So, Sax, are we going to talk with each other today or, you know, or is an ISO
player?
He turned into an ISO player.
He’s like the Carmelo Anthony of this.
He’s the Carmelo Anthony of the all in pod.
Sax, you want to pass the ball or you just want to you want to clank it off the room?
Raymond, I think we should have a focus on having a dialogue with each other
today, several points in the thing, as opposed to all standing up,
saying our piece and then we lost a little bit of the fiber of this team here.
There’s three people playing as a team.
And then there’s I would love to ask you questions and I would love
my job to pass the ball, Jake.
Al, you’re the guard.
You pass the ball.
I’m supposed to score.
Oh, really?
Remember what Shaq used to say when he wasn’t getting the ball?
He gets really unhappy.
So pass the ball to the big dog.
He’ll score.
Yeah, I’m Shaq.
You’re you know, you’re not Kobe.
Who is the shitty little like Fisher?
Yeah.
You’re Derek Fisher.
Make sure the big dog gets the ball.
There won’t be any problems.
I’m Bob Cousy. OK, I’m Gary Payton in this.
OK.
Rain Man, David Satterthwaite.
And it’s said we open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy.
Love you guys.
Nice.
Queen of Kinwam.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the all in podcast
where three besties talk about a range of talking topics and one monologues
about Biden derangement syndrome with you again this week,
the sultan of science and the dictator.
Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and playing
Iso ball somewhere in the wing is your political commentator.
Tucker Jr., Rain Man, David Sachs.
It’s an active projection.
First story, which Sachs is going to lose his mind over.
He’s got two monologues prepared.
Justin Trudeau has invoked an emergency order to freeze bank accounts
linked to trucker protests in Canada.
On Monday, Trudeau invoked an emergency law
that requires financial institutions in Canada to examine customer records
and take action against people involved with or aiding in the protest.
Here’s Trudeau’s tweet from yesterday.
If you’re watching on the video streams, illegal blockades
and occupations are not peaceful protests.
They’re a threat to jobs and communities, and they cannot continue.
In the House of Commons earlier today, I joined members of the Parliament
to speak about that and about the need
to invoke the Emergencies Act, the counter signal,
which is a right leaning Canadian digital publication reported
that 34 different crypto wallets were also being targeted by Canadian officials.
This law grants the government extraordinary powers
like the right to ban public assembly in certain locations.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said a plan to challenge
the government’s decision in court.
Remember, Sachs wrote a piece on financial
deplatforming for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense about a year ago.
The piece was about the private sector financial platforms, deplatforming folks.
So your thoughts, Sachs, you have 90 seconds on the uninterrupted clock
on the shot clock. All right.
Thank you, Jake. It’s true.
Last summer, I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss
is some stack talking about how financial
deplatform would be the next wave of online censorship.
And here we are. It’s actually happened.
What I could not have predicted is that it would occur in our mild manner
neighbor to the north and that the reprisals would be directed
by the government itself, not just a consortium of private actors.
And what Trudeau has done is he didn’t just employ the Emergency Act
against the truckers so that he could basically arrest them and break up
the protest.
They have now directed banks and any financial institution,
even cryptocurrency wallets to freeze the accounts, not just of the truckers,
but anybody who’s contributed to them.
Basically, anyone has contributed twenty five dollars or more.
There were two crowdfunding sites that they raised money from.
All those people, the thousands of of just ordinary Canadians
who did nothing more than contribute to an anti-government protest.
They are now at risk of financial ruin because their bank accounts have been frozen.
And you have to wonder what is the ends here that justifies the means.
COVID, you know, Omicron is on the wane.
It’s on its way out.
At the same time that Trudeau was announcing these dictatorial measures,
Ford, the the guy who runs Ontario, the largest province, 15 seconds
forward, was out there saying that he was going to that COVID mandates
were going to be over.
So why exactly are they doing this?
You know, we’re at the end of COVID.
And let me ask you a question.
If if there were people online making donations to the criminals who loot
and kill people in San Francisco, which you’ve railed against
being criminals who are breaking the law and should all be put behind bars.
Do you think that it would be appropriate in that context for the government
to block their donations to supporting criminal activity in a criminal ring?
You know that I think we all agree, you know, shouldn’t shouldn’t be transpiring.
Well, but your the implication there is that truckers are using violence
or something like that, and they’re not.
I mean, it’s been it’s been largely a peaceful protest.
It’s been very annoying to people who, you know.
But isn’t the case being made that they are actually breaking the law
by blocking streets?
And that’s not you know, there’s a peaceful protest
where you can go and get a permit and actually go in a public zone
and peacefully protest within the confines of the law
and what’s allowed in that jurisdiction.
Look, but what these folks are doing is civil disobedience,
which is not a peaceful protest.
It is, you know, kind of breaking the law to make a point.
It is peaceful because there’s been no violence.
If you look at actual videos, they’re breaking the law. Right.
Well, let me let me ask the question for free bird and sex.
If a group of truckers were shutting down the Bay Bridge
with three lanes of traffic and then shut down the 280 and the 101
and it impacted this, if they in fact are shutting down roads
and our businesses and ambulances can’t get through,
would you want them to be towed?
Would you want their cars to be towed?
Listen, here’s the thing.
The ambassador bridge, this vital choke point of commerce
between the US and Canada that was blocked and that was creating a serious problem.
But it had already been cleared on Monday by the time that Trudeau
invoked the Emergencies Act.
And then on Tuesday, he then invokes the Financial Act.
Your opinion, Saks, if they if they block roads and bridges,
would you if they were in charge?
Yeah. If they’re breaking the law in that way, it’s not just one lane.
It’s all three lanes damages society.
I’m just trying to understand the standard here, because
just zooming out to last year and the year before, right,
there was a protest happening with BLM and those BLM protests
resulted in damage to private property, to burning cars.
There were protests at the Capitol that involved folks trespassing
into federal land and federal buildings.
And now there’s protests that are, you know, blocking vital trade routes
and, you know, access to emergency vehicles and all this sort of stuff to me.
And also, you know, people in San Francisco breaking the law
and not being put in jail.
My personal opinion is anyone that’s breaking the law.
We should stop them for breaking the law.
And anyone that wants to kind of, you know, follow a peaceful protest
or make a point should kind of make the point.
But if the law is the law, shouldn’t there be a universal standard
to hold up the law?
And if the case and if the case is people are giving money to aid
in breaking the law, shouldn’t we stop the transmission?
Hold on. Hold on a second.
Look, I think you’re conflating a bunch of really important things there.
Aiding and abetting criminals is already illegal.
There are RICO statutes that allow the authorities
to go after people that are aiding and abetting.
Through monetary support, criminal behavior.
Separately, there is a whole body of law at the federal state
local level that allows you to deal with protests. OK.
The real question is, why did you have to go and invoke emergency powers
at the tail end of a pandemic for what is effectively
nonviolent protests?
Again, that’s the key question, right?
So just to give you some Canadian history
as a Canadian citizen, what I can tell you is that we’ve invoked
this Emergency Powers Act three times in the past.
The first was for World War two.
The second sorry, World War one.
The second was for World War two.
And the third was the FLQ crisis, which was a domestic terrorist
organization in Quebec that was fighting for a separate homeland.
That’s those are the three other times in the past that a sitting
prime minister has invoked these broad sweeping emergency powers.
And they did it because you exhaust the natural body of law
and the Constitution and the bill of the Charter of Rights that governs
the normal behavior of a democratic society.
What this was is not any of those things.
I don’t think anybody could claim that a bunch of nonviolent protests.
Yes, they were annoying.
Yes, they basically, you know, stop some commerce.
But I don’t think it was on the order of World War one, World War two
or a domestic terrorism issue like the FLQ crisis.
So why invoke this basically get out of jail free card
where you can behave without any checks and balances?
This is the confounding.
Hold on a second.
Did we exhaust the current body of normal governing law?
And if we didn’t, why is this example OK?
And the counterfactuals are so many.
Imagine Trump invoked this thing during BLM.
Imagine Biden did this right now.
Right. You would be up in arms.
I think that’s well said.
And we just have to make sure that the Emergencies Act that Trudeau invoked
requires something like an act of espionage against the country
or Syria, the word serious violence or in the law or the threat of serious violence.
Those conditions were simply not met.
Yeah. And then on top of that, to go after people who contribute
as little as $25 to these truckers who are trying to support them
because these guys are not making any money.
You know, they’re they have very they’re living under very harsh conditions.
So you make a small check.
You write a small donation to support these people, to aid them.
They’re simple working class people who are protesting for normalcy
and to get their freedom back.
And now all of a sudden your bank account gets frozen.
It is basically creating a it’s going to have a chilling effect
because it’s essentially creating a cast of untouchables
because no one is going to want to associate with, transact with or donate
to this group of people, these designated people now under the Emergencies Act
who your bank can get frozen if you deal with them.
I think it’s going to have the opposite effect.
I think there’s going to blow up in Trudeau’s face.
This is the worst decision making by any major political leader in a long time
to go after a group of people, as Chamath said, in the in the waning days
of a pandemic, what is the point?
Why are we picking this? Why is he picking this?
Why do you guys? So why? It makes no sense.
But why is he doing it?
And Chamath, why? Why did the police not break?
So I totally hear your point.
Why did the police not break up these protests?
Why did he need to invoke the emergency?
Because, look, it happened.
I think that the police in some cases did.
In some cases didn’t.
There were probably a lot of police sympathizers.
There were probably a lot of sympathizers in general,
as there were a lot of people who were detractors.
Are you think the police you’re saying there were police that were complicit?
It’s the nature of a protest.
You have people for you have people against.
But the point is, I think what’s really clear is Justin Trudeau.
First, basically said these people are racists and misogynists.
Then he said they just hold views that are just unacceptable to me.
And then like a totalitarian dictator invoked an emergency measures
act that allows him to do what he wants.
That’s the fact pattern.
He painted himself into a political corner and then tried to give successfully.
He gave himself absolute power for some period of time.
And the real question, I think, is why should this be allowed to happen
in a democratic country?
With democratic norms against people that haven’t done,
as far as I can tell, a shred of violent behavior?
No, it hasn’t been.
You guys think and where it’s clear that the body of normal governing law
hasn’t been exhausted yet, meaning the minute that these people
were asked to actually empty the ambassador bridge, they did.
Guys, we’re Canadians.
That’s what we do.
Yes, we love super nice.
But if you just ask us, we’re just going to do it.
Exactly.
No, you’re right.
Trudeau never tried talking to them.
I mean, why wouldn’t he just try and talk?
Why would he just try and negotiate with them?
Instead, he demonized them right off the bat as white supremacists
and Nazis and even, you know, confederates or which I don’t even
understand in the context of Canada.
This is a yet another example of the dying death right in front of us
of the woke playbook, right?
We talked about this last week.
I think it’s related to the San Francisco Board of Ed recall.
That’s now national and probably even international news.
The the the reaction to Rogan, the reaction to Dave Chappelle.
It’s all part and parcel of this thing where people up and down the
spectrum have learned what the mechanism of action is of this cancel
culture, and they don’t fall for it anymore.
Trudeau did not get the memo.
There’s a person that’s able to escalate it because he’s actually
in a seat of power, and that’s what I think people should be debating.
You mean shutting down dissenting voices from a position of power?
Just because.
And he went on the record.
He went on the record and he said, guys, these views are unacceptable to me.
Well, in a democratic society, that’s not your choice.
Yeah, not your choice, Justin.
I mean,
you could have engaged the views on all kinds of topics all the time.
Unacceptable is not the threshold of World War Two, World War One in the
FLQ crisis.
Do you guys think that there’s a moment here that also is a mile marker on
the road towards the state versus crypto, given the actions that were
Bitcoin wallets, because that seems to be like a big trend that’s going to
play out over the next decade or two.
There are plenty.
Inevitably, crypto is the threat to the state, right?
And so, you know, you’re going to see skirmishes like this that kind of, you
know, hey, wallets that donate are illegal.
And, you know,
Freedberg, this is one of the best points you’ve made.
If you look at what this has done to Bitcoin, and you look at what it’s done
for other cryptocurrencies, this will do more than McDonald’s accepting
Bitcoin, because this is the first time I’ve ever seen a cryptocurrency
accepting Bitcoin, because this is the first time like a Western democratic
state is seizing people’s funds, like in an incredibly unfair, unnecessary
way, which is just going to have more people say, you know what, maybe I
should keep some of my net worth out of the government’s purview, if they’re
going to seize it anyway.
And then now people are going to start looking into the coins that allow
people to conflate having an enemy with having a different view.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Having an enemy is a serious deal, right?
Whether that’s domestic or international.
That’s what we had to do in World War One World War Two in the FLQ crisis.
This is just somebody who has a different opinion.
I don’t agree in mask mandates is what one person says.
I want to mask mandate is what the other person says the idea that you
can deep platform one or the other or fire them from their job or prevent
them from having access to the money that they’ve earned or preventing
other people from donating money.
That’s really it’s a really low bar.
And I think when you normalize this kind of behavior, it’s a very
slippery slope.
And so if if somebody else were to do it, they now have like it’s again
going back to the Rene Girard sort of philosophical discussion from
last week.
One of the things about you know, these stoning rituals, right that
sacks talked about that we talked about last week.
One of the things that Rene Girard talks about is it is always hardest
for that first person, right?
The first person that throws the stone, right?
That’s how Jesus was able to defuse that that incident as described in
the book of John, but in a different example, the first person that
throws a stone all of a sudden normalizes it for everybody else after
them.
And then these stonings become commonplace or became commonplace.
So similarly, it’s like if you’re a sitting Democratic person who just
decides this doesn’t work for you.
You can’t flip the script and and basically remove everybody’s
Democratic rights.
That’s a really crazy.
It’s actually had a closing point you want to make?
Well, okay, just on this point about Bitcoin, the reason why Bitcoin
is necessary is because the tactics that Trudeau is using is essentially
to starve these truckers out to not only basically arrest them, but
he’s also taking away their insurance licenses.
He’s basically preventing them from ever working again.
He’s talked about that.
We’re going to put give you a criminal record.
It’s going to make it hard for you to get a job.
And then most importantly, on top of that, he’s preventing anyone from
helping them by contributing to them by making a donation.
So he’s essentially starving these guys out.
And that’s the reason why Bitcoin is potentially helpful is it allows
people using non custodial wallets to make an end run around that and
donate and help these these people who are being persecuted, essentially.
I mean, he could have just simply chosen to do what sacks his favorite
President Obama did with Occupy Wall Street, which is say, great, you
have something you want to voice.
Here’s where you can do it.
Just, you know, no guns, no violence.
But we let how long did Occupy Wall Street last in downtown Wall Street
and in Oakland and other places like a year or two, and you just wait
them out. And that’s it.
I think when you encounter a sincere protest movement, the first thing
you should do as a leader is actually listen and try to understand what
it is that they’re protesting on behalf of.
And Trudeau never did that.
He went straight to a to 11 with this.
And I think part of the reason why I mean, Jake, are you asked why?
Why is it that that, you know, there seems to be a common denominator
with this and with the Ukraine issue that the leaders are immediately
escalating these situations instead of looking for a way to deescalate
it and they’re doing it with the media egging them on.
And so as harsh as Trudeau’s rhetoric has been, the media’s rhetoric
around this has been even worse.
You have this CNN contributor, Juliette Kayyem, who’s also a Harvard
who basically tweeted that Trudeau needed to slash their tires, empty
the gas tanks, arrest the drivers, you know, making it unclear how
you never get the trucks off the bridge.
But then she said cancel their insurance, suspend their driver’s
license, prohibit any future regulatory verification.
She says, trust me.
I will not run out of ways to make this hurt.
You know, it’s you have the media cheering this on egging on Trudeau.
They’re doing the same thing beating the drums of war on Ukraine.
What is wrong with these people?
Yeah, deescalate.
And where’s the off ramp?
I think the biggest the biggest story is this this Bitcoin thing
because, you know, if you guys think about like, pre 1960s, like
capital wasn’t digitized.
It was like physical.
Like you had to own like a stock certificate or cash or gold or a
bearer bond today.
Everything is digitized, right?
Like there’s a digital record of, you know, who owns what stock and
who how much is in your bank account and none of it is tied to your
having a physical asset and ultimately the law was able to reach into
these digital systems and have greater oversight and ultimately
control, you know, over accounts and so on.
And it’s had a, you know, the digitization of capital assets has had
an incredible ability to drive economic growth and investment and
ease of transaction, but it’s also significantly increased the
centralization of assets or the central influence over assets.
Bitcoin seems to be the resolution to that.
And now you’re seeing the ultimate challenge to Bitcoin and the
challenge to decentralized systems like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
and so on.
I don’t want to speak specifically to anyone, but there seems to be
like this trend line over the last 60 years.
That’s now being challenged because you can have your accounts frozen
any moment, you know, for breaking the law or because emergency acts
are are induced.
And I think you’re right.
Probably going to accelerate interest in these kind of off government
chain.
If true, it’s just a separate chain.
Anybody can do it.
They’re doing it in China, right?
And they’re and I don’t know.
I don’t know if you guys know one.
It’s the point of it.
The digital yuan is like this incredible whole point.
It’s like absolute centralization of every capital asset.
Here’s where it gets scary.
Think about dangerous.
The digital yuan is the minute you say something that Xi Jinping
doesn’t like.
It’s a it’s a stroke of a keyboard key and all your assets are all
your assets are locked away.
It’s a database entry and you just basically reroute who belong who
belongs to or it could be it could happen in America.
They say, you know what California now wants to have a wealth tax.
Anybody who’s got money.
We’re just going to take your money out of your account automatically.
Do you guys think we sound like a right wing politics show at this
point?
This isn’t a right wing politics thing.
I mean, I think I think that we have so jumped the shark.
There are things that are happening today every day that you know, if
you had said in isolation two or three years ago, would any of these
things ever happen?
We all would have just looked at each other and said it’s impossible
that these things could happen.
And but the problem is fast forward two years of a pandemic.
I think we have let a lot of our civil liberties decay right under
our nose and we’re not willing to fight for it because it’s become
too tribal and rights have been politicized.
So the idea of having rights, you know, and then standing up for
your rights all of a sudden has to be a decision between whether
you’re left or right.
That’s crazy.
I don’t think that liberties in the sense of government oversight
have decayed as in addition to that.
Liberties in the sense of a social setting have decayed, you know,
we’ve because of cancel culture, we’ve normalized the ability to
silence minority or dissenting voices and this is both in the private
enterprise setting as well as in the public setting.
And it’s you know, I don’t know.
I don’t consider myself a right wing conservative person by any
stretch.
But I do consider myself a person who believes in individual freedom
and Liberty.
That’s called an American by the way.
Yeah, it’s basically being an American and I think, you know, as
we move on to this recall in San Francisco, I think Saks made a
really good point.
Like what are political leaders doing here?
Are they trying to stir the pot and antagonize these situations?
If you look, you know, Clinton, Obama, a lot of people previously
were trying to defuse these situations and then Biden seems to be
stirring the pot, Justin Trudeau.
And then if you look at Trump with BLM, you know, and the immigration
stuff, he never sat down and met with him and he arguably antagonize
them.
So I think this is a perfect segue into what happened.
And you know, so we should expect a little more from our political
leaders.
Great point from Saks.
You just brought up something incredible, you know, Trump railed
against these BLM folks, but at no point did he try to shut down their
bank accounts and take their money away.
And Trudeau can’t, you know, this was not even near in the scale of
BLM.
Yeah.
Who’s the bigger authoritarian?
Yeah.
I mean, it’s clearly if you objectively it’s Trudeau in this
situation.
The scary authoritarianism as we talked about in previous pods tends
to come from the left.
At least the right you see it coming.
I just want to read it’s veiled under moral virtue signaling.
That’s right.
They’re very sanctimonious.
They claim they claim to be the defenders of the working class while
they’re actually prosecuting them.
Such an unforced error, like, so dumb.
He’s gonna lose, right?
He’s gonna lose
if a DA was elected and a police office and police chief were elected
to San Francisco, that said we are going to freeze the bank accounts
and, you know, demobilize the criminals that are ransacking our
city, our people, our stores, would you support that?
No, not if it’s an office and extrajudicial use of power.
I mean, the law specifies what you’re allowed to do.
Do you think San Francisco’s in an emergency situation?
I mean, would you support the mayor taking on emergency authority to
go and fix the problem, which she just did, by the way, in the
tenderloin?
Yeah, but that doesn’t give her the power to go to Wells Fargo and
say to Wells Fargo, we want you to freeze all these accounts with
no due process of law.
That’s basically what Trudeau has done.
That’s the overreach.
That’s the line.
You think is like go and see you should have to go through a court
proceeding to freeze someone’s bank accounts, period.
Can’t just freeze someone’s bank account.
The law allows you to do this.
Now.
It’s called Rico.
So you follow the due process of the law and you can do all those
things free bird that you just mentioned if you want to free
somebody’s bank account, right?
You can actually do that.
The government has the ability to do that.
They don’t need to pass this.
Basically get out of jail free card to do whatever you want without
any oversight.
And to Chamath’s point earlier, have you exhausted the regular law
here?
They have the regular law haven’t even tried.
You can buy Fentanyl for five bucks on, you know, anytime you
want.
And meanwhile, the all the provinces are ending COVID mandates
anyway.
So this whole issue is moot.
So dumb.
It’s this is like the stupidest behavior at the end of a pandemic
that we’ve ever seen and shout out to George Lucas for getting it
right.
I mean, if you look at the theme of Star Wars, it was like, oh, I
just need emergency powers for a minute because of a trade Federation
blockade.
And here we are a crisis, a fake crisis.
Yeah, that wasn’t George Lucas, by the way.
I mean, that goes back to the Roman Empire, right?
Like, yeah, yeah, that was the formation of the Empire Caesar
God, Caesar God emergency authority.
I mean, this is a tried and true.
And the poll, the polls are actually right.
And the polls show that the most of the public in Canada is
applauding.
So what was the line from Democracy dies to applause?
Exactly.
That’s exactly that was Padme’s line in the Star Wars films.
All right, they’re aging.
Well, the prequels three members of San Francisco’s Board of
Education were they were the worst just to be clear, but go
not compared to the three, just huge dumps that Disney took on
the our childhoods with the sequels, three members of the
San Francisco Board of Education were called this week.
Massively, they lost by between 72% and 79%.
These were the virtue signaling maniacs who wanted to change
the names of all the schools wouldn’t reopen the schools,
yada, yada, and this really frustrated and they wanted to
get rid of elite AP classes.
All of this Jason they did they did.
Yeah.
And these three board members are out.
So London Breed,
Jason, Jason, just to be clear in the middle of a pandemic.
I think my understanding is that instead of figuring out how
to get these kids back in class how to figure out how they
could take off their masks.
They wanted to drop Abraham Lincoln and George Washington’s
name from schools because it was it was too regressive.
Yep, they canceled the gifted program because it made other
kids feel bad.
And a gentleman that wanted to serve on a committee
who I think was gay but not minority was excluded because
he wasn’t a minority.
Enough for them.
So these are the three people that 76% of San Francisco
citizens or you know residents just recalled and if you’re
not following this the tech industry had a major part in
this in terms of backing it.
There was a lot of claims which I’ll let sacks address in
a moment that this was a Republican driven out of state
movement.
But if you look there are not a hundred thousand Republicans
in San Francisco in all likelihood.
This was actually parents and a lot of cases based on the
geography of San Francisco and the density of certain
populations.
A lot of Asian Americans came out in force in some neighborhoods
90% were voting to oust these people Gary tan who is a product
of the San Francisco public education system and a great
entrepreneur venture capitalist was a leader in this movement.
So congratulations to him and this all is going to culminate
I think in May or June sacks will correct me with the recall
effort for Chesa Boudin this killer da who will prosecute
anybody sacks.
What are your thoughts on this victory and full disclosure?
You were a major donor to this.
I was the second largest donor and I was the largest donor
under age 90.
Arthur Rock was the biggest donor.
What a badass by the way, the guy is 95 years old.
He donated to $400,000 to this recall.
He was in fairness.
You live in San Francisco.
This is a backdoor issue for you.
You care.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Look, I think crime and schools are the key quality of life
issues in any community and it transcends partisan boundaries.
If your kids cannot get a quality education and you cannot
be safe in your community, nothing else matters and that
matters to Democrats just as much as Republicans and that’s
why like you said three quarters of San Francisco voted for
this recall even though 85% of them voted for Biden.
It’s not it’s basically a 90% Democrat city.
So, you know all these claims that was a Republican recall
turned out to be nonsense.
This was something that was broadly supported and and you
know, look, it’s the same reason that young can flipped a
you know, plus 10 Democrat state in Virginia, which is that
you know, it had a lot to do with school closures.
They kept the schools closed for a year and a half and then
when they were supposed to have conversation a PTA meeting
about reopening it like Jamal Smith said they spent five hours
debating whether to allow this beloved gay parent onto a
voluntary school board.
They didn’t they spent all their time, you know talking
about changing the names of the schools instead of how to
reopen them.
They also there’s chronic mismanagement.
I mean the school is something like 125 million dollars in
debt despite, you know being in a very rich city open for
one day.
That’s right.
Just so that they could get a state piece of the state budget
pie.
So these kids clamored back to school just so that they could
leave technically say, yeah, we were open and to get I think
it was a 12 or 13 million dollar check and then they shut
the schools down again, right?
And you brought a key point Jason, which is that the Asian
American community in San Francisco has been absolutely
galvanized by this issue because the school board also, you
know, Lowell High School is one of the best schools in the
city and it was merit-based and it had great advanced math
programs and this this board basically got rid of all that
stuff and it infuriated the Asian American community many
of whose most prominent members have basically risen out of
poverty because of the education they got at Lowell.
And so this war on merit that’s happening is something that
is going to you know, flip the you know, Asian American
community.
I think to when I when I was growing up, I grew up in a French
ghetto of Ottawa.
And I was supposed to go to a local high school.
That was just plainly trash and I was able to go to an
equivalent of Lowell this a public magnet high school that
had advanced classes and everything a gifted program and
it really did change my life.
And so I really understand what people are saying, which is
like when you’re in poverty, the only way out is through an
education.
Really, you may get, you know, get accidentally lucky, but the
only really predictable sustainable pattern here is is
through school.
And so when you deprive folks from being able to get a decent
education and there’s no real, you know, orderly logic to it.
It’s a really ridiculous kind of an idea.
The other thing is I think that this speaks very powerfully.
As sack said as a non as a bipartisan issue that these
Democrats have to get right because you know, you saw this
also in Virginia where Democrats basically went down this
one tack and you know, the Republican candidate Glenn
Youngkin basically said, hey, listen, the schools are broken.
It’s completely doesn’t make any sense.
We oppose a lot of what’s going on the watering down and the
critical race theory, etc, etc.
And he put it to a vote and a lot of people cross the aisle
there as well, where typically ardent Democrats basically
voted for this Republican governor.
I think the point is that there are just several issues that
are just so transcend like they’re just they transcend all
party lines.
And this is an anchor issue that we have to get right Friedberg.
Any thoughts on this?
Do you think this is the start of maybe a turnaround for San
Francisco because Chesa Boone is way more hated and safety is
an even bigger issue.
I think for a lot of people right now in San Francisco and
It dovetails with Asian hate and the number of Asian people
targeted in crimes.
So he’s got a I mean, if these people got out by 75% on average,
he’s going to be out by 95% is this a tipping point in San
Francisco going to make a read?
I don’t know.
I mean, look, I think there’s generally a broader
trend and momentum around what we classify as woke ism, which
I think is a little bit disparaging to the intention of
social justice and recognizing the primary points of social
justice through action and behavior in civic discourse and
government behavior.
And you know, this like the election of several da’s around
the country who take a different stance to prosecution of crime
to try and create better options for rehab and so on.
I think is not a movement that’s going to go away overnight.
I think there’s certainly a hefty amount of resistance, but
what we’re really doing right now is I think we’re learning
and realizing the boundaries of this movement and of this
moment, the one boundary that I think San Franciscans are too
bad in San Francisco, like, you know, as in the case in tech
has always been so progressive in terms of, you know, doing
these things faster than anyone else.
But what we’re realizing in San Francisco is non-prosecution
of criminals as the DA has undertaken over the past couple
of years leads to really heinous crime and rampant crime and
and this kind of social justice movement within the education
system causes a decline in the value of our education system.
Those are two really important learnings that San Francisco
has had over the past couple of years with this very important
and momentous kind of social justice movement, but it doesn’t
mean that the movement is over.
It doesn’t mean that quote-unquote woke ism is over.
It means that that social justice intent is still there, but
we’re realizing where the boundaries are and how far things
can and maybe should go.
I posted this article.
Tyler Collin, who’s a, you know, pretty well-known economist.
He wrote this op-ed for the for Bloomberg and what he said is
that woke ism has peaked and there’s just these two passages
that the builds on what freeberg said quote by woke ism.
I refer to a movement that on the positive side is highly aware
of racism and social injustice and is galvanized towards
raising awareness on the negative side.
It can be preachy alienating overly concerned with symbols
and self-righteous unquote.
And I think that that probably does summarize sort of like
where it starts, which is I think rooted in a very good place.
But unfortunately all too often where it ends, which is that
sort of moral absolutist judgment cancel culture around it.
And then the second quote that he said was the following.
He said quote woke ism is likely to evolve into a subculture
that is highly educated highly white and fairly feminine.
That is still a large mass of people but not enough to run
the country or all its major institutions in the San Francisco
school board recall.
For instance, the role of Asian Americans was especially
prominent unquote.
So I don’t know.
I just think that all these things sort of people are looking
for affiliation and you start with labels that bring you in
and then you have to sort out are all these labels really
true and how true are they and I think we’re in this moment
now where now that we know the mechanism of action of locus
and I just don’t think it works anymore and I think a lot
of people will say I believe in the high order of deals of
racial and social justice, but I don’t believe in the mechanism
of action.
And so the pendulum swung too far, but but but but the core
intent of a generation of change is underway, which is social
justice and climate change.
I think those are the two big points of concern be done with
this cohort under this will it will be done to this extreme
this fast, right?
And and I think that the pendulum went too fast too far and
it’s and there are boundary effects that are causing recourse
right now and we’re seeing this across the country, especially
in New York with the election of the mayor and San Francisco
that the da recalls happening in the next couple of months.
So sacks, what’s your prediction on the da recall by the way?
Well, that’s 95% but I mean it just to build on your point.
They were talking about 10% of the people in the United States
who are involved in this, you know, retweeting and virtual
signaling and you know, is Twitter a real place?
Well, no, a city’s a real place people have to live in San
Francisco.
And when these ideologies result in unlivable conditions for
people, well, they’re going to say, you know what, there’s
reality here.
How do we get competent people to take the positions sacks that
are being vacated now who should London breed put in these
three positions and maybe tech people need to I mean, this is
what I think has to happen.
I think some number of tech people have to get off the bench
and say, you know what, I’m going to do a tour of duty as
politicians in San Francisco to take back the city.
What should happen here in terms of who takes these positions
because Republicans can’t win in San Francisco.
So you’re going to need moderate Democrats, right?
Sacks before sacks goes, can I just say something?
Because I think I just want to say something that’s really
important sacks.
I’m sorry to jump in.
But Jake, how I think the point you’re making about the tech
people implies the tech people are effective and good at doing
this, but that’s not necessarily the fabric of San Francisco.
I’ve lived in San Francisco since 2001.
The number of people in San Francisco in 2001 that were in
the tech industry was a minority.
Since that time it became a significant size and over the
last two years since the pandemic it’s decreased significantly.
But San Francisco is a city with decades and generations of
history.
My wife’s family is multi-generational San Franciscans.
And I don’t think that traditionally San Franciscans view
tech people as the right people to solve these problems for
them that the intention of that city is not necessarily about
let’s get tech people to solve our problems.
They have a different set of values perhaps.
And so we often overstate and assume that tech people are the
right people and are this the problem solvers, but I don’t
think that that’s necessarily the right problems that people
want to solve.
So I just I just wanted to intervene and take these positions
because right, it’s really far left people are motivated to
take these positions.
I don’t see business people writ large across all political,
you know positions, but specifically San Francisco don’t
want to take these positions.
So is this just going to be replayed sex?
The recall effort was led by two parents autumn illusion and
Siva Raj.
They’re the ones who led this thing.
They’re the ones who rose up to basically oppose these crazy
school board members.
And that is who London breach to talk to.
I mean, she needs to go talk to the people who are successful
in organizing this recall because they understand the issues
obviously and the people are with them.
So either appoint them to the board or ask them for their
recommendations.
And I think what you see consistently, whether it’s with
this SF school board or the school boards that we saw in
Virginia, the young can very effectively ran against is that
they don’t believe the parents matter.
Terry McAuliffe fatal that his last gap was basically saying
that the parents shouldn’t get to decide what is taught in
the schools.
He basically said the quiet part out loud, but that is what
still across the country.
The teachers unions believe and most of Democratic Party,
the activists believe and until they start losing elections,
you’re not going to see a change in that belief.
Oh my god.
How awesome would it be exactor on the school board?
Oh my god.
Yeah, and just to put a pin in this and the cherry on top,
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted seven to four
to send a recall reform bill.
So their reaction to all of this is to do a recall of recalls
and say now you can’t recall somebody in their first year
and the people who are placed in these positions can’t run
again.
So now the speculation is that three people who got voted off
are going to run again.
So there’s a lot more to come on this.
Yeah, and also part so they’re putting this to staff that
they’re putting that on the ballot on June 7th, the same
day that we vote on the recall of Jason Boudin, the Board
of Supervisors now put in this measure that would make it
far harder to recall people.
One of the provisions of that is whoever London Breed appoints
as the successor, like you’re talking about, they cannot run
after that.
So it is designed to for no that makes no sense.
They’re basically what they do a great job, right?
Exactly.
It makes no sense.
So you have the Board of Supervisors trying to throw a wrench
into the democratic process.
Meanwhile, these are people who claim to be preserving democracy
saving democracy.
They are trying to throw a wrench in the thing is underlying
it David is they think they know better.
That’s what it fundamentally comes down to.
They’re willing to have democracy up to a point and when
that point is an unacceptable view by somebody else, they
feel like they know better and they’re willing to be really
draconian in whatever they do to decide.
Yeah, and shout out to Mike Bloomberg.
I’ll pull up the the tweet for everybody.
He hasn’t been very vocal or been on the stage much but
obviously did a great job in New York on reforming schools.
The San Francisco School Board recall should be a wake-up
call to elected officials, especially Democrats across the
nation.
Parents are fed up with the status quo and I put adults that
puts adults ahead of kids.
Yeah, well ideology ahead of results.
Well said Mike.
Yeah.
Well said Mr.
Bloomberg.
Yes, that was very good.
And Bloomberg has been very good on calling out the Democrat
their Democratic Party’s blind loyalty to the teachers unions
and until they’re willing to break with the teachers unions
who are their biggest donor.
We’re not going to get any real progress on school reform.
And this is the issue of my favorite political commentator.
One of them is Roy Tashara, who’s a Democrat.
He wrote the emerging Democrat majority.
He wrote a blog post talking about how the Asian American
voters are going to swing away from the Democratic Party
because of issues like this because of the decline of
standards in school and safety and and and the Asian American
community.
I think is galvanized on this Jason Boudin issue because they
have seen in all these cases of Asian hate where elders in
their community have been violently assaulted.
Jason Boudin has done nothing except release the perpetrators
occurs.
All right.
Well, listen, this is seems like a good turning point.
Let’s we talked about on this podcast over and over again
about the compression in SAS multiples in the public market
valuations, something that we’re still working through in the
stock market, which has been choppy at best over the last
couple of months.
An information story came out just this week, major crossover
funds like tiger and D one are slowing down their investments
in late stage private companies.
And I was talking to some folks who said the multiple compression
is here now.
They’re not doing the deals at 75 or 100 x revenue.
This is reported in an article by the information tiger global
told their LPS in a webinar earlier this month that it would
no longer focus on backing late stage startups preparing to go
public instead, they will focus on two things going even earlier
into series A and series B rounds and buying shares of public
tech companies that have sunk in value compared to the all time
highs. Obviously, we know twillow zoom block, all down over
60% from their one year highs, I could get into more details
here. But let’s stop for a second. And Chamath, what are
your thoughts in the dot com bubble?
It took somewhere between three to five years for most stocks
to bottom. And they bottomed, I think, peak to trough somewhere,
you know, towards 80% of where they were in 2000. Right. So it
took three to five years to go basically minus 80%. We did
that in three months, you know, maybe four months. And so the
markets have become a lot more efficient over time. So now that
we have that reset, it’s pretty natural that there’s going to
be a very quick reset on the private market side. And you
know, you have to go where the bodies are buried. And what I
mean by that, in this case is that overwhelming misvaluation
of late stage private companies. And so these folks don’t have
much of a choice, they have a lot of money that they’ve raised.
Before all of this happened, they have a huge portfolio of
stuff that they’ve marked up or have been marked up by others.
And they don’t want to go through the pain now resetting.
So part of the easy strategic decision there is to say, you
know what, we know this is a little bit radioactive. But
instead of really figuring out what the mark on these companies
are, we’ll go to a different sort of part of the playground
and play there. Because we don’t have to go and deal with these
issues. And, you know, we can do 10, 15 $20 million checks
into early stage businesses, pretty normal reaction strategically.
But I think the reality is that at some point in the next year
or two, these other companies have to get public, the hope
is that the market catches back up so that you can defend
the last valuation. And that’s the that’s the way that this
stuff doesn’t require a lot of pain. The problem is, if you’re
high burn, and you are counting on yet another successive round,
or you’re at a point in your life cycle where you need to go
public. In the next two years, if you go public, you will get
taken to the woodshed.
Take the woodshed being your valuation might be half of what
it is in your last round. So there’s going to be medicine
that has to be taken sacks, there’ll be medicine, some people
are gonna have to take some medicine sacks, what’s your best
advice being one of the great operators in the history of
Silicon Valley as a CEO of PayPal?
Well, I’m up there with share. I mean, I think this, I think
everybody agreed the top four people can correct me here. Tim
was a good operator.
I mean, I saw what you did to ICQ, man, you were riding that
that bad boy down. That wasn’t
I delivered a billion fucking users to a company. Okay, it’s
pretty decent.
You did pretty good at Facebook. I’ll say that. But if I would
think most people would say sacks, Cheryl, Tim Cook, Keith
Roy, boy, we’ll put that aside for the debate in terms of
operating a little dark, spicy barbecue pork here. Come on,
give me I’ll put you in the top 25. Sure. Okay. But I mean, it
wasn’t your wasn’t your chosen career. A little dark meat.
Nice. Please don’t get me in trouble. Bring me into your dark
people.
Wait, J Cal, who are your top four? Cheryl?
I put my top four in this order. I’ll give it an order.
So basically, for white people when
basically, Asian and Indian CEOs run most of the tech companies
and I’m talking about number two, CEOs, not CEOs. Just for
the CEO position. To be clear, I’m not talking CEO, I’m talking
to COO. I would say Tim Cook, when he was Steve Jobs, that’s
my number one operator last 20 30 years. Number two, I put
Cheryl Sandberg, who did obviously amazing things for
Google, and then Facebook, right? Those two would be my top
two. And then I tie my top two sacks as a PayPal and Zenefits
even though it didn’t work out. It was still a great run at the
time. And then I put Keith or a boy square and a couple of other
companies he did. Those are my top four. Anybody else want to
come at me? Go ahead. I don’t have complete data set on CEOs.
But where would you put sex? You did I put your mind to disagree?
Who might disagree?
Wasn’t Keith at LinkedIn?
Really? You are J. Cal lately.
It’s a love fest now. Yeah. Okay. There we go. There we go.
They’re back together.
You and Friedberg are at each other’s throats. So I’ll just
let you guys fight it out. And I’ll be all about the love. Yeah,
Friedberg. Why are you attacking J. Cal? Yeah, Friedberg.
Be quiet over there. No one’s asking you. Stay in your lane,
Friedberg. So sacks as an operator extraordinaire. What’s
your best advice to the company that raised 100 million? And
let’s say their valuation is now not a billion. It’s 500 million.
What are the steps you take? You got 14 months of runway in the
bank? Do you lay people off? Do you extend it to 24? What are
your thoughts? Okay, you must be dealing with this with companies
in your portfolio.
Well, there’s a few things going on. First of all, I think Tiger
built a great business and providing late stage sort of
passive non dilutive capital to companies, SAS companies, we
have a bunch of SAS businesses that they provided later stage
financing. I think those valuations are going to come
down. I don’t know that they’re going to be such a great partner
for series a firms because they are passive. And, you know, we
see is that series a companies need a lot of help. They need a
lot of advice, you need a lot of help with recruiting,
governance, governance, they need, you know, when they’re
growing from, say, 20 employees to 100, they need to know what
that org chart looks like, and on and on and on. So I don’t know
that if this report, I don’t know if this reporting is
actually true. But if the goal is all of a sudden for Tiger to
become a series a investor that competes with craft or Sequoia
or these other firms that are not very hands on, does it that
doesn’t seem like a great strategy to me. I do think that
for our later stage companies, they have to realize that, you
know, if they raise the other side of this, sorry, David, I
just want your reaction to this. I think it’s going to work, but
not for the right reasons. The reason it’ll work is there are
way more entrepreneurs now than there are great entrepreneurs.
And so of all of these entrepreneurs that exist, the
idea of getting passive money, where you won’t get fired, where
there is that remember, like, remember, when we were growing
up in Silicon Valley, the risk is always like if you take
Sequoia benchmark, you know, social cap, like there’s a high
bar for that capital, which means we are helping you run
this business effectively. And there’s a cost where if you
don’t perform, you will get fired. There’s always been that
risk. It’s true. And I guess that’s the argument they could
make. But the flip side is that there’s a lot of these. So the
CEO now, why would you take a $15 million Series A check from
Sequoia where they could fire you? Where’s $15 million from
Tiger, they’ll may never call you. We address that by doing
look, if a founder is really worried about that, we address
that by giving them three board seats, you know, we might have
one, they might have three. I mean, my view on it is you just
never fire a founder unless he does something criminal. It’s
just that simple. But so look, I think there’s ways of
addressing the governance where you can get the help or the
value out of an early stage firm without giving up the control.
So yeah, I mean, look, that’s the pitch that Tiger would make,
but I think that’s addressable.
What do you think of that pitch freeberg? We’ll give you the
$15 million Series A, you don’t have to have a board, you can
just be passive and let us know how it goes. Give us a quarterly
report. We’ll look at the p&l.
That’s all of crypto now. Anyways, that’s true. Well, I
mean, that’s a fair point. No governance in crypto is leading
to a lot of weird stuff. I can tell you, I tell people this a
lot. So I had three term sheets for my Series B. It was from
Andreessen Horowitz, coastal ventures and founders fund and
founders fund came in kind of last minute. But I went with
coastal, even though it’s a lower valuation, because the
node was pretty insistent, like, let me put someone that could
be useful some, you know, government person, because we’re
doing a lot of work lobbying in DC, on your board, we won’t be
on your board, we won’t bother you. And I took the round. And
then my Series C, I took from founders fund, because Brian
Singerman, who’s obviously a good friend, you know, made the
case like, look, our model of founders fund is we let founders
run the business, we’re not here to tell you how to run your
business. And they were both great fits. And you know, it
worked out. Well, I didn’t, I had, I have had experience with
antagonistic VCs on boards. And, you know, generally creates a
pretty negative dynamic. Now, when I was the worst story,
without the person’s name, I don’t think I want to go public
with it. So I’m not going to do that. But when I was on, give us
an idea of what the behavior would be, because there are
people in the audience who want to know what is bad behavior of
VC, just give us a composite. When you’re an entrepreneur, or
a CEO running an early stage business, you live that business
20 hours a day, you know, the details, if you’re smart, you’re
thorough, you’re analytical, you’re creative, there is no one
that’s going to come in the boardroom for two hours a
quarter, and suggest things to you that you haven’t thought of,
there’s no one that’s going to come in the room and be smarter
than you at your own business. And so more often than not,
Vinod’s been exceptional at defining this problem. The problem
is VCs join a board, and they think that they have to quote
add value. So they come in, and they make a bunch of suggestions
and recommendations and push you to do a bunch of things. And
as Vinod has said correctly, many times, they more often than
not add negative value, they can actually destroy and damage
a business, because they need to feel like they’re exerting
some degree of influence over the business. And as a result,
they push the business to do things that the CEO or founder
otherwise wouldn’t be doing. And that often ends up in a kind
of weird sticky kind of place. So I just validated the tiger
pitch right there. I think that’s right. And by the way,
it’s why founders fund founders fund is fantastic. I don’t know
if you guys are LPS, but their investment returns are so far
beyond what I think anyone really realizes they’re incredible
investors. And a big part of it is they try and find the
entrepreneur that doesn’t want and doesn’t need the help. And
then they give them the capital to go and execute and they leave
them the heck alone. And they are just so good at finding those
folks, identifying them and then literally being passive in
how they kind of manage and operate their business. And
that’s why they were so freaking good.
I think the people you’re talking about are a lot of rookie
VCs who come in and then yeah, they think they’re just
experienced x operators, even people who ran businesses who
say I know how to run a business and look, no two businesses are
alike. So maybe the way they ran their business with their team
and their market and their industry worked well for them.
But now when they got to come in and do it with someone else’s
business in some other space, with some completely different
team, you know, they try and exert influence. And really,
it’s just, you know, not want it.
Let me go to sack sacks. Hold on, I want to just get one from
you. Give us an idea because you’ve been in the business for
over 20 years. I mean, by the looks of it, maybe 40, but 20
years, just crushing it in the business. What’s the worst
behavior you’ve seen on a board? You can make a composite of
like a VC being destructive on a board.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think sometimes VCs will have sort of
hobby horses and they’ll keep pushing for things that the
founder doesn’t want. That’s not productive. But what I would
say is, first of all, let me just say like, I’m not somebody
who likes to take board seats. And I, I do it as it’s like I
see it as a cost, not a benefit to me, because it takes up my
time. If I didn’t have to ever take a board seat, that’d be a
great as far as I’m concerned, that’d be a good thing. I’m not
somebody who wants to, you know, insert myself and get on these
boards, you know,
offered as an incentive. No,
I only only took a board seals. Yeah, the only reason I’ll ever
take a board seat is because I have to do it because the
founder insists that otherwise they won’t go with I’ve seen
it with them. So exactly. So you’ll do it for one year,
right? You’ll say, Hey, I’ll do it for a year.
I always time limited now because I just can’t. I mean, I
can’t make a 10 year obligation. You know, it’s typically like
one or two years and then you know, we’ll see doesn’t mean
I’ll roll off in two years, but but I but I need to have the
expectation set up and and the reality is if the company can
perform well for another two years, they’ll be at a different
stage. And maybe they won’t, you know, need my help as much. So
tomorrow, the two most valuable pieces of private equity that
I own is a company called DCG. And it’s a company called
Netscope. And collectively, it’s like a billion dollars worth
of stock that I own what I’m on the board of one. I’m not on
the board of the other anymore. And I text with these guys
maybe once every two or three months at best. So, you know,
completely confirming David your point that great founders are
just end of one individuals, you know, Barry Silbert, Sanjay
Berry, next level guys. But that’s very different than the
the series a playbook because when I ran institutional money,
I’m telling you there is a pressure to be involved and show
some value. And I do think that there is a level of judgment
on the CEO that has happened. Now, maybe that’s changed
historically. But I think that’s the single biggest pivot that
one would exploit. If you were tiger or code two or D one
stepping into the early stage game, which is to essentially
make it a feature and it’s not dissimilar to when DST and Yuri
Milner entered the late stage round. You know, what was his
big differentiation? I’ll take common stock and I won’t take a
board seat. I do not need a board seat to be influential. It
seems so counterintuitive and so against the grain, but he
acknowledged what was this thing that up until that point was
true, which is common and preferred converged in price per
share. So buying common in a late stage company was the same
as buying preferred.
You know, that’s something you should explain a chamath for a
second people don’t know this, but at an IPO,
well, let’s start with it. So when you set up a company, you
have a price per share of the common stock and then a price
per share that the series a investor has. The series a
investor is buying preferred shares that actually looks more
like debt than equity. And what I mean by that is there’s
typically a coupon. There’s a rate of return. There’s
accumulated dividends. All these features give it a certain
price per share and the common has none of those features. And
so it has a low protective provisions and that gap is
typically around 20 to one when you set up a company. Okay, and
that’s what allows you to hire employees and give them very
very cheap options with embedded upside. Then what happens
is you raise more and more of these series B series C series
D these preference stack, right? Preferred shares build up,
but the value of the common keeps rising too. And by the
time you go public, the gap converges. What Yuri realized
was, hey, wait a minute. I’m buying a company a year or 18
months before it goes public. The price of the common and the
price of the preferred are roughly the same. And so I’m
just going to, you know, do that and I’m not going to take a
board seat because it’s clear this company is successful. So
similarly, for Tiger D one and code two, I would just observe
the obvious and kind of put everything that we’ve just said
on the table, which is, hey, guys, I’ll give you the money.
You’re either end of one or not. I’m making a guess that you are
and I’m just going to get out of your way and leave you alone.
I’m bundling governance and unbundling the governance and
advice piece from the capital piece, but you’re gonna still
need that governance and advice piece. I think it could work.
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of great founders or their
founders who start young and experience become great. And the
smart ones listen to advice on the way and they seek out people
who’ve done it before. And so, you know, yes, they may be an end
of one business by the growth stage. But that doesn’t mean
they don’t need any help whatsoever at the Series A
stage. Such a good observation. Yeah. And look, I think there’s
been I think there’s been an evolution Silicon Valley, I’d
actually say there’s been like three distinct phases in the
venture capital world. And I remember all of them. So you go
back to the the night the late 90s. Okay. When you had this
mentality on the part of VCs, that if a company became
successful, you would just automatically replace the
founders, right? You go bring in a professional CEO upgrade,
that was a disaster. Okay. And, and that’s when founders fund
Peter came in, I think founded founders fund in 2003. And the
reason they called it founders fund is to indicate they were
gonna be pro founder, and they would never replace the founder.
And they would let you do whatever you wanted. And I think
you want to tell the backstory of the Sean Parker stuff and how
that happened. Yeah, I mean, so basically, both Peter and Sean
Parker had, you know, experiences, they felt were very
negative with Sequoia. And by the way, I have great relations
with Sequoia, Roloff, who worked with us at PayPal is there. And
I think they’ve evolved as a firm. So I’m not calling them
out or anything. But, but both Sean Parker and Peter felt like
Sequoia pushed to have them replaced. And so with Plaxo,
specifically, there are a couple of different companies involved.
But when Peter was CEO of PayPal, as well, that, you know, he
felt he felt that pressure as well. So when they then founded
as two of the four founding partners of founders from back
in 2003, the whole point was, we are going to be pro founder,
you’re never gonna replace you will let you do whatever you
want. I think that was that was phase two. And that became I
think, the dominant model. And so becoming pro founder was now
table stakes. And I think the third phase has been, you know,
what Andreessen Horowitz has now done with this massive, like
the services and the value add, which is that we’re going to
basically not only be pro founder, but we’re going to like
bring all these resources to help you. And that’s the era
we’re in right now. I mean, from the, from our perspective, like
as as craft, I mean, look, it’s not in our interest to get into
any dispute with a founder. And if we feel like our advice isn’t
being taken, well, we just back off. You know, of course, we’re
pro founder, like we don’t want the control. We’re not control
investors. And, you know, if it’s if it’s, if it’s becoming
frictional, we’d rather just get out of the way.
No, it’s just not worth it. The underlying thing that you’re not
saying, though, it’s because you have enough of a fund that’s
large enough where you can have enough bets where any of these
any of these things to the upside is a total needle mover.
But anything that goes to zero doesn’t actually diminish the
fund or impair it meaningfully. So there is no upside to getting
engaged and really being non anti founder. So yeah, I think
it’s a I think it’s a part of a business model. But one thing I
want to tell you about Parker, Parker was single handedly
incredibly responsible for keeping Zuck in the seat when he
was president of Facebook, as Parker wrote, you know, the
structure that really allowed Mark to keep control super
voting shares,
it’s active to add on to your your point, I think that there
has been. So there seems to be a bifurcation around the services
model or not. But the fourth thing that seems to have
happened, and you guys tell me if I’m wrong on this, but it
plays into the tiger global story. When I was, when I got
that term sheet for my series B, at Climate Corp, Mark Andreessen,
I was trying to raise like 25 to $30 million. And Mark Andreessen
was like, we’re gonna give you a term sheet for $40 million more
than you were asking for. Because we want you to use that
extra capital to go faster to go harder to grab the market
because we have this big pitch in business is grabbing the
market. And that seems to have also become a bit of a mainstay
but not just a mainstay, but now almost like the kind of standard
pitch that a lot of the later stage guys are taking, which is
like, here’s so much capital that it helps you make the
market. And then the SoftBank Vision Fund kind of took that
to the extreme with $100 billion raise and Tiger Global, I think
last year, have publicly said they deployed about $15 billion
into startups, where a startup may in a natural cycle kind of
evolved to needing $70 million raise or $100 million raise. And
they’re like writing checks for 250 or 300. And saying this
extra capital gives you the ability to move faster. And the
reason is, the faster a business moves, the higher the multiple
they get on their revenue. So the higher the growth rate, the
higher the multiple. So if you can deploy capital faster, if we
can find a business where we can pump money through you to get it
out the door faster, your multiple goes up and Tigers
model was let’s just get the multiples up. There’s multiple
expansion and growth. So we’ll make money two ways when the
company goes public in 18 to 24 months. Obviously, when the
markets end up tanking and all those multiples compress, no
growth rate is going to solve that problem for you. But having
more capital than maybe you were thinking or asking for also
seems to have become kind of attacking. I don’t know if that
if you view that as kind of this fourth evolution, but that
certainly wasn’t the case 20 years ago, when VCs were being
careful about is it a $6 million round or an $8 million round,
what’s the right amount of capital. And nowadays, it’s much
more about take more than you need.
I’ll say there was a 3.5 in there, which is, you saw a
little bit of lack of governance or superpowers on the part of
like some incompetent founders or bad founders. Just you know,
whether it’s we were Theranos, whatever, too much control, not
enough governance, things go off the rail. But, you know,
based on this discussion, I really think this bifurcates
when it’s a first time founder versus a second time founder in
what I see, because I have been doing board training for seed
companies where I will just have three founders sit in on each
other’s first board meetings, we do one board meeting each, and
I train them how board meetings works in what I experienced with
Sequoia on my board and other boards. And first time founders
like the tactical stuff, how to run a board meeting legal HR
hiring partnerships, go to market strategies, man, it is
all tactical all the time. And then when I’ve been on with
second and third time founders, you know, they really are like,
here’s all the materials, here’s what I’m thinking about, what do
we think strategically, so they go from the tactical level to
the strategic and mission level awfully quick. And they actually
seem to enjoy having those four meetings a year. Whereas the
first time founders really need to have six to 10 a year in
those in that first, you know, call it year two of a company.
That’s my experience.
I realized in this discussion, that the market has really
meaningfully changed, meaning when I was actively investing,
even in the early 2000s, or sorry, in the in the, you know,
2011 1213. There was a culture where if you underperformed, you
would get replaced. And I think David, what you just spoke about
which, I guess is true, has really changed, which is if
you’re running a multi multi billion dollar fund, where every
check is $20 million, the upside is billions, but the
downside is negative 20. There’s just no point. And so
you know, Sequoia used to be known as a very, very, very
tough, tough, tough place for CEOs that were underperforming.
Now they got a $9 billion fund. Now you have maybe 20 years
ago, it doesn’t matter anymore. Not No, not even even 10, less
than 10 years ago. I think it was, I think it was known as a
very tough demanding place. I think benchmark was known as a
very tough demanding place because the money was much more
finite, right benchmark still don’t still that case.
Expectation culture, they never they never grew their fund size.
No, Jason, you’re not you’re not hearing me. I am. I think what’s
happening is, listen, I had Sequoia on my board, and I
worked at Sequoia. So there’s a difference between high
expectations, which I think all these folks have to have and the
willingness to replace the founder as CEO. And what I’m
saying is every VC claims this, but there were a handful of VCs
that had the courage to do this. I mean, famously, Mike Morrison,
john door, you know, had it out with Larry at the you know,
right, right after this round, like either go public, you know,
get your business model or give us your money back famously at
Google. So they’re not they’re willing to draw a line in the
sand. I think that that has fundamentally changed at all
these organizations, because the fund sizes have gone up. And the
and the mathematical reality of venture capital has changed
something else you’re missing, which is you got to remember
Moritz and door, we’re not operators. And now these
companies are being run rule off is running Sequoia. And he’s
an operator and he was there. So the changing of the guard and
Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were operators. So the operator
class behaves very differently. I disagree with you. I think
that fun respectfully just takes No, hold on. I think that fun
size dictates his behavior more than any singular other feature.
When you’re running a $9 billion fund, you just don’t sweat that
changing of the CEO. And David said it really well. You just
say, Okay, I’ll cut our losses and move on. We don’t lose. I
think it’s more about the culture change in Silicon Valley
of a bunch of MBA finance people who have never run a company now
moving and running companies. But you know, let’s move on to
the next any closing thoughts on this one?
Well, just I mean, Jason, you start to make this point that if
you’re a founder, and you want to eventually run a great public
company, when you IPO, guess what, you’re going to have
governments. And what I’ve seen big time, right? I mean, there’s
just Delaware law, there’s just a lot of like expectations around
being a public company. And so if you don’t have a board, you
know, and you’re not constituting one until you go
public, there’s going to be a massive amount of cleanup that
you have to do. I mean, that’s what I’ve seen. And so you’ll
end up scrambling to create a board, I think that a board
serves so many purposes early on of giving you advice and giving
you structure of providing support, help services, you can
still remain in control while getting those things. And I’m
just, I’m just skeptical that like, if you form a company with
completely passive VCs, you don’t even serve on a board,
like, you’re gonna have to do a lot of cleanup later, I’d say at
a minimum.
Totally. I think that that’s true, too. Totally. I’m not, by
the way, I’m not saying I advocate this. But I just think
that the reality is that if these large late stage crossover
firms really step into the early stage, I think they could
really build a big book of business. I do think there are a
lot of founders who would love to just be given the money and
just to be left alone. I’m not saying that they think they know
that it’s better for them. But on the margin just to be able to
be left alone. Now, what has changed maybe those everybody’s
going to be very hands off just because all the fund sizes have
exploded. So at that point, then you know, what is the difference
between Sequoia and D one time will tell.
I just know that like when I see a founder doing something that
I think could risk the company going off the rails, I’ll say
so. And then, you know, if it keeps happening, and situation
gets worse, I’ll say so again, I might mention the third time I
might not, at a certain point, I’m just like, maybe after like
two times, I’m just like, they don’t want to listen to me,
that’s fine. It’s their decision, their company, their
decision, they go off the rails, their problem, you know, we’ll
move on to the next one. I mean, that’s the reality.
Sometimes founders have to learn by doing it, like sometimes
their intent and you know what, they could be right and you
could be wrong too. So it’s hard as a, as a it’s hard as a
board member, you know, that’s why I’m very judicious in giving
advice as a board member now, and I’m on a bunch of boards and
do word training, because when the rule of was on my board, and
he still is, you know, he would ask great questions. And he
would be very thoughtful about Hey, have you thought about this?
Or when I got advice from Doug or Michael Moritz directly, you
know, Doug would say, Hey, well, can you share the two year plan
with me? And I’d say, you know, we haven’t built a plan. And he
said, Well, you know, Jason, you know, hope is not a plan. Let’s
make a plan. And let’s discuss, you know, the milestones along
here. And it was amazing to have that level of thoughtfulness
around totally vision as a founder.
I love I mean, as a founder, I love getting advice. And I think
you got to be really dumb not to seek it out. I mean, I when I
was a founder, I would even though I was sort of competing
with any off, I would meet with him and I would like get amazing
tidbits. Just recently, we did it wasn’t like an official board
meeting because roll off isn’t on our board, but he’s a big
investor in one of my incubations, Colin. And we just
did a meeting with him. And, and, and
gets it in every time. Not to be confused with all in, but no,
yeah, not to be confused. We have a trademark.
It was it was me and Axel, who’s the co founder of Colin and, and
roll off. And we had like an amazing meeting where we got
like, I’d say amazing advice from raw, that like, focused us.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t know these things. But it’s just like
when you’re in the weeds, sometimes you don’t actually
crystallize and focus on the most important thing. And I came
out of that meeting, feeling like, okay, roll off just
refocused us on the most important thing. And it was
immensely valuable. And you’ve got to be like dumb not to seek
that out, no matter what stage you’re at. Because I seek it out
today.
Yeah. And think about this, David, you’re in the thick of
things. He’s on squares board, he’s on other boards, he’s got a
picture of the entire playing field. It’s like somebody who’s
the coach of 15 NBA teams. And you’re like the coach of one,
he’s seeing things on other NBA teams that they’re doing in
methodologies and best practices that you’re just not going to
see. So I mean, again, and then if you look at the great
founders, TK used to come to me and say, Hey, you know, this is
the thing I’m going to be doing at the next board meeting, or
here’s the thing, can we jam out? And he would just ask for a jam
session, he came up with that term, and three or four people
would get together and just jam and talk for five hours about
the product. It was awesome. All right, let’s go on to David
Sachs, his favorite section of the show. Science with the
Sultan of Science himself. Oh, I thought you were gonna say his
favorite program. Oh, enough with that. Oh, we can’t talk
about that. That was exciting. You have to you if you are
engaged in the science segment, it’s actually PG or in a fight.
All right, let’s cover it. Here’s the deal. If David Sachs
is engaged during the science portion of the class, we will
let him have his fight. As the as the teacher here, tell us a
little bit about stem cells. And this HIV story, I was gonna tell
sex that the earth is round. Okay, it’s not flat. I don’t
care. Yeah. How does that affect Solana? So sorry, the story that
I think we wanted to, you guys wanted to cover today with the
HIV story, which incredible. Yeah, I suggested this topic. So
I’m interested. Explain it to us. HIV is a retrovirus. Meaning
once you get infected, it doesn’t go away. He doesn’t care.
He’s he’s flipping through his politico notes to figure out
what did he miss saying that he was supposed to say today? He
just flipped over to Ben Shapiro. He’s listening to
Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris in conversation. Go ahead.
Okay, the HIV being cured headline, you know, we can dive
into it for two minutes. But HIV is a retrovirus. When you get
infected with HIV, it stays in your body forever. It actually
ends up living inside of your immune cells. That’s what makes
it such an interesting, challenging virus. And it
destroys those immune cells. So over time, you end up getting
AIDS. And the way it enters the immune cells is through a
specific protein. Some people have a genetic mutation, where
if there’s a change in the their DNA, and that protein is
different, HIV cannot enter their immune cells. And they can
actually they are naturally immune to HIV. CCR five. Yeah.
And so what’s happened is found apparently in white, northern
Europeans. Yeah, like Norwegians, I think. Yeah,
exactly. And anyway, so what’s the interesting study that was
done, all immune cells are made from stem cells in your bone
marrow. And so you know, all the white blood cells that we have
that fight off our diseases come from our bone marrow. And when
you get a blood cancer, sometimes you end up getting so
severe that you have to actually wipe out all the immune cells in
your body, and give yours and you end up with a bone marrow
transplant. So you get new bone marrow put in your blood cells
put in. And hopefully, if you can survive the therapy and
survive that treatment, those that new bone marrow will
produce new immune cells in your body will recover, and you will
be cured of your blood cancer. So what happened is people had
HIV. And when you get this, this bone marrow transplant, you end
up, you know, they give you radiation and chemo, and they
wipe out all your blood cells. And, and then they give you this
bone marrow transplant. So they selectively chose bone marrow
stem cells that came from people that have the genetic mutation
that that prevents HIV. So then when these HIV patients that got
blood cancer got a bone marrow transplant with this mutation in
it, they were cured of HIV. And so it’s a pretty profound kind
of demonstration of what we already knew, which is that this
genetic mutation can can prevent HIV. And there are a lot of
therapies that are underway right now, to actually use gene
editing to induce that mutation in people’s blood cells in their
bone marrow without needing to give them a whole transplant.
The first guy that did it, the first guy that did it was
German, right? Or he was in Germany, I think, and he
unfortunately passed away. They cured his his HIV AIDS, but he
unfortunately had a relapse of the leukemia that killed him. But
I think all three cases of people that that have been
quote unquote cured, have been these leukemia patients.
But I’ll say two things, two things about the future of this
kind of possibility. Number one is you don’t need to get a bone
marrow transplant to have this mutation induced in your cells
to prevent this infection from kind of occurring in your body,
you can use gene editing tools to do that. And so we are now
developing gene editing therapies, where rather than go
and get a whole bone marrow transplant, to cure your HIV, we
can actually edit yourselves, those edited cells will now be
resistant, and you will be resolved of HIV. The second
thing is the way that they gave people the bone marrow
transplant, the way they created those stem cells for the
bone marrow transplant was from umbilical cord blood from from
newborns, which is very rich in stem cells. And this is a
traditional way of kind of giving people stem cell based
therapies is you go and source stem cells from another body, or
your own body, which are called autologous stem cells. But like,
I just want to say one thing, what’s really interesting in the
future is not going to be about pulling other people’s stem
cells into your body, and finding them from you know,
fetal blood or what have you, we now have the technology, which
I’ve talked about multiple times on the show called Yamanaka
factors, where theoretically, we can take your cells from your
own body, turn them into stem cells, grow them in a lab and
use that as the therapy that’s called autologous stem cell
therapy. And rather than use stem cells, we’re trying to find
them and sort, you know, figure them out where they are in your
body and pull them out, we can actually do stem cells from your
body. And that’s like, you know, 15 years out is autologous
induced stem cell therapy, where you actually make your own stem
cells, and then give yourself all sorts of therapies, not just
bone marrow transplants, but you can heal lots of tissue in the
body using these stem cell systems.
We don’t really hear about HIV AIDS anymore. In that article, I
think it said that there was about 37 million people around
the world that have HIV AIDS. And it’s incredible, actually,
the amount of progress that science has made in this
disease. I remember when I was growing up, it was made to be
like this incredible boogeyman. Yeah. And it really governed
like a lot of social norms at the time, because we were still
discovering what HIV AIDS was. And, you know, how, you know,
how do you think about sexual promiscuity, you know, from a
moral and ethical perspective? I think it had a huge impact on my
generation.
Absolutely. It did. It was a death sentence. They made us
paranoid.
So so here’s what’s happened. therapies have gotten so good
at suppressing suppressing the virus. If the virus is
suppressed far enough, even though you are always going to
be infected, if it’s suppressed far enough, the who and the FDA
have both said you can still have unprotected sex and not
transmit HIV. And so even though there are plenty of people out
there that might be having unprotected sex with HIV, the
therapies have suppressed the viral load to the point that
they’re not transmitting it actively. And so that’s been a
big breakthrough in science over the last decade.
And then they also had these prep pills, right, which people
could take proactively if they thought they might, you know,
find themselves. But I mean, Chamath, you and I lived in a
generation where I mean, it was the end of things. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it was the end of days. And they’re like, I don’t
know, it was a single biggest thing that I was that I was
taught in sex ed classes to be afraid of, be really scared at
all costs. And then the problem that it that it created was like
a, you know, in countries that had a large Catholic population.
You know, the Catholic Church was so, you know, evil, they
had, they were undecided on. They were the opposite. They
told people in Africa to not use condoms. When AIDS was
rampant, it was the biggest evil, second biggest evil the
Catholic Church did in modern history. Obviously, the first we
know,
I have a contribution to the segment.
I know, I took this relationship. Look, I remember
how scared people were of AIDS, you know, back in the 1980s,
when this came up. And I remember that there was a head
of the NIH, who even whipped up people’s fear, hold on people’s
fear, by saying that even casual even casual contact within the
same household can spread it. And you know,
yes, we know fact he dedicated his life to trying to solve and
reduce the suffering of solve for AIDS and HIV.
No, in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he was the face of government
difference towards AIDS. And he spread fear and was medically
wrong about it. Go check the records. He was a screw up on
it. He worked tirelessly and work tirelessly on it.
J. Cal, I think sacks is right in the sense that like what we
thought we knew back then turned out to be wrong. And I think
that’s a really important point. You know, particularly in
science, it’s a process of discovery. What we thought we
knew back then turned out it was all a hypothesis. It’s all a
thesis until it’s proven or disproven. And that’s the case.
Read Andrew Sullivan. I mean, you know, Fauci was absolutely
the enemy public enemy number one of the of the gay movement.
Who is it? Tony? Tony? Yeah. Well, it was a Tony, Tony
Perkins. There was actually a debate that Fauci was in on AIDS
where a gay actress literally said to him, I hate you. And if
you read Andrew Sullivan’s blog, he will talk about how he
remembers back in the 1980s, that Fauci was sort of public
enemy number one in the gay community, because of his
position on this during the Reagan administration. And so it
is a lot of civil disobedience, act up, etc. Remember, and he
responded by putting massive resources into this. So I think
you know, if he was that’s not listening to Andrew Sullivan on
this, Andrew Sullivan, he is not that way. Wait, Andrew Sullivan
is the reason why more than any other public intellectual, why
we have marriage equality today. He is number one, he advocated
for marriage equality, and in the New Republic made the case
for it before anybody else and popularize that argument.
I’m a fan of his writing.
Let’s not so don’t try and portray him as a far right
winger, whatever.
Portray fouture, you’re going to Fauci his intent. Anyway, to
believe that Fauci is an evil person.
I think you and many other people have mysteriously
forgotten who Fauci really is.
Okay, you think I know the conspiracy that you think
Fauci his intent is to, you know, cover up the
and he intentionally was working against solving for HIV.
That’s ridiculous.
Do you think Fauci had good intentions?
And if you inferred that sex, do you think Fauci had good
intentions?
I don’t I don’t really care about his intentions. I just
want to look at his actions. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.
It’s amazing to me that a public official who was so wrong, back
then in the 1980s, 1990s, on the public health rights of our time
would just be given a free pass. And along comes a new public
health crisis last couple years. And he’s been completely wrong
about that, too. So why are you giving this guy a free pass? I
don’t get it.
Hey, sex in a cloud of uncertainty in a time of war. Do
you think that leaders need to show strong intent and clear
signals? Or do you think that they should be wishy washy
because they don’t know enough?
I think they should just be right.
And if they’re trying the best with what they have with the
information they have at the time.
Okay, well, yeah, you there’s some forgiveness for for making
mistakes. But when you’re constantly wrong, maybe it’s
time to get somebody else in there. That’s true. And Fauci,
by the way, Fauci app with respect to code, we talked about
it before 100% participated in a suppression of the investigation
into the origins of COVID. There was an active attempt to
suppress that. Come on. You know that the the foliage email show
it.
It’s a good science segment.
I do want to give a shout out to the researchers who actually did
this with this woman in New York. It’s pretty freaking
incredible. What’s incredible is that they did it with HIV
patients who had blood cancer. And it was a really kind of like
thoughtfully designed experiment. Incredibly
thoughtful. Yeah, it’s been four years. So I mean, this has been
baking for a long time. By the way, as I zoom out and hear you
guys talk about what HIV was like, you know, back in the day
and the fear around it, I do think that 3040 years from now,
given the tools we have with induced stem cells and cell
based therapies, and there are hundreds of cell based therapies
coming to market over the next few years, they’re all in late
stage clinical trials, as well as gene editing, I think
hopefully, and I’m optimistic that one day, we will look back
at cancer and aging in the same way that we’re talking about HIV
today, and that both of those diseases can and will be
resolved with the tools that we’re developing through
science. And you know, there’s, there’s, there’s going to be
bumps along the road. But man, I, you know, it’s so clear that
he’s go, go.
Look, I think I think what Freeberg just said, actually is
really important and inspiring. And I think it’s great. And I
was kind of joking around with the Fauci thing. I didn’t
expect it to become a tangent. So I don’t need to keep going on
and on.
When you see him, when you see him in editing, try to change
his position.
Keep that whole segment.
Can you use of kind of a voice?
If you had to become so argumentative, we wouldn’t have
spent five minutes on it.
If I’m correct, you’re incorrect position that
on ramp, please, because I got to fly to Europe. Go.
Okay, here we go. David Sachs and Paul Graham have gotten into
it. It’s a battle for the ages and the stakes are so low. The
stakes are so high. And the animosity is so high because the
stakes are so low. Here we go.
Wait, but get it before this. Does Phil Helmuth qualified this
as a billionaire battle or a
literally, he revealed the billionaire if you follow Phil
Helmuth account, it’s being da greatest, being the greatest on
Twitter, being da greatest to get that phil. No, Phil Helmuth
outed he on his Twitter. His new billionaire bestie is his which
he stole bestie from me. I used to call everybody bestie and he
just co opted it. Like he co opted me calling him off the
dictator, but I’ll tell the dictator origin story later. Is
Stanley from DoorDash. Stanley tank, co founder, chief product
officer of DoorDash. Great guy. Really great.
Helmuth’s latest truffle.
Exactly. Because he found it. Okay, here we go. So some to
Paul Graham.
Go ahead, sex. All right, here’s the issue to pick what’s your
beef? Here we go. Actually, I did not seek out this be sex
vendetta section of the
panel. Listen, PG waded into my tweets. He came after me waited
on waiting. I love it. Please any billionaires out there who
want to like debate like come waiting into my tweets. Mark
Cuban didn’t make a big ass of himself. I don’t want to deter
these guys from from waiting in because it’s great. Here’s what
basically happened is I tweeted a video of all these
multimillionaire celebrity hypocrites partying massless at
the Super Bowl. And then meanwhile, the next day, my
three kids have to go to school in California wearing their
masks. That is ridiculous. Okay. It makes no sense. We all know
that. Okay. Any sane person knows that. That’s what I
tweeted about. I don’t know why of all issues that was
triggering in a PG, but he had to come in and say, Well, they
were all partying outdoors. It’s like, really? Looks to me like
they’re in a skybox. And if it has three walls in the ceiling,
I call that a room. But in any event, that wasn’t he was he was
misinformed. Because the rule of the Super Bowl was that if you
were not eating and drinking anyone under over the age of two
have to be wearing a mask. So you know, my point stands, I
just want to air. So here’s where things kind of went south
is, is so that I tweeted, blink twice, you know, Paul. And and
here’s the thing, I wasn’t totally trying to be snarky with
that comment. Here’s why I said that is because explain what
that means. I didn’t understand that. What does that mean?
Blink twice? Well, it means like, are you are a captor,
you’re being held kidnapped by these concepts that you have to
wear? No, you’re being held hostage by somebody. And the
reason why I said that is because is is look, if PG had
just been some crazy dumb person ever would have said that the
fact is that PG is smart. He writes extremely well published
a lot of interesting things. He’s an independent thinker. So
it almost seemed to me like somebody is holding him hostage
here. Because how can this really smart person be making
this case? Anyway, it kind of went south from there. So I have
no desire to continue that.
Meanwhile, Kendall Jenner wore North Face shoes to Justin
Bieber’s. Yeah, can you
she knows that he has a North Face? How did he do that?
Gossip, gossip, gossip.
All right. So this has been saxes, then corner for the week
and for a regular segment. But
the segment saxes,
I want to stay on the main issue here, which is Oh, please, let’s
do it every week. But
am I wrong about this mass hypocrisy that’s going on? How
in the world
picture of sacks in the mess? No, no, no sacks in the bag.
Jake, I’ll stop. I want to air 100% support for sacks on this
statement. I totally agree with you on the mask hypocrisy, as
well as the mask mandates in schools. I think it’s
ridiculous. We think that we’ve pivoted so far away from first
principle thinking on this stuff. It’s nuts. I totally
agree with you completely. And on this point, on you wasting
your time fighting with people on Twitter, my personal advice
to you as a friend is just cut it out. But buddy, but totally
agree. Oh, it’s entertainment.
All right, everybody for the dictator himself chamath
poly hoppitya. Rain Man. Yeah, David Sachs. And the Sultan of
science. If you see him out and about as for a selfie, Sultan of
science love selfies. He does. Love you boys. Bye. See you all
next time on the all in pod. Bye. Bye.
Rain Man, David.
sack.
We open source it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with
it. I love you.
Besties are gone.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy
like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release
that.