All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Intro & Dog update 5:48 COVID, Vaccine mandates, public vs. private policy 26:26 Collectivism, comparison to cigarettes, Sacks' latest podcast beef 36:56 Vaccine incentives in France ...45:39 Friedberg's science corner: DeepMind's latest breakthrough, Big Tech censorship, free speech infringements 59:40 Capital's role in progress, Bezos' poor press conference, difference in criticism by party, Elon & Bezos as capital allocators 1:10:46 Modern online pessimist psychology & how to fix it 1:21:32 Besties give their tech industry takeaways 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: NYT - In France, angry protests, rising infections and record vaccinations. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/world/france-covid-vaccine-pass-protests.html NYT - Military and V.A. Struggle With Vaccination Rates in Their Ranks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/politics/military-va-vaccines.html CNBC - Biden on Facebook: ‘They’re killing people’ with vaccine misinformation https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html Fortune - In giant leap for biology, DeepMind’s A.I. reveals secret building blocks of human life https://fortune.com/2021/07/22/deepmind-alphafold-human-proteome-database-proteins/ The Wizard of Menlo Park - Randall E. Stross https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Menlo-Park-Thomas-Invented/dp/1400047633 Tweets: https://twitter.com/OliviaGoldhill/status/1417446281685966853 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1416879494283993088 https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1417632367200673794

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 It's sacks, I am going to give you a thousand dollars each to the charity of your choice for every correct answer. Fuck it. Ten thousand. Ha! But you have to answer. You have to answer in real time and you can't fuck around, okay? No, stealing.
Starting point is 00:00:15 This is too much. Any charity chooses included Tucker Carlson 2024. Okay, let's go. You have to give the answers right away. You cannot fucking think about this. Here we go. Three, two, one. First middle and last the answers right away. You cannot fucking think about this. Here we go. Three, two, one. First middle and last name of your children,
Starting point is 00:00:28 and their birthdays, go! First, last. No. Stop it, we're done, we're ready. No. You're already stopped. Okay, go, do you know? You can beat these out, Nick, go ahead, go.
Starting point is 00:00:42 So, is, uh, go. So, is a January **** No, here, what's the year? Oh, 2008. **** **** Ah,
Starting point is 00:00:51 Ah, Ah, Ah, is October **** Ah, Ah,
Starting point is 00:00:59 Ah, Ah, 2010. Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, 2010 and then Little guy little man You're trying to stop me. You're trying to stop me with a little guy little man The puppy
Starting point is 00:01:15 He was born October 2016 2016. That was a struggle. I got it. I got it. There he got that. That's all that matters to see got there. It is so you're gonna give that you're gonna give 10 grand Yeah 10 grand each to 10 grand each so 30 grand name your church at Tucker Carlson for president DeSantis 2024 Hi, it I said charity asshole Hey everybody, hey everybody welcome to your favorite podcast, the all in podcast where we talk about the economy, technology, politics, and basically anything that's in the news with us today again, the queen of Kenwa himself, David Friedberg, how are you doing, David?
Starting point is 00:02:22 I'm hanging in there today. All right, people are looking for the dog. Where's the dog? Matty, he's sitting here on the floor. Matty, come here. Come on. Come on, Matty. All right, and from a random palace somewhere in the world the dictator himself, Chimoff, Polly, Hapiti, how you doing, see? I'm doing great. You know, I got another dog. While you were in Italy, I went to the breeder that I got hockey from and she had a three year old that was not really, you know, ever going to become a breeding dog or whatever. So I adopted the three year old.
Starting point is 00:03:02 He has a parasite, so he's been pooing everywhere, everywhere. That's great information for the call over the castle. All over the castle. Fantastic. Liquid poop, by the way. But we finally diagnosed it today, and he's going to the vet to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body. to get the parasite expunged from his body. Okay, thank you for that information. And I don't know where. Nobody cares, nobody cares. I mean, I have to ask you how you were doing. I thought you were just gonna say great.
Starting point is 00:03:33 I didn't know we were gonna go straight to diarrhea. We got a new dog too. You did. And it's been kind of a disaster. The kids were like, we found this like, you know, golden that is really calm, you, it like she's just super low energy and calms like perfect for us. I'm like, I don't know. I think that's just like the puppy is kind of asleep, you know, like it's gonna wake up.
Starting point is 00:03:56 They're like, no, no, no, no, no, this is like a special dog. It's like really well behaved. Whatever. So anyway, we get it sure enough, like a week later, the puppy wakes up and she's eating everything in the house destroying everything It's bit. Yeah, so now we're Wait, is that dog number two or three for you? It's dog two with the dog one was a rescue dog who's great So dog number two is now getting trained David sacks is with us. Of course the Rayman himself and in related dog stories, I put all the girls to bed and then I hear screaming, I get up, I run outside, literally
Starting point is 00:04:31 the new bulldog who's nine months old, Maximus went on, you know, one of his running fits. One of my daughters falls out of bed, gets like a bruise on her like lower back and she's whaling. The other daughter feels terrible about it and then the dog decides that he is going to projectile vomit everywhere all at the same time. You guys have had these moments where like, it's just completely utter chaos.
Starting point is 00:04:56 It's chaos. It's chaos. It's chaos. Dogs plus kids equals chaos. Chaos. But would any of us have it any other way? I love the combo of dogs and kids. It's just the best fucking thing. It's pretty great. It's pretty. Dogs are amazing in kids right? Especially when you bring in a new dog or a puppy into the house.
Starting point is 00:05:12 It's chaos, but it's a really beautiful chaos. Well, you know what I think also is like think about how overrated everything in life is. People like, oh my god, this place with the pasta in Italy. it's the greatest life-changing thing. And all this movie was incredible. It's the best movie ever made. And it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever. It's great or whatever. But I think kids and dogs are underrated universally. Have as many kids as you can possibly biologically have
Starting point is 00:05:40 and can economically afford as much one opinion. And the more dogs, the better. I love dogs, yeah. All right. I think we should start with the COVID cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions, touching on people's freedoms. And it's hard to know where to start here, but I think facts are always a good place to start.
Starting point is 00:06:04 Here in the United States, we had gotten COVID cases, you know, to that 12,000 a day average. It was pretty amazing, and it looked like it was going to go straight down, smooth sailing. And we had had deaths down and around, I saw some seven day averages where we were at 150, 200. Now, the weekends are kind of weird in terms of reporting, but the seven day average today is at 248. In other words, it's been flat for a month. When you do this on, this is according to the New York Times,
Starting point is 00:06:34 statistics, and Google, you can search for Google and you'll find these have some great data that they'll just put right in the search result. However, cases have gone from this 12, 15 K a day average, soaring in just 30 days to 62,000 a day and a seven day average of 40,000. So we're basically tripled the number of cases. Cases trail traditionally deaths by something in the neighborhood of 10 days. I think I'm correct, Friedberg. So what do you think is actually going to happen here? We're gonna get up to 100,000, 200,000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated?
Starting point is 00:07:16 Yeah, you know, the current logic on this is that there will be because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now and even more infectious variant of COVID, the people that are not vaccinated are starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from. So yeah, we will see deaths climb and I think like we talked about last time, we're starting to see even Gavin did an interview yesterday in California talking about how, you know, it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions, behavioral restrictions,
Starting point is 00:07:53 mask mandates, et cetera. So there's gonna be a set of reactions. And I think as we talked about last time, we saw the market start to react to the potential of that on Monday. And then very interestingly kind of reverse course of Tuesday and everything came back, whenever one has freaked out on Monday after they saw the weekends data, which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the US. But I think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are going to die.
Starting point is 00:08:17 Therefore, we're not going to see, you know, political leaders force restrictions that are kind of going to damage the economy. And we're going to start to walk what I think Israel is calling the golden line, which is balancing the economy with the the health of the citizenry. So, you know, we'll see. It's going to come down to policy, but I think from a desk perspective, there will absolutely be a rise in depth now as unvaccinated people are the going to be the bulk of those depths. And this thing is spreading
Starting point is 00:08:45 again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated. And then sacks, this becomes now a great Roshak test of what do you see in this data and in this moment because it's a pandemic as many people are saying now, I think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So people have chosen to opt in to this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it. You were part of it even as a vaccinated person, but you're feeling great. You're back to 100%.
Starting point is 00:09:16 So what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mask mandates, what's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated? Well, I think we need to differentiate between public policy and private behavior. So after last week's episode where I said, you know, Delta variance real, there's going to be huge spike in cases. Unfortunately, I thought we had this thing whipped a few weeks ago. Now I think the data is showing something different.
Starting point is 00:09:49 There's a lot of commoners saying, SACs, you've turned, you've been blue-pilled. No, I think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the policy conversation around it. I think the difference now from last year, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that we do have vaccines. So I think for most people getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table. The other is we know so much more about what works
Starting point is 00:10:15 and what doesn't work. And so lockdowns don't work if they ever did. They now know, looking at from what different states did last year that they don't make a difference. There's no reason to go back to that policy. But also, I would even say on mass, it should be... Do we know that? I think so.
Starting point is 00:10:36 We sure of that. Yeah, I think so, because the thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions. So in Florida, they didn't have mandates, but people who are at risk took extreme precautions. They would either lock themselves down or be very fiscidious about wearing a high quality mask. By contrast, in California, we had the most severe lockdowns, but they were never really feasible.
Starting point is 00:11:04 So there's 10 pages of exceptions. People didn't really abide by them. And then on top of it, you know, you have all these mass mandates, but if somebody wears like a sock, loosely affixed to their face, does that really protect them? You know, so, you know, people, if they're, if they're not interested in complying with these mandates, they do it in a half-hearted way. I'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place. So the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is going to be. We know now so much more about the risks that we all face than we did a year ago. And so just let private citizens decide. I mean, I'd even say on vaccines. I mean, look, I'm pro-vax.
Starting point is 00:11:46 I don't really understand where the anti-vax people are coming from, but I'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated, you know, on this show, who don't want to get vaccinated. You know, if they don't want to send those doses to the developing world, where they're desperate for them. And then let me ask you, Tramoth, do you agree with Saks's position?
Starting point is 00:12:05 That listen, citizens are just gonna have to make their own decision here, leave everything open. And let's not have the economy collapse again and people are smart enough to make their own decision. And is this framing of, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the correct framing? Wow, I'm really of two minds. There's the part of me that says that
Starting point is 00:12:25 you have to give people the right to make their own decision. The problem is that in this specific case, there's so much transmissibility. And as a result of that, how this thing can mutate that I think that public health has to take a priority over any individual's rights in this very specific narrow, narrow case. Because the Delta variant is so transmissible, people are going to have to lose some freedoms, is one of those showing a vaccine card when you go to a arena. You wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops
Starting point is 00:13:09 to be unvaccinated as an example. I mean, and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the peak-cree dish of the unvaccinated, you're increasing everybody's risk. And this is where I think individual freedoms, as long as it doesn't trample on collective freedom, then I think live and let live. But I think on this specific issue,
Starting point is 00:13:35 I think that it's unconscionable to be in a situation where we are fighting basically a time function where at a certain amount of time time you're going to have a variant that is, you know, basically will overcome all the vaccines we have, will kill enormous numbers of people, including the vaccinated, will literally shut the economy down. And that's a probabilistic event now. And I don't like the fact that susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for medical or religious reasons, they're just watching Fox News and just
Starting point is 00:14:10 spouting off. I agree that we're at risk there, but we're also at risk for vaccinated people in the rest of the world. So Delta variant came from India, the Lambda variant, I think the wrong came from Peru. I mean, the fact that matter is, unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential petri dish for the virus. So I'd rather, I mean, this is why we need to send those unused doses that by the way are at risk of expiring. We now, I mean, there was a tweet about this recently. There's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the US that are going to waste right now.
Starting point is 00:14:39 We should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated. Well, specifically to Mexico and Canada and Canada is, I think this month going to, even though we got off to a massive head start, going to eclipse us in terms of the percentage of vaccinated. Let me ask it more pointedly. Should teachers, public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated? Should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation, airplanes,
Starting point is 00:15:04 or take buses, long haul buses, long haul trains. And then third, should you be forced to show a vaccine card to get on to go to sporting events or concerts? Let's go through those three. So your personal freedom ends. You're going to be forced if you want to go to behaviors. If you want to participate in a public construct, if you want to
Starting point is 00:15:29 consume a public resource or if you want to provide a publicly funded good, then it's the broader public's rights that are superior to your individual rights. Otherwise, work at a charter school where it's not required. Watch the fucking concert from home or drive your car, use a bicycle or take a Uber. The end, that's what you think, and then freeberg. So I understand that argument. I would differentiate between public and private requirements
Starting point is 00:16:00 because I don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcefully stick a needle in your arm. So... Well, what you're about to say, you could stay home or you could take your bicycle. Well, sure. So is that a reasonable that you don't get to go to a warrior's game because you're on Vaxen. Yeah, I think the warrior's stadium is privately owned, the team is private. Okay. So I think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their employees and customers. What about airlines?
Starting point is 00:16:26 Because that is, you know, there's a limited number of them. Yeah, I think that's where it's. So airlines should be able to force it. Now, what about school teachers? What they can't force it, but they can set the requirements for you to board their planes. Okay, now, what about public schools? Should, if, let's do teachers and students should teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in because you said if they don't come to work in the
Starting point is 00:16:51 fall on a couple episodes back you're fired. Well, I wouldn't they want to get a vaccine. The whole debate with the teachers unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines, which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many. So I don't think that's a serious issue. Now now requiring the kids to get vaccinated is that that would be the real policy question and. Well, let's tackle both. Should teachers be forced to get the vaccine? Yes or no? You just kind of brushed over. Yeah, you put force. No, I mean, I think it's important to just, just, you know, pinpoint this. Like forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to, you know, work at the school, I just want to highlight the precedent, it's that's right, which is,
Starting point is 00:17:31 you know, you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in the arm. If someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot, does that mean then that they, you know, should lose their job as a public servant? Well, no, I mean, no, I'm saying that. Look, I think that's not the deal, but like if there's one or two teachers that say, you know what, it is a big deal to me. I have a different, I have a set of reasons why I don't want to be shot. Well, I think those teachers, that's an assumption of risk.
Starting point is 00:17:58 I mean, if they've decided they're going to assume the risk, then, you know, don't come crying to us when they get sick. Well, the document is that they're going to be the risk than, you know, don't come crying to us when they get sick. Well, the document is that they're going to be the vector of exposure, right? Yeah, I'm what they're the petri dishes. They can be the vector that gets kids sick. In all of these situations, there's always a very obvious and justifiable exemption for religious and medical reasons to not be vaccinated. Not just for this, but for anything else. So I struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a fucking clue about
Starting point is 00:18:32 science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate for them, where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves. They probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors, but on this one specific issue, they narrowly say, you know what, I'm an expert enough because I'm watching this television show I've made a decision. That to me makes no sense. Yeah, look, I actually agree with you. I'm in the camp of that everybody barring some, you know, highly specific medical condition that renders you
Starting point is 00:19:07 ineligible should be getting vaccinated. So I agree with you about what the right answer is, but I do think that when it comes to government, it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to government to force people to engage in behavior they don't want to engage in. I think it's a real question. Private organizations are different. We'll agree on private organizations, but we do have to make some decisions on public transportation. And we do have to make decisions about teachers, and we're going to have to make decisions
Starting point is 00:19:35 on students. So could you bench the teachers who, or otherwise penalize them who are not vaccinated. There are sometimes where a cop or a teacher is put in a not in the classroom, not on the beat for whatever reasons, sometimes disciplinary but for other reasons. Could you just say, listen, if you're not gonna get vaccinated,
Starting point is 00:20:00 you're going to not be in the classroom, you'll be a remote teacher and we're just gonna create two classes here. I don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get vaccinated but. But I look I think the virus is everywhere now it's just an epidemic and so to single out like one particular group and say you're going to put you down on your opinion so you're saying teacher should not be forced. Trying to pin you down on your opinion, so you're saying teacher should not be forced. I'm saying that, I mean, if they work in a private school, the private school could definitely require it.
Starting point is 00:20:29 We're talking about public only now. We all live on private. So you're saying, I think it's a really pin you down on it, yeah. I think it's a really complicated question because I think there are clear public health benefits to everyone getting vaccinated, but I also don't really like empowering government to force you because, look, it's like everything else.
Starting point is 00:20:46 The government may be right in this particular case, but what else is it gonna do with that power? And I don't like giving government that power. So look, it's a complicated question. I don't, it's not, I would probably air on the side of not letting government force people to do it. But look, I think it's a close call. I do think it's a close call. I do think it's a close call.
Starting point is 00:21:06 Jamal, force the teachers to get vaccinated or not. Yes. And the reason is because these kids are already being left behind, even when school is functioning normally. And you can see it in the test scores. You can see it in our readiness. You can see it in our ability to actually do the jobs that are required. We are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic. And now you introduce a reason for folks to basically check out and not appear.
Starting point is 00:21:39 What do you guys guess? How many years were lost in these 15 months when kids were at home? I would say not 15 months. No, it's more. Two years, two and a half years, three years. Well, I miss also this. So the actual scoring, depending on what grade they are,
Starting point is 00:21:56 did your kids miss graduation? Did they miss senior prom? Did they miss their SATs? I mean, what did they miss in terms of performance? Yeah, I mean, Timoth is a good point, which is that if that, that when government is the employer, requiring it on their employees, because it leads to better outcomes for that institution,
Starting point is 00:22:17 that is a little different than government just mandating that you, Jason Calcanos, private citizen, have to go get a shot in your arm, right? I mean, so there is a slight difference there, like military, for instance, right? The military probably wants to vaccinate everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation, they're not like incapacitated by an outbreak of COVID, right?
Starting point is 00:22:41 So I can, I think we're getting into shades of gray here from a policy perspective. You know, I don't want teachers missing school because for weeks at time, because they didn't do the obvious thing and getting the COVID vaccine. So look, I think there are some really good policy arguments there, but I think again,
Starting point is 00:23:01 the one place where I'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said, listen, you private citizen, not an employee of the government has to go get vaccinated. As much as I would like everyone to do get vaccinated, I don't want to give government that kind of power. President Biden could legally require military members to get vaccinated, but so far he has declined to do so July 9th, New York Times. Friedberg, where do you stand on this?
Starting point is 00:23:28 Tremott says, he's all in, your teacher, you get vaccinated at the end. Sax is kind of close, but is a little concerned. What do you say, Friedberg? I mean, another way to frame it is that there's a new qualification for a job. Like, you know, there's qualification to be in the military. You have to have certain physical capabilities. Jason, I don't know if you would qualify. I don't think I would.
Starting point is 00:23:52 I mean, I can be like, for totally different reasons, your inability to fight or throw a punch would be, no, maybe J. Cal could eat the enemy. Yeah. But, I would be great in the military. I'm a bit... He'd be like, I'm men's they'd be cooking the meatballs or something.
Starting point is 00:24:10 Private Joker. Private. A dope. There's the re I think the reason there's sensitivity to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs. And then you're telling them that in order to keep your job, you have to go get a vaccine. Now, if we were to have zero teachers today, and we were starting a public school system from scratch, and you said, here's one of the qualifying criteria to be a school teacher,
Starting point is 00:24:33 you have to have an education degree, you have to have maybe a master's degree in education, you have to have appropriate qualifications in training and certification. Oh, and by the way, you also have to have a vaccine. If that becomes a criteria, I think people find it less offensive. It's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go get a shot in order to keep your job. And that's the complicating thing that I think people are trying to wait through. I don't think that if you were to say, like, look, it's obvious that the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do pushups or whatever the criteria
Starting point is 00:25:06 might be. But if you impose that on people that were already in the military and then you're going to kick a bunch of them out, people would be up in arms about it. If you have a BMI requirement. That's the concern I think that arises with imposing these kind of personal body criteria upon specific jobs when people are already employed in that job. And there's absolutely no answer, right?
Starting point is 00:25:32 Like if you're gonna do it, you're gonna have incredible backlash and trouble and pain. And if you were to, and we're not in a circumstance where we can build these organizations and these institutions from scratch. Look, there's a lot of social issues
Starting point is 00:25:45 where, particularly on the liberal side, people do not want the government prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures, right? Well, I'd say it's even more invasive. Are you talking about people transitioning? Or the issue of abortion, very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not have the right to legislate.
Starting point is 00:26:08 What happens with what happens with what happens with my body, right? Forced, giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is that is invasive. So I do think there are like rights implications to that. But I want to be very clear. If you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole, if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share, then you need to sign up for the compact that we all sign up for. That's my overarching argument. The thing with abortion where I'm on the other side of the issue, just to be very clear, is like it is a woman's body. I don't think I have any right to
Starting point is 00:26:59 dictate what she does. I don't understand what she goes through. I don't understand what situation she's in. I don't think I have the judgment to do that. It should be a good decision. It doesn't have impact on the collective. And her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a probabilistic chance that I may die. It does not. But when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me. Or mutate. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:27:30 I'm not saying that I have a say, but I do think I should have a say, if you're then all of a sudden going to consume the same resources that I consume, where I've signed up to that compact for public health. Based on all this, here's where I come to. What if we gave teachers an off ramp? Listen, if you, you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom,
Starting point is 00:27:47 if not, you're gonna get a one year buyout or whatever, one month or two months for every year of service. So if you've been with us for 20 years, you're gonna get 20 months of pay. And, or you could say, if the virus is spreading at under this rate, in other words, we've got under 1 percent of the population infected
Starting point is 00:28:05 or whatever, the criteria is then you can come to work in the classroom. But if this thing is spreading, you're out. And that's it. And there's an offer amp here to David's point. Unless there's a narrow, like, look, I do think you can be a conscientious object or for real legitimate reasons.
Starting point is 00:28:20 Again, like we have these very specific definitions for religious or for health specific reasons that you don't get vaccinated. I think those should be respected. It's not that cohort of people we're talking about. It's everybody else that right now wants to not think for themselves. And as a result, put everybody else and themselves in danger. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:43 I think the most compelling part of your argument, Schmoth, is that we're, is the health externality, right? That that each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting, you know, multiplicative contagious particles. And this is why I was in favor of a mass mandate at the beginning of the pandemic is, it's not just an individual decision Your your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick So you know, this is why I do think it's also wasn't very basic correct sacks. I mean was your other point?
Starting point is 00:29:16 Yes exactly the potentially high benefit for very low cost I think we're in but but but the thing that maybe I didn't necessarily take into consideration is, you know, people complied in such a half-hearted way. I mean, I do think the mass makes a difference. If it's an N95 quality mask that you put on correctly, right? But when people just strap a sock to their face, it's loosely fitting, and they don't give a shit. I mean, does that really make a difference? I mean, I'm very skeptical. Let me ask you a question, Saks,
Starting point is 00:29:45 and then we'll go to Freeberg, and then we'll flip to the next topic. If we were on our third pandemic, or let's go for a bit, a second pandemic starts, a totally different one, you know, a bull type or something, and we're on the fifth variant, and people are dying at a higher rate.
Starting point is 00:30:00 Does your calculus change Saks? Because the cons, yeah. Because the downsides, the costs of not imposing those more restrictive regulations goes up considerably. I mean, definitely my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that if you're vaccinated, you're called it 95% likely
Starting point is 00:30:24 to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table. And so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk. You know, it's like it's like smoking in a way where when I made the movie think for smoking, Christopher Buckley told me, you know, he's the author of the book. And he said, look, there's something uniquely American about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful, right? The main character, and thank you for smoking is a spokesman for Big Tobacco and he's engaging in political spin, but his argument is, look, people have the right to engage in this behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them.
Starting point is 00:31:01 Maybe America is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that. But I do. Look, that is freedom. Is letting people do stupid things. And so we have to weigh the benefits of freedom against the cost. By the way, sorry, can I just say something? Sorry, can I just say something? Smoking is a perfect example, because as you know, there is now a non-trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled secondhand smoke. Both the smoker, but also other things,
Starting point is 00:31:38 condo boards, other places where all of a sudden, you didn't choose to fucking have, you know, tar and nicotine. Bartan Bartan was my dad worked in bars where it was a cloud of smoke for 30 years. 30 years. Right. They told him he was essentially a smoker. It's not just the detrimental activity at the time. Remember, we've socialized the cost of treatment for people through public health systems. And because of that, it's not just an individual's
Starting point is 00:32:06 choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone that's now got to pay the price. But the government is so omnipresent in all of our lives, there's always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make. And to to most point, I mean, everybody uses government services to some degree. So that alone can't be the reason. I do agree that the extra- No, but there is a great behavior, David. What about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an hour? Like it's the same thing? Well, that's illegal. That's illegal. But I think I think Shemoth is right that the smoking example is a good one because we do regulate secondhand smoke because there's an externality. There's a health externality to everybody else if you smoke in a public place. And so we restrict that, but we don't make
Starting point is 00:32:45 smoking illegal. We don't stop you from doing it in your own homes or in private places. And the argument is, listen, if you want to do something that's harmful primarily to you, that's your choice as an American. And I know people, a lot of people don't like that. Actually, this is the, this is, I posted a tweet that I got just because an opinion is wrong. Doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because the behavior is harmful, I posted a tweet that I got just because an opinion is wrong, doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because the behavior is harmful, doesn't mean it should be prohibited, just because something is beneficial, doesn't mean it should be required.
Starting point is 00:33:16 Right. It's a completely reasonable tweet. Yeah, I thought it was a pretty inoffensive, anodine tweet, just reminding people that just because, again, something is positive,ine tweet, just reminding people that just because, again, something as positive doesn't mean you force people to do it, and just because some behavior is harmful, you don't ban it. I think smoking is a great example of that, right? We let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them because freedom is a value in and of itself. For this, I was attacked as a selfish asshole
Starting point is 00:33:45 by this other pod. And I really, you could... Okay, our swisher and professor Coltakes. He's actually... Professor what? Coltakes, that literally made an index of all of professor G's, you know, takes that Macy's would be incredible and Amazon will lose its money and Yada Yada.
Starting point is 00:34:04 He's kind of obsessed with you too, Tremoth Proffji, yeah, who just got a show canceled on Bloomberg. But they were a little, Karris Wischer was called Sacks and Asshole. Well, trigger it. It was bizarre that they would get so triggered by this inoffensive tweet. But I think what you see here is an example of the way that the woke mind thinks, which is... Well, hold on. I don't think Kara's woke. Are you carrying me? She's like the Medaim Dufarge or the woke revolution. She's been meeting Farrge.
Starting point is 00:34:33 Medaim Dufarge was this character in the French Revolution who had knit the names of the next person to be guillotineed. And she was one of the leaders of the sans-Qulats. No, look, look, Kara is constantly gigning up the mob to try and, you know, guillotine. So no, non-woq person. I don't think that that's true. I don't know that's true. I think she's kind of moderate. You're trying to, you're trying to curry favor with her so you don't, you're not the next
Starting point is 00:34:57 one. No, no, no, no. She, I mean, she did get it right. You are an asshole. I mean, you are an asshole. She got that part. I got that part right. But she's old and failing. Well, you are kind of old. You look don't. You look old. She's effectively saying But you're old and failing. What you are. Oh, you look.
Starting point is 00:35:05 You look. She's effectively saying we're all assholes because I think all of us have talked about the need. I'm an asshole. I love it. Own it. Okay. What would she not a liner? What's your other choice?
Starting point is 00:35:16 Being a whiner on the sidelines? What we've said on the show is that we have a moral imperative to get back to normal. Do we not? Yes. That is what we've said on the show is that we have a moral imperative to get back to normal. Do we not? That is what we've said. For that, you're basically saying that that is a let them eat COVID position, right? That we are basically, we don't care if people get sick and died because of COVID.
Starting point is 00:35:35 That's not true. You know, we just have about, we have about. I think we should make people get vaccinated. Yeah, and you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated. I asked you, Zach, if there were three more variants and this was an acute situation, you said you would force. Oh, look, if we had a variant of COVID that was as deadly as Ebola and as transmissible as Delta variant, it 100% changes the game.
Starting point is 00:36:01 There's no question about it. So you're willing to change the government's ability to put a shot on based on it's a benefit. Yes, it's a benefit cost analysis and it's reasonable. But look, I give freedom a lot of weight and part of my calculations is the fact that I can get vaccinated to take to most likely take the most serious risk off the table. So while I am impacted to some degree by other people's choices, I'm much less impacted now that we have functional. But you're thinking about this.
Starting point is 00:36:31 I still have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're using this as a linear problem. This thing is transmutating. And so you have it. I know, Timoth, but there's still billions of people all over the world who are unvaccinated and we'd be better off focusing on getting them a martial plan for the vaccines.
Starting point is 00:36:49 All these unused doses, we're wasting our breath in the United States trying to get these vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people to get vaccinated. Did you guys see that a manual, a micron of France basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places, going into bars and cafes, they basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated. And he did it in a public address on TV, 22 million people watched it.
Starting point is 00:37:14 Yep. And then after he did this, suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20,000 a minute. They got 4 million people sign up to get vaccinated. Yep. You can't go to a cafe. You can't go to a cafe. I mean, in France, what's the point of being alive? And then let me throw a wet blanket on the framing of this on whether all of this talk
Starting point is 00:37:32 about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible. I have been to like three events over the last month or two where I was required to be vaccinated. And I literally just took a photo of this index card that I got from this person and sent it to them, which I could go make at Kinkos or I could print at home. It's like, I forgot. There's, my point is, I don't think that
Starting point is 00:37:55 there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about. How are you actually gonna know that people go to the Warriors game are actually vaccinated? How are you actually gonna know? They did it at Mattis' work run. They literally had you pull out your ID
Starting point is 00:38:09 and they matched your name to your Vax card. And I think printing out a Vax card and faking it, if I can be a fine, could be a $10,000 fine. And so you would do it like anything else. So you could make a bogus driver's license. My point is that it's not digital, right? There's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinatedus driver's license. And my point is that it's not digital, right? There's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated and who's not.
Starting point is 00:38:28 So so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like here's this piece of paper that says I'm vaccinated. I think that you're never gonna really close the whole on this thing. Now you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in France, which is you just announce the restrictions, you announce these rules, everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up. But I'm not sure this actually ends up becoming this
Starting point is 00:38:49 truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society over the next short while. Maybe over time, we digitize all this stuff, but we'll see. The best case scenario is that because Delta is so transmissible, we get to herd immunity because all the people who didn't get vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing turns out. How close are we to that? Because we have 60% of adults in the United States have had one shot or more,
Starting point is 00:39:14 which is why debts probably aren't going up because that's like 75% in people over 60, I think. So freeberg in your estimation as our science guy, with we have like 30 million people who've been infected that we know of, you got to triple that number, right? Because as people who we don't know, and then you have 65, you have 60%. So we've got to be in the range of 70% have been exposed or been vaccinated. So when does it kick in?
Starting point is 00:39:39 Or are we experiencing, you know, herd immunity right now with these low deaths? We talked about this before, but there's a spectrum of infection. You can have viral replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know, because you've got enough anti-bodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus, before your body even, you start to feel symptoms. And there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time, and you have incredibly bad symptoms,
Starting point is 00:40:12 and you have inflammation, and all the stuff that follows. And so, in terms of how you measure this stuff, it's really difficult to say that you're gonna stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to have been exposed. As we've seen, even when you have a broad and diverse antibody tool in your body, because you've been exposed to a vaccine, we are still seeing that some of these variants can
Starting point is 00:40:39 break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant. And so the rate of transmission slows, the rate of severe infection goes way down, and so on. So it's not as binary as, hey, we hit herd immunity and now we're done. It seems, this is, you know, as we talked about earlier, and as I think everyone is coming to terms with, this is going to be an endemic virus, and that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way causing sometimes severe sometimes you know modest outbreaks for likely a very long time no matter how many people get it no matter how many people get vaccinated because you have different levels should we ignore it at what level should we just say listen that is the steady state how many cases a day how many deaths day, do you think is the steady state that we should just say,
Starting point is 00:41:25 we just go to work and ignore it? I am a brutal, cold-hearted libertarian on this point, and I have been since we first talked about this last year. I've always been of the mind that we need to balance the follow-on life effect from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual loss of life, right? So you can never go I
Starting point is 00:41:49 I really think this point about zeroism and this term about zeroism is an important one You can never get to zero cases What is the acceptable number of cases and what is the cost to keep that case load down? The balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision. Put a number on it. It's about saving lives, right? So like there are a certain number of people whose lives are going to be ruined, who are some of them will commit suicide, some of them won't be able to earn an income again, their businesses are going to get shut down. What is the economic cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life versus the pain is what is the
Starting point is 00:42:21 number? We had a average of 250, 250,,000 cases known cases a day at the peak. We had a peak deaths of 4,100 a day. We are now at 200 people dying a day and 30,000 cases. Is there a number at which you say, let's just focus on getting back to work and is that number where we are now? I'm trying to get an idea. Yeah, again, I wouldn't simplify it to those data points. What I would do is I would look at what age are people dying, how many lifehairs are we losing, and how can we address the acute
Starting point is 00:42:53 populations that are at risk and the acute populations that are potentially going to be exposed, manage those populations differently than you manage. The broader population that has a lower likelihood of death and a lower likelihood of fatality and the restrictions that you then impose to, you know, start to manage the risk and the exposure to different populations gets way against the saving of life and the loss of life in both circumstances. So it's not easy, right? It's it's, it's, it's, it's, it never wants to sum this whole thing up to like how many deaths a day is appropriate. That's not the right answer, right? Because well, you're, how many deaths a day is appropriate? That's not the right answer, right? Because well, you're saying how many that part of it is so obvious, right? That and we should have
Starting point is 00:43:28 known this last summer, the obvious part being that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's the most at risk. And what do we do with lockdowns? We literally locked down the entire population every business. It was completely insane. We should have focused it on protecting the most at risk populations, isolating the sick or the people at greatest risk, not everybody, it was just insane. And I mean, I can't believe we're still having
Starting point is 00:43:56 that conversation a year later. Can I, before we move on to the next topic, can I read the best comment from Saks' tweet? So Saks' tweet, because an opinion is wrong, doesn't mean it should be censored, just because the behavior is harmful, doesn't mean it should be prohibited, but it isn't just because something is beneficial, doesn't mean it should be required. The best response goes to distantly social rumple, full name is at Wendell Shirk who said this message brought to you by the generic self-serving platitude alert network. Now it turned you to regularly scheduled episode of the
Starting point is 00:44:35 bland soap opera with the padlim sisters. Well yeah, look, there's an element of truth to that, which is I almost in tweet because I thought it was too much of a platitude, but the fact that people on the other side got so triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to tweet it is they think that if you're calling for any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy, you're basically a selfish asshole. I mean, it's insane. I mean, they want to stay in this world of zero-est covistressions forever. We got to move on.
Starting point is 00:45:09 We're 45 minutes into COVID, so we got to move on. But I think if this is in the influenza plus or minus 100% zone, we got to pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society. And, you know, local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks, but I kind of think if this is within two X of our yearly deaths from
Starting point is 00:45:33 you know, influenza and just the normal cold, I think we move forward as best we can. Do we wanna go to China, Cuba? I think just real quick, before we move away from this, I really wanna just highlight the deep mind announcement from this morning, because I think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variance and what's been going on.
Starting point is 00:45:49 OK. So this morning, deep mind, which public alpha fold, we talked about this a few. Deep mind is owned by Google. It's an AI arm. It's an AI arm owned by Google. And they basically took protein structure and tried to predict what a protein looks like
Starting point is 00:46:05 physically as a function of the DNA or RNA that codes the amino acids that make up the protein. And so again, like when you have a string of amino acids, they combine and they fold into a wave. It's really hard to predict, and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein, and then it does something in the body. And historically, we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein, which would allow us to predict what that protein can
Starting point is 00:46:31 then do in the body. So this morning, deep mind, incredibly published a database would be predicted structure of every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this capability that they now have. What does it mean in English? And so, you know, what this means is we now have a physical model of every protein that human DNA can make. And that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does, how it does it, and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins, and how certain drugs can affect those proteins, and how we can alter human health by making new molecules
Starting point is 00:47:11 or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways. It's an incredible data set that was just published. It's almost like releasing the Rosetta Stone, in my opinion, in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body.
Starting point is 00:47:30 They did it for 10 other species, and they said that they're gonna publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of wife that we have the sort of data set around, for which they expect will achieve over 100 million unique proteins in this database over the coming months months freely available and searchable.
Starting point is 00:47:47 And let me just explain, and I know I'm on a monologue here, so I'll win the monologue staff. That's a good one. It's a good one. But let me just explain why this is relevant. The Delta variant, what it is, is that, you know, the SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence is about 30,000 base pairs long. 10% of those are about 3000 base pairs make up the spike protein, which is the protein at the tip of the COVID virus that the coronavirus that gets into the cells. And for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus, there's about one nucleoside mutation, one of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves. And we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein.. And we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein. And so we suddenly discover empirically, and by looking
Starting point is 00:48:32 around, suddenly all these people are getting more infected than we're getting infected before, we look at the genetic code and we're like, oh, here's the changes that happened. But we could have with this capability from alpha fold predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors on the cells and getting it to cells. And what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible and more deadly. All these sorts of factors because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair. And so this tool that was released today, I think highlights that over the next decade,
Starting point is 00:49:10 these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally. And it gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them with new drugs and new variant models and new vaccines. Well ahead of the, oh my God, we just got hit with a nuclear bomb. Let's clean up the mess kind of in the future. So it's an exciting day and an exciting moment. Would they have been released this, David,
Starting point is 00:49:39 if it hadn't been for COVID coming out? Do you think DeepMind just pivoted their entire group? Because they have about 1,000 people I understand. And by the way, they pay something in the order of six or 700,000 a year on average. And there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year. So just think about the scale of what Google is spending
Starting point is 00:49:58 on this. You guys know that they probably shifted a large number of people to work on this. You guys know that I have long, deep roots at Google. And I will tell you that the value system of people there, the press and the public will think what they want. But I think that the value system of people there drove them to realize the importance of this work
Starting point is 00:50:18 that they're doing with AlphaFold. And it is important for humanity and it is important for the health broadly of people. They could have kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that. And I think the importance of this discovery and this capability was realized and is published for that very reason.
Starting point is 00:50:35 There's a lot of work that DeepMind does to optimize ad targeting and ads bending and all this stuff and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for Google per year based on those capabilities. And then there are these things that benefit all of us. And by putting this out publicly, it's a great good for humanity. And they're making it freely available and searchable. And so I don't think that COVID kind of instigated this
Starting point is 00:50:58 because they've been working on this for a very long time since before COVID. And this is a very hard biological problem that is key to understanding biology and how biology works. It's been going on for decades. They've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available. And you know, there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database. I mean, this is a, this is a mitpha to society, to humanity. It does it change the fact that Google's spending well over a
Starting point is 00:51:24 billion dollars a year in deep mind and doing projects like this, this has changed any of your thinking about breaking them up, trim off, or how we look at Big Tech. That's a good question. No, because how do you afford it? Where does this kind of... We learned something very disturbing about Big Tech this week, actually. This is quite a bombshell that Jen Pesaki dropped from
Starting point is 00:51:45 the White House press briefing. We got to talk about this. She just sort of casually mentioned that, oh yeah, by the way, the administration is flagging posts for a social media company for Big Tech companies to take down to remove. Accounts. There are accounts about specific accounts. And posts, yeah, and she just kind of meant, just casually mentions, oh yeah, the big tech companies are very eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these accounts. She even said that when one of these companies
Starting point is 00:52:16 takes down an account, the rest should do it too, implying that the White House is providing the central coordinated role in the censorship. A global block list. Yeah. Okay, but why the white house? Let's take the most charitable view here. I know that it's very easy to make this a left versus right, their censoring, yada yada,
Starting point is 00:52:34 Trump got banned. But if somebody was saying this was microch... This was an account that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine. Would it not be... How would the... And it was hitting scale, you know, what would be the way for the White House to inform social media that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was trending? Well, the White House or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position,
Starting point is 00:53:02 but this is different. This is the White House coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies. Well, they're not behind the scenes. They're saying they're doing it right here to everybody. Correct. Correct. The behavior was behind the scenes, but if Pesaki just admitted it,
Starting point is 00:53:13 which is why it's such a bombshell, look, even the ACLU. If you were president and there was an account on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, that was saying there was a microchip from Bill Gates. This is a blatant Violation of the people's first amendment. I would you then tell them how would you be allowed? You're the first amendment gives you the right to say things that are untrue
Starting point is 00:53:34 It is not the business of government to declare what is true and what is false Okay, even even hold on even the issue. I'm not done. Even the ACLU came out of retirement We haven't we haven't heard for them Even the ACLU came out of retirement. We haven't heard from them for the last year during any of the years. Talk to me the ACLU. Yeah. We haven't heard from them during the past year. During all of this, activity has been going on with the counts being blocked and ghosted. They finally came out of retirement to say that eat, that this is a dangerous
Starting point is 00:54:01 violation of people's First Amendment rights, you cannot have the government saying what be that we have to stop disinformation. Now it's shifted to, we have to stop misinformation. Those two things are very different. It's kind of like the difference in the term, a quality versus equity. They sound similar, but they actually mean very different things. Disinformation is actually a campaign of purposeful campaign of propaganda and lies usually put forward covertly. So it's the FSB. You're some intelligence agency putting out, putting out disinformation, usually under false accounts. So in that case, we can say, no, you can't do that because you can't engage in deception
Starting point is 00:55:01 around who you are, right? But misinformation is simply information that's being put out that frankly, you disagree with, okay? And- Or it could be discernibly wrong. Wait, you're kind of framing that, right? It could be you're putting out information like there's a microchip in the vaccine
Starting point is 00:55:17 that is explicitly known to be wrong. Look, the lab leak theory was considered misinformation by these same people three months ago, okay. Okay, let's take this specific example. There's a microchip. If it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine, would you be okay with the White House contacting
Starting point is 00:55:32 social media companies saying, hey, you got these accounts that are saying there's a microchip, you might wanna look into it. They're not saying take it down, they're saying take a look into it. That's not the White House's business. Do I believe in the microchip theory? No, of course, no, it's absolutely ridiculous,
Starting point is 00:55:44 but it is not the business of government. Let's get you to mouth that out. To be telling social media who to ban and who to block list. I think they didn't tell them to ban. I think they told them to be aware of it. Go ahead, Shemoth. I think your framing's wrong, Zach. Go to my mouth.
Starting point is 00:55:57 No, no. Tmasaki said that when one site takes it down, they should all take it down. And then Biden on top of it comes out and poor is kerosene on the fire by saying that social media sites are literally killing people by allowing by allowing this misinformation. So here we have. Now let's be honest.
Starting point is 00:56:14 He's a president. This is a president of the United States using the bully pulpit to call social media sites mass murderers by virtue of allowing people to have free speech. Trump never used language that in temperate. I don't remember him ever calling. Oh my God. American company. Let's go ahead, you're about to speak. Let's go ahead, you're about to speak. This is the exact reason you can't have a strangle hold on distribution because it will get perverted. And then we either have people we like or people we don't like in these positions of power or people we like or people we don't like regulating and it's constantly flipping and we're all just doomed and bound to get fucked over.
Starting point is 00:56:54 So back to the thing that Friedberg brought up before I think Alpha Fold is incredible. I think Google has been an incredible company. They make money hand over fist. They waste an enormous amount of money and all kinds of trash. So it's good that they were actually able to do something useful here. I generally think that companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon unfortunately Unfortunately, do not allow the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society. They're just too big. Tromboth makes a great point, which is we've got these big tech monopolies who become gatekeepers over content. Okay.
Starting point is 00:57:36 And what the administration has done, and their allies in Congress is hang a sort of damnaclyze over the heads of these big tech companies. They've appointed Lena Khan to be the enforcer at the FTC. They've got their six pills in Congress right now. They've held congressional hearings around taking away section 230 protection, which is very economically advantageous for these big tech companies. So they positioned the sword perfectly over the heads of these big tech companies, threatening to break them up and rein them in.
Starting point is 00:58:02 And then, Gen Pasaki and the White House go ahead and say, we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with. This is misinformation. Okay, that is a huge danger to free speech. It's basically like the administration saying to these big tech companies, nice little social network you got there, it'd be a real shame if anything happened to it.
Starting point is 00:58:22 Look at what's going on. Don't you want them broken up? I do want them broken up, but what I don't want. So, which is it? Do you want them to hold the sword or do you not want them to hold the sword? I actually want the sword to come crashing. I actually want the sword to come crashing down. Okay. So, you want to swing the sword, not hold it over and then use it for extortion. Yes. That's actually a great explanation. Then freeberg. Yes. I'm trying to moderate here. Freeberg. Do you give a chance? We've talked about this before. Freeberg has spent all day on his phone give a chance? We talked about this before.
Starting point is 00:58:45 Freeberg has spent all day on his phone. He has not dialed into this podcast. With you guys. I thought we just went over the alpha fold stuff way too fast. I mean, the arguing over freedom of speech is happening and all of this debate, freeberg, at the same time that we are making incredible life changing moments for humanity.
Starting point is 00:59:06 Two different companies went to space last week with civilians. And then we are basically defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on the planet. And we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would save everybody's life and let us continue on and people are dunking on bezos for not reading the room. I don't know if you saw this, Friedberg, but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room, etc.? Progress technologically will only arise with capital. So you can assume that that progress, you know, it's not like someone stumbles into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbles into a cave and discovered AlphaFold. There are years of toiling in labs like Edison did making the light bulb. Edison had to raise a ton of money to get that light bulb project off the ground.
Starting point is 01:00:05 If you guys haven't read, I'm trying to remember the biography, there's wizards of something. It's got wizards in the title, it's a good biography of Edison. And I feel like we're at this moment where the Wizard of Men in the Park, yeah, I think that's the Wizard of Men in the? Yeah, I think that's the Wizard of Menlo Park. That's right. The amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at Alpha Fold or at Waymo or what Bezos and Elon are doing is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work. You're not going to get a bunch of kick starters
Starting point is 01:00:42 to fund a SpaceX-like project or a, you know, Blue Origin-like project. And so I think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on multiple billion dollar bets. And like Shemops said, waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of 10 of them.
Starting point is 01:01:14 But if that $1 billion bet works, it's worth $500 billion. And that money continuously gets reinvested. And look at what Google did with Waymo. They put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone woke up and said, my God, self-driving is real, it's possible. And it kick-started an industry. And I just feel like the amount of money and not to mention the fact that like, these
Starting point is 01:01:33 are free markets. So these businesses, Google, you don't have to search on Google, you don't have to buy from Amazon, but everyone benefits from searching on Google, everyone benefits from buying on Amazon. And the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so good. And so I don't feel like these guys are screwing people over. You can consider the small business model as being like, hey, maybe we shouldn't have
Starting point is 01:02:00 had small business retailers for as long as we did, because at some point distribution was gonna be economically advantaged by being centralized, and therefore all consumers are gonna benefit by centralizing, is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever? Maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market,
Starting point is 01:02:20 but same with what happened with the taxi industry. Technology will force these evolutions. The capital accumulates and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined on a smaller scale. But go ahead, Jim. Yeah. No, I do think sympathetic to what you were saying. I do think that if you look at every platform innovation that's ever happened, so whether it's, you know, we go from no print to print, you know, to newspapers, to radio, to television, you've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the cap of centralized monopolistic or all agonialistic kind of early outcomes. And either through legislation or through innovation,
Starting point is 01:03:01 then the pendulum swings to decentralization. That's typically happened, right? And you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that. So it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things. And everybody says the argument is, well, no, because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock-in. But I think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the China and the China shop, and you have to just start all over. So it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody.
Starting point is 01:03:31 And obviously we want things like alpha fold to exist. And we want things like Waymo to exist. The question is how should they exist? And if they come out of the good will of Google, it is just so easily as likely that some other person, let's say it wasn't Sundar and Ruth Perat, but to other people who didn't like it, these things could have been very different forms and shapes and not existed at all. And I think that's the arbitrary nature of it, which is not necessarily free market capitalism that doesn't benefit us.
Starting point is 01:04:02 Should we, Jamoth, be upset that Bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from Amazon? He had a bad press conference. Let's just be clear. At the end of the day, he has wanted to do this his entire life. He built an incredible company. He was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it. He's invested billions of dollars in other things,
Starting point is 01:04:26 $10 billion in climate change. His ex-wife has invested $6 billion just last year alone in all kinds of good works. So those two individuals, because of their success, I think will generally do and have done the right thing. Less like at that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just put his phone in. Why was it nervous?
Starting point is 01:04:47 Well, I think you said it. You know, the thing that he said around, you know, I just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this. It sounded flippant and it didn't really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on Charlie Rose, right? So if you actually played those two things back side by side, you'd say is this the same person? One was thoughtful, extremely respectful. The other one was now, maybe he was just amped up. I mean, I could see I think that's what I think. Super high-pitched.
Starting point is 01:05:21 Absolutely on cloud nine, so to speak. And so, and so he just wasn't thinking about it, but you know, honestly, like look, he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say we're assuming you're coming back. So here's some fucking talking points. Why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to earth
Starting point is 01:05:37 and let's just make sure we nail this and put our best foot forward. That is where I think he probably has some regrets based on how people reacted. This Bezos space flight was a real Rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left, but the criticism was very different. The critique I heard from the right was that he's having some sort of midlife crisis in the rocket, looked too much like a phallus. Okay, fine, whatever. The criticism from the left was,
Starting point is 01:06:05 it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise. You could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that, why was you doing this with his own money? If this had been a NASA flight, I don't think they would have a problem with it. And so you see here that even though Bezos has been so much more effective using his own money
Starting point is 01:06:27 To do this that the left is reflexively hates that and And and and they kept saying well how dare he use this money the money could have been used on something else so much better Well, what do you think of that argument? Yeah, I think it's wrong in a couple of respects It basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than are greatest inventors. And I don't think that's true.
Starting point is 01:06:53 You look at these social programs, they wanna keep doubling down on, they're not working. You know, these programs are policy towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding. There's a tremendous amount of funding. In San Francisco, they're spending $60,000 per tent per year. They're spending $300,000 in social services
Starting point is 01:07:10 per homeless person per year. Lack of funding is not the problem. The approach is the problem. We spend something like $25,000 per pupil in California schools. The test scores are going down. So, you know, these people who are criticizing bezos don't know what to do with the money.
Starting point is 01:07:27 They don't know how to spend any credit. That's not good at executing. However, bezos or Elon, these are two of our greatest inventors. Let them go. Let them go because, you know, they are pushing the boundaries and I do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result of what
Starting point is 01:07:45 they're doing with this new space race. It's also super uninformed, if correct me if I'm wrong here, but they were saying that they should have been doing more initiatives on Earth. If you actually, and they were kind of talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space. And number one, the rocket ship fuel, my understanding in these, is less than what happens in a 747. So put that aside. And then second, Elon has done more for global warming with Tesla than anybody in the battery
Starting point is 01:08:13 packs, I think, in modern society. I can't think of somebody in the private sector who's done more. And then has there ever been a gift of $10 billion to one cause, let alone one cause, which Bezos gave, which was climate change. Nobody has done more. So, hasn't you had no, Chimath? I thought Richard Breton had done a lot for global warming. I thought he was very involved in the carbon credits space. I think that we're witnessing something that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent, getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong,
Starting point is 01:08:53 but want to just have a chance to be on the field and try. I'm going to have the freedom to do so. And that just literally infuriates a certain class of people. It proves itself up by what David said. We are not in a funding crisis. We are running $10 trillion deficits, or sorry, $100 billions of dollar deficits, $10 trillion trillion debt levels that are increasing every year,
Starting point is 01:09:18 we have a surfeit of money. We print money whenever we want. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money. We print money whenever we want. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money. And in the absence of people being able to do things, they would rather other people not do things, not because it's not the right thing to do, but because it makes them feel impotent. Right. And so what is driving that? I think there is a real contempt for private initiative and and jason your right you see it in the hatred towards elon nobody has done more
Starting point is 01:09:51 to actually reduce carbon emissions then elon i mean even the best and if story period and the story i mean the best of skiff to some philanthropy i don't know if that's going to make a difference or not you're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue, but it's indisputable that Elon, the electric car industry would not exist without Elon,
Starting point is 01:10:12 and yet there is contempt and hatred for the fact that he did the suprivate initiative. If the government is... Because he does it in a way that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally. They don't like that he says what he wants. They don't like that he does what he wants.
Starting point is 01:10:33 They don't like that he dresses the way he does. They don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough. It's not about the, look, people. What's all about the money that it's a wealth that's been accumulated to. Well, no, no, no, hold on. I don't think that's what it is at all. No.
Starting point is 01:10:47 I actually think what it is is psychological. It is nothing about money. I think what we are witnessing, and I think social media has just blown the cover off it, is a psychological awakening that people have, which is that they were comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders. They just believed the world would function as it should. Now you see people migrating through this membrane, achieving enormous amounts of success,
Starting point is 01:11:16 basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude. It breaks people's brains because they don't like it because now they think Why didn't happen to me why not me and the thing is because you're not capable and at some were along the way working You're not dedicated. You didn't try or you didn't try They did not with agency. I mean look every day Every day that the greatest thing that I've learned about the public markets now having been you know The greatest thing that I've learned about the public market is now having been purely on the early stage technology side building, running, then investing is I get a mark every day. Right?
Starting point is 01:11:52 Now to do both businesses, I get a scorecard every day. And some days I really think to myself, maybe I'm just not good enough today. And I say to myself, that is true today. And then the difference is tomorrow I have a choice, which is I wake up and I decide, am I gonna go back at it or not? And I'm not gonna game. And I'm not gonna hate on other people
Starting point is 01:12:13 who had a good day today just because I had a bad day. And that's what I think we're going through. We're going through and social media allows it to happen. And it allows you to put it out there. You can hide behind a screen name. You can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent-up frustration once.
Starting point is 01:12:32 That's what journalists doing in terms of, of course. Of course, because journalists are doing it too, where they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use. The difference is journalists do it with a real screen name under the guise of journalism. Everybody else does it with a fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolley. In order to do something really great like Bezos or like Elon, you have to believe that
Starting point is 01:12:56 you have agency over your own life. You have to believe that you can accomplish great things. You have to act with purpose. Is that really what we're teaching kids today in schools, what we're teaching them is there either victims or oppressors at some intersectional framework, we're not teaching them about earn success, we're teaching them about privilege,
Starting point is 01:13:18 which is presumptively ill-gotten. And it's all about a transference of privilege and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims. But no one's talking about how you actually create change successfully. Abundance. Abundance. It's always a negative some game. Freeberg, go ahead.
Starting point is 01:13:42 I did it in all the time. It's all about the Kim Kardashian sex tape. I think that there was this moment where someone who was, didn't do anything, didn't have a career, wasn't doing anything work wise, but was kind of a pseudo celebrity for being a celebrity. It's like the Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie era, right? Like, folks who don't really have much to talk about,
Starting point is 01:14:03 except that they're the ones that people are talking about. And then that sex tape turned her into a superstar, and then she became a billionaire a few years later. And so, there is this kind of poignant moment, I think, where folks are like, wait a second, you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country, you don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame. Therefore, the kind of assumption is,
Starting point is 01:14:28 hey, you know what, there are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do, and the rest of us don't. And I do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those moments and makes them very big. And kind of then that becomes the assumed standard. When the reality is, I mean, all four of us work really fucking hard.
Starting point is 01:14:49 All four of us came from nothing. I don't know about SACS, but I mean, the rest of us I think you guys dad was an immigrant doctor from South Africa and he moved to, let's just out of the zoo. I'm just doing ladies. But I mean, I think all of us graduated college deeply in debt and then we all worked our way out of debt.
Starting point is 01:15:05 And we all found ways to work really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country. And to build value and to build businesses. It can't be done. To realize those returns. And we don't start out as elites. We were never elite.
Starting point is 01:15:19 We were always the struggling immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we fought and we had grit and we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort. And I think that that's not really, and so did Bezos and so did Elon. And I don't think that there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them, like maybe in the days of the British monarchy, these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have.
Starting point is 01:15:47 And I think that that's so important because people miss that point and they think that Kim Kardashian or the random bolt of lightning or the elite is the kind of endowed upon people in a way that's unfair. They're misreading the situation. Everyone else is missing out.
Starting point is 01:16:02 Yeah. They misread the situation. So a couple of things. Kim Kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape, but fuck if she's not an incredible business person, because from there to now, that's execution. There's a lot of there's a lot of toiling hard work, good decision making. She fucking nailed it. Was I lucky to have actually joined Facebook versus my space? Yes, but when I was there,
Starting point is 01:16:26 did I fucking hit the cover off the ball? Goddamn yes. You know, was I lucky to have started social capital and be able to raise capital? Sure, but then did I have to help find a team, coach that team, work with them, make good investments? That's fucking hard. And I think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work, that there's all kinds of levels of success, that you can be proud of all kinds of different accomplishments. What I loved is when Friedberg used us and Elon and
Starting point is 01:16:55 Bezos in the same sentence, because I catch myself where I'm ashamed sometimes, where I'm like, I am not as good as those two guys. So how dare I use my name in the same sentence as their name? And then I think, wait a minute, what the fuck am I quibbling over? Like this is insane. In any way, shape or form, we've all made it.
Starting point is 01:17:13 Sure, there's different degrees, but it's beyond that it matters at this point. And this is what I think we're living in. A society where it really distorts you. So if we point to Tremoth, how do we change people from thinking that it's random and that you can't do it? Because there are group of people who are,
Starting point is 01:17:29 no, it is random. But there are a group of people who believe this system is rigged. I cannot become chimoff. And I can't become you on it. I'm stuck in a rut and I can't get out. I can't get out. How do we change that belief? The winers and the complainers and the haters
Starting point is 01:17:41 are stuck in a massive rut. And I think the thing that happened that I said at last pot, I'll say it again, and I maybe I'll just say it every fucking pod. It is not about winning and losing. It is about trying and learning. And that is a huge thing. It's about a learning mindset. It's about this idea that things are changing so fucking fast. The only thing that I can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn, because things will constantly be changing underfoot. But what do you say to the single mother
Starting point is 01:18:12 with three kids who is in a town where the factory is shutting down and she's losing her job and she doesn't have the resources to move? She is not the person that hates Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. I will fucking bet she does. But what a job fucking bet you on. But what is your idea of this?
Starting point is 01:18:26 Because aren't there institutional ruts in the United States? Yeah. I understand. These are two completely different topics. My point is, if you go online, it is filled with a small cohort of people that are positive and then a large cohort of people that are silently trying to just gain information. I'm not out. And a small vocal minority of bitter people who can't do shit. And all I'm talking about is people.
Starting point is 01:18:50 Peter, who knows if they're privileged, but I'm just saying they're here. I think they're getting paid $100,000 to work at the Atlanta Center. I just think that these people had been checkboxers their whole lives. They tried to play the team sports they were told to. They went to the schools. They tried to do the the CFA, the NBA, the this or the that, nothing worked for them. They work in an environment where they don't feel any equity. Actually, this is where equity is important.
Starting point is 01:19:16 They feel disenfranchised and they're angry. And as a result, they just want everything to be different so that nobody wins because they can't win. But if they were winning, they would be the first one to say, shut the fucking door behind me. I'm convinced of it, 100%. Yeah, the irony is that the people you're talking about all went to these elite institutions and they imbibed these ideologies and philosophies.
Starting point is 01:19:40 And I think the people who have been successful went to those, not in all cases, but they went to those places and then rebelled against it or just shut it out. Here's what we should do. Here's what we should do. We should all contribute five or ten million bucks into a, into a, now I'll see. We should call Pegasus. We should use Pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on Twitter. And then index that to LinkedIn to figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just published in database of all the haters. Well, I mean, it's how funny with that be. I, it's very interesting because I'm watching a group of these complainers leave traditional mainstream media because I'm focused on journalists because I was one, and I'm watching them leave journalism, a small group of them, and become entrepreneurs on sub-stack or their own products.
Starting point is 01:20:29 And I feel like there's a little group of them who are realizing, holy shit, I can make a million dollars if I apply myself and I quit the New York Times and I go start my own publication. Right, and I actually say something interesting and differentiated, not just towing the party line at the New York Times. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:20:43 There's a whole little crack here in this slide. I'll say, they are just a successful as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The financial quantum may be different, but I bet you the personal fucking satisfaction quantum is the same. And this is the key. This is the key.
Starting point is 01:21:01 You could be running a $500,000 your business and you could feel like a million fucking bucks You have a nice house, no nice family. You employ a couple people you provide a good life You do what you want to do when you want to do it the sense of freedom That comes with that and agency and agency is the same as them and in some ways, the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these guys would. Because they're so scheduled and people are coming after them all the time.
Starting point is 01:21:32 One of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart, hardworking, and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself, you will be successful in this industry. You know, over two decades, I mean, I've just seen it. How could you not? How could you not? You have such tailwinds at your back.
Starting point is 01:21:50 There's so much value being created. We saw over the past year more money, more LP dollars have gone into venture capital by farther than any other year. And more money, more returns is coming out. That's why more money is going in. You know, I'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful just by showing you. Right. And, and, and, and, and, but the first part is the critical part. You just said, who are not prone to self-sabotage, there is an enormous number of people who are prone to
Starting point is 01:22:15 self-sabotage. I was one. I am still one. But I work on yourself. We have a size yourself. Your ego. He blew up his firm. That's true. But I think he blew it up because there was creative destruction. I think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start a lot of... No, he's talking about it publicly, he said it. But the blowing up... When you... How do you reconcile the blowing up of the firm, Chimoff? Whatever number you're saying.
Starting point is 01:22:37 This is all old news. It's like, you know, the amount of success and capital and money that we've made is undisputable. And I've made it under all kinds of weather conditions. So, you know, it all kind of speaks for itself. But the problem is, again, if you ask an average person, I don't think they care. I don't think they know. I don't think they have an opinion. If you ask some, you know, I was interested in how you reconcile or look back on it.
Starting point is 01:23:05 Now it's so much distance. I'll tell you from an outside perspective, how I reconcile Tremoth's decision there is. I think that as you become more successful, your tolerance for doing stuff you don't want to do really goes down. Zero. It goes to zero.
Starting point is 01:23:17 100% Of course. Tremoth has got to a point where he didn't want to be doing any blueprints. Zero. By the way, that is a characterization as well, that sometimes in your career, you have to make it, and in your personal life,
Starting point is 01:23:29 you have to make a tough decision. And there is no good outcome, there is no good way to frame a way to do it. But there are these moments where you got a rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side, and you're gonna have to make a tough decision to get out of the way. I said to myself a long time ago, that if I was ever lucky to actually be wealthy enough where
Starting point is 01:23:50 my wealth would change by meaningful amounts, every order of magnitude I would do something different. And so, you know, you can do the fucking math, so there it is. It's interesting being friends with you and watching it, and then also, I hate to give, I'm not gonna get any credit. There it is. But being friends with Phil Helmuth, and watching him set outrageous goals for himself in poker,
Starting point is 01:24:16 I just thought, you know what, you gotta set some outrageous goals for yourself, and that's how I sort of broke through as I just said. The minute that I realized. I wanna be number one at everything I do. I wanna be the largest syndicate, the most, Jason, prolific investor. The minute I realized that I was basically going to become,
Starting point is 01:24:32 you know, a billionaire because of my Facebook stock, I fucking quit. And the craziest thing about it is I left so much stock on the table. It's like two, three billion dollars of fucking stock. I couldn't care less. And then, and then, you know, once I figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just investing in companies at a small scale, but now you
Starting point is 01:24:53 can, you know, control companies and really allocate and shape how economy flows. I made a different set of decisions. And now I'm here. And if I increase it by another order of magnitude, I'll make a different set of decisions. And that's poorly understood by folks because again, it doesn't map into a world view. But the point is it maps into something that keeps me whole and sane. And it allows me to not be zero sum about everybody else's success. And that's what I think we need to teach people. Try stuff. It's okay to fail because that's as long as you're
Starting point is 01:25:23 not self sabotaging yourself, David said it's so well, you will eventually be successful. What have you learned, David? You know, in this next chapter, being an investor, capital educator. You're the me? Yeah, David, you. Well, that's what I said. Well, that's what I said.
Starting point is 01:25:38 I mean, just, well, I mean, the thing that's happening right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's just an explosion. There's an explosion in the number of unicorns, an explosion in the amount of funding that's available, explosion in the amount of returns being generated. There are now so many VCs that VCs are literally throwing money at people. I mean, any half decent idea now gets funded. The idea that somehow this ecosystem is a leadist
Starting point is 01:26:07 or exclusionary, it's absurd, right? I mean, you've got micro VCs now who, no one has to go to Sanjo Road anymore, right? I mean, there are so many ways to- There's nobody else in the world. There's nobody else in the world. It's a ghost town, remember the traffic jam? I went down there the other day,
Starting point is 01:26:21 and there was no traffic jam. I was speaking at Stanford, and literally, I was like, I got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that Sanjo Road, and there was no traffic jam. I was speaking at Stanford and literally I was like, I got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that Sandal Road because it was at 830. I zipped down Sandal Road to Stanford. There was two cars. The tech ecosystem is so osmotic, it's so permeable
Starting point is 01:26:38 in terms of allowing new people. And in fact, it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it can't hire enough people, even in the worst economic conditions. And yet, when it comes to talking about social and political, it's talking about opportunity and social and political terms, the only thing you ever hear is that,
Starting point is 01:26:59 you know, the ecosystem is somehow a leader so exclusionary and that. I think that's old news. That might have been valid 15, 20 years ago. I know when I went to Santo Road for the first time, 15, 20 years ago, it was a bunch of white partners who went to Stanford or had MBAs from Harvard. But that's not the case now.
Starting point is 01:27:18 It's a bunch of people rolling funds and micro VCs and syndicates and everything in between. If you're so wrapped up in being a social justice warrior that you've just missed, that there is basically infinite opportunity, then it's on you. You're sabotaging yourself, and then five, ten years later, you're still stuck in that role. And then you become better and then you become better to Jamal's point. Freebrook, how hard was it for you to leave Google and what was that like?
Starting point is 01:27:44 I was at Google for two and a half years. It had gone through, I joined before the IPO. I was like a couple hundred employees, just under a thousand employees. And then we went public. I got this huge bonus from Sergei to stick around when I was thinking about. Huge. I mean, for me, it was like seven figures. Eight.
Starting point is 01:28:03 It was, yeah, it was a couple thousand shares of stock and like $250,000 of cash. And I gave it up. You know, it'd be worth a lot of money. But I just felt like I learned so much at Google and I had such an appreciation for the team there and the company. And by the way, I worked at Google and all of a sudden, the company went public and I could buy a house I mean it was an incredible moment for me and
Starting point is 01:28:28 And and I suddenly felt what Chimap talked about which is this freedom in my life suddenly I had Hit that that that next plateau of wealth where I now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth and I could leave or I guess I had over a million dollars of net worth and I could now leave and go do something I wanted to go do with my I had a couple hundred thousand dollars and I could leave, or I guess I had over a million dollars of net worth and I could now leave and go do something I wanted to go do with my, no, I had a couple hundred thousand dollars and I could go leave and do what I wanted to do Which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions and And so I honestly felt like really fine just leaving all that money behind I left a tie left millions of dollars behind For when I left Google of dollars behind for it when I left Google after being there for two and a half years to start my company. And it was
Starting point is 01:29:10 a struggle, right? As you guys know, building a business which I did from 2006 to 2013 was a nightmare. Every day was a nightmare. I say in entrepreneurs, and I said this publicly before, but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards. And one out of five days, you take a five step leap forward. So at the end of a week, you're one step ahead of where you started, but your existential memory is that you're failing every day. Every day.
Starting point is 01:29:36 And suddenly you wake up and seven years have gone by and you're like, oh shit, we've got an amazing business. And someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars. And if you don't have the grit and the guts and the determination to push through those those daily battles and deal with that hardship, you know, and I don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of Google felt right for me. I think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right for me. And so it was the right call for me. Obviously it worked out, but you know, still I make choices in my life in terms of
Starting point is 01:30:07 What do I want to do do I want to go live on a yacht or have some luxury or do whatever and I prefer to just make great businesses and Turn science into into commercial opportunity, and that's how I choose this in my time I just want to just send this out to the whole panel Do you ever think? You know having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at this age and then just you know, kite board or do whatever, do you ever think about retirement and not going into work? Fuck no! Okay.
Starting point is 01:30:36 Yeah. Do you feel you want to work harder? Yesterday, yesterday, as an example, was an incredible day because I was able to bicycle with Nat and the youngest to go get a gelato. I had a kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible in batteries, where you know starting from scratch, series A, co-founders, me, and the other director, and we're starting, literally starting. And I remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or 40 times, and it's the best feeling. And then I had a call because I'm trying to put a you know more than a billion
Starting point is 01:31:27 dollars to work in a different battery idea and I thought to myself, God, I'm so fucking lucky. And it's it was a grindy long day and I had never felt more thankful. So why would I you know, I don't know, I feel just so blessed. Sacks you ever think about hanging up or are you more motivated to go to work every day? Are you annoyed? Yeah, I mean, the thing that's giving me the most energy right now is we're in a private beta on call in near this app that we incubated. And it's good. It's, it's, it's good. And it's getting better every day
Starting point is 01:32:04 and I'm really enjoying tinkering on it. And I feel like, you know, it's kind of like it's. You're a good tinker, by the way. You're a good product, you're a good tinker. The tickling. We tried to hire SACs as VP of product at Facebook. What? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:32:20 What would that have paid him? I used 2000 SACs to be the date for like seven billions, probably seven or eight. 2007 SACs not taking that again? No, no, because I did Yammer instead. And Yammer was successful and I got through my own boss and that was better. So I don't know if I probably wouldn't have made as much money.
Starting point is 01:32:38 But look, I've done, like you guys, I've done, made lots of decisions that maybe less money. If I just stayed to PayPal for 20 years I my stock would have been worth many many billions right? That's why I tell people don't sell everything let your winners ride at least partially Yeah, I mean look my I was an investor in Facebook if I just kept all of that stock that be worth a billion dollars today So I was pretty crazy well sell some just don't sell everything. That's my new philosophy. Yeah Yeah, so you're point about to your point about what gives me enjoyment. I mean, I'm really having fun Tinkering with this app and you know what it's like it's like it's like a new season if you were in like the NBA or something
Starting point is 01:33:17 It's like can we make a championship run? Can we get one more ring? You know, and so you're like, you know, it'd be like saying to somebody, hey, you're ready to, you know, to an NBA champion. Hey, you got three rings. Why do you want a fourth, you know? And it's like, are you kidding me? Well, I'm still in this league. Well, I'm young enough and healthy enough
Starting point is 01:33:36 to make a run. And one more ring. How could you not want to do that, you know? You got to go for it. I got to go for it. I got to go for it. I can see you are you're engaged, which is great to say. All right, listen, this has been an amazing episode. We will see you all next week.
Starting point is 01:33:52 If you like the show, thanks. The end. We're not going to make it. Go try something. Go try something, everybody. Go try something. Go try something. Go try something.
Starting point is 01:34:01 Go try. Go try and fail. Go try. Go try and fail. Read a book. He got to read something that you wouldn't have otherwise read. Love you guys. But yeah, love you guys. Love you. I'll see you soon. Love everybody listening to everybody. I mean, literally if you're listening to this and you are buying into this, that the system is red, don't be a troll. Don't be a troll. Don't be a douche.
Starting point is 01:34:19 Like the system is not rigged. If anything, the system is rigged for you to participate and succeed. Join the party. The system is malleable. The system is malleable. If you want to change the world, the system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right way, you can make it, you can make a dent. You can. Who is this? Who is this who is this little search? I'm sorry. Hey look how happy you are who is the best dad? We should dad. All right, we'll see you all next time on the olive podcast. Bye bye. We're like your winners ride.
Starting point is 01:34:55 Rainman David Sadduck. I'm going on. And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just got crazy with it. I'm going to the US, I'm going to the US! What? What? What is life? Besties are gone, go thrifty!
Starting point is 01:35:16 That's my dog taking an initiative right away. Six. We're not on. Oh man, my hamlet has your meat, yeah. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all We're not all kids. Oh, man, my hamlet is actually meat-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed-me-ed I'm going on lead! I'm going on lead!

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