E24: Markets trend down, political manipulation via COVID "Zeroism," stimulus breakdown, biological Patriot Act

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/MikeSylvan Referenced in the show: NY Magazine - Zero COVID Risk Is the Wrong Standard https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/school-opening-science-coronavirus-teacher-unions-zeroism.html Released COVID-19 Response Contracts https://covid19.ca.gov/contracts Chesa's "response" to Sacks https://twitter.com/chesaboudin/status/1366508970102247424 GoFundMe for SF DA reporter https://www.gofundme.com/f/report-on-chesa-boudin-san-francisco-crime The Verge - Entire school board resigns in shame after forgetting their WebEx call was public https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/2/21/22294457/oakley-school-board-resigns-zoom Show Notes: 0:00 Markets tank, reasons for optimism in the short-term 15:29 Breaking down the stimulus 24:12 California's COVID emergency stimulus mishaps, political manipulation via "Zeroism" 38:27 Biological Patriot Act, freedom of choice post-vaccination 49:23 Newsom recall update, SF DA Chesa Boudin's high school friend responds to Sacks, SF bureaucratic issues 1:00:33 Grading Biden's first 60 days in office, Oakley School Board mishap, teacher's union issues, Jason's red pill bender

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

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I gotta count it the other another billion dollars I lost. I've lost two, two billion dollars in the last two days.

• 0:05David Friedberg?

  Are you guys recording? Please record this.

• 0:07Jason Calacanis?

  Looks like we, looks like we need a poker game tomorrow.

• 0:11David Sacks?

  Can you imagine how tilted Chamath is gonna go into the poker game?

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  He's gonna be, he's gonna be.

• 0:14David Sacks?

  Two million in the markets. He's gonna buy in for two million just to try and get even.

• 0:38Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. We took a week off and boy, that was sad. I missed you guys. I missed my besties.

• 0:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, we should tell, we should tell people we had a, we had a small medical procedure for one of the besties and, but everything's good and it was planned. So, you know, nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, but we just needed to take a week off. That's why we missed a week and that's why we're back.

• 1:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And one of the besties, uh, God, I got so many jokes. I'm not gonna tell. All the jokes that came into my mind right now would get me canceled.

• 1:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Get you canceled? Really?

• 1:11Jason Calacanis?

  I literally had seven jokes. I can't tell any of them.

• 1:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Based on the amount of money that I've lost in the last two days, I'm ready to get canceled. So it's fine. Put them in the chat and I'm just gonna fucking let them rip.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. David Sacks, the Rain Man is here calling in from an undisclosed compound.

• 1:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Miami.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  Treeburg, the queen of Kenwa, back in action. And the dictator himself licking his wounds.

• 1:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Two billion dollars for a billion a day. Keep it going.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  Checking the Apple stock app, hitting refresh and going, thank God these companies have fundamentals because I haven't seen this much blood since Game of Thrones.

• 1:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, honestly, at the, at this run rate, I can lose a trillion dollars.

• 1:55David Friedberg?

  How does today feel compared to last March when the same thing was happening? You know, every day the market was down 10%.

• 2:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is what's important to remember.

• 2:08David Friedberg?

  We made a joke. It was like it can only go down 10% so many days in a row.

• 2:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  March, March 31st, you, you guys have to remember that March 31st of 2020, the headlines all over the press and you can, you know, go to the way back machine and look at these things, but the Dow was down 20 some odd percent. The S and P was down 20% and it looked like the world was going to end. And then we had our first big stimulus bill. Um, and things started to look, China started to reopen slowly and things started to look better. And what's interesting is you have this rotational sort of deleveraging that's happening right now. People are repricing in inflation. People are moving into sort of these, you know, overlooked stories, getting out of growth a little bit and it's a bloodbath. Um, but I

• 2:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  would just, I would just encourage us all to remember that we were in some pretty dark days in March of last year as well. And, you know, when you looked at it by the end of the year, it looked amazing. So.

• 3:04David Sacks?

  I would just add to that. The markets are looking pretty grim for tech stocks right now, but this all started because of a really great jobs report showing that the economy is roaring back. So we added 379,000 jobs in February, which beat expectations by 200,000. They also revised the January gains up 166,000. So now the unemployment rate is down to 6.2%. Remember it was at like 15%, you know, last summer during the, the lockdowns for COVID. So, I mean, all of this is fundamentally due to, I think, really great news in the economy because COVID is ending and which kind of begs the question of why we need another

• 3:44David Sacks?

  $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. But, but I think that ultimately there's a lot of good news in the real economy and what investors are doing is figuring out how to now price or reprice, uh, all these different stocks in light of the economy roaring back.

• 4:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So just a little, just a little math lesson to build on what you're saying, you know, Everybody has a risk-free rate and all stocks are priced according to that risk-free rate. And when, you know, for the many, for the last sort of year, particularly when risk-free rates were essentially zero to negative, meaning, you know, that's, that's the riskless money where you, that you get from the government. It was hard to do anything except belong growth stocks in a big, big way. But David, to your point, if we get two or three more quarters of these kinds of jobs numbers, you're going to have a, you know, low, single-digit unemployment number. And what that means is wages will have to go up for businesses to compete.

• 4:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that's the kind of traditional form of inflation that actually reprices things because you then you lever up rates to kind of control inflation. When you lever up rates and you, you know, all of a sudden they're not zero, but they're two, three, four, five, six percent. This is sort of what brought the tech bubble to a halt in 2000, which is that, you know, you had six percent real rates. And so you can't own businesses that are projecting revenues, let alone profits in 2026.

• 5:09David Friedberg?

  When you can invest your money in a bond and make six percent.

• 5:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Six percent.

• 5:12David Friedberg?

  And that's what I like. So just for folks that don't know, this week started with this big bond sell-off. And what that means is bonds that used to yield zero percent, when you sell them, they're now yielding, 10-year treasuries, I think, are at one and a half points, right? And so as an investor, if I can make one and a half percent with no risk by owning US treasuries over the next 10 years, that may feel like a better bet than owning some risky asset, some speculative company. Now, the other thing that, that it has done, and Chamath, correct me if I'm off on this, but what I'm hearing is that that higher rate, because bonds sold down, because people are expecting inflation to come back up, the interest rates to borrow money are going up.

• 5:54David Friedberg?

  And so if you're a hedge fund or an institutional money manager, over the last year or so, you've been able to borrow money for zero percent. You can lever up your portfolio and, and, and buy as many stocks as you want without paying any interest on it. And now that rates are creeping back up, people are delevering, they're, they're taking risk off. And that's causing a sell-off in both bonds and stocks. And especially on the speculative end of the market where, you know, there's been. Obviously unchecked kind of investment capital.

• 6:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you're absolutely right. Like, look, at the end of the day, the cost of borrowing for a company goes up. What that's really saying is the investor that's lending them the money, you know, has other alternatives. And so then they're willing to charge you more and more for this for this capital. And as that happens, you'll see some companies get into potentially some real trouble. Because, you know, they're going to be borrowing money at rates where they can't necessarily generate the cash flows in the future to pay those things back. At the same time, as you said, if you look at sort of like, you know, the SPAC market has taken a real beating. What are Sacks really? Well, you know, in many ways, Sacks are synthetic bonds, right?

• 7:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the reason is because, you know, if you go and buy a SPAC, one share of any SPAC, you have the ability to redeem that if you don't like the deal that it does and get back your coupon. So, you know, you're notional, rather. So if you were to buy a government, you know, German bond at negative 1% or buy any SPAC where you can put that same, you know, $10 to work and get back $10, well, you'd do that versus getting back $9.90. So in many ways, like, you know, the SPAC market benefited from rates at zero because you could synthetically be long Sacks as almost a way of being synthetically long fixed income. Now, as rates go up, that's not true. So what that leaves in the SPAC market are actually people

• 7:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  who want to own long-term equity. And if you combine that with what we just said, which is the cost of capital going up and the discount rate going up, now all of a sudden, companies need to be really real. And you're seeing that because if you look at the companies that have just announced SPAC deals just in the last few days, their stocks have gotten absolutely obliterated and they're right on the knife's edge going into the redemption period. So if you have one or two more months of this where all of a sudden bonds look better and, you know, some of these Sacks post-announcement but pre-despacing go through, you know, $10 a share, people will just redeem for $10. And you'll have a bunch of busted IPOs or mergers.

• 8:29David Friedberg?

  Another thing we're seeing, sorry Jason, but another thing I think we're seeing right now is in the near term is a feedback loop. So as selling takes place, what happens is market participants are jumping in and short selling and participating in the trend of that stock. And so there are these these kind of experiences that are underway where it's not just about a sell off of owners, but it's also about a momentum trade that a lot of people are playing into. And so there is a very short term, extremely compounded effect of the delevering that's happening and the cycling that's happening in these markets. And so it's super volatile and probably will be for a little bit of of of time here, right?

• 9:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think so. I think we need to figure out whether there's really, um, whether there's a real inflation.

• 9:10David Friedberg?

  Risk.

• 9:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dragon cooking someplace. If if there if there really is inflation, like again, you have to think like the trillions of dollars we put into the economy eventually has to come out in productive goods and services. And all of that excess capital will probably inflate prices. Now it begs a different question, which is we maybe we've just actually been missing inflation all along, because if you ask somebody who lives in a city, you know, what the cost of rent has been, that that thing has been inflating by feels like 20% a year for years. So.

• 9:42Jason Calacanis?

  And healthcare and education costs.

• 9:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And healthcare and education costs. So maybe we've just done a really terrible job in the last few years of actually measuring inflation the way it should be. You know, it's calling this whole basket of, you know, you know, CPI X energy like, I mean, it's kind of nutty. Maybe the whole thing just made no sense a few years ago.

• 9:59Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you look to to David's point, and David gave me just a huge bag of red pills while we were off this week. So I've been just, I've been on a bender on these red pills. But if you look at those three categories, what do they have in common? Education, healthcare and housing, massive regulation. And then if you look at the things that have gone down, consumer goods, electronics, food, et cetera, or have stayed flat in terms of inflation. Those are things that the free market participates in.

• 10:26David Friedberg?

  The government's not involved.

• 10:27David Sacks?

  And it's not just the fact there's a lot of government regulation in things like healthcare and education. It's also that the government pays for a significant portion of it. And so there's no reason for the people. You know, who are billing the government to keep costs down? I mean, this is why the price of education of a college degree keeps going up is because the government's paying for a lot of it.

• 10:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I, I, David, you probably, I, I think you, you may have seen this, but when, you know, when we announced our merger with Clover for I P O C, one of the first slides I put up there was the only place in the market since two thousand and ten where you would have made more money than being long Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon was being long United Healthcare, Cigna, Wellspring. And the reason is because healthcare was this incredible thing post Obamacare. Nobody wants to talk about it on the left because it makes it look terrible, but we created massive price inflation. And United Healthcare was a thirty billion dollar company.

• 11:26Jason Calacanis?

  Narrative violation, be careful.

• 11:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right before, right before Obamacare passed, today it's a three hundred and thirty billion dollar company. And the level of growth that they and Aetna and, you know, Cigna and Wellspring, these coun- these companies have, have seen is astounding. So these highly regulated, you know, systems of societal infrastructure. Oh, that's where all the gains have been. Regulatory capture writ large.

• 11:51David Sacks?

  Right. Well, as soon as the government is paying for it, all the suppliers know they can increase their prices. Why wouldn't they? So it's, it's, what happens is the government tries to make something free for people and all they end up doing is making it really expensive.

• 12:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, they make it, they make it, they make it expensive in this very, in this very convoluted way, which is hard to track, right? Because it's like, you know, uh, who's actually paying? Well, you know, the insurance companies want to just book more revenue. Even if they're, you know, even if their gross aggregate profit grows much, much more slowly, they'd rather make the same amount of profit on a billion dollars versus a hundred million dollars. So what do they do? Their incentive is to just jack prices up. Who are paying those prices? Companies pay those prices. Who bears those costs? All of this stuff is really not clear because ultimately downstream, somebody has to pay for this stuff.

• 12:41Jason Calacanis?

  Taxpayers. And it's all obscurified. I mean, I mean, look at the tent story that we were sharing on our group, group thread. Sixty one thousand dollars for San Francisco to put people into tents with a no big contract. Uh, one question I have for, for you all, um, is If we look back, the last time we were at 6% unemployment, July 2014, we look at the unemployment graph, it spiked up to, as we discussed, 15%, and it has plummeted back down now to the 6% rate. If we look back on this moment in time, and how quickly the economy is recovering from this disaster that we've never experienced before, it looks

• 13:22Jason Calacanis?

  like this recession is going to be recovered, and we're already back in business in such a short period of time compared to what happened in the Great Recession and the dot-com boom. So, is America and the US dollar and the economy anti-fragile now, to use a Taleb term? How do we look at what happened with the economy? Did Trump do everything right with the stimulus?

• 13:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a complete outlier in the following way. In a typical recession, what has to happen is, so you have a contraction in the economy, but you don't know when the bottom is, right? The bottom is some number of months in the future, and government policy is basically trying to create a soft landing where, all of a sudden, the cost of capital is low enough now, where people say, "Ah, on the margin now, this incremental dollar, I would rather borrow and invest," which drives growth, which then gets the economy going. And so, how does a government deal with that? They are looking at economic data and saying, "Okay, you know what? Let me cut rates. I'll cut rates again. I'll cut rates again." And that's really the one tool that they have in their toolbox, because they're trying to predict

• 14:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in the future, "How many rate cuts do I need to get, or have, rather? How big do they need to be, until I get to that place where you bottom out?" The pandemic was the exact opposite, because in many ways, we actually hit the bottom in month one, because we said, "Everything go to zero right now," right? When you shut everything down, you technically can't have less economic activity than zero.

• 14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Than zero.

• 14:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so, in many ways, you price the bottom on day one, boom. And in hindsight, the real insight would have been to see that and say, "I'm buying this moment," because it only gets better from here. So, in one ways, like, all of the tools are actually now, we need to think about them in opposite. And I don't think we have that training to do that well. So, we're still going back to the same toolbox, which is why what David said is so true. We're thinking about incremental stimulus.

• 15:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As like a way to get to a soft landing, but we've already actually taken the hard medicine a year ago.

• 15:26Jason Calacanis?

  So let's tackle that, Sax. Should we, and let's take virtue signaling and populism out of this discussion, just on an economic basis, is it necessary to send every American another 600,000, 2,000, knowing what we know today, with the unemployment rate going down, would we be better off taking that capital and deploying it in education, unemployment, or something else?

• 15:52David Sacks?

  Well, first of all, it's 1.9 trillion that we don't have. We're borrowing it. I mean, I would extend unemployment for people in those hard-hit sectors that haven't come back yet. But most of this money is going for blue state bailouts of cities that are totally mismanaged. This is not going to help states like California or cities like San Francisco get their house in order, because this is going to bail them out and defer that day of reckoning from their chronic mismanagement. So we're borrowing money we don't have to bail out people, cities and states that don't really deserve it. I do think we should help the people who've been impacted, but it doesn't require 2 trillion. And, look, here's the thing, we're already down to 6% unemployment. We're going to be down to, I'd say, probably

• 16:33David Sacks?

  3% or 4% in two quarters. I mean, the economy's coming roaring back. And the reason it's coming roaring back is because COVID is ending, right? So the biggest announcement recently, and I think this is playing into what's happening in the stock market as well, is that Biden announced that every American who's over the age of 16, who wants a vaccine, will be able to get one by the end of May. By the end of May. I mean, we're going to have

• 16:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what happened to the fall?

• 16:56David Sacks?

  Right.

• 16:57Jason Calacanis?

  Cut six months off this.

• 16:59David Sacks?

  Yeah, when he came in office in January, he's saying the worst is not over. I mean, that was clearly sandbagging. The worst was over. And we're going to have 300 million doses by the end of May. And the only reason why everybody won't be able to get one is because of states that are, you know, creating these ridiculous hoops to get through.

• 17:17David Friedberg?

  Confiscating them.

• 17:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. Like California right now has 3 million doses sitting on a shelf because of all the crazy hoops that Gavin Newsom has everyone going through because he wants to score Browning points on equity, right? So if the government would just get out of the way, let everyone who wants to get a vaccine get one without worrying about making sure the exact right person in the exact right line gets one first, this thing will be over by Memorial Day. Over. Now, look, there'll still be a case here or there, for sure. There'll be, I'm not saying there'll be zero cases of COVID, but there'll be zero pandemic, understood as such.

• 17:50David Friedberg?

  By the way, I'll also say one other, you know, important point about the stimulus one that Sacks made. Yesterday, the CBO put out a projection. This is the Budget Office at, I think, Congress, and they said that the US national debt is likely to reach 202% of GDP by 2051. So the amount of debt that the US government will own is 2X the amount of all the revenue generated by all of the industries in the US in about 30 years. That's an insane statistic. And the reason that people look at, you know, GDP or debt to GDP is because you have to pay your debt down at some point. You owe some interest on that debt. You have to pay it down. And every year, you have to generate revenue

• 18:35David Friedberg?

  to pay the bondholders. And how do you, how does the federal government generate revenue? It either issues more debt or taxes. And in order to meet a 202% level of debt relative to GDP, you end up raising taxes so significantly as a percent of GDP to cover the, the interest payments and the principal payments every year, that you end up stalling out the economy, cutting important services, et cetera. And so we're in a circumstance now where the, the benefit we're going to get from taking on this additional debt relative to economic growth and stimulus doesn't actually outweigh the cost of that debt. And we're facing a fiscal crunch at some point in the next decade or two. And there is this, this big question

• 19:16David Friedberg?

  mark outstanding right now on a global stage. Is the dollar really the safest place to be? Does everyone really want to be dollar-denominated if this is the circumstance that the US federal government is going to be facing?

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a question for Chamath that I'm curious about. If the government is buying all this debt, shouldn't they be buying some amount of equity as well so they can profit from?

• 19:41David Friedberg?

  The government's issuing debt, Jason.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know. But isn't the government also going into the market and buying up corporate debt? Through all of this, and shouldn't they have profits coming from that?

• 19:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So there was a risk last year where, you know, corporates may not have been able to fund their obligations. And so the government basically said, we're going to be the buyer of last resort and step in. And effectively what they did was they essentially froze the credit markets. Because if you were going to then bet on some of these companies not being able to raise capital, you would have gone to the worst part of the, you know, the stack. Or you would have bet actually that there was going to be the state transition. So meaning debt is very tightly scripted as, you know, triple A plus, you know, double A, A minus. And these transitions from these tiers of like investment grade to junk to whatever are huge events.

• 20:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And basically the government said, no, everybody take your chips and go home because we are going to backstop companies like Ford or whoever, folks that were teetering. And so they effectively said, this is going to be, you know, until I tell you otherwise, a rigged game. I'm going to make sure I backstop these things. These companies will always be able to have money.

• 20:50Jason Calacanis?

  So my question though, Chamath, is if the government is going to do that and take that risk, shouldn't they get some warrants or some upside in the company's future success? To then create a virtuous cycle here that if they did backstop it, maybe they had warrants for 5% of the company? Like you would give if you were doing a debt instrument.

• 21:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They could probably do it if they were a direct lender and they had that chance and they didn't really do it in 2008. When they did it, and I mean, maybe they could have done it in a better way. Here, when you enter the open market, there's no such contract and so you can't negotiate that. Look, I want to sort of talk about something slightly related to this, which is if you actually looked at that $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, the thing that makes the most sense, and I think nobody would complain about, was saying, let's give a means-based test where the poorest Americans get the most money, call it 5,000 or 6,000, and the richest Americans get nothing. And I think nobody would disagree with that. And if you added up all of that money, it's probably on the order of 500 or 700 billion dollars. If you did a really expansive package.

• 21:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think people would, I mean, all of us would raise our hands and say, we shouldn't get a fucking dime. And, you know, people, other people should be getting many multiples of 1,400.

• 22:00Jason Calacanis?

  Why should anybody who wasn't impacted, Sacks, get anything? Like if you were not impacted.

• 22:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, of course.

• 22:06Jason Calacanis?

  You lose your job, you're staying home, you're not spending money. Why should you get anything? Because I think that's all the money going into NFTs and making bets on GameStop and doing all this, you know, shenanigans with Bitcoin.

• 22:18David Sacks?

  Of course. Look, this is Rahm Emanuel 2.0. Remember Rahm Emanuel back in the 2008, 2009 financial crisis said, never let a crisis go to waste. This is now never let a crisis reach its end, right? They don't want it to be over because this crisis is a justification. Yeah, this crisis is the justification for this piggy bank of spending that this this wish list that they wanted to pass for a long time. Very little of it actually has to do with helping

• 22:46David Friedberg?

  the very little, very little. In fact, if you actually look at the the breakdown of this 1.9 trillion dollar bill, it's every typical bill. It has a better title, but ultimately it's a bunch of pork barrels. By the way, there's a bunch of insanity in there like COVID testing. I mean, guess what? We don't need to test anyone for COVID in about 30 to 60 days.

• 23:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Throw those tests away. We needed them six months ago.

• 23:04David Friedberg?

  A couple billion dollars we could save, you know, and and the list goes on. But I think the point is, what Sacks is making is totally true. We're continuing to latch on to the COVID pandemic crisis as a means to an end. And we're not really solving any problems that are outstanding as the COVID pandemic and the risks. Remember, let's just go back a year. If you guys remember, the reason we shut down the economy was to flatten the curve. There was no assumption we were going to end COVID. The idea was let's make sure that the healthcare system doesn't get overwhelmed with people dying, where we can't handle as many people in ICU beds. And now we're in a situation where we're saying you still can't go outside. ICU beds are largely open. You still have to do X and Y and Z. We still need to be testing everyone. And all of

• 23:46David Friedberg?

  those risks and considerations should be coming off the table as more people have had COVID and more people have gotten vaccinated. And instead, we're using the fear that's been embedded in us over the past year as a mechanism to drive spending in a way that is clearly economically unsustainable, ultimately counterproductive, and unfortunately is being, you know, used as a mechanism for keeping folks in office and paying back their friends and all this other sort of nonsense that's going on.

• 24:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, you had a you had a breakdown of it. By the way, because it's not just the the federal stimulus bill, you know, the the California breakdown of what they spent.

• 24:20David Friedberg?

  Insane.

• 24:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you have that? Do you have that? Or can you fill it up?

• 24:23David Friedberg?

  You know, what what I'm going to do is I'm going to send the link because it was through a FOIA request, they were forced to list it. California had an emergency declaration.

• 24:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Joke, a total fucking joke.

• 24:32David Friedberg?

  Through that, through that emergency declaration, it gave the governor the power and the ability to enter into no bid contracts to meet the, the demands of the quote unquote emergency. And the contracts that were entered into are all publicly listed and available in a link that I will share with you guys, um, and it'll be available online. I don't think a reporter has done what needs to be done, which is to go through those contracts and identify how much money was spent on what? And where the, and why that money was spent and who ended up benefiting from it. Some of these contracts, including, for example, 1.9 billion dollars to PerkinElmer to provide nasal swabs and other, you know, reactive chemistry needed to run COVID tests. With an overflow capacity of their lab of 4,000 tests a day, which by the way, costs a few thousand dollars.

• 25:18David Friedberg?

  Um, for 1.9 billion dollars and ultimately California didn't really do any of the testing. It was done by private labs. Where did that 1.9 billion dollars go? There was another amount of money. There was a hundred million dollars spent on Accenture to build the vaccination website, no bid contract, a hundred million dollars for frigging three page website.

• 25:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What? Didn't that guy build that website in a weekend?

• 25:35David Friedberg?

  There was, the carbon health guy did. There was another, um, separately for his own vaccination program that he was running, which, you know, obviously highlights just how inept this whole process is. There was another, um, incredible multi hundred million dollar contract entered into for a guy. And then I looked up his address on Google Maps and I looked at his home and his office. It's in like a strip mall next to a donut shop and this guy is the guy, he's a, he's technically a doctor, but not really a practicing doctor. Who would, who got paid hundreds of millions of dollars to source overflow, um, hospital and doctor capacity for prisons in the, in California. Insane, the shit that's in there. And so, um, you know, the, the, the total kind of, um, I think mismanagement of capital and obviously inability to kind of manage through a crisis, get taken advantage of.

• 26:18David Friedberg?

  Yeah. And by the way, I think, I think the COVID, the fiscal, the, the federal COVID stimulus looks very similar in terms of the, the pork and other nonsense that's going on in there makes, yeah.

• 26:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hey mainstream media, instead of fucking grinding me about, well, you know, a couple hundred million dollars of share sales so that I can allocate it to fucking climate change. Why don't you do your goddamn job and fucking tell this story?

• 26:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, because this would take work and you don't get virtue signaling points.

• 26:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What a joke. I'll post the link now.

• 26:43Jason Calacanis?

  More. I need more red pills.

• 26:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What a joke.

• 26:45Jason Calacanis?

  Get me those red pills from Miami.

• 26:47David Sacks?

  So there's one, there's one article, like you're right, Chamath, like they, there's so many scandals. By the way, there was one just reported in the San Francisco Chronicle about how the city of San Francisco paid $16 million to pay for something like 260 tents or something like that. Tents for homeless people.

• 27:06Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, that's the entire budget of Burning Man.

• 27:09David Sacks?

  It was $61,000 per tent.

• 27:11Jason Calacanis?

  You could build an ADU for that.

• 27:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Guys, I have an entire gaggle of reporters sweating every single fucking share that I buy or sell. And these people, no, no, I don't. This is fucking stupid. And, and, and there's true, there's trillions of dollars just swashing around. Like, whoa, are we some third world fucking banana republic?

• 27:31David Sacks?

  Kinda.

• 27:32Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead. San Francisco is, that's for sure.

• 27:34David Sacks?

  All this money, all this money, all this money was dished out according to no bid contracts. So, so basically there was not a competitive bidding process because it was a COVID emergency. And so, yeah, look, I mean, all of Newsom's big backers in the healthcare industry got these giant no bid contracts. These, you know, the homeless industrial complex service providers in San Francisco got these giant contracts. None of it was bid out and the politicians would love to be able to keep this going because they've never had more power. They've never had more degrees of freedom to reward their political supporters. So, you know, I think there was one really good article I just want to bring up here. That was by Jonathan Chait.

• 28:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, this is the intelligencer in the New Yorker.

• 28:15David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Jason Calacanis?

  The New York, New York Magazine, NY Magazine.

• 28:18David Sacks?

  Yeah, his article is called Zero COVID Risk Is The Wrong Standard. And he defines a term called zeroism. What, what Chait writes is he, he describes zeroism as the following. He says, zeroism is an inability to conceive of public health measures in cost benefit terms. The pandemic becomes an enemy that must be destroyed at all costs. And any compromise could lead to death and is therefore unacceptable. So in other words, if like one person might die, then we need to continue all these. Emergency measures. Um, it's and, and, and this is the thing is that, look, COVID as a pandemic is going to be over by June. Okay. But there will always be cases of COVID. It's going to return as a seasonal illness.

• 29:00David Sacks?

  And the question is, are we going to allow zeroism to be the policy every year? We basically give these politicians unlimited power to do lockdowns, shutdowns, no bid contracts, and on and on and on. You already see with the teachers unions, right? The education unions are refusing to go back to work, even after their members are vaccinated. Yeah. Saying that there must be 14 days of no, meaning zero community spread before they can safely return. So the teachers unions or the education unions are saying is, we're not going to go back to work. We want paid vacation until there's zero cases.

• 29:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I just say?

• 29:34David Sacks?

  This is not realistic.

• 29:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I, I, um, I went to get, uh, my daughter's passport updated at USPS. They're working. While I was driving there, I saw all kinds of infrastructure. It was happening. We pay into a system that's supposed to guarantee in return some level of commitment by individuals that buy into that same system. Teachers are part of that. You can't, you can't have a get out of jail free card whenever you want to just say, no, we're going to change the rules. And it, but it applies to everybody else. The firefighters have to show up. The cops have to show up. The ambulance people have to show up. The nurses show up. You know, the USPS.

• 30:16Jason Calacanis?

  Uber drivers, Bart.

• 30:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everybody shows up.

• 30:19Jason Calacanis?

  Going to work, but these people, they need, the teachers should, uh, parents should take their kids out of school. That's what they should do. And then.

• 30:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do what, Jason? How, how, how are most people?

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, well, if you've got five or six parents.

• 30:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, people work.

• 30:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. No, no. But if you've got five or six parents together and.

• 30:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They don't have time for that shit. Jason, who, what are you talking about? This is not fucking normal.

• 30:40Jason Calacanis?

  Finish my sentence. Five or six parents get together. And if they had, if they had, um, what do you call it when you give parents a little bit of money for school? Voucher, voucher systems. The voucher system would then create the competition. If six or seven families could get five, 10K each and then run their own little bubble school. Their micro school, this could actually put pressure. That's not gonna happen.

• 31:01David Sacks?

  Well, it's not gonna, it's not gonna happen, but you actually have a pretty good point. What, what Newsom should do is he should go to these unions and say, listen, if you're not gonna go back and you're not gonna teach, no problem. We're gonna take the money that we give to your schools and give them out as vouchers and let the parents do what they want. In other words, we're gonna break your union. That is what he needs to do.

• 31:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's time to break the union.

• 31:19David Sacks?

  Newsom, the problem with Newsom is that his biggest contributor, the single biggest contributor is the education union, right? And so, look, he has publicly said that, yes, I'm in favor of schools reopening, but it's not enough for you to espouse the opinion that schools should go back. I mean, you're the governor. You need to go make that happen. You need to go tell the teachers unions, you must go back right now because there is no incremental COVID risk to the teachers. They've seen this now that states which have open schools have not seen an increase in COVID. There is no science to support this. He needs to tell them, go back right now or we're gonna break your union. He will not do that because he's an employee of those unions. And by the way, I have an update. I have an update on the, on the recall if you guys want it.

• 32:02David Friedberg?

  No way. Let's, let's get to it in one second because I do wanna, I do wanna just say, well, first off, I wanna make an observation that we are turning into the rational Rush Limbaugh. We're all kind of yelling in violent agreement.

• 32:13Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's infuriating.

• 32:15David Friedberg?

  It's kind of a little bit silly, but I am just observing the tone here a little bit. I will say, like, if you guys remember, we talked about this like last year, which is, you know, what will life be like post COVID, post the pandemic? And if you guys remember, I said this and I still firmly believe in, I think we're now seeing it play out, which is that the fear that gets created by the actual crisis will persist in terms of the subconscious behavior of the population for a long period of time. That's what happened after nine 11. You know, the insanity that went on with the TSA and security checking and racism against brown people and everything that arose post nine 11 persisted for a very long time as a result of the shock that we all experienced. And I don't think people were very cognizant of it occurring.

• 32:59David Friedberg?

  It was just like, oh, well, this is now the normal way of life. Everyone is so fearful of catching COVID and they've been so kind of trained and told that they're gonna die from COVID that we're finding ourselves in a circumstance where anything can then be rationalized. And those are folks that then have power and the ability can magnify the circumstances into something that it seems kind of shocking and absurd if you put on kind of a rational hat. But this is just one manifestation of what I think will be the case. We were. We all know people that have been vaccinated that are more than two weeks since their second shot of vaccination, who are still scared of doing things like being around other people or going into grocery stores because quote unquote, there may be a chance that there may be a variant that may not work on the vaccine that I may get that may end up killing

• 33:41David Friedberg?

  me. And if you actually do the math on it, you think about it rationally, you're not going to get COVID and you're not going to die, but there's a chance, therefore, I'm going to change my behavior. And that's part of what I think we're seeing manifest at a very large scale is this like trained fear mind that we all have at this point. And policy and everything. And by the, yeah, by the way, the $1.9 trillion stimulus is in part kind of empowered by this fear that we all have.

• 34:05David Sacks?

  Well, I disagree slightly. So look, is there going to be some PTSD from COVID? Yeah, I'm sure there will be, but I think people are ready to get out and with a vengeance. And I think people want to, and the problem is not that people are afraid, but that the people doing the health establishment, doing the messaging is not out there telling us the right things. I mean, you've got Fauci out there telling people that even after they're vaccinated, they cannot take off their mask until 2022, that they're not going to be able to die. No, seriously, they're not going to be able to dine indoors. They can't go to a movie, a concert, or a sporting event, and they can't socialize indoors except with other also vaccinated people. This is what Fauci is saying. I mean, so no wonder

• 34:50David Sacks?

  you've got so many people out there saying that they're going to wait and see whether the vaccine works or not. Well, because effectively Fauci and the health establishment, they're being so cautious in their guidance, they're effectively giving anti-vax messaging. They're basically saying that the vaccines don't work very well, which is just stupid. I mean, they all need to-

• 35:08Jason Calacanis?

  They should be going out saying, nobody has died who has been gotten a shot. Nobody has gone to the ICU who's gotten vaccinated. Nobody's been on a ventilator who's been vaccinated. Am I correct with those three statements?

• 35:19David Sacks?

  Yes, yes. They need to say if you-

• 35:20Jason Calacanis?

  No deaths, no ICU, no ventilator if you have the shot.

• 35:25David Sacks?

  What we need to be saying is very simple, which is if you've been vaccinated, you will not die. If you've been vaccinated, you will not die. Put that on a billboard and everyone's going to want to get vaccinated. You know, only 55% of the population right now says that they're going to get vaccinated as soon as they can.

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm ordering a billboard right now from the besties that just says, if you're vaccinated, you won't die. The besties.

• 35:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's pretty reasonable that individuals would still be afraid, you know, because I think we learned over the last year that we can't trust- The institutions that are supposed to tell us in an objective way, meaning you can't trust the WHO, you can't trust NIH, you can't trust the CDC, you can't necessarily trust the Surgeon General, you couldn't trust the President. Very complicated, right? So I think it's reasonable that people are skeptical. What I think is unreasonable is when, you know, sort of like organized unions or organizations or corporations who have a responsibility to run the infrastructure of this country, basically say, all these rules apply to everybody else but me. That's where I think we have to really just kind

• 36:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  of question ourselves and fix that. That's not cool. It's just fundamentally not reasonable.

• 36:36David Sacks?

  So we have Biden saying that everyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by the end of May. We have Gavin Newsom saying that most of the state, but not all of it, will reopen in August. Well, wait a second, you know, May, June, July, August. Why is there like a three-month gap here? It's because of the zeroism. I mean, I think Newsom has embraced this zeroism.

• 36:57Jason Calacanis?

  If not zeroism, what's the number? We have 8,000 people die a day in America on average historically. If it's under 500 deaths a day, should we be going back?

• 37:07David Sacks?

  That's not even the question. That's not even the question. Once everyone can get a vaccine, it's over. If you choose not to get the vaccine, like, sorry, it's on you. We're moving on.

• 37:17Jason Calacanis?

  I agree. Can I ask a question?

• 37:20David Friedberg?

  By the way, the equivalent of zeroism would be no one's allowed to drive a car because people die in cars all the time.

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  Or all cars have to be 35 miles an hour.

• 37:28David Friedberg?

  Or they, or you, or yeah, or no one's allowed to drink alcohol because alcohol has some adverse effect or increases chance of cancer or whatever, or whatever. At some point, like, do you end up?

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  You just triggered chamomile.

• 37:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, sorry, chamomile.

• 37:38Jason Calacanis?

  No wine?

• 37:39David Friedberg?

  Nice Bordeaux and Burgundy doesn't give you cancer.

• 37:41Jason Calacanis?

  What's wrong with the wine budget post-Spacocalypse?

• 37:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, it's gonna take a lot of, it's gonna take a lot of more billions before I stop drinking my wine. Question, I want to throw this into the scrum. What do you guys think about? I, by the, I mean, also, we're all just so punchy because we didn't talk last week.

• 37:59Jason Calacanis?

  Totally, I know.

• 38:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're all so agitated.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  We're all a little excited.

• 38:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  None of us have gotten to talk. All of our wives have been telling us what to do. We had nobody to vent with and now we're just going crazy.

• 38:08Jason Calacanis?

  It's like a bunch of 12 year old boys who are on timeout.

• 38:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like, it's like, it's like we've been in a two week timeout.

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get our bikes and go for a bike ride.

• 38:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, guys, honestly, honestly, like, have you guys, like, I have not gotten a word in edgewise with Nat for two weeks. And I was so looking forward to talking to you guys. I'm like, I want to talk.

• 38:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but listen, what do you guys, what do you guys think about the, the, the biological patriot act thing? You know, there's these vaccination passports that people are talking about. I just want to get a sense of where you guys think this is going and, and what you think about it.

• 38:38David Friedberg?

  This is the slippery slope that I think ends all slippery slopes with respect to privacy, right? So I think it was proposed in the EU that you would need to get a, you know, a digitally verified kind of passport stamp that shows that you have been vaccinated in order to travel freely amongst other EU nations. And so if you think about the implications of this, now the government or governments have the ability to demand that in order for you to move around freely, you need to represent something digitally or represent something about some healthcare procedure that you may or may not want to kind of, you know, take on. So that sound, everyone kind of nods their head and says, that seems totally reasonable and rational. It's COVID, we're all at risk, we should protect ourselves, yada, yada. But where does this go next, right? Because then it becomes, well, have you had your measles vaccine?

• 39:22David Friedberg?

  Or, you know, hey, you know, do you have herpes? And therefore you can't, you have to show someone your herpes passport if you want to have sex with them. Or, you know, end up kind of going to a point where we, we really don't have a barrier between what's private and what's nationalized, or even super nationalized in the, in the context of the EU. And, you know, is there kind of a slippery slope that emerges by allowing this amount of invasiveness of personal decision-making and personal data and making it available to government agencies in order to have access to the liberties that you, you know, believe may be endowed to you as an individual citizen of the world?

• 39:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So what do you do? What do we do?

• 39:58David Sacks?

  Well, I just think proposals like this are, I think they're going to fade away very quickly once COVID is over. And the real issue we have right now is that not enough of the population wants to get vaccinated because, again, the health authorities are being much too conservative in their guidance. So, you know, there's some polling numbers on this that, so only 15% of the public are actually opposed to gain the vaccine, like you kind of call them anti-vax. But there's another 20 to 30% that are taking this wait and see approach. And, you know, they're going to make sure that, like, other people go first and don't sprout tails or antlers or something before, you know, they're going to be willing to get it. But, but the reason why they're all waiting and seeing is because you've got, you know, Fauci and others saying that we're not going to have normalcy until Christmas

• 40:43David Sacks?

  or maybe even 2022. So if, if that's the case, if things aren't going to be normal till next year, why wouldn't you wait, you know? And I think what we need to be saying is, look, go get the vaccine. Everyone who wants it is going to be able to get it in the next two months, and COVID is over. It's over, guys.

• 41:01David Friedberg?

  But Sax, if there is a digital passport requirement in the EU, where do you think that goes? Like, if you have to show proof of a vaccination in order to enter the EU without quarantine, where does this go?

• 41:10David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a great precedent. But I, but I, I don't know that it's going to be necessary, because I just think that COVID is going to end so quickly.

• 41:19Jason Calacanis?

  There is a self, it's, it's a, this, I like Sax's point of view, which is, if you decide you're not going to do this, then you've put yourself at risk. But if nobody else can die from it, why do we need to check it? I understand, like, maybe in this bridge period, spring to summer, if you go to a Warriors game or a Knicks game, where you want to go to Burning Man or the EDC, you know, Electronic Daisy, Carnival, whatever Friedberg goes to, you know, when he goes to his raves. I mean, Friedberg at a rave is kind of the video we need to see, I think. But why would, that's fine with me, but in the short term, but in the long term, I don't want to give them that power. Look what happened with the Patriot Act and then them monitoring our data forever? And the government being able to put, you know, what Snowden found out, like, they were able to put on the AT&T

• 42:04Jason Calacanis?

  backbone, the ability to sniff all data? I mean, it's overreaching.

• 42:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Last January or February, I think, Jason, it was one of our first pods where I kind of put this marker out there on this biological patriarch and I said it's coming. I'm going to put another marker out there. By the way, because like, you know, there may be something like this in New York. I think most cities will have to have them. I think places, Jason, exactly as you say, for sporting events, for concerts. It'll be very hard as the number of strains increase, as the severity ebbs and flows over time, for us to not end up in this place. And I think it will be because certain people will feel a paternalistic desire to sort of, you know, it'll come from a good place. Like, I want to help everybody,

• 42:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  but they'll pass a law and that law will just get perturbed and it'll create all kinds of crazy consequences. But I want to put another shit out there, which is, you know, there was a really important civil rights case called Masterpiece Cake Shop versus Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It went to the Supreme Court and it was basically a guy who owned a bakery and he refused, I think it was, to make a cake for a same-sex couple. And ultimately, you know, the decision was, yeah, he's allowed. The Supreme Court gave a very narrow ruling that he was allowed to withhold service. And I asked this question, which is, well, what is the difference, frankly, between withholding service from a same-sex

• 43:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  couple or withholding service from somebody that isn't vaccinated? Because, you know, in the eyes of the business person, you know, assuming, apparently, you're allowed to make these kinds of, you know, judgments, because you're a private business. The implications, I think, are really vast. And so I'm just going to put it out there that I think that it's actually, David, I'll take the other side. So I think that there's going to be these biological patriarch acts, unfortunately. And then the second thing that I'll say is that I do think that it will get litigated to the Supreme Court. And I think that narrowly, what will come down is that businesses will be able to decide. And I think this is actually what'll put the vaccination or anti-vaccination movement.

• 44:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To the forefront, because I think in this complex global world where we don't know where diseases come from, except we know that they are more communicable, they can be more deadly, and they're more pervasive, and they spread faster just because of the nature in which the world is set up, there's gonna, there's probably going to be less and less tolerance for anti-vaccination. Now, that may slow down the actual process of getting vaccines to market, because we'll want to make it even safer if we're going to do forced vaccinations of certain things, but I'm just going to put a, put a shit out there that I think that that's coming.

• 44:51David Sacks?

  Well, I, I don't know that we need to force people to get vaccinated, but I think that we need to recognize that once people have the option of getting vaccinated, there's no need to have the same public policy response, right? So, so look, if Biden's correct that we're gonna have 300 million doses by end of May, and I think he must be correct because he's been very conservative in his guidance, then we should declare a date certain for the end of COVID. I'm not saying that the virus won't exist, I'm not saying there won't be a smattering of cases. I'm saying from a public policy perspective, there's no longer a panic, a raging pandemic, to justify these incredible new powers that the government has asserted, right?

• 45:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, what would you do that based on? The number of shots in arms or the number of deaths per day?

• 45:33David Sacks?

  No, it's, look, once, once everyone can get the vaccine, and then I think that'll be by Memorial Day's availability. So, I mean, look, what we should, and, and it will be available as long as, you know, governors like Newsom get out of the way and stop restricting the administration of it. But I think we need to declare a date certain where we say, listen, on June 1st, there is no more justification for government having these extraordinary powers to lock us down, to require us, I, I don't think we even need to wear masks beyond June 1st. And by the way, I was pro-mask, I was in favor of a mask mandate a year ago, as you guys know, but there's no need for it after June 1st. There's no need to have these crazy, you know, no big contracts.

• 46:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Certainly not if you're vaccinated, right, Friedberg? Like, I mean, you wouldn't-

• 46:14David Friedberg?

  Doesn't matter. I, I, it doesn't matter. I, I just, um, you know, I think it's, uh, it's a good point that Sacks is making. It's easy for people to say, let's wear a mask and protect ourselves, but- If you don't care about wearing a mask, but there are plenty of people who do. And I think the question is, at what point do we allow liberty to kind of play a role here? And it's not just about, you know, one person's point of view, which by the way, turned out to be wrong multiple times over the last year, is in terms of what they think that other people should do. And, you know, what does it mean to actually have freedom of choice and liberty?

• 46:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, if you look at states, that is a key. We have Texas has opened up and said, no mask mandate. One of the things that hurt us in this was we didn't have a centralized government dictating everything. And now we see like, hey, maybe having states make individual decisions is good.

• 47:06David Friedberg?

  By the way, I don't know if that's necessarily true. I'll say something about this that I think is important. It may be true that masks stop community spread of the virus, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we stopped the spread of the virus. The virus still spread. We still had a lot of viral cases in the United States. We had a lot of deaths that arose. And whatever restrictions we put in place, people still made the choice to go into other people's homes, take their mask off, enjoy free air, enjoy drinks and give each other the virus. And that's where so much of the spread occurred.

• 47:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you guys are not confronting this really obvious thing. I think like this Masterpiece Cake Shop thing is a really important concept. Like what happens? I'm just going to use an extreme example.

• 47:42David Friedberg?

  If it goes to the Supreme Court, you mean?

• 47:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, let's just say that, you know, Google's engineers unionize and they decide that, you know, they want everybody else at Google to be vaccinated. And then Google says, yeah, you're right. If you want to work at Google, you need to be vaccinated, not just for COVID.

• 47:59Jason Calacanis?

  Private company.

• 48:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not just for COVID, it's a private company.

• 48:01David Friedberg?

  By the way, that is a rule at schools, right? I mean, I think my preschool where my kid goes here in San Francisco requires proof of vaccination for the kids in order for them to go to school.

• 48:11Jason Calacanis?

  But traveling seems to be different. And see, traveling in some places is on public infrastructure, some on private infrastructure.

• 48:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I know, but just focus on this issue. What happens if private organizations pass a decision that you have to be vaccinated? It'll go to the Supreme Court. And if you look at Masterpiece, they will be, they will come out with the right to say that.

• 48:33David Sacks?

  Which is fine. You can go work somewhere else. Why is that? Why is that a problem? Exactly. Yeah, no problem. I'm just curious how this plays out.

• 48:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If only half the population of America.

• 48:42David Friedberg?

  Well, maybe they'll lose good engineers and the free market will resolve itself where Google end up saying, you know what? We're not going to pass this mandate because all the good engineers are going to leave. So let's just leave it, you know, leave it be.

• 48:52David Sacks?

  I'm, I'm, I'm more worried about the politicians trying to hold, the government trying to hold on to the power that it's asserted over us over the past year, even after COVID's over. That's my concern. I don't want them having a database of my medical records. No effing way. And so this is why, look, I think we need to declare a date certain that COVID as a pandemic is over. My date is Memorial Day. It's very clear to me that once everyone has the vaccine, it's over. Just make it when you can walk up. This is when, yeah, this is what, so I actually think that the Newsom recall, which will be in, will be going on this summer. Uh, this is what that election is going to turn into in my opinion is. So, so by the way, quick, can I give a quick update on? Yes, please.

• 49:33David Sacks?

  Okay. So I talked to the recall, uh, people this morning. They're up to 1.95 million Oh, oh. signatures. He's done. So 50,000 votes short of 2 million. They will be at or over 2 million in two weeks, which is the end of the signature period. Their validation rate is about 84%. So I think this is clearly going to pass. There will be a recall election. It will be around August. Now, fast forward, Newsom has said the state won't reopen until August, but I think that by May, June, July, you will see just about every other state reopen. Obviously Texas already completely reopened, but even blue states like Connecticut have now lifted lockdowns. They still have a mask mandate for the time being, but I think what

• 50:18David Sacks?

  you could see by this summer is that California will look like a laggard. You'll see that politicians like Newsom are holding on to this zeroist philosophy. They're being too restrictive. They look ridiculous compared to other states and he still probably won't have an agreement with the teachers unions to go back to school. And, uh, I think this could become the big issue in the, in the recall. You want to make an announcement, Sax?

• 50:41Jason Calacanis?

  You want to make an announcement now? We have a special announcement?

• 50:44David Friedberg?

  I mean, Chumot might be taking a, you know, Chumot might be taking a hiatus from work, given where the markets are at.

• 50:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought, I thought this governor thing would be value destructive. It looks like actually I would have saved money.

• 50:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fuck it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm back in, I'm back in.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I don't mean to be cynical, but if you lock everybody down in your state, Sacks, they can't collect signatures at the supermarket or at restaurants or Disneyland. So maybe, maybe Newsom shut everything down so that you couldn't collect sigs.

• 51:22David Sacks?

  Well, it's interesting because they actually found that direct mail was a very effective way of getting signatures. So they've gotten around that.

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  So Gavin Newsom is cutting the budget of the US Postal Service.

• 51:33David Sacks?

  No, look, Newsom is definitely, there's going to be a recall election. I think it'll be around August. And now there's recall efforts underway for Chase of Boudin.

• 51:42Jason Calacanis?

  The killer DA?

• 51:43David Sacks?

  The killer DA of San Francisco. Oh, as well as Gascoigne in LA and the San Francisco School Board. But we've got to talk, you know, we got to talk about how Boudin responded to our last pod, right?

• 51:57Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my lord.

• 51:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David, I have three comments to say before we talk about Boudin. Number one, I've never seen you more energetic. Did you get?

• 52:03David Friedberg?

  Where are you?

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  The red house, man. Did you, did you download a fourth emotion?

• 52:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you download a fourth emotion?

• 52:11David Friedberg?

  In Palm Beach, he's been at the massage parlor every morning.

• 52:13David Sacks?

  No, it's like a buildup. You're right, it's like a buildup over the last two weeks. It's like a, you know.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, big release.

• 52:19David Sacks?

  Too much, too much, too much energy.

• 52:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, how, how, how little have you spoken in the last two weeks? Has Jaclyn spoken the entire two weeks? I know what that feels like.

• 52:28David Sacks?

  You're right, you're right. I need, I need the bestie therapy. I didn't realize I needed this.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, bestie therapy. So does the audience.

• 52:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jake Alfreberg, you guys, you don't know this, but Saxi and I called each other on Friday and we spoke for half an hour and like it was a podcast. Back and forth.

• 52:45David Friedberg?

  You know, you can conference call on a microphone.

• 52:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We were so, we were so lowly. He did, he actually conference called.

• 52:51David Friedberg?

  All four of us, I picked up and we spoke for half an hour. It felt like a mini pod. It was so wonderful.

• 52:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god. Oh my god. But you know what? Men are too proud to, uh, men are too proud to go to therapy, so they start podcasts.

• 53:02David Friedberg?

  I was telling a friend of mine, I was telling, I was telling a friend, like, this podcast was kind of one of the surprising joys of my life over the last year. It really felt like a great kind of.

• 53:10Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second, you got the joy? Oh, we did upgrade your joy. We did.

• 53:12David Friedberg?

  You downloaded Joy? Yeah, I acknowledge Joy now. Okay.

• 53:16Jason Calacanis?

  He's, they're both smiling. Wow, it's incredible.

• 53:18David Friedberg?

  Okay, Sax, go tell us about Budin.

• 53:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, tell us about Budin. Uh, yeah, let me find the, the tweet. So basically, you know, remember on the last pod weeks ago, we, uh, Chesa was supposed to be on our pod, he canceled. And so then in response to that, Jason, hold the chicken noises for a couple of minutes here. Hold on. So, uh, I responded to Chesa saying, listen, you don't have to come on our pod, but I'll challenge you to debate. Let's do a debate, whatever format you want. And we posted it on, on Twitter. So he didn't respond, but it, by the way, it got like 180,000 views. So a lot of people watched the challenge. And so, but the crazy thing is, instead of responding directly, Chesa had a high school friend and campaign worker

• 53:58David Sacks?

  post a blog responding to me, which, and Jason got mentioned too. But it was crazy. It was like, why don't you just respond directly? Anyway, he had this, this, uh, shill respond. And what he basically said was, uh, in this response was he cited all these charging statistics and he tried to claim that Chesa has charged just as many cases as the previous DA. The problem with that is charging doesn't really mean anything because you can charge someone and then plead the charges down from a felony to a misdemeanor. It doesn't mean that the person was actually punished. It doesn't mean that you locked anybody up. It doesn't mean that you actually got a conviction to a serious crime or protected the public from anything. The, the real question is not charging, but dispositions of cases.

• 54:42David Sacks?

  And that's the real, that's the data that we need. And I know there's a bunch of reporters who are trying to get that data and Chase's office won't give it to them. And so, you know, I would, I would challenge this, um, this little, uh, Chesa volunteer. You know, go find out, you know, what, what is the real data on, you know, how many felony charges have been pleaded down to misdemeanors, right? How many felonies have actually been prosecuted? How many felony convictions?

• 55:11Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's interesting you bring this up. It's interesting you bring this up. If you do a search for GoFundMe Chesa Boudin, the number one result should be the, the, um, The GoFundMe page I started, it now has 455 donors and $54,000 in funding. And so I am withdrawing the $54,000 and I have a meeting with the woman from the Marina Times who's done great coverage of this and I'm also looking for some data scientists and I'm going to give the money minus some insurance for when Chesa sues me and some errors and omissions insurance and I'm going to be giving the $50,000 to a journalist or a data scientist or they can spend it however they want to to attack this very

• 55:56Jason Calacanis?

  issue which is just put more sunlight on it. And so Chesa Boudin is not happy with me, he's not happy with Sacks, but we are going to put the spotlight on him and it will be through journalism and it will be through constant pressure and you can help if you want to donate $100, go just donate to that. I'm not taking any money, obviously.

• 56:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a really interesting civics experiment, I think, for the rest of the country and I want to say that I don't know enough of these details. I go up to San Francisco every now and then. I don't, I've not liked what I've seen.

• 56:25Jason Calacanis?

  It's scary.

• 56:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's great that you guys are standing up for your city. The thing is, I wonder how much of these recall movements now will pick up steam, not just here, but wherever else they're allowable, all around the country. I mean, you know, the San Francisco Board of Education spent all this time and money, you know, basically navel gazing on the renaming of schools and then finally, just because they were just so utterly embarrassed, basically had to bag that. Could you imagine that in the most technically advanced and most progressive city in the world, basically, with the kinds of companies and people that we have here, that that's what people were thinking about during the middle of a pandemic when children were at home? Okay, you have this DA who's going to get basically recalled. In Los Angeles,

• 57:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you have a DA that's going to get recalled. In California, you have an entire... You know, governor of the state that's going to get recalled. So what are we learning? We're learning that people can actually, small numbers of people can be extremely effective at getting changed on.

• 57:22Jason Calacanis?

  And that they represent us and that the distance between what the public clearly wants and what some of these bought and paid for radically insane people, both on the left and the right, that needs to stop. And if people are, you know, going to not listen to their constituents, we need to stop them.

• 57:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  People want, people want centrism. They want simple centrism.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent. Reason, people want reason.

• 57:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the silliness is that the San Francisco Board of Education people are elected. When have any of you or any of the people that I know in San Francisco ever actually looked up who's the person on the Board of Education? It's not really a topic that people have paid much attention to. And I think that this experience, when you don't pay attention from a civic perspective on who your elected officials are and taking action in electing them, you wake up when a crisis like this occurs and you're like, oh shit, maybe I should pay attention the next time there's an election. And maybe I should be more active and be more thoughtful, or maybe we should end up in a situation where you allow the mayor or the Board of Supervisors to appoint the board and have an approval process where there's a little bit more kind of,

• 58:29David Friedberg?

  not just anyone that wants to get elected, puts themselves on the ballot, gets elected, no one really pays attention to who's getting elected, and then you wake up to this crisis.

• 58:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Isn't, isn't it true that like in the Board of Education, there was this, the whole thing came to a head because they were trying to like staff a committee, again, to waste time on some bullshit.

• 58:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And some guy, some guy raised his hand and, you know, he happened to be this, you know, gay person in a mixed cultural marriage, I think. And he wanted to be a part of this committee and he had been kind of like a really good thoughtful participant. And they said no, because he wasn't diverse enough or something.

• 59:05David Sacks?

  Yes, that's, that's exactly, that's exactly what happened. There was a school board meeting. It started at 4:00 PM. Okay, 4:00 PM. And this was the first issue they discussed is whether the, like you said, this, this gay white man was diverse enough to be on a committee. It was a committee where he was volunteering his time.

• 59:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Time, his good time.

• 59:22David Sacks?

  And everybody thought that he'd be at. I mean, you know, everybody liked him, but they spent several hours debating whether they should put him on for diversity reasons.

• 59:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cause he wasn't, he wasn't woke enough.

• 59:33David Sacks?

  Right, exactly. Then they spent their time talking about renaming schools and taking Abraham Lincoln's names off schools. And even renaming schools, they didn't even know why certain names were what they were.

• 59:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They got the people wrong.

• 59:45David Sacks?

  They got the people wrong. And then basically they didn't even get to the issue of school reopening until midnight. So eight hours later, and then everyone basically had gone to bed and the meeting ended. I mean, literally, this is what happened. And so the, the, the parents.

• 59:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like an SNL skit. It's like insane.

• 59:59David Sacks?

  It's, it's insane. And so, you know, the parents are up in arms and this is triggering a recall movement because the parents just want the schools reopened. And you keep getting these responses from the school board where, where they keep saying, oh, we're, we're listening to your concerns or whatever. They keep trying to process them, but they're not doing anything about it, you know? And then, and then they say, well, in order for us to reopen, we need to establish our testing infrastructure. And we're putting an RFP out for that and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, what are you talking about? Private schools have reopened, just reopen, you know, just reopen.

• 1:00:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you guys think about Joe Biden's first sort of 60 days in office?

• 1:00:40Jason Calacanis?

  Executing at a high level with the vaccine. I mean, opening up all those FEMA sites and getting to 2 million shots a day on average is undeniably great. The fact that he used the War Powers Act to force Merck and to, to do the, uh, Johnson and Johnson, uh, and to work with Johnson Johnson to increase production, undeniable. I'm not, I'm not happy about, you know, um, the teachers and him kowtowing to the teachers. And I'm not happy about just the hint that he wants to start the war machine up again. So, you know.

• 1:01:11David Sacks?

  Yeah. Bombing Syria. Who wants, who here wants to bomb Syria? It's like a rite of passage.

• 1:01:15Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to, I don't want to throw bombs on anybody anymore.

• 1:01:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where, where, where the fuck is Syria? Does anybody know? I mean, why, what, what, what are we doing?

• 1:01:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, our policy is the key issues for me, the teachers and the bombings. I don't want that.

• 1:01:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I see. I give him an eight out of 10, Jason, because I think the pandemic has been so well handled by him and science and that team. I think they've done a very good job. But those two things, those two things are huge black marks for me like, and Bloomberg ripped him one, you know? And Mike Bloomberg was on TV and he was just like, that is a joke. The teachers' unions are jokes. And you need to basically tear these people to the ground. You have to, and you cannot allow these folks to hold an entire generation of kids hostage. Okay. But then, and then the day, I think it was the same day or the day after, unfortunately Biden kind of capitulated to the teachers' union, not cool. And then the bombing of Syria was kind of like, why?

• 1:02:12Jason Calacanis?

  Let's use sanctions, let's use money. I mean, the legacy of Trump, I think, not starting wars was the one thing. And then him, you know, just backing up the Brings truck for the light speed. Those are the two best things he did. And those are two things that we should say, you know what? He got those things right. Let's carry those forward. We have to crack the teachers' unions. The teachers' union, the voucher system is the only way to do it. And it's very reasonable to say, parents who are paying shit tons of taxes should be able to take that money and educate their kids however they damn please. And if we're going to spend $15,000, $20,000 per student on public education, as a parent, whether you're in Brooklyn or Boise, Idaho, you should have access to that 15K and you should pick where it goes.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  And you should take control of it. That's the way to stop this macheguna.

• 1:03:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jake, I had the, I had the, this crazy realization as you were saying this, which is like, if you said, if I said to you, you know, electricians' union, I would say thumbs up. Auto workers' union, thumbs up. SEIU generally, thumbs up. Nurses' unions, thumbs up. But if I say teachers' unions, I just have this incredibly negative connotation now of an incredibly political class of people who are going completely out of their way to basically just like have exceptions and asterisks that apply to them and them only. It's I don't I don't am I the only one that feels that way? It just seems like it's trending to where like teachers unions almost becoming a four-letter word.

• 1:03:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think they care about teachers.

• 1:03:43Jason Calacanis?

  They they don't care about students.

• 1:03:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But unions but unions in general do a very important job.

• 1:03:47Jason Calacanis?

  Or the students, yeah.

• 1:03:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think unions in general do a really important job. And I think that, you know, like all these other unions, I have a very positive thought about what they're meant to be.

• 1:03:56Jason Calacanis?

  You you can be pro-union or pro-organized labor, but be against this specific union.

• 1:04:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:04:01Jason Calacanis?

  Just like you can be pro-reforming criminal justice and the unfairness of it, while still being against Chesa Boudin's insanity that people should be able to be murdered and killed and beaten in the streets.

• 1:04:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Impunity, yeah.

• 1:04:15Jason Calacanis?

  With impunity.

• 1:04:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well.

• 1:04:16Jason Calacanis?

  Like, this is, these, this is not even, this is a completely logical position to have. I want to not put people in jail for cannabis sales, and I want to remove people from nonvi- for nonviolent offenders from the incarceration. You can believe that while believing you should incarcerate somebody who murders somebody. This is not a hard logic to understand.

• 1:04:38David Sacks?

  Right, totally. No, you're right. I mean, the, the, the, it's, it's a combination of ideology and special interests, um, working against common sense and what the average citizen wants. You know?

• 1:04:52Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:04:52David Sacks?

  And did you see, did you see what happened?

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  Republican or, it's not Republican or Democrat, David, you and I agree on this.

• 1:04:58David Sacks?

  Yeah, of course. We just want, we just want common sense government that functions for, uh, the people as opposed to special interests or these radical ideologies.

• 1:05:06Jason Calacanis?

  I want to have a couple of pops at the battery and go walk to another bar without having to fear that somebody's gonna stab me for my goddamn iPhone. You know, or, or, or some poor kid's gonna get attacked by somebody deranged out of their mind on fentanyl.

• 1:05:20David Sacks?

  Look, this is why Newsom's gonna get recalled, is because crime and education are just fundamental issues. We do not feel safe in our cities, crime is out of control, and we're going crazy that we can't send our kids to schools. These are issues that affect cities and suburbs. Everyone's on the same page. And I think you're right that the teachers' unions have overplayed their hand and exposed themselves as not caring about the kids, just looking out for their own benefits. They want to be on paid vacation. Forever effectively. And do you see, there was a great example where in Oakley, which is a town in the East Bay, the whole, uh, they were caught on, uh, recorded on

• 1:05:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the hot mic.

• 1:05:56David Sacks?

  Yeah, the hot, there's a hot mic where the entire school board was forced to resign because they got caught mocking parents for, for quote, wanting their babysitters back so they could smoke pot. I mean, the cynicism here is unbelievable. I mean, these, these people are supposed to care about teaching young people and they, and they view themselves as just babysitters.

• 1:06:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16David Sacks?

  You know?

• 1:06:17Jason Calacanis?

  And they view parents as stoners. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:06:21David Sacks?

  We, we gotta shake up this system and, and, and the problem is

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  Competition.

• 1:06:25David Sacks?

  We need competition and look, the problem is that, that the people, that when you have unions running the schools, there's no reward for excellence. The bad, the bad people don't get fired and the good people don't get rewarded. So they, you know?

• 1:06:38Jason Calacanis?

  If you're pro, if you're anti-competition, you are a moron. Everything in this world gets better when people compete on the playing field in the arena to build better products and services. And in healthcare and in education and in housing, the government and dare I say it, the far left is stopping people from competing. We should look at ourselves as customers and that's what's happening right now. People are saying, we're the customer Gavin Newsom and Chesapeake, we don't want that product. That product's get the hell, get the hell out of here with that product and give us something reasonable. No person who's Republican, no person who's Democratic, doesn't want safety and

• 1:07:22Jason Calacanis?

  doesn't want competition education. The only people who don't, who want to stop competition education are special interests. Period.

• 1:07:30David Sacks?

  Amen. Man, you've been

• 1:07:32Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry, these red pills are fucking great.

• 1:07:34David Sacks?

  Man, these red pills, wow.

• 1:07:36Jason Calacanis?

  Peter Thiel red pills are, woo.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  Man, I thought Adderall was good, but God, these Miami Keith, Reboi, Peter Kiel, Stanford Red Pill's got me lit. I'm ready to go. All right. Anybody give a shit about NFTs? Non-fungible tokens. I mean, I think it's kind of brilliant, but uh,

• 1:07:57David Friedberg?

  By the way, don't we only have two minutes?

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  Two minutes.

• 1:07:59David Sacks?

  I think we should wrap. I think we should wrap on the Red Pill. I mean, you can't beat that. That was hot.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  Can't beat some Red Pill?

• 1:08:05David Sacks?

  That was hot.

• 1:08:06Jason Calacanis?

  When are we gonna see each other? I can't take it anymore. I'm like a caged animal. I need to get out of here. I need to get on one of your planes.

• 1:08:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm doing a, I'm doing,

• 1:08:14Jason Calacanis?

  Free Bird, where's your plane? Get me on the plane.

• 1:08:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm doing a home and away poker game on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday in LA, Thursday up here, but it's 500 and a thousand, Jason.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  Oy. Oh.

• 1:08:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you gotta play both days. You gotta play both days. So you can't play one or the other. You gotta play both days.

• 1:08:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:08:30David Sacks?

  Chamath is trying to make his billions back.

• 1:08:33Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if I want to be in a 500 one, one K game. No, I'm gonna go pass on that.

• 1:08:38David Friedberg?

  How's that any different than the normal game? I mean, like, you know?

• 1:08:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In fact.

• 1:08:41Jason Calacanis?

  I just, you know, you can't limp in with your aces. They're just, you're gonna get demolished. You got four callers that, yeah.

• 1:08:47David Sacks?

  Yeah. Rick Solomon will jump the fence with a seven, eight and bust them.

• 1:08:50Jason Calacanis?

  And laugh, and laugh.

• 1:08:51David Friedberg?

  And laugh. Nick, you gotta edit all this out.

• 1:08:54Jason Calacanis?

  No, you don't. This is the best part. The matcha king of Malibu. The Malibu matcha king.

• 1:08:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Matcha king, exactly.

• 1:09:01Jason Calacanis?

  Malibu. Tell him I'll take a matcha with extra money. All right, everybody. For the queen of Kenwa, for Rain Man David Sacks and for the demolished dictator who will rebuild. I believe in you, Chamath. You can rebuild it. You can rebuild that chip in a chair. Come on. Let's get back in the game. Chip in a chair. Give us another IPO GH, whatever.

• 1:09:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:09:22Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go, everybody. And we'll see you next time.

• 1:09:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you guys.

• 1:09:25Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks to our sponsors.

• 1:09:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bye, guys.

• 1:09:27Jason Calacanis?

  That don't exist.

• 1:09:28David Friedberg?

  Back at you.

• 1:09:29Jason Calacanis?

  Back at you. Ditto. I love you besties.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  Besties are gone.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:10:04Speaker 05

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

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  What your... The bee. What your... What your bee? Bee? What? We need to get merch. Besties are gone.