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E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more

July 23, 2021 / 01:35:52

This episode features discussions on COVID-19, vaccination policies, and the impact of technology on society. Guests include David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sacks.

The conversation starts with a light-hearted challenge involving donations to charity based on correct answers about personal details. The hosts then transition to discussing the current state of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., with David Friedberg highlighting the increase in cases and potential deaths among unvaccinated individuals.

David Sacks shares his views on public policy versus personal behavior regarding vaccinations, emphasizing the importance of individual choice while recognizing the risks involved. Chamath Palihapitiya adds to the discussion by stressing the need for public health considerations in light of the pandemic.

The episode also touches on the role of technology in addressing health crises, particularly with the announcement of DeepMind's protein structure database, which could revolutionize drug development and disease prevention.

Finally, the hosts reflect on the entrepreneurial spirit in the tech industry, discussing the balance between personal freedom and societal responsibility, while encouraging listeners to embrace opportunities for success.

TLDR

The episode discusses COVID-19, vaccination policies, and the impact of technology on health and entrepreneurship.

Episode

1:35:52
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sacks i am gonna give you a thousand dollars each to the charity of your choice for
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every correct answer [ __ ] it ten thousand but you have to answer you have to answer in real time and you
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can't [ __ ] around okay no stalling this is this is to any charity chooses included tucker
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carlson 2024 okay you have to give the answers right away you cannot [ __ ] think
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about this here we go three two one first middle and last name of your children and their birthdays go
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um stopping for time already no you're already stuck okay go dude oh you can beat these out nick go ahead go
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so is uh january no year what's the oh uh 2008 [Music] uh is uh october um uh 2010
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and then little guy little man first name little yeah you're trying to stop me with the little guy
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little man uh he was born october of uh 2016. all right that was a struggle i got it i got it
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there he got that that's all that matters is he got there it is so you're gonna give that you're
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gonna give ten grand yeah ten grand each two all right so it's 30 grand to tucker carlson for president desantis
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2024 i said charity [ __ ] [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to your favorite podcast the all
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podcast where we talk about the economy technology politics and well basically anything
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that's in the news with us today again the queen of quinoa himself david friedberg how are you doing david
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i'm hanging in there today all right people are looking for the dog where's the dog monty
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he's sitting here on the floor monty come here come on come here come on monty all right and
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from a random palace somewhere in the world the dictator himself chamoth polly hoppity how you doing see
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uh i'm doing great you know i i got another dog uh while you were in italy uh i went to
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um the breeder that i got aki from and uh she had a three-year-old that was not really you know ever gonna
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become a breeding dog or whatever so i adopted the three-year-old he has a parasite so he's been pooing
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everywhere everywhere that's great information for the call over all over the castle
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all over the castle fantastic liquid poop by the way uh but we finally diagnosed it today and he's going to the
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to the vet um to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body
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uh okay thank you for that information and i don't know nobody cares you no nobody cares how you were doing i
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thought you were just going to say great i didn't know we were going to go straight to diarrhea we got a new dog
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too you did and it's also it's been kind of a disaster the kids were like dad we
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found this like i think you know golden that is really calm you know like she's just super low
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energy and calms like perfect for us i'm like i don't know i think that's just like the puppy is kind of asleep
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you know like it's gonna wake up they're like no no no this is like a special dog it's
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like really well behaved whatever so anyway we get it sure enough like a week later the puppy
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wakes up and she's eating everything in the house destroying everything it spit yeah so now we're wait is that
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dog number two or three for you it's dog two with the dog one was a rescue dog who's great
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so dog number two is now getting trained all right david sax is with us of course the rain
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man himself and in related dog stories i put all the girls to bed and then i hear screaming i get up i run outside
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literally the new bulldog who's nine months old maximus went on you know one of his running fits
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one of my daughters falls out of bed gets like a bruise on her like lower back and she's wailing the
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other daughter feels terrible about it and then the dog decides that he is going to
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projectile vomit everywhere all at the same time you guys have had these moments where
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like it's just completely utter chaos it's chaos it's just chaos it's cat dogs plus kids equals
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chaos uh chaos so but get would any of us have it any other way i love the combo of dogs and kids
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it's just the best it's pretty gross dogs are amazing especially when you bring in a
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new dog or a puppy into the house it's chaos but it's a really beautiful chaos well you know what i think also is
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like think about how overrated everything in life is people like oh my god this place
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with the pasta in italy it's the greatest life-changing thing and all this movie was incredible it's the best
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movie ever made and it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever it's great or
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whatever but i think kids and dogs are underrated universally have as many kids as you can
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possibly biologically have and can economically afford as much one opinion and uh the more dogs the
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better i love dogs yeah all right uh i think we should start with the cova cases
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because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions touching on people's freedoms and it's
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hard to know where to start here but i think facts are always a good place to start
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here in the united states we had gotten covert cases you know to that 12 000 a day
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average it was pretty amazing and it looked like it was gonna go straight down smooth sailing um and we had had deaths
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down at around uh i saw some seven day averages where we were at 150 200. now the weekends are kind of weird um in
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terms of reporting but the seven day average today is at 248 in other words it's been flat
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for a month when you do this on this is according to the new york times statistics and google
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you can search for google and you'll find these they have some great data that they'll just put right in the
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search result however cases have gone from this 12 15 k a day average soaring in just 30 days to 60
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2000 a day and a 7 day average of 40 000 so we're basically tripled the number of
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cases cases trail traditionally debts by something in the neighborhood of 10 days
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uh i think i'm correct friedberg so what do you think is actually going to happen here we're
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going to we're going to get up to 10 100 000 200 000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths
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from the people who are not vaccinated yeah you know the current logic on this is that there
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will be um because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even
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more infectious variant of covid the people that are not vaccinated are um starting to get it at a higher
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rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from so um yeah we will see deaths climb
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and i think like we talked about last time we're starting to see even gavin did an interview
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yesterday in california talking about how you know there it's on the table that we may go back to certain
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restrictions uh behavioral restrictions mass mandates etc so there's going to be a set of
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reactions and i think as we talked about last time we saw the market start to react to the potential of that
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on monday and then very interestingly kind of reverse course on tuesday and everything
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came back when everyone was freaked out on monday after they saw the weekend's data which
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showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the u.s but i think the conventional wisdom is
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not that many people are going to die therefore we're not going to see you know um uh political leaders
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uh force restrictions that are kind of uh going to damage the economy and we're going to start to walk what i
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think israel is calling the golden line which is balancing the economy with the the health of the citizenry so
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um so you know we'll we'll see uh it's going to come down to policy but i think from a death perspective there will
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absolutely be a rise in depths now as unvaccinated people are the gonna be the bulk of those deaths and
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and this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated well and then sacks this becomes now a
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great raw shock test of what do you see uh in this data and in this moment because
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it's a pandemic as many people are saying now i think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase it's a
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pandemic of the unvaccinated so people have chosen to opt in to this pandemic and then a
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group of us have chosen to not be part of it you were part of it even as a vaccinated person but
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you're feeling great you're back to a hundred percent so what do you think should happen in
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terms of closings or shutdowns or mass mandates what's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated
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well i think we need to differentiate between public policy and private behavior so you know
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after last week's episode where i said you know delta variants real there's going to be huge spike in cases
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um unfortunately i thought we had this thing whipped you know a few weeks ago now i think the
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data is showing something different you know everyone there's a lot of commenters saying saks you've turned
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you've been blue pilled no it's you know i i think there's a difference between acknowledging what's
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going on and then having the the policy conversation around it um i think that the difference now from last year i mean
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there's a couple of things one is that we do have vaccines so i think for most people getting vaccinated will take
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the worst risks off the table the other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work
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and so lockdowns don't work if you know if they ever did they they they they we now know looking at
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from what different states did last year that they don't make a difference there's no reason to go back to that
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policy but also i mean i would even say on mass it should be wait do we know that i mean is that i think
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so are we sure of that yeah i think so because um the thing that the government planners never take
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into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions
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so in florida they didn't have mandates but people who are at risk took you know extreme precautions they would
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either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high quality mask by contrast
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in california we had the most severe lockdowns but they were never really feasible so there's 10 pages of
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exceptions people didn't really abide by them and then on top of it you know you have
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all these mass mandates but if somebody wears like a sock loosely affixed to their face does that really
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protect them you know so you know people if they're if they're not interested in complying with these
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mandates they do it in a half-hearted way i'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place
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um so the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their
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response is going to be we know now so much more about the risks that we all face
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uh than we did a year ago um and so just let private citizens decide i mean i'd even say on va on
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vaccines i mean look i'm pro-vax i don't really understand where the anti-vaxx people are coming
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from but i'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated
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you know on this show who don't want to get vaccinated you know if they don't want to send those doses
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to the developing world where they're desperate for them let me ask you trump do you do you agree with sax's
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position that listens citizens are just going to have to make their own decision
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here leave everything open and let's not have the economy collapse again and people people are
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smart enough to make their own decision and is this framing of this is a pandemic of
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the unvaccinated the correct framing wow i'm really of two minds there's there's the part of me that says that
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um you have to give people the right to make their own decision the problem is that
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in this specific case there's so much transmissibility and um as a result of that how this thing
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can mutate that i think that public health has to take a priority over any individual individual's rights
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in in this very specific narrow narrow case because the delta variant is so transmission
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transmissible people are going to have to lose some freedoms is one of those showing a vaccine card
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when you go to an arena you wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops to
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be unvaccinated as an example i mean and and the reason is because the longer you allow
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this thing to float around in the petri dish of the unvaccinated you're increasing everybody's risk and
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this is where i think individual freedoms as long as there's a trample on collective freedom then i think
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live and let live but i think on this specific issue uh i think that it's it's it's
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unconscionable to be in a situation where um we are fighting basically a time function
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where at a certain amount of time you're going to have a variant that that is you know basically will
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overcome all the vaccines we have will uh kill enormous numbers of people including the vaccinated will literally
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shut the economy down and that's a probabilistic event now and i don't like the fact that i'm
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susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for medical or religious
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reasons they're just watching fox news and just spouting off i agree that we're at risk there but
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we're also at risk from accident vaccinated people in the rest of the world so delta variant came from india the lambda
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variant i think the wrong came from peru i mean the fact that matter is unvaccinated people everywhere
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are a potential petri dish for the virus so i'd rather i mean this is why we need to send those
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unused doses that by the way are at risk of expiring we now i mean there was a tweet about
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this recently there's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the u.s that are going to waste right now
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we should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated specifically to mexico and
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canada and canada's i think this uh month going to even though we got off to a massive head
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start going to uh eclipse us in terms of the percentage of accident let me ask it
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more pointedly should a t should teachers be public school teachers be forced to be
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vaccinated should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation airplanes or you
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know take buses you know long-haul buses uh long-haul trains uh and then third should you be forced to show a vaccine
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card to get on to go to sporting events or concerts let's go through those three
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so your personal freedom ends you're going to be forced if you want to go to group
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behaviors if you want to participate in a public construct if you want to consume a public resource
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or if you want to provide a publicly funded good then it's the broader public's rights
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that um are superior to your individual rights otherwise work at a charter school where
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it's not required watch the [ __ ] concert from home or drive your car use a bicycle or take an
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uber the end sounds what do you think and then freeburg so i i understand that argument i would
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differentiate between public and private requirements because i i don't like the
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idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm um so
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what you might said you could stay home or you could take your bicycle well sure
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so is that reasonable that you don't get to go to a warriors game because you're
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unvaccinated yeah i think you know the warrior stadium is is privately owned the team is private
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so i think that i think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules
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for the benefit of their employees and what about airlines because that is you know a gay it's
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there's a limited number of them yeah i think so airlines should be able to force it now what about school
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teachers they can't force it but they can set the requirements for you to board their planes
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you know okay now what about public schools should if let's do teachers and students should
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teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in because you said if they don't come to work in the fall
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on a couple episodes back you're fired well why wouldn't they want to get a vaccine the whole debate with the
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teachers unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines
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which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many so i don't think that's a serious issue
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now requiring the kids to get vaccinated is um that that would be the real policy
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question and um well let's tackle both should teachers be forced to get the vaccine yes or no
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you just kind of brushed over yeah you force it for no i mean i think it's important to just
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to just you know pinpoint this like forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to
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you know work at the school i just want to highlight the precedent it sets right
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which is um you know you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in their
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arm if someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot does that mean then that they
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you know should lose their job as a public servant well no i mean no i'm i'm saying that i i look i i i said it's not
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a big deal but like if there's one or two teachers that say you know what it is a big deal to me i have a different i
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have a set of reasons why i don't want to get shot i i think those teachers that's an
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assumption of risk i mean if they've decided they're going to assume the risk then
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you know don't come crying to us when they get sick well the argument is that was your choice
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the vector of exposure right that they could have petri dishes they could be the vector that gets kids
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sick in all of these situations there's an always a very um obvious and justifiable exemption for religious
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and medical reasons to not be vaccinated not just for this but for anything else
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so i struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a [ __ ] clue about
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science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate
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for them where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves
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they probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors but on this one specific issue
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they narrowly say you know what i'm an expert enough because i'm watching this television show i've made a decision
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that to me makes no sense uh yeah look i i actually agree with you i'm in the camp
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of that everybody barring some you know um highly specific medical condition that renders you ineligible should be
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getting vaccinated so i agree with you about what the right answer is but i do think that when it
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comes to government it's it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to
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government to force people to engage in you know behavior they don't want to engage in can you i think that's a real
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question private organizations are different we all agree on private organizations but we we do have to make
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some decisions on public transportation and we do have to make decisions about teachers and we're going to have to make
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decisions on students so um could you bench the teachers uh who or otherwise penalize them
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who are not vaccinated you know there are sometimes where you know a cop or a teacher is put in a you know
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not in the classroom not on the beat for whatever reasons uh sometimes disciplinary but for other
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reasons could you just say listen if you're not gonna get vaccinated you're going to not be in the classroom
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you're not gonna you'll be a remote teacher and we're just gonna create two classes here
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i don't i don't think i don't i don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get vaccinated but
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but i um look i think the virus is everywhere now it's just endemic and so to single out like one particular
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group and saying you're going to lose your opinion so you're saying teachers should not be forced
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i'm saying that i mean if they work in a private school the private school could
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definitely require it public only now we all agree on private you're saying i think it's
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i think it's a really complicated question because i think there are clear public health benefits to everyone
00:20:39
getting vaccinated but i also don't really like empowering government to force you
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because look it's like everything else the government may be right in this particular
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case but what else is it going to do with that power and you know i don't like giving government
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that power so look it's a complicated question i don't you know it's not um i would i'd probably err on
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the side of not letting government force people to do it but but look i i think it's a close call i do think it's
00:21:04
a close call chamoth forced a teacher cfa accident or not yes and the reason is because these kids
00:21:13
are already being left behind even when school is functioning normally and you can see it in the test scores
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you can see it in our readiness you can see it in our ability to actually do the jobs that are required
00:21:29
we are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic and now you introduce a reason for folks
00:21:36
to basically check out and not appear i what do you guys guess how how many years were lost in these 15
00:21:44
months when kids were at home i would say not 15 months no it's more two years two and a half years three years
00:21:54
depending on what grade they are what did did your kids miss graduation did they miss senior prom did they miss
00:22:00
their sats i mean what did they miss in terms of yeah i mean chamoth has a good point which is
00:22:06
that if that that when government is the employer requiring it on their employees because
00:22:13
it leads to better outcomes for that institution that is a little different than government just mandating
00:22:20
that you jason calcano's private citizen have to go get a shot in your arm right i mean so there
00:22:26
is a slight difference there like military for instance right the military probably wants to vaccinate
00:22:31
everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation they're not like you know incapacitated
00:22:38
by an outbreak of covet right so i can i i think there you know we're getting into shades of gray here from a
00:22:45
public policy perspective you know i i don't want uh teachers missing school because
00:22:51
you know for weeks at a time because they didn't do the obvious thing getting the code vaccine
00:22:56
so look i i think there are some really good poly policy arguments there but i think again
00:23:01
the the one place where i'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said listen
00:23:06
you private citizen not an employee of the government has to go get vaccinated um as much as i
00:23:12
would like everyone to to to get vaccinated i don't want to give government that kind of power
00:23:16
president biden could legally require military members to get vaccinated but so far he has declined
00:23:22
to do so july 9th new york times friedberg where do you stand on this chamat says
00:23:29
he's all in your teacher you get vaccinated at the end saks is kind of close but is a little
00:23:35
concerned what do you say freeburg i mean another way to frame it is that there's a new qualification
00:23:41
for a job like you know there's qualification to be in the military you have to have certain physical
00:23:46
capabilities jason i don't know if you would qualify um i don't think i would i don't think i
00:23:52
can do like for for totally different reasons your inability to fight or throw a punch
00:23:57
would be no maybe j cal could eat the enemy trust me i would be great in the military i'm going to be here he'd be
00:24:05
like clemenza he'd be cooking the meatballs or something private joker private a donut there's the i think the reason
00:24:16
their sensitivity to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs and then you're telling them that in order to
00:24:22
keep your job you have to go get a vaccine now if we were to have zero teachers today
00:24:27
and we were starting a public school system from scratch and you said here's one of the qualifying criteria to be a
00:24:33
school teacher you have to have an education degree you have to have maybe a master's degree
00:24:37
in education you have to have appropriate qualifications and training and certification
00:24:40
oh and by the way you also have to have a vaccine if that becomes a criteria i think people find it less offensive
00:24:47
it's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go
00:24:52
get a shot in order to keep your job um and that's the complicating thing that i
00:24:57
think people are trying to wade through i don't think i don't think that if you were to say like look it's obvious that
00:25:02
the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do push-ups or whatever the the
00:25:06
criteria might be but if you impose that on people that were already in the military and then
00:25:10
you're going to kick a bunch of them out people would be up in arms about it if you had a bmi
00:25:15
requirement yeah and that's the concern i think that arises with you know imposing these kind of um
00:25:21
you know personal body uh criteria upon you know specific jobs when people are already employed in that job
00:25:29
um and it's there's there's absolutely no answer right like if you're gonna do it you're gonna have
00:25:35
incredible backlash and trouble and pain um and if you were to and we're not in a
00:25:39
circumstance where we can build these organizations and these institutions from scratch
00:25:42
look there's a lot of social issues where you know particularly on the liberal side people do not want the government
00:25:51
uh prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures right well um you know i'd say it's even more
00:25:58
invasive you're talking about people transitioning or you know or the issue of abortion you
00:26:02
know very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not
00:26:06
have the right to legislate what happens with what's happening what happens with my body right well
00:26:13
force it you know giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is you know
00:26:19
that is that is invasive and um so i do think there are like rights implications to that but i want to be
00:26:26
very clear if you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole
00:26:34
if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share then you need to sign up for the compact
00:26:45
that we all sign up for that's that's my over arching argument the the thing with abortion where i'm on
00:26:51
the other side of the issue just to be very clear is like it is a woman's body i don't think i have any right to
00:26:59
dictate what she does i don't understand what she goes through i don't understand
00:27:04
what situation she's in i don't think i have the judgment to do that it should and it doesn't have an
00:27:09
impact on the collective and her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a
00:27:17
probabilistic chance that i may die it does not right but when you choose to not get
00:27:23
vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me or mutate yeah i'm not saying that i
00:27:30
have a say but i do think i should have a say if you're then all of a sudden going to
00:27:34
consume the same resources that i consume where i've signed up to that compact for
00:27:38
public health based on all this here's where i come to what if we gave teachers an off-ramp
00:27:43
listen if you um you you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom if not you're going to get a one-year
00:27:48
buyout or whatever one month or two months for every year of service so if you've been with us for 20 years
00:27:54
you're gonna get 20 months of pay and or you could say if the virus is spreading at under this
00:28:00
rate in other words you know we we've got under one percent of the population infected or whatever
00:28:06
the the criteria is then you can come to work in the classroom but if this thing
00:28:09
is spreading you're out and that's it and there's an off-ramp here to to david's point unless there's an
00:28:16
arrow like look i i do think you can be a conscientious objector for legitimate reasons again like we we have
00:28:22
these very specific definitions for religious or for health specific reasons that you
00:28:26
ch that you don't get vaccinated i think those should be respected it's not that cohort of people we're talking
00:28:32
about it's everybody else that right now wants to not think for themselves and as a result put everybody else and
00:28:40
themselves in danger yeah i i think the most compelling part of your argument shamath
00:28:45
is that where is the health externality right that that that each person's decision
00:28:52
does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting you know multiplicative contagious
00:28:59
particles and this is why i was in favor of a mass mandate at the beginning of the pandemic is
00:29:04
it's not just an individual decision your your choice actually does affect whether
00:29:09
other people get sick so you know this is why i i do think it also wasn't very expensive correct sacks
00:29:15
i mean was your other point yes exactly potentially high benefit for very low cost
00:29:21
i think we're but but but the thing that maybe i didn't necessarily take into consideration is you know people
00:29:28
complied in such a half-hearted way i mean i do think the mass makes a difference
00:29:32
if it's an n95 quality mask that you put on correctly right right but when people just strap a
00:29:38
sock to their face it's loosely fitting and they don't give a [ __ ] i mean does
00:29:41
that really make a difference i mean i'm very skeptical let me ask you a question
00:29:45
sax and then we'll go to freeburg and then we'll flip to the next topic if we were on our third pandemic or
00:29:51
let's god forbid a second pandemic starts a totally different one you know ebola type or something and
00:29:57
we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a higher rate does your calculus change tax because
00:30:03
sure because because the the uh the downsides that the cost of you know not not imposing those more
00:30:12
restrictive regulations goes up considerably i mean definitely my thinking today is highly
00:30:17
influenced by the fact that that if you're vaccinated you're call it 95 likely to be taking the most
00:30:26
deadly or serious risks off the table and so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated
00:30:32
are essentially assuming the risk you know it's like it's like smoking in a way where when i made the movie thing for
00:30:37
smoking christopher buckley told me you know he's the author of the book and he said
00:30:41
look there's something uniquely american about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly
00:30:47
harmful right the main character and thank you for smoking as a spokesman for big tobacco
00:30:52
and he's engaging in political spin but his argument is look people have the right to engage in this
00:30:57
behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them maybe america is the only place in the world
00:31:02
where people buy into arguments like that but i do um i you know look that is that is um that's
00:31:08
freedom is letting people do stupid things you know and um and so we have to weigh
00:31:14
the benefits of of freedom against the against the costs and by the way sorry can i just say
00:31:20
something um smoking is a perfect example because as you know there is now um a non-trivial amount of
00:31:29
law around the liability related to individuals that enabled um secondhand smoke both the smoker
00:31:37
but also other things condo boards other places where all of a sudden you didn't choose to [ __ ] have you
00:31:43
know tara and nicotine my dad worked in bars where people it was a cloud of smoke for
00:31:49
30 years 30 years right they told him he was essentially a smoker it's not it's not just the detrimental activity at the
00:31:55
time remember we've socialized the cost of treatment for people uh through public health
00:32:02
systems and because of that it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost
00:32:08
for everyone that's now got to pay the price but the government is so omnipresent all of our lives there's
00:32:13
always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make and to toma's point i mean everybody
00:32:19
uses government services to some degree so that alone can't be the reason i i do
00:32:23
agree that the no no but david what about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an
00:32:29
hour like it's illegal that's illegal but but i think i think your mother is right that the
00:32:33
smoking example is a good one because we do regulate secondhand smoke because there's an externality there's a health
00:32:39
externality to everybody else if you smoke in a public place and so we restrict that but
00:32:44
we don't make smoking illegal we don't stop you from doing it in your own homes or in private places and the argument is
00:32:50
listen if you want to do something that's harmful primarily to you that's your choice as
00:32:56
an american you know and i know people a lot of people don't like that actually this is
00:33:00
a this i posted a tweet that i got just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it
00:33:06
should be censored just because the behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be
00:33:10
prohibited just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required right
00:33:17
it's a completely reasonable tweet yeah i thought it was a pretty inoffensive anodyne tweet
00:33:22
just reminding people that just because again something is is positive doesn't mean you force people to do it and just
00:33:29
because some behavior is harmful you don't you don't ban it i think smoking is a great example of that
00:33:35
right we let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them because freedom is a value in and of itself um for this
00:33:43
i was attacked as a selfish [ __ ] by um by this other pod and i i really like swisher and professor cold takes
00:33:53
professor what cold takes that literally made um an index of all of professor g's you
00:34:00
know takes that macy's would be incredible and amazon will lose its money and yada yada he's kind of obsessed with
00:34:05
youtube chamath prof g yeah who just got his show canceled on bloomberg but they were a little kara
00:34:11
swisher was called sacks an [ __ ] well triggered it was bizarre that they would get
00:34:16
so triggered by this inoffensive tweet but i think what you see here is an example of the way
00:34:21
that the woke mind thinks which is well hold on i don't think kara's woke are you kidding me she's like that she's
00:34:28
like the madame du farger the woke revolution she's always was this character in the french
00:34:36
revolution who admit the names of the next person to be guillotined and uh she was you know one of the the the
00:34:43
leaders of the sans q laws no look cara is constantly ginning up the mob to try and you know guillotine
00:34:48
some no non-woke person yeah i don't think that that's true that's true i think she's kind of moderate you're
00:34:54
trying to you're trying to curry favor with her so you don't know we're not there
00:34:57
no no she i mean she did get it right you are an [ __ ] i mean you are an [ __ ] she got that
00:35:01
she got that she's not old and failing well you are kind of old you look dope you look cool she's effectively saying
00:35:07
we're all [ __ ] because i think all of us have talked about this you're [ __ ] i'm an [ __ ] yeah i love it
00:35:11
own it [ __ ] it i'm not what's your other choice being a whiner on the sidelines
00:35:19
what we've said on this show is that we have a moral imperative to get to get back to normal do we not
00:35:24
that is what we've said and for that she's basically saying that that is a let the meat covered position right that
00:35:32
we are basically we don't care if people get sick and die because of covet that's
00:35:35
not true you know we just have about liverpool here i think we should make people get vaccinated
00:35:43
yeah and you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated i asked you saks if there were three more variants
00:35:48
and this was an acute situation you said you would force oh look if we had if we had a variant of
00:35:54
covid that was as deadly as ebola and as transmissible as delta variant it 100 percent changes the game there's
00:36:01
no question about willing to change the government's ability to put a shotgun based on it's a benefit
00:36:07
it's a yes it's a benefit cost analysis and that's reasonable but look i give freedom
00:36:13
a lot of weight and part of my calculation is the fact that i can get vaccinated to take to
00:36:19
most likely take the most serious risks off the table so while i i am impacted to some degree by other
00:36:26
people's choices i'm much less impacted now that we have functional thinking about this i still
00:36:32
have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're using you're viewing this as a linear
00:36:36
problem this thing is transmutating and so i know but there are still billions of people
00:36:42
all over the world who are unvaccinated and we'd be better off focusing on getting them a marshall plan
00:36:48
for the vaccines all these unused doses we're wasting our breath in the united states trying to get these
00:36:53
vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people to get vaccinated did you guys see that um uh emmanuel macron of france
00:37:01
uh you know basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places going into bars
00:37:07
and cafes they basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated and you did it in a public
00:37:12
address on tv 22 million people watched it and then after he did this suddenly the vaccination signups went up
00:37:18
to like 20 000 a minute they got four million people sign up to get vaccinated i mean
00:37:25
in france what's the point of being alive and then let me throw a wet blanket on
00:37:29
uh the framing of this on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible i
00:37:37
have been to like three events over the last month or two where i was required to be vaccinated
00:37:43
and i literally just took a photo of this index card that i got from this person and sent it
00:37:47
to them which i could go make at kinko's or i could print at home it's like there's i don't my point is i
00:37:54
don't think that there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're
00:38:00
actually talking about how are you actually going to know that people going to the warriors game are
00:38:04
actually vaccinated how are you actually going to know they did it at madison's work and they
00:38:08
they literally had you pull out your id and they matched your name to your vax card and i think printing out a vax card
00:38:13
and faking it if it could be a fine could be a ten thousand dollar fine and so you would do it like anything
00:38:19
else you could you could make a bogus driver's license it's not digital right there's no
00:38:24
there's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated who's not so so much of this
00:38:29
is just this like analog paper trail thing of like here's this piece of paper that says i'm vaccinated
00:38:33
i think that you're you're never going to really close the hole on this thing now you certainly will see the sort of
00:38:38
psychological behavior that they saw in france which is you just announce the restrictions you
00:38:42
announce these rules everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up but i you know i'm not sure this
00:38:48
actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society uh over the next uh you know
00:38:54
short while i mean maybe over time we digitize all this stuff but we'll see yeah i mean the best the best case
00:38:59
scenario is that because delta is so transmissible we get to hurt immunity because all the people who didn't get
00:39:04
vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing crosses
00:39:09
that because we have 60 of adults in the united states have had one shot or more uh which is
00:39:15
why debts probably aren't going up because that's like 75 percent in people over
00:39:18
60 i think so freeburg in your estimation as our science guy with what we have like 30 million people
00:39:25
who've been infected uh that we know of you got to triple that number right because there's people
00:39:29
who we don't know and then you have 65 you have 60 percent so we got to be in the range of 70
00:39:35
have been exposed or been vaccinated so when does it kick in or are we experiencing you know um herd
00:39:42
immunity right now with these low debts um we talked about this before but there
00:39:46
are um you know there's a spectrum of infection right you're you're you you can have viral
00:39:54
replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know because you've got
00:39:59
enough antibodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus before your body even
00:40:04
you know you start to feel symptoms and there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a
00:40:10
period of time and you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation all the stuff that follows
00:40:15
and so you know in terms of how you measure this stuff it's really difficult to say that you're
00:40:22
going to stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to be to have been exposed as we've seen
00:40:29
even when you have a broad and diverse antibody pool in your body because you've been
00:40:35
exposed to a vaccine we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some
00:40:40
period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant
00:40:44
and so the rate of transmission slows the rate of severe infection goes way down and so on
00:40:51
so it's not as binary as hey we hit herd immunity and now we're done it seems this is you know as we talked
00:40:57
about earlier and as i think everyone is coming to terms with this is going to be an endemic virus and
00:41:03
that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way causing sometimes severe
00:41:08
sometimes you know modest outbreaks for likely a very long time no matter how many people get it no matter how
00:41:13
many people get vaccinated because you have different levels should we ignore it at what level
00:41:17
should we just say listen that is the steady state how many cases a day how many debts a day
00:41:22
do you think is the steady state that we should just say we just go to work and ignore it
00:41:27
i am a brutal cold-hearted libertarian on this point and i have been since we first talked about this last year
00:41:33
i've always been of the mind that we need to balance the um the the follow-on life effect
00:41:40
from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual
00:41:46
loss of life right so you can never go i i i really think this point about zeroism and this
00:41:51
term about zeroism is an important one you can never get to zero cases what is the acceptable number of cases and what
00:41:58
is the cost to keep that case load down the balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision
00:42:04
put a number on it but it's about saving lives right so like there are a certain
00:42:09
number of people whose lives are going to be ruined who are some of them will commit suicide
00:42:12
some of them won't be able to earn an income again their businesses are going to get shut down what is the economic
00:42:16
cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life versus what i'm saying is what is
00:42:21
the number we had an average of 250 deaths 250 000 case known cases a day at the peak
00:42:27
we had a peak deaths of 4 100 a day we are now at 200 people dying a day and you know 30 000
00:42:35
cases is there a number at which you say let's just focus on getting back to work
00:42:40
and is that number where we are now i'm trying to get it yeah again i wouldn't simplify it to
00:42:45
those data points what i would do again i would look at you know at what age are people dying how many life years
00:42:51
are we losing and how can we address the acute populations that are at risk and the
00:42:55
acute populations that are that are potentially going to be exposed manage those
00:42:59
populations differently than you manage the broader population that has a lower likelihood of risk
00:43:03
of death and a lower likelihood of fatality and the restrictions that you then impose to
00:43:08
you know start to manage uh the risk and the exposure to different populations gets weighed against the saving of life
00:43:14
and the loss of life in both circumstances so it's it's not easy right it's it's
00:43:18
and everyone wants to sum this whole thing up to like how many deaths a day is appropriate
00:43:21
that's not the right answer right because well you're saying how many that part of
00:43:26
it is so obvious right that and we should have known this last summer the obvious part being
00:43:31
that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's
00:43:36
the most at risk and what do we do with lockdowns we literally locked down the entire population
00:43:41
every business it was completely insane we should have focused it on protecting the most at-risk populations isolating
00:43:49
the sick or the people at greatest risk not everybody it was just insane and um i mean i can't believe we're
00:43:55
still having that conversation a year later can i uh before we move on to the next
00:44:00
topic can i read the best can i read the best best comment from sax's tweet so sax's tweet
00:44:06
just because an opinion is wrong it doesn't mean it should be censored just because the behavior is harmful
00:44:11
doesn't mean it should be prohibited and just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it
00:44:15
should be required the best response goes to distantly social rumple whose full name is at wendell shirk who said
00:44:26
this message brought to you by the generic self-serving platitude alert network we now return you to your regularly
00:44:34
scheduled episode of the bland soap opera with the pablum sisters well yeah i look
00:44:40
there there's there's an element of truth to that which is i i almost didn't tweet it because i thought
00:44:44
it was too much of a platitude but the fact that people on the other side got so
00:44:48
triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to to tweet it is they think that if you're calling for
00:44:56
any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy you're basically a selfish [ __ ] i mean it's insane i
00:45:04
mean they want to stay in this world of zero s covis restrictions forever we've got to move
00:45:09
on we're 45 minutes into covin so we got to move on but i think if this is in the influenza
00:45:15
plus or minus hundred percent zone we got to pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society
00:45:23
and you know local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks but i kind of think if this is within you
00:45:28
know 2x of our yearly deaths from you know influenza and just the normal cold i think we move forward
00:45:36
as best we can do we want to go to china cuba i think just real quick before we move away from
00:45:41
this i really want to just highlight the deep mind announcement from this morning
00:45:44
because i think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on
00:45:49
okay so this morning you know deep mind which published alpha fold and we talked about this a
00:45:55
few uh owned by google it's their ai art it's an air owned by google and they basically took
00:46:01
protein structure and uh tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of
00:46:07
uh the dna or rna that codes the amino acids that make up the protein and so again like when you have a string of
00:46:13
amino acids they combine and they fold into a wave it's really hard to predict and that's
00:46:18
the shape of the molecule that we call the protein and then it does something in the body
00:46:22
and historically we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of
00:46:28
protein which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body so this morning deep mind
00:46:34
incredibly published a database with the predicted structure of every protein in the human
00:46:40
body and in 10 other species using this this capability that they now have what does
00:46:45
it mean in english and so you know what this means is we now have a physical model of every protein that human dna
00:46:54
can make and that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does how it does it
00:47:01
and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins and how certain drugs can affect those
00:47:05
proteins and how we can alter human health by making new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of
00:47:13
those proteins in specific and targeted ways so it's an incredible data set that was
00:47:17
just published it's almost like you know releasing the rosetta stone in my opinion uh in terms of we now have
00:47:24
this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do
00:47:29
things in our body they did it for 10 other species and they said that they're going to publish
00:47:33
this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have the sort of data set around
00:47:39
for which they expect will achieve over a hundred million unique proteins in this database over the coming months
00:47:45
freely available and searchable and let me just explain and i know i'm on a monologue here so i'll win the monologue
00:47:50
it's a good one it's a good one um but let me just explain why this is relevant the delta variant what it is is that you
00:47:56
know the the the sars cov2 rna sequence is about 30 000 base pairs long 10 of those or about 3 000 base pairs
00:48:04
make up the spike protein which is the protein at the tip of the cove virus like the coronavirus that
00:48:09
gets into the cells and you know for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus
00:48:15
there's about one nucleoside mutation one of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves and we don't know
00:48:22
how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the
00:48:28
protein and so we suddenly discover empirically and you know by looking around suddenly
00:48:32
all these people are getting more infected than we're getting infected before we
00:48:36
look at the genetic code and we're like oh here's the changes that happened but we could have with this capability
00:48:41
from alpha fold predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human h2
00:48:48
receptors on the cells and getting into cells and what other changes could be made in
00:48:53
the whole genome of the sars cov2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible more deadly
00:48:59
all these sorts of factors because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by
00:49:04
changing the base pair and so this tool that was released today i think highlights that over the next
00:49:09
decade these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants
00:49:13
occurring that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally and it gives us the ability to
00:49:21
start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them uh with new drugs and new variant models
00:49:26
and new um vaccines well ahead of the oh my god we just got hit with a nuclear bomb let's
00:49:31
clean up the mess kind of in the future so it's an exciting day an exciting moment would they have been
00:49:37
released this david if it hadn't been for covid coming out do you think deepmind just pivoted their entire group
00:49:45
because they have about a thousand people i understand and by the way they pay something in the order of six or
00:49:50
seven hundred thousand a year on average and there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars
00:49:54
a year so just think about the scale of what google is spending on this you guys know that they probably sh
00:50:01
shifted a large number of people to work on this you guys because i have long deep roots
00:50:05
at google and um i will tell you that the value system of people there you know the press and the
00:50:11
public will think what they want but i think that the value system of people there drove them to realize the
00:50:17
importance of this work that they're doing with alpha fold and it is important for
00:50:20
humanity and it's important for the health broadly of people they could have kept it all inside
00:50:24
and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that and i think the importance of this
00:50:29
discovery and this capability um was uh was realized and is published for that very reason
00:50:35
there's a lot of work that deepmind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending
00:50:39
and all this stuff and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for google per year
00:50:44
based on those capabilities and then there are these things that benefit all of us and by putting this
00:50:48
out publicly it's a great good for humanity and uh you know they're they're making it
00:50:53
freely available and searchable um and so i i don't think that covid kind of instigated this because they've
00:50:58
been working on this for a very long time since before kovid and this is a very hard biological
00:51:03
problem that is key to understanding biology and how biology works that's been going on for decades
00:51:08
they've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available um and you know there will be hundreds
00:51:13
of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database i mean this is a this is a mitzvah
00:51:18
uh to society to humanity does it change the fact that google is spending uh well
00:51:23
over a billion dollars a year in deep mind and doing projects like this does this change any of your thinking about
00:51:28
breaking them up tremoth or you know how we look at big tech that's a good question no
00:51:38
we learned something very disturbing about big tech this week actually um this is quite a bombshell that jen
00:51:44
pasake dropped from the white house press briefing we got to talk about this she just sort
00:51:49
of casually mentioned that oh yeah by the way the administration is flagging posts
00:51:55
for a social media company for big tech companies to take down to remove accounts they're talking about specific
00:52:00
accounts and posts yeah and she just kind of met just casually mentions oh yeah the big tech companies are very
00:52:07
you know eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these accounts
00:52:11
accounts she even said that when one of these companies takes down an account the rest should do it too
00:52:18
implying that the white house is providing the central coordinative role in the censorship global block list yeah
00:52:27
let me let's let's take the most charitable view here i know that it's very easy to make this a left versus
00:52:32
right there censoring yada yada trump got banned but if somebody was saying this was microch this was an account
00:52:39
that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine would it not be how would the and it was
00:52:46
hitting scale you know what would be the way for the white house to inform social media
00:52:52
that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was trending
00:52:58
the white house or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position but
00:53:02
this is different this is the white house coordinating behind the scenes with big
00:53:06
tech companies well they're not behind the scenes they're saying they're doing it right here to everybody
00:53:09
correct correct the behavior was behind the scenes but pasaki just admitted it which is why it's such a bombshell look
00:53:15
even the aclu if you were president and there there was an account on facebook youtube twitter that was saying
00:53:22
there was a microchip from bill gates this is a this is a blatant violation of the
00:53:26
people's first amendment would you then tell them how would you you are allowed your the first amendment gives
00:53:31
you the right to say things that are untrue it is not the business of government to
00:53:36
declare what is true and what is false okay even even hold on even the aclu came out of retirement we
00:53:45
hadn't we haven't heard from them for the last year during any of these parts of the
00:53:49
aclu yeah we haven't heard from them during the past year during all this um activity that's been
00:53:53
going on with the counts being blocked and ghosted they finally came out of retirement to
00:53:58
say that that this is a dangerous violation of people's first amendment rights you
00:54:03
cannot have the government saying what is true and what is false and then denying people the right um
00:54:10
to express their opinions based on what the government thinks is the truth and by the way there's been a very subtle
00:54:17
change here in the language that's being used if you remember what the argument used
00:54:22
to be that we have to stop disinformation does uh now it's shifted to we have to
00:54:27
stop misinformation so those two things are very different it's kind of like that well it's kind of
00:54:31
like the difference in the term equality versus equity they sound similar but they actually mean very different
00:54:37
things so disinformation is actually a campaign of a purposeful purposeful campaign of propaganda and
00:54:44
lies usually put forward covertly so it's the fsb you're some intelligence agency putting
00:54:51
out whatever putting out disinformation usually under false accounts so in that case we can say no you can't do
00:54:58
that because you can't engage in deception around who you are right but misinformation
00:55:05
is simply information that's being put out that frankly you disagree with okay and or it could be discernibly
00:55:11
wrong wait you're you're kind of framing that work it could be you're putting out information
00:55:15
like there's a microchip in the vaccine that is explicitly known to be wrong look the the lab leak theory was
00:55:21
considered misinformation by these same people three months ago okay but let's take the specific example
00:55:25
of there's a microchip if it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine would
00:55:30
you be okay with the white house contacting social media coming saying hey you got
00:55:34
these accounts that are saying there's a microchip you might want to look into it they're
00:55:37
not saying take it down they're saying take a look into it that's not the white house's business do
00:55:41
i believe in the microchip theory no of course not it's absolutely ridiculous but it is not the business
00:55:46
okay who to ban and who to block list i think they didn't tell them to ban i think they told them to be aware of it
00:55:53
go ahead chime off i think your framing's wrong sex guys no no swasaki said that when one site takes it down they
00:55:59
should all take it down and then biden on top of it comes out and pours kerosene on the fire by saying that
00:56:06
social media sites are literally killing people well yeah by allowing by allowing this
00:56:11
misinformation so here we go let's be honest is the president of the united states using the bully pulpit
00:56:18
to call social media uh sites mass murderers by virtue of allowing people to have
00:56:24
free speech trump never used language that intemperate i don't remember him ever calling
00:56:32
this is the exact reason you you can't have a strangle hold on distribution because
00:56:39
it will get perverted and then we either have people we like or people we don't like
00:56:44
in these positions of power or people we like or people we don't like regulating
00:56:49
and it's constantly flipping and we're all just doomed and bound to get [ __ ] over
00:56:54
so back to the thing that friedberg brought up before i think alpha fold is incredible
00:57:00
i think google has been an incredible company they make money hand over fist they waste an enormous amount of money
00:57:07
and all kinds of trash so it's good that they were actually able to do something
00:57:10
useful here i generally think that companies like google and facebook and amazon unfortunately
00:57:21
do not allow the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society they're
00:57:30
just too big tremoth makes a great point which is we've got these big tech monopolies
00:57:33
who've become gatekeepers over content okay and what the administration has done and
00:57:38
their allies in congress is hang a sword of damocles over the heads of these big tech companies
00:57:44
they've appointed lina khan to be the enforcer at the ftc they've got their six bills in congress
00:57:48
right now they've held congressional hearings around taking away section 230 protection which is very economically
00:57:54
advantageous for these big tech companies so they position the sword perfectly over the heads these big
00:57:59
tech companies threatening to break them up and rein them in and then jen pasake and the white house
00:58:05
go to them and say we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with
00:58:09
this is misinformation okay that is a huge danger to free speech it's basically like the administration saying to these
00:58:16
big tech companies nice little social network you got there it'd be a real shame if anything happened to it look at
00:58:22
what's going on don't you want them broken up i do want them broken up but what i don't know
00:58:27
which is if you want them to hold the sword or do you not want them to hold the sword i actually want the sword to
00:58:31
come crashing i actually want the sword to come out swing the sword not hold it over and then use it for extortion
00:58:36
yeah that's actually a great explanation then freedom yes i'm trying to moderate here freeburg do
00:58:42
you give a [ __ ] we've talked about this spent all day on his phone he has not dialed into this puzzle i'm with you
00:58:49
guys i thought we just went over the alpha fold stuff way too fast i mean the arguing over freedom of speech is
00:58:58
happening and all of this debate freedberg at the same time that we are making incredible
00:59:03
life-changing moments for humanity two different companies went to space last week
00:59:10
with civilians and then we are basically uh defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on
00:59:19
the planet and we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would
00:59:26
save everybody's life and let us continue on and people are dunking on bezos for not reading the room i
00:59:33
don't know if you saw this freedberg but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room etc
00:59:40
progress technologically um will only arise with capital so you can assume that that progress you
00:59:48
know it's not like someone stumbled into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbles into a cave and discovered
00:59:54
alpha fold uh there are years of toiling and labs like edison did making the light bulb um edison had to
01:00:01
raise a ton of money uh to get that light bulb uh project off the ground if you guys haven't read uh
01:00:07
i'm trying to remember the biography there's uh uh wizards of something um it's got
01:00:12
wizards in the title it's a good biography of medicine and um uh you know and and i feel like
01:00:18
we're at this moment where the wizard of menlow park yeah i think that's the the wizard of oz park that's
01:00:23
right and the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at alpha fold
01:00:29
or at waymo uh or what bezos and elon are doing um is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where
01:00:38
you can fund this work you're not gonna get a bunch of kickstarters to fund a spacex like
01:00:43
project or a you know blue origin like project and so i think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these
01:00:52
businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in
01:01:00
a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the
01:01:04
ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on
01:01:08
multiple billion dollar bets and like chimoff said waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of ten of them
01:01:14
but if that one billion dollar bet works it's worth 500 billion dollars and that money continuously gets
01:01:19
reinvested and look at what google did with waymo they put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone
01:01:24
woke up and said my god self-driving is real it's possible and it kick-started an industry and i i
01:01:29
just feel like the amount of money and not to mention the fact that like these are free markets so these
01:01:34
businesses google you don't have to search on google you don't have to buy from amazon but
01:01:39
everyone benefits from searching on google everyone benefits from buying on amazon
01:01:43
and the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their
01:01:49
products and their services because they are so good and so i don't feel like these guys are
01:01:54
um screwing people over you can consider the small business model as being like you know hey maybe we shouldn't have had
01:02:01
small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point distribution was going to be
01:02:05
economically advantaged by being centralized and therefore all consumers are going to
01:02:09
benefit by centralizing is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call
01:02:14
small businesses that should remain in business forever maybe there's a way to help them
01:02:18
transition into a new business model or a new market but same with what happened with the taxi
01:02:22
industry technology will force these evolutions the capital accumulates and that capital
01:02:26
can be invested in things that we would have never imagined um on a smaller scale but go ahead show
01:02:31
up yeah no i do think sympathetic to what you were saying i do think that if you look at every
01:02:35
platform innovation that's ever happened so whether it's you know we go from no print to print
01:02:41
you know to newspapers to radio to television you've always first started with a
01:02:47
pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized monopolistic or oligopolistic
01:02:56
kind of early outcomes and either through legislation or through innovation then the pendulum swings to
01:03:02
decentralization that's typically happened right and you can look at all of these industries that's gone through
01:03:07
that so it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things
01:03:12
and everybody says the argument is well no because technology has these specific
01:03:16
features of network effects and lock-in but i think that betrays this idea that legislatively you
01:03:22
can come and just basically destroy the china and the china shop and you have to just start all over
01:03:27
so it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody
01:03:31
and obviously we want things like alpha fold to exist and we want things like waymo to exist
01:03:37
the question is how should they exist and if they come out of the goodwill of google it is just so
01:03:45
easily as likely that some other person let's say it wasn't sundar and ruth peratt but two other people who
01:03:52
didn't like it these things could have been very different forms and shapes and not
01:03:56
existed at all and i think that's the arbitrary nature of it which is not necessarily free
01:04:00
market capitalism that doesn't benefit us should we chamoth be upset that bezos is going to space and spending tens of
01:04:08
billions of dollars that he made from amazon he had a bad press conference let's just
01:04:13
be clear at the end of the day he has wanted to do this his entire life he built an incredible company
01:04:19
he was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it he's invested billions of dollars in other
01:04:26
things 10 billion dollars in climate change his ex-wife has invested you know six billion dollars
01:04:31
just last year alone in all kinds of good works so those two individuals because of
01:04:37
their success i think will generally do and have done the right thing let's not get that confused with a
01:04:43
horrendous press conference where he just was well i think you said it you know the thing that he said around uh you
01:04:52
know i just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this it sounded flippant and it didn't
01:04:59
really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip
01:05:04
from 2000 on charlie rose right so if you if you actually played those two things back side by side you'd say is
01:05:12
this the same person one was thoughtful extremely respectful the other one was now maybe he was just amped up i mean i
01:05:19
could see him and so and so he just wasn't thinking about it but you know honestly like look
01:05:28
he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say we're assuming you're coming back
01:05:32
so here are some [ __ ] talking points why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to earth
01:05:37
and let's just make sure we nail this and put our best foot forward that is where i think he probably has some
01:05:42
regrets based on how people reacted this bezos space flight was a real rorschach test
01:05:48
because he took heat from both the right and the left but the criticism was very
01:05:52
different you know the critique i heard from the right was that uh he's having some sort of mid-life
01:05:57
crisis and the rocket looked too much like a phallus okay fine whatever that the criticism from
01:06:02
the left was um it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and
01:06:09
private enterprise you could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that you know
01:06:14
why was he doing this with his own money you know if this had been a nasa flight
01:06:18
i don't think they would have had a problem with it and so you see here that even though bezos has been so much
01:06:25
more effective using his own money uh to do this that the leftist reflexively hates that uh and and and and they kept
01:06:34
saying well how dare he use this money the money could have been used on something else so much better well
01:06:40
what do you think of that argument yeah i think it's wrong in a couple of respects it basically implies
01:06:45
that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest
01:06:51
inventors and i don't think that's true you look at these social programs they want to keep doubling down on
01:06:57
they're not working you know these programs our policies towards homelessness is not failing because of
01:07:02
lack of funding there's a tremendous amount of funding in san francisco they're spending 60
01:07:06
thousand dollars per tent per year they're spending 300 000 in social services per homeless person per year
01:07:12
lack of funding is not the problem the approach is the problem we spend something like twenty five
01:07:16
thousand dollars per pull per pupil in california schools the test scores are going down
01:07:21
so you know these people who are criticizing bezos don't know what to do with the money
01:07:27
they don't know how to spend anything they're not good at executing however bezos or elon these are two of
01:07:33
our greatest inventors let them go let them go because you know they are pushing the boundaries and i do
01:07:39
believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a
01:07:44
result of what they're doing with this new space race it's also super uninformed if
01:07:48
correct me if i'm wrong here but they were saying that they they should have been doing more initiatives on
01:07:53
earth if you actually and they were kind of talking about climate change and the use
01:07:57
of these fuels to get to space and number one uh the the rocket ship fuel my understanding in these
01:08:03
is less than the what happens in a 747 so put that aside and then second elon has done more for
01:08:10
global warming with tesla than anybody in the and the battery packs i think in modern society i can't think of somebody
01:08:17
in the private sector who's done more and then has there ever been a get there's never been a gift
01:08:21
of 10 billion dollars to one cause let alone one cause which bezos gave which was climate change
01:08:27
no no nobody has done it also hasn't you would know chamoth i thought richard branson had
01:08:32
done a lot for globe warming i thought he was very involved in the carbon uh credits space i think that we're
01:08:37
witnessing something that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life
01:08:45
where they've realized that they're impotent getting incredibly angry at people who
01:08:52
are willing to be wrong but want to just have a chance to be on the field and try
01:08:57
and have the freedom to do so and that just literally infuriates a certain class of people it
01:09:03
proves itself out by what david said we are not in a funding crisis we are running
01:09:08
10 20 trillion dollar deficits you know or sorry uh 10 you know hundreds of billions of dollar deficits 10
01:09:15
20 trillion dollar debt levels that are increasing every year we have a surveyed of money we print
01:09:22
money whenever we want we don't have a shortage of money we have a shortage of capable people who
01:09:27
know what to do with that money and in the absence of people being able to do things
01:09:34
they would rather other people not do things not because it's not the right thing to do but because it makes them
01:09:38
feel impotent right and and so what what is what is driving that i think you there's a real contempt for private
01:09:45
initiative and and jason you're right you see it in the hatred towards elon nobody has done
01:09:50
more to actually reduce carbon emissions than elon i mean even the best gifts period end of
01:09:57
story i mean the bezos gift to some philanthropy i don't know if that's going to make a
01:10:01
difference or not you're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue but
01:10:06
it's indisputable that elon the electric car industry would not exist without elon and yet there is contempt
01:10:13
and hatred for the fact that he did this through private initiative if they became
01:10:17
because he does it in a way that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people
01:10:25
who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally they don't like that he says
01:10:31
what he wants they don't like that he does what he wants they don't like that he dresses
01:10:35
the way he does they don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough it's not about the
01:10:40
look people it's also about the money that's the wealth that's been accumulated too
01:10:44
well no no hold on i don't think that's what it is at all no i actually think what it is is psychological it is
01:10:49
nothing about money i think what we are witnessing and i think social media has just blown the
01:10:54
cover off it is a psychological awakening that people have which is that they were comfortable
01:11:01
knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders and they
01:11:07
just believed the world would function as it should now you see people migrating through
01:11:12
this membrane achieving enormous amounts of success basically eclipsing every single insider
01:11:18
possible by orders of magnitude and it breaks people's brains because they don't like it because now they
01:11:24
think why didn't it happen to me why not me and the thing is because you're not capable and at
01:11:30
somewhere along the way hard working you're not dedicated you didn't try or you didn't try
01:11:35
they didn't act with agency i mean look every day every day the greatest thing that i've
01:11:40
learned about the public markets now having been you know purely on the early stage technology side
01:11:46
building running then investing is i get a mark every day right now to do both businesses i get a score scorecard every
01:11:53
day and some days i really think to myself maybe i'm just not good enough today and i say to myself that is true today
01:12:03
and then the the difference is tomorrow i have a choice which is i wake up and i
01:12:07
decide am i going to go back at it or not and i'm going to game and i'm not going to hate on other
01:12:13
people who had a good day today just because i had a bad day and that's what i think we're going
01:12:19
through we're going through and social media allows it to happen and it allows you to put it out there
01:12:24
you can hide behind a screen name you can basically say whatever you want to vent
01:12:29
this pent-up frustration watching journalists doing it of course of course because these
01:12:35
journalists are doing it too they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is
01:12:43
a productive use the difference is journalists do it with a real screen name under the guise of
01:12:48
journalism everybody else does it with a fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolling in
01:12:53
order to do something really great like bezos or like elon you have to believe that you have
01:12:57
agency over your own life you have to believe that you can accomplish great things
01:13:02
you have to you know act with with purpose and is that really what we're teaching kids
01:13:06
to uh today in schools what we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors
01:13:12
it's some intersectional framework we're not teaching them about earned success we're teaching them about
01:13:17
privilege which is you know is presumptively ill-gotten and it's all about a transference
01:13:23
of privilege and um and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people
01:13:31
who are victims but no one's talking about how you actually create changes successfully abundance right
01:13:38
abundance it's all a negative sum it's always a negative sum game free bird go ahead
01:13:42
i dance back to the kim kardashian sex tape i think that there was this moment where
01:13:48
someone who was didn't do anything didn't have a career wasn't doing anything work wise but was
01:13:54
kind of a pseudo celebrity for being a celebrity it's like the paris hilton nicole richie era right like uh
01:14:01
folks who don't really have much to talk about except that they're the ones that people are talking about and
01:14:06
then that sex tape turned her into a superstar and then she became a billionaire
01:14:11
a few years later and so um you know there there is this kind of poignant moment i
01:14:16
think where folks are like wait a second you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this
01:14:22
country you don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame therefore the ex the kind of assumption
01:14:28
is hey you know what there are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do and the rest
01:14:33
of us don't um and i do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those
01:14:39
those moments and makes them very big and kind of then that becomes the assumed standard
01:14:44
when the reality is i mean all four of us worked really [ __ ] hard all four of us came from nothing i don't
01:14:51
know about sax but i mean the rest of us his dad was an immigrant doctor from south africa and
01:14:56
he moved to south asia i'm just doing 80s well i mean i mean i think all of us graduated
01:15:01
college deeply in debt and then we all worked our way out of debt and we all found ways to work
01:15:07
really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country and to build value and to build
01:15:13
businesses to realize those returns and we don't start out as elites we were never elite we were always the
01:15:20
struggling you know immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we
01:15:27
fought and we had grit we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort
01:15:31
and i think that that's not really and so did bezos and so did elon and i don't think that
01:15:37
there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them like maybe in you know the british the days of the british
01:15:42
monarchy these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have and i think that that and i think that
01:15:48
that's so important because people miss that point and they think that kim kardashian
01:15:53
or the random bolt of lightning or the elite is the kind of endowed upon people in a
01:15:58
way that's unfair they're misreading the situation everyone else is missing out yeah they misread the situation so a
01:16:05
couple things kim kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape
01:16:10
but [ __ ] if she's not an incredible business person because from there to now that's execution totally there's a lot
01:16:16
of there's a lot of toiling hard work good decision-making she [ __ ] nailed it was i lucky to have actually joined
01:16:23
facebook versus myspace yes but when i was there did i [ __ ] hit the cover off the ball
01:16:29
god damn yes you know was i lucky to have started social capital and be able to raise
01:16:34
capital sure but then did i have to help find a team coach that team work with them make good investments
01:16:40
that's [ __ ] hard and i think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work
01:16:46
that there's all kinds of levels of success that you can be proud of all kinds of different
01:16:51
accomplishments what i loved is when friedberg used us and elon and bezos in the same
01:16:56
sentence because i catch myself where i'm ashamed sometimes or i'm like i am not as good as those two guys so
01:17:03
how dare i use my name in the same sentence as their name and then i think wait a minute what
01:17:08
the [ __ ] am i quibbling over like this is insane in any way shape or form we've all made it
01:17:13
sure there's different degrees but it's beyond that it matters at this point and this is what i think we're living in
01:17:19
a society where it really distorts you so if how do we change it how do we change people from thinking
01:17:25
that it's random and that you can't do it because there are a group of people who
01:17:30
but there are a group of people who believe the system is rigged i cannot become chamath
01:17:34
and i'm stuck i'm stuck in a rut and i can't get out i can't get out how do we change that belief yeah the whiners and
01:17:40
the complainers and the haters are stuck in a massive run and i think the thing that happened and
01:17:45
i said it last part i'll say it again and maybe i'll just say it every [ __ ] pod
01:17:49
it is not about winning and losing it is about trying and learning and that is a huge thing it's about a
01:17:56
learning mindset it's about this idea that things are changing so [ __ ] fast the only thing that i can do to stay
01:18:05
safe is to learn how to learn because things will constantly be changing underfoot but what do you say to the
01:18:11
single mother with three kids who who is in a town where the the factory is shutting down and she's
01:18:17
losing her job and she doesn't have the resources to move she she is not the person that hates elon
01:18:22
musk or jeff bezos i will [ __ ] do because aren't there institutional ruts in the united states yeah
01:18:28
i understand these are two completely different topics my point is if you go online it is filled with
01:18:36
p a small cohort of people that are positive and then a large cohort of people that
01:18:41
are silently trying to just gain information and a small vocal minority of bitter people who
01:18:47
can't do [ __ ] and all i'm talking about privileged people well who knows if they're
01:18:52
privileged but i'm just saying they're getting paid a hundred thousand to work at the election i just think
01:18:56
that these people have been check boxers their whole lives they tried to play the team sports they
01:19:01
were told to they went to the schools they tried to do the the cfa the mba the this or that
01:19:07
nothing worked for them they work in an environment where they don't feel any equity actually this is where equity
01:19:14
is important they feel disenfranchised and they're angry and as a result they just want
01:19:21
everything to be different so that nobody wins because they can't win but if they were winning they would be
01:19:26
the first one to say shut the [ __ ] door behind me i'm convinced of it 100 yeah the irony
01:19:32
is that the people you're talking about all went to these elite institutions and and they imbibed these ideologies
01:19:40
and philosophies and i think the people who have been successful went to those not in all cases but they
01:19:47
went to those places and then rebelled against it or just shut it out here's what we should do here's what we
01:19:52
should do we should all contribute 5 or 10 million bucks into a into an llc we should call pegasus
01:19:58
we should use pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on twitter and then index that to linkedin to
01:20:04
figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just publish a new
01:20:07
database of all the haters well i mean it's how funny would that be i i it's very interesting because i'm
01:20:14
watching a group of these complainers leave traditional mainstream media because
01:20:19
i'm focused on journalists because i was one and i'm watching them leave journalism a small group of them and
01:20:25
become entrepreneurs on sub stack or their own products and i feel like there's a little group of them
01:20:31
who are realizing holy [ __ ] i can make a million dollars if i apply myself and i quit the new
01:20:35
york times and i go start my own publication right and i actually say something interesting and differentiated not just
01:20:40
towing the party line at the new york times exactly there's a whole little there's a little
01:20:44
crack here in this like i'll say i'll say they are just as successful as elon musk
01:20:49
and jeff bezos the the financial quantum may be different but i bet you the personal [ __ ] satisfaction
01:20:57
quantum is the same and this is a little key this is the key you could be running a 500 000
01:21:03
your business and you could feel like a million [ __ ] bucks yeah you have a nice house you have a
01:21:10
nice family you employ a couple people you provide a good life you do what you want to do when you want to do it
01:21:16
the sense of freedom that comes with that and agency and agency is the same as them
01:21:23
and maybe in some ways the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these
01:21:27
guys would because they're so you know scheduled and people are coming after them all the
01:21:32
time one of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart hard working and
01:21:39
don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself you will be successful in this industry
01:21:44
you know over two decades i mean i've just seen how could you not you have such tailwinds
01:21:48
at your back there's so much value being created we saw over the past year more money
01:21:54
more lp dollars have gone into venture capital by far than any other year and more money more returns is coming out
01:22:00
that's why more money is going on no i'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful
01:22:05
just by showing it right and and you said that but the first part is the critical part you just said who are
01:22:10
not prone to self-sabotage there is an enormous number of people who are prone to self i was one i am
01:22:16
still one but i broke yourself yourself your ego he blew up his that's firm but i think he blew it up
01:22:26
because there was creative destruction i think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start
01:22:29
oh he's talked about it publicly he said it but the blowing up of when how do you
01:22:34
reconcile the blowing up of the firm chamoth whatever number of years later this is
01:22:39
all old news it's like you know the amount of success and capital and money that we've made
01:22:46
is undisputable and uh i've made it under all kinds of weather conditions so you know it all kind of speaks for
01:22:53
itself but the problem is again if you ask an average person i don't think they care i don't think they know
01:22:58
i don't think they have an opinion if you ask some you know i'm interested in how you
01:23:04
reconcile or look back on it now it's so much distance i'll tell you from an outside perspective how i reconcile
01:23:09
chamath's decision there is i think that as you become more successful your tolerance for doing stuff you don't
01:23:14
want to do really goes down zero it goes to zero hundred dollars about this got to a point where
01:23:20
he didn't want to be doing it and he blew it up zero by the way that that that is a characterization as well that
01:23:25
you know sometimes in in your career you have to make it and in your personal life you
01:23:29
have to make a tough decision and there is there is no good outcome there is no good
01:23:35
way there's no grateful way to do it but there are these moments where you got a
01:23:38
rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side and you're gonna have to make a tough
01:23:42
decision to get out of the way i said to myself a long time ago that if i was ever lucky to actually be
01:23:48
wealthy enough where um my wealth would change by um meaningful amounts every order of
01:23:55
magnitude i would do something different um and so you know you can do the [ __ ] math
01:24:02
so there it is it's interesting being friends with you and watching it and then also i hate to give
01:24:09
you know any credit there it is but being friends with phil hellmuth and watching him set outrageous goals
01:24:14
for himself in poker i just thought you know what you got to set some outrageous goals for yourself
01:24:19
and that's how i sort of broke through as i just said the minute i want to be number one at
01:24:22
everything i do i want to be the largest syndicate the most jason prolific investor the
01:24:27
minute i realized that i was basically going to become you know a billionaire because of my facebook
01:24:34
stock i [ __ ] quit and the craziest thing about it is i left so much stock on the table it's like two
01:24:41
three billion dollars of [ __ ] stock i couldn't care less and then and then you know once i
01:24:46
figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just investing in
01:24:52
companies at a small scale but now you can you know control companies and really
01:24:55
allocate and shape how economy flows i made a different set of decisions and now i'm here and if i increase it by
01:25:01
another order of magnitude i'll make a different set of decisions and that's poorly understood by folks
01:25:07
because again it doesn't map into a world view but the point is it maps into something
01:25:11
that keeps me whole and sane and it allows me to not be zero-sum about everybody else's success
01:25:17
and that's what i think we need to teach people try stuff it's okay to fail because that's as long
01:25:23
as you're not self-sabotaging yourself david said it so well you will eventually be successful what
01:25:29
have you learned david you know in this next chapter being an investor capital allocator
01:25:34
that me yeah david you well just yeah no it's what i said i mean just well i mean the thing that's happening
01:25:43
right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger it's just an explosion there's an
01:25:47
explosion in the number of unicorns explosion of the amount of funding that's available explosion and the
01:25:52
amount of returns being generated there are now so many vcs that vcs are literally throwing money at
01:26:00
people i mean any half-decent idea now gets funded the idea that somehow this ecosystem is
01:26:06
elitist or exclusionary it's absurd right i mean you've got micro vcs now who no one has to go to sand hill road
01:26:14
anymore right i mean there are so many ways there's nobody on hill road it's a ghost town remember a
01:26:18
traffic jam i went i went down there the other day and there was no traffic jam i was
01:26:23
speaking at stanford and literally i was like i got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through
01:26:27
that sandhill road because it was at 8 30. right i zipped down central road to stanford
01:26:32
there was two cars the the tech ecosystem is so osmotic it's so permeable in terms
01:26:39
of allowing new people and in fact it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it
01:26:43
can't hire enough people even in the worst economic conditions and yet when it comes to talking about
01:26:51
social and political talking about opportunity in social and political terms the only thing you ever hear is that
01:26:59
you know the ecosystem is somehow elitist or exclusionary and that's old that's old news that that
01:27:04
might have been valid 15 20 years ago i know when i went to santo road for the first time 15
01:27:09
20 years ago it was a bunch of white partners who went to stanford or had a mbas from you know harvard but
01:27:17
that's not the case now it's a bunch of people with rolling funds and micro vcs and syndicates totally
01:27:21
and everything in between if you're so wrapped up in in being a social justice warrior
01:27:26
that you've just missed that there is like basically infinite opportunity you know then it's on you you're
01:27:32
sabotaging yourself and then five ten years later you're still stuck in that role and then
01:27:37
you become bitter and then you become better to jamal's point free brook how hard was it for you to
01:27:41
leave google and what was that like i was at google for two and a half years uh i had gone through
01:27:47
i joined before the ipo i was like a couple hundred employees just under a thousand employees and then
01:27:52
we went public i got this huge bonus from sergey to stick around uh when i was thinking about huge i mean
01:28:01
for me it was like um seven figures it was yeah it was a couple thousand shares of stock
01:28:08
and like 250 000 of cash and i gave it up um you know be worth a lot of money but
01:28:15
i just felt like and i learned so much at google and i had such an appreciation uh for the team there in the company and
01:28:21
by the way i worked at google and all of a sudden the company went public and i could buy
01:28:25
a house i mean it was an incredible moment for me and and and i suddenly felt what jamaat
01:28:30
talked about which is this freedom in my life suddenly i had hit that that next plateau
01:28:36
of wealth where i now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth and i could leave or i guess i had over
01:28:43
a million dollars of net worth and i could now leave and go do something i wanted to go do with my
01:28:47
no i had a couple hundred thousand dollars and i could go leave and do what i wanted to do
01:28:52
which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions and um and so i honestly felt
01:28:59
like really fine just leaving all that money behind i left i left millions of dollars behind
01:29:04
uh for when i left google after being there for two and a half years to start my company
01:29:08
um and you know it was a struggle right like i mean as you guys know building a business which i
01:29:12
did from 2006 to 2013 um was a nightmare every day was a nightmare i i say uh in entrepreneurship i said
01:29:22
this publicly before but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards and one out of five days you take a five
01:29:27
step leap forward so at the end of a week you're one step ahead of where you started but your
01:29:32
existential memory is that you're failing every day every day and suddenly you wake up and
01:29:37
seven years have gone by and you're like oh [ __ ] we've got an amazing business
01:29:40
and someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars and um if you don't have the grit and the guts
01:29:45
uh and the determination to push through those those daily battles and deal with
01:29:49
that that hardship uh you know and i don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of
01:29:54
google felt right for me i think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right
01:29:59
for me um and so it was the right it was the right call for me obviously it worked out but you know still
01:30:05
i i make choices in my life in terms of what do i want to do do i want to go live on a yacht or
01:30:09
have some luxury or do whatever and i prefer to just make great businesses and turn science into into commercial
01:30:15
opportunity and that's how i choose this that might never and i just wanted to send this out to
01:30:18
the whole panel do you ever think you know having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at
01:30:26
this age and then just you know kite board or do whatever do you ever think about
01:30:31
retirement and not going into work [ __ ] no okay yeah you wanna do you feel you
01:30:38
wanna work harder yesterday yesterday as an example was an incredible day because i was able to um
01:30:47
bicycle with nat and uh the youngest to go get a gelato i had a kickoff meeting for i had a
01:30:57
kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible uh in batteries where you know starting from scratch
01:31:06
series a co-founders me and the other into the other director and we're starting literally starting
01:31:15
and i remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or 40 times and it's the best
01:31:20
feeling [Applause] and then i and then i had a call because i'm trying to put a you know more than a
01:31:26
billion dollars to work in a different battery idea and i thought to myself god like i'm so [ __ ] lucky
01:31:35
um and it's it was a grindy long day and i had never felt more thankful so why would i
01:31:42
you know you could and i don't know i i feel just so blessed saks you ever think about hanging up um
01:31:49
or are you more motivated to go to work every day are you annoyed yeah i mean the thing that's giving me the
01:31:54
most energy right now is we're in uh a private beta on call-in near this app that we incubated
01:32:00
and um i mean it's better it's it's good and it's getting better every day and i'm really enjoying tinkering
01:32:06
on it and i feel like you know i've you know it's kind of like a tinkerer by the way you're a good
01:32:11
product that you're good you're good at the tickling you know we tried to hire sax's vp of product at uh facebook
01:32:18
what yeah what would that have paid him i used 2 000 sacks no no because i did yammer instead and
01:32:32
you know yammer was successful and i got to be my own boss and that was better you know so i don't know if i probably
01:32:37
wouldn't have made as much money but look i've done like you guys i've done made lots of decisions that made me less
01:32:43
money if i just stayed at paypal for 20 years my stock would have been worth many many billions right that's
01:32:49
why i tell people don't sell everything let your winners ride at least partially
01:32:54
yeah i mean look my i was an investor in facebook if i just kept all of that stock that'd be worth a billion dollars
01:32:59
today so it's pretty crazy well sell some just don't sell everything that's my new philosophy yeah so your
01:33:06
point about your point about what gives me enjoyment i mean i'm really having fun
01:33:11
tinkering with this app and you know what it's like it's like it's like a new season if you're in like
01:33:16
the nba or something it's like can we make a championship run can we get one more ring you know
01:33:22
and so you're like you know it'd be like saying to somebody hey you already got you know to a nba an nba
01:33:28
champion hey you got three rings why do you want a fourth you know and it's like are you kidding me while
01:33:32
i'm still in this league well i'm young enough and healthy enough to make a run at one more at one more ring how could
01:33:41
you not want to do that you know you got to go for it i've got to go forward i can see you where you're
01:33:46
engaged which is great to see all right listen it's been an amazing episode uh we will see you all next week if you
01:33:52
like the show thanks the end we're not going to be something everybody go try to do
01:33:59
something anything possible try it just try outside your comfort zone read something that
01:34:05
you wouldn't have otherwise read love you guys but yeah i love you guys love you back see you soon
01:34:10
love everybody listening to everybody i mean literally if you're listening to this
01:34:14
and you are buying into this that the system is right neutral don't be a troll don't be a douche like
01:34:20
the system is not rigged if anything the system is rigged for you to participate and succeed join
01:34:26
the party the system is malleable the system is if you want to change the world the
01:34:33
system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right way you can make it you can make a
01:34:38
a dent you can uh who is this who is this little search hey look how happy you are
01:34:46
who's the best dad where's your dad all right we'll see you all next time on the all-in podcast bye bye
01:34:54
we'll let your winners ride rain man david and they've just gone crazy with it [Music]
01:35:25
we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just
01:35:29
it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] your feet we need to get mercury
01:35:43
[Music]

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Episode Highlights

  • Dog Chaos
    A humorous recount of chaotic moments involving dogs and kids.
    “It's chaos! It's just chaos!”
    @ 04m 58s
    July 23, 2021
  • Pandemic of the Unvaccinated
    A discussion on the implications of the pandemic affecting the unvaccinated.
    “It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated!”
    @ 09m 01s
    July 23, 2021
  • Vaccination and Teachers' Jobs
    The debate intensifies over whether teachers should be mandated to get vaccinated to keep their jobs.
    “If you're not gonna get vaccinated, you're going to not be in the classroom.”
    @ 20m 00s
    July 23, 2021
  • Impact of Vaccination on Education
    Concerns arise about the long-term effects of the pandemic on students' education and readiness.
    “How many years were lost in these 15 months?”
    @ 21m 41s
    July 23, 2021
  • Vaccination Enforcement Challenges
    Discussing the feasibility of enforcing vaccination requirements at events.
    “How are you actually going to know that people are vaccinated?”
    @ 38m 01s
    July 23, 2021
  • DeepMind's Protein Structure Database
    DeepMind publishes a groundbreaking database predicting protein structures, aiding medical research.
    “It's almost like releasing the Rosetta Stone.”
    @ 47m 21s
    July 23, 2021
  • Government and Big Tech Coordination
    Revelations about the White House coordinating with tech companies to censor posts.
    “This is a blatant violation of the people's first amendment rights.”
    @ 53m 26s
    July 23, 2021
  • The Space Race Debate
    The conversation shifts to the implications of billionaires like Bezos and Musk in space exploration.
    “Should we be upset that Bezos is going to space?”
    @ 01h 04m 06s
    July 23, 2021
  • The Psychological Awakening
    A discussion on how social media has exposed the divide between insiders and outsiders.
    “People are migrating through this membrane, achieving enormous success.”
    @ 01h 10m 52s
    July 23, 2021
  • The Illusion of Overnight Success
    The discussion highlights how some believe fame and wealth come without effort, exemplified by Kim Kardashian's rise.
    “You don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country.”
    @ 01h 14m 21s
    July 23, 2021
  • Embracing Failure
    Failure is presented as a stepping stone to success, as long as one avoids self-sabotage.
    “It's okay to fail as long as you're not self-sabotaging yourself.”
    @ 01h 25m 21s
    July 23, 2021
  • The Joy of Tinkering
    Finding joy in creating and improving new projects, like a new app.
    “I'm really enjoying tinkering on it”
    @ 01h 32m 00s
    July 23, 2021

Episode Quotes

  • Kids and dogs are underrated!
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
  • You have to get vaccinated to keep your job, that's the complicating thing.
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
  • You can never get to zero cases.
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
  • Misinformation is simply information you disagree with.
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
  • You don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country.
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
  • It's okay to fail as long as you're not self-sabotaging yourself.
    E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more

Key Moments

  • Dog Adoption02:48
  • Vaccination Debate19:12
  • Government Power Discussion23:15
  • DeepMind Announcement45:43
  • Space Race1:04:06
  • Agency Over Life1:12:56
  • The Kardashian Effect1:14:16
  • System Participation1:34:20

Tension Over Time

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