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