Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Besties are back and it’s a bestie Spacksgiving. Congratulations

to the queen of quinoa. His second company, David Freeberg, announces today, hours before

the taping of this special Thanksgiving pod, that he is taking Metro Mile public through

a SPAC and that besties see. And here is the quote that as only Chamath can tweet, Buffett

had Geico. I pick Metro Mile. I would just like to say that’s how you move markets. LeBron

James has three rings. Freeberg, tell us what is Metro Mile. And well, this isn’t a self

promoting podcast, is it? No, but I think it’s just, it’s your second company. I started the

company in 2011 when I was running Climate, when I was the CEO there. Climate was offering

insurance at the time. We learned a lot about the insurance markets and figured like, hey,

telematics or connecting cars to the internet is going to be a big deal. And we’re going to be

able to completely change the auto insurance industry. So we set up this company. I was the

chairman from the founding in 2011 and been chairman and I’ve been an active investor in the

business in every round since then. So the business has built some really compelling value

proposition for customers and it’s got really good unit economics and it’s needed its last round of

capital to get profitable. And turns out, as we were thinking about that this summer, that a SPAC

was a really good path for the business given the inflection point it’s at.

And the basic premise of the business is, instead of paying for insurance by month or time period,

the innovation here is you pay per mile.

Yeah, insurance today is like, you know, you fill out a form and you get a price for insurance, you

pay that rate for six months of coverage. But you know, depending on when you’re driving and how

much you’re driving, you should be paying a different price, right? So we kind of changed the

model to a rate per mile. And so if you don’t drive, you save, you know, so the average customer

doesn’t drive a lot with Metro Mile, they save 47% over what they were paying with like Geico or

Progressive Reinsurance.

And you do that with that ODB port?

It’s a little plug in device. And increasingly, we’re actually doing it directly by connecting to

cars, direct through Ford, and a couple other big automotive OEMs now have this ability to send the

data directly out of the car because they’re all internet connected now. So that allows us to just

basically, you know, see how many miles you’re driving. And the rate per mile is what we bill you

each month times the number of miles you drove on your on your car.

And you didn’t mention how you drive. I think that was a controversial concept for a while. You know,

if you speed if you ride, we

roadmap or

yeah, that is part of it today. But frankly, 70% of the price difference you get in auto insurance is

from the number of miles you drive and only 30% is really in this variance around behavior. You know,

most people are generally pretty good drivers. So believe it or not. So the real variance in terms of,

you know, your risk to the insurance company is how many miles you drive. So that really is the

predominant factors if we can accurately track that. Now, what’s interesting is like in a world of

autonomous cars, where you’re like turning on the car to be autonomous or fully self driving at some

point, you know, it’s on and off, you should be getting a different rate for those miles, right. So

if the car is if your Tesla on autopilot on the freeway, that should be safer than you on the

freeway, you shouldn’t be paying as much, even better, you can kind of think about how this moves

into a world where everything is dynamically priced, and dynamically build, usage priced, usage

priced, and that and also fair. So you know, if you’re a good driver, and you’re driving well, or

if you’re using autonomous features, you shouldn’t pay as much. And ultimately, that translates, you

know, into a truly kind of more dynamic service. And that’s really where the world has to go.

Because those low mileage drivers, or those good drivers, or those drivers using autonomous

should be paying considerably less. So they’ll start using our service. And that’ll force the

other guys to raise their rates. And it creates this huge, you know, kind of market mode. Great.

And we’re in the we’re in the we’re in the very early days. I mean, it’s like the first inning

still. So we’re, you know, we’re, we’re just getting going.

Chamath, you chose to do a pipe with the SPAC explain to the audience what a pipe is for people

who don’t know, and what you loved about metro mile.

Sure. I think the what is a pipe? A pipe is a private investment in a public enterprise. And

basically, what that means is that you’re making the round bigger, right? So it’s kind of like

Sequoia does your Series A and invest 10 million, I would come in and put another 10 million. And

now your Series A is 20 million. Same terms as the Sequoia’s round, except you’re now just grossing

up the amount of capital. Why are why is that helpful? Well, what it does is it allows somebody

to price the deal. So in this case, David SPAC sponsor price, the deal did the diligence and

decided to underwrite metro mile at that price. And then they came to me and said, Hey, you know,

do you want to come and join this round, essentially, and I got to know the business.

A lot of things that David said, basically are true. The thing that I will say is like,

everybody talks about the value of machine learning, right, and data oriented learning.

The most obvious thing that you can do is if you learn on top of a huge subset of data,

especially out in the real world, like driving data or any other kind of information is you

should be taking risk on top of it. And this is why sort of these next generation insurance

companies to me are so interesting, because it’s probably where you’re going to see

machine learning, be used that just massive, massive scale, because you’re just going to

reprice risk, and make it as David said, much more dynamic. So anyways, they showed it to me,

I, I really like the product, the metrics are really amazing. And so I joined. It’s great.

I’m really excited for I’m really excited for Friedberg.

Yeah, congratulations. Great job. And I’ve never worked on anything together. So it’s awesome.

We’re doing our first project here on the online podcast together.

All right. It sounds like a brilliant idea. And I’m just pissed. I’m not part of it.

Yeah, I Jason, do you know about this? I don’t know anything. I get out of it. I need to get

my beak wet. You too. You too. Narcissistic besties have been have been running around

touting every single unicorn you guys.

I miss my allocation in Robin Hood. I miss my allocation in Uber or whatever.

All right, new bestie rule, new bestie rule. Everybody gets a slice, even a little tasty poo.

Everybody gets their beak wet.

Like the old neighborhood, like the old neighborhood.

Back a little share.

Let’s Jason, why don’t you start an Angelus syndicate for every all in podcast listener?

Yes, all in podcast syndicate, it will be on the syndicate.com. I love Angelus. But yeah,

we’ll do it. We’ll do the syndicate.com slash all in podcast. And then we’ll aggregate all

these subscribers and I’ll take a 20% carry and you guys can suggest ideas.

We’ll do zero carry and we’ll allow all the listeners to participate in our deals,

which I think would be pretty cool. Listen, I’ve-

I love how every time you loop my business into this, whether it’s podcasting or syndicates,

you take out the money and the profit. I tell you what, I have an idea. How about we SPAC

this week in startups and you do it for no participation?

I’m the father of growth. You know how you grow? By making things free.

You want to maximize demand, just make it free. By the way, on this topic,

Saksipoo had this incredible tweet this week, which was basically like,

wow, this is like my 95th unicorn that filed to go public. I mean, literally every single

unicorn that filed this week to go public Saks was an angel investor, which is incredible.

Says how good he is as an investor. But the best follow-up tweet was Zach Weinberg,

the co-founder of Flatiron Health, whose tweet was,

I just want to congratulate myself on nothing for having not been a part of any of these companies.

I would like to congratulate myself for making no bets and taking no risk and getting no reward.

No, I thought Zach’s tweet was the best.

Saks, don’t you find it tiring? Like all these investments that you’ve made,

like don’t these guys call you and want to do meetings and chat all the time?

You know, this has got to be a huge amount of effort, right?

Well, not really.

You just put the money in and turn around?

Well, you know, if you’re not on the board, your obligation is basically to respond when somebody

asks you for something. And as an angel investor, it is a little different when you’re actually

leading around and you’re a board member.

I was making these investments back in 2012, 2013. That’s when these seeds were planted.

Right.

These were 50K, 100K, 250K checks, right? So the responsibility is proportional to the dollar

amount.

Somewhere a little bigger than that, actually. But I mean, I’ve written checks, you know,

seven-figure checks in some of these companies.

Well, Saks, according to your personal balance sheet that

we got from your accountant this week.

Yeah, Phil Hellmuth sent it.

Oh, man.

We see here a transaction for Howes. Is it true you did the Series B of Howes, the entire Series

B?

That’s what I heard.

No, no.

I heard it was you led the Series B.

No, no. NEA led that round. I mean, I invested a lot as an individual. I did co-lead

the Series B or C of Adapar. That was one that I did as an individual.

That’s incredible. Yeah, that’s going to be huge.

I have no idea what that company is, but that sounds awesome.

They manage funds.

They do portfolio management software.

It’s coming up on, you know, $100 million a year.

That name sounds awesome.

It’s getting pretty big.

I’m just kidding. I’m totally kidding. I’m totally kidding. Let’s start the pod, Jekyll.

Where are we going to start?

Well, I mean, I think-

Now that we’ve all self-promoted.

Exactly.

Well, I’m just happy to hear that Jason was cut out of your deal as much as me.

When I read about it on Twitter, I’m like, I better not be the only best to cut out of this

thing.

Are we all right?

You’re right. You’re totally right.

You’re right. You’re right. It is getting awkward now because people who watch

this podcast assume that we do everything together.

Like literally, they’re like, well, you guys go grocery shopping together.

You go on vacation together. You guys live in the same TikTok house.

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s not how it works.

I think the first thing we should talk about is just this amazing moment in time when,

because of science, and this podcast started during the pandemic, we have had, as predicted

by Freeberg, who gets to take two victory laps, he said by the end of the year, we’d have vaccines

and they would have, because of this mRNA, if I remember correctly, 90, 95% efficacy.

And sure enough, the week after Trump wins, I’m sorry, loses, sorry, Sachs, he lost actually.

The week after Trump lost, I know you’re doing both for him.

The week after he lost, Moderna, Pfizer, then the next week,

Moderna, and then the next week, Oxford.

And I understand Johnson & Johnson is about to announce something.

And all of these have 90 to 95% efficacy.

And that there are going to be 40, 50, and 60 million doses in December, January, and February,

just from the first two in America alone.

So, Freeberg, if you were to put a number on when herd immunity hits, because probably 20 or 30%

of people have had it, 20, 30% of people have some natural immunity, how long is this going to take?

And could we be doing this from a Warriors game next year?

When are we going to be able to do this in person and not have to test?

Yeah, I don’t know if it was Fauci or someone that’s closer to the operation

shared that they do think they can get 70% of Americans immunized by May.

So, by May, yeah.

So, you know, if you’ll remember a few podcasts ago, I think I tried to explain a big part of

the budget that went into this Operation Warp Speed was to parallelize production of these

vaccines while they were being tested.

And so we’ve been scaling up the production and the manufacturing of these.

And if they weren’t going to work, we’re just going to crash them, right?

A couple billion dollars, who cares?

It’s a good option for the American people.

So we’ve got a ton of doses that have been produced.

It’s about packaging and distribution now.

And that’s, you know, supposed to be kind of underway with the plan to be that on December

11th or 12th, when they give the emergency use authorization, these doses start showing up.

We basically went all in blind.

Like we just shoved the chips in and said, we’re going to make these vaccines even if

it’s more like a spray and pray angel investment portfolio.

You know, we bought like four different things or five different things.

We made bets in all of them and hope that one of them pays off.

And it turns out they’re all going to pay off.

So, you know, or a chunk of them are going to pay off.

And we get to have them ready, you know, in time to kind of make a difference here.

Now, all that being said, if you look at the case numbers in the US right now,

we could be as high as 30% of the American people have already been infected with coronavirus

based on some estimates.

So, as of the June 30th paper that was published from those dialysis patients,

and they did a pretty good statistical interpretation of looking at antibodies in

people’s blood, they estimate 10% of the American population was infected by coronavirus as of June

30th.

And then if you look at the number of people that have been infected since then, and you apply the

similar sort of multiple that you would assume based on tests, you know, there’s an estimate

that we could already be up to 30% of the US population has been infected.

Wow.

And therefore immune.

And theoretically, mostly immune.

Let’s just say that, right?

And so sure, there’s anecdotes and so on.

But yeah, let’s just say generally, yes, immune.

And so you combine that with these vaccines starting to roll out, and we get, you know,

a pretty kind of comfortable position in terms of the pandemic and hopefully a couple of months

here.

And that’s why the market’s going nuts.

And that’s why everyone I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I got some conference

invites this last week for conferences for next year that have been canceled this year.

And we’re really on hold.

Yeah, so Oh, wow.

People are starting to lean for what time frame third quarter or fourth quarter?

Summer, July.

Yeah.

So people are now assuming that and they’re booking hotel spaces based on it.

That is extraordinary.

Sachs, you shared this New York Times story.

Why don’t you summarize it for the audience?

And I’d love to get your thoughts.

In addition to this, as to what this recovery might look like, if in fact, we have more

vaccine than we need.

And even, you know, a reasonable number of Americans take it and don’t believe that it’s

a conspiracy theory by Bill Gates to control and the Illuminati and all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, this New York Times story is pretty remarkable.

It’s called politics, science and the remarkable race for coronavirus vaccine.

I think it just came out today in the New York Times.

Actually, sorry, it’s published.

It published November 21st, updated November 24th.

And it’s pretty remarkable.

It describes the effort by Operation Warp Speed by the administration, by Pfizer, by

Moderna kind of gives you the behind the scenes play by play.

And reading the article, you have to come away thinking that the Trump administration

did a pretty good job with this whole Warp Speed project.

I don’t know if the New York Times realizes that it’s making the Trump administration

look so good, or maybe they don’t care anymore because he’s lost the election.

But the article does make the administration look very good.

I mean, competent, very competent.

First of all, they shoveled money to the right people.

They, you know, they offered Pfizer money.

Pfizer didn’t want it or need it.

But Moderna did.

So they got a few billion dollars from Moderna.

They parallel processed a bunch of different attempts here so that if one company failed,

the others might succeed.

There was sort of a Reaganite cutting of bureaucratic red tape wherever they could.

There were examples in the story of the drug company needing something, some supplies or

what have you.

And they would call the administration and they would make it happen.

And then finally, the administration didn’t do anything to kind of mess with the science.

You know, in fact, they describe how this new experimental mRNA technique that they

used to generate the vaccine, they had the code for that within two days.

They actually had the vaccine sort of printed, if you will, within weeks.

And really what took all this time were the human trials, you know, the three stage human

trials, which the administration did not do anything to speed up.

And probably the irony of irony is the supreme irony is there’s a story.

There’s a there’s a bit in the story.

It actually begins with the this guy, Slowy, who’s the head of the Trump administration’s

effort to produce the vaccine.

He actually slowed down the Moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren’t

including enough minorities in the, you know, in the in the trial.

And that cost him three weeks.

If it weren’t for those three weeks, Moderna’s vaccine would have happened before Pfizer,

and it would have come out about a week before the election.

So you got to wonder like Trump has got to be pulling out his hair about what about about

about this twist of fate.

David, how does it attribute credit for warp speed?

And I’m going someplace with this.

So I’m just asking you the question.

Well, I don’t the article is not trying to attribute credit.

They’re just kind of describing the behind the scenes of how Pfizer Moderna came up with

their vaccines.

And it just but but in describing, you know, Pfizer, Moderna did the work of creating the

vaccine, but in describing the ways that warp speed contributed, they did things that were

only helpful and nothing that was harmful.

And so in that sense, it made the Trump administration look quite good.

Yeah, I think the point is that the warp speed folks, which is probably the least well known

working group working on Coronavirus to the rest of the public is because it was a lot of

wonky insiders.

It was sign of almost proving the exact opposite of what Trump typically does, which is, you

know, some idiotic, nepotistic leaning where it’s his daughter or it’s his son in law running

around, you know, completely and effectively, you know, doing something where they become

sort of front and center for taking credit.

In this case, it was just a bunch of policy walks.

You never heard about the project.

We only know about warp speed, because a handful of us have talked about it.

And it turns out to actually have been good, because they knew what they were doing.

And they do enough to, to not try to seek the credit and just get out of the way.

I mean, it proves almost the antithesis of how the Trump campaign, you know, managed

their time in the White House.

Well, I mean, I, you have a point where, you know, I was kind of reading this article

wondering, you know, where was Jared Kushner, because if Kushner knew about this, there’s

no way he slows down the Moderna vaccine by three weeks.

I mean, that might have made the difference right there and whether Trump wins or not.

Can you imagine the effect on the election if the vaccine had come out one week before

November 3rd?

I think Trump would have won decidedly if he had a vaccine or two out with 90%.

But I think he had no credibility, even though Moderna and Pfizer were saying late November,

and he said the vaccines are around the corner.

His whole tenure was based on so much lying.

He was the boy who cried wolf.

He was the president who cried wolf by the time he told the truth.

And he was telling the truth about the vaccines.

It was like, oh, my Lord, he told the truth in the final three months.

Well, can I give you the opposite, David, of that, which is that if Moderna basically

says, hey, guys, we have a vaccine that works for white people and a disease that’s, you

know, disproportionately killing blacks and, you know, Hispanics and brown people, Native

Americans, and all of a sudden, people are like, wait, what the fuck?

Maybe they would have gone into Georgia, and they would have just crushed them even more.

And then you would have actually had the Senate flip, too.

So you could have had a whole kind of distribution of outcomes there in a different case, because

you could have had an angry reaction as well.

We don’t know, I guess, as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s ironic that an administration that was constantly accused

of white supremacy probably lost the election, because they slowed down this vaccine trial

group to include more minorities.

No, I know.

But I think what we’re saying is it wasn’t the actual administration.

It was somebody that actually knows what they were doing.

We call that redemption in the movie when the person actually loses because they did

the right thing.

It’s kind of redemption.

Freeberg, when you look at these mRNA vaccines, you were educating us about them last night.

And also for a long time.

Tell the audience just one more time how these work briefly, and what the potential for them

is in the future.

Because I think a lot of us now are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

This is going to be over.

We’re going to be at conferences or traveling to Europe or whatever it is next summer.

But we are all going to be scarred for life thinking, when is the next coronavirus?

Just like for a decade, we were on pins and needles.

When is the next 911?

So this is going to be scar tissue for a generation or two of people.

When the next COVID comes, how quickly will warp speed 2.0 go?

Yeah, it’s the right question.

Because our approach to doing vaccines may have just changed permanently.

So every cell has your DNA.

And DNA basically codes proteins.

Every three letters of DNA makes an amino acid codes for a specific amino acid.

There’s 20 amino acids.

The way that DNA turns into proteins is through RNA.

So RNA is kind of like a mirror copy of your DNA.

It floats into these things called ribosomes in your cells and outcome proteins.

And it’s like a printer, right?

And so those ribosomes make your proteins using those amino acid sequences coded by the RNA.

So the way that the vaccines work historically is you’ll get a dead virus,

which is basically the protein of a virus.

Your immune system then learns to kill that or to remove that protein.

Oh, man.

Jesus, my dog.

Your immune system then learns to remove that protein from your body.

And that’s how you develop this memory, your immune memory to a specific protein.

And so they put this dead virus in your body,

and hopefully your immune system learns a good response to it.

mRNA basically puts the RNA in your body that codes for that protein.

Your cells then make that protein.

And because it’s making a lot more of the protein in a more consistent way,

theoretically, the idea is your body develops a much more robust immune memory and immune response

without it overloading your system with all the immune cells try and wipe that protein out right

away, and so on.

The challenge is you’re putting RNA in your body.

And we’ve always been worried about we don’t know what the side effects of mixing RNA in

your body would be.

Is it going to change your DNA?

Is it going to change your genetic makeup?

Is it going to cause other deleterious side effects?

So this technology, this capability, this knowledge has been around forever.

I mean, not forever, but for a long time.

And the idea has always been we could use RNA in this way.

But no one wanted it.

And we’ve used it in animals.

And we’ve used it in plants.

And we’ve seen the capabilities of using RNA to do different things like this.

But this is a big leap.

And so we kind of leapt forward here, getting to the point that we felt comfortable with

RNA as a treatment like this.

And it’s working.

So in theory, in the future, as Sax points out, you could take any virus or any bacteria.

You could read its DNA.

You could do that in an hour.

Then you could take chunks of that DNA and code RNA for it so that your body makes those

proteins that theoretically produce an immune response.

So that’s the science of how do you create a new vaccine.

I think that’s the amazing part is the way it’s described in this article is that it’s

almost like laser printing or 3D printing a vaccine.

It’s kind of like the equivalent of that.

You just take the genome of the virus and boom, you’ve got the vaccine.

And then all the other delay is about human trials and testing of it.

But imagine if that there was the next coronavirus is 10 times as deadly, something that spreads

as contagiously as smallpox and is as deadly as Ebola or something like that.

We could have a vaccine the next day.

Like you could, we could have it very, very quickly.

Challenge David would be as we’d have it the next day, like we did here, but we would be

going through this three phase trial.

And so I want to take a moment here and talk to Chamath about something, which is challenge

trials.

In the UK, they will start doing challenge trials for those people who don’t know what

a challenge trial is.

Essentially, they expose you to something dangerous, i.e. a virus like COVID.

And then they give you the vaccine and then they give you the virus as opposed to how

we do a three phase trial, which is you give the vaccine to 30,000 people and a placebo

to 30,000.

And then you come back three months later and see how many people got infected.

And it takes time and money, whereas challenge trials only take risk on the individuals who

are part of it.

Chamath, hundreds of people in the science community signed a letter.

And in the UK, they’re going to be doing the first challenge trials in January.

The United States is not doing these.

I’m certain China is.

Um, do you think it’s a moment in time where we need to think about the ethics and morality

of challenge trials specifically?

And then if so, how do you execute them with that?

How do you execute a challenge trial without it being unfair, um, or too dangerous for

people?

Obviously, you’re not going to just go into a prison and say, hey, anybody want to get

10 years off the sentence, join the challenge trial?

That seems morally bankrupt.

But we let people climb mountains without ropes.

Right.

Well, I think this speaks to a whole bunch of other issues that we’ve talked about on

the pod before.

You know, another example of this was section 230 before when we talked about it.

We had a body of law that was created at a moment of time that essentially was about

framing and understanding a specific pathway and a way to use technologies that today look

archaic.

And we have to rewrite the laws in order to just compensate and understand for where we

are.

So if I if you double click on trials, as an example, you know, if you have a solution

for a rare disease, you can go in a specific pathway with the FDA and get breakthrough

and fast track approval.

But if you, for example, have, you know, a novel immunotherapy cancer drug, you probably

you cannot, you know, you have to do a multi phase trial, a typical three phase trial,

you have to solve for very typical things like fatigue, etc, etc.

All these things slow progress down.

Now, in a world where we were somewhat flying blind 40 or 50 years ago, we didn’t have,

you know, things like CRISPR.

We didn’t have, you know, a real understanding of the genome.

We didn’t have delivery mechanisms like CAR T, you would say, Okay, yeah, we should be

really, really careful.

But I would say that the more you know, the more you can ease up on the rules, because

you can actually empower people with a lot of information.

And it shouldn’t take a disaster scenario for us to be iterative and experimental.

So I think the challenge trial is really important.

I think the concept of them make a lot of sense.

I think a lot of government should employ incentives to figure out who is eligible and

why.

But if you’re a healthy adult, male or female, and you want to participate in a trial, for

whatever set of reasons, you should be allowed to do so.

And companies that want to run those trials should be allowed to run them.

Similarly, if you want to find a complementary pathway through regulatory agencies to get

drugs to the starting line, you should be able to do those two.

And I think what we have to do is multi path these compounds going forward, because I think

that’s where you accelerate all these technologies is ability to actually solve these diseases.

Freiburg, why is it so controversial that a rocket ship company, or, you know, people

who want to climb on mountains without ropes, or a rocket ship company, like there are experimental

pilots, we have astronauts, they take unbelievable risk.

We send thousands of troops into harm’s way, for many different reasons, many of which

sadly die.

And they volunteer for those activities.

Those people are volunteering and compensated.

But when we look at science, and we look at a challenge trial, scientists say this is

morally reprehensible to compensate somebody for taking risk.

When that’s exactly what we do in the army, we do it with police officers, and we do it

with astronauts.

Help us understand how scientists think so differently than say war.

I don’t know if it’s scientists as much as it is, you know, regulatory framework like

the some people would call it a nanny state.

And, you know, there are things that the nanny state assumes individuals don’t have the

capacity to understand the extent of the potential loss or the or the nature of the risk.

This is true for angel investing, right?

You have to be a qualified investor to invest in a private company without appropriate

disclosures.

And it’s true in a lot of other contexts.

So, you know, to give people the authority to make decisions like this, it seems like

my I have no point of view that I’m kind of making here, but it seems like the government

assumes or the elected officials assume or the populace assumes that there are things

that people aren’t really equipped to make decisions on because they can’t understand

the risk because they’re not qualified.

And that and they get excluded from those activities.

But sex is the sex.

How should we reframe this?

Yeah.

Well, I think I should reframe it.

I think assumption of risk is, is a is a really good principle.

And it is a way for people to engage in potentially harmful behaviors, just because a behavior

is potentially harmful doesn’t mean you don’t get to do it.

In the United States, you’re allowed to do things that are manifestly harmful to yourself,

like smoking.

Well, you know, you even worse if you’re in Oregon, you can now do all kinds

of hard drugs.

I mean, you can assume that risk for yourself.

So, you know, if in Portland, Oregon, you can now take heroin openly in the street with

no consequence, but you can’t participate in a trial that could basically cure a cancer.

That’s insane to me.

I’ll tell you the flip side of it.

You’re allowed in Nevada to play roulette.

I mean, what the fuck?

Like, you know, it’s got a negative expected value statistically, factually for individuals,

but the individual doesn’t have the capacity.

Generally speaking, that’s playing roulette to recognize that every dollar they’re spending

at the roulette table is likely going to be, you know, taken away from them, like there’s

some percentage of that that’s going to be taken away.

There’s a 5% edge for the house on that on that game.

And, and so we make the argument in some cases that people don’t have the capacity to understand

risk.

But in other cases, it’s okay for them to not have the capacity to take risk.

And I think that there is this notion of what some people call regulatory capture that probably

encompasses both of these, which is that there is some degree of profiteering that

has created some set of laws that kind of manifestly capture that system in a certain

way.

So there are profitable casino enterprises that say, let’s get people to spend their money

in a risky way that they don’t understand.

And that becomes the law.

And then people in Nevada are allowed to do that.

There are also pharmaceutical companies that will say, we need to have huge regulatory

burdens.

So once we make that big investment, and we get patent approval, and we can lock in that

drug, we can charge a lot of money for it.

So I would argue to some extent that the regulatory capture associated with the profiteering

that happens on the back end, in pharmaceuticals has in large part driven the structure around

risk taking in, in drug trials, particularly in the US, I mean, you can go get whatever

drug you want over the counter in Mexico, right?

I mean, we have a very different system.

It’s also happens to be the most expensive in the world.

And the rationale is, well, you’re the most protected, right?

Well, the drug, the drug infrastructure here has created to your point, because of regulation,

the entire, you know, CRO industry, which is a multi multi billion dollar industry,

which basically is essentially a retardant of R&D velocity, right?

Its entire job is to slow things down, create these double blinded studies, by the way,

and so many of these studies are not even double blinded, they’re not even actually

scientifically rigorous, they get basically blown apart after the fact.

So what are they really in the business of doing?

It’s because they’re, they’re exploiting a business model that was created by laws,

laws that were written by regulators, regulators that were in the hands of lobbyists.

None of those folks truly understood at the time, but especially today, what’s really possible.

So, you know, it does not make sense in the United States of America, just writ large,

simply put that you can buy alcohol and drink yourself into the ground, buy cigarettes and

smoke yourself to death, you know, jump away your money, gamble away your money where you’re

negative Evie, or open, you know, openly do illicit drugs.

But you can’t participate in a thoughtful trial backed by scientific research.

In fairness to moth, you can get away with smoking fentanyl on in San Francisco and Oregon,

but it is illegal to use that plastic straw.

So be careful, folks, the laws are very clear here.

That plastic straw is going to get you in a lot of trouble.

I don’t know what the fine is, but it is.

I mean, it wouldn’t it wouldn’t be so crazy if it were true.

But to your point, like you would actually get arrested for having a plastic bag,

then you will for having fentanyl in San Francisco.

Absolutely.

They’ll arrest you for the bag that the fentanyl is in.

But Chesa Boudin will not arrest you for the fentanyl in the plastic bag.

Stacks, we’ve totally lost the script.

But Chamath sort of bridge this with the 230 discussion of common carrier.

And hey, you know, we had great intent with this law, but nobody saw social networks becoming

this dominant, addictive, etc.

So we need to be more nimble as a government in changing these regulations, whether it’s

straws, fentanyl, challenge trials, or 230.

You wrote a blog post about it.

After we had our 230 discussion, a lot of people started talking about it.

Have you come to some conclusion as to an exit ramp for 230 or a way to maintain it

without, you know, throwing the baby with the bathwater?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, OK, just kind of make one concluding thought on this last topic.

So the reason why innovations happen so fast on the Internet is because of, you know, one

word permissionless, right?

Permissionless innovation.

Nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to go get permission from someone in the government,

you know, repeatedly.

That’s really what makes a difference.

You know, Mark Zuckerberg as a, you know, sophomore in college can just build his project.

Larry and Sergei as PhD students can just build their project, ship it, start, you know,

getting users, and they don’t have to get the permission of a regulator, whose incentive,

by the way, is just typically not to get fired by approving something that might rebound

on them in some, you know, in some bad way.

And to keep their job, yeah.

Keep their job.

I mean, imagine if, you know, imagine just to take it like a random example, when Elon

launched Starman, remember when he put the, like, he launched the Tesla into space, and

there was like a astronaut in there, and it was like this kind of really cool moment.

I assume he just did it.

I assume he didn’t get permission from anybody to do it.

But could a moment like that have really happened if he did have to get permission?

No way.

It’d be like making its way up through the chain.

No one would know what to think of it.

No one would know whether they could be the one to approve it.

And then what if something goes wrong?

What if the Tesla comes back down to Earth and, you know, turns into a meteor or whatever?

Those are the scenarios that’d be running through their heads.

Nobody would have allowed it, right?

And so when you just let entrepreneurs do things, like good things happen, right?

And that’s why we’ve had so much progress on the internet.

And in so many of these other areas, we’ve had much less progress because, you know,

what a system like that selects for is your ability to go lobby regulators,

as opposed to just building your project and shipping it.

I think that one of the things that maybe happens is that,

you know, we’re all expecting, or maybe some of us, I have definitely

some version of a new deal and some grand bargain.

And I wonder maybe whether the new deal and our sort of like our version of FDR over the next,

I don’t know, 10 years is the person that actually says,

guys, we’re going to have a wholesale rewrite of the regulatory infrastructure

to account for technology.

Just period.

We’re going to start someplace reasonable and small.

And we’re going to make common sense reforms, just observing the times as they exist today.

Right?

And we’re going to go and systematically try to make these industries a little bit more resilient,

a little bit more entrepreneurial, you know, a little bit less corrupted by regulatory

capture and lobbyists and laws that just don’t make sense.

100 years later,

I mean, it’d be great if we could do that.

The reason we can’t is because how do you reform the law without the lobbyists

getting their fingers in it?

Right?

And, and the problem is, there’s no, there’s no lobbyist for the company that doesn’t exist yet.

Right?

For the founder, for the entrepreneur who’s got an idea in their head,

but they haven’t built their company yet.

There’s nobody representing that person in Washington, right?

And what happens is you get new regulations in Washington, some agency gets created,

they reach out and touch an industry, but now every player that’s affected

has to create their own lobbying, you know, organization.

Not true.

And David, what do you think about this?

What if the advocate for the entrepreneur or the uncreated company and uncreated product

is really the same as just individual civil liberties and rights?

How are they really that different?

Because really what it’s doing is saying, the entrenched organizational infrastructure

that runs my life gets deconstructed, and then power gets pushed down to be the individual.

That’s tantamount to the same thing, I think.

Well, we, we have seen some, we have seen some pushback.

Well, I mean, there is some silver lining here.

If you look right now, the citizens of California, obviously people have been fleeing,

and we’ve been talking about California and the one party system here causing so many problems.

But we did have Prop 22 pass.

And we now have 900,000 people have signed to recall Governor Newsom.

And these seem to be some pushback against this sort of nanny state

where people can’t make decisions.

And then additionally, today, the SEC announced that they will allow gig working companies

to give stock to employees as part of their compensation, up to 15% of their compensation.

In fact, Hester, how do you pronounce her last name?

It’s not Pierce.

You can’t pronounce the word Pierce?

Purse, Purse, Purse.

No, it’s spelled Pierce.

But Hester Purse is worth following on the Twitter, H-E-S-T-E-R-P-E-I-R-C-E.

Hester Purse, I had her on my podcast, This Week in Startups.

And they’re really getting aggressive in changing the accreditation law.

So anybody is going to be able to be an accredited investor who’s become

sophisticated through a testing mechanism.

And now they want to let gig workers get equity compensation.

But by the way, sorry, here’s a perfect example of a regulatory body and infrastructure that

actually has changed with the times.

I think the SEC, in fact, I think maybe we talked about this a little bit the last time.

I actually think one of the best Trump appointees has been Jay Clayton.

And I actually think Jay Clayton has done an incredibly good job.

And a lot of what he’s done is just deconstruct this kind of nanny state and say people can

become educated and make good decisions for themselves.

And because it’s in an area that’s relatively benign, i.e. investing, people kind of just

let it happen without a lot of pushback.

And everybody kind of generally supports it.

Democrats support it.

Republicans support it.

And the outcomes are really good, to your point, Jason.

In a world of zero rates, how do you expect any just average, ordinary middle American

who just works a decent job to save for their retirement to actually make enough money?

Well, they’re going to have to get educated and they’re going to have to find a way of

putting their money to work in assets that have a better return, which literally was

illegal up until very recently.

You were systematically letting the rich stay rich.

And you were blocking the poor from having an opportunity to advance.

What if Apple Store employees could get their paycheck and say, I want to take my paycheck,

70% cash, 30% restricted stock units at this discount?

We could let Apple Store employees make a million dollars after five or 10 years of

working there, 10, 20 years from now and have generational wealth change.

David Sachs, you had a comment.

Well, I was going to ask Jermoth, do you think this type of deregulation is going to happen

in the Biden administration?

Because what you’re discussing is like a very, really kind of classical Republican

Reaganite idea, right?

I agree.

And I think what’s going to happen is I think you’re going to continue to see deregulation

in areas that are benign and non-controversial.

So I think the SEC, the FCC, I think all of these places you’ll see movement.

I think you’ll probably actually see a lot more choice and deregulation effectively in

Medicare and CMMI.

I think those places will move first.

And then I think it’ll be up to some leader politician to then really rally the troops

on some higher order bits.

And one of the biggest higher order bits would be sort of around the broader healthcare

infrastructure, social security.

Education.

Education.

Education is probably the biggest one.

It’s just too sacrosanct for the Democrats.

You cannot get elected without the teachers.

And so unless there is a startup that completely disrupts teacher pay and teacher compensation,

then the public school teachers unions will continue to dominate a lot of the federal

and state policy.

For the worst, unfortunately.

Freeberg, if you had one regulation or series of regulations or regulatory body you would

most like to see change for the good of humanity and Americans and the rest of humans on the

planet, what would it be?

I’d probably help.

Probably the drug process, the drug development process.

There was a gene editing program that ran and someone died.

This was, what year was this?

97, 99?

And they basically halted all gene editing programs for 13 years.

You know how many people died during that time?

It was fucking, it’s a crazy, crazy fact where the one death is too many

rule basically doesn’t take into account the kind of broader implications on the downside.

So yeah, I think that one’s probably pretty important.

But there’s a good interview if you want to hear some interesting thoughts.

And again, not trying to be an advocate for any political point of view, but Charles Koch

goes on Tim Ferriss.

Have you guys heard this podcast interview?

I’ve listened to it, yeah.

Yeah, and he highlights a couple of really good examples about this regulatory capture

problem.

Like, if you’re poor, and you want to become a hairdresser, and you know, start a salon

or go work in a salon and make money cutting hair, the cost and the burden for you to go

get the necessary approvals from the Cosmetician Association is too burdensome for you know,

the average person who’s poor and needs to become a hairdresser.

And it’s just insane that you can’t just go be a hairdresser.

The government needs to ensure that people don’t get bad haircuts.

It’s worse, it’s worse.

You could, you don’t need a license to be the engineer that writes the machine learning

code that either drives a car autonomously, or that, you know, helps propel disinformation

in a social network.

But you do need to have a license to give someone a buzz cut.

Oh, that’s a bingo statement right there.

Yeah.

I mean, in fairness, I am checking out Saks’s new haircut here.

And I’m kind of thinking.

So there should be more regulation.

There might.

I was practicing without a license.

You were?

We can’t see the result of this.

Saks, you’re so white and pale.

You’re blending into the background shade.

It’s impossible to see where your skin ends, your hair starts and the shade ends.

But I feel like the regulatory, if you think about the framework, you know, it extends

into education, too.

Like, you can’t go get an entry level job without a quote unquote, college degree.

How fucking useful is a college philosophy degree to someone that’s trying to get an

entry level job working at X, Y, or Z bank, right?

Like, it’s, it’s a bit absurd that the structure is set up so that there are whether it’s,

you know, government or not, but there is effectively a hurdle, which is this alternative

to regulatory capture, but it’s like, call it embedded system, you know, capture.

Like, there is a significant kind of hurdle that you have to get through that costs a

lot.

And the point of entry has gotten too high for most.

And it really stalls things out.

And it’s going to cause more damage than good.

Well, and it’s also been completely disconnected from the reality of your employment potential.

People are going into debt for $200,000 in a liberal arts degree that provides no skill

that is valuable in the world.

Do we all agree that that makes sense?

Like, does anyone on this in this group argue for needing a bachelor’s degree for everyone?

No, I don’t think, I think, I think it’s useless.

What do you guys think of ISAs, income sharing agreements?

These have become kind of Lambda School does them, a bunch of other schools.

David, you saw a startup we just invested in that’s doing them.

And I think you liked them at the demo day we did with Kraft.

Maybe, you know, this idea is who should take the risk for an education.

And when you look at an ISA, an income sharing agreement, what they’re saying is,

the school takes the risk.

They let you come to school for free.

They give you what would be the equivalent of, let’s say, a $15,000 coding camp or growth

marketer risk.

Then you pay double that amount over five, six, seven years as a percentage of your income.

But if you don’t get income, if you don’t break 50k a year, you don’t have to pay it back.

And if you decide to go back to school or your income drops below 50, you don’t have to do it.

Can you imagine if a college had to make that promise?

They should do it.

They should start in college sports, but they should do it.

Imagine, you know, Duke basically went and recruited kids and said, listen, we’re going

to pay you to come to Duke.

We’re going to get you educated.

We’re going to teach you how to play basketball better than anybody else.

And we’re going to take 5% of your future earnings, yes or no.

You’re not going to have to go to boosters.

You’re not going to have to take money.

You’re not going to have to do any of this stuff on the side.

But just be your best, learn to play the game.

We’ll get you a reasonable education.

We’ll give you a good infrastructure.

And we take 5% of the backend.

With a cap.

So you could cap the upside, right?

Maybe there’s no cap.

But why do we always have to care about all of this?

Like, it’s like, you know, it’s like, whatever, maybe it’s 5% for the rest of your life.

You’re going to pay the government 50%.

You get nothing in return.

So if you pay 5% and you get coach K to teach you how to shoot a jumper, it’s better than that.

Right.

So why isn’t it possible?

And I remember how people had this unbelievably paternalistic, allergic reaction to income

sharing agreements when they were first talked about.

They called them indentured servitude, modern slavery.

And it was like, oh, my God.

So insulting to.

But it’s no different than signing a contract with an agent to represent you when you first

start out in any industry, music or sports or film or whatever.

You could sign an agency agreement where the agent is your rep for 10, 20 years, right?

I mean, some of those agreements can have long tails on them.

And that’s effectively the same.

You know, look, it’s even worse at a cap.

Look at look at we can talk about this in a second.

But like, you know, did you see what happened with Chappelle the last couple of days where

she let’s go?

Did you watch the video?

I loved it.

Yeah.

The video is incredible.

Video is incredible.

So the quick story on this is Chappelle basically did.

He had a request.

He went to Netflix and he said, take down Chappelle show.

Netflix took it down and he did a little stand up.

It’s on his Instagram.

It’s like 18 minutes.

It’s it’s fabulous.

As most Chappelle stuff.

Peek Chappelle.

Peek Chappelle.

And he basically told this story, which essentially the punchline is like, you know,

he signed a contract where he just got completely fucked.

And he’s like, this is happening every single day in so many markets.

And so the idea that then you have actually a different market, which disrupts something

by actually creating transparency and something reasonable is all of a sudden completely immoral.

It makes no sense to me.

So there’s abuses happening all the time.

That is what the contract that Chappelle signed was indentured servitude.

He doesn’t even have the rights to his name.

He cannot create his name and likeness.

Right.

Yeah.

If you wanted to create the Dave Chappelle show again, you’d have to call it the DC show.

But this is perfect.

Somebody owns his name.

What the fuck?

In perpetuity, in all mediums and platforms.

This is a perfect tie back to the earlier statement about, you know, do you have the

appropriate kind of understanding of the risk you’re taking or the benefit that you’re getting?

I think Kanye has been doing this whole thing about he doesn’t own the masters to his music

originally.

Right.

At the moment that he signed that contract, when he signed over all the masters, you know,

master recordings and all the future revenue rights to his music, he was getting paid a ton

of money in his mind at that time.

He said, oh, my gosh, I’m getting whatever it was.

Let’s say it’s $5 million.

I’m getting $5 million.

Most amount of money I’ve ever seen.

It is absolutely worth me giving over the masters of this music and the future royalty

rights to this music for 12 songs or whatever it is for me to get $5 million today.

And I can live an amazing life and it’ll change everything for me.

Who is to say that he was not, you know, of the appropriate sound mind and understanding

to decide in that moment to take that $5 million and give up all future royalties to his music?

Well, Chappelle’s argument was the people who are in that ecosystem are all friends.

They’re all working together and they’ve commoditized the artist and they collude

to do this kind of upside limiting deals.

And I think what makes Silicon Valley so special is that we collude the other direction.

We want people to have equity participation and we want the social contract of Silicon

Valley is I’m giving you equity.

I hope your penny stock becomes worth $1,500 and that you create multi-generational wealth

and you become an angel investor.

But I don’t know.

Look, if I’m an angel investor or want to be an angel investor and some schmo tricks

me into investing in his shitty company and I just lose $20,000, but I didn’t know how

to determine whether that company was shitty or not, because I’ve never done investing

before.

Read my book.

Is it for the government to regulate that circumstance and say, you know what, you need

to be a quote unquote qualified investor to be able to discern a good company for a bad

company or bullshit from not.

And the same for these contracts, right?

Like, I mean, so, you know, we’re making the argument, I think, for the, you know,

the regulatory framework for preventing people from being able to have freedom of choice.

And I think like earlier, you know, the case was made, like people should be able to make

have freedom of choice at any point.

Why should the government kind of step in and make a decision for me?

I think that I’m not advocating for government intervention.

My only point is that there are morally reprehensible things that are happening today

using contracts.

And that, you know, something like an income sharing agreement actually writes the ship

in so many ways.

That’s definitely the burden of capitalism.

Ultimately, it devolves to that, right?

Where like, oh, you’re sick, you have cancer, pay me a million dollars, I’ll give you this

drug.

So Hollywood’s a little bit of its own beast, where there’s all these gatekeepers, and the

gatekeepers are always trying to get control over, you know, the creative product.

And so, yeah, like, you know, signing contracts with those sharks is always a dangerous thing

to do.

I think Silicon Valley is very different.

We have much more of a culture of equity.

I think the income sharing agreements are much more in that vein.

And I think they’re a great idea for like any trade that demonstrably increases your

earning power, right?

So the beauty of Lambda School is they pay for you to get an education being a coder.

It then increases your salary, and they get a piece of that.

That’s like a win-win for everybody.

I think where this goes, if these ISAs are successful, is that every trade that’s valuable

will get its own ISA type school.

And then that gets peeled out of a university education.

So what’s left for colleges to do?

It’s basically, you know, all the stuff that doesn’t add value.

They’re museums.

They’re basically like these monasteries again, right?

They go back to being monasteries, not places where you get skills.

We need to celebrate vocational capability.

Because I think like, you know, we have so celebrated this mythical bachelor’s degree,

and it just means fucking nothing.

It’s like, it doesn’t really learn a trade.

And that’s just as frankly, that should be as respected or more.

But in the American culture, you don’t do that right now.

I’ve never understood that.

If you go, for example, to different countries around the world, Europe’s a good example,

actually, of this, because it’s the closest analog in terms of quality of living to America.

There’s a real celebration of people who choose vocational tradecraft, because there’s an entire

educational infrastructure that you can onboard yourself into.

You can become a skilled person, and you can have a really good, decent life.

And there’s pride in the work.

And there’s pride in that work.

And in America, you know, you covet this piece of paper, the piece of paper is really

just a scam that allows, you know, administrators to basically pay themselves millions of dollars

and or run an asset management business as the Trojan horse of that purpose.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

And so, you know, I don’t know, it’s I just think it’s I just think

the most amazing thing about these companies, I’ve been digging into them, because I’m looking

for more to invest in.

And these companies, these companies that are the trade schools that are based themselves

on ISIS, and there are ones who are doing welding and plumbing and all kinds of different

things.

And there are ISA platforms that are providing ISIS to any school that wants them and doing

like the sort of AWS of ISIS.

Anyway, these for what this firm told me was, inside of one of these trade schools, they

spend 50% of their time on placement 50% on education.

And that at a college, they spend 99 point x amount of time on the education and less

than 1% on placement, which kind of attracts right?

I mean, when we went to college, I don’t know if it’s changed much.

But the Career Services Center was like this two person office, like in the worst part

of campus.

And they don’t, when you’re doing an ISA, if you accept more people who are unqualified

and can’t, aren’t ready for the education or not motivated for it, it works against

you because they’re not going to pay back the ISA.

So you then get sharper, you know, you sharpen the blade of who gets accepted, you start

accepting the right people.

These colleges, they would accept anybody who would come in and take the loans.

That was your qualifier is did you pass your loan?

The ISA as a service idea is a brilliant idea.

I would invest in that.

I like that idea as an investment way better than running one of these schools, you know,

that that’s basically issuing the ISIS themselves.

But how amazing is that, that we live in a country where people are willing to, you

know, as a movement now, people are willing to fund your education because they know it’s

going to increase your earning power and then they’ll get paid on the back end.

That’s like fantastic.

And like, that’s all like happening.

All that innovation is happening right now without the government needing to get involved

or a big government loan program.

And the historical left is calling it indentured servitude.

Literally, like the Vox is in the New York Times of the world.

And I mean, servitude is having a $250,000 debt that you’ve got to pay down.

You can never get rid of in bankruptcy for the rest of your life.

Yes, that’s real indentured service.

I think the problem is that, you know, East Coast left leaning editorial publications.

They have to themselves justify their $190,000 bachelor philosophy from Oberlin College.

So, you know, if you, if you take that, you know, come up.

Oberlin is the number one listener base we have on this podcast.

Yeah.

You just lost.

No, but you’re right.

Once you’ve taken out every valuable trade and move them from a university where you

got to pay $100,000 a year to an ISA, where it costs you nothing, like what’s left?

It’s just going to be people studying.

Philosophy.

Oh yeah.

Intersectionality, intersectionality studies.

They’ll be studying the past.

They’ll be studying the past.

What a disaster to collapse upon itself.

All right.

As we wrap up here, let’s just take a moment to think about what some people are calling

the big reset.

It’s Thanksgiving.

We have a change in management in the country, which is obviously polarizing.

So I’ll put that aside.

But I think what’s happened with these vaccines and science is truly miraculous.

And let’s face it.

A lot of people, there’s a lot of pain and suffering this year.

A lot of people lost their jobs.

A lot of people lost their restaurants.

A lot of people are suffering from mental illness.

Some people are having to take care of their kids and get to know them.

I mean, it’s been hard for a lot of people.

Sorry about that, Sax.

I wasn’t directed at him.

David, do you know your children’s names now?

Yeah.

I do now.

What’s it like to spend three hours with one of your children?

He’s got flashcards in front of him right now.

There are pictures on the back.

The name’s on the other side.

That’s so brutal.

So anyway, I was trying to be sincere.

The kids would even occasionally run into my office during COVID, you know.

Yeah, and they want to talk to you and hug you and show affection?

Crazy.

Excuse me, sir.

Who are you?

I’m your father.

Actually, I am.

I thought I was just working from my office and all these kids show up and tell me it’s

their home.

Well, I just wanted to announce to the all-in audience that we have upgraded Friedberg and

Sax’s chips.

Just last week, Chamath and I pushed the update for the Joy 1.7 update.

How’s it been going to the two Davids now that you have a third emotion?

We now have emotion of joy.

Do not use it for—

It feels good and warm inside body.

Do not use it all in same day.

Spread it out over a month.

Hey, David, did you think that Trump actually resigned two days ago?

Was that the equivalent of a—or the concession tweet?

It was acceptance of—you’re talking about when he authorized the GSA to release transition

funds to Biden?

Yeah, I mean, that was his concession.

There, that’s basically what you’re going to get out of him.

That’s his acceptance of the election result.

So after anger, he’s now went into bargaining, and then he was depressed, and now he’s accepting?

Well, what basically happened is you had Rudy and Sidney Powell and that legal team going

to court to try and challenge all these rules.

The whack pack.

Yeah, they tried to go to court to challenge all these rulings.

I think Rudy was like one in 35, meaning I think he won one ruling and lost 35.

So it was going very, very poorly.

So like you versus Alan Keating.

Go ahead.

Yeah, but that’s a whole separate story we’ll get into.

But the thing that really ended it was when Sidney Powell came out with this elaborate

conspiracy theory that actually Trump lost the election because communist code writers

had effectively infected this the software that was running the election.

And somehow Hugo Chavez was behind this, even though he’s been dead for seven years.

Hugo got us again.

And the Republican governor of Georgia and Secretary of State were in on it.

Anyway, it was so wild and crazy that basically the narrative just cracked.

And so then you had like, Steve Schwarzman come out and then sort of the Republican business

community and and Pat to me, Republican senator from Pennsylvania came out and they all just

said, look, this is this is ridiculous.

And so that was the moment I think at which this narrative that the election was stolen

kind of cracked is and I think she kind of she did everyone a favor by being so like

off the reservation that it just brought the whole thing to like a meltdown.

Sidney Powell always whenever I see her, I always I just think that she’s one second

away from her dentures flying out of her mouth and hitting the camera.

I mean, that’s your crazy aunt.

That’s the crazy aunt at Thanksgiving.

She said she was going to release the Kraken.

And I guess she meant the I think I was running down Rudy’s.

I think it was the hair dye running down Rudy’s face.

Yes, exactly.

That’s the crack.

Rudy’s the crack.

I mean, I’m glad that it was a total meltdown.

It was a total shit show.

I’m glad the GOP finally, after Trump’s defeat, decided with 55 days left to go that they

would take a stand against.

Well, let me let me tell you what I think is going to happen now is I think that this

New York Times article we talked about the top of the show about the fact this Operation

Warp Speed that it was a big success.

I think that the best narrative for Trump, if he wants to maintain this idea that he

was robbed, is not that he was sort of legally robbed with fake votes or fake voting software,

but rather just that if these pharma companies have put out the news a week earlier, yes,

it would have meaningfully changed.

And I think he has an amazing story there.

I would agree with that.

Yeah.

And it’s kind of like, you know, when you have like a major sporting event, there’s

like a bad call by the refs and all the fans basically said, oh, we were robbed.

Well, you can’t get that like result overturned.

It is what it is.

You lost, but you have a talking point forever that you lost.

I mean, if you go to St.

Louis or whatever, and you mention there’s an asterisk, there’s there’s an asterisk.

Yeah, yeah.

When they suspended Draymond, when the National LeBron Association suspended Draymond and

that series, there are all these sporting events with asterisks by them.

I mean, like, you know, if you go to St.

Louis and mention the name Don Denkinger, you know, people will know what you’re talking

about.

I think the Cardinals lost the 85 World Series because of a first base umpires call, or at

least that’s their view of it.

Right.

And so I think, you know, what what Trump can do is is say that, look, we were robbed

because we never got credit for the vaccine.

Now, if I do think the economy is going to bounce back really strong next year because

of the vaccines.

Right.

I think you’ve got to say that if these vaccines and COVID in the next three, four,

five months, 2021 is going to be a great year.

So if Trump hands Biden these vaccines and the economy does well next year, but something

bad happens between now and four years from now, he’ll say, I handed this guy everything

on a silver platter.

He screwed it up.

And that’ll be his narrative for four years from now.

Could happen.

I’m just saying.

What do you what do you think about what do you guys think about the pick so far?

Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary is great.

Thank God it’s not Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

Yeah.

I mean, she’s out of the party.

Well, I do think the biggest challenge we’re going to face is this monetary policy issue.

I mean, the dollar is, you know, in decline.

We printed 30% of the U.S. dollars in circulation in the last six months.

And everyone’s cheering that the Dow is at 30,000.

It’s like, well, you know, there’s 30% more dollars.

So everything’s going to inflate.

So I think there’s a lot of work to do.

It’s great to have someone sitting in that seat who understands economic policy really

clearly and the tide of monetary policy.

Yeah.

I think the picks so far have been have been really, really top notch.

Tony Blinken, friend of a couple of ours for Secretary of State.

He’s a star.

Yellen’s a dove, which I think is really good for just, you know.

Did you guys know the chief of staff, Sax?

Do you know who this guy?

He’s been like Biden’s aide for a long time.

Is that the deal?

Ron Klain.

He’s the founder of Revolution with Steve Case.

Yeah.

He comes from a venture background.

All of Biden’s picks have been people who’ve been long time washing hands,

who he’s had personal relationships with for a long time.

He really seems to value that personal loyalty.

And they’ve also been kind of, you know, nice and boring, safe experience picks.

I think he’s delivering on kind of what he promised to be, which is a president we can

forget about.

Tone it down.

That’s his motto.

He’s going to be a caretaker president.

Yeah.

What do we do without Trump to talk about on this podcast?

Because it’s been about 34%.

We’re going to need a new topic to rotate in here.

We might need to put in a little Netflix as we wrap here.

What are you thankful for?

And what are you most looking forward to next year?

Vis-a-vis just it’s been a rough year.

I mean, listen, it’s been nice for people’s equity portfolios, of course.

But it’s really what do you hope for America, for humanity, for yourselves, your family,

for friends?

You know, what are you thankful for?

And I’ll let you, Friedberg, it looks like your processing unit has delivered a result.

So let’s hear it.

The emotion bank has been cleared.

Look, I don’t think that this year was any cup of tea for anyone.

So I think like everyone, you kind of value your friendships and your family.

So it’s been a year.

Going into COVID, I was in the office every day, spending more time at home, being closer

to my children.

I know their names, by the way, Sax.

I’ll teach you how to learn them.

It’s been actually really special being at home a lot and being with the family a lot

and realizing how much that stuff matters and how being close to everyone matters.

Because when you’re in the run of the life before you kind of get knocked back and just

put everything in perspective, you miss those moments.

So that’s been really special and important to me this year in a really kind of personal

way.

And just having friendships, right?

I mean, it’s great for us to all be able to talk as we do every day and have people you

can kind of connect with, even if you’re not sitting in person.

I do think that everyone realizes they need that.

So anyway, it’s been an insightful year.

Money aside, I was fucking terrorized at the start of this year about money.

And at the end of the year.

Here you go.

There it is.

It’s all a fucking roller coaster.

Sold the first company and now you got the second one.

Ip on.

Congratulations, Mazel.

Sax, has your processing unit overloaded with this question?

Or are you going to be able to articulate something you’re thankful for and appreciate?

I agree with all the things that Freeberg said.

The flip side of working from home all this time is you do get to spend a lot more time

with the kids.

I personally have, I like this shift to remote work where I can do a meeting from anywhere.

You know, you don’t have to go to the office.

That’s been kind of kind of nice upside, I think.

I think we probably all learned how self-sufficient we can be.

I have learned how to give myself a haircut.

Apparently, you guys don’t think I’ve done a very good job with it.

But it’s better than long hair.

So yeah, but look, I mean, I’m thankful for, you know, knock on wood, we all have our health

and, you know, and weirdly, the economy, Silicon Valley is doing still doing great

technology is doing great, still the future.

And I think the country is even though COVID is kind of at its worst right now, I do think

it’s going to get rapidly better as soon as these vaccines come to market.

So I do think we’ll work.

I do think 2021 will be a much, much better year.

Chamath.

In this really crazy way, I actually now am pretty thankful for what I’ve learned during

the pandemic.

I mean, I wish we didn’t have to go through it.

But I think that it was the most psychologically stressful period of my life.

Just to be so isolated from everybody.

And I learned something about myself recently, which is that in psychology, it’s called

repetitive compulsion, which is sort of like, you know, you repeat the sins of your father

or in this way, you know, I repeat these tired ways of behavior from my teens and my 20s

that were just unproductive.

And in the day to day life of just running around and going to meetings, as David said,

flying around, go to a meeting, go to the office, go here, go there.

You can make a lot of excuses for shitty behaviors that you carry with you.

And so what I’m really thankful for is in this lockdown, I’ve been forced to really

find the things that I don’t really like about myself and try to fix them.

So, you know, I’m really thankful for that, because I think hopefully everybody has something

positive to look at at the end of this.

And that’s definitely one thing for me.

It’s very touching and actually quite appropriate as we wrap here, because

Sachs and Freeberg and I had some things we don’t like about you, Chamath, that we wanted

to bring up.

You kind of knocked one off the list already, so we’ve only got four more to go.

It’s good you’re doing this work.

It’s good.

We were planning an intervention for this end of the pod, but you kind of opened the

door, so here we go.

You know, I’ll wrap up with just saying, you know, family and friends are the obvious,

you know, things that you appreciate at this time.

I am thankful also for the hope that we’ve seen from, you know, what we can do collectively

as a society when we put our minds to something, Warp Speed comes to mind, these frontline

workers.

I mean, we really maybe have seen what a global, a challenging problem being solved can do,

and hopefully that can translate into something like nuclear disarmament, sustainable energy,

global warming, etc.

And so I think on a macro level, the most macro level is the species.

Us humans as a species have now had an enlightening moment, just like World Wars and, you know,

Hiroshima and Nagasaki kind of changed people’s perspective of the entire world.

Jay and I were talking about that the other day, how people looked at the world differently

after those horrific bombs went off.

I think after this bomb goes off, we’re going to look at the world and say, hey, we can

solve problems, right?

And maybe we can be proactive about that.

And then finally, I think for the people suffering from mental illness, who maybe I was callous

and made fun of, or maybe just didn’t relate to, I can relate to now because I have felt

depressed, I have felt anxious, I have felt exhausted from this, right?

And it’s the first time in the 49 years I’ve been on the planet that I ever would say I

felt depressed.

I didn’t understand what that meaning was when Sachs would tell me how depressed he

was.

I just never, it never hit me.

I’m joking.

He never said that.

But it’s a good joke.

I am joking.

But I, you know, I think for people suffering from mental illness, get help and, you know,

talk to people.

And I think this really opened my eyes to that.

And of course, this podcast, you know, and our friendship—

This podcast was the best thing that, and one of the best things in my life that came

out of this whole period.

I think for me too.

And, you know, I’ve heard that from a lot of the people who listen to it.

And I’m sure if Sachs and Friedberg had a fourth emotion, they would agree with us too.

Frankly, I think this podcast has been doing nothing but costing me money.

You know?

Because I painted you as a Trump supporter.

God knows how many deals I’ve lost—

You are not a Trump supporter.

Yeah, God knows how many deals I’ve lost because Jason keeps trolling me as a Trump

supporter.

And then on top of it, I get cut out of the only good bestie deal.

If you would—

I thought at least I would get this bestie deal.

And you guys cut me out of it.

Okay.

Listen, I just want to be clear.

Sachs is a conservative and a Republican.

He is not a Trump supporter.

He did not vote for Trump.

This time he did not vote for Trump.

Last time, he does not support Trump’s behavior.

You can’t out what he’s voting, dude.

Sorry, but he told me he didn’t vote for him.

Well, he did.

Which one of us is going to try to hire Jared Kushner as a general partner?

No, definitely not.

If you’re saying most likely, because now you’re reinforcing the theme, that’s—

Actually, if you had to pick a venture fund that is most likely to hire Jared Kushner as a GP.

And Jason Horowitz.

They’ll do anything for business.

Are they still around?

Founders Fund.

Nope.

I don’t think Peter wants to share the spotlight.

Okay.

I’d go with Jason.

They’ll do anything to get a press release.

I don’t think that guy needs a fund to go work at.

True.

Yeah, he’ll just go buy another—

You know, he did get three Middle East peace deals done.

So, but, you know.

By the way, by the way, I mean, talking about inheriting incredible dividends, but

is it the most incredible thing that you can come in and get Middle East peace done,

but if you really unpack Middle East peace,

do you think that Middle East peace would have happened

if the cost of solar was not cheaper than the cost of oil?

Honestly, like, if you didn’t see an end in sight to oil,

do you think that the Middle East peace deal would have gotten done?

Yeah, I know what you’re saying.

I don’t think so.

Well, I know what you’re saying, which is that if the Middle East wasn’t becoming

less strategically relevant to us, you know, that creates degrees of freedom, I think.

But, yeah.

That’s had profound benefits for Silicon Valley too, right?

I mean, all this money that went into the Vision Fund and the money from Qatar and the money from

like all these sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East has funded a lot of venture funds,

has gone into direct late-stage rounds in a lot of companies, and it’s really been a great

boom for Silicon Valley.

People can make fun of the companies getting overfunded and the nonsense that’s gone on all

they want.

No, you’re right.

It’s better that than gold-plated Ferraris.

It filters out into more angel investing, it filters out into more venture LPs,

and it ultimately gives a big boost to this ecosystem.

So, I think that the damage to oil has been great for Silicon Valley.

The most incredible dividend of climate change is peace.

It’s like, it has made radical Islam a failed startup, you know, a hyped Series A that

couldn’t raise its Series B.

It’s made, you know, sworn enemies over thousands of years cooperate together, all for what

reason?

Because you got to pull the oil out of the ground now and monetize it, because otherwise,

the cost of wind and the cost of solar…

And you have to diversify, yeah.

And you have to diversify, because otherwise, the cost of wind and the cost of solar is

going to make pulling the oil out of the ground economically infeasible within three or four

years.

Yeah, I mean, you already can’t do it offshore.

They took Saudi Aramco public, they started selling off the shares, and they invested

that capital in tech and other stuff around the world.

It’s been helpful, but there is another factor at work, which is the fear of Iran is now

greater than on the part of Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Their fear of Iran is now greater than whatever mutual hostility they used to have.

And so, it’s kind of bringing people together that way.

But you got to give Krishna credit for still getting those deals done.

You know, no one thought he could do it.

I remember everyone was mocking him.

I agree.

He’s not a moron, and he’s the opposite of an abrasive guy, and he’s very thoughtful

and apparently very, I don’t know if you guys know him personally, but he’s supposed

to be very smart.

I’m sure that wherever he ends up next, he’s going to do very well, and he’s going to

get invited to be in a lot of places.

Yeah.

No, it’s clear he did a very good job on the Middle East stuff.

Yeah.

By the way, how crazy is it that Trump delivers on hottest economy ever, peace in the Middle

East, and three vaccines for coronavirus, and he’s still lost?

Who would have thought that?

Yeah, well, it does go to tell you what people think of character.

Yeah.

I don’t know if you watch how he tweets, but he’s something else.

He tweeted himself out of office.

If he acted normal, Sachs, he could actually take those victories.

If he stopped the personal attacks, if he stopped the grifting, he would have won.

He would have won.

He could have been, he actually, it would have been more than one.

He could have been Reagan.

If he came in, if he came, he could, it’s exactly what I was thinking.

If he came in in 2016, calm, cool, and collected with a team where there was a dial down the

insecurity and dial up sort of the intensity of actually calling people out for not passing

progressive change, he would have been elected in a landslide.

People would have said, well, on the way in, we were afraid.

But after four years, the guy actually-

He could have been magnanimous, is what you’re saying.

Yeah, and it was a real missed opportunity for him.

I still think much of Trump is he’s a WWE superstar, and that’s what people voted for.

It’s why Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota.

It’s why Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected governor of California.

The average person that’s looking at that guy versus the old dude that doesn’t talk

and saying some weird stuff about policy, it’s like, oh, man, that guy looks awesome.

Let’s put him in office.

This is going to be fucking fun.

And if he turned it down when he got in office, he’d be much less appealing, I think, to a

lot of people.

I think it’s the caricature of himself that makes him so appealing.

Then I’d like to go on the record with my 15-year projection then, which is that The

Rock is going to run for president.

I think the Iran situation, just to put that in perspective, David, if you look at the

age distribution on the chart I just put in the chat, it is just extraordinary how young

that country is.

The median age is, I think, 28 or 29 years old, and they’re barely holding on to power

there.

And it is going to flip into a much more progressive society than it is now.

They are barely holding on.

When you look at how many 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds there are in that country who

are drinking and watching TV and VPNs, and they have the internet, and they’re watching

porn, and they’re gambling, I’m sure, and buying Bitcoin and doing all this crazy stuff,

that country is barely holding on.

It’s going to be a crazy civil war.

And let’s just hope they don’t have nuclear bombs when that civil war happens.

Yeah, guys, guys, guys, being extremist, it’s just a bad product market fit now.

You know?

It’s just not worth it.

There’s no money to fund it.

Nobody cares that much anymore.

Everybody’s moved on.

Low NPS score.

Yeah.

Would you recommend extremism to a friend or family member?

Two.

All right, this has been another all-in podcast for Bestie C, the Rain Man David Sacks, and

the Queen of Quinoa on his coming out party today, IPO coming up for Metro Mile.

Congratulations to Friedberg.

Congratulations to Chamath on the pipe.

Sacks and I, we’re going to have to figure out a way to lick our wounds and wet our beaks.

Let’s put our thinking caps on, and over the break, find a deal we can exclude these two

from because we got to get in early, get 30% of a company, and then we got to have Chamath,

Spackett, and Friedberg do the late stage deal with all this Metro Mile money.

And we’ll see you all next time on the all-in podcast.

That was fucking great.

Best one yet.

You guys want to see something funny?

You guys see that video my wife just sent me?

That’s my dog taking a shit on your driveway, Sacks.

Oh, man.

Where is it?

I want to see that deuce.

It’s a code 13 again.

Oh, my God.

There’s only one person who has a code 13.

Chamath, can you take a shit on his Model X?

Oh, my God.

That’s something.

And we’d all have code 13.

Oh, no, everybody.

Can we roll over the credits?