E71: Russia/Ukraine deep dive: escalation, risk factors, financial fallout, exit ramps and more

0:00 David Sacks: Man for the people 0:50 Escalating tensions over Russia/Ukraine; nuclear scare; evolving forms of warfare 16:27 Assessing impact of economic sanctions: first, second and third-order effects; exit ramps for Putin and Russia 34:23 Reflecting on if taking NATO expansion off the table would have prevented war; Putin's risk of ruin; lessons learned so far 46:12 New version of economic warfare; possibility of a regime change; comparisons to the Cuban Missile Crisis; realist vs. idealist; lessons for Taiwan 1:05:22 Market impact, increased volatility, thinking in decades, managing risk 1:19:22 Car T-cell therapy breakthroughs and approvals; CRISPR patent controversy; Sacks makes a final point Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://twitter.com/phildstewart/status/1499535843207389186 https://www.onmanorama.com/news/world/2022/03/04/garry-kasparov-former-world-chess-champion-attacks-russian-president-vladimir-putin-ukraine-invasion-twitter.html https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1574056/world-war-3-russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-fiona-hill-us-national-security-council https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/nato-meets-ukraine-calls-no-fly-zone-hinder-russia-2022-03-04 https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1499587642115117059 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/ukraine-russia-war-zelensky.html https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LUKOY:OTCMKTS https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/wheat https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1498873063378612227 https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1499574209567199235 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/world/europe/lindsey-graham-putin-russia.html https://twitter.com/biancoresearch/status/1499385705591709698 https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-russia-germany-still-blocking-arms-supplies/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-hike-defense-spending-scholz-says-further-policy-shift-2022-02-27/ https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/world/europe/switzerland-russian-assets-freeze.html https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/02/28/sweden-arms-ukraine/ https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/04-april/e0403h.html https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/biography-george-h-w-bush-slams-iron-ass-cheney-rumsfeld-n457911 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY. GDP. MKTP. CD?locations=RU https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1499386637066727424 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-wests-green-delusions-empowered?s=r https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084580235/russia-blocks-facebook-twitter https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/technology/ukraine-war-misinfo.html https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1497834538843660291 https://www.indiatoday.in/fact-check/story/fact-check-russia-ukraine-war-old-woman-not-giving-invading-russian-soldiers-the-finger-1920479-2022-03-04 https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1496998762496946203 https://twitter.com/morganhousel/status/1499484089082007552 https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/euro-pinned-war-stokes-stagflation-fears-2022-03-03/ https://twitter.com/zekejmiller/status/1499739582115553281 https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/wheat-corn-prices-surge-amid-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/2774260/ https://www.myelomacrowd.org/janssen-s-cilta-cel-car-t-receives-fda-approval-for-relapsed-multiple-myeloma/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/fda-approves-jjs-cell-based-multiple-myeloma-therapy-blood-cancer-treatment-wsj-2022-03-01/ https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/a2-bios-activator-blocker-car-t-cell-therapies-show-early-promise-solid-cancers https://www.wsj.com/articles/crispr-patent-gene-editing-dispute-11646187911 https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/1499588624664657926

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Friedberg?

  Dude Sax, I love that look. Look at that shirt.

• 0:02Jason Calacanis?

  Look at that, man.

• 0:03David Sacks?

  Is it too noisy for a podcast?

• 0:04David Friedberg?

  No, you look very relatable. You're like a, you're like a, an American man, like just like at home, doing stuff.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  Is he trying to go full Tucker on us?

• 0:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is a really, really horrendous shirt that you're wearing.

• 0:14Jason Calacanis?

  That is a horrible, I mean, I, that was the same shirt Tucker was wearing last week.

• 0:18David Friedberg?

  Oh my God, Sax is gonna be so appealing to middle America right now. He's like.

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Look, he's going for the everyman.

• 0:23David Friedberg?

  Yeah, he's an everyman. He doesn't have a blazer on.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  He's trying to get the purple pills. Are you gonna go chop wood with Tucker?

• 0:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 0:29David Sacks?

  I may not be a man of the people, but I do try to be a man for the people.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sax.

• 0:42Jason Calacanis?

  And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, man. Nice. Queen of Kenwa.

• 0:50Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. It's obviously been an intense week and there is a topic, uh, there's really only one topic to talk about this week, and that's the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. With me to break all this down, I'm gonna take it from a couple of different angles. The Rain Man, David Sax, with his power flannel on today. He's gonna go chop some wood after this, trying to appeal to the everyman.

• 1:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Power flannel.

• 1:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's a power flannel. It's a power flannel. I think that was gifted by Tucker. And the Sultan of Science, hot off the.

• 1:25David Sacks?

  How do you know, how do you know it's a flannel instead of a cashmere? How do you know it didn't come from one of Chamath's little, um.

• 1:32Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath would never wear that shirt.

• 1:33David Sacks?

  Baby elephants.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  If you sent that shirt to Chamath, he'd burn it. That would go right in his pizza oven.

• 1:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I wouldn't burn it, but I, I would wipe my butt with it.

• 1:42Jason Calacanis?

  Geez, here we go, folks. Uh, and hot off the launch of the Cana Beverage Printer Replicator, the Sultan of Science himself, David Friedberg, and back from a little holiday.

• 4:06David Sacks?

  He had that video that came out with his cabinet standing behind him. That galvanized all the people of Ukraine to stand behind them. And then the West now wants to stand behind the whole country of Ukraine. So it's really been, you know, amazing leadership by Zelensky. And, um, you know, it's too bad in a way. We didn't have that kind of leadership among our allies in, say, Afghanistan. You know, we had this guy Gani who got in the first helicopter out of there when the, when the troubles started. Um, so, uh, you know, his, his leadership has been strong and admirable, and it's basically galvanized the West. And I think that Putin, I think, must have underestimated the level of resistance he would face.

• 4:44David Sacks?

  And also the unity of the West in terms of sanctioning him, uh, and providing support for the Ukrainians.

• 4:54David Sacks?

  All of that being said, I think we're now at a very dangerous sort of crossroads because the situation is, is very volatile. Uh, and you've got so much variance in the outcomes that can occur now. Um, I think you're seeing people prognosticate everything from, you know, uh, Kiev gets turned to rubble in the next week. And the Russians basically power through and win to this turns into a long-term insurgency. To, you know, there's going to be some sort of uprising in Moscow and, and, you know, regime change there. And I think because the variance is so high, because all the sort, you know, because the two sides are playing for all the marbles.

• 5:31David Sacks?

  So to speak, and you've even got, I think, intemperate and insane remarks by Lindsey Graham, basically calling for, uh, you know, calling for Putin's ouster, you know, which I think is going to give. I mean, that quote, just to pause there. Yeah, it's going to give the Kremlin, I think, a propaganda tool, but for, for rallying people internally. But the, the, the point is just, it seems like we're playing for all the marbles right now. And, um, I think that's a very dangerous place to be. And I'm seeing, you know, insane rhetoric and commentary by people trying to push us into war. And so just the other day, you know, one of the, one of the things I tweeted about is one of the craziest things you hear is we're already in World War III.

• 6:13David Sacks?

  Well, and you know, Kasparov said this, I mean, he's kind of a known to be a little bit of a hothead, but you also had Fiona Hill, who's supposed to be a Russia expert from the State Department, who frequently is the go-to source for CNN and other publications, also saying we're already in World War III. Well, no, we're not. I mean, if we were in World War III, you'd see the mushroom clouds, assuming you were still alive and not vaporized. So it is incredibly reckless for people to be saying things like this. And there is just, you know, this drumbeat of war that is being pushed by cable news and by the Twitter sphere. And just today, thankfully this morning, NATO announced that it would not be imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

• 6:55Jason Calacanis?

  And why is that important? Explain that.

• 6:57David Sacks?

  Well, because, because there's all these people who are saying, well, we shouldn't send boots on the ground to Ukraine. We don't need to get militarily involved, but let's, let's do a no-fly zone to basically help the Ukrainians.

• 7:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, how do you enforce that?

• 7:09David Sacks?

  What a no-fly zone means is that you're going to shoot down Russian planes.

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 7:13David Sacks?

  That's what it means. You are going to war. It may not be boots on the ground, it's boots in the sky. So had we done that, had we given in to the emotional appeals, and I think we all feel the tug on our heartstrings, but had we given into that, we would be potentially in a shooting war with Russia. And that would be the most serious, we're already in, I think, the most serious foreign policy situation in, you know, my lifetime. And, you know, I'm almost half a century old. So, you know, it's, it's very dangerous. And, you know, I've been saying for the last month on this podcast, I've been actually advocating for the cause of not getting militarily involved. And a month ago, it seemed like an argument I didn't need to make. But now it really does, because both sides are, are sort of,

• 7:58David Sacks?

  and this is, there's almost a unanimity in Washington that we need to continue escalating the situation.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, my, my concern is...

• 8:07David Friedberg?

  Less about the Washington intent to put boots on the ground or boots in the sky. And I'm much more concerned about NATO allies. There's 30 member nations in NATO. And if any one of them does something stupid, if there's any action by any even rogue element within the military or some statement even by some politician, some NATO member, you know, you could see a reaction potentially from Putin. And then Article Five kicks in, which is this collective defense article in NATO. And then the United States has an obligation to enter the conflict.

• 8:52David Friedberg?

  And that's the one scenario you didn't mention, which is the scenario I am most concerned about, most frightened by, is we don't know when or if a Franz Ferdinand moment could occur here. That someone does something stupid, some Polish tank rolls across the border and shoots down, shoots at some Russian, you know, tank, and then the Russian tank crosses over and then all of a sudden, we've got to go to the rescue and we've got to go defend that NATO member and then all of a sudden, this whole thing sparks into a wildfire.

• 9:23Jason Calacanis?

  It felt like last night could have been that. When you look at the fog of war, you know, was basically this nuclear reactor, if it explodes, if it has, you know, an episode, would do just tremendous damage to the whole continent. I mean, if you're living in a NATO country or in Moscow, if that thing had gone up, which I know is a very, would be a rare occurrence and they were shutting it down, et cetera. So, but there was that rumor last night, it felt like there could be a tipping point.

• 9:51David Friedberg?

  Nuclear material is like a whole nother level. It's like, it has nothing to do with war at that point. It has to do with extinction. You know, a nuclear reactor is almost like a temple on Earth to God. It's like this holiest of holies. No one can, should, or ever could consider that to be a point in conflict, ever. It's, nothing should be touched, let the wars of humans continue on the rest of the Earth's surface, but nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, that's unleashing the fury of the gods on Olympus. And when they come down, they scorch the Earth and nuclear material, you know, is an extinction kind of, or is, you know, kind of a cataclysmic event for this planet.

• 10:36David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, that, that goes well beyond this idea of like, is it NATO? Or did someone shoot at someone? Let's all go fight. It becomes like almost existential to the, to the condition of humans.

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, so what does that say about Putin then? I mean, Putin targeted that facility specifically.

• 10:51David Sacks?

  No, hold on a second. Hold on, I think that's fake news at this point. Do you see the tweet by Michael Schellenberger? So, hold on a second. You said this is fog of war.

• 10:58Jason Calacanis?

  Last night's tweet, I did see last night's tweet.

• 10:59David Sacks?

  Okay, so I don't necessarily think this is fog of war. I think this might be disinformation. So, here's what happened is, and it, it wasn't just misreporting. Zelensky tweeted out a video where he basically was saying, this plant has been attacked, it's on fire, it's going to be Chernobyl times 10 for all of Europe. And then the Foreign Minister of Ukraine came out with another statement just like that simultaneously. So this was coordinated. And then I saw on all the cable news networks, all of them, there was no difference between Fox and CNN, MSNBC, same reporting. They were all in a panic about this. And then, you know, and that now, then we find out very quickly the truth, which was confirmed by the White House, which is no radiation, no explosion, the, the fire was

• 11:42David Sacks?

  sort of tangential, it wasn't core to the plant. So, I think we have to be very careful now to guard ourselves against disinformation that is designed frankly to escalate the situation and pull us, to draw us into a war. Simultaneous with this, there was a New York Times op-ed by Zelensky and one of his aides who was standing next to him sort of transcribing, and the headline was something like "I'm Fighting to the Last Breath." Look, that is heroic. I mean, I think we can all recognize Zelensky's bravery and courage in doing that. However, the point of that article was to tug on our heartstrings to get us involved in the war. And what he said in that article was, "You don't need to send

• 12:23David Sacks?

  boots on the ground, but impose the no-fly zone," which we just talked about is a declaration of war.

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but no, what I was talking about with the nuclear power plant is not that it wasn't being hyped up by the media. Certainly, like, this was becoming like their ratings bonanza, and they were definitely hyping it up. And maybe Zelensky was giving a warning, "Hey, this could escalate." But the Russians did target that. They were bombing around it. They were firefighting. Sort of Friedberg's point, like, this is, I think, crazy behavior by Russian troops, by Putin, to actually, you know, try to seize a nuclear power plant. It seems pretty crazy. Chamath, you've been silent thus far. Let's get Chamath involved here.

• 12:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a 17th-century phrase that says, "Adversity makes for strange bedfellows."

• 13:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think what happens when you are in the middle of enormous adversity, you know, you need to do whatever it takes to win, right? That's, I think, why Zelensky is so patriotic and viewed so heroically around the world now. He's trying to defend his country and his people. I want to take the counter of, David, what you said. I actually think we are at war. But it's the most positive form of it in the sense that we are learning a different kind of warfare. Now, if you think about how we used to fight, up until, basically,

• 13:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the Persian Gulf War, it was armaments and tanks. And then that evolved in the Middle East because we had to fight insurgents and, you know, urban terrorism in many ways, right? I think this is a way in which we are learning that there's a different kind of warfare as well, which is fundamentally economic. And so, you know, it may not take the same shape as drones and missiles and fire and guns and bullets. But I think you would be foolish to make the mistake that we are now not at economic war with Russia. And at the end of the day, the outcome is the same, which is either they survive or

• 14:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  they don't survive. And everything we've done points to that we are willing to fight and we are willing to put a lot of economic collateral and chips on the field in order to win this battle. So I think in that respect, we are kind of at a war.

• 14:52Jason Calacanis?

  Is this a nuclear-level economic decoupling?

• 14:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is my point, is like everybody has a historical framework where they want to go back to how the natural path of escalation works. And I think this is a very different form of escalation that we need to consider. And I think that this is the kind of warfare that may actually, you know, be the way in which wars are fought in the future. You seize assets, you shut off access to supply routes, you make it impossible for anything to work. So, you know, I'll give you a simple example. A form of warfare is what's happening right now in the sense that, you know, for example, the Russian skies are completely clear, not just because that, you know, no external airlines will necessarily fly there, but because Boeing and Rolls Royce and GE and

• 15:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Airbus basically pulled all of their support, all of their parts, right? We've gone to war with respect to their petroleum and LNG supplies. How? Not necessarily because we won't still stop payments, which we are still enabling, but because the actual refiners won't take the oil and the LNG, because they then would be subject to sanctions. The people who would ship that are no longer taking those payments or those barrels of oil into the marketplace because they can't get insured by international banks. So in all of these various ways, we are actually at war. And I think, you know, maybe this is the way war should be fought in the future, because it'll save thousands of lives in the more classic way of describing how lives are sacrificed for.

• 16:26David Friedberg?

  I want to make a counterpoint. My concern, Tamak, is that we've rushed into a reactive response with respect to sanctions and seizing assets in a way that maybe not be calculated over the long run. Meaning, like, are we setting ourselves up for another Iraq-Afghanistan situation where we rush into a war and we don't have an exit strategy? And the issue is that a lot of the assets that we've effectively wiped the value down to zero have a repercussive effect on global businesses and the global economy. As an example, you know, this company that we were texting about called Lukoil, they were worth $60 billion

• 17:07David Friedberg?

  a few days ago. We effectively wiped them out to zero. And 65% to 70% of the shares in that company were held and owned by public retirement funds, pension funds, mutual funds that are used for retirees in Europe and the United States. And so, you know, a significant amount-

• 17:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this is a complete red herring. I've told you this in the private chat. I think this is a complete, complete red herring. And the reason it's a red herring is that the global total market cap of all of these businesses is meaningfully different than the amount of total CapEx that these guys represent. And inasmuch as you are going to take the equity values of certain of these companies to zero, it's in the grand scheme of things not that much equity value.

• 17:53David Friedberg?

  We can absorb it.

• 17:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're not talking trillions of dollars.

• 17:56David Friedberg?

  Forget about the equity value. Just think about the economic repercussions where there is leveraged positions and swaps and derivatives in place, counterparty swaps in place with a lot of these companies that are now going to default. And we're not going to know that till the end of this month, when everything has to settle and no one's going to be able to make their payments. Small price to pay, Friedberg, if- Well, hold on one sec. This applies both to Russian companies that are suppliers and buyers of assets, products, and services from international businesses. And all of a sudden, that line item just zeroes out.

• 18:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't believe the economic value of all of that oil exceeds the market cap of Lukoil. I don't believe it.

• 18:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I don't believe further that the economic value that's held by non-Russian actors is meaningfully more than a few tens of billions of dollars.

• 18:48David Friedberg?

  We're gonna find out pretty quick.

• 18:50Jason Calacanis?

  For sanctions.

• 18:50David Friedberg?

  By the way, Russia and the Ukraine combined account for roughly 25% of global wheat exports.

• 18:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me, let me say it differently.

• 18:57David Friedberg?

  That wheat goes to Egypt, and from Egypt it goes throughout Africa, and there's a lot of nations and a lot of people that depend on that food supply, and that food supply's now cut off.

• 19:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, I understand, but now we're talking about something different. You wanna talk about wheat, we can talk about wheat.

• 19:12David Friedberg?

  I'm just talking about generally, I'm talking about zeroing all this stuff out and cutting them off completely.

• 19:16Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on, hold on a second. One of the things you have to realize, Friedberg, is that the purpose of sanctions is to create massive pain that stops a madman dictator

• 19:24David Friedberg?

  Hundred percent agreed.

• 19:25Jason Calacanis?

  From invading other countries and causing a world war. So while it is tragic that some pension

• 19:32David Friedberg?

  Hold on, let me finish, Friedberg.

• 19:34Jason Calacanis?

  While it is tragic that people will suffer and people maybe can't get their Netflix or can't get their Facebook, or some wheat will get disrupted, all of this is the, the, is the better choice than going to war with Putin, and it's meant to create pain and suffering. It does not create pain and suffering, then Russia will not change.

• 19:53David Friedberg?

  I understand the intent.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's the point of sanctions.

• 19:55David Friedberg?

  Jake, I totally get it. I totally understand the intent, and I totally understand the point. My, my point is, have we really done the calculus? Because when you make this much of an impact this fast, when you rush into what we might call an economic war with such significant abrasion in such a significantly short period of time, do we really have a sense of where the calculus is? Because I don't know where the wheat imports are gonna come from for Egypt now, and I don't know where the millions of people that depend on that wheat supply are now gonna get fed from, and I don't think we have an answer. If we had a strategy that said, here's the solution, here's the solution from an energy perspective, from a food perspective, from a capital perspective, to fill all these holes, otherwise, we may all end up sharing that cost over the long run, and it's gonna be a big cost to bear.

• 20:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're wrong. And the reason why I think you're wrong is we've already seen how this has played out before. So in the last two years, we learned what governments are willing to do when you have supply shocks and demand shocks. And what they do is they turn on the money printer and they create enormous amounts of stimulus. Okay. And what we have now is a point where if these shocks are really, really, really meaningful globally, I think you're going to see the Federal Reserve and the ECB and the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan step in in a very coordinated way to provide liquidity to these markets.

• 21:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think what that has the byproduct of doing is blunting the economic consequences to everybody but the person who is sanctioned.

• 21:28David Friedberg?

  Do you think that's inflationary as well?

• 21:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No. And the other thing, in fact, it's the opposite. I, look, David and I have been the ones that said the risk is to a recession. We are now teetering towards a recession. Nick, you can throw this thing that I sent to you guys before. If you look back over the last 30 or 40 or 50 years and you look at every single period of when there has been a recession, what's interesting to note is that it's not always been the case that the price of energy has risen by 50% in a recession. But it is always the case that when energy prices spike by 50%, we enter a recession. We will contract as an economy. The government will have to become more accommodating. That is the price of this economic war that we have started.

• 22:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think it's a just price because what's happening is not supportable.

• 22:18David Friedberg?

  So Chamath, you are sure that we're, or you, you feel strongly that we're not entering into a condition of significant stagflation, where we're not able to re-stimulate the economy and we inflate everything with all this money printing?

• 22:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't even know what stagflation is, to be completely honest with you. I don't think I've ever seen it. I know how it's classically described. I think it's like pseudo-intellectual kind of gobbledygook speak. What I can tell you is I think that prices are... Too high in certain core commodities and goods. I think what's going to happen is we are going to find a way to subsidize those prices coming down. And I think the simplest way to do it is for the government to step in and become a buffer. And it will drive massive deficits. It'll drive increasing amounts of debt. But I think that is a simple way for us to make sure we put and ratchet the pressure. And just to speak on this other point, we have only just begun.

• 23:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Meaning just today, as we started the pod, Biden came out with an incremental new set of sanctions on Russian crude. So we're not at the, even in the beginning, we're at the beginning of the beginning.

• 23:23David Friedberg?

  I'm just worried this is a new kind of nuclear war. I mean, it's just frightening.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  If this is, if this is the new nuclear war, then it's a blessing because we're not going to have millions of people die. Sax, are the sanctions just right? Too strong, too little?

• 23:36David Sacks?

  I think what Friedberg is saying.

• 23:37Jason Calacanis?

  Versus going to war.

• 23:39David Sacks?

  I think what Friedberg is saying is that we're on an escalatory path here. That starts with sanctions, then leads to more and more sanctions, then includes arming the Ukrainians and on and on it goes.

• 23:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a big leap and I think, I think.

• 23:53David Sacks?

  No, we're already arming them.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  The Germans gave the, gave the Ukrainians Javelin missiles last week.

• 23:58David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I know, absolutely.

• 24:01David Sacks?

  And there's, there's a lot more coming. So, you know, what I would say is, back to something Jamal said, which is we're already at war. I, you know, call me a, call me non-binary, call me a non-binary thinker, but I don't, I don't like dividing our options in that simply into war and peace. I think there's like a spectrum here. And there, and, and you could call that spectrum an escalatory path. So there's sanctions, there's arming them and so on down the line. And I don't like characterizing what we're in or what we're doing as war. Because once you're in war, then it justifies anything and for the other side too.

• 24:36Jason Calacanis?

  So you're such a pacifist, Sax, it's awesome. Keep going.

• 24:40David Sacks?

  Look, we have to remember.

• 24:41David Friedberg?

  Wait, no, no, let me just clarify what I'm saying.

• 24:42David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me just wait. I didn't say we're at war. I said we're at a form of a war. It's an economic war. It's just a different.

• 24:47David Sacks?

  Well, I hope it stays economic then, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't like using that metaphor, but let's not debate semantics. But to, to Jason's point, am I a pacifist? What I would say is, you know, during the Cold War, we have to remember that this philosophy of containment that we had, the goal was to prevent the spread of communism while conceding that the countries that were already communist, that were behind the iron curtain, we would not challenge. We would not seek to roll that back. Why? Because we did not want hot war with the Soviet Union. And everything was calibrated to make sure that we did not blunder ourselves into nuclear wars, mutually assured destruction. And yet it almost happened anyway, most notably with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 25:28David Sacks?

  But rules of the game evolved, right? And so we did things like arm the Mujahideen, you know, rebels in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles. So that would be sort of the equivalent of the Javelins. But we sure as hell didn't put the American flag or a NATO flag on the boxes and on the trucks delivering those weapons. We delivered them through Pakistan, through intermediaries. There were rules of the game that we all understood. Now, I hope we are following similar rules, but it feels to me like we are, and, and I think one good thing is that both Biden and certainly Putin remember the Cold War. They're very involved in the Cold War. They'll all enough to remember it. And hopefully we remember those rules. The most encouraging thing I've heard Biden say this entire time was when he reiterated at the State of the Union that we would not get militarily involved.

• 26:13David Sacks?

  It's very important that he keeps saying that because, you know, the Russians are looking at these statements. So we just have to remember that, again, we're on this escalatory path. And, and one of the things that's going on here is, is, is a purity spiral. So there's a social media version of this and there's like a partisan version of this. So the social media version of this is that the way that you show that you're on the, the side of the good of Ukraine is you advocate for the no-fly zone, you advocate for the escalation. But if you advocate for slowing down, or de-escalating, or just taking a breath, you're called a Putin bootlicker, you're called Neville Chamberlain, I've already gotten about a thousand reply tweets coming at me saying that. So, the purity spiral on Twitter that

• 26:57David Sacks?

  we've seen in so many other contexts now pushes everybody into the, into World War III. Similarly, there's a partisan dynamic where, no matter what Biden says or does, no matter what new sanctions he imposes, the Republicans will always announce him for weakness, and the media and Fox News will always announce him for weakness. It's a one-way ratchet. How much more do you want him to do, is the question, and I think Friedberg asked, you know, a great question, which is, what is the endgame here? What are we trying to accomplish? And what I'm worried about is, the dynamic, this frenzy that, you know, what Balaji's called the chimp frenzy of social media, right? With cable news, and now social media,

• 27:40David Sacks?

  and partisan rhetoric, it all pushes us towards continual escalation at World War III. And who are going to be the grownups who say, "Listen, this is foolish, stand down, take a breath, by the way, we might want to keep some of these cards in reserve, we don't have to play every single thing right now."

• 27:57Jason Calacanis?

  To your point, I saw Lady G trending, I guess this is his nickname, but Lindsey Graham, literally explicitly said, "Somebody in Russia needs to assassinate Putin." I mean, this is a crazy escalation, and then on the other side, inside the, you have people saying, you know, Putin's a genius, and so...

• 28:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We are going to continue to ratchet up these economic sanctions, guys. We are, this is the beginning of the beginning of the economic sanctions. We're not even in the middle of them.

• 28:25David Friedberg?

  What do you think he's gonna do, Chamath? Like, what is the exit ramp for Putin? If we keep doing this, and he's in a corner?

• 28:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have no, I have no idea, but I think that it's clear, it's pretty, it's pretty plain as day, if you're going to be unemotional and just look at this from our, from the American...

• 28:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And European perspective, which is the only end game now is regime change. Right? And one step before regime change is a complete sort of detente and somehow, you know, surrender by Putin in the sense that he pulls back from Ukraine.

• 28:58David Friedberg?

  Not if 70% of his people support him, which is what a polling figure showed this morning. Right? And you know.

• 29:04Jason Calacanis?

  Be careful with those polls. I mean, people in Russia are not exactly going to say I'm anti Putin in a survey.

• 29:10David Friedberg?

  Well, J. Cal, I mean, look, you can say that to kind of defend what you believe about.

• 29:14Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not saying it to defend what I believe. I'm saying it pragmatically.

• 29:17David Friedberg?

  Just suspend it and assume for a moment that maybe that is the position of those people. Maybe they do believe in pride of nation. Like the United States would believe in pride of nation. If we were attacked, if everyone took economic sanctions against our country, would we not stand up and defend our president and our nation and say that our country is the prime country and our way of living and our life and we should be left alone? You know, this is, um, this is not an issue for the world to get involved in.

• 29:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, but let's play this out.

• 29:47David Friedberg?

  And so how do you end up, assume that is the case, how do you end up having a regime change where you don't have a country that's actually in revolt, but you have a country?

• 29:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have no idea. But let's play this out. Like, look.

• 29:57David Friedberg?

  Where people are rallying for what this guy is doing, if that is the case. Right?

• 30:01Jason Calacanis?

  Let's move our conversation to exit ramps.

• 30:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  From where we are, there's, there's two options, right? There's two options. Option one is Ukraine successfully defends itself. Right? And option two is Russia, quote unquote, wins. Okay? Let's just go down that branch for one second.

• 30:15Jason Calacanis?

  Or they settle. There's a third one, Shama. They, they come to a peace treaty, which is what's happened previously.

• 30:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, there's a third and then there's like, I guess what you're saying, Jason, is like everybody just kind of stops where they're, they are in place.

• 30:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they do a peace treaty. They give them the east of the Ukraine.

• 30:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Got it. Well, let's, let's play. So then what happens to all of these economic sanctions? Are they undone?

• 30:39David Friedberg?

  That would be part of the negotiation, right?

• 30:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe undone based on conditions?

• 30:44David Friedberg?

  The big question is, are the reparations paid one way or the other? And how do those get funded?

• 30:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, those reparations-

• 30:49David Friedberg?

  Does the IMF get involved and say, hey, we're going to fund your $300 billion war damage bill to the Ukraine? And, you know, there ends up being a-

• 30:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or do they just confiscate the $650 billion sitting in foreign bank accounts? That's owned by the Central Bank of Russia?

• 31:02David Friedberg?

  Again, like, how do you go back and lead a nation? And how does a nation accept that? How do they accept that their sovereignty has now been challenged? When a few months ago, they were the aggressor, right?

• 31:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then don't all roads go to-

• 31:15David Friedberg?

  I mean, look at what happened to Japan, by the way. You know, I mean, you know, it's a very similar kind of psychological shock that may not be as easy to swallow with modern Russians.

• 31:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Don't all roads then lead to, this is going to take a really long time to figure out?

• 31:29David Friedberg?

  A long, it's either going to take a long time, or it's going to catch on fire.

• 31:32Jason Calacanis?

  I thought Georgia took like 11 days. So, I mean, there's a Sun Tzu quote, which I don't want to butcher, but it was, "Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across." There needs to be a golden bridge here.

• 31:43David Friedberg?

  That's my point.

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  And we talked about- Well, we did talk about it two episodes ago, where we said-

• 31:47David Friedberg?

  Well, we're not, we're not the people running the country. I'm talking about, like, where's Biden? And where's the rest of the State Department in saying, here's an exit path for Putin? And clearly stated over and over again, and give him something to win, right? Like-

• 31:59Jason Calacanis?

  I think we gave a suggestion, David, correct me if I'm wrong, if you suggested, or I did, two weeks ago, when we started talking about this, which was, hey, why don't we just say, hey, we're not going to allow the, to allow Ukraine to join NATO for a decade? If you leave now, you know-

• 32:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're so past that.

• 32:15David Friedberg?

  We're so past that.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  Are we?

• 32:16David Friedberg?

  That has nothing to do with, I think, what's going on now.

• 32:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, you had countries, you had countries like, that came off the sidelines and have done things they haven't done 30, 40, 50 years, and in some cases, ever.

• 32:27David Friedberg?

  I mean, their industry just got gutted this week, J.Cow. So, like, there's a-

• 32:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should have done that three months ago.

• 32:32David Friedberg?

  There's a hundred million people worried about, there's a hundred million people worried about food.

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  If we had done it preemptively, would it have made a difference?

• 32:38David Sacks?

  I think it would have made a huge difference.

• 32:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like, look at Germany as an example. Germany undid 40 years of policy. You know, they had consistently been under-investing relative to their GDP in the military. And they made an explicit commitment to basically just ramp that up back above 2%. You know, they've also made commitments around their energy independence. You know, Switzerland is freezing bank accounts, something that they've really never done, and they've always stayed neutral. Sweden sending military support. So there's a lot of countries in Europe, in continental Europe, that have found a voice.

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's terrifying, right, Chamath? I mean, to live with this threat just east of you, this would be like us living with this threat in, you know, Central America or something. This is like two steps away. And I think that's what people forget is the geography here of, you know, France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine.

• 33:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this NATO commitment doesn't necessarily get it done at this point.

• 33:30David Sacks?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I didn't have to be part of anything.

• 33:33Jason Calacanis?

  What's the exit ramp for Putin?

• 33:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In my opinion, is that you ratchet these economic sanctions up so severely that then, you know, look, the thing is, hopefully, in the aperture of war, memories are short in the sense that, you know, if you ratchet these things up very aggressively, now all of a sudden, something from even two weeks ago seems like a much, much better place to be, right? And so that could be an off-ramp, which is like you basically find a way to take a lot of pressure off these economic sanctions in return for a détente.

• 34:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I don't know, but I'm making this up. I have no idea.

• 34:10Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it feels like there is no exit here because Putin has a lot of pride and nuclear weapons. Is this a no-exit situation, Sax?

• 34:19David Sacks?

  I think there's always an exit. We have to be willing to contemplate what that is. I think, to your question, let's go back for a second to your question of would it made a difference if we had taken NATO expansion off the table, say, last year? I think this year is probably already too late. But I think the answer is yes, regardless of whether you believe that NATO expansion is a real issue for the Russians or whether you think that's a pretext. Because, you know, people are in one of those two camps. Putin has been saying since 2008, in 2008, there was a NATO summit in Bucharest in which they basically declared, they proposed that Ukraine and Georgia could eventually be eligible for membership. That basically started this whole thing. The Russians at the time said, this is an absolute non-starter for us. It's a red line.

• 35:03David Sacks?

  No way will we allow this to happen. And in fact, later that year, they rolled the tanks into Georgia to put a stop to that idea in Georgia. In Ukraine, the conversation was deferred. They had this basically pro-Russian, democratically elected.

• 35:18David Sacks?

  Prime Minister, President, Yukonovich, who was deposed in a coup in 2014, a coup that was supported by our State Department and probably the CIA, okay? In reaction to that, Putin seized Crimea, not a year later, not months later, days later. The reason why he was able to seize it so quickly is the Russians actually have a naval base there at Sevastopol, okay? It's a lease, the area is leased from Ukraine, but they have a naval base there. It allows them to control the Black Sea. So, the Russian thinking on this, if you believe it, goes that, listen, we're about

• 36:00David Sacks?

  to have a pro-Western ruler come into Ukraine, installed by an American-backed coup, and now we're going to lose our main naval base in the Black Sea and it could be replaced with a NATO base? There's no way that's happening. So they moved to seize Crimea. And then after that, they started backing Russian separatists in the Donbass and the civil war began, okay? So that basically is what's been leading up to this. And then last year, they started getting very exercised about the possibility of this NATO proposal, which again goes all the way back to 2008, becoming formally recognized and Ukraine joining NATO. And again, this is from the Russian perspective, okay?

• 36:44David Sacks?

  And we could talk about whether there's a pretext in a second. But from the Russian perspective, they said that, listen, and Putin gave a speech like this, if Ukraine joins NATO, because of Article 5, the next time we have a border dispute, which is all the time, right? We could end up getting drawn into a World War III with you guys. And so there is no way we're going to allow Ukraine to be part of NATO. And so they proposed, they basically by December had given an ultimatum to the State Department. Now, what was the response to that? Lincoln came out at the critical moment and said NATO's door is open and will remain open. Basically said, you guys can, you know, take a hike.

• 37:27David Sacks?

  Now, obviously, that was an extremely provocative thing, and the Russians invaded Ukraine days later. Now, I think it's pretty obvious that if you take the Russians at their word that they believe, forget about whether you think it's true or not, but if you believe, take them at their word, that the same word they've been saying since 2008, that this is a red line for them, and they have a serious vital national interest there, then you should have diplomatically tried to resolve this issue. But even if you believe it was a pretext, and Putin is making up this whole red line thing, and his real goal is the expansion of Mother Russia and all that kind of stuff.

• 37:59Jason Calacanis?

  Or reunification.

• 37:59David Sacks?

  Or reunification. Let's say that's his real goal. It's still would have been a good idea for Blinken to basically declare that we are going to take NATO expansion off the table, which is simply an affirmation of the status quo. It's not appeasement. You're not giving anything up. You're reaffirming the status quo.

• 38:16Jason Calacanis?

  You're blocking something from happening in the future.

• 38:19David Sacks?

  Right. Why would that have been a good idea? Because the polling on this showed that the Russian people by two to one were in favor of basically taking this kind of military action against Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion, but they were not in favor of doing it purely for reunification. So you would have, if this was a pretext by Putin for his expansion as dreams, you could have taken away that card, and it would have changed his calculus. Would it have prevented the war? We can't say. But in his calculus, he's got to think, well, wait a second, maybe the people won't be behind this.

• 38:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's the good news, too. If you had given him that chip and said that we're not going to let them into NATO, and then he does invade, now you've proven that this person is in reunification mode, and he's deranged, and he's a war monger, and that this could go to other places, and Finland and Poland, and other people have a real reason to be scared.

• 39:12David Sacks?

  Yes, he would have much less internal support. So...

• 39:15Jason Calacanis?

  It would have been a much better chess move.

• 39:16David Sacks?

  Right. So there was a failure to listen. And this is what concerns me. So I want to, you know, George Herbert Walker Bush, who I think was a great foreign policy president, at least wasn't so good on domestic, at least got reelected, didn't get reelected. But everyone recognized him as a great foreign policy president. And he has a quote about this style. Of foreign diplomacy that we that his son practiced Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld. And the same people now in the Biden administration, it's all the sort of neocon foreign policy. He said, he called this iron ass foreign diplomacy. He called Cheney an iron ass and he called Rumsfeld arrogant.

• 39:56David Sacks?

  And, um, you know, what he basically said is that these guys, he's talking about Cheney and Rumsfeld. They don't listen, they just want to kick ass and take names. They never want to listen to the other guy's point of view. And, um, you know, he thought this was tragic. He thought it ruined Bush 43's presidency. And I gotta wonder, I mean, are we practicing the same style of iron ass diplomacy here? You know, um, well, now it's too late, we're already at war. I mean, I think if we had practiced, I, I, I think if Herbert Walker Bush and James Baker had been president last year and, and James Baker was Secretary of State, do you think we'd be in this mess? I don't think so. I think James Baker would have figured out a way to diffuse it.

• 40:38Jason Calacanis?

  Who is the political, who is the political scientist that you shared that link from in the group chat, uh, from the University of Chicago?

• 40:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, this guy, John Mearsheimer, who's sort of king of the realists.

• 40:48Jason Calacanis?

  I watched the video from him. It's quite convincing that we should have an approach that was, hey, we, we don't need to incite Ukraine to break off. We could let them make their own decisions and that we're kind of taunting the Russians. And I don't think, you know, he makes a pretty convincing argument there and I don't think you need to be a Putin apologist. You can keep in your head, this person's a dictator, this is a communist country, he's a murdering sociopath. And at the same time, we should not provoke him and let the Ukraine make their own decisions, but not encourage them to come into NATO. And we should have taken NATO off the table. It's pretty clear that that would have been a better, uh, decision here, but we, we still

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  can't think of an exit ramp here, which, and I don't hear Putin talking about, Putin has never said, I want X.

• 41:40David Sacks?

  Well, no, I think, you know, there have been times where he, well, I mean, look, I think his demands have been a nonstarter with us. I think at this point, he wants Crimea, he wants the Donbass to be independent, maybe, uh, under the suzerainty of Russia, some protectorate, basically. Uh, and he's talked about this, uh, denazification, demilitarization of Ukraine. I mean, so now I think the demands are escalated because they're at war and

• 42:05David Friedberg?

  He's lost too much. He needs to get more. Right? I mean, part of the, the problem is

• 42:10Jason Calacanis?

  You're saying he's stuck and he needs to

• 42:11David Friedberg?

  No, I think once you've, you know, once you've invested a hundred dollars, you gotta make a hundred fifty back. Whereas before he had invested ten dollars, he would have been happy taking fifty out. You know, and I think at this point, he's put too much in to walk out with the same sort of deal, you know, he was looking at before.

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  What are the chances he's overplayed his hand?

• 42:28David Friedberg?

  Like, the economic cost at this point to him, the loss of jobs, the loss of customers, the loss of the value of his currency. I mean, you add all this stuff up, uh, so much has been taken away. It's very hard to see him coming, feeling like he can come out of this thing ahead. And so he's only going to keep plowing forward.

• 42:46Jason Calacanis?

  Does he face the risk of ruin, Chamov? I mean, is this, like, at this point?

• 42:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, here's what I will say. In 2020, Russian GDP was 1.483 trillion dollars. Now, what percentage of that do you think is actually exports versus a domestic economy? Let's say half, let's be, just take a guess, right? So you're talking about 750 billion dollars of exports. So, um, let's just say that, you know, between the BOJ, uh, Bank of Canada, ECB, and the Federal Reserve, um, we all just collectively printed five trillion dollars. You can absorb many, many years of Russia's export loss. Now, it does have some gnarly

• 43:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  implications, you know, you probably have to work more closely, for example, with Iran. You have to get an Iran nuclear deal done. Why? So that we can get access to their oil, right? So it blunts the loss of the, of the Russian reserves, as an example.

• 43:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, we'd have to do some clever things on sustainability and farming. My point is, though, that I think the economic calculus of this decision is not as grandiose as it once may have seemed, post a COVID scenario where we were printing, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a month.

• 44:05Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's a, the only good news I can take from this, Ax, is, you know, the free world has now learned about what a dependency, like, we've literally woken up from the delusion that weekend. Hold on, let me just finish this one second, then I want to get your feedback on it. We have woken up from a delusion that we can intertwine our economies with rich, nuclear-powered dictators in communist countries, both China and Russia. And now, I think, the great decoupling and the great independence is upon us, with us moving semiconductors back onshore, going nuclear, maybe fracking seems, I think even any environmentalist will take fracking in Europe, fracking in the United States, over a dependency over a dictator.

• 44:48Jason Calacanis?

  So, is that not a silver lining here?

• 44:51David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's so obvious now to everybody that we need to be energy independent, that it was insane for us to throw away that energy independence. We've restricted it. I think that if there was a bill introduced, and I think it's being talked about, to repeal all the restrictions on fracking, it would pass the Senate 7525, meaning all the Republicans would vote for it, and half the Democrats would vote for it. So, I think everybody's on board now, and there was some remarkable, you see the tweets from Michael Schellenberger about it, it has come out that, you know who was backing all these?

• 45:24Jason Calacanis?

  Anti-fracking.

• 45:25David Sacks?

  The anti-fracking environmental movement in Europe.

• 45:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In Russia, in Europe.

• 45:31David Sacks?

  Exactly. And they fell for it, exactly.

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  And the Germans fell for it and turned off nuclear, and now, all of a sudden, they're dependent on Russia, and he has the pretext to now invade.

• 45:40David Sacks?

  Right, these environmental groups in Europe have been useful idiots for Putin and the Kremlin.

• 45:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that's what, that's what's so sad. I think I saw a tweet, it was something to the effect that 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, Europe actually produced more liquefied natural gas for Europe than Russia did. And the whole thing flipped because all these environmentalists forced Europe to shut down. They outsourced their guilt. They outsourced their guilt, but it turned out that a lot of those organizations may have been funded by Russia to basically affect that change. I wanted to say something, Jason, before, you know, there's a common...

• 46:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thing that you hear right now, which is, "Oh, economic sanctions don't work." And I just wanted to talk about that for one second. Which is, I think, I think there's a lot of people, there's a lot of chatter that historically, economic sanctions aren't enough, which is why you can't draw a very clear, bright line between that and military intervention as well. And I, as I thought about it, this is why I think you can actually fight an economic battle and an economic conflict without it pulling you into a military one. And the reason is actually because of what's happened in the last 40 or 50 years. You know, you have, like, the, the most critical infrastructure in the world, I think, is the financial infrastructure, whether we like it or not, right? Because, you know, energy infrastructure tends to be more localized, other forms of infrastructure are localized.

• 47:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the one real asset that is absolutely global and universal is the financial payments infrastructure. And, you know, what has really happened is that you can really cripple a country or an entity when you blacklist them from these organizations and these networks. And so this is why I actually think people underestimate the severity of, um, of economic sanctions, if done correctly. And I think before, you've never really, other than, you know, Venezuela and a couple of other, you know, North Korea.

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela.

• 47:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cuba, you've never really explored the totality and the impact of this kind of sanctions on a large global actor, which we're now going to figure out.

• 47:45Jason Calacanis?

  This is almost greater than sanctions. You're being, you're not allowed to participate. It's not even like you're saying, "You can't export this, you can't import this." It's, you're now not allowed, you have no seat at the table.

• 47:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the crude oil example and the airline industry example are two incredible examples of the ripple effects of these sanctions, right? So again, just to reiterate, like, if you're a European-based refiner, in order for you to go and buy that oil, you may have, you know, a working capital line from a German bank. Well, that would violate the terms of that bank now, and so you can't go and get that, right? If you actually have that oil on hand and you refine it into gasoline and you want to put it into the open market, and you call Flexport as an example, and say, "Help me get this stuff to X, Y, Z location," or Merst, or somebody else, they won't do it.

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, and you look at the tech sanctions that have started, it sounds minor, but you have Netflix is pulled out of the country, Apple's not selling products in the country, Google is starting to restrict services in the company. And this is going to have a massive impact on their ability to just participate in society. They just turned off proactively this morning. I don't know if you saw that. It was right as we were getting on air. Facebook's been banned. Instagram is still on. Twitter's still on, but the Russians now are turning off information into the country. While every other country, every other company is turning off their services there.

• 49:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the global economy, or not even the global economy, I think Japan, Europe, Canada, America, can collectively support five, six, seven trillion dollars of subsidies to blunt the economic impact of these sanctions. That's effectively shutting Russian exports off for eight, nine, 10 years.

• 49:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Think about the, so, you know, this, this is, that is the damage.

• 49:37Jason Calacanis?

  Any thoughts here as we kind of come to no way out here and just the Russian economy being decoupled?

• 49:46David Sacks?

  So, so I think that if we're going to figure out a way out, we need to assess what our objectives, you know, what our objectives are. And we talked earlier on, on, on the show about this idea of regime change and that there wouldn't be an answer without regime change. I disagree with that. I, you know, just those two words, regime change, should make everybody cringe because regime change was the justification for the Iraq war, for Afghanistan, for Libya, for Syria. And every single one of those things has been a disaster. When has the United States of America successfully achieved regime change? In the last 20 years without creating enormous blowback?

• 50:27David Sacks?

  There's an assumption that somehow if Putin gets toppled by an internal coup, that we end up with Gorbachev 2.0. Well, maybe we do. Maybe we end up with a hardliner who's even worse. I don't, you know, I don't.

• 50:39Jason Calacanis?

  So what should the goal be? Obviously, regime change would be wonderful if the Russian people chose that, but what is the?

• 50:44David Sacks?

  I'd say ceasefire.

• 50:45Jason Calacanis?

  Ceasefire and peace, right? Yeah, I agree.

• 50:47David Sacks?

  Ceasefire. So I think Putin miscalculated the resolve of Zelensky and the West. You know, Zelensky was like this TV actor, became president. He was very, before this, he was like 25% popularity. Now he's at 90 something percent. I think. Putin underestimated his resolve.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  Would you say Putin has lost the information war? I mean, that's pretty staggering. I mean, it's pretty clear that Putin thought he could win this information war. This is the first meme, the first meme war.

• 51:16David Sacks?

  Yeah, I agree. It is a meme war. I think we're being heavily propagandized. But if

• 51:21Jason Calacanis?

  But the West is winning the propaganda war.

• 51:23David Friedberg?

  But Jake, hell, look at, yeah, but I mean, look at where you're sitting, right?

• 51:27David Sacks?

  Ukraine is engaged in that effort too, right? I mean, you had, you had the whole Snake Island thing where basically the, um,

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  Did that wind up being confirmed as fake news?

• 51:36David Sacks?

  That was fake. Okay, you had Snake Island where the 13 Ukrainian soldiers said, we're gonna bring us death rather than surrender. It turns out they actually surrendered. You had the old woman walking up to the Russian soldiers with

• 51:48Jason Calacanis?

  Tell them to get the hell out of here.

• 51:49David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. That was a fake. What else? I mean, I think this

• 51:52Jason Calacanis?

  Everything's fake.

• 51:53David Sacks?

  This Chernobyl 2.0 was fake. Oh, the, um,

• 51:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that was half

• 51:56David Sacks?

  The fighter pilot, the fighter pilot was the ghost of

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  The ghost of Kiev.

• 52:00David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. That turned out to be a fake. So, look, we are being heavily propagandized. Now, I don't blame Zelensky or the Ukrainians for trying to propagandize us because

• 52:09Jason Calacanis?

  They're on the right side.

• 52:10David Sacks?

  They're a small country fighting for their lives. And if they can pull us into the war, it would help them. It might also cause World War III.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Or just win hearts and minds and, you know, flip Russian sentiments.

• 52:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's something else that's really interesting. I just went to, uh, the World Bank site just to check, um, whether the GDP number that I just gave you was right, and it is right. But what's even more interesting is that Russian GDP has actually decayed 35% in the last decade. It peaked in 2013 at $2.292 trillion. And so, and all the way down to now 1.43. So I think the point is with, you know, all of these other things that they've been having to deal with because of their foreign adventurism, um, you've seen a contraction of their economy already.

• 52:56Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, did we over, did the West and everybody overestimate, uh, Russia's capabilities here? I mean, is that a possibility? Because they seem like they're getting beaten pretty, uh, or they're, they're being fought back at a way people didn't think they would be able to.

• 53:10David Friedberg?

  First of all, I have no frigging clue. Second of all, I don't know like what people think that they thought they knew or do or don't know. But I think importantly, we don't really know what's going on over there. You know, we are hearing stories every day that we feel is conclusive and factual and on the ground reporting, and then a few hours later, we find out may or may not actually be true. You know, this is the fog of war. And I wouldn't take anything that I'm reading on Twitter, or seeing on CNN, or hearing some commentator from the United States making some comment about, nor would I feel the same about any commentator in the Ukraine, or Russia, or anywhere else for that matter. Facts are gonna be facts. I'm not sure facts are necessarily gonna get to us.

• 53:53David Friedberg?

  And so, I don't know what's going on the ground with Russia. There's a convoy supposedly that we know we can see from satellite imagery that's moving towards Kiev. It's stopped. We don't know why it stopped. There's claims by one group of people that says they're out of food and they're defecting. There's claims by another group of people that say they're waiting to encircle the city, and then command pressure and use this as leverage effectively to try and get a good negotiated deal to exit. We don't know. And so, you know, for us to be like, you know, four guys commentating at Starbucks, I think is a bit of a mistake, because there's very few facts that we can't actually say is objectively true at this point. Now, what we do know is Russia has a lot of nukes. And so, regardless of what's going on the ground with tactical stuff, you know, any

• 54:38David Friedberg?

  sort of assumption that leads to our belief that an alternative intervention, or some other force can ultimately win against Russia, is completely false, because Russia has thousands of nuclear warheads. And, you know, if Russia wanted to exert its military authority over anyone in the world, they can. And, and so, I wouldn't kind of take any of this stuff, that Russia's gonna lose a war, you know, a war on the ground in the Ukraine. I mean, at the end of the day, they've got the ultimate trump card.

• 55:10David Sacks?

  Well, and also, they haven't brought out the heavy, the heavy.

• 55:13David Friedberg?

  They've got bombers.

• 55:14David Sacks?

  Yes, they can bomb Kiev into rubble, okay?

• 55:17David Friedberg?

  They've got those bunker buster bombs. They've got stuff that.

• 55:20Jason Calacanis?

  What is the strategy here, to just?

• 55:21David Sacks?

  Listen, they can pull a Grozny, they can pull a Fallujah. I mean, look, you know, we, they, we can, they can, Dresden, let's not pretend like we haven't done it too. They can bomb these cities into rubble from the sky.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  And they're not, because it would be too bad. The blowback would be too bad from the West.

• 55:40David Friedberg?

  We don't know. We don't know, but there's certainly a strategy. These guys aren't a bunch of idiots scrambling around trying to figure out what to do. They've got the second most powerful military on planet Earth that can literally destroy every human on planet Earth. They are, they are pretty smart and they are going to figure something out to get themselves some sort of an advantage ultimately. What that is, we don't know. You know, we're sitting here trying to figure out how to play chess and we've never played it before.

• 56:03Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Sacks, that might be something worth discussing. There is a contingent that's saying, listen, Putin isn't thinking about this strictly logically.

• 56:14David Sacks?

  Yeah, I understand that point of view. You hear it a lot on, on the press.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think?

• 56:19David Sacks?

  Here's what I, well, here's what I think is I think Putin underestimated Zelensky's resolve, Ukrainian resolve, and I'd say the West's resolve. I think it would be a mistake, however, for us to underestimate his resolve.

• 56:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:32David Sacks?

  And that's what I'm afraid of next is that he doesn't want to give up. And listen, to go back to, to, you know, the Mearsheimer point. So there's a school of realism and what Mearsheimer says, and he predicted a lot of this. So you have to.

• 56:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's amazing. Yeah. He gave a great talk in 2015. I watched him right before we got on air.

• 56:50David Sacks?

  Right. One of the ways I, yeah, one of the ways I assess who I want to listen to and learn more from is when I see someone making far sighted predictions that come true, I'm like, okay.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty good one. Yeah.

• 57:00David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, okay, this guy has a mental model that seems to predict the world, right? I mean, like Carl Popper said famously, that difference between science or religion is that science makes predictions that are falsifiable. If you make predictions, one prediction after another that ends up becoming true, maybe you have a way of thinking about the world that is predictive. So this guy, I would just say, I can't summarize all of his thinking here, but I would just say, I mean, I went down kind of a rabbit hole on YouTube just watching his stuff. Obviously not all of it is right. Okay. But, and but, you know, the media has been demonizing this guy because for the few things he's gotten wrong about the situation, instead of all the things he's gotten right. And, you know, if you were to do the Washington establishment by the same standard, they've gotten far

• 57:42David Sacks?

  more wrong than he has, especially over, you know, since the Iraq war over the last 20 years. But anyway, the point he makes is simply this, or one. One of the points is, listen, this situation in Ukraine is to the Russians what the Cuban Missile Crisis was to us. Meaning, it is not a pretext for Putin to go in and expand his empire. What is really going on here is they have defined this as a red line they see as a vital national security interest. And so we should be thinking about them and their resolve the way that we thought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. So in other words, the Russians are acting like the Americans did in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 58:23David Sacks?

  And remember, Fidel Castro thought he had the sovereignty, he thought he had the right to go make a treaty and a deal with whoever he wanted. And he went to the, freely went to the Soviet Union to try and make a deal. And the Americans said, no way. And, you know, not in our backyard. And we imposed a blockade and we were flying the bombers. And Kennedy had advisors and generals who were willing to go to nuclear war to win that standoff and that confrontation. And ultimately, the way that they solved the problem is JFK sent Bobby Kennedy to go secretly cut a deal with the Russians to pull the Jupiter missiles, the warheads, out of Turkey. So there's a quid pro quo. They kept it secret for six months.

• 59:07David Sacks?

  Kennedy got to declare a victory, but the Russians, the Soviets got something out of it too. They were able to defuse the situation. So if there's any way to make a deal like that, I think it would be a good idea.

• 59:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, the reason, don't you think the reason he's, don't you think the reason, Sacks, that he is misunderstood is because we are propagating democracy and when we do something, well, it has the shine of, hey, we want people to be free. We want individual freedom. We want individual human rights. We want individual expression. These things are the height of human existence. And when communist countries do it, well, they're trying to spread communism and authoritarianism and reduce humans individualism and freedoms. And that is a valid argument. But he says in his talks, like, listen, you can put that aside and just say, you know, missiles in your backyard, not good.

• 59:59David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. So this is the fundamental dichotomy in sort of the foreign policy thinking or international relations between idealism and realism. Idealism says it's all about values. And so we're going around the world, we're promoting democracy, we're supporting allies who we think will spread democracy. There's good guys and bad guys. We're on the sides of the good guys, and that's who we support, and we change the regimes that are the bad guys. But the realists just think of this as great power rivalry. And we have to understand the way that great powers have always reacted and behaved. And great powers, whether it's Russia or the Soviet Union or us, will behave viciously and ruthlessly towards anything they perceive as a threat to their national security, their vital national security interests.

• 1:00:42Jason Calacanis?

  What are your thoughts on this being the moment we make the next big transition? We were in a bipolar world order. We're being unipolar for the majority of our lifetimes, where we only experienced the United States. And now, is this the moment we move to multipolar sex? Where we're gonna... Or have we moved there already?

• 1:01:00David Sacks?

  It's a transition that's happening mainly because of China. So we're in, you know, it seems like what we're doing is pushing Russia, vocally, into Xi's arms.

• 1:01:10Jason Calacanis?

  Which is a huge mistake.

• 1:01:12David Sacks?

  It's part of that. Well, I'm surprised to hear you say that, J. Cal.

• 1:01:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I said it two weeks ago. I mean, I said, this sounds crazy, but if we could get Putin to be, you know, in talks with us, then he's not in talks with Xi Jinping. And when you saw him with, you know, taking pictures with Xi Jinping, that should have been a red alarm bell to everybody that our foreign policy is not working. Because if he's talking to Xi Jinping, supposedly, and who knows if this is true, again, fog of war, to Friedberg's point, you know, maybe Xi Jinping told him, can you wait till after the Olympics to do this invasion? If they're coordinating at that level, that's really problematic for the US. We need him on our side. We need to get Pakistan on our side, India, South Korea. We need to build an alliance to deal with the eventuality of China going

• 1:01:58Jason Calacanis?

  into the South China Sea and taking over Taiwan. So Chamath, what are your thoughts on, does this give Xi Jinping a window or not? And is there any path to getting Russia back in talks with the West?

• 1:02:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Maybe he can help get them restarted in a way that could normalize relations.

• 1:02:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is this, uh, well, the, the real question is like, if you're Xi, do you look at this and say, uh, it emboldens me? Or I have to be even more strategic and crafty?

• 1:02:30Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think? I said the latter, yeah.

• 1:02:32David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's the latter, right? If Russia had rolled.

• 1:02:35David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  It'd be the former.

• 1:02:36David Sacks?

  This is one good, this is one good thing, and I'll, I'll sort of contradict what I said a little bit before. Look, I, I, I don't, I'm not passionately attached to either the realist or the idealist school of thinking. I think they're interesting. We need to consider both perspectives. What I would say is that the resilience, the ferocity of the Ukrainians, the resistance, defending themselves, giving Putin a punch in the nose, we can all support that because we know that Xi is watching. And if he sees, wow, the Russians really got a tough time with Ukrainians, what, you know, am I going to be facing a similar situation with Taiwan? And what's interesting is that the way the Ukrainians, they basically were willing to arm every man, woman,

• 1:03:18David Sacks?

  and I don't know, child, but every man and woman there, they're handing out the AK-47s. Basically, they Israelized, right? You want to know how Israel has survived in a neighborhood where everyone wants to kill them? Every single adult serves in the army and they get guns. It's like, you know.

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

  They're indoctrinated.

• 1:03:35David Sacks?

  Second Amendment over there.

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  Forced.

• 1:03:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so I think that the Ukrainians have shown a model that's really based on the Israel model, which is, listen, if Taiwan really wants to be independent, every adult there needs to learn how to fight and they need to have weapons. And that's going to be the best guarantor. We can be their ally, but that's going to be the best guarantor is creating a credible deterrent to Xi moving on them.

• 1:03:58Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, do we transition to another story here? I mean, this is, this is one of the problems when we're living in these kinds of times is that if you talk about anything other than this horrible thing.

• 1:04:09David Sacks?

  I saw a tweet, when all the decision trees can go to zero, meaning that like there's a 1% chance of, or 0.1% or 0.01% chance of, of war three, the nuclear war, then yeah, it's hard to talk about anything else. Hard to think about anything else, so.

• 1:04:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24David Friedberg?

  I watched Ozarks this week.

• 1:04:27Jason Calacanis?

  Well, amazing.

• 1:04:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Ozark, is that good?

• 1:04:30Jason Calacanis?

  Ozark is great. Jason Bateman, amazing.

• 1:04:32David Friedberg?

  Jason Bateman is so friggin good on it.

• 1:04:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Breaking Bad 2.0. I've watched that series twice and I've fallen asleep in episode one both times.

• 1:04:40Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no, you gotta keep going. It rolls. It's basically Breaking Bad 2.0.

• 1:04:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I started season two of Euphoria.

• 1:04:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my lord.

• 1:04:49David Friedberg?

  I'll never let your kids watch it.

• 1:04:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my god. It's either that or it's like the best deterrent. So like you make them sit and watch it and they'll, not only will they never not do drugs, but like they just won't do anything. They'll just like stay in the house.

• 1:05:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's scarring. It's basically Requiem for a Dream meets like Disney Plus afternoons. Like these are Disney stars living in Requiem for a Dream. Do not watch it.

• 1:05:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I need to decompress after I watch it.

• 1:05:14Jason Calacanis?

  If you have kids, it's terrorizing. It's terrifying.

• 1:05:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying.

• 1:05:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's scarring.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's very artistic, too, I have to say. I give them a lot of points.

• 1:05:23David Friedberg?

  Should we talk about markets? I mean, you know, I feel like there's a really important discussion because the markets are so volatile during these kind of volatile information times, times of, you know, information that's changing day to day, intraday. You know, where do you guys think about kind of spending your time right now? Are you kind of just putting your head in the sand and saying, we'll pull it out afterwards? I mean, how do you guys?

• 1:05:49David Friedberg?

  I mean, well, what's funny is like I-

• 1:05:51Jason Calacanis?

  Sax is curled up in a ball.

• 1:05:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, in times of, in times of uncertainty, you actually want to be deploying. So, you know, uh, I announced, what was it? Last week, I think it was?

• 1:06:04Jason Calacanis?

  The solar deal?

• 1:06:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The solar deal, you know, I put $228 million into this thing. And then I did another deal. I put 45 million bucks into this thing you guys know about, which we haven't announced yet.

• 1:06:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:06:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, um, but other than that, I've been literally, uh, white knuckled. Uh, I don't like to open the stock app. There's no point.

• 1:06:23Jason Calacanis?

  Take some Dramamine before you open your Morgan Stanley account.

• 1:06:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The stock up. The stock up. And what's so funny is like my Bloomberg terminal, which is right beside me here at my desk, I have not logged into it.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, put it in a drawer, unplug it.

• 1:06:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's just no point. At the end of every week, I get a report, right? Kind of like our P and L. And I just look at the top line, like Connor always sends me the top line is like, you know, and the last like eight weeks in a row, we've lost 1%, we've lost 2%, we've lost 2%. The time that it was like

• 1:06:50Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks wishes he lost 1%.

• 1:06:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I celebrated. I got so drunk that night. I was like, finally.

• 1:06:59Jason Calacanis?

  This is where it really does help, right, Sacks, to think in decades. Like, if you think in decades and you're a venture investor, you can kind of just put this stuff out of your mind, which is what I'm doing. And the great thing is, I'm seeing amazing companies, great founders, deals are taking longer to close, people are starting to do diligence again, and people are discussing what the right valuation for this early-stage startup is, which is good. That's healthy. I think we're getting like, I don't know what you're seeing in the in the early to mid-stage market privately, but I'm seeing really healthy discussions and late-stage madness is gone. It's over.

• 1:07:32David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I think 100 times ARR is over, but we, no one really knows where it's landing. So I've seen some deals get done at 60 to 80 times, but no one really knows where it should be, you know?

• 1:07:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I sent you guys this tweet from Morgan Housel, who is a great guy. And he has this fabulous tweet. He says, it says, the shock cycle. And it's this beautiful cycle. Assume good news is permanent, oblivious to bad news, then you ignore the bad news, then you deny the bad news, then you panic at the bad news, but then you accept the bad news, and then you ignore the good news, you deny the good news, you accept the good news, and then you assume the good news is permanent, that starts the cycle. If I could just put it out there, I don't know today if you guys saw non-farm payrolls, but we had a huge print in unemployment, like, really great print, meaning like, a lot of employers were able to find people to take jobs. It was a big number.

• 1:08:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the interesting thing about it was we didn't see wage inflation tick up with it. And if I had to look at that, and if you actually look at a bunch of the earnings reports that have come out in the last three or four weeks, I actually think we're in the part of the cycle here where we're starting to ignore the good news. And we're so negative and we're so emotionally wrapped up in everything that people forget that actually the world tends to keep moving forward, right? We are not in World War III by any measure are we in not, we are not anywhere near that. Okay.

• 1:09:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I just think it's important for people to take a step back and take a really deep breath, but I think that there's a lot of good news out there.

• 1:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  There's a ton of good news. And for people who don't know the term.

• 1:09:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And we're ignoring it.

• 1:09:18Jason Calacanis?

  For people who don't know the term print, when we say there's a print, that is just a colloquialism in the financial markets that something was formatted for printing previously and you got good news. So an official report is sometimes called, we got a print.

• 1:09:29David Sacks?

  I agree with, I think what's going on is there is some underlying good news, right? But there's this overhead of a small chance of something catastrophic happening. So how do you price that in, right? It's, it's, it's a.

• 1:09:41Jason Calacanis?

  It's like a one outer, right?

• 1:09:43David Sacks?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's.

• 1:09:45Jason Calacanis?

  This guy can hit quads, we're set over set. Yeah.

• 1:09:47David Sacks?

  It's a one hour, one outer to the apocalypse, basically.

• 1:09:50David Friedberg?

  If that tiny probability thing happens, the game is over. So, you know.

• 1:09:54Jason Calacanis?

  So it doesn't matter.

• 1:09:56David Friedberg?

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:09:57Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't matter. The cost of your house doesn't matter if there's a nuclear war.

• 1:10:01David Sacks?

  That's right.

• 1:10:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is, this is the thing that people underestimate is like, that's not a, that's not a risk that one should be hedging in any way financially. Right? At that point, the only thing that matters is the health and safety of your family and your friends, but really your immediate family, like can you take care of them and make sure they're safe? And so, you know, if you're, if you're an investor in the financial markets or you're building a company, managing for that externality, in my opinion, I'm not sure makes a ton of sense because I don't think you can manage to that externality.

• 1:10:29Jason Calacanis?

  You have no impact on it.

• 1:10:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's cataclysmic.

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's something completely out of your control.

• 1:10:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's an in-game scenario. Yeah. So I think you have to manage to the 99.999% of normalized outcomes. And I think right now there are some what's called green shoots, meaning like some positive news in the world and some positive data. By the way, the other thing that we saw today was, or this week was Jerome Powell. And, you know, the Jerome Powell testimony was also in the middle of massive amounts of bad news. Some actually pretty decent good news, which was, he said he's going to raise by 25 basis points in March. Everybody knew that, right? So we took the 50 basis pointer off the table. But then he was very clear that they were going to be data driven. And in the language of the Federal Reserve, what that essentially means is like, we're going

• 1:11:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  to be patient and wait and see. And if you couple it with what I said before, which is the economic cost of these economic sanctions towards Russia can be calculated. And I think that we have proven a willingness to print capital and money. And so if you put those two things together, I think there could be a real possibility that Powell becomes very accommodative. And, you know, he and Biden and the entire administration come together with Europe and everybody else and say, get the money printer back going because we are, we're going to stand the line on these economic sanctions. And we're going to, you know, sort of soft land the economy here because we think there's recessionary risks afoot.

• 1:11:56David Friedberg?

  Let me just provide a little bit of a counterpoint, which is where I'm most concerned. We don't know what the repercussions are fully in a dynamical system of global capital, of pulling out this much capital and devaluing assets at this scale so quickly. The shock to the system, I don't think has yet been realized. And I think we'll know at the end of this month, when books close, what things actually do to businesses, to swap agreements, to trades, you know, trade balances that are outstanding. And you could talk about economic stimulus as being the way to solve that. But we don't yet know what's broken. And they're like, like, let me just give you guys another example. Today, corn, I

• 1:12:39David Friedberg?

  think is trading at 760 a bushel. That hasn't happened, guys, I can't tell you in how long. This was a commodity that was trading at 350 a few months ago. And so we're now talking about that, the trickle down effect of that price into the beef. The trickle down effect is we're already seeing in California where the, or San Francisco, where the average price per gallon of gas at over $5. The trickle down effect on, on purchasing behavior, on businesses defaulting because suddenly their counterparties Dry up, we don't know and we won't know.

• 1:13:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, actually, we know some of those.

• 1:13:13David Friedberg?

  We know some of them, but we don't know what we don't know. And the thing I'm concerned about is this is, imagine when I say dynamical system from a physics perspective, it's like, take a hundred slinkies and tie them together into a giant graph of slinkies. And you start punching one of the slinkies like this. If you punch one or two of the slinkies hard enough, you don't know how the repercussions will cause a slinky all the way over there to suddenly shoot up or shoot down.

• 1:13:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you're also denying your ability to change a different slinky. That's the whole point of a dynamical system.

• 1:13:40David Friedberg?

  You could put energy back into it, but we don't know what's broken. And there could be something that's irreparably broken.

• 1:13:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We've gone through these things before, and I think you're not learning from history or at least not willing to admit it.

• 1:13:49David Friedberg?

  No, I think we're.

• 1:13:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hold on a second, we see it in TARP. Okay, we did not know the total extent of what happened in the GFC. And we had to invent a financial framework to soft land the global economy. We figured it out. When we went through LTCM and John Meriwether blew up.

• 1:14:04David Friedberg?

  Explain what that is.

• 1:14:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was a huge hedge fund in the late 90s that basically had a massively levered exposure to the financial markets to the tune of like tens or tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 1:14:16David Friedberg?

  Go read the book, When Genius Failed, if you want to read the story. It does a good job summarizing it, but it's a great story. Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:14:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And again, we had to step in with a governmental framework and a broad infrastructure of actors across the world to soft land the financial economy in a way, not knowing what the actual, what part was broken. So I just fundamentally disagree with this idea that we're running blind.

• 1:14:39David Friedberg?

  Yeah, look, we're talking about, I'm talking about capital and energy and food. And some combination of those things are going to cause some serious deleterious effects on people and on markets. And look, I get it, Chamath, I know that there's solutions for repair. And I know that we're going to act swiftly and aggressively. And every time, by the way, I just want to point out, in each of those scenarios you've talked about, we've acted more swiftly and more aggressively than we did in the scenario prior. And it's getting to the point that, you know, what is the value? How much debt, how much deficit are we really willing to take on? Everyone obviously has these kind of, you know, intrinsic existential questions about how much we really can act long term without the dollar. collapsing, but certainly in the context of a global economy collapsing, the dollar will always be the safe haven.

• 1:15:24David Friedberg?

  But there are other things at play here, like, you know, the cost of gas for the average American, you know, the, the, the, the amount of wheat and the amount of food that people in Africa are going to have access to.

• 1:15:33Jason Calacanis?

  What you're, what you're saying here, Friedberg, is that some of these things we have been through, and if you look at gas as one example, I think you're bringing up the important ones here, food and energy, gas. We actually know what happens when gas prices go up. We saw that not long ago. People bought more hybrids and the miles per gallon per car. Uh, you know, when you raise prices, consumption goes down and people get creative.

• 1:15:53David Friedberg?

  Those are long-term adjustments, J. K. I'm talking about the short-term acute effect.

• 1:15:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The thing that America has the ability to do is they have the ability to change the financial incentives for actors all around the world in a split second.

• 1:16:07Jason Calacanis?

  And behavior can change.

• 1:16:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and so I actually think, Friedberg, the nuanced thing that you're saying, which I completely agree with, but maybe we should say more explicitly is it probably is a reasonable way to manage risk in America, Europe, Canada, Japan. But what's going to be very, very difficult is the impact that this has on emerging markets in Southeast Asia, Asia, Africa, could be really, really deleterious for some amount of time.

• 1:16:32David Friedberg?

  And sad, and it's a, it's going to cause a humanitarian problem. It's really friggin sad and it's, you know, whatever progress has been made could be unwound.

• 1:16:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right. By the way, I think, I think that that is actually really the risk that I think, um, holding the line on these sanctions really does. It pushes the risk towards EM countries. And then I think we're going to have to figure out what our moral resolve is to go and fix those.

• 1:16:54David Friedberg?

  And that's my point earlier, which is we're going to bear the cost ultimately. The United States is going to have to step up in a really outsized way to solve this problem. And while we might not be sending troops on the ground, we're going to end up paying several trillion dollars.

• 1:17:05Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know that it's going to be just the United States, Friedberg. The United States seems to be working in coordination with our allies in this situation.

• 1:17:09David Friedberg?

  Whatever it is, J. K., like the other day.

• 1:17:11Jason Calacanis?

  We're not acting unilaterally anymore. That's a good news.

• 1:17:13David Friedberg?

  We're going to have an economic cost, right? There's going to be something.

• 1:17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's, there's, there's no amount of money that you can actually put on human life. And so if we can avoid a military war. I just think that there's just, there's, there's no red line on cost there. And so if we end up running massive deficits and now we're at, you know, 150, 250, 300% of GDP, uh, I think that, you know, morally that's, that is the right thing to do.

• 1:17:43Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, is, is, is the world becoming more-

• 1:17:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's more than idealistic and realistic.

• 1:17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Let me bring Sax in here. Sax, is the world becoming more anti-fragile slash resilient? Pick one of the two, I guess, to these kind of upending events because of COVID, because of China pulling out of financial markets? We just went through this. Friedberg was like, hey, this is unprecedented. Actually, I think we have a little bit of precedent here. We have the complete shutdown of the economy from COVID in recent memory. And we have China deciding that all these companies are no longer public. We've seen, they did their own economic sanctions. They sanctioned themselves and pulled out of markets. So what do you think Sax?

• 1:18:18David Sacks?

  I mean, I think the current crisis is a reminder that it's not, uh, too anti-fragile. I think we are in a transition. We've, the, the Cold War ended about 30 years ago. And since then, we've been engaging in this sort of unipolar foreign policy where America calls all the shots. Now the world is becoming more multipolar. I'm not sure it's all the way there yet. And you have countries like Russia and China reasserting themselves. And that's making the world a more dangerous place.

• 1:18:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you also have the EU working together in unison. And they seem to be, maybe they're going to become a bigger actor here because of this. Right? We're seeing them take a bigger-

• 1:18:56David Sacks?

  That was sort of a positive surprise, as long as they don't pull a Franz Ferdinand like Friedberg said and inadvertently blunder us into the, into a war.

• 1:19:05Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, folks, this is this week in dystopian outcomes.

• 1:19:08David Friedberg?

  No, no, let's talk about something good. Come on.

• 1:19:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Another good news, let's talk about CAR-T. Let's talk about the big CAR-T breakthrough this week. There is good news, guys. Good news is there.

• 1:19:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the good news is that we're managing crises after crises. China crises-

• 1:19:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You want to tell people about this revolutionary breakthrough in cancer?

• 1:19:25David Friedberg?

  I mean, look, there's just, there was another CAR-T therapy approved. Two of them approved in the last week for, um, myeloma CAR-T. Just, I think we've talked about it in the past. You know, every human body has, um, T cells. They're a core part of your immune system. T cells are programmed, so they have a, a sensor, uh, you know, that, that tells them where to go and what to destroy. And so as T cells learn what to destroy- You know, they can be really effective at clearing bad things out of your body, clearing pathogens and invasive things out of your body. And so a few years ago, you know, humans gained the ability to engineer T cells by adding the genetic code to a T cell, effectively engineering it to go after a very specific thing.

• 1:20:09David Friedberg?

  And so the big revolution in CAR-T therapies has been in oncology and cancer. So, you know, programmed T cells to destroy specific cancer cells in the body that, you know, you would historically have had to use really difficult, systemically challenging drugs like chemotherapies and so on to wipe out lots of cells. And in many cases, doesn't eradicate all the cancer. And CAR-T, turns out, it can be extremely effective at finding very specific cancer cells in your body and in many cases, causing complete remission in cancer. And so, you know, there was one CAR-T that was approved that showed, I believe it was an 88 or 90% complete remission in multiple myeloma, which is a form of blood cancer.

• 1:20:52David Friedberg?

  So they, they take your T cells out of your body. You just get a little blood draw, basically. They go in a lab, they're zapped with electricity, which causes them to open up slightly and an engineered, a little CRISPR edit happens. And those, those cells are now edited, the DNA in those cells is edited. And now those cells know to go after the cancer target. You put them back in your body after they grow up for a few days and they filter them and test them, make sure they're safe. And after they go back in your body, the T cells go to work and they clear all the cancer cells out of your body. It's an incredible technology.

• 1:21:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredible, incredible technology.

• 1:21:25David Friedberg?

  Cell-based therapies are unbelievable.

• 1:21:27Jason Calacanis?

  Is the name of the company involved in this A2 Bio? Is that the headline?

• 1:21:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, A2 did something else. No, so that breakthrough was even, even more important, I think, in the long term. What he's talking about is Janssen and Legend are the two companies that basically got approval from the FDA. Now, the thing with CAR-T is like, you know, CAR-T has been incredibly believed in blood-based cancers, right? But that's an entire category that excludes solid tumor cancers.

• 1:21:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What you're talking about Jason this week as well, what happened was A2 Bio basically figured out how to modify these T cells in a way where you can actually attack and target a very specific solid tumor. So there's a lot more work for those guys, but if you play that out, now you have this incredible ability for your own body to be trained to fight and kill cancer, whether it's in your blood or whether it's the solid tumors.

• 1:22:19David Friedberg?

  Now, the price of these therapies today, they're charging, call it $400 to $450,000 per treatment. And by the way, the treatment, it's a one-time shot. I mean, it's like, yeah, they pull the blood out of your body. And then the expensive, challenging part is how do you take the cells, isolate them, engineer them, test them, screen them, make sure they're safe. The way that is done today is very expensive and time consuming because the volume is low and there haven't been as many kind of engineering breakthroughs.

• 1:22:50Jason Calacanis?

  How long does it take, you know?

• 1:22:51David Friedberg?

  It could take a week to four weeks. So before you get

• 1:22:54Jason Calacanis?

  From one person, 10 people? Is it the equipment that's expensive?

• 1:22:57David Friedberg?

  No, no, like I actually invited Chamath to come with me. We went and visited one of these labs a few weeks ago, but I won't get into it. But it's unnecessarily inefficient in the sense that you can charge so much because when you spend half a million dollars to treat a cancer patient, you just saved yourself millions of dollars in long-term care for that cancer patient.

• 1:23:17Jason Calacanis?

  So the price is determined by the alternative cost?

• 1:23:20David Friedberg?

  That's how a lot of drugs are priced. It's like, how do you save money over the long run for the payer, you know, the insurance company? And so if the insurance company knows over the long run, they're going to pay $3 million in care for this cancer.

• 1:23:30Jason Calacanis?

  You save them 2.5.

• 1:23:31David Friedberg?

  They're totally willing to spend half a million dollars to, you know, to end the cancer.

• 1:23:35Jason Calacanis?

  Is that the right financial calculus for this, Chamath?

• 1:23:37David Friedberg?

  So here's the thing. So if you look at the actual cost of doing this, there is a university in the Bay Area that is doing CAR-T therapies and their cost is about 40 grand. They built their own lab to do this. And that, by the way, is also extremely inefficient. We, I think that over the long run, we can get the cost of cell therapies below 5,000 bucks. And when you can do that, by the way, CAR-T can be used not just to go after cancer, but you can get it to go after autoimmunity. So people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, there are Known B cells in your body that are making antibodies that are causing the inflammation in your body, destroying your own body. And so down the road, we could use CAR-T to destroy lupus, to destroy antibodies, B cells that are producing antibodies that are fundamentally

• 1:24:19David Friedberg?

  causing autoimmune conditions, including what we talked about a few weeks ago.

• 1:24:25David Friedberg?

  Multiple sclerosis, given that we now have a strong belief that if you can get rid of the EBV, the Epstein Barr virus from your body, you can wipe that out. So CAR-T can in the long run be harnessed, not just for cancer, but autoimmunity and potentially other pathogens in the body in a really targeted way. And this is kind of the beginning of what will likely be a multi-decade kind of new therapeutic modality that's accelerating.

• 1:24:49Jason Calacanis?

  I had a question for you, Chabat, though, on the pricing model here of, hey, the way we price this is how much are we saving the insurer? Is that too much price optimization? Is there a better model here?

• 1:25:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have no idea. I would like to talk about something else. Related to this, Jason, there's this massive patent battle going on for CRISPR.

• 1:25:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think it's worth J Cal, if you can give just a two-second primer, because I think we should talk about patents just for a second. And there's the extreme version, which is what Elon has done. And then there's the other extreme version, which is these two folks fighting over.

• 1:25:26Jason Calacanis?

  So obviously Elon has gone with putting the patents out, making his patents open source and putting them out there and using them as a deterrent, like nuclear weapons have been. But the US Patent and Trademark Office published a ruling on Monday in favor of MIT and Harvard over Berkeley. The ruling canceled certain patent applications made by the University of California and its partners regarding a CRISPR system known as CRISPR CAS9.

• 1:25:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  CAS9.

• 1:25:48Jason Calacanis?

  CAS9. The ruling states that they failed to provide persuasive evidence that they got the gene editing technology to work before the broad group did. The central question in dispute is which group got to the CRISPR CAS9 tool?

• 1:25:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Basically, the whole thing here, Jason, is like, there was a group led by these two incredible scientists who, they won the Nobel Prize, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier.

• 1:26:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Berkeley and she, Emanuel, I think, she's at a university in Germany, I think. But then there was a different team trying to develop a system for CRISPR-Cas9 from MIT, Harvard at the Broad. And they all filed patents on top of each other and this whole thing was a thing and, you know, the big implication of all this is what are companies supposed to do? Right? Because if you are a company that wants to build a CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing thing, look, there's a lot of situations where a single-point edit or a broad edit can have a meaningful change in your health. So these are businesses that should exist. You didn't know what to do because if you license the IP from the wrong person, you'd get sued.

• 1:26:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:26:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And many companies now are like trying to license both sets of patents. And I just think, to me, it frustrated me when I read this article. And, you know, this is the conversation I had with you guys in the group chat, is I think we need to think of and imagine a new way for patents to work because it shouldn't be the case that, you know, folks are competing for what is really effectively credit and then what stops behind them are all the commercial companies and investors and all of the, and just the normal individual day-to-day people who want solutions to solvable problems. But the reason it doesn't get to the starting line is because of patent credit and having to deal with patent trolls. And I just think that that's a terrible situation for us to be in.

• 1:27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Especially if it's something that could change the course of humanity. It almost feels like an arbitrator has to come in here and force a settlement. What do you think Friedberg is the right thing to do? Obviously, we have a tradition of people getting to, you know, monetize, dare I say, their innovations for some period of time with a patent.

• 1:27:55David Friedberg?

  I have multiple businesses I'm involved in where we leverage CRISPR. And I will tell you that the, you know, the group at Harvard, so the history is the group of Harvard and the group at Berkeley. argue, each argue that they discovered CRISPR-Cas9 around the same time, each argue that they have a right to CRISPR technology based on their discoveries that were made around the same time. And so for years, each of them have been starting companies and licensing CRISPR technologies to different companies. And all of those companies now, including several that are public, it turns out that if this ruling, you know, is to be believed, they actually have a license to a technology that they may not actually have a license to.

• 1:28:41David Friedberg?

  So there is a company that emerged a few years ago and actually made an open source version of this system. And so I have at least one company in gene editing, in plant gene editing, where we leverage this open source version of this system. And many more companies, many more businesses are embracing that open source alternative. I don't think that we see this turning out to be any different than what we saw with the proliferation of Linux in computer software, where, you know, Microsoft or whomever was trying to, you know, make everyone pay a licensing fee to use their operating system. And guess what markets discovered? They discovered that, hey, if someone is able to make something free and open source, then everyone will embrace it.

• 1:29:24David Friedberg?

  And here we are, where most of the internet is run on open source software. So, you know, I don't know what the right thing to do with respect to patents are, because, you know, the truth is, a lot of very difficult, very expensive technology, R and D dollars go into developing a technology that is theoretically, someone could look at it and make a copy of it. And so I do think that there are rights to defend with respect to patents. I think that if there is something that is a critical resource that an entire industry really needs to access, an open source solution will emerge. You know, the markets take care of it. And I think we've already seen that with CRISPR.

• 1:30:02David Friedberg?

  You know, it's hard to say at the end of the day, you want to license them, you know, patent a molecule and be the only person that can make that molecule and make money from it? Go ahead. But if everyone's going to need that molecule to run their business and to change the world, someone's going to make a cheaper alternative or a free alternative. That's just the way markets work. So.

• 1:30:18Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks would like to recite a poem for peace at the end of the podcast. He's gone totally soft, the pacifist, David Sacks.

• 1:30:25David Sacks?

  No, I'd like to, I'd like to address what you said when you called me a pacifist. Cause I think.

• 1:30:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God, here we go. After hours. This is all in after dark. Here we go.

• 1:30:34David Friedberg?

  He's an existential pacifist.

• 1:30:35Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, Sacks. Read your poem.

• 1:30:37David Sacks?

  When did I become a pastor? Well, I'm not, I'm not really a pastor. Look, I still believe in the idea of peace through strength, like Reagan said. Okay. But I remember when we, what is the only clean win that we've had in a war since World War II? America has.

• 1:30:49Jason Calacanis?

  Clean win, straight shot.

• 1:30:51David Sacks?

  The first Iraq war, when we drove Saddam out of Kuwait. That was George Herbert Walker Bush.

• 1:30:58David Friedberg?

  Our last conventional war.

• 1:31:00David Sacks?

  Well, it was also the last war that we actually won. Every other war that we've done has been turned into a fiasco.

• 1:31:05Jason Calacanis?

  Winning was pretty easy to define. Get out of Kuwait. The other ones we were trying to do revolutions.

• 1:31:10David Sacks?

  But remember, everybody wanted him to go all the way and march into Baghdad and change the regime, replace Saddam. And he said, no. And he had the wisdom to stop. And everybody called him a wimp, but he still had the determination and the wisdom to stop. And then what happened? His son comes in 10 years later and they finish the job. They get, they take out Saddam and they destabilize the entire Middle East. That's what the iron asses got us. So what has turned me against these regime change wars? It's, look, when I was in college, I thought Herbert Walker Bush was a wimp, you know, and, and George W. Bush was doing the right thing going into Iraq 20 years ago. But we've seen the results. And anybody today who doesn't modify their point of view on these regime change wars

• 1:31:55David Sacks?

  is a fool. I mean, they're not paying attention. And so for Lindsey Graham and, you know, these other guys out there to be, a lot of Republicans to be talking about regime change as something we should be seriously promoting, they've totally lost the script and they should be denounced as reckless, dangerous fools. And look, I'm seeing it on both sides of the aisle. But what we need to do now, listen, if it ends up being the case that the Russian people want to make a change, that's up to them. That's their call. Yes. Obviously, I'm not opposing something that they might want to do, but. For the idea that that should be our goal, that's our endgame, that's our objective, that is a recipe for disaster.

• 1:32:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we'll just wind up getting in a perpetual war, then when we leave, it'll revert, and that's what we saw. It reverts back to communist or authoritarianism. The people have to really want it. Revolutions are hard, fought, and bloody. And if you think you can just go in there with a couple of drones and get everybody to decide, oh, we embrace democracy from this point forward because you drone the hell out of the country, is farcical and is proven to be wrong. 100% agreement with you.

• 1:33:00David Sacks?

  No ceasefire is gonna be possible. I mean, it's gonna be hard enough as it is to get anything remotely like a deal, but it's not even gonna be possible if you've defined regime change as your objective.

• 1:33:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's way to dig Putin in. Like, that's literally what he wants to, you know, that you're giving him all the pretext he needs to keep this thing going, if it's self-preservation. All right, everybody, there's your overtime. Sax's writers were freaking out in the writers' room that he had to get his last point in before I pinned him as a pacifist.

• 1:33:30David Sacks?

  There are no writers for this stuff, J. Cal, because, look, everybody on cable news is singing from the same hymnal and following the same script. They're all being the drums of war. There's only one for cheek right now, which is, we're not doing enough, and we're being weak, and Biden needs to do more.

• 1:33:45Jason Calacanis?

  Not being weak.

• 1:33:46David Sacks?

  I agree.

• 1:33:47Jason Calacanis?

  Having patience is not being weak.

• 1:33:49David Sacks?

  We are doing a lot. We're doing a lot, and we should be careful.

• 1:33:52Jason Calacanis?

  De-escalation is the opposite of weak.

• 1:33:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  These economic sanctions are real. We have to follow through, and I think we have to make sure that the economy is supported while we do it.

• 1:34:02Jason Calacanis?

  On that note, let's pray for peace, and we'll see you all next week on the podcast. The All In Summit is May 15th to the 17th. 16th and 17th are the two days of the conference. Poker on the 15th, tournament for charity, events every night of the week, and you can apply for a scholarship at the website summit all in podcast.co, or just type in the All In Summit into Google, it'll be the first link. And 400, 600 tickets have been allocated, either sold or for scholarships. We're gonna do the best we can to have as great of an audience there as possible. And for the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, the Rain Man, David

• 1:34:42Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, and the Sultan, Sultan of Science, hot off the launch of Kana, congratulations, turning literally water into wine, David Friedberg, I'm J. Cal, and we'll see you next time.

• 1:34:54David Sacks?

  Love you, boys.

• 1:34:55Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, besties.

• 1:34:57David Sacks?

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:35:00David Sacks?

  Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:35:04David Sacks?

  And instead, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Westies. I'm the queen of Kenwa.

• 1:35:17David Sacks?

  Besties are back.

• 1:35:20David Friedberg?

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:35:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just... It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:35:35David Sacks?

  What? You're the bee? What? You're the bee? What? You're a bee? Bee? What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.