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

March 13, 2021 / 01:09:59

This episode of the All-In Podcast covers COVID-19 vaccination strategies, the Biden administration's policies, and the implications of equity in vaccine distribution. The hosts include David Friedberg, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya.

The discussion begins with an analysis of President Biden's announcement that all adults will be eligible for the vaccine by May 1st. The hosts criticize the slow vaccine rollout in California, highlighting the state's unused doses and the complications caused by eligibility requirements.

They argue that the focus on equity in vaccine distribution is counterproductive, preventing vulnerable populations from accessing vaccines. Friedberg emphasizes the need for a more straightforward approach to vaccination, suggesting that anyone who wants a vaccine should be able to get one without bureaucratic hurdles.

The conversation shifts to the effectiveness of vaccines, with references to studies showing significant protection after the first dose. The hosts express frustration over the anti-vaccine sentiment and advocate for a more positive narrative around vaccination.

Lastly, the episode touches on broader societal issues, including the concept of privilege versus success, and the impact of COVID-19 on mental health and public safety, particularly in California.

TL;DR

The hosts discuss COVID-19 vaccination strategies, equity issues, and societal implications of vaccine distribution policies.

Video

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does anybody have any thoughts on  this i mean i think it's incredible um
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so does fredberg's dog
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hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another  episode of the all-in podcast it's been a week  
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it's been a minute with us today of course  the queen of quinoa david friedberg and the  
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rain man himself calling in from a nondescript  mansion in one of 17 cities the rain man himself  
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david sacks and cackling like a dictator who  got his two billy back and he's back in the game  
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chem off paulie hapatia
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is he going to get a car with doors that  go like this doors that go like this
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let's talk a little bit about the vaccine biden  says everybody who's an adult is qualified by  
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may 1st he's instructed the states to do  that we are now hitting uh 2.x million a day  
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we had a 3 million shot day i believe friedberg  and obviously the 1.9 billion dollar covid slash  
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uh everybody gets a big slice uh bill got passed  1.9 trillion sorry that's what i said 1.9 trillion  
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no somebody put 1.9 billion on the number yes  1.9 trillion uh 1.9 billion is what the covid uh  
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nft went for the nft went for women said  in the past a trillion here trillion there  
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soon enough it's real money yeah yeah well  biden biden's speech really kind of begged   the question of why we still need this 2 trillion  dollar bill if covet is going to be over in may  
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but putting that aside i think biden's speech was  very welcome in that he called for states to drop  
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all of these crazy eligibility requirements  are actually preventing people from getting   vaccinated at this point he says that every adult  american should be able to get a dose by may 1st  
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and he's right and you know there's a sharp  contrast with gavin newsom in california who keeps   playing political games with the administration  of these doses so in california yesterday just  
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yesterday we added 250 000 more doses of unused  uh inventory so we the amount grew to 4.5 million  
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unused doses sitting on a shelf only 215 000  people got vaccinated so we're actually building  
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inventory faster than we're building the  population of people getting vaccinated   and it's because of all these crazy rules and  requirements you have to go make an appointment  
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you know and that really actually it's  counterproductive because it discriminates   against people who are less computer savvy don't  know how to navigate the website or you know  
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communities who don't want to enter their name  in a government database which you know there's   a lot of people in california don't want to you  know put put their names in a government database  
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and so it works against those communities getting  vaccinated at this point we should just drop all   the requirements drop the website let anyone  who wants a vaccine just get in line and get  
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vaccinated it'll go much faster the problem is  that we we throw around this word equity and that  
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we need to do something with equity and in fact  i think that people who use that word are stupid   i think what they're trying to say actually is we  don't want inequity and the most inequitable thing  
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is to actually take the most impoverished and  fragile of the population and prevent them from  
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actually getting the vaccine because they're  the ones that actually need to be working   and can't afford to actually not work or can't  afford to be sick or can't afford to you know  
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um find solutions to child care um it's this weird  word that like you know the extreme left uses now  
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to describe policies that are just frankly poorly  thought out and even more poorly executed it might  
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even be more pernicious than that correct freeburg  in that anybody who gets a shot is helping  
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everybody else because they are now a blocker in  the system i know this is incredibly simplistic  
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but i'm a simplistic guy and it just seems  to me it's a different way of thinking about   the benefit of vaccination and i've said it  in the past but the benefit of vaccination  
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is to get enough people vaccinated that the virus  generally stops spreading and then the pandemic  
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ends and that's the objective it's not about  creating equitable protection for individuals   and as americans it's interesting we think about  it in terms of an individual benefit it's like  
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how much do i get what do i get from this vaccine  i want to get protected the other guy's getting   protected before me who gets to go first yada  yada becomes this kind of competitive you know  
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frothing for a vaccination and the reality is  if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough  
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the pandemic ends if we can get 200 million shots  in arms this goes back to i think this tweet i  
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sent in in early january december if we get 200  million shots in arms we can be done with the  
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pandemic based on you know how many the efficacy  of transmission rate um reduction uh combined  
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with the fact that a certain number of people  have already developed immunity to this thing   we get to the point that there should be kind of  a you know think about a network and you start  
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turning nodes off the network suddenly becomes  really hard to see transmission happen across   the network and um and so the prioritization of  you know who gets the vaccine over you know how  
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fast we are deploying the vaccine has been  a critical error from day one in my opinion   um now look all that being said um i feel like  we could sit here and criticize and argue about  
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tactics and strategy all day long about this and  you know make politicians look like idiots and  
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administrators look like idiots but the truth  is we are now seeing three million shots a day  
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inviting speech he said which if you'll remember  is what i said we really should be targeting is   about one percent of the population every day  and that's roughly where we are biden said in  
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his speech that we are on a war footing which is  effectively what we said the other day the federal   government is operating 600 mass vac sites and  we are right now getting shots in arms for all  
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of the issues with prioritization and nonsense  that's going on i feel very in the united states  
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i agree with you i agree that biden has the  correct posture on this which is warfooting   we are not doing that in california i mean i  just talked about how we're building inventories  
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faster than we're getting vaccines administered  newsom just announced that 40 of the vaccines are  
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now going to be basically separated out and  reserved for equity zones and you know it's  
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what does that even mean it means that certain  communities uh only people in certain communities   can get those vaccines and they're going to be  distributed out through this complicated system of  
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local community groups all that does is put  money through some no-bid contract to some  
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shitty technical company uh a bunch of consultants  that then take advantage of the system get paid  
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hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to  to do nothing i mean right exactly i tweeted out  
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there's this bot that now scrapes and and by the  way before i tweeted out this thing about this   bot which is i think uh yeah i sent it to you  it's it's the california vaccines available bot  
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exactly and all it does is it it's it scrapes  that my turn.ca website but before that in our  
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group chat there was another friend of ours  who wrote his own scraper if you guys remember   and it was really shocking because all it would  show is page after page after page of completely  
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open and available vaccine vaccine slots you  know at the moscone center and other places  
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and you think all of this stuff is just a bunch  of i'll be blunt uh rich white people sitting in  
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a room with their head up their ass and they come  up with these stupid [ __ ] rules and then they   try to implement them with words like equity and  all that happens is that you compound inequality
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and let's go back to freeberg's first point which  is that all these unvaccinated people who can't   get vaccinated faster become a giant petri  dish for the virus to continue spreading and  
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experimenting on morphine and morphing so maybe  we actually do get a vaccine resistant strain   the new strains the variants have been popping up  so far are not vaccine resistant but the longer  
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the pandemic goes on the longer there's a chance  that one could arise and then we're back to square  
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one on this thing so it's going to hurt everybody  um and and here's the crazy thing is that you know  
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i think we all know a lot of people i know dozens  of people who've been vaccinated in california and  
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they all come to me and tell me they're whispering  about it you know because they don't want to but   tell anyone they're not scared of being canceled  they're scared of being canceled because you know  
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newsom and and the equity people have created this  idea that if you get a vaccine you're taking away   from somebody else in reality you're not because  anybody who's high risk has already gotten the  
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vaccine by now or has had access to get the  vaccine and all you're doing right now if you   get the vaccine is taking a dose off the shelf  where there's 4.5 million doses sitting there and  
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it's increasing by millions every week and so what  we need to do is well let me make a psa actually  
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starting on monday uh you could anyone  in california can get the vaccine with   a doctor's note and they're saying that doctors  have total discretion to give the note so let me  
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just make a psa to everyone out there if you're in  california just go get a doctor's note starting on   monday and go get the vaccine yeah you know stop  stop worrying about knew some stupid rules let's  
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also just be remember so two points on that not  everyone has the ability to go just get a doctor's  
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note it's really hard for people that have to go  to public clinics and so on to get a doctor's note   um what we are seeing is a lot of people just  hacking the website almost like soviet union era  
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breadlines where they go to the website they type  in something that's not true to get themselves a   slot and that's how a lot of people are kind of  filling the void the reality is i just want to go  
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back to the point i was making at the beginning i  think we're skating out of this thing and i think   that the inventory surplus which is absolutely  being built up at a staggering rate in the united  
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states right now if you look at the inventory  forecast from j j pfizer and moderna relative   to the deployment rate of the vaccines right now  you are correct we are building up a surplus an  
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inventory surplus and the rate of build up per  day is increasing right now so one million extra  
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shots a day two million extra shots a day being  yeah probably i think it's a million to a million   and so we're building up an inventory and so on  on top of the 30 million we have we have already  
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an inventory so so what's happening is there are  natural market dynamics where we are all pointing  
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out and saying is starting to play out in terms of  people kind of hacking the system there's so much   supply there are many vac sites now you can go  to any supermarket any pharmacy in california  
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to get a shot and everyone's just clicking  the box and saying yes i qualify and they're   going in and getting shots so the market demand is  starting to meet the supply even though there are  
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government and regulatory forces that are trying  to inhibit that from taking place and so i do feel   pretty good when you look at kind of the inventory  forecast and you look at how many shots have been  
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given per day that in 45 days or so we're going  to get to a point that we're starting to skate   out of this thing and kind of call it let me ask  you can i ask you a question despite the idiocy of  
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the process that regulators have kind of put in  place yeah free brick i just have a quick science   question because i i was trying to find the answer  to this but i i would love for you to tell us  
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what is the real efficacy of the vaccine and  what is your transmittability like your your  
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carrier status once you've gotten for example  like you know let's just say you take the the   pfizer vaccine right yeah if you get the pfizer  vaccine how many days until this is like pretty  
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good and you know like what is really the risk  profile between the first shot and the second shot  
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i'll share this link and then we can post it  on the um on the on the show notes and people  
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can take a look at it but it's an excellent paper  published in the new england journal of medicine   showing basically a population of unvaccinated  against pfizer vaccinated with half a million  
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in each population half a million people yeah and  um yeah and they showed basically the accumulated  
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infection rate severe hospitalization rate and  death rate of each of the two populations over  
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time and that really kind of i think highlights  the efficacy of the vaccines and at what   time period they become efficacious on each  of those metrics and by the way even after the  
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first dose across a population of half a million  people the margin of error on death um shows that  
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there may even be complete protection against  death after the first dose of the pfizer vaccine  
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within seven days of getting that shot pretty  powerful statistic what just to describe the   chart for those people listening you have two  populations and one's in blue one's in red and  
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it's the time is you know in days on the bottom  axis and when you get to day eight one line goes  
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sideways and the other one goes keeps going  straight up so it's day eight after the pfizer  
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that you're basically protected according to this  chart um and that's on the first shot and like i  
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think it adds like one or two cases yeah that's  right there have been zero deaths so i think day   eight is the day and the second dose seems like  to me you know it's just this unbelievable extra  
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another amazing chart which maybe we can dump  in the show notes is what's happening in san   francisco we hit 10 000 shots a day at the end of  february march 1st we're doing now 2 000 shots a  
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day so we literally have dropped 70 percent or so  we're at 3 000 shots i think from the peak yeah so  
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this crazy wokeness is resulting in you know in  this this virtue signaling that you know oh we  
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can't give any shots to anybody unless we get this  group first or that group first is now leading to   everybody hacking the system the hack that i've  heard is since teachers are getting it child care  
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people and food service people are getting it  people are now starting to get jobs at doordash  
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or saying they're a teacher and if you check that  box according to you know the back channel that  
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i've heard you go get the shot and you don't  get they don't ask you for anything they're  
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no one's checking it's just a driver's license  the pharmacies the grocery stores the mass fax   sites the sfdph california dph administered  sites the federal sites no one's checking  
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you sign up you check a box on the website it  says i attest that this is true and then you   go and show your id and get your shot and so  a lot of people have kind of initially started  
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skirting around the rules by going to be a  door dash driver for a day or what have you   and then saying i'm a food and ag worker and  then now generally people i think are just  
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clicking on the box and going in and getting a  shot now the sorry the just to go back on the   previous question champ i shared it figure 2  nick in this paper i shared particularly box e  
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shows the deaths due to covet 19 of a vaccinated  population a non-vaccinated population   and then it shows documented stars cov2  infection and you'll see that you basically have  
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almost no incremental infections in the vaccinated  population starting around 28 days after your  
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first dose and so you know that's really when you  could say you've got you know really good kind of   protection from the vaccine and you're already  starting to get the benefits early on antibody  
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studies have also shown that there's this big  jump up that happens around that period of time   um and so call it three weeks after your first  shot and then in particular the fourth week  
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uh you're really kind of like locked in with  a a protective um you know capacity now your   question around transmissibility is one  that's still being studied which is if i've  
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got a vaccine am i going to be able to pick  up the virus and transmit it to someone else   right now you know they're saying well we don't  have evidence one way or the other but i mean  
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generally the way that the virus is spread is you  develop an infection in your body your body then  
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makes lots of copies of the virus and then you  cough and spit them out in the air and that's   how people get it so theoretically you could  carry some virus on your mouth or on your nose  
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where those cells don't have immune protectiveness  and you know the vaccine the virus is still alive   but it's not spreading in your body you're not  creating a lot of superfluous virus to spread  
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in the world so you know the basic science of it  is you should not be spreading covid if you've  
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been vaccinated right i mean you may have some on  your skin or in your nose or something for a short   period of time but you're not going to develop  a systemic infection that you're then going to  
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kind of start exerting everywhere um so i think we  should we should we should start to transition to  
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this world of feeling really good and safe and  enjoying ourselves yeah we hit 500 000 shots a   day sacks in california and now we're down to  150 000. we've literally gone down two thirds  
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under the management yeah of governor hair joe  it's yeah i mean because because you know and and  
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what was his in his state of this the state  speech which went over like a lead balloon  
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the the most notable quote was we're not going  back to normal normal is never good enough normal  
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accepts inequity so because there might be some  inequity in the world around the wrong person in  
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line getting these doses we're never going back  to normal and he's basically ensuring that result   by taking forever with these vaccines but let me  let me um let me go back to to this point about  
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efficacy so i think freeberg gave the stats on  look the bottom line here is that vaccines work  
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that is the message we should be getting out to  people is that they work and the thing i've been   really surprised by in the reactions that i'm  seeing to my own tweets on twitter about this  
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is how loud the anti-vaxxed voices are and  how loud and sort of when you say anti-vaxx  
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you you don't mean not take the vaccine you mean  the vaccine doesn't work and we're never getting   rid of kovid the forever people yeah well there's  no it's there's there's actually a lot of people  
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on twitter who got really angry when i when i just  tweeted um i tweeted something about how it's so  
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it's over i tweeted it's over you know um right  biden says we can all get the vaccine um in may  
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if if you decide not to do it that's  on you the rest of us are moving on   and i got a lot of all i was really saying is look  once the vaccine's available there's no need for  
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any of these covert restrictions anymore but a lot  of people interpreted that as me saying something  
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that you should be forced to get the the vaccine  or something like that now look i don't think   you should be forced to get it but i think it's  highly effective it works and uh but i'm surprised  
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at how loud these sort of anti-vax voices are it's  usually like a conspiracy theory around around the  
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vaccine and and i think part of the reason why  those voices are are so loud is because they're  
00:18:04
unopposed because all the people who believe  in the vaccine are getting it but they're all   afraid of like like you were saying jacal of being  cancelled and so there's a conspiracy of silence  
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around this you know what we all need to be saying  is look go get vaccinated it works take the win  
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america take the win we screwed this thing up for  14 months can we just take the goddamn win i'll  
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give you a little thing that that always pops into  my mind in all of these things whenever i hear  
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some politician or some like naval gazing  intellectual use the word inequity i think  
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like this is a power grab because the word  equity is really about ownership whereas   the word equality is about balance right and and  power hungry politicians love the word equity and  
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inequity because it's their opportunity to grab  power and to tell us how things should be done or  
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to do things differently in a way where you know  they can enforce their mandate which is typically   ill-formed and not very smart um and i would just  encourage all of us whenever you hear the word  
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equity or inequity this huge huge red light should  be going up and you're at saying whatever this  
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person says next is a crock of horseshit and it's  probably a power grab whereas if you hear people  
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really talking about solving inequality there's  really no mechanism to solve inequality through  
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power well i think that's a great point around  the language that gets used and i have a similar  
00:19:28
uh concern about the way that the word privilege  gets used we used to have a term in this country   called success yeah people were successful or not  and you know success had a connotation of being  
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earned whereas privilege has a connotation  of being unearned well i mean now sometimes  
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privilege is earned success and sometimes  it's unearned and you know but but when you   start using the word privilege to describe all  success it implies that there's something you  
00:19:54
know unjust or unearned about it and it needs to  be reallocated so you know i that to me is another  
00:19:59
one of these political words is we shouldn't be  confusing success with privilege yeah they're   two very different things i have an example of  this oprah winfrey is successful prince henry  
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is has privilege his privilege his privilege i  shoehorned the uh meghan markle story finally i  
00:20:18
mean i do want to talk about the meghan markle  story actually at some point before the end of   this podcast but before let's do it right now uh  okay uh uh joe lonsdale actually also had a tweet  
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um a pretty unapologetic set of tweets around  you know the miscasting of this this concept  
00:20:33
of privilege and i thought it was really on  point i really agreed with what he was saying   and it's effectively what you're saying david  it's like people right now i find are just so  
00:20:41
well not not people the people that take  the time to wallow in twitter um mostly  
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at least as i interact with them are just  so bitter and i think that there is no  
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um magnanimous happiness for other people's  success anymore it i think i think like we  
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live in a culture now where everybody feels it  is so zero-sum when it's not in fact zero-sum um  
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and people just begrudge other people's  success especially by the way when it's  
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earned and the reason is because there's an entire  generation of people of all different ages and  
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you know but this this last five or ten years who  tapped themselves out now some were legitimately  
00:21:27
prevented from success but there's a lot of people  that bought into this narrative wow it's a whole   conspiracy that's set up against me so i'm  not even going to try and they are often the  
00:21:36
loudest and the most embittered absolutely and  the reason is because you know everybody wakes   up in their 40s and 50s and starts to rationalize  their choices in their lives and what they really  
00:21:46
feel deep down inside is oh my god i just let  an entire decade go by of blaming other people  
00:21:53
yeah and i think there's a surprisingly large  amount of that this ideology of victimization  
00:21:59
doesn't teach people the right things because you  start to think that you know if you're wallowing   in your oppression then you don't have agency  over your own life you're blaming other people  
00:22:07
for not being successful not getting ahead  when what you should be doing is focusing on   working and improving your own life and getting  ahead or also just redefining what happiness means  
00:22:16
happiness doesn't mean what that other person has  and then saying because i don't have that i have   nothing happiness is really like introspectively  figuring out like what really makes you complete  
00:22:26
and i mean not to get too syrupy about it but it's  like that's what we've also lost the script on so   when you when you put all of these things together  there's just a bunch of people that sit on the  
00:22:35
sidelines they either are too scared to enter the  arena or they don't want to enter the arena they  
00:22:41
don't want the failure that comes from it because  they've grown up in a culture where you know they   had the kindergarten soccer ball handed to them  the gold star and everything they participation  
00:22:50
trophy um and now what we really need are people  in the arena more than ever folks trying and  
00:22:58
it's okay and there's just not enough of them what  instead is there's just a lot of people who just   want to [ __ ] and complain and i think this is  the backlash to the meghan markle interview is  
00:23:08
is that this miscasting that this is an extremely  privileged person or you know harry and megan  
00:23:13
both are very privileged and but but i think  what they're trying to do by making all these   sort of accusations of racism against their own  families they're trying to ground that privilege  
00:23:24
in victim status and and this is the thing  about privilege is privilege is a social concept  
00:23:29
it's got nothing to do with with success which  is either earned or unearned and so the way that   people get uh to maintain their privilege  is that again they grounded in some sort of  
00:23:39
victimization um it creates these very perverse  incentives my reaction to the meghan markle uh  
00:23:46
prince harry interview was the following i had a  lot of um sympathy uh for um what she was saying  
00:23:54
um but on the other side i also thought you  must have known what you were getting into on   the way in and there was it was be now and look  i'll say this as a canadian and a sri lankan so  
00:24:06
the queen and the monarchy is an increase like  it's i can't describe to you guys because you're   not part of the commonwealth but it is  just a definitional definitional part  
00:24:17
of who we are as we grow up and i  don't know what the equivalent american   construct is i guess there isn't one really um  and so you know the monarchy is an incredibly  
00:24:28
important thing but we all know that it's this  kind of like anachronistic thing that just kind of  
00:24:36
i don't look for us it's not [ __ ] like i mean  like if you said to me despite all my [ __ ] and   raging against the machine and society and blah  blah and stature if if i could be invited to meet  
00:24:46
the queen i would be there in eight nanoseconds  okay i think the equivalent is the presidency   we we actually feel that way about the presidency  like going to visit the president is a president  
00:24:56
the presidency is not an endowed kind  of circumstance there's something about   there's something about the queen my point  is though we all know a that it's important  
00:25:03
it's a great symbol of of the commonwealth i'm  very proud of all of that but we also know it's   anachronistic and it doesn't make much sense  and so what what do you uh what do you think  
00:25:14
you were marrying into and i think you know my  perspective was i felt bad for her i can't believe   you know it got to the place where like people  wouldn't get help for her when she was sick and  
00:25:24
you know and then they were questioning harry's  or the the kids uh archie's a skin color i mean  
00:25:31
this is insanity like these people are stuck in  the 1800s but then you realize they are actually  
00:25:37
stuck in the 1800s because they're not allowed  to have a normal life they're not allowed to   actually interact so you know are they at fault or  they or is the system that creates these sort of  
00:25:46
like voyeuristic you know exotic animals in a zoo  that we call the king the queen these princes is  
00:25:51
the system at fault i don't know i i was kind of  like 50 50 on the interview but my perspective was  
00:25:57
the monarchy is in a really tough spot over  the next 30 or 40 years because again so now   let me tell you where my belief is i'm kind of  a little bummed by the whole thing the monarchy  
00:26:06
doesn't mean what it what what it used to be for  me david what's what was more enthralling to you  
00:26:11
this week tucker versus taylor or the queen versus  oprah and prince henry i didn't i didn't spend it  
00:26:19
i didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on  either one i mean look i i if i were if i were  
00:26:25
harry i would probably do the same thing which  is to basically leave look the first thing i did   in my career was lee was quit the the firm right  you know who wants to work for a firm um you know  
00:26:36
it's very tracked um so i don't blame him leaving  going to california you know that's what we that's  
00:26:41
what we all did right and he was being it's a very  that's a very entrepreneurial american thing to do  
00:26:46
what i what i had a problem with was the way  that they're attacking their own family because   they're being paid seven million dollars to do  this interview no no no hold on they were not it  
00:26:56
was the first question oprah asked and and they  were very clear they were not getting paid now   they did sign a hundred million who made the  seven million though no oprah did harpo did oh  
00:27:05
well she's a genius yeah she's a genius no no  let's see it again oprah oprah is our queen that's  
00:27:12
her queen of america right oprah is the queen she  gets oprah figured out a way to get paid it's even   worse it's even worse if they did the interview  for free and didn't even get a piece of the back  
00:27:21
end so all they did was attack and besmirch their  family uh for none of that and look i i i guess  
00:27:28
my point is so why would they do it if it's not  even about the money i mean it's about this idea   of defining their privilege grounding it in victim  status and i think there's something very fake and  
00:27:38
phony about that and i think that's why people  had this uh reaction to it where frankly they  
00:27:43
were i don't think they're on the side of the  royal family because it's it is outdated but i  
00:27:49
think the there was a lot of skepticism towards  what harry and i had a little bit of a problem   with the like live from our 15 million dollar  montecito mansion no jason i mean that was that
00:28:05
i know but they also have a 15  million dollar house next to oprah oh
00:28:10
no it's public they put five million  down and they took out a mortgage it's uh   someone listed this whole thing no it's an honest  question does the do the taxpayers of the uk  
00:28:19
fund the princess that's the whole point they went  and did a deal with netflix and they started end   of spotify and now they have a salary and they're  making money like everybody else so i mean i'm not  
00:28:27
i'm not i don't have an issue with any of that  no i don't have an issue with that i thought   the taxpayers were funded the lifestyle they do  fund the lifestyle of the other princes right  
00:28:35
sure yeah so i mean that's the thing we talked  about can we talk about something important yeah  
00:28:41
okay so a beeple sold for 69 million dollars i  mean this week this one's crazy all the dumbest  
00:28:49
[ __ ] happened this week taylor laurence  welcome to this week slaughtered on well   yeah that's making dumb [ __ ] so i miss i miss  tucker versus taylor but actually the the real uh  
00:28:59
the person who took on taylor that did a brilliant  job was glenn greenwald yeah i don't know i don't   know if you guys read his post but that was  brilliant brilliant and basically what he said  
00:29:10
is that look you've got these classes of reporters  out there who their job is to go out and they  
00:29:15
they're like little hall monitors you know trying  to bus people for whatever they might say in a  
00:29:20
clubhouse room not just public figures but private  people too they're in the business of destroying   lives and reputations you know that that's  basically their business model but then the second  
00:29:30
anyone has any criticism for them they claim  it's harassment which is just absolute nonsense
00:29:38
the only person that was inoculated against  social justice wokeness to write that article   is glenn greenwald because he is you know he's  gay he's got brown kids he lives in brazil  
00:29:47
you know with uh i mean it's it's fa it's like you  get well irresistible force moving the immovable  
00:29:53
meeting the immovable object he he he's not  completely immune because he was he was attacked   you know and and people said pretty nasty things  about him but yeah he definitely has some i think  
00:30:02
greenwald is an unbelievable writer who calls it  like he sees it um i don't agree with everything  
00:30:07
he says all the time um but you know he's right  to call this stuff out there was another bunch   of social justice nonsense this week as well  this this poor guy had to like give out this  
00:30:17
crazy apology tweet because he said what happened  wait what is that story okay this is the greatest  
00:30:22
okay there's a kiss i've been telling you jason i  want you to exercise because i lost 20 pounds look   at me i'm looking for something i wanted yeah i  want both of you guys to exercise tell me about it  
00:30:31
by the way public service announcement covid  vaccine ca is the bot so at covid vaccine  
00:30:37
vaccine it just tweets every five minutes a  hundred different places you can go pretend   to be a door dash driver and get a shot sorry  i mean it's just a word vaccinated check a box  
00:30:46
check box let's roll people don't let newsome  take away your health yeah don't let newsome  
00:30:53
don't focus on equity yeah i mean while he's  at like uh jason tell us about this uh tell us  
00:30:59
about this tweet thing what happened there's a  kid named dom he's an entrepreneur he's building   a company it's a good company it's funded  by stripe you know it's raised hundreds of  
00:31:06
millions of dollars like good for this guy yeah  but he likes to like you know he's kind of like  
00:31:11
trying to engage on twitter and he basically  said i feel so much better and i'm performing  
00:31:16
at such a higher level since i got my diet and my  exercise right i mean people who are not getting  
00:31:22
their physical right are really underperforming at  work it's such an opportunity or whatever and then   you know the the large and in charge you know fat  is beautiful you know contingent basically tried  
00:31:34
to cancel him sorry wait wait but did he say  that you have to be skinny no he just said you  
00:31:39
will before if you're fat you're underperforming  basically he didn't use the word fat but he said  
00:31:44
if you're not in shape you're underperforming at  work which i said is there science behind this and   yeah sure people showed me 100 studies that show  if you lose weight you have better concentration  
00:31:54
and focus i mean it's pretty obvious but he did  the cardinal sin as uh here here i'll read you the  
00:31:59
tweet an important lesson i learned well into my  career if you are not physically fit and healthy   then you are underperforming at work pretty  basic probably not very controversial but  
00:32:09
he did what david sacks always advises uh and the  the the advice he gave to trump which is never  
00:32:16
apologize um and he apologized dom apologized  and took the tweet down which then the mob really  
00:32:23
went after him and he said i screwed up and i'm  extremely sorry i have recently spent a lot of  
00:32:30
energy focused on my fitness eating and sleep  in my enthusiasm for my new fitness regime i  
00:32:35
posted a tweet that was meant to celebrate my new  healthy lifestyle but that's not how i came across  
00:32:40
and i see now i don't understand if my original  with all the problems that we have that need  
00:32:48
fixing i mean this is what people were focused  on this better but here's the exact here's the  
00:32:53
kicker of the apology this is something i really  need to improve on and i will well no no i'm not  
00:32:59
making fun of him i just think it's sad what the  hell is going on no but i mean don't apologize  
00:33:04
if you believe being healthier is you know good  then you should say it and you know we'll let  
00:33:11
the chips well with it people can debate it but  i mean can we have a debate about that because   this is in the middle of a covid crisis when  the top two vectors are age and obesity period  
00:33:21
if you're fat you die from coven that's that's  how it works and you got both those problems  
00:33:28
you're old and fat you guys didn't say stupid  all right i'm doing good today all right  
00:33:35
today in uh all in nonsense apparently there's  so much money in the system that an nft just sold  
00:33:42
for 69 million dollars after we talked about the  previous one billy bought for six million dollars  
00:33:47
i don't know that he bought it for six million  dollars but somebody bought one last week nft seem   like a real thing it's reasonable to trade stuff  but 69 million i think it's incredible i mean like  
00:33:57
like the then i saw the breakdown of like the  number of bidders here let me actually just   get this uh data up because i think you guys will  find it really incredible my thesis on this or my  
00:34:07
theory rather is um that there are a bunch of  people who have stakes in these crypto assets  
00:34:14
and then they all premeditate decide to  buy up these nfts to get the market started  
00:34:20
and then once it started like jason that's what  other people do with art right you know this  
00:34:26
but i've been buying art for a decade plus and  this is exactly how it works in the art market   you know we go in there certain people will go and  buy and then what the gallerist says is oh did you  
00:34:36
know that chamath just bought this piece or such  and such a person bought this other piece and then   all of a sudden the price spins up and  then they feed into it i mean this is where  
00:34:43
you know an enormous amount of money has been  made by gallerists over the last 20 or 30 years   now it just happens in a different  medium so the the bidding breakdown  
00:34:52
by the way of this nft is incredible 33 active  bidders 91 of the bidders were new to christie's  
00:34:58
55 came from the americas 27 percent of  bidders were from europe and 18 were in asia  
00:35:05
the age breakdown is the most interesting  six percent were gen z so 97 to 2012. 58  
00:35:12
of bidders were millennials 19 born between  81 and 96. wow 33 gen xers and 3 baby boomers  
00:35:19
so this is really like a transitional change in  you know basically deciding what's valuable and  
00:35:25
i don't think this i don't think this  was any different than you know when   you had this transition from you know sort of  impressionist in the art world like if you moved  
00:35:32
from the body of work where you know these  impressionist paintings were just going for   high tens low hundreds of millions of dollars and  i think it peaked around van gogh um and then you  
00:35:42
know basically it went from there off of a cliff  where you can basically give away impressionist   paintings uh and everything went to contemporary  and you know sort of like this post-modern stuff  
00:35:52
and that was a decisional change by boomers  what is what does giveaway mean to you chamoth
00:36:00
yeah you know tens of millions exactly
00:36:06
so i think on the nft stuff and and people  he's people as the artist there's two things  
00:36:11
going on right so one is on a technology level  nfts non-fungible tokens there they are it's a  
00:36:17
legitimate technology for creating provenance on  a blockchain you know if a piece of art basically  
00:36:24
gets put on a blockchain you have perfect  provenance but that doesn't mean that all nfts are   valuable in fact most of them won't be it's just  a technology then you have the other thing that's  
00:36:33
happening is on an art level what these sort of  um these sort of prestige galleries and so on  
00:36:39
they're saying that people is now a major artist  and there's and the reason someone becomes a major  
00:36:44
artist is because they usher in like an or become  representative of some new wave of art like jamaat  
00:36:50
is saying you've got impressionism you've got  modernism i mean the reason why jackson pollock   sells for whatever 100 million dollars no no  300 to 600 okay it's because he represents  
00:37:01
an important wave in art and some of those  waves fizzle out and they turn into ponzi  
00:37:06
schemes and some of them become real and people  are speculating that this digital art will be a   major wave and they're saying that beeple is the  most important artist and they're kind of betting  
00:37:15
on that now do i think it's gonna last um i don't  know i mean hard to say you said no you said the  
00:37:22
key thing though the key feature of nfts which  i think is amazing is that you can actually have   ownership and provenance written into a  blockchain now you take that abstraction  
00:37:31
you can apply to all kinds of surface areas  and it makes a ton of sense any kind of other   asset would make sense if you own a car if you  own clothes if you own watches if you own wine  
00:37:43
what happens if you own a house now all of a  sudden if you can prove ownership over this stuff   not only can you trade it but you can also borrow  against it and i think that that is a really  
00:37:51
interesting idea where once you financialize  all of these physical assets that we own  
00:37:58
you do eliminate an enormous amount of  inequality in the system because you can  
00:38:04
actually get real transparent pricing like  now could you yeah blockchains blockchains   are a ledger right they're a perfect ledger  system and so like everything every type of  
00:38:13
possession that relies on title should eventually  be blockchained so art art's a good example you  
00:38:19
know i uh helped found a company back in 2017  called harbor which was a blockchaining uh  
00:38:25
real estate and ended up getting uh acquired  so now wired or acquired no it got acquired
00:38:36
don't worry we're going to make money we're  going to make money as an lp i just wanted   a clarification yeah no we're we're not  going to make like stack type money but  
00:38:43
we'll make a little bit of money on that deal  so don't worry um but but yeah look i think  
00:38:48
i i think we're in the early early stages of this  type of technology you're gonna see eventually   blockchaining of every of every type of asset  where title is important david i think that this  
00:38:57
is such an amazing idea because like if you think  of all of the opaque lending markets where people  
00:39:02
can't get access to reasonable cost of capital  and they own assets you know you end up in these  
00:39:08
crazy worlds where like if you look at the the  housing crisis uh or the great financial crisis   you know there was like so much crazy lending  but behind that lending was like double  
00:39:16
triple mortgages it's happening right now in the  car market all of that stuff doesn't necessarily   need to exist because if you have clear provenance  and the ability to price risk you just get you  
00:39:26
know people can borrow a reasonable amount  of money at a reasonable rate and pay it back   and you know you can trade assets you could  sell assets it's a really big deal i think  
00:39:35
i think um if you take a zoom out on the uh  you know the notion of what an nft represents  
00:39:41
it's it doesn't feel too dissimilar from other um  what i would argue is like non-productive assets  
00:39:47
like if you think about where one's capital  goes where an individual puts their capital  
00:39:54
the first thing is kind of essentials right things  you need like food and medicine and housing and   clothing and whatnot and then you kind of enter  into these kind of you know non-extend you know  
00:40:04
kind of discretionary spending for a consumer you  know nice stuff nice clothes luxury goods things   that are basically going to diminish then as you  think about allocating the leftover capital you're  
00:40:13
either going to allocate your leftover capital  into investable assets that are either productive   or non-productive a productive asset is something  you buy that you expect to return it produces some  
00:40:23
value for you as you own it such as owning a home  where you get the value of living in it or owning  
00:40:28
a car where you get the utility of driving around  in it or owning a bond which issues a you know  
00:40:34
you know a coupon or a stock that's gonna you  know generate cash flows at some point in the   future theoretically um the non-productive assets  are these assets that are just not designed to do  
00:40:44
that but they're a store of value that you  expect at some point to realize some return   um you know because someone else will pay a higher  price to you for that non-productive asset this is  
00:40:54
like a piece of art or you know some piece of gold  or something it's something that you kind of hold  
00:40:59
or you know more increasingly you know digital  assets and it seems like the explosion in digital  
00:41:06
assets is you know as jason pointed out at the  beginning like as we've kind of moved to a highly   kind of overvalued segment of productive assets  those things that market is very frothy it's  
00:41:15
very difficult to kind of find productive  assets that are worth putting capital into   there's continually more interest in  non-productive assets across the board  
00:41:23
because there's excess capital in the system and  it turns out that when that happens there's enough   of a market dynamic that emerges in non-productive  assets it gives people a reason to put their  
00:41:32
capital in and expect to have a return on them in  the future as soon as the market starts shrinking   as soon as um you know you start having effects  that are deflationary your money will pour out of  
00:41:41
that market in general that's always what happens  with the art market and has for hundreds of years   um and it's it's it's the digital means of of  kind of realizing that same market transition  
00:41:50
that might might talk my question is do you  get the rights i guess this is a dependent on  
00:41:56
the terms that are set in the smart contract but  in the case of the people if i were to buy for 69   million do i have the rights to it so that i can  print t-shirts and sell hundred dollar t-shirts  
00:42:07
or can i create 10 000 that's more of these  can i monetize it is what i'm asking that's  
00:42:12
a great great great question i i don't know but  that's a fabulous question by the way because the   alternative like as you pointed out the artist and  and other folks have rights to art um even though  
00:42:22
the original painting is what's sold you know the  original um uh master of a bruce springsteen song  
00:42:30
could be sold to a collector but the rights the  rights on that track for reproducing it making  
00:42:35
money off it are owned by a publishing house so  you can own that physical magnetic tape but not   own the rights to exploit it and over time those  rights fall away so if you think about what that  
00:42:44
nft represents it represents that particular chain  of electrons and you know this is this is these by  
00:42:50
these bits that represent this image um and it's  not necessary to make a hundred more and then  
00:42:56
he could change one pixel theoretically or two  pixels and he could go print a bunch of stuff   and go not right not really because those images  were ones that he had he he had this rhythm of  
00:43:04
creating like one a day i think for a very  period and he contributed them all into this   master right exactly so there's a this is a it's a  one of one another interesting uh one of one that  
00:43:14
just happened was these uh performance artists  or i guess like underground digital artists  
00:43:20
uh bought a banksy for 125 or 125 thousand  dollars i get thousands and millions confused um
00:43:29
everybody well that's a that's a thing you  want to use for this episode is hashtag cancel   go ahead uh yeah good luck good luck anyways these  four guys bought bought this banksy um for 125 000  
00:43:45
they brought it to a warehouse in brooklyn they  took a high-res image of it okay so they took a  
00:43:52
picture of it and they created a one of one nft  right okay then they created a youtube video of  
00:44:00
them burning the original banksy so now all you  had was the digital manifestation of this physical  
00:44:10
thing wait for it and then they sold it for three  hundred and like fifty thousand dollars so they  
00:44:16
three x their money it's the most incredible story  um i can find the link and i'll put it in the  
00:44:22
show notes as well but it just shows you what's  happening and then i also think last thing on nfts   i saw that i think was like kings of leon just put  out an album and it was like it's like 50 bucks  
00:44:31
for a song or something like that and it comes  with like a bunch of uh interesting content so   it's the beginning of something guys i just think  that you need sort of like popular content to  
00:44:42
get this movement going but it seems to me like  this is what people want to do they want to own   digital assets they want to have provenance  they want to have custodial relationships but  
00:44:51
that they want to basically but it's just like  it's like art and posters right anyone can put   the poster up in their room anyone can buy a  copy for five bucks but who owns the original  
00:45:00
and owning the original may be visually identical  maybe graphically identical but it is truly about  
00:45:07
that notion of that that theoretical human mind  construct of ownership um that that creates that  
00:45:13
distinction and you just effectively have to  count on other human minds believing the same   thing in the future for you to be able to  reclaim that value that that monetary value  
00:45:22
um or you're going to take a loss on it i mean  jamaat have you ever sold art that you've bought   you know i've uh i've sold very little um i tend  to buy and accumulate with this idea of eventually  
00:45:33
endowing something with just because it's like you  know i think there are two ways to buy art one is   speculatively and the other one is to tell a story  um i took the second path um and so you know it's  
00:45:44
stuff that means a lot to me so it's hard for me  to part with it even though it sits in a freeport   in delaware so it's not exactly you know out and  about um with this idea that at some points people  
00:45:54
will get to really enjoy it once by the way i mean  one of the things that happens in the art world   and correct me if i'm wrong on this but you buy  this art and you don't ever a lot of art doesn't  
00:46:02
get resold so everyone kind of buys it under the  notion that it's going to be worth more in the   future and they can sell it for more but very few  people actually do end up selling it no no no no  
00:46:11
that's it so here's what's inside in the trading  market right but like i mean generally like a lot   of collectors end up endowing art or or uh gifting  it and when you gift it you get an appraisal done  
00:46:22
and you get a deduction on the appraised value  right and so you can definitely do it that way   so uh one one interesting story is that um one of  the large auction houses has a financial arm and  
00:46:32
uh the most incredible thing is like over like the  last 50 years their cumulative default rate was 30  
00:46:41
basis points on their book like cumulatively not  like a year or a month but ever nobody defaults  
00:46:50
well because they borrow money for the purposes  of maybe buying other things or whatever and then   they will very you know trade out of things  and trade up to things and trade across  
00:46:59
things but it's a very vibrant market of buying  and selling it just happens to be very informal  
00:47:07
and a little bit closed and very much for insiders  and you know another reason that i think that nfts  
00:47:12
will will change because it'll will change this  is that it just makes it available to everybody   because you put all art on a very level playing  field and really at the end of the day what is  
00:47:22
art it's a commentary on society and i think  that having that level of transparency on that   kind of stuff is i think is going to be really  valuable because you don't want one or two people  
00:47:31
who you fundamentally disagree with as being  a taste maker for a kind of art that you think   is fundamentally flawed right you'd rather it's  just it's no different than being able to go to  
00:47:39
95 different media sites to read the content  you want or you know being able to listen to a   thousand different kinds of music all of it in  its totality is a commentary on society and i  
00:47:49
think what society says is we want transparency  and we want choice and this is where i think  
00:47:54
like that's why i think there's a good a good  dovetail into what's happening with the stimulus  
00:48:00
bill and where we started which was is this even  necessary um we have uh stimulus checks going  
00:48:06
out in the amount of two thousand dollars per  individual in households with under 150k i believe  
00:48:12
is um the income level which means people who  were not impacted financially in any way by  
00:48:21
what's happened to under covid are going to get  in a family of five ten thousand dollar checks   uh even if nobody was laid off or that's only  that's only like nine percent of the bill jason  
00:48:31
yeah i mean so it was 100 it was 450 million out  of 1.9 trillion so what do we think the impact  
00:48:37
we sort of have working theory oh sorry go ahead  jason what are your general thoughts on this   is it necessary and then two what's this what  are the second order effects that we each  
00:48:47
predict will happen over the next 18 months  when all of this capital gets injected so  
00:48:52
the latter is what i've been focused on trying to  figure out and i saw some really interesting data  
00:48:57
which basically i'll ask you guys the question  because maybe you guys know the answer but   if you measure wealth inequality when do  you guys think was the most recent period  
00:49:08
where there was the least wealth inequality  the least well sorry how do you define that  
00:49:14
uh you can measure it like the ginny index or  you can measure it as like you know the the gap   between the top decile and the bottom decile in  terms of uh wealth and accumulated assets well  
00:49:25
would it be before the robber barons no it was  the between the robber barons and now the period  
00:49:31
of the least inequality in recent history was in  the late 70s which is an incredible stat to say  
00:49:36
where the gap between the top decide on the bottom  decile was like you know kind of like on an index  
00:49:42
like 60 65 whereas today it's sort of like at 100.  um now what happened then and it's this is really  
00:49:50
interesting wasn't that an inflationary period  there you go so what happened and as it turns out  
00:49:56
inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease level of  the playing field absolutely it decreases people's  
00:50:03
richness so it makes rich people poorer that's  really the most effective tool that you have to  
00:50:09
recalibrate it's very very hard to redistribute  money and i think every attempt at doing that  
00:50:15
has largely failed but the one consistent way  and if you go back periods before that you know  
00:50:20
into the beginning of the but in an inflationary  environment borrowing costs go up so you know  
00:50:26
businesses and people that rely on borrowing  to grow their net worth they're investing   assets to grow their net worth kind of suffer  more than people that what have a home have a  
00:50:34
you know weight wages go up in an inflationary  environment right weights go up which actually   if you think about like what you said before like  you know as people get wealthier they they move  
00:50:43
their money into you know essentially financial  assets and away from sort of like working assets   and when you know interest rates go up and the the  risk-free rate goes up then the attractiveness of  
00:50:54
those assets go down yeah and so what happens is  shares and technology companies go down but what  
00:50:59
i what actually also happens is that you your cost  of capital for a traditional business because it's  
00:51:04
higher they have to then charge more which means  that they're paying their employees more and those   folks um on a marginal basis tend to then you  know take those dollars and spend those dollars so  
00:51:16
inflation is this very productive mechanism  of actually redistributing wealth and actually   homeowners benefit homeowners benefit as well but  like you know it shrinks it shrinks the wealth  
00:51:28
mild mild inflation mild inflation is  probably good it's probably it's better than  
00:51:35
probably deflation but if it tips over into  hyperinflation then it destroys everyone's  
00:51:41
savings right and rich people have the ability  to protect their assets against inflation   a lot better than the middle class people  do so you know you look at like venezuela  
00:51:50
we are germany hyper inflation yeah people just  hyperinflation destroyed the value of of of uh  
00:51:57
where are we seeing inflation where do we  anticipate we'll see inflation i saw today tesla's   tesla raised the price on all their cars except  for two well they have to because the inputs of  
00:52:06
you know if you think about like if you break  down a tesla and you look at where the money   goes the money really is in the batteries and  if you break down the batteries it goes into  
00:52:13
three critical inputs lithium nickel and cobalt  and the prices are highly suspect and um they're  
00:52:20
they're very poorly predicted and so the cost  of tests are going to go up by 20 or 30 percent  
00:52:26
and there's nothing that there's nothing that  tesla can do and by the way you'll see this across   all commodity products if inflation  takes hold in a in a meaningful way  
00:52:35
um including uh you know food products ag products  you know um all commodities you know metals  
00:52:42
but um the businesses that will benefit the most  and this is really interesting from a technology  
00:52:47
perspective and i think it played in part my  understanding is speaking to a number of pms   about this portfolio managers at funds um is that  you know technology companies don't have a lot of  
00:52:57
hard assets um and so they have less kind of you  know value accretion and they don't play in a  
00:53:03
commodity supply chain so it's much more difficult  for a technology company to say raise rates by 30  
00:53:09
whereas a food company can raise rates by  30 percent one of the ways to look at this   is to look at the um you know the  book value or the capex you know  
00:53:17
property plant and equipment of a business  and businesses that have a lot of pp e   are generally going to do better in an  inflationary environment they're going  
00:53:24
to have more throughput on that ppe they're going  to have higher dollars per unit of pp e um and so  
00:53:30
you'll see you know this is why there's a shift of  dollars into what are traditionally called kind of   value stocks or you know kind of bigger industrial  companies away from you know software kind of tech  
00:53:39
companies which don't really really benefit  from this inflationary trend um and so there's   going to be you know some sort of play out in in  those sorts of products probably more jay calvin  
00:53:50
do we see it in sas because i've noticed that  sas prices are going up and that people are just  
00:53:57
keep adding to the price of these sas products  i was pricing out all the virtual conference   you know stuff like hop in and all that air  meet and whatever and i was just shocked  
00:54:05
at how much they wanted to charge you know 15  50 thousand dollars a year and i was like but  
00:54:11
can i use like zoom in this for that you know in  a chat room slack room and are we gonna see it  
00:54:16
happen in sas where people are gonna start raising  the prices and just increase their profit margin   because their employees are gonna demand more  money because they're part of this cycle i i think  
00:54:24
that's a function of pricing power uh going up  for sas companies they become more established and  
00:54:29
entrenched um those companies are very profitable  i don't think they're experiencing wage pressure   in any way um i think they're just becoming  more successful their pricing power is going  
00:54:38
up as they become not necessarily monopolist but  as they have more market share and they dominate  
00:54:43
their categories they can increase prices but  i want to go back to this idea of the 1970s  
00:54:48
because i want to i want to challenge the idea  that the us economy was doing well in the 1970s  
00:54:54
so chamath mentioned the the ginny index there was  a different kind of metric called the misery index  
00:55:00
that was was a much more popular index that was  used around that time and the misery index was  
00:55:08
defined by a brookings economist and it was  basically the sum of the unemployment rate  
00:55:13
and the inflation rate and in 1980 the misery  index was 19.7 percent this is why ronald reagan  
00:55:21
got elected is because you had a cpi  which the inflation rate of 12.5 percent  
00:55:27
and then you had unemployment of another 7.2  percent on top of that and you know the 1970s were  
00:55:36
especially the late 70s were an economic  disaster for the country so maybe things   were more nominally equal but everyone was equally  more equally poor and what you saw in the 1980s  
00:55:49
is that they got you know inflation under control  uh paul volcker at the fed broke inflation that  
00:55:55
lowered interest rates enormously that allowed  people to buy homes um the stock market went up  
00:56:00
and um you know it was an economic boom so i don't  know that this idea that we we want to introduce a  
00:56:06
lot of inflation into the system is a good idea  like i said i think mild inflation of say two  
00:56:12
percent is better than two percent deflation  the other way but uh but i think we should be  
00:56:17
very careful here about um about uh inflation  and making sure it doesn't get out of control  
00:56:24
the other index to look at is the quality of life  index which is typically you know health care um  
00:56:31
and then the property price to your income ratio  commuting pollution uh safety and those kind of  
00:56:38
things and you know the united states is 15th on  that list with obviously the nordics and australia  
00:56:44
uh germany new zealand just being at the top  of those rankings in america i've never really  
00:56:50
thought about that right we don't really even  discuss happiness you know and that and that   quotient we don't index for that happiness and  low stress i think we're talking a lot about  
00:56:59
quality of life in san francisco now because  that's a community that's very rich and yet   it's a miserable city to live in because crime is  out of control you know jason you and i have been  
00:57:08
to focusing on this uh d.a chasebudden who's had  an enormous impact on people's quality of life  
00:57:14
because he's simply not prosecuting uh theft  in the city there's actually is a crazy tweet  
00:57:20
where a city council member was inside city hall  calling for a hearing on the rampant rise and  
00:57:26
theft in the city and meanwhile his car was broken  into right outside city hall i mean you can't   make this stuff up and then the other thing that  came out were a whole series of statistics about  
00:57:36
crime in san francisco showing or sorry trials  and convictions basically chaisa has not been uh  
00:57:43
has not been conducting any trials he hasn't been  convicting anyone it turns out that the number of  
00:57:48
trials and convictions that he's gotten in the 14  months he's been d.a is one-tenth of what gascone  
00:57:54
got when he was da and by the way gascon's not the  model d.a or anything i mean gascone is facing a  
00:58:01
recall in la for delection of duty and he's still  10 times more productive than chase boudin um  
00:58:08
just a quick update many of you when i mentioned  the gofundme for to put a journalist on chessa if  
00:58:16
you just type in gofundme chessa c-h-e-s-a into  the google we added eight thousand dollars since  
00:58:22
last week so we have fifty eight thousand dollars  that's going to a journalist and a data journalist   to cover this exact issue uh so thanks to  the folks who donated i'm not taking any  
00:58:29
money from it i'm donating obviously um other  than a small other than a small finder's fee  
00:58:35
no zero dollars i'm donating to it i basically  said i'll be one percent of it whatever the final  
00:58:41
number is i think the marina times has done a  great job with this um yeah and there have been a   couple other sources as well but but how dishonest  was it i mean this has been a recurring theme on  
00:58:51
the pods i just want to touch on it chase has sent  his little mouthpiece his little minion the high   school friend to go out and challenge us writing  that blog post saying that it was a lie that chase  
00:59:01
that wasn't prosecuting anybody and lo and behold  the numbers have come out he tried to claim that   uh chasa had the same rate of charging that ghost  gascone did and that was true but the problem is  
00:59:12
he's been pleading down all these charges he's not  taking anyone to trial he's not convicting anyone   he's certainly not locking anybody up so i mean  what what a lie that was well and criminals are  
00:59:23
just so savvy that they actually understand what  the chances are of them actually getting convicted  
00:59:30
and they shape their grift and their crime to  whatever the environment they're in is just like  
00:59:36
people who deal drugs just like people who take  these hardcore fentanyl drugs they just pick the   market where they're going to be most welcome so  they're not going to do it down in palo alto or  
00:59:45
san mateo or mill valley they're going to do it  on turkey street yeah so so i think that's how  
00:59:50
it starts but i got to tell you you know i'm in la  right now and um there was a an episode like last  
00:59:56
week at um il pistai but like oh yes and uh it's  it's on canon street and downtown beverly hills  
01:00:04
number one italian place that's where all the  celebrities go it's a great italian place there's   a lot of outdoor seating there was basically um  a mugging of someone was just sitting at a table  
01:00:14
apparently they were wearing a really  nice watch and some and they were they   were robbed at gunpoint in the middle you know in  the middle of the of the rest time yeah lunchtime  
01:00:24
and then there was a struggle over the gun i don't  know why the guy just didn't hand over the watch   but anyway he struggled over the gun four shots  went off one of them bounced off the concrete and  
01:00:32
hit a woman in the leg oh my god so this is like  crazy it's getting i mean it's getting out of here   sounds like san paulo where they chop people's  arms off for the watch i mean they literally will  
01:00:41
drive by apparently and just cut your arm off  if they can't if you don't give them the watch   well i just you know the criminals are starting  to feel emboldened because gascone and boudin  
01:00:50
are not they're not having trials they're not  prosecuting they're not locking people up and   so they're graduating to more and more serious  offenses i'm sure they probably didn't want to  
01:00:58
shoot anybody or maybe that wasn't their intention  they just want to steal the watch but it resulted   in a shooting just like the deaths of hannah  abbey and elizabeth platt when you had you know  
01:01:08
troy mcallister you know hit them with the car so  i mean the fact that we're not locking people up  
01:01:14
is resulting in in in people dying and a lot of  risky very risky behavior all right as we wrap  
01:01:21
here a lot of spacks going out we obviously saw  um another i guess roblox was a direct listing  
01:01:28
um i'm just curious only only under price by  50 it's the same same problem as the ipo so  
01:01:35
basically what you're saying is bill gurley's on  his headset walking around el camino real house  
01:01:42
what i'm calling journalists what i'm  saying is uh irrespective of what the   the goals of the direct listing were the result  is the same as a traditional ipa there you go  
01:01:52
um well can i give a shout out to you to a  company that david sacks um sure oh pipe yes  
01:02:00
congrats which is a an incredible company that  basically like helps you capitalize your contracts   with your customers and it's just it's just  basically this incredible thing that i'm seeing  
01:02:10
and it's and there's a couple of others that do  it as well um clearbank is another one but you can  
01:02:15
fund your company non-dilutively and at some point  i think we should actually talk about the state   of the union adventure maybe we can do that in a  couple of next episodes i have a lot of thoughts  
01:02:24
on where i think venture capital is going and when  i see things like pipe i'm just like completely  
01:02:29
so happy because i just think it it's uh it's it's  com it's gonna change the the the way in which  
01:02:35
venture investing is done it's a it's a  very brilliant idea you can go to pipe.com   twist to get 12 months free um pipe.com is a  two-sided marketplace if you have reoccurring  
01:02:45
sas revenue or any kind of reoccurring  revenue somebody did it with the sub stack   so i think pomp liano the guy who  pumps uh bitcoin he has a newsletter  
01:02:56
that makes whatever quarter million dollars a  year um he sold for 95 cents on the dollar his  
01:03:03
forward looking subscriptions for the year  and bought bitcoin with it when it was at 35.  
01:03:08
so he's like doubling down but if you're a sas  company and we have many of them in our portfolios   you could take all of your monthly contracts  sell them on the marketplace to somebody else  
01:03:18
not pipe pipe doesn't buy it it's some other  financial person who says i'll give you 94   cents on the dollar give you 92 cents on the  dollar i'll give you 85 cents on the dollar  
01:03:25
and so if you were if you have a 10 million  book of business paying monthly you can get  
01:03:31
that 10 million now and deploy it but jason i  think more customers i think this is a good this   is a good maybe way to end but i think let's  agree that the next pod let's talk let's start  
01:03:40
with the future venture capital 100 i mean it's  changing dramatically it's changing dramatically   and i i think these non-dilutive ways of growing  a company will completely impact pricing you know  
01:03:49
pre money post money the amount of equity that  employees can and should own in these businesses  
01:03:56
you know what is the value of brands like you  know it like people will know who david sachs   is and who harry hurst is people necessarily don't  even care anymore like you know hey if i'm calling  
01:04:06
from sequoia what does that mean anymore um  they're going to say who from sequoyah is calling  
01:04:11
so these are all really interesting topics that i  think are worth talking about another path is just   the public markets you know right i mean public  markets are becoming the new late stage private  
01:04:18
market and it's really you know both the spac and  early stage ipo and direct listing models are are  
01:04:25
changing dramatically and it's um and there's  more speculative risk seeking in the public  
01:04:30
markets in a way that i don't think we've ever  seen um and it's uh it's creating an opportunity  
01:04:35
for companies that are still you know what in  a traditional um kind of sense might be called  
01:04:42
you know early stage or still businesses a lot of  risk being able to go public and and you know kind   of take their companies out and let the public  markets wager on on how well they're going to  
01:04:51
execute and and how well they're going to be  able to develop their product or their market   um and it's by the way it's something we've  seen historically with biotech where there's  
01:04:58
kind of very binary kind of bets that happen  and binary outcomes because the markets are   known and you don't need to kind of productize  or build a business around it but now we're  
01:05:05
actually taking both business risk market risk  technology risk product risk um public markets  
01:05:11
at all stages and i think you're going to see  these um these scenarios where people will build  
01:05:16
public portfolios public business public  company portfolios that will perform a lot   like venture portfolios right you'll have one  or two businesses that'll have a 10 bagger and  
01:05:24
you know a chunk that will go to zero and a chunk  that'll have some modest return on them and it's   going to be yeah it's going to be this tremendous  learning experience because a lot of people will  
01:05:32
put all their money into one stock that they think  has already been made it's already it's already   done things it's netflix it's netflix it's you  know their promise of the future is 100 certain  
01:05:42
and the reality is their promise of the future is  five percent certain and so depending on the price   you're entering and how many of these things  you buy you could build a portfolio that could  
01:05:49
have a good return but it's um it's going to be  a lot of speculative betting and a lot of losses  
01:05:54
and if you don't diversify you're going to lose a  lot of money and you know so the question is also   how does it evolve regulatory wise chamath how  are you communicating that to the market because  
01:06:03
you'll have some spacks that go out i would  think virgin galactic is in that more like  
01:06:08
they're a deep tech researching phase and then  you have other ones that are already you know  
01:06:13
churning the the ringing the register right so how  do you communicate that to retail investors or the  
01:06:19
audience or that's up to them to do the research  how do you think about that i mean there's as well   as the bad inventory that's getting added no  look yeah i do a tweet storm i do a one-pager  
01:06:30
i have a multi-hour detailed investor presentation  that's taped and then we have a typically a 100 to  
01:06:38
300 page s4 so you can ingress into finding out  the true story of a business at whatever point  
01:06:44
you want it really just does come down to doing  your work i mean a lot of the folks on twitter   you know when you see the market straight down  and they complain my reaction is stop crying  
01:06:52
and do your own work um and there's like we have  complete transparency in this process so it is up  
01:06:58
to people to do their job and the the thing that  i think is happening right now is people think   that they don't have to do a job and that money  is free and it's not it's hard to make it it's  
01:07:07
hard to make good investments it's hard to build a  company everything is hard nothing is really easy   because if it was easy everybody would be doing  it all the time and so that's that's what i would  
01:07:16
love to leave people with i really gotta go guys  i love you guys all right let's let's start with   venture capital next week yeah love you boys  free davids love you love you davidson oh my
01:07:32
i mean we love each other and we can  say it and then the guys on this side   love you they're working on it like look at jake  out dragging it out stop dragging everything out  
01:07:42
we're dragging it out because we love you david  we'll see you all next time bye bye red bread   pills got me lit red pills got me lit red pills  got me lit red pills got me lit red pills got
01:08:01
i've been on a bender on these red pills but
01:08:19
i've been on a bender on these red pills
01:08:50
i'm ready to go more i need more red pills  what a joke get me those red pills from miami
01:09:20
um i'm ready to go all right  anybody give a [ __ ] about nfts
01:09:52
i've been on

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This episode stands out for the following:

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Episode Highlights

  • Vaccination Strategy Critique
    The discussion highlights the inefficiencies in California's vaccination rollout and the need for better access.
    “We should just drop all the requirements...”
    @ 03m 06s
    March 13, 2021
  • The Importance of Vaccination
    A call to action emphasizing the collective benefit of getting vaccinated to end the pandemic.
    “If we get enough people vaccinated fast enough, the pandemic ends.”
    @ 04m 36s
    March 13, 2021
  • Equity vs. Inequity
    A critical look at how the term 'equity' is used in politics and its implications.
    “Whenever you hear the word equity... it's probably a power grab.”
    @ 19m 05s
    March 13, 2021
  • The Culture of Victimization
    A discussion on how the ideology of victimization limits personal agency and success.
    “Wallowing in oppression means you don't have agency over your own life.”
    @ 21m 59s
    March 13, 2021
  • The Monarchy's Tough Spot
    Reflections on the monarchy's relevance and challenges in modern society.
    “The monarchy is in a really tough spot over the next 30 or 40 years.”
    @ 25m 57s
    March 13, 2021
  • NFTs and Market Dynamics
    Exploring the rise of NFTs and their implications for value and ownership.
    “The NFT market is a transitional change in deciding what's valuable.”
    @ 35m 19s
    March 13, 2021
  • The Banksy NFT Story
    Four artists bought a Banksy for $125k, burned the original, and sold the NFT for $350k.
    “It's the most incredible story.”
    @ 44m 16s
    March 13, 2021
  • Art Ownership and Rights
    The complexities of owning art versus owning rights to reproduce it are explored.
    “What is art? It's a commentary on society.”
    @ 47m 22s
    March 13, 2021
  • Inflation's Role in Wealth Distribution
    Inflation can effectively decrease wealth inequality by making rich people poorer.
    “Mild inflation is probably good.”
    @ 51m 35s
    March 13, 2021
  • The Future of Venture Capital
    The landscape of venture capital is changing dramatically, impacting pricing and equity ownership.
    “These non-dilutive ways of growing a company will completely impact pricing.”
    @ 01h 03m 40s
    March 13, 2021
  • Public Markets as Late Stage Private
    Public markets are evolving, presenting new opportunities and risks for companies and investors alike.
    “Public markets are becoming the new late stage private market.”
    @ 01h 04m 11s
    March 13, 2021
  • Investing Requires Hard Work
    Investors must do their research and understand that making money is challenging.
    “It's hard to make good investments; everything is hard.”
    @ 01h 07m 07s
    March 13, 2021

Episode Quotes

Key Moments

  • Collective Benefit04:36
  • Zero-Sum Culture21:02
  • Victim Mentality21:53
  • Enter the Arena22:50
  • Health and Performance31:59
  • NFT Revolution44:16
  • Art Rights Debate47:22
  • Red Pills1:08:01

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