E74: Market update, inverted yield curve, immigration, new SPAC rules, $FB smears TikTok and more

0:00 Sacks' DC trip and foreign policy speaking gig 5:50 Yield curve inversion, breaking down the current state of the markets, understanding the labor market through birth rate and immigration 26:16 How the US can fix its current economic issues, reframing high-skilled immigration 48:54 SEC's new proposed rules around SPACs and climate disclosures for public companies: how will both markets be impacted? 1:10:29 Meta used a GOP firm to run a smear campaign against TikTok in the US: dirty, necessary, or both? 1:19:03 Food shortage update 1:24:33 Sacks and Jason reflect on Biden's inflammatory comments on Putin Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525 https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/part-us-yield-curve-just-inverted-does-that-mean-recession-is-coming-2022-03-28 https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/dont-fear-the-yield-curve-reprise-20220325.htm https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/restoration-hardware-stock-price-ceo-warns-big-short-economy-inflation-2022-3 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/PATH:NYSE https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/03/american-population-growth-rate-slow/629392 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/2-year-treasury-yield-tops-10-year-rate-a-yield-curve-inversion-that-could-signal-a-recession.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-big-new-wealth-tax-white-house-budget-fy-2023-11648504962 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-28/manchin-pans-biden-s-proposed-tax-on-unrealized-gains-of-wealthy https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/democrats-go-directly-to-the-center https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-29/spacs-face-fresh-sec-legal-threat-for-overly-bullish-forecasts https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-27/spacs-can-take-away-the-insiders-advantage-in-ipos-and-markets https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/the-sec-will-regulate-climate https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/30/sec-targets-spacs-with-new-rules-about-forecasts-mergers.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.agweek.com/news/ukraine-ag-production-could-drop-80-fertilizer-prices-to-cut-food-supply-long-term-uk-expert-says https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/03/wheat-in-2023.html https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2021/09/information-on-2021-cash-rents-with-implications-for-2022.html https://www.agweek.com/news/usda-nass-to-livestream-prospective-planting-report https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089300515/biden-putin-remarks-regime-change https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-s-approval-ratings-soar-amid-russia-s-war-in-ukraine/ar-AAVI29R

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

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, Jason and Sacks look like fucking two accountants who've just been fired from Lehman Brothers in 2008.

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. We're carrying our boxes out to the street and getting a taxi.

• 0:10David Friedberg?

  Sacks does look appropriate for his setting.

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  How long are you in DC for? Sax, are you in and out one day? What are you doing?

• 0:16David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'm flying back tonight for the fundraiser tomorrow morning.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  Who's the fundraiser with? You want to tell everybody?

• 0:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Big boy?

• 0:23David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's an April Fool's joke. I'm hosting a fundraiser for a Democrat.

• 0:26Jason Calacanis?

  Blue state. He's trolling everybody with his blue state. Put your red tie on. Put your red tie. You have a red tie with you, Sacks?

• 0:31David Sacks?

  I wore a blue tie today.

• 0:33Jason Calacanis?

  Really? Oh, you're trolling?

• 0:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Full troll is on.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, what a little troll artist. All right, let's get started.

• 0:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. With us back from his Tahoe vacation, you were certainly missed, even though the episode was record-setting. The Queen of Kenwa himself, he'll reboot your physique with his Munich, puts the Mana in the Kana. And he's your pal from NorCal, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. How are you doing, brother?

• 1:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Shit, you have a whole sequence of these things? This is great.

• 1:22David Friedberg?

  You actually do work for this podcast now?

• 1:24David Sacks?

  If you can keep this going every week, it'll be amazing.

• 1:27Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I just felt like getting a plug in for Munich and Kana. That was my, if I could get two portfolios.

• 1:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, go, go, hit Sacks and me. Let's go.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, you know, he's back with us again, the czar of ARR, the savant of SAS. He puts the ass in Asperger's. He's a sucker. He's a sucker for Tucker, the rain man himself, David Sacks.

• 1:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's so good.

• 1:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Next up, the dictator agitator and our frequent collaborator. He's back to back with the SPACs, a trendsetter with the sweaters. The future he can foreseea, Chamath Palihapitiya.

• 2:06Jason Calacanis?

  We got you, everybody.

• 2:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not as good as David's, I gotta say.

• 2:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there's a lot to go with Asperger's Tucker. I mean, he's the material for Sacks. I could have done 20 minutes.

• 2:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  20 minutes.

• 2:17Jason Calacanis?

  I could have done 20 minutes on Sacks. Sacks, you are, of course, in DC with some Star Chamber thing. You, Bannon, Teal, who's, who, what, what Star Chamber bullshit are you doing in?

• 2:28David Sacks?

  No, I spoke at a foreign policy conference today called.

• 2:31Jason Calacanis?

  What's the name of it?

• 2:32David Sacks?

  It's called Up From Chaos and sponsored by a group called The American Moment and The American Conservative.

• 2:40Jason Calacanis?

  What did you speak about?

• 2:41David Sacks?

  Well, it's called Up From Chaos because our foreign policy has been chaos for the last 30 years. The United States has been in seven wars. We've, how many trillions have we spent on nation building? We've lost all of those wars. Name one war we've won. Look at all the lives that have been lost, thousands and thousands of our soldiers, and then, you know, millions of innocent people all over the world. I've said it before, this is what happens when the United States goes around the world stampeding like a raging elephant. We need a more restrained foreign policy. So that's what I've been articulating. I don't know what, what about that makes it either conservative or liberal. But, you know, what we need is, is more restraint.

• 3:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, first of all, it's too logical.

• 3:20David Sacks?

  It's too logical, right? You know, it's, it's, it's pretty much everyone in this town. I mean, there's no lobby for decreasing our involvement, right? Because, I mean, the military industrial complex has gotten so big and so powerful.

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Trump did not want to start wars. It was a key piece of his platform. And it did seem, up until, and we'll get into this, obviously, up until the gaffe from Biden, 12 hours after I said you weren't giving him the benefit of the doubt, it threw me right under the bus.

• 3:51David Sacks?

  Biden just declared a new world order. I mean, he is bought into all this.

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  Regime change with Putin.

• 3:56David Sacks?

  Yeah, and he said regime change. I mean, he's bought into this liberal interventionism. Obama was much better. I mean, Obama had all the right instincts. He de-escalated things in Ukraine. We could have had the situation back in 2014. Obama pulled the plug. And he de-escalated in Syria over the, over the objections of his staff. I mean, the problem is, if you, Obama basically got played by the staff and the establishment.

• 4:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because Obama, Obama was there for eight years and he knew that, you know, it was all about. Doing the right thing and also about the legacy and the judgment that would look back on his decisions. Whereas everybody else is like, well, I'm here for this four year grift and I'll be back for another four years later. So, you know, the more chaos, the better for a lot of those people.

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  He couldn't get us out of Afghanistan. Why couldn't he get us out of Afghanistan, Sack? Cause he wanted to, right?

• 4:45David Sacks?

  He got played by the generals. So Ben Rhodes wrote a book. Ben Rhodes was sort of one of Obama's right-hand guys and he coined a term that stuck for called the blob, which is the term for this sort of Washington foreign policy establishment. All the people in the State Department and the think tanks and the sort of the journalists who love being the drums of war. I mean, that whole establishment that is addicted to war. And, um, you know, if you read that Atlantic magazine interview called the Obama doctrine where Obama's interviewed. He lays it out. He says, look, there is a foreign policy playbook that presidents are expected to follow.

• 5:27David Sacks?

  In response to any provocation, any incident, you're supposed to react in a highly militarized way. And if you don't, you get attacked and the generals, he wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but the generals started leaking against him that it'd be a fiasco. And then unfortunately Obama didn't stick to his guns. He didn't want to take those political hits. It was unfortunate. He really should have.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we'll get into Ukraine at the end of the show, but let's talk a little bit about markets up top here. The US yield curve inversion is upon us. Maybe you could give us a CP a little primer on what this means. The inverted yield curve and why people are talking about it this week?

• 6:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think people, yeah, were talking about it. The reason they were is that they believe that it predicts a recession. And specifically what they look at is the interest rate on a two-year bond and an interest rate on a 10-year bond and you subtract one from the other. And when it inverts, what effectively what it means is that, you know, typically in a healthy economy, you want rising interest rates over a long period of time. And the reason you would want that is that you are guessing that the economy will be healthy. There'll be a nominal amount of inflation, so things will tend to increase in price.

• 6:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And as a result of that, you need to get paid more for the future than today. Right? So if you want me to take 10-year risk, you need to pay me a little bit more than if you want me to take two-year risk. And so things should go up into the right. But when all of that stuff 10 years out, all of a sudden is trading for a lower yield than today. What people think will happen is that, you know, governments will cut interest rates massively. They tend to do that in order to stimulate the economy, right? To get money back into the system, and they tend to do that because of a recession. And so people look at the difference between the two-year bond and the 10-year bond, and they try to guess what's going to happen. Here's the problem with all of this.

• 7:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It turns out that it's not as correlated as one thinks. And Nick, I posted this link, so you can just put it up there. But a bunch of economists at the Fed actually went and, you know, you have access to this data. They backtested this. And what they found was that there was actually a more predictive signal of recessions, which is the difference between the three-month T-bill and the 18-month T-bill.

• 7:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if you look at the 3's 18 spread, they call that the forward spread at the Fed. That's actually not showing a recession at all. In fact, that shows a very healthy ascent, largely taking into account the fact that the Fed has told us that they're going to rip in a bunch of rate increases over the next 18 months. So what are we to do with all of this? Well, when there's been a recession, it has typically been true that both the 2's 10s and the forward spread have collapsed to zero or gone negative. That's this inversion. It has never really been the case that 2's 10s inverts while the forward spread stays up and you have a recession.

• 8:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In the past, we've mentioned that when oil has these kinds of price spikes, it typically forecasts a recession. So if you put all of this data together, it's a really murky picture. So what are you supposed to do? It's not totally clear to me.

• 8:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think that the general way that I think the market is reacting to this is probably inappropriate, and I'll tell you why. And the setup, by the way, because of this inappropriateness is actually quite interesting. So why is the reaction inappropriate? Look, if you think about where we were in November and where we are today, almost April 1st, right? So it's been four months, five months. We've had massive exposition of inflation. We've had massive disruptions to the supply chain. We've had the beginning of a war whose end is somewhat indeterminate today. That's causing a bunch of spikes in a bunch of really critical commodities the entire world needs.

• 9:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We've had a Federal Reserve that went from hiking 50 or 75 basis points to hiking 200 to 250 basis points by the estimated average. And so all of these things have happened, yet the market is basically at an all-time high, plus or minus 5%. That really doesn't hang together at some really basic logical level, right? So what's going to happen? Well, Brad said this last week. What has actually happened under the hood is a dispersion, which means the crappy companies have gotten crushed and the good companies have gotten whacked, but not crushed. Okay? And then when they rally, they rally disproportionately in favor of the good companies. So what are we doing right now?

• 10:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we are going to see this diversion of companies, and we're about to go through earnings season, right? We're at the end of Q1. And I think what's going to happen is really interesting. You're going to have a handful of companies who have a great handle on their business, who actively project strength. I know what I'm doing. I know how I'm going to perform. The levers are in my control. I'm going to invest for the future. I'm going to go and consolidate a market. Those companies will get rewarded. And then anybody else who has a whiff of indecision, or whose structural business is flawed, and then they use all of these other issues as a reason to explain their flawed business, will get completely whacked. Two examples over this last week, and we had this debate.

• 11:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, people were talking about restoration hardware and the CEO basically saying the sky is falling and there's a huge recession. And you know, my comment is, well, if you take the other side of the coin, Restoration Hardware sells overpriced crappy furniture into a housing market that's basically shut down because refi rates are at 5%. There's the other explanation for why his business is crappy. It doesn't necessarily have to be a recession.

• 11:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and just to clearly define it, a recession is two quarters or more of negative growth, the economy contracting. And we've had about a dozen of these since World War II. We remember a couple of them in our lifetimes. Obviously, the COVID situation created a recession for a couple of quarters. And then we had the Great Recession, which lasted, I think that was almost, it was over a year, right? That was six quarters, I think, five quarters. So these happen every 10 years or so. So if we do have a recession, and it seems implausible to me that we would have negative growth for two quarters.

• 12:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the other, the other interesting company, for example, was UiPath, which UiPath got whacked today 25 or 26%. And what they actually reported was that they thought that they were going to increase ARR to, you know, 1.2 billion from like 900. That's a, that's a huge, at that scale, to grow 35, 40% in ARR in a year is really quite incredible. But their ACV numbers and their revenue numbers were a little soft. They got whacked. And now they're trading, you know, like 11 times ARR. So you have some of these companies that are going to blame macro headwinds, but they may actually just have a, you know, a flawed business model. You'll have these other companies who actually overperform,

• 12:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  but may have been a little bit too highly valued, who'll get valuation reset on any faint weakness. And so, you know, it's going to be really up to these CEOs and these boards, when they write their earnings releases, to be very precise. Those that have a handle on their business, I think, are going to get really rewarded. And those that don't need to blame the macro market and just get all the bad news out now, because this is the quarter. It doesn't get any better from here.

• 13:18Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, best ways to fight a recession? Cut spending, I'm sorry, increase government spending, cut taxes.

• 13:28Jason Calacanis?

  Where are we at in terms of how many bullets we have left to do these kind of things? We don't really have a, you know, ability to spend more money. And I guess lowering interest rates is the other way to stimulate it. Do we even know we're going into a recession? So do you think we're going into a recession? If we are, is there a way to reverse it through the, the normal tactics?

• 13:48David Sacks?

  We're definitely going into a slowdown and whether it becomes a recession to be determined. I think there's a very good chance because we already were headed for a slowdown because of interest rate increases, because of inflation. And now on top of it, we've got all the supply chain disruptions from this war. And we know that, you know, unplugging the 144 million Russians in the Russian economy, we've basically unplugged that from the global economy. So that's going to hit our economy if there's a little bit of delayed reaction there. So these are all negative indicators and I think we're either going to have a recession or something very close to it.

• 14:26Jason Calacanis?

  And they typically last 11 months, right, Sax? So how long would the recession be? You think it's typically 11 months, two quarters, six quarters?

• 14:34David Sacks?

  Yeah, normally it's like 18 months till you get back to where you're supposed to be or something like that. But you're right, we have very limited tools to fight this because we've already spent, I mean, we've already broken the glass in case of emergency for COVID. We spent something like 10 trillion. By the way, that's what caused a lot of the problems is we flooded the zone with liquidity. Now we're trying to mop that up with interest rate increases. That's slowing down the economy. So there's nothing left to really spend. You can't really drop interest rates much more. And if you do, you'll get much worse inflation. So it seems to me that we don't have a lot of tools here and we could end up with something like a stag, 1970s style stagflation where we continue to see inflation with a slowing economy.

• 15:17Jason Calacanis?

  Let's unpack what that experience would be like. Economy slowing, there's less job openings, people are spending less money while the prices of goods and services continue to go up?

• 15:28David Friedberg?

  That's why they spend, that's why they spend less money. And that's why there's, there's recession. Like, I mean, you're paying six bucks for gas, you have less money to go out for dinner every week, right? You pay. Uh, you know, twice as much for an airplane ticket. You don't spend as much on the hotel. I mean, like, you know, the, the rippling effects of the rate of inflation are decreased spending and there isn't enough time for, you know, the, the new job creation engine to catch up. And, you know, without a stimulus effect, you're in trouble. That's really the situation we're in. And that's what, you know, can kind of cause these tax inflationary effects to, to, to drag on.

• 16:07Jason Calacanis?

  Almost every other time we've had a recession, people couldn't find jobs and I can remember them qualitatively. People saying, hey, I want to get a job. I need more money. I can't find one. And now we're sitting here with more jobs than we can fill. Still over 10 million jobs available and, and people are still resigning from jobs. So how do we factor in the labor market, Shama?

• 16:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, it's all this.

• 16:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's super confounding. It's just not like previous ones.

• 16:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is. I actually think, Jason, the explanation for all of this is, um, not necessarily about the supply demand dynamics of labor, but our social policies related to our birth rate and immigration. I posted this article link for you guys to read in the Atlantic, but basically our birth rate in 2021 absolutely fell off a cliff. It was less than 300,000 net births in the entire country. And net birth is defined as immigration plus births minus deaths. And when you look under the covers, you know, we had two really discontinuously bad things. One that was, that has been building since Trump and one that was acute. The thing

• 17:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that was acute was that in 2021, after we had vaccines, which is crazy thing to think about, we had a million deaths, basically, right? Because of COVID. So that's a million people that largely exited the workforce, plus or minus. Obviously some, not, not all of those people working, but I think the overwhelming majority.

• 17:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, probably 50%. We have 50, 60% labor participation.

• 17:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  More, more, more. I suspect, I suspect.

• 17:38Jason Calacanis?

  Some could have been retired, right?

• 17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what I'm saying. I think it's probably like 70, 80% of the people that died were probably in the workforce in some way. So you had, you had all those people leave. We have a troublesome issue with births and birth rates. All Western economies do. Basically, as a standard of living goes up and as the equality between men and women go up, birth rates go down without commenting on the dynamics of that. That is just true. And so, you know, we should celebrate that in the sense that like, you know, you want increasing equality, you want people to have more choice, et cetera, all these things.

• 18:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So how do you make up for the gap? Well, you make up for the gap in immigration and the problem is that Trump closed the door.

• 18:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 18:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Biden has not reopened the door. And so, you know, we have had a meaningful falloff in immigration. It doubly compounded because then because of COVID, we had border controls and we shut the borders completely. So even if, you know, you were a student that would come here, odds were maybe you'd get a master's or a PhD and then stay here. None of those people can, so nobody can get in. So that's the real problem that we have to solve, Jason, which is that you're not going to get, you know, families to all of a sudden have kids. You know, that that's an 18 year problem if you started that problem today to get them into the workforce, or 25 year problem. So immigration is really the only solution and we don't really have the sponsorship to do that at a domestic policy level.

• 19:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then you add to that the fact that labor participation, which when we were coming up, 67, 68% of people in the country were work, choosing to work. And now we're down in the 60% and maybe ticking up to, yeah, 62% it looks like on that Fred website. So we need to greatly increase the number of people in the country and the people participating in the labor force if we're to avoid a recession, right? More people working.

• 19:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need to boost immigration. We need to boost it. Yeah, I would encourage everybody to read this Atlantic article because I think Nick Thompson does a very good job of just basically summarizing the issues that we have.

• 19:39Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what are your thoughts here? If, is it getting more people to participate in the labor force, importing more people, both? And then how do you, how do you get that to actually happen?

• 19:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, Derek Thompson, not Nick Thompson.

• 19:52David Friedberg?

  Look, I'm not an economist, but I don't know if that really solves the acute runaway problem that we're experiencing right now. Well, one thing I'll say about inflation, let's say you're running a company and you raise your prices. You're not often going back and dropping your prices again. And, you know, you have to have a catch-up effect.

• 20:13David Friedberg?

  For income and savings to make up for the increment in pricing. And that's really, you know, a key driver right now that the rate at which prices are going up. And, you know, sure, gas and other commodities trade back down. But consumables, durables typically stay high after they inflate. Um, you end up having, you know, kind of this persisting effect and it's really hard to kind of just grow your way out of that. So, um, you know, without stimulus and so, you know, I'm not sure that the labor solution is going to solve this kind of acute problem, um, that we're going to be facing that's that seems to be at this point dragging on.

• 20:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think about the argument, though, that there's a substitutional effect, meaning?

• 20:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When prices of goods rise, people find cheaper goods. Uh, and then separately, what happens is, you know, part of a productive society is you make better and more interesting and more useful goods and services. And, you know, incrementally, especially if you use technology, those things tend to be deflationary. So they do get cheaper, meaning, you know, you used to pay for photo storage, Dropbox comes along, gives it away for free. Then Google comes along and gives everything away for free.

• 21:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 21:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you have this deflationary, natural deflationary effect where you tend to save money on the things you used to pay for because a lot of people find that they can build a different kind of business model to monetize giving it to you or subsidizing it.

• 21:33Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's the key, Chamath, is that if people, if prices go up, then entrepreneurs are going to look and say, you know what? There's a better way to do this. You want to go on vacation? You want to stay somewhere for two weeks? You can't afford the hotel? Okay, let's try this new thing like this Airbnb. Somebody rents you their apartment. They move in with another person. For the week, you use their apartment and you can rent for a hundred fifty a night instead of three fifty at a hotel. That, that, uh, pricing, uh, when there's runaway pricing, people come up with better solutions for people.

• 22:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think, I think that that's generally been true. And by the way, the, if you think about the, the biggest areas that have been sticky, um, which are energy policy and housing policy. Um, the way that we'll have to unlock. Better pricing in those markets will be because we deregulate, not by increasing regulation, but by massive deregulation. You know, we have massive nimbyism up and down the stack that prevents us from building the housing supply we need. That has to get fixed, right? And we need to have better energy policy. Like, for example, you take a state like California, you know, it's the most populous state in the country, it's the richest state in the country, but it has electricity prices that are three times higher than the national average. That doesn't make any sense, right? And so, you know,

• 22:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  how do you expect renewables to really compete when people are still incentivized to fire coal and not gas? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. These prices cannot be this high. They're high because of lobbying and because of lobbyists and special interests. And so if you rip that stuff out by deregulation, you actually allow, as you said, Jason, entrepreneurs to do the right thing, and they will push prices back down.

• 23:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sax?

• 23:09David Sacks?

  What's your question?

• 23:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I thought you might want to comment on what we're talking about entrepreneurs creating products and services that lower prices, that then, you know, maybe create the exit ramp here to inflation and stagflation, some combination of that that's going to be upon us.

• 23:26David Sacks?

  Sure. I mean, there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy in the US. It's strong. Technology does cause deflation. It's deflationary. But this is not going to help us get out of what's coming over the next year or two. Look, the bottom line is that we had a massive government overreaction to COVID, in which we printed and spent way too much money, something like 10 trillion plus. And, you know, this is the classic hangover after the party. You know, they put the punchbowl out for way too long, and now we're all gonna pay the price for it.

• 23:58Jason Calacanis?

  They spiked the punchbowl.

• 23:59David Sacks?

  They spiked the punchbowl big time.

• 24:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:01David Sacks?

  And we're already seeing it. And think about like, all the advice we're giving our portfolio companies to slow down their spending and extend their runway. Every board in America is going to be doing that. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But this yield curve inversion is, you know, fairly predictive. I mean, it's not perfect, but, you know, CNBC had this report today. Historically, it's met when the yield curve inverts, there's been a better than two thirds chance of recession at some point in the next year, and greater than 98% chance of recession at some point in the next two years. So it looks to me like-

• 24:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It needs to be inverted for at least 90 days typically. But again, I think if you look at the forward spread from the Fed, it's- It's more accurate than the two stents, but your point is the same. Something is happening that we need to take seriously and none of the outcomes here are growthy, good outcomes. And the policy wonks in Washington really need to figure out what their position is going to be on this stuff and what they push next in terms of legislation. Because we're going to be going into the back half of the year in a midterm election where the economy is slowing, interest rates are high, prices are high. This is a horrible setup for the day.

• 25:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, and let's think about what the priorities of the administration have been throughout all of this. I mean, one year ago, they did that whole $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. They were warned by people like Stanley Druckenmiller that retail was back, the consumer was back, and yet they still printed $2 trillion. That caused a huge amount of inflation. It totally backfired. And that wasn't the end of it. If they had their way, we would have had $4 trillion more of spending and the whole bill back better. Now Biden just floated this new trial balloon over this unrealized gains tax. So last year, they floated the trial balloon about basically doing a wealth tax and everyone hated it. And now they just proposed it again. It was insane. And even when they brought it out, they leaked that they had Manchin's support behind it.

• 25:56David Sacks?

  And then the next day, Manchin came out and disavowed it and said, no, no, no, I don't support this. I mean, what is the administration thinking? It makes no sense.

• 26:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I mean, clearly.

• 26:05David Sacks?

  And then on foreign policy, I mean, I strongly believe we could have cut a deal on Ukraine a year ago to diffuse this whole situation before it turned into a war. Now we got a war over there.

• 26:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's talk about what they should do. I mean, number one on the list for me is we should be getting every entrepreneur from around the world, any really intelligent person who wants to go to graduate school here into this country. We need to have like a Manhattan project to just scoop up all these mutant geniuses from around the world and get them here and get them starting companies here.

• 26:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't even need to do that. It was working.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  And don't fuck it up.

• 26:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bush, Obama, all you had to do was just leave it alone.

• 26:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everybody who was any good at anything wanted to come to the United States, including the three of us.

• 26:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 26:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And all of a sudden, it's like, nah, it's good. Yeah, I pass.

• 26:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, I guess.

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you set out that you hate entrepreneurs and you resent them for success, don't be surprised if they want to stay in the country. That.

• 27:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I don't, I don't think that's what it was. I think it was much crueler than that. I think that we went to a posture that said, okay, you know what? Net new immigration was viewed as something that was displacing people, wasn't a net value creator, was, you know, in some cases viewed very xenophobically. And that is really problematic because it's actually about a large population issue. And it's about how you construct a healthy, thriving population.

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. This was Trump's worst, yeah, worst approach. He was best approach, clearly not starting wars, worst approach, shutting the borders down for some populist reason when we actually need people in the country.

• 27:47David Sacks?

  Well, hold on. But see, the way you just framed that is why I think there's a problem, which is, look, obviously, the immigration is a very fraught issue. But the choice that's being presented to us by our political parties is either you're in favor of immigration, you know, like bringing in all these superstars, like we have founders in Silicon Valley, that makes sense, or you're in favor of open borders. I mean, why are those the two choices? That we either have H1Bs or we have an open border. I mean, that makes no sense. I mean, what we should have is a sensible immigration. First of all, we should strip the border security issue out of it. Because whatever the number of immigrants.

• 28:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everyone should be pro border security.

• 28:25Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we need a point based system. We need to be have a reasonable discussion between Democrats and Republicans about a point based system. There's a qualitative distance.

• 28:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You advocated that for a long time, and it works in Canada, and you're, I think you're absolutely.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Australia, New Zealand, UK. They all have this. It's like, what, what does our country need right now? Okay, do we need people, you know, who are laborers? Or do we need people starting companies? Do we need, you know, scientists?

• 28:48David Friedberg?

  I don't know if you've noticed, but to me, this is very equivalent to the removal of SAT and ACT scoring and admissions. The notion of merit, the notion of performance is not one that really matters in this country as much right now. As much as the notion of equity. And equity really has kind of become the mainstay of not just how we're making. Policy decisions on a local level, but a lot of these kind of national issues are becoming about equity. And it's about, you know, equitable consideration for wealth creation for existing citizens in the United States. And the perception that a minority of people or some majority of people actually. Missed out on significant wealth creation over the past couple of decades as globalization.

• 29:29David Friedberg?

  And technology advances have accelerated growth in our economy and the share of that growth. Has been disproportionately assigned to a small percentage of people. And I think it is that same notion that drives a lot of the the kind of. Sub decisions, the local decisions that we're making. As well as these important policy decisions and the point that I think is critical, it's really hard to get across. To everyone or anyone for that matter. Is that, you know, and I've talked about this a lot, but progress brings everyone forward, but it doesn't bring everyone forward symmetrically. Right? Progress brings everyone forward. Give an example, Friedberg. So Amazon's a great example. I've used it a lot. Um, with Amazon, we've all been given access to more goods and cheaper goods than we would have had before.

• 30:14David Friedberg?

  So we all benefit from that progress, right? Everyone can get on an app and get a frigging inflatable swimming pool delivered to their home and the vitamins they need. Within 24 hours at half the price of what it would have cost them to go down to the local Ace Hardware store. That's an incredible benefit for all of us. So our share of wallet. On that sort of goods has gone down, therefore we can spend more, get access to more stuff and we're all prospering. And if you think back to what life was like 30 years ago, 20 years ago, to those of you. Who, you know, were spending money 20 years ago or whatever, it's an incredibly different proposition than what we had back then. And it really has changed the world and changed our all of us as consumers' ability to consume more. That's amazing. The problem is Jeff Bezos is worth $160 billion. So everyone looks at that and they want to land base Jeff Bezos and they want to say this is unfair.

• 30:59David Friedberg?

  And equity becomes the discussion, which is why is one guy worth $160 billion? The reality is he benefited. Everyone, everyone got benefit from the value that he helped create in this world, in this market. And then the reaction is, we gotta stop this from happening. We can't let people be worth a hundred sixty billion dollars. Without putting their eye on the point that, you know what, I'm spending three grand a year less because of this possible, because of this technology that he brought to market. And so there's a lot of these solutions that I would say are progressive. They, they progress us all as a society. Everything from biotech to technology and software, to any sort of business or services innovation that people are willing to pay money for, that people are willing to embrace in an open and free market.

• 31:41David Friedberg?

  And then what happens is the spoils of that progress aggregate in a minor, in a, in a small way to a small number of people. And that's the payoff in capitalism. But when that happens over and over again for two hundred and fifty years, you fast forward and by the way, a lot of those compound, people wake up and they say, I don't want that anymore. And they miss the fact that progress is taken for granted. And here we are. We want to give up progress and we want to get equity. And it's going to cause a real ripple effect that's going to last for decades. And it's not the first time we've seen it, right? This has happened historically over cycles that last hundreds of years and it's happening now in the United States and in the entire Western world. Um, and I think it's going to be really unfortunate generally for progress.

• 32:24David Friedberg?

  Um, and all the ones, you know, and all, all the advocates for equity are going to kind of raise their hand.

• 32:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're totally right. What's the solution? Cause that's, it's just a really sad.

• 32:33David Friedberg?

  I've thought about this a lot and you know, I look at what China did, um, and everyone's going to say I'm pro-China, but what was interesting about China recently is they ratchet up and they ratchet down that free market system. So they allow progress and then they disallow progress when the equity meter goes the wrong way. And so if you kind of think about an equity meter and a progress meter, you have to balance those two over time. Because otherwise what happens is you spring back and then the springing back is when governments change, revolutions happen. You know, democracy falls apart, autocracies arise, all those sorts of awful things. And really I would say those cyclical things that happen. I don't want to characterize any of them as good or bad, but cyclical things that happen with society over time. And so, you know, that is effectively what's happening, guys.

• 33:17David Friedberg?

  Like, the ultra-high tax rate, the regulatory regime, you know, the government coming in and stopping Facebook. I mean, these sorts of behaviors are almost like an attempt to mute and ratchet down both inequity as well as the, you know, unfortunate side effect of progress.

• 33:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right. We're basically punishing excellence, and that is challenging for long-term growth.

• 33:42David Friedberg?

  You're minimizing progress to improve the rate of equity of distribution of gains, right? And it's very hard, because, by the way, what you're also doing is you're relating a first derivative and a second derivative effect. And so, you know, first-order and second-order effect, so it becomes a really difficult thing to... And people don't really see it this way. People see kind of the very, you know, myopic view of, "I gotta redistribute wealth, I gotta help people that are out of jobs." These guys have only seen their income go up by 10%, while everyone else's income's gone up by 40%. And so, you know, politicians, you know, legislators react to that circumstance. But the zooming out is that circumstance arose as we all made progress with respect to security, with respect to health, with respect to food availability, with respect

• 34:26David Friedberg?

  to consumables being cheaper, et cetera, et cetera. All these great things that progress has given us. And, you know, there's a ratcheting effect. The hope I have is that that ratcheting isn't too binary. It doesn't flip too far back the other way, too fast, in which case you have a socialist state arise, a revolution arise, you know, all the things that we've seen kind of come out of this.

• 34:48Jason Calacanis?

  Or are people just canceling AP Math in California?

• 34:50David Friedberg?

  Precisely, precisely. And then the rippling effect of no more AP Math and no more Sacks is, you know, row, like, you know, yeah, fast forward 20 years.

• 34:59Jason Calacanis?

  MIT brought back the... I don't know if you saw this week, MIT brought back Sacks as a qualifier after they paused it. I think a lot of people are starting to realize this is a road to nowhere. Sax, what do you think is, to Chamath's point, like, is there a solution to get America behind excellence and pragmatic, you know, kind of solutions for immigration? And if there is a way to do that, how would you do it?

• 35:22David Sacks?

  Well, I think like we were talking about, you got to kind of unpack the issue. So like we talked about strip border security out of it. Don't make that part of it. Then I think you got to differentiate between high skill and low skill immigration, like what you call the point system. I mean, if you look at who's founding companies in Silicon Valley, something like 40% of startups have an immigrant co-founder. So clearly immigrants bring a ton of entrepreneurial energy to the US, but we also, it's in our selfish interest to make sure that the immigrants we're letting in actually have the skills that make them potential founders. So I think it's just would be smart for us to think that way. And you can't even really have that conversation. It seems like today to have more of a skills-based immigration system. I mean, who, who's willing to say that?

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you could just say three buckets, you know, here's people who need amnesty because they're being prosecuted persecuted in their country and they're here because of humanitarian reasons. Here's a bucket for high performers who are going to add to our economy and create jobs. And then here's another bucket, which is a lottery and a lineup system. Hey, you want to come here because you don't have skill, but you want to come here because the country is so great. Okay. You know, each of those buckets is going to have its own process and your, your odds might be different in each bucket. You know, is that so hard for people to grok?

• 36:41David Sacks?

  Right. But you gotta remember, you know, we're, we're sitting for in the economy. I mean, it's very easy for us to say this because we are sitting in Silicon Valley and for us, immigration is an economic good. It's a benefit. But if you are in a part of the country or a part of the economy where you're in a low wage job, maybe you're a service employee or you're a union employee in the Midwest. The more immigrants that are let in that are low skill, they compete with you and drive your wages down. And that's why people are against it. So that's basically the conundrum is as long as you're talking about immigration as being a single thing, it's going to have a lot of political opposition. That's why we need to, you know, bifurcate it between high school and low skill. Let in more high skilled people and less low skill.

• 37:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The least, if you had to rank them from least controversial to most controversial. I think letting in high skilled labor is probably the least controversial thing.

• 37:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Then, and there is always controversy around this, it's always on the, you know, the bucket of people for humanitarian grounds, right? Some people agree, some people disagree. Should these people be considered refugees? Should they not? How many of your family members should you be able to sponsor? How many not? Et cetera, et cetera. And that's somewhat controversial. But I think we can all agree, the most controversial bucket are folks that would otherwise come, that would be considered lower skill, because they are the ones that really put pressure in very practical, measurable ways into the economy. And we just have to, to your point, segregate and differentiate how we think about this problem. Because again, if you take immigration, the word away, and actually just use immigration

• 38:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  as an input to this equation on population stability, we have population instability right now. So unless we figure out something between live births and deaths, which I don't think we're going to solve tomorrow.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 38:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's going to create a very large imbalance that our economy and our country cannot really recover from.

• 38:45Jason Calacanis?

  You know what? You sparked my thinking there. It really is a framing issue. We should not call high skilled labor coming here as immigration. We should be flipping that to talent acquisition. We should be looking at it as America is trying to get more talent here so we can win the industries that matter. And if we looked at it as, this is talent acquisition, it has nothing to do with immigration. This is us going out and sourcing the smartest people to come here so our companies win against other companies in the global economy to create more jobs for Americans. Talent acquisition could be something we could be investing in. We should be thinking, how do we win that?

• 39:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All the problems that ail us, the solution is in some hardworking group of men and women, of which some will be entrepreneurs who want to be here. You know, we're trying to figure out how to actually build our own chips while there are semiconductor experts getting trained, whether here or abroad, who would want to be here to do that job on behalf of the United States, right? We want to figure out climate independence. There are men and women being trained here and abroad who want to be here and solve that problem on behalf of the United States, on and on and on and on. And that's what it means to be, and I'll use a sports analogy, you know, the L.A. Lakers, right? That's what it means to be, you know, the New England Patriots. Everybody wants to play for you.

• 40:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so when you're in that position and you have that branding tailwind, you have to use it to your advantage to stack the deck in your favor so that you're constantly winning championships. Otherwise, you're being really derelict in your duty. And I think, you know, hopefully, if people look at the broad population level issue that we just exposed because of COVID, there is a stat in this article as an example. In the county of Los Angeles, we are now, in the last 20 years, we've seen a 50% reduction in the birth rate in LA from 150,000 births a year to about 100. And if you forecast that forward, you know, before the turn of the century, the county of Los Angeles will have zero net births.

• 40:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you run, if you run, if you run the, that's insane.

• 40:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So we need to figure out how to solve this problem. Because it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it really impacts GDP. It impacts all these other issues that Freebrooke just talked about as well. The sense of equality and fairness. If we're not creating and growing, we are going to fight over how to split a shrinking pie. And that does tend to lead to revolution.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's when people, it could get really gnarly. We're not growing, entrepreneurs are not coming here, new jobs are not being created. Imagine if Amazon wasn't created.

• 41:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The historical implications for what Freebrooke said are really well-defined in history. If you go back thousands of years, you look at every single time, you know, an empire goes through that period of decline, when they have net negative growth, economic growth, and they have this sort of rising populism, what they end up doing is they end up fighting, and they have different ways of fighting, right? But they end up fighting over how to reallocate a shrinking pie. And there are many of those outcomes when they fight that ends up in, you know, really turbulent moments in history.

• 42:00Jason Calacanis?

  And that's where this wealth tax.

• 42:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's where we have a responsibility to make sure you don't end up going through, you know, a Russia scenario, a China scenario, you know, and there are more productive ways to solve these problems.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's where the wealth tax that was floated, which seems, it's DOA already, but this concept of everybody having, who's over $100 billion, having to assess all their worth and give 20% back minimum each year, is that dividing of the pie and maybe they can allocate less money towards.

• 42:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can we all agree that like, you know, on the margins, when you make a lot of money, you can and should pay more taxes? I don't think that's a super controversial idea. You know, on the margins, if you are a massive polluter, you should pay some taxes to compensate for the damage you're creating to the environment. These are not controversial ideas. The problem is that, you know, what Sacks said is true. You take a sensible concept and then you pervert it because you have to contort it with all this language to make it political and it loses all of its value in it. So for example, you know, why does the administration have to write this law, potential law or proposal, in a way that so obviously violates the Constitution of the United States? Are they that dumb?

• 43:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think they're that dumb. But they do it to appease some political aspect of the Democratic Party and then as a result it becomes DOA within eight minutes of it being announced, Manchin says this is dead. What is the point of that theater?

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's virtue signaling.

• 43:31David Friedberg?

  Aren't you a donor? You should know, right? What would they tell you? I mean, what's the Democratic Party saying?

• 43:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think what they would say off the record is that these were sacrificial totems to the progressive left, meaning that they do it for window dressing to destroy, like it's like throwing a cat a ball of yarn.

• 43:50David Friedberg?

  It seems like that populist progressive left is becoming a bigger base than it was historically.

• 43:56David Sacks?

  In the Democratic Party it is. I'm not sure how big it is, but in the Democratic Party, yeah, look, it's where all the energy is, the Democratic Party, and it's where a lot of the donors are. That yeah, that is who's driving the agenda in the Democratic Party today. That is why the Democrats are going to get shellacked in November. Read Roy Tushare's Substack. He is the Democratic political consultant who wrote "The Emerging Democratic Majority", predicting, this is back in 2002. He wrote a book about how there would be a new Democratic coalition of young voters and minorities and women, and they would come together and that would create, you know, Democratic majorities and Democratic presidents forever. And then Obama wins in 2008, and it looks like Tushare's prediction's coming true.

• 44:38David Sacks?

  And he recently, in the last two years, has been warning that that some things happened that he could never have predicted, which is that working-class voters are now moving out of the Democratic Party. Not just whites, but also Hispanics and Asians, even Black voters who are working class are all moving to the Republican Party. So he believes the Republican Party is losing its natural majority. Why? Because progressives have taken over and on cultural and social issues, they are much more liberal than the working class of this country. So basically, what's happened is the Democrats have become a professional class party, and the Republicans are in the process of transforming into a working-class party, and that's turning everything upside down.

• 45:20David Sacks?

  But ultimately, you know, with Yonkin winning in Virginia last year, and I think the Republicans on generic ballot are up like, what, plus 10, plus 12? I mean, they're going to have a huge, I think, wave in November. You know, you've got to remember that professionals, meaning college-educated voters, are only about a third of the electorate. I think about 37%. And then the other 63% are working class. The working class does not like this extreme socio-cultural progressive agenda. They don't like seeing their statues ripped down. They don't like this sort of, what they see is kind of this antagonism towards American history and American icons. They don't believe in socialism, you know, and so on down the line.

• 46:05David Sacks?

  And the Democratic Party is increasingly speaking only to itself. I mean, they are in an echo chamber, and I think these progressives are going to have to lose a few elections before they realize. I mean, the same thing happened to the Democratic Party back in the 1980s, right? You had Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush win three landslide elections, 1980, 1984.

• 46:26David Sacks?

  Eighty-eight and then the Democrats nominate these like horrible candidates Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Dukakis, and then who comes along?

• 46:33Jason Calacanis?

  Easy on the Greeks, easy on the Greeks. Dukakis was pretty great.

• 46:37David Sacks?

  Okay, like we found the one fan. We found the one fan.

• 46:40Jason Calacanis?

  He was terrible.

• 46:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, who comes along in nineteen ninety-two? Bill Clinton and he has this whole new faction within the Democratic Party, the DLC, and his explicit mandate was to lead them back to the center. And then he chooses Al Gore as his running mate to double down on that image. I don't think Al Gore actually was that centrist. I think he's that, but his image at that time was that he was pretty centrist.

• 47:02Jason Calacanis?

  He was.

• 47:03David Sacks?

  So, so you had, yes, I mean, I think at that time, so their Democratic Party had to lose for about twelve years before they nominated a candidate and put him at the leadership of the party who could drag them back to the center. Now, listen, I mean, all we have right now are foreshadowings of this. We have the Yonkin victory last year. We have the fact those three school board members of San Francisco got kicked out. You know, we'll see what happens to Chesa Boudin on June seventh. So we're getting these glimmers and I think November will be a big test, but where I think this thing is headed is that the, the working class voters of this country don't like this radical progressive shift in the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party is going to keep losing until they're willing to make changes.

• 47:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and immigration is just such an easy one and, and courting the working person is what the Democrats did forever. So I don't know how they, how they can screw this up.

• 47:58David Sacks?

  But remember, working class voters don't, working class voters are not in favor of immigration, J Cal. They do not want unlimited number of immigrants coming in.

• 48:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they don't want unlimited, but they would like to see their family members.

• 48:08David Sacks?

  And driving their wages down.

• 48:09Jason Calacanis?

  But they do want their family members to be allowed in. So for the folks who have.

• 48:13David Sacks?

  Now, you talk to, you talk to Hispanic voters who are citizens in America, they are not in favor of unlimited immigration because that creates wage pressure for them.

• 48:21Jason Calacanis?

  Reasonable.

• 48:22David Sacks?

  I'm telling you, it's not, it's not like what you think. The, the more, the higher you are economically in the social strata, the more professional you are, the more you like immigration because like for people like us, we like immigrants because they found companies and we invested in them. We see the economic vitality that they bring. But if you're a working class, okay, you do not want that wage pressure. You just don't. So unless the Democrats figure out a way to talk about it, the way we're talking about it, where we separate high skill and low skill, they will lose with that message.

• 48:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's get into some other things happening in the market. SEC is proposing a new set of rules to regulate SPACs. I wonder if anybody here can chime in on this?

• 49:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I wrote, I wrote an editorial in Bloomberg, basically a year ago, spelling out a bunch of new regulations that I thought the SEC should adopt. They adopted a lot of them in this draft, so I think that that's really good. They missed a couple of key things, and this is again tying back to this other thing. When we're in this phase right now where we are really questioning how capitalism should work, I think that there are two reactions that people can have. One is you pass more regulation that entrenches existing advantages. And the other is you pass regulation that either deregulates

• 49:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  or democratizes a market. And if I had to cast the half of my proposals that the SEC adopted, I would say it falls more into the first bucket than the second. And Jason, you've spoken to the second bucket of laws that the SEC could also change, which is, you know, it's in their power to give people an on-ramp to prove that they are qualified and accredited so that they can participate in some of these really, you know, vibrant ways of making money beyond just investing in the S and P 500, like investing in startups if you're educated and capable of doing. The SEC at the same time proposed a bunch of legislation around reporting requirements for ESG.

• 50:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if you look at both of these two buckets of laws, I think they're rooted in good ideas, and I think that there are some good concepts in it. But who really wins? I think if you look at it, the American Bar Association had a huge victory here because the amount of incremental regulation is going up, which means, you know, what was a 300-page filing with the SEC will now be 350 pages, right? I think that benefits lawyers. I think it benefits consultants. I think it benefits the accountants. So I think it benefits the ecosystem of people that participate. It's not so clear how normal, everyday folks benefit from a lot of this stuff. So I think if you strip it all away, what I would say is,

• 51:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the SEC is trying to do the right thing, but I would really encourage them to do the second half of what they should be doing, which is Making these on-ramps better built.

• 51:28Jason Calacanis?

  Generally speaking, what do you think happens in the SPAC space? We had 600 of them after you started this.

• 51:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's going to consolidate to the 10 of us that know what we're doing.

• 51:35Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 51:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just like, you know, look, the IPO rules are extremely sophisticated. Did it hurt Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs's IPO business? No, it just meant that the 95 small banks that did IPOs went away. And it consolidated to six and the league tables, you know, just churned between the six. JP Morgan, one year is the top, you know, then it's Morgan Stanley, then it's Goldman Sachs, then it's B of A, then it's Credit Suisse. Similarly, SPACs will consolidate around six or seven players and, you know, will do most of the business.

• 52:04Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think, Friedberg, of this new SEC announcement that they're considering climate disclosures for publicly traded companies? This would basically not only what they're doing in terms of consuming or, you know, allowing greenhouse gases and emissions, but also this scope three concept, your inputs, what is your supply chain doing and what are your consumers doing? So if you're making the iPhone, what happens to the iPhone when the consumer gets rid of it? Or what did it take to get those minerals out of the ground to make the iPhone? What do you think? Is this a net benefit? Is it the lawyers win? Or does measuring all this actually mean we're going to see publicly traded companies manage it better? A lot of opting into it already, like Google and Apple are doing it on their own accord. But what do you think generally of this regulation?

• 52:49David Friedberg?

  Well, I'll say, let me just say something on the SPACs and then I'll answer that question. You know, if you read the comment, the first SEC proposed rule, it was to amend the definition of a blank check company to make the liability safe harbor for forward-looking statements such as business forecasts unavailable in filings by SPACs. So, you know, this was, you know, I think one of the primary points of appeal over the past couple of years, we've all been private market, sophisticated private market investors. When we take a pitch or hear a pitch from a company, we all have the experience and the know-how. Not always correctly, but at least we know what to look for, what to ask.

• 53:30David Friedberg?

  And over time have learned through our wounds and our failures to appropriately diligence, forecast and understand what they mean and what they say. And, you know, because the public markets historically through an IPO are available to retail investors, you know, generally whatever the definition is of unqualified or, you know, folks who may not have the level of sophistication that, you know, some regulatory body has deemed is needed to be able to do that level of diligence. The statements that are made in an IPO in an S1 need to be kind of factually referenced, referenceable. And that's not true when it comes to forecasts and that's why they're not included in S1s in an IPO.

• 54:13David Friedberg?

  But in a SPAC, the appeal was you can tell your forward-looking forecast, paint the rosy picture like you would for a startup. And then theoretically, the investor should make an assessment of the risk and the upside and the objective that the business is saying they're going to go shoot for and achieve. And it's pretty evident, and I think we all knew this, you know, coming out of last year, that, you know, many investors made investments on the basis of those forecasts, you know, being to some degree reasonably achievable or likely achievable. And it turns out that in many cases, they were not and were not achieved. And that's the big motivation here. So the real fundamental question with respect to Chima's point about markets is how much do you want to have the government and a regulator

• 54:57David Friedberg?

  play the role of deciding who is and who isn't sophisticated enough to make an assessment about a business's forward-looking prospects? Or should we simply keep all forward-looking prospects or, you know, forecasts like this, you know, out of those documents? And it's an important conversation to have because for years, people have been saying, I want to invest in private companies, but I'm not a qualified investor. Therefore, I'm only going to be able to invest in public companies. And as we're seeing, the problem with investing in private companies or speculative companies is that you're investing on the come and more often than not, that doesn't end up happening. And that's a really hard lesson to learn. And SPACs have kind of forced the retail market that have not historically invested in private companies to learn that lesson very fast.

• 55:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is why, by the way, in my, what I was asking the SEC to do on top of the things that they already did was I said, make us all invest our own money. You know, make the sponsor really monetarily at risk. I've invested a minimum of $100 million in every single deal I've done as a SPAC sponsor. That's a lot of money.

• 55:59Jason Calacanis?

  More skin in the game and disclosing that would be great and maybe even having a clearinghouse where you could see the percentage of cash to the ultimate raise that the promoter has would be...

• 56:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All of that stuff worked great. All of that stuff, Jason, is in the spirit of disclosure and transparency. I just wish they would have done that.

• 56:14David Friedberg?

  You still think it's important to have forward-looking statements in these SPACs? I mean, if that ends up becoming, you know, the cornerstone of this proposed regulation and it goes through...

• 56:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think it's a cornerstone. I think the thing is that there are really important businesses that need good stewards to help them get into the public markets to raise money to fund their business. And there are some people who really understand that and there are many others who don't. And the thing that the SEC should make a decision on is whether just having a bunch of middlemen serves a market better or having a combination of some middlemen and some principals all competing is better. Because remember, what is capitalism really? You have these trapped sources of money, right? When you buy an equity, right, or you buy a bond,

• 57:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you're putting money into a trapped asset. It's an unproductive asset. It may yield some return.

• 57:16Jason Calacanis?

  But it's dead money.

• 57:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not really generating it. It is dead money.

• 57:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Capitalism is about creating an incentive for you to take that money out of that dead asset, that unproductive asset, and put it directly into the hands of somebody who will make it productive. I'm gonna, you know, build some oil fields. I'm gonna make...

• 57:33Jason Calacanis?

  A battery factory.

• 57:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A battery factory. I'm gonna make shoes.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  Product service, yeah.

• 57:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Whatever it is, right? And so, you know, having more competition that creates the incentives for that process to happen, to go from point A to point B, should be the goal of the government. Because in the absence of that, again, going back to the previous conversation, you're going to basically shrink the incentives of productivity. And I don't think that's what anybody wants to have happen.

• 58:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's such an easy solution to all of this. We have a test if you want to drive a car. And if you want to drive a big car called the truck, you have to get a different test. You want to drive a motorcycle, slide it and take that.

• 58:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, Jason, I just wanted to...

• 58:13Jason Calacanis?

  Why not have a test?

• 58:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You brought up a really good point earlier, and I just wanted to put a fine point on what you said. Let's just say all these companies, that's all of our startups included, will now, when we go public, have to create these disclosures around scope one, scope two, scope three emissions. And there's this weird concept called materiality that exists in law, which will now, again, have to get adjudicated. Let's say Apple doesn't disclose what's actually happening in their factories. Somebody can now sue them because they will say, "That's a material disclosure that you didn't disclose." Well, guess what will happen? That'll wind its way and meander its way through the courts. It'll take years. There'll be tens and tens of millions of dollars spent on that litigation

• 58:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  because Apple will vehemently defend the right that it wasn't a material disclosure. Because the implications otherwise will be measured in the billions or tens of billions of dollars. So who really wins? Consultants win. Trial experts win. The lawyers win.

• 59:11Jason Calacanis?

  Lobbyists.

• 59:12David Friedberg?

  Jason, I just want to frame this up for a second, because I think it's important for people to think about, you know, costs that are external to the business operation. Meaning costs that are borne by the broader society, by other members of society, not the business itself. So let's say that you're a company that makes products with a lot of sugar, and, you know, or cigarettes that, you know, we know when people consume a lot of sugar, cancer goes up, obesity goes up, diabetes goes up. The cost for cancer treatment, the cost for diabetes treatment, the cost for medical treatment associated with smoking, or sugar, or alcohol, is borne by a health system where the ultimate cost is shared by a large group of society,

• 59:57David Friedberg?

  by a number, all number of members, whether that's a public health insurance program or a private one. There's a group that shares that cost. And so you, as a consumer, are not paying that cost today. The question is, should you be paying that cost? And this is true for CO2 emissions, for carbon emissions. You know, you drive a gas guzzling car, you purchase gasoline. There is carbon that goes in the atmosphere. You're not going to end up individually fixing the carbon out of the atmosphere later. The rest of us are going to have to bear that cost as our homes burn down. You know, as floods cause, you know, houses to wash away. As all the catastrophe that we're all predicting is going to happen starts to happen. So the question is, how do you account for those external costs?

• 1:00:38David Friedberg?

  And then the second question that will arise in a market-based system that we have is, who's going to pay for those costs? Right now, we all assume those costs and we don't charge anyone for them. We don't just, we don't charge anyone for the obesity epidemic. We don't charge anyone for the cancer epidemic associated with cigarettes until we had that big legislation that, that, that, you know, the DOJ knocked that off. We don't charge anyone today for carbon emissions that we're all going to have to pay the cost for. And so, you know, the first step is identifying and quantifying the external costs of the product or service that you're providing. And deciding whether or not to tax the consumer of that product, whether or not to tax the seller of that product. And ultimately, how to transition that capital back to the repair mechanism for pulling the, the effects of that product back out of the system.

• 1:01:23Jason Calacanis?

  So in this analogy, Coca-Cola, if people drank too much of it and got fat, would be responsible for their diabetes treatment?

• 1:01:30David Friedberg?

  Well, this goes back to the sugar tax point, which is, should we have a sugar tax? Because there's a quantifiable effect that too much sugar has on human health. Obesity, diabetes, cancer. I mean, so that's an argument, right? And so, in order to do that, the first step is disclose the risks, disclose the associated conditions that arise from the product or service that you're offering. And I think that's part of the intention. And a lot of very smart, progressive people in capital markets, some good friends of mine have been talking, have been talking for years about the importance of this level of disclosure. Because it is the first step in truly accounting.

• 1:02:03Jason Calacanis?

  For climate, you're talking about, yes, for climate. For climate.

• 1:02:06David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty controversial, actually, you think we should charge, we should charge Coca-Cola for diabetes?

• 1:02:12David Friedberg?

  Well, go ask the question of should you charge for a carbon related product for

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'll ask both. Carbon, should corporations be responsible for the downstream carbon from their customers and the upstream inputs?

• 1:02:26David Friedberg?

  At least disclose it and decide who's ultimately gonna have to pay for that.

• 1:02:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The answer to the former is yes. The answer to the latter is, if you, you know, there's a, there's a term shit in, shit out.

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, garbage in, garbage out.

• 1:02:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've spent a lot of time in climate. I know what's measurable and what's not. I've looked at the space a lot. And I just think that there is no credible way to execute on, David, what you're saying you want. All it's gonna do is gonna create a bunch of money that flows to consultants that create BS nonsensical reports.

• 1:03:01Jason Calacanis?

  Is that true in your mind, Friedberg?

• 1:03:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the downstream implication of that will be lawsuit upon lawsuit that gets adjudicated by the courts on this concept of materiality.

• 1:03:11Jason Calacanis?

  You think we should be recording if Friedberg or not? You disagree or agree with Joma?

• 1:03:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I agree it should be recorded. I'm saying it's not possible. I'm saying the only winners in this will be the consultants.

• 1:03:22Jason Calacanis?

  You agree with that, Friedberg?

• 1:03:22David Friedberg?

  I'll agree. These carbon markets are absolute BS. Carbon sequestration mechanisms are absolute BS. I mean, none of this stuff is real right now.

• 1:03:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're complete fraudulent markets.

• 1:03:30David Friedberg?

  It's all grifters. It's all BS.

• 1:03:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All grifters. All trash.

• 1:03:34David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'm not trying to be too disparaging with everyone. There are good actors out there and good intentions, for sure.

• 1:03:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There is a tree in Brazil.

• 1:03:40David Friedberg?

  But there's a lot of ways that you can kind of take this stuff apart and say, you know what, this doesn't actually add up. And there's a good business to be had in the meantime, and everyone feels good running that business.

• 1:03:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Simple example, Jason. How will you know that a sensor that's on a flu of a manufacturing plant is accurate? How do you know that it's not been doctored?

• 1:03:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you know? Just a, just a very, very simple question. Just that.

• 1:04:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, when it came to Volkswagen, a leaker leaked the information and that's, and the press got on it and that's how it was regulated. It was, it was in the review mirror. That's how Volkswagen got busted.

• 1:04:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that's how we're gonna, we're gonna fix climate change is a bunch of whistleblowers?

• 1:04:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, that's what happened also within RJ Nabisco and the cigarettes as well.

• 1:04:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what changed as a result of that? Nothing.

• 1:04:24Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, no, in the cigarette industry, um, that led to the largest fines in the history of corporate America, I think, up until that time.

• 1:04:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We still don't have a tax. We still don't have a pool.

• 1:04:31Jason Calacanis?

  We have a tax. We have a big tax on cigarettes. Yeah, sure, but to lower consumption.

• 1:04:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but we don't, you know, we don't force these companies to basically subsidize a portion of our healthcare costs. Every time somebody shows up with lung cancer, it's not like we say, you know what, that's going to be half borne by RJR Nabisco.

• 1:04:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, I mean, this, the measurement can't be bad, but I guess it's what you're saying.

• 1:04:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I'm saying the concept is good. The measurement is literally so terrible as to be worthless.

• 1:04:56Jason Calacanis?

  Wouldn't there be a bunch of new companies that come up, though, that then create the auditing trail? So you say, hey, we're going to put, you have to have one of these companies put the sensors on your, uh, factory and Ernst & Young have to audit it.

• 1:05:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a small oddity of, of, you know, again, there's a lot of companies, for example, this is where Silicon Valley, I think, gets a little, you know, caught up in their own nonsense. There's a lot of companies in Silicon Valley that have made a lot of money measuring bits, right? Analytics companies, because the exhaust of a tech company is sitting in some log file somewhere. That's just a matter of being parsed, right? Do some ETL, do some transformations, put it in some beautiful table, run some query on top of it. Lo and behold, you can know everything about your company. When you're measuring atoms, it's just a little bit more complicated. And I think that people underestimate that complexity. So while the desire of this is good, I think the whole point is that, you know, if you

• 1:05:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  draft this language the wrong way, again, my own, I want to be very precise of what I'm saying. What I think it will do, instead of actually causing more conformity and have people emitting less carbon, it'll create a shadow industry of measurement and consulting around this industry while people debate materiality when they get caught.

• 1:06:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:06:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is not the point of this. But when you draft laws like this, you have to think about these implications.

• 1:06:23Jason Calacanis?

  So is there, is there an easy answer here or just no easy answers? In terms of if we want companies to be somewhat more knowledgeable and responsible in their carbon emissions.

• 1:06:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think that the responsibility ultimately comes from the end consumer buyer customer of a product. Because if they have an alternative that offers them those trade offs, whether it's at a higher price or a lower price or the same price and they adopt it, then these companies really pay attention, right? Because ultimately, what they really care about is their downstream profitability. Otherwise, I worry that a lot of what's happening in corporate America today is basically some form of greenwashing. You know, so for example, like, we joke, but it's true. When you look at these carbon offset markets, these indirect offset markets, what are they? A company spews all kinds of gnarly stuff into the environment.

• 1:07:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They hire a consulting firm, I just want to explain to you how it works today. They hire a consulting firm who uses an Excel spreadsheet to guesstimate how badly they have polluted the environment. Okay, it's a fundamental guess. Then they go to another company that says, well, can you buy me some equal and offsetting amount of credits? And that company then will go and plant some trees or buy some trees, claim the trees exist, measure and impute, again in a different Excel spreadsheet, how much, you know, carbon capture is happening by those trees? Do we know that those trees aren't getting sold 10 times over to 10 other companies? We don't know that. So my point is that we have a lot of work to do to solve these problems.

• 1:08:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would rather see, again, raw capitalism solve this problem. And I think in climate change, the most productive thing we could do is lower the barriers for trapped unproductive capital to get into the hands of really amazing scientists and entrepreneurs who are building things that can measurably remove carbon from the environment.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  And there's really two easy ways to do it. One is have a test, and the other is, on the roads, we have a speed limit. So if you are a non-affluent person already, but you want to dabble in this, it's a very simple way to do it, Chamath. I propose have a written test, just like you have a Handgun or a car test, a driving test. And then how about you can deploy 10%.

• 1:08:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's so incredible. You just said this. You could allow an 18 year old person to buy an AR. Give me the name of the gun, AR 15.

• 1:08:50Jason Calacanis?

  And a car and go speeding down the highway.

• 1:08:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But they're not allowed to invest in GoPuff.

• 1:08:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, they're too not sophisticated. You can shoot the bullets in the air while you're going down the road.

• 1:09:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is going on?

• 1:09:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, and there's no path to it. That's the frustrating part. Like in some places, it's hard to get a gun. You got to take a eight hour test. Other places you can just buy them on the wherever.

• 1:09:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You allow 18 year olds, you can allow an 18 year old to take psychedelics and marijuana legally.

• 1:09:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:09:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Open in a market.

• 1:09:17Jason Calacanis?

  Buy a gun.

• 1:09:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But they are not allowed to buy secondary shares of Stripe.

• 1:09:21Jason Calacanis?

  No, they're too. Yes. And so this is the stupidity of it. Well, here. And here's the other thing. You can have two different things. You have the test. So now you know the person's educated. But you could also say, hey, listen, whatever's on your tax return for the last two years. You can invest 10% of that a year in, you know, private companies. So if you made, I don't know, 150,000 in the last two years, you made 75,000 a year. Okay, you can put 15,000 of it into companies.

• 1:09:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You will allow people to go and work for startups to help build the enterprise value of a startup. Let's pick our favorite startup like an Uber, but not invest in their equity before they go public.

• 1:09:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right. You're not sophisticated. You're sophisticated enough to build it.

• 1:09:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You'll, you're sophisticated enough to drive for them for years to help them build a $50 billion company, but not buy a piece of that company along the way.

• 1:10:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That doesn't seem right either.

• 1:10:11Jason Calacanis?

  But you could pull over and buy scratch off tickets and lottery tickets till the cows come home. But you can't buy a scratch off ticket in a startup.

• 1:10:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Makes no sense.

• 1:10:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Sacks, you've been quiet in all of this. I know that you hate the environment and regulation. What's your thoughts?

• 1:10:26David Sacks?

  I'm not, I'm not, I'm just not deep in this topic. So I don't want to weigh in.

• 1:10:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, here's one you are deep in. Facebook hired a GOP lobbying firm to smear TikTok. According to the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell.

• 1:10:38Jason Calacanis?

  Here's something you're deep in. It's the GOP.

• 1:10:41David Friedberg?

  No, no, before that, you said, you said he's like into destroying the environment or something.

• 1:10:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, he doesn't care about the environment. I mean, Sacks is never going to go into the forest and even go near a tree.

• 1:10:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He doesn't go outside.

• 1:10:53Jason Calacanis?

  No, he's barely looking.

• 1:10:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sealed bedroom.

• 1:10:56Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. He closed the curtains. He's like, oh, beautiful view of the sky. Oh, nature.

• 1:11:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He travels like the pope. His car has one of these things. He doesn't even have to sit down. It's just enclosed. He stands up. It's bulletproof glass. You know, he just waves as he goes by.

• 1:11:08David Friedberg?

  Sacks, have you taken your kids camping?

• 1:11:11David Sacks?

  I go outside sometimes. I much prefer going to an outdoor shooting range than an indoor shooting range.

• 1:11:15Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. So you go and shooting, you send an outdoor one. So this is a really crazy story. Taylor Lorenz broke it. Facebook paid the GOP lobbying firm.

• 1:11:26David Friedberg?

  Your friend, Taylor Lorenz.

• 1:11:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, she, I had her on the show. Here is the excerpted from the internal Targeted Victory email obtained by the Washington Post. Quote, "Get the message out that while Meta, Facebook, is currently a punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is number one in sharing data, that young teens are using. Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that current bills, proposals aren't where state attorney generals or member of Congress should be focused." Uh, so what do we think? I mean, we've talked here many times about reciprocity. We can't have our social networks in China. Why should TikTok be here? I think we all agree.

• 1:12:03David Sacks?

  It sounds like they want to do a PR initiative around the points that you've always made on this pod.

• 1:12:07Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. No, I mean, that's the, that's the, they could be right about this, but doing a dirty tactic, I think TikTok should be banned.

• 1:12:14David Sacks?

  It's a dirty trick in a way for them to deflect attention from themselves onto some other company's problems. So there's something distasteful about that. But the point that they're making is kind of true. I mean.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  We should not allow, I mean.

• 1:12:27David Sacks?

  I'm not saying we shouldn't allow them, but I think whatever.

• 1:12:29Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, you think TikTok should be allowed in the United States, really?

• 1:12:32David Sacks?

  I don't know about that, but I just think that.

• 1:12:34Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think? Think about it for a second.

• 1:12:35David Sacks?

  Whatever problems people have with Facebook, they should have them like 10x with TikTok. That's kind of my point.

• 1:12:39Jason Calacanis?

  A thousand percent in agreement on this. TikTok is run by a country that we wondered, ah, do they care about the data? And then they literally passed a law. If you want to run your company, the government has to have the data.

• 1:12:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have fallen into a TikTok rabbit hole and I would like to come clean.

• 1:12:58Jason Calacanis?

  Uh oh.

• 1:12:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, with you guys. There's something, there's something on TikTok called Sandwich Bros. What are these guys? These guys are guys that make sandwiches. And then they cut the sandwich and then they open it up so that you can see what's in the inside of it.

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  Gooey cheese.

• 1:13:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I mean, no, some of these fucking sandwiches, these guys are making. Dude, I have watched an hour straight of.

• 1:13:21Jason Calacanis?

  Of Sandwich Talk?

• 1:13:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, wait, here's the best part. So then there is this woman who I thought was gonna be incredible. She's like, you know, I'm tired of these Sandwich Bros. I'm gonna be the first woman that really breaks through making sandwiches. I was like, you go get it. And she made a vegan sandwich.

• 1:13:37Jason Calacanis?

  God damn it.

• 1:13:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I was like, where's the meat? I wanted to be, I wanted to be deep into it, but like, you know, chicken.

• 1:13:44Jason Calacanis?

  Roast chicken. Oh, nice. Yeah. Bacon, avocado.

• 1:13:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bacon, bacon.

• 1:13:49Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe some pickles in there. Get a little. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I find so.

• 1:13:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Chicken tikka masala burrito, that's probably my favorite one. And the guy made it from scratch, like everything from scratch.

• 1:14:00Jason Calacanis?

  I love that. Here's the problem. It's such a compelling product. You feel so terrible using it. So you love it at something and then you feel very vapid for having used it and you have regret. And then the Chinese are running it and they're programming our children and have all their data and locations. Um, you know, it's a lot of conflicted feelings. What does go around the horn?

• 1:14:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Trying to program in me with all the sandwich stuff?

• 1:14:23Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you're too thin and you need to eat a sandwich.

• 1:14:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, maybe they were trying to be vegan, but that sandwich, yuck. It looked horrible.

• 1:14:32Jason Calacanis?

  I think this, you, you just, they're trying to program Shama to get fat.

• 1:14:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But yuck.

• 1:14:37Jason Calacanis?

  That's what they want. They want you to get fat. What are you seeing on your TikTok feed right now, Friedberg, since you're so obsessed with your phone? And should, should TikTok be banned? Should the Chinese be allowed to program our children with their algorithm? Yes or no, Friedberg?

• 1:14:50David Sacks?

  That's what you're looking at. Well, just mentioning the product makes you want to use it, so.

• 1:14:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's so addicting. What is so addicting about it?

• 1:14:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, tell me the best vegan sandwich you ever had. Like, the best one. Like, is there one that stands out? Quinoa.

• 1:15:04Jason Calacanis?

  Quinoa.

• 1:15:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cucumbers.

• 1:15:06David Friedberg?

  There's a, there's a great, um, sandwich shop in Berkeley, you guys. None of you, I don't think ever go to Berkeley.

• 1:15:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I live in Palo Alto.

• 1:15:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Berkeley is.

• 1:15:15David Friedberg?

  I'll get one, I'll actually get one, Uber it over to you.

• 1:15:18Jason Calacanis?

  What, what, what is it, what's on it? Avocado, sprouts.

• 1:15:21David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sprouts I don't like.

• 1:15:23David Friedberg?

  Well, I actually, there's one I like that's got the, the, the feta cheese, like the really good shark salty feta cheese.

• 1:15:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:15:29David Friedberg?

  So they've got a whole bunch. It's actually voted one of the best sandwich shops in California, I think.

• 1:15:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35David Friedberg?

  Really good.

• 1:15:35Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:15:36David Friedberg?

  I made myself a tempeh avocado sandwich for lunch today.

• 1:15:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah? That's, oh, that's fantastic. You know what? I was gonna do that myself, but instead I just decided to slam my hand with a hammer. Cause it's more enjoyable. I should like smash my hand and bang off.

• 1:15:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had crab ravioli.

• 1:15:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Absolutely great. You murdered those crabs.

• 1:15:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Delicious.

• 1:16:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but let's just go around the horn. Should yes or no TikTok be banned? Should a Chinese company be allowed to have a social network at scale in the United States? Yes or no? Friedberg?

• 1:16:12David Friedberg?

  No, I, yes, I don't think that we should be restricting the products and services that people choose to use.

• 1:16:18Jason Calacanis?

  Even from a communist country that is likely spying on them? Okay, got it. We know where you stand. Sacks?

• 1:16:23David Sacks?

  Well, I'd, I'd want, I'd want to know that they're not, that it's not spyware, right? So.

• 1:16:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah, if it's spyware, sure, that's illegal. If it's illegal, stop it. But like.

• 1:16:31Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying you trust, you trust the Chinese government?

• 1:16:35David Sacks?

  No, I don't trust them. It would be a serious, it would be an issue I'd seriously look at. I might come out on the India side of things, but I'd like to understand a little better like what they're doing.

• 1:16:42Jason Calacanis?

  The India side of things being that India has banned.

• 1:16:43David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Jason Calacanis?

  They're smart. Indians are smart and pragmatic.

• 1:16:48David Friedberg?

  I just think it's a, I think it's a slippery slope. Cause then you end up seeing China ban iPhones. And I mean, you know, the whole thing kind of.

• 1:16:54Jason Calacanis?

  We're already banned. They already banned Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in their country.

• 1:16:58David Friedberg?

  I don't know. I mean, there's just, there's still a lot, there's, there's a big consumer market in China for US goods and services. And it just seems like a slippery slope.

• 1:17:06Jason Calacanis?

  Where do you sit on this?

• 1:17:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you guys nailed it, which is that I think these things have to be quid pro quo. It doesn't make any sense, in my opinion, for us to allow. A non-American company to thrive where in that same end market, our products are not allowed to compete.

• 1:17:24Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I think there are two things that matter to me, which is that, you know, if we're going to allow TikTok to thrive here, it seems like there needs to be some version of a deal that says, Facebook, Google, you know, these core products and services just need to have a chance where consumers can vote. That's one thing. And I do think separately, what David said is really importantly true. And I don't think it applies to just TikTok, but whenever a product gets to a certain level of scale, and we can define what that threshold is, but it's probably in the half a billion to a billion Mao kind of range, monthly active users range.

• 1:18:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You do have to a way of like, you know, going through the source and making sure there's no crazy spyware in there. And I don't know exactly how to do that. But I think that that that should just be a general expectation for any product, because look, let's, let's be honest, and, and, and I've, we've had this conversation before. You don't think the odds are high that at some point, some very talented knowledge worker that is on an immigrant visa inside of one of these large tech companies isn't actually working on behalf of a foreign.

• 1:18:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they had Twitter had it. They had two people from the kingdom working there.

• 1:18:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, so my point is, I think that, that these things are probably true, right? Like in the tens of thousands of employees that work in big tech, there's probably at least five or 10 of these people that work on behalf of foreign governments. So we don't know what they may or may not have introduced in certain elements of the code. So it's not unreasonable to fund a, you know, an organization that can audit this code base. But I think that I would rather let them stay in order to open up that end market for our products.

• 1:19:03Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we have to wrap on this. Freebro, a couple of weeks ago, you outlined the pasta, the potential of famines caused by. Putin's insane, you know, war in Ukraine.

• 1:19:16David Friedberg?

  That's not what I said, but sure.

• 1:19:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I'm framing it the way I want, but you commented on the possible famine caused by Putin's insane war.

• 1:19:24David Friedberg?

  Again, not what I said, but sure, yeah.

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's go to famine before Sacks loses his mind about Biden's quote of regime change, which I'll let you end on. Sacks, you get your victory lap. But somebody came for you and said, hey, listen, Freeburg basically doesn't know what he's talking about because commodity markets are showing that India and other folks are going to step up and there's not going to be a problem with famine. So can you unpack that for us?

• 1:19:49David Friedberg?

  I will tell you that we are already seeing a lot of scrambling happening for redundancy in these commodity supply chains. And there's a couple of issues, which I highlighted before, I'll highlight again. Number one is just the ability to export. So while there may be product, commodity products sitting in these markets, getting them on ships out of Russia, out of Ukraine, even if sanctions and trade restrictions are lifted and make them available, is very difficult because a lot of the carriers are concerned about insurance and liability as they would be forced to go into a port and do a transaction with an entity that they're supposed to not do transactions with. So there's a lot of reasons why these ships are not going to port,

• 1:20:33David Friedberg?

  not picking a product and not bringing it to where it needs to go. Critical risk in Africa in the near term. So this is an acute problem with respect to transport. The next problem is with respect to planting. As of this week, and I'm going to put a couple of links in here. And these links, Nick, are not in order with respect to what I'll say. But I'll, you know, I'll kind of put a bunch of these things out here. But there is an expectation that we could see up to an 80% decline in planted acres in the Ukraine. And there's a bunch of really good anecdotes in this particular story about how farmers are scared about going out and planting because drones might blow them up. And I mean, look, you're in the middle of a war zone. You're not in a rush to go out and plant. And so there's a lot of planting that needs to happen in order for us to have,

• 1:21:18David Friedberg?

  you know, the expectation of the supply coming out of the field. in about six months. So that's kind of the second stage of the problem is a large export market for goods coming out of Ukraine and Russia might be, you know, might, we might have a kind of significant reduction in inventory as the number of acres that are planted goes down. And then the third thing that I highlighted before, which is absolutely still very true, and I have put some data in here that you can all look at, is related to the price of fertilizer. So fertilizer prices through the roof because nat gas has gone up, so ammonia prices have gone up, potash exports are prohibited from Russia, so potash has gone up. And so as a result, we're seeing fertilizer prices shoot up. And in a lot of countries, what I, what I've included here in this particular link in

• 1:22:03David Friedberg?

  the chat and Nick on the YouTube, you can kind of put this on the screen, but there's a guy named Gary Schnittke. Gary is the ag economist. He's like the number one ag economist in the world. He's at University of Illinois. Everyone reads all his stuff in the industry. Um, this guy breaks everything down to unit economics, numbers, helps people make decisions about what to plant, when, what the economics are. And he highlights the current economics for planting in Illinois. Illinois is the, you know, largest corn producing state in the U.S. and a critical supplier of, of our, you know, national kind of food supply. And he points out that, you know, as of right now, um, you would have to invest in Illinois,

• 1:22:44David Friedberg?

  uh, about $810 to have a $243 return on corn because the price of fertilizer has gone so high. So you invest 810, you expect to make a little over a thousand, and these, um, uh, you know, these, uh, these, these are not assuming rent. The problem is when you factor in the cost of rent, the average rent in Illinois is $227. So a lot of farmers in Illinois rent their land about half to. And so, uh, for a lot of farmers, it's actually uneconomical, not just in Illinois, but around the world now, where the cost of the inputs, the cost of rent, the cost of production exceeds the expected profit coming out of the farm. And so farmers are not going to plant.

• 1:23:26David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, we're seeing kind of a major issue with, um, uh, with these farmers around the world kind of making planting decisions right now that are informed by upside down economics. This is being monitored, you know, fortunately in the US, the USDA reported today that it looks like the price of corn is such that a lot of farmers are going to go back and plant soybeans and we're seeing basically a historic planting survey coming out today that says farmers are in fact going to go out in the field, they are in fact going to plant, but this is not true everywhere. We don't, we haven't done the calculus on it yet, but there's a ton of anecdotal support and a ton of survey data that's coming out showing that farmers aren't going to plant the acres that they normally would plant because costs are so high. That means there's going to be less production over the next year. That means famine hits us in a year. That's a big problem.

• 1:24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks wants to know why they don't just use DoorDash or Uber Eats. He's to just order more food if they can't get the wheat.

• 1:24:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is not what's going through David's mind right now.

• 1:24:18Jason Calacanis?

  David's mind is...

• 1:24:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David is honing in. He's like LeBron in the fourth quarter. There's, you know, a minute left. He's like, everybody get out of the way. Give me the ball.

• 1:24:27Jason Calacanis?

  Just ISO ball. He's going to do his ISO.

• 1:24:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's about to play ISO ball. Three, two, one, David, go.

• 1:24:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right, here we go. So, right as we got off air and I was defending, hey, listen, you're, you're mind reading Biden. He's never said regime change. You got to give him some credit here. You're, you're, you're taking madman Putin's, you know, version of events over our own presidents. And then 12 hours later, I'm on the ski lift and crazy grandpa decides to say, for God's sake, this man, referring to Putin, cannot remain in power. Of course, the White House walked this back, but go ahead and take your victory lap, Sacks.

• 1:25:08David Sacks?

  Oh my God, am I getting an apology here from J Cal 2?

• 1:25:11Jason Calacanis?

  It's not an apology. You know, at the time I was right, but I didn't...

• 1:25:15David Sacks?

  You said I was, it was basically pro Putin because of what I said, and now you're admitting that I was telling the truth?

• 1:25:21Jason Calacanis?

  No, I admit that Biden, crazy grandpa, said something he shouldn't have said, and that maybe that reflects truly how he feels.

• 1:25:29David Sacks?

  Right. That's called, so in Washington, they call that a Kinsey gaffe.

• 1:25:33Jason Calacanis?

  A Kinsey gaffe, yeah.

• 1:25:34David Sacks?

  The New Republic editor, Michael Kinsey, who said, "A gaffe in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth." That's what Biden did. He accidentally told the truth about what the administration's policy has been.

• 1:25:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:25:46David Sacks?

  You can see this in the fact that, look, who's playing peacemaker right now in these peace conversations? It's been Macron from France, it's been Naftali Bennett from Israel, it's been Erdogan from Turkey. It has not been anyone from the United States. We've been strangely absent. And to the extent we said anything about the peace process, it always seems to be us throwing cold water on it. So there's been a lot of people, you know, prominent commentators like Neil Ferguson, who I quoted before, and others who have speculated that the United States' goal here is not a rapid resolution to the conflict, but rather to protract it in order to make Russia bleed, in order to destabilize and topple the Russian regime. I think it was actually quite, and the problem with that is this is very dangerous. I mean, just look at what Friedberg just said about the food insecurity that's causing.

• 1:26:31David Sacks?

  It is very dangerous for us to protract this conflict so that, you know, famine could be worse. The war could spread, it could degenerate, we could get drawn into it somehow. We want this thing to be over as quickly as possible. And I think it was actually the Biden gaffe net-net was a very positive thing because they had to walk it back so quickly.

• 1:26:51Jason Calacanis?

  And severely.

• 1:26:52David Sacks?

  And severely, that it basically, it showed the whole world and, you know, the media administration, no, we really need to end this quickly. We can't be dragging this thing out. So I think by stating what their clandestine policy was so clearly, it forced them to have to disavow it. And the only people who are upset at the end of the day were these neocons, like, no, no, no. What Biden said is true. We should try and topple Putin.

• 1:27:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, theoretically, he should go, but not

• 1:27:18David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:27:19Jason Calacanis?

  Right now, it's like, which is it?

• 1:27:21David Sacks?

  To disavow it. And that was actually very clarifying for US policy because regime change should not be our goal.

• 1:27:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, I think, I think the administration said something to the effect of, he was speaking as a man, not as a president.

• 1:27:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, let's, I mean, can we be honest about Biden? I mean, they, they don't know what he's going to say next. I mean, he's, his, I mean, I don't mean to You know, speak ill of anybody, but cognitively, this is a huge gaffe. It's a huge mistake. We're trying to resolve this thing and then you give Putin exactly the ammunition he wants. Oh, look, it's regime change, see? And I think what we may have here is two crazy grandpas. One that wants to put the USSR back together and one that wants to be the person who ousts Putin. Neither of those is what the world wants.

• 1:28:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a real bummer that we are kind of on the second stage here, just idling around, looking around, while these other countries are sort of creating a, you know, almost like this new world order around us. That's a bummer.

• 1:28:25David Sacks?

  We played our hands, right? We played our hand very badly because we keep intervening in all these countries where there's no upside. I mean, I keep talking about it. All of these wars where we spent trillions and we got nothing out of it.

• 1:28:36Jason Calacanis?

  You're a peacenik. We like it.

• 1:28:39David Sacks?

  I'm just, I don't see the, I'm a realist. First of all, I do like peace better than war, but I don't understand the point of going to war when there's no vital American interest. That's been jeopardized. Our security is not jeopardized. Our economy is not jeopardized. In fact, us protracting the war is going to jeopardize those things. So I don't get what American policy is designed to achieve or has been designed to achieve for the last 20 years. We've just been stumbling around the world, making all these like virtue signaling statements about values. And then meanwhile, we end up like bombing the hell out of these countries.

• 1:29:13Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the Middle East was for clearly for oil and energy.

• 1:29:16David Sacks?

  Afghanistan.

• 1:29:17Jason Calacanis?

  Let's be honest, those were about oil.

• 1:29:20David Sacks?

  There's no oil in Afghanistan. What were we doing there? Trying to build a new state, a new, new sort of democracy in Afghanistan.

• 1:29:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They were.

• 1:29:28Jason Calacanis?

  It was revenge for 9/11.

• 1:29:29David Sacks?

  Yeah. So that was legitimate. That was a legitimate reason to go there, which was to get Osama bin Laden. And that was the just cause.

• 1:29:37Jason Calacanis?

  Whack the Taliban.

• 1:29:38David Sacks?

  Once, and you know what? We should have got him at Tora Bora instead of outsourcing it to the locals. That was a total screw up.

• 1:29:44Jason Calacanis?

  Huge mistake.

• 1:29:45David Sacks?

  But once that job was done, we should have been out of there, out of there.

• 1:29:49Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. What a, what a misadventure. What do we have? Do you have any thoughts, Sacks, on like the endgame here? Because it does seem like Putin is getting exhausted and maybe he gets the win?

• 1:30:00David Sacks?

  I think we know what the endgame is gonna be. It's basically Ukraine's gonna be neutral. They can't be part of NATO. They get some security guarantees from the Western exchange for that. Crimea is part of Russia. It that's a fait accompli. It happened in 2014. And then the last part is what they're really fighting over, which is this Donbass region, where you've got Russian ethnic speakers going up against Ukrainian far-right nationalists.

• 1:30:24Jason Calacanis?

  How close are we in your mind?

• 1:30:26David Sacks?

  Well, both those sides are willing to fight. So that's the issue. And look, the truth of matter is, I think it's going to result in some form of independence for these disputed territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, right? I mean, and but the reality is, the United States of America doesn't have a vital interest.

• 1:30:43Jason Calacanis?

  We're 37 days into this. Is it gonna end? Is it gonna end in under 60?

• 1:30:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sacks suggested the right approach, I think, a month ago, which is let all of those people vote.

• 1:30:55David Sacks?

  Just have a plebiscite, have a referendum.

• 1:30:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Create a referendum, let them vote, let them be self-deterministic. And that may be the most reasonable middle ground for both sides to say, okay, let's give this a shot.

• 1:31:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're right. If you could achieve a ceasefire, if you could get a ceasefire here.

• 1:31:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  War's terrible. End this.

• 1:31:14David Sacks?

  Yeah, if you could get a ceasefire, have the UN observers come in, administer an election Crimea. There's no doubt which way Crimea would go. I don't know what would happen in Luhansk or Donetsk. I think they probably would go independent. So let's just do a vote. It'll be about self-determination, not appeasement. And let's find out. That's what we should be pushing for.

• 1:31:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, people getting to vote on their future. Wow, crazy idea. I mean, it's gotta end. I mean, it's gotta end in a month, too. This is becoming super damaging for Putin, right? I mean, these economic sanctions. Plus we're giving

• 1:31:45David Sacks?

  There's a story that was on MSN.

• 1:31:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's like day thirty seven.

• 1:31:51David Sacks?

  Yeah, Putin's approval rating in Russia is eighty three percent. His approval ratings have gone up. We thought, you could say it's fake or whatever, but apparently this is a reasonably decent polling operation. This is a poll by Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. Apparently, his polling, his poll numbers were sixty nine percent in January. They've gone up. Look, Russians will rally around the flag, just like Americans rally around the flag.

• 1:32:14Jason Calacanis?

  And they're suffering in that country.

• 1:32:16David Sacks?

  They are suffering, but the Russians are very good at suffering, J. Cal. It's their national pastime. You ever read Dostoevsky?

• 1:32:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, not for I don't like to read it.

• 1:32:24David Sacks?

  War and Peace.

• 1:32:24Jason Calacanis?

  No, I don't actually. I would much rather watch the next Marvel movie or a Kurosawa film. I am not interested in, yeah.

• 1:32:34David Sacks?

  Listen, my whole speech was about the fact that American diplomacy could have prevented the situation last year. That's not to say that we caused it. It was Putin's decision to invade. It's his war. The bloodshed is on him. However, more effective diplomacy could have diffused the situation a year ago, and we totally blew it. We just totally blew it. And this is going to hurt us. This, I mean, look, this is one of those things that the administration thinks doesn't affect them, but you know what? When our economy goes into recession, because this is a straw that breaks the camel's back, voters are going to take it into consideration.

• 1:33:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, we do, we do hire people in many, many industries to do their job, and the people that are hired to be diplomats, their job is to be diplomatic and to find compromises.

• 1:33:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, it's time to wrap here. Some exciting news on the conference front. Palmer Lucky of Andrew Technologies, building weapons and systems and defensive systems, is going to come to the event. He's not, he's a fan of the pod, apparently. He's a big fan of David Sacks's. So we're going to talk about the military. And just as a general concept, I have a theme I was just going to float by, y'all. Think a lot of the talks and a lot of the, the zeitgeist is around the problem I want to solve. So I'd like you all to think about that. I think this will be a celebration of people who are trying to solve. Have important problems in the world. So what are you solving for is going to be the I think the theme of the event. What are you trying to solve for? And so Friedberg, if you can give

• 1:34:03Jason Calacanis?

  a maybe a little talk, Chamath, David, I would be great if the four besties gave a little 15 minute solo talk. We're gonna have a lot of these solo talks, position, hey, here's what I'm solving for, and then conversations about what we're solving for.

• 1:34:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, do you know Dalio? You should get Dalio. I think he'd be great.

• 1:34:17David Friedberg?

  I don't know.

• 1:34:18Jason Calacanis?

  And Kathy Wood looks like, I think Kathy Wood's coming too.

• 1:34:21David Sacks?

  But by the way, there's a new video that Dalio just put out, which is like the 45 minute animated documentary version of his book. And really good. I watched it. I haven't, I haven't read the book, but I watched it. And I thought it was really great. It's all about how empires rise and fall. And it's pretty clear that he thinks we're a late stage empire. And he talks about a lot of the things that we're talking about on the show. And

• 1:34:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I watched it this week. I thought it was exceptional. And then I ordered the book. Yeah, I thought it was really, really good.

• 1:34:48Jason Calacanis?

  I'm halfway through.

• 1:34:48David Friedberg?

  Oh, look at you guys coming around. You gotta listen to me like a

• 1:34:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have to watch it on YouTube because his animations are excellent.

• 1:34:55Jason Calacanis?

  Very nice.

• 1:34:55David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The YouTube video is just superb.

• 1:34:57David Sacks?

  It's very accessible. I mean, anybody

• 1:34:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredibly, incredibly good. Highly recommend.

• 1:35:02David Sacks?

  Yeah. I mean, look, I, I agree with him. I agree with him.

• 1:35:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  One of you guys get Dalio on the thing. Let's get him.

• 1:35:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Dalio, reach out. I know, we know you're listening. So can somebody just

• 1:35:12David Sacks?

  I think the question to ask Dalio is

• 1:35:14Jason Calacanis?

  I think he is actually, I think he's a fan of the show.

• 1:35:15David Sacks?

  I think the question to ask Dalio is how do you revitalize a late stage empire?

• 1:35:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's right.

• 1:35:20David Friedberg?

  That's a good

• 1:35:20Jason Calacanis?

  That is the question, question. Can it be done? Well, can it? No, can it be done? I think is the real question. All in sum, it made 15, 16, 17.

• 1:35:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Ken is too theoretical. I think it's more, how would you do it? Yeah.

• 1:35:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. If it's possible, what would the path be? And it's gotta be something about building the pie, not shrinking it. That's for sure. Uh, May 15, 16, 17, the conference is the 16th and 17th, 625 of 700 tickets allocated. If you'd like to apply for a scholarship, go ahead and do that. It's not going to be a bro down. The ratio has

• 1:35:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Congrats to you, Jason, for really pushing the diversity and

• 1:35:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Getting a lot of scholarships and women and people of color. It's good. Thank you for that.

• 1:35:58Jason Calacanis?

  Really, really, really great to see so many people applying. If you didn't get a response back for your application, you'll get it by April 15th. That's going to be when we tell everybody if they're officially in or out. But we have been increasing the ratio. It was organically 90, 95% male, female. And now it's a 65, 35. So we're really making progress on that front. So it's not going to be a bro down. Sorry, Sax. It's not going to be a bro down. It's going to be diversity here. Diversity equals power, Sax.

• 1:36:26David Sacks?

  I hope there's diversity of ideas, too.

• 1:36:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, there you have it, folks. For the Rain Man, David Sax. Sultan of Science.

• 1:36:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can't wait to see one, one third of my besties tonight. Thanks a lot, guys.

• 1:36:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm showing up. I mean, you got

• 1:36:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're the one over three.

• 1:36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, these guys, you gotta remember, these guys would have to have their drivers.

• 1:36:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Translator.

• 1:36:50Jason Calacanis?

  Well, these guys would have to have their drivers.

• 1:36:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nick beep the name.

• 1:36:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, these guys would have to have their drivers drive them 30 minutes and then wait for them outside and then drive them home after they've drank in $5,000 worth of your wine. It's a little bit overbearing.

• 1:37:03David Friedberg?

  What are you gonna pour tonight, Chuma?

• 1:37:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, it'll be some really good stuff. Uh, probably some like older Sasakaya, I'm thinking 85s. But Free Bird, um, if you come, I can also make some tempeh.

• 1:37:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's gonna be the best tempeh and sprout ravioli you've ever had.

• 1:37:21David Friedberg?

  It's good for the family. It's good for the planet. It's good for the animals.

• 1:37:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is tempeh?

• 1:37:26David Friedberg?

  It's soybeans, fermented soybeans. It's delicious.

• 1:37:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know what? Can I, can I tell you what I, what I think? Yuck! Yuck!

• 1:37:33Jason Calacanis?

  But I mean, in fairness, your chef always makes something exceptional for Free Bird when he comes to dinner.

• 1:37:39David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's always, you're always a generous host and your chef is always exceptional.

• 1:37:44Jason Calacanis?

  Get your, get Sax's driver and come down.

• 1:37:48David Friedberg?

  Sax, send the heli, send the heli up to Marin to grab me.

• 1:37:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Free Burgers, come.

• 1:37:53Jason Calacanis?

  Come, come, just get a driver.

• 1:37:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, when do you land?

• 1:37:57David Sacks?

  Uh, late, late tonight. I'm

• 1:38:00Jason Calacanis?

  Cool, on tilt? Come on tilt.

• 1:38:02David Sacks?

  No, no, no, it'll be like 3 a.m. or something.

• 1:38:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, 3 a.m. My gosh.

• 1:38:06Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, fuck that. The game's over by then. All right. See you later, besties.

• 1:38:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you, guys.

• 1:38:09Jason Calacanis?

  Bye, bye.

• 1:38:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bye, bye.

• 1:38:11Jason Calacanis?

  Bye, bye.

• 1:38:14David Sacks?

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:38:17David Sacks?

  Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:38:21David Sacks?

  And instead, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Sack. I'm the queen of Kinoah.

• 1:38:34David Sacks?

  Besties are back.

• 1:38:37David Friedberg?

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:38:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, man.

• 1:38:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:38:52David Sacks?

  What? You're the bee. What? You're the bee. What? You're a bee. Bee? What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.