00:00:00
guys my [ __ ] dog is in jail joker's in jail joker got in jail again okay so he's been jailed in italy he was jailed
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in palo alto when will that dog learn i've spent quality with my dog he's out of control why did he got jailed because
00:00:13
he's a runner he went to he's a runner he's a runner he's a track star he uh the the we he we send him to like a you
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know like the dog walker where he goes and runs around and they come pick him up but then they the guy opened the
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vendor anyways he gets found they they're trying to call me um
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because i guess my number is on the thing which i hadn't realized you don't pick up can't reach me well
00:00:39
i'm in dc in new york and uh they put them in the kennel and we get this picture and nick you can
00:00:44
post the picture but you know because i sent it to you poor poor joker and dog joe he's a great dog
00:00:50
but he is he's wait is he back did you get now he's back we got him back but he's bad he's out of jail again honestly he's only going to learn if he
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goes to jail you should get a little tag for him those little uh remote tracking that's not i mean it could scrape but it
00:01:01
doesn't stop him from escaping that dog there's something wrong with that dog remember when jax came over yeah
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was like growling i punched
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he's not been trained we have to trade him i mean i i i get it he hasn't betrayed but he's so cute did you train
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that dog to hate white people
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that dog is a little racist [Music]
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[Music] all right everybody welcome to another
00:01:51
episode of all in the podcast that you've been listening to for 48 episodes here we are
00:01:58
on the precipice of greatness 49 episodes in with us again today the queen of quinoa
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your science ambassador david friedberg also on the pod the rain man himself
00:02:11
definitely his dad lets him drive in the driveway david sacks and
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batting cleanup the dictator himself chamath paulie what did we all think of last week's pod
00:02:24
with biology i felt it got cut off too soon i was getting into a groove with biology and
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i'm trying to figure out how to pick that up with him because i thought that we were getting into some pretty interesting discussion towards the end and we
00:02:36
obviously ran out of time jamaat had to hop off so uh it would it would have been great to keep that conversation going apology
00:02:42
i really do think there's a big question mark on like how does the decent centralized web or decentralized social
00:02:49
networks in particular work with respect to kind of that you know recommendation application layer which
00:02:54
is effectively what search solved on the internet um and so i'm i'm curious to keep the conversation going and seeing
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you know what this means i made the decision to end the pod because chamoth had to go sax had to go there was a hard
00:03:06
stop and i was like i don't want to keep this going without the other besties and people were very
00:03:12
upset they thought i um shut it down abruptly but we had a certain amount of time and we can always have them back so everybody relax but i did look at the
00:03:19
stats we each came in with our you know whatever percent pro rata and he had double so he had 40 and we all had
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basically which is right for a guest i think i felt right didn't it feel right i think it's important to hear what when
00:03:30
folks come on what they have to say um he's a really smart guy
00:03:36
and you know you can kind of just let him go and riff for a while um and then just react to him so i think
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it's it's lovely to hear such a deep thinker think out loud quite honestly yeah and
00:03:48
even if you don't agree with him i don't agree with him on a lot of his points about you know decentralized everything i think centralized works for
00:03:55
you know many things better i'm curious sax you know looking back on it where there are moments that you felt
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maybe you disagreed with him more or agree with him more and wanted to lean into a conversation obviously it's very hard to have five people on a pod and
00:04:07
only get a certain amount of air time etc well look i think um i think biology
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is a great guest to have on once in a while i mean it does kind of turn the pod a little bit more into a ted talk
00:04:19
uh definitely have that vibe but the the fans liked it and i mean biology should have
00:04:25
his own show i mean he can go for a while i mean he's got a lot to say for hours yes and he has he has and and i
00:04:31
think he should do his own show because there's definitely a huge fan base for it and uh and if people want more
00:04:37
biology i interviewed him for about an hour on purple pills which is kind of the
00:04:42
the i don't know if you were called solo pod solo show that i do where i occasionally interview people on call download call
00:04:48
in and go check out purple pills uh so yeah you know i gave
00:04:54
biology a little pep talk coming in saying hey listen it's a round table discussion and i've interviewed you before and you can kind of tip into the
00:05:02
monologuing and explaining very big picture things so just try to pass the ball a little bit here
00:05:07
and i think he he did adjust his game a little bit but it's you know it's hard to have somebody like that on i think
00:05:13
you pointed it out zach said it's more like a ted talk for him we're having a conversation and he's used to being interviewed and i think that is a that's
00:05:20
a transition but you know um it was fine let's move on yeah okay so i think we'll
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start off with something we talked about on episode nine which was
00:05:30
coinbase's ceo brian armstrong wrote a very controversi very very controversial blog post uh exactly a year ago coinbase
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is a mission focused company at the time he was dealing with a never-ending
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debate inside his own company about black lives matter about social justice and any number of issues and he said
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listen the company is mission focused our mission is to you know make people more financially independent literate
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etc and we're going to ban any discussions on our electronic communications you can do things on your
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own time and it was quite controversial at the time we had a good discussion i re-listened to our discu i really
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listened to our discussion on that pod and we all universally felt like it was the right move well he went ahead
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and uh picked up the hornet's nest he did not have to talk about this ever again everybody had forgotten about it
00:06:21
and he grabbed the hornet's nest ran into the end zone and spiked it jason can you well before you do that can you
00:06:26
say how many people left as a result of his blog post and all do you know those stats because i think i don't have those
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there was a big article about it this was i think i think it was worth him doing a follow-up post this was the one
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year anniversary of his blog post and he was kind of giving us the status update and what he basically said is that the
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policy had worked um so you gotta so first of all should we just review what the policy was
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the policy was that they were gonna declare the workplace to be politically neutral that people
00:07:01
would leave their politics at the door they would not have sort of extraneous political conversations at work that
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doesn't mean you couldn't support whatever causes you wanted on your own time or tweet whatever you want on your own time but
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while you're at work they would declare it to be sort of a political dmz like a demilitarized zone basically all he was
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doing was reasserting the old center the old etiquette of hey when you go to work you you're not engaged in
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you're politically heated yeah you're paid to work you're not there to engage in political activism
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so that was the policy and of course uh the the the woke mob became completely hysterical about it uh as it turns and
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so then what happened is that brian offered everyone a very generous severance policy if they
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didn't want to stick around certainly policies yes extremely generous they made it really easy then generous right they made it really
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easy for people to check out if they want to check out well only five percent took the policy people yes and then on the heels of that
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there was a gigantic new york times hit piece against the company the usual disinformation and slanders um against
00:08:06
the company and then now we have this follow-up piece and i think what brian basically reported is that today coinbase is a
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more aligned company because everyone who's there wants to be there for the mission that's what they focus on when they go to work he talked about how they
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had hired top talent away from other companies i mean basically he put out the bat signal and people came running
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because you know we have they wanted neutrality they did not want it people are voting with their feet yeah they're
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fed up with the politics and distraction and and i think the employees were secretly relieved that he declared this
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policy basically he took the heat on himself for the larger benefit of all the employees who just wanted to be
00:08:44
there and work and not have to wonder whether they're doing something right or wrong because they're on the wrong side
00:08:50
of a political issue friedberg nailed it when he said uh in our episode 9 which you go back to freeburg you may not
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remember your comments but you said what about the employees who just want to come to work and don't want to engage
00:09:01
in political speech now you're infringing on them to force them to be participate in these discussions and they don't have a choice because they
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need to feed their families need to go to work and so freiburg i think you take a little victory lap there he says in this tweet storm i'll just read the
00:09:13
third part of it one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers since
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my post we've grown our head count about 110 doubled it while our diversity numbers
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have remained the same or even improved in some metrics so all of the hand ringing and pearl clutching that this
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would have a negative effect on the company has turned out to be wrong go ahead chamboth and then freeburn
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i mean if you want it's like i think it's important to set the context for what this is there is a
00:09:40
um a productivity war going on inside of um institutions around the world and what's
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happening is that people's personal beliefs are bumping up against what the mission and um
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goals operational goals of a company are or a university or all these other
00:10:00
places and so this is probably the first big example this is a what is a 50 60 billion dollar public company
00:10:06
um 50 billion dollar public company that basically said enough's enough this is our mission everybody else um
00:10:14
basically just needs to shut the [ __ ] up and i think that that's very important now if they then go off and actually
00:10:20
crush their goals that's the one missing piece in all of this because when that happens
00:10:25
then you can write a through line through all of this and say okay this is in part what allowed them to do it so i
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think that the the the folks that you know uh were really
00:10:37
up in arms still have uh one small straw in the fight which is that if these guys
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don't achieve their goals they'll point to this as one of the reasons why but
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diversity is strength or if you know like yeah you're suppressing free speech you know that argument
00:10:55
but i think if brian then goes and delivers a couple of knockout quarters and a couple of knockout years
00:11:01
then you know what he will be able to say definitively which no one can refute is we leave our politics at the door we
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define our okrs and then we go and we build things that people need as a company and then you go off and you
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can do whatever you want and i think that that's very powerful for uh many companies and institutions friedberg you
00:11:20
heard my recap of what you said last i'm not sure if you remembered or you re-listened what are your thoughts today i think it's um it's worth just noting
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less about the particularities of what was said and the particular issue at hand here and i i
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would look more to kind of brian's um leadership style as an excellent example
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of defining and creating strong culture culture in an organization
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can give that organization what it needs to succeed it puts everyone aligned in a specific way on how we make decisions
00:11:51
how we operate it doesn't matter what his particular beliefs and opinions were what to exclude what to include in the
00:11:56
dialogue and the discourse and the model for discourse within the organization i think what matters that he put
00:12:01
a line in the sand and he said this is what we're gonna do this is what's in and this is what's out
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and organizations that do that and do that effectively generally win they win more they do better the teams are
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aligned the teams are more unified and i think that definition may sometimes be controversial and you'll notice that as
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companies get bigger go public they're larger they bring in professional managers and the founders ceo steps out
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they generally don't do that right they generally try to not do that definitional work because they're trying
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to minimize loss and not kind of take the bet on maximizing long-term gain and doing the things that they think culturally define
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or will enable success long term so i i think it's a great example of leadership generally on how you kind of can um can
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be very vocal about defining a strong culture elon calls it i think elon calls it corporal speak
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what happens most companies when they get bigger they gravitate towards corporate speak and then what happens is some cohort of
00:12:57
employees who are really good just feel trapped in this kind of morass of mediocrity and by the way look at
00:13:04
elon's um you know call it attrition rate right by the typical large-scale public company
00:13:10
corporate metric of like how many people are leaving per year you'd say oh my gosh something's up with that organization but it really speaks to a
00:13:16
strong culture there's a company that's famous for this called bridgewater associates you know run by ray dalio 100 billion dollar hedge fund one of the
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best performing investment vehicles of all time and they have incredible culture i've talked about ray dalio's book principles before and some of the
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work he's done on this where he is so adamant about getting culture right within the organization how you operate
00:13:34
that they almost have i think a 30 attrition rate after the first year of people that come in because they not
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only try and screen for these elements of what they consider to be the right cultural fit for their organization up front but then they also screen people
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the heck out of the door if they're not a good fit and and i think elon has a similar sort of model and you know i
00:13:51
think brian the way he speaks about the organization is a similar model and it's about defining the lines it's about
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being very crystal clear about what's in and what's not whatever as a ceo and a founder whatever you believe you need to
00:14:04
believe in it strongly and you can communicate it clearly and then communicate it and then let people vote
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they vote with their feet they don't get to vote whether to change it they just get to vote whether they get to stay or
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whether they go and i think that that's a really smart i think that's well said yeah i think there's one other issue
00:14:19
here jake allen this goes back to your point about why did brian have to bring this back up was it unnecessary did he spike
00:14:25
the horn assess in the end zone here's why i think it was necessary if you go to point seven and eight of his tweets
00:14:31
storm he says it was the most positive reaction i've gotten from any change i've made in the history of the company
00:14:36
which is saying something how could something be so negative in the press that turned out to be incredibly incredibly positive with every
00:14:42
stakeholder 95 percent of of employees privately all the investors were telling him it was a great thing
00:14:48
and then what he says is the only sense i can make of it is there's a huge mismatch right now between people's stated and revealed preferences and
00:14:54
we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up so to me this is the point of this
00:15:01
tweetstorm i'm bringing up now is without people like brian standing up and saying
00:15:08
what the truth is that look everybody wants this they're just afraid to articulate the principle
00:15:14
uh we we keep um we keep encouraging this climate of fear and you know the
00:15:20
alternative to coinbase you know one of the other companies we've talked about is apple i mean you can basically choose to be
00:15:25
coinbase or apple what has apple done they booted out antonio garcia martinez because of a passage in his book that
00:15:32
they knew about and ever since then the company's been roiled by boycotts and petition writing from the employees
00:15:38
about some new calls every couple of weeks and eventually that'll show up in the operating results of the business it's just a matter of time right and so
00:15:45
so why why does that go on i mean i'm sure most employees at apple don't want to be
00:15:50
you know constantly roiled by these like petition campaigns uh but they have to put up with it
00:15:56
because everyone's so afraid to speak up and that's why it's important that what brian did we have to basically recognize
00:16:02
that this woke mob who's cowed everyone to silence is maybe five percent of these companies
00:16:08
and if everybody just acts like brian the problem will be over well we know we know what the trail of breadcrumbs is
00:16:14
right now and i think we should probably you know shine a light on it which is that that five percent is uh exactly the same
00:16:22
as donald trump they just exist on the left you know and there's a there's more and more research that shows that just
00:16:29
as much as we thought they were right authoritarians they're also left
00:16:34
authoritarians and this is what we're seeing that that the craziness that you know everybody decries on the right
00:16:40
actually also exists on the left and they just put a button on that before we pivot to the next story armstrong
00:16:46
was very clear that the mission is about global wealth inequality so staying focused on that
00:16:53
in his mind is the the high order a bit and will result in the most great change so paradoxically or ironically you know
00:17:00
all these woke people attacking coinbase coinbase might do more for wealth inequality and justice in the world if
00:17:07
they stay focused than if they try to tackle everything and you know this is a road to nowhere for apple i think saks
00:17:13
you pointed this out about how if you were running apple you would fire anybody who does the petition because i'll tell you where apple is about to to
00:17:22
basically land by enabling all of this woke mob inside their own company by
00:17:27
coddling them addressing them and not keeping them focused they will eventually get to
00:17:33
the fact that china is you know has three million uyghurs in a concentration camp and those uyghurs
00:17:40
are proven to be providing through slave labor equipment and
00:17:46
components to companies that eventually make their way to apple products ergo
00:17:51
apple supports slavery and that's what the employees will eventually get to and that will cause chaos but there's
00:17:57
something even closer more closer to home that that's probably true or could be true i don't know it is true um but
00:18:03
you know the fact that apple had the the most important security leak
00:18:09
in their entire software career just a few months ago is also quite important
00:18:15
like you had a because why is it so you had a zero so the ios 14.8 exists
00:18:22
because of why because a researcher or a set of researchers in toronto discovered that
00:18:27
there was a zero click exploit in ios that allowed you to basically turn on the microphone turn on the
00:18:34
camera you know grab anything you needed from iphones it was the most secure device until two months ago when it
00:18:41
turned out it was actually the most insecure device so i tend to think i tend to think those kinds of technical
00:18:46
mistakes happen when people take their eye off the ball and i think people take their eye off the ball because they're
00:18:53
demoralized with dealing with distractions sex yeah i mean
00:18:59
i think it's the whether it's the uyghurs or the security issue it's a good example of uh the employees at
00:19:05
apple see the spec in somebody else's eye but not the log in their own i mean that's that's the the principle
00:19:12
and um and they would be much better off focusing on dealing with their own internal issues um but but let's go can
00:19:18
we go back to that article that your mother referenced about the authoritarian anything you got anything else on this
00:19:23
issue do you want to before we we sag way over no i thought this is a really great article do you want to explain it jay cal yeah
00:19:29
i'll just give you a quick overview and then you can dive right in since you put on the docket psychiatrist and rother sally satell uh hopefully i'm
00:19:35
pronouncing that correct wrote an article for the atlantic entitled the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians on the left the main
00:19:41
point here is that trump's presidency sparked a ton of research and coverage of authoritarianism on the right but
00:19:47
mostly ignored the left with some researchers even suggesting that the left wing that wet left wing authoritarianism isn't real in an email
00:19:54
to satell a social psychologist from rucker said the following uh for 70 years the law the lore in the social
00:20:01
sciences has been that authoritarianism has been found exclusively on the political right why is that one reason
00:20:07
left-wing authoritarian authoritarianism barely showed up in social psychology research is that most academic experts
00:20:13
in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole sex well
00:20:20
actually chamoth put this on the docket so dude do you want to introduce what you liked about it the reason i saw this
00:20:26
and i thought it was so interesting was basically we had an entire body of research trying to understand why
00:20:33
some folks are attracted to these authoritarian figures like trump
00:20:39
and overwhelmingly all the research at the time said they only exist on the right and you know you and all of this
00:20:46
started after hitler and so there was all this research around the you know social and
00:20:52
attitudinal uh reactions to hitler and how he came to power and then all of the iterations of folks like him on the
00:20:58
right afterwards and so people put trump in that category and then they said it can only exist
00:21:04
there but as it turns out when this person did this research and she surveyed 7 000 people and all of this data was very
00:21:11
well summarized in this atlantic article which i'm sure we can post in the show notes that folks should read
00:21:17
lo and behold it actually exists on both sides so as it turns out the extreme right and the extreme left are exactly
00:21:24
the same they're moral absolutists they believe in themselves and themselves
00:21:29
only and they believe anybody else that outside of where they are is fundamentally in the wrong and if you
00:21:36
actually look at that and see how trump behaved in his presidency and now how you see how the
00:21:43
left names and shames you factually find a lot of commonality so the reason i found that article
00:21:49
interesting is that it actually says again what we've been saying which is coming down the middle and finding you
00:21:55
know reasonable compromise is the only way forward because this minute you start moving in either direction you are
00:22:02
the same and that person is an ugly person that we don't want around let me give the
00:22:07
money quote and then get your feedback freeberg the similarities in the study included quote similarities between
00:22:12
authoritarianism on both sides left and right preference for social uniformity check prejudice toward different group
00:22:19
different others willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior cognitive rigidity aggression and
00:22:26
punitiveness toward perceived enemies outsized concern for hierarchy and as
00:22:32
chamath pointed out moral absolutism uh freebird i think authoritarian figures resolve when
00:22:41
a population feels uh insecure so i mean we talked about this last pod
00:22:48
but i do think that you know the notion of freedom emerges after the comfort of security
00:22:55
has been provided and i think the absence of security drives people away from the drive towards freedom like when
00:23:02
you have a feeling of insecurity with respect to kind of your ability to get a job i mean
00:23:08
remember hitler rose to power when unemployment um you know post weimar republic was
00:23:15
skyrocketing people you know couldn't get jobs they couldn't afford food and the authoritarian figure was going
00:23:22
to provide the security needed i think to resolve the concerns that the population had and then you know people
00:23:28
latch on to that so you know there are moments in time when i think authoritarianism can emerge with
00:23:33
different forms of resolution it doesn't necessarily mean that the authoritarian actor needs to take a left or a right
00:23:40
point of view they're just going to give you a path to security when you're feeling insecure if you don't feel insecure you're going to say that's
00:23:45
ridiculous so countries that are wealthy countries that are privileged with the opportunities that
00:23:51
maybe the united states has are less likely and less inclined to fall in in you know in favor of authoritarian
00:23:58
leaders and then as we slip backwards economically unemployment wise etc we're
00:24:03
more likely to be uh to be in favor of of those sorts of actors um and so i think that you know
00:24:09
we'll see him but don't you think it's crazy that we actually uh didn't think it could exist in one end of the political spectrum and
00:24:15
now it does you have a point in that or no i never really understood the whole like hitler is purely a right-wing guy
00:24:21
like he was a you know a socialist and he was trying to enable like you know socialized services and socialized
00:24:27
systems for people you know in a lot of political circles that would be argued as being a very kind of left point of
00:24:33
view um and so i i don't know if it yeah let's go beyond let's go beyond hitler
00:24:39
you're right the the nazi party was a national socialist party that's what that's what the name of the party was
00:24:44
but there's also stalin pol pot mao i mean if you're paying attention to history you know that there's been
00:24:50
authoritarianism on the left not just the the right and so but
00:24:55
you know in the universities and in the media they only want to focus on the right-wing version of it and i think
00:25:01
what this study does is it up ends 70 years of dogma that that you
00:25:06
know authoritarian authoritarianism is only to be found on the political right i mean it's obviously can be found on the political
00:25:12
left as well and you can see that in cancel culture in speech restrictions in uh these um
00:25:20
very aggressive covet mandates that are now happening you can see it in the um
00:25:26
the sort of the um the ghoulishness anytime somebody in the right you know uh dies from kovid i mean there's
00:25:33
there's always some uh chortling on the part of the left about this um the harsh penalties for non-compliance
00:25:40
i mean right now rigidity is the one that stands out for me like there is just on the left they make a decision
00:25:47
amazon is bad and they cannot move off of that right david like what about what about willingness to wield group
00:25:53
authority to coerce behavior and what about aggression and punitiveness towards perceived energy cancer culture that would be connected
00:25:59
to me it begs a good question which is um what socialist
00:26:05
regimes have come to power without an authoritarian figure
00:26:11
has there just none they're all revolutionaries right actually the study has a really good
00:26:17
point about this which is they they say that um the researchers described what they called anti-hierarchical aggression
00:26:24
so one of the traits of authoritarianism is is they call it an outsized concern for a hierarchy
00:26:29
but you know leftists think that they don't believe in hierarchy but actually they do they believe in an
00:26:34
anti-hierarchical hierarchy which is they want to turn upside down the social hierarchy and they're willing to justify
00:26:41
the the ends justify the means in other words if you can turn the hierarchy upside down they'll let you do anything
00:26:47
and it's actually pretty scary that's where the sort of the revolution comes from here's a practical thing jkl about
00:26:53
what you said which illustrates this point even further right now we have a three and a half trillion dollar bill um
00:27:00
kind of meandering um through congress and you know it's very much a question mark about whether it gets past or not
00:27:06
and one of the elements that's in there is free community college
00:27:12
now when it passes if it passes there's a lot of support that that's
00:27:19
something that the government should do it's a good thing but if you're a private company like amazon who just announced that they will
00:27:25
give you free college they're still a bad company and and this is the example of this
00:27:31
intellectual rigidity that doesn't actually see the forest from the trees what do you really want do you want the
00:27:36
process where you control and you meter out progress or do you actually want the outcome where somebody
00:27:43
can get a job where they make 15 or 20 an hour and also now get college paid for yes
00:27:49
much better the latter yeah much better if the government didn't have to provide i'd love i'd love it if the government
00:27:54
could pay for it but i'm really glad that amazon is in a position to pay for it as well but if you start to become
00:27:59
absolutist and say well no it just needs to be top down and metered out this way and any private organization that wants
00:28:06
to try to do it is still bad i think that's where that rigidity holds us all back it's unnecessary here's where i see
00:28:12
the rigidity hm off is they keep saying gig workers are bad nobody should be allowed to be a gig worker and david had
00:28:18
a great interview with the ride-sharing guy on call-in and in which they talked about the fact and this is somebody who
00:28:24
is super pro advocate of drivers said listen 80 of people do not want to do
00:28:30
shift work they do not want the government dictating how they work and i talked anecdotally with an uber driver
00:28:36
said he's making like 70 bucks an hour during peak hours they were fighting to get minimum wage
00:28:43
for drivers now drivers are making twenty thirty forty fifty dollars an hour uber rides have gone and lift rides
00:28:51
massive competition free market works well and and they can't take the win they still are so rigid on the left that
00:28:58
they're demanding whatever that woman's name is who is you know in the pocket of the lorena gonzalez lorena gonzalez in
00:29:04
the pocket of the the unions how cynical are they the victory is upon them people are
00:29:11
getting paid five times more three times more than minimum wage and they still want to screw them the takeaway for a
00:29:16
lot of people should be that your spidey senses should go up when folks present solutions as a choice
00:29:24
of one source only ah you know one thing when things just cannot can only happen in
00:29:31
one way and it's the way that i feel the most comfortable yeah your spidey sensor should go up and you should think to
00:29:36
yourself really is that is that really the only way like can't we have choice can't we have different ways of
00:29:42
solving this can't maybe we can run an experiment and see what happens go ahead sex well i think your spidey sense
00:29:47
should also go up whenever somebody is basically saying that speech needs to be censored for some higher purpose you
00:29:54
know uh that that that whatever people are trying to abridge and take away
00:30:00
our rights and our sort of long-held values uh our freedoms you have to start
00:30:06
getting concerned and there's always a reason why they want to do it in the study the quote that the the left-wing
00:30:13
authoritarians agreed with was getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called
00:30:18
right to free speech so there's always some higher reason the means always justify the the answer always justify
00:30:24
the means um but but that's that's what you have to look out for is when they're taking away your right to speech another fun
00:30:30
proof point um fun because it's dave chappelle uh uh that you can listen to or watch to
00:30:36
see a flavor of this left-wing authoritarianism is called redemption song which is a little clip he put out
00:30:42
recently and the the entire clip is more about him getting his
00:30:47
body of work back from comedy central but the part in the beginning talks about
00:30:52
um folks on the left that really tried to dunk on him when he got coveted
00:30:58
and you should just listen to his reaction and how he frames it because i think it's pretty powerful and again it
00:31:03
explains that extremism on both sides they actually end up looking the same yeah aggression and punitiveness towards
00:31:10
perceived enemies and i think that applies to anyone who anyone who defies it that whatever the
00:31:16
conventional wisdom is on kovit there's another another example in the study of uh that that the people who the
00:31:23
left-wing authoritarians agreed with the statement i cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative so you know you've got
00:31:30
these social groups that are completely uniform and by the way there's been like studies for a long time showing that
00:31:36
uh liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to be upset if their son or daughter were to marry someone of the
00:31:41
opposite party so this has been this has been turned up in polls for a while but this and you've seen it on universities
00:31:48
and college campuses right but there's this idea that you know anybody of the other uh political side is just suspect
00:31:55
you know morally suspect needs to be shunned uh needs to be expelled um like those are the people you have to
00:32:01
be concerned about yeah you can't be friends i can't be friends with you sacks because you voted for trump it's just ridiculous people
00:32:08
have this no but it's i think it's the derangement to give the other
00:32:14
side of this i think trump was so extreme and so trolling and so great i mean if you think about his
00:32:19
super power it was to troll the left and put them into such a deranged mindset that they did actually become that which
00:32:27
they hated most right but he he did he did troll the left but but here's but here's the thing
00:32:32
is that we only hear uh in the media about the authoritarianism
00:32:37
of the trump administration how many times were they screaming fascism during the trump years and
00:32:43
and now today and of course you know if you go to msnbc it's it's january 6 all day all the time that's all they want to
00:32:50
talk about but you there's a total blind spot with respect to the authoritarian tendencies of the left which we see
00:32:56
right now in covit policy i mean it is getting so extreme right now and i mean freeburg you posted uh the breaking news
00:33:03
that just announced via press conference gavin newsom is now implementing mandated coveted vaccines for all public
00:33:10
k through 12 schools in california starting this fall wait wait these students
00:33:16
yeah all all eligible kids in all in all public schools in all public schools in order to go to school in california you
00:33:22
have to have a vaccine i mean kindergarten kindergarten well i mean they're not eligible yeah if
00:33:28
it's when they're eligible yeah they're they're they're going to be eligible very soon i mean look i i i so so we have a 13
00:33:37
year old an 11 year old and a 5 year old the 13 year old got vaccinated she wanted to we supported it the 11 year
00:33:43
old wasn't eligible she didn't get a vaccine she got coveted for me it was a mild case and our five-year-old isn't
00:33:48
eligible for the vaccine he never got coveted now if if and when a new vaccine comes out
00:33:54
that our five-year-old is eligible i don't think he needs it i mean i'm not anti-vaxx i mean i'm glad i got the
00:34:00
vaccine i'm glad you know is he going to school my thirteen-year-old got the vaccine yeah i guess the question is do
00:34:05
you if it is safe do you want them going to school catching it spreading it and you want them to not have to wear a mask
00:34:11
how can you say conclusively what's safe for a five or six year old at this point it's a little hard their
00:34:18
bodies are developing and yeah you need some time i mean do we really need to mandate this i mean why why can't parents make up their own decision
00:34:24
because of other people in society who would be impacted i mean you also see this you know look i think i think
00:34:30
vaccines maybe are complicated debate because vaccines do actually provide protection let's talk about these mass
00:34:35
mandates which i supported at the beginning of the pandemic because it's all we had to fight it but you take an
00:34:40
example like san francisco still has these stringent mass mandates the mayor london breed was caught out at um
00:34:47
dancing singing screaming but in fairness to her it was tony tony tony yeah i mean that's when she stopped her
00:34:53
defense she was like she was basically like it's tony tony tony guys what do you want me to do here i'll risk the covenant which is
00:35:06
i mean what do you want to do what do you want her to do what do you think about let me ask this question what she said when she got caught was actually
00:35:12
correct which is we should be out supporting restaurants we should be out supporting nightlife adults should be able to make their own decision about
00:35:19
the risks they're willing to take the problem is she's not willing to give the rest of us that choice right and we can
00:35:24
all make our own choice and by the way look the idea that the cove is not to get you
00:35:30
where you know once you take off your mask when you get to the table you know we've talked about this right
00:35:36
yeah you wear the mask and the mater d stand to the table then you take it off to eat and drink and the cove is somehow
00:35:41
not going to get in she was saying she was like i listen they were like you weren't eating we
00:35:47
have you on video you weren't drinking she's like it's unrealistic for an adult to put the mask on and off in between
00:35:52
sips and bites and i was on a flight and i was flying coach as opposed to business class recently and when i was
00:35:58
in business class i was eating and drinking there was no entire foreign language so far you're speaking what are
00:36:04
you saying anyway most people pay for a plane ticket and then they get on an airplane
00:36:11
so but the interesting thing was when i was in business class i was eating my meal i was drinking no issues i had the
00:36:17
mask off for whatever 20 minutes i was eating and drinking when i was in coach same situation the flight attendant was
00:36:23
going up and down the aisle and while people were eating and drinking if she didn't have the mascot she was kind of being like uh a whole monitor saying
00:36:30
please put your mask on in between bites and i was like okay
00:36:35
yeah and when we supported this mass mandate way at the beginning of the vaccine we all thought the government's going to distribute n99 or at least n95
00:36:42
high quality 3m mass right you never got those i mean we never got those testing kits i know and people people are like
00:36:49
walking around wearing these cloth mat these loose-fitting cloth masks it's ridiculous it's like the covet goes
00:36:55
you know through the bottom over the top through the site you go right through it i mean like it doesn't do anything and
00:37:00
yeah you're the lone ranger yeah how's that work i mean i look if you wear a high quality like you know ppe type mask
00:37:08
i think it might be helpful but you know it's a marginal benefit once we have vaccines oh by the way just as we end
00:37:14
this what do we think of um andrew wiggins well you can't comment on
00:37:20
this maybe because you're an owner on the team but a number of nba players uh high profile
00:37:26
ones in fact in new york and california where you're not allowed in the arena if you're not vaccinated are now deciding
00:37:32
to sit out their home games so kyrie irving being the highest profile one
00:37:38
is refusing to get the vaccine and he will be getting paid he's got a
00:37:43
200 million dollar contract max player i think he gets 40 50 million a year um he's gonna give up half of his salary
00:37:50
to not 20 million a year to not get the vaccine at least and leave his team to not play with him in home games
00:37:57
what are our thoughts on mandating nba players who are playing inside an arena
00:38:03
to be vaccinated do you see draymond's interview i did what did what did they have to say
00:38:08
about this he said he said he's so [ __ ] strong isn't he yeah he was like this is ridiculous that we don't like respect
00:38:15
each other's like we've made this so political and it's all like antagonistic as opposed to he went meta recognizing
00:38:21
that there are differences and people have differences of opinion and respecting them and embracing each other for those differences rather than like
00:38:28
attacking each other and finding fault in each other and forcing them yeah and it's a great point but um
00:38:34
i don't know i mean i don't think that this point is any different than the point about you know mandating a vaccine for anything any workplace any school i
00:38:42
mean if you're going to mandate if you're going to mandate vaccines for workplaces and mandate vaccines for schools
00:38:47
you know the mba is going to you know not be kind of excluded here it's what it is
00:38:52
right just happens to be a bigger paycheck and a higher profile stage i think as a matter of policy the the right policy is to let private employers
00:38:59
decide whether they're going to require vaccination or not i think i think private organizations have the right to
00:39:05
do that if you know if a restaurant tour wants to say that we are going to be an all vacs restaurant you want to
00:39:11
you know they're only going to take clientele who are vax that should be their right to do it if another restaurant says we don't care people can
00:39:17
go to that restaurant if they want you know i think that the free market can sort of sort this out i don't know
00:39:22
that we need the government imposing it if the mba decides this is what they want to do they can't it has decided
00:39:28
well i mean what i wonder about is how necessary it is um i mean given the fact
00:39:33
that you know all the players are young and healthy um and if they want the vaccine they can
00:39:38
get the vaccine look i'm really glad i got it you know i think it but but i just you know if it given that
00:39:46
everybody is vaccinated now who wants it i just you know what is the point of forcing
00:39:51
that last 10 of holdouts to do something they don't want to do i mean this is where i think
00:39:57
the authoritarian i would resist the authoritarian impulse freedberg is there a new pill that's coming out uh i saw a
00:40:04
story today about this i don't know where to cover that i'll go to unicorns first uh merck published some results uh on
00:40:11
this uh basically um antiviral pill it effectively
00:40:16
uh inhibits rna replication uh in viruses and it's kind of uh it was
00:40:22
designed to be kind of broadly applicable it was you know discovered at emory university years ago
00:40:28
and they were testing it for influenza and then even priests pre-covered they were testing it on other kind of
00:40:33
coronaviruses asars and mers and so the the data that they just
00:40:39
published shows that there's a 50 percent reduction in hospitalizations 50 percent uh in hospitalizations for uh
00:40:47
for people that are the test positive for a sars cov2 infection and then they
00:40:53
start the pill within some number of hours you take a few of these pills i think they said five days right yeah within five i think well they did the
00:40:59
test on like uh it was effectively yeah four or five days that's right um and you end up reducing the number the
00:41:05
percentage of people that end up in the hospital by 50 now you know uh so the idea is that for
00:41:11
countries that don't have access to vaccines you can very cheaply make this chemistry it's a cheap molecule that you
00:41:18
could theoretically produce at scale and you could ship it all over the world and countries that don't have you know
00:41:24
broad scale vaccination programs they can make these pills available quickly and cheaply and then you know as people
00:41:29
get uh infected with stars kobe 2 they just pick up this pill you know put it in every pharmacy go grab a couple
00:41:34
and then the hospitalization rate goes down we don't yet know if it reduces the transmission rate so there's a lot of
00:41:41
question marks on like does this actually solve the problem of the pandemic it's certainly another instrument to blunt the uh you know the
00:41:48
impact pronounce the name of it it's malnourished
00:41:54
the government um by the way there wasn't a lot of people in the study no one that took the pill died people that
00:42:00
didn't take the pill did die uh in the in the infection in the infected population because they split them right
00:42:06
they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill the people that had the placebo there were deaths no one in the group that had the pill um the actual
00:42:13
pill died and so um you know so so theoretically we don't yet have enough data to know but there's also a big
00:42:19
question on the side effects typically these uh anti uh uh viral the rna kind of um
00:42:25
blocking drugs have other side effects they're usually pretty mild but um you know so
00:42:31
so there'll be a little bit more studying but generally people view this as a super big positive it's another instrument i'm gonna make a i'm gonna
00:42:37
make a prediction here we go i think that the combination of vaccines
00:42:43
and what is equivalently tamiflu for covid which is effectively what this is
00:42:49
is the one two punch we need so that this basically is rendered um
00:42:54
you're missing the three you're missing a key piece there the testing you must have testing to know that you have to take this uh but i i think that that's a
00:43:01
i think like the testing is it's not efficient but solutions exist my point is if you have a combination of all
00:43:07
these things this is like a flu which means that there'll be less ability for folks to not show up to work which means
00:43:13
that most of the economy will get back going and i think then we can get back
00:43:19
to really addressing what are all that 10 or 12 trillion dollars how does it show up in the economy that's where the
00:43:25
inflation comes from that's for all this other stuff so uh i'm i'm pretty excited by what i read today but now my mindset
00:43:32
is going to 18 months from now midterm inflation i think that's going to be
00:43:37
what it's all about we ordered 1.7 million courses of this i'll call it's a
00:43:42
we can just call basically this is the equivalent of a z pack so called as the mpac um if this uh hits i've taken
00:43:49
probably 1.7 million z packs a million that's just on the way back from vegas hey
00:43:54
um so i mean this feels like the end game and they are going for emergency use so let's
00:44:00
keep our fingers crossed this would mean the stock market's going to rip jamuth i know i think the stock market um is in
00:44:07
a little bit of precarious position because if you have to if you have to reposition yourself for inflation there's a lot of tech
00:44:14
stocks that will get just absolutely obliterated like well when when you when you when you
00:44:20
have inflation so the the order of operations inflation means prices go up
00:44:26
the the government sees prices going up and they say how do we control that they raise interest rates so that the cost of
00:44:31
borrowing goes up so that then less money is being spent right so that we become a little bit more restrained
00:44:37
when you do that then all of a sudden people have to think about how much money you're going to make in the future because if you're
00:44:43
not investing as much in the future you won't make as much in the future and when you discount all those dollars back there's less of them
00:44:49
and so all of a sudden you start to think about oh my gosh well i want dollars today not dollars 10 years from
00:44:54
now that really puts a lot of pressure on tech stocks because we trade
00:45:01
on multi-year valuations in the future so inflation is very bad for technology stocks inflation tends to be good for
00:45:07
companies that make money today why because if i get a dollar today i can put it in this in the you know bond
00:45:13
markets or i put it into a savings account and i can get more interest than i would have otherwise
00:45:19
and then separately you also want to own things that are physical and real because those have more value so all of
00:45:24
that has to then get worked out into the economy and we have to make a bunch of economic decisions
00:45:30
so we so now the solution for that in all of those cases though is still if you're a hyper growth company you'll be
00:45:35
okay so if you're growing more than 50 60 a year you're fine but if you're growing 20 or 30 and you're kind of a
00:45:41
middling business and rates are going up and inflation is going up you're in a very very very
00:45:47
precarious spot and um saks what do you think okay well there was there was a great
00:45:53
article in the wall street journal over the past week called university endowments billions in the golden era venture
00:45:59
capitals basically talking about i mean these these university endowments are like gaining 50 year-over-year there's
00:46:04
been like nothing like it before there's so many unicorns being created there's and if you there's a separate article in
00:46:10
i think pitch book as well about the rate of unicor or crunch base yeah that the rate of unicorn creation i think
00:46:16
last year it was like one every few days now it's it's more than one a day bonkers and so you know we're getting
00:46:23
multiple unicorns now created every day this year it's just this golden era of vc this engine of wealth and prosperity
00:46:30
creation so that's the good news and and to connect this to a point we were talking about earlier
00:46:36
if the the radicals on the left would just allow the golden goose to keep laying golden eggs we're going to have
00:46:43
enough wealth and prosperity to pay for all these progressive programs in the long run
00:46:49
but they're not willing to wait and so you have in washington for example i think
00:46:54
a political program that really could upset the apple card i mean you're talking about a three and a half trillion
00:47:00
dollar reconciliation bill it'll probably get brought down to somewhere between one and a half and two then you
00:47:05
got a 1.2 bill trillion dollar infrastructure bill they've already spent one point nine trillion on a
00:47:11
coveted relief bill this is after the six trillion what would you like would you advise it should be the amount spent
00:47:16
well okay good question so last year the federal government generated record tax receipts the most
00:47:24
revenue it's ever raised and it was about 19 and a half percent of gdp when
00:47:29
bill clinton left office he bro boasted about the fact that government
00:47:34
spending was only 18 and a half percent of gdp last year it was about 30 percent
00:47:39
of gdp my theory on this is that if you have uh government spending as a you know
00:47:46
share of the economy at around 20 percent from a tax and spending standpoint things basically
00:47:53
work okay but as you try to go up to 25 and 30 it starts to break you have too much deficits and debt too much money
00:48:00
printing too much taxation too much inflation you become more brittle and you start to you basically are you know
00:48:07
unhealthy you're killing the golden goose and so you know all we have to do is let the
00:48:13
economy keep ripping 20 of it is gonna is going to be government share
00:48:18
and you'll be able to fund more and more progressive programs over time as society gets richer and by the way this
00:48:25
this um prosperity that's being created in the tech ecosystem it's available to
00:48:31
everybody who has a good idea i mean this is not so so as we all know so it's not just government that's creating
00:48:37
advancement and uh economic opportunity for disadvantaged people the tech economy's creating it as well and what i
00:48:43
worry about is is why are we taking so much risk in upending this whole system
00:48:49
that is working quite well well the other thing is this is all in the face of there being 11 million open jobs
00:48:55
there's 1.4 jobs for everybody who's unemployed so the idea that in some ways
00:49:00
society is broken and people can't be employed now these might not be there's a greatest job there's only four million
00:49:06
there's only four million people looking for work there's 11 million outstanding jobs yeah i mean it is bonkers friedberg
00:49:12
do you think this is sustainable what are your thoughts on spending and turning over the apple cart as sax is
00:49:18
saying the longer you guys have me on this podcast the more likely it is you guys
00:49:23
are gonna unmask me as a die-hard libertarian um i will not let my tendencies um you know come out in full
00:49:30
force uh the spending is ridiculous and there's a lot of waste so i mean i'll just leave it at that what i think is interesting
00:49:36
though is this unicorn creation system uh this unicorn creation machine
00:49:42
you know it's worth highlighting because i think that that crunch based article showed that these unicorns in aggregate were worth like
00:49:48
what one and a half trillion dollars or something um and those so those are all private companies three point four trillion dollars
00:49:56
so is that the amount of both bills 3.4 trillion is the total market cap of
00:50:02
all the private unicorns not just in the us but the world and right now in washington they're talking about three
00:50:07
and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill same size can you imagine governments spending
00:50:12
basically the entire value of the tech ecosystem in one year it's bonkers right and so this but by the way i mean like i
00:50:19
think that that 3.5 trillion you can kind of think about that as being the future economy of the future of global
00:50:25
economy right so the entire uh i just pulled up the latest uh quarterly stat but the entire
00:50:31
uh market cap of public u.s companies uh today stands at 47 trillion dollars the
00:50:37
top 500 or about 38 trillion dollars so you know these private companies that are kind of the emerging tech companies
00:50:43
are you know call it ten percent or you know eight percent uh of uh today all
00:50:49
public pub today of all public companies today and you know it used to be the technology company started in silicon
00:50:56
valley sold technology to traditional industries what's happening in silicon valley today and over the last 10 years
00:51:03
or so is that technology quote unquote companies are becoming the next industrial companies they are replacing
00:51:10
profound incidents and so this is like what we saw you know airbnb is a hotel chain without hotels
00:51:17
uber is you know a transportation company without vehicles doordash but
00:51:22
even more importantly there's an entire emergent class of life sciences companies of novel hardware companies
00:51:28
and these businesses are leveraging their core technology competence to create an advantage in replacing an old
00:51:36
model of doing industry they're not selling it to the old school company and so i think that the you know and people are freaking out about you know some of
00:51:42
these big investors like tiger global coming in and writing crazy checks if you take an index of the three and a
00:51:48
half trillion dollars today and said you know what these guys today are gonna be worth more than the 46 trillion dollar
00:51:56
market cap of all the other public companies that's it today in the next 20 or 30 years that's a pretty good way to
00:52:01
kind of place your money over a 30-year horizon i'm going to go ahead and put as much money as i can into the index of
00:52:07
the private companies and expect that they're going to be worth more than 46 trillion in 30 years i'm going to make a 10 bagger that's a retirement fund for
00:52:13
my family and so it makes a ton of sense i think that these um you know these unicorns given the advantages that are
00:52:20
inv you know kind of uh evolving from software and like sciences and so on do end up kind of playing out uh it's going
00:52:26
to be ugly and that when what will happen is you'll end up seeing the asymmetry you'll see the like oh my gosh there's something that's a thousand x
00:52:31
you know 100x return it'll become a 100 billion dollar public company or two billion dollar public company and then there'll be a bunch of them they're
00:52:36
going to die um and people are going to focus on the depths and say this was overhyped the bubble is over but the reality is the index of companies today
00:52:43
i would be willing to bet 20 to 30 years from now it's worth more than the 46 trillion dollar of all the public companies today so chamath one of the
00:52:50
things we're seeing here and you're playing a small part in it or a large part depending on who you talk to
00:52:56
we now have over 6 000 publicly traded companies on u.s exchange no we have less than four thousand we have about
00:53:01
thirty eight hundred okay uh no we had thirty six hundred in 2016 according to the research i have
00:53:07
here according to mortgage watch six thousand public trading companies and u.s exchanges so they could be counting the pink sheets and over the counters
00:53:14
which is we're seeing dramatically more publicly traded companies
00:53:19
many speculative ones or ones where you're getting to buy in in year four five or six obviously you're part of
00:53:24
that with uh you know all the different ipo as through what are you up to now
00:53:29
what's the yeah we have six tech specs we have four biotech packs you know i mean i've started or invested in a bunch
00:53:36
of others that have gone public um so let's look at this through the lens of the the public markets as well
00:53:42
my mac review is exactly what friedberg said we are much better off with as many technology companies being birthed and
00:53:49
being viable because over the long arc of time those companies will rebuild things that are
00:53:55
today inefficient and broken in a better way and the world becomes better
00:54:02
the question is for a lot of people well what if the wealth isn't better because it's only you know a
00:54:08
fraction of the number of people with a very specific skill set that then the other people don't have that i think is
00:54:13
a valid argument but then there's a different way to attack this problem which is you could actually do something
00:54:19
really meaningful around corporate interest rates and corporate tax policy that would then get
00:54:24
it right so like even if those those thousand companies if you assume
00:54:29
that that 3.4 trillion dollars 10 x's that's 34 trillion of eventual market cap right that's going to be supported
00:54:35
by trillions of dollars of earnings but maybe those things only have a million or two million employees but there's
00:54:41
eight billion eight you know odd people in the world well the way you get the money into the government's coffers so
00:54:46
that they can reallocate it to everybody that doesn't work at those thousand companies is through sensible tax policy that goes
00:54:52
after the companies because those companies will still do the job right it's not like you're going
00:54:58
to choose to not work at a you know world-beating startup in a mission that you care about because
00:55:03
of the corporate tax rate nobody's going to do that right so i think this is where like if you if you if you actually
00:55:10
um take a step back and think of the bigger picture the answer is right in front of us we just choose not to listen this is
00:55:16
why you know again what trump did was kind of stupid you know he focused on corporate tax policy
00:55:21
cutting it unnecessarily and now what we're doing is we're fighting over tax policy and part of the
00:55:26
reason why this bill isn't going to get passed is because of corporate tax policy and trying to raise it again
00:55:32
but really what we should do is actually raise it leave personal rates roughly where they are you know elon even said
00:55:38
when when asked by kara swisher this week he's like i paid 53 taxes what about you
00:55:43
yeah and it's going to 57 and you know it's 53 57 61 who cares sure whatever
00:55:49
that's all and he has to the point he made was listen the pro public article was
00:55:55
really disingenuous they said he got a tax refund and they didn't they never explained well that's because he overpaid his
00:56:02
taxes massively the year before so they're selectively pulling information and the fact is he
00:56:08
said i will be the first money into spacex and tesla i'll be the last money out that is something we want
00:56:14
uh more founders to do which is never sell their shares and be have more skin in the game sorry i i'm sorry i disagree
00:56:21
with that i think that's a that's a bunch of [ __ ] malarkey why
00:56:26
if you choose to not sell so be it okay but look at the good that bill gates has
00:56:31
done by selling down microsoft so i mean yeah shouldn't exist the bill
00:56:37
gates foundation shouldn't exist no no no the reproductive protection it had to be paid some he did that when he hits
00:56:43
his 60 years old i'm sure no you know no he started to do it when he was 40 years old jason and he wanted anyone sold
00:56:50
paypal and he was able to use that money to reinvest in tesla i think elon's putting all the money
00:56:56
back into two companies that are solving two major issues he wouldn't have been able to do that if
00:57:01
he hadn't sold in the first exactly my my point is let's not conflate the problem
00:57:07
if you generate wealth i think that you should be bound morally
00:57:12
bound by society to put the money back to work he chooses to put the money back to work by
00:57:18
reinvesting so aggressively into the things that he's doing that's laudable yeah i think that's virtuous yeah i
00:57:24
agree but it's not the only way bill gates took a different path which is to basically take all those profits sell it
00:57:30
down to then be able to go and put it into the gates foundation people will take multiple paths the point that's the
00:57:35
same among all these people is there's a moral obligation they feel to do the right thing for the future then we're in
00:57:40
agreement so let's just celebrate that not some tactical thing about it by the way one other point i'd make like
00:57:47
you you said that you know we should tax the the wealth creation and distribute it there's another way to get that
00:57:54
redistribution of wealth which is to enable access to the investments earlier
00:57:59
by public pension funds by the endowments by the places where people by the retirement funds where you know a
00:58:05
broader swath of the population you know have savings sitting right and they use the accreditation
00:58:11
we've historically kind of forced the narrative that everyone in the united states needs to have a home and have 80
00:58:16
90 of their wealth tied up in a piece of real estate and then we end up with these massive kind of inflationary bubbles to keep that value that book
00:58:22
value kind of growing for them the reality is if that money was put more productively into building businesses
00:58:28
via retirement funds that had access to venture capital the public pension funds already do but they should they probably
00:58:34
under allocate to venture capital today relative to where they're putting over here we talked about the endowments they're looking at look at that that's
00:58:40
another way by the way if that was the model you wouldn't need to tax right by the way one of the brilliant provisions in this reconciliation bill
00:58:46
is they're actually disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative assets including startups
00:58:52
and and insane venture capitalists insane that is so wrong so friggin wrong yeah
00:58:59
what that's in there taking pension funds and saying you
00:59:04
can't have access to them you as an individual through a 401k
00:59:11
or ira cannot invest in alternatives yes partly in response to that well they
00:59:17
should just make it a cap don't you think they should cap peter thiel's um i think
00:59:23
why why cap anything who's this who's this episode because it was against the spirit of it the spirit of the wrath was
00:59:29
let's let's discuss this as a specific issue i'll see it out for you saks uh peter thiel put his facebook stock in
00:59:34
his roth and yeah you're supposed to get that tax free so you can have a great retirement
00:59:40
he did that as an end run around paying taxes on the facebook investment that became worth billions of dollars
00:59:45
reportedly so now they're saying you can have a roth but anything above 50 billion you got to pay tax on because
00:59:52
the goal here isn't for you to use it as a shelter against some massive uh venture gains sacks
00:59:59
yeah i i don't have a huge problem with them putting a cap on the benefit of these accounts however my my issue with
01:00:05
what's in the bill there's a couple of issues one is like we said they're disallowing investments and alternatives
01:00:10
which i just think is bad for savers why would you want to do that second is the treatment of what happens when
01:00:17
you exceed the cap and right now what they're saying is you have to distribute out all of those funds and then subject
01:00:24
subject them to immediate taxation at ordinary income rates which is confiscatory because you could have
01:00:30
made the investment outside the retirement account and paid locked long long term capital rates
01:00:36
if you do go over it should be yeah long-term tax of course yeah and and furthermore it's even worse than that because what they're saying is let's say
01:00:42
that you do have an alternative like an investment in a startup or a venture fund you have to distribute it
01:00:48
out and pay tax on that even though that investment is not liquid right so you should be able to take it out and just
01:00:54
be treated normal cap gains and not have to liquidate it do you think well what it's going to do is it's going to get
01:00:59
it's going to give people an incentive it's going to warp the incentives for saving because what it's going to say to people is you want to do well but not
01:01:05
too well right because if you hit the cap you're not subject to a confiscation you get penalized yes it should be so
01:01:12
neutral yeah exactly i think situation work is you have a cap at any distribution above that you basically that becomes the
01:01:18
basis for future taxation all of this can be summarized more simply i think that we have
01:01:24
unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish
01:01:30
line and stagger the starting line right because all of this still doesn't apply to rich people no this is rich
01:01:37
people rich people can do all of these different things they can set up these out-of-state trusts they can set up
01:01:42
generation skipping trusts they can be you know qualified um investors they can
01:01:48
have qsbs deductions and so what this will do unfortunately is entrench the kind of
01:01:55
wealth gains that peter thiel was able to generate in a very visible way that will just piss
01:02:01
everybody off and i think instead you got to go back to a different um
01:02:06
to a different litmus test so i jason you have been the strongest advocate for letting people participate
01:02:13
in the economy i have always agreed with that we need to figure out how we can make sure it's important that
01:02:18
it isn't abused but that's the best way is to educate folks about financial literacy so that they can actually be a
01:02:24
part of it even the starting line let everybody be able to put stuff into this stuff and learn about it i mean what
01:02:30
peter did essentially was put lottery tickets into his you know non-tax retirement fund lottery tickets being
01:02:36
buying stocks in private companies early but regular americans aren't allowed to do that so rather than retroactively try
01:02:43
to penalize peter because you disagree with his politics or because he did it too well
01:02:48
i think it's better that everybody be allowed to be an accredited investor and do what peter did which is everybody should be able to take their 401k or
01:02:55
their roth and be able to buy the next linkedin uber so if you were a civilian and you took an uber or you used
01:03:01
linkedin to hire somebody in year two and you had an opportunity to buy those shares you should be allowed to buy it
01:03:07
because you're a human resources person or uber driver and you realize this is a great service that will change the world doesn't take a genius to figure that out
01:03:14
uh freeberg yeah look i mean the the downside is you see speculative concentrated bets that white people out
01:03:21
and that's the reason the protective provisions are in there so i think there are probably sensible ways of managing
01:03:26
that um you know around uh you know qualifying you know pools of these
01:03:33
investments in a way creating indexes against them etc uh and maybe that's the right way to provide access but you know
01:03:40
giving individuals uh that maybe you know don't have the right kind of point of
01:03:45
view uh on a particular investment the ability to put all of their capital into that investment
01:03:51
generally i would say go for it the problem is we've socialized you know uh protection right so and this
01:03:58
is the same with healthcare in a model for governing or model for a state where you provide socialized care
01:04:05
for people through healthcare socialized healthcare or you provide socialized support for people through you know the
01:04:11
social security system and other services like that um it's difficult to say okay the government's going to be your backstop
01:04:17
and is going to provide the support for you and we're also going to let you take risky behavior and that's where i think
01:04:23
the two have to go hand in hand if you want to get rid of one you got to get rid of the other um and so because otherwise we all end
01:04:30
up paying the cost of the person that takes the you know outsized risk and then we all end up having to foot the
01:04:35
bill for that person taking that risk so if we're all going to be there to protect that person we have to tell them you can't take unnecessary risks
01:04:42
okay hey um saks let me ask you a con conspiracy theory here
01:04:47
peter thiel supported trump when trump was teetering on
01:04:53
the access hollywood tape and he went to bat for him he gave him a big
01:04:58
donation at that time then obviously did the republican national convention and was a key intellectual
01:05:04
uh influencer in his election plan now the democrats are in and suddenly the
01:05:11
focus becomes this one outsized roth ira and we're going to rewrite the law so that peter thiel has to take
01:05:18
5 billion or so is one of the estimates that i saw online on cnbc out of his ira
01:05:24
do you think this is specific vindictiveness on the part of the democrats to try to attack
01:05:31
specifically peter thiel i know he's your best well yeah i mean he does feel and i'm not i'm not a peter teal apologist but this feels vindictive and
01:05:38
personal so yes and no okay so what i would say is there have been proposals over the
01:05:43
last i think going back to maybe even 2014 on providing some restrictions or
01:05:49
caps on the you know these these iras and the roth iras um however there's never been
01:05:55
a proposal as punitive and retroactive and confiscatory as what they're doing
01:06:00
here and specifically it's the fact that they're going to force peter to distribute out
01:06:06
everything above the cap and then tax it as ordinary income i mean that that's just changing the rules
01:06:12
that part i think is directed at peter and i've actually heard that staffers on capitol hill are
01:06:18
calling this the peter thiel provision so let me just confirm that part for you so what i would say is i think there is
01:06:25
a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts but the way they're doing it is
01:06:31
so punitive i think it is motivated by political revenge against peter chamoth what do we
01:06:36
think of the number of unicorns being created in the private markets obviously when a company hits unicorn status i
01:06:42
think they're going to start buzzing around and maybe knocking on your door and stacks and boards might start thinking about that
01:06:49
these companies sometimes have 10 million dollars 30 million dollars in revenue 50 million
01:06:54
in revenue and they're becoming worth a billion dollars do these valuations make sense writ large and are you concerned
01:07:00
that this is a bubble i don't think there's a bubble okay explain why there's not a bubble in
01:07:05
early stage private companies well i think it's because of what we just talked about which is that
01:07:11
these companies by and large are growing at incredibly fast rates and they are
01:07:16
replacing legacy incumbents that are growing very slowly or not at all
01:07:23
with and who who have basically won for a long time with inferior products and so as these superior products with more
01:07:30
nimble organizations get capitalized to go to market they're just going to win
01:07:35
and so i think what we're seeing is a wholesale replacement of the economy from the old to the new and so that's
01:07:42
why these companies will do well and i think it's going to be a a really
01:07:48
powerful force in the world because like the world should be a little bit more efficient and fairer
01:07:54
when you have all this modern technology working on your behalf so i'm a real
01:08:00
supporter of all of this i think there's going to be even more and i think you know the the thing that we have to be
01:08:05
comfortable with is whenever something goes from a fringe thing which is what venture capital was jason when all of us
01:08:10
were you know first in silicon valley 20 years ago to you know today in 2021
01:08:17
we're sitting here uh this is going to become a fundamental part of the economy and when that happens uh there'll be
01:08:24
more and more money the returns won't be as good that'll be okay but there'll be a lot of progress and so you know we're
01:08:30
going through the same transition that private equity did in the 80s and 90s that venture that hedge funds did you
01:08:36
see all the different venture capitalists who are retiring bichon from spark the kid from uh lightspeed a bunch of
01:08:43
other folks obviously our friend bill grimley is stepping up why don't you call me jeremy jeremy jeremy's 50 he's 50. yeah
01:08:50
am i doing something wrong here i'm like busy creating a venture firm at age almost 50. you're always people you're
01:08:56
on the wrong side of this distribution i mean what what do we think's behind this they just made too much money and they're getting money or is it because
01:09:02
it's too competitive now it's too hard they're moving to wyoming i would say it's slightly different than this i
01:09:07
don't know i don't know i mean i know all of those guys but i don't know what their motivation is but
01:09:13
what i would say is i tend to think that the mindset of venture
01:09:18
has a relatively short half-life and i think it's about 15 years
01:09:24
and i think that there is a and because you know company building is roughly a 10-year arc you know like when
01:09:30
you get into something early and so i i i think that there is like a newness whenever you start i don't think
01:09:36
it matters what your age is and um then there is this
01:09:41
sort of like uh death march that sets in by year
01:09:47
eight or nine and then you try to see it through to returning the capital and making sure
01:09:53
all the employees and and uh founders you've been invested with land the ship
01:09:59
and and i think what these guys did was get to that place and say okay i've had this 15-year beautiful arc
01:10:05
do i want to do another 15-year arc and for a lot of people um it won't make much sense and then also i think your
01:10:11
patience to do it goes away right because it's like you guys know what it is it's exhausting it is exhausting it's
01:10:18
exciting the amount of drama i'm dealing with right now in my portfolio is bonkers the the the bad i don't know if
01:10:25
you're seeing the sax but the amount of shenanigans bad behavior fraud uh lying
01:10:30
backstabbing is that an all-time high that would be your portfolio jkl yeah no it's like no it's literally three
01:10:37
companies i'm literally dealing with three companies with drama out of 350. i think it's one out of 100 is probably
01:10:42
fine but i am seeing all kinds of shenanigans even in the diligence phase i'm seeing it jason i meant something
01:10:48
more tactical which is like for example you know yesterday we're starting something really
01:10:53
ambitious in batteries and i have to sit there for an hour and we have to go through ordering the
01:10:59
equipment setting up the lab getting you know human resources and there's only so much of that that you have the energy to
01:11:05
do after a certain amount of time it's important work you have to do it right
01:11:10
but it feels uh a little low leverage now for that ceo
01:11:15
it's everything and so you have to be on top of your game to help that person and i think this is where i appreciate their
01:11:22
honesty in basically saying guys i don't have that level of
01:11:28
detailed focus in me anymore and that's important because in the next generation of folks who want to put in that 15-year
01:11:33
journey you need somebody committed you need somebody who's super committed yeah and i do think there's a difference between being a partner in a large
01:11:41
partnership where you kind of have your portfolio of companies and you know to chamas point you're going to be on that
01:11:47
arc with them and then kind of building a firm from scratch where like quite frankly i would go crazy the way that
01:11:55
you know you're dealing with jason and chamoth is saying i would get burned out if i didn't have a team right so we now
01:12:00
have like a pretty big team how many to well just on the investment team i think we've got about 15 people and and then
01:12:07
we now have a bunch of operating partners so you know we were looking at what andreessen harwich has done with services you know we had this big debate
01:12:13
in the venture community for a long time about whether venture firms should operate it should offer services and operating partners
01:12:19
and andreessen you know went hog wild with that they've got like 200 people doing it and i think they've proven that
01:12:24
it works in the sen i don't you know it's not totally clear how much value they're delivering but it clearly works
01:12:30
in the sense that founders would like the services if they can get them it's great marketing but it may not be it's
01:12:36
great it's it's great it's great marketing if you're a great founder when you were a great founder you wouldn't want andreessen horowitz telling you how to
01:12:41
run your hr and doing your marketing for you yammer right but so what we've done is what we've done is focus on bringing
01:12:48
on not 200 people but an expert in every functional area that a sas company might need because you do want access to an
01:12:55
expert when you're setting up the department you want to go talk to the digital marketing person or the legal person or you know or you know we have
01:13:02
an executive briefing center now so we do believe that there is a version of the services model that makes a lot of sense and we are building that if i had
01:13:08
to do all of that value add myself yeah i would i would burn out yeah i mean i think it's a very
01:13:13
good point i literally last week launched thesyndicate.com syndicate just for the
01:13:19
same reason so i can build a group of individuals who are focused just on that and who have that domain expertise but
01:13:26
they're the great founders do not want you up in their business so i i i'm concerned with like that that's why we
01:13:33
have like kind of we call it a teach them how to fish model where we don't want to do the work we want to give them an expert as a resource who can meet
01:13:39
with them show them show them some best practices coming to you expecting you to do the work because that's what think happens
01:13:45
sometimes is that although can you find us a developer and i'm like no but i can talk to you about finding
01:13:51
developers but i don't have a recruiter on staff do you have a recruiter yeah we actually do now we have three recruiters
01:13:56
on staff so um so you're paying a half million dollars a year to recruit for your companies that's a big basically
01:14:02
basically that's a big advantage is it working are you actually landing developers yeah i mean look we can't
01:14:07
freeze and i don't give a [ __ ] about any of this all right well anyway this is us in the weeds so you want to talk about some okay well just to upload up a level
01:14:14
for a second yeah i just want to go back to this like golden era point when we're talking about venture capital because
01:14:20
look obviously in the weeds we're going to talk about our problems but i really think that
01:14:25
what's happening here with a thousand new unicorns being minted every year is just unbelievable if you look at the
01:14:31
number of billionaires in the us i just googled this there were 614 billionaires in the us as of october 2020. now
01:14:38
there's probably more i don't know let's say there's a thousand well if you're mincing a thousand new unicorns every year how many billionaires is that
01:14:45
creating i mean how many millionaires more importantly how many people who are making 50 to 250 000 a year before they
01:14:51
join the ecosystem and now are worth millions will buy homes hire people start in the next let me just give you guys the counterpoint to that which i'm
01:14:58
not necessarily arguing but i'm this is what i think the narrative is which is that those businesses that are kind of
01:15:04
you know accumulating wealth and accumulating revenue are effectively destroying the old economy and shutting
01:15:10
down companies and shutting down there's 11 million job openings that's [ __ ] i don't i don't i don't believe it's a
01:15:15
zero-sum game yeah i think there's it's it's created by destruction it is disruptive right so there is a there is
01:15:20
kind of a temporal flux and there's a flux of people across from the old economy to the new economy and it's
01:15:26
that's flux that i think creates the great uncertainty and the great yes heartache that everyone's trying that's the hand ringing that's the hand
01:15:32
this is why it is so important to get corporate taxation right because if you're going to replace gdp dollar for
01:15:39
dollar don't focus on the fewer employees that work there focus on the largest number
01:15:44
possible which is the revenue that these employees are helping to generate for these companies so if you had much much
01:15:50
higher corporate taxation you can play around with all the personal taxation you want but if a lot of people do get
01:15:56
shut out of the economy you're not going to make nearly as much for the government as you would by taxing
01:16:02
companies more chamath should there be a backstop because we know tax law is so
01:16:07
sophisticated and if you're intelligent you could make it seem like you didn't make any money because you're investing you're
01:16:12
distributing yada yada should there just be a hey listen whatever you want to do with your taxes is fine but x percent of
01:16:19
your top line revenue is your base tax and you cannot get around that
01:16:24
should there be something like that there's a couple things that this tax bill attempted to do which could be really powerful if it does get passed
01:16:32
i think that corporations should pay a large tax i think that they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on
01:16:38
r d and i think they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on basically benefits for their employees
01:16:45
and i think that would do a lot to level the playing field then i do think that you can have much
01:16:51
higher individual taxation but you need to make it simpler because there's too many easy ways
01:16:57
like that propublica article showed for you to play games for individuals to not pay taxes
01:17:03
and so you got to simplify all of this stuff because it's too complicated so if you're rich enough to hire a fleet of
01:17:09
lawyers you will work your way around it yes period
01:17:15
and they and they repealed it as part of the the amt was for corporations was repealed as part of the
01:17:21
tax cuts and jobs act i think i don't know where that stands but it does seem like a lot of companies because i don't
01:17:27
know how that makes sense jkl i mean like some businesses run high margin some are low margins some are losing money some are over investing it's
01:17:33
complicated i don't have the solution that's why i'm sort of saying well one of the i think one of the optics issues
01:17:38
here is you know people are like that company didn't pay any taxes that company sells this many iphones that
01:17:43
companies yes because they're they're doing what tax laws were designed to do which is to encourage investment uh so how do you
01:17:50
fix it give me a solution freebird i don't i think that once businesses are mature and they start dividend in cash
01:17:55
and making distributions and they're profitable that might be the time to tax them i'm not sure why would they ever do that if they had an army of people
01:18:01
saying hey you don't have to you don't want to change the point if they're investing in growth they're creating jobs and they're growing the economy and
01:18:07
that's what we said was fine i don't think they're creating as many jobs as you think but they are growing the economy that's why you have
01:18:12
to tax the corporation because that's the effective proxy for taxing gdp yeah look i i would be all about
01:18:19
let me just i'll wear my libertarian hat again for a second but like i would be all about taxation if i felt like my
01:18:25
dollars had a positive roi where they ended up and the problem right now is like government spending is set up in
01:18:31
such a way that it's effectively been gamified and people extract capital from the government and my dollars are not
01:18:36
getting a positive roi for me or for society i would rather have them which is why you left let's be honest that's why you left san francisco i mean it's
01:18:43
just that's spending more time i left san francisco i've got a family and i and i need a backyard so that's a little bit but it isn't part of it that you are
01:18:50
san francisco is a separate degree of incompetence like but yes you're right they're spending more than ever
01:18:55
and it's getting worse san francisco's a whole another a whole other nightmare jake out well like i'm just speaking california
01:19:01
in general right now whether it's the state level or the federal level it feels to me and i think it feels to a lot of people
01:19:08
that dollars aren't being spent in a way that's generating a return for the taxpayer and i think we all feel that way and i
01:19:15
think that's what's frustrating it's not about how much one's being taxed it's about how are those tax dollars being spent and are they being spent in a way
01:19:22
that secures the future of our nation of our people of our livelihoods etc and
01:19:27
making you know giving everyone access to opportunity what's hap what's happened what's happened is we've created things like student loan
01:19:32
programs and you know housing programs and infrastructure programs that are literally just giving away money to
01:19:39
private companies that are profiteering off of government spending right and it's cronie as our favorite professor scott galloway
01:19:45
says it's one thing i really do agree with it it is that there is this notion of
01:19:50
crony capitalism where the united states and state governments even local governments as seen in san francisco
01:19:56
california all the way up to the federal level are spending money in a way that i think we all feel um is benefiting some
01:20:02
disproportionately to most now if there was a high degree of taxation and everyone was benefited in a meaningful
01:20:08
way and those programs were well managed and capital flowed meaningfully to to support everything we want to support
01:20:14
great i think everyone would raise their hand raise two hands and say tax the heck out of me let's make that happen but that's not what happens and i think
01:20:20
that's the primary aversion to high taxation sacks you get the final word yeah i mean
01:20:25
look what i'm worried about is taxes are going up big time no matter what happens in washington spending is going up big
01:20:32
time we now have peacetime deficits that are the biggest that they've ever been
01:20:38
the deaths the national debt the peacetime national debts the highest has ever been uh we have a looming debt crisis in
01:20:45
china we have supply chain shortages what could go uh i mean you know
01:20:51
there's a lot of things here that could upset the apple cart and i what i'm afraid of is we're going to look back at
01:20:56
this year the thousand unicorns being minted and say that really was the golden era and everything happened and
01:21:01
after that we really screwed up sex you sound like the old guy at starbucks it says that every generation and complains
01:21:07
about the last generation on the golden era and it's all down how much does music suck today normally normally i
01:21:12
will say how impressive it is that ten years ago none of those unicorns existed and it is likely the case that three
01:21:18
trillion dollars of value was created via private funding and private companies over the last 10 years so all
01:21:23
these entrepreneurs all these employees anyone working at these businesses anyone involved in these businesses should be thrilled about the fact that
01:21:29
you from xero created three and a half trillion dollars of value in 10 years that's extraordinary yeah i'm not i'm
01:21:35
not trying to create nostalgia about the past i'm talking about the present and trying to preserve it because i'm seeing
01:21:40
some storm clouds on the horizon yeah i would like to play the best song from tony tony tony as we leave yeah
01:21:47
okay everybody we're heading out this one's for you london breed
01:21:52
[Music] state state approved entertainment you can take off your mass for this
01:21:58
entertainment it's so good you guys watch uh squid game anybody watch wig game no we have lives
01:22:05
nobody watched my game okay my kid my kid's been talking about that should i be letting them watch the squid game or is that no it's the most violent uh
01:22:11
korean horror dystopian uh show ever watched they're going to be scarred for life
01:22:17
hey as a follow-up did you uh did you stop your kids from uh from tick tock
01:22:22
did you take your kids off tick tock they told yeah i went in there i'm like kids
01:22:28
what are you watching [Music] i'll tell you in a second [Music]
01:22:34
yeah so did you take your kids off tick tock yeah i went in there i was like kids what are you watching they're like dad get the hell out of here yeah
01:22:41
they said tell us our names and he was like okay i'll be right back jack if you could tell me to turn it off tick-tock
01:22:48
by my name i'll do it david's like see you later the conversation was what do you guys watching on tick tock i hear
01:22:54
it's all sex and drugs they're like no we're watching dance videos i'm like okay go ahead i trust you the dance videos are literally like
01:23:01
absolutely uh sex and drug based every single one of them
01:23:07
it is so devious oh stop it is not that you're so exaggerated i am so not
01:23:12
exaggerating literally the if you listen take the most obscene lyric to uh obscene hook to any rap song
01:23:20
that's what trends oh my god it's so true guys every generation says the same about the natural it's unbelievable
01:23:26
right no but it is like explicit listen whatever i mean like you know um i just want to pearl jam
01:23:32
and you know all the way back to the beach boys and shaking his hips yeah exactly yeah
01:23:37
but i mean no this when i say it's explicit it is literally expensive you just don't get the youth j-cal you don't
01:23:43
understand them i i think i understand it a little bit too well anyway you do not
01:23:50
see you listen i oh hey guys are we going to do the all in summit or not i actually went to the code conference and i was like
01:23:56
this was amazing to get back out you got to stop talking about ideas and actually just doing them what are you talking
01:24:01
about we created this pot i'm just trying to get buy in jason just do it okay all right i need your
01:24:07
buy-in we have a voting system here we're going in miami miami okay first year second year
01:24:14
italy not
01:24:26
so here's how it's going to work 250 tickets 200 for purchase 50 for scholarship all in summit three days
01:24:33
miami saks and i are off to the races more people bro why do you have to keep it so exclusive you're just so excited
01:24:41
what is it i want to invert the top top-down hierarchy to what i want to be a left-wing authoritarian
01:24:47
what is it that i have to believe that is what you are a left-wing authoritarian
01:24:52
i just want to be rich and powerful i don't care what party i money status am power yeah let me tell
01:24:58
you let me tell you why i like this idea is because to the points we're talking about with coinbase earlier we you know
01:25:05
we have these conferences in the tech industry and they're frankly run by people who hate
01:25:11
tech in the tech industry and people who have successful tickets right exactly
01:25:16
and so the i see these tech founders going up on these stages and subjecting themselves to these interrogations by
01:25:23
people who hate them and i'm like what are they doing like it makes no sense i'm putting up a form i'm going to let
01:25:28
people take deposits i'm going to pick a month and we're going to go how many people went to the conference guys you went to this week uh i the code
01:25:35
conference i think was probably three or four hundred by design it was a third or half how much how much
01:25:40
tickets i i didn't actually buy a ticket because i didn't want to be in the conference itself because i was concerned about a
01:25:46
breakthrough virus but i did host the poker game with skye and brooke tickets i think are 8 000 for code and i
01:25:52
think ted is up to 10 or 15. so maybe how much are we charging we made like twenty seventy five hundred seventy five
01:25:57
hundred we're charging seventy five hundred so two hundred and ten tickets and then fifty scholarships for people who wouldn't be able to afford it so the
01:26:04
the gross revenue here so we want 1.5 million and what's our cost going to be cost
01:26:09
will be a million and what so wait so we're get so we're making profit on this deal no i'm making a profit
01:26:18
we spend i may be very clear we spend what we i
01:26:23
am buying the wine and you will shut the [ __ ] up okay so then it's going to be it's going to cost 2 million so it's going to make
01:26:30
1.5 i don't know if he's going to win no it's gonna cost i want a wine budget so that everybody
01:26:36
that comes is it feels like they've had an exceptional food and beverage experience
01:26:41
is gonna spend half a million dollars on wine no joke so then it has to be 10k a ticket but you know what the people who
01:26:46
are coming can afford it they don't check out we're not privileging you with some profiteering i'm not profiteering
01:26:51
off of it honestly the reason i want to do it most is i want to play poker for three days and i want to have us the
01:26:57
four of us interview the most iconoclastic interesting people and i want to do it for the fans so that some
01:27:03
number of fans get to come who wouldn't normally be able to come to a conference at this level and i just think it would be a blast
01:27:09
it'd be fun to get together okay stop talking about it and do it okay i'll do it all right i want to make sure everybody's bought in i mean so get you
01:27:15
[ __ ] on the side i'll set a date okay not not the first week of february because i think i have a i think in
01:27:21
march april march april also not the third week of february because i think i'm skiing in europe
01:27:28
just [ __ ] can you just give up you're not gallivanting around europe and other
01:27:35
places bro i'm i'm grinding every day here you see what i'm doing it's like i'm [ __ ] working hard too i mean it's
01:27:40
crazy right now it's like the i've never seen the market like this i mean it is bonkers enjoy a lot less
01:27:47
what's that enjoy it while it lasts exactly all right everybody we'll see you next time for the dictator champ
01:27:52
polly hopper tia for the rain man david sacks and the queen of quinoa david friedberg i'm j-cal
01:27:59
and we'll see you on episode 50 bye bye [Music]
01:28:10
we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music]
01:28:33
we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to
01:28:39
release [Music]
01:28:47
we need to get these [Music]
