This is an incredible fashion disaster.

We have to be David Sachs is dressed like where’s Waldo.

OK, Friedberg, Friedberg is dressed like

driving a fucking Subaru Outback.

Oh, God. Unbelievable.

I mean, this is ridiculous.

Let your winners ride

Rain Man, David Sachs.

And it’s said we open source it to the fans

and they’ve just gone crazy.

I love you.

And I mean, we know

everybody, everybody.

It’s another episode of the all in podcast.

Episode 31 with us today from.

Well, it’s just rolled out of bed.

The queen of Kenwa himself, David Friedberg is here.

Let me do my only get that.

It’s not going to help.

Have you been studying the homeless problem by by yourself

going out on the streets or what?

The Friedberg.

Do we need to do an intervention?

All right. I’m going to go change.

Give me a five minute.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

The Friedberg minutes up.

We have to keep the Friedberg ratio up.

I had somebody stop me in Miami and say, keep the Friedberg ratio high.

Also with us chiming in is where’s Waldo himself.

The skipper David Sachs, the Rain Man is here.

The skipper is here.

Don’t change my name.

Don’t change my nickname.

I’m comfortable with Rain Man. Don’t throw me off.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely OK with Rain Man.

Of course, not the skipper, not the skipper.

And the dictator himself got a full night’s sleep.

I hope this time I did.

Jamal Khaliha Patea.

And of course, I’m Jake, how the baby seal here.

In Miami, look at the view, how beautiful.

It’s been an incredible, incredible week.

The tiger has been unleashed.

I went to Austin.

Now I’m in Miami.

Jake, you’re more like you’re more you’re more like a pudgy hyena.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

You’re not really a tiger.

The quarantine 15 big announcement.

10 pounds are gone. Five to go.

I’m lifting weights outside in Miami.

It’s been amazing.

Field report. I get to Austin.

I kid you not.

I got my mask on.

10 people, first of all, 10 people say I love the all in podcast.

Every like 15 feet walking in Austin and in Miami.

But somebody looks at me with my mask and says, are you OK, son?

And I was like, what?

I kid you not.

And he said, are you vaccinated?

And I said, yeah.

He’s like, why are you wearing a mask?

And I realized it’s time for independent critical thinking.

Sax, I got to give it to you.

Another great, great tweet for me to copy and adapt to steal your deal.

But I love this tweet that you had where you said early in the pandemic,

explain the tweet or maybe read the tweet.

This is well, which one?

I’ve been blasting masks about one group of people wouldn’t wear masks.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Well, at the beginning, that’s right.

I mean, the the dysfunction of our politics is that half the country

wouldn’t wear a mask at the beginning of the pandemic.

And now the other half of the country won’t take them off at its end.

This is the problem, is that the mask has become

it’s the equivalent of the red MAGA hat for Team Blue.

This has become some sort of virtue signaling,

even when it’s not necessary.

But it’s actually destructive because it’s performatively

sending the signal to people that the vaccines don’t work.

And we have a third of the country today is still vaccine hesitant.

And this is not helping.

What we need to be sending the message to them is, look, get vaccinated

so life can get back to normal so you don’t have to wear a mask.

And, you know, we still have the CDC putting out this ridiculously

conservative and timid guidance saying that, well,

if you get vaccinated, you can take off your mask outdoors

as long as you’re not with too many people.

Well, like what?

No. I mean, look, once you get vaccinated,

you should need to wear a mask outdoors or indoors.

And, you know, we had the state, this sort of mini

State of the Union this past week with Biden.

And it was this really like nobody was there.

No, it was like an empty room.

Empty room because of social distancing.

And they were all wearing masks, even though, you know,

every single one of them is vaccinated.

And so I think Biden really missed an opportunity in that speech.

Yes, he said that everyone should get vaccinated, but show not tell.

I mean, you know, he walks up to the microphone in a mask

saying that we should all get vaccinated.

Well, what is the mask for?

Why don’t you tell people that if you get vaccinated,

you don’t need a mask anymore?

And so, you know, we have this sort of contrast.

It’s actually really it’s it’s really incredible, because to your point,

he was trying to make some very important points in that speech, David.

And when the camera would actually pan from behind him.

So instead of looking at him and Kamala and Nancy Pelosi, it would look

there was nine people.

And you thought another sold out crowd for.

No, no, no, no, no, because because no, no, no, because typically

when when you give these sort of State of the Union or, you know,

these kind of like a hundred day addresses, it is packed

because you have everybody in Congress.

You have everybody in the Senate.

You know, you have you have typically like a bunch of other officials.

You have a Supreme Court judge, like in a State of the Union address.

And there was nobody.

And it felt really striking to watch that.

If Trump’s mistake was not wearing a mask in April of 2020,

I think Biden’s mistake is not taking it off in April of 2021.

Why can’t we get a political leader

who is willing to put on masks at the right time and take them off?

Or do risk assessment?

Just we need a political leader who’s reasonably scientific

and will actually say, here’s the intersection of science

and common sense that everybody can map to and copy me,

because it is to your point, David, you know, the leader of the free world

is given that title for a reason.

It’s not it’s not complete, completely ignore what I say.

I’ve been put in this position because I am, you know, on some dimension.

expected to be the most thoughtful person in the room and set the example for everybody.

Let’s just talk like the important consequence of this.

And I agree with sex.

The important consequence of this, however, is the economic effect it has.

So for example, in San Francisco, restaurants are only allowed to be at a quarter capacity.

So there are restaurant owners that want to get back to business that want to generate income

again, that want to get off of the PPP loan program and all of the government support.

And they should be able to because most people in San Francisco at this point,

the vast majority, in fact, are vaccinated.

And the restaurants, for no scientific reason, are shut down or limited to a quarter capacity.

And this is the case across a lot of cities and a lot of states in the country right now,

where the conservatism with respect to coming out of the, you know,

the major part of this kind of pandemic is what’s now keeping the economy or

not just keeping the economy because we’re fueling the economy with stimulus,

but is keeping business owners and keeping people that want to participate actively

in building and running their businesses from getting back to work,

because we’re so conservative about this.

And you know what, sex is totally right.

Yeah, like, take the masks off, let people go into restaurants and let people go have

dinner in San Francisco.

Let these places get back to work.

By the way, we have a we have an A B test.

That’s actually nobody’s talking about, which is that

the more conservative version of America’s posture, right?

America is sort of like half we don’t care and half we care too much.

But in Europe, you could see a more, you know, homogeneous approach to the problem.

And we printed a negative 0.6% GDP growth in Europe.

So to your point, with all the vaccines that are out there with all of the logic and all

of the science, not being able to just take the mask off and get back to life as normal was

negative 0.6% GDP growth in a quarter, where they also printed hundreds of billions of dollars.

And now you come into the United States last year, I don’t know if you guys remember this,

but every forecast I saw had GD from the smartest folks saying q1 GDP would be on a run rate to be

around 10%.

It would be one of the best in history.

It was only 1.6%.

So we’re on a 6.4% GDP growth run rate.

Guys, that’s not 10%.

Now it’s still a lot.

But the point is, we got to get back to life as normal, we have to show that these vaccines

work, we have to tell people that you can have a normal life, you should be going out

spending money going back to the office live normally.

Yeah, and we should we should we should just cover the data.

I mean, we should I mean, it’d be great to put up the latest CDC data on the screen.

Yeah, if you use the CDC as a source for the data, as opposed to listening to their

interpretations of it, their policy interpretation, it’s actually pretty illuminating.

So out of 87 million people who’ve been vaccinated, there have only been 408 serious cases,

which would be count as hospitalization or death related to COVID.

So those are odds of one in 213,000.

The odds of being hit by lightning are one in 180,000.

So your odds of being struck by lightning are greater than your risk of getting seriously

sick.

What are the odds of a royal flush?

I need this in poker terms.

I think this sounds like hitting a royal flush twice.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s crazy.

How many royal flushes have we each hit?

I’ll put it I’ll put this article up and you guys can share it in the show notes.

The technology review one.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think it it does a good job of speaking to sexist statistic.

Now.

Yeah, so I think sex I think this represents the CDC data in the first paragraph in this

article, but it goes on to kind of speak about the statistical likelihood of these events.

So, you know, basically, you know, it opens up by saying, you know, as of April 20 87

million people in the United States have been vaccinated and only 7157 or point

008% went on to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, 330 of whom were hospitalized and 77 of whom

died from the disease.

And I would guess that that of those people, there is likely some immune dysfunction,

which is a, you know, a likely reason why it doesn’t mean that every individual has

that risk.

It means that there are certain people out there that are going to have immune dysfunction

and won’t react well to won’t develop the appropriate kind of protection from the vaccine.

And that’s, you know, that that’s small, small, small, small, small percent of people

are the are where we’re kind of seeing, you know, actual risk like

that’s where I get the 408 number is it’s the number of hospitalizations plus deaths

minus the ones that they say in the footnote were not related to COVID.

Right.

So there’s some other like cause.

So 408 out of 87 million.

And by the way, I think it’s worth just highlighting, you know, just think about the

rationale for why there is conservatism here still, right.

So if there are still pockets where people have not been vaccinated in the country,

and there are still areas where people are hesitant to get vaccinated, and there’s a

large unvaccinated population, the official guidance, the official kind of reasoning,

I believe, is that we need to be conservative to get all of those people to behave in a

conservative enough way to keep a, you know, a surge from occurring regionally around the

country, and the loss, the downside is very negligible, where people still have to wear

masks.

What I don’t think that that calculus accounts for is that the loss is actually not negligible.

The loss of telling people broadly to keep wearing masks is a hesitancy to go back to

work a hesitancy and a conservancy to engage in normal economic activity.

And so, you know, I think that we’re kind of missing that point in the kind of officiating

of this, of this exit strategy here.

And it’s, it’s certainly I’m aligned with sax on this, I certainly think it’s, it’s biting

us more than it’s helping us to give you an idea, just like experience wise, when I was

in Austin, every restaurant is that 110 capacity, the locals, they were like, I can’t get a

reservation for a week or two, the town is packed, everybody in the country is going

to Austin and Miami, because they’ve just learned that Austin and Miami have officially

declared if you have the vaccine, you can go have your life.

But there is still a little bit of theater on the margins.

When you go into a restaurant, I went in to get a meal.

And I didn’t have my mask on.

I kid you not 110 capacity, 100 people sitting at the bar, 200 people at tables.

She hands me a mask.

And I said, I’ll have one I put it on.

I said, Can I ask you a question?

And she says, Why should you wear a mask when there’s 300 people in here without a mask

and the doors are closed?

I was like, that’s the exact question.

She goes, it makes no sense.

The governor wants no mess, the mayor wants masks.

And so they’re having their own little version of the national conversation in Austin, which

is locally scared, or at least the politicians are and then reasonable otherwise.

So you literally put your little mask on, you walk 10 feet to your table and then take

it off for the rest of the time in Miami.

I go to Miami, I walk into I you know, it was I haven’t been out in 14 months.

So I decided I would check out a club.

And I went to a nightlife club.

And people were dancing and having a great time.

People were also popping bottles.

And I was like, Oh, my God, it’s over.

Like, and nightlife club.

It was a nightlife club.

And no, it was not a Yes.

Anyway, it was a legitimate club, you know, here in South Beach.

And so I took a little Insta.

And I share I fed the Insta.

And immediately I got three comments from friends who are like, What are you doing in

that club?

And I wrote back to all three.

I’m vaccinated.

And they were like, Okay, I was like, is this obvious?

But I think this was the point I made a few months ago, which is I do think that the

subconscious training, the fear factor that’s been kind of, you know, built into us over

the last year, year and a half.

It’s gonna take a while to kind of train our way out of, you know, people aren’t going

to be that rational and that conscious about Oh, I’ve been vaccinated, people are basically

the default is fear, the what ifs, the buts, but oh, my God, people are still getting COVID,

even though they’re vaccinated, but there’s there’s variants, but and everyone looks for

a conscious or, you know, a kind of conscious reason why they’re rationalizing their subconscious

fear.

And everyone’s got this fear to go and do things and this fear to go back in the world,

because we’ve literally been trained and beaten into a corner for the last year.

Now, the conscious reality is, you don’t need to be fearful, but I’m fearful.

Therefore, I’m looking for reasons to maintain my fear.

And I think this, this, this is like what I get, I say that I said it like four times

before, but this is what happened after 911.

And it lasted for years.

And you know, we still have ridiculous TSA processes, we need our leaders to take their

masks off, get tell everybody they’re vaccinated, take their masks off, go back to normal life

so that everybody else will feel that it’s okay, too.

Because even if you’re, even if you’re, if you’re not fearful, David, the other thing

that you are is just guilty.

And you’re right, totally.

And you got to, you got to get rid of that as well.

And the only way you’ll do it is if highly visible people are now actually going back

to life as normal.

Yeah, like the peer pressure element of it.

It’s like, I feel bad, I feel bad going into a store when everyone else is wearing a mask.

And like, I’m this crazy, this crazy MSNBC moment, one of the hosts of one of their shows

said, I’ve been fully vaccinated, but I went running in Central Park.

So I double masked.

And I’m like, the virtue signaling was so insane.

And I’m like, wait a second, you’re outdoors.

That’s insane.

This is the, this is the Joy Reid thing.

Yeah.

I don’t want to say the person’s name.

Because then if you mention who it is, then you might be attacking a person of color or

a woman host.

So I just said.

Well, now you’re avoiding it, which makes it think that you are.

So who is it?

How am I supposed to say it without being?

Does anybody want, I mean,

Nobody watches MSNBC.

Yeah.

MSNBC was the Trump derangement syndrome therapy was MSNBC.

The ratings go.

I want to have a question for the three of you.

Knowing what we’ve seen here, between the logic of both sides and the media and the

insanity, what do you take away from the year of the pandemic as it comes to a close in

how you personally look at the world?

Sachs, you want to start like,

Yeah, I’ll tell you.

I feel like the American people are constantly being propagandized.

And there is almost like an information war being perpetrated on the American people where

we cannot get the data, the facts and the truth.

I think it’s true now in terms of people not taking off their masks, even though we have

the CDC data that basically shows the lightning strike probability of getting COVID.

But we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic.

Remember, I have all these people on Twitter telling me every time I tweet about this.

Why don’t you just listen to the experts, right?

They want me to shut off my brain and just do whatever the CDC says.

I’m like, well, do you realize the CDC was against masks at the beginning of the pandemic

back in March of 2000?

Last year, when I was saying we need to wear masks, because I was looking at the success

of the Asian countries and some of the data coming out of that.

The CDC was very, very slow in adopting masks.

They were against it.

They were telling us we didn’t need to do it.

And that was the historical CDC, like, right?

They’ve been around for a long time.

And then also Trump was anti-mask.

And so you had

Trump was slow to adopt masks, too.

And yeah, and absolutely.

And so, yes, I mean, I’ve said that there’s like a Venn diagram of American politics,

where, you know, one circle is favored mask wearing one year ago, and then wants to get

rid of mask mandates today.

The Venn diagram of overlap between those two groups is very small.

I’m in that overlap.

I feel like I’m in like a very lonely part of the political graph.

Yeah.

Chamath, how has your thinking, you know, now that we’ve had to process this event in

our lifetime, that is probably the most consequential, you know, moment?

Yeah, I have, I have, I’ve thought about this a lot.

Jason, you asked a really important question.

And I think everybody should probably try to take five minutes and actually write this

down.

Because I think I’ll tell you what I learned.

I learned, I learned three things.

The first thing I learned is intellectual.

And it’s exactly the same thing that David Sachs said, it is completely shocking to me

how much disinformation there is, and also how we are so prone to turning off our brains

and not thinking for ourselves.

So it’s really shocking.

And I think 2020 was the year that that was laid bare, that the institutions that feed

you information can’t really be trusted, that you can’t really trust the interpretation

of actual simple data, that nobody wants to think in first principle.

So that’s the first one, we have stopped thinking for ourselves.

And that’s a recipe for disaster.

And so that’s an intellectual thing that I’ve realized, and I don’t want to do it.

And so I’ll think for myself, and I’ll take the consequences.

The second was economic, which is, wow, we have really over rotated to this crazy form

of globalism that is going to get undone over the next 30 years.

And that’s going to have a lot of implications.

And it can be done in a way that can rejuvenate the United States, which I think can fix a

lot of the stuff that was created.

And we should talk about that later today.

And then the third is physiological, which is if you didn’t know before, I’m going to

tell you now, and it’s this three letter word that we make into a four letter word in America,

which is the letters f at, we have a fat epidemic in the United States, almost 80%

of every single person that was hospitalized, because of COVID was clinically obese.

And you can’t say it, and you’re not allowed to say it, if you say that somebody is fat,

or if you say that somebody is obese, it’s all of a sudden, like, you know, you’re going

to get virtue signal canceled.

And instead, what we’re doing is we’re leaving an entire generation of people

completely abandoning them, because we’re not confronting the problem, that by a combination

of food, and the lack of movement, we are setting them up to either die acutely of something

like COVID, or chronically by heart disease and diabetes.

And that it was like, it is now so obvious.

And by the way, that’s the other thing where these healthy fit people were running around

double vaxxing and or double masking in Central Park, and they don’t even know the basic data.

Like, even if you thought you were going to go to the hospital, the 80% of all of those

millions and millions of hospitalizations were from people that were obese, they had

physiologically, completely taken their body to a place that it wasn’t able to fight.

Right.

So those are my three takeaways, intellectual, economic and physiological.

Insert one thing on that is because I agree with with everything to Martha said is this

idea of laying bare that laying bare the sort of corruption of these like institutions that

are supposed to be coming up with good policies and educating us and it turns out they, you

know, keep giving us this foolish guidance.

But there’s also another institution, I think that was laid bare, which are these education

unions, right?

We had school closures for a year, the learning loss and the isolation that kids are have

experienced.

We don’t even know what the results of this are going to be.

This could be a generational consequence.

And what we see from the education unions, they didn’t want to go back to school.

They fought it.

You know, we had the whole Oakley school board resign because they just said, well, they

want us to go back to work to be babysitters for their kids so we could smoke pot.

These are people who don’t care about the kids.

And after this year, I don’t know how anyone can be against school choice or charter schools

or giving parents more involvement in their kids educations.

100%.

Freeberg, coming out of the pandemic, and looking at your own psychology and your own

life, what have you learned?

And what do you take forward in terms of lessons and how you’re going to approach post pandemic

life?

I’ll kind of flip it a little bit.

One of the first experiences I had with how broadly people could be influenced in a way

that doesn’t have grounding or rooting in facts and reality is when I sold my company

to Monsanto in 2013.

And J. Cal, I think you came with me on one of these trips that I took.

Yeah, I visited Monsanto with you.

And, you know, there was an incredible bias by my team and by me personally, prior to

even engaging in conversations with Monsanto against that company, because they were deemed

to be evil.

And as I spent a lot of time personally kind of digging into the facts and the history

of the business and kind of how we got here, it was surprising to me like how much of the

bias against Monsanto was not rooted in fact, and was in fact, you know, a series of claims

that then became truth and reality, because of the perception, and it just became it,

things got stuck that way.

GMOs are bad, GMOs are evil, that the science of how they work, what they do, why they’re

useful, was never contemplated, never became part of the dialogue.

It was just this assumed fact that this is an evil company that this stuff is bad.

And, you know, this is a long, long topic, we can talk about this, I’m sure for an entire

hour and a half about the science and technology behind GMOs and how we make food and all that

sort of stuff.

And I’d be happy to do that another time.

But like, for me, I was just so surprised when I engaged with thoughtful friends of

mine who were scientists, even, and they had this bias.

And then when you engage them in a dialogue about like, why, where does that come from?

What’s the rooting?

It just wasn’t there.

And I got and I mentioned this to you guys, when I was an executive at the management

team in Monsanto, we had a WHO ruling, where a guy got himself elected to the IRC, the

this is the cancer research group within WHO.

He was this liberal guy, who was very anti technology who got himself elected to the

IRC board, and got a ruling made that Roundup is a possible carcinogen.

And that ruling led to a $10 billion lawsuit that Monsanto or now Bayer is settling, which

wasn’t rooted in the science or the facts that the other scientists on the committee had kind of

previously kind of previewed and gone through and said, this isn’t cancerous.

And it’s incredible the implications it’s had.

And so, I’ve always, you know, for several years now, I’ve had this kind of belief that

like people can be led to believe things that aren’t necessarily rooted in objective truth,

or in fact, or have empirical evidence to behind them.

And this goes back to the origins of religion and monarchies and like, you know, these myths

and these, these, these, these tales we tell ourselves, where we all end up believing something

and there’s some influencing factor that drives that.

I think this has just been an incredible manifestation of that, the misinformation

on both sides, from the beginning to the end of the pandemic.

And it’s just been extraordinary to watch.

I don’t think you change it.

I think social networks amplify it.

You know, I think that the rate at which information or misinformation flows back and forth is

making it easier and quicker to kind of adopt this, you know, systemic, inaccurate belief

system that people might adopt.

And so, you know, it’s a big question mark for me.

I don’t know, you know, how we as a people kind of move forward with like objective fact

based decision making and belief systems.

And I don’t know if we ever will.

But well, yeah, it’s just how humans are wired, maybe, you know.

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.

I really like all of your answers, because mine is very similar.

Number one, I feel like I was always an independent critical thinker in my life, and that I think

I kind of started to pick sides because of Trump that like I just found him so offensive.

And I realized I have to go back to being just an independent critical thinker.

I affiliate with no party.

I assume all news stories are fake news.

I assume all data is being manipulated.

I assume everybody’s got an agenda.

I believe everybody’s virtue signaling now.

And I’m making the decisions for myself.

And I in the one of the things dovetails exactly what you said, Chamath, which is,

this was a disease of a of, you know, old people, and fat people, obese people,

of which I have been one for far too long.

And this is my commitment is just I got to take my health 100% seriously.

Now that I’m 50 years old, I got a trainer, I got a masseuse.

I’m working out and doing weights.

I’m doing everything.

I changed my diet.

I’m taking supplements, the stuff we talked about here.

I went right to my doctor after that episode.

We did, Chamath.

I’m getting that body scan for four fucking grand or whatever it costs.

And I’m just doing it all.

Are you saying a masseuse is going to help you lose weight?

No, but I’ve had a, I’ve had shoulders.

Maybe the a**.

Maybe the a**.

No, no.

Beep that out, beep that out.

No, I just realized I don’t stretch.

I don’t stretch.

And my shoulders were getting very tight and being on the computer and everything.

So I’m just functionally.

What a man of the people.

What a man of the people.

Oh, look at you.

Which house are you in?

Trader.

I got a masseuse.

Sex every week.

I got to figure out.

No, I got a person.

I got to afford that.

I’m spending my money on making myself healthy.

The third thing, and this is heartfelt and sincere, is that friendship and our loved ones

are really with, along with health is so important.

And I am cherishing every moment, every experience with every friend, knowing that the world can

shut down and whatever, and we have to take advantage of every moment.

And that, for me, is the takeaways.

Just to build on something.

I’m really proud of what you’re trying to do, Jason, for your health.

When I, I remember I, you know, you know how we, you all have these high grade school pictures.

Yep.

Right.

Like you go to like picture day or whatever.

Yeah.

And there was this crazy contrast that I had in my grade school pictures.

There was like two of them when I was in Sri Lanka.

So, I was like, you know, five and six.

And then great, you know, then I was seven or eight.

And then all of a sudden, this crazy, hey, what’s up, Antonio?

Antonio, I see you.

Miami, Miami, mucho caliente.

Does Antonio realize he’s on an international podcast?

You’re on a podcast that goes out to 500,000 people.

You’re on YouTube, you’re international.

Yeah, it’s going international.

Nobody even knows who he is.

Don’t worry.

He’s like one of the most powerful guys in our industry.

What I was going to say is like, by like, I think when I was like nine or 10, I had

gotten really fat.

Really?

Because, because when we moved to Canada, it was a very different food supply.

And then economically, we were in a different place.

We ate what we could afford.

And I put on a lot of weight.

And that weight carried with me until college.

And then after college, and that’s when I said, I got to get in shape exactly for the

same reason, Jason, because like, my dad was getting dialyzed, he was constantly, you

know, dealing with these health issues.

And I said, I don’t deal with this shit.

But that’s a rare thing that happens.

If you think about the number of people that are put in this predicament of like, not even

forget, you’re able to get a trainer or whatever.

But there are a ton of people that can only eat what they can afford.

Yeah.

Right.

And the reality is, it is just meaningfully cheaper to eat at McDonald’s than it is to

go to Whole Foods and be able to buy organic food.

And so it’s just not even on the agenda for people.

So this is what I mean by you, we have to be able to say that it’s not that people are

fat, because they choose to be that there are these systemic imbalances that make people

sick.

You know what I mean?

Education and health.

These are the education that we need to work on in America.

Like Sachs, you said it was it last week, Sachs, you said, you know, the I think this

is a great bargain that could happen in America with all this polarization.

If even a republican conservative like Sachs can say, everybody should get a great education,

and everybody should be healthy.

Right?

Like, and Sachs isn’t a socialist, but this, this is important.

And it’s so easy to just get a happy meal, then to eat a salad, you know, or whatever.

I was in Washington, DC this week.

And I met with this organization, which anybody who is interested in this should check out

called Third Way.

And what Third Way is, is a centrist organization, right?

So, they largely work with Dems to try to pull them here.

And I think the republican version is called the Niskansen, I guess, center.

But the idea is I sat with these guys, and I was like, just teach me something.

And they taught me the most incredible thing.

You guys know who Pew is?

Pew goes out and does all these surveys.

The Pew Research Center.

They’ve been doing it for decades.

They’re the most respected, I think, in surveys.

Pew does this incredible thing where they go to like a whole bunch of countries in the world.

And they ask this basically very simple question.

I’m going to ask you guys what you think the answer is.

On a zero to 10 scale, where 10 is important.

What do you think Americans think to the following question?

How important is hard work to get ahead in life?

Meaning, right, so it’s a proxy for how Americans think about hard work.

How important is hard work to get ahead in life?

Friedberg, what percentage of Americans do you think that say that hard work

is important to get ahead in life?

And I’ll give you a couple of data points in 80%.

Yeah.

But the setup is Indonesia 28% India 38% Germany.

50% Go ahead.

What do you think the answer is?

Well, it should be 100%.

But what do I think it is in the US?

I’m hoping it’s above 60.

I agree with you, sax 100% is the right answer.

And I believe Americans don’t believe it.

I’m gonna put Americans at 35%.

Because we’ve seen so many people get lucky and get rich.

Or just people think the system is rigged, or the victim culture where people tell everybody

don’t bother trying because it’s rigged.

And you just it’s the argument.

Sorry, tomorrow, I’ll let you give us the answer in a second.

But I think the argument is that like entrepreneurism

fuels these moments of extraordinary success, but the perception creates the opposite effect,

which is someone can get rich very quickly.

And therefore, there’s this luck factor or this unfairness factor

that is inherent in the system, right?

And so, while it does enable hard work to drive tremendous outcomes,

the perception is that holy crap, in three years,

Kylie Jenner went on Instagram and became a billionaire or whatever, right?

And people get really kind of blown away by that.

And I think it’s discouraging and or one person’s success

makes it such that other people can’t that it’s zero sum when in fact,

a company, what’s your what’s your number for America?

80%.

The number is 73%.

And we are the third highest ranking country.

Wow, that’s great.

So it’s amazing.

Now, if you if you ask then Americans, who better represents the interests of hardworking people,

among Republicans and Democrats, the overwhelming answer is now Republicans,

which is really interesting.

Democrats, even in exit polling basically voted for Biden,

because they just really found Trump distasteful.

And a lot of the people that, you know, basically said,

you know, he’s an ass.

And so they voted him out.

But it was not because they believed that Democrats could do the job of actually

reinforcing the values of hard work.

And this goes back to

they don’t want handouts.

People don’t want handouts.

People want a fair shot.

They want an even starting line.

They don’t want an even finishing line.

Yeah, they don’t they don’t no one wants paternalism.

And everyone wants opportunity.

You know, but you take what you’re given, when it’s available to you.

No one says no, you know, I spent a lot of time with farmers in the Midwest in the United States,

very diehard conservative, generally, right.

And, and farmers benefit greatly from significant government,

federal government support programs,

primarily a crop insurance program and some commodity price support programs.

But, but they are very anti government.

And there’s this tremendous irony there, right?

Because they don’t want to hand out, they want to kind of be left alone,

they want to be able to run their business they want and I’m generalizing, right,

but I’m just speaking broadly to kind of the theme of things I hear when I when I meet with farmers.

But when the crop insurance program shows up and direct support payments show up, you’re like,

okay, I’ll take the check.

You know, and so it’s hard to say no.

But I think the motivation for everyone is universally the same, which is right,

I want to have the opportunity to be successful independently.

Are we creating policies that reinforce this?

And are we creating the condition that makes people feel less like a victim,

less looking for handouts?

And let’s reduce I have a concern about the stimulus checks.

I do think it was a smart thing to do to get us out of this.

But do you guys wonder if this generation which is not going back to work,

we have a shortage of Uber drivers, we have a shortage of bartenders, waiters,

nobody was a lot of people are just choosing not to go to work because they have their stimmies.

America is a place where you come to, because you want to grind, you want to find your own

little engine room. And you want to be in there and you want to put in the hours

and the people that it attracts from around the world.

Speak to that, you know, the way that you can explain,

you know, why Indonesia and India are so far to the left on that same question

is because it’s an extremely homogeneous population with zero immigration.

No immigration. Yeah.

I actually think the reason why America so far to the right is it itself selects,

not by, you know, some kind of gender, age or religion or color of skin.

By motivation.

It’s motivation.

Yeah.

And it’s like, if you’re motivated to crush you come to the United States.

Yeah.

We’ve all we’re all what are we like, you know, one generation away,

except Jason, you’re two generation American.

My Irish side is sixth generation.

We’re all first generation, except for Jason, right? We all moved here

to the United States as immigrants.

As immigrants.

With motivated family. Yeah.

I think that’s why I’m the least successful of the group.

Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah. You’re the lazy,

complacent American, whereas we’re the hungry immigrants.

I’m trying. I’m trying. Hey, listen, you’re the Daniel Day-Lewis character.

I got too off to do the podcast, so I’m doing something right.

You’re the Daniel Day-Lewis character in Gangs in New York. You know,

you hate the immigrants, you sit at the boat, you throw eggs at everyone.

It’s interesting you bring that up.

Yeah.

Do you know where my Irish

forbearers came from and where they immigrated to?

Ireland?

The five points.

Oh, the five points.

We were in the five points.

It’s exactly accurate.

Yeah.

Of course I was. It makes total sense.

You’re not Daniel Day-Lewis. You’re the heavier, shorter guy, though.

That was kind of the second.

Not for long. You know what?

Yeah.

I dropped 10 on my quarantine 15 and I gave it to Saks.

Yeah, you did.

You’re looking good, Jacob.

You look good in Miami. Miami suits you.

In a weird way, I got to give J-Cal as much credit for where he came from as Chamath,

because I don’t know, those parts of Brooklyn are maybe as tough as Sri Lanka.

Kids with guns. Kids with guns.

Yeah, you know, child warriors.

You’re going to get chopped.

Always roll with a posse.

By the way, you know, on immigration, I don’t know if you guys saw this, you know, George

W. Bush paints now and he paints immigrants.

So I bought his book, I bought a signed copy of it.

I should have brought it to the podcast today, but it’s a great book.

I highly recommend it.

Trigger warning.

No, but he actually has some writings in there that talks about the power of immigration and

how immigration is so core to the success of the United States, just to our point.

So this conversation made me think of the book that I just bought this week.

Really cool book, by the way, George W. Bush.

Amazingly great artist really captures the personality of immigrants in his work.

I think the thing is, like, everybody wants to come here to work hard.

Everybody that’s here is willing to work hard, right?

Whether you’re first generation or not.

And then the question is, can government create policies that allow us to do that and actually

just create a safety net to catch us if we fall?

Because that’s what we also all want.

So there are parts of Biden’s bill that I think made a ton of sense, like, you know,

making community college free.

That’s a really disruptive idea because it’ll put a ton of pressure on for profit colleges,

right?

To like, get their act together or not.

That’s a good idea.

The child tax credit so that you can actually have subsidized, you know, child care for

your kids.

That’s a good idea.

But then where you kind of go astray is then when you start to figure out, you know, the

levels of taxation.

Again, we talked about this last time.

But, you know, I just think that that’s where you can kind of demotivate people to not then

put in the hours.

I think this is a good segue also into immigration through our southern border and this incredibly

polarizing issue and how the media is polarizing it, how the parties are polarizing it.

Just to ask a question to see if we even understand the data, how many people do you think are

illegal immigrants in the United States right now?

20 million.

Okay.

Friedberg, Sachs?

That’s a guess.

Yeah, I guess I guess 18 million.

I’ll take a slight under to Chamath, but about the right.

That’s about the right.

The last number I heard was like 12 million, but that was a few years ago.

Bingo, it’s 12.

Now, how many people are apprehended at the southern border a year since 2010 every year?

Half a million.

Anybody else want to take a guess?

50,000.

All right, it’s 350,000.

So we literally are tearing the country apart.

And I know that because I watched the movie Sicario, and I’m estimating based on the scene

where they ran everyone up at the border and took them away.

So that’s my terrifying film.

Yeah.

And awesome.

Like, incredible film.

Just bring his annex because you might have a panic attack.

My favorite modern director, Dennis Villanueva.

He’s unbelievable.

But yes, we digress.

Yes.

That scene when they’re racing the cars into the border crossing border checkpoint.

What it is, it’s so intense.

So if you guys are into sci fi, that guy directed The Arrival, which is one of my favorite films.

Yeah, that’s a fabulous beautiful film.

Yeah, beautiful film.

So literally, the country’s being torn apart, a country of 330 million, over 3 million would

be 1%, 0.1% coming into the border.

And we just said, immigration is all these amazing people coming here to who want to

strive and who want great things.

Why are we tearing the country up over this issue?

This is a tough topic.

Well, I think, I think, Jason, I think your point of view on immigration really depends

on where you’re sitting in the economy.

So I think for all of us who are in Silicon Valley, we know that something like half of

startups have an immigrant co-founder.

Totally.

So we’ve seen, you know, like PayPal, I think, you know, there were like three or four immigrants

on the founding team.

You know, Peter was born in Germany.

Elon was born in South Africa.

Max was born in Russia.

You know, I was born in South Africa, and then you go down the list.

Same thing with Google, you know, Sergey Brin came from Russia, and just on and on it goes.

So if you’re sitting in Silicon Valley as a tech worker, you see that these immigrants

bring tremendous dynamism to the economy.

However, if you’re in a low wage job, maybe low skill service, then the, you know, a lot

of this immigration is competition, and it creates wage pressure for you.

So this is why historically, the unions have not been in favor of, you know, of immigration.

You have, you know, a lot of service workers in the minority communities, you know, there’s

a lot of animosity towards immigrants because of that.

Fundamentally, it creates job competition and wage competition.

And I do think, well, so look, it’s easy for us to sit here in Silicon Valley, where we

sit in the economy and say, oh, well, let’s just have unlimited immigration.

It doesn’t matter.

Well, yeah, it doesn’t matter to us.

But if you’re in the low skill part of the economy, it does matter a lot to let in a

flood of immigrants who are in that low skill category.

And by the way, we’re worried about these jobs getting automated away as well.

So, you know, I think you have to have a sensible policy.

I mean, yes to immigration, but I think you have to think about how much sort of low skill

immigration can we assimilate and absorb.

Right.

But aren’t a lot of those people who are coming in also then taking lower wages because they’re

off the books and they’re illegal.

Whereas if we had a more reasonable policy of letting whatever percentage in, like we

could just pick a number.

And if that actually worked, and they were getting paid on the books, then it would remove

some of that downside pressure.

So you’re not paying somebody under the books to be a delivery person or a dishwasher or

whatever the entry level job is, they have to get paid that minimum wage.

Jason, I think this speaks to the broader kind of set of political topics, which relates

to the enablement of competition.

And it speaks to some of the trade policy points that I think the last administration

made, which is to limit trade and to limit access to global markets to provide services

and products to the United States and to tax them.

Because the lower cost labor ultimately outcompetes with higher cost labor in the United States.

And so, you know, you get lower cost goods.

But the balance is, is it worth having lower cost goods and services, where you could actually

see too much of a decline in the employability or in the wages of people that are currently

producing those goods and services in the United States.

And that’s the tricky balance, right?

There’s no blue or red right way to do this.

We want to enable competition, we want to enable progress, we want to enable lower cost

of production, lower cost goods and services.

But we also don’t want to have the economic impact and the social impact of people being

underemployed and unemployed.

And balancing those two, one of the tricky pieces of that balancing puzzle is immigration,

another one is trade, another one is regulation, and etc, etc, right?

So, a lot of these things kind of drive that tricky balance.

I really bounce around on this.

I, of all of the four of us, I was the only one that immigrated myself.

So, I didn’t, you know, it’s not that my parents did it.

Oh, you did it, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

I did it myself.

I drove to the border, I got a TN visa stamp, you know, I crossed the border into Buffalo,

I stood in line, I got my own social security number.

And I started a life in America in the year 2000.

How old were you?

22, I guess, or 23.

You had a job lined up already?

I had a job, I had a job offer, I had my offer letter, I did the whole thing.

Then I transferred on to an H1B visa, I had to go through all of that, then I had to,

you know, wait in line, I got delayed, I had to refile.

So, as a person that went through the immigration system and finally got their green card in

2007 or 8, and then my, my citizenship in 2011 or 2012, I bounce around on how I feel,

because I remember the insecurity I felt in not wanting to lose my visa and have to

leave and go back to Canada.

And so, if somebody was in that situation, I could see why, you know, they would get

very agitated if they saw a lot of immigration being lumped into one broad brush, right?

And because if you if you look at it, actually, there’s a there’s a really interesting conundrum,

because it’s not like immigration is a thing where all immigrants are pro immigration.

Right?

That’s right.

It’s actually not that at all.

It tends to be sort of cultural elites are pro immigration, because it’s a, it’s a synthetic

way of showing openness and open mindedness.

But then, you know, inside.

No, right?

I mean, it’s true.

It’s because it doesn’t get affected by doesn’t get affected by it.

Exactly.

If anything, it makes it easier for them to maybe find people to hire.

Well, as someone that lived through it, what I would say is it, you know, if I was still

waiting for my green card and waiting in line and having the idea that there was some amnesty

program would have made me feel very insecure.

I’m not sure how I would have reacted to it.

But in that moment, I would have felt insecure.

So the broad solution to immigration is you have to separate the two problems and say,

this part of the problem can be solved almost like a professional sports team, which is

to say we have the ability to draft every year, the smartest and most interesting capable

people that want to come here and work hard.

That will probably, you know, it’d be a rising tide.

Then there are these two other buckets bucket in the middle is just compassionate openness,

you know, family members and other people refugees, you know, because I was emigrated

into Canada, not in the first bucket, because we didn’t have much to contribute economically,

but in the second bucket, which is for social justice and refugees.

And then there is a third bucket, which is there are people that are not going to be

in a position to wait in line, they are going to come to the border.

And we have to have a mechanism of saying, okay, you shouldn’t have done it, but you

did.

And now here’s a pathway where you can earn the right to prove that you should be here.

And I think that there there’s a but we can’t have that nuance, because nobody wants to

hear it, you want to lump it into one, you know, this is where, for example, like last

year, when Trump, you know, decapitated the h1 b program, I thought this is just so dumb.

Yeah, no nuance.

It’s basically telling, you know, like, it’s forcing a star athlete, you know, to go and

play a different sport.

Why would you do that?

You know, and it’s so artificial, it doesn’t make any sense.

But it’s such a reasonable, there’s such a reasonable discussion to had to be had here,

because other countries have solved this exact thing with the point based system, Australia,

Canada, New Zealand, and others have all worked on a system like this, which is you get points

for each of the qualities that you bring, and then you put some numbers on it.

But there is no

Jake out those countries are much, much harder to get into the United States.

Well, getting into New Zealand, you better buy a property or something like that.

It might be that the point based system is letting in the people that make the society

stronger.

No, Canada has a really progressive view on this.

I mean, they have a point based system, but they do a lot.

They’re really compassionate about, you know, the folk, they’ll take in a lot more refugees

than most other countries.

And I think that that they’ve never lost that spirit.

And I think that the point is, I think I agree with Jason, it’s possible.

It’s logical.

The problem is, it’s too logical.

And, you know,

it’s like the free bird made an interesting connection to the issue of free trade.

So, you know, look, you know, I majored in economics in college, you know, I was like

a believer in free trade, like sort of completely ardent free trade, because why it creates

economic efficiency.

And so, you know, it’s logical.

And if people lose their jobs, their factory closes, because we’re not as good, then yes,

you let the chips fall where they may.

I think what we’ve learned over the last 20 or 30 years is that we have to consider the

distributional consequences of a policy like free trade, because it’s about, well, who

benefits and who loses?

And yes, American consumers have benefited from the flow of cheap goods from China and

other places.

But we’ve seen our manufacturing…

American producers have lost.

Have lost, yeah.

And so, throughout the Midwest and the Rust Belt, you’ve got these empty factories, they

just line up like tombstones up in, you know, places like Detroit.

And you’ve got these towns that used to be factory towns are now just kind of empty,

and the people are like hooked on fentanyl, and it’s a social disaster.

And so, I think, you know, what I’ve kind of learned about this is you have to take

into account the consequences of these policies.

And it can’t just be about…

So, you’ve evolved your position?

I have.

It can’t just be about a Darwinian economic efficiency anymore.

You have to think about who wins and who loses.

And by the way, what’s ironic…

Can I give you a little history?

Everybody’s got feedback on this one.

A lot of the current globalization policy that the United States embraced over the last

two or three decades, I think, Sax, correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of this originated

during the Clinton era, which was, you know, a democratic president.

And then ironically, the free trade Republicans are the ones who have flipped over the last

couple of years to realize the economic consequence on the production side of the United States is so

severe that we need to now limit free trade.

And if you remember, Paul Ryan, you know, who was the House Speaker a few years ago,

had this six-point plan for the Republicans going into the primaries.

And one of the key points was to, you know, enable the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

They were trying to continue to push free trade.

And I think that the policy shift is ironic, because it’s always been kind of a red issue,

then it became a blue issue, then it became a red issue.

And I think, you know, like everything, we are evolving our points of view as we

experience and learn more things and get more data.

And perhaps the rate of progress isn’t the thing to optimize for, but the rate of progress

balanced against the equality of progress seems to be where the United States is at right now.

To respond to what Freeberg said about how this happens.

So there’s an old saying in Washington that the best,

sorry, that the worst ideas are bipartisan.

And the idea of bringing China into the World Trade Organization and giving them

sort of MFN trading status, that happened under Clinton, but it was absolutely a bipartisan

decision.

And part of the reason why our politics are so royal today-

Well, no, it was proposed.

It was proposed, Clinton.

It was passed in Bush.

Right.

Okay.

But they both supported it.

It was a bipartisan sort of disaster.

And I think one of the reasons why our politics are so royal today, you’ve got this populism

on the right, and you’ve got a populism of the left, and that where they both agree

is in restraining, is having a more protectionist trade policy.

That’s right.

So I think a little bit of history here is important.

I think you got most of it right.

But if you go even one step back under Clinton, there was nothing that they actually did.

But it was something that Deng Xiaoping did, which was that, you know, for a large time,

I think until the mid-90s, 94, the renminbi was firmly pegged to the US dollar.

And, you know, it was like, you know, 5.8 renminbi to the US dollar.

And all of a sudden, they basically said, well, look, we have this hapless economy.

We have to do something about it.

And we have this enormous bulge of young people.

And so they did this brilliant thing.

And China said, you know, we’re going to basically devalue our currency.

And they’re going to basically make it essentially float.

And instantly, you re-rated the currency by 40%.

And over time, it re-rated by almost 60%.

And what it did was all of a sudden, it unleashed, as you said,

all of these subsidies into the United States.

Why?

Because now Chinese goods became 30% cheaper, right?

And then the Thai goods became 30% cheaper.

Indonesian goods became 80% cheaper, right?

Vietnamese goods became 50% cheaper.

That’s that entire contagion in Eastern Asia that we went through in the late 90s.

So it’s like China devalues their currency.

All of a sudden, you have all these young people in China who can make things for 30% cheaper.

You’re able to flood the American market with goods.

We were like, wow, this is incredible.

My jeans that cost $10 now cost $7.

I’m just using it as a representative example.

I’m just going to buy more jeans.

And so you’re consuming, consuming, consuming.

All of a sudden, Bush comes along and says, well, this seems to be working out well.

I want to go to war with Iraq.

I need to basically get China to vote yes in the Security Council.

OK, what’s it going to take?

China’s like, admit me to the WTO.

Because even during all of this, they were still not part of the WTO, to David’s point.

And that’s when the nuclear bomb went off in 2004.

The minute that they were involved and they could actually have bilateral trade

relationships and normalize trade relationships, then all of a sudden, the next wave happens

because instead of just buying cheap Chinese jeans, every American company was like, wait a

minute, I can drive up earnings by just exporting this factory to China writ large.

And the Chinese had all this capital that they had built up all these US dollars to

then support it and subsidize it.

Well, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma, right?

Shamoff, because if you don’t do it as an American company, and you don’t

move your manufacturing there, and everybody else does your shareholders, your shareholders

will decapitate your stock prices, you know, as a CEO, you get fired.

And so, so then that’s, that’s when David that what you said happened.

That’s when you hollow out from 2014 to 2016.

You hollow out the middle class, you hollowed out the inside the Rust Belt.

And then basically, you de industrialized the West, you saw the rise of populism,

you saw the rise of opioids as essentially a coping mechanism

for people’s inability to even work hard, right?

To talk back to the first thing to have purpose, Shamoff,

Americans are wired to work hard, right?

So they need to self medicate.

If you can’t let them work hard.

Yeah, they turn to fentanyl and opioids to do it.

And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump gets elected in 2016.

So what have we learned without hope is the man without fear, you know, you give people

no job and no purpose in the morning, what happens and the Democratic Party’s turn to

socialism, I think that’s like part of it as well.

So this is really interesting, because we’re talking about second, the set that I think

everybody who was doing this was considering the second order problems.

And what we’re experiencing now is the third order problem,

which is things that people couldn’t predict.

Like, we now have a communist country that is not changing its human rights record and

is not changing its behavior, and might even be getting worse.

And we’ve enabled China, but but Jason, China,

China will actually self regulate, I actually think now,

the China issue is a little overblown the way we take it.

Meaning, I think China’s central planners are frankly, just much, much smarter than

ours.

Right?

They just are.

Well, they have several planning.

And better tools.

They don’t have a limbic system that’s just reactionary to the current

or any legal system.

They have no legal system.

That should scare us that they’re more effective planners than our our politicians.

But here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing that smart policy can’t outrun, though.

It cannot outrun demographics.

And the most important takeaway that I learned over the last few weeks when I was studying

this problem, because I’ve been thinking a lot just currently, like, okay, inflation,

what’s the 10 year view?

What’s just going to happen?

Like, what’s my macro view of the world?

And I saw the most interesting stat, which is the median age in China.

And the median age in South Asia is greater now than the median age in America.

So it’s in the mid 40s versus the mid 30s.

And that’s an enormously important thing.

Because now you have an aging population in China.

You’ve had this one child policy that’s really has worked against them for a very long time.

So they have they have an underrepresentation of these young people.

And so you’re flexing now to managing a demographic shift where folks are older.

They’re not going to work in a factory.

They’re not making goods the same way they used to.

Economic growth is tapering.

And so that whole China situation, in fact, demographically is going to solve itself.

But the implications for America are not good.

Meaning, I think inflation goes up, commodity prices go up, prices of everything go up.

But it allows us to actually reestablish and rejuvenate the industrialized Rust Belt of

America.

We just have to spend the money.

And this is where I think, like, when you look at Biden’s plan, this is where I wonder,

like, didn’t anybody do this simple macroeconomic, you know, trace route to actually come up

with this?

Because it’s pretty obvious what to do.

And then you wonder, which is why I mean, have have literally a trillion dollars allocated

to reestablishing entire supply chains across critical industries that we want to own,

which I think Friedberg, you brought up what 15 episodes ago that this is an incredible

opportunity for us to bring manufacturing here and bring the next generation and reinvent

manufacturing.

I still think biomanufacturing represents this complete, great domain where the United

States could build and lead.

You know, I’ll just give you some statistics.

Globally, there’s about 25 million liters of fermentation capacity or biomanufacturing

capacity.

Of that about 20 million is used to make beer and wine and pharmaceutical drugs today in

an enclosed system.

5 million is available for rent.

And of that 4 million is already rented out.

So there’s only a million liters of capacity really available for rent.

There’s 100 synthetic biology companies that are looking to produce fermentation based

products from materials for clothing, to food to animal protein to new drugs, and they can’t

get the capacity to make this stuff and every one of them is scrambling around Silicon Valley

looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding to go build friggin manufacturing

capacity for biomanufacturing.

This is where the United States can lead.

Because we can make every material, every drug and every consumable that the entire

world would use using biomanufacturing.

And just to be clear, biomanufacturing-

Let’s roll, let’s effing go.

So you edit the DNA of an organism and it can be programmed to make a molecule for you.

And so we can use large fermenter tanks to make this stuff.

I did the math recently, and you would need about 10 to 50 billion liters of capacity

to make all the animal protein for the entire world.

And using 45,000 liter tanks, which are three meters wide each, it would take about 30 to

40 square miles of fermentation tanks to make all the protein for the whole world.

We could build that in the United States for about-

In Nebraska.

For about $300 to $400 billion.

And we could build it in a couple of years.

I mean, that is like a moonshot.

You could also make materials for clothing.

You could make-

Detroit.

You could make bioplastics-

Go to the Rust Belt.

Put it there.

And this is like this, because today the science exists.

It’s like go back to like the internet era.

We now have this ability to program organisms to make stuff for us.

This did not exist 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.

Today is the moment it exists.

So, if we don’t capitalize on this huge budget to build infrastructure to go after this massive

opportunity to make everything that the world consumes, we’re going to miss out and free

markets will compete us away.

This is the one time that big check can be written and that big check can enable this

new industry.

And instead of making cars and making, you know, all the stuff that maybe we don’t need

to be making anymore-

You really think that all this trillions of infrastructure spending is going to what you

just described?

That’s my point.

It’s not.

That’s my point.

No, it’s not.

That’s my point.

And I think that, but that’s what I mean is we’re missing this opportunity.

We’re rebranding the same old social programs as infrastructure because the politicians

know that’s one of the last categories of spending that’s still popular.

I mean, it’s not going to go to the right things.

It does.

It does.

Those labels, those labels pull well.

When you say jobs, like for example, one of the things I learned, which is insane, is

that for whatever reason, people think fixing climate change is a net negative because it

will restrict one’s way of life and destroy jobs.

Whereas in fact, it’s the exact opposite.

Right.

It should actually allow you to do more, live healthier, and there should be an entire

renaissance of industries and jobs.

And so it goes back to the disinformation just makes a rational conversation almost

impossible.

Speaking of politics, can we just shift to Caitlyn Jenner real quick before we wrap because

we’re almost out of time.

Caitlyn Jenner is officially running for governor.

And I guess people are making light of it.

But Sachs, you actually wrote a considered post on it.

So unpack it for us.

Yeah, I was defending Caitlyn Jenner.

I mean, look, I mean, what Caitlyn Jenner came out and said is that Gavin Newsom’s DAs,

Chesa Boudin and George Gaskin in LA are presiding, I’m putting words in her mouth,

presiding over a crime wave.

And she was calling him out on that.

And what you then immediately saw was all of Gavin’s people come out and criticize her

for being stupid because supposedly, she didn’t know that DAs were locally elected.

Well, I think a couple of points there.

First of all, why hasn’t Gavin Newsom come out and distance himself from Chesa Boudin

and George Gaskin and what they’re doing in those cities?

He hasn’t done that because he’s been cozying up to their side, the sort of progressive

extreme radical decarcerationist wing of the party.

And the reason we know that is because he recently had a job to fill, the attorney general

spot in California.

He could have chosen anybody for that job.

And he chose an East Bay Assemblyman named Rob Bonta for it, who is an ally of Chesa

Boudin and Gaskin and this progressive DA alliance.

And so, yeah, it’s true that Newsom didn’t appoint these DAs, but he’s appointing their

allies to posts that are even more important, the attorney general of all of California.

And so, I think it was a very legitimate issue for Caitlyn Jenner to come out and call out

Gavin Newsom on.

And I think she’s onto something here, which is there’s a lot of issues in California.

There’s a lot of things that are wrong from homelessness to unemployment and these crazy

COVID restrictions.

But the number one issue, I think, has to be crime.

We are seeing an explosion of crime in our streets.

We all know there are large parts of LA and San Francisco that we do not feel comfortable

walking around in anymore.

Oh, my God.

You’d be crazy to walk down the street with a child.

The livable area where you feel safe living or opening a business or walking around has

drastically shrunk in the last few years.

And if you do not feel safe in your city, nothing else politically matters.

The government’s first responsibility is to protect its people.

And I think if Caitlyn Jenner can keep speaking out on issues like this, I think maybe she

has a shot.

Yeah, I think that she’s got a credible shot if she has a reasonable economic policy behind

it.

And, you know, this, the school voucher thing on education.

Those are the things that will carry California voters because I do think and by the way,

here’s where I think we should take some credit.

The best thing about this podcast, other than the fact that we used ourselves to keep us

sane, it’s it’s made it it’s made it fashionable, fashionable to think independently again.

And eventually what becomes fashionable becomes the rigor.

And what that means is I think that there will be more and more people that will think

for themselves.

And if she has reasonable policies and a platform that’s understandable, she can win.

And that’s an incredible testament, I think, to people making their own decisions.

And being able to have a reasonable conversation with people with different opinions, I think

is the other takeaway from the podcast that people always give me that feedback when they

see me on the street or whatever, and talk to me about it.

And as a point, going to Austin, they are now dealing with tent city problems like LA

and the same problems that they’re dealing with, we’re dealing with in San Francisco.

So I went for a walk around the lake a couple of times, it was great.

And, you know, there were a lot of tents.

And they’re literally taking the most beautiful lake in the entire beautiful part of the city.

And it’s becoming camp central, they’re basically ruining it for the, the actual

citizens who are not homeless.

Austin lifted the tent ban they had in Texas.

Now Texas is voting now the entire conversation when I was in Austin, all conversations did

not go to NFTs, crypto, the border or anything, it went to tent city.

And people in Austin who are very liberal, we’re saying, I’m voting to ban tent city.

I’m voting, I’m voting against, you know, this insanity, because it’s we don’t want

to become San Francisco, we don’t want to become LA.

So the and these are liberal people.

And the the concept that a city would allow people to camp in the center of the city and

ruin it for everybody else is insane.

Portland’s version of Amsterdam is still up and running.

It’s been a year.

I mean, if people want to camp, we have campgrounds for that send the campers to the campgrounds.

Can I tell you the secret origin story of Miami and why Miami is now a tech hub?

It’s because of this issue.

It’s because a tech entrepreneur got punched in the face by a homeless person in San Francisco.

I don’t know if he’d want me to tell the story.

I’ll find out afterwards.

And you can beep out his name, but basically, who is a prolific tech founder, he’s got

I don’t know if he’d want me to tell the story, but he was out just would you do beeps?

It’s fine.

We’ll do two beeps.

Anyway, he was out walking around San Francisco.

And a crazy homeless person just walked up and punched him in the face for no reason.

And this is something this homeless person has done many times.

The cops were there just kind of shrugged.

Didn’t want to prosecute it.

Didn’t want to write up a ticket.

He’s like, No, I really want to press charges.

So the cops like, Okay, fine.

So then, you know, he presses charges.

Nothing happens.

The DA office basically keeps, you know, giving him the run around until he basically says,

Fine, forget it.

He drops charges.

He just moves.

He just votes with his feet.

So he moves to Miami.

He was the first one from that sort of like the sort of the core, like Silicon Valley

plugged in ecosystem to move out to Miami.

He says he did the seed round.

Then he talked to Keith Raboy.

And he’s the one who convinced Keith Raboy to move to Miami.

So Keith Raboy then did the Series A.

He did the Series A. So Keith was the seed investor of Miami, and he got Raboy to do

the Series A. And then Raboy, you know, he’s very, you know, prominent and loud on social

media.

He’s been evangelizing the whole thing.

And then he got Delian and Founders Fund and their whole noise machine to move, you know,

their circus to Miami.

And now look at it.

Look at it.

Yeah.

But it’s this.

I’m here.

Now, it took it.

They’ve got a mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, who actually said, We want tech here, right?

You know, and they don’t have a homeless problem.

The city has a lot of cops.

It’s well managed.

So look, he’s got the right environment.

And most of all, the city of Miami is welcoming to the tech ecosystem, where San Francisco,

the politicians seem to can’t wait to get rid of it.

But it’s all comes back to this homeless issue.

I think if hadn’t gotten punched in the face by the homeless person, I think this all would

have played out very differently.

It’s very, very true.

Let’s wrap on a quick fang.

I don’t you must have seen every single major tech company had a massive blowout quarter.

And when I say massive, I mean, unbelievable.

And the five, the five tech companies now collectively this year will make more than

$1.2 trillion trillion with a T of revenue.

If those five companies were a country, it would be the 14th largest country in the world.

Wow, we’re not talking market cap here, folks, we’re talking cash in the bank account,

just revenue, no, no, just revenue, revenue, right?

We’re not talking profits, which is which, which I think is a good proxy for GDP.

And so the point is, you know, if these companies were countries, collectively fang would be

a top 15 country.

And, and if you and so I guess really, what we’ve learned is what we’ve known, which is,

okay, these are monopolies.

They have pricing power.

You know, unfortunately, Facebook had to actually even disclose that, you know, inventory only

grew by 12%.

But prices grew by 35%.

You know, Google basically showed the same thing.

And if you go back to sort of like the pillar of antitrust law, which is that 1970 odd Supreme

Court case, it defined what’s called the consumer welfare test, right?

So, so, you know, the FTC and DOJ, they’re relatively toothless in the face of companies

cutting prices, but they can really act when companies raise prices.

And here’s where their definition of a monopoly, which is brittle, it doesn’t account for 20.

You know, 2021 tech companies does come into play, because now you can see that they’re

that they’re winding up their pricing power if they can raise prices.

Number one, the second thing that I’ll say is the Apple Facebook thing is a very important

canary in the coal mine as well.

Because it’s not as if the five of them can actually work together.

There’s infighting, right?

And so it’s Game of Thrones.

Well, with this new update to iOS, you know, what those dialogues will essentially do,

in my opinion, if I had to guess is limit inventory, right?

So Facebook and Google will have fewer ads that they can actually run in a targeted way.

And so the only way that they can keep then growing revenue with fewer impressions is

by raising prices even more.

And then the last thing I’ll say is, you know, this complicated dynamic between Apple, Facebook

and Google is that Google still pays Apple almost 70 or $80 billion for search, whereas

Facebook pays them nothing.

So if you put all these things in a box, I think you’re going to see the beginning of

the end.

This is where now you can see the end game come into focus, which is wedding.

Well, you don’t need necessarily new laws and section 230.

Although we’ll have that you now see Fang M moving into the line of sight of the traditional

antitrust framework, because now they can use very traditional, you know, anti competitive

pricing law to go after these guys.

I am going to I am going to strongly disagree with Chamath.

Okay, and I’ve not disagreed with Chamath this strongly since we’ve done the podcast.

But the reason I strongly disagree is because this is not inventory that is being sold at

a fixed price where the price is set by the company.

Facebook and Google, in particular, run an auction model, they are a marketplace business,

they have advertisers who show up, and they bid on ads, which is the inventory that they’re

able to get based on the data that they’re able to match to that particular ad slot.

If the advertisers can get more value by bidding a higher price, because of the data that they’re

getting that shows that this customer is more likely to click on the ad and ultimately buy

something, they will bid more for the ads.

What has been such an incredible juggernaut of a business for both Google and then Facebook,

which was effectively a mimic of Google system was this auction model.

And the innovation has been in getting more data, as you as you track consumers around

the internet.

And secondly, is in the smart ad targeting, which is where the algorithm figures out which

ad to show the consumer based on whether that consumer is likely to click on the ad or not.

And the more consumers click on the ads, the more advertisers are willing to pay for an

impression, because that ad is now going to come that ad is now going to convert to more

revenue for them.

That is why this is not a monopolistic approach to pricing.

It is an auction approach.

And I think and it’s why they’ve won in the past over this argument.

But yeah, go ahead, I could go ahead at Facebook, my team was the one that built it.

So I oversaw those guys back in 2008 and nine, when we did the first version of it,

obviously, it’s gotten much more sophisticated.

And you’re right, it’s a victory auction.

And literally, my mandate to the team was, I don’t want your innovations, copy Google,

and give me a version of what Google looks like.

And we’re going to implement it.

There’s a problem.

It’s not exclusively that ads are not sold entirely based on that system.

Ads are sold direct via a team.

So for example, when Budweiser writes $100 million check or Procter and Gamble, they’re

not necessarily stepping in the auction the same way as a small and medium sized business.

And if you look at how Facebook and Google have oriented their policy, they’ve only highlighted

those people because David, to those people, you’re absolutely right.

There’s a very legitimate market clearing price argument for them.

But there are an entire class of advertisers that come in over the top saying brand advertisers,

yeah, that gets structured deals that get structured API’s, they get structured access

and Facebook is and Google is setting price.

And Microsoft is setting price.

And so this is where that’s the entry point, because at the end of the day, an impression

to David Friedberg, whether it’s seen by the local taco shop, or Procter and Gamble,

some of it will be a victory auction, some of it will be structured inventory.

It’s a convoluted mess of the two.

You can’t tease it out.

You’re right at the end.

At the end, it’s about getting CPM higher, right?

It’s about cost per 1000 impressions.

But it’s a long I think this is a good conversation.

Episode 31.

I would love to talk about some of my early days at Google and how we made some of those

decisions.

Because I think it’s instrumental to how this is designed to be ultimately a system of commerce

efficiency.

That’s really important.

Not just a system of selling ads.

But let’s talk let’s talk about it later.

Yeah.

Okay, as we wrap most impressive observation from these quarterly reports that just came

out for me, Amazon’s ad business, 24 billion, growing at 77% year over year, on top of their

Amazon Web Services business.

It’ll be bigger than AWS in three years at this rate.

Yeah, what’s everyone else’s?

What’s everyone else’s?

That to me was like, whoa.

What was the most impressive thing for the rest of you guys on all the earnings?

There’s a lot of impressive things here.

I have a second, but go ahead.

Yeah, it was unbelievably impressive.

But we have, we have four enormous monopolies on our hands.

And if I was a betting man, end of decade, these four monopolies will not exist.

I’ll make that bet.

Oh, broken up.

Yeah.

By the end by the end of this decade.

So 2030.

Yeah.

Okay.

Long bet.

I’m willing to bet you dollars to donuts.

That what they face breakup.

I’ll bet a couple donuts.

You bet a couple dollars.

Okay.

And we’ll give the donuts to sacks.

I’m left donuts.

Sacks.

What was your sacks?

What was your takeaway?

Well, I mean, I would up level it slightly in antitrust.

There’s historically two schools.

There’s the Bork school and the Brandeis school.

Bork was narrowly focused just on consumer harm and would be closer to like the Freeberg position.

The Brandeis school is more about concentrations of power.

Right.

And would be more concerned about, you know,

not letting people get too powerful in this American democracy.

And I think the interesting thing is now that there’s folks on the right

who definitely are buying into the Brandeis school because of the restrictions on free speech

and access to the marketplace of ideas that companies like Amazon, actually all of them,

Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook have all imposed.

They’re limiting people’s access to the marketplace of ideas.

So I think now it’s really interesting.

You’re seeing a combination of both the right and the left get together saying these companies

are too big.

They’re too powerful.

I think the Republicans are saying, well, let you keep the money.

We’re not going to take your wealth.

The Democrats are saying, we’re going to take your power and your wealth.

The Republicans are saying, we want to level your power a little bit.

But I think, you know, these forces are going to come together.

And I agree with Chamath.

I think, I don’t know exactly when, but I think these companies are going to get broken up and

knocked down because they are too powerful.

It’s a good counter argument, Sax.

I mean, the other, that more important point of view of power

versus, you know, economic harm to consumers is an important one.

Clearly, there’s no accounting for that quantitatively and politics will drive it.

I think like, it’s just incredible.

I mean, if you guys think about it as a consumer, I mean, how incredible are the

products that Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple have made?

And free, and all free.

They’ll still exist if they get broken.

I mean, even the iPhone, like ordering stuff on Amazon.

Every day I’m amazed and marvel at the world we live in, at the shit that we can do with

the click of a button.

I mean, it is such an incredible world we live in because of these businesses.

So, as much as we can hound them for all the wealth and monopoly power.

But David, here’s the problem.

Here’s the problem is that Apple and Google in particular have a monopoly on the applications

that can exist on these incredible phones.

Yes.

And if you can’t get access to the App Store, you can’t exist as an app, and frankly, you

can’t even have a business in the modern world if these guys cut you off.

And so, we already saw a congressional hearing very recently in which Spotify and some other

apps were testifying against Google and Apple because…

And the Apple tax.

Because, yes, because these platforms were discriminating against those applications

in order to benefit themselves.

And I think that in particular has to be looked at, and I think eventually stopped.

Two things.

Two things.

Apple just got sued by the EU today.

So, they got slapped with antitrust for their App Store.

So, that’s going to sort itself out as well.

So, you have all this, as Jason said, Game of Thrones.

I wanted to read to you guys something.

Justin just put it in the chat.

This is something I said to Brad Gerstner in 2019 when he was interviewing me for something.

And I think it’s even more true today than it was in 2019.

I said the following.

I said, my perspective on Facebook is the reason why the market gives it a small multiple.

Because by the way, you hear this all the time.

Like, my gosh, these companies are so cheap.

Why are they so cheap?

I said, the reason why the market gives it such a small multiple is because they don’t

believe, the market, the market doesn’t believe that their earnings potential is durable.

Because the market is sure that in the next 10 or so years, governments will start to act

because they care about their own self-preservation.

So, if you get very reductionist, at the end of the day, that’s what governments care about.

And so, they’re going to legislate to protect their monopoly, which is the ability to have

power.

All right.

There it is, folks.

A shout-out from Chamath to Chamath in 2019.

Shout-out.

I’d like to give a shout-out to myself.

Jason, I would like to do this.

Don’t hurt your arm patting yourself on the back.

Don’t hurt you.

You got to stretch that out with your functional stretching on Sundays.

I get my functional stretch on.

Love you, besties.

Bestie, when are you guys coming back, please?

Can we play poker now that we’re all vaccinated?

I might have to go to New York next week to just round out my three-city tour.

Can we book the Miami trip, Chamath?

Let’s go out there.

No, we’re doing a live show.

Oh, big news is coming, everybody.

We are going to be putting up a voting mechanism.

You’re going to be able to vote with your dollar with a tiny donation to see all in live,

whichever city gets the most donations.

No, no, let’s just go to Miami.

All right, fine, we’re going to Miami.

But where are we going to donate the money to?

Have we decided that, or?

I mean, I think it should be something in relation.

Let’s play poker and the winner or, you know, do a single hand payload.

And the winner gets to decide the charity of their choice.

Oh, I like that.

I like that.

That could be fun.

I mean, I think something that we’ve all agreed on.

Can we just decide to sell tickets in Miami, New York and be done with the show?

Miami, Miami.

I know.

I think Miami and New York.

We could just do a one-two.

I mean, it’s a quick jump.

Chamath, you decide the date.

The rest of us will make it work.

These guys are already there.

End of May, we’re going to pick a date.

We’re going to go to Miami.

We’re going to do the first taped live all in.

And we’re going to sell.

We’re going to sell tickets for like five or ten bucks.

Yum, yum.

All the proceeds go to charity.

It’s got to be more like 50 or 25 because of the venue.

Because we have to, the venue’s got to get their vig.

But anyway, love you, besties.

Love you guys.

Love you, Freeberg.

Love you, Chamath.

Back at you.

Most of all, everybody.

Love you, Jacob.

Love you, Sax.

Love you, Sax.

Back at you.

We’ll see you all next time on the All In podcast.

Bye-bye.

Rain man David Sacks.

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, Weston.

I’m the queen of Kinhoan.

I’m going all in.

What your winners lie.

What your winners lie.

What your winners lie.

Besties are gone.

Go 13.

That’s my dog taking a shit on your driveway seat.

Sax.

Oh, man.

My avid Asher will meet me at the place for the shoot.

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, but they just need to release it out.

What about B?

What about B?

B?

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.

I’m going all in.