SPEAKER_00: freeberg freeberg what's up it seems like you have a piece of on the side of your mouth or is that a birthmark that's oh no that's a birthday gotcha SPEAKER_07: did you record that yeah absolutely jesus look at this guy he takes his shirt off for one fucking selfie and now everybody who's fat and pal on the show the other three of us is SPEAKER_05: gonna be ridiculed i'm having steak tonight s-t-e-a-k tonight i'm lifting twice a week now SPEAKER_14: oh come on sacks come get some let's go three two hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another SPEAKER_09: episode of the all in podcast with me again the dictator himself chamov poly hapatia rain man david sacks definitely with us definitely a great driver his dad lets him drive in the driveway and of course everybody's favorite the queen of quinoa the science conductor himself SPEAKER_23: david freeberg queen the queen uh a lot of activity online it's been a little bit of chaos since we uh all got together here i guess we should talk about this apple story with uh antonio garcia martinez you may have heard that he was hired by apple to i guess run their ad efforts and i have a little bit of information on kind of what he was going to do there in terms of ads which is really SPEAKER_25: interesting um but uh tell us tell us tell us tell us okay well anyway you know how we're basically SPEAKER_00: start at the beginning and assume people don't know who antonio garcia martinez so antonio garcia SPEAKER_09: martinez was a facebook developer he is some really smart guy who uses a lot of big words and wrote a book SPEAKER_23: called chaos monkeys which is a great book where he takes um a very jack kerouac kind of you know a lot of prose and uh he wrote this book about his time at facebook the problem is he said some things in the book that would be five years later problematic at the time they were actually uh considered problematic by some folks and in the full quote maybe uh less problematic but he was essentially ousted because of the following problematic quote um the quote is most women in the bay area are soft and weak cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of they have their self regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their independence but the reality is come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion they become precisely the sort of useless baggage you trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel and they shorten that quote to be that most women are SPEAKER_30: soft and weak and uh full of uh full of shit so in context in this book he was contrasting the bay area women SPEAKER_23: he had dated with the mother of his kids who he describes as strong and tall and tough and amazing um but still the quote's a little gnarly and the quote out of you know when it's out of context becomes particularly gnarly and of course um this led to uh a petition at apple which then led to him being fired uh which now is going to lead to him probably getting a 10 million dollar settlement uh of course there's a lot of uh hypocrisy being brought up here because apple has allegedly been using or apple supply chain has slave labor SPEAKER_25: in it from the uyghurs and other ethnic minorities um and obviously apple gave dr dre billions of dollars uh for beats by dr and uh he has a even more misogynistic um series of lyrics and was also accused of physically assaulting um i believe his wife and other people he dated who dr dr dr dr yeah David Sacks: uh so anyway uh what do you think okay there you go next story no i'm happy to jump into this um i think jason i think you're you're you focus a little bit too much and i saw your your pod with zach coleus on this um a lot of good takes but i think you're a little too focused on what agm as i think it's easier to just call him by his initials what he did as opposed to what the employees at apple did and um there's at least four things that apple did or five things that apple did wrong i mean number one i think there was a very good reason not to hire this guy which is that he wrote a best-selling tell-all book about SPEAKER_42: the last big tech company he worked at so why if you're a big tech company why in the world would you hire him so that was stupid decision number one but they did decide to hire him and once they hire him they got to treat him like any other employee and give him a chance to show what he can do and so that leads to mistake number two which is these 2 000 employees who signed this petition really distorted and took out of context that passage and i know the passage is cringe okay um and gnarly and and it could you know certainly appear sexist but you have to put it in its context and the the larger con this is a work of literature this is a best-selling uh book it's what 150 000 words they're taking 150 words out of context and the context was like you said he's describing the mother of his children the love of his life in as this sort of linda hamilton-esque in terminator type figure or charlie's theron in mad max and this passage is not in there to describe all women it's just basically a literary flourish to contrast the the this the woman that he loves uh being such a badass compared to every other woman and and you know when kara swisher interviewed agm five years ago she brought up this passage he explained it and she said yeah okay i get it so you know it's certainly the case that people can understand the context if they choose to and they simply are not choosing to understand the context which brings me to mistake number three which is these 2 000 employees lied in their petition by claiming that their safety is threatened by apple hiring agm that is simply untrue it's physically impossible in the era of zoom when everyone's working from home but this guy is not a threat to anyone's safety but they you but they use that claim they make that claim because they know that if you accuse someone of threatening your safety it will trigger the machinery of hr to remove that person from the workplace this is the language of safetyism and it's a specific tactic to basically get somebody canceled and removed from the workplace okay and then that leads to the the the next mistake i think mistake number four which is the bosses of apple caved into this pressure they were total cowards they never even gave agm the chance to explain himself they never asked him what did you intend by this passage what were you trying to do and by the way they knew about this book when they hired to say it's even worse they knew about the book SPEAKER_18: they had vetted and they talked to many people as when a big time when a big tech company hires somebody for a major position like this they call all the references and all of this is uncovered and dealt with SPEAKER_46: of course they knew about it and then when the mob complains they fire him summarily without SPEAKER_42: subjecting the decision to proper hr processes this is hr by mob rule it's totally unacceptable no company should be run this way and then finally that brings us number five is that in explaining their decision and trying to justify their cowardice and giving it to the mob they said that they fired him because of his behavior agm never had a chance to engage in any behavior he barely started at the job this wasn't because of his behavior this is because of the book that he wrote five years ago so what they're saying is that if you ever publish a written work at any time in your life years and years ago that that can somehow constitute present day behavior and that other people in the workplace can have a problem with that be that this is not behavior and this is why he's going to have a giant um defamation suit and settlement because they are making him unemployable in the tech industry by claiming that he was fired for some some sexist behavior he was not what do you think he'll get paid in a settlement SPEAKER_52: i put it at 10. 10 million well i was just thinking he's a half million dollar a year employee SPEAKER_25: to a million with his rsu so let's just put it at a million unemployed for 10 to 20 years because of this or the damages to his reputation and present value that back yeah so and yeah so i think 10 million SPEAKER_00: is the number my curiosity in this was just um did those 2 000 employees feel the same way about dr dre of course not or did they do they feel the same way about some of the movies that they sell uh in the itunes store or do they feel the same way about some of the games that they enable um in the app store yeah or some of the subscriptions that are sold um right do they care do they care that much about what's happening in their chinese supply chain um i mean i think it seems at least on the outside the answer is no but it would be interesting to get an explanation of that from the same hr people SPEAKER_59: um i don't know whether the guy should have been fired or not but i do think that you should have SPEAKER_00: a predictable standard and every company is allowed to do what they want if the standard at apple is that we are going to hold you accountable for everything you've done in the past irrespective of whether you've disavowed it or not so be it that's their right and i think that the employees of that company have a right to do that i think is that if you start to arbitrarily enforce it you go down this weird place which is like basically i think what they're saying is if it's good for business we're going to ignore it if it's not obvious that it's good for business we'll act because it's a low cost way of keeping the masses um you know that the medicated and i think that's what's even scarier to the 2000 people it's not that you know maybe they should feel proud Chamath Palihapitiya: that they got their pound of flesh but they really should figure out how they want to stand on all these other points because to cherry pick puts puts the whole company in just a weird posture that's SPEAKER_65: that's not scalable freeberg uh i'm less interested in the hypocrisy and the values debate which is obvious that's kind of the first order point with all this stuff it's like do the employees have the right values is there hypocrisy by management is there hypocrisy by the employees what strikes me though is um a failure of leadership at these organizations you know you guys think back to brian armstrong's kind of purging of the woke mob and the political discourse that was happening at coinbase a few months ago he took a point of strong leadership um to a new level and i think it highlighted when the leader steps up and says this is how we're going to operate these are how we're going to make decisions and puts his foot down uh people will leave and you evolve the culture and i think it indicates to me that certain companies as they've gotten really big and really successful like apple and even alphabet and various other kind of large tech companies the leaders no longer lead the employees lead the narrative on culture and the narrative on values and um you know it speaks to two things one is that there perhaps aren't founder leaders running those organizations anymore that there are managers whose job is critically important whose job is to keep the wheels on and keep the wheels from falling off so they have more to lose and they are constantly trying to protect the downside than they are trying to be aggressive about growing to the upside um and then i think it's just uh you know secondly this kind of um you know failure uh to kind of define what your values are from a leadership perspective and the void gets filled by the employees the void gets filled by the mob and so while it's this one kind of you know debatable point today and this one kind of hypocritical point today it's really interesting to see the this isn't happening at other companies that are founder led and if it is the you know the culture SPEAKER_71: gets steve jobs would have handled this completely differently steve jobs would not have let his SPEAKER_73: employees tell him who or should he would have stopped and said let's have a discussion about SPEAKER_65: a really clear point of view about who we hire why we hire them and how we make decisions and not let the democ democratic kind of rule or the you know um it's not even democratic it's not like all SPEAKER_25: employees took a vote how much of this chamath has to do with the coddling of silicon valley SPEAKER_23: employees for two decades vis-a-vis you know you get driven to school on your school bus you sit on you know you get your lunch prepared for you we do your dry cleaning every friday you get to come and ask challenging questions to the leaders and this concept of like you know everybody has a voice at work as opposed to this is a company controlled by shareholders and or a founder and you work for it and there is a trade of services here vis-a-vis what toby had to say at shopify which is this is not a SPEAKER_77: family this is a sports team you are here to perform we are here to perform for our customers Chamath Palihapitiya: the end so the in fact if you if you had a chance and maybe nick we can post it in the show notes but SPEAKER_00: the email that toby lutke wrote to shopify employees was unbelievable that to me is like that's a tour de force that should be basically like that should be minted and sold as an nft what's an nft we forgot about those and it was it was it was just an incredible email adjacent to your point and the way that that started if i i may be getting these facts wrong but there was an emoji of a noose inside of a slack channel um and then and then folks got quite upset with it and so i think toby's response was to basically shut down the whole channel and say hey guys you know we're losing the script about why we're here and you know i think brian armstrong's essay was a version of that the question is why are we here if i had to guess i think it's because we've pumped so much money into silicon valley companies they didn't know where to spend it and so i actually think that what we've really done is over hired far too many people into many of these companies and so SPEAKER_59: they kind of are very smart people sitting around twiddling their thumbs and so obviously they're SPEAKER_00: just going to get distracted meaning um i remember like you know at facebook there was barely enough SPEAKER_59: people to keep the lights on for a while then i remember by the time i was leaving i was like wow there's way too many people here a lot of them and most of them were all really really smart but it SPEAKER_00: wasn't obvious to me what many of them did and you know people would look at me and then say oh you know that's a really arrogant thing to say and that's not true and everybody's valuable i don't know um you know if you look at google i've always thought like that company could probably run by 2000 SPEAKER_59: people but you know there's 200 000 people so the 198 other thousand of them need to find something to do it's probably the same at apple it's probably the same at all these big tech companies and that's SPEAKER_00: the leverage that you get from technology it's naturally massively deflationary so but if you keep pumping billions and billions and billions of dollars into these companies where the app experience is written by 50 or 100 critical people or managed by 500 or a thousand critical people SPEAKER_54: um this is the natural byproduct i think which of all of that by the way freeberg said organizations SPEAKER_84: want to grow right like how many organizations say you know we should be smaller we don't need this SPEAKER_59: many people you know you're saying something really important not enough founders and boards understand the difference between growing a business and growing an org those are two totally different things and the reason is because we've lost sight of very simple financial metrics in silicon valley meaning if you go to any other industry where there is a cost of capital people understand what return on invested capital means they know how to measure it yeah they know what operating leverage means they know SPEAKER_00: what margin expansion means we only have valuation and they seek that out here we think about exactly as you said valuation and so this idea that having a hundred people do the work and see margins lift is antithetical to the silicon valley culture it's oh as margins go up let's just keep running the same profitable business but instead have a 500 people a thousand people what do you think you're an SPEAKER_86: operations machine people would say on a coo basis you're one of the top three to five in the history SPEAKER_89: of the valley what do you say coo man um yeah i mean look chamath is right that in a company that's David Sacks: well run and well led where uh people people don't have time on their hands to engage in these shenanigans um so yeah i mean i think i think that's absolutely right i think companies in startups are increasingly have to choose whether they want to be apple or whether they want to be um coinbase or shop 5 for that matter and just this this week at apple there's a new petition circling now there's SPEAKER_91: a petition called by thousands of employees calling for tim cook to denounce the israelis and endorse SPEAKER_93: the palestinian side of the conflict yeah how's that gonna work well of course does he have a position SPEAKER_94: on abortion is there an abortion position at well but but now that they've given into the the woke mob David Sacks: there's no reason for the mob to stop they're going to be circulating a petition every week and that's kind of the point is so and actually agm himself had a really good quote about this he did a great interview with um matt taibbi and um he laid out the choice that companies face like this he said it's interjected this is um antonio garcia martina saying it's interjecting the whole twitter cesspool SPEAKER_42: with all the dog piles and all the performative signaling and all that crap into a corporate setting and replicating those dynamics and calling it work that's basically what happened is what's happening is you you're these employees are performing twitter at work on slack and they're pretending like it's really work and it's not and i think you know founders are going to have to make a decision do you stand up and take a uh brian armstrong like position or a toby position SPEAKER_98: or do you eventually degenerate into some sort of or a base camp by the way or even base camp the most SPEAKER_09: woke virtual signaling founders on twitter decided to take that's right the most libertarian or spartan approach you know stoic approach of toby to give you uh toby's well base camp just to finish the David Sacks: base camp thought so so base camp tried to accommodate this sort of like woke mentality and what they found SPEAKER_42: is that they got pushed so far it became so distracting they eventually had to move to the armstrong position and that's kind of my point is once you yeah everybody's going to move to that SPEAKER_23: yeah that's my point i mean and if you don't believe what i what i said was like listen if you believe that a organization that allows political speech and this kind of stuff as a primary function inside the company well then go build a competitor to base camp and show that that system works better here's toby's quote uh to help you make this more clear to team members here are some pointers about SPEAKER_09: what shopify is not shopify like any for-profit company is not a family the very idea is preposterous you are born into a family you never choose it and they can't unfamily you it should be massively obvious that shopify is not a family but i see people even leaders casually use the term like shoppy fam which will cause the members of our teams especially junior ones that have never worked anywhere else to get the wrong impression the dangers of family thinking in quotes are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go shopify is a team italicized not a family we literally only want the best people in the world the reason why you join shopify is because i hope all other people you met during the interview process were really smart caring and committed this is magic and it creates a virtuous magnetism on talented people because very few people in the world have this in themselves SPEAKER_00: people who don't should not be part of this team i mean when i was um when i was at facebook when i was at facebook we used to convene the senior team and you know i was like i want i really want to fire the bottom five or ten percent of the company of you and we would force stack rank and we did it for about three or four years and then the excuse was it's too big and there are too many people and the roles are too diverse and you can't rank i actually don't believe that even to this day i think it's pretty obvious who the real thousand x kind of employee contributors are and by the way they exist in every function there's thousand x sales people there's thousand x you know product managers there's there's the thousand x people that work in facilities they exist in every job function and SPEAKER_59: companies i don't think do a good enough job of figuring out who they are and so instead what happens SPEAKER_00: is people that are not even a hundred x or not even a 10x are really more like a one or 1.1x can basically hide in all of that noise and i think that if you could separate hr into two things but there's really three things one is like benefits which is critical the second is actually like safety and the ability to whistle blow if there's something really nefarious or bad that's SPEAKER_59: happened and then the third that's really valuable i think is organizational design right how do you put people in good jobs and how do you allow them to have a huge amount of autonomy to run and build a SPEAKER_00: career but all of this other policing stuff to me just seems like um it coddles to the lowest 25 SPEAKER_59: i don't know if that and this is my intuition to the lowest 25 performers of every course of course SPEAKER_25: it does and just to uh close this story up and wrap to our next uh in tone agm announced that he is going to take a year wait for it to write for sub stack so he is going to get paid 10 million dollars i i would guesstimate in a settlement by apple he's going to get a half million dollar SPEAKER_111: i'll take the over i'll take the over i'll take the over if only we can bet on this i set such a SPEAKER_112: good line we can bet on it yeah we can bet on it i'll take the over okay i set the line at 10. SPEAKER_62: anybody want the under i'll take you'll take the uh well go go give it give a different bet and i'll SPEAKER_116: then i'll figure out a different line you can set a different line set a different line i think 10's a good line because you gotta think if they offer him seven million i mean it's gonna SPEAKER_119: be something like that i don't know what the big what the number is but we'll never know i'll i'll SPEAKER_123: make a line 15.6 i'll take the under i'll take the under wow really take the under yeah 15 is way SPEAKER_125: too much way too much david's quiet i'd say under 15. yeah that's not a good line 11.5 is a good line SPEAKER_131: okay let me do it 11.5 what do you take jama can afford the book against all three of us okay SPEAKER_132: 11.5 chama takes the over 11.5 free berksaks yeah i don't know under let's can i just tell you why SPEAKER_123: if you look at the last four year compounding of apple stock right and so if you think about reasonable number of grants as his level of seniority plus the imputed compounding plus whatever he would SPEAKER_54: have gone you should be part of his team somebody sent this clip because that's the argument is i i do think you end up getting to probably 20 million and then you got to include the SPEAKER_123: appreciation up yeah you get to buy it now price at 15 and call it and they've also also you could SPEAKER_94: make the argument they've rendered him unemployable in the industry so and then there's foregone SPEAKER_139: mental suffering what about suffering he is going to suffer he's going to need to be on meds my client SPEAKER_09: is suffering he's in therapy twice a week he can't get out of bed he's not going to be able to be in functional relationships and he's too scared to leave the house he should wait on the sub stack David Sacks: because he's going to make so much money on sub stack it's going to mitigate his damages SPEAKER_145: yeah don't take the subject deal wait just wait on the way i'll give you guys another step do you SPEAKER_64: guys know what apple's market cap divided by employees is apple is apple's market probably seven SPEAKER_152: million in employee anyone else wait a second there's a hundred thousand employees and it's worth SPEAKER_65: two trillion okay there's 150 000 employees 2.1 trillion so it's 14 million an employee so the other way to think about it is if apple's like gonna lose one or two good employees over this um you know they'd uh they'd happily pay up to get uh to get the guy to be quiet so it's worth one employee to pay 14 million dollars wow no i mean well you're you're not dividing by all the SPEAKER_157: slave labor in china and i'll recall i'll recall well they cause they actually cause zero SPEAKER_161: that was bad sorry i mean it's dark but it's true i mean this is the hypocrisy of apple they've literally got slave labor in their supply chain not that they want it in their supply chain SPEAKER_165: let's just go through this because like this is a common narrative but has anyone actually like gotten SPEAKER_146: to the bottom of well that's why i said reported i mean yeah yeah it is it is known again like i don't like pushing i don't like pushing narratives actually i tweeted something that SPEAKER_94: i know i retweeted something that came from i think a pretty valid source um that author from SPEAKER_91: the atlantic who i think is pretty legit also i just think just in terms of his quote if he had SPEAKER_23: taken the word woman out of the quote uh most people in the bay area are soft and weak in a zombie apocalypse i don't think you're recruiting from the bay area uh but related to this story uh in terms of chamat's point about you know uh 1000x performers uh america is uh really doing a bad job at math and gary tan uh the venture capitalist retweeted and participated in a tweet thread SPEAKER_25: about immigrants um who know that standardized test is probably your best shot at getting somewhere your money social science can't take you the rules are well standardized and he tells this story about SPEAKER_23: this but there was a persuasion article um about us failing math and that they're going to be in california getting rid of the gifted programs for math because it's unfair to the kids who are not gifted as a kid who is was not gifted uh and to the three kids on the program who were in gifted programs SPEAKER_35: or at least two of you were i have no problem with there being a gifted program but any thoughts on SPEAKER_00: this i think it's shameful yeah it really is i mean like we are we are really doing our level best to just completely our population why i mean why is this even how could this even be possible it's like like just as like it's it's kind of like the equivalent it's the moral equivalent of actually saying you know what we're going to eliminate welfare for the bottom five percent like our job as a society is to kind of like find the broadest set of solutions for the most number of people and solve for both extremes so when you're dealing with education you both need to understand that SPEAKER_59: there are folks that need some kind of structural support look when i came to canada i had esl right english as a second language you take that so that you can learn the native language of a country it didn't mean that i was stupid it just meant that i was behind you know if i had dyslexia or something else i would need some kind of support one of my children had a speech impediment we had a speech therapist this is what you do but on the other side if you have a kid who's an incredibly high Chamath Palihapitiya: performer who has the potential to just completely crush hey like you should be able to give that kid a pathway to achieve and give back so the idea that you would eliminate anything at the extremes SPEAKER_85: is kind of completely uncompassionate and stupid just totally stupid well it's in the name of having SPEAKER_25: a more equitable math class again i hate that word please don't use that word please don't use that SPEAKER_64: word that is let that is the least this i mean this goes back to the point i made a few episodes ago that SPEAKER_65: you know you can have progress or you can have equality but it's very difficult to have both and you know if you want to try and make everyone equal and give no one the opportunity to have more or get more than anyone else because of whatever the circumstance may be whether it's earned no or no but this is my point like you know you limit the ability for everyone to to progress as a group because we're now limiting the ability for folks to take calculus i know equality look i'll use a SPEAKER_00: video game example equality means we all get to play grand theft auto not that we have a somebody who actually plays for us and gets to the same answer and just gives you a ticket that says we don't SPEAKER_182: all get the same score on don't get the same score yeah so so so that's that is what equality means SPEAKER_00: is that we all get to play and we all get a chance versus equity which is leveling everyone equity is leveling everybody and saying here's your result right by the way it's the same as this other person SPEAKER_65: whatever the misnomer is but the notion of leveling everyone where no one can be ahead of anyone else by too far uh obviously limits as a group our ability for the top decile to to increment or the top quartile to increment i gotta think look let's and let's again use yeah let's again use our friends because SPEAKER_00: instead of ours but you know we know a lot of really smart people um who have really really smart kids we also know people in general that are in tough circumstances who also probably have really smart kids just purely selfishly for me i want those kids doing the best they can to figure out what the hell they can invent for us in the future why would you slow those kids down you know it's kind of like saying you know what like how about a black athlete would you would it be preposterous to say you know what you don't have a right to go to the nba and make money for your family i'm going to slow you down because there's another white kid that's going to go through four years of college so you know David Friedberg: what you're going to have to go through four years of college and you're going to have to pay for it SPEAKER_30: well actually what i would propose uh is when i go up to dunk that we just the rim automatically SPEAKER_23: lowers two feet yeah yeah so i can dunk and then when you go for a label just raises six inches David Sacks: it would be more equitable for me that's more equitable yes more equity let me let me let me add another layer to this so i i agree with you with you guys that what we should be thinking about is opportunity we should always be asking what increases opportunity for the most people and that's how we should measure political programs and we're not doing that here we are sort of leveling down but i would say it's even more nefarious than that which is i think what's happening is that the education establishment is completely failing our kids and our schools and what they're trying to do is SPEAKER_42: destroy the evidence of that failure wow and and so they're hiding they're hiding the results now this persuasion piece yes this persuasion piece lays out the statistics which are pretty grim okay so according to these like global measurements by oecd okay math proficiency in the us we rank 37 in the world okay and there's only 37 developed nations in the world according to the development so we're last among developed countries china which is our main global competitor is number one okay and we achieve these horrible results despite ranking fifth in the world and per pupil spending so it's not a spending problem okay and as we know to the extent we do have high performing math students in the us a huge majority of them are actually foreign born and so we're actually kind of cheating our our numbers a little bit it's even worse than it appears now what is the education establishment doing about this how are they hiding the failure well when school comes back in the fall they're planning to eliminate accelerated math okay that means that there's no more algebra for eighth graders who are ready to take it on there's no more calculus for high schoolers who want to you know do like the ap classes and get a jump on stem you know for college the entire idea of gifted students is now under attack like we talked about in the name of equity it's become a catch-all for every bad idea and the university california system has now abandoned the sat and act so they temporarily got rid of those requirements during the pandemic but now they've used it as a crisis and now they say they're not bringing back the requirements until at least 2025 and you can bet it's never going to return at all and so here's the thing they're trying to get rid of measuring how bad we are at mass so SPEAKER_46: we won't have to think about it they just want to give everyone a gold star and a pat on the back SPEAKER_25: and just say how you know this reminds me of sax is when you threw away the um the digital scale i got you SPEAKER_201: right i'm not i'm not fat because i'm not measuring it great perfect SPEAKER_208: oh my god it's like we really it's it's the movie idiocracy it literally we are doing the movie SPEAKER_59: idiot have you guys why don't we why don't we just uh why don't we just eliminate all admissions programs at every university and just have one global admissions board where every campus is the same Chamath Palihapitiya: what is the difference between mit um and stanford and caltech and the university of arkansas in my opinion there shouldn't be it's more equitable to just have somebody go close to home because you SPEAKER_213: can save money you know carbon emissions are lower right you can just take the bus to the local Chamath Palihapitiya: school competition is one centralized place teach you why have anybody basic course i mean if i said this you you'd think that i was a crazy person except that's basically what we're now telling all of our SPEAKER_25: high school i'm also getting rid of michelin stars and i'd like yelp to take off their review system because it's not equitable like we should not have michelin stars anymore every show every restaurant's the same every restaurant you get three quarters of a star we should not the health department should Chamath Palihapitiya: not give ranks of letters and they should not be forced to post it because that's inequitable SPEAKER_220: absolutely you know yeah also you can game you can game the health test you could literally just SPEAKER_65: follow the rules so let me just ask the um the counterpoint question which is uh uh standardized testing for example benefits people that can afford tutors and special you know classes to get ahead and provide more tutors yeah therefore well therefore it's higher income people that can always well the point is they can always layer on additional tutoring they can always layer on additional SPEAKER_225: classes and they're therefore there's a finite number of math it's a finite score friedberg you SPEAKER_00: can only get 800 on the math acits i'll i'll be somewhat um flip floppy here i don't believe in standardized tests that much i never did well particularly in standardized tests i do think that they can be gamed but that's different from what we're talking about what we're saying is if kids show aptitude we are explicitly choosing to not give them a chance to develop at their potential and the problem is we do this in other areas we do it in athletics we do it in music we do it in the arts but we're not going to do it in stem that's what we're choosing to do that is what's crazy so choose to get rid of the sat or act whatever you want i don't care but if you are the lebron james of physics SPEAKER_59: jesus christ like let that kid become the lebron james of physics i'll tell you like i i am i got into uc SPEAKER_65: berkeley because i had great standardized test scores because i had an aptitude what was your sat free SPEAKER_114: berg let's do this um i got a uh let's do this an 800 math and i think it was a 720 verbal okay so SPEAKER_230: you got a 15 20 out of 1600 at the time i got yeah and i was 11. and i got an 800 on the math David Sacks: i was uh 750 math um 720 verbal 14. are you writing this down this is pre this is pre the inflation SPEAKER_235: there was a big uh sat i was i was i was 15 10 on the sat oh we were okay so i woke up 400 points SPEAKER_238: 500 points behind each of you in canada i was just kind of like we didn't even write it but i went and i SPEAKER_210: wrote it just for shits and giggles and i didn't do well i didn't do well like you just said you SPEAKER_239: weren't good at standardized tests so what are you talking about yeah you're in the top three percent SPEAKER_213: yeah yeah i know but generally like i wasn't a good test taker i was in probation in college David Sacks: academic yeah i'm not a good testing but look the the reason why these tests got invented was actually to prevent discrimination um i think it was back in like the 50s right um you know i think it was like at that time it was jews being kept out of the ivy league and one of the ways that they corrected for that was they made everyone take the same test and so you could see the scores and it would SPEAKER_42: shine some light on you know making sure that people didn't just get in because they were legacies that they got in because um you know they had that good good scores and there's been decades of work since David Sacks: then to try and eliminate bias in the test and so the the the claims of bias now and the test really SPEAKER_42: aren't supported now right to freeberg's point obviously that if you take some rich kid who lives in the suburbs who gets a 1400 and you compare that to a kid in the inner city who doesn't have who grew up poor doesn't have the advantages and that kid gets a 1300 well which score is better probably the 1300 and so you can take that into account in my view in the admissions process but eliminating the David Sacks: scores all together why would you want to have less information to make a decision there's no reason SPEAKER_77: not to get rid of these i would just think more holistically about how you accept students and SPEAKER_23: i mean is it more competition and having better teachers what we should be focusing on here as opposed to even standardized testing or god forbid canceling programs let's just invest in more SPEAKER_00: competition for schools well so in canada we had this thing where when i was graduating we had specific different kinds of math contests and computer science contests and other things that you could write the putnam etc and uh those things were actually really instructive because they were purely verticalized things that could test your aptitude and the school that i went to university of waterloo would look at a lot of those things and adjust for it because my grades were decent but my some of those one this one specific math test i took was pretty good i remember and then they would adjust it exactly as david said to what is this kid's background and his circumstances and they called it a french factor they would just adjust my marks and that's how i got into waterloo and i didn't think i was going to so um there's all kinds of ways where you can be smart about it but again we're talking about guys don't lose sight of what you're saying we are actually going to cut all these kids off at the knees starting in grade eight so forget about all of this stuff by the time that these kids David Friedberg: graduate they're going to be i honestly they're going to be like really dumb the problem ultimately SPEAKER_42: isn't just measurement it's the denial of opportunity to learn it's about it's about getting rid of the learning in the classes that's the biggest problem you have to move to a state with a gifted program SPEAKER_25: now if your kid is really smart out of public education um which doesn't help anybody i mean literally schools don't have to teach we put it we've now designed a system to summarize schools SPEAKER_09: don't have to compete for students teachers don't have to compete for jobs or for their employment and now we're saying students don't have to compete so if you remove competition from the human condition uh you're just not going to have any performance there there's going to be no progress and as a species we need progress we need to solve global warming we need to solve a lot of issues and don't we want to live longer and better lives like where is the optimistic nature of the human species competition is at the core of excellence and to just take it out of everything the whole stack SPEAKER_247: jaco that's the smartest thing you've ever said way smarter than 11 20 sat score thank you thank you SPEAKER_252: how lame is it that we're still talking about our sat score it's like 300 was the average so SPEAKER_123: in brooklyn when you're 320 points above average david it's a bfd what's lame is the four of us all remember down to the number what our score is that's what's land i think i was 11 20 11 50. i gotta i SPEAKER_25: gotta look it up um all right uh do we want to go to the crypto meltdown or talk about inflation or do we should we dovetail those together or just want to go straight to ufos well bry biden just uh they SPEAKER_235: they just a press release just hit the wire and they just cut the infrastructure bill from 2.3 trillion Chamath Palihapitiya: to 1.7 trillion oh so we're doing our job here at the all in podcast and uh i i had heard from somebody that there just is not the broad-based support um for uh the capital gains tax so that's not going to happen um and it looks like the corporate tax will probably go to 25 percent um not SPEAKER_59: even up to 28 and interestingly i didn't realize this but one of the biggest features of the bill SPEAKER_62: that has the most popularity is that they're closing this loophole around ip that sits outside the united states and that more than the corporate taxes will raise almost a trillion dollars of revenue SPEAKER_09: i agree with that one why should you put your why is apple i mean you want to talk about hypocrisy putting their ip in ireland so they don't pay taxes google does the same it was everybody's doing SPEAKER_76: that why does that exist it's so un-american well it's a subsidiary that has different taxation on it and you know to kind of that capital and that uh and that earnings sits outside the us SPEAKER_25: that ip was made in california it was not made in dublin no offense to you know my home country SPEAKER_00: i remember facebook we did that we did this exact thing we signed over all the ip and then the irs sued facebook and i remember like i was called either to i was subpoenaed and we went through like a whole multi-year trial it may still be going on and it was around this issue which was the irs said hey facebook how come you you know you ported this over there and i think facebook's answer was yeah we paid the tax and i think they did they don't think they did anything SPEAKER_212: wrong because the laws allowed it but it effectively helped shield then tens of billions of dollars of SPEAKER_18: future taxes i i mean i remember reading about this and i'm like how does this pass the sniff test well SPEAKER_65: it's where the revenue is recognized jacal so you basically can produce the ip here and then transfer it to your subsidiary when you transfer to your subsidiary you can recognize the earnings in that subsidiary and that subsidiary pays taxes in its local jurisdiction um the i think the issue facebook had was that they transferred the ip and they undervalued what the future value would be from that ip transfer and that's why the irs sued them is this accounting snafu in terms of like what did you value it out at the moment you transferred it here's another idea why doesn't why don't they look at SPEAKER_77: as part of this ip licensing where does the consumption of that ip occur and where do the employees SPEAKER_54: who maintain that ip live jacal it's a very smart idea the problem is that's the slippery slope that SPEAKER_00: then gets to local taxation you know the thing is we have all these global tax treaties where these large corporate entities can basically play this game and they're not subject to local tax but that's the thing that's going to really start the undoing of the big monopolies because if you start to abandon these global tax treaties and you're starting to see it Chamath Palihapitiya: france is trying to do some stuff the uk is trying to do some stuff states individually in the united SPEAKER_00: states are trying to sue these companies or tax them more that's the that's the first way to chip away at these monopolies is to basically say your global tax treaty you need to pay x amount of dollars to be here and it already exists because of these you know realist sorry the retail tax nexuses and how e-commerce companies have to pay local tax in the areas but once it sort of touches a whole bunch of other industries um and countries uh i think that you're going to have that that's why i think yelling janet yellen yesterday said that you know she's in support of trying to have a global minimum tax of 12 basically trying to get to the end state and tell every country let's all circle the wagons and agree that we'll all just charge everybody 12 and then we won't go all our separate ways the pr the problem is that if you have a lot of usage in a country you know that country doesn't care what the taxation is in zimbabwe right or canada they're like if i'm the uk or france i'm like i look at the top 20 apps in my country and i'm like wait a SPEAKER_83: minute these guys would be paying me 50 billion dollars a year in tax it's hard to get away from the incentive to to not want to tax these companies right now sax any thoughts yeah i don't have a huge David Sacks: thought on the the ip issue um it it seems like i know they're the republican proposal on the infrastructure was six to eight hundred billion um biden's proposal initially was 2.3 chamath is right now they're down to 1.7 i think that the markets have been choking on the size of all of this tax and spend and the there's been all these reports of inflation spiking and so the gross stocks have just been hammered because we're all expecting big interest rate increases to control this future inflation so um biden's been horrible for gross stocks so far and it really i guess that what it shows is that you know what are gross stocks gross stocks are future investment and it shows the way that the government can crowd out when you have excess government spending i guess you can call it investment if you want but when you have excess government spending it starts to crowd out private investment because it raises interest rates and that you know decreases the the value of gross stocks SPEAKER_25: and there's less money that flows into that yeah it does seem like the market reaction to the infrastructure bill uh and to inflation has made biden reconsider his approach and maybe he just came SPEAKER_94: out too hot is i don't i don't think biden's reconsidering i think it's people like joe manchin David Sacks: um remember it's a 50 warner mark warner kristen cinema the the moderate there's three or four moderate democrats in the senate who i think are receiving the message your mouth put it really well the last pod that the markets are sending a message to washington i think some of those centrist democrats read the message i don't think biden's aware of it i don't know what he's aware of he doesn't seem too aware of anything to me but i think the moderate democrats are getting a message and they're telling they're telling the white house the package is too big and they they're um and i think that's why it's SPEAKER_00: coming down the other thing that i think people um may be getting their heads around here's what's changed since last week there's a growing body if i had to say like you know the beautiful thing about the the markets is that it is an extremely elegant voting mechanism in the short term right i mean buffett says it's it's a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term but if you look at sentiment and how things are voted on in the public markets in real time it's incredibly illustrative so um there's a body of people now that are voting a very different scenario than inflation what they're voting for now is this idea that by the fall a lot of this short-term pent-up demand will have worked its way through the system and instead we'll be back to this realization that we've had for the last 20 years which is hey wait a minute people don't actually want to buy more of these physical goods they're going to go back to consuming the way they did before it's going to reflexively push towards technology companies again and we're going to have this rebirth of growth and you would say well how would you know that that vote is likely and this one incredible thing happened this last week which i just want to throw out here um one thing that i look at is this thing called 10-year break-evens which is basically a thing that the federal reserve of st louis publishes and what it basically shows is like what people think collectively trillions of dollars what the 10-year break-even interest rate is going to be and it peaked last week at 2.54 and it's fallen 13 uh basis points uh just in the last week down to 241 and i don't know whether it's sustained or whatever but there is a growing idea that the worst may be behind us and if you layer on top of this now biden pulling back right on uh stimulus because he can't get it done pulling back on cap gains pulling back on corporate taxation um and a more measured policy of investment we we could SPEAKER_71: all be back so we're basically taking the medicine and getting back to where we were but we still have massive asset inflation we're seeing in houses cars and other things well we may have just pulled forward SPEAKER_00: demand meaning you know people are like okay i'm flush with money the savings rate in the united states has been you know going at an incredible clip people may pull forward all that spending and say i was going to buy a car 18 months from now or i was going to buy a house two years from now it i'm going to do it now because prices are going up too fast i don't want to miss out but then they're out of the market now for the next many number of years and this is what i'm saying where you see this Chamath Palihapitiya: short-term spike of demand and then things get back to normal if that's what we see good times are back in growth stocks yeah SPEAKER_290: all in podcast sentiment levels go high again i've literally i did like two or three early SPEAKER_23: stage deals recently and i had members of my syndicate say like how does this valuation make SPEAKER_25: sense and i said to them you know it actually doesn't make sense um if you're looking at it with SPEAKER_23: the traditional metrics but all valuations are higher at all stages so i'm going to selectively you know overpay compared to what we were paying a year or two ago you know if i really love a company SPEAKER_25: but i will sit out a lot of i'm sitting out a lot of rounds right now that i just can't get my head around the valuation so hopefully some well there's always a trickle down there's always a trickle down David Sacks: from gross stocks in the public markets to venture right because the the last private investors like the big funds who do the super late stage stuff they're just doing an arbitrage on what they pay versus what the company's going to list for publicly so when they see those valuations go down they adjust and then it works its way all the way down the stack so you know gross stocks have just been hammered and especially all the recent listings the ipos and spax and everything and and that's going to trickle its way down i think to venture it's just i think we have the yeah and i think we have the lead indicator SPEAKER_25: on that as clubhouse right which will be the canary in the coal mine i don't know how you guys SPEAKER_297: reconcile explain explain what's going on with clubhouse just for those explain what it is okay SPEAKER_23: so clubhouse is a casual audio space you go into a room and you're immediately taken to a live SPEAKER_77: conversation with people speaking on stage and an audience audience members can be promoted to the SPEAKER_72: stage and start talking and so you wait wait hold on it's in an app and it's all audio so there's an SPEAKER_65: all audio there's an app you go in and it's all audio yes so it's like amateur night at a strip club SPEAKER_301: but for words uh or more comedy club whatever you just bring pop up on stage yeah it's kind of like SPEAKER_302: a champagne room but a little different um so anyway and there we go it's more cancellation from the pod SPEAKER_07: apple 2 000 signatures from apple to remove all in from the podcasting app we just lost three ranks SPEAKER_18: in the apple podcasting app so what's very interesting about this app is that it had a SPEAKER_23: massive number of downloads during the pandemic because people were home and people were not doing anything at night because they were sheltering in place and um they had in you know 2 million downloads in january 9.5 million in february of this year and then came crashing down 2.7 million in SPEAKER_09: march and 922 in april but at the same time their valuation over 18 months went from 100 million in their seed when they had like three or four thousand users to a billion to four billion in the last round SPEAKER_23: of financing for a company with zero revenue and uh let's call it a couple of million people using the app and what's really interesting is the same venture firm led all three rounds a la sequoia's SPEAKER_09: investment in whatsapp where they did all the private funding so you have no outside capital marking this valuation a four billion dollar evaluation four billion dollars well they got David Sacks: a they got an acquisition offer from twitter for four billion and they they turned was that ever confirmed i've heard it was real so so but so basically the reason why the four billion private round happened was so they would keep going as an independent company they could basically take some chips off the table through secondary and kind of go for the bigger outcome but yeah they could have just sold to twitter for four billion so they may end up regretting that but like is this really SPEAKER_65: a function of a broader um inflation valuation inflation or is this just a function of there was a company that was a social network with hyper growth and then it turns out that the product had no stickiness and the hyper growth went away the souffle collapsed the souffle collapsed can i can i can i just point out like and and forgive me if any any of you guys are investors in this company or anyone that's listening cares but like if this thing came out before youtube people would say you know this is interesting but it needs an asynchronous killer it needs a thing where you can like record a SPEAKER_180: conversation post it online and people can come and watch it and listen to it when they want it was always so crazy to me that you had to be logged into the app to listen to what was going on and if SPEAKER_165: you didn't you missed the conversation and there was no way to like go watch the recording of the conversation like am i crazy to think that this was just like i think you i think you nailed it that David Sacks: they don't have async in there and actually i've got a little bit of disclosure to make here SPEAKER_327: what what the beak got wet but it didn't get too wet it's a breaking news story okay so i think David Sacks: i understand what clubhouse did wrong async is a huge part of it but rather than tell you exactly i'm going to show you because i've been incubating a new app what what yes that we're we're we're on test flight right now and you guys after this pod i can i can demo it for you and if you guys if you guys want to invest i'm going to close around uh this week for it it's getting wet and so if you guys SPEAKER_336: want to what's our evaluation what's the value what's our insider all in what's the bestie vow SPEAKER_328: yeah what's the best i'll talk to you guys about offline how much how much money do you want to raise we already we're raising 10 million bucks and we already have commitments and but i'm SPEAKER_339: creating room for you guys yeah 500k each sounds like 500k each where is it let's talk about it SPEAKER_247: offline but um but the apps on test flight i think we'll be ready to launch in a few weeks SPEAKER_341: can i can i say what's it what's it called can you say yeah no i'll say it it's called call in SPEAKER_28: calling calling i thought it was i thought it was going to be called club mouse SPEAKER_146: does this have a uh it's called yeah like are we going to do the podcast on it we absolutely could SPEAKER_94: do the podcast on it and it would be awesome nick would be out of a job so i don't think he would SPEAKER_344: like that too much quality level but i think it's good for call-ins if we wanted to do a call-in David Sacks: show it would be good for that yes it'd be great it'd be great to do exactly that's why it's called call-in is because the ability for you to take callers is obviously a huge feature but also like we could host after parties for our fans to like you know chop up the latest episode and talk about it SPEAKER_52: yeah these fans are getting crazy did you guys see the all in stats twitter handle i don't know the SPEAKER_23: twitter handle off the top of my head but somebody's these kids are doing um uh they're using machine learning or something to know what percentage of time we each speak on the pod and how many monologues and they're doing all these statistics it's crazy that's really cool um i was SPEAKER_00: gonna say uh in defense of clubhouse for a second i don't i don't know the app per se but i think like why andresen did all of that in my opinion is because they're pressing a hot hand which makes a ton of sense from their perspective it's like you know i think that they're going for the kill shot because i think they're basically set up they're basically set up to become sequoia if if they really i mean i think if you think about like which two firms are really crushing on all cylinders right now obviously sequoia has always been the perennial number one but if you think about the SPEAKER_59: the heater that andresen it's on it's incredible and so from their perspective the four billion dollar valuation is less important than what is their real capital at risk and that's probably a 100 or 150 million which in the grand scheme of having 40 or 50 billion dollars of AUM if you consider the value SPEAKER_00: of all their public positions as well that's a really reasonable risk to take so i think in that SPEAKER_54: way it's kind of like they're taking a shot to try to just you know if it does become worth 10 billion SPEAKER_77: or 50 billion also if it if it only gets sold for 500 million they get their money out first so what does David Sacks: it matter what does it matter they're going for the 100 billion dollar outcome i mean they've seen that instagram sold too soon they saw that snap turned down a 3 billion dollar offer from facebook and now it's worth 80 billion so they're going for the 100 billion dollar youtube 1.6 billion yeah and now it's worth hundreds of billions so they're hoping it's going to be like that um but chamath is right SPEAKER_42: look if they had taken what say 20 of a 4 billion dollar outcome 800 million that doesn't even pay David Sacks: back their fund right but if it ends up being 100 billion dollar outcome they make 20 billion now it's SPEAKER_39: like a coinbase for them what what do you think they gave to the founders well who knows to keep SPEAKER_354: them in the game because 4 billion they owned 80 percent yeah they took out they took chips off the David Sacks: table but here's the thing all those decisions were made before the recent collapse in engagement at clubhouse i'm not sure anybody would be paying 4 billion for it now given everything that's gone wrong but you know who knows it's still pretty early and just for people who are curious there is a SPEAKER_25: twitter handle all in underscore stats and um yeah it's all in stats.com i don't know we're not affiliated with these maniacs but um we we love the stands and uh we're going to do something in person in september congratulations to the stands for losing their minds i think it's a pretty good uh way for them to capture a bunch of uh attention on the twitter all right um crypto is getting absolutely hammered uh and i it's the chinese have once again said that uh they're basically saber rattling about cryptocurrency they're obviously going to do their own um uh i think you have to talk about Chamath Palihapitiya: china in a in a slightly broader lens and just what's happening in crypto because like this is the same week where they basically they've they forced you know zhang yeming to resign from bite dance i mean you know last last week it was or last month it was the ceo pin duo duo and jack maz SPEAKER_18: mia they're going for the jugular i mean it's like we're why are they taking out all their top ceos this SPEAKER_09: would be like putting elon and jeff bezos on the bench is that they just don't want any heroes i don't Chamath Palihapitiya: know i mean i guess maybe the speculative part of me would say they're showing them who's really in SPEAKER_00: charge of these companies i mean it would be crazy to your point if the government of the united states forced sundar pichai and tim cook and mark zuckerberg and elon musk to resign it's like hey Chamath Palihapitiya: sorry i'm sorry you need to leave right now and put somebody else in and deactivate their badges SPEAKER_247: yeah we just we just relentlessly criticize them right but but yeah we just demonize them David Sacks: we just try to cancel them but look but they deserve that level of scrutiny because the amount of power they have but but yeah that we don't we don't put them in jail or house arrest or drive them out of their companies and that is a big advantage for the u.s economy the treasury department here in SPEAKER_25: the united states is doing a little saber rattling they want to know anytime there is a ten thousand dollar transaction in any kind of digital token and uh they're talking about a cbdc to do their SPEAKER_23: own cryptocurrency so they're putting out a white paper for feedback this summer um and uh we are now SPEAKER_25: seeing a pullback on bitcoin from you know uh mid 60s to uh you know now into the 36 37 000 per bitcoin SPEAKER_366: do you think this is the end of the beginning beginning of the end it's the beginning of the SPEAKER_59: beginning david rubinstein was on cnbc today and david rubinstein for those you guys don't know is um was Chamath Palihapitiya: a co-founder of carlisle group you know more blue chip and blue-blooded you cannot get and very connected in washington and you know he said it best where he said you know effectively the people want this and SPEAKER_83: the government will uh have no choice except to support it because you can't take something like this with this much institutional and retail demand away so we have to go to the place where Chamath Palihapitiya: now crypto needs to be like everything else and maybe the crypto stands get upset with that because they don't like it that you know a bunch of their parents are all of a sudden going to be buying tokens and stuff but they got to get over it um then this stuff should be you know transacted in the same way you transact anything else you buy it you sell it you get a tax return you pay your taxes SPEAKER_25: and you move on this reminds me of the transition that we all went through with i don't know if you remember kazaa and napster and bit torrent like everybody all the we a lot of our contemporaries in their 30s you know whatever 10 20 years ago were like you can't stop it you can't stop it and it got stopped you know like you made it illegal and you prosecuted people and then you came up with solutions that were regulated like spotify or you know netflix and you gave the consumers what they wanted so david do you think this is a similar path right now that we're going through which is the crypto zealots and the and the and the stands are gonna basically have to get used to as chmod saying SPEAKER_356: their parents buying it and crypto not being this underground thing but being regulated in in a major way in the united states and is that a good or bad thing i i think the thing that that's happening David Sacks: quietly behind the scenes is that major wall street players institutions endowments and so forth over the past year have decided that bitcoin and crypto is a legitimate asset class and they've been allocating to it huge huge pools of capital balance sheet capital have been allocating into it i don't think that's gonna change this is probably a pretty good buying opportunity we've seen these crashes in bitcoin many many times over the years it plummets down and then it goes back up and it eventually goes back up reaches a new peak so this is probably a pretty good entry point for the next rally we don't know when that's going to be but the whole point of bitcoin is that it's censorship SPEAKER_89: resistant and china can do its best to try and stamp it out but i don't think they'll be successful at SPEAKER_202: that you don't oh you're so wrong about that that that is the most naive take worst take you've ever had how's china going to stop bitcoin uh how do they stop vpns they put people in jail how do they David Sacks: stop religion they put people in jail they may make it incredibly hard for chinese citizens to get a hold of bitcoin i agree with that but they're not gonna be able to stop bitcoin they're not going SPEAKER_45: to stop bitcoin in the west but they will stop it in china they will 100 percent full stop and you SPEAKER_09: know how many servers are in china i mean go talk to the people who were in tiananmen square about SPEAKER_381: what the miners will have to move out the miners miners are done and then if it'll be an underground SPEAKER_18: thing but it'll be like having a vpn which is five years in jail for selling vpns what do you think SPEAKER_65: about the irs requirement that you have to report any bitcoin transaction over ten thousand dollars do you think that that and americans can be prosecuted for not reporting right so i don't know how SPEAKER_384: much that's fine fine good so what do it so yes get over it but i do think that will get rid of 20 SPEAKER_140: of the transactions that might have been no this is this is the silk road fallacy that you know that David Sacks: the only legitimate use for crypto or i said 20 i didn't say okay fine but so maybe that makes that that small fraction of illegitimate or illicit use cases no sex i think the point is um that they're SPEAKER_65: trying to chase down it's not about illegal use cases it's about not reporting a taxable SPEAKER_76: gain on your bitcoin before you use that money to buy something so sure of course it's about David Sacks: tax evasion but look but that's not that's not going to stop bitcoin usage um you know smart people who've been trading bitcoin been paying taxes on it for years that's not i don't think that's really an issue if you were in china and you had created your wealth in china or many many other countries all over the world and there were currency restrictions and controls and the government was asserting more and more power and we're putting business leaders under house arrest and SPEAKER_42: and seeking to put them under their thumb you'd be trying to convert as much your net worth into bitcoin as possible so that all you have to do is if you ever had to flee the country you wouldn't have to have dollars in your suitcase or gold bricks or diamonds you'd simply have to have a password in your brain that you could access at any computer terminal when you got out of the country and so that i think that sort of digital gold is a phenomenal use case of bitcoin and the more oppressive all these countries become the more they increase the value of that use case what do you think is SPEAKER_49: the black swan event in crypto in bitcoin in particular taxation in the united states a 10 SPEAKER_25: additional taxation like you do on cigarettes that would be for me the united states putting a tax on SPEAKER_23: it that makes it less competitive with our our national coming cryptocurrency the cbdc that the united states will launch in the next two or three years they're going to say if you want to SPEAKER_25: use any of these other currencies there's a 10 tax on them we want you using ours the legitimate one David Sacks: there's there's a very negative black swan that obviously has never occurred um but if anyone ever manages to counterfeit a bitcoin uh or this is the double spend problem right if you could ever if you could ever double spend or or figure out a way to create bitcoins um or counterfeit them whatever that weren't in the blockchain if the number of bitcoins ever grew beyond the 21 million that's just built SPEAKER_140: into the way that the whole thing works if that ever happened bitcoin is instantly worthless that would be the black swan on the negative side i think the black swan on how could that if it didn't SPEAKER_400: happen in the first 11 years what do you think the light on a percentage basis that it happens in the SPEAKER_403: 20th exactly it's too expensive now and it's too it's too visible like the way that it would have SPEAKER_213: happened it would have happened in the first two or three years or the argument could be maybe SPEAKER_65: opposite that now it's so valuable that it's worth investing to figure out a target yeah yeah and and and as and rather than have it be about a diminishing probability it could be an increasing probability over time which is that the pathways to get there start to get resolved whereas in the past you didn't have enough time to resolve those pathways and i'm speaking highly theoretical here but SPEAKER_77: like certainly there's a lot of technical account that it's open source and that everybody can see it so SPEAKER_25: you would think that everybody would discover the vulnerability at the same time right in an open Chamath Palihapitiya: source project well no i think the i think the issue practically speaking in this would be that you would see those resources getting organized meaning you'd see silicon being bought in volume by some centralized player and then you'd have to see water and power come together as well and this is where i think it's just not realistic where today that i think the horse has left the barn because SPEAKER_213: if you try to basically capture enough hash rate to kind of like overpower this network Chamath Palihapitiya: it's it's it's like the scene in austin powers where he's screaming in front of a steamroller but SPEAKER_26: the steamroller is moving at like one foot a minute right you see it coming it's just like you just see SPEAKER_56: it coming well would you have a black swan friedberg you asked a loaded question so do you have one SPEAKER_65: i think about it a lot i don't really i mean it's a black swan it's because it's a black swan so you don't really see it coming but like you know the the thing about bitcoin which has always given me pause is the fact that the only way it works is if everyone believes that more people are going to believe in it tomorrow than believe in it today well that's the only way it appreciates yeah but the for a variety of reasons it's also the only way that it works because um if it starts to depreciate it becomes almost like this unwinding circumstance and there are moments where it unwinds but then people kind of say well you know what more people are going to get on this there's the chinese argument there's the argentinian argument there's all the reasons why people will try and store wealth in this system and that becomes a rationale for continuing to bet on it and my observation is so many people that are active in bitcoin compare bitcoin to the price of the dollar which to me seems like it doesn't make sense relative to the intention of bitcoin which is to not be part of the monetary system that uses the dollar as kind of the de facto you know um system of value uh and so why have the comparison to the dollar as the objective for bitcoin why is the objective not transactions use cases number of people that are active on the network etc etc and nobody buying it is buying it as a substitute for dollars they're buying it as a lottery ticket so yeah that's that's right and so then it becomes this rationale that it's like it's an investment that you put money in in the form of dollars or your local currency with the intention that you will be able to get more of your local currency out at some point in the future and the only way that works is if you expect someone else will buy it from you at a higher price in the future therefore it's all about propagating the uh you know the marketing around the bitcoin whereas if your objective was really about making this become a replacement currency system or replacement monetary system you would ultimately care less about you know what's the dollar value per coin and you would care more about how many people are using it SPEAKER_23: you know how active let me build on that question on it so sax or chamath if this cbdc and americans currency you know starts to move towards a bitcoin blockchain like experience what would america start to look like if 10 or 20 percent of your dollars instead of being held in a bank SPEAKER_94: we're on a blockchain with an american a government a government-backed blockchain doesn't accomplish David Sacks: anything it's still that people are it's centralized and not only is it centralized but also it's still prone to debasement right yeah and so look human beings have used everything from gold coins to seashells as money we can make anything money that's easy to transact if we all agree on it that's the SPEAKER_42: sense in which bitcoin is the bubble that becomes true if everyone believes in it provided provided the number of bitcoin stay at 21 million and that the technology enforces the scarcity the problem we have with the us dollar is the government can just print as many of them as they want yeah you change the denominator problem yeah and so i think there's a positive black swan as well for positive for David Sacks: bitcoin which is stanley druckenmiller thinks in the next 15 years the us dollar will no longer be the world's reserve currency well what's going to replace it the positive black swan would be that SPEAKER_42: bitcoin becomes if not the a world reserve currency an unofficial world reserve currency why because people trust it they trust the decentralization more than they trust any government and that would that SPEAKER_421: would be a big flip is that in is the united states and china are they going to let bitcoin become SPEAKER_54: the world's reserve currency well it's not a choice that they have you sure so yeah there's nothing SPEAKER_86: they can do what about the law and guns and jail and tax i don't i don't know what that means there's SPEAKER_85: there's nothing that they could there was nothing that they could do to stop it before there's SPEAKER_25: nothing that they can do to stop it now well you can't get the new york times in china and you can't practice religion there so they have a pretty easy system they put you in jail they want to stop bitcoin they could just put you in jail how by finding out that you have bitcoin and just well because they have a hundred percent uh view into the internet there they have how on because they SPEAKER_09: have routers that's how they capture all the uyghurs is they know their location because they have mobile phones and when they use signal or any other encrypted technology they catch them no i don't i don't think that's how it works but that's how they catch all the dissidents there is they they have them and they also have apple's entire data center is controlled by the chinese government SPEAKER_00: there's no ledger somewhere that says this specific wallet address equals david sacks and there's not Chamath Palihapitiya: going to be one anytime soon um and so you'll have these centralized wallet authorities that actually you know have a lot of account information but the reality is the sophisticated actors you know use tumblers they they they washed sort of like their their paths in a way where it's very difficult to SPEAKER_00: figure out who these people are now if you if you don't if you use a site that doesn't have kyc that's always going to be the case and you know people with huge amounts of bitcoin are sophisticated enough to know how to stay anonymous if they want to for everybody else who doesn't care because for them it's sort of an investment asset class and an inf you know a hedge then they're not going to care either and the point is when enough people own it governments aren't in a position to track record SPEAKER_59: of them just waking up one day and pulling the plug on anything is zero that's not how people do things SPEAKER_00: you have to have like centralized policy and support and i don't see it one way or the other of all the things that china and the united states will face over the next 30 or 40 years this is like 50th on the David Sacks: list sacks what do you think any closing thoughts i mean i think we we've said it um so yeah i mean look i think i think if you're going to stay in a place like the united states you need to comply with tax law you're absolutely going to report your bitcoin holdings if it's required but if the reason you're buying bitcoin is because you're fleeing a country or you're worried about fleeing a country SPEAKER_42: you're obviously not going to report it and that's the that's the advantage of it is that it's a portable money supply that again you can just um you don't have to carry anything with you you just SPEAKER_00: put a password in your brain wallet tell me about ufos before we leave i mean can you believe this SPEAKER_25: thing this is the craziest thing i i so there was a yeah there's a 60 minutes episode that just happened uh deputy assistant uh secretary of defense for intelligent literally said the crafts we're seeing are and then in quotes far beyond anything that we're capable of there's nothing we could build that would be strong enough to endure the amount of force and acceleration imagine a technology that can do 700 g-forces fly 13 miles per hour evade radar and has every no obvious signs of propulsion and yet can clearly defy the effects of earth's gravity that's precisely what SPEAKER_26: we're seeing from the director of advanced aerospace threat identification program i mean is this real like how is what what do we do what our government says there are crafts that outtrip our arsenal by at SPEAKER_436: least a hundred years to a thousand years at the moment and we're like meh what do you think SPEAKER_65: friedberg you're the scientist here there's a if you read the original um uh treatment written by arthur clark for the movie 2001 a space odyssey which was written before the movie and then the book was written after the movie um he makes a really compelling point and the point he makes is that when civilizations achieve um a sophisticated enough level of technology there's no longer a need to physically transport yourself from star to star and transport yourself around the universe think about this for a second take what we have from virtual reality today and fast forward 200 years and then take what we have in terms of you know the ability to print and create anything we want on demand and fast forward two or three hundred years those two conditions alone might give us the ability to strap on something to our brain and literally and remember our brain is simply sensing what our body is given and if you can control what your brain is sensing through some strap-on device or whatever you don't actually need to physically be in the place where that happens so if we can remotely sense what's going on somewhere else in the universe or some other part of our planet and we can remotely pick up those signals and view them or experience them you just feel you don't need to physically be there SPEAKER_114: and then secondly all this sorry all this via strap-on okay yeah and then secondly i shouldn't use it i SPEAKER_440: shouldn't use the term and then secondly if you could print it if you want yeah but think about SPEAKER_165: if you guys ever watch the tv show star trek next generation which i would guess maybe one of the replicator or the replicator or the holodeck and you could walk in number three on my list of star SPEAKER_180: trek yeah series if you if you walk in and you could literally recreate the physical space that you want to be in to accomplish anything the holodeck and then you could print anything why would you use all the energy and all of this work to transport physical matter from one part of the universe to the other when all matter is transmutable and the only thing that differentiates SPEAKER_65: things is the photons coming off that matter which is just to sense it so if you can sense things remotely while you're physically here why go through the trouble why go through the trouble SPEAKER_23: and so the argument for the same reason that we go to hawaii and not just watch a movie no because SPEAKER_180: we don't have enough of the sensing capabilities today to truly recreate being in hawaii but imagine if we did and and we are very much on the path to doing that and in two three hundred years we have the ability to physically recreate what it's like for our body to be in hawaii in every form smell taste color everything about being there physically and our body experiences it why the hell would you fly to hawaii you could meet people you could socialize so in a world in a world where that technology exists which could by the way be neural link right where you can you know put these signals directly into the brain etc moving physical matter from one part of the universe to the other makes zero sense all matter is transmutable you can convert one atom to another using a technology locally so you wouldn't do that and so that's the premise of 2001 is that you've got these local communication pods that just transmit information from different parts of the universe you don't need to physically transport yourself so that's the that's the the macro kind of argument against this notion that ufos or aliens are in a physical spacecraft visiting it's so old school technology that it makes no sense it's like saying you know oh my gosh all these people are coming over to the SPEAKER_65: united states on horses from europe you know like it just like why would they do that why would they use a horse uh so so i think that's the argument against ufos being aliens and spacecraft now is there really cool technology that has this advanced capability and they're these crafts that are in our sky and someone has that technology maybe um but i'm not sure about this general SPEAKER_35: pieces i mean you blew my mind with that so yeah sax uh i you obviously don't care so we SPEAKER_451: i have no way for this to increase the irr of my fund or to get me another home beep boop on planet earth why would i want to go i just somehow feel like if they're really ufos it'd David Sacks: be like an even bigger story like we'd all know it you know it's not going to be some like weird fringe SPEAKER_455: conspiracy thing here's the here's the thing i do not care about emotions like humans why would i care SPEAKER_77: about the emotions of others every single photograph that's been taken in the last year is absolutely recognizably better than the one taken 10 years ago and every single photo or video of SPEAKER_18: these aliens looks like it was shot in a on a camera from 1950 on film that was left in somebody's SPEAKER_459: basement and meanwhile meanwhile pixar movies can recreate literally the ocean we're recording this SPEAKER_39: on zoom why can't it get me a clear shot there's not one clear shot of this show me the alien in 4k SPEAKER_225: high def and then i'll believe it i'll believe if you ever see a spacex launch where it has a camera SPEAKER_177: by the engine and we can see the engine like why can't we get a shot of the until then i will be traveling between my homes living my best life i am living my best life not in san francisco we will SPEAKER_49: get chesa booted and recalled i will tell you sax i don't think you need to harp on the chesa point anymore because i don't hear anyone making the case on the other side anymore SPEAKER_468: dustin moskovitz dustin moskovitz yes what from us yes yes nick pull up the tweet so you know i've SPEAKER_328: been basically because look there oh we fired him up here we go no let me get this and then we can take off insert quarter here no look we're taking all this heat from these stupid reporters you're David Sacks: talking about our donations you know like asking what are we up to look we're very public about what SPEAKER_42: we're up to but this is a terrible tweet from dustin there there have been these tech billionaires dustin moskovitz reed hastings and mike krieger and they've been donating money to what to chase a boudin and gascon and that's disappointing yeah horrible so i asked i just said why are you donating money to this insanity and dustin's still defending it and then he said i'm going to mute you now because you SPEAKER_23: know you didn't want to you didn't want to wait just in fairness let me pull this up dustin's quote is i live in the city and i'm not going anywhere crime happens to me too trust me we write extensively about why of our grants here you know here's the thing i think dustin reed hastings um and uh their spouses are very involved in criminal justice reform and what we have to do is give somebody like dustin or reed hastings the benefit of the doubt here and say we understand your donations were meaningful to you and you wanted to um maybe lower the incarceration of black people in jail for crimes that were not violent and we agree let's know this conversation because i'm not giving them David Sacks: the benefit of the doubt let me explain why okay so read so this is a good example this reed hastings thing is a good example by the way just today it was announced that he donated three million to gavin newsome um in any event so you know he keep he look he's on that side of the spectrum by the way SPEAKER_42: there's a little backstory there i don't know if you guys remember when there was pressure uh on the facebook board to kick peter teal off but back in 2016 it was reed that was from reed hastings SPEAKER_444: okay so the guy is very close-minded i think it's his wife is actually handling this well he was the SPEAKER_42: board member who pushed to get peter off because he couldn't handle the fact that there might be another board member who would disagree with him politically so it's a very close-minded point of view but let's take let's take this example of crime in la okay so we had this uh election where george gascone who was a failure as da in san francisco he goes down to la and runs against the the veteran da down there jackie lacy who happens to be a black woman a veteran seasoned da competent nobody had a problem with her i think she's a democrat okay it's not like this is a right-wing person and so george gascone basically fails his way out of san francisco goes down to la and he basically um dislodges her from that seat with 15 million dollars an unprecedented amount spent in a da election where did that money come from five million came from source five million came for reed hastings five million came from blm now you know in any other context the idea that you're going to fire a talented competent seasoned veteran black woman and replace her with an incompetent white male that would be seen as institutional racism but nobody complained about it at all but it's outrageous and what is there what is the most charitable was behind that what is the most charitable SPEAKER_25: view of why they're supporting gascone and chesa well there there's this decarcerationist agenda David Sacks: and so yes you're you're right that they see mass incarceration as a problem but the problem it is but the solution is not mass decarceration that we need something in between and the problem with SPEAKER_42: gascone and chase a booty they just want to let everybody out they don't want to they also don't SPEAKER_18: want to add anybody so i think if their agenda is to lower the number adding people is against that SPEAKER_282: there are people who need to go to jail murderers people dying every day in san francisco SPEAKER_42: uh by at the hands of repeat offenders who chase a buddine has made the decision to let them out of jail even though they should be in jail these are dangerous violent felons the problem with this is SPEAKER_25: i think chamath i would like to get your feedback on it is you know you when a person gives these kind SPEAKER_23: of donations and they make it their public persona and it doesn't go well how does one uh you know SPEAKER_18: i don't know disentangle or reconcile they made a bet that had a bad outcome because this is obviously SPEAKER_09: a bad outcome you don't want the city to devolve into chaos i don't particularly care about san SPEAKER_00: francisco and i think i think the two the two of you guys can talk about it on no i'm done i'm gonna get SPEAKER_213: rid of my place in the city on colin but i i could i couldn't care less about how that's i think i'm done SPEAKER_506: well i got i got nothing to say okay i want to add just one thing look i so i care because i live David Sacks: there but but this trend this is not just san francisco this whole idea of these radical SPEAKER_42: decarcerationists they are running for da in every major city this is going to be a national trend and they're going to cause a lot of uh carnage a lot of death and destruction until the people realize SPEAKER_241: and there will inevitably be a backlash to this and hopefully just not too many people no no fair SPEAKER_00: enough i i don't want to be too flippant my point is it's a really important debate it's going to happen in every city but folks need to get engaged in those cities and do something about it if you SPEAKER_180: want to hear the argument of why this is happening you can go watch the ted talk on youtube of adam SPEAKER_65: foss he was the original like proponent of the da's coming in to drive the decarceration uh decarceration movements um and uh you know i just think it's important to be informed of the other perspective uh in evaluating where folks are coming from that are that are proponents for SPEAKER_25: this movement yeah i'm trying to be charitable towards their position dustin and reed if you want to come on the pod and be a bestie guestie i guess maybe dustin doesn't respond to me and said David Sacks: listen we don't know what the counterfactual is if we had a more aggressive da that was his arguments we don't know the counterfactual so i of course so i posted a list of people of SPEAKER_42: innocent victims who've died okay because directly because of a decision that chase abudin made that's your counterfactual yeah that's your counterfactual all right listen SPEAKER_84: it's been an amazing episode and uh no plugs no ads no nothing if you like the show great and if SPEAKER_18: you don't like it how the hell did you make it to the minute 75 for the queen of quinoa the dictator himself chamali papatia i'm having steak tonight he's having steak tonight tonight if you're vegan SPEAKER_518: david friedberg you're not invited to steak dinner i'm having beers tonight i'm having beers tonight you're having beers and roasted eggplant tonight you've never eaten fish in your life never had sushi SPEAKER_101: and sax is by the way that's true i don't know if our listeners are here today yeah SPEAKER_305: so actually we're going to talk about sax's health where's your first second and third SPEAKER_232: dinner tonight i'm i'm on a seafood diet i eat i see the food and i get it SPEAKER_530: the fat guy on this pod i don't get it this is not i just bought my third machine this can't be SPEAKER_23: happening it's happening this is your twilight zone episode i just bought i'm going i decided i'm going twice a week with the trainer and i just bought the hydro so now i have tonal peloton tread and i SPEAKER_18: got the hydro i'm going from smart machine to smart machine hey are you spat oh i got it oh good SPEAKER_539: question no no no no comment comment okay sorry i just saw some tweet people have other things to do SPEAKER_541: guys i gotta call i gotta go i gotta go all right everybody love you guys yeah get a salad okay we love you bye besties i'll eat a salad and of course the dictator here absolute dictator SPEAKER_546: i write a minimum of a hundred million dollars personal SPEAKER_551: it's hard to make good investments it's hard to build a company SPEAKER_546: i'm the dictator i am a complete byproduct of a social safety net you actually want your kids to have a hazmat or not money is free and it's not i pick up the slack people think money is free but SPEAKER_563: it's not thousands of millions confused i get thousands of millions confused i get thousands of SPEAKER_566: millions firing on all cylinders shout out to all my haters ultra-relancing billionaire has bought the SPEAKER_570: french laundry just want to be called king SPEAKER_572: the little guy getting run over i just can't stand that SPEAKER_579: it's hard to make it it's hard to make good investments it's hard to build a company because if it was easy everybody would be doing it all the time this one man who's listening to this SPEAKER_584: who wants to go to the french laundry stay at home pour a bunch of salt on whatever you're gonna SPEAKER_587: eat okay melt a stick of butter in the microwave stick a butter in the microwave drink it and then basically take 1500 dollars light it on fire you've been to the french line SPEAKER_579: it's hard to make it it's hard to make good investments it's hard to build a company because if it was easy everybody would be doing it all the time this one man for yourself it's all about you you can figure it out the rugged individualism that's just not realistic like