All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
Episode Date: July 23, 2021Show 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)
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.
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,
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.
So, is, uh, go. So, is a January
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No, here, what's the
year?
Oh, 2008.
****
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Ah,
Ah,
Ah,
Ah,
is
October
****
Ah,
Ah,
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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?
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,
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.
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
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%.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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,
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
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.
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,
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
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
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?
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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,
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?
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,
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?
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.
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.
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,
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
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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?
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,
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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?
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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.
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,
$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?
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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,
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
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,
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.
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.
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,
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?
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
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.
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
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,
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.
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,
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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,
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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
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,
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
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,
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!