E14: Salesforce acquires Slack, DeepMind's AlphaFold breakthrough, Trust Fund Socialists & more

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Invest with the Best... ies!: https://www.thesyndicate.com/allin Referenced in the show: NYT - The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/style/trust-fund-activism-resouce-generation.html Coinbase - An upcoming story about Coinbase https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012afc25d27 NYT - 'Tokenized': Inside Black Workers' Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-cryptocurrency-black-employees.html Show Notes: 0:00 Besties intro, fashion talk & the All-In Syndicate 3:47 Insights on Slack being acquired by Salesforce for $27.7B - why did they sell, are there any nitpicks, was this a home run for Salesforce? 19:14 Sacks on going up against Marc Benioff and Salesforce Chatter while at Yammer, importance of holding onto winners as long as possible 27:26 Why is DeepMind's AlphaFold a major breakthrough? When will it begin impacting drug discovery? Dangers of AI at scale 47:07 Republican party misfires, Georgia runoff implications, can Trump pre-pardon his family, Biden's effective strategy so far 59:21 Trump's Section 230 gambit, will Trumpism fade away? 1:05:23 Trust Fund socialists 1:26:14 Coinbase vs. NYT round 2, https://www.thesyndicate.com/allin

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, besties are back, besties are back, going around the horn. Rain Man David Sacks calling in from an undisclosed location, suffering through two Code 13s in one lifetime. And David Friedberg is here, the queen of quinoa, spacking everything in sight, living the life, calling in from a nondescript Ritz Carlton room, it appears to be. And of course, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihopetia, cackling like a fool. Welcome back, everybody. This is what you pay for with your subscription to the All In Podcast, brought to you by Slack.

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  If you didn't own Slack shares, raise your hand. It's been an incredible week on a number of levels. We're going to talk this week about Salesforce buying Slack, Trump and Section 230, the Coinbase, the ongoing Coinbase saga.

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg found some interesting science that could save humanity. And of course, the trust fund socialists in the New York Times who hate their parents for giving them money.

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  Let's start off with-

• 1:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's start with off the most important thing. What is that shirt undershirt combo you're wearing? I mean, look, you have buttons on buttons.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  Did I break the layering rule?

• 1:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You can't, you can't-

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  School us.

• 1:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you're gonna layer properly, you can have only one layer of buttons. But to have two layers of buttons-

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  That's not how it works.

• 1:36David Friedberg?

  No, J. Cal went in and got an almond-

• 1:38Jason Calacanis?

  Layers are for players, not me.

• 1:40David Friedberg?

  No, he got like an almond milk cappuccino and he's like, I like how that barista dresses and I'm gonna wear that from now on.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second, can I ask a technical question? Can I have buttons? I can't have buttons on buttons, but can I have buttons and then a zipper up like with the-

• 1:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you can't do that either.

• 1:56David Sacks?

  Chamath has had a weird aversion to buttons ever since he spent the time in Italy.

• 2:02Jason Calacanis?

  Was he button shamed in Italy?

• 2:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I wasn't, I was a little button shamed, but I'm looking at Sax has buttons on his collars, which just makes no sense.

• 2:10Jason Calacanis?

  Sax is wearing the same Brooks Brothers shirt that he graduated high school in. At Brooks, he owns 17% of Brooks Brothers at this point from the number of Blazers he's bought there. All right, let's get off to it. We've insulted each other. I don't think Friedberg's taken the brunt of anything yet. Anybody have any chop busting they want to do with Friedberg or is that just sort of built in?

• 2:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Friedberg took the tablecloth that I use for a picnic in the summertime and made it into a shirt.

• 2:37Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. You know, you have to be frugal at this time and also Friedberg cares about the environment. He's not going to just let a picnic blanket go to waste.

• 2:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a hemp based tablecloth and so I knew it was going to get taken and stolen.

• 2:52David Friedberg?

  I love how I choose to spend my time with you guys. It just pays off. Here we go. All right, can we kick this off?

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's kick it off with our advertisement for nobody because Chamath will not let me make any money off of this podcast. And thanks again for the suggestion that we launch a syndicate with no carry. Now a bunch of dipshits on Twitter are like, hey, when is the all in syndicate starting? I'm like, never. I need to make a living. I need to get my beak wet and this week.

• 3:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm sorry, but I think an all in syndicate would be super, super disruptive and cool.

• 3:27Jason Calacanis?

  I'm totally fine with running it as long as we can have the 20% carry and I'll manage the whole thing. We got four people on the call, four or five, we each get 5% carry, but we got to make a living here. Not everybody's made a Chamath, not everybody's got Sacks A through Z or had all of their Slack shares bought. I think we'll kick it off with that. Chamath, we saw this week, in fact, just two days ago, Salesforce in a record transaction for a SaaS company. I think it's the highest ever paid for a SaaS company, $27 billion, 27.7 billion dollars for Slack, which has only been public for just over a year, I think. You were, I think, did the series B in Slack right after they did the pivot at Social Capital. I don't know if that was in front of one or two, but.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  Phil Hellmuth keeps talking about it.

• 4:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a series B in TinySpec, but it was the series A in Slack. And there's a really important story, which is that myself and Ray Ko, who's my partner at Social Capital, we've worked together now for, my gosh, I think it's probably 15 years, wrote a really great memo justifying the investment in Slack. And it had to do with one thing and one thing only. We ignored the revenue and ARR. I mean, it was fine and nice and good. But the single biggest thing that we were attracted to was something that we looked at and which was called intercompany edges.

• 4:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And even back in 2015 or 16, when we did this original investment, there was this dynamic where people across companies were communicating via Slack channels. And I was completely stunned by this idea because that was effectively a substitution for email. Because the only way you communicate across companies today is by email. You know, David is at craftventures.com and he emails me at socialcapital.com and I email Jason at inside.com. That's how we communicate across businesses. Except now, all of a sudden, you could be messaging and having a much more realtime interface. That, to me, was incredibly disruptive and it justified the entirety of the real forward-looking investment thesis.

• 5:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, fast forward five years later, and these guys have more usage on a daily basis than Facebook, which is stunning because, you know, these guys have 10 million DAUs and Facebook has 2 billion. So it just goes to show you the quantity of traffic and the volume of information and theoretically, you know, productivity that's happening on Slack. And so I'm not sure what Salesforce bought. I actually think that, you know, you can make a case why it's a shame that it got bought. A very strong one, in fact. But what they did get, whether they know it or not, is an intercompany edge effect, which is the most disruptive thing to email. And in the hands of Salesforce and that sales team,

• 6:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it has the ability to really be a very disruptive force for good in enterprise software.

• 6:28Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so Sax, this is a natural passing of the ball to you and the baton because you did Yammer, sold it to Microsoft for a billion dollars. And obviously Slack was the mobile successor to the desktop version of Yammer. And you got a lot of your fingerprints all over this. But the fact is, you did a tweet storm about it. Slack is an unbelievable success. Steward is a great founder. You know, he sold his first company Flickr for 30 million, this one for almost 30 billion. So that's pretty nice. But there was one failure, and you pointed out in your tweet storm. Explain what the one failure, if you could pick out of the hundreds of things, thousands of things they did right. There was one thing they did wrong that, to Chamath's point, would have resulted in them

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  remaining an independent company that could have become worth more than 27 billion.

• 7:17David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was, it was a slowness to embrace the idea of enterprise sales. And by the way, let's put this in context. I mean, Steward and the Slack team did a phenomenal job. 30 billion dollar exit, seven years of just about flawless execution. So I don't want to, and also, you know, I was an investor in the company. So thank you to Steward for letting me invest. I definitely don't want to sound like an ingrate or a critic. I mean, they just, they did a phenomenal job. But if you were to nitpick just one, one little thing that I think they could have done faster, it would have been embracing enterprise sales.

• 7:57David Sacks?

  The big learning from Yammer, you know, we learnt this at Yammer from 2008, 2012, is that enterprises don't self-serve, right? They don't self-close. Bottom-up SaaS products are phenomenal for generating top-of-funnel, basically generating leads. But you have to have salespeople close the deals. And enterprises don't just kind of pull out a credit card and self-serve. They need a salesperson. And I think there was something in the DNA of Slack that actually I see really...

• 8:31David Sacks?

  Very commonly in the DNA of of sort of producty SaaS companies, producty SaaS founders, which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales and they want to believe that they can just be entirely product driven. And what I see across the board is they all come to the same realization that that we had a yammer, which is we have to have a sales team. And I do remember, you know, back in 2014, the whole yammer sales team was basically rolling off because of, you know, Microsoft acquired the company in 2012 and those integration period. And by 2013, 2014, they were all looking for jobs.

• 9:12David Sacks?

  And I remember, you know, my my former CRO, I think, was interviewing at Slack and it would have been such a perfect thing for them because he had just learned all the lessons of how you layer on kind of an enterprise sale on top of a bottom up product. And they just weren't ready to make that higher yet. And so, look, if you're going to nitpick, look, $30 billion outcome, no one's criticizing. But if you're to nitpick, you know, it's an A plus regardless. But, you know, this would be the one thing you could you could say.

• 9:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, congratulations all around to everybody involved, especially Phil Helmuth, who was an LP in one of Chamath's funds. So if you need insights on Slack or any of the inside information, you can just follow Phil Helmuth on Twitter at being the greatest, or I am the greatest, or I'll always be the greatest, one of those Twitter handles is his.

• 10:05David Sacks?

  But Jason, I mean, you basically came to the same conclusion in your emergency pod, right? I mean,

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

  I did. I hadn't seen your, I think your tweet came after the emergency pod. But yeah, it just seemed to me this company, unlike Zoom, should have been able to grow quicker. And if you look at their numbers, they had 87 companies that had were spending over $1 million. You put a rabid sales team on that product and they go in like Benioff does with his sales team. I mean, He was just hyper aggressive at just putting huge numbers out there and saying you have to pay us this much money. So much so that I don't know if you remember Elon getting into a public spat with him where he's like, Salesforce is horrible software, get it out of the organization. He basically banned it because they came to him with the bottom up people using of Salesforce and said, hey, you owe us this amount of money.

• 10:55Jason Calacanis?

  And Elon was like, F you, banned forever from inside of our organization. We'll build our own software. We don't need it. And they didn't have somebody and Stuart didn't have that DNA, I think, to say aggressively, we need to charge what this product is worth. And you saw that in, I think, one of their strengths and weaknesses, which was, they only build you for people who were actively using the product. Now, that's a beautiful, awesome feature. It makes you not scared to use it. But on the enterprise level, I mean, that seemed to be like maybe one of those non-cutthroat things that maybe were holding them back. David, you have any insights on this or should we go on to alpha folk?

• 11:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's, it's, it's really important to remember the, the mechanics and the game theory around M and A, especially, you know, big game hunting when you're doing $30 billion acquisitions. It's also kind of true at billion dollar levels, but less so. But the bigger the acquisition gets, you have to remember that there's an asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers. And the question is, who does the asymmetry favor? Right? Because you could look at this acquisition and say, wow, Salesforce is crazy for spending $30 billion. And somebody else may say, wow, Slack was really stupid for selling it for $30 billion. Right? The reality is that I think that there was asymmetries on both sides.

• 12:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that what Slack probably saw, and I don't know because I've been off the board now for more than a year. But I think what they saw was, as David said, just, you know, a level of sophistication and scale and ability to cross-sell and up-sell that was needed for enterprise scale. Either you overcome it with precision and speed, or you overcome it by going the same pace as somebody like Microsoft, but with an equivalent product portfolio. So that's, that's sort of one realization that, that Slack had. But in, in the case

• 12:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Of you know, um, Salesforce, what they probably had was a realization that they couldn't go wall to wall inside of a customer because they didn't really have a product that was useful or usable to every single individual inside of an enterprise. And so both of those two things create asymmetries. There's a level of fear inside of Slack and there's a level of fear inside of Salesforce. Both of them are about the fear of disruption. And then the question is, who gets the better of the other person in the middle of the acquisition, right? So the deal could have probably gotten done at, you know, 22 billion. It probably could have also gotten done at 45 billion. And that's again, to a combination of how well you play poker in that moment, right? Who blinks first and the quality of the bankers?

• 13:31Jason Calacanis?

  This is like two people having top pair on a very textured board. It's like, and they're just raising versus each other.

• 13:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, it's who outplays them. Because like, it's similar also to like how Microsoft bought LinkedIn, right? Because if you think about what happened in LinkedIn, if you remember when that happened, it was almost to a T, very much like Slack. LinkedIn had one bad quarter. They got decapitated by, you know, and I owned it at the time in the, in our public fund. It got decapitated by like 50, 60, 70%. I mean, something insane for missing numbers by like a few pennies. Okay? And all of a sudden, it took a lot of the wind out of their sails internally. It didn't change the user momentum at all because, you know, the users that were signing up for LinkedIn didn't care what the stock price was yesterday, today and tomorrow. But it all of a sudden created a fear. And I think Microsoft was able to exploit that fear. And within a year,

• 14:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  this company was bought for $25 billion. Not dissimilar, you know, Slack had, you know, a hiccup and they got rerated, the stock bounced back. But I think that if Salesforce was smart, they probably created, you know, sort of like a white knight kind of bid that said, listen, you need enterprise scale and the ability to cross-sell and upsell, I can give it to you. And Slack probably said, listen, you need to go wall to wall. So I understand why you need me. And, you know, the price is what the price is.

• 14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Good, Friedberg.

• 14:50David Friedberg?

  If you look at the pricing, right? So Slack. Normally, the way these big M and A, you know, public company M and A deals get done is the board has to approve the price and they have to say this was the right deal for us relative to other options. And one of the ways you assess that is you look at where the share price has been historically. And if you're getting a premium to where the share price has been historically, let's say 30, 40% higher than it's ever been, then the board says, great, that's a good deal. We should take it because we've got a long way to grow into that value. In this case, the deal was done not at a very high premium to where Slack traded just in the summer. Is that right? Chamath, so it looked like it peaked.

• 15:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's basically, if you took at the

• 15:30David Friedberg?

  It's a 10% premium, right?

• 15:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  10% premium, yeah.

• 15:32David Friedberg?

  10% premium, yeah.

• 15:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We opened the direct listing at 40 or 41 and then this was at 45.

• 15:38David Friedberg?

  Right. And so there clearly was a sense of weakness from the board, which is, I think, why the Salesforce stock traded down afterwards, because if they were willing to sell at that small of a premium, the forecast internally is probably feeling not that strong. And then people translate that into, hey, Salesforce bought something that's not that strong. You know, there's something a little bit amiss. But obviously, to your point, they're missing a lot of the cross-selling and the synergy that will arise.

• 16:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's a huge slam dunk acquisition and I go back to this idea of intercompany network effects. I think they exist and I think they're real. And I think that the Slack product team's ability to innovate around that was not as fast as it could have been, but it was still very unique. And I think it was a true moat. And, you know, the tragedy is we won't see what the terminal value is if they were left alone to execute. And in this weird way, like, I've always struggled with why Microsoft was so overly obsessed with Slack, because if you looked at the team's product, it was much more directly competitive with Zoom.

• 16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And to this day, still remains much more directly competitive with Zoom than Slack. But, you know, there we have it.

• 16:55Jason Calacanis?

  And if you look at the revenue, Slack was doing 800 million run rate, so anyway, rounded up to a billion, and yet Salesforce at 20 billion. So 5% revenue to revenue, and then they got 10% of the company. So in that way, if you look at it on a percentage basis, which is, you know, how you might look at the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is what percentage of the existing entity did they get?

• 17:21David Sacks?

  Slacks growing about 60% a year and Salesforce is growing about 22%, something like that.

• 17:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other thing is the president of Salesforce is Brett Taylor, who was our CTO at Facebook, who I worked with. And so I think Brett also understands network effects really well.

• 17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you know, by the way, in this interesting twist of fate, Benioff was the under bidder, I think, for LinkedIn. And so, you know, we've, we've seen mark around the hoop on these, you know, social network, network effect, business tool acquisitions before and finally.

• 17:54Jason Calacanis?

  Also Twitter. He was running, he was hanging around the basket with Twitter and then they also brought his name up for TikTok, which made no sense. So I think Benioff is just looking at this like, if, if Google and Microsoft and Apple are too scared to buy things because of antitrust. Well, I'm under the radar of the antitrust trillion dollars, so I'm, I'm the only game in town, right?

• 18:15David Sacks?

  He's, he's under the radar because he doesn't have a play in this sort of communication or collaboration space. And so therefore there are no antitrust issues. If Microsoft were to do it, it would definitely be scrutinized because you could argue that they're adding to their existing dominant market share and, and collaboration. But Benioff's dream has always been, at least since he, you know, launched Chatter to compete with, with us when we were doing Yamers back in 2010, 2011, is he, his dream has always been to have a product that could get him onto every seat in the enterprise, you know, his current product set has, is departmental. I mean, you've got kind of the CRM product for sales and they've got the support cloud for customer support and they've got the marketing cloud for marketing.

• 19:01David Sacks?

  And so he's gone department by department, but he's never really had a sort of pan, like cross company. Yeah. Something that the entire company would use.

• 19:10Jason Calacanis?

  Like a central login system, right? And Slack is that central login system. But when you, when he came up against you, it was very, you know, Benioff, you're friendly with Benioff. Benioff came at you so hard. He threw three or 400 engineers at Chatter. He took out full page Wall Street Journal ads. He tried to poach your people. He tried to make the product free. He made it personal against you after you would not sell to him. True or false, David Sacks?

• 19:41David Sacks?

  I don't, I don't think he made it personal, but it was definitely.

• 19:44Jason Calacanis?

  Did it feel personal?

• 19:45David Sacks?

  Um.

• 19:46Jason Calacanis?

  Did he hurt your feelings?

• 19:48David Sacks?

  No, no, no, no.

• 19:49Jason Calacanis?

  He did. That's.

• 19:51David Sacks?

  I understood what he was trying to do.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  That's your way of saying.

• 19:53David Sacks?

  No, I mean, if we had sold to Salesforce, like we ended up. So what I would say is, yeah, we got in like a very, it was a very competitive situation. He didn't beat us. Um, you know, I, what's that?

• 20:05Jason Calacanis?

  He failed. Does that product even exist?

• 20:07David Sacks?

  Yeah. Um, it's sort of like a feed inside of the CRM product. It didn't really succeed as a standalone collaboration product. And so we won that battle, but it definitely, I would say it scared us enough to sell to Microsoft. Because, you know, the.

• 20:23Jason Calacanis?

  What did he offer you?

• 20:24David Sacks?

  We were about to enter a new stage of competition. So here's what happened is he launched his product to kind of be a clone of Yammer inside of Salesforce, but he was initially charging $15 per seat. We were charging like five. And so they massively overpriced it and, and they event, and then they, they were on this like slippery slope where they kept lowering the price to compete better with us. And then finally they realized that they should just give the thing away for free as a strategic move. Um, and that was when we decided to sell it to Microsoft is we didn't know, we, we knew we had a better product than chatter, but we didn't know how it would go if we were up against a free chatter.

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us honestly, how much did he offer? What was the meeting like? Were you major the offer?

• 21:05David Sacks?

  We, yeah. So. Yeah. So here's, I'll tell you the backstory. I mean, this hasn't been publicly, publicly revealed, but.

• 21:15Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 21:18David Sacks?

  In service of the, in service of the all in podcast.

• 21:22David Friedberg?

  Go ahead. Go ahead, David. Get us some ratings.

• 21:25David Sacks?

  Yeah. To try and, in service of trying to get us from number three to number one on the charts. Um, no, you know, it's funny. We launched Yammer at the TechCrunch 40 conference that Jason, as you know, you were the co-founder of. And Benioff was like a judge. He was a panelist and he was raving about it. And you could just, you know, from, from the moment we launched, he was raving about it. You could see the light bulb go off with him. And he realized that like social was gonna be was, you know, at the time, obviously, social was big with consumer social networks, but he saw the potential of social or collaboration inside the enterprise. And so, yeah, I mean, like, I think a year later or something,

• 22:06David Sacks?

  they were interested in buying the company for around $250 million. The big issue for them, though, was that Benioff had a bunch of like engineers who wanted to build it in-house. And so they, they, they actually, I don't know what would have happened if, if they, you know, didn't want to build it themselves, but basically they vetoed doing a deal. And so they ended up building Chatter and they threw the 300 engineers at it and they basically spun their wheels for a few years. And anyway, it turned out to be much better for us because we end up selling the company for five times as much to Microsoft. You know, if we had sold to Salesforce in like 2010, it would have been a much smaller deal. But yeah, that, I mean, he was very interested in it from the, from the get go.

• 22:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right, folks, here you have it. Breaking news in the background on what actually happened. Congratulations to Stuart and the team.

• 22:59David Friedberg?

  I want to, I want to ask a question. Chamath and Sax, did you guys keep all of the shares you, you originally invested in to the exit here? Just to set the context for folks, you know, you invest in a company, it's a small startup, it's exiting for 30 billion.

• 23:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, for, for, for, of 100 shares that I owned, per every 100 that I owned,

• 23:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  10 of them I sold at 38, right at the direct listing.

• 23:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I want to say 40 of them I sold in the mid 20s. And the rest of it just got taken out at this price.

• 23:47Jason Calacanis?

  So your dollar cost average to the, you know, whatever, high 30s, maybe 40 or something?

• 23:51David Sacks?

  Yeah, I don't know my exact, I mean, I, I, I sold some and I still own some. So, you know, I definitely got my, my beak wet from this acquisition.

• 24:04David Sacks?

  But uh, no, but look, I, I, I think I probably sold, you know, more than half of them, you know, um, and that was a mistake. And you know, one of my biggest learnings as an investor has just been to let your winners ride. You know, my biggest mistakes as an investor has not been the losers. It's all, it's been selling the winners prematurely. Yeah.

• 24:21Jason Calacanis?

  You did that with Uber as well, David. Uh, and I sold some Uber before, but I kept a lot of my Uber, maybe most of it or half of it, I think. Anyway.

• 24:30David Sacks?

  Uber, Facebook. I mean, Facebook, you know, when they IPO'd, it was worth 50 billion. We all thought that was like unbelievable. I mean, cause it was over a 50x return, but um.

• 24:40Jason Calacanis?

  What's the lesson for you, Sacks?

• 24:42David Sacks?

  Just never sell anything if you can help it.

• 24:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, uh, I sold all of my Facebook in 2014 and bought Amazon and Tesla. I think that you have to be able to sell for two reasons, liquidity and moral obligation.

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 24:57David Sacks?

  Yeah. I mean, that's an exaggeration. I mean, you can never, it's, it's, it's, people need to be able to sell, but to the extent you can hold on, uh, just don't sell everything, you know, always, you know, keep, um, you know.

• 25:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, keep selling. I mean, think about the people who were at Apple in the eighties or Microsoft in the eighties or Amazon in the nineties. A lot of those people got frustrated holding the shares for so long. And I think keeping at least 20% of your shares forever, you know, could be amazing. There was somebody told me had never sold a single share of, I don't know if that's a true story or not.

• 25:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I told you that. You can't be leaking that information.

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Anyway, I didn't know that was a leak.

• 25:37David Sacks?

  More breaking news.

• 25:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's move to Alphaform.

• 25:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let's, please, credit all in podcast.

• 25:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God.

• 25:50David Friedberg?

  The same may or may not be true with and his shares.

• 25:52Jason Calacanis?

  You know what we should do is we should do a, um, we should put beeps in there, Nick. I was told had never sold a share of and then we just let everybody react to it. This way, nobody knows who we're talking about.

• 26:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I, I do know that has not sold a single share and it has only sold shares of to fund capital calls, which is an incredible statement to fortitude and vision.

• 26:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my Lord.

• 26:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredible.

• 26:19David Friedberg?

  It's by the way, by the way, it's not always worked out because he did the same with. And those didn't go as well.

• 26:26David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, you have to diversify when when you've got all your eggs in one basket in one company. Obviously, you have to sell some shares, but you know, one of the things I've just learned over the last 20 years is probably, you know, people ask me, what's your biggest regret or learning or whatever? It's just selling too early is like one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Look at PayPal. PayPal is now a $250 billion company. We sold it in 2002 for 1.5 billion. We thought that was a great deal at the time and we sold it for less than 1% of what it's worth today. And the product's basically the same, you know, it's just compounding.

• 26:58Jason Calacanis?

  Is the lesson, never sell. If it's a winner, ride it, you can pair.

• 27:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, hold on, hold on, I'm going to put a final nail this coffin, then we're going to go to Alpha Fold. There's a great quote by Warren Buffett, which is, if you know what you're doing, the best thing you can do is be as concentrated as possible. Nobody ever got rich in their seventh best idea. And I think that that basically sums it up. But you have to be in a position to have the ability to have that kind of portfolio allocation. And I think that's hard. Free Bird, explain Alpha Fold, please.

• 27:30David Friedberg?

  Okay, let's explain, give me two minutes on, I'll explain proteins and then the importance of proteins and then Alpha Fold. So the numbers to remember are four, three and 20. There are four nucleic acids that make up your DNA. We all learned this in high school biology. Sets of three A, C, T and G combinations define an amino acid. There are 20 amino acids. And a protein is a string of amino acids. So in your body and every cell, there are these organelles, they make proteins by reading the DNA, taking a copy of it and turning it into amino acid chains. And that's what we kind of call proteins.

• 28:12David Friedberg?

  But what's interesting is when you make a chain of amino acids, so there's 20 of them that you could put in each point in the chain. It doesn't come out as a long chain. What happens is those amino acids, the whole thing collapses, and it turns into a very specific shape. And the shape of that protein is what defines its function. So pretty much every biological function across all life is undertaken by proteins doing something. Some proteins, like hemoglobin in our red blood cells, will have a very specific little pocket where oxygen molecules stick into the pocket, and then it moves the oxygen from your lungs to your cells. It's a pretty amazing protein to exist, and it specifically is shaped to do that exact function. There are other proteins that can, for example,

• 28:56David Friedberg?

  rip apart other molecules, break a molecular bond. There are other proteins, for example, that can take nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it into plants' cells that the plants can then use to grow. There's an incredible, you know, set of potential on the nanoscale of what you can do with proteins, and we see that in life, and we're just shocked and awed and amazed by it every day. But in order to figure out how to create proteins that do specific things, you have to know how do those amino acids turn into the shape that the protein ultimately takes, and that's what's called protein folding. And so the hard thing is, and you know, why is this important? It's important because we can easily read DNA, and therefore we can figure out

• 29:40David Friedberg?

  what amino acid sequence is being made to define that protein. But what we don't know really well is what is the shape of that protein, and therefore how does it undertake the function that we see it taking in biology? And if you think about the reverse of this, the reverse of this, if you have a function you want to undertake in biology, you can design a protein to do that function for you. For example, bind to a specific point on a cancer cell, or, you know, take carbon out of the atmosphere, or pretty much anything else your mind can kind of imagine. On the nanoscale, proteins can be designed to do. The challenge is how do you write the code, which is the DNA, to make the protein that does that thing? Well, we don't know how the code turns into the shape. And that's what folding, the folding problem is.

• 30:24David Friedberg?

  So the folding problem, there's a data set. And the data set is what's the three dimensional shape of a protein? And then what's the DNA code that defines the amino acid sequence that makes that protein? And how do you figure out how to predict the shape of the protein from the amino acid sequence? It has been an impossibility. And again, if you think about this chain of amino acids, they each have little,

• 30:47David Friedberg?

  you know, electrical spacers and the way that they bind to each other, it's very complicated. You can't just deterministic define it. You know, we don't have that level of understanding on a quantum scale. So what AlphaFold has done is they have now been able to predict from a sequence of amino acids, what the protein shape will ultimately become. By learning from a database of hundreds of thousands of structural protein

• 31:15David Friedberg?

  shapes that have been defined through really, really, really difficult, you know, scanning microscopes and other techniques to really try and scan a protein on a microscopic scale. And then looking at the DNA sequence and figuring out, okay, what's the relationship? And the accuracy of their predictive model now is within the range of error of the microscopes that are being used to actually scan and measure those proteins. So that's incredible. Because now theoretically, you could come up with a design for a protein. And you could actually build that protein by writing the amino acid sequence. And that protein can do any number of things you want to do. And this has been a difficult problem that's been intractable by humanity. And we've been challenged by it for decades.

• 31:59David Friedberg?

  For this machine learning breakthrough to kind of be realized in literally less than three years. I mean, these guys were at a score of 40 last year. And this year, they're at like nearly 90, which is incredible. And so now, you know, we can now predict what the shape will be from the DNA sequence. And this is going to unlock this ability. Everyone's now going to take their model, if they license it or whatever they do with it. Or people are going to go learn using the same techniques that DeepMind used. But it just means that it's possible. And then scientists will go away and they'll say, you know what, I want to do this particular thing on a microscopic scale. Let me design in three dimensional space a protein to do that thing. Okay, now let me go figure out how to make that protein by writing the DNA code, which is really easy if you can use this algorithm to solve that for you. And

• 32:44David Friedberg?

  it is literally dollars and pennies to make proteins. We can write DNA on a computer. We can get printed DNA sent to us in 48 hours in a FedEx envelope for a DNA printing facility. We can put it in a microbe and we can get that microbe to make the protein for us in a day. The lab cost, any high school biology class can do this now. So by being able to actually figure out what DNA to write, based on the objective function of what do we want the protein to do, it's going to unlock this universe of things we can do in medicine, in environmental science. We can do things like break apart PET plastics. We can do things like fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and getting rid of fertilizer plants. We can create all sorts of new, you know, food solutions, health solutions, environmental solutions.

• 33:27Jason Calacanis?

  Any chance you can make a pizza that doesn't have carbohydrates? Because that's what I'm thinking about here is, is there a way we can make a healthy pasta or pizza or something like that? But in all seriousness, what do you think the early wins will be out of this technology? And is this a theoretical win that will benefit from in 20 years? Or is this a serious breakthrough that we're going to benefit from in the near term, like one to five years?

• 33:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I think both, both are true. This is an incredibly important advancement in machine learning. But the reality is that, you know, Google will still have to spend, DeepMind will have to spend a lot of time refining it. And then they have some really big ethical challenges ahead of it. How do you expose this technology to whom and under what conditions? And it's the same situation that OpenAI has with GPT-3, although a lot of people, I think, you know, the scale of the computer science challenge maybe was a bigger win in GPT-3 because it was a much more open space. And I think this is a much more specific sort of almost expert system in a way. But the downstream commercial implications of this is just enormous. And so just think about this, like, this is where like, you gotta, you gotta love companies like Google, the fact that

• 34:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They exist because from, you know, PageRank in 1999 to CPC ads in 2003 and 4, we have AlphaFold in 2020. And that, to me, is just, that's just

• 34:50Jason Calacanis?

  This is an argument against breaking up tech because only a tech company with this amount of resource knowledge can then go spend a billion dollars on DeepMind.

• 34:59David Friedberg?

  I mean, Alphabet's burning four to five billion dollars a year on their quote-unquote "other bets" line. And people give them a lot of shit for it. But, I mean, you hit any one of these things and it's a hundred billion dollar payday. I mean, look at YouTube. YouTube's easily a hundred billion dollar payday on a billion dollar bet, billion six.

• 35:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, that's a 250 to 500 billion dollar company.

• 35:18David Friedberg?

  Applied Semantics, a lot of people miss this, but Applied Semantics was a hundred million dollar bet. And that's the entirety of AdSense initially.

• 35:24Jason Calacanis?

  Android, Chrome.

• 35:25David Friedberg?

  Android.

• 35:26David Sacks?

  Is this, is this the first commercial application of DeepMind? Because until now, you know, they've had AlphaZero.

• 35:34David Friedberg?

  So there was, there was a period of time, a lot of people, I don't know if,

• 35:39David Friedberg?

  let me just think about this for a second.

• 35:41David Sacks?

  Because AlphaZero, AlphaZero was really good.

• 35:44David Friedberg?

  I want to be careful about this, but I do think that

• 35:46Jason Calacanis?

  Be careful to not disclose.

• 35:47David Friedberg?

  No, but I do think, I do think it was disclosed that they've used DeepMind to improve ads quality and to improve YouTube viewing. And as a result of that, you get the number of hours per day of the average user on YouTube to double or triple. Ad revenue goes by 3X. And I think in one quarter, Google was able to generate something like an incremental 15 billion annualized revenue from DeepMind.

• 36:10Jason Calacanis?

  And you know what that DeepMind actually did on YouTube? It sent everybody to the alt riot and Infowars and Ben Shapiro. Congratulations. Be careful when you send people's minds with artificial intelligence. Maybe you just argued to break them up.

• 36:23David Friedberg?

  Yeah. But I, I understand Saxon is being used broadly across the products at Google. Now, now in a much more careful way is my understanding. Look, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big ally of Alphabet. I'm a big fan and I love

• 36:37Jason Calacanis?

  You know, they were

• 36:38David Friedberg?

  And I used to work there and I'm very close to people there, so.

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  You know who used to be on the board and was the major backer of that company, DeepMind?

• 36:44David Sacks?

  Founder's Fund.

• 36:45David Friedberg?

  Founder's Fund.

• 36:46Jason Calacanis?

  Elon Musk too, and he begged them to not sell to Google because.

• 36:50David Friedberg?

  I mean, $400 million, $400 million exit was a steal for Google.

• 36:54Jason Calacanis?

  Forty or 50 scientists, I think.

• 36:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, absolute steal.

• 36:56David Sacks?

  No, Elon, I mean, Elon has publicly said that he thinks Deep Mind is like the greatest threat. Well, he thinks AI is a great threat to humanity and of the people working on AI, Deep Mind is the furthest along and therefore most dangerous.

• 37:10Jason Calacanis?

  He tried to stop, I mean, he told me straight up, like, he's been very public about this since, that he, he said, I'll give you an unlimited amount of money to not sell to Google. He's friends with Larry Page too, but he said, don't sell. I want you to be independent. I want you to keep working on this. But he said that when he saw the AI there become aware that it was an AI, that that was when he was like, wait a second.

• 37:30David Sacks?

  No, wait, Deep, Deep Mind is not, the alphas, Alpha Fold or Alpha Zero is not self-aware.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  He felt it was becoming self-aware that it knew what it was. I don't know if that was just Elon, you know, just sort of.

• 37:42David Sacks?

  No, it's not, it's not self-aware. So, I mean, I've, I've watched, yeah, I mean, the amazing things that Deep Mind has released prior to this were games, right? They had this chess, this chess AI called Alpha Zero, which rapidly became not just the best chess. It not only beat every human in the world, it also beat every chess engine because computers became more, you know, better at chess than humans a long time ago because of their sheer computational power. But Alpha Zero plays like a human, but with kind of that same computational power. And so that created a whole revolution in chess engines. And then they also did that with a game called Go, they created Alpha Go.

• 38:25David Sacks?

  And basically every single game that you can think of, Deep Mind's created, you know, an alpha, whatever, alpha version that destroys both humans and computers. But this is the first thing they've publicly announced that, that seems like it will be available to others eventually that could have tremendous social impact.

• 38:48Jason Calacanis?

  Imagine the government trying to understand this. Can you imagine them being brought before like senators and congressmen?

• 38:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  These are the new weapons of mass destruction. I mean, let's be honest, like if if somebody else had had AlphaFold, and probably somebody does and just hasn't said, you know, I mean, Google actually values transparency. So that's the only reason why we know. Imagine what they could do, as Friedberg said, it's like, you know, the the opposite of this is basically to design a specific protein that basically, you know, destroys organs or

• 39:20David Friedberg?

  There are proteins called prions, which are the scariest thing known in biology, in my opinion. A prion is a protein that it actually finds similar proteins and based on its shape, it gets those proteins to change and it becomes like a virus. And prions actually are, there's an extremely sad series of diseases that are related to prions where your body expresses a protein in the wrong way, and then that protein itself gets other proteins to change and creates copies of itself and it spreads. It is a fascinatingly scary biological phenomenon. But, you know, there are extremely scary things you can do with the designer protein capabilities.

• 39:59Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, you could make a bioweapon that would be similar to what the aliens in Prometheus and aliens were doing, the engineers.

• 40:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Even much worse, even much worse. This is why I think they're going to spend years before, so this is why, back to that earlier question, it'll be years before this sees the light of day because they're they're smart enough to know what they've uncovered. And I think they did they did the right thing by talking about it because I think there's a lot of really amazing R and D.

• 40:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the reality is that Google, for the next 20 or 30 years, will have layers and layers of oversight because you know, it's not like you're going to allow a company to enrich uranium in Mountain View without oversight. And this is the equivalent, it's just a we're we're buying time until governments realize that they have to do that they have to do it.

• 40:45David Friedberg?

  But let's also remember, the protein data set that trained on is publicly available. You know, anyone can access this and with the, you know, a catch up in machine learning, you know, capability to DeepMind infrastructure wise, theoretically, you know, someone could could, I think it's it's an inevitability that in the next call it 24 months, someone else will replicate this.

• 41:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right now, I think what DeepMind has done is showed that specific Techniques of learning can overcome limitations in compute. But to your point, David, like we're accelerating silicon at a fast enough speed where, you know, if like, if you can throw 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 pet ops at a problem, you're, you know, you can run, you know, some really, really old version of TensorFlow and probably get to the same answer.

• 41:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I actually think they published, I'm gonna find it while you guys are chatting, but they published what the compute needs were on running this. I'll find it in a second and tell you.

• 41:40David Sacks?

  Let me make one sort of slightly dissenting point on the whole WMD thing. I mean, look, obviously, the, you know, who has access to this technology needs to be controlled. We do have to make sure it doesn't get into the hands of bad actors. But the reality is, there's plenty of existing WMDs out there that have been around for a long time that bad actors could get their hands on. They could already make, you know, extremely dangerous viruses in a lab. They could, you know, take something that's as contagious as smallpox and make it as deadly as a bull or something like that. And it's these new technologies that provide a way for us to combat those WMDs. Because, you know, technology has a tendency to become democratized.

• 42:24David Sacks?

  You know, was it 75 years ago, the US was the only country that had an atomic weapon? Now, what, like, close to 10 have, you know, nuclear atomic weapons? And so, you know, these, these sort of nefarious technologies get democratized anyway. And we really need some of these new technologies and new abilities as a way to combat them. It's like last week, we were talking about the ability now to basically print,

• 42:53David Sacks?

  you know, a vaccine using this mRNA technique within two days. You know, you could imagine, you know, if, if, if someone tried to use a bioweapon and create a new virus, we could print a vaccine the next day. Those are the kinds of capabilities we're gonna need to fight the spread of WMD.

• 43:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right. It's just that you then have a law of large numbers problem. Meaning, you know, the previous problem before is you had 180, 190, 200 state-sponsored actors. So if you had a 1%, you know, rate of people who are just bad, you're talking about two states. Now, when you talk about 5 billion people getting access to code that's basically running an AWS or GCP instance someplace, and you have a 1%, you know, bad guy rate, all of a sudden, that 1% really matters. And I think that's the problem. It's just the law of large numbers, David, applied to very, very small rates of immorality.

• 43:44David Friedberg?

  But I mean, you can already do very scary things with, you know, recombinant DNA, taking DNA from one organism, putting it in another and sending that organism out and, you know, theoretically, you could have designed a virus that would spread throughout humanity and cause a lot of death, right? I mean, there's a lot of this capability out there.

• 44:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Except that people would have found that out, because like you can't run these labs and you're not going to get, you know, monkey models or mouse models. It's like, there's a trail of breadcrumbs there that is easier to track, wouldn't you agree, than just running an instance in a simulation on GCP, sending it someplace to then have a protein printed that comes in a FedEx envelope to you?

• 44:18Jason Calacanis?

  And you have to hire people. As we saw in Iran with, you know, their chief scientist being whacked by whoever accidentally whacked him with 60 people. Like, you need to have the brain power to do this. Once you have the brain power to do it, you can track that brain power. And we had, for the last, I think it's like since we even tested nuclear bombs, we've had these special planes flying around the globe looking for the signature of nuclear detonations or any kind of nuclear fallout. And we've been flying those forever.

• 44:50David Friedberg?

  Look, I think bio defense is going to become probably one of the biggest industries on planet Earth, starting in the latter half of this century, because you're going to get to a point where digital biology is like a tool, just like software was in the 80s, where suddenly everyone could access it, everyone could use it, everyone could do stuff with it. You have this ubiquity of scary shit happening, hackers everywhere.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  But wait, hold on, Friedberg, didn't we have that as well in those same claims about nuclear power and we've been able to, for a hundred years?

• 45:16David Friedberg?

  No. Look, with nuclear in particular...

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  Or close to a hundred years, make it illegal.

• 45:20David Friedberg?

  With nuclear in particular, there is a material problem. You have to source and refine material to do something scary. With biology, you don't. You can do this anywhere. You can do it on your desktop at home. And, you know, it's getting easier, cheaper, faster, and you can use software and a printer and, you know, a cheap sequencer and do stuff.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  Do we believe that China has this, Friedberg?

• 45:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 45:40David Friedberg?

  China, for sure. Yeah, I mean, look, this is, yeah.

• 45:42Jason Calacanis?

  Are they ahead of DeepMind or behind DeepMind?

• 45:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent.

• 45:46David Friedberg?

  So here's the stat- That's the DeepMind put out. It took um the equivalent of 100 to 200 GPUs run over a few weeks uh to build this model.

• 45:53Jason Calacanis?

  That is no fact.

• 45:54David Friedberg?

  I don't care how advanced DeepMind is at this point.

• 45:56Jason Calacanis?

  That's nothing.

• 45:57David Friedberg?

  So you know, if that's the the model, then someone else can replicate that. Uh you know, someone else will replicate that.

• 46:02David Sacks?

  That's what happened to to AlphaZero, the DeepMind chess engine. After they proved it, now there's a whole bunch of uh chess AIs.

• 46:11David Friedberg?

  I think I think I think we're within within one year, Jake Howl, of a lot of startups replicating this AlphaFold uh technique. And then using that to go do drug discovery and you'll see 50 startups getting funded 12 to 18 months from now, based on some novel protein idea. Um and I think that this will.

• 46:28Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta get our beats wet on this on the ISAs. Everybody go to, this is getting ridiculous. Everybody go to the syndicate.com slash all in.

• 46:36David Friedberg?

  But I but I will make my.

• 46:37David Sacks?

  We should create a protein.

• 46:38David Friedberg?

  Go ahead.

• 46:38David Sacks?

  We should create a protein folding syndicate.

• 46:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Here it is. Everybody go to the syndicate.com slash all in. If we do this, I'm collecting the emails now.

• 46:49David Friedberg?

  No, but I I will I will I will make my first series of bets less on the application and more on the the protection. I think biodefense 30 years from now is gonna be so important.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  All right. If you want to invest with the best ease.

• 47:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can there, is there gonna be a protein that prevents Rudy Giuliani from farting?

• 47:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, what is going on, Sax? Let's throw to you as our resident right wing uh.

• 47:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm joking, I'm joking, Sax. Don't take it so personal. We know you didn't vote for Trump. We know you did a write-in vote for for Tucker Carlson.

• 47:22Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you this. Have you have you or have you not had dinner with Tucker Carlson?

• 47:28David Sacks?

  Um.

• 47:28Jason Calacanis?

  That's a big pause. I call. All in.

• 47:32David Sacks?

  Um I I've actually, uh yeah, I I um no, I don't think I've had dinner with Tucker, but.

• 47:37Jason Calacanis?

  You've been to a party with Tucker Carlson at Peter Hill's house.

• 47:40David Sacks?

  No, but let me let me let me get to, he he here's what's happening is, well, I feel my dream of gridlock in Washington for the next four years is slipping away. Um you know, the the you know, I described this as sort of like, it was kind of a dream scenario that you had. Have a divided Congress and the Republicans, you know, they won 50. They won 50 seats in the Senate in November and then, you know, because of this stupid rule in Georgia that you have to, you can't just win, you have to win by having over 50%. The Republicans would have had 51, but now these, there's a runoff for these two open seats. And the Republicans were ahead in the polls at the time. They were the more, I think it's mostly it's

• 48:25David Sacks?

  based on the candidates being more popular than the Democratic candidates. But now because of all these antics around the election, the Democrats have both Democratic candidates have pulled ahead.

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 48:36David Sacks?

  And so it's, yeah, they are now both Democratic candidates in the last couple of, last week or so.

• 48:43David Sacks?

  Osip is ahead of Purdue by about two points, which is a stunner because Purdue has already beaten him before. He beat him in the November election. He's, I think a better candidate.

• 48:53Jason Calacanis?

  Though, right? And the, and the margin of error has always swung to the Republican.

• 48:57David Sacks?

  Right. But Warnock is seven points ahead of Loeffler. So that one is outside the margin of error. He's clearly beating her. And it, you know, and now it looks like Purdue's in danger too. The Republicans just need to win one of those in order for us to have, you know, divided government in Washington, which I think tends to produce better results than giving one party all the levers of power.

• 49:24David Sacks?

  But, but this is, this is the crazy thing. And so I think even from Trump's point of view, you know, I think this is a branding exercise to, you know, prove that he didn't lose. The problem is.

• 49:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. How's that going?

• 49:36David Sacks?

  Well, it's not working and it looks like it's going to cost Republicans the Senate, which is something that I think he won't come back from. So if I was advising the president, I would tell him to drop this, you know, these, these legal challenges. They fired Sidney Powell from the legal team, which I think was a good decision because of her crazy wild allegations, but now Rudy's out there doing the same stuff.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  Rudy Giuliani.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  The answer that I gave you is they didn't bother to interview a single witness.

• 50:06Jason Calacanis?

  Rudy Giuliani, he was suggesting, he wasn't waking up the genie. He was, he was tucking his pants in, laying down in the bedroom, having a drink with a Russian underage.

• 50:15David Sacks?

  I mean, Rudy is just, I mean, fresh off his, his guest starring appearance in the Borat movies. I mean, it's like.

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  Uncredited, uncredited.

• 50:22David Sacks?

  Uncredited, yeah. It's like he's reenacting my cousin Vinny or something in these, um, in these hearings.

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. How many?

• 50:30David Sacks?

  But it's gonna cost Republicans the Senate.

• 50:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think they're, it's so amazing. Like the Democrats basically have now have a stone cold free roll because there is a very good chance that these guys are going to, um, win these two Senate seats, which would just be absolutely incredible, absolutely incredible.

• 50:47David Sacks?

  So, so Republicans are definitely figuring this out. Rich Lowry had a great column. He's a editor of National Review. He's on the right, but I think provides very good, objective political analysis. He's sound, his last column sounded the alarm bells about what was happening in Georgia. And look, if the, if the issue in the Georgia runoffs is, are these antics? If it's Rudy and Sidney Powell, the Republicans are gonna lose the seat, the both seats. If the question of the election is whether Democrats should have a free hand to ram through whatever legislation they want, then I think the Republicans win. So the question is, what is that election going to be about? And the longer that Rudy stays on the stage, making these crazy wild allegations, the worse it gets for Republicans.

• 51:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When is the Georgia runoff election?

• 51:31David Sacks?

  I think it's January 5th or 10th. It's one of those two. January 5th, I think.

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  My gosh. Would anybody here, if they had gray hair, and I know we have three gentlemen on the call who have gray hair, Friedberg, somehow you're, you're, you're, you might be, maybe I've answered this question already.

• 51:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just not on his head.

• 51:51Jason Calacanis?

  Would any of you dye your hair if you were a 79, 87 year old Rudy Giuliani?

• 52:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, my hair is white and getting whiter. It's like, it is what it is. It's a passage of time. I would just move on.

• 52:06Jason Calacanis?

  David, would you consider? Just taking that gray rod out of your hair because you have the silver fox as it stands. Would you ever consider it?

• 52:15David Sacks?

  You can see the decision I've made, but um, look, that's not, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, that was just like a meltdown. I mean,

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  A literal meltdown.

• 52:25David Sacks?

  A literal meltdown and

• 52:28Jason Calacanis?

  It was so like representative of the moment.

• 52:31David Sacks?

  The congressional Republicans want to use a hook to get Rudy off the stage. I mean, they cannot wait to get him off the stage and

• 52:39Jason Calacanis?

  Why don't they just stand up and just tell Trump to shut this down?

• 52:43David Sacks?

  I think, I think it's coming. It's coming. So.

• 52:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Oh, wow. So the Republicans are going to stand up to Trump with four weeks left in office. Wow. What a profile in courage. Friedberg, are you dying your hair? Do you have gray hair and are you actually dying it or have you not hit the gray yet? Just tell us right now. It's an emergency pod.

• 53:00David Friedberg?

  No. This is the truth. David, are you dying your hair? Yes or no? This is it. This is all natural, baby.

• 53:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So many ways. Have an opinion on whether Trump is allowed to pre pardon himself and his kids?

• 53:15Jason Calacanis?

  That's exactly where I was going.

• 53:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah, sex.

• 53:18David Sacks?

  Well,

• 53:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, our right wing.

• 53:19David Sacks?

  He can definitely pardon his kids. I don't know that there's an open legal question whether he can pardon himself.

• 53:24David Friedberg?

  Can you pre pardon?

• 53:26Jason Calacanis?

  What does it mean pre pardon in this definition?

• 53:28David Sacks?

  I don't, you can't.

• 53:29David Friedberg?

  You can only pardon for a committed crime, right? I mean, that's traditionally.

• 53:33Jason Calacanis?

  No, Nixon was a blanket, right?

• 53:35David Sacks?

  Well, you can pardon for things that happened in the past. Um, I don't think you can pardon for things that happen in the future.

• 53:40Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have to define it? You can get a blanket pardon.

• 53:43David Sacks?

  No, I don't think you have to define it. I think you could just do a blanket pardon. Um, the, I would advise Trump not to do it if I were one of his advisors. And the reason is that he can only pardon for federal. And the big problem the Trump family has right now are these, you know, the Southern District of New York, these mad doc prosecutors who are Democrats. This is, you know, I don't approve of it. This is, this is, to me, this is the, to me, this is the criminalization of political differences. I don't, I think it'd be great if he could pardon because I do think that those guys are. Again, they're trying to criminalize political differences, but but pardoning doesn't solve the problem with the Southern District of New York.

• 54:23David Sacks?

  And Biden has already said that he doesn't believe in having any having these having like a federal investigation of Trump. And so I don't think I don't think Trump has anything to worry about federally. I think the problem is.

• 54:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  God, can I just say Biden is just so fucking decent and classy? Like, isn't it refreshing? It's actually boring, but isn't it just refreshing? About? Biden is just so decent. Who's Biden? Like, I haven't seen that guy. Has he worked for us? Oh, he's been great. No, I mean, like, he's been. Disappeared. Look, he doesn't disappear. He's just not crazy.

• 55:00David Sacks?

  He's Biden Biden Biden has done a really has done a few really smart things. I mean, in his acceptance speech, he did what Churchill advises you to do in victory, which is be magnanimous. He's made the right sort of sounds towards reconciliation. I think saying that he didn't believe in going after Trump criminally. I mean, look, I I don't think that would have been a good political move anyway, because it would have created a backlash. But it was a smart thing to say. And so he and then I think the other smart thing he's done is, which is very Biden anyway, which is he's gone establishment all the way for his cabinet. He has not put he hasn't named any totally crazy progressives to his cabinet yet that the Republicans could latch on to for the Georgia runoffs.

• 55:44David Sacks?

  And so Biden's doing a very good job right now of appearing non-threatening and doing nothing to nothing to blow up his honeymoon.

• 55:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He and his visors have run a perfect, perfect. Flawless. It's been flawless. I mean, David, you just nailed it. Like, all of all the things he could have done to potentially put the Senate at risk or to potentially give Republicans sort of something to hang their hats on. He has given zero space, right? Like, he has not created a single opening. So you you would have thought that coming into this election cycle, the way that Trump tried to paint Biden was like this, you know, gaffeaholic. And instead, he has just been picture pitch perfect.

• 56:24David Sacks?

  Well, I think I think I think he's a he's a gaffe machine when he speaks spontaneously, which he has not done. I mean, every time I've seen him speak since the elections, be reading off a teleprompter. But I think that his campaign has run a really good they have run a good strategy. And now, look, it helps that the press doesn't really challenge.

• 56:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is like the it's like it's like Weekend at Bernie's, except it's like Presidency at Bernie's. You know, it's like

• 56:48Jason Calacanis?

  They hit him in a basement.

• 56:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He only reads off the teleprompter, hold him up, put him in the on the stage.

• 56:53David Sacks?

  But yeah, the press let him get away with it. I mean, no, no other candidate could have gotten away with a basement strategy. But the press was so determined to go after Trump that they really gave him a free pass on what Biden believed and what he was gonna do. But look, Biden has run Biden Biden has run a very good campaign and a very good transition. And really, I think the biggest mistake he made during the campaign was not declaring definitively that he would not try to pack the street court. That was his big mistake. And what happened? The voters split the ticket to give the Senate to the Republicans so that Biden wouldn't be able to pack the court. And so he wouldn't be able to do it anyway. And I think maybe his administration has learned from that mistake, which is don't do anything or say anything that's gonna give Republicans something to

• 57:37David Sacks?

  latch on to to say that Biden is really a radical, we got to stop him. And anyway, so to now, Georgia's in play and Biden could win the Senate.

• 57:45Jason Calacanis?

  That's a perfect insight, Stacks, because what you haven't seen as well is you haven't seen Kamala Harris out there all that much, because that's something Republicans could glom on to. And you haven't seen AOC, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren. They are persona non grata. They are not involved in this.

• 58:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow, they are MIA.

• 58:02Jason Calacanis?

  They are MIA. And they the Democrats won't bring them up. And you have Bernie Sanders, like, wasn't he supposed to be in charge of like?

• 58:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elon Omar wants to cancel rent and mortgages. I mean, they're throwing

• 58:14Jason Calacanis?

  That was classic.

• 58:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they're throwing everything out there just to see if anything sticks right now.

• 58:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, Biden Biden has really given Bernie Sanders and that wing of the party the high hat in the in these cabinet choices. In fact, he just named a woman to be the head of the of OMB, the you know, the budget who has a huge Twitter feud with Bernie Sanders and the Bernie, the Bernie folks are up in arms about it. I don't think she's going to get through. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, Biden has really, um, stiff armed a lot of the progressives.

• 58:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He doesn't want to be associated with the hysterical left. I mean, it's a, why would you want to?

• 58:51David Friedberg?

  I also, I also think it's I think it's an appeal to the right. I mean, he is, he is appealing to the right to some extent, right? I mean, like by, by not putting those people in place. I think all the moderates on the right are

• 59:03David Sacks?

  He's never going to be able to appeal to the Trump base, but what he's going to be able to do is prevent the Republicans from, from sort of labeling him as a radical and therefore, and therefore, you know, win over those independents that he needs.

• 59:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, back to, back to Trump for one second. I apologize because I wanted to ask you, David. I mean, the other thing that could tip Georgia is this whole craziness where Trump is like, I'm going to veto the, the defense bill unless we repeal section 230. And if you're, you know, um, a military person in Georgia, you're like, wait a second. You're going to leave my brothers and sisters in arms, basically lolly gagging without any financial support because you don't like Twitter's tweet policy? It's going to seem kind of crazy.

• 59:50David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was, it was one of these like classic Trump moves where you feel like, I, I think he does have a good point with respect to the, the social media companies. I do think they've been engaging in censorship. They've overstepped their bounds. They are, they, they do deserve some sort of cup comeuppance or control. I personally don't think that repealing to to a, uh, two third, was it 280? Um, is the, uh, section 230 is the way to go.

• 1:00:18David Sacks?

  It's, um, it for a bunch of reasons that we could get into if you want, but, um, but, but yeah, it was one of these like reflexive Trump, Trump, you know, tweets. And you, you heard Republicans in, in the Senate were very, very quick to shoot it down. Um, and you know, there was an article in Politico where, um, Republicans were quoted, well anonymously saying they're pretty sick of this shit. That was the quote. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that Republicans on Capitol Hill are kind of ready for, for, for those types of antics to be over.

• 1:00:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, should he, or will he pardon himself and the kids? Like, I mean, I guess that's what it comes down to. And then I think we should move on.

• 1:00:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't, I don't, I don't think so. And I don't think it'll matter because I think Biden will leave him alone and it will not help his biggest risk. And this is, by the way, why they tried to get Jay Clayton to resign from the SEC and move over to the Southern District of New York because they thought maybe he could run some kind of interference. But, I mean, I think the state AGs will want a pound of flesh here.

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  And, and so should they?

• 1:01:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If I were advising.

• 1:01:23Jason Calacanis?

  Or should we move on?

• 1:01:24David Sacks?

  Yeah, just, if I were advising Trump and, and advising him on how to maximize his legacy, it would be, you know, pardon, pardon people in the administration have been treated unfairly. There's no need to pardon yourself. Um, I don't, I don't think he has federal exposure. Um, and I would, and I would tell him that, you know, if Republicans lose these Georgia Senate seats, that he will be blamed for, uh, among the base for a long time. And that I think will be hard for him to get past, uh, in four years. And so it's very important, I think, for him to make sure that, that at least Purdue wins his election.

• 1:02:02David Friedberg?

  Yeah. What do you guys, can I ask another question? What do you think is going to happen with, um, so Trump is trying to make his case, um, but no one's listening. Twitter keeps putting up his fraudulent, you know, uh,

• 1:02:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is disputed.

• 1:02:19David Friedberg?

  Claims, disputed claims thing. And he's been pushing Newsmax and OANN. Do you think those become viable and real kind of media businesses now? And are they actually going to steal an audience away from Fox News?

• 1:02:32David Sacks?

  A hundred percent. It's already happened. It's just the increasing fragmentation of media, right?

• 1:02:38David Friedberg?

  The cable networks don't pick them up, do they?

• 1:02:41David Friedberg?

  The cable companies?

• 1:02:42David Sacks?

  I've seen, I've seen Newsmax, Newsmax has a cable channel.

• 1:02:45Jason Calacanis?

  My theory is this entire twisted, like crazy right, alt-right mania just fades into oblivion. And the Republican Party reinvents itself.

• 1:02:56David Sacks?

  No, no.

• 1:02:57Jason Calacanis?

  Cause they can't win. They can't win, David. They can't win with this brand of crazy.

• 1:03:00David Sacks?

  They did, they did win.

• 1:03:01Jason Calacanis?

  They did, and they will not in the future because they just lost.

• 1:03:03David Sacks?

  The Republicans won like 10 or 12 seats in the House. They've almost got the majority back in the House. They almost certainly will win back the House and retire Nancy Pelosi in two years during the midterm election. I'll put money on that right now. They held the Senate.

• 1:03:19Jason Calacanis?

  Local elections.

• 1:03:20David Sacks?

  They held the Senate.

• 1:03:21Jason Calacanis?

  The presidency again with this strategy. You think they can win with the demographic shift with Trump in 2024? Really?

• 1:03:28David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Jason Calacanis?

  You think people want to go back to that level of crazy?

• 1:03:32David Sacks?

  No, no, no. People, people don't, they don't want the, they don't want the crazy, but this idea that the issue set that Trump ran on and won on is dead. I don't, I don't agree with that.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44David Sacks?

  Those issues are still there.

• 1:03:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You'll have a better branded face and a standard bearer for those issues. And if you say it in a less crazy way, and you're generally less crazy, I think that it will resonate with a lot more people than have already proven that it resonates with. It already resonates with 70 million. Could it resonate with 75 and could they overtake the White House? It's not inconceivable. So I think, I think we can't all of a sudden say this is signed, sealed and delivered. It's a fait accompli and all of a sudden it's just Democrats the rest of the way. David's right. The down ballot results for the Democrats were not good. And it's a sign that moderate centrism is the only winning strategy. If you really have a strategy where it's like, I really want to win and not just me, but my party and generations of people after me. You have to run a centrist campaign.

• 1:04:30Jason Calacanis?

  Which is why they're retiring the AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Bro contingent, right? So if the Democrats marginalize that group of crazy.

• 1:04:39David Sacks?

  Right. There was a, there was a Democratic House member, I think Elizabeth Spanberger, who almost lost her seat, I think in like a Virginia, like kind of a swing Virginia district. There was a big call of the Democratic House Caucus. And she was just laying into Pelosi and the leadership there. Because she was basically saying, don't ever mention defund the police again. You know, if you want me to win my my swing district next time, do not mention this ever again. And she was just, this was all in the Washington Post, you know, they, um, the the call was leaked by about a dozen different press outlets, which tells you there was a lot of unhappiness among the House members who almost lost their seat because of these like radical ideas.

• 1:05:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other, the other thing is, and you know, unless all of a sudden the, the folks that are in their twenties and thirties are radically different than many, many generations before them. The reality is that they will, as they get older and wealthier, generally speaking, get more conservative. And we are about to go through, over the next 20 years, 30 trillion dollars of wealth transfer. And so, you know, I mean, you can wear

• 1:05:49Jason Calacanis?

  Good segue.

• 1:05:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But buttons on buttons on flannel. But at the end of the day, when your, you know, mom and dad pass, pass away. And all of a sudden, you know, you have four, five, six, seven, eight million bucks. And you have to think about your children and your children's children. I tend to think people generally do, very predictably, get more conservative. And so, again, another reason why you can't count on a staid interpretation of progressivism. There will be progressivism. I think it just will be a different form of policy and it'll just be more moderate and centrist and it'll be normal.

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, which is a perfect segue to the New York Times story that came out on the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 27th. The rich kids who want to tear down capitalism, socialist minded millennials, millennial heirs are trying to live their values by getting rid of their money. Lately, Sam Jacobs, and I'll read just a little bit of it, has been having a lot of conversations with his family's lawyers. He's trying to gain access to his trust of 30, his 30 million dollar trust fund. At 25, he's hit the age where many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cards. He doesn't want to do that. But by wealth management standards, his plans are just as bad. He wants to give it all away. I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars is possible.

• 1:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  A socialist's college, Mr. Jacobs, sees his family's extreme, plutocratic wealth as both a moral and economic failure. His parents must be very proud of him.

• 1:07:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  First of all, Sam Jacobs sounds like an idiot and he shouldn't have any money. So hopefully he gets his wish.

• 1:07:19Jason Calacanis?

  Why did his parents give him thirty million dollars? This trust fund should be like given to somebody who deserves it.

• 1:07:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but, but, what, what Sam, what Sam Jacobs wants doesn't mean that Sam Jacobs gets to decide for everybody else. And just because that he wants to live in a communist country, he can go and find one. And the reality is like, you know, we just talked about Alpha Fold. Well, guess what? You know, there's four of us on this, on this podcast today that over the next twenty or thirty years are more than likely going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in protein design. And I don't do that with any sense of shame.

• 1:07:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I'm glad that Stuart Butterfield made me, you know, a lot of money because it's going to go, go back into the world in positive ways. And, you know, maybe if my children are taught properly, they'll be able to take a small piece of that and they'll decide that, you know, there's something else that's important to them. But the reality is that everybody should be allowed to make their own decisions. And I don't want somebody like him, especially a twenty-five-year-old dipshit, telling me or my kids, who even though they're, you know, under the age of fifteen, are probably smarter than him, what to do.

• 1:08:27Jason Calacanis?

  David, when you read this article, if you did read it, what were your thoughts? Especially in regards to parenting and thinking about our own kids. Because that's what I started thinking about. I was like, oh, my God, what if one of my daughters wants to take her trust fund and just throw it into the wind? I really don't want a communist.

• 1:08:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, hold on. I just want to say one thing. The part that's completely reasonable and that I respect is this, this twenty-five-year-old seems to have come to a decision. What I find completely unreasonable and, you know, just completely lathered with insecurity is his need to then project it and say it has to be true for everybody else as well. And the grand arcing statements of how it should never be just completely betrays, you know, what we've learned in how society functionally works. Like, if you want democracy, the only sort of economic philosophy that's been partnered with with democracy to work well is capitalism. And so if you want to change one, you're going to have to change the other. And just the fact that, you know, with all of his education, the hundreds of

• 1:09:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  millions of dollars, you know, didn't get a course in civics to understand that is kind of sad.

• 1:09:33Jason Calacanis?

  I just, before you go, David, I have to read one comment, because it's so deranged, that it almost seems like it was part of a script to like some billions or secession. Heirs whose wealth have come from specific sources sometimes use that history to guide their giving. That's a New York Times saying that. Pierre Delahunt, a 32-year-old socialist anarchist Marxist communist, or all of the above, has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather's outlet mall empire. When I, and this is, Mr., I'm sorry, MX, I've never seen that before, Delahunt. How do you pronounce Max Hunt? How do you

• 1:10:16Jason Calacanis?

  pronounce MX? MX Delahunt takes non-gendered pronouns. Has anybody seen MX? I've never seen that.

• 1:10:25David Sacks?

  That was the first time, yeah.

• 1:10:27Jason Calacanis?

  That's the first for me. So I guess if you're non-gendered.

• 1:10:29David Sacks?

  So you don't have to say mister or miss or misses.

• 1:10:33Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. It's like Latinx, where you just can group a bunch of people into one thing. I got it. This is what MX Delahunt says. I'm just trying to figure out how it's pronounced. Maxus Hunt Delahunt.

• 1:10:48Jason Calacanis?

  Taking a shot.

• 1:10:50David Sacks?

  Jason, you're not showing respect for his pronouns.

• 1:10:54Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to get canceled. It just is kind of hard to pronounce MX. I don't mean to laugh, but I need somebody to tell me how to pronounce MX.com.

• 1:11:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is the quote that is so insane. When I think about outlet malls, and I think this is what we all think about when we think about outlet malls. When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression. What's the first thing that comes to mind, Friedberg, when you think of an outlet mall?

• 1:11:25David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Certainly, it's intersectional oppression or a subway.

• 1:11:28David Friedberg?

  You know, look, I just, can I just point out, like, the, um, the New York Times has become a little bit sensationalist, like, you know, if you were to ask statistically, what percentage of people that are inheriting wealth are gonna be stupid like this, the answer would probably be pretty low. But they find the one or two characters like this and they build the story around them. And then people extrapolate that as if that is the persona of the entire population of people that are gonna inherit some degree of wealth, and that becomes the story. And I'm just so sick of it, like, I don't read the New York Times anymore. And look, I love the New York Times, I would read it every single day, I still have it on my phone, I still pay for my subscription, but I'm so sick of the narrative being written by the author's objective. And then they go and find one or two facts that meet that narrative.

• 1:12:11David Friedberg?

  And rather than speaking about it statistically and saying, we surveyed 100 people that were wealthy, this is how many. And if it, if it was 60% of them saying, I'm gonna go give away all my wealth and do crazy shit. Great, like, that's the story.

• 1:12:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But again, that's-

• 1:12:24David Friedberg?

  But picking, picking, picking an individual and building the narrative around that individual as if that is the-

• 1:12:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but David, but David, and this is the point, like, what they do is they don't even talk about people who want to give their money away. What they do is they create these caricatures around this, like, judgment, judgment. It's, it's all about this, like, judgment, it's like, you know, I am, it's virtue, it's like, I am holier than everybody else because of these decisions that I made, and I just find it so offensive. Now, here's, can I just tell you, I had my physical last week, and I have a doctor in LA who's superb, and he's, he's in many ways sort of a philosopher king to me. He's been incredibly important in my life, and, you know, I-

• 1:13:00David Friedberg?

  Dr. Agus?

• 1:13:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I talked to, his name, his name is Christian Rena, uh, at Lifespan Medicine, but, uh, anyways. And here's what you're, and I talked to Chris about raising kids and Chris has seen, you know, thousands of people over the course of his, you know, journey as a primary care physician. And he's seen the kids of these folks and et cetera. And, you know, he boiled it down to me. It's like, um, you know, your job as a parent is to make sure that your children have incredible tools, married with incredible habits. And so some of these things are very simple like food and, you know, how to eat and self-care and exercise. But some of these things are really important, which is a worldview, empathy, and he uses this word which is called awareness.

• 1:13:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And awareness is this idea that you understand the world around you. And that's an incredibly difficult thing for parents to be able to teach their kids. But it seems like if you could give them that, that's independent of anything other than time and care, right? It doesn't matter whether you're rich or you're poor. It doesn't really matter whether you're black or you're white. You can really teach the concept of awareness and empathy. And then the other thing that he taught me was, you know, there's a really big difference between folks like you, meaning guys like me, who grew up poor and who are focused on the generation of money, right? Meaning making money. And some of you make it, some of you don't, but you're living in this existential threat that you feel is hanging over you. And so you go out and you

• 1:14:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  make it. And a lot of it is driven by this insecurity you've had since you were young. But make no mistake, your children's lives is harder than yours, and it's about the utilization of money. And whether they want to give it away or whether they want to use it, you have a responsibility to teach them, whether you're giving them a dollar, a million dollars, or a billion dollars. And this is where I think somewhere along the way, these kids as parents, you know, may or may not have done the best, maybe they did the best they could, but somewhere along the way, these gaps are obvious, at least in the telling of the article. And this is where I go back to, if you're really going to talk about something like this, which actually is quite important, because again, we're going to go through the, the most enormous wealth transfer in the history of the world in the next 20 years, 30 trillion dollars. That could,

• 1:15:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  so talk about that. If, if enough people took their inheritance and decided to eradicate student debt, it would be 3% of what's going to be inherited over the next 20 years. Think about it. So, obviously, you can do some incredible things, but it's not framed in the right way. It doesn't promote the right kind of discussion, and all it is is salacious reporting that makes these kids look like caricatures.

• 1:15:37David Friedberg?

  And by the way, remember, that money today is invested somewhere. So to pull that 3% out would have a kind of triple, kind of rippling and kind of, um, probably deleterious effect on, on.

• 1:15:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, these are.

• 1:15:51David Friedberg?

  Stock a little lower.

• 1:15:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, forget about that. It's a factories, family owned businesses.

• 1:15:56David Friedberg?

  This is my point also, is I think that there's a responsibility to these stewards of capital, right? They, they, they may be, you can call them wealthy all you want, but they really are the people that pull the strings and where money's moving. Um, and there's a, I think, you know, to your point, kind of a, a degree of responsibility that inevitably has to kind of sit with this, uh, this group, uh, because that capital is sitting somewhere.

• 1:16:15David Sacks?

  Here's the problem with it is if they just want to give their money away to a charity that they thought was worthy and that, and they were willing to live like, you know, monks or something and not need money, that'd be fine, you know, we could respect that. But the reason why they're in such a hurry to get rid of this wealth is because they feel like money itself is ill-gotten, that wealth itself is, is by definition ill-gotten. It must have come from, at the expense of somebody else, right? It, it, you only could have gotten that wealth by ripping people off. And that is the thing that, that's the idea that's really pernicious about this sort of like socialism movement, is they don't really understand that the way capitalism works,

• 1:16:57David Sacks?

  you only get rich by selling something to somebody that they want that makes their life better, right? I mean, all of us are engaged in the creation of new technologies and new products, and that makes the world better and people want to pay for that. And that's what creates value and, and that's what creates wealth. And it's really just kind of sad that people, you know, are, and it goes beyond this article on these trust fund kids, but this whole condemnation of capitalism and this attack on any, you know, billionaires or whatever. Um, the problem with it is it doesn't recognize the way that value is created for everybody.

• 1:17:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I, uh, can I give you a quote?

• 1:17:34David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  From Walter Williams, who just passed away, who's a very famous economist. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow men. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow men. And that's really true. And somewhere along the way, folks, folks have lost the script and have all of a sudden gone back to prehistoric capitalist times. And I think that we don't have enough good examples of constructive capitalism that prove that this is not a bad word.

• 1:18:09David Sacks?

  Yeah, I give it, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love the Walter Williams quote. Just to give another example, Jeff Bezos just gave $10 billion to climate change.

• 1:18:20Jason Calacanis?

  And you know what, this kid Teddy, what's the kid's name? Teddy Schaefer or something like that? The journalist? Has been riding him on Twitter. I think he works for Vox or something like, they have basically been attacking Bezos since he made the announcement that he hasn't done enough. And it's like, $10 billion is the largest contribution ever made to a single cause. I mean, obviously, Bill Gates getting into his foundation.

• 1:18:44David Sacks?

  Right. And how did he do that? Because he created Amazon, which has created enormous value for all of us. Imagine if one of these kids in the article, instead of just giving their money away, by the way, it looks like there's a bunch of organizations that have sprung up to scam these kids out of their trust fund. It's sort of, you know, a fool and their money are a fool and their money are soon parted. There's a whole bunch of scam artists who are trying to scam these kids, but yeah, I mean, they're definitely getting scammed. But imagine if instead of just getting scammed out of their money, they were to use it to create a business that created a new product or technology that served people. Then maybe they could turn that 30 million into 10 billion like Bezos did.

• 1:19:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and if they lost it, they would have done it in the pursuit of something really grand. And so nobody would actually

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

  Instead of virtue signaling.

• 1:19:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Instead of virtue signaling on the New York Times.

• 1:19:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like these guys were so glad to be in the New York Times to dunk on capitalists and dunk and literally dunk on their own parents. Think about that. You hate your parents so much. You have to go to the New York Times and tell them how much you hate them. I mean, I don't know how this changes.

• 1:19:43David Sacks?

  Well, by the way, so speaking of virtue signaling in the New York Times, can we talk about the New York Times writing that hit piece on Coinbase?

• 1:19:49Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I mean, if you want to go there, I mean, this is the third rail of the podcast, but we've been talking about Brian Armstrong, just to set the table here. Brian Armstrong wrote a memo. He said, "No politics at work."

• 1:20:01David Friedberg?

  By the way, J. Cal, I just posted an image for Nick to put up here, just to...

• 1:20:05Jason Calacanis?

  Don't tell me it's a code 13 at Sacks again.

• 1:20:08David Friedberg?

  No, this is not a code 13. It's to reinforce your point about the, you know, the virtue of capitalism, you know, this kind of dates back to, these are three images, three charts from the year 1500 to today.

• 1:20:20Jason Calacanis?

  Energy use has grown 115 times.

• 1:20:23David Friedberg?

  Well, so this is basically a measure of population, consumption and production, right? And so, the capitalist incentive has driven the ability, while population has grown 14x over the last 500 years, it's driven a nearly 10x increment in what is available for humans to consume per capita during that period of time. I mean, think about that. That was driven entirely by industry. And so, industry has enabled, and production has increased by 240x. So, we have a surplus of goods on planet Earth, and a surplus of access to goods because of the capitalist incentive over the last 500 years.

• 1:21:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And whose right is it to say that that was wrong? And all of the people that are employed by it and live within that mechanism?

• 1:21:08Jason Calacanis?

  And who are no longer living in poverty, who are no longer slaves.

• 1:21:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All of a sudden, 50,000 people convert to Signal because they're sitting in their warm homes in America, telling everybody else to fuck off? I mean, I find it kind of a joke. I mean, I would like you to go and live, you know, where I was supposed to live before I emigrated.

• 1:21:24David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:21:24Jason Calacanis?

  Sri Lanka.

• 1:21:26David Friedberg?

  No heater, no roof, no food, etc.

• 1:21:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what these kids should do. They should go to North Korea.

• 1:21:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You go, come to Sri Lanka, I can show you. You go to an outhouse, okay? You sit there, you squat to go to the bathroom, okay? There's no fucking three ply, you know, bamboo, you know, press-free toilet paper to deal with. You know, you literally, you know, you clean yourself with your hand, you brush your teeth with coal. I remember, we used to brush our teeth with fucking coal, okay? We have a well for water. And so, you have all these people in these situations where all we wanted was to just have a chance to run the race. And the people that were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, who had the chance to run the race, turns around and tells guys like me, "No, you can't", and it fucking infuriates me.

• 1:22:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I want to blow up the racetrack, by the way. I want to just get rid of the entire...

• 1:22:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, honestly, fuck you.

• 1:22:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's a serious fuck you to these, to these, like, they were, they profited and they benefited from democracy and capitalism, and now they want to revert back to a system where everybody who's in that system is trying to get into this system.

• 1:22:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They don't understand what feudalism is, because there are so many layers removed through their fucking filtered lenses and, you know, country clubs and bullshit vacations and all this crap, that they have no idea what it's like. And I'm telling you, I am first generation of having escaped that shit, and I don't want anything to do with it.

• 1:22:49David Friedberg?

  But the point is, capitalism has allowed not just the US, but many other countries to change their course in life. Stephen Pickner's, for all of the controversy he creates, his books on, you know, what humans have really achieved during this great kind of era of capitalism and industrialism, and how we've changed our course on planet Earth, improved human health, improved longevity, improved calorie, access to calories, improved access to shelter, to medicine. It's all because of a, an incentive, a market-based incentive system. And it is very, very powerful. It is the most powerful force we know as a species, and it's allowed this incredible acceleration, exponential acceleration of possibility for our species.

• 1:23:31Jason Calacanis?

  Also, from the article, a great quote, Elizabeth Baldwin, a 34-year-old democratic socialist from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy an apartment and raise a family, enjoying the sort of pleasant, middle-class existence denied to many people of color in the United States.

• 1:23:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is, I mean, that's just, I don't know, I just, I, I don't see, let's just move on. Let's talk about Brian.

• 1:23:59Jason Calacanis?

  It's so dumb.

• 1:24:00David Sacks?

  They, they, they see, they see the world in a zero-sum way, where, you know, anything they have means that somebody else must have, it must have been taken away from somebody else. They don't really understand the way that value is created by an exchange and by people creating new things. And, you know, and, and that's what technology is all about, you know, it's creating new things.

• 1:24:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, there was a time when everybody didn't have access to clean water. Now, we take that for granted. There's a time when everybody didn't have access to affordable food, and electricity.

• 1:24:29David Friedberg?

  And by the way, look at how we started.

• 1:24:31Jason Calacanis?

  All of this is driven by capitalism.

• 1:24:33David Friedberg?

  And look at how we started the conversation today. AlphaFold, I, I think, is the realization of one of the greatest capitalist enterprises in history, if not the greatest, you know, alphabet.

• 1:24:43Jason Calacanis?

  And they're still getting started.

• 1:24:44David Friedberg?

  And the output of that is going to be an incredible new tool for drug discovery that is going to extend human lifespan in an incredible way.

• 1:24:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was a window of time where folks who are really, really good at bitching and complaining had a window of opportunity to bitch and complain. And what happened was they were not able to seize power. And then just in the last few months, literally, I think we are nailing that coffin shut. Because as you said, David, you're going to have to all of a sudden like, look at companies like Google and look at things like AlphaFold and reject them. And I don't know how people do, because everyone will need something that that company will create now and that AlphaFold will be responsible for. We are all going to need a vaccine. These are all coming from for-profit companies that thrived on top of R and D. You know, all of it was funded by past drug profits from other things.

• 1:25:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so, you know, we're going to have to really look at ourselves in the mirror and say, did we not want that? Did we want to just die on the street to prove a point? And I don't think anybody actually wants that.

• 1:25:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, what is your, what is the ultimate criticism of Amazon? They made, you know, iPhone chargers $5 instead of being $40.

• 1:25:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the point is, you can't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't actually, you know, complain about Amazon on the one hand, complain about no action on climate change on the other, complain about this, complain about that, complain about the other thing, then you're just a fucking whiner. And nobody wants a whiner around because they're not additive, they're not useful. You don't learn anything from a whiner.

• 1:26:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so looking at the New York Times versus Coinbase, the foul New York Times fake news, sorry, I'm just channeling Trump there. Okay, foul New York Times fake.

• 1:26:24David Sacks?

  Well, talk about, talk about whining. This is more virtue signaling, uh, whining by the New York Times. And actually, the, the, look, this was clearly a hit piece because they don't like Brian Armstrong's decision to make Coinbase an apolitical workplace. If any workplace is chosen to be political, it's the New York Times. There's a lot of examples of that, the fact that they-

• 1:26:46Jason Calacanis?

  They ran Barry Weiss out of there, they-

• 1:26:47David Sacks?

  They ran Barry Weiss out of the newsroom. I mean, this is, these are the most-

• 1:26:50Jason Calacanis?

  They ran the editor page out.

• 1:26:51David Sacks?

  That's right. I mean, they ran James Bennett out of there for publishing an op ed by Tom Cotton. Remember that? He got kicked out. He got forced to resign because he published one op ed by a Republican senator. Okay, this is the most closed minded group, the most closed minded political workplace. And here they are lecturing a Silicon Valley company that in their view isn't tolerant enough. I mean, it's ridiculous, but the but the and it was obvious that it was a hit piece. The stories, the examples in the article were years old.

• 1:27:26David Sacks?

  You know, the they weren't even reported to HR violation as violations at the time. So there's, you know, it's it's people cooking up things that weren't reported as problems at the time. But the but the really interesting thing about the story, I think, is that is the way Coinbase reacted to it by preemptively announcing that it was coming, which really made the New York Times reporters really irate. You know, they called it extremely unprofessional.

• 1:27:54Jason Calacanis?

  The reporters were upset and they threatened that they would no longer. The journalist said, if you guys are going to front run our stories, we are not going to call you when we have a story. And I responded to that. And I was like, are you serious? Like, you're literally going to lose what little integrity you have left about fact checking? Because somebody wrote a preemptive blog post about it.

• 1:28:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll say this about I'll say this about Brian Armstrong. I have a lot of respect for him for making a stand. I think every CEO has that, right? And I'm glad that at the end of the day, the employees at Coinbase were given a humane way of making a decision to be on the same page with him or not. I will also say that I thought that essay was not well written and that, given the chance, I could have rewritten that for him in a much better way. I maintained this the whole time, but I think he's in the right here.

• 1:28:42Jason Calacanis?

  Wrap it up, David. Tell us what you think.

• 1:28:45David Sacks?

  Well, okay, that's interesting that Chamath is, it's interesting to hear your support for Brian. So we've talked about, this has become a recurring topic on the pod. But anyway, I think, you know, the important thing is the way that I think the tech community fought back against this hit piece. And it was the, like you said, Jason, the front rowing of the story. Somebody, a wag on Twitter had a, had a great comment saying, you know,

• 1:29:13David Sacks?

  basically said, you know, I try to walk up, I agree with the New York Times on this. I try to walk up to somebody and kick him in the nuts and they covered their groin. You know, how dare they, you know?

• 1:29:26David Sacks?

  How unprofessional of them.

• 1:29:28Jason Calacanis?

  It was a slow motion kick to the nuts.

• 1:29:30David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. And so

• 1:29:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's coming Sunday. It's Wednesday, but on Sunday, we're kicking you on the nuts.

• 1:29:37David Sacks?

  So yeah, the New York Times, the Coinbase just covered his groin. So the New York Times can cover, kick him in the nuts. And, and of course, the reporters all went hysterical about that. But it, you know, but, but it was a really brilliant PR tactic by Coinbase because what it did is it almost like released a spike protein. You know, by, by sort of a pre announcing New York Times story, it created this spike protein that trained the immune system of Silicon Valley to be ready for this pathogenic New York Times story. And the, the story just really fell flat. It didn't go anywhere.

• 1:30:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was, and they did the same thing with the away CEO. She was too hard on people in Slack. All of these stories to go full circle involve some leak from a Slack room. So if you're a CEO or you're managing anybody, don't have any difficult or legal issues discussed on Slack. Just go for a walk with somebody, talk to them face to face because you're going to get destroyed. All right. Listen, everybody, this has been another amazing episode. We had 10 more stories. We wanted to get to that we weren't able to get to. But while we were doing this, I asked my crack team.

• 1:30:46Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry, at the Syndicate.

• 1:30:48David Friedberg?

  Whoa, what was that?

• 1:30:50Jason Calacanis?

  To set up the syndicate.com slash all in. So I'm not saying we're doing a syndicate.

• 1:30:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, we are. We're gonna figure out how to do something. We're gonna do something to let the people who listen invest alongside us. We're gonna figure it out in 2021 at some point.

• 1:31:06Jason Calacanis?

  But you have to write a review on iTunes.

• 1:31:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you just gotta sign up.

• 1:31:09Jason Calacanis?

  Just gotta sign up at the syndicate.com slash all in. If we do a folding protein company or a unicorn in the ISA space, maybe everybody who listens to the all in podcast gets to wet their beak for the Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wet your beak.

• 1:31:25David Sacks?

  Wet your beak.

• 1:31:29Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get merch.

• 1:31:32Jason Calacanis?

  Wet my, I can't wet my beak is like the merch.

• 1:31:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The T-shirt, the T-shirt guy, the T-shirt guy that listens to us, we love you. There's a code 13, obviously, but wet your beak or wet the beak. We have to figure out which one's better.

• 1:31:43David Sacks?

  I think we have a new, I think we have a new tagline for the pod.

• 1:31:46Jason Calacanis?

  Wet your beak.

• 1:31:47David Sacks?

  Wet your beak.

• 1:31:47Jason Calacanis?

  Wet your beak and code 13. These are great merch opportunities for anybody who wants to go do merch. You can go do merch on your own. We don't care. We're not in the merch business. Put it up on your own website.

• 1:31:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you besties.

• 1:31:59Jason Calacanis?

  Love you besties. So for bestie Rain Man, the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya, and the queen of quinoa himself, Metro Mile, founder, spacker, piper, laying pipe and spax everywhere. I'm Jason Calacanis for the besties. We'll see you next time, which could be in a week or a month, who knows, on the All In Podcast.

• 1:32:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you besties.