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look at this red on my stock screen i can't believe what's going on
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does it mean i'm a loser i don't know i need some self-worth now
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oh god in three two [Music]
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three [Music]
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hey everybody hey everybody welcome back the all-in podcast is back apologies about last week i had a personal
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emergency are we allowed to say why of course i mean you could say it go see it say it say
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anyway humble break with us today
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david freeman probably happened to be the the rain man himself david sacks i was on a world tour i was not a world tour
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no no no come on just i'll tell the story obviously i don't like to talk about a certain friend of mine because he's very
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high profile i don't talk about it in public just flex just just flex just do it i've been
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lifting i just want to let people know the gun shows back no you were backstage at snl helping uh
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elon with uh the snl appearance were you not this is true tell us what that was like
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tell us about the backstage experience tell us about the backstage experience i mean we were we were living it out in real time with you guys but tell us what
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it was tell us why why elon recruited you to do it all right so are you elon's funniest friend
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[Laughter] arguably uh well i mean he knows i mean hold on i don't you remember the joke in the at
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sax's roast five years ago remember when elon was late and i had that ad-lib joke there
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were two jokes that i landed at sax's thing which i thought were mine no jason my thing i and i when i
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was being roasted no wait was it jason's party socks oh yeah yeah yeah
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i hosted jason's roast yeah that's right it's your anyways okay go ahead you're
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the funniest otherwise known as the the funniest night of all of our collective lives yes
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it was really nice that was really cool we have to tell stories from that sometime sometime we'll tell the jay cow roast
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you probably are elon's funniest friend and and have a talent for for writing let's not beat around the world let's not do it okay
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i'll take that i'll take the compliment um so i left to go on a little trip to go to austin to see
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some friends and then miami to see some friends one of those friends uh who i hooked up with and was hanging
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out with in miami was obviously elon and uh he was doing saturday night live
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and we were just coming up with ideas around the dinner table and we were just laughing our asses off just brainstorming ideas that would never be
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allowed on television you know and um he said hey would you come with me
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to satinet live and i was like oh that's great you have enough tickets i assumed he meant saturday night you know and he said no i
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don't have a lot of tickets it's kovit it's like half his money would you come with me um to the writer's room and just
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you know be my wingman basically so i had like three four board meetings and five podcasts so
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i just talked it was like an instant yes
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no i mean i take my work seriously can you give me about half a second to decide i already made the decision in my
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mind that if my friend needs help you guys have been in similar situations where you've asked me for help i've i've rolled with chamaf on speaking gigs or
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going down to try to you know save uh sax from going into complete utter madness oh my god this was not crisis management
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anyway so you said yes yes and you know without giving uh
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well without giving away anything that was private or confidential they have a process that they've been
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doing for 46 years and we came in you know with our own process
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of what we wanted to do and it it kind of was a you know kind of an interesting thing
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because a lot of the ideas i had were let's just say a little too far out for the cast
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or for the riders but some of them landed and
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i got to spend a lot of time with lauren michaels um and i really worked on my impersonation
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of him he's canadian he's canadian and i was like so lauren tell us who were the worst hosts ever
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and he's like um it's an interesting question jason you know we don't
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like to think of it that way but um with um in terms of people who thought
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they were smart and maybe were not as smart as they thought they were stephen
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seagal um was a little bit difficult and what a safe choice that's a very
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safe choice there was chris christopherson um you know back in 78. he wasn't a musical
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um guest that was carly simon and um
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he liked to drink and in this very green room in 78 he had a couple of drinks bef during the
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rehearsal the dress rehearsal so we we wheeled in some coffee and like any sports team when the game
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starts we play the game okay so so who was responsible for the
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chad skit okay so chad's an existing character and that was a really amazing one to watch
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because we went to brooklyn to a warehouse and the production was incredible and what the role i played if i'm being
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totally honest is to just you know be elon's friend and be there with him but also you know was that funny for you was that
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f should i do that should i not do that because there are no you were a punch-up man i was a punch-up guy i wrote some lines
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without you know taking anything away from the writers there who do the bulk of the work and the actors and the set
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designers it is amazing to see what they do uh like we had to go through 40 scripts and you know when you read something in the script
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it's kind of hard to know if it's funny but then when you put chloe or you know kate mckinnon or colin jose or che or mikey day like
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this these people are phenomenally talented so all of a sudden the script comes alive
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but for the for the um the the the two punch-ups i i got really good i'll just give you one
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anecdote because i don't want to get myself in too much were you responsible for besties in the gen z they don't comment on that one
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i thought that would as soon as i saw it i thought of you yeah and then the other the other one that i thought was incredibly well done was murder durder
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okay so i had nothing to do with that one um and i thought we thought that was like we thought that one was incredibly dumb
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like when you read it on the script it was like is this funny or not but they you know this is the thing you add tremendous performance
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and you uh add incredible set design and we were we were in brooklyn three in the morning and elon comes out with that
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wig on in a in a suit and we just start laughing hysterical
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and he just goes right into creepy priest it was that was great what about what about the asperger's
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joke because yeah that was me yeah because you used that as a tease uh amongst people we may mutually know
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a lot yes yeah and so when i heard it i was like oh that's a jason joke that's actually what i'm proud of but
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what's so ironic no but what's so ironic is the asperger's joke came out and then everyone all these press
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articles got written saying elon has admitted publicly to having asked for yours
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and he is we are so proud of him and it is such a moment to come clean about having this this
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thing and it was like a jason yeah this jason joke that became a uh oh my gosh you know what
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i'll tell you i'm particularly proud of that one because here's how that one went down they had an idea to do jeopardy and it
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was probably the flattest pitch um because you know it's like 11 o'clock at night a writer comes in and says we want to do jeopardy uh auditions and
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we want it's a kind of a feature for the cast to do auditions i don't know if you ever saw the star wars editions jurassic
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progression it's kind of that vein so i was like for me i was like oh that sounds like it's got potential but it was a very dry pitch they didn't have
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any examples and when they actually did it it was like really weird characters that were obscure so i had pitched
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uh my own version of jeopardy and elon had his version of jeopardy elon's version of jeopardy was dictator
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jeopardy which was kim jong-un you know mbs putin you know et cetera
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and then i was like how to deal with your adversaries and he was like uh for 800 and he's like
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planonium and i was like genocide it got really dark
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and so we are laughing our asses you know but then like there were security concerns
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basically we're kind of dialing this around it would be as funny as the it would be a direct correlation of
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funny to the chances of elon being assassinated by one of those people so then we decided maybe we don't do
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that one and i said i've got a great idea asperger's jeopardy and it would be
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zuck elizabeth holmes which chloe uh from the show who's an absolute genius
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incredibly sweet and she really engaged deeply with elon and connected with our team
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and then obviously elon and so you'd have elon playing zuck somebody playing elon and then chloe
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playing elizabeth holmes and they would be like you know um how to deal with an intense
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uh situation with an employee and then presses it don't make eye contact you know like and so one of the
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writers i could tell she was not happy about this and she said listen my
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husband has aspergers my two brothers have aspergers and all of a sudden we're in like okay you know we can't offend anyone
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liam we can't offend anybody land and i would say you know 80 90 of the staff is very you know like
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let's go for it and then there's probably 10 or 20 who are very sensitive to different topics and so there's a little navigation you
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have to do there but we really want and then so eel goes i have asperger's and you know like
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the whole room is like wow so then i was workshopping with somebody and i wasn't in the writers room i i contributed two percent that max
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other than you know being elon's friend and and supporting him but you know they came in and said hey
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when they didn't want to ask elon something they came to me and i negotiated some situations like they didn't originally want to have any
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doge father or any cryptocurrencies on the show we had to negotiate that oh my god well i mean no they have they
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have they have general counsel there they have standards they're now on it now now we know why the show's not funny anymore there's too
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many people with the veto i love the show i think it's very funny elon elon made it culturally relevant
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for the first time in like a decade what you're describing is too many people with a veto right
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over the content of the show that's what makes it not funny you got to be willing no no i think the show i think the show
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is very funny i think they take some artistic at risk and what's not funny to us might be like funny to some other folks
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so that's why it's hit or miss but certainly moving the show from 11 30 on the west coast definitely has an impact so what
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they could have done 10 years ago before the timing was synced between the west and east coast is different they're
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now on in prime time there's still a big cultural shift that's happened it's like you don't even like texas yeah
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i'll give you the two the two best ones it's not it's not john belushi anymore when the the like the corporate ceo comes on the
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show and and wants to do crazier wilder stuff than the people you know who are the regulars
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but anyway keep going so anyway um you know the one of the folks who's working on the
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monologue you know comes in and the original monologue you know all these things go from rough to potential to good to great to amazing
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and so for me it was you know just you guys know my career choice i just really made me think like maybe i picked the wrong career choice because i'm pretty
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[ __ ] good at this i should do this so i started to call it at the after party i was like you know i've kind of made my money already
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there's any chance i can get an internship he's like uh no but i think jason you can you can
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always take credit for being the third or fourth rider on elon's monologue perfect so anyway they're doing
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they said they wanted to do an asperger's joke i said so i i wrote the asperger joke of you know hey i just want to let people
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know i've got asperger's and um so there's not going to be a lot of eye contact tonight so if you see me looking
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off screen it's not that i'm looking on cue cards it's just that i have asperger's so they didn't keep the cue card part but they kept the rest of it and then they did
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the oj joke which was written by colin jost who is absolutely phenomenal as a human uh just
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as a writer and a collaborator and we spent a lot of time with colin jones he came in and um they had this joke
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about oj having been on at 79 and 96. the 96 was a joke he wasn't actually on a 96 i think that's when he went to jail
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or something and i said to him i said i don't think people understand the joke they actually think he was on in 96.
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he goes well let's just rehearse it so we're in the green room rehearsing and elon goes you know so hey and um you know like oj
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you know like i'm smoking weed on every podcast it's that's like saying oj you know you know you murdered once and now he's
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a murderer forever you know and you know side note he was on in 79 and 96 and i just go like this
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and he killed both times and the room this like a silence and
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that everybody goes hysterical it's like one of my you know poker assistants
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i bet there was like a split second where everyone looks left and right it's like is it okay no that's my point like it's okay to laugh at this yeah and colleen joe just
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looks at me and goes that's getting in there and i said i landed that one um so there were you know some moments like that
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for me i i tell you i i'll get emotional talking about it um it's one of the happiest times i've
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ever seen in elon's life and i've been with him for 20 years actually you've known him for 25 obviously
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in the feeling of monday and tuesday that oh my god this could be a complete utter disaster i mean that was our fear
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and that like we we're just not in sync here and these maybe it's going to be unfunny and this is a huge mistake like that was kind of
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our vibe from our our squad and we had um three of us there uh including elon and then you know we
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the the asperger jokes lands and i i tell you a woman from a wardrobe comes in and
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she's crying she's crying and she says uh you know she sees me
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first and we she had been there when we were doing the joke and she said my son you know was beat up for having
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aspergers and you know this changes everything
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wow it became like a serious thing three or four people came in to the room
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i kid you not crying oh my god because one in 20 20k one in 20 boys i think now have asperger's
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do you guys remember in living color you remember that show from the earliest yes can you juxtapose like like comedy
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today and comedy from a living color where they had like damon wayans as like the the homeless
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guy and like everything that would be so like non-pc today and like totally inappropriate and how much things have
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shifted where like even the joke becomes like you know serious kind of can ask a question sorry jason when when people were getting emotional
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it was because of why they were like thank you for validating and putting it out there and showing a a role model
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that is that one of the squawk alley guys you know basically got choked up twice on monday
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and he said elon can go do no wrong in my mind now because i'm dealing with a son who has
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aspergers and they do something sometimes that can be very challenging as a parent
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right and it just explains a lot about and we all know people who have aspergers
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davids and we we know people who are further on the spectrum and someone who's been accused of being
00:15:29
on the spectrum can i speak to this issue i mean yes like look if anything asperger's is correlated with an
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extreme ability to focus and to be successful that's why there's so many people in tech who have asperger's who have
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been accused of having asperger's um so i don't know that it's something that people have to be i guess unless
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you have like an extremely like extreme case like on the kind of in the autistic
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um part of the spectrum but like mild asperger's probably is correlated with success because you it's like the
00:16:00
opposite of 80d right it's a it's it's extreme ability to focus um but
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honestly like what you're describing to me sounds so lame
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like this is why the show's not funny anymore it's not about the jokes look it should be about the joke i
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disagree 100 that joke landed it made everybody laugh it may have landed a little too close to somebody guys guys just to just
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just to disintegrate the the reason david you're saying this is because we all
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know at least the three of us four of us what was not what did not make it and what's on the cutting that's why you're
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saying it and so i think you have to just i can't say what you can't get to the country but i will tell you what i will i will
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reveal one skit that means no you can't you can't you can't you cannot you can i can it's just one i mean there was one they
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recorded which i think will come out as a digital short and the premise is fomo capital fear of missing out capital
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that was good yeah and and yeah that was a good one that was your right that was your idea or ian
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i'm trying to remember where it originated we were just talking about you know just the state of like people buying
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nfts and everything and i think elon may have said like they all have fomo and then i was like yeah i'd be like a venture capital
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firm that and then he named it fomo capital so it was a little bit of a collaboration but i think mostly elon in that one and
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the this person comes in and the skit is hilarious so they're probably going to release it as a digital short like cut
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for time but we'll release it and this person comes in and there's like an associate who's being trained
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um and he's they're like welcome to fomo capital where we never say no to nothing and
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he's like okay i don't know if i understand that like sit down you'll get the hang of it and then people come in with increasingly ridiculous ideas
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and i'll just tell you one of them which woman comes in goes so you guys know impossible meats this
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is impossible vegetables these are vet these taste just like vegetables but this broccoli is made
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with um endangered white rhinos and she takes
00:18:00
a bite of it tastes just like broccoli and elangos is amazing and they hand them a picasso
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and then somebody comes in and says like it's just hilarious it's just more more money why didn't that get on
00:18:12
the show well what they do is they do a two hour show with a live audience and they just
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take out two or three skits and so there were three skits i think that were taken out for time and then those could
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be released digitally now so they just want to have extra they did a long opening they did like i think it was like 10 minutes on the
00:18:29
[ __ ] the mother's day one yeah can i just say miley cyrus has the most incredible voice
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oh my god i could listen to her sing forever oh she has got an incredible voice
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so i was like i thought the opening was really shaky i mean i was there this is the first
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time i've watched live tv in like 10 years ever since apple tv was invented i'm sitting there waiting for elon to
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come out and crush the monologue and then miley cyrus does this long unfunny thing with all these
00:19:00
mothers it's great you know it's meant to be awesome first of all it's not a thing it was a song it was a song it's called the song
00:19:08
it was a wtf moment for me i was like where is elon bring out elon i am not here to
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see a bunch of mothers i mean it's interesting i'll tell you that was an interesting moment david
00:19:19
because they were like we'll put you in like four of the skits out of the seven and eli and we don't want to work you know elon too
00:19:25
hard so i was doing these sort of sidebars with some of the producers uh one in particular who is just a phenomenon
00:19:32
she's she's an amazing producer who just gets everything done because this all occurs from monday to
00:19:37
saturday and they work 16 18 hours a day and um you know she said you know we don't
00:19:45
want to take up too much of his time so we think four is the right number and i said you know he gave up the week he's the busiest guy in the world arguably
00:19:51
he wants to be in every skit and she's like well nobody really does that uh maybe a comedian here or there and uh you and just said if i'm here use
00:19:59
me i want to be in every skit and like they we had to like reshuffle the deck a bit and and he was willing to do
00:20:05
anything including wario or you know and wear a costume or be the creepy priest he you know elon
00:20:12
was funny um i think he surprised everyone in terms of being a performer just in terms of his performance i think
00:20:18
it was really strong um it was as good as like you know someone who's in the entertainment business would be i think
00:20:25
i think yeah exactly it's a universal take even elon's sort of haters had to concede
00:20:31
that he performed well he kind of committed to all those roles even when it was like poking fun at himself
00:20:37
yeah i had to i had to dunk on professor uh dummy uh galloway who was like i'm gonna live
00:20:44
tweet elon and he's just like going on cnn talking about elon he's going on every [ __ ] cable channel he can to
00:20:49
to like ride elon's coattails and he tweeted elon would lose tesla would lose 80 90
00:20:54
of its value two years ago like just are you kidding me but i agree like even someone like
00:21:01
professor galloway who said tesla was worthless he is now just all over it and and it
00:21:06
humanized him you know um which is nice i think he did i think he did a great job and uh it was fun um i'm super happy for
00:21:13
him lauren michaels came in and said elon you did a great job come back anytime
00:21:20
sincerely and um i said how about next year like
00:21:26
you're his agent you're like his agent basically he's a punch-up guy he's the agent he's
00:21:33
the hype man the negotiator i was doing mostly negotiations and and laura michael said absolutely jason
00:21:40
we'd love to have elon back you absolutely crushed it and i you know elon's busy in the green room
00:21:47
by the way do we know what the ratings were uh third batch show of the season so far i think not counting all the youtube
00:21:52
views and the international views i think chappelle's the only person who beat him um
00:21:58
a couple of those a couple of the skits are gonna live forever i think on youtube i mean the chad skid in particular
00:22:04
was really hit it out of the park by the way my observation on the skits were the ones where elon was kind of
00:22:11
indispensable were like the really were really great like the chad thing and i thought that the western
00:22:17
where well laurent you know where he plays this like 18th century old west version of himself it's like this genius
00:22:23
in the old west who's telling them to ride electric horses or something yeah for me that was really funny so i
00:22:29
thought the ones where elon was sort of indispensable the more indispensable elon was to the skit i thought the better it was and then
00:22:35
some of the skits i mean look live sketch comedy is very hit or miss i thought the ones that were more missed were the ones
00:22:41
where they could have done them without elon it could have been a skit any any yeah you know any snl i think it's
00:22:47
accurate yeah it's like why wouldn't you take advantage of having elon there and and they did um you know and just to the
00:22:53
staff you know yeah first off i'm sorry i was such a ruckus
00:22:58
and i should just rubbed her in the uh in this space but uh really i mean what a great time elon had
00:23:04
a great time the after party was amazing uh and uh describe the after party were
00:23:10
they wearing masks that's a good segment that's outside no
00:23:16
i'll just leave that it was an outside party but we danced until this is actually for real and i think
00:23:23
it's a good segue into just what we're seeing out there i left san francisco having been yelled at
00:23:29
somebody because my mask fell off i didn't know it and i had gone into you know a store and
00:23:34
they were like your mask and they yelled it across the store you know oh sorry you know just kind of you know when they fall off you don't notice it
00:23:41
then i got to austin and when i'm in austin i'm walking down the street i'm the only person in austin wearing a mask
00:23:47
and somebody points to me and goes you don't have to wear that mess son and i was like oh and i look around there's nobody wearing
00:23:53
a mask it's my first day there and he goes you've been vaccinated i said yeah he goes you really don't
00:23:58
need to wear a mask so i take the mask off i get to florida a friend of mine was out uh you know uh
00:24:04
having a cocktail at a bar invites me to meet him for a cocktail i go to meet him for a cocktail
00:24:09
there's a dj and he who shall he who shall not be named anyway i went to have a cocktail
00:24:15
as one does in miami there's a hundred 200 people 200 people in the club the only people wearing masks are the
00:24:21
staff who are wearing them as chin guards and i'm like that's not the purpose i miss but okay so
00:24:27
and then i get to new york and everybody in new york is wearing one or two masks on the street on i walk
00:24:35
down an empty street okay so we should talk we should talk about that cdc article that was in the new york times because that's
00:24:40
an incredible summary jason of of this whole issue in a nutshell which is it's unbelievable and
00:24:46
then to just give satnet live a nod every day everybody tested you got you know two
00:24:52
tests like the i don't i forget the names of them now since i stopped taking them but you did like the
00:24:57
the big one and the small one every day you got tested every day you got wristbands you had to wear a mask
00:25:02
100 of time and then when you were in the studio you had to wear the glass shield so if you saw the picture i did of myself and
00:25:08
elon and blood pop michael who's a famous producer for justin bieber and lady gaga who's a friend of ours
00:25:15
mike had to wear it too so we're i mean elon had a mask on because he had to take it off to do skits but all the rehearsals
00:25:21
everybody was messed up including the actors and everybody was vaccinated so
00:25:29
they really are taking it seriously and i understand because they in new york they had a ton of people die
00:25:34
and to get my understanding that's what i heard secondhand was that lauren michaels had
00:25:39
to get a special variance to keep saturn at live on the air from you know the governor and the mayor and
00:25:45
everybody had to sign off on it but um i tweeted it's not this is not taking covet seriously this is
00:25:50
this is basically an irrational fear of covid well because they got hit the hardest david
00:25:56
so i think that they got hit the hardest and i tweeted why is everybody wearing a mask in new york and of course i got like a hundred
00:26:01
uh because there's a pandemic but then what the the two reasons that made sense were so many people died and there's so much
00:26:07
suffering in new york that people out of a sign of respect are still wearing them until they hit here heard immunity officially
00:26:13
um which i know you could roll your eyes at david but you know they did have a it would be any question i don't i don't think that's the real reason no
00:26:20
well anyway i do actually do think it's the real reason because people multiple people said to me it's a way of showing people that you
00:26:25
actually care about them and that you're going to really take this seriously until the end no i think it's it's more what ezra klein said
00:26:31
which is this is the red maga hat for team blue this is pure virtue signaling possible
00:26:36
the other thing they said was on a practical basis in new york you're you know on the
00:26:41
subway your office and in you know going into a cafe you have to wear it and you're doing that 17 times a day so
00:26:49
taking the mask on and off just becomes less work than just leaving it on that's those were reasonable answers i
00:26:54
got but anyway somebody summarized this another another reason i think is that
00:27:00
look if you're if you're in a blue part of the country the media sources for team blue are
00:27:06
still promoting this idea that outdoor spread is a thing that it's it's a risk
00:27:12
um we're finally now getting i mean we've known since last summer that there were no cases no documented
00:27:19
cases of casual outdoor spread anywhere in the world the atlantic was reporting on this okay
00:27:24
this is not a conservative publication this is a liberal a skewed liberal publication liberal
00:27:30
meaning yes exactly so we've known since last summer i mean when gavin newsom declared that we weren't allowed to go
00:27:36
to the beach it was widely mocked and so only now is the cdc getting around to loosening its guidance
00:27:44
on outdoor mass wearing but it's still not loose enough and so there was a great article by david
00:27:49
leonard in the new york times that just came out i think yesterday or two days ago call about the cautious cdc and and what
00:27:56
he said is by the way this just validates everything we've been saying on the pod for the last few months leonard chronicles the the sort of
00:28:03
absurdly conservative guidance given by the cdc basically the cdc
00:28:08
continues to suggest that outdoor transmission accounts for up to 10 of cases when the real number is
00:28:14
certainly under one percent is probably under point one percent and this is all based on a single
00:28:20
study in singapore where that was misclassified it was based on a construction site that really wasn't
00:28:26
even an outdoor spread and yet the cdc still insists that unvaccinated people need to wear mass
00:28:31
outdoors that vaccinated people wear them in large public values and that children at summer camp
00:28:37
wear them at all times this is the current cdc guidance and so yesterday when the head of the
00:28:42
cdc was pulled in front of a congressional hearing and asked about this she doubled down
00:28:48
on this less than 10 and and the reason why it's so misleading is technically speaking less than 10 is
00:28:54
correct but when the real number is zero zero one percent or something like that it's highly misleading
00:29:01
to give ten percent and the reason the line in the article which i loved is it is accurate to say that sharks eat
00:29:08
less than two hundred thousand humans a year but it is also more accurate to say sharks attack 150 humans a year
00:29:16
right and 150 is very different than 200 000 but if you say sharks attack you know 200 000 people or less a year
00:29:24
you would think that it's a it's a much bigger problem than it actually is and i think that's the whole point which is
00:29:29
we um we're not being scientific we're being emotional and reactive and the paper
00:29:35
that leonard references basically they took this data that identified how
00:29:41
spread was occurring empirically and identifying you know through tracing you know where are people actually picking
00:29:46
up covid and that's really where this empirical evidence suggests we're talking about a less than 0.1
00:29:52
percent casual outdoor spread rate and you can see that empirically in the data
00:29:58
but then there's also this deterministic kind of approach where you could say like look how does spread happen spread happens with viruses we know that
00:30:04
viruses need to live in liquid in order to survive when you're outdoors if there's any amount of wind or uv light the virus can very quickly degrade
00:30:12
the protein can degrade the rna doesn't transfer and so there's a deterministic rationale for scientific rationale for why that
00:30:18
may be the case and this evidence that this paper which i've now shared kind of gathers together shows that um you know that that is
00:30:25
indeed what the statistics are showing um and so yeah you're right but i think the the precautionary principle david is
00:30:31
where the argument would be made on the other side which is you know what's the cost of wearing a mask if there's any risk at
00:30:36
all and by the way i'm not i'm not making this case personally but i think that's where a lot of people would make the
00:30:42
counter argument rather than debate the facts and the evidence and the science they would say
00:30:47
but who cares it's just a mask why does that matter and so i think the question is why does
00:30:52
it matter right like why does it matter if they're telling us to wear masks is there really that much of a cost to people to do that
00:30:58
well i mean if people are doing it voluntarily that's their right to do so but the question is mass
00:31:05
mandate should we continue to have mandates on the population for something that isn't necessary and look i was one
00:31:12
of the first people in march of 2000 to call for mass wearing and mass mandates because
00:31:17
we were seeing the data out of the asian countries showing that they were effective they were high cost or high benefit low cost so i
00:31:24
was in favor of it when there was a pandemic raging but when t 0 the rate of
00:31:30
transmission is in free fall everywhere and now we've learned that outdoor spread is not an issue i
00:31:35
don't support restricting people's freedom and if you know for for for a for a reason
00:31:40
that's not rooted in science and you know the problem with the cdc guidance is that people really act on it so
00:31:47
you've got politicians you've got local jurisdictions who will not schools you have schools i
00:31:53
mean so the schools have remained closed and by the way the schools have been open in texas and florida
00:31:58
for six months we know based on empirical data in the real world seeing what's happening in texas and florida that that you're
00:32:04
not seeing an increase in cova cases in those places because of school reopening and yet the cdc has not moved its guidance on school
00:32:11
reopening you have summer camps now that for liability reasons will make kids wear masks because they
00:32:17
can't take the risk of getting sued and then you've got politicians like evan newsom who won't wipe their ass
00:32:22
without the cdc's permission to do so so it has a real consequence in the real world
00:32:28
that the cdc is stuck on this ridiculous guidance did we read the actual sentence from the
00:32:33
new york times about under 10 percent so you could read it because it's really
00:32:39
sad actually uh just in terms of the misleading cdc numbers they said in quotes under 10 of the spread has
00:32:45
occurred outside when in reality the share of tradition that occurred outdoors seems to be below one percent and maybe
00:32:52
below point one percent multiple edemiologists edemiologist right we'll also also read the quote this is
00:32:57
directly from david leonard in the new york times um and i think it's important to you know it's great when you can quote the new
00:33:03
york times or the atlantic because these are left-leaning publications so team blue should
00:33:08
be more willing to accept them what leonard said is there's not a single documented covet infection anywhere in the world
00:33:15
from casual outdoor interactions but do people know that i mean do the people walking down the street
00:33:21
with mass on know that they'll they'll know it now because according by the way did you guys know jason just
00:33:27
told me this we accumulate a million views slash listens a week to our podcast yeah
00:33:34
so now archives growing yeah so now now that now now a million people will at least know i mean at least i think it's you know um
00:33:42
it's a little bit self-selective so let's be honest you know yeah for intelligence i mean the people where we are actually some of the people no no
00:33:49
but but the real question is like isn't this an opportunity for the cdc to actually re-establish some credibility
00:33:55
which is to say okay we're going to get back to facts we're not going to we are not we know that people will be prone to
00:34:00
acting on anecdote and emotion so we're going to be grounded in truth in fact we went back we looked at the
00:34:05
singapore study here are the flaws in it here's how it applies and so we're going to own it and revise it and that would go
00:34:12
such a long way the fact is they they it it's it's important to understand like what do you
00:34:17
think the incentives are for them to keep doubling down on bad decision-making there's no
00:34:24
downside i think i said this i think i said this a few months ago which is i don't think that the cdc or any um kind of medical
00:34:32
uh you know administrative um a group in particular has to
00:34:38
uh think about the synthesis of the effects of some of the policy that they're recommending
00:34:43
their objective is to save lives so if i'm running the cdc i'm going to tell people don't leave your home ever
00:34:49
don't drink alcohol don't eat red meat exercise you have to exercise 60 minutes a day or you get taxed i mean there's a
00:34:54
lot of things that you could see if you were purely focused on saving lives you would make specific recommendations only to save
00:35:01
lives without thinking about the consequences outside of saving lives the consequences outside of saving lives
00:35:07
of you know telling people to wear masks is it minimizes economic activity some might argue therefore there's going to be an impact
00:35:13
on airlines and hotels and outdoor thing and spending and all this other stuff people being willing to go to work
00:35:18
and people being afraid of being in the office i mean i see this across all my companies where people even though
00:35:24
they're vaccinated and they're scientists they're afraid to go to work um and so you know part of par part of
00:35:29
the perpetuation of the fear that arises from these uh policies that are all about the absolute
00:35:35
saving of any life is that you end up having a significant cost that's not related to the objectives
00:35:41
of that particular medical organization and we see it around the world
00:35:46
sorry this just goes back to what i said about leadership a few episodes ago which is the the leadership of the administration
00:35:52
should be synthesizing the recommendation of that group along with the effect that other groups might
00:35:57
be indicating would arise from that recommendation and coming up with a kind of concrete you know kind of objective around okay well how do we
00:36:04
balance these these different effects what you're saying is absolutely correct the people who are making the decisions are only thinking about their responsibility
00:36:11
so it's like a secret service agent when the president's like can i go out and sign autographs absolutely not they're gonna say no because they are
00:36:17
responsible for keeping the president alive now the other
00:36:22
pernicious thing about this is they kept trying to game the public and the public when you try to game the
00:36:28
public and you get caught where they say don't foul she says don't wear a mask because he doesn't want to run out of masks then they say keep the masks on
00:36:34
because they want to you know virtue signal or whatever it is or they won't simply say the vaccine is not
00:36:40
dangerous or that the vaccine is actually going to keep you from dying they undersold the vaccine and now
00:36:48
everybody's going to question everything they do for all time don't manage us manage the facts
00:36:55
stop trying to manage people and just start managing your communication and make it crisp and
00:37:01
clear and then somebody has to be a goddamn leader and say okay the doctors are saying this
00:37:06
the economy is saying this and here's how those two things overlap in schools being closed means more
00:37:12
suicide in kids more depression in kids and people not being able to put food on their tables means we're going to
00:37:18
create who knows what this economic policy is going to create which is another segway david you had something
00:37:24
to say well look i i agree with that but i think you guys are being a little bit too charitable to the cdc
00:37:29
it's not just that they're wrong and it's not just that they have a bureaucratic incentive for for cya and to be
00:37:37
too conservative in their guidance is the fact that when an error gets pointed out like by david
00:37:42
leonard in the new york times they double down on the lie and so leonard followed up
00:37:48
his his article it happened so go to this tweet that i just put in the chat he said at a senate hearing today
00:37:53
senator collins asked cdc director dr wolinski about today's edition of mourning which was his article which
00:37:59
explains why the cdc's claim that less than 10 percent coveted transmission is misleading and wallenski then doubles
00:38:05
down and has a bunch of excuses and basically defends this 10 number which is a lie now why
00:38:10
would the cdc be doing this there is separate reporting by the new york post go to this article
00:38:17
on teachers unions collaborated with the cdc on school reopenings so this guidance that the cdc put
00:38:23
forward on school reopenings the teachers unions were part of writing that guidance and all of their
00:38:30
suggestions were actually accepted and incorporated by the cdc now how is this science this is politics
00:38:38
last year there are a bunch of articles accusing the the trump administration of
00:38:44
incorporating you know political considerations into their guidance there were huge scandals about this where is the
00:38:51
reporting today about the influence that the teachers unions are wielding over the cdc
00:38:58
to deliberately keep schools closed even though the science does not support that this is a gigantic scandal and yet no
00:39:05
one's covering it it's left for the new york post to cover this instead of the new york times by the way i think this is a good transition to that
00:39:11
druckenmiller interview because um you know uh saks i just retweeted uh what you had sent which was
00:39:17
a link to the uh to the video uh interview so um you know stanley druckenmiller is this
00:39:22
uh um uh incredible uh incredible investor the goal g o a t goat there's a there's
00:39:29
a there's many stories about draco miller at one point you know he's the guy that notoriously they say broke the bank of england where
00:39:35
he was betting against the british pound and forced the the the central bankers in the uk to
00:39:40
devalue the pound and he's made billions of dollars managing initially george soros's money and then
00:39:46
um spun off and runs his own money now as an investor and so he he's a a macro guy so he
00:39:52
thinks about kind of macro economic conditions and effects and he talks a lot about fed policy so he gave this interview on cnbc
00:39:58
um and i think the uh you know the the most kind of prescient quote uh and it was also based on an op-ed he
00:40:05
wrote right saks in the wall street journal yeah yeah but the interview is fantastic the tv interview is great just watch that
00:40:11
the interview is great and he said in in in the write-up he said clinging to an emergency after the emergency has passed uh is is
00:40:18
what the fed behavior indicates right now and i think that you know kind of what we're talking about broadly is perhaps
00:40:23
the emergency in the united states where you have this uncontrolled increase in covet cases that's not the
00:40:30
case today so the emergency has passed we still have covid but it is not an emergency and the point
00:40:37
is there's a lot of institutions and individuals and businesses that are still operating as
00:40:42
if we were in the throes of the emergency and and so druckenmiller is making the case especially the fed and the fed policy is
00:40:49
acting as if we're in an emergency but broadly we're seeing this across a lot of institutions like the teachers
00:40:54
unions and others where people are effectively you know never let a good emergency go by without taking advantage of whatever the
00:40:59
the saying is never waste a crisis never waste a crisis and the crisis keep the crisis going is kind of the model everyone's in right now which is
00:41:06
like the crisis they're keeping it going as long as they can and drucker miller gave some pretty
00:41:11
amazing quotes he said that well first of all he described our current monetary fiscal policy as being
00:41:17
the most radical he had ever seen and this guy's been watching markets for decades the fed has pumped 2.5
00:41:23
trillion of qe into the economy post-vaccine post-retail recovery
00:41:29
he said that right now retail demand is five years above trend meaning not only has retail demand fully
00:41:35
recovered it's where if you look at the trend line it would be five years from now so they are pumping
00:41:41
like demand like crazy they've issued six trillion of new debt and then this is the thing i
00:41:46
didn't know at all he said the fed is buying 60 of new debt issues
00:41:51
without this the bond market would be rejecting this massive fiscal expansion because interest rates have become prohibitive
00:41:58
and he said that when when interest rates revert to the norm the historical norm interest expense on our debt will be 30
00:42:05
of the government budget so i mean think about that look the the the markets have had to intervene and we
00:42:13
have essentially decoupled what the government thinks is happening
00:42:20
with what the capital markets needs people to know and that's a really unique dynamic like i mean i'm i
00:42:26
i'm not nearly as successful as stan or have been in the markets as long as him but in my 20 years this is the first time
00:42:33
i've really seen that so just to give you a sense of this you know the markets are now acting to
00:42:39
establish inflation expectations that the fed just seems to not want to do anything about
00:42:45
and what was so for just to give you guys a sense of this like you know when in february the markets really kind of
00:42:51
had its first capitulation what happened was that all of a sudden people digested all these facts that
00:42:57
stan just said and realized wait a minute like all of this money is going to drive prices higher and so what they did was
00:43:05
they took the they took the yield on the 10-year bond up by like 150 100 basis points and the
00:43:11
markets freaked out they went from like 0.75 to 1.75 and the fed came out and said hey hold
00:43:18
on nothing to see here this is everything's going to be fine but then everything since then has been
00:43:23
sort of leading to this realization commodity prices are up 50 percent there's this kind of like
00:43:29
joke that like you know you see a bed of lumber moving across a railroad it's like a billion dollars of lumber
00:43:35
just because of how expensive it is you know there are shortages everywhere you'll be shocked to know that today
00:43:42
chipotle put out the following guidance which is they said they are increasing the minimum wage to 15
00:43:50
and that within three years you can make a hundred thousand dollars a year at chipotle yeah
00:43:58
that is as much as some engineers and coders in the united states
00:44:04
dara korshoshawi the ceo of uber said on the uber earnings call last week that
00:44:10
the um average hourly rate that some drivers in new york
00:44:15
uber drivers in new york were getting paid was 38 bucks an hour what 38 dollars an hour so what does all
00:44:22
of this mean i think what's standard 100 000 a year but we're in this weird place where we've decoupled
00:44:28
the government institution that's responsible for fiscal stability and then the overall capital
00:44:34
markets used to work in tandem and they're no longer working in tandem because you have
00:44:39
a narrative and a set of data points that aren't supported by the facts and so this is an interesting thing so in the
00:44:45
cdc versus the american people example there's no way to push back right i mean
00:44:51
governors can act independently cities will act independently but at the end of the day you know the teachers unions are
00:44:56
working with the the cdc the school camps have this guidance and you're stuck in this morass in the
00:45:03
capital markets that's not necessarily true and so you can change and you can you can re-rate asset prices based on
00:45:11
sentiment and i think what everybody is saying in this example is we're past the emergency we've put too
00:45:18
much money in the economy we need to reopen and we now need to face the fact
00:45:24
that there are massively rising prices which means that there will be inflation
00:45:29
and if you don't act the capital markets will continue to act for us and so this is an example today
00:45:36
where you're just seeing a bloodbath in the markets and by the way the the only time the two government officials tried to be on either side
00:45:44
janet yellen last friday kind of casually in an interview kind of put her toe out in the water as
00:45:50
treasury secretary and kind of said something that said there could be inflation and literally was hand slapped
00:45:55
and had to put out something that disavowed her comments less than 24 hours later um so that's there's there's a bloodbath
00:46:02
in the markets today and there's been one for the last couple of months and in particular all the growth stocks have been hammered
00:46:08
and just to build on what you're saying to moth so there's a announcement today there's some data that the the inflation the cpi is up four percent
00:46:16
uh and climbing and so people are now pricing in big interest rate increases and so that
00:46:23
makes growth stock that hammers growth stocks because all the earnings are in the distant future and so they get now discounted at a higher rate
00:46:29
and so the valuations get absolutely hammered so you know it's it's it's absolutely
00:46:35
souring uh that the markets are basically souring on this biden agenda
00:46:40
and you know i just you know i i i'm beginning to wonder if biden's gonna be a jimmy carter here because
00:46:47
frankly all he had to do was leave things well enough alone covet was winding down we had a vaccine
00:46:54
all they had to do was distribute it to as many people as possible and covet let the recovery take shape
00:47:00
and instead they push this insane 10 trillion dollar agenda of taxes and spending
00:47:07
that are now over stimulating the economy that are causing inflation that are now creating interest rate
00:47:13
increases no that's that's not that's not true yet meaning he did do a good job on the vaccine david
00:47:19
but then to your point the federal government's posture on reopening is still been stunted and he's proposing
00:47:25
so much more incremental capital which we all know probably will not be efficiently spent
00:47:31
and there isn't any other good ideas and so he believes his path to re-election
00:47:36
which is true is to spend and to put money to put money into the economy i think it's going to backfire i
00:47:41
think it's a backfire massachusetts and to tax right so he's the spending he's trying to he's trying to offset
00:47:47
with higher taxes on the wealthy which uh you know from his point of view is not going to affect
00:47:52
him and the analysis is probably fair it's not going to affect his his voter block um he's going to
00:47:59
backfire massively look if the economy turns we were set for a post covet boom and right now
00:48:04
that is all at risk because your mouth like you're saying they're keeping the economy closed or parts of it way too long
00:48:11
they then over compensate for that by printing a ton of money and then they overcome say for that
00:48:16
by raising taxes too much just just to build on that so that second step of their overcompensating their
00:48:23
inability to open with money is so true because then what happens is your labor force stays
00:48:29
impaired because people make enough money by not working this is the key issue right now for a
00:48:34
lot of businesses i mean you have restaurants that are overbooked cannot get servers
00:48:40
jim cramer was saying he's he's up to 18 you know per hour per servers he's going to move
00:48:45
it to 20 it won't make a difference because with that extra 300 i think in federal st federal unemployment plus
00:48:53
three to 700 i think depending on where you are you're now at 60 70 80 and people are
00:48:59
like well people will still go to work and it's like yeah but you're saving commuting and you probably have side hustles
00:49:05
and you've lowered your commute expense so what is going to incentivize people to go back to work we are now running a
00:49:10
dry run with cryptocurrency and you know stimulus a ubi experiment
00:49:16
and the result of this ubi experiment is uh negative economic growth or uh throttled
00:49:22
economic growth we cannot be productive if people don't want to work and contribute so just to your point we need more
00:49:28
people so just your point on friday montana which was part of the federal government's
00:49:34
um you know pandemic related ui benefits program basically said that we're canceling
00:49:40
those benefits and we're opting out and on top of that i think they're now offering a 1200
00:49:45
bonus to return to work and the problem is because the montana now has a severe labor shortage
00:49:50
but it's not just montana it's every state in the union so we have these two opposing forces right
00:49:56
we have so much stimulus we have an under motivated labor force
00:50:02
we have more taxation that's also just going to be wasted so very poor roi and then now we have input costs going
00:50:09
up um and prices going up to try to attract people it's it's all going to drive
00:50:15
here's the quote from the governor of mississippi the purpose of unemployment benefits is to temporarily assist mississippians
00:50:21
who are unemployed through no fault of their own after many conversations over the last several weeks with mississippi small business owners
00:50:27
and their employees it has become clear that the pandemic unemployment assistance and other like programs passed by the
00:50:33
congress may have been necessary in may of last year but are no longer so in may of this year and can you
00:50:39
imagine the hit you're gonna take from voters from woke mobs
00:50:45
from people who believe in income inequality when you say i think we have to stop sending people
00:50:50
free money so they go back to work like this is a very hard position to take um and we now have this occurring on a
00:50:57
micro basis in california we have a is is it true we have a 75 billion dollar surplus this year
00:51:04
as the city devolves and now we're going to take that and instead of lowering taxes and maybe trying to get tesla
00:51:11
or oracle or other venture capital firms that have left instead of doing that what would be what
00:51:16
would be what could we do david with that 75 billion okay well okay so great point so the 75 billion
00:51:22
dollar surplus one-third of that is a is from the federal bailout which obviously we don't need and that's the
00:51:27
money printing that's coming out so we're giving that back right to another state yeah good luck good luck exactly no the
00:51:33
other two thirds is because last year we had all these unexpected tax receipts from the stock market boom and so you
00:51:39
had all these california taxpayers paying capital gains on that so but what this highlights to me is and
00:51:45
what i wonder about is how many of those taxpayers have left the state because we know that we had net
00:51:51
migration loss of 182 000 in 2020. so how many of those people left the state and won't be paying taxes
00:51:58
this year and if biden breaks the stock market through this insane tax and spend then where is this like surplus gonna
00:52:04
come from next year and what this highlights to me is i think we have people in washington and sacramento for that matter who've
00:52:10
lost sight of the fact that ultimately the private sector and and the public sector are a partnership
00:52:17
because the private sector generates the largesse and the wealth to fund the public sector and to fund the
00:52:23
creation of these public goods to fund education to fund law and order to fund social
00:52:29
programs and they've stopped seeing it that way they see the private sector not as something like a cow to be milked
00:52:36
or a you know or or um you know or a sheep to be sheared
00:52:41
but they want to skin the sheep instead of instead of cheering it and um and so they're really at risk
00:52:47
of or you know killing the golden goose i guess you could put it put it that way um you know and i think that you know
00:52:53
during the clinton years just to take uh just to take a contrast we had a
00:52:58
government spending as a federal government spending as a percent of gdp was between eight and a half and
00:53:04
22 percent that was the range and we had a boom uh so when you have
00:53:09
a federal spending as a percentage gdp around 20 it works right and that doesn't mean you
00:53:15
can't increase government spending it just means that government spending will increase as the economy gets bigger
00:53:20
but what you have now is federal spending over 30 of gdp and everything is starting to break
00:53:26
that's the problem very very big problem and of course and that's why we're all getting red
00:53:31
pilled right how many people in silicon valley frankly who make a living off growth stocks are now starting to scratch their
00:53:37
heads going gee what did i vote for uh it's definitely becoming a thing and uh i would say
00:53:44
the the purple pill party you know like chop it up let's mix these two things let's candy flip whatever it takes like to get
00:53:51
out of this you know we got to get this party restarted centrism is the answer it absolutely is
00:53:56
and you know centralism is the answer i think it's probably good for us to take a pause here and uh
00:54:02
maybe talk about this uh business insider hit piece um or what was likely to be a hit piece
00:54:08
but turned out i think on emergent fair um calling this all in podcast
00:54:13
and i i didn't don't know if this is accurate but i thought it was pretty funny possibly the single most disruptive
00:54:21
click in california politics this year i think they're referring to the four of us
00:54:26
um and then of course i get absolutely skewered for making clucking noises i own those
00:54:33
clucks i'm proud of those clucks
00:54:40
can i say something i think that look our i don't know i'm a little exhausted
00:54:47
about local politics and california politics i'm not exhausted by
00:54:52
federal politics because i think it's it's an important um lens as david said into like how we
00:54:59
actually conduct business because all of the businesses we're involved with are inherently uh global and america leads
00:55:06
here's what i'll say though about about that article which i didn't read um like most of these things which i
00:55:11
don't really read never read your press rule number one in the game i think it's incredibly important to
00:55:18
realize that california was a bellwether for
00:55:24
opportunity and the ideals of american upward mobility and a lot of people came
00:55:30
here irrespective of the taxes because they sought out like-minded people they
00:55:36
sought out a moderate liberal liberal viewpoint and an economic set of opportunities
00:55:44
two of those three boundary conditions are changing and that's why i think california is now
00:55:51
important because it is a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the united states which is do we become a balkanized country of 50
00:55:58
states or are there like generic progressive moderate ideals that everybody can agree
00:56:05
to and sign up to and where governments largely still get out of the way this like i don't think you know if you look
00:56:13
at sort of like tech oligopolists and the hatred we have for them i don't think political oligopolists are
00:56:19
any better and so you know i don't think we want either of them in charge is really the answer
00:56:25
um and so we just we just got to use this election cycle i think to kind of
00:56:32
like vote a moderate agenda the most disruptive thing that can happen in
00:56:38
california is somebody emerges who is rational and moderate who says you can categorize me as a
00:56:44
republican or democrat on a whole bunch of issues i had to pick a platform because this stupid election
00:56:50
model makes me pick one so call me a democrat or call me a republican but the reality is i'm a centrist
00:56:56
here's what i believe and if that person gets voted in then hopefully it changes the conversation for the rest of the country
00:57:03
otherwise we are headed to 50 balkanized states operating independently and jason the
00:57:09
thing where you make a joke it's actually kind of sad if you get 25 billion dollars and you don't need it
00:57:15
the ideal thing is that you actually give it back to the federal government because you think there's some accountability for all these dollars and
00:57:20
it actually is the right thing to do and the fact that everybody laughs because we know of course not we'd rather just dig a ditch and fill a ditch
00:57:27
for 25 billion or you know two and a half miles of high-speed rail whatever the crazy thing is that's kind
00:57:34
of sad it's always it's sad and it's corrupt right it's a corruption it's a corruption that we've just gotten
00:57:40
used to which is you're gonna take 26 billion that you don't need that you don't deserve it's like the school board in san
00:57:46
francisco announcing they're going to open school for one day to qualify for incentives for reopening
00:57:51
that gavin newsom gave him for 12 million bucks it's a pure money grab it's out it's outrageous you know um it's all about the benjamins
00:57:58
for these guys and and by by that i do not mean students named benjamin um wow there you go folks david sacks
00:58:06
punching it up on the next snl i wonder what i'm not as good as you invite you to come with him
00:58:11
i'm going to stick with my i'm not as good as you jason i'm going to stick with my my day job but but let me can we go back to this
00:58:17
article i want to give you my two cents on this article um i did uh i you know it was behind a paywall so it was hard to
00:58:23
to read but i got a copy of it here's my view on it first of all i think they did pull their punches a little bit because we did the pre-bundle
00:58:29
you know we called them out before based on their very biased list of questions they sent me but at any event they kind of pulled
00:58:35
their punches a little bit but the article was kind of suffused with this how dare they pissiness you
00:58:40
know and in a couple of areas one was you know the reporter was very upset that we're going direct right we've
00:58:46
talked about going direct meaning um going around reporters and speaking directly to the public it's kind of well
00:58:52
how dare they do that you know they should be talking through us you know uh you know we the objective reporters and
00:58:58
then we'll tell the story for them no we're going direct we want to have an influence we want to speak our minds and the second thing
00:59:05
they're upset about is the fact that we're contributing to these elections and the reporter made a point
00:59:10
of saying that i sought out the boudine recall they didn't just come to me i sought them out and wrote 25 000
00:59:17
as if what is he really up to why did he seek them out well if you want to know what i'm up to i've
00:59:23
written about it i wrote a blog on you know the problem of chase a booty and i've written a blog on the on
00:59:28
how gavin newsom has moved very far to the left you don't need to speculate or wonder what i'm up to i've spent thousands of
00:59:34
words yeah but here's the problem talking about it david they want you to go through them exactly and the
00:59:41
fact that this podcast has bigger reach than when we go on cnbc or bigger reach than we're in business
00:59:48
insider and you know when the new yorker article on chamoth comes out more people will listen to this podcast
00:59:54
than read that article that's what this is about yes absolutely there's a certain
00:59:59
threatening nature to what we're doing here where you know as they admit we're more
01:00:04
influential than they are well then why read them like what is the point especially if they're doing link baiting they look even
01:00:10
they look dumb when compared to the dialogue we're having here they can't have the dialogue we're having here
01:00:16
because let's face it we're we're for insiders we see the what's happening on the inside and
01:00:21
if we talk to them they might get 10 or 20 percent of the picture and in aggregate they might get
01:00:27
to 50 or 60 but we get a hundred percent let me connect a couple dots because i think what you're saying is is really
01:00:33
important in my mind i think this is another example of like the cdc example
01:00:39
or the financial markets example where in in all of these cases what we have is
01:00:44
the following dynamic which is like if you think about when the newspaper used to hit your front door
01:00:50
right like you used to wake up and you know when the paper was delivered right we all remember that and you'd pick it up and it was a
01:00:57
physical paper now i'm just going to use it this number to make it to make an example let's just say it was eight and
01:01:03
a half by eleven you take this eight and a half by eleven piece of paper and what you have is a fixed container
01:01:10
and so what there was was inherent competition and so inherently you had this leverage
01:01:16
where it was only the best things that got into the paper right they segregated by sections people
01:01:22
wanted to advertise against it and having a fixed amount of con of real estate
01:01:27
really made that real estate precious and i think that that was really really important now think about what's happened when you
01:01:34
go to that same paper online let's just use the new york times effectively that container has become
01:01:39
infinite and so now you've completely taken away the ability for anybody to actually assign real value
01:01:47
there's no above the masthead or above the fold concept as much as there used to be especially in infinite scrolling
01:01:53
the point of all of this is this is why there's no value in coming back and re you know telling the truth you just go
01:02:00
to the next clickbait title because you just keep on going and going and you just wonder hey wait a minute to tell the truth
01:02:06
is an inconvenient artifact of my business model today whereas before telling the truth was really important it was an anchor which
01:02:12
created more value for you to sell ads now it's just it just gets lost in a sea of things there's such an
01:02:18
agenda so the point is the financial markets in this interesting way is the only or it's one of the few
01:02:24
places left where you can vote in real time about the truth
01:02:30
right and so for example like you know you get all of these readings and you get all of these documents from the fed which is the financial markets
01:02:37
version of the cdc but you can vote that you don't believe them and you can see it every day the
01:02:43
gap between what they say is narrative and what the facts are and that's a really healthy dynamic that still exists
01:02:49
in in finance and capital markets we just need to figure out a way where it exists everywhere else otherwise people will always
01:02:58
want to make sure that they have a direct conduit to tell their version of the truth
01:03:03
and allow people to decide for themselves uh before we get to science with freeberg if you get this camera
01:03:08
back up and running i don't know if you guys know but vox canceled us this week with an assist from taylor lorenz
01:03:14
the funniest darkest turn in all of this is the multi-millionaire vcs co-opting the language of young women
01:03:20
mlm marketers in an effort to seem cool and hip with us why white men are using the term besties
01:03:27
i don't know if you saw that i think i think taylor lorenz has had her sense of humor surgically removed
01:03:33
i mean that doesn't interest monitor doesn't yeah doesn't she understand that this is a
01:03:39
self-deprecating self-mocking bit that we came up with or that you came up with i mean come on
01:03:45
it's a gag we know it's funny for 50 year old guys to be calling each other just the reason why by the way just if
01:03:52
everybody wants to know the origin of that is one of our other friends phil hellmuth kept calling me bestie c and we used to
01:04:00
think it was the dumbest thing that we've ever heard and then what we thought was would be even funnier is to just co-opt it
01:04:06
and it was given no credit but it was done initially to make fun of what how mute
01:04:11
used to call me right because then we used to call it well hellmuth actually has the maturity level of a teenage girl
01:04:18
so that's true that's true with the name dropping i don't i when he used the term bestie
01:04:23
he was not using it ironically no no no no we're using it ironically yeah yeah hey
01:04:29
um let's talk a little bit about science so we can keep the freedberg ratio up for all these freedberg stands including the
01:04:34
whichever maniac is running freeberg's dog's anonymous twitter handle i don't know if you talked to twitter
01:04:40
security about that yet friedberg my dog's on a walk right now he'll come back and then he can tweet later as well it is my it is my dog that
01:04:46
runs the uh the account yeah yes so much for our ratings no twitch yeah what what is your dog's name again
01:04:51
monty montgomery wiggins with no montgomery this this is going to be lowest lowest
01:04:57
episode in a long time but his name was um was wiggins at the spca where i adopted him from and
01:05:02
i uh and i wanted to name him monty because he's like a hustler he hustled his way you know from the streets of the mission
01:05:09
into a nice condo in pack heights so i gave him the full name montgomery so he's montgomery wiggins now oh here it is monty come here
01:05:15
come on come here come here come on dee come on monty okay tweet something
01:05:21
[Music] hey um there's a lot going on with synthetic biology we saw
01:05:26
two uh different ipos in i believe the last month or so tell us about um
01:05:33
the the gink gingko bioworks public offering and the zamergin
01:05:41
well cybergen so so the premise of synthetic biology which dates back you know many years right
01:05:48
genentech is one of the first companies uh to effectively use synthetic biology
01:05:54
to uh to make products so you know genentech and amgen started making these proteins
01:06:01
that became biologic drugs and the way you um you can kind of think about synthetic
01:06:06
biology is the dna is software and we can program the software to get the organism
01:06:12
of the uh you know whatever dna we're changing to make something that we want to use and so
01:06:18
synthetic biology is all about editing the genome or editing the dna of an organism
01:06:23
editing its dna and doing that in in a way that you can kind of make a product and so this was done initially for
01:06:29
biologic drugs and and over the last kind of 20 years or so
01:06:34
using synthetic biology as a as a kind of approach we've kind of thought about well how can we make things like fuel
01:06:40
and increasingly more commoditized products like um you know proteins that we might consume for animal consumption
01:06:47
instead of using animals to make proteins and so the underlying technologies have all
01:06:53
followed an accelerated path that's greater than moore's law you know dna sequencing costs have dropped faster than moore's
01:06:59
law over the last 10 or 15 years the ability to synthesize or print dna uh crispr
01:07:05
you know kind of provides us with a set of tools to do much more precise dna editing and and so on and so forth and there's
01:07:11
just a confluence of technologies sort of like there were leading up to the personal computing revolution
01:07:17
that are now going to enable this incredible proliferation of a new industry that
01:07:23
many argue will rewrite all industrial systems all industry that makes everything that
01:07:29
humans consume from materials to food to the chemicals to the plastics everything that we use in our daily life
01:07:36
can be rewritten using synthetic biology and so the promise of this dates back again like two decades or so there was a
01:07:42
company called amherst that john doerbach that was one of the first companies that was one of the few companies from the
01:07:47
original synthetic biology companies that actually survived and made it through and they're still around they're still a publicly traded company and more
01:07:54
recently there have been these kind of more digitally enabled at least that's the premise that they kind of make for for what for their
01:08:00
businesses companies so zymergen which was you know got a bunch of soft bank money they raised a billion dollars as a
01:08:06
private company uh they got public with like i think 13 or 14 million of revenue
01:08:11
and they're worth five billion dollars in their ipo so they just went public um and this other company called ginkgo
01:08:17
bioworks uh which is a similar sort of you know synthetic biology platform company just went public
01:08:22
or just announced that they're going public via spec at a 15 billion dollar market cap with you know
01:08:28
i think less than 100 million a revenue so um you know the game is on and i think one
01:08:33
way to kind of think about this is um these businesses aren't great businesses today
01:08:39
but the promise of the next century being um all about synthetic biology you know where biology becomes software
01:08:46
and you can program biological organisms to make and print pretty much anything we as humans consume
01:08:52
is a premise that everyone believes is going to come to fruition this century and it will completely reinvent industry
01:08:57
will improve sustainability i think it is going to be the great savior for this planet and for our ability to sustain on this
01:09:02
planet so these are kind of you know two big ipos that validate that the capital markets are there there's so
01:09:08
many big institutional investors champ can share more on this that are like backing quote-unquote esg companies synthetic biology is this kind of esg
01:09:16
you know moment um and uh and i think these two ipos happening at the valuations that they're
01:09:21
happening at and the capital that's going in i think these are kind of like the netscape moments for synthetic biology
01:09:26
and we're going to see a tremendous amount happen over the next couple of years so chemoth how close are these from being science projects in the lab to
01:09:33
being scalable revenue companies in your estimation because these are de minimis amounts of capital we're talking about
01:09:39
so this feels like the minimum amount of revenue minimum amounts of revenue large amounts large amounts of capital
01:09:46
is this a is this um how far is it to actually cross that chasm
01:09:52
we um i think that we're still trying to figure out what the right business model for these companies
01:09:58
is so for example like if you look at chip design right like so there's an entire value chain where
01:10:04
there's the people that manufacture the equipment right there's the people that run the factory there are the people that
01:10:11
develop the tool chain so the software that you can use to characterize and build a chip right
01:10:16
and if you look at those industries the the factory in the middle tends to be the least valuable
01:10:22
companies like verilog you know folks that make the software are really important and then folks that
01:10:27
make the equipment because the equipment is so precise and very complicated is valuable if you
01:10:32
translate that to biology we need to sort out where the value is going to be so
01:10:37
the the amazing thing about ginkgo is what its promise is what the promise that they that they're
01:10:43
going to make to the market is we're going to make um biology programmable so that the the an
01:10:50
entire generation of biologists and chemists who would otherwise have not been able to just actually
01:10:56
literally like right into a command line interface and generate uh biologic samples we're
01:11:02
going to be able to enable that the same way an electrical engineer so like you know for example like you know when i was doing internships or
01:11:08
you would literally be writing verolog and it would get you know basically generating what was called a net list and you could send a net list
01:11:15
to a fab and all of a sudden out comes a chip so that's what we're trying to do the problem that they have to figure out now
01:11:22
is are you a tool provider are you you know picking shovels
01:11:27
are you doing it yourself on balance sheets you're talking about yeah are you a product company and this
01:11:33
is where we're too early to know what the answer is but as the market sorts that out
01:11:39
as david said more people will get comfortable applying money this is why xymogen and ginkgo
01:11:45
are two really important data points because as david said it will force the market
01:11:52
to help these companies rationalize where they are and what the tool chain
01:11:58
looks like and compare it to semiconductors and in that you're gonna have an entire
01:12:04
generation of companies get built it's super exciting i i spend time in and around
01:12:09
these businesses without getting too specific and i think they're really compelling really interesting this is i mean i
01:12:15
never i i don't generally speak my book but this is where i spend most of my time right so i really am making a bet
01:12:22
on my career and my capital and my time on um synthetic biology
01:12:27
um and and the opportunity it presents for our species this century so all of the work i do and i have
01:12:34
several businesses that i would say compete with ginkgo and zymogen in different ways and are attacking this problem in different ways which is
01:12:40
uh i i mentioned this last time but how do you produce enough by what biological material how do you make stuff
01:12:46
once you go fermenters fermenters and you know so are there fermenter tank companies are there
01:12:51
you know cheap fermentation platform companies you know do we need to scale these things up do we need to kind of reinvent how they're
01:12:57
operating there's a lot of stuff we need to kind of figure out over the next couple of years uh for this to really kind of sweep the
01:13:03
world but but the fact that we can like program biology to make stuff for us is is is kind of where we're at today that's
01:13:08
the moment so here's another example of a fabulous company this is this is a private company but
01:13:13
you know you'll exp you'll see them in the next probably three or four years debut as a public business called pivot bio
01:13:20
another synthetic biology company which i think is just masterful and you know what essentially
01:13:26
pivot bio does it essentially is a clean alternative to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer so
01:13:32
like you put this [ __ ] in the ground when you're planting seeds and what it enables is plants that were
01:13:38
previously incapable of nitrogen fixation meaning getting nitrogen out of the soil
01:13:43
they're able to do it now all of a sudden yields go up density goes up predictability of the crops go up
01:13:48
and it's a huge advance for farming what's interesting about um you know so pivot bio like like chamoth
01:13:54
mentioned there's a lot of plants like soybeans legumes that will fix nitrogen they'll take nitrogen out of the air
01:14:00
right most seventy percent of the air is nitrogen and so plants need nitrogen to grow all protein has to have nitrogen in
01:14:06
it so nitrogen is key to growing plants corn you need to put nitrogen on the ground so around six percent of global
01:14:13
electricity is used to make ammonia which is the fertilizer that farmers around the world put on their fields to
01:14:18
grow their corn and the the ammonia that sits on the field and doesn't get absorbed by the
01:14:24
plant turns into nitrous oxide which is a 300 x worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide
01:14:30
think about that 300 times the heat capacity of carbon dioxide when it goes up into the atmosphere so
01:14:36
the environmental effects of nitrogen-based agriculture are awful and you know pivot is one of the first
01:14:42
they actually commercialized a research microbial strain to do this and you put it on the seed before you put it in the
01:14:47
ground but now the ability for us to engineer microbes and the microbes now pull the nitrogen out of the air and stick it
01:14:53
into the plant the ability for us to engineer microbes opens up this universe of possibility where pivot is kind of like
01:14:59
you know kindergarten level of what's going to happen over the next couple years where we can now engineer all these microbes to pull nitrogen out of the
01:15:05
atmosphere and maybe reduce all fertilizer use and have a huge effect on greenhouse gas um resulting from
01:15:10
from from from agriculture a lot of what you've mentioned seems to be things in the world
01:15:16
products that can be improved and refined what about inside of our bodies i know there are some efforts to
01:15:23
understand what cells are doing and maybe use synthetic biology to get a reading
01:15:28
on a molecular or cellular level as to what is going on inside your body and then there are these self-replicating systems that might be
01:15:34
able to you know i don't know if your white blood cells were low you know when it was the 80s and it was hiv
01:15:39
you could just boom produce more whites of blood cells with a shot or something well the original idea of moderna
01:15:46
which we all know now as being kind of this rna vaccine producer was you could put rna in your body and therefore provide the
01:15:52
code to get your cells to make specific proteins that can do things in your body and so we did this example well the
01:15:58
example we're using now is the covid vaccine right so it makes the covet the spike protein which we then develop an immune response
01:16:04
to but the idea with moderna is you could eventually replace medicine with these rna shots and now
01:16:10
your cells can start to make specific proteins to do specific things in your body now we're very elementary as a species
01:16:16
in our understanding of how proteins drive systems level biology and outcomes so we're starting to learn about this
01:16:22
but i will tell you there is a really interesting research team at ucsf uh led by um a woman named hanael sameed
01:16:29
and and this research team is identifying they're building a toolkit of proteins
01:16:35
where these proteins can almost have like robotic arms they can have really interesting function think about
01:16:40
martin short in inner space remember that machine he went in he went in the body and he started doing stuff in the body they're working on building basically a
01:16:47
toolkit so it's not just a single protein that now you it goes and does something but really complicated combinations of
01:16:52
proteins that can now go in the body and fix things and repair things and and react environmentally to
01:16:58
specific conditions in the body like oh there's a cancer cell here i'm gonna go do something to it now um and and so there's this whole there's
01:17:04
this whole world of like dynamic call you know kind of making things more dynamical than they have been historically just just thinking about aging would it
01:17:11
theoretically be able to help with hearing loss eyesight loss you know and those type of
01:17:16
things uh would you be able to there's another area of biology we could talk about this at length but there's another biology
01:17:22
called stem cell therapy where you can basically take you know all cells evolve from stem cells uh in your body so these are kind of the
01:17:28
original cells that you have initially in an embryo right and then as your body kind of grows you end up with these stem cells
01:17:34
and you have stem cells in your body today those stem cells when they make a copy they can differentiate into different
01:17:39
cells in your body so for the last you know 10 20 years in california by the way has about a four
01:17:45
billion dollar if i remember right stem cell grant program where they're funding our research into stem cell therapies
01:17:51
so there are significantly successful therapies right now multiple companies
01:17:58
are productizing and launching and they're already active in the market for fixing blindness with people that
01:18:03
have specific diseases called retinitis pigmentosa where your your the retinal cells in your body and
01:18:08
your eyes degrade and stop working you will get a stem cell injection of progenitor retinal stem cells into your
01:18:14
eye and you will grow a new retina and you can see again and the efficacy is insane it is incredible how well this
01:18:21
works and they are doing this with lots of other stem cell therapies so we're getting so smart and here's an
01:18:26
incredible thing scientists discovered a few years ago i think these guys won the nobel prize for this you could take any cell in the human body
01:18:32
and induce it chemically meaning you put a bunch of chemicals on that cell and get that cell to convert back into a
01:18:39
stem cell now you've created your own stem cells from your own body and you can now put them back in your body and get them to
01:18:45
turn into any other cell in your body so this is called induced pluripotent stem cell therapy ipsc so ipsc now forms the basis for a
01:18:52
lot of these stem cell therapy kind of um programs that are underway and so this is going to be an it's
01:18:58
an insane field over the next couple days hey uh freedberg if we took the 25 billion dollars that we don't need in
01:19:04
california and gave it to these companies totally quickly could we survive totally totally could we solve this problem
01:19:10
nothing drives me more nuts than when i see money not going to science i mean it is just i mean seriously like
01:19:16
let's we need to start our own political party that is based on reasonable suggestions
01:19:22
like the one i just made or the ones you know the middle ground party just a
01:19:27
reasonable part sex do you think there's possibility for a third for a true third party in the united states
01:19:34
structurally no it's really set up to be a two-party system you have to really take over one of the two parties and frankly the
01:19:40
problem in our politics right now i'm not saying the republican party is great but the democrat party has basically been taken over by woke socialists
01:19:47
so you know but so i think that kind of like limits your options um but i mean you what you have to do is
01:19:55
create a movement and then you you basically take over one of the parties right i mean what we're describing today i mean just
01:20:02
to uplevel it is it almost feels like we're in a race between technological acceleration and
01:20:07
social and political deterioration right so like technology one more time we're in a race
01:20:15
i think for the future between technological acceleration and social and political deterioration
01:20:20
wow and the question is which one of these forces is going to win the future everything freeberg describes is incredibly hopeful right we're going to
01:20:26
be able to cure people with all these miracle technologies i mean even the new mrna vaccines that were developed
01:20:32
for covid i mean it's miraculous right and we're going to be able to use that same mrna technology for other things other
01:20:37
diseases maybe even to attack cancer cells so there's so many positive things happening we all see it in
01:20:43
the technology ecosystem there's been an explosion of wealth creation and opportunity
01:20:48
created over the last 20 years in technology and so we have this very positive force
01:20:54
and then everything that seems to be happening in our politics and society is negative it's it's involves
01:21:00
deterioration it's it's basically um a special interest corruption
01:21:05
it's um you know it's basically people wedded to these insane ideologies
01:21:10
and you're right like what we really want is just a pragmatic a pragmatic party that allows the
01:21:16
private sector to do its job generate the wealth necessary to then fund social programs instead of trying to upturn the whole
01:21:23
system which is what it feels like so many people in power are trying to do today yeah so i registered uh a registered
01:21:30
reason party for us if we if we ever want to go there so if you want to bookmark reason party
01:21:37
let's uh let's let's uh talk about this tonight boys because i gotta run oh is it on yum yum i'm gonna see two of
01:21:44
you tonight you cannot wait sex you gotta fly up you gotta find sex
01:21:50
what are you doing having a bird if you don't let the bird out of the cage our friend from la is flying up yeah
01:21:56
i mean you can our other friend who puts the ball in the basket is coming yeah there are many friends many friends
01:22:02
come on saks basketball friends free the bird i'll take it under advisement speaking of bird they just announced a spac today
01:22:13
love you guys
01:22:20
i love you besties and we'll see you see you guys next time see you guys on the all-in podcast bye bye love you guys
01:22:28
let your winners ride rain man david sacks
01:22:35
we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it
01:22:41
[Music]
01:22:50
besties [Music]
01:23:02
it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music]
01:23:11
we need to get these
01:23:23
[Music] oh
