Does anybody have any thoughts on this? I mean, I think it’s incredible.

So does Friedberg’s dog.

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In podcast.

It’s been a week. It’s been a minute with us today. Of course,

the queen of Kinwa David Friedberg and the rain man himself calling in from a nondescript

mansion in one of 17 cities, the rain man himself, David Sachs, and cackling like a dictator

who got his to Billy back. And he’s back in the game. Chamath Pali Hapitiya.

For those of you three, he’s rebillionized.

He rebillionized. Is he going to get a car with doors that go like this?

Doors that go like this?

Let’s talk a little bit about the vaccine. Biden says everybody who’s an adult is qualified by May

1, he’s instructed the states to do that. We are now hitting 2.x million a day, we had a 3

million shot day, I believe Friedberg and obviously the $1.9 billion COVID slash everybody gets a big

slice bill got passed.

$1.9 trillion with a T.

Sorry, that’s what I said $1.9 trillion. No, somebody put $1.9 billion in the notes. Yes,

$1.9 trillion. $1.9 billion is what the COVID

went for. The COVID NFT went for $1.9 trillion.

As Sachs said in the past, a trillion here, a trillion there.

Soon enough, it’s real money. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Biden’s speech really kind of begged the question of why we still need this $2 trillion

bill if COVID is going to be over in May. But putting that aside, I think Biden’s speech was

very welcome in that he called for states to drop all of these crazy eligibility requirements that

are actually preventing people from getting vaccinated at this point. He says that every

adult American should be able to get a dose by May 1. And he’s right. And you know, there’s a

sharp contrast with Gavin Newsom in California who keeps playing political games with the

administration of these doses. So, in California, yesterday, just yesterday, we added 250,000 more

doses of unused inventory. So, the amount grew to 4.5 million unused doses sitting on a shelf.

Only 215,000 people got vaccinated. So, we’re actually building inventory

faster than we’re building the population of people getting vaccinated. And it’s because

of all these crazy rules and requirements. You have to go make an appointment.

You know, and that really, actually, it’s counterproductive because it discriminates

against people who are less computer savvy, don’t know how to navigate the website, or,

you know, communities who don’t want to enter their name in a government database,

which, you know, there’s a lot of people in California don’t want to, you know, put their

names in a government database. And so, it works against those communities getting vaccinated.

At this point, we should just drop all the requirements, drop the website, let anyone

who wants a vaccine just get in line and get vaccinated. It’ll go much faster.

The problem is that we throw around this word equity, and that we need to do something with

equity. And in fact, I think that people who use that word are stupid. I think what they’re

trying to say actually is we don’t want inequity. And the most inequitable thing is to actually

take the most impoverished and fragile of the population and prevent them from actually getting

the vaccine because they’re the ones that actually need to be working and can’t afford to actually

not work or can’t afford to be sick or can’t afford to, you know, find solutions to childcare.

It’s this weird word that like, you know, the extreme left uses now to describe policies that

are just frankly, poorly thought out and even more poorly executed.

It might even be more pernicious than that, correct, Freiburg, in that

anybody who gets a shot is helping everybody else because they are now a blocker in the system. I

know this is incredibly simplistic, but I’m a simplistic guy. And it just seems

it’s a different way of thinking about the benefit of vaccination. And I’ve said it in

the past, but the benefit of vaccination is to get enough people vaccinated that the virus

generally stops spreading, and then the pandemic ends. And that’s the objective. It’s not about

creating equitable protection for individuals. And as Americans, it’s interesting, we think

about it in terms of an individual benefit. It’s like, how much do I get? What do I get from this

vaccine? I want to get protected, the other guys getting protected before me, who gets to go first,

yada, yada, and it becomes this kind of competitive, you know, frothing for a vaccination.

And the reality is, if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough, the pandemic ends.

If we can get 200 million shots in arms, this goes back to I think, this tweet I sent in

early January, December, we get 200 million shots in arms, we can be done with the pandemic based

on you know, how many the efficacy of transmission rate reduction, combined with the fact that a

certain number of people have already developed immunity to this thing, we get to the point that

there should be kind of a, you know, think about a network, and you start turning nodes off the

network suddenly becomes really hard to see transmission happen across the network. And,

and so the prioritization of, you know, who gets the vaccine over, you know, how fast we are

deploying the vaccine has been a critical error from day one, in my opinion. Now, look, all that

being said, I feel like we could sit here and criticize and argue about tactics and strategy

all day long about this and, you know, make politicians look like idiots and administrators

look like idiots. But the truth is, we are now seeing 3 million shots a day. In Biden’s speech,

he said, which, if you’ll remember is what I said, we really should be targeting is about 1%

of the population every day. And that’s roughly where we are. Biden said in his speech that we

are in a war footing, which is effectively what we said the other day, the federal government is

operating 600 mass vac sites. And we are right now getting shots in arms for all of the issues

with prioritization and nonsense that’s going on. I feel very

in the United States. I agree that Biden has the correct posture on this, which is war footing.

We are not doing that in California. I mean, I just talked about how we’re building inventories

faster than we’re getting vaccines administered. Newsome just announced that 40% of the vaccines

are now going to be basically separated out and reserved for equity zones. And you know, it’s

even mean, it means that certain communities, only people in certain communities can get those

vaccines. And they’re going to be distributed out through this complicated system of

local community groups. All that does is put money through some no bid contract to some

shitty technical company. A bunch of consultants that then take advantage of the system get paid

hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to do nothing. I mean, right, exactly. I tweeted out

there’s this bot that now scrapes and by the way, before I tweeted out this thing about this bot,

which is I think, yeah, I sent it to you. It’s it’s the California vaccines available bot.

Exactly. And all it does is it’s it scrapes that my turn.ca website. But before that,

in our group chat, there was another friend of ours who wrote his own scraper, if you guys

remember. And it was really shocking because all it would show is page after page after page of

completely open and available vaccine slots. Yeah. You know, at the Moscone Center and other

places. And you think all of this stuff is just a bunch of I’ll be blunt, rich white people sitting

in a room with their head up their ass. And they come up with these stupid fucking rules. And then

they try to implement them with words like equity. And all that happens is that you compound inequality.

And let’s go back and let’s go back to Freeberg’s first point, which is that all these unvaccinated

people who can’t get vaccinated faster become a giant Petri dish for the virus to continue spreading

and experimenting on morphing and morphing. So maybe we actually do get a vaccine resistant

strain. The new strains, the variants have been popping up so far are not a vaccine resistant.

But the longer the pandemic goes on, the longer there’s a chance that one could arise. And then

we’re back to square one on this thing. So it’s going to hurt everybody. And here’s the crazy

thing is that, you know, I think we all know a lot of people. I know dozens of people who’ve

been vaccinated in California. And they all come to me and tell me they’re whispering about it,

you know, because they don’t want to tell anyone. They’re scared of being canceled.

They’re scared of being canceled because, you know, Newsom and the equity people have created

this idea that if you get a vaccine, you’re taking away from somebody else. In reality,

you’re not because anybody who’s high risk has already gotten the vaccine by now or has had

access to get the vaccine. And all you’re doing right now, if you get the vaccine is taking a dose

off the shelf, where there’s 4.5 million doses sitting there, and it’s increasing by millions

every week. And so what we need to do is, well, let me make a PSA actually, starting on Monday,

you could anyone in California can get the vaccine with a doctor’s note. And they’re saying that

doctors have total discretion to give the note. So let me just make a PSA to everyone out there.

If you’re in California, just go get a doctor’s note starting on Monday and go get the vaccine.

Yeah, you know, stop, stop worrying about Newsom stupid rules.

Let’s also just remember, so two points on that not everyone has the ability to go just get a

doctor’s note. It’s really hard for people that have to go to public clinics and so on to get a

doctor’s note. What we are seeing is a lot of people just hacking the website, almost like

Soviet Union era breadlines, where they go to the website, they type in something that’s not true

to get themselves a slot. And that’s how a lot of people are kind of filling the void. The reality

is, I just want to go back to the point I was making at the beginning, I think we’re skating

out of this thing. And I think that the inventory surplus, which is absolutely being built up at a

staggering rate in the United States right now, if you look at the inventory forecast from J&J,

Pfizer and Moderna, relative to the deployment rate of the vaccines right now, you’re correct,

we are building up a surplus and inventory surplus and the rate of buildup per day is

increasing right now. So 1 million extra shots a day, 2 million extra shots a day being

a million. And so we’re building up an inventory. And so what happens with the 30 million we have

already in inventory. So what’s happening is there are natural market dynamics where we are all

pointing out and saying is starting to play out in terms of people kind of hacking the system.

There’s so much supply. There are many vac sites. Now you can go to any supermarket,

any pharmacy in California to get a shot. And everyone’s just clicking the box and saying,

yes, I qualify, and they’re going in and getting shots. So the market demand is starting to meet

the supply, even though there are government and regulatory forces that are trying to inhibit that

from taking place. And so I do feel pretty good when you look at kind of the inventory forecast,

and you look at how many shots are being given per day, that in 45 days or so, we’re going to

get to a point that we’re starting to skate out of this thing and kind of call ask you can ask

you a question, despite the idiocy of the process that regulators have kind of put in place. Yeah,

Freeberg, I just have a quick science question, because I was trying to find the answer to this,

but I would love for you to tell us. What is the real efficacy of the vaccine? And what is

your transmittability like your carrier status once you’ve gotten, for example, like, you know,

let’s just say you take the Pfizer vaccine, right? Yeah. If you get the Pfizer vaccine,

how many days until this is like pretty good? And, you know, like, what is really the risk

profile between the first shot and the second shot? I’ll share this link, and then we can post

it on the show on the on the show notes, and people can take a look at it. But it’s an excellent

paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing basically a population of

unvaccinated against Pfizer vaccinated with half a million in each population, half a million people.

And yeah, and they showed basically the accumulated infection rate, severe hospitalization

rate and death rate of each of the two populations over time. And that really kind of, I think,

highlights the efficacy of the vaccines and at what time period they become efficacious on each

of those metrics. And by the way, even after the first dose across a population of half a million

people, the margin of error on death shows that there may even be complete protection against

death after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine within seven days of getting that shot pretty

powerful statistic. What just to describe the chart for those people listening, you have two

populations, and one’s in blue, one’s in red. And it’s the time is, you know, in days on the bottom

axis. And when you get to day eight, one line goes sideways, and the other one goes keeps going

straight up. So it’s day eight after the Pfizer, that you’re basically protected, according to

this chart. And that’s on the first shot. And like, I think it adds like one or two cases.

Yeah, that’s right. I’ve been zero deaths. So I think day eight is the day. And the second dose

seems like to me, you know, it’s just this unbelievable extra. Another amazing chart,

which maybe we can dump in the show notes is what’s happening in San Francisco, we hit 10,000

shots a day. At the end of February, March 1, we’re doing now 2000 shots a day. So we literally

have dropped 70%. Or so we’re at 3000 shots, I think from the peak. Yeah. So this crazy wokeness

is resulting in, you know, in this, this virtue signaling that, you know, oh, we can’t give any

shots to anybody unless we get this group first or that group first is now leading to everybody

hacking the system. The hack that I’ve heard is, since teachers are getting it, childcare people,

and food service people are getting it, people are now starting to get jobs at DoorDash,

or saying they’re a teacher. And if you check that box, according to, you know, the back channel that

I’ve heard, you go get the shot and you don’t get they don’t ask you for anything other than

your driver’s license. No one’s checking. It’s just a driver’s license pharmacies, the grocery

stores, the mass vac sites, the SF DPH, California DPH administered sites, the federal sites, no one’s

checking. You sign up, you check a box on the website, it says I attest that this is true.

And then you go and show your ID and get your shot. And so a lot of people have kind of initially

started skirting around the rules by going to be a DoorDash driver for a day or what have you.

And then saying, I’m a food and ag worker. And then now generally, people I think, are just

clicking on the box and going in and getting a shot. Now, sorry, just to go back on the previous

question, Chamath, I shared it figure to Nick in this paper I shared, particularly box E,

shows the deaths due to COVID-19 of a vaccinated population and non vaccinated population.

And then it shows documented SARS-CoV-2 infection. And you’ll see that you basically have

almost no incremental infections in the vaccinated population, starting around 28 days after your

first dose. And so you know, that’s really when you could say you’ve got, you know, really good

kind of protection from the vaccine, and you’re already starting to get the benefits early on.

antibody studies have also shown that there’s this big jump up that happens around that period of

time. And so call it three weeks after your first shot, and then in particular, the fourth week,

you’re really kind of like locked in with a protective capacity. Now, your question around

transmissibility is one that’s still being studied, which is if I’ve got a vaccine, am I going to be

able to pick up the virus and transmit it to someone else? Right now, you know, they’re saying,

well, we don’t have evidence one way or the other. But I mean, generally, the way that the virus is

spread is you develop an infection in your body, your body then makes lots of copies of the virus,

and then you cough and spit them out in the air. And that’s how people get it. So theoretically,

you could carry some virus on your mouth or on your nose where those cells don’t have

immunoprotectiveness. And, you know, the vaccine, the virus is still alive, but it’s not spreading

in your body, you’re not creating a lot of superfluous virus to spread in the world. So,

you know, the basic science of it is, you should not be spreading COVID if you’ve been vaccinated,

right? I mean, you may have some on your skin or your nose or something for a short period of time,

but you’re not going to develop a systemic infection that you’re then going to kind of

start exerting everywhere. So I think we should, we should we should start to transition to this

world of feeling really good and safe and enjoying ourselves. Yeah, we hit 500,000 shots a

day sacks in California. And now we’re down to 150,000. We’ve literally gone down two thirds

under the management of Governor hair gel. It’s Yeah, because because you know, and what was his

in his state of this, the state speech, which went over like a lead balloon, the most notable quote

was, we’re not going back to normal, normal was never good enough, normal accepts inequity.

So because there might be some inequity in the world around the wrong person in line getting

these doses, we’re never going back to normal. And he’s basically ensuring that result by taking

forever with these vaccines. But let me, let me, let me go back to this point about efficacy. So

I think Friberg gave the stats on look, the bottom line here is that vaccines work. That is the

message we should be getting out to people is that they work. And the thing I’ve been really

surprised by in the reactions I’m seeing to my own tweets on Twitter about this is how loud the

anti vax voices are, and how loud and sort of when you say anti vax, you don’t mean not take the

vaccine, you mean the vaccine doesn’t work, and we’re never getting rid of COVID. The forever

COVID people. Yeah, well, there’s no it’s, there’s, there’s actually a lot of people

on Twitter who got really angry when I when I just tweeted, I tweeted something about how

it’s over, it’s over, I tweeted, it’s over. You know, right, Biden says we can all get the vaccine

in May. If you decide not to do it, that’s on you, the rest of us are moving on. And I got a lot of

all I was really saying is, look, once the vaccine is available, there’s no need for any of these

COVID restrictions anymore. But a lot of people interpreted that as me saying something that you

should be forced to get the vaccine or something like that. Now, look, I don’t think you should be

forced to get it. But I think it’s highly effective. It works. And, but I’m surprised at

how loud these sort of anti vax voices are. It’s usually like a conspiracy theory around around

the vaccine. And I think part of the reason why those voices are so loud is because they’re

unopposed. Because all the people who believe in the vaccine are getting it, but they’re all afraid

of like, like you were saying, J. Cal of being canceled. And so there’s a conspiracy of silence

around this. You know, what we all need to be saying is, look, go get vaccinated. It works.

Take the win. America, take the win. We screwed this thing up for 14 months. Can we just take

the goddamn win and move on? I’ll give you a I’ll give you a little

thing that that always pops into my mind and all of these things. Whenever I hear

some politician or some like naval gazing intellectual use the word inequity. I think

like this is a power grab because the word equity is really about ownership. Whereas the word

equality is about balance. Right? And and power hungry politicians love the word equity and

inequity because it’s their opportunity to grab power. And to tell us how things should be done

or to do things differently in a way where, you know, they can enforce their mandate,

which is typically ill formed and not very smart. And I would just encourage all of us whenever you

hear the word equity or inequity is huge, huge red light should be going off in your head saying

whatever this person says next is a crock of horseshit. And it’s probably a power grab.

Whereas if you hear people really talking about solving inequality, there’s really no mechanism

to solve inequality through power. Well, I think that’s a great point around the

language that gets used. And I have a similar concern about the way that the word privilege

gets used. We used to have a term in this country called success. Yeah, people were successful or

not. And, you know, success had a connotation of being earned, whereas privilege has a connotation

of being unearned. Well, I mean, now, sometimes privilege is earned success, and sometimes it’s

unearned. And, you know, but but when you start using the word privilege to describe all success,

it implies that there’s something, you know, unjust or unearned about it, and it needs to

be reallocated. So, you know, that to me is another one of these political words is,

we shouldn’t be confusing success with privilege. Yeah, they’re two very different things.

I have an example of this. Oprah Winfrey is successful. Prince Henry is has privilege.

It’s privilege.

It’s privilege. I shoehorned the Meghan Markle story.

I mean, I do want to talk about the Meghan Markle story, actually, at some point before the end of

this podcast. But before we do that, right now, okay. Joe Launcel actually also had a tweet,

a pretty unapologetic set of tweets around, you know, the miscasting of this, this concept of

privilege. And I thought it was really on point. I really agreed with what he was saying. And it’s

effectively what you’re saying, David, it’s like, people right now, I find are just so well, not

people, the people that take the time to wallow in Twitter, mostly, at least as I interact with them,

are just so bitter. And I think that there is no magnanimous happiness for other people’s success

anymore. It, I think, I think, like, we live in a culture now where everybody feels it is so zero

sum, when it’s not, in fact, zero sum. And people just begrudge other people’s success, especially,

by the way, when it’s earned. And the reason is because there’s an entire generation of people

of all different ages, and, you know, but this this last five or 10 years, who tapped themselves

out. Now, some were legitimately prevented from success. But there’s a lot of people that bought

into this narrative of, well, it’s a whole conspiracy that’s set up against me, so I’m not

even going to try. And they are often the loudest and the most embittered. Absolutely. And the reason

is because, you know, everybody wakes up in their 40s and 50s and starts to rationalize their choices

in their lives. And what they really feel deep down inside is, oh, my God, I just let an entire

decade go by of blaming other people. And I think there’s a surprisingly large amount of that.

This ideology of victimization doesn’t teach people the right things, because you start to

think that, you know, if you’re wallowing in your oppression, then you don’t have agency over your

own life, you’re blaming other people for not being successful, not getting ahead, when what

you should be doing is focusing on working and improving your own life and getting ahead.

Or also just redefining what happiness means. Happiness doesn’t mean what that other person

has and then saying, because I don’t have that, I have nothing. Happiness is really like

introspectively figuring out like what really makes you complete. And I mean, not to get too

syrupy about it, but it’s like, that’s what we’ve also lost the script on. So, when you put all of

these things together, there’s just a bunch of people that sit on the sidelines. They either

are too scared to enter the arena, or they don’t want to enter the arena. They don’t want the

failure that comes from it, because they’ve grown up in a culture where, you know, they had the

kindergarten soccer ball handed to them, the gold star in everything they’ve ever done.

Participation trophy.

And now what we really need are people in the arena more than ever, folks trying and failing,

and it’s okay. And there’s just not enough of them. What instead is, there’s just a lot of

people who just want to bitch and complain. And I think this is the backlash to the

Meghan Markle interview is that this miscasting that this is an extremely privileged person or,

you know, Harry and Meghan both are very privileged. And, but I think what they’re

trying to do by making all these sort of accusations of racism against their own

family is they’re trying to ground that privilege in victim status. And this is the thing about

privilege is privilege is a social concept. It’s got nothing to do with success, which is either

earned or unearned. And so, the way that people get to maintain their privileges is that, again,

they grounded in some sort of victimization. It creates these very perverse incentives.

My reaction to the Meghan Markle, Prince Harry interview was the following. I had a lot of

sympathy for what she was saying. But on the other side, I also thought,

you must have known what you were getting into on the way in. And there was, it was, and look,

I’ll say this as a Canadian and a Sri Lankan. So, the Queen and the monarchy is an increase,

like, I can’t describe to you guys, because you’re not part of the Commonwealth. But

it is just a definitional part of who we are as we grow up. And I don’t know what the equivalent

American construct is. I guess there isn’t one really. And so, you know, the monarchy is an

incredibly important thing. But we all know that it’s this kind of like, anachronistic

thing that just kind of, I don’t look for us, it’s not bullshit. Like, I mean, like,

if you said to me, despite all my bullshit, and raging against the machine and society,

and blah, blah, blah, and stature, whatever. If I could be invited to meet the Queen, I would be

there in eight nanoseconds. I think the equivalent is the presidency, we actually feel that way about

the presidency, like going to visit the President is a big deal.

The presidency is not an endowed kind of circumstance.

There’s something about there’s something about the Queen. My point is, though,

we all know a that it’s important. It’s a great symbol of the Commonwealth. I’m very proud of all

of that. But we also know it’s anachronistic, and it doesn’t make much sense. And so what,

what do you what do you think you were marrying into? And I think, you know, my perspective was,

I felt bad for I can’t believe, you know, it got to the place where, like, people wouldn’t get

help for her when she was sick. And, you know, and then they were questioning Harry’s or the kids,

Archie’s skin color. I mean, this is insanity, like these people are stuck in the 1800s. But

then you realize they are actually stuck in the 1800s, because they’re not allowed to have a

normal life. They’re not allowed to actually interact. So, you know, are they at fault? Or

they or is the system that creates these sort of like voyeuristic, you know, exotic animals in a

zoo that we call the king, the queen, these princes, is the system at fault? I don’t know,

I was kind of like 5050 on the interview. But my perspective was, the monarchy is in a really tough

spot over the next 30 or 40 years. Because again, so now let me tell you where my belief is. I’m

kind of a little bummed by the whole thing. The monarchy doesn’t mean what it what it what it

used to mean for me.

David, what’s what was more enthralling to you this week,

Tucker versus Taylor or the Queen versus Oprah and Prince Henry?

I didn’t, I didn’t spend, I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time on either one. I mean,

look, I, if I were, if I were Harry, I would probably do the same thing, which is to basically

leave. Look, the first thing I did my career was quit the firm, right? You know, who wants to work

for a firm? You know, it’s very tracked. So I don’t blame him leaving, going to California,

you know, that’s what we that’s what we all did, right? I mean, he was being it’s a very,

that’s a very entrepreneurial American thing to do. What I what I had a problem with was the way

that they’re attacking their own family, because they’re being paid $7 million to do this interview.

No, no, no, hold on. They were not, there was the first question Oprah asked,

and they were very clear they were not getting paid. Now, they did sign.

Who made the 7 million?

No, Oprah did. Harpo did.

Oh, well, she’s a genius.

Yeah, she’s a genius. No, let’s just be clear. Oprah is our queen.

That’s the queen of America. Oprah is the queen. Oprah figured out a way to get paid.

It’s even worse. It’s even worse if they did the interview for free and didn’t even get a

piece of the back end. So all they did was attack and besmirch their family for none of that. And

look, I guess my point is, so why would they do it if it’s not even about the money? I mean,

it’s about this idea of defining their privilege, grounding it in victim status. And I think

there’s something very fake and phony about that. And I think that’s why people had this reaction

to it, where, frankly, they were, I don’t think they’re on the side of the royal family, because

it is outdated. But I think there was a lot of skepticism towards what Harry and Meghan were saying.

I had a little bit of a problem with the, like, live from our $15 million Montecito mansion.

No, Jason, stop, stop.

Our victimhood.

Who paid for that house?

They have a $15 million house. I know, but they also have a $15 million house next to Oprah.

No, it’s public. They put $5 million down and they took out a mortgage.

Someone listed this whole thing.

No, it’s an honest question. Do the taxpayers of the UK fund the princes?

No, that’s the whole point. They went and did a deal with Netflix and Spotify,

and now they have a salary. And they’re making money like everybody else. So I mean,

I’m not, I don’t have an issue with any of that.

No, I don’t have an issue with that. I thought the taxpayers were, funded the lifestyle.

They do fund the lifestyle of the other princes, right?

Sure.

Yeah. So, I mean, that’s the thing.

Can we talk about something important?

Yeah. Okay. So a Beeple NFT sold for $69 million.

I mean, this week, this week was crazy. All the dumbest shit happened this week.

Taylor Lorenz getting, you know, slaughtered on.

Welcome to this week of dumb shit.

So I miss Tucker versus Taylor, but actually the person who took on Taylor that did a brilliant job

was Glenn Greenwald. I don’t know if you guys read his post, but that was brilliant.

Savage.

Brilliant. And basically what he said is that, look, you’ve got these class of reporters out

there who their job is to go out and they’re like little hall monitors, you know, trying to bust

people for whatever they might say in a clubhouse room, not just public figures, but private people

too. They’re in the business of destroying lives and reputations, you know, that’s basically their

business model. But then the second, anyone has any criticism for them, they claim it’s harassment,

which is just absolute nonsense.

Well, what’s funny is the only person that was inoculated against social justice,

wokeness to write that article is Glenn Greenwald because he is, you know, he’s gay,

he’s got brown kids, he lives in Brazil, you know, with, I mean, it’s like you can’t,

irresistible force moving the immovable, meeting the immovable object.

He’s not completely immune because he was attacked, you know, and people said pretty

nasty things about him. But yeah, he definitely has some.

I think Greenwald is an unbelievable writer who calls it like he sees it.

I don’t agree with everything he says all the time. But, you know, he’s right to call this

stuff out. There was another bunch of social justice nonsense this week as well. This poor

guy had to like give out this crazy apology tweet because he said he liked to exercise.

What happened? Wait, what is that story?

OK, this is the greatest. OK, there’s a kid.

I’ve been telling you, Jason, I want you to exercise because I love you.

I lost 20 pounds. Look at me. I’m looking pretty good.

I want it. Yeah, I want both of you guys to exercise.

Tell me about it.

By the way, public service announcement. COVID vaccine CA is the bot. So at COVID vaccine,

it just tweets every five minutes, a hundred different places. You can go

pretend to be a door dash driver and get a shot. Sorry. I mean,

if you were vaccinated, check a box, check a box. Let’s go. Let’s roll people.

Don’t let Newsome take away your health.

Yeah. Don’t let Newsome put you in a noose.

Don’t focus on equity.

Yeah. Meanwhile, he’s at like French Laundry.

Jason, tell us about this tweet thing. What happened?

There’s a kid named Dom. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s building a company.

It’s a good company. It’s funded by Stripe. You know, it’s raised hundreds of millions

of dollars. Like good for this guy.

Yeah. But he likes to like, you know, he’s kind of like trying to engage on Twitter. And he

basically said, I feel so much better and I’m performing at such a higher level since I got

my diet and my exercise. Right. I mean, people who are not getting their physical right are

really underperforming at work. It’s such an opportunity or whatever. And then, you know,

the the large and in charge, you know, fat is beautiful, you know, contingent,

basically tried to cancel him.

Sorry, wait, wait, but but did he say that you have to be skinny?

No, he just said you will perform if you’re fat, you’re underperforming. Basically,

he didn’t use the word fat. But he said, if you’re not in shape, you’re underperforming at work,

which I said, Is there science behind this? And yeah, sure. People show me 100 studies that show

if you lose weight, you have better concentration and focus. I mean, it’s pretty obvious.

But he did the cardinal sin as here here, I’ll read you the tweet, an important lesson I learned

well into my career, if you are not physically fit and healthy, then you are underperforming at work,

pretty basic, probably not very controversial. But he did what David Sachs always advises.

And the the the advice he gave to Trump, which is never apologize. And he apologized,

Dom apologized and took the tweet down, which then the mob really went after him.

And he said, I screwed up. And I’m extremely sorry. I have recently spent a lot of energy

focused on my fitness, eating and sleep in my enthusiasm for my new fitness regime.

I posted a tweet that was meant to celebrate my new healthy lifestyle. But that’s not how it came

across. And I see now how sensitive I mean, with all the with all the problems that we have

that need fixing. I mean, this is what people were focused on this. But here’s the here’s

the kicker of the apology. This is something I really need to improve on. And I will.

Well, no, I’m not making fun of him. I just think it’s

what the hell is going on. But I mean, don’t apologize. If you believe being healthier is,

you know, good, then you should say it. And you know, we’ll let the chips roll with it.

People can debate it. But I mean, can we have a debate about that? Because this is in the

middle of a COVID crisis, when the top two vectors are age and obesity, period.

If you’re fat, you die from COVID. That’s, that’s how it works.

And you got both those problems.

You’re old and fat.

You guys didn’t say stupid. All right, I’m doing good today.

All right, today in all in nonsense, apparently, there’s so much money in the system,

that an NFT just sold for $69 million. After we talked about the previous one,

Bill Lee bought for $6 million. I don’t know that he bought it for $6 million.

But somebody bought one last week. NFTs seem like a real thing. It’s reasonable to trade stuff,

but $69 million.

I think it’s incredible. I mean, like, like the I saw the breakdown of like the number of bidders

here, let me actually just get this data up. Because I think you guys will find it really

incredible.

My thesis on this, or my theory, rather, is that there are a bunch of people who have

stakes in these crypto assets. And then they all premeditate decide to buy up these NFTs to get

the market started. And then once it started, like, you know, other people do with art, right?

You know this, but I’ve been buying art for a decade plus. And this is exactly how it works

in the art market. You know, we go in there, certain people will go and buy. And then what

the gallerist says is, Oh, did you know that Chamath just bought this piece or such and such

a person bought this other piece, and then all of a sudden, the price spins up, and then they feed

into it. I mean, this is where, you know, an enormous amount of money has been made by gallerists

over the last 20 or 30 years. Now it just happens in a different medium. So the bidding breakdown,

by the way, of this NFT is incredible. 33 active bidders, 91% of the bidders were new to Christie’s,

55% came from the Americas, 27% of bidders were from Europe, and 18% were in Asia.

The age breakdown is the most interesting. 6% were Gen Z, so 97 to 2012. 58% of bidders were

millennials, born between 81 and 96. Wow. 33% Gen Xers and 3% baby boomers. So this is really

like a transitional change in, you know, basically deciding what’s valuable. And I don’t think this,

I don’t think this was any different than, you know, when you had this transition from,

you know, sort of impressionist in the art world, like if you moved from the body of work,

where, you know, these impressionist paintings were just going for

high 10s, low hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think it peaked around Van Gogh.

And then, you know, basically, it went from there off of a cliff, where you can basically give away

impressionist paintings, and everything went to contemporary and, you know, sort of like this

postmodern stuff. And that was a decisional change by boomers. What does give away mean to you,

Chamath? You know, 10s of millions. So I think on the NFT stuff, and Beeple,

Beeple is the artist, there’s two things going on, right? So one is on a technology level,

NFTs, non fungible tokens, they are, it’s a legitimate technology for creating provenance

on a blockchain. You know, if a piece of art, basically gets put on a blockchain,

you have perfect provenance. But that doesn’t mean that all NFTs are valuable. In fact,

most of them won’t be. It’s just a technology. Then you have the other thing that’s happening

is on an art level, what these sort of, these sort of prestige galleries, and so on,

they’re saying that Beeple is now a major artist. And there’s and the reason someone becomes a

major artist is because they usher in like, or become representative of some new wave of art,

like Chamath is saying, you’ve got impressionism, you’ve got modernism. I mean, the reason why

Jackson Pollock sells for whatever $100 million. No, no, 300 to 600.

Okay, it’s because he represents an important wave in art. And some of those waves fizzle out,

and they turn into Ponzi schemes, and some of them become real. And people are speculating that this

digital art will be a major wave. And they’re saying that Beeple is the most important artist,

and they’re kind of betting on that. Now, do I think it’s gonna last? I don’t know. I mean,

hard to say. No, you said the key thing, though, the key feature of NFTs, which I think is amazing

is that you can actually have ownership and provenance written into a blockchain. Now,

you’ve take that abstraction, you can apply to all kinds of surface areas, and it makes a ton

of sense. Any kind of other asset would make sense if you own a car, if you own clothes,

if you own watches, if you own wine, what happens if you own a house? Now, all of a sudden, if you

can prove ownership over this stuff, not only can you trade it, but you can also borrow against it.

And I think that that is a really interesting idea where once you financialize all of these

physical assets that we own, you do eliminate an enormous amount of inequality in the system,

because you can actually get real transparent pricing. Now, could you-

Yeah, blockchains are a ledger, right? They’re a perfect ledger system. And so,

every type of possession that relies on title should eventually be blockchained. So, art’s a

good example. You know, I helped found a company back in 2017 called Harbor, which was a blockchaining

real estate, and it ended up getting acquired. So, now-

Acquired or aquired?

No, it got acquired. We’re gonna-

Don’t worry, Chamath, we’re gonna make money. We’re gonna make money.

As an LP, I just wanted a clarification.

Yeah, no, we’re not gonna make like SPAC type money, but we’ll make a little bit of money on

that deal. So, don’t worry. But yeah, look, I think we’re in the early, early stages of this

type of technology. You’re gonna see eventually blockchaining of every type of asset where title

is important.

David, I think that this is such an amazing idea, because like, if you think of all of the opaque

lending markets where people can’t get access to reasonable cost of capital, and they own assets,

you know, you end up in these crazy worlds where like, if you look at the housing crisis,

or the great financial crisis, you know, there was like so much crazy lending,

but behind that lending was like double, triple mortgages. It’s happening right now in the car

market. All of that stuff doesn’t necessarily need to exist, because if you have clear provenance

and the ability to price risk, you just get, you know, people can borrow a reasonable amount of

money at a reasonable rate and pay it back. And, you know, you can trade assets, you could sell

assets. It’s a really big deal, I think.

I think, if you take a zoom out on the, you know, the notion of what an NFT represents, it’s,

it doesn’t feel too dissimilar from other, what I would argue is like non productive assets,

like if you think about where one’s capital goes, where an individual puts their capital,

the first thing is kind of essentials, right, things you need, like food and medicine and

housing and clothing and whatnot. And then you kind of enter into these kind of, you know,

non extent, you know, kind of discretionary spending for a consumer, you know, nice stuff,

nice clothes, luxury goods, things that are basically going to diminish. Then, as you think

about allocating the leftover capital, you’re either going to allocate your leftover capital

into investable assets that are either productive or non productive. A productive asset is something

you buy that you expect to return, it produces some value for you as you own it, such as owning

a home where you get the value of living in it or owning a car where you get the utility of driving

around in it, or owning a bond, which issues a, you know, a, you know, a coupon or a stock that’s

going to, you know, generate cash flows at some point in the future, theoretically, the non

productive assets are these assets that are just not designed to do that. But they’re a store of

value that you expect at some point to realize some return, you know, because someone else will

pay a higher price to you for that non productive asset, this is like a piece of art, or, you know,

some piece of gold or something, you know, something that you kind of hold, or, you know,

more increasingly, you know, digital assets. And it seems like the explosion in digital assets is,

you know, as Jason pointed out at the beginning, like, as we’ve kind of moved to a highly kind of

overvalued segment of productive assets, as things that market is very frothy, it’s very difficult

to kind of find productive assets that are worth putting capital into, there’s continually more

interest in non productive assets across the board, because there’s excess capital in the system.

And it turns out that when that happens, there’s enough of a market dynamic that emerges in non

productive assets, it gives people a reason to put their capital in and expect to have a return

on them in the future. As soon as the market starts shrinking, as soon as you know, you start

having effects that are deflationary, your money will pour out of that market. In general, that’s

always what happens with the art market and has for hundreds of years. And it’s, it’s, it’s the

digital means of kind of realizing that same market transition. My question is, do you get

the rights? I guess this is a dependent on the terms that are set in the smart contract. But in

the case of the people, if I were to buy for 69 million, do I have the rights to it so that I can

print t shirts and sell $100 t shirts? What can I create 10,000? That’s a good question. I monetize

it is what I’m asking. That’s a great, great, great question. I don’t know. But that’s a

fabulous question, by the way, because the alternative, like, as you pointed out, the

artist and and other folks have rights to art. Even though the original painting is what sold,

you know, the original master of a Bruce Springsteen song could be sold to a collector.

But the rights the rights on that track for reproducing it making money off it are owned

by a publishing house, you can own the physical magnetic tape, yeah, not own the rights to

exploit and over time, those rights fall away. So if you think about what that NFT represents,

it represents that particular chain of electrons. And you know, this is this is these bite these

bits that represent this image. And it’s not necessarily make 100 more. And then he could

change one pixel, theoretically, or two pixels, and he could go print a bunch of stuff and go

not really, because those images were ones that he had, he had this rhythm of creating like one

a day, I think, for a very long period of time. And he contributed them all into this master,

right? Exactly. So there’s a this is a it’s a one of one another interesting

one of one that just happened was these performance artists, or I guess, like underground

digital artists bought a Banksy for 125 million or $125,000. I get 1000s and millions confused.

That’s a joke. You want to use for this episode is hashtag cancel Chamath. Go ahead.

Yeah. Good luck. Good luck.

Anyways, these four guys bought bought this Banksy for $125,000. They brought it to a

warehouse in Brooklyn. They took a high res image of it. Okay, so they took a picture of it.

And they created a one of one NFT, right? Okay, then they created a YouTube video of them burning

the original Banksy. Oh, so now all you had was the digital manifestation of this physical thing,

wait for it. And then they sold it for 300 and like $50,000. So they three x their money.

It’s the most incredible story. I can find the link and I’ll put I’ll put it in the show notes

as well. But it just shows you what’s happening. And then I also think last thing on NFTs I saw

that I think was like Kings of Leon just put out an album and it was like it’s like 50 bucks.

For a song or something like that. And it comes with like a bunch of interesting content. So

it’s the beginning of something guys, I just think that you need sort of like popular content to get

this movement going. But it seems to me like this is what people want to do. They want to own digital

assets, they want to have provenance, they want to have custodial relationships, but that they

want to basically, but it’s just like, it’s like art and posters, right? Anyone can put the poster

up in their room, anyone can buy a copy for five bucks, but who owns the original and owning the

original may be visually identical, maybe graphically identical. But it is truly about

that notion of that that theoretical human mind construct of ownership that creates that distinction

and you just effectively have to count on other human minds believing the same thing in the future

for you to be able to reclaim that value, that monetary value, or you’re going to take a loss

on it. I mean, Chamath, have you ever sold art that you bought? You know, I’ve sold very little.

I tend to buy and accumulate with this idea of eventually endowing something with just because

it’s like, you know, I think there are two ways to buy art. One is speculatively and the other

one is to tell a story. I took the second path. And so, you know, it’s stuff that means a lot to

me. So, it’s hard for me to part with it, even though it sits in a free port in Delaware. So,

it’s not exactly, you know, out and about with this idea that at some points, people will get

to really enjoy it once. By the way, I mean, one of the things that happens in the art world

if I’m wrong on this, but you buy this art and you don’t ever, a lot of art doesn’t get resold.

So, everyone kind of buys it under the notion that it’s going to be worth more in the future,

and they can sell it for more. But very few people actually do end up selling it.

No, that’s it. So, here’s the great thing.

In the trading market, right? But like, I mean, generally, like a lot of collectors end up

endowing art or gifting it. And when you gift it, you get an appraisal done and you get a

deduction on the appraised value, right? And so, You can definitely do it that way. So,

one interesting story is that one of the large auction houses has a financial arm.

And the most incredible thing is like over like the last 50 years,

their cumulative default rate was 30 basis points on their book. Like, cumulatively, not like a year

or a month, but ever. Nobody defaults.

Because they borrow money for the purposes of maybe buying other things or whatever. And then

they will very, you know, trade out of things and trade up to things and trade across things.

But it’s a very vibrant market of buying and selling. It just happens to be very informal,

and a little bit closed, and very much for insiders. And, you know, another reason that I

think that NFTs will change because it will change this is that it just makes it available to

everybody. Because you put all art on a very level playing field. And really, at the end of the day,

what is art? It’s a commentary on society. And I think that having that level of transparency

on that kind of stuff is, I think is going to be really valuable because you don’t want one or two

people who you fundamentally disagree with as being a tastemaker for a kind of art that you

think is fundamentally flawed, right? You’d rather it’s just it’s no different than being

able to go to 95 different media sites to read the content you want, or, you know, being able

to listen to 1000 different kinds of music. All of it in its totality is a commentary on society.

And I think what society says is we want transparency, we want choice. And

this is where I think, like, that’s why I think this is a good, a good dovetail into

what’s happening with the stimulus bill, and where we started, which was is this even necessary?

We have stimulus checks going out in the amount of $2,000 per individual in households with under

150k, I believe is the income level, which means people who were not impacted by financially,

in any way by what’s happened to under COVID are going to get in a family of 5 $10,000 checks,

even if nobody was laid off, or that’s only that’s only like 9% of the bill, Jason.

Yeah, I mean, so it was, it was 450 million out of 1.9 trillion.

So what do we think the impact? We have a working theory? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jason.

What are your general thoughts on this? Is it necessary? And then to what’s the what are the

second order effects that we each predict will happen over the next 18 months when all of this

capital gets injected? So the latter is what I’ve been focused on trying to figure out. And

I saw some really interesting data, which basically, I’ll ask you guys a question,

because maybe you guys know the answer. But if you measure wealth inequality, when

do you guys think was the most recent period where there was the least wealth inequality,

the least? Sorry, how do you define that? You can measure it like the Gini index,

or you can measure it as like, you know, the gap between the top decile and the bottom decile,

in terms of wealth and accumulated assets? Well, would it be before the robber barons?

No, it was the robber barons. And now, the period of the least inequality in

recent history was in the late 70s, which is an incredible stat to say where the gap between the

top decile and the bottom decile was like, you know, kind of like, on an index, like 6065.

Whereas today, it’s sort of like at 100. Now, what happened then? And it’s this is really

interesting. Wasn’t that an inflationary period? There you go. So what happened? And as it turns

out, inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease levels of playing field. Absolutely. It decreases

people’s richness. So it makes rich people poor. That’s really the most effective tool that you

have to recalibrate, it’s very, very hard to redistribute money. And I think every attempt

at doing that has largely failed. But the one consistent way and if you go back periods before

that, you know, into the beginning of the but in an inflationary environment, borrowing costs go up.

So, you know, businesses and people that rely on borrowing to grow their net worth or investing

assets to grow their net worth kind of suffer more than people that would have a home have a,

you know, wages go up in an inflationary environment, right?

Wages go up, which which actually, if you think about like, what you said before, like, you know,

as people get wealthier, they move their money into, you know, essentially financial assets and

away from sort of like working assets. And when you know, interest rates go up, and the risk free

rate goes up, then the attractiveness of those assets go down. Yeah. And so what happens is

shares and technology companies go down. But what what actually also happens is that you your cost

of capital for a traditional business, because it’s higher, they have to then charge more,

which means that they’re paying their employees more. And those folks, on a marginal basis,

tend to then, you know, take those dollars and spend those dollars. So inflation is this very

productive mechanism of actually redistributing wealth and actually homeowners benefit,

homeowners benefit as well. But like, you know, it shrinks, it shrinks the wealth,

you know, mild, mild inflation, mild inflation is probably good. It’s better than

probably deflation. But if it tips over into hyperinflation, then it destroys everyone’s

savings. Right? And rich people have the ability to protect their assets against inflation a lot

better than middle class people do. So you know, you look at like Venezuela, we are Germany,

hyperinflation. Yeah, people just hyperinflation destroyed the value of, of,

where are we seeing inflation? Where do we anticipate we’ll see inflation? I saw today

Tesla’s Tesla raised the price on all their cars except for two, they have to because the inputs

of you know, if you think about like, if you break down a Tesla, and you look at where the money

goes, the money really is in the batteries. And if you break down the batteries, it goes into three

critical inputs, lithium, nickel and cobalt, and the prices are highly suspect. And they’re,

they’re very poorly predicted. And so the cost of Tesla’s are going to go up by 20 or 30%.

And there’s nothing that there’s nothing that Tesla could do.

And by the way, you’ll see this across all commodity products, if inflation takes hold in a

meaningful way, including, you know, food products, ag products, you know, all commodities, you know,

metals, but the businesses that will benefit the most, and this is really interesting from a

technology perspective, and I think it played in part, my understanding is speaking to a number

of PMs about this portfolio managers at funds is that, you know, technology companies don’t have a

lot of hard assets. And so they have less kind of, you know, value accretion, and they don’t play in

a commodity supply chain. So it’s much more difficult for a technology company to say raise

rates by 30%. Whereas a food company can raise rates by 30%. One of the ways to look at this is

to look at the, you know, the book value or the capex, you know, property, plant and equipment

of a business and businesses that have a lot of pp&e are generally going to do better in an

inflationary environment, they’re going to have more throughput on that pp&e, they’re going to

have higher dollars per unit of pp&e. And so you’ll see, you know, this is why there was a shift of

dollars into what are traditionally called kind of value stocks, or, you know, kind of bigger

industrial companies away from, you know, softer kind of tech companies, which don’t really really

benefit from this inflationary trend. And so there’s going to be, you know, some sort of play

out in those sorts of products, probably more J. Calvin, I think, do we see it in SAS, because I’ve

noticed that SAS prices are going up, and that people are just keep adding to the price of the

SAS price, I was pricing out all the virtual conference, you know, stuff like hop in and all

that Aramid and whatever. And I was just shocked at how much they wanted to charge, you know, 1550

$100,000 a year. And I was like, but can I use like zoom in this for that, you know, in a chat

room, slack room? And are we going to see it happen in SAS, where people are going to start raising

the prices and just increase their profit margin, because their employees are going to demand more

money, because they’re part of this cycle. I think that’s a function of pricing power

going up for SAS companies, they become more established and entrenched.

Those companies are very profitable, I don’t think they’re experiencing wage pressure in any way.

I think that they’re just becoming more successful, their pricing power is going up as they become

not necessarily monopolist, but as they have more market share, and they dominate their categories,

they can increase prices. But I want to go back to this idea of the 1970s. So I want to,

I want to challenge the idea that the US economy was doing well in the 1970s. So Chamath mentioned

the Gini index, there was a different kind of metric called the misery index,

that was was a much more popular index that was used around that time. And the misery index,

it was defined by a Brookings economist. And it was basically the sum of the unemployment rate

and the inflation rate. And in 1980, the misery index was 19.7%. This is why Ronald Reagan

got elected is because you had a CPI, which the inflation rate of 12.5%. And then you had

unemployment of another 7.2%. On top of that, and you know, the 1970s were, especially the late

70s were an economic disaster for the country. So maybe things were more nominally equal,

but everyone was equally more equally poor. And what you saw in the 1980s is that they got,

you know, inflation under control. Paul Volcker at the Fed broke inflation, that lowered interest

rates enormously allowed people to buy homes, the stock market went up. And, you know, it was an

economic boom. So I don’t know that this idea that we want to introduce a lot of inflation into the

system is a good idea. Like I said, I think mild inflation of say, 2% is better than 2% deflation

the other way. But, but I think we should be very careful here about, about inflation and making

sure it doesn’t get out of control. And the other index to look at is the quality of life index,

which is typically, you know, healthcare, and then the property price to your income ratio,

commuting, pollution, safety, and those kinds of things. And, you know, the United States is

15th on that list, with obviously the Nordics and Australia, Germany, New Zealand, just being

at the top of those rankings in America, I never really thought about that, right? We don’t really

even discuss well, I mean, yes, you know, and that, and that quotient, we don’t index for that

happiness and low stress. I think we’re talking a lot about quality of life in San Francisco now,

because that’s a community that’s very rich. And yet it’s a miserable city to live in because crime

is out of control. You know, Jason, you and I have been focusing on this DA, Chase Abuden,

who’s had an enormous impact on people’s quality of life, because he’s simply not prosecuting

theft in the city. There’s actually, it was a crazy tweet where a city council member

was inside City Hall calling for a hearing on the rampant rise in theft in the city. And meanwhile,

his car was broken into right outside City Hall. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

And then the other thing that came out were a whole series of statistics about crime in San

Francisco showing, or sorry, trials and convictions. Basically, Chase has not been conducting any

trials. He hasn’t been convicting anyone. It turns out that the number of trials and convictions that

he’s gotten in the 14 months he’s been DA is one-tenth of what Gascon got when he was DA.

And by the way, Gascon is not the model DA or anything. I mean, Gascon is facing a recall in LA

for dereliction of duty, and he’s still 10 times more productive than Chase Abuden.

Just a quick update. Many of you, when I mentioned the GoFundMe to put a journalist on Chesa,

if you just type in GoFundMe Chesa, C-H-E-S-A, into the Google, we added $8,000 since last week.

So we have $58,000 that’s going to a journalist and a data journalist to cover this exact issue.

So thanks to the folks who donated. I’m not taking any money from it. I’m donating, obviously.

Other than a small finder’s fee.

No, $0. I’m donating to it. I basically said I’ll be 1% of it, whatever the final number is.

I think the Marina Times has done a great job with this.

There’ve been a couple other sources as well, but how dishonest was it? I mean,

this has been a recurring theme on the pod, so I just want to touch on it.

Chesa sent his little mouthpiece, his little minion, the high school friend,

to go out and challenge us, writing that blog post, saying that it was a lie,

that Chesa wasn’t prosecuting anybody. And lo and behold, the numbers have come out.

He tried to claim that Chesa had the same rate of charging that Gascon did. And that was true.

But the problem is he’s been pleading down all these charges. He’s not taking anyone to trial.

He’s not convicting anyone. He’s certainly not locking anybody up. So, I mean, what a lie that

was. Well, and criminals are just so savvy that they actually understand what the chances are

of them actually getting convicted, and they shape their grift and their crime to whatever

the environment they’re in is. Just like people who deal drugs, just like people who take these

hardcore fentanyl drugs, they just pick the market where they’re going to be most welcome.

So, they’re not going to do it down in Palo Alto or San Mateo or Mill Valley.

They’re going to do it on Turk Street. Well, yeah. So, I think that’s how it starts.

But I got to tell you, you know, I’m in LA right now, and there was an episode,

like, last week at El Pastaio. Oh, yes.

It’s on Cannon Street in downtown Beverly Hills. The number one Italian place where

all the celebrities go. It’s a great Italian place. There’s a lot of outdoor seating.

There was basically a mugging of someone was just sitting at a table. Apparently,

they were wearing a really nice watch. And they were robbed at gunpoint in the middle,

you know, in the middle of the restaurant. Lunchtime, yeah.

Lunchtime. And then there was a struggle over the gun. I don’t know why the guy just didn’t hand

over the watch. But anyway, he struggled over the gun. Four shots went off. One of them bounced

off the concrete and hit a woman in the leg. Oh, my God.

So, this is like, it’s getting, I mean, it’s getting out of hand.

Sounds like San Paolo, where they chop people’s arms off for the watch. I mean,

they literally will drive by, apparently, and just cut your arm off if they can’t,

if you don’t give them the watch. Well, I just, you know,

the criminals are starting to feel emboldened because Gascon and Boudin are not, they’re

not having trials, they’re not prosecuting, they’re not locking people up. And so,

they’re graduating to more and more serious offenses. I’m sure they probably didn’t want

to shoot anybody, or maybe that wasn’t their intention. They just want to steal the watch,

but it resulted in a shooting, just like the deaths of Hannah Abe and Elizabeth Platt,

when you had, you know, Troy McAllister, you know, hit them with the car. So, I mean,

the fact that we’re not locking people up is resulting in people dying and a lot of risky,

very risky behavior. All right, as we wrap here, a lot of SPACs going out. We obviously saw

another, I guess, Roblox was a direct listing. I’m just curious.

Only underpriced by 50%.

Oof. Oops.

It’s the same problem as the IPO, just sort of a larger quantity.

So, basically, what you’re saying is Bill Gurley’s on his headset,

walking around El Camino Real, calling journalists.

No, what I’m saying is, what I’m saying is, irrespective of what the goals of the direct

listing were, the result is the same as a traditional IPO.

There you go.

Can I give a shout out to a company that David Sachs?

Sure.

Oh, Pipe?

Yes.

Congrats.

Which is an incredible company that basically, like, helps you capitalize your contracts with

your customers. And it’s just basically this incredible thing that I’m seeing. And there’s

a couple of others that do it as well. ClearBank is another one. But you can fund your company

non-dilutively. And at some point, I think we should actually talk about the state of the union

in venture. Maybe we can do that in a couple of next episodes. I have a lot of thoughts on where

I think venture capital is going. And when I see things like Pipe, I’m just completely so happy

because I just think it’s going to change the way in which venture investing is done.

It’s a very brilliant idea. You can go to pipe.com slash twist to get 12 months free.

Pipe.com is a two sided marketplace. If you have reoccurring SaaS revenue, or any kind of

reoccurring revenue, somebody did it with a sub stack. So I think Pomp Liano, the guy who

pumps Bitcoin, he has a newsletter that makes whatever quarter million dollars a year.

He sold for 95 cents on the dollar his forward looking subscriptions for the year and bought

Bitcoin with it when it was at 35. So he’s like doubling down. But if you’re a SaaS company,

and we have many of them in our portfolios, you could take all of your monthly contracts,

sell them on the marketplace to somebody else, not Pipe. Pipe doesn’t buy it. It’s some other

financial person who says, I’ll give you 94 cents on the dollar, give you 92 cents on the dollar,

give you 85 cents on the dollar. And so if you were if you have a 10 million dollar book of

business paying monthly, you can get that 10 million now and deploy it. But Jason,

I think this is a good, this is a good way to end. But I think let’s agree that the next pod,

let’s talk, let’s start with the future venture capital.

100%. I mean, it’s changing dramatically.

It’s changing dramatically. And I think these non dilutive ways of growing a company will

completely impact pricing, you know, pre money, post money, the amount of equity that employees

can and should own in these businesses. You know, what is the value of brands like, you know, it,

like, people will know who David Sachs is, who Harry Hurst is, people necessarily don’t even

care anymore. Like, you know, hey, if I’m calling from Sequoia, what does that mean anymore?

They’re gonna say who from Sequoia is called. So these are all really interesting topics that I

think are worth talking about. Another path is just the public markets, you know, right? I mean,

public markets are becoming the new late stage private market. And it’s really, you know,

both the SPAC and early stage IPO and direct listing models are, are changing dramatically.

And it’s, and there’s more speculative risk seeking in the public markets in a way that

I don’t think we’ve ever seen. And it’s, it’s creating an opportunity for companies that are

still, you know, what in a traditional kind of sense might be called, you know, early stage or

still businesses with a lot of risk being able to go public and, you know, kind of take their

companies out and let the public markets wager on, on how well they’re going to execute and,

and how well they’re going to be able to develop their product or their market. And it’s, by the

way, it’s something we’ve seen historically with biotech, where there’s kind of very binary kind of

bets that happen, and binary outcomes, because the markets are known, and you don’t need to kind of

productize or build a business around it. But now we’re actually taking both business risk,

market risk, technology risk, product risk, to the public market at all stages. And I think

you’re going to see these, these scenarios where people will build public portfolios,

public, public company portfolios that will perform a lot like venture portfolios, right,

you’ll have one or two businesses, it’ll have a 10 bagger, and, you know, a chunk that’ll go to

zero and a chunk that’ll have some modest return on them. And it’s going to be Yeah, it’s going to

be this, this tremendous learning experience, because a lot of people will put all their money

into one stock that they think is already been made. It’s already it’s already done things Netflix,

it’s Netflix, it’s, you know, their promise of the future is 100% certain. And the reality is

their promise of the future is 5% certain. And so depending on the price you’re entering, and how

many of these things you buy, you could build a portfolio that could have a good return.

But it’s, it’s going to be a lot of speculative betting and a lot of losses. And if you don’t

diversify, you’re going to lose a lot of money. And you know, so the question is also, how does

it evolve regulatory wise? Chamath, how are you communicating that to the market? Because

you’ll have some specs that go out, I would think Virgin Galactic is in that more like they’re a

deep tech researching phase, and then you have other ones that are already, you know, churning

the the ringing the register, right? So how do you communicate that to retail investors or the

audience? Or that’s up to them to do the research? How do you think about that? I mean, there’s as

well as the bad inventory that’s getting added? No, look, yeah, I do a tweet storm. I do a one

pager, I have a multi hour detailed investor presentation that’s taped. And then we have a

typically a 100 to 300 page s four. So you can ingress into finding out the true story of a

business at whatever point you want. It really just does come down to doing your work. I mean,

a lot of the folks on Twitter, you know, when you see the market straight down, and they complain,

my reaction is stop crying and do your own work. And there isn’t like we have complete

transparency in this process. So it is up to people to do their job. And the thing that I

think is happening right now is people think that they don’t have to do a job and that money is free.

And it’s not, it’s hard to make it. It’s hard to make good investments. It’s hard to build a

company. Everything is hard. Nothing is really easy. Because if it was easy, everybody would

be doing it all the time. And so that’s that’s what I would love to leave people with. I really

got to go guys. I love you guys. Let’s start with venture capital next week. Yeah. Love you,

boys. Free Davids. Love you. Love you, Davids. Love you guys. I love you. I love you. I love

you. I do love you. I mean, we love each other. And we can say it. And then the guys on this side.

Love you. They’re working on my guys. Look at Jake out dragging it out. Stop dragging

everything out. We’re dragging it out because we love you, David. We’ll see y’all next time. Bye.

I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.

I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.

Boy.

I’m ready to go. I need more. I need more red pills. What a joke. Give me those red pills

from Miami. David gave me just a huge bag of red pills. I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.

I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.

I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.

I’m ready to go. All right. Anybody give a shit about NFTs.

I’ve been on a bender on these red pills.