E59: Twitter's content warning algo, equity audits, politicians trading stocks, Fed's next move, mRNA & more

(0:00) Bestie Intro: Sweater update, NYC stories (8:30) Sacks got flagged on Twitter, theorizing on Twitter's content warning algorithm (14:37) "Racial equity audits" with product-level consequences might be coming to Big Tech (27:37) Elizabeth Warren vs. Elon on Twitter, birth of "Senator Karen," understanding where the Fed can go from here (42:56) Omicron spreading rapidly in NYC, but deaths are still relatively flat, anticipating the quality of life split for blue/red states going forward (53:02) Jeremy Strong's New Yorker profile and backlash, politicians trading stocks (1:08:57) Future of mRNA technology (1:15:39) SF Mayor London Breed's speech on increasing law enforcement: is she the right person to turn the ship around? Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1470799225566859268 https://freebeacon.com/democrats/democrats-push-racial-equity-audits-to-cement-control-of-tech-companies https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-the-no-buy-list https://mobile.twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1470415896053227522 https://mobile.twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1471512117257846784 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL https://twitter.com/mangan150/status/1470827691527999494 https://twitter.com/peterpham/status/1471514774546509829 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/on-succession-jeremy-strong-doesnt-get-the-joke https://www.etalk.ca/celebrity/jessica-chastain-and-more-celebs-unnecessarily-run-to-jeremy-strong-defence-after-new-yorker-profile.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-curry-warriors-shooting-11637027582 https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-stock-act-violations-senate-house-trading-2021-9#sen-dianne-feinstein-a-democrat-from-california-1 https://www.investopedia.com/regional-fed-presidents-step-aside-amid-trading-backlash-5203208 https://www.wsj.com/articles/131-federal-judges-broke-the-law-by-hearing-cases-where-they-had-a-financial-interest-11632834421 https://twitter.com/bgmasters/status/1471183791121055747 https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039313011/tiktokers-are-trading-stocks-by-watching-what-members-of-congress-do https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-research-finds-immune-system-responds-to-mrna-treatment-for-cancer https://twitter.com/robkhenderson

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

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's talk about the sweaters. Okay. Let David, let's start with you because I love it.

• 0:04David Friedberg?

  I love it.

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  David.

• 0:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I love that sweater.

• 0:06David Sacks?

  I decided to up my sweater game for Chamath. This is Tom Ford.

• 0:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love it.

• 0:10Jason Calacanis?

  Tom Ford.

• 0:11David Sacks?

  Tom Ford. The buttons are made out of endangered rhino horn.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  We just lost a third of the audience.

• 0:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So my sweater is a very light Italian cashmere made by a company called Doriani, Doriani Cashmere. This right here is a little-

• 0:29Jason Calacanis?

  I thought we weren't doing plugs for our startups.

• 0:30David Friedberg?

  This is how we're monetizing the All In Pod.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. Dorian Cashmere just got a free-

• 0:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This right here, this right here is a little young calf leather. Very soft, very soft. And the buttons, like David's, are made from shark fin.

• 0:45David Friedberg?

  And for those of you at home who would like to spend $150 and stay warm, may I recommend the Marine Layer? You can find it on Union Street Jacket.

• 0:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, how-

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  You can also find that jacket on Turk Street.

• 0:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How tilted is Sweater Karen, listening to this? Sweater Karen, if you're listening.

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

  I will never reveal. Sweater Karen got back to me and she was like, oh my God, he's so tilted.

• 1:08David Friedberg?

  I think I know who she is.

• 1:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sweater Karen can kiss my brown ass.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  So Jade comes home last night, I kid you not. She's like, I don't like you in the t-shirts. I got you some sweaters. And I was, you know, we're going to the mountains for the holiday. And I was like, did you watch the podcast about the sweater? She's like, no, I don't listen to your podcast. I was like, okay, fair enough. And I'm like, I'm looking at these things. They're all in these boxes and she's got this bunch of sweaters. I started opening them up and I was like, what did you spend on this? She said $3,000. I was like, I'm not comfortable spending $3,000 on a sweater.

• 1:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's half a sweater.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Let alone eight of them. And she goes, no, it was $3,000 for all eight.

• 1:40David Sacks?

  Yeah, Chamath is like, is that a sleeve?

• 1:42Jason Calacanis?

  That's a- It's like it's $3,000 for all eight shirts.

• 1:45David Friedberg?

  Four buttons and a waistband?

• 1:47David Sacks?

  That might be a vest for Chamath.

• 1:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's the box the sweater came in with, $3,000. So I got my three quarter zip and I'm feeling good. I'm feeling really good. I feel pretty sexy and I'll be honest.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Yes. Breaking into the top 50 podcasts week after week. Because of you, the amazing audience, telling your friends about the pod. It's been two weeks, so it's week and week. All right. Week. That's what I said. Week after week.

• 2:32David Friedberg?

  A week and a week.

• 2:33Jason Calacanis?

  After week. A week and a week. For two weeks. Hitting the top 40 podcast episodes in the world. Thanks to the fans with me, of course. The dictator himself in a amazing sweater. Light, light cashmere gilet. The Sultan of Science. I found out from his mom. She much prefers the Sultan of Science to Queen of Kinwa. So that's what we're going with going forward. David Friedberg, who had a great party up in Beeep. And I really enjoyed going. And Sax, who didn't go to Beeep's party. Or to Friedberg's party. He stayed home and played chess on his iPhone. The Rain Man himself, David Sax. Welcome to the pod, everybody. Okay. You want my two New York stories?

• 3:17David Friedberg?

  My one true bestie, Jason Calacanis.

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's true.

• 3:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, that's not true. I, I really wanted to come, but Nat's breastfeeding and so I couldn't come.

• 3:24David Friedberg?

  The helipad was shut down. Chamath couldn't land. You were getting breastfed?

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  There was like, was there a Curb Your Enthusiast? Oh, no. It was. This great show called Afterlife from Ricky Gervais. There's literally a scene in it where a woman. They work for a local newspaper that's going out of business and they're going to do local stories. And the big story in town is a woman is making pudding. Incredibly delicious pudding and it's from her breast milk. And they go and cover the story. Anyway, I'll just leave it at that. It's a pretty amazing story.

• 4:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you want to know my two New York stories or not?

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's hear it. What were you saying? You had a helicopter story? What's that?

• 4:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, helicopter story. Helicopter is also a New York story. So, uh, I, uh, went to Deepdale to play golf with, uh, a certain well-known individual and, uh, we chopper, we chopper back.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  A finance individual?

• 4:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, politics, well-known political individual.

• 4:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:30David Sacks?

  So this is not a rock and roller. You do not want to step foot in a helicopter with a rock and roll star.

• 4:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but so here, so here's my story, which is why I, I, I totally freaked out about helicopters and I can't, this was eight years ago. We played Deepdale, which is just, you know, outside New York. Get in this, the chopper lands in the middle of the thing. I was like, okay, that's fine, you know? And we're going and I'm already feeling kind of skittish. I don't like helicopters. Get to the East Side heliport and the East Side heliport is basically right by the East River. And so the helicopter descends and one of the skis doesn't actually land on the fucking

• 5:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oops!

• 5:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thing. And so

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  Tiltie poo?

• 5:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It does a little tilty poops and then the guy comes back up and then he lands. You, I honestly, like, I have never been more scared in my life.

• 5:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right, that's it.

• 5:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I was like, that's it. Never again.

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  Any besties. It's a bestie ban for life. We're making a pact here. Nobody in fucking helicopters.

• 5:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's crazy. So that's why I'm on New York. Last New York story was I was there two days ago or for the last couple of days.

• 5:31Jason Calacanis?

  For Santa Con?

• 5:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In the middle of this Omicron breakout. Uh, by the way, had a beautiful dinner, uh, after the game, Draymond, Kevin, Drat, me, a bunch of friends.

• 5:42Jason Calacanis?

  Did you go to the game?

• 5:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we went to the private room at Carbone. It was so brutal though. I have to tell you, I feel so disgusting with myself. I had a work dinner. And I have sushi at the work dinner. And then, you know, Dre texts after the game. He's like, hey, we're all having dinner at Carbone. I said, okay, I'll, I'll head through. I went to the hotel. I called Matt and I said, I'm brushing my teeth.

• 6:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And she said, but you're going out. And I said, yes, but if I brush my teeth, I'm not going to eat a second dinner. And I thought, you know, and then, but I made the key mistake, but I didn't floss. So I was unflossed, but I brushed my teeth.

• 6:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 6:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I show up and fucking I lose it. And wine and dessert and bread and pasta, pasta, pasta. It was really brutal. And by 3am, I stumble home and I felt so bad because I had to wake up at like, you know, 8 o'clock in the morning. No, my first meeting was at 7:45.

• 6:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, congratulations to Steph Curry, by the way.

• 6:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredible, no?

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Greatest shooter of all time.

• 6:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's a virtuoso.

• 6:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, that was my, that was my New York story. I, I gained, you know.

• 6:46Jason Calacanis?

  Here's my, here's my.

• 6:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I gained one kilo. 2.2 pounds I gained in two days.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, here's my Carbone story. Hardest thing to, hardest reservation to get in New York. Sax is like, Jake, I'll need to help me a favor. What's the best place in New York to do a closing dinner? I'm like, I got you. I got my guy. Get my guy on the horn. My guy's like, okay, I got you. Carbone, Friday fucking night, 8 o'clock, hardest ticket to New York. You know what Sax does? Goes dark. Friday afternoon, 1pm. He's like, yeah, we're not gonna make it.

• 7:16Jason Calacanis?

  I'm like, my friend is like, Jake Al, your guy burned the Carbone res?

• 7:23David Sacks?

  That was the Bird IPO. I was gonna take the founder out to dinner that night at Carbone and then it turned into like the big group dinner with like 30 people. So it moved over to.

• 7:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, by the way, the, the, the private room, which is like, you know, not in the restaurant, but it's like a little bit on the side. It only fits like 15, 20 people. So it's not like you, and that's, that's, then it's really tight.

• 7:45Jason Calacanis?

  How, what, let me ask you a question. What was Steph's, uh, how did Steph feel?

• 7:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Steph wasn't there. Draymond, Kevin, me, Benny Fowler, Morale, but just a bunch of.

• 7:56Jason Calacanis?

  You say Kevin, Kevin Durant?

• 7:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Jason Calacanis?

  Kevin Durant still, huh, friendly with, uh?

• 8:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's honestly, he's, he's such a great guy.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  I love Kevin Durant.

• 8:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He really, he is really, really, really a great guy.

• 8:08Jason Calacanis?

  Wish he had stayed.

• 8:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Super, super sensitive, cool.

• 8:10David Sacks?

  He's friends again with, uh, dating. All good.

• 8:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Always, he was always.

• 8:14Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I think that when they had their blow up, it was more like they're brothers and it was just a little bit.

• 8:19David Sacks?

  Like when you started talking like Joe Pesci?

• 8:24David Sacks?

  Did, did Kevin Durant ever start talking like Joe Pesci?

• 8:28Jason Calacanis?

  Inside baseball. All right. It was an eventful week on Twitter. We're only one week into the new Twitter CEO's reign. Jack is gone and already David Sacks has been flagged. It's a guy. It can't be a coincidence that you were talking about them flagging accounts at the end of free speech. And that, pull it up on the screen, everybody. Investors should be spending their time finding good investments, not endlessly debating interest rates, inflation and tax policy. But that's the uncertainty Washington has created. It's a great tweet. I like that tweet, actually. And then the flag, the conversation from Sacks has been flagged.

• 9:11Jason Calacanis?

  Some conversations can get heavy. Don't forget the human behind the screen.

• 9:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think that this is, that's machine learned? Or do you think that that's an editor that goes in there and actually manually flags?

• 9:23David Friedberg?

  Machine learned.

• 9:23David Sacks?

  No, I think that's a great question.

• 9:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But what is, but what is in there that actually triggers?

• 9:28Jason Calacanis?

  Debating? Washington?

• 9:31David Friedberg?

  Interest rates, tax policy, Washington.

• 9:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure that you could build.

• 9:36Jason Calacanis?

  Or maybe it's the ratio.

• 9:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't, I don't know how you would build a function that would wait this in a way where this could get flagged of all the things you could say with those words. This is so benign.

• 9:44David Friedberg?

  Well, I think it's the kind of, it seems to be this thing's trying to ward off bullying attacks on Sacks, which I don't think Sacks needs to be too worried about.

• 9:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. Cause they're telling this to people who would reply.

• 9:55David Sacks?

  You're saying it's there to protect me.

• 9:57David Friedberg?

  It's to protect you. It's one of those things where they're like trying to get people to not insult you in the comments.

• 10:02Jason Calacanis?

  They're talking about that's just life.

• 10:03David Friedberg?

  Do you get, do you get a lot of insults and comments on your tweets?

• 10:06David Sacks?

  Oh, undoubtedly, but.

• 10:07David Friedberg?

  So it could just be a blanket.

• 10:09David Sacks?

  This, this tweet's comments section was pretty benign.

• 10:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. It may not be about the tweet. It might be about the replies.

• 10:15David Sacks?

  No, but this wasn't that hot. This wasn't that hot. I think Jamar might be on to something. You know, Michelle Tandler got the same label around the same day for a tweet that seemed totally innocuous too. So what I wonder about is, you know, is this labeled to protect us? Or is it a way, is it sort of a passive aggressive way for snowflakes at Twitter? So like label people they don't like and sort of suggests they're vaguely disreputable.

• 10:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think it's that. I don't think it's You don't think?

• 10:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's a right there. It's a left wing conspiracy. It's a, it's the, it's the libs going after the, the

• 10:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no.

• 10:49Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, you're paranoid.

• 10:51David Sacks?

  I haven't seen any liberals getting, I haven't seen any like left wing people getting labeled this way.

• 10:55David Friedberg?

  There seems to be a blanket attempt at trying to kind of mute the tone a little bit across the, the debating that happens and the comments that come across in the replies. And I think they're just trying to like, get everyone to tone it down a bit.

• 11:05Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's a really

• 11:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Destroy it before you tweet it. It'd be really interesting to know whether this was algorithmic or was editorial, because I think if it's editorial, it does actually, I don't think it's as extreme as what David just said, but it skews more in the realm of like, people with an axe to grind can flag one thing over another or not, right? But if it's algorithmic, I think that that algorithm probably just needs a lot of tweaking because it's not

• 11:27Jason Calacanis?

  Well, anyway, this

• 11:28David Friedberg?

  Doesn't it say that there's a person behind the tweet? It's like trying to get people to not say

• 11:33Jason Calacanis?

  There's nothing wrong with the warning. The warning is charming. The warning's charming. Be nice to each other.

• 11:38David Friedberg?

  It's, it's trying to get you to be nice to each other.

• 11:40David Sacks?

  It's ridiculous.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  It's like your mom inserting herself and being like, now remember.

• 11:44David Sacks?

  It's, it's there to suggest that there might be something wrong with the content that's being posted.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know

• 11:50David Sacks?

  In other words, in other words, the content is so triggering that, you know, it needs warning labels.

• 11:55David Friedberg?

  Do you guys think that paternalism has a role on social networks to try and mollify the, the kind of discourse being too acrimonious, like?

• 12:04David Sacks?

  I think we need some, some of the transparency that Jack Dorsey repeatedly promised at all the congressional hearings. Remember when he got hauled up there? He promised that they would give more transparency about the way that their algorithms worked. Where is that? And it hasn't been delivered up. They promised it. Now Jack Dorsey's skipped out of town and there's a new guy in charge. Uh, well, we need to know how these algorithms work because they are pressing their thumb on the scale, you know, of debate in the marketplace of ideas by suggesting that some ideas are sketchier than others.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  They should just put here, this was algorithmically done based on, they should explain it under, or there should be a little question mark. You hover the question mark, based on the words in the thread, it feels like things are getting heated here. We did this with an algorithm or Users reported this as a heated thread. So we put this here, or a human did it.

• 12:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We decided, no, we decided.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  We decided, yeah.

• 12:54David Friedberg?

  But you want it to be an open marketplace of ideas, but the fact is it's Twitter's marketplace of ideas.

• 12:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 12:59David Friedberg?

  And Facebook's is Facebook's marketplace of ideas. And at the end of the day, I don't think you're going to get away from any of these centralized social networks having anything but some degree of moderation to play a role in.

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  In a related thing, they didn't just target Sacks. Also, Chamath, you didn't see this, but they flagged one of your tweets just this afternoon. Pull it up. As you can see here, it's a slightly different one. It says, "Layers are for players. This conversation will drift to $5,000 sweaters." So a big warning for Chamath to just... And for the people replying, be careful. This...

• 13:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, that must be, that must be, then, that must have been human, you know, human initiated.

• 13:36Jason Calacanis?

  For sure. And this one came in for Prof G. Another one came in for Prof G. So, and in this case, I think they're actually trying to think about the public good. This guy is full of shit. He thought JCPenney would beat Amazon.

• 13:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How many, how many hours of masterclass Adobe Photoshop did you take to get this little joke?

• 13:55Jason Calacanis?

  I got people from my... I didn't make these. My meme team did. I'm convinced that there's two ways to raise your next fund in Silicon Valley. One, have one of the top 50 podcasts in the world, or two, have a strong meme game. And I'm going for both. Sacks now has a warning on his. And this one, they put it on your profile page. Sacks, read it.

• 14:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah, this was crazy. Warning, this person has interesting things to say. If you, if you're too interesting, you get labeled now. It's really crazy. No, I saw Jake, I saw Jake having too much fun with this. I'm like, I gotta get it on this act.

• 14:25Jason Calacanis?

  You're like, I need a meme team. I'm literally, if anybody out there, I don't care if you're, I need a comedian. I'm willing to pay on a pay-per-meme, a pay-per-viral, whatever it takes. Okay, in a related story, Democrats want racial equity audits at tech companies. According to the Washington Free Beacon, which Sacks, correct me if I'm wrong, that's some sort of wacky right-wing publication.

• 14:50David Friedberg?

  Never heard of it.

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Washington Free Beacon, if instituted auditors would have veto power over every product or initiative, that's not an exaggeration is what the story says. One proposal from House Democrats would fine companies $20,000 a day for not completing biennial independent racial equity audits. A left-wing nonprofit called Color of Change is pushing for these audits. Last week, their president called for independent auditors to vet new products from tech companies before they're released in front of Congress. 2018 Color of Change successfully pushed Facebook into completing an audit. They called for more restrictions on Trump's posts. Color of Change itself pushed for Trump to be permanently banned from the platform.

• 15:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just so you know, this is exactly the the rough version of what happened to Microsoft in their DOJ settlement. Their antitrust settlement was effectively an oversight where lawyers at the DOJ were the product managers and had, not effectively veto right, but you had to approve product features before you could push them for 10 years. You know, this is essentially what caused bombers reign to be so, you know, ignominious. It's like you couldn't do anything because like you had you had a plan to do something and you'd have to go to these random folks who didn't really have the context to make a decision one way or the other on features. So, I mean, the idea that they would do this is a pretty, it's pretty crazy.

• 16:06Jason Calacanis?

  I need a point of clarification here. I've heard the term racial audits or racial equity audits. My understanding of those were to understand the composure of the company in terms of, you know, the diversity in the company, but this is something different. This is in the product? To make sure the product isn't racist? Can products be racist? What's an example of a product being racist? I don't understand what they would find.

• 16:33David Sacks?

  Let me unpack this for you. Okay, what they are basically saying is that these big companies, and for example, they've called on Google to conduct one of these audits. They want all these big companies to conduct these audits. These so-called auditors are actually political consultants who are members of the Democratic Party, who are friends of the centers who are pushing for this. They're political activists.

• 16:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's a grift.

• 16:55David Sacks?

  And it's partly a grift, but it's more than that because, you know, when you conduct an audit, let's just take this word audit for a second, okay? You bring in a big five accounting firm and they will check your numbers according to generally accepted accounting principles, GAAP, and make sure that the numbers are what you've warranted them to be. That is the purpose of an audit. And if the auditor ever says that you've done anything wrong, like you have to fix it, there's no choice, or you can appeal to some other auditor and have them redo the work, okay, according to these generally accepted principles. With an equity audit, what exactly are the principles that are being enforced or checked here? There is no generally accepted list of equity principles that must be enforced to these companies. Basically, you have to do whatever this political activist tells

• 17:38David Sacks?

  you to do. I mean, it's essentially like bringing in a party commissar to now take over the company, or at least be inside the company telling the executives and officers of the company what to do. It's something that frankly, the CCP would do.

• 17:53Jason Calacanis?

  It does feel a little like, uh, yeah, Stasi-like. Didn't we have all of the companies on their own, from Twitter to Google to Facebook, release their own diversity stats years ago?

• 18:08David Sacks?

  I think this is about more than diversity. It's about equity. It's about equity. So...

• 18:12Jason Calacanis?

  So let's explain the difference in what that means. This is somehow how the companies run? Like, the day-to-day life of the employees there, not just the composure and the breakdown of the employees?

• 18:21David Sacks?

  Look, equity, equity means anything that progressives say it means. We've seen on this program before how equity has dumped the shark. There's now, uh, there was a provision in the infrastructure bill for tree equity. So, I mean, really, any disparity that occurs that progressives don't like can now be called a violation of equity, and this gives them the authorization to come in there and start giving orders.

• 18:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's very weird that I don't understand how the product then review gets stopped.

• 18:47David Sacks?

  Well, maybe.

• 18:48Jason Calacanis?

  Is that meant to throttle you from leasing product as a punitive?

• 18:51David Sacks?

  Let me give you an example. So recently, you know, I wrote a piece called the the no buy list, where I basically you had companies like PayPal and some of these other financial firms were starting to deny service to customers, to users, based on their political affiliations. And not just like people who are in, you know, well-known hate groups that like everybody sort of, you know, issues and wants to stay away from. But these are people with relatively down the middle conservative, you know, conservative groups, and they were being denied service by, you know, fintech firms. So now I'm not saying that this is what this means, but if this equity auditors tells you, well, look, I don't think it's equitable to allow these conservative groups

• 19:33David Sacks?

  to, you know, be a user of your product. Well, what's the company going to do? They're going to have to listen to that. And that is a plausible scenario, given that it's already occurred.

• 19:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We've all, we've, we've said this so many times on the pod, but I just want to say it again for, because I guess a lot of folks are new and listening. Whenever you hear equity used by a politician, it usually means there's a power grab involved.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because if you really want things to be fair, you want things to be equal.

• 19:58Jason Calacanis?

  Rantocracy.

• 19:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You want equality. But whenever you start throwing the word equity around and say, we want racial equity, it's a bunch of, you know, a small number of people who, you know, basically have and live by what I, you know, what's often called luxury beliefs, who want to judge other people, who want to be morally absolutist, and then who want to basically like, you know, exercise a power grab. And we have to push back on that stuff because it's just a slippery, slippery slope.

• 20:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this also seems like overbearing red tape for companies. I mean, if the company has no problems, no complaints against it, you know, releases their diversity numbers, like, what is the point of going in there and auditing them?

• 20:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's use, let's use an example that builds on what David said. Let's take Square. Okay. One of the, one of the most incredible things that Square did was in a hackathon, essentially, build a cash app.

• 20:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And one of the most incredible things that happened in the cash app was that it really started to blow up in urban communities. Okay. And it starts to normalize.

• 20:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Banking, opening up bank accounts, having more savings, understanding, you know, an on-ramp into crypto. You know, Cash App has probably done more to get black and brown people into crypto and to save money and to understand their cash than almost anybody else, as like a almost explicit strategy. And so is somebody supposed to go in there and just arbitrarily judge whether there's too many white people that work at Square? Or not enough black people and so XYZ thing has to change? Or such and such a feature doesn't actually speak to folks, so you can't do it? It's insanity. It's like

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  Also, to your point, Sax, is what do these people know? Like, what is their qualification and what's the goal?

• 21:40David Sacks?

  Right. And to build on Shamas' point, if these senators, so I think Cory Booker was the one who proposed this. If these senators want those specific policies implemented in the Fortune 500, let them pass a bill to do it and let all of our elected representatives vote on that bill. And then we can see if it'll really, if it's popular enough to pass and whether it passes constitutional muster. They won't do that because these bills, if they were directly concretized and for

• 22:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They don't have legs.

• 22:07David Sacks?

  Would be very unpopular. So instead, what they do is tell you, well, we're not going to do this directly. We're going to put pressure on these big companies to hire one of our political friends, again, this like commissar-like person, and empower them to tell these companies what to do. So it's really kind of insidious what they're doing and they're kind of covering it all up with these nice sounding names. I mean, who could be against a racial equity audit, right?

• 22:31Jason Calacanis?

  Racists.

• 22:32David Sacks?

  Yes. If you're against it, you must be a racist and you must not believe in auditing companies.

• 22:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 22:38David Sacks?

  So it's a word game.

• 22:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have to, you just, it's a word game. It's using words that are really loaded and mean a lot to a lot of us, right? If I hear racism and race, my ears perk up. It's not triggering, but my ears perk up and I have, I have a lot of inbuilt opinions on it that have been governed by 45 years as living as a, as a brown man. And so, okay, it stands to reason that I'm going to pay attention. But on the surface, if you say racial equity audit, it also doesn't seem actually all that bad. It seems like reasonably benign and that seems like an okay thing to do. It's just that most of us then stop at that point and move on.

• 23:14Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 23:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if you actually look at the rules, again, I would just say whenever Political frameworks use the word, "We need to create more equity." The outcomes are horrible. For example, look in healthcare. You know, if we have used this idea of healthcare equity, health equity, and we've misused it to such a degree. And all we see is that now the system is so perverted, it also doesn't work for the majority of people that have actually had the healthcare system work for, right? Like, at the top of the pecking order has always been white men have always gotten the best care, and we've always measured our healthcare progress in America based on the longevity of men, white men. You know, seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty years old. And then it started to degrade, and people were curious what was happening. And underneath it all was just a bunch of power grabs.

• 23:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Under the realm of equity, we passed all these crazy laws. We basically didn't do anything to really create more accountability and a cost-based system. And here we are. So at some point, when the citizenry hears that word, you're gonna have to put your thinking cap on and actually take the opposite view, which is, "Hold on, this is a really nice sounding word." It may not be what I think it is, and I gotta pay attention, because more than if I didn't hear the word at all.

• 24:26Jason Calacanis?

  Anything you have on race, Friedberg, representing

• 24:32Jason Calacanis?

  South Africans?

• 24:33David Sacks?

  Fundamentally, I don't think this is about race, J. Call. I think this is about power.

• 24:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Power.

• 24:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's a power. It feels like a power grip. Also, it feels like a little grip. It feels like a little bit of a grift. I know I had heard on the back channel that a lot of the people who are criticizing some big tech companies who were getting, you know, I'm not gonna say who or under what moniker.

• 24:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sweater Karen?

• 24:52Jason Calacanis?

  Not Sweater Karen, but there was a group of people who were like attacking big tech.

• 24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sweater Karen, if she has an opinion on Sweater, she must have an opinion on racial equity. Come on.

• 25:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I know. At least Sweater Karen has. The issue is, they would complain and create these, you know, basically, you know, Twitter mobs. And then they'd say, "Oh yeah, and hire us for $20,000. We'll come in and fix the problem for you." So they were creating the Twitter mob to then come in and solve the problem.

• 25:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's so brutal.

• 25:18Jason Calacanis?

  And I was like, "Oh, wow, that is..." That's so brutal. That's so dirty.

• 25:21David Sacks?

  No, I mean, these HR consultants who've written these books, like, was it Dangel or whatever, on white fragility and, you know, how to be an anti-racist. I mean, they're all making a fortune in corporate fees, you know, charging twenty, thirty thousand dollars per gig. I mean, it is absolutely a racket.

• 25:39David Friedberg?

  I'm not a fan of equality of outcome. I'm more a fan of equality of opportunity. And I think many, many of these sorts of folks, I try and identify methods to drive equality of outcome. And it inhibits the competitive forces that cause the best person, the best idea, the best business, the best market model to win. And, you know, I think it's easy to conflate the two when you don't really think through it, but it is certainly appropriate and reasonable to make sure that folks aren't discriminated against when they apply for a job. I don't think it's appropriate to then apply considerations of race and other factors when people are equally in the same

• 26:21David Friedberg?

  job on who gets to have the chance at the bonus. It is the best performer that should have the chance at the bonus. And the same should be true in marketplaces and the same should be true at business. And I think that what we're really seeing is this fundamental effort to try and generate equality in outcomes in lots of different manifestations. And we're seeing it more frequently and more severely than we've seen it historically. But it's not, I don't think it's the right model and it's only going to lead to demise of marketplace dynamics and the things that cause forces for success and progress to win.

• 26:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, we, we mentioned this a couple of times. I'll just say it again. But we are about to have probably the most significant movement and questioning of equity versus equality. Because I think in the next month, maybe in the next two months, we're going to sort of see a pretty strict opinion on affirmative action. And if you talk to legal scholars, the overwhelming consensus is this is gone. And, you know, we're going to have to figure out how to rebuild, you know, what was a really important system that tried to give folks at least, you know, getting to the starting line in the same way.

• 27:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's not gonna, it's not really gonna exist in this, in the same way, shape or form.

• 27:37Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of Karens, Elizabeth Warren was bashing Elon over taxes. And Elon has a Twitter handle with some followers and he responded. Elizabeth Warren says, let's change the rigged tax code so the person of the year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloaders off everyone else. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk is pretty good at Twitter. He replied, and if you opened your eyes for two seconds, you would realize I pay more taxes than any American in history this year. He paid, which is I guess true. He paid more in taxes now than any American in history.

• 28:16Jason Calacanis?

  As a side note, Elizabeth Warren has a $12 million net worth and I saw that she paid no taxes on her equity holdings because she didn't sell anything, which is how the tax code works.

• 28:27Jason Calacanis?

  And Elon then responded, don't spend it all at once. Oh, wait, you already did.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  And then, you know, after the warm up replies, Elon really, you know, got in the zone and like Steph Curry, just started draining half court shots.

• 28:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He erashe'd her every single time.

• 28:46Jason Calacanis?

  Erred her with 50,000 replies. Yeah. You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend's angry mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason. Please don't call the manager on me, Senator Karen. Elon also responded to Bernie Sanders tweet today about climate change. Bernie Sanders said, when future generations ask us, what do we do to stop the climate crisis? How will they answer? And Elon said, and so great tweets. But to the bigger picture, do these people even know what's going on in the world?

• 29:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they woke up, they woke up on the wrong side of the tilt bed. Yeah. Because in like a 24 hour period, he was the Time Person of the Year, the FT Person of the Year. And they just went into super mega tilt mode.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  And the Build Back Better Act got shelved and he paid taxes on 20 billion in sales.

• 29:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And. Well, I mean, you know, I think we we talked about this last week, but that bill is dead now. I mean, they pushed it to March to basically avoid a down vote. Nothing's gonna happen. David, you're right.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, wait a second. We said last week, wouldn't it be hilarious if Elon said, kill it? And then it got killed?

• 29:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I don't I don't think that that's why the bill is dying. I think the real reason is that we now see a Fed posture, which is actually pretty reasonable, which actually says, oh, wait, there's way too much money in the system as it is.

• 30:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, the Fed two days ago basically said, we're gonna see up to three rate hikes next year, probably 50 basis points each. So, you know, it's basically acknowledging that these these last, you know, several years, we have printed way too much money and they're trying to fix the problem that they created. So that's, I think, the real reason. And then the CBO comes out and basically says the Congressional Budget Office and says, this thing is a white albatross that's gonna cost way more than you guys think it will. And so it puts Biden in this very awkward situation, which is, you know, on the one hand, he supports Powell. Um, and, you know, he supports institutions or has historically like the CBO. But he effectively then has to push back on both of them all in one false soup to try

• 30:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  to ram this bill down people's throats and the support is, I think it's crumbling. And so, you know, to save face, they basically said, well, we'll put a pin on this and we'll revisit it in March. But you guys know what's gonna happen in the next three months, there's gonna be some other crisis. Most folks will forget and it may just allow them to move on without having to actually deal with the potential of this thing getting defeated, which would just be, I think, cataclysmically bad for

• 31:19Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks.

• 31:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For Democrats.

• 31:20Jason Calacanis?

  You were on CNBC today, I thought you said something really important where you said, hey, listen, maybe if we just calm things down for a year, we can, you know, get through, I'm not sure what the exact quote was, but maybe you could unpack that sentiment you had on CNBC today, because I thought that was pretty important.

• 31:38David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I agree with what Chama said. This, I mean, this BBB bill was particularly anachronistic once the 6.8% inflation print came out. In other words, we're in a hyperinflationary environment, and here comes this bill that the CBO says if, you know, over 10 years would cost $5 trillion, that's the last thing we need is more money printing when, you know, we've got this inflationary fire out of control. So I think that is why the bill is being shelved, probably not to return. I think that the larger problem that we have in the markets is that there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty being created right now by Washington. We've had tremendous uncertainty over spending, over taxes, over

• 32:22David Sacks?

  interest rates, and the conversations that I'm having with friends who are investors in really every asset class, real estate, VC, crypto, the conversations are all the same. What's interest rates going to do? What's the macro picture going to be? I've never seen investors who should be focused on, hey, do I invest this company or buy this building, whatever. Those aren't the conversations. It's all, everyone's a macroeconomist now. And so we're also distracted by this. And so now the Fed, a couple of days ago, finally gave us clarity. I mean, what they basically said is they're going to accelerate the taper. They'll, they'll end quantitative easing at the end of Q1, and then we're basically going to get

• 32:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Explain what that means to people who don't know what they've been purchasing and why.

• 33:03David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, quantitative easing is kind of a weird term. What it means is that the Fed has been going into the bond market and buying bonds. I think basically mortgage-backed securities and treasuries. And they've been buying, I think, about $90 billion a month. They're going to cut that back to $60 billion a month, and that'll continue.

• 33:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just to explain it a little bit more, when you do that, what you're doing is you're giving somebody that owns those bonds money.

• 33:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so the Fed prints money.

• 33:32David Sacks?

  This is the government, basically.

• 33:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The government prints a hundred dollars, takes that hundred dollars, steps into the market, and takes something from you, in this case, it's a bond, and gives you that freshly printed hundred dollars. What are you going to do? Well, you're probably going to go and spend that. You're going to buy other things. And that's the cycle of inflation that quantitative easing basically creates. And so when you call, when you talk about tapering, what that means is slowing down the money printing machine and slowing down you stepping in the market and buying assets with money that you've created out of thin air.

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  And it's up to other people to buy those assets. If other people see value in them.

• 34:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You, you then, you then are forced to find the real market clearing price.

• 34:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, those, those bonds are now on the Fed's balance sheet. And so there's a very interesting chart showing assets that are owned by the Fed. And it went up by something like three trillion during COVID. So that is the sort of monetary stimulus that's been pumped into the market over the last couple of years. Separately, we've had something like six or seven trillion of just spending by the government. So, you know, tremendous amount of-

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  And so that three trillion is not thrown away. So we're clear, we're going to get interest on that and people, some number will default, some of them will get paid back. It's a way of stimulating the economy, but we now know after this STEMI checks and all the stimulus we did during the pandemic, we don't need to put more fire or oxygen or kerosene on what we got going in this economy, correct, David?

• 34:56David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we should show that chart about how much the Fed's balance sheet has grown over the last couple of years. But, you know, the, the argument I think would be the reason why they do, they buy these assets is if they're buying bonds, it basically means that it keeps the yield down, right? Because if they weren't the ones buying them, someone else would have to buy these bonds to keep the government funded, and they might demand a higher interest rate, a higher yield on the bonds. So this, by having the Fed come in and increase the demand for the government's debt, it means that the government can sell its debt more cheaply. So when they stop doing that, I think you can expect that, you know, interest rates

• 35:37David Sacks?

  are going to need to rise in order to make our debt attractive to, you know, to bond buyers.

• 35:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other thing, the other thing, by the way, that the Fed did when they did that was it wasn't just government bonds that they were buying. They decided completely arbitrarily at one point to start buying certain corporate debt. So they own like Ford debt, GM debt.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  Commercial paper, that's called, yeah.

• 36:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, that, well, not, I mean, commercial paper is sort of more very fast turn, short term duration, but like, how do you make a decision to start buying corporate bonds? It's like buying corporate equities. Do you buy Google versus Facebook? Do you have a view?

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  Who's the capital allocator making that decision?

• 36:16David Sacks?

  So more importantly, who's, who's setting the price?

• 36:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who's setting the price? So, you know, these guys have been off the reservation for a long time. I think it's fair to say that they were forced into action without a playbook in the middle of a once in a, you know, lifetime, once a century pandemic. Fair enough. And I think they actually did a pretty reasonable job, but we just kept the tap on for so long.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And now we're like dealing with this stuff, trying to figure out how do we actually compensate? So the idea that we would add, knowing all of this, so it's one thing, I think, if Biden passed the bill five months ago, six months ago, because we didn't know any of this stuff. But to do it now, knowing that, I think that it's really hard. And I bet you that it's not just Manchin on the Democrats that are having a little bit of heartburn and second thoughts. It's probably more because I suspect that they could have forced his hand really if it was just up to him. But I suspect there are other Democrats who are now teetering on the fence, thinking, I don't want my legacy to be tied to this. When we're printing six, seven, eight percent inflation for me to basically keep the money printing machine on, because it's, it's insane.

• 37:23Jason Calacanis?

  This is like the Sopranos episode where he gave him like, he fronted the guy like 45 boxes of Ziti. And like you wake up and this guy can't pay the bill on the poker game. Like where, can we even afford to pay this back at some point?

• 37:33David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, I think when, when March comes around and this bill's supposedly going to be brought back off the table, we're going to be into the election season in 2022. And I don't know that Democrats are going to want to defend this. I think there is a view on the Democratic side that if they deliver enough goodies to their base, then that will help them win elections. But I think what helps you win elections more than delivering goodies to your special interests is for the economy to be healthy.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 37:58David Sacks?

  And if they are sort of pressurizing this inflation situation. That is, I think, ultimately, that could backfire. I think that's going to be worse for the economy. Frankly, I think Manchin's doing Biden a favor because if the economy does grow by 4% next year, as the Fed is predicting it is, and if inflation comes down, because you stop printing money the way they're doing, then, you know, I think the Democrats will do better in the election if the economy is good. I mean, one of the reasons why they did so poorly, you know, in the off-year election a month ago, is that there's tremendous economic anxiety out there. People are seeing the inflation at the gas tank when they go to buy food. And, you know, if that continues, I think they're gonna do very poorly next

• 38:41David Sacks?

  year. I wanted to, like, bring up this chart from Fred on total assets on the Fed balance sheet. I think it is really interesting to look at this thing. Because, so the Fed had about a trillion of assets until 2008. Okay, then we had the financial crisis, and they doubled it. That's when quantitative easing began. It went to 2 trillion. But then, from roughly 2009 to about 2020, before COVID, somehow the balance sheet grew from 2 trillion to 4 trillion. So, and it had gone to 4 and 1/2, and they were starting to shed assets, so they were starting to get off drugs. But it was still from 2 to 4 trillion between this, like, 2009 and 2020 period, when supposedly we weren't in a crisis. So, you know, they've

• 39:24David Sacks?

  continued this quantitative easing. Then COVID hits, and the amount grows from 4 to 7 trillion, just in 2020. And since then, it's gone from 7 to a little under 9 trillion, just in the last, you know, well, they

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  How do we get these things off our books ever? I mean, these are 20-year bonds.

• 39:43David Sacks?

  Eventually, they gotta sell them. Well, either they're gonna have to sell the assets.

• 39:46Jason Calacanis?

  Or they come down.

• 39:46David Sacks?

  Well, well, it's not like that. They basically are the, the Fed is the one who bought the government debt. So their buying is called a 10-year Treasury. So, yeah, I guess they could just wait till the bond gets paid off. But But I guess they could do that. But but now the Fed has an incentive not to let the assets get toxic, right? So if you know, the assets would get toxic if you know, if interest rates go up too high, that drives bond prices down. And now all the assets on their books are worth a lot less.

• 40:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, this is this is like the point where we have to just call it and say, okay, you know what? Let's move on. Meaning in the sense that like, we have to go to these root causes because the money is more money is not going to fix what we're dealing with. So I just put something in the group chat, and I just want to get your guys' reaction to it. Because when I saw it, it blew my mind. There was a study, okay, that was just published a few days ago, and it said the following thing. Children born during the pandemic have experienced a catastrophic drop in cognitive development of 22 IQ points.

• 40:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yep, I saw this.

• 40:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. And when you look at it, the people that were the most affected were male children and children of lower socioeconomic families. But everybody was affected. Yet you see the amount of money that we're spending already. So adding more money to something is not going to make it better if what we're spending today is basically just getting flushed down the toilet. And these are the kinds of things that really matter. How do you allow an entire generation of kids to see to see to suffer? By the way, what is that show? That means that teachers actually are unbelievably important. So number one, they should get paid a lot more. Okay, let's just put it that way.

• 41:34Jason Calacanis?

  And there should be more of them, and it's more class sizes.

• 41:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly. But if you if you have, you know, these completely screwed up incentives between, you know, the organizations, the unions that represent these teachers, and then the parents who have completely different incentives, and they basically fight to never be in classroom and to not really teach, this is the measurable outcome.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The IQ of our children, I mean,

• 41:55Jason Calacanis?

  Their verbal ability, their executive function, their scores are going down.

• 42:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do they recover from that?

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  Be a lot of tutoring. It's gonna be a lot of summer school.

• 42:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  Zoom's not gonna do it.

• 42:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think more Fortnite and Roblox fixes this problem.

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, definitely not.

• 42:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And and I feel terrible because like, you know, as a parent, that's that was my solution, right? I was struggling with the Zooms, like every other parent. And then in the evenings, I was just so burnt and just feeling so beside myself in the middle of the pandemic. Whereas I had a no iPad rule for my kids, I broke down.

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 42:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know?

• 42:29Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody did. I mean, it's like you're you're home with your kids all day long. It's not how it's supposed to work.

• 42:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so the point is like, this is where the government should step in and actually say, okay, here, let me take leadership on this topic. Right? And talk to the unions, fix whatever needs to be fixed, amp up the the money into charter schools, do whatever you need to do. But please fix the problem. But randomly spending money to try to buy votes, I think people see through that. It just doesn't work.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  And related to that, Omicron is spreading like crazy. Uh, New York City.

• 43:02Jason Calacanis?

  Omicron, Omicron.

• 43:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There is no N.

• 43:05Jason Calacanis?

  Omicron.

• 43:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Omicron.

• 43:07Jason Calacanis?

  Omicron, yes. I'll I'll learn how to pronounce it when it's gone.

• 43:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Omicron, Omicron.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  Is spreading like crazy.

• 43:15Jason Calacanis?

  In New York City and in the UK, amongst other places, the NBA and the NFL are seeing surges.

• 43:21David Friedberg?

  I've had a ton of people I know test positive this week. You guys had that? Family, friends, crazy. It's insane how many people are, I know so many people.

• 43:29Jason Calacanis?

  In New York City, East Coast.

• 43:32David Friedberg?

  Related, yeah. And a lot of people that don't have um, any symptoms.

• 43:35Jason Calacanis?

  So here's the chart of cases, uh, cases spiking, but hospitalizations and deaths are flat or going down. Um, in places where these outbreaks are occurring, the UK charts are even darker. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence, everybody on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter. Uh, young people in New York who went to SantaCon are saying they all got it. But if you look at this chart.

• 43:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is SantaCon?

• 43:56Jason Calacanis?

  SantaCon is the worst holiday of the year. It's a time when a bunch of young people dress as Santa Claus. And get drunk. And you have 10,000 people, it's a bar crawl.

• 44:09David Friedberg?

  This is like Santa Claus. Do you see this? You see how, you see how Monty's wearing his Santa outfit?

• 44:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Monte Claus.

• 44:16David Friedberg?

  That's what goes on. Everyone wears their little Santa outfit and they go bar crawling.

• 44:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So it's not sexy Santa?

• 44:21Jason Calacanis?

  Well, actually, I have a story about that. I was in San Francisco. Oh, my God. I know, I know.

• 44:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You were Sexy Santa?

• 44:27Jason Calacanis?

  No, I literally took my daughters out for pizza, Tony's, in North Beach. And, you know, I got my three daughters and there's all these people walking around like, look dad, it's Santa Claus. Like a lot of them. And so there's a thousand Santa Claus descend on North Beach. And I turn around and I kid you not, there are two old guys, I'm talking 70 years old. And they're wearing a baseball, a Santa hat, Santa boots, and nothing in between. Literally buck naked in, on the street. So, yeah.

• 45:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bro, you're, you're so, you're so demented. Okay. You're like this, like, unkey perv. Like every time I get those text messages, I don't know what to think. Did you guys click on the Twitter link when Jason was like, guys, search for the Folsom Street Fair on Twitter? I can't, I can't unsee what I saw.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, why is Folsom Street trending? I was like, I thought there was a terrorist attack.

• 45:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bro, that was so brutal. You, you should, you can't send that shit around. Like, it's so brutal.

• 45:31Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, guys, don't click on, I was like, don't click on Folsom.

• 45:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was like, oh, this is a Twitter link. What is it about? Web 3.0?

• 45:38Jason Calacanis?

  Not exactly. The Folsom Street Fair, I'm gonna go ahead and say, don't search for that. If you have kids around, it's a little bit intense. But anyway, the SantaCon was on Saturday, December 11th. And so here we are, five days late, you know, four or five days later and the stuff hitting. If that's true, it almost perfectly mirrors the original outbreak after St. Patty's Day in March 2020.

• 46:00Jason Calacanis?

  And if you look on social media, all the city M D lines where people get tested are around the block. And 30 NBA players have entered the COVID protocol in the last two weeks. About 7% of the league. And we had a big question mark of would this be less, more contagious? It obviously is. Check. Less deadly, it apparently is.

• 46:19David Friedberg?

  Some studies show as much as 40 times more infectious than Delta. Highly contagious, extreme, very much airborne. It's going everywhere. Like I said.

• 46:31David Friedberg?

  Last time, if it does end up having low severity and low hospitalization rate and low death rate for vaccinated or vaccinated plus boosted populations, this could end up being a massive immunizing event, meaning like a lot of people will develop new antibodies and resistance. And, you know, that could be a net good thing, but it's certainly the case that this is not a one strain, one shot and done pandemic. This is an endemic kind of circumstance. We're going to be in this for a while. And, you know, the circumstances are one that may kind of require, you know, an adaptation in terms of how we live and operate. And especially as it relates to things that are so important, like keeping businesses open and schools. You know, I think we're going to use recent memory to guide future decision making, or at least

• 47:15David Friedberg?

  politicians and, you know, kind of lawmakers will, and they'll say, hey, this is what we did last time this happened. And we just saw this in California where they're like, last time, like we told everyone going to lockdown or wear masks indoors again, and we're seeing that behavior again. Certainly, it may have an impact in terms of the spread, but this is highly contagious and it's going to spread everywhere. And I think there's just some adaptation that maybe is going to be needed here over the long run. There's no end, there's no end in sight.

• 47:45Jason Calacanis?

  There's no end in sight, but it is less deadly. And so it could be mass immunizing. And that has led people to think of this herd immunity, potentially if there's not another variant. Sacks, if the NBA and the NFL are learning to live with COVID, and obviously, when we were in Miami, there's no COVID, and Austin, there's no COVID.

• 48:04David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Jason Calacanis?

  Is everybody now just go, because it seems like the politicians now, whether it's in Europe, we're seeing the protests, and I think we'll see them here in the United States if this keeps up. Australia, obviously, having protests as well. The public has decided, I think, we're willing to have 1,000 people die a day, or a certain number of people die today to get back to normal. So what do you think the end game here is going into 22?

• 48:25David Sacks?

  I'll make a prediction for 2022. Okay, I will predict that even the blue areas of the country are gonna have fatigue with all these COVID restrictions. And so even the blue state governors who are addicted to their state of emergencies and their restrictions and lockdowns and closures and mask mandates, even they are gonna have to give them up in 2022 because the country is sick and tired of this. Peter Pham had a really good tweet just the other day, maybe you guys can dig it up, where he had a friend visit him from Texas, and they've been living normally there since like July of 2020, roughly. Kids in school, occasionally someone gets sick, but they've been living normally. Okay, it's

• 49:06David Sacks?

  a manageable problem. And he couldn't believe, Peter's friend could not believe how they're living in LA, where still everyone's living in fear. They've, we now have a new one month indoor mask mandate, thanks to, you know, Governor Newsom, who still is ruling the state under state of emergency. What good is that gonna do? So I think, you know, but, but, but I think that some of these blue areas, people are so petrified still of the virus. And I think it's just because of, they're the ones who have been ingesting all this fear porn coming from the media. And, but I, but I think it's gonna break. I think the, the finally, this hysteria and panic will break, it'll crest over the blue

• 49:47David Sacks?

  parts of the country in 2022. They're already back to normal in the red parts. And especially Omicron, you can't stop this. Okay?

• 49:56Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's the salient point here.

• 49:58David Sacks?

  Nothing works.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  You're all gonna get it.

• 50:00David Sacks?

  Look, the little, the little stupid vax card that you have to show everywhere to get like popcorn at a movie theater, like, you know, in San Francisco, doesn't do anything because vaccinated people can spread it too. So that doesn't do anything. And the mask mandate doesn't do anything. Um, you know, and so none of this stuff does anything except getting a vaccine reduces the severity of the illness.

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  And losing weight, sacks.

• 50:23David Sacks?

  And losing weight.

• 50:24Jason Calacanis?

  And we can't have that conversation.

• 50:25David Sacks?

  Those things, those consequences are mainly on the person who decides to do it.

• 50:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's what we have to say is we just have to tell everybody, you know, listen. Lose weight, get in shape, eat healthy, get vaccinated, get back to life. That's it. That's the best you can do. I'm, I believe everybody's gonna get it.

• 50:39David Sacks?

  We're, we're starting to see like a real divergence in American life where, and I think Omicron's, if we have lockdowns under Omicron, and really the, the big issue is school closures. If we go back to school closures in blue states and have more of the learning loss that Chamath was talking about, and I bet we do. Whereas in red states, they're still out there learning normally and they're dealing with it, just like they deal with the outbreak of a flu season or cold season. But they, you know, they're just managing it. We're gonna, there's gonna be, we're gonna be living in two different Americas. But I, but I don't believe this is sustainable. I think eventually these governors who are holding on to their power and their restrictions are gonna lose in 2022.

• 51:21David Sacks?

  The ones who haven't given it up are gonna, are gonna basically, uh, fall to a red wave in November 22. I think Newsom might be the only one left standing.

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  Have any schools closed? I see everybody's canceling their Christmas parties. JP Morgan canceled that.

• 51:34David Sacks?

  We're close, we're close.

• 51:36Jason Calacanis?

  Every Christmas party's been getting canceled. Um, and I wonder if schools, I mean, teachers unions, I think they gotta be having a meeting right now.

• 51:44David Sacks?

  They don't even, the, the teachers unions don't even acknowledge that learning loss exists.

• 51:48Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is why I decided to homeschool for the year of the pandemic and I kept my homeschool teacher for, you know, a couple of hours a day. And, uh, my kids have done wonderfully and it's great to have the ability to afford to be able to do that, but not everybody can have an after school tutor.

• 52:02David Sacks?

  Let me up level this for a second. Okay. So I'm, maybe I'm spilling the beans on one of my predictions I'll make at the predictions episode we do. But first we had COVID, okay? Then we had the overreaction to COVID, both politically and economically. Economically, we pumped 10 trillion plus of spending and monetary and QE and all this sort of stuff. Politically, we had these restrictions, school closures, lockdowns, mandates. Okay. I think we're about to enter a new phase, which is the correction to the overreaction. And I think we're already in the correction. So the market's been correcting, growth stocks have been correcting for the last five or six weeks. I now think that we're, there was a bit of a political correction with Yonkin

• 52:45David Sacks?

  winning in Virginia. Remember that state swung 10 points relative to a year ago. And I think you'll see a further correction, both political and economic in 2022. So we may not be completely past COVID, but I think we are going to be past this sort of overreaction to COVID.

• 53:01David Friedberg?

  What do you guys think about Succession?

• 53:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no, I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. Don't say anything. Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Strong, let's talk about the Jeremy Strong thing. Jeremy Strong, okay, Jeremy Strong is a weirdo, according to a New Yorker profile, and there's been a huge response to it. Uh, this profile came out. This is Kendall, Kendall Roy on Succession. Kendall Roy, who is woke and dumb and ineffective as an executive. And obviously, the show is modeled after Rupert Murdoch and Fox and the kids there, who are not dopey, actually. In the article, it hinted that most of Succession's coworkers dislike him due to his intensity and method acting rituals. He won't rehearse with anybody. He's in character all the time, like Daniel Day-Lewis.

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  He won't get makeup whenever anybody else does because he doesn't want to reduce the energy and the buildup. Uh, the article notes, there is a fine line that Strong walks between being a legendary method actor and just a completely awesome networker.

• 54:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, can I tell you why this story was interesting to me and why I sent this to you guys?

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so here's a guy who, in many ways, is a virtuoso, and the reason, even he's a, he's a really good actor, because I despise Kendall Roy on that show. Uh, and I was wondering, like, is this guy just a terrible actor or is he such a good actor that I hate them?

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 54:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I hate him. And that's why I was attracted to this article and in it or after it. So basically, what happens is, he's a virtuoso, just, and I'll come back to him in a second. These people at the New Yorker, who I guess are just jealous or want to write clickbait, try to destroy this guy. But what they didn't factor is that when they published this article, all these other actors would come to his defense and do it really publicly.

• 54:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain. Aaron Sorkin wrote a letter.

• 54:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly, that Jessica Chastain published to Twitter because Aaron, Aaron Sorkin doesn't have access to social media by design. And in all of it, they said, this is the most incredible person we've seen. Aaron Sorkin says, this guy is as good as Dustin Hoffman, which is like, that's his...

• 55:11Jason Calacanis?

  As good as it gets.

• 55:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So why was it interesting to me? It's, you have these people. Who are grinding and trying to perfect their craft, be a virtuoso. You talked about Steph Curry, grinding, try to perfect his craft. Just a little Steph Curry story as a tangent. He brought in this team where they basically started to map out all of the circumferences of the ring, of the of the net. And he practiced this summer, literally trying to get it perfectly in to create this very specific kind of swish. And he just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting, not, you know, all the time, but every day for some number of shots, trying to get the ball perfectly into the basket. That is a level of perfectionism. And that's being a virtuoso that none of us can

• 55:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  really appreciate. But you see the output and we all love it. He's already the GOAT and he's trying to outdo himself. Here's a different guy in a completely different theater, in this case, acting, trying to also be really legendary and putting himself through all kinds of stuff, and still not lose himself in it. Okay. So much so that all of these other people will really appreciate how amazing he is. And to me, what I don't like is that then these critics, who don't do anything, who've never accomplished anything at all in their lives, feel so triggered that they have to judge him. It's one thing to not have that skill. I'll never be as good of an actor as Jeremy Strong. I'll never be as good of a basketball

• 56:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  player as Steph. But I don't hate these people for that. I'm so happy that people like this exist. But there's a strain of people that exist. And then who also have a platform.

• 56:47David Friedberg?

  I was about to connect the dots for you. Is like, look at, yeah, look at how the politicians feel the same way about private market.

• 56:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Politicians, social media. Decide to try to destroy people. So instead, what these people do is they take a shortcut. They're the critics. They're not in the arena. Okay. The folks in the arena are booking wins and losses constantly. But you have this, you have this strain of impotent critic that doesn't naturally know how to do for themselves. And they somehow have a platform. And then what they end up doing is cutting corners and then some subset of those start to cheat. Cue David.

• 57:25David Sacks?

  Well, yeah, it's a story that Congress back in 2012 passed a bill called the Stock Act to prohibit members of Congress from trading on their insider knowledge based on, you know, based on legislative actions they're about to take. And it's been widely flouted by dozens of, you know, representatives and senators. And the problem is there's no punishment. It's something like a $200 fine or something like that that gets waived in most of these cases. So it's completely hypocritical because these are the, these politicians like Senator Karen, they're constantly demonizing and attacking other people to make themselves look better. And then here they are, they've got dirty hands. And they asked Pelosi, they said to Pelosi, well, don't you think that

• 58:09David Sacks?

  members of Congress should be prohibited from trading stocks, right? Because their actions have such a huge consequence on them. And Pelosi said, no, it's a, it's a free market. It's a free market. We should be free to, to do that. It's like, huh, you know, I don't remember that being a defense every time you've wanted to regulate some, you know, industry that, uh, that you didn't think.

• 58:30Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't the president have to divest when they take the presidential office? Isn't that a thing?

• 58:34David Sacks?

  Divest or they put, they put their assets in a blind trust.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So they're blind. So why, why would senators, Congress?

• 58:41David Sacks?

  Totally.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  People be any different than the president?

• 58:43David Sacks?

  It's absurd that elected officials should be able to engage in insider trading. It makes no sense.

• 58:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The Fed actually had this issue as well. Two, um, two folks on the Federal Reserve Board resigned. And then Powell issued a whole bunch of, I think, new laws tried or regulations inside the Fed to try to fix it. And the same issue occurs with federal judges. And there are federal judges that are consistently trading in the equities of the companies that are in front of them. And so how can you, how can you adjudicate a case? There was one judge that had 130 plus conflicts, trading conflicts.

• 59:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  130 plus and he is the one that's there where AT&T or Facebook or Google has an issue. I mean, how can you actually assume that these folks are being impartial if that's the case? And there are no consequences for this. And yet, you know, if you're again, going back to where we started, somebody in the arena trying to do something, you just got to think to yourself like you have critics that are bashing you. You have folks that are basically flouting the law because they can. And then you put these two together and it's like, this is so, it's kind of depressing to be honest with you. You start to lose a little bit of faith in the system.

• 59:54Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, these politicians are grifters. That's it. And full stop. I mean, they're just grifting and

• 1:00:02Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, except for apparently, except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they should just buy the companies they hate. Why aren't they buying Amazon and Tesla? They would be total proponents of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk if they did.

• 1:00:12David Sacks?

  Yeah. In fairness to Warren, I've seen her tweet that she supports the banning of the insider trading by congressional representatives. But I don't exactly see her fighting for it, you know, as hard as she's denouncing people like Elon. So, um, look, I mean, it's, it's characteristic of elected officials that they, um, what is it? They see the splinter, you know, in somebody, you know, in somebody else's eye, but not the, the log in their own or something like that. Isn't that the expression? But you know, who's taking advantage of this issue is Blake Masters, who's running for Senate in Arizona, just tweeted about that this would be the first thing he would fix if he gets elected, which is to ban insider trading by elected officials. And I, I think it's remarkable that, you know, politicians as shrewd as Nancy Pelosi are deceiving

• 1:00:57David Sacks?

  this issue to Republicans. I mean, I don't know why Republicans wouldn't make this a major plank of their platform for 2022.

• 1:01:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nancy Pelosi is, I think, the third or fourth richest person in Congress. Her husband is a very sophisticated property equity investor. There are these meme stocks that follow Nancy Pelosi's stock trading account or pretend to that were, you know, recently, by the way, banned by Twitter, right?

• 1:01:21David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Jason Calacanis?

  That was weird. Yeah.

• 1:01:23David Sacks?

  Protecting her.

• 1:01:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Protecting her effectively. So, you know, she has an incentive to not, her seat of power is not necessarily the salary that she earns by being House leader, but it's by translating that in a bunch of different ways. And one way, apparently it turns out, is being an active equity investor in the market.

• 1:01:41David Sacks?

  It's unbelievable that's allowed. I don't know how this isn't just like an A plus fantastic issue for Republicans. They should make it an absolute plank of their platform.

• 1:01:50Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here we go. Florida Republican Brian Mast was late in disclosure disclosing purchase of up to 100,000 in stock at an aerospace company, which had just testified before a committee, he says. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was 16 months late disclosing that he bought, his wife bought stock in a pharma company that manufactures an antiviral COVID-19 treatment.

• 1:02:11David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:02:11Jason Calacanis?

  Nevada Democrat, Suzy Lee, failed to probably disclose more than 200 trades.

• 1:02:16David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Jason Calacanis?

  Worth as much as 3 million. I mean, this is bonkers.

• 1:02:19David Sacks?

  Just to be clear, the violations have been on both sides of the aisle. I'm not at all trying to say that Republicans are better on this than Democrats, however.

• 1:02:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is good, this is good bipartisan cooperation.

• 1:02:29David Sacks?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's ridiculous. This is the political class in Washington engaging in bad behavior. But, but, but the difference is this, which is that Pelosi, the only leader of a party I've heard defend this is Pelosi. And I think this is a fantastic issue for outsider candidates, really on both sides to run on.

• 1:02:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, this is, this is also something that Biden can take because Biden has never tried to do this stuff, you know?

• 1:02:52David Sacks?

  Oh, my God. Biden's got so many shady dealings and conflicts.

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  Are you talking about his kid selling paintings to China?

• 1:02:58David Sacks?

  There's a lot of rich Bidens out there. Apparently, he's got a rich brother. He's got a, you know, Hunter's been paid a lot of money.

• 1:03:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, maybe that's true. But Joe Biden has been really down the middle. Come on, be fair.

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  Hunter's brilliant. I mean, he's selling paintings.

• 1:03:10David Sacks?

  Yeah. But why are they buying Hunter Biden paintings for $500,000?

• 1:03:14Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, he's a great artist. I mean, why do people buy? I don't know if you saw Melania's coming out with NFTs today. So she's, Melania's, everybody's securing the bag now. I mean, if, and by the way, the presidential grift is always the best. Just as a case in point, Trump's SPAC.

• 1:03:33Jason Calacanis?

  Is worth over 2 billion and BuzzFeed, which makes 360 million a year and I think has 102 million cash.

• 1:03:39David Sacks?

  Yeah, but he's not in office. He's not in office.

• 1:03:41David Friedberg?

  That's misstated, Jason. Trump's back, his shares that he's going to be receiving are worth close to 20 billion.

• 1:03:48Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:03:48David Friedberg?

  20 billion.

• 1:03:49David Sacks?

  But he's not in office anymore, so I'm not sure.

• 1:03:51David Friedberg?

  The shares that he's going to receive.

• 1:03:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, in the future.

• 1:03:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah, what you're counting is the market cap of the cash and trust, the value of the shares that are already public in the stack. The Trump, the value of the Trump entity is going to be closer to 20 billion.

• 1:04:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that right? Wow, that's even crazier with no revenue. These poor media people.

• 1:04:09David Friedberg?

  Well, the SEC, apparently the DOJ sent a bunch of inquiries on this, asking for background on the transaction because there's no business, there's no contract, there's no employees, it's just a whole.

• 1:04:20Jason Calacanis?

  But by the way.

• 1:04:21David Friedberg?

  Idea.

• 1:04:22Jason Calacanis?

  Just to make sure that everybody understands this is, this is a bipartisan thing as well. The, the ultimate bag secures, the Obamas got, I think 50 million plus each for their book deals and they got supposedly high eight figures, like 50, 60, 70, 80 million dollars from Netflix.

• 1:04:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, hold on a second, hold on a second. When you said, when you called them bag secures, I was really triggered there for a second. So am I supposed to take that offensively that you're saying Michelle Obama and Barack Obama secured the bag?

• 1:04:49Jason Calacanis?

  Secured the bag is a term for getting the money. The Obamas are doing it.

• 1:04:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  The Clintons did it and the Trumps are doing it. It's a thing, secure the bag.

• 1:04:58David Sacks?

  But Jason, we're, we're not against everybody not be able to make money. The issue is trading on your office in a way that, where you are trading on your insider information that your office has given you.

• 1:05:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, but I mean.

• 1:05:13David Sacks?

  Or if you're selling influence. If you sell a book, hold on a second, if you sell a book when you're out of office, is that really a problem? Is that on the same thing?

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  I wanted to point out the Netflix one. What was Netflix's existential crisis for the eight years Obama was in office? And if you remember? Nobody remembers? Net neutrality. Could they get, would they have to pay Verizon? What was the Obama's position on net neutrality? They were for net neutrality. Netflix stock went up 40, 50x under Obama. It could all be a coincidence. I'm just saying.

• 1:05:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What the fuck?

• 1:05:46David Sacks?

  So you're saying it's like, you're saying it's a disguise lobbying payment to Obama?

• 1:05:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's like.

• 1:05:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are you serious?

• 1:05:52Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's like, I mean, listen, the Clintons were doing speaking gigs for Goldman Sachs at half a million dollars.

• 1:05:59David Friedberg?

  This is kind of my cue to go to dinner now.

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here's the mRNA.

• 1:06:03David Sacks?

  You know, the main way that Winston Churchill supported himself was writing books. I think it's okay for politicians to write books and if, because ultimately the public buys them and that's how they make money.

• 1:06:12Jason Calacanis?

  What about when the book is 50 million and the normal price would be 10? That's the problem.

• 1:06:16David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, if I, I guess you might have a point. If the advance was so in excess of the expected sales that it raises a question of what the real motive is for the payment. But I don't, but is that, is that what happened?

• 1:06:26Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody gets paid a $50 million advance. Nobody gets an eight-figure deal. Who's never made a documentary before? No, I mean, if this book sold 5 million copies, it still wouldn't be worth it. Uh, let's move on to mRNA. So we keep our freed, uh, free birth factor high.

• 1:06:41David Friedberg?

  I'm like so, I'm so ready to go to dinner. Rick Thompson gave me a wonderful bottle of wine. By the way, I'm going to go drink it tonight.

• 1:06:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm so super tilted that you, you, you, you, like, it's like, I mean.

• 1:06:50Jason Calacanis?

  What? Did I criticize the Obamas?

• 1:06:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I can't do it.

• 1:06:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's a no-fly zone for you?

• 1:06:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm super tilted. I mean, this is worse than sweater Karen.

• 1:06:59Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what about the Clintons? Can I, can I, uh, go after their 500k speaking gigs for Goldman Sachs?

• 1:07:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Jason Calacanis?

  That's okay?

• 1:07:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine.

• 1:07:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just don't touch the Obamas.

• 1:07:09David Sacks?

  But I mean, Jason, are you, are you doing exactly what Senator Karen did to Elon, which is by virtue of the fact that they're making money that you are now imputing evil motives to it?

• 1:07:20Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's just a disproportionate to what they should get paid.

• 1:07:22David Friedberg?

  By your assessment, their assessment's the same about Elon.

• 1:07:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I pay a lot of money for Michelle Obama to do much of any. I think she's just a total badass.

• 1:07:29Jason Calacanis?

  For somebody who's never made a film, uh, for Netflix, I don't think it makes sense.

• 1:07:33David Friedberg?

  You, you said the same thing about Rivian. I don't know, man. You're projecting a little bit.

• 1:07:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I totally agree. If this is on the second floor, I'd jump out the window right now.

• 1:07:40David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you.

• 1:07:42David Friedberg?

  Let winners be winners, J. Cal.

• 1:07:44David Sacks?

  I think we should differentiate between insider trading.

• 1:07:47Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:07:47David Sacks?

  Bad and should not be allowed. Influence peddling, bad, should not be allowed. And somebody out of office making money.

• 1:07:53David Friedberg?

  Monetizing their influence.

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:54David Sacks?

  Well, no, no, not monetizing their influence. And if they did that, that's the problem.

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  Getting paid for services is fine.

• 1:07:59David Sacks?

  Getting paid to sell tickets or books. That's if that's what it is, that's fine.

• 1:08:03Jason Calacanis?

  Unless it's disproportionate to the reality.

• 1:08:05David Sacks?

  Okay, fine, fine.

• 1:08:06Jason Calacanis?

  Put a pin in it. Put a pin in it. mRNA, no.

• 1:08:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, no, no, no. Jason, say you like the Obamas.

• 1:08:11Jason Calacanis?

  No, I don't like the Obamas. I would vote Obama in for a third term.

• 1:08:16David Friedberg?

  Okay. Didn't you get paid a $50,000 speaking fee recently to speak at a Qlik conference?

• 1:08:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, he did.

• 1:08:20David Friedberg?

  I get paid all the time. I got worth that. Overpaid.

• 1:08:22Jason Calacanis?

  Overpaid.

• 1:08:23David Friedberg?

  Overpaid.

• 1:08:24Jason Calacanis?

  You're worth $8.50 for a fucking Subway sandwich.

• 1:08:28David Friedberg?

  You're worth like $2,500.

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  I just got paid $15,000 to do a 50-minute speaking game.

• 1:08:32David Sacks?

  Who are they paying you to influence, J. Cal?

• 1:08:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, honestly, J. Cal.

• 1:08:35Jason Calacanis?

  I have no influence.

• 1:08:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, Jason, you're like a, like 30% less than a high-end escort. Okay? No offense.

• 1:08:43David Sacks?

  Oh, man.

• 1:08:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's expensive.

• 1:08:44Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Really, there's a, there's a, what's 30% more than 50? You're saying it's like 80 grand. And that's, I don't know, 60, 70 grand. I didn't realize that.

• 1:08:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Talk to us about the mRNA news for cancer, Freiber, that came out this past week.

• 1:09:02David Friedberg?

  So I think the article that you guys sent around was one related to an oncology treatment that uses mRNA tech. But I, I think it's, what I wanted to kind of, what I thought would be interesting to talk about for a second is just zooming out on mRNA technology as a whole, which, you know, has been theorized for, you know, the, the potential of it's been talked about for 50 years. If we talk about real quick what, what RNA is, remember your DNA, your genetic code, you know, defines the, the printing of proteins in your cells. And so every three letters of DNA is an amino acid, a bunch of amino acids in it. In a row, form a protein, and that protein has some function in your body.

• 1:09:46David Friedberg?

  The way that the DNA gets translated into protein is through these mRNA snippets. So a little snippet of RNA is a copy of DNA which floats over from the DNA strand, and it floats into what's called the ribosome, and the ribosome is the protein printer in the cell. And there's lots of ribosomes, and there's lots of RNA floating around all the time, and it's being copied over. So some chemical triggers the expression of that gene, of that sequence of DNA into RNA that then turns into protein. And so a chemical induces the protein. Then the protein does something interesting, and the protein has a function in your body. And some of those proteins in human body can, you know, do bad things, and some of them can do good things. And so the idea has always been that we can actually use proteins

• 1:10:29David Friedberg?

  as a way to modulate our health and modulate disease. For example, creating a protein that can attach to cancer cells and signal immune cells to come and kill those cancer cells, as an example. And some people have genetic problems where their DNA prints the wrong protein, and then that protein is malformed or causes some harm to your health. And so the idea for RNA technology has always been that instead of having DNA be the source of truth for the proteins that get expressed in your body, can we stick RNA directly into cells and use that RNA to trigger the production of proteins that can do specific things in your body? And remember, the biggest segment of the pharma market, or a huge segment of the pharma market, is what's called biologic drugs, which are largely antibodies, which are a type of protein,

• 1:11:14David Friedberg?

  that have some specific function. But very many of these proteins are hard to get into the body and get them into the right place and get them to do the things we want them to do. So it would be a lot easier if we could get RNA into the right cells to get those cells to make the right protein to do that thing that we want them to do. So everything from cancer treatment to genetic diseases, and there's RNA interference, and there's RNA, or what are called oligonucleotides, that can be used to block specific bad proteins from being produced in your cells, or is kind of another kind of course of treatment. So making proteins that we think are therapeutic and blocking the production of bad proteins. Are kind of the the mainstay of this idea behind RNA technology.

• 1:11:56David Friedberg?

  And Moderna was started to pursue this effort out of flagship pioneering, which is an incubation shop in in Boston. And they really kind of struggled for years to find the right footing of what's the right business model and the right product. And the FDA kind of struggled with approving this stuff. And then boom, COVID hit. And when COVID hit, it was like, holy crap, let's accelerate this RNA technology, use it for vaccines, which had been in development for years. And the protein that's being produced is the same protein you find on the the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which triggers an immune response and builds up your immunity to that virus. And now the floodgates are open. And this is incredible because the frontiers in RNA over the next decade could change the course of how we treat disease

• 1:12:35David Friedberg?

  and change the course of of outcomes for many diseases, from genetic diseases all the way through to cancers. And so we're starting to see those floodgates open. I think there's now a few, a handful of these, you know, RNA interference products that have been approved by the FDA. And we're now starting to see many more of these cancer and immunotherapy drugs start to get approved as RNA therapies. But it really, I think, was lit by by the breakthrough with COVID and everyone kind of seeing the benefit of this and the lack of side effects. And we've now got, I think, a validation in the market and acceptance from consumers that this technology could transform the industry in the same way that Genentech transformed the pharma industry with biologic drugs

• 1:13:19David Friedberg?

  in the 80s and 90s. So it's super exciting. And, you know, we can do updates regularly on our show if you guys want to talk about more of the cool stuff that's coming out. But man, this is going to transform how medicine is delivered and and the potential of things that we can kind of trade.

• 1:13:34Jason Calacanis?

  Let me ask you a question. Would the, if we looked at the total number of deaths from COVID and then the potential debt, you know, deaths avoided or early deaths or more lifegays added, however you want to do it, from mRNA and the impact on cancer over the next, say, 30 or 40 years? In other words, the impact it would have on the people living today who live through COVID? Do you think net net we'll see that the prevention of cancers through this new technology could actually make?

• 1:14:03Jason Calacanis?

  You know, basically there's a silver lining to what happened during COVID.

• 1:14:07David Friedberg?

  It's a good question. Let me give you the counterpoint. In the late 90s, there was a gene editing clinical trial that took place and they tried to and a patient and they delivered the gene editing technology via virus. And so the virus goes in, it spreads around and it has this molecule that would edit the gene and it was for genetic disease. And a patient that they gave it to, a young guy, got this virus and he actually died from it. And they shut down all clinical trials for years. And it was like, boom, that's the end. So there are a lot of scientists, a lot of doctors have argued for years that that particular case caused so many lives to be lost because we lost years of progress in being able to run clinical

• 1:14:51David Friedberg?

  trials during that time and get drugs to market that could treat people. And you're right, maybe the opposite has happened here, that while these clinical trials may have taken years and years and years to get through in a normal setting, perhaps the pandemic was the accelerant we needed to get more of these to market faster and millions of people whose lives would have been lost or would be lost otherwise to cancer and other genetic diseases and so on over the years to come will be saved because these therapies will get to market faster. And so, yeah, it's a great point and maybe, I don't know what the calculus is between the lives lost in the pandemic versus the lives gained via these treatments coming to market faster, but it's certainly a good way to think about it.

• 1:15:29Jason Calacanis?

  The way to look at it, we could look at the days of life lost, right? And if we actually could actually predict how long someone's going to live and the, you know, extension of life, I think we could come out of this ahead. Finally, on our docket, London Breed calls for better policing in San Francisco after this insane surge in crime. Here's the video.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  And it's time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps. To be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city. We are going to turn this around. This is a city that has a population of less than 1 million people with an over $12 billion budget. The residents of this city have been extremely generous in providing us with the resources we need to make a difference.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  And now, the priorities we need to make must be to protect them, must be to turn things around in their neighborhoods. When you are in a room full of people, I would say probably anywhere between 90 and 95% of folks could raise their hand and say that either their car has been broken into, or they've been a victim in some capacity or another. That is not okay. That is not acceptable.

• 1:16:56Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, I thought crime was down and that everything was great, and that we were going to defund the police. What is happening here? What's the big turnaround?

• 1:17:04David Sacks?

  Well, it's exactly what I was saying, that first of all, I loved it. I love what she said. It's exactly what I've been saying for the last year, and it's really great to hear her say the same types of things. I started this campaign back in January after New Year's Eve, you had those two women get killed by a repeat offender who was released by Chesa Boudin. And then as I dug into it, I saw that he was doing this all the time as part of his agenda of decarceration. So, and you know, a year later, like we've talked about throughout this whole time, and the city has totally degenerated into some sort of dystopian Gotham-like city. This did feel like the beginning of a Batman movie. I mean, it was a strong statement. I thought it was great. This is just the beginning of what needs to be done.

• 1:17:47David Sacks?

  I predict that London Breed is going to eventually butt heads with Chesa Boudin. There is no way that he will support this agenda of fixing the city. She wants to increase the police presence. So like you said, she is going to refund the police, not defund the police. Chesa Boudin is, I mean, the only people he's passionate about prosecuting are police officers.

• 1:18:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11David Sacks?

  So we have a huge problem that the police department is actually, we have too few of them. We're understaffed.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Who would take that job?

• 1:18:18David Sacks?

  It's not just because of budgets, also because they're demoralized and they've got, you know, they've got this prosecutor. By the way, there was a case just recently where um a repeat offender bashed a vodka ball over the head of a cop and Chase has just announced that he's getting sent to mental health diversion instead of being prosecuted. I want to

• 1:18:40Jason Calacanis?

  What? You can attack a cop and not go to jail in the city of San Francisco?

• 1:18:46David Sacks?

  Yes. This is why the cops are demoralized. So in order for London Breed to fix the problem, she is going, and I think she's on the right track here. He's got to go. So here's my prediction. On February 15th, they are having the recall election for the education board. And I predict that that board, at least two of the three are going to be recalled. The parents are sick and tired of it. They are going to be out. I think that's going to embolden London Breed to then support the recall of Chesa Boudin in the June election. And, and I think between

• 1:19:18Jason Calacanis?

  And she gets to pick his replacement when he's recalled.

• 1:19:20David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. So I

• 1:19:21Jason Calacanis?

  That's what she's doing. She basically flipped. She was quiet up until this point.

• 1:19:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The progressive left are slowly eating themselves.

• 1:19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is self-preservation, right, Chamath? I mean, if she didn't make a change here, she's going to be out of office too. She'll get recalled.

• 1:19:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not self-preservation. They're realizing that these policies don't work. Moral absolutism didn't work on the left or the right. These guys have tried on a small scale to do what a certain faction of the Democratic Party has been trying to do at a national level. It doesn't work. Overspending, underpolicing, undereducating, it doesn't do anything.

• 1:19:59David Sacks?

  There, I think there's going to be a schism. I think it started after the Yonkin victory in Virginia, and I think it's going to accelerate throughout for the next year and especially after the red wave in November 2022. There's going to be a schism between liberal pragmatists and these extreme radical progressives. I think um London Breed represents, she's obviously very liberal, but I think she's pragmatic. I think she wants to find solutions that work. Whereas Chesa Boudin is a radical ideologue who will never change, no matter how much evidence is presented to him that his policies don't work and are backfiring.

• 1:20:32David Friedberg?

  I think um there's a simple formula. The person who gets you into the mess is likely not the right person to get you out of the mess. And, um, you know, she, she talks about San Francisco having a $12 billion a year budget. Can you guys imagine if she was the CEO of a tech company that had $12 billion a year in OpEx? And she ran the business into the ground, would the board say, go ahead, turn it around? Absolutely not. The board would step in and in this case, the board is the citizens of San Francisco. And they would say, let's find the right person to turn this thing around. And while she stood up and said the right things and it may, maybe it would echo. And I think, you know, even if it echoes within David Sacks's heart, I'm sure it's echoing in a lot of hearts of more liberal San Franciscans.

• 1:21:18David Friedberg?

  Um, but I think that the apathy, being asleep at the wheel and allowing the, um, disorganization across the departments within that city is ultimately her responsibility. And I don't think that any amount of, you know, verbiage or action she might take at this point justifies the damage she has caused while being the leader of that city. And I think that you'll, and by the way, I think you'll see to Sacks's point earlier. I think you'll see the same response across the nation where folks feel like the, the leaders that got them into the mess that they're in locally in cities and elsewhere around this country are going to vote those folks out of office, um, because they want to change.

• 1:22:02David Friedberg?

  And it's the same reason we saw folks vote Trump into office and the same reason we saw folks vote Trump out of office. The more you want to see a change, the more you're going to make a change with your political electorate.

• 1:22:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg is so, so right. There is a phenomenal Twitter account. His name is Rob Henderson and he's like a PhD student right now. I think he's in Europe on scholarship. You know, is this, this, this kid, this guy has, has an incredible background, which you can talk about later. But Rob Henderson has this thing which I love, which is that, you know, a lot of this stuff is born out of what he calls luxury beliefs, right? Like defunding the police is a luxury belief. If you're like this rich, middle-class cloistered person that can sit behind a gate, have armed security, yada, yada, yada. Because you're not living in the ghetto where the byproducts of.

• 1:22:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The byproduct of defunding the police are borne out, or decarceration are borne out, or, you know, if you send your kid to a private school, you can completely be for all these crazy radical ideas like defunding, you know, advanced placement, defunding the gifted program, because if your kid's smart, you'll just pay for a tutor and you can do whatever you want. Those luxury beliefs exist more in the progressive left in such a small cohort of people than in any other political class that we have in America. And when they get a hold of power, they've now had the right to show whether those luxury beliefs can actually work. The data says it doesn't.

• 1:23:29Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go with competence. I mean, how about that? Like, just keep people safe and make the education system-

• 1:23:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  These luxury beliefs belong in sociology textbooks, in anthropological articles. They're better off in like, we're beatnik, smoke pot, and talk about it over a glass of wine.

• 1:23:46David Sacks?

  Let me clean up something. Just, so, look, I have no special desire to defend London Breed. I'm sure there are many-

• 1:23:52Jason Calacanis?

  I knew that. I don't know.

• 1:23:54David Sacks?

  No, look, I'm sure there are many better-

• 1:23:57Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, are you wearing a London Breed brand sweater? Is that London Breed?

• 1:24:02David Sacks?

  Tom Ford.

• 1:24:03Jason Calacanis?

  Tom Ford. Oh, sorry. Tom Ford, Tom Ford. Tom Ford, Tom Ford.

• 1:24:07David Sacks?

  Look, I'm sure there are better mayors, but just, I think, I think we have to sort of temper what you said based on the realities of politics in San Francisco, which are, which are this. We actually have a weak mayor. The mayor can't do anything-

• 1:24:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20David Sacks?

  Without a vote, without the vote, the border supervisors-

• 1:24:23Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:24:23David Sacks?

  And the soups are controlled right now by a bunch of crazies-

• 1:24:26Jason Calacanis?

  Wackos.

• 1:24:26David Sacks?

  Who are basically allies. Dean Preston and Matt Hanny and Hillary Roden, who are, who are allies of Chesa Boudin, okay? So, London Breed, I think, wants to do some good things. I think that she is more pragmatic than these ideologues. I think that she could have been more aggressive and more outspoken about standing up to them, however-

• 1:24:49Jason Calacanis?

  Earlier.

• 1:24:50David Sacks?

  Earlier, okay? But I think she is now doing the right thing in terms of the speech she just gave, basically calling for refunding the police, and we're sick of the- bullshit and we're gonna take action. Those are the right things to be saying right now. She did the right thing in terms of supporting the recall of the school board. And what I'm saying is, let's give her a chance to see if she does come out in favor of the recall of Chesa Boudin, because I think that's where it's headed. And if she gets on board with that, and she shows she's pragmatic, she may actually survive.

• 1:25:16Jason Calacanis?

  Will you do a fundraiser if she gets out?

• 1:25:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's happening all around the country, right? We saw Bill de Blasio, who was the first real progressive leftist elected to a major city. He completely ran New York City into the ground. Now Eric Adams is gonna go clean it up, right? We had Glenn Youngkin, who basically ran a centrist campaign, take over Virginia. It's over. Let's call it, it's over centrism pragmatism. Enough of these extreme polar opposites, okay? Let, let Antifa and the Proud Boys go and make love to each other in some deserted island. It's over. It's done. Let's stop talking about it.

• 1:25:53Jason Calacanis?

  I heard somebody said to me, like Proud Boys and, um, what's the other group? Oath Keepers or something? They, this, uh, woman who's gay, she's like, oh, you know, it was Rachel Maddow. She's like, I think these are like gay activist groups, aren't they? Like Proud Boys? It sounds like a gay activist group.

• 1:26:14David Sacks?

  I think we're seeing the, the correction of the overreaction, the pandemic cause. What, what Neil Ferguson calls pandemic politics that we, that the pandemic bred a strain of radical politics that we saw all over the country. And I think,

• 1:26:28Jason Calacanis?

  On both sides.

• 1:26:28David Sacks?

  And I think the country is gonna come out of that.

• 1:26:31Jason Calacanis?

  Did you see these idiots go to Cheesecake Factory and do a sit-in? Without their masks on? And that, that's their form of protest is like, we're gonna go into the Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:26:41David Sacks?

  Who are you talking about?

• 1:26:42Jason Calacanis?

  There was a Cheesecake Factory protest, uh, and now it's going national with people who are anti-mask, anti-vax. They're, don't wanna have to show their cards or wear a mask when they walk to their seat. So they're literally doing sit-ins at Cheesecake Factory. And I was like, I would protest going to a Cheesecake Factory. I'm not gonna protest in a Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:27:01David Sacks?

  Well, some people aren't on a diet like you, J. K. How they enjoy cheesecake.

• 1:27:04Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, well, where are you at? What's the number? Sax, just give us the number. What's your weight today?

• 1:27:08David Sacks?

  Around 170.

• 1:27:09Jason Calacanis?

  I'm 174, so I'm right, I'm right, I'm coming right up behind you. You hear the steps? You hear the saxon?

• 1:27:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Saxi, Saxi, I'm gonna tell you, bro, I love your sweater. I'm gonna drive to the city, come to the mausoleum and make love to you with that sweater on.

• 1:27:21Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. We'll see you next week on the All In Podcast. Love you, besties. Love you, Sacks.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  Love you, Sacks. Back at you. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:27:37Speaker 05

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 1:27:41Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, besties.

• 1:27:41Speaker 05

  I'm the queen of Kinoah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 05

  Besties are back.

• 1:27:52Speaker 05

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 1:28:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

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