All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E27: The Great Inflation Debate, Amazon gets spicy on Twitter, rethinking supply chains & more
Episode Date: March 27, 2021Sacks' Inflation Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vBeh__Kyf57jfhWPOQXaU64VdLaowQBAHwXjBzuVSPs/edit?usp=sharing Follow the besties: 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 Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Referenced in the show: Tweets https://twitter.com/davehclark/status/1375045409542823939 https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1374901873484967938 https://twitter.com/Mat_Yarger/status/1374212541367345155 https://twitter.com/Mat_Yarger/status/1375163739759116297 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1375488265915002883 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1375244032230625281 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1375283834711777282 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1375484528559448064 Bitclout https://rb.gy/sjtjzy Show Notes: 0:00 Besties get ready to rumble & discuss recent Twitter polls 7:25 Debating inflation, Sacks presents his deck 37:20 Amazon social team goes on the offensive, Facebook's regulatory capture play around content moderation 48:42 Suez Canal, rethinking our centralized infrastructure & supply chain risk management, infrastructure bill concerns 1:00:18 Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for $10B, Sacks on SaaS exits from Yammer experience 1:02:49 Poker talk, going to the movies, Disneyland, EU incompetence
Transcript
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Hey, everybody, hey, everybody, welcome to the all in podcast with us today again.
The queen of Ken, why David freeberg David sacks the rainman himself and of course the dictator
here, Chimoff. And let's get ready. It's time. Chimoff and sacks. Here it comes, everybody.
And sacks here it comes everybody
Sacks is ready in the red corner
Representing Richard Nixon
And rich people everywhere
In the rainman sacks
And in the blue corner representing... ...Helbee J.
They underserved the forgotten, the underdogs,
the woke left,
Chamoff, Polly, Hapa, Tio!
What you're winners, ride? Rainman, David, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South, South And I will also be representing John F. Kennedy who said a rising, who said a rising tide
lifts all boat. And maybe even some Bill Clinton Bill Clinton don't forget
Don't forget
The left and the right yeah
Bill Clinton did a great job. He ended he ended the welfare set
All right, so here we go folks
in in show
Housekeeping we do need to point out that we've been running some polls. The fans of the show
have been running polls. And I don't even know why I'm bringing this up because I got barbecued in
them. But we have three polls we need to share with the audience from Twitter. The first is if you
could have just one of the all-impot besties to mentor you and your startup growth, who would it
be and why? Looks like Rainman, you ran away with that one with 39% the dictator with 34. Queen of Kenwak coming
at a 17 and Ubers, there are more than faster came in with the measly 8%. I will tell you,
this is why 83% of startups fail. They choose the wrong mentor. Perfect.
So I was I was proud to win this one, but the truth is, so
Trimoth was slightly ahead. And then I put my thumb on the scale by retweening the pole,
because obviously my followers are more likely to vote for me. So then I shot ahead and I kept
real quiet, because I didn't want to mock retweet it to his 1.2 million followers. And if he
had done that, he probably would have blown me out of the water,
but I kept real quiet until the time elapsed.
And then I shared it with the group.
Nobody keeps a track of followers,
but it's actually closer to 1.5.
No.
The only person who knows your followers
better than you, Jamal, is Phil Helmuth. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha the other side of this story. If you could have just one of the all-emphod besties moderate your podcast, it would choose. And it turns out the dictator, 31% to my 30.6% of full,
1% more than me. I came in second, world's best wingman, and rainman, 21%, queen of king
wah, 16%. And then most importantly, which bestie would
you want in your, on your side in a bar fight?
I will say it's Chimalt smooth, velvety voice that ran away for him here.
Hmm, thank you.
Yes.
I think, I think, you know, I think the audience is just trying to hurt Jason.
I think we're just trying to hurt Jason.
That was it.
That was it.
Like, Jason.
Jason has heard he's inadequate by more than 1% for a lot of time.
Oh, it's, I mean, people might be, usually it's measured in inches, not percentages.
Somebody was dunking on me on Twitter and they're like, you're the poorest of all your
friends.
I was like, that's the strategy.
Always have more powerful and richer friends than you.
Then you don't have to worry about picking up the check.
Okay.
And then there was another interesting AI breakthrough this week.
Wait, wait, did you talk about the bar fight?
What was the bomb curious?
Oh, the bar fight one. Hold on.
I think you're right. I didn't get to that one.
The bar fight was, oh, here we go.
For some reason, these morons seem to think that your stick legs are going to help them
in a fight.
Bro, that's a bad, I honestly I need to correct this like that was maybe bad lighting or a bad camera
Wait, I see they're not there they're, guys, guys, guys, guys,
honestly come on, they are not as skinny as people seem to be railing.
And honestly, I'm happy to, you know, if there's a standard way of measuring,
if they're, okay, you know what, Jason, if there's a standard way,
if somebody can tell us, what is the standard way of measuring leg circumference?
I'm happy to submit my measurements.
I don't think they're that skinny.
They're really, really anorexic.
Super disturbing.
Thank you.
You got a lot going on up top.
I'm very proud of you, but below the belt,
it's not true, bro.
I work on my legs a lot.
It's keep working.
It's legs and abs to keep your back strong.
I can tell you guys one thing this podcast will win in a poll is the hosts talk about themselves
more than any other podcast on the internet.
We know what it is.
We need to talk about each other in order to make fun of each other.
Yeah, they should be called the Naval Gaze podcast.
All right, here we go.
So, besties that you most want on a fight, Queen of Kinwak coming in dead last.
Yeah.
I'm coming in at 17%.
Rainman, 30% and Shamaaf, I guess that thirst trap you tweeted got you 39% in that poll.
I can hold my own in a physical altercation.
I think you want Shemaaf and I because I think Saks is going to be under the table calling
9-1-1. I want Shamaat and I because I think Saks is going to be under the table calling 911.
And Freeberg is going to try to talk it out and get just absolutely sucker bunch.
He's like, guys, we don't really need to fight.
Jason is the one that would smash the beer bottle, create a shiv and say, let's go.
I would have Jason, I would actually pick Jason as number one.
If you were going to be in a bar fight. Jason certainly touts his Taekwondo skills.
On more than one occasion, he's claimed to be an expert in Taekwondo.
Can we pull up the video?
Isn't there a video of you doing Taekwondo?
Where's the video of Jason pushing hellbues?
Let's make news video.
If you want to see Jason and a grown man another grown 50 year old
overweight man fighting we have video. Yeah.
Well, I that that one I don't know if we should show but Nick you should definitely insert
the image of J. Cal trying to do the Taikwan doke kick and it looks like he's about to
have a herniated growing.
It's about the size of the shirt. Yeah, I was my 20s.
All right, let's start Jason. What do, Jason. What do we got this week?
I guess the topic we should get right to is inflation.
This is a topic we've been talking about a whole bunch
because we're printing a ton of money.
Everybody seems to think the hedge against inflation
is to buy Bitcoin or do you put your money into equities?
And are we actually gonna see things other than homes
and education massively inflate?
We've seen some anecdotal evidence of this Tesla increased the price of their cars, used
cars have gone up in price, which is a function of the lack of production of some cars during
the pandemic.
So there might be multiple two defectors there, but just putting it out there, are we going
to go, are we gonna face inflation
that goods and services are gonna just go through
the roof and cost, or do we have enough efficiency
in the system that the average consumer's not gonna see
massive inflation on the products and services they buy?
Coming out of the pay.
Is it the real issue that Chamassa's inflation is good,
and he, because it creates a quality,
and he thinks 1979 was a great year?
I think it should go straight
to that. All right. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I think we should go to
Chamath to explain his tweet storm. Okay. And then I'll respond. Okay. There we go. So I think,
David, you got unnecessarily emotional and personal. That was not again, these, these were things that I've learned from someone who I will say without betraying
him is an extremely well-respected person at an extremely well-known institution that
basically has helped make a lot of sort of, you know, capital allocators very smart about
things and has made people a lot of money.
So I was relaying what I learned through him.
So let me just relay that again, and I'll just start with this.
Whenever you have a dollar of income, you can do one of two things with that income.
You either consume things, right?
So you buy or you can save and you can put it into investments for the future, right?
So consumption and investment. The reality is that most people, so the lower 60% of the income
distribution essentially spends above their income. The lowest actually spends at. So a dollar earned
is a dollar spent. And then the middle two, because they have access to credit, a dollar earned,
they spend about percentage points more than that.
When you get to the richest 20% of the population, they're actually able to save and they save
about 13 cents of every dollar, and they're able to invest in the future.
So consumption and investment.
The reality is inflation comes through a volume of activity, right?
So you as a rich person can go and buy one $100,000 necklace at Tiffany's,
it doesn't move the needle for inflation. But when you know, 200,000 people buy a $1,000
dollar television, that's felt in the economy. It moves. So inflation comes because of gross
tonnage of volume. So you need consumption. And by definition definition what that does is it pushes
Consumption into those you know that 60 to 80% of people that are not the top 20%
So what it means is that you know you have a volume game of people buying things and when they buy more of those things
Inflation goes up. How do they buy more things? They have more income because their propensity is to consume.
So then you have to ask yourself, where is this incremental income coming from? And all he has observed, which I think is very credible is we have the supernatural event in the pandemic.
We've now started to print trillions of dollars of incremental consumption. And that's going to
start to lead to the most simple ways
in which consumption manifests in inflation,
which is via commodity prices.
What does that mean?
Let me say it simply.
A rich person lives in a well-insulated house,
drives an electric car, and eats fish.
A less rich person lives in a poorly-insulated house,
lives, you know, drives drives an SUV and eats beef.
Beef versus fish as a simple example, it consumes 20, 30, 50,
a hundred times more input costs to generate that same pound of protein than a fish does.
It's just an example of showing how income distributions and the effects and the consumption patterns of large swats of people drive different consumption behaviors which drive inflation.
So all he was trying to represent to me was that idea,
which is that we have printed trillions of dollars,
we are creating artificial levels of consumption,
that consumption will actually drive up commodity prices,
commodity prices will actually drive up commodity prices, commodity prices will actually drive up inflation.
Then what he told me was the best analogy, again, it's not perfect, but it rhymes to the
history, is what actually happened in the 1970s, which is that by having this sort of boundary
condition, you have to ask yourself what will happen if inflation rips higher.
And starting in the late 60s through the 70s, that's kind of what you had, a same kind
of boundary can forget the way in which the money got to people.
In this case, it was a government check.
But in the late 60s and early 70s, we had similar kinds of programs.
We had Head Start. We had AmeriCorps, we had Food Stamp Sack, we had the Social Security
Act.
All of these things were transfer payments.
When you put that much money into the hands of a large swath of people, consumption went
up, commodity prices went up, inflation went up.
It peaked in 1979, but it also happened that when that happened, the
gap between the rich and the poor was the lowest it had ever been.
And so I thought that that was a really interesting thing to observe.
Okay, sacks.
You were triggered by this.
Well, I wasn't triggered.
I just said it was Thomas Worst take ever.
And then, uh, but David, but David, it wasn't my, it wasn't my tape.
It wasn't my tape. it wasn't my tape.
You were triggered.
It wasn't my tape, did it.
No, no, no, no, no.
Okay, well, let me explain what's wrong with the tape.
I created a PowerPoint.
So, I pulled it, Jamoth.
No, it's not boring.
And Jamoth has done it too, so don't, don't even go there.
I'm gonna do email.
You guys come and hit me up at the second half.
No, no, freeberg, we're gonna keep the free.
We're gonna keep the freeberg index high. So go ahead, Saks. Take us through the PowerPoint. What do you want?
I'll keep this quick. Okay, so I've called the PowerPoint to my source.
David, David, it says right at the top of the disclaimer, here is something I learned today. Why is it my day?
Well, you said you responded to me then saying that I didn't like facts. So that was your
response. So I am proving I'm going to show you some facts. Okay. So first of all, let's
ask the question was 1979 a good year. I don't think you can just cherry pick this one
number, the the Juni index and say that this was some sort of great year. 1979 a severe
recession begins,
which ultimately leads to negative 0.3%
GDP growth in 1980.
The word stack, Flation, Misery, Index,
become household terms.
We had unemployment of 6% on its way to 7.2% in 1980.
We had a 13.3% in inflation rate.
The prime rate for 30-year mortgage was 11.2%.
Wow, wow, wow.
Yeah, good luck trying to buy a house.
We had long lines of the gas pump.
There was an oil embargo.
We had price controls.
Do you guys remember the gas pump lines?
I wasn't born yet, but gone.
Yeah, it was crazy.
And then Jimmy Carter declares a national crisis
and confidence.
This was the so-called Malay speech.
He was well on his way to becoming a one-term president.
So what the show is is that we do it. is that hold on, let me just do the takeaway.
So the takeaway is that the Ginny Index, as 1979 was a great year.
And the issue is, the reason it wasn't, is because it's a lot easier to make everyone
equally poor than equally rich.
When the economy does poorly, guess what, the gap shrinks. Then Margaret Thatcher had a great line about this. So long as the gap is smaller, they would
rather have the poor be poorer. That's a great video everyone should watch on our last
speech to Parliament.
Jamath Posted this chart showing, this is the percentage of wealth held by the top.
1%.
Jamath, we'll go to you next to explain one, two, and three. But let me just point out, look at when else the Ginny index was plummeting, the 1930s.
The great depression did a great job creating relative equality by making everyone poor.
So my point is, yeah, I understand there are these equalities, but you know what creates
inequality, economic booms.
That's what creates inequality.
What we should care about is not just inequality but economic growth,
real wage growth, poverty, how many people are below the poverty line and concentrations of power.
So that's what we should be looking at, not just this journey coefficient. Let me stop there.
I've got other slides, but I'll stop there and let you respond.
Saks, go back one slide. The three points there were just interesting to me. Number one was LBJ and the war on poverty
and all those social programs.
Number two, and you spoke about this,
but I don't think you're doing a full accurate assessment.
What Carter's biggest mistake was,
was he stopped the transfer payments.
Because LBJ started them, Nixon continued them,
Carter stopped them. And I think it's important to
frame. Explain what transfer payments are for people who don't understand.
Well, it's basically like, you know, there are all kinds of ways to get money into the hands
of individuals. You know, we, we now talk about universal basic income. That's a way of transferring
money from the government and from systemic holders of capital to individuals.
Food stamps was away, the social security was away.
There's all kinds of different ways.
Well, fair was away until Clinton disassembled that.
So I think that what we'll never know
is what would have happened
if Carter hadn't actually stopped those balance payments.
And the key point is about what happened
then afterwards in three. So you had this basically stopping by Carter. He didn't get to,
he didn't get to reap any of the benefits of it. Reagan comes in and says, you know what,
we're going to simplify the tax code. We're going to defund all kinds of stuff, including,
for example, all the mental health defunding that he had already done in California that spewed people with mental health disease onto the streets of San Francisco
and Los Angeles. And that sort of continued. And then the real cataclysmic change on top of
all of this, which sealed the fate of that trend line happened in point number three, which is when
George, George Bush in 2001 had this really seminal decision,
which is he had the ability to block China from entering the WTO and instead he left them
in.
And he traded that for a vote on the Security Council.
And when you think about what really happened there, you will unleashed one billion people
willing to do anything at a cheaper, faster and better rate.
You ushered in globalization, you ushered in the gutting of the middle class of America,
and you transferred all that wealth creation that could have happened in a more inefficient,
but in a balanced way that could have benefited Americans, and you shipped them abroad to China.
So I think it's just interesting to note that basically since 1979 we've all been singing from the same
playbook. And I think that maybe what we need to do is figure out whether we need to come back
to this idea of shifting the balance of payments back into the hands of individual consumers.
And all I'm saying is without making a judgment is when you look at what Biden has done in just in the first 60 days, 1.9 trillion
dollars of stimulus, and a proposed $3 trillion stimulus package, we're not even three months into
his presidency and you forecast that forward, it feels like we're entering an era of spend, spend,
spend. And that was an opinion of mine
Which I believe is actually fairly accurate. I do think it will
Drive inflation. I do think it'll drive commodity prices and I think on balance
I do think it will suppress the wealth creation of the rich and I do think it will give
Folks that don't necessarily have investments the ability to make more in real income, which they will spend.
Well, okay, just quickly.
So I'm going to begin by agreeing with the part of Jamoth's response that I agree with,
which is what happened around 2000, 2001, which killed wage growth for the average worker.
Jamoth is right about that, but it wasn't just George W. Bush.
It was a bipartisan disaster.
In 2000, Bill Clinton pushes Congress to approve the U.S.-China Trade Agreement and gave them
full access to the WTO.
This was basically temporary MFN.
And look at what he said.
He said, economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street.
It requires China to open its markets to us in new ways.
And it turned out to be a one way street the other way.
And then he also said that for the first time
our company is able to sell industry products in China,
made by workers here in America
without being forced to relocate,
manufacturing to China,
we'll be able to export products without exporting jobs.
Well, gee, the exact opposite happened.
So, and then what happens in 2001 is Bush
makes this situation permanent.
He grants permanent, what's called permanent normal trade relations, which basically MFN status
in perpetuity to China granting them full access to our markets.
And Jamath is right that that devastated the average worker because all of a sudden they're
being forced to compete with foreign labor that's potentially making $2 a day and is not
subject to the same labor laws
and environmental laws as workers in the US are.
So I agree with Tramoth about what happened then,
but I gotta go back and clean up this view
of what happened between 1980 and 2000,
because that's where I think we have this disagreement.
Let's talk about the Chinathing for a second.
Yeah.
We made a mistake there.
We got hoodwinked. We made a mistake there. We got Hoodwinged.
We don't have access to their market. I think it would be good to pause for a second and say,
okay, we tried this experiment for 20 years. There was some good that came out of it. Our companies
were able to grow and become the dominant players in the world like Apple, but in Amazon, right? We
did capture a lot of this value. And a lot of people came out of poverty in China, I guess on the margins.
That's a good thing we can all agree.
But it's a communist country and we basically enabled a communist country to become
essentially, you know, our counter party in running the planet and in our
leadership positions on the planet.
What do we do now in terms of unwinding this?
Is there a way to roll this back or do we just mute it from this point forward? And how does it become a two-way street? Or is
that just not even possible? As we've seen with the NBA and some other companies, Twitter,
Google, just not being allowed to even operate in China?
Who's we? America, United States?
The United States.
I mean, citizen, US companies, global companies. I mean, yeah.
You know, I think that the the challenge is your your framework, right?
Guys, I think I think there's one big thing you're forgetting in 2001, which is I think
that Bush actually traded away access to the WTO so that they could guarantee China's
vote when he wanted to go to war with Iraq, which happened in 2003.
Okay. Well, two dumb decisions that got worse by being put together.
What's all I'm saying is it was a trade.
It was a trade.
He traded, he traded access to, he traded access to the WTO in return for their support for
a UN resolution to go to war with rock.
Look, I, you know, you, Shemoth, you said that I was defending the Republican point of
view.
I'm not, I'll be the first to say that George W. Bush was, his presidency was a disaster.
I think it'll
go down as one of the worst. He got us into all these stupid foreign wars in the Middle East. He
began them. I think the decisions with China were a mistake. So I certainly don't want to defend
that. And by the same token, I think the Clinton years were generally great years in America. So this
is not a partisan fray analysis on my part. What do you think though about the China concept here
and how we would go forward?
And what's the path for it with China?
I mean, again, like I think it comes down to your objective
and who are you solving for?
And who should we solve for?
Democracy, the human species?
Well, I mean, I feel like the point of view that one government is innately better than
another is being tested and proven right and wrong every day right now.
And I'm not sure that it's fair to say that just because the form of government
that the Chinese have kind of adopted and used to govern their country and their people is innately wrong.
There are certainly things that are innately wrong in many democracies and that are innately
wrong in many non-democratic republics.
And so I'm not sure it's fair to just say that that's really the objective is let's get
rid of that communism.
I mean, that was an easy kind of simple check that you could use a few decades ago as a way to kind of rally everyone emotionally towards some cause.
But I think there's a lot of businesses today that operate effectively in their own kind
of geopolitical cloud. And it's a little bit of a kind of misstatement to think that an
American company is an American company. It's not that American, quote unquote, American
companies solely
build their stuff and sell their stuff in the United States. Many quote unquote American companies build stuff overseas and sell stuff overseas. And globalization as much as we might want to kind of
poo poo the effects it had on the average quote unquote American worker. It really has transformed the way businesses operate with respect to politics and countries.
There's a, oh God, what's the book?
I can't remember the book, but there's a book that speaks to how a lot of large multinational
corporations today effectively have to operate as if they were countries into and onto themselves.
And so they have competing interests with respect to what the average American or the American
government or the American people might have, even though they might be quote unquote
American companies, and there might be some intricate tie.
And so I'm not sure it's as simple as we have to quote unquote defeat China.
We are so intricately tied to the economy of China, to the workers of China and vice
versa.
And I think that it's a much more complicated thing than, you know, here's our three-point
checklist for how do we quote unquote be China.
And that's why it's hard.
And that's why I think a lot of smart people have, you know, kind of taken on and been challenged
by and failed at trying to resolve a path forward where there's this quote unquote looming
enemy that is going to become the global economic power, which strips the American people of their influence around the world.
And that may be kind of the inevitability of the 21st century.
I don't think there's a-
That's a pretty dark inevitability if-
But I don't know if there's a simple easy answer.
And I don't know if from a business point of view, let's say, I'm a company.
I'm not sure I necessarily feel the effects of one quote unquote country affecting, you
know, having more influence globally with other countries and others, it turns out a lot
of businesses have greater influence than a lot of governments.
And so, you know, one way to kind of think about the evolution of globalization and maybe
even with respect to kind of the notion of what we've been talking about decentralization
is that maybe governments themselves become less important in the 21st century.
And it's the decentralized online movements and businesses and other entities that perhaps
are not as regulated and controlled and owned by governments. And maybe the big failure of the 21st
century will be governments. We'll see.
Jamoth? Yeah, that's on chat. I'm sorry, that was a bit esoteric, but...
No, no, I think it's, yeah, it is, I, any
tax.
The thing, the thing that you're not willing to acknowledge is that even when GDP
shrinks, it's like, it's, it's, it's shrinking from a base where there's substantive growth
year over year.
Like, you know, are the GDP in 1969 where LBJ was president was less than a trillion
dollars, and the GDP now is like 23 and a half trillion dollars.
And so it's been nothing essentially but a straight line up.
And so, you know, this idea that we, the inflation causes, you know, the only way that we close
the wealth gap is by making everybody poor is not true.
We're, some people may be getting less rich at the same rate, so they feel poor,
but the idea that you actually become poor is just not true.
It's a feeling that you have, but it's not rooted in fact.
So, when you look at the wealth gap, are you concerned about the gap or are you concerned
with the status of the folks on the bottom and how much their lot in life has gotten better?
Yeah, I mean, I'm concerned with both.
Actually, I have a slide on this too.
I would buy this argument, and I've heard this argument from people not as smart as
David.
I would buy this argument if GDP did something other than go up in an absolute straight
fucking line.
No, it doesn't.
It does.
Well, hold on.
Let me show GDP in a second.
The first thing I want to discover is that part of the problem with the Genie Index is
it doesn't fully account for government transfers.
This is something I didn't fully know until I researched it after your tweet storm to
mouth.
Basically, only 2% of the population, so the publicly reported stats are that 13.5% of the
U.S. population lives in poverty.
Once you actually take into account all these programs and transfer payments, it's more like 2%.
You can see this on this chart on the left here that the green represents the transfer payments.
By the way, I'm not against transfer payments. I think we need a social safety net. I want the
social safety net to be as effective as possible. I don't want it to trap people in government
dependency. I want it to work. I want it to get people out of poverty and into the opportunity economy. But I absolutely believe we need a social safety
net and we need these transfer payments. And you can see that the green bars there make
a huge difference in reducing poverty. The Ginni Index doesn't really take that into account.
Well, how do you fund these types of transfer payments? The more of a stronger economy that
you have, the more that you have a government,
the more that you have an economic boom, the more that you see real wage growth and the ability to fund these programs.
Let's go back to, let's just look at GDP for a second. So if you go back to, let's go back to this period,
82 to 2000, I call this the Reagan Clinton boom. I see this as a bipartisan, a relatively bipartisan period,
where under Reagan and Clinton,
you had GDP growth of almost 4% compared to the usual 2, 2,
and 1,5%.
By the way, this is why Reagan and Clinton left office
with huge approval numbers despite scandals.
Remember Reagan had a rank contra, Clinton had Lewinsky.
None of that mattered really in the eyes of the American people
because the economy was so strong. And you can see that here. And by the way, it hasn't been this strong
in the 2000s. We've never really gotten back to this type of economy since 2009.
Is that because of the economic boom of the PC and internet errors? What would we attribute
to? The technology boom has a huge impact, but let me just describe what started it.
What happened in 1981? Reagan's inaugurated as president in January of 1981. He cuts the top
marginal income tax rate from 70 to 50%. And I'd say equally important, you have Paul Volker at the fed,
he breaks inflation, he jacks up interest rates, causes a very severe recession in 1982, but it broke the back
of hyperinflation.
And we, it ushered in decades of declining interest rates.
You can see that on this chart here.
Interest rates have more or less been in the decline since Paul Volker was at the Fed.
What does this do?
It made the, it reduced the, the, the, the riskfree rate of return which leads to more investment in
In every event in in everything it leads to more investment
It called it calls a rally in the bond market and the stock market and by the way
No one remembers mod in a modern area. I'm sorry sex
But like most interest rates for buying a home mortgage rates were over six and a half percent for most of the
Yeah, it was fifteen the last couple of decades yeah good good like buying a home in the 1970s right like David David
can you like can you actually be intellectually honest and overlay aggregate actual GDP on this chart
because what you'll see is it goes up into the right independent of all of this bullshit
no that's not true. You can see it.
That is absolutely true.
And I'll just, can I share my screen?
GDP growth rate versus...
No, this is GDP growth rate.
Forget growth rate.
What is the actual number?
Right, we're talking about the real number and not the percentage growth because I was
actually about to ask the real, all-assage guy.
This is great.
This is great.
I know.
But this is the change in GDP.
I know. I'm talking about great two mathematics here, guys. The is great. I know. This is the change in GDP. I know. I'm talking about
great to mathematics here, guys. The
absolute number, the absolute number,
keeps going up into the right because
no, it doesn't. That these, these, these
dots that are below zero are sessions
with GDP. Those are changes from the
year before. So when you're
compounding naturally, no, no, no, no,
the green and red bars at the very
bottom are changes from the year before, but these are absolute percentage changes in GDP. I know.
The recession, the recession is defined as two quarters of negative growth. So GDP can go down.
David, can I just show you the aggregate GDP growth from 1960 to 2000 and you can just look
at this and tell me what's, what is wrong with the trading economics website
that everybody else would use?
Yeah, for it up.
I mean, I think one of the things that I have
as a question for everybody is,
is there a major difference between 2%, 2.5%, 3% growth
in terms of how we all experience our lives?
And what are we optimizing there for?
Are we optimizing for consistency?
Or are we in, you know, no recessions?
Well, this is what's interesting.
So do you see this chart right here?
It's perfectly consistent with the exception.
This is aggregate GDP, okay?
It started off at less than a trillion and 1950 something.
It was about, you know, a trillion dollars at 1968.
And it's about a trillion dollars at 1968, and it's about $23 trillion
dollars now. This is the aggregate of what has happened in the American economy over the
last 70 years. Compounding interest is an amazing thing.
Now, exactly right. Now, this has happened in democratic presidencies, Republican presidencies,
when rates were at 16%% when rates were at 0%.
So all I'm saying is we have a natural tendency and inertia to move forward.
The rate of change we can debate and obviously it is ebbed and float over years.
But the fact that it's towards moving forward and downhill with increasing momentum is undeniable.
And so again, I would ask when we think about the fact that the natural tendency is that
the next five
or ten year period in aggregate will become bigger and better.
There'll be more of the pie to share.
Why is inflation a bad thing?
Because all it does is depress financial assets.
It drives up earnings and income, which drives up consumption of the lower three or four
quartiles of the or lower three quartiles of the earnings population, I just
don't see why it's such a bad thing.
I think I think mild inflation, you know, and the 2 to 4 percent range is fine and it's
probably better, it's certainly better, I would say, than 2 to 4 percent deflation.
But when you start to get run away inflation like we did in the 1970s, it massively increases
interest rates.
And that makes it harder for people to buy houses and borrow money and invest money because
now the risk for your ever-turn is higher.
And that needs to stay flat.
But that only applies.
I know, but that only applies to the top quartile of the population.
The bottom three quartiles don't give a shit about what you just said because they don't
do it. I don't think people want to have to spend $600 on a loaf of bread.
Look at Venezuela, you look at Weimar, Germany, you do not want inflation to get out of control.
It can spiral out of control because once people start to expect.
Is that realistic though that it will spiral out of control given technological advances,
efficiency?
I mean, what that's the backdrop that you are?
You are bringing up, I think, the really brilliant point, which is, could it really even happen
today?
Because if you think about where we allocate our time and attention and consumption, half
of it, by definition, are things that are just so naturally deflationary.
We're on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, all the time. Those are naturally
deflationary sinks of time and energy and effort and money. So to Jason's point, like
I think that that's actually true. I just think that it's even possible to actually
have hyperinflation anymore.
Where do we have hyperinflation? NFTs, Bitcoin, equities, and home.
Financial assets.
And homes, right?
I mean, and that's a highly regular.
And I guess healthcare and higher education.
Those, but pretty much,
ready to admit the governments involved in.
Basically, well, the government's not involved
in NFTs and Bitcoin.
Those are the anti-government portfolio.
But, but by the way, healthcare inflation
really started in Obama because of Obama care.
Yeah, anything that the government's involved in inflates?
Yeah, because of the government's paying the bill, why wouldn't you raise prices?
Well, there's no competitive market.
There's one cost of charge whatever you want, et cetera.
So, to be clear, inflation is not my number one concern right now.
I'm just saying that it would not be a good thing to let it get out of control
That's all
But it's not it's not the biggest concern my list your main concern is dunking on chama for that tweet storm
No, no, I'm not dunking on him. I'm he he dunked on me saying that you know
It's basically turned into a bunch of 15 year old girls who said something and got mission-terpid on social media
And now we have to work in that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Mike get richer. That's the problem. Let's pivot to that then. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have been following
what's happening with the head of operations at,
or I guess these, the head of warehouses at Amazon.
Amazon is standing up to Elizabeth Warren on Twitter.
They're mixing it up. Did you guys see these tweets?
Let's pull them up.
No, it's cool. What?
You haven't seen these?
No.
Jamal, didn't you donate like some ridiculous amount
of money to Elizabeth Warren's campaign?
No, 25k, just a little Tasty Poo.
It was a little teaser bet and I didn't like what I saw so I had to shut it down.
I shut it down on the turn.
Oh, the floor was not there.
The floor was empty.
The floor was empty.
I couldn't do it.
You limped in?
You limped in with 7-4?
I limped in with 7-4 off-suit.
I put a little teaser bet out there.
I didn't like what I saw.
And so I folded.
Basically, Amazon is finally saying,
hey, we're just gonna stand up
when Elizabeth Warner Bernie Sanders
kinda attack us and attack Bezos.
And they just said, listen, you guys
set the minimum wage.
Do your job.
We moved the minimum wage at Amazon to $15 an hour.
We made our decision, get back to work
and set the federal minimum wage of $15 an hour
and stop telling us we don't pair attacks
as cause you make the tax law.
So essentially this dovetails with the hearing,
I don't know if you guys watched any of the hearing
with Zuckerberg and everybody,
but basically they were,
it seems like big tech is just putting the foot down and saying,
just tell us what you want us to do because we're doing it.
We're giving people to cheat on it.
Yeah, what Zuckerberg, what Zuckerberg and Dorsey basically said is that if you don't like
that kind of speech, then why don't you prohibit it instead of telling us to do it, you can't
and you won't because it's a violation of the First Amendment.
So that, yeah, they were kind of pushing back on them saying, listen, if you have such a problem with
that past the law.
Yeah.
And this guy, Dave Clark, you guys know Dave Clark at Amazon?
Nope.
So this is the guy who's been mixing it up.
And if the audience is listening, you can see a bunch of this on the YouTube channel because
we will put in a lot of efforts.
He's like the number two guy there. He runs the entire retail business I guess.
Yeah, so now Amazon is on a full court press
to engage with, let's call it the socialist left.
I guess they call themselves democratic socialists
because they don't wanna be called socialists.
And they're saying like listen, we give people healthcare,
we give them 15 bucks an hour.
And if you wanna tour the facilities,
tour the field, but nobody is peeing in bottles.
And then of course the press and a couple of people showed bottles
with pee in them that drivers can't stop to even go to the bathroom,
which I think is a tragedy and horrible.
People should not have to pee in bottles.
I mean, they asked me about it on CMBC today.
I was like, this is a serious question.
Like, of course nobody should be peeing in bottles.
But if you look at this exchange,
I think we're kind of hitting the end of this debate,
which is everybody kind of agrees.
We should have health care for everybody in the country.
We should have a $15 minimum wage.
Why are we dunking and fighting with each other?
When we've got this adversary, which is,
or two adversaries with Russia and China,
we have these two crazy adversaries
who want to build authoritarian countries
and control the economy and eventually control the planet.
Why are Americans fighting with each other
over these issues?
I mean, this is just incredible.
I just want to read it.
Bernie Sanders says,
I look forward to meeting with Amazon workers
in Alabama and Friday.
All I want to know is why the richest man in the world,
Jeff Bezos, is spending millions
trying to prevent workers from organizing a union so they can negotiate for better wages,
benefits, and working conditions. To which he replies, all we want to know is why the
Senator is one of the most powerful Paul's and Polit politicians in Vermont for 30 plus years,
and their minimum wage is still only $11.75. Amazon's minimum wage is $15 plus great
healthcare from day one.
The senator should save his finger wagging lecture until after he actually delivers in his own
backyard. To your point, it is getting to a point now where folks are like, all right guys,
so step up and change the laws and change the incentives. And I think that that's going to be
really important. Saxi, you had something that you were really
miffed by what Zach said or something
at the thing about all this.
Well, what Zach was trying to do in that hearing,
the Stratekery guy, what's his name, Ben Thompson?
Ben Thompson.
Stratekery.
I think it's Stratekery.
Stratekery.
No, no, no, no, it's Stratekery.
No, Stratekery.
He literally said it.
He went to the poker game that we do at the D conference, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, 100 bucks a year he's got like 10,000 people paying for it. It's crazy. I guess what what makes me the way he
Okay, great. So the way thank you for that
Thank you for that clarification
What what Ben Thompson wrote the way he describes Zuck statement is that Zuck was pulling up the latter
On all the other social networking sites that might come afterwards and it was look
It was one of those tactical maneuvers that's in Facebook's sort of
narrow self-interest, but it's so obviously in their self-interest that people slam them
for that.
It's just too Machiavellian.
And basically what Zuckerberg said is, listen, we now have over 30,000 people doing
content moderation.
You guys should check, you, the, the lawmakers
should change section 230 to say that, you know, you the social media sites only get
section 230 protection in the liability shield. If you engage in this kind of
content moderation, but if you're a site that doesn't then you don't get protection.
Well, what's, what Zuckerberg trying to do? You know, small startups can't hire
30,000 people to do content moderation. So this is like classic regulatory capture,
but done brazenly in the open at a congressional hearing.
I think you're right.
I think it kind of makes a lot of sense for him.
The game theory is pretty obvious,
which is like, okay, make it now impossible
for anybody to compete with us.
And you basically lock us in forever.
It's pretty brilliant.
The question is,
what do you think the odds are
that politicians fall for this?
I think they're forcing their hand now.
So they don't have much choice.
Yeah, well, I mean, the Democrats on that committee
have basically been saying that disinformation
is a huge problem and you, the social media sites
need to correct it.
You need to control it.
And so Zuckerberg comes along and says,
okay, great, no problem.
We've hired 30,000 content moderators. We're gonna to do what you said. In fact, we're going to hire more.
And by the way, if you really want to get tough about this, why don't you modify section
230 to require it? Well, how many other startups can ever hire that number of content moderators?
This is creating a mode that will basically protect Zach and Facebook forever.
Right, capture. Yep.
And the other crazy thing in this was,
the stupid format they come up with,
would they give each person who's,
you know, a senator or congressman,
who's a congressperson who's,
to end the questioning, they give them five minutes.
So they're like, I only want to yes no answer.
And you're like, I'm going to ask you
the most challenging problem in the world.
I need you to answer yes or no, binary, one or zero.
And it's like, well, that's not kind of how a nuanced issue works.
Like section two, third, this is going to take some time.
Can I get one minute to answer the question, two minutes to answer the question?
And so Jack and Zuckerberg and everybody just kind of threw their hands up.
They're like, I can't answer this in a yes.
No, can you ask me, give me 30 seconds to answer these questions.
It was pretty ridiculous.
And then they were trying to get them all to say
that their platforms were used for the January 6th insurgency.
And I don't agree with Zuck on much.
But he was like, no, I think the people who were involved
in January 6th were responsible for it.
So whether that's the president or the people
who broke into the capital,
they're the ones who are actually responsible for this.
You guys didn't want to do that.
No, I read some summaries of it and I think Dorsey actually did a great job and I liked
his performance and let me read you a quote, Mike Solana tweeted this.
He said, Jack said, I don't think these decisions should be made by private companies or the
government, which is why we're suggesting a protocol approach to help the people make the decisions themselves.
That was Jack Dorsey.
Now, that almost sounds like me if he just changed the word protocol to First Amendment
case law.
So I don't want these companies or the Senate Judiciary Committee, you know, censoring
people.
I want to use a revered external standard, which is the first amendment
case law that's been developed over the last two centuries.
So Jack wants to use a protocol, okay, but fine, but he's on the right track here, which
is he saying, look, we don't want to be in the business of having this power to decide
who's going to have access to the town square.
And that's the step in the right direction.
He's also got a project there
to turn social networks into open standards.
So in other words, the way we can all,
anybody can make an email client
because email is an open standard.
Anybody can build a web page or a browser
because HTML is an open standard.
He wants to do that and he's working on that inside of Twitter
where anybody is going to be able to take their tweets
and they're going to be decentralized.
There's going to be no central server and you're going to be able to bring your own algorithm.
So if you feel the algorithm is causing you to see extreme views, you can say, I want
mine to only lean towards, I want this one that leads towards positivity and kindness,
right?
Somebody can make a third party.
There's a algorithm that gets rid of jerks.
You guys probably saw this week, but a deal was announced.
And investment was announced.
And recent Sequoia, myself, and a few others,
we did this thing called BitCloud.
Oh, I heard about this.
So what is it just to give you a sense of it?
It's like, I've been hearing about it separately
from a bunch of people.
Yeah, so I mean, like the, in a nutshell, what these guys did was they said, okay, well,
you know, we're just going to take, you know, this entire blockchain concept and we're going to fork it
and we're going to create this thing where folks can essentially have one blockchain they can, you
know, have content around it and then identify sort of people and nodes.
And all of a sudden, like we all have this currency that sits on top of this bit cloud currency.
And why that's interesting is their first app that they built on top of this was basically
a kind of a clone of Twitter, just kind of as a proof of concept app.
And I think Jason, it's moving to a place where now people with reputation and people
with trust can actually signal that they have it.
And then that's probably a better way over time for folks like us to figure out what is
valuable and not valuable, what is trustworthy and not irrespective of whichever end of
the spectrum it's coming in off of and then
If there is disinformation, you know that person's quote unquote bit cloud stock, right that they're token will fall in value
There'll probably be a lot of interesting apps that are built on top of this. I was really
drawn to the
General idea of the project and I think that's what Andrews and in Sequoia probably felt as well.
So there are these interesting solutions.
There's BitCloud, there's Jason,
what you said, this open source project at Twitter.
It's all gonna be really interesting,
but I think if we can get to a way
where we can quantify reputation and trust,
that's another way of working around
the pulling up the ladder effect
of what Facebook and Twitter
effectively told Congress this week.
I want to talk to you guys about what the hell is going on in the Suez Canal and what does this mean?
I mean, freeberg, what the fuck is this? This is unbelievable.
You know, it's so random and unfortunate, but this ship that weighs 200,000 metric tons that's taller, it's longer than the Empire
State Building is tall, going through the Suez Canal, which I think, you know, there's
about 100 ships a day go through the Suez Canal.
And it's, you know, the Suez Canal really is, you know, kind of an amazing engineering accomplishment
that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. It basically
allows ships from Asia to not have to go all the way around Africa to get to Europe.
And the ship goes into the Suez Canal and it had a blackout. It's power went out. And so it just
kept cruising without being able to control the steering because there's like frigging power steering
on these massive ships. They don't have a wire connected to the rudder. And so, you know, the thing,
no backup battery supply, I guess.
It was awesome.
No one knows, but like the power went out
and the total blackout on the ship,
they couldn't get the power back on
and the thing just keeps cruising and cruising and cruising
and it cruises right into the side,
which is this big sand barrier
and either side of the Suez Canal.
And it gets lodged in the sand barrier on the side.
Now, when you have 200,000 metric tons moving at a few miles an hour, that's an incredible
amount of momentum of energy.
And so when it lodges in the side, that's, you know, it's lodged in there.
And now it's ducts.
It's acceleration.
You know, it's actually a ducts, a ducts, a ducts, a ducts, a ducts velocity, but yeah,
you're close.
And so the thing just basically got lodged in there and they can't get it out.
And now they think it's going to take another week or two before they'll be able to kind of dig
all around the sand and tugboat the thing out of there. But I think what's interesting, so 10%
of global trade moved through the Suez Canal. And about a hundred of these massive ships a day,
you know, moved through this canal. But it really highlights the fragility of our global supply chain.
Similar to kind of the experience, I think we had during the COVID pandemic when all of
a sudden things like toilet paper were less available to us. But, you know, a small power
advantage on a boat, on a ship, you know, in the middle of the Suez Canal can suddenly
block up so much of global trade and cause massive fluctuations
in commodity prices and availability of supplies and products for businesses around the
world.
This is going to be rippling economic effects for a period of time.
It's unclear how significant they're going to be.
But I really do think that taking note of the fragility of our supply chain in this particular
context is worth taking a step back. And I spent a lot of my personal, my work time,
obviously off the podcast, thinking about
kind of our systems of industry.
And the global industrial revolutions
were really predicated on this notion of centralization.
We took a lot of our production systems
and we centralized them and created automated repeatable tasks.
And that reduced the cost and allowed us per unit of production to basically make things
much more affordably.
But the problem with centralization, generally speaking, and supply chains is exactly this,
which is you have a supply chain that is much more delicate.
And it is much more, I mean, think about the difference in power, right?
If the power goes out at a power plant, all the homes that are connected to it lose power
versus if every home had their own power generator or solar cells, they could continue to support themselves.
And in a similar context, so much, and this goes back to our conversation earlier about globalization,
so much of our global supply chain for industry has become centralized by finding the lowest cost possible,
but it loses all of its durability.
And so the 21st century, and especially leading into this infrastructure bill that we're
going to be talking about, or that's going to be talked about for a long time now,
for months to come, presents an opportunity for us to think about durability in industry and
durability and supply chains that I think is really profound and allows us to shift the balance of power, but also shift the sources of production of all the things we consume
as a species in a much more distributed way.
And that can be done using green technology, using three features, using bio-manufacturing,
using solar.
There's a lot of vertical farming.
Vertical farming. Yeah, whatever.
I'll disagree with you on that one, and we'll talk about that separately.
But I would argue like so much of industry has been centralized
because remember when the industrial revolutions took hold,
the only skill set we had as a species was mechanical engineering.
And in the years that followed, we developed skills in chemical engineering and ultimately in software and hardware engineering. And in the years that followed, we developed skills in chemical engineering, and ultimately in software
and hardware engineering.
And now more recently in biochemical engineering,
where we can use biological systems to make stuff.
And the advent of those technology capabilities,
I think, really gives us the opportunity today
to reinvent these supply chains.
And so the Suez Canal, I hope, is a little bit of a wake-up call.
And I hope leads into some of the thinking
around the infrastructure-build proposals
where we're about building durability in the supply chain.
And in that process, by the way, creating manufacturing jobs,
in a more distributed way.
Let me build on what you're saying.
So for all of the people listening, that really, really care about electrification
and electric cars, and there's a bunch of test labels here.
Testly uses a specific kind of battery called NCA and there's, you know, other forms
of batteries, but for the most part, in Tesla, in China, uses this LFP chemistry.
But the point is, there's a lot of very, very valuable nickel that goes into making lithium
ion batteries.
And so if you believe in electrification and you believe in zero emissions
and you believe in using these batteries, you need to believe in nickel, which is a tough business.
Okay, you're grabbing rock out of the ground and you're leaching this extremely important
metal out of it. So just a little while ago, there is a huge nickel manufacturer called
just a little while ago, there is a huge nickel manufacturer called Norlisk Nickel, right?
And they have these two Russian nickel mines
and just very recently, they flooded.
And the plug, which had been erected
for localizing the flooding was washed away,
not for the first time, not for the second time,
but for the third time.
And people now think that getting all this water
out of the mind may take at least a year, okay?
So why should we care?
Well, right now, if you think about all the batteries
that were forecasted to make in order to sort of eliminate
climate change and do all these good things
and for Tesla to make their beautiful cars
or whomever that, you know,
they need nickel. And right now we have a deficit of nickel that's going to emerge now in less
than a year. And we have, we have about a 37 to 40% shortage of what we need. So it's like, you have
all these grandiose visions of how the world should work.
And an electric failure in a barge shuts down the global supply chain for weeks. A flood in a nickel mine.
A flood in a nickel mine is going to cause the price of a Tesla to basically double.
And shouldn't people at some point ask ourselves, is this really what efficiency is supposed to
feel like on the ground? And it may not be, right?
And so maybe again going back to the first conversation, a little bit more inefficiency,
a little bit more inflation, a little bit more redundancy will allow us to be resilient.
And maybe that's what we really want.
We know.
You could ask the people in Texas what they want after they lost their power and They have one light snowstorm and the whole city is destroyed. I mean, there really is
There is something to having the redundancy in your home and the supply chain and obviously drugs which we witnessed during the pandemic
Right, I mean we
We were so we were so concerned about
short-term profit maximization that we off-short our entire pharmaceutical production and PPE manufacturing to China,
which then said that they might ration it to us based on geopolitical concerns.
No, thanks.
So, yeah, that is Pennywise and Pound Foolish, the absolute definition.
Is the infrastructure bill going to fix it freeberg?
You have a rundown of the infrastructure bill.
You know, there isn't a good clarity on this.
My concern is that there's going to be lots of push for things like roads and stuff that
doesn't create ongoing jobs.
That so much money is going to go into basically a disguised stimulus
package versus the ideal infrastructure program set is to enable industry.
So if you go back and you think about the Manhattan Project and the Apollo mission, those
were very expensive government programs that have a very specific mandate.
But because there were big investments and difficult problems, they unlocked a lot of industry that followed that initial development cycle.
And I think that is kind of a good guideline for us to think about with respect to what
we might hope for an infrastructure bill to do, which is to create unlock for industry
as opposed to plowing money into short-term service contracts with a bunch of guys who
are going to make a ton of money building roads and it doesn't really change the industry very much.
And so I'm concerned it's going to be a giveaway of money that's going to create a short-term
stimulus but doesn't really create long-term effects in the industry. But we'll see what kind of
comes out as they get more clarity on this. There's certainly a big push for quote unquote green.
But I'm not sure the people that are quote unquote green advisors in this context are going to
be thinking about this, you know, this next century of opportunity.
Yeah, so we'll see.
America's gonna have to have a real come to Jesus
if they actually really give a shit about climate change.
I'll give you a different example.
Again, to really electrify,
you have to pull metals out of the ground.
That is a dirty business, okay?
And there are impacts to the environment,
even if you're the best at it. And right now in the Western Hemisphere, it takes 20 years
to green light a mind. 20 years are shortages start in the next year. In China, they have,
you know, no issues whatsoever, right? Let's just say so maybe it takes them seven to ten years
to get a to get a project greenlit.
Now, I'm not advocating that we become China, but I think that it's really important for
us to realize that if we're going to really take this seriously, you can't have progress
being hijacked by things that may not matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
There is the opportunity, for example, to build a massive set of copper and nickel
mines in the western hemisphere, but the minute that they get green lift, they get, there's
an injunction that's filed by an NGO that'll say, oh, you know, we have to think about
the land grouse.
And it's like, well, what the fuck is the land grouse?
And at some point, you have to figure out whether you actually want your kids to have asthma or not, and whether they can suck up, you know, PM 2.5 and PM
10 for the rest of their lives, or you care more about the land grouse. And this is going
to come to a head. And hopefully the infrastructure bill paves the way for these decisions, because
I think as a country, we're going to have to decide because many other countries in order to have clean air
and drinkable water are going to basically prioritize
humans over the land grills.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the nuclear discussion
we had earlier in this podcast of like,
we can't even put a new nuclear power plan in this country
without it taking decades.
Any interesting updates on the business side,
I saw is Microsoft really about to buy discord for $10 billion? and any interesting updates on the business side,
I saw is Microsoft really about to buy Discord
for $10 billion?
Yeah, if you look at that compared to the Slack acquisition,
is Slack got what for $28 billion with,
was it $800 million in revenue,
yearly revenue at the time?
And Discord has $150 million,
and they're going for $10.
It's unbelievable.
It's an even higher multiple.
So the time trial of your year for sale
for 1.2 billion at this point, don't you fully?
Well, it was in hindsight, it was probably cheap.
It made the market, yeah.
Well, I mean, back in 2012,
we really thought back in 2012 that 1 to 2 billion
was like the best case scenario.
Yeah, the upper
bound of what a SaaS exit would look like. We just never realized how big the market could
get. And now obviously you have Slack at close to 30 billion. You have DocuSign IPOing,
you have 40 billion. You have Zoom at over 100 billion. And so the market just ended up
so much bigger than we ever thought. And we were the optimists. We were the ones building
companies in SaaS back then. And so the cloud has just been so, I mean, and you see this now
with, you know, the numbers that Azure and Google Cloud and AWS keep reporting, where they're
at like tens of billions of revenue. And they're still growing like 40, 50% a year. So the
cloud is just so much bigger than what we all thought and what came before.
So I've just decided to stop trying to find new ideas and just keep investing in this.
That's why I'm all in on SaaS right now.
Do you think Microsoft is doing this to compete with Slack or they're doing it to just really take over gaming?
Do you have any insights, Sacks?
I think probably, it's probably an element of both where they do, like one of their
few consumer business lines that's done really well as Xbox and gaming and they bought
Minecraft and so I think they can get some value out of it there, but I have to believe
that this is competitively driven.
They got to be worried about Slack.
I mean, the crowd jewel at Microsoft is the office suite.
The reason they bought Yammer is to accelerate the transition of office
into cloud, social, and mobile.
And it did help do that.
And they got to be worried about Salesforce now buying Slack.
I mean, that is,
Benny office been wanting to go after office for a long time,
and this is his way to do it.
Yeah.
All right.
There you have it, folks.
Another all-in podcast is in the can.
Let me just ask a question.
People making summer plans and fall plans based on the...
I'm making tonight plans.
I'm making tonight plans.
I can't wait to get you victims into the poker room. Sax, I want you to fly in.
Sax, come and play. We need a full, bestie victim.
Well, Sax, what's your plan tonight?
Like, are you going to some fancy, like, pasta restaurant with your wife?
What are you doing, pop-in bottles with?
Yeah. Yeah.
Who are you hanging out with tonight, Sax?
What are you doing?
Yeah, what are you doing these days?
I was talking with the kids. It was Friday night. I'm just gonna ask you. Do you know their names? were you hanging out with tonight's yeah what are you doing these kids
fighting
you know
you have
put them to bed
for your
days come to the poker game
tell us your kids' middle names
actually that's a good one
you know
whatever
I went to the movies last night.
I took my 11 year old out.
She wanted to get a shake-shack, so I took her to Shake-shack and the movie theater was
there and it was open.
I was like, oh, let's go check it out.
What's going on at the movie theater?
And Terminator 2 was playing 15 minutes later.
Great film.
Incredible film. Incredible film holds up an amazing to see on the big screen. We walk in, I kid
you not, you know, 100-seat theater with these beautiful big chairs. Nobody there. And
they were so excited. Sorry, Jacob. Did you rent the whole thing? No. It just happens
to be that they're open for business. They space people out. And it was $5 a ticket to see it.
I'm taking my daughters to the movies this afternoon.
First time they've ever been to the movies.
They're three and a half and two.
I am so excited to take them to a movie theater.
So we rented the whole theater for $99.
It's the best deal in town.
What movie are you seeing?
Trolls.
You can choose a movie.
That's the cool thing.
There's a list of 50 films and you can pick a film.
I got a little kid film for them.
They're going to go see a movie theater and have popcorn and have the experience.
And you can have other friends there.
Yeah, you can have up to 20 people.
You rent the whole theater for 99 bucks.
If you want to come see Trolls, just cruise off.
I'll send you a ticket.
Oh my God.
That's the coolest fucking thing.
That's awesome.
That's all the versus Kong is happening.
And I'm renting a theater for it.
So if everybody wants to bring their kids,
it's a great experience.
My kids would never sleep after seeing that.
It's cool.
No, it's not for three to five year olds, but, you know,
10 year olds, yes.
It's a hundred bucks.
This is an AMC theater.
99 bucks.
It's awesome.
For AMC, yeah.
But the synopolis, I think, charges 200.
And that's the, like, really high end theater where you can press
a button and the waiter comes. And the waiter was like,
thanks for coming. We really appreciate it.
Like you're one of the first guests.
No way. There is no way.
Yeah. It was kind of like an emotional moment for me to take my
daughter again, because that's what we would do every Friday.
Yeah. You know, there's no way movie theaters go out of business.
I mean, there just, it's such like like a every Friday. Yeah. There's no way movie theaters go out of business. I mean, it's such like a traditional experience.
It's so American.
I wonder what AMC's trading at.
Hmm.
I wonder if AMC would be an interesting.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know.
I know. I know. I a 20 seat theater. I have a 40 seat theater.
The sacks, how many bitters are,
do you have built in your various homes?
Do you only have a lot of theater for home sacks?
Is it one theater for home?
No, he's got a multiplex in each.
He's people out of my 24 movies.
They mean it in the popcorn stand.
I'm excited to go back to the movies.
Me too.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that soon.
I love movies.
How excited are you guys to go to Disneyland?
I want to take my kids to Disney.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait.
I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't day. Memorial day. And even in California, Gavin Newsom basically is finally capitulated to logic
and everybody can get a shot now as of April 15th. Yeah. Which means by May 15th, everybody
who wants to get vaccinated. It took the recall and and shame and shaming him and berating him
on Twitter constantly. I mean, Peter Femme was tweeting out like every day the growing
inventories of vaccine and all the open appointments. We all were and it's like ridiculous.
We kept at mentioning him. Five million shots on shelves in a pandemic. I mean, you don't
need to be freeberg to understand how vaccines work. Each person's a blocker, right?
Yeah. And the other thing, the other thing that got Newsom to move was that Biden
gave that press conference in which he moved up the date. And so then that prompted Newsom to move
up his date. And the same thing happened like a month ago when when Biden gave that speech where
he said he gave that May 1st date as a date everyone should get vaccinated. So frankly, it'd be nice
if we had a governor
who would just do the right thing
without the constant threat of recall and tweet shaming
and the president dragging him into the future.
But I guess-
What should we do with all,
I'm curious what you guys think of what we should do
with all this extra supply.
I had an interesting idea for the economy.
If you come to America and you've tested that
you don't have COVID, right? You take a test on the, for you get there. If you come to America,
we will give you the vaccine at the airport. Jason, I think, here's what we're going to do from now on.
How great would that be for you? You're going to have, you're going to have three little chips
a week and you get to put a chip in a jar and then you can suggest one of your ideas. But then once you hit the root, you were done. Okay.
This is a good activity economy. Yeah.
Vaccine tourism. Yeah.
No, we like formalize vaccine tours. If you come to America for vacation, complimentary
vaccines on the way in.
I mean, we're already at the point. We have everyone's.
Look, effectively, affected. No, I think effectively we're going to have that. It won't be at the airport, but I mean, the all the restrictions think effectively we're gonna have that.
It won't be at the airport,
but I mean, the all the restrictions are coming off
in every state by mid-April now.
And-
Most people can't afford an international plane ticket.
You know, they're not like gonna come to the US
to get a shot.
I would like to advocate that we take these extra vaccines
and we ship them to the developing world.
Yeah, they should go south of the border for sure.
For sure.
Yeah. And by the way, we're doing a should go south of the border for sure. For sure.
Yeah.
And by the way, we're doing a much better job vaccinating people than Europe.
I mean, it's unbelievable that COVID is spiking in Europe right now because they've been so
incompetent at getting people vaccinated.
Well, there are issues where they do want to put shock order in.
Shockingly incompetent.
Shockingly incompetent.
The Canadians and the European said, we want you to prove to us the vaccine works before
we put our order in.
I don't think we went a bad part of this. I think Jason, like, I think that, like, sometimes,
I think over the last 40 years, there's been two polar opposites of governing people. One
is what I would call the autocrat and the other is what I would call kindergarten soccer,
where when the ball, no matter where the ball is on the on the soccer field, every player on every team is surrounded.
And so as a result, no progress is here.
Progress is bursting and unpredictable and sometimes not great, but it can happen.
And this is where like, you know, so like, I mean, we are, I'm still shocked at the lack of scientific
rigor and understanding by these people.
at the lack of scientific rigor and understanding by these people.
And so how could you have an entire western set of countries who are theoretically not stupid,
be in this situation in April of 2021 knowing what we know.
Yeah. Well, how's Brexit? How's Brexit looking now? No, it's not.
Because Britain is like almost fully vaccinated.
Their COVID numbers are coming way down.
And then the bridge variant, the British variant, it started in the UK, is spreading like
wildfire across Europe because they're too bureaucratic to get everyone vaccinated.
So I mean, Britain is looking really good by comparison right now.
They opted out of kindergarten soccer.
Yeah. And by the way, this is just a tieback
to the infrastructure for a second. I don't have a problem with infrastructure if the investment
is going to be spent wisely. But how much of us trust the government to spend the money
wisely as opposed to on pork barrels spending and wasteful projects and taking too long.
We have the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. The original Bay Bridge took two years to build, and then the repair of it took 17 years where they did the upgraded version.
And that's the problem we have is that nobody really trusts our government anymore to allocate
this money wisely. Just to give people an idea, doses administered per 100 people, 39, well, now 40 for the US. And Israel 114, obviously, there's two DOS shots.
And Spain 14, Italy 14, Canada 12, Mexico 4.
My mom, who's almost 80, just got her for a shot,
which I think is inexcusable, just intruder
if you're listening.
Disaster.
I just think that's unacceptable.
Unacceptable. She's 79 years old.
It's unacceptable. God. I mean, these politicians, these politicians and bureaucrats design this
complicated system to prove that they're helping people. It's just like news and transport.
No, okay. It's just where all they do is get the way. Equity. That's what we do.
All they do is get the way. The red, the red light should go off and you should run far away from
whatever comes after we're going to solve an equity problem.
We see let's go for efficiency. Let's let's go. Yeah.
All right, everybody. We'll see you all next time on the
all in podcast. Love you guys. Love you,
Disney. See tonight. See tonight tonight.
Exactly.
I love you.
Did you get it? Yeah.
Did you get it? Yeah.
Bring us some of that. Bring us some of that sacks, crafty Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, You're right. I'll come in tilted because I'll be negative Jeff Yolk. Yes.
Just go for a point twice.
How about if we cover it? We'll just do a flippable cover.
Cover your Jeff Yolk boy. That's not a no.
I didn't hear that.
Somebody's low.
Someone send texts and tell her to kick him out of the house tonight.
Well, let your winners ride. Brain man David Sack. to kick him out of the house tonight. Besties are gone, go for it! That's my dog, take it away, she's right, wait, sit down!
Oh man, my ham is the actual meat, the ass was so good!
We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two
Cause they're all just like this like sexual tension, but we just need to release them out
What, you're the B, what, you're the B
B, what? We're the B. B. What?
We need to get merch these aren't there.
I'm going on leave!
I'm going on leave!
you