00:00:01
like jacob can you get any closer to the
00:00:03
camera
00:00:03
i mean your face is like right up in
00:00:05
there we can see your bloodshot eyes
00:00:07
oh god it's really um 9am start times a
00:00:09
little rough by jake
00:00:10
out a little rough by jake out that's
00:00:13
true i want my second cup of coffee
00:00:15
already
00:00:16
this is this is a lifestyle choice we
00:00:18
may regret
00:00:20
we'll let your winners ride rain man
00:00:24
[Music]
00:00:27
david source
00:00:31
[Music]
00:00:35
hey everybody hey everybody welcome to
00:00:37
another episode of the all in podcast
00:00:39
it's saturday morning
00:00:41
it's ridiculously early but we're taping
00:00:43
the show
00:00:44
because one of the besties happens to
00:00:46
have left the continent
00:00:47
with us from an undisclosed location
00:00:51
chamath polyhapatia are you in a wine
00:00:54
cellar
00:00:55
or in catacombs i am
00:00:58
in i am and look at it wait for it wait
00:01:00
for it wow
00:01:03
were you able to see that or no no what
00:01:05
was that are you in
00:01:06
are you in the cathedral somewhere you
00:01:08
mean the ceiling of your
00:01:11
it's room you paid for the four walls
00:01:14
and now you can afford the roof
00:01:15
okay hold on hold on okay hold on i'll
00:01:17
do a little i'll do a little uh
00:01:19
let's see if you can just see outside
00:01:20
and get a sense of
00:01:22
the view oh you can't oh no we can't
00:01:24
just
00:01:25
oh whoa bestie lifestyle happening there
00:01:28
just got to hold it for a second and
00:01:29
then there well no that's my architect
00:01:31
hold on
00:01:33
look at this wow i love how i love how
00:01:36
the house is already built and he's
00:01:37
still paying the architect yeah he's
00:01:38
like
00:01:39
do me a favor this came out great but
00:01:40
you rip down these four rooms and then
00:01:42
just start over
00:01:43
all right well we lost uh bestie c as he
00:01:46
walks around his castle
00:01:47
in some european country welcome to the
00:01:50
lifestyles of the rich and famous
00:01:51
what time is it there for you well it's
00:01:53
uh six in the afternoon six in the
00:01:55
evening i
00:01:55
was in london last week and holy
00:01:57
mackerel
00:01:59
the weather if you want to see climate
00:02:00
change spend some time in europe because
00:02:02
literally day over day
00:02:04
uh london on the first day i landed was
00:02:08
call it 24 degrees celsius so whatever
00:02:10
that is 80
00:02:11
78 maybe beautiful literally the next
00:02:15
day
00:02:16
it was 62 and raining and it just kept
00:02:20
bouncing back and forth
00:02:21
it is the weirdest thing and if you're
00:02:25
in europe right now
00:02:26
you you just see some of the craziest
00:02:27
weather patterns literally day over day
00:02:29
massive thundershowers then you know
00:02:31
it's completely normal i mean
00:02:33
no wonder everybody here takes climate
00:02:35
change so seriously you actually
00:02:36
feel it every day and with us as well uh
00:02:39
david sacks is here the rain man himself
00:02:43
tearing up the twitter we've been off
00:02:44
for two weeks so there's a lot to cover
00:02:46
and of course the queen of quinoa
00:02:50
chairman of the production board david
00:02:53
friedberg right off the bat i think we
00:02:55
got to go science and get the freedberg
00:02:57
ratio up from the get
00:02:59
biogen has an alzheimer's drug that on
00:03:02
monday the fda approved
00:03:04
it's the first new treatment for
00:03:05
alzheimer's in almost two decades
00:03:07
and biogen's drug is not a cure for
00:03:09
alzheimer's
00:03:10
and freeberg will get into that it does
00:03:12
not reverse the disease's progression
00:03:14
but it does mitigate it gets it getting
00:03:16
worse
00:03:16
very strange moment in time the fda's
00:03:19
advisory panel
00:03:21
three members of it have quit because
00:03:23
they didn't want to approve this drug
00:03:25
because it had such
00:03:27
a modest efficacy three quit but
00:03:29
unanimous
00:03:30
vote against approval right so unanimous
00:03:32
vote against then three quit and this is
00:03:34
i think out of 10 or 11 individuals
00:03:37
um so this is truly significant the drug
00:03:39
is going to cost 55
00:03:40
000 it still requires brain scans and
00:03:43
all this kind of stuff but it's hope for
00:03:44
people
00:03:45
suffering uh and so the fda approved it
00:03:49
um friedberg tell us on a science basis
00:03:52
what we're seeing here is what's
00:03:55
happening in journalism and social media
00:03:57
now happening
00:03:58
in science or is this some other you
00:04:01
know search for truth
00:04:02
uh or some other issue the biogen drug
00:04:04
that was approved this week is called
00:04:06
adjukanymab remember any drug that ends
00:04:09
with mab
00:04:10
mab means monoclonal antibody so it's an
00:04:13
antibody
00:04:15
and antibodies you know as we've talked
00:04:16
about in the past are proteins that
00:04:19
can be made by our immune system and
00:04:21
proteins that bind to a specific target
00:04:24
that then tells your immune system to
00:04:26
clear that target out of your body so
00:04:28
that's what monoclonal antibodies do
00:04:31
and we have been using biological drugs
00:04:33
monoclonal antibody drugs
00:04:35
for decades now to target specific cells
00:04:39
or specific proteins in our body
00:04:42
that we can then remove from our body
00:04:44
and that can reverse or change you know
00:04:46
human health in very significant ways so
00:04:48
this is a
00:04:49
you know a class of drugs that is very
00:04:51
efficacious for having specific outcomes
00:04:53
across many disease states
00:04:55
and so years ago researchers at the
00:04:57
university of zurich
00:04:59
were looking at people with alzheimer's
00:05:01
that were having slowly progressive
00:05:03
dementia and they looked at antibodies
00:05:04
that they could find in their brain
00:05:06
and they found this antibody that they
00:05:08
saw was binding to amyloid plaque and
00:05:10
amyloid plaque is one of the
00:05:11
theorized mechanisms by which
00:05:13
alzheimer's progresses that as amyloid
00:05:15
plaque builds up in your brain
00:05:17
you know you start to have dysfunction
00:05:18
and inflammation and the amyloid plaque
00:05:20
kind of
00:05:21
may be the driver of alzheimer's but
00:05:23
that is not proven
00:05:24
so they then you know ultimately gave it
00:05:26
to a company called neuromune who
00:05:28
licensed it the biogen and biogen
00:05:29
started testing it
00:05:31
and they took this antibody um
00:05:34
that they discovered and they turned it
00:05:35
into a a you know
00:05:37
an antibody you can now get injected
00:05:39
into your body goes into your brain
00:05:41
it by the idea is it binds to amyloid
00:05:43
plaque and removes it from your brain
00:05:44
and so theoretically this should slow
00:05:46
down or stop alzheimer's
00:05:48
but it turns out that as they ran this
00:05:50
test across thousands of patients
00:05:52
it didn't have as much of an effect and
00:05:54
in fact the data across many many
00:05:57
patients showed
00:05:58
that it didn't really off of a placebo
00:06:00
baseline meaning people that didn't get
00:06:01
the drug versus people that did get the
00:06:03
drug
00:06:03
that it wasn't really that different in
00:06:05
terms of cognitive scores and tests and
00:06:06
all this other stuff
00:06:07
so they abandoned it a few years ago
00:06:09
they kind of got this they stopped the
00:06:11
trial they had this kind of negative
00:06:12
outcome
00:06:12
and you know biogen got beat up for it
00:06:15
and then all of a sudden they refiled
00:06:16
about nine months later with the fda
00:06:18
saying well look when we look
00:06:20
at the patients with the highest dosage
00:06:22
of the drug because they gave it in
00:06:23
three different doses so the people that
00:06:24
got the most antibodies
00:06:26
this particular group of people had a 23
00:06:30
decline in the progression of their
00:06:32
alzheimer's which is kind of one way of
00:06:35
slicing the data
00:06:36
and and as a result they went back to
00:06:39
the fda
00:06:40
and people were like well you know some
00:06:41
of the tests don't really show that
00:06:43
still there was some cognitive test
00:06:44
results that didn't show that that was
00:06:45
the case
00:06:46
and they fought back against and so some
00:06:48
people were pushing back against it
00:06:50
and we're not sure no one knows for sure
00:06:52
how it all kind of came together at the
00:06:54
end but the fda ultimately approved this
00:06:55
drug and here's what's challenging about
00:06:57
this
00:06:58
you basically will go in you'll get an
00:06:59
injection of this this antibody just
00:07:01
like you do with many other antibody
00:07:02
based therapies
00:07:03
it costs roughly five dollars to make
00:07:05
antibody therapy just to be clear so
00:07:07
when you make them
00:07:08
five bucks roughly is the cost and
00:07:10
they're charging fifty six thousand
00:07:12
dollars for this treatment so that's
00:07:13
problem one in the pharmaceutical kind
00:07:15
of debate is should we be charging
00:07:17
the you know the quality of life premium
00:07:20
and then number two
00:07:21
yeah and then part uh you know the kind
00:07:23
of second issue is like should this
00:07:25
thing have been approved when it wasn't
00:07:26
really
00:07:27
that efficacious and you could slice the
00:07:28
data slightly and now
00:07:30
all payers you know meaning all people
00:07:32
who are insured or the government or
00:07:33
whoever it is that's responsible for
00:07:34
insurance payments
00:07:36
is ultimately bearing the cost of
00:07:37
everyone with alzheimer's and there's 15
00:07:39
million people in the united states of
00:07:40
alzheimer's
00:07:41
they're going to raise their hand and
00:07:42
say oh my god anything that gives me any
00:07:44
chance or any hope i want to get
00:07:46
but if it costs 56 000 is it really the
00:07:48
responsibility of the insurance company
00:07:50
and all the payers
00:07:51
to give everyone a hope even if the drug
00:07:53
may not work now the downside in the
00:07:54
side effects is negligible
00:07:56
there's no risk to taking this drug so
00:07:58
it's all about the cost and the upside
00:08:00
and that that that is the big
00:08:01
philosophical debate right now is like
00:08:03
first of all should we approve drugs
00:08:04
like this
00:08:04
should we allow pharma companies to
00:08:06
charge whatever they want even when the
00:08:07
efficacy is very low
00:08:09
and the cost is very low to make this
00:08:11
stuff and how do we ultimately decide
00:08:13
what so this is a
00:08:13
classic risk reward chamoth how do you
00:08:15
look at this on a financial basis
00:08:17
yeah let me let me let me give you sort
00:08:19
of like a a market
00:08:21
investing kind of view on this um look
00:08:23
i've been taking biotech
00:08:25
pretty seriously over the last 18 months
00:08:27
just trying to learn because i think
00:08:29
basically
00:08:30
freeberg ins you know incepted me with
00:08:33
uh
00:08:34
this idea that you you have to know it
00:08:36
um so here's what's interesting in the
00:08:38
setup for what i've learned
00:08:40
and putting a little bit of my knowledge
00:08:41
together which is dangerous but
00:08:43
the setup for alzheimer's is really
00:08:45
scary if you're black
00:08:47
you're 20 more likely to get it
00:08:50
if you look at the distribution of all
00:08:52
patients 60
00:08:54
and upwards of you know 64 65
00:08:57
are women so if you think about the
00:08:59
distribution of this disease
00:09:01
it's it's the disease of minorities and
00:09:04
it's the disease of women
00:09:06
now that's problematic in and of itself
00:09:08
because if you want to have any form of
00:09:09
equality it seems like this is something
00:09:11
that we have to tackle
00:09:13
the second interesting thing as a as a
00:09:15
setup to this is
00:09:16
every single alzheimer's drug that's
00:09:18
ever gone through the fda
00:09:20
has been rejected and has failed and
00:09:22
what's interesting
00:09:23
and the the the more social science
00:09:26
around this is
00:09:27
this was also where two of the more
00:09:28
infamous insider trading
00:09:30
events ever happened was around failed
00:09:32
alzheimer's drug
00:09:34
um the first which is less known but
00:09:36
inside baseball is what happened at sac
00:09:38
which was a huge hedge fund but the
00:09:40
second that's very well known as martha
00:09:42
stewart
00:09:42
and why she went to jail was around the
00:09:45
speculation in the insider trading of
00:09:47
the phase three results of an
00:09:49
alzheimer's drug which ultimately turned
00:09:50
out to fail
00:09:51
it was almost the surest money on wall
00:09:53
street which is every time some
00:09:54
one of these drugs came to market you
00:09:56
just bet against it and it would turn
00:09:57
out that these stocks would
00:09:58
collapse so there's the social and
00:10:00
market setup
00:10:01
i am super torn but i think there are
00:10:04
some positive points to make on this
00:10:06
thing so but let me give you the
00:10:07
negative case the negative cases
00:10:08
what is the fda doing approving a drug
00:10:11
where there's no clear evidence that it
00:10:12
leads to clinical benefits and
00:10:14
it could give families a sense of false
00:10:16
hope
00:10:18
what are you doing in terms of process
00:10:20
if you have a unanimous vote against
00:10:21
approval
00:10:22
so why do you even bother having an fda
00:10:24
advisory committee of outside experts if
00:10:26
they're just going to do what you want
00:10:28
and it
00:10:28
could set a precedent where companies
00:10:31
can get drugs approved on limited
00:10:33
evidence
00:10:33
now here's the positive point which is
00:10:36
they may be taking a long-term view and
00:10:39
what they could be really doing is
00:10:40
creating a market that ultimately
00:10:42
incentivizes other folks to come in
00:10:45
where then ultimately those people are
00:10:47
the ones that find the solution right
00:10:48
because
00:10:49
this biogen drug biogen came out and
00:10:52
basically said we think this is a 100
00:10:53
billion dollar market
00:10:55
so now all of a sudden you must believe
00:10:57
capitalism is going to take hold
00:10:59
and a lot of young startups will say
00:11:00
well i should be going after this
00:11:03
market as well
00:11:04
and so by going after that after biogen
00:11:07
then maybe you actually do
00:11:09
get to the solution and just a kind of a
00:11:12
little bit of trivia
00:11:13
it turns out that the acting fda
00:11:14
commissioner in 2016
00:11:16
this woman janet woodcock she was the
00:11:18
one that approved a different form of
00:11:19
drug in the exact same setup that one
00:11:21
was
00:11:23
eta leprosine which is basically for
00:11:25
duchene muscular dystrophy
00:11:27
he had a negative panel vote she
00:11:29
basically said no
00:11:30
we're going with this the scientific
00:11:31
community reacted similarly back then
00:11:34
but she basically took the view that you
00:11:36
know you're doing no harm exactly what
00:11:37
you said free bro because the safety
00:11:38
says it's fine
00:11:40
you're doing no harm to the patients by
00:11:41
approving this drug and maybe it might
00:11:43
turn out to work in the end
00:11:44
and in that specific case for duchenne
00:11:47
muscular dystrophy
00:11:48
what we see four years later is that now
00:11:50
there are a lot more companies focused
00:11:52
on finding a solution
00:11:53
and they're pouring a ton of money into
00:11:55
r d and maybe one of those things will
00:11:56
break through
00:11:57
so i think she could just be running the
00:11:59
same playbook here in alzheimer's which
00:12:01
is important enough
00:12:02
that somebody needs to do something
00:12:04
you're saying the economic incentive
00:12:06
could drive further innovation in the
00:12:08
space that ultimately could benefit
00:12:10
patients more truly than this current
00:12:11
drug
00:12:12
i think so and i think like you know
00:12:14
what look a lot of
00:12:16
like i think drugs that that
00:12:19
are potential solutions
00:12:23
in many ways i think what the fda is
00:12:25
doing are two things which i think are
00:12:26
really positive
00:12:27
the first is that they're accelerating
00:12:28
their approval timelines right so you
00:12:30
can have breakthrough approval and
00:12:31
innovations
00:12:32
and so you can get to market much much
00:12:34
faster the best example is what we've
00:12:36
seen in these
00:12:36
vaccines but the second thing is if you
00:12:38
have a well-structured
00:12:40
safety study that says that these things
00:12:42
are not harmful to humans
00:12:44
then yeah david it's it's basically
00:12:46
saying sell a 56
00:12:47
000 drug there's a 10 000 copay now we
00:12:50
should talk about that because that
00:12:51
shows how broken medicare plan b
00:12:53
is uh part b sorry um but yeah they're
00:12:56
creating a hundred billion dollar market
00:12:58
out of nothing
00:12:59
yeah but should should that be the case
00:13:01
chamoth or should it be regulated
00:13:02
because ultimately if the regulators are
00:13:04
approving the drug and enabling the
00:13:06
commercial opportunity
00:13:08
shouldn't the regulators also say you
00:13:09
know what you can have this commercial
00:13:11
opportunity but you can only charge
00:13:12
x because we're not going to have the
00:13:14
taxpayer pay the y
00:13:16
uh or package hey freeberg let me ask a
00:13:19
really basic question here
00:13:20
why is there no you know document put
00:13:24
out by the fda saying here's how we came
00:13:26
to this decision
00:13:27
in plain english or is there because i
00:13:30
looked for that couldn't find it
00:13:31
in other words you know the same way
00:13:33
there was a vote they could say hey
00:13:34
listen
00:13:34
we understand the vote we're overruling
00:13:36
it for this reason and why isn't there
00:13:37
an interim step
00:13:38
the fda is not the fda is not your
00:13:40
doctor right so i think the way things
00:13:42
are set up is your doctor is meant to be
00:13:44
informed
00:13:45
about the panel's review of drugs and
00:13:47
they and there are
00:13:48
labels that doctors need to be able to
00:13:50
read and understand and then the
00:13:51
doctor's job is to make a decision on
00:13:53
treatment for their patients
00:13:54
and make a recommendation to their
00:13:56
patients so ultimately the fda is not a
00:13:58
consumer organization
00:13:59
the labels that get approved what the
00:14:01
pharmaceutical companies have to say
00:14:03
about their drug all of that stuff is
00:14:04
overseen by the regulators of the fda
00:14:06
and then that is then used by the
00:14:08
doctors to make treatment decisions
00:14:10
and and they couldn't kick this back and
00:14:12
say listen no jason but couldn't they
00:14:14
kick it back and say
00:14:15
we want you to do one more trial or some
00:14:16
bridge step here hey you can do 10 000
00:14:18
people over the next three years they do
00:14:20
that and by the way
00:14:21
and they are going to do continuing
00:14:22
studies on ad you can map as it goes
00:14:24
into market they always do that and they
00:14:26
always ask for more data
00:14:27
and they do this continuous review the
00:14:29
fda is a really strong body
00:14:32
and a really strong regulatory body and
00:14:34
we should all feel kind of pretty well
00:14:35
you know safe and secure but the issue
00:14:37
is really i think the economic question
00:14:38
on the other end which is
00:14:40
they could approve a hundred drugs
00:14:41
tomorrow and then what happens to the
00:14:43
economics of health care
00:14:44
if everyone's allowed to charge any
00:14:46
price they want for any care
00:14:47
if it has even the slightest range of
00:14:49
efficacy we're not going to be able to
00:14:50
afford anything
00:14:51
you know so just so this is where like
00:14:53
you know regulatory bodies run
00:14:54
run into each other because the effort
00:14:57
so alzheimer's
00:14:58
alzheimer's is a drug of the old right
00:15:01
health care expenses are covered by
00:15:03
medicare
00:15:05
and in medicare there's a section called
00:15:06
medicare part b which effectively is a
00:15:09
way for these drugs to go to market
00:15:11
just so you guys know under a medicare
00:15:13
part b plan a physician
00:15:16
gets a six percent kickback of the price
00:15:18
of the drug
00:15:20
your doctor gets six percent of that
00:15:22
fifty seven thousand dollars
00:15:24
that's a terrible incentive it's a it's
00:15:26
an incredibly bad incentive
00:15:28
and so three thousand dollars every time
00:15:30
you put somebody on this
00:15:31
it's quite a spiff it is and so and so
00:15:34
you know
00:15:34
medicare part b has been this mechanism
00:15:36
that people have wanted to undo for a
00:15:38
long time
00:15:38
now if you're sitting in the fda you
00:15:40
can't change that because that's covered
00:15:41
by cms
00:15:42
yeah that's not your that's not your
00:15:43
jurisdiction i think it's like this
00:15:45
weird
00:15:45
inter governmental agency warfare push
00:15:49
and pull and trying to move the
00:15:50
incentives
00:15:51
this all goes back to if congress can't
00:15:53
act
00:15:54
then all these folks have all of these
00:15:56
other random tools they just have to
00:15:57
throw the spaghetti against the wall
00:15:59
and this is the kind of stuff that
00:16:00
happens because congress should actually
00:16:02
be
00:16:03
fixing this in a more substantive
00:16:04
holistic way and until they do it this
00:16:06
is what's going to happen
00:16:07
this is no different than what we saw
00:16:08
during the pandemic where we had
00:16:10
health regulators coming in local health
00:16:12
regulators public health officials
00:16:13
saying everything's shut down
00:16:15
because their incentive is to save lives
00:16:17
their incentive is not to
00:16:18
balance the trade-off between saving
00:16:20
lives and protecting the people
00:16:22
versus the economic damage and the
00:16:23
fallout and the cost of it and there are
00:16:25
two different agencies and ultimately
00:16:27
the synthesis
00:16:28
of these decisions isn't being managed
00:16:30
by a leader anywhere
00:16:31
or by a leading organization anywhere
00:16:33
and that's where things inflate and get
00:16:34
ugly and get nasty
00:16:35
over time okay uh saks as a free as a
00:16:38
free market monster what do you think
00:16:39
saks how would you approach
00:16:41
releasing these drugs as a no but you're
00:16:44
for less regulation when you see this
00:16:46
regulatory mess of spaghetti and
00:16:49
you know costs and and price gouging you
00:16:51
know if we take the most cynical
00:16:53
look at it because 15 million people
00:16:55
times 55 000
00:16:56
a year i'm no genius at math i but i
00:16:59
my sats tell me enough that that's going
00:17:02
to be this drug's going to make what 10
00:17:03
billion a year 20 billion a year
00:17:05
something in that range
00:17:06
if they just get a fraction of those
00:17:07
people so i mean i i agree with
00:17:10
friberg and schmoth that we shouldn't
00:17:11
give doctors an incentive to choose one
00:17:14
treatment or another
00:17:15
right i mean that just seems totally
00:17:16
warped but going to the
00:17:18
sort of larger issue of fda approval
00:17:22
um i would make it a little bit easier
00:17:24
to
00:17:25
to get drugs approved i mean look i i
00:17:27
think that you know double blind test is
00:17:28
the gold standard
00:17:30
if the drug clearly doesn't work you
00:17:32
don't approve it but this is a case
00:17:33
where
00:17:34
the evidence is a little bit
00:17:35
inconclusive and in a situation like
00:17:38
that
00:17:38
where it's a drug that might help people
00:17:40
who are facing a deadly disease
00:17:42
and you know alzheimer's is one of the
00:17:43
worst it's not only
00:17:45
you know event the prognosis is terminal
00:17:47
but it also is deteriorative
00:17:49
and it's devastating for patients and
00:17:51
their families
00:17:52
these people have nothing to lose and so
00:17:55
i would let the drug
00:17:56
through i think and then watch how it
00:17:58
performs over the next couple of years
00:18:00
they could always revoke
00:18:02
the approval in two years you know in
00:18:04
other words almost consider the usage of
00:18:06
the drug over the next couple years as a
00:18:08
stage four trial
00:18:10
you know the the one group who's not
00:18:12
complaining about this are patients
00:18:14
i mean alzheimer's patients want the
00:18:16
ability to test this
00:18:18
and generally speaking i think we should
00:18:19
give people who are facing again
00:18:21
a terminal prognosis the ability to try
00:18:24
these drugs
00:18:25
yeah and free bro correct me if i'm
00:18:27
wrong the reason or maybe chemotherapy
00:18:30
you're better for this but just looking
00:18:31
at the economics of this taking care of
00:18:32
somebody with alzheimer's
00:18:34
and if you it starts to hit people at 65
00:18:37
and people start living to 78
00:18:39
85 years old they need to have care a
00:18:42
person with alzheimer's the issue is not
00:18:44
their ongoing maintenance in terms of
00:18:47
their brain it's their day-to-day life
00:18:49
they cannot be left alone so they have
00:18:51
to be either institutionalized or have
00:18:53
home care
00:18:54
and then you're talking about a hundred
00:18:55
thousand a year and i think medicare and
00:18:57
some other
00:18:58
people pay for that so 55k if the person
00:19:01
can take care of themselves that's how
00:19:02
price
00:19:02
is done that's exactly right is that how
00:19:05
they do it so pricing is typically done
00:19:07
based on the long-term cost benefit of
00:19:09
their
00:19:10
of the drug of the the to the to the
00:19:13
paying system
00:19:14
so you know they'll take a look at like
00:19:16
hey here's how much we're going to
00:19:17
benefit people
00:19:18
or benefit the paying system therefore
00:19:20
we can charge x dollars for getting this
00:19:22
drug that's why
00:19:23
today you can go get a um a car t
00:19:26
therapy or something you know some sort
00:19:27
of therapy that
00:19:28
that is going to be highly efficacious
00:19:29
and they'll charge you a million dollars
00:19:31
or genetic um
00:19:32
there there's a few that are getting
00:19:33
approved now uh for genetic diseases
00:19:36
and that you know million dollar
00:19:38
one-time fee because you get you get the
00:19:40
treatment once it costs
00:19:41
you know technically nothing the cogs
00:19:43
are zero to make this stuff
00:19:44
you get that treatment they charge you a
00:19:45
million dollars because the long-term
00:19:47
care of the progression of that disease
00:19:48
is so high
00:19:49
that they can economically rationalize
00:19:51
that um and so
00:19:53
is that ethical or moral on the pricing
00:19:56
clarify one thing so we're talking about
00:19:58
it at 56 6 000
00:19:59
a year that is true but it's basically 4
00:20:02
800
00:20:03
per shot you get a shot once per month
00:20:06
and that costs 4 800 and so you multiply
00:20:08
that by 12
00:20:09
and you get to the 56 000 number now
00:20:11
it's 4 800
00:20:13
to get this monthly shot an outrageous
00:20:16
amount of money for what could be a
00:20:17
breakthrough alzheimer's treatment
00:20:19
i don't necessarily think so i mean that
00:20:21
is the sticker price that's not what the
00:20:23
patient
00:20:24
is going to pay right the patient's
00:20:26
going to pay the ten thousand dollar
00:20:27
copay but divide that by 12
00:20:29
you're going to pay about 850 per month
00:20:32
for what could be a breakthrough
00:20:33
treatment
00:20:34
i mean to me the real issue is whether
00:20:36
it works and since it's
00:20:38
since there are some positive
00:20:39
indications but it's inconclusive
00:20:42
inclusive
00:20:43
i would say tie goes to the runner here
00:20:45
meaning you can try it
00:20:47
and let's revisit it in two years and
00:20:48
see if it works but but it wasn't a tie
00:20:51
as far as scientists were concerned so
00:20:53
what is the disconnect there chamath
00:20:55
because i think what they were looking
00:20:57
for no but they were looking for
00:20:59
a causal link and the problem is at some
00:21:02
point along the way over the last few
00:21:03
years we started with the hypothesis
00:21:05
that
00:21:06
amyloid plaque was causal of alzheimer's
00:21:08
and then we moved to a place where there
00:21:10
was some correlation
00:21:12
and then we moved to a place where we
00:21:13
said actually it may not do much of
00:21:15
anything
00:21:16
but i actually agree with saks i think
00:21:18
the fda did something really novel here
00:21:20
which is that they
00:21:22
applied an extremely aggressive free
00:21:24
market approach
00:21:25
to a market that has been completely
00:21:27
bereft of solutions
00:21:29
and so if you can create a hundred
00:21:31
billion dollar market overnight
00:21:34
i think it stands to reason that a lot
00:21:36
of people will look at the increase in
00:21:38
biogen's market cap
00:21:40
and the profits that biogen can make
00:21:42
over the next 10 or 15 years and say
00:21:44
i will attack that and do that cheaper
00:21:46
faster better it happens in every other
00:21:48
market
00:21:50
i think the point here is that it
00:21:51
probably shouldn't have been the fda's
00:21:53
role
00:21:54
to create competition but for whatever
00:21:57
reason whether it's how the capital
00:21:58
markets and biotechnology are structured
00:22:01
or the way that you know medicare part b
00:22:03
kind of works and creates these odd
00:22:05
incentives
00:22:06
we are where we are and so i tend to
00:22:09
think that it's probably better that
00:22:10
this drug was approved i also agree with
00:22:12
saks that
00:22:13
in general i think as long as you have a
00:22:16
reasonably
00:22:17
defensible safety study we should
00:22:19
probably be in the business of getting
00:22:21
more drugs approved
00:22:23
faster and the reason is that it allows
00:22:27
smart clever hardworking people
00:22:30
to connect the dots in ways that right
00:22:32
now we don't know anything about like
00:22:33
just like you know a random factoid to
00:22:36
prove this point
00:22:37
like when you look inside for example of
00:22:38
who wins a nobel prize
00:22:40
right particularly in the fields of
00:22:42
biology and chemistry etc
00:22:44
you have people that are in their 60s
00:22:46
and 70s
00:22:47
that win awards for research done in
00:22:49
their 20s and 30s
00:22:51
so clearly people at some point when
00:22:54
they are somewhat
00:22:55
less jaded you know and somewhat more
00:22:57
naive maybe
00:22:58
have the ability to really transform the
00:23:00
world for all of us
00:23:02
and if you can marry that to economic
00:23:04
incentives so folks that understand the
00:23:05
markets can also be along for that ride
00:23:08
that in my mind i think is generally
00:23:09
better than a nanny state of babysitters
00:23:12
i agree with that point i i think i
00:23:14
think let me frame this to you in a
00:23:15
question for you
00:23:17
of those scientists on that board who
00:23:19
voted against this
00:23:20
if their parent or spouse god forbid
00:23:23
we're suffering from alzheimer's
00:23:24
how many of them would take the drug out
00:23:26
of this this is my point is
00:23:28
and and it's a point i was going to make
00:23:29
which is everyone wants that lottery
00:23:31
ticket there's no downside and only
00:23:32
upside because you're not paying for the
00:23:34
lottery ticket
00:23:35
and so the way the system works in terms
00:23:38
of paying right now
00:23:40
as a patient and as a doctor i have no
00:23:43
incentive to manage cost down
00:23:45
right all i have is opportunity in front
00:23:48
of me
00:23:49
and so as we add more opportunities we
00:23:51
give everyone the ability to have a
00:23:52
lottery ticket that potentially could
00:23:54
cure their disease or
00:23:55
or you know make them kind of live
00:23:57
forever have a healthier state
00:23:58
of being uh you know we are going to see
00:24:01
this proliferation of approvals
00:24:03
that end up costing all of us so much
00:24:05
that the inflation that we've already
00:24:06
experienced in terms of paying costs for
00:24:08
health care
00:24:09
continues to climb so the challenge is
00:24:11
like you know
00:24:12
if we are going to continue to operate a
00:24:14
socialized model of medicine
00:24:16
or even partially socialized where the
00:24:17
government's paying some amount of
00:24:19
of the uh of the premium or employers
00:24:21
are paying part of the premium
00:24:22
where the individual that's getting the
00:24:24
treatment doesn't bear the cost
00:24:26
you're going to end up seeing everything
00:24:27
in flight because you're creating this
00:24:29
incentive now
00:24:30
companies are going to rush in they're
00:24:31
going to try and get 10 things approved
00:24:33
everyone's going to be taking an
00:24:34
alzheimer's drug in a couple of years
00:24:35
because there's going to be so many
00:24:36
available on the market and none of them
00:24:38
may actually be curing alzheimer's
00:24:40
maybe 10 of people get cured 90 don't
00:24:43
but the cost is going to be millions of
00:24:44
dollars you know per person for these
00:24:46
treatments
00:24:47
and everyone pays that i'm not saying
00:24:49
that's necessarily a bad
00:24:50
thing you know we need to have a
00:24:51
proliferation of innovation certainly
00:24:53
the challenge is in the interim period
00:24:55
the inflation we've already experienced
00:24:57
in healthcare which is just
00:24:58
extraordinary
00:24:59
will continue to climb if you know we
00:25:02
don't regulate
00:25:03
the actual market for pricing on these
00:25:05
things
00:25:06
and on the other side we pay all the
00:25:08
bills or there's some socialized
00:25:10
pool to pay all the bills you can't have
00:25:12
it both ways i'll give you the other
00:25:13
side of the argument as well
00:25:14
which um is the reason why this could be
00:25:18
so
00:25:19
valuable again if you look back to what
00:25:22
jane lockwood did
00:25:23
um was it muscular muscular disorder
00:25:25
yeah in duchesne muscular dystrophy
00:25:28
you know for janet janet woodcock sorry
00:25:30
part of me jenna woodcock
00:25:31
um but if you if you know anybody whose
00:25:34
child has duchene muscular dystrophy my
00:25:36
gosh what an incredibly debilitating
00:25:38
disease you would not
00:25:40
want anybody in the world to have it and
00:25:43
again
00:25:43
by approving that drug what she did i
00:25:46
think is something pretty incredible
00:25:47
because now there are
00:25:48
of the the number of companies that have
00:25:51
again come after that market opportunity
00:25:53
because she helped define a market
00:25:55
four of them are already public just to
00:25:58
give you a sense of it and they're you
00:25:59
know and so
00:26:00
the odds at least numerically
00:26:04
are greater today than they were four
00:26:06
years ago and
00:26:07
that was a you know potentially
00:26:09
non-efficacious drug that that frankly
00:26:11
though had a
00:26:11
had a legitimate safety study to your
00:26:14
guests chamath
00:26:15
and friedberg 10 out of 10 of those
00:26:17
people on the fda board
00:26:19
would have a spouse or a loved one take
00:26:20
it because there's no downside if you
00:26:22
look at biogen's market cap just to wrap
00:26:24
up here uh they added 20 billion dollars
00:26:26
in market cap
00:26:27
in the five days since you know this
00:26:28
announcement happened so in terms of
00:26:30
incentives
00:26:31
you got to think every other drug
00:26:32
company is saying hey i've got something
00:26:34
that kind of sort of works and it's
00:26:36
really expensive
00:26:37
can i get a free ticket now can i do
00:26:39
this compassion hopefully it's just the
00:26:40
former thing kind of sort of works and
00:26:42
then you know yeah
00:26:43
from there all right moving on to our uh
00:26:46
next topic
00:26:46
bezos has decided that he will be the
00:26:49
first billionaire in space
00:26:51
uh three people are going to be going to
00:26:53
space in quotes on an 11-minute flight
00:26:55
on july 20th 2021
00:26:59
uh jeff bezos in a promotional video on
00:27:01
his instagram
00:27:03
uh sprung this on his best friend his
00:27:05
bestie his brother mark
00:27:06
who agreed to go with him and there's
00:27:08
bidding of three million dollars i guess
00:27:11
to
00:27:11
it's up to 4.8 oh my god 4.8 now
00:27:15
on blue origin site uh and
00:27:18
just doing back of the envelope math
00:27:20
which i which i did uh uh
00:27:21
last week when i heard this announcement
00:27:23
600 people or so have gone to space some
00:27:25
of them have gone multiple times
00:27:26
blue origin's done 20 some odd flights
00:27:28
two of which
00:27:29
went south and probably would have
00:27:31
resulted in death so i think five to ten
00:27:33
percent of blue origin's fight
00:27:34
flights would have killed uh uh sadly
00:27:37
they joseph had been on them but
00:27:39
obviously they've made progress since
00:27:40
then two of the 120 plus flights
00:27:42
that spacex have done but none in the
00:27:44
last six years
00:27:45
um have had an accident uh and obviously
00:27:48
uh virgin galactic had one tragic
00:27:50
accident as well
00:27:52
so is this a wise idea and where would
00:27:55
we put the percentage risk of ruin
00:27:57
slash fatality i just i just wanna i
00:28:00
just wanna do statistics for a second
00:28:01
jason
00:28:02
sure yeah just because there were
00:28:05
blue origin accidents in the past
00:28:07
doesn't necessarily mean that it has any
00:28:09
bearing
00:28:10
in predicting the future likelihood of
00:28:12
there being an accident
00:28:13
because the data from the past is from
00:28:15
different machines and
00:28:16
different techniques and different
00:28:18
processes so i don't think you know to
00:28:20
your tweet and the controversy with your
00:28:22
tweet and
00:28:22
you know your point now i don't think
00:28:24
you can necessarily look at the past
00:28:26
this is much more of a kind of
00:28:27
deterministic conversation about like
00:28:29
hey look here are the things we have
00:28:30
done with our
00:28:30
systems and here's why we have a high
00:28:32
confidence in this thing you know kind
00:28:34
of working which is obviously why people
00:28:35
don't go on the first 50 rockets or
00:28:37
first 20 rockets whatever it happens to
00:28:39
be
00:28:39
but statistically it's it's non-zero so
00:28:42
i guess the question is
00:28:43
is this a wise move and where would you
00:28:45
actually put the odds at
00:28:46
but it could it could very well be zero
00:28:48
now could yeah you don't know
00:28:50
right we don't know how well their
00:28:51
safety systems have been developed i
00:28:52
mean we don't know how
00:28:53
you know the i don't know anything about
00:28:55
this but i'm pretty sure that if bezos
00:28:56
is go he's a pretty smart guy he's not
00:28:58
going in anything that's going to have
00:28:59
some high
00:28:59
some some even nominal likelihood of
00:29:01
death right like and he knows
00:29:03
probabilities and he's been there in the
00:29:05
last 15 test flights and he's seen the
00:29:07
data and he's probably seen
00:29:09
a string of nominal flights and
00:29:12
at some point you just feel like you
00:29:14
know okay this is this is really
00:29:15
dialed in here my prediction is bezos is
00:29:17
going to come back and he's going to
00:29:18
announce that he's going to be the ceo
00:29:20
of blue origin
00:29:21
i think this is what he's going all in
00:29:22
on blue i think this is what he wants to
00:29:24
do with the rest of his life i think
00:29:25
it's been pretty clear that this is such
00:29:26
a passion for him and like you know he's
00:29:28
he's got the world's greatest money
00:29:30
machine ever it's a flywheel it'll run
00:29:32
as a monopoly for decades he can do
00:29:34
whatever he wants to do now and so when
00:29:36
he takes a look at this
00:29:37
what's greater after you've conquered
00:29:38
earth than leaving earth and
00:29:40
moving on so to me this seems to be so
00:29:43
intellectually interesting to him and
00:29:45
um and so kind of existentially
00:29:46
interesting my guess is he goes in full
00:29:49
time on blue origin now that he's kind
00:29:50
of transitioned to the chairman role and
00:29:51
he's kind of been pretty public about it
00:29:52
100 100 david
00:29:56
are you conservative and typically very
00:29:57
scared of anything dangerous go ahead
00:30:01
well i'll give bezos credit for dog food
00:30:03
in his own product
00:30:04
but um to me i would take a contrarian
00:30:07
view overall
00:30:08
um you know i think sometimes people get
00:30:10
so rich and so powerful that there's
00:30:12
nobody around them to tell them when
00:30:14
they have a bad idea
00:30:15
and quite frankly i think this is a
00:30:18
brain fart
00:30:19
that the people around him are telling
00:30:21
him smells like perfume
00:30:23
and they should be telling him dude what
00:30:25
are you thinking
00:30:26
you know if if jakow said to me
00:30:29
he was going up on a rocket i'd be like
00:30:32
dude you got at least 30 good years here
00:30:34
you know bezos don't screw up the
00:30:36
podcast
00:30:37
yeah we need the hosts we need you down
00:30:39
here what are you thinking
00:30:41
bezos has got like 170 billion after the
00:30:44
divorce
00:30:45
he's you know still a young guy and he's
00:30:47
gonna risk it
00:30:48
to go up in space for like three minutes
00:30:51
um
00:30:52
i mean now yeah they've this is the they
00:30:54
have sent the crash test dummy up there
00:30:57
successfully 15 times but this is the
00:30:59
first manned flight the first
00:31:01
flight with humans on it he's determined
00:31:03
to be on it if i were his advisor i
00:31:05
would say put
00:31:07
a gopro on the head of the crash test
00:31:09
dummy
00:31:10
and experience it in virtual reality
00:31:16
exactly what are you thinking yeah i
00:31:18
mean if this was a
00:31:19
stunt that you know um
00:31:22
uh richard branson did early in his
00:31:24
career remember he did the ballooning
00:31:25
things and he was
00:31:26
trying to become a billionaire and
00:31:28
trying to get excitement around his
00:31:30
brand
00:31:30
but i think this is totally unnecessary
00:31:33
and it is not
00:31:34
a the the risk of rooney is not zero it
00:31:36
might be close to zero
00:31:38
but it's definitely not zero i mean well
00:31:40
now branson's trying to beat bezos into
00:31:42
space so he's announced
00:31:43
he's gonna go up two and you know
00:31:46
so these guys are both um being dirty is
00:31:49
he going up on the um
00:31:50
uh galactic uh chamoth what's he do
00:31:53
how's he going up this space
00:31:56
is that a virgin galactic flight
00:32:06
i don't know if it wasn't public is it
00:32:08
you're saying sorry did you say it was a
00:32:10
public thing
00:32:11
no i said it virgin galactic is a public
00:32:13
company of which i'm chairman of said
00:32:15
board of directors i'm not saying
00:32:16
anything about anything
00:32:18
branson is is trying to beat bezos into
00:32:20
space
00:32:21
by going up before him there is now a
00:32:23
space race going on
00:32:24
and you have to wonder and then
00:32:25
meanwhile elon i i wonder how much of
00:32:28
this is because
00:32:29
of bezos's pride because elon tweeted
00:32:33
that bezos couldn't get it up because
00:32:35
his rocket
00:32:37
bezos rocket is only going to actual
00:32:39
space yeah it goes to like suborbital
00:32:41
like
00:32:42
low earth orbit you know space he gets
00:32:44
it halfway up
00:32:46
i think he's somewhere in the 50 to 70
00:32:48
range i think how much if he had
00:32:50
a little blue pill blue origin if he got
00:32:53
the little blue origin pill he might get
00:32:55
to 100 how great is this space race by
00:32:57
the way
00:32:57
this is so freaking cool right i mean
00:32:59
like the government
00:33:01
is pretty amazing i mean the government
00:33:02
creates all these great contract
00:33:03
incentives this is a this is a good role
00:33:05
for government right they come in they
00:33:06
create all these contract incentives
00:33:07
spacex has been making all this money
00:33:08
from the us government
00:33:10
and then they take that money and they
00:33:11
invest in creating the space race this
00:33:12
industry
00:33:13
that you know could absolutely transform
00:33:16
humanity for the centuries to come
00:33:18
uh it really speaks to kind of like how
00:33:20
semiconductors
00:33:22
and computing came out of the space race
00:33:24
of the mid 20th century
00:33:26
and we could see this kind of like next
00:33:28
industrial age arise for
00:33:29
the space industrial age uh because of
00:33:31
these incentives that have been created
00:33:33
by the government it seems to me like
00:33:34
there's a good role here the
00:33:35
government's played and this is super
00:33:37
super cool
00:33:38
isn't this in stark contrast to the
00:33:40
government doing the space shuttle
00:33:42
program
00:33:42
which if you look at the fatalities
00:33:44
there have been about 30 fatalities and
00:33:46
going to space 14 of which were on the
00:33:47
two shuttles
00:33:49
one that tragically blew up on the way
00:33:51
up and one that
00:33:52
disintegrated on the way down in our
00:33:53
childhoods in the 80s i believe
00:33:55
um it was also incredibly expensive look
00:33:58
this is privatization for the win
00:34:00
right instead of having the government
00:34:02
doing all the r
00:34:03
d and the government is good at some
00:34:06
things but r d
00:34:06
is not one of them so you you let the
00:34:09
private sector
00:34:10
do the r d and then nasa's contracting
00:34:13
with these private sector companies
00:34:15
the government is a phenomenal balance
00:34:17
sheet yes how do you feel
00:34:18
about the government funding this work
00:34:20
right because they're not doing the work
00:34:22
but it's the taxpayers money that's
00:34:23
going to spacex and others for contract
00:34:26
services
00:34:26
that ultimately fuels this innovation
00:34:28
engine do you feel like this is a good
00:34:30
role for government spending
00:34:31
is to kind of well the question the
00:34:33
question for government
00:34:34
as a policy matter is whether we want to
00:34:36
go to space and then the question is how
00:34:38
do we get there i definitely
00:34:39
believe that if we believe it's
00:34:41
important to have a space station to get
00:34:43
to space
00:34:44
to kind of advance the frontiers of
00:34:48
you know humankind yeah then then then
00:34:50
it's it's a worthy
00:34:52
program to fund and then the question is
00:34:53
well how do you get there and i think
00:34:56
you know funding spacex and these or
00:34:58
it's not funding it's contracts
00:34:59
with spacex to deliver the product is a
00:35:02
much better idea than having the
00:35:03
government trying to develop it itself
00:35:05
right yeah because those are milestone
00:35:07
based with some level of competition
00:35:09
even if people might complain about the
00:35:12
bidding process et cetera the contract
00:35:14
is for a duration of time and for
00:35:16
deliverables if the deliverables are not
00:35:18
bad or the contract expires
00:35:20
then we start the whole process over
00:35:21
again and this correct me if i'm wrong
00:35:24
is a must do for us because we cannot
00:35:26
let the communist and authoritarians
00:35:28
own space we have no choice being the
00:35:31
democratic west
00:35:33
of owning space and getting there before
00:35:35
them and dominating space
00:35:36
nobody can own space but i think the
00:35:38
united states
00:35:39
is an incredible balance sheet nobody
00:35:42
can own space
00:35:43
i mean are you kidding me what if
00:35:45
somebody gets up there who
00:35:46
decides to put nuclear missiles up there
00:35:48
and decides anybody else who puts
00:35:50
satellites up there we're gonna just
00:35:51
nuke them and laser them
00:35:53
you're not gonna own it you don't even
00:35:54
need a nuke quite frankly
00:35:56
you could drop a tungsten rod from space
00:36:00
okay just a like a giant steel rod and
00:36:02
by the time it hits the ground
00:36:04
it's going so fast that it basically can
00:36:06
blow up
00:36:07
or assassinate anybody what the hell are
00:36:10
the two of you
00:36:11
i mean have the two of you become no
00:36:12
this is real like
00:36:14
the two of you are like that like be
00:36:16
arthur and the golden girls
00:36:17
jesus christ the guys in the muppets
00:36:21
arthur here blathering on the
00:36:25
the south military applications have you
00:36:26
not seen the chinese putting rockets
00:36:28
over taiwan and military exercises
00:36:30
these people are not chasing playing
00:36:32
games jason i understand
00:36:34
nobody no all i'm saying is there's no
00:36:37
owning it
00:36:38
okay it's too vast it's effectively
00:36:40
infinite
00:36:41
you can't own it okay you can have
00:36:43
certain areas you can be dominated
00:36:46
you can't yeah of course you can
00:36:48
dominate space
00:36:50
they go up there and they don't play by
00:36:51
the rules i mean did you guys not see
00:36:52
what happened with hitler in
00:36:54
europe he dominated europe number of
00:36:56
years jason listen
00:36:58
of all parts of space that you can
00:37:00
dominate
00:37:01
maybe the one planet is uranus other
00:37:03
than that there's
00:37:04
nothing you guys are so
00:37:08
naive about the intentions of russia and
00:37:10
china it is
00:37:11
phenomenal they have 100 year plans to
00:37:14
dominate humanity
00:37:16
and they are willing to put millions of
00:37:18
people into concentration camps
00:37:20
they have no problem going to space and
00:37:22
deciding we're going to own the
00:37:24
satellites
00:37:24
and we're going to knock other
00:37:25
satellites i can't believe you were so
00:37:27
anti-trump and
00:37:28
and and it's just you're saying it's
00:37:31
unbelievable you're so funny can i just
00:37:32
say one thing i think i think back to
00:37:34
what we said before the u.s is an
00:37:35
incredible balance sheet
00:37:36
and what free brook said is so true
00:37:39
which is like coming out of the apollo
00:37:40
program
00:37:41
we really created so much technological
00:37:43
innovation it propelled the u.s forward
00:37:45
we unfortunately gave a lot of it up
00:37:47
but hopefully this time around we can do
00:37:49
it again and
00:37:50
by the way just last week i guess it was
00:37:52
or i guess it was last week
00:37:54
um or a month ago you know where we got
00:37:57
that chips act
00:37:58
in play which is a quarter trillion
00:38:00
dollars you know for semiconductors and
00:38:01
other things
00:38:02
um so we're slowly getting there but
00:38:04
this is where the u.s can do a lot of
00:38:06
good which is just to act as a funding
00:38:07
source
00:38:08
and then let private markets kind of
00:38:09
take over the rest by the way we've
00:38:11
talked about this on the past couple of
00:38:12
podcasts but there is
00:38:13
i think 90 billion dollars earmarked in
00:38:15
this new bill
00:38:16
for enabling american manufacturing
00:38:18
progress and so it will be through a
00:38:20
similar sort of funding mechanism it
00:38:22
looks like
00:38:22
as what we're seeing here it could be a
00:38:24
fantastic boon for
00:38:26
innovation and um and infrastructure
00:38:28
yeah what other categories should we
00:38:30
model this after sax should we do this
00:38:32
for nuclear should we do it for
00:38:33
education for housing
00:38:34
before we move on i mean look jake i
00:38:36
want to come to your defense on this
00:38:37
point because i think it's
00:38:38
it's um because i think it's just wrong
00:38:41
to say that there aren't
00:38:42
like vast and important military
00:38:44
applications
00:38:46
of space the fact of the matter is you
00:38:48
look at the history of warfare
00:38:50
it's critical to have the high ground
00:38:52
whoever has the high ground ultimately
00:38:54
wins the war this is why the first thing
00:38:56
we do oh the greeks the greeks had the
00:38:58
highest
00:39:08
let me finish the point the first thing
00:39:10
we do in a in a war or a conflict is
00:39:12
establish
00:39:13
total air superiority it's the reason
00:39:15
why our infantry
00:39:16
doesn't take massive losses um it's you
00:39:19
know we want to establish
00:39:21
you know artillery um that that
00:39:24
sort of protects the infantry look the
00:39:26
future artillery is going to be from
00:39:27
space
00:39:28
it is the ultimate high ground uh it is
00:39:30
i agree with jcal it's naive to think
00:39:32
that the other side that other powers
00:39:34
are not pursuing military applications
00:39:37
we have to have the ability to
00:39:40
defend ourselves against space-based
00:39:42
attacks
00:39:43
and to have those those abilities
00:39:45
ourselves those capabilities
00:39:47
and so that is part of what's factoring
00:39:50
in here with the space
00:39:50
i get it i get it i know what you guys
00:39:52
want a
00:39:55
you want giant giant laser in space i
00:39:57
don't i don't think it has to be a laser
00:39:59
i think it can be low-tech
00:40:00
you know just if you just literally shot
00:40:03
ball bearings at other satellites it
00:40:05
would rip through them right i mean
00:40:07
the tungsten rock program is an actual
00:40:08
program right zach
00:40:10
yeah yeah it's a funded military program
00:40:12
oh my god by the time you if you drop
00:40:14
something from space it hits the ground
00:40:15
at like mach 35
00:40:17
phil hellmuth has invaded our podcast
00:40:19
and taken the body of david
00:40:22
no but in all seriousness this um
00:40:24
program
00:40:25
that we're seeing great success with
00:40:27
inspiring the greatest you know
00:40:28
entrepreneurs of our time
00:40:30
to go after big prizes like this could
00:40:32
we not do this with nuclear energy
00:40:34
housing and education
00:40:36
or are is that kind of out of the
00:40:38
question
00:40:39
let me just point out by the way the
00:40:41
things you just pointed out are the
00:40:43
things that are now
00:40:43
most regulated and it's the regulatory
00:40:47
burden
00:40:48
which ultimately stifles innovation
00:40:50
whereas
00:40:51
in this case we're enabling innovation
00:40:52
without putting a lot of regulatory
00:40:54
burden on space at this stage right and
00:40:56
so as soon as itar which is one of these
00:40:58
regulatory bodies starts to step in and
00:41:00
maybe we start to limit things that can
00:41:01
be done in space and so on and so forth
00:41:03
you may
00:41:03
see things kind of get damaged like
00:41:04
nuclear energy got damaged because the
00:41:06
fear of the downside ends up um
00:41:09
you know kind of counterbalancing the
00:41:11
opportunity of the upside
00:41:13
and it's something we've seen time and
00:41:14
time again with every innovation cycle
00:41:16
in every industry and you know you're
00:41:19
right right now we're in this
00:41:20
opportunistic moment in the space race
00:41:22
but as soon as kind of the regulatory
00:41:23
burden becomes heavy you're gonna see
00:41:25
the same thing that happened with
00:41:26
housing the same thing that happened
00:41:27
nuclear energy and all the other kind of
00:41:28
innovation cycles
00:41:29
that that kind of got stifled uh not
00:41:31
just in the us but globally
00:41:34
yeah so we don't think for nuclear we'll
00:41:36
see this happening anytime soon
00:41:39
man that would be an incredible uh
00:41:40
nobody nobody wants
00:41:42
nuclear if there's a huge nimby problem
00:41:44
with nuclear right which is who really
00:41:45
wants a nuclear power plant in their
00:41:46
backyard i mean
00:41:48
not gonna happen i don't think it's
00:41:49
realistic it's it's one of these ideas
00:41:52
that you know sounds great in theory but
00:41:55
then in practice
00:41:56
no one's willing to raise their hand and
00:41:57
say i want that really easy solution for
00:41:59
that why don't you just make
00:42:00
anybody who has to live within x zone of
00:42:03
a nuclear power plant have a tax credit
00:42:05
of a million dollars a year
00:42:06
they still don't want it look i think
00:42:08
the future of alternative energy is
00:42:10
solar
00:42:11
um it's it's an inexhaustible supply
00:42:15
the cost of solar panels
00:42:19
keeps going down exponentially the cost
00:42:21
curve is going down exponentially
00:42:23
and look ultimately all life on this
00:42:24
planet is solar powered right because
00:42:26
fossil fuels come from
00:42:28
the remains of dead dinosaurs who were
00:42:30
ate plants and plants are
00:42:32
solar powered so ultimately the sun is
00:42:35
the ultimate
00:42:36
source of energy not wind not nuclear
00:42:39
not windmills well geothermal it's going
00:42:41
to be solar geothermal capacity is still
00:42:44
like 100 billion years based on our
00:42:46
current um
00:42:48
consumption rate but uh there's limited
00:42:51
uh research relative to the opportunity
00:42:53
in general thermal but yeah totally
00:42:55
agree with you sac
00:42:55
in a microcosm of uh you know the
00:42:58
reopening of the pandemic we've been at
00:43:01
record low case loads um and debts are
00:43:04
so low now from
00:43:05
covet 19 in the low hundreds that it's
00:43:08
probably hard to know
00:43:09
freedberg you tell me if i'm wrong or
00:43:11
right if people are of those three or
00:43:13
four hundred people dying a day
00:43:14
that's with covid from covet et cetera
00:43:17
um but anybody
00:43:18
i think it's intellectually correct to
00:43:20
say that anybody who
00:43:21
over the age of 12 who wants a vaccine
00:43:23
can get it and anybody who's in a
00:43:24
high-risk group
00:43:26
certainly now has had over six months to
00:43:28
to get a vaccine
00:43:30
so we're basically done and now the
00:43:31
question becomes what happens to society
00:43:34
are we gonna go back to work
00:43:35
uh apple employees uh wrote a letter
00:43:38
um about apple's uh demand
00:43:42
i'm using air quotes here that people
00:43:45
come back to work
00:43:46
three days a week amazon just adjusted
00:43:49
their return to work policy
00:43:51
uh backing off their claim of uh in
00:43:53
march that they're going to return to an
00:43:55
office-centric
00:43:56
uh culture they announced that employees
00:43:58
can do two days remote three days in the
00:43:59
office that seems to be the
00:44:01
three for two um google has a similar
00:44:04
policy
00:44:06
they're expecting people to return to
00:44:07
the office three days a week in
00:44:08
september
00:44:09
twitter said you can work from home
00:44:10
forever because jack is an introvert and
00:44:13
doesn't want to come back to work i
00:44:14
guess
00:44:14
uh facebook employees either need
00:44:17
approval to continue work from home
00:44:18
full-time or they will need to be back
00:44:20
in the office 50
00:44:21
of the time but zuckerberg personally uh
00:44:23
said that he is embracing remote work
00:44:25
here's the quote
00:44:26
i found that working remotely has given
00:44:27
me more space for long-term thinking and
00:44:29
helped me spend more time
00:44:31
with my family which has made me happier
00:44:33
and more productive
00:44:34
at work which i guess is either
00:44:37
devastating for real estate or this is a
00:44:39
great negotiation that's going on you
00:44:40
had some choice quotes about
00:44:42
apple employees doing three um
00:44:46
uh letters
00:44:49
uh petitions in three weeks yeah yeah so
00:44:53
look i i
00:44:54
i don't have a problem with the work
00:44:56
from home
00:44:57
policy my my problem is with the fact
00:44:59
that the apple employees
00:45:02
keep doing what they do which is sign
00:45:03
these petitions and of course the
00:45:05
it's all the snowflake language around
00:45:07
we're not being listened to
00:45:08
we're not being heard you know and then
00:45:10
they want to dictate to management
00:45:12
uh the way that the company should work
00:45:14
and so they circulate petitions to get
00:45:16
other employees fired
00:45:17
they circulated petitions to make tim
00:45:19
cook take his stance against israel
00:45:21
now they're circulating petition on work
00:45:22
from home and of course
00:45:25
that is what apple employees do and
00:45:27
apple management
00:45:28
is doing what it seems to do which is
00:45:30
cave to these petitions
00:45:32
every time and so they're in an infinite
00:45:33
loop where the employees have realized
00:45:36
they can run the company
00:45:37
by forming these these sort of boycotts
00:45:39
and petition mobs
00:45:41
and it's working now again my objection
00:45:43
is not to work from home
00:45:45
most of my portfolio companies are now
00:45:47
working from home or fully distributed
00:45:49
they're hiring employees
00:45:50
everywhere it's been very liberating for
00:45:52
them to be able to hire talent
00:45:54
anywhere in the world and so i think the
00:45:56
work from home question
00:45:58
the reason why these big companies are
00:45:59
struggling with it i think quite frankly
00:46:01
is this because it's about their ability
00:46:03
to supervise
00:46:05
their employees i think that work from
00:46:07
home makes the best employees better
00:46:09
but it allows the worst employees to
00:46:11
hide and i think what this really comes
00:46:13
down to is a fear
00:46:14
on the part of apple and google and
00:46:16
facebook they've got thousands of
00:46:18
employees
00:46:19
who aren't really working and are going
00:46:20
to be able to completely hide
00:46:23
and and i think that's what this policy
00:46:24
comes down failure of management or just
00:46:26
the nature of workforce i think the
00:46:28
nature of these gigantic companies where
00:46:29
they've got so many employees
00:46:31
that they're trying to figure out how to
00:46:32
supervise them all and make sure they're
00:46:34
actually doing work
00:46:35
there's this funny tweet that's going
00:46:36
around i don't know if it's true or not
00:46:38
but it got retweeted
00:46:39
about somebody saying that i've gotten
00:46:41
six jobs during the pandemic
00:46:43
they're all work from home and i'm
00:46:45
waiting to get fired from them for
00:46:46
you know people realizing i'm not doing
00:46:48
anything and so
00:46:49
i think this work from home controversy
00:46:51
ultimately is about
00:46:53
the ability of these large companies to
00:46:55
supervise a workforce that they don't
00:46:57
know what they're doing
00:46:58
if anything oh my god what a brilliant
00:47:01
idea
00:47:02
the big unstopped problem in the
00:47:03
pandemic with respect to work from home
00:47:05
is
00:47:05
how do you onboard new people in my
00:47:08
opinion
00:47:09
like if you have an established company
00:47:11
with established people where everybody
00:47:12
knows each other it seems
00:47:14
like uh all positive to be able to work
00:47:17
from home because there's trust there's
00:47:18
decorum there's
00:47:20
social norms there's all these things
00:47:21
that were established together
00:47:24
but what happens when all of a sudden
00:47:25
you introduce one two three four
00:47:27
five five hundred new people into the
00:47:28
mix how do you onboard these folks how
00:47:30
do you get
00:47:31
and i think that's not a solved problem
00:47:32
and until you do that i'm not sure that
00:47:34
work from home will be
00:47:35
as effective as it can be because i
00:47:37
think you'll just get a lot of people
00:47:38
that
00:47:38
that uh languish a little bit as they
00:47:41
switch jobs now maybe what that means is
00:47:42
they'll switch
00:47:43
jobs less because they'll just say
00:47:45
actually this is net better my crappy
00:47:47
job got a little bit better so there's
00:47:48
no reason to move
00:47:51
the on your point of commercial real
00:47:53
estate jkl i actually think
00:47:54
it just brings the utilization down but
00:47:57
i'm not sure it destroys it because i
00:47:58
think
00:47:59
people need the physical plant now maybe
00:48:02
over time they'll get much smarter
00:48:04
um about getting smaller spaces and
00:48:06
having flex spaces so like things like
00:48:07
wework do better
00:48:09
um because then you use that for
00:48:10
overflow space or that's how you
00:48:12
how you actually have a primary outfit
00:48:14
um
00:48:15
but yeah those are my thoughts freeberg
00:48:18
any thoughts
00:48:18
i think it's gonna be hard to what i'm
00:48:21
hearing i don't know if you guys
00:48:22
have talked to a lot of ceos but i just
00:48:24
hear it's kind of a little bit tough
00:48:26
right now to find the balance of
00:48:28
the rules around when to be in work
00:48:30
because people have meetings
00:48:33
um in the off they'll have a meeting
00:48:35
eighty percent of the people will show
00:48:36
up to the meeting 20
00:48:37
will be remote and then it's a huge
00:48:38
headache for everyone to be like okay
00:48:40
we're all in the room we're all having a
00:48:41
conversation now we got to zoom the
00:48:42
people in that aren't here
00:48:44
and this person decided not to show up
00:48:45
today and it's kind of become a little
00:48:47
bit of a
00:48:48
a weird photo or what what's the the
00:48:50
right word
00:48:52
to comment right to not come into work
00:48:55
while everyone else is meeting in person
00:48:57
and it's just becoming a little bit of a
00:48:58
conflict across the organization right
00:49:00
now
00:49:01
um there's good it's going to be sticky
00:49:02
for a while i'm not sure there's going
00:49:03
to be a great
00:49:04
um solution and it's going to vary by
00:49:06
company also it's very different as you
00:49:09
guys know when
00:49:09
you know when i was single in my early
00:49:12
20s working at google
00:49:14
oh here it comes oh well no it was like
00:49:16
it was it was going to work it was like
00:49:18
it's cool
00:49:23
no it was like it was cool like it was
00:49:25
it was great to go to campus every day
00:49:27
now that i'm married with kids you know
00:49:29
like being with being around your kids
00:49:30
more often you got obligations at home
00:49:32
it's very different right your
00:49:33
priorities change
00:49:34
and so when you have a diversity in the
00:49:36
workforce of people with different home
00:49:38
lives and so on
00:49:38
what if you're married but you don't
00:49:40
know and you have kids but you can't
00:49:42
remember their names
00:49:43
david overdue sucks
00:49:47
i mean but at that moment in time
00:49:49
correct me if i'm wrong fredberg
00:49:51
you know google was taking people out of
00:49:53
stanford harvard mit whatever
00:49:55
and they were basically giving them
00:49:56
another four years in college with this
00:49:58
like college campus experience
00:50:00
you've got a great experience it was a
00:50:02
freaking barista made your coffees
00:50:04
anytime you wanted coffee you walk over
00:50:05
to a counter
00:50:06
and there's a barista he makes you
00:50:08
whatever you want you get all these
00:50:09
amazing snacks and you go
00:50:10
you go down the slide to your meeting i
00:50:12
mean it's like when you say it was great
00:50:14
experience do you mean
00:50:15
that it was like fun and for the
00:50:17
employees like it was like a fun life
00:50:19
experience or do you mean they actually
00:50:20
got good work experience
00:50:22
fun life experience yeah yeah it was but
00:50:25
it was like useless
00:50:27
it was useless from like a skills or
00:50:30
like
00:50:30
resume like for me from building your
00:50:32
career
00:50:33
it was useless right well the work
00:50:35
itself was useful at least for me at
00:50:37
least at that era at google when it was
00:50:38
a private company i loved that work it
00:50:40
was an incredible experience for me
00:50:41
i made a lot of friends and and built
00:50:43
incredible career experience working at
00:50:45
google when it was a private company
00:50:46
um but what about now i mean google has
00:50:48
this reputation
00:50:49
that there's thousands of employees not
00:50:51
doing anything it was satirized
00:50:53
totally by by the employees on sitting
00:50:55
on the roof of the show silicon valley
00:50:57
hulu yeah exactly
00:51:00
yeah so look i mean instead of sitting
00:51:02
on the roof they're going to be sitting
00:51:03
on their couch at home you know that's
00:51:04
right
00:51:05
i guess i guess it's an improvement but
00:51:08
i think that's really what it comes down
00:51:09
to
00:51:09
what what facebook said in its statement
00:51:11
was kind of interesting there was a
00:51:13
a part in there where they kind of
00:51:14
implied that work from home would be
00:51:16
like a perk
00:51:17
you know and that high performers would
00:51:19
get it and then low performers
00:51:21
would have to come into the office more
00:51:23
and that probably
00:51:24
is the right approach because in order
00:51:27
to let people work from home you have to
00:51:29
trust them
00:51:29
to be much more self-motivated to get
00:51:31
their work done and quite frankly
00:51:33
the employees who want to hide you got
00:51:36
to make those people come into the
00:51:37
office you can say
00:51:38
it's like in jail where the good inmates
00:51:40
get their own stuff totally
00:51:41
yeah absolutely if you get time in the
00:51:43
yard
00:51:44
exactly it's conjugal visits if you're
00:51:47
running a 500 to a thousand employee
00:51:50
sas company based in silicon valley with
00:51:52
offices around the country or whatever
00:51:53
what would you do
00:51:54
right now what would your your work from
00:51:56
home policy be today
00:51:58
well most of my companies that are in
00:51:59
that position are going fully remote
00:52:01
fully distributed
00:52:03
and it is and they're going to be some
00:52:05
challenges to be sure but i just think
00:52:07
it's inevitable
00:52:08
now some of them i i do think there is a
00:52:11
strong cultural advantage we've talked
00:52:12
about this before chamoth has made this
00:52:14
point
00:52:14
around having everyone in the same
00:52:16
office or at least having hubs
00:52:18
so i am a fan of developing hubs you
00:52:20
might have like an engineering hub
00:52:22
somewhere
00:52:22
that you know and then you've got some
00:52:24
remote engineers you might have like a
00:52:26
customer service hub
00:52:28
i i do think that like call centers for
00:52:30
example you're much better off having
00:52:32
everybody
00:52:33
work from the same call center uh
00:52:36
because
00:52:37
that that is like a total productivity
00:52:39
job where it's about like how many units
00:52:41
of work can you do within a certain
00:52:42
amount of time
00:52:43
it's way easier to measure and manage
00:52:45
that work
00:52:46
when it's all happening in one place and
00:52:48
those call centers tend to be in
00:52:49
locations that
00:52:50
aren't as expensive as the bay area at
00:52:53
metro mile we have a big
00:52:54
customer service and claim center in
00:52:55
tempe arizona and
00:52:57
we have gone fully remote since the
00:53:00
pandemic and productivity per unit
00:53:02
uh per employee has gone up uh since
00:53:05
going distributed because
00:53:06
it turns out that you know i'm not i'm
00:53:08
not going to pine too deeply on this but
00:53:11
you know the the the throughput
00:53:13
increases when people are kind of maybe
00:53:14
not being distracted in the office or
00:53:16
something so
00:53:17
you can actually track it and that's a
00:53:19
very measurable job right so the
00:53:20
throughput and everything can be
00:53:22
measured
00:53:22
um so i would kind of make a counter
00:53:24
point there that maybe we're seeing
00:53:25
something different
00:53:26
yeah i mean look you maybe you may be
00:53:28
right about that i mean it all comes
00:53:29
down to do you have the ability do you
00:53:31
have systems that can manage the
00:53:33
the sort of sprawl and if you do i mean
00:53:36
and you can really measure the output
00:53:38
and you can ensure the employees are
00:53:40
delivering results that's it's a win-win
00:53:42
i i created a super lightweight version
00:53:45
of this
00:53:46
um where since slack is so dominant i
00:53:48
just tell people
00:53:49
you need to have a start and end to the
00:53:51
day so you can like get on with your
00:53:52
personal life
00:53:54
just at the start of the day do an sod
00:53:57
in slack in the general channel you just
00:53:59
say two or three bullet points of what
00:54:00
you're working on today
00:54:01
and then at the end of the day reply to
00:54:03
that
00:54:04
same one with your eod just what you got
00:54:07
done today and then inform your
00:54:08
employees and then you don't need to be
00:54:10
managed so if you can do that for five
00:54:12
minutes at the start of the day and just
00:54:14
five minutes into the day
00:54:15
and then on friday before you leave for
00:54:17
the close up the week give me an eow of
00:54:19
what you got done this week
00:54:21
and then on saturdays like today when
00:54:23
we're taping this i go through
00:54:24
have a cup of coffee read all the eows
00:54:26
and i give feedback
00:54:28
and it has made it so clear who's a
00:54:30
contributor
00:54:31
in the company and who's not and when i
00:54:33
i instituted this pre-pandemic
00:54:36
and i had two people quit because they
00:54:37
were like i don't want to do it and it
00:54:39
turned out that those people were the
00:54:40
lowest performers
00:54:41
i think you should call it a tps report
00:54:44
it you know i i
00:54:46
would you could frame it as such like
00:54:48
micromanaging and i said you can either
00:54:49
frame this as micromanaging
00:54:51
or you're setting an intention of what
00:54:53
you're going to do in your workout
00:54:55
and then you record what you did in your
00:54:57
workout since i started using the tonal
00:54:59
system and since i started using hydro
00:55:00
i'm not
00:55:01
advertising them here but they both have
00:55:03
measurements and i
00:55:05
i did 6 500 pounds on the tonal
00:55:08
and i'm like i want to break that record
00:55:10
this weekend i want to do 7000 pounds i
00:55:12
want to do five exercises
00:55:14
and i went from doing three exercises
00:55:15
three reps to five exercises four reps
00:55:17
and and
00:55:18
if i want to measure it if i if i do
00:55:20
slash apple slices
00:55:22
into slack do i get apple slices
00:55:24
absolutely we will bring you
00:55:26
you can also pick milk or chocolate milk
00:55:28
or strawberry milk
00:55:30
what did you guys think of that's press
00:55:31
release that salesforce sent out which
00:55:33
said something to the effect of like
00:55:34
they are becoming an entirely slack
00:55:37
centric company they're going to rebuild
00:55:39
i guess the entire architecture of
00:55:41
sfdc around or salesforce around of
00:55:43
course we predicted that on the show
00:55:45
slack is going to be the re they're
00:55:46
going to rename sales for slack no but i
00:55:48
don't really understand what that meant
00:55:49
other than the actual headline of the
00:55:51
statement i'm wondering if you guys
00:55:52
understand what it means
00:55:54
well i i think i understand what benioff
00:55:55
is getting at which i saw an interview
00:55:57
that he did recently
00:55:58
where he talked about their quarterly
00:56:00
results which i guess were their best
00:56:01
ever it was like a fabulous quarter for
00:56:03
them
00:56:04
um what he talked about benioff is very
00:56:06
good at connecting his products to
00:56:07
larger societal trends
00:56:09
and the big trend that he's kind of
00:56:10
hooking on to is
00:56:12
this distributed work trend and the way
00:56:15
he described it is
00:56:16
is you know basically this is the future
00:56:18
companies are trying to figure it out
00:56:20
but they need a saddle because i guess
00:56:22
this this is a trend that could sort of
00:56:23
buck them off the horse
00:56:25
and he's trying to say that slack is
00:56:27
going to be the thing that anchors your
00:56:28
company now for this new era of remote
00:56:30
distributed work i think it's kind of
00:56:32
brilliant marketing brilliant um
00:56:34
yeah absolutely i mean there's brilliant
00:56:36
they're there he's absolutely brilliant
00:56:38
he has built such an incredible
00:56:39
organization i mean
00:56:40
the scale of salesforce over these last
00:56:44
20 years
00:56:44
my gosh he is he is a star star of stars
00:56:49
i mean in i set you guys in the slack
00:56:51
the or i sent you guys in the chat
00:56:53
this uh socketsite.com which is a cool
00:56:55
real estate site for
00:56:56
san francisco that's been around for two
00:56:58
decades i think um
00:56:59
it's hilarious they calculate how much
00:57:01
open office space by how many salesforce
00:57:03
towers
00:57:04
are empty in uh and it's 16 million of
00:57:07
square feet of vacant office space now
00:57:09
spread across
00:57:09
uh san francisco this seems to me at the
00:57:12
same time we're having a crazy housing
00:57:14
crisis i don't know if you're monitoring
00:57:15
this but
00:57:16
it turns out that banks and hedge funds
00:57:19
and now redfin
00:57:20
and you know uh open door and all these
00:57:22
companies are
00:57:23
buying homes homes are getting bit up at
00:57:26
the same time mortgage
00:57:27
uh mortgages are an all-time low and
00:57:29
people are moving around and we're not
00:57:31
constructing so
00:57:32
i think we had a 60 or 70 decline in new
00:57:35
housing uh
00:57:36
being released into the market and now
00:57:38
we've got a full-blown
00:57:39
housing crisis in the country i'm going
00:57:41
to go back uh otto the
00:57:43
limb and put up my uh 10-year break even
00:57:46
i think this whole inflation thing is a
00:57:48
head fake
00:57:49
and i think that um the
00:57:53
right now we're in this weird position
00:57:55
where the
00:57:56
the home builders are not necessarily
00:57:58
sure whether they're going to rip in
00:58:00
the capital necessary to build a bunch
00:58:01
of homes the reason they would slow down
00:58:03
is if they think that inflation is
00:58:05
coming
00:58:05
rates go up mortgage rates go up and
00:58:08
then demand falls off
00:58:10
but if it turns out to be a head fake
00:58:11
the builders will then
00:58:13
actually build what's necessary and they
00:58:15
have the capital capacity to do it but i
00:58:17
don't think that they've had the
00:58:19
the economic justification and the
00:58:21
courage to do it and and
00:58:22
in fairness to them it's because the
00:58:24
10-year break even has gone straight up
00:58:26
since the depths of the pandemic
00:58:28
which is essentially again just to you
00:58:29
know get everybody up to speed
00:58:32
it's it's how the market thinks about
00:58:34
the future forward inflation rate
00:58:35
anyways over the last three or four
00:58:37
months or three or four weeks sorry
00:58:38
since we talked about it it's kind of
00:58:39
steadily started to fall off and i think
00:58:41
there's a prevailing
00:58:42
sentiment that you know we're gonna see
00:58:44
some short-term spikes we saw it this
00:58:46
past week in cpi
00:58:47
energy went bananas right the cost of
00:58:50
energy the cost of certain things
00:58:53
but then we're going to get back to
00:58:54
normal and when we get back to normal
00:58:56
inflation will be okay and i think jason
00:58:58
that's probably a solution because if it
00:58:59
gets
00:59:00
you know if that if that boogie
00:59:03
is actually not real and um we put it
00:59:06
away
00:59:07
then um uh the builders will be back in
00:59:10
size
00:59:11
and and they'll green light a lot of
00:59:13
projects and i think you'll see housing
00:59:14
supply kick back
00:59:15
up really aggressively that'll be good
00:59:17
for us yeah two two points there i think
00:59:20
one it so i i hope jamath is right about
00:59:22
the long-term inflation
00:59:24
prognosis um it's been you know it's
00:59:27
it's very important for investment in
00:59:30
growth companies growth stocks and
00:59:33
high-tech companies that the inflation
00:59:34
the long-term interest rate
00:59:36
remains low so i hope you're right i
00:59:38
think that ultimately
00:59:40
what's happening is there's a battle
00:59:42
going on between
00:59:43
um sort of fiscal and monetary policy
00:59:46
coming out of washington which is highly
00:59:47
inflationary
00:59:48
and then technological deflation so for
00:59:50
the last 25 years because we've had this
00:59:52
explosion
00:59:53
of productivity around technology it's
00:59:56
driven down the prices
00:59:57
of pretty much everything that's not
01:00:00
where the prices aren't set by the
01:00:01
government so
01:00:02
healthcare uh universities things like
01:00:04
that the prices have gone up because the
01:00:06
government's paying for it
01:00:07
everything else the price has come down
01:00:08
massively so we've we were kind of in
01:00:11
this battle between
01:00:12
sort of government inflation and
01:00:14
technological deflation i don't know
01:00:16
which one's going to win
01:00:17
um i do think that the sort of the the
01:00:20
policies we're seeing
01:00:22
creating a lot of government debt and uh
01:00:24
the fed continuing on this never-ending
01:00:26
qe are are pretty scary but in any event
01:00:29
i hope you're right
01:00:30
about where this ends up i think on the
01:00:32
the other point was
01:00:34
um was sorry we were on we're talking
01:00:37
about the housing
01:00:37
yeah the housing so this is a really
01:00:40
interesting sort of populist
01:00:42
narrative that's evolving where you've
01:00:44
got i mean it's i think both the left
01:00:46
and the right can agree
01:00:47
that it's a pretty scary thing that you
01:00:49
now have major hedge funds
01:00:51
buying up huge stocks of housing in the
01:00:54
u.s
01:00:55
driving up prices so first-time
01:00:58
homebuyers can't buy a home i mean that
01:00:59
is a very
01:01:01
uh scary it's a nightmare it's a
01:01:03
nightmare trend and i think you're
01:01:04
seeing
01:01:05
a reaction to it on the left that
01:01:07
california now proposed
01:01:08
some new policy where they want the
01:01:10
state of california to pay for
01:01:11
50 percent of first-time homebuyers
01:01:14
houses which just seems insane to me
01:01:16
but you know and then on the on the
01:01:18
right uh tucker just did a segment
01:01:20
coming down attacking blackrock and
01:01:22
these big hedge funds
01:01:23
for for basically for for driving up the
01:01:26
prices
01:01:27
so i think you're going to see a
01:01:28
unanimity on the populist left and right
01:01:31
in reaction to these hedge funds but the
01:01:34
thing that no one's really talking about
01:01:35
that they need to be talking about
01:01:37
is the nimbyism i mean jason you
01:01:39
mentioned it the reason why we don't
01:01:41
have enough housing is because it's too
01:01:43
hard
01:01:43
to build and chamath is right that the
01:01:46
builders could get the capital for it
01:01:47
but it is too hard to get these projects
01:01:49
approved that is the thing we've got to
01:01:51
uh
01:01:52
that that is the change we got to make
01:01:53
to build on that i think what's
01:01:55
happening now
01:01:56
becomes the catalyst to break
01:01:59
that enemyism if you all these black
01:02:02
rocks are buying up all the homes if
01:02:04
young people and young families can't
01:02:05
buy a home despite mortgage rates being
01:02:08
ridiculously low
01:02:09
and despite them having the money to do
01:02:11
it and the desire to do it
01:02:13
then that's going to create a massive
01:02:14
societal upheaval i believe
01:02:16
and then that's going to either drive
01:02:18
people to other states like texas is
01:02:20
benefiting because they're pro
01:02:21
development
01:02:22
it's going to catalyze the massive
01:02:24
movement of people out of new york out
01:02:26
of california whatever states
01:02:27
are are giving too much red tape it's
01:02:30
going to drive people to those states
01:02:31
because that's where the housing people
01:02:32
it's going to be built or those states
01:02:34
are going to crack under the pressure
01:02:35
and say
01:02:36
you know what we're going to let you
01:02:38
build in sacramento
01:02:40
and you know you guys know i'm i have a
01:02:42
housing company in my portfolio
01:02:44
and they are they are getting absolutely
01:02:48
deluged with people begging them to do
01:02:50
affordable housing in different
01:02:51
locations and
01:02:52
the biggest problem they're having is
01:02:53
sorting through all the projects and
01:02:55
what are we going to do
01:02:56
but the great news is technology exists
01:02:58
now to build modular homes in factories
01:03:01
like tesla dust cars
01:03:02
and ship them to site and take six
01:03:04
months to a year out of the construction
01:03:05
process
01:03:06
so then it just becomes a matter of
01:03:08
regulations and which state decides
01:03:10
that they're gonna let people buy a home
01:03:11
for the first time and if
01:03:13
california doesn't let people buy a home
01:03:14
for a first time who's going to pay
01:03:16
taxes here
01:03:18
where's the growth going to come from
01:03:19
this is going to be a motorcycle this is
01:03:20
a stall moment i think
01:03:22
just just you know then the other the
01:03:23
other really terrible thing about home
01:03:25
ownership is that
01:03:26
it is where the preponderance of wealth
01:03:28
creation for average
01:03:30
americans comes from and so when you
01:03:32
lock people out of home ownership you're
01:03:34
essentially ripping away
01:03:35
60 to 70 percent of how they're ever
01:03:37
going to make real wealth
01:03:39
and so yet again you exacerbate jason to
01:03:42
your point
01:03:43
the inequality that we have where a few
01:03:45
folks make all the money
01:03:47
and then everybody else they're kind of
01:03:49
shut up from the equity market
01:03:51
they're shut up from private investing
01:03:53
and then they're shut up from owning a
01:03:54
home
01:03:55
and no wonder people are pissed because
01:03:56
it's like you throw your hands in the
01:03:57
air you're literally creating a
01:03:59
revolution you pulled up three ladders
01:04:00
at once you can't invest
01:04:02
you can't tell me how i could tell me
01:04:04
how i can just earn some money so that i
01:04:05
can pay for my kids to go to college
01:04:07
take a vacation and have a nice life
01:04:08
whenever tell me how to do it then
01:04:10
yeah because look and nobody has a
01:04:12
summary government doesn't have a good
01:04:13
answer
01:04:14
you you're we're pulling up the ladder
01:04:15
of home ownership we've pulled up the
01:04:17
ladder with the credit innovation you
01:04:18
can't invest in private companies
01:04:20
we've made higher education far too
01:04:22
expensive we pulled up that ladder
01:04:24
i mean what's left for the average
01:04:26
citizen to to to grow their wealth
01:04:28
this is a crazy thing we pull up the
01:04:30
latter and then in response government
01:04:31
creates a program
01:04:33
to subsidize people and bail them out at
01:04:34
the end i mean it doesn't make any sense
01:04:36
i mean mike salana had mike selena had a
01:04:39
really funny tweet about
01:04:40
the the california uh program which was
01:04:42
it's amazing the lengths
01:04:44
to which people will go to avoid
01:04:46
building new housing
01:04:47
you know new supply it's like we
01:04:49
subsidize home buyers for this
01:04:51
artificial price increase we've caused
01:04:53
by limiting the supply this is like
01:04:54
eliminating people's uh student loans
01:04:56
just allow supply and demand yeah just
01:04:59
make more colleges and make them cheaper
01:05:01
what do you guys think about this whole
01:05:02
pro-public speaking of wealth inequality
01:05:04
this pro-publica league of tax records
01:05:06
somebody inside the irs or it was
01:05:08
hacked we don't know yeah this is
01:05:10
clearly a whole person got a hold of
01:05:11
basically 3 000
01:05:13
uh the tax records many going back many
01:05:16
years of 3 000 of the wealthiest
01:05:17
americans
01:05:18
and propublica has slowly started to
01:05:21
digest
01:05:22
and and issue um news reports about them
01:05:25
and it shows
01:05:26
that you know in some years guys like
01:05:28
bezos
01:05:29
paid no tax um whatsoever were able to
01:05:31
take huge deductions
01:05:33
you know at one point actually bezos in
01:05:34
the year where we made you know
01:05:36
kind of like billion dollars was able to
01:05:39
essentially
01:05:40
didn't uh claim he made nothing and then
01:05:43
made so little or made negative dollars
01:05:45
that he got a four thousand dollar tax
01:05:47
credit that's typically reserved for
01:05:48
people
01:05:49
you know people people who it was a tax
01:05:52
credit for your kids yeah
01:05:53
it's not meant for a billionaire
01:05:55
essentially but you know they
01:05:57
this was a lot i think the big story
01:05:59
here is the leak
01:06:00
more than uh capital gains how capital
01:06:04
gains works we all know how capital
01:06:05
gains work propublica has got an agenda
01:06:07
obviously this is a left-leaning uh
01:06:10
investigative journalism
01:06:11
uh funded by the left uh and donations
01:06:14
and uh they do a great job with
01:06:16
investigations but in this case
01:06:18
they're just telling everybody what we
01:06:19
already know which is if you have giant
01:06:21
holdings you can get a loan against them
01:06:23
whether it's you own a home and you can
01:06:25
get a mortgage against it or
01:06:26
equity line or if you own a bunch of
01:06:28
stock you can get a margin loan i mean
01:06:30
it's not really news i think this is
01:06:32
like stirring the pot and the big news
01:06:34
is
01:06:35
who who released this data and then you
01:06:36
know there are some countries
01:06:38
i believe sweden is one of them where
01:06:40
tax records are politically published
01:06:42
top level yeah they have to be published
01:06:44
and so i think the way the united states
01:06:46
is going is we're going to force people
01:06:47
to publish their tax records
01:06:48
and we're going to force some sort of
01:06:50
minimum uh for people with holdings
01:06:52
aka a wealth tax and i'm not saying i
01:06:54
agree with either of those
01:06:55
but i think that this is the way it's
01:06:57
going and somebody posted to our
01:06:59
i'd be in favor of seven thousand more
01:07:00
irs agents are coming online
01:07:02
i'd be in favor of publishing tax
01:07:04
returns i i have no i i i think that
01:07:06
that's a really good idea
01:07:07
that's the flax mostly no no no i think
01:07:10
it's a really smart thing to do
01:07:11
i think like you would see a lot less
01:07:13
shady behavior if you had to publish
01:07:14
this stuff
01:07:15
when you publish your tax return uh
01:07:17
chamath would you do a shirtless holding
01:07:18
up your tax return in a mirror and take
01:07:20
a selfie and then that's how you would
01:07:21
publish it or listening and sweat yeah
01:07:23
more like more like a one tier one tier
01:07:29
it should just be a picture of you with
01:07:31
a wheelbarrow of cash
01:07:32
just you dumping it into a fight i think
01:07:35
one thing i'll say is i think these
01:07:36
stories have highlighted
01:07:38
just an incredible um ability
01:07:42
to shift the narrative and create a
01:07:44
different kind of
01:07:45
dialogue around taxation because
01:07:48
as we all know the principle of taxation
01:07:50
in the united states
01:07:51
is that you are taxed on income and
01:07:54
income is a
01:07:55
recognized gain meaning when you sell an
01:07:57
asset for
01:07:58
cash or for some other asset or you do a
01:08:00
job or you do a job
01:08:02
and then you get paid you get that cash
01:08:04
that you can now go use to go buy
01:08:05
something or to
01:08:06
to do whatever you want to do with that
01:08:08
is the transaction moment
01:08:10
that you get taxed on and everyone's
01:08:12
saying well this guy's a billionaire he
01:08:13
has these billions of dollars he paid no
01:08:15
taxes
01:08:16
he didn't necessarily make billions of
01:08:18
dollars of income that year
01:08:20
his stock value may have gone up
01:08:22
billions of dollars but if we all taxed
01:08:23
each other
01:08:24
when our stock values went up each year
01:08:26
and we didn't get a rebate when our
01:08:28
stocks went down
01:08:29
people would feel pretty upset the
01:08:31
average american the average person
01:08:32
would probably feel pretty upset if they
01:08:33
got taxed every time
01:08:35
their stock portfolio went up and then
01:08:37
they didn't get to have a rebate when
01:08:38
their stock portfolio went down so the
01:08:39
principle of taxation is such that when
01:08:41
you
01:08:41
sell those shares and you ultimately
01:08:43
generate income that's when you get
01:08:45
taxed
01:08:46
but the narrative is very quickly
01:08:47
shifting where people are like oh this
01:08:49
guy's a billionaire
01:08:50
state stated you know he didn't pay the
01:08:53
taxes they don't say anything about how
01:08:54
much income he actually made and a lot
01:08:55
of these guys don't need income
01:08:57
because they have a dollar salary they
01:08:59
pay like you know well they effectively
01:09:00
have a credit card one way to think
01:09:02
about it is wealthy people have a credit
01:09:03
card as jamal pointed out
01:09:05
because they can buy everything on loan
01:09:06
they can buy everything they want on
01:09:08
credit
01:09:08
because down the road everyone knows you
01:09:10
guys have billions of dollars when
01:09:11
aren't they paying consumption taxes on
01:09:13
those so if they do take the billion
01:09:15
and you buy houses you're paying
01:09:16
consumption
01:09:18
more it's actually even more uh
01:09:20
perverted so
01:09:22
if you take a loan and then you use that
01:09:24
loan to actually
01:09:25
invest the united states tax law says
01:09:28
that all that interest you pay
01:09:30
is deductible as well and so the
01:09:32
arbitrage
01:09:33
that you find yourself in is if you're a
01:09:36
happy person
01:09:37
yeah it's like you have these assets you
01:09:39
go to a bank they'll
01:09:41
they'll lend it against because they
01:09:42
want you know what is the bank's job the
01:09:44
bank's job is to generate interest right
01:09:46
so
01:09:46
you know they want these big fish as
01:09:48
customers right and so
01:09:49
and then and then uh part of the tax
01:09:51
code is that it's tax deductible
01:09:53
and so it's one of these things that i
01:09:54
think structurally gets people
01:09:56
very confused about what's right or
01:09:58
wrong but it happens and it happens um
01:10:00
is there any common sense solution sex
01:10:02
well i was gonna say just keep in mind
01:10:03
that when somebody
01:10:04
lives on a credit card like one day that
01:10:06
credit card comes to you
01:10:08
and it's not a problem for bezos because
01:10:11
amazon's talk just keeps going up and up
01:10:12
and up but
01:10:13
you will occasionally hear about some
01:10:15
rich person going broke
01:10:17
and the reason is always that they took
01:10:19
on too much debt
01:10:20
and then their stock price went down and
01:10:22
all of a sudden they owe
01:10:24
more than the value of the collateral
01:10:25
and then they're just done and so
01:10:28
yeah exactly so you do take it for
01:10:29
granted when you live on margin you are
01:10:32
taking a big risk most people don't do
01:10:33
that
01:10:34
most people who have gains will
01:10:36
eventually cash out they'll do that by
01:10:38
selling their company or they'll sell a
01:10:40
piece of their stock they'll have a
01:10:41
stock selling plan
01:10:43
and then they pay tax exactly and i feel
01:10:46
so i feel like it's really unfair how i
01:10:48
look i don't want to say it's unfair
01:10:50
because people get really riled up when
01:10:51
rich people
01:10:52
aren't paying taxes but it's interesting
01:10:54
to me how the narrative
01:10:56
has been kind of very quickly reframed
01:10:59
without the specificity
01:11:00
of the income that was generated by
01:11:03
these individuals
01:11:04
and they're just saying look this person
01:11:06
has all this wealth they didn't pay any
01:11:07
taxes
01:11:08
without actually recognizing that this
01:11:09
person may have had an income generating
01:11:11
event earlier in their life which they
01:11:12
did pay taxes on
01:11:14
or they will have an income generating
01:11:15
event later in their life which they
01:11:16
will pay taxes on
01:11:18
um and so the the truth is a little bit
01:11:20
more nuanced than i think
01:11:21
you know the very quick kind of sound
01:11:23
body press stories kind of indicate
01:11:25
and it's um it's just really it's been
01:11:26
really interesting to watch how many
01:11:28
people get so riled up and frothy about
01:11:30
this moment
01:11:30
and i get that we all you know everyone
01:11:32
kind of dislikes wealthy people
01:11:34
um you know i certainly did when when
01:11:36
you know i was
01:11:37
i had no money and i felt like i was
01:11:38
getting screwed by this thing you
01:11:39
certainly did when we started this
01:11:40
podcast
01:11:44
but i think freeberg raises a great
01:11:46
point which is that
01:11:48
with bezos take for example and look by
01:11:49
the way maybe he should be paying
01:11:51
more tax in other ways but with respect
01:11:53
to his amazon stock
01:11:54
he built this machine called amazon
01:11:58
it's this machine that makes all of our
01:12:00
lives better
01:12:01
um for for the most part in terms of the
01:12:03
delivery of goods and services
01:12:05
you know you press a button somebody
01:12:06
shows up the next day so he builds this
01:12:08
incredible machine
01:12:09
he owns a piece of it he's merely
01:12:12
holding on to his ownership
01:12:14
in that machine but the way that the
01:12:16
public market is valuing
01:12:18
that machine keeps going up and up and
01:12:19
up but to freeburg's point
01:12:21
he hasn't recognized more income he
01:12:23
doesn't have more cash
01:12:25
in his bank account um and so should he
01:12:27
be paying
01:12:28
taxes here's the thing if you change the
01:12:31
hold on if you change the rule chamath
01:12:32
correct me if i'm wrong here
01:12:33
and you said you have to pay on the gain
01:12:36
then somebody who bought a house in 1980
01:12:38
and it appreciated
01:12:39
100x in california by the time they were
01:12:42
70 and they bought it in their 30s they
01:12:44
would get caught up in this wealth tax
01:12:46
or paying for it as they go
01:12:47
the appreciation this mechanism exists
01:12:50
now jason you said a key thing this
01:12:52
mechanism exists
01:12:53
at all parts of the tax code so
01:12:56
yes a billionaire can basically go to
01:12:58
jpmorgan or goldman sachs or morgan
01:13:00
stanley
01:13:01
you know get a margin loan on their
01:13:02
stock and live their life but individual
01:13:04
folks who are not billionaires can do
01:13:06
that via a heloc
01:13:07
on their home and a lot of people do
01:13:09
that as well they take home equity lines
01:13:11
of credit and they use that to forward
01:13:12
finance things as well
01:13:14
the difference is that because the
01:13:15
quantums are so much bigger
01:13:17
you have this ability for rich people to
01:13:19
accelerate their wealth creation in a
01:13:21
way that normal folks don't so i'll give
01:13:23
you another example so one example that
01:13:24
i just spoke about is you basically
01:13:26
take a loan instead of selling things
01:13:29
right
01:13:30
you use that to make investments all of
01:13:32
that interest is tax deductible
01:13:33
number one number two is even if you
01:13:36
don't need
01:13:37
to do that you can just take a loan
01:13:40
on a small percentage of your capital
01:13:43
reinvest that
01:13:45
again pay the interest and now you're
01:13:47
running implicitly
01:13:48
a little bit of leverage and just to
01:13:50
give you a sense of it
01:13:51
there's a really great study by um aqr i
01:13:54
think is the name of the hedge fund
01:13:56
and um they reverse engineered
01:14:00
uh buffett's returns and what they saw
01:14:02
was that buffett ran about 20 to 30
01:14:04
percent levered
01:14:05
his entire career and the way he did
01:14:08
that was
01:14:08
synthetically by the float of geico the
01:14:11
point i'm trying to make is even the
01:14:12
best investors in the world
01:14:14
prove that a small amount of margin and
01:14:17
leverage
01:14:18
is the key between being average and
01:14:20
being the best in the world
01:14:22
and if that if he needed that let's be
01:14:24
honest we all need that
01:14:26
and again we all can't have that it's
01:14:28
only available to a few
01:14:30
and so i'm not saying that the rules are
01:14:32
wrong but the rules do
01:14:34
stifle the ability to basically move up
01:14:36
and move down
01:14:37
that curve it's clear how often people
01:14:39
move down
01:14:40
people get stopped out they get margined
01:14:42
out happens all the time
01:14:44
it's very hard to see examples of people
01:14:46
moving up it's because it's harder and
01:14:48
harder
01:14:48
to get that first little bit of capital
01:14:50
that then you can go and run with yeah
01:14:52
and see i think the great
01:14:54
the great reconciliation is what we need
01:14:56
to work on as a society and if you look
01:14:57
at what the great reconciliation would
01:14:59
be
01:14:59
it's can i get a great education can i
01:15:01
get great health care and can i have a
01:15:03
nice home
01:15:03
and if you just said we're going to have
01:15:05
uh health care for everybody in the
01:15:07
united states
01:15:07
very easy to pay and if you just said
01:15:09
we're going to allow the building of
01:15:12
single-family homes two or three bedroom
01:15:14
homes
01:15:15
and you cannot stop them and any state
01:15:17
that tries to stop them is not going to
01:15:19
get whatever amount of federal funding
01:15:20
and then finally we said all trade
01:15:22
schools are free those are three very
01:15:24
simple things that's a great idea by the
01:15:26
way
01:15:26
this what a fabulous idea jason i love
01:15:29
it i
01:15:29
reconciled and charter schools and
01:15:32
charter schools and school choice for
01:15:33
everybody
01:15:34
yeah because that is the number one
01:15:36
thing to create equality of
01:15:38
opportunities
01:15:39
these are incredible ideas guys and safe
01:15:42
communities
01:15:43
because the number one thing kids need
01:15:45
is a great education and a safe
01:15:47
household and you cannot have that when
01:15:49
care
01:15:50
and health care you can't have that when
01:15:52
gun violence is exploding across the
01:15:54
country
01:15:55
our communities are no longer safe we
01:15:56
have to fix that problem all right
01:15:58
listen we're at 75 minutes do we want to
01:16:00
talk about toxic bitcoin
01:16:01
insanity in miami yeah what the hell is
01:16:03
going on over there what are these guys
01:16:05
doing all right so very simple
01:16:07
there was a bitcoin conference in miami
01:16:08
if you go to that conference you have to
01:16:10
agree to not mention other
01:16:11
cryptocurrencies
01:16:12
there is a we all have heard of bitcoin
01:16:15
maximalization
01:16:16
or being a bitcoin maximalist this means
01:16:18
you believe that bitcoin is the one true
01:16:21
cryptocurrency all other
01:16:22
cryptocurrencies do not exist
01:16:24
this conference has codified that to the
01:16:27
point at which people are jumping on
01:16:28
stage like maniacs
01:16:29
ripping off their clothes to reveal
01:16:32
dogecoin shirts
01:16:33
and then people are saying bitcoin
01:16:35
maximalism
01:16:36
now has evolved into bitcoin toxicity
01:16:39
which is a subset of the bitcoin
01:16:40
movement
01:16:41
what bitcoin toxicity says is in order
01:16:43
for bitcoin
01:16:44
to become the one true currency and the
01:16:47
reserve currency
01:16:48
we must attack anybody who attacks it in
01:16:51
other words cult-like behavior
01:16:52
either except muhammad jesus moses
01:16:56
whoever hindi hindu god zeus
01:16:59
for the greeks you have to accept our
01:17:01
god or else we're going to attack you so
01:17:04
if you can
01:17:04
actually see this in practice i tweeted
01:17:07
if a if bitcoin was replaced by
01:17:08
technology what would that look like
01:17:10
and you get massively ratioed on twitter
01:17:12
which means more comments than likes
01:17:14
i'll take i'll take the other side of
01:17:16
this if you want yeah go ahead
01:17:18
well so bitcoin toxicity is now a thing
01:17:20
and it's actually i believe
01:17:22
making the movement um toxic to people
01:17:25
and people are not going to want to
01:17:26
participate so it's actually collapsing
01:17:28
the project
01:17:29
people do not want to be involved in
01:17:30
toxicity and people think that there's
01:17:32
many
01:17:33
ways to win in crypto there are so the
01:17:34
crypto community because of the recent
01:17:36
loss of 50
01:17:38
i think now is in a debt spiral of
01:17:40
toxicity go
01:17:41
sex well i think this is a fake moral
01:17:44
panic on your part
01:17:46
um look if if toxicity means
01:17:49
that you think that all these
01:17:51
cryptocurrencies are a scam
01:17:53
then jason you are guilty of toxicity
01:17:55
too because you don't think
01:17:56
you're using
01:17:59
nobody has been on twitter more saying
01:18:01
that all these cryptocurrencies are a
01:18:02
scam
01:18:03
the only disagreement that you and the
01:18:05
bitcoin maximals have
01:18:06
is with respect to bitcoin but you both
01:18:08
agree both sides agree
01:18:10
that you and the maximums believe that
01:18:12
all these other cryptocurrencies
01:18:13
are this is a real technology there are
01:18:16
scammers in it
01:18:17
you've contributed you've contributed to
01:18:19
the toxicity by basically
01:18:21
absolutely not i don't know by
01:18:22
constantly denouncing every crypto
01:18:26
it's icos and scams i believe technology
01:18:28
it's a real technology
01:18:30
uh but anyway it's it's it's just gross
01:18:32
and i think it's i think that in general
01:18:33
if i had to summarize what i see
01:18:36
i i see like there's a vein of
01:18:39
young men basically who are super super
01:18:42
frustrated
01:18:43
and um in cells and well i don't know if
01:18:46
they're intel's or not but like you know
01:18:48
i think that they
01:18:49
they basically i think like
01:18:53
ran the race the way they were told they
01:18:56
checked all the boxes they went to the
01:18:57
schools they got the jobs they did the
01:18:59
thing they did that
01:19:01
and it's kind of not working and so
01:19:03
whenever they find a thing that's new
01:19:05
i think they find acceptance in the
01:19:06
community and then man do they get
01:19:09
really rigid about it and they
01:19:11
in some ways just stop thinking for
01:19:12
themselves and that's a shame
01:19:14
called the cult man can i quote
01:19:16
something we've all been raised on
01:19:17
television to believe that one day we'd
01:19:19
all be millionaires and movie gods and
01:19:20
rock stars but we won't
01:19:22
and we're slowly learning that fact and
01:19:24
we're very very pissed off
01:19:26
so that's fine of course it's fight club
01:19:29
that's a great quote it's so true so
01:19:31
true it's so true
01:19:32
that basically summarizes twitter i feel
01:19:35
like that summarizes
01:19:36
twitter it's instagram instagram made it
01:19:38
a hundred times worse you could see
01:19:39
everyday people suddenly becoming rich
01:19:41
and famous or at least the perception
01:19:43
and using filters to look better and
01:19:44
then everyone feels like they're being
01:19:46
left out or everyone feels like they
01:19:47
want something that they don't have
01:19:49
and then you're left in this constant
01:19:50
state of want and desire and this
01:19:51
constant state of unhappiness
01:19:53
so uh this isn't new by the way you know
01:19:56
these are buddhist principles
01:19:57
that daca this source of unhappiness is
01:20:00
really
01:20:00
um about desire and if you can let go of
01:20:03
and we
01:20:04
create more comparing yourself to others
01:20:06
yeah i think there's a
01:20:07
a different answer to to the fight club
01:20:09
nihilism
01:20:10
um than just sort of uh giving up all
01:20:12
desire i understand the sort of buddhist
01:20:15
approach i actually wrote in 1999 when i
01:20:18
joined paypal i wrote
01:20:19
an article called silicon valley's fight
01:20:22
clubs in which i basically said
01:20:23
that startups were the answer to this
01:20:26
sort of
01:20:27
you got remember fight club came out in
01:20:28
1999 and so you had this sort of
01:20:31
nihilism associated with this empty
01:20:33
materialism people wanted all these
01:20:35
materialistic things
01:20:36
but it didn't really make them happy but
01:20:38
i think that creating something great
01:20:40
and being part of creating something
01:20:42
great is the answer to this and it's
01:20:44
about
01:20:45
it's about creation it's about purpose
01:20:47
it's having meaning
01:20:49
mastery mastery and we are robbing
01:20:52
people of having that experience
01:20:54
when we do stuff like universal basic
01:20:56
income or or tell them they don't need
01:20:58
to work
01:20:58
you know we should be encouraging them
01:21:00
to have these great experiences
01:21:02
and this is why i kind of react to these
01:21:04
like apple snowflakes
01:21:05
who don't want to come into their
01:21:06
billion dollar spaceship campus it's
01:21:08
like
01:21:09
you know they're just punching a time
01:21:11
clock you know they're not really
01:21:12
getting any meaning out of their work
01:21:14
and that's the thing i sort of react to
01:21:16
that's so um
01:21:19
you'd rather than find another place
01:21:21
where they can actually find purpose and
01:21:23
mastery rather than be at apple be mad
01:21:25
right contribute control did the iphone
01:21:28
have been created
01:21:29
by a remote team it could let's be clear
01:21:32
the iphone would never have happened had
01:21:33
it not been for steve jobs
01:21:35
okay period you need to have the founder
01:21:38
yeah you need to know
01:21:39
you just needed to have him i mean he
01:21:40
could have been anybody but he him
01:21:42
if with him with a remote team could
01:21:44
they have made the iphone
01:21:46
i don't think so i don't know i mean i
01:21:48
think i think apple will probably be a
01:21:49
different company if steve we're still
01:21:51
here who knows which is why i think they
01:21:52
want people to come back
01:21:53
and i think what's happening here i mean
01:21:55
i hate to be super cynical is i think a
01:21:56
lot of people
01:21:57
left the bay area didn't tell apple
01:22:00
because you're supposed to tell them if
01:22:01
you relocate
01:22:02
and they're just trying to extend their
01:22:05
tenure at apple because
01:22:06
there is no way to come in three days a
01:22:07
week if you're living
01:22:09
you know in tahoe or further out i mean
01:22:11
what are you supposed to do get a hotel
01:22:12
for two nights a week
01:22:14
and then drive back to tahoe or phoenix
01:22:16
i mean these people have
01:22:17
left if steve were still around those
01:22:20
apple employees be racing back to the
01:22:22
office
01:22:22
because they'd be so excited about what
01:22:24
they're working on they'd be working on
01:22:26
new products
01:22:27
and if they didn't if they didn't have
01:22:28
that passion steve would have weeded
01:22:30
them out in two seconds
01:22:32
at the end of the day snowflake by the
01:22:34
way
01:22:35
you mentioned snowflake although you
01:22:36
said apple snowflakes but the founder of
01:22:38
snowflakes said
01:22:39
in a cnbc episode essentially
01:22:43
we care about diversity but we care
01:22:46
first and foremost about being a high
01:22:48
performing
01:22:48
organization i'm paraphrasing that
01:22:51
services
01:22:52
our customers and our shareholders and
01:22:54
so while diversity is important
01:22:56
we're going to fill a role with the best
01:22:58
person we can find and so now
01:23:00
the grand debate that has started is and
01:23:03
i think it's related to what happened at
01:23:05
coinbase and shopify with
01:23:06
you know no more political speech at
01:23:08
work is meritocracy
01:23:10
and uh can meritocracy live alongside
01:23:14
equity and equality and diversification
01:23:17
um
01:23:18
or diversity so diversity and
01:23:19
meritocracy in the same organization
01:23:21
which wins mike moritz wrote this um
01:23:23
pretty fabulous essay i think it was in
01:23:25
the financial times a couple of years
01:23:26
ago he got in a little bit of heat for
01:23:28
doing it
01:23:29
but essentially what he said was you
01:23:31
know while we are all
01:23:32
talking about the things that we think
01:23:34
are important there's an entire cadre of
01:23:36
engineer in china
01:23:37
that are coding 24 7. i think he
01:23:40
actually said like it's 996 exactly yeah
01:23:42
9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week and they
01:23:44
use the same tea bag three times
01:23:46
and he used that to illustrate he know
01:23:48
he used it to illustrate their
01:23:50
commitment to excellence and what he
01:23:51
used to see in silicon valley where
01:23:52
people
01:23:53
on the weekends the parking lots were
01:23:55
full keep going um
01:23:56
but i i just bring this up because it's
01:23:58
like
01:24:00
we've lost the ability to have both
01:24:02
things be true
01:24:03
meaning it's it's maybe like at the end
01:24:06
of the day frank slootman
01:24:08
is a representative and a spokesperson
01:24:11
for the values of a company that's a
01:24:13
hundred billion dollar company that came
01:24:15
out of nowhere
01:24:16
and built something fabulous for people
01:24:18
in a matter of a few years
01:24:20
i doubt that he speaks for himself only
01:24:24
no he specifically said in this comment
01:24:27
so if
01:24:27
he was speaking for other people who
01:24:29
were too scared to talk about it
01:24:31
okay but i'm saying he but i'm saying he
01:24:33
also he's but he's
01:24:34
i don't care about other companies he
01:24:35
speaks for snowflake
01:24:37
so to the extent he says that as the ceo
01:24:39
of snowflake
01:24:40
why can't we respect that an entire
01:24:42
company has decided to do something
01:24:45
for example you know the other opposite
01:24:47
end of this do you remember this bakery
01:24:49
i think it was in colorado that like
01:24:51
you know refused to make a cake yeah
01:24:53
refused to make a cake for a lesbian
01:24:55
couple it went all the way to the
01:24:56
supreme court and they said
01:24:58
that this guy had the right to deny
01:25:01
them making the cake to me it it makes
01:25:04
my blood boil
01:25:06
but at least i live in a country where
01:25:08
he has the right to have that opinion
01:25:10
and it's in within a legal boundary of
01:25:12
reasonableness i guess
01:25:13
now i learn from that and i say okay
01:25:15
that's a legal bound of reasonableness
01:25:18
and until that law is overturned that's
01:25:20
what it is this is so much less than
01:25:22
that and we can't
01:25:23
you know let this guy actually just go
01:25:25
about his day without issuing an apology
01:25:27
yeah he's not the american engineers
01:25:30
that are working 996 in china
01:25:32
eating our lunch every day yeah i mean
01:25:35
in america
01:25:37
you have to you have to give you another
01:25:39
example i'll give you another example
01:25:40
you have to
01:25:41
capitulate and agree to the diversity
01:25:44
uh jason let me give you let me give you
01:25:46
another example there is a massive
01:25:49
um play right now going on in the
01:25:51
uranium market
01:25:53
it was brought to my attention i was
01:25:55
like let me just go look at this i don't
01:25:56
know anything about this but i just was
01:25:57
curious about what's going on and
01:25:59
effectively what it is there is a fund
01:26:01
that was trying to basically corner
01:26:02
uranium and drive the price up
01:26:04
and the entire thing about uranium which
01:26:06
was interesting is okay what is it used
01:26:08
for it's used for nuclear reactors
01:26:10
well then you spend a little time
01:26:11
understanding nuclear reactors and
01:26:14
i was shocked to learn how clean
01:26:18
how safe yep how reliable how repeatable
01:26:22
i had all these stupid cobwebs in my
01:26:25
head
01:26:26
based on a random couple of press
01:26:28
releases three mile island
01:26:29
fukushima etc so when i cleared all of
01:26:32
that bias away and i learned about it
01:26:34
then i'm like why aren't nuclear
01:26:36
reactors everywhere
01:26:38
because it is the fastest way for us to
01:26:40
get to carbon neutral
01:26:42
and then i find out the same people who
01:26:44
want carbon neutral
01:26:46
i.e greenpeace is the one of the largest
01:26:49
advocates against nuclear and i thought
01:26:53
how do we not again be in a position to
01:26:56
actually hold two thoughts that are
01:26:57
slightly divergent at the same time
01:26:59
we want nuclear energy because it
01:27:02
actually supports something that's even
01:27:04
more important
01:27:05
to the sustainable ecosystem that
01:27:07
greenpeace is there to protect in the
01:27:08
first place
01:27:09
and you can't have it and to me i find
01:27:11
so i find all of this stuff
01:27:14
again ad nauseam in this list of while
01:27:16
we're all naval gazing on this
01:27:18
china's progress china is 996.
01:27:22
right we have to have four progress and
01:27:24
by the way uh slotman
01:27:25
he put out a release comments i made
01:27:27
during a media review of last week
01:27:29
may have led some to infer that i
01:27:30
believe that diversity and merit are
01:27:32
mutually exclusive
01:27:33
when it comes to recruitment hiring and
01:27:34
promotion i do not believe this and i
01:27:36
want to personally apologize to anyone
01:27:37
who may have been hurt
01:27:38
or offended by my comments so been added
01:27:41
said in a statement posted monday i've
01:27:43
accepted
01:27:44
personal responsibility for the lack of
01:27:46
clarity in my comments
01:27:47
i think slootman's apology actually only
01:27:50
buttresses the original point he was
01:27:52
making which is that ceos are afraid to
01:27:54
say what they really think
01:27:55
yes he came out he had the bravery
01:27:57
encouraged to say what he really thought
01:27:59
he then got piled on on twitter and now
01:28:01
he's apologizing for it and walking it
01:28:03
back it's really
01:28:04
kind of a shame to chamas point how can
01:28:07
we have honest conversations when people
01:28:08
are just afraid
01:28:09
to say what they think whether i agree
01:28:11
with frank slupin or not is not the
01:28:12
point the point is that
01:28:14
if his entire company and his employees
01:28:16
and his executive team
01:28:17
have made a specific decision that they
01:28:19
view
01:28:20
merit as you know incredibly important
01:28:24
and then they
01:28:24
they layer diversity in as a result who
01:28:28
am i to cherry pick those words
01:28:29
and all of a sudden i have a wording
01:28:31
issue with that because i don't even
01:28:32
understand the hiring criteria it's not
01:28:34
as if he published those stuff so it's
01:28:35
not
01:28:36
not like anybody on the outside had any
01:28:38
shred of ability to know the details
01:28:40
right
01:28:40
and and yeah i agree and here's my
01:28:43
problem with all the people who
01:28:44
attacked frank on twitter is
01:28:47
you know have any of those people said
01:28:49
one word about
01:28:51
school choice or charter schools the
01:28:53
need to
01:28:54
release the stranglehold that the
01:28:56
education unions have on our kids
01:28:58
they're running these schools
01:29:00
for the benefit of the unions not for
01:29:02
the benefit of the kids
01:29:03
they're abolishing advanced math and how
01:29:05
many of the people attacking frank
01:29:06
have said one word about that because if
01:29:08
we want to achieve
01:29:10
if we want to achieve a quality of
01:29:11
opportunity in our society we have to
01:29:13
fix the schools
01:29:14
and so it's so easy to attack frank but
01:29:17
they're unwilling
01:29:18
to say one word about school choice
01:29:21
because
01:29:22
the unions are a political ally and it's
01:29:23
inconvenient for them to do so
01:29:26
what about again going and actually
01:29:28
understanding
01:29:29
the cleanliness and safety of nuclear
01:29:31
and you know being able to tell folks on
01:29:33
the environmental left that actually
01:29:35
this is a path to sustainable energy and
01:29:38
a better ecology
01:29:40
and biodiversity in the shortest path
01:29:43
possible they just want to shut down the
01:29:44
conversation they don't want there to be
01:29:46
any real conversation or difficulty
01:29:47
we're shutting down to be really honest
01:29:49
with you
01:29:50
words and we're shutting down rather
01:29:52
superficial conversations and
01:29:54
nobody ends up addressing the root cause
01:29:56
issues of anything that's the shame
01:29:58
i just think that we are screaming at
01:30:01
each other about things that none of us
01:30:02
really understand
01:30:04
without taking the time to understand
01:30:05
each other meanwhile
01:30:07
china is 996. i just can't say which is
01:30:10
why we need to
01:30:11
now you agree chamath we have to win
01:30:13
space meanwhile
01:30:14
china is 996. they're 996 and they're
01:30:18
going to win
01:30:20
billion people that are born in a
01:30:22
collectivist system
01:30:24
against against holistically defined
01:30:26
goals
01:30:27
over a multi-decade period of time
01:30:30
they're the only by the way the going
01:30:32
back to where we started just to end
01:30:34
maybe the podcast
01:30:35
biotech is the last bastion where
01:30:37
america is
01:30:38
completely dominant right software too
01:30:41
not really there are incredible advances
01:30:44
that it's
01:30:44
it's been american biotechnological
01:30:47
ingenuity
01:30:48
through and through and the question
01:30:50
there is going to be
01:30:51
how do we make sure we wrap our arms
01:30:53
around this category
01:30:55
and continue to do great things because
01:30:57
in the absence of it and if we get
01:30:58
again if we lose the script some other
01:31:01
country is going to 996 that market from
01:31:03
us as well
01:31:05
yeah i think you know what you're
01:31:06
pointing out is we're in this
01:31:07
generational
01:31:08
competition sort of um sort of cold war
01:31:11
type conflict with with china
01:31:13
i think our foreign policy is starting
01:31:15
to realign around that you're seeing
01:31:17
both democrats republicans really get on
01:31:18
the same page
01:31:19
now about the the threat that china
01:31:21
represents but
01:31:23
our domestic policy is not realigned
01:31:24
around that if we really want to win
01:31:26
this cold war against china we have to
01:31:29
be competitive
01:31:30
and we keep doing things to our schools
01:31:33
our kids and other parts of our system
01:31:35
and our economy that are
01:31:36
anti-competitive
01:31:37
we need more freed works you know and if
01:31:39
you get rid of like advanced programs we
01:31:41
have no freedbergs
01:31:43
we need to clone freedberg freebart
01:31:44
what's the chances we could just clone
01:31:46
you
01:31:46
and have like a 2000 more freebergs to
01:31:49
solve this biotech problem
01:31:50
would you be open to that can we can we
01:31:52
start the clone wars with you do you
01:31:53
think you would get along with your
01:31:54
clone or would you want to destroy your
01:31:56
clone
01:31:56
destroyed that's that's mimetic i want
01:31:59
10 clones of myself are you kidding me
01:32:01
can you imagine the round table you know
01:32:03
renee girard wrote about this very
01:32:05
eloquently
01:32:06
many many decades ago this goes in one
01:32:08
place which is
01:32:10
you know it goes it goes into it goes
01:32:12
into uh capital merger
01:32:13
i want a clone army of myself would you
01:32:15
like to just sit down and play chess
01:32:17
with your clone all day
01:32:18
not chess but he'd like to do something
01:32:20
else oh no
01:32:21
oh no that's not an image i wanted oh no
01:32:26
you're gonna have a threesome with
01:32:28
yourself no nothing sexual no
01:32:30
no no no stop that's sort of what you
01:32:32
were saying i'd be cool with clones i'd
01:32:33
i'd create
01:32:34
wrestle with your own clone wrestling i
01:32:36
feel like there's all these different
01:32:38
things i want to do in my life that you
01:32:39
know different careers or whatever and i
01:32:41
could send one sacks out to different
01:32:42
lifestyles
01:32:43
one stack could be an architect and one
01:32:44
could be a director and one could
01:32:46
want to be a whatever one champ to be a
01:32:48
lawyer do you guys want to have your
01:32:49
mind blown for a second
01:32:50
yes please okay so there's a concept
01:32:54
a capability called induced pluripotent
01:32:57
stem cells where you can basically take
01:32:59
any cell in your body
01:33:01
and apply a bunch of chemicals to it and
01:33:02
effectively get that cell to convert
01:33:04
into a stem cell once it converts into
01:33:07
us and so the
01:33:08
the copy of the cell becomes a stem cell
01:33:10
and this was uh these guys yamanaka
01:33:11
factor they won the nobel prize for this
01:33:13
now you could take that stem cell and
01:33:16
turn it into an ova cell turn it into a
01:33:18
um effectively uh um an egg cell a fetus
01:33:23
and then you could induce that fetus to
01:33:25
start dividing based on a discovery that
01:33:26
was made recently which hasn't been done
01:33:28
in mammals yet
01:33:29
but effectively get it to start dividing
01:33:31
without being fertilized and grow up and
01:33:33
it would effectively grow
01:33:34
a clone so this has been done in plants
01:33:36
it has not been done in animals
01:33:37
so in theory in the next decade or two
01:33:40
we could take any
01:33:41
any hair cell from our own body convert
01:33:44
it into a stem cell this is totally
01:33:45
sci-fi by the way it's not proven
01:33:46
there's no
01:33:47
there's a bunch of there's a bunch of
01:33:48
discoveries that have been made research
01:33:49
that's been done that points to this
01:33:50
trajectory
01:33:51
that you could then take that stem cell
01:33:53
from take a cell from your body turn it
01:33:54
to a stem cell turn into an egg cell
01:33:56
induce it to start growing and turn it
01:33:59
into effectively equations i just want
01:34:00
to say
01:34:00
as you've been saying i've been shaking
01:34:03
my head jason has no reaction saks is
01:34:05
grinning from interior
01:34:08
i mean he cannot wait exactly sign me up
01:34:11
i'm gonna be like saddam hussein with
01:34:13
like
01:34:16
myself
01:34:22
i love you besties uh for the queen of
01:34:25
quinoa
01:34:26
rain man himself and the dictator i'm
01:34:29
jake al and this has been
01:34:31
a double episode of the all-in podcast
01:34:34
we'll see you all next time bye-bye
01:34:47
[Music]
01:34:58
besties
01:35:00
[Music]
01:35:22
we need to get
01:35:32
i'm going on
