All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E13: SPACsgiving Special! More promising vaccine news, innovation vs. regulation, reforming higher ed, morality of challenge trials & more
Episode Date: November 25, 2020Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/...allinpodcast Referenced in the show: NYT Article - Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine.html Show Notes: 0:00 Besties congratulate Friedberg & Chamath for taking Metromile public, Chamath explains a PIPE, Sacks & Jason express their discontent for being left out of the first bestie SPAC 10:59 More positive vaccine news, NYT article on Operation Warp Speed: did the Trump administration nail it? 21:50 How will the COVID experience impact the response to the next pandemic? Morality of challenge trials, hypocrisy of regulatory capture around gambling, drug use, pharma, etc. 35:25 Why innovation has occurred so rapidly on the Internet: Permissionless innovation & lack of regulators, regulation vs. innovation 47:07 Thoughts on ISAs & how they could disrupt overpriced higher education, Dave Chappelle's contract with Comedy Central 59:58 Trump accepts defeat (sort of), Biden's cabinet selections so far 1:06:29 What the besties are thankful for 1:14:50 Peace in the Middle East being achieved by declining reliance on oil, based on resume alone - would Trump have won if not for his antics? 1:21:01 Code 13!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey, everybody welcome back besties are back and it's a bestie SPAC's giving
Congratulations to
The queen of Kinwa
His second company
David Freiberg announces today hours before the taping of this special Thanksgiving pod
That he is taking Metro mile public through SPAC and that bestie see and
Here is the quote that as only Chimoff can tweet, Buffett had Geico.
I pick Metro Mile.
I would just like to say, I'll tell you, move markets.
LeBron James has three rings
Freeberg tell us what is Metro mile and
Well, this isn't a self-promoting podcast is it I mean no, but I think it's just you know It's your second company I started the company in 2011 when I was running climate when I was to see you there and
You know, so we were climate was offering insurance at the time
We learned a lot about the insurance markets and figured like a you know And we were, climate was offering insurance at the time.
We learned a lot about the insurance markets
and figured like, hey, telematics
or connecting cars to the internet is gonna be a big deal
and we're gonna be able to completely change
the auto insurance industry.
So we set up this company.
I was the chairman from the founding in 2011.
And you know, been chairman and I've been an active investor
in the business in every round since then.
So the business has built some really compelling value proposition for customers and you know, it's got really good unit economics
and it's needed its last round of capital to get profitable and turns out, you know, as we were thinking about that this summer
that a SPAC was a really good path for the business given the inflection point it's at.
And the basic premise of the business is, instead of paying for insurance by month or time periods, the innovation here is you pay per mile.
Insurance today is like, you know, you fill out a form and you get a price for insurance and you pay that rate for six months of coverage But you know depending on when you're driving and how much you're driving you should be paying a different price, right?
So we kind of changed the model to a rate per mile and so if you don't drive you save
You know, so the average customer doesn't drive a lot with math for a mile
They save 47% over what they were paying with like Geico progressive reshare
And you do that with that ODB port.
It's a good deal.
Yeah, the little plug-in device and increasingly we're actually doing it directly by connecting
to cars, direct through Ford and a couple other big automotive OEMs now have the
ability to send the data directly out of the car because they're all internet connected
now.
So, that allows us to just basically see how many miles you're driving and the rate per
mile is what we bill you each month
Times the number of miles you drove on your on your car and you didn't mention how you drive
It I think that was a controversial concept for a while, you know if you speed if you right
We
That's all the map or yeah, that is part of it today
But frankly 70% of the price difference you get in auto insurance is from the number of miles you drive
And only 30% is really in this variance around behavior. You know, most people are generally pretty good drivers
So believe it or not. So the real variance in terms of you know, your risk to the insurance companies
How many miles you drive? So that really is the predominant factor. So if we can accurately track that now
What's interesting is like in a world of autonomous cars where you're like turning on the car to be autonomous or fully self driving at some point, you know, it's on and off, you should be
getting a different rate for those miles, right? So if the car is, if your Tesla is on autopilot on
the freeway, that should be safer than you on the freeway, you shouldn't be paying as much
price there. You can kind of think about how this moves into a world where everything is dynamically
priced and dynamically build. You switch priced.
You switch priced and also fair.
So if you're a good driver and you're driving well or if you're using autonomous features,
you shouldn't pay as much.
And ultimately that translates into a truly more dynamic service.
And that's really where the world has to go because those low mileage drivers or those
good drivers or those drivers using autonomous features should be paying considerably less. So they'll start using our service and that'll force the other
guys to raise their rates and it creates this huge kind of market mode. We're in the very early
days. I mean, it's like the first inning still. So we're just getting going.
Chimavi, you chose to do a pipe with a SPAC. Explain to the audience what a pipe is.
We both don't know.
And what you loved about Metro Mile.
Sure.
I think what is a pipe?
A pipe is a private investment in a public enterprise.
And basically what that means is that you're making the round bigger.
Right.
So it's kind of like Sequoia does your Series A and invest 10 million, I would come in
and put another 10 million and now your Series A is 20 million.
Same terms as Sequoia's round except you're now just
grossing up the amount of capital.
Why is that helpful?
Well, what it does is it allows somebody to price the deal.
So in this case, David's SPAC sponsor,
price the deal, did the diligence
and decided to underwrite Metramile at that price.
And then they came to me and said,
hey, do you want to come and join this round essentially?
And I got to know the business.
A lot of things that David said basically are true.
The thing that I will say is like,
everybody talks about the value of machine learning,
and data-oriented learning.
The most obvious thing that you can do
is if you learn on top of a huge subset of data,
especially out in the real world,
like driving data or any other kind of information,
is you should be taking risk on top of it.
And this is why sort of these next
generation insurance companies to me are so interesting because it's probably where
you're going to see machine learning be used at just massive, massive scale because
you're just going to reprice risk and make it as David said, much more dynamic. So anyways,
they showed it to me. I really like the product. The metrics are really amazing.
And so I joined.
It's great.
I'm really excited for it.
I'm really excited for free, Brad.
Yeah.
Congratulations.
Great.
Jamal, then I've never worked at anything together.
So it's awesome.
We're doing our first project here on the All In podcast together.
All right.
So that's it.
It sounds like a brilliant idea.
And I'm just pissed that I'm not part of it.
I know. I'm not part of it
To Yeah, I
Don't know anything I
Need to get my be quit you
You two you two narcissistic besteskies have been running around
touting every single unicorn.
You guys have been a part of that.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot.
I have been a pilot. I have been a pilot. I have been a pilot. I have Just a little kick back, a little share. Let's Jason, why don't you start an angelist syndicate
for every all-in podcast listener?
Yes.
All-in podcast syndicate.
It will be on the syndicate.com.
I love you.
It'll be an angelist, but yeah.
We'll do it with the syndicate.com slash all-in podcast.
And then we'll aggregate all these subscribers.
Can I just say a 20% carry?
And you guys can suggest that.
Can I just say, no, we'll do zero carry and we'll allow all the listeners to participate
in our deals, which I think would be pretty cool.
Listen, I love it.
I love it.
Every time you loop my business into this, whether it's podcasting or syndicates, you take
out the money and the profit.
I tell you what, I have an idea.
How about we spec this week in startups and you do it for no participation on the father of growth
You know how you grow by making things free
You want to maximize demand just make it free
By the way on this topic
Saxipu had this incredible tweet this week which is basically like wow, this is like my
95th
Unicorn that went that filed to go public. I mean literally every single unicorn that went that file to go public. I mean, literally every single unicorn that filed the
speak to go public sacks was an angel investor, which is
incredible.
Since I've got these as an investor, but the best follow up
to eat was Zach Weinberg, the co-founder of Flatiron
Health whose tweet was, I just want to congratulate myself on
nothing for having not been a part of any of these
companies.
I would like to congratulate myself for making no bets and taking no risk and getting no reward.
I thought Zach's tweet was a buzz.
Zach, don't you find it tiring like all these investments that you've made?
Like, don't these guys call you and want to do meetings and chattel the time?
I mean, you know, this is gonna be like a huge amount of effort, right?
I mean, you know, this is gonna be like a huge amount of effort, right?
Well, not, not, I mean, it really doesn't turn around.
Well, you know, if you're not on the board, your obligation is basically to respond when somebody asks you for something.
I know as an angel investor, it is a little different when you're actually like
leading around in your board member.
I was making, I was making these investments back in 2012, 2013.
That's when these seeds were planted.
These were 50K, 100K, 250K checks, right?
So the responsibility is proportional to the dollar amount.
Somewhere a little bigger than that actually, but I've written checks, some figure checks
and some of these companies.
Well, sex, according to your personal balance sheet
that we got from your accountants this week.
Yeah, Phil, how many sent it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good.
Oh, man.
We see here a transaction for house.
Is it true you did the series B of house,
the entire series B?
That was $1,000,000.
No, no.
That's what I heard.
No, no.
I heard it was, you led the series B. me. No, no. Any A led that round. I
mean, I invested a lot as an individual. I did co lead the series B or C of Adapar. That
was one that I did as an individual. That's incredible. Yeah, that's amazing. Gonna be huge.
I have no idea what that company is, but that sounds awesome. They manage funds.
They do portfolio management software.
It's coming up on $100 million in an hour.
That name sounds awesome.
It's pretty big.
I'm just kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
I'm totally kidding.
Let's start the pod, J-Cal.
Where are we gonna start?
Well, I mean, I think.
Now that we've all still promoted.
Exactly.
Well, I'm just happy to hear that Jason was cut out of your deal as much as me.
When I read about it on Twitter, I'm like, I better not be the only best to cut out.
So.
All right.
It's so fun.
You're right.
You're right.
You're right.
You're right.
You're right.
It is getting awkward now because people who watch this podcast assume that we do everything
together.
Like literally they're like, well, you guys go grocery shopping together, you go on vacation
together, you guys go back to our house.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
I think the first thing we should talk about is just this amazing moment in time when
because of science, you know, and this podcast started during the pandemic, we have had,
as predicted by Freeberg, who gets to take two victory laps, he said by the end of the
year, we'd have vaccines and they would have because of this mRNA, if I remember correctly, 90, 95% efficacy.
And sure enough, the week after Trump wins, I'm sorry, loses, sorry,
he lost actually, the week after Trump lost, I know you're doing both of them.
The week after he lost Moderna, a Pfizer, then the next week,
Moderna, and then the next week, Oxford.
And I understand Johnson and Johnson is about
to announce something, and all of these have 90 to 95% efficacy,
and that there are gonna be 40, 50 and 60 million doses
in December, January and February,
just from the first two in America alone.
So, Friedberg, if you were to put a number on when
herd immunity hits, because
probably 20 or 30 percent of people have had it, 20 or 30 percent of people have some
natural immunity, how long is this going to take? And could we be able to be doing this
from Warriors game next year? When are we going to be able to do this in person?
I don't know if it was test. Yeah, I don't know if it was Fauci or someone
that's closer to the operation, shared that
they do think they can get 70% of Americans immunized by May.
So my May, yeah.
So, you know, if you'll remember a few podcasts ago, I think I tried to explain a big part
of the budget that went in to this operation at Warp Speed was to parallelize production
of these vaccines while they were being tested.
And so we've been scaling up the production and the manufacturing of these.
And if they weren't going to work, we're just going to crash them, right?
A couple billion dollars, who cares? It's a good option for the American people.
So we've got a ton of doses that have been produced.
It's about packaging and distribution now.
And that's, you know, supposed to be kind of underway with the plan to be
that on December 11th or 12th, when they give the emergency assault authorization,
these doses start chilling up in campus.
We went all in, we basically went all in blind.
Like we just shoved the chips in and said,
we're gonna make these vaccines even if they're not.
It's more like a spray and prey angel investment portfolio.
You know, we bought like four different things
or five different things, we made a bet's in all of them them and hope that one of them pays off and it turns out they're
all going to pay off.
So, you know, or chunk of them are going to pay off and we get to have them ready, you
know, in time to kind of make a difference here.
Now, all that being said, if you look at the case numbers in the US right now, we could
be as high as 30% of the American people have already been infected with coronavirus
based on some estimates.
So as of the June 30th paper that was published from those dialysis patients and they did
a pretty good statistical interpretation of looking at antibodies and people's blood,
they estimate 10% of the American population was infected by coronavirus as of June 30th.
And then if you look at the number of people that have been infected since then,
and you apply the similar sort of multiple
that you would assume based on tests,
there's an estimate that we could already be up to 30%
of the US population has been infected.
Wow.
And therefore immune.
And theoretically, mostly immune.
Let's just say that, right?
And so we share those anecdotes and so on.
But yeah, let's just say generally, yes, immune.
And so you combine that with these vaccines starting to roll out and we get, you know,
a pretty kind of comfortable position in terms of the pandemic and hopefully a couple of months here.
And that's why the market's going nuts and that's why everyone, I mean, I don't know about you
guys, but I got some conference invites this last week for conferences for next year that have
been canceled this year and we'll be able to hold. Yeah, so people are starting to lean out for what time frame third quarter or fourth
quarter? Summer July. Yeah, so people are now assuming that and they're booking hotel spaces
based on it. That is extraordinary. Sac, you shared this New York time story. I want to summarize
it for the audience. And I'd love to get your thoughts in addition to this as to what this recovery might look like. If in fact, we have more vaccine than we need and
even a reasonable number of Americans take it and don't believe that it's a conspiracy
theory by Bill Gates to control and the Illuminati.
Yeah, I mean, this New York Times story is pretty remarkable. It's called politics science and then our remarkable race for a coronavirus vaccine.
This came out, I think it just came out today in the New York Times.
Actually, sorry, it's published.
It published November 21st, updated November 24th.
And it's pretty remarkable.
It describes the effort by Operation Warp Speed, by the administration,
by Pfizer, by the Durant, that kind of gives you the behind the scenes, play by play.
And reading the article, you have to come away
thinking that the Trump administration did a pretty good job
with this whole warp speed project.
I don't know if the New York Times realizes
that it's making the Trump administration look so good
or maybe they don't care anymore
because he's lost the election.
But the article does make the administration look very good.
I mean, very confident, first of all,
they shoveled money to the right people.
They offered Pfizer money,
Pfizer didn't want it or need it, but Moderna did.
So they got a few billion dollars Moderna. They parallel processed a bunch of different
attempts here so that if one company failed, the others might succeed. There
was sort of a Reaganite cutting of bureaucratic red tape wherever they
could. There were examples in the story of the drug company needing
something, some supplies or what have you, and they would call the
administration and they would make it happen.
And then finally, the administration did do anything to kind of mess with the science.
In fact, they describe how this new experimental mRNA technique that they used to generate
the vaccine.
They had the code for that within two days.
They actually had the vaccine sort of printed,
if you will, within weeks.
And really what took all this time
were the human trials,
the three-stage human trials,
which the administration did not do anything to speed up.
And probably the irony of irony,
is the supreme irony,
is there's a story,
there's a bit in the story it actually
begins with the this guy's slawy who's the head of the Trump administration's effort to produce
the vaccine he actually slowed down the Moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren't
including enough minorities in the you know in the in the trial and that cost him three weeks. If it weren't for those three weeks,
Moderna's vaccine would have happened before Pfizer, and it would have come out
about a week before the election. So you got to wonder, like Trump has got to be
pulling out his hair about about this twist of fate. David, how does it attribute
credit for warp speed?
And I'm going someplace with this, so I'm just asking you the question.
Well, the article's not trying to attribute credit.
They're just kind of describing the behind the scenes
of how Pfizer Moderna came up with their vaccines.
And it just, but in describing,
Pfizer Moderna did the work of creating the vaccine,
but in describing the ways that warp speed contributed,
they did things that were only helpful and nothing that was harmful.
And so in that sense, it made the Trump administration look quite good.
Yeah, I think the point is that the warp speed folks,
which is probably the least well known working group working on coronavirus
to the rest of the public is because it was a lot of wonky insiders. It was sign of almost proving the exact opposite of what Trump typically
does, which is some idiotic, nepotistic leaning, where it's his daughter or his son-in-law
running around completely and effectively doing something where they become front and center
for taking credit. In this case, it was just a bunch of policy walks.
You never heard about the project.
We only know about work speed because a handful of us have talked about it.
And it turns out to actually have been good because they knew what they were doing
and they do enough to not try to seek the credit and just cut out of the way.
I mean, it proves almost the antithesis of how the Trump campaign
managed their time in the White House.
Well, I mean, you have a point where you know, I was kind of reading this article wondering,
you know, where was Jared Kushner?
Because if Kushner knew about this, there's no way he slows down the Moderna vaccine
by three weeks.
I mean, that might have made the difference right there, and whether Trump wins or not.
Can you imagine the effect on the election if the vaccine had come out one week before November 3rd?
I think the Trump would have won decidedly
if he had a vaccine or two out with 90%.
But I think he had no credibility.
Even though Moderna and Pfizer were saying late November
and he said the vaccines are around the corner,
his whole tenure was based on so much lying.
He was the boy who cried wolf. He was the president who cried wolf by the time
He told the truth and he was telling the truth about the vaccines
He it was like oh my lord. He he told the truth in the final three months
And I can I give you the opposite David of that which is that if Moderna basically says hey guys
We have a vaccine that works for white people and a disease that's, you know, disproportionately killing blacks and, you
know, Hispanics and brown people, Native Americans. And all of a sudden, people are like, wait,
what the fuck? Maybe they would have gone into Georgia and they would have just crushed
them even more. And then you would have actually had the Senate flip too. So you could have
had a whole kind of distribution of outcomes there in a different case because you could have
had an angry reaction as well. We don't know, I guess, as many.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's ironic that an administration that was constantly accused
of white supremacy probably lost the election because they slowed down this vaccine trial group to
include more minorities. No, I know, but I think what we're saying is it wasn't the
actual administration. You know, we call that David. We call that redemption in the
movie when the person actually loses because they did the right thing. It's
kind of redemption. Freebreak, when you look at these mRNA vaccines, you were educating us about them last night,
and also for a long time. Tell the audience just one more time how these work briefly,
and what the potential for them is in the future, because I think a lot of us now are starting to
see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is going to be over. We're going to be at conferences or going traveling to Europe or whatever
it is next summer. But we are all going to be scarred for life thinking, you know, when is the next
coronavirus? Just like for a decade, we were on pins and needles. When is the next 9-11? So this
is going to be scarred tissue for a generation or two of people, when the next COVID comes, how quickly
will warp speed 2.0 go?
Yeah, it's the right question because our approach to doing vaccines may have just changed
permanently.
So every cell has your DNA and DNA basically codes proteins.
Every three letters of DNA makes an amino acid.
Codes for a specific amino acid.
There's 20 amino acids.
The way that DNA turns into proteins is through RNA.
So RNA is kind of like a mirror copy of your DNA.
It floats into these things called ribosomes in yourself
and outcome proteins.
And it's like a printer, right?
And so those ribosomes make your proteins using those amino acid
Sequences coded by the RNA. So the way that the
Vaccines work historically is you'll get a dead virus which is basically the protein of a virus your immune system then learns to kill that or to
that protein
Oh, man, Jesus my dog your immune system then learns to remove that protein
from your body.
And that's how you develop this memory,
your immune memory to a specific protein.
And so they put this dead vaccine,
the virus in your body, and hopefully your immune system
learns a good response to it.
mRNA basically puts the RNA in your body
that codes for that protein.
Your cells then make that protein, and because it's making
a lot more of the protein in a more consistent way, theoretically, the idea is your body develops
a much more robust immune memory and immune response without it overloading your system
with all the immune cells trying to wipe that protein out right away, and so on. The challenge
is you're putting RNA in your body, and we've always been worried about, we don't know what
the side effects of mixing RNA in your body
Would be is it gonna change your DNA?
It's gonna change your genetic makeup. It's gonna cause other delirious side effects
So this technology this capability this knowledge has been around forever
I'm not forever, but for you know long time and the idea has always been we could use RNA in this way
But you know no one wanted it and we've used it in animals and we've used in plants, and we've seen the capabilities of using RNA to do different things like this.
But this is a big leap.
And so, you know, we kind of left forward here
of getting to the point that we felt comfortable
with, you know, RNA is a treatment like this,
and it's working.
So, in theory, in the future, it's actually points out,
you could take any virus or any bacteria,
you could read its DNA, you could do that in an hour,
then you could take chunks of that DNA
and code RNA for it so that your body makes those proteins and theoretically
produce an immune response.
So that's the science of like, how do you create a new vaccine?
I think that's the amazing part is the way it's described, you know, in this article,
is that it's almost like laser printing or 3D printing a vaccine.
It's kind of like the equivalent of that.
You just take the genome of the virus and, you know, boom, you've got the vaccine and then all the other delay
is about human trials and testing of it. But imagine if that there was the next coronavirus
as 10 times as deadly, you know, something that spreads as contagiously as smallpox and
is, you know, as deadly as a bowl or something like
that. We could have a vaccine the next day, you know, like you could, we could have a
very good question.
The challenge, David, would be as we'd have it the next day like we did here, but we
would be going through this three-phase trial. And so I want to take a moment here and
talk to Chimath about something which is challenge trials. In the UK, they will start doing challenge trials for those people who don't know what a challenge trial is.
Essentially, they expose you to something dangerous, i.e. a virus like COVID, and then
they give you the vaccine, and then they give you
the virus. As opposed to how we do a three-phase trial, which is you give the vaccine to 30,000 people
and a placebo to 30,000 and then you come back three months later and see how many people
got infected and it takes time and money.
Whereas challenge trials only take risk on the individuals who are part of it.
A hundred of people in the science community signed a letter and in the UK, they are going
to be doing the first challenge trials in January.
The United States is not doing these. I'm certain China is. Do you think it's a moment in time
where we need to think about the ethics and morality of challenge trials specifically?
And then if so, how do you execute them with that? How do you execute a challenge trial without
it being unfair or too dangerous for people?
Obviously, you're not gonna just go into a prison
and say, hey, anybody wanna get 10 years off the sentence
join the challenge trial, that seems morally bankrupt.
But we let people climb mountains without ropes.
So, right.
Well, I think this speaks to a whole bunch of other issues
that we've talked about on the pod before.
You know, another example of this was section 230
before when we talked about it.
We had a body of law that was created in a moment of time that essentially was about framing and
understanding a specific pathway and a way to use technologies that today look archaic.
And we have to rewrite the laws in order to just compensate and understand for where we are. So
if I, if you double click on trials as an example,
you know, if you have a solution for a rare disease,
you can go in a specific pathway with the FDA
and get breakthrough and fast track approval.
But if you, for example, have, you know,
a novel immunotherapy cancer drug,
you probably, you cannot, you know,
you have to do a multi-phase trial, a typical three-phase trial,
you have to solve for very typical things like fatigue, et cetera, et cetera.
All these things slow progress down.
Now, in a world where we were somewhat flying blind,
40 or 50 years ago, we didn't have things like CRISPR.
We didn't have a real understanding of the genome.
We didn't have delivery mechanisms like CAR-T.
You would say, okay, yeah, we should be really, really careful.
But I would say that the more you know, the more you can ease up on the rules because
you can actually empower people with a lot of information.
And it shouldn't take a disaster scenario for us to be iterative and experimental.
So I think the challenge trial is really important.
I think the concept of them make a lot of sense.
I think a lot of government should employ incentives to figure out who is eligible and why, but
if you're a healthy adult male or female and you want to participate in a trial for whatever
set of reasons, you should be allowed to do so.
And companies that want to run those trials should be allowed to run them.
Similarly, if you want to find a complementary pathway through regulatory agencies to get
drugs to the starting line, you should be able to do those too.
And I think what we have to do is multi-path these compounds going forward, because I think
that's where you accelerate all these technologies
is the ability to actually solve these diseases.
Fribberg, why is it so controversial that a rocket ship company, or people who want
to climb on mountains without ropes, or a rocket ship company, like there are experimental
pilots, we have astronauts, they take unbelievable risk. We send thousands of
troops into harm's way for many different reasons, many of which sadly die, and they volunteer
for those activities. Those people are volunteering and compensated. But when we look at science,
and we look at a challenge trial, scientists say this is morally reprehensible to compensate somebody for taking risk.
When that's exactly what we do in the Army, we do it with police offers and we do it with
astronauts. Help us understand how scientists think so differently than say war.
I don't know if it's scientists as much as it is, you know, regulatory framework, like
some people would call it a nanny state and you know there are things that the nanny state assumes individuals
Don't have the capacity to understand the extent of the potential loss or the or the nature of the risk
This is true for angel investing right you have to be a qualified investor to invest in a private company without appropriate disclosures and
It's true in a lot of other contexts.
To give people the authority to make decisions like this, it seems like, I have no point of
view that I'm making here, but it seems like the government assumes or the elected officials
assume or the populates assumes that there are things that people aren't really equipped
to make decisions on because they can't understand the risk because they're
not qualified. And they get excluded from those activities. But sex is the...
Yeah, sex, how should we reframe them?
I think it's something of risk is a really good principle and it is a way for people to engage in potentially harmful
behaviors.
Just because a behavior is potentially harmful doesn't mean you don't get to do it.
In the United States, you're allowed to do things that are manifestly harmful to yourself
like smoking.
You know, even worse, if you're an organ, you can now do all kinds of hard drugs.
I mean, you can assume that risk for yourself.
So, you know, if in Portland, Oregon, you can now take heroin openly in the street with
no consequence, but you can't participate in a trial that could basically cure a cancer.
That's insane to me.
I'll tell you the script.
I'll tell you the flip side of it.
You're allowed in Nevada to play roulette.
I mean, you the flip side of it. You're allowed in Nevada to play roulette. I mean what the fuck like you know
It's got a negative expected value statistically factually for individuals
But the individual doesn't have the capacity generally speaking that's playing roulette to recognize that every dollar
They're spending at the roulette table is likely going to be to you know
Take it away from them like there's some percentage of that that's gonna be taken away
There's a 5% edge for the house on that game.
And so we make be argument in some cases that people don't have the capacity to understand risk,
but in other cases it's okay for them to not have the capacity to take risk.
And I think that there is this notion of what some people call regulatory capture that probably
encompasses both of these, which is that there is some degree of profiteering that has created
some set of laws that kind of manifestly capture that system in a certain way.
So there are profitable casino enterprises that say let's get people to spend their money in a risky way that they don't understand.
And that becomes the law and then people in the bad are allowed to do that.
There are also pharmaceutical companies that will say we need to have huge regulatory burdens.
So once we make that big investment and we get patent approval and we can lock in that drug, we can charge a lot of money for it. So I would argue to some extent that
the regulatory capture associated with the profiteering that happens on the back end in pharmaceuticals
has in large part driven the structure around risk-taking in drug trials, particularly in the US.
I mean, you can go get whatever drug you want
over the counter in Mexico, right?
I mean, we have a very different system.
It's the most expensive.
It's also happens to be the most expensive in the world.
And the rationale is, well, you're the most protected, right?
Well, the drug infrastructure here has created to your point
because of regulation, the entire, you know,
CRO industry, which is a multi-multibillion dollar industry,
which basically is essentially
a retardant of R&D velocity, right?
Its entire job is to slow things down, create these double-blinded studies.
By the way, and some many of these studies are not even double-blinded.
They're not even actually scientifically rigorous.
They get basically blown apart after the fact.
So what are they really in the business of doing?
It's because they're exploiting a business model that was created by laws, laws that were
written by regulators, regulators that were in the hands of lobbyists.
None of those folks truly understood at the time, but especially today, what's really
possible.
So it does not make sense in the United States of America, just writ large simply put that
you can buy alcohol
and drink yourself into the ground.
Buy cigarettes and smoke yourself the death.
You know, jump on.
Jamble away your money.
Gamble away your money where your negative EV
or openly do elicit drugs,
but you can't participate in a thoughtful trial
back by scientific research.
In fairness, Jamoth, you can get away with smoking fentanyl in San Francisco and Oregon,
but it is illegal to use that plastic straw.
So be careful, folks.
The laws are very clear here.
That plastic straw is going to get you in a lot of trouble.
I don't know what the fine is, but it is...
It wouldn't be so crazy if it were true.
But to your point, like you would actually get arrested for having a
plastic bag, then you will for having ventil in the
set. Just go absolutely. They'll arrest you for the bag that
the fentanyl's in. But Chesa, buddhan will not arrest you for the
fentanyl in the plastic bag. Stacks, we've totally lost
the script, but Chimath sort of bridged this with the 230
discussion of common carrier and hey, you know, we had great intent with this law, but nobody saw
social networks becoming this dominant, addictive, etc. So we need to be more nimble as a government
in changing these regulations, whether it straws, ventanol, challenge trials, or 230.
You wrote a blog post about it.
After we had our 230 discussion,
a lot of people started talking about it.
Have you come to some conclusion as to an exit ramp
for 230 or a way to maintain it without,
throwing the baby with the bath water?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, just kind of make one concluding thought
on the class top.
Of course. So the reason why innovation has happened so fast Yeah, yeah, well, okay, just kind of make one concluding thought on sure of the class top so
The reason why innovations happen so fast on the internet is because of you know one word permissionless
I permissionless innovation nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to go get permission from someone in the government
You know repeatedly that's really what makes a difference you know know, Mark Zuckerberg as a, you know, software and college can just build his project, Larry and Sergey as PhD students can just build their project,
ship it, start, you know, getting users, and they don't have to get the permission of
a regulator, who's incentive, by the way, is just typically not to get fired by approving
something that might rebound on them in some, you know, in some bad way.
And to keep their job. Yeah.
Keep their job.
I mean, imagine if, you know, imagine just to take
like a random example when Elon launched Starman.
And remember when he put the, like,
yeah, he launched the Tesla into space.
And there was like a astronaut in there.
And it was like this kind of really cool moment.
I assume he just did it.
I assume he didn't get permission from anybody to do it.
But could a moment like that have really happened
if he did have to get permission?
No way.
Maybe like making it so we have to through the chain
or we would know what to think of it.
No one would know whether they could be the one to approve it.
And then when if somebody goes wrong,
what if the Tesla comes back down to earth
and it turns into a meteor or whatever,
those scenarios of he running through their heads, nobody would have allowed it.
So when you just let entrepreneurs do things, like good things happen, and that's when
we've had so much progress on the internet.
In some of these other areas, we've had much less progress because what a system like
that selects for is your ability to go lobby regulators as opposed to just building your project and shipping it.
I think that one of the things that maybe happens
is that we are all expecting or maybe some of us
I have definitely some version of a new deal
and some grand bargain.
And I wonder maybe whether the new deal
and our version of FDR over the next,
I don't know, 10th years, is the person that actually
says, guys, we're going to have a wholesale rewrite of the regulatory infrastructure to
account for technology. Just period, we're going to start someplace
reasonable and small and we're going to make common sense reforms, just observing the times
as they exist today. And we're going to go and systematically try to make these
industries a little bit more resilient, a little bit more entrepreneurial, you know, a little bit
less corrupted by regulatory capture and lobbyists and laws that just don't make sense
100 years later. I mean, it'd be great if we could do that. The reason we can't is because how do
you reform the law without the lobbyist getting their fingers in it, right? And the problem is there's no lobbyist for the company that
doesn't exist yet, right? For the founder, for the entrepreneur who's got an idea in their head,
but they haven't built their company yet, there's nobody representing that person in Washington,
right? And what happens is you get new regulations in Washington.
Some agency gets created.
They reach out and touch an industry.
But now every player that's affected
has to create their own lobbying, you know,
or organization.
Not true.
David, what do you think about this?
What if the advocate for the entrepreneur
or the uncreated company and uncreated product
is really the same as just individual civil liberties
and rights.
How are they really that different?
Because really what it's doing and saying,
the entrenched organizational infrastructure
that runs my life gets deconstructed
and then power gets pushed down to be the individual.
That's tantamount to the same thing, I think.
Well, we have seen some pushback.
Well, I mean, there is some silver lining here. If you look right now, the citizens of California,
obviously, people have been fleeing and we've been talking about California and the one-party
system here causing so many problems. But we did have Prop 22 pass and we now have 900,000 people have signed to recall Governor Newsom and these seem
to be some pushback against this sort of nanny state where people can't make decisions.
And then additionally, today the SEC announced that they will allow gig working companies to give stock to employees as part of their
compensation up to 15% of their compensation. In fact, Hester had a pronounced or last name.
It's not Pierce.
You can't pronounce the word Pierce?
Perse.
Perse.
No, it spells Pierce, but Hester Purse
is worth following on the Twitter,
H-E-S-T-E-R-P-E-I-R-C-E.
Hester Purse, I had her on my pockets
as we can start up, and she,
they're really getting aggressive
in changing the accreditation law.
So anybody's gonna be able to be an accredited investor,
it just becomes sophisticated
through a testing mechanism.
And now they wanna let gig workers get... But by the way, sorry.
Here's a perfect example of a regulatory body and infrastructure that actually has changed
with the times.
I think the SEC, in fact, I think we maybe we talked about this a little bit the last
time.
I actually think one of the best Trump appointees has been Jake Layton.
And I actually think Jake Layton has done an incredibly good job.
And a lot of what he's done is just deconstruct this kind of nanny state and say people can
become educated and make good decisions for themselves.
And because it's in some, it's in an area that's relatively benign, i.e. investing, people
kind of just let it happen without a lot of pushback and everybody kind of generally supports
it. Democrats supported, Republicans supported, and the outcomes are really good to your point Jason
Which is in a world of zero rates. How do you expect any just you know average ordinary middle American who just works a decent job to
Save for their retirement to actually make enough money while they're gonna have to get educated they're going to have to find a way of putting their money to work and in
In assets that have a better return which literally was illegal up until very recently Yeah, I mean you were having this you were systematically letting the rich stay rich and you were blocking the poor from having an opportunity to advance
Like what if Apple store employees could get their paycheck and say I want to take my paycheck
70% cash, 30%
restrict its stock units at this discount. Like we could let Apple Store employees
make a million dollars after five or 10 years of working there, 10, 20 years
from now, and have generational wealth change, David, it's actually a head
comment. Well, I was going to ask your math, do you think this type of deregulation
is going to happen in the Biden administration?
Yes.
Because what you're discussing is like a very really kind of classical Republican or Reaganite
idea, right?
I agree.
And I think what's going to happen is you're going to continue to see deregulation in areas
that are benign and non-controversial.
So I think the SEC, the FCC, I think all of these places you'll see movement.
I think you'll probably actually see a lot more choice and deregulation effectively in Medicare and CMMI.
I think those places will move first. And then I think it'll be up to some leader
politician to then really rally the troops on some higher order bits. And one of the
biggest higher order bits would be sort of around the broader healthcare infrastructure,
social security, education, education is probably the biggest one. That's like the, it's
just too sacrosanct for the Democrats. that's that's like the it's just
two sacrosanct for the democrats you cannot get elected without the teachers and so
unless there is a startup that completely disrupts teacher pay and teacher compensation
then the public school teachers unions will continue to dominate a lot of the
federal and state policy for the worst, unfortunately.
Freeberg, if you had one regulation or series of regulations or regulatory body, you would
most like to see change for the good of humanity and Americans and the rest of the humans on
the planet.
What would it be?
Probably help.
Yeah, it's probably the drug process, the drug development process. and the rest of the humans on the planet, what would it be? I probably helped.
Yeah, it's probably the drug process, the drug development process.
You know, there was a gene editing program that ran and someone died.
This was, what year was this?
97, 99.
And they basically halted all gene editing programs for 13 years.
You know how many people died during that time?
It was fucking, it's a crazy, crazy fact where, you know, the one death is too many rule.
You know, basically doesn't take into account the kind of broader implications on the downside.
So, yeah, I think that one's probably pretty important.
But, you know, there's a good interview.
If you want to hear some interesting thoughts, and again, not trying to be an advocate for
any political point of view, but Charles Koch goes on Tim Ferriss.
Have you guys heard this podcast?
I've listened to it, yeah.
Yeah, and he highlights a couple of really you guys heard this podcast? Interview. I've listened to it. Yeah.
And he highlights a couple of really good examples about this regulatory capture problem.
If you're poor and you want to become a hairdresser and start a salon or go work in a salon and
make money cutting hair, the cost and the burden for you to go get the necessary approvals
from the cosmetician association is to burdensome for the average person who's
poor and needs to become a hairdresser.
And it's just insane that you can't just go be a hairdresser.
The government needs to ensure that people don't get bad haircuts.
It's worse, it's worse.
You don't need a license to be the engineer that writes the machine learning code
that either drives a car autonomously
or that helps propel disinformation
and a social network,
but you do need to have a license
to give someone a buzz cut.
Oh, that's a bingo statement right there.
Yeah, I mean, in fairness,
I'm checking out Saxx's new haircut here
and I'm kind of thinking, so there should be more regulation. They're my
I was practicing without a license
You work
Yeah, I'm fine.
So we can't see the result of this.
You can't see what it is.
Saks, you're so white and pale, you're blending it to the background shade.
It's impossible to see where your skin ends, your hair starts and the shade.
But I feel like the regulatory,
if you think about the framework,
it extends into education too.
Like you can't go get an entry-level job
without a quote unquote college degree.
How fucking useful is a college philosophy degree
to someone that's trying to get an entry-level job
working at X, Y, or Z bank, right?
Like it's a bit absurd that the structure is set up
so that there are, whether it's government or not,
but there is effectively a hurdle,
which is this alternative to regulatory capture,
but it's like call it embedded system capture.
Like, there is a significant kind of hurdle
that you have to get through the cost a lot
and the point of entry has gotten too high for most
and it really stalls things out and it's going to cause more damage than good.
Well, and it's also been completely disconnected from the reality of your employment potential.
People are going into debt for $200,000 in a liberal arts degree that provides no scale
that is.
Do we all agree that makes sense?
Does anyone in this group argue for needing a bachelor's degree for everyone?
No. I don't think I think it's useless.
What do you guys think of ISAs?
Income sharing agreements. These have become kind of Lambda school does them.
A bunch of other schools. David, you saw a startup we just invested in that's doing them.
And I think you like them at the demo day we did with Kraft.
Maybe this idea is who should take the risk for an education? And when you look at an
ISA and income sharing agreement, what they're saying is the school takes the risk. They let you
come to school for free. They give you what would be the equivalent of, let's say, a $15,000
coding camp or growth marketer risk. Then you pay double that amount over five, six six seven years as a percentage of your income
But if you don't get income if you don't break 50k a year
You don't have to pay it back and if you decide to go back to school or your income drops below 50
You don't have to do it. Can you imagine if a college had to make that promise?
They should do it. They should start in college sports, but they should do it
Imagine you you know Duke basically went recruited kids and said, listen, we're going to pay you to come to Duke. We're
going to get you educated. We're going to teach you how to play basketball
better than anybody else. And we're going to take 5% of your future earnings.
Yes or no? You're not going to have to go to boosters. You're not going to have
to take money. You're not going to have to do any of this stuff on the side. But
just be your best. Learn to play the game. We'll get your reasonable education. We'll
give you a good infrastructure. And we take 5% of the backend with the cap
So you could cap the upside right or maybe there's maybe there's no cap and and but why do we always have to care about all of this like it's like
You know, it's like whatever
Maybe it's 5% for the rest of your life. You're gonna pay the government 50% you get nothing in return
So if you pick 5% and you get coach K to teach how to shoot a jumper. It's better than that
Right, so why why isn't it possible? And I remember how people had this unbelievably paternalistic allergic reaction to income sharing agreements when they
were first talked about. They called them indentured servitude and they can say.
They're different to slavery. And it was like, oh my God. So insulting to.
But a different thing is not.
Signing a contract with an agent to represent you when you first start out in any industry
music or or sports or
uh, film or whatever one you could sign a agency agreement where the agent is your rep for 10, 20 years, right?
I mean, some of those agreements can have long tails on them and that's effectively the same.
You know, look at what's an even race.
I had a cap. Look at look at uh, we can talk about this in a second, but like, you know,
did you see what happened with Chel the last couple of days where?
Let's go
Did you watch the video? I loved it. Yeah, the video is incredible video is incredible
So the the quick story on this is shapel basically did
He had a request he went to Netflix and he said take down shapel show Netflix took it down and
He did a little stand-up. It's on his Instagram. It's like 18 minutes. It's fabulous as most
Sheep Hell stuff. Peek Sheep Hell. And he basically told this story, which essentially the punchline is like, you know,
He signed a contract where he just got completely fucked. And he's like, this is happening every single day in so many markets.
And so the idea that then you have actually a different market, which disrupts
something by actually creating transparency and something reasonable is all of a sudden
completely immoral, makes no sense to me. So there's abuses happening all the time. That
is what the contract that Chappelle signed was indentured servitude. He doesn't even have
the rights to his name. He cannot be his name and likeness, right? Yeah, if you write a great,
so if Dave should still show again,
he's at the call of the DC show.
But this is perfect.
Somebody owns his name.
What the fuck?
But this is the opportunity in all medium,
simplifying forever.
This is a perfect tieback to the earlier statement about,
you know, do you have the appropriate kind of understanding
of the risk you're taking or the benefit that you're getting?
I think Kanye has been doing this whole thing about he doesn't own the
masters to his music originally, right? At the moment that he signed that
contract when he signed over all the masters, you know, the master recordings and
all the future revenue rights to his music, he was getting paid a ton of money in
his mind at that time. He said, oh my gosh, I'm getting whatever it was. Let's
say it's $5 million. I'm getting $5 million. The most amount of money I've
ever seen,
it is absolutely worth me giving over the masters
of this music and the future royalty rights
to this music for 12 songs or whatever it is
for me to get $5 million today.
And I can live an amazing life
and it will change everything for me.
Who is to say that he was not, you know,
of the appropriate sound, mind, and understanding
to decide in that moment to take that $5 million
and give up all future royalties to his music.
Well, Chappelle's argument was the people who are in that ecosystem or all friends are all
working together and they've commoditized the artist and they collude to do this kind
of up side limiting deals.
And I think what makes Silicon Valley so special is that we collude the other direction.
We want people to have equity participation.
And we want the social contractors Silicon Valley is,
I'm giving you equity.
I hope your penny stock becomes worth $1,500
and that you create multi-generational wealth
and you become an angel investor.
But I don't know, look, if I'm an angel investor
or wanna be an angel investor,
and some
shmo tricks me into investing in his shitty company
and i just lose twenty thousand dollars but i didn't know how to determine
whether that company was shity or not because i've never done investing before
really my book is it for the government to regulate that circumstance and say
you know what you need to be a quote unquote qualified investor to be able to
discern a good company for a bad company or bullshit from not
and the same for these contracts, right?
Like, I mean, so we're making the argument, I think, for the regulatory framework for
preventing people from being able to have freedom of choice.
And I think, like earlier, the case was made, like, people should be able to have freedom
of choice at any point.
Why should the government kind of step in and make a decision for me?
I think that they're, I'm not advocating for government intervention.
My only point is that there are morally
reprehensible things that are happening today
using contracts and that, you know,
something like an income sharing agreement
actually writes the ship in so many ways.
That's definitely the burden of capitalism.
Ultimately, it evolves to that right where like,
oh, you're sick, you have cancer, pay me a million dollars.
I'll give you this truck
So
Hollywood's a little bit of its own beast where there's all these gatekeepers and the gatekeepers are always trying to get control over
You know the creative product and so yeah like you know signing contracts with those sharks is always a dangerous thing to do
I
Think Silicon Valley is very different. We have much more
of a culture of equity. I think the income share agreements are much more in that vein.
And I think they're a great idea for like any trade that demonstrably increases your earning
power, right? So the beauty of Lambda School is they pay for you to get an education being
a coder. It then increases your salary and they get a piece of that.
That's like a win-win for everybody.
I think where this goes, if these ISAs are successful,
is that every trade that's valuable
will get its own ISA type school,
and then that gets peeled out of a university education.
So what's left for colleges to do,
is basically all the stuff that doesn't
have value. They're museums. They're basically like these monasteries again, right? They go back
to being monasteries, not places where you get skills. We need to set, we need to celebrate vocational
capability. Because I think like, you know, we have, we have so celebrated this mythical bachelor's
degree. And it just means fucking nothing. It doesn't really learn a trade,
and that's just as frankly,
that should be as respected or more,
but in the American culture,
you don't do that right now.
I've never understood that.
If you go, for example,
to different countries around the world,
Europe's a good example actually of this,
because it's the closest analog
in terms of quality of living to America,
there's a real celebration of people who choose vocational tradecraft because there's an entire
educational infrastructure that you can onboard yourself into, you can become a skilled person
and you can have a really good decent life.
And there's pride in the work.
And there's pride in that work.
And in America, you know, you covet this piece of paper.
The piece of paper is really just a scam that allows, you know, administrators to basically pay themselves millions of dollars
and or run an asset management business as a the Trojan horse of that purpose. It just doesn't
make any sense. And so, you know, I don't know, I just think it's, I just think the most amazing
thing about these companies, I've been digging into them
because I'm looking for more to invest in.
And these companies that are, the trade schools
that are based on themselves on ISIS,
and there are ones who are doing welding
and plumbing and all kinds of different things.
And there are ISA platforms that are providing ISAs
to any school that wants them in doing
like the sort of AWS of ISIS.
Anyway, this firm told me was inside of one of these trade schools,
they spend 50% of their time on placement, 50% on education.
And that out of college, they spend 99.x amount of time on the education
and less than 1% on placement, which kind of attracts.
I mean, when we went to college,
I don't know if it's changed much,
but the Career Services Center was like this two-person office
like in the worst part of campus.
And they don't, when you're doing an ISA,
if you accept more people who are unqualified
and can't aren't ready for the education
or not motivated for it, it works against you
because they're not going to pay back the
isa. So you then get sharper. You know, you sharpen the blade of who gets accepted.
You start accepting the right people. These colleges, they would accept anybody who
would come in and take the loans. That was your qualifier. Is did you pass your
loan? The isa is a service idea is a brilliant idea. I would invest in that.
I like that idea as an investment way better
than running one of these schools.
You know, that's basically showing the ISOs themselves.
But how amazing is that, that we live in a country
where people are willing to, you know, as a movement now,
people are willing to fund your education,
because they know it's gonna increase your earning power
and then they'll get paid on the back end. That's like fantastic. And like that's all like
happening, all that innovation is happening right now without the government needing to get involved
or got a big government loan program. And the historical laugh. People aren't getting settled. People
aren't getting settled with all the certitude. Literally like the boxes in the New York times of
the world and. Yeah, I mean, it's for servitude is having a $250,000 debt that you've got to pay down.
You can never get rid of in bankruptcy for the rest of your life.
That's real indentured, server.
I think the problem is that, you know, East Coast left leaning editorial publications.
They have to themselves justify their $190,000
Bachelor philosophy from Oberlin College.
So, you know, if you take that, you know,
you know, Schema, Oberlin is the number one listener base we have on this podcast.
Yeah, you just lost.
Yeah.
But you're right, once you've taken out every valuable trade and move them from a university
where you got to pay $100,000 a year to an ISO where it costs you nothing. Like what's left? Is this going to be fuel
studies? Philosophy? Oh yeah, people say. Intersectionality, intersectionality
steps. They'll be studying the past. They'll be studying the past. What a
disaster. Collapse upon itself. All right, as we wrap up here, let's just take a
moment to think about what some people are calling the big reset.
It's Thanksgiving.
We have a change in management in the country,
which is obviously polarizing.
So I'll put that aside, but I think what's happened
with these vaccines and science is truly miraculous.
And let's face it, a lot of people
is a lot of pain in suffering this year.
A lot of people lost their jobs,
a lot of people lost their restaurants, a lot of people lost their restaurants,
a lot of people are suffering from mental illness.
Some people are having to take care of their kids and get to know them.
I mean, it's been hard for a lot of people, sorry about that sex.
I wasn't doing that.
David, do you know your children's names now?
Yeah.
I do now.
David, what's it like to spend three hours with one of your children?
He's got flashcards in front of him right now.
There are pictures on the back, the neighborhood list.
I think it's like a good one.
That's a brutal.
So anyway, I was trying to be sincere.
The kids would even occasionally run into my office during COVID, you know?
Yeah, and they want to talk to you and hug you and show affection.
They're crazy.
They're like, excuse me, sir.
Who are you on your father?
Actually, I am. I thought I was just working for my office and all these kids show up and tell me it's their home. So
Well, we I just wanted to announce to the all-in audience that we have upgraded Friedberg and Saks's chips just last week
Chimath and I pushed the update for the joy
1.7 update and how's it been going to the two day?
It's now that you have a third emotion.
We now have emotion of joy.
Do not use it for, it feels good and warm inside body.
Do not use it all in same day, spread it out over a month.
Hey, David, did you think that Trump actually resigned
two days ago?
Was that the equivalent of a like or the concession tweet? It was acceptance of you're talking about when
they he authorized the GSA does to release transition funds to buy it in. Yeah I
mean that that that was his concession right there. That's that's basically
what you're gonna get out of him. That's his acceptance of the of the
election result. So after anger he is is now went into bargaining. And then he was depressed and now he's accepting.
Well, what basically happened is you had Rudy and Sydney Powell and that legal team going to court
to try to challenge all these, the whack back. Yeah, try to go out to court to challenge all these rulings. I think Rudy was like
one in 35, meaning I think he won one ruling and lost 35, so it was going very, very poorly.
So like you versus Alan Keating, go ahead. Yeah, but that's a whole separate story we'll get into.
But the thing that really like ended it was when Sydney Powell came out with this elaborate conspiracy theory that actually Trump lost the
election because communist code writers had effectively, you know, infected the software that was
running the election. And somehow Hugo Chavez was behind this, even though he's been dead for seven
years. Hugo, that is again. And the Republican governor of Georgia
and Secretary of State were in on it.
Anyway, it was so wild and crazy
that basically the narrative just cracked.
And so then you had like Steve Schwartzman come out
and then sort of the Republican business community
and Pat Tumey, Republican Center from Pennsylvania
came out and they all just said, look, this is ridiculous.
And so that was the moment, I think, at which this narrative that the election was stolen,
kind of, cracked is. And I think she did everyone a favor by being so off the reservation
that it just brought the whole thing to a meltdown.
Sydney Powell always, whenever I see her,
I always, I just think that she's one second away
from her dentures flying out of her mouth
and hitting the camera.
I mean, that's your crazy aunt.
That's the crazy aunt that Thanksgiving like she.
She said she was gonna release the crackin'
and I guess she meant the-
I think she meant smoke the crackin'.
I was running down Rudy's face.
I think it was the hair dye running down Rudy's face.
Yeah, that's exactly, that's the cracky. Rudy's the crack. I mean, I'm glad that it was a total meltdown. It was a total shit show.
I'm glad the GOP finally after Trump's defeat decided with 55 days left to go that they would
take a stand against. Well, let me let me tell you what I think happened now. What let me tell
what I think is going to happen now is I think that this New York Times
article, we talked about the top of the show about the fact that this Operation Warp Speed
that it was a big success, I think that the best narrative for Trump, if he wants to maintain
this idea that he was robbed, is not that he was sort of legally robbed with fake votes
or fake voting software, but rather just said if these pharma companies
have put out the news a week earlier,
it would have immediately changed.
And I think he has an amazing story there.
I would agree with that.
Yeah, and it's kind of like, you know,
when you have like a major sporting event,
there's like a bad call by the rest,
and all the fans basically said,
oh, we were robbed, well, you can't get that result overturned.
It is what it is.
You lost, but you have a talking point forever
that you lost.
I mean, if you go to St. Louis or whatever
and you mentioned the thing.
There's an asterix.
Yeah, there's an asterix.
Yeah, you go to St. Louis.
Yeah, when they suspended Dremont.
When the National LeBron Association
suspended Dremont in that series.
There are all these sporting events with asterix is by them. I mean, like, you know,
if you go to St. Louis and mention the name Don Denkenger, you know, people will know what you're
talking about. The I think the car is lost. The St. Louis car also lost the 85 world series
because of the first base on Pires call, or at least that's their view of it. And so I think what Trump can do is say that, look,
we were robbed because we'd never got credit for the vaccine.
Now, if I do think the economy is going to bounce back
really strong next year because of the vaccines, right?
I think you've got to say that if these vaccines end COVID
in the next three, four, five months,
2021's going to be a great year. So if Trump hands Biden these vaccines end COVID in the next three, four, five months, 2021's gonna be a great year.
So if Trump hands Biden these vaccines
and the economy does well next year,
but something bad happens between now and four years from now,
he'll say, I handed this guy everything on a solar platter,
he screwed it up, and that'll be his narrative for four years from now.
Good, good happen, I'm just saying.
What do you think about,
what do you guys think about the pick so far?
Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary is great.
Thank God, he's not a lizard boy.
He's nice and boring.
He's nice and boring.
He's really good.
Well, I do think the biggest challenge we're gonna face
is this monetary policy issue.
I mean, the dollar is, you know, in decline,
we printed 30% of the US dollars in circulation
in the last six months.
And everyone's cheering that the Dow is at 30,000.
It's like, well, you know, this 30% more dollars.
So everything's gonna inflate.
So I think there's a lot of work to do.
It's great to have someone sitting in that seat
who understands economic policy really clearly and the tight and monetary policy.
Yeah, I think the picks so far have been really, really top notch.
Tony Blinken, friend of a couple of ours for Secretary of State.
He's a star.
Yellen's a dove, which I think is really good for just, you know, you guys know the chief
of staff.
Sax, do you know who this guy, he's been like Biden's aide for a long time, kind of,
is that deal?
Ron Flain, he was a founder of Revolution with Steve Case.
Yeah, he comes from a venture back in which he's friend.
All of Biden's picks have been people
who've been long time washing hands
who he's had personal relationships with for a long time.
He really seems to value that personal loyalty.
And they've also been kind of, you know,
nice and boring, safe,
experience, peace. I think he's delivering on kind of what he promised to be, which is
a president we can forget about. Yeah, this tone, tone it down. That's a lot of care. Take
your president. Yeah. What do we do without Trump to talk about on spot guess? Because it's been about
34%. We're going to need a new topic to rotate in here
We might need to put in little Netflix as we wrap here
What are you thankful for and what are you most looking forward to next year?
vis-a-vis just
It's been a rough year. I mean it's been nice for people's equity portfolios, of course
But it's really what do you hope for America, for humanity, for
yourselves, your family, for friends?
You know, what are you thankful for?
And I'll let you freeberg.
It looks like your processing unit has delivered a result.
So let's hear it.
The emotion bank has been cleared.
That bank has been cleared. That was so good.
So, I look, I don't think that this year was any cup of tea for anyone.
So I think like everyone, you kind of value your friendships and your family.
So, it's been a year, you know, going into COVID, I was in the office every day, spending
more time at home, being closer to my children.
I know their names, by the way, SX.
I'll teach you how to learn them.
It's been actually really special being at home a lot and being with the family a lot
and realizing how much that stuff matters and how being close to everyone matters.
Because when you're in the run of the life before you get knocked back and just put everything
in perspective, you miss those moments.
That's been really special and important to me this year
in a really kind of personal way.
And just having friendships, right?
I mean, it's great for us to all be able to talk
as we do every day and have people you can kind of connect with
even if you're not sitting in person.
I do think that everyone realizes they need that.
So anyway, it's been a insightful year.
Money aside, I was fucking terrorized and it started this year about money and the end of the year.
Here you go.
It is. It's all a fucking roller coaster.
So the first company and now you got the second IP on congratulations,
Mosul. Sacks has your processing unit overloaded with this question.
Or are you going to be a particular?
Yeah, I know. I, I, I agree with, with all the things that Friberg said.
The flip side of working from home all this time is you do get to spend a lot more time with the kids.
I personally have, I like this shift to remote work where I can do a meeting from anywhere.
You know, you don't have to go to the office. That's been kind of nice upside, I think.
I think.
I think we probably all learn how self-sufficient we can be.
I have learned how to give myself a haircut.
Apparently you guys don't think,
done a very good job with it, but.
But it's better that you have your long hair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, but look, I mean, I'm thankful for,
you know, knock on wood, we all have our health and,
you know, and weirdly, the economy is still in value, still doing great, technology is doing great,
still the future. And I think the country is, even though COVID is kind of at its worst right now,
I do think it's going to get rapidly better as soon as these vaccines come to market. So I do think we'll work, I do think 2021 will be a much, much better year.
Jamaf.
In this really crazy way, I actually now am pretty thankful for what I've learned during the
pandemic. I mean, I wish we didn't have to go through it, but
I think that it was the most psychologically stressful period of my life, just to be so
isolated from everybody. And I learned something about myself recently, which is that
in psychology, it's called repetitive compulsion, which is sort of like, you know,
you repeat the sins of your father or in this way, you know, I repeat these tired ways of behavior
from my teens and my twenties that were just unproductive. And in the day-to-day life of just running around
and going to meetings as David said, like flying around, go to a meeting, go to the office, go here, go there.
You can make a lot of excuses for shitty behaviors that you carry with you.
So what I'm really thankful for is in this lockdown, I've been forced to really find
the things that I don't really like about myself and try to fix them. So, you know, I'm really thankful for that,
because I think hopefully everybody has something positive
to look at at the end of this,
and that's definitely one thing for me.
It's very touching, and actually quite appropriate
as we wrap here because SACs and Freebroke and I had some things
we don't like about you, Chimath, that we wanted to bring up.
So you got to have to more off the list already.
So I'm going to go for more to go.
It's good you're doing this work.
We were planning an intervention for the end of the pod, but you kind of open the door.
So here we go.
You know, I'll wrap up with you saying, you know, family and friends are the obvious things that you appreciate
at this time. I am thankful also for the hope that we've seen from what we can do collectively
as a society. When we put our minds to something, warp speed comes to mind. These frontline workers,
I mean, we really maybe have seen what a global, a challenging problem being
solved can do. And hopefully that can translate into something like nuclear disarmament, a sustainable
energy, global warming, et cetera. And so I think on a macro level, the most macro level
is the species. Us humans as the species have now had an enlightening moment, just like
world wars. and you know,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki kind of changed people's perspective of the entire world.
Jane and I were talking about that at the other day, how people looked at the world differently
after those horrific bombs went off.
I think after this bomb goes off, we're going to look at the world and say, hey, we can
solve problems, right?
And maybe we can be proactive about that.
And then finally, I think for the people suffering from mental illness, who maybe I was callous and made fun of,
or maybe just didn't relate to, I can relate to now
because I have felt depressed, I have felt anxious,
I have felt exhausted from this, right?
And it's the first time in the 49 years
I've been on the planet that I ever would say I felt depressed.
I didn't understand what that meaning was
when Saks would tell me how depressed he was, I just never hit me. I'm joking. He never said that. But it's a good
joke. I am joking. But I think for people suffering from mental, let's get help and talk to
people. And I think this really opened my eyes to that. And of course, this podcast,
an offering to...
This podcast was the best thing that one of the best things in my life that came out of
This whole period. I think for me too
And you know, I've heard that from a lot of the people who listened to it and I'm sure if sacks and freedberg had a fourth emotion
They would they would agree with me. I think this podcast has been doing nothing but costing me money
You know
I painted you at the Trump support. God knows how many tears I've lost.
You are not a Trump support.
Yeah, God knows how many deals I've lost
because Jason Q. Strollen is a Trump supporter.
And then on top of it, I get kind of out
of the only good, bestie deal.
If you wouldn't fuck.
I thought at least I'd get this bestie deal.
And you guys come me out of it.
Okay, listen, I just want to be clear.
Sacks is a conservative and a Republican. He is not a Trump supporter. He did not vote for Trump. This time he'd not vote for Trump. Last time he does not support Trump's behavior.
You can't know what he's voting, dude. Sorry, but he told me he didn't vote for him.
Well, he did. Which one of us, which one of us is gonna try to hire Jared Kushner as a general partner?
No, definitely not.
If you are saying most likely, because now you're reinforcing the theme at that.
Actually, if you had to pick, actually, if you had to pick a venture fund that is most like the higher
Jared Kushner as a GP.
And Jason, don't do anything for a place.
Are they still around?
Founders fun.
No.
I don't think Peter wants to share the spotlight.
Okay.
I go in Dresan.
They'll do anything to get a press release.
I don't think that guy needs a fun to go work at.
True.
You help just go buy another.
No, he did get three Middle East peace deals done.
So, but, you know.
Who's got it?
Actually, come on.
By the way, by the way, I mean talking about inheriting incredible dividends, but is it the most incredible thing that
You can come in and get Middle East peace done, but if you really unpack Middle East peace
Do you think that Middle East peace would have happened if the cost of solar was not cheaper than the cost of oil?
Honestly, be like if if you if you didn't see an end in
sight to oil, do you think that the Middle East pays down a lot?
I don't think so.
Well, I know what you're saying, which is that if the Middle East wasn't becoming less
strategically relevant to us, that creates degrees of freedom, I think.
But, yeah.
That's had profound benefits for Silicon Valley too, right?
Like, I mean, all the same money that went into the Vision Fund and the money from Qatar
and the money from like all the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East has funded a lot of venture
funds, has gone into direct late-stage rounds and a lot of companies and it's really been a great
boom for Silicon Valley. People can make fun of the company is getting overfunded and the nonsense
it's gone on all they want for the glory.
Money coming in, it filters out into more angel investing,
it filters out into more venture LPs,
and it ultimately gives a benefit to the ecosystem.
So I think that the damage to oil has been great
for Silicon Valley.
The most incredible dividend of climate change is peace.
It's like, it is made radical Islam, a failed startup, you know, a hyped series A that
couldn't raise its series B. It's made, you know, sworn enemies over thousands of years
cooperate together, all for what reason? Because you got to pull the oil out of the ground
now and monetize it, because otherwise the cost of wind and you have to diversify, because you have to diversify because otherwise the cost of win and the cost of solar is going
to make pulling the oil out of the ground economically and feasible within three or four
years.
I mean, you already can do it.
That's what it took.
They took Saudi Arabia public.
They started selling off the shares and they invested that capital in tech and other
stuff around the world.
And that's it's been helpful, but there is another factor at work, which is the fear of
Iran is now greater than on the part of Saudi Arabia and Israel. Their fear of Iran is now greater
than whatever mutual hostility that used to have. And so it's kind of bringing people together
that way. But you got to give Christian credit for still getting those deals done. You know, no one thought he could get do it. I remember I was blocking him.
I agree. He's not a moron and he's not a piece of the opposite of an abrasive guy and he's
very thoughtful and apparently very, uh, he has no personally, but he's supposed to be very smart.
I'm sure that wherever he ends up next, he's going to do very well and he's going to get
invited to be in a lot of places. Yeah.
No, it's clear he did a very good job on the Middle East stuff.
Yeah.
By the way, how crazy is it that Trump delivers on hottest economy ever, peace in the Middle
East, and three vaccines for coronavirus, and he's still lost?
Who would have thought that?
Yeah, well, it does go to tell you what people think of character.
Yeah.
Character man or something. He's not going to wait, but. He's going to tell you what people think of character. Yeah, character back or something.
You're like, wait, but.
He's not the little...
He's not the little...
He's not the little...
He's not the little...
He's not the little...
If he acted normal sacks, he could actually take those victories.
If he stopped the personal attacks, if he stopped the grifting, he would have won.
He could have been...
He actually could have been more than one.
If he...
He could have been rated.
If he could...
He could...
He could...
Exactly what I was thinking.
If he came in in 2016, Com Cool and collected with a team
where there was a dial down the insecurity and dial up
sort of the intensity of actually calling people out
for not passing progressive change,
he would have been elected in a landslide.
People would have said, well, on the way in,
we were afraid, but after four years,
the guy actually-
He could have been magnanimous, is what you're saying.
Yeah, and it was a real missed opportunity for him.
I still think much of Trump is he's a WWE superstar,
and that's what people voted for.
It's why Jesse Ventura got elected,
Governor of Minnesota, it's why Arnold Schwarzenegger
got elected Governor of California.
The average person that's looking at that guy versus,
the old dude that doesn't talk and you know saying some weird stuff about policy
It's like oh man that guy looks awesome. Let's put him in office like this is gonna be fucking fun
And if he turned it down when he got in office he'd be much less appealing. I think to a lot of people
I think it's that my caricature of himself that makes him so so appealing
Then I'd like to go I'd like to go on the record with my 15 year projection then,
which is that the rock is gonna run for president.
I think the Iran situation, just to put that in perspective, David,
if you look at the age distribution on the chart, I just put on the chat,
it is just extraordinary how young that country is the median age is,
I think, 20 or 29 years old, And they're barely holding onto power there.
And it is going to flip into a much more progressive society than it is now.
They are barely holding on.
When you look at how many 25 year olds and 30 year olds are on that country who are
drinking and watching TV and the internet and they're watching porn and they're gambling
I'm sure and buying Bitcoin and doing all this crazy stuff.
That country is barely holding on.
It's going to be a crazy civil war.
And I just hope they don't have nuclear bombs when that's a war.
Guys, guys, like being like extremist, it's just like, it's just a bad product market
fit now.
You know, it's just like not worth it.
There's no money to fund it.
Nobody cares that much anymore.
Everybody's moved on.
Low NPS score.
Yeah.
Would you recommend extremism to a friend or family member?
Two.
All right.
This has been another all- in podcast for Bestie C,
the Rainman David Sacks and the Queen of Kinwa on his coming out party
today IPO coming up for Metro Mile.
Congratulations to Friedberg.
Congratulations to Jamoth on the pipe.
Sacks and I we're gonna have to figure out a way to lick our wounds
and wet our beaks.
Let's put our thinking caps on and over the break find a deal.
We can exclude these two from.
We got it we got to get it early get 30% of a company and then we got to have Chimouth,
Spac at in Freeberg do the late stage deal with all this Metro mile money.
And we'll see you all next time on the All in Pocus.
That was fucking great best when you got you guys want to see something funny you guys see
that video my wife just sent me?
That's my dog taking a shit on your driveway sex.
Oh man.
Oh man.
Where is it?
I want to see that douche.
I just put it in.
It's a code 13.
Oh my god.
There's only one person who has a code 13.
Is that smock?
Can you take a shit on his Model X?
Oh my god.
That's unbelievable.
And we all have code 13.
Boop.
Boop.
Oh no, everybody.
Boop.
We rolled over the credits.
Ha ha.