SPEAKER_00: guys my f***ing dog he's in jail joker's in jail joker got in jail again okay so he's been jailed SPEAKER_02: in italy he was jailed in palo alto when will that dog learn i've spent quality he's out of SPEAKER_05: control he got jailed because he's a runner he went to he's a runner he's a runner he's a track star he uh the the we he we we sent him to like a you know like the dog walker where he goes and Chamath Palihapitiya: runs around and they come pick him up but then they the guy opened the van door anyways he gets found they they're trying to call me um because i guess my number is on the thing which i hadn't realized you don't pick up can't reach me well i mean i'm in dc in new york and uh they put them in the kennel and we get this picture and nick you can post the picture but you know because i sent it SPEAKER_12: to you poor poor joker and dog jill he's a great dog the but he is he wait is he back did you go SPEAKER_04: he's back we got him back but he's back he's out of jail again honestly he's only going to learn if SPEAKER_14: he goes to you should get a little tag for him those little uh remote tracking bro that's not i mean SPEAKER_15: it's great but it doesn't stop him from escaping that dog there's something wrong with that dog SPEAKER_20: remember when he came around when sacks came over yeah and the dog was like growling at him and sacks SPEAKER_23: was like hunched in the corner like it's the only dog that doesn't like me i mean every other SPEAKER_26: dog every other dog trained in no he's not trained he's not been trained we have to train SPEAKER_29: him i mean i i get it he hasn't been trained but he's so cute did you train that dog to hate white SPEAKER_36: people that dog is a little racist i'll say it all right everybody welcome to another episode of SPEAKER_45: all in the podcast that you've been listening to for 48 episodes here we are on the precipice of greatness 49 episodes in but with us again today the queen of quinoa your science ambassador david friedberg also on the pod the rain man himself definitely his dad lets him drive in the driveway SPEAKER_48: david sacks and batting cleanup the dictator himself chamath polyhapitiya what did we all think of last SPEAKER_50: week's pod with balaji i felt it got cut off too soon i was getting into a groove with balaji and i'm trying to figure out how to pick that up with him because i thought they were getting into some SPEAKER_51: pretty interesting discussion towards the end and we obviously ran out of time chamath had to hop off so uh it would it would have been great to keep that conversation going with balaji i really do think there's a big question mark on like how does the decentralized web or decentralized social networks in particular work with respect to kind of that you know recommendation application layer which is effectively what search solved on the internet um and so i'm i'm curious to keep the conversation SPEAKER_53: going and seeing you know what this means i made the decision to end the pod because chamath had to SPEAKER_45: go sax had to go there was a hard stop and i was like i don't want to keep this going without the other besties and people were very upset they thought i um shut it down abruptly but we had a certain amount of time and we could always have him back so everybody relax but i did look at the stats SPEAKER_46: we each came in with our you know whatever percent pro rata and he had double so he had 40 percent and SPEAKER_59: we all had basically which is right for a guest i think i felt right didn't it feel right i think it's important to hear what when folks come on what they have to say um he's a really smart guy and you know you can kind of just let him go and riff for a while um and then just react to him so i think it's it's lovely to hear such a deep thinker think out loud quite honestly yeah and even if you SPEAKER_63: don't agree with him i don't agree with him on a lot of his points about you know decentralized SPEAKER_43: everything i think centralized works for you know many things better i'm curious sax you know looking back on it were there moments that you felt maybe you disagreed with him more or agree with him more and wanted to lean into a conversation obviously it's very hard to have five people on a pod and only get a certain amount of air time etc well look i think um i think biology is a great guest SPEAKER_69: to have on once in a while i mean it does kind of turn the pod a little bit more into a ted talk uh definitely have that vibe but the the fans you liked it and i mean biology should have his own show i mean he can go for a while i mean he's got a lot to say for hours yes and he has he has and and i think he should do his own show because there's definitely a huge fan base for it and uh and if people want more biology i interviewed him for about an hour on purple pills which is kind of the the i don't know if you want to call solo pod solo show that i do where i occasionally interview SPEAKER_74: people on call and download call in and uh go check out purple pills uh so yeah you know i gave SPEAKER_45: biology a little pep talk coming in saying hey listen it's a round table discussion and i've interviewed before and you can kind of tip into the monologuing and explaining very big picture things so just try to pass the ball a little bit here um and i think he he did adjust his game a little bit but it's you know it's hard to have somebody like that on i think you pointed it out sacks that it's more like SPEAKER_59: a ted talk for him we're having a conversation and he's used to being interviewed and i think that is a that's a transition but you know um it was fine let's move on yeah okay so i think we'll start SPEAKER_45: off with something we talked about on episode nine which was coinbase's ceo brian armstrong wrote a SPEAKER_46: very controversial blog very very controversial blog post uh exactly a year ago coinbase is a mission focused company at the time he was dealing with a never-ending debate inside his own company about black lives matter about social justice and any number of issues and he said listen the company is mission focused our mission is to you know make people more financially independent literate etc and we're going to ban any discussions on our electronic communications you can do things on your own time and it was quite controversial the time we had a good discussion i re-listened to our disc i re-listened SPEAKER_43: to our discussion on that pod and we all universally felt like it was the right move well he went ahead SPEAKER_45: and uh picked up the hornet's nest he did not have to talk about this ever again everybody had forgotten about it and he grabbed the hornet's nest ran into the end zone and spiked it jason can you well before Chamath Palihapitiya: you do that can you say how many people left as a result of his blog post and all do you know those SPEAKER_69: stats because i think i don't know those stats i do but it was it was five percent ended up leaving there was a big article about it this was i think i think it was worth him doing a follow-up post this SPEAKER_88: was the one-year anniversary of his blog post and he was kind of giving us a status update and what he basically said is that the policy had worked um so you got so first of all should we just review what the policy was the policy was that they were going to declare the workplace to be politically neutral that people would leave their politics to the door they would not have sort of extraneous political conversations at work that doesn't mean you couldn't support whatever causes you wanted on your own time or tweet whatever you want on your own time but while you're at work they would declare it to be sort of a political dmz like a demilitarized zone basically all he was doing was reasserting the old center the old etiquette of hey when you go to work you you're not engaged and you're completely heated yeah you're paid to work you're not there to engage in political activism so that was the policy and of course uh the the the woke mob became completely hysterical about it uh as it turns and so then what happened is that brian offered everyone a very generous severance policy if they didn't want to stick around certainly generous policy yes extremely generous they made it really easy absurdly generous right they made it really easy for people to check out if they want to check out well only five percent took the policy 60 people yes and then on the heels of that there was a gigantic new york times hit piece against the company the usual disinformation and slanders um against the company and then now we have this follow-up piece and i think what brian basically reported is that today coinbase is a more aligned company because everyone who's there wants to be there for the mission that's what they focus on when they go to work he talked about how they had hired top talent away from other companies i mean SPEAKER_93: basically he put out the bat signal and people came running because you know we have they wanted SPEAKER_94: neutrality they did not want it people are voting with their feet yeah they're fed up with the SPEAKER_93: politics and distraction and and i think the employees were secretly relieved that he declared this policy basically he took the heat on himself for the larger benefit of all the employees who just SPEAKER_98: wanted to be there and work and not have to wonder whether they're doing something right or wrong because they're on the wrong side of a political issue freeberg nailed it when he said uh in our SPEAKER_45: episode nine which you go back to freeberg you may not remember your comments but you said what about the employees who just want to come to work and don't want to engage in political speech now you're infringing on them to force them to be participate in these discussions and they don't have a choice because they need to feed their families need to go to work and so freeberg i think you take a little victory lap there he says in this tweet storm i'll just read the third part of it one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our SPEAKER_43: diversity numbers since my post we've grown our head count about 110 percent doubled it while our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved in some metrics so all of the hand SPEAKER_58: ringing and pearl clutching that this would have a negative effect on the company has turned out to be wrong go ahead shabbat and then freeberg i mean if you want it's like i think it's important to set SPEAKER_59: the context for what this is there is a um a productivity war going on inside of um institutions around the world and what's happening is that um people's personal beliefs are bumping up against what the mission and um goals operational goals of a company are or a university or all these other SPEAKER_10: places and so this is probably the first big example this is a what is a 50 60 billion dollar public SPEAKER_59: company um 50 billion dollar public company that basically said enough's enough this is our mission SPEAKER_05: everybody else um basically just needs to shut the up and i think that that's very important now if they then go off and actually crush their goals that's the one missing piece in all of this because when that happens then you can write a through line through all of this and say okay this is Chamath Palihapitiya: in part what allowed them to do it so i think that the the the the folks that you know uh were really up in arms still have uh one small straw in the fight which is that if these guys don't achieve SPEAKER_05: their goals they'll point to this as one of the reasons why but the whole diversity is strength or you know like yeah you're suppressing free speech you know that argument but i think if brian then goes Chamath Palihapitiya: and delivers a couple of knockout quarters in a couple of knockout years then um you know what he will be able to say definitively which no one can refute is we leave our politics at the door we define our okrs and then we go and we build things that people need um as a company and then you go SPEAKER_108: off and you can do whatever you want and i think that that's very powerful for uh many companies and SPEAKER_109: institutions friedberg you heard my recap of what you said last i'm not sure if you remembered or SPEAKER_111: we listened what are your thoughts today i think it's um it's worth just noting less about the SPEAKER_112: particularities of what was said and the particular issue at hand here and i i would look more to kind SPEAKER_51: of brian's um leadership style as an excellent example of defining and creating strong culture culture in an organization can give that organization what it needs to succeed it puts everyone aligned in a specific way on how we make decisions how we operate it doesn't matter what his particular beliefs and opinions or what to exclude what to include in the dialogue and the discourse and the model for discourse within the organization i think what matters that he put a line in the sand and he said this is what we're going to do this is what's in and this is what's out and organizations that do that and do that effectively generally win they win more they do better the teams are aligned the teams are more unified and i think that definition may sometimes be controversial and you'll notice that as companies get bigger go public they're larger they bring in professional managers and the founder ceo steps out they generally don't do that right they generally try to not do that definitional work because they're trying to minimize loss um and not kind of take the bet on maximizing long-term gain and doing the things that they think culturally define or will enable success long-term so i i think it's a great example of leadership generally on how you kind of can um can be very vocal about defining a strong culture elon calls it i think elon calls it corpo speak what you grab what SPEAKER_05: happens like meaning most companies when they get bigger they gravitate towards corpo speak and then what happens is some cohort of employees who are really good just feel trapped in this kind of morass SPEAKER_112: of mediocrity and by the way look at elon's um you know uh call it attrition rate right by the typical SPEAKER_51: large-scale public company corporate metric of like how many people are leaving per year you'd say oh my gosh something's up with that organization but it really speaks to a strong culture there's a company that's famous for this called bridgewater associates you know run by ray dalio 100 billion dollar hedge fund one of the best performing investment vehicles of all time and they have incredible culture i've talked about ray dalio's book principles before and some of the work he's done on this where he is so adamant about getting culture right within the organization how you operate that they almost have i think a 30 attrition rate after the first year of people that come in because they not only try and screen for these elements of what they consider to be the right cultural fit for their organization up front but then they also screen people the heck out of the door if they're not a good fit and and i think elon has a similar sort of model and you know i think brian the way he speaks about the organization is a similar model and it's about defining the lines it's about being very crystal SPEAKER_10: clear about what's in and what's not whatever if you as a ceo and a founder whatever you believe you need to believe in it strongly and you communicate it clearly and then communicate it and SPEAKER_05: then let people vote they vote with their feet they don't get to vote whether to change it they just get to vote whether they get to stay or whether they go and i think that that's a really SPEAKER_88: smart i think that's well said yeah i think there's one other issue here jay jay cal and this goes back to your point about why did brian have to bring this back up was it unnecessary did he spike the hornet s in the end zone here's why i think it was necessary if you go to uh point seven and eight of his tweet storm he says it was the most positive reaction i've gotten from any change i've made in the history of the company which is saying something how could something be so negative in the press that turned out to be incredibly incredibly positive with every stakeholder 95 of of employees privately all the investors were telling him it was a great thing and then what he says is the only sense i can make of it is there's a huge mismatch right now between people stated and revealed preferences and we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up so to me this is the point of this tweet storm bringing up now is without people like brian standing up and saying what the truth is that look everybody wants this they're just afraid to SPEAKER_93: articulate the principle uh we we keep um we keep encouraging this climate of fear and you know the alternative to coinbase you know one of the other companies we've talked about is apple i mean SPEAKER_88: you can basically choose to be coinbase or apple what has apple done they booted out antonio garcia martinez because of a passage in his book that they knew about and ever since then the company's been SPEAKER_125: roiled by boycotts and petition writing from the employees about some new cause every couple of SPEAKER_127: weeks and eventually that'll show up in the operating results of the business it's just a SPEAKER_93: matter of time right and so so why why does that go on i mean i'm sure most employees at apple don't want to be you know constantly roiled by these like petition campaigns uh but they have to put up with it because everyone's so afraid to speak up and that's why it's important that what brian did we have to basically recognize that this woke mob who's cowed everyone to silence is maybe five percent SPEAKER_128: of these companies and if everybody just acts like brian the problem will be over well we know we know SPEAKER_59: what the trail of breadcrumbs is right now and i think we should probably you know shine a light on it which is that that five percent is uh exactly the same as donald trump they just exist on the left SPEAKER_05: you know and there's an there's more and more research that shows that just as much as we thought they were right authoritarians they're also left authoritarians and this is what we're seeing that SPEAKER_10: that the craziness that you know everybody decries on the right actually also exists on the left and SPEAKER_66: they just put a button on that before we we pivot to the next story armstrong it was very clear that SPEAKER_45: the mission is about global wealth inequality so staying focused on that in his mind is the the high order a bit and will result in the most great change so paradoxically or ironically you know all these woke people attacking coinbase coinbase might do more for wealth inequality and justice in the world if they stay focused than if they try to tackle everything and you know this is a road to nowhere for apple i think sax you pointed this out about how if you were running apple you would fire anybody who does the petition because i'll tell you where apple is about to to to basically land by enabling all of this woke mob inside their own company by coddling them addressing them and not keeping them focused they will eventually get to the fact that china is you know has 3 million uyghurs in a concentration camp and those uyghurs are proven to be providing through slave labor equipment and components to companies that eventually make their way to apple products ergo apple supports slavery and SPEAKER_77: that's what the employees will eventually get to and that will cause chaos but there's something even SPEAKER_05: closer more closer to home that that's probably true or could be true i don't know it is true um but you know the fact that apple had the the most important security leak in their entire software career just a few months ago is also quite important like you had a because why is it important so you had a zero so the i ios 14.8 exists because of why because a researcher or a set of researchers in toronto discovered that there was a zero click exploit in ios that allowed you to basically turn on the SPEAKER_10: microphone turn on the camera you know grab anything you needed from iphones it was the most secure device until two months ago when it turned out it was actually the most insecure device so you're saying SPEAKER_05: think i tend to think those kinds of technical mistakes happen when people take their eye off the ball and i think people take their eye off the ball because they're demoralized with dealing SPEAKER_69: with distractions sax yeah i mean i think it's the whether it's the uyghurs or the security issue it's a good example of uh the employees at apple see the spec in somebody else's eye but not the log in their own i mean that's that's the the principle and um and they would be much better off SPEAKER_88: focusing on dealing with their own internal issues um but but let's go can we go back to that article SPEAKER_137: that jimoth referenced about yeah anything you got anything else on this issue do you want to before SPEAKER_138: we we segue over no i thought this is a really great article do you want to explain it jaco yeah i'll SPEAKER_66: just give you a quick overview and then you can just dive right in since you put it on the docket psychiatrist and author sally sattel uh hopefully i'm pressing that correct wrote an article for the SPEAKER_46: atlantic entitled the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians on the left the main point here is that trump's presidency sparked a ton of research and coverage of authoritarianism on the right but mostly ignored the left with some researchers even suggesting that the left wing that wet left wing authoritarianism isn't real in an email to sattel a social psychologist from rutgers said the following for 70 years the law the law in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism has been found exclusively on the political right why is that one reason left-wing authoritarianism barely showed SPEAKER_45: up in social psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole sex well actually SPEAKER_140: chamath put this on the docket so chamath do you want to introduce what you liked about it the SPEAKER_142: reason i saw this and i thought it was so interesting was basically we had an entire body of Chamath Palihapitiya: research trying to understand why some folks are attracted to um these authoritarian figures like trump and overwhelmingly all the research at the time said they only exist on the right and you know you and all of this started after hitler and so there was all this research around the you know social and SPEAKER_10: attitudinal uh reactions to hitler and how he came to power and then all of the iterations of folks like came on the right afterwards and so people put trump in that category and then they said it can only exist there but as it turns out when this person did this research and she surveyed 7 000 people and all of this data was very well summarized in this atlantic article which i'm sure we can post in the show notes that folks should read lo and behold it actually exists on both sides so as it turns out the extreme right and the extreme left are exactly the same they're moral absolutists they believe in themselves and themselves only and they believe anybody else that outside of where they are is fundamentally in the wrong and if you actually look at that and see how trump behaved in his presidency and now how you see how the left names and shames you factually find a lot of commonality so the reason i found that article interesting is that it actually says again what we've been saying which is coming down the middle and finding you know reasonable compromise is the only way forward because this minute you start moving in either SPEAKER_05: direction you are the same and that person is an ugly person that we don't want around let me give the SPEAKER_58: money quote and then get your feedback friedberg the similarities in the study included quote similarities SPEAKER_46: between authoritarianism on both sides left and right preference for social uniformity check prejudice SPEAKER_45: toward different gr different others willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior cognitive rigidity aggression and punitiveness toward perceived enemies outsize concern for hierarchy SPEAKER_58: and as chamath pointed out moral absolutism uh free bird i think authoritarian figures resolve when um SPEAKER_51: uh a population feels uh insecure so i mean we talked about this last pod but i do think that um you know the notion of freedom emerges after the comfort of security has been provided and i think the absence of security drives people away from the drive towards freedom like when you have a feeling of insecurity with respect to kind of your ability to get a job i mean remember hitler rose to power when unemployment um you know post weimar republic was skyrocketing people you know couldn't get jobs they couldn't afford food and the authoritarian figure was going to provide the security needed i think to resolve the concerns that the population had and then you know people latch on to that so you know there are moments in time when i think authoritarianism can emerge with different forms of resolution it doesn't necessarily mean that the authoritarian actor needs to take a left or a right point of view they're just going to give you a path to security when you're feeling insecure if you don't feel insecure you're going to say that's ridiculous so countries that are wealthy countries that are privileged with the opportunities that maybe the united states has are less likely and less inclined to fall in in you know in favor of authoritarian leaders and then as we slip backwards economically unemployment wise etc we're more likely to be uh to be in favor of of those sorts of actors um and so i think that you SPEAKER_76: know we'll see him emerge but don't you think it's crazy that we actually uh didn't think it could exist in one end of the political spectrum and now it does you have a point in that or no i never really SPEAKER_112: understood the whole like hitler is purely a right-wing guy like he was a you know a socialist and SPEAKER_51: he was trying to enable like you know socialized services and socialized systems for people you know in a lot of political circles that would be argued as being a very kind of left point of view SPEAKER_151: um and so i i don't know if it yeah i i let's go beyond let's go beyond hitler but you're right the SPEAKER_69: the nazi party was a national socialist party that's what that's what the name of the party was but there's also stalin pol pot mal i mean if you're paying attention to history you know that SPEAKER_88: there's been authoritarianism on the left not just the the right and so but you know in the universities um and in the media they only want to focus on the right-wing version of it and i think what this study does is it upends 70 years of dogma that that you know authoritarian authoritarianism is only to be found on the political right i mean it's obviously can be found on the political left as well and you can see that in cancel culture in speech restrictions in uh these um very aggressive covet mandates that are now happening you can see it in the um the sort of the um the ghoulishness anytime somebody in the right you know uh dies from covet i mean there's there's always some uh chortling on the part of the left about this um the harsh penalties for non-compliance SPEAKER_53: i mean right now rigidity is the one that stands out for me like there is just on the left they make a decision amazon is bad and they cannot move off of that right david like what about what about SPEAKER_140: willingness to wield group authority to course behavior and what about aggression and punitiveness SPEAKER_112: towards perceived enemies cancel culture that would be that to me it begs a good question which is um SPEAKER_51: what socialist regimes have come to power without an authoritarian figure has there just none SPEAKER_88: right general they're all revolutionaries right actually the the study has a really good point about this which is they they say that um the researchers describe what they called anti-hierarchical aggression so one of the traits of authoritarianism is is they call it an outsized concern for hierarchy but you know leftists think that they don't believe in hierarchy but actually they do they believe in an anti-hierarchical hierarchy which is they want to turn upside down the social hierarchy and they're willing to justify the the ends justify the means in other words if you can turn the hierarchy upside down they'll let you do anything and it's actually pretty scary that's where the sort of the SPEAKER_142: revolution comes from here's a practical thing jacal about what you said which illustrates this point Chamath Palihapitiya: even further right now we have a three and a half trillion dollar bill um kind of meandering um through congress and you know it's very much a question mark about whether it gets passed or not and one of the elements that's in there is free community college now when it passes if it passes there's a lot of support that that's something that the government should do it's a good thing but if you're a private company like amazon who just announced that they will give you free college they're still a bad company and and this is the example of this intellectual rigidity that doesn't SPEAKER_10: actually see the forest from the trees what do you really want do you want the process where you control and you meter out progress or do you actually want the outcome where somebody can get a job where they make 15 or 20 an hour and also now get college paid for yes i personally want the SPEAKER_03: latter yeah we much better if the government didn't have to provide i'd love i'd love it if the government SPEAKER_10: could pay for it but i'm really glad that amazon is in a position to pay for it as well but if you start to become absolutist and say well no it just needs to be top down and metered out this way and Chamath Palihapitiya: any private organization that wants to try to do it is still bad i think that's where that rigidity SPEAKER_45: holds us all back it's unnecessary here's where i see the rigidity moth is they keep saying gig workers are bad nobody should be allowed to be a gig worker and david had a great interview with the ride sharing guy on call-in and in which they talked about the fact and this is somebody who is super pro advocate of drivers said listen 80 of people do not want to do shift work they do not want the government dictating how they work and i talked anecdotally with an uber driver said he's making SPEAKER_77: like 70 bucks an hour during peak hours they were fighting to get minimum wage for drivers now drivers are making 20 30 40 50 an hour uber rides have gone and lift rides a massive competition free market works well and and they can't take the win they still are so rigid on the left that they're demanding whatever that woman's name is who is you know in the pocket of the arena gonzalez larena gonzalez in the pocket of the the unions how cynical are they the victory is upon them people are getting paid five SPEAKER_12: times more three times more than minimum wage and they still want to screw them the takeaway for a lot SPEAKER_10: of people should be that your spidey senses should go up when folks present solutions as a choice of one source only ah you know when things when things can only happen in one way and it's the way that i feel the most comfortable yeah your spidey sensor should go up and you should think to yourself really is that is that really the only way like can't we have choice can't we have different ways of solving this SPEAKER_175: can't maybe we can run an experiment and see what happens go ahead sax well i think your spidey SPEAKER_69: sense should also go up whenever somebody is basically saying that speech needs to be censored SPEAKER_88: for some higher purpose you know uh that that that whenever people are trying to uh bridge and take away our rights and our sort of long-held values uh our freedoms you have to start getting concerned and there's always a reason why they want to do it in the study the quote that the the left wing authoritarians agreed with was uh getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called right to free speech so there's always some higher reason the means always justify the the ends always justify the means um but but that's that's what you have to look out for is when Chamath Palihapitiya: they're taking away your right to speech another fun proof point um fun because it's dave chapelle uh that you can listen to or watch to see a flavor of this left-wing authoritarianism is called redemption song which is a little clip he put out recently and the the entire clip is more about him getting his body of work back from uh comedy central but the part in the beginning talks about folks on the left that really tried to dunk on him when he got covet and uh you should just listen to his reaction and how he frames it uh because i think it's pretty powerful and again it explains that extremism on both sides they actually end up looking the same yeah aggression and punitiveness SPEAKER_140: towards perceived enemies and i think that applies to anyone who anyone who defies the the whatever the SPEAKER_88: conventional wisdom is on covet there's another another uh example in the study of uh that that the people who the left-wing authoritarians agreed with the statement i cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative so you know you've got these social groups that are completely uniform and by the way there have been like studies for a long time showing that uh liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to be upset if their son or daughter were to marry someone of the opposite party so this has been a this has been turned up in polls for a while but this and you've seen it on universities and college campuses right but there's this idea that you know anybody of the other political side is just suspect you know morally suspect needs to be shunned needs to be expelled SPEAKER_93: um like those are the people you have to be concerned about yeah you can't be friends i can't SPEAKER_66: be friends with you sax because you voted for trump it's just ridiculous people have this SPEAKER_45: no but it's i think it's the derangement to give the other side of this i think trump was so extreme and so trolling and so great i mean if you think about his super of power it was to troll the left and put them into such a deranged mindset that they did actually become that which they hated most right but SPEAKER_88: he he did he did troll the left but but here's but here's the thing is that we only hear in the media about the authoritarianism of the trump administration how many times were they screaming fascism during the trump years and and now today and of course you know if you go to msnbc it's it's january 6 all day all the time that's all they want to talk about but you there's a total blind spot with respect to the authoritarian tendencies of the left which we see right now in covet policy i mean it is getting so extreme right now and i mean freeberg you posted uh the breaking news that just announced via press SPEAKER_161: conference gavin newsom is now implementing mandated covet vaccines for all public k-12 schools in california starting this fall wait wait these students yeah all all eligible kids in all in all SPEAKER_162: public schools in all public schools in order to go to school in california you have to have a vaccine SPEAKER_191: i mean kindergarten kindergarten well i mean they're not eligible yet if it's when they're eligible SPEAKER_88: yeah they're they're they're going to be eligible very soon i mean look i i i so so we have a 13 year old an 11 year old and a five year old the 13 year old uh got vaccinated she wanted to we supported it the 11 year old wasn't eligible she didn't get a vaccine she got coveted for me it was a mild case and our five-year-old isn't eligible for the vaccine he never got covet now if if and when a new vaccine comes out that our five-year-old is eligible i don't think he needs it i mean i'm not anti-vax i mean i'm glad i got the vaccine i'm glad you know is he going to school my 13 year old got the vaccine SPEAKER_45: yeah i guess the question is do you if it is safe do you want them going to school catching it spreading it and do you want them to not have to wear a mask how can you say conclusively David Sacks: what's safe for a five or six year old at this point it's a little hard their bodies are developing SPEAKER_93: and yeah you need some time i mean do we really need to mandate this i mean why why can't parents SPEAKER_200: make up their own decision because of other people in society who would be impacted i mean you also see SPEAKER_88: this you know look i think i think vaccines maybe are a complicated debate because vaccines do actually provide protection let's talk about these mass mandates which i supported at the beginning of the pandemic because it's all we had to fight it but you take an example like san francisco still has these stringent mass mandates the mayor london breed was caught out at um dancing SPEAKER_203: singing screaming but in fairness to her it was tony tony tony yeah i mean that's what she said SPEAKER_26: with her defense she was like she was basically like it's tony tony tony guys what do you want me to do i don't care i'll risk the coven which is i have to give her that one if you want to risk if SPEAKER_209: you want to be able to play poker or see your favorite artist i mean i mean what do you want to do what do you want her to do what do we think about let me ask this question what she said when SPEAKER_93: she got caught was actually correct which is we should be out supporting restaurants we should be out supporting nightlife adults should be able to make their own decision about the risks they're willing to take the problem is she's not willing to give the rest of us that choice right and we can all make our own choice and by the way look the idea that the cove is not going to get you when you know once you take off your mask when you get to the table you know we've talked about SPEAKER_218: this right yeah you you wear the mask in the maitre d stand to the table then you take it off to eat and drink and the cove is somehow not going to get in yeah this was the thing she was saying she was SPEAKER_77: like i listen i they were like you weren't eating we have you on video you weren't drinking she's SPEAKER_45: like it's unrealistic for an adult to put the mask on and off in between sips and bites and i was on a flight and i was flying coach as opposed to a business class recently and when i was in business class i was eating and drinking there was no an entire foreign language so far you're SPEAKER_222: speaking what are you saying so most people pay for a plane ticket and then they get on an airplane SPEAKER_45: so but the interesting thing was when i was in business class i was eating my meal i was drinking SPEAKER_200: no issues i had the mask off for whatever 20 minutes i was eating and drinking when i was in coach SPEAKER_45: same situation the flight attendant was going up and down the aisle and while people were eating and drinking if they didn't have the mask on she was kind of being like a whole monitor saying please SPEAKER_227: put your mask on in between bites and i was like okay yeah and when we supported this mass mandate SPEAKER_28: way at the beginning of the vaccine we all thought the government was going to distribute n99 or at least n95 high quality 3m mass right we never got those we never got other people i know and people SPEAKER_227: people are like walking around wearing these cloth masks these loose fitting cloth masks it's ridiculous it's theater the covet goes you know through the bottom over the top through the side you go right through it i mean like it doesn't do anything and yeah you're the lone ranger yeah how's SPEAKER_28: that work i mean i look if you wear a high quality like you know ppe type mask i think it might be SPEAKER_88: helpful but you know it's a marginal benefit once we have vaccines oh by the way just as we end this SPEAKER_45: what do we think of um andrew wiggins well you can't comment on this maybe because you're an owner on the team but a number of nba players uh high profile ones in fact in new york and california where you're not allowed in the arena if you're not vaccinated are now deciding to sit out their home games so kyrie irving being the highest profile one is refusing to get the vaccine and he will be getting paid he's got a 200 million dollar contract max player i think he gets 40 50 million a year he's going to give up half of his salary uh to not 20 million a year to not get the vaccine at least and leave his team to not play with them in home games what are our thoughts on mandating nba players who are playing inside an arena to be vaccinated dc draymond's interview i did what did what did day SPEAKER_244: they have to say about this he says he's so strong isn't he yeah he was like this is ridiculous SPEAKER_51: that we don't like respect each other's like we've made this so political and it's all like antagonistic as opposed to he went meta recognizing that there are differences and people have differences of opinion and respecting them and embracing each other for those differences rather than like attacking each other and finding fault in each other and forcing them yeah and it's a great point but um i don't know i mean i don't think that this point is any different than the point about you know mandating a vaccine for anything any workplace any school i mean if you're gonna mandate if you're gonna mandate vaccines for workplaces and mandate vaccines for schools you know the mba is gonna you know not be kind of excluded here it's what it is right just happens to be a bigger paycheck SPEAKER_256: and a higher profile stage i think as a matter of policy the right policy here is to let private employers decide whether they're gonna require um vaccination or not i think i think private SPEAKER_88: organizations have the right to do that if you know if a restaurateur wants to say that we are going to be an all vax restaurant you want to you know they're only going to take clientele who are vax that should be their right to do it if another restaurant says we don't care people can go to that restaurant if they want you know i think that the free market can sort of sort this out i don't know that we need the government imposing it if the mba decides this is what they want to do they can't it has decided what do you think of that decision well i mean what i wonder about is how necessary it is um i mean given the fact that you know all the players are young and healthy um and if they want the vaccine they can get the vaccine look i'm really glad i got it you know i think it but but i just you know if it given that everybody is vaccinated now who wants it i just you know what is the point of forcing that last 10 percent of holdouts to do something they don't want to do i mean this is where i think the authority i would resist the authoritarian impulse freeberg is there a new pill SPEAKER_46: that's coming out i saw a story today about this i don't know if you want to cover that or go to SPEAKER_50: unicorns first uh merck published some results uh on this uh basically um antiviral pill it effectively SPEAKER_51: uh inhibits rna replication uh in viruses and it's kind of uh it was designed to be kind of broadly applicable it was you know discovered at emery university years ago and they were testing it for influenza and then even priests pre-covid they were testing it on other kind of coronaviruses sars and mers um and so the the data that they just published shows that there's a 50 reduction in hospitalizations uh in hospitalizations uh for people that are that test positive uh for sars cov2 infection and then they start the pill within some number of hours you take a few of these pills i think they said five days right yeah well i think well they did the test on like uh it was effectively yeah four or five days that's right um and you end up uh reducing the number the percentage of people that end up in the hospital by 50 percent now you know uh so the idea is that for countries that don't have access to vaccines you can very cheaply make this chemistry it's a cheap molecule that you could theoretically produce at scale and you could ship it all over the world and countries that don't have you know broad scale vaccination programs they can make these pills available quickly and cheaply and then you know as people get uh infected with sars cov2 they just pick up this pill you know put it in every pharmacy go grab a couple and then the hospitalization rate goes down we don't yet know if it reduces the transmission rate so there's a lot of question marks and like does this actually solve the problem of the pandemic it's certainly another instrument to blunt the uh you SPEAKER_267: know the impact pronounce the name of it it's malnupiravir malnupiravir the government um and by SPEAKER_51: the way there wasn't a lot of people in the study no one that took the pill died people that didn't take the pill did die uh in the in the infection in the infected population because they split them right they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill the people that had the placebo there were deaths no one in the group that had the pill um the actual pill died and so um you know so so SPEAKER_112: theoretically we don't yet have enough data to know but there's also a big question on the side effects typically these uh anti uh viral the rna kind of um blocking drugs have other side effects SPEAKER_51: they're usually pretty mild but um you know so so there'll be a little bit more studying but generally SPEAKER_271: people view this as a super big positive it's another instrument i'm gonna make it i'm gonna make a Chamath Palihapitiya: prediction here we go i think that the combination of vaccines and what is equivalently tamiflu for covid which is effectively what this is is the one two punch we need so that this basically is rendered SPEAKER_195: um you're missing you're missing a key piece there the testing you must have testing to know that you Chamath Palihapitiya: have to take this uh but i i think that that's a i think like the testing is it's not efficient but the solutions exist my point is if you have a combination of all these things this is like a SPEAKER_10: flu which means that there'll be less ability for folks to not show up to work which means that most Chamath Palihapitiya: of the economy will get back going and i think then we can get back to really addressing what are all that 10 or 12 trillion dollars how does it show up in the economy that's where the inflation comes from that's for all this other stuff so uh i'm i'm pretty excited by what i read today but SPEAKER_10: now my mindset is going to 18 months from now midterm inflation i think that's going to be SPEAKER_66: what it's all about we ordered 1.7 million courses of this i'll call it's a we can just call basically this is the equivalent of a z-pack so called as the impact um if this uh hits and i i've taken SPEAKER_169: probably 1.7 million z-packs that's just on the way back from vegas hey um so i mean this feels like SPEAKER_45: the end game and they are going for emergency use so let's keep our fingers crossed this would mean Chamath Palihapitiya: the stock market's going to rip chamoff uh no i think the stock market um is in a little bit of precarious position because if you have to if you have to reposition yourself for inflation there's a lot of tech stocks that will get just absolutely obliterated like well when when you when you when you SPEAKER_282: have inflation so the the order of operations inflation means prices go up the the government Chamath Palihapitiya: sees prices going up and they say how do we control that they raise interest rates so that the cost of borrowing goes up so that then less money is being spent right so that we become a little bit more restrained when you do that then all of a sudden people have to think about how much money you're SPEAKER_282: going to make in the future because if you're not investing as much in the future you won't make as much in the future and when you discount all those dollars back there's less of them and so all Chamath Palihapitiya: of a sudden you start to think about oh my gosh well i want dollars today not dollars 10 years from now that really uh puts a lot of pressure on tech stocks because we trade on multi-year valuations SPEAKER_10: in the future so inflation is very bad for technology stocks inflation tends to be good for companies Chamath Palihapitiya: that make money today why because if i get a dollar today i can put it in this in the you know bond markets or i put it into a savings account and i can get more interest than i would have otherwise SPEAKER_10: and then separately you also want to own things that are physical and real because those have more value so all of that has to then get worked out into the economy and we have to make a bunch of economic decisions so we so now the solution for that in all of those cases though is still if you're a hyper SPEAKER_282: growth company you'll be okay so if you're growing more than 50 60 a year you're fine but if you're growing 20 or 30 and you're kind of a middling business and rates are going up and inflation is going up you're in a very very very precarious spot and um sacks what do you think SPEAKER_69: okay well there was there's a great article in the wall street journal over the past week called um university endowment mint billions in the golden era of venture capital is basically talking about i mean these these university endowments are like gaining 50 year over year SPEAKER_88: there's been like nothing like it before there's so many unicorns being created there's and if you there's a separate article and i think pitch book as well about the rate of unicorn or crunch base yeah that the rate of unicorn creation i think last year it was like one every few days now it's it's more than one a day bonkers and so you know we're getting multiple unicorns now created every day this year it's just this golden era of vc this engine of wealth and prosperity creation so that's the good news and and to connect this to a point we were talking about earlier if the the radicals on the left would just allow the golden goose to keep laying golden eggs we're going to have enough wealth and prosperity to pay for all these progressive programs in the long run but they're not willing to wait and so you have in washington for example i think um a political program that really could upset the apple cart i mean you're talking about a three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill it'll probably get brought down to somewhere between one and a half and two then you got a 1.2 billion dollar infrastructure bill they've already spent 1.9 trillion on a covet relief bill this is after the six trillion what would you what would you advise it should be the amount spent well okay good question so last year the federal government generated record tax receipts the most revenue it's ever raised and it was about 19 and a half percent of gdp when bill clinton left office he bro boasted about the fact that government spending was only 18 and a half percent of gdp last year it was about 30 percent of gdp my theory on this is that if you have uh government spending as a you know share of the economy at around 20 percent from a tax and spending standpoint things basically work okay but as you try to go up to 25 and 30 it starts to break you have too much deficits SPEAKER_93: and debt too much money printing too much taxation too much inflation you become more brittle and you start to you basically are you know unhealthy you're killing the golden goose and so you know all we have to do is let the economy keep ripping 20 of it is going to is going to be government share and you'll be able to fund more and more progressive programs over time as society gets richer and by the way this this um prosperity that's being created in the tech ecosystem it's available to everybody who has a good idea i mean this is not so so as we all know so it's not just government that's creating advancement and uh economic opportunity for disadvantaged people the tech economy is creating it as well and SPEAKER_128: what i worry about is is why are we taking so much risk and upending this whole system that is working SPEAKER_185: quite well well the other thing is this is all in the face of there being 11 million open jobs there's SPEAKER_45: 1.4 jobs for everybody who's unemployed so the idea that in some ways society is broken and people can't be employed now these might not be there's only there's only four million there's only four million SPEAKER_125: people looking for work there's 11 million outstanding jobs yeah i mean it is bonkers friedberg do SPEAKER_45: you think this is sustainable what are your thoughts on spending and turning over the apple cart as SPEAKER_296: sexist saying the longer you guys have me on this podcast the more likely it is you guys are going SPEAKER_51: to unmask me as a die hard libertarian um i will not let my tendencies um you know come out in full force uh the spending is ridiculous and there's a lot of waste so i mean i'll just leave it at that what i think is interesting though is this unicorn creation system uh this unicorn creation machine SPEAKER_112: you know it's worth highlighting because i think that that crunch space article showed that these unicorns in aggregate were worth like what one and a half trillion dollars or something SPEAKER_268: um and so those are all private companies 3.4 trillion dollars 3.4 trillion so is that the amount SPEAKER_93: of both bills 3.4 trillion is the total market cap of all the private unicorns not just in the us but the world and right now in washington they're talking about three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill same size can you imagine government spending basically the entire value of David Sacks: the tech ecosystem in one year it's bonkers right and so this but by the way i mean like i think that SPEAKER_112: that 3.5 trillion you can kind of think about that as being the future economy of the future global SPEAKER_51: economy right so the entire uh i just pulled up the latest quarterly stat but the entire uh market cap of public u.s companies uh today stands at 47 trillion dollars the top 500 are about 38 trillion dollars so you know these private companies that are kind of the emerging tech companies or you know call it 10 percent or you know eight percent uh of uh all public today of all public companies today and you know it used to be the technology companies started in silicon valley sold technology to traditional industries what's happening in silicon valley today and over the last 10 years or so SPEAKER_112: is that technology quote unquote companies are becoming the next industrial companies they are SPEAKER_51: replacing the profound insight profound insight and so this is like what we saw you know airbnb is a hotel chain without hotels uber is you know a transportation company without vehicles SPEAKER_112: doordash doordash but but even more importantly there's an entire emergent class of life sciences companies of novel hardware companies and these businesses are leveraging their core technology competence to create an advantage in replacing an old model of doing industry they're not selling into the old school companies and so i think that the you know and people are freaking out about you know some of these big investors like tiger global coming in and writing crazy checks if you take an index of the three and a half trillion dollars today and said you know what these guys today are going to be worth more than the 46 trillion dollar market cap of all the other public companies that sit today in the next 20 or 30 years that's a pretty good way to kind of place your money over a 30-year horizon i'm going to go ahead and put as much money as i can into the index of the private companies and expect that they're going to be worth more than 46 trillion in 30 years i'm going to make a 10 bagger that's a retirement fund for my family and so it makes a ton of sense i think that these um you know these unicorns given the advantages that are involved you know kind of evolving from software and like sciences and so on do end up kind of playing out uh it's going to be ugly and what will what will happen is you'll end up seeing the asymmetry you'll see the like oh my gosh it's something that's a thousand x you know 100 x return it'll become a hundred billion dollar public company or two billion dollar public company and then there'll be a bunch of them that are going to die um and people are going to focus on the depths and say this was over hype the bubble is over but the reality is the index of companies today i would be willing to bet 20 to 30 years from now is worth more than the 46 trillion dollar of all the public companies so chamath one of the things we're SPEAKER_58: seeing here and you're playing a small part in it or a large part depending on who you talk to SPEAKER_66: we now have over 6 000 publicly traded companies uh on u.s exchange no we have less than 4 000 we have about 3 800. okay uh no we had 3 600 in 2016 according to the research i have here according to market watch 6 000 public trade companies in u.s exchanges so what's the right number counting the SPEAKER_45: pink sheets and over the counter which is we're seeing dramatically more publicly traded companies SPEAKER_46: many speculative ones or ones where you're getting to buy in in year four five or six obviously you're SPEAKER_66: part of that with uh you know all the different ipoas through what are you up to now what's the yeah SPEAKER_76: we have six tech specs we have four biotech specs you know i mean i've started or invested in a bunch SPEAKER_282: of others that have gone public um so let's look at this through the lens of the the public markets as well my macro view is exactly what friedberg said we are much better off with as many technology companies being birthed and being viable because over the long arc of time those companies will rebuild things that are today inefficient and broken in a better way and the world becomes better the question is for a lot of people well what if the wealth isn't better because it's only you know a fraction of the number of people with a very specific skill set that many other people don't have that i think is a valid argument but then there's a different way to attack this problem which is you could actually do something really meaningful around corporate interest rates and corporate tax policy that would then get it right so like even if those those thousand companies if you assume that that 3.4 trillion dollars 10x is that's 34 trillion of eventual market cap right that's going to be supported by trillions of dollars of earnings but maybe those things only have a million or two million employees but there's eight billion eight you know odd people in the world well the way you get the Chamath Palihapitiya: money into the government's coffers so that they can reallocate it to everybody that doesn't work at those thousand companies is through sensible tax policy that goes after the companies because SPEAKER_282: those companies will still do the job right it's not like you're going to choose to not work at a you know world beating startup um in a mission that you care about because of the corporate tax rate nobody's going to do that right so i think this is where like if you if you if you actually um take a step back and think of the bigger picture the answer is right in front of us we just choose not to listen this is why you know again what trump did was kind of stupid you know he Chamath Palihapitiya: focused on corporate tax policy cutting it unnecessarily um and now what we're doing is we're fighting over tax policy and part of the reason why this bill isn't going to get passed is because of corporate tax policy and trying to raise it again but really what we should do is actually raise it leave SPEAKER_282: personal rates roughly where they are you know elon even said when when asked by carol swisher this David Friedberg: week he's like i pay 53 taxes what about you yeah and it's going to 57 and you know 53 57 61 who cares SPEAKER_45: sure whatever and he has to the point he made was listen the pro public article was really disingenuous they said he got a tax refund and they didn't they never explained well that's because he overpaid his taxes massively the year before so they're selectively pulling information and the fact is he said i will be the first money into spacex and tesla i'll be the last money out that is something we want uh more founders to do which is never sell their shares and be have more SPEAKER_317: skin in the game sorry i i'm sorry i disagree with that i think that's a that's a bunch of Chamath Palihapitiya: fucking malarkey why if you choose to not sell so be it okay but look at the good that bill gates has SPEAKER_320: done by selling down microsoft so i mean yeah that shouldn't exist the bill gates foundation shouldn't exist no no no no the reproductive protect it had to be paid somehow he did that when he hit 60 years SPEAKER_04: old i'm sure when no you don't know he started to do it when he was 40 years old jason and he SPEAKER_112: won't sold paypal and he was able to use that money to to reinvest in tesla and spacex i do SPEAKER_77: think he's putting all the money back into two companies that are solving two major issues for SPEAKER_323: humanity he wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't sold in the first exactly my my point is SPEAKER_10: let's not conflate the problem if you generate wealth i think that you should be bound morally bound by society to put the money back to work he chooses to put the money back to work by reinvesting so aggressively into the things that he's doing that's laudable yeah i think that's virtuous Chamath Palihapitiya: yeah i agree but it's not the only way bill gates took a different path which is to basically take all those profits sell it down to then be able to go and put it into the gates foundation SPEAKER_10: people will take multiple paths the point that's the same among all these people is there's a moral obligation they feel to do the right thing for the future then we're in agreement so let's just SPEAKER_05: celebrate that not some tactical thing about buying and selling by the way one other point i'd make SPEAKER_112: chamath like you you said that you know we should tax the the wealth creation and distribute it SPEAKER_51: there's another way to get that redistribution of wealth which is to enable access to the investments earlier by public pension funds by the endowments by the places where people by the retirement funds where you know a broader swath of the population you know have savings sitting and change the accreditation laws we've historically kind of forced the narrative that everyone in the united states needs to have a home and have 80 90 of their wealth tied up in a piece of real estate and then we end up with these massive kind of inflationary bubbles to keep that value that book value kind of growing for them the reality is if that money was put more productively into building businesses via retirement funds that had access to venture capital the public pension funds already do but they should they probably under allocate to venture capital today relative to where they're SPEAKER_334: putting their we talked about the endowments are crushing it look at another way by the way if that was the model you wouldn't need to tax right you well by the way one of the brilliant provisions SPEAKER_88: in this reconciliation bill is they're actually disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative SPEAKER_337: assets including startups and and uh venture capital insane that is so wrong so friggin wrong yeah SPEAKER_100: what that's in there they literally are taking pension funds and saying you can't SPEAKER_184: have access to them you as an individual through a 401k or ira ira cannot invest in alternative rule David Sacks: right yes partly in response to that well they should just make it a cap don't you think they SPEAKER_45: should cap peter teal's um i think why why cap anything who's to who's because it was against the spirit of it the spirit of the roth was let's let's discuss this as a specific issue i'll tee it up for you sax uh peter teal put his facebook stock in his roth and yeah you're supposed to get that tax free so you can have a great retirement he did that as an end run around paying taxes on the facebook investment that became worth billions of dollars reportedly so now they're saying you can have a roth but anything above 50 billion you got to pay tax on because the goal here isn't for you to use it as a shelter against some massive uh venture gains sax yeah i i don't have a huge problem with SPEAKER_88: them putting a cap on the benefit of these accounts however my my issue with what's in the bill there's a couple of issues one is like we said they're disallowing investments and alternatives which i just think is bad for savers why would you want to do that second is the treatment of what SPEAKER_93: happens when you exceed the cap and right now what they're saying is you have to distribute out all of those funds and then subject subject them to immediate taxation at ordinary income rates which is confiscatory because you could have made the investment outside the retirement account and SPEAKER_253: paid locked long long term cap gains rates if you do go over it should be yeah long term tax of SPEAKER_93: course yeah and and furthermore it's even worse than that because what they're saying is let's say that you do have an alternative uh like an investment in a startup or a venture fund you have to distribute it out and pay tax on that even though that investment is not liquid right so you SPEAKER_53: should be able to take it out and just be treated with normal cap gains and not have to liquidate SPEAKER_28: it do you think well what it's going to do is it's going to get it's going to give people an incentive it's going to warp the incentives for saving because what it's going to say to people SPEAKER_93: is you want to do well but not too well right because if you hit the cap you're now subject to SPEAKER_353: a confiscation you get penalized yes it should be so it shouldn't be a penalty yeah exactly i think SPEAKER_93: the way to work is you have a cap but any distribution above that you basically that becomes the basis for future taxation i think all of this can be summarized more simply i think that we have Chamath Palihapitiya: unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish line and stagger the starting line SPEAKER_10: right because all of this still doesn't apply to rich people no this is vindictive rich people rich people can do all of these different things they can set up these out-of-state trusts they can set up generation skipping trusts they can be you know qualified um investors they can have qsbs deductions and so what this will do unfortunately is entrench the kind of wealth gains that peter teal was able to generate in a very visible way that will just piss everybody off and i think instead you got to go back to a different um to a different litmus test so i jason you have been the strongest advocate for Chamath Palihapitiya: letting people participate in the economy i have always agreed with that we need to figure out how we can make sure more important that that it isn't abused but that's the best way is to educate SPEAKER_10: financial literacy so that they can actually be a part of it even the starting line let everybody be able to put stuff into this stuff and learn about it i mean what peter did essentially was put lottery SPEAKER_66: tickets into his you know non-tax retirement fund lottery tickets being buying stocks in private SPEAKER_43: companies early but regular americans aren't allowed to do that so rather than retroactively try to penalize peter because you disagree with his politics or because he did it too well i think it's better that everybody be allowed to be an accredited investor and do what peter did which is everybody should be able to take their 401k or their roth and be able to buy the next linkedin uber SPEAKER_45: so if you were a civilian and you took an uber or you used linkedin to hire somebody in year two SPEAKER_43: and you had an opportunity to buy those shares you should be allowed to buy it because you're a human resources person or uber driver and you realize this is a great service that will change the world SPEAKER_112: doesn't take a genius to figure that out uh freeberg yeah look i mean the downside is you see speculative SPEAKER_51: concentrated bets that white people out that's the reason the protective provisions are in there so i think there are probably sensible ways of managing that um you know around uh you know qualifying you know pools of these investments in a way creating indexes against them etc uh and maybe that's the right way to provide access but you know giving individuals uh that maybe you know don't have the right kind of point of view uh on a particular investment the ability to put all of their capital into that investment generally i would say go for it the problem is we've socialized you know uh protection right so and this is the same with health care in a model for governing or model for a state where you provide socialized care for people through health care socialized health care or you provide socialized support for people through you know the social security system and other services like that um it's difficult to say okay the government's going to be your backstop and is going to provide the support for you and we're also going to let you take risky behavior um and that's where i think the two have to go hand in hand if you want to get rid of one you got to get rid of the other um and so because otherwise we all end up paying the cost of the person that takes the you know outsized risk and then we all end up having to foot the bill for that SPEAKER_271: person taking that risk so if we're all going to be there to protect that person we have to tell them SPEAKER_66: you can't take unnecessary risks okay hey um sax let me ask you a conspiracy theory here peter thiel supported trump when trump was teetering on uh the access hollywood tape and he went to bat for him he gave him a big donation at that time then obviously did the republican national convention and was a key intellectual uh influencer in his election plan now the democrats are in and suddenly the focus becomes this one outsized roth ira and we're going to rewrite the law so that peter thiel has to take five billion dollars or so is one of the estimates that i saw online on cnbc out of his ira do you think this is specific vindictiveness on the part of the democrats to try SPEAKER_361: to attack specifically peter tail i know he's your best well yeah i mean it does feel and i'm not i'm SPEAKER_348: not a peter thiel apologist but this feels vindictive and personal so yes and no okay so what i would say SPEAKER_69: is there have been proposals over the last i think going back to maybe even 2014 on providing some restrictions or caps on you know these these ira's and the roth ira's um however there's never SPEAKER_88: been a proposal as punitive and retroactive and confiscatory that's what they're doing here and specifically it's the fact that they're going to force peter to distribute out everything above the cap and then tax it as ordinary income i mean that that's just changing the rules that part i think is directed at peter and i've actually heard that staffers on capitol hill are calling this the peter thiel provision so let me just confirm that part for you um so what i would say is i think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts but the way they're David Sacks: doing it is so punitive i think it is motivated by political revenge against peter chamath what do SPEAKER_45: we think of the number of unicorns being created in the private markets obviously when a company hits SPEAKER_66: unicorn status i think they're going to start buzzing around and maybe knocking on your door and spax and boards might start thinking about that these companies sometimes have 10 million dollars 30 million dollars in revenue 50 million in revenue and they're becoming worth a billion dollars do these valuations SPEAKER_46: make sense writ large and are you concerned that this is a bubble i don't think there's a bubble okay SPEAKER_287: explain why there's not a bubble in early stage private companies no i think it's because of what we just SPEAKER_282: talked about which is that these companies by and large are growing at incredibly fast rates and they are replacing legacy incumbents that are growing very slowly or not at all with and who who have basically won for a long time with inferior products and so as these superior products with more nimble organizations get capitalized to go to market they're just going to win and so i think what we're seeing is a wholesale replacement of the economy from the old to the new and so that's why these companies will do well and i think it's going to be a a really powerful force in the world because like the world should be a little bit more efficient and fairer when you have all this modern technology working on your behalf so i'm a real supporter of all of this i think there's going to be even more and i think you know the the thing that we have to be comfortable with is whenever something goes from a fringe thing which is what venture capital was jason when all of us were you know first in Chamath Palihapitiya: silicon valley 20 years ago to you know today in 2021 we're sitting here uh this is going to become a fundamental part of the economy and when that happens uh there'll be more and more money the returns won't be as good that'll be okay but there'll be a lot of progress and so you know we're going through the same transition that private equity did in the 80s and 90s that SPEAKER_46: venture that hedge funds did you see all the different venture capitalists who are retiring bajan from spark the kid from uh light speed a bunch of other folks obviously our friend bill SPEAKER_374: is stepping back what do you call people jeremy jeremy's 50. he's 50. yeah am i doing something wrong David Sacks: here i'm like busy creating a venture firm at age almost 50. you're on the wrong side of this SPEAKER_267: distribution what what are we thinks behind this they just made too much money in their money or is SPEAKER_132: it because it's too competitive now it's too hard they're moving to wyoming i would say it's slightly different than this i don't know i don't know i mean i know all of those guys uh but i don't know Chamath Palihapitiya: what their motivation is but what i would say is i tend to think that the mindset of venture has a relatively short half-life and i think it's about 15 years why and i think that there is a and because you know company building is roughly a 10-year arc you know like when you get into something early and so i i i think that there is like a newness whenever you start i don't think it matters what your age is and um then there is this sort of like uh death march that sets in by year eight or nine and then you try to see it through to returning the capital and making sure all the employees and and uh founders you've been invested with land the ship SPEAKER_10: and and i think what these guys did was get to that place and say okay i've had this 15-year beautiful arc do i want to do another 15-year arc and for a lot of people um it won't make much sense SPEAKER_386: and then also i think your patience to do it goes away right because it's like you you guys know what SPEAKER_45: it is exhausting it's exhausting the amount of drama i'm dealing with right now in my portfolio is bonkers the the the bet i don't know if you're seeing the sacks but the amount of shenanigans bad behavior fraud uh lying backstabbing is at an all-time high that would be your portfolio jaco yeah no it's like no no it's it's literally three companies i'm literally dealing with three companies with drama out of 350. i think it's one out of 100 is probably fine but i am seeing all kinds of shenanigans even Chamath Palihapitiya: in the diligence phase i'm seeing it jason why i meant something more tactical which is like for example you know yesterday i we're starting something really ambitious in batteries and i have to sit there for an hour and we have to go through ordering the equipment setting up the lab SPEAKER_10: getting you know human resources and there's only so much of that that you have the energy to do after a certain amount of time it's important work you have to do it right but it feels uh a little Chamath Palihapitiya: low leverage now for that ceo it's everything and so you have to be on top of your game to help that person and i think this is where i appreciate their honesty in basically saying guys i don't have that SPEAKER_10: level of detailed focus in me anymore and that's important because in the next generation of folks who want to put in that 15-year journey you need somebody committed you need somebody who's super committed SPEAKER_69: yeah and i do think there's a difference between being a partner in a large partnership where you kind of have your portfolio of companies and you know to chamath's point you're going to be on that SPEAKER_88: arc with them and then kind of building a firm from scratch where like quite frankly i would go crazy the way that you know you're dealing with jason and chamath is saying i would get burned out if i didn't have a team right so we now have like a pretty big team how many to well just on the investment team i think we've got about uh 15 people and and then we now have a bunch of operating partners so you know we were looking at what Andreessen Horowitz has done with services you know we had this big debate in the venture community for a long time about whether venture firms should operate it should offer services and operating partners and Andreessen you know went hog wild with that they've got like 200 people doing it and i think they've proven that it works in the set i don't you know it's not totally clear how much value they're delivering but it clearly works in the sense that founders would like the services if they can get them it creates marketing but it may not be that's great it's great it's great marketing so if you're a great founder when you SPEAKER_63: were a great founder you wouldn't want Andreessen Horowitz telling you how to run your hr and doing SPEAKER_93: your marketing for you at yammer right but so what we've done is what we've done is focus on SPEAKER_88: bringing on not 200 people but an expert in every functional area that a sas company might need because you do want access to an expert when you're set up the department you want to talk to the digital marketing person or the legal person or you know or you know we have an executive briefing center now so we do believe that there is a version of the services model that makes a lot of sense and we are building that if i had to do all of that value add myself yeah i would i would SPEAKER_66: burn out yeah i mean i think it's a very good point i literally last week launched the syndicate.com SPEAKER_45: slash sas a sas syndicate just for the same reason so i can build a group of individuals who are focused just on that and who have that domain expertise but they're the great founders do not want you up in their business so i i i'm concerned with like that that that's why we have SPEAKER_401: like kind of we call it a teach them how to fish model where we don't want to do the work we want David Sacks: to give them an expert as a resource who can meet with them show them show them some best practices SPEAKER_66: do you have people though coming to you expecting you to do the work because that's what i know happens sometimes is they're like although can you find us a developer and i'm like SPEAKER_45: no but i can talk to you about finding developers but i don't have a recruiter on staff do you have SPEAKER_125: a recruit yeah we actually do now we have three recruiters on staff so um so you're paying a half SPEAKER_45: million dollars a year to recruit for your companies that's basically basically that's a big SPEAKER_406: advantage is it working are you actually landing developers yeah i mean look we can't freeberg and i don't give a about any of this all right well anyway this is us in the weeds so SPEAKER_93: you want to talk about some okay well just to kind of up level it for a second i just want to go back to this like golden era point when we're talking about venture capital because look obviously in the SPEAKER_88: weeds we're going to talk about our problems but i really think that what's happening here with a thousand new unicorns being minted every year is just unbelievable if you look at the number of billionaires in the us i just googled this there were 614 billionaires in the us as of october 2020 now there's probably more i don't know let's say there's a thousand well if you're minting a thousand new SPEAKER_227: unicorns every year how many billionaires is that creating i mean how many millionaires more SPEAKER_77: importantly how many people who are making 50 to 250 000 a year before they join the ecosystem and now SPEAKER_267: are worth millions will buy homes hire people start the next but let me just give you guys the the SPEAKER_51: counterpoint to that which i'm not necessarily arguing but i'm this is what i think the narrative is which is that those businesses that are kind of you know accumulating wealth and accumulating revenue are effectively destroying the old economy and shutting down companies and shutting and SPEAKER_97: destroying jobs 11 million job openings that's i don't i don't i don't believe it's a zero-sum game yeah i think there's it's it's creative destruction but it is disruptive right so there SPEAKER_112: is a there is kind of a temporal flux and there's a flux of people across from the old economy to the new economy and it's that flux that i think creates the great uncertainty and the great yes heartache that everyone's trying to solve for that's the hand-wringing that's the hand-wringing SPEAKER_282: this is why it is so important to get corporate taxation right because if you're going to replace SPEAKER_10: gdp dollar for dollar don't focus on the fewer employees that work there focus on the largest number possible which is the revenue that these employees are helping to generate for these companies so if you had much much higher corporate taxation you can play around with all the personal taxation you want but if a lot of people do get shut out of the economy Chamath Palihapitiya: you're not going to make nearly as much for the government as you would by taxing companies SPEAKER_46: more chamath should there be a backstop because we know tax law is so sophisticated and if you're SPEAKER_45: intelligent you could make it seem like you didn't make any money because you're investing you're distributing yada yada should there just be a hey listen whatever you want to do with your taxes is fine but x percent of your top line revenue is your base tax and you cannot get around SPEAKER_10: that should there be something like that there's a couple things that this tax bill attempted to do which could be really powerful if it does get passed i think that corporations should pay a large tax i think that they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on r d and i think they should Chamath Palihapitiya: be forced to spend a certain percentage on basically benefits for their employees and i think that would do a lot to level the playing field then i do think that you can have much higher individual SPEAKER_10: taxation but you need to make it simpler because there's too many easy ways like that pro publica article showed for you to play games for individuals to not pay taxes and so you got to simplify all of this stuff because it's too complicated so if you're rich enough to hire a fleet SPEAKER_118: of lawyers you'll work go your way around it yes period and they and they repealed it as part of the SPEAKER_66: amt was for corporations was repealed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act i think i don't know where that stands but it does seem like a lot of companies i don't know how that makes sense jacal SPEAKER_51: i mean like some businesses run high margin some are low margin some are losing money some are over SPEAKER_66: investing no it's complicated i don't have the solution that's why i'm sort of saying but one of SPEAKER_45: the i think one of the optics issues here is you know people are like that company didn't pay any SPEAKER_51: taxes that company sells this many iphones that company's yes because they're they're doing what tax laws were designed to do which is to encourage investment uh so how do you fix it give me a SPEAKER_415: solution freeberg i don't i think that once businesses are mature and they start dividend in cash and making distributions and they're profitable that might be the time to tax them SPEAKER_63: i'm not sure why would they ever do that if they had an army of people saying hey you don't have to SPEAKER_415: you don't want to because if they're investing in growth they're creating jobs and they're growing the economy and that's okay so the status quo is fine i don't think they're creating as many jobs as SPEAKER_00: you think but they are growing the economy that's why you have to tax the corporation because that's SPEAKER_51: the effective proxy for taxing gdp yeah look i i would be all about let me just i'll wear my libertarian hat again for a second but like i would be all about taxation if i felt like my dollars had a positive roi where they ended up and the problem right now is like government spending is set up in such a way that it's effectively been gamified and people extract capital from the government and my dollars are not getting a positive roi for me or for society i would rather have them sit SPEAKER_137: somewhere else which is why you left let's be honest that's why you left san francisco i mean SPEAKER_51: it's just they're spending more i left san francisco i've got a family and i and i need a backyard so SPEAKER_434: that's a little bit but isn't part of it that you are san francisco is a separate degree of SPEAKER_50: incompetence like but yes you're right they're spending more than ever and it's getting worse SPEAKER_112: san francisco is a whole nother a whole nother nightmare jacal well like i'm just speaking in general when you're writ large in general right now whether it's the state level or the federal level SPEAKER_51: it feels to me and i think it feels to a lot of people that dollars aren't being spent in a way that's generating a return for the taxpayer and i think we all feel that way and i think that's what's frustrating it's not about how much one's being taxed it's about how are those tax dollars being spent and are they being spent in a way that secures the future of our nation of SPEAKER_112: our people of our livelihoods etc and making you know giving everyone access to opportunity what's hat what's happened what's happened is we've created things like student loan programs and you SPEAKER_51: know housing programs and infrastructure programs that are literally just giving away money to private companies that are profiteering off of government spending right and it's crony capitalism SPEAKER_439: as our favorite professor scott galloway says it's one thing i really do agree with him politics SPEAKER_51: it is it is that there is this notion of crony capitalism where the united states and state governments and even local governments as seen at san francisco california all the way up to the federal level are spending money in a way that i think we all feel um is benefiting some disproportionately to most now if there was a high degree of taxation and everyone was benefiting in a meaningful way and those programs were well managed and capital flowed meaningfully to to support everything we want to support great i think everyone would raise their hand raise two hands and say tax the heck out of me let's make that happen but that's not what happens and i think that's the primary aversion to high taxation so actually get the final word yeah i mean look i what SPEAKER_399: i'm worried about is taxes are going up big time no matter what happens in washington spending is SPEAKER_69: going up big time we now have peacetime deficits that are the biggest that they've ever been the defs the the national debt the peacetime national debt's the highest it's ever been uh we have a looming debt crisis in china we have supply chain shortages what could go i mean you know what there's a lot of things here that could upset the apple cart and i what i'm afraid of is we're going to look SPEAKER_88: back at at this year the thousand unicorns being minted and say that really was the golden era and everything happened after that we really screwed you sound like the old guy at starbucks it says SPEAKER_444: that every generation and complains about the last generation we're in the golden era and it's all SPEAKER_447: down how much does music suck today normally normally i will say how impressive it is that 10 years ago SPEAKER_112: none of those unicorns existed and it is likely the case that 3 trillion dollars of value was created via private funding and private companies over the last 10 years so all these entrepreneurs all these employees anyone working at these businesses anyone involved in these businesses should be thrilled about the fact that you from zero created three and a half trillion dollars of value in 10 years SPEAKER_88: that's extraordinary yeah i'm not i'm not trying to create nostalgia about the past i'm talking about the present and trying to preserve it because i'm seeing some storm clouds on the horizon yeah yeah SPEAKER_165: i would like to play uh the best song from tony tony tony as we leave yeah okay everybody we're heading SPEAKER_401: out this one's for you london breed state state approved entertainment you can take off your SPEAKER_454: masks for this entertainment it's so good any do you guys watch uh squid game anybody watch squid game SPEAKER_457: no we have lives nobody watched good game okay my kid my kid's been talking about that should i be SPEAKER_66: letting them watch squid game or is it no it's the most violent uh korean horror dystopian uh SPEAKER_439: show ever watched they're gonna be scarred for life hey sax as a follow-up did you uh did you stop your kids from uh from tick tock did you take your kids off tick tock they told yeah i went in there SPEAKER_461: i'm like kids what are you watching i'll tell you in a second all right yeah so did you take your kids off tick tock yeah i went in there i was like kids what are you watching they're like dad get the SPEAKER_467: hell out of here yeah i said tell us our names and he was like okay i'll be right back if you can SPEAKER_470: tell me to turn off tick tock buy my name i'll do it david's like see you later the conversation was SPEAKER_471: what do you guys watching on tick tock i hear it's all sex and drugs they're like no we're watching SPEAKER_348: dance videos okay go ahead i trust you the dance videos are literally like absolutely uh sex and SPEAKER_406: drug based every single one of them it is so deviant no stop it is not that you're so exaggerating i am SPEAKER_77: so not exaggerating literally the if you listen take the most obscene lyric to uh obscene hook to any SPEAKER_444: rap song that's what trends oh my god it's so true guys every generation says the same about the next SPEAKER_439: it's unbelievable right no but it is like explicit i listen whatever i mean like you know um pearl jam SPEAKER_323: and you know all the way back to the beach boys they said about elvis and shaking his hips yeah SPEAKER_222: exactly yeah but i mean no this when i say it's explicit it is literally explicit you just don't get the youth jcal you don't understand them i i think i understand it a little bit too well SPEAKER_63: anyways do not use the youths listen i oh hey guys are we going to do the all-in summit or not i SPEAKER_222: yeah i went to the code conference and i was like this was amazing to get back to you got to stop talking about ideas and actually just doing them what are you talking about we created this SPEAKER_343: spot i'm just trying to get buy-in jason okay all right i need your buy-in we we have a voting SPEAKER_491: system here rolling pick up miami miami miami okay first year miami second year italy not rome all right we'll do first year miami second year italy no let's make it somewhat accessible i think we do SPEAKER_495: domestic you have a cane so you can't get there you old bastard all right so here's how it's going SPEAKER_45: to work 250 tickets 200 for purchase 50 for scholarship all in summit three days miami SPEAKER_282: sax and i are off to the races why don't you make it more people bro why do you have to keep it so SPEAKER_386: exclusive you're just so exclusive what is it i want to invert the top-down hierarchy to what i want SPEAKER_00: to be a left-wing authoritarian is it that i have to believe that is what you are a left-wing SPEAKER_507: authoritarian i just want to be rich and powerful what party i am i just want money status and power SPEAKER_508: let me tell you let me tell you why i like this idea is because to the points we're talking about SPEAKER_88: with coinbase earlier we you know we have these conferences in the tech industry and they're frankly run by people who hate tech and the tech industry and people who are successful tickets right exactly SPEAKER_93: and so the i see these tech founders going up on these stages and subjecting themselves these interrogations by people who hate them and i'm like what are they doing like it makes no sense SPEAKER_406: i'm putting up a form i'm gonna let people take deposits i'm gonna pick a month and we're gonna go how many people went to the conference guys you went to this week uh i the uh code conference i think was SPEAKER_45: probably three or four hundred by design um it was a third or half how much were the tickets i i didn't actually buy a ticket because i didn't want to be in the conference itself because i was concerned about a breakthrough virus but i did host the poker game with sky and brooke tickets i think SPEAKER_48: are 8 000 for code and i think ted is up to 10 or 15. so maybe how much are we charging maybe like SPEAKER_521: twenty five million dollars seventy five hundred we're charging seven five hundred so two hundred and SPEAKER_110: then 50 scholarships for people who wouldn't be able to afford it so the the gross revenue here SPEAKER_455: so we want 1.5 million and what's our cost going to be cost will be a million and what so wait so SPEAKER_528: we're so we're making profit on this deal no i'm making a profit because i'm gonna run and we're SPEAKER_386: sweet 500. we spend to be very clear we spend what we excuse me spend what we make i am buying the wine and you will shut the up okay so then it's going to be it's going to cost two million so it's going to SPEAKER_406: make 1.5 no no no and if he's doing the wine no it's going to cost two million i want i want a wine SPEAKER_132: budget so that everybody that comes is it feels like they've had an exceptional food and beverage SPEAKER_255: experience jimata's gonna spend half a million dollars on wine no joke so then it has to be 10k a SPEAKER_222: ticket but you know what the people who are coming can afford it they don't take out we're not SPEAKER_45: privileging you with some profiteering i'm not profiteering off of it honestly the reason i want to do it most is i want to play poker for three days and i want to have us the four of us interview the most iconoclastic interesting people and i want to do it for the fans so that some number of fans get to come who wouldn't normally be able to come to a conference at this level and i just think it would SPEAKER_539: be a blast it'd be fun to get together okay stop talking about it and do it we're all okay i'll do it SPEAKER_240: all right i just want to make sure everybody's bought in i mean i'll set a date i'll set a date okay SPEAKER_537: not not the first week of february because i think i have a i'm thinking march april march april also not the third week of february because i think i'm skiing in europe SPEAKER_406: okay can you give us the dates you're not gallivanting around europe and other places bro i'm i'm grinding every day here you see what i'm doing it's like i know i'm working hard too i mean it's SPEAKER_551: crazy right now it's like the i've never seen the market like this i mean it is bonkers enjoy a while SPEAKER_53: less what's that enjoy it while it lasts exactly all right everybody we'll see you next time for the dictator chamath palihapitiya for the rain man david sacks and the queen of kinoa SPEAKER_563: david friedberg i'm jcal and we'll see you on episode 50 bye bye