All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E54: Spread trading big tech, capital allocation, Zillow's misfire, Progressives suffer losses

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Besties do a Microsoft-themed intro 7:53 Spread trading big tech, amazing power of Google and Microsoft 17:28 Sacks speaks about Bird going public from the NYSE, understanding distrib...utions and evergreen funds, why Friedberg went the startup studio route 30:36 How DAOs fit in to the capital allocation landscape, the balance of consumer-facing products and infrastructure solutions for web 3.0 35:24 Zillow's iBuying implosion 46:05 Wokelash: Progressive democrats take huge hit on election day 2021, what are American voters looking for? 1:14:57 New CO2 to starch conversion discovered by Chinese researchers, future climate incentives 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://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1455553539552382979 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-01/zillow-selling-7-000-homes-for-2-8-billion-after-flipping-halt https://twitter.com/RTanuku/status/1456324783809826819 https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/elections-2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/nyregion/stephen-sweeney-durr-nj-election.html https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/republican-ann-davison-defeats-nicole-thomas-kennedy-to-become-seattles-first-woman-city-attorney https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/politics/democrat-losses-2022.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curriculum-guidelines.html https://nypost.com/2021/11/01/mcauliffe-claims-everybody-clapped-after-classroom-comment https://www.newsweek.com/cnn-van-jones-glenn-youngkin-delta-variant-trumpism-1645303 https://twitter.com/patrickruffini/status/1454792424488902656 https://www.shorenewsnetwork.com/2021/10/17/if-taxes-are-your-issue-njs-not-for-you-murphy-says-comment-taken-out-of-context/ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh4049 https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1454482267707899909 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/blah-greta-thunberg-leaders-climate-crisis-co2-emissions https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-finance-china-india-11636039142 https://www.wsj.com/articles/tariffs-climate-change-greenhouse-gases-manufacturing-steel-11635862305 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1454808104256737289

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 My body is a wonderland. If that wonderland is white, soft, and mushy. Sure. And hairy too. You know, the worst thing about skin on skin sleeping with the newborn is that, you know, sometimes she roots and she goes after the male nip. I know. The problem is my nip was covered in hair.
Starting point is 00:00:21 That's really the awkward for everybody. She started gagging. I'll tell Tully that story when she's 18 or at her wedding. It's really awkward for everybody. She started gagging. I'll tell Tully that story when she's 18. Or at her wedding. It'll be even better. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The All In The World. So they just go crazy. Love you guys. I'm queen of kid. I'm going to the league. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All in Podcast.
Starting point is 00:00:50 I am wearing a blue shirt. I am a pasty white, old, green man who's balding and obnoxious. And with me today is. No, no, no, no, no. You have to say your pronoun, bro. Am I, oh, and my pronouns are, Oh wait, what are my pronouns? My pronouns are,
Starting point is 00:01:12 beep, beep, and most people just call me a jerk. With me today, of course, is my Sri Lankan Erko Lucky, Hello, A Furry Sweater. Hello, everybody. My name is Jamoth. I have a salt and pepper black hair brown eyes. I am tall six foot two. I go by the pronouns we king and stud muffin. And I'm here to talk to you about internet security protocols. Why, why, why, why? I look like Ergel.
Starting point is 00:01:45 I think people should just come up and say, well, I don't look like Ergel. The closest like Ergel. I look like a bollywood when you put your flat about it. I like to Sri Lankan Ergel to us. Welcome to the Olive Podcast. Do out of the four of us are canceled.
Starting point is 00:01:59 Next up for cancellation sucks. Yes, I'm coming to you here from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, with for once land that belonged to the Mohiga and the Montauk, the O'Nida, the year of the earthquake, tribes. Oh, Rocketsons time in Memorial. You forgot the Irish.
Starting point is 00:02:22 We owned the seven points. Oh, my God. You really didn't. You went seven points. Oh my god. You literally didn't. You went for it, Saks. I love you. I'm, uh, isn't it important that we, at any moment,
Starting point is 00:02:34 that we're successful, we have to flageulate ourselves or remind ourselves at one time as all this land was owned by somebody else we stole it. How so the Greeks conquered the Romanians and sell it to apologize for that? But at one time, all this land was owned by somebody else. We stole it. Also the Greeks conquered the Romans and so I apologize.
Starting point is 00:02:49 But you forgot to mention you're also wearing a further shirt that is four sizes too large. This is my slim fit. So that's slim fit. Oh no, here we go again. That's just been upgrading the wardrobe. It's changing. Wait, wait, before free bird does the intro, Jake, you want to tell them why we're doing
Starting point is 00:03:07 these intros like this? Yeah, I got a pause before I get, okay, yesterday on the internet emerged a series of videos that were clipped of Microsoft presenting their new suite of developer tools, Yadiada, and corporate people got up and without any explanation started describing their physical appearance, their pronouns, their ethnicity, their skin tone, and their hairstyles. And the entire internet was like, oh my god, this is crazy. Wokeism, what is happening here? No, I thought it was a skit.
Starting point is 00:03:42 I thought it was a Saturday of the life skit. Right. And so then as soon as they got called out by the entire internet, they claimed that they were doing this for visually impaired people, which kind of begs the question of why visually impaired people need to know what race you are. Like, it's still playing into this like crazy way race consciousness. But then on top of it, it wasn't just that. We know it's not that because then they started doing this. No, no, but hold on. Yeah. Also, if you if you're blind and technically can't see, you may not even know what blue means. Because you will have never seen the color blue or blonde. Okay. Right. Right.
Starting point is 00:04:13 But they were also identifying their races, which kind of begs the question of why that's important. But if you were born blind, you would not know what that means either. You're literally color blind. I think people have, I think, I need to put it, but yeah, put it on the same footing as people who are not visually impaired. You know what I'm saying? If you're visually impaired, you're using the wrong language. That language is for the sighted people. Okay.
Starting point is 00:04:33 But I'm just calling bullshit on their stated explanation that has anything to do with visually impaired because then they went on to basically recite the names of 10 tribes, Native American tribes and the ones I've heard of on which the Microsoft campus used to belong to. So, which is why I was kind of making front of that in my initial statement. But, so look, this is just woke capitalism. This is wokeism out of control. Obviously, they didn't see the election results earlier in the week. It's clearly there was some level of virtue, seemingly. I think in their defense, they were trying to do it. I think for the visually impaired the problem was they didn't explain the context and They didn't give instructions to the people on what to do so that
Starting point is 00:05:14 That was but Jake hell that video that was a clip pulled out of a broader context to right so like Apparently this is common on campus or common there that this is happening all over So we just don't know it is a common because I asked people online. But it was optional. It was optional. It's not. But to the common point, I think the reason the internet reacted the way it was was I asked every single person who came at me because the woke left came at me.
Starting point is 00:05:36 I just said, can you show me another clip of this on YouTube of any event with this occurred and nobody could. So I think this was kind of a first. When did you stop being a member of that Woke Left, J.K.L.? What was the moment? I never liked a historical site. I've never been for Bernie. I've never been for Elizabeth Ward.
Starting point is 00:05:52 I've always been moderate. Oh, wait, can I use Freebrood's intro? Yeah, Freebrood, can we hear yours? My identity is illusion. My identity is illusion. It's an illusion created by the viewer and you can call me whatever you want. I sit on the ground where during the Hadrian period there was lava and magma and nothing but
Starting point is 00:06:11 CO2 and methane and I represent those gases that are now lost to the oxygenation and the cyanobacteria that's warmed over the surface and took everything over and led to the formation of eukaryotic life and here we all sit today in our privileged existence. Thank you. Are you saying that you want to freeberg is just electrons hitting neurons in interesting ways? Yeah, no, he's like, he's like it, it, it, his pronouns are proton and a matter of chemical quantum bath. Quantum foam is my pronoun.
Starting point is 00:06:44 So would you like to formally apologize for colonizing the dark matter during the Big Bang now? Or would you like to, I feel it was inappropriate. It wasn't fair when the cyanobacteria took over the face of the earth and sucked up all the CO2 and created all the oxygen. And for that we all apologize. For the genocide of, for the genocide of, of CO2 and methane. I mean, those molecules were really happy. And they had a very kind of like peaceful existence on this earth. And, you know, Scientist came in and ripped it away. So I'm back here, I just took it all away from that. And, you know,
Starting point is 00:07:22 and then the offspring ended up being us. And here we are. So apologies. All right. All right. Welcome to episode 54. Everybody's canceled. The final episode. Everybody's horrible.
Starting point is 00:07:36 I don't think that the Microsoft thing was bad. When you hear the broader context, it was like, you know, that's just, you know, I think it's a reasonable thing that visually impaired people on the screenually I'm still long Microsoft and Google and short the rest of big tech. So I'm fine with it There you go back to the stock price. See it. I actually I Jamal, do you think that the Google long Netflix short plays the right play? I think the best trade on the internet the most obvious simple money making trade is long Microsoft Google short Big tech short the rest of the big tech short Short IBM, short Netflix. No, no, no, short,
Starting point is 00:08:08 short, what I don't know, meaning you can very comfortably short Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and be long Microsoft Google. So as a spread trade, right, right. It's the most, it's the best risk parity trade on the internet right now. I mean, period in the markets. Can you explain the spread trade trade trade? So look, look, I tweeted this a while ago, but it's like, and again, the, I think like, well, let me be constructive and say the people on Twitter that respond to these threads are not totally stupid, although I think they're kind of idiotic. I said, you know, here's how you can effectively, you know, I said something about, you know, big tech and I said, oh, I can comfortably put my short on.
Starting point is 00:08:46 And I'm kind of trolling people when I do that because I'm not telling them the full trade. And the real trade whenever you put anything on, in my opinion, is all about managing risk. And the best thing about the internet and the stock market is that when you're betting on internet stocks, you don't necessarily have to be naked long or naked short, which comes with a lot more risk than if you were one security and short another against it. So, for example, over the last 10 years, you would have made a lot of money by being long Amazon and short a basket of traditional commerce companies, offline commerce.
Starting point is 00:09:22 I'm going to make up a basket, but may see's JC Penny, you know, K-Mart, Sears, right? So if you were short those in long Amazon, that's what's called a spread trade. You're basically playing the gap between your longs and your shorts. It's independent of where the market generally trades. It's one of the key. It relevant of the market.
Starting point is 00:09:41 You're basically saying, because those stocks could go up, but just not- Everything could go up right. Everything could go up right. Amazon. When you put that trade on, for example, it's, I'm going to bet that if everything goes up, Amazon will go up more than Kmart Wal-Mart's here. And if the stock market goes down, Amazon won't go down that much, but these ones will go down a lot. And you're playing the spread. So just to be very explicit, there was a very, and I talked about this last week,
Starting point is 00:10:09 but this idea was in mind, it's a borrowed trade from somebody who's a very well-known hedge fund manager, who put it on in massive size, and to be honest, not knowing much of anything, I just copied it, but his initial trade was long Google Short Facebook. And that trade basically was at parity, which meant that the long and the short canceled each other out for about the last four years.
Starting point is 00:10:34 Until the last year, it completely blew out and it returned about 80-85%. So if you had put $100 in, you would have made about 85 bucks on this trade by being Long Google short Facebook. The bigger trade at scale is actually long Google and Microsoft and short the rest of big tech. And there's a lot of vagaries why that this idea makes a lot of sense. What you're saying is they'll outperform the other basket of tech on a relative basis. On a relative basis. So it's not like you're saying Airbnb can't go up or Facebook can't go up, it could. It's not going to go as up as much as those.
Starting point is 00:11:09 He's saying that the trillion dollar market cap companies, not the Airbnb. And the reason why focusing there makes sense is there are hyper liquid markets. They have tremendous ways in which you can have massive size on. So you could put a trade of 10 billion long versus 10 billion short. I mean, you can put mega size on on these things if you have real conviction. And then the third thing is when the banks look at that kind of position, they actually, from a risk management perspective, treated differently than if you were just naked long any one of these things.
Starting point is 00:11:45 Or make it long would be just making one bet. Yeah, or make it short, which is even more dangerous. Because if the market collapses by 30%, both stocks might go down 30, roughly, but one will go down 32, and the other one will go down 28. And so you're really only... You're down 2%, that's a post of a 30%. So all the market risk is taken out when you make trades like that.
Starting point is 00:12:07 The reason it's possible also today to do so, it's such a scale, right? Chim off is interest rates are so low. So when you borrow on margin to go long, the rate is very low. And when you short this stock, if it's a highly liquid stock, it doesn't cost a lot to borrow the short. So you're actually carrying cost on that trade ends up being pretty low relative to the upside you expect. So just to give you a sense of it,
Starting point is 00:12:31 my, you know, when I tweeted that tweet out, to complete the picture, I was actually long something against my proposed short. And I put it on in pretty meaningful leverage. And it's worked out really well because I was playing the spread. I was basically betting that, you know, the safest company on the internet today is Google
Starting point is 00:12:50 because they're both a platform company. And to the extent that they're at risk at being an app company, the risk is to Apple, but because they pay Apple so much for search, they're inoculated. And so in many ways, Google is the safest. And it's also, as we've said before, the purest money-making machine on the internet. You're referring, of course, to Google paying Apple $10 billion to be the default search in this. They own Android, so one platform,
Starting point is 00:13:16 and on the other platform, they pay them so much that they're going to be always protected. And the second best company is Microsoft. And we even saw it by the way this past week. I don't know if you guys saw that, but Microsoft decided to take a broadside attack against notion. Yeah, that is a productivity app that's been growing very well. I felt this when I was on the board of Slack. When Microsoft put its gun sites on us, we always thought that they could not outcompete with us.
Starting point is 00:13:41 And what it turns out is when you have a massive distribution advantage, feature parity is enough, and you can actually be slightly less than good enough on the features, because distribution and bundling and packaging overpower a customer's desire to adopt a product. So in the case of Slack, it was very difficult, I think,
Starting point is 00:14:00 for us to compete against Microsoft's bundling of teams with all this other software that they were selling and all the discounting that they could do made it very difficult for us to compete because we had a single product. And lo and behold, 18 months later, the only real long-term protective solution
Starting point is 00:14:16 for Slack shareholders was to basically get bought by Salesforce so that you could be part of a bigger hole. This past week, Microsoft decided to go after notion and it's going to be, I think, a very similar story where, you know, once they decide to sort of go after this product experience, they only need to be 80% as good, and then the distribution and bundling and packaging will take care of the other 20%. It doesn't kill the other company, but it creates headwinds, that massive headwinds. Because a company like Notion cannot be fully valued over long periods of time, simply
Starting point is 00:14:46 being an SMB company. At a minimum, you'll have to move into the mid-market. You may necessarily never have to go to the enterprise, but you probably have to go to the mid-market. And in that is a very troublesome path because Microsoft has so much, you know, tentacles, so many tentacles inside of those businesses. So many ways. Basically, the long Microsoft, long Google is a pretty obvious kind of like monopolistic
Starting point is 00:15:09 You know pear trade the question is what are you short against it so that you can take out the market volatility and you can place bread Again Apple has severe, you know headwinds with respect to inflation pressures and margins and supply chain issues. Amazon has pretty meaningful headwinds now relative to pricing power and competition. Facebook has pressure with respect to regulatory oversight. I mean, I just came up with one. What about Airbnb versus the airline?
Starting point is 00:15:38 You're talking about spread trade? You're talking about small or rinky dink ideas. Well, I'll just say, I'm not playing on the same chip stack issue. I wasn't there on Tuesday night. I'm which is an incredible margin business, that's incredibly well-run and growing, versus airlines which are horribly run and low margin, why wouldn't that be a good spread trade? I'm just thinking about it. I think it's a very, very, too, you're picking two random companies out of a hat. Well, no, they're both in transportation and vacation and travel. They're completely different businesses
Starting point is 00:16:25 with completely different motivations, with different capital pools, with different people that own the stock. There's no point trying to get cute on these things. My point is, if you really want to be hedged against market risk, got it. Coda, we're her safest.
Starting point is 00:16:39 Find the simplest, most obvious thing. Don't overthink it or don't put it on. So another obvious one, here's it. So obvious is within big tech, figure out which ones you want to be long, which ones you want to be short. That's a spread trade that over the next four or five years, where if you expect a lot of market volatility, it makes sense to maybe put some of this kind of stuff on, right? A different version of this idea, which makes sense is in autos. Again, trillions of dollars of market cap and you can make a decision. Do I want to be long, Tesla lucid and Rivian and short the traditional autos? That could be a trade. You know, but trying
Starting point is 00:17:19 to, like, trying to go after, like, let me pick Airbnb versus United Airlines is too random for me and I don't think they're correlated enough For it to make any sense. All right, it's being of the stock market sacks You've got the background of the New York Stock Exchange as your zoom background today. What's that about? Yeah, so bird listed on the New York Stock Exchange today this is a company that I've been involved in pretty much Just the beginning we let the series A round back in 2017. It was actually the first check I wrote as a VC to lead around at Kraft. And four years later, public company on the New York Stock Exchange, pretty amazing. And so you're literally at the New York Stock Exchange. Yes, I am in the first remote
Starting point is 00:18:00 bestie. Yes, and you can see behind me, that is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It's not like, you know, if you've seen the movie trading places, it's not like that anymore. There are no stock brokers, there's no like paper flying around. Got it. I'm not really sure what the purpose
Starting point is 00:18:16 of all those monitors are down there. I feel to me a little bit like a movie set. You know, it's like a movie set, yeah. Yeah, and so people like us come here to record things, but as we all know, the all the trades are really happening inside darn machines. Can you turn around and just start yelling, boo-ya, boo-ya, and let's say security comes in. No, I'm elevated above the floor, knowing who really hear me, I mean, like this sort of broadcast
Starting point is 00:18:44 booth. So take us behind the decision to go public as a four-year-old company. We were expecting you know Airbnb, Ubers, and lifts took over 10 years to go public. Now here we are sitting on a four-year-old public company. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, something in between, and how does the board and the management team make that decision to go public? I think it's a good thing, a bad thing, something in between and how does the board and the management team make that decision to go public? I think it's a good thing because the company, well, the company wanted to. I think it had the opportunity to. It grew very, very quickly before COVID. Then you had COVID, was like sort of a huge setback. I mean, they see the scooters sheet to stop for at least six months because of lockdowns. But then coming out of COVID, they bounced back really strongly.
Starting point is 00:19:25 They kind of pivoted their model to, it was called a fleet manager model, where basically they're putting a business in a box for a local operator, a local entrepreneur, to buy the scooters with financing and manage the fleet themselves. So it's a much more highly virtualized model. So as a result of that in Q2, they just did 60 million
Starting point is 00:19:46 in revenue in the last quarter. And I think it was the gross profit of something like 27%. And it was had a loss of like 12 million. So they're very, very close to getting to profitability. And you know, the company's only four years old. It took Uber 12 years or whatever to getting to profitability. And the company's only four years old. It took Uber 12 years or whatever to get to be public. So it's been a pretty amazing ride. There've been a lot of big ups and downs, but so it's kind of a pretty sweet event. What is it trading under now?
Starting point is 00:20:17 I know it was Switchback was like the SPAT name. Right, so it's, today was the first day it started trading under the ticker symbol BRDS. I guess all birds took BIRD so we took BRDS and You know, if there's a total number of shares outstanding of I want to say roughly three hundred million so it's about a 2.4 billion dollar market cap, you know as it stands right now Which you know first series a investors pretty great really happy, you know, first series A investor is pretty great.
Starting point is 00:20:45 Really happy free to sexy. Yeah, congratulations. It's great. Congrats, dude. We heard last week, Sequoia is gonna do the Sequoia fund, this Evergreen fund, keep owning shares. Now, as a VC, do you distribute after four years of this investment and you made multiple investments,
Starting point is 00:21:01 or do you make the decision, hey, we think it's undervalued, we have, you know, conviction in the company, we were going to be in it for 10 years or do you just take the quick win and give everybody their shares? Well, I'm going to ever agree to be on the board for the next year. So, I'm playing to do that and we have a traditional six month lockup and so at that point we don't have to make a decision about when or how much to distribute the shares. And it is the first time we've been confronted with decision. I mean, craft ventures is only a four-year-old firm. And like I said, this is actually the first round that I led as a VC. So it's the first time we've been confronted with a distribution of this magnitude. We've had some smaller distributions. So yeah, we still have to make those decisions.
Starting point is 00:21:43 We haven't decided yet what we're going to do. If the stock is up, let's say, meaningfully in the next six months, and you get to that, you know, six months in a day, and you have the ability to distribute, and it's up 25% and you're looking at it, business is thriving, you're on the board, do you consider holding for a year or two so that you can distribute at $16, $25 or whatever your price target is. Maybe. We haven't gotten to that point yet. So yeah, I mean, I guess what I would say is that our bias would be to distribute shares to our LPs so that they can make their own decisions about whether they're sold or not. As long as we think the stock is priced fairly, if for some reason we thought it wasn't,
Starting point is 00:22:27 then there'd be our additional reasons to hold on to it and make the distribution later. Jamal, what are your thoughts on this given it's come up before? And a number of us are going to be faced with this decision, and then we see Sequoia has got LP buy-in for an Evergreen fund. Well, I think an Evergreen fund is different
Starting point is 00:22:43 from having to figure out how to do distributions. They're solving for two different ideas. The Evergreen fund is really good because you don't have to do this continual fundraising process and you can basically roll gains back into the next tranche of invested companies in an easier way. I like that idea. It was pretty rare at the time. I remember when I was starting social capital, the only fund that did it really well was Sutter Hill. And for a whole host of reasons,
Starting point is 00:23:13 I decided to not do an evergreen fund. In hindsight, I think for me, that turned out to be better because then it was easier for me to wind down and have a clear demarcation of when it was just myself and other LPs versus when it was just my capital. But there were some really good reasons to do it. The hardest thing I think that Sequoia is going to find in this new iteration is at some
Starting point is 00:23:40 point, somebody's reputation will be on the line for judging public equities and It's still not clear to me that people who live in breathe venture Can context switch well enough to then live in breathe Public equities. So just the best example I would say is like Tiger Global when you look inside that Organization, which is incredibly well-run. There are two superb Investors that carved the universe up. You have Chase Coleman that runs a public book and you have Scott Schleifer that runs a private book. What is it proof? To me, it proves that it's just very hard to find a person that can do both.
Starting point is 00:24:15 And the context switching is very complicated. So maybe Sequoia finds an incredible public market strategist that can then manage these positions. Otherwise, they've done this for a few years. Sequoia, I don't know, people realize this. They set up a huge fund. The Heritage Fund and they set it up with only GPs money. It's got billions under management and it's been making late-stage private but mostly public equity investing. I know, but that's a fun to funds.
Starting point is 00:24:43 What I'm saying is, I'll be very honest with you, if I was an LP of Sequoia, I would want the money back. And the reason is, I'm not sure that Sequoia can compound money in the public markets anywhere near what I could. So do you buy the point that they make that like exiting some of these left most of the, you know, kind of value creation on the table? No, I think what they're saying something much more subtle, which is they exited and they have regrets for selling. You have to remember when Sequoia distributed Google, every single partner got Google shares.
Starting point is 00:25:17 Now had they held those shares, they would be saying any of this. And famously, I'll tell you when I actually they held their shares. That what I know when I actually do. Fair enough, but maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but let's just put it out there that, for example, I know explicitly when I almost merged social capital with Kleiner Perkins like six years ago,
Starting point is 00:25:35 I spent so much time with John Dorr, the most incredible thing that I was so impressed with Dorr was he told me, he had never sold a single share of Amazon that was distributed to him, and he had only sold the handful of shares of Google only to fund future capital requirements at Clienter at the time. So I just think that ultimately, I think probably what Sequoia was saying is, man, I wish I had
Starting point is 00:25:59 not sold my Google shares when they were distributed to me, because otherwise they wouldn't make that claim. No, I think what they're saying is more so. I think they're saying, you as our LPs should have held them. We are on the board of these companies from day one. We have better insights in the second decade than in the first production board, founder David Friedberg, how do you think about early exits distributing capital because you do have also with a startup studio structure,
Starting point is 00:26:23 which you should explain to the audience how a startup studio works because you create companies which is you know was a terrible place to be maybe five or ten years ago but it turns out you're in the best place because zero to one is where all the values created explain the two things what a startup studio is for people who don't know and then what's your view of selling early if a company of yours goes public? I think there's a big, there's a bigger kind of framing here, which is a lot of investors, you know, professional money managers have tried to find ways to create what is called permanent capital, which is a vehicle whereby they can continuously make investments decide when to sell those investments and recycle the capital and continue investments with the idea of being that over time, they're not
Starting point is 00:27:09 at risk of capital outflows, meaning investors pull their money out, and they're not at risk of needing to go out and raise more money. They can share in the value creation as they grow their book value over time. Years ago, a bunch of hedge funds set up public reinsurance companies. Dan Loeb did this, what's his name? I know or did this. The lackman did it. Basically, Bill Acman did it.
Starting point is 00:27:33 What they did is they set up a public company and you can public company a reinsurer. And then they used that reinsurer to underwrite reinsurance. And when you underwrite reinsurance, you get all this capital that you can then go invest. And then the hedge fund managed that investment. And because it's actually a public company,
Starting point is 00:27:49 it's a got a balance sheet. The shareholders can't pull their money out, right? It's just got a balance sheet. And the hedge fund was managing that balance sheet and generating good returns. And this is effectively what Warren Buffet does. And everyone looks to Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffet. It's kind of the key kind of long term here, which is, hey, look, if you can keep
Starting point is 00:28:10 investing and keep compounding value, this thing can grow exponentially over time. So, you know, the way we set up the production board, I had the option of raising a fund and being a fund manager. I chose to set up the production board because I was much more interested in, I think the similar sort of vein of what Sequoia is saying, which is like, how do you become a longer term builder and a longer term holder, and where you don't have these incentives to return capital, because you only get paid if and when you return capital.
Starting point is 00:28:37 And then you're kind of making these decisions to, you know, because your shareholders are saying, well, you had a good return, quickly give me the shares back and let me, and mark your profit and take your share. And I was also more interested in, look, the fact is over time, there's always going to be opportunities to chase with the capital. So if we have a great gain, if something works out really well, we can take the, the, the gain and we can reinvest that capital in building new things. There's no shortage of opportunities to pursue for the rest of my
Starting point is 00:29:03 life. So that's why I set up the production board initially in partnership with Alphabet, and then later on we brought in Bill Gates and other Alan and Co and other kind of investors that have a similar sort of mindset, which is like, let's just, if we haven't an exit, recycle that capital and continuously have no value. They're not looking for a quick win. They don't have pension payments to make, right? They don't have a reason to distribute cash. And so same with me, like, I don't have a reason to take cash out. So the objective was just build this thing over time and grow value over time. And that's why I set it up the way I did. And I think it allows us to make, you know, really long-term bets that are super risky. Most of what we're doing is super technical and difficult and
Starting point is 00:29:42 maybe very hard to pull off, many of which are still after many years in a very early stage. So you need very patient capital. Patient capital. And also the preference for not trying to find exits, but I have found this. I'll tell you one thing. I have been through a number of circumstances where I have seen businesses I've been an investor in
Starting point is 00:29:59 or involved in that have traded long term value for short term opportunity, meaning there's an opportunity to make a business that you can then go raise capital against. You change your strategy to do that, then you go raise VC funding, and now the business looks like it's working. But the 10X or 100X opportunity was taken off the table because you ended up going down this different path that was a sure thing that was more likely to work that created value in the short term
Starting point is 00:30:25 that allowed you to mark up your investment or raise capital against that, but you gave up the big long term thing. And I think that's something I've been trying to avoid with this structure. And it certainly makes sense with some of these other folks and what they're trying to do. So what we're getting at here, SACs, is decision making by capital allocators. And on behalf of their LPs or letting the LPs make those decisions, inevitably the crypto world says, well, why aren't you just doing this in a DAO and having some decentralized
Starting point is 00:30:54 authority make the decisions? I had a conversation with our friend Vinny Lingam after the Solana stuff and multi-quin capital. And we were talking about DAO's for early stage investing or syndicates and just brainstorming, hey, is there a way to do this? And the problem I came to every time was, should a bunch of folks be making decisions who are not meeting with the companies or meeting with 2,000 companies a year? What are your thoughts on a DAO representing what we collectively do, but we all do it in different flavors? Does this actually exist?
Starting point is 00:31:32 Yep. Well, there have been DAOs that have existed to vote on buying NFTs. So yes, for collectibles. I kind of feel like I'll let you know when it actually gets here. So open-minded to it, but who knows? Yeah, but we talk about these things if they are here and they it actually gets here. So open-minded to it, but who knows? Yeah, but I mean, we talk about these things as if they already are here and they're not quite here. I mean, technically, I know they exist,
Starting point is 00:31:50 but people haven't really figured out how to use them to be a fun manager, for example. I think David's right. I think the look, I, there are these three immutable features of Web 3.0 that we're gonna have to figure out over the next few years. So the obvious ones are decentralization. That makes sense.
Starting point is 00:32:11 The second obvious one, there's the level of composability, which means that you're plug and play with everything. But the third one is this idea of democratization and governance. And that's where Dows come in. And David's right, we don't really know what the boundaries of that feature is. and governance, right? And that's where Dow's come in. And David's right, we don't really know what the boundaries of that feature is.
Starting point is 00:32:29 I think it exists in some small level scale, but we need to have many iterations of companies get built to figure out what it'll mean. So I don't know, I'm taking a pretty traditional approach Jason, which is that, you know, it's kind of like a crawl walk run strategy right now in the crawling phase and I'm kind of saying how did Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 develop and I'm trying to just copying it. So you know in Web 1.0 and 2.0 You need it companies like Sun Microsystems and Cisco and you know all of the plumbers
Starting point is 00:33:04 on microsystems and Cisco and all of the plumbers. Foundational stuff. To build plumbing for the internet, to allow the thousand flowers to bloom at the application level. And we had a very good reference model, by the way, for Web 1.0, for most people, if you want to look at it, it's called the OSI reference stack. And if you actually look at that OSI stack,
Starting point is 00:33:20 you can translate that to all kinds of value creation over the first two arcs of the internet over 20 years. Trillions of dollars is created by just following each of those substrates. And in those transitional layers was where these great beautiful companies were built. And I think similarly, we're going to do that again, but we need a different stack to represent what WebPri is. So, you know, this week we did something which was pretty straightforward, which was this idea that if you're going to build all these apps, you're going to need a distributed compute infrastructure, which means you're going to need very simple building blocks like
Starting point is 00:33:55 remote procedure calls, RPC, that exists in Web2.0. It's kind of a not something you don't really think about, but in Web3 doesn't exist. And so it's all this AWS, you know, GCP-like infrastructure that has to get built. And that's what Sintika does. And I am a cool person. I think that's a really very interesting observation there because everybody is trying to go to the application level and talk about the consumer experience. But before you even have the ability, you know, we're talking about cars before
Starting point is 00:34:25 we've even made a transmission or, you know, an I-s engine. That's exactly right. This is why crypto comes across us so delusional and strange sometimes. They wrote 3,000 ICO papers. None of them were about infrastructure. They're all about some sort of endgame. The thing is, it's a very delicate balancing act, right? You need a handful of companies that capture consumer imagination, that then incentivize all of the plumbing companies to come in and build underneath it, right? You need a handful of companies that capture consumer imagination, right? That then incentivize all of the plumbing companies to come in and build underneath it,
Starting point is 00:34:49 right? So it's a customer. It's a very delicate balancing act, right? So you need it compuser in order to enable a bunch of companies. Then you need it AOL in order to enable another set. Then you needed Yahoo, then you needed Google. And in all of that, what happened was people were pulled through. You needed Amazon commerce to justify AWS. So we're in that world where it's going to be a little back and forth, where the pendulum will swing back and forth between consumer experiences that capture imagination, get to some level of scale, that then create incentives for the developer ecosystem and the technology infrastructure to catch up.
Starting point is 00:35:24 Zillow, which we talked about previously, became an iBire. What's an iBire? That means you buy a bunch of single-family homes, you know, likelihood, like open door and redfin have been doing. And then you hope to flip them, maybe improve them, and maybe lower costs to the consumers by taking out real estate brokers. This has created a lot of bad feelings amongst real estate brokers a TikTok video
Starting point is 00:35:49 Trended a couple of months ago where a broker said or accused Zillow Of buying up these homes in order to do price fixing and to corner the market on homes well It turns out that Zillow which has an incredible CEO in Rich Barton and has done tremendously over the decades. According ahead of their earnings call this week, Bloomberg reported Zillow is trying to offload 7,000 homes for 2.8 billion. That's about a 400K average per home. And Zillow shares dropped 37% this week alone from 166.
Starting point is 00:36:25 Their market cap has dropped 9 billion throughout the week. And they're down 70% from a peak valuation of 48 billion just in February about six months ago. Zillow is going to reduce its workforce by 25% over the next few months. I'm assuming that's all those I buyers anecdotally. A lot of what I'm hearing is they bought homes indiscriminately, the anecdotal stories that are breaking on Twitter and other forums with real estate brokers are, they would look at a home, they didn't know that it had a noisy neighbor or where it was near power lines or whatever the people who came in, bought them indiscriminately,
Starting point is 00:36:59 maybe too fast, whereas some other companies maybe opened or readfin were more considered. I actually had Glenn from readfin on the pod not long ago. And he said, it's a very hard operational business. He had to be very careful on what you buy in your entry price. That seems to have turned out to be true. What do you think, Freiburg? Rich Barton, who runs Zillow, is considered a legend
Starting point is 00:37:18 in Silicon Valley. He has been involved in some of the most successful internet companies. And when he stepped back in as the founder of Zillow Step Back In to run the business a few years ago, it was viewed as kind of a second resurrection of this business, and he was going to take it into new areas. And then three and a half years ago, he announced the side by our program, which everyone thought was such an incredibly strong move, and obviously chased open door, which Tomov is involved in and I'm sure we'll share
Starting point is 00:37:48 more on. But it was such an obvious opportunity that if you could add liquidity to the real estate market, the residential real estate market, there's an incredible amount of value to be had. Now, the way that they wrote about it, when they talked about it initially, and then the way that they've kind of talked about it in their earnings report this week, was that they were trying to be a quote market maker in the business. And it turned out that what they were really doing was being more of a speculator right a market maker looks at bids and afts in the spread and then tries to create a gap in that spread and make and take some share of it. And by adding that liquidity the idea is the spreads can narrow and they can make money. In this case, they were looking at the historical velocity of selling prices of homes and using that as a way to kind of project what was going to happen,
Starting point is 00:38:34 which makes them much more of a speculator than a market maker. And they clearly got this wrong. And they're kind of quote unquote models on, you know, where a price is headed ended up getting them in trouble. There's also the inherent conflict where they are now competing in a way with the brokers that generate a lot of revenue for them and are a big part of their core business. And they were clearly, you know, cannibalizing their own business where the zeppes and some of the other scoring that they provide as a data and analytics platform to both sides of the existing market starts to get blown up because they're coming in and saying, we're going to put our foot down and say,
Starting point is 00:39:08 this is what the value is. It inevitably kind of cannibalizes the core product that they provide to both sides of the market. One could argue this was flawed from the beginning. The execution clearly was way off. It begs the question, where was leadership and tracking what was going on here as these guys were buying homes at market prices that are well above what they were actually selling for
Starting point is 00:39:29 in the market, no one was actually doing on the groundwork. They were all doing kind of speculative models and saying this is what we think will happen. And then they woke up way too late and lost way too much money. I think they lost $300 million in the quarter. So really a lot of questions and a lot of challenges on this. I'm sure Timoth has a point of view on what makes Open Door distinct from Zillow, but
Starting point is 00:39:52 there's a really important kind of underlying here. The maturity of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who's crushed it so many times doesn't mean that they're perfect. And this was a big mess. You can go really too fast into a turn here and clearly they flipped the car. Chamath, I don't know how comfortably you are talking about this in general. Okay, well that's here we go. Number one, you know, I'm not on the board.
Starting point is 00:40:18 Of open door. Of open door. Maybe tell us about your history with open door. Chamath would be super. Look, I am one of the largest individual shareholders of that Door. Maybe tell us about your history with Open Door to be super. Well, look, I am one of the largest individual shareholders of that company. I think somewhere between 3% and 4% of the business I am. We, I came to own those shares with a large investment,
Starting point is 00:40:35 as well as through the transaction where we merged. One of our spacks into it and took it probably. Is that IPOB. Yes. A couple of things to say, the first is about the CEO and founder of OpenDore. Eric Wu is special, special, special. So let me just leave it at that on that topic.
Starting point is 00:41:00 The second is, I think that Rich Barton is very special, but it speaks to two big mistakes that Zillow made. The first is that catching a Wave of disruption is very difficult when you have an old line business that is fundamentally competitive with the new line of business and Zillow as David said had this thing called Zestimate, whose entire job was to directionally drive
Starting point is 00:41:28 top of funnel traffic into the rest of their media business. Now, imagine you go to a website to look up your house value or somebody else's house value. Accuracy is a bug. The feature that makes a Zestimate work isn't highly inflated house price, right? Like, if you go and you see a crazy house price number, that's interesting. That's more clickworthy than if you go in there and it shows them depressed value, you think the side sucks.
Starting point is 00:41:58 That's the unfortunate psychological reaction. So I think whether we believe it or not or whether Zillow knew it or not, Zestimate over time basically calcified this idea of price inflation. So the accuracy was never a goal. So then if you take that business and then you try to orient it towards home buying and you use probably Zestimate or some version of it to underpin how you buy and take risk. It creates a lot of risk and I think this is essentially what played out where they were over buying homes and they didn't know how to price this stuff accurately. So my partner Ravi tweeted this out, but the open door margin on average is about 10% the
Starting point is 00:42:37 zillow margin on average was 3%. So they had a much more razor thin margin of safety here, which again speaks to pricing. And then it speaks to this third thing, which is that if you start doing one thing and do it really well with software, the gains over years really compound. And so when somebody else shows up and tries to pivot their business to try to copy it, it's very, very difficult. The classic example is Google versus Yahoo. Yahoo had a beautiful directory driven business.
Starting point is 00:43:08 But when Larry and Sergey were really Larry invented PageRank and then invented that first version of a Google search index, as we saw it, it play out over the next 10 or 15 years, it was impossible for Yahoo to really invest the technical capital necessary to catch up with Google. And every day, and every week, and every year, as Fribert talked about last week, those technical gains compound and compounded, now Google is completely unassailable with respect to search.
Starting point is 00:43:36 I suspect we will look back and the ability to accurately forecast price and volatility and the ability to accurately forecast price and volatility and the ability to sell these assets at a defined margin of safety in a predictable way is something software can solve. And it seems that open door is the first. It doesn't necessarily mean it'll be the only one, but it has an enormous head start now, and as long as they can keep iterating, those gains will compound. So that's what I think. I just think this is a wonderful business run by an incredible CEO. To wrap up this Zillow story, Sachs, any thoughts on Trimout's point here, you know, you're the rating agency, and you had had this business and the business might be orthogonal to the existing money printing machine on a strategic basis.
Starting point is 00:44:29 What do you think any lessons or mistakes here in terms of when you hand a cap zillow or do you want to just move on to our poll? I mean, look, I was a scene investor and opened door because Ravoy invited me to the seed round. So, you know, I'm a little biased here, but I think it's pretty obvious what happened. Zillow tried to copy them. The business is much more operationally complicated than they realized. It's a low business, low margin business, which requires a ton of capital. So if you're off a little bit, the losses can be huge. And Zillow couldn't figure it out. They underestimate the difficulty. That's what frequently happens in a big company. It tries to copy a smaller sort of upstart company. So, I mean, that to me is what happened in a nutshell.
Starting point is 00:45:10 Quite frankly, we're an hour into this pod and we haven't discussed issues. Any issue that I think is broadly relevant to most Americans, I think this is one of our worst episodes we're gonna bore everyone to tears. I frankly don't understand what the fuck you're doing. I don't even know why we have a topic list. When you start pulling shit out of your ass like,
Starting point is 00:45:24 dals and I don't know what the fuck else. All right I don't even know why we have a topic list. When you start pulling shit out of your ass like, dals and I don't know what the fuck else. All right, all right, follow. We'll talk about politics. I've got the doubt question sucked. Oh, right, I'm just giving you the opportunity. D- D- That we should even be talking about.
Starting point is 00:45:37 Cut it out of the show. Cut it out. The whole episode should be cut. Jesus Christ, you probably actually went in the stupidest episode you ever had done. Yeah, I agree. I think we should cut all that stuff. Go and great., episode you ever done. Yeah, I agree. I think we should cut all that stuff. Go and great.
Starting point is 00:45:47 No, Jason, Jason, I agree. That part where we cut it. That's fine. You got some fucking loser. I'm trying to give you guys the benefit of the doubt to just, because it was like, no one cares. All right, fuck, calm down everybody. You want to talk about politics?
Starting point is 00:46:01 We talk about politics. It's okay, Saks. Go ahead. Tell us about the election. Okay. I'll just write all some of the key results here from blue states. We have a woke lash going on all across the country. That's the important thing. In Virginia, a state that buy'd in one by 10. He's cranky.
Starting point is 00:46:17 Huge upset Republican Glenn Youngkin, Beatari McCall, a former governor there. He was, this was a huge upset, McCollough was supposed to win. Youngkin won 51-48, so that's a 13-point swing versus where Biden was just a year ago. In New Jersey, a state that bought in one by 16 points, the Democrat held onto it, but only by 1.5 points, and I bet you anything, the RNC is kicking itself,
Starting point is 00:46:43 they didn't give it any money to Chatterlele who is the challenger, who I think almost who came very, very close. And there were down ticket seats that went Republican. So the, this is really interesting. In South Jersey, which is a blue collar bash in for Democrats historically. Swini versus Burr. That's right. The Democratic States and leaders Steve Swini lost to a truck driver named Ed Derer who spent a grand total of $153 on his campaign.
Starting point is 00:47:13 Okay. So those were some, and then we had some other. And was he a writer? Like he was printing on the words to say write me in, I think. I don't think he was a writer, but, but any event. So implications for 2022, Dave Wasserman of Cook Blocker report calculates somewhere between a 44 and 51 C game from the GOP. They only need five Cs to win the majority. So, it's looking very bleak for the Democrats in 2022. And
Starting point is 00:47:36 then I think you also had some very interesting local elections in Minneapolis. Voters rejected a proposal to defund the police with 56% of the vote. There was a ballot proposition to change the police department into some sort of larger public safety group voters, rather than none of it. In Seattle, which is a very liberal city, they voted for a literal Republican as city attorney, which is the office of POSCutes, Mr Meaners, so against a police abolitionist who said she would stop prosecuting Mr. Meaners. You're forgetting that in Virginia,
Starting point is 00:48:12 it wasn't just Glenn Yonkin that won, but basically it was Terry McCollough, and then a lieutenant governor who was some milk toast individual, and an attorney general candidate who was caught in black face, which by the way, there is no more racist thing you can do just to get let you guys let everybody know all the non-colors, okay, that guys please don't do black face or brown face.
Starting point is 00:48:36 It's such a bad. It's just not. It's not. No, you're right. It was a sweep. So the lieutenant. And the young and it was a it was a black female lieutenant governor and a Latino attorney general. That's right. And they swept, right? That's right. That's right. So the lieutenant governor was Winston Sears. She's a, a black woman Republican. If you see in the photo of her, she's frequently photographed with a giant assault rifle in her hands.
Starting point is 00:48:57 That's her. And then, they has spanked attorney general Jason Miori's one as well. So yeah, it was a huge sweep. And then, you know, in Long Island and Staten Island, which again are blue counties, you had two Republican prosecutors beat the local sort of incumbent Democrat de-carceration D.A. Just I think this is very clear, which is Trump was behaviorally extreme and after four years, people were sick of it. Nobody wanted that behavioral extremism because it was unpredictable, and people felt frankly in danger, and I think that that was legitimate. He also turned out to be extremely lazy and
Starting point is 00:49:39 probably pretty dumb. Now, what we're realizing is the different form of extremism, which is policy extremism, will also be met with the same response, which is that you can't sustain election results and wins, right? So people care consistently about three things. They care about the economy. They care about the education of their children, and they care about safety. And the thing that Glenn Youngkin did, which I thought was, at least a playbook for centrist and the right, and it's also a playbook for the Democrats if they choose to embrace
Starting point is 00:50:12 it, is to understand that these things are reaching a tipping point where, you know, again, we've said this before, it is possible to live in a state of mind where you believe in Black Lives Matter and you believe in law and order, right? And when you try to pit those two things against each other, for example, like you would have thought the one place where they would have basically defunded the police in its entirety would have been Minneapolis after George Floyd, but instead even they drew the line and said no. Or New York. Or New York. There was a really compelling quote actually by this woman, I think it was in the New York
Starting point is 00:50:48 times. And what she said was, I didn't elect Joe Biden to be FDR. I elected him to tack to the middle and just calm things down so that everybody could exhale so that we could reset. Same with me. And what's up? Yeah, that was Abigail Samburger, actually. She's a Virginia Democrat.
Starting point is 00:51:06 Yeah, she's a Virginia Democrat who want to see in one of those blue counties that just flipped red to vote for Youngkin. And since she got elected, I guess she got elected last year, she's been telling the Democratic, but she's the one who called out Pelosi in that caucus meeting saying, I don't ever want to hear the words defund the police again, that is electoral poison.
Starting point is 00:51:26 And then she said, yes, nobody elected Biden to be FDR, they elected to be normal and stopped the chaos. And so yeah. So it's certainly my vote, yeah. Yeah, there's a big backlash going on because Biden has decided to start governing like Bernie Sanders. So it's a fact.
Starting point is 00:51:39 So it's a fact. So, it's a lesson Dems learned this time around is it's very easy to beat Trump, but it's very hard to beat a moderate Republican. No, no, it's not that. You just have to be a rational, normal person. That's what I mean by a moderate Republican. Well, you just have to be moderate.
Starting point is 00:51:58 I don't think it matters when this is, but this is the key takeaway. That's the way Dems, it was so easy for them to use retrom. But these three topics are not a Republican tent pulled nor are they a Democratic tent pulled But this is the key takeaway. It was so easy for them to use retrom. And be Trump. But these three topics are not a Republican tent pole nor are they a Democratic tent pole. They are the tent pole of reasonable people, meaning which most people are reasonable. Hey guys, get out of the way so that we can,
Starting point is 00:52:17 you know, have a reasonable life in an economy. Hey folks, please make sure my kids, when I send them to school for eight hours a day, come back reasonably educated. And please keep my streets safe. And I'm not really willing to decarcerate, had hawk to such a degree that all of a sudden crime gets out of control. Those are not democratic or Republican tent polls. Those are just moderate centrist rational things to believe in. Yeah. And also behave normally. Like I think whatever have with these progressives where
Starting point is 00:52:43 they couldn't pass the stimulus bills and things that almost everybody agreed on. Glenn Youngkin was not behaviorally extremist and from a policy perspective was pretty much down the middle. Eric Adams is not behaviorally extreme and he is politically down the middle. The mayor of Buffalo who got reelected is not behaviorally extreme and he is politically down the middle. The mayor of Buffalo who got reelected is not behaviorally extreme and he's politically down the middle. Do you start to see a pattern here? Nobody wants AOC Bernie, Elizabeth Warren or Trump. I think it's not a question of AOC or Bernie or Trump.
Starting point is 00:53:17 It's just that right now the temperature of America is, let's just all exhale and just re-center ourselves as a country. And so moderation and centrism is actually what calls for today. I don't know how to predict what happens in 15 or 20 years. And maybe AOC is the canary in the coal mine for where the country goes by a plurality of people in 15 or 20 years. But what's clear is it's not where it goes today. And I think that it all behooves us to just take a real step back and exhale and just read the T-Leaves because every single thing that the Democrats tried to do to sort of like make this extreme really didn't work, the
Starting point is 00:53:56 race baiting, all of that stuff really kind of failed. And I think that that's important to listen to. You know, because you had a lot of black, Indian, Chinese, families that just showed up Hispanics, you know, that again, reliable democratic voters and voted for Glenn Youngkin in a way that was surprising to me, right? And then, so if you compare New Jersey and Virginia, Biden won Virginia by 10.
Starting point is 00:54:25 He, the democratic nominee lost by the one new jersey by sixteen and film or if he barely speak by was like ten thousand votes jeris always had a uh... a republican kind of uh... leaning group uh... they're very uh... to buy one by sixteen or they should have been a cake well but i think that sixteen how much of that is get Trump out of office? Is what we, I think the Democrats need to parse.
Starting point is 00:54:48 And I believe we're through the two radicals. We're repudiating behavioral extremism and policy extremism. So I think we just need to realize rational, nor almost chill people who can do reasonable things, get our kids educated. So for example, on the education front, I don't know if you guys saw this
Starting point is 00:55:05 because I tweeted and you can put this Nick in the group chat. But in California right now, there's a battle over math class. Ridiculous. Right? Where the title, I'm just going to read the title because it sets it off.
Starting point is 00:55:15 California tries to close the gap in math, but sets off a backlash. Proposed guidelines in the state would deemphasize calculus, reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted, and build a connection to social justice. Critics say math shouldn't be political. Well, of course, the way those articles always written, it's always about the backlash. You know, they don't talk about what the people in charge are trying to do to basically
Starting point is 00:55:41 degrade the curriculum. Of course, there's a backlash because parents don't like put the people on these school boards are doing. This was the sleeper issue in Virginia, was the school board issue. You had, you know, parents were already angry that the teachers unions had kept the schools closer a year and a half during COVID. And while their kids were at home,
Starting point is 00:56:00 you know, work doing classes over Zoom, parents got a good look at what some of their kids were learning and then like what they saw, I mean, we're talking about lessons plans that incorporated CRT and, you know, the 1619 Project View of America, singling out kids by their race, making them focus on difference, and then there were some, you know, rather explicit materials at young grade levels about, you know, LGBT issues. And so this led to a whole bunch of confrontations that school board means for parents of all races objected to the least less than plans for their kids. And the school board's administrators
Starting point is 00:56:34 just dismissed their complaints that a hand. And their message was, we're not teaching CRT your kids, but if we were, it's a good thing and only white supremacists would object. So that was sort of what was happening in the background. And then McCallough comes along and makes his gigantic gaff in the last debates
Starting point is 00:56:53 about two weeks for the election where he says, I don't think parents should be telling the schools what to teach. And what? Yes, this is- With the customer. No, he said that on a debate. And it was- He said that on a debate
Starting point is 00:57:04 about two weeks for the election. McCallff was leading through this whole thing until that debate, where in this was sort of a akinzley gaffer in the sense that, you know, Michael Kinsley said a gaffer is when a candidate inadvertently says something true. You know, this is McCall's view is that the teachers unions should be controlling the schools, not the parents.
Starting point is 00:57:22 Well, yes. So this is what Yankeh jumped all over. All of his ads in the last week's the campaign really focused on this issue, you know, poor gasoline on a fire. And then the most tone-deaf thing McCall have did is he had Randy Wyingarden, who was the head of the big teachers union coming in campaign
Starting point is 00:57:41 from at the 11th hour. Well, of course, that's not going to save him because people are sick and tired of the teachers unions. So, you know, this was basically the big sleeper issue, CRT and the schools in Virginia. And, you know, this is, I think, specifically is what the Democratic Party has to wake up to as if these progressive ideologies are not popular. The other thing I'll say about Glen Youngkin is that this is another thing that the Republican should hopefully pay attention to, which is you can look normal, act normal, be normal.
Starting point is 00:58:17 This is not an extremist in any way. This guy was the co-CEO of Carlisle, which is a huge and very successful private equity firm. So this is a very rational, reasonable person who, you know, didn't embrace anything that was really that pro-Trump. And that should be a real wake-up call to the Republicans, which is, hey, let's just run a fleet of normal people. I think what you saw, I think, Jamal is right, that what you saw in Virginia is that the playbook that Gavin
Starting point is 00:58:45 Newsom just used to defeat the recon California did not work in Virginia, which is he tried to paint Youngkin as a Trump proxy. And Youngkin very definitely avoided that. He got Trump's endorsement very early in the process. He did not have Trump come to the state, and you'd have to say it also helped young kid a lot, that social media, that Trump was an all over social media because he's been banned.
Starting point is 00:59:12 So, you know, in a weird way, Facebook and Twitter are deserving of assist here, because they help keep Trump out of the Virginia race. So, you know, this playbook that Newsom defined that worked very effectively from California, which is simply to keep running against Trump, I think Democrats thought they'd be able to win elections for years based on that. That playbook didn't even last two months.
Starting point is 00:59:34 So I think Democrats are going to have to find a new playbook here. Okay. So Friedberg on this California issue around education, one of the key or most controversial concepts is detracking. In other words, instead of having high performing students go to a high performing track, and then everybody else stay behind, maybe keeps in not all cases, but keeps some of the students together because there is some research that shows if done right, if you track people together, the higher performing students will pull up the ones who are slightly behind.
Starting point is 01:00:07 Other people say we're basically throttling people who could be the next science team or the next world class leader in science math, etc. Any thoughts on the concept of detracting since I'm assuming you were in the high speed track in science and math. Maybe we should get rid of like, JV and varsity sports teams as well, and you know, AA baseball and major league baseball as well, and you know, any distinction of performance or exceptionalism goes away.
Starting point is 01:00:41 You know, and that is kind of the key social question is, are we going to give up exceptionalism to minimize the distance between the exceptional and the average? And that seems to be what makes people feel bad. But I've said this point before, we're doing it when we try and think about the billionaire tax or what have you. As soon as you start to limit progress, you reduce inequality, but you limit progress. And the same will be true, not just in science, not just in business,
Starting point is 01:01:14 but also in sports and athletics and any other kind of system where you will have exceptionalism, you will have an average, you will have a distribution amongst human performance. And as soon as we try and limit the difference in that distribution, we move the entire curve to the left. Here's the counter-free bird. What some studies have shown is, yes, you will throttle the high performers, but we're seeing along race lines certain demographics being left behind, other ones excelling, and that you can get.
Starting point is 01:01:49 Yeah, it's an ethics and values question, right? Like, do you think that individual freedom and the opportunity to pursue your opportunity, your exceptionalism should be taken away from you, such that others who aren't as exceptional as you are given greater progress than they would have had on their own. And that's the key crux of what all of these social systems are grappling with, whether it's in sports or business or finance or education, is what's the right thing to do. And that ethics question is going to be defined by the social agenda of the moment, and the
Starting point is 01:02:24 means of the moment And what we all think is is the right thing to do and it's different all over the world and it's different within political systems But it's a very device and point that I think folks who find themselves on one end of that exceptional spectrum and different Aspects are going to have one point of view and folks on the other end of that Exceptional spectrum are going to have other points of view and everyone's going to be sensitively tuned to where they fall in that spectrum. I will say one thing though, on that spectrum, exceptionalism is rarer than the average. Therefore, it is likely the case that over the next years and decades, we will see the idea that we should remove exceptionalism in business and exceptionalism in education and exceptionalism and education, exceptionalism in sports, because it benefits the majority,
Starting point is 01:03:05 and no one kind of recognizes, and a lot of folks don't recognize, the progress that is made by exceptionalism. And that's, and then we're gonna wake up one day and be like, wait a second, we don't have the best sports teams winning all the gold medals, we don't have the smartest kids, we don't have the best businesses, China and Europe and Brazil, andomever else the emerging markets are going to India are going to start to have on such a good point. I think this is a very old debate. It's the debate between a quality of opportunity and a quality of results. And the progressive left is absolutely obsessed
Starting point is 01:03:38 with a quality of results or outcomes which they now call equity, which is we're going to take people at the finish line and we're going to move them around, we're going to redistribute the outcomes to achieve a more proportional representation or something more fair. As opposed to giving everybody as much opportunity at the outset as possible, that is the fixation right now. That is why they're taking out advance math in the schools, they're trying to level people. It's not going to work. it doesn't lead to a more, we wanna have an exceptional society,
Starting point is 01:04:09 where I think we should be focusing on creating as much opportunity for everybody. The way to do that would be to let every child go to the school of their choosing so that we would stop trapping kids in bad schools. But back to, kind of bring this back to the election for a second, because I think it was a very clear repudiation of this progressive mindset.
Starting point is 01:04:27 And I think there's essentially two sets of reactions to it. If you look at sort of all the left-wing commentators, the one who I thought seemed to get it the most was CNN's Van Jones actually had I thought, you know, a rare moment of introspection where he said it was, the results were a five-long fire. He said it was a big, big wake-up call for the Democrats to stop annoying voters with woked, hectoring. He actually advised Biden to start triangulating against the woked left in the way that Bill Clinton did, I mean, which is something that I've been suggesting on this, this pod.
Starting point is 01:05:03 So you're saying something super important. The game theory now is for Biden to put to the test. The progressive left because now he can go firmly to the center. And he can put all of the pressure on the progressive left in the house and Warren and Bernie Sanders in the Senate. Wait, he's right. That's the first thing he should do is he has he should pull a sister soldier on Bernie Sanders. uh... warren and brnie sanders in the senate first and he should do is he should have he should pull a sister soldier on brnie sanders
Starting point is 01:05:30 he he can't keep delegating the domestic agenda to brnie sanders he if you want to save his presence you'll start triangulating in the way that built when did i'm not sure he's going to i think there's already a misperception that the reason why they lost selection is because they didn't deliver the goodies in this House Reconciliation Bill. Yeah, I don't think the public cares about the goodies. I mean, they care about this normalcy and centrism.
Starting point is 01:05:54 There's a part of the Democratic base that does want the what's in that House Reconciliation Bill, but here's the thing. Democratic turnout in this election was extremely high. The Democratic turnout for McCalliffe was higher than the Democratic turnout four years ago for the Democratic who won. The turnout that in New Jersey was higher than what Murphy got four years ago and he won. The problem the Democrats have is that Republican turnout was extremely high, even without Trump, showing that Trump doesn't matter that much to turn out. And the independence came out in a big way for Republicans. So this idea that Democrats can just win elections
Starting point is 01:06:32 by delivering, you know, programs for their base, that's not gonna work. So I think that's a misperception. I think Vandewans has the right idea that they need to triangulate, but you turned the channel to MSNBC and they were just blaming the whole thing on white supremacy. I've got them basically hysterical.
Starting point is 01:06:48 Just on the detracting thing, this shows to me a severe lack of creativity. If you look at what happened in the NBA, they had this developmental league, which they didn't kind of run, then became the G league. They now have the ability to bring players fluidly from the Warriors G league team up to the Warriors or the next team up to the Warriors or the next team up to the next. What this means is you don't have to say there's two different tracks and the two never shall meet in the season.
Starting point is 01:07:13 They can move up and down in math. A very easy solution to this would be to have the high track for high performers, have the regular track and then spend with all this money we have, say, hey, every school is going to be open from three to five o'clock, four days a week, if anybody wants to attempt to get into a higher track of math, just stay after school for two hours, anybody can go and get one on one tutoring and just don't lose a number of teachers. The whole country wants excellence. They don't want leveling, they don't want equity, they don't want a quality of results, they want a quality of opportunity. Well, but they do want leveling, they don't want equity, they don't want a quality of results, they want to have a quality of opportunity.
Starting point is 01:07:46 But they do want other people to move up, they do want to see, and that's true. And that's true. And students and immigrants do better at math, that's what you're missing. Yes, and that's about a quality of opportunity. Absolutely. No, it's not just about a quality of opportunity.
Starting point is 01:07:57 They're so far behind statistically that you need to do something new. What we're doing is not working, David. That's why people are picking this bad decision. Yeah, but they're, they're, they are eliminating advanced math because they don't want to actually look at the problem. What do you see the problem, man?
Starting point is 01:08:13 Well, if there's an underperforming system group, then you should work harder to raise them up, not eliminate the subject. How would you do that? Give me a suggestion. Charters and school choice. Okay. Look, I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're going to define structural racism as conditions that trap people of color in poverty across generations, it seems like a pretty fair definition.
Starting point is 01:08:33 Then you have to say the number one cause of structural racism is the school system. 100% education. It's the school system because we know poor kids are trapped in schools that aren't very good. Why? Because they're controlled by the education unions. They don't have a choice. They don't have money. So who is making that argument on the side of the left? No one. Why? Because everyone knows the unions, especially the education unions, are the number one donor to the Democratic
Starting point is 01:08:58 party. So the Democrats won't even look at this problem. All will do is by the public agency could build their base is by saying we want to fix education. That would be if you have a education. What do you think? Youngkin just did in Virginia by the way, 55% of Hispanics in Virginia voted for Youngkin. So minorities are shifting on this issue of drivers and school choice. Yeah. These are the new private chat. These are the new quality of life issues. If Youngkin has a good four years in Virginia, he can run for president and crush this thing.
Starting point is 01:09:29 Can I show you just one chart and then we can get off the politics thing, which is it was this chart from this guy Patrick Raffini who's a pollster. And I think it really illustrates the problem that progresses. The Democratic Party has. Just try the chart for the lesson. Okay, so what this chart shows is it basically shows where the Democratic, the Democratic Party has. Okay, so what this chart shows is it basically shows where the Democratic Party is and the Senate Republican Party is in relation to the center of the country. And basically, as you'd expect in a democracy, whichever party is closer to five wins.
Starting point is 01:10:01 So in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, the Democratic Party, the Senate of it, was smack dab as five. The Republicans weren't that far away. They were as six. So the party, even though there is a lot of partisan warfare, the political differences actually weren't that great. And Clinton, I think, more accurately found that dead center. Okay, fast forward to 2004.
Starting point is 01:10:23 So George W. Bush is president now. The Democrats are at four Republicans are at five. That's why Republicans won. Okay, now go to 2017. This these poll numbers he did. And this is a few years ago. The Democrats are all the way at two, okay, and the Republicans are at six and a half. So it's true that both parties have moved all away from the center. But Republicans are one and a half points away from the center, whereas Democrats are three points away. So the Democrats have actually moved further away from the center. If you look at who are the activists in the Democratic Party, who is the base, who is the
Starting point is 01:10:56 energy, who does all the work, who does the contributions, it is the progressives, right? This is why McCallough ran, as McCallough is not a progressive, he was a Clinton Democrat, going way back to the 90s. Okay? He was Bill Clinton's right hand man in the party back in the 90s, but he nevertheless ran as a progressive in Virginia who supported the teacher's unions. Why? Because he was appealing to the base of the party.
Starting point is 01:11:22 Gavin Newsom did the same thing in California. Gavin was never a Bernie bro. I mean, he's always been liberal, but he has moved very far left. And Biden has moved very far left, is present. Why is that? Because the base of the party has moved very far left. So unless that gets fixed, I see. So you're going to the party's base, but not the countries. Exactly. So you're going to need a strong Democrat who can basically give the Heisman to that part of the base, or they're going to keep losing elections. I think this could be a Republican decade.
Starting point is 01:11:54 I know it doesn't seem like it right now, because you had Trump and their Republicans lost, but look out quickly, their Republicans turned around their electoral fortunes with Trump on the sidelines. Then that's just a huge tournament. Yes, it's a lot of Trump is the nominee in 2024 all bets are off. But in 2022, he's not the nominee. He's still a censored from social networks. He's really nowhere in sight. And people, people have a very short
Starting point is 01:12:21 memory. It turns out they've moved on very quickly. Young can check the box because he felt he had to to get the nomination and to run on the Republican platform. But then you think Youngkin's going to talk to Trump once? No. Not once. And I think, and I honestly think this election's going to help Republicans move past Trump because what are Republican beliefs in, um, in like that the electoral system is rigged
Starting point is 01:12:44 now, right? What are Republican beliefs in like that the electoral system is rigged now? Right? I mean, all these blue cities and states just delivered big results for Republicans. So where exactly is the ballot stuff going? Where exactly is the stole? Where are the stolen elections? That's going to stop now, too. They're going to stop. It's going to stop overnight, right? Because I mean, So the way Kristen Sinema probably knows this, like, you know, the funny thing about all of this is when Peter Tio put in $10 million into this pack for Blake Masters, who used to work for him, and said, you know, in Arizona, I'm going to run this guy against you, Sinema tacked hard to the center instantly.
Starting point is 01:13:17 So she knew too. Yeah. Well, so just this small point of course, Blake is running against the other guy, the astronaut guy from space, he has name, astronaut guy, from Space God's name. But, yeah, but, but, but, cinema is up in the next election cycle. So, you got a little bit more time, but you're right, like cinema is attuned and mansion is attuned, there are some of the few Democrats that are attuned to where the central center of the country is.
Starting point is 01:13:41 You are mansion in the wake of this election said, this is a center right country, these guys better wake up. You know, they should really, now look, I think, I think what's going are mentioned in the wake of this election said this is a center right country. These guys better wake up. You know, they should really now look. I think I think what's going to happen in the wake of this election is that this infrastructure bill is going to sail through because one of the crazier things that the progressors were doing was holding that bill hostage. It might have helped McCollough. I don't think would have I don't think McCollough would have won, but it might have helped him by a point or two if they had gotten that infrastructure bill done because a lot of those programs are going
Starting point is 01:14:06 to be popular in a state like Virginia. Okay. But I mean, but I think that, you know, this House Reconciliation Bill, they just seemed hell-bent on jamming it through with all these tax increases. Yeah, I don't think that's not popular. You know, what the big issue in New Jersey would have been for them. Yeah. One of the big issues in New Jersey where you're almost at this upset within one point was taxes
Starting point is 01:14:26 You know, there was a a gaff by Murphy who said something like you know He said he said that if taxes are someone's chief concern He said quote maybe we're not your state. Can you imagine that wow and he almost lost the election because of that So I don't think all these big tax increases are what the country wants. And if Biden insists on allowing Bernie to dominate the agenda and Warren, I think you're gonna see 40 to 50 seat losses by the Democrats in 2022.
Starting point is 01:14:57 Okay, moving on to our final topic. Crazy update out of China, a research team has developed a method of converting carbon dioxide into starch. Science magazine published this paper from a research team of 100 grams of catalysts converting 5 grams of CO2 per hour into starch. And freeberg, I swear you tweeted that this is 10 times more efficient than corn plants. What's the impact of something like this?
Starting point is 01:15:26 Could it hit scale? Would it have an impact on food security, carbon, global warming? Yeah, so I tweeted this paper out because it's just, it's a fantastic demonstration of what's possible in this new emerging, not emerging, it's been around for a long time, but kind of, you know, in the state of art, in biomanufacturing.
Starting point is 01:15:48 You know, photosynthesis is the system by which most starch is produced on planet Earth today. That is plants, converts sunlight, and use water and carbon dioxide to make starches and starches and sugars, which are where carbohydrates are account for 60% of human calories. And we get all those calories from rice, wheat, potatoes, which are grown on about 60% of our acres that we farm on planet Earth. So in plants, there's a series of these chemical reactions. And what these guys did is they isolated and created a couple of specific proteins, which are a class of proteins called enzymes. And what an enzyme is is it's a protein
Starting point is 01:16:31 that can take different molecules and combine them and force them to react and make something new. And they identified a couple of enzymes and engineered a few enzymes and put them together in a cell-free system, meaning there's no cells involved. It's just a tank with a bunch of fluids in it, and they stick in some carbon dioxide that they can suck in from the atmosphere, and they have to drive it with some hydrogen gas,
Starting point is 01:16:56 which we can just get from water. And the system basically converts that carbon dioxide into starch, which is being done at a rate that's almost 10 times higher than what we see with corn plants. So it's an incredible demonstration. There's several steps to the system, like six steps, and I did some back of the envelope math. And my back of the envelope math on what they've demonstrated, and by the way, everything
Starting point is 01:17:19 they did is publicly available for reproducibility. So people are going to try and re-source. Open source. So people are going try and re-source. Open source, so people are gonna try and copy this now. But my back of the envelope math is, this system can produce about 10 grams of starts per liter per day, which would mean it would take about 2.7 trillion liters to suck up all of the carbon dioxide
Starting point is 01:17:43 that all of humans are putting in the atmosphere every year from all of industry. That would require about 27 million tanks that are about 40 feet tall and about 8 feet wide. That whole, all of those tanks could fit in an area about 25 by 25 miles. You could attach one nuclear reactor to it to suck up the water and convert it into hydrogen gas and feed the system. And those tanks, 25 miles by 25 miles, would take out all of the carbon dioxide on planet earth and convert it into usable starch. And that starch, by the way, that system could be tuned not just to make starch for consumption. It could be used to make biofuels.
Starting point is 01:18:21 It could be used to make bioplastics. It could be used to make anything that's hydrocarbon based. And so you can kind of think about this being the entry point to a series of production systems that we could use to make stuff. Right. So, Friberg, why did they open source it? So, there are a research team of scientists from China
Starting point is 01:18:38 and they've been iterating on this process. This isn't the only process, right? And so, what they're showing is that this is possible. And what I think we will see is a lot of people rattling their brains now saying, not only do we use proteins and enzymes that we find in nature, but we're going to start to engineer our own proteins and our own enzymes that are even more efficient than what we see in nature. And that's what's starting to happen. This system alone, what I just described, this 25 mile by 25 mile system, which is tiny,
Starting point is 01:19:07 is the equivalent of starch production from 42 US corn belts. If you took all the corn growing in the United States, it's 42 times that, is what it would produce. That's my back of the envelope math of kind of what these guys did. And so I think what they're showing is this is what's incredibly yeah, yeah, and then the implications we could go in a hundred directions and we could talk for an hour About what this means and what you could do with it But I think it really catalyzes this this point that that that that we're kind of everyone's always like how we gonna get all this carbon out of the atmosphere What are we gonna do with this where there's a will there's a way the science is here today 27 million tanks made out of plastic you could probably get that stuff produced, you know, a couple billion dollars. Find a piece of land that's 25 by 25 miles, it's near some water and put a nuclear power plant there. And you could suck up all the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Starting point is 01:19:55 Anyone want to take a guess of how many people on the team were in advance math courses? The funny thing about this that I think is really interesting is that it came at the same week where we were ending, you know, what was this political theater of COP26? You know, Greta Thunberg, who's, you know, how dare you? How dare you? Well, she had this very funny comment, which is like, ah, you know, it was a bunch of corporate nonsense and the same old blah, blah, blah, was a description of corporate nonsense and the same old blah blah blah was your description of cop 26 You know, we had this great Trickle of like you know agreements
Starting point is 01:20:30 There was like on Monday. There was an agreement to stop deforestation And then you realize it's a non-binding agreement and you're like, oh, okay Well, I guess we're not gonna stop deforesting. We're just gonna keep doing that and all of this stuff Just kind of like took a lot of my enthusiasm and I was a little despondent about what was going on. And then when I saw this thing, I was really quite impressed. I will say that there's a very tricky thing happening right now, which is that developing countries basically said, listen, if you want us to go after climate change, we want $1.3
Starting point is 01:21:04 trillion a year to support us. And so, you know, the Western world will have to figure out whether we're willing to pay, you know, what is the equivalent of, you know, six or seven percent of US GDP to a whole bunch of other countries every year for them to slow down. And if we don't make these payments to India and China and a bunch of other developing nations, they have said we're just going to continue to do what we're going to do. Here's an idea. Take half of that money and put it towards science. Yeah, take half that money and go build a plant that uses this system that was just demonstrated
Starting point is 01:21:34 and put it in South Texas and suck up ocean water and convert that ocean water into hydrogen gas. Great, right? By the way, ocean water can be turned into hydrogen gas by running electricity through it. So you're putting a nuclear power plant to make the electricity, you run it through ocean water, you create hydrogen gas, you pump it into these friggin' tanks, and it sucks up all the CO2 and it makes stuff that humans can consume and that we can use. And suddenly you have the abundance of material, you have the abundance of food, and you can
Starting point is 01:22:01 turn this and jobs, and you can turn this into a lot of different things. And you know, this kind of goes to the point I've been making for a while if we want to invest in infrastructure. This is the sort of thing that both solves climate change, creates jobs and has extraordinary economic return potential built into it. So how does it get politicians re-elected? You know, I think the private market may come after this stuff.
Starting point is 01:22:21 I'll be honest. I'm talking to people looking at this being like, why do we make a plant that we can make bios you have bioplastics and food and other stuff out of this technique, and there's gonna be other iterations of this technique, but it's such a no-brainer. What would a product like a functional prototype of this? Like a small prototype, nothing, right?
Starting point is 01:22:39 I mean, a couple of million bucks. Yeah, like nothing. So, you know, the other thing that happened this week beyond this request for $1.3 trillion is that, you know, we're now seriously considering carbon tariffs. And we talked about this on a pod before, but, you know, I've said, I think this is the most disruptive thing in the capital markets and geopolitics that can happen in the next 10 or 20 years.
Starting point is 01:22:59 It's an effective carbon tariff, which is to say that when a good or service enters the borders of a country, they will levy some tax that they think represents its drag on the environment. And so, you know, the simple example would be a car, you know, you make a car, you make a Tesla in Texas, but the minute it crosses the border to Canada, Canada says, well, here's the true carbon intensity of this car, all of the energy that you put into the aluminum, to the batteries, you know, to the buildings where the engineer sat that were building FSD, and, you know, I'm going to charge an $8,000 tax on this car. Or iPhone's coming out of China. Yeah, that's happening. I think that's coming. So I think that the combination of tariffs
Starting point is 01:23:47 and these transfer payments is going to create a real economic incentive for folks to make these kinds of big technological leap. So I'm pretty bullish on all of that. I'm less bullish on politicians' ability to organize because unfortunately, again, this is the first time I really paid attention to COP. And it just looked like a bunch of really,
Starting point is 01:24:06 you know, use the clinical theater. It's just a lot of political theater. SACS, does this science conversation about saving the planet do anything for you, would you like to get back to? No, I mean, I think it's the way to solve the problem is you have to figure out new technologies to actually take carbon out of the atmosphere because you're not gonna do it through, you know,
Starting point is 01:24:23 these political programs. I mean, China, India, paying them and another developing nations 1.3 trillion a year. I mean, foreign aid already is one of the least popular parts of the government's budget. You're going to now pay 1.3 trillion to these countries so that they, it's nonsense. And you're going to pay for that. Put that money into your education system and create science and technology that solves the problem.
Starting point is 01:24:48 No, why you're gonna stand for that? Yeah, and the taxes are low. Pour it into your education system. Pour it in. Yeah, I don't think there's a political solution to this problem that's gonna be palable to people. I think it's gonna have to be solved through new technology.
Starting point is 01:25:02 Now, let me ask you a question, Freiburg. You said there's a six-step process. Given your experience building science and technology products, is it possible for each of those six steps to get but 20% more efficient a year? Yeah, look, I mean, I just say that to describe that there's a series of steps in the system. But at the end of the day, this is a demonstration of science that has been probably funded
Starting point is 01:25:27 to some small amount. But if you start to iterate on this approach and think big picture and think infrastructure solution here, there's a lot of room for improvement, I'm sure. So we're going to work it back at the envelope 25 by 25 mile. If this is getting 50% more efficient, 25% more efficient year over year, we could see it becoming twice as efficient every two to three years, and your 25 mile might be a five-mile radius city. I mean, think about it. Think about it. I'm going to march, right? What are we going to do in march? We're not going to grow friggin
Starting point is 01:25:56 fields of corn and grow cows and stuff, right? You're going to need a system that literally takes the molecules that are in the atmosphere there, uses some electricity that's probably going to be produced by a nuclear power plant and convert those molecules into what you want to make and consume. And that's what we can do on Earth today. The systems are going to get better, they're going to get cheaper, they're going to get faster, and that's why I'm highly optimistic about solutions to climate change in the century. It's not about an if, it's about a when, and the when is going to be defined by the willpower of how we are going to allocate our people and our capital resources to solve these problems in the near term, we have the tools to do it.
Starting point is 01:26:32 I love the fact that we're sort of hitting this fork in the road where it's like, do we just want to give the money to a bunch of governments to pretend they're going to solve this and grifters, or do we want to put it into science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneur hand, entrepreneur hand, that execute, execute, right? What did you say? I picked the forber. We should, yeah, let's give it to politicians. We don't know what the fuck they're doing. I mean, it really is like when, you know, I don't know if he's right, Elon say like, yeah, if you want to solve World Hunger, can you make us, can you make us, let's talk about
Starting point is 01:27:03 that. That's just so beautiful. I thought that was like the greatest, that's dunk of the week. Nothing gets me up in the morning like funding shenanigans, right? Go ahead Jay, Jay, I'll tell the stories. I mean, just somebody was like, oh, Elon, you know, made more money, Tesla stocks. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, describe it? You're doing such a shitty job today, is the matter.
Starting point is 01:27:25 What are you trying to do? I was playing a role. All I did was put a siss in your hands. You guys dunked everything. But dude, I'm out of it. But dude, there was an article. You wanna take out his voice? Dude in his voice, yeah.
Starting point is 01:27:34 And hang on, and there was an article. Stop. There was an article that was written that basically said, you know, a $6.8 billion, which is, you know, what Elon Elon made in a day or something could cure World Hunger. And then the head of the UN World Food Program retweeted that, again, trying to further dunk on Elon. And then Elon responded, well, if you can just show me a plan and just please reply in line here on Twitter and it's credible and detailed, I'll just sell this
Starting point is 01:28:11 stock and I'll give it to you. And everybody was like, oh my God, there was this oh my God moment like, wow, can this really happen? Ending world hunger sounds like a beautiful idea. It can only, it only costs, you know, $6.8 billion and obviously it went nowhere because the guy didn't have a plan and it was just a complete joke. But that's what happened. Yeah. And he's like, yeah, just put all of your,
Starting point is 01:28:35 put all of your expenses out there, show us your plan and it was like, oh, crickets. Nothing. All right, everybody. On behalf of the dictator, Chamath Polyhapatia, the queen of Kenwa, the Sultan of science, David Friedberg, and for the rainman himself reporting from, definitely reporting from. Yeah, he's reporting from the New York Stock Exchange.
Starting point is 01:28:57 Congratulations again, my bestie, David's axe on the triumphant IPO of bird. We'll see you all next time on the Queen of King Wild I'm going on a leash! What? What? What? What? What? I'm going on a leash! Besties are gone for nothing! That's my dog taking a wish to drive away. So, what's next? Oh, man, my hamlet has your meat and I put it in the kitchen. So, you should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two, because they're all
Starting point is 01:29:42 just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release our town What you're that big what you're Here be We need to get I'm doing all the it

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