E31: Post-vaccination virtue signaling, pandemic lessons, immigration, Caitlyn Jenner for CA Governor, Big Tech earnings & more

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 Referenced in the show: MIT Technology Review - Some vaccinated people are still getting covid. Here's why you shouldn't worry. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/29/1024301/vaccines-covid-breakthrough-infections-immunity-cdc/ David Sacks on Medium - Caitlyn Jenner Is Right: Crime is the #1 Issue in California and Gavin Newsom Bears Ultimate Responsibility https://davidsacks.medium.com/caitlyn-jenner-is-right-crime-is-the-1-issue-in-california-and-gavin-newsom-bears-ultimate-381b3cee42db Tweets https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1378856861970038784 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1388125436241223682 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1388135440843251714 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1388129450651492355 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1387582236573175809 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1387598770825830404 Show Notes: 0:00 Bestie intro, Jason's trip recap 2:47 Sacks on hypocrisy and virtue signaling surrounding wearing masks post-vaccination, Biden's address 16:07 Pandemic lessons 30:02 Immigration, Americans self-selecting as hard workers, understanding two different types of immigration 48:04 How Darwinian free trade has negatively impacted the US middle class 1:00:44 Caitlyn Jenner for CA Governor, crime & homelessness 1:07:48 Big Tech earnings

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is an incredible fashion disaster we have today. David Sacks is dressed like Where's Waldo. Okay, Friedberg, Friedberg is dressed like

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  driving a fucking Subaru Outback. Oh, God. Unbelievable. I mean, this is ridiculous.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody, everybody. It's another episode of the All In Podcast, episode 31. With us today from, well, I just rolled out of bed, the queen of Kenwa himself, David Friedberg is here. Let me do my hair. Get that hair. It's not gonna help.

• 0:52David Sacks?

  Have you been studying the homeless problem by, by yourself going out on the streets or what?

• 0:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm doing an intervention? All right, I'm gonna go change. Give me a five minutes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Friedberg minutes up. We have to keep the Friedberg relation, the ratio up. I had somebody stop me in Miami and say, keep the Friedberg ratio high. Also with us chiming in is Where's Waldo himself, the skipper. David Sacks, Rain Man is here. The skipper is here.

• 1:27David Sacks?

  Don't change my nickname. Don't change my nickname. I'm comfortable with Rain Man. Don't throw me off.

• 1:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, definitely. Definitely okay with Rain Man. Of course, not the skipper, not the skipper. And the dictator himself. Got a full night's sleep, I hope this time. I did. I really did. Holly Hapatia. And of course, I'm J. Cal, the baby seal here in Miami. Look at the view. How beautiful. It's been an incredible, incredible week. The tiger has been unleashed. I went to Austin. Now I'm in Miami. J. Cal, you're more like a, you're more, you're more like a pudgy hyena.

• 2:05Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. You're not really a tiger. The quarantine 15, big announcement, 10 pounds are gone, five to go. I'm lifting weights outside in Miami. It's been amazing. Field report. I get to Austin, I kid you not. I got my mask on.

• 2:22Jason Calacanis?

  Ten people, first of all, ten people say, "Love the All In Podcast," every like fifteen feet, walking in Austin and in Miami. But somebody looks at me with my mask and says, "Are you okay, son?" And I was like, "What?" And he said, "I kid you not." And I, he said, "Are you vaccinated?" And I said, "Yeah." He's like, "Why are you wearing a mask?" And I realized, it's time for independent critical thinking. Sax, I gotta give it to you. Another great, great tweet for me to copy and adapt to steal your deal quote. But I love this tweet that you had, where you said, "Early in the pandemic..." Explain the tweet, or maybe read the tweet. This is...

• 3:01David Sacks?

  Well, which one?

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  The one about masks. About one group of people wouldn't wear masks.

• 3:06David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 3:07David Sacks?

  Well, at the beginning, that's right. I mean, the dysfunction of our politics is that half the country wouldn't wear a mask at the beginning of the pandemic, and now the other half of the country won't take them off at its end. This is the problem, is that the mask has become, it's the equivalent of the red MAGA hat for Team Blue. This has become some sort of virtue signaling, even when it's not necessary. But it's actually destructive, because it's performatively sending the signal to people that the vaccines don't work. And we have a third of the country today is still vaccine hesitant, and this is not helping. What we need to be sending the message to them is, "Look, get vaccinated

• 3:50David Sacks?

  so life can get back to normal, so you don't have to wear a mask." And, you know, we still have the CDC putting out this ridiculously conservative and timid guidance, saying that, "Well, if you get vaccinated, you can take off your mask outdoors, as long as you're not with too many people." Well, like, what, no, I mean, look, once you get vaccinated, you shouldn't need to wear a mask outdoors or indoors. And, you know, we had this state, this sort of mini State of the Union this past week with Biden, and it was this really, like, jarring image.

• 4:21Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody was there.

• 4:22David Sacks?

  No, it was like an empty room.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  Empty room.

• 4:24David Sacks?

  Because of social distancing, and they were all wearing masks, even though you know every single one of them is vaccinated. And so I think Biden... Really missed an opportunity in that speech. Yes, he said that everyone should get vaccinated, but show not tell. I mean, you know, he walks up to the microphone in a mask saying that we should all get vaccinated. Well, what is the mask for? Why don't you tell people that if you get vaccinated, you don't need a mask anymore. And so, you know, that we have this sort of contrast.

• 4:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's actually really, it's, it's really incredible because to your point, he was trying to make some very important points in that speech, David. And when the camera would actually pan from behind him. So instead of looking at him and Kamala and Nancy Pelosi, it would look, there was nine people. And you thought. Another sold out crowd for President Ambien? No, because, because, no, no, no, because typically when you, when you give these sort of State of the Union or, you know, these kind of like 100 day addresses, it is packed because you have everybody in Congress, you have everybody in the Senate, you know, you have, you have typically like a bunch of other officials, you have the Supreme Court, like in a State of the Union address. And there was nobody. And it felt really striking to watch that.

• 5:34David Sacks?

  If Trump's mistake was not wearing a mask in April of 2020, I think Biden's mistake is not taking it off in April of 2021. Why can't we get a political leader who is willing to put on masks at the right time and take them off at the right time?

• 5:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or to risk assessment. Just we, we need a political leader who's reasonably scientific and will actually say, here's the intersection of science and common sense that everybody can map to and, and copy me. Because it is to your point, David, you know, the, the leader of the free world is given that title for a reason. It's not, it's not completely, completely ignore what I say. I've been put in this position because I am, you know, on some dimension, expected to be the most thoughtful person in the room and set the example for everybody else.

• 6:21David Friedberg?

  Let's just talk like the important consequence of this, and I agree with Sacks. The important consequence of this, however, is the economic effect it has. So for example, in San Francisco, restaurants are only allowed to be at a quarter capacity. So there are restaurant owners that want to get back to business, that want to generate income again, that want to get off of the PPP loan program. All of the government support and they should be able to because most people in San Francisco at this point, the vast majority, in fact, are vaccinated and the restaurants for no scientific reason are shut down or limited to a quarter capacity. And this is the case across a lot of cities and a lot of states in the country right now where the conservatism with respect to coming out

• 7:04David Friedberg?

  of the, you know, the major part of this kind of pandemic is what's now keeping the economy or not just keeping the economy because we're fueling the economy with stimulus. But is keeping business owners and keeping people that want to participate actively in building and running their businesses from getting back to work because we're so conservative about this. And you know what? Sacks is totally right. Yeah, like take the masks off, let people go into restaurants and let people go have dinner in San Francisco. Let these places get back to work.

• 7:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, we have a, we have an A B test that's actually nobody is talking about, which is that the more conservative version of America's posture, right? America's sort of like half, we don't care and half we care too much. But in Europe, you could see a more, you know, homogeneous approach to the problem. And we printed a negative 0.6% GDP growth in Europe. So to your point, with all the vaccines that are out there, with all of the logic and all of the science, not being able to just take the mask off and get back to life as normal was negative 0.6% GDP growth in a quarter where they also printed hundreds of billions of dollars. And now you come into the United States, last year, I don't know if you guys remember this, but every forecast I saw

• 8:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  had GD from the smartest folks saying Q1 GDP would be on a run rate to be around 10%. It would be one of the best in history. It was only 1.6%. So we're on a 6.4% GDP growth run rate. Guys, that's not 10%. Now, it's still a lot, but the point is we got to get back to life as normal. We have to show that these vaccines work. We have to tell people that you can have a normal life. You should be going out, spending money, going back to the office, live normally.

• 8:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, and we should, we should, we should just cover the data. I mean, we should, I mean, it'd be great to put up the latest CDC data on the screen. Yeah, if you use the CDC as a source for the data as opposed to listening to their interpretations of it, their policy interpretation, it's actually pretty illuminating. So out of 87 million people who've been vaccinated, there have only been 408 serious cases, which would be counted as hospitalization or death related to COVID. So those are odds of one in 213,000. The odds of being hit by lightning are one in 180,000. So your odds of being struck by lightning are greater than your risk of getting seriously sick.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  What are the odds of a royal flush? I need this in poker terms. I think this sounds like hitting a royal flush twice.

• 9:28David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  It's crazy. How many royal flushes have we each hit?

• 9:32David Friedberg?

  I'll put it, I'll put this article up and you guys can share it in the

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Show notes. The technology review one?

• 9:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think it, it does a good job of speaking to Sacks's statistics. Now, yeah, so I think, Sacks, I think this represents the CDC data in the first paragraph in this article, but it goes on to kind of speak about the statistical likelihood of these events. So, you know, basically, you know, it opens up by saying, you know, as of April 20th, 87 million people in the United States have been vaccinated and only 7,157 or 0.008% went on to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, 330 of whom were hospitalized and 77 of whom died from the disease. And I would guess that, that of those people, there is likely some immune dysfunction, which is a, you know, a likely reason why. It doesn't mean that every individual has that risk. It means that there are certain people out there that

• 10:21David Friedberg?

  are going to have immune dysfunction and won't react well to, to, to, won't develop the appropriate kind of protection from the vaccine. And that's, you know, that's small, small, small, small, small percent of people are the, are where we're kind of seeing, you know, actual risk line.

• 10:34David Sacks?

  That's where I get the 408 number is it's the number of hospitalizations plus deaths minus the ones that they say in the footnote were not related to COVID.

• 10:42David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 10:43David Sacks?

  So there's some other like cause. So 408 out of 87 million.

• 10:48David Friedberg?

  And by the way, I think it's worth just highlighting, you know, just think about the rationale for why there is conservatism here still, right? So if there are still pockets where people have not been vaccinated in the country, and there are still areas where people are hesitant to get vaccinated, and there's a large unvaccinated population, the official guidance, the official kind of reasoning, I believe, is that we need to be conservative to get all of those people to behave in a conservative enough way to keep a, you know, a surge from occurring regionally around the country. And the loss, the downside, is very negligible where people still have to wear masks. What I don't think that that calculus accounts for is that the loss is actually not negligible.

• 11:30David Friedberg?

  The loss of telling people broadly to keep wearing masks is a hesitancy to go back to work, a hesitancy and a conservancy to engage in normal economic activity. And so, you know, I think that we're kind of missing that point in the kind of officiating of this, of this exit strategy here. And it's, it's certainly, I'm aligned with Sacks on this, I certainly think it's, it's biting us more than it's helping us.

• 11:52Jason Calacanis?

  To give you an idea, just like experience-wise, when I was in Austin, every restaurant is at 110 capacity. The locals there were like, I can't get a reservation for a week or two. The town is packed. Everybody in the country is going to Austin and Miami because they've just learned that Austin and Miami have officially declared, if you have the vaccine, you can go have your life. But there is still a little bit of theater on the margins. When you go into a restaurant, I went in to get a meal, and I didn't have my mask on. I kid you not, 110 capacity, 100 people sitting at the bar, 200 people at tables. She hands me a mask, and I said, I'll have one. I put it on, I said, can I ask you a question? And she, the hostess says, uh, why should you wear a mask when there's 300 people in here without a mask and the doors are closed?

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, that's the exact question. She goes, it makes no sense. The governor wants no masks, the mayor wants masks, and so they're having their own little version of the national conversation in Austin, which is locally scared, or at least the politicians are, and then reasonable otherwise. So you literally put your little mask on, you walk 10 feet to your table, and then take it off for the rest of the time. In Miami... It's a true story. I go to Miami. I walk into, I, I, you know, it was, I, I haven't been out in 14 months. So I decided I would check out a club and I went to a nightlife club and people were dancing and having a great time. People were also popping bottles and I was like, oh my God, it's over like, and

• 13:20David Friedberg?

  A nightlife club.

• 13:21Jason Calacanis?

  It was a nightlife club and it, no, it was not a, a, yes. Anyway, it was a legitimate club, uh, you know, here in South Beach. Um, and so I took a little Insta and I shared, I fed the Insta and immediately I got three comments from friends. Who are like, what are you doing in that club? And I wrote back to all three, I'm vaccinated. And they were like, okay. And I was like, is this not obvious?

• 13:49David Friedberg?

  But I think this was the point I made a few months ago, which is I do think that the, the subconscious training, the fear factor that's been kind of, you know, built into us over the last year, year and a half. Um, it's going to take a while to kind of, um, train our way out of. You know, people aren't going to be that rational and that conscious about, oh, I've been vaccinated. People are basically the default is fear, the what ifs, the buts, but oh my God, people are still getting COVID even though they're vaccinated. But there's, there's variants, but, and everyone looks for a conscious, or you know, a kind of conscious reason why they're rationalizing their subconscious fear. And everyone's got this fear to go and do things and this fear to go back in the world. Cause we've literally been trained and beaten into a corner for the last year.

• 14:29David Friedberg?

  Now the conscious reality is you don't need to be fearful, but I'm fearful, therefore I'm looking for reasons to maintain my fear. And I think this, this, this is like what, again, I, I'll say that I said it like four times before, but this is what happened after nine 11 and it lasted for years. And, and you know, we still have ridiculous TSA processes.

• 14:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need our leaders to take their masks off. Get, tell everybody they're vaccinated, take their masks off, go back to normal life. So that everybody else will feel that it's okay too. Because even if you're, even if you're, if you're not fearful, David, the other thing that you are is just guilty. And you know,

• 15:03David Friedberg?

  Right, totally.

• 15:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you gotta, you gotta get rid of that as well. And the only way you'll do it is if highly visible people are now actually going back to life as normal.

• 15:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Like the peer pressure element of it. It's like, I feel, I feel bad going into a store when everyone else is wearing a mask and like, I'm, I'm the asshole.

• 15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy, this crazy MSNBC, uh, moment, one of the hosts of one of their shows. Said, I've been fully vaccinated, but I went running in Central Park. So I double masked. And I'm like, the virtue signaling was so insane. And I'm like, wait a second, you're outdoors.

• 15:34David Sacks?

  This is a, this is a Joy Reid thing. Yeah.

• 15:37Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to say the person's name because then if you mention who it is, then you might be attacking a person of color or a woman host. So I just said,

• 15:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, now you're avoiding it, which makes it think that you are. So who is it?

• 15:48Jason Calacanis?

  How am I supposed to say it without being?

• 15:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Does anybody watch? I mean,

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody watches MSNBC.

• 15:53David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Jason Calacanis?

  MSNBC was the Trump Trump Derangement Syndrome Therapy was MSNBC. The ratings go, I want to have a question for the three of you. Knowing what we've seen here between the illogic of both sides and the media and the insanity. What do you take away from the year of the pandemic as it comes to a close in how you personally look at the world? Sax, you want to start like?

• 16:22David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'll tell you. I feel like the American people are constantly being propagandized. And there's almost like an information war being perpetrated on the American people where we cannot get the data, the facts and the truth. I think it's true now in terms of people not taking off their masks, even though we have the CDC data that basically shows the lightning strike probability of getting COVID. But we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic, remember I have all these people on Twitter telling me every time I tweet about this, why don't you just listen to the experts? Right? They want me to shut off my brain and just do whatever the CDC says. And I'm like, well, do you realize the CDC was against masks at the beginning of the pandemic back

• 17:03David Sacks?

  in March of 2000 last year, when I was saying we need to wear masks because I was looking at the success of the Asian countries and some of the data coming out of that. The CDC was very, very slow in adopting masks. They were against it. They were telling us we didn't need to do it.

• 17:19Jason Calacanis?

  And that was the historical CDC, like, right? They've been around for a long time. And then also Trump was anti-mask. And so you had

• 17:27David Sacks?

  Trump was slow to adopt masks too. And yeah, and absolutely. And so, yes, I mean, I've said that there's like a Venn diagram of American politics where that, you know, that one circle is favored mask wearing one year ago, and then wants to get rid of mask mandates today. The Venn diagram of overlap between those two groups is very small. I'm in that overlap. I feel like I'm in that like a very lonely part of the the political graph.

• 17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Chamath, how has your thinking, you know, now that we've had to process this event in our lifetime, that is probably the most consequential, you know, moment?

• 18:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I have. I have. I thought about this a lot. Jason, you ask a really important question. And I think everybody should probably try to take five minutes and actually write this down. Because I think, I'll tell you what I learned. I learned, I learned three things. The first thing I learned is intellectual, and it's exactly the same thing that David Zsak said. It is completely shocking to me how much disinformation there is. And also, how we are so prone to turning off our brains and not thinking for ourselves. So it's really shocking. And I think 2020 was the year that that was laid bare, that the institutions

• 18:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that feed you information can't really be trusted, that you can't really trust the interpretation of actual simple data, that nobody wants to think in first principles. So that's the first one. We have stopped thinking for ourselves. And that's a recipe for disaster. And so that's an intellectual thing that I've realized. And I don't want to do it. And so I'll think for myself, and I'll take the consequences. The second was economic, which is, wow, we have really over rotated to this crazy form of globalism that is going to get undone over the next 30 years. And that's going to have a lot of implications. And it can be done in a way that can rejuvenate the United States, which I think can fix a lot of the stuff that was created. And we should talk about that later today. And then

• 19:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the third is physiological, which is if you didn't know before, I'm going to tell you now. And it's this three letter word that we make into a four letter word in America, which is the letters F A T. We have a fat epidemic in the United States. Almost 80% of every single person that was hospitalized because of COVID was clinically obese.

• 19:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you can't say it.

• 19:57Jason Calacanis?

  And you're not allowed to say it.

• 19:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you say that somebody is fat, or if you say that somebody is obese, it's all of a sudden like, you know, you're going to get virtue signal canceled. And instead, what we're doing is we're leaving an entire generation of people, completely abandoning them, because we're not confronting the problem that by a combination of food and a lack of movement, we are setting them up to either die acutely of something like COVID, or chronically by heart disease and diabetes. And that it was like, it is now so obvious. And by the way, that's the other thing where these healthy, fit people were running around double vaxing and/or double masking in Central Park, and they don't even know the basic data. Like, even if you thought you were going to

• 20:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  go to the hospital, the 80% of all of those millions and millions of hospitalizations were from people that were obese. They had physiologically completely taken their body to a place that it wasn't able to fight.

• 20:55Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So those are my three takeaways.

• 20:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:58Jason Calacanis?

  Intellectual, economic, and physiological.

• 21:00David Sacks?

  Can I just insert one thing on that is because I agree with with everything Chamath just said is this, this idea of laying bare, that laying bare the, the sort of corruption of these like institutions that are supposed to be coming with good policies and educating us. And it turns out they, you know, keep giving us this foolish guidance. But there's also another institution, I think that was laid bare, which are these education unions, right? We had school closures for a year. The, the learning loss and the isolation that kids are have experienced, we don't even know what the results of this are going to be. This could be a generational consequence. And what we see from the education unions, they didn't want to go back to school. They fought it. You know, we had the whole Oakley School Board resign because they just said, well, they want us to go back to work to be

• 21:44David Sacks?

  babysitters for their kids so we could smoke pot. These are people who don't care about the kids. And after this year, I don't know how anyone can be against school choice or charter schools, or giving parents more involvement in their kids' educations.

• 21:59Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent. Friedberg, coming out of the pandemic and looking at your own psychology and your own life, what have you learned? And what do you take forward in terms of lessons and how you're going to approach post pandemic life?

• 22:15David Friedberg?

  I'll kind of flip it a little bit.

• 22:18David Friedberg?

  One of the first experiences I had with how broadly people could be influenced in a way that doesn't have grounding or rooting in facts and reality is when I sold my company to Monsanto in 2013. And J Cal, I think you came with me on one of these trips that I took.

• 22:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I visited Monsanto with you. It was very educational.

• 22:37David Friedberg?

  And, you know, there was an incredible bias by my team and by me personally, prior to even engaging in conversations with Monsanto, against that company because they were deemed to be evil. And as I spent a lot of time personally, kind of digging into the facts and the history of the business and kind of how we got here, it was surprising to me like how much of the bias against Monsanto was not rooted in fact and was in fact, you know, a series of claims that then became truth and reality because of the perception. And it just became, things got stuck that way. GMOs are bad. GMOs are evil. But the science of how they work, what they do, why they're useful, was never contemplated, never became part of the dialogue. It was just this assumed fact that this is an evil company, that this stuff is bad.

• 23:22David Friedberg?

  And, you know, this is a long, long topic. We could talk about this, I'm sure, for an entire hour and a half about the science and technology behind GMOs and how we make food and all that sort of stuff. And I'd be happy to do that another time. But like, for me, I was just so surprised when I engaged with thoughtful friends of mine, who were scientists even, and they had this bias. And then when you engage them in a dialogue about like, why, where does that come from, what's the rooting, it just wasn't there. And I got, and I mentioned this to you guys, when I was an executive at the management team at Monsanto, we had a WHO ruling where a guy got himself elected to the IARC. The, um, this is the Cancer Research Group within WHO. He was this liberal guy who was very anti-technology, who got himself elected to the IARC board

• 24:06David Friedberg?

  and got a ruling made that Roundup is a possible carcinogen. And that ruling led to a $10 billion lawsuit that Monsanto, or now Bayer, is settling, which wasn't rooted in the science or the facts, that the other scientists on the committee had kind of previously kind of previewed and gone through and said, this isn't cancerous. And it's incredible the implications it's had. And so I've always, you know, for several years now, I've had this kind of belief that like people can be led to believe things that aren't necessarily rooted in objective truth, or in fact, or have empirical evidence to behind them. And this is, this, this goes back to the origins of religion and monarchies and like, you know, these myths and these, these, these tales we tell ourselves, where we all end up believing something and there's

• 24:49David Friedberg?

  some influencing factor that that drives that. I think this has just been an incredible manifestation of that. The misinformation on both sides, from the beginning to the end of the pandemic. And it's just been extraordinary to watch. I don't think you change it. I think social networks amplify it. You know, I think that the, the rate at which information or misinformation flows back and forth is making it easier and quicker to kind of adopt this, you know, systemic inaccurate belief system that people might adopt. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's a big question mark for me. I, I don't know, you know, how we as a people kind of move forward with like objective fact-based decision-making and, and belief systems. And I don't know if we ever will. But, um,

• 25:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah.

• 25:29David Friedberg?

  It's just how humans are wired, maybe, you know?

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  I've been giving it a lot of thought. I, I really like all of your answers because mine is very similar. Number one, I, I feel like I was always an independent, critical thinker in my life. And that I think I kind of started to pick sides because of Trump, that like I just found him so offensive. And I realized I have to go back to being just an independent, critical thinker. I affiliate with no party. I assume all news stories are fake news. I assume all data is being manipulated. I assume everybody's got an agenda. I believe everybody's virtue signaling now. And I'm making the decisions for myself. And I, in the, one of the things dovetails exactly with you said, Chamath, which is, this was a disease of, A, of, you know, old people and fat people, obese people,

• 26:13Jason Calacanis?

  of which I have been one for far too long. And this is my commitment is just, I, I gotta take my health 100% seriously now that I'm 50 years old. I got a trainer, I got a masseuse, I'm working out, I'm doing weights, I'm doing everything. I changed my diet, I'm taking supplements, the, the stuff we talked about here. I went right to my doctor after that episode we did, Chamath. I'm getting that body scan for four fucking grand, or whatever it costs. And I'm just doing it all.

• 26:37David Friedberg?

  Are you saying a masseuse is gonna help you lose weight?

• 26:40Jason Calacanis?

  No, but I've had a, I've had shoulders- Maybe the [bleep], maybe the [bleep]. No, no.

• 26:47Jason Calacanis?

  No, I just realized I don't stretch. I don't stretch and my shoulders were getting very tight and being on the computer and everything. So I'm just

• 26:52David Sacks?

  What a man of the people. What a man of the people.

• 26:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look at you. Which house are you in?

• 26:58Speaker 04

  I got a personal trader. I got a masseuse.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  Sex every week. I gotta figure. No, I got a personal.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  I got a $4,000 money.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'm spending my money on making myself out. The third thing, and this is heartfelt and sincere, is that friendship and our loved ones are really with along with health is so important. And I am cherishing every moment, every experience with every friend, knowing that the world can shut down and whatever, and we have to take advantage of every moment. And that for me is the takeaways.

• 27:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The, just to build on something, I'm really proud of what you're trying to do, Jason, for your health. When I, I remember I, you know, you know how you all have these high grade school pictures?

• 27:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 27:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? Like you go to like picture day or whatever?

• 27:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And there was this crazy contrast that I had in my grade school pictures. There was like two of them when I was in Sri Lanka. So I was like, you know, five and six. And then great, you know, then I was seven or eight. And then all of a sudden this crazy, hey, what's up, Antonio?

• 28:03Jason Calacanis?

  Antonio, I'm here. Miami, Miami, mucho caliente.

• 28:10David Sacks?

  Does Antonio realize he's on an international podcast?

• 28:13Jason Calacanis?

  You're on a podcast that goes out to 500,000 people.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's going international.

• 28:18Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody even knows who he is. Don't worry. He's like one of the most powerful guys in our industry.

• 28:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What I was gonna say is like, by like, I think when I was like nine or 10, I had gotten really fat.

• 28:32Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 28:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because, because when we moved to Canada, it was a very different food supply. And then economically, we were in a different place. We ate what we could afford and I put on a lot of weight. And that weight carried with me until college and then after college. And that's when I said, I gotta get in shape. Exactly for the same reason, Jason, because like my dad was getting dialyzed. He was constantly, you know, dealing with these health issues. And I said, I don't deal with this shit. But that's a rare thing that happens. If you think about the number of people that are put in this predicament of like, not even, forget, you're able to get a trainer or whatever, but there are a ton of people that can only eat what they can afford.

• 29:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? And the reality is, it is just meaningfully cheaper to eat at McDonald's than it is to go to Whole Foods and be able to buy organic food. And so it's just not even on the agenda for people. So this is what I mean by, we have to be able to say that it's not that people are fat because they choose to be, that there are these systemic imbalances that make people sick. You know what I mean?

• 29:31Jason Calacanis?

  Education and health, these are the things that we need to work on in America. Like Sax, you said it, was it last week Sax, you said, you know, I think this is a great bargain that could happen in America with all this polarization. If even a Republican conservative like Sax can say, everybody should get a great education and everybody should be healthy. Right? Like, and Sax isn't a socialist, but this is important. And it's so easy to just get a Happy Meal than to eat a salad, you know, or whatever.

• 30:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was in Washington DC this week, and I met with this organization, which anybody who is interested in this should check out called Third Way. And what Third Way is, is a centrist organization, right? So they largely work with Dems to try to pull them here. And I think the Republican version is called the Niskanen, I guess, Center. But the idea is I sat with these guys and I was like, just teach me something. And they taught me the most incredible thing. You guys know who Pew is? Pew goes out and does all these

• 30:35Jason Calacanis?

  The Pew Research Center. They've been doing it for decades. They're the most respected, I think, in surveys.

• 30:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pew does this incredible thing where they go to like, a whole bunch of countries in the world. And they ask this basically very simple question. I'm going to ask you guys what you think the answer is. On a zero to 10 scale, where 10 is important.

• 30:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think Americans think to the following question? How important is hard work to get ahead in life? Meaning, right, so it's a proxy for how Americans think about hard work. How important is hard work to get ahead in life? Friedberg, what percentage of Americans do you think that say that hard work is important to get ahead in life? And I'll give you a couple of data points.

• 31:21David Friedberg?

  I would, I don't know, eighty percent? Yeah.

• 31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the setup is Indonesia, twenty-eight percent. India, thirty-eight percent. Germany, fifty percent. Go ahead, what do you think the answer is?

• 31:32David Sacks?

  Well, it should be a hundred percent, but what do I think it is in the US? I'm hoping it's about sixty.

• 31:40Jason Calacanis?

  I agree with you, Sax. A hundred percent is the right answer. And I believe Americans don't believe it. I'm gonna put Americans at thirty-five percent.

• 31:49David Friedberg?

  Because we've seen so many people get lucky and get rich in the United States.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Or just people think the system's rigged, or the victim culture where people tell everybody, don't bother trying because it's rigged. And you just, it's.

• 32:00David Friedberg?

  I think the argument, sorry, Chamath, I'll let you give us the answer in a second. But I think the argument is that like entrepreneurism fuels these moments of extraordinary success, but the perception creates the opposite effect, which is someone can get rich very quickly and therefore there's this luck factor or this unfairness factor that is, you know, that is inherent in the system, right? And so while it does enable hard work to drive, you know, tremendous outcomes, the perception is that, holy crap, in three years, you know, Kylie Jenner went on Instagram and became a billionaire or whatever, right? And people get really kind of blown away by that. And I think it's discouraging and.

• 32:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or one person's success makes it such that other people can't, that it's zero sum, when in fact a company.

• 32:43Jason Calacanis?

  What's your, what's your number for America?

• 32:45David Friedberg?

  Eighty percent.

• 32:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The number is 73% and we are the third highest ranking country in the survey.

• 32:52Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, that's great.

• 32:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So it's amazing. Now, if you, if you ask then Americans, who better represents the interests of hardworking people, among Republicans and Democrats, the overwhelming answer is now Republicans, which is really interesting. Democrats, even in exit polling, basically voted for Biden because they just really found Trump distasteful. And a lot of the people that, you know, basically said, you know, he's an ass, and so they voted him out. But it was not because they believed that Democrats could do the job of actually reinforcing the values of hard work. And this goes back to...

• 33:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah, they don't want handouts. People don't want handouts.

• 33:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  People don't want handouts. People, people, people want a fair shot. They want an even starting line. They don't want an even finishing line.

• 33:36David Friedberg?

  Yeah, they don't, they don't, no one wants paternalism. And everyone wants opportunity. You know, but you take what you're given when it's available to you. No one says no. You know, I spent a lot of time with farmers in the Midwest in the United States, very diehard conservative generally, right? And, and farmers benefit greatly from significant government, federal government support programs, primarily a crop insurance program and some commodity price support programs. But, but they are very anti-government. And there's this tremendous irony there, right? Because they don't want to handout. They, they want to kind of be left alone. They want to be able to run their business. They want, and I'm, and I'm generalizing, right? But I'm just speaking broadly to kind of the theme of things I hear when I, when I meet with farmers. But when the crop insurance program

• 34:20David Friedberg?

  shows up and direct support payments show up, you're like, okay, I'll take the check. You know, and so it's, it's hard to say no, but I think the motivation for everyone is universally the same, which is, right, I, I want to have the opportunity to be successful independently.

• 34:33Jason Calacanis?

  Are we creating policies that reinforce this? And are we creating the condition that makes people feel less like a victim, less looking for handouts, and less... I, I have a concern about these stimulus checks. I, I do think it was a smart thing to do to get us out of this. But do you guys wonder if this generation, which is not going back to work, we have a shortage of... Uber drivers, we have a shortage of bartenders, waiters, nobody was, a lot of people are just choosing not to go to work because they have their stimmys.

• 35:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  America is a place where you come to because you want to grind. You want to find your own little engine room. And you want to be in there and you want to put in the hours and the people that it attracts from around the world speak to that, you know, the way that you can explain. You know, why Indonesia and India are so far to the left on that same question is because it's an extremely homogeneous population with zero immigration.

• 35:28David Friedberg?

  No immigration. Yeah.

• 35:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think the reason why America is so far to the right is it itself selects not by, you know, some kind of gender, age, or religion, or color of skin.

• 35:39David Friedberg?

  By motivation.

• 35:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's motivation. And it's like, if you're motivated to crush, you come to the United States. I mean, we, we've all, we're all, what are we like? You know, one generation away, except Jason, you're two generation American?

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

  My Irish side is sixth generation.

• 35:52David Friedberg?

  We're all, we're all first generation, except for Jason, right? We all moved here to the United States as immigrants.

• 35:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As immigrants.

• 35:58David Friedberg?

  With motivated family. Yeah.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's why I'm the least successful of the group. Is that what you're saying?

• 36:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're the lazy complacent American, whereas we're the hungry immigrants.

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying, I'm trying. Hey, listen.

• 36:09David Friedberg?

  You're the Daniel Day Lewis character in Gangs of New York. You know, you hate the immigrants, you sit at the boats, you throw eggs at everyone.

• 36:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's interesting you bring that up. Do you know where my Irish poor bearers came from and where they immigrated to?

• 36:25David Friedberg?

  Ireland.

• 36:26Jason Calacanis?

  The five points.

• 36:28David Friedberg?

  Oh, the five points.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  We were in the five points. It's exactly accurate. Of course I was. It makes total sense.

• 36:34David Friedberg?

  You're not Daniel Day Lewis. You're the, the heavier, shorter guy, though. That was kind of the.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  Not for long. You know what? I dropped 10 on my quarantine 15 and I gave it to Sax.

• 36:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, you did.

• 36:43David Friedberg?

  You're looking good, Jay Cal. You look good. You look good in Miami. Miami suits you.

• 36:47David Sacks?

  In a weird way, I gotta give, I gotta give Jay Cal as much credit for where he came from as Chamath. Because I don't know, those parts of Brooklyn are maybe as tough as Sri Lanka.

• 37:00Jason Calacanis?

  Kids with guns, kids with guns. Yeah, you know, child warriors. You're gonna get jumped. Always roll with a posse.

• 37:06David Friedberg?

  By the way, you know, on immigration, I don't know if you guys saw this, you know, George W. Bush is a paints now, and he paints immigrants.

• 37:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 37:15David Friedberg?

  So I bought his book. I bought a signed copy of it. I should have brought it to the podcast today, but it's a great book. I highly recommend it.

• 37:20Jason Calacanis?

  Trigger warning.

• 37:21David Friedberg?

  No, but he actually has some writings in there that talks about the power of immigration and how immigration is so core to the success of the United States, just to our point. So this conversation made me think of the book that I just bought this week. Really cool book, by the way, George W. Bush, amazingly, great artist, really captures the personality of immigrants in his, in his work.

• 37:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the thing, the thing is, like, like, everybody wants to come here to work hard. Everybody that's here is willing to work hard, right? Whether you're first generation or not. And then the question is, can government create policies that allow us to do that and actually just create a safety net to catch us if we fall? Because that's what we also all want. So there are parts of Biden's bill that I think made a ton of sense, like, you know, making community college free. That's a really disruptive idea because it'll put a ton of pressure on for-profit colleges, right? To like, get their act together or not. That's a good idea. The child tax credit so that you can actually have subsidized, you know,

• 38:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  childcare for your kids. That's a good idea. But then where you kind of go astray is then when you start to figure out, you know, the levels of taxation, again, we talked about this last time, but, you know, I just think that that's where you can kind of demotivate people to not then put in the hours.

• 38:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is a good segue also into immigration through our southern border and this incredibly polarizing issue. And how the media is polarizing it, how the parties are polarizing it. Just to ask a question to see if we even understand the data, how many people do you think are illegal immigrants in the United States right now?

• 38:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Twenty million.

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Free Burksacks?

• 38:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'd say yes.

• 38:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess eighteen million. I'll take a slight under to Chamop, but about the right, that's about the right order of magnitude.

• 39:04David Sacks?

  The last number I heard was like twelve million, but that was a few years ago and so.

• 39:08Jason Calacanis?

  Bingo, it's twelve. Now, how many people are apprehended at the southern border a year since 2010 every year?

• 39:15David Friedberg?

  Half a million.

• 39:17Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody else want to take a guess? Fifty thousand. All right, it's 350,000. So, we literally are tearing the country apart.

• 39:25David Friedberg?

  And I know that because I watched the movie Sicario and I'm estimating based on the scene where they rounded everyone up at the border and took them away. So, that's my.

• 39:33Jason Calacanis?

  Terrifying film.

• 39:34David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  And awesome. Like.

• 39:36David Friedberg?

  Awesome. Incredible film.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  Just bring us Xanax because you might have a panic attack.

• 39:41David Friedberg?

  My favorite modern director, Denis Villeneuve, he's unbelievable, but.

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 39:46David Friedberg?

  We digress. Yes.

• 39:47Jason Calacanis?

  That scene when they're racing the cars into the border crossing, border checkpoint. What it is so intense. It's so intense.

• 39:54David Friedberg?

  So if you guys are into sci-fi, that guy directed The Arrival, which is one of my favorite films.

• 40:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's a fabulous movie.

• 40:01David Friedberg?

  Beautiful film. Yeah. Beautiful film.

• 40:02Jason Calacanis?

  So literally, the country's being torn apart. A country of 330 million. Over 3 million would be 1%, 0.1% coming into the border. And we just said, immigration is just all these amazing people coming here to who want to strive and who want great things. Why are we tearing the country up over this issue?

• 40:23David Friedberg?

  This is a tough topic.

• 40:25David Sacks?

  Well, I think, I think Jason, I think your, your point of view on immigration really depends on where you're sitting in the economy. So I think for all of us who are in Silicon Valley, we know that something like half of startups have an immigrant co-founder.

• 40:41David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 40:42David Sacks?

  So we've seen, you know, like PayPal, I think, you know, there were like three or four immigrants on the founding team, you know? Peter was born in Germany. Elon was born in South Africa. Max was born in Russia. You know, I was born in South Africa, and then you go down the list. Same thing with Google, you know, Sergey Brin came from Russia and just on and on it goes. So if you're sitting in Silicon Valley as a tech worker, you see that these immigrants bring tremendous dynamism to the economy. However, if you're in a low wage job, maybe low skill service, then the, you know, a lot of this immigration is competition and it creates wage pressure for you. So this is why historically the unions have not been in favor of, you know, of immigrants.

• 41:26David Sacks?

  You have, you know, a lot of service workers in the minority communities. You know, there's a lot of animosity towards immigrants because of that. Fundamentally, it creates job competition and wage competition. And I do think, well, so, so, so, look, it's easy for us to sit here in Silicon Valley, where we sit in the economy and say, oh, well, let's just have unlimited immigration. It doesn't matter. Well, yeah, it doesn't matter to us. But if you're in the low skill part of the economy, it does matter a lot to let in a flood of immigrants who are in that low skill category. And by the way, we're worried about these jobs getting automated away as well. So, you know, I think you have to have a sensible policy. I mean, yes, to immigration, but I think you have to think about

• 42:09David Sacks?

  how much sort of low skill immigration can we assimilate and absorb?

• 42:13Jason Calacanis?

  Right, but are a lot of those people who are coming in also then taking lower wages because they're off the books and they're illegal? Whereas if we had a more reasonable policy of letting whatever percentage in, like we could just pick a number. And if that actually worked and they were getting paid on the books, then it would remove some of that downside pressure. So you're not paying somebody under the books to be a delivery person or a dishwasher, whatever the entry level job is. They have to get paid that minimum wage.

• 42:40David Friedberg?

  Jason, I think this speaks to the broader kind of set of political topics, which relates to the enablement of competition. And, and it speaks to some of the trade policy points that I think the last administration made, which is to limit trade and to limit access to global markets, to, to provide services and products to the United States and to tax them. Because the lower cost labor ultimately outcompetes with higher cost labor in the United States. And so, you know, you get lower cost goods, but the balance is, is it worth having lower cost goods and services where you could actually see too much of a decline in the employability and the wages of people that are currently producing those, those goods and services in the United States? And that's the tricky balance, right?

• 43:23David Friedberg?

  There's no blue or red right way to do this. We want to enable competition. We want to enable progress. We want to enable lower cost of production, lower cost goods and services. But we also don't want to have the economic impact and the social impact of people being underemployed and unemployed. And balancing those two, one of the tricky pieces of that balancing puzzle is immigration. Another one is trade. Another one is regulation, et cetera, et cetera, right? So a lot of these things kind of drive that, that tricky balance.

• 43:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I really bounce around on this. I, of all of the four of us, I was the only one that immigrated myself. So I didn't, you know, it's not that my parents did it. Oh, you did. Yeah, yeah, okay. I did it myself. I drove to the border. I got a TN visa stamp, you know, I crossed the border into Buffalo. I stood in line. I got my own social security number. Um, and I started a life in America in, in the year 2000. How old were you? Twenty-two, I guess, or twenty-three. You had a job lined up already? I had a job. I had a job offer. I had my offer letter. I did the whole thing. Then I transferred onto an H1B visa. I had to go through all of that. Then I had to,

• 44:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you know, wait in line. I got delayed. I had to refile. So as a person that went through the immigration system and finally got their green card in 2007 or eight, and then my, my citizenship in 2011 or 2012, I bounce around on how I feel because I remember the insecurity I felt in not wanting to lose my visa and have to leave and go back to Canada. Um, and so if somebody was in that situation, I could see why, you know, they would get very agitated if they saw a lot of immigration being lumped in into one broad brush, right? And because if you, if you look at it, actually, there's a, there's a really interesting conundrum because it's not like immigration is a thing where all immigrants are pro-immigration. Right? That's right.

• 45:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's actually not that at all. It tends to be sort of cultural elites are pro-immigration because it's a, it's a synthetic way of showing openness and open-mindedness. Um, but then, you know, in, inside, no, right? I mean, it's true. It's because they don't, they don't get affected by it. It doesn't get affected by it. Right, exactly. If anything, it makes it easier for them to maybe find people to hire. Well, as someone that lived through it, what I would say is it, it, you know, if I was still waiting for my green card and waiting in line and having the idea that there was some amnesty program would have made me feel very insecure. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to it. But in that moment, I would have felt insecure. So the, the broad solution to immigration is you have to separate the two problems and say,

• 45:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  this part of the problem can be solved almost like a professional sports team, which is to say, we have the ability to draft every year. The smartest and most interesting, capable people that want to come here and work hard. That will probably, you know, it be a rising tide. Then there are these two other buckets. Bucket in the middle is just compassionate openness. You know, family members and other people, refugees, you know, because I was emigrated into Canada. Not in the first bucket, because we didn't have much to contribute economically. But in the second bucket, which is for social justice and refugees. And then there is a third bucket, which is there are people that are not going to be in a position to wait in line. They are going to come to the border and we have to have a mechanism of saying, okay.

• 46:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You shouldn't have done it, but you did. And now here's a pathway where you can earn the right to prove that you should be here. And I think that there, there, there is a, but we can't have that nuance because nobody wants to hear it. You want to lump it into one. You know, this is where, for example, like last year when Trump, you know, decapitated the H1B program, I thought this is just so dumb.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no nuance.

• 46:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's, it's basically telling, you know, like, uh, it's forcing a star athlete, you know, to go and play a different sport. Why would you do that? You know, and it's so artificial. It doesn't make any sense.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  But it's such a reasonable, there's such a reasonable discussion to had here, to be had here because other countries have solved this exact thing with the point-based system. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others have all worked on a system like this. Which is you get points for each of the qualities that you bring and then you put some numbers on it. But there is no difference.

• 47:30David Sacks?

  Those countries are much, much harder to get into than the United States. Good luck getting into New Zealand. You better buy a property or something like that.

• 47:37Jason Calacanis?

  It might be that the point-based system is letting in the people that make the society stronger.

• 47:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Canada has a really progressive view on this. I mean, they have a point-based system, but they do a lot. They're really compassionate about. You know, they'll take in a lot more refugees than, than most other countries. And I think that that, they've never lost that spirit. And I think that the point is, I think I agree with Jason. It's possible. It's logical. The problem is it's too logical and, you know.

• 48:03Jason Calacanis?

  Let's polarize it. It's like the math.

• 48:05David Sacks?

  I think Freiburg made an interesting connection to the issue of free trade. So, you know, look, you know, I majored in economics in college, you know, I, I was like a believer in free trade, like sort of completely ardent free trade. Because why? It creates economic efficiency. And so, you know,

• 48:21Jason Calacanis?

  Logical.

• 48:22David Sacks?

  It's logical. And if people lose their jobs, their factory closes because

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 48:27David Sacks?

  We're not as good, then, yes, you let the chips fall where they may. I think what we've learned over the last 20 or 30 years is that we have to consider the distributional consequences of a policy like free trade, because it's about, well, who benefits and who loses? And yes, American consumers have benefited from the flow of cheap goods from China and other places, but we've seen our manufacturing

• 48:49Jason Calacanis?

  American producers have lost.

• 48:51David Sacks?

  Have lost. Yeah. And so throughout the, the Midwest and the Rust Belt, you've got these empty factories. They just line up like, like tombstones up in, you know, places like Detroit. And, and you've got the, you've got these towns that used to be factory towns are now just kind of empty and the people are like hooked on fentanyl. And it's a social disaster. And so I think, you know, what I've kind of learned about this is you have to take into account the consequences of these policies and it can't just be about

• 49:17Jason Calacanis?

  You've evolved your position.

• 49:18David Sacks?

  I have. It can't just be about a Darwinian economic efficiency anymore. You have to think about who, who wins and who loses.

• 49:26David Friedberg?

  And by the way, what's ironic?

• 49:28Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody's got, everybody's got feedback on this one.

• 49:31David Friedberg?

  A lot of the current globalization policy that the United States embraced over the last two or three decades. Um, I think Sacks, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of this originated during the Clinton era. Uh, which was, uh, you know, a Democratic president. And then ironically, the free trade Republicans are the ones who have flipped over the last couple of years to realize the economic consequence on the production side of the United States is so severe that we need to now limit free trade. And if you remember Paul Ryan, you know, who was the House Speaker a few years ago, had this, um, six-point plan for the Republicans going into the primaries. And one of the key points was to, you know, enable the trans-Pacific partnership. They were trying to continue to push free trade. And I think that the policy shift is ironic because it's always been kind of a red issue, then it became a blue issue, then it became a red issue.

• 50:15David Friedberg?

  And I think, you know, like everything, we are evolving our point of view as we experience and learn more things and get more data. And perhaps the rate of progress isn't the thing to optimize for, but the rate of progress balanced against the equality of progress seems to be where the United States is at right now.

• 50:33David Sacks?

  To respond to what what Friedberg said about about how this happened. So there's an old saying in Washington that the best, sorry, that the worst ideas are bipartisan. And the idea of bringing China into the World Trade Organization and giving them sort of MFN trading status, that happened under Clinton, but it was absolutely a bipartisan decision. And part of the reason why our our politics are so royal today.

• 50:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, no, it was proposed, it was proposed Clinton, it was passed then Bush.

• 50:59David Sacks?

  Right, okay, but they both supported it. It was a bipartisan sort of disaster. And I think one of the reasons why our politics are so royal today, you've you've got this populism on the right and you've got a populism on the left and that where they both agree is in restraining, is having a more protectionist trade policy.

• 51:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's right. So so I think I think a little bit of history here is important. I think you got most of it right, but if you go even one step back, under Clinton, there was nothing that they actually did, but it was something that Deng Xiaoping did, which was that, you know, for a large time, I think until the mid 90s, 94, the renminbi was firmly pegged to the US dollar. And, you know, it was like, you know, 5.8 renminbi to the US dollar. And all of a sudden, they basically said, well, look, we have this hapless economy. We have to do something about it. And we have this enormous bulge of young people. And so they did this brilliant thing. And China said, you know, we're going to basically devalue our currency and they're

• 51:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  going to basically make it essentially float. And instantly you rerated the currency by 40%. And over time, it rerated by almost 60%. And what it did was all of a sudden it unleashed, as you said, all of these subsidies into the United States. Why? Because now Chinese goods became 30% cheaper. Right? And then the Thai goods became 30% cheaper, Indonesian goods became 80% cheaper, right? Vietnamese goods became 50% cheaper. That's that's that entire contagion in Eastern Asia that we went through in the late 90s. So it's like China deep values their currency. All of a sudden, you have all these young people in China who can make things for 30% cheaper.

• 52:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're able to flood the American market with goods. We were like, wow, this is incredible. My jeans that cost $10 now cost $7. I'm just using it as a representative example. I'm just gonna buy more jeans. And so you're consuming, consuming, consuming. All of a sudden, Bush comes along and says, well, you know, this seems to be working out well. I want to go to war with Iraq. I need to basically get China to vote yes in the Security Council. Okay, what's it gonna take? China's like, admit me to the WTO, because even during all of this, they were still not part of the WTO. And to David's point, and that's when the nuclear bomb went off in 2004, you know? The minute that they were involved and they could actually have, you know, bilateral trade relationships and normalized trade relationships.

• 53:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Then all of a sudden, the next wave happens because instead of just buying cheap Chinese jeans, every American company was like, wait a minute, I can drive up earnings by just exporting this factory to China writ large. And the Chinese had all this capital that they had built up, all these US dollars, to then support it and subsidize it.

• 53:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's a prisoner's dilemma, right, Chamath? Because if you don't do it as an American company and you don't move your manufacturing there and everybody else does, you're dead.

• 53:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Your shareholders, your shareholders will decapitate your stock price, you know, as a CEO, you get fired. And so, so then, that's, that's when David, that what you said happened. That's when you hollow out. From 2014 to 2016, you hollow out the middle class, you hollowed out the inside, the rust belt. And then basically, you de-industrialize the West. You saw the rise of populism, you saw the rise of opioids as essentially a coping mechanism for people's inability to even work hard, right?

• 54:22Jason Calacanis?

  To have purpose.

• 54:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To the first thing.

• 54:23Jason Calacanis?

  To have purpose, Chamath.

• 54:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Americans are wired to work hard. And so they need to self-medicate. If you can't let them work hard.

• 54:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They turn to fentanyl and opioids to do it. And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump gets elected in 2016. So what have we?

• 54:36Jason Calacanis?

  A man without hope is a man without fear. You know, you give people no job and no purpose in the morning. What happens?

• 54:41David Sacks?

  And the Democratic Party's turned to socialism. I think that's like part of it as well.

• 54:45Jason Calacanis?

  So this is really interesting because we're talking About second, the I think everybody who was doing this was considering the second order problems and what we're experiencing now is the third order problem, which is things that people couldn't predict, like we now have a communist country that is not changing its human rights record and is not changing its behavior and might even be getting worse. And we've enabled them.

• 55:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  China, but Jason, China, China will actually self-regulate. I actually think now the China issue is a little overblown, the way we take it, meaning I think China's central planners are frankly just much, much smarter than ours, right? They just are.

• 55:25David Friedberg?

  Well, they have central planning.

• 55:27Jason Calacanis?

  And they have better tools.

• 55:28David Friedberg?

  They don't, they don't.

• 55:29Jason Calacanis?

  Immunit domain communism.

• 55:30David Friedberg?

  A limbic system that's just reactionary to the current.

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  Or any legal system. They have no legal system.

• 55:36David Sacks?

  That should scare us that there are more effective planners than than our politicians.

• 55:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But here's the thing, here's the thing that smart policy can't outrun, though. It cannot outrun demographics and the most important takeaway that I learned over the last few weeks when I was studying this problem, because I've been thinking a lot just currently, like, okay, inflation, what's the 10-year view? What's just going to happen? Like, what's my macro view of the world? And I saw the most interesting stat, which is the median age in China and the median age in South Asia is greater now than the median age in America. So it's in the mid 40s versus the mid 30s. And that's an enormously important thing, because now you have an aging population in China, you've had this one child policy that's really has worked against them for

• 56:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a very long time. So they have, they have an under-representation of these young people. And so you're flexing now to managing a demographic shift where folks are older, they're not going to work in a factory, they're not making goods the same way they used to, economic growth is tapering. And so that whole China situation, in fact, demographically, is going to solve itself. But the implications for America are not good, meaning I think inflation goes up, commodity prices go up, prices of everything go up. But it allows us to actually re-establish and rejuvenate the the industrialized rust belt of America. We just have to spend the money. And this is where I think like, when you look at Biden's plan, this is where I wonder, like, didn't anybody do this

• 57:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  simple macroeconomic, you know, trace route to actually come up with this? Because it's pretty obvious what to do. And then you wonder.

• 57:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, have have literally a trillion dollars allocated to reestablishing entire supply chains across critical industries that we want to own.

• 57:25Jason Calacanis?

  Which I think Friedberg, you brought up, what, 15 episodes ago, that this is an incredible opportunity for us to bring manufacturing here and bring the next generation.

• 57:33David Friedberg?

  And reinvent manufacturing. I still think biomanufacturing represents this this complete great domain where the United States could build and lead. You know, I'll just give you some statistics. Globally, there's about 25 million liters of fermentation capacity or biomanufacturing capacity. Of that, about 20 million is used to make beer and wine and pharmaceutical drugs today in an enclosed system. 5 million is available for rent, and of that 4 million is already rented out. So there's only a million liters of capacity really available for rent. There's 100 synthetic biology companies that are looking to produce fermentation-based products, from materials for clothing, to food, to animal protein, to new drugs, and they can't get the capacity to make this stuff. And every one of them

• 58:18David Friedberg?

  is scrambling around Silicon Valley, looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding to go build friggin' manufacturing capacity for biomanufacturing. This is where the United States can lead, because we can make every material, every drug, and every consumable that the entire world would use using biomanufacturing. And just to be clear, biomanufacturing-

• 58:36Jason Calacanis?

  Let's roll. Let's effing go.

• 58:37David Friedberg?

  So you edit the DNA of an organism, and it can be programmed to make a molecule for you. And so we can use large fermenter tanks to make this stuff. I did the math recently, and you would need about 10 to 50 billion liters of capacity to make all the animal protein for the entire world. And using 45,000-liter tanks, which are three meters wide each, it would take about 30 to 40 square miles of fermentation tanks to make all the protein for the whole world. We could build that in the United States for about 3 to 4-

• 59:08Jason Calacanis?

  In Nebraska.

• 59:09David Friedberg?

  For about 3 to 400 billion dollars. And we could build it in a couple of years. I mean, that is like a moonshot. You could also make materials for clothing, you could make-

• 59:16Jason Calacanis?

  Detroit.

• 59:17David Friedberg?

  You could make bioplastics.

• 59:18Jason Calacanis?

  Put it there.

• 59:19David Friedberg?

  And and this is like this, because today, the science exists, it's like, go back to like the internet era. We now have this ability to program organisms to make stuff for us. This did not exist 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Today is the moment it exists. So if we don't capitalize on this huge budget to build infrastructure, to go after this massive opportunity to make everything that the world consumes, we're going to miss out and free markets will compete us away. This is the one time that big check can be written and that big check can enable this new industry. And instead of making cars and making, you know, all the stuff that maybe we don't need to be making anymore.

• 59:51David Sacks?

  You really think that all this trillions of infrastructure spending is going to what you just described?

• 59:56David Friedberg?

  That's my point. It's not. That's my point. And I think that, but that's what I mean is we're missing this opportunity.

• 1:00:02David Sacks?

  We're rebranding the same old social programs as infrastructure because the politicians know that's one of the last categories of spending that's still popular. I mean, it's not going to go to the right things.

• 1:00:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It does. It does. Those labels, those labels pull well. When you say jobs, like for example, one of the things I learned, which is insane, is that for whatever reason, people think fixing climate change is a net negative because it will restrict one's way of life and destroy jobs. Whereas in fact, it's the exact opposite.

• 1:00:31David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:00:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It should actually allow you to do more, live healthier, and there should be an entire renaissance of industries and jobs. And so it goes back to the disinformation just makes a rational conversation almost impossible.

• 1:00:44David Sacks?

  Speaking of politics, can we just shift to Caitlyn Jenner real quick before we wrap because we're almost out of time?

• 1:00:48Jason Calacanis?

  Caitlyn Jenner is officially running for governor and I guess people are making light of it, but Sax, you actually wrote a considered post on it. So unpack it for us.

• 1:00:59David Sacks?

  Yeah, I was defending Caitlyn Jenner. I mean, look, I mean, what Caitlyn Jenner came out and said is that Gavin Newsom's DAs, Chesa Boudin and George Gaskin in LA are presiding, I'm putting words in her mouth, presiding over a crime wave. And she was calling him out on that. And what you then immediately saw was all of Gavin's people come out and criticize her for being stupid because supposedly she didn't know that DAs were locally elected. Well, I think a couple of points there. First of all, why hasn't Gavin Newsom come out and distanced himself from Chesa Boudin and George Gaskin and what they're doing in those cities? He hasn't done that. Because he's been cozying up to their side, the the sort of progressive, extreme radical

• 1:01:43David Sacks?

  decarcerations wing of the party. And the reason we know that is because he he recently had a job to fill, the Attorney General spot in California. He could have chosen anybody for that job, and he chose an East Bay Assemblyman named Rob Bonta for it, who is an ally of Chesa Boudin and Gascon and this progressive DA alliance. And so, yeah, it's true that Newsom didn't appoint these DAs, but he's appointing their allies to posts that are even more important, the, you know, the Attorney General of all of California. And so I think it was a very legitimate issue for Caitlyn Jenner to come out and call out Gavin Newsom on. And I think she's on to something

• 1:02:27David Sacks?

  here, which is, there's a lot of issues in California. There's a lot of things that are wrong, from homelessness to unemployment and these crazy COVID restrictions. But the number one issue, I think, has to be crime. We are seeing an explosion of crime in our seat, in our streets. We all know there are large parts of LA and San Francisco that we do not feel comfortable walking around in anymore.

• 1:02:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God, you'd be crazy to walk down the street with a child.

• 1:02:51David Sacks?

  The livable area where you can, where you feel safe living or opening a business or walking around has drastically shrunk in the last few years. And if you do not feel safe in your city, nothing else politically matters. The government's first responsibility is to protect its people. And I think if Caitlyn Jenner can keep speaking out on issues like this, I think maybe she has a shot.

• 1:03:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think that she's got a credible shot if she has a reasonably economic policy behind it. And, you know, this, the school voucher thing on education, those are the things that'll carry California voters, because I do think, and by the way, here's where I think we should take some credit. The best thing about this podcast, other than the fact that we used ourselves to keep us sane, it's made it fashionable, fashionable, to think independently again. And eventually, what becomes fashionable becomes de rigueur. And what that means is, I think, that there will be more and more people that will think for themselves.

• 1:03:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if she has reasonable policies and a platform that's understandable, she can win. And that's an incredible testament, I think, to people making their own decisions.

• 1:04:07Jason Calacanis?

  And being able to have a reasonable conversation with people with different opinions, I think, is the other takeaway from the podcast, that people always give me that feedback when they see me on the street or whatever and talk to me about it. And as a point, going to Austin, they are now dealing with tent city problems like LA and the same problems that they're dealing with, we're dealing with in San Francisco. So I went for a walk around the lake a couple of times. It was great.

• 1:04:32Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, there were a lot of tents. And they're literally taking the most beautiful lake in the entire beautiful part of the city, and it's becoming Camp Central. They're basically ruining it for the actual citizens who are not homeless. Austin lifted the tent ban they had in Texas. Now, Texas is voting now. The entire conversation when I was in Austin, all conversations did not go to NFTs, crypto, the border, or anything. It went to tent city. And people in Austin, who are very liberal, were saying, "I'm voting to ban tent city. I'm voting against, you know, this insanity because we don't want to become San Francisco. We don't want to become LA." So, and these are liberal people.

• 1:05:17Jason Calacanis?

  And the concept that a city would allow people to camp in the center of the city and ruin it for everybody else is insane.

• 1:05:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dude, Portland's version of Amsterdam is still up and running. It's been a year.

• 1:05:30Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if people want to camp, we have campgrounds for that. Send the campers to the campgrounds.

• 1:05:35David Sacks?

  Can I tell you the secret origin story of Miami and why Miami is now a tech hub? It's because of this issue. It's because a tech entrepreneur got punched in the face by a homeless person in San Francisco. I don't know if he'd want me to tell the story. I'll find out afterwards and you can beep out his name. But basically, [bleep], who is a prolific tech founder, he's got [bleep].

• 1:05:57David Sacks?

  I don't know if you'd want me to tell the story, but he was out just Would you do two beeps? It's fine. We'll do two beeps. Anyway, he was out walking around San Francisco and a crazy homeless person just walked up and punched him in the face for no reason. And this is something this homeless person's done many times. The cops were there, just kind of shrugged, didn't want to prosecute it, didn't want to write up a ticket. He's like, no, I really want to press charges. So the cops are like, okay, fine. So then, you know, he presses charges, nothing happens. The DA office basically keeps, you know, giving him the runaround until he basically says, fine, forget it. He drops charges, he just moves, he just votes with his feet. So he moves to Miami. He was the first one from that sort of, um, like the sort of the core, like Silicon Valley plugged in ecosystem

• 1:06:42David Sacks?

  to move out to Miami. He says he did the seed round. Then he talked to Keith Raboy. And he's the one who convinced Keith Raboy to move to Miami. So Keith Raboy then did this. Series A. He did the series A. So was the seed investor of Miami and he got Raboy to do the series A. And then Raboy, you know, he's very, you know, prominent and loud on social media. He's been evangelizing the whole thing. And then he got Delian and Founder's Fund and their whole noise machine to move, you know, their circus to Miami. And now look at it, look at it.

• 1:07:14David Sacks?

  But it's, it's this. I'm here. Now it took, they've got a mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, who actually said, we want tech here, right? You know, and they don't, they don't have a homeless problem. The city has a lot of cops, it's well managed. So look, he's got the right environment and, and most of all, the city of Miami is welcoming to the tech ecosystem where San Francisco, the politicians seem to, can't wait to get rid of it. But it's all comes back to this homeless issue. I think if, if hadn't gotten punched in the face by the homeless person, I think this all would have played out very differently. That's very, very true.

• 1:07:47Jason Calacanis?

  Let's wrap on a quick fang. I don't, you must have seen every single major tech company had a massive blowout quarter. And when I say massive, I mean unbelievable.

• 1:08:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The five, the five tech companies now collectively this year will make more than 1.2 trillion dollars, trillion with a T of revenue. If those five companies were a country, it would be the 14th largest country in the world.

• 1:08:17Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. We're not talking market cap here, folks. We're talking cash in the bank account.

• 1:08:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just revenue, no, no, just revenue.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  Revenue, right. We're not talking profits.

• 1:08:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which is, which I, which I think is a good proxy for GDP. And so the point is, you know, if these companies were countries collectively, Fang would be a top 15 country. And, and if you, and so I guess really what we've learned is what we've known, which is, okay, these are monopolies, they have pricing power. You know, unfortunately, Facebook had to actually even disclose that, you know, inventory only grew by 12%, but prices grew by 35%. You know, Google basically showed the same thing. And if you go back to sort of like the pillar of antitrust law, which is that 1970 odd Supreme Court case, it defined what's called the consumer welfare test, right?

• 1:09:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, so, you know, the FTC and DOJ, they're relatively toothless in the face of companies cutting prices, but they can really act when companies raise prices. And here's where their definition of a monopoly, which is brittle, it doesn't account for 20, you know, 2021 tech companies, does come into play because now you can see that they're, that they're winding up their pricing power if they can raise prices, number one. The second thing that I'll say is the Apple, Facebook thing is a very important canary in the coal mine as well. Because it's not as if the five of them can actually work together. There's infighting, right?

• 1:09:43Jason Calacanis?

  And so. Yeah, it's Game of Thrones.

• 1:09:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, with this new update to iOS, you know, what those dialogues will essentially do, in my opinion, if I had to guess, is limit inventory, right? So Facebook and Google will have fewer ads that they can actually run in a targeted way. And so the only way that they can keep then growing revenue with fewer impressions is by raising prices even more. And then the last thing I'll say is, you know, this complicated dynamic between Apple, Facebook and Google is that Google still pays Apple almost 70 or 80 billion dollars for search, whereas Facebook pays them nothing. So if you put all these things in a box, I think you're going to see the beginning of the end. This is where now you can see the end game come into focus, which is...

• 1:10:26David Friedberg?

  Red wedding?

• 1:10:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you don't need necessarily new laws in Section 230, although we'll have that. You now see Fang M. moving into the line of sight of the traditional antitrust framework, because now they can use very traditional, you know, anti-competitive pricing law to go after these guys.

• 1:10:43David Friedberg?

  I am in a strongly disagree with Chamath. Okay, I've not disagreed with Chamath this strongly since we've done the podcast. The reason I strongly disagree is because this is not inventory that is being sold at a fixed price where the price is set by the company. Facebook and Google, in particular, run an auction model. They are a marketplace business. They have advertisers who show up and they bid on ads, which is the inventory that they're able to get based on the data that they're able to match to that particular ad slot. If the advertisers can get more value by bidding a higher price because of the data that they're getting that shows that this customer is more likely to click on the ad and ultimately buy something, they will bid more for the ads.

• 1:11:28David Friedberg?

  What has been such an incredible juggernaut of a business for both Google and then Facebook, which was effectively a mimic of Google's system, was this auction model. And the innovation has been in getting more data as you track consumers around the internet. And secondly is in the smart ad targeting, which is where the algorithm figures out which ad to show the consumer based on whether that consumer is likely to click on the ad or not. And the more consumers click on the ads, the more advertisers are willing to pay for an impression because that ad is now going to convert to more revenue for them. That is why this is not a monopolistic approach to pricing. It is an auction approach. And I think, and it's why they've won in the past over this argument. But yeah, go ahead, I could... Go ahead.

• 1:12:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At Facebook, my team was the one that built it. So I oversaw those guys back in 2008 and nine when we did the first version of it. Obviously, it's gotten much more sophisticated and you're right, it's a Vick re-auction. And literally, my mandate to the team was, I don't want your innovations, copy Google. And give me a version of what Google looks like and we're going to implement it.

• 1:12:31David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:12:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a problem. It's not exclusively that. Ads are not sold entirely based on that system. Ads are sold direct via a team. So for example, when Budweiser writes a hundred million dollar check or Procter and Gamble, they're not necessarily stepping in the auction the same way as a small and medium sized business. And if you look at how Facebook and Google have oriented their policy, they've only highlighted those people because David, to those people, you're absolutely right. There's a very legitimate market clearing price argument for them. But there are an entire class of advertisers that come in over the top.

• 1:13:05David Friedberg?

  You're saying brand advertisers.

• 1:13:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that get structured deals, that get structured APIs, they get structured access and Facebook is and Google is setting price. And Microsoft is setting price. And so this is where that's the entry point because at the end of the day, an impression to David Friedberg, whether it's seen by the local taco shop or Procter and Gamble, some of it will be a Vick re-auction, some of it will be structured inventory. It's a convoluted mess of the two, you can't tease it out.

• 1:13:34David Friedberg?

  You're right, at the end, at the end, it's about getting CPM higher, right? It's about cost per thousand impressions, but it's a long, I think this is a good conversation.

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  This is episode thirty one for sure.

• 1:13:42David Friedberg?

  I would, I would love to talk about some of my early days at Google and how, how we made some of those decisions because I think it's instrumental to how this is designed to be ultimately a system of commerce efficiency that's really important, not just a system of selling ads. But let's talk, let's talk about it later, yeah.

• 1:13:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, as we wrap, most impressive observation from these quarterly reports that just came out for me. Amazon's ad business, twenty four billion, growing at seventy seven percent year over year. On top of their Amazon Web Services business.

• 1:14:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It'll be bigger than AWS in three years at this rate.

• 1:14:19David Friedberg?

  Yeah, what's everyone else's, what's everyone else's?

• 1:14:22Jason Calacanis?

  That to me was like, whoa.

• 1:14:24David Friedberg?

  What was the most impressive thing for the rest of you guys on, on all the earnings this week?

• 1:14:27Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of impressive things here, I have a second, but go ahead.

• 1:14:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was unbelievably impressive, but we have, we have four enormous monopolies on our hands. And if I was a betting man, end of decade, these four monopolies will not exist. I'll make that bet. Oh, broken up? Yeah.

• 1:14:45David Friedberg?

  By the end, by the end of this decade, so 2030?

• 1:14:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. Okay. Long bet.

• 1:14:49David Friedberg?

  Interesting that.

• 1:14:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm willing to bet you dollars to donuts. That what? They they face breakup?

• 1:14:54David Friedberg?

  I'll bet a couple donuts, you bet a couple dollars.

• 1:14:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 1:14:57David Friedberg?

  And we'll, uh.

• 1:14:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Give the donuts to Sax, I'm off donuts.

• 1:15:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, what was your Sax, what was your takeaway?

• 1:15:04David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, I would up level it slightly in in antitrust, there's historically two schools. There's the Bork School and the Brandeis School. Bork was narrowly focused just on consumer harm and would be closer to like the Friedberg position. The Brandeis School is more about concentrations of power.

• 1:15:18David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:15:19David Sacks?

  And would be more concerned about, you know, not letting people get too powerful in this American democracy. And I think the interesting thing is now that there's folks on the right who definitely are buying into the Brandeis School because of the restrictions on free speech and access to the marketplace of ideas that companies like Amazon, actually all of them, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook have all imposed. They're limiting people's access to the marketplace of ideas. So I think now it's really interesting. You're seeing a combination of both the right and the left get together, saying these companies are too big, they're too powerful. I think the Republicans are saying, well, let you keep the money. We're not going to take your wealth. The Democrats are saying, we're going to take your your power and your wealth.

• 1:16:04David Sacks?

  The Republicans are just saying, we want to level your power a little bit. But I think, you know, these forces are going to come together. And I agree with Tomoth, I think, I don't know exactly when, but I think these companies are going to get broken up and knocked down because they are too powerful.

• 1:16:18David Friedberg?

  It's a good, it's a good, it's a good counter argument, Sax. I mean, the other, that that more important point of view of power versus, you know, economic harm to consumers is a is an important one. Clearly, there's no accounting for that quantitatively. And politics will drive it. But I I think like it's just incredible. I mean, if you guys think about it as a consumer, I mean, how incredible are the products that Alphabet, Amazon and Apple have made?

• 1:16:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And free and all free.

• 1:16:42David Sacks?

  They'll still exist if they get broken.

• 1:16:44David Friedberg?

  I mean, even the even the iPhone, like ordering stuff on Amazon. Every day I'm amazed and I marvel at the world we live in. The shit that we can do with the click of a button. I mean, it is such an incredible world we live in because of these businesses. So as much as we can hound them for all the wealth and monopoly power.

• 1:16:59David Sacks?

  Here's the problem. Here's the problem is that Apple and Google in particular have a monopoly on the applications that can exist on these these incredible phones.

• 1:17:08David Friedberg?

  Yes.

• 1:17:09David Sacks?

  And if you can't get access to the App Store, you you can't exist as an app.

• 1:17:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  App Store is the layout action.

• 1:17:14David Sacks?

  And frankly, you can't really even you can't even have a business in the modern world if these guys cut you off. And so we already saw a congressional hearing very recently in which Spotify and some other apps were testifying against Google and Apple because.

• 1:17:28David Friedberg?

  And the Apple tax.

• 1:17:30David Sacks?

  Because, yes, because these platforms were discriminating against those applications in order to benefit themselves. And I think that in particular has to be looked at and I think eventually stopped.

• 1:17:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Two things, two things. Apple just got sued by the EU today. So they got slapped with antitrust for their App Store. So that's going to sort itself out as well. So. You have all these, as Jason said, Game of Thrones. I wanted to read to you guys something. Justin just put it in the chat. This is something I said to Brad Gerson in 2019 when we were, he was interviewing me for something. And I think it's it's even more true today. Then it was in 2019. I said the following. I said, my perspective on Facebook is the reason why the market. Gives it a small multiple, because by the way, you hear this all the time, like, my gosh, these companies are so cheap. Why are they so cheap? I said, the reason why the market gives it such a small multiple is because they don't believe the market.

• 1:18:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The market doesn't believe that their earnings potential is durable. Because the market is sure that in the next 10 or so years, governments will start to act. Because they care about their own self preservation. So if you get very reductionist. At the end of the day, that's what governments care about. And so they're going to legislate to protect their monopoly, which is the ability to have power.

• 1:18:47David Friedberg?

  All right. There it is, folks. A shout out from Chamath to Chamath in 2019.

• 1:18:54Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out. I'd like to give a shout out to myself. Hold on, Jason. No, Jason, I would like to do this.

• 1:19:02Jason Calacanis?

  Don't hurt your arm patting yourself on the back so hard. You gotta stretch that out with your functional stretching on Sundays. I get my functional stretch on. Love you besties.

• 1:19:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can besties, when are you guys coming back? Please, can we play poker now that we're all vaccinated?

• 1:19:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I might have to, I might have to go to New York next week to just round out my three city tour.

• 1:19:18David Friedberg?

  Can we book the, uh, can we book the Miami trip, Chamath? Let's, let's go out there.

• 1:19:22Jason Calacanis?

  We're, no, we're doing a live show. Oh, big news is coming, everybody. We are going to be putting up a voting mechanism. You're going to be able to vote with your dollar with a tiny donation to see All In Live. Whichever city gets the most donations.

• 1:19:36David Friedberg?

  No, no, let's just go to Miami.

• 1:19:38Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, fuck it, we're going to Miami.

• 1:19:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But where, where are we, where are we going to donate the money to? Have we decided that or?

• 1:19:42Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I, I think it should be something in relation.

• 1:19:45David Friedberg?

  Play poker and the winner or, you know, do a, a single hand PLO and the winner gets to decide the charity of their choice.

• 1:19:51Jason Calacanis?

  No, I like that. I like that. That could be fun. I mean, I think something that we've all agreed on.

• 1:19:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can we just decide to, can we just decide to sell tickets in Miami and New York and be done with the show?

• 1:19:59David Friedberg?

  Miami, Miami.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  I know. I think Miami and New York, we could just do a one, two. I mean, it's a hot, quick jump.

• 1:20:05David Friedberg?

  Chamath, you decide the date. Well, the rest of us will make it work. These guys are already there.

• 1:20:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  End of May, we're going to pick a date. We're going to go to Miami. We're going to do the first taped live All In. And we're going to sell, we're going to sell tickets for like five or 10 bucks.

• 1:20:16David Friedberg?

  Yum, yum, yum.

• 1:20:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All the proceeds go to charity.

• 1:20:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's gotta be more like 50 or 25 because of the venue, because we have to, the venue's got to get their vig. But anyway, love you besties. Love you guys. Love you Friedberg. Love you Chamath.

• 1:20:29David Friedberg?

  Back at you.

• 1:20:30Jason Calacanis?

  Most of all, everybody. Love you, Jacob. Love you, Sax. Love you, Sax.

• 1:20:34David Friedberg?

  Back at you.

• 1:20:36Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you all next time on the All In Podcast. Bye bye.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  Besties are gone.

• 1:21:03Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:21:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  What your B B? What your B? What your B? B? What? We need to get mergies. I'm going all in.