00:00:00
j cal looks like he's going to a night
00:00:02
at the roxbury absolutely
00:00:04
he looks like joey
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i'm a joke
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i mean you look horrible thank you thank
00:00:14
you really [ __ ]
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here we go
00:00:20
[Music]
00:00:36
thanks for coming this is the production
00:00:39
board symposium
00:00:41
2021 tell us just a little bit about
00:00:44
why we're here david and what this is
00:00:46
and what it represents for the
00:00:48
production board the production board
00:00:49
symposium second ever thank you all for
00:00:51
being here we're excited we have uh
00:00:54
[Applause]
00:00:56
an amazing group of um science uh
00:00:59
scientists engineers folks from
00:01:02
academia from business from the
00:01:04
investing community some of our
00:01:05
investors so we're excited to share
00:01:07
thoughts and ideas over the next couple
00:01:09
days um
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and thought we would uh chase half of
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you away by hosting the all-in pod
00:01:14
tonight so um here we go
00:01:17
great uh okay so first up in the news
00:01:19
rolling stone uh amplifies false
00:01:22
ivormectin story you were following this
00:01:24
chabot what do you think
00:01:25
this uh ivormectin controversy and you
00:01:29
want a little give a little summary of
00:01:30
what the issue is before we
00:01:33
talk about the hypocrisy of it well on
00:01:35
september 1st oklahoma news station k4
00:01:38
ran a story and published an article on
00:01:40
ivermectin overdoses
00:01:43
backing up rural hospitals the article
00:01:45
was titled patients
00:01:48
overdosing on ivermectin backing up
00:01:50
rural oklahoma hospital
00:01:53
hospitals and ambulances uh first line
00:01:55
of the article quote a rural oklahoma
00:01:57
doctor said patients who are taking the
00:02:00
home dewormer medication ivermectin to
00:02:03
fight covenant 19. causing emergency
00:02:05
rooms and ambulances to
00:02:07
back up on september 3rd rolling stone
00:02:09
amplified the story in its own article
00:02:12
the only problem was they treated they
00:02:14
tweeted it with a picture
00:02:16
that featured people
00:02:18
lined up in the cold it turns out the
00:02:20
picture was people waiting for vaccine
00:02:23
shots back in january not
00:02:26
gunshot victims waiting to get into the
00:02:28
hospital
00:02:30
yeah the story is totally false you
00:02:31
understand that right well i didn't want
00:02:33
to say fake news but i know beyonce it
00:02:35
was it was beyond fake news this was
00:02:37
basically a doctored up conjured article
00:02:40
by some person trying to incite a moral
00:02:42
mania
00:02:43
at rolling stone look there you tell me
00:02:46
if the the science of this is wrong the
00:02:48
whole the whole premise is ridiculous
00:02:50
so ivermectin basically as far as we
00:02:52
know because we don't know that much
00:02:54
acts on a handful of
00:02:56
uh specific characteristics one we know
00:02:59
to be glutamate which we don't really
00:03:00
express in the same way as like [ __ ]
00:03:02
worms
00:03:03
and so yes technically it can be used as
00:03:05
a dewormer but there are four or five
00:03:06
other ways in which it acts which we
00:03:08
don't know anything about because we
00:03:09
haven't taken the time to do a
00:03:11
broad-based double-blind study so i
00:03:13
think the fairest thing to say about
00:03:15
iverbecten is we don't know what it is
00:03:18
and so neither the people that propose
00:03:20
to use it as a solution for for covid
00:03:23
nor the people that rail against it
00:03:25
aren't really starting from the basis of
00:03:26
fact but then what happens is you have
00:03:29
these folks who basically are so turned
00:03:31
off by the idea
00:03:32
that you know people aren't getting
00:03:34
vaccines they're going to use this other
00:03:36
thing they basically doctored up an
00:03:38
article that wouldn't be so bad because
00:03:39
nobody reads rolling stone
00:03:42
right it's kind of a it's like it's kind
00:03:44
of it's an ancient brand nobody's going
00:03:45
there for medical people
00:03:47
but then the problem is you get a
00:03:48
handful of these folks who think they're
00:03:49
really really smart who amplify it
00:03:51
rachel maddow amplifies it jimmy kimmel
00:03:53
does it on a comedy skit and then all of
00:03:56
a sudden there's this enormous outrage
00:03:58
but the problem is you can't put the
00:03:59
genie back in the bottle when it turns
00:04:00
out to be a completely fabricated lie
00:04:02
and then
00:04:04
all the people that are purporting to
00:04:05
basically push this lie who now have
00:04:07
been outed
00:04:08
have no consequences because they're on
00:04:10
the left screaming at the right and what
00:04:13
happened when it was the other way
00:04:14
around we basically started to put
00:04:16
people in boxes we basically kicked them
00:04:18
off these platforms and again so you
00:04:20
have this
00:04:21
compounding building double standard
00:04:22
that to me is the whole the worst part
00:04:24
about it
00:04:26
david when we look at uh
00:04:28
the ivermectin story we also saw joe
00:04:30
rogan got coveted that was a big haha
00:04:33
moment for a lot of people um and he
00:04:35
took ivermectin as part of his treatment
00:04:37
and then people started amplifying that
00:04:38
he was taking a worm
00:04:40
uh drug
00:04:55
around this pandemic yeah i mean look
00:04:57
this is really a media story you had
00:04:59
rolling stone publish this article based
00:05:02
on a single source you have this one
00:05:04
crank basically saying that emergency
00:05:06
rooms are turning away gunshot victims
00:05:09
and people having heart attacks okay and
00:05:11
all they had to do all rolling stone had
00:05:13
to do was call up any one of these
00:05:15
several hospitals they immediately would
00:05:16
have refuted the source but they didn't
00:05:19
do that they also could have simply
00:05:21
googled the number of toxic ivermectin
00:05:24
cases to find out if it was even
00:05:25
plausible statistically
00:05:27
that you could have ivermectin overdoses
00:05:30
flooding oklahoma hospitals but they
00:05:31
didn't do that either why
00:05:33
didn't they confirm the sources because
00:05:36
the article was too perfect it confirmed
00:05:38
all of their priors their first prior
00:05:41
was about ivermectin they've been waging
00:05:42
this war on ivermectin claiming it's a
00:05:45
horse dewormer when it's actually that
00:05:47
is one of its purposes but it's not the
00:05:50
only one it was a it was a drug designed
00:05:52
for humans is used against parasites now
00:05:55
as jamasa we don't know
00:05:57
whether it's effective against covid
00:05:59
they got to do the double blind studies
00:06:00
then we'll find out but that was sort of
00:06:02
their first prior and let's face it the
00:06:04
second prior was that this is in
00:06:06
oklahoma right and so rolling stone
00:06:08
wants to believe you have all these maga
00:06:10
idiots out in oklahoma eating horse
00:06:12
paste okay
00:06:14
and that's why they love this story so
00:06:15
much and that's why rachel maddow loved
00:06:17
the story so much and she then starts
00:06:19
spreading it okay and after she gets
00:06:21
called out including by say glenn
00:06:23
greenwald as of last night she had not
00:06:25
taken it down now why because she knows
00:06:28
there are no consequences for
00:06:29
misinformation and lying why because
00:06:31
twitter and facebook do not punish
00:06:34
people on the left for misinformation
00:06:35
that is some penalty they only meter out
00:06:38
for people who disagree with their
00:06:40
cultural and political biases
00:06:43
that gets the get out of jail free card
00:06:45
i don't i don't even think it's secret i
00:06:46
just think these people all are part of
00:06:48
the same cultural sort of mule you they
00:06:52
all have the same political and cultural
00:06:53
biases and there is never look where is
00:06:56
the twitter warning the twitter label on
00:06:58
the rachel maddow post even now saying
00:07:01
that this tweet this article is
00:07:02
misinformation
00:07:04
uh it doesn't exist because it's
00:07:06
inconvenient
00:07:07
let's talk about the science of i think
00:07:09
i would pay for 40 dollars for all in
00:07:10
podcast live
00:07:12
it's dynamic it's like it works yeah by
00:07:15
the way you're on the show so okay i'm
00:07:16
here too
00:07:17
um
00:07:18
tell me the last time we heard
00:07:20
a news story that didn't have bias to it
00:07:23
what was the last general thing that was
00:07:25
reported
00:07:26
that we didn't feel had the angle that
00:07:29
then elicited emotion either love or
00:07:31
hate or alignment or not um
00:07:34
have that reaction to the facts the only
00:07:36
reason you are in the wall street
00:07:37
journal just now about like the the
00:07:38
democrats proposal on taxes i have an
00:07:41
emotional reaction to it but it's
00:07:42
fact-based i've got a hundred is it
00:07:45
really was it
00:07:47
my reaction or no the story
00:07:49
yeah they just said that they the the
00:07:51
house proposal now is to move the
00:07:53
cap gains rate to from 20 to 25 the
00:07:56
corporate tax rate from whatever it was
00:07:58
to 26 and a half but it's my point is
00:08:01
there are articles written by folks who
00:08:04
just want to get the facts across and
00:08:06
let you judge whether it's good or bad
00:08:08
who knows time will tell then there are
00:08:10
folks that basically manufacture [ __ ]
00:08:13
because again i think and i think is
00:08:15
matt taibbi that said this because it
00:08:17
creates moral mania
00:08:19
drives the narrative drives the emotion
00:08:21
but it's the last grasp of the power of
00:08:23
journalism that's all they have left at
00:08:25
this point is just to basically make it
00:08:26
a complete [ __ ] free-for-all and in
00:08:28
it they still have some kind of
00:08:30
relevancy i have these old new york
00:08:31
times uh newspapers like the whole year
00:08:34
printed from like 1936 through 1944 it's
00:08:37
cool thinking this huge book
00:08:38
and i'll you know we'll but you must
00:08:41
have been out all the time but you
00:08:42
didn't have time to read those yeah i
00:08:43
mean but you flip through these things
00:08:45
they're like
00:08:47
they are they are just like old like
00:08:49
ticker stories you know it had
00:08:51
absolutely no like narrative attached to
00:08:53
it there was no like these are the
00:08:55
people almost the implicit right and
00:08:57
wrong right the implicit morality of
00:08:58
every decision that's being made of
00:09:00
everything that's being reported on i
00:09:01
have a feeling the only thing that's
00:09:02
going to be left in like 10 years is the
00:09:03
economist and then like the mob rule in
00:09:06
the metaverse and that's kind of
00:09:07
incredible i mean you also have podcasts
00:09:08
where people can discuss these things
00:09:10
and maybe a more
00:09:12
um honest traits
00:09:15
there's a few great podcasts like that
00:09:16
mr and mr anti-facebook what do you
00:09:18
think about this wall street journal
00:09:19
article that says that there's a secret
00:09:20
cabal that basically gets to get out of
00:09:22
jail free card on facebook and nobody
00:09:24
else does
00:09:25
millions of people though it said right
00:09:27
yeah that's a lot
00:09:28
you work there it's exactly the point
00:09:30
i've been making right which is that
00:09:32
there's two sets of rules if you are
00:09:35
part of the in crowd if you share the
00:09:37
cultural biases if you're part of the
00:09:39
same class whether it's you know
00:09:41
socio-economic or political or whatever
00:09:43
that of the people who are doing the
00:09:45
content moderation doing the censorship
00:09:47
you get
00:09:48
get out jail free card the rules are
00:09:50
different for you you can be rachel
00:09:52
maddow and post an article that's
00:09:53
complete [ __ ] and even after the
00:09:55
entire twitter sphere calls you out you
00:09:57
don't post a correction but you don't
00:09:59
get labeled you don't get censored but
00:10:01
if you're on a different part of the
00:10:02
political spectrum you do
00:10:04
i mean there's two sets of rules
00:10:07
yeah i mean i think i think it's insane
00:10:08
i mean this is exactly what i think
00:10:10
people have been saying for
00:10:11
a long time when people say oh you know
00:10:13
it's algorithmic it's not really human
00:10:14
controlled there's there's no real
00:10:16
intervention and then you find out
00:10:17
there's actually literally something
00:10:19
called cross check which its definition
00:10:21
is check the hue you know check the
00:10:23
algorithm and override it with my own
00:10:25
bias that's the that's the definition of
00:10:27
what the feature is well i mean in
00:10:28
whenever we start down this censorship
00:10:31
route like who gets to decide and then
00:10:34
what is their motivation and even if
00:10:35
they have pure motivation there's no way
00:10:38
to
00:10:38
you know not but assume the platforms
00:10:40
die assume everything de-platforms and
00:10:42
decentralizes and then like all media is
00:10:44
through substance or through
00:10:47
the colon app or through other kind of
00:10:48
media well decentralized uh crypto based
00:10:52
exactly so
00:10:53
there's no longer a platform there's no
00:10:54
longer a sensor model what's gonna end
00:10:56
up happening people are gonna click on
00:10:58
the stuff that they want to hear
00:11:00
confirmation bias it's going to become
00:11:02
more extreme it's going to become you
00:11:03
know even more heated there's going to
00:11:05
be splintering of media creation as
00:11:06
there is right now that we see today
00:11:08
right every every element of the
00:11:10
spectrum will be kind of produced and
00:11:11
you're going to end up clicking on the
00:11:12
stuff that creates the greatest
00:11:13
emotional response because that's what
00:11:14
people like to consume how does a
00:11:16
citizen who wants to inoculate
00:11:18
themselves from fake news bias
00:11:20
how do you recommend they go after
00:11:22
science and how do they they have to
00:11:23
learn the stuff for themselves they have
00:11:25
to try to become an expert themselves
00:11:27
it's hard like anything that's hard
00:11:28
right i mean there's there's got to be a
00:11:30
will i don't think that that's really um
00:11:33
it's it's not to be discouraging i just
00:11:35
think that it's a lot easier to not do
00:11:37
that right it's like it's a lot easier
00:11:39
to consume ice cream all the time it's a
00:11:41
lot more fun to consume ice cream all
00:11:42
the time and to kind of plan your diet
00:11:44
eat healthy and work out and all this
00:11:45
sort of stuff and i think that's really
00:11:46
where
00:11:47
you know media like a lot of things is
00:11:49
headed as we create these kind of
00:11:51
feedback loops that are all because
00:11:52
everything's digital everything ends up
00:11:53
becoming feedback i bet i bet you i bet
00:11:55
you if you look inside
00:11:57
because like now
00:11:59
some rabid politician will get a hold of
00:12:00
this facebook crosstrek thing i bet you
00:12:03
um if you look and graph
00:12:05
the number of people that were
00:12:07
essentially whitelisted from being able
00:12:08
to say whatever the hell they want
00:12:10
versus what was popular on facebook
00:12:12
you'd see a left versus right
00:12:14
distribution very clearly you'd
00:12:16
basically see because if you look at it
00:12:18
now i think there's a i can't remember
00:12:20
his name but he's a he's a former new
00:12:21
york times reporter that tweets out
00:12:23
every day um the top 10 links that are
00:12:26
shared on facebook and it's
00:12:28
like a [ __ ] train wreck it's like
00:12:30
one normal article and then it's like
00:12:32
nine like right-wing infowars
00:12:36
it's a train wreck every day
00:12:38
and so if you're you know a hipster
00:12:40
sitting in east menlo park
00:12:42
you know at some point like the cuffs
00:12:44
and your jeans are rolled up too tight
00:12:45
the [ __ ] shirt cuffs are rolled up
00:12:47
too tight you know
00:12:48
um and you're just freaking out and then
00:12:50
you're like we need to create something
00:12:52
what do we call it and we're like cross
00:12:54
check you know and then all of a sudden
00:12:57
what happens is you just start
00:12:58
introducing people hoping that then the
00:13:00
list that gets published every day on
00:13:02
twitter changes but then what happens
00:13:05
actually is you find the exact opposite
00:13:07
thing happens that people are so like
00:13:09
they sniff out the [ __ ] they're like
00:13:11
what is going on here but then they
00:13:13
double down and then next thing you know
00:13:14
ben shapiro's nine you know eight of the
00:13:17
ten top stories every day
00:13:19
on facebook and that's how you have
00:13:20
donald trump and everything else
00:13:24
next topic well
00:13:28
go ahead well it's gonna i mean i don't
00:13:30
wanna do it themselves yeah look i i
00:13:32
think both sides are capable of
00:13:35
both sides of the political spectrum are
00:13:36
capable of spreading misinformation and
00:13:38
[ __ ] and you have to vary your
00:13:40
information diet right i mean if all you
00:13:42
do is participate in
00:13:45
you know the right wing or left-wing
00:13:46
echo chamber you're going to buy into
00:13:49
the ivermectin hoax you're going to be
00:13:51
story here from rolling stone or
00:13:54
whatever it is so you have to
00:13:56
make an effort to again to vary your
00:13:58
information
00:14:00
or
00:14:01
the uh lab leak theory
00:14:04
theory exactly but we now have five of
00:14:05
these during the pandemic alone right
00:14:07
right but see what what i
00:14:09
object to is the fact that the
00:14:11
censorship rules only seem to apply to
00:14:14
one side of the spectrum is look both
00:14:16
sides are capable of spreading
00:14:18
misinformation but only one side is
00:14:20
being censored why because the people
00:14:22
running these powerful tech companies
00:14:24
agree they're like you know 90 plus
00:14:26
percent of that political persuasion
00:14:28
that is not healthy
00:14:32
raise your hand if you agree with how
00:14:33
many people uh agree with sacks that
00:14:35
trump should be reinstated on all
00:14:36
platforms
00:14:39
all right there you go
00:14:41
people agree that the tech platforms
00:14:44
have a political bias
00:14:46
how many disagree with that statement
00:14:49
nobody's interesting
00:14:53
wife is the chief business officer
00:14:54
facebook thanks for that
00:15:02
who couldn't see that because i don't
00:15:04
know do we have the audience on yeah no
00:15:06
no no no
00:15:08
no everyone yeah everyone except for
00:15:11
phil dwight and these are silicon best
00:15:13
described as silicon valley to barney so
00:15:15
that's why you have to raise his hand no
00:15:17
but to be clear for people listening
00:15:18
phil's wife works 100 percent he's got
00:15:21
to say no it's okay it's okay 99 but
00:15:23
everybody else here agreed with that and
00:15:25
these are all people who are silicon
00:15:27
valley
00:15:30
they know
00:15:31
so how many of us are democrats i mean
00:15:33
we're all mostly democrats i would guess
00:15:34
how many people voted democrat in the
00:15:36
last 11 years how many are not democrats
00:15:37
how many people voted for trump raise
00:15:39
your hand nice and high no nobody said
00:15:41
that nobody no literally there's only
00:15:43
that's very interesting seriously
00:15:46
here's a question i have okay so we are
00:15:48
we are firmly going down because i think
00:15:50
it's pretty it's pretty clear to me i'd
00:15:52
be willing to make the bet that
00:15:54
the media is on the side of vaccine
00:15:56
mandates okay they want the
00:16:00
top down control and the sense of
00:16:02
theoretical safety that a vaccine
00:16:04
mandate gives them in their own little
00:16:06
bubble and so that's why i think they
00:16:08
support this and i think you know
00:16:10
blowing up ivermectin was kind of
00:16:12
a method of many that they've undertaken
00:16:15
to do that whether we believe in vaccine
00:16:17
mandates or not but now it's coming it's
00:16:19
coming in the la school district it's
00:16:20
you know biden is trying to push this
00:16:22
thing through the bls this is going to
00:16:24
be a very very big deal
00:16:27
what do you guys think is the right
00:16:28
thing to do on vaccine mandates
00:16:30
irrespective of all we're going to hear
00:16:32
over the next
00:16:34
government government or private
00:16:36
employer mandates or both well we should
00:16:38
let's walk through it i'm seeing both uh
00:16:40
for
00:16:41
the gov government employees let's start
00:16:43
with that yeah or the government mandate
00:16:45
look it goes through the bls it says any
00:16:46
company public or private that is a
00:16:49
hundred employees or more well i mean i
00:16:50
think we all agree
00:16:52
that people in the military or people in
00:16:54
health care
00:16:55
they should all be vaccinated or they
00:16:56
shouldn't come to work correct
00:16:59
do you agree with that but that's also
00:17:00
not not even enforceable like sorkin
00:17:03
andrew ross sorkin tweeted out like he
00:17:05
had to take his kid to the urgent care
00:17:07
and he walked in and the doctors weren't
00:17:09
wearing masks or something yeah i read
00:17:11
that and said something about like not
00:17:13
being vaccinated it doesn't matter or
00:17:14
blah blah and he like well that goes to
00:17:16
enforcement but i mean
00:17:18
the military has said you have to carry
00:17:20
i thought wait you brought your kid to
00:17:21
the [ __ ] urgent care don't you first
00:17:23
need to know what's wrong with the kid
00:17:24
you can't prosecute this person's
00:17:26
opinion on masks and vaccines before you
00:17:28
figure out what's wrong with your kid
00:17:30
well what do you think sex military
00:17:33
military health care teachers the i
00:17:35
think the crux of the issue is whether
00:17:37
employers should be able to require that
00:17:40
well there's two issues one is whether
00:17:42
um employers should be allowed to
00:17:44
require it which i think everybody agree
00:17:46
not everyone but but most people i think
00:17:48
agree that private employers and you
00:17:50
could lump the government with this
00:17:52
should be allowed to
00:17:54
test or their employees or require their
00:17:56
employees to be vaccinated if they want
00:17:57
to and or at least i would support that
00:18:00
part of it is let private enterprises
00:18:03
require vaccination if they want if they
00:18:04
decide hey in order to come back to the
00:18:06
office you got to be vaccinated for
00:18:08
everyone's safety they can impose those
00:18:10
rules now the question is do we need to
00:18:12
go beyond that to have a federal
00:18:15
mandate
00:18:16
and it's not that i'm anti-vaccine i
00:18:19
just think that's like an awfully
00:18:20
authoritarian thing to do and
00:18:23
it raises a bunch of questions so for
00:18:25
example
00:18:27
i have a friend who owns a chain of dry
00:18:29
cleaners okay he's got over 100
00:18:30
employees mostly minimum wage in a bunch
00:18:32
of different locations about 20 of his
00:18:35
what is his ethnicity
00:18:38
what does that have to do with anything
00:18:39
just curious sri lankan
00:18:44
anyway so he's the third most famous sri
00:18:47
lankan american yes anyway so
00:18:50
he's got 100 employees about 20 of them
00:18:51
are anti-vax and they will not get
00:18:53
vaccinated okay so they will walk out if
00:18:57
you know if this is required
00:19:00
hold on but he can't run his business if
00:19:02
there's a 20 walkout he just can't do it
00:19:04
okay so now we get to the soft part of
00:19:06
the mandate which is well instead of
00:19:09
requiring the vax he can do a weekly
00:19:11
test well we did that outside here who's
00:19:14
going to pay for those tests who's going
00:19:15
to administer them is it like you know
00:19:17
they had a nurse out here with the full
00:19:20
you know
00:19:21
uh you know hazmat yeah the hazmat thing
00:19:24
so you know that's not cheap so how
00:19:26
who's going to pay for that who's going
00:19:27
to do that what's the documentation
00:19:28
around that going to be is that get
00:19:30
logged into the computer system what
00:19:32
kind of proof is it does it require a
00:19:35
trip to the lab or is this something we
00:19:36
can do in five minutes i mean look if we
00:19:38
had done what freeburg said a year ago
00:19:40
on this pod we should do which is have
00:19:42
these one dollar five-minute tests be
00:19:45
available everywhere then maybe that
00:19:47
sort of rapid test out would make these
00:19:50
mandates more palatable but we don't
00:19:52
have that yet um you know there aren't
00:19:54
enough of these it turns out we still
00:19:55
need it even with the vaccines because
00:19:57
no vaccine is going to be 100 effective
00:19:58
and with right but my point is since we
00:20:00
don't really have that solution
00:20:03
operationalized you know having a hard
00:20:06
vax mandate on a 100 million employees
00:20:08
of private enterprises
00:20:10
you know that's going to cause i think
00:20:12
chaos in the economy what if we get a
00:20:14
variant david or trump
00:20:16
if we get a variant god forbid that is
00:20:19
more dangerous
00:20:20
than delta let's say it spreads just as
00:20:22
fast but it's five times as deadly does
00:20:24
that change your thinking about this
00:20:26
mandate and where do you stand on the
00:20:27
mandate no i i think the mandate in this
00:20:29
very specific narrow instance makes
00:20:31
sense and i think what we should be
00:20:32
fighting about is how
00:20:34
we actually write it so that it's not
00:20:36
wholly expensive and the reason is
00:20:38
because we know
00:20:40
that there is a probabilistic
00:20:43
distribution of outcomes where a
00:20:45
non-trivial percentage of them results
00:20:47
in a variant that is deadly
00:20:49
and so we can understand the math and we
00:20:51
can understand a sense of time to figure
00:20:53
out that if we don't do something and if
00:20:56
we don't get to some amount of control
00:20:59
around what this is
00:21:01
we're all in really big trouble so
00:21:04
because of that specific thing i just
00:21:06
think this is where you know look
00:21:08
the president has the ability to invoke
00:21:10
the war measures act to do all kinds of
00:21:12
things that are super normal
00:21:14
and you know we would never say that
00:21:16
those abide in normal times and we've
00:21:18
created a framework for him to be able
00:21:20
to do those things in non-normal times
00:21:21
and then revert to normal
00:21:24
i think this is one of those cases just
00:21:25
because i don't think the economic
00:21:27
consequences and the social consequences
00:21:29
if we let this thing uh continue to
00:21:32
compound and continue to mutate it
00:21:34
doesn't make any [ __ ] sense we're not
00:21:36
learning anything
00:21:37
we uh could have used the warm mandate
00:21:40
act across two presidencies to demand
00:21:44
some companies make a dollar test
00:21:46
we have 75 80 tests approved in germany
00:21:48
they're down to two or three dollars why
00:21:51
has the fda not
00:21:54
gotten us to that level that germany's
00:21:55
at
00:21:56
and why haven't we done the war mandate
00:21:58
act i mean we have like a constructed
00:22:00
capitalist model of like
00:22:02
let the free market tell the government
00:22:04
what is the right thing to do and so
00:22:06
then they invite abbott and they invite
00:22:08
the the guys in and they're like you
00:22:10
know the white house they have a
00:22:11
consortium meeting and everyone's kind
00:22:13
of a little bit chuckling about this
00:22:14
like oh this is awesome it's another two
00:22:16
billion dollar payday which is what they
00:22:17
just got i don't know if you saw
00:22:19
uh the the write-up today
00:22:21
but the federal government is paying
00:22:24
walmart for the difference between the
00:22:26
wholesale cost and the retail cost so
00:22:28
that consumers cannot now go buy abba
00:22:30
tests at the wholesale price at the
00:22:31
store two billion dollars taxpayer money
00:22:33
gone
00:22:34
when we could have had a bunch of smart
00:22:37
scientists get together at the white
00:22:39
house
00:22:40
with a bunch of engineers take over a
00:22:42
freaking factory and on a piece of paper
00:22:45
print 8 billion [ __ ] tests
00:22:47
and then chop them up and distribute
00:22:49
them for 50 cents and instead we have
00:22:51
this problem where we're like depending
00:22:52
on the korean supply i kid you not of
00:22:56
the test kits that are like plastic
00:22:58
that's where they make all the like
00:22:59
pregnancy test kits and all this stuff
00:23:00
and these um
00:23:02
this like the commercial model is like
00:23:04
tell us how you want to make these tests
00:23:06
tell us what the right model is and of
00:23:07
course you end up with a thirty dollar
00:23:09
test when in germany you can go buy a 50
00:23:11
cent test at any liquor store
00:23:13
um and so it's it's constructive it's
00:23:15
straight up corruption and if you go
00:23:17
back like you know i don't know if you
00:23:19
know the the production board's named
00:23:20
after the straight into the microphone
00:23:22
named after the war production
00:23:24
which was um set up during world war ii
00:23:27
what's that it's pretty humble
00:23:29
yeah um
00:23:30
took the war out
00:23:32
you know
00:23:33
um but it was uh but the idea was like
00:23:35
how do you take a system level uh design
00:23:37
approach uh to solving kind of big
00:23:40
problems and um one of the issues
00:23:43
that we had during world war ii was a
00:23:45
supply chain problem on making tanks and
00:23:47
planes and so
00:23:48
they put together a bunch of smart
00:23:50
people deutsche knows this better than
00:23:51
anyone because he was a lie back he was
00:23:53
alive and he was you can look at the old
00:23:55
photos they're sitting in the front guys
00:23:56
you have the hammer before he does he
00:23:58
made it in the factory floor old as [ __ ]
00:24:01
and um and there was basically a con
00:24:03
coordinated effort it's fine today by
00:24:05
the way sorry the kim happy birthday
00:24:07
happy birthday
00:24:09
um
00:24:10
but there was a coordinated effort by
00:24:11
engineers at the top down to design a
00:24:14
system for making these things cheap and
00:24:16
fast and that's an approach that i think
00:24:18
we lost right like we kind of gave way
00:24:20
to this model of yeah laissez faire like
00:24:23
you come in you tell me what you think
00:24:24
we should do okay that's a good idea
00:24:26
let's take photos and we're out and
00:24:27
that's it like we don't have a wartime
00:24:29
mentality right now we haven't had a
00:24:30
wartime mentality since covet hit
00:24:32
everyone's continued to try and parade
00:24:34
around and get reelected and you know
00:24:36
earn votes
00:24:37
we're not taking this we're not acting
00:24:39
we're you know like every
00:24:41
every time kind of a business or a
00:24:42
government or any organization goes
00:24:44
through a phase it goes through a
00:24:45
wartime phase or a peacetime phase we
00:24:47
should be acting like we're in a wartime
00:24:48
phase and we're not can answer your
00:24:49
question if you may three or four of us
00:24:52
basically pronated up some money could
00:24:54
you go and print eight billion of these
00:24:55
[ __ ] tests
00:24:56
in the u.s you cannot get them approved
00:24:58
without the fda i'm not asking for
00:24:59
approval i'm saying could you do it 100
00:25:02
and how long you could buy some old
00:25:03
freaking paper mill and in three months
00:25:05
i mean you know this this actually
00:25:06
people in this room who could do this
00:25:08
in um now isn't there a framework with
00:25:11
an fda that basically allows you to
00:25:14
effectively experiment on yourself
00:25:17
there's a compassion there's a
00:25:20
it's for drugs it's for therapeutics not
00:25:21
for diagnostics so you're saying that if
00:25:23
i want to you can't build my own test
00:25:25
and use it if you want to build a if you
00:25:26
want to build a diagnostic test that
00:25:27
tells someone whether or not they have
00:25:29
an illness you have to get fda approval
00:25:31
in the united states so
00:25:33
that's also just published before
00:25:35
some pretty statement is regulatory
00:25:37
capture like is one of the biggest
00:25:38
issues and in related
00:25:40
news by the way another insane statistic
00:25:42
just sorry they're up i saw this today i
00:25:44
forgot someone we know tweeted this
00:25:47
the
00:25:48
who wants to guess the ratio of
00:25:50
administrators to doctors in the us
00:25:52
healthcare system 300 to one yeah i saw
00:25:55
at 301 yeah 900 to one today oh my god
00:25:58
and that is up from five to one in 1970
00:26:01
by the way think about it can i just
00:26:02
build on what you said 900 to 1. your
00:26:04
initial tweet said 300 to 1 and it ended
00:26:07
in 2010 right before obamacare passed so
00:26:10
from 300 to 900 was all obamacare yeah
00:26:13
regulatory sacs is shaking his head
00:26:15
which by the way uh nothing against
00:26:17
obamacare because i think like coming as
00:26:18
a canadian i actually believe in
00:26:20
subsidized health care and i think the
00:26:21
the principle of obamacare was great but
00:26:23
there was one fatal flaw which is it
00:26:25
basically said okay you know what you're
00:26:27
capped at the following margin
00:26:29
and the minute that people said wait a
00:26:31
minute i can only have a 20 gross margin
00:26:33
what do you do you just jack up prices
00:26:35
to basically jack up revenue because if
00:26:37
you can only take 20 percent you're
00:26:38
going to take 20 of a bigger number than
00:26:40
a smaller number and so it completely
00:26:42
burned the incentives for any healthcare
00:26:44
company in the united states to do
00:26:46
anything other than just basically walk
00:26:47
prices up
00:26:49
and it's funny because if you look at
00:26:50
the stock prices of these
00:26:52
companies
00:26:53
you you would have made more money being
00:26:55
along united healthcare than you would
00:26:56
have been uh owning facebook google any
00:26:58
of these other tech companies in the
00:27:00
last decade crazy stat
00:27:02
uh speaking of regulatory capture tesla
00:27:05
uh got left out of this new tax credit
00:27:07
or proposed tax credit insane four
00:27:10
electric cars i don't know if you saw
00:27:11
that but tesla wasn't invited a couple
00:27:13
of months ago to biden's ev summit
00:27:16
elon responded like i wonder why i
00:27:18
wasn't invited it turns out it's because
00:27:20
they're not a union shop their employees
00:27:22
make much more money than union
00:27:24
employees make uh and but now as a
00:27:28
punishment but hold on as a punishment
00:27:30
the twelve thousand dollar credit that
00:27:32
they're giving to or they're proposing
00:27:33
to give to all ev manufacturers is only
00:27:36
if you have union employees it's 4 500
00:27:39
less to tesla
00:27:41
so literally two massive regulatory
00:27:44
captures and corruption go or maybe
00:27:47
no i mean i don't have much more to add
00:27:49
to that i mean you hit the nail on the
00:27:51
head i mean this is to serve the unions
00:27:52
it's not to serve uh clean energy
00:27:56
or the ev industry i mean a little bit
00:27:57
for uv but it's mostly for the unions
00:28:01
the um
00:28:02
[Music]
00:28:04
on the one hand what we do is we say
00:28:05
that climate change is this existential
00:28:08
issue
00:28:09
but then when the rubber meets the road
00:28:11
if you look inside the infrastructure
00:28:12
plan today we unveiled basically how
00:28:15
we're going to do all the tax credits
00:28:17
and again it's just an enormous amount
00:28:19
of just sloppy
00:28:20
um regulatory capture
00:28:23
we're doubling and tripling credits in
00:28:24
certain places we're disallowing credits
00:28:27
in other places when you follow the
00:28:29
dollars what happens is you can map it
00:28:30
to companies those companies tend to be
00:28:33
mostly public large balance sheets large
00:28:35
lobbying efforts and it's not
00:28:37
necessarily the most important companies
00:28:39
that matter so if you know if i said to
00:28:41
you what are the most important
00:28:42
companies in climate change you'd
00:28:44
probably say well maybe it's direct air
00:28:45
capture maybe it's nuclear maybe it's
00:28:47
some other thing that basically helps
00:28:48
you go to a different place and where
00:28:50
does all the tax credits and tax dollars
00:28:52
go sun run sun power these are companies
00:28:55
that basically you know have this
00:28:57
oligopolistic hole stranglehold on
00:29:00
essentially installing solar panels and
00:29:02
battery walls in homes across the united
00:29:05
states and it's not to say that that job
00:29:07
isn't important but to basically
00:29:10
explicitly block other people out
00:29:12
because all the chatter today on um you
00:29:15
know or some of the chatter today was
00:29:17
around just if this bill passes as
00:29:20
written you're gonna see these stocks
00:29:22
rip and so obviously the positive
00:29:24
reinforcement loop of wall street and
00:29:25
hedge funds getting behind these
00:29:27
companies their market cap goes up the
00:29:29
amount they allocate to lobbyists go up
00:29:30
and then all this [ __ ] just
00:29:32
continues to cycle through the system
00:29:34
free break how far are we away from
00:29:36
small nuclear reactors and fusion just
00:29:38
from a science perspective and then on a
00:29:41
regulatory basis
00:29:43
i don't know enough i mean yeah
00:29:45
i i look i mean from what i've seen
00:29:48
there there are great technologies that
00:29:50
you know we should be able to kind of
00:29:51
realize my understanding and speaking to
00:29:53
investors some in this room
00:29:55
and i know champs looked at this area a
00:29:56
lot
00:29:57
is um you know there's the the
00:30:00
regulatory burden that's made it so
00:30:01
difficult to launch nuclear
00:30:04
um technically it seems like there's
00:30:05
great breakthroughs there was an
00:30:06
announcement from a group this past week
00:30:09
cfs yeah on a new um
00:30:12
super conducting magnet system that they
00:30:14
spent years designing this is a bill
00:30:16
gates backed company anyone here an
00:30:18
investor
00:30:19
no
00:30:20
john
00:30:23
and uh basically it enables like the
00:30:25
tokamak plasma fusion based systems uh
00:30:28
to be kind of reliably produced now and
00:30:30
so they've they've had a proof of
00:30:32
demonstration of this uh
00:30:34
of the superconducting magnet system
00:30:36
that effectively allows you to control a
00:30:38
plasma which is like 10 million degrees
00:30:40
celsius in a little donut that spins
00:30:42
around and that plasma allows you to
00:30:44
kind of pull energy out that can be used
00:30:46
for you know effectively you put a bunch
00:30:47
of material in this thing runs and more
00:30:50
energy comes out than you put in it's
00:30:52
magic
00:30:53
and so you know this has been a
00:30:54
theoretical kind of concept for decades
00:30:57
uh getting the superconducting magnet
00:30:59
system to control the plasma in a very
00:31:00
small space
00:31:02
using a very small kind of system was
00:31:04
proven and now they think that they're
00:31:06
you know call it four or five years away
00:31:07
you know by the way everything in
00:31:08
nuclear is always four or five years
00:31:10
away so four or five years away with a
00:31:12
grain of salt uh from kind of having a
00:31:14
demonstrable kind of uh system so
00:31:16
there's technologies that are clearly
00:31:17
like on the brink or proceeding nicely
00:31:20
but
00:31:20
as we know um a lot of a lot of these
00:31:22
sorts of technologies similarly are kind
00:31:24
of regulatory burdened we're about a
00:31:25
hundred degrees away i think from a from
00:31:27
a operational functional room
00:31:29
temperature semiconductor
00:31:30
and superconductor sorry and you know
00:31:33
i've told
00:31:34
a team that i'm working with on this
00:31:36
project i don't want to go into energy
00:31:38
generation or unless we can do it in a
00:31:40
small form manufacturing thing that can
00:31:42
be adopted broadly but if you try to go
00:31:44
and you know basically build some
00:31:46
distributed energy resource out over
00:31:48
here that powers cavallo point it's
00:31:50
impossible because you run into these
00:31:52
people who don't really understand the
00:31:54
science won't take the time and you know
00:31:56
we've taken so many steps backwards from
00:31:58
nuclear that it's probably just going to
00:32:01
take decades
00:32:03
and it's going to take some cataclysmic
00:32:05
climate change event where the only way
00:32:07
out is this super abundant energy source
00:32:10
where you're willing to basically say ah
00:32:12
[ __ ] it we're [ __ ] otherwise by the
00:32:13
way if you if you were to go to mars
00:32:15
today you wouldn't be pulling a bunch of
00:32:17
[ __ ] you know oil out of the ground
00:32:19
and burning it and you know rotating uh
00:32:21
you shouldn't i mean and you wouldn't
00:32:23
necessarily i mean you'd be using you
00:32:25
know solar at the beginning but you
00:32:27
wouldn't necessarily rely on solar the
00:32:28
you know the cost of material to
00:32:30
transport from here to mars
00:32:32
to yield the best energy potential would
00:32:34
likely be some sort of nuclear power
00:32:35
source right um as it is in a lot of
00:32:37
military so that's your question sax
00:32:40
elon was saved by obama
00:32:43
i mean
00:32:44
just kind of like having we were there
00:32:46
even meaning like you know it was in
00:32:47
that moment he was able to get that deal
00:32:49
with daimler he was able to get these
00:32:51
you know tax credits the the auto
00:32:53
bailout you know all of that stuff but
00:32:55
then it seems like we're in the middle
00:32:57
of a democrat administration and they
00:32:59
may go out of their way to basically try
00:33:01
to [ __ ] this guy i just think it's like
00:33:02
become a special interest free-for-all
00:33:04
there was an article today that the
00:33:06
national deficit year to date is 2.7
00:33:10
trillion
00:33:12
and i think that we're on october 1st
00:33:13
fiscal year so there's one more month so
00:33:15
it'll be about 3 trillion last year was
00:33:17
over 3 trillion because of covid
00:33:19
there haven't gotten to the
00:33:20
infrastructure bill yet that's going to
00:33:21
be another 1.2 trillion on top of that
00:33:24
the democrats are saying they want
00:33:25
another three and a half well not all
00:33:27
democrats but thank god for joe manchin
00:33:29
but another three and a half trillion
00:33:32
and you know most people can't even
00:33:33
really say what's in that three and a
00:33:34
half trillion dollar bill i mean it's
00:33:36
we're at 28 trillion something like that
00:33:38
of national debt
00:33:39
i mean and it's all just like special
00:33:41
interest plunder
00:33:42
well i mean if you look at the results
00:33:44
the results aren't there correct yeah
00:33:46
and then on top of that
00:33:47
um
00:33:48
well you know i i understand i mean
00:33:51
with respect to obamacare okay that's a
00:33:52
major item
00:33:54
on let's call the democrat wish list was
00:33:56
to give everyone health care and we
00:33:57
didn't even get there okay but you can
00:33:59
sort of understand that but
00:34:01
most people i think even
00:34:03
on the left
00:34:04
can't really say what the big ticket
00:34:07
item is
00:34:08
that's going to be delivered for this
00:34:09
three and a half trillion that is
00:34:11
proposing to be spent
00:34:13
so um i mean it's just it it's just
00:34:16
become this like you know special
00:34:17
interest freeberg we talked about not
00:34:19
having a wartime stance with the
00:34:21
pandemic
00:34:22
we don't have a wartime stance with
00:34:24
global warming or extreme weather
00:34:26
whichever
00:34:27
term you want should we
00:34:29
yeah
00:34:32
yeah
00:34:34
i mean yeah we're burning money i don't
00:34:35
know like a drunken salary what's going
00:34:37
on right now and actually a lot of what
00:34:38
we're going to talk about this symposium
00:34:41
over the next day or so
00:34:43
is that there is effectively now a
00:34:45
raging
00:34:46
free market appetite for these solutions
00:34:49
um the capital is pouring in the
00:34:51
entrepreneurship is blossoming
00:34:53
ballooning the technology is advancing
00:34:56
so you know to some degree folks might
00:34:58
say
00:34:59
you know this is going to get solved but
00:35:00
there are major infrastructure solutions
00:35:03
that are needed for us to accelerate the
00:35:05
outcome and win the the war
00:35:07
and those infrastructure solutions
00:35:09
aren't going to get funded by softbank
00:35:11
and they're not going to get funded by
00:35:12
chamath they're going to need to get
00:35:14
funded by the type of dollars i mean
00:35:17
keep keep you keep building your book
00:35:18
like you are you will fund them in the
00:35:20
next decade but saks you know kind of
00:35:22
speaks to the kind of numbers that i
00:35:24
think you know are necessary here i mean
00:35:25
you think about how much money we spent
00:35:27
on covid without any results over the
00:35:29
last year it really begs the question if
00:35:32
we were kind of to take an roi based
00:35:34
approach to where we spending these
00:35:35
dollars this would probably be the first
00:35:37
on the list and by the way the private
00:35:39
market and jobs will benefit and what
00:35:41
happened in this this bill this
00:35:43
infrastructure bill has passed um
00:35:45
this past year that's now been you know
00:35:47
uh more kind of definitively drafted
00:35:50
is a bunch of infrastructure jobs that
00:35:52
are basically giveaways they're not
00:35:53
actually solving problems with climate
00:35:55
change they're not pushing technology
00:35:56
forward they're not creating uh these
00:35:59
alternatives that we're talking about
00:36:00
they create 10x and 100x outcomes they
00:36:03
are yesteryears solutions and they're
00:36:06
not going to move the needle enough and
00:36:07
so i you know look i do think like
00:36:10
it's unfortunate but the climate change
00:36:12
war production board is needed to kind
00:36:14
of get the kind of dollars motivated
00:36:16
that are needed to create the kind of
00:36:17
infrastructure to solve these problems
00:36:19
um despite the free market appetite the
00:36:21
free market appetite by the way fuels
00:36:22
the outcomes but it still needs uh it
00:36:25
needs something behind
00:36:26
is it possible just as we're having this
00:36:29
discussion here we're looking at an
00:36:30
incompetent corrupt government
00:36:33
that is filled with grifters who are
00:36:35
bought and sold and then on the other
00:36:38
side and causing
00:36:39
problems that's a that's a mouthful i
00:36:41
wouldn't say that people but i i
00:36:42
disagree that people are corrupt and
00:36:44
grifters i i do think that really yeah i
00:36:47
i do think that there's a lot of good
00:36:48
motivations i just think that this is
00:36:49
the government yeah look there may be
00:36:51
corruption but i don't think that that's
00:36:53
the the universal truth right people are
00:36:55
generally you you know you we've all met
00:36:58
politicians right
00:37:00
which one is it it's it's it's a it's a
00:37:02
point of perspective right and there's a
00:37:04
what's your perspective my perspective
00:37:05
is that they're all being told by their
00:37:06
constituents what they want and then
00:37:08
they're doing it or by lobbyists or by
00:37:10
lobbyists but
00:37:11
are they supposed to listen to a lot at
00:37:13
the end of the day the way that the the
00:37:14
system is set up is people get reelected
00:37:16
by doing what they're the people that
00:37:18
are going to vote and put the dollars
00:37:19
and put the votes out for them are
00:37:21
asking them to do and that's the way
00:37:23
that this has kind of resolved itself
00:37:25
so and by the way when the war when when
00:37:27
wars happen you know when i guess when a
00:37:30
war happened
00:37:32
in the 20th century that wasn't the
00:37:34
driving force the driving force was
00:37:36
existential and it was we have to win
00:37:37
the war and that's that that really
00:37:39
needs to be the mindset we all need to
00:37:41
adopt today which is an existential
00:37:43
mindset we need to win the war and it
00:37:44
can't be about what my constituents are
00:37:46
telling me what the lobbyists are
00:37:47
telling me so despite
00:37:49
this either incompetence graft or if
00:37:52
you're more charitable you know it's a
00:37:54
complex problem to solve despite all of
00:37:56
that
00:37:57
we have massive entrepreneurship in the
00:37:58
country we have massive capital
00:38:00
allocation uh at a extreme violent rate
00:38:03
in fact a lot of that money is coming
00:38:05
from all this money being pumped into
00:38:07
the system so in a way do you think the
00:38:09
only solution we have chamoth is
00:38:11
entrepreneurs in startups who are
00:38:13
getting large amounts of money to solve
00:38:15
these problems because it's not going to
00:38:16
happen by government obviously we have a
00:38:18
ton of great entrepreneurs and i think
00:38:20
that we're doing things
00:38:23
we're doing we're okay so
00:38:25
this is this is
00:38:27
if you look at the internet in the 20
00:38:29
years that we've been grinding in the
00:38:30
internet we've had an incredible
00:38:32
tailwind that helped us
00:38:34
which is all these people much like the
00:38:36
folks in this room but in different
00:38:37
companies 10 or 20 years earlier than
00:38:39
you are now
00:38:41
abstracting parts of the stack so that
00:38:43
the rest of us could use it right
00:38:46
um and so you know i remember 2006 we
00:38:49
were racking and stacking servers at
00:38:51
facebook in santa clara me adam deangelo
00:38:53
like and i was like what the [ __ ] are we
00:38:55
doing and i remember in 2008 when adam
00:38:57
deangelo he was our cto at the time left
00:38:59
he started a company called quora
00:39:01
d'andre's like i'm building on aws and i
00:39:03
thought he was a [ __ ] idiot
00:39:05
i thought who builds on aws you build
00:39:07
your own data centers now if you said
00:39:09
that to somebody you would be the idiot
00:39:12
right so if it's that or if it's the
00:39:14
tooling and the tool chains that we've
00:39:15
been able to build on top of
00:39:17
all of that abstraction and
00:39:19
simplification has allowed an order or
00:39:22
frankly probably even maybe two orders
00:39:23
of magnitude of entrepreneurship to come
00:39:26
that's also now happening in biotech
00:39:28
so all of that is an incredible progress
00:39:31
the problem now is we used to be
00:39:34
a part of the economy that was an
00:39:36
afterthought
00:39:37
we were over here
00:39:40
politicians didn't need to understand
00:39:41
they didn't need to take the time
00:39:43
their first reaction is denial because
00:39:46
it basically pushes up against power and
00:39:48
that really freaks them out
00:39:50
but now we're at a point where we are so
00:39:53
integral they need to understand it
00:39:55
better here's a perfect example
00:39:57
last week
00:39:59
illuminous patents expired
00:40:02
so if you're in the business of
00:40:04
healthcare and if you're in the business
00:40:05
of like you know crispr gene therapy any
00:40:08
of the stuff that actually a lot of you
00:40:10
guys are involved in
00:40:12
you would love for the fact that you
00:40:14
know next-gen sequencing could have a
00:40:16
thousand flowers boom bloom 90 different
00:40:19
methods the cost of a sequence goes down
00:40:22
to a penny
00:40:23
it's not possible today because you have
00:40:24
to go through one methodology you have
00:40:26
one company to work through you have one
00:40:28
set of reagents or a set of reagents
00:40:30
that one company sells and it's
00:40:32
basically cordoned off
00:40:34
that can't change because of technology
00:40:36
because they can then sue you go to
00:40:38
courts and they win
00:40:40
and so this is where you have to
00:40:42
interface with the government and they
00:40:43
just need to get smarter
00:40:45
because otherwise there's only so much
00:40:47
innovation we can do before
00:40:49
their historical legacy things like
00:40:51
patents and ip come and bite you in the
00:40:53
ass sex what do you think is
00:40:55
entrepreneurship alone and capital
00:40:58
allocation by aggressive
00:41:00
you know thoughtful and bold uh capital
00:41:03
allocators enough to solve the
00:41:05
incompetence in washington or the graft
00:41:07
well it's going to have to be and i mean
00:41:09
here's the good news bad news okay i had
00:41:11
a tweet that kind of went viral so when
00:41:13
afghanistan happened you know we spent
00:41:16
two trillion dollars
00:41:18
2500 american casualties 40 000 wounded
00:41:21
and
00:41:22
what have we gotten out of it the
00:41:25
chinese are about to take up residence
00:41:26
in bagram
00:41:28
in our splendid air force base
00:41:30
and uh the taliban are one of the best
00:41:32
equipped armies in the world that's
00:41:34
basically what our two trillion dollars
00:41:35
got us and china's going to build a
00:41:37
super highway right by the way they're
00:41:38
going to extract did you see the thing
00:41:40
where like the taliban were flying
00:41:41
around in our helicopter
00:41:43
helicopters no it was fake apparently
00:41:45
yeah
00:41:49
apparently apparently the helicopters
00:41:51
that were left behind are non-functional
00:41:52
so let's just clear that up that's not
00:41:54
true yeah there's more blackhawks than
00:41:56
any other army in the world except for
00:41:57
us
00:41:58
um i mean haven't you seen all the
00:41:59
photos of them they're all decked out in
00:42:01
our uniforms it's incredible yeah oh
00:42:03
yeah
00:42:04
they got our night vision goggles photos
00:42:06
on the internet
00:42:07
no no no there was reporting itemizing
00:42:09
the inventory the cache of weapons we
00:42:11
left behind it was gigantic all right
00:42:13
let's get to the question now the good
00:42:15
news bad news okay so that that's that's
00:42:17
the bad news that's what two trillion
00:42:18
dollars of government spending got us
00:42:21
um the the good news is i went back and
00:42:23
i looked at
00:42:24
how much money has been invested in the
00:42:26
venture capital space over that same
00:42:27
20-year period that we were in
00:42:28
afghanistan and it roughly tallied up to
00:42:31
about two trillion dollars i didn't know
00:42:33
that actually i just i added up the
00:42:34
charts
00:42:35
and about and most of it was in the last
00:42:38
five years because it's actually been a
00:42:39
huge acceleration in the amount of money
00:42:41
coming into vc over the last several
00:42:43
years the softbanks the tigers and so
00:42:46
that you've had these late stage funds
00:42:47
the mega lane stage funds so the truth
00:42:49
is
00:42:50
for
00:42:51
really way less than i'd say a trillion
00:42:54
dollars of you know early stage like
00:42:56
true venture money we've been able to
00:42:58
create the entire technology ecosystem
00:43:00
as we see it today i mean not entire i
00:43:02
guess go back 20 years there's five
00:43:04
years in the late 90s so
00:43:07
the the the private enterprise system
00:43:09
has accomplished so much with relatively
00:43:13
so little money you compare
00:43:15
the efficiency of it you almost wonder
00:43:17
how did we squander so much money in
00:43:19
afghanistan
00:43:20
it took active looting
00:43:22
by many different forces to basically
00:43:25
squander
00:43:26
i mean think about like literally have
00:43:28
to burn money
00:43:29
every venture back company
00:43:31
every stage
00:43:33
in the last 20 years
00:43:35
that's how much money we spent in
00:43:36
afghanistan i mean how much of that
00:43:37
money went to line the pockets of
00:43:40
private contractors
00:43:42
and you know warlords we were paying off
00:43:44
i mean it was a giant kleptocracy okay
00:43:48
so but the good news is look what we got
00:43:49
for the same amount of money here you
00:43:51
know and not just here every every
00:43:53
private venture back company
00:43:55
so i do think we are capable of
00:43:57
accomplishing great things but
00:43:58
with relatively small amounts of
00:44:00
investment and thank goodness for that
00:44:02
because that's the only thing that's
00:44:03
producing anything in our society
00:44:05
but um
00:44:07
but i mean it's true right but but look
00:44:09
at what washington's about to do they
00:44:10
want to stomp on all this innovation i
00:44:12
mean they want to jack up the cap gains
00:44:14
rate to the same to higher than ordinary
00:44:17
income i mean that is the return on
00:44:19
investment for the for the for venture
00:44:21
capital for the kind of investment i'm
00:44:23
talking about i mean they want to make
00:44:24
it punitive now that's not going to pass
00:44:27
thankfully because we got joe manchin
00:44:29
but that's about it by the way i will i
00:44:31
will contradict myself and agree with
00:44:32
sax i do think there will be a hundred x
00:44:34
thousand ten 1000x 10000x
00:44:36
breakthrough
00:44:37
that will resolve a lot of the
00:44:39
challenges we face as a species on
00:44:41
planet earth over this century so we're
00:44:43
optimistic i'm 100 optimistic i'm
00:44:45
actually this might that's my the the
00:44:47
title you gave it away the title of my
00:44:48
talk in the morning uh tomorrow morning
00:44:51
um yeah but yeah yeah i do
00:44:53
and by the way my talk says absolutely
00:44:55
nothing about the government and we went
00:44:56
railing against the government now
00:44:57
everyone's kind of feeling sad and we
00:44:59
sound like a bunch of old guys sitting
00:45:01
at the starbucks talking yeah talking
00:45:03
about the government how they suck um
00:45:05
but at the end of the day i do think
00:45:07
that um the ingenuity of uh the human
00:45:11
spirit and science will resolve the
00:45:13
problems that we face today jesus christ
00:45:15
and we are not gonna end up we're not
00:45:17
going to end up developing on the
00:45:19
government
00:45:20
to solve the problem
00:45:21
all right i want to talk about one other
00:45:22
by the way we should kind of be able to
00:45:23
take questions uh from the audience so
00:45:25
if you have a question i'm going to jump
00:45:26
out there um should we do that now
00:45:28
because yeah just end with the ccp uh is
00:45:32
now
00:45:33
moving to break up alipay's business
00:45:35
this is after jack ma uh went on
00:45:38
a holiday to learn how to oil paint
00:45:40
thoughts chamaf
00:45:42
well i think this is sort of like one
00:45:44
other step in what we've been talking
00:45:46
about for a while which is that china is
00:45:48
basically becoming
00:45:50
a completely vertically integrated
00:45:52
government
00:45:53
where
00:45:54
the public and private sector has no
00:45:56
real clear delineation and i think that
00:45:58
that actually has a lot of implications
00:46:00
to us because they export
00:46:02
an enormous amount of technology and
00:46:04
building blocks to us and we have no
00:46:06
recourse if those guys either change
00:46:09
their mind and this is sort of what
00:46:11
pulls us into
00:46:12
this next very complicated phase of uh
00:46:15
geopolitics because for example if they
00:46:17
decide to cut us off you know in our
00:46:20
they will invade taiwan i've said this
00:46:22
before but i think that they will
00:46:24
and we will have no choice except to
00:46:26
deploy troops into taiwan
00:46:28
because in the absence of the silicon
00:46:30
that we need from tsmc and a couple of
00:46:32
other manufacturers there we have zero
00:46:34
capability here this is why you see
00:46:36
intel i mean for any like any second
00:46:38
when you guys hear an intel press
00:46:40
release that says they're investing 90
00:46:41
[ __ ] billion dollars do you not think
00:46:44
where does intel come up with 90 billion
00:46:46
dollars
00:46:48
right this is a pull through from us
00:46:49
government because it allows us to start
00:46:52
to rebuild
00:46:53
an enormous amount of critical
00:46:54
infrastructure that we've left to other
00:46:56
people
00:46:57
so you know china is systematically
00:47:01
decomposing and basically destabilizing
00:47:04
all the china internet companies they're
00:47:05
going to control and inbound all of the
00:47:07
critical resources and we're gonna have
00:47:10
to have these really hard conversations
00:47:12
unless this is again why i go back to i
00:47:13
don't believe what you said
00:47:15
entrepreneurs are not enough of the
00:47:16
solution we need the government to step
00:47:18
in with intelligence not with anything
00:47:21
other than that
00:47:22
they don't need laws necessarily they
00:47:24
just need to understand the problem and
00:47:26
then or get out of the way in some cases
00:47:29
or step in and for example like you know
00:47:32
allow the regulatory regulatory capture
00:47:34
to be disrupted but they won't do it
00:47:37
because special interests and by the way
00:47:39
special interests what do they spend you
00:47:41
know if you try to donate to a [ __ ]
00:47:42
congressman
00:47:44
four thousand dollars two thousand five
00:47:46
hundred dollars like these people aren't
00:47:48
spending 80 million dollars to defend an
00:47:50
80 billion dollar business they're
00:47:52
spending 80 000
00:47:54
and that's why we can't have progress
00:47:56
that's crazy to me
00:47:58
sacks your thoughts on china's recent
00:48:00
actions to
00:48:02
basically deprecate entrepreneurship
00:48:05
it's it's a continuation of the trends
00:48:06
we've been talking about on the show
00:48:08
like math was saying i mean they're
00:48:09
bringing these um entrepreneurs these
00:48:12
their moguls uh their their oligarchs
00:48:15
under their thumb under the thumb of the
00:48:16
ccp
00:48:18
and xi jinping they're consolidating
00:48:20
control and power
00:48:22
and money and it's also about the data
00:48:24
that was another part of the this new
00:48:26
law is they want to get their hands on
00:48:28
the data that um
00:48:31
all the credit data of every single
00:48:33
person that uses alipay all throughout
00:48:35
southeast asia
00:48:36
that's [ __ ] crazy
00:48:38
and they also control and everybody's
00:48:40
tick-tock you're talking about yeah we
00:48:42
get there at the same time yeah it's
00:48:43
crazy it's crazy
00:48:45
if you were running the chinese
00:48:46
government wouldn't you do the same
00:48:49
i would do everything that they're doing
00:48:50
which is why it's crazy to us that we
00:48:52
are sitting here allowing it to be done
00:48:54
to us
00:48:56
that's what the crazy the crazy right
00:48:57
there's nothing there's nothing about
00:48:59
what they're doing doing is not
00:49:00
illogical right what we are doing is
00:49:03
illogical
00:49:04
because we should have a reaction to
00:49:06
these things we should have a point of
00:49:07
view it can't be tacitly sticking our
00:49:09
head in the sand
00:49:11
all right who's got a question for one
00:49:12
of the besties okay let's try and make
00:49:14
it a tight question talk up the book
00:49:16
john of course these bills are
00:49:17
incredibly wasteful but
00:49:20
you're you guys are engaged so how come
00:49:21
you're not looking through them and
00:49:22
saying this piece i like this piece is
00:49:24
messed up because it doesn't sound like
00:49:26
you've read them either
00:49:28
to be honest with you i haven't read
00:49:29
them i rely on these summaries that i
00:49:31
get from my team and to be honest with
00:49:33
you the legibility of these things are
00:49:35
incredibly low
00:49:36
and the problem is every bill that gets
00:49:38
written now
00:49:40
it's almost like it goes through a
00:49:41
process if you take a two-page bullet
00:49:43
point bill which is really what
00:49:46
senators or
00:49:47
congress people understand and approve
00:49:50
and then out comes the other end two
00:49:52
thousand pages that are
00:49:53
undigestable
00:49:55
so you're absolutely right i don't i
00:49:57
rely
00:49:58
on these summaries i have zero idea
00:50:01
what's really in there let's take
00:50:02
another question
00:50:03
yeah um i'm alex philippenko
00:50:06
you did this poll of whether the media
00:50:08
are
00:50:09
right winning
00:50:10
leaning or left-leaning and the
00:50:11
overwhelming majority said left-leaning
00:50:13
but do you think that that's in part
00:50:15
because for four years we had been fed
00:50:17
so many lies and so much misinformation
00:50:20
from
00:50:21
the extreme right
00:50:23
[Music]
00:50:25
david that question was directed to you
00:50:26
[Music]
00:50:30
i mean look i think there were plenty of
00:50:33
polls if you go back like 10 20 30 years
00:50:36
there's a media organization there's a
00:50:38
guy named brent bizzell who is doing
00:50:39
studies of media bias and if you were to
00:50:42
actually look at
00:50:44
how people in the media voted it was 90
00:50:47
plus percent democrat i mean
00:50:49
it's it's been it's been a thing for a
00:50:51
long time and now it came to a head
00:50:55
i would say
00:50:56
during the trump administration because
00:50:59
the
00:51:00
the press i think in going after trump
00:51:03
gave up something important which is
00:51:06
they gave up their objectivity i mean
00:51:09
they flatly would i mean it was you know
00:51:12
whether you want to call it trump ranger
00:51:13
syndrome or whatever i mean they now saw
00:51:15
it as their duty not to report
00:51:18
objectively both sides but they would
00:51:20
just flatly declare
00:51:23
uh things that trump were saying were
00:51:25
false you know you still see this today
00:51:28
i'm not saying that all the things he
00:51:30
said were true maybe he did say false
00:51:31
things but normally if you wanted to say
00:51:33
that one person's saying something false
00:51:35
you would get a source
00:51:37
on the other side and then you would
00:51:38
quote them
00:51:40
and then that's how you would basically
00:51:41
construct the article
00:51:43
and you had the press basically almost
00:51:46
really become unhinged
00:51:48
and i think they they kind of rip the
00:51:49
empire jersey off their backs um to in
00:51:52
order to chase after trump and i think
00:51:54
you know ultimately they got him um
00:51:56
trump was a one-term president but i
00:51:59
think that it's really contributed to
00:52:01
the polarized media environment we have
00:52:03
now any way to get that referee jersey
00:52:05
back on the press no no
00:52:09
sex
00:52:10
well how i mean they you know
00:52:13
the problem is the journalism and media
00:52:15
have changed so much the nature of press
00:52:17
has changed yeah right it's fragmenting
00:52:19
and splintering much like everything
00:52:21
else
00:52:22
there's um yeah we talk about this at
00:52:24
some of our companies i keep referring
00:52:25
to our companies because i know a lot of
00:52:26
people are here today but you know we
00:52:28
talk about the fragmentation of food
00:52:30
brands for example or the fragmentation
00:52:32
of people's kind of individual media
00:52:34
selection the same is happening in the
00:52:36
press
00:52:37
where you know you're now kind of going
00:52:39
to pick and choose the five articles you
00:52:41
want to read as opposed to buying one of
00:52:43
three newspapers and reading everything
00:52:44
in that newspaper each day
00:52:46
and i think that's fueling this which is
00:52:48
not necessarily in my opinion i've said
00:52:49
this before not necessarily a
00:52:51
constructed or designed decision of the
00:52:54
quote-unquote press but it's more a
00:52:56
phenomenon that arises from the
00:52:58
individuals that consume the media and
00:52:59
they make selections and that selection
00:53:01
bias ends up driving the clicks and the
00:53:03
votes and the counts and the prints of
00:53:05
that particular form of media and guess
00:53:07
what we end up choosing the stuff that
00:53:08
triggers us more and makes us feel some
00:53:10
stronger emotion and then it creates a
00:53:12
feedback loop and that's where this is
00:53:13
coming from and i think it's enabled by
00:53:16
the internet not necessarily bad actors
00:53:18
at platform companies but it's it's
00:53:20
inevitable in a decentralized world or a
00:53:23
platformed world that's why and also
00:53:25
part of the story is advertising went
00:53:27
away as an option as google and facebook
00:53:28
took over those markets so they went
00:53:30
subscription and how do you get
00:53:31
subscribers you pick a side
00:53:33
you can't really go down the middle i
00:53:35
want to feel something emotional when i
00:53:36
click and buy and spend 99 cents or
00:53:38
whatever like it's not i just i don't
00:53:39
want to like be bored to death
00:53:41
everything is so stimulating in this
00:53:42
digital world like i want to be
00:53:43
stimulated right so there's a really
00:53:44
interesting poll that came out today
00:53:46
that speaks to this which is um they
00:53:48
they ask you know people on the left to
00:53:50
the right what do you think the
00:53:51
country's biggest problem is um
00:53:53
on the left the number one answer was
00:53:55
trump supporters
00:53:57
you know so
00:53:59
you know now on on the right it was a
00:54:01
little bit more varied it was the
00:54:02
taliban it was china you know um
00:54:05
it was
00:54:06
what should we be most concerned about
00:54:08
objectively from each of you what do you
00:54:09
think the top three things we should be
00:54:11
concerned about i think as americans i i
00:54:13
don't think the right answer for either
00:54:15
side is like the other half of america
00:54:18
i think i think that happens because you
00:54:20
haven't varied your information diet
00:54:22
you're sitting there watching one
00:54:24
station on cable news and you're being
00:54:27
fed you're being basically being fed
00:54:29
this stuff that the others demonizing
00:54:31
the other side right and
00:54:33
you know the other side is you know is
00:54:35
being otherwise
00:54:37
all right let's take two more questions
00:54:38
nico
00:54:40
uh chamoth this goes back to a point
00:54:42
that you made about entrepreneurs not
00:54:43
being enough and bringing the government
00:54:45
i think a lot of the topics covered are
00:54:47
bringing a lot of government uh support
00:54:49
um or involvement so um from y'all's
00:54:52
perspective how do we bring in uh maybe
00:54:55
new incentives on the government side to
00:54:56
bring in
00:54:57
younger people smarter people people who
00:54:59
are going to make better change than
00:55:01
what we may be seeing today
00:55:03
i mean if you look at country countries
00:55:06
like singapore their solution was
00:55:09
to elevate the role of government to be
00:55:11
so high
00:55:12
from a societal value perspective it was
00:55:14
an incredibly respected role it was well
00:55:17
compensated and it was a thing that was
00:55:20
a real jumping off point to
00:55:22
other positions of true influence
00:55:25
here
00:55:26
we started with that idea so like you
00:55:28
know when you think about what's what
00:55:30
played out in the 1940s 50s and 60s i
00:55:33
think we had a lot of that but then the
00:55:35
problem was we had a handful of things
00:55:38
that completely perverted the cycle the
00:55:40
cherry on the cake i think was citizens
00:55:42
united that basically just tore the
00:55:44
band-aid off
00:55:46
and we are where we are where
00:55:48
it's not clear today that the most
00:55:51
intellectually curious people are in
00:55:52
government nor does it even get its fair
00:55:54
share okay so what do you do about it
00:55:58
i think that there's an element of it
00:56:00
which is you have to play the game on
00:56:01
the field which is folks like us what i
00:56:04
would encourage all of you to do is if
00:56:05
you're in a position
00:56:07
to actually accumulate political power
00:56:09
you have a responsibility to do so and
00:56:12
it is directly correlated with money
00:56:15
and so as you find com found companies
00:56:17
and you get liquidity
00:56:19
you have a responsibility to be engaged
00:56:22
because you will have a louder voice i'm
00:56:24
not saying that it's right i'm not
00:56:26
saying that it's fair but it's a game on
00:56:28
the field the more you spend the more
00:56:30
time you get with all these folks and
00:56:31
you should use that
00:56:33
beyond that
00:56:35
we have to find a way of orienting them
00:56:37
so once you get a seat at the table i
00:56:39
think it's about showing them that
00:56:41
there's these nuanced laws that are a
00:56:43
lot less sexy than they want to talk
00:56:44
about but that actually have real impact
00:56:47
sex what do you think of senators
00:56:48
getting paid like ceos would that help
00:56:50
solve the problem if people could look
00:56:51
at it and say well you paid a half
00:56:53
million dollars in that job or a million
00:56:54
dollars in that job would we draw a
00:56:56
different caliber of person
00:56:58
um i wouldn't be opposed to that i
00:57:00
wouldn't be opposed to people in
00:57:01
government that the top people making
00:57:03
more money i don't know that though that
00:57:05
that really would be the thing that
00:57:07
attracts a higher i mean i think most of
00:57:09
those people go into it for for power
00:57:12
and um
00:57:13
you know the problem isn't that
00:57:15
they're not smart i mean some of them i
00:57:17
guess aren't very smart but you also
00:57:19
have the lack of um
00:57:21
you know they since they can't make
00:57:22
money when they're in they have to
00:57:24
figure out how to make it on the way out
00:57:25
you know yeah before yeah probably
00:57:27
absolutely
00:57:28
giving them a pay increase is not
00:57:29
something i would be opposed to um i
00:57:31
mean it's something that's hard for them
00:57:32
to do because it's easy to campaign
00:57:35
against politicians who want to pay
00:57:36
themselves more but yeah i'd rather pay
00:57:38
them more salary so they're less
00:57:41
beholden to the special interests when
00:57:43
they get out of office
00:57:44
um but i don't think that by itself is
00:57:47
gonna solve the problem
00:57:49
let's take another question
00:57:51
so my question is how do we get both
00:57:53
sides to agree right we want to get back
00:57:55
to the truth and in science and
00:57:56
economics we have a way to measure the
00:57:58
truth in science design scientific
00:58:00
experiment and you measure it against
00:58:01
reality so you both sides can agree
00:58:03
what's reality in economics you either
00:58:06
make money you don't make money right
00:58:07
you can measure it against something so
00:58:09
what can we do to get back to both sides
00:58:12
agreeing on what is true i mean i think
00:58:14
the challenge is it takes more than 15
00:58:17
seconds to walk someone through the
00:58:18
experimental design and the outcome and
00:58:20
the and the action to be taken as a
00:58:23
result same with any i mean
00:58:25
i i don't know what the viewership is of
00:58:27
the economist but i'm pretty sure it's
00:58:28
been going down zero right but this is
00:58:31
why markets work better thank you for my
00:58:34
subscription
00:58:35
then politics
00:58:36
right this is why markets work better
00:58:38
than politics because freeburg in order
00:58:40
for you to pursue what you want to
00:58:41
pursue you don't have to convince a
00:58:43
majority of the country to support it
00:58:46
you just need to find one person who's
00:58:47
willing to fund it
00:58:49
you know you raise the money so
00:58:51
and and the same is true for every
00:58:52
startup and that's why progress is made
00:58:54
by startups and not a lot of progress is
00:58:56
made by this is actually why by the way
00:58:58
that's why i don't think any of us spend
00:58:59
time in politics even though we talk
00:59:01
about it all the time no but because it
00:59:02
influences our decision making i think
00:59:04
politics has done more to rekindle my
00:59:07
interest
00:59:08
in
00:59:09
all things technology and specifically
00:59:11
web 3.0 and d5 than anything else
00:59:13
because these last four years have
00:59:16
completely
00:59:17
convinced me that we need to find a very
00:59:20
decentralized way of building the future
00:59:23
it's going to be ugly though i am i i am
00:59:25
confused i mean i am convinced that the
00:59:26
next 80 years is exactly that like you
00:59:28
know in the physical world there's a
00:59:29
bunch of stuff that's going to happen in
00:59:31
the social world it's going to be
00:59:32
related to this defy decentralization
00:59:34
movement that's underway and it's
00:59:36
underweight because of what we're
00:59:36
hearing about happening in china what
00:59:38
we're talking about happening in the u.s
00:59:39
and you know i mean i don't know i
00:59:43
won't give the context i was hanging out
00:59:45
with some people the other day
00:59:47
they were they were uh working on my
00:59:49
house and they um they were telling me
00:59:50
every single one of them
00:59:52
were trading criticisms uh every single
00:59:55
one of them were trading crypto and the
00:59:56
whole conversation you're really
00:59:57
expensive on the whole the whole
01:00:00
the whole conversation was about crypto
01:00:03
and i don't trust the us dollar and
01:00:04
everything's inflating away and i i
01:00:06
think
01:00:08
politically we're not really awake to
01:00:10
the fact that this is a broad
01:00:12
meaningful social movement it's playing
01:00:15
out with crypto bubbles and nfts and
01:00:17
other nonsense but those are short-lived
01:00:18
bubbles those are little feedback loops
01:00:20
frothing is happening as the tide rises
01:00:23
um and i do think that that is going to
01:00:25
be kind of the big pushing force
01:00:27
david is why china said no more crypto
01:00:29
what are your votes that's the big
01:00:31
battle and by the way everyone's going
01:00:32
to end up saying that let me come back
01:00:33
to crypto just one point on on movement
01:00:36
so there's political movements and then
01:00:37
there's kind of uh economic movements
01:00:40
like private
01:00:41
initiative i wrote a blog post called
01:00:43
your startup as a movement in which i
01:00:44
compared
01:00:46
being i said a good start founder is an
01:00:48
evangelist for their cause it is almost
01:00:49
like leading a political movement you
01:00:51
have to go out there kind of have a
01:00:52
stump speech and evangelize people to
01:00:54
your cause which you know is ideally a
01:00:58
larger mission than just whatever you
01:01:01
know benefits your company right this is
01:01:02
why elon has been able to
01:01:05
um you know frankly why he's been able
01:01:07
to sell
01:01:08
uh so many cars without spending a dime
01:01:10
on marketing is because he creates a
01:01:12
much larger movement than just what's
01:01:14
good for tesla right but the the
01:01:17
difference i think between
01:01:19
uh sort of a private movement and a
01:01:21
political movement is this is that when
01:01:23
you're successful as the leader of a
01:01:26
company everyone imitates you so now
01:01:28
because elon's successful everyone else
01:01:30
is trying to introduce their own
01:01:31
electric cars whereas in politics
01:01:34
whenever you start a political
01:01:35
organization you know an equal and
01:01:37
opposite organization will spring up to
01:01:39
oppose you and it's just very hard to
01:01:42
get anything done maybe that's the way
01:01:44
it should be because we don't want
01:01:45
people imposing their political will on
01:01:48
us but this is why i i am a big fan of
01:01:51
startups and smart young people pursuing
01:01:54
startups and not politics what do you
01:01:56
think about decentralized crypto
01:01:58
you know finance uh in america should we
01:02:02
should we allow it should we tax it
01:02:04
we should clearly allow it because um
01:02:06
this whole crypto stack this whole uh
01:02:09
decentralized finance stack that's being
01:02:11
built could very well be the future of
01:02:13
finance and we certainly want to be
01:02:15
ahead of that curve maybe there's some
01:02:17
bubbles in here in that but i think
01:02:19
what's really interesting there's
01:02:20
certainly a lot of really smart
01:02:22
engineers coders entrepreneurs who are
01:02:24
going to that area and so i think it'd
01:02:26
be a mistake just to discount it i think
01:02:28
we want america to be on the forefront
01:02:30
of that technology wave just like every
01:02:33
other technology wave i'll make a
01:02:34
prediction my prediction is in the next
01:02:37
20 years the d5 movement will catalyze
01:02:41
a movement against the open internet
01:02:43
and it is because state actors will
01:02:45
compete with private actors for this
01:02:47
battle between centralized institutional
01:02:50
state-based control systems like i want
01:02:52
to have a know your customer if you want
01:02:54
to buy crypto in the us versus all of
01:02:56
these offshore places where i can go and
01:02:57
sign up get a bunch of money and trade
01:02:59
forever and never pay the irs a cent and
01:03:01
live my life in the ether and the open
01:03:04
internet will start to get threatened
01:03:06
we've seen this in the past where proxy
01:03:08
servers and dns servers got you know
01:03:10
requests from the doj and take down
01:03:12
notices and if that starts to happen
01:03:14
where all the servers and all the fiber
01:03:16
lines that are running in and out of the
01:03:17
us and elsewhere
01:03:18
start to get kind of tackled like china
01:03:20
has a closed internet um you could start
01:03:22
to see this become a really ugly battle
01:03:24
that starts to play out and i think
01:03:26
we're not too far i mean i don't know if
01:03:28
you guys agree but i think the open
01:03:29
internet is kind of going to be the
01:03:30
great battleground to resolve this well
01:03:33
the original battle was over information
01:03:35
and now it's over money and the dollar
01:03:37
well i think there's a really
01:03:38
interesting point there which is you
01:03:39
know i remember the late 90s early 2000s
01:03:42
where the big technology investing wave
01:03:44
was all about connecting people and
01:03:47
goods into seamless global networks and
01:03:50
that's where all the investment went
01:03:52
today and and behind that was sort of
01:03:54
this utopian idea that the internet was
01:03:56
going to break down barriers and
01:03:58
tribalism and remove geographic borders
01:04:00
and create a single connected world well
01:04:03
what what exactly is the bet on crypto
01:04:06
today it's a bet
01:04:07
that
01:04:08
fiat currencies are going to collapse
01:04:10
and deteriorate be undermined by money
01:04:13
printing the u.s dollar will stop being
01:04:14
the world's reserve currency most likely
01:04:17
that individuals need to be protected
01:04:19
against the rise of the authoritarian
01:04:21
state these are the big themes of crypto
01:04:24
and if you think of major technology
01:04:26
investing waves as essentially a
01:04:27
prediction market on what smart people
01:04:30
think the future is going to look like
01:04:31
it's pretty scary that we're going from
01:04:33
a utopian
01:04:34
technology investing wave to a very
01:04:36
dystopian technology investor destroys
01:04:38
capitalism
01:04:40
you know if you think about what
01:04:41
capitalism is it's not just a return on
01:04:43
investment but it's the tonnage of
01:04:45
dollars
01:04:46
right so anyone who's a big investor
01:04:48
here
01:04:49
um i'll pick out jan because he's done
01:04:50
an incredible job
01:04:52
you know you're putting more and more
01:04:54
dollars in for more and more dollars out
01:04:56
that's the pressure brad you know these
01:04:58
guys are under enormous pressure to get
01:05:00
tonnage of dollars through the system in
01:05:02
a productive way and so you know these
01:05:04
guys are at the forefront um
01:05:07
but when you look at you know most of
01:05:09
the projects on solana they're seeded
01:05:11
with a few million dollars and these are
01:05:13
60 80 billion dollar market cap projects
01:05:17
um and so i don't know how
01:05:19
capitalism survives in that world number
01:05:22
one number two governance goes
01:05:24
completely out the window because you're
01:05:25
essentially replacing
01:05:27
um a set of
01:05:29
norms that we've all agreed to about
01:05:31
what a company is it's an llc or it's a
01:05:34
c corp that is incorporated with laws
01:05:37
there is recourse for you you can go to
01:05:39
these places and sue them
01:05:42
now it's a dow
01:05:43
it's a bunch of rules written in a
01:05:45
blockchain here's how it all works
01:05:47
here's how i make my hr decisions here's
01:05:49
this here's that here's the other thing
01:05:51
um and then you basically decompose
01:05:53
everything into a service where it's
01:05:55
recursive
01:05:56
you cannot build with me
01:05:58
unless you make yourself buildable to
01:06:00
others
01:06:02
okay so
01:06:05
when you add all these three things
01:06:06
together i think to me it's the most
01:06:10
incredibly positively disruptive force i
01:06:12
have seen
01:06:13
i think it will destroy wealth i frankly
01:06:16
couldn't give a [ __ ] um and i think it's
01:06:19
better for the world let's take a final
01:06:20
question
01:06:22
thanks jason um and maybe to connect
01:06:24
some of the dots
01:06:26
you know i think the
01:06:28
the power of the individual
01:06:30
perhaps
01:06:31
reflected in crypto has never been
01:06:32
greater relative to the power of
01:06:34
government
01:06:35
right thomas friedman talked about super
01:06:37
empowered individuals 20 years ago
01:06:39
um
01:06:41
whether you're a terrorist or whether
01:06:42
you're a capitalist the power of the
01:06:44
individual is is is
01:06:47
never been greater
01:06:49
the four of you started a movement
01:06:51
earlier this year
01:06:53
around
01:06:54
what was going on in california
01:06:56
right a lot of people got excited about
01:06:59
the recall about what might come next
01:07:02
i think where we fail as entrepreneurs
01:07:05
where we fail as allocators
01:07:08
is
01:07:08
we had no strategic plan for california
01:07:13
we have no strategic alternative plan
01:07:15
for america
01:07:17
the parties have platforms
01:07:20
why don't we put together a strategic
01:07:23
plan for this state a strategic plan for
01:07:26
the country that brings in these folks
01:07:29
the production board is a strategic plan
01:07:32
for winning world war ii
01:07:35
right and so to chamas point that it's
01:07:38
incumbent upon us to get involved i
01:07:40
think it's incumbent upon us to step up
01:07:42
what it means to be involved
01:07:45
it's not hire a lobbyist in dc it's not
01:07:48
you know
01:07:49
just show up and vote
01:07:51
but i actually think that the voice that
01:07:53
you have carries a lot of responsibility
01:07:56
and i think that i would have liked to
01:07:58
have seen the all-in step up and do
01:08:00
something to catalyze a strategic plan
01:08:03
for california right not necessarily
01:08:05
endorse a candidate but let a candidate
01:08:07
stand on top of that strategic plan if
01:08:09
we really think about
01:08:10
decentralized right
01:08:14
i'll let you wrong i'm really honest
01:08:15
with you why didn't you run for governor
01:08:17
you're supposed to run for governor yeah
01:08:19
you [ __ ] it up we don't we don't have
01:08:21
as four people our act together
01:08:24
we are
01:08:25
still learning
01:08:27
because we
01:08:28
are like anybody else in a startup you
01:08:30
stumbled into some success there's about
01:08:31
a million people that will listen watch
01:08:34
consume this a week
01:08:36
and
01:08:37
all the polling or all of the data that
01:08:39
you pull it's like new york san
01:08:40
francisco dc
01:08:42
we don't internalize that and use it for
01:08:44
any strategic intent they're still if i
01:08:47
could just to be honest with you they're
01:08:48
still infighting bitching complaining
01:08:51
you know all kinds of [ __ ] nonsense
01:08:53
where if you saw the inside of it you'd
01:08:54
be like hey [ __ ] wake the [ __ ] up
01:08:57
get a plan together and act we don't
01:08:59
have that brad
01:09:00
and we disagree on a lot
01:09:02
that's okay
01:09:03
but what we but we we can't get we can't
01:09:06
get away from ourselves we are learning
01:09:08
how to do that
01:09:09
um and we've had a bunch of instances
01:09:11
where we've had to come together and say
01:09:12
hey our friendship is the most important
01:09:15
so let's [ __ ] sort this out and we've
01:09:16
always been able to sort it out we're
01:09:20
going to get pushed to what every other
01:09:22
you know startup founder story gets
01:09:24
pushed to which is now what
01:09:26
are we just going to sit here babylon
01:09:29
for another [ __ ] 3-4 years through a
01:09:30
pandemic and you know maybe you get to 2
01:09:33
million views 3 million views maybe
01:09:34
spotify gives you a deal and you can
01:09:36
make 10 20 million bucks a year who the
01:09:38
[ __ ] cares
01:09:40
so you're right we have a responsibility
01:09:42
to figure out
01:09:44
if we are four reasonable voices
01:09:47
in the sea
01:09:48
and people are attracted to those voices
01:09:50
what do we use it for
01:09:52
and we've talked about it but we haven't
01:09:54
put
01:09:55
pen to paper and finalized
01:09:57
by the way we
01:09:58
spent about 90 minutes a week on this
01:10:00
podcast and then
01:10:04
i also think we've also tried to
01:10:06
experiment a little bit david and i
01:10:08
collaborated on getting chessa boudin
01:10:11
recalled but in different ways david
01:10:13
sacks david sacks literally helped them
01:10:16
start a recall chesabooting campaign
01:10:19
gary tan who listens to the pod started
01:10:21
his own with democrats and then i
01:10:24
tweeted anybody want to donate for an
01:10:26
investigative journalist to cover
01:10:28
chester boone's office because we
01:10:29
couldn't find anybody covering it
01:10:31
60 000 showed up for that gofundme page
01:10:34
and we just gave it to a journalist who
01:10:36
started this week and she's reported
01:10:38
in the first 10 days on three different
01:10:40
like
01:10:41
tragic cases in san francisco that have
01:10:43
not been followed up on by the dea's
01:10:45
office so that was just a little you
01:10:47
know example of dipping our toes and
01:10:49
obviously chamath
01:10:50
you know being uh pushed to run for
01:10:52
governor caught fire like we thought
01:10:55
that was a joke it was literally
01:10:56
somebody who listens to the pod put the
01:10:58
website up he tweeted as a joke and then
01:11:00
all of a sudden it's on cnbc but the
01:11:03
best thing has been the feedback we've
01:11:04
gotten from people like you brad and
01:11:05
everybody in the audience bill gurley a
01:11:07
lot of other people here and uh we have
01:11:09
thought about hey what do we use this
01:11:11
platform for in terms of making change
01:11:13
like that and i think that that'll be
01:11:14
your tool it's the right question and
01:11:15
the right challenge brad it is
01:11:17
appreciate it i appreciate it
01:11:18
all right david we should let everybody
01:11:20
get to pizza i want to say thanks to the
01:11:21
besties to jay cal jamal sacks
01:11:32
yeah and um
01:11:34
just thanks for listening to the show
01:11:35
thanks to friedberg if um you want to
01:11:37
make things truly uncomfortable uh david
01:11:39
loves to give a long embrace a nice hug
01:11:42
tell him come on you're his favorite
01:11:44
family
01:11:45
this [ __ ]
01:11:47
he there's another friend who shall not
01:11:48
be named
01:11:50
who is a side hugger nobody likes us who
01:11:53
likes a side hugger anybody side hugging
01:11:55
you want to get the full frontal hug
01:11:56
when you full frontal hog with sacks
01:11:58
give it to him but i had to force him
01:12:00
today because he comes into you like
01:12:01
stand up i'll show you he comes in like
01:12:03
this
01:12:04
and then he does this the hip hug like
01:12:06
he does he does kind of to him yeah it's
01:12:07
called asparagus so nice to see you
01:12:10
it's called that's burgers
01:12:12
looks like he's going to a night at the
01:12:14
roxbury absolutely
01:12:23
i mean you look horrible thank you thank
01:12:26
you really [ __ ] horrible okay i
01:12:28
appreciate it is that your fault
01:12:30
here we go all right let's wrap it up
01:12:32
all right uh well this has been the
01:12:34
all-in podcast and enjoy your time at
01:12:36
the
01:12:41
[Music]
01:12:49
the conference and they've just gone
01:12:50
crazy
01:12:54
[Music]
