E3: Modern Cold War between US & China, economic recovery, potential mass migration out of San Francisco, pandemic politicization & more with David Sacks & David Friedberg

Follow @chamath: https://twitter.com/chamath Follow @jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis 0:01 Jason & Chamath intro David Sacks & David Friedberg 1:15 Everybody gives their quarantine update: Sacks is in Mexico while running Craft remote, Chamath got a new poker table & is excited for shelter-in-place to end, Friedberg is getting back into a rhythm 8:04 Chamath & Sacks reflect on the coming return to normalcy & politicization of the virus 12:41 Sacks on 3 major data-driven discoveries about the virus 15:54 Friedberg on fatality rate data, overestimating the lockdown's impact on stopping the virus 19:32 Getting back to work 21:05 Chamath on the stock market not reflecting the economy, Sacks on what an economic recovery might look like 28:00 Friedberg on potential of another NYC-level outbreak, Chamath on negative impact of left/right culture war 34:05 Sacks on democratic hesitation to end lockdowns giving Trump a strategic advantage, Friedberg on Hydroxychloroquine's benefits/risks 37:57 Sacks on potential resorting of the Bay Area & Silicon Valley due to remote work 41:51 Chamath on benefits of working remote, why San Francisco might lose large numbers of people 45:18 Tesla/Fremont situation a microcosm for politicization of the pandemic, benefits of people starting to distrust inept bureaucrats 49:33 Chamath on the beginning of the modern Cold War, dealing with market conditions considering China's standing in the world, ideological issues 53:46 Sacks on US/China relationship, how US can penalize China 59:25 Friedberg on how US can leapfrog China in manufacturing by using modern, automated solutions

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast with Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihopatia. We record this podcast well, on a, on a really unique schedule Chamath. What's our schedule right now? Whenever we feel like it?

• 0:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, basically, it is whenever our significant others get so sick of us that they kick us out and say, "Don't come back."

• 0:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we get thrown to the pool house. We decide to pop up the podcast. Uh, you're in Atherton. Uh, I'm in the city in San Francisco.

• 0:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thank you, Duke of Discretion. Is there anything else you'd like to do? Tell them my address? My gate code.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  Gate code, up the fence. Um, you know, we had two guests on that people just went absolutely crazy for. Uh, the two Davids.

• 0:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But they weren't available, so.

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  So, we're just gonna talk shit about them. No, we have two amazing Davids in our lives, David Friedberg and David Sacks. And they are super smart, super effective at their work. Uh, everything we're not Chamath. And so we though we bring them back on the podcast and we'll do a little roundtable here and talk about life in the age of Corona. So, welcome back to the podcast, David Sacks.

• 1:04David Sacks?

  Yeah, good to, good to be back with you.

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  And also David Friedberg. Thank you, guys. Happy to be here. All right, fantastic. So, I just want to start off with our quar check. How is everybody doing in this quarantine? How's everybody's mental health? Let's start with you, Sacks.

• 1:22David Sacks?

  Um, well, as you might be able to see, um, we've moved our, our bunker to a undisclosed Mexican location.

• 1:31David Sacks?

  You know, and it's been great. Um, you know, uh, we, you know, I think it, it's really kind of sad because where we're at is, is a tourist city that would normally be, um, at peak season and it's just deserted right now. All the construction stopped. Um, normally you see lots of, you know, hotels and houses, um, being built and that's all stopped. Um, and there's no tourists, so it's all just kind of cleared out. But, um, I think it's quite safe, you know, uh, every uh, worker that I've seen here since we landed at the airport to, you know, God transported to. To this community we're at, I mean, has been wearing a mask, much more consistent than I think in the

• 2:12David Sacks?

  US. And, you know, I think it's been, it's been fine.

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  Now, of course, you founded the Kraft Venture Capital firm, and people know before that you obviously did Yammer and sold that to Microsoft for a billion dollars plus. And before that, you were the COO at PayPal. What's going on with your business? Are you actively investing? And how is your firm running remote?

• 2:40David Sacks?

  It's, it's, it's worked very well. I mean, we've always been super collaborative as a firm. We were always, we were already on Zoom and we were, you know, we share everything on Yammer. And so for us, just moving to Zoom wasn't that difficult. We've done four or five deals, I think, since the whole kind of quarantine started.

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Did you, did you say that you actually use Yammer now in 2020?

• 3:06David Sacks?

  We're still using it.

• 3:07Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God. Is Yammer still available? That's insane.

• 3:12David Sacks?

  I mean, it's kind of gone a little bit buried inside of Microsoft, but you can certainly still get it. And no, we love it. I mean, the whole firm kind of works, works in Yammer. And it works very well for us.

• 3:23Jason Calacanis?

  And now what's going to happen with this incredible office that you have, this beautiful office you have in San Francisco in commercial real estate now that, are you going to come back to work? We saw Twitter and Square, the Jack collection of companies, they're not going to come back to their offices. They're work from home primarily going forward. What are you going to do?

• 3:41David Sacks?

  Well, it'll be a great asset for us in the year 2025 or something like that. No, I mean, we will eventually go back to work there. I think that the team still likes having an office. I think, you know, the idea that everyone wants to work out of like a small room and, you know, extra room in their house, I think is probably getting, it's probably a little overrated. I think people would like to get back to the office. But do we have to have one? No, I mean, I think we've proven that we can do our jobs via Zoom. And, you know, we've done a lot of, we've done, like I said, we've done four or five deals since this started where we haven't met with the entrepreneur in person, you know, it's all been done via Zoom. And it's, it's worked great.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Chamath, how are you doing? What has, what's your mental health like? I, you know, I get to see you once in a while on CNBC throwing bombs. But how are you doing?

• 4:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was really excited for um, phase two of the shelter in place to uh, start here in San Mateo County. So that's been really good. Um, a new poker table that I had built arrived today, which I'll be installing after this. And what I mean by I'll be installing uh,

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  You'll be supervising.

• 4:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll be supervising.

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  You'll be watching as people do real work.

• 5:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Watching and um,

• 5:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's a beautiful table. I saw the pictures of it. Does it have an infinity edge? Is it an infinity edge poker table?

• 5:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It, no, no, no, no, but I'll send you a picture when it's all done, but it just looks stunning. Um, and I really want to try to organize a game soon so that I can get you guys back into the into my little cave here.

• 5:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I am uh, ready for this shelter in place to end. Uh, I'll just be honest. And I think that my sentiments are the sentiments of a lot of people. It's uh, it's really tough. Really, really tough. I, I'm, I'm losing all my motivation to be put on this.

• 5:34Jason Calacanis?

  It is weird to not see people even, and you're an extrovert, uh, David, you're an introvert and then David Friedberg also on the line. Uh, David, uh, how are you handling all of this?

• 5:47David Friedberg?

  I'm fine. I think uh, one of the things that made a huge difference for me is the uh, creating a rhythm in the day because there isn't one when you kind of normally get up and you go to work. And then you come home at the end of the day from work. That's a rhythm and you're, you kind of get kind of adjusted to it. So not having that, a lot of people I've been hearing are struggling with that. I was certainly struggling with it, having sleep issues and uh, I sit on about a dozen boards, some of which are small companies, some of which have a couple hundred employees. And I've been hearing pretty consistently mental health issues across all the companies. Uh, and I think it's just been really grading on people. I think it number one kind of says, we probably do need to be together and have social space. Uh, as David said, like being in the same office, people really miss that and you get a lot of value from that.

• 6:35David Friedberg?

  And I've been getting up every day in the last couple of weeks and going offsite, going out of my house to go work. We're actually working on another place and I have like a little office there and I go kind of work there. And so that's made a huge impact honestly on my mental health, being able to do that every day. So just doing that's been been helpful. Not everyone has that privilege, but I think it speaks a lot to why we're going to need to go back to offices when this is all done.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  And what do you think about what's happening with your businesses? Obviously, you're running a startup studio, I guess would be one way to describe it, where you create companies and then spin them out. What's been the business interruption, if any?

• 7:09David Friedberg?

  We have a couple of hardware and lab companies. That's most of what we've done. And so those operations are paused. So that's been really frustrating. The teams have all found ways to adjust and work from home. So our companies are not predominantly software based. There's a lot of software, but it's not predominantly software. So it's been difficult on those scientists and engineers that work in a lab or in a physical environment that they have to go to to do their work. The larger companies, we have a number of food businesses that happen to be in the food supply chain one way or another. Frankly, those businesses are doing fantastically well. And there's been just this incredible success in the era of COVID on kind of a focus on fundamentals like food, supply chain, efficiency, availability of things that people need. And we were doing a lot in

• 7:52David Friedberg?

  human health and we've kind of benefited from that. So yeah, I think it's kind of a mix for us, but I think every business is bifurcated one way or another during this kind of moment of punctuated equilibrium.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think one thing I'd like to sort of talk about is we've had you both on the podcast early on at the start of the pandemic. And I'm curious, Chamath, now that we're here, over two months in quarantine, sheltering in place, and a lot of information, a lot of cards have turned over here, right? We've seen the flop, I think. We haven't seen the turn in the river, so to speak. What is your assessment of what we were talking about, you know, a month or two ago, and what we thought about this, and what's become reality, and what hasn't? What are you more optimistic about? What are you more pessimistic about? Chamath, let's start with you.

• 8:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that we will have this

• 8:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pandemic or this disease well in hand within two years. And so whether it's a combination of a therapeutic and a vaccine or just a therapeutic. I just think that we're gonna kick its ass. And so that's made me more optimistic. I think that the thing that's made me more pessimistic, though, is the return to normalcy has been sort of cut on political lines. And it's been so massively politicized. I mean, when David talks about the fact that, you know, you can go to a developing country like Mexico and all of a sudden, you know, everybody can get around the idea of masks. It's because that there's a level of common sense there that trumps politics.

• 9:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And in the United States, that just isn't the case. And so what you're seeing in this crazy way, I think, is sort of the center left and the left, probably sticking very firmly to the ideology of sheltering in place and a lockdown, probably on the sort of hope that it gets Trump out of office. And on the other side, sort of the red states, I think, have basically said, hey, I would rather get sick from coronavirus and take my chances than the 100% chance of failure that I have in my professional life if you leave me at home for another week or month or what have you. So that's been a huge disappointment of how political this whole thing has gotten.

• 10:13Jason Calacanis?

  And Sacks, you've been talking about like common sense procedures. Sort of same question to you. What you first thought, and you had been talking about, you thought an L-shaped recovery. So we'll get into also the economy here. But in terms of the disease, what did you think two months ago that you don't think now? And what do you think?

• 10:33David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, in preparation for this, I kind of went through my Twitter feed to see what I was saying the last time I was on the pod and how well it was holding up. And two months ago today, I tweeted that pandemic, that underreaction caused the pandemic and overreaction will cause the depression.

• 10:53David Sacks?

  And I think that's kind of where we are right now. Um, we still have this pandemic with us, but now we're also potentially facing, I think, a potential depression because of the way we're, we're overreacting. We're still in lockdowns, um, in, you know, huge swaths of the, of the country. Um, and, uh, no, no one can quite understand why. I mean, the original reason for the lockdowns was to buy us time so that the hospitals wouldn't become overwhelmed like Italy. Well, no, nowhere in the country did the hospitals get overwhelmed and we're still in these lockdowns. And, um, and so, you know, I, I, I think that, um, it's, it's long overdue for, for it to end. Now, at the same time, you know, where I agree with Tomah that this whole thing's become politicized,

• 11:37David Sacks?

  where, um, you know, the, the, the people who generally want to get us out of lockdowns, don't believe in doing anything. You know, they're not even, you know, a lot of them aren't even willing to wear masks, which I think is just kind of insane. Um, so, you know, where, where I come out on this thing is that I think we should end lockdowns, but wear masks. And it's very hard to find anybody, you know, in the, in the political spectrum who, who agrees with that because, you know, one side wants to keep lockdowns going indefinitely and the other doesn't want us to wear masks.

• 12:09Jason Calacanis?

  And it makes no logical sense, obviously. And if you think about our political system, the left is so far left that the moderates on the left side don't have a place to live anymore. And then on the right, the conservatives, which I would put you in, uh, the group of who were, um, you know, looking for fiscal conservatives, conservatives, um, they don't have a home anymore either. And so the most reasonable approach is clearly to start going back to work for people who are not at risk and who wear a mask.

• 12:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think, I think there's been since last pod that we did together. I think there's been three kind of major discoveries or sets of facts that have come out about the virus. Number one,

• 12:53David Sacks?

  Um, the official fatality rate has been over, which is about six percent. You know, it's a very high fatality rate. It's pretty scary. But we now know that that's overstated by probably at least ten X. Um, because it doesn't take into account all the asymptomatic cases or mild cases. Uh, that just never got tested. Um.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  And this is the fatality rate of people who contracted the virus.

• 13:18David Sacks?

  Right. As a, yes, exactly. Uh, as opposed to people whose case. The, the, the, the problem with the, uh, it's kind of a, a debate between the. The IFR versus the CFR, the infection fatality rate versus the case fatality rate. The, um, the problem with kind of the official CFR numbers is that. Only the people who got really sick are, you know, ever got tested. And, um, you know, Friedberg was the earliest person. Um, I know to start talking about the need for wide scale population testing and these blood serology tests and. Other kinds of tests to establish what the real baseline is. Um, but regardless of like, and there's been a whole bunch of different tests with different results. Um, I, you know.

• 13:57David Sacks?

  Um, we don't know exactly what the true IFR is to this day, but we do know it's probably closer to. Half a percent than to five percent. So that's sort of discovery number one. I think discovery number two is. And we knew a little bit, saw a little bit of this from the Wuhan data, but now it's really clear. That, that which populations are at risk and. It's, you know, the, the data seems to suggest that people. Under sixty who are healthy, don't have sort of preexisting conditions. Are fifty times, um, less likely to develop or, or. There's, there's a fifty X greater chance for those over sixty. Uh, in terms of a, of the, of, you know, having a really bad outcome.

• 14:40David Sacks?

  Um, and so for people under sixty who don't have these preexisting conditions, it's. You know, it's just not, the, yes, there's always, you know, examples to the contrary, but. It's not this, this sort of gigantic risk. And so for. Two thirds of the population, they don't have a huge risk and we're still locking them down. Um, I think the third thing, the third study, um, and not, not just study, there's, there's been studies and there's been models and then we've also seen. Practice, um, is that. Wide-scale use of masks or ubiquitous mask-wearing is sufficient to control the virus, meaning to stop the exponentiality of the virus. We've seen, you know, in the

• 15:20David Sacks?

  Asian countries or Czechoslovakia, other places, they've been able to get the, you know, the so-called R naught, the, you know, the viral coefficient to go below one with, you know, wide-scale use of masks. And so we have a way to prevent the virus from going exponential that doesn't require lockdowns. And so the thing, you know, I blogged about with the last time I was on your show was, why would you do this most severe thing, these lockdowns, and not do this easy thing that's just merely inconvenient, which is masks?

• 15:53Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, when you look at it, and you're the, I think, have the deepest science, clearly have the deepest science background of all of us, what, how do you look at this pandemic, now that we're 75 days into it here in the Bay Area, and obviously, you know, this started in December, it looks like, in China? What's your take on it now? What did you get right early? And what have you changed your mind about recently?

• 16:17David Friedberg?

  I think, I'm actually funny, when you say that, I just pulled up the original WHO Joint Mission on COVID Final Report. And the date of this report, by the way, is February 20th. So there was this big thing they published, 40 pages long from the WHO, and in it, they highlighted, you know, the, this fatality rate estimate inside of Hubei, you know, Wuhan and outside of Hubei. And they, you know, we knew from this data very early on that we were at about a half percent fatality rate. And then, you know, we saw all of this other stuff happen with Korea and the Princess cruise ship and the NBA players. Very early on, we saw all these people that were roughly asymptomatic. And we're starting to get two

• 17:00David Friedberg?

  kind of explanations for why that is. But from the beginning, I felt really like, you know, this is going to be a largely asymptomatic kind of spreading infectious vector. What I got wrong was when we went into lockdown, I don't know, Chumak, if you remember this, when we talked the first time on Jason's, on your guys' podcast. I ask you guys, or you guys ask me when I thought we'd be back and I was like, oh, April 7th, we'll be back to work. And I also had a bet going with you guys and I said, we're gonna have less than 20,000 deaths in the US. I so overestimated the effectiveness of the lockdown. And I think that was kind of, you know, one of the more kind of like striking things to me is the quote unquote lockdown. And I just sent the video to Nick. Nick, do you have it?

• 17:43David Friedberg?

  Can you queue it up? So basically, this is what I think has happened in the United States. Like, pull this thing up. I was in Berkeley on Saturday and I went to play, to meet some buddies and we played frisbee golf on campus and had a beer, some college buddies of mine. And so I'm walking around in Berkeley and there is frat party after frat party going on. No masks, everyone's on top of each other. You can see the video right here. I took a video of one of

• 18:05Jason Calacanis?

  the frat parties. I think that's beer pong.

• 18:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah, they're all playing beer pong. There's like girls and drinking and people are passing around bottles of vodka and there's no mask. And this was the entire campus of Berkeley. Like, and I think this is what's gone on like around the country. So the belief that you could just kind of like lock away the virus, I believe like, oh my God, there's, it's so extreme. It's so draconian. We're gonna shut down the world and this thing is gonna get stopped in 30 days, like happened in China. That is not what happened in the United States of America. Like, people want to be free. People want to party. People want to live their life. They want to go to work. They want to see their friends and family and they, they're not used to being told no by the government. And so I think that's been, to me, the biggest surprise is just like how ineffective the quote unquote lockdown has been. And I think it really speaks to the need that David mentioned, which is, this

• 18:49David Friedberg?

  lockdown isn't binary. You can't just say lock everyone down or let them all out. You've got to nuance your way to a solution, which means like masks, which means watching out for nursing homes, which means temperature checking before letting people in the buildings of over 100 people. Like, all the stuff that I think needs to be done for this to be kind of effective at, you know, tracking and tracing. And we can't just assume that, you know, a quote unquote lockdown is gonna keep people inside and keep this thing from spreading because the frat party, as you'll see, is the perfect representation of what, what's really going on out there.

• 19:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, circling back around to you, Chamath, what do you think of what the two Davids sort of outlined there in terms of the path forward and how we all handicapped what was going on?

• 19:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think the reality is that by hook or crook, we're gonna basically exit this lockdown sooner than we think, because I think people just can't take it anymore. So there's no point in having a shelter in place order if everybody's running around playing beer pong. And so it's not doing anything. And so you might as well get the productive value of the economy going again by letting people go back to work. You know, and just finding some simple ways that people can look past the politics and just do the right thing. Wear a goddamn mask and shut the fuck up and go back to work.

• 20:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's really like, I mean, when you think about it, it's like, why is this such a big deal? Get everything you want and just put a little bit of cloth over your face. I mean, a lot of the folks that push back on this, you know, they're better off wearing the mask.

• 20:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it is pretty striking when you watch the protests and you see a bunch of people who are, you know, obviously older and obviously obese.

• 20:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those are not the best looking knives in the drawer. Let's just put it that way.

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Not, definitely not, and.

• 20:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Little dull and rusty is what I would say.

• 20:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and you know, they're carrying guns and they've never served a day in the army. I mean, it's, they're literally cosplaying Marines.

• 20:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have nothing to say about that. All I'm saying is this whole mask thing is not such a big deal. Just if you can wear a mask and get back to being productive and get back to a job, I think you should be allowed to.

• 21:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So we had a big debate, V shaped, W shaped, U shaped, L shaped, recovery. I was in the, I'm aspirationally V shaped, but I'm expecting a U. Sax, you were the L and I think Chamath, you were the W, the U or the L. We've had a V. How do you explain Chamath, what is going on in the stock market? Cause you said it was the end of days. You said this is going to be a disaster. Is it going to be disaster? Is this the end of the days? And we've got some false rebound and this V-shaped recovery is not sustainable? What? How do you explain this inexplicable V-shaped responsibility of a response?

• 21:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's two things to keep in mind. First of all, the economy is completely fucked. So don't, don't, you know, don't look at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and a handful of, you know, internet SaaS companies and kid yourself. We have 30 million American men and women out of work. That is every fifth person you see walking down the street does not have a job.

• 22:05Jason Calacanis?

  What happens when lockdown ends? If we, if the lockdown ends in June, as expected for most people?

• 22:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, let me, let me.

• 22:10Jason Calacanis?

  How many people are, how many rebound?

• 22:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, no. So, so look, here, here, here's the thing that we've had. We've had trillions of dollars of money printed into the system. And when you print that money into the system, which the Federal Reserve has done, it hits the asset markets and it has basically stabilized the bond market. And the incremental dollar sits in the hands of an individual who must put the money to work. Because when you look back on this, this is not, you know, a random person managing their 401K. The overwhelming majority of the money sits in, sits in the hands of hedge funds or pension funds or sovereign wealth funds or mutual funds. They have a job to do. And so you have to think about what is their incremental decision.

• 22:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So even if the stock market made no sense on any valuation metric, the incremental dollar that they have, which they're paid to put to work, will get put to work. And so what you've actually seen is a dispersion. And what I mean by that is if you graph the S and P 500 index

• 23:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  versus the unweighted S and P 500 index, which basically means the first one ranks companies by market cap and gives the biggest companies more weight. The other one ranks every company equally. There's been a massive split, a dispersion. And what it really shows is that companies that traffic in bits, so software businesses have a bid and companies that traffic in atoms have gotten completely decimated and they are literally worthless. And so when you put all these things together, the real economy is in the toilet. There are tens of millions of, you know, men and women out of work. The earnings power of real companies that do physical things in the world are cheaper and lower than they've ever been.

• 23:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Meanwhile, the companies that have a high velocity, high margin, software-driven businesses have gone to the moon. So it's unfair to look at 30 or 40 businesses and paint that as a V-shaped recovery. It is a equity market that is buoyed by Fed dollars that is not mapping to the reality of what's happening on the ground.

• 24:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so Sacks, you're, you're pretty plugged into the economy and you think about this a lot. What do you think the recovery looks like? Is this going to be two, three, four, five-quarter recession? Is it going to be depression era like some people are apt to say? What keeps you up at night thinking about the economy and what gives you hope?

• 24:42David Sacks?

  Well, I, it kind of depends if there are other shoes to drop. So I agree with Trumath that, you know, the state of the economy right now is terrible and it's divorced from the financial markets because of, you know, all the money printing and interventions that the Fed and Treasury are, you know, have been doing. You know, one way to think about it is, well, the, the stock market is denominated in, in US dollars. And if, you know, they just printed a whole bunch more of them, those dollars are worth less. And so, you know, the, the price of, of the stocks are going to rise. But, but yeah, I think looking forward, you know, I, it's probably going to be a two to three-year process to get out of this unless some other shoe drops, which could make it much worse.

• 25:28Jason Calacanis?

  So you're, you're betting on two to three years to get back to, let's call it, single-digit unemployment?

• 25:35David Sacks?

  Um, well, let's see, we're at like, what, fifteen percent right now or something like that? Um, so.

• 25:43Jason Calacanis?

  Thirty-five million people, you get down to, you know, ten million again, twenty million?

• 25:48David Sacks?

  I mean, it's, it's, it's hard to say. It's gonna take a long time to create all those jobs. You know, a lot of these businesses are not just gonna come, you know, racing right back. Um, so, yeah, I think it's probably like a two to three year process to get back to some sort of, you know.

• 26:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, the thing you have to remember is like, look, the unemployment numbers that we have had in the last probably seven or eight years, so during Obama and Trump, have been completely manipulated because the number of people that are entirely leaving the workforce um, is quite high. And so, you know, it's not just a numerator problem. We have a denominator problem too. There are fewer and fewer workers that, you know, um, are willing to work because some of them just give up.

• 26:27Jason Calacanis?

  Right, or it's just not worth it for the pay that's available is another stated reason.

• 26:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, so the thing that we're gonna have to figure out is like, how many of the people that are leaving the workforce may never come back? And that has a, a societal toll and weight that we all have to bear.

• 26:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of people who maybe are in their sixties or maybe even late fifties. They got ten, twenty years left that they could be, uh, working in management, sales, whatever it is. And they just say, you know what? It's not worth it. I'm gonna go, uh, try to find a place to stay and maybe not rejoin the workforce. Early retirement or just capitulation.

• 27:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 27:05David Sacks?

  Well, and, and, but, you know, remember I said about other shoes dropping? I mean, we, we're still in the early, I, I, I, I think we're, we're still in the early stages seeing the repercussions of what, you know, a two, three month shutdown of the economy, you know, what, what, what that's gonna look like. And so, the, you know, the wave of defaults is just beginning and, um, you know, who knows what happens with cities and states? Um, and so on down the line. I mean, who knows, you know, does, do the debt markets have kind of an inexhaustible, um? You know, desire for to, you know, to buy US debt, or could we reach some sort of saturation

• 27:43David Sacks?

  point? And then that triggers the next, you know, set of, of crises. So we just, you know, I would say like the, the two to three year outlook is, is the one that's kind of like what it looks like today. But if there are these other big shoes to drop, it could turn into something much worse.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think Friedberg, we're all in agreement that there will be a second wave of some type. Uh, just depends on how big the spike is. Do you think there'll be another New York City level outbreak where we'll see, you know, 2,000 people, 1,500 people dying in a certain region every day for some sustained period of time? What are the chances of that happening, Friedberg?

• 28:21David Friedberg?

  I don't know. I mean, I think going forward, the, you know, the New York situation, people's behavior has been shocked. So, you know, to the points earlier, the most effective thing you can do is stop coughing on your hand, touching a railing, someone else touches the railing and touches their mouth. I mean, that's kind of how this goes. Um, you know, there's been early on some weird like aerosolized, aerosolized studies that they've kind of said, hey, this thing spreads in the air and so on. It's really, you know, you got to be in a closed kind of confined space. And people are wearing masks now. So the likelihood of the transmission happening at the rate that we saw in New York, great paper out of MIT, by the way, that shows how this happened on the subway.

• 29:01Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 29:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah, identified the subway as kind of the primary vector that drove transmission in New York City.

• 29:07Jason Calacanis?

  That was always my thesis. And I remember talking about it and saying, how is this not obvious to everybody that eight million people ride that thing every day or something like it's so obvious?

• 29:16David Friedberg?

  They did an incredible job proving it. So it's not like people running in Central Park are spreading coronavirus to each other. It's everyone in these confined spaces coughing in the air and then you kind of get this stuff.

• 29:25Jason Calacanis?

  And 20 people get on and off at every stop. That's the other thing people don't realize is that it's not just a bunch of people. It's not an airplane. We have X number of people going in one direction for three, four, five hours. This is 20 people getting on and off every five minutes. It's almost like you couldn't design a better incubator for it.

• 29:42David Friedberg?

  And I don't think a city in the United States approaches the density that you have in New York. So remember, these are not deterministic factors. There's like a spectrum of probabilistic spectrum here. So you have a lot of people, they have a certain type of behavior, they're not wearing masks. You kind of add these up and you end up with this really high kind of vector that drives this rapid spread as we saw in New York City. You're not going to see that in Dallas, you're not going to see that in Houston, you're not going to see that in San Diego. You're going to have more of the slow, steady burn as some risk is taken in the environment. Some risk is taken by frat parties and people not wearing masks and people touching their mouth. But it's not going to have the same sort of massive effect you saw in New York. So I wouldn't expect us to have a New York style second wave. I do expect there to continue to be this like slow burn going forward of

• 30:27David Friedberg?

  new cases. And it's certainly going to be more obvious now that we're testing a lot more.

• 30:31Jason Calacanis?

  And so, Chamath, at this point, we're basically putting a price on life and saying, hey, some amount of deaths is worth taking the risk. And as Americans, a unique group of people in the world in how we look at personal freedom, Americans are just making the choice, hey, listen, if you don't want to take the risk, stay home. But the rest of us, if we want to take the risk, we're going to go take the risk. That's what this has come down to in your mind, Chamath?

• 30:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think that it's very difficult for Americans to envision a world where like, you know, their personal freedoms are infringed upon. I mean, it's sort of like one of the founding principles of the entire country. This is why I think that the tragedy of this thing is that the way to get everybody what they want is so simple. As David said, it's like, you know, above 65, you stay home, you work remotely. Under 65, you temperature check and wear a mask. And, you know, you're 95% of the way there, but it's become a left versus right decision to do it. You know, the mask wearers are still in a lockdown and the non-mask wearers want to get back to work. And basically, like, there's, it's

• 31:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  just, it's just another kind of culture war between the left and the right.

• 31:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's really just shocking to me. I mean, I might for what it's worth, you know, if I was, I am a betting man, so I'll just tell you, you know, my line now is that I think that Donald Trump is overwhelmingly likely to win as a function of people's frustration about the lockdowns. And I think that the Democrats' best hope of winning in November is ending these things sooner rather than later.

• 32:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's amazing. We're talking about a pandemic, a once in a hundred year pandemic, it looks like. And we're literally looking at our reaction to it through the lens of this president being reelected or not. Like, literally, that's the determining factor on the advice we're giving to people. We're telling people they can't go to the beach, but they can be on an airplane. They can't go to the Tesla factory, but they can ride the subway. I mean, on a communication basis, is there any worse way we could have communicated this to the populace?

• 32:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the communication was bad, but the I think the bigger problem, quite honestly, is that the Republican Democratic governors in the United States can't get on the same page. And at the same time, there's just a tendency to support Donald Trump or not support him in a very reflexive, instinctive way that isn't helpful right now. And and there just doesn't seem to be enough political wherewithal and courage to just stand up and do the right thing, independent of what your what your political persuasion is. So but I but I think on the margin now, I think you have different but very similar boundary conditions to 2016, where there are all these people that kind of like told you one thing and did another.

• 33:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are all these people right now that probably are, you know, preference falsifying as we speak. And, you know, they'll show up into the voting booth and they'll be angry if they're not back in their jobs, especially if they've been laid off by as a result of not being able to get back.

• 33:36Jason Calacanis?

  And they would blame that on the Democrats, not the Republicans, and therefore Trump gets his next term.

• 33:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, because the it's it's the Democratic states that are pushing the hardest to basically like, you know, you saw the craziness in Los Angeles, but like, you know, Eric Garcetti was basically like, we'll we'll enter the shelter in place in, you know, December of 2022. And it's like, this is it's Los Angeles.

• 33:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's not gonna happen.

• 34:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, players gotta play. I mean, like, this is just is unbelievable.

• 34:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 34:04David Sacks?

  Well, the the I I do I I agree the the lockdowns, the or the unwillingness to end the lockdowns gives Trump an issue for November, assuming this continues, that supersedes the incompetence of the COVID response, which is that, you know, our lives and livelihoods are not owned by politicians to, you know, meter out and give back to us in in drips and drabs and as they see fit. That is the issue that the lockdown crowd is is giving to Trump. And I do think it will, if if it's still the issue in November, it will supersede the the, you know, the initial incompetence of the COVID response.

• 34:48Jason Calacanis?

  And what what did you think of this whole? What's the drug that Trump said he was taking, David Sax?

• 34:54David Friedberg?

  I draw I draw chloroquine.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So or free drug, maybe you take it. We talked about that early on and that I think you properly said, like, if you took it early, this could be, you know, a could has potential taking it later, it's probably too late. I think you nailed that on the pod last time. Why has this become such a political issue? And what are your thoughts on that drug specifically and its potential efficacy?

• 35:19David Friedberg?

  Look, I I'm not a doctor, but it from what I understand is there is a so just so you know, there's like side effects to this drug for a small percentage of the population. And this drug can actually inhibit energy production in certain cells, which can cause organs to dysfunction. And it particularly shows up in the heart. So people end up with what's called a long QT interval and potentially some heart issues that can be pretty dangerous and deadly depending on your body. So it's really a little bit of an unknown. There's also issues longer term with with vision impairment can damage your retinal cells and cause vision loss. So there's risk to this drug. It's not like taking, you know, an Advil. It is a it is a measured risk.

• 36:04David Friedberg?

  It's a low probability, but the severity can be high. And so typically with a scenario like that, doctors and scientists like to see, you know, phased clinical trials and you kind of do, you know, randomized and you have placebo and testing. And so that hasn't necessarily been done for this particular virus, this particular condition. And often the the design of those studies matters a lot. So you could give it to a bunch of quote unquote COVID patients, but if it's not being given to COVID patients either before or right as they're getting sick, maybe it doesn't show the results that you would expect from a prophylactic treatment, meaning you're getting it before you're really sick. And that's where it may be the most efficacious. And so some people are saying, wait, we don't know enough. Don't do it.

• 36:46David Friedberg?

  It's not worth the risk because of that small percentage, high severity problem. While others are saying, oh, my gosh, it's totally worth the risk because the downside if you get coronavirus can be really bad. And, you know, so there's a lot of room for debate here. And when there's a lot of room for debate, you usually kind of revert to some sort of base belief or some base kind of political point of view or something. And I think that's what's gone on here. This isn't a clear cut, the sun is is yellow and the sky is blue kind of conversation. This is like, I can interpret this a lot of different ways. It does seem that like, look, this drug, you know, like a lot of has an effect in the same way that a lot of other that this drug might have on a lot of other viruses. And this especially plus zinc, you know, and this Z-Pak, this Zithromycin, which is

• 37:30David Friedberg?

  an antibiotic, together may be really effective. And so, yeah, if you weigh the downside and the probability of that downside for a patient against what the potential upside would be, depending on their risk factors, now that we know those better for COVID, you can make an educated decision and maybe it should just be left in the hands of doctors versus like have some national statement about it. I don't know. But yeah, certainly a lot of room for debate and thus a lot of kind of, you know, political engagement on this.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, there was a lot of talk about what the Bay Area looks like after this, whether it's commercial real estate with Twitter and Square going full work from home and people not wanting to work in cities. What are your general thoughts on what the world looks like a year from now and maybe five years from now? If there is going to be some permanent change, what do you think it would be?

• 38:20David Sacks?

  Well, there could be a big resorting. I mean, it kind of depends if the virus becomes endemic. It's just something we kind of end up living with. But, you know, so if it does, I mean, if you're like over 70, are you really going to want to stay in a place like New York City? Or are you going to want to go somewhere else? And so I could imagine if this does become this long-term thing that's just endemic, you know, if we don't have a vaccine, I could see cities resorting where, you know, New York is people who are comfortable with COVID risk. And, you know, it's, I think San Francisco, the big issue with San Francisco is that there were always a bunch of reasons not to want to live there.

• 39:04David Sacks?

  I mean, the city just seems like chronically mismanaged.

• 39:09Jason Calacanis?

  Feces, lots of poop.

• 39:11David Sacks?

  The huge homeless problem, it's just, you know, public health issues with that. There's, there's a lot of crime that isn't responding to properly. So there's all these like reasons not to live there. But the reason why people chose to live there is because the tech industry had a very strong network effect and you needed to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco in order to have access to these, these jobs and opportunities. And if those jobs opportunities are now available via Zoom and you can be doing them from anywhere, are people still going to choose to live in San Francisco? You know, with, and you know, with the, the cost of living and housing and apartments and all the rest of it that, that goes, that goes along with it. So, yeah, I mean, I think there is some chance that this whole remote work thing could break.

• 39:55David Sacks?

  Silicon Valley's network effect and that would be really bad for places like San Francisco, which, you know, otherwise might not be the greatest places to live.

• 40:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, my thesis on this in terms of getting out of the recession, I think remote work could lead to a level of efficiency and profitability in the companies that we have never seen before. If you think just about every manager now knows how to manage remote workers, right? You learn that in like three, four weeks, you figure out how to manage people remote. Even people who hated managing people remote, all these Gen Xers and Boomers who are managing, you know, Millennials and earlier Gen Xers, they now know how to do it. And what they quickly learn is these three or four people in my team are crushing it. These two or three people don't need to be here, they're not actually adding any value.

• 40:49Jason Calacanis?

  So I think what's going to happen is they're going to cut the bottom people. Then they're going to cut their office space. Now you've removed, I don't know, call it 30% of the cost basis of a business, 40% and it's operating better and people are happier. And then when you do hire somebody, there's going to be more talent available and you've just opened it up that you can hire somebody anywhere in the world without an office and you don't have to relocate them and you don't have to pay, I don't know what you guys think the average additional cost is to be in San Francisco, but I'm going to say $30,000. So a $40,000 a year job or $50,000 a year job becomes a 70 or 80, something like that. And if all that happens, these companies are going to be so profitable that they're

• 41:32Jason Calacanis?

  going to start growing and that leads us out of the economic downturn. Any thoughts on my thesis?

• 41:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's not a thesis, that's a hope.

• 41:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hope's not a fucking strategy, Jason.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I just think it's a potential way out. I think it, I mean, what do you think in general about this trend of remote then, Joma?

• 41:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's great and I think that we're realizing that, you know, there's no monopoly on innovation and companies can be really productive remotely, that most of the work in an office is busy work and politics and you can cut it all out and you can do the same amount of work in much less time, which gives you more time to frankly be with your family or take up a hobby or learn a second language or a third language. I mean, I just think it's so much better for people to realize like we gotta, you know, it's, it's not like you, you know, it's not, it's not 1820 or 1920, it's 2020. So we're gonna live to 100 years old. Like, we have a long time to be in the grind. And so, um, you know,

• 42:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  working and accomplishing what you used to in half the time and not having to commute and being able to live where you want and your people you like. Man, that has a huge positive impact to your kids, you, your community. It's just way better. I just think, um, offices are just complete, kind of like, it's all Shakespearean theater in the end. And cutting it all out is great. And specifically, San Francisco is just a complete cesspool dump of shit. And so, you know, being able to just get out of that city is just-

• 43:09Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome to the all, you're listening to the All In Podcast.

• 43:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I read, I read some stats yesterday that were just so unbelievably shocking, like, the number of break-ins, the number of, uh-

• 43:21Jason Calacanis?

  Number one in the country.

• 43:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here, number one in the country. The, the, the amount of disease that, like, communicable disease, like typhoid. And I'm like, typhoid? I, I, I was born in a country and scratched and clawed to emigrate as a refugee to leave a country that had typhoid as a disease.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome home, Jermoff.

• 43:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just to end up back in that, in San Francisco.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  Did you bring it?

• 43:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's-

• 43:45Jason Calacanis?

  You brought it with you?

• 43:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's an absolute joke. So, um, yeah, I mean, the idea that I'd never have to go to San Francisco ever again is, oh my God, it brings joy to me.

• 43:56Jason Calacanis?

  It is a, it's an unmitigated disaster. This, and I think this will be part of the boom-bust cycle that, you know, David, you were part of when you were here at Stanford, you know, getting an office in San Francisco or having an apartment. It was cheaper, I think, in the city than it was down in Palo Alto, was it not?

• 44:11David Sacks?

  Well, back in, yeah, when we moved Yammer to San Francisco, which was 2009, I think we were able to get space for $20 a foot per year.

• 44:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Crazy.

• 44:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I paid, 2007, 2008.

• 44:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I read, I read, I read a crazy article. It was about uh, the Krishners and this building that they own, that Brookfield Asset Management was gonna buy. And um, and it said that they bought this building and so the Krishners moved to like Park Avenue, the General Motors Building overlooking Central Park or something, right? It's a beautiful building. And it actually quoted in there the price that they were paying. And it was incredible because it was like a hundred bucks a square foot per year. And I realized, oh my God, they're paying less for Central Park views in New York than I'm paying for a warehouse in Palo Alto.

• 45:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The fuck is going on? This makes no sense whatsoever.

• 45:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that'd be supply and demand right there.

• 45:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, and I thought to myself, like, this is, this is crazy. Like California is so expensive, the taxes are so high. Uh, it's, I think people will, are gonna leave in droves, honestly.

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  What do we think of Elon, um, selling all his homes and then actually saying he's gonna leave and, you know, move Tesla out?

• 45:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I don't think it's a practical reality to move Tesla out of, out of California. I think that the incremental facilities can be built wherever he wants them to be built based on where he gets the tax incentives.

• 45:38David Sacks?

  Well, but I think the Tesla Fremont was a really good example of this sort of like culture war that's going on, this, this political ba- battle over lockdowns and um, you know, you had kind of a mid-level health department bureaucrat in Fremont padlocking their factory and saying they couldn't go back to work. Um, whereas if he was in Texas, he could. Um, and then, you know, around the same time, you had this whole like chilly Luther thing in Texas where she was a small business owner, um, you know, owns a, uh, like a haircut place and she was basically gonna be put in jail for a week for giving somebody a haircut. And uh, there was like a, you know, dust up over that. Um, so you know, I, I think that like,

• 46:21David Sacks?

  you know, the, the country is certainly ready to get back to work and um, and if this is the political debate, you know, in November, I'm not sure it will be because six months is a really long time from now, but um, or was it four or five months? Um, but if this is a political debate, I, you know, this, this will be the way that, that Trump gets reelected.

• 46:39David Friedberg?

  Yep. I think there's gonna be some pretty significant benefits because of the reaction you guys are speaking to. It's not just about people moving, but it's a reaction to regulation. And that could have some pretty profound effects that could benefit certain sectors and businesses and accelerate new outcomes. One of the things that, you know, I have a strong belief in is like, I think in 20 years, we could kind of eradicate all infectious disease. The only thing holding that up is regulation because the science is known, the engineering is basically there. And it's simply a function of getting these things approved and getting across the finish line.

• 47:20David Friedberg?

  Doing gene editing in humans for genetic mutations that cause harm to humans is a technique that we've known for 20 years. And there was a guy, a patient that died in 1999 from one of the first AAV treatments, the viral vector gene editing treatments. After that, there was this clampdown and suddenly everything stopped and there was like no longer any progress in the space. And they're just now starting to come back. And there's a lot of, you know, really interesting technology that has been kind of hindered. I mean, you know, not being able to put Teslas out, I think is the tip of the iceberg of what people are seeing regulation can do to businesses. And look, I'm by no stretch, you know, a libertarian party card carrier.

• 48:04David Friedberg?

  But I do think, and I see it in businesses that I'm involved in all the time, that this, you know, incredibly onerous, like overreaching regulatory burden and bureaucrats really hinder great new things from happening in the world. And it's just become so frigging apparent how inept the people are that are making the decisions that are doing this to us are during this crisis. And I think it could have a profound benefit on kind of deregulation and accelerating the adoption of new tools and new technologies that could really help us all. So I view the positive side of this. It's not just like everyone's going to leave California, like there's inept bureaucrats and overregulation everywhere.

• 48:43Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk geopolitics for a moment. Chamath, you know, you heard the president call it the Wuhan virus. Obviously, there's no doubt that it came from there. There is a debate, was this something that was not created in a lab, but that was being studied in a lab and accidentally got out? And that's how the jump happened? And there's some tension there between China and the US. What do you think the global reaction is going to be and the fallout will be for China? If any, Japan is paying factories, I read, and helping subsidize them to move factories out of China so they can move that dependency. We obviously saw the dependency on PPE and drugs being made actually in Wuhan in that area. And how we don't have a supply chain that we can rely on for really mission critical stuff.

• 49:27Jason Calacanis?

  How will we look at this Chinese relationship in the United States and globally? Post pandemic?

• 49:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the beginning of the modern Cold War. And so it's America versus China. Except that China is a much more worthy adversary for us than the USSR SSR was at their peak. And the reason is because China has been making strategic investments for the last 30 years. You know, the biggest thing that prevents China from really going guns blazing broadside attack on the US is that the US dollar is still the reserve currency of the world. But even there, China, you know, is trying to do a digital currency and a stable coin. And these are all these state sponsored initiatives that come from frankly,

• 50:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  just strategic decision making to try to usurp the United States as the most powerful country in the world. And so again, it goes back to, is this a political issue? Or is this an ideological issue? Or is this an exceptionalism issue? Or is this just a practical reality that we do not want another country being number one? And can we all agree? And if we can all agree, then I don't think they'll win.

• 50:42Jason Calacanis?

  Where do you, where do you sit on it? For you, is it practical? Is it ideological?

• 50:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Completely practical. I have zero, like, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot because I have not done any investments. And I just did my first. So it's been three months and I did, and it was a credit deal. So it's not even equity. And, you know, I was, and I was reflecting on what, what am I trying to do? Because I felt myself frenetically, you know, spending and working too much and, you know, looking at all these different opportunities. And I realized, wait a minute, like, my job here is not to win some finite game. Like, this is not ending like a basketball game or a soccer match. This is like, I'm trying to be in this thing for 50 years, so my goal is to survive.

• 51:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the reason why I say that is my ideology is very fluid. I have to be able to adapt to market conditions as they change. Because if I want to be a relevant, you know, person in the world in 50 years from now, first rule of business is don't go out of business. Second rule of business is don't forget rule number one, you know? So in that context, I think it's a very practical thing that we just have to deal with China and make sure that they do not usurp America's standing in the world as the most important country of the world.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  For me, it's ideological. I just don't want a communist country.

• 52:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't care about that.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  That is torturing their citizens as the number one country in the world. I think it's extremely dangerous.

• 52:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a real issue with this. Like, I don't think you have the right to judge. Just like Californians can't judge Texans and Texans can't judge Floridians.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, you're wrong. You absolutely should judge people who are torturing people and not allowing people to have freedom of speech. Yeah, you should judge them, actually. Actually, for human rights violations, I think you should judge people.

• 52:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I think that we, there's, there's a lot of that stuff in America that you stay silent on, then.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  No, that's not true. I am absolutely for cannabis, anybody who's arrested for cannabis violations and low level drug things, I think they should be let out of jail, just like J.B. Pritzker did in Chicago. I mean, and I think the death penalty should be repealed here because we don't apply it properly. Those are the number one and two things, probably in the United States, that go against the human rights, the Declaration of Human Rights. And I'm actually very pro fixing those things. I was totally against waterboarding, and I think that was the worst moment in modern American history.

• 53:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I honestly, I honestly think that, like, China's gonna be, do China, you know, India's gonna be India. And instead of getting caught up... In our own ideology, you should change it in your own country and then make sure that the other country doesn't win.

• 53:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and that's my point is, do you believe engagement with China leads them towards democracy and better human rights conditions for their citizens or not?

• 53:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Again, that's the fool's errand. That is an absolute

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it worked for East Berlin, and it did work in saving Europe from the Nazis.

• 53:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But the boundary conditions are entirely different, and China has proven that it works. Europeans were genetically bred to be lazy oligarchs. They just needed this excuse.

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, everybody. I think we just got kicked out of the iTunes store. Saxy poo.

• 53:47David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Jason Calacanis?

  China. Hawk, dove, engagement, isolation, where do you stand? You heard Chamath say his position. Where do you stand?

• 53:57David Sacks?

  Yeah, decoupling from China is going to be a bipartisan issue now. I think both candidates now will be, well, Trump is gonna, is gonna run blaming China for, for what happened. And I don't think Biden's gonna be defending China. In fact, they're gonna try and peg him with the whole Beijing Biden label, and he's probably gonna need to try and out-Trump Trump on, on China. So decoupling is gonna happen. It doesn't really make sense for us to be dependent on China for our antibiotics, for our medicines, for our PPE, for, you know, any of these, you know, any of these products that are important for national survival. I think all that stuff

• 54:39David Sacks?

  is gonna come back home. I think, you know, trading with them for other things might be toys, apparel, things that just aren't fundamentally strategic the same way. I think that can continue. But, you know, the, the thing about trade is it creates interdependence, and I don't think that this country's gonna wanna be dependent on China for anything strategic anymore.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  Two questions for you, David. What is China's liability, if any, at this point with this pandemic? Obviously, if they, you know, didn't, they withheld information or silenced whistleblowers, that's a, a whole different level. And then TikTok, should we allow TikTok in this country? Should we, if we're not allowed to have Facebook or Twitter in China? Take those questions either way you want.

• 55:28David Sacks?

  Well, the on liability, I mean, I think, yeah, their liability is is huge. Um, I mean, there's still a bunch of questions we got to answer around where exactly the virus came from. Um, but the the really fateful decision that I think China made is when they shut down travel to Wuhan, uh, to and from Wuhan. Uh, you know, with respect to other parts of China, but they let people from Wuhan just kind of, you know, leave to go all over the world. And so, you know, they weren't letting people from Wuhan go to other parts of China, but they were able to come to the US. And, um, so I I think they do have huge liability, but are we going to hold them to it?

• 56:13David Sacks?

  No, I mean, as a practical matter, um, you know, we're not gonna, you know, it'd be it'd be a mistake to to try and change the principle of sovereign immunity in the courts. But, um, I think in terms of popular opinion, they do have, um,

• 56:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are other ways to, there are other ways to quote unquote punish them. Like, I mean, and the US is already doing it. So, you know, for example, the US is limiting and constraining Huawei's ability to get access to 5G. And so, you know, it really forces China to either buy European and American equipment, which is essentially to say that, you know, the the Five Eyes will be able to basically spy into China. Um, or they have to basically, you know, uh, storm into Taiwan and take over TSMC. I mean, so there are, there are all these other gambits and strategies that one can take without getting ideology ideologically caught up in, you know, Chinese human rights because they're not going to change.

• 57:07David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, look, all wealth comes from trade, you know, whether it's at the level of individuals or nations, uh, wealth comes from trade. And so it'd be silly for us to say that we're just never going to have trade with China. But I think that, you know, trade also creates interdependence. And so we're not gonna, I don't think, continue to engage and to depend on them for things that are inadulterated or national survival. And so, you know, that that's going to be the change. And the other thing is, you know, we're gonna demand that the trade be more reciprocal.

• 57:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Take the TikTok example.

• 57:39David Sacks?

  Well, you know, what what's probably going to happen is that the TikTok will probably be caught up in some larger negotiation and, you know, is the quid pro quo? Well, Tesla gets to sell cars in China and TikTok gets to operate in the US, maybe. Um, but, you know, I I don't think. TikTok sort of falls into the, you know, necessary for national survival category. So it really falls into the reciprocity, um, you know, principle. And the question I guess will be, are we getting enough in return to allow them to operate here? And I think that's the way that all this commerce is gonna, is gonna start working.

• 58:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and that's the thing, at least we can like confront our hypocrisy. So Jason, I don't disagree with you about how, you know, gross the human rights record is. I just think it's a joke that we all sort of like cry foul like it's like the biggest thing in the world. When we can't even clean up our own backyard and then meanwhile, we continue to trade with them. That's just utterly, utterly.

• 58:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So that's why I think we have to continue to work on cleaning our backyard while continuing to enable the freedom fighters.

• 58:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Our own backyard. Meanwhile, win the game against China and winning the game is not basically pushing for human rights reforms. It's making sure, as David said, we have a better trade balance and make, and making sure that like, you know, that the critical parts of the supply chain and infrastructure that America needs for national security isn't dependent on a third party who have completely different incentives than we do.

• 59:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then there's also like soft things like, why is the, you know, why are we taking American movies and changing the ends in order to have them sold in China? Like they're literally corrupting our art. And, and that incremental dollar that Hollywood's getting or whichever, you know, person trading with China is getting. I think it's not worth giving up what makes America unique and a leader in the world. Friedberg, you have any thoughts on China?

• 59:25David Friedberg?

  There's about 112 million people in China that work in factories. Factories in China are purpose built, so they're built to make a thing. And then they gotta get retooled if you want to make another thing. You take those two facts, it's very hard to kind of replace China as a source of production for a lot of what we consume in this country. That's the reality. So there's two ways you could go. And then there's two kinds of necessities and you end up with a matrix of like two by two. You could decouple from China and, um, basically recreate that same production system here in the United States. And that just wouldn't fucking be possible. Like we don't have enough people to work. We don't have the ability to do that. The cost of everything would go up by five X.

• 1:00:11David Friedberg?

  We could invent new systems of production, which we have the ability to 3D printing, bio manufacturing, all these other kind of really interesting ways of making stuff that could replace the old factories that are run in China. Similar to kind of what maybe Elon has tried to do with his automated, you know, factory with Tesla. And so through automation, through 3D printing, through bio manufacturing, you can kind of change the methods of doing this stuff. If we could do that, then we could decouple from China. So the reality is like, I, I don't know like how we continue to consume things at the, you know, as a percentage of wallet share that come from China without rebuilding how you make stuff.

• 1:00:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but that's the whole point. By the way, I think the reason why that's valuable is that that's the best way for us to actually get back to an inflationary cycle as well. So I completely agree with you. It is incredibly inefficient. It'll be incredibly costly. But that's where I think you shift the balance of power so that instead of all the power sitting on the side of capital, you shift it to the side of labor, labor demands for wages. And then all of a sudden, costs go up, input costs go up, prices go up, inflation exists, and that fixes a lot of our debt problems. It fixes our deflationary super cycle. It fixes a lot of things. And so.

• 1:01:25Jason Calacanis?

  So if things got more expensive, it would be good for the economy.

• 1:01:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Very good.

• 1:01:29David Friedberg?

  Yeah, even but even look, even with maximal, like, look, that replace 112 million workers in China with some number of Americans. You know, I, I'm not sure you could make all the stuff you need to make here.

• 1:01:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, there's other countries too. I mean, I think people are moving factories, Japanese are moving factories to Taiwan and Vietnam.

• 1:01:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah, but if we create new methods of production, which we're uniquely positioned to do, we can completely reinvent the wheel in a lot of industries and actually produce for the world. Because right now, you know, China exports physical goods, the US exports virtual goods. And if we want to get into the business of making physical goods, we have to just do it 10x better. We have the ability to do that. We just got to get the fucking will. So if I were to take $3 trillion of federal money and, you know, treasury bonds and hope that they don't turn into junk bonds, I would basically turn that money into reinventing the systems of like, how do we make stuff using these new technologies that the US is uniquely positioned to capitalize on? And you know

• 1:02:26Jason Calacanis?

  I love this Friedberg leapfrog strategy.

• 1:02:29David Friedberg?

  Could make the same thing that 100 Chinese workers make.

• 1:02:32Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. I love it. That's and I think that's where we got to an hour into this. Friedberg, you win. You got the best. I think you got the hottest tag in the whole group is if we are going to bring back manufacturing, let's leapfrog it. Let's just go. Let's just you. We don't have to keep letting them make. You know, socks or iPhones, but you know, let's make the next automated factories and the 3D printing factories here.

• 1:02:54David Friedberg?

  And buy a manufacturer.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody, anybody have anything they need to promote or plug at the end of the podcast? Anything they're working on that people should know about? No, but I love you guys. I fucking miss you. I want to kiss all of you on the mouth. Wow. Just exactly what I was thinking, Chamath. I was about to. So back at you. I've been, I've been locked down for three months. I'm lost my mind. I mean, this is May 12th for me and I

• 1:03:17David Friedberg?

  I think we all got to go to Mexico and see Sacks for a

• 1:03:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20David Sacks?

  I had some friends come down and we played golf and no one wore masks within our little circle and nobody got sick. And you know,

• 1:03:31Jason Calacanis?

  And you're all been tested.

• 1:03:33David Sacks?

  We haven't been tested, but we haven't, we don't have any symptoms.

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  I got tested twice, negative both times. And it was a very weird thing because I'm think I'm Friedberg, correct me if I'm wrong, I would, I should be rooting that I had it and it didn't do anything to me, right?

• 1:03:46David Friedberg?

  Totally. By the way, let me just say one more thing. That's a really interesting finding. This paper came out a few days ago. That shows that 40 to 60% of the population that has never been exposed to SARS coronavirus 2, the current coronavirus, already have activated T cells to the virus. And the reason is that they've had other coronaviruses through a common cold and they've developed this immune response. So this may explain why a large percentage of people are just so asymptomatic and totally fine. And it's a pretty astounding finding. And so you could get checked for those other antibodies or, you know, these, these activated T cells. And know if you're in a good position to kind of ward off the coronavirus. And that's another thing we should probably do. That's 60% of people that already have this.

• 1:04:31David Friedberg?

  By the way, that won't stop the spreading. That person will still get infected and spread, but their, you know, immune response is such that they'll shut the thing down pretty quickly.

• 1:04:39Jason Calacanis?

  So would you call this like some parallel or shadow herd immunity or individual immunity?

• 1:04:47David Friedberg?

  It's individual immunity and it's related to just cross reactivity with other coronaviruses. And so we've already developed an immune response to other coronaviruses that that gives us seemingly a pretty good response to this coronavirus for, you know, more than half, up to half.

• 1:04:59Jason Calacanis?

  David, on a percentage basis, how, um, how much do we know about this virus? Just as we wrap up here, if you had to state a percentage of like, in, in two years, we're going to know a hundred percent or 90% about the virus, whatever it is. What do we know now?

• 1:05:17David Friedberg?

  We know everything about the virus itself. We are very, like, like with any virus, we know very little about how it affects a specific human based on their genotype, meaning based on your health and your, your genes, here's what this virus is going to do to your body. And we're not going to know that in two years and we're not going to know that. We don't know that for most viruses for humans today. The matching of genotype to genotype of viral to.

• 1:05:40Jason Calacanis?

  But if we understand X amount about the HIV virus or Ebola, what do we know now? If you, I mean, maybe Ebola would be the best one. Like we, we have pretty good knowledge of that after X number of years. What do we know now on a percentage basis of coronavirus? We had to guess.

• 1:05:55David Friedberg?

  Again, we, we know everything about the virus itself, like a hundred percent.

• 1:05:58Jason Calacanis?

  Or, okay, about this pandemic.

• 1:06:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the human response to the virus and why it's causing all these weird symptoms with different people and so on. Yeah, I'd say we're probably, I don't know, 40%, 30%. We've kind of mapped the outcome, but we haven't mapped the progress to the outcome in the human body.

• 1:06:12Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating. All right. All right. Listen, great job, Chamath. Great job, David Sacks. Great job, David Friedberg. If you want to subscribe to the podcast, type in all in with Chamath. Uh, and.

• 1:06:24David Friedberg?

  Love you besties.

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  Love you guys, besties.

• 1:06:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Shuffle up in DL. Can't wait to see that new table.

• 1:06:29David Friedberg?

  We'll see you. We'll see you at Mexico.

• 1:06:30Jason Calacanis?

  Get back to work. Let's get back to work. Wear your goddamn masks, people. Wear a mask. Wear a mask. Okay. Be safe.