All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E49: Coinbase CEO reflects on controversial blog, state of the markets, 1000 unicorns, tax reform & more
Episode Date: October 2, 2021Show Notes: 0:00 Brian Armstrong follows up on his one-year old blog post "Coinbase is a mission focused company" 19:27 Authoritarianism on the left 33:04 Newsom's new vaccine mandate, NBA vaccine cov...erage, Merck COVID pill 45:51 Golden Age of VC, 1000 unicorns & the impact on private/public markets 57:45 Corporate tax reform, Roth IRAs & the "Peter Thiel Provision" 1:06:36 Chances of a VC bubble, why notable VCs are retiring, building a modern venture firm 1:23:51 All-In summit planning 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 Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-company-af882df8804 https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1443727729476530178 https://blockchain.news/news/workers-quit-coinbase-exchange-apolitical-stance https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1443846265582735362 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychological-dimensions-left-wing-authoritarianism/620185/ https://ktla.com/news/california/gov-newsom-to-make-major-announcement-on-efforts-to-protect-teachers-students-from-covid/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/01/merck-to-seek-emergency-authorization-for-oral-covid-19-treatment.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-endowments-mint-billions-in-golden-era-of-venture-capital-11632907802 https://news.crunchbase.com/news/crunchbase-unicorn-board-1000-companies/ https://siblisresearch.com/data/us-stock-market-value/ https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-number-of-companies-publicly-traded-in-the-us-is-shrinkingor-is-it-2020-10-30 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/17/house-tax-bill-would-likely-force-peter-thiel-to-pull-5-billion-from-his-ira.html
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Guys, my fucking dog.
And Jail, Joker's in jail?
Joker got in jail again.
Okay, so he's been jailed in Italy.
He was jailed in Palo Alto.
When will that dog learn?
I've spent quality time with that dog.
He's out of control.
Why do you get jailed?
Because he's a runner.
He's a runner.
He's a runner.
He's a track stop.
He, we sent him to like a, you know, like the dog walker
where he goes and runs around and they can come pick him up. But then the guy opened the van door. He took off.
Anyways, he gets found. They're trying to call me because I guess my number is on the
thing which I hadn't realized. You don't pick up? Can't reach me. Well, I'm in DC in New
York. And they put them in the kennelnel and we get this picture and Nick you can post
the picture but you know because I said to you poor poor Joker and dog jail is a great dog.
But he is but he is not back.
He's not back.
He's not back.
But he's back.
He's out of jail again.
Honestly, he's only going to learn if he goes to do you get a little tag for him those
little remote tracking guys?
Bro that's not I mean the great but it doesn't stop him from escaping.
That dog.
This really wrong. That dog.'s something wrong with that dog I remember when you were born, that's game over
Yeah, like
Like growling at the center
Like, I'm stuck in the corner like
It's the only dog that doesn't like me
And he's so cute
Every other dog, every other dog who has been on a lot of training
No, he's not been trained
He's not been trained, we have to train him
I mean I get it, he has to be trained
But he's so cute
Did you train that dog to hate white people?
That dog is a little racist. I'll say We open source into the finance and they just go easy on the website.
We know.
I'm going to another episode of all in the podcast that you've been listening to for 48
episodes.
Here we are on the precipice of greatness 49 episodes in with us again today, the queen
of Kenwa, your science ambassador,
David Friedberg, also on the pod, the rainman himself, definitely his dad lets him drive
in the driveway, David Sacks, and batting cleanup, the dictator himself, Jamoth, Polly,
Hoppatiya.
What did we all think of last week's pod with biology?
I felt it got cut off too soon. I was getting into a groove with biology and I'm trying to figure
out how to pick that up with him because I thought that we were getting into some pretty interesting
discussion towards the end and we obviously ran out of time, Chimapat to Hop-Off.
So it would have been great to keep that conversation going with biology. I really do think there's
a big question mark on like,
how does the decentralized web or decentralized social networks in particular work
with respect to that recommendation application layer,
which is effectively what search solved on the internet.
I'm curious to keep the conversation going and seeing what this means.
I made the decision to end the pod because
Shemoth had to go, Sax had to go, Saksad to go.
There was a hard stop and I was like,
I don't want to keep this going without the other besties
and people were very upset.
They thought I shut it down abruptly
but we had a certain amount of time
and we can always have them back so everybody relax.
But I did look at the stats.
We each came in with our, you know, whatever percent
pro-rata and he had double.
So he had 40% and we all had basically for a guest, I think.
I felt right. Didn't it feel right?
I think it's important to hear what when folks come on, what they have to say, um,
he's a really smart guy and, you know, you can kind of just let him go and riff for a while.
Um, and then just react to him.
So I think it's, it's lovely to hear such a deep thinker think
out loud, quite honest.
Yeah, and even if you don't agree with him,
I don't agree with him on a lot of his points
about decentralized everything.
I think centralized works for many things better.
I'm curious, SACs looking back on it,
where there are moments that you felt maybe you disagreed
with him more or agree with him more
and wanted to lean into a conversation. Obviously, it's very hard to have five people on a pod and only get a certain amount of air time etc.
Well look I think I think biology is a great guest have on once in a while I mean it does kind of turn the pod a little bit more into a TED talk.
Definitely have that vibe but the fans liked it and I mean biology his own show. I mean, he can go for a while.
I mean, he's got a lot to say.
Foulers. Yes. And he has.
He has. And I think he should do his own show because there's
definitely a huge fan base for it. And if people want more
biology, I interviewed him for about an hour on purple pills,
which is kind of the, the, I don't know, if you want to call
solo pod, solo show
that I do where I occasionally interview people on call.
Dan Loan call in and go check out purple pills.
So yeah, I gave a biology a little pep talk coming in saying, hey, listen, it's a roundtable
discussion and I've interviewed you before and you can kind of tip into the monologue and
explaining very big picture thing.
So just try to pass the ball a little bit here.
And I think he did adjust this game a little bit, but it's, you know, it's hard to have
somebody like that on.
I think you pointed it out, Sacks, that it's more like a TED talk for him.
We're having a conversation and he used to being interviewed.
And I think that is it.
That's a transition.
But, you know, it was fine.
Let's move on.
Yeah. Okay.
So I think we'll start off with something we talked about on episode nine, which was Coinbase
the CEO, Brian Armstrong, wrote a very controversial blog post, exactly a year ago Coinbase's
emission-focused company at the time he was dealing with a never-ending debate inside his own company about Black Lives Matter,
about social justice, and any number of issues, and he said, listen, the company is mission-focused. Our
mission is to make people more financially independent, literate, et cetera, and we're going to ban
any discussions on our electronic communications. You can do things on your own time. And it was
quite controversial on the time. We had a good discussion. I
relistened to our discussion on that pod. And we all universally felt like it was
the right move. Well, he went ahead and picked up the hornet's nest. He did
not have to talk about this ever again. Everybody had forgotten about it. And he
grabbed the hornet's nest, ran into the end zone and spiked it Jason
Can you well before you do that? Can you say?
How many people left as a result of his blog post and all do you know those stats because I think
I don't know those stats any but it was it was 5% ended up leaving there was a big article about it
You know this was I think I think it was worth him
Doing a follow-up post this was the one year anniversary of his blog post,
and he was kind of giving us a status update.
And what he basically said is that the policy had worked.
So you got, so first of all,
should we just review what the policy was?
The policy was that they were gonna declare
the workplace to be politically neutral.
That people would leave their politics to the door.
They would not have sort of extraneous
political conversations at work.
That doesn't mean you couldn't support whatever causes
you wanted on your own time or tweet whatever you want
on your own time, but while you're at work,
they would declare it to be sort of a political DMZ,
like a demilitarized zone.
Basically, all he was doing was reasserting
the old center, the old etiquette of,
hey, when you go to work, you're not engaged in completely heated.
Yeah, you're paying to work. You're not there to engage in political activism.
So that was the policy, and of course, the woke mob became completely hysterical about it,
as it turns... And so then what happened is that Brian offered everyone a very generous sovereigns policy if they
Didn't want to stick around and certainly generous policy. Yes, extremely generous. They made it really easy
Absolutely, then generous right they made it really easy for people to check out if they want to check out
Well only 5% took the policy six people yes, and then on the heels of that it was a gigantic New York Times hit piece against the company the usual
disinformation and sl piece against the company, the usual disinformation and slanderers against the company.
And then now we have this follow-up piece.
And I think what Brian Basier reported is that today coin base is a more aligned company
because everyone who's there wants to be there for the mission.
That's what they focus on when they go to work.
He talked about how they had hired top talent away from other companies.
I mean, basically he put out the bat signal and people came running because we have...
They wanted neutrality.
They did not want it.
People are voting with their feet to come.
They're fed up with the politics and distraction.
I think the employees were secretly relieved that he declared this policy.
Basically, he took the heat on himself for the larger benefit of all the employees who
just wanted to be there and work
and not have to wonder whether they're doing something
right or wrong because they're on the wrong side
of a political issue.
Freeberg nailed it when he said in our episode nine,
which you go back to,
freeberg, you may not remember your comments,
but you said, what about the employees who just want
to come to work and don't want to engage in political space?
Now you're infringing on them to force them
to be participate in these discussions, and they don't have a choice because they need to feed their families and they need to go to work and don't want to engage in political space. Now you're infringing on them to force them to be participate in these discussions. And they don't have a choice because they
need to feed their families, they need to go to work. And so free break, I think you
take a little victory lap there. He says in this tweet store, I'll just read the third
part of it. One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our
diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our head count about 110 percent, doubled
it. While our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved in some metrics, so all of the hand ringing and pearl clutching that
this would have a negative effect on the company has turned out to be wrong. Go ahead,
Chimoff and then Freeper.
I mean, if you want, I think it's important to set the context for what this is. There
is a productivity war going on inside of institutions around the world.
And what's happening is that people's personal beliefs are bumping up against what the mission
and goals, operational goals of a company are, or a university, or all these other places.
And so this is probably the first big example.
This is what is a $50, $60
billion public company. $50 billion public company that basically said enoughs enough.
This is our mission. Everybody else basically just needs to shut the fuck up. And I think
that that's very important. Now, if they then go off and actually crush their goals, that's
the one missing piece in all of this because when that happens, then you can write a through line through all of this and say, okay, this
is in part what allowed them to do it. So I think that the folks that were really up in
arms still have one small straw in the fight, which is that if these guys don't achieve
their goals,
they'll point to this as one of the reasons why.
But if Brian diversity is strength, you know, like you're suppressing free speech, you
know, that argument.
But I think if Brian then goes and delivers a couple of knockout quarters and a couple
of knockout years, then, you know, what he will be able to say definitively, wish no one
can refute is,
we leave our politics at the door, we define our OKRs, and then we go and we build things
that people need as a company.
And then you go off and you can do what everyone.
And I think that that's very powerful for many companies and institutions.
Friedberg, you heard my recap of what you said last time.
I'm not sure if you remember that or you were really lessened.
What are your thoughts today? I think it's worth just noting less about the particularities of what was said in the
particular issue at hand here.
And I would look more to kind of Brian's leadership style as an excellent example of defining
and creating strong culture.
Culture in an organization can give that organization what it needs to succeed.
It puts everyone aligned in a specific way on how we make decisions, how we operate.
It doesn't matter what his particular beliefs and opinions were, what to exclude, what to
include in the dialogue, and the discourse, and the model for discourse within the organization.
I think what matters that he put a line in the sand.
And he said, this is what we're going to do.
This is what's in, and this is what's out.
And organizations that do that and do that effectively generally win.
They win more, they do better.
The teams are aligned, the teams are more unified.
And I think that definition may sometimes be controversial.
And you'll notice that as companies get bigger, go public, they're larger,
they bring in professional managers and the founder CEO steps out, they generally don't do that, right?
They generally try to not do that definitional work because they're trying to minimize
loss and not kind of take the bet on maximizing long-term gain and doing the things that they
think culturally define or will enable success long-term.
So I think it's a great example of leadership generally on how you can be very vocal about
defining a strong culture.
Elon calls it, I think Elon calls it Corpo Speak.
What happens?
What happens?
You know what happens?
You know, meaning most companies, when they get bigger, they gravitate towards Corpo Speak.
And then what happens is some cohort of employees who are really good just feel trapped
in this kind of morass of mediocrity.
And by the way, look at Elon's, you know, call it a
tradition rate, right?
By the typical large-scale public company corporate metric of like how many people are leaving
per year, you'd say, oh my gosh, something's up with that organization.
But it really speaks to a strong culture.
There's a company that's famous for this called Bridgewater Associates, you know, run by
Radalio, $100 billion hedge fund, one of the best performing investment vehicles of all
time.
And they have incredible culture.
I've talked about Radalio's book, Principles Before and some of the work he's done on
this, where he is so adamant about getting culture right within the organization, how
you operate, that they almost have, I think, a 30% attrition right after the first year
of people that come in, because they not only try and screen for these elements of what
they consider to be the right cultural fit for their organization up front, but then they also screen people the heck out
of the door if they're not a good fit.
And I think Elon has a similar sort of model.
And I think Brian, the way he speaks about the organization, is a similar model.
And it's about defining the lines.
It's about being very crystal clear about what's in and what's not.
Whatever, as a CEO and a founder, whatever you believe, you need to believe in it strongly.
And you communicate it clearly.
And then communicate it and then let people vote.
They vote with their feet.
They don't get to vote whether to change it.
They just get to vote whether they get to stay
or whether they go.
And I think that that's a really smart thing.
That's what I was saying.
I think there's one other issue here, Jake.
Jake, how this goes back to your point about
why did Brian have to bring this back up?
Was it unnecessary?
Did he spike the horn assessed in the end zone?
Here's why I think it was necessary.
If you go to 0.7 and 8 of his tweet storm, he says, it was the most positive reaction I've
gotten from any change.
I've made in the history of the company, which is saying something.
How could something be so negative in the press that turn out to be incredibly positive
with every stakeholder, 95% of employees,
privately, all the investors were telling him it was a great thing.
And then what he says is, the only sense I can make of it is there's a huge mismatch
right now between people stated and revealed preferences.
And we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up.
So to me, this is the point of this tweet storm bringing up now,
is without people like Brian
standing up and saying what the truth is, that look,
everybody wants this, they're just afraid
to articulate the principle.
We keep encouraging this climate of fear.
And the alternative to Coinbase,
one of the other companies we've talked about is Apple.
I mean, you can basically choose to be Coinbase or Apple.
What has Apple done?
They booted out Antonio Garcia Martinez because of a passage, even this book, that they knew
about.
And ever since then, the company's been roiled by boycotts and petition writing from the
employees about some new cause every couple of weeks.
And eventually, that'll show up in the operating results of the business.
It's just a matter of time.
Right.
So, why does that go on?
I mean, I'm sure most employees at Apple don't want to be, you know, constantly royaled
by these, like, petition campaigns.
But they have to put up with it because everyone's so afraid to speak up.
And that's why it's important that what Brian, we have to basically recognize that this
woeb mob, who's caled everyone to silence,
is maybe 5% of these companies.
And if everybody just acts like Brian,
the problem will be over.
Well, we know what the trail of bread crumbs is right now.
And I think we should probably shine a light on it,
which is that that 5% is exactly the same
as Donald Trump, they just exist on the left.
And there's more and more research that shows
that just as much as we thought they were
right authoritarians,
they're also left authoritarians.
And this is what we're seeing,
that the craziness that everybody decries on the right
actually also exists on the left.
And they just put a button I'm at
before we pivot to the next story.
Armstrong was very clear that the mission is about global wealth inequality.
So staying focused on that in his mind is the the high order a bit and will result in
the most great change.
So paradoxically or ironically, you know, all these woke people attacking Coinbase, Coinbase
might do more for wealth inequality and justice in the world.
If they stay focused, then if they try to tackle everything, and you know, this is a road
to nowhere for Apple.
I think, Sachs, you pointed this out about how if you were running Apple, you would fire
anybody who does the petition, because I'll tell you where Apple is about to basically
land.
By enabling all of this wokeoke Mob inside their own company
by coddling them, addressing them,
and not keeping them focused,
they will eventually get to the fact that China
is, you know, has three million weagers
in a concentration camp, and those weagers are proven
to be providing through slave labor, equipment and components to companies that
eventually make their way to Apple products.
Ergo, Apple supports slavery.
And that's what the employees will eventually get to, and that will cause chaos.
But there's something even closer, more closer to home.
That's probably true, or could be true, I don't know.
It is true. But the fact that Apple had the most important security
leak in their entire software career just a few months ago
is also quite important.
Like you had a zero, so the iOS 14.8 exists because of why?
Because a researcher or a set of researchers in Toronto
discovered that there is a zero click exploit
in iOS that allowed you to basically turn on the microphone,
turn on the camera, grab anything you needed for my phones.
It was the most secure device until two months ago.
When it turned out, it was actually the most insecure device.
So you're saying?
I tend to think those kinds of technical mistakes happen when people
take their eye off the ball.
And I think people take their eye off the ball because they're demoralized with dealing
with distractions.
Sax?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's the, whether it's the weavers or the security issue, it's a
good example of the employees at Apple
see the spec in somebody else's eye,
but not the log in their own.
I mean, that's the principle.
And they would be much better off focusing
on dealing with their own internal issues.
But let's go back to that article
that Jimout referenced about the authoritarian example.
Yeah, if you got anything else on this issue,
do you wanna, before we segue over?
No.
I thought this is a really great article.
Do you want to explain it, Jacob?
Yeah, I'll just give you a quick overview
and then you can dive right in
since you put it on the docket.
Psychiatrist and author Sally Satel,
hopefully I'm pronouncing that correct,
wrote an article for the Atlantic entitled,
The Experts Summout overlooked authoritarians on the left.
The main point here is that Trump's presidency sparked
a ton of research and coverage of authoritarianism on the right, but mostly ignored the left with The main point here is that Trump's presidency sparked a ton of research and coverage
of authoritarianism on the right, but mostly ignore the left with some researchers even suggesting
that the left wing, that left wing authoritarianism isn't real. In an email to Sotel, a social
psychologist from Rutgers said the following, for 70 years, the law, the law in the social sciences
has been that authoritarianism has been found exclusively on the political right.
Why is that? One reason left wing authoritarian authoritarianism barely showed up in social psychology research is that most
academic experts in the field are based that institutions for prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole sex.
Well, actually, Jamoth put this on the docket. So Jam So, do you want to introduce what you liked about it?
The reason I saw this and I thought it was so interesting was basically we had an entire
body of research trying to understand why some folks are attracted to these authoritarian
figures like Trump.
And overwhelmingly, all the research at the time said they only exist on the right. And all of this started after Hitler. And so there was all this research
around the social and attitudinal reactions to Hitler and how he came to power.
And then all of the iterations of folks like him on the right afterwards.
And so people put Trump in that category. And then they said it can only exist there.
And so people put Trump in that category and then they said it can only exist there. But as it turns out, when this person did this research and she surveyed 7,000 people
and all of this data was very well summarized in this Atlantic article, which I'm sure we
can post in the show notes that folks should read, low and behold, it actually exists
on both sides.
So as it turns out, the extreme right and the extreme left are exactly the same.
They're moral absolutists.
They believe in themselves and themselves only.
And they believe anybody else that outside of where they are is fundamentally in the wrong.
And if you actually look at that and see how Trump behaved in his presidency,
and now how you see how the left names and shames, you
factually find a lot of commonalities. So the reason I found that article interesting
is that it actually says again, what we've been saying, which is coming down the middle
and finding, you know, reasonable compromise is the only way forward. Because this minute
you start moving in either direction, you are the same. And that person is an ugly person
that we don't want around.
Let me give the money, quote,
and then get your feedback, freedberg.
The similarities in this study included, quote,
similarities between authoritarianism
on both sides, left and right.
preference for social uniformity, check.
Pregnus toward different, different others,
willingness to wield group authority to co-hors behavior,
cognitive rigidity, aggression
and punitiveness toward perceived enemies, outsize concern for hierarchy, and as Jamal
pointed out, moral absolutism, a free bird.
I think authoritarian figures resolve when a population feels insecure.
So, I mean, we talked about this last pod,
but I do think that, you know,
the notion of freedom emerges after the comfort
of security has been provided.
And I think the absence of security
drives people away from the drive towards freedom.
Like, when you have a feeling of insecurity
with respect to kind of your ability to get a job,
I mean, remember Hitler rose to power
when unemployment, you know,
post WIMAR Republic was skyrocketing.
People, you know, couldn't get jobs,
they couldn't afford food.
And the authoritarian figure was going to provide
the security needed, I think, to resolve the concerns that the population had,
and then people latch on to that.
So, you know, there are moments in time when I think authoritarianism can emerge with different forms of resolution.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the authoritarian actor needs to take a left or a right point of view.
They're just going to give you a path to security when you're feeling insecure.
If you don't feel insecure, you're going to say that's ridiculous.
So countries that are wealthy, countries that are privileged with the opportunities that
maybe the United States has are less likely and less inclined to fall in favor of authoritarian
leaders. And then as we slip backwards economically, unemployment wise, etc., we're more likely to be
And then as we slip backwards economically, unemployment wise, et cetera,
we're more likely to be in favor of those sorts of actors.
And so I think that, you know, we'll see him emerge.
But don't you think it's crazy that we actually
didn't think it could exist
in one end of the political spectrum,
and now it does, you have it a point in that or no?
I never really understood the whole, like,
Hitler is purely a right-wing guy.
Like, he was a, you know, a socialist,
and he was trying to enable
like, socialized services and socialized systems for people,
you know, in a lot of political circles
that would be argued as being a very kind of left point of view.
And so I don't know if it, yeah.
Yeah.
Let's go beyond Hitler.
You're right, the Nazi party was a national socialist party.
That's what the name of the party was.
But there's also Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao.
I mean, if you're paying attention to history,
you know that there's been authoritarianism
on the left, not just the right.
And so, but in the universities,
and in the media, they only want to focus
on the right wing version of it.
And I think what the study does is it up
in 70 years of dogma that authoritarianism
is only to be found on the political right. I mean, it's obviously can be found on the
political left as well. And you can see that in cancel culture, in speech restrictions,
in these very aggressive COVID mandates that are now happening. You can see it in the,
this sort of the, the, the, the foolishness anytime,
somebody in the right, you know, dies from COVID.
I mean, there's, there's always some chortling on the part of the left about this.
The harsh penalties are noncompliance.
I mean, right now,
the majority is the one that stands out for me.
Like, there is just on the left,
they make a decision, Amazon is bad,
and they cannot move off of that, right David?
Like, what about willingness to wield
group authority to course behavior
and what about aggression and punitiveness
towards perceived enemies?
Cancel culture, that would be cancel culture.
That to me is, yes.
It begs a good question, which is,
what socialist regimes have come to power without an authoritarian
figure?
Has there just been...
None.
They're all revolutionaries.
Right.
Actually, the study has a really good point about this, which is they say that the researchers
describe what they call anti-hierarchical aggression.
So one of the traits of authoritarianism is they call it an outsized concern for hierarchy,
but leftists think that they don't believe in hierarchy, but actually they do.
They believe in an anti-hierarchical hierarchy, which is they want to turn upside down the
social hierarchy and they're willing to justify the ends justify the means.
In other words, if you can turn the hierarchy upside down,
they'll let you do anything.
And it's actually pretty scary.
That's where the sort of the revolution comes from.
Here's the practical thing, Jake Elaba,
what you said, which illustrates this point even further.
Right now, we have a $3.5 trillion bill,
kind of meandering through Congress.
And it's very much a question mark about
whether it gets passed or not.
And one of the elements that's in there is free community college.
Now when it passes, if it passes, there's a lot of support that that's something that
the government should do.
It's a good thing.
But if you're a private company like Amazon who just announced that they will give you free college, they're still a bad company.
And this is the example of this intellectual rigidity that doesn't actually see the forest
from the trees. What do you really want? Do you want the process where you control and you
meter out progress? Or do you actually want the outcome where somebody can get a job where they
make $15 or $20 an hour, and also now get college paid for?
Yes, we do.
We do need much better.
Yeah, we much better if the government didn't have to provide that.
I'd love it if the government could pay for it, but I'm really glad that Amazon is in
a position to pay for it as well.
But if you start to become absolutist and say, well, no, it just needs to be top down
and metered out this way.
And any private organization that wants to try to do it is still bad.
I think that's where that rigidity holds us all back. It's unnecessary.
Here's where I see the rigidity to moth is they keep saying gig workers are bad.
Nobody should be allowed to be a gig worker. And David had a great interview with the right-charing guy on call-in
in which they talked about the fact, and this is somebody who is super pro advocate of drivers that listen 80% of people do not want to do shift work.
They do not want the government dictating how they work, and I talked anecdotally with
an Uber driver, studies making like 70 bucks an hour during peak hours.
They were fighting to get minimum wage for drivers. Now drivers are making 20, 30,
40, $50 an hour. Uber rides have gone and Lyft rides have gone. That's what the massive
competition for the market works. Well, and they can't take the win. They still are so rigid on
the left that they're demanding whatever that woman's name is, is, you know, in the pocket of the Lorraine Gazzales. Lorraine Gazzales in the pocket of the unions.
How cynical are they?
The victory is upon them.
People are getting paid five times more, three times more
than they were waged and they still want to screw them.
The takeaway for a lot of people should be that your
spidey senses should go up when folks present solutions as
a choice of one source only.
So when things can only happen in one way and it's the way that I feel the most comfortable,
your spotty sensor should go up and you should think to yourself, really?
Is that really the only way?
Can't we have choice?
Can't we have different ways of solving this?
Maybe we could present experiment and see what happens?
Go ahead, Saks.
Well, I think your spide sense should also go up
whenever somebody is basically saying
that speech needs to be censored
for some higher purpose.
Whenever people are trying to abridge and take away
our rights and our sort of long held values,
our freedoms, you have to start getting concerned.
And there's always a reason why they want to do it.
In the study, the quote that the left wing authorian's agreed with was, getting rid of inequality
is more important than protecting the so-called right to free speech.
So there's always some higher reason, the means always justify the means.
But that's what you have to look out for
is when they're taking away your right to speech.
Another fun proof point, fun because it's Dave Chappelle
that you can listen to or watch to see a flavor
of this left-wing authoritarianism
is called redemption song, which is a little clip
he put out recently.
And the entire clip is more about him getting his body
of work back from Comedy Central.
But the part in the beginning talks about folks on the left
that really tried to dunk on him when he got COVID.
And you should just listen to his reaction
and how he frames it, because I think it's pretty powerful.
And again, it explains that extremism on both sides, they actually end up looking the same.
Yeah, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies. And I think that applies to anyone
who, anyone who defies that whatever the conventionalism is on COVID.
There's another example in the study of that, that the people who, the left wing authoritarians
agreed with
the statement, I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.
So you know, you've got these social groups that are completely uniform.
And by the way, there have been like studies for a long time showing that liberals are
twice as likely as conservatives to be upset if their son or daughter were to marry some
of the opposite party.
So this has been turned up in polls for a while.
But this, and you've seen it on universities and college campuses, right?
But there's this idea that, you know, anybody of the other political side is just suspect,
you know, morally suspect needs to be shunned, needs to be expelled.
Like those are the people you have to be concerned about.
Yeah, you can't be friends.
I can't be friends with the Usax because you voted for Trump.
It's just ridiculous people have this.
No, but it's, I think, the derangement to give the other side of this, I think Trump
was so extreme and so trolling and so great.
I mean, if you think about his super power, it was to troll the left and put them into
such a deranged mindset that they did actually become that which
they headed most.
Right, but he did, he did troll the left, but here's, but
here's the thing is that we only hear in the media about the
authoritarianism of the Trump administration. How many times
were they screaming fascism during the Trump years? And, and
now today, and of course,
if you go to MSNBC, it's January 6th all day,
all the time, that's all they wanna talk about.
But there's a total blind spot
with respect to the authoritarian tendencies
of the left, which we see right now in COVID policy.
I mean, it is getting so extreme right now.
And I mean, Freeberg, you posted the breaking news
that just announced by a press
conference, Gavin Newsom is now implementing mandated COVID vaccines for all public K through
12 schools in California, starting this fall. Where are these students? Yeah. All, all eligible
kids in all, in all public schools, in order to go to school in California, you have to have a vaccine.
I mean, gender garden?
Gender garden?
Well, I mean, they're not eligible, yeah.
If it's when they're eligible, yeah.
They're going to be eligible very soon.
I mean, look, I, so, so we have a 13 year old and 11 year old and a five year old.
The 13 year old got vaccinated.
She wanted to.
We supported it.
The 11 year old was an eligible.
She didn't get a vaccine. She got COVID for me.
It was a mild case and our five year old isn't eligible for the vaccine. He never got COVID. Now if
if and when a new vaccine comes out that our five year old is eligible, I don't think he needs it. I mean, I'm not anti-vax.
I mean, I'm glad I got the vaccine. I'm glad, you know, going to school by the virtual got vaccine. Yeah, he goes to school. If it is safe, do you want them going to school catching it, spreading
it, and do you want them to not have to wear a mask?
How can you say conclusively what say for a five or six year old at this point? It's a little
hard. Their bodies are developing and yeah, you need some time. I mean, do we really
need to mandate this? I mean, why can't parents make up their own decision? Because
of other people in society who would be impacted. I mean, you also see need to mandate this? I mean, why can't parents make up their own decision? Because of other people in society who would be impacted
as they think.
I mean, you also see this, you know, look,
I think vaccines maybe are complicated to be
because vaccines do actually provide protection.
Let's talk about these mass mandates,
which I supported at the beginning of the pandemic
because it's all we had to fight it.
But you take an example like San Francisco,
still has these stringent mass mandates
that Mayor London breed was caught out at,
dancing, singing, screaming.
But in front of us to her, it was Tony Tony Tony.
I mean, that's what she's got to say.
That was her defense.
She was like, she was basically like,
it's Tony Tony Tony, guys, what do you want me to do?
I'll risk the COVID, which is proud to be the third.
I had to give it that one, I had to give it that one.
If you want to risk, if you want to be a V to play poker
or see your favorite artist, I mean,
I mean, what do you want to do?
What do you want her to do, guys?
What do you think about?
Let me ask this question.
What she said when she got caught was actually correct,
which is we should be out supporting restaurants.
We should be out supporting nightlife.
And don't should be able to make their own decision
about the risk they're willing to take.
The problem is she's not willing to give the rest of us
that choice.
Right.
And then we can all make our own choice. And by the way, look, the idea that the
COVID is not going to get you, you know, once you take off your mask when you get to the table,
you know, we've talked about this, right? That's so far. Yeah, you wear the mask in the
meter, g stands to the table, then you take it off to eat and drink, and the COVID somehow
not going to get you in. Yeah, she was saying She was like, listen, they were like, you weren't eating.
We have you on video, you weren't drinking.
She's like, it's unrealistic for an adult to put the mask on and off in between steps
and bites.
And I was on a flight and I was flying coach as opposed to business class recently.
And when I was in business class, I was eating and drinking.
There was no.
An entire foreign language so far you're speaking.
What are you saying? So.
I still have to do my own life.
Most people pay for a plane ticket and then they get on an airplane.
So, but the interesting thing was when I was in business class,
I was eating my meal, I was drinking no issues.
I had the mask off for whatever 20 minutes I was eating and drinking.
When I was in coach, same situation, the flight attendant was going up and down the aisle and while people are eating and drinking if they never
mask on she was kind of being like uh... a whole monitor saying please put your mask on in between bites.
And i was like okay.
And when we supported this mass mandate way at the beginning of the vaccine we all thought the government is going to distribute and ninety nine or at least at ninety five quality 3M masks, right? We've never got those.
We've never got other people.
I know, and people are like walking around
wearing these cloth masks, these loose-footed cloth masks.
It's ridiculous.
It's dangerous.
Like the COVID goes through the bottom,
over the top, through the side, go right through it.
I mean, like it doesn't do anything.
And like you're the lone ranger.
Yeah, how's that work?
I mean, I look, if you worry,
I high quality, like, you know, PPE type mask, I think it might be helpful, but, you know,
it's a marginal benefit once we have vaccines. Oh, by the way, just as we end this, what do we think
of Andrew Wiggins? Well, you can't comment on this maybe because you're an owner of the team,
but a number of NBA players, high profile ones, in fact, in New York on this maybe because you're in an owner on the team, but a number of NBA players
high profile ones, in fact, in New York and California, where you're not allowed in the arena, if you're not vaccinated, are now deciding to sit out their home games. So Kyrie Irving being the
highest profile one is refusing to get the vaccine. And he will be getting paid. He's got
$200 million contract max player. I think he gets 40,
50 million a year. He's going to give up half of his salary to not 20 million a year to not get
the vaccine at least and leave his team to not play with them in home games. What are our thoughts
on mandating NBA players who are playing inside an arena to be vaccinated. DC Drain Monster interview.
I did.
What did, what a day to say about this.
He says that he's so fucking strong, isn't he?
Yeah, he was like, this is ridiculous that we don't like respect each other's like we've
made this so political and it's all like antagonistic as opposed to just recognizing that
there are differences and people have differences of opinion and respecting them and embracing each other
for those differences rather than like attacking each other
and finding fault in each other.
And forcing them.
Yeah, and it's a great point, but I don't know.
I mean, I don't think that this point is any different
than the point about, you know, mandating a vaccine
for anything, any workplace, any school.
I mean, if you're gonna to mandate vaccines for workplaces and
mandate vaccines for schools, you know, the MBA is going to, you know, not be kind of
excluded here. It's what it is. Right. Just happens to be a bigger paycheck in a higher
profile stage. I think it doesn't matter a policy. The right policy here is to let private
employers decide whether they're going to require vaccination or not. I think private
organizations have the right to do that.
If a restaurant tour wants to say that we are going to be in all Vax's restaurant,
you want to, you know, they're only going to take clientele who are Vax.
That should be their right to do it.
If another restaurant says we don't care,
feel can go to that restaurant if they want.
I think the free market can sort of sort this out.
I don't know that we need the government imposing it.
If the MBA decides, this is what they want to do.
They can't.
It has decided what they think of our decision.
Well, I mean, what I wonder about is how necessary it is.
I mean, given the fact that, you know, all the players are young and healthy.
And if they want the vaccine, they can get the vaccine.
Look, I'm really glad I got it, you know, I think it.
But, but I just, you know, if it given that everybody is vaccinated now, who wants it, I just, you
know, what is the point of forcing that last 10% of holdouts to do something they don't
want to do?
I mean, this is where I think the author, I would resist the authoritarian impulse.
Friedberg, is there a new pill that's coming out?
I saw a story today about this. I don't
know if I want to cover that or go to Unicorns first.
Merck published some results on this basically anti-viral pill. It effectively inhibits RNA
replication in viruses. And it was designed to be kind of broadly applicable. It was, you know,
discovered at Emory University years ago and they were testing it for influenza and then even
pre-COVID, they were testing it on other kind of coronaviruses, SARS and MERS. And so the data that
they just published shows that there's a 50% reduction in hospitalizations. 50% in hospitalizations for people that are the test positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection,
and then they start the pill within some number of hours.
You take a few of these pills.
I think they said five days, right?
Yeah, well, they did the test on like it was effectively, yeah, four or five days.
That's right.
And you end up reducing the percentage of people that end up in the hospital by 50%.
The idea is that for countries that don't have access to vaccines, you can very cheaply
make this chemistry.
It's a cheap molecule that you could theoretically produce at scale and you could ship it all
over the world.
Countries that don't, broad scale vaccination programs,
they can make these pills available quickly and cheaply.
And then, you know, as people get infected with SARS-CoV-2,
they just pick up this pill, you know,
put it in every pharmacy, go grab a couple,
and then the hospitalization rate goes down.
We don't yet know if it reduces the transmission rate.
So there's a lot of question marks on like,
does this actually solve the problem of the pandemic?
It's certainly another instrument to blunt the you know the impact pronounced the name of it. It's
Malnou Peraveur. Malnou Peraveur the government
And by the way, there wasn't a lot of people in the study no one that took the pill died people that didn't take the pill did die
In the in the in section in the infected population because they split them right they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill the people that didn't take the pill did die in the infection in the infected population
because they split them right they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill
the people that had the placebo there were deaths no one in the group that had the pill
the actual pill died and so you know so theoretically we don't yet have enough data to know but there's
also a big question on the side effects typically these anti-viral RNA blocking
drugs have other side effects.
They're usually pretty mild, but so there'll be
a little bit more studying, but generally people view
this as a super big positive.
It's another instrument.
I'm going to make a prediction.
Here we go.
I think that the combination of vaccines
and what is equivalently tamiflu for COVID, which
is effectively what this is, is the one to punch we need so that this basically is rendered
not.
You're missing a key piece there.
The testing.
You must have testing to know that you have a takeness.
Sure.
But I think that that's a, I think like the test things is, it's not efficient, but the solutions exist.
My point is, if you have a combination of all these things,
this is like a flu, which means that there'll be less ability for folks to not show up to work,
which means that most of the economy will get back going.
And I think then we can get back to really addressing what are all that 10 or 12 trillion dollars?
How does it show up in the economy?
That's where the inflation comes from.
That's for all this other stuff.
So I'm pretty excited by what I read today,
but now my mindset is going to 18 months from now,
midterm inflation, I think that's going to be
what it's all about.
We ordered 1.7 million courses of this.
I'll call it's a, we can just call it,
basically this is the equivalent of a Z-pack. So I can call this the M-pack. If this hits, then I've taken probably 1.7
million Z-packs of mine. That's just on the way back from Vegas. So, I mean, this feels
like the end game and they are going for emergency use, so let's keep our fingers crossed.
This would mean the stock market's going to rip Jamoth. I know.
I think the stock market is in a little bit of precarious position because if you have
to reposition yourself for inflation, there's a lot of tech stocks that will get just
absolutely obliterated. Like, well, when you have inflation, so the order of operations,
inflation means prices go up.
The government sees prices going up and they say, how do we control that? They raise interest
rates so that the cost of borrowing goes up so that then less money is being spent,
right? So that we become a little bit more restrained. When you do that,
then all of a sudden people have to think about how much money you're going to make in the future,
because if you're not investing as much in the future, you won't make as much in the future and when you discount all
those dollars back, there's less of them. And so all of a sudden you start to think about, oh my gosh,
well, I want dollars today, not dollars 10 years from now. That really puts a lot of pressure on
tech stocks because we trade on multi-year valuations in the future. So inflation is very bad for technology stocks.
Inflation tends to be good for companies
that make money today.
Why?
Because if I get a dollar today,
I can put it in the bond markets
or I put it into a savings account
and I can get more interest than I would have otherwise.
And then separately,
you also want to own things that are physical and real
because those have more value.
So all of that has to then get worked out into the economy and we have to make a bunch of
economic decisions. So now the solution for that in all of those cases though is still if you're
a hyper-grotes company you'll be okay. So if you're growing more than 50-60% a year, you're fine.
But if you're growing 20 or 30% and you're kind of a middling business and rates are going up
and inflation is going up,
you're in a very, very, very, very precarious spot.
And, Sachs, what do you think?
Okay, well, there was a great article
in the Wall Street Journal over the past week called,
University Endowment Billions
in the Golden Era Venture Capital,
is basically talking about, I mean,
these, these, University Endowment are like gaining
50% over a year, there's been like nothing like it before. There's so many unicorns being created. There's, and if you,
there's a separate article in, I think, pitch book as well about the rate of unicorn or crunch
base. Yeah, that the rate of unicorn creation. I think last year, it was like one every few days.
Now it's, it's more than one a day. Bunkers. And so, you know, we're getting multiple unicorns now created every day this year.
It's just this golden era of VC, this engine of wealth and prosperity creation.
So that's a good news and to connect this to a point we were talking about earlier, if
the radicals on the left would just allow the golden goose to keep laying golden eggs,
we're going to have enough wealth and prosperity to pay for
all these progressive programs in the long run, but they're not willing to wait. And so you have in
Washington, for example, I think a political program that really could upset the apple cart. I mean,
you're talking about a three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill. It'll probably get
brought down to somewhere between one and a half and two.
Then you got a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
They've already spent $1.9 trillion on a COVID relief bill.
This is after the $6 trillion last year.
What would you advise should be the amount spent?
Well, okay.
Good question.
So, last year, the federal government generated record tax receipts.
The most revenue it's ever raised,
and it was about 19.5% of GDP.
When Bill Clinton left office,
he boasted about the fact that government spending
was only 18.5% of GDP.
Last year, it was about 30% of GDP.
My theory on this is that if you have government spending as a share of the economy at around
20% from a tax spending standpoint, things basically work.
As you try to go up to 25% and 30% starts to break, you have too much deficits and debt,
too much money printing, too much taxation, too much inflation, you become more brittle, and you start to,
you basically are, you know,
on health it.
You're killing the golden goose, and so,
you know, all we have to do is let the economy keep ripping,
20% of it is gonna be government share,
and you'll be able to fund more and more progressive programs
over time as society gets richer,
and by the way, this prosperity
that's being created in the tech ecosystem, it's available to everybody who has a good idea.
I mean, this is not so as we all know, so it's not just government that's creating advancement
and economic opportunity for disadvantaged people. The tech economy is creating it as well.
And what I worry about is, is why are we taking so much risk in upending this whole system that
is working quite well? Well, the other thing is this is all in the face of there being 11
million open jobs. There's 1.4 jobs for everybody who's unemployed. So the idea that in some
way society's broken and people can't be employed. Now these might not be.
There's only four million, there's only four million people looking for work.
There's 11 million outstanding jobs.
Yeah.
I mean, it is bonkers, Friedberg.
Would you think this is sustainable?
What are your thoughts on spending and turning over the apocard as sex?
I say the longer you guys have me on this podcast, the more likely it is you guys
are going to unmask me as a
die-hard libertarian. I will not let my tendencies, you know, come out in full force. The spending
is ridiculous and there's a lot of waste. So, I mean, I'll just leave it at that. What I think
is interesting though, is this unicorn creation system, this unicorn creation machine, you know,
it's worth highlighting because I think that that CrunchBase article show that these unicorns
and aggregate were worth like what,
one and a half trillion dollars or something.
And so those are all private companies.
$3.4 trillion.
$3.4 trillion.
So is that the amount of both bills?
$3.4 trillion is the total market cap
of all the private unicorns,
not just in the US but at the world.
And right now in Washington, they're talking about $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
Same size.
Can you imagine government spending basically the entire value of the tech ecosystem in
one year?
It's bonkers.
Right.
And so this, but by the way, I mean, like I think that that 3.5 trillion, you can kind
of think about that as being the future economy of the future
global economy.
Right?
So the entire, I just pulled up the latest quarterly stat, but the entire market cap of
public US companies today stands at $47 trillion.
The top 500 or about $38 trillion.
So these private companies that are kind of the emerging tech companies are, you know, call it 10%, or, you know, 8% of all public companies today.
And you know, it used to be that technology companies started in Silicon Valley, sold
technology to traditional industries.
What's happening in Silicon Valley today and over the last 10 years or so, is that technology
quote unquote companies are becoming the next industrial companies. They are replacing the
potential industries. Profoundness. Profoundness.
And so this is like what we saw, you know, Airbnb is a hotel chain without hotels. Uber is,
you know, a transportation company without vehicles. Door dash. Door dash. But even more importantly,
there's an entire emergent class of life
sciences companies, of novel hardware companies, and these businesses are leveraging their core
technology competence to create an advantage in replacing an old model of doing industry.
They're not selling into the old school companies.
So I think that the, and people are freaking out about some of these big investors like
Tiger Global coming in and writing crazy checks.
If you take an index of the three and a half trillion dollars today and said, you know what?
These guys today are going to be worth more than the $46 trillion market cap of all the other public companies that sit today in the next 20 or 30 years.
That's a pretty good way to kind of place your money over a 30-year horizon.
I'm going to go ahead and put as much money as I can into the index of the private companies and expect that
they're going to be worth more than 46 trillion in 30 years. I'm going to make a 10-bagger.
That's a retirement fund for my family.
And so it makes a ton of sense, I think, that these unicorns, given the advantages that are
involved, you know, kind of evolving from software and like, sciences and so on, do end up playing out.
It's gonna be ugly.
And what'll happen is you'll end up seeing the asymmetry.
You'll see the like, oh my gosh,
it's something that's a thousand X, 100 X return.
It'll become a hundred billion dollar public company
or two hundred billion dollar public company.
And then there'll be a bunch of them that are gonna die.
And people are gonna focus on the depth
and say this was over hype, the bubble is over.
But the reality is the index of companies today,
I would be willing to bet 20 to 30 years from now is worth more than the $46 billion of all the
public companies today.
So, Chimoff, one of the things we're seeing here and you're playing a small part in it
or a large part depending on who you talk to, we now have over 6,000 public-related companies
on US exchange.
No, we have less than 4,000.
We have about 3,800.
Okay.
No, we had 3,620 in according to the research I have here, according to market
watch, 6,000 public trading companies in US exchanges.
So we think it could be running the pink sheets and over the counter.
Which is I was seeing dramatically more publicly traded companies.
Many speculative ones or ones where you're getting to buy in in your four,
five or six, obviously, you're part of that with, you that with all the different IPOAs through what are you up to now? What's the?
Yeah, we have six tech specs. We have four biotech specs. I mean, I've started or invested
in a bunch of others that have gone public. So let's look at this through the lens of
the public markets as well. My Mac review is exactly what Friedberg said. We are much
better off with as many technology companies being birthed and being viable because over the long
arc of time, those companies will rebuild things that are today inefficient and broken in a better
way. And the world becomes better. The question is, for a lot of people, well, what if the wealth
isn't better because it's only, you know, a fraction of the number of people with a very
specific skill set that many other people don't have? That I think is a valid argument. But
then there's a different way to attack this problem, which is you could actually do something
really meaningful around corporate interest rates and corporate tax policy, that would then get it. Right? So like even if those those thousand companies, if you assume that that $3.4 trillion
ten X's, that's 34 trillion of eventual market cap, right? That's going to be supported by
trillions of dollars of earnings. But maybe those things only have a million or two million
employees, but there's eight billion, eight, you know, odd people in the world. While the
way you get the money into the government's coffers so that they can reallocate it to everybody
that doesn't work at those thousand companies is through sensible tax policy that goes after
the companies because those companies will still do the job. It's not like you're going
to choose to not work at a world-beating startup in a mission that you care about because
of the corporate tax rate. Nobody's going to do that, right? So I think this is where like, if you, if you,
if you actually take us that back and think of the bigger picture, the answer is right in
front of us, we just choose not to listen. This is why, you know, again, what Trump did
was kind of stupid, you know, he focused on corporate tax policy, cutting it unnecessarily.
And now what we're doing is we're fighting over
tax policy. And part of the reason why this bill isn't going to get passed is because
of corporate tax policy and trying to raise it again. But really what we should do is actually
raise it, leave personal rates roughly where they are. You know, Elon even said, when asked
by Karris Wischer this week, he's like, I pay 53% taxes. What about you? Yeah. It's going to 57. And you know, 53, 57,
61, who cares? Sure. Whatever. And he has to, the point he made was, listen, the pro-public
article was really disingenuous. They said he got a tax refund and they didn't, they never explained,
well, that's because he overpaid his taxes massively the year before. So they're selectively pulling information.
And the fact is he said, I will be the first money into SpaceX and Tesla.
I'll be the last money out.
That is something we want more founders to do, which is never sell their shares and
be have more skin in the game.
Sorry, I'm sorry, I disagree with that.
I think that's a that's a bunch of fucking malarkey. Why?
If you choose to not sell so be it okay, but look at the good that Bill Gates has done by selling down Microsoft
So I mean, yeah, that shouldn't exist the Bill Gates foundation shouldn't exist. No, no, no, the reproductive
It had to be paid somehow. He did that when he hits hit years old. I'm sure when I said, no, you know, other, no.
He started to do it when he was 40 years old, Jason.
And he was, and he was sold PayPal,
and he was able to use that money to reinvest
in Tesla and say, anyway, I do think you all
have putting all the money back into two companies
that are solving two major issues with humanity.
He wouldn't have been able to do that
if he hadn't sold in the first place.
Exactly. My point is, let's not conflate the problem.
If you generate wealth, I think that you should be bound, morally bound by society,
to put the money back to work. He chooses to put the money back to work by reinvesting so
aggressively into the things that he's doing. That's laudable. Yeah, I think that's virtuous.
Yeah. I agree.
But it's not the only way.
Bill Gates took a different path, which is to basically take all those profits, sell
it down, to then be able to go and put it into the Gates Foundation.
People will take multiple paths, the point that's the same among all these people is there's
a moral obligation they feel to do the right thing for the future.
We're in agreement.
So let's just celebrate that, not some tactical thing about buying line in selling. By the way one other point I'd make
to them off like you you said that you know we should tax the the the wealth creation and
distribute it. There's another way to get that redistribution of wealth which is to enable
access to the investments earlier by public pension funds, by the endowment, by the places
where people, by the retirement funds, where a broader swath
of the population have savings sitting.
And I hate the accreditation.
We've historically kind of forced the narrative
that everyone in the United States needs to have a home
and have 80, 90% of their wealth tied up
in a piece of real estate.
And then we end up with these massive kind of inflationary
bubbles to keep that value, that book value kind of growing
for them.
The reality is if that money was put more productively into building businesses via retirement
funds that had access to venture capital, the public pension funds already do, but they
should be probably under-allocate to venture capital today relative to where they're
putting their robots.
We talked about the endowments.
We're looking at the returns.
But that's just another way, by the way, if that was the model, you wouldn't need to
tax, right?
You could basically do that.
By the way, one of the brilliant provisions
in this reconciliation bill is they're actually
disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative assets,
including startups and venture capital funds.
In sane.
That is so wrong.
So what?
That's for good wrong.
Yeah.
What?
That is insane.
That's in there.
That's in there.
That's in there.
That's in there. That's in there. That's in there. That's in there. Taking pension funds and saying, you can't have access to them.
No, no, no. You as an individual through a 401k or IRA,
I wrote, I cannot invest in alternative assets.
That's the peer-teal rule, right?
Yes, partly in response to that.
Well, they should just make it a cap.
Don't you think they should cap Peter Teals?
I think, why cap anything?
Who's to set, Well, because it was against
the spirit of it. The spirit of the Roth was, let's discuss a specific issue. I'll see
it out for you, Sacks. Peter Teal put his Facebook stock in his Roth. And yeah, you're supposed
to get that tax free so you can have a great retirement. He did that as an end run around
paying taxes on the Facebook investment that became worth
billions of dollars reportedly.
So now they're saying, you can have a Roth, but anything above 50 billion, you got to
pay tax on because the goal here isn't for you to use it as a shelter against some massive
venture gains, sacks.
I don't have a huge problem with them putting a cap on the benefit of these accounts.
However, my issue with what's in the bill, there's a couple issues. What is, like we said, they're
disallowing investments and alternatives, which I just think is bad for savers. Why would
you want to do that? Second is the treatment of what happens when you exceed the cap.
And right now, what they're saying is you have to distribute out all of those funds and
then subject them to immediate taxation
and ordinary income rates, which is confiscatory because you could have made the investment outside
the retirement account and paid long term tax rates.
It should be, if you do go over, should be long term tax, of course.
Yeah, and furthermore, it's even worse than that because what they're saying is, let's say that
you do have an alternative
like an investment in a starboard or a venture fund,
you have to distribute it out and pay tax on that,
even though that investment is not liquid.
Right, so you should be able to take it out
and just be treated with normal cap gains
and not have to liquidate it.
Do you think?
Well, what it's gonna do is,
it's gonna get people an incentive.
It's gonna warp the incentives for saving
because what it's gonna say to people is,
you wanna do well, but not too well.
Because if you hit the cap,
you're not subject to a confiscation.
You get penalized, yes.
It should be a penalty.
It should be a penalty.
Yeah, exactly.
I think the way to work is you have a cap
and any distribution above that,
you basically, that becomes the basis
for future taxation.
I think all of this can be summarized more simply.
I think that we have unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish line
and stagger the starting line, right? Because all of this still doesn't apply to rich people.
No, this is Vindic.
You know, rich people can do all of these different things.
They can set up these out of state trusts.
They can set up generations, skipping trusts.
They can be, you can be qualified investors,
they can have QSPS deductions.
And so what this will do,
unfortunately, is entrench the kind of wealth gains
that Peter Tio was able to generate
in a very visible way that will just piss everybody off.
And I think instead you got to go back
to a different
to a different litmus test. So I Jason you have been the strongest advocate for letting people
participate in the economy. I have always agreed with that. We need to figure out how we can make
sure that that it that it isn't abused. But that's the best way is to educate those
about financial literacy so that they can actually be a part of it.
Even the starting line, let everybody be able to put stuff into this stuff and learn about it.
I mean, what Peter did essentially was put lottery tickets into his, you know, non-tax retirement fund.
Lottery tickets being buying stocks in private companies early.
But regular Americans aren't allowed to do that.
So rather than retroactively try to penalize Peter
because you disagree with his politics
or because he did it too well,
I think it's better that everybody be allowed
to be an accredited investor and do what Peter did,
which is everybody should be able to take their 401k
or their Roth and be able to buy the next LinkedIn Uber.
So if you were a civilian and you took an Uber
or you used LinkedIn to hire somebody in year two
and you had an opportunity
to buy those shares? You should be allowed to buy it because you're a human resources person
or Uber driving, you realize this is a great service that will change the world, doesn't take
a genius to figure that out. FreeBur? Yeah, look, I mean, the downside is you see speculative
concentrated bets that white people out. That's the reason the protective provisions are in there. So I think there are probably sensible ways of managing that around qualifying pools of these investments in a way,
creating indexes against them, etc. And maybe that's the right way to provide access, but giving
individuals that maybe don't have the right kind of point of
view on a particular investment, the ability to put all of their capital into that investment.
Generally, I would say go for it.
The problem is we've socialized, you know, protection, right?
So and this is the same with healthcare.
In a model for governing or model for a state where you provide socialized care for people through healthcare socialized healthcare
Or you provide socialized support for people through you know the social security system and other services like that
It's difficult to say okay the government's gonna be your backstop and is gonna provide the support for you
And we're also gonna let you take risky behavior and that's where I think the two have to go hand in hand
If you want to get rid of one, you got to get rid of the other.
And so because otherwise, we all end up paying the cost of the person that takes the, you
know, outsized risk.
And then we all end up having to flip the bill for that person taking that risk.
So if we're all going to be there to protect that person, we have to tell them you can't
take unnecessary risks.
Okay.
Hey, um, Saks, let me ask you a conspiracy theory here.
Peter Tiel supported Trump when Trump was teetering on the Axis Hollywood tape and he went
to bat for him.
He gave him a big donation at that time.
Then obviously did the Republican National Convention and was a key intellectual influencer
in his election plan.
Now the Democrats are in,
and suddenly the focus becomes this one outsize Roth IRA
and we're gonna rewrite the law
so that Peter Tiel has to take $5 billion or so
is one of the estimates that I saw online on CMBC.
Out of his IRA,
do you think this is specific
vindictiveness on the part of the Democrats to try to attack specifically Peter Till? I know
he's your bestie. Well, yeah, I mean, it does feel and I'm not I'm not a Peter Till
apologist, but this feels vindictive and personal. So yes and no. Okay, so what I would say is there
have been proposals over the last, I think going back
to maybe even 2014 on providing some restrictions or caps on these iris and the Roth iris.
However, there's never been a proposal as punitive and retroactive and confiscatory.
That's what they're doing here.
And specifically, it's the fact that they're going to force Peter to distribute out everything
above the cap and then tax it as ordinary income.
I mean, that's just changing the rules.
That part, I think, is directed at Peter.
And I've actually heard that staffers on Capitol Hill are calling this the Peter Teal
provision.
So let me just confirm that part for you.
So what I would say is I think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these
retirement accounts, but the way they're doing it is so punitive.
I think it is motivated by political revenge against Peter.
Chimath, what do we think of the number of unicorns being created in the private markets?
Obviously, when a company hits unicorn status, I think they're going to start buzzing around
and maybe knocking on your door and facts and boards might start thinking about
that. These companies sometimes have $10 million, $30 million in revenue, $50 million in
revenue, and they're becoming worth a billion dollars. Do these valuations make sense,
writ large? Are you concerned that this is a bubble? I don't think there's a bubble.
Okay. Explain why there's not a bubble in
early stage private companies. Well, I think it's because of what we just talked about, which is that
these companies by and large are growing at incredibly fast rates, and they are replacing
legacy incumbents that are growing very slowly or not at all,
with and who have basically won for a long time within
the theory of products. And so as these superior products with more nimble
organizations get capitalized to go to market, they're just going to win. And so I
think what we're seeing is a wholesale replacement of the economy from the
old to the new. And so that's why these companies will do well and
I think it's going to be a really powerful
Force in the world because like the world should be a little bit more efficient and fairer
When you have all this modern technology working on your behalf. So I'm a real
Supporter of all of this. I think there's going to be even more and I think know, the the thing that we have to be comfortable with is whenever something goes from a fringe thing, which is what venture capital was Jason when all of us were, you know, first in Silicon Valley 20 years ago.
To, you know, today in 2021, we're sitting here.
This is going to become a fundamental part of the economy. And when that happens, there'll be more and more money.
The returns won't be as good.
That'll be okay, but there'll be a lot of progress.
And so, we're going through the same transition
that private equity did in the 80s and 90s.
That hedge funds went up into the two.
Did you see all the different venture capitalists
who are retiring, Bichon from Spark,
the kid from light speed, bunch of other folks,
obviously our friend built a really
stepping on.
Jamie, Jamie, he's 50.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm doing something wrong here.
I'm like busy creating a venture firm at age almost 50.
You're on the wrong side of this.
Well, so what are we things behind this?
They just made too much money in their money.
Or is it because it's too competitive now?
It's too hard.
They're moving away. I would because it's too competitive now. It's too hard. They're moving to Wyoming.
I would say it's slightly different than this.
I don't know, I don't know,
I mean, I know all of those guys,
but I don't know what their motivation is.
But what I would say is I tend to think
that the mindset of venture
has a relatively short half-life,
and I think it's about 15 years.
And I think that there is a, and because, you know,
company building is roughly a 10-year arc, you know,
like when you get into something early.
And so I think that there is like a newness
whenever you start.
I don't think it matters what your age is.
And then there is this sort of like death march
that sets in by year eight or nine, and then you try to see it through to returning the capital and making sure all the employees and founders
you've been invested with land the ship.
And I think what these guys did was get to that place and say, okay, I've had this 15-year
beautiful arc.
Do I want to do another 15 year arc?
And for a lot of people, it won't make much sense.
And then also, I think your patience to do it goes away,
right?
Because it's like, you guys know what it is.
It's exhausting.
It's exhausting.
It's exhausting.
It's exhausting.
The amount of drama I'm dealing with right now
in my portfolio is bonkers.
The, the, the bad, I don't know if you're seeing this,
but the amount of shenanigans, bad behavior, fraud,
a lying backstabbing is at an all time high.
That would be your portfolio, Jacob.
Yeah.
No, it's like, it's literally three companies.
I'm literally dealing with three companies with drama
out of 350.
I think it's one out of 100 is probably fine.
But I am seeing all kinds of shenanigans, even in the diligence phase, I'm seeing it
season by.
I met something more tactical, which is like, for example, yesterday, we're starting something
really ambitious in batteries.
And I have to sit there for an hour and we have to go through ordering the equipment
setting up the lab, getting the human resources.
And there's only so much of that that you have the energy to do after a certain amount
of time.
It's important work.
You have to do it right, but it feels a little low leverage.
Now for that CEO, it's everything.
And so you have to be on top of your game to help that person.
And I think this is where I appreciate their honesty in basically saying, guys, I don't have that level of
detailed focus in me anymore. And that's important because in a next generation of folks who want to put in that 15-year journey,
you need somebody committed. You need somebody who's super committed.
Yeah, and I do think there's a difference between being a partner in a large partnership where you kind of have your portfolio of
companies and
to Jamal's point, you're going to be on that arc with them.
And then kind of building a firm from scratch where, like, quite frankly, I would go crazy
the way that you're dealing with Jason and Jamal's saying, I would get burned out if I didn't
have a team.
Right.
So, we now have like a pretty big team.
How many?
Well, just on the investment team, I think we've got about 15 people. And then we now have a a pretty big team. How many? Well, just one the investment team, I think we've got about 15 people.
And then we now have a bunch of operating partners.
So, you know, we were looking at what
Andreson Harvets has done with services.
You know, we had this big debate in the venture community
for a long time about whether venture firms should offer services
and operating partners.
And Andreson, you know, went hog while with that.
They've got like 200 people doing it.
And I think they've proven that it works in the sense,
I don't, it's not totally clear how much value
they're delivering, but it clearly works in the sense
that founders would like the services
if they can get them.
It's a great marketing, but it may not be necessary.
It's great, it's great marketing.
If you're a great founder, when you were a great founder,
you wouldn't want in Dresan Harowitz
telling you how to run your HR,
doing your marketing for you, and hammer.
Right, but so what we've done is what we've done wouldn't want in Dries and Horowitz telling you how to run your HR, doing your marketing for you and hammer. Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
So what we've done is what we've done is focus on bringing on not 200 people, but an expert
in every functional area that a SaaS company might need because you do want access to an
expert.
When you're set up the department, you want to go talk to the digital marketing person or
the legal person or you know, or you know, we have an executive briefing center now.
So we do believe that there is a version of the services model
that makes a lot of sense, and we are building that.
If I had to do all of that value add myself,
yeah, I would burn out.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very good point.
I literally last week launched the syndicate.com slash slash
a slash syndicate just for the same reason.
So I can build a group of individuals who are focused just on that
and who have that domain expertise.
But the great founders do not want you up in their business.
So I'm concerned with like-
That's why we have, we call it a teaching model,
where we don't want to do the work.
We want to give them an expert as a resource
who can meet with them, show them some best practices
of a big-
Do you have people coming to you expecting you
to do the work?
That's what I happen sometimes, is there like- No big deal. Do you have people coming to you expecting you to do the work? Because that's what I happen sometimes.
Is there like, can you find us a developer?
And I'm like, no, but I can talk to you about finding developers,
but I don't have a recruiter on staff.
Do you have a recruiter?
Yeah, we actually do now.
We have three recruiters on staff.
So we're paying a half million dollars a year
to recruit for your companies.
That's a big advantage.
Basically, that's a big advantage.
Is it working?
Are you actually landing developers?
Yeah, I mean, look, we can't be the...
Free-purg-and-I don't give a fuck about any of this.
All right, wait, wait, this is us in the weeds.
So, you want to talk about some...
Okay, well, just a couple of...
A couple of...
Yeah, I just want to go back to this, like, golden era point
when we're talking about venture capital because, look,
obviously, in the weeds, we're going to talk about our problems.
But I really think
that what's happening here with 1000 unicorns being minted every year is just unbelievable.
If you look at the number of billionaires in the US, I just googled this, there were 614
billionaires in the US as of October 2020.
Now there's probably more, I don't know, let's say there's a thousand.
Well, if you're minting a thousand unicorns every year, how many billionaires is that creating?
I mean, how many millionaires, more importantly,
how many people who are making 50 to $250,000 a year
before they join the ecosystem and now worth millions
will buy homes, hire people, start the next step.
But let me just give you guys the counterpoint to that,
which I'm not necessarily arguing,
but this is what I think the narrative is,
which is that those businesses that are kind of,
accumulating wealth are accumulating
wealth and accumulating revenue are effectively destroying the old economy and shutting down
companies and shutting down the current jobs.
Which there's 11 million job openings, that's bullshit.
I don't believe it's a zero-sum game.
I think it's creative stuff from that.
But it's disruptive.
It is disruptive, right?
So there is a temporal flux, and there's a flux of people across from the old economy
to the new economy. And it's that flux of people across from the old economy to the new economy
And it's that's flux that I think creates the great uncertainty and the great heartache that everyone's trying to
So that's the hand ringing that's the hand ringing for this is why it is so important to get corporate taxation right because
if you're gonna replace
GDP dollar for dollar
Don't focus on the fewer employees that work there, focus on the largest number possible,
which is the revenue that these employees are helping to generate for these companies.
So if you had much, much higher corporate taxation, you can play around with all the personal
taxation you want.
But if a lot of people do get shut out of the economy, you're not going to make nearly
as much for the government as you would by taxing companies more.
Chimath should there be a backstop because we know tax law is so sophisticated and if
you're intelligent, you could make it seem like you didn't make any money because you're
investing, you're distributing Yadda Yadda, should there just be a, hey, listen, whatever you
want to do, your taxes is fine.
But X percent of your top line revenue is your base tax and you cannot get around that.
Should there be something like that?
There's a couple of things that this tax bill attempted to do, which could be really powerful
if it does get passed.
I think that corporations should pay a large tax.
I think that they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on R&D, and I think they
should be forced to spend a certain percentage on basically benefits for their employees.
And I think that would do a lot to level the playing field.
Then I do think that you can have much higher individual taxation, but you need to make it
simpler because there's too many easy ways, like that ProPublica article showed, for you
to play games for individuals to not pay taxes.
And so you got to simplify all of this stuff
because it's too complicated.
So if you're rich enough to hire a fleet of lawyers,
you'll work your way around it.
Yes, period.
And they repealed it as part of the EMT
for corporations was repealed as part of the tax cuts
and jobs act, I think.
I don't know where that stands, but it does seem like a lot of
companies.
I don't know how that makes sense, J.K.L.
I mean, like some businesses run high margins, some are low
margins, some are losing money, some are over investing.
No, it's complicated.
I don't have the solution.
That's what I'm sort of saying.
Well, one of the, I think one of the optics issues here is,
you know, people are like, that company didn't pay any taxes,
that company sells this many iPhones, that company sells many.
Yes, because they're doing what tax laws were designed to do, Like that company didn't pay any taxes, that company sells this many iPhones, that company sells this many.
Because they're doing what tax laws were designed to do,
which is to encourage investment.
So how do you fix it?
Give me a solution, Freiburg.
I think that once businesses are mature
and they start dividending cash
and making distributions and they're profitable,
that might be the time to tax them.
I'm not sure what they would like.
Why would they ever do that
if they had an army of people saying,
hey, you don't have to.
You don't want to check a checkpoint.
If they're investing in growth, they're creating jobs and they're growing the economy.
And that's what we've done.
So that's why I was fine.
I don't think they're creating as many jobs as you think, but they aren't growing the economy.
That's why you have to tax the corporation because that's the effective proxy for taxing
GDP.
Look, I would be all about, let me just, I'll wear my libertarian hat again for a second,
but like I would be all about taxation
if I felt like my dollars had a positive ROI
where they ended up.
And the problem right now is like government spending
is set up in such a way
that it's effectively been gamified
and people extract capital from the government
and my dollars are not getting a positive ROI for me
or for society.
I would rather have them sit somewhere else.
Which is why you left, let's be honest.
That's why you left San Francisco.
I mean, it's just that's not spending more.
That's not, I left San Francisco. I've got a's just that's not sending more. I left San Francisco.
I've got a family and I need a backyard.
So that's a little different.
I mean, but is it in part of it that you are?
San Francisco is a separate degree of incompetence.
But yes, you're spending more than I remember.
And you're getting it to the course.
San Francisco's a whole nother nightmare, Jake,
I'm just speaking, more powerful in your writ large.
I mean, in general, right now, whether it's the state level
or the federal level, it feels to me,
and I think it feels to a lot of people,
that dollars aren't being spent in a way
that's generating a return for the taxpayer.
And I think we all feel that way.
And I think that's what's frustrating.
It's not about how much one's being taxed.
It's about how are those tax dollars being spent?
And are they being spent in a way
that secures the future of our nation,
of our people, of our people,
of our livelihoods, et cetera, and making, you know, giving everyone access to opportunity?
What's happened? What's happened is we've created things like student loan programs, and, you know,
housing programs and infrastructure programs that are literally just giving away money to private
companies that are profiteering off of government spending. And it's crony capitalism as our favorite
professor, Scott Galloway says,
it's one thing I really do agree with.
Pressure politics?
It is that there is this notion of crony capitalism
where the United States and state governments,
even local governments have seen
its San Francisco, California,
although we have to the federal level,
are spending money in a way that I think we all feel
is benefiting some disproportionately to most.
Now, if there was a high degree of taxation
and everyone was benefited in a meaningful way
and those programs who are well managed
and capital flowed meaningfully to support everything
we want to support, great.
I think everyone would raise their hand, raise two hands
and say, tax the heck out of me,
let's make that happen.
But that's not what happens
and I think that's the primary
of urgent to high taxation.
Sachs, you at the final word?
Yeah, I mean, look, what I'm worried about is taxes
are going up big time, no matter what happens in Washington.
Spending is going up big time.
We now have peacetime deficits that are the biggest
that they've ever been.
The peacetime national debt, the highest
has ever been.
We have a looming debt crisis in China, we have supply chain shortages.
What could go on?
I mean, you know, there's a lot of things here that could upset the Apple cart.
And what I'm afraid of is we're going to look back at this year, the thousand unicorns
being minted and say that really was the golden era and everything happened after that.
We really screwed up.
You sound like the old guy at Starbucks. It says that every generation and complained about the last generation of gold and error and everything happened after that. We really screwed it up. So you said like the old guy at Starbucks,
it says that every generation
and complaints about the last generation
are more than golden era and it's all down.
It's just music, it's not today.
Normally, normally.
I will say how impressive it is that 10 years ago,
none of those unicorns existed.
And it is likely the case that $3 trillion of value
was created via private funding
and private companies over the last 10 years.
So all these entrepreneurs, all these employees, anyone working at these businesses, anyone
involved in these businesses should be thrilled about the fact that you from zero created
three and a half trillion dollars of value in 10 years, that's extraordinary.
Yeah, I'm not trying to create nostalgia about the past.
I'm talking about the present and trying to preserve it because I'm seeing some storm clouds
on their horizon.
Yeah, yeah.
I would like to play the best song from Tony Tony Tony.
Is it really?
Yeah.
Okay, everybody, we're heading out.
This one's for you, London breed.
State, state approved entertainment.
You can take off your mask for this entertainment.
It's so good.
And you guys watch a squid game.
Anybody watch squid game?
No, we have loves.
Nobody watch squid game, okay. My kid's been talking about that. Should I be laying anybody watch Squid Game? No, we have lives. Nobody watch Squid Game, okay.
My kid's been talking about that, should I be laying
on the watch Squid Game, or is it?
No, it's the most violent Korean horror dystopian show
ever watched, they're gonna be scarred for a lot.
Oh, I wanna watch that.
Hey, Saks, as a follow up, did you stop your kids
from TikTok?
Did you take your kids off TikTok? They told, yeah, I went in there. I'm like kids. What are you watching?
I'll tell you in a second
Yeah, so did you take your kids off Tik Tok?
Yeah, I went in there. I was like kids. What are you watching that like that guy the hell out of here?
Okay out of here. I said tell us our names and he was like, okay, I'll be right back. Jack,
you can tell me to turn off the duck. By my name, I'll do it. David's like, see you later.
Tell me my first thing. The conversation was, what do you want? I was watching a TikTok. I hear
it's all sex and drugs. They're like, no, watching Dancery is like, okay, go ahead. I trust you.
The dance videos are literally like absolutely sex and drugbased, every single one of them.
It is so deep in it, it's saying.
No, stop.
It is not that you're so exaggerating.
I am so not exaggerating.
Literally, if you listen, take the most obscene lyric to obscene hook to any rap song, that's
what trends are on it.
Oh my God, it's so true, guys.
Every generation says the same about the next
it's unbelievable right? No, but it is like explicit. I was like, I mean like, you know,
I just want to Pearl Jam and all the way back to the beach boys like every
guy in the city is hips. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but I mean, no, this when I say it's
explicit, it is literally explicit. You just don't get the youth, Jake. How you don't
understand them. I think I understand it a little bit too well.
Anyway, so the youths, the youths.
The youths.
Listen, oh, hey guys, are we gonna do the all-in summit or not?
I went to the code conference and I was like,
this was amazing to get back to you.
You gotta stop talking about ideas
and actually just doing them.
What are you talking about?
We created a spot.
I'm just trying to get by and,
Jason, we could do it. Go, just do it. All right you talking about? We created a spot. I'm just trying to get by and, Jason, get to do it.
Go, just do it.
Okay, all right.
I need your guy and we have a voting system here.
We're all in.
Pick up my name.
Hey, buddy.
Miami.
Miami.
Okay, first year, Miami, second year, Italy.
Not Rome.
All right, we'll do first year, Miami, second year, Italy.
No, I'm trying to make it so much more sensible.
I think we do domain.
You have a cane so you can't get there, you old fucking bastard.
So here's how it's gonna work.
250 tickets, 200 for purchase, 50 for scholarship,
all in summit, three days Miami,
Saxony are off to the races.
Why?
Why don't you make it more people, bro?
Why do you have to keep it so exclusive?
You're just so exclusive.
I want to invert the top down hierarchy to what?
I want to be a left wing authoritarian.
I have to believe that is what you are,
a left wing authoritarian.
I'm like, listen, I just want to be rich and powerful.
What party I am.
That's why you money status in power.
Let me tell you, let me tell you why I like this idea
is because to the points we're talking about
with Coinbase earlier, we have these
conferences in the tech industry and they're frankly run by people who hate tech in the
tech industry and people who are successful.
Right, exactly.
And so I see these tech founders going up on these stages and subjecting themselves
these interrogations by people who hate them.
And I'm like, what are they doing?
Like, it makes no sense.
I'm putting up a form.
I'm going to let people take deposits.
I'm going to pick a month and we're going to go.
How many people went to the conference, guys?
You went to this week?
The code conference, I think, was probably three or four hundred by design.
It was a third or a half of it.
How much do I really take it?
I didn't actually buy a ticket because I didn't want to be in the conference itself
because I was concerned about a breakthrough virus, but I did host the poker game with Sky and Brooke.
Tickets, I think, are 8,000 for code, and I think Ted is up to 10 or 15.
So maybe so much to recharge it.
We need like $2,500.
$2,500.
We're charging 7,500.
So $210,000.
And then 50 scholarships for people who wouldn't be able to afford it.
So the gross revenue here is one of one from five million.
And what's our cost going to be?
Cost will be a million.
And what so wait, so we're making profit on this deal?
No, I'm making a profit.
I'm going to be 500.
I'm not.
We spend it.
We spend it be very clear.
We spend what we make.
I am buying the wine and you will shut the fuck up.
Okay, so then it's gonna be, it's gonna cost two million.
So it's gonna make one point five million.
No, no, no, no.
And if it's down to wine, no.
It's gonna cost two million.
I want to wine budget so that everybody that comes
is it feels like they've had an exceptional food
and beverage experience.
Tim, I'll just give this man half a million dollars
on wine, no jokes.
So then it has to be 10K a ticket.
But you know what, the people who are coming can afford it.
They don't care.
J.K., we're not privileging you with some profiteering.
I'm not profiteering off of it.
Honestly, the reason I want to do it most is I want to play poker for three days and
I want to have us, the four of us, interview the most iconoclastic, interesting people and
I want to do it for the fans so that some number of fans get to come,
who wouldn't normally be able to come to a conference
at this level.
And I just think it'd be a blast,
it'd be fun to get together.
Okay, stop talking about it and do it, we're all.
Okay, I'll do it, all right, I just wanna make sure
everybody's bought in.
I mean, it's fun to get you fuckers on the floor.
So set a date.
I'll set a date, okay.
Not the first week of February,
because I think I have a hope in the future.
I'm thinking March, April.
March, April.
Also not the third week of February, because I think I'm skiing, I'm thinking March April, March April, also not the third week of February,
because I think I'm skiing in Europe. Can you just give up some, can you give us the dates you're not
gallivanting around Europe and other places? Bro, I'm grinding every day here. You see what I'm doing.
It's like, it's like, I'm fucking working hard too. I mean, it's crazy right now. It's like, I've
never seen the market like this. I mean, it is bonkers. Enjoy it while less. What's that? Enjoy it while less. Exactly.
Alright, everybody. We'll see you next time for the dictator, Chimap Polly Haapatia for
the Rainman Daily Sacks and the Queen of Kienwa David Friedberg. I'm J. Cal. And we'll episode 55 bye bye You're one of us right? I'm a real nice guy. Besties are gone, don't worry.
That's my dog, can you give it to me?
It's your driveway.
Sit next to me.
Oh man, I have a bad show.
We should all just get a room and just have one big hug.
Because they're all just like this like sexual tension.
They just need to release their house.
What your feet, what your feet?
Your feet. What? Beef. What?
You're beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef.
Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef. Beef.