E12: Biden wins, Pfizer vaccine, markets rip, Trump's next act, COVID endgame scenarios & more

All-In Podcast

Ask about All-In Podcast

Episode Description

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg

Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Show Notes: 0:00 Besties reflect on the election night special, comparing Trump's case to Al Gore's in 2000 4:44 Was this election devastating for extreme-ism in politics? 12:13 Pfizer vaccine, withholding the vaccine from the political news cycle 21:54 COVID endgame scenarios 28:45 Public markets ripping, gridlock great for the economy 34:43 Analyzing exit polls, death of identity politics 50:57 Biggest loser of the election: Journalism 57:43 When will Trump concede? What will his next move be? 1:07:37 San Francisco's collapse - will it eventually go bankrupt?

Brief Summary

The episode analyzes the 2020 election results, centrist voter desires, media roles, and future political dynamics in America.

Key points

  • Election Night Chaos. The last episode discussed the chaotic events of election night, highlighting unexpected twists.
  • Trump's Legal Challenges. A comparison of Trump's election contest to Bush v. Gore reveals significant hurdles.
  • Voter Sentiment Shift. Discussion on how voters seem to prefer centrist candidates over extremes.
  • Vaccine Timing Controversy. The hosts debate the implications of the vaccine announcement timing on the election.
  • The New Normal. Society will bear lasting changes from the pandemic, affecting how we live and interact.
  • A Shift in Living. The pandemic has permanently altered our way of life, with new systems in place.

Episode highlights

Transcript

hey everybody welcome to another all-in podcast this is an all bestie no guestie episode of all in the last time you heard from the besties it was election night and it was a [ __ ] show a [ __ ] crazy [ __ ] show let's be honest i mean we if we go back and look at that historical document we had moments where we thought trump was gonna absolutely crush then we had moments of confusion and now here we are and i think we have to give a couple of uh bestie kudos to uh first off chamoth pointing out pennsylvania was gonna be big and then second when we went through the possible

scenarios of who wha what could possibly happen a big giant blue wave uh trump winning it all and then maybe something in the middle option three came through and that was sexy poo nailed it i think that was your assumption saks the soft landing the soft landing yeah so why don't we just for the people who didn't tune in live sorry jason can i ask you a question sexy poo sexy was that your um like projection or was it from that from that guy who lives in his dad's basement his mouth yeah newman uh you and i worked worked together on on those takes but yeah the the take that we

thought was was possible but probably unlikely but could represent a really good scenario was the the soft landing where you get a split decision and i think that's what the american people voted for um you know you had the democratic frame on the election was that we needed a return to normalcy and decency the republican frame was at the radical left could not be trusted with power and voters basically said they were both right they sort of surgically removed donald trump while thwarting the radical left's dream of total control in washington and what the electorate seems to be saying is they want the parties now to work together instead of voting for extreme ideology but tbd sacks i mean georgia's still up for grabs they're gonna go after it hard right

i mean they just they filed in pennsylvania yeah so i think there's a series of core challenges we can talk about i think that they're unlikely to prevail very very unlikely i think joe biden will be the next president um we can kind of compare this to you know uh bush v gore uh from 2000 and if you you want to compare trump's case to gore's case it's weaker in every respect i mean first of all with bush v gore uh gore only had to overturn one state which was florida whereas trump has to now contest and overturn three or four states simultaneously second you know gore was within a few hundred votes of bush it was extremely close trump is no closer than about 12 000 votes in in georgia that's the closest one third you know um gore uh

or or bush never trailed uh gore in in any in any recount and um and and trump has that problem that he's never um and he he's very far behind gore as well so you look at those three things and you'd say you know gore couldn't overcome it and he had a closer situation than this and of course i'd say finally you know a w had uh the velvet hammer james baker working for him whereas trump frankly has rudy giuliani who's throwing press conferences in the parking lot of forces and landscaping between a dildo shop and a crematorium uh i mean you can't make this stuff up i think

somebody was tweeting you know it's this is perfect because you know they were saying they wanted rudy to [ __ ] off and die so it was so appropriate that this press conference was held between a dildo shop and a crematorium so you know it's not exactly the a team that trump's got playing for him here in in the courts but i mean david bossie by the way david bossie who's in charge of the whole thing david bosse is not even a lawyer and then he gets government so now he's on the sidelines i mean just there's so many angles we can take here um including the fact that am i correct that trump's campaign advisor got covered like the day after or he's no no mark meadows staff got it but david bossie who's in charge of this whole recount process got coveted as well

okay so i want to just shift us now to what could have so many things went right for the democrats but there was also something very clear here that happened which is the what i call the uh hsp the hysterical socialist party of america i think was dealt a a death blow if you look this was very close and so you know even if we want to talk about the electoral college et cetera these are still very low numbers i believe if the pfizer news comes out last week trump wins or if any combination of aoc by aoc bernie or warren were in any way involved in this

election process and weren't pushed to the side the squad was squashed because we knew that if they got any kind of play trump sells into victory so when we look at what happens going forward and i'll i'll let any one of the three of you take this what does this say about the hysterical socialist party the hsp the squad the bernie bros what does this say about them well you have a you have a look you have a you have a loud group of people on both sides and the reality is that both extremes of both parties actually after this election have very

little to stand on that's unique because if you think about what the plurality of americans want is actually just a common decent centrist do no harm alternative and they're going to pick that more times than they're not going to pick it it's only when things get extreme like in 2016 in order to send a message will they do it um and until it's resolved they tried to do it again now so we should actually talk about that i don't think that this was you know a runaway it was way too close on too many dimensions that actually matter for the future prosperity of america but that being said what does it mean for the future i think the future is like a pete butterjudge must be high-fiving you know the people in his camp right now because a common

decent thoughtful centrist uh platform will win for example like let's just say you believe in gay rights guess what you don't need to be at the fringes to believe in that that's mainstream you believe in like a reasonable form of healthcare that's mainstream if you believe in climate change it's mainstream you start to go and tick off the things that the extremes would want to believe there's very little room for them to stand on so one party is going to be basically about like a federalized nanny state and the other party will be a bunch of conspiracy theorists crazies and i think it's going to force more and more people to the middle i think that's the future to me that's that's a much safer place to be than i think where we could have been if you know trump had won or if the extreme left had basically been um been validated with a candidate that won

right and i would add to that that the the proof of that the proof of the elector's desire to attack towards the center is you look at the down ballot uh elections so you know in the senate the republicans are still holding on to a majority pending the florida um runoff but the the democrats failed to take out susan collins tom tillis steve daines these were three incumbent republicans who were way behind in the polls heading into election day uh they didn't come close to taking out lindsey graham or mitch mcconnell despite their names gee get out of this one alive explain that susan collins no lady g lindsey graham oh i see you know uh lindsey graham they said that it was neck and neck and he actually ended up winning that state by like 14 points it wasn't close uh the polls were wildly off and um and you saw that across across the board in the house too democrats expected a gain of 10 to 15 seats instead they've

lost about 10 seats they failed to defeat a single gop incumbent the gop house members ran about two or three points ahead of president trump um and that and then the democrats were completely shut out in texas which was supposed to be going purple there were eight open gop seats democrats won none of them so this you know so anyway i'm providing some support to the idea that this was a split decision election the voters voted to remove both of the or to voted against the extremes of both parties so friedberg when you look at this you see i think an absolute um just people don't want to deal with trump anymore how much of this do you think is

trump derangement system as uh syndrome and what got trump into office eventually taking him out which is the guy just takes up too much oxygen in the room and that's coming from me and the guy is just incredibly annoying to have to deal with day to day that's also coming from you and that's also coming from me free burger i i think we've i think we've been at a rave for four years and everyone's like coming down from the mali and you're not going to go to a marilyn manson concert like right after being in a rave like you want to go sit in the parking lot and you just want to chill out a little bit and we all just want to like have a beer and relax you know like i mean i think that you need some 5 htp and a banana you just yeah you you want to go sit in the 7-11 parking lot at four

in the morning and you want to like go get a [ __ ] sweet cappuccino smoke a cigarette and relax like it's been it's been too much and i think it's like everyone's just kind of ready to chill out a bit and so this whole [ __ ] swinging back to the you know to the concert across the road sounds just as bad as what we've just been through so let's just you know let's just live our lives a little bit and you know we'll come back in four years and figure out how to [ __ ] things up again i think that's kind of the psyche that's right i think i think voters want a presidency they can forget about you know i think trump's um sort of achilles heel as he demanded too much of the voters constant time and attention there was like this psychic cost to it it obviously antagonized the other side and drove turnout for the democrats but um but it seems like voters are saying look just leave us alone we want to just forget about what's happening in washington for four years and now they can because you know pending the georgia runoff it looks like you know mitch mcconnell and

joe biden will have to be in a power sharing arrangement and nothing gets done unless the two of them agree and by the way just on that there was a great uh tweet by paul graham he said the day after the election something to the effect of it feels like some background process in my computer had was just killed that was consuming five percent of my cpu and it's and it's operating system spinning wheel of death but it's it's david is so right it's like you know it's been this omnipresent thing in all of our lives over the last four years and uh it's just exhausting and you know there wasn't that much value that came from paying so much attention and worrying so much and so it's just a great opportunity to come off the sugar high

and reset ourselves and take a nap i think that's a various due point chamath in that what what it was gained from this trump derangement from this trump sucking all of the attention and constantly uh tweeting and you know i think the big win here freeberg is if you look the proof is in the pudding trump we we find out on saturday morning that trump is uh you know has lost and biden has won and 48 hours later we find out pfizer has 90 efficacy on their vaccine obviously these two things are highly correlated biden has already delivered the vaccine in just 48 hours and then today we got the rapid testing has been approved by the fda i mean

look at this by if at this rate biden's going to cure global warming by the end of the year look um first off i i think it's a little um it is pretty paradoxical that yeah the vaccine news came 48 hours yeah and i don't think it's paradoxical i mean that was crazy i mean you know there's supposed to be an october surprise not a november surprise i think if trump has any legitimate argument about being done dirty in this election it is over this vaccine news because you know the chinese announced that three hours after bayes declared president pfizer announces it a day after uh bayern's declared president i mean you know when trump went around this the um you know was campaigning saying a vaccine was mere weeks away everyone thought that was [ __ ] but as it turns out he was telling the truth and if those guys had announced it jason like you were

saying two weeks before the election it might have changed this thing but you guys that might have a hundred percent 100 and this is not something he can go to the courts it's not like he can go to the courts and get the election recounted overturned because of this so it's not something that's legally actionable but i do think that on this news alone trump in four years will be able to claim on some level that this was a stolen election but couldn't the same be said about hillary's uh email server right so like one night news came out like oh and it was like timed around the election and i do think that there was a concerted effort to not let um you know the progress with kovid get in the way of the election in any way you know bias it either way and i think

it's like pretty reasonable and fair to say like let's just not make this part of the news cycle leading into the election and this was expected like if you guys go back a couple of podcasts like um you had a prediction on when we would have a vaccine i i think i predicted end of september because of the way that they set up the uh the production cycle in parallel with the testing cycle and the way that they were fast-tracking a lot of the testing in a way that wasn't normal um for this sort of a development and um it was it was gonna happen this fall if i'm an executive at one of these companies i don't want my vaccine to become a politicized event right like i just want to be like i think it's it's the reasonable thing to say like let's just put it on hold let's deal with it all after the election we're still moving forward we're not holding anything up in terms of production and getting this thing across the finish line it's just the announcement of where

we are so why make that part of the new cycle you know um and i think like people learned their lesson with hillary's server last time it's like this one used you know bombshell drops in the news cycle spins up and she loses the election everyone blames her losing the election for that coming out no one wants to be culpable for that right i'm a pfizer exec i'm just trying to make [ __ ] medicine like i don't want to be on the hook for said another way someone's winning or losing an said another way chamoth nobody wants to go to a warriors finals game versus the lakers and have the refs call you know decide the game in the final couple of minutes so do you think chamoth this is if you were running pfizer if you were on the board of pfizer and you have this information and you know it can come out in this two-week window at any time

what decision would you make chamof well just imagine that the vaccine was 90 ineffective and it was announced two weeks before the election um you'd have an entire cohort of people saying this was meant to basically sabotage the election in the other direction so the point is it's a no-win situation the only answer is to wait until after the election um because that's the only way that you can actually say you know we were not um we were being impartial so um i'm sympathetic to this idea that uh all the news had to wait two or three days um or maybe it was two or three weeks now knowing in advance what the answer was obviously you can read into that but

i think even if it was 90 percent ineffective it should have waited till after the election as well exactly i i i just think that i don't get the sense that you do agree with that saks well let's put this way i mean we we know from our time working at large companies that it takes them weeks to even approve a press release and so pfizer had this news weeks ago now i understand their reason for not wanting to appear to be influencing the outcome of the election so i that's why they held on to it i think everybody saw the way that facebook was scapegoated four years ago for the election and no one wants to no corporation wants to put themselves in that position of being accused of affecting

the election outcome one way or another i'm sure that's why they did it as opposed to a conspiracy against trump but you know this news was available i think we'll find out weeks ago and so i guess you'd have to blame or or there'd be some culpability on the part of trump's election team or you know his his head of the fda or what have you they must have known some of this information and you would think they would have done a better job getting it out there no he did say at every rally it's just around the corner it's just around the corner we're around the corner and and we all thought it was [ __ ] you thought it was [ __ ] we thought it was [ __ ] right and you know why we thought it was [ __ ] well because trump trump does have a tendency towards hyperbole hyperbole on trump's most honest day he's hyperbolic on trump's average day he is lying incessantly so if anything if he was right and he was right

that we were turning the corner and the vaccine was coming and it was going to be beautiful a beautiful perfect vaccine and everybody was going to get it he's paying the price for being a liar for four years right but it's the kind of thing right no no no boy who cried wolf well and so does the media by the way but but yeah look i i in order for a piece of news this big to be believed before the election it can't come from a candidate and it's it's it's pretty amazing that none of this news got out there through some other source you would think that some of the people on the health care task force that trump appointed might have been you know surfacing this or paying attention to it maybe pfizer did a really good job of hiding it i don't know but um

it is pretty amazing that it didn't come out sooner well the the other crazy thing is like you know even the pfizer team didn't exactly know what was going on the chief the the head of vaccine research she said we're not part of the federal government's uh you know warp speed program and then uh two days later pfizer was like actually we are part of the warp speed program it's just that you know we're a supplier the whole point is that um i'm not sure that pfizer actually knew two weeks in advance david i think that they were probably trickling stuff together and they probably had a sense of it at the end of the last week i'm surprised it didn't leak to be quite honest that's the more shocking thing which means that um um it was probably something that uh uh very very very few people knew about well the ceo the ceo put out a statement saying that he

would be first in line to take the new vaccine which i thought was you know a great statement because a lot of people were questioning whether you know how real it was or how rushed it was but in order for him to do that and and in order just to get like a press release announced i don't think that's the kind of thing that comes together in the you know one or two day period between uh the announcement of joe biden winning the election and their and their announcement so you know i i just think they had to know weeks ago i just want to say to my greek brother alberto borlas the ceo of pfizer a great greek who has led to the saving of the world saganaki is on me if you uh if you if you take 90 efficacy and you assume at most in the united

states 40 percent of people will take the actual vaccination you'll have 36 percent of the population covered which is still not enough to get the r naught less than one is that correct free berg what do you think no i don't know i'm not an epidemiologist i'd have to what i mean does it sound directionally correct to you that people in the states are going to take it i mean i think you don't take it isn't this like uh everyone who's high risk will take it yeah and as of about two months ago you know it was estimated that 30 percent of people on the east coast had already developed um uh immunity due to the seroprevalence studies that that showed um antibodies on the west coast it was much lower closer to three percent you could estimate based on the growth in cases since then and assuming we're kind of missing a bunch we're probably on a national basis we're at 10 back then on a national

basis you're probably up to 20 right now of um americans have already been effectively immunized by getting the virus so you know if that's true then you're at 55 and you're getting pretty close to a um you know an ability to kind of inhibit this thing from um uh from spreading rapidly again so how do we each feel i'll just go around the horn how do we each feel about the covet 19 end game when will we see all schools open all nba arenas open with no distancing give us a quarter in 2021 when in america enough vaccines will have been delivered

and distributed and rapid testing that life goes back to let's call it 85 percent of normal i don't think you ever get there i mean it's like we talked about this a couple episodes ago but it's after 9 11 you know the tsa emerged and american travel never went back to the way it was before um and i think there will be a lot about the way we live that's going to be you know kind of permanently scarred and permanently changed here for a while whether it is taking people's temperatures at football games wearing masks and you know farmers markets who knows there's going to be all these weird rules they're going to pop up they're going to last for years regardless of how much immunization takes place regardless of how cheap and available testing is we're going to have this scar for a long time um in terms of how we live as a society

i don't think we should kid ourselves that we're gonna go back to quote unquote normal um and i do think kids are gonna get tested and schools are gonna be like this friggin you know almost like tsas now uh you know kids are gonna go into school and get tested regularly and they're gonna do all sorts of stuff that we would have never dreamed imaginable in a free country a year ago um and i think that's permanent um i think you know we're gonna you're already seeing people going nuts at bars and restaurants and people that have had it are out there partying and living their life again um so there's certainly don't you think if you get the vaccine you're just gonna be like yolo i've had enough of this yeah but i don't think that that systems are going to change uh back to normal i think systems have changed to the point that we've now got a way of living that we think is safer that we think is we we are now kind of inhibited because of this system

you agree yeah there'll be a lot fewer it's what dave chappelle said on saturday there will be a lot fewer mass shootings the pandemic has done a great job of keeping the whites at home we watched it all you [ __ ] three out of four besties watched it together all you all you guys go down your mass shooting rampages you know the whites are at home they're frustrated but they're at home thank god uh so i think there'll be some advantages well i mean but let's talk about it your mother does does 2021 mean let's go back to school 2021 september no problem no i think free burger's right i think that the best we'll get back to is sort of this 80 state and i don't think it happens until probably 2022 and maybe 2023 but probably 2022 because you have to remember like we have to ramp up now billions of vaccine production like it's a this is a non-trivial path from here to quote-unquote mass market and uh that takes a long time

i think we have to figure out how we're going to administer it by the way it's and and the way that the pfizer vaccine works and maybe these other folks is you get the shot and then you know three months three weeks later i think you get a booster so you have to take two cycles of this thing um and it's not gonna last forever and it's not gonna last forever so this is uh freeberg's right it's the beginning of a very different way of living um i think i think that the the good part about it is that um you know we've made a lot of changes that makes our lives a lot more efficient the bad part about it is we're even more detached from our neighbors and you know we're probably even more

likely uh to be a little bit uh more separated if we don't make an effort to be together sacks do you buy this because i get the sense that you might be more optimistic than free berg yeah cha cha i guess i guess i am i think covet is going to be a distant memory by next summer i think we'll have one to two quarters of transition but i think that once the vaccine's widely available plus the treatment of the testings for the people who slip through the cracks um yeah i i tend to think things are going to snap back very fast and kovitt will just be this bad memory a very distant bad memory and i think in fact i think things may bounce back the other

way everyone having been cooped up and afraid of getting some life-threatening illness are going to come out of this really wanting to party i think the whole world's going to be like tel aviv for you know a few months or something and um yeah i mean i really do think it's going to bounce back i think to the point politically where a few years from now people could ask wait why why was it again that trump lost you know um you know th this covet thing will be it will be so in the rear view mirror that will wonder why we were so afraid of it i think this is uh i'm going to go with

david's sax's position here because of the simple fact that we had 130 000 confirmed cases you know up until this election period the last week or so and deaths still not spiking it's a little just a minor uptick you know we had a day with like uh i think maybe 1500 but still staying in that you know thousand range even with case of spiking and i think that we were so incompetent with test and trace in this country that we didn't see exactly what happens in an authoritarian country or a country that is lucky enough to be an island and has easy borders which we almost do i mean we basically have two borders we're like two-thirds of two you know 50 percent island but hawaii taiwan japan and australia all quarantined people on the way in they tested them

and they had extremely extremely low death counts and extremely low case counts with the vaccine being half as effective as you know they claim and rapid testing which some of us have know some of us know people who have experienced rapid testing at homes that combination i believe is going to make this go so low and the people who are high risk are still going to be scared staying home i think like david come the summer of next summer people are going to be at a rave with freeberg's you know custom-made molly or whatever he's making during this downtime

going absolutely bonkers i think burning man next year becomes like the the greatest burning man ever it'll be it'll be the burn of of of all burns why was let's shift a bit over to uh the economy what a rip did we see when that pfizer i mean the election and pfizer this week led to a huge rep obviously there's a little bit of cyclical movement the tech stocks were the big winners now people are starting to buy disney back up to 140 i guess people assume the parks will reopen what's our outlook for the stock market in david sacks's you know scenario three you know i don't say gridlock government but forced to

compromise government what do we think the markets look like the next two years i think you have to go out saxophone no glasses well i was gonna say gridlock is great for the markets um but both when bill clinton was president with a republican house and when obama was president and there was a republican house and i guess uh center for a period of time gridlock is great for the markets especially given the amount of stimulus that's taken place i mean you had the trump tax cuts especially those corporate tax cuts really set the market on fire and then you've got this pumping by the fed and the treasury all the stimulus money for kovid i mean those conditions and then why is gridlock good we didn't explain that here well because explain to somebody who doesn't understand why gridlock is good why good luck is good well because it creates predictability for business and

it means that washington's not going to get in the way and do something to screw up the good times i mean we have fundamentally you know great underlying conditions for economic growth which is we have now pretty low taxes and we had this for better or worse we had this tremendous amount of stimulus fiscal stimulus what we know historically is over the past hundred years right since the 20s independent of republican administrations or democratic administrations you know more progressive less progressive more conservative less conservative during world wars not during world wars the markets go up eight percent a year so the do no harm solution is that things inflate naturally by eight percent especially if those things are public stocks so you know the markets love the fact that there's uh nothing that could theoretically get in the way of that natural

eight percent and then when you layer on top of it as david said uh all this free money that's just like rocket fuel jet fuel um but you know but you saw though that there was a rotation right there was a rotation out of these high growth software names particularly the work from home bid kind of got crushed you know i mean i think zoom was off 25 over two days or some crazy thing like that um meanwhile sort of all of these theme park stocks and cruise lines and airlines all of a sudden ripped so i mean look the reality is the scary thing about all of this is if any of that stuff actually comes to pass we're going to see inflation and the reason is because if you start going out and spending a bunch of money on tickets and vacations and flights and

this and that and pumping money into the economy and taking all that stimulus money and putting it back to work prices will go up um and by the way that's not such a bad thing for the economy which which needs a little bit of it so um all of this is i think generally very very good news freeberg do you have a position on what you think will happen in the coming let's let's i would think the midterm is what people care most about so that would be let's call it two to six quarters there's one potential speed bump still which is what i mentioned at the beginning which is georgia uh the the democrats could still win both runoffs in georgia for senate and they could um because kamala harris would then have the breaking vote it would be a 50 republican 50 democrat senate and

and the vice president would uh would break any ties the question is if you have that same turnout where do the libertarians break because i think the libertarians were almost two percent of the vote well i think yeah what's interesting is um the i don't know if you guys have but i've gotten emails from a lot of people asking me to donate money for this uh uh runoff campaign in georgia i think god i got so many so many i i i think i think we're gonna see literally the biggest um the the biggest funding for a senate runoff race in history by far don't you think saks like probably north of 100 million dollars being spent maybe 100 to 200 million dollars being spent on

advertisements in georgia to try and get people to go vote one way or the other the democrats think they have a real run at this they think it's make or break two years to kind of get their you know um uh history changing policies in effect republicans think it saved the the nation time so everyone's rushing to georgia right now um so the markets are going to have a very close eye on what's going on over there i think um i'm you know i'm very nervous about it um if the democrats look like they're getting much more money into the state and they're actually going to you know get people to the polls and um to the voting booths and actually get into this runoff on january 5th and actually flip uh get both of those seats to be uh um to be blue uh it's gonna be a very different

market environment i mean you could see the market drop by 30 40 percent uh in the next six we have we have a situation where it's 4848 there are two seats up for grabs those two seats are in a runoff these and i want to get into the exactly let me correct that jason it's 48.50 yes the republicans have a 50 to 48 advantage with two open seats in the runoff actually sorry one one seed is open the other it has an incumbent purdue who's facing ossip purdue won in the last election he got like nine point nine percent fifty yeah if you get fifty percent you get to this runoff in january georgia the only place that has this where you have to get to fifty in order to win yeah it's crazy it's crazy so weird is this just they want the extra attention or who came up with this idea this seems just like every state's got its own history it's crazy it is one of the unique things about living in the united states of america as opposed to america let's talk about

exit polls uh well this is what's incredible here let me tee this up for you so in in 2020 um biden got 80 of the black vote trump got six this is aggregate so we can break this down by men and age group and you can it looks even uh even more interesting latinos biden got 67 trump got 22 percent of the latino vote between the ages of 18 to 34 so boomers oh sorry pardon me uh gen z uh and millennials again i would have thought 100 biden it was on it was 62 percent biden 23 went for trump one in four uh amongst women uh and again you know we thought ah okay uh you know

suburban women are breaking biden 80 20. it turned out biden got 58 percent of women trump got 35 of all the female vote and the coup de grace whites with a degree um again you would have thought this would have been 80 20 90 10 and said it was 53 biden 38 trump so this really was uh something if we look at this if we look back on this the pollsters were completely wrong in thinking once again that these groups of people are monolithic the the and then i think the most the most mind-boggling to me and and i had a candid discussion about this was um the term latin x is a a catch-all term for people who are of latino spanish-speaking uh descent and what somebody told me who is in this latinx group is that it's the most insulting thing they've ever been told it's almost as a term

like the term saying oriental to describe people from asia you're just grouping us all into one thing people from cuba venezuela and mexico all think the same this is the absolute you know end game of identity politics which is we have to put you in a corner we own you we own your opinion and you belong to our party whichever party it is oh you don't have a degree you're a gop hillbilly oh you you're latinx okay well then we own you you're a democrat david what and and i know that this is an area where you know uh you have a lot of expertise what are

your thoughts well as it turns out um promoting socialism to people who fled cuba nicaragua and venezuela to escape it uh turns out not to be a great uh election strategy and um and so yeah it's this this idea that latinx is is one block it's not it consists of a bunch of different of immigrants from a bunch of different nations and the ones who fled socialism are not eager to reenact it in the united states the republicans flipped two house seats in south florida where there's a lot of cuban americans and even in the um the heavily uh mexican-american counties

uh in along the rio grande and texas uh trump improved uh let's see it looks like he improved um 59 and 30 39 respectively over his 2016 showing so this is not just some fluke of the exit polls um it seems like trump really made progress in a lot of these groups that seemed to defy their you know what what the promoters of identity politics the way that they wanted them to vote um gay americans were another one i think trump improved his share of the gay vote from 14 in 2016 to 28 um this year so um i mean really it's pretty amazing people are not voting the way that they're supposed to vote um trump also improved from 12 to 18 with black men

and four to eight percent of black women i mean those are still pretty low numbers but there was improvement there and i think part of the reason is that not all of the african-american community is on board with defunding the police well i also think what it means is identity politics is a stupid strategy forget whether you're offended by it or not at this point what's clear is it's a stupid [ __ ] strategy it doesn't work it's a path to losing because the more and more you do it the more and more you're going to disenfranchise individuals who want to be judged sort of of sound mind and body right i mean if he took a thousand sri lankans and put him in a room and said i'm going to judge you as a sri lankan vote i would tell you to go [ __ ] yourself

you know i would be deeply offended by that and this is where i think the radical left is going to have to retool because their theory of how they take power in america is always that demographics is destiny that you know as the country simply becomes more diverse we're gonna they're automatically gonna vote for us and there's a lot of data in this election to show that that's not what's gonna happen you actually have to run on issues that people care about let's think about this in the context of internet advertising right the the the world prior to internet advertising you had um you know uh channels and you would have an audience that was estimated to be made up of some demographic set on that channel and you would buy an ad spot on that channel and that's who you would reach and so you would create a message for that now today we can create

personalized ads and personalized messages and uh internet advertisers are much more thoughtful about targeting targeting based on psychographic profiling behavioral targeting and i think that's where politics has to head in the united states it's kind of keeping up with this personalization of both products but also of media and ads and um and i think that's what we're going to see if you listen to james carville who's like you know a classic kind of democratic campaign advisor um and he did a podcast just leading up to the election and if you listen to this podcast these guys are very old school it's like the whites are going to do this and the blacks are going to do that and the the college educator are going to do this and the others are going to do that

and they don't realize that the segmentation that's possible today i think reveals a lot more about the character of the uh of the population they're basically i think it's such an astute point freyberg they're basically living in the level of granularity of network tv it's like cable tv yeah it's like they got to cable tv and they're like okay bet espn nascar and guess what like like the world is much more complex individuals have found their own personal voice and they found their own personal voice through social media through instagram through this ability to kind of define themselves not fit within a cohort and i think that's what maybe they always did feel that way and we just had never had the technology to get there yeah but i think it's i think it's also about people like people have complex points of view you know the four of us sit here

and none of neither of us none of us identify as a party anymore we all identify with with um certain uh points that we think are important to us individually and then we have a point of view on those points and i think that's the case for the majority of the population in the united states i don't think people are like i'm just a [ __ ] democrat no matter what and i'm a republican no matter what people care more deeply in a more complex way and i think politics needs to resolve to that um and and that's going to require a shift in how you communicate how you message how you get feedback how you drive um uh blocks for voting and uh it's gonna it's gonna uh you know be a really interesting change over the next 15 to 20 years and it may be what saves the republic i i think this is an incredible observation it might be the observation of the episode

and i just want to point to a tweet i did because i this is this election has really led to me doing um two things one i've been just thinking deeply about what do i actually understand about americans in america um and then i also you know there's all these red pills around so i decided i would crush up a red pill and i would just you know put a little on my finger and i try a little red pill for a second uh and everybody told me i've been repelled now on twitter and that i'm a trump fan i am not i hate the guy i think it's horrible but i i did this quick survey here i said if you voted for trump i want to understand what percentage of your vote vote was based on the combination of a canceled culture b identity politics c socialism d coastal elites telling you how to live explain other issues that contributed in a reply

i.e spending immigration sc the supreme court et cetera and i just said zero percent one to 25 26 to 50 at over 50. and and i got 12 000 votes go ahead and look at the results not the replies but go ahead and vote it doesn't matter which one you pick over 50 of people who voted for trump and i know this is unscientific it's my followers but it's definitely feels directionally correct the people who felt 26 to over 50 percent was part of the cancel culture identity culture was what they were trying to communicate with their vote well this is this is such an important thing because i think this is what we're fighting over the every single 70 of them no every single

election going forward like if you if you put this on top of the 70 odd million people that voted this kind of roughly makes sense which is that you know there's probably about 20 million people who will completely vote democrat no matter what and 20 million people who will completely vote republican no matter what their their just eyes are closed their ears are closed they don't care but when you take those people out there's this enormous amount of people in the middle who have the ability to vote a split ticket you know and as and as as saxxypoo said like they'll vote uh a democrat into the white house but then down ballot they'll vote a bunch of republicans

and they'll just make sure there's a balance of power so they've been telling us about this kind of centricity for years and so if you want to win an election you do two things part one is you understand this dynamic that centrism wins and part two is what friedrich says which is you understand that we need to enter sort of the google cpc world of political advertising and really cater not just the ads but also the message to individual people and stop the um you know the cat the gross high level categorization which isn't working anymore yeah and and and jason let me can i add um that the connection between cancel culture in this election so you know obviously the pollsters got everything completely wrong and again again

and but the reason is because of cancel culture so in exit polling 45 of republicans with college degrees expressed fear that their careers could be at risk if their views became known compared to only 23 democrats saying that and so there were these you know quote unquote shy trump voters who are afraid to tell pollsters what they really think now it wasn't the trump voters that you think of when you see the pickup trucks and the convoys go by or the rallies sort of the those those were the voters from 2016 who weren't counted it was sort of the non-college blue collar voters the michael moore uh you know people who turned out for trump and big numbers and weren't

properly counted four years ago the pollsters actually counted those people correctly this time the people they completely underestimated was actually the white college vote who swung for a lot of swung from democrat to republican they voted for trump because of this issue and they were afraid to say anything about it because they're afraid of getting canceled and by the way they they are every other person everybody listening to this podcast works with and so deal with that one right exactly anybody who's not actively virtue signaling on twitter for biden is a trump voter i'm not sure that's exactly correct but roughly i think it's wrong roughly you know if people aren't exp if people in tech aren't explicitly endorsing uh biden on twitter they're probably closet from voters

it is going to be very interesting for people to go back to offices because now we have had a resolution and identity politics cancel culture and extremism on both sides hysterical and trolling trolling republicans hysterical libs this has been a loss for both of those parties and now the pandemic is ending we're going to be back in offices at some point i mean what is office culture going to be like are people going to go with the brian armstrong let's just get work done here let's not talk about politics it's just too charged or not um it's going to be a very interesting it's every it's every comp it's every company's right

you know it's every company's right to care about what they want to care about every board every ceo every controlling shareholder and then it's every employee's right to vote with their feet about whether that's okay or not and i think that look i i mean the whole brian armstrong thing again just to say one of the most pathetically poorly written you know pieces of english prose i've ever [ __ ] seen you know he's a crypto in fairness my dog my dog is my dog he's not a coder he's a she's a ceo my dog slamming his her paw on the keyboard would have created a better prose than that but he was coming from a reasonable place he had the right to say what he said um the problem is that

it's so antithetical to what you're allowed to believe for example living in san francisco um but i think that that's going to change because you can't ignore every other person telling you that there are meaningful economic issues that matter and that the prioritization and the policing of these you know sort of high-value social signaling issues are no longer a priority and i think that what's going to happen is there will be room for a party that focuses on that uh and a group of people but they will be relegated just like on the other side uh that will happen

to the republican version of that as well i i just think this whole thing to this honestly for me it was it seems like such a tight election it is but i really think the huge winner here is centrism 100 i i i i agree with that and i i would say that this election proves that brian armstrong was right because the average american is tired of these highly charged political situations and the last thing they want to do is have these conversations at work where they can get reported to where they can offend their co-workers and get reported to hr they can make them feel unsafe they don't want to have these conversations at work certainly by the way only five percent of coinbase's employees took armstrong up on that offer to leave so the number of people

who actually want to have a politically charged workplace is very very small they're just the noisiest they're the squeakiest wheel i mean and that was a ridiculous deal i mean what did he say six months and we invest he made it really attractive to leave if you didn't agree with this possibility was that was that written because i couldn't figure that out yeah it was written it was an attractive deal to leave if you wanted to leave and ninety-five percent chose to yeah did i say it was poorly written i didn't understand it because it was so hollywood so anyway so 95 percent stayed so my point is just the number of people who actually like this highly polarized politically charged situation in which we're all arguing with our friends over politics and children are divorcing their parents because they're not woke enough i mean people don't want to live in that kind of country anymore and i think this is the thing that joe biden really got right in his campaign i mean this is why i mean this

is the only way that his basement strategy could actually work and results in him getting elected is people actually do want this return to normalcy do you know who the biggest loser is going to be coming out of this i think not when you think holistically about the ecosystem it's going to be the media because they have made an absolute fortune over the last four or five years picking aside what is the point of watching rachel maddow january 20th what is the point of tuning into fox news or reading the hysterical opinion page of the new york times all of these places that were being propped up by either trumpism or anti-trumpism are now going to

find themselves where they started which is not a job without a job and we just wanted you to tell us the news and terrorism straight there was a great new york times have an opinion page rip the opinion page out of the new york times rip it out of the wall no no no no no no i i no i disagree i think the opposite happened which is that opinion page was meant to be where people could have an opinion so that everything else was fact and the problem is that all the other pages became opinion as well and nobody told anybody but yes i don't think that but nobody can tell the difference and look at that nobody can tell the difference that's right they can't tell the difference and look at that expose about how barry or barry weiss was run out of the new york times

it basically the activists ran her out um and the the reality is activists have completely captured the new york times and cnn and msnbc and there is and they always had fox and the new york times they always had fox but but now we have no objective neutral media and so who's going to call the election i mean you complain about the fact that trump is sowing dissent but who is the universally trusted uh spokesperson for neutrality the way that walter cronkite was when he could just declare it and that's the way it is and people believe that's the way it is

who did the best job freedberg that night when we were doing that let's reflect on the live stream i have two questions for the live stream number one who is your bestie guestie who who did you think added the most as a guestie and why and then number two we're doing we're doing whatever what we're gonna do we're gonna do a poll a human valuable before i got a lot of feedback on the guesties there's a little girly people can i say one more thing on this stuff brad before before we go there uh there was a there was a really good article in the new york times about maggie haberman right and maggie who's a fantastic journalist but built an entire career it really amplified came to a head in 2016 um and she just scoop after scoop um about trump

but the most impelling thing about that whole article was somewhere near the you know a third of the way from the bottom uh she's like look uh at the end of the day uh she said something like i'm dispensable and i know it and it was the most honest thing because it's like despite her popularity and despite sort of you know how big of a stick she carries the reality is sans trump uh there's just nothing to do there's nothing to leak there's there just is not nearly as much to do i did just put in the um the chat here the washington post fox news the hill

basically like the full gamut of um of uh of uh media opinion have highlighted that the media generally is the biggest loser of the uh of the 2020 election and i think i i think they've just lost the um uh the faith of their audience and um you know it's it's i mean it's this access point i don't know how many people were you're either looking for objective and you've lost it or you're looking for opinionated and you feel like you're um you know your aligned opinion setting media partner has betrayed you um you know the fact that fox called it for uh for trump and trump's now saying fox is is is a liar the fact that the new york times doesn't feel

like they're being objective anymore and they're you know they're running people out of the uh out of the newsroom in general i just feel like we've been disenfranchised um and i think that's uh that's something that's going to be really hard to kind of recover from and resolve and for the love of god can somebody please get i i don't want you to break any laws but however if we could read the slack channel of the new york times reporters leading up to the hundred days of this election that would become the greatest best-selling book of all time to watch the new york times writers bicker with each other sax i mean we could do 10 hours on that no problem let's talk about okay bestie gasting guesties what did you think of our guests i

thought they were all great i thought they're all great are we now becoming uh media critics we're gonna now yeah who do we like our own podcasts what are you going for are we why are you yeah jason wants jason wants to throw youth under the bus go ahead jason no no no no no no oh contraire does anyone have a video they want to share person on the podium youth in his place that it was not the it was not the point guard in this case somebody pulled a draymond and pulled she held you at the side and said stop you gotta pass the ball i do you think brad did a great job he had some great insights i think bill gurley had some great insights which i think was just a great really good job of getting some people to rotate in i enjoyed it yeah i thought it was really well everyone was great i'll give a shout out to my bestie newman

he was better he was better as a political analyst and all those jokers on cnn and fox and msnbc the dude with the with the map and he kept touching the map and yeah it's like that guy gets paid to do that i can't believe he gets paid to do that i'm gonna get my daughter on cnn she can do that when's the guy on cnn who does that john k john king john king god bless this guy because i don't know how much adderall he's on but i i turned it on at 8am and he was zooming into pennsylvania and he's like oh well of course in 2018 this time 2016. he's like let's zoom out and let's go back to arizona of course in arizona this place i was like is this guy a geography teacher i mean

he was amazing and just the dexterity he looked like he was tom cruise a minority report with the fingers i don't know i don't know if i'd call him tom cruise i don't look like tom cruise but the minority report pinch and zoom in and out it was incredible when uh when when does trump call this thing that's a great question well i think he has to run out these core challenges which will take a few weeks but i i predict by thanksgiving um but it may have to go up to the supreme court but he's gonna he's gonna dot the eye dot every eye and cross every t that he's got legally um but he's got like we talked about the very beginning he's got a huge uphill challenge i'd i see the court ultimately ruling against him or throwing it out what is the point david what is it well because why shouldn't he doesn't he's not gonna win

no i don't i don't know that he he knows that he he i think it's his right to exhaust every legal uh possibility and let's remember al gore didn't concede for 37 days after the election so i certainly think trump is within his rights over the next few weeks to run this out in terms of what the point is i mean other than the obvious attempt to challenge it legally i do think this is partly a branding exercise by trump um it's a marketing exercise i don't think he's going to come up with enough malfeasance to overturn an election but i do think he'll probably produce a lot of smoke and this is about protecting his brand as a as a winner and

you know if he kicks up enough um you know examples of voter fraud or or what have you he'll always be able to say you know years from now that this was it was a stolen election and when you combine the fact that kovid really did drive this this election you could call that chinese election interference if you want the fact that the vaccine is now here already you could call that um you know some sort of election interference he's going to have enough arguments where if he wants to run four years from now um i think he probably gets the republican nomination again what what's the percentage chance chamath that he runs again in four years zero um free berg trump yeah

i think he's gonna be making so much money he's not gonna know what to do with himself he's not going back to that [ __ ] torture support your house if you think about the white house like some terrible blumhouse production movie set he's like [ __ ] that i'm not going back there it was awful where is he going where is he going he's going to go to china he's going to shanghai is he going to he's going to launch it you're going to be in new york he's going to buy a law firm because he's gonna need a law firm to keep everyone at bay and he's gonna be probably printing a hundred million bucks a month you know put it at dubai saudi arabia i think yeah i think i think he's definitely gonna launch a media business and uh he'll he'll try to become king maker i think i think he will become a king maker republican politics he will launch a competitor to fox news but it will also be fox news hybridized with a grassroots movement like the tea party and every

republican will need to go get his endorsement or they will be primaried by the trump party and i i would not put it aside more could not disagree more i think he's a disgrace i think he will be i think that's not what david said he's gonna come not you david i'm talking about trump i think dave is incredible uh no i think the stuff that comes out after this the deluge the number of sdny suits all the griff and the graft it's all coming out not only is he not going to be a king maker he will not be able to get the backing for this network it'll be breitbart light

and it'll be shut down within 24 months he'll fail so miserably that when he walks into a restaurant it'll be like game of thrones shame shame well i i don't i don't i don't think so i think that it's very likely that the donald trump that runs for president in 2024 is donald trump jr oh god no he's horrible the whole republican party has to start over let's end on this pompeo did a press conference is the state department currently preparing to engage with the biden transition team and if not at what point does a delay hamper a smooth transition or pose a risk to national security there will be a smooth transition to a second trump administration

all right we're ready the world is watching what's taking place here we're going to count all the votes when the process is complete there'll be electors selected there's a process the constitution lays it out pretty clearly the world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today successful today and successful with the president who's in office on january 20th a minute afternoon will also be successful can i can i just say i don't disagree with the position they're taking it's not immoral it's customary and traditional to concede your election but you know december 15th is the date that congress ratifies the electoral votes uh to determine who the next president is going to be um and these guys are just taking a a very kind of pragmatic um legal line that is not

immoral in a way they they believe that they have some case on on what the vote should be the votes are all very close yadda yadda i'm not saying that he's gonna win or by any chance but i don't think that um folks saying like let the votes be counted and let congress do their job of having the states tell them who their electoral votes are going to is uh is an inappropriate position to take i sound like i might sound like some conservative you know trump head but i'm not i think that um these guys i'm what i'm just saying is that these guys aren't that immoral in in kind of asking for that for that you know sorry i also think at the fringes of the republican party this is what you keep all these militia folks and all these other folks at bay is just you

show a really methodical um you know um stepping away from the spotlight and i think that this is yeah honestly it's this is a very deliberate safe calming thing to do cause i think there's there's been nothing about the trump administration from 2016 through to this very moment that has been customary or traditional and so i don't know why we all expected him to step in and say like i can see like the way that we've been doing it it would be worse it'd be worse if he had conceded and all of a sudden was holding a bunch of protests and rallies all over the country that but he's not doing anything illegal no one has any legal requirement to concede and um you know and i think as long as these guys on december 15th which is the date that we should all be watching and waiting for as long as these guys do the appropriate thing at that point then um you know that that's the only point in which i would have any sort of concern or worry

about what's going on with the transition in the government but sorry i think this is about saving face and saving brand a sexy passenger he'll he'll be out by december 15th meaning right it'll this will all be done yeah i agree and look let's remember that al gore was able to challenge the election result for 37 days without being hysterically accused of undermining democracy so let trump have his day in court it'll play out over the next few weeks i expect that the obstacles he has has to overcome are are too large and he will lose these lawsuits it might go to the supreme court it would not be a bad thing if the supreme court were the ones to make this decision uh they're one of the last institutions that still trusted clearly the media are not and i think that you know trump will accept the result he may not concede but he will accept the result

when it comes from the supreme court is there a non-zero chance that he could win on a recount he would have to prove systemic fraud because it's not like florida where there's just one state and a few hundred votes he's gotta overcome over twelve thousand votes in at least three states so that's the issue is is it it's a percent on its sacks if you had to lay money on it oh i mean it's like some ten percent chance i think except 10 chance 1 in 10 you'd give 10 to 1 odds no i'm saying it's under 10 i'm saying it's a very small well here's the thing so bush v gore the um the supreme court ruled seven to two

i mean you would have thought it was nine to zero um so clearly there was some sympathizers in bush v gore so hopefully you know it's something like seven to two and um you know we move on i i believe if it gets the supreme court it will be at least seven to two if not eight one or nine zero just because i think trump has a much harder case to prove in florida the issue was simply whether the recount should be allowed to continue james baker went to the supreme court to stop the recount that was in process uh because of the fear that the local corrupt election officials basically steal the election for gore that you know but but but bush was always ahead in that election there was never a time when bush was behind um biden is now ahead in every swing

state that matters trump has to now overturn that result in at least three of those states i don't know how thousands of votes by tens of thousands of i just don't know how he does that he has to prove some sort of systemic fraud that took place across the nation that and and look i think from like a marketing or branding standpoint he'll be able to create a lot of smoke i think they will actually find quite a bit of misconduct because i don't think our elections are perfect but will it rise to the standard that the supreme court is going to set for overturning an election i don't think so i don't think so i mean they'll probably find it on both sides there's got to be some crazy well the other trump supporter who has 10 ballots they signed and there'll be some crazy liberal who did this the nuanced issue is whether they can do a constitutionally valid recount by you know the time necessary as well so the longer that this lays on then they'll be forced to basically

say no to that also because otherwise it will be effectively throwing out an election and so uh as we wrap here san francisco's uh continues to devolve revenue down 40 percent in terms of taxes budget is double what it's been uh just a few years ago crime is going crazy walmart is closing their stores and leaving because of walgreens i'm sorry walgreens we don't have a walmart here um and there's 20 there's more homes on the market now than there have been too much of anything is a bad thing if you eat too much broccoli it's a bad thing you know what i mean so too much of a single party monoculture is bad whether it's republican or democrat you need a diverse

centrist plurality and in the absence of that many cities that veer in one direction or the other will decay and die and san francisco is going to be the tip of the spear for the left's version and there's been a bunch of cities that have already been the examples of the rights version so you know what um apparently the water is warm and they want to join anybody else freedberg i can't i can't find a lot to disagree with there i think san francisco we're basically an atlas shrugged i mean the uh you know half the storefronts are closed they're boarded up uh the city is completely surrendered to the criminal element you can't park your car anywhere in the city without having it getting broken into they won't prosecute people for crimes including

uh increasingly violent crimes um the uh you know the the the the city is about to go bankrupt and the entrepreneurs are all disappearing they're all leaving i mean it's right out of the shrugged yeah i mean it's it's the uh the action is the wrong action right so san francisco the biggest disappointment of election night for me was the new business taxes that were passed um for san francisco businesses um and and there was also this like um for for 99.9999999 of people they're going to shrug and say i don't give a [ __ ] but there was this new tax of six percent for homes that get sold over 10 million dollars now uh if you're

a successful entrepreneur an investor or a ceo of a company in san francisco and you know it's it's like a slap in the face um you add the business tax with that kind of high-end property tax and it's almost like an invitation to leave the city and some people are nodding their heads wait this six percent is on leaving or buying uh transaction when you sell so you literally six percent off the top uh when you sell a home the city basically just took six percent of my house yeah this the city just took six percent of my house it is now tax they're now a part owner of my house yeah it's an estate tax and so there are people like there are people in san francisco uh who we all know how much warning did you have before they took your bedroom yeah i mean

um there's a london breed put some people in sax's third 13th bedroom on the third floor and they're all living there right now but i mean it's okay i got like wings i don't even know about it's like totally it's like richie rich's house or something so nobody cries nobody cries for super rich people and you know but it was so short-sighted is the point right right exactly i'm not complaining about the taxes on me but it's going to do tremendous damage to the city people are not going to want to move here and we yeah yeah i look i've built businesses in san francisco since 2006 and i will not build another business in san francisco and i hear the same from other entrepreneurs if you're going to build a business do it in the south bay do it in the east bay do it in the north bay or do it in austin or la or somewhere else

but this is just not a place to build businesses the city is basically saying we don't want you here now that would be fine and dandy if the city was being conservative in the way that they spend and if they were actually reducing their budget and you know kind of reducing the the city's activities the problem is these these uh taxes diverge with the budget because um the taxes are now going to go down because businesses are leaving people are selling their homes they're not going to buy expensive homes anymore and um we are seeing a budget crisis san francisco i think is looking at a 1.7 to two billion dollar budget shortfall this year um i mean like where's that money gonna come from this is a city with eight hundred thousand and we have and there was that expose in the san francisco chronicle talking about how there's over twenty thousand city workers making over a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year 000 yeah yeah what are we getting for all of that the evidence is not apparent um and this is where okay look i'd be happy to give

the city six percent of my house and pay all these high taxes if we actually got something for it but the city just keeps getting less and less livable uh yes city budget in 2013 so we have a fiscal crisis a fiscal crisis and we have a livability crisis that i think is even worse um and that that's a huge problem and let's be frank san francisco was always the accidental beneficiary of silicon valley if you will san francisco was the accidental billionaire it was silicon valley that created this enormous wealth and all the jobs and the the companies it wasn't san francisco policies or politics that created any of that it just so happens that silicon valley got big enough it started around stanford it got big enough that san francisco as the nearest

metropolitan area really was a beneficiary of that and and you know because they never really did anything to create the conditions for that prosperity frankly they took it for granted and now that the rug's been pulled out from under them i don't think they're really going to know what to do local local san francisco politicians treated silicon valley success as a grab bag and uber set up here and twitter and square and salesforce and san francisco politicians put their hand in the honey jar and took as much as they could and um it's now backfiring because new businesses don't want to set up here entrepreneurs don't want to operate here and as sax is pointing out the you know the the rapid kind of inflation has caused this tremendous decline uh in in the

quality of service there's zero accountability zero checks and balances so san francisco is in for a really frank a scary reckoning and a lot of people are really worried about it and it's like a very real problem it's not like oh the city's [ __ ] haha like a two billion dollar budget shortfall um you're either going to have to cut a lot of jobs of public employees or you're going to have a city that's going to go bankrupt and you know bonds are going to get defaulted on and at the same time you're going to have this mass exodus of people and businesses and it is a it is a very kind of unwinding not right now um so it's it's a scary moment i don't think there's a real great answer for for what to do it's more nuanced but i think it i think it will happen mark my word san francisco will file for bankruptcy in the next 10 years wow i mean pelosi is just looking you know pelosi held out a major city filing for maybe 15 maybe 15

years but yeah remember a big part of what pelosi held out on the big thing she held out on in the stimulus negotiations uh last month was for local and state governments to get bail out support uh in this stimulus package and she's acutely aware she lives one block away from me down the road here she's acutely aware of what's going on in san francisco and the solution may not be to bail out these cities and these states um if they're going to continue to operate the way they are because it's um so the state needs to break in order to rebuild well you need to cut budget i mean any of us running a business know like you know if you have a little revenue coming in and you're spending too much where the [ __ ] the money coming from you can't just keep going to big papa in dc and asking him for more money what about masayoshi-san maybe he'll he consider coming in or maybe it's back maybe should we do it i really

francisco listen i i think chamath traumath is right about san francisco being the proof of what happens when you have a one-party system and i i really hope that the the tech community the tech liberals who are listening to this podcast they're not going to listen to me because they probably you know think i'm too conservative but you know tremoth is pretty liberal and um you know he makes the right point and you know we cannot have a one-party system that remains healthy for very long we need the pendulum to swing back towards the center and um you know i really hope that yeah power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely as you've as you've said many times yeah it's true that's yeah lord acton said that we this is literally what the dark knight batman series is

about it's literally about not having a basic standard of policing and allowing criminals to run a city we've turned into a goddamn comic book like you have to arrest people who commit crimes okay and and i'm sorry if that hurts your feelings and one of the things that's beat people up yeah you're right and one of the things that's like the comic book is the sense of fatalism you know it's like everybody knows san francisco is broken but nobody thinks they can do anything about it that's really the tragedy of it that is the tragedy and you know what if any of us i've said it before i'm like i know exactly how you can stop all these car break-ins you there's

a thing called the bait car you put 10 bait cars out you put cameras in them and now that einstein has spoken boys i love you i love you all i miss you all i just can't wait to see you again and uh for those of you who would like to advertise on podcast the advertising rate has been set at 10 million dollars a year for however many episodes we we do i will read the ad at the end of the show if you give 10 million dollars to the charity of chamot's picking which apparently is going to be san francisco i think that'll balance point seven percent of the budget uh follow friedberg on the twitter follow david sacks follow champion if you like the show tell your friends and write a review

or don't we don't care we just do this because we like hanging out with each other we'll see you all oh and if you want to be a guest on the show we don't accept any guest recommendations for the love of god i don't know how many people are begging to be on the show it's there's room enough for four people maybe on a live show bestie guesties you're not getting your ceo of your whatever company on the show period end of story and i cannot introduce you to chamoth to spack your company enough of that love you besties

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

Related episodes