the debates yes or no

SPEAKER_97: if the vote were to happen today he would win uh joe biden would win i think he's actually more

SPEAKER_77: likely to win based on news that just hit the wire which we haven't talked about today which is it looks like facebook is going to ban all political ads this year what yeah and so if they do that

SPEAKER_246: wow uh obviously that's facebook in a fight for survival right now that ad camp amazing how a bunch

SPEAKER_151: of advertisers taking a one-month pause all of a sudden brings zuckerberg to the table amazing how

SPEAKER_50: my uh my well-timed short thesis tweet uh play oh yum yum so i think that works uh that obviously

SPEAKER_77: works to biden's favor all right if that's the case and then my my point on the debate if i were biden what i would do right now is i would go on twitter and i would say release your tax returns and i'll debate you and i would repeat that tweet twice a day uh and love it freeberg gets the dunk

SPEAKER_151: 360. that's a done in that's a big card over freeberg wins the debate uh this show is sponsored

SPEAKER_03: by nobody however i'm going to ask my bestie c if somebody were to make a 25 000 donation to charity

SPEAKER_50: would you allow me to read an ad for 30 seconds during the pot at some point no but i'll match it to wherever you want to go no fucking ads ever um i love i love you guys i miss you love you

SPEAKER_05: love you bestie c i love you love you free love you uh sax it was great playing golf let's get a let's golf let's fucking golf man i'm losing my mind we'll see you little let's do a little small

SPEAKER_125: little nasa boys a little 10 000 you know see you next time on the all in podcast tell your friends to tune in if they want to listen to something intelligent bye bye