Hey everybody, it’s me, Jason Calaclinas. Welcome, welcome.

Hey everybody, it’s me, Jason.

Thank god Trump’s out.

I hate Trump and I love myself.

Hey everybody, happy days are here again. Champagne bottles popping. Happy days are here again.

Sax is so happy. Trump’s out of office.

He gave an amazing speech about how great Biden’s inauguration was.

Welcome to the All In podcast.

Oh my gosh.

With me today, in our post-inauguration afterglow, is the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya,

the queen of quinoa, David Friedberg, and riding the blue wave, diving in.

No more red pills. The blue wave is David. Rain Man Sax is with us.

David, how did it feel to watch Biden’s inauguration speech,

which you said hit all the notes, and I see you wearing blue today.

Let me have a sip of my Vuv-Kliko and tell us.

You’ve got the blue jacket, the blue shirt, and the blue headset on.

You’ve ridden the blue wave. Tell us how you feel with Biden in office.

I’m going to drink my Vuv.

Jason, I’m just happy to see that you’re happy.

Does this mean that your Trump derangement is over?

You’ve gone cold turkey. You’re on the wagon.

I’m just happy to have my friend back and not have you part of this

Trump derangement zombie horde that you’ve been in for the last few years.

I’ll tell you two quick stories.

The first one turned out not to be true, but there was a New York Times alert

that came out this weekend saying that they were going to lift the travel ban.

For a moment, I was a little in shock.

I’m Canadian. My family’s in Canada. I haven’t seen them in a year.

My mom is 80 years old. I haven’t seen her in a year.

Then the second was on the day of the inauguration,

Biden signed an EO, I guess, that starts to basically create a path to citizenship.

There are two women in my life who I think are just lovely, lovely people

who I’ve never been able to hire.

Now, this gives us a path to hire them and compensate them the way that we wanted to.

In these moments, I started crying.

I’ve probably had three or four moments and I realized like,

holy shit, I have had so much pent up emotion,

waiting for honestly, just like a normal average day.

Simple, humane, good things.

I’m not trying to jump on the Biden bandwagon.

I think that he’s got a lot of work to do.

But I do think that just at a level, simple, basic level of humanity,

it was a different, it was a big sea change.

How did you take it?

Freeberg? I’m curious.

Did you cry as well?

I observed the inauguration.

It was interesting.

We didn’t upgrade your firmware, sorry.

We were supposed to push the two David firmwares for the ability to cry.

But did you feel any emotion of the three emotions we’ve given you

in your programming?

Did any of them move at all?

I don’t remember.

I mean, I don’t remember the origin of my non-emotional

characterization, Jason.

But yeah, I think it was…

Just based on every interaction we’ve ever had with you, but continue.

Right. I guess that makes sense.

So I feel like the Biden moment on inauguration day,

it really did feel like a sigh of relief,

because so much of Trump love him or hate him

has been driven by a degree of tension, right?

He came in to office on the premise that he was going to drain the swamp.

I mean, that’s a very active position.

He’s going to go in, he’s going to change things.

And I think the Biden tone is like,

let’s take it down a notch.

Let’s all take a deep breath.

And I feel like that generated a collective sigh of relief.

I’ll also say that I watched that with the eyes of someone who voted for Trump.

I didn’t vote for Trump.

But I don’t think I voted this year.

I can’t remember.

It was in the middle of the pandemic.

But I basically feel like there was a lot of folks…

It’s easy to say, let’s unite the country when you’re on the winning side.

And when you’re not, and you’re sitting there,

and your guy got kicked out of office,

and your guy claimed that he got kicked out because of fraudulent activity,

and you’re one of the 46% of Americans

that are already disapproving of Biden’s performance in his first two days of office.

You don’t look at that as a moment of relief.

You don’t look at that as a moment of respite.

And I feel like there’s a little bit of a missed point of view

in terms of how we’re all covering it and talking about it.

It certainly feels good to take the tension down and take a deep breath

and have leadership not be putting the tension out there.

But there’s a lot of anger and disappointment still festering out there.

And I think we need to be very cognizant of why and what we can do.

And it would have been nice to see Biden not just say,

let’s unite, but actually step over the line

and declare some of the policies and points of view of the other side

as being valid and engaging more directly on those points,

versus saying, we’ll all work together in the future.

And we’re already seeing this riff with McConnell and others

in terms of how to deal with the filibuster in a unified Senate.

And I just don’t think that we’re there.

So, yeah.

Sachs, what are your thoughts?

And then we’ll go to you, Chamath.

Yeah, I mean, look, I’m not going to swoon over an octogenarian

reading cliches off a teleprompter.

I’m sorry, I just can’t do it.

Now, that being said, you know, the inauguration speech

struck all the right notes of, you know, reconciliation,

lowering the temperature, coming together.

These are the things you’re supposed to say at an inauguration.

These are the presidential layups, if you will.

It’s kind of a weird thing that Trump could never quite get these layups in.

Biden did what he was supposed to do.

And I agree that there is a sense of relief in the temperature being lowered

and the situation in Washington feeling a bit depressurized.

And so, I think he deserves credit for that.

That’s all for the good.

I think the problem Biden’s going to have is not just sort of the Trump right opposing him,

but the uncivil warriors in his own party.

Uncivil warriors, I think, was the most memorable line in his speech.

There are people, I think, you know, on the left

who aren’t really on board with the reconciliation agenda.

I mean, shortly after the election, you had AOC proposing

a truth and reconciliation commission to go after everyone from the Trump era.

I don’t think that’s exactly the kind of reconciliation Biden’s talking about.

You have, I think, the oppressive hand of big tech

playing into this revenge agenda by acting as a speech cartel.

And now we have the rest of the tech stack jumping on board with the speech cartel.

You had an announcement from a whole bunch of finance companies, PayPal, Stripe, Square,

that said they would cancel the accounts and by implication livelihoods

of anyone connected to January 6th.

Well, what exactly does that mean?

I mean, there were many thousands of people at this rally on the mall.

Only a few percent of them breached the Capitol

and an even smaller percentage engaged in violence.

But everybody who was at the mall and really everyone in the MAGA movement

is, quote unquote, connected to that protest.

So how many degrees of Kevin Bacon are we going to play in acting out these reprisals?

And I think the worst part of all is that now we have in Congress

a bill put forward by Adam Schiff that basically would create a domestic Patriot Act

to create giant new surveillance powers for the state to go after people they deem to be

traitors and seditionists and domestic terrorists.

And I actually tweeted a letter by Rashida Tlaib of the squad opposing this.

It’s the first time I’ve stood with the squad I was proud to

because the last thing the state needs right now is more surveillance powers.

And this idea that we’re fighting a war against fellow Americans based on

basically political dissent, that’s not going to create reconciliation.

That’s going to lead to the next step in this horrible tit for tat game.

Just to build on this for a second.

There was a Rasmussen poll that came out today.

Today’s Friday, January 22nd.

So two days after the inauguration and Biden’s disapproval rating is 45%.

And, you know, all of a sudden, you can think again, as you said,

three days ago, you know, a lot of people were on the losing side and are now on the winning side.

And today, a lot of people that were on the winning side are quote unquote,

on the losing side.

And you see how reflexive the reaction is.

It’s like an auto hate, right?

It’s like auto disapproval.

And so if that’s the case, it just it just begs the question.

How much room and how much tolerance will we have as a society if we start to go after folks

that is, you know, that effectively have an enormous amount of political dissent?

Are there fringes of both parties that need to get basically found out,

exposed and put in jail, whether they’re Antifa on the left or,

you know, the far right extremists on the right?

Absolutely.

But hopefully, the FBI already has enough power to do that.

And that’s already their remit.

And what we’re not going to have to do is pass an enormous number of laws.

I mean, I’ve said this before, like, the Patriot Act was so crazy because

it was a foreign actor and a foreign event on domestic soil that created it.

But, you know, between the pandemic and now what happened in the Capitol,

a biological Patriot Act, a domestic Patriot Act, these are all in the offing.

And I think what we’re going to have to do is, again, it sounds cheesy, but find the common

ground so that we can expose who are at the fringes of both parties, who are the real crazy

people, round those folks up and deal with them with the laws that we have today, because

otherwise the unintended consequences for the overwhelming majority of the Americans who are

just normal folks is going to be a little scary.

I thought a really interesting reconciliation moment happened with the woman who stole

Nancy Pelosi’s laptop.

I don’t know if you guys were have read that story.

But this woman who stole the laptop and was considering selling it to the Russians or

something.

She’s 22 years old.

She’s obviously was misguided in doing this.

And the judge basically explained to her that she was releasing her to her mother’s, you

know, care and that her mother would go to jail if, you know, she did anything further.

But she said, listen, you know, you’re a beneficiary of the Constitution.

You are getting a speedy trial.

You are getting representation.

And she used it almost as a civics lesson.

And I think we had a discussion, maybe two episodes when the pot got a little hot, which

was great for ratings, by the way, and for our relationships.

And it resulted in a reconciliation dinner that we had a little a little wives dinner.

Our wives brought us together for dinner to just make sure everything was on the well.

Chamath Chamath brought us together for dinner and brought us and brought wives.

Yeah.

And no, I mean, it was it was a good thing, because frankly, Jason, I was starting to

hate you just just a little bit, but I could feel the hate, you know.

And Chamath being empathetic as he is recognize the situation.

And so we’ve decided to do, you know, at least a quarterly besties dinner to make sure that

yeah, that the contentiousness does not get out of hand and interfere with our friendships,

which are more important than our politics.

Ultimately, that’s what we all hope is comes out of this podcast, which is a deeper understanding

and reconciliation of of issues that we disagree on.

And breaking bread, having a meal or having a civil conversation, even if it gets a little

heated, keeping it civil is important.

I thought that this is the way to handle it.

A lot of these we’re going to be able to use some amount of judgment on the people who

storm the Capitol and say, okay, this person’s misguided.

They took a selfie, this person broke windows.

And then this person, you know, threw a fire extinguisher at a cop.

And we have to make sure that the justice system is deployed in a fair way.

And more surveillance and more investigation.

I don’t think that’s the solution.

I think more surveillance, more investigations.

Absolutely.

Because I think the FBI has the power today to do that.

And I think they should.

Like I said, they should find every single person involved, find the appropriate crime,

make sure that they’re punished.

But the idea of passing broad sweeping surveillance powers over every American citizen is fucking

nuts.

It’s bonkers.

And by the way, all that’s all that’s going to do is create these honeypots for foreign

governments to want to attack anyways, because if that capability exists, it exists in code

on servers somewhere.

And folks in China and other places will want to find out where that is, and they will be

attacking it all day long.

And so the last thing we need is we’re already leaking enough information about ourselves

online willingly and unwittingly.

I don’t want there to be a honeypot.

That’s the first thing.

The second thing I just want to say is I thought it was incredible what Mitch McConnell did

just back to your comment, Jason, about making sure folks get the right adjudication.

I think Mitch McConnell set the stage to have Donald Trump impeached.

And the reason I think that is this was the first time he was completely unequivocal,

which is that Donald Trump provoked all these folks.

And I think what it allows the Republican Party to do is to get together under closed

doors, you know, behind closed doors, circle the wagons and say it’s either him or us,

we choose right now.

And I think what’s going to happen if I had to guess is that that allows a lot of people

to break ranks and support the impeachment in the Senate that’s going to start on Monday.

And I think there’s a real chance now that that this impeachment goes through and he

gets convicted.

I think it’s worth just thinking about the implications of that.

If you did that, there are there are Trump loyalists, there aren’t really GOP loyalists.

And I guess there are GOP loyalists.

But there are a lot of Trump loyalists that are not loyal to the GOP at this point.

And Saxe, you know, correct me if I’m wrong.

But if Trump does actually create a fringe party, does create a patriot party, as he

suggested he might, you could see up to 20 million Americans joining that party.

And, you know, that would reduce the ranks of the Republican Party significantly.

And in kind of my understanding is in political theory, what would result is you always have

a balance in the parties.

And so the parties kind of adjust left or right to create that balance.

Ultimately, it’s just kind of the organic way this works.

In order for the Republican Party to gain, you would probably see a lot of membership

move over to the Republican Party, which means that the Democratic Party is going to move

further left.

And, you know, think about the implications of that.

If Trump does actually if they do actually kick Trump out of the party, and he does set

up a fringe party, you will likely see the Democrats move further left, creating a much

more kind of conflicting story for some of the centrists than what they’re telling today

of what’s going to happen in the future.

And that’s a very different America in the next two to three years that could be created

if they took that risk.

And I think they have to associate that calculus when they’re making this decision.

You know, you can talk about justice and wanting to kick him out of the party.

But the implications of him leaving the party are rather profound.

Oh, it would fracture the Republican Party.

It would be, I guess, the best historical analog would be when Teddy Roosevelt left

the party to form the Bull Moose Party.

He actually fractured the Republican Party.

And that allowed, I think, Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency, beating Taft.

Yeah, I mean, the Republicans would basically lose every election from now until Trump is

no longer, you know, a force in American politics.

If he created, I guess, or they’d have to move left, right?

I mean, in order for them to gain, you know, more people, they’d have to get the centrist

Democrats.

They’d have to move left, and that’ll give the Democrats the ability to move left.

Yeah, I mean, it would be a dream scenario for the Democrat Party.

I’m surprised.

I’d be surprised at the end of the day if enough Republicans went along with this to

fracture the party.

But look, I understand that on some basis, you know, Trump caused what happened at the

Capitol.

He convened everybody.

He rabble roused.

But I think that, frankly, if you have a trial, I think the question we have to ask is, like,

what agenda does this serve?

Does this serve a reconciliation agenda, or does this serve a revenge agenda?

I mean, the guy’s already out of office.

I thought we canceled the Trump reality show.

And this is like bringing it back for another season, because this trial is going to be

a shit show, just like all things Trump.

You have a trial in the Senate, and it’s going to turn into a total farce, okay?

And, you know, look, I think cosmically, Trump was reckless.

He was responsible.

But when you actually look at the legal definition of incitement, it’s actually very hard to

prove incitement.

So now Trump’s going to get his lawyers up there, and they’re going to be pushing back

on this, and it’s going to consume the country for months.

And I just think we should be moving forward right now.

The guy’s already out of office.

I thought it was going to be three days and done.

Why would it take months?

I’m curious.

You’re just saying you overhang from it?

They’re going to start it mid-February, right?

It’s not going to be three days.

This goes on until the trial’s over.

I mean, it’ll be at least a week of discussion, right, Sax?

So, Sax, is it, do you think the GOP preventing Trump from being able to run again is worth

the week of animosity, let’s call it?

I think we should just move on as a country.

And at the end of the day, I think that’s what’s good for Biden’s agenda.

I mean, this will become very consuming.

What’s good for the GOP, though?

As a person who would align themselves with Republicans mainly, I would say, what do you

think is best for your party, the party you’re a part of?

Just moving on, just moving forward.

What if Trump comes back and gets the nomination in 2024?

I mean, I think that is definitely a risk you take.

But I think that-

Do you want to take that risk?

I’ll leave it to the voters to decide what makes sense.

Interesting.

I think that the only salvation for the Republicans is to repudiate Trump.

And I actually agree with Friedberg.

I think that this creates the opportunity for this, I think Trump wants to call it the

Patriot Party, to be sort of center-right.

I think Democrats probably ebb over time, you know, center-left.

And then the Republicans actually are this interesting power broker, because they can

actually tack to the middle and be centrist, you know, about a social safety net combined

with, you know, small government.

If you could somehow tiptoe and balance on that line, I think that is the winning strategy

that people want.

But I think that’s my point is the Republican Party is going to have to move left in order

to create balance between the two parties again, because they are going to lose 20 million

voters to the Patriot Party.

And that’s the profound shift that’s going to happen.

And when the Republican Party moves left, the Democrats are going to move further left.

And so-

Maybe, I don’t think that moving that far left is a really winning strategy for them.

No, but I think I think Friedberg is right.

So as an example, I think I can say this, but like I had a call this week with the mayor

of Miami, Francis Suarez.

What an unbelievably impressive guy.

Holy fucking shit.

This guy is amazing.

What he’s done in Miami is incredible.

I mean, the GDP growth is like Chinese GDP growth, 10%, 8%, 6 and a half percent.

He’s running fiscal surpluses.

You know, crime is down, down, down.

He’s done an incredible job.

This guy’s a fundamental centrist.

You know, and when you talk about what his beliefs are, I was like, what is this guy?

Is he a Democrat?

Is he Republican?

I was like, he’s like, honestly, I’m a centrist, you know?

And so my point is, if whoever tacks to the middle will find the ability to attract incredible

leaders that I think are our next generation set of leadership.

So in that way, Trump as a change agent,

Sachs, was a success in that he broke the system.

And this was Peter Thiel’s kind of concept when he put him in.

And I know you don’t speak for Peter, but Peter’s idea was, hey, this person’s a change agent.

He’s going to be this, you know, drain the swamp person.

Maybe that didn’t happen, but he has basically made everybody reconsider what party they want

to be part of and what they actually want on the political agenda.

And now we’re so we’ve never been more focused on politics and how our country runs in our

lifetime, have we?

Well, Trump, you’re right that Trump was a classic disrupter.

Keith Rablois has this line about founders that

disruption is created by disruptive people.

And Trump was, you know, one of those very disruptive people.

I mean, just to take two examples, I mean, he created a total realignment on our views

around China.

I think it’s now a bipartisan consensus that, you know, we should not keep feeding

China and making, you know, keep feeding that the Chinese tiger and turning into a dragon.

Everyone seems to think now that summary appraisal is warranted.

And the other big issue was the forever wars in the Middle East.

You know, I think Trump first created a realignment within the Republican Party when he said,

no more bushes.

He meant no more of these stupid foreign wars.

And I think that was an important realignment.

So, yeah, I mean, he’s been a very disruptive figure.

I think that everyone’s breathing a sigh of relief because we’ve moved on.

I think that he unnecessarily was incendiary and sort of pressurized the situation.

But I think the best thing at this point is to move forward and not keep rehashing the Trump era.

Speaking of rehashing, I don’t know if you guys know about what is happening with Facebook,

but they have an oversight board they created last year in the spring.

And the oversight board is not to do the day to day policing of Facebook and Instagram and

WhatsApp activity, but it is to be a place where people who have been have had content removed or

have had their account suspended to appeal. They have taken the Trump case, as it were,

and given it to their Supreme Court, which is the oversight board.

And the oversight board is going to make a judgment basically on should Trump get his

social media accounts back. They have complete autonomy from Facebook. They are funded by

Facebook with 120 or 130 million dollars over the next six years. So they’re getting like

20 million dollars a year to run this. They’ve got a really amazing bench of intellectuals,

public intellectuals, and they’re sort of above Facebook in this regard. What do we think

should happen to Trump’s social media accounts? Should he have a path to reclaiming them?

And with this board that exists as this a budsman, as I talked about in the last episode,

what do we think of this process? And do we think maybe Twitter and YouTube should join this

oversight board? Let’s separate these two things. And actually, Jason, you just framed it perfectly.

Let’s separate the two issues. One is, is any of us comfortable with a random set of people that

some people will like and other people not like making these decisions on our behalf that are not

necessarily trained to make these decisions? I mean, these aren’t elected trained judges or

lawyers that sit for a bar exam. These are just, you know, private citizens ultimately at the end

of the day. I think that if you allow this to happen at scale, there’s going to be a bunch

of decisions that you’ll be okay with and support. I think a lot of people probably are cheering when

Trump got blocked. But if you can abstract it away and think about all the people that you

actually care about, what if the administration was on the other side, and now all of a sudden,

you know, these people to curry favor with the administration went in a different direction and

people that you cared about got blocked. It is an untenable situation. And I think this is the

slippery slope that the framers never intended. I don’t think it should be people like this,

making any decision like this. And in many ways, it’s a it’s a fig leaf for these companies to

pretend they’re doing the right thing while they’re really shirking the real responsibility.

Friedberg, you agree?

It’s hard to say on this specific. So I think we should just take a broader point of view on this,

which is how do tech companies create independence in the platforms that they’re building so that

they don’t get scrutinized as monopolists. And so there are several examples of this being done,

both successfully and not successfully across the tech ecosystem. Google made Android open source.

And by making the Android operating system open source, they were able to have their own forked

versions that they were able to install on phones with partners like HTC and Samsung and others,

that they could then have their search engine be the primary search engine.

So the entire Android operating system is available for anyone to work on for anyone to fork for

anyone to use. And then Google’s iteration of that open source platform and Google’s contributions,

which they were making regularly, allowed them to kind of have a great commercial outcome without

being the owner of the operating system, having learned from the mistakes of Microsoft in the past.

Facebook tried to take a similar approach with Libra, and it was a total shit show and a disaster.

I don’t know where it is today. But they tried to create this also independent board

to provide oversight and to kind of do all the open source work on the Libra currency.

And Facebook was going to then use that on their platform as their kind of token cryptocurrency

solution. And obviously, there was so much scrutiny because no one believed the independence.

And I think we’re hearing the same thing now about the Facebook Oversight Board.

Jack Dorsey is now taking the same approach with Blue Sky, which is meant to be this open sourced,

you know, independently managed social media protocol system. And so Twitter would effectively

become an application layer on top of this open sourced approach to how do you decide what goes

on social media, how do you decide what’s inappropriate and appropriate, and what

technology protocols are available for everyone to use and what business and arbitration protocols

are available for everyone to use in an open sourced way. And we’ll see where Jack goes with

Blue Sky, he seems to be doing a better job messaging and organizing teams of people to work

on this. And I don’t see the pushback that Facebook is getting with their oversight board.

So unfortunately, a lot of these the big tech platforms in order to avoid the monopolistic

allegations and the allegations of control and influence, they’re creating independence,

independent systems, and the titter miss. And I don’t think we yet know, I think in the next

year or two, we’ll see how Blue Sky, Libra, the Facebook Oversight Board, and some of these other

platform, what would you do, David? What would you do? Let me just put it to you. If you were

in charge, you were the CEO of Facebook or Twitter, would you have a path to reinstating

Trump? Yes or no? Yeah, let me just get freebergs. Would you? Yes or no?

reinstate Trump? Oh, yeah, 100%. We should have a path to it. I think the like I’ve said in the

past, having some objective, I think that number one, I don’t think it was inappropriate for them

to kick him off the platform from a legal perspective. I don’t Saxon, I might disagree,

but we can probably argue for an hour. But I think from a freedom of speech point of view,

they’re private companies with private accounts, and they did what they wanted to do. Was it the

right thing to do? I don’t think that was the right thing. So you give him a path to getting

his account back. And so I think you need to create an objective system. And you need to give

everyone whether it’s Trump or whomever else, everyone has to have the same set of standards

that they’re held to. And then a universal approach that anyone can appeal and okay,

but that’s the approach. But knowing what Trump did on January 6, would you let him back on your

platform? If you were CEO, is the question I’m trying to get out of your free bird. But okay,

David, you go? Yeah, I mean, so so here’s the fundamental problem is that the town square

is now owned by Facebook and Twitter, the town square got privatized, and our speech rights are

now in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as a practical matter. I mean, you do not

have speech rights in the modern world if you get deplatformed by big tech. And until now, there’s

been no way to appeal their decisions. We have had no transparency into their decisions. So I think

Facebook creating this appeals board is a step in the right direction. But you know, they’re calling

it their Supreme Court. But I’ll tell you, my Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. You know,

at the end of the day, we all know that the most important part of a trial is jury selection. And

Zuckerberg is still picking these 20 people. And, you know, actually, just in case in point,

he picked the top, he picked the four, and the four pick the next 16. And then they don’t have

an ongoing ability to pick the next ones. And they have some amount of terms. So just to give you

that. Okay, well, fair enough. And like I said, Look, I don’t want to criticize this move on its

own, because it is a step in the right direction. We need an appeals process when people get

canceled. Okay. That part is good. But what I would like to see, like I said,

my Supreme Court is a Supreme Court, and they’ve spoken to this issue. And I would like to see

these social networking monopolies apply a First Amendment standard, a speech policy broadly

consistent with the First Amendment. And sometimes that will mean allowing speech we don’t like,

but it will result in a greater level of speech protection for all of us.

Well, it will allow speech back on the platform. No, but hold on a sec. If you’re going to go by

that standard, the problem is with this Oversight Board concept is that it completely violates

exactly what the Supreme Court is meant to be, which is a country by country set of governance

and standards and laws. Like I’m just looking at the Oversight Board people right now. These

people look incredibly well credentialed. ME Palmore of Israel, Catalina Botero Marino of

Colombia, Niga Dad from Pakistan, Hele Thorning Schmidt from Denmark, Catherine Chen from Taiwan,

Jamal Green from the United States, Alan Rusbridger from UK, Andreas Sajo from Hungary,

and it goes on and on. How are we supposed to adjudicate a set of standards at a national

level? Like when we have the are all these people from all these different countries supposed to

apply on US constitutional right of free speech and have the idea would be they would use some

global standard, but then also take into consideration local standards. That’s what

they’re stated purposes and why they’re so diverse. The setup for that, though, Jason,

is that then we know when, when there’s a, you know, the Hindu nationalist BJP party has a

specific point of view. And so when Modi wants to get elected, there’s going to be specific kinds of

free speech laws there, you know, Poland’s gonna have a different point of view, and they’re not

going to respect what’s happening in the Oversight Board case in point. Australia passed a potential

law, or is considering passing a law, which is basically around if you know, treating Facebook

and Google as quasi publishers, and that, you know, they’re, I think that they have to pay some

kind of royalty now for articles that are shared or published or whatever. And Google said, I’m out.

And then Facebook said, I’m out too. So what does that mean for, you know, 200 million people,

you’re out? What does that mean? You’re out, you can make money when the getting’s good. And all

of a sudden, you build this public infrastructure, when the country’s rules change, I actually

respect that more than trying to create some of this broad, holistic governance committee,

because I think it’s a shit show. You can’t cherry pick which laws you want to observe and respect

and, and then which laws you don’t. You know, I think Jamal makes an excellent point about

how difficult this is going to be to implement. Let me propose an alternative that actually comes

from a former law professor of mine at the University of Chicago, Richard Epstein. He

made the point that he wants to apply common carrier regulation, at least in the US to these

monopolies. And the example he gives is that the railroad monopolies could not deny you service

based on your political views. And, you know, this is, this is a, this is a real issue. Imagine,

you know, going back in time, you know, we had the Lincoln Douglas debates, for example,

the way that Lincoln and Douglas went around the country was by train. Imagine if some railroad

magnate some oligarch said, Mr. Lincoln, I don’t like your views, I’m not going to give you

passage on my railroad monopoly, the common carrier rules would have prevented them from

doing that. And what Epstein suggests we do is, if you’re a essentially a monopoly, a speech

monopoly in the in the US, one of these platforms that has, you know, the gigantic network effects,

you have to apply the common carrier rules. It’s an interesting concept. I think let’s move on to

the economy. And it’d be very interesting. We’ll monitor obviously, what the this oversight board

does, we’re going to monitor what’s going to happen with this January 6.

Sorry, Jason, the last thing on this is you can you can tell if you if you graft and I’m sure

somebody listening to all end can graph and tweet this, but if you graft the price to earnings ratio

of big tech, as all of these issues have come out, like, you know, if you looked at a time series of

their PE, and you put on there, you know, things like George Floyd, things like the Capitol riots,

you know, all of these things that have created these flashpoint issues around free speech,

flashpoints, the, the massacre in New Zealand and Christchurch that was live streamed on Facebook,

all of this stuff, what you’ll see is, at least capitalism is voting that these companies will

not be allowed to be companies much longer. The smart money is betting that they’re going

to be regulated, and something’s going to change, it’s going to be a quasi governmental organization,

exactly that the level of regulation at a government by government level,

is going to be so onerous as to make these companies quasi nonprofits that work on behalf

of countries, they’re going to become utilities, right, they’re getting they’re going to get

regulated, like utilities at some point, or they’re going to have to adopt some governance,

like we’ve talked about, or other options will emerge. And I think what Jack is doing with the

is a blue sky is what they’re calling it blue sky. Yeah, yeah, what they’re really doing with

blue sky is saying your profile and your data is going to be stored on some blockchain or

some decentralized system like Bitcoin or like any other peer to peer service, which means

it’s not on their server, Twitter just pulls all that data together. So we would all have our own

domain names and calacanis.com or sax.com slash profile dot whatever the HTML equivalent is,

let’s just call it dot social, you know, your sax dot social URL would be your profile on Facebook,

Twitter and everywhere else. And when you post it to it, it would post to Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore, they could say we don’t actually host this stuff, we’re just pulling it together,

which then destroys their business model perch moths point, what do we think, as a little aside,

is going to happen with the tick tock case? Now that Trump is out of office, and Biden is in

office, we sort of alluded to China sacks being a super important thing that we all have consensus

on now what should happen with tick tock? And do you think Biden will go after tick tock and say,

hey, we got to get this out of here? Because it’s, you know, essentially spyware and jacquemus was

just resurfaced. And let’s just talk about China for a second.

Yeah, I think the sad reality is that the whole tick tock thing is going to get swept under the

rug. I think there’ll be no restrictions on tick tock. I think what we need, the issue with like,

with banning tick tock, though, is that it’s just one place where China can collect data on all of

us. I mean, the reality is, there’s 1000s of places. And so, you know, I do think that taking

some action on tick tock is warranted, but it would it is a little bit of selective enforcement.

But what I would like to see is some guarantee some assurance that that tick tock is not is

collecting data in the way they’re saying they’re collecting it and that there’s not

sort of spyware within the app. And I don’t think we know for sure whether there’s spyware or not,

I’ll say it, I’ll say it slightly differently. I’ve maintained this for a while, but it is

inconceivable that inside of big tech at every single company that you define big tech is not

at least one spy from Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia.

Did I tell you guys I had a spy working for me a climate? No, you got to rest. No, tell us the

story. It’s public. So I’ll share it. We had a data scientist named Hightower, great guy,

worked on our remote sensing team, and worked on our nitrogen model, which predicted nitrogen

content in soil and was very deep in the in the in the code base and everything. And shortly after

I had left, I found out this so climate, just for the audience, what my company I started and ran

was acquired by Monsanto in 2013, which is a big seed company, a lot of people know it for other

things. And, and so I left, and I found out that the guy quit, went to the airport, and the FBI

intercepted him at the airport, and they found tucked into his bag, a thumb drive, and he had

downloaded all of our code base for our nitrogen models. And he was taking them to give them to the

Chinese government. And so he’s in jail right now. He’s in prison in the US right now. But this was

like the most nondescript, super nice scientist, data scientist guy you’ve ever met, like you would

have had zero suspicion. And, and it turns out, this is the point, how many of those exist in

Facebook, and it was so by the way, it was so easy for him to get access to our code base. And he

pulled all this stuff down. And he had the whole model. And you know, there’s a there’s a lot of

articles about what happened in our case. But you’re right, it’s happening all over the place.

And, and I don’t think that we fully appreciate like, how much of America’s IP is stored in

software, and data, and how accessible that is to employees inside of these organizations,

and that the security is not adequate to protect that data and that IP.

And then the crazy thing is, like, you know, when just to connect the two dots here on this

jack muffin, like when you saw that video, were like, you know, basically, he was forced to,

you know, show field. I’m okay. And, you know, this is all about the Chinese party held captive.

Hmm. My gosh, like, I mean, these are all quasi governmental companies.

Alibaba exists, because of the largest of the Communist Party and Xi Jinping,

if that wasn’t clear after last week, I mean, and so to your point, like, you know, if any company

gets a hold of US user data, or otherwise, it’s effectively the Chinese government getting ahold

of that data. Yeah, we don’t need proof, David, when Jack Ma disappears, and then comes back and

looks, he looked nervous on that video. I’m no expert, but he did not look like he was the Jack

Ma, who was giving speeches and inspiring people. And I don’t know what this does to entrepreneurship

in China. But I mean, who in China is going to start a company now and want to be the next

Jack Ma or Jeff Bezos? No, I think I think Jason, it’s even simpler, what happens,

it makes it makes entrepreneurship even simpler, meaning for those entrepreneurs that thought that

there was a balance between financial imperative and moral imperative, there’s no balance,

you can flush the moral imperative down the fucking toilet, they China will allow you to

get super rich, and super successful, as long as you super toe the line. And that’s the message.

Right? It’s like what Putin did with Khodorkovsky in Russia. It’s like he basically told all the

oligarchs you work for us now. And, and that’s basically that it worked. That’s basically the

message from the CCP to Jack Ma, and to every other entrepreneur in China is you work for us

now. And by the way, civil military fusion was part was was a policy expressly announced by

President Xi. You know, one other data point on this, I think is really interesting is that Biden

just announced that he was keeping on Christopher Wray as the head of the FBI. Christopher Wray gave

a speech back in July at the Hudson Institute about the counter espionage efforts that the

FBI is engaged in. And he was saying that the FBI has more cases now related to, to Chinese

counterintelligence. He said that the FBI is opening a new China related counterintelligence

case every 10 hours, and to a day and of the of the nearly 5000 active FBI counterintelligence

cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. So this is

directly from a speech he gave in July. So I think it’s really interesting. Now at the time that he

gave the speech, you know, a lot of people were saying, well, this is just Trump’s more of Trump’s

China baiting. But I think that by Biden keeping on Chris, Christopher Wray, there’s a continuity

of policy there. And I think, you know, focusing on tick tock is probably the wrong thing. We need

a more comprehensive policy to deal with counterintelligence. Well, it’s a good start,

though, to say, if you hit scale, we’re not going to let you operate here. And we want reciprocity.

Adding to this outgoing Secretary Pompeo, and is the day before the inauguration,

tweeted, I have determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide

and crimes against humanity in China targeting the Uyghurs, Muslims and members of other ethnic

and religious minority groups. That’s quite a bomb to leave the day before. And I think this signals

we are going to keep resetting this relationship. And what an incredible opportunity for us to bring

factories back here bring, as we’ve talked about here, manufacturing back, correct, Friedberg?

That’s what I think. Let’s kick it off. We got we got 3 million, 3 million factories in China.

I think we’ve got less than 100,000 in America.

Let’s go and it will be so glorious. It will be so fucking glorious. I mean,

think about this, right? Look, think about the amount of money like at the end of the day,

what is a government’s purpose? Is it to run a profit? No. You know, that’s our job,

right? Is it to run at break even? I would actually say no. I think it’s to basically

promote the prosperity of current and future generations of its citizens.

And so you should be investing. So if this is the perfect investment,

so if we’re going to be printing, you know, trillions of dollars, and you know,

we should talk about the stimulus bill, because Biden’s going to rip in another 2 trillion,

which I think is a perfect segue. And then by the way, and then after that,

there’s going to be this, it’s amazing infrastructure bill, put the money to work,

let’s reclaim a bunch of this capability on shore and let’s rebuild America.

Okay, Friedberg, you looked at the $1.2 trillion stimulus package that Biden is

proposing. How much of that goes towards rebuilding factories in America?

Well, none. So remember, there’s

a 1.9 billion, 1.9 trillion. Yeah. And so just to put that in context,

you know, Wall Street has talked about there were going to be four,

four massive stimulus bills, you know, since last April, May, I think they’ve talked about this.

And we’re seeing this come to fruition now. And Chamath, correct me if you’ve heard differently.

But there’s always been the expectation, we would have the big first stimulus,

which we had last March, then a second stimulus, people have been waiting for the state stimulus

or the local government stimulus, which this one now it captures. And then the fourth program was

always going to be infrastructure. And we haven’t seen details of the proposed Biden infrastructure

plan yet. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to have a lot of green energy stuff tied up in it. But

let’s just let’s just hit the numbers, right. So in 2009, post financial crisis to keep the

global economy from collapsing, Congress passed an $800 billion aid package,

800 billion was extraordinary at the time, and we’d never seen anything like it,

TARP. And last March, if you’ll recall, we passed this emergency $2 trillion package,

you know, more than 2x what we had during the financial crisis. And now just in December,

right before the year wrapped up, Congress passed another $900 billion package.

And now we’re talking about this $1.9 trillion package getting passed. So we’ve eclipsed

anything you could have ever considered possible in terms of fiscal stimulus. At this point,

the M1 money supply, which I sent the link out ahead of this for share has gone up by 75%

in just the past year. And now if we break down the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill,

you know, a huge chunk of it and this is what Wall Street’s been waiting for

is $350 billion is going to state and local governments. So think about San Francisco or

the state of California, the city of Chicago, the city of New York, all of these folks have

seen their revenue decline, and they’ve had to run massive emergency programs.

Where’s that money coming from? They haven’t been able to raise taxes, they’ve had to put a hold on

receipts. And so this is meant to bridge the gap at the local level. And this is really important,

because so much of capital markets still very much fund local and state governments through

municipal bonds. And those bonds, if they start to default, are going to have a dangerous rippling

effect in the economy. So bridging the state and local government budgets with this $350 billion

package turned out to be, you know, an absolute need and the Republicans prior to the election

were pushing hard against this and saying, let those states fail. They’re mostly blue states,

let those cities fail. They’re mostly blue cities, they’re mismanaged, they’re being

stupid about how they’re operating. So this is a big deal. There’s 160 billion for COVID fighting,

some of which, you know, I throw up on $20 billion for vaccination, which equates to

about $150 per person they expect to vaccinate, which is an extraordinarily high cost. If you

actually think about it on a first principles basis, it’s ridiculous how inefficient they’re

going to be at this $50 billion for testing $40 billion for protective gear and supplies.

And what this indicates to me is so much of what goes on in government and government spending

is skating to where the puck used to be not skating to where the puck is going.

And it’s almost like by the time this money gets deployed, I’m not sure we’re going to need as much

protective gear and supplies. I’m not sure we’re going to need as much testing if we can actually

get the vaccinations done in the next 90 to 100 days. And much of the country starts to recover

from this. You know, you’ve now got $150 billion program sitting out there that doesn’t need to be

out there. And it’s a waste of money. What we should be doing is taking that money and investing

in biomanufacturing infrastructure. So we can more quickly develop and deploy vaccines in the future.

What would it cost to build a factory just back of the envelope that was capable of making

the next? You know, let’s call it one to 1,000,000,000 shots.

One to it’s not a lot. So it’s not a lot. Let me I’ll give you guys the unit economic build.

And you can do the math at home. four grams per liter is the expected yield of a of a

biomanufacturing facility. And a liter is like, you know, how many liters of water do you have

in a tank, you can build half million liter facilities for a couple $100 million. And that’s

four grams per liter every seven days. And as vaccine or the the antibody therapies that we’ve

seen, the antibody therapies are about two grams. And that’ll save someone’s life. The vaccines are

a fraction of a gram. And so you can start to kind of do the math on how just a few billion

dollars invested in building some of these biomanufacturing facilities that are modular

and can be very quickly reprogrammed to make a new molecule can be used to support the future

vaccine supply chain and the future anti antibody therapeutic supply chain, which is critically

needed in this country. And if I were to take $160 billion for COVID fighting, give me 10% of that,

and we’ll be ready for any virus in the future. And we’ll be able to print out vaccines for the

whole country within 30 days. And so a little bit again, of this is not really forward thinking,

it’s scientists and doctors saying what they need, what they’re talking about is last year’s

need. They’re not thinking in terms of what the industrial supply chain needs are going to be in

the future on an ongoing basis for this country at this point, I’m not seeing it. And so I feel a

little bit let down by that. And I hope that the infrastructure programs that are going to be

proposed in the next in the next bill, will start to encompass some of that work.

Paradoxically, it’s going to cost a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear weapons.

So we’re literally going to spend a trillion dollars over the next decade,

upgrading our nuclear. Is that true? That’s nutty.

That’s what I’m reading a headline right here.

Here’s my here’s my little wish list for this infrastructure bill, I think, when you look at

some of the most compelling work that’s happened in the developing world. So like, if you’re going

to go and, you know, build a massive water facility or an energy installation, a lot of

people are worried, hey, listen, I have to deal with, you know, local currency risk, I have to

deal with, you know, corruption, I could have the government, you know, take away this facility from

me without notice, the rule of law may not be strong. And the World Bank has this mechanism

where you can basically go and ensure, you know, for I think it’s like one or 2% of your project

costs the whole project. And it really makes things work. I would love to see the US government

effectively create a program that is similar but different in the following way. There are

some enormous things America needs to do, where the IP exists with our allies. And there is an

enormous fear, what would happen if that IP leaked specifically to China. One example is if you

believe and you care about climate change, and the making of batteries, there’s an enormous

amount of IP that sits with the Japanese. That, you know, if we could license and work with,

as a country, we could build factories all over the country. And we would be the leader in climate.

But that’ll take the US government to basically work bilaterally with the Japanese government to

basically say, listen, if it takes the NSA to fucking protect this shit, we will do it.

But you can run them, they we could just give them their sovereignty in those facts.

You know, these are these are these are for profit companies that are, you know,

relatively risk averse, they’re not going to rip in 10 million bucks to $10 billion to build,

you know, a cathode plant in the US, I would other people would. But that’s my hope in the

infrastructure bill is that we take some of these things that have worked in the developing world,

and we use it to grease the skids in how we rebuild America, it would be fucking glorious.

And also just think about how much a nuclear power plant costs, it’s like six to $9 billion

to build a nuclear power plant. And we haven’t built many new ones. And we’re on the way there.

But if part of this trillion dollars, we could build 10 more of those, energy independence

would continue and global warming would go down. Anything to add there, David looks like you want

to come Well, I did just one final word, you know, the, the, the great senate leader,

Everett Dirksen famously said that, you know, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon,

you’re talking about real money. And now we’re talking about a trillion here and a trillion

there. And these are really big numbers. And I think we should be very concerned about debt and

deficits. No one’s really talking about this yet. But all of this money has to be paid back at some

point. What’s the worst that can happen, David, let’s actually do that. I mean, I’m asking the

question in a non joking way, what is the worst that can happen? Oh, I mean, inflation, inflation,

well, not not just so inflation, because the government will eventually have to monetize the

debt by printing more money, the dollar stops becoming the world’s reserve currency, maybe

that Bitcoin becomes the world’s reserve currency, maybe something else does. It could be lead to,

you know, very severe to basically a debt crisis in the future. What would that look like for

companies and citizens of America? Well, if you’re middle, if you’re middle class, your savings get

wiped out, you know, if so, so if you’re super rich, the reality is there’s already been tremendous

asset inflation. So there’s already been a lot of inflation. But frankly, if you are very rich and

own assets in the stock market, you’re you’re sort of, you’re protected, you know, but if you’re a

middle class person with most of your savings in your bank account, that money is not worth a lot

less, you’re destroyed, or your home, yeah, you get destroyed by that. Yeah, it’s really very sad.

So if you aren’t equities, and the market is on a rip, you know, paying an extra couple of million

dollars for your second home is not a big deal, because your equities have gone up more than that

are equal to that. And if you’re right, somebody who gets makes income, we have a separate issue.

Let’s look, this is this is a this is a bigger issue. But I and I think we should talk about

this at some point, because this is what the grand fallacy of technology was supposed to be.

Like, you know, if you if you break down capitalism into its two most natural states,

you have labor and you have capital, right, you have workers and you have owners. And the biggest

problem that technology did was it drove a wedge and it created an extremely small owner class,

and an extremely massive labor class. And so the reality is that a very few very handful of people

can can get extremely wealthy by being owners of these next generation assets. And then everybody

else is essentially, you know, rendered as labor. And so this wealth inequality just grows and grows

in compounds. And so we have to figure out a way. Yeah, how’s that different than the past?

Because I think it’s got I think I think technology accelerated that dynamic.

Well, I think jumping in on this, I mean, I think that technology creates bigger winner,

take all outcomes, and that’s fed into inequality. But the good thing about tech or the tech ecosystem

is that frankly, we have option pools, right? We have broad based ownership of these companies.

If you go work for a Google or Facebook, whatever, you get

10,000 people, that’s 10,000. No one and they’re and they’re replacing 2 million jobs with 10,000

people. I mean, this is why this is why we need to have 100% participation in the markets by

everybody in the country. Joe Greenblatt, who I had on my podcast recently is a proponent of this

chamath they saw you tweeting about it. When you’re born in the United States, we should put $5,000

in a 401k that you can’t touch until you’re 65 years old. That is in whatever index funds

and every person born gets that $5,000 and cannot touch it. And then we see where it winds up.

I’m not sure. It doesn’t solve the problem that a lot of people have to climb up a hill first,

right? They take on a lot of debt to get education to put themselves in a position to ultimately be

able to generate the income to do that. And I think, you know, sure, give them $5,000 in the

beginning, but it’s not going to get them where they need to be. But it does solve one portion

of the problem, which is they don’t have participation. And we could take out the

wondering what your retirement is going to be like.

I think both of you are right. I think like there needs to be

something that allows people to have a line of sight to savings like a lot of about being invested

in anything where you own it, whether it’s real estate, or whether it’s a piece of artwork,

or whether it’s stocks and bonds. So many people don’t even know how to begin and don’t understand

the concept of ownership. And so they are stuck in being in the ghetto of labor. And I think like

one of the biggest things we can do is you can give them the taste of ownership so that they

understand that difference so that they want to be an owner. Okay, number one. And then to David’s

point, number two is we still have a responsibility to educate people so that they can actually have

skills that they can monetize. And we have a responsibility to do that. And right now,

we make it so fucking hard. And we trick people because like we send them down the path of

getting a $200,000 art history degree, and then they end up working at a Starbucks and then there,

which is impossible to monetize. I mean, it’s ridiculous. You can’t monetize that.

You can’t. By the way, what you’re saying to mop is the reason I think retirement accounts

were set up in the US was to shift away from pension fund models where people were getting

a fixed income at retirement, and shifting them to a model of equity and ownership in the markets

where they could participate actively on a tax free basis. But obviously, it hasn’t done enough.

I think the big difference between the Industrial Revolution, the first and second Industrial

Revolution and where we are with software in the last two to three decades is the capital required,

right? It’s very little capital to build a highly valuable software business. It required a lot of

capital to build oil infrastructure and railroad infrastructure and factories. And so to your point,

you get extraordinarily different outsized returns today than you did 100 years ago as an owner

versus labor. And the bridge to try and give people ownership through retirement accounts

certainly hasn’t been enough. To your point, David, I saw this study. It was fucking crazy.

I’m going to get the exact numbers wrong, but the trend is accurate. When people used to actively

manage their 401k, there was a very small participation rate, but the mean return was

off the charts and the amount of dollars as a function of their paycheck was off the charts.

Call it 50, 60 cents of every theoretical dollar you could put into it. The minute that we went to

passive and that you could sort of trickle money in, the number of people that participated

literally more than doubled, but then the amount of that max dollar went off of a cliff.

And so the problem that we’ve had is we haven’t taught people. We’ve misdirected some of them to

say, have a 401k. It replaces your pension as if it’s the solution. That’s still not the solution.

And we need to have ways of teaching people how to actually manage it. It’s not that hard and the

basics can be taught very simply, but right now we are massively exacerbating this wealth gap,

the way that we behave. And then all of this money that’s going to go in, this 1.9 trillion,

whatever, how many trillion comes afterwards is frankly, for the few that are smart enough to

take advantage of it will be amazing, but it’ll still push the overwhelming majority of Americans

who are stuck in labor deeper and deeper into that ghetto and they’ll never get up.

It is definitely every little bit helps, right? Like if you have the 401k that helps

and then educate people. And I think if we gave everybody an ISA at birth or an income sharing

agreement for these 20 professions and the government provided those.

Jason, why is it that, you know, for example, if to invest in a startup,

you either have to have more than $5 million or more than, you know, a million bucks.

200k a year, it’s bonkers and they’re going to have to change it.

And so if you’re a product manager, that’s like really, really talented, or if you’re like,

you know, somebody else who’s just got a, you know, a PhD in nuclear biology and frankly,

is, you know, is decided to teach for 60,000 and you can’t participate,

even though you have the intellect to judge. Like, we’re just like, kind of like compounding.

It’s even worse than that. The person who’s changing the accreditation laws at the SEC

and working on this said, I cannot, I’m writing the accreditation laws.

And because I make 150k a year, whatever it is under 200k,

I can’t participate. And I’m the one responsible for the law.

That person must be one of the most sophisticated people in the world.

It literally is the most sophisticated person in the world when it comes to accreditation.

That’s why we need to move to sophisticated investor, not accredited,

and just some test. And if you did that, every single Uber driver,

Lyft driver, Postmates driver, Airbnb host, or a person who used the cash app or PayPal

would have said, I can, as one of the first users, I have access to buy shares.

I’m just going to say this. I’ll buy them.

This problem has to get fixed, because I think in the next 10, I think in the next 10 and 20 years,

the United States is going to fucking reemerge like a phoenix. And the reason the reason is

because of innovation around climate change and agriculture and biotechnology and technology.

These four areas are going to recast GDP. But what that also means is that if we’re going to create

20 or $30 trillion a year for the next 10 and 20 years, 300, 500 trillion,

how the fuck do we make sure that more than 18 people participate?

Absolutely.

Well, so I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying. But I can tell you,

every single one of the companies that I’ve invested in are looking to hire people right now,

they cannot hire people soon enough. It’s their biggest challenge. And it’s not just coders,

it’s salespeople, it’s marketing people, it’s HR people, it’s every role in their company,

they have trouble trying to hire the right person. And they give options to all those people.

So it’s not just a small number of founders getting equity. This is basically a new category

of call it entrepreneurial labor. It’s labor who gets ownership in the company that’s never

existed before. And really, what this comes down to is we need more people participating in the new

economy. If you participate in the new economy, then you get ownership. And if you’re in the old

economy, then you really are stuck in labor. And so what we need to do is spread the opportunity

that that technology represents to more people. That’s part of the minimum wage,

maybe we should have a minimum equity participation. So we have the minimum

wage over here. But if you’re working for an entrepreneurial enterprise, why not get a minimum,

you know, participation in equity, because the free market takes care of that. I mean,

if you have the right market hasn’t taken care of it, David, the free market has,

I agree with David, the free market has, the problem is, how does a person working at Walmart

ever participated in the Walmart appreciation? That’s the point, they will, they will leave

and go to a company that gives them equity. And that’s why you’ll see this. That’s convenient to

say, but they got a job within an hour of their house, it’s not, they got to have the

right skills, Jason. And so this all comes back to education. You know, we got to we got to

people who are in rank and file jobs, the 30 million truck drivers, cashiers, etc,

have equity participation as a right, I think I think you’re saying something different.

Should they? Absolutely. Should the company that does that be created? Absolutely. Will they be

rewarded with all the people that want to work there? Absolutely. So now somebody should go

and start that fucking company. Okay. I just think it’s an interesting concept. I mean,

we do have a minimum wage, why not have a minimum? Jason, you know, the same woman that ran

Elon out of California, Lorena Gonzalez, she’s doing another thing now, just propose a new bill,

like, do you want her to basically pick the equity thresholds? Because that’s what you’re saying?

Well, no, let’s pivot. Let’s pivot to California. Okay, let’s pivot to another disaster.

So the recall is well on its way, they need to get 1.5 million signatures, we’re at 1.1 or 1.2.

But we actually really need to because there’s some verification process that goes on. So in

all likelihood, we will see Gavin Newsom recalled. We agree on that. Yeah, I’ll tell you this,

the stats I heard, there’s about a million, call it a million, million one signatures,

they’ve seen about an 85% verification rate to date. Saks, correct me if I’m wrong on this,

they’re getting about 200,000 signatures a week. They’re, you know, the cost for marketing and

attracting people to get these signatures is coming in at like three to six bucks a signature.

So it’s really not a lot of money is needing to be spent to get this done.

And, you know, even if the verification rate drops to 75 or 65%, you’re still on track at this rate

to hit the recall target by March 17, which is the deadline. And so it appears highly likely

they’re going to get there. Saks, am I right on all that? Yeah, I think they’re at 1.2 million

signatures. That’s what I heard. And they’re trying to get they’re trying to get to 2 million

to have a buffer so that you know, they that you know, they don’t get pushed under the but 1.5 is

the number they need. Yeah, they need 1.5 million certified signatures.

70% of the way there according to the website recall Gavin 2020.com, which I think

I think they will get there. I think they’ll get there. And then there and then the recall

election would take place about four to five months after. After that, there’s a couple of

months where it moves through the finance committee, the recall election has to be budgeted.

And then Newsom would have the opportunity to set a date within I think 60 to 80 days roughly.

So I think we’re looking at July for a recall election.

And Saks, how do you get? How does a candidate get on the ballot because Chamath

is asking for a friend?

Wait a second, I want to be on to that candle. Should we have all four besties be on?

Yeah, we should we should we should all run as all four.

Can we can we run if we’re gonna let the voters decide a squad, we’re gonna

yeah, we’re probably we’re probably gonna have four Kardashians on there. So four besties on

there. And what action? Yeah, so the it’s it’s it’s stunningly easy to be a replacement candidate,

we should expect there’ll probably be about 150 replacement candidates on the ballot. Every,

every third tier C-list celebrity is gonna, you know, like, you know, back to Gary Coleman did it

like, you know, 20 years ago. Every C-list celebrity is going to do it to try and boost

their Q rating. I’m sure we’ll see Kathy Griffin on there. I mean, what she’s been doing. And so

it’s gonna be a farce.

By the way, can we talk about why he’s getting recalled? Because I do get this question a lot

from people in tech and out of tech. And I just want to highlight some of the reasons I’ve heard

and I’d love to hear why you guys think he’s, you know, why there’s this push against him.

But from people within the tech community, I’ve heard that the ad hoc lockdown rules

have really pissed a lot of people off in terms of when businesses are allowed and not allowed

to be open and kind of the responsiveness and the guiding principles around this

during COVID. Obviously, the you know, the inability to fight against the tax rate,

but no one wants to be publicly saying that the failed vaccine rollout, the failed testing,

you know, sex, tomorrow, Jason, what do you guys think is the reason he’s getting recalled? What

are the top five hypocrisy is number one, I think it’s the hypocrisy of going to those restaurants

and then making people not go to the beach, which is crazy. And then I think number two

is the virus, we’ve only deployed 37% of our doses in California. And that makes us, you know,

of the major states that are putting out a lot of these vaccines, one of the worst performers.

Second, yeah, we’re in Florida, and New York are the other large states, and they’re at 5649 and

50%. We’re still stuck at 37%. California, the cradle of innovation and technology,

and this bum, he’s a bum 37% deployed, we should be leading should be 70%. He’s a bum. Can I get

out of here? It’s Newsome derangement syndrome. Oh, my god. No, I’m trying to get a viral clip.

I’m trying to get a viral clip. You guys are besties. Jason just has a problem with anyone

in authority. You know, no, it’s the hair. It’s a problem. Jason great fucking hair.

It’s the hair is too good. French laundry, the hypocrisy and then get to work. So personality,

personality for you is the biggest driver. Is that right, Jason?

No, it’s literally the performance of their Washington, DC, West Virginia, North Dakota,

South Dakota, all 66 to 73% of their vaccines are both their double us. Now it’s smaller states,

but still, we’re goddamn California. Here’s what I would say as a list.

Number one, we’re the most heavily taxed. Number two, we are we have some of the worst

infrastructure in the country. We have some of the lowest and poorest performing schools

in the country. We have the highest homeless rates for veterans in the country. We have the

worst preparedness for climate in the country. And so it’s basically just a complete bungling

at every level. And so and then the fourth or the last, which is the biggest one is we have now

created an inhospitable culture for innovation. And the biggest problem with that is if these

climate jobs and these technology jobs and these biotechnology jobs pivot to more accepting and

progressive local and state managements, like Austin, Texas and Miami, Florida,

we lose these things forever. This is a multi-generational decay that we’re starting.

And so if we care about the state, I love California. I love San Francisco. I love

how eclectic and unique and different it is. I was always happy to pay 10, 11, 12, 13, 14%

because it was worth it. Now, I don’t know what we get for it. And so I think we I think I think

he should get recalled. I just think he’s he’s trash. And just to underscore the point on

lockdowns, we now have certainly more cases, we have more deaths, and we have more deaths per

capita than Florida, despite the fact that Florida has no lockdowns and a much older population.

And so I was just in Florida a few weeks ago, like, you know, like Jamal was saying, you know,

Suarez, the mayor there has created a really a land of the free. I mean, it’s really unbelievable.

You can go to bars, you can go to restaurants, there’s no lockdown whatsoever.

They don’t have as big a problem as California does right now.

Why do you think that is?

Because, well, because I think that the lockdowns-

On a scientific basis, yeah.

I think the lockdowns only forestalled the problem. Eventually, the virus finds a way around

them. And I also think the thing that’s happening in Florida is that, okay, so my aunt lives there,

she’s in her 70s. She’s not going to bars and restaurants because she knows she’s highly at

risk. And so just because the government doesn’t lock down, doesn’t mean that people don’t

take sensible precautions on their own. And so I think that what’s happened is that people are

going out to bars and restaurants are low risk, and they’re keeping the economy going over there.

And instead, in California, we have this very draconian lockdown policy,

and it’s put all these small businesses out of work.

No, no, it’s worse. It’s not a draconian lockdown policy. It’s a whipsaw.

Oh, it’s open. Okay, great. Now go and invest in a bunch of CapEx to make sure there’s outdoor

dining. Oh, hold on, you’re closed. What is that? That’s just stupid. It’s incompetent.

Tons of restaurant bar owners in San Francisco spent on average $30,000

building outdoor seating for their facility, only to have it all shut down three and a half

weeks later. Incompetent. It’s fucking incompetent.

I mean, can you imagine being an owner of that business? What the experience must have been like?

No, it’s unfair. No, I mean, you would literally,

they’re going to kill themselves. This is the tragedy of it. People will lose everything,

and there’ll be suicides, depression, domestic violence, drug use.

And then this guy’s having dinner at French Laundry during the whole, I mean, it’s just

such a bad look. I just got a note.

What a bad look. He’s actually been banished from being at

the French Laundry. Apparently, it’s been renamed the Sri Lankan Laundry, and some notable Sri

Lankan billionaire has bought the French Laundry. French Laundry, by the way, they got a $2.6

million PPP loan that got forgiven. So there’s a lot of heat on the French Laundry as a whole.

What does it cost to go to French Laundry? $800 a person?

Anybody who’s listening to this, who wants to go to the French Laundry,

stay at home, pour a bunch of salt on whatever you’re going to eat.

Melt a stick of butter in the microwave.

Melt a stick of butter in the microwave, drink it, and then basically take $1,500,

light it on fire, you’ve been to the French Laundry. You’re welcome. Here’s what you do.

Take a really great steak.

Trash.

And then cut it into a cube and throw out 80% of it.

That place is trash.

And then put the cube in the middle of a big, large plate.

That’s not even nouveau riche. It’s just nouveau stupid.

Oh, that’s terrible.

I got trash.

Meanwhile, people are down in Texas getting a brisket burrito for $4.

But I think California really needs to fix this. We need to figure out what’s going on.

I just want to ask one more question of you guys. You don’t think that this

because I was having this debate with my family about Newsome,

and I was telling them about the perspectives I was hearing from tech people,

and why everyone’s so against Newsome.

And I’ve heard all these different things that you guys have shared today.

And they’re very… And I’m hearing a lot of people making the counterpoint like,

this is a very difficult time. It’s been an impossible year for everyone everywhere.

So first of all, Newsome was dealt a pretty difficult hand to play.

And at the same time, we are all psychologically primed

to look for grass being greener on the other side. I think a big part of…

Certainly, there’s a lot of people leaving California, my belief, for Texas and Florida,

primarily because of taxes. And then you justify it with all the things that are wrong with

California. But we’re all really primed right now with this notion that it’s a difficult place to be.

But we’re also really having a shitty year. We’ve had this pandemic, businesses have been shut,

everyone’s sick, the economy’s having issues. There’s a really difficult hand that’s been dealt.

Well, I don’t buy that as an excuse for Newsome. I mean, look, it is true that we’re going through a

very difficult time. But the reason I don’t buy that as an excuse for Newsome is because

this is not April or May of 2020, when we thought the fatality rate was 7%.

And lockdowns could be justified then. But we now have so much more data. We’ve seen that

states that did not do lockdowns, like Florida and Texas, frankly, have been no worse off

than those that have done very severe lockdowns. And so what is the point of continuing with this

facade? And that is what I think we can legitimately blame Newsome for is the failure to

learn and to change course based on data to adapt. And where is the daily press briefing on what’s

happening? I think… And by the way, most of the spread is not happening at businesses,

it’s happening in homes. And in California, we have a particularly difficult problem

because of multi generational family homes, especially in the Latino communities that have

been hardest hit by COVID. And the transmission rate… They also happen to skew with diabetes

as well. Yeah, the transmission rate in those communities is three to five x what it is

elsewhere. And I think, you know, and that is not a result of businesses being open. In fact,

those communities are also suffering the biggest hardships because businesses are closed.

Well, by the way, this goes to the vaccination strategy just being so idiotic. Like,

you know, if you want it to be equitable, then why weren’t we just rolling through

and basically getting those families to be vaccinated first independent of age? You know,

you’re, you’re, you know, all these vaccination sites, nobody shows up.

I spoke to SFDPH, Department of Public Health about this last week, and they told me that

they cannot get those communities, they’re very non trusting of the vaccine. And they’re having

a real struggle getting people to sign up to take the vaccine. The problem is, even if that is the

case, the problem is you should not be holding up vaccines for one community and get everybody

else vaccinated. So they never said you cut the head off this fucking transmission.

Over 60 gets it. That’s it. There’s nothing to discuss. Let’s wrap up everyone, everyone gets

it. But you allocate a certain number of doses to you basically have like a TSA pre check line.

If you’re over 60, or you’re in certain communities, you jump to the front of the line. And

that’s it. But everyone can stand in line and put fucking shots in arms because everyone I know

that’s over 65 can’t even get an appointment. And it’s bullshit. And the whole thing is incompetence.

So I think what I think what SAC said is so right. It’s like in these moments, J. Cal,

and Friedberg, like a light gets shone on the ability for people to figure things out. And

then you know what the intellectual capability of these people are. And like, look, we saw the

intellectual incapability of Trump. Because we all adapt, this guy could not adapt. Okay. And,

and so we are now seeing the intellectual incapability of Gavin Newsom. And I just think

they’re part of the same lot. They’re just kind of, you know, people who are in over their head.

And they’re beholden to people who got them there. And their number one concern is staying in office,

which means appeasing a bunch of special interests. Speaking of special interest,

David Sachs is still on tilt about conservatives being cancelled. David, you wanted us to wrap with

this Wilkinson cancellation. So every podcast, we’re going to have a right winger who’s cancelled

and David’s justification for putting them back on the platform. Go ahead, David.

Well, actually, so yeah, this is this is this is the issue.

The week with David.

Yes, yes, it’s well, this is actually it’s not a it’s not a left wing it. So this is the issue

du jour on social media right now is that a writer named Will Wilkinson was just fired from his job

and cancelled. But here’s the thing. It was he’s not a conservative. He’s actually a liberal.

What?

And it was a yes. And it was a right wing tweet mob that got together to get him fired.

Yes. And so

how did you get this mob together to get him cancelled?

Explain.

Yeah. So

we’re back, everybody. So much for the wives dinner.

My God. Yeah.

I’m going to need another wives dinner.

Well, no, look, I feel the need to speak out on this because I got to make it really clear

that I do not support cancel culture when perpetrated by the right against the left.

I think it’s

What did he do?

OK, so he posted a tweet making a joke that maybe was in poor taste, not that funny,

basically saying that if we want unity, the one thing that like the Trumpers and the

Biden supporters can agree on is hanging pence. You know, it’s what is hanging,

lynching, lynching, lynching, lynching or hanging. He said he said hang. I think.

No, I think he said hang.

Maybe it’s in poor taste and it’s inciting violence on the march. Go ahead, Saks.

It’s in poor taste.

Well, no, look, it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a joke that’s not actually that funny and

maybe in poor taste. What he’s referring to is the fact that the you know, that there were people

on January six who were going after Mike Pence. Right. That was sort of the joke.

Anyway, look, he that’s not the point. He deleted it. He apologized for it. His boss

is still fired him for it. Nobody believes that he was trying to incite violence.

OK, I mean, come on. We all know that was not inciting violence, but but the mob pretended

that he was in order to create its phony outrage. And then his bosses have to pretend that he was

in order to appease the mob. And they pretend like it was incitement to violence so they can fire him.

And then he even had to pretend that he was inciting violence because he had to then

abjectly apologize for it. And there’s just that’s the thing about cancel culture. I really

don’t like it. It’s just so fake and phony. We all have to pretend and things that aren’t

true in order to pacify some tweet mob whose outrage is manufactured anyway.

And I don’t like seeing the right doing this. And that’s what I tweeted about. And then we

had all these people on the right responding to me saying an eye for an eye. You know,

the left deserves this, too. Now they’re going to get a taste of their own medicine.

And the problem with that is, look, you know, you’re you might win this particular battle,

but you’re losing the war because you’re now buying into the premise of cancel culture.

You’re now buying into this idea that we need to economically cancel people who disagree with us.

And I really reject that. It’s certainly bad timing to say,

lynch or hang, whichever word he used, obviously, lynching is a much worse word.

After people were chanting, hang Mike Pence, but he was making a commentary on that.

The joke didn’t land. And when the joke doesn’t land, you need to just take ownership of that

and say that you shouldn’t be canceled. You just say it was a poor attempt at humor. I apologize.

Right. And Jason, you know better than anybody else when a joke doesn’t land.

So, yeah, I mean, here’s one thing to learn about comedy. People don’t remember the jokes

that don’t land. They remember the ones that land. Okay, everybody.

It’s like investing in startups. It’s like you got a lot of losers to find the few winners.

Absolutely. That’s my I’m a volume guy. You know, that Governor Chamath dot com,

Governor Sachs dot com, Governor Freeberg dot com, and Governor Jason dot com.

Can I just say, Jason, Jason, if Newsom is recalled, I would like to put my name on the

ballot. And my commitments are quite simple. I just want to I’m going to cut the taxes to zero.

And I’m going to basically create an incredibly pro climate change

jobs and pro tech jobs and pro biotech jobs economy. And I’m going to raise teacher salaries

and I’m going to give everybody a school voucher. Okay, we have maybe, maybe on the next episode,

we can all declare that we’re running for governor and present our platform.

Oh, let’s do that. Let’s do that.

All right, everybody. Go to Governor Chamath dot com, Governor Sachs dot com,

Governor Freeberg dot com, Governor Jason dot com.

Register your domain name before the pod goes live.

I already registered all four of them.

What’s your P?

All redirected to my Twitter handle. Thank you, guys.

We’ll see you all next time.

Love you, boys.

Bye.

On the All In podcast. Love you, besties. Love you, Sachs.

Back at ya.

All in.

We’ll let your winners ride.

Rain Man David Sachs.

I’m going all in.

And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you, besties.

Queen of Kinwam.

I’m going all in.

Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

Besties are gone.

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

Oh, man.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless.

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

What’s your B?

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.

I’m going all in.