Hey, everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast

with Jason Kalacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya.

We record this podcast, well,

on a really unique schedule, Chamath.

What’s our schedule right now, whenever we feel like it?

Basically, it is whenever our significant others

get so sick of us that they kick us off

and say, don’t come back.

Yeah, we get thrown to the pool house.

We decide to pop up the podcast.

You’re in Atherton.

I am in the city in San Francisco.

Thank you, Duke of Discretion.

Is there anything else you’d like to do?

Tell them my address, my gate code.

Gate code, out the fence.

You know, we had two guests on

that people just went absolutely crazy for,

the two Davids. But they weren’t available, so.

We’re just gonna talk shit about them.

No, we have two amazing Davids in our lives,

David Friedberg and David Sachs,

and they are super smart, super effective at their work,

everything we’re not, Chamath.

And so we thought we’d bring them back on the podcast,

and we’ll do a little round table here

and talk about life in the age of Corona.

So welcome back to the podcast, David Sachs.

Yeah, good to be back with you.

And also David Friedberg.

Thank you guys, happy to be here.

All right, fantastic.

So I just wanna start off with our quar check.

How is everybody doing in this quarantine?

How’s everybody’s mental health?

Let’s start with you, Sachs.

Well, as you might be able to see,

we’ve moved our bunker to a undisclosed Mexican location.

And it’s been great.

I think it’s really kind of sad

because where we’re at is a tourist city

that would normally be at peak season,

and it’s just deserted right now.

All the construction stopped.

Normally you see lots of hotels and houses being built,

and that’s all stopped.

And there’s no tourists,

so it’s all just kind of cleared out.

But I think it’s quite safe.

Every worker that I’ve seen here

since we landed at the airport got transported

to the community we’re at has been wearing a mask,

much more consistent than I think in the US.

And I think it’s been fine.

Now, of course, you founded the Kraft Venture Capital firm,

and people know before that you obviously did Yammer

and sold that to Microsoft for a billion dollars plus.

And before that, you were the COO at PayPal.

What’s going on with your business?

Are you actively investing?

And how is your firm running remote?

It’s worked very well.

I mean, we’ve always been super collaborative as a firm.

We were already on Zoom,

and we share everything on Yammer.

And so for us, just moving to Zoom wasn’t that difficult.

We’ve done four or five deals, I think,

since the whole kind of quarantine started.

I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.

Did you say that you actually use Yammer now in 2020?

We’re still using it.

Oh my God, is Yammer still available?

Yeah. That’s insane.

I mean, it’s kind of gotten a little bit buried

inside of Microsoft, but you can certainly still get it.

And no, we love it.

I mean, the whole firm kind of works in Yammer,

and it works very well for us.

And now what’s going to happen

with this incredible office that you have,

this beautiful office you have in San Francisco

in commercial real estate,

now that are you going to come back to work?

We saw Twitter and Square, the Jack collection of companies,

they’re not going to come back to their offices.

They’ll work from home primarily going forward.

What are you going to do?

Well, it’ll be a great asset for us in the year 2025

or something like that.

No, I mean, we will eventually go back to work there.

I think that the team still likes having an office.

I think, you know, the idea that everyone wants to work out

of like a small room and, you know,

extra room in their house,

I think it’s probably getting,

it’s probably a little overrated.

I think people would like to get back to the office.

But do we have to have one?

No, I mean, I think we’ve proven

that we can do our jobs via Zoom.

And, you know, we’ve done a lot of,

we’ve done, like I said,

we’ve done four or five deals since this started

where we haven’t met with the entrepreneur in person.

You know, it’s all been done via Zoom and it’s worked great.

All right, Chamath, how are you doing?

What’s your mental health like?

You know, I get to see you once in a while

on CNBC throwing bombs, but how are you doing?

I was really excited for phase two of the shelter in place

to start here in San Mateo County.

So that’s been really good.

A new poker table that I had built arrived today,

which I’ll be installing after this.

And what I mean by I’ll be installing-

You’ll be supervising.

I’ll be supervising.

You’ll be watching as people do real work.

I’ll be watching and-

It’s a beautiful table.

I saw the pictures of it.

Does it have an infinity edge?

Is it an infinity edge poker table?

No, no, no, no.

But I’ll send you a picture when it’s all done,

but it just looks stunning.

And I really want to try to organize a game soon

so that I can get you guys back into my little cave here.

Yeah.

I am ready for this shelter in place to end.

I’ll just be honest.

And I think that my sentiments

are the sentiments of a lot of people.

It’s really tough, really, really tough.

I’m losing all my motivation, to be quite honest.

It is weird to not see people,

and you’re an extrovert, David.

You’re an introvert.

And then David Freeberg also on the line.

David, how are you handling all of this?

I’m fine.

I think one of the things that made a huge difference

for me is the creating a rhythm in the day,

because there isn’t one when you kind of normally get up

and you go to work,

and then you come home at the end of the day from work.

That’s a rhythm,

and you kind of get kind of adjusted to it.

So not having that,

a lot of people I’ve been hearing are struggling with that.

I was certainly struggling with it, having sleep issues.

And I sit on about a dozen boards,

some of which are small companies,

some of which have a couple hundred employees.

And I’ve been hearing pretty consistently

mental health issues across all the companies.

And I think it’s just been really grating on people.

I think it, number one kind of says,

we probably do need to be together and have social space.

As David said, like being in the same office,

people really miss that.

And you get a lot of value from that.

And I’ve been getting up every day in the last couple

of weeks and going offsite, going out of my house to go work

or actually working on another place

that I have like a little office there,

and I go kind of work there.

And so that’s made a huge impact, honestly,

on my mental health, being able to do that every day.

So just doing that, it’s been helpful.

Not everyone has that privilege,

but I think it speaks a lot to why we’re going to need

to go back to offices when this is all done.

And what do you think about,

what’s happening with your businesses?

Obviously you’re running a startup studio,

I guess would be one way to describe it,

where you create companies and then spin them out.

What’s been the business interruption, if any?

We have a couple of hardware and lab companies.

That’s most of what we’ve done.

And so those operations are paused.

So that’s been really frustrating.

The teams have all found ways to adjust and work from home.

So our companies are not predominantly software-based.

There’s a lot of software,

but it’s not predominantly software.

So it’s been difficult on those scientists and engineers

that work in a lab or in a physical environment

that they have to go to to do their work.

The larger companies,

we have a number of food businesses

that happen to be in the food supply chain

one way or another.

Frankly, those businesses are doing fantastically well.

And there’s been just this incredible success

in the era of COVID on kind of a focus on fundamentals

like food, supply chain, efficiency,

availability of things that people need.

And we were doing a lot in human health

and we’ve kind of benefited from that.

So yeah, I think there’s kind of a mix for us,

but I think every business is bifurcated one way or another

during this kind of moment of punctuated equilibrium.

Yeah, I think one thing I’d like to sort of talk about

is we’ve had you both on the podcast early on

at the start of the pandemic.

And I’m curious, Chamath, now that we’re here

over two months in quarantine, sheltering in place,

and a lot of information,

a lot of cards have turned over here, right?

We’ve seen the flop, I think.

We haven’t seen the turn in the river, so to speak.

What is your assessment of what we were talking about

a month or two ago and what we thought about this

and what’s become reality and what hasn’t?

What are you more optimistic about?

What are you more pessimistic about?

Chamath, let’s start with you.

I think that we will have this pandemic

or this disease well in hand within two years.

And so whether it’s a combination

of a therapeutic and a vaccine

or just a therapeutic,

I just think that we’re gonna kick its ass.

And so that’s made me more optimistic.

I think that the thing that’s made me more pessimistic,

though, is the return to normalcy

has been sort of cut on political lines.

And it’s been so massively politicized.

I mean, when David talks about the fact that

you can go to a developing country like Mexico

and all of a sudden everybody can get around

the idea of masks,

it’s because that there’s a level of common sense there

that trumps politics.

And in the United States, that just isn’t the case.

And so what you’re seeing in this crazy way,

I think, is sort of the center left and the left

probably sticking very firmly to the ideology

of sheltering in place and a lockdown,

probably on the sort of hope

that it gets Trump out of office.

And on the other side, sort of the red states,

I think have basically said,

hey, I would rather get sick from coronavirus

and take my chances

than the 100% chance of failure

that I have in my professional life

if you leave me at home

for another week or month or what have you.

So that’s been a huge disappointment

of how political this whole thing has gotten.

And Saxe, you’ve been talking about

like common sense procedures,

sort of same question to you.

What you first thought,

and you had been talking about,

you thought an L-shaped recovery.

So we’ll get into also the economy here,

but in terms of the disease,

what did you think two months ago

that you don’t think now?

And what do you think?

Well, in preparation for this,

I kind of went through my Twitter feed

to see what I was saying the last time I was on the pod

and how well it was holding up.

And two months ago today,

I tweeted that the pandemic,

that underreaction caused the pandemic

and overreaction will cause the depression.

And I think that’s kind of where we are right now.

We still have this pandemic with us,

but now we’re also potentially facing,

I think, a potential depression

because of the way we’re overreacting.

We’re still in lockdowns

in huge swaths of the country.

And no one can quite understand why.

I mean, the original reason for the lockdowns

was to buy us time

so that the hospitals wouldn’t become overwhelmed like Italy.

Well, nowhere in the country

do the hospitals get overwhelmed

and we’re still in these lockdowns.

And so, I think that it’s long overdue for it to end.

Now, at the same time,

I agree with Chamath

that this whole thing’s become politicized

where the people who generally wanna get us out of lockdowns

don’t believe in doing anything.

A lot of them aren’t even willing to wear masks,

which I think is just kind of insane.

So, where I come out on this thing

is that I think we should end lockdowns, but wear masks.

And it’s very hard to find anybody

in the political spectrum who agrees with that

because one side wants to keep lockdowns going indefinitely

and the other doesn’t want us to wear masks.

And it makes no logical sense, obviously.

And if you think about our political system,

the left is so far left that the moderates on the left side

don’t have a place to live anymore.

And then on the right, the conservatives,

which I would put you in the group of

who were looking for fiscal conservatives,

they don’t have a home anymore either.

And so, the most reasonable approach

is clearly to start going back to work

for people who are not at risk and who wear a mask.

Yeah, I think there’s been,

since the last pod that we did together,

I think there’s been three kind of major discoveries

or sets of facts that have come out about the virus.

Number one, the official fatality rate has been over,

which is about 6%.

You know, it’s a very high fatality rate.

It’s pretty scary.

But we now know that that’s overstated

by probably at least 10x

because it doesn’t take into account

all the asymptomatic cases or mild cases

that just never got tested.

And this is the fatality rate of people

who contracted the virus.

Right, yes, exactly.

As opposed to people whose case,

the problem with the,

it’s kind of a debate between the IFR versus the CFR,

the infection fatality rate versus the case fatality rate.

The problem with kind of the official CFR numbers

is that only the people who got really sick

you know, never got tested.

And, you know, Freiburg was the earliest person

I know to start talking about the need

for wide scale population testing

and these blood serology tests

and other kinds of tests to establish

what the real baseline is.

But regardless of like,

and there’s been a whole bunch of different tests

with different results, you know,

we don’t know exactly what the true IFR is to this day,

but we do know it’s probably closer to half a percent

than to 5%.

So that’s sort of discovery number one.

I think discovery number two is,

and we knew a little bit,

we saw a little bit of this from the Wuhan data,

but now it’s really clear

that which populations are at risk.

And it’s, you know,

the data seems to suggest that people under 60

who are healthy don’t have sort of preexisting conditions

are 50 times less likely to develop,

or there’s a 50X greater chance for those over 60

in terms of, you know, having a really bad outcome.

And so for people under 60

who don’t have these preexisting conditions,

it’s, you know, it’s just not,

yes, there’s always, you know, examples to the contrary,

but it’s not this sort of gigantic risk.

And so for two thirds of the population,

they don’t have a huge risk

and we’re still locking them down.

I think the third thing, the third study,

not just studies, there’s been studies

and there’s been models,

and then we’ve also seen practice,

is that wide-scale use of masks

or ubiquitous mask wearing

is sufficient to control the virus,

meaning to stop the exponentiality of the virus.

We’ve seen, you know, in the Asian countries

or Czechoslovakia, other places,

they’ve been able to get the, you know,

the so-called R-naught, the viral coefficient

to go below one with, you know, wide-scale use of masks.

And so we have a way

to prevent the virus from going exponential

that doesn’t require lockdowns.

And so the thing, you know, I blogged about

the last time I was on your show

was why would you do this most severe thing,

these lockdowns, and not do this easy thing

that’s just merely inconvenient, which is a mask.

Freeberg, when you look at it

and you’re the, I think have the deepest science,

clearly have the deepest science background of all of us,

how do you look at this pandemic

now that we’re 75 days into it here in the Bay Area?

And obviously, you know, this started in December,

it looks like, in China.

What’s your take on it now?

What did you get right early?

And what have you changed your mind about recently?

I think, I’m actually funny when you say that.

I just pulled up the original WHO joint mission

on COVID final report.

And the date of this report, by the way, is February 20th.

So there was this big thing they published

40 pages long from the WHO.

And in it, they highlighted, you know,

this fatality rate estimate inside of Hubei,

you know, Wuhan and outside of Hubei.

You know, we knew from this data very early on

that we were at about a half percent fatality rate.

And then, you know, we saw all of this other stuff

happen with Korea and the Princess cruise ship

and the NBA players very early on.

We saw all these people that were roughly asymptomatic.

And we’re starting to get two kind of explanations

for why that is.

But from the beginning, I felt really like, you know,

this is gonna be a largely asymptomatic

kind of spreading infectious factor.

What I got wrong was when we went into lockdown,

I don’t know, Chamath, if you remember this

when we talked the first time on Jason’s,

on your guys’ podcast, I asked you guys,

or you guys asked me when I thought we’d be back.

And I was like, oh, April 7th, we’ll be back at work.

And I also had a bet going with you guys.

And I said, we’re gonna have less than 20,000 deaths

in the US.

I so overestimated the effectiveness of the lockdown.

And I think that was kind of, you know,

one of the more kind of like striking things to me

is the quote unquote lockdown.

And I just sent the video to Nick.

Nick, do you have it?

Can you queue it up?

So basically, this is what I think has happened

in the United States.

Like pull this thing up.

I was in Berkeley on Saturday and I went to play,

to meet some buddies and we played Frisbee golf on campus

and had a beer, some college buddies of mine.

And so I’m walking around in Berkeley

and there is frat party after frat party going on.

No masks, everyone’s on top of each other.

You can see the video right here.

I took a video of one of the frat parties.

I think that’s beer pong.

Yeah, they’re all paying beer pong.

There’s like girls and drinking

and people are passing around bottles of vodka

and there’s no mask.

And this was the entire campus of Berkeley.

Like, and I think this is what’s gone on

like around the country.

So the belief that you could just kind of like

lock away the virus, I believe like, oh my God,

it’s so extreme.

It’s so draconian.

We’re going to shut down the world

and this thing is going to get stopped in 30 days

like happened in China.

That is not what happened in the United States of America.

Like people want to be free.

People want to party.

People want to live their life.

They want to go to work.

They want to see their friends and family.

And they’re not used to being told no by the government.

And so I think that’s been to me,

the biggest surprise is just like how ineffective

the quote unquote lockdown has been.

And I think it really speaks to the need

that David mentioned, which is this lockdown isn’t binary.

You can’t just say lock everyone down or let them all out.

You’ve got to nuance your way to a solution,

which means like masks,

which means watching out for nursing homes,

which means temperature checking

before letting people into buildings of over 100 people.

Like all the stuff that I think needs to be done

for this to be kind of effective at tracking and tracing.

And we can’t just assume that a quote unquote lockdown

is going to keep people inside

and keep this thing from spreading

because the frat party, as you’ll see,

is the perfect representation

of what’s really going on out there.

All right, circling back around to you Chamath,

what do you think of what the two Davids

sort of outlined there in terms of the path forward

and how we all handicapped what was going on?

Well, I think the reality is that by hook or crook,

we’re going to basically exit this lockdown

sooner than we think,

because I think people just can’t take it anymore.

So there’s no point in having a shelter in place order

if everybody’s running around playing beer pong.

And so it’s not doing anything.

And so you might as well get the productive value

of the economy going again

by letting people go back to work.

And just finding some simple ways

that people can look past the politics

and just do the right thing.

Wear a goddamn mask and shut the fuck up

and go back to work.

It’s really like, I mean, when you think about it,

it’s like, why is this such a big deal?

Get everything you want

and just put a little bit of cloth over your face.

I mean, a lot of the folks that push back on this,

they’re better off wearing the mask.

Yeah, I mean, it is pretty striking

when you watch the protests

and you see a bunch of people who are obviously older

and obviously obese.

Those are not the best looking knives in the drawer,

let’s just put it that way.

Definitely not.

Little dull and rusty is what I would say.

Well, and you know, they’re carrying guns

and they’ve never served a day in the army.

I mean, they’re literally cosplaying Marines.

I have nothing to say about that.

All I’m saying is this whole mask thing

is not such a big deal.

Just if you can wear a mask

and get back to being productive and get back to a job,

I think you should be allowed to.

All right, so we had a big debate,

V-shaped, W-shaped, U-shaped, L-shaped recovery.

I was in the, I’m aspirationally V-shaped,

but I’m expecting a U.

I think for Sachi, you were the L

and I think Chamath, you were the W,

the U or the L.

We’ve had a V.

How do you explain, Chamath,

what is going on in the stock market?

Because you said it was the end of days.

You said this is gonna be a disaster.

Is it going to be a disaster?

Is this the end of the days

and we’ve got some false rebound

and this V-shaped recovery is not sustainable?

How do you explain this inexplicable V-shaped response?

There’s two things to keep in mind.

First of all, the economy is completely fucked.

So don’t look at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft,

Google and a handful of internet SaaS companies

and kid yourself.

We have 30 million American men and women out of work.

That is every fifth person you see

walking down the street does not have a job.

What happens when lockdown ends?

If the lockdown ends in June,

as expected for most people,

how many people are, how many rebound?

No, so look, here’s the thing that we’ve had.

We’ve had trillions of dollars of money

printed into the system.

And when you print that money into the system,

which the Federal Reserve has done,

it hits the asset markets

and it has basically stabilized the bond market

and the incremental dollar sits in the hands

of an individual who must put the money to work.

Because when you look back on this,

this is not a random person managing their 401k.

The overwhelming majority of money

sits in the hands of hedge funds or pension funds

or sovereign wealth funds or mutual funds.

They have a job to do.

And so you have to think about

what is their incremental decision.

So even if the stock market made no sense

on any valuation metric,

the incremental dollar that they have,

which they’re paid to put to work will get put to work.

And so what you’ve actually seen is a dispersion.

And what I mean by that is if you graph

the S&P 500 index versus the unweighted S&P 500 index,

which basically means the first one

ranks companies by market cap

and gives the biggest companies more weight.

The other one ranks every company equally.

There’s been a massive split, a dispersion.

And what it really shows is that

companies that traffic in bits,

so software businesses have a bid

and companies that traffic in atoms

have gotten completely decimated

and they are literally worthless.

And so when you put all these things together,

the real economy is in the toilet.

There are tens of millions of men and women out of work.

The earnings power of real companies

that do physical things in the world

are cheaper and lower than they’ve ever been.

Meanwhile, the companies that have high velocity,

high margin software driven businesses

have gone to the moon.

So it’s unfair to look at 30 or 40 businesses

and paint that as a V-shaped recovery.

It is a equity market that is buoyed by Fed dollars

that is not mapping to the reality

of what’s happening on the ground.

Okay, so Sax, you’re pretty plugged into the economy

and you think about this a lot.

What do you think the recovery looks like?

Is this going to be two, three, four, five quarter recession?

Is it going to be depression era

like some people are apt to say?

What keeps you up at night thinking about the economy

and what gives you hope?

Well, it kind of depends if there are other shoes to drop.

So I agree with Tramath that the state of the economy

right now is terrible

and it’s divorced from the financial markets

because of all the money printing and interventions

that the Fed and Treasury have been doing.

One way to think about it as well,

the stock market’s denominated in U.S. dollars

and if they just printed a whole bunch more of them,

those dollars are worth less

and so the price of the stocks are going to rise.

But yeah, I think looking forward,

it’s probably going to be a two to three year process

to get out of this unless some other shoe drops

which could make it much worse.

So you’re betting on two to three years

to get back to let’s call it single digit unemployment.

Um, well let’s see, we’re at like what,

15% right now or something like that?

So, you know-

35 million people, you get down to 10 million again,

20 million?

Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say.

It’s going to take a long time to create all those jobs.

You know, a lot of these businesses

are not just going to come racing right back.

So yeah, I think it’s probably like a two to three year

process to get back to some sort of, you know-

And by the way, the thing you have to remember is like,

look, the unemployment numbers that we have had

in the last probably seven or eight years,

so during Obama and Trump,

have been completely manipulated

because the number of people

that are entirely leaving the workforce is quite high.

And so, you know, it’s not just a numerator problem.

We have a denominator problem too.

There are fewer and fewer workers that, you know,

are willing to work because some of them just give up.

Right, or it’s just not worth it

for the pay that’s available is another stated reason.

So the thing that we’re going to have to figure out

is like how many of the people

that are leaving the workforce may never come back.

And that has a societal toll

and weight that we all have to bear.

Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of people

who maybe are in their 60s or maybe even late 50s,

they got 10, 20 years left

that they could be working in management,

sales, whatever it is.

And they just say, you know what, it’s not worth it.

I’m going to go try to find a place to stay

and maybe not rejoin the workforce.

Early retirement or just capitulation.

Yeah.

Well, and, but, you know,

remember what I said about other shoes dropping.

I mean, we’re still in the early,

I think we’re still in the early stages

seeing the repercussions of what, you know,

but two, three months shut down the economy,

you know, what that’s going to look like.

And so the, you know, the wave of defaults is just beginning

and, you know, who knows what happens with cities and states

and so on down the line.

I mean, who knows, you know,

do the debt markets have kind of an inexhaustible,

you know, desire to buy US debt

or could we reach some sort of saturation point?

And then that triggers the next, you know, set of crises.

So we just don’t, you know,

I would say like the two to three year outlook

is the one that’s kind of like what it looks like today.

But if there are these other big shoes to drop,

it could turn into something much worse.

I think, Friedberg, we’re all in agreement

that there will be a second wave of some type,

just depends on how big the spike is.

Do you think there’ll be another

New York City level outbreak where we’ll see, you know,

2000 people, 1500 people dying in a certain region every day

for some sustained period of time?

What are the chances of that happening, Friedberg?

I don’t know.

I mean, I think going forward, the, you know,

the New York situation, people’s behaviors have been shocked.

So, you know, to the points earlier,

the most effective thing you can do is stop coughing

on your hand, touching a railing.

Someone else touches the railing and touches their mouth.

I mean, that’s kind of how this goes.

You know, there’s been early on some weird,

like aerosolized studies that they’ve kind of said,

hey, this thing spreads in the air and so on.

It’s really, you know,

you gotta be in a closed kind of confined space.

So people are wearing masks now.

So the likelihood of the transmission happening

at the rate that we saw in New York,

there’s a great paper out of MIT, by the way,

that shows how this happened on the subway.

Oh, really?

Describe it.

Identified the subway as kind of the primary vector

that drove transmission in New York City.

That was always my thesis.

And I remember talking about it and saying,

how is this not obvious to everybody

that 8 million people ride that thing every day

or something?

Like, it’s so obvious.

And they did an incredible job proving it.

So it’s not like people running in Central Park

or spreading coronavirus to each other.

It’s everyone in these confined spaces coughing in the air,

and then you kind of get this stuff.

And 20 people get on and off at every stop.

That’s the other thing people don’t realize

is that it’s not just a bunch of people.

It’s not an airplane where you have X number of people

going in one direction for three, four, five hours.

This is 20 people getting on and off every five minutes.

It’s almost like you couldn’t design

a better incubator for it.

And I don’t think a city in the United States

approaches the density that you have in New York.

So remember, these are not deterministic factors.

There’s like a spectrum, a probabilistic spectrum here.

So you have a lot of people,

they have a certain type of behavior,

they’re not wearing masks.

You kind of add these up,

and you end up with this really high kind of vector

that drives this rapid spread, as we saw in New York City.

You’re not gonna see that in Dallas.

You’re not gonna see that in Houston.

You’re not gonna see that in San Diego.

You’re gonna have more of the slow, steady burn

as some risk is taken in the environment.

Some risk is taken by frat parties

and people not wearing masks and people touching their mouth.

But it’s not gonna have the same sort of massive effect

you saw in New York.

So I wouldn’t expect us to have a New York style

second wave.

I do expect there to continue to be this like slow burn,

going forward of new cases.

And it’s certainly gonna be more obvious

now that we’re testing a lot more.

And so Chamath, at this point,

we’re basically putting a price on life and saying,

hey, some amount of deaths is worth taking the risk.

And as Americans, a unique group of people in the world

in how we look at personal freedom,

Americans are just making the choice.

Hey, listen, if you don’t wanna take the risk, stay home.

But the rest of us, if we wanna take the risk,

we’re gonna go take the risk.

That’s what this has come down to in your mind, Chamath?

Yeah, I think that it’s very difficult for Americans

to envision a world where their personal freedoms

are infringed upon.

I mean, it’s sort of like one of the founding principles

of the entire country.

This is why I think that the tragedy of this thing

is that the way to get everybody what they want

is so simple.

As David said, it’s like above 65, you stay home,

you work remotely.

Under 65, you temperature check and wear a mask

and you’re 95% of the way there,

but it’s become a left versus right decision to do it.

The mask wearers are still in a lockdown

and the non-mask wearers wanna get back to work.

And basically, it’s just another kind of culture war

between the left and the right.

It’s really just shocking to me.

I mean, for what it’s worth, I am a betting man,

so I’ll just tell you.

My line now is that I think that Donald Trump

is overwhelmingly likely to win

as a function of people’s frustration about the lockdowns.

And I think that the Democrats’ best hope

of winning in November is ending these things

sooner rather than later.

It’s amazing we’re talking about a pandemic,

a once in a hundred year pandemic, it looks like,

and we’re literally looking at our reaction to it

through the lens of this president being reelected

or not.

Literally, that’s the determining factor

on the advice we’re giving to people.

We’re telling people they can’t go to the beach,

but they can be on an airplane.

They can’t go to the Tesla factory,

but they can ride the subway.

I mean, on a communication basis,

is there any worse way we could have communicated this

to the populace?

Well, the communication was bad,

but I think the bigger problem, quite honestly,

is that the Republican Democratic governors

in the United States can’t get on the same page.

And at the same time, there’s just a tendency

to support Donald Trump or not support him

in a very reflexive, instinctive way

that isn’t helpful right now.

And there just doesn’t seem to be enough

political wherewithal and courage to just stand up

and do the right thing,

independent of what your political persuasion is.

But I think on the margin now,

I think you have different

but very similar boundary conditions

to 2016, where there are all these people

that kind of like told you one thing and did another.

There are all these people right now

that probably are preference falsifying as we speak,

and they’ll show up into the voting booth

and they’ll be angry if they’re not back in their jobs,

especially if they’ve been laid off

as a result of not being able to get back.

And they would blame that on the Democrats,

not the Republicans, and therefore Trump gets his next term.

Well, because it’s the Democratic states

that are pushing the hardest to basically like,

you saw the craziness in Los Angeles,

but like Eric Garcetti was basically like,

we will enter the shelter in place in December of 2022.

And it’s like, this is, it’s Los Angeles.

I mean-

It’s not gonna happen.

Players gotta play.

I mean, like, this is just, this is unbelievable.

Yeah.

Well, I do, I agree.

The lockdowns, or the unwillingness to end the lockdowns

gives Trump an issue for November,

assuming this continues,

that supersedes the incompetence of the COVID response,

which is that, you know, our lives and livelihoods

are not owned by politicians to, you know,

meter out and give back to us in drips and drabs.

And as they see fit,

that is the issue that the lockdown crowd

is giving to Trump.

And I do think it will,

if it’s still the issue in November,

it will supersede the, you know,

the initial incompetence of the COVID response.

And what did you think of this whole,

what’s the drug that Trump said he was taking, David Sachs?

Hydroxychloroquine?

Yeah.

So, or Friedberg, maybe you take it.

We talked about that early on,

and that, and I think you properly said,

like, if you took it early, this could be,

you know, could, has potential,

taking it later, it’s probably too late.

I think you nailed that on the pod last time.

Why has this become such a political issue?

And what are your thoughts on that drug specifically

and its potential efficacy?

Look, I’m not a doctor,

but it, from what I understand is there’s a,

so just so you know, there’s like side effects to this drug

for a small percentage of the population.

And this drug can actually inhibit energy production

in certain cells, which can cause organs to dysfunction.

And it particularly shows up in the heart.

So people end up with what’s called a long QT interval

and potentially some heart issues

that can be pretty dangerous and deadly,

depending on your body.

So it’s really a little bit of an unknown.

There’s also issues longer term with vision impairment,

can damage your retinal cells and cause vision loss.

So there’s risk to this drug.

It’s not like taking, you know, an Advil.

It is a measured risk.

It’s a low probability, but the severity can be high.

And so typically with a scenario like that,

doctors and scientists like to see, you know,

phased clinical trials and you kind of do, you know,

randomized and you have placebo and testing.

And so that hasn’t necessarily been done

for this particular virus, this particular condition.

And often the design of those studies matters a lot.

So you could give it to a bunch of quote unquote,

COVID patients, but if it’s not being given

to COVID patients either before

or right as they’re getting sick,

maybe it doesn’t show the results that you would expect

from a prophylactic treatment,

meaning you’re getting it before you’re really sick.

And that’s where it may be the most efficacious.

And so some people are saying, wait, we don’t know enough.

Don’t do it.

It’s not worth the risk because of that small percentage,

high severity problem.

While others are saying, oh my gosh,

it’s totally worth the risk.

Cause the downside, if you get coronavirus

can be really bad.

And you know, so there’s a lot of room for debate here.

And when there’s a lot of room for debate,

you usually kind of revert to some sort of base belief

or some base kind of political point of view or something.

And I think that’s, what’s gone on here.

This isn’t a clear cut.

The sun is yellow and the sky is blue kind of conversation.

This is like, I can interpret this a lot of different ways.

It does seem that like, look, this drug, you know,

like a lot of, has an effect in the same way

that a lot of other, that this drug might have

on a lot of other viruses.

And this especially plus zinc, you know,

and this Z-Pak, this azithromycin, which is an antibiotic,

together may be really effective.

And so, yeah, if you weigh the downside

and the probability of that downside for a patient,

against what the potential upside would be,

depending on their risk factors,

now that we know those better for COVID,

you can make an educated decision

and maybe it should just be left in the hands of doctors

versus like have some national statement about it.

I don’t know.

But yeah, it’s certainly a lot of room for debate

and thus a lot of kind of, you know,

political engagement on this.

Saks, there was a lot of talk about

what the Bay Area looks like after this,

whether it’s commercial real estate with Twitter and Square

going full work from home

and people not wanting to work in cities.

What are your general thoughts on

what the world looks like a year from now

and maybe five years from now,

if there is going to be some permanent change,

what do you think it would be?

Well, there could be a big resorting.

I mean, it kind of depends if the virus becomes endemic.

It’s just something we kind of end up living with.

But, you know, so if it does, I mean,

if you’re like over 70,

are you really going to want to stay in a place

like New York City

or are you going to want to go somewhere else?

And so I could imagine if this does become

this long-term thing that’s just a endemic,

you know, if we don’t have a vaccine,

I could see cities resorting where, you know,

New York is people who are comfortable with COVID risk.

And, you know, it’s, I think San Francisco,

the big issue with San Francisco

is that there are always a bunch of reasons

not to want to live there.

I mean, the city just seems like chronically mismanaged.

There’s a huge-

Feces, lots of poop.

There’s a huge homeless problem.

It’s just, you know, public health issues with that.

There’s a lot of crime

that isn’t responded to properly.

So there’s all these like reasons not to live there.

But the reason why people chose to live there

is because the tech industry

had a very strong network effect

and you needed to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco

in order to have access to these jobs and opportunities.

And if those jobs and opportunities

are now available via Zoom

and you can be doing them from anywhere,

are people still gonna choose to live in San Francisco?

You know, with the cost of living

and housing and apartments and all the rest of it

that goes along with it.

So, yeah, I mean, I think there is some chance

that this whole remote work thing

could break Silicon Valley’s network effect.

And that would be really bad for places like San Francisco,

which otherwise might not be the greatest places to live.

Yeah, my thesis on this

in terms of getting out of the recession,

I think remote work could lead to a level of efficiency

and profitability in the companies

that we have never seen before.

If you think just about every manager now

knows how to manage remote workers, right?

You learn that in like three, four weeks.

You figure out how to manage people remote.

Even people who hated managing people remote,

all these Gen Xers and boomers who are managing,

you know, millennials and earlier Gen Xers,

they now know how to do it.

And what they quickly learn is,

these three or four people in my team are crushing it.

These two or three people don’t need to be here.

They’re not actually adding any value.

So I think what’s gonna happen is

they’re gonna cut the bottom people.

Then they’re gonna cut their office space.

Now you’ve removed, I don’t know,

call it 30% of the cost basis of the business, 40%.

And it’s operating better and people are happier.

And then when you do hire somebody,

there’s gonna be more talent available.

And you’ve just opened it up that you can hire somebody

anywhere in the world without an office.

And you don’t have to relocate them.

And you don’t have to pay,

I don’t know what you guys think the average

additional cost is to be in San Francisco,

but I’m gonna say $30,000.

So a $40,000 a year job or a $50,000 a year job

becomes a 70 or 80, something like that.

And if all that happens,

these companies are gonna be so profitable

that they’re gonna start growing.

And that leads us out of the economic downturn.

Any thoughts on my thesis?

That’s not a thesis, that’s a hope.

Yeah.

Hope’s not a fucking strategy, Jason.

Well, I just think it’s a potential way out.

I mean, what do you think in general

about this trend of remote then, Jamal?

I think it’s great.

And I think that we’re realizing that

there’s no monopoly on innovation

and companies can be really productive remotely

that most of the work in an office is busy work and politics

and you can cut it all out.

And you can do the same amount of work in much less time,

which gives you more time to frankly be with your family

or take up a hobby or learn a second language

or a third language.

I mean, I just think it’s so much better

for people to realize like we gotta,

it’s not like, it’s not 1820 or 1920, it’s 2020.

So we’re gonna live to a hundred years old.

Like we have a long time to be in the grind.

And so, working and accomplishing what you used to

in half the time and not having to commute

and being able to live where you want

and your people you like,

man, that has a huge positive impact to your kids,

you, your community.

It’s just way better.

I just think offices are just complete

kind of like, it’s all Shakespearean theater in the end

and cutting it all out is great.

And specifically San Francisco

is just a complete cesspool dump of shit.

And so, being able to just get out of that city is just-

All right, everybody, welcome to the,

you’re listening to the All In Podcast.

I read some stats yesterday

that were just so unbelievably shocking.

Like the number of break-ins, the number of-

Number one in the country.

Number one in the country.

The amount of disease that like communicable disease,

like typhoid.

And I’m like, typhoid?

I was born in a country and scratched and clawed

to emigrate as a refugee

to leave a country that had typhoid as a disease.

Welcome home, Jermoth.

Just to end up back in that in San Francisco.

Did you break it?

That’s a joke.

You brought it with you?

That’s an absolute joke.

So yeah, I mean, the idea that I’d never have to go

to San Francisco ever again is,

oh my God, it brings joy to me.

It is an unmitigated disaster.

And I think this will be part of the boom-bust cycle

that, you know, David, you were part of

when you were here at Stanford,

you know, getting an office in San Francisco

or having an apartment.

It was cheaper, I think, in the city

than it was down in Palo Alto, was it not?

Well, back in, yeah, when we moved Yammer

to San Francisco, which was 2009,

I think we were able to get space for $20 a foot per year.

Crazy.

That’s what I paid, 2007, 2008.

I read a crazy article.

It was about the Kushners and this building that they own,

that Brookfield Asset Management was gonna buy.

And it said that they bought this building

and so the Kushners moved to like Park Avenue,

the General Motors building overlooking Central Park

or something, right?

It’s a beautiful building.

And it actually quoted in there

the price that they were paying.

And it was incredible because it was like 100 bucks

at a square foot per year.

And I realized, oh my God, they’re paying less

for Central Park views in New York

than I’m paying for a warehouse in Palo Alto.

What the fuck is going on?

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, that’d be supply and demand right there.

And I thought to myself, like, this is crazy.

Like, California is so expensive.

The taxes are so high.

I think people are gonna leave in droves, honestly.

What do we think of Elon selling all his homes

and then actually saying he’s gonna move Tesla out?

I mean, I don’t think it’s a practical reality

to move Tesla out of California.

I think that the incremental facilities can be built

wherever he wants them to be built

based on where he gets the tax incentives.

Well, but I think the Tesla Fremont

was a really good example of this sort of like culture war

that’s going on, this political battle over lockdowns.

And, you know, you had kind of a mid-level

health department bureaucrat in Fremont

padlocking their factory

and saying they couldn’t go back to work.

Whereas if he was in Texas, he could.

And then, you know, around the same time

you had this whole like chilly Luther thing in Texas

where she was a small business owner, you know,

owns like a haircut place.

And she was basically gonna be put in jail for a week

for giving somebody a haircut.

And there was like a, you know, dust up over that.

So, you know, I think that like, you know,

the country is certainly ready to get back to work.

And if this is the political debate, you know, in November,

I’m not sure it will be

because six months is a really long time from now,

but, or was it four or five months?

But if this is a political debate, I, you know,

this will be the way that Trump gets reelected.

Yeah.

I think there’s gonna be some pretty

significant benefits

because of the reaction you guys are speaking to.

It’s not just about people moving,

but it’s a reaction to regulation.

And that could have some pretty profound effects

that could benefit certain sectors and businesses

and accelerate new outcomes.

One of the things that, you know,

I have a strong belief in is like,

I think in 20 years,

we could kind of eradicate all infectious disease.

The only thing holding that up is regulation

because the science is known,

the engineering is basically there,

and it’s simply a function of getting these things approved

and getting across the finish line.

Doing gene editing in humans for genetic mutations

that cause harm to humans

is a technique that we’ve known for 20 years.

And there was a guy, a patient that died in 1999

from one of the first AAV treatments,

the viral vector gene editing treatments.

After that, there was this clamp down

and suddenly everything stopped

and there was like no longer any progress in the space.

And they’re just now starting to come back.

And there’s a lot of, you know,

really interesting technology

that has been kind of hindered.

I mean, you know, not being able to put Teslas out,

I think is the tip of the iceberg

of what people are seeing regulation can do to businesses.

And look, I’m by no stretch, you know,

a libertarian party card carrier,

but I do think, and I see it in businesses

that I’m involved in all the time,

that this, you know, incredibly onerous,

like overreaching regulatory burden and bureaucrats

really hinder great new things from happening in the world.

And it’s just become so frigging apparent

how inept the people are that are making the decisions

that are doing this to us are during this crisis.

And I think it could have a profound benefit

on kind of deregulation and accelerating

the adoption of new tools and new technologies

that could really help us all.

So I view the positive side of this.

It’s not just like, everyone’s gonna leave California.

Like there’s inept bureaucrats

and overregulation everywhere.

Let’s talk geopolitics for a moment.

Chamath, you know, you heard the president call it

the Wuhan virus.

Obviously there’s no doubt that it came from there.

There is a debate.

Was this something that was not created in a lab,

but that was being studied in a lab

and accidentally got out and that’s how the jump happened.

And there’s some tension there between China and the US.

What do you think the global reaction is gonna be

and the fallout will be for China, if any,

Japan is paying factories, I read,

and helping subsidize them to move factories out of China

so they can move that dependency.

We obviously saw the dependency on PPE

and drugs being made actually in Wuhan in that area

and how we don’t have a supply chain

that we can rely on for really mission critical stuff.

How will we look at this Chinese relationship

in the United States and global post pandemic?

This is the beginning of the modern Cold War.

And so it’s America versus China,

except that China is a much more worthy adversary for us

than the USSR was at their peak.

And the reason is because China has been making

strategic investments for the last 30 years.

You know, the biggest thing that prevents China

from really going guns blazing,

broadside attack on the US is that the US dollar

is still the reserve currency of the world.

But even there, China, you know,

is trying to do a digital currency and a stable coin.

And these are all these state sponsored initiatives

that come from frankly, just strategic decision-making

to try to usurp the United States

as the most powerful country in the world.

And so again, it goes back to, is this a political issue

or is this an ideological issue

or is this an exceptionalism issue

or is this just the practical reality

that we do not want another country being number one?

And can we all agree?

And if we can all agree, then I don’t think they’ll win.

Where do you sit on it?

For you, is it practical?

Is it ideological?

Completely practical.

I have zero, like, you know,

I’ve been thinking about this a lot

because I have not done any investments

and I just did my first.

Cool.

So it’s been three months and it was a credit deal.

So it’s not even equity.

And, you know, I was, and I was reflecting on

what am I trying to do?

Because I felt myself frenetically, you know,

spending and working too much and, you know,

looking at all these different opportunities.

And I realized, wait a minute,

like my job here is not to win some finite game.

Like this is not ending like a basketball game

or a soccer match.

This is like, I’m trying to be in this thing for 50 years.

So my goal is to survive.

And the reason why I say that is my ideology is very fluid.

I have to be able to adapt to market conditions

as they change, because if I want to be a relevant,

you know, person in the world in 50 years from now,

first rule of business is don’t go out of business.

Second rule of business is don’t forget rule number one.

Right.

You know?

So in that context, I think it’s a very practical thing

that we just have to deal with China

and make sure that they do not usurp America’s

standing in the world

as the most important country of the world.

Just for me, it’s ideological.

I just don’t want a communist country.

I don’t care about that.

That is torturing their citizens

as the number one country in the world.

I think it’s extremely dangerous.

I have a real issue with this.

Like, I don’t think you have the right to judge.

Just like Californians can’t judge Texans

and Texans can’t judge Floridians.

Oh no, you’re wrong.

You absolutely should judge people who are torturing people

and not allowing people to have freedom of speech.

Yeah, you should judge them, actually.

Actually, human rights violations,

I think you should judge people.

I think that we, there’s a lot of that stuff in America

that you stay silent on.

No, that’s not true.

I am absolutely for cannabis.

Anybody who’s arrested for cannabis violations

and low-level drug things,

I think they should be let out of jail

just like J.B. Pritzker did in Chicago.

I mean, and I think the death penalty should be repealed here

because we don’t apply it properly.

Those are the number one and two things,

probably in the United States,

that go against the human rights,

the Declaration of Human Rights.

And I’m actually very pro-fixing those things.

I was totally against waterboarding

and I think that was the worst moment

in modern American history.

I honestly think that China’s gonna do China.

India’s gonna be India.

And instead of getting caught up in our own ideology,

you should change it in your own country

and then make sure that the other country doesn’t win.

Well, and that’s my point is,

do you believe engagement with China

leads them towards democracy

and better human rights conditions

for their citizens or not?

And I think-

Again, that’s the fool’s errand.

That is an absolute-

Well, it worked for East Berlin

and it did work in saving Europe from the Nazis.

But the boundary conditions are entirely different

and China has proven that it works.

Europeans were genetically bred to be lazy oligarchs.

They just needed an excuse.

Okay, everybody.

I think we just got kicked out of the iTunes store.

Saxy poo.

Yeah.

China.

Hawk, dove, engagement, isolation.

Where do you stand?

You heard Chamath say his position.

Where do you stand?

Yeah, decoupling from China

is gonna be a bipartisan issue now.

I think both candidates now will be-

Well, Trump is gonna run blaming China for what happened.

And I don’t think Biden’s gonna be defending China.

In fact, they’re gonna try and peg him

with the whole Beijing Biden label

and he’s probably gonna need to try

and out-Trump Trump on China.

So decoupling is gonna happen.

It doesn’t really make sense for us to be dependent on China

for our antibiotics, for our medicines, for our PPE,

for any of these products

that are important for national survival.

I think all that stuff is gonna come back home.

I think trading with them for other things

might be toys, apparel,

things that start fundamentally strategic the same way.

I think that can continue.

But the thing about trade is it creates interdependence.

And I don’t think that this country

is gonna wanna be dependent on China

for anything strategic anymore.

Two questions for you, David.

What is China’s liability, if any, at this point

with this pandemic?

Obviously, if they withheld information

or silenced whistleblowers,

that’s a whole different level.

And then TikTok.

Should we allow TikTok in this country?

Should we, if we’re not allowed to have Facebook

or Twitter in China?

Take those questions either way you want.

Well, on liability, I mean, I think,

yeah, their liability is huge.

I mean, there’s still a bunch of questions

we gotta answer around where exactly the virus came from.

But the really fateful decision that I think China made

is when they shut down travel to Wuhan,

to and from Wuhan with respect to other parts of China,

but they let people from Wuhan just kinda leave

to go all over the world.

And so they weren’t letting people from Wuhan

go to other parts of China,

but they were able to come to the US.

And so I think they do have a huge liability,

but are we gonna hold them to it?

No, I mean, as a practical matter,

we’re not gonna, it’d be a mistake

to try and change the principle of sovereign immunity

in the courts.

But I think in terms of popular opinion, they do have.

There are other ways to,

there are other ways to quote, unquote, punish them.

Like, I mean, and the US is already doing it.

So, for example, the US is limiting

and constraining Huawei’s ability to get access to 5G.

And so it really forces China

to either buy European and American equipment,

which is essentially to say that the five eyes

will be able to basically spy into China,

or they have to basically storm into Taiwan

and take over TSMC.

I mean, so there are all these other gambits and strategies

that one can take without getting ideologically caught up

in Chinese human rights,

because they’re not gonna change.

I mean, look, all wealth comes from trade,

whether it’s at the level of individuals or nations,

wealth comes from trade.

And so it’d be silly for us to say

that we’re just never gonna have trade with China.

But I think that trade also creates interdependence.

And so we’re not gonna, I don’t think,

continue to engage and to depend on them

for things that are vital to our national survival.

And so that’s gonna be the change.

And the other thing is,

we’re gonna demand that the trade be more reciprocal.

Take the TikTok example.

Well, what’s probably gonna happen is that TikTok

will probably be caught up in some larger negotiation.

And is the quid pro quo,

well, Tesla gets to sell cars in China

and TikTok gets to operate in the US, maybe.

But I don’t think TikTok sort of falls into the,

necessary for national survival category.

It really falls into the reciprocity principle.

And the question, I guess, will be,

are we getting enough in return

to allow them to operate here?

And I think that’s the way that all this commerce

is gonna start working.

And that’s the thing,

at least we can confront our hypocrisy.

So Jason, I don’t disagree with you

about how gross the human rights record is.

I just think it’s a joke that we all sort of cry foul,

like it’s the biggest thing in the world

when we can’t even clean up our own backyard.

And then meanwhile, we continue to trade with them.

That’s just utterly, utterly.

Yeah, so that’s why I think we have to continue to work

on cleaning our backyard while continuing to enable

the freedom fighters.

First, we gotta clean up our own backyard.

Meanwhile, win the game against China.

And winning the game is not basically pushing

for human rights reforms.

It’s making sure, as David said,

we have a better trade balance

and making sure that the critical parts

of the supply chain and infrastructure

that America needs for national security

isn’t dependent on a third party

who have completely different incentives than we do.

Well, and then there’s also like soft things

like why is the, you know,

why are we taking American movies and changing the ends

in order to have them sold in China?

Like they’re literally corrupting our art

and that incremental dollar that Hollywood’s getting

or whichever, you know, person trading with China’s getting,

I think it’s not worth giving up

what makes America unique and a leader in the world.

Freeberg, you have any thoughts on China?

There’s about 112 million people in China

that work in factories.

Factories in China are purpose-built.

So they’re built to make a thing.

And then they got to get retooled

if you want to make another thing.

You take those two facts,

it’s very hard to kind of replace China

as a source of production

for a lot of what we consume in this country.

That’s the reality.

So there’s two ways you could go.

And then there’s two kind of necessities

and you end up with a matrix of like two by two.

You could decouple from China

and basically recreate that same production system

here in the United States

and that just wouldn’t fucking be possible.

Like we don’t have enough people to work.

We don’t have the ability to do that.

The cost of everything would go up by five X.

We could invent new systems of production

which we have the ability to,

3D printing, biomanufacturing,

all these other kind of really interesting ways

of making stuff that could replace the old factories

that are run in China.

Similar to kind of what maybe Elon has tried to do

with his automated factory with Tesla.

And so through automation, through 3D printing,

through biomanufacturing,

you can kind of change the methods of doing this stuff.

If we could do that, then we could decouple from China.

So the reality is like,

I don’t know like how we continue to consume things

at the, you know,

it’s a percentage of wallet share that come from China

without rebuilding how you make stuff.

No, but that’s the whole point.

By the way, I think the reason why that’s valuable

is that that’s the best way for us to actually get back

to an inflationary cycle as well.

So I completely agree with you.

It is incredibly inefficient.

It’ll be incredibly costly,

but that’s where I think you shift the balance of power

so that instead of all the power sitting

on the side of capital,

you shift it to the side of labor,

labor demands for wages,

and then all of a sudden costs go up,

input costs go up, prices go up, inflation exists.

And that fixes a lot of our debt problems.

It fixes our deflationary super cycle.

It fixes a lot of things.

And so-

So if things got more expensive,

it would be good for the economy.

It’d be very good.

Yeah, but even, look,

even with maximal, like, look,

that replaced 112 million workers in China

with some number of Americans,

you know, I’m not sure you could make all the stuff

you need to make here.

Yeah, I mean, there’s other countries too.

I mean, I think people are moving,

Japanese are moving factories to Taiwan and Vietnam.

Yeah, but if we create new methods of production,

which we’re uniquely positioned to do,

we can completely reinvent the wheel

in a lot of industries

and actually produce for the world.

Right now, you know,

China exports physical goods,

the US exports virtual goods.

And if we want to get into the business

of making physical goods,

we have to just do it 10x better.

We have the ability to do that.

We just got to get the fucking will.

So if I were to take $3 trillion of federal money

and, you know, treasury bonds

and hope that they don’t turn into junk bonds,

I would basically turn that money

into reinventing the systems of like,

how do we make stuff using these new technologies

that the US is uniquely positioned to capitalize on.

And, you know-

I love this Friedberg leapfrog strategy.

One US worker could make the same thing

that 100 Chinese workers make.

There you go.

I love it.

And I think that’s where we got to.

And now we’re into this.

Friedberg, you win, you got the best.

And then you got the hottest take in the whole group is,

if we are going to bring back manufacturing,

let’s leapfrog it.

Let’s just go, let’s just,

you don’t have to keep letting them make,

you know, socks or iPhones,

but, you know, let’s make the next automated factories

and the 3D printing factories here.

And buy a manufacturer.

Anybody have anything they need to promote

or plug at the end of the podcast?

Anything they’re working on that people should know about?

No, but I love you guys.

I fucking miss you.

I want to kiss all of you on the mouth.

Wow.

Just exactly what I was thinking, Chamath.

I was about to, so back at you.

I’ve been locked down for three months.

I’m lost my mind.

I mean, this is May 12th for me.

I think we all got to go to Mexico and see Saks for a,

for a little bit.

Let’s do it.

I had some friends come down and we play golf

and no one wore masks within our little circle

and nobody got sick.

And, you know.

And you’re all been tested.

We haven’t been tested, but we haven’t,

we don’t have any symptoms.

I got tested twice.

Negative both times.

And it was a very weird thing.

Cause I think I’m, Freeberg, correct me if I’m wrong.

I would, I should be rooting that I had it

and it didn’t do anything to me, right?

Totally.

By the way, let me just say one more thing.

That’s a really interesting finding.

This paper came out a few days ago

that shows that 40 to 60% of the population

that has never been exposed to SARS coronavirus two,

the current coronavirus,

already have activated T cells to the virus.

And the reason is that they’ve had other coronaviruses

through a common cold

and they’ve developed this immune response.

So this may explain why a large percentage of people

are just so asymptomatic and totally fine.

And it’s a pretty astounding finding.

And so you could get checked for those other antibodies

or these activated T cells

and know if you’re in a good position

to kind of ward off the coronavirus.

And that’s another thing we should probably do.

That’s 60% of people that already have this.

By the way, that won’t stop the spreading.

That person will still get infected and spread,

but their immune response is such

that they’ll shut the thing down pretty quickly.

So would you call this like some parallel

or shadow herd immunity or individual immunity?

It’s individual immunity,

and it’s related to just cross-reactivity

with other coronaviruses.

And so we’ve already developed an immune response

to other coronaviruses that gives us seemingly

a pretty good response to this coronavirus

for more than half, up to half the population.

David, on a percentage basis,

how much do we know about this virus

just as we wrap up here?

If you had to state a percentage of like,

in two years, we’re gonna know 100%

or 90% about the virus, whatever it is.

What do we know now?

We know everything about the virus itself.

We are very, like with any virus,

we know very little about how it affects

a specific human based on their genotype,

meaning based on your health and your genes,

here’s what this virus is gonna do to your body.

And we’re not gonna know that in two years,

and we’re not gonna know that,

we don’t know that for most viruses for humans today.

The matching of genotype to genotype

viral to-

But if we understand X amount about the HIV virus

or Ebola, what do we know now?

I mean, maybe Ebola would be the best one.

Like we have pretty good knowledge of that

after X number of years.

What do we know now on a percentage basis

of coronavirus?

We had to guess.

Again, we know everything about the virus itself,

like 100%.

Or okay, about this pandemic.

Yeah, the human response to the virus

and why it’s causing these weird symptoms

with different people and so on.

Yeah, I’d say we’re probably, I don’t know,

40%, 30%.

We’ve kind of mapped the outcome,

but we haven’t mapped the progress to the outcome

in the human body.

Fascinating, all right.

All right, listen, great job, Chamath.

Great job, David Sachs.

Great job, David Freeberg.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast,

type in all in with Chamath.

Love you, besties.

I love you guys, besties.

All right, shuffle up in DL.

Can’t wait to see that new table.

We’ll see you in a few minutes, I go.

Let’s get back to work.

Let’s get back to work.

Wear your goddamn masks, people.

Wear a mask.

Wear a mask. Be safe.

Okay, be safe.