Pick up your phone, dipshit.

Hello?

Sax.

Yeah, I’ll be ready in like two minutes.

Let’s go.

Splash some water on your face.

Take a couple of whatever you need, some and let’s go.

We’re waiting.

Okay.

Hurry up.

It’s your chance to get max airtime.

Listen, free birds out.

That means you’re going to get by default 33.3% of airtime.

It’s going to be your biggest week ever.

Fly.

Rain Man.

David Sax.

Hey everybody.

Hey everybody.

Welcome to another episode of the all in podcast with us today the dictator himself, Chama Okay,

Papatia and the rain man, David Sax.

I’m Jay cow, and the queen of quinoa.

Quit the show.

We’re not here.

He quit the show.

I think I think he quit.

So we’re looking for a science person.

If you know anybody, email all science guy at the all in podcast calm if you want to

apply for the science position here.

No, he couldn’t make it.

He was moving.

He’s moving.

He’s moving.

Yes, we can say that without invading his privacy, but he’s not going to be able to

do a show anyway, because there’s so much going on.

And I think we should start with this.

Do we want to start with the COVID stuff again for the third episode in a row?

Or do you want to start with China and then back into COVID?

Oh, fuck COVID.

I think we should just do COVID quickly.

Because I think, you know, as much as the audience complained about it, we got a lot

of comments saying, Why are you talking about COVID so much, we were ahead of the curve.

I’m predicting this whole new delta wave.

You know, we told people what was coming.

I think it was a useful service.

So people might not want to hear it.

But it was, I think, I would say, we’re probably two weeks ahead of the

it was very impressive.

I think that we’ve gotten a couple things actually right the a couple weeks ahead of

other people.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, it was pretty obvious that this was going to race through the places

that had low vaccination.

And having the breakthrough cases is I don’t think anybody anticipated that.

And the thing we didn’t Yeah, over the last week on Twitter, I’m seeing this big debate

on whether vaccinated people can spread the Delta variant.

And I’m like, guys, didn’t you see the show two weeks ago, we covered this.

Yeah, I got it.

I was vaccinated.

I got it from someone who was vaccinated.

This is no, you know, the Delta variant has slipped the vaccine.

It still prevents the most serious cases, generally speaking, we need to see it as a

spectrum of protection, rather than completely binary.

But yeah, absolutely, you can get it and pass it on if you’re vaccinated.

Like we know that and we said we told the audience that three weeks ago.

The other thing we predicted was, you know, that this is going to be incredibly disruptive.

And it’s going to create another debate of lock and potential lockdowns and mask mandates.

And most of all, we discussed and we you know, we had a I think a pretty vibrant debate between

all of us about under what circumstances does your decision to not get vaccinated impact

everybody else vis a vis the petri dish of the next variant that’s coming.

Hopefully that’ll be less deadly, less contagious, which is tends to be how these things go.

But we also predicted some people are just going to start requiring vaccines, vaccine

cards. And we mentioned what’s happening in France.

And I don’t know what examples you’ve seen this week.

Yeah, I thought last week when you made vaccine passports, the main issue, I thought, well,

let’s put it this way. I think that was actually turned out to be great moderation, because

what has been the big issue all over the world since the last episode, vaccine passports,

you saw it with Naftali Bennett in Israel, they are not taking any of this vaccine

hesitancy. There’s 9 million people in that country, 8 million are vaccinated.

They’re telling the last million, you got to go get vaccinated.

He has laid down the law saying enough is enough.

A billion people have gotten vaccinated.

It works. And for the last million of you who haven’t gotten vaccinated, if you want

to attend any function with more than 100 people, if you want to go to synagogue, if

you want to go to a sports game, if you want to go to the mall, you have to be vaccinated

or you are going to get tested that day at your own expense.

Everywhere you go, it’s going to be so they’re going to make it a real pain in the ass until

you get vaccinated. You then separately had Roger Goodell basically doing the same thing

in the NFL, saying to players, you know, first of all, all the coaches have to get vaccinated.

There was an anti-vax coach who got fired and then they don’t have as much power with

the players because the players have a union.

But Goodell said to them, listen, if you don’t get vaccinated, you’re going to get tested

every day that you go to work.

And if the team if there’s an outbreak on the team and you guys miss a game, you’re

going to lose all of your salary.

We’re not going to put up with apparently there’s a game last year during the during

covid where it was a Ravens Steelers game.

And half of the one of those teams, the Ravens, half of the first string was out with

covid or they were in isolation protocol because they’re around players.

Obviously, if you’re in a locker room, one player gets everyone’s going to be exposed.

Right. So it turned out to be like one of the worst games that the NFL put on last year

and Goodell saying we’re not going to put out product like that anymore.

If you are the reason why the team misses a game, guess what?

You and all of your teammates are going to lose your salary.

And since there’s only 17 games in NFL season, you’re talking about real, real money.

So you had Goodell doing that.

And now you have Facebook and Google basically coming out saying in order to go back to

the office, you have to be vaccinated.

Now, it’s a little bit of the soft.

It’s sort of more of the iron fist beneath the velvet glove because they are offering

testing. So if you don’t get vaccinated, you can get a test every time you go to the

office. But unlike Israel, which is making you pay for it, you know, Facebook and Google

are so rich they’re going to pay for it.

So basically what you’re seeing here is that government is not in the U.S.

Biden is going to mandate federal workers.

Otherwise, you have to get tested weekly.

This is beyond now debatable.

I think the funny thing is the Republicans, I think somewhere along the way, realized,

oh, my God, we’re going to lose the midterm elections.

They have found a way to find a single modality and behavior to steal defeat from the jaws

of victory. You know, I think that the Republicans were probably trending to basically win

back the house. And now I don’t think that’s the case.

And you have a bunch of these red state governors who are literally flipping their shit

right now trying to figure out how to get their folks vaccinated.

Many of these people may not even be able to vote come midterms because they’re either

going to be dead or still sick.

I mean, it’s it’s we’ve learned a lot.

And at this point, you’re being left with folks there again.

There are people who do it for religious reasons.

I get it. There are people that, you know, are going to sort of like live off the grid

and live by themselves. I get them, too.

But the folks that want to be a tax on the system or use public resources, I don’t

understand. And they’re basically going to get singled out and discriminated against.

And the carrot and the stick method here, I think, is going to work because we saw a

bunch of people sign up to get vaccinated in France once they said, listen, you can’t

go to a cafe or a bar.

And I think that a lot of the people who are not vaccinated are probably enjoying going

out and having a life.

Danny Meyer, the restaurateur in New York from Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern,

one of the most famous restaurateurs of all time, announced on CNBC this morning that

he’ll be requiring vaccines for all staff and customers.

What do we think of that restaurant saying you’ve got to show a Vaxcar on the way?

And if I love it, listen to me, if I’m going to go in and I’m going to spend two or

$3,000 on wine and then a couple thousand bucks on a tip, I don’t want some asshole

who’s going to get me sick there.

It’s bad enough that I still may get sick.

And by the way, Danny Myers restaurants are not like, you know, fucking, you know, Red

Robin. These are extremely high places.

The idea that you can get a communicable respiratory disease and spend $5,000 is

untenable, untenable, nonstarter.

Saks, I mean, listen, you you’ve you very interesting last episode.

I felt like you were really trying to balance your belief in freedom and people being

able to make decisions themselves with, you know, the reality that we can’t be close

forever. How has the last week changed your thinking and what do you think of the Danny

Meyer? I like what Danny Meyer did in this sense.

He wants to create a certain experience for his clientele, and he knows that his

clientele are more likely to go dine in his restaurants if there is a vaccine policy at

his restaurants. He’s not saying a policy for the whole country.

He’s setting it for his establishment.

He has every right to be able to do that, and he believes that will help his bottom

line. And he’s probably right about that.

Similarly, Roger Goodell, same thing.

I mean, he took a tough line because he knows that if he wants the NFL to put out a great

product every week, they can’t be canceling games because of covid outbreaks.

You know, they can’t have the first string players out with covid.

So he made a smart business decision.

I think people should have the freedom, the right to do that.

Now, I still have, let’s call it a reservation about government requiring it, not

because I don’t see the benefit.

I definitely see the health benefit, but just because I don’t like giving government the

power to stick a stick, a needle in your arm.

If you’re a government employee, I do think the government has added power.

We talked about this last week.

They can make it a job requirement.

And, you know, what’s interesting in California, California said, if you’re a state

employee, you got to get vaccinated.

But the one group they singled out were the teachers, because, you know, Gavin Newsom

has no guts to stand up the teachers union whatsoever.

And I find it so ironic that early in the pandemic, we had this big debate about

whether the teachers would go back to school in the fall.

And the teachers union said we won’t go back unless we’re first in line for the

vaccine. Well, guess what?

They got that. Now they’re saying they’re not going to go back if you make us get

vaccinated. I mean, you can’t win with moving the goalposts.

I mean, people in the goalposts, they want to work from home.

They it’s kind of ridiculous.

That’s one group that needs to do it most.

And they should be the one.

It’s kind of like the army and teachers and health care workers.

They should be given a mandate.

If you want this job, you must be vaccinated.

You cannot be in the army and the military and not be vaccinated because we need you

in close quarters on a helicopter to go whack Osama bin Laden.

We can’t have a COVID outbreak in the Navy SEALs when we

got to go. I’m OK with that.

I think I think every employer has the right to require it if they believe it’s going to

impact job performance. Now, I want to go back to the point that you made about the

midterm elections. I because I there’s a part I agree with and a part I disagree

with. So the part I agree with is that the Republicans were cruising

to, you know, a midterm shellacking.

And now the the whole vaccine hesitancy

issue, I think there was a prospect of that causing damage

to the Republicans, not because most Republicans are vaccine

hesitant, but rather because Republican politicians were not out front

enough on getting vaccines. But look, there’s a difference between reality and

perception. Here’s the reality.

Every single Republican governor, every single one has been vaccinated

and has supported the vaccine.

Mitch McConnell is vaccinated, supports the vaccine.

Kevin McCarthy put out a statement.

You even have the House minority whip, Scalise, get vaccinated

on on live TV.

Why had he not been vaccinated? Because he already had COVID and he didn’t actually

think he needed it, but he got the vaccine anyway to basically double down.

You had Sarah Huckabee Sanders come out and say that she was getting the

Trump. She called it the Trump vaccine.

Yes, please. If they put the Trump logo on it.

Right. I mean, she understands, right?

Like this is probably, you know, Operation Lightspeed or

Warp Speed or whatever was probably the biggest operation operation.

Fuck up the midterms. That’s what the Republicans should call this.

Yeah. Well, so look, I mean, the Republican politicians in the main

support vaccines. The problem is that they were being a little bit too quiet

about it. As a result of that, you have the fringe people, the Marjorie Taylor

Greene’s and so forth.

They were occupying too much airspace around this issue.

And, you know, frankly, you know, right now, I think that I think the Democrats

are going to keep those.

I wouldn’t I wouldn’t actually go that far, but because I think that

I think the Republican problem was not that their vaccine has done, but rather

that they were just being a little too quiet about it.

But now I think that’s changed.

I mean, there is not a single major Republican politician

who isn’t strongly in favor of vaccine.

If the Republicans can get their actual act together and actually get these,

you know, Jason does joke about it, but I do think he’s right in a certain way.

Basically, like this, this group of Republicans largely

who refuse to get vaccinated, then they may be able to pull something out.

But I think that it’s going to have to require a little bit of backtracking

and showing up, as you said, by the mainstream Republican political groups.

And they just have not done a good job.

There’s a really simple offering for them.

New information, new strain, new approach.

Listen, we didn’t anticipate Delta would happen.

This is 10 times.

Yeah, it allows people to save face.

Basically, they can save face.

You got a perfect offer.

Listen, there’s new information here.

This thing is even the CDC hasn’t officially changed their policy yet.

I mean, it’s coming right.

We know it’s coming.

They’ve always been behind the curve.

We predicted the policy change on the show

anywhere from two weeks to two months before they actually do it.

But look on the vaccine.

I don’t discern a difference in position

on the vaccine itself between Republican governors and Democratic governors.

They both are advocating it.

They’re both allowing private organizations to require it.

But none of them, to my knowledge, have either had the guts

or the temerity, however you want to see it, to actually require it.

Oh, I love that word.

Temerity, temerity, not really used, not used enough.

And just putting a cap on this before we move on to what’s going on in China.

We talked about implementing this.

And how do you implement it?

Well, we don’t need to have a national registry.

People have vaccine cards.

You bring your vaccine card, you show it.

And then, of course, people go to, well, what happens if you create a fact?

Can anybody create a fake vaccine card?

Yes, of course you can.

But the FBI has put out

a statement now because of Lollapalooza, the music festival.

They are saying do not buy a fake vaccine card,

because if you want to have no mask at Lollapalooza,

you have to show your vaccine card.

And they said the FBI is tweeting about this.

It’s illegal. It endangers yourself and those around you.

And it’s a federal crime that could lead to hefty fines or prison time.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

So show us your papers.

Just get the vaccine and just get the vaccine, folks.

Why are we still dealing with this?

Oh, my God. It’s quickly becoming a Darwin award.

This is quickly moving into Darwin award territory.

We are. I talked to my doctor and I was like, I want to get the Moderna or J&J.

Which one should I get?

And they’re like, well, you got the Pfizer already.

I’m like, I want to take a second.

Like, I don’t think that’s going to make a difference.

I was like, I think it’s totally going to make a difference.

This is like when we got off the pod last week.

And they’re like, yeah, I was like, well, just give me the third shot of Pfizer then.

And they’re like, well, that’s not necessary either.

I’m like, I don’t care if it’s not necessary. I want it.

Give me the third shot of Pfizer.

And then I open up Drudge Report yesterday.

And it’s like third shot of vaccine of Pfizer in Israel or whatever.

They’re just going to start giving people a third shot.

Yeah, I just want to get ahead of the curve.

And you’re exactly right.

But by the way, there’s one other piece of news that came out

that I think is very positive on COVID, which is the availability

of these oral antivirals, the pills.

That you can take when you get an early case of it.

Right. So it’s like what they have for Tamiflu with the flu.

Like no one should ever die of the flu because Tamiflu is like completely

effective at stopping it, provided you take Tamiflu early in the case.

So I think that, you know, with the reduced effectiveness of vaccine,

what we’re going to have to do is supplement the vaccines and the boosters

with home testing and then, you know, these oral antivirals

so that you get you take a test, you discover you got COVID

and you immediately get prescribed, you know, one of these these pills.

And the pharma companies are coming out.

There’s like three different pharma companies coming out with these oral

and antivirals.

And if Freeberg were here, he could tell us all about it.

Freeberg, explain the science behind this.

You know what? The science can go fuck itself.

Hey, Danny Meyer, chill a great bottle of white burgundy because I’m coming, baby.

Vaccinated.

Let’s go, baby.

Vaxxed and ready to go.

Oh, my Lord.

All right.

The China situation has been perplexing to me.

You know, my position was always be careful

working in China or investing in China or investing in Chinese companies

because they could change the rules at any time and change the rules

they have in the past year.

We talked about, obviously, and financial and Jack Ma going MIA

ByteDance, a CEO and founder,

stepping down as CEO amid Chinese regulations and all the scrutiny.

And then we have Didi last week.

Being pulled from the App Store in an unprecedented penalty

where you’re not allowed to download Didi and the existing users can use it.

And then on top of that, all the educational companies this week

were told that they cannot operate as for profit companies.

And these companies have gone public in Hong Kong and in the West.

And this has caused such an acute effect.

SoftBank is clearing a bunch of its Uber position

to cover their losses in Didi.

And then there is the story of Larry Chen, who is a Chinese education entrepreneur.

He was worth 15 billion in January.

Now he’s lost 99% of his net worth, according to Bloomberg.

He founded Gautu Teichido or Teichido, which is a Chinese online tutoring firm.

As we know, education is huge in China.

That company, Gautu, peaked at $142 a share in January

and has fallen to $3 a share.

Big sordid story there.

Tencent lost 100 billion in market cap in three days earlier this week

as China cracked down on what they call the monopoly in music rights.

So while we debate what happens with the monopolies here in the United States,

China just literally told them, and here’s the quote from the BBC article,

the company and its affiliated businesses have been told that they can no longer

engage in exclusive deals over music rights

and must dissolve any existing agreements within 30 days.

I mean, this would be like Biden just saying,

the app store is now open, you have to let other app stores in Apple or,

you know, just coming down and saying to Amazon,

you can’t sell Amazon Basics anymore in 30 days,

no more Amazon Basics at the site.

What do you think the end game is here?

Is this a because China seems like they are very deliberate,

and they plan in centuries, what is happening here?

There’s the short term and the long term.

I think what’s happening in the short term is that the same thing that we are

talking about in the United States that sacks is, you know, very eloquently,

basically, I think, led most everybody in just really framing for a lot of people

is this idea that, you know, we have privatized free speech,

and we have put the distribution of information

into the hands of three or four founder CEO oligarchs.

That’s also true in China.

And when you look under the hood of the major internet companies,

there’s four or five guys that are in charge.

And so I think that in the United States,

politicians feel increasingly uneasy with those folks having power

because it’s applied indiscriminately.

Trump gets banned, Trump may not get banned, this person gets distribution,

this article is considered misinformation,

that article is considered disinformation, this article is suppressed.

It’s a dangerous place to be.

And in China, they were just like, enough is enough.

So I think the short term as it relates to the internet companies

was basically a realization that we are not going to allow

any more devolution of power from the Chinese Communist Party

to and into the hands of these internet entrepreneurs.

So that was sort of like the…

So it’s a move out of fear.

They’re scared they’re going to lose their power base.

Not scared.

I think they’re just smart.

And they were like, we’re not going to allow this to happen.

So they don’t have to deal with Section 230 or any law like that.

I think it was just a realization that we want them to understand who is boss.

Right.

And so there was a wave of resignations.

There was now all of this market cap upheaval.

And this is now where we get to sort of like the appetizer.

And I think in the appetizer, what they’re basically saying is,

we will control how money is made and who makes money.

And I think that that sets up the really difficult thing that I think happens,

which is about the long term.

So in this thing, what’s happening right now is China very firmly telling everybody,

we are firmly in control.

There is no private market.

And there is no capital market without our approval.

And that’s a really big statement.

And in fact, it was such a big statement that I think the Chinese security authorities and

had like a conference call with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, all these folks were invited.

And you know, the vice chairman, basically, his quote was something to the effect of,

we promise that any more changes will at least let you know,

not a there’s nothing, nothing to see here, or there’s nothing more to come.

It’s just more that as we decide new rules, we’ll make sure that we give you guys enough warning.

So it’s very much firmly saying, we know exactly how money is made,

we will decide who makes money in what way.

And we’re going to make sure that, you know, all of this wealth creation

happens under terms that we define.

And I think that the setup for the long term, the long term in China is complicated.

It is an enormous demographic time bomb.

We’ve talked about this before.

By the end of 2100.

China’s population will shrink from 1.1 1.2 billion people down to about 700 million people.

So they had very progressive, quote, unquote, under their framework,

laws of one child policy to basically make it economically viable in the 60s and 70s.

There was such a number of people, those people were able to get great jobs in the, you know,

80s and 90s and 2000s.

And now they’ve realized, oh, wow, we made a huge miscalculation,

because now there is just not enough people.

And so China is going to shrink.

And I think that honestly, I think Xi Jinping probably thinks the simplest way to solve this

is to basically nationalize a lot of the economy over time.

And so I, if I was a betting man, which I am general, but I’m not in China,

because I just don’t understand the market.

It’s super, it’s a great casino.

It’s a stupid place to bet.

I’m not going to say that.

I just think that I don’t know the market.

Well, I mean, they change the rules of the game.

Hold on, let me just finish what I was saying.

I think that what we’re starting, what we’re starting to see is the beginning

of nationalizations.

And I think it’s going to start in technology universe, because those are the critical assets

that the Chinese need to own for the future.

So that’s, in my opinion, what’s happening.

I think it’s really important.

What’s going on there?

And, yeah,

Saks, when you look at this, we’ve been talking about, you know, this, these two great competitors,

America and China, and who’s going to win?

How does China win?

If this would seem not having a vibrant entrepreneurial, you know, socialist,

communist hybrid, is this the end of that experiment?

And now it’s just going to go all national.

And then doesn’t that make it easier for the West to win if China is just going to say,

we’re going to, we’re going to operate everything.

And they don’t have a competition of ideas.

If they go that far, I think it’s really interesting, actually, to compare what’s

happening in China with what’s happening on the US, in the US, because on the surface,

both countries are having this debate about whether big tech needs to be reined in,

broken up, controlled.

We’re having that debate in the US.

And obviously, they’re having some version of it in China.

But it’s a little bit like the civil rights debate, right?

Where, you know, we have our civil rights issue in the US.

And, you know, they have Shenzhen, you know, they have the Uyghurs, you know, it’s like

a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the way they react.

And I think there’s, I would say there’s three main differences here between the Chinese

approach and the US approach.

Number one, data privacy.

We have a concept of separation between private companies and the data they control, and the

data that the US government can get its hands on.

And the US government typically has to get a warrant and go through a court proceeding

to get that data.

What China is doing, they’ve now passed a law, basically saying all these companies,

your data belongs to us.

If we want it, we get it, they’re taking operational control over the data, and you

know, they’re going to use it.

Okay, that’s a big difference.

Number two, I think that China seems to be really worried about these big tech companies,

not just in terms of whether they might engage in anti-competitive practices or consumer

harm, sort of those conventional antitrust concepts in the United States.

But they’re concerned about these big tech moguls becoming power centers in China.

And you saw this with Jack Ma, right?

I mean, clearly, the CCP had a problem with the way that Jack Ma had become a figure,

that people rallied around him, they looked at him, they cared about what he had to say.

And all of a sudden, yes, the ant IPO was put on hold, but it was more than that, right?

You know, this was not just like, you know, what the SEC would have done.

All of a sudden, Jack Ma disappears.

He goes into some sort of house arrest.

He comes out three months later, looking kind of emaciated.

You know, they are putting the fear of God in, you know, these big tech moguls in a way

that we would never do in the US.

I mean, look, I don’t want Tim Cook to engage in anti-competitive practices.

But I don’t want anything bad happening to Tim Cook.

I don’t think the guy should be under house arrest.

If he wants to donate his money to political causes and speak out as a private citizen,

he has every right to do that.

And I’ll defend his right to do that no matter, you know, how much I want, you know, Apple to

be reined in.

They don’t have that, again, that separate concept in China.

And I think the last thing that’s going on here that’s different is you saw China put

the kibosh on.

There were 34 IPOs of major Chinese tech companies that were scheduled to IPO in US markets.

And they have sort of shut that pipeline down.

And what it appears to be, they appear to be saying is that, you know, we’ve talked

about reshoring strategic industries back to the US, like pharmaceutical manufacturing.

They seem to be saying we are going to reshore the IPO business.

We do not want you, big Chinese tech companies, IPOing on American markets, on American exchanges.

We are bringing that business back to China.

And that is why I think you’re seeing, you know, giant ripple effects now.

Because, I mean, to Chamath’s point about decoupling, we now, it looks like, are going

to be decoupling our financial markets.

And, you know, that’s why you’re seeing, you know, gigantic hits to the valuation.

That’s a, would you, would you agree with me that the decoupling of these financial

markets might be in the best interest of humanity, and ultimately, the decoupling of these two

economies, if we don’t see eye to eye about human rights, and how to treat people, maybe

it’s good that we have a little more distance between the two markets.

I mean, it’s hard to know if engagement is the better process.

But it doesn’t seem like the Chinese Communist Party wants to have anything to do with democracy,

anything to do with free markets, they want to control all the markets.

Yeah, I mean, you could see, but you know, in a way, the product that the US was exporting

to China was, was our financial markets.

And not in, I think, a good way, right.

So that I think the bad version of this is when China is able to buy up ownership in

critical strategic centers in the US, and that affects people’s speech rights over here.

But this is not China, buying up ownership in the US.

This was China acting as a consumer of US financial markets.

And, and I think, I think it’s different, right?

When we’re selling products over there, that helps correct our trade balance, right?

This is why I don’t have a problem with Elon selling cars over in China, he’s helping our

trade balance.

Okay, but so but they’re kind of canceling that they’re kind of saying we’re going to

this industry, we want to have a domestic, you know,

this is creating a mono economy, right?

It’s like, it’s going to blur the lines between public and private ownership.

And it’s going to basically make it one huge pot from which the Chinese government

can can take and put it back into as it deems fit for the broader success of China as a whole.

Right.

So if you’re a CEO, and they don’t like you, you’re going to resign, right?

If you’re a company, and they’re worried about your propensity to be a little too frisky on

your own, they’ll reign you in the law, they use cybersecurity law or something else.

But the point is that I think that we shouldn’t take this as free market regulators having

their way.

This isn’t Lena Khan implementing, you know, some laws, this is a top down decision to

nationalize large parts of the economy, starting with technology.

And I know that for some people that may seem unfathomable.

But if I’m a betting man, which I am, that’s what I would bet on that this is the beginning

of the beginning of an attempt to pull these companies in.

I mean, at the at what David said is true.

The Chinese government owns the data of Chinese companies.

So at the end of the day, the Chinese government also owns the users,

and it also owns the revenues.

It just hasn’t told you yet.

Yeah, in a way, it’s like the Chinese government in our government is trying to

officiate the game fairly and create a really competitive, vibrant game.

And I think what the Chinese government just said is the game’s over.

Like there is no game.

Yeah.

No, there’s a game.

It just has, it just has one because it has an uber CEO, it made a bunch of CEOs,

general managers in a large corporation that report through a reporting chain to one person.

But there’s no more game in terms of building companies and investing in China.

Like, how is the West ever going to trust?

How is Goldman Sachs or Sequoia, you know, launching a venture firm there or

retail investors or hedge fund investors?

How are they ever going to want to participate in that market?

Because so look, for example, when you invest in China, right, or if you set up a fund,

you know, there are two pools of capital, right?

There’s the local renminbi denominated investment vehicles.

And then there’s the US dollar denominated investment vehicles.

And they do that to segregate where the capital comes from.

So it’s not too difficult for the Chinese government to basically say, you know what,

I’m going to actually make a constraint on dollar inflows so that, you know,

the renminbi denominated investment funds that are from Chinese investors into Chinese

companies needs to be above a certain percentage, call it two thirds, right?

Or call it 80%.

They can make all these decisions, because these are all just rules that are completely

under the control.

So I think that people who don’t think this is going to happen, are probably not looking

at the setup, the setup seems to be directing itself towards that outcome.

And by the way, it makes sense for what Xi Jinping wants to do.

But that’s not my question.

My question is, why would Masayoshi San or another entity ever invest in China?

Because you look through the risks, and you got completely enamored by the population

and the TAM.

But what I’m saying now is, why would they do it again?

Or are they not going to do it?

No, but there are there are boundary conditions, I would say that even before this, you would

have had to reconsider the population is shrinking.

There’s a different demand side pull that’s happening, right?

Older people need different kinds of services than younger people.

There’s not enough younger people.

There’s too many men, there’s not enough women.

So there’s not enough couples, there’s not that all of these demographic issues,

ultimately, will get reflected in the economic reality, which is that smart investors would

put money in China differently over time anyways.

But I think that this is a bigger thing, as David said, which is if that’s coming to pass,

you want to control the pipes, because you want to control how that information is presented

to people, your citizens, so that they don’t get pissed off.

And then you might as well just own the economy, own the business.

Anyway, I see this as being amazing for American tech companies, because I don’t see who would

ever want to be an entrepreneur, whoever has a great idea and wants to pursue it in China.

Why would you do it?

No, I disagree with you.

And the reason I disagree with you is…

We don’t have access to their markets anyway, what company has access to their market?

The difference is young, smart Chinese people for decades have been staying in China,

in part because it was more, they could more relate culturally to Jack Ma than they could

to Jack Dorsey.

Okay, that’s just, I mean, that just makes sense.

Sure.

And I understand that.

And then the second is, we, like a lot of, like, sorry, like the opposite of some other

Western countries that Canada closed our doors.

Why would the next Jack Ma start a company if they saw Jack Ma disappear?

That’s my question.

Because you know what, if you’re coming from China, and you can you can only make a billion

versus 45 billion, I think you still take the shot.

Okay.

I think J Cal is right.

In the sense, I don’t think it’s gonna be like a binary decision, where all of a sudden,

everyone just stops doing business in China, but they’re gonna be hedging their bets.

I mean, if you were a Chinese billionaire looking at this landscape,

your, your, your priority has got to be to get some wealth outside the country beyond

the control of the CCP, you’re gonna be buying Bitcoin, you’re gonna be trying to get your

money overseas, you have got to be very nervous about what’s happening in Palo Alto.

Absolutely.

I mean, look, I think what President Xi is doing is fundamentally redefining the bargain

between Chinese entrepreneurs and the government.

And here was the original bargain, right?

The great Chinese leader and economic reformer Deng Xiaoping basically set the bargain, you

know, 40 years ago, and what basically the bargain was this, we’re going to open up the

economy and let you the entrepreneur get rich, we’re going to keep all the political power.

So as long as you don’t mess with us politically, you can get as rich as you want.

That was the original bargain.

Now President Xi is saying there’s a new bargain, there’s a new boss in town.

And here is the deal.

That economic interest in China will be subordinate to national interest.

Those national interests are defined by the CCP.

And I run the CCP for life.

Exactly.

And that is what is happening.

And that is a big change.

They just got layered.

There’s a new CEO that they report to.

This actually makes me very hopeful.

Actually, I think this is going to be like a spiraling down of their economy.

I don’t think it’s going to spiral up.

I don’t think so.

Who’s going to invest in their economy?

Everybody, guess what?

Because if you want a shred of fucking lithium, if you want a battery, if you want nickel,

if you want anything to happen, you need to work with China.

They are incredibly smart and thoughtful.

They had been strategic.

While we’ve been running around, you know, complaining, crying,

talking about the kindergarten soccer game.

They were doing the hard work.

They were doing it for decades.

And until we find solutions that can work around them, we need to work with them.

I think they just throttled innovation and they just shot themselves in both feet.

I think they’re going to regret this decision.

I would come out in the middle and say they’ve just attached a discount rate that now every

investor has to consider political risk when they invest in China, because the future is

very uncertain.

The bargain is getting changed.

And if you’re an investor, you now have to take you’re taking some

huge risk.

I agree with David.

I think that’s a better way.

I would refine what I’m saying by saying it’s a distribution of risk where it’s closer to

Russia now than it is to the United States.

Yeah.

And then I think there’s a there’s literally an act called the McGinskey Act.

McGinskey Act.

What is the act that Bill Broder’s lawyer McGinskey?

Oh, yes.

Because basically, in Russia, they were just killing people and taking their businesses.

I mean, this feels like the equivalent in China.

I mean, literally, that was Bill Broder’s lawyer who was tortured to death.

And I just don’t see anybody wanting to invest there anymore.

And it just does make the Bitcoin.

In hindsight, it does look like they shut down Bitcoin a couple of months before making

these actions.

So your point, David, they probably anticipated that people would start shipping their money

out using Bitcoin.

And so they banned Bitcoin.

And now they’re banning CEOs from having too much power.

That was probably a sequential event.

That would be very smart on their part.

You know, can’t leave.

Very smart.

What does this do to like, the Sequoia Capital, China, the Masayoshi San investing heavily

there, Tencent investing here.

All the Chinese have been very active in the United States investing in companies.

All the Chinese LPs are fine.

All the Chinese GPs are fine.

All the Chinese companies are fine.

I think David’s right.

It’s just a discount factor.

I do think it affects global dollar flows.

And I think it’s hard for a Western capital pool to allocate money to China without doing

a little bit more work and applying a higher discount rate.

Yeah, I have to believe that the conversations happening in these firms that have made gobs

of money in China over the last couple of decades, it has to be are we living on borrowed

time?

How much more time do we have before China says that Chinese profits, Chinese return

on investment are going to go to Chinese individuals and companies under our control?

Because that’s the direction it all seems to be headed.

Yeah.

And how quickly can I get out of these positions?

I mean, how do you even get out of these positions?

That’s the other thing I don’t understand.

If they’re going to reverse some IPOs, how does that mechanically happen?

Are they going to just say it’s a buyout?

It’s a second second transaction, and they’ll just do like a buyout.

So if Masayoshi-san owns some amount of DD, they say, here’s the price per share that

we pay you.

Here’s your cash.

Give us a share.

Ciao.

That’s incredible.

A forced sale at whatever price they determine.

I know.

I mean, like, I think these things will operate more efficiently than that, because you have

a distributed shareholder base.

So, you know, China can’t force a shareholder DD to sell the shares because it’s listed

in an American stock exchange.

But if DD does go private, the way that the news reports are saying, somebody’s going

to have to backstop that capital.

I suspect it’ll be a Chinese organization.

So they will take DD private again, and then buy out all of the shareholders who bought

from around the world.

By the way, if that does come to pass, I think that is an obvious signal that we’re moving

into sort of a more nationalization of critical resources.

And China has determined that internet resources are critical.

And I think that that’s right.

If I was in their shoes, that’s exactly what I would do as well.

Does this mean that we should be kicking out Chinese companies from operating in the US,

i.e. TikTok, etc?

No, but I do think that TikTok needs to get carved out of ByteDance and it needs to have

a completely American cap table.

But that shouldn’t be a government edict.

That should be something that the ByteDance investors and board are scrambling to do right

now, because otherwise, that equity value may go to zero.

ByteDance should be a half a trillion dollar company.

It probably is a couple hundred billion dollar company now, which means that it probably

lost half of its market value.

That’s crazy.

Crazy.

I think there’s a few things for us to worry about there.

I mean, I like the idea of out competing China by having freer and more open capital markets

and allowing anyone in the world to invest in our companies.

I think the issues with TikTok are more around data.

We know now that any data that ByteDance has belongs to the Chinese government.

This isn’t just a TikTok issue.

It’s any company, any US company that’s doing business in China.

Look, it applies to Zoom.

OK, look, Zoom, we’re on Zoom right now.

Zoom is not a Chinese company, but it has a giant engineering team in China.

What are the data implications for that?

Yeah, they stopped routing their servers.

Remember, they had some servers routing through China.

But I do think they’re going to have to shut down and sell off whatever their assets are

in China.

That’s going to be untenable to have a communication platform.

It’s kind of like Huawei, right?

We don’t allow Huawei to operate.

And we’re going to have to do that with software, right?

There’s been a big CRISPR breakthrough.

65-year-old man named Patrick Daugherty was suffering with a disease in which his protein

was misshapen, building up in his body, destroying important tissues, such as nerves in his hands

and feet.

He watched the same disease kill his dad.

And here’s the quote, had watched others get crippled and die difficult deaths from this

disease.

And it’s a terrible prognosis.

He entered a trial utilizing CRISPR, the gene editing tool, and researchers reported the

data indicating that the experiment treatment worked well.

The study Daugherty volunteered for is the first in which doctors are simply infusing

the gene editor directly into patients and letting it find its own way to the right gene

in the right cells, in this case, the cells in the liver, making the destructive protein

the advance is being held not just as not just for amyloidosis patients, but also as

a proof of concept that CRISPR could be used to treat many other much more common diseases.

It’s a new way of using the innovative technology to my thoughts.

I think this is a really important breakthrough.

And what it allows us to do now is see a world where, look, if you if you think about the

two different paths of the following idea, you’re going to make a solution to a problem.

If the problem was an internet company, or you wanted to make a product, what you would

do is you would go to Amazon Web Services, you’d be able to consume a whole set of abstractions.

And then you would build a light amount of programming, which is essentially like the

application logic of your app, right?

I think a lot of people listening understand that idea, because that’s what they do.

Here, what we’re getting to a place is now soon, we’re going to be able to view

biological problems in the same way.

So we’re building all these small little building, I don’t want to call them small,

but building these very important building blocks, that is very much akin to the building

blocks we needed to put together the first set of computers to put together ms dos, all

of that allowed us to create Windows, Windows allowed us to actually access the internet.

And there was this in seriatim development of things that happened.

And I think that we’re on the verge of that.

And that’s what these kinds of breakthroughs really show us, which is that you can view

so for example, you know, in a different company, they they’ve created these MRNA

gate arrays, logic gate arrays.

So if you’re, you know, a chip designer, you would understand how to basically create

electrical function, in part using, you know, gate arrays.

But if you reduce a biological function to the same idea, now that same person has a

translational ability to solve a different problem that they didn’t have before.

So I think what we’re saying is that we’re seeing this platformization, this AWSification

of a biological tool chain, with things like CRISPR, and all of the other modalities that

need to stack on top of it, so that the next person can view it as a programming problem.

And I think that that’s the really exciting path that accelerates a lot of this development.

But this is an enormously important breakthrough, because it validated a lot of what CRISPR was

beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that that up until now was basically what it was

known for.

And a lot of investment had gone into companies that were trying to do things.

But this is the first really important one.

The funny thing about Intelli is that it’s been public for like, seven, eight years,

and it’s just been toiling, toiling, toiling, toiling.

And then, you know, the last little while, obviously, it’s gone absolutely crazy because

of this breakthrough.

Yeah, and in related news, CRISPR creates its first genetically modified marsupials

after years of using the gene editing technique, CRISPR to genetically modify everything from

vegetables to lab, rodents.

Researchers have used it to edit one of the hardest targets yet, marsupials, the MIT

technology reports.

I guess it turns out they’re very hard to edit.

And we’re now editing marsupials and changing things like their hair color.

So brave new world.

Freeberg was here.

The Freeberg ratio would be off the charts.

Wrapping up, we have pretty incredible, just just one thing to add to that.

I mean, I think what it what it shows is that these COVID vaccines are just the first product,

the first breakthrough product of this mRNA technology, there’s going to be a lot more.

And what I wonder about is, you know, this, this category of vaccine has some people,

they’re kind of like, you know, in the, in the technology world, you have kind of a spectrum

of early adopters, late adopters, Luddites, you know, people are actively against technology.

Yeah, well, I mean, Luddites are even laggards.

And yeah, yeah, Luddites are even more violently opposed.

I think the original Luddites, they, I think the original Luddites were in England, they

lost their jobs at some factory.

And so they broke into the factory with sledgehammers to destroy all the machines that replaced

their jobs.

So there’s clearly a spectrum.

And what I wonder about is that if you’re on sort of the Luddite end of the spectrum

with respect to biotechnology, I mean, are you going to have a materially worse life

because you’re not getting the benefits of all these vaccines and all these treatments?

And I mean, COVID could just be the first example of this.

Well, I mean, if you build on it, it’s sort of like we’re going to create a two class

society, one that is not only dealing with all the maladies and cancers and living longer,

but we haven’t even started to think about, well, taking somebody who’s already in great

health, and what can you do for them?

So, oh, you know what, you can be two inches taller, you could add 10 IQ points, you could

run faster, you could have higher blood oxygen, whatever.

I mean, we could, we could genetically modify people to stay underwater for 10 minutes and

be, you know, better processors of oxygen, like other mammals are, you could have super

humans.

I mean, that’s basically where this is going.

And that unlocks a whole nother level of ethical and moral considerations.

But you’re right, there could be a group of people who are like, I don’t want to touch

any of this.

And they die at 60, 70, 80 years old.

And then we got another class of people who embrace this, and they have 20 more IQ points,

then they live to 120.

No, I mean, it’s, it sounds funny, but, and like science fiction, but that is in the realm

of possibility in our lifetimes.

There’s a lot of great science fiction written about this whole sort of transhumanist idea.

A book series I really like is Nexus by Ramez Nam, who actually was a developer at Microsoft,

and, you know, then became a writer.

And he writes with, I’d say, a high degree of sort of accuracy, accuracy and specificity

about these technologies and how they might evolve.

People should be sure to check out that book.

Jason, be honest, if you could actually increase anything in your body through this gene editing,

what would it be?

Just throw anything out there.

But the first thing to put anything out there, I would increase my muscle mass 100% increase

my muscle mass percentage of fat would go down, not in reality and absolute terms, but

just in percentages.

So this CRISPR thing was a public company called Intelli Therapeutics.

But I want to throw a shout out to another startup that seemingly I think may have had

a breakthrough this week called form energy.

And the reason why these guys are interesting is that they’ve built this incredibly massive

long duration battery out of iron.

Now, why is that important?

We have really simple ways of harvesting iron from the earth.

It is literally everywhere, everywhere you look iron exists.

It’s not so true for nickel.

It’s not true for cobalt.

It’s not true for manganese.

It’s not true for lithium.

It’s not true for all of these other specialty chemicals that we need in order to build batteries.

But these guys have solved a very complicated technical challenge that will allow you to

store energy cheaply, which has huge implications for electricity and grids.

And so big shout out to these guys at form, because if it looks like what they said they

did is true.

It’s a really important breakthrough that will have some important ramifications.

It’s amazing, by the way, to see progress.

Now you wake up and you read these things.

And you’re just like, God, this is incredible that there are people working away on shit

that really matters.

It’s almost as if there’s like, one group of people, we talked about cynicism in a previous

episode recently.

There’s one group of people, whether you’re in the founder circles or capital allocator

or a journalist covering this space, who understands it.

There’s a technical, you know, explosion going on here, an innovation that is going to solve

a lot of problems.

And they have another group of people who think that all these problems are intractable.

I’m kind of looking at this, you know, what happened with COVID.

And I was talking to my wife about global warming.

And I was like, feels to me like we can solve global warming, like feels like it’s very

much in our control.

And there’s another group of people who feel like it’s over and don’t have kids, because

the whole planet’s gonna go on.

I mean, I think Elon tweeted this out.

And I think we’ve talked about this now with respect to China.

But you know, we have an enormous problem in the world in general, which is that unless

our birth rate is positive and accretive, it has huge implications to progress, right?

If you just like, if you eliminate, or you decrease the denominator of the global population,

the odds that there’s another Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos that are created are just lower.

And so net of anything else, a declining population rate, particularly in Western

countries has huge detrimental effects to the world.

And so all the folks that think that they’re going to solve the ecology of the world by

not having kids, it’s a little misguided.

The thing to do is to actually have a positive birth rate, find technological solutions to

this problem, and allow what we’ve been able to do, which is a rising populace to basically

be motivated to work and solve problems.

And I think that we have to be very careful about that.

Because if people don’t get this right, they’re going to take the wrong solution.

It’s not going to be a solution at all.

And it’s going to make the problems even worse.

Could you imagine if the population of the earth shrank in half what it would mean in

terms of productivity, services, the healthcare requirements that are needed, the cost of

providing those things, the economic viability of countries will go away, it would be a disaster.

Yet there is a group of people who feel we should do exactly that.

And not a small group of people.

Yeah.

Well, they think that I think I think the mistake is in thinking that human consumption

is the problem.

And specifically with respect to climate change or global warming.

No, you can’t see it that way.

Because, look, humans, in order to exist, need to consume.

And we’re going to emit carbon as part of that process.

The important thing to focus on is energy production.

Are you shifting to clean production?

Because you’re never going to shrink your consumption enough to basically eliminate

carbon emissions.

It has to be done on the production side.

And one of the interesting things that’s happening now, I think we should talk about is

in Europe, they’re creating this new carbon trading plan.

I think China is even trying to set up one of these markets.

And so they’re creating these new marketplaces to trade carbon permits.

And I think the most exciting part about this is that it gives an incentive for innovators

to create new technologies that actually take carbon out of the atmosphere.

They’re called negative emissions technologies.

Because what happens is if you have a technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere, you

can now sell a permit on the exchange that gives somebody else the right to emit that

carbon.

And now those technologies, those nets, the negative emission technologies, it’s unclear

whether they really exist yet, but no one’s going to create them if there’s not a customer

for them.

And that’s what’s really cool about these new tradable permit schemes is they create

a buyer for those nets.

I think that’s ultimately how we’re going to solve this problem of climate change.

We’re not going to do it through reducing human consumption.

Like, we’re gonna have to go back to the stone age if you don’t want to emit carbon.

It’s about moving to clean production of energy and creating negative emission technologies.

Yeah, let me just build on that for a second.

Look, there’s a bunch of cap and trade systems.

China basically has a carbon tax system in place.

The big thing that none of these folks have gotten to yet, but I think if you look at

the laws in Europe, they’re going there is the idea of a carbon tariff.

And I think these carbon taxes, if they actually exist properly, will look like a tariff.

What does that mean?

Let’s just say you’re Britain, and you want to import a Volkswagen from Germany.

If Britain has a carbon tariff, that says basically, you need to account for all of

the emissions that went into making this car.

And I’m going to assess an import duty that basically maps to that.

I think that that’s where the world is going.

And that’s probably, David, to your point, it’s going to be a really big value unlock,

because the amount of money that will get both made but also destroyed in that process

will be incredible.

And that’s where we have a chance to really reimagine consumption in a different way.

Like, there are just so many categories.

I saw this interesting stat, if you look at CPG companies, right, companies like Procter

and Gamble, Clorox, and you compare them to the places where they sell their goods, like

Walmart and Target, every single major big box retailer has basically declared a net

zero emission strategy in the next five to 10 years.

Not a single company on the CPG side has actually any plans to do anything meaningful, anywhere

near 2030 2045 2050.

And when you look under the hood, those companies like PNG and Clorox are enormous emitters,

enormous.

So even though you walk into a target in Amazon, and you try to make yourself feel good thinking,

thinking to yourself, I’m buying something that zero emissions, it’s not true.

It’s basically that Amazon will will bear the cost of getting to net zero.

But the products that you actually consume are horrible for the environment.

And the amount of you know, fossil fuels that went into it and the amount of plastic that

will then get put into the ocean.

It’s tremendous.

And so moving slightly more aggressively beyond these cap and trade systems into something

that looks more like a tariff, I think could be really important for the world.

And we’re going to need to do it.

There’s and there are multiple ways to do it.

I don’t know if you guys saw Elon backed this the XPRIZE carbon sequestering sequestering

project, which is $100 million prize.

And you can do this in multiple ways.

You can do it at the factory.

And there’s the 1 trillion trees.org.

I don’t know if you saw that where they’re trying to plant a trillion trees, because

that’s the original way to sequester this carbon.

So there’s going to be like three or four different ways to do this.

And if there’s an incentive to do it, yeah, that is going to help for sure.

Part of why there’s such political disagreement over this is because you look at approaches

like the Green New Deal.

I mean, I think they understand the problem.

But what they’re proposing is always on the consumption side is basically politicians

picking and choosing how people are going to consume carbon, whether it’s, you know,

cracking down on private planes to factories.

I mean, again, taking us back to the Stone Age, nobody wants to know.

No one sane, I think, wants to support that kind of totalitarian principle that the politicians

get to tell us how to consume.

But this is why I think these market-based solutions where you say, look, carbon emissions

are obviously an externality.

If you want to emit, you need to basically pay the correct price for carbon emissions.

And we use the money that you pay as some sort of, whether it’s a tax or whether it’s

buying a permit, we use that money then offset into negative carbon emissions.

It’s a market-based system where the government controls the externality, but they don’t dictate

how people get to consume carbon.

And I think that’s the right balance.

And we don’t really have that type of balanced conversation in the US yet, because you’ve

kind of got one side that says they want to save the planet, but they want to control

everything.

And then you got the other side saying, well, look, I want to save the economy because your

plan, the Green New Deal is going to destroy it.

What we need is, again, a market-based solution to this.

And I guess the criticism of a market-based solution is you’re basically giving people

a way to, the most cynical interpretation would be you can pay to pollute.

You can just, you can pollute all you want and just pay a fine, essentially.

But that’s not the right way to look at it.

You’re actually offsetting.

Somebody else is capturing what you put out there.

And depending on the rules of the road, if you had to capture 50% more than you put in,

you could create a formula there, right?

I mean, there could be some formula that over time…

There’s been a lot of fraud in this market.

Like, you know, people sell these carbon credits from, you know, certain forests.

And there’s this joke, which is like, there’s been a tree that’s been sold like 80 billion

times, because it’s like, you can’t really verify, you can only really estimate the amount

of carbon sequestration that, you know, for example, a tree actually does in the first

place.

And so there’s been just a lot of, unfortunately, you know, flat by night, unreliable, non trustworthy

ways that this market has evolved.

People have been waiting for decades for this carbon trading market to really step into

high gear, which is why some folks think the more aggressive plan will just be introduced

tariffs and let the market, David, to your point, sort it out.

Chamath, what do you think the prospects are for these negative emission technologies?

I can’t believe that a solution as low tech as planting trees is going to solve the problem

of carbon.

Yeah, yeah.

So the question is, what do you what do you think, assuming we create the market, the

demand for negative emission technologies, the permits to emit?

What do you think the prospects are technologically that innovators are going to come up with

these solutions?

I do think that we are a couple of breakthroughs away from these things being non issues.

So I’ll give you a couple of examples.

If you look at like, I’ll just use batteries as an example, because where I’m spending

a lot of time, when you look back, and like you ask yourself, like, how did we decide

to make the batteries the way we make them?

You know, was it some like, you know, broad survey of every single chemical composition

and all these different structures.

And we realized that, you know, a composition of nickel and manganese and cobalt was the

right thing to do.

Or lithium and iron and phosphate was, it turned out that it was mostly like a handful

of people decided and we all just been iterating around the edges ever since.

So one of the solutions to a lot of these problems is to actually go back to first principles.

The problem is that as these industries get built up, and you know this, you have so much

PP&E, like so much equipment, so much investment in physical capex that’s happened.

The idea of switching platforms is almost impossible, because it’s not economically

viable.

So we are in this situation today where a bunch of solutions have been proposed, David,

to solve that problem, right?

The problem with carbon capture and other other things and negative emission technologies

is that they’re extremely expensive, they’re very inefficient, they require an enormous

amount of energy themselves, and it’s not clear that they work.

So what’s happening?

One is that there’s been some pretty novel innovations in moving people past some of

these basic problems by looking at the periodic table to try to find different ways of solving

things like energy storage, which has huge implications to climate.

But the second is that we are pushing the boundaries of physics in different ways as

well.

And that’s where there’s going to be the potential for an enormous breakthrough,

specifically around superconductors.

So what is a superconductor?

It’s something that allows an enormous amount of energy to basically trans through it.

Now, we have this issue, which is that you can actually create superconductors in highly

controlled environments that are extremely, extremely cold, but they have incredible

performance characteristics that would revolutionize power and energy transmission and

storage.

People have been innovating in bringing that up to room temperature.

In that breakthrough, which I think you will see in the next 20 to 30 years, it’s just

a complete sea change of how we think about this whole problem.

So I think the short term, we’re innovating in the periodic table.

In the long term, we’re figuring out how to bend the laws of physics.

And I think that those are those are probably the two most practical solutions to a lot

of these things that remove the constraints that we’ve created.

And again, the constraints have been completely human defined, which is the sad thing.

They were not necessary from the start, we could have made very different decisions.

Had we known these problems were going to be as big as they were, you know, the way

that we make plastic didn’t have to be this way.

Right, the amount of petroleum that we use, it didn’t have to be in this specific way.

But this is where we are.

And there are direct air capture technologies DAC, which is basically an energy issue,

you can literally suck the carbon dioxide out of the air.

And again, another another issue of material science, because the the substrates that you

use tend to be relatively inefficient and sort of really activate them, you’re pumping

a tremendous amount of energy through there.

That’s the issue is, can you get the energy?

And I think when we talked about the small reactors, the small modular nuclear reactors,

if energy is free, or it’s solar based, you could you could kind of get a virtuous cycle

going here.

That’s essentially what superconductors allows you to see is a world where you basically

have limitless, free energy.

It sounds like the thing that we all agree on is that this problem is ultimately going

to be solved by innovation.

And this is the problem I have with so many of the political proposals is, you know, our

ability to innovate is a function of the size and scope of our economy and the incentives

and rewards for innovation and the freedom for entrepreneurs to do their thing.

And if you crush that, yeah, you know, with government mandates, you won’t get the innovation

we need to get out of this problem.

We can easily innovate our way out of it.

And it requires some individual to say, I want to dedicate my life to it.

And then what is the motivation to do that?

And who are the capital allocators who are going to give them the billion dollars to

create this?

I spent a bunch of time.

So I’m the capital allocator that will give billions.

In fact, I did a survey of the superconductor space, as an example.

And here’s what I found of the of the four folks that I found, who are all each individually

doing things in superconductors that I think are incredible.

They’re all immigrants.

Every single one were not born in the United States.

You could you they are so fucking happy to be here.

They feel so lucky.

And they don’t understand why everybody complains all the fucking time.

Yeah, complaining is, there is a disease of constantly complaining about stuff.

And if you count the number of times you complain every day, and it’s more than two or three

times a day, you need to get your head examined.

You’re probably just talking yourself into anxiety problems.

Stop complaining, start building.

I mean, these problems are solvable.

There is an immigrant in in the United States right now that will figure out how to conduct

electricity without resistance, it will transform the world.

And we are so fucking lucky that that guy came here to this country.

And we have the chance to give the guy a billion dollars.

One of my favorite movies is wag the dog with Rob De Niro.

And Dustin Hoffman plays this producer character.

And every time there’s a setback, he’s like, Oh, this is nothing.

I remember we made this movie and three out of the four lead actors died.

And we recast the movie.

It’s like, this is nothing.

Yeah.

And you know, that’s sort of his catchphrase is he’s got this can do attitude where no

matter what setback happens, he just makes it it’s like, Oh, this is nothing.

We got it.

And, you know, and that’s kind of the attitude you need.

If you want to be an entrepreneur is there’s gonna be so many setbacks, you got to be like,

Oh, this is nothing.

And you figure out a way around it.

Yeah, this one of the guys that are working on superconductors showed me his data for

the last 10 years.

And what’s interesting, David, to your point is he had a four year period where he took

a huge step back, where basically, like, you know, he had this superconductor.

He’s like, it works at, you know, I’m just going to use simple numbers here.

But like, you know, minus 300 Celsius, he got it all the way up to minus, you know,

100.

And then it went back to minus 200.

For four years, could you imagine the mental devastation?

And I said, How did you deal with it?

He goes, Ah, you know, basically, he’s like, Ah, it’s nothing.

And thank God for that guy.

It’s interesting.

I just listened to Quentin Tarantino’s on a podcasting tour, because he’s got a new

book, he wrote a novel out of the once upon a time in Hollywood characters.

And I just started listening to it.

It’s fantastic.

Listen on audible.

And Brian Koppelman from the moment interviewed Quentin, I listened to it yesterday on my

bike ride.

And he was just talking about how he just never gave up.

And he had written true romance.

And then he wrote, what was the other one he wrote?

At that time, natural born killers, natural killers.

Yeah.

And he was just talking about how the first movie nobody would do.

Then he wrote the two screenplays and nobody would do and then he got to Reservoir Dogs.

And, you know, they tried to scrape together $800,000.

And he kept asking me, Why didn’t you quit?

Why didn’t you quit?

He’s like, Well, you know, I just, I figured it out.

Like, I figured out I had a voice.

And then nobody would buy my scripts, because I was trying to do something innovative.

And they were reading the scripts.

And they didn’t understand what I was doing in terms of innovating on how a movie would

be with, you know, how he does with Pulp Fiction, he changes the time and tells the storytelling

in a nonlinear fashion.

They think nobody understood it.

But every time I read it, I realized I had a voice, it was my voice, it was getting better

and better.

And then people, you know, I sold those movies, and then he kept building them.

And it was very inspiring to think about that take of like, he just didn’t give up.

And he just totally looked at the work and he found his he found his own value in his

own work, improving.

Even without the external, you know, it’s a it’s a fantastic story.

It’s like one of those classic, you know, Hollywood entrepreneur stories.

He’s working at a video store for years.

And, you know, he would start, he was making his own movie.

And he would film on the weekends.

And then, you know, he made a few hundred dollars every week, basically.

And then he would rent the equipment on a Friday, because then they would only charge

him for one day because it was the weekend.

So he could basically record the entire weekend.

And so he’d go off and record and, and then he’d have to go back to work.

And he started making this movie, you know, one weekend at a time for like two or three

years.

And then he finally put, he didn’t even have the money to get the film developed.

So finally, after three years, he gets the film developed.

And he’s like, unfortunately, it sucked.

It wasn’t what he was expecting.

But during that time, he wrote True Romance, which then got bought.

He sold that screenplay.

That gave him a little bit of money.

Then he wrote Reservoir Dogs.

And then he met Lawrence Bender.

And, you know, Bender went out, read the script.

It was like, holy shit, this is amazing.

They raised the million or so bucks to make the movie.

And then that kind of launched everything.

And yeah, it’s one of these, you know, amazing rags to riches stories.

You know, they’re kind of rare.

And they’re more rare in Hollywood.

They occur all the time in the tech industry.

That’s such an interesting point.

He said, they’re like, you would never let you make that movie now.

And you know, in another conversation, I think I listened to three podcasts with them.

Joe Rogan, Bredi Stenelis, and then Brian Koppelmans.

And all three of them are tremendous.

But I think in the Bredi Stenelis, in the Joe Rogan one, he’s like,

oh, they would never let you make that movie.

He was like, bullshit, you can just make it.

I just made it.

Did you not see the last two films and how politically incorrect they were?

And, you know, I don’t care what Bruce Lee’s, you know, fans think of how I portray Bruce Lee.

He was a bad actor.

He was a terrible, you know, human being to these folks.

And his basic thing was everybody keeps waiting to ask for permission.

And he’s like, I’m just going to make my movies.

And let the chips fall where they may.

I’m not going to be censored.

I’m not going to censor myself.

And I’ll make my 10 movies.

And that’s it.

Game over.

I’m going to tell a rags to riches story.

I want to tell this poker story.

I get one last one on Tarantino and then you tell your story.

Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs.

I think it came out in 1991.

That really inspired me to want to make movies because I saw that somebody could make a movie

outside the system for so little money.

And that’s why I made Thank You for Smoking.

And we have another independent movie coming out next year about Salvador Dali, which,

you know, finally got made after about 15 years.

So, yeah, I mean, he’s inspired a lot of people.

He shows what can be done.

This is a rags to riches story that involves Jake out.

So I get invited.

I get invited to the Harvard Business School to give a speech.

First and last time I was invited because I was disinvited, Jason.

After that, what happened?

But well, the back two rows walked out in the first five minutes.

Wow.

It was incredible.

I get invited to do this thing.

Obviously, it’s in Boston.

It’s in wintertime, right, Jacob?

It was winter and it was Boston.

It’s like not a great trip.

So I was like, OK, Jacob, what are we going to do to spice this trip up?

And we invite Big Al.

Oh, OK.

And we get on the plane and Big Al says, oh, you want to play a little poker?

I said, absolutely.

And I turned to Jacob and I said, Jason, do you want to play?

He’s like, I said, you know, you guys can play against each other.

And I said, Jason, why don’t you deal?

He’s like, I’m not interested in dealing.

And I said, Jacob, I’ll give you 10% of whatever I win.

I was like, shuffle up.

He deals the game for fucking six hours from L.A. where we were.

Chinese poker to Boston.

I smashed Big Al.

I smashed Big Al.

Smash.

I smashed him.

And then we go into the thing.

We have like a nice dinner, blah, blah, blah.

We go out.

We have the thing at Harvard where I said something like, you know,

I think an NBA is basically worthless.

It’s not a good use of your time.

I think you should be out building things.

The back two rows walked out.

They were completely offended.

And I did the speech.

It doesn’t matter.

I get back on the plane and we’re flying back.

And at some point, I realized I said, Jason, what’s the tally?

And Jason says, I’m up 40,000.

And I said, excuse me.

And it turned out that I was fucking smashing him.

Smashing.

Smashing.

Anyways, the long story short of it was that we circled for a few times

and then we finally landed.

And J Cal won $55,000.

But that’s circling.

So you could win more.

Here’s what you don’t know.

Through the pack of cards at Jason and said, I never want to.

I never want to see you ever again.

I never want to have you fucking play poker ever again.

I went to the pilots and I told them,

I’ll give you five grand if you can make this flight last another hour.

And they were like, yeah, we got a circle.

They got it.

And we just kept circling for an hour.

I was like, I got to get another hour.

And he lost $550,000 on a fucking stupid trip.

He never even wanted to come.

He just came.

He didn’t want to go to the best Michelin star restaurant in Boston.

Oh, my God.

In Boston.

It’s so fucking stuffy, by the way.

It’s so stuffy and so stuffy.

They take themselves so seriously.

And they’re trying to, you know, bring, you know, 18 courses to us.

And, you know, Big Al’s a big guy.

He’s called Big Al for a reason.

I mean, he’s a linebacker.

And they say to Big Al.

He’s like, I’ll take this.

I want a steak.

What do you got?

He’s like, oh, there’s a steak included in the prefect.

You should do the tasting menu.

It’s like, oh, you’re tasting money.

Fuck it.

Let’s go.

I’ll put more truffles on it.

They’re like, it’s not truffle season.

Sorry.

He’s like, OK, well, make it truffle season.

Anyway, he started bringing the food and he wants to eat a steak.

And they bring him.

I kid you not.

You know one of those funny scenes in a movie where, like, they pull the tin

and it’s like a small piece of meat that’s like giant plate.

Schaefer comes flying off a piece of parsley and that’s it.

The steak was the size of a pack of Wrigley’s gum.

I am not kidding.

They took like a beautiful steak and they just made a little rectangle out of it.

He takes his fork.

He puts it on it.

He holds it up to the woman.

He goes, where’s my steak?

And he puts the whole steak in his mouth.

She goes, sir, that was your steak.

He’s like, I want a steak.

He starts screaming.

I want a steak.

I want a steak.

The whole restaurant.

He’s like, I ordered a steak.

This is not a steak.

If you ask him about this trip, he’s like, I lost so much money.

Yeah.

He’s like, I didn’t eat.

It was cold in Boston.

It was cold.

It was the worst trip ever.

It was a horrible trip ever.

And he is like, the woman’s like, well, how can we make you happy?

He’s like, bring me a steak.

They’re like, well, sir, we gave you a steak.

The steak came.

How many steaks?

How many steaks are you going to afford now that Robinhood just went public?

Congrats for JK.

Yeah.

You know, it’s right now it’s my third biggest win, Ubercom.

And then this one and, you know, time in market, I think Robinhood going out at 30 billion.

There’s a chance this could go 10, 20, 30 X from here.

I think it could be a trillion dollar company someday.

22 million members, even through all the craziness that we talked about on this podcast,

you know, they’re learning, they’re fixing things.

And 22 million people using the product, and they’re going to launch so many other

products as part of it.

And all these young people getting financially literate.

I know it’s a double edged sword, but I kind of feel like this generation balance.

It’s it’s it’s better balance.

It’s important.

I mean, can you imagine if we were in our 20s trading derivatives and options and just

trading stocks all day?

I wanted to do that.

But it was too hard.

You had to get a broker.

It was $35 a trade when I started trading and you had to call Charles Schwab and put

it in order.

Of all the things of all the things I could have done online in my 20s and 30s trading

stocks, what didn’t end up being high on the list?

But I mean, a lot of cards, right?

But that’s what these kids are doing.

Like for them, this is, you know, in the same zone.

A lot of them as sports betting, wagering, playing poker for money.

They’re they’re learning.

I don’t know how you feel about it, David.

Well, I mean, if you make a lot of mistakes early in your career, when you’re making $100

bets or buying a 10th of a stock, you know, it’s small stakes and you’re going to learn

a hell of a lot.

So I think the education part is you can only learn by doing right, Saks?

I mean, you can’t learn in a in a thing.

OK, listen, it’s been an amazing episode, even without Freeberg.

We miss you, Freeberg.

Come back next week.

Let the conspiracy theories abound.

But Freeberg just was busy.

He couldn’t make it.

And we all wanted to.

We missed each other.

So we wanted to see our besties.

We love you, Freeberg.

I love you, Freeberg.

We love you, Freeberg.

Back at you, Freeberg.

Back at you, Freeberg.

And we’ll see you all next time on the All In Podcast.

Bye-bye.

My dog taking a notice in your driveway.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just

useless.

It’s like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

What the beep beep?

We need to get merch.

I’m going all in.