E8: TikTok + Oracle, how privacy loss will impact society, economy & COVID outlooks for 2021

hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of all in the podcast episode eight besties are here to talk about tech economy politics the election and our lives in silicon valley uh welcome back to the pod david friedberg the queen of quinoa is here from an undisclosed j kell always always a joy yes undisclosed location somewhere in the midwest you you bailed on sf after the smoke you lasted how many days into the barbecue into the orange cloud i left on the wednesday of the orange cloud and uh took it was crazy took my kiddos and we're uh we're waiting at the fires in the uh in the midwest well it's beautiful the last two days

here uh also from an undisclosed bestie location david sacks back on the program rain man is here yep definitely here good to be here all right well there you go man of many words and speaking of a man of many words off of seven keynotes this week talking about spax the uh prince of spacks chamoth paulie happened back on the pod how are you besties well we had a little bestie reunion which i think we can talk about your mouth invited us over to have an outdoor bestie reunion yeah and you gave one of them gonorrhea and you gave the other two well we it it's crazy to say but

i literally had to call chamoth uh two or three days after he hosted ah so a socially by the way a socially distanced dinner outdoors social distant dinner outdoors wonderful we had some great ribeye fantastic uh cracked open a nice bottle or two of wine and the pork and but but then what did you do well then a family member of mine who shall remain nameless decided to go to a party in san francisco and possibly got the rona and he tested positive and then i had to get everybody in my house tested twice everybody came back negative but i had to call chamoth and tell him listen

i i wasn't exposed but some members of my family were therefore i might have second hand exposure i took two tests came back negative two times in a row can i just say though it's really crazy like we have to develop all these new social norms and you're not sure what to say and you're not you're not sure how to react and it's like it's it must have been like when you know you got a call and it's like hey listen uh uh you know your girlfriend's like i may be pregnant or like you know somebody's like hey listen i have an std like you just like what i felt like that

when i was texting the good child there's like three of us and i had to text with my tail between my legs i think i've been exposed i'm really sorry guys i think calcanus is the greek word for turd and the punch bowl you know it's all yeah it's so yeah exactly i don't know if we can tell the the code 13. oh i'm going to tell the code 13 story i wasn't even there but i think there's legendary jason jason jason calcanis gets invited by david sacks out of his benevolence to come to stay uh in hawaii at the four seasons and uh at somewhere some point during this week-long vacation

christmas day you hear a shout from the pool from the lifeguard no no it was it was even before that we were sitting at the bar so me and jason and his brother-in-law were sitting at the bar having drinks and all of a sudden there's a commotion and the bartenders and the staff and you started hearing people on walkie-talkies saying code 13 code 13. and people are running people right we don't we don't know what to make of that we think it's a terrorist attack i mean literally the four seasons is on a high alert alarms are going off and then and then we hear okay well we were like we said to the bartender well what's the

code 13 and he's like well it means that some kid you know uh crapped in the pool did a number two in the pool and we're like you know and then and we're like okay well you know it was jason's kids well so then then i started hearing something about like the sax kids and i'm like oh no sax code 13th yeah they thought it was us and then it turns out it was it was jacob's kid and we were we were never able to get a a a reservation but they have this again well what's so funny is like i i've been i went there at one point a few years later and it's a whole ordeal

because they said so how do you guys deal with like you know a code 13 they're like oh go 13. you have to evacuate the whole hotel half the island gets sent away here's what had to happen this is on just to put the code 13 in perspective i i think my ten-year-old at the time was two years old my sister-in-law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody and the baby's not wearing a swim diaper and so basically a snickers bar floats out of the and there's the snickers bar in the pool and you guys have kids you know how big these things could get you're like how is that

possible that uh you know like a movie theater size snicker king-size snicker pool is floating in the middle but this is on december 25th these poor people are spending three thousand dollars a night there is not a single chase lounge by the pool that's not occupied it is peak capacity at the uh four seasons hotel on the big island or wherever it was the pool has to be shut down for four hours a person has to get in with the hazmat suit retrieve the snickers bar king-sized snickers has to get out of here then they have to throw in every chemical known to man so much so that the

pool is ruined for christmas day and that's the code 13 story all right getting back to our topics tick tock is on the verge of being banned from additional us downloads the commerce department has announced that will ban u.s downloads and business transactions with tick-tock and wechat somehow wechat got pulled into this on sunday this will um seemingly we're going to allow tick-tock to operate until november 12th so they got a little bit of a stay of execution uh but of course if they can't update in the app store that means there could be any security

vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated and stephen attempting uh to push through a tick tock deal uh that'll enable retaining some chinese ownership um and there's some sort of agreement now with oracle will have some kind of an oversight board uh to do continuous third party audits what does this say uh chamath about uh where we're at and do you believe that you know a democratic uh leader let's say obama or biden uh would have taken the same approach here does it worry you that the government's getting this involved or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and

saying hey listen uh we're gonna need to have some basic level of reciprocity from china if we're gonna allow you in our app sir you know i think i think it's kind of like um you know like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other and they're like turn left and you're like no no i'm gonna turn right and then you realize you should have turned left but then you keep turning right a few more times then you take a couple more lefts but then you end up at the the same place but it was complete [ __ ] dumb luck um i feel like we're going to end up in the

same place here with tiktok which is that i think that the trump administration probably is doing this and donald trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power and you know american exceptionalism which i'm not sure is the right reason to do it but i think the outcome is right which is that um you know for years china has essentially been shut out to american companies unless you effectively just count out to these guys um and you know some companies have and some companies like you know google have not and

other companies like facebook have been totally basically blocked from entering and so i think it's completely right it's it's it's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantages that that chinese companies have had and so you have to play hardball to create a different set of rules and i think this probably gets us to that place the reason why it's happening is probably more because the tick tock people played that joke on trump at the tulsa rally if you had if i had to guess yeah uh what do you think friedberg is this a good sign for america and the globe that

you know in the democratic nations of the world that we're going to put a foot down with china and say hey some reciprocity or you're not going to be able to participate in our marketplace or is this a personal vendetta from trump or a little bit of both i don't see how it's um anything but uh a slippery slope forward in the escalation of um you know what's gonna be kind of transpiring between these two nations in the the next couple of years and maybe decades you know this goes back to the you know early 2000s when google and others wanted to enter

china and china has for those who don't know china has this great firewall right the chinese citizens can't openly access the rest of the internet and china wanted to censor content and sensor um what their citizens are accessing um and so there's been a back and forth between the tech industry and china uh going back almost 20 years now to try and figure out how we can bring our services to china and then china launches a service that's very successful in the us in tiktok and um i think it's just a you know a part of the reciprocity equation which doesn't resolve anything it only

escalates things so it's unfortunate but it's just kind of another step in the path that i think is inevitable in front of us here saks uh we'll give you the the final word here uh is this a good thing for humanity for international relations that china is you know having a little bit of a hand check here like hey there's going to be a limit to how you can operate in the west uh or is this a personal vendetta from trump and then what do you see going forward um it's it it's true that i mean first of all our social networks are not allowed over there so i

don't think we need to feel bad about um you know not allowing their social networks over here but besides reciprocity or the lack of it um i think the deeper reason for this is just around data security and and how the you know and i think the the the ccp has given us adequate grounds here to ban not just tick tock but you know apps like that um because president xi himself declared this policy of civil military fusion which means that any business in china any business asset there including data can be appropriated to serve the the ends of the chinese military or the communist party and you know the the ccp has set up this vast surveillance

apparatus over its own citizens it's um asserted um extra territorial sovereignty over former chinese citizens with meaning dissidents um so that the chinese diaspora anywhere in the world they've asserted sovereignty over that and um you know recently there was a pretty remarkable speech by the fbi director christopher wray describing you know operation uh foxhunt which is the chinese effort to track down and presumably ultimately punish chinese distance anywhere in the world and as part of that that the chinese have sort of weaponized ai and social media and so uh he also described i mean this is like pretty

amazing i didn't you know that the the equifax hack which collected data on something like sense of data over 100 million americans the chinese were behind that um i didn't know that and um so you know it's it's true it's true that you know no one piece of data poses uh by itself a risk to to to the security of of america or americans but it's sort of the systematic collection and aggregation of the data and the hacking uh collectively that i do think pose a security threat and um and i think you got to stop right there zach actually an individual's

data could absolutely be compromised if they have access to your uh passwords because through the clipboard they have access to your phone role if a young person had photos that were say compromising in their photo role the phone is you know basically given access to that they upload that now you could use that as compromise against a senator's child or against a senator themselves and this seems like an abstract thing but this is exactly what the chinese and russians have been doing for a very long time if you've seen the series the americans and you go back to the 80s

to see the weaponization of you know somebody who is in the closet who was gay during that time or somebody was having extramarital affair you could compromise anybody with just sexual compromise and you hear we're giving access to hundreds of millions of people's photo libraries by the way clipboards by the way you just said something that's really scary which is like if you're if you're the chinese and you know they have the patience to play the long game uh you just aggregate and collect this thing for 30 years on the off chance that one of

these people becomes important i mean what is the reason you got a manchurian candidate just you you just surveilled 300 million americans and just say uh you know what we'll take our shot i mean it's going to cost us a few billion dollars a year in storage who cares yeah i'm not like is is there really a case that what they're doing in the tick tock app i don't know how much you guys have read um some of the studies on on what they are actually pulling but is there really a case that what they're pulling is particularly different than what would be pulled by pretty much

any other social app or photo sharing app on your phone there was some you know kind of insight that hey they were capturing the mac address but that was up until last november after november they the app kind of refreshed and stopped doing that and it was a hack that some number of apps out there were already doing but my understanding is the way that they've built the app it's the same kind of ad tracking type um approach that a lot of apps are taking i i think i think it's a naive position that because we haven't caught them doing something nefarious that they aren't actually

doing something nefarious right now if you look at what uh mbs did to jeff bezos sending that um i guess it was a movie file or an image that then wound up hacking his wechat and his phone like yeah i think they've built the software i think it's purpose-built uh whether it's wechat or tick-tock to have these back doors there's no way the chinese government is not influencing that guys look if you if you had to bet david um what do you think the odds are between 0 and 100 with 100 being absolute certainty that there are foreign national spies that work at google facebook amazon microsoft that's my point it's is it i mean look i think

that there are no but do you think it's 100 oh of course it's a hundred yeah i think at every one of them it's probably a hundred percent yeah at least one you know foreign national that has a connection to intelligence in china yeah it's probably a hundred percent 100 so my point is tick tock is 100 chinese 100 chinese so you don't even have to guess whether it's my point is like if if if there is some you know access to personal data that we're all concerned about being compromised at literally every other [ __ ] app company yeah every other app is not connected to you know but the point that champ just made is that they

very well could be the fact is we as individuals have exposed all of our personal and private data to six or seven companies i think you're saying it'd be a really right thing it is a this is a canary in the coal mine for a bigger issue this is why i'm saying i think that you know trump is probably acting out of an expression of power but i think what we're realizing is actually this is about core fundamental privacy and the safety and security of each of us as individuals and it should start a bigger conversation like privacy i i really do think this privacy is the killer

feature of the 2020s right um you know what david just said about like you know if you're if you're a chinese ex-national the idea that you're like look i've been a citizen of three countries the idea that the sri lankan government all of a sudden may not like what i have to say and can spy on me or you know root my phone or steal my data it really disturbs me like uh i'm sorry but no go [ __ ] yourself like i left that country for a reason yeah so i think i think the republican to watch on this as well besides trump i guess is uh there's a senator josh hawley who

is um crazy well he's he he's sort of a critic of of big tech and i think he's got some interesting things to say but but in this particular area he is proposing legislation to regulate the types of information that can be collected by applications that are based in countries that are fundamentally hostile or adversarial to the us and that to me seems like the right policy because you know it's not just about tick tock it's about all the apps that collect information on americans that can be appropriated by you know the chinese communist party or russia or iran places like

that and so i think we need a more holistic policy here than just banning tiktok and it may not be necessary to ban tiktok if you had the right limitations placed on them but um but but but i i do think this this this whole um sort of compromise solution with larry ellison and oracle that makes no sense to me this idea that you know ellison will own 20 of the company but nothing else really changes it'll still be based in china uh a chinese company they'll still be chinese engineers based in china who you know and they still own 80 of it i mean how how does that really

address the the data center don't you don't you think david that that's just basically a way of just it's a wealth transfer to larry ellison which i think is amazing i mean if i could totally do it yeah it's bite dance it's no it's it's it's it's put it in your lap yeah no it's bite dance it's bite dance paying political protection money to larry ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process but and i but that's why i don't think it's going to fly i mean holly has already said that it's not good enough for him and so even if i think and it doesn't live up to

trump's stated criteria even though he seems to be this is ultimately a syphilis ruling sex is that who's going to make the final call on this or does uh trump have sole executive kind of authority on on foreign security on security grounds to kind of block it does it go to cypheus i don't know that's a good question i think syphilis disapproves um m a right it has to it has to approve it yeah i mean so you're right i mean there are there are members of congress that are all going to need to be convinced to get this thing done

well but cepheus approves mna i didn't think they could like block applications as of last year as of last year every investment um triggers cyphus it's it's a weird new thing that happened uh i was involved in a company recently that seemed secondary to the national security power that that trump may have so this is almost like a two-tier kind of thing one is to approve one is for um you know for trump to be cool with it uh national security terms and then second is the anti-trust issues if we just go back a second talking about the broad you know as

chamoth called it kind of this canary in a coal mine you know i don't know how many of you guys use an amazon echo or a google home or amazon fire tv or a nest thermostat every every single every single one of them has ambient audio listening on it every single one of them even and another thing people don't realize is every speaker is actually a microphone as well as a speaker you can actually listen on any house speaker whether it's a sonos device or what have you and so we've got uh you know our homes are already wired um amazon fire tv runs on [ __ ] android um i mean

there's a hundred ways into your home as it is it seems to me like there's a significant concern about how much data we are already exposing that's being highlighted here i don't think that there's you know it's sort of like playing uh that where you try and pop the hamsters in the game it's like at some point we're gonna realize these things are here everywhere and it's not just a company but it is how we are living our lives now and how technology is kind of um capturing every piece of information about everything we do this is this is i go back to this somebody will take this or

many people will take this and run with it but i think that there is an enormous amount of money um that consumers will pay for the assurance of anonymity and privacy i don't really know how it's expressed david but like you know for example like if i could get a phone that was completely locked down and encrypted and um like a burner phone is what you're talking about and like a lot of people are now doing this they take a second phone they put vp vpns are the or the first step right and you're seeing like i tried i'm very popular well like i try to use signal i try to use

facetime audio i'll even use whatsapp now just because these things are intend encrypted and i have nothing particularly important or interesting to say or hide um but i just don't like the idea that in the in the open wild um i'm ju i just feel very vulnerable to data breaches more than any other kind of breach i mean i had this conversation with somebody that was you know sort of helping me lock down uh my wi-fi network you know and for a long time i only had one end point and all of a sudden he's like look let's have a home and a guest but in that conversation

what he was saying is um the the biggest form of theft isn't like burglaries anymore it's basically people just having packet sniffers outside your house um because they can get access to everything and anything and can i ask you can i ask you a question there's a there's a book by a guy named steven baxter was a science fiction book from years ago and arthur clark called the light of other days and these guys developed wormhole technology they could put it in any house and they could see and listen to everything and suddenly the technology became kind of ubiquitous

so everyone could create a wormhole anywhere and see and hear everything so effectively information was completely transferable and free and available to everyone and the book kind of highlights how society changed in that context so in a world where you see where everyone is and what everyone is doing and saying there's no longer any notion of information asymmetry and the way people operate and behave changes because so much of our life is dependent on people not knowing things about us that we know so when you're when your employee is going to go interview

for another job and they tell you they're going to the dentist you can say like hey that's not true and the guy says you know what i'm actually thinking about looking for another job because i hate working for you you suck so everyone starts changing kind of how they behave do you think that 50 years from now that's where the world heads do you really think it's possible to stop this train in its tracks and not end up in a world of what i would call kind of like hyper transparency where all information becomes kind of because it's already being collected everywhere about everyone

and it's only i think it's rising exponentially people are going to start i i think that people are going to start turning their homes into like those skiffs you know sensitive compartmented information facilities you always hear about like senators going into the skiff kind of situation for private stuff i think like people are going to start taking this very seriously as they get compromised you know time after time and embarrassing and uh you can see with apple making it their marketing strategy apples you don't think society changes oh i think it's already changed

already with like people getting their phones hacked and they're you know nudes being leaked people normalize that i think it makes the world a much shittier place because it basically robs us of our own independence and our fundamental right to privacy and i just think that's a really bad outcome and so you know what like i if if like the need for likes uh and tweets uh and followers uh leads me to a place where i lose privacy i would just say shut them all down now um because i think that people's self-worth is much bigger than what they understand it to be

if they're willing to make that trade-off but yeah most people appreciate that well i i i would also i would also just add that just because there's more transparency doesn't mean that it serves the interests of truth like jason said earlier um this information can be used to create you know ops you know and right manipulate and um you know it's um and so um yeah i don't you know it look like like trotsky said just because you're an artist in war doesn't mean war isn't interested in you i mean this data can be collected to run operations on people uh that don't serve you know the

interests of greater transparency i think i think people don't think from first principles on this topic this is sort of like the idiotic orthodoxy of silicon valley which is like they they wrap themselves in the flag of transparency like it means something but they have no real idea what it really means at scale and at the limit and right you know there's one thing about getting access to a [ __ ] looker dashboard who cares you know and but the word transparency is used for that the same way that it's used for david exactly what you just said and there

are two completely different things they have completely different meanings and uh the latter's implications are so much more important and we need to think about this from first principles because i think people's inherent identity as human beings ultimately gets put at risk over time it should absolutely be the case that these social networks or anybody collecting data gives an op this is the way i would form the legislation if you are running a service like facebook twitter google for free and you're monetizing through advertising you must provide an option like what

service to advertising services then i think you should be forced to give a option for whatever the amount of that monetization is a year to pay us a subscription so for example if facebook makes 80 dollars per person you lost you lost this uh monetization jason sorry i think let's it's it's over it's over next segment next time all right well just as we wrap up here on this segment kevin's sister might uh he's in the running apparently to take over for tick tock uh is that a good idea uh saks i think you know a system i i think it's a pretty it's it's a dumb idea unless the company literally becomes an

american company i don't know why you've made this point in the context of kevin mayer like if if if he's working for bite dance he's working for the by dance board directors which reports the ccp it's just why would someone who's in his position want to sacrifice his independence to do that yeah it makes no sense i mean that's this is becoming the big test on everybody's moral compass especially hollywood which is changing the ending of movies to satisfy the ccp like literally the people who are the biggest virtuous signals in the world

celebrities hollywood china china knows how to use its market access we don't we just threw open our markets to their products uh which caused you know us to lose our whole you know industrial you know manufacturing capacity we didn't demand anything really in exchange for that whereas in order to get access to china you have to say and do the right things or certainly to to not criticize them and so they they know how to use as we saw with the mba and the whole um daryl mori thing um you know they know how to use their market access all right

well let's go on to the economy here we've been sheltering in place uh essentially for six months and now people are starting to talk about hey maybe we need to do another lockdown and obviously this uh economic challenge is being felt very differently in some places it's an opportunity obviously a lot of people with sas software and you know people who work behind keyboards are having a renaissance and a lot of the economy is pouring into their keyboards while restaurants retail and anybody who has to work in the real world is part of what's becoming essentially a permanent unemployed class that

perhaps is starting to look like a dry one of ubi what are your thoughts chamoth on this permanent unemployment situation um i i have a i have a bunch of thoughts here let me just go kind of give you the stream of consciousness like um jerome powell gave a speech i think it was two or three weeks ago in jackson hole um and he basically said like look the federal reserve is taking a completely new posture on rates and um you know they they basically clarified that in explicit detail just um uh just a few days ago uh and they basically said we're keeping rates where they are

until at least 2023. you know my personal views for rates are going to stay basically at zero for the next half decade and i think it's probably pretty likely that we're going to see rates stay at zero probably a full decade so what does that mean okay well a typical recession what happens is you don't know where the bottom is right things sort of sort of decay they get a little bit worse they get a little bit worse they get a little bit worse then things bottom out and then you know you start to grow and you can use interest rate policy to kind of help navigate how soft the landing is

as well as how fast the recovery is that's sort of like classic economics and how bankers and the markets and all these folks used to work and it eventually would trickle into main street now we just have none of those things we have rates zero they're not going to go anywhere they're not going to go up they're probably not going to go down they're going to kind of just stay where they are that's one thing second is we priced in the bottom which was the first month of the coronavirus we took the markets basically assuming oh there's no growth and now we've priced things back as if they'll recover the rating agencies are out to lunch

they've basically said you know what i'm going to look out till 2021 or 2022 give me a reason to justify not to downgrade you so that you can continue to raise more debt which by the way is free um so you have all these dynamics where i think the capital markets are in an expansive mood and an expansive mode and in that i actually think there's a real bid to uh employment because there isn't really that many ways now you can without just getting completely ripped apart put money to work and so the the the real earnest capital allocation strategy that's

left for most ceos is to actually buy things invest in things try more things and all of those i think lead to net employment so in general i'm kind of constructive and bullish and i don't think that this idea that there's a permanent unemployment class sticks around freeberg what are your thoughts obviously a lot of americans work in retail um you know we obviously uh have all these restaurant workers who are out of work and travel is uh now hitting the end of the furloughs at a lot of these um different arrow lines et cetera what's your thought on this unemployment middle america catastrophe well i don't think um happiness comes from you know absolute standards of living i think happiness arises from one's relative standard of living whether that's relative to

how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor and and seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy it's otherwise society decays so the notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined and inflation-adjusted uh basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent which is you know some sort of decay societal decay we have to resolve the the opportunity framework for people which is how do you give people an

opportunity to kind of progress in their lives and earn more over time and have access to you know doing more with themselves while they're here on planet earth i mean that's just what humans need so um you know maybe there's a short-term fix but i think we've got some structural things to fix to kind of enable opportunities and and give people kind of an inherent uh you know kind of stepladder in life i heard a really dark theory a few years ago which is if we do this we're going to resolve to a world where we're going to have a bunch of people playing video games because then the

only way you can get people to feel like they're progressing in their lives is to give them more medals on their video games and give them a higher ranking and score and that's where society kind of gets to to kind of keep people psychologically kind of satiated and it's a pretty dark you know sad place if that's where we end up it's like a bad episode of black mirror but we've had a few episodes of black mirror this year so you know it sounds like ready player one uh with a masters were playing video games instead of actually going out in the world totally

sax what what's your thought on you know just the next two years let's say and how this all shakes out and this will give us a good segue into the coronavirus and where we stand right now with this potential second lockdown and the impact that might have psychologically on people and also on the economy there's not going to be a second lockdown it doesn't make any sense and even if there were people aren't going to support it certainly any of the red states aren't going to do it i guess the blue states may they still haven't you know sort of unlocked down so maybe that gets

more protracted in places like california but um but it we're not going to go back into lockdowns and people won't support and i think the thing that we basically figured out that should have been obvious months ago now is that um coronavirus is really like two different diseases in terms of its effects on on people so for elderly people and for people with risk factors it's very dangerous you know i'm very worried about my parents and you know for people in that group they have to take you know extreme precautions but for young healthy people without risk factors it's

um it's not been that deadly it's it's very unpleasant it's a very bad two weeks but you know for example if you look at the data now on uh on colleges coming back there's been some reports that the virus is spreading like wildfire on college campuses that's true but hospitalizations and and deaths have not gone up and so because it's just not that um it's just not that deadly to to to younger people and so i think this idea of shutting down the whole economy to protect people at risk is just seems like overkill and i think if we had to do it all

over again we wouldn't have done lockdowns we just would have protected at risk people we've still consistently had a thousand deaths a day we thought this might go down what are your thoughts on americans just being okay with that um that basic death toll sex well i mean any deaths is is obviously bad and tragic and um you know and statistically there are going to be people who who die even who are in the you know lowest group so for sure but you know but we've had about 200 000 deaths the original estimates from this virus were two to three million so um it's

i guess my point is not that it's not bad but it's you know but that it's um you know much less deadly than i think was originally thought there's an argument that that's not deaths directly attributable to coronavirus right and that um the vast majority of of those folks had co-morbidities and that you know the primary driver this is an argument many have made i'm not gonna take a strong point um but you know 85 percent plus of folks have significant comorbidities um and you know this virus may be um kind of has a contributing factor to their death but if let's assume everyone in the united states had coronavirus today then every death that was

reported today would be reported as a coronavirus death um and so they're testing a lot of folks um uh you know in the hospital finding that they have coronavirus it's un you know it's very difficult to then prove that the reason that they died or the sole reason that they died was coronavirus if you had to pick a percentage free bird where would you put it half of all the deaths if you just guess but that's my point is i don't think it's one thing right i'm not sure that it's someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus and they've also got severe diabetes heart

disease cancer they're on chemotherapy i mean you could list the other things that they might have what caused their death you know you can't as a coroner it's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death but when they test that person and they find that their chronovirus positive their that number is now being counted in the statistics that say that was a coronavirus death that day and coronavirus is so prevalent in the united states right now it's such a significant part of the population it's also very difficult to say hey guys like you know these deaths are so i'm

not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus that is absolutely happening but it's very difficult to say what is the net effect on life right now uh we're still learning a lot about how this virus interacts with different people based on their genetics and based on their disease state and and other factors let me ask you one more way for you free burger then i'll give it over to chemoth which is freeberg and your estimation as a scientist and somebody who's a i would say a man of science on the call here uh

are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021 and what's your best outlook for a return to normalcy if you had to pick a time when it feels like we can go to a warriors game or play cards regularly or go to the world series of poker wendy do you have a a time period where you think that could possibly happen it's all politics and social behavior it has nothing to do with science like after 9 11 there were no more serious like terrorist attacks on the united states but our [ __ ] lives changed dramatically we go sit in tsa lines and you know get our asses swabbed

when we get on an airplane now and that's still going on 20 years later so i'm i'm pretty sure there's a lot of change that's here to stay in the u.s because of coronavirus and will be even after everyone gets vaccines and the deaths drop below 10 a day and yada yada so um yeah i'm i'm not convinced that this is like hey here's the date we're all going to be out of it and then we're safe because people are psychologically scarred behavior has changed businesses have changed the landscape of how we work as a society has changed and that's not going away so it's it's it's not

like we're going to go back i think it's like we're going forward into a different world where we operate differently much is what happened after 9 11. what's your take on that shamath i think that uh david's right that you know were it but for coronavirus i think a lot of these people that died would still be alive and so you know i don't think it really matters how much of the blame we're trying to ascribe to it it's just that it was a meaningful non-trivial contributing factor so these deaths are avoidable and we have to deal with that the second is i don't think what we

know what the peak to trough looks like because we haven't really gone through a real full-blown flu season yet you know coronavirus came to america at the tail end of the winter and it's going to be i think tough to figure out what it's going to do in october november december january or february when it's really cold in many parts of the united states and you know whatever effects again we still don't know it in totality but whatever effects the warm weather had in muting it or whatever mutation muted it may change so i tend to think it's another 18 to 24 months

of this posture but freedberg is really right which is like this is what's so sad which is when you could point a finger and look at somebody and say you you're the cause it was much easier to react and create rules and create boundaries as uncomfortable or as inconvenient as they were and live by them and because this is more nameless and faceless it's impossible um so all right well here's some good news i was able to acquire uh i've been on a little investigative journalism kick asking people if they have access to rapid testing uh kits i.e they have them in korea and

i was able to get and i'm curious your thoughts on this friedberg the rapid response liberty coven 19 igg igm test cassettes and they cost 15 to 20 bucks each and they take 10 minutes they're easy to use um i mean i've had those since march and they cost 50 cents each so so these are now officially available though in the united states you had those from some other country correct i got from china and i got from the us and i got from korea um and and these things are just made everywhere dude and they're like they're these are the um

accuracy right yes yeah the so there's a paper that was published at ucsf um i i got an acknowledgement because of my donations to support the research and it showed that it these tests have actually very good specificity and the sensitivity is is going to be call it 85 but these are antibody tests and and further research has shown that not everyone has the same antibody response after getting infected and there's a relationship between how severe the disease is for you and and various other factors so and these will only show up typically

you know days to weeks after you get infected the antigen tests which are the more common kind of ones that everyone's looking for now are these tests that can actually find the virus itself and so they'll take a swab of your nose or some saliva from your mouth and see if there's any virus in there and it's a much much lower sensitivity than the pcr test which is the expensive you know lab test but it can be done on a stick and it's a good enough thing for letting people in to say a football game um and our a good friend of ours just texted me and told me that they're

doing this at the ut austin game they're using this antigen test to let people into the uh the football game today so um or this weekend so it's getting kind of more widespread yes and so when we have those tests at scales what will the world look like for burke i don't know just like the tsa you'll get swabbed and you know these things it's great business to be in by the way if you guys you know want to spack a korean uh antigen test business these things are going to sell like crazy there's a company that um i heard of through a friend which had it's an israeli company

i never followed up on it uh which was a effectively a breathalyzer um which would be could you just imagine that would be incredible right right you just well the reason we've talked about this in our chat group there are there are startups like um uh was it quadell hemodius q who've got these little you know two or three hundred dollar little handheld readers and the cartridges are basically mouth swabs or lower nails nasal swabs you know cost 10 bucks and i think you know i think they'll be they're going to be rolling out over the next few months and assuming we can scale the production of them i think they will be everywhere and uh you know i

don't think it'll be a government mandated thing so i don't think the government will get its act together but it'll be the kind of thing where you go shopping at a store or whatever and they'll be early adopters or a restaurant they'll start using it people will realize well wait i don't want to get swapped three times a day so then they'll get some sort of like receipt or voucher they can take with them to the next place and so i i think you know i'm like actually like i think i'm more optimistic than you guys about covid right now i think that whether it's because of these rapid

tests or because of treatments coming or just this fundamental fact about comorbidities again not absolving not not saying that covet isn't serious but this is the fact that we've learned that it's um you know that it's it's really deadly primarily for people who have comorbidities i think for all of these reasons i think kova is going to be a distant memory by next summer i really do i think um i think behaviorally too what's that do you think behavior changes as well like businesses and movie theaters yeah sports yeah i think i think people we

i think people will largely be back um to what they were doing last summer or by next summer um i think we're gonna have like you know call it a six-month period where you know we we do these rapid tests just to make sure um and um but but i but i think as the case rate starts dropping off um things will kind of revert back to to where they were i mean the the question to ask is kind of you know which trends were there before covet and have been accelerated like i would say the move from like death of retail the shift to e-commerce that feels to me like it's here to

stay but um you know food delivery things like that but there was no trend of people not going to sports games anymore you know and i think like stuff like that will just snap right back i don't know i don't know about you guys i'm still like feeling [ __ ] up by the whole thing you don't really realize how much your psychology has changed until you kind of reflect on decisions and behaviors like there's still a fear factor that i think needs to kind of be ironed out but um you know we'll see how long it takes for people it's just like it's so different when you're so used to

just waking up and hopping on zoom for work and avoiding people and putting masks on when you go walk your [ __ ] dog i mean it's like yeah you know it's gonna be hard to kind of change out of that overnight well i think there's i think this idea of the greater flexibility around working arrangements the ability to work from home i think offices will become a little bit more like co-working spaces for a single company where people come in three days a week and work from home a couple days a week i think there'll be a permanent flexibility but

uh but i also think that people want to get back to work and they want it back to offices and they want to interact with people and i think everyone's going to be excited to do that again it's not like everyone's going to be working from home forever um so i you know i think again i next summer is kind of my my date for when things are back to back to normal uh well this has been certainly uh driving a lot of our politics right now you probably saw the book that came out with the tapes of trump saying that you know he was trying to play it down

sax as a lifelong republican what were your thoughts when the republican presidential candidate the republican president said uh hey i'm trying to play this down when he was at the same time saying it was deadly serious does that make you worry about trump as a candidate and what do you think that's gonna how that might play into the election it must have been disappointing for you to hear your candidate trump say at the same time this is deadly and i want to play it down well trump trump's leadership on this has been a little bit erratic for sure um and by the way

let's go back and remind the viewers here that in the first pods we were doing back in april i think we kind of nailed what the right policy response should be i wrote a blog on april 2nd talking about that mass should be required that that was the right response but we also said that lockdowns very quickly after the start of lockdown said that it was um excessive you know and that what we should do is be going all in on mass not lockdowns i certainly would have liked to have seen trump get that right several months earlier um that being said let's not forget everybody else who got this stuff wrong too i mean you look at cdc

um you know or w-h-o we had talked about this on a previous pod uh i mean w-h-o um was was also uh unclear about mass and and fouchy i guess now retroactively saying that he didn't think that mass were necessary because he's trying to prevent a run on supplies i mean the whole the whole response of the health care establishment they were all they were all like really bad and so i have a greater degree of forgiveness for people who made mistakes back in march or april but what i think is hard to forgive now are these people who are promoting the wrong policies now

that we know so much more and i mean at this point i would think i think that kovit is covet policy is a net plus for trump in this campaign because the other side of it is um is is these permanent lockdowns you know this is an article in um was it foreign policy saying that we need to go back to lockdowns and i think biden said that we need to have lockdowns again and you know his policy would be to listen to the experts but all these experts again were wrong about so many things and and so you know again i think this this idea of permanent lockdowns if that is the alternative to trump will

help trump win uh and so you don't think that this woodward book and and that kind of stuff plays into the election or the debates in the coming weeks i think it's sort of priced into the stock you know i mean look if it weren't for kovid i think that if you go back to like january february when trump gave that state of the union speech his ratings were the highest they had been the economy was on fire um you know he kind of it looked like he was on cruise control to winning re-election and then covet happened and you know um and his ratings went down to the to their lowest point and

um and so i think he already paid the price for you know the the let's call it inconsistent leadership that um that woodward described so i think that's priced in and now the question is if the economy gets good enough fast enough um and the other side is on the side of lockdowns and trump is on the side of reopening um you know i again i think covet policy becomes a net plus for him chamatha 538 has in its simulations 77 wins and 100 for biden you think that's accurate yeah i mean i i think that until uh the debates i think that this thing is basically where

it's been for a long time um and if if biden flubs the debate and basically comes out as um you know intellectually too inconsistent to be voted in by a plurality of americans he's done for and trump's going to win so he can't have these you know verbal gaffes and basically seem like he's a you know a senile octogenarian if he does come off that way he's going to lose um but if he doesn't then look many of the moments you see him now he's actually pretty crisp um that probably gets the job done because like i said i think more people just want a

non-trump alternative um than want the trump alternative even within the republican party and look like preference falsification can cut both ways all the people that said they weren't going to vote for him but then did um you know there's also probably a cohort of people that now feel obligated when they came out of the woodwork as supporting him now they just feel like it's easier to be publicly supporting him but then in the you know they may go the other way so it all kind of works in both directions um but i i still think on the margin uh biden is the

biden is the favorite and you know how different will the world look chamath in your estimation under abiding presidency we get to january 1st how different does the country feel is it going to be some great relief is it going to be some great joy like when obama won no no what do you think all these things are emotional overreactions in both directions um the reality is that if you if you actually graft substantive policy that affects your everyday life the magnitude of the impact of the presidency has been shrinking since the 1980s i think the most impactful president

of our lifetimes our lifetime so you know 70s onwards was reagan and it's basically been decaying ever since um and uh so i think you know i think that the the job of the presidency is mostly window dressing except for foreign policy that matters less and less and i'll tell you why that matters less and less because all the things that the president used to you know really govern like foreign policy was a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things for example our entire posture on the middle east which has been a [ __ ] [ __ ] show or our entire posture

on russia was in part because of uh our energy policy and in a world of sustainable energy those entire regions are uh not important anymore so we can let them basically fend for themselves they're going to they're going to devolve because they're going to have to suck out all the oil out of the ground to try to monetize it before wind and solar and everything else become the dominant form of of energy and so if you take energy policy off the table all of a sudden the national security interests to care about large spots of the world go to zero

right so so then there's less and less than the presence of it's pretty pretty pretty short isn't it yes so so my my my point is the surface the surface area of the impact of the president is shrinking and it shrinks as technology like if you think about it what is driving foreign policy and national security policy changes over the last 10 15 years definitely over the next 40 or 50 is technology right if we get if we get for example if we get any form of like carbon sequestration uh at scale broadly available um you're going to have a complete resurgence of western

economies if that technology is invented in the united states or western europe freeberg quickly you'd think that biden is going to win and then what do you think the country feels and looks like into abiding presidency and then let's move over to energy and sustainable energy and carbon after that i don't know um you know i'll say the same thing i've said in the past i i don't think um the notion of a sense of relief is is realistic i don't think this is about uh people think it's about trump but trump is the product of what it's all really about um

and so i'll just you know kind of highlight i think you know biden is is a column instead of thinking about things as democrats and republicans and left and right if we think about it as kind of populism and free marketism and in the middle of centrism you know we're probably taking a notch toward centrism and at the end of the day the march towards populism seems to be continuing and you know whether trump is kind of the product of that march or maybe the next one will be elizabeth warren or aoc it's kind of the same thing in my opinion um but i i think that's the bigger kind of concern is um you know how do we again keep general

generally keep most people in the united states feeling like they can progress in life feeling like they can find happiness in life and feeling like there's opportunity for them to kind of you know achieve their objectives and if they don't feel like they're getting it they're going to try and wrap it all up and unions will continue to scale and aoc will become the vice presidential nominee in 2024 and yadda yadda uh freebird what are your thoughts on the wildfires global warming and the politics of all that and then we'll go to uh cancel culture with eusex

um california has 33 million acres of forest land it's about 100 million acres in total land so for us to make up about a third of our land um so far we're burning three and a half million so about 10 of our acres um when we burn an acre we release uh about 15 of the carbon that's stored in that acre into the atmosphere so thus far if you do the math on that we've released about as much uh co2 as we've as the california cars release in a year by the wildfires um and the politics we're seeing play out so it's it's it's a significant problem but over the last 40 years

we've added about a quarter a ton of carbon to each acre per year um and the reason we've done that is we haven't kind of you know lit fires and managed the forests and cut down trees and there's been all these restrictions in california so there's an argument that some are making that this is about forest management and then there's an argument that others are making that this is about climate change and dry weather and hot weather causing the fires and the reality is it's both but it's as everything else in this country right now becoming highly politicized that um

and you know trump visited newsome in a very kind of symbolic gathering this week i don't know if you guys saw the packet that was handed out to trump it was awesome it was like 24 point from was i mean you guys got to see it it's awesome the little packet he got awesome and then and then used some sat like exactly six feet from him with a mask on and trump sitting there without the mask on i mean it's such a [ __ ] political circus um and uh you know i think all things are true and all things are false and we can move on uh well the the the

the debate on the fires is i mean what it's the debate has has become sort of uh climate change versus forest management you know that's sort of the debate about it and like most of these debates you don't necessarily have to choose there can be an element of truth on both sides um you know regardless of how much climate change has caused these fires we've done a very very poor job in the state managing them and you know this idea that we can just fix global warming and or wait you know not have good forest management until you know and just kind of wait for global warming to be fixed is um i mean that's a really stupid idea so

regards of how much climate change is to the cause of this i think we need a much more competent state reaction to you know to to the fact these fires do you believe in global warming david sacks i believe in the you know in greenhouse the greenhouse gas theory and that yeah that it's you know that man-made co2 emissions are going to have an impact on the environment i think that you know what's a little bit hard to know is the exact timing and magnitudes of some of these things but i agree with what elon said which is that we're running a very high risk experiment here um continually putting out you know co2 greenhouse gases into

into the atmosphere why is it so difficult for the republican party and i feel like you're almost straining and couching your words there david that you believe in global warming you believe in what elon's saying it's not worth doing this for risk why do republicans seem to have such an aversion to just saying hey global warming is a thing and we need to fix it because because because democrats wrapped those words around them like a flag and so it became a political issue um like with everything else i mean i i think so so again as we have this false choice now of whether you

want to save the environment or save the economy and um and the problem is i think i think that a lot of republicans don't want to concede the issue oh hey little guy a lot of problems don't want to concede the issue because they're afraid it'll lead to something like the green new deal and so what we need to do is figure out um some responses to the problem that don't require us to destroy the economy right and for you if we did incentives if the if the country spent incentive sacks to get solar on roofs and stuff like that you wouldn't be opposed to it would you

um you mean like taxing carbon emissions or just giving discounts on putting solar in subsidizing solar for people's houses or maybe the middle ground of creating more nuclear reactors which seems like something that neither party can agree to hold on little guy sorry i got it got a little podcast okay sorry no problem yeah um look i think i i think to the extent that um carbon emissions are uh an externality the traditional way of dealing with this is you would internalize the externality by placing some tax or penalty on that um but so look would i rather tax carbon

emissions than something else yes i mean but the only way you're going to get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one-for-one tax reduction in other areas right because there's a there's this other larger debate about whether you know what else should be taxed what about you chamoth what are your thoughts on solving global warming and this polarized sort of republican democrat if you're for a global if you're if you believe in global warming you're not a republican there's a i i think that um this is the most correlated thing with

a healthy economy because i think that whoever solves climate change or the set of solutions that solve climate change first of all they'll be uh unbelievably economically successful they will employ enormous numbers of people um and they'll have a really profound legacy in the world so uh the the question is how to do it and i think the problem is right now there's there's as david i think actually puts the best lens on the topic which is right now we don't even have enough canonical data so that there's a single source of truth that we can all rely on

and have not having to judge it as climate change i think is an important step which would just mean having a longitudinal measurement of temperature and you know having a longitudinal measurement of everything from pm 2.5 to pm10 to you know uh carbon methane all of the other normal sort of emissions nitrous oxide all this stuff so that then you can just understand what men and women as part of the human race are doing to uh [ __ ] with the counter factual because the counterfactual as if we were just like living normal chill lives and so once you understand that then you can

figure out how to at least mitigate that back to what the counterfactual would have been or do it even better i think the best thing again we talked about this in a pod a couple weeks ago or a couple couple months ago the best thing that governments can do is introduce incentives and i think the the most meaningful incentives here are not at the consumer level but they're more upstream so you know if you take something like cement you know cement which is responsible for i think 20 of all the carbon emissions is a really pernicious industry because you know they all they are very

local they operate within 300 local kilometers of every place where you ship cement to make concrete and whatnot um and when you look at sort of where the emissions are um they're at a very specific part of the chain which is effectively impossible to mitigate so you have to have a level of material science um you know improvement to really move things away from cement altogether well just knowing that you're going to have to have the incentives that a government creates to pull that forward another example is when you look at like manufacturing all the [ __ ] that we

all love you know i don't care whether you like [ __ ] normal pants or hemp pants you know when you go back and you look at how h m makes those pants there's our high temperature processes that are burning fossil fuels they're emitting all kinds of really terrible junk into the environment and so it doesn't matter whether you're vegan per se you know you're not going to go around unclothed you're not going to not use spoons right so all of that the totality of all of that we need to completely reinvent high temperature manufacturing that's not going

to happen unless the government steps in because like for example take something as simple as steal you know it's a tragedy of the commons right i mean basically is if if if no individual can make an uh a major impact uh maybe they won't freeberg you think we have all the technology we need to do this and it's really just a matter of incentives and deployment right now in terms of global warming or stemming global warming is that a correct statement that we have the technology we just haven't deployed correct correct and i think it's 100 percent it's unpacked

well what i will say is we have the science the um the engineering and the resourcing uh and then the market are the are the kind of unresolved right and so resourcing is capital the market can be created artificially by putting in place government subsidies or having the government be a customer or you just have to wait a long enough period of time if you listen to um the tim ferriss interview with coke uh which one was it charles coke he talks about how ultimately consumers will vote with their dollars if climate change is real and global warming is

starting to have an effect on planet earth and we're seeing that right we're seeing people make a switch to a vegetarian diet we're seeing people buy teslas we're seeing people make choices for sustainability so the free market is resolving and will resolve climate change is the argument that some libertarians might make um and then i think be it is that true in your mind freeberg do you buy that i think it's i i i'll be honest with you i've been [ __ ] shocked by how many people are choosing to pay a premium for vegetarian meat alternatives i was wrong on

this i bet against these companies eight years ago i didn't bet against them but i chose not to bet for them because i made the argument consumers will only buy stuff that's cheaper and taste as good and i was wrong um millions of consumers are going to burger king and buying a veggie burger now which wasn't the case and we're seeing this across the world yes out of a crisis of consciousness right like you're saying that's right it's a it's a behavioral change wow because they yeah that's what they want in the market that's what they want to spend their money

on they want to spend their money on having a nicer world it's just like when people will spend a premium amount of money on a nice suit it makes them look good and feel good it's the same sort of notion i i feel good when i'm buying a tesla i feel good when i'm buying a veggie burger instead of a meat burger knowing that it is harming my people around me i couldn't bring myself to buy a carbon-based ice engine uh recently i was thinking about you know if i'm in tahoe and i need to go off-road or there's no conditions i need to have a car for and i want to i'm picking up

the model y with the dual engine and putting snow tires on it as opposed to getting the new you know jeep wrangler or the uh the new defender but whether it's biomanufacturing or um you know uh synthetic meets um or i think we're not just in a point where we have to create luxury markets i think we are going to disrupt commodity markets um and i think we're going to do that this decade and it's going to blow people's [ __ ] mind um when everything you're eating looks tastes and and feels the same and it's cheaper and it was just made in a more sustainable way using

bioengineering which is kind of you know the ability to to write the physical world with software except it's realized through genomics and it's it's an incredible thing that we're doing how much of this is the generational shift i mean gen x seemed pretty absorbed with our own projects and a little bit of consciousness but these millennials are now getting into their 30s and they're 35 years old these the oldest millennials and they seem to be incredibly focused on the environment and doing what's right this is a generational shift in your mind freebird

no i i think this is just the slow march of of humanity's ability to master our world in technology and uh you know uh look let me just give you a scenario chamath kind of says we're going to decarbonize the atmosphere if we could build an algae or a seaweed from scratch or using some basis and use software to resolve what's the right sort of seaweed to create that will grow like crazy in the oceans when it gets heavy it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and it literally just pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and drops to these 40 000 foot or you

know 4 000 foot deep kind of wells we have already built around 70 of planet earth we have the tools to do that again the engineering and the capital to do that and then the market for is there a market for that it doesn't if if governments are like it's a crisis let's put a billion dollars into this like we did in the apollo program we will get that done in five years i mean there's just there's no shortage of tools and science to be able to resolve that sort of a problem today much like we're about to produce a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months after discovering

the virus which is unprecedented so our ability to kind of read genomics and write genomics and as a result create biological machines that can do things in the physical world and self-propagate gives us this incredible toolkit humans never had at its disposal before and it will be the way that will resolve climate change and it will in the meantime we're going to bridge the gap between here and there by creating these nice luxury markets by the way here's a and so on here's an incredible example so when you look at sort of where um you know methane is a really problematic

greenhouse gas and most of the methane emissions are from cows but it's from enteric fermentation which is you know fancy language for burping and what's incredible is there are now efforts to use crispr to genetically engineer um you know cows that don't necessarily have that same gut biome you know dynamic so that you're burping methane that there's also feed that you can actually give a cow that'll minimize methane emissions burping by 30 or 40 percent all these things are to your point david they're they're so fantastical if you think about it but they're possible today and

we just need to organize and get us kind of like a center of gravity around these things and they'll happen can we get can we get jason the uh human version of that does it also cover tooting does it work for flatulence uh interestingly chris sacca tweeted about investing in a company called running tide which grows kelp and uh will suck carbon from the atmosphere i mean it just sinks it to the ocean floor and they're selling carbon offsets by putting seaweed on the ocean floor so such such a no-brainer right i mean like the ocean is so big and it's this per and like

it's not getting in the way of land well you don't have to go figure out licenses and rights you got you got to basically get carbon to go into the ocean and so then you basically need an organism that can grow and self-propagate quickly and radically accumulate uh biomass in the ocean and then figure out how to get rid of it so the best way to get rid of it is have it sink it's got to be some sort of seaweed or kelp or algae and you just put it in the open ocean and it'll propagate i mean that's just such a great obvious us and there's a thousand scenarios like that that

i think you know we're gonna kind of creatively uh come up with and results nuclear not even on the discussion freeberg i'm curious like is it just too tainted the work i've done the work i've done on nuclear it used to cost something like some number of dollars to get a nuclear power plant through the regulatory barriers in the united states and now it is so cost prohibitive it's something like 10 billion dollars now from maybe you know 100 million uh you know two decades ago there's something about the regulatory barriers yeah well there's a huge there's a huge nimby

problem right i mean who who wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard nobody i mean nobody wants it jason but but i agree with like the larger point here that the solution to the problem is ultimately going to be all these new technologies these innovative solutions not making people feel bad for consuming and you know being alive um you know you you look at tesla and it's moving the whole world to electric cars not with a government mandate but just by creating a better car and so it's ultimately going to be technology companies you know increasing the solution set

um and giving people new choices that's how we're going to ultimately solve the problem and interesting in the news new scale is creating small nuclear reactors and they just got approval this is a the portland-based new scale powers they had a small modular reactor that has been approved by the us department of energy for a site in eastern idaho we'll see if that ever comes online but it does seem like small nuclear reactors could solve part of the nimby problem in that they're smaller so if something were to go wrong we would have some ability to contain uh

or have a smaller footprint in a disaster-like situation let's wrap with the overton window uh chamath talked about it closing and saks uh there was a good article the taxonomy of fear uh that you started with the group tell us a little bit about that article a taxonomy of fear by emily yuff i think it's yeah what's her name yeah she's a writer for the atlantic who wrote this again it's called taxonomy of fear and persuasion i think it's an important article what it does is analyze uh cancel culture and the language that's used to cancel people

and um one of the you know one of the things she diagnoses is what she calls safety ism which is anytime somebody doesn't like um what you know an idea or what somebody else is saying they claim that their safety is being threatened by that idea and it's kind of invoking these magic words that hr you know has come up with where you know if anyone is is creating an unsafe work environment or an unsafe college campus well the the source of the problem has to be removed immediately and so this is the the language of cancer culture and

you know the problem with it is that it doesn't really matter what the intent of the person was or um you know intense sort of irrelevant or whether the objection is reasonable or not you know whether it it it causes uh it whether actually you know threatens anyone's safety and so there's an example of this when um 50 prominent sort of writers intellectuals wrote a letter to harper's magazine including jk rowling and um matt iglesias who's a co-founder of uh vox and so there was a you know there's a trans writer uh there's a writer on who's a trans uh person

uh at vox who claims that her her safety was threatened but because one of the co-founders had signed this letter the letter didn't discuss trans issues it was simply the fact that uh iglesias had signed it along with jk rowling and so jk rowling apparently is is um you know yeah i i miss this part of harry potter but apparently the the trans movement is yeah heart position women who were born uh women who were born biologically female are different than women who transition right so right and that's her position but her position is being attributed to glaciers by association yeah exactly and so

yeah i would be like saying that i'm in support of trump just because i'm on this podcast with you sense to be clear yes it's contamination it's contamination by association um you know cancer culture and uh this one everybody being scared of words and this will be if if trump wins in november it'll be because this whole thing um just gets too much for too many people there is a massive plurality of people in the middle who think this overreaching sensitivity by the extreme left and the extreme right are uh are just completely out to lunch and um 100 percent agree and and i and i think that by the way the extreme left and the extreme right they should all just

get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless [ __ ] wits anyways all of them both of them on the extreme light like when antifa and the alt-right are fighting with each other it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow um thanks for tuning in to the all-in pocket i i mean i mean most people are in the middle most people don't need to have this like us or them you know it's it's it's like uh you're not allowed to have an opinion like i actually learn more from people that i disagree with just by hearing them

and not trying to judge them and i think that most of us as well have our views that are sort of moderately in the middle so for example there was a usc professor that got sanctioned because he was trying to he was teaching a language class and he used the chinese word for that which sounds like the n word and i think he didn't preface it correctly or what have you but then you know he apologized he was suspended and folks wrote a letter now everybody has a right the the people who felt uh offended have the right to write the letter the administration had the right to react

and then i think people read that article and think to themselves is this actually the uh has the pendulum swung too far or not and and mark my words if people feel that the pendulum has swung too far they will elect donald trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a [ __ ] about any of this stuff so that would be the bellwether no that's exactly right so i think it's really important i think that there's a large part of the country that feels that trump is a shield not a sword that he is their protector against this this type of cancel culture and i know trump

seems like an instigator and he's very threatening to a lot of people on the other side but again to these people he's more of a shield and i think it's it's not just the fact that he speaks out and denounces cancer culture that makes him a hero to these people it's his his superpower is his uncancel ability it's this you know it's the fact that the left has done everything they can to try and get rid of this guy to impeach him what have you yeah and he's and he keeps surviving and so it's it's his very you know uncanceled ability that makes him such a hero to these

people and i think this is the thing that the the left or the media doesn't quite understand is that denouncing trump in ever more hysterical terms doesn't you know it doesn't work because it kind of feeds it actually hurts it actually hurts it adds more right it adds more people right to his cohort who say you're overreacting right and hystericalness of overreacting like i tweeted i've been on this you know mini uh tweet effort to tell people listen there are chromebooks in the world they're very cheap 90 of the americans are excuse me on the internet at high speed

and there are so many online resources for you to get ahead in life go try to be a marketer go do khan academy go learn ux and design these are the clearest paths into the technology industry and i get hysterical liberals who say people don't have access to the internet people don't have access to chromebooks and people don't have the free time or the motivation to improve their lot in life and it's like are you who are you talking about because ninety percent of the country has access to the internet and uses it uh already and if you go and do a search for a chromebook on ebay

use one you could find one for 50 to 150 bucks so we have this narrative that people cannot rise up and people cannot improve themselves and every time i say i believe people can improve themselves people say that i'm uh like a racist that i believe that people could improve themselves and it just makes me further away from the democratic party it makes me further away from the left that i think i think this i'm going to put out a crazy um idea which is that i think if donald trump wins in a meaningful way in november i don't think he will but if he does the actual

silver lining for for everybody is i think the republican party will disintegrate and the democratic party will disintegrate and in its place i think you'll probably have three or four parties and i think that that would be amazing so it's the burn it all down vote which was peter thiel's idea in the beginning was like i think sacks and teal when they coordinated this trump election it was all burn it down burn it down right sex that was your star chamber discussion with teal would you want guys wanted to burn it all down i think you're trying to i think what you're doing is contamination by association there yeah to

college just because thiel right when's the last time you talked to peter till no peter's a friend of mine but i don't but again and and i agree with him about some things i just agree with him about other things but this is it you did this idea but but this idea that we can't hang out with people you know or or that hanging out with people means that we must endorse every view they have like why is it even relevant that you know i'm friends with peter look we are like for example we're friends in our group chat with a couple guys who are very far right we're not going to name who they are

but i would say that i think that the group chat is better off for them being able to say what they believe and push back and just like there's a bunch of us who are in the middle and we waffle back and forth between the left and the right and then there are folks that are more on the far right our far left uh or on the left so i i just think that we forget that there is enormous value in the diversity of thought um and and people think that there is uh some sort of safety and conformity and in fact i will tell you um that's actually the exact

opposite you're more likely to be in conflict with someone that you are very similar to because eventually you will always end up competing for the exact same resource and that resource becomes scarce if you are actually spending time with people that are divergent and different from you you actually end up not competing for the same resources because you're one second you're built differently so there's just less conflict so this is why multi-party systems work this is why you have less fighting when there's you know in canada and um and europe

than you do in the united states because the united states tries to reduce things down to two choices and so we we all of a sudden like just glom into these pools that are seemingly similar and we just end up hating each other freeburg any final thoughts on canceled culture yeah i think it's just gonna be bad i i totally i totally agree with jamaat that if trump wins the election this will be the reason um that the same thing happened when the republicans overplayed their hand with bill clinton right and it was said at that time that you know clinton was always very fortunate in who his enemies were

um because no matter you know what he did wrong or how badly he screwed up his enemies always made too big a deal of it they overreacted and it played into his hands and i you know i have to wonder if that's what's happening right now with this whole cancel culture yeah all right well we'll leave it at that we've gone over an hour uh if you're listening to the all-in podcast and you'd like to advertise uh it's not possible there's no ads on this podcast and if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast that's also not possible there's no guests

so send your advertising and guest requests to tomorrow org breaking news right now there is a tech crunch story that just broke while we're on air can't stop wound stop social capital just filed for its fourth spac uh if you're into spax no that's not the that's the that's not the article the article oh the article is launched is spack and it's back as he spacks the world with spax yeah we just announced three yeah oh you just announced number three no no three three d e and f oh d e and f got approved no yeah they're filed out with the sec now yeah and when would d

e and f be available for people to buy shares in it then is that like that 60 days uh 15 days oh okay great all right well there you have it and then you confirmed that the second spec was open door right is that confirmed where is that that was announced on tuesday yeah congratulations on that thank you how do you feel about all these people stealing your thunder with stacks i think it's i don't know it's great no it's it's great i think it's growing the market it's good for entrepreneurs it's amazing i mean what this is going to mean that companies with 50 to

150 million will be able to go public on a clear path i hope so i i've said this before we've gone from eight thousand public companies to four thousand in 20 years so let's uh reverse the tide let's go back double the number of companies that's right i mean we should think we should have gone up you would think it would be in interest rates it has to yeah yeah all right well here we go uh please for the love of god somebody convinced calm robin hood thumbtack and data stacks to go public because i've got kids to put their school uh all right everybody for bestie c the rain man himself david sacks and the queen of quinoa freed burgers

this is the all in podcast we'll see you next time bye bye love you besties