E25: Biden's vaccine mandate, "equity" in distribution, NFT speculation, impact of inflation & more

does anybody have any thoughts on this i mean i think it's incredible um so does fredberg's dog hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all-in podcast it's been a week it's been a minute with us today of course the queen of quinoa david friedberg and the rain man himself calling in from a nondescript mansion in one of 17 cities the rain man himself david sacks and cackling like a dictator who got his two billy back and he's back in the game chem off paulie hapatia is he going to get a car with doors that go like this doors that go like this

let's talk a little bit about the vaccine biden says everybody who's an adult is qualified by may 1st he's instructed the states to do that we are now hitting uh 2.x million a day we had a 3 million shot day i believe friedberg and obviously the 1.9 billion dollar covid slash uh everybody gets a big slice uh bill got passed 1.9 trillion sorry that's what i said 1.9 trillion no somebody put 1.9 billion on the number yes 1.9 trillion uh 1.9 billion is what the covid uh nft went for the nft went for women said in the past a trillion here trillion there

soon enough it's real money yeah yeah well biden biden's speech really kind of begged the question of why we still need this 2 trillion dollar bill if covet is going to be over in may but putting that aside i think biden's speech was very welcome in that he called for states to drop all of these crazy eligibility requirements are actually preventing people from getting vaccinated at this point he says that every adult american should be able to get a dose by may 1st and he's right and you know there's a sharp contrast with gavin newsom in california who keeps playing political games with the administration of these doses so in california yesterday just yesterday we added 250 000 more doses of unused uh inventory so we the amount grew to 4.5 million unused doses sitting on a shelf only 215 000 people got vaccinated so we're actually building

inventory faster than we're building the population of people getting vaccinated and it's because of all these crazy rules and requirements you have to go make an appointment you know and that really actually it's counterproductive because it discriminates against people who are less computer savvy don't know how to navigate the website or you know communities who don't want to enter their name in a government database which you know there's a lot of people in california don't want to you know put put their names in a government database and so it works against those communities getting vaccinated at this point we should just drop all the requirements drop the website let anyone who wants a vaccine just get in line and get vaccinated it'll go much faster the problem is that we we throw around this word equity and that we need to do something with equity and in fact i think that people who use that word are stupid i think what they're trying to say actually is we don't want inequity and the most inequitable thing

is to actually take the most impoverished and fragile of the population and prevent them from actually getting the vaccine because they're the ones that actually need to be working and can't afford to actually not work or can't afford to be sick or can't afford to you know um find solutions to child care um it's this weird word that like you know the extreme left uses now to describe policies that are just frankly poorly thought out and even more poorly executed it might even be more pernicious than that correct freeburg in that anybody who gets a shot is helping everybody else because they are now a blocker in the system i know this is incredibly simplistic

but i'm a simplistic guy and it just seems to me it's a different way of thinking about the benefit of vaccination and i've said it in the past but the benefit of vaccination is to get enough people vaccinated that the virus generally stops spreading and then the pandemic ends and that's the objective it's not about creating equitable protection for individuals and as americans it's interesting we think about it in terms of an individual benefit it's like how much do i get what do i get from this vaccine i want to get protected the other guy's getting protected before me who gets to go first yada yada becomes this kind of competitive you know frothing for a vaccination and the reality is if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough the pandemic ends if we can get 200 million shots in arms this goes back to i think this tweet i

sent in in early january december if we get 200 million shots in arms we can be done with the pandemic based on you know how many the efficacy of transmission rate um reduction uh combined with the fact that a certain number of people have already developed immunity to this thing we get to the point that there should be kind of a you know think about a network and you start turning nodes off the network suddenly becomes really hard to see transmission happen across the network and um and so the prioritization of you know who gets the vaccine over you know how fast we are deploying the vaccine has been a critical error from day one in my opinion um now look all that being said um i feel like we could sit here and criticize and argue about tactics and strategy all day long about this and you know make politicians look like idiots and

administrators look like idiots but the truth is we are now seeing three million shots a day inviting speech he said which if you'll remember is what i said we really should be targeting is about one percent of the population every day and that's roughly where we are biden said in his speech that we are on a war footing which is effectively what we said the other day the federal government is operating 600 mass vac sites and we are right now getting shots in arms for all of the issues with prioritization and nonsense that's going on i feel very in the united states i agree with you i agree that biden has the correct posture on this which is warfooting we are not doing that in california i mean i just talked about how we're building inventories faster than we're getting vaccines administered newsom just announced that 40 of the vaccines are

now going to be basically separated out and reserved for equity zones and you know it's what does that even mean it means that certain communities uh only people in certain communities can get those vaccines and they're going to be distributed out through this complicated system of local community groups all that does is put money through some no-bid contract to some shitty technical company uh a bunch of consultants that then take advantage of the system get paid hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to to do nothing i mean right exactly i tweeted out there's this bot that now scrapes and and by the way before i tweeted out this thing about this bot which is i think uh yeah i sent it to you it's it's the california vaccines available bot

exactly and all it does is it it's it scrapes that my turn.ca website but before that in our group chat there was another friend of ours who wrote his own scraper if you guys remember and it was really shocking because all it would show is page after page after page of completely open and available vaccine vaccine slots you know at the moscone center and other places and you think all of this stuff is just a bunch of i'll be blunt uh rich white people sitting in a room with their head up their ass and they come up with these stupid [ __ ] rules and then they try to implement them with words like equity and all that happens is that you compound inequality and let's go back to freeberg's first point which is that all these unvaccinated people who can't get vaccinated faster become a giant petri dish for the virus to continue spreading and

experimenting on morphine and morphing so maybe we actually do get a vaccine resistant strain the new strains the variants have been popping up so far are not vaccine resistant but the longer the pandemic goes on the longer there's a chance that one could arise and then we're back to square one on this thing so it's going to hurt everybody um and and here's the crazy thing is that you know i think we all know a lot of people i know dozens of people who've been vaccinated in california and they all come to me and tell me they're whispering about it you know because they don't want to but tell anyone they're not scared of being canceled they're scared of being canceled because you know newsom and and the equity people have created this idea that if you get a vaccine you're taking away from somebody else in reality you're not because anybody who's high risk has already gotten the

vaccine by now or has had access to get the vaccine and all you're doing right now if you get the vaccine is taking a dose off the shelf where there's 4.5 million doses sitting there and it's increasing by millions every week and so what we need to do is well let me make a psa actually starting on monday uh you could anyone in california can get the vaccine with a doctor's note and they're saying that doctors have total discretion to give the note so let me just make a psa to everyone out there if you're in california just go get a doctor's note starting on monday and go get the vaccine yeah you know stop stop worrying about knew some stupid rules let's also just be remember so two points on that not everyone has the ability to go just get a doctor's note it's really hard for people that have to go to public clinics and so on to get a doctor's note um what we are seeing is a lot of people just hacking the website almost like soviet union era

breadlines where they go to the website they type in something that's not true to get themselves a slot and that's how a lot of people are kind of filling the void the reality is i just want to go back to the point i was making at the beginning i think we're skating out of this thing and i think that the inventory surplus which is absolutely being built up at a staggering rate in the united states right now if you look at the inventory forecast from j j pfizer and moderna relative to the deployment rate of the vaccines right now you are correct we are building up a surplus an inventory surplus and the rate of build up per day is increasing right now so one million extra shots a day two million extra shots a day being yeah probably i think it's a million to a million and so we're building up an inventory and so on on top of the 30 million we have we have already an inventory so so what's happening is there are natural market dynamics where we are all pointing

out and saying is starting to play out in terms of people kind of hacking the system there's so much supply there are many vac sites now you can go to any supermarket any pharmacy in california to get a shot and everyone's just clicking the box and saying yes i qualify and they're going in and getting shots so the market demand is starting to meet the supply even though there are government and regulatory forces that are trying to inhibit that from taking place and so i do feel pretty good when you look at kind of the inventory forecast and you look at how many shots have been given per day that in 45 days or so we're going to get to a point that we're starting to skate out of this thing and kind of call it let me ask you can i ask you a question despite the idiocy of the process that regulators have kind of put in place yeah free brick i just have a quick science question because i i was trying to find the answer to this but i i would love for you to tell us what is the real efficacy of the vaccine and what is your transmittability like your your

carrier status once you've gotten for example like you know let's just say you take the the pfizer vaccine right yeah if you get the pfizer vaccine how many days until this is like pretty good and you know like what is really the risk profile between the first shot and the second shot i'll share this link and then we can post it on the um on the on the show notes and people can take a look at it but it's an excellent paper published in the new england journal of medicine showing basically a population of unvaccinated against pfizer vaccinated with half a million in each population half a million people yeah and um yeah and they showed basically the accumulated infection rate severe hospitalization rate and death rate of each of the two populations over

time and that really kind of i think highlights the efficacy of the vaccines and at what time period they become efficacious on each of those metrics and by the way even after the first dose across a population of half a million people the margin of error on death um shows that there may even be complete protection against death after the first dose of the pfizer vaccine within seven days of getting that shot pretty powerful statistic what just to describe the chart for those people listening you have two populations and one's in blue one's in red and it's the time is you know in days on the bottom axis and when you get to day eight one line goes sideways and the other one goes keeps going straight up so it's day eight after the pfizer

that you're basically protected according to this chart um and that's on the first shot and like i think it adds like one or two cases yeah that's right there have been zero deaths so i think day eight is the day and the second dose seems like to me you know it's just this unbelievable extra another amazing chart which maybe we can dump in the show notes is what's happening in san francisco we hit 10 000 shots a day at the end of february march 1st we're doing now 2 000 shots a day so we literally have dropped 70 percent or so we're at 3 000 shots i think from the peak yeah so this crazy wokeness is resulting in you know in this this virtue signaling that you know oh we can't give any shots to anybody unless we get this group first or that group first is now leading to everybody hacking the system the hack that i've heard is since teachers are getting it child care

people and food service people are getting it people are now starting to get jobs at doordash or saying they're a teacher and if you check that box according to you know the back channel that i've heard you go get the shot and you don't get they don't ask you for anything they're no one's checking it's just a driver's license the pharmacies the grocery stores the mass fax sites the sfdph california dph administered sites the federal sites no one's checking you sign up you check a box on the website it says i attest that this is true and then you go and show your id and get your shot and so a lot of people have kind of initially started skirting around the rules by going to be a door dash driver for a day or what have you and then saying i'm a food and ag worker and then now generally people i think are just

clicking on the box and going in and getting a shot now the sorry the just to go back on the previous question champ i shared it figure 2 nick in this paper i shared particularly box e shows the deaths due to covet 19 of a vaccinated population a non-vaccinated population and then it shows documented stars cov2 infection and you'll see that you basically have almost no incremental infections in the vaccinated population starting around 28 days after your first dose and so you know that's really when you could say you've got you know really good kind of protection from the vaccine and you're already starting to get the benefits early on antibody studies have also shown that there's this big jump up that happens around that period of time um and so call it three weeks after your first shot and then in particular the fourth week uh you're really kind of like locked in with a a protective um you know capacity now your question around transmissibility is one that's still being studied which is if i've

got a vaccine am i going to be able to pick up the virus and transmit it to someone else right now you know they're saying well we don't have evidence one way or the other but i mean generally the way that the virus is spread is you develop an infection in your body your body then makes lots of copies of the virus and then you cough and spit them out in the air and that's how people get it so theoretically you could carry some virus on your mouth or on your nose where those cells don't have immune protectiveness and you know the vaccine the virus is still alive but it's not spreading in your body you're not creating a lot of superfluous virus to spread in the world so you know the basic science of it is you should not be spreading covid if you've been vaccinated right i mean you may have some on your skin or in your nose or something for a short period of time but you're not going to develop a systemic infection that you're then going to

kind of start exerting everywhere um so i think we should we should we should start to transition to this world of feeling really good and safe and enjoying ourselves yeah we hit 500 000 shots a day sacks in california and now we're down to 150 000. we've literally gone down two thirds under the management yeah of governor hair joe it's yeah i mean because because you know and and what was his in his state of this the state speech which went over like a lead balloon the the most notable quote was we're not going back to normal normal is never good enough normal accepts inequity so because there might be some inequity in the world around the wrong person in

line getting these doses we're never going back to normal and he's basically ensuring that result by taking forever with these vaccines but let me let me um let me go back to to this point about efficacy so i think freeberg gave the stats on look the bottom line here is that vaccines work that is the message we should be getting out to people is that they work and the thing i've been really surprised by in the reactions that i'm seeing to my own tweets on twitter about this is how loud the anti-vaxxed voices are and how loud and sort of when you say anti-vaxx you you don't mean not take the vaccine you mean the vaccine doesn't work and we're never getting rid of kovid the forever people yeah well there's no it's there's there's actually a lot of people on twitter who got really angry when i when i just tweeted um i tweeted something about how it's so

it's over i tweeted it's over you know um right biden says we can all get the vaccine um in may if if you decide not to do it that's on you the rest of us are moving on and i got a lot of all i was really saying is look once the vaccine's available there's no need for any of these covert restrictions anymore but a lot of people interpreted that as me saying something that you should be forced to get the the vaccine or something like that now look i don't think you should be forced to get it but i think it's highly effective it works and uh but i'm surprised at how loud these sort of anti-vax voices are it's usually like a conspiracy theory around around the vaccine and and i think part of the reason why those voices are are so loud is because they're

unopposed because all the people who believe in the vaccine are getting it but they're all afraid of like like you were saying jacal of being cancelled and so there's a conspiracy of silence around this you know what we all need to be saying is look go get vaccinated it works take the win america take the win we screwed this thing up for 14 months can we just take the goddamn win i'll give you a little thing that that always pops into my mind in all of these things whenever i hear some politician or some like naval gazing intellectual use the word inequity i think like this is a power grab because the word equity is really about ownership whereas the word equality is about balance right and and power hungry politicians love the word equity and

inequity because it's their opportunity to grab power and to tell us how things should be done or to do things differently in a way where you know they can enforce their mandate which is typically ill-formed and not very smart um and i would just encourage all of us whenever you hear the word equity or inequity this huge huge red light should be going up and you're at saying whatever this person says next is a crock of horseshit and it's probably a power grab whereas if you hear people really talking about solving inequality there's really no mechanism to solve inequality through power well i think that's a great point around the language that gets used and i have a similar

uh concern about the way that the word privilege gets used we used to have a term in this country called success yeah people were successful or not and you know success had a connotation of being earned whereas privilege has a connotation of being unearned well i mean now sometimes privilege is earned success and sometimes it's unearned and you know but but when you start using the word privilege to describe all success it implies that there's something you know unjust or unearned about it and it needs to be reallocated so you know i that to me is another one of these political words is we shouldn't be confusing success with privilege yeah they're two very different things i have an example of this oprah winfrey is successful prince henry is has privilege his privilege his privilege i shoehorned the uh meghan markle story finally i

mean i do want to talk about the meghan markle story actually at some point before the end of this podcast but before let's do it right now uh okay uh uh joe lonsdale actually also had a tweet um a pretty unapologetic set of tweets around you know the miscasting of this this concept of privilege and i thought it was really on point i really agreed with what he was saying and it's effectively what you're saying david it's like people right now i find are just so well not not people the people that take the time to wallow in twitter um mostly at least as i interact with them are just so bitter and i think that there is no um magnanimous happiness for other people's success anymore it i think i think like we

live in a culture now where everybody feels it is so zero-sum when it's not in fact zero-sum um and people just begrudge other people's success especially by the way when it's earned and the reason is because there's an entire generation of people of all different ages and you know but this this last five or ten years who tapped themselves out now some were legitimately prevented from success but there's a lot of people that bought into this narrative wow it's a whole conspiracy that's set up against me so i'm not even going to try and they are often the loudest and the most embittered absolutely and the reason is because you know everybody wakes up in their 40s and 50s and starts to rationalize their choices in their lives and what they really

feel deep down inside is oh my god i just let an entire decade go by of blaming other people yeah and i think there's a surprisingly large amount of that this ideology of victimization doesn't teach people the right things because you start to think that you know if you're wallowing in your oppression then you don't have agency over your own life you're blaming other people for not being successful not getting ahead when what you should be doing is focusing on working and improving your own life and getting ahead or also just redefining what happiness means happiness doesn't mean what that other person has and then saying because i don't have that i have nothing happiness is really like introspectively figuring out like what really makes you complete and i mean not to get too syrupy about it but it's like that's what we've also lost the script on so when you when you put all of these things together there's just a bunch of people that sit on the

sidelines they either are too scared to enter the arena or they don't want to enter the arena they don't want the failure that comes from it because they've grown up in a culture where you know they had the kindergarten soccer ball handed to them the gold star and everything they participation trophy um and now what we really need are people in the arena more than ever folks trying and it's okay and there's just not enough of them what instead is there's just a lot of people who just want to [ __ ] and complain and i think this is the backlash to the meghan markle interview is is that this miscasting that this is an extremely privileged person or you know harry and megan both are very privileged and but but i think what they're trying to do by making all these sort of accusations of racism against their own families they're trying to ground that privilege

in victim status and and this is the thing about privilege is privilege is a social concept it's got nothing to do with with success which is either earned or unearned and so the way that people get uh to maintain their privilege is that again they grounded in some sort of victimization um it creates these very perverse incentives my reaction to the meghan markle uh prince harry interview was the following i had a lot of um sympathy uh for um what she was saying um but on the other side i also thought you must have known what you were getting into on the way in and there was it was be now and look i'll say this as a canadian and a sri lankan so the queen and the monarchy is an increase like it's i can't describe to you guys because you're not part of the commonwealth but it is just a definitional definitional part

of who we are as we grow up and i don't know what the equivalent american construct is i guess there isn't one really um and so you know the monarchy is an incredibly important thing but we all know that it's this kind of like anachronistic thing that just kind of i don't look for us it's not [ __ ] like i mean like if you said to me despite all my [ __ ] and raging against the machine and society and blah blah and stature if if i could be invited to meet the queen i would be there in eight nanoseconds okay i think the equivalent is the presidency we we actually feel that way about the presidency like going to visit the president is a president the presidency is not an endowed kind of circumstance there's something about there's something about the queen my point is though we all know a that it's important it's a great symbol of of the commonwealth i'm very proud of all of that but we also know it's anachronistic and it doesn't make much sense and so what what do you uh what do you think

you were marrying into and i think you know my perspective was i felt bad for her i can't believe you know it got to the place where like people wouldn't get help for her when she was sick and you know and then they were questioning harry's or the the kids uh archie's a skin color i mean this is insanity like these people are stuck in the 1800s but then you realize they are actually stuck in the 1800s because they're not allowed to have a normal life they're not allowed to actually interact so you know are they at fault or they or is the system that creates these sort of like voyeuristic you know exotic animals in a zoo that we call the king the queen these princes is the system at fault i don't know i i was kind of like 50 50 on the interview but my perspective was

the monarchy is in a really tough spot over the next 30 or 40 years because again so now let me tell you where my belief is i'm kind of a little bummed by the whole thing the monarchy doesn't mean what it what what it used to be for me david what's what was more enthralling to you this week tucker versus taylor or the queen versus oprah and prince henry i didn't i didn't spend it i didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on either one i mean look i i if i were if i were harry i would probably do the same thing which is to basically leave look the first thing i did in my career was lee was quit the the firm right you know who wants to work for a firm um you know it's very tracked um so i don't blame him leaving going to california you know that's what we that's

what we all did right and he was being it's a very that's a very entrepreneurial american thing to do what i what i had a problem with was the way that they're attacking their own family because they're being paid seven million dollars to do this interview no no no hold on they were not it was the first question oprah asked and and they were very clear they were not getting paid now they did sign a hundred million who made the seven million though no oprah did harpo did oh well she's a genius yeah she's a genius no no let's see it again oprah oprah is our queen that's her queen of america right oprah is the queen she gets oprah figured out a way to get paid it's even worse it's even worse if they did the interview for free and didn't even get a piece of the back end so all they did was attack and besmirch their family uh for none of that and look i i i guess

my point is so why would they do it if it's not even about the money i mean it's about this idea of defining their privilege grounding it in victim status and i think there's something very fake and phony about that and i think that's why people had this uh reaction to it where frankly they were i don't think they're on the side of the royal family because it's it is outdated but i think the there was a lot of skepticism towards what harry and i had a little bit of a problem with the like live from our 15 million dollar montecito mansion no jason i mean that was that i know but they also have a 15 million dollar house next to oprah oh no it's public they put five million down and they took out a mortgage it's uh someone listed this whole thing no it's an honest question does the do the taxpayers of the uk fund the princess that's the whole point they went and did a deal with netflix and they started end of spotify and now they have a salary and they're making money like everybody else so i mean i'm not

i'm not i don't have an issue with any of that no i don't have an issue with that i thought the taxpayers were funded the lifestyle they do fund the lifestyle of the other princes right sure yeah so i mean that's the thing we talked about can we talk about something important yeah okay so a beeple sold for 69 million dollars i mean this week this one's crazy all the dumbest [ __ ] happened this week taylor laurence welcome to this week slaughtered on well yeah that's making dumb [ __ ] so i miss i miss tucker versus taylor but actually the the real uh the person who took on taylor that did a brilliant job was glenn greenwald yeah i don't know i don't know if you guys read his post but that was brilliant brilliant and basically what he said is that look you've got these classes of reporters out there who their job is to go out and they

they're like little hall monitors you know trying to bus people for whatever they might say in a clubhouse room not just public figures but private people too they're in the business of destroying lives and reputations you know that that's basically their business model but then the second anyone has any criticism for them they claim it's harassment which is just absolute nonsense the only person that was inoculated against social justice wokeness to write that article is glenn greenwald because he is you know he's gay he's got brown kids he lives in brazil you know with uh i mean it's it's fa it's like you get well irresistible force moving the immovable meeting the immovable object he he he's not completely immune because he was he was attacked you know and and people said pretty nasty things about him but yeah he definitely has some i think

greenwald is an unbelievable writer who calls it like he sees it um i don't agree with everything he says all the time um but you know he's right to call this stuff out there was another bunch of social justice nonsense this week as well this this poor guy had to like give out this crazy apology tweet because he said what happened wait what is that story okay this is the greatest okay there's a kiss i've been telling you jason i want you to exercise because i lost 20 pounds look at me i'm looking for something i wanted yeah i want both of you guys to exercise tell me about it by the way public service announcement covid vaccine ca is the bot so at covid vaccine vaccine it just tweets every five minutes a hundred different places you can go pretend to be a door dash driver and get a shot sorry i mean it's just a word vaccinated check a box

check box let's roll people don't let newsome take away your health yeah don't let newsome don't focus on equity yeah i mean while he's at like uh jason tell us about this uh tell us about this tweet thing what happened there's a kid named dom he's an entrepreneur he's building a company it's a good company it's funded by stripe you know it's raised hundreds of millions of dollars like good for this guy yeah but he likes to like you know he's kind of like trying to engage on twitter and he basically said i feel so much better and i'm performing at such a higher level since i got my diet and my exercise right i mean people who are not getting

their physical right are really underperforming at work it's such an opportunity or whatever and then you know the the large and in charge you know fat is beautiful you know contingent basically tried to cancel him sorry wait wait but did he say that you have to be skinny no he just said you will before if you're fat you're underperforming basically he didn't use the word fat but he said if you're not in shape you're underperforming at work which i said is there science behind this and yeah sure people showed me 100 studies that show if you lose weight you have better concentration and focus i mean it's pretty obvious but he did the cardinal sin as uh here here i'll read you the tweet an important lesson i learned well into my career if you are not physically fit and healthy then you are underperforming at work pretty basic probably not very controversial but

he did what david sacks always advises uh and the the the advice he gave to trump which is never apologize um and he apologized dom apologized and took the tweet down which then the mob really went after him and he said i screwed up and i'm extremely sorry i have recently spent a lot of energy focused on my fitness eating and sleep in my enthusiasm for my new fitness regime i posted a tweet that was meant to celebrate my new healthy lifestyle but that's not how i came across and i see now i don't understand if my original with all the problems that we have that need

fixing i mean this is what people were focused on this better but here's the exact here's the kicker of the apology this is something i really need to improve on and i will well no no i'm not making fun of him i just think it's sad what the hell is going on no but i mean don't apologize if you believe being healthier is you know good then you should say it and you know we'll let the chips well with it people can debate it but i mean can we have a debate about that because this is in the middle of a covid crisis when the top two vectors are age and obesity period if you're fat you die from coven that's that's how it works and you got both those problems

you're old and fat you guys didn't say stupid all right i'm doing good today all right today in uh all in nonsense apparently there's so much money in the system that an nft just sold for 69 million dollars after we talked about the previous one billy bought for six million dollars i don't know that he bought it for six million dollars but somebody bought one last week nft seem like a real thing it's reasonable to trade stuff but 69 million i think it's incredible i mean like like the then i saw the breakdown of like the number of bidders here let me actually just get this uh data up because i think you guys will find it really incredible my thesis on this or my theory rather is um that there are a bunch of people who have stakes in these crypto assets

and then they all premeditate decide to buy up these nfts to get the market started and then once it started like jason that's what other people do with art right you know this but i've been buying art for a decade plus and this is exactly how it works in the art market you know we go in there certain people will go and buy and then what the gallerist says is oh did you know that chamath just bought this piece or such and such a person bought this other piece and then all of a sudden the price spins up and then they feed into it i mean this is where you know an enormous amount of money has been made by gallerists over the last 20 or 30 years now it just happens in a different medium so the the bidding breakdown by the way of this nft is incredible 33 active bidders 91 of the bidders were new to christie's

55 came from the americas 27 percent of bidders were from europe and 18 were in asia the age breakdown is the most interesting six percent were gen z so 97 to 2012. 58 of bidders were millennials 19 born between 81 and 96. wow 33 gen xers and 3 baby boomers so this is really like a transitional change in you know basically deciding what's valuable and i don't think this i don't think this was any different than you know when you had this transition from you know sort of impressionist in the art world like if you moved from the body of work where you know these impressionist paintings were just going for high tens low hundreds of millions of dollars and i think it peaked around van gogh um and then you

know basically it went from there off of a cliff where you can basically give away impressionist paintings uh and everything went to contemporary and you know sort of like this post-modern stuff and that was a decisional change by boomers what is what does giveaway mean to you chamoth yeah you know tens of millions exactly so i think on the nft stuff and and people he's people as the artist there's two things going on right so one is on a technology level nfts non-fungible tokens there they are it's a legitimate technology for creating provenance on a blockchain you know if a piece of art basically gets put on a blockchain you have perfect provenance but that doesn't mean that all nfts are valuable in fact most of them won't be it's just a technology then you have the other thing that's

happening is on an art level what these sort of um these sort of prestige galleries and so on they're saying that people is now a major artist and there's and the reason someone becomes a major artist is because they usher in like an or become representative of some new wave of art like jamaat is saying you've got impressionism you've got modernism i mean the reason why jackson pollock sells for whatever 100 million dollars no no 300 to 600 okay it's because he represents an important wave in art and some of those waves fizzle out and they turn into ponzi schemes and some of them become real and people are speculating that this digital art will be a major wave and they're saying that beeple is the most important artist and they're kind of betting

on that now do i think it's gonna last um i don't know i mean hard to say you said no you said the key thing though the key feature of nfts which i think is amazing is that you can actually have ownership and provenance written into a blockchain now you take that abstraction you can apply to all kinds of surface areas and it makes a ton of sense any kind of other asset would make sense if you own a car if you own clothes if you own watches if you own wine what happens if you own a house now all of a sudden if you can prove ownership over this stuff not only can you trade it but you can also borrow against it and i think that that is a really interesting idea where once you financialize all of these physical assets that we own you do eliminate an enormous amount of inequality in the system because you can

actually get real transparent pricing like now could you yeah blockchains blockchains are a ledger right they're a perfect ledger system and so like everything every type of possession that relies on title should eventually be blockchained so art art's a good example you know i uh helped found a company back in 2017 called harbor which was a blockchaining uh real estate and ended up getting uh acquired so now wired or acquired no it got acquired don't worry we're going to make money we're going to make money as an lp i just wanted a clarification yeah no we're we're not going to make like stack type money but we'll make a little bit of money on that deal so don't worry um but but yeah look i think

i i think we're in the early early stages of this type of technology you're gonna see eventually blockchaining of every of every type of asset where title is important david i think that this is such an amazing idea because like if you think of all of the opaque lending markets where people can't get access to reasonable cost of capital and they own assets you know you end up in these crazy worlds where like if you look at the the housing crisis uh or the great financial crisis you know there was like so much crazy lending but behind that lending was like double triple mortgages it's happening right now in the car market all of that stuff doesn't necessarily need to exist because if you have clear provenance and the ability to price risk you just get you know people can borrow a reasonable amount of money at a reasonable rate and pay it back and you know you can trade assets you could sell assets it's a really big deal i think

i think um if you take a zoom out on the uh you know the notion of what an nft represents it's it doesn't feel too dissimilar from other um what i would argue is like non-productive assets like if you think about where one's capital goes where an individual puts their capital the first thing is kind of essentials right things you need like food and medicine and housing and clothing and whatnot and then you kind of enter into these kind of you know non-extend you know kind of discretionary spending for a consumer you know nice stuff nice clothes luxury goods things that are basically going to diminish then as you think about allocating the leftover capital you're either going to allocate your leftover capital into investable assets that are either productive or non-productive a productive asset is something you buy that you expect to return it produces some

value for you as you own it such as owning a home where you get the value of living in it or owning a car where you get the utility of driving around in it or owning a bond which issues a you know you know a coupon or a stock that's gonna you know generate cash flows at some point in the future theoretically um the non-productive assets are these assets that are just not designed to do that but they're a store of value that you expect at some point to realize some return um you know because someone else will pay a higher price to you for that non-productive asset this is like a piece of art or you know some piece of gold or something it's something that you kind of hold or you know more increasingly you know digital assets and it seems like the explosion in digital

assets is you know as jason pointed out at the beginning like as we've kind of moved to a highly kind of overvalued segment of productive assets those things that market is very frothy it's very difficult to kind of find productive assets that are worth putting capital into there's continually more interest in non-productive assets across the board because there's excess capital in the system and it turns out that when that happens there's enough of a market dynamic that emerges in non-productive assets it gives people a reason to put their capital in and expect to have a return on them in the future as soon as the market starts shrinking as soon as um you know you start having effects that are deflationary your money will pour out of that market in general that's always what happens with the art market and has for hundreds of years um and it's it's it's the digital means of of kind of realizing that same market transition that might might talk my question is do you get the rights i guess this is a dependent on

the terms that are set in the smart contract but in the case of the people if i were to buy for 69 million do i have the rights to it so that i can print t-shirts and sell hundred dollar t-shirts or can i create 10 000 that's more of these can i monetize it is what i'm asking that's a great great great question i i don't know but that's a fabulous question by the way because the alternative like as you pointed out the artist and and other folks have rights to art um even though the original painting is what's sold you know the original um uh master of a bruce springsteen song could be sold to a collector but the rights the rights on that track for reproducing it making money off it are owned by a publishing house so you can own that physical magnetic tape but not own the rights to exploit it and over time those rights fall away so if you think about what that

nft represents it represents that particular chain of electrons and you know this is this is these by these bits that represent this image um and it's not necessary to make a hundred more and then he could change one pixel theoretically or two pixels and he could go print a bunch of stuff and go not right not really because those images were ones that he had he he had this rhythm of creating like one a day i think for a very period and he contributed them all into this master right exactly so there's a this is a it's a one of one another interesting uh one of one that just happened was these uh performance artists or i guess like underground digital artists uh bought a banksy for 125 or 125 thousand dollars i get thousands and millions confused um

everybody well that's a that's a thing you want to use for this episode is hashtag cancel go ahead uh yeah good luck good luck anyways these four guys bought bought this banksy um for 125 000 they brought it to a warehouse in brooklyn they took a high-res image of it okay so they took a picture of it and they created a one of one nft right okay then they created a youtube video of them burning the original banksy so now all you had was the digital manifestation of this physical thing wait for it and then they sold it for three hundred and like fifty thousand dollars so they three x their money it's the most incredible story um i can find the link and i'll put it in the

show notes as well but it just shows you what's happening and then i also think last thing on nfts i saw that i think was like kings of leon just put out an album and it was like it's like 50 bucks for a song or something like that and it comes with like a bunch of uh interesting content so it's the beginning of something guys i just think that you need sort of like popular content to get this movement going but it seems to me like this is what people want to do they want to own digital assets they want to have provenance they want to have custodial relationships but that they want to basically but it's just like it's like art and posters right anyone can put the poster up in their room anyone can buy a copy for five bucks but who owns the original and owning the original may be visually identical maybe graphically identical but it is truly about that notion of that that theoretical human mind construct of ownership um that that creates that

distinction and you just effectively have to count on other human minds believing the same thing in the future for you to be able to reclaim that value that that monetary value um or you're going to take a loss on it i mean jamaat have you ever sold art that you've bought you know i've uh i've sold very little um i tend to buy and accumulate with this idea of eventually endowing something with just because it's like you know i think there are two ways to buy art one is speculatively and the other one is to tell a story um i took the second path um and so you know it's stuff that means a lot to me so it's hard for me to part with it even though it sits in a freeport in delaware so it's not exactly you know out and about um with this idea that at some points people will get to really enjoy it once by the way i mean one of the things that happens in the art world and correct me if i'm wrong on this but you buy this art and you don't ever a lot of art doesn't get resold so everyone kind of buys it under the notion that it's going to be worth more in the future and they can sell it for more but very few people actually do end up selling it no no no no

that's it so here's what's inside in the trading market right but like i mean generally like a lot of collectors end up endowing art or or uh gifting it and when you gift it you get an appraisal done and you get a deduction on the appraised value right and so you can definitely do it that way so uh one one interesting story is that um one of the large auction houses has a financial arm and uh the most incredible thing is like over like the last 50 years their cumulative default rate was 30 basis points on their book like cumulatively not like a year or a month but ever nobody defaults well because they borrow money for the purposes of maybe buying other things or whatever and then they will very you know trade out of things and trade up to things and trade across things but it's a very vibrant market of buying and selling it just happens to be very informal

and a little bit closed and very much for insiders and you know another reason that i think that nfts will will change because it'll will change this is that it just makes it available to everybody because you put all art on a very level playing field and really at the end of the day what is art it's a commentary on society and i think that having that level of transparency on that kind of stuff is i think is going to be really valuable because you don't want one or two people who you fundamentally disagree with as being a taste maker for a kind of art that you think is fundamentally flawed right you'd rather it's just it's no different than being able to go to 95 different media sites to read the content you want or you know being able to listen to a thousand different kinds of music all of it in its totality is a commentary on society and i think what society says is we want transparency and we want choice and this is where i think

like that's why i think there's a good a good dovetail into what's happening with the stimulus bill and where we started which was is this even necessary um we have uh stimulus checks going out in the amount of two thousand dollars per individual in households with under 150k i believe is um the income level which means people who were not impacted financially in any way by what's happened to under covid are going to get in a family of five ten thousand dollar checks uh even if nobody was laid off or that's only that's only like nine percent of the bill jason yeah i mean so it was 100 it was 450 million out of 1.9 trillion so what do we think the impact

we sort of have working theory oh sorry go ahead jason what are your general thoughts on this is it necessary and then two what's this what are the second order effects that we each predict will happen over the next 18 months when all of this capital gets injected so the latter is what i've been focused on trying to figure out and i saw some really interesting data which basically i'll ask you guys the question because maybe you guys know the answer but if you measure wealth inequality when do you guys think was the most recent period where there was the least wealth inequality the least well sorry how do you define that uh you can measure it like the ginny index or you can measure it as like you know the the gap between the top decile and the bottom decile in terms of uh wealth and accumulated assets well

would it be before the robber barons no it was the between the robber barons and now the period of the least inequality in recent history was in the late 70s which is an incredible stat to say where the gap between the top decide on the bottom decile was like you know kind of like on an index like 60 65 whereas today it's sort of like at 100. um now what happened then and it's this is really interesting wasn't that an inflationary period there you go so what happened and as it turns out inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease level of the playing field absolutely it decreases people's

richness so it makes rich people poorer that's really the most effective tool that you have to recalibrate it's very very hard to redistribute money and i think every attempt at doing that has largely failed but the one consistent way and if you go back periods before that you know into the beginning of the but in an inflationary environment borrowing costs go up so you know businesses and people that rely on borrowing to grow their net worth they're investing assets to grow their net worth kind of suffer more than people that what have a home have a you know weight wages go up in an inflationary environment right weights go up which actually if you think about like what you said before like you know as people get wealthier they they move

their money into you know essentially financial assets and away from sort of like working assets and when you know interest rates go up and the the risk-free rate goes up then the attractiveness of those assets go down yeah and so what happens is shares and technology companies go down but what i what actually also happens is that you your cost of capital for a traditional business because it's higher they have to then charge more which means that they're paying their employees more and those folks um on a marginal basis tend to then you know take those dollars and spend those dollars so inflation is this very productive mechanism of actually redistributing wealth and actually homeowners benefit homeowners benefit as well but like you know it shrinks it shrinks the wealth mild mild inflation mild inflation is probably good it's probably it's better than

probably deflation but if it tips over into hyperinflation then it destroys everyone's savings right and rich people have the ability to protect their assets against inflation a lot better than the middle class people do so you know you look at like venezuela we are germany hyper inflation yeah people just hyperinflation destroyed the value of of of uh where are we seeing inflation where do we anticipate we'll see inflation i saw today tesla's tesla raised the price on all their cars except for two well they have to because the inputs of you know if you think about like if you break down a tesla and you look at where the money goes the money really is in the batteries and if you break down the batteries it goes into three critical inputs lithium nickel and cobalt and the prices are highly suspect and um they're

they're very poorly predicted and so the cost of tests are going to go up by 20 or 30 percent and there's nothing that there's nothing that tesla can do and by the way you'll see this across all commodity products if inflation takes hold in a in a meaningful way um including uh you know food products ag products you know um all commodities you know metals but um the businesses that will benefit the most and this is really interesting from a technology perspective and i think it played in part my understanding is speaking to a number of pms about this portfolio managers at funds um is that you know technology companies don't have a lot of hard assets um and so they have less kind of you know value accretion and they don't play in a

commodity supply chain so it's much more difficult for a technology company to say raise rates by 30 whereas a food company can raise rates by 30 percent one of the ways to look at this is to look at the um you know the book value or the capex you know property plant and equipment of a business and businesses that have a lot of pp e are generally going to do better in an inflationary environment they're going to have more throughput on that ppe they're going to have higher dollars per unit of pp e um and so you'll see you know this is why there's a shift of dollars into what are traditionally called kind of value stocks or you know kind of bigger industrial companies away from you know software kind of tech companies which don't really really benefit from this inflationary trend um and so there's going to be you know some sort of play out in in those sorts of products probably more jay calvin

do we see it in sas because i've noticed that sas prices are going up and that people are just keep adding to the price of these sas products i was pricing out all the virtual conference you know stuff like hop in and all that air meet and whatever and i was just shocked at how much they wanted to charge you know 15 50 thousand dollars a year and i was like but can i use like zoom in this for that you know in a chat room slack room and are we gonna see it happen in sas where people are gonna start raising the prices and just increase their profit margin because their employees are gonna demand more money because they're part of this cycle i i think that's a function of pricing power uh going up for sas companies they become more established and

entrenched um those companies are very profitable i don't think they're experiencing wage pressure in any way um i think they're just becoming more successful their pricing power is going up as they become not necessarily monopolist but as they have more market share and they dominate their categories they can increase prices but i want to go back to this idea of the 1970s because i want to i want to challenge the idea that the us economy was doing well in the 1970s so chamath mentioned the the ginny index there was a different kind of metric called the misery index that was was a much more popular index that was used around that time and the misery index was

defined by a brookings economist and it was basically the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate and in 1980 the misery index was 19.7 percent this is why ronald reagan got elected is because you had a cpi which the inflation rate of 12.5 percent and then you had unemployment of another 7.2 percent on top of that and you know the 1970s were especially the late 70s were an economic disaster for the country so maybe things were more nominally equal but everyone was equally more equally poor and what you saw in the 1980s is that they got you know inflation under control uh paul volcker at the fed broke inflation that lowered interest rates enormously that allowed people to buy homes um the stock market went up

and um you know it was an economic boom so i don't know that this idea that we we want to introduce a lot of inflation into the system is a good idea like i said i think mild inflation of say two percent is better than two percent deflation the other way but uh but i think we should be very careful here about um about uh inflation and making sure it doesn't get out of control the other index to look at is the quality of life index which is typically you know health care um and then the property price to your income ratio commuting pollution uh safety and those kind of

things and you know the united states is 15th on that list with obviously the nordics and australia uh germany new zealand just being at the top of those rankings in america i've never really thought about that right we don't really even discuss happiness you know and that and that quotient we don't index for that happiness and low stress i think we're talking a lot about quality of life in san francisco now because that's a community that's very rich and yet it's a miserable city to live in because crime is out of control you know jason you and i have been to focusing on this uh d.a chasebudden who's had an enormous impact on people's quality of life because he's simply not prosecuting uh theft in the city there's actually is a crazy tweet

where a city council member was inside city hall calling for a hearing on the rampant rise and theft in the city and meanwhile his car was broken into right outside city hall i mean you can't make this stuff up and then the other thing that came out were a whole series of statistics about crime in san francisco showing or sorry trials and convictions basically chaisa has not been uh has not been conducting any trials he hasn't been convicting anyone it turns out that the number of trials and convictions that he's gotten in the 14 months he's been d.a is one-tenth of what gascone got when he was da and by the way gascon's not the model d.a or anything i mean gascone is facing a

recall in la for delection of duty and he's still 10 times more productive than chase boudin um just a quick update many of you when i mentioned the gofundme for to put a journalist on chessa if you just type in gofundme chessa c-h-e-s-a into the google we added eight thousand dollars since last week so we have fifty eight thousand dollars that's going to a journalist and a data journalist to cover this exact issue uh so thanks to the folks who donated i'm not taking any money from it i'm donating obviously um other than a small other than a small finder's fee no zero dollars i'm donating to it i basically said i'll be one percent of it whatever the final

number is i think the marina times has done a great job with this um yeah and there have been a couple other sources as well but but how dishonest was it i mean this has been a recurring theme on the pods i just want to touch on it chase has sent his little mouthpiece his little minion the high school friend to go out and challenge us writing that blog post saying that it was a lie that chase that wasn't prosecuting anybody and lo and behold the numbers have come out he tried to claim that uh chasa had the same rate of charging that ghost gascone did and that was true but the problem is he's been pleading down all these charges he's not taking anyone to trial he's not convicting anyone he's certainly not locking anybody up so i mean what what a lie that was well and criminals are just so savvy that they actually understand what the chances are of them actually getting convicted and they shape their grift and their crime to whatever the environment they're in is just like

people who deal drugs just like people who take these hardcore fentanyl drugs they just pick the market where they're going to be most welcome so they're not going to do it down in palo alto or san mateo or mill valley they're going to do it on turkey street yeah so so i think that's how it starts but i got to tell you you know i'm in la right now and um there was a an episode like last week at um il pistai but like oh yes and uh it's it's on canon street and downtown beverly hills number one italian place that's where all the celebrities go it's a great italian place there's a lot of outdoor seating there was basically um a mugging of someone was just sitting at a table apparently they were wearing a really nice watch and some and they were they were robbed at gunpoint in the middle you know in the middle of the of the rest time yeah lunchtime

and then there was a struggle over the gun i don't know why the guy just didn't hand over the watch but anyway he struggled over the gun four shots went off one of them bounced off the concrete and hit a woman in the leg oh my god so this is like crazy it's getting i mean it's getting out of here sounds like san paulo where they chop people's arms off for the watch i mean they literally will drive by apparently and just cut your arm off if they can't if you don't give them the watch well i just you know the criminals are starting to feel emboldened because gascone and boudin are not they're not having trials they're not prosecuting they're not locking people up and so they're graduating to more and more serious offenses i'm sure they probably didn't want to shoot anybody or maybe that wasn't their intention they just want to steal the watch but it resulted in a shooting just like the deaths of hannah abbey and elizabeth platt when you had you know troy mcallister you know hit them with the car so i mean the fact that we're not locking people up

is resulting in in in people dying and a lot of risky very risky behavior all right as we wrap here a lot of spacks going out we obviously saw um another i guess roblox was a direct listing um i'm just curious only only under price by 50 it's the same same problem as the ipo so basically what you're saying is bill gurley's on his headset walking around el camino real house what i'm calling journalists what i'm saying is uh irrespective of what the the goals of the direct listing were the result is the same as a traditional ipa there you go um well can i give a shout out to you to a company that david sacks um sure oh pipe yes

congrats which is a an incredible company that basically like helps you capitalize your contracts with your customers and it's just it's just basically this incredible thing that i'm seeing and it's and there's a couple of others that do it as well um clearbank is another one but you can fund your company non-dilutively and at some point i think we should actually talk about the state of the union adventure maybe we can do that in a couple of next episodes i have a lot of thoughts on where i think venture capital is going and when i see things like pipe i'm just like completely so happy because i just think it it's uh it's it's com it's gonna change the the the way in which venture investing is done it's a it's a very brilliant idea you can go to pipe.com twist to get 12 months free um pipe.com is a two-sided marketplace if you have reoccurring

sas revenue or any kind of reoccurring revenue somebody did it with the sub stack so i think pomp liano the guy who pumps uh bitcoin he has a newsletter that makes whatever quarter million dollars a year um he sold for 95 cents on the dollar his forward looking subscriptions for the year and bought bitcoin with it when it was at 35. so he's like doubling down but if you're a sas company and we have many of them in our portfolios you could take all of your monthly contracts sell them on the marketplace to somebody else not pipe pipe doesn't buy it it's some other financial person who says i'll give you 94 cents on the dollar give you 92 cents on the dollar i'll give you 85 cents on the dollar and so if you were if you have a 10 million book of business paying monthly you can get

that 10 million now and deploy it but jason i think more customers i think this is a good this is a good maybe way to end but i think let's agree that the next pod let's talk let's start with the future venture capital 100 i mean it's changing dramatically it's changing dramatically and i i think these non-dilutive ways of growing a company will completely impact pricing you know pre money post money the amount of equity that employees can and should own in these businesses you know what is the value of brands like you know it like people will know who david sachs is and who harry hurst is people necessarily don't even care anymore like you know hey if i'm calling from sequoia what does that mean anymore um they're going to say who from sequoyah is calling so these are all really interesting topics that i think are worth talking about another path is just the public markets you know right i mean public markets are becoming the new late stage private

market and it's really you know both the spac and early stage ipo and direct listing models are are changing dramatically and it's um and there's more speculative risk seeking in the public markets in a way that i don't think we've ever seen um and it's uh it's creating an opportunity for companies that are still you know what in a traditional um kind of sense might be called you know early stage or still businesses a lot of risk being able to go public and and you know kind of take their companies out and let the public markets wager on on how well they're going to execute and and how well they're going to be able to develop their product or their market um and it's by the way it's something we've seen historically with biotech where there's

kind of very binary kind of bets that happen and binary outcomes because the markets are known and you don't need to kind of productize or build a business around it but now we're actually taking both business risk market risk technology risk product risk um public markets at all stages and i think you're going to see these um these scenarios where people will build public portfolios public business public company portfolios that will perform a lot like venture portfolios right you'll have one or two businesses that'll have a 10 bagger and you know a chunk that will go to zero and a chunk that'll have some modest return on them and it's going to be yeah it's going to be this tremendous learning experience because a lot of people will put all their money into one stock that they think has already been made it's already it's already done things it's netflix it's netflix it's you know their promise of the future is 100 certain

and the reality is their promise of the future is five percent certain and so depending on the price you're entering and how many of these things you buy you could build a portfolio that could have a good return but it's um it's going to be a lot of speculative betting and a lot of losses and if you don't diversify you're going to lose a lot of money and you know so the question is also how does it evolve regulatory wise chamath how are you communicating that to the market because you'll have some spacks that go out i would think virgin galactic is in that more like they're a deep tech researching phase and then you have other ones that are already you know churning the the ringing the register right so how do you communicate that to retail investors or the

audience or that's up to them to do the research how do you think about that i mean there's as well as the bad inventory that's getting added no look yeah i do a tweet storm i do a one-pager i have a multi-hour detailed investor presentation that's taped and then we have a typically a 100 to 300 page s4 so you can ingress into finding out the true story of a business at whatever point you want it really just does come down to doing your work i mean a lot of the folks on twitter you know when you see the market straight down and they complain my reaction is stop crying and do your own work um and there's like we have complete transparency in this process so it is up to people to do their job and the the thing that i think is happening right now is people think that they don't have to do a job and that money is free and it's not it's hard to make it it's

hard to make good investments it's hard to build a company everything is hard nothing is really easy because if it was easy everybody would be doing it all the time and so that's that's what i would love to leave people with i really gotta go guys i love you guys all right let's let's start with venture capital next week yeah love you boys free davids love you love you davidson oh my i mean we love each other and we can say it and then the guys on this side love you they're working on it like look at jake out dragging it out stop dragging everything out we're dragging it out because we love you david we'll see you all next time bye bye red bread pills got me lit red pills got me lit red pills got me lit red pills got me lit red pills got i've been on a bender on these red pills but i've been on a bender on these red pills i'm ready to go more i need more red pills what a joke get me those red pills from miami

um i'm ready to go all right anybody give a [ __ ] about nfts i've been on