Yeah, Chamath goes to those sorts of events and they all pick some endangered animal and

then they skin it and they make a sweater out of it for him.

That’s that Illuminati sh**, Illuminati.

So this is Kashmir, it’s Loro Piana.

The lining is chinchilla.

Oh, chinchilla.

I knew it.

Geez.

I knew it was some poor animal.

I mean, it is so phenomenal.

Some poor animal.

Probably nicer than a dog.

It’s so warm.

Probably sweeter than any dog you’ve ever met if you actually played with a chinchilla.

It’s so warm.

It’s so, oh, I’m just rubbing it.

PETA is boycotting the show right now.

Who?

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

We’ll let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Saks.

And that’s it.

We open-sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys.

Queen of Kinwam.

I’m going all in.

Hey, everybody.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of the All In Illuminati podcast.

We took Thanksgiving off, but the Illuminati is back to tell you what’s going on in the

Star Chamber.

David Freeburg, the Sultan of Science, Queen of Kinwam, back with us.

I like it.

Sultan of Science.

Looking svelte, David Saks at his fighting weight, 168 to 172 pounds in the red corner

and with a cashmere chinchilla sweater.

Chinchilla.

The Urkel from Sri Lanka at 142 pounds, Chabath Palihapatiya.

And I’m of course, J.

I’m at my, I’m at my, not peak weight, but in my 20s and 30s, I was like 172 pounds.

Well you’re six foot, right?

So that’s-

Six two.

So I mean, I’m currently 166.

What?

Wow.

And you, and you, and you are wearing a shirt.

Wow.

That’s incredible.

If I was 166, I would-

I did my, I did my body scan.

I was-

Percentage body fat is what?

15%?

11.1%.

What?

You’re going into elite athlete slash castaway territory.

I’ve been there.

I’ve been there for a while.

Yeah.

And Saks-

Lean body mass was 152.8 pounds.

Unbelievable.

My basal metabolic rate was 1,868 calories.

Okay.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Yeah, this was with my jeans on, sorry.

And this was midday.

So I had breakfast.

So it was 171.9.

So 172.

So minus the clothes in the morning, I think I’m 167, less eating.

Amazing.

Wow.

Yeah.

Body, yeah.

11.1% body fat.

My BMI was 22.7.

That’s incredible.

Wow.

Congratulations.

All right.

So we took Thanksgiving off, but we’re back.

And of course, it’s been a bit of a crazy run.

Saks and I are in Miami for Web 3.0.

We would be delighted to know that there is no COVID in Florida.

They’ve solved the COVID problem.

But-

I missed you guys.

I missed you guys.

It’s been-

It’s tough to take a week off.

That was a mistake.

We should have done a Thanksgiving episode.

Yeah.

It’s lame to take a week off because I miss everybody.

Yeah, I agree.

Did everyone have a good Thanksgiving?

I took my kids to Vegas.

You did?

Really?

The older three.

Me and Nat’s dad, we took the older three to Vegas.

We took them to like Blue Man Group, to the Lions.

You saw a good show.

Lions Safari.

Blue Man is a little loud, actually, to be honest.

I don’t think it’s really appropriate for kids to … Hey, I almost had a seizure, so

I don’t like it.

Yeah.

Did you teach your kids how to play craps?

I like that Beetle Cirque de Soleil show.

Beetle’s Love.

Yeah.

That would have been a better choice in the end.

Love that one.

What else did we do?

We took them to the Adventure Dome, which is like an indoor amusement park.

What did you eat?

Any good food?

We ate a Cipriani one night and Carbone the next night.

I was about to say, man.

Those two places.

Oh.

Fabulous.

We had vodka sauce.

Fabulous.

I was talking to Jade about the Carbone rigatoni with vodka sauce, and she started making it

for me.

Delicious.

She had the recipe online.

It’s unbelievable.

It’s so funny you mentioned it, but both me and Popsie got it, and we were both like,

this is fricking awesome.

Spicy rigatoni.

It’s so delicious.

I mean, you can make it at home, and it’s pretty amazing.

Saks.

What was your … You came to Miami for Thanksgiving, I take it?

Oh, wait, wait.

Yeah.

And I won 100 dimes.

Played craps for a little bit.

Bop, bop.

Beep, beep.

Bink.

Okay, so that plays for half the trip.

Where’d you play?

You played Encore?

I stayed at the Encore.

I spiked the wind for 100 dimes for two hours.

That’s a nice little thing.

Right at the bottom of the towers at that little VIP area down there?

Here’s the best thing.

I mean, look, when you go to a casino, the best thing is you put the dice in the hands

of the person that’s never rolled.

I said to Sergio, I said, Bopsy, just go there.

You’re going to start rolling.

I’m not going to talk to you.

I’m not ignoring you, so please don’t misinterpret this, but I’m just going to let you be in

your little zone.

He hit everything.

Wow.

Everything.

Wow.

For 30 minutes.

And you got up.

You left a winner.

It’s always about … It’s all about when you get up.

Speaking about when you get up, I have been with Saks.

You want to talk about Rain Man?

Literally when David Saks … Oh, my God, Saks.

Saks went off one night.

Do you remember that night he went off?

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

I was about to bring it up, but here’s the thing with Saks.

How much did he win?

No, no, no, no.

How much did you win?

I saw a ballpark.

That’s not correct.

That’s not correct.

Beep it out.

I will say.

How much was that?

No.

Beep it out, man.

No.

Beep it out.

What was the number?

All right.

Well, anyway, let me just tell you.

When Saks and I go to Vegas and he plays blackjack, it’s literally like the two of us coming down

the escalator, like Tom Cruise and Rain Man.

We’re wearing the same suit.

We go in there.

Wait.

Who’s Tom Cruise?

I’m Tom Cruise, and he’s the Rain Man.

Literally, he’s got his head tilted.

He’s like, blackjack.

Yeah, we’re going to play three hands of concurrent blackjack with J-Cal.

Of course, we’re counting cards at the Aria, at the high roller, and so we start high rolling,

and I swear to God, this guy goes down a model X, goes up a plat, but he never gives up.

He never gives up, and we’re supposed to go to LA.

I have a benefit dinner I bought a table for, and he’s like, I’m sorry, J-Cal.

I can’t leave, so I show up for the benefit dinner three hours late.

They’re closing the place down.

They’re like, oh, thanks for showing up, J-Cal, and it was all because he had to come back

up, but I’ve seen him come back from some gnarly defeats.

What is the secret, Saks?

Well, I saw Phil, your friend Phil Hellmuth and Brandon Cantu the other night here in

New York City, and they reminded me of that legendary run where basically, I think I bought

in for 100, and I was playing two hands, and I was down to my last five, and I’d been on

a horrible losing streak.

The hand came along where the dealer had a five showing, and basically, I doubled down

for my last bets, and then the dealer misdealed.

We did the cards out of order, and Phil made her rewind the cards and have them go back

to where they were supposed to go instead of declaring the hand a misdeal because I

had doubled down with the five showing.

Anyway, the pit boss came over.

They ended up listening to Phil, and I won those two hands, and then from there, I went

on a run.

Oh, I love it.

Wow.

I love it.

Wow.

Cantu actually remembers the stats.

He’s like, you won 85% of the hands in the next two shoes.

Shoes.

Yeah.

You won like 35 hands in a row.

He’s like, it was unbelievable.

Yeah.

It was crazy.

Did you tip Phil at the end of the night?

He was there playing with me.

It was him, me, and then Cantu was there as like kind of the real bird, and it was bonkers.

These pro poker players, they are kind of savants for these kinds of things.

They remember every hand.

Everything.

Right.

Everything.

They could go back years.

Right.

Phil talks about some random hand.

Yeah.

Every flop, turn, river.

It’s really incredible.

They’re gambling TiVos.

They’re gambling TiVos.

It’s a DVR in their brains.

Yeah.

When we were playing, it was basically Phil was there, and then I was playing two hands,

and then Brandon was just hanging with us, and he remembers all the stats of what happened

for that, whatever, half hour.

It’s bonkers.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, since we took a week off, we apologize for taking the week off.

We regret it.

A couple of things have happened.

I don’t know if you guys look at the stats, but I couldn’t believe it, but we were the

41st most popular episode two episodes ago in the world, so the pod has reached some

sort of tipping point.

I don’t know if you’re having this experience in Miami, David, but is everybody stopping

you to say they love All In, and did you see all the Spotify love of people who watched

like 3,000 minutes of All In in their year review?

That was a cover viral feature that Spotify came up with was a way to basically, it generates

a list of what your top shows were for the year based on listening minutes, so it’s like

actually mathematical, and then you can basically retweet that.

So yeah, I’ve seen a lot of tweets of people saying that we were number one or top five.

I had one guy stop me at Art Basel, I don’t get stopped that much, but there is a little

bit more of that.

Yeah, I’m getting stopped constantly, and it was just a flood.

So thank you to everybody who shared that and for tuning in, and we apologize for taking

weeks off.

We’re going to have a no weeks off rule going forward, that’s absolutely necessary.

But last week, we had a new variant come out.

We’ve been talking about it a whole bunch.

Well, you didn’t talk about Miami.

How was Miami?

You’ve been having a good time?

Well, I got to tell a story about Miami.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So I mean, I think this place is paradise.

First of all, the weather is just perfect this time of year.

San Francisco is miserable.

It was like raining and cold.

Then we come here and it’s like mid-70s all week, and of course, you’re not stepping over

hypodermic needles or feces, or you’re not worried about being randomly assaulted by

a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break, just for starters, right?

So we’ve been like talking all week.

We’ve been talking all week.

And that’s just in your house.

Right.

On the table.

That’s just in the mausoleum before you get out.

That’s just going to Starbucks.

Yeah.

That’s just going to Starbucks.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So in any event, we’re having this conversation about, should we just move here full-time?

And it’s like, it’s a heart-wrenching or gut-wrenching decision because the kids have schools and

friends and we’ve been in California a long time.

And so here we are wringing our hands about whether to make this move.

And all of a sudden, I read online that Nancy Pelosi just spent $25 million buying her retirement

house for when she loses the house in 2022, presumably she’ll retire as Speaker, you know,

in January of 23, when she’s not Speaker anymore.

She’s going to move to Santa Barbara?

No, she’s moving to Florida.

She bought a place in Jupiter.

No, it wasn’t true.

Hold on.

It was, yeah.

I know it turned out to be fake news.

Well, I questioned that.

I think it was true.

And then she didn’t like the bad press, so they bailed out of that deal.

We won’t really know what’s true until January of 2023, where we see where she retires to.

But in any event, so I’m reading this article and it says she’s buying a house.

It’s where Tiger Woods lives.

And actually it’s like half an hour from where Donald Trump is.

So here she is buying this house, probably with ill-gotten insider trading profits.

And she’s going to live…

She’s the best trader in the Senate.

Unbelievable trader.

In the world.

In the world.

All of our government officials, she’s got the best insider information.

And she’s planning to retire to a community of people she’s demonized.

I mean, starting with like Trump and then Tiger Woods.

And so she’s going to be living in this community of people who she’s been moralizing against

and demonizing against as the Speaker of the House.

And meanwhile, the rest of us are wringing our hands about whether we should stay in

San Francisco, the city, the dystopian city that she’s the political boss of, that her

political machine has run into the ground.

And I’m looking at this going like, oh, no, you don’t.

You’re not leaving me holding the bag for this.

If you’re going to Florida, I’m definitely going to Florida.

I’m definitely going to Florida.

You can turn the lights out, Saks.

You can turn the lights out.

They’re going to just leave me holding the bag.

I’m like the last one in San Francisco, I’m going to be turning out the lights.

So did that tip the scale for you?

I’m like, I’m definitely out of here.

I’m like, if the boss of San Francisco is out of here, I’m definitely out of here.

But I have some people, some other people to convince.

But Saks, in fairness to Nancy Pelosi, she’s sitting on a ton of equities and she doesn’t

want to pay cap gains in California.

So I mean, you got to be fair to her.

It’s not like she wants to pay for the ridiculous spending in California when she does cash

out all those chips.

I guess, Freeberg, let’s go to you to talk about the new variant.

Maybe you could tell us how to pronounce it because there seems to be some debate about

the pronunciation of this and what’s your take on it?

Were you in a frat in college?

You have to remember the Greek alphabet.

No, I went to school at night.

So I didn’t have the college experience.

Yeah.

I went to night school.

I think it’s Omicron.

Omicron.

Got it.

Omicron.

Omicron.

Omicron.

Omicron.

And it’s…

Try it again, J-Cal.

Last time.

One last time.

Omicron.

Omicron.

There’s no N.

Omicron.

Omicron.

Let’s monetize the Greek alphabet.

Megatron?

It’s not a transformer, J-Cal.

Omicron.

Omicron.

Omicron.

I missed you, Saks.

Wait, how many miles away from here?

Let’s go get a Cuban sandwich after this.

Yeah, come over here.

Why aren’t you guys together right now?

I don’t get it.

I thought you guys would be in the same room.

Let’s go to the Cuban deli and play, I don’t know, Cuban sandwich chicken.

Yes.

Who could eat less bites as we lose our ways?

I have the place.

I got the sandwich place over in Little Havana.

That’s unbelievable.

But anyway, continue.

Tell us if it’s the end of the world or no worry.

No, I mean, at this point, there’s three things that scientists are looking out for data on.

One is kind of the innate transmissibility of this variant.

The second is…

Which is like the R0 in an unvaccinated population.

The second is immune evasion, meaning it can get around antibodies or get around people

that are vaccinated or have the virus.

And then third is kind of the severity, right?

Which is like how many people translate into hospitalized cases.

Okay.

So every day, there’s varying data and information coming out.

There’s an incredible spike in South African surveillance data and testing data.

Right now, as of today, I think 25% of people getting tested in South Africa are testing positive.

Okay.

Wow.

That’s stunning.

Yeah.

And only about a quarter of the population is vaccinated there.

So this will be pretty telling pretty quickly on if hospitalizations start to climb and

if the disease severity in an unvaccinated population kind of matches or mimics what

we’ve seen with other variants.

This variant is quite different.

So there’s like 30 mutations on the spike protein here.

Normally, you’ll see an evolution where one mutation leads to another variant, leads to

another variant.

And they call it a new variant when there’s enough kind of differential behavior of the

virus.

So there’s always mutations happening.

But once a mutation causes a change in behavior, they note it.

So normally, you see kind of an evolutionary track where there’s like one mutation, then

another, then another, and so on.

In this case, this mutation set is so far away from anything else that exists.

There’s like 30 new mutations that popped up on this protein, on the sequences for this

protein, that it’s like such a different virus.

This is a major upgrade.

Yeah.

When did they…

It’s so different.

It’s almost like…

It’s like a new virus altogether.

Yeah.

It’s almost like it’s not a naturally occurring virus that behaves like other viruses do.

Okay.

So cutting the conspiracy…

When did China upgrade the virus?

Let me cut the conspiracy theory for a second and just say what the kind of current consensus

thinking is of what may have caused this incredible change.

One is that someone or some people that have severe immune compromised systems had a virus

in them that did not kill them, but just kept circulating in their bodies for months and

months and months, and mutated so much that it got to the point…

And this is what’s really interesting.

It got to the point that it mutated such that it can now transmit amongst a vaccinated population.

So think about the virus finally found a way out of the floodgates and the floodgates are

blocked in by vaccinated people.

And so that’s one reasonable explanation.

The other one is that South Africa is just a monitoring station.

There’s a whole big chunk of Africa where we have no surveillance going on.

There’s no genetic sequencing going on.

And there could have been anywhere in Southern Africa or even in Central Africa that these

viruses could have been circulating amongst populations for the last year and a half with

no surveillance or testing or sequencing.

And all of a sudden, one person travels to South Africa and boom, this thing pops up

on the radar and everyone’s like,

wow, look at what we just stumbled into.

So, look, one thing that seems pretty certain, this variant is going to be everywhere fast.

Like, it is so transmissible by some estimates and you can read Trevor Bedford or there’s

a bunch of great folks on Twitter, you can kind of follow their writings on this.

But Trevor’s done a great job.

The R naught on this could be as high as 40, which is, you know, measles by comparison

is 12 to 13.

Now, it’s more likely that the R naught is somewhere between seven and 20.

But regardless, it seems to be that high in the presence of an immune, immunized population,

meaning it’s got incredibly good evasiveness around people that have the vaccine or have

had the virus.

So, it’s going to spread like crazy.

I think this whole thing is a complete fucking nothing burger.

Yeah.

And so, that’s the other side.

It’s like, maybe it’s just not a big deal and it ends up being like Delta and it sort

of spreads around.

A lot of people don’t know they have it.

And then all of a sudden, it’s even more impotent than Delta.

So, that is definitely something that people are saying because there’s not a lot of new

hospitalization spiking in South Africa.

We’re not seeing severe cases of all these people, you know, 25% of people are testing

positive.

They’re showing mild to no symptoms and that’s anecdotal right now.

So, we’ll know in the next two weeks of whether this actually changes hospitalization.

To me, this is more of an example of yet again, how unreliable our institutions are than anything

else.

We knew nothing about this.

We had a couple of cases and the mainstream media literally in a moment where there was

frankly, not a lot of news.

Slowest news day of the year is the day after Thanksgiving for people.

This is when it broke Friday after Thanksgiving.

Exactly.

Essentially, manufactured this histrionic reaction to something where we didn’t know

anything about it.

We didn’t know how important it was.

We didn’t know how bad it was.

We didn’t know anything.

And then what happened was then the financial media took that and then ran with it basically

trying to whip up even more histrionics, but within the financial markets, which then feed

the mainstream news cycle.

And we have this whole loop going down the toilet bowl.

And lo and behold, I think what we’re actually learning is what we should have just waited

a few days to realize beforehand, which is it’s not that severe, but to the extent that

it is, we’ve sequenced it.

We have vaccines and we can deploy these quickly.

Oh, by the way, at the same time, the New England Journal of Medicine put out the study,

which basically showed how important and efficacious these vaccines are.

So the fact that we’re even talking about this to me is just absolutely emotional and

not practical or useful.

The big question Chamath is, it’s not about whether it is functionally a nothing burger

or not.

But what’s really important now is how policymakers are going to respond to this, right?

Because there is a press cycle.

There is a bit of a hysteria.

Everyone’s asking me about it.

Everyone’s freaked out about it.

Everyone’s worrying about it.

And so the policymakers are going to respond to that sentiment.

And the question is, are we about to face more lockdowns and things that are going to

be adverse to the economy?

And how are markets going to react?

Not necessarily to the true severity of the risk of this variant, but more importantly

to the policy decisions that are going to come out of the perceived risk of this variant.

And that seems pretty scary right now.

Well, you saw Biden.

I mean, one thing I’ll give him is this.

I mean, he’s I think he’s done a bad job on a lot of other things.

But on this, his political instincts were sound, which is he said very clearly, we’re

not going to go back to lockdowns.

And I think he was really speaking to Democratic governors when he said that to people like

Avid Newsom and our poker friend JB Pritzker and Whitmer in Michigan.

Listen, guys, we’re not going back to lockdowns no matter what happens with this Omicron thing.

We’re not going to do school closures.

We’ve seen how unpopular the school closures were in this off-year election.

It was one of the big issues that helped Glenn Youngkin win Virginia, which had previously

voted for Biden by 10.

So I think you saw the message come down from on high.

We’re not going to go back to lockdowns.

Now, I think, though, that what that does is admit, and I think what Omicron will show

is that lockdowns didn’t work at all.

At most, lockdowns and all these measures, whether it’s mask mandates or whatever, all

it did was delay the timing of the virus.

What you’re going to see is Omicron will be everywhere very soon.

There’s nothing that policymakers can do to stop it.

The only thing that seems to work is vaccines and booster shots.

There’s some good data around the third booster preventing serious cases.

Other than vaccines, and I guess the one thing policymakers could do would be to get red

tape out of the way so that they can more quickly come up with a booster to this new

variant.

That would be the one thing they could really help with.

But otherwise, nothing policymakers have done has helped.

And I think this is going to be an admission that ultimately lockdowns were a disaster

for the economy.

Nobody could argue lockdowns are not a disaster for the economy.

But in the early days, if we go back to when this pandemic started, we really didn’t know

how to handle this.

We did not have any treatments, and we were ventilating people and essentially killing

them by blowing oxygen into their lungs too aggressively, from what I understand.

So in a way, wasn’t it?

That’s a, yeah.

Okay.

Well, I mean, I think it’s a debate because we’re not ventilating people now as much as

we were, right?

We’re flipping them over, et cetera.

But the lockdowns did, correct me if I’m wrong, Friedberg, at least allow us to not have the

hospitals overrun like they were in New York and Italy.

And that was…

I don’t know if that’s true.

I honestly don’t know if the hospital…

I don’t know if the lockdowns actually changed the…

We don’t know.

Look, I’m going to sound like some…

And now we’re going to, you know, kind of enter into this controversial territory.

But…

Sure, let’s do it.

It seems like a lot of people still got together in private settings.

Oh, of course.

And the virus continued to spread.

And so there was a question around how effective lockdowns were and how much they really did

change the trajectory of the spread of the virus.

And yes, they probably did have a muting effect.

But, you know, it’s unclear what the trade-off was and whether it was really worthwhile.

And at the end of the day, a few days and a few weeks after they started, people were

over them.

And they started meeting on their own.

We didn’t know how deadly it was, though.

At that time, we didn’t know how deadly it was.

Admittedly, we didn’t know a lot at the beginning of the pandemic.

And so you have to, I think, give people a break for the mistakes that were made, say,

in March or April.

I think by May, it was pretty clear the lockdowns weren’t going to work.

If they had worked, states like California wouldn’t have had 10 pages of exceptions based

on how politically connected you were.

So, for example, the local bartender had her bar run out of business by lockdowns, but

Hollywood studios would get a break on their productions.

So, we know that lockdowns didn’t work.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been these exceptions.

And we have data from Sweden.

Remember all the hysteria about Sweden, basically, was doing nothing.

They weren’t doing lockdowns.

They weren’t doing mandates.

They were going for herd immunity.

They were going for herd immunity.

And they were killing their people.

Well, guess what?

Sweden’s data was no worse than anybody else’s.

The hospitals weren’t overrun.

And I think what Omicron will finally show is that, you know, our whole policy since

the beginning of COVID, whether it was two weeks to stop the spread, or these, like,

vaccine mandates, or even this idea of herd immunity, it’s all been to try and put the

genie back in the bottle.

In other words, it’s been to try and defeat COVID.

It’s to put this virus back in the lab, I guess you could say.

And the reality is we’re never going to defeat it.

I mean, it really is something that we’re going to have to learn to live with and to

manage.

And so, you know, vaccine should be a variant.

It’ll be a seasonal disease.

And it’ll be something like the flu, in terms of how it cycles each year.

And it seems unlikely that it’s going to be eradicated through vaccination.

Let me pull Chamath back in.

There may be a variant that matters.

But this is not it.

Instead, what we really need to do is have a process of not overreacting, because there’s

going to be n number of these into the future.

And the only thing that really decays the vaccine’s potency, or sorry, the COVID’s potency

is having it go through vaccinated people.

And thank God we had so many people vaccinated because this is what we’re so again, this

whole thing is a nothing burger.

Let’s just move on.

It’s stupid.

Well, so the market, the markets are obviously reacting, maybe we should talk about reacting

to that.

I think that they are using an excuse, like people want to trim positions.

And this is a great excuse.

Yeah.

Look at look, look, the week before, when I started to trim, it was like, Oh, how dare

you, blah, blah, blah, you know, and I’m like, Well, I don’t know if the smartest people

are selling, maybe it makes makes sense to sell.

So I started to trim and I’m so glad that I did because it was, you know, 10 days ahead

or a week ahead of all of this craziness.

Now look at what’s happening in the markets today.

People are going massively risk off, you know, there are almost 500 stocks that are off 30

or 40% in the last 30 days.

Yeah, but the stock market is still basically at all time highs.

So think of that for a second.

So everybody that thinks that the stock market is doing poorly is wrong.

It is doing exceptionally well.

It’s just that the 400 stocks that people in Silicon Valley really care about have been

getting kicked in the teeth.

Yeah.

And the paper company and the, you know, the specialty chemicals company have actually

done reasonably well, which is nothing that any of us have exposure to, or, you know,

some of us don’t have exposure to.

So go ahead, Jason.

Can we can we can we then look at this as, hey, the era of, we’re going to give a lot

of credit to companies for, you know, what’s going to happen in the next 10 years, 10 year

outcomes.

Yeah.

10 year outcome that we saw Rivian came up, you know, and then many other stocks, and

obviously, crypto falls into this, this idea of giving people a decade of forward looking

credit, maybe is going to come back to think it’s too early way these and look at earnings

or maybe two years of credit.

No, I’m not going to say that, because I think it’s too early for us to sort of go and jump

to these conclusions.

Right now, we are in a moment, there have been 71 or two of these moments since 2009.

Where you have either a sector drawdown, or a market drawdown.

In this case, we’re in the middle of a massive growth sector drawdown, okay, the multiples

on these companies are shrinking companies like snowflake and peloton.

Sure, cloudflare, zoom, we’re trading at 70 to 100 times revenue, and people are reevaluating

whether those multiples are worth it, irrespective of the quality of the company, because those

are very high quality companies.

So we’re just rewriting the risk right now.

Okay, and it’s not broad based.

The real problem is all these companies that I think raised a lot of money in private markets

are now going to get stuck, because if the public markets have compressed multiples by

30 to 50%, they are the ultimate buyer.

The idea that you can wait and then go public later, may not stand to reason, especially

if inflation really keeps these multiples in, you know, in check.

And so all these private businesses, and then all of the ones that sort of were planning

IPOs in the next 12 to 18 months are probably in a little bit more of a challenging spot

than they were.

We’re seeing a lot of I mean, come on, is it not true that we’re seeing a bunch of these

SPAC deals and new issuances come out to market with converts attached to them.

So rather than getting a straight valuation and common equity rolled, these deals are

coming out where investors are saying, look, I’ll value this thing, but I want to get paid

a preferred return, and I want to have some seniority over the common.

And so I can protect my investment to some degree.

At least that’s what I’m hearing from bankers is kind of the rumbling in the SPAC and pipe

market right now is these kind of protective new types of equities that are coming out

in order that the investors can kind of keep their mark on their private valuation rounds,

but get the company out to public, but the public market is getting a better deal than

just straight common equity.

Look, it’s like bringing Pepto Bismol to Mexico.

If you’re worried about an upset stomach, don’t go to Mexico.

Okay, and we just lost 7% of the audience.

But you’re saying you wouldn’t invest in these converts for these kind of companies that

need that.

We’re focusing too much on the symptomology and not the root cause.

Right.

The minute that you’re trying to wrap all these features around something, you know,

the nature of those kinds of features is that it’s trying to subsidize what is otherwise

not a clear, simple, viable story at that price.

So either change the price or change the company.

Yeah, I will say one important point about what’s going on.

A lot of people have said this is a crash and that terms have been used a lot.

But, you know, because people that have only traded in markets and have a brief history,

call it back to the 2000s, the last three major drawdowns have been the dot com crash,

then the financial crisis, and then the COVID crash.

And all of them had true systemic risk that caused kind of, there’s all these ripple effects

and secondary effects.

And Chamath, I mean, you know, and for all you guys, it seems to me that this time what’s

going on is a devaluation that doesn’t have systemic risk attached to it.

If these…

Well, we had…

I don’t know about that.

We had this happen in 2018, because in 2018, it looked like there was going to be inflation.

Powell, you know, basically killed the market.

He raised rates.

And then it turned out he was completely wrong, and China was okay, and everything was fine.

And then the market just completely violently snapped back.

Again, this is what I’m saying, which is, it’s too early to tell whether this is just

a short term opportunity for people who have made a lot of money to de-risk.

And Satya Nadella just sold 300 million in stock.

Wasn’t it half his position?

Half his position.

It was half of his position.

Yeah.

I mean, that to me was insignificant.

Elon Musk sold, you know, 10 billion.

I’ve sold almost, I think, six or $700 million worth of stuff this year.

Like, this is what I think smart market participants do.

You don’t just wait and just try to mark to market the last tick.

Sax, you think there is systemic risk in here?

Yeah.

I mean, so, well, look, first of all, what’s going on here?

I mean, Mr. Moth is right that over the last four weeks, we’ve seen a 30% to 50% decline

in these tech growth stocks.

What is the reason for that?

Interest rate expectations driven by inflation.

For the first six months of the year, all you heard out of Washington, the administration,

was this inflation was transitory.

That story is basically that collapsed because now people can see that as persistent.

They’re now pricing in the risk of interest rate increases.

Oh, Sax, you’re breaking up.

He’s done.

He’s toast.

He’s done.

He’s toast.

He’s probably still talking.

He’s probably still talking.

Yeah, he’s on a monologue right now.

Henry Belcaster is cutting it right now.

Yeah, Henry Belcaster can TikTok him.

Well, whoever wrote this part of the speech that he has prepared for his fault.

Super crestfallen.

Like, oh, that was my best speech writing.

Whatever that guy’s name is, I’m sure it’s annotated so he can go back to that point

in his diatribe.

Absolutely, yes.

I mean, I think actually this is an AI version.

This is like a deep fake of Sax that we just played at this point for this monologue.

Reboot the Sax.

Can we reboot the Sax simulation?

The Sax simulation?

Uh-huh.

Well, I mean, if you look at private markets, it’s obvious that they were getting ahead

of themselves.

And I think to your point, Shamath, when we were talking before about what private market

companies do in this situation, well, I was advising them if you can get at a high valuation

and you can get clean terms, you take the money, sure, if it’s from quality investors.

But just make sure that you have enough runway to fill into this valuation if there is valuation

compression, which is what there is now.

So the idea that a private company with 20 million or 30 million in SaaS revenue was

worth 50, 60, 70 times that, that’s not the case right now in the public markets.

And maybe it goes back down to 20 or 30, but you just have to have that runway to land

the playing, correct?

Yeah.

One way to think about that is it’s less about people often use that high multiple to refer

to this year’s numbers.

But what the market is doing typically in those situations is they’re saying the multiple

in the future will be X.

And so they’re saying we project five, 10 years out this revenue and I’m paying one

to five times revenue, you know, for seven to 10 years out or whatever the right kind

of way that they’re framing that up.

But then the commentators on the market pricing come in and they say, Hey, you guys are crazy.

You’re paying a hundred times revenue.

And the market isn’t thinking about this year’s revenue.

They’re thinking about revenue in years seven through 10.

Yes.

That giving credit, right?

They’re giving credit, right?

Yeah.

And they can’t do that now because interest rates, let’s say interest rates climbed to

three and a half percent.

I can go make three and a half percent by putting my money in for a 10 year bond.

And now I can’t kind of, and so I have to discount that future back from 10 years out.

And now I’m only going to be able to value it in five years out.

So now my revenue for five years out is like a little bit lower and the multiple I’m going

to give them a little lower.

So the valuation today gets a little bit lower.

And that’s how these things kind of translate as a function of interest rates.

It’s a little bit harder to make a bet on a 10 year horizon because interest rates are

no longer 0%.

So you have to kind of make a bet on a five year horizon or a three year horizon.

And if interest rates are really high, you’re betting on this year’s numbers.

Chamath, I think we should talk a little bit about this inflation concept.

I did a little tweet storm, you know, about this sort of transitory versus, you know,

perpetual.

And I do think we’ve talked about it here.

We’ve crossed that rubric on of everybody is raising prices because everybody else is

raising prices, not necessarily even because they are experiencing, you know, higher costs

in their business.

But they’re just like, you know, my haircuts costing more, my stakes costing more.

I’ve got to charge more for whatever my services is.

Is there any way to unwind this inflation?

It seems to me like the reason we’ve had no inflation for so many decades of our entire

lives, like I mean, jeans in the 1980s cost the same as jeans now was because of globalization

and efficiency.

Well, that took, what, three decades or four decades of just constant innovation and constant

globalization.

Well, we’ve already got globalization maxed out, perhaps too much globalization, right,

that we learned that we actually have risk associated with this, you know, supply chain.

And how much more efficiency is there in making a pair of jeans?

I don’t know if we’re going to be making them in a slurry.

So is there a path to unwind it?

You know, rich people not having their equities be worth as much, then maybe it trickles down.

I don’t, it’s unprecedented, right?

I think what happens in the stock market is absolutely irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter.

I mean, you know, we focus on it a lot.

But, you know, when we talk about the core structural economy, the stock market is a

lagging indicator of a whole bunch of things.

Sometimes it’s cash flow.

A lot of the times it’s emotion, money supply, money supply.

I think that there’s a much more important thing which we’ve talked about, which is that,

you know, we have said and I have said that coming out of the pandemic, we are moving

the world back into a more, you know, decentralized place, right?

The centralization was this just in time, you know, single supply chain, single point

of failure existence.

And if you look inside of China, the thing that they want more than anything else is

to become even more centralized, right?

I don’t know if you saw today, but there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about

how China is going to create basically an overall holding company to own all the rare

earths that are made inside of China, and then to apportion them out as they see fit.

So, the government will now control a critical element and supply chain into climate change.

Okay.

Basically, they’re creating their own OPEC in a way, like their own version of…

It’s a very good way of saying it.

Exactly.

So, China is pushing more and more for centralization.

We…

So, for example, you know, myself and Fortress, we did this deal a year ago to bring this

company public called MP Materials.

And the whole idea was to start to build diversity in the supply chain, to build a decentralized

supply of all kinds of things.

In that case, it was around these rare earths, because we saw this thing happening in China.

Okay.

The problem is those kinds of investments are very much few and far between.

So, the solution to fixing the core structural inflation we have is going to take a decade.

It’s going to take trillions of dollars of investment.

And more than that, I think it’s going to take an enormous amount of coordination between

private and public participants.

And I think that that’s where this whole thing fails, which is why, you know, I’m a little

bit more concerned about it.

Like, and I think I’ve explained this to you.

But look, we have massively underinvested in the level of infrastructure we need to

support ourselves.

Yeah, we outsource.

Like, as in a simple example, like starting in 2016, we absolutely decapitated the ability

for the United States to invest in our own true energy independence.

Okay.

You know, the level of fracking, the level of nat gas, oil, all of this stuff basically

fell off of a cliff.

And you would say, well, that was the right capital allocation decision because of climate

change.

Well, it turns out today, not really, because we have absolutely no investments on the climate

change side.

Right.

We don’t have rare earth, we don’t have lithium, we don’t have nickel, we don’t have cobalt,

we don’t have graphite.

So, we actually can’t make the batteries, which means that now oil is at $100 a barrel

and gas costs 10 bucks at the pump.

So, that was a coordination problem.

Really, the right thing to have done would have been to continue to invest in our domestic

supply chain for energy, while we also created incentives to decarbonize.

So, this is what I mean by these issues have been building up for years, Jason.

Yeah, decades.

Inflation is now here.

I think it’s here to last.

I’ve been pretty consistent about this.

And this is the real reason why we’re going to have a few years of pain.

And so, money losing, unprofitable businesses selling future cash flows in 10 to 12 years.

I mean, some people will buy them, but I won’t be.

I just sent you a link to freight rates for cargo ships coming from China to LA.

And you’ll see in the last month and a half or so…

September was the peak, yeah.

Yeah.

So, starting in April, it was like, whatever, $2,000 and it climbed up to nearly 20, nearly

went 10x over that period of time.

And then in September, it started to decline.

It’s dropped by 50% and it’s continuing to drop week after week right now.

And we’re seeing the same in lumber prices right now.

I’ll send you another link to how lumber prices have declined precipitously.

Also, from an early part of the year peak.

And we’re seeing this across a lot of these supply markets where we were talking about

inflation being the driver and some of the other…

A lot of the economists at the Fed and other policymakers were talking about these being

transitory pricing effects.

And so there’s a bit of a mixed bag emerging.

We are seeing in some of these markets that prices have declined by 50%, 75% in just the

last few weeks.

By the way…

The supply chain distortions have right-sized and the demand and the supply started to balance

out a bit more.

And that’s creating, I think, a better certainty around pricing, better reliability on these

supply chains.

And a lot of folks estimate that this will take all the way through 2022 for that supply

chain glut and mismatch to work its way all the way through to the consumer.

Indigestion.

Yeah, to the consumer.

And so there are a number of points of view that say, look, these pricing issues that

we’ve been seeing in the recent term may, in fact, still be transitory.

We may see them work their way out at the end of 2022.

And we’re starting to see the early signs of that actually playing out.

And so I would say the jury is still out.

Generally, we’ve obviously doubled the amount of US dollars that are in supply or increased

it by 50% a year.

We’ve got, you know, interest rates at zero.

We’ve got, you know, people aren’t going to reduce their wages, right?

Wages are only going to go up.

And there’s a lot of things that you make the point of, like, spending is only going

to go up.

The government’s never going to spend less.

By the way, just on that point, the government changed their formula for what is considered

a conforming mortgage.

I think it kicks in in January.

And essentially, it basically allows US homeowners to have a million-dollar mortgage and have

it essentially be conforming.

Now, that’s like a, you know, pretty large increase.

I think it’s almost 20% from what it used to be.

Why is that important?

Think of the amount of money that’s stuck in US real estate by US homeowners, who now

all of a sudden can have conforming loans that are, you know, which used to be jumbos

or super jumbos.

So worse terms become better terms.

You have more equity, you can pull out more money.

I think that people will spend that money.

And so even on the consumer side, I think that you have an impetus to spend.

I was the one thing I wanted to say, I wanted to clarify something I said earlier.

You know, it’s very difficult to buy these, you know, long dated businesses promising

huge cash flows in the future.

There is one kind of version of that company, though, that you can buy, in my opinion, and

what I am still buying, which is deep physical science and R&D.

Because those businesses in some ways are still on a risk adjusted basis, in my opinion,

great bets to make.

But otherwise, you know, you want to be allocated to spending a lot of money on research and

are going to have future products.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a lot of money, but that the outcome in success is

so asymmetric.

Those are really interesting to me businesses in moments like this were, you know, if I’m

if I’m delivering my portfolio, that’s how I’m thinking about it, which is I want to

make those kind of bets in the future.

The one thing I think that could help unwind this and I think it’s to your point, Friedberg

about some of the indigestion is starting to work its way through the system.

And there could be two things occurring at the same time, we could be have more money

supply, prices could be going up, homes could be going up, lumber could be coming down.

But that doesn’t mean that the person constructing a home is just going to magically say, Oh,

wow, I spent less on lumber, I can take a million dollars off the price of this new

home or 100,000, even whatever it is.

But competition does seem to drive prices lower.

And so if we do see more people participating as employees or employment, well, then there

would be some competition for less competition for labor.

And we might see more competition other places in the economy, if there were more cars available.

Obviously, people will try to win customers right now, you don’t have to win a customer

if you’re selling a car, even a used one, they’re going for 1020 k used cars are going

people who bought used cars two years ago, are selling them for the same price.

So they got two years for free in their car, even though they put 10,000 miles on it.

By the way, speaking about employment for a second, you know, the the I heard I saw

the stat, it was pretty insane.

But about 2.1 million people under immigrated to the United States at the beginning of Trump’s

tenure as president.

What that means is that what it’s what that what that means is that we lost about 2.1

million immigrants than we would have normally based on the run rate of how immigration should

have worked.

So whether that was people being rejected at the border, or whether that was just people

deciding not to come to the United States because of their feelings for Trump, we lost

2.1 million eligible workers over those four years of his presidency.

We also had a bunch of people who had degrees in certain jobs who basically gave up on their

profession.

And we talked about this before, which is, you know, the teacher who decides it’s better

off to just go work at Amazon, right than to actually be a teacher because you actually

get paid more now.

And then the third thing is that there’s a ton of people that are making an enormous

amount of money through inheritance and through their parents who are boomers, who are now

in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

And all of that is exacerbating this employment problem, which you can only solve by raising

wages, right?

There’s a ton of more people in the country.

Well, all of it just means that there are fewer people to do the work, which means you

are going to have to pay more to get the work done.

Yeah, we’re going to or we could let more people in the country based on their specific

skills.

You put these two things together, structural inflation is here.

We’ve under investigated under invested at the macro level.

And we’ve completely distorted people’s incentives to work at the micro level.

Prices go up.

One thing I’m seeing in the market, and I think David’s back with us, David Sachs, is

that Kiefer boy had this tweet, and I think we talked about a four or five episodes ago,

a bunch of capital allocators are saying, you know, what was a great run.

But I think I’m going to opt out.

I’m going to move on to my next adventure.

I don’t want to deal with what we’re dealing with here on this podcast, which is what do

you even make of this confluence of the pandemic crypto, you know, printing more money supply

and interest and unknowable valuations in the face of massive technological change from

AI, biology, etc.

So I thought it’d be interesting to talk about all of our decisions to stay in the capital

allocation game and what we think about this retiring group of capital allocators who are,

let’s face it, retiring at 50 or less.

I had coffee with Keith this morning, and then he tweeted that on the heels of our conversation.

So I think I can provide a little more insight into what he was thinking there.

I think part of the backdrop here is the concern that we’re going into a very different

environment than what we’ve had over the last 10 years.

I mean, over the last 10 years, we’ve basically had record good times because of this low

interest rate environment.

Right.

And low interest rate environments are fantastic for growth stocks.

Now, it looks like we’re moving into an environment in which inflation is certainly not

transitory.

We don’t know how long it’s going to last for.

And that creates an expectation of which rates are going to rise.

And so the next decade may not be as good for growth stocks.

And you’ve also had over the last year or two, price levels have been much higher.

So you’ve got to figure there’s a whole cohort of VCs who’ve had a great decade, who’ve made

a lot of money.

And now they’re asking, does it really make sense for me to sign up for another decade

that may not look as good?

And the truth is, if you’re not the principal of your firm, if you’re one of 20 partners,

it doesn’t make as much sense for you to stay in the game when you’ve just had a fantastic

decade.

You’ve probably made more money than you thought you’re going to make.

And now you’re not so sure about the next one.

Pretty brave thoughts.

I mean, you still want to build companies.

Yeah.

I don’t know.

I like building stuff and building new stuff that’s kind of going to have an impact and

it’s technically difficult.

So that’s kind of where I get drawn to spend my time.

But I can understand people whose job it is to kind of manage other people’s money and

invest it for them.

And they participate in the profits they generate.

Realizing after some period of time, like, hey, I bought a bunch of lottery tickets.

I mean, if you buy lottery tickets at the local 7-Eleven every day, and one day you

hit the $12 million jackpot, you’re not going back to 7-Eleven the next day to keep buying

lottery tickets.

And so, in the context of being a money manager to generate returns, and that being kind of

your principal interest, and you kind of hit a return outcome, that statistically, you

know, will not happen again.

I don’t see the point of the hassle of going back to work.

I could see the psychology of saying that that’s enough for me.

I do think, however, most VCs are truly…

We can kind of generalize all we want.

But as we all know, we have lots of friends who are VCs.

And I’d say, generally, the majority of them are very intellectually curious and driven.

And what I am seeing is a shift of people who have had successful investing track records

and have had massive outcomes, shifting their attention now.

They take some time off.

And I’d say almost 100% of them come back, and they always ask for a meeting.

And I’m like, sure.

And then they’re like, I want to work on climate change solutions.

And so what I’m seeing is this kind of second act happening now.

And we’ve seen it with guys like Chris Sacca, and folks who had these massive, massive outcomes

in their first run.

They know they’re not going to…

The statistical likelihood of doing that again is very low.

But then after spending a couple years on the ranch or surfing, you wake up and you’re like,

I want to do something meaningful with my life.

I got kids.

I look them in the eye and I’m like, what should we do to get…

What do I want to do for the future for my children?

And they all come back around.

So one of the things I’m seeing is this second act phenomenon where VCs are moving away from

being pure play technologists and making money to saying, I want to do stuff that’s a little

bit more meaningful and altruistic coming into climate change.

And as a result, we’re seeing insane funding happening in climate change tech companies

or climate tech or whatever the heck the label is this week.

Stuff that, in my opinion, doesn’t make any sense.

Businesses that aren’t real businesses, technologies that don’t actually make sense, it’ll never

work out.

But hey, that’s always been the case in venture, right?

One out of 1000 works and changes the world.

But we are seeing that.

And that’s kind of a personal observation as I’m seeing a lot of these second acts going

after climate change.

Chamatha, this last year or 18 months, pretty exhausting as a capital allocator to try to

make sense of the world and get your bearings.

It’s like going through multiple storms.

Does that make you more engaged?

I get the sense, knowing you for a long time, that you and I might be similar.

Yeah, the chessboards are getting mixed up, the pieces and the values are getting changed,

whatever.

It’s making me more excited to participate and try to figure it out.

Yeah.

It’s like a hand to poker to me.

I’m more intellectually stimulated now.

Me too.

I’m the most engaged I’ve ever been.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I left the money management business five years ago, I guess.

And honestly, it was a very hard path.

But it’s been the most rewarding.

Because I was able to focus on the things that I wanted.

Look, if you do this job, well, this job is voting for change with your money.

And making change using money.

And that’s great.

Because money is not that useful beyond a very small amount.

And then you have to question, like, what are your real priorities?

So, yeah, like grinding away at something that matters, to me, I’ve always found fulfilling.

And I feel like I am an athlete whose muscle doesn’t decay by my mid-30s, but probably

decays in my 70s or 80s, which is my brain.

And so, you know, I’m only, you know, I’m only I’m a rookie.

So, I’m excited.

The fact that things are compressing, or maybe there’ll be less startups or less capital

allocators involved, what I’ve seen in my career, post dot com era web 2.0, amazing

time to be alive, amazing time, because there were less anybody who started a company after

the dot com bust, or after the 2008 financial crisis, was a legitimate warrior who wanted

to change the world and was incredibly focused.

And then the sense of entitlement I’m seeing on all sides of the table right now from founders

to board members to investors, it just seems like everybody’s in some sort of mad dash

to secure some bag, by any means necessary.

And there’s no focus on the customers and the product and the team.

Everybody’s, you know, living in some just manic, you know, grab money grab, you know,

when you’re in the middle of a paintball war, you know, you’re trying to, you’re trying

to shoot the paintball gun and you’re trying to hit people and it’s a little bit crazy

on the field.

But, you know, as everyone kind of gets back to the locker room and they take their win,

you know, all humans ultimately are going to be driven by a desire to leave something

in the world to make an impact of some sort.

And at some point, all the folks who have made a ton of money in this cycle, there were

a lot of folks who made a ton of money in the last cycle, are kind of asking themselves,

you know, how do I leave an impact?

How do I make an impact in the world?

And I still have a skill set and I still have a capability to do so.

And so then there’s this search for meaning and that’s where you see kind of the climate

change and the healthcare and all these other kind of paths start to form for people.

I do think Web 3 also offers another path of opportunity for folks where they can kind

of rewrite the internet and think about how to reinvent the social model for humanity,

the economic model for humanity, the governance model for humanity, the communications model

for humanity.

It’s super exciting.

Yeah.

And Web 3 creates that kind of, you know, that visionary kind of platform opportunity

and folks are all kind of excited about what’s next.

So, you know, once the dust settles a little bit and you put some money in your pocket

and you realize, you know, it’s not going to change your life more than, you know, it

did last week and, you know, you want to make an impact and then folks kind of come back

and they start pursuing, you know, where impact will lie.

Sax, let’s go to you.

Sax, what was Roboy talking about?

What were you guys talking about in this breakfast?

Keith and I just talked about how we’re about to enter a very different kind of macro environment

for growth stocks and we don’t know how long it’s going to take, but there’s no question

that multiples and valuations are going to come down.

And there’s a lot of younger founders and investors who never lived through a bear market

or a down cycle and they’re about to get a rude awakening.

So, look, I think it’s a little different for us because we’re all principals at our

firms.

And so, therefore, if we’re not happy about something, we could simply effectuate a change

in strategy.

But if you’re one of 20 partners at a giant firm, even if you’re the most successful one,

it’s hard for you to move that ship.

And, you know, your returns get divided by, you know, it’s one over N where N is the number

of like full partner shares.

And, you know, if you just made a ton of money over the last 10 years and you’re thinking

about whether you want to sign up for going through a bunch of choppy waters, there’s

a lot of good reasons right now for people to reevaluate.

Now, look, Keith and I were both discussing this in the context of, hey, this would be

great for us because we’re not going anywhere.

But Keith did think that because the macro picture is changing, that is one more reason

for people who are on the fence and thinking about retiring to move forward with that.

All right.

So I think we’ve talked about capital allocation, and we got the variant, and we got the markets.

Can I just point out how like, Zach, it seems like you and JCal and everyone are kind of

in Miami at Art Basel, and this thing’s been going on for years, and it’s an art fair.

Yeah.

But it’s like tech has taken it over.

Like, the tech industry…

Basically, yes.

Yeah, like the tech community seems to have this kind of consistent trend of going to

these like esoteric, kind of call it originally artistically created events and spaces.

It was like Sundance, and then it was Burning Man, and now it’s like Miami Art Basel and

kind of like…

And ruining it.

Ruining it, taking it for themselves.

You know, hey, now it’s Tech Week in Miami, but it was like Art Basel has been going on

for forever.

It’s NFT Basel, they’re calling it.

NFT Basel, yeah.

Brutal.

It’s literally…

I feel bad for all the real creatives.

Yeah.

We’re the ugly Americans who come in and ruin the artisanal, you know, feel of the place

and flood the place with cash.

But look, no.

One difference between Florida or Miami in particular and California and San Francisco

in particular is nobody hates money or success over here.

They’re happy for, you know, all these rich people to come in and spend their money.

They really believe in capitalism over here.

huge Cuban immigrant population who had direct experience with socialism and Argentinians

and people from South America.

And I mean, they teach their kids in schools the evils of socialism.

So yeah, nobody here is looking to purge the rich.

That’s nice.

It’s funny, Sax, because the Bay Area has a huge South Asian population, right?

And a huge immigrant population.

Why is that not the case in California, right?

Why is this huge immigrant population, whether they come from South America, Latin America,

or they come from South Asia, India, China?

Do we not have the same sort of response here for, you know, pushback against socialist

tendencies and the push for capitalism and entrepreneurism?

The big difference in South Florida is that those immigrant communities were politically

active and got really ingrained in the political process.

And so they were a loud voice, you know.

Systemically, what happens in South Asian families is we just don’t do that.

It’s just not a thing.

And in fact, if you look inside of our countries, the politicians are just the absolute sketchiest,

most brutal folks.

And so, you know, when you have people that got double E degrees from IIT, the last thing

that they’re thinking is like, I want to run for mayor of Santa Clara.

That doesn’t happen.

So it’s just a big cultural distinction between the Chinese and South Asian populations versus

the South American population.

I have to say, San Francisco has become truly dystopian.

I went to San Francisco to see a comedy show, Hasan Minhaj, who is a big fan of This Pod.

He has an incredible show, by the way.

He’s fabulous.

He’s amazing.

And he did a show about MBS and him getting into it with The Kingdom and Patriot Act,

his show.

It was one of the most powerful, like, one-man shows I’ve seen.

It kind of transcends comedy.

But I took Sonny, our friend Sonny, and we had a great time.

We walked through Union Square, because we wanted to get like a drink.

We walked through Union Square, and it was cordoned off with cop cars at every intersection,

and there’s no cars in the street.

And I was like, what’s going on?

Is there some police activity?

And I was like, they’re like, no, the Louis Vuitton store got knocked off.

I kid you not, every single store has had every single window boarded up like it’s a

hurricane season.

But they all did them in pitch black.

So it must have been like one vendor came and did this for every vendor.

But like Zara, The Gap, Nike, every single storefront has been boarded up.

And then there are security guards outside, and you have to make an appointment to go

Christmas shopping.

And literally, they have road blockades of multiple cars at every intersection, because

these smash and grabs have become so brazen and dangerous.

There were 30 or 40 people involved in that one at the Louis Vuitton store.

Can you imagine you’re shopping for Christmas and 40 people run through the windows?

This is the logical result of everything I’ve been warning about since the beginning of

the year.

You have prosecutors like Chaser Boudin, who have essentially decriminalized theft by refusing

to prosecute it.

After the Louis Vuitton looting, he comes out there and says, well, don’t bring this

noise from out of town.

That’s what he calls crime is noise.

And he’s trying to pretend like it didn’t arise in San Francisco, like somehow it’s

come from out of town.

No, you created it by refusing to prosecute these types of crimes.

And then after talking tough, the first thing he did, he already released.

The police actually caught some of these looters of the LVMH.

He has already released them on zero bail.

Exactly.

The prison, the jail is a revolving door.

They have zero bail.

And so the people who did this are already out on bail.

Chaser talks tough when he charges them, but the charges are never actually brought.

They’re put down, thrown out, and it is dystopian.

And we couldn’t find a place to have a drink.

We couldn’t find a single bar.

We just wanted to have like a post comedy show drink.

And by the way, Hassan’s a huge fan of the pod.

We talked for an hour of the show.

He brought us backstage.

It was a really, really class act.

And we should have him on the pod at some point.

Do we want to talk about Jack leaving Twitter?

Well, there’s a segue here.

I mean, Chamath mentioned that you have these immigrant minorities from South Asia, I’d

say Indian Americans, Chinese Americans.

They’ve been spectacularly successful in the United States.

They haven’t been as politically active as, say, the Cuban Americans or Argentinian Americans

in Florida, but they’ve been incredibly successful.

You had another example of that this week with Jack leaving Twitter.

His replacement is Parag Agarwal.

He’s an Indian American.

So you now have, you know, Indian immigrants, I guess, first or second generation running

Google with Sundar, Sasha Nadella at Microsoft, the CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayan, the CEOs

of MasterCard, Nokia, NAPA and IBM, all Indian Americans.

So there’s no question that people of color can be spectacularly successful in the United States.

And I think those communities are…

Don’t mess with the Browns.

Hold on.

Those communities are so busy availing themselves of the abundant opportunities for success

in this country that they haven’t been basically involved in politics because they haven’t

been complaining about anything.

They’ve just been succeeding.

Too busy winning.

Too busy winning.

Yeah.

There’s a viral joke.

If you’re a CEO in Silicon Valley, you live long enough to see yourself replaced by an

Indian CEO.

That trended.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Look, Satya, Sundar, there’s like four or five other examples, but it’s now just absolutely

a great triumph.

It’s amazing for our society that a lot of people who are immigrants or sons of immigrants

come here and run the largest, most dynamic, important companies in the world.

This is an incredible win.

And we have to reboot immigration in this country.

I believe in this very strongly that we need to get more intelligent people here.

And if you come here for your degree, we need to staple a green card to your degree when

you come up and pick it up on stage at Stanford or Harvard or whatever, community college,

you should stay here and build companies here.

We have to really open that up.

That was one of the huge failings of the Trump presidency and now going into Biden, who doesn’t

seem to care about immigration either.

Both of these people, it’s huge fails.

Both parties do not want to bring intelligent people here.

I want to talk about Mike Bloomberg’s $750 million donation.

Okay, that’s what we’ll end on.

Explain to people what happened.

He’s given 750 to charter schools.

Am I correct?

First of all, Mike’s a boss.

I’ve known him for 15 years.

The best.

He is the best.

He is an absolute stone cold boss.

Killer.

Before I tell this story of what he did, you know, Mike was the largest donor to Johns

Hopkins.

And for years, he would donate without any fanfare.

And this is something that I’ve actually copied from him.

I’ve given money to my alma mater, not anywhere near the same amount as he has.

But, you know, after he passed a billion dollars of donations, he made it public.

And he was able to make Johns Hopkins permanently need blind.

And so it’s kind of like Johns Hopkins became this bastion to attract the smartest kids

period bar none.

Right.

And everybody gets and everybody gets their their way paid basically.

So he announced a program 750 million dollars over the next four or five years, I think

to get 150,000 kids, Jason, tell me if I got this wrong, into charter schools all around

the country.

And he basically just talked about how, you know, the pandemic is really let our kids

down in every single way possible.

And he had these quotes from the leader of the California Teachers Union.

And it was so odious, the things that she said, and the biggest quote was basically

like, you can recall Gavin Newsom, and you can recall the mayor of a city, but you can’t

recall me.

So I’m just going to do what I want.

And it was it was unbelievable.

It was disgusting, actually.

Man, I wish he had won for president.

Number one issue I Glenn Young can one in Virginia was that was schools.

It was the fact that you had these school lockdowns and closures.

And then also, the parents weren’t happy with what’s being taught in the schools.

And the unions and the politicians are beholden to them are completely arrogant about this

and explicitly say to the parents, you don’t get to decide what you’re by the way, arrogant

is the right word.

David, if you read these quotes in the Wall Street Journal article, it’s disgusting.

It’s disgusting the way this woman talks about our kids.

It’s really disgusting.

And, well, it takes a rare democrat like Bloomberg to basically stand up to them.

I mean, Biden certainly doesn’t because they are the number one specialist Democratic Party

in terms of the manpower and boots in the ground and donations.

You will never hear a politician like Gavin Newsom ever stand up to them because he wants

to be president.

He doesn’t want to basically he doesn’t want to cross any major interest of the Democratic

Party.

It takes an outsider like Bloomberg to understand how they were able to sell so effectively

anti choice for parents and schools like everybody in the world.

100% of people in America know that choice and competition equals better outcomes, better

products.

That’s not up for debate.

And somehow they were able to flip people’s thinking that no, no competition in schools

was more equitable and that created more equity in the world.

How did they do that?

Or how did they pull this off?

They just paid everybody off.

They didn’t do that.

They never gave parents a choice because parents didn’t know a choice was possible.

We took a system.

That’s my point.

How did we dilute people into thinking?

I’ll tell you.

Yeah.

No, they didn’t have to dilute people.

They just had to basically use their money to pay off a small cohort of individuals to

basically back their own view.

That’s it.

Here’s some of her quotes if you want to read them.

Number one, there’s no such thing as learning loss because Mike Mike was basically saying

that you know, these kids have stopped learning and there’s a huge learning.

She said there’s no such thing as learning loss.

She said in an interview with LA magazine, our kids didn’t lose anything.

It’s okay that hold on.

It’s okay that our babies may not have learned their times tables.

They learned resilience.

That’s honestly, that’s a crock.

That’s a crock of who is this person?

And how do we get her out of office?

And what is she like?

But but the money the money quote was this one.

You can recall the governor.

You can recall the school board.

But how are you going to recall me?

That’s really come on fate.

Let’s go.

Saks do you have a purple pack?

This is Cecily Cecily my art cruise, the head of the Los Angeles teachers.

Somebody start recall Cecily.org will recall all of them.

I think this recalling trend is brilliant.

Like if people are absolutely not doing their job.

Yes, recall them.

She should be allowed obviously to be a great representative for LA school teachers and

fight on their behalf.

That’s what unions and union leaders are supposed to do.

But something tells me between that goal and how she expressed herself here.

Something has happened and that’s corrupted her go to market, if you will, that I think

it’s really scary.

It’s a town.

She has an arrogance there in those quotes.

That’s just obvious.

Look, the thing about these policies, progressive policies is they hurt the communities that

they that they pretend to be speaking for the most.

And so who is hurt by learning loss the most it’s disadvantaged kids who can’t afford

private tutors.

The exact same thing is true of defund the police and this decarceration and deprosecution.

The communities that get hit the hardest are the ones that are exposed to the most crime.

They’re basically the most deprived areas.

The rich people can hire private security, have high walls, live in gated communities.

And so we’re seeing over and over again.

This is why Eric Adams, who basically is a pro police guy in New York City, got huge

percentages of the votes of minority communities in places like the Bronx.

And Glenn Youngkin did extremely well in Virginia with minority communities.

So, you know, these and they tend to be primarily white progressives like Jason Boudin, like

Georgia Gascogne, like Gavin Newsom.

They’re the craziest ones.

They’re the craziest ones.

They are deranged.

They are.

They are so deranged.

These are these are luxury beliefs that they that they’ve learned.

Absolutely.

Virtue signaling is so just a luxury, luxury beliefs.

Speaking of crazy progressive, we just go back to the Twitter thing for a second, because

I think there’s a little bit more to say there about Jack Dorsey stepping down, because I

think there’s a real fear on the part of a lot of people that Twitter now is going to

slide into even greater censorship like YouTube has, because now you have a CEO who, you know,

Perag, who said last year in 2020, there’s an article where he basically said that Twitter

does not need to follow the principles of the First Amendment as content moderation

policy.

So here you have a company.

I mean, you just look at the bookends of Jack Dorsey’s reign as CEO, and it’s really a sharp

contrast.

You had when Dick Costello was CEO 10 years ago, he said, we are the free speech wing

of the free speech party.

And now to Perag is CEO Dorsey’s handpicked successor 10 or 11 years later, basically

saying that the First Amendment does not matter.

They don’t have to follow it when it comes to their content moderation.

So I think it’s been a real sea change over there and how they view their mission.

They used to be in favor of free speech.

They used to think that what they’re doing was democratizing.

Now they basically are pushing this agenda of censorship.

You’ve seen it, censorship of really any opinion that violates the elite consensus, like on

COVID, like on many of these issues.

It could be simpler, David.

It could just be that it’s just really hard to run these things at scale.

And so they’re all just saying, you know what, it’s so hard.

I don’t want to run it anymore.

I don’t think it’s that hard.

I mean, so here’s the thing.

So Mike Solana had a column where he’s basically arguing that Jack Dorsey was really a secret

defender of the First Amendment and the censorship would be even worse or will be once he’s gone.

I think there’s some.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I agree that it was.

Well, let me let me tell you the part I disagree with.

I agree.

I agree.

Things are only going to get worse once he’s gone.

Well, no, I know he is for freedom of speech.

He just didn’t like to have to deal with the government and all these issues.

Like, I think it just became untenable because of the scale.

But he is a free speech guy.

But the one thing with Larry Page.

Same with Larry Page, yes.

This is on a personal basis.

We know this.

Edmund Burke had a great quote saying that all that is necessary for evil to triumph

is for good men to do nothing.

Jack Dorsey may be a good man, but he did nothing or very little to stop this agenda

of censorship.

When they came to him and said they’re going to de-platform a sitting president of the

United States, all he had to say was no, no.

He had the veto power and he didn’t use it.

Listen, he left.

I mean, I hate to get into politics here because people hate this part of the show, but he

let he specifically believe that Trump should stay on the platform because he was president

and he stood up to people for four years who told them, get president off.

Like everybody was screaming, Trump shouldn’t be on here.

And he said, no, he’s the president.

He should be on that.

That was his position.

It was January 6th that he took him off.

All these guys, Larry, Larry and Sergey, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey.

They are all fundamentally free speech people.

They believe in the power of the open Internet.

I remember in the early days at Google, the intention and the motivation behind the mission

of Google was the democratization of access to information.

By creating access to information and making all information, all points of view, all data

available, they believed that democracy would flourish around the world and that would enable

these things that would allow these societies that were limited in information, access information

to flourish and transform themselves.

And I think the challenge arises when the political motivation where someone’s voice

that’s being spoken is viewed and deemed to be harmful or viewed and deemed to be inflammatory

or viewed and deemed to be too violence inducing.

And that’s where the push comes to shove in these kind of governance decisions that these

folks end up having to make.

It’s not an easy position.

Fundamentally, philosophically, I think that everyone that’s involved in the Internet,

all technologists, they all have the same intention and motivation and point of view.

But it is so frigging hard to navigate what ends up happening.

And by the way, look at what happened to 4chan.

4chan was supposed to be this open, no one’s going to touch it.

And then there were pictures of like people being murdered and raped and all this other

sort of terrible stuff that emerged on 4chan.

And same at Reddit, right?

Remember the whole controversy around Reddit needing to clamp down?

And Ellen and others got a lot of heat for clamping down on the free speech, quote unquote,

of what was going on on Reddit.

Revenge porn.

Yeah, there’s a line.

Because there’s a line.

And it’s very hard.

Your point of view on what the line should be and someone else’s point of view on what

the line should be is a difference of opinion.

And at the end of the day, opinions are going to drive…

And yours, David, is based on your guy getting banned.

Let’s be clear here.

If your guy hadn’t been banned, that’s the tip of your spear.

No, I think, quite frankly, I think the fact that he’s off Twitter, I think is frankly

great for my team, if you want to call it that, because…

Oh boy, here we go.

Here it comes.

Here it comes.

No, I mean, look…

Download the Colin app at App Store right now.

Colin app is available on Android.

Do a Google Play and I’m going to call it app.

No, let me respond.

Let me respond to it.

Shemoth, are you eating rice?

Is Shemoth eating rice right now?

I had an incredible barley salad.

Okay, no, let’s back off.

And then a little brezzino.

I want to respond to what Freeberg said.

Okay, so Freeberg is exactly…

Closing argument.

Closing argument is this.

Freeberg is exactly right about where the internet stood 10 years ago.

You’re right that Zuck and Page and Dorsey all believed in the open internet.

They believed in the democratizing power of the internet.

When the Green Revolution happened in 2009, everybody was cheering.

So what changed?

I’ll tell you what changed.

In 2016, they got a candidate elected who they didn’t like, and their principles

were so skin deep, basically so superficial, that they completely flipped

because they got one election where there was a result they didn’t like.

And so they turned against democracy.

Look, Twitter and democracy worked in 2016.

The establishment lost because they had supported two decades of futile wars

in the Middle East, trade policy with China that hollowed out jobs,

border policy that didn’t make sense.

The American people sent the establishment a message in 2016.

The establishment should have taken the note, okay, but they didn’t.

Instead, what they did is blame social media for disinformation,

Russian collusion, hate speech, white supremacy, what have you.

And since then, they’ve been on a mission to ban those things

from their social networks.

It is a total myth, okay?

The reason why Trump won the election in 2016 is because of the issues he ran on.

The establishment should have taken the note.

Instead, they’ve been on this wild goose chase attacking disinformation.

Hey, Nick, Nick, can you just edit out that last part of David’s

I don’t want anybody to hear it.

Thank you.

Yeah, we get to vote.

Yeah, let’s vote David’s Trump rant on the episode.

Take that out, Nick.

Please just bleep it out.

No, he never said anything.

Don’t you think the biggest winner here is going to be TikTok?

Because if Twitter does go forward with the standing,

if they say, look, you can’t put user-generated content on our platform

if it has video and images of people without their consent and approval,

it’s going to eliminate all of this democratization of access to video feeds

of riots and crime and all sorts of things that have been a real big boon.

So TikTok’s not going to do that.

TikTok’s going to end up soaking up this whole market, right?

For user-generated content.

Just so everybody knows what we’re talking about.

The day after Jack left, they said there’s going to be a new safety and security.

Again, if you feel unsafe, that’s when you get that little,

your antenna should go up.

So if you feel unsafe because somebody posted a picture of you,

even if you were in a public space, which is completely valid,

you can take a picture of anybody in a public space that if you didn’t consent

and you feel unsafe, then you can have it taken down.

And this has led to people thinking like,

you can’t take a picture at a Warriors game of people in the background

without getting the 20 people in the row to consent.

It’s kind of like a backstop, I think,

but it is definitely a very bizarre position to take that people in public

can’t have their picture taken because that is a just canonical example

of freedom of speech and you don’t have a right to privacy if you’re out in public.

So it kind of falls into your category, David.

The policy doesn’t make, the policy doesn’t even make any sense.

Nobody even understands it.

It’s illogical.

It’s very poorly rolled.

It’s illogical.

Look, you could have set a policy of, listen,

if you have a non-public person being harassed,

you can always take down basically unauthorized footage of that person.

It could have been a harassment policy.

Instead, they just banned all public video footage.

And you know it’s going to be applied selectively.

Here’s my problem with this disinformation argument, okay,

is where are the warning labels or the banning of tweets basically describing

Kyle Rittenhouse as a white supremacist across straight lines with an AR-15?

That is not true, okay?

But that message went viral on Twitter.

The Steele dossier went viral on Twitter, and yet there are no warning.

Hold on a second.

There are no warning labels to this day,

despite the fact that that’s been completely debunked.

I’m not trying to defend any specific politician in particular, Jason.

I know you think this is all about Trump.

It’s not.

It’s about the double standard, okay?

These censorship principles only exist so the employees of the company can

censor one side of the debate they don’t agree with.

You’ve got to admit that there is a ton of bias and one-sidedness in the way

these principles are enforced.

I agree there’s bias.

I agree that these companies are 70, 80% Democrat, and I agree they all have

significant issues around Trump derangement syndrome.

We’ve got to go.

Chamath has had to leave the building.

He had to go on to his next meeting for the dictator, the queen of quinoa,

the sultan of science, and the Raymond David Sachs,

who I’m going to go get a Cuban sandwich with right now that we’re both going

to look at and poke around and take two bites of so we can say,

My guy, the Raymond David Sachs.

We’ll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.

We’ll let your winners ride.

Raymond David Sachs.

I’m going all in.

We open-sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

I love you, Wesley.

The queen of quinoa.

I’m going all in.

Let your winners ride.

Let your winners ride.

I’m going all in.

Besties are gone.

That’s my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because

they’re all just useless.

It’s like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

Wet your feet.

Wet your feet.

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.

I’m going all in.