E16: Reflecting on the riots at the US Capitol, plus: Georgia runoff elections, vaccine distribution & more

Follow the crew: 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/aizgdm Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/MikeSylvan Referenced in the show: The Killer D. A. by David Sacks https://rb.gy/k5rz0k Show Notes: 0:00 New intro for the besties - listen here: https://rb.gy/aizgdm 2:14 Sacks' trip to Miami 6:01 Reflecting on the riot at the US Capitol: police response, double standard with BLM protest, big picture, prosecuting Trump & healing the nation post-Trump 29:43 2016 Election interference, reasons for unrest & polarization, Trump's culpability 44:19 Should the 25th Amendment be invoked? 49:51 Democrats win Georgia runoff elections, did Trump's implosion lose Georgia for the GOP? 56:23 How Friedberg would handle vaccine distribution 1:07:45 San Francisco's Killer D. A., recalling Gavin Newsom, Kim Kardashian for Governor of CA

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm going all in with your beak, with your beak, with your beak.

• 0:07Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are back.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  I'm going all in.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  And instead, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 0:22Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, S.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  I'm the queen of quinoa.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I'm going all in.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Let your winners ride, let, let your winners ride.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are back.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  That is playing a dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man.

• 0:41Speaker 03

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

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  What your beak, what your beak.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  What your beak.

• 0:53Jason Calacanis?

  Beak.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  What?

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get merge. Besties are back.

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  All right, and we're back. And thank you to Young Spielberg with the All In 1.5 Extended Edition remix. We're going all in.

• 1:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was.

• 1:17Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you to the super fans.

• 1:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was really incredible, actually.

• 1:20Jason Calacanis?

  We're back.

• 1:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I gotta say.

• 1:21Jason Calacanis?

  We're back.

• 1:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks, Young Spielberg.

• 1:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, shout out Young Spielberg. With us, the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks is definitely an excellent driver and his dad lets him drive in the driveway. And the queen of quinoa, spectacular David Friedberg is with us. We did an emergency pod. We just had all agreed. We're taking a nice break. Nothing's gonna happen over the new year. This is the down period. And 2021 is gonna be delightful and simple.

• 1:52Jason Calacanis?

  And then all hell breaks loose. We could start with the vaccine. We could start with the Capitol. We could start with Georgia.

• 1:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we have to start. We have to start. We have to start with the Capitol.

• 2:02Jason Calacanis?

  We have to start with the Capitol. All right. So let me just run through the series of events that occurred here. There's a certification process, correct, Sacks, that goes on where the electoral college gets counted. And somewhere at 10 a.m. Trump had a rally of thousands of supporters. You were not there, David, correct? You weren't at this rally.

• 2:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He was in quote unquote Miami.

• 2:25Jason Calacanis?

  Right. I think he's in the Miami Hilton on Pennsylvania Avenue right now. Had he put up that fake Miami background. But the truth is, let's be honest here. Trump came out at 10 a.m. and had a rally.

• 2:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, can we just take a stop back for a second?

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 2:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Doesn't David Sacks look like Elliot Gould in Ocean's Eleven right now?

• 2:48Jason Calacanis?

  He kinda does.

• 2:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's so Elliot Gould.

• 2:52Jason Calacanis?

  He is a silver fox. And are you, I mean, you were very public about being in Miami over the new year. You took your talents to Miami and we see this background. So we can assume that dictators in his poolhouse poker room. We know that Friedberg's in a Ritz Carlton somewhere based on the furniture. He's in his Ritz Carlton office. And Sacks, based on your background, are you in Miami right now?

• 3:17David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Jason Calacanis?

  Are you still there?

• 3:18David Sacks?

  I still, I'm still, I'm still here.

• 3:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, but David.

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  And did you meet with the mayor or not?

• 3:23David Sacks?

  I haven't, I actually met him. I did meet him. I went to like a tech event the other night and he was there. So.

• 3:31Jason Calacanis?

  Were you wearing masks at the tech event or not?

• 3:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Were you wearing a mask?

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  Mask or no mask?

• 3:35David Sacks?

  It was, they were like masks in. No, no, no, I'll tell you. There were masks indoors and then there was like COVID testing inside and then you could graduate to the outdoor patio part where people generally weren't wearing masks.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  So were you in conversations with people with no masks on? Is that what you're saying? At this?

• 3:53David Sacks?

  Yeah, but you know, everyone's been like COVID tested like a zillion times and it was outdoors. And, you know, I'm willing to meet with people outdoors. You know, I generally don't do it indoors, but I'm, I'm, I've said that's my policy, starting several months ago.

• 4:08David Friedberg?

  Can we, can we rewind to April with that photo of Sacks? Do we have it where he was in the ski mask and the goggles? And like the biohazard suit and like how things have changed. He's like, I'll go to Miami and have a chat with someone.

• 4:21David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 4:24David Sacks?

  You, you, you could definitely do a how it started and how it's going, split photo for it. But, but look.

• 4:30David Friedberg?

  You're like sharing a banana split with someone like, you know.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, literally on eBay and Alibaba buying ventilators for his home triage center.

• 4:42David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, we, we had people from the WHO saying in March at the, you know, that the case, the infection fatality rate was like 7%, you know, and the two big things we learned after that were number one, that there was a huge distribution by age. Right. And so somebody under 50 without comorbidities had a much, much, much lower risk. And then also the thing we learned is that the, there's, there's maybe a 10x difference between the infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate. I mean, you guys know all this.

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 5:11David Sacks?

  And so, so once we learned those things, um, I mean, I, you, you know, I think a rational person takes things like that into account. I changed my policy with respect to COVID, you know, and, and now especially that we have, you know, easy access to tests, which weren't available. You can get tested before going into a event.

• 5:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have, I have a question to add on to that. Do you own a fur Chewbacca outfit? And were, were you in Washington DC yesterday?

• 5:45Jason Calacanis?

  With more paint on your nipples?

• 5:46David Friedberg?

  Do you have a podium? Do you have a neck to waist tattoo?

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  Are you standing behind a podium?

• 5:54David Sacks?

  Let me hide the, the Viking horns that I've got stashed away here.

• 5:58Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen.

• 5:59David Sacks?

  There was a great, there was a.

• 6:00David Friedberg?

  Can we title, can we title yesterday's event National Lampoon Siege of the Capitol? It was like Animal House, like, you know.

• 6:07David Sacks?

  Yeah, there was a great, there was a great tweet by somebody saying this was, uh, this was like the storming of the Bastille as perpetrated by the cast of Animal House. And there, and there was another, there's another great tweet saying, uh, the Capitol now appears to be under the control of a man in a Viking mask.

• 6:28Jason Calacanis?

  The best one, the best one was, I have lost all respect for Nicolas Cage's ability to steal the US Constitution. Apparently, yeah, whatever copies left. All right, so let's just go through the chain of events here and it was, it was absolutely surreal because Trump literally went out to a, a mob of people, um, and said, I want you to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and show the GOP what it takes to have courage, et cetera. Mike Pence, uh, apparently told Trump that he was not going to go to bat for him in this ceremonial, um, process of counting the votes. And lo and behold, you're watching this, you know, the objections going on to the electoral

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  count and you see the Secret Service come rushing in and it becomes a, you know, very serious situation. And when you watch some of the videos, it is truly terrorizing that thousands of people overwhelmed the police. And I guess I want to start with people's opinion on Trump's culpability in inciting what was very dangerous behavior. Four people are dead. Um, so we, you know, while we're joking about the cosplay outfits, a woman who was an ardent Trump supporter, who is a vet, who did four tours, uh, from what I've read, and I shared the video with you before, literally, you know, as they broke into the building, was

• 7:55Jason Calacanis?

  trying to breach another area of the building and she's climbing through a window and gets shot, apparently by the Secret Service or the police and dies. And so it's all fun and games until four people are dead. And now somebody's lost their wife, daughter.

• 8:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but Jason, Jason, I mean, there could have been 400 dead. There could have been 4,000.

• 8:16Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this could have become a shootout at the OK Corral. I can't understand why the police showed the restraint they did. I mean, when you see them getting surrounded, I don't know if you saw the one.

• 8:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They didn't, they didn't show restraint, Jason. There was no police. When you look at the amount of security that's typically there and has been there for other situations, and then you compare it to the amount of security, knowing for a month and a half that this was coming, it's, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So I'm a little, I'm a little dumbfounded that, you know, you couldn't have seen this Facebook group called, you know, hashtag Storm the Capitol, which had tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of members in there, plotting and scheming, selling merchandise called Storm the Capitol. You know, these guys were wearing printed sweatshirts that they had time to

• 9:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  make, and nobody knew about it, and nobody thought to reinforce the security and barricade it and make sure that you couldn't go from the protest site to the cap. I mean, I, it just seems like there's some level of complicity that needs to get found out here.

• 9:23David Friedberg?

  But there was a, there was an interview I saw with an ex-DC police guy who said that, I think folks were told to tamper down, the police forces were told to tamper down on managing crowds and protests and riots following the controversy associated with BLM a few months ago, and spraying folks with pepper spray and water and all the physical techniques that were used were so outraging that, that there was just more of a systemic concern about being too aggressive with protesters. And as a result, they went too far the other way. It's, it's not an unreasonable.

• 9:59Jason Calacanis?

  So it just happens to be, Friedberg, that when black people protested and brown people, they got the tear gas and beaten with batons. And then when the white people stormed the, the Capitol in the same area, they got walked down the steps and escorted out. With a stern warning to not do it again. I mean, this is hypocritical and insane.

• 10:24David Sacks?

  I, I, I don't know why you have to go there particularly. Um, it, it, it looked to me like what happened is that the Capitol Hill Police simply got completely overwhelmed. Uh, you look at these, you know, giant, this is a rally on the mall that turned into a mob. Well, first it's kind of turned into a tailgater, then it turned into a mob, and then it turned into an insurrection. It kind of stumbled forward into progressive uh, phases of, uh,

• 10:52Jason Calacanis?

  Stupidity.

• 10:52David Sacks?

  of stupidity and disaster. But it's, it looked to me like the Capitol Hill Police simply got overwhelmed. They, they obviously were unprepared. They were surprised, I think, by this. And I saw a video of tons of tear gas being used. I saw people getting tear gas like crazy. And I think there was reports, uh, this morning on Twitter that the whole area in front of the Capitol there was covered in that light film that remains after tear gassing. So I don't think they were really pulling punches too much. And I also think that, uh, that there will be prosecutions. I think that, uh, the, these people were, were captured on video. There's a lot of talk on Twitter, and everybody is in favor of finding out who they are, applying facial recognition,

• 11:35David Sacks?

  and, uh, bringing charges. So I think there will be a lot of charges, unlike, let's say, the, the BLM protests this summer. I don't remember anybody getting charged based on video of people rioting or looting. And then I think, you know, the, the, the, the final difference actually with the BLM protests is that if you've watched Fox News at all in the last 24 hours, the condemnation of what, of the storming of the Capitol, of what happened, has been across the board, both right and left. Everybody across the political spectrum has condemned it. Nobody is apologizing for it. Nobody on the right is looking for root causes to explain the reasons why it happened. Everybody is just condemning it and saying that it should never have happened, and

• 12:20David Sacks?

  the people who did it should be prosecuted. And, uh, so I don't see any kid gloves here being used, um, you know, either physically or

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you where I see the kid glove sacks is when you see officers being chased up the steps and, uh, or taking selfies, you know, which is one instance. I don't want to just say that's the only indicative thing, but when people are breaking through windows. And just kind of being let go, I mean, they were obviously overwhelmed, but I'm surprised more people didn't get shot. Let's just tackle this head on in terms of the race issue.

• 12:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I have a question for David before I make my statement. David, do you think that if this were black and brown people storming the Capitol, would there have been more or less than four deaths?

• 13:05David Sacks?

  Honestly, I think it would have been the same. I just, you know.

• 13:11Jason Calacanis?

  I disagree.

• 13:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I really disagree, and I'll tell you why. I think you have the best of intentions wanting to think that way, but here's the way I see it. I see a president that basically instigated a group of people who are fundamentally disenfranchised. Let's face it, like, there are a lot of very, very reasonable Republicans and a lot of very reasonable Democrats. The fringes of both parties are functionally mentally retarded. We know this, okay? And so what you see are extreme on both sides who are just completely lost and looking for any excuse. And so you have a president in the tail end of his presidency, an ignominious presidency, basically call them out.

• 13:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nobody who actually had a job or anything to do could show up, right? So you had all these people show up.

• 14:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's a Wednesday.

• 14:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a Wednesday during the day. I mean, and what do you think happens? They're there, they're all frothed up, you know, Eric Trump frothing them up, Donald Trump Jr. frothing them up, Trump frothing them up, Giuliani frothing them up, and all of a sudden, as you said, stumbling into degrees of craziness and stupidity to storm the Capitol. And I just think to myself, how could a president instigate this kind of action? Number one. The second thing I think about is when black athletes peacefully protested something that they had the fundamental constitutional right to protest, in the president's eyes, they were sons of bitches.

• 14:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  White people that stormed the fucking Capitol, the People's House, were called patriots by the president's daughter, and then were told...

• 14:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then we're told that they were loved by the president himself. To me, it's just an enormously stark contrast of a double standard. I think that beyond the persecutions of the people, I actually feel very bad for the people that stormed the Capitol. I feel like these are folks that are on the fringes who just need a vessel and Trump is a vessel and then he instigate them and runs away. You know what I mean?

• 15:23Jason Calacanis?

  He's a coward. He's lost. And these are lost people.

• 15:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Then these guys commit the crime and now they're gonna go to jail? I feel like the culpability has to go all the way back to Trump, to Hawley, to Cruz. These guys are the, those are the real scumbags in all of this.

• 15:38Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what are your thoughts on this? And then I'll go back to Sacks and let him respond.

• 15:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if this was a Black Lives Matter and, and, and it was black people involved or brown people involved in, in the same sorts of activities you saw yesterday, that you would not see more shootings. I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take. Obviously, I think there's this other circumstance, which is that event preceding this one, as I mentioned, I saw an interview with a DC police, former police director, director of the police or some, I forgot what his title was, where he highlighted that, you know, folks were kind of instructed to stand down following the BLM controversies. And so I think that's also kind of a reasonable point of view.

• 16:27Jason Calacanis?

  And is Trump-- What about the president's culpability? I mean, I think that's one issue that's gonna have to be addressed post, and I think we have to figure out what life post-Trump is gonna be like, because this is a level of chaos that nobody, to Sacks's point, all people condemned.

• 16:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a theory which actually takes its origin from, from Hitler, where Hitler used this term, "the big lie." And, you know, the theory is that you can create political propaganda by saying something that's so outrageous, it is so improbable that people say, "There's no way this thing keeps getting said over and over unless it's actually real." This is sort of like the QAnon pedophile ring in the pizzeria, or the fact that the election was stolen from you. It is such an outrageous statement, that it seems to people that it only has to be true, because it is such an insane thing.

• 17:26David Friedberg?

  And if it is, it's so insane and I'm so incited by this thing. So this is kind of, you know, acknowledged as being, you know, a political propaganda technique that goes back a long time. By the way, Hitler used it as a way to, used it as almost like a double bluff, to blame the Jews in Germany, which was, you know, an unfortunate kind of origin of the term. But the term is used a lot now in saying like, these sorts of events are ridiculous. Now, what's going to happen going forward? I don't think big lies go away. You can try and mute them on Twitter and mute them on Facebook or mute them on Reddit, but whether it's QAnon or whatever is next. This is becoming kind of a standard form now because of the way media is distributed.

• 18:10David Friedberg?

  Anyone can say a big lie and it gets a lot of listens. And Trump is totally culpable for that. He made some shit up. He made a bunch of claims. I mean, if you guys haven't seen Lindsey Graham's speech yesterday, it is absolutely worth watching that he gave late last night.

• 18:23Jason Calacanis?

  I saw it. I saw it.

• 18:24David Friedberg?

  And he's like, I asked for the, for the, show me the 10, give me 10 people that claimed that they voted and they were under 18. He's like, they gave you one. Give me anyone that was in prison or died and they gave me zero. And he's like, goes on and on for a couple of minutes about how none of what was said about what happened in the election was true and it was all false. And he's like, this is all just not true. And so I think Trump is culpable for creating a falsehood and, you know, having a megaphone and, you know, there were certainly technology.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  What about the inciting of violence? That is, I think, where the rubber is going to meet the road. Trump's going to be out of office in two weeks or less, one way or the other. Do you, and let me just take it to Sacks. Sacks, I want to give you the time to respond to the, the issue of the double standard in terms of race and BLM. And then also, do you, Sacks, if you're on Biden's team coming in, do you advise that you prosecute Trump or investigate Trump for this insurrection? Yes or no?

• 19:26David Sacks?

  Okay, so just to tie off on the BLM issue, I just fundamentally don't think that race is the issue here. Chamath, look, I don't know at the end of the day what the fatalities would have been if it had been a BLM protest that went awry, but I will stick to what I said before, which is I predict that you will see more prosecutions come out of this, of the people who are involved, I'm talking about the people who stormed the Capitol, than we saw from all the BLM protests over the summer. I mean, I don't remember any prosecutions coming out of videotape of people being caught, recorded, looting and rioting, and I predict you will see more here. And again, I think another difference, again, to the extent

• 20:08David Sacks?

  there's a double standard, you know, I remember a lot of left-wing news networks calling the rioting and looting this summer peaceful protests, which they clearly were not. You even had a book called "In Defense of Looting," and I don't hear anybody defending the storming of the Capitol, nobody on the right. So, look, to the extent there's a double standard, I don't know that it accrues to the BLM side of this, but look, I think that's kind of beside the point and not the real issue here. I mean, Jason, to your question of, is Trump responsible? Yes. I mean, clearly. 100%. 100%. Yes, because he is the one who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months. Two months ago, right after the

• 20:53David Sacks?

  election, there was an article published in The Spectator called "Deplorables Don't Riot." It was actually a pretty good op-ed. You know, it was written by a conservative, and the conservative's point was that, you know, all these windows and shops have been boarded up in anticipation of potential rioting and looting with the election, and all these conservatives are saying, well, who are they afraid of? You know, not us, not the MAGA folks. Well, and the theory was, "Deplorables don't riot," and the right was proud of that two months ago, and now we are seeing that, well, no, the deplorables are rioting. Why is that? What changed over the last two months? And what changed is the constant feeding to this group of people, this idea, starting with Trump, but then perpetuated by, you know,

• 21:38David Sacks?

  different right-wing media organizations and other politicians who sort of were, you know, trying to curry favor with Trump, they were constantly pushing forward this idea that the election was stolen, so that these people on the mall who then riot and storm the Capitol believe that the election was being stolen from them. So, you know, ultimately, that responsibility goes, i- i- is Trump's.

• 21:59Jason Calacanis?

  So, to be clear and reflecting back to you, you're saying Trump incited sedation, is that the right word?

• 22:07David Sacks?

  Well.

• 22:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sedition?

• 22:09David Sacks?

  Uh, s- s- sedition doesn't seem like the wrong, it doesn't seem like the exact right word to me, I mean.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  A riot?

• 22:14David Sacks?

  It was, it wa- it was certainly a riot. Now, now, did, now, look, I mean, you're talking about prosecuting a legal case. Uh, you know, if you want to look at the legal standard for incitement, it has to be, you know, provoking people to take an imminent lawless act. Uh, did he?

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty close.

• 22:31David Sacks?

  I think, I think he load, if you want to see the, this mob as a gun, I think he loaded the gun. He pointed it in a certain direction, but did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No, not specifically. I think therefore it'd be a very hard case to prosecute, but I think, you know, prosecuting him in a court of law is just, is sort of unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he is, I think most people see that he's culpable, and I even think most-

• 22:57Jason Calacanis?

  Is that the end of his political career?

• 22:59David Sacks?

  I think he's, I think he's disqualified himself from being a, a candidate, you know, at a national level again. I mean, if you look-

• 23:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 23:06David Sacks?

  Again, just go back two months ago, uh, look at how much has changed. Two months ago, just in the day or two after the election, Trump had narrowly lost, but there was talk of him starting a new news network to rival Fox. There was talk about he could even be a candidate again in, in 2024. It was not off the table. I think now it's, it's clearly off the table, and you've seen, i- it's partly because of the Georgia runoffs, which, which we should get to, but again, the Republican candidates, at least one of them, had won that election two months ago, and now they lost, and that has a lot to do with Trump's antics in the meantime of just feeding this constant, you know, lie about the stolen election.

• 23:47David Friedberg?

  All right, Chima, I think there's a really important question about, you know, sorry, but is it worth prosecuting Trump, uh, post fact? Um, you know, does that do more harm or good for, for the country as a whole? Certainly, there'll be a lot of people that would get great satisfaction of putting Trump in prison, and a lot of people are calling for that. But, um, we really do need to question the, um, you know, the incredible divide in the nation, and what's the best way to, to heal the divide? The objective shouldn't be pursuing justice. Uh, it should be about moving forward. I'm not suggesting don't prosecute Trump, but I, I think that it's worth, it's worthy of noting that- You know, there is another way of framing this whole thing, which is what's the best thing to do going forward. Though on the flip side, you could even make the case that

• 24:30David Friedberg?

  one of the best things Joe Biden could do today, or tomorrow, is to announce a federal election review commission to actually look into wrongdoings at the state level with a bipartisan basis.

• 24:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it's a slam dunk case anyway.

• 24:46David Friedberg?

  If Biden did that, and he, you know, he basically embraced the notion that a lot of folks are really angry about, and said, "I'm listening to you, I'm hearing you, let me show you," and at the same time, they did not prosecute Trump, and, you know, let him go off into the distance and do his own thing, maybe you start to kind of, you know, heal the rift a little bit. But right now, everyone's kind of inflamed, and there is this like, "How do we prosecute him? What do we do when he's, you know, do, you know, and we're just continuing to kind of escalate the dialogue and increase the rift."

• 25:14David Sacks?

  I just, yeah, so, look, I think prosecuting Trump at this point, first of all, legally, that might be a difficult case to prove because of the need to prove that the, that he was trying to provoke an imminent lawless action. You know, if he had been at the barricades, you know, pushing people forward, yes, but, so I think legally it'd be a tough case, and I think it'd be, like you said, it'd be unnecessarily divisive and partisan. I don't know why we need to go there. I mean, at the end of the day, any politician's stock and trade is their credibility and popularity. And Trump has fundamentally damaged the perception of him, I think, even among the right.

• 25:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a huge issue with this, and I'll tell you why. It's because the folks that are now going to go to jail were instigated by this guy. And the folks that were there in many ways were brought, they were cajoled, they were instigated to travel from, groomed to travel there, to take the time out of their lives, to basically then get fed this rhetoric, and in a moment of just crazy mob-like mentality to act out at the behest of the leader of the free world. There has to be a consequence, not just to those people, because they, in many ways, are not the person to prosecute.

• 26:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To the extent that you are going to put some of these people in jail, which we look like, it looks like we're going to, and by the way, let's be honest, there is no inconceivable way that these people get charged with a misdemeanor. That's not going to stand, right? And the worst perpetrators of this, when they get put in jail, will get put in jail for five to 10 years, minimum. And so, what are, what are we going to do when we look at ourselves in the eye and say, these poor Americans, at the end of the day, who were instigated by this guy, and he yet again gets off scot-free, while hundreds of Americans who were basically in a peak of craziness, fed by this guy, does something and goes to jail, and you have hundreds of lives and hundreds of families ruined?

• 27:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Even if we don't find a way to basically put Trump in jail for this, I can 100% guarantee you, I will bet a million bucks, that now, the Southern District of New York gloves off. Every single state that can go after this guy, gloves off. And, to the extent that Joe Biden had any incentive to basically like, let this go away at the federal level, gloves off. In my opinion, I really, I really, really think something's gonna happen.

• 27:45David Friedberg?

  Let's say, let's say that folks do go after Trump. What does that do? If he gets put in jail, or he, you know, gets, there's some criminal proceeding brought against him, what does that do to the 50% of the nation that truly support him and truly care about him?

• 27:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't, I don't.

• 28:00David Friedberg?

  You know, like, like, like, the balance of justice versus unification, you know, how do we weigh the two?

• 28:04Jason Calacanis?

  I think we're talking actually about 25% of the country.

• 28:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, I don't even think it's that.

• 28:08David Friedberg?

  Whatever it is, right? Or whatever it is, like, there's obviously a big voting bloc, and a big bloc of the potential bloc that he likes to call it.

• 28:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, I think, I think of the 70 million people that voted for Donald Trump, I think there are half of them who would equally vote for a normal centrist candidate.

• 28:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And didn't necessarily believe in Donald Trump. Then I think there's the other 35 million. And I do think that there's a spectrum of those 35. And I think that you probably lost 10 or 15 million of them after the events of yesterday, where they just threw their hands up in the air and said, hey, wait a minute.

• 28:45David Friedberg?

  It would really only inflame 20 million, is what you're saying.

• 28:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Correct. And I agree with Chamath on that. And those 20 million people are, you know, sad to say, concentrated in about 10 states that don't functionally matter economically or otherwise.

• 28:59David Friedberg?

  And so the balance of justice versus unification, certainly it sounds like you're saying weighs heavily towards justice, right? Like more, more folks will benefit from seeing him come to justice or what perceived justice than.

• 29:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think what it will allow, I think it'll allow the Republican Party to re-center itself. I think that's better for politics. I think it's better for governance. It's better for America. I think it allows a lot of people to basically wake up out of this haze that they've been in in four years and say, wow, wait a minute. Enough, enough. Like I was on a really bad bender. I did a couple of things I really regret and I need to re-center myself.

• 29:32David Friedberg?

  How do you not find this turning into a tit for tat, Berlusconi, Italy, Brazil, Israel kind of phenomenon where, you know, future leaders are then attacked and challenged and taken to court?

• 29:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The best tweet I saw on this was this woman tweeted out that the following, she said, "When the Democrats lost in 2016, they knitted pink hats and donated to Planned Parenthood."

• 29:56David Sacks?

  No, they didn't. No, they didn't. They invented a ridiculous Russian conspiracy theory.

• 30:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They, David.

• 30:02Jason Calacanis?

  That like 10 people went to jail for.

• 30:03David Sacks?

  The Russia hoax. The Russia hoax. No one went to jail for.

• 30:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a hoax. Come on. They were, the Russians were obviously trying to interfere.

• 30:10David Sacks?

  You're like the last person, you're like the last person who still believes in this.

• 30:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, listen, I still believe that they tried and I still believe, I don't know that they succeeded, but I think they tried.

• 30:18David Sacks?

  Mueller spent two years investigating this, tens of millions of dollars, 25 FBI agents.

• 30:23Jason Calacanis?

  Those are all GOP talking points. The fact is Manafort went to jail.

• 30:27David Sacks?

  For something completely unrelated.

• 30:29Jason Calacanis?

  These guys were all.

• 30:30David Sacks?

  You must be the last person who still believes that Trump won in 2016 because of Russian interference.

• 30:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think that they, I think he asked the Ukraine for help and I think he asked the Russians for help and I think that he would have gladly accepted the help. Now, is it, was it a conspiracy like in the Grand?

• 30:47David Sacks?

  No, it wasn't a conspiracy.

• 30:48Jason Calacanis?

  You can never know if it affected it, but this is the problem with your. Russia talking point is that you're trying to just say because he didn't get prosecuted, which he's probably not going to get prosecuted for this either. The guy is a serial offender. Okay, and they were trying to get information from WikiLeaks and they were trying to get the the hacks. And so I don't know why you can so clearly see what he's doing, David, when he incites this violence and then you don't see that he would, he has no moral backbone or character and that he wouldn't accept foreign aid?

• 31:20David Sacks?

  No, no, it's not that.

• 31:21Jason Calacanis?

  He's a treasonous bastard.

• 31:23David Sacks?

  Here, here, here's my view, okay? Here's my view is that when you lose an election as a candidate, you have to look in the mirror and ask what you did wrong. Okay, Trump failed to do that two months ago instead of just taking the L and, you know, and he, he could have blamed it on the fact the vaccine was one week late. I mean, there were, there were, you know, instead of just accepting the loss, he invented this conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and he's basically like Friedberg said, been pumping it month after month. And, you know, his enablers, you know, have, have perpetuated until we had this, you know, total breakdown and storming of, of the Capitol. But again, you know, where was the democratic reassessment of why they lost in 2016?

• 32:05David Sacks?

  Who on the Democrat side looked in the mirror and said, you know, we shouldn't have lost that election, you know, what did we do wrong? They didn't do that. Instead, they blamed it all on Russian interference or Facebook. You know, all of a sudden Facebook went from being a darling to being a scapegoat.

• 32:21Jason Calacanis?

  And there was Russian ads being put with rubles and tons of link forms confirmed done by the Russians in order to ferment anti Hillary sentiment. I mean, this actually happened.

• 32:37David Sacks?

  It's true.

• 32:37Jason Calacanis?

  To your point, did it actually affect the election? Nobody can know that, but it did occur.

• 32:43David Sacks?

  Yes, we can because, yeah, it did. It did. Some FSB back-

• 32:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so now you're admitting there was Russian interference.

• 32:48David Sacks?

  No, I, no, no, no.

• 32:49Jason Calacanis?

  So you were before saying there wasn't, and now you're saying there was.

• 32:51David Sacks?

  I'm talking about, I'm talking about why some, but, no, no, it's not, because here, here's the, here's where you're being misleading, is, yes, is it true that there was some FSB operative somewhere buying ads on Facebook?

• 33:04Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds of them, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands.

• 33:08David Sacks?

  Out of billions of impressions, okay? It was a microscopic number of total impressions of the election, and the people who actually looked at those ads thought they were absurd. Imagine some operative, hold on, let me finish my point. Imagine some operative in Moscow trying to influence the American election by buying ads on Facebook. It, it, did they try? Yes. Look, foreign intelligence services are trying all the time, okay? But was that the re-

• 33:34Jason Calacanis?

  So they did try?

• 33:35David Sacks?

  They did try, yes, but was that-

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  And did Trump and his family ask them to help?

• 33:40David Sacks?

  No, there was no, there's no proof of collusion. There was no proof of collusion, okay?

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't take the meeting, okay?

• 33:44David Sacks?

  No, that's what Mueller, he spent two years investigating it and found no collusion. Look, so my point is, again, we're getting off on a rabbit hole here, but my point was, when, when you as a candidate lose an election, you have to take responsibility for that. That was not done in 2016, and it was not done certainly in 2020 by Trump. It is the problem with both our political parties, that they would rather invent conspiracy theories and lies than acknowledge why people are rejecting them.

• 34:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I agree with this. I, I would say this, but that is not the point. David, you are right, okay? Somewhere along the way, we got stuck worrying about the pronouns that we use, and which bathrooms should be or should not be transgendered, while the American middle class was completely gutted from pillar to post. That is what's created the boundary conditions for this. Every single time there's been an insurrection, or an uprising, or a revolution in America, it has never been about ideology. It has always been about economics. Always. And economics is the tip of the spear in this country, whether we like it or not. It started with the Boston Tea Party. You know, it continued through the Civil War.

• 34:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It has always been about that topic. So, we all let it happen. We all have a responsibility to fix it. That, though, is a topic, I think, for another day, because that's the grand arc of what we need to do in our generation and fix this inequality gap. Meanwhile, we do have this tactical issue, which is you have the leader of the free world, in my opinion, and I think in a lot of reasonable-minded people's opinion, instigating, essentially at a minimum, a riot, and at the maximum, some form of like-

• 35:37Jason Calacanis?

  Treason.

• 35:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Idiotic form of- I don't- I mean, but the problem is, it's just, it is just like, it's just, it's incomprehensible what it is.

• 35:47Jason Calacanis?

  I've fallen on the side that we need to prosecute him now. I was, I was 50/50 on this, but I'll tell you what's tipped me over, is, you know, if we don't prosecute him, there's this sort of like unfairness to it. I think that's a very good point you made, Chamath. But I also think that he is go- we need to wake people up from this fog they've been in to Friedberg. And I don't, I think we have to free the Republican Party to get back to some more version that is reasonable, like you are, Sacks. I would rather see you-

• 36:17David Sacks?

  The Republican Party has, is, is already rejecting Trump. So, just look at what's happened in the last 24 to 48 hours. Even after this storming of the Capitol, okay, you had Republicans who were just hours before objecting to the electors, they basically were saying, "No, I've changed my mind."

• 36:34Jason Calacanis?

  Who was that? Lindsey Graham, but not Ted Cruz, not that other- Kelly Loeffler.

• 36:38David Sacks?

  Kelly Loeffler did, and there were a few other ones who switched sides. You had excellent speeches by Lindsey Graham and then Romney. I agree with that. They spoke very, very eloquently. And just today, Elaine Chao resigned as Secretary of Transportation. I think that's mostly significant-

• 36:54Jason Calacanis?

  Who's left, David, in the Republican Party?

• 36:57David Sacks?

  Look, I think, I think after George- The Republican Party was already blamed Trump for that. And now after the storming of the Capitol, they're ready to be done with him. This idea that you need to prosecute Trump to end his somehow end his relationship with the Republican Party, I think it will just backfire.

• 37:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think that's what the point is. I think the point is that nobody is above the law. And when you, when you lead, you know, what, look, the, the thing with the people that attended this rally is in any other situation, and Jason, you said it earlier, these are our veterans. These are the people that are like working good jobs. They're trying to just keep America going. They've always believed in American exceptionalism. There was nothing wrong with that. It was just perverted by this fucking scumbag.

• 37:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 37:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He is a complete piece of shit fucking scumbag.

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  He's garbage and I think that's why you have to prosecute him. I think you have to make an example of him. I, I know that they, with Nixon, they took a different approach, but I just think he's too dangerous to leave unprosecuted because every time he has some bad behavior, whether it was the Ukraine, whether it's, you know, Russia, we can debate what level they wanted to engage with the Russians or, you know, in the case of this riotous behavior, you know, I think he's not going to stop. That's the thing that I fear is I don't think he's going to stop.

• 38:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would rather, I would rather take every single person arrested and give them zero days in jail and add it all up and give it to Trump.

• 38:26David Sacks?

  Well, I, I wouldn't, I mean, I, I agree with you to, to some degree that they were victims of this two-month propaganda campaign to convince the right that this election was stolen. I think a lot of those people who were storming the Capitol, they were there not to steal an election, but because they were, thought they were there to prevent the stealing of an election. And so, yes, they, they have been duped by a lot of people, including, you know, leading with, with Trump, but including a lot of other people who should have known better. But, but that being said, they did make the decision to hop the barricades, smash the windows, go into the Capitol.

• 39:02Jason Calacanis?

  There is some personal responsibility that has to occur.

• 39:04David Sacks?

  Absolutely, yeah, we can't.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  And that's the tragedy of this woman, like, but let's talk about this woman for a second. And I think it's important to look at this specific case. This is a person who's a veteran. And she was inside the halls already and was trying to breach another area. And she was just shot dead by Secret Service. They might have been protecting the VP. They might have been protecting Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell. Who knows? Um, but they shot her dead.

• 39:33David Sacks?

  Yeah, I saw it on video. I mean, it's on video.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's unbelievable. And it, I mean, coming from a law enforcement family, I can tell you that's a clean shooting. If she was breaching and they told her, do not come in here, we're going to shoot you. And they were protecting, the Secret Service is protecting an asset? They're allowed to shoot you. Like, you can't jump that. And she's a military vet. She's from the Air Force? I mean, what is in her mind? How wound up was she by Trump and by this propaganda? That when they told her, do not breach the second door inside there?

• 40:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, you just said the key word. You cannot be spun up in all of this by Giuliani. He's a fucking moron. You know, he can barely like not wet his pants. You know, you're not going to get spun up by Sidney Powell. The only person that can really catalyze this is the person that has the respect that comes with sitting in the seat that's called the presidency of the United States. He's the only one. He's the only one. We all know this. Because if Giuliani was running this rally and said, let's go storm the Capitol, nobody would have done it. We all know this.

• 40:39David Sacks?

  Look, yeah.

• 40:40Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think about this woman, David? Like, think about the psychology of this person for a second, the humanity of it.

• 40:46David Friedberg?

  You know, I'll say something. I think, um, man, politics is, um, isn't the problem. It's kind of the manifestation of the problem. If you think about how crazy it is that, I posted a tweet about this the other day because I've been thinking about it a lot. I think it's so crazy that you can show people a TV ad or a Facebook ad and get them to change their mind on what to vote. Like, um, People are kind of shown stuff, and the bigger problem is this kind of reductionism that's kind of enveloped all of this. You know, if you go back 100 years, I guarantee you people were having deeper, more civil conversations about differences of opinion

• 41:24David Friedberg?

  and ways to govern and laws to govern us. And I think like, you know, it's so easy to put a 30-second kind of reductionist ad in front of someone, incite their kind of amygdala to respond and change their mind about something, or push them in some direction. And I think that's the bigger issue with like what's been going on, is people are kind of being pushed all the way to one side, or pushed all the way to the other side, through this, you know, this very kind of simple process. There is no dialogue to decide what candidate to vote for, dialogue to decide what path to take. It's all insidious. Like lock his ass up, you know, kill them. Like, everything has

• 42:05David Friedberg?

  become extremely binary. And the grayscale is really the reality, and unfortunately, we've kind of really hurt ourselves in this tribalism over objectivism kind of approach to how we talk as a society and how we debate. And as a result, people are pushed over the edge. And I think this is a manifestation of that broader problem, which I think is probably linked to the internet and short attention spans and all this shit that's going on.

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this is also why I think the GOP has just been completely, you know...

• 42:38David Friedberg?

  But it's not just the GOP.

• 42:39Jason Calacanis?

  Dominated. Now, but I'm saying, I think there's a good segue into Georgia, which is...

• 42:44David Friedberg?

  But you could say the same about AOC. And you could say that AOC is doing the same to the Democratic Party, and they're, you know, equally frustrated with this extremist point of view, or Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, and they're, you know, capturing the attention.

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, none of them got the nomination, though, right? And none of them got cabinet positions.

• 42:57David Friedberg?

  But they could have, and they were close. And it was like, hey, look, give everyone a million dollars. Okay, great. Like, and tax the rich 90%. Great. Like, it's easy to say. And my point is, by the way, I think the root of a lot of this is, is people are programmed to be unhappy, right? That's how you instigate people to take action. The bottom 10% of Americans make more money and have a better position in life than the top 10% of Kenyans. And it's an incredible statistic if you think about it. Go to DollarStreet.org or DollarStreet.com and you can actually play around and see what different people live like around the world. Yet, in the US, we are told at every strata, whether you're wealthy or not wealthy relative to others in the United States, that you should be better off.

• 43:42David Friedberg?

  And it is, you know, happiness is the difference between expectation and outcome. And everyone's been set an expectation beyond what they currently have. And as a result, through programmatic work that is done on people in the United States, we are being told, "You should be unhappy. Oh, and by the way, here's the short-term solution to resolve it." And it's driving an incredible amount of behavioral shift, and it really threatens democracy, as we saw this week. And you guys will remember, my big loser for the political loser for 2020 was the American Democratic Institution. And I think we saw that this week.

• 44:17David Sacks?

  I agree with that.

• 44:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On the heels of that, can I ask you guys what you think of this? Basically Pelosi has told Pence, "You have to invoke the 25th Amendment or they're going to take up impeachment." What do you guys think about that?

• 44:30Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's the right thing to do.

• 44:32David Friedberg?

  How do you do that?

• 44:33Jason Calacanis?

  I think there has to be a backstop against this.

• 44:36David Friedberg?

  How do you run impeachment proceeding?

• 44:37Jason Calacanis?

  Is it possible Trump could do something crazy? You could, oh, here's the thing. And I tweeted a tweet for Har about this. If you are impeached successfully, you can't run again. So I think that this is a way to put the nail in the coffin of Trump even having the ability to run in 2024, which I think is why the Democrats are on the right side of history on this one. That's my personal belief.

• 44:59David Friedberg?

  Maybe they sign a non-prosecution agreement with him if he resigns. And that's kind of the final, you know.

• 45:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I would like to see.

• 45:05David Sacks?

  But Jason, why can't you trust voters to make the right decision in 2024?

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Um, do I trust voters? It's not about trusting the voters. It's more about, do I think there should be ramifications for somebody's behavior? That's, that's my fear is that if he keeps getting away with stuff, he could do something even more violent or dangerous. As Chamath said earlier, it's a miracle that 100 people weren't shot dead and this wasn't a firefight. I mean, if somebody takes out a gun at any moment during that and people start shooting, we could have hundreds of people, Americans, dead, not just the four who died. And I think Trump is absolutely capable of doing something in the last 14 days. If he did this 15 days out, why wouldn't he do something else seven days out or three days out? He's a maniac.

• 45:55Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior. It's completely possible that he could do something more dangerous in the last 14 days. I know that that sounds crazy, but look at what we saw yesterday.

• 46:08David Sacks?

  I think, I think there is like a white knuckle element to the next two weeks. I think we're all kind of white knuckling it to, you know, to see what's going to happen. We have 300 hours to go till Biden is sworn in and I've got to admit, like I'm counting down the hours, you know?

• 46:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's too insane. Nobody wants to live like this.

• 46:27David Sacks?

  Everybody's feeling, everybody's feeling that. That being said, I just think that, I'm more on Friedberg's point of view on this, that we have this insane level of partisan warfare in the US. It's gone to like a whole nother level and I just, and, and Trump has definitely made it worse and the storming of the Capitol is the, you know, is the zenith of it. It's the apex, but look, the other side's been doing it too. And the question is just how we de-escalate this insane partisan warfare.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't Biden the de-escalation, Chamath? Isn't Biden like being elected?

• 47:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, I think it is. Yeah, I think it is.

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, we picked the most boring candidate who has the most milquetoast, middle-of-the-road approach, who, who Lindsey Graham likes and who traveled the world with. I mean, Lady G loves him.

• 47:16David Sacks?

  Well, to the extent that Biden has a mandate, this is it. I mean, and he talked about it in his victory speech that night, which was, which was quite good. It's about bringing people together. Now, look, I mean, the issue, one of the issues is you can't ignore the fact that Democrats for the last four years have waged this insane partisan war against Trump. I mean, let's not even go into the merits, but you had this two-year Mueller witch hunt. You then had this impeachment, you know, crusade, which, look, if there was a lot of validity to the impeachment, why wasn't it used as a campaign issue last year? I just think everybody knows.

• 47:53Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a question.

• 47:54David Sacks?

  Everybody knows that was hyper-partisan. And, and my point is that, yeah, look, I mean, I think it's a good thing if Biden can de-escalate things. That, that is, that is, I think, why he won the election, is that he was seen as more of a sane alternative.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a question, Sax. Do you think it would have been, do you think if Trump had been impeached for the Ukraine interference and Pence had taken over, we would not have seen what we were seeing yesterday and the country would have been further along to healing?

• 48:22David Sacks?

  So, you know, no, I mean, Pence would not have invited or asked all of his supporters to come to the Capitol to oppose the counting, the counting of the electors. I, look, that was a unique Trump thing for, you know, he could not accept the loss and had to keep pushing and pushing and pushing.

• 48:42Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 48:43David Sacks?

  On this idea that he, that the election was stolen. Okay.

• 48:45Jason Calacanis?

  So, it would have been a good idea to impeach him.

• 48:47David Sacks?

  No, no, it wouldn't. No, it wouldn't. Because if you had, if you had impeached Trump, well, first of all, he was impeached, okay? But if you had voted to convict him, if you had removed him from office, the Senate had voted to convict over a phone call, okay? And, look, I'm not defending the phone call. I'm not saying the phone call was perfect. Okay, I know Trump says it was perfect. It was not a perfect phone call, but you can't remove a sitting president for that, okay? Look, it was unseemly or whatever. I think we all know what he was trying to do in that phone call, but you can't remove a sitting president over that. That was hyper-partisan. And so, no, the country would be much further apart today if you had done that. And, and so the question now is, well, how do you bring it back together? And I think, I understand where, where, where Tomoth is coming from.

• 49:29David Sacks?

  I think that Trump deserves morally culpably, I think he is culpable.

• 49:36Jason Calacanis?

  Some repudiation.

• 49:37David Sacks?

  Some repudiation, but, but I don't believe in locking him up or prosecuting him. That's only going to make things much, much worse.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  For this crime. We, we don't even know what else is out there. I mean, I think there's other issues out there. Let's talk about Georgia. Let's, I think we've nailed the Trump. I mean, unless anybody really feels like continuing to talk about the social.

• 49:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stacey Abrams is a genius. I mean, my gosh, she should be in charge of everything.

• 50:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Can we get her on the vaccine rollout?

• 50:04David Sacks?

  Well, Trump.

• 50:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's incredible. It's incredible.

• 50:06David Sacks?

  Stacey Abrams did an incredible job on the Democrat side mobilizing turnout. But the reason why the Republicans lost Georgia is frankly, Trump, I mean, Trump cost them Georgia. Two months ago, Purdue beat Ossoff in that election. He won. He won.

• 50:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He won.

• 50:23David Sacks?

  And, and he's beaten him before. I think he is, I mean, he's not the most wonderful candidate, but I think he is a better candidate. And he lost because of these antics over the last two months, culminating in that insane phone call that Trump had with the Georgia Secretary of State.

• 50:40Jason Calacanis?

  We haven't even talked about that.

• 50:40David Sacks?

  Raffel's burger. Right.

• 50:42Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, should he be prosecuted for that, Sax?

• 50:45David Sacks?

  Can't you just find the 11,000 votes? Look, I, I just think, you know, I don't

• 50:49Jason Calacanis?

  Which one is more prosecutable? Sending people to the Capitol or asking them and begging them to find him 11,000 votes? Which one is more prosecutable to you, Sax? Since you're going to be framing stuff?

• 50:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's, wait, Jason, hold on. Let's, let's move, let's move away from the whole Trump goes to jail for a second. I just want to, I think it's important to talk about Georgia because I think, David, you're going to make a point.

• 51:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, I think we're getting hung up too much on the legalities. And let's just talk about what's right and wrong, you know, which we, is what we can agree on and let, you know, lawyers and prosecutors figure out the legalities. Ramesh Panuru from National Review had a great quote about Georgia. He said that Purdue and Loeffler could have survived any two of these three, being unimpressive candidates, Georgia shifting purple, and Trump being a maniac. And unfortunately, you had three out of three, and that's why they lost. If, it was a great, is a great quote. You know, you had the Raffel's burger call, you know, can't you just find me 11,000 votes the day before the election or two days before the election? I mean, that had to push swing voters and undecideds to the

• 51:51David Sacks?

  Democrats. And the other thing is that Purdue and Loeffler weren't able able to make the best argument that they had, which is if you vote for us, you end up with split, you, you, you prevent the Democrats from having all the power in Washington. So unless you want to give all the power in Washington to a single party, you need to vote for us. That was the best argument for voting for them because there's a lot of people in this country who believe in splitting their ticket because they don't trust either party, which is kind of where I'm at. But they were unable to make that argument effectively because Trump was still hanging on to the idea that he was going to be president.

• 52:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I think David, I honestly, I think this comes down to the intelligence of the candidates. Kelly Loeffler is a moron. She's an idiot. David Perdue is a good old boy. He's an idiot. They're just stupid. This actually speaks to a bigger problem, which is the Republicans could do so much better if they could actually find younger, more vibrant, intelligent people, and instead they find these fucking morons. I don't know where they find them. But, you know, they pulled Kelly Loeffler out of some like backstage Dallas beauty pageant and just kind of like fluffed her up and tried to get her to run. She's a moron.

• 52:56David Sacks?

  Loeffler, Loeffler was a mistake. Loeffler was a mistake.

• 52:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fucking idiot.

• 53:00Jason Calacanis?

  Did you read the story about her with the WNBA?

• 53:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I mean, Georgia is full of

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  They basically

• 53:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Georgia, Georgia is full of so many incredible politicians and they found that idiot.

• 53:11David Sacks?

  That, that, that was a huge mistake. If they just voted or yeah, I mean, the governor made a huge mistake. They put, they appointed her to the last two months. Uh, I, so I, I agree that she's a particularly weak candidate, but the Republicans only needed one of these two elections and Perdue had beaten Ossoff before. I agree with you. He's not necessarily the greatest candidate of all time, but he has proved better than Ossoff in the past, including November. And the reason why he lost two months later is because what's transpired in the last two months? Biden has acted presidential and Trump has done what he's done. And that, that made all the difference. And, and that, by the way, is why you're seeing the Republicans breaking from Trump. They were already on their way to breaking with him and then you had this storm in the Capitol.

• 53:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are the implications for Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz?

• 53:56David Sacks?

  I think this was a blow to them because I think that what they were doing in terms of opposing the electors, everybody knew it was sort of cynical and

• 54:10Jason Calacanis?

  Theater.

• 54:11David Sacks?

  It was theater. It was performative theater designed to curry favor with Trump so that he might endorse them in 2024 for the nomination. And it was it was it was optionistic. And the problem is it backfired horribly. And, you know, people now see it for what it was. And so, yeah, I think it's gonna hurt. Ultimately, they tried to do something optionistic that they thought would help them politically. And I think it's gonna hurt them.

• 54:35Jason Calacanis?

  But wait, I have to ask you guys, do you guys know the backstory of Loeffler and the Atlantic Dream, the WNBA team?

• 54:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's honestly, Jason, I'm gonna get so angry because she is just a complete piece of shit. Please don't fly. I'm, you can bring it up. I think she's just a complete

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks and Freeburger aware of this, but

• 54:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think she's a complete piece of shit.

• 54:55Jason Calacanis?

  She basically

• 54:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But go ahead, tell the story.

• 54:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's basically, she was anti BLM, and she was writing letters to the NBA WNBA to not allow the players to be vocal about Black Lives Matter with the, you know, after the killing of, the murder of George Floyd. And so what the team did, if you look at that story, is they backed Warnock. They got on the call with him. They refused to say her name. And they rallied the support of Warnock, who ultimately beat her, and they refused to say her name ever again. The players on her own team.

• 55:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Courage. If you want to see courage, the women that play in the WNBA are some of the most incredible people

• 55:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in the world. These are, these are women that have basically stopped their athletic career, stopped fame, you know, stopped all of the attention, in some cases, stopped fortunes, to work on behalf of criminal justice reform, to basically overturn, you know, unjust convictions. These women are incredible. And then to be suppressed, to be able to say what was on their mind, Kelly Loeffler is a piece of shit.

• 56:06Jason Calacanis?

  And they basically wore these vote Warnock t-shirts every day at every game. I mean, imagine. And then now they're, I think, gonna be forced.

• 56:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bravo to those women.

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I give them, Sue Bird, I think, is the, was the leader of the whole movement.

• 56:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bravo to her.

• 56:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, bravo to her. All right, moving on from politics, I think we have to talk Friedberg about the deployment of the vaccine. I did a quick poll on Twitter and Twitter and the American people have asked that Friedberg, the queen of quinoa, be responsible for the vaccine distribution going forward.

• 56:41David Friedberg?

  Really? I'm in. Let's do it. I would get that vaccine into everyone's arms in 75 days. I mean, it would be locked and loaded.

• 56:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You would be such a cold lock. That would be amazing.

• 56:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I don't know how that happens.

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  So Friedberg, what would you do differently?

• 56:58David Friedberg?

  I would love to do that.

• 56:59Jason Calacanis?

  And maybe you could describe, you know, we were supposed to be at a million a day. We're at 350, trending towards 400. We did 1.5 million in 72 hours, according to Fauci at one point, right after the new year. So we're kind of like halfway where we need to be. What would you do differently? Because a rollout seems, we have more than 50% are on the shelves still, not in arms.

• 57:22David Friedberg?

  It is a wartime scenario. When war is happening, you don't go home at 5:00 PM and wake up at 9:00 AM and clock out for an hour for lunch and, you know, you don't, oh, well, don't run too fast, you know, you might trip. You don't do any of that. We've created incredible disincentives in the system. In fact, Cuomo put out a million dollar fine if you get your vaccine out of line. I mean, think about the disincentive that creates. Now people are more scared about giving the vaccine to the wrong person than they are incentivized to give the vaccine to the right person. And the reality is, this is a group game. This isn't an individual game. It's not about who gets vaccinated first and you'll

• 58:04David Friedberg?

  live and you'll die. We all need to get vaccinated as a group so that we all have immunity so that this virus stops spreading. It doesn't matter if you're individually vaccinated. It matters if we're all vaccinated because that's the only way we're all going to get out of the economic slump that is truly damaging this country right now. And so the first step is create a military-style operation. Figure out how many feet on the ground, you know, it's all a rate-based system, right? How many are you running per day? And then how do you achieve that objective? And over time, you have your target rate per day. You would scale it up over 75 days or whatever your rollout timeframe needs to be. And you would say, this is how we're going to get there. We need this number of people giving shots this many minutes apart. And then you go figure out where are you going to give the shots and who's going to give them?

• 58:48David Friedberg?

  Get the vaccines to where they need to get to, take over all the gymnasiums and all the stadiums and all the open sports facilities around the country. People can drive up, stand in line, get a friggin shot. And 65-year-olds get priority for the first 30 days, and then after 30 days, your 65 and over crowd loses their priority and it's open season for who wants to get a shot. You stand in line, you get a shot. Walk in, you got 3.8 million nurses in the United States, you go contract 500,000 of them, you give them a huge friggin one-time bonus to come and run this program. You run 24-hour shifts in the gymnasiums around the country. People come in, they get shots, they get out, takes three minutes. If you're feeling weird, if you have risk of allergies, you go sit in the other room, you wait for two hours and there's a bunch of roaming nurses keeping an eye on you. And you get this thing

• 59:32David Friedberg?

  done. That's it. This is not that complicated. And we can leverage the National Guard to create the infrastructure to support these lines and get these things done. We can go recruit, there are plenty of nurses associations, you can go, people can work overnight shifts and get paid triple overtime, get extra bonuses for doing this. It's a great way to kind of create an economic stimulus around this. We can get this entire country vaccinated in 90 days. And the way that Israel's doing it is a great model, you know, when they run out of-

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  Describe that, yeah.

• 59:58David Friedberg?

  So at the end of the day, if, you know, when you open, when you take these things out of deep freeze, you're at risk of them spoiling at that point, because the mRNA is very, you know, can break, and so it needs to be really cold, and then you gotta give the vaccine very quickly. Otherwise, the mRNA can degrade and it's not effective.

• 1:00:13Jason Calacanis?

  And you have to defrost it in order to give it?

• 1:00:15David Friedberg?

  Yes, you defrost it, then it's sitting there, now you gotta give it within a couple hours, and if you got extra doses-

• 1:00:19Jason Calacanis?

  So it's super complicated.

• 1:00:20David Friedberg?

  What they're doing in Israel is they're looking outside, they grab the pizza guy that's on the bicycle truck, on the bicycle cruising by, they're like, "Do you want a shot? Come on in." They give him a shot. They grab the next guy. You do not need to track everyone that gets a shot. You do not need everyone to show their ID to get a shot. You do not need to X, Y, and Z. All the disincentives that create friction in the system of rolling out the vaccine need to be completely eliminated. There's no qualifying criteria, except maybe being 65 and over for the first 30 days. And we prioritize politics over health and safety. We have made it the case that the teachers should get the shot first, because the teachers' unions created an uproar in California and said they're not gonna go to work unless they, so now, the teachers are gonna get it- And the essential workers are gonna get it, which are people that are working in stores and warehouses and other stuff.

• 1:01:02David Friedberg?

  And meanwhile, the people that can actually die from this, fifteen percent likelihood of death if you're over eighty-five, are not getting it, because they're not technically an essential worker. So the prioritization where we've tried to create these artificial, politically motivated systems for defining who gets the vaccine and who doesn't, is absolutely killing us and literally killing us. Four thousand people died yesterday in the United States. And so this system is fucked up. The incentives we've, and don't bleep that out, because that's exactly what it is. The disincentives we've created are destroying the rollout. The governor's getting involved in creating models of prioritization that are politically motivated are killing us. And we should centrally plan this thing. War Production Act. Make a shit ton of this stuff. Grab it all. Get a hundred million doses distributed into gymnasiums around the country.

• 1:01:46David Friedberg?

  Get the nurses in there. Get the National Guard to organize.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  This should have been federal. I mean, that's the key. This should have been a federal effort.

• 1:01:51David Friedberg?

  Central planning is sometimes needed to get shit done. We did it with the War Production Board during World War II. We did it with the Manhattan Project. There have been countless examples where we've had to centralize planning for a massive, short-term event. And this is one of those events. And this needs to be prioritized and organized centrally. And it needs to have the right-minded people on this, not kind of people that are, you know, political operatives and not people that are working nine to five. This is a war, and we need to go win the fucking war.

• 1:02:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the good news is Trump has time. He's at Camp David this weekend, so I think he can put some attention to it. Sax.

• 1:02:29David Sacks?

  Can I ask a question, Friedberg? So, you know, what do you think about just using markets to distribute the vaccine?

• 1:02:36David Friedberg?

  It's a great idea. I think, you know, you have to get the incentives such that time-based systems are the incentive, right? Because the objective here is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. So take that being your objective, and then figure out, look, you guys are gonna get a thousand dollars per person vaccinated in the first fifteen days. And then you're gonna get five hundred dollars, and then, you know, whatever the transition is. And then anyone can sign up to buy doses at a cost, so they have skin in the game, right? That's an alternative. So let Walgreens and CVS buy fifty million dosers. And then they're incentivized to get them rolled out as quickly as possible. Let them do the work, sure. And frankly, if a few people have anaphylactic reactions across the country, that's just the reality. In war, you have some casualties. This can't be perfect. It has to be good enough to win the war.

• 1:03:19David Sacks?

  Well, by the way, when somebody goes into anaphylactic shock, just to clarify that. Yeah, you get an EpiShot. It's not fatal if you have an EpiPen.

• 1:03:27David Friedberg?

  That's right. And so, you know, when you get a, when you get a, you know, a vaccine, if you get one of these vaccines, forty percent to sixty percent of people are gonna have some sort of reaction. You're gonna have a fever, because these are, these produce a ton of proteins in your body, relative to what you would normally, you know, kind of experience with a dead vaccine. There's a lot of vaccines in your body, there's a lot of protein in your body, your body reacts to get rid of that protein, you produce all these antibodies very quickly. So you end up having a fever, you end up having some allergic response, or headaches, or flushing, or whatever. So everyone's gonna have, a lot of people are gonna have some sort of thing. So, one of the concerns is they wanna have nurses available, and they wanna have this feel like a controlled medical environment. But again, the reality

• 1:04:08David Friedberg?

  is, we have to sack it up. We have to accept the fact, that people are gonna be uncomfortable. It is not gonna be an easy, simple vaccine, like you get the flu vaccine at Walgreens, it's gonna be a little bit uncomfortable. You may not have five or six nurses surrounding you, and getting all the TLC that Americans have become used to getting every time we, you know, brush our friggin' teeth. And, and we're gonna have some people go into anaphylactic shock, and they're gonna get EpiPen shots, and, and, you know, and we shouldn't be charging fifteen hundred dollars for EpiPen shots, is another, you know, important point. But I think the market-based model could work as well. So...

• 1:04:38David Sacks?

  Hasn't Israel done this right? I mean, Israel, they moved the old people to the front of the line, but anybody can get in line, if they've got extra doses that day, they just keep sticking people, they keep jabbing people, until they run out. All day long, until they run out.

• 1:04:52David Friedberg?

  That's right. And they're probably at twenty percent of the population by now.

• 1:04:54David Sacks?

  Yeah, so I, I'm sure we all agree with everything you're saying.

• 1:04:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It speaks to an enormous amount of political incompetence. I mean, it's really, really just unbelievable why we just don't have smarter people in charge of these things.

• 1:05:10David Friedberg?

  But Sax, I just wanna ask you, because, you know, there is the conservative argument on this, which is, you know, states, the federal government shouldn't be doing everything, and states need to kind of manage their populace, and manage, you know, what goes on locally. You know, what is the conservative, I'm not asking you this, and I'm not attacking you, I'm just asking, like, what is the conservative argument for not doing central planning and central organization around vaccine distribution, and delegating it to states? And, you know, are there, you know, do you think that there's a case against... You know, for that, that's pretty strong in within the Republican Party and within kind of conservative.

• 1:05:45David Sacks?

  I think if there's a conservative point of view on this, it would just be that let let markets distribute the vaccine, they'll do a much better job. I don't, you know, I think whether it's federal or state, the question is who's more incompetent, and I'm not really sure. I mean, I think the problem right now is that when you make vaccine distribution fundamentally political, then the debate becomes about exactly who's, what is your position going to be exactly in line, as opposed to just running the most number of people through the process as quickly as possible. We're getting ourselves so twisted up in knots over making sure that the exact right person is in line, that we're having, you know, vaccine go to waste.

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  And just to put that in context, 21 million plus doses have been distributed in the United States, 5.9 have made their way into people's arms. In other words, there are 15 millions, over 75% of doses have not gone in people's arms. And in California, we have distributed 5.85% of the population's vaccines, but we've only put 1.3 in people's arms. So we are literally a 4X where we should be. We're at 25% of where we should be. It is absolutely unbelievable that this is happening.

• 1:07:02David Sacks?

  And meanwhile. If the government, if the government's, if the government stopped trying to do anything except, you know, look, it did Operation Warp Speed, that actually did help get vaccines done faster.

• 1:07:12David Friedberg?

  That was just, that was just money, to your point, Sax. All they did was create a market where they basically pre-bought all the vaccines, whether or not they were going to work, and then funded the market to go and produce them early. That's all that it was. So to your point, that Operation Warp Speed, for everyone thinking it's a massive centrally controlled effort, it was a market-based incentive.

• 1:07:30Jason Calacanis?

  It wasn't the Manhattan Project, is what you're saying.

• 1:07:33David Friedberg?

  They put up a couple billion, yeah, they, they put up a couple billion dollars and said to all these pharma companies, go produce the vaccine, and if it works, we'll buy them. If it doesn't work, throw them away. But let's get production going. And that was it.

• 1:07:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I, can I use this as a segue? Like, I mean, what we're seeing is sort of, we have a bunch of elected officials, we give them, you know, an enormous amount of responsibility. They also get this implied power. And then you just, you see sometimes in these acute moments, they're totally derelict. Then, I just want to move off of vaccines for a second. Then you get an elected official who is not acutely incompetent, but it seems broadly grossly and consistently incompetent. And I want to talk about Chesa Boudin. And I want to use Sacks's article, which, to be very honest, David, was probably one of the most incredibly well-written things. Well done.

• 1:08:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have ever created. I don't know, Jason, do we have show notes? Can we put it in? We'll put it in the show notes, yeah. We'll put a link in the show notes. It is so fucking good what you wrote. If everybody, folks who are listening, have a chance to read David's. Killer DA. The Killer DA. But it basically, you know, starts with a profile of this young woman, seemed like an incredible woman that was killed by this drunk driver. But anyways, David, do you want to talk about it?

• 1:08:55David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, so for the last, let's say for the last couple of months, I've been following the San Francisco, a couple of San Francisco Police Department accounts on Twitter. And I was noticing these extraordinary tweets, which are getting retweeted a lot, about how they kept arresting and then having to let go of all these criminals who are committing burglaries and other crimes. And you could see the frustration of the police department boiling off these tweets. And, you know, basically, they were subtweeting this new district attorney that we've had, Chesa Boudin, who is elected, he's been in office about a year. He was elected at the end of 2019. And so I started doing a little bit of research. And then we had this horrible New Year's Eve killing of this, you know,

• 1:09:39David Sacks?

  wonderful young woman, Hannah Abe, who came to America from Japan for college and stayed here for work. She was just 27 years old. She gets killed by a criminal, someone who was released, who was paroled by Chesa Boudin back in April. He had been in jail for armed robbery. Chesa released him as part of a plea bargain. And then he was arrested five more times for stealing cars and other crimes, most recently, two weeks ago. And the DA refused to press charges and that that's the reason he was out on New Year's Eve, he stole a car and then there was this hit and run where he killed Hannah and another woman.

• 1:10:22David Sacks?

  And so, you know, I had already been noticing this issue and so I started doing some some research and I have a research assistant helping me with this, it's the only way I could put something like this together. And we went pretty deep and we realized that the death of Hannah wasn't just an accident or an act of negligence by this DA, it was part of an overall philosophy of decarceration that he has. He, his, his background is very interesting. He was a child of parents who were in the Weather Underground, who when he was just a baby, committed armed robbery and were part of the murder which was-

• 1:10:59Jason Calacanis?

  David, David, say the words, they were domestic terrorists.

• 1:11:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, they were, they were, that's right, they were domestic terrorists. They participated in an armed robbery against a Brink's truck which-

• 1:11:07Jason Calacanis?

  And these were domestic terrorists that were competent when compared to what we saw yesterday in the Capitol. Like, these are highly capable domestic terrorists, to be clear.

• 1:11:17David Sacks?

  I don't know, I don't know how capable they were, their, their robbery resulted in the death of two police officers and a Brink's guard and they were put in prison. His mother spent 20 years in prison, she's now released, her, his father is still in prison for almost 40, 40 years. And he's described in interviews how his earliest memories are visiting his parents in prison and how this shaped his entire political outlook. And he became a public defender, which I think was a pretty good place for him. I think if I were an indigent, you know, criminal defendant, I would want someone like Chase Biddy on my side and, but the problem is, he ran for district attorney and he simply doesn't believe in prosecuting huge numbers of crimes, you know, certainly property crimes,

• 1:12:01David Sacks?

  burglary, shoplifting, vandalism, and those crimes have absolutely spiked in the city. You know, 45% increase in burglaries in one year, 35% increase in stolen cars, 30% increase in homicides. Crimes are through the roof because he simply doesn't believe in putting people in jail.

• 1:12:24David Friedberg?

  Well, can I just say this? Sorry, let me just point out, there's a little bit of a history to this notion that DAs should change the criminal justice system. There's a TED Talk by a guy named Adam Foss. I don't know if you've seen it, or if any of you guys have watched it. I was at the TED conference the year that he spoke. But this guy basically thought, you know, he made the case that it is the role and the opportunity for the district attorney, for the prosecutor, to change the criminal justice system from the prosecutorial side, that you can, you know, kind of demotivate jail and other kind of, you know, mechanisms of punishment, and push for a rehabilitation program as an alternative, and that the district attorneys can take this role on of changing

• 1:13:09David Friedberg?

  the criminal justice system. And it created a little bit of a mini-movement, and there was a lot of attention and follow-up after he gave his TED Talk. And I think San Francisco, in large part, picked up on the momentum coming out of this and other similar sort of stories about the DA can really change the criminal justice system, and Chesapeake Dean really kind of capitalized on it. In principle, a lot of people are motivated from a good place when they elected him, which is, it is unfortunate, a lot of people get trapped in a life of crime, and the fact that they're in and out of prison is a result of the fact that they're put into the criminal justice system in the first place, and parole is really harsh on people, and all these other reasons why. People's lives are ruined for simple mistakes, and if they get an opportunity in life, they can fix themselves and they can come out in a better place. So there is a bit of an origin story.

• 1:13:54David Friedberg?

  It's not just like, "San Francisco said, 'Let's get an anarchist to be our DA and destroy the world, and kill us all.'" Like, I think it came from a good and true place, where this all kind of originated. But obviously, the experiment has gone severely awry in San Francisco, and his particular methods and his particular actions have certainly caused far more harm than anyone has seen any good, as Sacks eloquently pointed out.

• 1:14:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They've started a recall effort for him, too. Well, I think the danger is, not that you have an enlightened political philosophy, I think that's actually quite great, and that we can experiment. I think the danger is both on the left and on the right, where people cathartically deal with childhood trauma through their job. And you know, I don't know what Chesa Boudin has gone through, and I feel very bad that he had an incredibly hard life, or complicated, or maybe not, I don't even know. But I wouldn't want to know that he's trying to deal with his own experiences through his job, because that's not his job. Meaning, you know, you don't want an activist DA.

• 1:14:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you want a DA that's enforcing the laws, and what you do want is you want to elect politicians who change the laws to reflect our values.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that would be a better through line, I think. And really, I mean, if you look at what's happening in San Francisco, I think we've conflated income inequality, which people in San Francisco are very tuned into, with essentially junkies, people who are addicted to incredibly hardcore drugs that are very hard to get off of, and we've had more deaths from overdoses of fentanyl than we've had from COVID, by a magnitude of four or five. I mean, it is bedlam on the streets of San Francisco, and if you don't enforce a basic rule of law, what happens is the price of drugs gets cheaper, more available, more

• 1:15:47Jason Calacanis?

  people try them, more people get addicted, and then more people come from other places because they know you have the lowest price on drugs, and the price of drugs is inversely correlated with prosecution of drug crimes, so, prosecution of crimes. So, this is why San Francisco is spiraling.

• 1:16:03David Friedberg?

  And most drugs are purchased from criminal funds, so, you know, criminal activity goes up to fund the drug purchasing. So, that's the vicious cycle that's driving San Francisco.

• 1:16:12Jason Calacanis?

  And there's a recall going on, and then in related news, Gavin Newsom is now up to a million signatures in his recall, which I think is two-thirds of the way there?

• 1:16:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. They have until mid or late February, they're gonna get the votes. And I think, I think the question, you know, Friedberg and I talked about this just on a phone call, he and I caught up a couple of days ago. I think it is time, guys, for us to find an incredibly centrist, thoughtful candidate, and put them into the recall race against Newsom. Friedberg had the best idea, which was Kim Kardashian, which I think is incredible because she is very smart, she's very likable, she's got enormous distribution, she's like, she's about to become a lawyer. You know, that'll be the amazing, the best platform for Kardashian to run for president.

• 1:17:01David Friedberg?

  Look, it's, it's pretty clear, you know, recognition influenced fame is what gets people elected, you know, not the best policy and not the greatest experience, from Jesse Ventura to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, I mean, these are celebrities who, I would argue, in the case of Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and maybe even Donald Trump as well, their celebrity was kind of, you know, it had hit its, its, its media-driven apex, and, and this was a second act, and, you know, perhaps someone like that is a great fit here. Kim Kardashian really fits the bill, but, you know, I, I, that's just a shot in the dark, but I do think someone like that needs to go up, because if you put politician up again, it's another one of these eye-rolling events, and for, you know, for the populist

• 1:17:45David Friedberg?

  to kind of really find appeal, it has to be a recognized person, you know, broadly recognized and liked person.

• 1:17:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55David Friedberg?

  Jason, it could be you.

• 1:17:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  GovernorJason.com?

• 1:17:58David Friedberg?

  Governor Jason.

• 1:17:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not ready to run for political office, I'm 50, and when I'm 60, I would consider it, actually, but not right now. I want to work. I got a hop, too. I think we all got a hop, but I was gonna say one thing, which is, the beginning of today's podcast was probably the punchiest it's ever been, and I think it just speaks to the fact that there was so... The bar was so high for Trump to have done something that would have actually gotten us to actually argue and interrupt each other, you know, because we've been so incredibly like loving and protective of each other for four years on this topic, but it literally took an armed insurrection.

• 1:18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:18:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For us to finally just say enough.

• 1:18:38Jason Calacanis?

  They even cracked the besties. The besties. Well, I mean, I think it's good for people to see Sacks, maybe an eye or Chamath and Sacks or whoever disagree on some of these cases or Friedberg, you know, doesn't believe in prosecuting Trump. I think we actually had a split ticket there where Sacks and Friedberg felt like we shouldn't prosecute Trump and Chamath and I were in the prosecute Trump one. But I think we're all struggling with these issues. All Americans are struggling with these issues of how do you deal with a black swan event? I think that's what's so unique about Trump is, and I think David, you could speak to this, is I don't think the system was designed for his level of crazy, right? Like our system is based on norms and traditions and trust, just like venture investing is. And we see this in venture investing.

• 1:19:23Jason Calacanis?

  Some founder goes off the, you know, jumps the fence and all of a sudden, you know.

• 1:19:27David Sacks?

  Yeah. I mean, well, we still, I would say our system performed pretty well in terms of being stress tested and well, look, we still got two more weeks, you know? I think we're all kind of, we're all kind of white knuckling it right now. Yeah.

• 1:19:41Jason Calacanis?

  Land the plane.

• 1:19:42David Sacks?

  Yeah. Hoping nothing else happens. But, but look, if, if Trump's goal was a coup, you know, I think it's a strong word, but if it like, it totally failed. I mean, he didn't come close to.

• 1:19:53Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:19:54David Sacks?

  To succeeding in a coup.

• 1:19:56Jason Calacanis?

  The opposite, in fact.

• 1:19:57David Sacks?

  The opposite. He's, he, again, we talked about how I think his, he destroyed his popularity over the last two months.

• 1:20:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He, he impacted his earnings by negative $2 billion.

• 1:20:07David Sacks?

  Yeah. So, but, but, but, you know, but, but to this point about us agreeing or disagreeing, you know, I saw a whole bunch of fans of the pod, like at mentioning me saying, I wonder what Sacks is going to say about this. I don't know what, like, yeah, and I'm kind of like, like, what do they think I'm going to say? Like, they think I'm going to be supportive of this? I mean, you know, like, I, I think somehow you, Jason, you've programmed the viewers that I like, I'm somehow like, the Trump, the Trump guy, uh, you know, because you're always trolling me as the Trump supporter. I mean, I

• 1:20:39Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you believe that Russia was a hoax and that black people would have been treated the same climbing up those steps. We all know that's not true.

• 1:20:46David Sacks?

  Well, we're, we're

• 1:20:48Jason Calacanis?

  Some of these are self-inflicted wounds of your own. Take some ownership there.

• 1:20:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Boys, boys.

• 1:20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:20:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I gotta hop.

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:20:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I love you very much. Happy New Year.

• 1:20:56Jason Calacanis?

  Happy New Year, besties.

• 1:20:57David Friedberg?

  I will say one thing before we meet next time. I guarantee you, some highly unexpected and highly impactful thing will occur.

• 1:21:04Jason Calacanis?

  Please, no. Can we get back to talking about Sacks or The Bachelor?

• 1:21:10David Sacks?

  I can, I can

• 1:21:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God. We didn't even, we didn't even talk about, uh, my SPAC today.

• 1:21:13David Friedberg?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyway.

• 1:21:14Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, give it a plug. Go ahead.

• 1:21:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no.

• 1:21:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, just explain to people what you

• 1:21:18David Friedberg?

  He doesn't need a plug at Double today. It's insane.

• 1:21:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, explain what happened.

• 1:21:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  IPOE, IPOE is merging with SoFi. Um, it's an incredible company led by an incredible CEO, Anthony Noto. Um, you can read a little one pager on my website. But, um, anyways, guys, more importantly, to all the listeners out there, Happy New Year to all of you guys. Let's make 2021 kick ass.

• 1:21:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:21:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, I love you guys. I miss you.

• 1:21:41Jason Calacanis?

  Miss you.

• 1:21:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  See you guys soon.

• 1:21:42David Friedberg?

  Bye.

• 1:21:42Jason Calacanis?

  Play poker soon. Oh, look, there's somebody.

• 1:21:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I got interrupted. I gotta go.

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right. We'll see you all.

• 1:21:46David Friedberg?

  I got interrupted. I gotta go.

• 1:21:47Jason Calacanis?

  Next time. Take us out, young Spielberg. Take us out, young Spielberg.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  What your winners want?

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  Besties are gone.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  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 they just need to release somehow.

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  What your... B B. What your... What your B? B? What? We need to get merch. Besties are gone.