E67: Revisiting Rogan, Canadian truckers' protest, fusion breakthrough, $MSFT's savvy move & more

0:00 Bestie Intro: Phil Hellmuth found a new billionaire 1:30 Chamath's new camera positioning 3:58 Revisiting the Joe Rogan/Spotify situation, racism claims, and the video controversy 30:04 Canadian truckers' "Freedom Convoy": root causes, impact, what is this turning into? 45:00 Nuclear fusion breakthrough: Friedberg shares thoughts and theories on what this could mean for the future of energy and life on Earth 54:15 Contrarian energy trade, Chamath's Big Tech play morphing into a long-term investment 1:01:01 Microsoft's savvy "burn it down" app store strategy, US income not keeping up with inflation, consumer sentiment getting worse, opening up and getting back to normal 1:15:57 CIA allegedly used an executive order from 1981 to execute warrantless surveillance on American citizens, DHS domestic terrorism infrastructure Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/spotify-removes-joe-rogan-episodes-n-word-1235172972 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/joe-rogan-podcast-episodes-removed-b2009035.html https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/3/22915456/spotify-ceo-joe-rogan-daniel-ek-town-hall-speech-platform-podcast https://people.com/tv/howard-stern-addresses-past-use-of-blackface-n-word https://twitter.com/aodespair/status/1489565575894478849 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1490803436639588352 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/11/world/canada-trucker-protest https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/10/truckers-convoys-may-target-super-bowl-bidens-state-union/6738641001 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want https://globalnews.ca/news/8539610/trucker-convoy-covid-vaccine-mandates-ottawa https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1245179774097477633 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/new-york-mask-mandate.html https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-left-is-blowing-its-big-opportunity https://www.google.com/finance/quote/XLE:NYSEARCA?window=6M https://seekingalpha.com/news/3799278-oil-and-gas-stocks-top-todays-leaderboard-as-oil-resumes-upward-climb https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-promises-openness-on-new-app-store-as-it-seeks-approval-for-activision-acquisition-11644424237 https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1491771262544318464 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-consumer-sentiment-falls-fresh-151419313.html https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/12/13/thomas-sowell-inflation-can-tax-the-poor-as-well-as-the-rich/ https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/716486/biden-is-blowing-his-covid-moment/ https://twitter.com/hollandcourtney/status/1491996868829614081 https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-heinrich-newly-declassified-documents-reveal-previously-secret-cia-bulk-collection-problems-with-cia-handling-of-americans-information https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HainesBurns_WydenHeinrich_13APR21%20-FINAL.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-february-07-2022

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  We had a nice dinner. Chamath hosted a little, uh, we played a little bit of the cards and there's this new kid there. Oh, big shout out to co-founder of is there. Great guy. How do you wind up here at the game, uh, sitting here, you know, uh, having a beautiful dinner with us? And he's like, well, and then Chamath goes. And he points to Hellmuth. Hellmuth found a billionaire. When Hellmuth finds a billionaire, what happens? He's tied to the hip. He has like a billionaire. He's a billionaire wrangler.

• 0:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hellmuth is like one of those truffle dogs in like, you know, Alba in Italy, you know, you send him out into the woods. He forages around, he finds, he finds a truffle, just digs it out.

• 0:43Jason Calacanis?

  And that's it. It's like, and then he follows like a dog. He follows. Tail wagging, tail wagging.

• 0:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Waiting for his owner to show up and pick this little billionaire off the ground. Here's another one.

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  Look daddy, see? I found another billionaire.

• 0:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hellmuth, Hellmuth is the most insecure person, but he's such a beautiful human being. I mean,

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  He's a great human.

• 1:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like, it's like the tale of two people. He's, he really is a walking case of schizophrenia and narcissism, just.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, that's Chamath saying that.

• 1:30Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. With us again, the new chairman and majority shareholder of Laura Piana, Chamath Poliopetia and the viceroy of veganism.

• 1:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you like my thin cashmere gilet that I'm wearing?

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  Gilet?

• 1:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Gilet.

• 1:49Jason Calacanis?

  Do you mean polo?

• 1:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, gilet.

• 1:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, gilet. Okay. Magnifique. Uh, also with us, the viceroy of veganism, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and the Regent of the Right Wing.

• 2:07Jason Calacanis?

  David Sacks.

• 2:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The viceroy of vegans. Wow.

• 2:12Jason Calacanis?

  Viceroy of vegans. It came to me in the shower today. I was like, you know, he needs a new one.

• 2:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I switched my background, guys. Do you like it? I just flipped the camera to look the other way, just to mix it up a little bit.

• 2:20David Friedberg?

  Now we can see your chef picking the vegetables in your garden.

• 2:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, yeah, Bill, before you used to see him pick the herbs.

• 2:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The herbs are on this side, but now he's, yeah, you can see him picking the veggies.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, there's the sous chef. Okay, there's the prep chef. And there's the head chef. Okay, yes, everybody showed up today. Okay, great.

• 2:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, you seem to enjoy the food, Jason, every time you come. You talk all this shit. But you are always eating when you're at my house. You're always eating.

• 2:45Jason Calacanis?

  Who's the first RSVP after Phil?

• 2:47David Sacks?

  He's not just eating, he's sending his notes to the kitchen. Could you just do this a little differently?

• 2:52Jason Calacanis?

  I do give notes. I do, I do. Usually positive ones. It's like three out of four are positive notes.

• 2:57David Friedberg?

  You know, when I flew with Chamath a few weeks ago, the chef made gluten-free Nutella crepes with homemade Nutella. I mean, it was like the most extraordinary breakfast experience.

• 3:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That Nutella has no sugar. It's incredible. It's basically all protein, fat, and it's sweetened with monk flour sugar.

• 3:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So delicious, that Nutella.

• 3:18Jason Calacanis?

  They also kill some albino seals.

• 3:20David Sacks?

  I've not brought a chef on the plane with me, but I think in fairness, your kitchen's bigger.

• 3:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, your plane's not that big. Yeah, I mean, you've got a small plane.

• 3:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mine has a kitchen.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if a Cessna 142 can fit a chef, Sacks.

• 3:33David Sacks?

  I'm feeling plane-shamed.

• 3:35Jason Calacanis?

  You are.

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  I just got to Business Select on Southwest, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now. All right, everybody, let's get started. A lot of topics people want to talk about. Do you want to start with Rogan or the Canadian truckers?

• 3:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Rogan probably leads into the truckers, no?

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  It might, in fact, lead into the truckers. Okay, so we covered Rogan and Spotify in episode 66, a whole bunch. Since that time, a video surfaced on Saturday with Joe Rogan repeatedly saying, well, the N-word, and it's pretty rough to watch, and he did a mea culpa, an apology. And overall, now Spotify has taken down 70 episodes of his podcast. You know, that's out of over 1,000.

• 4:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I thought it was like 113. That's the, that's the, that's what I saw on Twitter. There's 113, maybe 70 had the N word, but 113 total.

• 4:36Jason Calacanis?

  You're correct. I stand corrected. 110 have been taken down.

• 4:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was texting with Sacks. It's like, it's like almost 6% of all of his episodes they took down.

• 4:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Something like that.

• 4:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, but not, not all of them were because of that language.

• 4:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, that's what I'm saying. But 6% were taken down.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  6% taken down. In his apology, he said, uh, obviously he was wrong, uh, to use that word for the decade or so, but he pointed out that he did not use it towards a person as a slur, but was talking about it more, uh, in studying or discussing the N word.

• 5:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Use versus mention, is that right? Is that the distinction?

• 5:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, or use versus quoting.

• 5:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So he said it was taken out of context, apologized. Uh, he also made a, uh, joke that he immediately said, oh my God, that's pretty racist. I shouldn't have told that joke. Where he, uh, compared, uh, going to see Planet of the Apes in an all black theater in Philly, saying he was in Africa. On Sunday, Daniel X sent a memo to Spotify employees claiming he is not the publisher of the Joe Rogan Show.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  Something I completely dispute. We'll talk about that in a moment. Thoughts on the latest Bruhaha and do we think that Spotify will be able to handle, uh, this, what seeming, it seems to have died down over the last couple of days, uh, and Rogan is now joking about it in his comedy, uh, you know, engagements at small comedy clubs. What do you think, Sacks? Is Joe Rogan gonna weather the storm? Is Spotify gonna stick with him?

• 6:05David Sacks?

  Well, okay. So as of the last episode of the All In Pod, uh, they were trying to cancel Rogan for misinformation. And for the reasons we discussed, that basically failed because, you know, so many of the times, something starts as misinformation, eventually becomes the truth. Rogan seemed like a guy who actually just wants to present both sides, present a balanced viewpoint. In any event, that whole attempt to cancel him based on misinformation was fizzling out. And then low and behold, this 22 second clip comes out and they escalate the charges to racism.

• 6:37David Sacks?

  If you kind of look at, you know, who's behind this clip, it's pretty clear that it was a Democratic super PAC put this together and sort of astroturfed it as a viral video. This is part of an organized attempt to cancel Rogan. Now, as to the merits of the, the sort of racism accusation against him, I mean, look, let me say that I don't think anybody, especially a public figure, should be using this kind of language, you know, in this day and age, even if you're just sort of quoting something or mentioning it, you know, he, he should have, he shouldn't, he should have known better.

• 7:18David Sacks?

  However, there are also similar clips that are now circulating of Joe Biden doing the same thing, using this type of like incredibly incendiary language and like a brazen, almost offhanded way. You've got clips of Howard Stern.

• 7:33Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on a second. Wait, you're saying brazen and he said it exactly the same way as Joe did.

• 7:37David Sacks?

  I would say maybe in a cavalier way. He's, he's, but let me, let me come back. So you have, you have Biden doing it. You've got Howard Stern doing it. So what is the difference? I mean, the, the reality here is that we used to, in our culture, have a distinction between the use of this type of language as an epithet, which was never okay.

• 8:00David Sacks?

  Or using it, you were referencing it. You might've been quoting it. You might've been quoting a rap song. You might've been quoting a Dave Chappelle routine. You might be reading from a book. That you might've been telling a story in which somebody else has said it and you're merely trying to relay what happened. The rules today are that's not an excuse. You can't say it. But the truth is that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the rules were a little different. That's why Biden said it. That's why Howard Stern has these episodes. And I think it's why Rogan had said it. And I think it's a little bit disingenuous for people to now try and apply the new rules to this old language. And they're doing it very selectively because they're not trying to cancel these other people

• 8:45David Sacks?

  who've said these things under the old. Rules, they're trying to cancel Rogan. So I think what you're seeing here is selective cancellation outrage, selective application of these new language rules for the purpose of getting Rogan canceled. Why? For the same reasons we were talking about two weeks ago or last week, which is he's an outsider, he's an independent voice, he bucks the establishment, he doesn't present the orthodox view on COVID, and that's frankly why they want to cancel him.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  Free bird.

• 9:15David Friedberg?

  I'm just looking at the Howard Stern quote. So in 1993, Howard Stern dressed in blackface and used the N word in a skit he did, mimicking Ted Danson, talking about Whoopi Goldberg, something. And he said, I'll be the first to admit, I won't go back and watch those old shows. It's like, who is that guy? But that was my shtick. It's what I did and I own it. I don't think I got embraced by Nazi groups and hate groups. They seemed to think I was against them too. So I think, you know, Sacks is probably right. I mean, Howard Stern's a very different character today. You know, I think the question of if Howard Stern acted that way today, would cancel culture kind of mob him? The answer is probably yes.

• 9:54David Friedberg?

  But I think it's because, you know, Rogan is out here probably picking a bone with everyone. You know, he's kind of, there's, there's, there's no alignment, there's no,

• 10:08David Friedberg?

  there's no tribal behavior with Rogan, right? He doesn't, he, he's been pretty public about being very liberal. He's been very public about being conservative in some ways. And I don't think he kind of aligns himself strongly with anyone. And so he is a threat to everyone. He's got a huge following and, you know, he speaks openly and honestly in a way that, that is threatening. Certainly his behavior was inexcusable and has been inexcusable, but there are others, right? And so it's, it's, it's an important question, which is why him? Why now?

• 10:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's also interesting with that Ted Danson. He was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time, I believe, and Ted Danson was, there was a roast of Whoopi Goldberg at the Friars Club, Ted Danson dressed in blackface, I think.

• 10:51Jason Calacanis?

  Which Whoopi Goldberg was in on.

• 10:52David Friedberg?

  Ted Danson dressed him. Didn't Howard dress?

• 10:54Jason Calacanis?

  And then Howard did a send up of that.

• 10:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, the point is, the more, the standard has changed significantly. Let's let Chamath chime in.

• 11:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My book of the year last year was this book Wanting by this author Luke Burgess. He wrote something on Substack. I'll send you guys the link. You can put it in here. But he said, he said the following, he said, "As we regress to a superstitious, quasi pagan world of witch burning, civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating." And he was talking about Rogan. I think that the, the thing that I was the most proud of in this whole thing was Daniel Ek. I mean, disclosure, he's a friend of mine, so maybe this is biased. However, I think that Spotify had business principles.

• 11:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this was similar to what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase. I think they stuck to those principles. They made a well reasoned decision that they explained to their employees and shareholders. And then they did the most important thing that Sacks has always been saying around free speech, which was, which is more speech. And so what Spotify said when they explained the decision to not deplatform Joe Rogan, was that they would take the exact equivalent economic value of what they were paying them, him, $100 million, and invest it in underrepresented, historically underrepresented groups, to tell their stories, to tell, you know, to make their music, et cetera.

• 12:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so effectively doubling, you know, the universe of that kind of content. And so, I think if, if people are really willing to listen, I think what we should take away from this is, here's a really clear eyed example of the solution to free speech, which is just to get more of it on your platform, to have the right disclosures and disclaimers. And then for, you know, people to go along with their lives so that they can then choose. And I think that that's, that was the, that was the one positive outcome that, that I saw from this entire episode. The rest of it was another attempt at, you know, being morally absolutist and...

• 13:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know scapegoating. And then the, uh, that was before, obviously, the, the N word thing. And then the N word thing just brought to light that we live in a very different age where the rules have changed. And I think the open question is, um, you know, if you're going to judge people for past behaviors on current rules.

• 13:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are we allowed to do it selectively or does it apply to everybody?

• 13:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I, and I think that, you know, this is why I think, you know, we saw people like David Simon, you know, came out and David Simon was very, um,

• 13:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you know, basically excoriated Joe Rogan, but then David Simon wrote The Wire, you know, and if you, if you watch The Wire, which is, uh, uh, you know, an incredible piece of television that people point to all the time is one of probably the greatest shows on television. You know, every probably, you know, 13th or 14th word was the N word.

• 14:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I have like two observations here.

• 14:14Jason Calacanis?

  Though, and then I'll get to you, Sax, and you have something you want to chime in on. I, I always like to think about intent. And then I like to look at the apology and think, is this like sincere or not? And when you look at the intent, and does anybody actually think Joe Rogan is a racist? And I, I think it's pretty clear he's not from all of the behavior collectively in his life. And then you look at the apology. I thought, I felt it was incredibly sincere. Uh, and there were many learning moments in it. And he's a comedian, which is kind of this other space where we, we ask comedians to make us laugh and make us feel uncomfortable. And now we're also asking them to live by a standard that changes every year and, and words come on and off the allowable list.

• 14:58Jason Calacanis?

  Would anybody here, does anybody here actually think, or anybody listening to me think Joe Rogan is actually racist? I, I think the answer is I don't think anybody thinks that. And then number two, I, I felt the apology was incredibly thoughtful, um, and well done. Sax, what are your thoughts?

• 15:13David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I agree, I agree with those things. Um, nobody was accusing Joe Rogan of racism until the cancellation mob started throwing stones and the misinformation stones didn't work. So then they escalated to racism.

• 15:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the generalized thing is just take, take the context out of Rogan for a second. I think that the, the formula, if I can point to this of cancel culture is now, I think, pretty well understood, which is, um, if you don't like somebody.

• 15:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You need to throw some ism label on them until that ism label sticks. And eventually you will find an ism label, but the, the thing that this cancel culture doesn't appreciate is everybody has some ism that, that can be attached to them. Yeah. Now, some isms are worse than others, obviously, but you know, we're all infallible, right? I, I go back to like, if you want to quote the Bible, right? There's a, there's a beautiful passage in the Bible, uh, the book of John. And the whole thing, and you guys have heard this quote many times before, but let me just give you the setup. So in the law of the land back then, adultery was illegal, but only for the woman. Right? And so there's a very famous example of a woman who's accused of adultery.

• 16:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, uh, you know, she was about to be, uh, stoned to death, which was essentially the punishment. And Jesus basically draws a line and says, you know, he who is without sin should cast that first stone. And, uh, nobody does. It de-escalates that conflict and everybody leaves, right? Um, and there's a very famous essay, uh, that Rene Girard wrote that basically compared that to, to a different example in a more paganist context where people did stone people. The idea of all of this is that there's some amount of, you know, sin that everybody carries. And I think that at some point,

• 17:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  cancel culture will realize that you have to de-escalate and you have to see through some of this noise. You have to have some point of moral resolution to really move on. Because this sort of like fatalistic judgment doesn't work anymore. So whoever people wanted to cancel Rogan, they must be very frustrated today because for all intents and purposes, he got off the hook. Maybe try again in the future with some other ism. He may just as well get off the hook in the future.

• 17:39David Sacks?

  Right.

• 17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So what is the real solution? The real solution is to figure out how to de-escalate. And after you have a conversation about the things that he's doing that really upset you. And that is still not what's happening.

• 17:50David Friedberg?

  And a path perhaps to resolution. Let's get Friedberg in and then you, Sax. Friedberg. I'll say two things. One, I think I once sat next to Tony Blair for dinner. You know, he was the prime minister of the UK. And he told me it was a really funny conversation because he was talking about his youth. And he's like, if there were iPhones when I was young, I would not have ever been elected to public office. Like, you know, he was in a rock band. He, I don't know if you guys know his history, but you know, he was a pretty freewheeling kind of guy. And his point was really broader than that. It was that, you know, all of us have something that people can look to us for and use against us in some way. But I think what's really important with this Joe Rogan thing, and I think the bigger picture for me.

• 18:28David Friedberg?

  Dissenting voices and critical voices and outspoken voices are extremely important in the discourse that makes society progress. It is not a good society when people that have dissenting of voices or offensive voices are shut down. Society has a better opportunity to chart a new course and to identify new paths. Sometimes when the dissenting voice is wrong and sometimes when it is right. But in both cases, it is important to have that dissenting voice because it allows us to have the dialogue that allows us collectively to figure out what is wrong and what is right. And so this notion of cancel culture and the way that people like Joe Rogan are and have been attacked for things that they have said in the past or do say today.

• 19:12David Friedberg?

  I think is really contrary to the opportunity that the United States presents with this, you know, founding principle of freedom of speech. Sax.

• 19:21David Sacks?

  Yeah, so I agree with that. But I want to build on what Chama said with the Renee Gerard analysis of this. I mean, what we're seeing here is the modern day equivalent of a primitive, you know, archaic stoning ritual. This is a modern day virtual stoning in which we're not killing somebody, but we're trying to kill their digital avatar. I mean, we're basing Trying to remove and destroy their online presence. I mean, that was really the goal here. And and and the mechanics of this thing, it it only works to the extent that people are unaware of the the mechanism of the scapegoating. As soon as they become aware that this person's being targeted selectively as a scapegoat, it stops working.

• 20:05David Sacks?

  And that was the situation we were in last week where you had, you know, Neil Young through the first, he cast the first stone. Despite being guilty of misinformation many times himself, he's got like a weird history of saying weird things about GMOs and gay people and some of the stuff got dredged back up. And and I think that was fair because let he who is without misinformation cast his first stone. And then he got some of his friends, you know, the these aging, you know, rockers like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash to to to throw the next stones. And then the media got in on this and CNN and MSNBC, they were throwing stones.

• 20:44David Sacks?

  And it was all motivated by the fact that Rogan is simply does not refuse, he refuses to parrot their orthodoxy because you know, we can see people like Howard Stern, who I like Stern, okay, but today Howard Stern has become a full-fledged COVID hysterical. I mean, he is fully on board with the COVID restrictions and mandates and hysteria. That's why he gets diplomatic immunity to this. So this whole, the the whole scapegoating ritual around Rogan was about to fail last week and that's why they escalated it is because they saw, first of all, Rogan was getting away. And then second, our ability to to run these sorts of like witch hunts. If people start to reject that, we lose all of our power.

• 21:28David Sacks?

  And so that's why this thing escalated into the most sensitive area that we have in our society, this language around race, this very hurtful, these hurtful epithets. And these people are playing games with that with with that type of language and it's very destructive. And but I think people are seeing through it, you know?

• 21:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I really agree with this. I think like the the scapegoating has a way to resolve. Things is losing its effectiveness increasingly. It did work online for some amount of time early on. And David, you're exactly right. It's when the mechanism of action was poorly understood. But now that everybody sees it and people try to do it all the time, it just stops working. And it's not nearly as effective anymore.

• 22:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's a burnt out tactic. You know, we see this in startups and it's like this marketing channel has been overburdened. And everybody knows, like, okay, I'm being marketed to, and to give it some context for those people who are wondering, you heard Rene Girard like three or four times here. He's a philosopher and he taught at Stanford. He had a big impact on Peter Thiel. I don't know if Sacks actually took any courses with him. And there's a book.

• 22:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Me, Peter, David, I mean, like if you're

• 22:41Jason Calacanis?

  Did you take courses with him?

• 22:42David Sacks?

  I never, I never took any courses, but Peter told me about his ideas in college and I read some of his books.

• 22:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  His books are incredible. I mean, he is one of the most powerful thinkers of, of the I mean, he's, he passed away unfortunately.

• 22:55Jason Calacanis?

  Reminds me of Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, like they were really thinking about the, the, the sort of basic, basic tenants of like human, the human condition and how people behave. It's really worth double clicking on. I think also interesting in terms of forgiveness and blackface, Justin Trudeau has appeared no less than three times in his youth in blackface. And it's, it's not a joke. It's literally true.

• 23:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Justin Trudeau, like the reason why the, the racism label was planted on Rogan is because he's heterodox. The reason why that racism label has not yet really been planted on Justin Trudeau is because he's orthodox. He's quite, he's quite part of the ingrained establishment. He comes from royalty. In Canada, growing up, Pierre Trudeau, you know, we were, we were liberals growing up. We were members of the Liberal Party. We'd made donations to the Liberal Party. You know, in our lore, there is no greater symbol than Pierre Trudeau, his father. And so when you're the son of somebody like that, you get an enormous amount of credit in your bank account that you're born with. And he was able to burn through

• 24:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  so much of it by doing things that anybody else in any other situation may have been judged much more harshly for. And he wasn't. And he becomes Prime Minister and then he's able to get reelected. But you know, his day of reckoning, reckoning is coming because he is revealing himself.

• 24:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To be a part of this establishment with these views that are actually really uncomfortable and, you know, quite grotesque because of how judgmental they are of everybody else.

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  And that's a great segue. And then just finally, Sax, correct me if I'm wrong here. Joe Rogan has voted Democrat his whole life. He holds largely Democratic beliefs. He's for universal healthcare. He's pro-trans. He's pro-gay.

• 24:48David Sacks?

  He's supported Bernie Sanders.

• 24:50Jason Calacanis?

  And he was voting for Bernie Sanders.

• 24:53David Sacks?

  He's a really stupid person for the Democrats, for Democratic politicians like Biden to alienate because he's a hero to young people. He's a hero to the working class and his views are fundamentally, I'd say, more progressive.

• 25:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they're 100% progressive, yes.

• 25:09David Sacks?

  So it's stupid for them to do this, but it's also stupid for them to be alienating these truckers because Democrats were supposed to be the party of the working class. So let's pivot to that issue.

• 25:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I just say one last thing? I just want to reiterate this, Sax, because I just, I just want to really give you a chance to say it again. You've always said, and it's so true, the solution to free speech and to protect it is more speech. And I just want to say to Daniel Ek and the team at Spotify, you guys must have been in a really difficult spot, but the decision to take that $100 million to increase the funnel for other voices and historically underrepresented voices is so good. And I hope you guys get to the other side of it, but I thought it was a really, really, really good decision.

• 25:50David Sacks?

  Yeah. I mean, so on Ek and the Spotify decision, let me say one thing to that. So I applaud them for not canceling Rogan. They must have been under enormous pressure to do so, including from their own, you know, employees. The only thing I didn't like in next statement was when he talked about the user safety and how they need to do a better job of, of user safety. That's a concept that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, Rogan is not sneaking into people's living rooms and turning his show on and pressing play. If people don't like it, I'm talking about users. If users don't like the content, they don't have to listen.

• 26:24Jason Calacanis?

  You don't have to click play. You can literally turn the channel.

• 26:27David Sacks?

  Safety.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:28David Sacks?

  So we've so bought into this idea of psychological safety that being confronted with any view you don't like is a threat to your safety. That is actually a threat to free speech because it's giving the most hysterical people in our culture, the ones who are most prone to being offended, a veto over any idea and speech they don't like.

• 26:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if you're uncomfortable or you're unsafe, you could remove yourself from that situation. If it's a piece of media, you don't need to read every book. You don't need to see every Quentin Tarantino film. You don't need to listen to Joe Rogan or whatever else that you find offensive to you personally.

• 26:59David Sacks?

  I just don't think we should be feeding that idea that that psychological safety is a legitimate idea.

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  We talked about this before with like, you know, people at work. If they say they feel unsafe, that's instantly like an HR, like, oh, my God, you feel unsafe.

• 27:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, red alert. HR comes running over because they have a legal requirement. If someone's creating a safety issue in the workplace, they have a legal requirement to remove that problem. That's why this language got started is it triggers the machinery of HR to remove people who are doing nothing wrong.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  If I told you as an employee, like Sax, hey, listen, your work product is not good enough. You're like, I feel unsafe.

• 27:34David Sacks?

  Right. Anyway, let's go to the truckers because I think we're beating this to death.

• 27:37Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to have one final comment on Spotify. I think Dan, I appreciate what Daniel did with a hundred million dollars. That's great. And I think it's great that he's supporting free speech and he's, and he's holding his ground there. I know that's not easy. However, I think he's intellectually dishonest, saying they're not the publisher of Joe Rogan. I have a three-part test to see if you're a publisher. Do you pay for the content? Do you promote it? Do you produce it? If you do two or more of those, you're de facto a publisher in my mind. They pay a lot of money for Joe Rogan. They promote the heck out of him. And while they don't produce it in advance by picking the guests, they do have a production-like veto on what content they put out there.

• 28:18Jason Calacanis?

  And so if Netflix has to own the people they pay, even if they don't produce it and they promote, then Spotify does need to have the same standard. And Disney and Netflix, all are producers of content. Nobody would argue that. And I believe Spotify is the producer. Daniel's not being honest.

• 28:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Final thought on this. Let me just defend Spotify for a second. You guys have been through this. I've, I've been through this many times at several of my companies. But when you are in the middle of a firestorm, it's very rare that you can put out these, you know, press releases.

• 28:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where the pride of authorship is one person. And in many ways, you have to write these PR releases with all of these guardrails that think about all of these future issues that may prop up over time. And so I understand that you guys had some issues with some of the words. I would just say again, look at the action. And the action is, he didn't deplatform someone, and then he doubled down on free speech, and he actually pointed a hundred million dollar fire hose at people who can now tell their own stories on a platform that is the most important audio platform in the world. So I would say, you know, that's kind of like same thing when I said, you know, I didn't particularly like sometimes, you know, Brian's essay, I could have written it better.

• 29:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But at the end of the day, what I saw through it, and I admitted this later, the substance of what Brian Armstrong did was incredibly profound, one of the most important things that actually happened in the last few years in Silicon Valley culture. And I would just say that I think that Daniel did something really powerful here. And I think that both Spotify and Coinbase deserve, and the employees and the leaders there deserve a round of applause. I think it was a very, very hard decision, and I think they stuck to their guns, irrespective of what you believe, they stuck to their guns.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

  Canadian truckers are protesting, as many of you know, vaccine mandates just breaking today. Ontario's premier has declared a state of emergency for the entire province, and Ottawa police have braced for thousands of protesters to descend for the third consecutive weekend USA Today. Also reported the convoy could disrupt the Super Bowl, Biden's State of the Union, et cetera. The protest has been self-titled "The Freedom Convoy" and has been underway since January 29th. 29th, it appears. It has banned several thousand vehicles across the country, and the truckers are blocking key roadways and bridges, including the Ambassador Bridge. They're seeking an end.

• 30:46Jason Calacanis?

  To Canada's vaccine mandates. And it feels like this is now morphing into something a little bit wider than just vaccine mandates. Uh, maybe it's becoming a Occupy Wall Street type of protest, open to many people with many different things that they have grievances about. A reporter from, uh, Bari Weiss's Common Sense Newsletter slash Media operation, uh, wrote what the truckers want.

• 31:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, you're, you, you just nailed it. Um, I do think that this is actually Occupy Wall Street.

• 31:22Jason Calacanis?

  2.0, yeah.

• 31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look, it, it turned out, just to get roots and facts. So it's not just truckers. This is a broad-based coalition of people across every single race and gender and age group in Canada that's participating in this thing. In fact, the Bari Weiss article, you know, she profiled men, women of all ages, Sikhs, you know, whites, I mean, everybody, blacks. There was, so there's a, there's a coalition of people. Second is this really isn't about vaccination rates because it turns out truckers are 90% vaccinated. They're vaccinated at a higher percentage than the actual broad-based population of Canada, which is about 78%.

• 32:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the, the point of this, and again, I care about this so much as a Canadian, but I, I just want to read a quote from Justin Trudeau because I think it encapsulates what this is really about. The quote is, "The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians." And I think it's that phrase, unacceptable views, that really points to what the real issue here is, which is that there are a lot of people who now say, "It's been two years, enough with mask mandates, enough with all of this."

• 32:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, almost police state that's developed, all of the emergency use power that politicians have taken, let's reclaim our democracy and let's have, you know, freedom again. And under the political viewpoint of the ruling Liberal Party, which by the way is now going into revolt as well, a bunch of Liberal MPs have just completely flipped because of this statement. It summarizes what Trudeau is saying, which is, what you believe is unacceptable to me, and so now I will quash you.

• 33:12David Friedberg?

  Or that Canada has one viewpoint, Friedberg. Did any of you guys listen to the New York Times Daily podcast that our friend sent out the link to this morning? Yes. You know, to me, these are the same story. It was actually an interview with a reporter who highlighted some work that she had done and identified that Phil Murphy, the Democratic Governor of New Jersey, had done some polling and some focus group discussions with some of his constituents. And the overriding tone was one of emotion, one of feeling left out of the life that they believed they should have been living over the past two years. And ultimately, I think the tone speaks very clearly to what the truckers are saying, which

• 33:56David Friedberg?

  is everyone feels more than ever incredible overreach into their personal lives by the government, and by different governments, whether it's local or federal here in the US, or by this Canadian government, or, you know, go to Australia or the UK, and the sentiment seems to be similar everywhere. I don't think that any time since World War II have we seen the government create such restrictions and such mandates in democratic republics like the United States that we just saw over the past two years. And I think the fact that it's continuing, when folks are now seeing, you know, on the ground every day, you know, the mildness of Omicron, or like, you know, the big, the challenges that their kids are facing in school, and you kind of put these things

• 34:39David Friedberg?

  together and you say to yourself, why is my government restricting my life and causing the challenge that I'm being forced to face? For what? And I think that's a tone that everyone feels everywhere in the West today. I think in the East... It's a little bit different, right? Because of the mindset there. But I think here

• 34:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Collectivism.

• 34:57David Friedberg?

  Collectivism. And I think here, we pride individual liberty and freedom as kind of the foundation of these democracies, to have the government tell us what we have to wear, shots we have to put in our arms, where we can go and when, how we can behave in ways that were never legislated, in ways that were never kind of debated and discussed publicly. Just feels overreaching at this point. I think everyone's hit their breaking point. And this is another one of these examples, this trucking thing is another one of these examples of people manifesting their breaking point.

• 35:27Jason Calacanis?

  And Sax, to the point we've been discussing over and over again, things have changed radically since the beginning of the pandemic. You believed in mask mandates early because, hey, no downside, we talked about that. And we didn't want hospitals to be overrun, which is reasonable. You wanted to have oxygen. We were all, you know, trying to make plans for, hey, how bad is this going to be? But we're sitting here two years later, and it's pretty clear Omicron, which I had, thank you Sax, is a nothing burger.

• 35:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks Sax.

• 35:55David Friedberg?

  Saxacron.

• 35:55David Sacks?

  I helped you.

• 35:56Jason Calacanis?

  Saxacron, maybe a superhero. Thank you.

• 35:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All I've ever gotten is sick when I've been around you.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I went to Sax's party and all I got was an $8,000 gift bag and Omicron. The gift bag's pretty great at Sax's parties.

• 36:07David Sacks?

  No, I think getting Omicron helped you because it enabled you to see that this, for you, was largely a nothing burger. And so you could come out of your house and start acting normal. I think there's a lot of people all over the country are like that.

• 36:17Jason Calacanis?

  You were saying that? You haven't left your house for two years.

• 36:20David Friedberg?

  Do you remember the photos of Sax at the beginning of COVID, when he was wearing the triple mask and the goggles?

• 36:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he was scared to death. He ran to Mexico and built a fort. He Colonel Kurtz did.

• 36:30David Sacks?

  Well, look, I supported mask mandates at the beginning of the pandemic when Fauci was telling us masks didn't work. Let's not forget that. You know, I was supporting when the health officials told us they didn't work. Why? Because it was the only thing we had. We didn't have vaccines.

• 36:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David, David, David, come on. He was, he was doing us a favor by lying to us, by his own admission. He said, I lied to you so that we could preserve these masks for frontline workers. Well, thank you. Thank you, Anthony Fauci.

• 36:54David Sacks?

  One of many, one of many noble lies that he's been telling.

• 36:58Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 36:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's a noble liar. He's a noble liar.

• 37:01David Sacks?

  By May of 2020, I would, I was saying.

• 37:03David Friedberg?

  He's my biggest political loser.

• 37:04Jason Calacanis?

  Pick from 2020. Go on.

• 37:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Take it easy on your picks. I know you want to do your victory lap. It's only February. Give us till like June for the check in. Okay, Colonel Kurtz, continue.

• 37:14David Sacks?

  Masks were the main alternative to lockdowns. That's the way I saw it in the summer of 2020. And I was saying, end these crazy lockdowns, just do masks. And then once we had the vaccine, end all COVID restrictions. That was a year ago. And now we still have these restrictions a year later. And that is what the truckers were rebelling against. Just like you said, these are ordinary people who are sick and tired of having to show their papers and have to deal with these mandates. And, and for that, they've been like absolutely demonized. I mean, Trudeau comes out and says that they're basically white supremacists and racist and homophobic, every epithet he can throw at them.

• 37:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, to your point, he used every, he did use every ism. He really did try to cancel them at first. And this is what's really painted him in a corner. He went on national TV and he said, these people are racist and misogynist. That's, that's specifically what he said. And it actually turned out that the overwhelming majority of them were not. They were just normal, ordinary, law-abiding Canadians who were just fed up with the overreach. And then, then what happened was the polling said, you should bring these convoy leaders in, sit them down and talk to them. And then the, the political calculus though was impossible for him because he had already called them racist and misogynist. So then how could he bring them in?

• 38:27David Sacks?

  Right, exactly. Yeah. How do you negotiate with Nazis, basically?

• 38:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So then what he did was he ran out of Ottawa. So instead of staying in Ottawa, now he's under, in a secure location for his safety.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God. Oh, he feels unsafe. So, trigger warning. But in fairness, when you bring 8,000 people together and you get a wide enough group of people, there was SWAT stickers and white Confederate flags that were flown. So it might've been two of 8,000, but that did happen.

• 38:53David Sacks?

  Within any protest movement.

• 38:55Jason Calacanis?

  Which I just said, yes.

• 38:57David Sacks?

  Within any protest movement, there's always going to be a handful of people who go too far and are too extreme, but they did not represent the vast, vast majority of the people who turned out, which are ordinary citizens. And Trudeau seized on a handful of isolated examples to try and demonize these guys. And I think it's blowing up in his face. The fact of the matter is, the truckers did not start this fight. It's the zealotry of our elites, of our professional class that started this fight. They will not give up on these mandates. That's the fundamental problem.

• 39:28Jason Calacanis?

  And while they go to the Super Bowl with no mascot.

• 39:30David Sacks?

  I think what you're seeing here with this trucker thing, I think it's going to have huge ripple effects because it's showing the schism in the Democratic Party between the professional elites and the working class. Here you have the working class. Remember, these were the essential workers. These are the people bringing us our food. Most of them have already had COVID over the last couple of years. They couldn't sit behind a computer and do their job in their pajamas on Zoom all day. Okay. So these guys know the reality of COVID, just like you learned the reality, Jason, when you actually got it. And yet we've got this neurotic class of professionals within the Democratic Party who don't want, who are these COVID dead enders, don't want to give this stuff up. And that's the fundamental divide. And I think Biden's going to have to choose which side are you

• 40:13David Sacks?

  on? Are you on the side of the working class or the professional class? Trudeau has chosen his side. He is the effete elite face of these COVID dead enders. And, and Biden's going to have to choose who he supports.

• 40:25Jason Calacanis?

  And then those are dwindling. You have governors now who are Democratic governors in many states who are saying, listen, Omicron is obviously different. And look at the charts, look at the data. We don't need masks.

• 40:38David Sacks?

  We have to talk about this New York Times story on how New Jersey and several other of these blue states dropped the mask mandates. It was absolutely extraordinary.

• 40:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's not extraordinary. The risk assessment is different, David.

• 40:47David Sacks?

  What was extraordinary about it is that.

• 40:50Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I think it's kind of obvious more than extraordinary. If Omicron is less deadly, it's an upper respiratory, doesn't kill people who are vaccinated, and most people are vaccinated, pretty obviously it's time to pivot and open everything up. It's time to take an obvious decision.

• 41:03David Sacks?

  Biden really missed his moment here. So I think, you know, like Friedberg said, it was. Phil Murphy, he's a Democratic governor in New Jersey. He was supposed to have an easy reelection win by 20 to 30 points. He narrowly squeaks by by two or three points. Okay. So then he conducts the focus groups to find out, what do we miss? Why were we so off on this thing? And they find out that people are so tired of these mandates, he goes to the White House. Okay. And shows these findings and says, guys, we have to get off this losing position on COVID. And the White House sits on his hands and does absolutely nothing. So Murphy is like, we can't wait anymore. So he unilaterally goes without White House support. This is all in the New York Times article. This is not like some right wing publication saying this. Okay. So he unilaterally says, okay, we're getting rid of the mask mandate.

• 41:47David Sacks?

  Okay. And then five other states do the same thing because they realize we can't wait anymore. And Biden is just nowhere to be found. And Psaki is saying, well, we're deferring to the CDC. They're deferring to, you know, Rachel Walensky at the CDC and Randy Weigartner at the teachers unions. And these health officials like Barbara Ferrer in LA County, all of whom are saying, we cannot lift these mandates yet. They don't want, so they are completely on the wrong side of this. And then Biden really steps in it. By saying to Trudeau in Canada, listen, you guys got to clear this bridge. Do whatever you need to do to clear this bridge. Basically implying that the civil disobedience needs to be met by force. And then you've got Harvard professors and CNN analysts saying slash their tires.

• 42:30David Sacks?

  Take away their trucking licenses, starve them out, you know? So this has been the response. And the response to that is now there's a trucker convoy getting started in the US. And they're going to march on Washington. They're going to drive to Washington.

• 42:42Jason Calacanis?

  Great.

• 42:42David Sacks?

  And between now and then Biden better figure out what side he's going to be on. Uh, because if he doesn't handle this right, I think it's going to be the end of his presidency.

• 42:50Jason Calacanis?

  Peaceful civil disobedience is fine. As long as they're not blocking ambulances, getting people to and from hospitals. That's fine, especially the unvaccinated on respirators.

• 42:58David Sacks?

  Is this Scranton Joe, the, the, the, the guy who said he would take us back to normalcy? The, the representative of the working class is that who the President of the United States is? Or is he in the Trudeau camp, the, you know, the Fauci and the Walensky and the Barbara Ferrer? And easily influenced.

• 43:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're asking a, you're asking a rhetorical question. I think that the, the polling data makes the answer pretty clear, which is that the Democratic Party is lurching towards establishment insiders.

• 43:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And working, normal, ordinary people have in larger and larger numbers started gravitating towards the Republican Party. Minorities in far larger numbers than we ever expected have started lurching towards the Republican Party. And so the answer is sort of in the polling data and what the actual facts on the ground have been. You know, I mean, we forget because we were all so ready to cast away our Trump derangement syndrome, but he did get, I think, what was it, nine million more people to vote for him in this past election?

• 44:06David Sacks?

  Yeah, the working class, whether it's the white working class or the non-white working class are moving in huge numbers. I think the margin of non-white working class who moved to the Republicans last election was 18 points. They got 18 points more share than eight years ago. So the working class, regardless of their race, is moving towards the Republicans while the Democrats are becoming this more elite professional class party, this woke elite party. And, you know, I think Biden sort of is caught in the middle of this, and I think he's running out of time to try and reestablish that he's going to have a centrist presidency that does not completely kowtow and defer to the left of his party to this sort of woke elite thinking.

• 44:50David Sacks?

  You know, you see Democratic political scientists like Roy Tishare writing about this like every week, saying, this is your last chance, this is your moment to save your presidency. I don't know if he's listening.

• 45:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, Friedberg, we made some great progress in science this week in nuclear fusion. Do you want to tee this up for us?

• 45:08David Friedberg?

  I'm happy to. So let me just give a little background for maybe a minute on fusion. So, you know, the way energy is made in the sun and in all stars is through this process of nuclear fusion where hydrogen nuclei, the protons inside of hydrogen atoms shoot around at such a high energy and they're so dense because of the amount of hydrogen it all causes gravity to pull them all together, they get really dense, they start slamming into each other. When they slam into each other, they fuse into helium and ultimately into heavier elements and release energy in the process. And that is what fusion is. So, you know, we talk about nuclear energy on Earth. All nuclear energy that we've generated on Earth as a species to date has been through fission, where we take much heavier elements like plutonium and uranium and they break

• 45:52David Friedberg?

  apart by squeezing them together and they release energy. But this creates radioactive material, it's dangerous, it's very, very expensive and so on. So there's always been a question since roughly the 1950s on whether or not we could recreate the conditions of the sun or stars on planet Earth by creating a plasma, by creating the same sort of plasma that exists inside of stars, very hot, very fast, very dense hydrogen that can slam into itself and slam into atoms and fuse into helium and release energy.

• 46:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Does that same plasma exist on Uranus?

• 46:25David Friedberg?

  Uh huh.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  God, you're gonna give him a wedgie? Let science boy finish.

• 46:31David Friedberg?

  Oh, sorry. Back to you.

• 46:34Jason Calacanis?

  Never gets old. Was it 69 megajoules or 420 megajoules?

• 46:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so plasma fusion's always been this kind of holy grail of energy, because if you can actually generate plasma fusion, the amount of energy it takes to create the plasma is less than the energy that comes out of the plasma. So it's effectively

• 46:49Jason Calacanis?

  Net positive.

• 46:50David Friedberg?

  Infinite, free, cheap plasma. And so the system that people have been building for the last 25, 30 years is these donut-shaped systems called Tokamaks. They're like a circle, like a donut, and they spin the plasma around inside, and so it takes a lot of energy and magnets and so on to try and make this work. You know, it's a company we talked about a few months ago called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which uses a new superconducting material to control that plasma and use, instead of using expensive magnets, may just raise $1.8 billion. And, you know, more recently, the Joint European Taurus, which is managed by the Atomic Energy Authority in the United Kingdom, just this week demonstrated energy output from their

• 47:34David Friedberg?

  Tokamak plasma fusion system, where they generated, you know, 59 megawatts of energy in five seconds, which is a record. The prior record was set in 1997 by that same agency, they generated 16 megawatts of power output. So it was a great breakthrough. And you know, to make this all possible has required technical breakthroughs in electronics, technical breakthroughs in sensors and computing and hardware and material science and superconductors. And so all of this is starting to coalesce that plasma fusion might actually become a reality. And the ITAR system, which is the biggest construction project in Europe, 35 nations have contributed a total of roughly 50 to 60 billion dollars to make this system.

• 48:17David Friedberg?

  Is it's going to go online around 2027. They've been building it for 20 years. It's going to be a 500 megawatt demonstration system. And if it works, then it opens up the door that in the future, we may actually be able to turn plasma fusion into an energy source for all of humanity. It basically would use water. Plasma fusion is made from taking hydrogen, which you would get from water, spinning it around, heating it up, getting it to be really, really dense, and ultimately driving power out of it. The implications are extraordinary, right? So over the next few decades, it is appearing more likely that we will have plasma fusion systems working on Earth. And as that happens, energy becomes free and it becomes unlimited. And with unlimited free energy, we can terraform Earth, right? We can take ocean water, desalate, turn it into fresh water.

• 49:03David Friedberg?

  We can pump that into deserts, turn them into rainforests. You know, the total annual production of energy on Earth today is about 170 terawatt hours. That amount of energy could be generated from just a 10 foot by 10 foot by 10 foot cube of water. That's the amount of energy, the amount of material that would be turned into photons that would drive all of the electricity we need on Earth. So it's an incredible technology and incredible breakthrough. We're starting to see this stuff happen. One area that I wanted to kind of just highlight, which no one talks about, but which I think is extraordinarily important about 100 years from now, let's say. As these plasma fusion systems work, it's certainly going to be true that we'll have abundant free energy during the back half of this century. And that'll change everything. We'll decarbonize the atmosphere, we'll terraform the planet.

• 49:48David Friedberg?

  We can make whatever we want, we can build things, etc. But the same system of plasma fusion theoretically could be used to fuse heavier elements than just helium. So fast forward 100 or 200 years, if we can actually make plasma fusion systems work, we could also, and to make helium, to make energy, we could also use them to make heavier elements, like the rare earth metals that we talk about being so important here on Earth to make batteries.

• 50:16David Friedberg?

  Or phosphorus, which, you know, we're going to run out of on planet Earth in about 100 years, which is a critical component of agriculture and feeding ourselves. So, you know, over the next, call it 100 years, plasma fusion systems, I think, back half of this century, come online, provide us with abundant free energy. And then in the 22nd century, I think this idea of nucleosynthesis, the idea that we can actually make the rare earth or the heavier elements that are limited natural resources here on Earth, where we could turn water into gold, or water into lithium, or water into molybdenum, or, you know, into beryllium, or whatever, starts to become a reality. And so this, to me, like, I feel like we're on the eve of plasma fusion being a reality, you know, based on some of the results we're seeing, and it's one after the other. I-TERR is going to come online, you know, Commonwealth Fusion had their materials breakthrough,

• 51:01David Friedberg?

  and on and on and on. So this seems to be building up.

• 51:04Jason Calacanis?

  And it's going to hit a tipping point, yeah.

• 51:06David Friedberg?

  That's right. I think the 2030s and the 2040s are where this becomes real. And all these problems and concerns we have about climate change and carbon in the atmosphere, all of this stuff can be reversed with infinite energy.

• 51:18Jason Calacanis?

  And so...

• 51:19David Friedberg?

  So I'm optimistic, and I'm excited about a lot of what we're seeing.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you one question. Obviously, when people start hearing about nuclear reactors and fission, and then they start learning about fusion, they immediately have the Chernobyls of the world and Fukushima's come to mind, and nuclear bombs. In this case, when this reaction occurs, my understanding, I've interviewed a couple of people working on these reactors, is that the reaction just fizzles out, it just stops, and then the...

• 51:45David Friedberg?

  It's not radioactive. So these are not radioactive materials that naturally decay into radioactive ions or particles that can damage the body or damage... These are literally just hydrogen atoms that are spun around so hot and smashed into each other. So if the machine breaks, everything just turns off. That's it.

• 52:04Jason Calacanis?

  And the output, even when it's working, my understanding is some natural, like, just air and water. So there's no output, there's no...

• 52:12David Friedberg?

  There's nothing radioactive, there's no environmental...

• 52:14Jason Calacanis?

  There's nothing to deal with.

• 52:15David Friedberg?

  So let me fast forward 200 years. So now, assume these systems work. As you guys know, all technology, over time, gets better, faster, cheaper, smaller.

• 52:26David Friedberg?

  So in 200 years, we could find that we have plasma fusion reactions in every pocket, in every computer, in every phone. Imagine a world where we no longer need batteries, where we no longer need transmission lines, and where a system can literally pull hydrogen out of the air, generate electricity on the fly. And it sounds crazy, but people thought, people would have never thought that the batteries that we put inside of phones would have existed when the first flow cell, battery cell was made, you know, whatever, you know, during the early days of chemistry, electrical chemistry. So, you know, the idea that we've been able to shrink batteries as we have, the idea that we've been able to make generators like we have today, these were concepts that would have been so foreign. So I do think that in 200 years, if plasma fusion systems work, there's nothing about the laws of physics

• 53:08David Friedberg?

  that says they're limited in scale to only being large. They theoretically could be reduced down, so there's no limit to the size they could drop down to. And so there could be a world 200 years from now where plasma fusion reactors exist in every component that needs electricity. And so ultimately, you could see putting these systems on spaceships and using them to convert elements from one form to another, and we could live for, you know, 100,000 years on a spaceship and just recycle the elements on that spaceship to produce all our food and our air and everything. And yeah.

• 53:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For sure, we could get to Uranus with that.

• 53:42Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 53:42David Friedberg?

  And back. The summary.

• 53:44Jason Calacanis?

  And back.

• 53:45David Friedberg?

  And back.

• 53:45Jason Calacanis?

  You could circle his anus.

• 53:46David Friedberg?

  So that was my diatribe on plasma fusion. I'm super excited about some of the progress.

• 53:50Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So right now, Sax is wondering how do we wet our beaks? Just tell us where to place the bet.

• 53:54David Friedberg?

  There's nowhere yet. This is.

• 53:56David Sacks?

  I mean, honestly, I don't place bets on things that take 100,000 years.

• 54:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's only 100 years, Sax.

• 54:02David Sacks?

  Oh, 100 years, sorry.

• 54:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  100,000 years.

• 54:04David Sacks?

  I invested in things that might materialize in four years. Sorry.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  100 weeks, he needs to operate his plane.

• 54:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax's bills are due next month.

• 54:10Jason Calacanis?

  Margin call, Sax. Oh, oh.

• 54:12David Sacks?

  I got bills to pay.

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  I got bills.

• 54:14David Friedberg?

  He's got bills. A big part of, you know, just speaking markets for a second, I mentioned to you guys at the end of last year that I made a bet on energy stocks. And the reason I made a bet on energy stocks is because some of the breakthroughs that we're seeing in decarbonization and renewable energy has driven a reduction in capital improvements across energy infrastructure. Because people are so optimistic about what's over the horizon and they're so pessimistic about carbon-intensive energy systems that we actually have under-invested over the past few years in energy infrastructure that it's turning out today is critically needed. So while this is a great long-term kind of optimistic world scenario and it's going to decarbonize energy production and energy systems, in the near term, we're actually

• 54:57David Friedberg?

  struggling a bit to meet our energy demands and there's a lot of leverage that energy producers have over those that are the consumers, as we're seeing currently with the Russia, Ukraine, Europe crisis and so on. And so part of the reason for the climate and energy stocks over the last couple of weeks has been largely driven by the fact that we're realizing that this under-investment in CapEx has created a decline in productivity of these assets relative to the demand. And so suddenly everyone's like, oh my gosh, these things are going to be able to charge more, commodity prices are going up, and so on. So, you know, it's very hard to think about playing an investment cycle around this stuff because in the near term, there's still significant demand and we only have carbon-intensive systems to produce energy.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I was gonna ask you, Trumav, if does this mean on an investment thesis, you might see a massive spike in carbon-based fuel systems and these sovereign wealth funds, and then a dramatic drop-off?

• 55:44David Friedberg?

  No.

• 55:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. What do you predict will happen?

• 55:47David Friedberg?

  The, nobody will support anybody investing in pulling more oil out of the ground. They'll, they'll support trying to get more from what we have. But, you know, I don't know if you guys saw, but, you know, there's no support for this. Whether you're an investor and you go activist on some of these oil companies, you know, whether you're, I think Biden had a big setback because, you know, he had cleared a whole, like, millions of acres of offshore land for some kind of energy extraction that was then just reversed by the courts. No, but nobody has support for this stuff. But that's, but what you're saying is exactly right and it's exactly the reason oil prices are climbing.

• 56:30David Friedberg?

  I just sent you guys a link to what's going on today. But they're climbing for the wrong reason. So, look, let's just be realistic here. We, you know, we have a cartel, it's called OPEC, you know, and what they do is they decide output. And we have some checks and balances to OPEC, namely Russia and a few other actors, who will try to then regulate supply and demand so that there's mutually assured destruction.

• 56:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The net result of all of that right now is that we do have some constrained supply for the amount that we need to get back to the level of production we had pre-pandemic. So we are going to have some sustained energy prices, but you saw something really important this past week. Everybody was waiting for this big CPI print, right, the Consumer Price Index print. Everybody thought it was going to be a bad number. It was a pretty bad number, but the markets were pretty responsive to it. And then it's been pretty responsive the rest of the week despite a whole bunch of stuff. I don't know if you guys saw, but like yesterday, there was this crazy article where, you know, one of the Fed governors was like, we should raise by 100 basis points by July and, you know, we should do eight raises. And the markets were like, what are you talking about? And why is that? Because

• 57:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  now people have started to look, you know, I've mentioned this before, when you go into a rate cycle, we're kind of past worrying about how many, we kind of look to the end and decide what we want to believe about the future. And one of the most interesting things is the rate of change of this inflation was actually lower month over month. And so if you think about it that way, we had a bad CPI print, but it's actually not going up as much. And in fact, it's starting to trail off and a lot of economists now forecast basically this inflation peaking or already having peaked over the last few weeks. Consumer sentiment is not so good. A lot of us are now shifting our consumption away from goods

• 58:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  to more services. We're stopping, you know, the hoarding of the toilet papers of the world, if you will. And so I'm not a big buyer of this trade, to be honest with you, Friedberg. I think that it works in the short term. I don't think it's an investment. I think at some point, you're going to have to make a decision about what your view on energy is.

• 58:43David Friedberg?

  No, I agree. I don't think this is a long-term trade. It's a trade, not an investment. That's right. But I do, I do, I do think that the macro sentiment sent the market in one direction. It creates this, it created a buying opportunity, which I was pretty clear about. And I do think that some of this global tension stuff we're seeing is only going to drive it up for a while.

• 58:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I do, I do think, however, that the, the, this big tech spread trade is moving from a trade to an investment, actually. And that I didn't expect. And the reason is, I talked to a bunch of folks on Wall Street over this past week, and they told me two things. And one of them is a segue, because I think we should talk about Microsoft, which is another brilliant move in the lexicon of business, but.

• 59:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What they said was, Facebook has become a funding short for other investments. Now, what does that mean? Everybody was crowded into big tech. We talked about this before, right? Those five stocks were broadly owned. They were effectively the index. But after that, after that earnings report, a lot of investors, including retail investors, had to decide where to reallocate their capital and had to decide where to invest, where the money was going to come from to invest in these other names that were really beaten up. And what folks on Wall Street have been telling me is that, you know, Facebook has become what's called a funding short, meaning there is no bid to buy that from institutional owners.

• 1:00:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They'd rather on the margin sell it to generate the cash to then take and invest in other things. And what you saw over this past week is the bottoming out of a lot of these growth stocks that were beaten up, right? They rallied pretty significantly every day, three, four, five, six percent rallies. And other names in big tech have rallied really well, including Microsoft. And, and so I, I, I think that there is the potential, a small potential, that that's going from a trade to an investment, actually, a sustainable trend that you can bank on for, you know, several years.

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  Investment, hold the stock for five, 10 years.

• 1:00:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The trade, that spread trade you can hold for a long period of time.

• 1:00:42Jason Calacanis?

  But for the winners to be, the winners in that, just so people get refreshed, Google's a winner in that.

• 1:00:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Microsoft, Google.

• 1:00:47Jason Calacanis?

  Microsoft, Google. And then you feel Amazon, Facebook, obviously, and Netflix are the losers in that trade. Still feel that way?

• 1:00:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that Microsoft and Google are far and away the winners. Far and away the winners. And, look, you saw, you saw, you saw this Microsoft thing today, or sorry, this past week, so smart, you know?

• 1:01:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so just to give, catch people up on that, Microsoft has made another savvy move to get approval for their $75 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition. They promised their video game app store would operate with open market principles. CEO of the year Satya Nadella and others traveled to Washington.

• 1:01:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nadella.

• 1:01:26Jason Calacanis?

  Nadella, right, the sentence at the end. Traveled to Washington this week to meet with regulators regarding the acquisition. So they are proactively going to Washington as opposed to other people who maybe are not. Quote from Microsoft President Brad Smith, "We are more focused on adapting to regulation than fighting against it." That's some really interesting kung fu.

• 1:01:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look, there's a famous story about this explorer named Hernando Cortez where, you know, we've all heard this analogy or this little phrase before. Where, you know, when they were exploring, coming from Europe and, you know, they hit the Caribbean Islands and then, you know, looking for America, et cetera. The famous phrase is burn the boats.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:02:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? Can't go back. We have to find our way.

• 1:02:11Jason Calacanis?

  Make it work.

• 1:02:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The way that that's been extended in business is sort of what we would call scorched the earth. And there's a competitive move that a lot of businesses, if they're smart enough, can execute. Which is to effectively take a key market and take an economic view of that market. Where you say that we're going to take all the economic value away from it. And I think this is a first step towards a really interesting play that Microsoft could pull. Which is essentially to scorch the earth of app stores.

• 1:02:41Jason Calacanis?

  Which is Google's and Apple's really big money printer.

• 1:02:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To make a completely open permissible platform with very little to no take rate. And in a market as big as video games. I think what it does is it creates pressure on all these other mega platforms to essentially copy them. And I think Friedberg mentioned this before, Google has actually been the best in doing this by finding these key markets. Or I think it was Saks, you know, Chrome and other things and giving them away for free. Google is in a position to make the App Store effectively free. And then that puts Apple on a little bit of a desert island. So Jason, back to why I think you can keep Apple in that basket of shorts. The competitive pressures are mounting by the moves of Microsoft that I think are easier for Google to copy and very difficult for companies like Apple to copy because it creates an incredible disincentive.

• 1:03:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and also as part of this open App Store concept, they would let you use any payment system. So if you're on an iPhone and you wanted to use Apple Pay with a Google app purchase, you could do that. And if you're on, you know, Microsoft, you could use PayPal as an example.

• 1:03:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, what do you, what do you think about inflation?

• 1:03:46David Sacks?

  Okay, there was a really interesting chart on inflation that actually Zero Hedge tweeted, and I threw it up in the notes here, where they said real hourly earnings are negative 1.7%. It's the 10th month in a row where US incomes aren't keeping up with inflation. So the problem here is that, you know, people's incomes have increased with inflation, but not as much as the inflation rate. So the net effect of it is that people are feeling worse off. When they go to the grocery store to buy groceries or whatever they need, they don't feel as rich. That's the fundamental problem here. And I think there's a lot of people out there who think that there's a free lunch, that if we printed 2 trillion

• 1:04:27David Sacks?

  worth of stimmy checks, this is the whole, that $2 trillion bill last year they shoveled through. I think the idea was, we're going to print as much money as we can before the election, and it's going to help us in the midterms. Actually, as it turns out, it boosted inflation so much that people are feeling worse off, even though their wages went up slightly, because on a net basis, their earnings are down. So I just think it's a good reminder that you can't just like print wealth, you can't print your way to prosperity.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  No free lunches?

• 1:04:58David Sacks?

  There's no free lunches.

• 1:04:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59David Friedberg?

  Or we're going to create addiction to universal income or universal subsidy. That's the alternative, is people are going to basically try and vote to make some programs that were initially meant to be temporary more permanent, in order to keep up the lifestyle that they've become accustomed to.

• 1:05:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just, just to build on Sax's point, the University of Michigan Consumer Center that was released, I think it was today, this morning, and it shows exactly what he's saying, which is that, you know, consumers propensity and confidence in the economy has been falling off a cliff. You know, the month over month change was almost, it was down 8.2%. The year over year change is down almost 20%.

• 1:05:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Current economic conditions was down 20% and then index of consumer expectations down 19%. So to Sax's point.

• 1:05:47David Sacks?

  People are scared. Yeah, well, we've been, we've been talking on the show for the last, I'd say, couple of months about balancing the risk of recession versus the risk of inflation. Inflation, I think, has gotten slightly worse. The print went from, the last print was like 7.1%, now it's 7.5%. So to Chamath' point earlier, it's getting worse, but the rate of how fast it's getting worse is slowing. Could be peaking. But the risk of recession, I think, is increasing because what's keeping this economy going is the consumer. And if the consumer sentiment now all of a sudden is tanking and people feel poor because of inflation, I just, you know, now the, the risks are starting to become more balanced.

• 1:06:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As sentiment goes down, this is where governors play a critical role because if they don't open up these economies, we can't actually have a consumer-led consumption rebound of the economy because there aren't any services to buy because you can't actually be around anybody. So if the economy remains effectively closed and people are done buying, you know, tubs of margarine and toilet paper, because, you know, Armageddon isn't coming as we were worried it would, what are we supposed to be doing? So this is how these things interplay. So we have to get these, again, going back to where we started, we have to get this economy open and we have to just get back to some sense of normalcy and the consumer will lead us out. But I think Sax, you're right, on the margin, I think the risk is towards a recession because people don't see this. Thomas Sowell, who's a well-known Stanford, he's a, I think he's

• 1:07:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a senior fellow at Hoover, you know, he, he has this comment, which is effectively taxes are bad for the rich and the poor, but inflation is bad just for the poor.

• 1:07:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the reason he says that is because, you know, if you're wealthy, you can transition to assets that are sort of inflation-adjusted or inflation-protected, right? You can consume assets or you can purchase assets to protect yourself. But inflation is an exceptionally regressive means of the government taking compensation away from you, current compensation, and it disproportionately affects working-class ordinary people. And so if you have real wages that are negative, inflation that's high, that's confiscatory, right? You are, you are meaningfully less well-off than you were before and, you know, the wealthy folks have a way to hedge, but normal, ordinary working-class people do not. And on the margin, then, if they then do not go out and spend. The problem will be some sort of recessionary effect.

• 1:08:02Jason Calacanis?

  I also think if we open up, more people might, since they're so lonely and getting weird staying at home, I think they might actually want to go do jobs to socialize and do things. I'm seeing people want to get out and do, you know, trips with their teams and they're sick of staying home. Salesforce just bought a retreat center. We saw this south of the city, the Bay Area, and because Benioff's got a concern, I guess, that all these employees he hired over two years who've never met another Salesforce employee are getting weird and lonely and, you know.

• 1:08:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think history's going to be very, I think, David, you're right. I think history's going to be really judgmental of Biden. If he is the last person to basically give the green light and all of these Democratic governors basically revolt and open up underneath, you know, either silence or the complete opposite point of view. This is a really bad setup.

• 1:08:55David Sacks?

  Well, National Journal, which again is not some right-wing publication, they're just sort of an analyst of what's happening in Washington, said that Biden had an article, Biden is blowing his COVID moment. He was elected to lead us back to normalcy. All he had to do was say, guys, it's time for the restrictions to come off and take credit for the fact that we were, that the whole country was ready to move on. And he's kind of missed it. And, but this trucker convoy that's coming to Washington gives him one more chance, I think, to get on the right side of this because there's really two ways he can react. One is to treat them as, you know, domestic terrorists, you know, racist, white supremacists, insurrectionaries, or he can, you know, embrace them.

• 1:09:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, constituents.

• 1:09:38David Sacks?

  All he has to do is say, listen, we love you, we respect you, we hear you, we agree with you, it's time for these mandates to end. And you know what? Thank you, Rachel Walensky and Anthony Fauci for your service. We understand you're just trying to keep the country safe, but thank you very much. We're ready to move on. We're getting rid of all these restrictions. His popularity would like bounce five points, 10 points if he did that.

• 1:10:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm betting he's going to. I mean, he's, he's always represented the working man and woman of this country. That's been his thing from the beginning. I bet you he does embrace them. And if you look at Omicron, remember the scariness of December? Hey, this thing is spreading 30, 40, 50 times faster. I wonder. If it's going to have the same death rate and we didn't know. And now we know. And it's February. Two months later, we know that the curve in South Africa, same as the curve in New York and California, up and down. And then the only people who die seemingly are immunocompromised or unvaccinated or both. So feels like the perfect time.

• 1:10:33David Sacks?

  You know, who really led us back to normalcy? I mean, we really need to give credit to all the people who fought to get. It's the moms who went to these school board meetings who are denounced as domestic terrorists. They're the ones who put pressure to repeal these mask mandates on their kids, which by the way, aren't even fully off. In New York and California, adults don't have to wear a mask anymore, but the kids do. It's the scientists, it's the scientists of the Great Barrington Declaration who were demonized and called fringe and kooks and conspiracy theorists. They're the ones who provided the real data against lockdowns, not the NIH. It's these truckers who are basically opposing mandates. These are the people who are dragging us back to normalcy. And it's the politicians who are reacting to that when the polls change. And I think what the people want now is some real leadership. It's a politician who gets up there and leads us back to normalcy.

• 1:11:18David Sacks?

  Why can't Biden do that?

• 1:11:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a great article in the Times and they profiled, you know, a couple of people. And one of them was a mom in New York who's running for Congress against, you know, an entrenched, an entrenched Democrat. And she's, I mean, you know, she's just a good hearted mom who was like, this is enough. Enough's enough. I need to get back to normalcy. My kids need to get back in school.

• 1:11:40Jason Calacanis?

  We still have mask mandates here in California. Kids are still wearing masks in school, yeah.

• 1:11:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's becoming tribal warfare amongst the Democrats in California because even when, you know, the, the governor basically said, okay, mask mandates can go on X state. The, the county supervisors have not decided. So for example, in Santa Clara County, you know, uh, they've not said yes.

• 1:12:05David Sacks?

  In LA County, there's a health, an unelected bureaucrat, a health director named Barbara Ferrer. She calls the shots on COVID. After Newsom basically said that the masks can come off, she says, no, they can't. Not until April. Who is this person giving us orders? She told this to the board of supervisors down there and we're all just supposed to listen? Now, the reason why she has this authority is because Newsom is granted to her under Newsom's state of emergency. So what he should do is end that. What is the emergency? The Super Bowl is happening this weekend in the state and everyone's going to be there maskless.

• 1:12:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I was at the Warriors game last night and you had people wearing the most flimsy of masks that does nothing to protect people, taking them off while they're eating and drinking, and then people walking around with signs, the security guards had signs that said, please put your mask on. And they were walking up to people, I kid you not, and putting this like little round sign in people's faces and not talking to them, just, you know, and they would stand there until you put your mask back on. And like, you're literally eating a hot dog and then you put the hot dog down and then they come up and put the sign in your face, then you put your mask up, you take another bite of your hot dog. I mean, it was getting unnecessarily confrontational and just weird. And nowhere else are you seeing it. And then you go to a restaurant and the employees are wearing masks and nobody else is.

• 1:13:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nick, I hope, I hope you can find it.

• 1:13:20Jason Calacanis?

  So weird.

• 1:13:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was this clip on Twitter when the mask mandate was lifted in Nevada and it was a clip of kids in like grade two or three and they went crazy. Okay. And the reason they were so excited was like they got to be normal again. And the explanation, I had never heard this more beautifully said, these children can finally see their friends' emotions on their face.

• 1:13:48David Sacks?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:13:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can you imagine if you're four, five, six, seven years old and you cannot understand the emotions of other kids because you're covered up in a mask?

• 1:13:59Jason Calacanis?

  And you've only had an experience in school, two years in school.

• 1:14:02David Sacks?

  My six-year-old has never attended a day of school without a mask.

• 1:14:05Jason Calacanis?

  I was about to say, right? Like that's, there's kids out there who I never had.

• 1:14:08David Sacks?

  And you know, I was at, I was at, like the, I was at horses with one of my kids last weekend and there were a bunch of kids out there riding. It's sunny, it's outside, they're on a horse, they're all wearing masks in a voluntary optional situation. I'm just like, how brainwashed? This generation that we're raising, I mean, they're going to be so neurotic, but they're also like brainwashed. I mean, it's, it's crazy.

• 1:14:31Jason Calacanis?

  We see it in the Bay Area, like I'll have a party with the kids or a group of kids come over and there's two or three parents who show up at the, we only do outdoor parties, obviously.

• 1:14:42Jason Calacanis?

  Two or three of the 10 kids will have masks on, their parents will have masks on, and like the most intense N95, like sealed masks. And I'm like, you want to take your mask off for a picture? And one of the kids refused to take her mask off for a picture outside at a birthday party. I was like, okay.

• 1:14:57David Sacks?

  Listen, I mean, when I supported the mask mandate, the very beginning of the pandemic, it was always as an interim measure. If I had known that people would want to continue this thing forever, there's no way I would have supported it.

• 1:15:08Jason Calacanis?

  But it also probably was effective in the early days with the first five.

• 1:15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think we know what the psychological impact to children is when they don't understand other people's emotions and you do it over a long period of time.

• 1:15:17Jason Calacanis?

  No, we don't.

• 1:15:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that's a fair statement. We don't know the impact. And it's probably not zero.

• 1:15:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so at some point, we need to look at the risks, calculate some expected value, and the people we need to prioritize are those that are the youngest. Okay? And I've said this before, and it's like, the teachers' unions need to understand that calculus. Parents already understand that calculus. I don't think the state legislators, governors, and the federal bureaucracy yet understands this calculus, but it's time to return to normal and it's time to return.

• 1:15:52David Sacks?

  Totally.

• 1:15:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry. And on this point, I would like to bring up something, the ACLU thing, just because I think I would love to get your take on, you know, talking about civil liberties and freedoms. There are things that are happening here under our noses every day, under Democratic and Republican presidents that, to me, when I saw this on the ACLU Twitter feed yesterday, was shocking. Jason, do you want to tee that up?

• 1:16:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right. In other news, the CIA has been secretly conducting surveillance programs to capture Americans' private information. On Thursday, Democratic Centers Wyden and Heinrich sent a letter to Director of the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence. The letter called for greater transparency into the CIA's data collection of private US citizens. Basically, the CIA used Executive Order 12333, which was signed by Reagan in 1981 to gather data on US citizens. The letter notes the program was, quote, "entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern the collection and without any judicial, congressional, or even executive branch oversight that comes

• 1:17:03Jason Calacanis?

  from FISA," that's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, "collection," quote.

• 1:17:08Jason Calacanis?

  What these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside of FISA law. In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that had generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.

• 1:17:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, where is the mainstream media while they breathlessly run around chasing cancellation stories? Where are they to report and to hold accountable this stuff? And where are our politicians in actually doing their job? But, you know, I don't think there's ever been this kind of overreach that's just constantly been going on with zero accountability or transparency into it. You know, the FBI is responsible for domestic laws, right? And the FBI has a very clear path in which they need to get warrants in order to be able to surveil US citizens. And then the fact that we give an agency whose responsibility is actually foreign.

• 1:18:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the CIA is supposed to work only on international, not domestic.

• 1:18:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then to basically spy on its citizens with zero accountability or reporting is seems to be a pretty important issue that should at least be discussed, especially in a world now where executive power just keeps ramping up and ramping up. What's going on? And there's zero transparency or accountability. If I didn't randomly see this on an ACLU tweet, would we even be talking about this?

• 1:18:29Jason Calacanis?

  Probably not. And the other thing that's crazy about it is I think the way they get away with this, Chamath, and this has been something that the Patriot Act had a similar technique, is they, the CIA and some other organizations will track international people of interest, you know, money launderers, et cetera, and then say, in order to track them, well, anybody they contact in America is fair game. Or if they're, you know, and so you can get the metadata from the phone calls and the emails. And I think that's how a lot of this gets justified.

• 1:19:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What this letter seems to say is we just, there's a broad scale surveillance program against US citizens that is indeterminate in scope and scale.

• 1:19:09Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So we don't know.

• 1:19:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That seems very different than that.

• 1:19:12David Sacks?

  And then in in parallel to this, there was also that announcement that the Department of Homeland Security is creating this major apparatus, this infrastructure to go after domestic terrorists. Well, look, if they mean people who actually like set off bombs or commit real crimes, fine. But, Chamath, you asked where the media is. The media is defining routine political dissent as domestic terrorism now. I mean, you hear this type of threat inflation. We've heard these truckers even described as insurrectionists. So, you know, how are these programs going to be used is really the question. You create this massive infrastructure. Under the executive branch, we've seen that in Washington, this trend towards criminalizing political disagreements, where Democrats, Republicans have been putting

• 1:19:55David Sacks?

  their partisans in jail for years. But are they now going to apply this to political disagreements in the country? Can they use these powers to go after truckers who are engaging in civil disobedience? Can they use these surveillance powers to go after somebody who just tweets things on social media that they don't like? I mean, these are the open questions.

• 1:20:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15David Sacks?

  It's very scary.

• 1:20:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and it's also hard to determine, because you might have some people on the right who are protesting something in a very valid way. And then you get some whack jobs like the Oath Keepers, who are bringing in tons of weapons outside the DC area on January 6. So there's a valid concern here with all those weapons the Oath Keepers brought and their plans to do a coordinated takeover after they first got in there. But then you have the other dipshits who are there are probably just there to have fun and bang drums and support Trump, right?

• 1:20:43David Sacks?

  Do you think these truckers are engaged in an insurrection?

• 1:20:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, we don't know. And I don't think so, no. I mean, if they if they bring a bunch of guns, then yes, we should have concerns. But I don't think they are.

• 1:20:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The slippery slope is when you have an executive order that is not governed by the standard guardrails that we use to have checks and balances between these kinds of government agencies and the people and the elected officials that we elect. Here's how it basically gets in a really tricky place. You have, I'm just going to use Justin Trudeau's quote, okay, but replace that person with any politician in power. Hey, there's a small fringe minority of people who are on their way here. They hold unacceptable views.

• 1:21:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you know what that person is going to do? That person is going to want to do everything in their power to basically understand, break apart, um, and tear up that fringe minority group. Now, isn't that scary?

• 1:21:35David Sacks?

  Right. When you have this overheated political rhetoric that describes your political opponents, your dissenters.

• 1:21:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As enemies of the state.

• 1:21:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, as enemies, as white supremacists, as Nazis, as insurrectionaries, as domestic terrorists. Why wouldn't then the law enforcement arms of our government then treat them that way? I mean, does the Department of Homeland Security or the CIA or the FBI, do they understand that the politicians are just engaging in rhetoric and threat inflation? Or will they take that, those invocations literally to, well, we have to investigate and stop these people?

• 1:22:10Jason Calacanis?

  I think they've done a, Department of Justice done a pretty good job of that.

• 1:22:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just want, I just brought this up because I think it's really important for somebody in the mainstream media of which many listen to this podcast.

• 1:22:19Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:22:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a responsibility to actually double click into this issue and figure out what's going on, please.

• 1:22:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For, on behalf of all of us.

• 1:22:27David Friedberg?

  By the way, like if you guys, I mean, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BBC, everyone covered it today, but the story today is that lawmakers made this claim with no details and no evidence. So I'm sure the investigations are underway. I mean, the journalists are clearly leaning in to identify, you know, the, the evidence behind the story, and I'm sure more will come out over the coming days and weeks.

• 1:22:48Jason Calacanis?

  And in fairness, like you said, is the Justice Department doing this even handily? They were very specific with the, the January 6th insurrection acts where they went after oath keepers because they had a coordinated, they're a militia. They literally refer to themselves as militia. And those people are getting treated very different than the people who broke glass or sat on Pelosi's desk. Those people are getting three months suspended sentences, six month sentences. And the oath keepers, who are a militia, they call themselves a militia, they're dangerous. Um, and they're treating them very differently, and they're the only ones who are being charged with the more serious 10 to 20 year sentences. So I would say they are doing a great job.

• 1:23:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All right, everybody, this has been an amazing journey from, uh, truckers to Joe Rogan and all the way to Uranus and back for the Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:23:38Jason Calacanis?

  The Sultan of Science, dude.

• 1:23:39David Sacks?

  Nobody needs your outro, Jason.

• 1:23:41Jason Calacanis?

  And benevolent dictator.

• 1:23:43David Sacks?

  They know who we are.

• 1:23:44Jason Calacanis?

  They live for the outro. People love it. Oh my god. Love you, boys. We'll see you all next time. On the All In Podcast. Bye, bye. Love you, besties.

• 1:23:54David Sacks?

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:23:57Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:24:01David Sacks?

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

• 1:24:05Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, besties. I'm the queen of killing.

• 1:24:09David Sacks?

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

• 1:24:14Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:24:17David Sacks?

  That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

• 1:24:22David Sacks?

  Oh, man.

• 1:24:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:24:33David Sacks?

  Let your be, be. Let your be. What?

• 1:24:38Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get merch. Besties are gone.