E23: Radical DAs, breaking down FB/Google vs. Australia, sustained fear post-vaccine & fan questions

jk are you going to do your trump impression were you going to do your your okay yeah everybody i'm getting my twitter arrangement syndrome right before we start the podcast i want to warm him up this doesn't warm him up it gets them deranged get your show notes up [ __ ] let your winners ride rain man david sacks it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with them hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another all in podcast with me today of course the dictator chamath polly hoppetea the queen of kin wah david friedberg and of course yeah definitely the rain man is here david sacks he's an excellent driver in the driveway yeah

okay boys uh i guess we made it to episode 22. your intro becomes one second longer for every episode we do it's just people love it and it's so laborious you know they don't they think it's so stupid i am you have to understand persuasion what i'm doing is i do the same intro and it warms up okay see we're still we're still talking about the intro okay let's just see everybody's obsessed about it you prove my point all right guys are we gonna dress elephant in the room the elephant in the room or do we just move on to topics i will say elephant in the room after the last show

um i fought very hard with the three of you to not post that episode you wanted to can't you want to spike the episode i wanted to spike the episode and i'll tell you why um i thought it was not good content i don't think vlad said anything new or remarkable or interesting i don't think we had good analysis and i think the whole thing kind of felt flat and felt like a pr stunt and i felt that truly and honestly and i you know i made the case to you guys that we should cancel um obviously i lost uh and i think going forward we should have a veto right but you know we can

talk about that offline did you quit the show or did you threaten to quit the threatened the show i'm gonna after this i'm gonna propose to you my rules my ground rules for for going forward one of which i think should be no more pr [ __ ] from jason's portfolio but um you know besides that i think i think i hear a bestie guestie is that com.com at the door and i i don't think that we're journalists by the way i don't i don't think that the journalism thing works for us i think we're like analysts and commentators and you know we have opinions and so to bring someone on and try and interview them with a four-on-one format it just feels weird

it doesn't seem to work it doesn't create an opportunity for discourse and frankly you know when you try and do journalism in this context you either appear like you're softballing or you appear like you're doing gotcha journalism and i think both are bad and so i think it works really well when the four of us just kind of chat and analyze and shoot the [ __ ] and have opinions and talk and debate um and so my vote is to kind of avoid doing bestie guesties unless you know it's something pretty amazing and critical and we can all kind of build a dialogue with that person around a topic but um yeah so that's kind of my where i'm sitting and

how i feel about it but we've had a lot of debates obviously since uh since the last episode about it can can i can i build on what you're saying um you know this is like kind of like that really uh famous teddy roosevelt quote about sort of like the man in the arena with the dust on his face right um i feel like all four of us are in the grind doing things and i think what makes the podcast good is it's almost like there's like you know in a basketball game of four quarters there's a time out and you come off the floor and you can actually just take a second to observe what

you're seeing and then the ref blows the whistle and you go back into the game and i think for me what makes this thing so fun is i feel like every friday for these two hours you know it's basically the ref calls a timeout or the coach calls a timeout and we can just kind of take a breath and just observe all right what's happened before we get back in the arena and so you know just to your point um i don't think we're journalists and i don't think we should try to be because i don't think that's the point of what this is it should be for friends talking about things

that are important and then to the extent that it's important and interesting for other people they'll listen or not listen and i think these last few weeks we got caught up a little too much in you know ratings where is it ranking how can we go higher and it's that the gamification of people's reactions that i think caused us you know to do that um whereas the episode before i actually kind of liked because draymond is legitimately one of our really good friends you know he's a bestie we see him we see him many many times obviously less during

basketball season but a ton when he's outside we play poker together we all hang out together so it's that to me i think is sort of inbounds um last week and then also you know last week i was i think we were all supposed to be on point i'll just tell you personally for me i had an extremely crushing two weeks of work i was extremely tired i ended up literally unplugging and not doing anything for three days straight and sleeping um and so i didn't even do my best even just to be either supportive or you know uh argumentative with vlad so i don't think i got anything out of it myself okay coming around the horn sacks

do you how do you feel that episode stands on its own obviously it's very polarizing we got barbecued in the comments we got barbecued on reddit we got barbecued on social media but then there were a large number of people who said they really liked it uh my mom um david pr my portfolio manager right i mean people who liked it excellent right there's 12 people in the watch fun give us your candid assessment because you weren't as hard as these other two on it yeah i wasn't as hard as these other two and i do feel like that if they felt they that we were

soft on vlad then they should have brought it harder and they should have gone after vlad and challenged him more that being said i completely understand and agree with what freeberg is saying that look we're not journalists we're not playing a game of gotcha it's not our job to go after vlad i think a lot of the you know the comments on twitter that's what they wanted us to do but that's not who we are you know um it's difficult for business to sex i mean if you're attacking vlad and then the next day we have to go into supporting founder mode it's kind of a bad look

isn't it yeah i mean it's not what we do right i mean we we are like your mouth was saying we are in the arena we're doing things we're not critics sitting on the sidelines pointing out you know what the doers of deeds did wrong you know and so it's not our job to you know run an inquisition on on vlad you know and so we're not really equipped to do that i think i think freeburg is right that it doesn't really make sense to have guests on the show if the job is to you know to get to the bottom of something as investigators you know we're not we're not investigators and

it was you know a big story uh just to sort of put a cap in it from my perspective you know i'm always supportive of my guys i try to be supportive of whoever i invest in and i try to give them the benefit of doubt and this is a situation where you know people are upset there were mistakes that were made and so i think anything other than demolishing vlad is considered by some constituency as a failure right and so what are we supposed to do here i can't be trashing my own company that i'm an investor and a supporter of and founders who i

believe in it just it would well i think there was a moment there was a moment in the pod jason where i think actually uh so on the whole i thought vlad did it did a good job in accomplishing his objective on our pod which was the same objective he had in front of congress which was basically to run out the clock without saying very much you know and uh you know he actually whoever prepped him for for congress did a pretty good job because he testified for five hours and said nothing quotable you know which which is pretty much kind of the goal during that situation it's kind of

the goal for your head down yeah exactly so but there was a moment in the pod last week where i think vlad got himself in a little bit of trouble freeburg did ask actually a pretty tough question about the guy in the street who who had lost all of his life savings how would vlad respond to that he made this claim well i saved that person money because i shut down trading at the high and then we pointed out no i mean it was a high because you shut down trading you have the causation backwards and then you you ran and said whoa whoa whoa whoa you know well my guy was on the floor i

got to pick him up what are you talking about i called the timeout i got in there but let's yeah exactly yeah all right let's move on let's see do we talk about the insanely high profile guest that was planned for march 5th that just canceled on us no no we should we should talk to you do we put it on the tab because i you know this this the other thing about protocol i'll just say freeburg is if we have a guest on you cannot just spike the guests if they took the time to be on that was my unless you tell them before they come on i may say we might spike it if it doesn't if we don't

like it yeah do they get that right none of us do this for a profession none of us are getting paid we don't have any advertisers like i completely agree we're not here to get a tr machine for people i mean vlad had his friggin pr woman sitting on the zoom call while we were doing it last week you know like i just don't think that's a little inside baseball that got interesting i think explain what happened when well no we don't have to go there jason i just think i just think what freebrook says is right like we we do this we don't make any money from it we do it because we

like to talk we i think we all learn from it i think other folks enjoy it they learn from it but i do think that freeberg's right we're not going to be used as a shill i think we're learning i think we're learning what the ground rules should be just like any other business vlad's made mistakes he's going to change we've made some mistakes and we're iterating and i think one positive iteration that freeberg has proposed is if any one of us don't like an episode because we think it's basically moving away from our values we should be able to spike it and i i support that

i support it generally but i don't like the idea of inviting a guest on and then it doesn't go well and then telling you know from our perspective it makes us look bad and then we tell the guests well you came out that's good and we came out down there we're killing you no no i don't think that's the point i think what freeberg says is like look this is not for to be a marketing thing and so we're going to ask things that are exposed that are about having a real conversation where there's real honesty and if you're going to just be there and bat around as sac said to run the clock out

then we're just gonna spike fair enough fair enough i think if that's communicated ahead i'm okay by the way come with your a game and this is a great segue to talk about what actually we were a person that was gonna come on and realize that they probably were going to get so pilloried um that they basically spiked themselves uh is yeah they opted out jessa boudin the the district attorney of san francisco tell tell the guys what happened sex well no we we invited him to come on the podcast no no we didn't invite him to come he an intermediary said

that she could get him on the pod would we like to have him on the pod we said we discussed that we said sure have chested on and then go from there sex we didn't like seek him out he was well okay so he he great so he but he agreed to be on the show and then you our scheduler got an email out of the blue like a day or two ago saying sorry he's not coming on the show no explanation right isn't that what happened yeah that's basically it i mean so look here's what i would say is um chaser mr district attorney you don't have to come on the show but i will challenge you to a debate

anytime anyplace any format on your policies in san francisco so if you have if you have the huevos to engage in a debate i am ready and i thought chaser was a guy who had a little bit of courage i mean there was that night when people were discussing the situation in san francisco and on clubhouse and he jumped into the room so i thought this was a guy who had some cajones so chase if you have if you have the hotspot if you have the cajones if you have the huevos let's debate let's talk about your policies and by the way he's an expert this is what he does

you know he's an expert isn't he a defense attorney sacks you're going to have a he was a public defender he should he should mop the floor with me i'm just some shallow tech bro yeah tech bro who doesn't know anything who he can easily demonize so i would say come on let's go let's do a debate i'll agree to whatever format you want but we need to talk about what's happening in san francisco because crime is out of control and it's his fault trigger the young spielberg rain man song right about we should talk about what's happening in san francisco okay so since since the last pod

there there has been another victim um sharia muslim who was a young young man from from originally from kenya who he came to the united states for college just like hannah abe uh who was killed on new year's eve uh he went to dartmouth all of his advisers said he was brilliant he had a young wife and a three-year-old baby he was in san francisco for 10 days goes out running and gets hit gets gets killed by another drugged out hit and run driver who had been uh named um uh let's say i think it was uh jerry jerry oli adams or something like that um i don't have the the guy's name but he was arrested four or five times

in the last year and he was released every single time by boudin's office it's it's just like the new year's eve story where you had this repeat offender troy mcallister hit you know he was he had stolen a car he was fleeing another crime he had committed he was on drugs and he killed hannah abbey and elizabeth platt and this was this was another case where he was caught five times over the past year and every single time he was not charged by buda and he was just let go and so we have this case we have a district attorney who doesn't want to prosecute people his agenda is

decarceration it's like a fire chief who doesn't believe in using water yeah and he is part of the burn it all down party yeah let me challenge you with the argument he might make which i think i've heard him make a few times um which is really um a position on the criminal justice system not necessarily on local prosecution but really what he says is once um you know once someone ends up in the criminal justice system in the united states it causes this cycle of recurrence and the cycle of repeat that is very difficult to get out it basically minimizes the opportunity for reform

for an individual for a criminal to to reform themselves and to have a shot at being a successful member of society again in the future and the objective is find other ways to to kind of accelerate reform and not use incarceration as the only tool in the toolbox what is um you know what is the the argument back to him when he makes that point because i've heard him make that point a number of times and how do you kind of move past that uh that point with him yeah so so the the i'm not saying that incarceration is the only answer but boudin's only answer is decarceration

he doesn't want to prosecute anyone he doesn't want to lock anybody up and we see the results immediately in this community you have these repeat offenders now killing people they should have been locked up it's you know boudin's always putting forth these elaborate theories this is you know the the central chronicle an article about it about why these crimes occur and he never wants to put the fault on the people who are actually perpetrating the crimes it's always economic desperation he just put afford a theory that a decline in tourism is causing uh people to commit more uh home invasions you know he he never wants to yes this

is in the service of chronic article here i'll put it up on this i mean it's crazy i mean the other thing you left out david i'll say is and this was really you know hits home to anybody with kids is a food driver for doordash not that it matters which service but uh was in san francisco's pacific heights neighborhood which is the safest and most elite neighborhood uh in it's you know the beverly hills or bel air of san francisco and his car was carjacked with his four-year-old daughter and two-year-old boy inside now of course you should not be leaving two

kids in the car putting that aside that mistake which i'm sure this father is suffering over but he needed to make deliveries obviously he made a mistake of leaving the kids in the car but we all got an amber alert last week on our phones i mean this is the level of lawlessness it's turned into escape from new york level gotham city level chaos and the criminals know they will not be prosecuted and this is the key criminal justice problem here if you say you are not going to prosecute crime and you demonstrate to the hardest core faction of

criminals that you don't prosecute they're going to take advantage of that weakness and and that's what's happening let me take the counterpoint just for a second just so we can construct what the other side of the argument looks like the other side of the argument says okay these folks are largely you know engaged in an enormous amount of petty crime to support their drug habit right i think that's probably the and that you know underneath that is just an explosion uh of opioids and fentanyl and whatnot underneath that is sort of economic uncertainty that's been compounding

and just basically crusting over um and so folks would say okay these guys are a victim of a much broader economic malaise that needs to get fixed i'm just i'm just you know you're shaking your head jason but i'm just saying i think that that's where the trail of breadcrumbs grows in the counter in the counter in the in in the counter argument so well th th these are these are the types of arguments that chaser makes in order to um obfuscate and disguise that his real agenda is basically radical decarceration you know he's got this this childhood background

where his parents went to jail when he was just a baby and he grew up he says his earliest memories are visiting his parents in jail and it profoundly affected his political views and now we have to suffer through this we're suffering for his childhood trauma here's his childhood trauma and so so tremoth you're right about deeper causes but it doesn't excuse the need to lock people up when they are dangerous to the community and it's not just petty crime i mean let's go through the actions he's taken as da okay so first week on the job just about he abolished the whole cash bail

system okay which voters in november just voted uh in with prop 25 to affirm so voters of california want the cash bail system because it keeps criminals locked up what chase has said is that he would replace cash bail with an algorithm well what exactly is that algorithm he won't explain well he won't submit to third party audit there is no algorithm they're just letting people go okay then the next thing he did was fire seven veteran prosecutors in the da's office who weren't on board with his agenda these are people who have spent their whole lives prosecuting murders

rapes i mean hardcore crime and it takes years of experience to learn how to be a prosecutor like that so for him to just purge this office of these veteran prosecutors is a disaster for the city i've been talking to people who used to work in the da's office and they tell me that the problem goes much deeper than that that in addition to these seven veterans he purged over 30 prosecutors which is about a quarter of the whole office have left under his reign because they don't like working for him so you know and he complains about being short-staffed he says a lot that he can't

you know prosecute everyone needs to be prosecuted he's so stuff the reason he's short staff is no one wants to work for him you know by the way i think it's worth highlighting this guy was elected right so the the the city the voters in the city runoff i understand right he won by something like 2000 votes it was a tiny tiny number of votes regardless people voted him in on a platform that he very clearly articulated and is now realizing in office so there's something about that platform that i think is worth noting was and is appealing uh and and probably is to a large number of people

largely right and no the the the part of it that's appealing okay is that is that is that we we do believe that there are too many people in prison and that a better and a better way to deal with a drug addict who commits say petty theft is to send them to treatment okay as opposed to putting them in prison right so i think we can all agree on that but but his agenda is so much more radical than that he just doesn't want to lock people up take um take troy mcallister okay this is a dangerous person who uh he was uh he was facing trial for his third strike okay he committed armed

robbery he robbed a store with a gun okay he was facing a third strike for that for that robbery and one of the first things uh chase did when he came in was basically uh releasing for time served he basically pleaded that down that was someone who's facing a life sentence that is the reason why hannah abbey and elizabeth platt are dead is because he didn't want to prosecute that's a violent offender sex i i'm not disagreeing by the way i think like what is interesting to me is that so many people um have an eye on and agree with the notion that criminal justice

system needs reform the problem is realizing that reform with a radical district attorney doesn't really resolve to a solution it resolves to more problems on a local level what's good and even chase said this publicly which is like you can't just solve this problem from the da's office it is a much bigger and broader problem and the radical action he's taking isn't solving any problems it's creating far more and um i think it is worth noting though that there is should and likely will be especially with uh kamala harris uh um as vice president some attempts at reforming

on a federal level um uh you know how how criminals are treated how the system realizes opportunities for them to reform and come back into society as productive members but to your point you lose all sense of safety and security if you try and do it solely on the local level well let me let me ask a question like look now we have basically political activism and judicial activism on not just the right right people used to pillory trump for putting in all these you know extremely conservative judges who felt they were gonna just sort of like legislate their own point of view

you know supreme court nominees who were going to try to overturn roe v wade uh but it turns out it's happening on the left as well i guess just more at the local level um how pervasive is this like meaning the issues of san francisco are they are these the same issues of other cities and towns in america well i mean you've got gascon in la who's running the exact same agenda as chase abu deen he's not prosecuting third strikes he was just sued by an organization of deputy da's and the judge is now requiring him to uphold the law which is three strikes he will not bring third strike charges on his own he's also this is both gascon and boudin

now have prohibited prosecutors from attending the parole hearings of dangerous convicts murderers rapists whatever and victims groups are up in arms because they need a prosecutor to go there and explain to the parole board why this person does not deserve to be released and so you now have recall movements forming and by the way they've also done stuff like take death penalty off the table they've take taken gang enhancements off the table they're like voluntarily they're unilaterally disarming their their the prosecution teams they're

taking away weapons at their disposal to lock people up and this is why you're already seeing recalls forming around guests going into la there's now a recall of uh boudin forming okay david david go back to what friedrich just said they're probably not doing a bait and switch on their platform so let's just like what do you think it is about what they are saying that resonates on the way in with the plurality of people yeah here's the thing that resonates um and and it's not that again it goes back to this idea that incarceration is definitely not the only

answer this is where i agree the problem is budin is on the other side of it where decarceration is his only answer right we need to use uh multiple weapons or tools in our toolkit here so hold on so for example okay let's take the let's take the drug addict who commits a petty theft we all agree that person should go to treatment not to jail or prison right a non-violent of course offender okay reason but how how are you gonna get that person to go to treatment because right now there is no leverage whatsoever to get that person to go to treatment because boone's

just not bringing charges he's not prosecuting the choice should be given to that person listen you can either go to jail or you can go to treatment what's it going to be yeah that's right right now we have all these social services guess what nobody uses them because a hardcore addict is not going to avail themselves of those services i would make the argument that we have a broader bigger problem with the criminal justice system as it operates and it is deep and it is complex and it is friggin awful there's a book from a few years ago that this guy named shane bauer wrote

i'm just trying to remember the name i think it's called american prison and uh the guy goes undercover and he goes and works in a in a in a penitentiary in louisiana um and he reports on what the conditions are like and these are these these prisons that are run by private companies that are contracted by the state locally and what it's like to be an employee at one of these companies and what these employees do and how the prisoners are treated there is no system for reform once you end up behind bars in most prisons in the united states and that is um you know he makes the argument others have made the argument that is a has a long history

that dates all the way back to slavery in the united states and in some cases it's just about ineptitude in some cases about unions especially in california where we have a huge cost for uh for corrections and for the uh the health care and the pensions for corrections officers and so there's a lot of complex competing interests in history that relates to why this criminal justice system doesn't largely work on a moral and ethical basis as we might all kind of you know wear our hearts and look at like at how things are working and so the problem is everyone sees this or a lot of

people will see this voters will see this system treating people poorly being inept being corrupt and they want us being racist and they want to fix it and the way they fix it is they see a guy who shows up and he's like i'm a sledgehammer and i'm going to fix it i'm going to take care of all these people and the reality is when you try and take a shotgun and shoot it inside of a room it's going to cause more problems than good and i think that's really what he is he is a manifestation of the anger of voters and the anger of people that look at how complex and racist the system is and how difficult it is to resolve these problems and we're all

looking for a simple big hammer answer and he's got the biggest mouth around the biggest family and that's why people vote for him all right chamoth and then we'll wrap it here absent a few uh words specifically racist if you took that out you could use that entire statement you said and describe trump as well meaning the left and the right are moving to these polls where it's all about authoritarian sort of strong men at the federal state local level folks to your point david that just want to go and take a sledgehammer to things and depending on your political beliefs

or depending on the biases or depending on your life lived you're going to gravitate to these two polls and what's crazy is over the next 20 or 30 years these polarizing figures will become crisper sharper smarter you know they'll find a way to foment all of all of the support without any of the long tail shittiness that trump figured out like trump was you know he's like a beta test of an idea right he was like version 0.1 wait till we see version 1.0 of the american strong man or strong woman it's really going to be [ __ ] scary well yeah and this is this is a guy who um

uh was a fan of of hugo chavez long after he revealed himself to be a strong man intent on ruling for life and so yeah he is very much in that mold he is a sledgehammer to the system but but look i think and and the problems are big and complicated but look we all have a role to play the reformers have a role to play public defenders and defense attorneys have a role to play and the district attorneys and prosecutors have a role to play and the problem we have right now and the role of the district attorney is to prosecute it i don't think that this by the way sacks is a very

difficult problem to solve i think there are just so many misaligned incentives it's very clear that we don't try to reform people when they go to prison and that there's a weird incentive when it's a for-profit prison and the customers and the revenue is based on how many people you have in the prison so if we just get rid of that there's no private prisons where people have an incentive to keep people in there and then if we made treatment free for everybody and had over capacity of treatment centers and then we look at the drug schedule and say

these are the drugs that are not these are the drugs that are not harmful and these are the drugs that are really really really harmful we're looking at a fentanyl issue like it's a cannabis issue and that that's drugs you know cannabis versus fentanyl is like a nuclear bomb versus like a slingshot it's sure there's no comparison between these two things right and but here's the thing no one's going to treatment when they're not forced well of course right but there's no treatment to go to maybe the weight for treatment is six no no no that's not true that's not true we have a lot of social services that aren't being used there are there

is a lot of treatment available people don't want to do it unless they really have to let me bring it back to where we were before maybe the right thing is to actually have a bunch of these sledgehammer folks go off for the next 10 or 20 years you know the trumps and the chesabuddins maybe they're all the same and maybe what we're all just saying is enough's enough this system doesn't work so let's just tear it down every single brick of it brick by brick at the local state and federal level all i'm saying is um just i just want to get your reaction

to that statement guys maybe maybe that's what we're seeing people are that that is what bhutan is doing is he is deconstructing the district attorney's office from the inside he is destroying it he is not bringing charges against people he's driving away all the veteran prosecutors he's bringing in all his he's bringing in his own people who all were uh public defenders and have that mindset and people are dying look we can see the results right now in the streets innocent people are dying hannah abbey elizabeth platt cheerio it's an emergency but at chamatte's

point is there any validity sacks or fredberg to the burn it all down cause chaos and then people come in and say you know what that's not gonna this doesn't need to be fixed let's have a new discussion will nuance be added to this discussion sacks we need to improve things incrementally okay you're not going to make things better by dismantling the whole district attorney's office i mean come on we need to improve things incrementally yeah i mean look everything looks exponential until it cycles back so you know you're only going to have so much um evolution

to gotham in san francisco until enough people put their hands in the air and say okay you know time for a change let's go back and let's start fixing this they are they are saying that that's why we're having that i mean there's a recall chesa budden movement flexing a muscle and making it stronger i think you know we're learning a lot about what approaches to criminal justice reform work and what approaches do not work and it is clear that a local only non-prosecution position is not going to work with respect to both criminal justice reform and the satisfaction of the society

at large um and we're realizing that and i think we are inevitably i mean there's so many people that are up in arms we are inevitably going to cycle back the other way at some point very soon here yeah and honestly i think you guys are over intellectualizing this a little bit you know when when sharia uh died because he got hit by by that repeat offender they asked his uh wife who's responsible for this she said very clearly the d.a that is who is responsible and she's right let's stop over intellectualizing this i know the problems are big and complicated

frankly people like chase up prey on that because they can kind of obscure what they're doing with you know some nice sounding obfuscation some nice sounding words but the reality is he's not prosecuting the way he needs to we got to stop this yeah and it is possible to have nuance and to hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time david you could there's a practical reality too people cannot murder people people cannot drive in cars and run red lights on fentanyl while saying the criminal justice system is incredibly biased and racist and people who

are of color in texas you know wind up in jail for five or ten years for selling a bag of weed and then we're investing in companies that are making weed gummies or people are buying stock in weed companies at the same time you can't have one person who's a black teenager in texas going to jail for decades for doing what somebody in california or seattle or canada is getting an ipo for i mean this is a fundamental injustice in the world and you're right that's something that chester preys on but there must be nuance here where we look at each individual situation say

what are the ways to solve the problem surgically not with a shotgun to david freeburg's point but with maybe a scalpel and a sniper rifle do we want to move on to questions from our audience because they submitted hundreds of questions or do we want to move on to the australian news and facebook backing out of publishing news if you like let's end with the q a i think saks what the [ __ ] is going on with facebook and australia and climate change and this is insanity yeah so i think what's going on in australia australia is is contemplating a law that would require

facebook and google and i think just those two companies to essentially pay royalties for hyperlinks to to to news publications and i think this is mostly at the behest of some powerful uh newspaper magnates down there i think like rupert murdoch and i love the way you say magnates it's like well they are i mean you know um and so uh it but but but this issue is going to be very closely watched by europe and maybe even the u.s um it's basically a tran like a a wealth transfer from google and and facebook to the traditional media and to traditional publishers um this is

an issue where i actually um side with with zuckerberg and facebook on this i mean i kind of threw up a little bit in my mouth saying that but um but uh no but look tim berners-lee has come out and said that it could really interfere with the open internet and the world wide web if you start to tax hyperlinks i mean historically hyperlinks and the titles on hyperlinks were um were were fair use you could you could use those things without violating somebody else's copyright or need to pay them a royalty and so i think that it's it's bizarre to me that that facebook

and google wouldn't now be able to use hyperlinks and i'm kind of worried about where that goes and uh you know i so facebook facebook said that they're not going to publish links now for australian news and then but then they followed that up with they were also going to start dismantling any anti-climate change content i don't know if that's just just an illustration well there's labeling so there's another thing going on which is they've decided not to label any posts involving climate change which is part of the whole censorship debate

and um and so yeah i mean well it's separate but related in the sense that the traditional media is cheering on censorship but then when facebook essentially uh censors these links because they don't want to pay royalties to traditional media then the traditional media is up in arms and so they're very selective in how they how they view these issues my principle is very consistent which is i want an open internet i'm against censorship in all of its forms and i and i you know and i'm worried that this new australian law could really lead to some lead to an overall reduction or shutdown here's what's really i think going on is that with fair use

the doctrine of fair use it's a four-part test uh you're a lawyer obviously you know all this sacks but to sort of educate people in the audience who don't there's no specific uh number of characters no specific percentage of the original work that you uh can use you to clear yourself of fair use fair use is a test when it goes before a judge a judge looks at this four-part test the percentage of the work you used is the public confused is there some educational or criticism version of it so if you were to use 10 percent of this podcast and you were to wrap it with you know put us in

a picture window and you were 50 of it there was no confusion that you were commenting on this that would be fair use or if you were to use it in educational system and if you were monetizing it now if you were to just clip our podcast like this one website clipped the podcast and made 60 clips of it took our file and i sent them a cease and desist actually and said hey don't do this we're doing it ourselves they fought us they said we're fans and i said i don't care if you're fans or not you're not linking back you're not giving us credit and you're doing 60

clips if you want to do one or two clips and you want to comment on it that's fine but you can't take all 60 clips and make a 60 clip version of this um and so fairness is in the word fair use the problem with zuckerberg and with how google has used journalists content is they are clipping out specific sections of it and putting it in something called one box on google so many of you might have said how many people you know how many pounds are in you know whatever or what time is this tv show on and then the content that was made by the ringer or the new york times

gets clipped and they put just that section david with an algorithm and they give you the answer so you don't need to go visit that website this is tipping over into what i would call unfair use because you're eliminating the person linking now let me finish yeah if it was just the url and you didn't pull the headline you didn't pull the abstract and you didn't pull a photo that would be fine there is a very easy solution to this which is if you want to pull the link and the headline you pay zero dollars but if you want to pull anything else a hundred characters etc you need

to get a license from that person unless you are doing actual criticism so there's nothing to stop anybody in australia right now from taking a screenshot of a new york times story or an australian you know newspaper story and writing some commentary on it you just can't wholesale take everything and so what we're seeing here is a real-time negotiation between private parties into what is fair and i think google has a really rich history of sharing revenue the app store they give 70 to app developers youtube they give 55 to creators and with adsense

they let you put adsense on your website and they give you 68 cents on the dollar or something in that range they never actually disclose the exact percentage but that's what i'm told it is facebook has given zero dollars to instagram users zero dollar whatsapp uses zero dollars to facebook folks they're too greedy and what facebook needs to do is either not use the content or come up with some reasonable payment and come to an agreement with these folks who are now banding together and they're realizing the traffic we get from facebook and google is not worth

what they're taking away from with us which is all that revenue that you know they earned in the free market and so this is a free market debate and i think the government should stay out of it to a certain extent and let the free market work which is all publishers should get together in the united states and confront facebook and say pay us unless you use anything more than the headline but jason i think these things are interconnected though right on the one hand if you're if you have an economic stake in distribution of content but then you're also then going to decide under

you know an opaque definition what is truth or not truth you all of a sudden just become i mean the purest form definition of a publisher right and i think it just becomes a very treacherous place for both facebook and google to end up in so it's almost paying the bell by the way yeah no you're right google's paying for it facebook's decided not to but facebook they said something like only four percent of their their their posts involve this kind of content so it's just not a big deal for them the way it is for for google well i think it is a big deal for facebook they're just

trying to make a point here because zuckerberg yeah yeah and they're they're being they're being they're being overly heavy-handed in their response yeah there's no question about they're throwing their weight around it doesn't look good but i'm not defending facebook i'm defending the principal i mean look if this australian principle were used you wouldn't have the drudge report you wouldn't be able to create a site of newsletters no you could if it was commentary you could put the link and right it's when you just rip the links people are objecting to ripping the links

without any commentary judge reporter rewrites the headline puts his own spin on it and then links he would never get caught into this and there is no publication that would ever object what they're objecting to is taking the photo taking the first paragraph and the the the synopsis is 30 or 40 percent of the value and so facebook is a better and twitter with their algorithms are better front pages than the new york times front page well why isn't this applying to twitter then i i think it will ultimately they'll go there as well i think this will become the test case which is

if you want to take more than just the headline and like you know basically that's it or the url if you want to have that little snippet pay us pay us something it doesn't have to be a lot but this could actually solve if these networks that are making tens to hundreds of millions of billions of dollars if they just said you know what one percent to the news organizations to keep them viable just like anybody else would pay on the licensing fee for terrestrial rights why is the australian government setting the price and why are they only applying this to google and

facebook well i think they're going to go right down the line i think it's just a starting point but to my point i said earlier is i don't think the government needs to do this right i think the news organizations on mass should get together and put their foot down and say no and if they did they would get it sounds like what the government should do is clarify what fair use entails maybe it's just maybe it's a link plus a title i mean look it's it's never just a link right it's a hyperlink plus the the plus the work yeah exactly yes the snippet is the issue right so fine so

the government should clarify what fair use is and then if google and facebook or ever want more they got to go negotiate for it exactly but but australia is doing more than that they're setting the price and they're limiting their overreaching policy just to google and facebook because they know that if they applied it to everybody by the way we do that we already do this in the united states david with local carriage of uh news organizations on terrestrial tv so we already have we already mix it up with the ftc doing this with licenses and the public good

so it's the extent i think the other thing that you know is going to happen with all of this is like on the other on the other side of this the actual media organizations themselves that theoretically could benefit from this are frankly just going out of business anyways i i there's a you know there's a wall street journal alert um for the owner of the la times who's about to sell the times like it's very likely that the times in four or five years doesn't even exist so i don't really know where all of this goes except that you know everybody's just going to be an individual

person blogging and tweeting whatever opinion they want right so there'll be no money to pay anybody because it won't really matter but what will be left is then these rules on arbitration of fact and fiction and i think that that's where we're going to end up that's going to be a crazy place because then those folks those folks then really are the puppet masters yeah i i i agree that these traditional publications have like a fundamental business model problem and it's not going to be salt like i think there's a like a misplaced blame on facebook and google i mean the fundamental problem with all these publications are

you go search for a news article on something and there's like 10 versions of the same thing or more 100 versions and you know when newspapers we saw thousands of newspapers all across the country and they had a local geographic monopoly but once it all got digitized and moved online you realize how much redundancy there was you have thousands of reporters creating the exact same thing and there needs to be consolidation it doesn't make sense to have 100 articles not only that but a point we made last time which is um you know facts have largely commoditized or most facts like

you know remember we used to open the newspaper and look at what the stock market prices were we we opened the newspaper looked at the sports scores we looked at what happened in this place in this place facts about events facts about the prices of things facts about sports scores that's all completely commoditized i mean that's like 90 of the content of what people used to read the newspaper for has gone online and so as we talked about last time newspapers and publications of the like have largely moved into you know different sorts of narratives and um

you know it's created a a marketplace that has a lot more competition because anyone can write that as we're seeing with sub stack and medium and as we're seeing with our own podcast that we're seeing with our own podcast and i think that's um this feels to me like you know i went to a media conference back in 2008 and there was this huge battle between google and viacom and i was at the conference and i think larry page was on stage or someone or eric schmidt was on stage and the viacom ceo got up and he's like when are you gonna start

paying us for our content and uh i think that that and he really screamed at him in a room of like 800 people and i feel like that same kind of point of view has persisted until there's finally some legislation that they feel kind of gets them justice meanwhile the world has passed them by and you know i think this uh this will be kind of some transitory uh legislation that ultimately the content is going to democratize anyway and the content creation's going to democratize last topic for me because i really want friedberg's answer to this because i also just saw an alert how the

federal government is opening up a vaccination site in miami-dade county i actually saw francis suarez retweet it um what the hell's going on with vaccinations are we going to get vaccinated soon i said it in december and i tweeted about it and i've repeated it multiple times since that the u.s has enough supply to vaccinate pretty much anyone that wants to get vaccinated because we are producing and delivering three to four million doses per day in the us right now and um there is a just a fundamental issue especially like i mean look at california you know they haven't

opened up quote unquote vaccination to people outside of tier or what they're called tier 1a and so this is much more of a kind of policy issue than an administrative issue than a supply and demand issue there's enough people that want the vaccine and there's enough vaccine so just let people get [ __ ] vaccinated um and so i feel like the market forces are now kind of converging with policy a little bit more than they were a month ago and the policymakers are no longer fighting and complaining about supply and complaining about constraints you know

we've got mass vac sites now in california the amount of money that's being wasted by the way in this process makes me want to vomit every time i read about it that's a whole other separate issue but it feels to me like we're probably may june when enough people are vaccinated that we can have you know a circumstance where people are going to fly without masks and be comfortable doing so but i'm sure there will be these over you know constraining rules around what people can and can't do in public for a very long time like i mentioned would happen i do want to say one thing

that i've noticed we were we were all we played some poker the other night we were with a friend who uh got vaccinated and i was like he said this is my first time playing poker with people and i was like well you got vaccinated like why are you he's like well i don't know if other strains are going to get me or you know if this thing's evolving and other people are going to get sick and um if you think about what's happened over the last year people have been conditioned to be afraid and so even though we're getting vaccinated even though this thing is moving and working i'm

concerned that we're not going to end up in a more civil state schools aren't opening people aren't flying people aren't doing stuff even after vaccinations and science and data shows that these things are okay texas in florida or maybe there's something maybe there's some cases of it but what i'm saying is like you know the human subconscious gets trained first and then our conscious mind rationalizes what we feel we've all now been trained over the past year to be very afraid and then we all come up with these rational excuses about why i can't do x y and z it's

like but you've been [ __ ] vaccinated you're fine like all the data all the science says go do whatever you want to do go into a nightclub sweaty next to people robbing beats yes tell us about the throbbing nightclub yeah it's like they've never seen you so animated it's like that scene from goodwill hunting i remember when he talked to the psychologist he's like tell us about your rave did the molly just kick in friedberg did you drop a molly at the start of the pod but my point is like people are really afraid and i think uh i just got the best

idea for an episode the biggest concern i have is frankly less about are we going to get vaccinated i feel like the convergence between market forces and government nonsense is now going to allow us to all get fascinated but the issue is really going to be like how do you break through these rules and the fear that that's basically because i want but i don't understand where where are the max vaccination sites in california and who's eligible like why aren't we just making this thing like a drive-through this is where we can absolute violent agreement that california is so messed up with respect to how we're vaccinating

we have so much supply we're sitting on half our friggin supply right now in california 30 million vaccines sitting on shelves we are now at 75 percent deployed 80 california's got like four or five million vaccines sitting in storage it should be a drive-through and you just get in line and you go and sometimes what we're doing is you know but in what we're doing now is you got to schedule oh yeah scheduling's [ __ ] because you first you got to qualify then you got to schedule an appointment and then the the the clinic or whatever's only open from nine to five and so

like how many doses are they really administering when you've got to make an appointment probably one every half hour so maybe they get through 16 people a day or something qualifications yeah and they can find a million dollars and lose their medical license if they inject the wrong person so i mean you're talking about 16 people per day at a site when they could be doing a couple hundred i mean it's crazy well johnson and johnson is coming and that's refrigerator stable right freeberg so you don't even need we now have bought 1.2 billion but let me go back to freeberg's point

about when will life get back to normal i'm not as pessimistic as you are dave about this idea that life won't go back to normal and part of the reason why is i'm seeing so much outrage about school closures right now california is one of the only states in the country that still completely closed all the schools and people are absolutely up in arms i'd say it's as big an issue as this exploding crime issue crime is a big issue in the cities and school closures is the big issue in the suburbs and if these two things don't turn around i think avenues is going to get recalled i

mean people are just on fire about this yeah but i mean my point was like our our wealthy conservative you know uh friend that lives in florida was afraid to go do stuff even after he's been vaccinated yeah and i think that's what's permeated everywhere it's just like there's free work it's like a shark attack you know if there's a shark attack you know at half moon bay or whatever people don't swim there for a couple of weeks and then somebody swims and they're like oh the water's great people will jump back in i think it's april david to your point of when this

goes back to normal because if you look now people have been saying freebird correct me if i'm wrong would you put a 5x multiplier on the confirmed cova cases a 4x multiplier 5x i think is the right medium medium so if you have 30 million people who've had the vaccine uh had covid you're looking at five times that is 150 now you have 60 million people who have been vaccinated we're at 210 there are 330 million americans 70 million are under our kids so you know we're basically getting to herd immunity and if you look at the slopes right now what is causing the drop in cases this massively david is it herd immunity vaccine or are people

suddenly wearing masks what is it there's complexity because everyone assumes that there's one thing that affects the whole population but remember the way viruses work is they're hyper local and so the local population dynamics looked at on a scale is where you see the statistical results of the scale and so you know we saw this in north dakota a bunch of people got really sick they got to herd immunity in communities and then all of a sudden it dropped off the curve when you zoom out and that's happening combined with behavioral changes combined with vaccines

then you start to see these statistical things happen at scale so it's not a simple answer but the answer generally can be we are coming down the slope we are getting to a point of you know general like low case counts low death counts low fatality and we should be living a normal life allowing our economy to kind of progress again um and we're still caught up in this kind of fear fear um let's just do this end on this pick a date when you think all four besties are vaccinated i'm gonna say april 1st june june okay what do you got free break i say april 1st we're all

going to be vaccinated it's literally a choice i mean any one of us could go get vaccinated in the next month i mean how none of us are over 30 bmi i mean saks was for a minute california's opening 1b a lot of the other states are opening broadly if any of you wanted to get on a plane and go get vaccinated somewhere else you could i mean there's enough places now that have open vacs or will in the next 30 days you can go get vaccinations okay so you say 30 days which would be march 15th or so yeah i think that's a choice for the four of us if you guys want to hop on a

plane we can go get vaccinated does anybody have access to it sorry but doesn't that kind of you you're saying in an open vac state anybody can show up without proof of advice you have to have a driver's license i've looked into this there have been different ways that this has played out but generally speaking there are market forces at play where you know where there's a will there's a way not saying that you're cutting line and screwing people over but there are vaccinations that are happening all over the country now with people that want to get vaccinated by the way

in california next week tier one b opens up so anyone what does that mean what does tier one be it's a total bs definition it is absolutely ridiculous i absolutely think this is the biggest waste of time and money ever but tier one b definition in california is health care work sorry child care workers so anyone that's a teacher or works with children uh if your nanny or your daycare uh people um you know wanted to they could go and get vaccinated oh wait our nanny can get vaccinated starting next wednesday in california and so all you need to

do is go get to a vaccine with vaccines and by the way they all a lot of them have vaccination um supply now uh or they will this weekend there's apparently big shipment going out um and also all food and agriculture workers loosely defined so people that work in grocery stores restaurants farm workers you're saying anyone should have anyone if you have a chef they can get back to no no i think two people out of four on here might have chefs i think two of us definitely don't so so if you take care of your own kids and cook your own food you can't get vaccinated but if you

do that for somebody else you can so wait you're saying if you have a chef and you have nannies you get vaccinated no you don't you don't saying is you yeah if you're a chef or a nanny for someone else you can go get vaccinated next week right but david what do you want for dinner i'm coming over right now to make whatever you want i'll watch your kids this weekend david get me a shot it's so insane we have all these ridiculous job categories and distinctions it's just like with the lockdown policy they had 10 pages of exceptions for essential workers listen if

you've got a policy with 10 pages of exceptions the policy doesn't make any sense yeah like all the like and this caused all the controversy in l.a like anyone that works in the movie business is an essential worker but people that work there's people that work in restaurants and bars they're not let's see this for what it is it is payoff to doosans political supporters uh the the politicians are using they use essential worker exceptions and now they're using vaccines as political capital they dole them out to their supporters so that you know in exchange for you

know votes down the road also the remember the exception david if you serve more than seven courses in your prefix you can get a vaccine so that is the french laundry if you add an amuse booze and an intermezzo you qualify for the vaccine there are people going to states renting houses and getting driver's licenses and getting vaccines i know about that's called vaccine tourism by the way think about it this way in six weeks i think a lot of those restrictions are gonna fall by the wayside because the supply is gonna completely outstrip the nonsensical you

know restrictions and prioritization methods we put in place and hopefully god willing these idiots who have the ability to vaccinate people open up their sites 24 7 and drop all the [ __ ] questionnaires and registration requirements let people drive in get a shot wait 15 minutes and leave and have just some basic principled people on site that can take care of people if they have a adverse allergic reaction and get shots in arms we have the shots we have the supply we're going to be over supplied by may we're going to have far more shots than

there will be demand and so you know we just need to get this this kind of nonsense thrown out the window straight to q a this is from uh vadesh he says where are you investing your money over the next 10 years so friedberg you want to start and then we'll go to saks and then pretty largely uh you know on the podcast i mean two areas that are super interesting to me that i'm spending a lot of time on is obviously biomanufacturing so the idea that we can kind of move away from traditional animal based agriculture and systems of production to systems

where we use a genetically engineered microbial organisms to produce molecules and materials and food and that that that system of production can have a radical impact on on the environment on the opportunity for jobs on the cost of goods and uh and things that humans want and consume and that's that's a primary area of interest for me and i think it's a multi-decade i think by 2050 you know we should see um most of our goods that are manufactured rather than being made in the traditional sense which is basically old technology scaled up uh which is what

the industrial revolution did uh but really shift to a new model of manufacturing where we use a smarter machine which is a gene a biological organism to make stuff so that's my risk sex yeah so i'm i'm focused on the area of bottom up sass which is basically business software that can go viral uh very much in the mold of yammer which is a company i founded and sold back a dozen years ago it was a precursor to slack let's be honest right it could have been 27 billion but you did not ride your winner you took the quick billy and that was not a mistake because it lets

you invest in the other 20 unicorns correct kinda i mean so so so oh you do have a chip on your shoulder about selling too early no no no no it's not a chip i would say that around the time that paypal hit a 200 billion dollar market cap and slack had a 27 billion dollar outcome i started realizing you know if i just stuck with my ideas longer you know i probably would would do better and i'm like you know i don't really need to come up with a new thesis or a new idea i already came up with the idea 12 years ago which is to make business software viral i'm just going

to keep investing in that thesis so it's not that original or new for me but um but but it is you know bottom up has become the i would say almost the dominant mode now explain that to somebody who doesn't understand what you mean bottom up yeah so so bottom up means that the entry point for the software is any employee in the company they can just start using it they go to your website they start using it they spread to their co-workers as opposed to down top down is like the oracle sales guy who carries a bag and goes to meet with the cio and you know sells them a big

expensive implementation that's the and that's traditionally what business software used to be is a is a big top down i t sale bottom up is this is going in through the rank and file employees all right chamoth poly hoppitya for the next 10 years where are you putting your money uh two areas uh inequality well it's not even 10 i would say for the next for the rest of my life um so it's i think these are multi-decade but uh inequality and climate change and so um you know the inequality side what does that mean it's any by the way the second you said inequality

and climate change sacks left like he went to throw up yeah he's like what he's read he went to throw up he's like oh god here we go there he's back now he's back zach he just called the security he went and he kissed his gold bricks that he keeps in his house no inequality basically means uh anything that evens the starting line so they if that's healthcare software that solves a chronic condition or if that's financial software that drives inclusion um and then climate change is pretty obvious but the the panoply of things that we need to do to basically you know slow the warming of the earth those are the two areas huge opportunities for vadesh if you even care i take a remora

like approach um if you don't know what a remora is you ever see like a big shark and then there's like a bunch of things stuck to it and it's like following the shark and it just eats whatever so basically what i do is i'm getting behind these three guys and i just draft on these three sharks and just try to weasel my way onto their cap tables it's a it's a living you know basically let's go to the poker game and try to no uh in all sincerity i am stay i am vertical agnostic because i think the great companies uh make the verticals they create the

categories and the categories don't exist at your schedule particularly yeah what's that all right yeah and so what i do in the early stages i am focused on the process and the process i'm trying to master here is what i do with the syndicate.com which is find great companies and share it with now 7 000 accredited investors and let them decide you know how much they want to invest in each deal and just to give people an idea we are on a 60 million dollar run rate this year of deploy capital via the syndicate in other words it'll be four times five times what my fund will do the fund has access to 100 of deals but the syndicate has access to 60 roughly

so now that we've broken our no advertising role no i mean we're all talking our book here let's take another question um and uh angel is available from harpercollins business what oh here's a good one by the way if you want to save money on car insurance metromile.com sorry go ahead absolutely fantastic also the ticker symbol uh what's the biggest investment venture miss you had early starting out that would have been a ridiculous return what is our anti-portfolio looking like friedberg we'll start with you and then go check out thingosax i was with um jack dorsey and um in at this conference and he went around and did a pass of the hat and who wanted to invest in his new startup called square

that's my story what what is that a 50 is that a 50 million dollar myth um yeah i'm not going to say it it would have been bad 50k in at 10 million but i mean the pro here's by the way an interesting thing going back to this the point sacks made earlier and that we've said in the past you know when square went public there was a lot of questions and trepidation around its valuation big fund managers were poo pooing the company and what's the market cap of square today sacks you might know 100 120 120 billion wow i mean 125 billion today that's incredible right because

like when they went public people were kind of poo pooing it saying this thing is a this is a sub billion dollar company you know it shouldn't be worth anything more than a billion dollars and look at it just a few years later um anyway yeah i missed it i missed that one on the uh seed round and um and i've just watched with with all what you get to innovate as a public company it traffic a four billion dollar valuation it did right it did like five years ago and so within five years it's gone from 4 billion to 124 billion i was in a venture capital fund that invested in it they

distributed the shares i sold half and i was like i'll just keep half i like jack i sold half at 72 and now it's at 276 and so ride your winners folks uh saks anti-portfolio which one is the most painful honestly i haven't missed that much to speak okay um unbelievable what a douche well actually um i i analyzed my chess game with peter thiel and uh actually my check my castle uh queenside castle was actually a brilliant move uh if he hadn't pinned by no i mean look i uh i i i ten i i look i don't overthink these things too much i mean it's

why i'm in like 27 unicorns if the company looks good i i invest uh is this phil hellmuth what would you say your total like multiple is on all your angel investing like that's not the question saks answer the question come on the audience asked what you missed can you just be humble enough to say yeah yeah no no i'll tell you i'll tell you so this was a sort of a semi miss is that um oh my god it's not even a mess well here's how i made up for it no no put in half my normal amount no no let me tell you what happened i did miss it so

uh back in 2007 um i thought twitter was going to take off i had a like a former employee who wanted to sell secondary and so you know i had a deal worked out to buy i think a couple hundred thousand dollars of shares at i don't know 40 million dollar evaluation or something like that and um we submitted it to the company and then they roofered it for because i think chris for chris sacca basically i don't know if you remember saka had set up like some secondary secondary thing yeah so yeah the fact that you know i wasn't able to complete that transaction probably cost me

you know a couple hundred million bucks uh chamath anti-portfolio what's this i have a huge airbnb portfolio huge robin hood you know airbnb at a billion obviously i actually did invest i agreed to invest but then i got into a huge public snafu with with chesky because he was taking a bunch of money off the table and then we ended up not even finalizing the investment and your letter was your letter was published your email was leaked my email was leaked yeah it was leaked so i was really pissed when they did that but anyways that was a decade ago not much has changed i guess

um there is one thing that above all others which is sadly also in my portfolio so my portfolio my andy portfolio is the same thing you can guess what it is but that's bitcoin at one point you know we controlled low single digits mid single digits of the entire float and had i held on to that that's talking about you know a mid deca billion dollar position so my anti portfolio uh in in the unrealized loss and unrealized gains or losses if you will on bitcoin is in the many tens of billions of dollars yep mine is clearly bitcoin as well because i was

reporting on it when it was 10 cents and i was one of the first journalists to write about it and talk about it on my podcast and i had like maybe 10 of these bitcoins in a wallet of um that was a mount gox and it got hacked and it all went away and then my wife bought it at under 200 and so now we have a joke in the house that my wife is going to because of her incredible trade because she she saw it as well um return more on her it's conceivable she'll return more than my entire investing career so shout out to jade uh for getting that one um

actually i i made that mistake too that's moth made of not huddling enough long enough so that that is that did you guys see did you see this article i i fished this article out but in 2014 i was buying uh a land at mardis camp in lake tahoe and i told the sales guy there jeff hall i said hey listen i'll buy this lot if you let me buy it in bitcoin because i wanted to promote bitcoin bitcoin as a transactional infrastructure so we went to a company called bitpay they wired it up and i bought it for 1.6 million dollars in bitcoin that was 2 800 coins which right now

is worth 140 or 150 million dollars what are you going to build on that lot are you going i don't you should make it a grave you should make it a grave plot you should just well my my ex-wife owns a lot i hope you know she enjoys it but i'm saying you literally could have bought the next lakers and the warriors and been the majority owner in each all right let's take another question what's the number one macro uncertainty or risk you guys are most worried about for your investment portfolios there is only one and i think it's inflation but i think

it's important to understand where inflation is coming from the single biggest risk to all of us is what's going to happen in the following order of operations so i think all of this sort of at the coming out of the pandemic basically what you're going to have is like four or five major trading blocks in the world right you have china as a standalone you have europe as a standalone you have america slash north america under biden i think it could be more north america as a as a standalone and then you have these sort of what i would call random you know friends with benefits africa south america japan korea okay but those are

all bit players to these three huge trading blocks everybody was going to go and they're going to go and get vertically integrated so it sort of builds a little bit on what david said like you're not going to have you know one central place where you get this thing basically i.e china that you ship on a boat to get over here for a whole host of reasons national security carbon etc so you can have all these vertically you know vertically integrated supply chains and resilient economies you know what that does when you have to try to build that stuff prices go screaming

higher because instead of having one factory in china making nine billion iphone cases you have now 50 factories all around the world each with their own infrastructures and costs and whatever and so i think you're gonna reflate the world um i don't know when it happens but um that's sort of the biggest risk to all of what we do is that all of a sudden you know real rates go to like six or seven percent and then all of a sudden you're not going to look at a company trading at 50 times earnings and say um you know you're going to you're going to question that so that i think

that's the biggest risk that i think friedrich what's your risk facts what's your risk zach you go ahead yeah so actually mine is pretty similar to moss which is i think we're accruing these unpayable deficits and debts uh and obligations and uh you know all this money has to be paid back at some point uh that the u.s government's incurring i mean there's a california version of this where we've accrued a trillion dollars of pension obligations that we have no ability to pay so yeah i mean i think that eventually it translates into inflation but i think it

translates into something even worse which is at some point people become skeptical about loaning money to the us government and the the because they don't want the u.s to just print dollars to pay back these these loans and uh the us dollar stocks becoming the world's reserve currency i think the reason why we're seeing bitcoin go to the moon right now is people are starting to speculate on the idea that that this might be the future world reserve currency because it's not subject to manipulation by by you know um by central banks and uh and and you know

and let's think like that that world looks if you think about like a world in which the the us dollar is not the world's reserve currency anymore in which the government is basically uh broke i mean that is it's it's pretty scary to think about there's a ray dalio who's a um uh famous uh and you know prominent uh hedge fund founder of bridgewater associates wrote an essay if anyone's interested called the big cycle of money credit debt and economic activity you can find it online he published it last year highly recommended reading he has a few chapters that

that proceed and follow that talks about the grand macroeconomic cycle of governments and societies and it's really worth the read um i think one really basic principled economic point is that governments operate in such a way that their um their people ask for goods and ask for services um the government spends on those services by borrowing more than they're making in income in that year um and and that is i think the uh you know the premise for a lot of how governments operate around the world the only way that that works over time is if your future

shows that that borrowing allows you to grow your revenue more and therefore you can underwrite taking on debt to pay in the future so you force growth and you know i've said this a couple of times before but it is the most basic principle but it is also the most scary and shocking principle which is the only way you can afford debt is if you have growth and that forces you to find growth and when you're forced to find growth you get all of these unnatural perturbations in terms of economic activity and market forces it is not necessarily the case that things should and would always grow and we force things to always grow because of the

mechanism by which we fund our services at a government level and that is what's basically going to ultimately lead to a lot of different types of crises both kind of financial crises but uh but also societal crises in terms of you know revolution and and social pushes for socialism and and all the other things that that are typically associated with things like inflation um and so it is it is the big crisis of the the 21st century will be you know we underwrote growth in the 20th century um and there's a lot of uh forces that that make kind of you know bring that

all to kind of bear this section i see one that's maybe a little less acute and a little bit more big picture which is the number of people living in democracies in the world as a percentage of population which has been going down uh which if you asked anybody they would be pretty shocked to hear but just looking at the percentage of humans on the planet not the percentage of countries because the percentage of countries that are democracies or you know flawed democracies um is right now at um you know 45 percent and we have 55 of regimes are authoritarian or hybrid

and the population of people living in those is growing so we we have countries that are authoritarian that are growing countries that are democracies like in europe or or in the west and the u.s canada are declining and or not keeping up pace in terms of population growth and that is uh i think going to be the the major issue which is does china win capitalism plus authoritarianism where does democracy plus capitalism work the next question i think is super fascinating uh which is what would each of you wish you could teach every 12 year old right now what a great question

chamath uh you want to go first do you have something that comes to mind do you need a minute to think about it well it's such a fabulous question that's a great question there's so many very personal for all of us yeah there's so many answers there uh well let's let's workshop it anybody else what comes to mind is very this is very tactical okay so i'm sure there's like grander things but just the two things we're not really teaching are coding and financial literacy and those are like the two big i think omissions in the curriculum right now and would be very

helpful for for people to learn oh i mean on that theme i would also then add um like better eating habits um and uh mental health exercises um freeburg you got any that come to mind things you want your 12 year old or everybody's 12 year old to learn i think the principles of uh biology and how we look i mean again like i feel like we underestimate and we don't talk enough about the opportunity and the reality that is about to hit us like a tidal wave of bioengineering um you know everything in medicine is moving towards this notion of using biological

machines to fix our bodies like not just a molecule which is the historical way of doing medicine where you find a molecule does something in the body you stick it in you turn into a drug but we are actually on the precipice of creating machines biologically engineered or designed cells and proteins that can go into your body and do specific things and enhance your your life and improve your health and solve you know disease similarly like i talked about earlier biomanufacturing to make all the materials and food in a more sustainable way in a lower cost

way and so i think teaching the principles of dna how dna causes protein how protein causes function and how cells operate um and and how that is basically being softwarized and you can basically think about biology now as being software uh i think that is the the trend of um of science and engineering i think computing created a great foundation but i i think that's really if i were to tell my twelve-year-old uh daughter in eight years what she should consider doing um or spending her time studying it's bioengineering and and what the

opportunities are that are going to arise from that uh all great answers i think for me i'll again move it up a level since you guys took some of my answers financial literacy was definitely going to be in there for me but i would say radical self-reliance and entrepreneurialism and resiliency i think a lot of young people right now don't believe that they have agency in their lives in the world that they can create stuff that they can not be stopped if they go and do something and they there's a victim uh mentality and culture that the system is rigged against you and that you cannot rise above which i understand why people feel that way but i actually think it's less true than ever and so we have to basically

really remind people that if you are radically self-reliant you can live the american dream you can create anything you want there is absolutely nobody who can stop you and you know all the knowledge you want to learn is out there and so so the in radical self-reliance for me is this concept of the ability to learn and the ability to learn how to learn and having faith that you can learn any skill you know even 60 70 percent you know uh very quickly is what i see uh results in you know people being successful in life this ability to take on any new topic with

a zeal and an understanding that you can master it or or even 60 or 70 mastery means something going around the horn we're gonna plan a a bestie trip and we might even allow besties to come for the first live bestie show what is your vote i want everybody to type it into the chat room i everybody's going to type in where they most want to have a bestie show all right i like it okay so chamath and i both want to go to new york saks wants to go to miami to see keith reboy and peter thiel his besties those are his alternate universe besties by the way they won't do a podcast together no oh my god how great would that podcast be

i think that would be i think you call that the righties the writings you've got the besties you've got the leasties and you're gonna get the right i'm starting the leasties it's gonna be me howard lindsen sarah cohn and uh prof g profgt why why won't you call it the worsties the worst to be the worst yeah i'm gonna do the worsties just as a thing i had an idea here's an idea if we want to be the number one podcast freedberg do you have any of that molly from your 1999 2000 era i've never i've never done molly i've never done it sure you just made your own synthesis of it and

took it okay great here's how to become the number one podcast we all take molly at the start of the podcast and we start the podcast 30 minutes in and then we see if david sacks could say i love you can i just say we've done more self-referential naval gazing [ __ ] on this pod than any other pod and i don't know this is like even worse than you don't have to listen to it people we may need to spice and vlad nick will need to edit the [ __ ] out of this and spike it spike it all right boys here we love you boys i love you besties love you david love you mother david

i gotcha love we upgraded the david's by the way with their outrage and cantankerous firmware which we saw from friedberg when he threatened to quit the podcast over the publishing of the robin hood no that's why we added the thirst strap feature set that's why he went to throbbing and pulsating he was just throbbing and pulsing we'll see you know we have time on the all-in-one let your winners ride rain man david besties we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's we need to get back i'm going on