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like jacob can you get any closer to the camera i mean your face is like right up in
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there we can see your bloodshot eyes oh god it's really um 9am start times a
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little rough by jake out a little rough by jake out that's true i want my second cup of coffee
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already this is this is a lifestyle choice we may regret we'll let your winners ride rain man
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[Music] david source [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast
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it's saturday morning it's ridiculously early but we're taping the show
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because one of the besties happens to have left the continent with us from an undisclosed location
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chamath polyhapatia are you in a wine cellar or in catacombs i am in i am and look at it wait for it wait
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for it wow were you able to see that or no no what was that are you in are you in the cathedral somewhere you
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mean the ceiling of your it's room you paid for the four walls and now you can afford the roof
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okay hold on hold on okay hold on i'll do a little i'll do a little uh let's see if you can just see outside
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and get a sense of the view oh you can't oh no we can't just oh whoa bestie lifestyle happening there
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just got to hold it for a second and then there well no that's my architect hold on
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look at this wow i love how i love how the house is already built and he's still paying the architect yeah he's
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like do me a favor this came out great but you rip down these four rooms and then
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just start over all right well we lost uh bestie c as he walks around his castle
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in some european country welcome to the lifestyles of the rich and famous what time is it there for you well it's
00:01:53
uh six in the afternoon six in the evening i was in london last week and holy mackerel
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the weather if you want to see climate change spend some time in europe because literally day over day
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uh london on the first day i landed was call it 24 degrees celsius so whatever that is 80
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78 maybe beautiful literally the next day it was 62 and raining and it just kept
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bouncing back and forth it is the weirdest thing and if you're in europe right now
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you you just see some of the craziest weather patterns literally day over day massive thundershowers then you know
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it's completely normal i mean no wonder everybody here takes climate change so seriously you actually
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feel it every day and with us as well uh david sacks is here the rain man himself
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tearing up the twitter we've been off for two weeks so there's a lot to cover
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and of course the queen of quinoa chairman of the production board david friedberg right off the bat i think we
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got to go science and get the freedberg ratio up from the get biogen has an alzheimer's drug that on
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monday the fda approved it's the first new treatment for alzheimer's in almost two decades
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and biogen's drug is not a cure for alzheimer's and freeberg will get into that it does
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not reverse the disease's progression but it does mitigate it gets it getting
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worse very strange moment in time the fda's advisory panel three members of it have quit because
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they didn't want to approve this drug because it had such a modest efficacy three quit but
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unanimous vote against approval right so unanimous vote against then three quit and this is
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i think out of 10 or 11 individuals um so this is truly significant the drug is going to cost 55
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000 it still requires brain scans and all this kind of stuff but it's hope for
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people suffering uh and so the fda approved it um friedberg tell us on a science basis
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what we're seeing here is what's happening in journalism and social media
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now happening in science or is this some other you know search for truth uh or some other issue the biogen drug
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that was approved this week is called adjukanymab remember any drug that ends with mab
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mab means monoclonal antibody so it's an antibody and antibodies you know as we've talked
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about in the past are proteins that can be made by our immune system and proteins that bind to a specific target
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that then tells your immune system to clear that target out of your body so that's what monoclonal antibodies do
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and we have been using biological drugs monoclonal antibody drugs for decades now to target specific cells
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or specific proteins in our body that we can then remove from our body and that can reverse or change you know
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human health in very significant ways so this is a you know a class of drugs that is very
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efficacious for having specific outcomes across many disease states and so years ago researchers at the
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university of zurich were looking at people with alzheimer's that were having slowly progressive
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dementia and they looked at antibodies that they could find in their brain and they found this antibody that they
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saw was binding to amyloid plaque and amyloid plaque is one of the theorized mechanisms by which
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alzheimer's progresses that as amyloid plaque builds up in your brain you know you start to have dysfunction
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and inflammation and the amyloid plaque kind of may be the driver of alzheimer's but
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that is not proven so they then you know ultimately gave it to a company called neuromune who
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licensed it the biogen and biogen started testing it and they took this antibody um
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that they discovered and they turned it into a a you know an antibody you can now get injected
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into your body goes into your brain it by the idea is it binds to amyloid plaque and removes it from your brain
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and so theoretically this should slow down or stop alzheimer's but it turns out that as they ran this
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test across thousands of patients it didn't have as much of an effect and in fact the data across many many
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patients showed that it didn't really off of a placebo baseline meaning people that didn't get
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the drug versus people that did get the drug that it wasn't really that different in
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terms of cognitive scores and tests and all this other stuff so they abandoned it a few years ago
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they kind of got this they stopped the trial they had this kind of negative outcome
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and you know biogen got beat up for it and then all of a sudden they refiled about nine months later with the fda
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saying well look when we look at the patients with the highest dosage of the drug because they gave it in
00:06:23
three different doses so the people that got the most antibodies this particular group of people had a 23
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decline in the progression of their alzheimer's which is kind of one way of slicing the data
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and and as a result they went back to the fda and people were like well you know some
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of the tests don't really show that still there was some cognitive test results that didn't show that that was
00:06:45
the case and they fought back against and so some people were pushing back against it
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and we're not sure no one knows for sure how it all kind of came together at the
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end but the fda ultimately approved this drug and here's what's challenging about
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this you basically will go in you'll get an injection of this this antibody just
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like you do with many other antibody based therapies it costs roughly five dollars to make
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antibody therapy just to be clear so when you make them five bucks roughly is the cost and
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they're charging fifty six thousand dollars for this treatment so that's
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problem one in the pharmaceutical kind of debate is should we be charging the you know the quality of life premium
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and then number two yeah and then part uh you know the kind of second issue is like should this
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thing have been approved when it wasn't really that efficacious and you could slice the
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data slightly and now all payers you know meaning all people who are insured or the government or
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whoever it is that's responsible for insurance payments is ultimately bearing the cost of
00:07:37
everyone with alzheimer's and there's 15 million people in the united states of
00:07:40
alzheimer's they're going to raise their hand and say oh my god anything that gives me any
00:07:44
chance or any hope i want to get but if it costs 56 000 is it really the responsibility of the insurance company
00:07:50
and all the payers to give everyone a hope even if the drug may not work now the downside in the
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side effects is negligible there's no risk to taking this drug so it's all about the cost and the upside
00:08:00
and that that that is the big philosophical debate right now is like first of all should we approve drugs
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like this should we allow pharma companies to charge whatever they want even when the
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efficacy is very low and the cost is very low to make this stuff and how do we ultimately decide
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what so this is a classic risk reward chamoth how do you look at this on a financial basis
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yeah let me let me let me give you sort of like a a market investing kind of view on this um look
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i've been taking biotech pretty seriously over the last 18 months just trying to learn because i think
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basically freeberg ins you know incepted me with uh this idea that you you have to know it
00:08:36
um so here's what's interesting in the setup for what i've learned and putting a little bit of my knowledge
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together which is dangerous but the setup for alzheimer's is really scary if you're black
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you're 20 more likely to get it if you look at the distribution of all patients 60
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and upwards of you know 64 65 are women so if you think about the distribution of this disease
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it's it's the disease of minorities and it's the disease of women now that's problematic in and of itself
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because if you want to have any form of equality it seems like this is something
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that we have to tackle the second interesting thing as a as a setup to this is every single alzheimer's drug that's
00:09:18
ever gone through the fda has been rejected and has failed and what's interesting
00:09:23
and the the the more social science around this is this was also where two of the more
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infamous insider trading events ever happened was around failed alzheimer's drug
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um the first which is less known but inside baseball is what happened at sac which was a huge hedge fund but the
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second that's very well known as martha stewart and why she went to jail was around the
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speculation in the insider trading of the phase three results of an alzheimer's drug which ultimately turned
00:09:50
out to fail it was almost the surest money on wall street which is every time some
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one of these drugs came to market you just bet against it and it would turn out that these stocks would
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collapse so there's the social and market setup i am super torn but i think there are
00:10:04
some positive points to make on this thing so but let me give you the negative case the negative cases
00:10:08
what is the fda doing approving a drug where there's no clear evidence that it
00:10:12
leads to clinical benefits and it could give families a sense of false hope what are you doing in terms of process
00:10:20
if you have a unanimous vote against approval so why do you even bother having an fda
00:10:24
advisory committee of outside experts if they're just going to do what you want
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and it could set a precedent where companies can get drugs approved on limited evidence
00:10:33
now here's the positive point which is they may be taking a long-term view and
00:10:39
what they could be really doing is creating a market that ultimately incentivizes other folks to come in
00:10:45
where then ultimately those people are the ones that find the solution right because
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this biogen drug biogen came out and basically said we think this is a 100 billion dollar market
00:10:55
so now all of a sudden you must believe capitalism is going to take hold and a lot of young startups will say
00:11:00
well i should be going after this market as well and so by going after that after biogen
00:11:07
then maybe you actually do get to the solution and just a kind of a little bit of trivia
00:11:13
it turns out that the acting fda commissioner in 2016 this woman janet woodcock she was the
00:11:18
one that approved a different form of drug in the exact same setup that one was eta leprosine which is basically for
00:11:25
duchene muscular dystrophy he had a negative panel vote she basically said no we're going with this the scientific
00:11:31
community reacted similarly back then but she basically took the view that you know you're doing no harm exactly what
00:11:37
you said free bro because the safety says it's fine you're doing no harm to the patients by
00:11:41
approving this drug and maybe it might turn out to work in the end and in that specific case for duchenne
00:11:47
muscular dystrophy what we see four years later is that now there are a lot more companies focused
00:11:52
on finding a solution and they're pouring a ton of money into r d and maybe one of those things will
00:11:56
break through so i think she could just be running the same playbook here in alzheimer's which
00:12:01
is important enough that somebody needs to do something you're saying the economic incentive
00:12:06
could drive further innovation in the space that ultimately could benefit patients more truly than this current
00:12:11
drug i think so and i think like you know what look a lot of like i think drugs that that
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are potential solutions in many ways i think what the fda is doing are two things which i think are
00:12:26
really positive the first is that they're accelerating their approval timelines right so you
00:12:30
can have breakthrough approval and innovations and so you can get to market much much
00:12:34
faster the best example is what we've seen in these vaccines but the second thing is if you
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have a well-structured safety study that says that these things are not harmful to humans
00:12:44
then yeah david it's it's basically saying sell a 56 000 drug there's a 10 000 copay now we
00:12:50
should talk about that because that shows how broken medicare plan b is uh part b sorry um but yeah they're
00:12:56
creating a hundred billion dollar market out of nothing yeah but should should that be the case
00:13:01
chamoth or should it be regulated because ultimately if the regulators are approving the drug and enabling the
00:13:06
commercial opportunity shouldn't the regulators also say you know what you can have this commercial
00:13:11
opportunity but you can only charge x because we're not going to have the taxpayer pay the y
00:13:16
uh or package hey freeberg let me ask a really basic question here why is there no you know document put
00:13:24
out by the fda saying here's how we came to this decision in plain english or is there because i
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looked for that couldn't find it in other words you know the same way there was a vote they could say hey
00:13:34
listen we understand the vote we're overruling it for this reason and why isn't there
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an interim step the fda is not the fda is not your doctor right so i think the way things
00:13:42
are set up is your doctor is meant to be informed about the panel's review of drugs and
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they and there are labels that doctors need to be able to read and understand and then the
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doctor's job is to make a decision on treatment for their patients and make a recommendation to their
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patients so ultimately the fda is not a consumer organization the labels that get approved what the
00:14:01
pharmaceutical companies have to say about their drug all of that stuff is overseen by the regulators of the fda
00:14:06
and then that is then used by the doctors to make treatment decisions and and they couldn't kick this back and
00:14:12
say listen no jason but couldn't they kick it back and say we want you to do one more trial or some
00:14:16
bridge step here hey you can do 10 000 people over the next three years they do that and by the way
00:14:21
and they are going to do continuing studies on ad you can map as it goes into market they always do that and they
00:14:26
always ask for more data and they do this continuous review the fda is a really strong body
00:14:32
and a really strong regulatory body and we should all feel kind of pretty well you know safe and secure but the issue
00:14:37
is really i think the economic question on the other end which is they could approve a hundred drugs
00:14:41
tomorrow and then what happens to the economics of health care if everyone's allowed to charge any
00:14:46
price they want for any care if it has even the slightest range of efficacy we're not going to be able to
00:14:50
afford anything you know so just so this is where like you know regulatory bodies run
00:14:54
run into each other because the effort so alzheimer's alzheimer's is a drug of the old right
00:15:01
health care expenses are covered by medicare and in medicare there's a section called
00:15:06
medicare part b which effectively is a way for these drugs to go to market just so you guys know under a medicare
00:15:13
part b plan a physician gets a six percent kickback of the price of the drug your doctor gets six percent of that
00:15:22
fifty seven thousand dollars that's a terrible incentive it's a it's
00:15:26
an incredibly bad incentive and so three thousand dollars every time you put somebody on this
00:15:31
it's quite a spiff it is and so and so you know medicare part b has been this mechanism
00:15:36
that people have wanted to undo for a long time now if you're sitting in the fda you
00:15:40
can't change that because that's covered by cms yeah that's not your that's not your
00:15:43
jurisdiction i think it's like this weird inter governmental agency warfare push
00:15:49
and pull and trying to move the incentives this all goes back to if congress can't
00:15:53
act then all these folks have all of these other random tools they just have to throw the spaghetti against the wall
00:15:59
and this is the kind of stuff that happens because congress should actually be fixing this in a more substantive
00:16:04
holistic way and until they do it this is what's going to happen this is no different than what we saw
00:16:08
during the pandemic where we had health regulators coming in local health regulators public health officials
00:16:13
saying everything's shut down because their incentive is to save lives their incentive is not to
00:16:18
balance the trade-off between saving lives and protecting the people versus the economic damage and the
00:16:23
fallout and the cost of it and there are two different agencies and ultimately the synthesis
00:16:28
of these decisions isn't being managed by a leader anywhere or by a leading organization anywhere
00:16:33
and that's where things inflate and get ugly and get nasty over time okay uh saks as a free as a
00:16:38
free market monster what do you think saks how would you approach releasing these drugs as a no but you're
00:16:44
for less regulation when you see this regulatory mess of spaghetti and you know costs and and price gouging you
00:16:51
know if we take the most cynical look at it because 15 million people times 55 000
00:16:56
a year i'm no genius at math i but i my sats tell me enough that that's going
00:17:02
to be this drug's going to make what 10 billion a year 20 billion a year something in that range
00:17:06
if they just get a fraction of those people so i mean i i agree with friberg and schmoth that we shouldn't
00:17:11
give doctors an incentive to choose one treatment or another right i mean that just seems totally
00:17:16
warped but going to the sort of larger issue of fda approval um i would make it a little bit easier
00:17:24
to to get drugs approved i mean look i i think that you know double blind test is
00:17:28
the gold standard if the drug clearly doesn't work you don't approve it but this is a case
00:17:33
where the evidence is a little bit inconclusive and in a situation like that where it's a drug that might help people
00:17:40
who are facing a deadly disease and you know alzheimer's is one of the worst it's not only
00:17:45
you know event the prognosis is terminal but it also is deteriorative and it's devastating for patients and
00:17:51
their families these people have nothing to lose and so i would let the drug through i think and then watch how it
00:17:58
performs over the next couple of years they could always revoke the approval in two years you know in
00:18:04
other words almost consider the usage of the drug over the next couple years as a
00:18:08
stage four trial you know the the one group who's not complaining about this are patients
00:18:14
i mean alzheimer's patients want the ability to test this and generally speaking i think we should
00:18:19
give people who are facing again a terminal prognosis the ability to try these drugs
00:18:25
yeah and free bro correct me if i'm wrong the reason or maybe chemotherapy you're better for this but just looking
00:18:31
at the economics of this taking care of somebody with alzheimer's and if you it starts to hit people at 65
00:18:37
and people start living to 78 85 years old they need to have care a person with alzheimer's the issue is not
00:18:44
their ongoing maintenance in terms of their brain it's their day-to-day life
00:18:49
they cannot be left alone so they have to be either institutionalized or have home care
00:18:54
and then you're talking about a hundred thousand a year and i think medicare and
00:18:57
some other people pay for that so 55k if the person can take care of themselves that's how
00:19:02
price is done that's exactly right is that how they do it so pricing is typically done
00:19:07
based on the long-term cost benefit of their of the drug of the the to the to the
00:19:13
paying system so you know they'll take a look at like hey here's how much we're going to
00:19:17
benefit people or benefit the paying system therefore we can charge x dollars for getting this
00:19:22
drug that's why today you can go get a um a car t therapy or something you know some sort
00:19:27
of therapy that that is going to be highly efficacious and they'll charge you a million dollars
00:19:31
or genetic um there there's a few that are getting approved now uh for genetic diseases
00:19:36
and that you know million dollar one-time fee because you get you get the treatment once it costs
00:19:41
you know technically nothing the cogs are zero to make this stuff you get that treatment they charge you a
00:19:45
million dollars because the long-term care of the progression of that disease is so high
00:19:49
that they can economically rationalize that um and so is that ethical or moral on the pricing
00:19:56
clarify one thing so we're talking about it at 56 6 000 a year that is true but it's basically 4
00:20:02
800 per shot you get a shot once per month and that costs 4 800 and so you multiply
00:20:08
that by 12 and you get to the 56 000 number now it's 4 800 to get this monthly shot an outrageous
00:20:16
amount of money for what could be a breakthrough alzheimer's treatment i don't necessarily think so i mean that
00:20:21
is the sticker price that's not what the patient is going to pay right the patient's
00:20:26
going to pay the ten thousand dollar copay but divide that by 12 you're going to pay about 850 per month
00:20:32
for what could be a breakthrough treatment i mean to me the real issue is whether
00:20:36
it works and since it's since there are some positive indications but it's inconclusive
00:20:42
inclusive i would say tie goes to the runner here meaning you can try it and let's revisit it in two years and
00:20:48
see if it works but but it wasn't a tie as far as scientists were concerned so
00:20:53
what is the disconnect there chamath because i think what they were looking for no but they were looking for
00:20:59
a causal link and the problem is at some point along the way over the last few years we started with the hypothesis
00:21:05
that amyloid plaque was causal of alzheimer's and then we moved to a place where there
00:21:10
was some correlation and then we moved to a place where we said actually it may not do much of
00:21:15
anything but i actually agree with saks i think the fda did something really novel here
00:21:20
which is that they applied an extremely aggressive free market approach to a market that has been completely
00:21:27
bereft of solutions and so if you can create a hundred billion dollar market overnight
00:21:34
i think it stands to reason that a lot of people will look at the increase in biogen's market cap
00:21:40
and the profits that biogen can make over the next 10 or 15 years and say i will attack that and do that cheaper
00:21:46
faster better it happens in every other market i think the point here is that it
00:21:51
probably shouldn't have been the fda's role to create competition but for whatever
00:21:57
reason whether it's how the capital markets and biotechnology are structured
00:22:01
or the way that you know medicare part b kind of works and creates these odd incentives
00:22:06
we are where we are and so i tend to think that it's probably better that this drug was approved i also agree with
00:22:12
saks that in general i think as long as you have a reasonably defensible safety study we should
00:22:19
probably be in the business of getting more drugs approved faster and the reason is that it allows
00:22:27
smart clever hardworking people to connect the dots in ways that right now we don't know anything about like
00:22:33
just like you know a random factoid to prove this point like when you look inside for example of
00:22:38
who wins a nobel prize right particularly in the fields of biology and chemistry etc
00:22:44
you have people that are in their 60s and 70s that win awards for research done in
00:22:49
their 20s and 30s so clearly people at some point when they are somewhat less jaded you know and somewhat more
00:22:57
naive maybe have the ability to really transform the world for all of us and if you can marry that to economic
00:23:04
incentives so folks that understand the markets can also be along for that ride that in my mind i think is generally
00:23:09
better than a nanny state of babysitters i agree with that point i i think i think let me frame this to you in a
00:23:15
question for you of those scientists on that board who voted against this if their parent or spouse god forbid
00:23:23
we're suffering from alzheimer's how many of them would take the drug out
00:23:26
of this this is my point is and and it's a point i was going to make which is everyone wants that lottery
00:23:31
ticket there's no downside and only upside because you're not paying for the
00:23:34
lottery ticket and so the way the system works in terms of paying right now as a patient and as a doctor i have no
00:23:43
incentive to manage cost down right all i have is opportunity in front of me and so as we add more opportunities we
00:23:51
give everyone the ability to have a lottery ticket that potentially could cure their disease or
00:23:55
or you know make them kind of live forever have a healthier state of being uh you know we are going to see
00:24:01
this proliferation of approvals that end up costing all of us so much that the inflation that we've already
00:24:06
experienced in terms of paying costs for health care continues to climb so the challenge is
00:24:11
like you know if we are going to continue to operate a socialized model of medicine
00:24:16
or even partially socialized where the government's paying some amount of of the uh of the premium or employers
00:24:21
are paying part of the premium where the individual that's getting the treatment doesn't bear the cost
00:24:26
you're going to end up seeing everything in flight because you're creating this
00:24:29
incentive now companies are going to rush in they're going to try and get 10 things approved
00:24:33
everyone's going to be taking an alzheimer's drug in a couple of years because there's going to be so many
00:24:36
available on the market and none of them may actually be curing alzheimer's maybe 10 of people get cured 90 don't
00:24:43
but the cost is going to be millions of dollars you know per person for these treatments
00:24:47
and everyone pays that i'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing you know we need to have a
00:24:51
proliferation of innovation certainly the challenge is in the interim period the inflation we've already experienced
00:24:57
in healthcare which is just extraordinary will continue to climb if you know we don't regulate
00:25:03
the actual market for pricing on these things and on the other side we pay all the
00:25:08
bills or there's some socialized pool to pay all the bills you can't have
00:25:12
it both ways i'll give you the other side of the argument as well which um is the reason why this could be
00:25:18
so valuable again if you look back to what jane lockwood did um was it muscular muscular disorder
00:25:25
yeah in duchesne muscular dystrophy you know for janet janet woodcock sorry part of me jenna woodcock
00:25:31
um but if you if you know anybody whose child has duchene muscular dystrophy my gosh what an incredibly debilitating
00:25:38
disease you would not want anybody in the world to have it and again by approving that drug what she did i
00:25:46
think is something pretty incredible because now there are of the the number of companies that have
00:25:51
again come after that market opportunity because she helped define a market four of them are already public just to
00:25:58
give you a sense of it and they're you know and so the odds at least numerically
00:26:04
are greater today than they were four years ago and that was a you know potentially
00:26:09
non-efficacious drug that that frankly though had a had a legitimate safety study to your
00:26:14
guests chamath and friedberg 10 out of 10 of those people on the fda board would have a spouse or a loved one take
00:26:20
it because there's no downside if you look at biogen's market cap just to wrap
00:26:24
up here uh they added 20 billion dollars in market cap in the five days since you know this
00:26:28
announcement happened so in terms of incentives you got to think every other drug
00:26:32
company is saying hey i've got something that kind of sort of works and it's
00:26:36
really expensive can i get a free ticket now can i do this compassion hopefully it's just the
00:26:40
former thing kind of sort of works and then you know yeah from there all right moving on to our uh
00:26:46
next topic bezos has decided that he will be the first billionaire in space uh three people are going to be going to
00:26:53
space in quotes on an 11-minute flight on july 20th 2021 uh jeff bezos in a promotional video on
00:27:01
his instagram uh sprung this on his best friend his bestie his brother mark who agreed to go with him and there's
00:27:08
bidding of three million dollars i guess to it's up to 4.8 oh my god 4.8 now
00:27:15
on blue origin site uh and just doing back of the envelope math which i which i did uh uh
00:27:21
last week when i heard this announcement 600 people or so have gone to space some
00:27:25
of them have gone multiple times blue origin's done 20 some odd flights two of which
00:27:29
went south and probably would have resulted in death so i think five to ten percent of blue origin's fight
00:27:34
flights would have killed uh uh sadly they joseph had been on them but obviously they've made progress since
00:27:40
then two of the 120 plus flights that spacex have done but none in the last six years
00:27:45
um have had an accident uh and obviously uh virgin galactic had one tragic accident as well
00:27:52
so is this a wise idea and where would we put the percentage risk of ruin slash fatality i just i just wanna i
00:28:00
just wanna do statistics for a second jason sure yeah just because there were blue origin accidents in the past
00:28:07
doesn't necessarily mean that it has any bearing in predicting the future likelihood of
00:28:12
there being an accident because the data from the past is from different machines and
00:28:16
different techniques and different processes so i don't think you know to your tweet and the controversy with your
00:28:22
tweet and you know your point now i don't think you can necessarily look at the past
00:28:26
this is much more of a kind of deterministic conversation about like hey look here are the things we have
00:28:30
done with our systems and here's why we have a high confidence in this thing you know kind
00:28:34
of working which is obviously why people don't go on the first 50 rockets or
00:28:37
first 20 rockets whatever it happens to be but statistically it's it's non-zero so
00:28:42
i guess the question is is this a wise move and where would you actually put the odds at
00:28:46
but it could it could very well be zero now could yeah you don't know right we don't know how well their
00:28:51
safety systems have been developed i mean we don't know how you know the i don't know anything about
00:28:55
this but i'm pretty sure that if bezos is go he's a pretty smart guy he's not
00:28:58
going in anything that's going to have some high some some even nominal likelihood of
00:29:01
death right like and he knows probabilities and he's been there in the last 15 test flights and he's seen the
00:29:07
data and he's probably seen a string of nominal flights and at some point you just feel like you
00:29:14
know okay this is this is really dialed in here my prediction is bezos is going to come back and he's going to
00:29:18
announce that he's going to be the ceo of blue origin i think this is what he's going all in
00:29:22
on blue i think this is what he wants to do with the rest of his life i think it's been pretty clear that this is such
00:29:26
a passion for him and like you know he's he's got the world's greatest money
00:29:30
machine ever it's a flywheel it'll run as a monopoly for decades he can do
00:29:34
whatever he wants to do now and so when he takes a look at this what's greater after you've conquered
00:29:38
earth than leaving earth and moving on so to me this seems to be so intellectually interesting to him and
00:29:45
um and so kind of existentially interesting my guess is he goes in full time on blue origin now that he's kind
00:29:50
of transitioned to the chairman role and he's kind of been pretty public about it
00:29:52
100 100 david are you conservative and typically very scared of anything dangerous go ahead
00:30:01
well i'll give bezos credit for dog food in his own product but um to me i would take a contrarian
00:30:07
view overall um you know i think sometimes people get so rich and so powerful that there's
00:30:12
nobody around them to tell them when they have a bad idea and quite frankly i think this is a
00:30:18
brain fart that the people around him are telling him smells like perfume and they should be telling him dude what
00:30:25
are you thinking you know if if jakow said to me he was going up on a rocket i'd be like
00:30:32
dude you got at least 30 good years here you know bezos don't screw up the podcast
00:30:37
yeah we need the hosts we need you down here what are you thinking bezos has got like 170 billion after the
00:30:44
divorce he's you know still a young guy and he's gonna risk it to go up in space for like three minutes
00:30:51
um i mean now yeah they've this is the they have sent the crash test dummy up there
00:30:57
successfully 15 times but this is the first manned flight the first flight with humans on it he's determined
00:31:03
to be on it if i were his advisor i would say put a gopro on the head of the crash test
00:31:09
dummy and experience it in virtual reality exactly what are you thinking yeah i mean if this was a
00:31:19
stunt that you know um uh richard branson did early in his career remember he did the ballooning
00:31:25
things and he was trying to become a billionaire and trying to get excitement around his
00:31:30
brand but i think this is totally unnecessary and it is not a the the risk of rooney is not zero it
00:31:36
might be close to zero but it's definitely not zero i mean well now branson's trying to beat bezos into
00:31:42
space so he's announced he's gonna go up two and you know so these guys are both um being dirty is
00:31:49
he going up on the um uh galactic uh chamoth what's he do how's he going up this space
00:31:56
is that a virgin galactic flight i don't know if it wasn't public is it you're saying sorry did you say it was a
00:32:10
public thing no i said it virgin galactic is a public company of which i'm chairman of said
00:32:15
board of directors i'm not saying anything about anything branson is is trying to beat bezos into
00:32:20
space by going up before him there is now a space race going on and you have to wonder and then
00:32:25
meanwhile elon i i wonder how much of this is because of bezos's pride because elon tweeted
00:32:33
that bezos couldn't get it up because his rocket bezos rocket is only going to actual
00:32:39
space yeah it goes to like suborbital like low earth orbit you know space he gets
00:32:44
it halfway up i think he's somewhere in the 50 to 70 range i think how much if he had
00:32:50
a little blue pill blue origin if he got the little blue origin pill he might get
00:32:55
to 100 how great is this space race by the way this is so freaking cool right i mean
00:32:59
like the government is pretty amazing i mean the government creates all these great contract
00:33:03
incentives this is a this is a good role for government right they come in they create all these contract incentives
00:33:07
spacex has been making all this money from the us government and then they take that money and they
00:33:11
invest in creating the space race this industry that you know could absolutely transform
00:33:16
humanity for the centuries to come uh it really speaks to kind of like how semiconductors
00:33:22
and computing came out of the space race of the mid 20th century and we could see this kind of like next
00:33:28
industrial age arise for the space industrial age uh because of these incentives that have been created
00:33:33
by the government it seems to me like there's a good role here the government's played and this is super
00:33:37
super cool isn't this in stark contrast to the government doing the space shuttle
00:33:42
program which if you look at the fatalities there have been about 30 fatalities and
00:33:46
going to space 14 of which were on the two shuttles one that tragically blew up on the way
00:33:51
up and one that disintegrated on the way down in our childhoods in the 80s i believe
00:33:55
um it was also incredibly expensive look this is privatization for the win right instead of having the government
00:34:02
doing all the r d and the government is good at some things but r d is not one of them so you you let the
00:34:09
private sector do the r d and then nasa's contracting with these private sector companies
00:34:15
the government is a phenomenal balance sheet yes how do you feel about the government funding this work
00:34:20
right because they're not doing the work but it's the taxpayers money that's
00:34:23
going to spacex and others for contract services that ultimately fuels this innovation
00:34:28
engine do you feel like this is a good role for government spending is to kind of well the question the
00:34:33
question for government as a policy matter is whether we want to go to space and then the question is how
00:34:38
do we get there i definitely believe that if we believe it's important to have a space station to get
00:34:43
to space to kind of advance the frontiers of you know humankind yeah then then then
00:34:50
it's it's a worthy program to fund and then the question is well how do you get there and i think
00:34:56
you know funding spacex and these or it's not funding it's contracts with spacex to deliver the product is a
00:35:02
much better idea than having the government trying to develop it itself right yeah because those are milestone
00:35:07
based with some level of competition even if people might complain about the bidding process et cetera the contract
00:35:14
is for a duration of time and for deliverables if the deliverables are not bad or the contract expires
00:35:20
then we start the whole process over again and this correct me if i'm wrong is a must do for us because we cannot
00:35:26
let the communist and authoritarians own space we have no choice being the democratic west
00:35:33
of owning space and getting there before them and dominating space nobody can own space but i think the
00:35:38
united states is an incredible balance sheet nobody can own space i mean are you kidding me what if
00:35:45
somebody gets up there who decides to put nuclear missiles up there and decides anybody else who puts
00:35:50
satellites up there we're gonna just nuke them and laser them you're not gonna own it you don't even
00:35:54
need a nuke quite frankly you could drop a tungsten rod from space okay just a like a giant steel rod and
00:36:02
by the time it hits the ground it's going so fast that it basically can blow up
00:36:07
or assassinate anybody what the hell are the two of you i mean have the two of you become no
00:36:12
this is real like the two of you are like that like be arthur and the golden girls
00:36:17
jesus christ the guys in the muppets arthur here blathering on the the south military applications have you
00:36:26
not seen the chinese putting rockets over taiwan and military exercises these people are not chasing playing
00:36:32
games jason i understand nobody no all i'm saying is there's no owning it
00:36:38
okay it's too vast it's effectively infinite you can't own it okay you can have
00:36:43
certain areas you can be dominated you can't yeah of course you can dominate space
00:36:50
they go up there and they don't play by the rules i mean did you guys not see
00:36:52
what happened with hitler in europe he dominated europe number of years jason listen
00:36:58
of all parts of space that you can dominate maybe the one planet is uranus other
00:37:03
than that there's nothing you guys are so naive about the intentions of russia and
00:37:10
china it is phenomenal they have 100 year plans to dominate humanity and they are willing to put millions of
00:37:18
people into concentration camps they have no problem going to space and deciding we're going to own the
00:37:24
satellites and we're going to knock other satellites i can't believe you were so
00:37:27
anti-trump and and and it's just you're saying it's unbelievable you're so funny can i just
00:37:32
say one thing i think i think back to what we said before the u.s is an incredible balance sheet
00:37:36
and what free brook said is so true which is like coming out of the apollo program
00:37:41
we really created so much technological innovation it propelled the u.s forward we unfortunately gave a lot of it up
00:37:47
but hopefully this time around we can do it again and by the way just last week i guess it was
00:37:52
or i guess it was last week um or a month ago you know where we got that chips act
00:37:58
in play which is a quarter trillion dollars you know for semiconductors and other things
00:38:02
um so we're slowly getting there but this is where the u.s can do a lot of good which is just to act as a funding
00:38:07
source and then let private markets kind of take over the rest by the way we've
00:38:11
talked about this on the past couple of podcasts but there is i think 90 billion dollars earmarked in
00:38:15
this new bill for enabling american manufacturing progress and so it will be through a
00:38:20
similar sort of funding mechanism it looks like as what we're seeing here it could be a
00:38:24
fantastic boon for innovation and um and infrastructure yeah what other categories should we
00:38:30
model this after sax should we do this for nuclear should we do it for education for housing
00:38:34
before we move on i mean look jake i want to come to your defense on this point because i think it's
00:38:38
it's um because i think it's just wrong to say that there aren't like vast and important military
00:38:44
applications of space the fact of the matter is you look at the history of warfare
00:38:50
it's critical to have the high ground whoever has the high ground ultimately
00:38:54
wins the war this is why the first thing we do oh the greeks the greeks had the highest
00:39:08
let me finish the point the first thing we do in a in a war or a conflict is establish
00:39:13
total air superiority it's the reason why our infantry doesn't take massive losses um it's you
00:39:19
know we want to establish you know artillery um that that sort of protects the infantry look the
00:39:26
future artillery is going to be from space it is the ultimate high ground uh it is
00:39:30
i agree with jcal it's naive to think that the other side that other powers are not pursuing military applications
00:39:37
we have to have the ability to defend ourselves against space-based attacks and to have those those abilities
00:39:45
ourselves those capabilities and so that is part of what's factoring in here with the space
00:39:50
i get it i get it i know what you guys want a you want giant giant laser in space i
00:39:57
don't i don't think it has to be a laser i think it can be low-tech you know just if you just literally shot
00:40:03
ball bearings at other satellites it would rip through them right i mean the tungsten rock program is an actual
00:40:08
program right zach yeah yeah it's a funded military program oh my god by the time you if you drop
00:40:14
something from space it hits the ground at like mach 35 phil hellmuth has invaded our podcast
00:40:19
and taken the body of david no but in all seriousness this um program that we're seeing great success with
00:40:27
inspiring the greatest you know entrepreneurs of our time to go after big prizes like this could
00:40:32
we not do this with nuclear energy housing and education or are is that kind of out of the
00:40:38
question let me just point out by the way the things you just pointed out are the
00:40:43
things that are now most regulated and it's the regulatory burden which ultimately stifles innovation
00:40:50
whereas in this case we're enabling innovation without putting a lot of regulatory
00:40:54
burden on space at this stage right and so as soon as itar which is one of these
00:40:58
regulatory bodies starts to step in and maybe we start to limit things that can be done in space and so on and so forth
00:41:03
you may see things kind of get damaged like nuclear energy got damaged because the
00:41:06
fear of the downside ends up um you know kind of counterbalancing the opportunity of the upside
00:41:13
and it's something we've seen time and time again with every innovation cycle
00:41:16
in every industry and you know you're right right now we're in this opportunistic moment in the space race
00:41:22
but as soon as kind of the regulatory burden becomes heavy you're gonna see the same thing that happened with
00:41:26
housing the same thing that happened nuclear energy and all the other kind of innovation cycles
00:41:29
that that kind of got stifled uh not just in the us but globally yeah so we don't think for nuclear we'll
00:41:36
see this happening anytime soon man that would be an incredible uh nobody nobody wants
00:41:42
nuclear if there's a huge nimby problem with nuclear right which is who really
00:41:45
wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard i mean not gonna happen i don't think it's
00:41:49
realistic it's it's one of these ideas that you know sounds great in theory but
00:41:55
then in practice no one's willing to raise their hand and say i want that really easy solution for
00:41:59
that why don't you just make anybody who has to live within x zone of a nuclear power plant have a tax credit
00:42:05
of a million dollars a year they still don't want it look i think the future of alternative energy is
00:42:10
solar um it's it's an inexhaustible supply the cost of solar panels keeps going down exponentially the cost
00:42:21
curve is going down exponentially and look ultimately all life on this planet is solar powered right because
00:42:26
fossil fuels come from the remains of dead dinosaurs who were ate plants and plants are
00:42:32
solar powered so ultimately the sun is the ultimate source of energy not wind not nuclear
00:42:39
not windmills well geothermal it's going to be solar geothermal capacity is still
00:42:44
like 100 billion years based on our current um consumption rate but uh there's limited
00:42:51
uh research relative to the opportunity in general thermal but yeah totally agree with you sac
00:42:55
in a microcosm of uh you know the reopening of the pandemic we've been at record low case loads um and debts are
00:43:04
so low now from covet 19 in the low hundreds that it's probably hard to know
00:43:09
freedberg you tell me if i'm wrong or right if people are of those three or four hundred people dying a day
00:43:14
that's with covid from covet et cetera um but anybody i think it's intellectually correct to
00:43:20
say that anybody who over the age of 12 who wants a vaccine can get it and anybody who's in a
00:43:24
high-risk group certainly now has had over six months to to get a vaccine so we're basically done and now the
00:43:31
question becomes what happens to society are we gonna go back to work uh apple employees uh wrote a letter
00:43:38
um about apple's uh demand i'm using air quotes here that people come back to work
00:43:46
three days a week amazon just adjusted their return to work policy uh backing off their claim of uh in
00:43:53
march that they're going to return to an office-centric uh culture they announced that employees
00:43:58
can do two days remote three days in the office that seems to be the three for two um google has a similar
00:44:04
policy they're expecting people to return to the office three days a week in
00:44:08
september twitter said you can work from home forever because jack is an introvert and
00:44:13
doesn't want to come back to work i guess uh facebook employees either need approval to continue work from home
00:44:18
full-time or they will need to be back in the office 50 of the time but zuckerberg personally uh
00:44:23
said that he is embracing remote work here's the quote i found that working remotely has given
00:44:27
me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family which has made me happier
00:44:33
and more productive at work which i guess is either devastating for real estate or this is a
00:44:39
great negotiation that's going on you had some choice quotes about apple employees doing three um
00:44:46
uh letters uh petitions in three weeks yeah yeah so look i i i don't have a problem with the work
00:44:56
from home policy my my problem is with the fact that the apple employees keep doing what they do which is sign
00:45:03
these petitions and of course the it's all the snowflake language around we're not being listened to
00:45:08
we're not being heard you know and then they want to dictate to management uh the way that the company should work
00:45:14
and so they circulate petitions to get other employees fired they circulated petitions to make tim
00:45:19
cook take his stance against israel now they're circulating petition on work
00:45:22
from home and of course that is what apple employees do and apple management is doing what it seems to do which is
00:45:30
cave to these petitions every time and so they're in an infinite loop where the employees have realized
00:45:36
they can run the company by forming these these sort of boycotts and petition mobs
00:45:41
and it's working now again my objection is not to work from home most of my portfolio companies are now
00:45:47
working from home or fully distributed they're hiring employees everywhere it's been very liberating for
00:45:52
them to be able to hire talent anywhere in the world and so i think the work from home question
00:45:58
the reason why these big companies are struggling with it i think quite frankly is this because it's about their ability
00:46:03
to supervise their employees i think that work from home makes the best employees better
00:46:09
but it allows the worst employees to hide and i think what this really comes down to is a fear
00:46:14
on the part of apple and google and facebook they've got thousands of employees
00:46:19
who aren't really working and are going to be able to completely hide and and i think that's what this policy
00:46:24
comes down failure of management or just the nature of workforce i think the nature of these gigantic companies where
00:46:29
they've got so many employees that they're trying to figure out how to supervise them all and make sure they're
00:46:34
actually doing work there's this funny tweet that's going around i don't know if it's true or not
00:46:38
but it got retweeted about somebody saying that i've gotten six jobs during the pandemic
00:46:43
they're all work from home and i'm waiting to get fired from them for you know people realizing i'm not doing
00:46:48
anything and so i think this work from home controversy ultimately is about the ability of these large companies to
00:46:55
supervise a workforce that they don't know what they're doing if anything oh my god what a brilliant
00:47:01
idea the big unstopped problem in the pandemic with respect to work from home is
00:47:05
how do you onboard new people in my opinion like if you have an established company
00:47:11
with established people where everybody knows each other it seems like uh all positive to be able to work
00:47:17
from home because there's trust there's decorum there's social norms there's all these things
00:47:21
that were established together but what happens when all of a sudden you introduce one two three four
00:47:27
five five hundred new people into the mix how do you onboard these folks how do you get
00:47:31
and i think that's not a solved problem and until you do that i'm not sure that
00:47:34
work from home will be as effective as it can be because i think you'll just get a lot of people
00:47:38
that that uh languish a little bit as they switch jobs now maybe what that means is
00:47:42
they'll switch jobs less because they'll just say actually this is net better my crappy
00:47:47
job got a little bit better so there's no reason to move the on your point of commercial real
00:47:53
estate jkl i actually think it just brings the utilization down but i'm not sure it destroys it because i
00:47:58
think people need the physical plant now maybe over time they'll get much smarter
00:48:04
um about getting smaller spaces and having flex spaces so like things like wework do better
00:48:09
um because then you use that for overflow space or that's how you how you actually have a primary outfit
00:48:14
um but yeah those are my thoughts freeberg any thoughts i think it's gonna be hard to what i'm
00:48:21
hearing i don't know if you guys have talked to a lot of ceos but i just hear it's kind of a little bit tough
00:48:26
right now to find the balance of the rules around when to be in work because people have meetings
00:48:33
um in the off they'll have a meeting eighty percent of the people will show up to the meeting 20
00:48:37
will be remote and then it's a huge headache for everyone to be like okay we're all in the room we're all having a
00:48:41
conversation now we got to zoom the people in that aren't here and this person decided not to show up
00:48:45
today and it's kind of become a little bit of a a weird photo or what what's the the
00:48:50
right word to comment right to not come into work while everyone else is meeting in person
00:48:57
and it's just becoming a little bit of a conflict across the organization right
00:49:00
now um there's good it's going to be sticky for a while i'm not sure there's going
00:49:03
to be a great um solution and it's going to vary by company also it's very different as you
00:49:09
guys know when you know when i was single in my early 20s working at google oh here it comes oh well no it was like
00:49:16
it was it was going to work it was like it's cool no it was like it was cool like it was
00:49:25
it was great to go to campus every day now that i'm married with kids you know
00:49:29
like being with being around your kids more often you got obligations at home it's very different right your
00:49:33
priorities change and so when you have a diversity in the workforce of people with different home
00:49:38
lives and so on what if you're married but you don't know and you have kids but you can't
00:49:42
remember their names david overdue sucks i mean but at that moment in time correct me if i'm wrong fredberg
00:49:51
you know google was taking people out of stanford harvard mit whatever and they were basically giving them
00:49:56
another four years in college with this like college campus experience you've got a great experience it was a
00:50:02
freaking barista made your coffees anytime you wanted coffee you walk over to a counter
00:50:06
and there's a barista he makes you whatever you want you get all these amazing snacks and you go
00:50:10
you go down the slide to your meeting i mean it's like when you say it was great
00:50:14
experience do you mean that it was like fun and for the employees like it was like a fun life
00:50:19
experience or do you mean they actually got good work experience fun life experience yeah yeah it was but
00:50:25
it was like useless it was useless from like a skills or like resume like for me from building your
00:50:32
career it was useless right well the work itself was useful at least for me at least at that era at google when it was
00:50:38
a private company i loved that work it was an incredible experience for me i made a lot of friends and and built
00:50:43
incredible career experience working at google when it was a private company um but what about now i mean google has
00:50:48
this reputation that there's thousands of employees not doing anything it was satirized
00:50:53
totally by by the employees on sitting on the roof of the show silicon valley hulu yeah exactly
00:51:00
yeah so look i mean instead of sitting on the roof they're going to be sitting
00:51:03
on their couch at home you know that's right i guess i guess it's an improvement but
00:51:08
i think that's really what it comes down to what what facebook said in its statement
00:51:11
was kind of interesting there was a a part in there where they kind of implied that work from home would be
00:51:16
like a perk you know and that high performers would get it and then low performers
00:51:21
would have to come into the office more and that probably is the right approach because in order
00:51:27
to let people work from home you have to trust them to be much more self-motivated to get
00:51:31
their work done and quite frankly the employees who want to hide you got to make those people come into the
00:51:37
office you can say it's like in jail where the good inmates get their own stuff totally
00:51:41
yeah absolutely if you get time in the yard exactly it's conjugal visits if you're
00:51:47
running a 500 to a thousand employee sas company based in silicon valley with offices around the country or whatever
00:51:53
what would you do right now what would your your work from home policy be today well most of my companies that are in
00:51:59
that position are going fully remote fully distributed and it is and they're going to be some
00:52:05
challenges to be sure but i just think it's inevitable now some of them i i do think there is a
00:52:11
strong cultural advantage we've talked about this before chamoth has made this
00:52:14
point around having everyone in the same office or at least having hubs so i am a fan of developing hubs you
00:52:20
might have like an engineering hub somewhere that you know and then you've got some
00:52:24
remote engineers you might have like a customer service hub i i do think that like call centers for
00:52:30
example you're much better off having everybody work from the same call center uh
00:52:36
because that that is like a total productivity job where it's about like how many units
00:52:41
of work can you do within a certain amount of time it's way easier to measure and manage
00:52:45
that work when it's all happening in one place and those call centers tend to be in
00:52:49
locations that aren't as expensive as the bay area at metro mile we have a big
00:52:54
customer service and claim center in tempe arizona and we have gone fully remote since the
00:53:00
pandemic and productivity per unit uh per employee has gone up uh since going distributed because
00:53:06
it turns out that you know i'm not i'm not going to pine too deeply on this but
00:53:11
you know the the the throughput increases when people are kind of maybe not being distracted in the office or
00:53:16
something so you can actually track it and that's a very measurable job right so the
00:53:20
throughput and everything can be measured um so i would kind of make a counter point there that maybe we're seeing
00:53:25
something different yeah i mean look you maybe you may be right about that i mean it all comes
00:53:29
down to do you have the ability do you have systems that can manage the the sort of sprawl and if you do i mean
00:53:36
and you can really measure the output and you can ensure the employees are delivering results that's it's a win-win
00:53:42
i i created a super lightweight version of this um where since slack is so dominant i
00:53:48
just tell people you need to have a start and end to the day so you can like get on with your
00:53:52
personal life just at the start of the day do an sod in slack in the general channel you just
00:53:59
say two or three bullet points of what you're working on today and then at the end of the day reply to
00:54:03
that same one with your eod just what you got done today and then inform your employees and then you don't need to be
00:54:10
managed so if you can do that for five minutes at the start of the day and just five minutes into the day
00:54:15
and then on friday before you leave for the close up the week give me an eow of what you got done this week
00:54:21
and then on saturdays like today when we're taping this i go through have a cup of coffee read all the eows
00:54:26
and i give feedback and it has made it so clear who's a contributor in the company and who's not and when i
00:54:33
i instituted this pre-pandemic and i had two people quit because they were like i don't want to do it and it
00:54:39
turned out that those people were the lowest performers i think you should call it a tps report
00:54:44
it you know i i would you could frame it as such like micromanaging and i said you can either
00:54:49
frame this as micromanaging or you're setting an intention of what you're going to do in your workout
00:54:55
and then you record what you did in your workout since i started using the tonal
00:54:59
system and since i started using hydro i'm not advertising them here but they both have
00:55:03
measurements and i i did 6 500 pounds on the tonal and i'm like i want to break that record
00:55:10
this weekend i want to do 7000 pounds i want to do five exercises and i went from doing three exercises
00:55:15
three reps to five exercises four reps and and if i want to measure it if i if i do
00:55:20
slash apple slices into slack do i get apple slices absolutely we will bring you
00:55:26
you can also pick milk or chocolate milk or strawberry milk what did you guys think of that's press
00:55:31
release that salesforce sent out which said something to the effect of like they are becoming an entirely slack
00:55:37
centric company they're going to rebuild i guess the entire architecture of sfdc around or salesforce around of
00:55:43
course we predicted that on the show slack is going to be the re they're going to rename sales for slack no but i
00:55:48
don't really understand what that meant other than the actual headline of the
00:55:51
statement i'm wondering if you guys understand what it means well i i think i understand what benioff
00:55:55
is getting at which i saw an interview that he did recently where he talked about their quarterly
00:56:00
results which i guess were their best ever it was like a fabulous quarter for them
00:56:04
um what he talked about benioff is very good at connecting his products to larger societal trends
00:56:09
and the big trend that he's kind of hooking on to is this distributed work trend and the way
00:56:15
he described it is is you know basically this is the future companies are trying to figure it out
00:56:20
but they need a saddle because i guess this this is a trend that could sort of buck them off the horse
00:56:25
and he's trying to say that slack is going to be the thing that anchors your
00:56:28
company now for this new era of remote distributed work i think it's kind of
00:56:32
brilliant marketing brilliant um yeah absolutely i mean there's brilliant they're there he's absolutely brilliant
00:56:38
he has built such an incredible organization i mean the scale of salesforce over these last
00:56:44
20 years my gosh he is he is a star star of stars i mean in i set you guys in the slack
00:56:51
the or i sent you guys in the chat this uh socketsite.com which is a cool real estate site for
00:56:56
san francisco that's been around for two decades i think um it's hilarious they calculate how much
00:57:01
open office space by how many salesforce towers are empty in uh and it's 16 million of
00:57:07
square feet of vacant office space now spread across uh san francisco this seems to me at the
00:57:12
same time we're having a crazy housing crisis i don't know if you're monitoring
00:57:15
this but it turns out that banks and hedge funds and now redfin and you know uh open door and all these
00:57:22
companies are buying homes homes are getting bit up at the same time mortgage uh mortgages are an all-time low and
00:57:29
people are moving around and we're not constructing so i think we had a 60 or 70 decline in new
00:57:35
housing uh being released into the market and now we've got a full-blown housing crisis in the country i'm going
00:57:41
to go back uh otto the limb and put up my uh 10-year break even i think this whole inflation thing is a
00:57:48
head fake and i think that um the right now we're in this weird position where the
00:57:56
the home builders are not necessarily sure whether they're going to rip in the capital necessary to build a bunch
00:58:01
of homes the reason they would slow down is if they think that inflation is coming
00:58:05
rates go up mortgage rates go up and then demand falls off but if it turns out to be a head fake
00:58:11
the builders will then actually build what's necessary and they have the capital capacity to do it but i
00:58:17
don't think that they've had the the economic justification and the courage to do it and and
00:58:22
in fairness to them it's because the 10-year break even has gone straight up
00:58:26
since the depths of the pandemic which is essentially again just to you know get everybody up to speed
00:58:32
it's it's how the market thinks about the future forward inflation rate anyways over the last three or four
00:58:37
months or three or four weeks sorry since we talked about it it's kind of steadily started to fall off and i think
00:58:41
there's a prevailing sentiment that you know we're gonna see some short-term spikes we saw it this
00:58:46
past week in cpi energy went bananas right the cost of energy the cost of certain things
00:58:53
but then we're going to get back to normal and when we get back to normal inflation will be okay and i think jason
00:58:58
that's probably a solution because if it gets you know if that if that boogie
00:59:03
is actually not real and um we put it away then um uh the builders will be back in
00:59:10
size and and they'll green light a lot of projects and i think you'll see housing
00:59:14
supply kick back up really aggressively that'll be good for us yeah two two points there i think
00:59:20
one it so i i hope jamath is right about the long-term inflation prognosis um it's been you know it's
00:59:27
it's very important for investment in growth companies growth stocks and high-tech companies that the inflation
00:59:34
the long-term interest rate remains low so i hope you're right i think that ultimately
00:59:40
what's happening is there's a battle going on between um sort of fiscal and monetary policy
00:59:46
coming out of washington which is highly inflationary and then technological deflation so for
00:59:50
the last 25 years because we've had this explosion of productivity around technology it's
00:59:56
driven down the prices of pretty much everything that's not where the prices aren't set by the
01:00:01
government so healthcare uh universities things like that the prices have gone up because the
01:00:06
government's paying for it everything else the price has come down massively so we've we were kind of in
01:00:11
this battle between sort of government inflation and technological deflation i don't know
01:00:16
which one's going to win um i do think that the sort of the the policies we're seeing
01:00:22
creating a lot of government debt and uh the fed continuing on this never-ending
01:00:26
qe are are pretty scary but in any event i hope you're right about where this ends up i think on the
01:00:32
the other point was um was sorry we were on we're talking about the housing yeah the housing so this is a really
01:00:40
interesting sort of populist narrative that's evolving where you've got i mean it's i think both the left
01:00:46
and the right can agree that it's a pretty scary thing that you now have major hedge funds
01:00:51
buying up huge stocks of housing in the u.s driving up prices so first-time homebuyers can't buy a home i mean that
01:00:59
is a very uh scary it's a nightmare it's a nightmare trend and i think you're
01:01:04
seeing a reaction to it on the left that california now proposed some new policy where they want the
01:01:10
state of california to pay for 50 percent of first-time homebuyers houses which just seems insane to me
01:01:16
but you know and then on the on the right uh tucker just did a segment coming down attacking blackrock and
01:01:22
these big hedge funds for for basically for for driving up the prices so i think you're going to see a
01:01:28
unanimity on the populist left and right in reaction to these hedge funds but the
01:01:34
thing that no one's really talking about that they need to be talking about is the nimbyism i mean jason you
01:01:39
mentioned it the reason why we don't have enough housing is because it's too
01:01:43
hard to build and chamath is right that the builders could get the capital for it
01:01:47
but it is too hard to get these projects approved that is the thing we've got to
01:01:51
uh that that is the change we got to make to build on that i think what's happening now
01:01:56
becomes the catalyst to break that enemyism if you all these black rocks are buying up all the homes if
01:02:04
young people and young families can't buy a home despite mortgage rates being
01:02:08
ridiculously low and despite them having the money to do it and the desire to do it
01:02:13
then that's going to create a massive societal upheaval i believe and then that's going to either drive
01:02:18
people to other states like texas is benefiting because they're pro development
01:02:22
it's going to catalyze the massive movement of people out of new york out of california whatever states
01:02:27
are are giving too much red tape it's going to drive people to those states because that's where the housing people
01:02:32
it's going to be built or those states are going to crack under the pressure
01:02:35
and say you know what we're going to let you build in sacramento and you know you guys know i'm i have a
01:02:42
housing company in my portfolio and they are they are getting absolutely deluged with people begging them to do
01:02:50
affordable housing in different locations and the biggest problem they're having is
01:02:53
sorting through all the projects and what are we going to do but the great news is technology exists
01:02:58
now to build modular homes in factories like tesla dust cars and ship them to site and take six
01:03:04
months to a year out of the construction process so then it just becomes a matter of
01:03:08
regulations and which state decides that they're gonna let people buy a home
01:03:11
for the first time and if california doesn't let people buy a home for a first time who's going to pay
01:03:16
taxes here where's the growth going to come from this is going to be a motorcycle this is
01:03:20
a stall moment i think just just you know then the other the other really terrible thing about home
01:03:25
ownership is that it is where the preponderance of wealth creation for average americans comes from and so when you
01:03:32
lock people out of home ownership you're essentially ripping away 60 to 70 percent of how they're ever
01:03:37
going to make real wealth and so yet again you exacerbate jason to your point the inequality that we have where a few
01:03:45
folks make all the money and then everybody else they're kind of shut up from the equity market
01:03:51
they're shut up from private investing and then they're shut up from owning a
01:03:54
home and no wonder people are pissed because it's like you throw your hands in the
01:03:57
air you're literally creating a revolution you pulled up three ladders at once you can't invest
01:04:02
you can't tell me how i could tell me how i can just earn some money so that i
01:04:05
can pay for my kids to go to college take a vacation and have a nice life whenever tell me how to do it then
01:04:10
yeah because look and nobody has a summary government doesn't have a good answer
01:04:14
you you're we're pulling up the ladder of home ownership we've pulled up the
01:04:17
ladder with the credit innovation you can't invest in private companies we've made higher education far too
01:04:22
expensive we pulled up that ladder i mean what's left for the average citizen to to to grow their wealth
01:04:28
this is a crazy thing we pull up the latter and then in response government creates a program
01:04:33
to subsidize people and bail them out at the end i mean it doesn't make any sense
01:04:36
i mean mike salana had mike selena had a really funny tweet about the the california uh program which was
01:04:42
it's amazing the lengths to which people will go to avoid building new housing
01:04:47
you know new supply it's like we subsidize home buyers for this artificial price increase we've caused
01:04:53
by limiting the supply this is like eliminating people's uh student loans just allow supply and demand yeah just
01:04:59
make more colleges and make them cheaper what do you guys think about this whole
01:05:02
pro-public speaking of wealth inequality this pro-publica league of tax records somebody inside the irs or it was
01:05:08
hacked we don't know yeah this is clearly a whole person got a hold of basically 3 000
01:05:13
uh the tax records many going back many years of 3 000 of the wealthiest americans
01:05:18
and propublica has slowly started to digest and and issue um news reports about them
01:05:25
and it shows that you know in some years guys like bezos paid no tax um whatsoever were able to
01:05:31
take huge deductions you know at one point actually bezos in the year where we made you know
01:05:36
kind of like billion dollars was able to essentially didn't uh claim he made nothing and then
01:05:43
made so little or made negative dollars that he got a four thousand dollar tax credit that's typically reserved for
01:05:48
people you know people people who it was a tax credit for your kids yeah it's not meant for a billionaire
01:05:55
essentially but you know they this was a lot i think the big story here is the leak
01:06:00
more than uh capital gains how capital gains works we all know how capital gains work propublica has got an agenda
01:06:07
obviously this is a left-leaning uh investigative journalism uh funded by the left uh and donations
01:06:14
and uh they do a great job with investigations but in this case they're just telling everybody what we
01:06:19
already know which is if you have giant holdings you can get a loan against them
01:06:23
whether it's you own a home and you can get a mortgage against it or equity line or if you own a bunch of
01:06:28
stock you can get a margin loan i mean it's not really news i think this is like stirring the pot and the big news
01:06:34
is who who released this data and then you know there are some countries i believe sweden is one of them where
01:06:40
tax records are politically published top level yeah they have to be published and so i think the way the united states
01:06:46
is going is we're going to force people to publish their tax records and we're going to force some sort of
01:06:50
minimum uh for people with holdings aka a wealth tax and i'm not saying i agree with either of those
01:06:55
but i think that this is the way it's going and somebody posted to our i'd be in favor of seven thousand more
01:07:00
irs agents are coming online i'd be in favor of publishing tax returns i i have no i i i think that
01:07:06
that's a really good idea that's the flax mostly no no no i think it's a really smart thing to do
01:07:11
i think like you would see a lot less shady behavior if you had to publish this stuff
01:07:15
when you publish your tax return uh chamath would you do a shirtless holding up your tax return in a mirror and take
01:07:20
a selfie and then that's how you would publish it or listening and sweat yeah
01:07:23
more like more like a one tier one tier it should just be a picture of you with a wheelbarrow of cash
01:07:32
just you dumping it into a fight i think one thing i'll say is i think these
01:07:36
stories have highlighted just an incredible um ability to shift the narrative and create a
01:07:44
different kind of dialogue around taxation because as we all know the principle of taxation
01:07:50
in the united states is that you are taxed on income and income is a recognized gain meaning when you sell an
01:07:57
asset for cash or for some other asset or you do a job or you do a job and then you get paid you get that cash
01:08:04
that you can now go use to go buy something or to to do whatever you want to do with that
01:08:08
is the transaction moment that you get taxed on and everyone's saying well this guy's a billionaire he
01:08:13
has these billions of dollars he paid no taxes he didn't necessarily make billions of
01:08:18
dollars of income that year his stock value may have gone up billions of dollars but if we all taxed
01:08:23
each other when our stock values went up each year and we didn't get a rebate when our
01:08:28
stocks went down people would feel pretty upset the average american the average person
01:08:32
would probably feel pretty upset if they got taxed every time their stock portfolio went up and then
01:08:37
they didn't get to have a rebate when their stock portfolio went down so the
01:08:39
principle of taxation is such that when you sell those shares and you ultimately
01:08:43
generate income that's when you get taxed but the narrative is very quickly shifting where people are like oh this
01:08:49
guy's a billionaire state stated you know he didn't pay the taxes they don't say anything about how
01:08:54
much income he actually made and a lot of these guys don't need income because they have a dollar salary they
01:08:59
pay like you know well they effectively have a credit card one way to think about it is wealthy people have a credit
01:09:03
card as jamal pointed out because they can buy everything on loan they can buy everything they want on
01:09:08
credit because down the road everyone knows you guys have billions of dollars when
01:09:11
aren't they paying consumption taxes on those so if they do take the billion
01:09:15
and you buy houses you're paying consumption more it's actually even more uh
01:09:20
perverted so if you take a loan and then you use that loan to actually invest the united states tax law says
01:09:28
that all that interest you pay is deductible as well and so the arbitrage that you find yourself in is if you're a
01:09:36
happy person yeah it's like you have these assets you go to a bank they'll
01:09:41
they'll lend it against because they want you know what is the bank's job the
01:09:44
bank's job is to generate interest right so you know they want these big fish as
01:09:48
customers right and so and then and then uh part of the tax code is that it's tax deductible
01:09:53
and so it's one of these things that i think structurally gets people very confused about what's right or
01:09:58
wrong but it happens and it happens um is there any common sense solution sex well i was gonna say just keep in mind
01:10:03
that when somebody lives on a credit card like one day that credit card comes to you
01:10:08
and it's not a problem for bezos because amazon's talk just keeps going up and up
01:10:12
and up but you will occasionally hear about some rich person going broke and the reason is always that they took
01:10:19
on too much debt and then their stock price went down and all of a sudden they owe
01:10:24
more than the value of the collateral and then they're just done and so yeah exactly so you do take it for
01:10:29
granted when you live on margin you are taking a big risk most people don't do
01:10:33
that most people who have gains will eventually cash out they'll do that by selling their company or they'll sell a
01:10:40
piece of their stock they'll have a stock selling plan and then they pay tax exactly and i feel
01:10:46
so i feel like it's really unfair how i look i don't want to say it's unfair
01:10:50
because people get really riled up when rich people aren't paying taxes but it's interesting
01:10:54
to me how the narrative has been kind of very quickly reframed without the specificity
01:11:00
of the income that was generated by these individuals and they're just saying look this person
01:11:06
has all this wealth they didn't pay any taxes without actually recognizing that this
01:11:09
person may have had an income generating event earlier in their life which they did pay taxes on
01:11:14
or they will have an income generating event later in their life which they will pay taxes on
01:11:18
um and so the the truth is a little bit more nuanced than i think you know the very quick kind of sound
01:11:23
body press stories kind of indicate and it's um it's just really it's been
01:11:26
really interesting to watch how many people get so riled up and frothy about this moment
01:11:30
and i get that we all you know everyone kind of dislikes wealthy people um you know i certainly did when when
01:11:36
you know i was i had no money and i felt like i was getting screwed by this thing you
01:11:39
certainly did when we started this podcast but i think freeberg raises a great point which is that
01:11:48
with bezos take for example and look by the way maybe he should be paying more tax in other ways but with respect
01:11:53
to his amazon stock he built this machine called amazon it's this machine that makes all of our
01:12:00
lives better um for for the most part in terms of the delivery of goods and services
01:12:05
you know you press a button somebody shows up the next day so he builds this incredible machine
01:12:09
he owns a piece of it he's merely holding on to his ownership in that machine but the way that the
01:12:16
public market is valuing that machine keeps going up and up and up but to freeburg's point
01:12:21
he hasn't recognized more income he doesn't have more cash in his bank account um and so should he
01:12:27
be paying taxes here's the thing if you change the hold on if you change the rule chamath
01:12:32
correct me if i'm wrong here and you said you have to pay on the gain then somebody who bought a house in 1980
01:12:38
and it appreciated 100x in california by the time they were 70 and they bought it in their 30s they
01:12:44
would get caught up in this wealth tax or paying for it as they go the appreciation this mechanism exists
01:12:50
now jason you said a key thing this mechanism exists at all parts of the tax code so
01:12:56
yes a billionaire can basically go to jpmorgan or goldman sachs or morgan stanley
01:13:01
you know get a margin loan on their stock and live their life but individual folks who are not billionaires can do
01:13:06
that via a heloc on their home and a lot of people do that as well they take home equity lines
01:13:11
of credit and they use that to forward finance things as well the difference is that because the
01:13:15
quantums are so much bigger you have this ability for rich people to accelerate their wealth creation in a
01:13:21
way that normal folks don't so i'll give you another example so one example that
01:13:24
i just spoke about is you basically take a loan instead of selling things right you use that to make investments all of
01:13:32
that interest is tax deductible number one number two is even if you don't need
01:13:37
to do that you can just take a loan on a small percentage of your capital reinvest that
01:13:45
again pay the interest and now you're running implicitly a little bit of leverage and just to
01:13:50
give you a sense of it there's a really great study by um aqr i think is the name of the hedge fund
01:13:56
and um they reverse engineered uh buffett's returns and what they saw was that buffett ran about 20 to 30
01:14:04
percent levered his entire career and the way he did that was synthetically by the float of geico the
01:14:11
point i'm trying to make is even the best investors in the world prove that a small amount of margin and
01:14:17
leverage is the key between being average and being the best in the world and if that if he needed that let's be
01:14:24
honest we all need that and again we all can't have that it's only available to a few
01:14:30
and so i'm not saying that the rules are wrong but the rules do stifle the ability to basically move up
01:14:36
and move down that curve it's clear how often people move down people get stopped out they get margined
01:14:42
out happens all the time it's very hard to see examples of people moving up it's because it's harder and
01:14:48
harder to get that first little bit of capital that then you can go and run with yeah
01:14:52
and see i think the great the great reconciliation is what we need to work on as a society and if you look
01:14:57
at what the great reconciliation would be it's can i get a great education can i
01:15:01
get great health care and can i have a nice home and if you just said we're going to have
01:15:05
uh health care for everybody in the united states very easy to pay and if you just said
01:15:09
we're going to allow the building of single-family homes two or three bedroom
01:15:14
homes and you cannot stop them and any state that tries to stop them is not going to
01:15:19
get whatever amount of federal funding and then finally we said all trade schools are free those are three very
01:15:24
simple things that's a great idea by the way this what a fabulous idea jason i love
01:15:29
it i reconciled and charter schools and charter schools and school choice for everybody
01:15:34
yeah because that is the number one thing to create equality of opportunities these are incredible ideas guys and safe
01:15:42
communities because the number one thing kids need is a great education and a safe
01:15:47
household and you cannot have that when care and health care you can't have that when
01:15:52
gun violence is exploding across the country our communities are no longer safe we
01:15:56
have to fix that problem all right listen we're at 75 minutes do we want to talk about toxic bitcoin
01:16:01
insanity in miami yeah what the hell is going on over there what are these guys doing all right so very simple
01:16:07
there was a bitcoin conference in miami if you go to that conference you have to
01:16:10
agree to not mention other cryptocurrencies there is a we all have heard of bitcoin
01:16:15
maximalization or being a bitcoin maximalist this means you believe that bitcoin is the one true
01:16:21
cryptocurrency all other cryptocurrencies do not exist this conference has codified that to the
01:16:27
point at which people are jumping on stage like maniacs ripping off their clothes to reveal
01:16:32
dogecoin shirts and then people are saying bitcoin maximalism now has evolved into bitcoin toxicity
01:16:39
which is a subset of the bitcoin movement what bitcoin toxicity says is in order
01:16:43
for bitcoin to become the one true currency and the reserve currency we must attack anybody who attacks it in
01:16:51
other words cult-like behavior either except muhammad jesus moses whoever hindi hindu god zeus
01:16:59
for the greeks you have to accept our god or else we're going to attack you so
01:17:04
if you can actually see this in practice i tweeted if a if bitcoin was replaced by
01:17:08
technology what would that look like and you get massively ratioed on twitter which means more comments than likes
01:17:14
i'll take i'll take the other side of this if you want yeah go ahead well so bitcoin toxicity is now a thing
01:17:20
and it's actually i believe making the movement um toxic to people and people are not going to want to
01:17:26
participate so it's actually collapsing the project people do not want to be involved in
01:17:30
toxicity and people think that there's many ways to win in crypto there are so the
01:17:34
crypto community because of the recent loss of 50 i think now is in a debt spiral of
01:17:40
toxicity go sex well i think this is a fake moral panic on your part um look if if toxicity means
01:17:49
that you think that all these cryptocurrencies are a scam then jason you are guilty of toxicity
01:17:55
too because you don't think you're using nobody has been on twitter more saying
01:18:01
that all these cryptocurrencies are a scam the only disagreement that you and the
01:18:05
bitcoin maximals have is with respect to bitcoin but you both agree both sides agree
01:18:10
that you and the maximums believe that all these other cryptocurrencies are this is a real technology there are
01:18:16
scammers in it you've contributed you've contributed to the toxicity by basically
01:18:21
absolutely not i don't know by constantly denouncing every crypto it's icos and scams i believe technology
01:18:28
it's a real technology uh but anyway it's it's it's just gross and i think it's i think that in general
01:18:33
if i had to summarize what i see i i see like there's a vein of young men basically who are super super
01:18:42
frustrated and um in cells and well i don't know if they're intel's or not but like you know
01:18:48
i think that they they basically i think like ran the race the way they were told they
01:18:56
checked all the boxes they went to the schools they got the jobs they did the thing they did that
01:19:01
and it's kind of not working and so whenever they find a thing that's new
01:19:05
i think they find acceptance in the community and then man do they get really rigid about it and they
01:19:11
in some ways just stop thinking for themselves and that's a shame called the cult man can i quote
01:19:16
something we've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd
01:19:19
all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact and
01:19:24
we're very very pissed off so that's fine of course it's fight club that's a great quote it's so true so
01:19:31
true it's so true that basically summarizes twitter i feel like that summarizes
01:19:36
twitter it's instagram instagram made it a hundred times worse you could see
01:19:39
everyday people suddenly becoming rich and famous or at least the perception and using filters to look better and
01:19:44
then everyone feels like they're being left out or everyone feels like they want something that they don't have
01:19:49
and then you're left in this constant state of want and desire and this constant state of unhappiness
01:19:53
so uh this isn't new by the way you know these are buddhist principles that daca this source of unhappiness is
01:20:00
really um about desire and if you can let go of and we create more comparing yourself to others
01:20:06
yeah i think there's a a different answer to to the fight club nihilism um than just sort of uh giving up all
01:20:12
desire i understand the sort of buddhist approach i actually wrote in 1999 when i
01:20:18
joined paypal i wrote an article called silicon valley's fight clubs in which i basically said
01:20:23
that startups were the answer to this sort of you got remember fight club came out in
01:20:28
1999 and so you had this sort of nihilism associated with this empty materialism people wanted all these
01:20:35
materialistic things but it didn't really make them happy but i think that creating something great
01:20:40
and being part of creating something great is the answer to this and it's about
01:20:45
it's about creation it's about purpose it's having meaning mastery mastery and we are robbing
01:20:52
people of having that experience when we do stuff like universal basic income or or tell them they don't need
01:20:58
to work you know we should be encouraging them to have these great experiences and this is why i kind of react to these
01:21:04
like apple snowflakes who don't want to come into their billion dollar spaceship campus it's
01:21:08
like you know they're just punching a time clock you know they're not really
01:21:12
getting any meaning out of their work and that's the thing i sort of react to
01:21:16
that's so um you'd rather than find another place where they can actually find purpose and
01:21:23
mastery rather than be at apple be mad right contribute control did the iphone have been created
01:21:29
by a remote team it could let's be clear the iphone would never have happened had
01:21:33
it not been for steve jobs okay period you need to have the founder yeah you need to know
01:21:39
you just needed to have him i mean he could have been anybody but he him if with him with a remote team could
01:21:44
they have made the iphone i don't think so i don't know i mean i think i think apple will probably be a
01:21:49
different company if steve we're still here who knows which is why i think they
01:21:52
want people to come back and i think what's happening here i mean i hate to be super cynical is i think a
01:21:56
lot of people left the bay area didn't tell apple because you're supposed to tell them if
01:22:01
you relocate and they're just trying to extend their tenure at apple because
01:22:06
there is no way to come in three days a week if you're living you know in tahoe or further out i mean
01:22:11
what are you supposed to do get a hotel for two nights a week and then drive back to tahoe or phoenix
01:22:16
i mean these people have left if steve were still around those apple employees be racing back to the
01:22:22
office because they'd be so excited about what they're working on they'd be working on
01:22:26
new products and if they didn't if they didn't have that passion steve would have weeded
01:22:30
them out in two seconds at the end of the day snowflake by the way you mentioned snowflake although you
01:22:36
said apple snowflakes but the founder of snowflakes said in a cnbc episode essentially
01:22:43
we care about diversity but we care first and foremost about being a high performing
01:22:48
organization i'm paraphrasing that services our customers and our shareholders and
01:22:54
so while diversity is important we're going to fill a role with the best person we can find and so now
01:23:00
the grand debate that has started is and i think it's related to what happened at
01:23:05
coinbase and shopify with you know no more political speech at work is meritocracy
01:23:10
and uh can meritocracy live alongside equity and equality and diversification um
01:23:18
or diversity so diversity and meritocracy in the same organization which wins mike moritz wrote this um
01:23:23
pretty fabulous essay i think it was in the financial times a couple of years ago he got in a little bit of heat for
01:23:28
doing it but essentially what he said was you know while we are all talking about the things that we think
01:23:34
are important there's an entire cadre of engineer in china that are coding 24 7. i think he
01:23:40
actually said like it's 996 exactly yeah 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week and they
01:23:44
use the same tea bag three times and he used that to illustrate he know he used it to illustrate their
01:23:50
commitment to excellence and what he used to see in silicon valley where people on the weekends the parking lots were
01:23:55
full keep going um but i i just bring this up because it's like we've lost the ability to have both
01:24:02
things be true meaning it's it's maybe like at the end of the day frank slootman
01:24:08
is a representative and a spokesperson for the values of a company that's a hundred billion dollar company that came
01:24:15
out of nowhere and built something fabulous for people in a matter of a few years
01:24:20
i doubt that he speaks for himself only no he specifically said in this comment so if
01:24:27
he was speaking for other people who were too scared to talk about it okay but i'm saying he but i'm saying he
01:24:33
also he's but he's i don't care about other companies he speaks for snowflake
01:24:37
so to the extent he says that as the ceo of snowflake why can't we respect that an entire
01:24:42
company has decided to do something for example you know the other opposite end of this do you remember this bakery
01:24:49
i think it was in colorado that like you know refused to make a cake yeah refused to make a cake for a lesbian
01:24:55
couple it went all the way to the supreme court and they said that this guy had the right to deny
01:25:01
them making the cake to me it it makes my blood boil but at least i live in a country where
01:25:08
he has the right to have that opinion and it's in within a legal boundary of
01:25:12
reasonableness i guess now i learn from that and i say okay that's a legal bound of reasonableness
01:25:18
and until that law is overturned that's what it is this is so much less than
01:25:22
that and we can't you know let this guy actually just go about his day without issuing an apology
01:25:27
yeah he's not the american engineers that are working 996 in china eating our lunch every day yeah i mean
01:25:35
in america you have to you have to give you another example i'll give you another example
01:25:40
you have to capitulate and agree to the diversity uh jason let me give you let me give you
01:25:46
another example there is a massive um play right now going on in the uranium market
01:25:53
it was brought to my attention i was like let me just go look at this i don't
01:25:56
know anything about this but i just was curious about what's going on and effectively what it is there is a fund
01:26:01
that was trying to basically corner uranium and drive the price up and the entire thing about uranium which
01:26:06
was interesting is okay what is it used for it's used for nuclear reactors well then you spend a little time
01:26:11
understanding nuclear reactors and i was shocked to learn how clean how safe yep how reliable how repeatable
01:26:22
i had all these stupid cobwebs in my head based on a random couple of press releases three mile island
01:26:29
fukushima etc so when i cleared all of that bias away and i learned about it then i'm like why aren't nuclear
01:26:36
reactors everywhere because it is the fastest way for us to get to carbon neutral
01:26:42
and then i find out the same people who want carbon neutral i.e greenpeace is the one of the largest
01:26:49
advocates against nuclear and i thought how do we not again be in a position to actually hold two thoughts that are
01:26:57
slightly divergent at the same time we want nuclear energy because it actually supports something that's even
01:27:04
more important to the sustainable ecosystem that greenpeace is there to protect in the
01:27:08
first place and you can't have it and to me i find so i find all of this stuff
01:27:14
again ad nauseam in this list of while we're all naval gazing on this china's progress china is 996.
01:27:22
right we have to have four progress and by the way uh slotman he put out a release comments i made
01:27:27
during a media review of last week may have led some to infer that i believe that diversity and merit are
01:27:32
mutually exclusive when it comes to recruitment hiring and promotion i do not believe this and i
01:27:36
want to personally apologize to anyone who may have been hurt or offended by my comments so been added
01:27:41
said in a statement posted monday i've accepted personal responsibility for the lack of
01:27:46
clarity in my comments i think slootman's apology actually only buttresses the original point he was
01:27:52
making which is that ceos are afraid to say what they really think yes he came out he had the bravery
01:27:57
encouraged to say what he really thought he then got piled on on twitter and now
01:28:01
he's apologizing for it and walking it back it's really kind of a shame to chamas point how can
01:28:07
we have honest conversations when people are just afraid to say what they think whether i agree
01:28:11
with frank slupin or not is not the point the point is that if his entire company and his employees
01:28:16
and his executive team have made a specific decision that they view merit as you know incredibly important
01:28:24
and then they they layer diversity in as a result who am i to cherry pick those words
01:28:29
and all of a sudden i have a wording issue with that because i don't even understand the hiring criteria it's not
01:28:34
as if he published those stuff so it's not not like anybody on the outside had any
01:28:38
shred of ability to know the details right and and yeah i agree and here's my
01:28:43
problem with all the people who attacked frank on twitter is you know have any of those people said
01:28:49
one word about school choice or charter schools the need to release the stranglehold that the
01:28:56
education unions have on our kids they're running these schools for the benefit of the unions not for
01:29:02
the benefit of the kids they're abolishing advanced math and how many of the people attacking frank
01:29:06
have said one word about that because if we want to achieve if we want to achieve a quality of
01:29:11
opportunity in our society we have to fix the schools and so it's so easy to attack frank but
01:29:17
they're unwilling to say one word about school choice because the unions are a political ally and it's
01:29:23
inconvenient for them to do so what about again going and actually understanding
01:29:29
the cleanliness and safety of nuclear and you know being able to tell folks on the environmental left that actually
01:29:35
this is a path to sustainable energy and a better ecology and biodiversity in the shortest path
01:29:43
possible they just want to shut down the conversation they don't want there to be
01:29:46
any real conversation or difficulty we're shutting down to be really honest with you
01:29:50
words and we're shutting down rather superficial conversations and nobody ends up addressing the root cause
01:29:56
issues of anything that's the shame i just think that we are screaming at each other about things that none of us
01:30:02
really understand without taking the time to understand each other meanwhile china is 996. i just can't say which is
01:30:10
why we need to now you agree chamath we have to win space meanwhile china is 996. they're 996 and they're
01:30:18
going to win billion people that are born in a collectivist system against against holistically defined
01:30:26
goals over a multi-decade period of time they're the only by the way the going
01:30:32
back to where we started just to end maybe the podcast biotech is the last bastion where
01:30:37
america is completely dominant right software too not really there are incredible advances
01:30:44
that it's it's been american biotechnological ingenuity through and through and the question
01:30:50
there is going to be how do we make sure we wrap our arms around this category and continue to do great things because
01:30:57
in the absence of it and if we get again if we lose the script some other country is going to 996 that market from
01:31:03
us as well yeah i think you know what you're pointing out is we're in this
01:31:07
generational competition sort of um sort of cold war type conflict with with china
01:31:13
i think our foreign policy is starting to realign around that you're seeing both democrats republicans really get on
01:31:18
the same page now about the the threat that china represents but our domestic policy is not realigned
01:31:24
around that if we really want to win this cold war against china we have to be competitive
01:31:30
and we keep doing things to our schools our kids and other parts of our system and our economy that are
01:31:36
anti-competitive we need more freed works you know and if you get rid of like advanced programs we
01:31:41
have no freedbergs we need to clone freedberg freebart what's the chances we could just clone
01:31:46
you and have like a 2000 more freebergs to solve this biotech problem would you be open to that can we can we
01:31:52
start the clone wars with you do you think you would get along with your clone or would you want to destroy your
01:31:56
clone destroyed that's that's mimetic i want 10 clones of myself are you kidding me
01:32:01
can you imagine the round table you know renee girard wrote about this very eloquently
01:32:06
many many decades ago this goes in one place which is you know it goes it goes into it goes
01:32:12
into uh capital merger i want a clone army of myself would you like to just sit down and play chess
01:32:17
with your clone all day not chess but he'd like to do something else oh no oh no that's not an image i wanted oh no
01:32:26
you're gonna have a threesome with yourself no nothing sexual no no no no stop that's sort of what you
01:32:32
were saying i'd be cool with clones i'd i'd create wrestle with your own clone wrestling i
01:32:36
feel like there's all these different things i want to do in my life that you
01:32:39
know different careers or whatever and i could send one sacks out to different lifestyles
01:32:43
one stack could be an architect and one could be a director and one could want to be a whatever one champ to be a
01:32:48
lawyer do you guys want to have your mind blown for a second yes please okay so there's a concept
01:32:54
a capability called induced pluripotent stem cells where you can basically take any cell in your body
01:33:01
and apply a bunch of chemicals to it and effectively get that cell to convert into a stem cell once it converts into
01:33:07
us and so the the copy of the cell becomes a stem cell and this was uh these guys yamanaka
01:33:11
factor they won the nobel prize for this now you could take that stem cell and turn it into an ova cell turn it into a
01:33:18
um effectively uh um an egg cell a fetus and then you could induce that fetus to
01:33:25
start dividing based on a discovery that was made recently which hasn't been done
01:33:28
in mammals yet but effectively get it to start dividing without being fertilized and grow up and
01:33:33
it would effectively grow a clone so this has been done in plants it has not been done in animals
01:33:37
so in theory in the next decade or two we could take any any hair cell from our own body convert
01:33:44
it into a stem cell this is totally sci-fi by the way it's not proven there's no
01:33:47
there's a bunch of there's a bunch of discoveries that have been made research
01:33:49
that's been done that points to this trajectory that you could then take that stem cell
01:33:53
from take a cell from your body turn it to a stem cell turn into an egg cell induce it to start growing and turn it
01:33:59
into effectively equations i just want to say as you've been saying i've been shaking
01:34:03
my head jason has no reaction saks is grinning from interior i mean he cannot wait exactly sign me up
01:34:11
i'm gonna be like saddam hussein with like myself i love you besties uh for the queen of
01:34:25
quinoa rain man himself and the dictator i'm jake al and this has been a double episode of the all-in podcast
01:34:34
we'll see you all next time bye-bye [Music] besties [Music] we need to get i'm going on