E14: Salesforce acquires Slack, DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, Trust Fund Socialists & more

okay besties are back besties are back going around the horn rain man david sacks calling in from an undisclosed location suffering through two code 13s in one lifetime and david friedberg is here the queen of quinoa spacking everything in sight living the life calling in from a nondescript ritz-carlton room it appears to be and of course the dictator himself chamoth poly hopitia tackling like a fool welcome back everybody this is what you pay for with your subscription to the all-in podcast brought to you by slack uh if you didn't

own slack shares raise your hand it's been an incredible uh week um on a number of levels we're going to talk this week about uh salesforce buying slack trump and section 230 uh the coinbase the ongoing coinbase saga uh freeberg found some interesting science that could save humanity and of course the trust fund socialists in the new york times who hate their parents for giving the money uh let's start off let's start with off the most important thing what is that shirt undershirt combo you're wearing i mean look it's just it's you have buttons on buttons

break the layering rule you can't you can't fool us if you're going to layer properly you can have only one layer of buttons but to have two layers of buttons that's not how it works jkl went in and got it oh no layers are for players not me no he's like an almond milk cappuccino and he's like i like how that barista dress is and i'm gonna wear that from now on wait a second can i ask a technical question can can i have buttons i can't have buttons on buttons but can i have buttons and then a zipper up like with the no you can't do that either um listen

had a weird aversion to buttons ever since he spent the time in italy did you was he button-shamed in italy i wasn't i was a little button-chained but i'm looking at sax's buttons on his collars which just makes no sense saks is wearing the same brooks brothers shirt that he graduated high school in at brooks he owns 17 of brooks brothers at this point from the number of blazers he's bought there all right let's get off to it we've insulted each other i don't think freeberg's taking the brunt of anything yet anybody have any uh chop busting they want to do with free burgers that's just sort of built in no freeburg took the tablecloth that

i used for a picnic in the summertime and made it into a shirt you know you have to be frugal at this time and also free bird cares about the environment he's not going to just land a picnic it was a hemp based tablecloth and so i knew it was going to get taken and stolen i love how i choose to spend my time with you guys it just pays off here we go all right can we kick this off all right let's kick it off with our advertisement for nobody because tomorrow will not let me make any money off of this podcast uh and thanks again for the suggestion that we launched a syndicate

with no carry now a bunch of [ __ ] on twitter are like hey when is the all-in syndicate starting i'm like never i need to make a living i need to get my beak wet and this week i'm sorry but i think a an all-in syndicate would be super super disruptive and cool i'm totally fine with running it as long as we can have the 20 carry and i'll manage the whole thing we got four people on the call four or five we each get five percent carry but we gotta make a living here not everybody's made a chima not everybody's got spacks a through z or had all of their slack

shares bought i think we'll kick it off with that chamath we saw this week in fact just two days ago salesforce in a record transaction for a sas company i think it's the highest ever paid for a sas company 27 billion dollars 27.7 billion dollars for slack which has only been public for just over a year i think you were i think did the series be in slack right after they did their pivot at social capital i don't know if that was in one or two but phil hellmuth is serious about it it was a series b in tiny spec but it was the series a in slack and um there's a really

important story which is that um myself and raco um who's my partner at social capital we've worked together now for my gosh i think it's probably 15 years um wrote a really great memo justifying the investment in slack and it had to do with one thing and one thing only we ignored the revenue and ar i mean it was fine and nice and good but the single biggest thing that we were attracted to was something that we looked at and which was called inter-company edges and even back in 2015 or 16 when we did this original investment there was this dynamic where people across companies

were communicating via slack channels and i was completely stunned by this idea because that was effectively a substitution for email because the only way you communicate across companies today is by email you know david is at craftventures.com and he emails me at socialcapital.com and i email jason inside.com that's how we communicate across across businesses except now all of a sudden you could be messaging and having a much more real-time interface that to me was incredibly disruptive and it justified the entirety of the real forward-looking investment thesis

now fast forward five years later and these guys have more usage on a daily basis than facebook which is stunning because you know these guys have 10 million daus and facebook has 2 billion so it just goes to show you the quantity of traffic and and the the volume of information and theoretically you know productivity that's happening on slack and so i'm not sure what salesforce bought i actually think that you know you can make a case why it's a shame that it got bought a very strong one in fact but what they did get whether they know it or not is an inter-company edge effect which is the most disruptive thing to email and in the hands

of salesforce and that sales team i think it has the ability to really be a very disruptive um force for good in enterprise software all right so sax this is a natural um passing of the ball to you and the baton because you did yammer sold it to microsoft for a billion dollars and obviously slack was the mobile successor to the desktop version of yammer and you got a lot of your fingerprints all over this but the fact is you did a tweet storm about it slack is an unbelievable success stewart is a great uh founder you know he sold his first company flickr for 30 million this one for almost 30 billion so that's pretty nice

but there was one failure and you pointed out in your tweet storm explain what the one failure if you could pick out of the hundreds of things thousands of things they did right there was one thing they did wrong that uh to jamaat's point would have resulted in them remaining an independent company that could have become worth more than 27 billion yeah it was it was a slowness to embrace the idea of enterprise sales and and by the way let's put this in context i mean stuart and the slack team did a phenomenal job 30 billion dollar exit um seven years of just about flawless execution so i don't want to and also you know i was an investor

in the company so thank you to sir for letting me invest i'm definitely don't want to sound like an ingrate or a critic i mean they just they did a phenomenal job but if you were to nitpick just one one little thing that i think they could have uh done faster it would have been embracing enterprise sales the big learning from yammer uh you know we learned this at yammer from 2008 to 2012 is that enterprises don't self-serve right they don't self-close bottom up sas products are phenomenal for generating top of funnel basically generating leads but

you have to have sales people close the deals and enterprises don't just kind of pull out a credit card and self-serve you they need a sales person and i think there was um something in the df dna of snap slack that actually i see really very commonly uh in the dna of of sort of product e sas companies product e sas founders which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales and they want to believe that they can just be entirely product driven and and what i see and across the board as they all come to the same realization that that we had a yammer which is we have to have a sales team

and i do remember you know back in 2014 the whole yammer sales team was basically rolling off um because of you know microsoft acquired the company in 2012 and there's an integration period and by 2013 2014 they were all looking for jobs and i remember you know my my former cro i think was interviewing at slack and it would have been such a perfect thing for them because he had just learned all the lessons of how you layer on kind of an enterprise sale on top of a of a bottom-up product and they just weren't ready to to make that higher yet and so look if you're

going to nitpick look 30 billion outcome no one's criticizing but if you're to nitpick you know um it's it's an a plus regardless but you know this would be the one thing you could you could say well congratulations all around to everybody involved especially phil hellmuth who was an lp in one of chamot's fun so if you need insights on slack or any of the inside information you can just follow phil hellmuth on twitter at being the greatest or i am the greatest or i'll always be the greatest one of those twitter handles is but but jason

you basically came to the same conclusion in your emergency pod right i mean i did i hadn't seen your i think you tweeted him after the emergency pod but uh yeah it just seemed to me this company unlike zoom uh should have been able to grow quicker and if you look at their numbers they had 87 companies that had were spending over a million dollars you put a rabid sales team on that product and they go in like benioff does with his sales team i mean he was just hyper aggressive at just putting huge numbers out there and saying you have to pay us this much money so much so that

i don't know if you remember elon getting into a public spat with him where he's like salesforce is horrible software get it out of the organization he basically banned it because they came to him with the bottom up people using of salesforce and said hey you owe us this amount of money and elon was like fu banned forever from inside of our organization we'll build our own software we don't need it and they didn't have somebody and stewart didn't have that dna i think to say aggressively we need to charge what this product is worth and you saw that in i think one of their strengths

and weaknesses which was they only build you for people who were actively using the product now that's a beautiful awesome feature it makes you not scared to use it but on the enterprise level i mean that seemed to be like maybe one of those non-cutthroat things that maybe were holding them back david do you have any insights on this or should we go on to alpha photo it's um it's a it's really important to remember the the mechanics and the game theory around m a especially you know big game hunting when you're doing 30 billion dollar acquisitions

um it's also kind of true at billion dollar levels but less so um but the bigger the acquisition gets you have to remember that there's an asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers and the question is who does the asymmetry favor right because you could look at this acquisition and say wow salesforce is crazy for spending 30 billion dollars and somebody else may say wow slack was really stupid for selling it for 30 billion dollars right the reality is that i think that there was asymmetries on both sides i think that what slack probably saw and i don't know because i've been off the board now for more than a year um but

i think what they saw was as david said just um you know a level of sophistication and scale and ability to cross-sell an upsell that was needed for enterprise scale either you overcome it with precision and speed or you overcome it by going the same pace as somebody like microsoft but with an equivalent product portfolio so that's that's sort of one realization that that that slack had but in in the case of you know um salesforce what they probably had was a realization that they couldn't go wall-to-wall inside of a customer because they didn't really have a product

that was useful or usable to every single individual inside of an enterprise and so both of those two things create asymmetries there's a level of fear inside of slack and there's a level of fear inside of salesforce both of them are about the fear of disruption and then the question is who gets the better of the other person in the middle of the acquisition right so the deal could have probably gotten done at you know 22 billion it probably could have also gotten done at 45 billion um and that's again to a combination of um how well you play poker in that moment right who blinks first and the quality of the bankers this is like two people having top

pair on a very textured board it's like pizza and they're just raising versus each other yeah that's who i play them because like it's similar also to like how microsoft bought linkedin right because if you think about what happened in linkedin if you remember when that happened it was almost to a t very much like slack linkedin had a one bad quarter they got decapitated by i you know and i owned it at the time in the in our public fund it got decapitated by like 50 60 70 i mean something insane for missing numbers by like a few pennies okay and all of a sudden it took a lot of the wind

out of their sales internally it didn't change the user momentum at all because you know the users that were signing up for linkedin didn't care what the stock price was yesterday today and tomorrow but it all of a sudden created a fear and i think microsoft was able to exploit that fear and within a year this company was bought for 25 billion dollars not dissimilar you know slack had uh you know a hiccup and they got re-rated the stock bounced back um but i think that if salesforce was smart they probably created you know sort of like a white knight kind of bid that said listen

you need enterprise scale and the ability to cross-sell and upsell i can give it to you and slack probably said listen you need to go wall to wall so i understand why you need me and you know the price is what the price is good free burger if you look at the pricing right so slack normally the way these big ma you know public company m a deals get done is the board has to approve the price and they have to say this was the right deal for us relative to other options and one of the ways you assess that is you look at where the share price has been historically and if

you're getting a premium to where the share price has been historically let's say 30 40 percent higher than it's ever been then the board says great that's a good deal we should take it because we've got a long way to grow into that value in this case the deal was done not at a very high premium to where slack traded just in the summer uh is that right chamots it looked like it peaked it's basically if you look at the 10 premium right 10 premium yeah 10 premium yeah we we opened the direct listing at 40 or 41 and then this was at 45. right and so there clearly was a

a sense of weakness from the board which is um i think why the salesforce stock traded down afterwards because if they were willing to sell at that small of a premium the forecast internally is probably feeling not that strong and then people translate that into hey salesforce bought something that's not that strong um you know there's there's something a little bit amiss but but obviously to your point they're missing a lot of the cross-selling and the synergy that that that i think it's a huge slam dunk acquisition and i go back to the this uh idea of intercompany

network effects um i think they exist and i think they're real and i think that the slot the the slack um product team's ability to innovate around that was not as fast as it could have been but it was still very unique and i think it was um it was a true moat and you know the the tragedy is we won't see what the terminal value is if they were um left alone to execute and in this weird way like i've always struggled with why microsoft was so overly obsessed with slack because if you looked at the team's product it was much more directly competitive with zoom and to this day still remains much more directly

competitive with zoom than slack but you know there we have it and if you look at the revenue um slack was doing 800 million run rates and we rounded up to a billion and yet salesforce at 20 billion uh so five percent revenue to revenue and then they got 10 of the company so in that way if you look at on a percentage basis which is you know how you might look at the facebook instagram and and whatsapp is what percentage of the existing entity did they get right the science growing size scoring about 60 a year and salesforce is growing about 22 something

like that the other thing is the president of salesforce's uh brett taylor who uh was our cto at facebook who i worked with and so i think brett also understands network effects really well um and you know by the way in in this interesting twist of fate benioff was the under bidder i think for linkedin and so um you know we've uh we've seen mark around the hoop on these you know social network network effect business tool um acquisitions before and finally also twitter he was running he was hanging around the basket with twitter and then they also brought

his name up for tick-tock which made no sense so i think benioff is just looking at this like if if google and microsoft and apple are too scared to buy things because of antitrust well i'm under the radar of the antitrust trillion dollars so i'm i'm the only one right he's uh he's under the radar because he doesn't have a play in this sort of communication or collaboration space and so therefore there are no anti-trust issues um if microsoft were to do it it would definitely be scrutinized because you could argue that they're adding to their existing dominant market share

and and collaboration um but benioff's dream has always been at least since he uh you know launched chatter to compete with with us when we were doing yammer this is back in 2010 2011. is he his dream has always been to have a product that could get him onto every seat in the enterprise you know his current product set has is departmental i mean you've got kind of the crm product for sales and they've got the support cloud for customer support and they've got the marketing cloud for marketing and so he's gone department by department but he's never really had a sort of pan like or cross

company yeah something that the entire company would use like a specific login system right and slack is that central login system but when you when he came up against you it was very you know benioff you're friendly with benioff benioff came at you so hard he threw three or four hundred engineers at chatter he took out full-page wall street journal ads he tried to poach her people he tried to make the product free he made it personal against you after you would not sell to him true or false david sacks i don't i don't think he made it personal but uh it was definitely do you feel

personal um did he tell you now no no no no no it he did that's i understood what he was trying to do that's your way of saying no i mean if we had sold to salesforce like we we ended up so what i would say is yeah we got in like a very it was a very competitive situation he didn't beat us um you know i was that he fell does that product even exist yeah um it's sort of like a feed inside of the the crm product it didn't really succeed as a standalone collaboration product and so we won that battle but it definitely i would say it scared us enough to sell to microsoft

um because you know the what did we we were about to we were about to enter a new stage of competition so here's what happened is he launched his product to kind of be a clone of yammer inside of salesforce but he was initially charging fifteen dollars per seat we were charging like five and so they massively overpriced it and and the event and then they they were on this like slippery slope or they kept lowering the price to compete better with us and then finally they realized that they should just give the thing away for free as a strategic move um and that

was when we decided to sell to microsoft is we didn't know we knew we had a better product than chatter but we didn't know how it would go if we were up against a free chat tell us honestly how much did he offer what was the meeting like where he made you the offer we yeah so yeah so here's i'll tell you the back story i mean this hasn't been public publicly revealed but um here we go in service of the all-in podcast go ahead go ahead david give us some ratings and services trying to get us from number three to number one on the charts um no you know it's funny we launched uh yammer at the techcrunch 40 conference that jason as you

know you were the co-founder of and benioff was like a judge he was a panelist and he was raving about it and you could just you know from from the moment we launched he was raving about it you could see the light bulb go off with him and um he realized that like social was going to be it was you know at the time obviously social was big with consumer social networks but he saw the potential of social or collaboration inside the enterprise and so yeah i mean like i think a year later or something they were interested in buying the company for around 250 million dollars the big

issue for them though was that benioff had a bunch of like engineers who wanted to build it in-house and so they they they actually i don't know what would happen if um if they you know didn't want to build it themselves but but basically they vetoed doing a deal and so they ended up building chatter and they threw the 300 engineers at it and they basically spun their wheels for a few years and um anyway it turned out to be much better for us because we end up selling the company for five times as much to microsoft um you know if we had sold to salesforce in like 2010 it would have

been a much smaller deal um but yeah that i mean he was very interested from the from the get-go all right folks so you have a breaking news in the background on what actually happened congratulations to stewart and the team i want to ask a question did you guys um keep all of the shares you you originally invested in um to the exit here just to set the context for folks you know you invest in a company it's a small startup it's actually over 30 billion for every share that i owned half of it were half no uh yeah for of of of a hundred shares that i owned per every 100 that i owned um 10 of them i sold at 38 right at the direct listing

um i want to say 40 of them i sold uh in the mid-20s and uh the rest of it just got taken out at this price so your dollar cost average to the you know whatever high 30s maybe 40 or so yeah i don't know my exact i mean i i i sold some and i still own some so um you know i definitely got my my beak wet from this acquisition but but uh no but look i i think i probably sold you know more than half of them you know um and that was a mistake and you know one of my biggest learnings as an investors has been to let your winners ride you know my biggest mistake as an investor has not

been the losers it's all it's been selling the winners prematurely yeah uber as well david uh and i sold some uber before but i kept a lot of my uber maybe most of it or half of it i think anyway uber facebook i mean facebook you know when they ipo'd it was worth 50 billion we all thought that was like unbelievable i mean because it was over a 50x return but um what's the lesson just never sell anything if you can help it i uh i served on my facebook in 2014 and bought amazon and tesla i think that you have to be able to sell for two reasons liquidity and moral obligation

yeah i mean that's an exaggeration i mean you can never it's it's people need to be able to sell but to the extent you can hold on uh just don't sell everything you know always you know keep um yeah keep saying think about the people who were at apple in the 80s or microsoft in the 80s or amazon in the 90s a lot of those people got frustrated holding the shares for so long and i think keeping at least 20 of your shares forever you know could be amazing there was somebody told me had never sold a single share of i don't know if that's a true story or not i told you that you can't be okay okay anyway

more breaking news what we should do is we should do a um we should put beeps in there nick i was told had never sold a share of and then we just let everybody react to it this way nobody knows what we're talking about i i do know that has not sold a single share and it has only sold shares of the fund capital calls which is an incredible statement to fortitude and vision incredible lord incredible it's by the way by the way it's not always worked out because he did the same with those didn't go as well yeah i mean look you you have to diversify when when you've got all your eggs in one basket in one company obviously you have to sell some

shares but um you know one of the things i've just learned over the last 20 years is probably people ask me what's your biggest regret or learning or whatever it's just selling too early is like one of the biggest mistakes you can make look at paypal paypal is now a 250 billion dollar company we sold it in 2002 for 1.5 billion we thought that was a great deal at the time and we sold it for less than one percent of what it's worth today and the product's basically the same you know is the lesson never sell if it's a winner ride it you compare okay hold on hold on

i'm gonna put a final nail disc off and then we're gonna go to alpha fold there's a great quote by warren buffett which is um if you know what you're doing the best thing you can do is be as concentrated as possible nobody ever got rich in their seventh best idea and i think that that basically sums it up but you have to be in a position to have the ability to have that kind of portfolio allocation and i think that's hard free birds explain alpha fold please uh okay let's explain give me two minutes on i'll explain proteins and then the importance

of proteins and then alpha folds so um the numbers to remember are 4 3 and 20. there are four nucleic acids that make up your dna we all learned this in high school biology sets of three a c t and g combinations define an amino acid there are 20 amino acids um and a protein is a string of amino acids so in your body and every cell there are these organelles they make proteins by reading the dna taking out a copy of it and turning it into amino acid chains and that's what we kind of call proteins but what's interesting is when you make

a chain of amino acids so there's 20 of them that you could put in each point in the chain it doesn't come out as a long chain what happens is those amino acids the whole thing collapses and it turns into a very specific shape and the shape of that protein is what defines its function so pretty much every biological function across all life is uh is undertaken by proteins doing something some proteins like hemoglobin in our red blood cells will has a very specific little pocket where oxygen molecules stick into the pocket and then it moves the oxygen from your

lungs to your cells it's a pretty amazing protein to exist uh and it specifically is shaped to do that exact function there are other proteins that can for example rip apart other molecules break a molecular bond there are other proteins for example that can take nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it into plants cells that the plants can then use to grow there's an incredible you know a set of potential on the nanoscale of what you can do with proteins and we see that in life and we're just shocked and odd and amazed by it every day but in order to

figure out how to create proteins that do specific things you have to know how do those amino acids turn into the shape that the protein ultimately takes and that's what's called protein folding um and so the hard thing is um and you know why is this important it's important because we can easily read dna and therefore we can figure out what amino acid sequence is being made to define that protein but what we don't know really well is what is the shape of that protein and therefore how does it undertake the function that we see it taking in biology and if you think about the

reverse of this the reverse of this if you have a function you want to undertake in biology you can design a protein to do that function for you for example bind to a specific point on a cancer cell um or you know take carbon out of the atmosphere or pretty much anything else your your mind can kind of imagine on the nanoscale proteins can be designed to do the challenge is how do you write the code which is the dna to make the protein that does that thing well we don't know how the code turns into the shape and that's what folding the folding problem is so the folding problem

there's a data set and the data set is what's the three-dimensional shape of a protein and then what's the dna code that defines the amino acid sequence that makes that protein and how do you figure out how to predict the shape of the protein from the amino acid sequence it has been an impossibility and um again if you think about this chain of amino acids they each have little um you know uh electrical spaces and and the way that they bind to each other it's very complicated you can't just deterministically define it

you know we don't have that level of understanding on a quantum scale so what alpha fold has done is they have now been able to predict from a sequence of amino acids what the protein shape will ultimately become by learning from a database of hundreds of thousands of structural protein shapes that have been defined through really really really um difficult uh you know scanning microscopes and other techniques to really try and scan a protein on a microscopic scale and then looking at the the dna sequence and figuring out okay what's the relationship

and the accuracy of their predictive model now is within the range of error of the microscopes that are being used to actually scan and measure those proteins so that's incredible because now theoretically you could come up with a design for a protein and you could actually build that protein by writing the amino acid sequence and that protein can do any number of things you want to do and this has been a difficult problem that's been intractable by humanity and we've been challenged by it for decades um for this machine learning breakthrough to kind of be realized in literally less than three years i mean the these guys were

at a score of 40 last year and this year they're at like nearly 90. which is incredible and so now um you know we can now predict what the shape will be from the from the dna sequence and and this is going to unlock this ability everyone's now going to take their model if they license it or whatever they do with it or people are going to go learn using the same techniques that deepmind used um but it just means that it's possible and then scientists will go away and they'll say you know what i want to do this particular thing on a microscopic scale let me design in in three

dimensional space of protein to do that thing okay now let me go figure out how to make that protein by writing the dna code which is really easy if you can use this algorithm to solve that for you and it is literally dollars and pennies to make proteins we can write dna on a computer we can get printed dna sent to us in 48 hours in a fedex envelope for a dna printing facility we can put it in a microbe and we can get that microbe to make the protein for us in a day the lab cost any high school biology class can do this now so by being able to actually figure

out what dna to write based on the objective function of what we want the protein to do it's going to unlock this universe of things we can do in medicine in environmental science we can do things like break apart p-e-t plastics we can do things like fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and getting rid of fertilizer plants we can create all sorts of new um you know food solutions health solutions environmental solutions any chance you can make a pizza that doesn't have carbohydrates because that's what i'm thinking about here is is there a way that you can make

a healthy pasta or pizza or something like that but in all seriousness what do you think the early wins will be out of this technology and is this a theoretical win that will benefit from in 20 years or is this a serious breakthrough that we're going to benefit from in the near term like no i think one or five years both are true this is an incredibly important advancement in machine learning um but the reality is that you know google will still have to spend a deep mind will have to spend a lot of time refining it and then they have some really big ethical challenges

ahead of it how do you expose this technology to whom and under what conditions and it's the same situation that openai has with gpt3 although a lot of people i think you know the scale of the computer science challenge maybe was a bigger win in gpt3 because it was a much more open space and i think this is a much more specific sort of almost expert system in a way um but the the downstream commercial implications of this is just enormous um and so just think about this like this is where like you gotta you gotta love companies like google the fact that they exist because

from you know page rank in 1999 to cpc ads in 2003 and four um we have alpha fold in 2020. and that to me is just that's just this is an argument against breaking up tech because only a tech company with this amount of resource knowledge can then go spend a billion dollars on deepmind i mean alphabet's burning four to five billion dollars a year on their quote-unquote other bets line and people give them a lot of [ __ ] for it but i mean you hit any one of these things and it's a hundred billion dollar payday i mean look at youtube youtube's easily a hundred billion dollar

payday on a billion dollar bet billion six oh no that's it that's a 250 to 500 billion dollars applied semantics a lot of people missed this but applied semantics was 100 million dollar bet and that's the entirety of adsense initially android android um is this is this the first commercial application of deep mind because until now you know they've had alpha zero it's been so there was a period of time a lot of people i don't know if uh let me just think about this for a second because alpha zero alpha was really good i want to be careful about this but i do think people could not disclose no but i i do think i do think

it was disclosed that they've used deep mind uh to improve ads quality and improve um uh youtube viewing and as a result of that you get the number of hours per day of the average user on youtube to double or triple ad revenue goes by three x and i think in one quarter google was able to generate something like an incremental 15 billion annualized revenue from deep mines and you know what that deep mind actually did on youtube it sent everybody to the alt-right info wars and ben shapiro congratulations be careful when you send people's minds with artificial intelligence maybe

you just argued to break them up yeah but i i understand stacks that it's being used broadly across the products at google in in in in now now in a much more careful way is my understanding i'm look i'm a i'm i'm a big ally of alphabet i'm a big fan and i love you know they were and i used to work there and i'm very close to people there so i know who used to be on the board and was the major backer of that company deepmind founder's fund founder's fund elon musk too and he begged them to not sell to google because i mean 400 million 400 million exit was a steel

40 or 50 scientists i think yeah absolute steel no elon i mean elon has publicly said that he thinks deep mind is like the greatest threat to well he thinks ai is a great start to humanity and of the people working on ai deep mind is the furthest along and therefore most dangerous he tried to stop he i mean he told me straight up like when he's been very public about this since that he he said i'll give you an unlimited amount of money to not sell to google he's friends with larry page too but he said don't sell i want you to be independent i

want you to keep working on this but he said that when he saw the ai there become aware that it was an ai that that was when he was like wait a second no wait dude deep mind is not the alpha's alpha fold or alpha zero is not self-aware that's it i felt it was becoming self-aware that it knew what it was i don't know if that was just elon you know just sort of no it's not it's not self-aware so i mean i've watched anything yeah i mean the amazing things that deepmind has released prior to this were games right they had this um this chess ai called alpha zero which

rapidly became not just the best chess um it only beat every human in the world it also beat every chess engine because computers became more you know better at chess than humans a long time ago because of their sheer computational power but uh alpha zero plays like a human but with kind of that same computational power and so that created a whole revolution in chess engines and then they also did that with a game called go they created alphago and basically every single game that you can think of uh deepmind's created you know an alpha whatever alpha version that

um destroys both humans and computers but this is the first thing they've publicly announced that that seems like it will be available to others eventually that could have tremendous social impact imagine the government trying to understand this can you imagine them being brought before like senators well these are these are these are the new weapons of mass destruction i mean let's be honest like if if somebody else had had alpha fold and probably somebody does and just hasn't said you know i mean google actually values transparency so that's the only reason why we know

um imagine what they could do as friedrich said it's like you know the the opposite of this is basically to design um a specific protein that basically um you know destroys organs or there are proteins called prions which are the scariest thing known in biology in my opinion a prion is a protein that it actually finds similar proteins and based on its shape it gets those proteins to change and it becomes like a virus and prions actually um are there's an extremely uh sad series of diseases that are related to prions where your body expresses a protein in the

wrong way and then that protein itself gets other proteins to change and creates copies of itself and it spreads um it is a fascinatingly scary um biological phenomenon but you know there are extremely scary things you can do with the designer protein capabilities basically you could make a bio weapon that would be similar to what the aliens and prometheus and aliens were doing the engines even much worse even much worse this is why i think they're going to spend years before so this is why back to that earlier question it'll be years before this sees the light of day because

um they are they're smart enough to know what they've uncovered and i think they did they did the right thing by talking about it because i think there's a lot of really amazing r d but the reality is that google for the next 20 or 30 years will have layers and layers of oversight because you know it's not like you're going to allow a company to enrich uranium in mountain view without oversight and this is the equivalent it's just a we're we're buying time until governments realize that they have to do that they have to do it but let's also remember

the protein data set they trained on is publicly available you know anyone can access this and with the you know i should catch up in machine learning you know capability to deep mind uh infrastructure wise theoretically you know someone could could i i think it's it's an inevitability that in the next 24 months someone else will write this right now i think what deepmind has done is showed that specific um techniques of learning can overcome limitations in compute but to your point david like we're accelerating silicon at a fast enough speed where you know if

like if you can throw 5 10 50 100 500 pet ops at a problem uh you're you know you can run you know some really really old version of tensorflow and probably get to the same answer yeah i actually think they published uh i'm gonna find it while you guys are chatting but they published um what the compute needs were on running this uh i'll find it in a second uh i'll tell you let me make one sort of slightly descending point on the whole wmd thing i mean look obviously the you know who has access this technology needs to be controlled um we do have to make sure it

doesn't get into the hands of bad actors but the reality is there's plenty of existing wmds out there that have been around for a long time that bad actors could get their hands on um they could already make you know extremely dangerous viruses in a lab they could you know take something that's as contagious as smallpox and make it as deadly as ebola or something like that and it's these new technologies that provide a way for us to combat those those wmds because you know technology has a tendency to become democratized um you know um was it uh 75 years

ago the us was the only country that had an atomic weapon now what like close to 10 have you know nuclear atomic weapons and so um you know these these sort of nefarious technologies get democratized anyway and we really need some of these new technologies and new abilities as a way to combat them it's like last week we were talking about the ability now to basically print um you know a vaccine using this mrna technique within two days you know you can imagine you know if if someone tried to use a bio weapon create a new virus we could print a vaccine the next day

um those are the kinds of capabilities we're going to need to fight the spread of wmd i think you're right it's just that you then have a law of large numbers problem meaning you know the previous problem before is you had 180 190 200 state-sponsored actors so if you had a one percent you know rate of people who are just bad you're talking about two states now when you talk about five billion people getting access to code that's basically running an aws or gcp instance someplace and you have a one percent you know bad guy rate all of a sudden that one percent really matters

and i think that's the problem it's just the law of large numbers david applied to very very small rates of immorality but i mean you can already do very scary things with you know recombinant dna taking dna from one organism putting in another and setting that organism out and you know uh theoretically you could have designed a virus that would spread throughout humanity and cause a lot of death right i mean there's a lot of this uh capability people would have found that out because like you can't run these labs and you're not gonna

get you know monkey models or mouse models it's like there's there's a trail of breadcrumbs there that is easier to track wouldn't you agree than just running an instance in a simulation on gcp sending it someplace to then have a protein printer that comes in a fedex envelope too and you have to hire people as we saw in iran with you know their chief scientist being whacked by whoever accidentally whacked him with 60 people like you need to have the brain power to do this once you have the brain power to do it you can track that brain power and we had uh for the last

i think it's like since we even tested nuclear bombs we've had these special planes flying around the globe looking for the signature of nuclear uh detonations or any kind of nuclear fallout and we've been flying those forever uh i think i think i think i think biodefense is going to become probably one of the biggest industries on planet earth starting in the latter half of this century because you're going to get to a point where um digital biology is like a tool just like software was in the 80s where suddenly everyone could access it everyone could use it everyone

could do stuff with it you have this ubiquity of scary [ __ ] happening hackers everywhere hold on freebird didn't we have that as well and those same claims about nuclear power and we've been able to for 100 years with nuclear close to 100 years nuclear and particularly with nuclear in particular there is a material problem you have to source and refine material to do something scary with biology you don't you can do this anywhere you can do it on your desktop at home and you know it's getting easier cheaper faster and you can use software and a printer and you

know a cheap sequencer and do stuff do we believe that china has this freeburg yes china for sure yeah i mean look this is yeah i think today's head of deep mind or behind hundred percent 100 so here's the stats that deepmind put out it took um the equivalent of 100 to 200 gpus run over a few weeks uh to build this model that is i don't i don't care how advanced deepmind is at this point um so you know if that's the model then someone else can replicate that uh you know someone else that's what happened to to alpha zero the d minor chess engine after they proved it now there's a whole bunch of uh chess ais yeah a lot of startups replicating this alpha fold uh technique and then using that to go do drug

discovery and you'll see 50 startups getting funded 12 to 18 months from now based on some novel protein idea um and i think that this we got to get our beach wet on this and the iss everybody go to this is getting ridiculous everybody's good slash all in but but we should create a protein we should create a we should create a protein folding syndicate yeah absolutely here it is everybody go to thesyndicate.com all in if we do this i'm collecting the emails now uh no but i i will i will i will make my first series of bets less on the application and more on the protection

i think biodefense 30 years from now is going to be so important if you want to invest with the best ease can there is there going to be a protein that prevents rudy giuliani from farting i mean what is going on saks let's throw to you as our resident right wing uh joking sacks don't take it so personal we know you didn't vote for trump we know you did a write-in vote for tucker carlson let me ask you have you have you or have you not had dinner with tucker carlson um i call all in uh i i've actually uh yeah i um no i don't think i've had to know with

tucker but into a party with tucker carlson no but let me let me get uh here's what's happening is well i feel my dream of gridlock in washington for the next four years is slipping away um you know the the you know i described this as sort of like it was kind of a dream scenario that you would have um a divided uh congress and the republicans you know they won 50 they won 50 seats in the senate in november and then you know because of this stupid rule in georgia that you have to you can't just win you have to win by having over 50 um the republicans would have had uh 51 but now these there's a runoff for these two open seats

and the republicans were ahead in the polls at the time they were the more i think it was mostly it's based on the candidates being more popular than the democratic candidates but now because of all these antics around the election the democrats of both democratic candidates have pulled ahead and so it's yeah they are now both democratic in the last couple of last week or so um ossop is ahead of purdue by about two points which is a stunner because purdue has already beaten him before he beat him in the november election he's i think a better chance though right

and the the most margin right but warnock is seven points ahead of uh loffler so that one is outside the margin of error he's clearly uh beating her and um it you know and now it looks like purdue's in danger too the republicans just need to win one of those in order for us to have you know divided government of washington which i think tends to produce better results than giving one party all the levers of power um but but this is this is the crazy thing and so i think even from trump's point of view you know i think this is a branding exercise to you know prove that

he didn't lose the problem is yeah how's that going well it's not working and it looks like it's gonna cost republicans the senate which is something that i think he won't come back from so if i was advising the president i would tell him to drop this you know these these legal challenges they fired sydney powell from the legal team which i think was a good decision because of her crazy wild allegations but now rudy's out there doing the same stuff judy giuliani giuliani the answer that i gave you is they didn't bother to interview a single witness

he was adjusting he wasn't waking up the genie he was he was tucking his pants in laying down in the bedroom having a drink with a russian underage age i mean rudy is just i mean fresh off his his guest starring appearance in the borap movies i mean it's like he's uncredited yeah it's like he's reenacting my cousin vinnie or something in these um in these hearings yeah um how many things it's gonna cost republicans the senate yeah i think they're it's so amazing like the democrats basically have now have a stone cold free roll because there is a very good chance that

these guys are going to um win these two senate seats which would just be absolutely incredible absolutely so so republicans are definitely figuring this out rich lowry had a great call he's a editor of national review he's on the right but i think provides very good objective political analysis he's his last column sounded the alarm bells about what was happening in georgia and look if the if the issue in the georgia runoffs is are these antics if it's rudy and sydney powell the republican's gonna lose the seat both seats if the question of the election is whether democrats

should have a free hand to ram through whatever legislation they want then i think the republicans win so the question is what is that election going to be about and the longer that rudy stays on the stage making these crazy wild allegations the worse it gets for republicans when is the georgia runoff election i think it's january 5th or 10th it's one of those two january 5th i think my gosh would anybody hear if they had gray hair and i know we have three gentlemen on the call who have gray hair uh freedberg somehow you're you're you're you might be maybe i've answered this

question just not on his head would any of you dye your hair if you were a 79 87 year old rudy giuliani no my hair is white and getting whiter it's like it is what it is it's a passage of time i would just move on david would you consider t just taking that gray right out of your hair because you have the euro the silver fox as it stands would you ever consider it you just you can see the decision i've made but um look that's not i mean it's yeah i mean that was just like a meltdown i mean a literal meltdown a little literal meltdown and uh it was so like representative of the moment the the congressional republicans

want to use a hook to get rudy off the stage i mean they cannot wait to get him off the stage and uh but if they don't stand up and just tell trump to shut this down i think i think it's coming it's coming so yeah oh wow so the republicans are going to stand up to trump with four weeks left in office wow what a profiling courage freeberg are you dying your hair do you have gray hair and are you actually dying or have you not hit the gray yet just tell us right now it's an emergency pod no it's the truth david are you dying you're here yes or no this is it there's so many ways to have an opinion on whether trump um is allowed to pre-pardon himself and his

kids oh that's exactly where i was going yeah sex well yes our right wing he could definitely pardon his kids i don't know that there's a open legal question whether he can pardon himself can you pre-pardon um what does it mean pre-pardon in this definition you mean i don't in the future i don't know you can only pardon for a committed crime right i mean that's traditionally not part of it right well you can pardon for things that happened in the past um i don't think you can pardon for things that happen in the future and you can find it you can what's a blanket

party no i don't think you have to define it i think you could just do a blanket pardon um the i would advise trump not to do it if i were one of his advisors and the reason is that he can only pardon for federal and the big problem the trump family has right now you know the southern district of new york these mad dog prosecutors who are democrats this is you know i don't approve of it this is this is to me this to me this is the criminalization of political differences i don't i think it'd be great if he could pardon because i do think that

those guys are again they're trying to criminalize political differences but but pardoning doesn't solve the problem with the southern district of new york and biden has already said that he doesn't believe in having any uh having these uh having like a federal investigation of trump and so i don't think i don't think trump has anything to worry about federally i think the problem is god can i just say this it's just so [ __ ] decent and classy like isn't it refreshing it's actually boring but isn't it just wait what are you talking about biden is just so decent who's biden

like i haven't seen that guy has he worked for us he's been great no i mean like he's well he's disappeared no he doesn't disappear he's just not crazy he's bidet biden biden has done a really has done a few really smart things i mean in his acceptance speech he did what churchill advises you to do in victory which is be magnanimous he's made the right sort of sounds towards reconciliation i think saying that he didn't believe in going after trump criminally i mean look i i don't think that would have been a good political move anyway because it would have

created a backlash but it was a smart uh thing to say and so he and then i think the other smart thing he's done is uh which is very biden anyway which is he's got an establishment all the way for his cabinet he has not put he hasn't named any totally crazy progressives to his cabinet yet that the republicans could latch on to for the georgia runoffs and so biden's doing a very good job right now of appearing non-threatening and doing nothing to nothing to blow up his honeymoon he and his advisors have run a perfect perfect flawless flaw it's been flawless i mean david

you just nailed it like all of all the things he could have done to potentially put the senate at risk or to potentially give republicans sort of something to hang their hats on he has given zero space right like he has not created a single opening so you you would have thought that coming into this election cycle the way that trump tried to paint biden was like this you know uh gaffaholic and instead he has just been picture pitch perfect roxanna well i think i think i think he's a he's a gaff machine when he speaks spontaneously which he has not

done i mean every time i've seen him speak since the election has been reading off a teleprompter but i think that his campaign has run a really good they have run a good strategy um and now look it helps that the press doesn't really challenge you uh it's like it's like weekend at bernie's except it's like presidency at bernie's you know it's like four years they hit him in a basement he only reaches out to teleprompter hold him up put him in the on the stage yeah the press let him get away with it i mean no other candidate could have gotten away with a basement strategy but the press

was so determined to go after trump that they really gave him a free pass on what biden believed and what he was going to do but look biden has run by biden has run a very good campaign and a very good transition and really i think the biggest mistake he made during the campaign was not declaring definitively that he would not try to pack the supreme court that was his big mistake and what happened the voters split the ticket to give the senate to the republicans so that biden wouldn't be able to pack the court and so he wouldn't be able to do it anyway and i think maybe

his administration has learned from that mistake which is don't do anything or say anything that's going to give republicans something to latch on to to say that biden's really a radical we got to stop him and anyway so to now george is in play and biden could win the senate that's a perfect insight sax because what you haven't seen as well is you haven't seen kamala harris out there all that much because that's something republicans could glom on to and you haven't seen aoc bernie sanders or elizabeth warren they are persona no grata they are not involved in this wow they are

m.i.a they are m.i.a and they the democrats won't bring them up and you have bernie sanders like hey wasn't he supposed to be oh george of like elon omar wants to cancel rent and mortgages i mean they're throwing that classic and they're throwing everything out there just to see if anything sticks right now yeah but biden biden has really given uh bernie sanders and that wing of the party the hi-hat in the in these uh cabinet choices in fact he just named uh a woman to to be the head of the uh of omb the uh the you know the budget director who has a huge

twitter feud with bernie sanders and the bernie the bernie folks are up in arms about it i don't think she's gonna get through um but but yeah i mean biden has really um stiff-armed a lot of the progressives associated with the hysterical left i mean it's a why would you want to associate i just want i also think it's historical i think it's an appeal to the rights of the right i mean he is appealing to the right to some extent right i mean like by by not putting those people in place i think he's never understood never writer he's never going to be able to appeal to the trump base

but what he's going to be able to do is prevent the republicans from from sort of labeling him as a radical and therefore and therefore you know went over those independents that he needs and by the way back to back to trump for one second i apologize because i wanted to ask you david i mean the other thing that could tip georgia is this whole craziness where trump is like i'm gonna veto the the defense bill unless we repealed section 230 and if you're you know a military person in georgia you're like wait a second um you're going to leave my brothers and sisters in arms basically

lollygagging without any financial support because you don't like twitter's tweet policy it's gonna seem kind of crazy yeah it was it was one of these like classic trump moves where you feel like i think he does have a good point with respect to the social media companies i do think they've been engaging in censorship they've overstepped their bounds they are they they do deserve some sort of comeuppance or control i personally don't think that repealing two to eight uh two third was it 280 um is the section 230 is the way to go um it um for a bunch of reasons that we could

get into if you want but um but but yeah it was one of these like reflexive trump trump you know tweets and you heard republicans in in the senate were very very quick to shoot it down um and you know there was an article in politico where um republicans were quoted well anonymously saying they're pretty sick of this [ __ ] that was the quote and so yeah i mean i think that republicans on capitol hill are kind of ready for for for those types of antics to be over okay should he uh or will he pardon himself and the kids like i mean i guess that's what

it comes down to and then well i think we should i think i don't i don't i don't think so and i don't think it'll matter because i think biden will leave him alone and it will not help his biggest risk uh and this is by the way why they tried to get jay clayton to resign from the sec and move over to the southern district of new york because they thought maybe he could run some kind of interference but i mean i think the state ags will want a pound of flesh here and if i were if i yeah just if i were advising trump and and advising him on how to maximize his legacy

it would be you know pardon pardon people in the administration been treated unfairly there's no need to pardon yourself um i don't i don't think he has federal exposure and i would and i would tell him that you know if republicans lose these georgia senate seats that he will be blamed for among the base for a long time and that i think will be hard for him to get past uh in four years and so it's very important i think for him to make sure that that at least purdue wins his election yeah what do you guys can do can i ask another question what do you think is gonna happen

with um so trump is trying to make his case um but no one's listening twitter keeps putting up his fraudulent you know uh um this is just disputed claims thing and he's been pushing newsmax and oann do you think those become viable and real kind of media businesses now and are they actually gonna steal an audience away from fox news 100 percent it's already happened it's just the increasing fragmentation of media right cable networks don't pick them up do they uh the cable companies i've seen i've seen newsmax newsmax has a cable channel my theory is this

entire twisted like crazy right alt-right mania just fades into oblivion and the party reinvents itself no no because they can't win they can't win david they can't win with this brand they did they did win they did and they will not in the future because they just lost their the republicans won like 10 or 12 uh seats in the house they've almost got the majority back in the house they almost certainly will win back the house and retire nancy pelosi in two years during the midterm election i'll put money on that right now they held the senate local elections they held the senate

presidency again with this strategy you think they can win with the demographic shift with trump in 2024 really yeah uh because people want to go back to that level of crazy people people don't want the they don't want the crazy but this idea that the issue set that trump ran on and one on is dead i don't i don't agree with that yeah those issues are still there you'll have a better branded face and a standard bearer for those issues and if you say it in a less crazy way and you're generally less crazy i think that it will resonate with a lot more people than have already proven that

it resonates with it already resonates with 70 million could it resonate with 75 and could they overtake the white house it's not inconceivable so i think i think we can't all of a sudden say this is signed sealed and delivered it's a fata complete and all of a sudden it's just democrats the rest of the way dave is right the down ballot results for the democrats were not good and it's a sign that moderate centrism is the only winning strategy if you really have a strategy where it's like i really want to win and not just me but my party and generations of people after me

you have to run a centrist campaign which is why they're retiring the aoc elizabeth warren bernie bro contingent right so well yeah there's there's a house member that group of crazy right there was a there was a democratic house member i think elizabeth spamberger um who almost lost her uh seat i think in like a virginia like kind of a swing virginia district there was a big uh call of the democratic house caucus and she was just laying into pelosi and the leadership there because she was basically saying don't ever mention defund the police again you know

if you want me to win my my swing district next time do not mention this ever again and she was just this was all in the washington post you know they um the the call was leaked by about a dozen different press out outlets which tells you there was a lot of unhappiness among the house members who almost lost their seat because of these like radical ideas the other the other thing is and you know unless all of a sudden the the folks that are in their 20s and 30s are radically different than many many generations before them the reality is that they will as they get older and wealthier

generally speaking get more conservative and we are about to go through over the next 20 years 30 trillion dollars of wealth transfer and so you know i mean you can wear good segue but buttons on buttons on flannel but at the end of the day when you're you know mom and dad pass pass away and all of a sudden you know you have four five six seven eight million bucks and you have to think about your children and your children's children i tend to think people generally do very predictably get more conservative and so again another reason why you can't count on um a stayed interpretation of progressivism it there will be progressivism i think it just will

be a different form of policy and it'll just be more moderate and centrist and it'll be normal uh which is a perfect segue to the new york times story that came out on the friday after thanksgiving november 27th the rich kids who want to tear down capitalism socialist minded millennials millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money lately sam jacobs and i'll read just a little bit of it has been having a lot of conversations with his family's lawyers he's trying to gain access to his trust of 30 his 30 million trust fund

at 25 he's hit the age where many heirs can blow their money on her brain businesses or stable of sports cards he doesn't want to do that but by wealth management standards his plans are just as bad he wants to give it all away i want to build a world where someone like me a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars is possible a socialist college mr jacob sees his family's extreme plutocratic wealth as both a moral and economic failure his parents must be very proud first of all sam jacobs sounds like an idiot and he shouldn't have

any money so hopefully he gets his wish why did his parents give him 30 million dollars this trust fund should be like given to somebody who deserves it like yeah but but what what's saying what sam jacobs wants doesn't mean that sam jacobs gets to decide for everybody else and just because that he wants to live in a communist country he can go and find one and the reality is like you know we just talked about alpha fold well guess what you know there's four of us on this on this podcast today that over the next 20 or 30 years are more than likely going to invest hundreds of

millions of dollars in protein design and uh i don't do that with any um sense of um shame um and i'm glad that stuart butterfield made me you know a lot of money because it's going to go go back into the world in positive ways and you know maybe if my children are taught properly they'll be able to take a small piece of that and they'll decide that you know there's uh something else that's important to them but the reality is that everybody should be allowed to make their own decisions and i don't want somebody like him especially a 25 year old [ __ ] telling me or my

kids who even though they're you know under the age of 15 are probably smarter than him what to do david when you read this article uh if you did read it uh what were your thoughts um especially in regards to parenting and thinking about our own kids because what i started thinking about i was like oh my god what if one of my daughters wants to take her trust fund and just throw it into the wind i really don't want to comment wait hold on i just want to say one thing the part that's completely reasonable and that i respect is this this 25 year old seems to have come to a decision

what i find completely unreasonable and you know just completely lathered with insecurity is his need to then project it and say it has to be true for everybody else as well and and the the grand arcing statements of how it should never be just completely betrays you know what we've learned in how society functionally works like if you want democracy the only sort of economic philosophy that's been partnered with with democracy to work well as capitalism and so if you want to change one you're gonna have to change the other and just the fact that you know with all of his education the hundreds of

millions of dollars you know didn't get a course in civics to understand that is kind of sad i just before you go david i have to read one comment because it's so deranged that it almost seems like it was part of a script to like some billions or secession um heirs whose wealth have come from specific sources sometimes use that history to guide their giving there's that's in new york time saying that pierce still a hunt a 32 year old socialist anarchist marxist communist or all of the above has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather's outlet mall

empire when i and this is uh mr uh mr i'm sorry mx i've never seen that before abdullah hunt how do you pronounce max hunt how do you pronounce mx mx de la hunt takes non-gendered pronouns has anybody seen mx i've never seen that that was the first time yeah that's the first for me so i guess it's so you can say so you don't have to say mr or miss or missus it's like latinx where you just can group a bunch of people into one thing got it right um this is what uh mx de la hunt says i'm just trying to figure out how it's pronounced maxis hunt de la hunt um taking a shot

jason you're you're not showing respect for his pronouns i don't want to get canceled it just is kind of hard to pronounce mx i don't mean to laugh but i need i need somebody to tell me how to pronounce mx.com um but this is the quote that is so insane when i think about outlet malls and i think this is what we all think about when we think about outlook walls when i think about outlaw malls i think about intersectional oppression what's the first thing that comes to mind freeburg when you think of an outlet mall certainly it's intersectional compression or a subway

i just can i just point out like the um the new york times has become a little bit sensationalist like you know if you were to ask statistically what percentage of people that are inheriting wealth are going to be stupid like this the answer would probably be pretty low but they find the one or two characters like this and they build the story around them and then people extrapolate that as if that is the persona of the entire population of people that are going to inherit some degree of wealth and that becomes the story and i'm just so sick of it like i don't read the new york

times anymore and look i love the new york times i would read it every single day i still have it on my phone i still pay for my subscription but i'm so sick of the narrative being written by the author's objective and then they go and find one or two facts that meet that narrative and rather than speaking about it statistically and saying we surveyed a hundred people that were wealthy this is how many and if it was sixty percent of them saying i'm gonna go give away all my wealth and do crazy [ __ ] great like that's the story but again but picking picking and picking

an individual and building the narrative around that individual as if that is the game but david and that's the point like what they do is they don't even talk about people who want to give their money away what they do is they create these caricatures around this like judgment judgment it's it's all about this like judgment it's like it's virtu it's like i am holier than everybody else because of these decisions that i made and i just find it so offensive now here's can i just tell you i had my physical last week and i have a doctor in l.a who's superb and he's he's in many

ways sort of a philosopher king to me he's been incredibly important in my life and you know dr agus i talked to his name his name is christian renna uh at lifespan medicine but uh anyways um and here's what you're and i talked to chris about raising kids and chris has seen you know thousands of people over the course of his you know journey as a primary care physician and he's seen the kids of these folks and etc you know he he boiled it down to me it's like um you know your job as a parent is to make sure that your children have incredible tools married with

incredible habits and so some of these things are very simple like food and you know how to eat and self-care and exercise but some of these things are really important which is a world view empathy and he uses this word which is called awareness and awareness is this idea that you understand the world around you and that's an incredibly difficult thing for parents to be able to teach their kids but it seems like if you could give them that that's independent of anything other than time and care right it doesn't matter whether you're rich or you're poor it doesn't really

matter whether you're black or white you can really teach the concept of awareness and empathy and then the other thing that he taught me was you know there's a really big difference between folks like you me meaning guys like me who grew up poor and who are focused on the generation of money right meaning making money and some of you make it some of you don't but you're living in this existential threat that you feel is hanging over you and so you go out and you make it and a lot of it is driven by this insecurity you've had since you were young but make no mistake your children's

lives is harder than yours and it's about the utilization of money and whether they want to give it away or whether they want to use it you have a responsibility to teach them whether you're giving them a dollar a million dollars or a billion dollars and this is where i think somewhere along the way these kids as parents you know may or may not have done the best maybe they did the best they could but somewhere along the way these gaps are are obvious at least in the telling of the article and this is where i go back to if you're really going to talk to about something like this

which actually is quite important because again we're going to go through the the most enormous wealth transfer in the history of the world in the next 20 years 30 trillion dollars that could so talk about that if if enough people took their inheritance and decided to eradicate student debt it would be three percent of what's going to be inherited over the next 20 years think about it so obviously you can do some incredible things but it's not framed in the right way it doesn't promote the right kind of discussion and all it is is salacious reporting

that makes these kids look like caricatures and by the way remember that money today is invested somewhere so to pull that three percent out would have a kind of triple kind of rippling and kind of um probably deleterious effect on on amazon no no forget about that factories family but this is this is my point also is i think that there's a responsibility to these stewards of capital right they they may be you can call them wealthy all you want but they really are the people that pull the strings and where money's moving um and there's uh i think you know to your point kind of a degree of

responsibility that inevitably has to kind of sit with this uh this group um here's the problem with it is if they just want to give their money away to a charity that they thought was worthy and that and they were willing to live like you know monks or something and not need money that'd be fine you know we could respect that but the reason why they're in such a hurry to get rid of this wealth is because they feel like money itself is ill-gotten that wealth itself is is by definition ill-gotten it must have come from at the expense of somebody else right you only could have gotten

that wealth by ripping people off and that is the thing that that's the idea that's really pernicious about this sort of like socialism movement is they don't really understand that the way capitalism works you only get rich by selling something to somebody that they want that makes their life better right i mean all of us are engaged in the creation of new technologies and new products and that makes the world better and people are willing to pay for that and that's what creates value and and that's what creates wealth and it's really just kind of sad that people

you know are in this it goes beyond this article on these trust fund kids but this whole uh condemnation of capitalism and this attack on any you know billionaires or whatever um the problem with it is it doesn't recognize the way that value is created for everybody can i um can i give you a quote um from walter williams who uh just passed away who's a very famous uh economist prior to capitalism the way people amassed great wealth was by looting plundering and enslaving their fellow man capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow men

and that's really true and some are along the way folks folks have lost the script and have all of a sudden gone back to pre-historic capitalist times and um i think that we don't have enough good examples of constructive capitalism that prove that this is not a bad word yeah exactly yeah i love the walter williams quote um just to give another example jeff bezos just gave 10 billion dollars to uh climate change teddy what's the kid's name teddy schaefer or something like that the journalist has been writing him on twitter i think he works for vox or something like

they have basically been attacking bezos since he made the announcement that he hasn't done enough and it's like 10 billion dollars is the largest contribution ever made to a single cause i mean obviously right bill gates and how did he do foundation right and how did he do that because he created amazon which has created enormous value for all of us imagine if one of these kids in the article instead of just giving their money away by the way it looks like there's a bunch of organizations that have sprung up to scam these kids out of their trust fund it's sort of you

know a fool in their money in their money are soon parted there's a whole bunch of of scam artists who are trying to scam these kids but uh yeah i mean they're definitely getting scammed but imagine if instead of just getting scammed out of their money they were to use it to create a business that created a new product or technology that served people then maybe they could turn that 30 million into 10 billion like bezos did and and if they lost it they would have done it in the pursuit of something really grand and so nobody would actually instead of virtue signaling

instead of virtue signaling on the new york times yeah like these guys were so glad to be in the new york times to dunk on capitalists and dunk and literally dunk on their own parents think about that you hate your parents so much you have to go to the new york times and tell them how much you hate them i mean i don't know how this changes well by the way speaking of virtue signaling in the new york times can we talk about the new york times writing that hit piece on coinbase all right i mean if you want to go there i mean this is the first rail of the podcast but we've been talking

about brian armstrong just to set the table here brian armstrong wrote a memo he said oh no politics by the way by the way jkl i just posted an image for nick to put up here just to to don't don't tell me it's a code 13 that says this is not a code 13. it's to reinforce your point about the you know the virtue of capitalism you know this kind of dates back to these are three three images three charts from the year 1500 to today and energy use has grown 115 times well so this is basically uh a measure of population consumption and production right and so the the capitalist

incentive has driven um the ability while population has grown 14x over the last 500 years it's driven um a nearly 10x increment in what is available for humans to consume uh per capita during that period of time i mean think about that that was driven entirely by industry and so industry has enabled and production has increased by 240x so we have a surplus of goods on planet earth and a surplus of access to goods because of the capitalist incentive over the last 500 years and whose right is it to say that that was wrong and all of the people that are employed by

it and live within that mechanism and who are no longer living in poverty who are no longer slaves all of a sudden 50 000 people convert you signal because they're sitting in their warm homes in america telling everybody else to [ __ ] off i mean i find it kind of a joke i mean i i would like you to go and live you know where i was supposed to live before i emigrated right sri lanka no heater no roof no food etc they should go to north korea you go come to sri lanka i can show you you go to an outhouse okay you sit there you squat to go to the bathroom okay

um there's no [ __ ] three-ply you know uh bamboo you know press-free toilet paper to deal with um you know you you literally what you know you clean yourself with your hand you brush your teeth with coal i remember we used to brush our teeth with [ __ ] coal okay we have a well for water and so you you have all these people in these situations where all we wanted was to just give a chance to run the race and the people that were born with a silver spoon in their mouth who had the chance to run the race turns around and tells guys like me no you can't and it [ __ ] infuriates

me yeah i want to blow up the racetrack by the way yeah i want to just get rid of the internet i mean [ __ ] about you it's a serious [ __ ] you to these to these like they were profited and they benefited from democracy and capitalism and now they want to revert back to a system where everybody who's in that space they're trying to get into this system they don't understand what feudalism is because there are so many layers removed through their [ __ ] filtered lenses and you know country clubs and [ __ ] vacations and all this crap that they have

no idea what it's like and i'm telling you i am first generation of having escaped that [ __ ] and i don't want anything to do with it but the point is capitalism has allowed not just the us but many other countries to change their course in life um stephen pickner's for all of the controversy he creates his books on um you know what humans have really achieved during this great kind of era of capitalism and industrialism and how we've changed our course on planet earth uh improved human health improved longevity improved calorie access to calories improved access to shelter to medicine

um it's all because of a an incentive a market-based incentive system and it is very very powerful it is the most powerful force we know as a species and it's allowed this incredible acceleration exponential acceleration of possibility for our species also from the article a great quote elizabeth baldwin a 34 year old democratic socialist from cambridge massachusetts she plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy an apartment and raise a family enjoying the sort of pleasant middle-class existence denied to many people of color in the united states

what is that i mean that's just i don't know i just i i don't think let's just move on let's talk about brian it's so dumb they they see they see the world in a zero some way where you know anything they have means that somebody else must it must have been taken away from somebody else they don't really understand the way that value is created by an exchange and by people creating new things um and you know and and that's what technology is all about you know it's creating news i mean there was a time when everybody didn't have access to clean

water now we take that for granted there's a time when everybody have access to affordable food and electricity and by the way look at how we started all of this is driven by capitalism and look at how we started the conversation today alpha fold i think is the realization of one of the greatest capitalist enterprises in history if not the greatest you know alphabet and they're still getting started and the output of that is going to be an incredible new tool for drug discovery that is going to extend human lifespan in an incredible way there was a window of time where folks who are

really really good at bitching and complaining had a window of opportunity to [ __ ] and complain and what happened was they were not able to seize power and then just in the last few months literally i think we are nailing that coffin shut because as you said david you're gonna have to all of a sudden like look at companies like google and look at things like affifold and reject them and i don't know how people do because everyone will need something that that company will create now and that alpha fold will be responsible for we are all going to need a vaccine these are all

coming from for-profit companies that thrived on top of r d you know all of it was funded by past drug profits from other things and so you know we're going to have to really look at ourselves in the mirror and say did we not want that did we want to just die on the street to prove a point and i don't think anybody actually wants that i mean what is your what is the ultimate criticism of amazon they made you know iphone chargers five dollars well the point is 40 you can't have your cake and eat it too you can't actually you know complain about amazon on the one hand complain

about no action on climate change on the other complain about this complain about that complain about the other thing then you're just a [ __ ] whiner and nobody wants a whiner around because they're not additive they're not useful you don't learn anything from a whiner all right so looking at the uh new york times uh versus coinbase the foul new york times fake news sorry i'm just we'll talk about talk about whining this is more virtue signaling uh whining by the new york times and actually the look this was clearly a hit piece because they don't like brian armstrong's decision to make coin base in a political workplace if any

workplace has chosen to be political it's the new york times there's a lot of examples of that the fact that they ran barry weiss out of there they ran mario weiss out of the newsroom they ran james bennett out of there for publishing a an op-ed by tom cotton remember that he got kicked out he got forced to resign because he published one op-ed by a republican senator okay this is the most close-minded group the most close-minded political workplace and here they are lecturing a silicon valley company that in their view isn't tolerant enough i mean it's ridiculous but the but the and it was obvious that it was a hit piece the

stories the the examples in the article were years old um you know the uh they weren't even reported to hr violation as violations at the time so there's you know it's it's people cooking up things that weren't reported as problems at the time but the but the really interesting thing about the story i think is that is the way coinbase reacted to it by preemptively announcing that it was coming which really made the new york times reporters really irate you know they called it extremely enough reporters were upset and they threatened that they would no longer the journalist said if you guys are going to front run our stories

we are not going to call you when we have a story and i responded to that and i was like are you serious like you're literally going to lose what little integrity you have left crazy about fact checking because there's an amazing somebody wrote a pre-emptive blog post about it i'll say this about i'll say this about uh brian armstrong i have a lot of respect for him for making a stand i think every ceo has that right and uh i'm glad that at the end of the day the employees at coinbase were given a humane way of making a decision to be on the same page with him

or not i will also say that i thought that essay was not goal written and that uh given the chance i could have rewritten that for him in a much better way i've maintained this the whole time um but i i think he's in the right here wrap it up tell us what you think well okay that's that's that's interesting that your mother's um it's interesting to hear your support for brian so we've talked about this has become a recurring topic on the pod um but anyway i think you know the important thing is the way that i think the tech community fought

back against this hit piece and it was the like you said jason the front running of the story somebody's uh a a wag on twitter had a had a great comment saying you know um he basically said you know i try to walk out you i agree with the new york times on this i try to walk up to somebody and kick him in the nuts and they cover their groin you know how dare they you know uh how unprofessional of them it was a slow motion kick to the nuts yeah exactly and so coming sunday it's right but it was day but on sunday we're kicking you on the nuts so yeah the new york times

the coin base just covered its groin so the new york times can cover kick him in the nuts and um and of course the reporters all went hysterical about that but it you know but but but it was a really brilliant pr tactic by coinbase because what it did is it almost like released a spike protein you know by by sort of a pre-announcing new york times story it created this spike protein that trained the immune system of silicon valley to be ready for this pathogenic new york times story and the the story just really fell flat it didn't go anywhere

yeah it was um and they did the same thing with the away ceo she was too hard on people in slack all of these stories to go full circle involve some leak from a slack room so if you're a ceo or you're managing anybody don't have any difficult or legal issues discussed on slack just go for a walk with somebody talk to them face to face because you're going to get destroyed all right listen everybody this has been another amazing episode we had 10 more stories we wanted to get to that we weren't able to get to uh but while we were doing this i asked my crack team

sorry at the syndicate whoa what was that to set up the syndicate.com slash all in so i'm not saying we're doing a syndicate yes we are we're going to figure out how to do something we're going to do something to let the people who listen invest alongside us we're going to figure it out in 2021 at some point but you have to write a review on itunes no you just got to sign up just got to sign up at the syndicate.com all in if we do a folding protein company or a unicorn in the isa space maybe everybody who listens to the all-in

podcast gets to wet their beak for the rain when david speak what you're the beak let your feet the t-shirt guy that listens to us we love you uh there's a code there's a word but wet your beak or what the beak we have to figure out which one's better i think we have a new i think we have a new tagline for the pod what you're being wet you're right and code 13. these are great merch opportunities for anybody who wants to go do merch you can go do merch on your own we don't care we're not in the merch business put it up on your own website love you guys love you besties uh so

for bestie rainman the dictator paulie hoppetea and the queen of quinoa himself metro mile founder spacker piper laying pipe and spacks everywhere i'm jason calaganis for the besties we'll see you next time which could be in a week or a month who knows on the all in podcast love you besties