E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more

Show Notes: 0:00 Intro & Dog update 5:48 COVID, Vaccine mandates, public vs. private policy 26:26 Collectivism, comparison to cigarettes, Sacks' latest podcast beef 36:56 Vaccine incentives in France 45:39 Friedberg's science corner: DeepMind's latest breakthrough, Big Tech censorship, free speech infringements 59:40 Capital's role in progress, Bezos' poor press conference, difference in criticism by party, Elon & Bezos as capital allocators 1:10:46 Modern online pessimist psychology & how to fix it 1:21:32 Besties give their tech industry takeaways Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Referenced in the show: NYT - In France, angry protests, rising infections and record vaccinations. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/world/france-covid-vaccine-pass-protests.html NYT - Military and V. A. Struggle With Vaccination Rates in Their Ranks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/politics/military-va-vaccines.html CNBC - Biden on Facebook: 'They're killing people' with vaccine misinformation https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html Fortune - In giant leap for biology, DeepMind's A. I. reveals secret building blocks of human life https://fortune.com/2021/07/22/deepmind-alphafold-human-proteome-database-proteins/ The Wizard of Menlo Park - Randall E. Stross https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Menlo-Park-Thomas-Invented/dp/1400047633 Tweets: https://twitter.com/OliviaGoldhill/status/1417446281685966853 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1416879494283993088 https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1417632367200673794

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

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, I am going to give you a thousand dollars each to the charity of your choice for every correct answer. Fuck it, 10,000.

• 0:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you have to answer, you have to answer in real time and you can't fuck around, okay? No stalling.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is to, this is to, any charity chooses included Tucker Carlson 2024. Okay, let's go.

• 0:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have to give the answers right away. You cannot fucking think about this.

• 0:24Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 0:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Three, two, one. First, middle and last name of your children and their birthdays. Go!

• 0:31David Sacks?

  First, middle, last.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  Stalling for time already!

• 0:37David Sacks?

  No, I know.

• 0:37Jason Calacanis?

  You're already stalling. Okay, go, Dino. You can beep these out, Nick. Go ahead, go.

• 0:41David Sacks?

  So, is January?

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, year. What's the year?

• 0:47David Sacks?

  2008.

• 0:54David Sacks?

  Is October?

• 1:00David Sacks?

  2010. And then?

• 1:04Jason Calacanis?

  Little guy, little man. First name little, little name man.

• 1:08David Sacks?

  You're trying to stump me with a little guy.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  Little man.

• 1:11David Sacks?

  The little guy, the little guy. Bobby.

• 1:16David Sacks?

  He was born October of 2016.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, good. He did it.

• 1:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was a struggle.

• 1:27David Sacks?

  I got it. I got it.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  He got there. That's all that matters is he got there. It is, it is all.

• 1:32David Sacks?

  So you're gonna give the, you're gonna give 10 grand?

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 10 grand each to?

• 1:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  10 grand each, so it's 30 grand. Name your charity.

• 1:38Jason Calacanis?

  30 grand to Tucker Carlson for president.

• 1:40David Sacks?

  DeSantis 2024.

• 1:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I said charity asshole.

• 2:03Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to your favorite podcast, the All In Podcast, where we talk about the economy, technology, politics, and well, basically anything that's in the news. With us today, again, the queen of quinoa himself, David Friedberg. How are you doing, David? I'm hanging in there today. All right, people are looking for the dog. Where's the dog? Marty, he's sitting here on the floor. Marty, come here, come on, come here, come on, Marty. All right. And from a random palace somewhere in the world, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya. How you doing, see?

• 2:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, I'm doing great. You know, I got another dog.

• 2:45Jason Calacanis?

  While you were in Italy?

• 2:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, I went to, um, the breeder that I got Aki from and, uh, she had a three-year-old that was not really, you know, ever gonna become a breeding dog or whatever. So I adopted the three-year-old. He has a parasite, so he's been pooing everywhere, everywhere.

• 3:06Jason Calacanis?

  That's great information for the cold.

• 3:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All over the castle.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  All over the castle. Fantastic.

• 3:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Liquid poop, by the way. Uh, but we finally diagnosed it today and he's going to the, to the vet, um, to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body.

• 3:23Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, okay. Thank you for that information. And I don't know where.

• 3:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nobody cares.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody cares. I mean, I asked you how you were doing. I thought you were just gonna say, great. I didn't know we were gonna go straight to diarrhea.

• 3:35David Sacks?

  We got a new dog, too.

• 3:37Jason Calacanis?

  You did?

• 3:37David Sacks?

  And it's also, it's been kind of a disaster. The kids were like, Dad, we found this like, uh, I think, you know, golden, that is really calm, you know, like, she's just super low energy and calm. It's like, perfect for us. I'm like, I don't know. I think that's just like, the puppy's kind of asleep, you know? Like, it's gonna wake up. They're like, no, no, no, no, this is like a special dog. It's like, really well behaved. So anyway, we get it. Sure enough, like, a week later, the puppy wakes up and she's eating everything in the house, destroying everything. It's been, yeah, so now we're.

• 4:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, is that dog number two or three for you?

• 4:13David Sacks?

  It's dog two. The for dog one was a rescue dog, who's great. So dog number two is now getting trained.

• 4:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right. David Sacks is with us, of course, the Rain Man himself and in related dog stories. I put all the girls to bed and then I hear screaming. I get up, I run outside. Literally the new bulldog, who's nine months old Maximus, went on, you know, one of his running fits. One of my daughters falls out of bed, gets like a bruise on her like lower back and she's wailing. The other daughter feels terrible about it and then the dog decides that he is going to projectile vomit everywhere, all at the same time. You guys have had these moments where like it's just complete utter chaos.

• 4:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's chaos.

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  It's just chaos. It's chaos. Dogs plus kids equals chaos. So.

• 5:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But would any of us have it any other way? I love the combo of dogs and kids. It's just the best.

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty great. Dogs are amazing and kids are amazing.

• 5:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Especially when you bring in a new dog or a puppy into the house. It's chaos, but it's a really beautiful chaos.

• 5:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know what I think also is like, think about how overrated everything in life is. People like, oh my God, this place with the pasta in Italy is the greatest life-changing thing. And all this movie was incredible. It's the best movie ever made. And it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever. It's great or whatever, but I think kids and dogs are underrated universally.

• 5:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have as many kids as you can possibly biologically have and can economically afford is my one opinion. And the more dogs, the better.

• 5:45Jason Calacanis?

  I love dogs. Yeah. All right. I think we should start with the COVID cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions, touching on people's freedoms. And it's hard to know where to start here, but I think facts are always a good place to start. Here in the United States, we had gotten COVID cases, you know, to that 12,000 a day average. It was pretty amazing and it looked like it was going to go straight down, smooth sailing. And we had had deaths down at around, I saw some seven day averages where we were at 150, 200. Now the weekends are kind of weird in terms of reporting, but the seven day average today is at 248.

• 6:29Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, it's been flat for a month. When you do this, this is according to the New York Times statistics and Google. You can search for Google and you'll find these have some great data. That they'll just put it right in the search result. However, cases have gone from this 12, 15 K a day average soaring in just 30 days to 62,000 a day and a seven day average of 40,000. So we're basically tripled the number of cases. Cases trail traditionally deaths by something in the neighborhood of 10 days. I think I'm correct, Friedberg. So what do you think is actually going to happen here? We're going to, we're going to get up to 10, 100,000, 200,000 cases a day and maybe double

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated?

• 7:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you know, the current logic on this is that there will be, because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even more infectious variant of COVID, the people that are not vaccinated are starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from. So yeah, we will see deaths climb. And I think like we talked about last time, we're starting to see even Gavin did an interview yesterday in California talking about how, you know, there it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions, behavioral restrictions, mask mandates, et cetera. So there's going to be a set of reactions. And I think as we talked about last time, we saw the market start to react to the potential

• 8:01David Friedberg?

  of that on Monday. And then very interestingly kind of reversed course Tuesday and everything came back when everyone was freaked out on Monday after they saw the weekend's data, which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the U.S. But I think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are going to die. Therefore, we're not going to see, you know, political leaders force restrictions that are kind of going to damage the economy and we're going to start to walk what I think Israel is calling the golden line, which is balancing the economy with the, the health of the citizenry. So, um, so, you know, we'll, we'll see. It's going to come down to policy, but I think from a death perspective, there will absolutely be a rise in deaths now as unvaccinated people are the, going to be the bulk of those deaths and, and this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated.

• 8:47Jason Calacanis?

  And then Sacks, this becomes now a great Rorschach test of what do you see in this data and in this moment because it's a pandemic, as many people are saying now, I think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So people have chosen to opt into this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it. You were part of it even as a vaccinated person, but you're feeling great, you're back to 100%. So what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mask mandates? What's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated?

• 9:29David Sacks?

  Well, I think we need to differentiate between public policy and private behavior. So after last week's episode where I said, you know, Delta variant is real, there's going to be a huge spike in cases. Unfortunately, I thought we had this thing whipped, you know, a few weeks ago. Now I think the data is showing something different. You know, there's a lot of commenters saying, Sacks, you've turned, you've been blue pilled. No, it's, you know, I think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the, the policy conversation around it. I think that the difference now from last year, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that we do have vaccines. So I think for most people, getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table. The

• 10:13David Sacks?

  other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work. And so lockdowns don't work if, you know, if they ever did, they, they, they, we now know, looking at from what different states did last year, that they don't make a difference. So there's no reason to go back to that policy. But also, I mean, I would even say on masks, it should be-

• 10:33Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, do we know that? I mean, is that-

• 10:35David Sacks?

  I think so.

• 10:36Jason Calacanis?

  Are we sure of that?

• 10:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think so, because- The thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions. So in Florida, they didn't have mandates, but people who are at risk took, you know, extreme precautions. They would either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high-quality mask. By contrast, in California, we had the most severe lockdowns, but they were never really feasible, so there's 10 pages of exceptions. People didn't really abide by them. And then on top of it, you know, you have all these mask mandates, but if somebody wears like a sock loosely affixed to their face, does that really protect them? You know, so, you know, people, if they're, if they're not interested in complying with

• 11:21David Sacks?

  these mandates, they do it in a half-hearted way. I'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place. So the, the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is going to be. We know now so much more about the risks that we all face than we did a year ago. And so just let private citizens decide. I mean, I'd even say on, on vaccines, I mean, look, I'm pro vax. I don't really understand where the anti-vax people are coming from, but I'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated, you know, on this show who don't want to get vaccinated, you know? If they don't want to, send those doses to the developing world where they're desperate for them.

• 12:01Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you, Tremoff, do you, do you agree with Sacks's position that, listen, citizens are just going to have to make their own decision here, leave everything open, and let's not have the economy collapse again and people, people are smart enough to make their own decision? And is this framing of this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the correct framing?

• 12:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow, I'm, I'm really of two minds. There's, there's the part of me that says that you have to give people the right to make their own decision. The problem is that in this specific case, there's so much transmissibility and as a result of that, how this thing can mutate, that I think that public health has to take a priority over any individual.

• 12:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Individuals' rights in this very specific narrow, narrow case.

• 12:52Jason Calacanis?

  Because the Delta variant is so transmissible, people are going to have to lose some freedoms. Is one of those showing a vaccine card when you go to an arena?

• 13:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated, or you had to go through a lot of hoops to be unvaccinated, as an example. I mean, and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the Petri dish of the unvaccinated, you're increasing everybody's risk. And this is where I think individual freedoms, as long as it doesn't trample on collective freedom, then I think live and let live.

• 13:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think on this specific issue, I think that it's unconscionable to be in a situation where we are fighting basically a time function, where at a certain amount of time, you're going to have a variant that is, you know, basically will overcome all the vaccines we have, will kill enormous numbers of people, including the vaccinated, will literally shut the economy down. And that's a probabilistic event now. And I don't like the fact that I'm susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for medical or religious reasons, they're just watching Fox News and just spouting off.

• 14:11David Sacks?

  I agree that we're at risk there, but we're also at risk from unvaccinated people in the rest of the world. So Delta variant came from India, the Lambda variant, I think the Ron came from Peru. I mean, the fact of the matter is, unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential Petri dish for the virus. So I'd rather, I mean, this is why we need to send those unused doses that, by the way, are at risk of expiring. We now, I mean, there was a tweet about this recently, there's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the US that are going to waste right now. We should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated.

• 14:42Jason Calacanis?

  Specifically to Mexico and Canada, and Canada's, I think, this month going to, even though we got off to a massive head start, going to eclipse us in terms of the percentage vaccinated, let me ask it more pointedly. Should teachers be, public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated? Should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation airplanes? Or, you know, take buses, you know, long haul buses, long haul trains? And then third, should you be forced to show a vaccine card to get on?

• 15:15Jason Calacanis?

  To go to sporting events or concerts. Let's go through those three. So your personal freedom ends, you're going to be forced.

• 15:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you want to participate. If you want to participate in a public construct, if you want to consume a public resource, or if you want to provide a publicly funded good, then it's the broader public's rights that are superior to your individual rights. Otherwise, work at a charter school where it's not required, watch the fucking concert from home, or drive your car, use a bicycle, or take an Uber.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  The end. Sacks, what do you think? And then Friedberg.

• 15:53David Sacks?

  So I understand that argument. I would differentiate between public and private requirements because I don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm. So.

• 16:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what you might said, you could stay home or you could take your bicycle.

• 16:09David Sacks?

  Well, sure.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Is that reasonable that you don't get to go to a Warriors game because you're unvaccinated?

• 16:14David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think the Warrior Stadium is privately owned. The team is private. So I think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their employees and customers.

• 16:26Jason Calacanis?

  What about airlines? Because that is, you know, there's a limited number of them.

• 16:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think.

• 16:32Jason Calacanis?

  So airlines should be able to force it. Now, what about school teachers?

• 16:35David Sacks?

  Well, they can't force it, but they can set the requirements for you to board their planes.

• 16:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, now, what about public schools? Should, if, let's do teachers and students. Should teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in? Because you said if they don't come to work in the fall on a couple of episodes back, you're fired.

• 16:53David Sacks?

  Well, why wouldn't they want to get a vaccine? The whole debate with the teachers' unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines, which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many. So I don't think that's a serious issue. Now, requiring the kids to get vaccinated is, that would be the real policy question and.

• 17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's tackle both. Should teachers be forced to get the vaccine? Yes or no?

• 17:14David Friedberg?

  You just kind of brushed over.

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you.

• 17:16David Friedberg?

  Force, force, no, I mean, I think it's important to just, to just, you know, pinpoint this. Like, forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to, you know, work at the school.

• 17:28David Friedberg?

  I just want to highlight the precedent it sets, right? Which is, you know, you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in their arm. If someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot, does that mean then that they, you know, should lose their job as a public servant?

• 17:45David Sacks?

  Well, no, I mean, no, I'm saying that, look, I

• 17:48David Friedberg?

  You said it's not a big deal, but like if there's one or two teachers that say, you know what, it is a big deal to me. I have a different, I have a set of reasons why I don't want to get a shot.

• 17:56David Sacks?

  Well, I think those teachers, that's an assumption of risk. I mean, if they've decided they're going to assume the risk, then, you know, don't come crying to us when they get sick.

• 18:05David Friedberg?

  Well, the argument is that they're going to be the vector of exposure, right? Yeah, and what if they're the Petri dishes, as we talked about. They could be the vector that gets kids sick.

• 18:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In all of these situations, there's always a very obvious and justifiable exemption for religious and medical reasons to not be vaccinated, not just for this, but for anything else. So I struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a fucking clue about science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate for them, where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves. They probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors, but on this one specific issue, they narrowly say, you know what, I'm an expert enough because I'm watching this television show, I've made a decision. That to me makes no sense.

• 18:57David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, I actually agree with you. I'm in the camp of that everybody barring some, you know, highly specific medical condition that renders you ineligible should be getting vaccinated. So I agree with you about what the right answer is, but I do think that when it comes to government, it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to government to force people to engage in, you know, behavior they don't want to engage in.

• 19:25Jason Calacanis?

  Can you bench them?

• 19:26David Sacks?

  That is a real question. Private organizations are different, right?

• 19:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we all agree on private organizations, but we do have to make some decisions on public transportation, and we do have to make decisions about teachers, and we're going to have to make decisions on students. So, could you bench the teachers who, or otherwise penalize them, who are not vaccinated? You know, there are some times where, you know, a cop or a teacher is put in a, you know, not in the classroom, not on the beat, for whatever reasons, sometimes disciplinary, but for other reasons. Could you just say, listen, if you're not going to get vaccinated, you're going to not be in the classroom, you're not going to, you'll be a remote teacher, and we're just going to create two classes here?

• 20:07David Sacks?

  I don't think, I don't, I don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get vaccinated, but, but I, um, look, I think the virus is everywhere now. It's just endemic. And so to single out like one particular group and say you're going to lose your job-

• 20:20Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to pin you down on your opinion. So you're saying teachers should not be forced?

• 20:24David Sacks?

  I'm saying that, I mean, if they work at a private school, the private school could definitely require it. Look, I think-

• 20:29Jason Calacanis?

  We're talking about public only now. We all agree on private. So you're saying-

• 20:32David Sacks?

  Look, I think it's a really-

• 20:33Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to pin you down on it, yeah.

• 20:34David Sacks?

  I think it's a really complicated question, because I think there are clear public health benefits to everyone getting vaccinated, but I also don't really like empowering government to force you, because, look, it's like everything else. The government may be right in this particular case, but what else is it going to do with that power? And, you know, I don't like giving government that power. So, look, it's a complicated question. I don't, you know, it's not, um, I would, I would probably err on the side of not letting government force people to do it. But, but, but look, I, I think it's a close call. I do think it's a close call.

• 21:06Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, force the teachers to get vaccinated or not?

• 21:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, and the reason is because these kids are already being left behind, even when school is functioning normally. And you can see it in the test scores. You can see it in our readiness. You can see it in our ability to actually do the jobs that are required. We are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic. And now you introduce a reason for folks to basically check out and not appear. What do you guys guess? How many years were lost in these 15 months when kids were at home? I would say not 15 months.

• 21:49Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 21:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's more two years, two and a half years, three years.

• 21:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I miss also this psychological scarring, depending on what grade they are. Did your kids miss graduation? Did they miss senior prom? Did they miss their Sacks? I mean, what did they miss in terms of development?

• 22:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, Chamath is a good point, which is that if that when government is the employer, requiring it on their employees because it leads to better outcomes for that institution, that is a little different than government just mandating that you, Jason Calacanis, private citizen, have to go get a shot in your arm, right? I mean, so there is a slight difference there, like military, for instance, right? The military probably wants to vaccinate everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation, they're not like, you know, incapacitated by an outbreak of COVID, right? So I can, I think there, you know, we're getting into shades of gray here from a poly policy perspective. You know,

• 22:47David Sacks?

  I don't want teachers missing school because, you know, for weeks at a time because they didn't do the obvious thing against COVID vaccine. So, look, I think there are some really good poly policy arguments there. But I think, again, the one place where I'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said, listen, you, private citizen, not an employee of the government, has to go get vaccinated. As much as I would like everyone to get vaccinated, I don't want to give government that kind of power.

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  President Biden could legally require military members to get vaccinated, but so far he has declined to do so. July 9th, New York Times. Friedberg, where do you stand on this? Chamath says he's all in. You're a teacher, you get vaccinated at the end. Sacks is kind of close, but is a little concerned. What do you say, Friedberg?

• 23:37David Friedberg?

  I mean, another way to frame it is that there is a new qualification for a job. Like, you know, there's qualification to be in the military. You have to have certain physical capabilities. Jason, I don't know if you would qualify. No. I don't think I would. I don't think I can be like-

• 23:53Jason Calacanis?

  For totally different reasons. Your inability to fight or throw a punch would be-

• 23:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, maybe J Cal could eat the enemy.

• 24:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jason Calacanis?

  Trust me, I would be great in the military. I'm a berserker.

• 24:05David Sacks?

  He'd be like Clemenza. He'd be cooking the meatballs or something.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Private Joker. Private Paula Dona.

• 24:14David Friedberg?

  There's the rea- I think the reason there's sensitivity to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs. And then you're telling them that in order to keep your job, you have to go get a vaccine. Now, if we were to-

• 24:25Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 24:25David Friedberg?

  If we were to have zero teachers today and we were starting a public school system from scratch, and you said, here's one of the qualifying criterias to be a school teacher. You have to have an education degree. You have to have maybe a master's degree in education. You have to have appropriate qualifications and training and certification. Oh, and by the way, you also have to have a vaccine. If that becomes a criteria, I think people find it less offensive. It's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go get a shot in order to keep your job. And that's the complicating thing that I think people are trying to wade through. I don't think- I don't think that if you were to say like, look, it's obvious that the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do pushups or whatever the criteria might be. But if you impose that on people that were already in the military

• 25:10David Friedberg?

  and then you're going to kick a bunch of them out, people would be up in arms about it.

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, if you had a BMI requirement.

• 25:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah, and that's the concern, I think, that arises with, you know, imposing these kind of, you know, personal body criteria upon, you know, specific jobs when people are already employed in that job. And it's, there's absolutely no answer, right? Like, if you're gonna do it, you're gonna have incredible backlash and trouble and pain. And if you were to- and we're not in a circumstance where we can build these organizations and these institutions from scratch.

• 25:42David Sacks?

  Look, there's a lot of social issues where, you know, particularly on the liberal side-

• 25:49David Sacks?

  People do not want the government prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures, right? Well, you know, I'd say it's even more invasive.

• 25:58Jason Calacanis?

  Are you talking about people transitioning?

• 26:00David Sacks?

  Or, you know, or the issue of abortion, you know, very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not have the right to legislate what happens with

• 26:09Jason Calacanis?

  What experimental treatments, yeah.

• 26:11David Sacks?

  What happens with my body, right? Well, force it, you know, giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is, you know, that is, that is invasive. And so I do think there are like rights implications to that.

• 26:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I want to be very clear. If you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole, if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share, then you need to sign up for the compact that we all sign up for. That's, that's my overarching argument. The, the thing with abortion where I'm on the other side of the issue, just to be very clear, is like, it is a woman's body. I don't think I have any right to dictate what she does. I don't understand what she goes through. I don't understand what situation she's in. I don't think I have the judgment to do that. It should be her decision.

• 27:09Jason Calacanis?

  And it doesn't have an impact on the collective.

• 27:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a probabilistic chance that I may die. It does not.

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 27:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  Or mutate, yeah.

• 27:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not saying that I have a say, but I do think I should have a say. If you're then all of a sudden going to consume the same resources that I consume, where I've signed up to that compact for public health.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Based on all this, here's where I come to. What if we gave teachers an off-ramp? Listen, if you, you, you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom. If not, you're going to get a one-year buyout or whatever, one month or two months for every year of service. So if you've been with us for 20 years, you're going to get 20 months of pay. And, or you could say if the virus is spreading at under this rate, in other words. You know, we've got under 1% of the population infected or whatever the criteria is, then you can come to work in the classroom. But if this thing is spreading, you're out and that's it. And there's an off-ramp here to David's point.

• 28:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unless there's a narrow, like, look, I do think you can be a conscientious objector for legitimate reasons. Again, like, we have these very specific definitions for religious or for health-specific reasons that you don't get vaccinated. I think those should be respected. It's not that cohort of people we're talking about. It's everybody else that, right now, wants to not think for themselves and, as a result, put everybody else and themselves in danger.

• 28:42David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think the most compelling part of your argument, Chamath, is that is the health externality, right? That each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting, you know, multiplicative contagious particles. And this is why I was in favor of a mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic is it's not just an individual decision. Your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick. So, you know, this is why I do think it's

• 29:13Jason Calacanis?

  It also wasn't very invasive, correct, Sax? I mean, was your other point?

• 29:16David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. Potentially high benefit for very low cost. I think we're, but the thing that maybe I didn't necessarily take into consideration is, you know, people complied in such a half-hearted way. I mean, I do think the mask makes a difference if it's an N95 quality mask that you put on correctly, right?

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 29:36David Sacks?

  But when people just strap a sock to their face that's loosely fitting and they don't give a shit, I mean, does that really make a difference? I mean, I'm very skeptical.

• 29:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a question, Sax, and then we'll go to Friedberg and then we'll flip to the next topic. If we were on our third pandemic, or let's, God forbid, a second pandemic starts, a totally different one, you know, Ebola-type or something, and we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a higher rate, does your calculus change, Sax?

• 30:03David Sacks?

  Sure, because the downsides, the costs of

• 30:09David Sacks?

  You know, not not imposing those more restrictive regulations goes up considerably. I mean, definitely, my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that that if you're vaccinated, you're call it 95% likely to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table. And so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk. You know, it's like it's like smoking in a way where when I made the movie Think for Smoking, Christopher Buckley told me, you know, he's the author of the book. And he said, look, there's something uniquely American about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful. Right. The main character in Think for Smoking is a spokesman for Big Tobacco, and he's engaging in political spin.

• 30:54David Sacks?

  But his argument is, look, people have the right to engage in this behavior, even if it is known to be harmful to them. Maybe America is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that. But I do, um, I, you know, look, that is, that is, um, that's freedom, is letting people do stupid things, you know? And, um, and so we have to weigh the benefits of of freedom against the, against the costs. And, um,

• 31:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, sorry, can I just say something? Um, smoking is a perfect example because as you know, there is now, um, a non-trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled, um, secondhand smoke, both the smoker, but also other things, condo boards, other places where all of a sudden you didn't choose to fucking have, you know, tar and nicotine.

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 31:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bartenders, my dad worked in bars where people, it was a cloud of smoke for 30 years.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  30 years.

• 31:51David Sacks?

  Right.

• 31:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They told him he was essentially a smoker.

• 31:53David Friedberg?

  It's not, it's not just the detrimental activity at the time. Remember, we've socialized the cost of treatment for people, uh, through public health systems. And because of that, it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone that's now got to pay the price.

• 32:10David Sacks?

  But the government is so omnipresent, all of our lives, there's always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make. And to Thomas' point, I mean, everybody uses government services to some degree. So that alone can't be the reason. I do agree that

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, but there is outrageous behavior, David. What about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an hour? Like, it's the same thing.

• 32:30David Sacks?

  That's illegal. That's illegal. But I think, I think Chamath is right that the smoking example is a good one, because we do regulate secondhand smoke, because there's an externality, there's a health externality to everybody else, if you smoke in a public place, and so we restrict that. But we don't make smoking illegal. We don't stop you from doing it in your own homes, or in private places. And the argument is, listen, if you want to do something that's harmful, primarily to you, that's your choice as an American. You know, and I know people, a lot of people don't like that. Actually, this is the, this, I posted a tweet that I got attacked for.

• 33:03Jason Calacanis?

  Just because an opinion is wrong, doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because a behavior is harmful, doesn't mean it should be prohibited. Just because something is beneficial, doesn't mean it should be required.

• 33:16David Sacks?

  Right.

• 33:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's a completely reasonable tweet.

• 33:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, I thought it was a pretty inoffensive, anodyne tweet, just reminding people that just because, again, something is positive, doesn't mean you force people to do it. And just because some behavior is harmful, you don't, you don't ban it. I think smoking is a great example of that, right? We let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them, because freedom is a value in and of itself. For this, I was attacked as a selfish asshole by, by this other pod. And I really think-

• 33:49Jason Calacanis?

  Who, Kara Swisher and Professor Cold Takes?

• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  Professor what? Cold Takes, that literally made an index of all of Professor G's, you know, takes, that Macy's would be incredible, and Amazon would lose its money, and yada, yada. He's kind of obsessed with you too, Chamath Prof G.

• 34:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, who just got a show canceled on Bloomberg. They were a little Kara Swisher was called Sax an asshole.

• 34:13David Sacks?

  Well, triggered. It was bizarre that they would get so triggered by this inoffensive tweet, but I think what you see here is an example of the way that the woke mind thinks, which is.

• 34:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, hold on. I don't think Kara is woke.

• 34:26David Sacks?

  Are you kidding me? She's like the she's like the Madame Dufarge of the woke revolution. She's.

• 34:31Jason Calacanis?

  Who is Madame Dufarge?

• 34:32David Sacks?

  Madame Madame Madame Dufarge was this character in the French Revolution who had knit the names of the next person to be guillotined. And she was, you know, one of the leaders of the sans culottes. No, look, Kara is constantly ginning up the mob to try and, you know, guillotine some non non woke person.

• 34:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think that that's true.

• 34:52Jason Calacanis?

  That's true. I think she's kind of moderate.

• 34:53David Sacks?

  You're trying to you're trying to curry favor with her. So you don't.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  No, we're not. No, no, no. She I mean, she did get it right. You are an asshole. I mean, you are an asshole. She got that. But you're not old and failing. Well, you are kind of old. You looked old.

• 35:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You look old.

• 35:05David Sacks?

  She's effectively saying we're all assholes because I think all of us have talked about.

• 35:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We are assholes. I'm an asshole.

• 35:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, own it.

• 35:14David Sacks?

  What?

• 35:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not a whiner. What's your other choice? Being a whiner on the sidelines?

• 35:19David Sacks?

  What we've said on this show is that we have a moral imperative to get to get back to normal. Do we not? That is what we've said. And for that, you've basically saying that that is a let them eat COVID position, right? That we are basically, we don't care if people get sick and die because of COVID. That's not true. You know, we just have a.

• 35:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I care. I think we should make people get vaccinated.

• 35:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated. I asked you Sax if there were three more variants and this was an acute situation, you said you would force.

• 35:51David Sacks?

  Oh, look, if we had if we had a variant of COVID that was as deadly as Ebola and as transmissible as Delta variant, it 100% changes the game. There's no question about it.

• 36:02Jason Calacanis?

  Willing to change the government's ability to put a shot on based on.

• 36:06David Sacks?

  It's a benefit.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:07David Sacks?

  It's a yes, it's a benefit cost analysis and.

• 36:10Jason Calacanis?

  That's reasonable.

• 36:11David Sacks?

  But look, I give freedom a lot of weight and part of my calculation is the fact that I. I can get vaccinated to take to most likely take the most serious risks off the table. So while I I am impacted to some degree by other people's choices, I'm much less impacted now that we have.

• 36:30Jason Calacanis?

  But you're you're thinking about this, you're I still have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're using you're viewing this as a linear problem. This thing is transmutating and so.

• 36:39David Sacks?

  I know, Chamath, but there are still billions of people all over the world who are unvaccinated and we'd be better off focusing on getting them a Marshall Plan for the vaccines. All these unused doses, we're wasting our breath in the United States trying to get these vaccine hesitant or anti-vax people to get vaccinated.

• 36:56David Friedberg?

  Did you guys see that Emmanuel Macron of France, you know, basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places, going into bars and cafes. They basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated and he did it in a public address on TV. Twenty two million people watched it.

• 37:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 37:14David Friedberg?

  And then after he did this, suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20,000 a minute. They got four million people sign up to get vaccinated.

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yep. You can't go to a cafe, I mean, in France, what's the point of being alive?

• 37:27David Friedberg?

  And then let me throw a wet blanket on the framing of this on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible. I have been to like three events over the last month or two where I was required to be vaccinated. And I literally just took a photo of this index card that I got from this person and sent it to them, which I could go make at Kinkos or I could print at home.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot of effort.

• 37:52David Friedberg?

  There's I don't my my point is I don't think that there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about. How are you actually going to know that people going to the Warriors game are actually vaccinated? How are you actually going to know?

• 38:06Jason Calacanis?

  They did it at Madison Square Garden. They they literally had you pull out your ID and they matched your name to your Vax card. And I think printing out a Vax card and faking it could be a fine, could be a $10,000 fine. And so you would do it like anything else. You could you could make a bogus driver's license and drive cars.

• 38:22David Friedberg?

  It's not digital, right? There's no there's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated and who's not. So so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like, here's this piece of paper that says I'm vaccinated. I think that you're you're never going to really close the hole on this thing. Now, you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in France, which is you just announce the restrictions, you announce these rules, everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up. But I, you know, I'm not sure this actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society over the next, you know, short while. I mean, maybe over time, we digitize all this stuff, but we'll see.

• 38:57David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, the best, the best, the best case scenario is that because Delta is so transmissible, we get to herd immunity because all the people who didn't get vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing burns out.

• 39:08Jason Calacanis?

  How close are we to that? Because we have 60% of adults in the United States have had one shot or more, which is why deaths probably aren't going up because that's like 75% in people over 60, I think. So Friedberg, in your estimation, as our science guy, with, we have like 30 million people who've been infected that we know of, you've got to triple that number, right? Because there's people who we don't know and then you have 65, you have 60%. So we've got to be in the range of 70% have been exposed or been vaccinated. So when does it kick in? Or are we experiencing, you know, herd immunity right now with these low deaths?

• 39:43David Friedberg?

  We talked about this before, but there are, you know, there's a spectrum of infection, right? You're, you're, you're, you can have viral replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know, because you've got enough antibodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus, before your body even, you know, you start to feel symptoms. And there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time and you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation and all the stuff that follows. And so, you know, in terms of how you measure this stuff, it's really difficult to say that you're going to stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to be, to have been exposed. As we've

• 40:28David Friedberg?

  seen, even when you have a broad and diverse antibody pool in your body, because you've been exposed to a vaccine, we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant. And so the rate of transmission slows, the rate of severe infection goes way down and so on. So it's not as binary as, hey, we hit herd immunity and now we're done. It seems, this is... You know, as we talked about earlier, and as I think everyone is coming to terms with, this is going to be an endemic virus. And that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way, causing sometimes severe, sometimes,

• 41:08David Friedberg?

  you know, modest outbreaks for likely a very long time, no matter how many people get it, no matter how many people get vaccinated because you have

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  At what level should we ignore it? At what level should we just say, listen, that is the steady state? How many cases a day, how many deaths a day? Do you think is the steady state that we should just say, we just go to work and ignore it?

• 41:27David Friedberg?

  I am a brutal, cold hearted libertarian on this point, and I have been since we first talked about this last year. I've always been of the mind that we need to balance the, um, the, the follow on life effect and from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual loss of life. Right? So you can never go, I, I, I, I really think this point about zeroism and this term about zeroism is an important one. You can never get to zero cases. What is the acceptable number of cases and what is the cost to keep that case load down? The balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision.

• 42:04Jason Calacanis?

  Put a number on it.

• 42:05David Friedberg?

  But I, it's about saving lives, right? So like, there are a certain number of people whose lives are going to be ruined, who are, some of them will commit suicide. Some of them won't be able to earn an income again, their businesses are going to get shut down. What is the economic cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life?

• 42:20Jason Calacanis?

  What I'm saying is, what is the number? We had an average of 250 deaths, 250,000 case, known cases a day at the peak. We had a, a peak deaths of 4,100 a day. We are now at 200 people dying a day and, you know, 30,000 cases. Is there a number at which you say, let's just focus on getting back to work? And is that number where we are now? I'm trying to get an idea of-

• 42:43David Friedberg?

  Yeah, again, I wouldn't simplify it to those data points. What I would do is-

• 42:46Jason Calacanis?

  And how do we simplify it?

• 42:47David Friedberg?

  Again, I would look at, you know, at what age are people dying? How many life years are we losing? And how can we address the acute populations that are at risk and the acute populations that are, that are potentially, um, going to be exposed? Manage those populations differently than you manage the broader population that has a lower likelihood of risk of, of death and a lower likelihood of fatality. And the restrictions that you then impose to, you know, start to manage, uh, the risk and the exposure to different populations gets weighed against the saving of life and the loss of life in both circumstances. So it's, it's not easy, right? It's, it's, and everyone wants to sum this whole thing up to like, how many deaths a day is appropriate? That's not the right answer, right? Because-

• 43:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you're saying how many?

• 43:25David Sacks?

  That part of it is so obvious, right? That and we should have known this last summer. The obvious part being that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's the most at risk. And what do we do with lockdowns? We literally locked down the entire population, every business. It was completely insane. We should have focused it on protecting the most at-risk populations, isolating the sick or the people at greatest risk, not everybody. It was just insane. And I mean, I can't believe we're still having that conversation a year later.

• 43:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I, before we move on to the next topic, can I, can I read the best, can I read the best, best comment from Saks's tweet? So Saks's tweet, just because an opinion is wrong, doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because a behavior is harmful, doesn't mean it should be prohibited. And just because something is beneficial, doesn't mean it should be required. The best response goes to Distantly Social Rumpel, whose full name is @wendellshirk, who said, "This message brought to you by the generic self-serving platitude alert network. We now return you to your regularly scheduled episode of the bland soap opera with the Pavlim sisters."

• 44:38David Sacks?

  Well, yeah, I, look, there, there's, there's an element of truth to that, which is I, I almost didn't tweet it because I thought it was too much of a platitude, but the fact that people on the other side got so triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to, to tweet it is they think that if you're calling for any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy, you're basically a selfish asshole. I mean, it's insane. I mean, they want to stay in this world of zero S-COVID restrictions forever.

• 45:08Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta move on. We're 45 minutes into COVID, so we gotta move on. But I think if this is in the influenza plus or minus 100% zone, we gotta pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society. And, you know, local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks. But I kind of think if this is within, you know, 2X of our yearly deaths from

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  You know influenza and just the normal cold. I think we move forward as best we can. Do we want to go to China, Cuba?

• 45:39David Friedberg?

  I think just real quick, before we move away from this, I really want to just highlight the DeepMind announcement from this morning because I think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on.

• 45:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 45:50David Friedberg?

  So this morning, you know, DeepMind, which published AlphaFold, and we talked about this a few episodes ago.

• 45:56Jason Calacanis?

  DeepMind is owned by Google, it's their AI arm.

• 45:58David Friedberg?

  It's an AI arm owned by Google and they basically took protein structure and tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of the DNA or RNA that codes the amino acids that make up the protein. And so again, like when you have a string of amino acids, they combine and they fold into a wave that's really hard to predict and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein and then it does something in the body. And historically, we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein, which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body. So this morning, DeepMind incredibly published a database with the predicted structure of

• 46:39David Friedberg?

  every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this capability that they now have.

• 46:45Jason Calacanis?

  What does it mean in English?

• 46:46David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, what this means is we now have a physical model of every protein that human DNA can make. And that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does, how it does it, and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins and how certain drugs can affect those proteins and how we can alter human health by making new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways. So it's an incredible dataset that was just published. It's almost like, you know, releasing the Rosetta Stone, in my opinion, in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body.

• 47:30David Friedberg?

  They did it for 10 other species and they said that they're going to publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have the sort of dataset around, for which they expect will achieve over 100 million unique proteins in this database over the coming months, freely available and searchable. And let me just explain, and I know I'm on a monologue here, so I'll win the monologue stat on this one.

• 47:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's a good one, it's a good one.

• 47:52David Friedberg?

  But let me just explain why this is relevant. The Delta variant, what it is, is that, you know, the SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence is about 30,000 base pairs long. 10% of those, or about 3,000 base pairs, make up the spike protein, which is the protein at the tip of the COVID virus, the coronavirus that gets into the cells. And, you know, for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus, there's about one nucleoside mutation. One of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves. And we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein. And so we suddenly discover empirically, and, you know, by looking around, suddenly all these people are getting more infected than were getting infected before.

• 48:36David Friedberg?

  We look at the genetic code and we're like, oh, here's the changes that happened. But we could have, with this capability from AlphaFold, predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors on the cells and getting it to cells? And what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible, more deadly? All these sorts of factors, because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair. And so this tool that was released today, I think, highlights that over the next decade, these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally.

• 49:19David Friedberg?

  And it gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them with new drugs and new variant models and new vaccines, well ahead of the, oh, my God, we just got hit with a nuclear bomb. Let's clean up the mess, kind of, in the future. So it's an exciting day and exciting moment.

• 49:35Jason Calacanis?

  Would they have been, released this, David, if it hadn't been for COVID coming out? Do you think DeepMind just pivoted their entire group? Because they have about 1,000 people, I understand. And by the way, they pay something in the order of 600,000 or 700,000 a year on average. And there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year. So just think about the scale of what Google is spending on this.

• 49:58David Friedberg?

  You guys know that-

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  They probably shifted a large number of people to work on this.

• 50:03David Friedberg?

  You guys know that I have long, deep roots at Google. And I will tell you that the value system of people there, you know, the press and the public will think what they want. But I think that the value system of people there drove them to realize the importance of this work that they're doing with AlphaFold, and it is important for humanity and it's important for the health broadly of people. They could have kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that. And I think the importance of this discovery and this capability was realized and is published for that very reason. There's a lot of work that DeepMind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending and all this stuff, and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for Google per year based on those capabilities. And then there are these things that benefit

• 50:46David Friedberg?

  all of us. And by putting this out publicly, it's a great good for humanity, and you know, they're making it freely available and searchable. And so I don't think that COVID kind of instigated this, because they've been working on this for a very long time, since before COVID. And this is a very hard biological problem that is key to understanding biology and how biology works. It's been going on for decades. They've unlocked it with software, and they're making it freely available. And you know, there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database.

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is a mitzvah to society, to humanity. Does it change, the fact that Google's spending well over a billion dollars a year on DeepMind and doing projects like this, does this change any of your thinking about breaking them up, Chamath, or you know, how we look at big tech?

• 51:32David Friedberg?

  Good question.

• 51:33Jason Calacanis?

  No? Because, how do you afford this? Yeah, where does this kind of?

• 51:38David Sacks?

  We learned something very disturbing about big tech this week, actually. This was quite a bombshell that Jen Psaki dropped from the White House press briefing. We got to talk about this. She just sort of casually mentioned that, oh yeah, by the way, the administration is flagging posts for a social media company, for big tech companies to take down, to remove.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  Accounts. They're talking about specific accounts.

• 52:01David Sacks?

  And posts, yeah. And she just kind of just casually mentions, oh yeah, the big tech companies are very, you know, eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these accounts. She even said that when one of these companies takes down an account, the rest should do it too, implying that the White House is providing the central coordinative role in the censorship.

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  A global blacklist.

• 52:25David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but hold on. Let's take the most charitable view here. I know that it's very easy to make this a left versus right. They're censoring, yada yada, Trump got banned. But if somebody was saying, this was an account that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine. Would it not be, how would the, and it was hitting scale? You know, what would be the way for the White House to inform social media that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was trending?

• 52:58David Sacks?

  The White House or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position, but this is different. This is the White House coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies.

• 53:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're not behind the scenes. They're saying they're doing it right here to everybody.

• 53:09David Sacks?

  Correct, correct. The behavior was behind the scenes, but Psaki just admitted it, which is why it's such a bombshell. Look, even the ACLU-

• 53:16Jason Calacanis?

  If you were president and there was an account on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, that was saying there was a microchip from Bill Gates-

• 53:23David Sacks?

  This is a blatant violation of the people's First Amendment rights.

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  How would you then tell them? How would you-

• 53:29David Sacks?

  You are allowed. The First Amendment gives you the right to say things that are untrue. It is not the business of government to declare what is true and what is false.

• 53:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 53:39David Sacks?

  Even, even, hold on, even the ACLU, I'm not done. Even the ACLU came out of retirement. We haven't, we haven't heard from them for the last year during any of these-

• 53:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's hard to be the ACLU.

• 53:50David Sacks?

  We haven't heard from them during the past year during all of this activity that's been going on with accounts being blocked and ghosted. They finally came out of retirement to say that that this is a dangerous violation of people's First Amendment rights. You cannot have the government saying what is true and what is false and then denying people the right to express their opinions based on what the government thinks is the truth. And by the way, there's been a very subtle change here in the language that's being used. If you remember, what, the argument used to be that we have to stop disinformation. Now it's shifted to we have to stop misinformation. So those two things are very different. It's kind of like the, well, it's kind of like the difference

• 54:32David Sacks?

  in the term equality versus equity. They sound similar, but they actually mean very different things. So disinformation is actually a campaign of-

• 54:41Jason Calacanis?

  Purposeful.

• 54:42David Sacks?

  Purposeful campaign of propaganda and lies usually put forward covertly. So it's the FSB, you are some intelligence agency putting out-

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

  CIA, whatever.

• 54:52David Sacks?

  Putting out disinformation usually under false accounts. So in that case, we can say, no, you can't do that because you can't engage in deception around who you are, right? But misinformation is simply information that's being put out that frankly, you disagree with. Okay. And

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  Or it could be discernibly wrong. Wait, you're you're kind of framing that wrong. It could be, you're putting out information like there's a microchip in the vaccine that is explicitly known to be wrong.

• 55:19David Sacks?

  Look, the the lab leak theory was considered misinformation by these same people three months ago.

• 55:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but let's take the specific example of there's a microchip. If the if it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine, would you be okay with the White House contacting social media companies saying, hey, you got these accounts that are saying there's a microchip? You might want to look into it. They're not saying take it down. They're saying take a look into it.

• 55:39David Sacks?

  That's not the White House's business. Do I believe in the microchip theory? No, of course not. It's absolutely ridiculous, but it is not the business of government to be telling social media who to ban and who to block list.

• 55:51Jason Calacanis?

  I think they didn't tell them to ban. I think they told them to be aware of it. Go ahead, Chamath. I think your framing is wrong, Sax. Go ahead.

• 55:56David Sacks?

  No, no, Psaki said that when one site takes it down, they should all take it down. And then Biden, on top of it, comes out and pours kerosene on the fire by saying that social media sites are literally killing people.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah.

• 56:09David Sacks?

  By allowing, by allowing this misinformation. So here we have

• 56:13Jason Calacanis?

  See now, let's be honest.

• 56:14David Sacks?

  He's a president. This is the president of the United States using the bully pulpit to call social media sites mass murderers by virtue of allowing people to have free speech. Trump never used language that intemperate. I don't remember him ever calling

• 56:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God.

• 56:28David Sacks?

  American companies

• 56:30Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, Chamath. Let Chamath speak. Let Chamath speak.

• 56:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is the exact reason you you can't have a stranglehold on distribution because it will get perverted. And then we either have people we like or people we don't like in these positions of power, or people we like or people we don't like regulating, and it's constantly flipping. And we're all just doomed and bound to get fucked over. So back to the thing that Friedberg brought up before, I think Alpha Fold is incredible. I think Google has been an incredible company. They make money hand over fist. They waste an enormous amount of money on all kinds of trash. So it's good that they were actually able to do something useful here.

• 57:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I generally think that companies like Google and Facebook

• 57:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and Amazon unfortunately do not allow

• 57:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  They're just too big.

• 57:30David Sacks?

  Tramath makes a great point, which is we've got these big tech monopolies who've become gatekeepers over content. Okay. And what the administration has done and their allies in Congress is hang a sword of Damocles over the heads of these big tech companies. They've appointed Lina Khan to be the enforcer at the FTC. They've got their six bills in Congress right now. They've held congressional hearings around taking away section 230 protection, which is very economically advantageous for these big tech companies. So they've positioned the sword perfectly over the heads of these big tech companies, threatening to break them up and rein them in. And then Jen Psaki in the White House go to them and say, we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with. This is misinformation. Okay?

• 58:11David Sacks?

  That is a huge danger to free speech. It's basically like the administration saying to these big tech companies, nice little social network you got there. It'd be a real shame if anything happened to it. Look at what's going on.

• 58:23Jason Calacanis?

  Don't you want them broken up?

• 58:25David Sacks?

  I do want them broken up, but what I don't want-

• 58:27Jason Calacanis?

  So which is it? Do you want them to hold the sword? Or do you not want them to hold the sword?

• 58:30David Sacks?

  I actually want the sword to come crashing. I actually want the sword to come crashing down.

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  So you want them to swing the sword, not hold it over and then use it for extortion?

• 58:36David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 58:36Jason Calacanis?

  That's actually a great explanation then. Friedberg?

• 58:39David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 58:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to moderate here. Friedberg? I've- Do you give a shit? We've talked about this before.

• 58:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg has spent all day on his phone. He has not dialed into this podcast.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  I'm with you guys. I thought we just went over the Alpha Fold stuff way too fast. I mean,

• 58:55Jason Calacanis?

  the arguing over freedom of speech is happening and all of this debate, Friedberg, at the same time that we are making incredible life-changing moments for humanity. Two different companies went to space last week with civilians. And then we are basically defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on the planet. And we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would save everybody's life and let us continue on. And people are dunking on Bezos for not reading the room. I don't know if you saw this, Friedberg, but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room, etc.? Progress-

• 59:41David Friedberg?

  Technologically, will only arise with capital. So you can assume that that progress, you know, it's not like someone stumbles into a cave and discovered a rocket ship, or stumbles into a cave and discovered AlphaFold. There are years of toiling in labs, like Edison did, making the lightbulb. Edison had to raise a ton of money to get that lightbulb project off the ground. If you guys haven't read, I'm trying to remember the biography, there's Wizards of something. It's got wizards in the title, it's a good biography of Edison. And, you know, and I feel like we're at this moment where- The Wizard of Menlo Park? Yeah, I think that's the Wizard of Menlo Park, that's right.

• 1:00:23David Friedberg?

  And the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at AlphaFold, or at Waymo, or what Bezos and Elon are doing, is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work. You're not going to get a bunch of Kickstarter's to fund a SpaceX-like project, or a, you know, Blue Origin-like project. And so I think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development, and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital

• 1:01:07David Friedberg?

  to take on multiple billion-dollar bets, and like Chamath said, waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of 10 of them. But if that $1 billion bet works, it's worth $500 billion, and that money continuously gets reinvested. And look at what Google did with Waymo, they put over $1 billion in that project before everyone woke up and said, "My god, self-driving is real, it's possible." And it kick-started an industry. And I just feel like the amount of money, and not to mention the fact that like, these are free markets. So these businesses, Google, you don't have to search on Google, you don't have to buy from Amazon, but everyone benefits from searching on Google, everyone benefits from buying on Amazon. And the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so-

• 1:01:51David Friedberg?

  Good. And so I don't feel like these guys are screwing people over. You can consider the small business model as being like, you know, hey, maybe we shouldn't have had small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point, distribution was going to be economically advantaged by being centralized. And therefore, all consumers are going to benefit by centralizing. Is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever? Maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market, but same with what happened with the taxi industry. Technology will force these evolutions. The capital accumulates and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined on a smaller scale. But go ahead, Chum, up here.

• 1:02:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I do think sympathetic to what you were saying. I do think that if you look at every platform innovation that's ever happened. So whether it's, you know, we go from no print to print, you know, to newspapers, to radio, to television. You've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized, monopolistic or oligopolistic kind of early outcomes. And either through legislation or through innovation, then the pendulum swings to decentralization. That's typically happened, right? And you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that. So it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things.

• 1:03:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And everybody says the argument is, well, no, because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock-in. But I think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the China and the China shop and you have to just start all over. So it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody. And obviously, we want things like AlphaFold to exist. And we want things like Waymo to exist. The question is, how should they exist? And if they come out of the goodwill of Google, it is just so easily as likely that some other person, let's say it wasn't Sundar and Ruth Perat, but two other people who didn't like it, these things could have been in very different forms and shapes and not existed at all.

• 1:03:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that's the arbitrary nature of it, which is not necessarily free market capitalism. That doesn't- Benefit us.

• 1:04:02Jason Calacanis?

  Should we, Chamath, be upset that Bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from Amazon?

• 1:04:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He had a bad press conference. Let's just be clear. At the end of the day, he has wanted to do this his entire life. He built an incredible company. He was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it. He's invested billions of dollars in other things, $10 billion in climate change. His ex-wife has invested, you know, $6 billion just last year alone in all kinds of good works. So those two individuals, because of their success, I think will generally do and have done the right thing. Let's not get that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just put his foot in his mouth. Well, I think you said it, you know, the thing that he said around, uh, you know, I just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this.

• 1:04:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It sounded flippant and it didn't really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on Charlie Rose. Right? So if you, if you actually played those two things back, back side by side, you'd say, is this the same person? One was thoughtful, extremely respectful. The other one was, now, maybe he was just amped up. I mean, I could see how he could be.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I think. He was just really on cloud nine, so to speak.

• 1:05:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, and so, and so he just wasn't thinking about it. But, you know, honestly, like, look, he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say, we're assuming you're coming back. So here's some fucking talking points. Why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to earth? And let's just make sure we nail this and put our best foot forward. That is where I think he probably has some regrets based on how people reacted.

• 1:05:44David Sacks?

  This Bezos, um, space flight was a real Rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left. But the criticism was very different, you know, the critique I heard from the right was that, uh, he's having some sort of midlife crisis and the rocket looked too much like a phallus. Okay, fine, whatever. The, the criticism from the left was, um, it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise. You could almost see Them being horrified and dismayed that, you know, why was he doing this with his own money? You know, if this had been a NASA flight, I don't think they would have had a problem with it. And so you see here that even though Bezos has been so much more effective using his own money

• 1:06:27David Sacks?

  to do this, that the left just reflexively hates that. And, and, and, and, and they kept saying, well, how dare he use this money? The money could have been used on something else so much better.

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think of that argument?

• 1:06:41David Sacks?

  I, I think it's wrong in a couple of respects. It basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest inventors. And I don't think that's true. You look at these social programs, they want to keep doubling down on, they're not working. You know, these programs, our, our policies towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding. There's a tremendous amount of funding in San Francisco. They're spending $60,000 per tent per year. They're spending $300,000 in social services per homeless person per year. Lack of funding is not the problem. The approach is the problem. We spent something like $25,000 per pupil, per pupil in California schools. The test scores are going down. So, you know, these people who are criticizing Bezos don't know what to do with the money.

• 1:07:27David Sacks?

  They don't know how to spend it any better. They're not good at executing. However, Bezos or Elon, these are two of our greatest inventors.

• 1:07:34Jason Calacanis?

  Let them go.

• 1:07:35David Sacks?

  Let them go because, you know, they are pushing the boundaries. And I do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result of what they're doing with this new space race.

• 1:07:47Jason Calacanis?

  It's also super uninformed. If, correct me if I'm wrong here, but they were saying that the, they should have been doing more initiatives on earth. If you actually, and they were kind of talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space. And number one, the, the rocket ship fuel, my understanding in these is less than the, what happens in a 747. So put that aside. And then second, Elon has done more for global warming with Tesla than anybody in the, in the battery packs. I think in modern society, I can't think of somebody in the private sector who's done more. And then has there ever been a, there's never been a gift of $10 billion to one cause, let alone one cause which Bezos gave, which was climate change.

• 1:08:27David Sacks?

  Nobody, nobody has done more.

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  Also hasn't, you would know Chamath, I, I thought Richard Breton had done a lot for global warming. I thought he was very involved in the carbon credits space.

• 1:08:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that we're witnessing something that.

• 1:08:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent, getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong, but want to just have a chance to be on the field and try.

• 1:08:57Jason Calacanis?

  And have the freedom to do so.

• 1:08:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that just literally infuriates a certain class of people. It proves itself out by what David said. We are not in a funding crisis. We are running 10, 20 trillion dollar deficits, you know, or sorry, 10, you know, hundreds of billions of dollar deficits, 10, 20 trillion dollar debt levels that are increasing every year. We have a surfeit of money. We print money whenever we want. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money. And in the absence of people being able to do things, they would rather other people not do things, not because it's not the right thing to do, but because it makes them feel impotent.

• 1:09:39David Sacks?

  Right. And, and so what, what, what is driving that? I think you, there is a real contempt for private initiative. And, and Jason, you're right. You see it in the hatred towards Elon. Nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than Elon. I mean, even the Bezos gift.

• 1:09:56Jason Calacanis?

  Period. End of story.

• 1:09:57David Sacks?

  Period. End of story. I mean, the Bezos gift to some philanthropy, I don't know if that's going to make a difference or not. You're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue, but it's indisputable that Elon, the electric car industry would not exist without Elon. And yet there is contempt and hatred for the fact that he did this through private initiative.

• 1:10:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because he does it in a way that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally. They don't like that he says what he wants. They don't like that he does what he wants. They don't like that he dresses the way he does. They don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough. It's not about the, look, people.

• 1:10:40Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's also about the money that it's the wealth that's been accumulated too.

• 1:10:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, no, no, no, hold on. I don't think that's what it is at all.

• 1:10:46Jason Calacanis?

  No?

• 1:10:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think what it is, is psychological. It is nothing. About money. I think what we are witnessing, and I think social media has just blown the cover off it, is a psychological awakening that people have, which is that they were comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders, and they just believed the world would function as it should. Now you see people migrating through this membrane, achieving enormous amounts of success, basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude. And it breaks people's brains because they don't like it because now they think,

• 1:11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Why didn't it happen to me?

• 1:11:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why not me? And the thing is because you're not capable. And at somewhere along the way,

• 1:11:31Jason Calacanis?

  Or hardworking. You're not dedicated.

• 1:11:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or you didn't try.

• 1:11:33Jason Calacanis?

  Or you didn't try.

• 1:11:35David Sacks?

  They didn't act with agency.

• 1:11:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, look, every day, every day, the greatest thing that I've learned about the public markets now, having been, you know, purely on the early stage technology side, building, running, then investing, is I get a mark every day. Right now, to do both businesses, I get a scorecard every day. And some days, I really think to myself, maybe I'm just not good enough today. And I say to myself, that is true today. And then the difference is tomorrow, I have a choice, which is I wake up and I decide, am I going to go back at it or not?

• 1:12:09Jason Calacanis?

  Get back in the game.

• 1:12:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I'm not going to hate on other people who had a good day today, just because I had a bad day. And that's what I think we're going through. We're going through, and social media allows it to happen. And it allows you to put it out there. You can hide behind a screen name. You can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent up frustration one has.

• 1:12:32Jason Calacanis?

  Journalists doing it too.

• 1:12:33David Sacks?

  Of course, of course, because

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  These journalists are doing it too, where they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use.

• 1:12:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The difference is journalists do it with their real screen name under the guise of journalism. Everybody else does it with a fake screen name. And it's all just a bunch of trolling.

• 1:12:52David Sacks?

  In order to do something really great, like Bezos, or like Elon, you have to believe that you have agency over your own life. You have to believe that you can accomplish great things. You have to, you know, act with, with purpose. And is that really what we're teaching kids today in schools? What we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors, it's some intersectional framework. We're not teaching them about earned success. We're teaching them about privilege, which is, you know, is presumptively ill-gotten. And it's all about a transference of privilege and, um, and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims. But no one's talking about how you actually create change and success.

• 1:13:36Jason Calacanis?

  Abundance.

• 1:13:37David Sacks?

  Abundance. It's all a negative sum. It's always a negative sum game.

• 1:13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Free bird, go ahead.

• 1:13:42David Friedberg?

  I date it all back to the Kim Kardashian sex tape. I think that there was this moment where someone who was, didn't do anything, didn't have a career, wasn't doing anything work-wise, but was kind of a pseudo-celebrity for being a celebrity. It's like the Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie era, right? Like, uh, folks who don't really have much to talk about, except that they're the ones that people are talking about. And then that sex tape turned her into a superstar, and then she became a billionaire a few years later. And so, um, you know, there, there, there is this kind of poignant moment, I think, where folks are like, wait a second, you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country? You don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame?

• 1:14:25David Friedberg?

  Therefore, the, the, the kind of assumption is, hey, you know what? There are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do, and the rest of us don't. Um, and I do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those, those moments and makes them very big and kind of then that becomes the assumed standard. When the reality is, I mean, all four of us worked really fucking hard. All four of us came from nothing. I don't know about sex, but I mean, the rest of us.

• 1:14:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, his dad was an immigrant doctor from South Africa and he moved to the deep south as a Jew in the eighties.

• 1:14:59David Friedberg?

  But, but I mean, I mean, I think all of us graduated college deeply in debt. And then we all worked our way out of debt and we all found ways to work really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country and to build value and to build businesses.

• 1:15:13Jason Calacanis?

  It can be done.

• 1:15:14David Friedberg?

  And to realize those returns. And we don't start out as elites. We were never elite. We were always the struggling, you know, immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we fought and we had grit and we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort. And I think that that's not really, and so did Bezos, and so did Elon. And I don't think that there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them, like maybe in, you know, the British, the days of the British monarchy, these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have. And I think that that, and I think that that's so important because people miss that point. And they think that Kim Kardashian, or the random bolt of lightning, or the elite is the, the kind of endowed upon people in a way that's unfair.

• 1:15:59Jason Calacanis?

  They're misreading the situation.

• 1:16:00David Friedberg?

  And everyone else is, everyone else is missing out. Yeah.

• 1:16:03Jason Calacanis?

  They misread the situation.

• 1:16:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So a couple of things. Kim Kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape, but fuck if she's not an incredible business person, because from there to now, that's execution.

• 1:16:15David Friedberg?

  Totally true.

• 1:16:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of toiling, hard work, good decision making. She fucking nailed it. Was I lucky to have actually joined Facebook versus MySpace? Yes. But when I was there, did I fucking hit the cover off the ball? God damn, yes. You know, was I lucky to have started social capital and be able to raise capital? Sure. But then did I have to help find a team, coach that team, work with them, make good investments? That's fucking hard. And I think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work, that there's all kinds of levels of success, that you can be proud of all kinds of different accomplishments. What I loved is when Friedberg used us and Elon and Bezos in the same sentence, because

• 1:16:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I catch myself where I'm ashamed sometimes, where I'm like, I am not as good as those two guys. So how dare I use my name in the same sentence as their name? And then I think, wait a minute, what the fuck am I quibbling over? Like, this is insane. In any way, shape or form, we've all made it. Sure, there's different degrees, but it's beyond that it matters at this point. And this is what I think we're living in, a society where it really distorts you. So if-

• 1:17:22Jason Calacanis?

  How do we change it, Chamath? How do we change people from thinking that it's random and that you can't do it? Because there are a group of people who are-

• 1:17:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, it is random.

• 1:17:29Jason Calacanis?

  But there are a group of people who believe the system is rigged, I cannot become Chamath.

• 1:17:34David Friedberg?

  And I'm stuck in a rut. And I'm stuck in a rut and I can't get out.

• 1:17:37Jason Calacanis?

  I can't get out. How do we change that belief?

• 1:17:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The whiners and the complainers and the haters are stuck in a massive rut. And I think the thing that happened, and I said it last pod, I'll say it again, and maybe I'll just say it every fucking pod. It is not about winning and losing, it is about trying and learning. And that is a huge thing. It's about a learning mindset. It's about this idea that things are changing so fucking fast. The only thing that I can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn because things will constantly be changing underfoot.

• 1:18:10David Friedberg?

  But what do you say to the single mother with three kids who is in a town where the factory is shutting down and she's losing her job and she doesn't have the resources to move?

• 1:18:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  She is not the person that hates Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. I will fucking bet you dollars to donate.

• 1:18:25David Friedberg?

  But what does she do? Aren't there institutional ruts in the United States? Yeah.

• 1:18:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I understand. These are two completely different topics. My point is, if you go online, it is filled with a small cohort of people that are positive and then a large cohort of people that are silently trying to just gain information and learn.

• 1:18:45David Friedberg?

  Grind it out, yeah.

• 1:18:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And a small vocal minority of bitter people who can't do shit. And all I'm talking about is...

• 1:18:50David Friedberg?

  Bitter privileged people.

• 1:18:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, who knows if they're privileged, but I'm just saying they're here.

• 1:18:54David Friedberg?

  If they're getting paid a hundred thousand to work at the Atlantic or something.

• 1:18:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think that these people have been check boxers their whole lives. They tried to play the team sports they were told to. They went to the schools. They tried to do the CFA, the MBA, the this or the that. Nothing worked for them. They work in an environment where they don't feel any equity. Actually, this is where equity is important. They feel disenfranchised and they're angry. And as a result, they just want everything to be different so that nobody wins because they can't win. But if they were winning, they would be the first one to say, shut the fucking door behind me. I'm convinced of it 100%.

• 1:19:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, the irony is that the people you're talking about all went to these elite institutions and they imbibed these ideologies and philosophies. And I think the people who have been successful went to those, not in all cases, but they went to those places and then rebelled against it or just shut it out.

• 1:19:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what we should do. Here's what we should do. We should all contribute five or 10 million bucks into an LLC. We should call Pegasus. We should use Pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on Twitter and then index that to LinkedIn to figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just publish huge databases of all the haters.

• 1:20:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it's

• 1:20:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How funny would that be?

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  I, I, it's, it's very interesting because I'm watching a group of these complainers leave traditional mainstream media because I'm focused on journalists because I was one. And I'm watching them leave journalism, a small group of them and become entrepreneurs on Substack or their own products. And I feel like there's a little group of them who are realizing, holy shit, I can make a million dollars if I apply myself and I quit the New York Times and I go start my own publication.

• 1:20:37David Sacks?

  Right, and I actually say something interesting and differentiated, not just toeing the party line at the New York Times.

• 1:20:42Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, there's a whole little, there's a little crack here in this like

• 1:20:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, I'll say, I'll say they are just as successful as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The, the financial quantum may be different, but I bet you the personal fucking satisfaction quantum is the same. And this is the key, this is the key. You could be running a $500,000 a year business and you could feel like a million fucking bucks.

• 1:21:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, you're a king, you're a queen.

• 1:21:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a nice house, you have a nice family, you employ a couple of people, you provide a good life, you do what you want to do, when you want to do it. The sense of freedom that comes with that and power and agency is the same as them. And maybe in some ways, the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these guys would because they're so, you know, scheduled and people are coming after them all the time.

• 1:21:32David Sacks?

  Well, one of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart, hardworking and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself, you will be successful in this industry. You know, over two decades, I mean, I've just seen it. How could you not? You have such tailwinds at your back. There's so much value being created. We saw over the past year, more money, more LP dollars have gone into venture capital by far than any other year and more money, more returns is coming out. That's why more money's going in.

• 1:22:02Jason Calacanis?

  I'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful just by showing up.

• 1:22:06David Sacks?

  Right, and, and

• 1:22:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you said, but the first part is the critical part. You just said, who are not prone to self sabotage. There is an enormous number of people who are prone to self. I was one, I am still one, but I work on it every day.

• 1:22:19Jason Calacanis?

  How do you self sabotage yourself, your ego? He blew up his firm.

• 1:22:23Jason Calacanis?

  That's true. But I think he blew it up because there was creative destruction. I think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start over.

• 1:22:30David Friedberg?

  No, he's talked about it publicly. He said it.

• 1:22:32Jason Calacanis?

  But the blowing up of, when you, how do you reconcile the blowing up of the firm, Chamath? Whatever number of years later and rebooting it.

• 1:22:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is all old news. It's like, you know, the amount of success and capital and money that we've made is undisputable. And I've made it under all kinds of weather conditions. So, you know, it all kind of speaks for itself. But the problem is, again, if you ask an average person, I don't think they care. I don't think they know. I don't think they have an opinion. If you ask some, you know, blithering hater.

• 1:23:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I was asking because I'm interested in how you reconcile or look back on it. Now it's so much distance.

• 1:23:06David Sacks?

  I'll tell you from an outside perspective, how I reconcile Chamath's decision there is I think that as you become more successful, your tolerance for doing stuff you don't want to do really goes down.

• 1:23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Totally. It goes to zero.

• 1:23:17David Sacks?

  Of course. Chamath has got to a point where he didn't want to be doing it and he blew it up.

• 1:23:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Zero.

• 1:23:22David Friedberg?

  By the way, that, that, that is a characterization as well that, you know, sometimes in, in your career, you have to make it, and in your personal life, you have to make a tough decision. And there is, and there is no good outcome. There is no good way to frame it.

• 1:23:35Jason Calacanis?

  There's no graceful way to do it.

• 1:23:36David Friedberg?

  But there are these moments where you got a rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side, and you're going to have to make a tough decision to get out of the way.

• 1:23:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I said to myself a long time ago, that if I was ever lucky to actually be wealthy enough where my wealth would change by meaningful amounts, every order of magnitude, I would do something different. And so, you know, you can do the fucking math. So, there it is.

• 1:24:03Jason Calacanis?

  I, it's interesting being friends with you and watching it. And then also, I hate to give Phil Hellmuth any credit.

• 1:24:10David Friedberg?

  There it is.

• 1:24:11Jason Calacanis?

  But being friends with Phil Hellmuth and watching him set outrageous goals for himself in poker, I just thought, you know what? You gotta set some outrageous goals for yourself. And that's how I sort of broke through is I just said, I want to be number one at everything I do. I want to be the largest syndicate, the most prolific investor.

• 1:24:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The minute I realized that I was basically going to become, you know, a billionaire because of my Facebook stock, I fucking quit. And the craziest thing about it is I left so much stock on the table, it's like two, three billion dollars of fucking stock. I couldn't care less.

• 1:24:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, and then, you know, once I figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just investing in companies at a small scale. But now you can, you know, control companies and really allocate and shape how economy flows. I made a different set of decisions and now I'm here. And if I increase it by another order of magnitude, I'll make a different set of decisions. And that's poorly understood by folks because again, it doesn't map into a worldview. But the point is it maps into something that keeps me whole and sane. And it allows me to not be zero sum about everybody else's success. And that's what I think we need to teach people. Try stuff. It's okay to fail because that's as long as you're not self sabotaging yourself. David said it so well. You will eventually be successful.

• 1:25:29Jason Calacanis?

  What have you learned, David? You know, in this next chapter, being an investor capital allocator?

• 1:25:33David Sacks?

  Me?

• 1:25:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, David, you.

• 1:25:36David Sacks?

  Well, that's what I said.

• 1:25:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38David Sacks?

  No, it's what I said. I mean, just, well, I mean, the thing that's happening right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's just an explosion. There's an explosion in the number of unicorns, explosion in the amount of funding that's available, explosion in the amount of returns being generated. There are now so many VCs that VCs are literally throwing money at people. I mean, any half decent idea now gets funded. The idea that somehow this ecosystem is elitist or exclusionary, it's absurd, right? I mean, you've got micro VCs now who, no one has to go to Sand Hill Road anymore, right? I mean, there are so many ways to raise money.

• 1:26:17Jason Calacanis?

  There's nobody on Sand Hill Road. It's a ghost town. Remember the traffic jam? I went, I went down there the other day and it, there was no traffic jam. I was speaking at Stanford and literally I was like, I gotta put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that Sand Hill Road because it was at 8:30. I zipped down Sand Hill Road to Stanford. There was two cars.

• 1:26:33David Sacks?

  The, the tech ecosystem is so osmotic, it's so permeable in terms of allowing new people. And in fact, it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it can't hire enough people, even in the worst economic conditions. And yet, when it comes to talking about social and political, talking about opportunity and social. Political terms, the only thing you ever hear is that, you know, the ecosystem is somehow elitist or exclusionary.

• 1:27:01Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's old, that's old news. That, that might've been valid 15, 20 years ago. I know when I went to Santo Road for the first times 15, 20 years ago, it was a bunch of white partners who went to Stanford or had a, a MBAs from, you know, Harvard, but that's not the case now. It's a bunch of people with rolling funds and micro VCs and syndicates.

• 1:27:21David Sacks?

  Totally.

• 1:27:21Jason Calacanis?

  And everything in between.

• 1:27:22David Sacks?

  If you're so wrapped up in, in being a social justice warrior that you've just missed, that there is like basically infinite opportunity, you know, then it's on you. You're sabotaging yourself. And then five, 10 years later, you're still stuck in that role.

• 1:27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Conditions have changed.

• 1:27:37David Sacks?

  And then you become bitter and then you become bitter to Jamal's point.

• 1:27:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Freebro, how hard was it for you to leave Google? And what, what was that like?

• 1:27:44David Friedberg?

  I was at Google for two and a half years. Uh, I had gone through, I joined before the IPO. I was like a couple hundred employees, just under a thousand employees. And then we went public. I got this huge bonus from Sergey to stick around, uh, when I was thinking about leaving. I mean, for me, it was like, um,

• 1:28:02Jason Calacanis?

  Seven figures, eight figures?

• 1:28:03David Friedberg?

  It was, yeah, it was a couple thousand shares of stock and like $250,000 of cash. And I gave it up. Um, you know, it'd be worth a lot of money, but I just felt like, and I learned so much at Google and I had such an appreciation uh, for the team there and the company. And by the way, I worked at Google and all of a sudden the company went public and I could buy a house. I mean, it was an incredible moment for me. And, uh, and, and I suddenly felt what Chamath talked about, which is this freedom in my life. Suddenly I had hit that, that, that next plateau of wealth, where I now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth. And I could leave, or I guess I had over a million dollars of net worth and I could now leave and go do something I wanted to go do with my, I, no, I had a couple hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:28:48David Friedberg?

  And I could go leave and do what I wanted to do, which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions. And, um, and so I honestly felt like really fine just leaving all that money behind. I left, I left millions of dollars behind. Uh, for when I left Google, after being there for two and a half years to start my company. Um, and you know, it was a struggle, right? Like, I mean, as you guys know, building a business, which I did from 2006 to 2013, um, was a nightmare. Every day was a nightmare. I say in entrepreneurism, I've said this publicly before, but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards and one out of five days, you take a five step leap forward. So at the end of a week, you're one step ahead of where you started, but your existential

• 1:29:32David Friedberg?

  memory is that you're failing every day.

• 1:29:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Every day.

• 1:29:35David Friedberg?

  And suddenly you wake up and seven years have gone by and you're like, oh shit, we've got an amazing business and someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars. And if you don't have the grit and the guts and the determination to push through those daily battles and deal with that hardship, you know, and I don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of Google felt right for me. I think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right for me. And so it was the right, it was the right call for me. Obviously it worked out, but you know, still I make choices in my life in terms of what do I want to do? Do I want to go live on a yacht or have some luxury or do whatever? And I prefer to just make great businesses and turn science into commercial opportunity. And that's how I choose to spend my time.

• 1:30:17Jason Calacanis?

  Do you ever, and I just wanted to send this out to the whole panel. Do you ever think, you know, having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at this age and then just, you know, kiteboard or do whatever? Do you ever think about retirement and not going into work?

• 1:30:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fuck no.

• 1:30:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah. You want to, do you feel you want to work harder?

• 1:30:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yesterday, yesterday, as an example, was an incredible day because I was able to bicycle with Nat and the youngest to go get a gelato. I had a kickoff meeting for, I had a kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible in batteries where, you know, starting from scratch, a series A, co-founders, me and the other, the other director. And we're starting, literally starting. And I remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or 40 times and it's the best feeling.

• 1:31:20Jason Calacanis?

  La doce vita.

• 1:31:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then I, and then I had a call because I'm trying to put a, you know, more than a billion dollars to work in a different battery idea. And I thought to myself, God, I'm so fucking lucky. And it's, it was a grindy, long day and I had never felt more thankful. So why would I, you know, and I don't know, I feel just so blessed.

• 1:31:47Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, you ever think about hanging it up? Um, or are you more motivated to go to work every day? Are you annoyed?

• 1:31:52David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing that's giving me the most energy right now is we're in a private beta on call in. You know, this app that we incubated and um, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's good. It's getting better every day and I'm really enjoying tinkering on it. And I feel like, you know, I, you know, it's kind of like

• 1:32:10Jason Calacanis?

  You're a good tinkerer, by the way. You're a good product You're good. You're good at tinkering, the tickling.

• 1:32:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We, you know, we tried to hire Sax as VP of Product at Facebook.

• 1:32:17Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:32:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Jason Calacanis?

  What would that have paid him?

• 1:32:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I used 2,000 Sax

• 1:32:24David Sacks?

  Probably billions.

• 1:32:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right, 7 billions, probably 7 or 8, 2,007 or 8 Sax.

• 1:32:28Jason Calacanis?

  You regret not taking that gig?

• 1:32:29David Sacks?

  No, no, because I did Yammer instead and you know, Yammer was successful and I got to be my own boss and that was better. You know, so I don't know if I probably wouldn't have made as much money, but look, I've done, like you guys, I've done, made lots of decisions that made me less money. If I just stayed at PayPal for 20 years, my stock would have been worth many, many billions, right? That's why I tell people, don't sell everything, let your winners ride, at least partially. Yeah, I mean, look, my, I was an investor in Facebook. If I had just kept all of that stock, that'd be worth a billion dollars today. So, I mean, it's pretty crazy. Well, sell some, just don't sell everything.

• 1:33:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's my new philosophy.

• 1:33:05David Sacks?

  Yeah, but to your point about, to your point about what gives me enjoyment, I mean, I'm really having fun tinkering with this app. And you know what it's like? It's like, it's like a new season. If you were in like the NBA or something, it's like, can we make a championship run? Can we get one more ring? You know?

• 1:33:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:33:22David Sacks?

  And so you're like, you know, it'd be like saying to somebody, hey, you already got, you know, to NBA, an NBA champion, hey, you got three rings, why do you want a fourth? You know, and it's like, are you kidding me? While I'm still in this league, while I'm young enough and healthy enough to make a run, at one more, at one more ring, how could you not want to do that? You know?

• 1:33:43Jason Calacanis?

  You gotta go for it.

• 1:33:44David Sacks?

  Gotta go for it.

• 1:33:45Jason Calacanis?

  I can see you, you're engaged, which is great to see. All right, listen, this has been an amazing episode. Uh, we will see you all next week. If you like the show, thanks. The end, we're not gonna beg you. Go try something, go try something, everybody, go try something. Do something, anything's possible. Try, just try. Try and fail. Read a book outside of your comfort zone. Read something that you wouldn't have otherwise read. Love you guys. But I love you guys. Love you best. Love you soon. Love everybody listening to. Yeah. I mean, literally, if you're listening to this and you are buying into this that the system is rigged. Don't be a troll. Don't be a troll. Don't be a douche. Like, the system is not rigged. If anything, the system is rigged for you to participate and succeed. Join the party.

• 1:34:27David Sacks?

  The system is malleable. The system is malleable. If you want to change the world, the system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right way, you can make it, you can make a dent.

• 1:34:39Jason Calacanis?

  You can. Uh, who is this? Who is this little? Sir Jota. Hey, look how happy you are. Who's the best dad? Who's your dad, dad? All right, we'll see you all next time on the All In Podcast. Bye bye.

• 1:34:57Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:35:01David Sacks?

  And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Wesley. I'm the queen of Kino.

• 1:35:14David Friedberg?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:35:17David Friedberg?

  That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

• 1:35:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big U-Jorgie because they're all just, it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:35:33David Sacks?

  What you're the B. What you're a B.

• 1:35:38Jason Calacanis?

  We need to get merch.

• 1:35:39David Sacks?

  Besties are back.