E51: Supply Chain Shortages, Inflation, DeSantis, Ted Sarandos Netflix Memo, Cancel Culture, Fan Q&A

yesterday the game went off the chain it was it's we started off at 500 and a thousand and then we were like ah these 500 chips are so annoying then we started to play a thousand a thousand then it was a thousand two thousand that said one thousand two thousand four thousand then one two four eight then one two four eight sixteen one two four eight sixteen thirty two thousand coming around oh my god how much lose what was the big winner and big loser how much i'm not gonna say just tell us how much out eight hundred i put at minus eight hundred minus seven don't don't say these [ __ ] names bro how'd you do i didn't okay oh oh oh okay you can tell that your mouth lost because when you ask him how'd you do and it's like just he goes from the

super effusive talking about the game to just like one word fine okay fine okay how was your night he's like look i [ __ ] 42 million dollars for breakfast it was fine here we go three two three [Music] [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in podcast 50 episodes down and uh yeah we'll definitely get three or four more in before the band breaks up uh with us today again uh from an undisclosed location david sacks the rain man himself chamoth paulie hapatia the dictator and the queen of quinoa david friedberg how's everybody doing how's everybody feeling how's everybody's week going really great yours just just great awesome i uh i i feel really good i um i feel

super grateful oh really your poker game last night yeah the stock market's up today it feels great it's been a good week it's been a good week i feel so much equanimity mark is up four percent uh freeburg how are you doing my wife went to the um hospital three times this week all three times thinking she was in labor hey um are you how how did i i mean we're we're two centimeters dilated we're still waiting here i mean we are there too and we're just waiting any day like literally any hour um so we were we get action on this can we can we bet who's gonna come first or i think i think fredberg's gonna come first because it's his third it's the only it's allison's third it's not second yeah yeah so we can lay odds two to one what do we get i'll i'll take the over under on what day is it today today is the 15th we're getting induced on the

26th that's 11 days or not i'll take the over under on the i think you'll render on uh the 21st that you're setting the line i'll set the line at the 21st of october i'm going over i'll go over for that this is for nat book it okay yeah for now yeah under what do you got sacks over under on the uh 21st 26 is the expected date where are we betting on we're pretending that pay attention when analysis children are born and when their children are trying to get action aren't you guys a little too old having kids i mean are you even going to see them graduate exactly you got a vasectomy i mean some of us are a whole bar mitzvah younger than you exactly so you snipped i would if anybody was snipped i would

guess it would be saks are you are you snippy snippy is this the type of vital information you think the audience wants to know yeah i think they do actually i think that's a yes i think he's been snipped chamoth is definitely not stamped nope you can you can burn's nuts you want to come over here and uh inspect that conduction inspection i don't think i don't think you can visually understand that let's let's it's not visually understandable yeah freeberg's definitely not snipped as proven by his wife being pregnant i don't think you say snip bro i think you should say vasectomy you know ah i'm just you know i think you say snip snip i think stocks has been snipped that's actually a good bet we could book it on sex being snipped okay listen a lot of

topics to get to i think we were trying to get to this topic last week uh there's been a supply chain uh interruption right now there's some shortages obviously of key components like microchips we all know this according to car and driver the top three models impacted by the chip shortage where the ford f-series pickup trucks cheap cherokee suvs and the chevy equinox suvs basically a lot of the cars uh that have advanced driving systems are now removing them i was looking at getting an suv for the winner and i was looking at the cadillac escalade and they took self-driving out of the 2022 model or the autopilot basically because they can't get the chips um and we all know why this is

happening obviously covid uh and then also on top of it demand so people are buying second computers third computers places like dell are having an apple are selling a lot of desktops a lot of laptops and there's also a labor shortage so the labor force obviously here in the united states is much smaller than it was uh we all know that people are raising salaries to try to get people to come back to work they're turning off the bonus unemployment uh early in some states we're here in october this is all supposed to be turned off by now so i guess i'll start with you chamoth in terms of uh the markets here uh what do you think is happening and is this an acute risk or just something that will pass i think the well this is where i think i kind of generally disagree with the market i think that most people

are under the impression that these are short-term um kind of contractions and expansions and that this is just a thing that needs to get worked through the system as we readjust to a post covet world blah blah i think it's different and the reason i think it's different is if you just look at one thing and one thing only which is that we have a massive labor shortage in america and there is an incredible stat that i saw which was the average hourly earnings of non-manager people in hospitality and travel and the average salary the mean salary was around 20 some odd dollars an hour and it's now 33 bucks an hour and so what that to me says is that we are going through a really sustained period where you cannot get people to do the work that needs to get done

biden had to call the port of la and try to get these guys to be open 24 hours a day the president of the united states is calling a local port trying to get it to stay open but why can't they stay open because you have long sherman you have all these unionized folks who will expect to get certain levels of compensation which they deserve in order to do that work 24 7 but then all of that is going to get put through the system and if you still have millions of jobs that needs to get done in order for the economy to function the only efficient way that that's going to get resolved is by raising salaries and those are consistent and persistent

those things are not just like oh you know what i gave yes i did say 50 bucks an hour but now i'm taking you back yeah you can't take that back that's going to be that's so and then so i tend to so that that's one thing and then second so there's people right so labor capital i just think it's getting more and more expensive to get folks to do work and then there's the raw materials that you use to make anything and everything that i see is that stuff is going bananas and so i put these two things together and i'm like i think this stuff is here to stay i'm really kind of a little bit of a you know and i and i had not worried and you you can see in every episode before this i was always consistently like

there is no inflation you can fade the inflation trade now i'm kind of positioning myself to uh hedge myself in this situation all right freeberg uh we've seen the pictures uh on of the long beach uh and the los angeles uh ports there's just ships out there like i think 70 or 80 is where it peaked at uh in july i don't know have the latest data here of when it updated um but is there not a silver lining here that if people are making more money then we're gonna increase the size of the middle class and we're gonna ex you know increase upward mobility and that it is a double-edged story it's great that we increase the middle class but then they're going to want to buy stuff so people are now making 35 bucks an hour and they were making 20. now

they got more disposable now they're going to go on amazon and buy more stuff and it's going to accelerate this problem is it not the challenge is the rate of change this is what the fed tries to manage and you know there's a white house economic advisory committee that's involved in trying to figure out what's going to happen here because the current estimate is it's going to take at least a year or probably a year to work through the current log jam and the global supply chains and during that period of time as chemical points out what's happening is the cost for goods is climbing because people have to charge more because there's limited inventory and people are bidding up the the value of that inventory as they do that the businesses um end up needing to get more labor and so they have to pay more to hire people if they pay more to hire people those people end up demanding more and the cycle can

actually go the wrong direction where you have an inflationary spike that persists how do you taper that inflation it's not necessarily great for economic growth if you can't produce the stuff and it can actually cause these runaway kind of effects in the dynamic system of supply and demand when you have these these these things clogging up the the system for supply so um so so it is a real risk and it is the biggest thing that um you know the white house this economic task force is kind of trying to figure out right now is where's the balance lie where you can um you know basically try and taper this inflationary effect that's being caused by this log jam in the supply chain without causing economic disruption by rising it by raising interest rates

um and so it's a really uh kind of complicated you know second and third derivative formula that needs to kind of be resolved and that's why so many of these little elements are so important to get right by the way rates by the way central bankers around the world have raised rates the only place that hasn't gone up is europe ecb and the united states of federal reserve so and let's be honest you know europe and the united states we absorb labor and materials from all around the world right we are the net importers we are the net ultimate buyers of last resort of all of these things and so if you're seeing inflation in those other you know supply-driven economies they are going to come on shore they're going to hit us in the face i think prices are going up the other the other free market argument

that could be made is that these um these current trends will accelerate a trend towards more automation of uh low-cost labor because it now will make sense for businesses to invest in the capital in the capex um in the infrastructure and ultimately for technology companies to build that that tooling uh to support that infrastructure that will automate jobs like working in fast food like doing local delivery like doing factory assembly um like moving things across the country and trucks so self-driving trucks um uh you know factory automation biomanufacturing additive and 3d manufacturing and 3d printing these are all industries that could benefit from the fact that labor now for kind of you know traditionally low income work has gotten so expensive that it starts

to make sense to switch to the technology alternative which historically may have been too expensive but now starts to make economic sense to businesses this is and so there's a number of these automation industries that may significantly benefit and that ends up ultimately being deflationary and the market comes into balance so that's another way to kind of think about the macro on what may play out here there's a bigger risk here than just inflation i mean there's also a risk of of stagnation or stagflation because it's not just that prices are going up and workers wages are going up which could be a good thing but goods and services aren't being produced so i mean i know like my own experience i recently ordered a tesla when i got a tesla

a couple years ago like i got in two weeks it was like almost instant this time they wanted me to wait two months and it's got an alert that's going to take two more months beyond that so we have no idea and if if you know tesla doesn't get most the money i don't think until i actually take delivery of the car right that's when you make final payment so now they can't book that revenue and those earnings and tesla isn't even the car company that's most affected by this you know the big um you know traditional american auto companies like ford are even more affected so if companies cannot deliver their products you that can cause an economic recession and i think like these are major storm clouds looming on the horizon now what is the cause of

this i mean i think it's it's um it's multifactorial a lot of things that jamal said i just want to really highlight this port issue there was a great uh tweet storm by zach cantor earlier in the week where he said the supply chain crisis is a clever rebrand it makes it seem like there are grand exogenous forces at work rather than the unions holding ports for ransom while dozens of ships pile up working just two shifts with a two-hour break in between the country at their mercy uh and he goes on to elaborate on that and that is why they're allowed to do that but but to terma's point uh this is why biden felt the need to to get involved so um that the problem is if you read the fine print on this story of biden announcing that the ports of la and long beach will open 24 hours which they clearly need to to get the goods to

market if you read the like the bottom part of the story everyone's announcing their intention to go 24 7 but there is no date certain for when that's going to be it's a negotiation with the union so chemoth to your point they are going to have to negotiate with the unions um you know initially it looked like the story was that biden was going to use his sway his his clout with the unions to basically push them to take a deal but i don't think he's really done that everyone's just announcing their intention to negotiate well you know if the ports are holding the whole country hostage like this that could cause a recession i think that's gonna rebound i think they're running 24 7 now aren't they sad long beach and la are both running 24 7. well i just posted this article that came out um

i mean like yesterday and it says it was published uh two days ago and it said there was not a date certain for when this oh it's updated october 14th which is yesterday and if you read the bottom of the article it says they have not determined a date for when 24 7 operations will start they've just merely announced their intention oh yeah i'm just going to go 24 7. the biden administration says it's not really they announced it as if it was a done done look unless biden is willing to listen i mean chamathi writes that they're entitled to negotiate but here's the thing i mean they're holding the whole country hostage now they're holding the economy hostage so at a

certain point if their demands are unreasonable it's it's i think proper for the president united states to step in and say guys this is ridiculous you have to go back to work we're going to make you know we're going to help negotiate a deal here that's what reagan did with the air traffic controllers the air traffic controllers union shut down the whole commercial aviation system reagan got involved said you cannot shut down the account this way you must go back to work yes exactly so i think biden is probably going to have these longshoremen are or the ports i guess they're not striking they're just not doing an extra shift but he couldn't do it if they're doing two shifts if they're doing two shifts two hours a day that's like withholding

that's that's like a partial strike wait they're doing two two hour shifts or two exactly eight hours eight hour shifts they can't be doing two hour shifts for two hours read what zack canner posted he said that they're working just two shifts with a two hour break in between okay but those might be two eight hour shifts with the two hour break in between is how i read that no no he says read the the tweet here he says uh before any changes uh this coming week the longshore routine at the ports involved two shifts 8 am to 4 pm and 6 pm to 3 um an overnight shift to 5 hours is available but it is up to 50 more expensive and rarely used so basically

you're talking about yeah it's an 8 to 4 pm shift with a 2 hour break or 6 pm to 3 a.m so basically yes so it is um for that six hours that's two six hour shifts they should be running it like you know elon runs the tesla factories when they're building which is 24 hours a day overlapping shifts just getting off urgency here they're gonna have to pay them some reasonable overtime but they can't the unions can't hold the whole country hostage and look if biden unless buying steps in to solve this we will have a recession so it will oh this could be a recession i think it's bigger than just the ports i don't think reopening the ports is is the entirety of it i think there's a lot of other things going on i mean jake out

to a point you've made we had four million people drop out of the labor force last month i mean that was unbelievable so yeah the unemployment rate looks great but the number of people actually going to work is significantly lower i mean that was a huge shock to all the economists seeing that many people drop out there's still too many people who essentially are being paid not to work in one form or another and that is hurting the economy you also have this issue in in china which is very interesting this was i think covered in the new york times about how dependent chinese factories are on coal and uh which you know is a bad thing obviously that's not a clean energy source but because of restrictions on

coal it's actually started to impact manufacturing over there we can debate where that's a good thing or bad thing but it's contributing to the effect i suspect that china has woken up to this and they will they're not going to shut down their economy because of concerns about clean energy so i assume this is a very temporary decision um and then of course you have the whole issue of covet restrictions i mean there were a lot of international covert restrictions which wasn't just the us that where they were shutting down factories or creating you know a lot of rules that got in the way of keeping factories open um they were doing this internationally and there's a lot of regulations around seafaring as well because of coveted

restrictions so you have this pileup i would say of of regulations ultimately i'd say with covet as the origin that have now caused this um supply chain crisis and unless it gets fixed it could absolutely cause a 1970 style stagflation type recession next year tribata you buy that do you think we could have a this combination of people refusing to go to work or just opting out and saying like yeah it's even if you pay me 35 or 40 i'm just not interested i have enough no i don't have teas and i don't want to go back to work i i actually think that's exactly what it is there was this really interesting um tweet that i saw on twitter hopefully nick you can find it but it was some kid that basically said you know i'm growing up in atlanta and there's a

bunch of kids that i used to run with um you know who would otherwise be in the streets right causing all kinds of trouble and these kids are now at home like specking nfts and like you know posting on tick tock or whatever it's just a completely different reimagination of like labor and time spent and and that's just this very small example and so that maybe touches retail or maybe touches you know quick service restaurants but there's all these different things where now that at the end of this pandemic people are making very different decisions about their time and how to spend their money and again i'll tell you again there's a lot of people you got to remember how many people in the united

states have died or are dealing now with some reasonably important health issues at the back end of virus half a million people a million people i want you to keep in mind what i told you guys before there is 770 trillion dollars that has to get transferred down from all these baby boomers down to these people in their 20s 30s and 40s and don't think for a second that they're not making different optimization decisions around perceived wealth so i just think inflation is here i think the labor shortage is going to get worse not better i think we're gonna have to pay people more to get out of it i think prices are going up input costs are going up energy costs are going up um so this is it and i mean i think i think that probably the fed and the ecb are really raising this time

next year they're probably in a really really tighter posture what do you think freeburg we should also remember that there are going to be some responses from sorry free bird glassing tech stocks in the [ __ ] toilet why because no multiples no no but no no bueno for no cash flow growth stocks yeah yeah and rising everybody everyone's going to start buying yield when yucky poops wait let's explain this to the audience why freeburg why why um i mean once interest rates go up you'll see that dividend yields will go up which means stock prices go down because people will expect a higher return because if i can buy treasury bonds and make a few points of return on my money

and i'm going to have to buy a stock i'm going to want to i'm going to demand a few more points of dividend yield on that stock and so so so the price technic you know the price for stocks will typically go down to match the yield that you're going to get from these more growth free investments to be more precise a stock is either uh mature note about cash today or effectively a promissory note about cash in the future the thing with tech stocks is we tell everybody the same thing your money is going to come 30 years from now because we're going to be a monopoly by then and every dollar that i have today i'm going to reinvest into r d and engineering and in a in an environment where interest rates are zero you're happy to

do it because you're like well great these guys are investing at way better rates than zero which is what i get from you know my bank and so i want facebook and google and amazon and all these startups to be putting all this money in the ground on my behalf but when interest rates start going up they say no hold on a second i need more money up front less money in the future because the future becomes more uncertain and that's the big trade-off for tech companies where they get really pummeled okay well is there a number in terms of interesting there's a class of tech companies right like amazon sorry like microsoft oracle google where you are actually seeing an

apple you're getting dividends and you're getting share buybacks where the cash is coming out of the business and those are the mature businesses that also still happen to have growth attached to them and i don't see how portfolios are going to shed those assets um you're going to shed the more speculative hey you know we're not yet at a point of maturity we're still 2030 whatever yeah the guys that are investing and there's no kind of line of sight to true cash flow coming back to the shareholders but look at at the end of the day the point i was trying to make earlier was that um there is going to be a response right so we've seen remember when the pandemic kind of set in and everyone started ordering from home amazon rushed out and hired a

hundred thousand local delivery drivers they bought all these trucks and they built their own supply chain infrastructure for last mile delivery to get products to people's homes and we're now seeing on the other side walmart home depot target and other big retailers integrating their supply chain to get product into stores and so they're starting to buy trucks hire people pay them significant you know wages to be drivers on staff for them rather than contracting to these third parties that are saying oh we don't have any inventory we don't have any trucks we don't have any drivers we can't do anything for you now and so the response is think about it you're a product company you're tesla tesla just went out and did this massive deal

in caledonia to source you know some mineral that they need to make batteries or to make their uh their their cars i can't remember exactly what it was but you're you're increasingly going to see the businesses that have a balance sheet step up and actually start to integrate their supply chains rather than full stack more more resilient kind of this disparate set of service providers each of which is only kind of is all typically operating at max capacity and then they can't kind of respond to these sorts of jolts to the system and so we're going to see a lot of investment i think by businesses that make product or deliver product to the consumer as they try and integrate the supply chain problem themselves and that

may take some of the strain off the system and some of this inflationary risk out of the equation we'll see over the next couple of quarters but certainly in this last earnings report i saw some statistic a very large percentage of earnings reports spoke directly about supply chain disruption affecting the forecast for the business and the ability for the for the business to meet their forecast goals and that's just hurting everyone okay so they're gonna have to do something about it if they're resourced to do it right all right so saks though there are some silver linings here companies become more resilient uh they become more automated they build a full stack they build their own factories we're seeing

uh you know ty the taiwanese semiconductor company is doing a 7 billion project to build a new factory in japan funded by the japanese government so we're seeing a lot of redundancy redundancy and we're also seeing the middle class grow if people are making 35 bucks an hour 40 bucks an hour and they're getting health care and they're starting to have uh overtime and other concessions being made that builds the middle class it sounds like we're solving some problems uh as well as you know dealing with this i i guess what you call absolutely inflate looks and inflation is a good thing i know people think it's a it's like a really bad terrible thing there are certain kinds of inflation that are really productive we we have

had to find a way to fight the bad parts of technology technology's great nine you know nine out of ten things it's amazing efficiency you know uh all these great characteristics that it gives you but one crappy externality of technology is that it's deflationary you can do more with less and that's fundamentally not great for earnings it's not great for labor participation it's not great for all these things that people you know are really upset about today so it's great for the individual company getting those games i actually think it's kind of like it actually balances out the natural pace of of technology which is like you have the natural ability to just actually have cheaper faster better this

inherent efficiency that's building up on one side of the ledger but then what's great is on the other side of the ledger you actually have you know labor being able to balance it out and i think that that's a really good thing because they can demand more to do the rest of the work that's not covered by tech so that's important what are your thoughts about this expanding middle class isn't it a great thing that you know people are saying i'll stay home instead of making 12 bucks an hour it's an unfair wage it's not a livable wage and then all of these companies are saying you know what okay well they created so quick the big companies they went to 18 to 35 an hour instantly they always had the money to pay more they

just didn't need to increasing wages in real terms is a good thing i think you have to ask why the wages are going up is it going up because of increased productivity which is a good thing or is it going up because of inflation if it's going up in um if it's going up because of inflation then the wage gains are somewhat illusory because all the products that consumers want to buy are also going up in price all we've done is sort of is uh devalue the dollar so we have to we don't know yet whether these um but we do know that inflation is actually very high we don't know exactly if these uh wage gains are permanent or just a function of that um but let's go back to this inflation point for a second i

think this is actually really important we're at something like a 5.1 percent inflation rate it's just about the highest um since the late 70s early 80s now we have this threat of a supply chain crisis this is you know this is potentially right we have a supply chain crisis people can't sell cars right this is the recipe for stack 2.0 now the ques now i think there's an assumption that if inflation persists the fed will simply just fight it they'll increase interest rates somewhat and they'll control it but i actually think that the degrees of of action that the fed can take here might be more constrained than people think i just want to flag so one of the primary sources i use for the the national debt is this website fred.stlewisfed.org it's a good website that has a lot of charts by a branch of

the of the fed so they have this chart we've seen that federal debt as a percentage of gdp is at sort of all-time peacetime highs you know we're now we were at 100 for a few years and now because of covid we just rocketed up over 120 percent we're close to 140 now the argument by mostly liberal economists that the debt didn't matter was because the debt service remained very low on this debt so we had a huge increase in debt but because interest rates were so low uh the the the the debt service was still very very small and i think you know they have a good piece on this website about this as well that i'll

just post here in the notes but um i think i don't know if you guys remember back to um a pod we did in may where we talked about stanley druckenmiller came out swinging against the fed and he warned about this very situation i just want to like i want to just read this this article that we covered back i think in may it feels like an eternity ago but remember when we just talked about this what rocket miller warned is that if yields on the 10-year treasury rise the projected level of 4.9 which is simply the historical average the government spending would be close to 30 percent of gdp each year simply paying back interest expense compared to

two percent last year unless it monetizes the debt which experts think is unlikely and drunken miller released would have horrible implications for us dollar so in other words we now have this enormous debt the only reason why debt service payments aren't crowding out the entire federal budget is because we've had interest rates at historically abnormal lows zeros basically yeah so how exactly is the fed gonna fight inflation if they jack up interest rates to where they should be say 4.9 percent then the entire federal budget will be going to working against themselves right it's like you're the bank and taking the loan at the same time this is like somebody who gets a variable interest

mortgage and they get five 10 years into their mortgage and then all of a sudden they go from interest only and some low interest rate and then they have to pay market rate and they realize they can't afford the home we might not be able to afford the budget we're putting out there is what you're saying sacks well i'm saying the fed may not have the tools all the tools they want to fight inflation if it comes back or i mean it's going to be politically very unpopular i mean can you imagine the pressure the fed will be under not to raise rates if it means that all of these discretionary programs basically have to be cut that we have an austerity mode in the federal budget how are we going to pay for all this debt service yeah and then the first thing they're going to think about is hey maybe we should cut military spending since it's the largest

at the time when china is doing sorties in and around taiwan and the south china sea and we've got you know six you know navies doing coordinated uh sailing there which i think is a adjacent issue here historically historically great powers that want to remain great don't owe over 100 of their economy uh especially you know when a lot of it's held by uh foreign powers i mean that is a situation that makes us fragile not anti-fragile right because if we hit a crisis if there is you know some unforeseen military conflict what what glass do we break now in case of emergency we've already spent we're already at we're in peace time and we have wartime levels of debt and now inflation is making a return and the fed is going to make some really

tough choices about whether to control inflation and essentially impose austerity on the on government spending or whether they monetize the debt which will lead to a runaway depreciation of the dollar neither one of those things is a good situation how would we have reduced our austerity well they can't but but again if debt service rises to thirty percent of the federal budget where's that money gonna come from you have to raise taxes and cut spending you have to do which is why and i think this is joe manchin's point you know if you've been listening to joe manchin talk about the current reconciliation bill and he says look 3.5 trillion doesn't make sense we don't know what situ what situation we're going to

confront in the future we don't know what crises are coming we're going to reduce our ability to tackle all those future problems by overspending right now that's been joe manchin's argument and looking at this risk of stagflation in the forms of the supply chain shortage and this 5.1 interest rate number you'd have to say that if we want to preserve any flexibility next year to raise interest rates uh you better be really careful about how much debt you incur now agree yeah look when when when druck said that the 10-year break even was sort of you know at a five-year high at the time um we're back there now um look i i'm just gonna i i said this on cnbc i'll just say it again i think it's coming i don't think it's a

short-term blip and i think that we are in a period that will resemble the late 70s and i think that you know you kind of want to be risk off and not own risk assets um and by the way it is hard okay because like we are all all of us all four of us both risk all we're both risk on and all we own are risk assets that are you know it's one thing to say let's take risk but you could take risk and like lower of all things this is this is like taking risk in the most risky thing that's what we all do and at a time when people have run up the valuations of private market companies to a level that just nobody

can understand i mean look i think you got a year to 18 months to kind of clean this stuff up meaning like as market participants we can you know we can shuck and jive and get everything into a decent place but it's coming um and i hope i'm wrong but um i think we'll look back on this and we'll say we said it probably eight to 12 months before it really reared its ugly head but it's coming uh freeberg any thoughts on what's happening in taiwan and what uh you know even a modest conflict there would do to markets given how to sax's point this is the opposite of antifragile we are in like full fragility here i mean this is like you know a tray full of

champagne glasses on a boat in rough seas at any point we could trip and everything comes crashing down does it feel like that to you freeburg or do you feel like we're gonna be able to navigate this i mean i don't know about taiwan but i think we're just going to keep inflating our way out of this mess like remember like that that's what we did last year and um it's what we'll do again this year the the the biggest um losers in that equation are the um the middle class uh because uh you know the middle class actually owns assets that are now going to be worth less um folks who are not in the middle class that are below the middle class don't

own assets so it doesn't really affect them they just make higher wages but stuff costs more so they'll be fine and then you know wealthy individuals will end up getting taxed away uh to fund some of this and i think that's the inevitable kind of way that the equation balances right but i mean think about how much tax rates are about to go up right now in this reconciliation bill we haven't even gotten to like any of these crises by the way we don't know for sure if they're going to happen i think we could describe these things as storm clouds right now that are very much on the horizon multiple storm clouds they're converging right and if they do materialize in the way that we're talking about what weapons do we have left in order to fight them what weapons

of fiscal policy what weapons of monetary policy we're already going to have taxes on an all-time high yeah yeah well we're going to have to tax money no we're going to print money and we're going to pay ourselves we're going to go to the central bank it's what you said we're going to monetize our debt and that is going to go up that is i mean remember the top um marginal tax rate was what 70 80 percent in the uh 60s and 70s i mean you know that's likely where we're going to go back to well i think we're already going to be back there as a result of the reconciliation we've already done yeah but we've already we've already broken the glass in case of emergency we already you're gonna you're gonna see some of

these wealth taxes get chased down you're gonna see the top marginal tax rate go up 70 80 you know i mean i think that's the way the equation balances it's not like the world's going to end we're going to solve it by taking assets away from some and we're going to inflate all the all assets like that sounds pretty bad yeah yeah i mean 78 if you by the way it's not going to affect you it's not going to be going to work it will affect most people it will affect most people even though they don't think it will because it's going to affect the quality of our economy i'm just trying to predict what's going to happen sax i'm not saying this is the solution to our problem i mean i think the solution to our problem is technology but you know the question is

does that come to market fast enough say more about that oh i i feel like we need a deflationary set of technologies that can like mitigate all of these effects right so software automation self-driving trucks things that take the labor force because people don't want to work low-income jobs factually and you know now that there's america now that there's in america now that there's a world where people don't have where people have other options because other jobs have been created because we pump so much money into these other industries we're seeing people migrate away from low-income jobs like driving a truck for ten dollars an hour or working at mcdonald's for eight dollars an hour and

so to fill that gap and avoid the economic collapse that will occur in those sectors of the economy you need to automate and you need to find solutions that can replace the labor with some alternative technology solution that actually allows the product to be fulfilled to the consumers that demand it um or you're going to see rates go up like you're going to be paying twelve dollars for a hamburger because you're gonna have to pay everyone twenty five dollars what would either you can take it i'm sure you're both going to have opinions here but um we've been battling over immigration and nobody even seems to understand how many people are coming into the country or under what system should we not tie the number of jobs

available you know over the trailing x number of months a year's quarters to how many people were bringing to the country and couldn't we solve this by allowing five million people a million people whatever it is per year a half million people in to take those low income jobs and utilize that uh group of people to you know get businesses back on track i think it's too convenient to say that these are all low-income jobs i don't think that's necessarily true um and i think that it then starts to introduce a whole bunch of other constraints in the system these are folks that then need health care these are folks that need child care these are folks that need you know that they are also

attacks on resources as well right we are all tax on the natural resources and the infrastructure of our country and so you know it i don't think that that's the solution necessarily to that specific problem what if the jobs that were the people that are coming in we have enough people here to do the work but then we do it what we don't have is the market clearing price for that work to get done and so what i'm just trying to say is i think that the simpler and more obvious solution is to raise salaries until you get people to fill these jobs and i think that it's happening and so i do think that over the next year or two or three you're going to see you know labor rates

basically go back up and employment rates go back down and salaries go back up and inflation go back up all of these things are going to happen together that's the solution i think immigration is it is a solution to a completely different problem which is which is that we're not competitive like i've i really so you're talking about bringing an elite highly educated technical people look i i really think that running a country should really be like running a sports team you know and recruit the best talent and you should really be recruiting the best talent you should be looking at game film you should be coming up with plays you should be running and testing those plays you know you should have different plays that you run in the first quarter versus the fourth quarter different

plays when you're on the goal line sure you know and and i think that like when you look at professional sports one thing is that they don't see color gender sexual orientation they see ability to be performant statistics and statistical excellence yeah and then they go seek statistical excellence and and and if you translate that to a country my simple rubric on immigration is every year there's a draft and america is the free place every free agent wants we're the yankees yeah with the warriors yeah i [ __ ] the yankees we're like the warriors okay these are trash jesus christ who historically has won the most we're the new england patriots okay the cheaters we're the chicago bulls we're

the you know we we are the team that everybody would want to play for it's up to us to have a good gm and a good president of the team at a good front office that just picks off all these smart geniuses this should be i think your great point here chamoth is you're saying let's take the emotion out of this immigration and let's make it a point-based system which by the way the point-based system is what australia new zealand the uk canada all do and americans don't even know what the point based system is saks what are your views uh as somebody who i've heard leans a little bit to the right on opening up immigration or maybe sweeping all this amazing talent globally who have the highest statistics go i like jamaa's sports team analogy we want to get the biggest stars from all over the world to come to the us i mean i think that makes

sense i think you know this so-called immigration issue gets so confused with so many different things i mean first of all there's immigration and then there's border security right and immigration or just having a border period and so many people think that if you're get pro-immigration you basically can't have a border i mean that makes no sense um you know we need to have a border and uh we need to have actual like have an actual immigration policy shouldn't just yet be like okay you make it across i i i like president or if your guy ron desantis becomes president what should his what will you tell ron situation i like what you're saying i like what you're saying with a point system having it be skills based i mean that makes sense right the republicans do that they've been so emotionally tied to this

issue because of trump can they actually you know tie themselves to something performance-based and be non-emotional about it can they change their position i think trump actually did endorse like a more skills-based immigration system i think that i i don't know the republicans are the ones being emotional about it i mean the people who are your sides are clearly super emotional the side that i think is like insane are the people who don't think we need a border i mean you clearly have to have a border yes and even obama came out recently made a statement that you have to have a border because the the the progressive left had gone so far it's almost like they wanted to be whatever trump was doing they wanted to do the opposite of

you know it's like pull the 180. and so it's almost like the buying administration policy became to stop doing whatever it was that trump was doing including finishing the wall i don't i don't really understand why that was like such a problem yeah building a wall also seemed like ridiculous we could just it's just one piece it's just one piece of the solution but to stop it in mid construction let me ask you a a question it broke this week that you're hosting uh a fundraiser for ron desantis you got a little bit of blow back from that uh from the woke uh you know in the san francisco crowd but in terms of your influence with somebody like that do you

think you can actually influence them to get ron desantis to listen to this episode and maybe talk about the point-based system and change the framing of that do you think you have enough influence to do that i don't know i mean i don't know exactly what his position on immigration is that's not that that's not like the set of issues that's um that i respect him for i mean the reason why i wanted to support desantis is that he was the first governor to end these insane lockdowns and um i mean this is back in it should have been obvious to everybody by may of 2020 that the lockdowns didn't work and he was the first one to to roll them back and um and florida did very well especially considering that they have so many old people in florida so

you know on the whole not what i have done everything exactly the way he did it now you know but nobody did it perfectly no he is but is he is he a trump supporter and a trump acolyte or is he distancing himself from i think i honestly i think that like point of view is coming from the point of view of somebody who's not in the republican party it doesn't have to deal with the dynamics of winning support in the republican party that's what i'm saying yeah so you you have to basically toe the line with trump to get the nomination i don't i don't see it as towing the lie and i just think look i think he's his own person he's the governor of florida he's setting policy over there um he can be supported or not based on what he's doing in florida i think like trump is the issue that everybody on the other side will want to talk about but i don't

think it's relevant to what he's doing i don't think he's relevant to what he's inside of the republican party over this and should we support trump but i wouldn't say i wouldn't say it's a civil war but there definitely is some some conflict and yeah i mean i hope it resolves and look i think elections are always about the future i don't think people want to relitigate the past and i think that and i think that the republican party be wise i think to find a candidate of the future and not try to rehash or relitigate the past um another good reason for me to support desantis i think he is a future looking future-oriented candidate um i do think that look i'll say it the stuff i hear trump doing now in these speeches where he's relitigating what happened last

year um and and attacking other republicans like mcconnell because he doesn't because they failed his personal loyalty test um it's a little bit like what he did frankly in georgia with the runoffs where yeah he sewed so much chaos that the republicans lost a seat the purdue seat that they had won on election night and they had that runoff and you have to say that a huge part of the reason for that was the was trump uh attacking raffles burger and and all the the georgia gop because he thought they were insufficiently loyal to him and then you know you had the whole the tape come out of can you just find 11 000 votes i mean i think voters in georgia punished the republican party for that by by giving that seat to the democrats

that is the that that margin created the democratic majority which will now give us probably an incremental four to six trillion of spending and tax increases that we wouldn't otherwise have had so i i do think these elections are very important and it would behoove the republicans look i'm not i'm not like one of these never trumper people who i i'm just not obsessed with trump period i just think the republicans need to run a future looking candidate not a backwards-looking candidate in 2024. and i think desantis could be that guy it's very very early to say i mean the first thing he has to do is run for governor for re-election

in uh which i think is next year's 2022 so i will support him for that all right you guys have anybody read the the ted surrenders memo yeah this is great we should definitely jump into this we talked about uh the chappelle performance uh sax and uh freeborn did you watch it did you watch it oh god what nerd you haven't watched oh my god you guys are culturally bankrupt what were you guys doing this week like [ __ ] beakers and like you know you were just like are you like in like some laboratory doing like saturdays i haven't watched it yet but i don't need to watch it to know i support it he doesn't have to click on the link all right so there's almost nothing chappelle could say to make me want to

cancel him i mean and by the way i've seen a lot of chef chappelle and i love chappelle so i think i understand that just what he was doing but i i do need to see it still but look he should not be canceled it's ridiculous i don't think he is he's going to survive but here's what goes beyond this um let me uh read you from it so everybody knows that the name of the special he did was the closer it was released on october 5th a lot of outcry from glaad and uh advocacy groups and actually people inside of uh netflix there's been some resignations there have been some people who contribute content to netflix who are now saying

they'll not work with the company and um it's really interesting ted sorrento sent a memo to the entire company on monday and he's this is the second one he sent and he says we know that a number of you have been left angry disappointed and hurt by our decision to put dave chappelle's latest special on netflix very interesting opening uh he's he's addressing their feelings just this is a master class and a memo because in that first part he just addresses i understand you feel that way with the closer we understand that the concern is not about offensive to some content but titles which could increase real world harm so now he's framing their argument as it's not

because it's defensive it's because of real world harm you've brought this up before sax the real world harm concept with um apple and uh antonio while some employees disagree we have a strong belief that content on screen does not directly translate into real world harm it's not exactly true uh we'll get into that the strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last 30 years especially with first party shooter games and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries uh and so he goes above and beyond just talking about offensive material uh adults can watch violence assault and abuse or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy

without it causing them to harm other stand-up comedians often expose issues that are uncomfortable because the art by nature is highly provocative as a leadership team we do not believe that the closer is intended to incite hatred or violence against anyone for our sensitive content guidelines so basically he says you know if you don't like it change the channel if you're a customer you can cancel your subscription or if you work here and you don't like it you don't need to work here but is this the end of cancel culture this combined with brian armstrong's positioning sax this is your i don't i don't think it's the end of it uh for the simple reason um let's assume that this comic had not signed a 60 million dollar deal with netflix let's say he had signed a sixty thousand

dollar deal okay or six million yeah or six million or whatever and uh and and he didn't have the legions of fans that that dave chappelle had do you think that sarandos would make making the same decision i mean i think that's special by you know by a a a netflix comedy by dave smith would be swept under the ruggle right now we that would never see the light of day uh i think the same thing was true with joe rogan and spotify right i mean uh spotify made a 60 million deal with rogan uh the employee oh 100 million the employees all protested and spotify is too tall for rogan but they had every economic incentive to do so i don't completely trust these companies that if it wasn't massively in their bottom line interest that they would have stood up for free speech i suspect that if it was you know they would not have they would not have i think

he said in the email sticks and stones is one of the most watched you know piece of content we have and this the closer was like top four or five in america uh over like the last few weeks so there's a huge economic incentive and and and reid hastings said the same thing when he posted the other co-ceo into a group forum which said listen our job is to please our customers and all this data says is that we've pleased our customer right and i think in the case right and and i think to me that's him putting his foot down and saying we're going to make the content we want to make i don't think i don't think it's a principle i don't think it's a super pro look i i don't want to i don't want to look past it because i think that it's so rare to

get a memo like uh sarandos wrote where he's defending artistic freedom or freedom of speech or what have you i mean it's so rare to ever see that that i don't want to gain say it too much but i also do believe that this sort of special treatment is really reserved for the for the artists the creators like a chappelle like a rogan they're basically too big to cancel i mean these companies have spent too much money on their programs to just summarily cancel them they also again like i said have legions of fans who would rise up and protest if they were canceled but i don't think but i don't think these companies would make the same decision for the the middle the mid-level creator and in a sense rogan and chappelle they're post-economic right i mean they've made so much money

that they're free to do what they want and they've got a big enough audience to protect themselves from these companies but it's the little creator who's still on their way up who can never take the kinds of creative risks that chappelle is taking or that well they can take it they just can't do it on netflix but i i the tone of this to me sound sounded like a manifesto and a the end of the discussion from dad like we're doing this if you don't like it get off the ship but this is the way the ship is going that's the way i read it and i think spotify did a similar thing with um joe rogan to your point which was hey listen there's some content out there from like alex jones or some people who are just conspiracy theorists they took

down those episodes and joerg was like i don't care i got paid um but yeah it does feel to me like this is a tipping point when you put brian armstrong joe rogan and chappelle together that corporations are going to say you know what the mob is fine you can have your opinion but your opinion stops where we have to run a business freeberg what are your thoughts i think i think netflix has a appreciation for artistry certainly evident by the money they've spent and the product they've put out and i think good artist and good artistry is um uh you know can be provocative it's designed to make you change your opinion look at things

differently think about things differently and be challenged in the norms of you know your everyday life and i think that's um that's important in art in all forms um and that means seeing and being exposed to and um being engaged by things that you don't normally get exposed to and engaged by and i think that's what chappelle is fantastic at and i think that's what other great art is great at and um and i think that as long as netflix maintains that ethos that artistry does that and the good thing is people appreciate it and they uh they appreciate that that form and they

appreciate being challenged in that way and i think that as a result the market will as reid hastings identified continue to demand it and as much as some people might be offended it's the fact that it is offensive that i think makes it good um so let me ask you and i think that they appreciate that let me let me know i hope you're right about what this means i mean let me be really clear i mean i hope it goes down exactly the way that you're saying because that that is what i want to believe is happening i'm a little bit skeptical that this is a little bit more of a bottom line motive because they got so much money at stake they can't afford to cancel chappelle but i hope you're right

that i hope you're right that it's a statement of principle and they will apply that principle to lesser-known artists who can't protect themselves as much and you know hopefully this is kind of like you know what it reminds me of is the jon stewart lab the the the wuhan lab leak moment where you had jon stewart go on um colbert's show and he all of a sudden he made it okay to talk about the lab leak theory it was like you couldn't talk about it before you cracked the overton window off yes exactly and so hopefully chappelle will do that for this like woke cancellation mob is to finally get everybody to realize oh like we can stand up to this chamath is the overton window uh on a go

forward basis do you see it closing more staying where it is or perhaps even opening there's a there's a really great philosopher this is uh this is my maybe my one and only grand tribute to peter thiel but he he is um he's a huge supporter of a philosopher named renee gerard and uh i agree with a lot of a lot of that uh a a lot of renee gerard's philosophies and basically it's called memetic theory and the idea is you're born without preferences and then you kind of just copy what's around you and so what the other person wants is what you want and that's what ultimately leads to a lot of conflict and the only way to resolve conflict is is with a huge grand sacrifice of some kind okay and if you think about it here if you're

going to really put you know cancel culture if you're gonna kill it there needs to be some just massive escalation and conflict around this idea that allows us to resolve it in one way or the other in one direction or the other and i don't think this is it i think it's not big enough quite honestly i think it's a little bit sort of like you know there's folks like us that love comedy and we're willing to keep it in a very strict box which is let people say what they're gonna say be shocked with it and don't take it on to yourself and don't you know and go and reflect it into the world it's entertainment and you can you know it's like i choose not to watch um violent stuff because i don't like it i find it i find it very

offensive or you know i don't play first person shooters i find it really unsettling you know grand theft auto i found it really outrageous and other people will feel like that about chappelle my whole thing is we should all be allowed to make those judgments because i think we're all still pretty rational people at the end of the day and do the right thing in the normal world but this isn't the thing that's going to get this uh issue to be resolved so i don't know how it comes there needs to be some huge escalation around this thing i suspect what happens is it actually just uh dissipates and goes away and the reason is because everybody who's much younger than us has such a huge digital footprint that they've created through their whole life there is so much [ __ ] that's out there god yes that they just have no choice but to let everybody else off the hook

we we are in a very different situation because we were doing some [ __ ] shady stuff always on the down low oh he's hidden whoa easy there but that that's how it was our child you're largely anonymous you would roll deep and you would just you would pretend you would not you know and now the culture is very different and i think with that comes a lot of acceptance every you know every kid at some point may or may not be on tinder bumble rhea you know grinder whatever so there's going to be a body of that content that's up every kid will have said something crazy you know on tick tock and all of this stuff will be there and so you'll have a choice which is if you're going to hold me accountable i'm going to hold you accountable and so it's mutually assured destruction and i think that's what causes cancer culture to go away in time it's the last vestige of very

guilty people of our generation fascinating what do you think freeburg is the overturned window opening closing or about i think i think what jamaat is saying is right i um i think i've referred to this book called the light of other days before when we talked i think so right yeah um the book is like all about this notion of all information that's available to everyone everywhere and societal norms completely change people no longer find things offensive and they no longer and everyone basically shifts to a mode of much more kind of open dialogue because you know keeping things behind closed doors and then positioning one person against the other completely changes when you can see everyone's

cards all the time um and so i think yeah generally we're headed that way i don't think we're gonna information wants to be free more information is being generated about each of us all the time i don't think that we're headed in the opposite direction kind of back to a victorian era i think we're going in the other way so there's going to be blips and starts um uh that that'll kind of you know be setbacks on that general trajectory um so yeah i do think it's it's it's a moment you know it's a moment in time right now um where this is happening i mean look at the two examples we've discussed brian armstrong and uh coinbase that was about essentially black lives matters and talking about social justice at work and this one is about trans uh and trans rights and essentially i don't want to say poking fun at or you know uh discussing uh i mean it basically says in it that he's team turf

if you were to take two organizations that standing up against would be the most challenging and difficult i think those are the top two no i guess so that i mean that's why i think this is the mo this is the most telling is that you have two different organizations saying hey we're going to put our foot down just for a background netflix had a very strange um i didn't see the actual film so i won't make judgment on it but it was a very strange uh trailer for a film called cuties which was really over sexualizing young girls like eight nine ten-year-old girls and they didn't take it down um in the united states uh netflix but uh they did that was in france it was in france it was a french movie yeah and they have a different view of kids and sexuality and yeah uh i think people

found it a little dark uh here in the united states but they survived that one as well uh or they weathered that one as well so i think what people are finding is if you put your foot down at a certain point i think what the axis says is right then they've these guys have realized that if we have this very specific message around artistic freedom and we never violate it because that's one of those things where if you take that hill you have to be there forever right you can't have asterisks around that idea but by doing that they basically dominate the content production game in hollywood which then allows them to feel the most content at the cheapest average

price which then makes churn less and customer acquisition higher and they're already the largest media company in the world and they're only going to get bigger you know their netflix says what 200 million subscribers they're gonna get to a billion subscribers it's just inevitable and so for them i do think it's a very rational business position to take which is that i have to appeal to a billion people over the next you know seven or eight years you don't have to watch everything on netflix you do not have to listen to every album netflix is a [ __ ] mess i mean they should spend 10 minutes and improve the ui so you can actually find something my god it's so bad i and you know he he basically surrendos

made the point that you know along with chappelle show they are funding a ton of content by people of color probably more than anybody and trans people it's a big focus of what they're doing at netflix and it's you know it's essentially to sax's point more speech is better than less all right do we want to go tether fda chaos well why don't you take uh why don't you do your reverse victory lap because after all your victory lap for me but no bro it was the exact opposite it is not a it's a [ __ ] fraud come on can you please stop saying that apparently the cftc went in did the work and is naturally now refuting what you thought was the case jason okay why don't you just how about i read you the quote from at least june 1st 2016 to february 25th

2019 together misrepresented to customers and the market that tether maintained sufficient us dollar reserves to back every usdt in circulation with the equivalent equivalent amount of corresponding fiat currency held by tether and safely deposit and tell their bank accounts uh in other words they told everybody they were one for one they were not they lied to the public and that's why they're getting a 41 million dollars that's why they're banned from new york and that's why they're banned from trading in canada i think and they're supposedly a department of justice um these guys are shady as f am shady do you have a do you have an economic interest in tether

no crypto he does no no i i can anyone have an economic interest in tether all it is is a one for one tokenized dollar well no it's not that's what they claim it is no i know you're you're right that it should be and we need an audit to establish that it is and they won't audit they'll do an attestation when they did their attestation all they have to do is show a document that says there's money in an account they don't have to show how long that's been in the account certainly this certainly feels like a security to me and i would think the sec should get involved in uh stable coins are the number one thing on gensler and the scc's mind right yeah i mean they they make a claim of a secured interest in something unlikely

this is like crypto this is the easiest part of cryptocurrency why is it easy why because because look at a bank account you audit it you're done it's it's a tokenized dollar that's it it is not actually i'm not even sure it's a security it basically is a digital representation of a dollar industry sitting in a bank account somewhere it's a money market yeah it's a money market in funds they're securities and they're regulated at securities okay fine but my point is you know there are complicated securities and then there's securities that aren't complicated this is definitely the least complicated complicated that this company only has to their own attestations like six percent three to six percent in cash in a bank account and the rest is in highly volatile corporate

uh paper here's the point that i was trying to make to you in the group chat oh when a company who's got billions and billions and billions of dollars of some stable coin whatever or something that you think is zero okay it's a multi multi-billion dollar market um tens of billions oh sorry tens of thousands seventy billion in tether out there and and and could you imagine if they like let's just say if there were 70 billion of tether and like you know one billion of securities that would be a fraud of gargantuan proportions right we would be talking about we would be if they siphoned the money out for their own use

beyond talking about fines what i found comical jason is your claims make it seem like bernie madoff enron level corruption craziness hold on okay and the fine was 42 million which is like who [ __ ] cares 42 million and it was between them and another firm so either the cftc completely got the fine wrong and they missed a zero or two zeros or this was not nearly as big as you thought it was i'm shocked shocked that jacob got overly excited about some perceived hopes uh yeah jason didn't fully understand something and got very emotional about it look here all right that's it that's it i got it here's here's the best case scenario for making sense of jkl's points which is it's possible that

tether the company behind tether has all the money they've just not chosen to keep it in dollar reserves and so they put it in corporate bonds and a whole mishwash of different things to get the float to get the flow my guess is that tether is solvent i don't think it's it lacks solvency but uh but i personally would feel better about any stable coin if it was 100 dollar back i think it should be which is what jeremy miller is doing at um circle i had them on the pod this week i hope they bought the get lab uh ipo uh well i mean the the the issue here is they also co-mingled funds which is what got full tilt in trouble the user's accounts with their money in it was mixed with the operating capital so they were using

the deposits to operate the business which is the biggest no-no they were co-mingling the funds that people thought were backed uh and bitfinex and tether were the same company that's why they both got the fines at the same time they've also been banned from doing any having any customers in new york and they've been banned in canada and there's apparently a doj wire for it so i think this is the beginning of the end not the end of the beginning okay that's my personal belief i was just wanting to get your reaction to what seemed like a really pathetic fine for what could be a 70 billion fraud i mean facebook got a series of speeding tickets too i mean i think that that's i mean that's a big issue for our government is that billion dollars what's that they paid like five billion dollars or something right

they're a trillion dollar company i mean it's nothing five billion is a big number not in relation to their market cap and how much cash they throw off 42 million i mean that's a tax payment it's a quarterly tax payer for for you champagne for us uh or maybe for sax he's doing pretty well too yum yum all right uh do we want we promise we do some questions should we do a couple of questions sure i mean we would also talk about the fda and oh my god the fda my gosh free bird do you want to leave this freeberg you want to tell us about the chaos at the fda well i don't think it's chaotic like you guys think it is um i'll make that

counter why don't you why don't you make your chaos point first and then i'll make it i don't know that's not my point it's just kind of the uh what people yeah people are perceiving this so like you know there's been a couple of these um changes in recommendations now all of these recommendations that um and you know the these statements and approvals that have come out of the fda are predicated on these independent advisory panels that are put together to look at research data assess the research data and make a recommendation on what they think is appropriate so we saw this happen with the pfizer booster shot a few weeks ago where initially the advisory panel which again is made up of independent doctors and scientists who

generally don't have any sort of economic interest in the outcome here they voted 16 to 2 against everyone getting a booster shot and then they voted 18 to 0 in favor of everyone 65 and over and those at risk of getting a booster shot and then recently there was you know similar sort of consternation around the modern and they ended up looking at data that indicated that maybe a half dose which is 50 micrograms instead of 100 micrograms would have a reasonable amount of efficacy relative to the side effect risk for people over 65 and therefore they made a recommendation to approve that as a booster which the fda is now approving and so again the way this process is run and i think it's a good process is independent advisors of doctors and

scientists come together and the one that recently came together was around this generalized use of aspirin as a heart attack deterrent because it thins the blood and limits the risk of people getting heart attacks but it turns out that such a a large percentage of the population or large enough percentage of the population we're having bleeding issues where your stomach bleeds i don't know if you guys have this but you know you take ibuprofen or nsaids your stomach can bleed that was causing more of a problem for people than they were seeing in the data in terms of a reduction in heart attack effects for people that were not highly at risk and so they revised the recommendation and said hey let's give

people that are only at risk and over a certain age aspirin not just blanket give it to everyone over 40 or 50. and so it took in account new data and i think this is an important point science is messy right by definition science is about gathering data forming a hypothesis testing again iterating restating your hypothesis and it's it's designed to be circular it's designed to be a learning system not designed to be a system that defines absolute truth and absolute fact and it's good to see the fda doing this work and it's good to see scientists reviewing new data and changing their recommendations and you know we've seen this in in health we've seen this in in the food system in the

usda changing their diet guidelines and people used to be told don't eat dietary cholesterol it turns out saturated fat is what causes cholesterol in your blood so there were a lot of changes that that kind of emerged as new data was gathered and really tried to eat a lot of carbs remember the all-carb diets yeah and then they learned that they made a change in their stays yeah wait wait can we bring that back i'm starving i used to eat pasta every day first it was rice in my tens and twenties oh i've seen you eat rice oh the shoveling of rice so freeburg i mean if we're gonna be just intellectually eating pizza if we're gonna be intellectually honest about this the fact that you know official health officials can be wrong

about positions they've maintained with i guess seemingly total certainty for decades and now they can revise those positions i mean doesn't that lend some credence to some of these like anti-vaxx arguments when they say well gee i'm i'm skeptical about injecting our mrna into myself think it's a totally different you just got the episode banned on youtube we just got a warning i'm glad i'm glad i got the vaccine i got the pfizer vaccine um and i think look it could have saved my life i mean i had a very mild case of delta yeah one of the first breakthroughs because so but but it was

very mild and i think that was because i got pfizer i think the risk return was completely worth it and but but i can also see why people with like five-year-old like kindergarten age you know want to get in might not want to get it for their kids when the upside is absolutely you know tiny given that it doesn't really affect five-year-olds very much and the downside is not there's no problems how is that any different than the aspirin thing it might no i don't i don't wish you had gotten really sick yes you are no but there's a bunch of people on the left i don't i don't um i don't disagree with the framing that that um here's what typically happens the scientists or the fda panel will say based on the data that we have this is

our recommendation on what should happen and then the framing that that people then assume is oh this is what they believe to be absolute truth and with absolute certainty this is what we have to do and i think the translation layer to the general population is such that this is the ten commandments i came down from mount sinai and this is what i'm saying it has to happen and the reality is it is based on data and that data changes over time and i think that your point is right there is no absolute certainty that the pfizer vaccine is going to be absolutely perfect for everyone and it's going to absolutely reduce the risk more than it um increases the risk for people five years

old and younger um and it's a it's a very fair point that like but the problem as we've seen on all sides is that the framing is that these things are binary and they're not right there's a probability distribution of which is defined as the risk and the the things that might go wrong and the probability distribution of the benefits and then people assume that it's just binary yes i think you're making an excellent point there i just want to underscore let me kind of translate what you're saying is that the the people at the fda are in these positions who actually understand the science make a cost-benefit analysis and what they're saying and approving it is that the costs outweigh the risks sorry the benefits outweigh the risks

the broad population there's a broad population okay by the way that's why i got the vaccine i don't know for sure that there's no downsides in 10 years all i know is there's an upside immediately and i benefited from that so i was very happy to take it but in any event instead of this complicated cost-benefit analysis the media translates that into good bad it's almost like a moral case and then the politicians translate that into laws and rules and if you question the rules you're now a bad person because you you've opposed the quote-unquote good side of the argument i mean for example gavin newsom just signed a bill in california saying that if you are a public school child elementary school kindergarten you have to get vaccinated in order to go to

a public school even though the vaccine doesn't even exist for them yet i mean you could be pro-vax which i guess i would consider myself to be clearly provacs i mean i got it my 13 year old got it i support it i think it's a smart decision but to require a five-year-old to get it in order to go to public schools well you can also wait until we get the fda data here's a question for you friedberg um you know having this um one of the complaints has been the fda restricts progress i mean i think actually peter thiel had this position for a while that we should uh you know so just get rid of it and disband it what do we think about having the fda being framed as these are

recommendations and then each state gets to make a decision with their local fda so then if colorado or texas or florida had a difference of opinion about psychedelics about vaccines they could run it's a really important matter of ethics yes what are your ethics that you believe um you know should be the guiding principles for how the government plays a role in individuals making choice about their health and their body and so if you believe that the government and this is there's no right or wrong here it's simply a framing of what you believe if you believe that it's appropriate for the government to make the decision about what's safe and not safe for you as an individual to do

then the fda should stay in place and they should have their criteria of when they're ready to make a recommendation there's enough data to define the benefits and the cost of a particular thing that you might put in your body and then telling you yes you should or shouldn't do this if you and if not they're going to take their time and and figure that out now if you don't believe that then yes the fda should be disbanded and drug companies will go around and they will tell people take this drug it will save your life and people will take it and there will be there will be people that will suffer from that there will be people that will have or maybe something in between there will be people

and and remember like the criteria for the fda is do no harm so you know that is the criteria for a doctor in general it is a very difficult criteria to meet when there are costs to a drug or cost to a therapy or treatment when people get chemotherapy for cancer there are awful deleterious side effects to their body but the benefit of saving their life and getting rid of the cancer having at least a shot at doing that is great enough and the fda has made a judgment call that that cost and that benefit kind of created an equation that says this is an approved drug now and that's really their goal and if they don't have enough data and they haven't taken enough time to figure that out they don't feel comfortable approving a drug and making that recommendation but

then if you let them get out of the way and you let individuals make choice you could see this being a disgusting free-for-all where drug companies will hawk snake oil on people and a lot of harm will be caused and that's that's the counter argument and i'm not saying one is right or whatever i was thinking there might be something that really comes down to what is the role that you want i mean it's really that what is the role that you want any government whether it's states or the federal government to play in deciding what you can and can't do with your body and what you can and can't put in your body and ultimately what companies that are making products for you can and can't say to you about the benefit and the cost of that product and there's no simple solution right i mean like look at kyrie irving i mean he's he basically is

200 million dollars not every individual is equipped to look at the data and make a judgment call on their own and so the question then is what authority will they look to and if the alternative authority that they will look to is not as good as a research team of 18 scientists then they're probably going to end up getting bad advice do you think that's really all right what do you think the aldrich kyrie retires i think it's 60 right now i think he's giving up 200 million dollars because he won't get back 200 million extension he gets paid like 30 or 40 million dollars a year he refuses to get the vaccine he said the reason he's not getting the vaccine is because of all the people who don't have a

choice the pilots who are being forced to get it or not go to work so he is a privilege he says and he wants to make this decision for everybody else he also believes that the earth is flat stop that was a joke he said i don't think it was a joke where are you getting that from jacob uh typing kyrie irving flat earth he talked about how do we know the earth is actually around and he basically is yeah two days later he came out and he was like you guys misinterpret anyways that's neither here or there he's oh he's what he's unique and wacky he sounds like i don't know so i would i wouldn't make that decision why are you so pejorative like i know i know you're still a member of the media you have like a vestigial tail here is that you just bought in to the framework that

freeberg laid out which is the media takes complicated issues cost-benefit analyses and turns them into right first of all he didn't come to the knicks he didn't come so now he's bad now he's back to the knicks he sounds to me like a man of conscience no man of conscience who's willing to stand up on principle turn down 200 million dollars i got the vaccine for free i sure as hell wouldn't turn away 200 million dollars not to get it so i mean 200 million to not take it would you have taken would you have not taken it yeah i think so i think i'm not taking it for 200 million there uh there was a i heard a great story yesterday at the poker table one of the

guys was telling me uh it's his backgammon teacher and he says his backgammon teacher or is it you know good backgammon teacher and a magician blah blah 20 years ago he was asked um to get female breast implants for a year for a hundred thousand dollars he did it and he kept them for 20 years um that's quite a free roll so you know the bar for people to do the par for people to do things is really not that high uh is really what what i took away from that story and what i take away from this story is so let's go around the horn no but kyrie is willing to draw the line on something that he believes in and it's going to cost him 200 million dollars there's a lot of things that come with all of that noise um he should be allowed to make that decision in my opinion um and i don't i don't like the way that

he's characterized because i think this is a good human being he's a phenomenal basketball player there's no phenomenon could you imagine how strongly he feels about this if he's willing to walk away from the game that he loves and that's you know been an enormous part of his life why why is it so important to foist on kyrie irving the need to get vaccinated i mean it's because in new york city in indoors you have to there's a vaccine requirement and he can't play at home games he could play in texas or houston so they've talked about trading him to houston but then when he went to new york and you also can't practice with the team in new york new jersey i guess massachusetts there's a bunch of states

where you can't go indoors without a vaccine they're in close proximity to each other you get the idea i just think we're turning a good thing into which is the vaccine i generally think it's a it's a great thing that i got done so quickly it's a miracle of science and i think it's helped a lot of people i mean all of us i mean it's the thing that's going to end the pandemic largely already has but we're turning into a bad thing but why were we demanding that these holdouts like every last person must get vaccinated what about what about a flight attendant should a flight attendant be forced if they're on a tiny house or should they be working somewhere you get so much protection by being vaccinated yourself

that i don't think so you don't believe in mandates now well i think private companies have the right to to nba is a private company i know i get it so but i'm just i'm just starting to really question here whether it's truly necessary to get every single one of these last holdouts i just there's something un-american about imposing on free people this decision they can't just make up their own mind you in a previous episode said you were in favor of it if people were dying at a higher rate if it was more accurate well hold on you did say that you said if it was killing kids and a lot of people were dying if it was favorable if it was some sort of like ebola like yeah of course

it'd be a whole different cost benefit analysis exactly um but look what i said and i think this is still my position is that government shouldn't require shouldn't stick a needle in your arm i think private businesses can do it um or you don't use that service so how much would it take for you to get b cups uh implanted for a year for one billion dollars would you do it only b's i'm not saying like a strong d or something like just like a modest because no i mean is that a real story from us yeah send you the link it's there's a huge article about it it's in wikipedia as well yeah that's an old story listen you've already someone's got b for that i've lost 16 pounds i'm good

i'm good i'm i'm just like a perky a right now b-cups be gone this show has gone off the rails um we promised the audience we take two questions the first one is for friedberg and the first question comes from daniel nielas he says alphaphone made great progress in predictive protein folding is there anything similar for chemical synthesis could a similar system finally predict a less energy-intensive pathway to ammonia then the haber bosch process for example i don't think this is right this is a this is a great question when molecules interact a molecule is a bunch of atoms stuck together and there are electrons and protons that make up that molecule and therefore there's this kind of variable electric potential energy potential that surrounds that

molecule and it's very difficult today to deterministically model how two molecules might interact with one another in physics and um it turns out that that resolves using quantum physics and so today we can't really kind of put two molecules together and say here's what happens when you put these together and have a computer program very quickly and easily solve that quantum physics is involved and we don't have a good way to simulate quantum physics in binary computers so um one of the theories and and there's been some work on this in on the research basis creating the framework for it is that we can use quantum computers to simulate the quantum states of molecules and use that to figure out

how molecules might interact with one another and as a result you could kind of see us creating simulations that resolve certain enzymes or proteins that might break apart molecules or stick molecules together or other molecule combinations that might cause something to happen the haber bosch process which is being referred to was discovered through trial and error in the early 20th century by a german physicist an engineer and they realized that if they compressed atmospheric um air to 200 times atmospheric pressure and ran it over an iron catalyst with electricity it's zapped it broke apart the nitrogen bonds in the in the atmosphere in the air that was compressed and trickled out ammonia which is uh nitrogen and hydrogen um and

so this was like this amazing invention and it saved the world and fed the world there's a great book called the alchemy of air if anyone's interested in hearing about this um but it was through trial and error and we got so friggin lucky as a species that we figured this out using quantum computing in the next 30 years hopefully we'll be able to deterministically um model these these behaviors on a molecular atomic level and as a result kind of build new systems to make things um and that'll be an incredible um kind of tool kit for humans uh that'll advance a lot of science and a lot of engineering uh forward i'm still really strongly of the belief and this goes back to your point earlier i'm sorry i'm going on a bit of a ramp yeah it's great in a hundred to 120 years from now i do

think we'll all have a a replicator in our room and that replicator will make all the things we want to make nearly instantaneously with very low energy and very low cost um and there's an oregon a new brand oregon the next car you want to make i mean we could see and by the way this is a crazy concept it's not just about oh you know quantum stuff or whatever was described in star trek in but the general principle that you can locally make things and locally make things cheaply with very little energy and very little input changes the whole supply chain model we're seeing this increasingly with new technologies with 3d printing and biomanufacturing you start to put

these all together and you take a non-linear track out in the next couple decades and you get to a point that all this nonsense we're talking about where we're mining stuff in one place and making it another and shipping and combining it all another support exactly sex you're gonna be able to print a conscience [Applause] all right here's a question for saks matty or i guess me and also chamath uh and i guess all four of us maddie chavis asks between being a vc founder angel corporate employee which has been the most fun rewarding and why what advice would you give someone early in their career hoping to be be like you multi-channel investor thought leader when they grow up sacks well i didn't i didn't become a vc until after i had already done a few tours of

duty as a founder and operator so i mean my recommendation would be to get involved in startups first generally get some operating experience and uh that would serve you well startups or even bigger companies i i just think getting getting some reps inside of an organization is critical i tell everyone that uh that's coming out of college or early in their career it's important you go get that perspective and work at a bigger business i mean i spent a few years at google and you know it was a thousand people when i joined grew to 10 000 by the time i left but like i learned so much just in that role and seeing successful products successful models for operating a

business um it was really uh impactful for me long term and then you go and make all the mistakes as a founder building a startup you know and a lot of people end up with bad confirmation bias if they work at a startup that didn't work out and they think and all they can draw from is a failed model for operating um if things didn't which was your favorite which you know role has been your favorite to date freeberg you know when i was an executive at monsanto it's really nice to have that private jet that would come out and take me places they had a whole security requirement i already have that anyway [Music] what was your favorite sex my favorite stint uh yeah well what's i mean obviously what we did at paypal has gone on to become a legend and then you

know paypal i was the founder ceo he led that to a unicorn exit so you got to say those would be the two best professional experiences i was joking about the private jet thing i honestly like to me and i sex i'm sure you know and the rest of you guys can feel the same but like making a great product and selling that product and you know working with a customer with that product is honestly like the most rewarding thing you can do it's like you know getting your hands dirty and actually delivering something of value in the world there's nothing more rewarding than that i mean all the financial engineering and making money and all the nonsense that goes on is really kind of a zoom out of that but that's really where reward comes in um yeah i feel that way too i was joking

about the private jet too nick caught me miss speaking so yeah it was that the first experience of paypal the second experience was yammer you may have to do something which is your favorite private jet that you have yeah which to defend myself on stealing uh toiletries on chamot's plane no don't don't defend yourself don't do it it was a mini bottle of scope i drank half of it what do you say how many did you take put it back in the drawer on your plane i took a truth true story i did take the half bottle of pappy them you took my pappy van winkle it was like a half left that's a five thousand dollars i'll tell you actually i'll tell you a funny story

about it i posted a half bottle of papi so blame me yeah okay so here i got to tell you this funny story so i was growing up i was going on you didn't take it was going on i was going on a business trip with um a couple of uh you know friends co-workers who they're actually founders now of a company i backed anyway we were going to like an event in i think it was in atlanta so it's like a four-hour flight so they at you they opened the liquor drawer or whatever and saw the time framework and um they asked like they could have uh sure take whatever you want and then i went in the back and and went to sleep so but by the time we land

like four hours later the entire papi van winkle like stash has been they've gone through it and it's like yes all these different types of papi you've got the papi 23 you've got some of these you've got some of these antique antique ones so they asked me you know they've never flown on a private plane before they asked me you know say hey sax how much did this flight cost and i said it cost about six thousand dollars in jet fuel and about eight thousand dollars in papua new guinea pour the pack into the jet oh my god it costs more than uh i'm from around the way i'm leaving with something i'm leaving with something you know like if i'm i'll be on a pj i'm gonna leave with something i

think we've found a way to end this podcast in the moment insufferable way possible um highlight it make it the opening all right four the queen of quinoa david friedberg for rain man david sacks and the dick and also we're playing we're playing next week at sexy blues places we're playing at the mausoleum no we're playing at the museum nobody knows where the mausoleum is nobody knows where the mausoleum is but it was worse i've been docked so many times we better get security [Music] coming don't bring his all right we'll see you all next time bye bye later we'll let your winners ride rain man david sacks we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music]

it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow we need to get back [Music] going on [Music]