E68: Trudeau invokes emergency powers, Bitcoin vs. government, Tiger Global's new strategy & more

0:00 Sacks needs the ball 1:43 Trudeau invokes emergency powers to try and stop the truckers protest 13:45 Bitcoin's role in decentralizing currency away from potentially hostile governments 25:37 San Francisco Board of Education recall: what this means for the boundaries of progressivism 42:02 Assessing Tiger Global's new strategy: less late-stage private companies, more Series A and B rounds, more compressed public tech stocks 1:11:24 HIV stem cell breakthrough, Sacks gives some hot takes on Fauci 1:24:59 Sacks' vendetta corner: Sacks vs. Paul Graham Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/police-begin-financial-squeeze-trudeau-defends-emergency-edict https://www.thecountersignal.com/news/rcmp-ban-34-crypto-wallets-from-working-in-canada https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-the-no-buy-list?utm_source=url https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1494534850090442752 https://twitter.com/juliettekayyem/status/1491757167308902405 https://twitter.com/juliettekayyem/status/1491789181428715521 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/us/san-francisco-school-board-recall.html https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1493876167085944834 https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/05/24/covid-funding-loophole-san-francisco-school-reopening https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-18/wokeism-has-peaked-in-america-but-is-still-globally-influential https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1493860336713097218 https://twitter.com/MikeBloomberg/status/1494009394257870848 https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-coming-asian-voter https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiger-global-d1-capital-signal-pullback-from-big-private-tech-deals-amid-market-rout https://www.wsj.com/articles/woman-appears-cured-of-hiv-after-umbilical-cord-blood-transplant-11644945720 https://twitter.com/phil_hellmuth/status/1494144604555206656 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1493296369796202496

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  So Sax, are we gonna talk with each other today or, you know, or? He's an ISO player. He turned into an ISO player. He's like the Carmelo Anthony of this squad.

• 0:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's the Carmelo Anthony of the All In Pod. Sax, you wanna pass the ball? Or you just wanna, you wanna clank it off the rim?

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  Raymond, clank!

• 0:14David Friedberg?

  I think we should have a focus on having a dialogue with each other today. Several points in the thing as opposed to all standing up, saying our piece and then hopping off.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, we lost a little bit of the fiber of this team here. There's three people playing as a team and then there's like... Sax, I would love to ask you questions and I would love for you to ask me questions.

• 0:28David Sacks?

  It's not my job to pass the ball, J Cal. You're the [bleep] guard. You pass the ball. I'm supposed to score.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 0:32David Sacks?

  Remember what Shaq used to say when he wasn't getting the ball? He gets really unhappy. He said, "Pass the ball to the big dog, he'll score." I'm Shaq, you're, you know, you're not Kobe. Who is the shitty little like off-guard?

• 0:44Jason Calacanis?

  Derek Fisher?

• 0:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're Derek Fisher. Make sure the big dog gets the ball. There won't be any problems.

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  I'm Bob Cousy, okay? I'm Gary Payton in this [bleep] in another year, okay?

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the All In Podcast where three besties talk about a range of topics and one monologues about Biden Derangement Syndrome with you again this week. The Sultan of Science and the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and playing ISO ball somewhere in the wing is your political commentator, Tucker Jr., Raymond David Sax.

• 1:36David Sacks?

  It's an active projection.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  All right, in our first story, which Sax is gonna lose his mind over, he's got two monologues prepared. Justin Trudeau has invoked an emergency order to freeze bank accounts linked to trucker protests in Canada. On Monday, Trudeau invoked an emergency law that requires financial institutions in Canada to examine customer records and take action against people involved with or aiding in the protest. Here's Trudeau's tweet from yesterday, if you're watching on the video streams. Illegal blockades and occupations are not peaceful protests. They're a threat to jobs and communities and they cannot continue in the House of Commons. Earlier today, I joined members of the parliament to speak about that and about the need to invoke

• 2:19Jason Calacanis?

  the Emergencies Act. The Counter Signal, which is a right-leaning Canadian digital publication, reported that 34 different crypto wallets were also being targeted by Canadian officials. This law grants the government extraordinary powers, like the right to ban public assembly in certain locations. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said it planned to challenge the government's decision in court. Remember, Sacks wrote a piece on financial deplatforming for Barry Weiss's Common Sense about a year ago. The piece was about the private sector financial platforms deplatforming, folks. So, your thoughts, Sacks. You have 90 seconds on the uninterrupted clock.

• 3:00David Sacks?

  On the shot clock, all right. Thank you, Jake. It's true. Last summer, I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss's Substack, talking about how financial deplatform would be the next wave of online censorship. And here we are. It's actually happened. What I could not have predicted is that it would occur in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, and that the reprisals would be directed by the government itself, not just a consortium of private actors. And what Trudeau has done is he didn't just employ the Emergency Act against the truckers so that he could basically arrest them and break up the protest. They have now directed banks and any financial institution,

• 3:41David Sacks?

  even cryptocurrency wallets, to freeze the accounts, not just of the truckers, but anybody who's contributed to them. Basically, anyone who's contributed $25 or more. There were two crowdfunding sites that they raised money from. All those people, the thousands of just ordinary Canadians who did nothing more than contribute to an anti-government protest. They are now at risk of financial ruin because their bank accounts have been frozen. And you have to wonder, what is the ends here that justifies the means? Covid, you know, Omicron is on the way, it's on its way out. At the same time that Trudeau was announcing these dictatorial measures, Ford, the guy who runs Ontario, the largest province.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  Fifteen seconds.

• 4:25David Sacks?

  Ford was out there saying that he was gonna, that Covid mandates were gonna be over. So why exactly are they doing this? You know, we're at the end of Covid and.

• 4:35David Friedberg?

  Sax, let me ask you a question.

• 4:37David Sacks?

  Yes, go for it.

• 4:39David Friedberg?

  If there were people online making donations to the criminals who loot and kill people in San Francisco, which you've railed against, being criminals who are breaking the law and should all be put behind bars, do you think that it would be appropriate in that context for the government to block their donations to supporting criminal activity and a criminal ring? You know, that I think we all agree, you know, shouldn't be transpiring.

• 5:03David Sacks?

  Well, but the implication there is that truckers are using violence or something like that, and they're not. I mean, it's been largely a peaceful protest. It's been very annoying to people who's, you know.

• 5:15David Friedberg?

  But isn't the case being made that they are actually breaking the law by blocking streets? And that's not, you know, there's a peaceful protest where you can go and get a permit and actually go in a public zone and peacefully protest within the confines of the law and what's allowed in that jurisdiction.

• 5:28David Sacks?

  Look.

• 5:28David Friedberg?

  But what these folks are doing is civil disobedience, which is not a peaceful protest. It is, you know, kind of breaking the law to make a point.

• 5:36David Sacks?

  It is peaceful because there's been no violence. If you look at actual videos.

• 5:39David Friedberg?

  But they're breaking the law, right?

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let me, let me ask the question for Friedberg then, Sax. If a group of truckers were shutting down the Bay Bridge with three lanes of traffic and then shut down the 280 and the 101, and it impacted this, if they in fact are shutting down roads.

• 5:58David Friedberg?

  And picking up our families and our businesses and our emergency travel.

• 6:02Jason Calacanis?

  And ambulances can't get through, would you want them to be towed? Would you want their cars to be towed?

• 6:05David Sacks?

  Listen, here's the thing. The Ambassador Bridge, this vital choke point of commerce between the US and Canada, that was blocked and that was creating a serious problem. But it had already been cleared on Monday by the time that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. And then on Tuesday, he then invokes this financial act.

• 6:22Jason Calacanis?

  Your opinion, Sax, if they, if they block roads and bridges. Would you?

• 6:27David Friedberg?

  If they're breaking the law?

• 6:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if they're breaking the law in that way. It's not just one lane, it's all three lanes.

• 6:32David Friedberg?

  It damages society. I'm just trying to understand the standard here because just zooming out to last year and the year before, right? There was a protest happening with BLM. And those BLM protests resulted in damage to private property, to burning cars. There were protests at the Capitol that involved folks trespassing into federal land and federal buildings. And now there's protests that are, you know, blocking vital trade routes and, you know, access to emergency vehicles and all this sort of stuff. To me, and also, you know, people in San Francisco breaking the law and not being put in jail. My personal opinion is anyone that's breaking the law, we should stop them for breaking the law. And anyone that wants to kind of, you know,

• 7:14David Friedberg?

  follow a peaceful protest or make a point should kind of make the point. But if the law is the law, shouldn't there be a universal standard to hold up the law? And if the case, and if the case is people are giving money to aid in breaking the law, shouldn't we stop the, you know, transmission of that money?

• 7:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's go to Chamath. Hold on, hold on a second. Look, I think you're conflating a bunch of really important things there. Aiding and abetting criminals is already illegal. There are RICO statutes that allow the authorities to go after people that are aiding and abetting through monetary support criminal behavior. Separately, there is a whole body of law at the federal, state, local level that allows you to deal with protests, okay? The real question is, why did you have to go and invoke emergency powers at the tail end of a pandemic for what is effectively nonviolent protests? Again, that's the key question, right? So just to give you some Canadian history,

• 8:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  as a Canadian citizen, what I can tell you is that we've invoked this Emergency Powers Act three times in the past. The first was for World War II. The second, sorry, World War I. The second was for World War II. And the third was the FLQ crisis, which was a domestic terrorist organization in Quebec that was fighting for a separate homeland. Those are the three other times in the past that a sitting prime minister has invoked these broad-sweeping emergency powers. And they did it because you exhaust the natural body of law and the Constitution and the Charter of Rights that governs the normal behavior of a democratic society. What this was is not any of those things. I don't think anybody could claim that a bunch of nonviolent protests, yes, they were annoying.

• 8:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, they basically stopped some commerce. But I don't think it was on the order of World War I, World War II, or a domestic terrorism issue like the FLQ crisis. So why invoke this basically "get out of jail free" card where you can behave without any checks and balances? This is the confounding. Hold on a second. Did we exhaust the current body of normal governing law? And if we didn't, why is this example okay? And the counterfactuals are so many. Imagine Trump invoked this thing during BLM. Imagine Biden did this right now. EU would be up in arms.

• 9:35David Sacks?

  I think that's well said. Let me just add something to that. The Emergencies Act that Trudeau invoked requires something like an act of espionage against the country or the word "serious violence" are in the law, or the threat of serious violence. Those conditions were simply not met. And then on top of that, to go after people who contribute as little as $25 to these truckers, who are trying to support them because these guys are not making any money. You know, they're living under very harsh conditions. So you make a small check. You write a small donation to support these people, to aid them. They're simple working-class people who are protesting for normalcy and to get their freedom back. And now all of a sudden, your bank account gets frozen?

• 10:19David Sacks?

  It is basically creating a, it's gonna have a chilling effect because it's essentially creating a cast of untouchables because no one's gonna want to associate with, transact with, or donate to this group of people, these designated people now, under the emergencies act, who your bank account can get frozen if you deal with them.

• 10:38Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's gonna have the opposite effect. I think this is gonna blow up in Trudeau's face. This is the worst decision-making by any major political leader in a long time. To go after a group of people, as Chamath said, in the waning days of a pandemic, what is the point? Why are we picking this? Why is he picking this guy to die on?

• 10:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, why do you guys think so?

• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

  It makes no sense!

• 10:57David Friedberg?

  But why is he doing it? And Chamath, why did the police not break, so I totally hear your point. Why did the police not break up these protests? Why did he need to invoke the emergency?

• 11:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they have been. Because, look.

• 11:08Jason Calacanis?

  They have been.

• 11:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that the police in some cases did, in some cases didn't. There were probably a lot of police sympathizers. There were probably a lot of sympathizers in general, as there were a lot of people who were detractors.

• 11:19David Friedberg?

  Are you thinking the police, you're saying there were police that were complicit?

• 11:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's the nature of a protest. You have people for, you have people against. But the point is, I think what's really clear is, Justin Trudeau first basically said, "These people are racists and misogynists." Then he said, "They just hold views that are just unacceptable to me." And then like a totalitarian dictator, invoked an emergency measures act that allows him to do what he wants. That's the fact pattern. He painted himself into a political corner and then tried to give, successfully, he gave himself absolute power for some period of time. And the real question, I think, is, why should this be allowed to happen in a democratic country, with democratic norms, against people that haven't done, as

• 12:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  far as I can tell, a shred of violent behavior?

• 12:08Jason Calacanis?

  No, it hasn't been violent.

• 12:09David Friedberg?

  Do you guys think?

• 12:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And where it's clear that the body of normal governing law hasn't been exhausted yet. Meaning, the minute that these people were asked to actually empty the ambassador bridge... They did. Guys, we're Canadians. That's what we do. Yes, we love to protest, but if you just ask us, we'll just go and do it.

• 12:28Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 12:29David Sacks?

  No, you're right. Trudeau never tried talking to them. I mean, why wouldn't he just try and why wouldn't he just try and negotiate with them? Instead, he demonized them right off the bat as white supremacists and Nazis and even, you know, Confederates, which I don't even understand in the context of Canada.

• 12:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is yet another example of the dying death right in front of us of the woke playbook, right? We talked about this last week. I think it's related to the San Francisco Board of Ed recall that's now national and probably even international news. You can roll all the, the, the reaction to Rogan, the reaction to Dave Chappelle. It's all part and parcel of this thing where people up and down the spectrum have learned what the mechanism of action is of this cancel culture and they don't fall for it anymore.

• 13:14Jason Calacanis?

  Trudeau did not get the memo.

• 13:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a person that's able to escalate it because he's actually in a seat of power and that's what I think people should be debating.

• 13:22David Friedberg?

  You mean shutting down dissenting voices from a position of power?

• 13:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just because, and he went on the record.

• 13:26Jason Calacanis?

  Unnecessarily.

• 13:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He went on the record and he said, guys, these views are unacceptable to me. Well, in a democratic society, that's not how it works.

• 13:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, not your choice, Justin. I mean, I could have engaged them.

• 13:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Views on all kinds of topics all the time. Unacceptable is not the threshold of World War II, World War I and the FLQ crisis.

• 13:45David Friedberg?

  Do you guys think that there's a moment here that also is a mile marker on the road towards the state versus crypto, given the actions that were taken against Bitcoin wallets? Because that seems to be like a big trend that's going to play out over the next decade or two.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  There, there are plenty of-

• 14:00David Friedberg?

  Inevitably, crypto is the threat to the state, right? And so, you know, you're going to see skirmishes like this that kind of, you know, hey, wallets that donate are illegal and, you know.

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  Freebie, this is one of the best points you've made. If you look at what this has done for Bitcoin and you look at what it's done for other cryptocurrencies, this will do more than McDonald's accepting Bitcoin because this is the first time like a Western democratic state is seizing people's funds like in an incredibly unfair, unnecessary way, which is just going to have more people say, you know what, maybe I should keep some of my net worth out of the government's purview if they're going to seize it anyway. And then now people are going to start looking into the coins that allow people to-

• 14:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You can't conflate having an enemy with having a different view. Those aren't the same thing. Having an enemy is a serious deal, right? Whether that's domestic or international. That's what we had to do in World War I, World War II, and the FLQ crisis. This is just somebody who has a different opinion. "I don't agree in mask mandates," is what one person says. "I want a mask mandate," is what the other person says. The idea that you can deplatform one or the other, or fire them from their job, or prevent them from having access to the money that they've earned, or preventing other people from donating money, that's really, um, it's a really low bar. And I think when you normalize this kind of behavior, it's a very slippery slope. And so if, if somebody else were to do it, they now have, like, it's,

• 15:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  again, going back to the Rene Girard sort of philosophical discussion from last week. One of the things about, you know, these stoning rituals, right, that Sacks talked about, that we talked about last week. One of the things that Rene Girard talks about is, "It is always hardest for that first person." Right? The first person that throws the stone, right? That's how Jesus was able to diffuse that, that incident as described in the Book of John. But in a different example, the first person that throws a stone all of a sudden normalizes it for everybody else after them, and then these stonings become commonplace, or became commonplace. So similarly, it's like, if you're a sitting democratic person who just decides this doesn't work for you,

• 16:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you can't flip the script and, and basically remove everybody's democratic rights. That's really crazy.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, you had a closing point you wanted to make?

• 16:14David Sacks?

  Well, okay, just on this point about Bitcoin. The, the reason why Bitcoin is necessary is because the tactics that Trudeau is using is essentially to starve these truckers out. To not only basically arrest them, but he's also taking away their insurance licenses. He's basically preventing them from ever working again. He's talked about that. "We're gonna put, give you a criminal record. It's gonna make it hard for you to get a job." And then, most importantly, on top of that, he's preventing anyone from helping them by contributing to them, by making a donation. So he's essentially starving these guys out. And that's the reason why Bitcoin is potentially helpful, is it allows people using non-custodial wallets to make a run around that and donate and help these, these people who are being persecuted, essentially.

• 16:57Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he could have just simply... chosen to do what Sacks's favorite president Obama did with Occupy Wall Street, which is say, great, you have something you want to voice. Here's where you can do it. Just, you know, no guns, no violence, but we let, how long did Occupy Wall Street last in downtown Wall Street and in Oakland and other places, like a year or two? And you just wait them out and that's it.

• 17:19David Sacks?

  I think when you encounter a sincere protest movement, the first thing you should do as leaders actually listen and try to understand what it is that they're protesting on behalf of. And Trudeau never did that. He went straight to a to 11 with this. And I think part of the reason why, I mean, Jake, how you asked, why, why is it that, that, you know, there seems to be a common denominator with this and with the Ukraine issue that the leaders are immediately escalating these situations instead of looking for a way to deescalate it. And they're doing it with the media egging them on. And so as, as harsh as Trudeau's rhetoric has been, the media's rhetoric around this has been even worse. You have this CNN contributor, Juliette Kayyem, who's also a Harvard professor,

• 17:59David Sacks?

  who basically tweeted that Trudeau needed to slash their tires, empty the gas tanks, arrest the drivers, you know, making it unclear how you'd ever get the trucks off the bridge. But then she said, cancel their insurance, suspend their driver's license, prohibit any future regulatory verification. She says, trust me, I will not run out of ways to make this hurt. You know, it's you have the media cheering this on, egging on Trudeau. They're doing the same thing, beating the drums of war on Ukraine. What is wrong with these people?

• 18:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, deescalate and where's the off ramp?

• 18:33David Friedberg?

  I think the biggest, the biggest story is this, um, this Bitcoin thing because, you know, if you guys think about like pre 1960s, like capital wasn't digitized. It was like physical, like you had to own like a stock certificate or cash or gold or bearer bond. Today, everything is digitized, right? Like there's a digital record of, you know, who owns what stock and who, how much is in your bank account and none of it is tied to you're having a physical asset. And ultimately the law was able to reach into these digital systems and have greater

• 19:07David Friedberg?

  oversight and ultimately control, you know, over accounts and so on. And it's had a, you know, the digitization of capital assets has had an incredible ability to drive economic growth and investment and ease of transaction. But it's also significantly increased the centralization of assets or the central influence over assets. Bitcoin seems to be the resolution to that. And now you're seeing the ultimate challenge to Bitcoin and the challenge to decentralized systems like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and so on. I don't want to speak specifically to anyone, but there seems to be like this trend line over the last 60 years that's now being challenged because you could have your accounts frozen at any moment, you know, for breaking the law or because emergency acts are induced.

• 19:51David Friedberg?

  And I think you're right, it's probably going to accelerate interest in these kind of off government chain into some separate chain. If Trudeau can do it, a lot of them.

• 19:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anybody can do it.

• 20:00David Friedberg?

  They're doing it in China, right? And they're, and I don't know if you guys.

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's the point of the digital yuan. It's the point of it.

• 20:06David Friedberg?

  The digital yuan is like this incredible.

• 20:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's the whole point.

• 20:08David Friedberg?

  It's like absolute centralization of every capital asset.

• 20:11Jason Calacanis?

  Here's where it could get scary.

• 20:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Think about dangerous the digital yuan is. The minute you say something that Xi Jinping doesn't like, it's a, it's a stroke of a keyboard key and all of a sudden.

• 20:20David Friedberg?

  All your assets are locked away.

• 20:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a database entry and you just basically reroute who it belongs to.

• 20:25Jason Calacanis?

  Or it could be, it could happen in America. They say, you know what? California now wants to have a wealth tax. Anybody who's got money, we're just going to take your money out of your account automatically.

• 20:34David Friedberg?

  Do you guys think we sound like a right wing politics show at this point?

• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

  No, this isn't a right wing politics thing.

• 20:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because I think, I think that we have so jumped the shark. There are things that are happening today, every day, that, you know, if you had said in isolation, two or three years ago, would any of these things ever happen? We all would have just looked at each other and said, it's impossible that these things could happen. But the problem is, fast forward two years of the pandemic, I think we have let a lot of our civil liberties decay right under our nose and we're not willing to fight for it because it's become too tribal and, and rights have been politicized. So the idea of having rights, you know, and then standing up for your rights, all of a sudden has to be a decision between whether you're left or right. That's crazy.

• 21:16David Friedberg?

  I don't think that liberties in the sense of government oversight have decayed. In addition to that. Liberties in the sense of a social setting have decayed. You know, because of cancel culture, we've normalized the ability to silence minority or dissenting voices. And this is both in the private enterprise setting as well as in the public setting. And it's, you know, I don't know, I don't consider myself a right wing conservative person by any stretch, but I do consider myself a person who believes in individual freedom and liberty.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  That's called an American, by the way.

• 21:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's basically being an American. And I think, you know, as we move on to this recall in San Francisco, I think Sacks made a really good point. Like, what are our political leaders doing here? Are they trying to stir the pot and antagonize these situations? If you look, you know, Clinton, Obama, a lot of people previously were trying to defuse these situations. And then Biden seems to be stirring the pot, Justin Trudeau, and then if you look at Trump with BLM, you know, and the immigration stuff, he never sat down and met with them and he arguably antagonized them. So I think this is a perfect segue into what happened. And, you know, so we should expect a little more from our political leaders. Great point from Sacks.

• 22:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You just brought up something incredible. You know, Trump railed against these BLM folks, but at no point did he try to shut down their bank accounts and take their money away.

• 22:38Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 22:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Trudeau, you know, this was not even near in the scale of BLM.

• 22:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, who's the bigger authoritarian? Yeah, I mean, it's clearly, if you, objectively, it's Trudeau in this situation.

• 22:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The scary authoritarianism, as we talked about in previous pods, tends to come from the left. At least the right, you see it coming.

• 22:55Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to re-

• 22:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's veiled under moral virtue signaling. That's what's so dangerous.

• 22:58David Sacks?

  Right, they're very sanctimonious. They claim, they claim to be the defenders of the working class while they're actually prosecuting them.

• 23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Such an unforced era, like, so dumb. He's gonna lose, right? Trudeau's gonna lose?

• 23:11David Friedberg?

  If a DA was elected and a police officer, a police chief were elected to San Francisco that said, "We are gonna freeze the bank accounts and, you know, demobilize the criminals that are ransacking our city, our people, our stores," would you support that?

• 23:28David Sacks?

  No, not if it's an extrajudicial use of power. I mean, the law specifies what you're allowed to do.

• 23:34Jason Calacanis?

  Do you think San Francisco is in an emergency situation? I mean, would you support the mayor taking on emergency authority to go and fix the problem, which she just did, by the way, in a tenderloin?

• 23:43David Sacks?

  Yeah, but that doesn't give her the power to go to Wells Fargo and say to Wells Fargo, "We want you to freeze all these accounts with no due process of law." That's basically what Trudeau has done.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's the overreach. That's the line you think is like, go and seize.

• 23:57David Sacks?

  You should have to go through a court proceeding to free someone's bank account, period. Can't just freeze someone's bank account.

• 24:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The law allows you to do this now. It's called RICO. So you follow the due process of the law, and you can do all those things, Friedberg, that you just mentioned. If you want to freeze somebody's bank account,

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 24:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you can actually do that. The government has the ability to do that. They don't need to pass this basically get out of jail free card to do whatever you want without any oversight.

• 24:24Jason Calacanis?

  And to Jamat's point earlier, have you exhausted the regular law here?

• 24:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They haven't exhausted the regular law.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  They haven't even tried. You can buy Fentanyl for five bucks on, you know, the tenderloin anytime you want.

• 24:36David Sacks?

  And meanwhile, all the provinces are ending COVID mandates anyway, so this whole issue is moot.

• 24:41Jason Calacanis?

  So dumb. This is like the stupidest behavior at the end of a pandemic that we've ever seen. And shout out to George Lucas for getting it right. I mean, if you look at the theme of Star Wars, it was like, "Oh, I just need emergency powers for a minute because of a trade federation blockade," and here we go.

• 24:56David Sacks?

  A crisis, a fake crisis.

• 24:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah, that wasn't George Lucas, by the way. I mean, that goes back to the Roman Empire, right? Like, yeah.

• 25:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that was the formation of the empire.

• 25:06David Friedberg?

  Caesar God emergency authority. I mean, this is a tried and true.

• 25:09David Sacks?

  And the polls, the polls show that actually, right, and the polls show that most of the public in Canada is applauding. So what was the line from Democracy Dies to Applause?

• 25:19Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. That's exactly. That was Padmé's line in the Star Wars films. All right, they're aging well, the prequels. Three members of San Francisco's Board of Education were.

• 25:27David Friedberg?

  They were the worst, just to be clear, but go on.

• 25:29Jason Calacanis?

  Not compared to the three just huge dumps that Disney took on the our childhoods with the sequels. Three members of the San Francisco Board of Education were recalled this week massively. They lost by between 72% and 79%. These were the virtue signaling maniacs who wanted to change the names of all the schools, wouldn't reopen the schools, yada, yada. And this really frustrated and they wanted to get rid of elite AP classes. All of this.

• 26:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They did, Jason, they did.

• 26:02Jason Calacanis?

  They did, yeah. And these three board members are out. So London Breed.

• 26:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, just to be clear, in the middle of a pandemic, I think my understanding is that instead of figuring out how to get these kids back in class, how to figure out how they could take off their masks, they wanted to drop Abraham Lincoln and George Washington's name from schools because it was it was too regressive.

• 26:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 26:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They canceled the gifted program because it made other kids feel bad. And a gentleman that wanted to serve on a committee, who I think was gay but not minority, was excluded because he wasn't a minority enough for them. So these are the three people that 76% of San Francisco citizens or residents just recalled.

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  And if you're not following this, the tech industry had a major part in this in terms of backing it. There was a lot of claims, which I'll let Sacks address in a moment, that this was a Republican-driven, out-of-state movement. But if you look, there are not 100,000 Republicans in San Francisco in all likelihood. This was actually parents in a lot of cases, based on the geography of San Francisco and the density of certain populations. A lot of Asian Americans came out in force in some neighborhoods, 90% were voting to oust these people. Gary Tan, who is a product of the San Francisco public education system and a great entrepreneur and venture capitalist, was a leader in this movement. So congratulations to him.

• 27:30Jason Calacanis?

  And this all is going to culminate, I think in May or June, Sacks will correct me, with the recall effort for Chesa Boudin, this killer DA who won't prosecute anybody. Sacks, what are your thoughts on this victory? And full disclosure, you were a major donor to this.

• 27:44David Sacks?

  I was the second largest donor and I was the largest donor under age 90. Arthur Rock was the biggest donor. What a badass, by the way. The guy's 95 years old. He donated $400,000 to this recall.

• 27:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In fairness, you live in San Francisco.

• 27:58David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a backdoor issue for you. You care about this.

• 28:00David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, look, I think crime in schools are the key quality of life issues in any community, and it transcends partisan boundaries. If your kids cannot get a quality education and you cannot be safe in your community, nothing else matters. And that matters to Democrats just as much as Republicans. And that's why, like you said, three quarters of San Francisco voted for this recall, even though 85% of them voted for Biden. It's not, it's basically a 90% Democrat city. So, you know, all these claims that was a Republican recall turned out to be nonsense. This was something that was broadly supported. And, and, you know, look, it's the same reason that Yonkin flipped a, you know, plus 10 Democrat state in Virginia, which is that, you know, it had a lot to do with school closures.

• 28:45David Sacks?

  They kept the schools closed for a year and a half. And then when they were supposed to have a PTA meeting about reopening it, like Jamos said, they spent five hours debating whether to allow this beloved gay parent onto a voluntary school board. They didn't. They spent all their time, you know, talking about changing the names of the schools instead of how to reopen them. They also, there's chronic mismanagement. I mean, the school's something like $125 million in debt despite, you know, being in a very rich city.

• 29:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They opened for one day.

• 29:14David Sacks?

  That's right.

• 29:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Just so that they could get a state, a piece of the state budget pie. So these kids clamored back to school just so that they could technically say, yeah, we were open and to get, I think it was a 12 or 13 million dollar check, and then they shut the schools down again.

• 29:28David Sacks?

  Right. And you brought a key point, Jason, which is that the Asian American community in San Francisco has been absolutely galvanized by this issue because this school board also, you know, Lowell High School is one of the best schools in the city, and it was merit based, and it had great advanced math programs. And this, this board basically got rid of all of that stuff. And it infuriated the Asian American community, many of whose most prominent members have basically risen out of poverty because of the education they got at Lowell. And so this war on merit that's happening is something that is going to, you know, flip the, you know, Asian American community, I think, to...

• 30:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When I, when I was growing up, I grew up in a French ghetto of Ottawa.

• 30:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I was supposed to go to a local high school that was just plainly trash. And I was able to go to an equivalent of Lowell, this a public magnet high school that had advanced classes in everything, a gifted program. And it really did change my life. And so I really understand what people are saying, which is like, when you're in poverty, the only way out is through an education, really. You may, you know, get accidentally lucky, but the only really predictable, sustainable pattern here is is through school. And so when you deprive folks from being able to get a decent education, and there's no real, you know, orderly logic to it, it's a really ridiculous kind of an idea.

• 30:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The other thing is, I think that this speaks very powerfully, as Sacks said, as a non, as a bipartisan issue that these Democrats have to get right, because, you know, you saw this also in Virginia, where Democrats basically went down this one tack. And, you know, the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin basically said, hey, listen, the schools are broken. It's completely doesn't make any sense. We oppose a lot of what's going on, the watering down and the critical race theory, et cetera, et cetera. And he put it to a vote. And a lot of people crossed the aisle there as well, where typically ardent Democrats basically voted for this Republican governor. I think the point is that there are just several issues that are just so transcendent,

• 31:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  like they're just, they transcend all party lines. And this is an anchor issue that we have to get right.

• 31:45Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any thoughts on this? Do you think this is the start of maybe a turnaround for San Francisco? Because Chesa Boudin is way more hated, and safety is an even bigger issue, I think, for a lot of people right now in San Francisco. And it dovetails with Asian hate and the number of Asian people targeted in crimes. So he's got a, I mean, if these people got out by 75% on average, he's going to be out by 95%. Is this a tipping point? Is San Francisco going to make a rebound?

• 32:14David Friedberg?

  I don't know. I mean, look, I think there's generally a broader.

• 32:19David Friedberg?

  Trend and momentum around what we classify as woke-ism, which I think is a little bit disparaging to the intention of social justice and recognizing the primary points of social justice through action and behavior in civic discourse and government behavior. And, you know, this, like the election of several DAs around the country who take a different stance to prosecution of crime to try and create better options for rehab and so on, I think is not a movement that's going to go away overnight. I think there's certainly a hefty amount of resistance, but what we're really doing

• 33:01David Friedberg?

  right now is I think we're learning and realizing the boundaries of this movement and of this moment. The one boundary that I think San Franciscans are too bad, San Francisco, like, you know, as in the case in tech, has always been so progressive in terms of, you know, doing these things faster than anyone else. But what we're realizing in San Francisco is non-prosecution of criminals, as the DA has undertaken over the past couple of years, leads to really heinous crime and rampant crime. And this kind of social justice movement within the education system causes a decline in the value of our education system. Those are two really important learnings that San Francisco has had over the past

• 33:41David Friedberg?

  couple of years with this very important and momentous kind of social justice movement. But it doesn't mean that the movement is over. It doesn't mean that quote-unquote woke-ism is over. It means that that social justice intent is still there, but we're realizing where the boundaries are and how far things can and maybe should go.

• 33:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I posted this article. Tyler Collin, who's a, you know, pretty well-known economist, he wrote this op-ed for Bloomberg. And what he said is that woke-ism has peaked. And there's just these two passages that builds on what Friedberg said. "By wokeism, I refer to a movement that on the positive side is highly aware of racism and social injustice and is galvanized towards raising awareness. On the negative side, it can be preachy, alienating, overly concerned with symbols and self-righteous." And I think that that probably does summarize sort of like where it starts, which is, I think, rooted in a very good place, but unfortunately, all too often where it ends, which is that

• 34:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  sort of moral absolutist judgment, cancel culture around it. And then the second quote that he said was the following, he said, quote, "Wokeism is likely to evolve into a subculture that is highly educated, highly white, and fairly feminine. That is, still a large mass of people, but not enough to run the country or all its major institutions. In the San Francisco School Board recall, for instance, the role of Asian-Americans was especially prominent." So, I don't know, I just think that all these things sort of, you know, people are looking for affiliation and you start with labels that bring you in and then you have to sort out, are all these labels really true and how true are they?

• 35:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think we're in this moment now where, now that we know the mechanism of action of wokeism, I just don't think it works anymore. And I think a lot of people will say, "I believe in the high order of deals of racial and social justice, but I don't believe in the mechanism of action."

• 35:34David Friedberg?

  Yeah, the pendulum swung too far, but, but, but the core intent of a generation of change is underway, which is social justice and climate change. I think those are the two big points of concern.

• 35:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It just won't be done with this cohort under this pandemic.

• 35:47David Friedberg?

  Well, it won't be done to this extreme this fast, right? And, and I think that the pendulum went too fast, too far, and it's, and, and there are boundary effects that are causing recourse right now. And we're, we're seeing this across the country, especially in New York with the election of the mayor, and San Francisco, the DA recall's happening in the next couple of months. So, Sax, what's your prediction on the DA recall, by the way?

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's 95%, but I mean, to build on your point, they were talking about 10% of the people in the United States who are involved in this, you know, retweeting and virtual signaling and, you know, is Twitter a real place? Well, no, a city's a real place. People have to live in San Francisco. And when these ideologies result in unlivable conditions for people, well, they're going to say, you know what, there's reality here. How do we get competent people to take the positions, Sax, that are being vacated now? Who should London Breed put in these three positions?

• 36:42Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe tech people need to, I mean, this is what I think has to happen. I think some number of tech people have to get off the bench and say, you know what? I'm going to do a tour of duty as politicians in San Francisco to, to take back the city. What should happen here in terms of who takes these positions? Cause Republicans can't win in San Francisco, so you're going to need moderate Democrats, right Sax?

• 37:00David Friedberg?

  Before Sax goes, can I just say something? Cause I think, I just want to say something that's really important Sax, I'm sorry to, to jump in. But Jake Hall, I, I think the point you're making about the tech people implies the tech people are effective and good at doing this. But that's not necessarily the fabric of San Francisco. I've lived in San Francisco since 2001. The number of people in San Francisco in 2001 that were in the tech industry was a minority. Since that time, it became a significant size. And over the last two years since the pandemic, it's decreased significantly. But San Francisco is a city with decades and generations of history. My wife's family is multi-generational San Franciscans. And I don't think that traditionally San Franciscans view tech people as the right people to solve these problems for them. That the intention of that city is not necessarily about let's get tech people to solve our problems.

• 37:45David Friedberg?

  They have a different set of values perhaps. Um, and so we, we often overstate and assume that tech people are the right people and are the, the problem solvers. But I don't think that that's necessarily the right problems that people want to solve. So I just, I just wanted to intervene and say that.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Well, then who should take these positions? Because it's typically really far left people are motivated to take these positions. I don't see business people writ large across all political, you know, positions, but specifically in San Francisco, don't want to take these positions. So is this just going to be replayed Sax?

• 38:15David Sacks?

  The recall effort was led by two parents, Autumn Illusion and Seva Raj. They're the ones who led this thing. They're the ones who rose up to basically oppose these crazy school board members. And that is who London Breach should talk to. I mean, she needs to go talk to the people who are successful in organizing this recall because they understand the issues, obviously. And the people are with them. So either appoint them to the board or ask them for their recommendations. And I think what you see consistently, whether it's with this SF, uh, school board or the, the, uh, the school boards that we saw in Virginia, that Yonkin very effectively ran against, is that they don't believe. The parents matter. Terry McAuliffe fatal, but his last gap was basically saying that the parents shouldn't get to decide what is taught in the schools.

• 39:00David Sacks?

  He basically said the quiet part out loud, but that is what still across the country, the teachers unions believe and most of the democratic party, the activists believe. And until they start losing elections, you're not going to see a change in that belief.

• 39:13David Friedberg?

  Oh my God, how awesome would it be if Sack were on the school board?

• 39:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God. Yeah. Uh, and just to, to put a pin in this, uh, and the cherry on top, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted seven to four to send a recall reform bill. So their reaction to all of this is to do a recall of recalls and say, now you, uh, can't recall somebody in their first year and the people who are placed in these positions can't run again. So now the speculation is the three people who got voted off are going to run again. So there's a lot more to come on this.

• 39:47David Sacks?

  Yeah. And also part, so they're, they're putting this, this app that they're putting that on the ballot on June 7th, the same day that we vote on the recall of Jason Booty and the board of supervisors now put in this measure that would make it far harder to recall people. One of the provisions of that is whoever London Breed appoints as the successor, like you're talking about. They cannot run after that. So it is designed to, for no, that makes no sense. They're basically.

• 40:12Jason Calacanis?

  What if they do a great job?

• 40:13David Sacks?

  Right. Exactly. It makes no sense. So you have the board of supervisors trying to throw a wrench into the democratic process. Meanwhile, these are people who claim to be preserving democracy, saving democracy. They are trying to throw a wrench in the.

• 40:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thing is underlying it, David, is they think they know better. That's what it fundamentally comes down to. They are willing to have democracy up to a point. And when that point is an unacceptable view by somebody else, they feel like they know better and they're willing to be really draconian in whatever they do to decide.

• 40:44David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Jason Calacanis?

  And shout out to Mike Bloomberg. I'll pull up the, the tweet for everybody. He hasn't been very vocal or been on the stage much, but obviously he did a great job in New York on reforming schools. The San Francisco School Board recall should be a wake-up call to elected officials, especially Democrats across the nation. Parents are fed up with the status quo and that puts adults ahead of kids.

• 41:07David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jason Calacanis?

  And ideology ahead of results. Well said, Mike.

• 41:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, well said.

• 41:12Jason Calacanis?

  Mr. Bloomberg.

• 41:13David Sacks?

  Yes, that was very good. And Bloomberg has been very good on calling out the Democrat, the Democratic Party's blind loyalty to the teachers' unions. And until they're willing to break with the teachers' unions, who are their biggest donor, we're not going to get any real progress on school reform. And this is the issue, my favorite political commentator, one of them is Roy Chisholm, who's a Democrat, he wrote the Emerging Democrat Majority. He wrote a blog post talking about how Asian-American voters are going to swing away from the Democratic Party because of issues like this, because of the decline of standards in school.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  And safety.

• 41:46David Sacks?

  And the Asian-American community, I think, is galvanized on this Chesa Boudin issue because they have seen in all these cases of Asian hate, where elders in their community have been violently assaulted, Chesa Boudin has done nothing except release the perpetrators.

• 42:00Jason Calacanis?

  Bonkers. All right, well, listen, this seems like a good turning point. We talked about on this podcast over and over again about the compression in SaaS multiples, in the public market valuations, something that we're still working through in the stock market, which has been choppy at best over the last couple of months. An information story came out just this week, major crossover funds like Tiger and D1 are slowing down their investments in late-stage private companies. And I was talking to some folks who said the multiple compression is here now, they're not doing the deals at 75 or 100x revenue. This was reported in an article by The Information. Tiger Global told their LPs in a webinar earlier this month that it would no longer focus on backing late-stage startups preparing to go public.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  Instead, they will focus on two things: going even earlier into Series A and Series B rounds, and buying shares of public tech companies that have sunk in value compared to the all-time highs. Obviously, we know Twilio, Zoom, Block, all down over 60% from their one-year highs. I could get into more details here, but let's stop for a second. And Chamath, what are your thoughts?

• 43:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In the dot-com bubble...

• 43:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It took somewhere between three to five years for most stocks to bottom. And they bottomed, I think, peak to trough somewhere, you know, towards 80% of where they were in 2000. Right. So it took three to five years to go basically minus 80%. We did that in three months, you know, maybe four months. And so the markets have become a lot more efficient over time. So now that we have that reset, it's pretty natural that there's going to be a very quick reset on the private market side. And, you know, you have to go where the bodies are buried. And what I mean by that in this case is the overwhelming misvaluation of late-stage private companies.

• 43:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so these folks don't have much of a choice. They have a lot of money that they've raised before all of this happened. They have a huge portfolio of stuff that they've marked up or had been marked up by others. And they don't want to go through the pain now of resetting. So part of the easy strategic decision there is to say, you know what? We know this is a little bit radioactive. But instead of really figuring out what the mark on these companies are, we'll go to a different sort of part of the playground and play there. Because we don't have to go and deal with these issues. And, you know, we can do 10, 15, 20 million dollar checks into early-stage businesses. Pretty normal reaction strategically.

• 44:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think the reality is that at some point in the next year or two, these other companies have to get public. The hope is that the market catches back up. So that you can defend the last valuation. And that's the, that's the way that this stuff doesn't require a lot of pain. The problem is if you're high burn. And you were counting on yet another successive round. Or you're at a point in your lifecycle where you need to go public. In the next two years, if you go public, you will get taken to the woodshed.

• 45:05Jason Calacanis?

  Taken to the woodshed being your valuation might be half of what it is in your last round. So there's going to be medicine that has to be taken, Sax.

• 45:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There'll be medicine.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Some people are going to have to take some medicine. Sax, what's your best advice, being one of the great operators in the history of Silicon Valley as a CEO of PayPal? Gee, thanks, Jacob. Well, I'm going to put you up there with Sher. I mean, I think, I think everybody agreed, the top four, people can correct me here. I was a good operator.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I saw what you did to ICQ, man. You were riding that that bad boy down. That wasn't easy.

• 45:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I delivered a billion fucking users to a company.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 45:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's pretty decent.

• 45:39Jason Calacanis?

  Um, you did pretty good at Facebook, I'll say that. But if I would think most people would say Sachs, Sheryl, Tim Cook, Keith Raboy, we'll put that aside for the debate in terms of operating.

• 45:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Throw in a little dark spicy barbecue pork here. Come on.

• 45:51Jason Calacanis?

  I put you in the top 25, Chamath. Sure. Okay. But I mean, it wasn't your chosen career.

• 45:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A little dark meat. A little dark meat. Nice, Jake.

• 45:59Jason Calacanis?

  He's don't get me in trouble. Bring me into your orbit.

• 46:05David Friedberg?

  Wait, J Cal, who were your top four? Sheryl, Tim Cook?

• 46:08Jason Calacanis?

  My top four in this order. I'll give it an order.

• 46:09David Friedberg?

  So basically, four white people when basically Asian and Indian CEOs run most of the tech companies and stuff.

• 46:17Jason Calacanis?

  I'm talking about number two COOs, not CEOs. Just for the CEO position, to be clear. I'm not talking CEO. I'm talking COO. I would say Tim Cook, when he was Steve Jobs, that's my number one operator last 20, 30 years. Number two, I put Sheryl Sandberg, who did obviously amazing things for Google and then Facebook, right? Those two would be my top two. And then I tie my top two Sachs as PayPal and Zenefits, even though it didn't work out, it was still a great run at the time. And then I put Keith Raboy, Square, and a couple of other companies he did. Those are my top four. Anybody else want to come at me? Go ahead. I don't have complete data set on COOs. But where would you put Sachs? Did I put you fair?

• 46:58David Sacks?

  I disagree.

• 47:00Jason Calacanis?

  Who am I to disagree?

• 47:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, and wasn't Keith at LinkedIn as well?

• 47:05David Sacks?

  You are, J Cal, lately.

• 47:07Jason Calacanis?

  It's a love fest now.

• 47:09David Friedberg?

  There we go. There we go. They're back together.

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  You're advising. Listen, you and Friedberg are at each other's throats, so I'll just let you guys fight it out and I'll be all about the love.

• 47:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, Friedberg, why are you attacking J Cal?

• 47:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Friedberg.

• 47:22David Sacks?

  Be quiet over there. No one's asking you.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  Stay in your lane, Friedberg. So Sachs, as an operator extraordinaire, what's your best advice to the company that raised 100 million? And let's say their valuation is now not a billion, it's 500 million. What are the steps you take? You got 14 months of runway in the bank. Do you lay people off? Do you extend it to 24? What are your thoughts? You must be dealing with this with companies in your portfolio.

• 47:44David Sacks?

  Well, there's a few things going on. First of all, I think Tiger built a great business in providing late-stage, sort of passive, non-dilutive capital to companies, SaaS companies. We have a bunch of SaaS businesses that they provided later-stage financing. I think those valuations are going to come down. I don't know that they're going to be such a great partner for Series A firms because they are passive. And, you know, what we see is that Series A companies need a lot of help. They need a lot of advice. You need a lot of help with recruiting.

• 48:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Governance.

• 48:12David Sacks?

  Governance. They need, you know, when they're growing from, say, 20 employees to 100, they need to know what that org chart looks like, and on and on and on. So I don't know that if this, I don't know if this reporting is actually true, but if the goal is all of a sudden for Tiger to become a Series A investor that competes with Kraft or Sequoia or these other firms that are very hands-on, that doesn't seem like a great strategy to me. I do think that for our later-stage companies, they have to realize that, you know, if they raise...

• 48:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I take the other side of this? Sorry. David, I just want your reaction to this. I think it's going to work, but not for the right reasons. The reason it'll work is there are way more entrepreneurs now than there are great entrepreneurs. And so of all of these entrepreneurs that exist, the idea of getting passive money where you won't get fired, where there is that, remember like, remember when we were growing up in Silicon Valley? The risk is always like, if you take Sequoia, Benchmark, you know, social capital, like, there's a high bar for that capital, which means we are helping you run this business effectively. And there's a cost where if you don't perform, you will get fired. There's always been that risk.

• 49:20David Sacks?

  It's true, and I guess that's the argument they could make. But the flip side is that there's a lot of these...

• 49:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So the CEO now, why would you take a $15 million Series A check from Sequoia where they could fire you? Whereas $15 million from Tiger, they may never call you.

• 49:33David Sacks?

  We address that by, look, if a founder's really worried about that, we address that by giving them three board seats. You know, we might have one, they might have three. I mean, my view on it is you just never fire a founder unless he does something criminal. It's just that simple. But, so look, I think there's ways of addressing the governance where you can get the help or the value out of an early-stage firm without giving up the control.

• 49:58David Sacks?

  So yeah, I mean, look, that's the pitch that Tiger would make, but I think that's addressable.

• 50:02Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think of that pitch, Friedberg? We'll give you the $15 million Series A. You don't have to have a board. You can just be passive and let us know how it goes. Give us a quarterly report. We'll look at the P and L.

• 50:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's all of crypto now anyways.

• 50:15David Friedberg?

  That's true.

• 50:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, that's a fair point. No governance in crypto is leading to a lot of weird stuff, I can tell you.

• 50:20David Friedberg?

  I tell people this a lot. So I had three term sheets for my Series B. It was from Andreessen Horowitz, Cosla Ventures, and Founders Fund. And Founders Fund came in kind of last minute. But I went with Cosla, even though it was a lower valuation, because Vinod was pretty insistent, like, let me put someone that could be useful, some, you know, government person, because we were doing a lot of work lobbying in DC, on your board. We won't be on your board. We won't bother you. And I took the round. And then my Series C I took from Founders Fund, because Brian Singerman, who's obviously a good friend, you know, made the case like, look, our model at Founders Fund is we let founders run the business. We're not here to tell you how to run your business. And they were both great fits. And, you know, it worked out well. I didn't, I had,

• 51:03David Friedberg?

  I have had experience with antagonistic VCs on boards. And, you know, it generally creates a pretty negative dynamic. Now, when I'm on a-

• 51:10Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us the worst story without the person's name.

• 51:13David Friedberg?

  I don't think I want to go public with it, so I'm not going to do that. But when I was on-

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  Give us an idea of what the behavior would be, because there are people in the audience who want to know what is bad behavior of VC? Just give us a composite.

• 51:22David Friedberg?

  When you're an entrepreneur or CEO running an early-stage business, you live that business 20 hours a day. You know the details. If you're smart, you're thorough, you're analytical, you're creative, there is no one that's going to come in the boardroom for two hours a quarter and suggest things to you that you haven't thought of. There's no one that's going to come in the room and be smarter than you at your own business. And so more often than not, Vinod's been exceptional at defining this problem. The problem is VCs think, join a board, and they think that they have to, quote, add value. So they come in and they make a bunch of suggestions and recommendations and push you to do a bunch of things. And as Vinod has said correctly many times, they more often than not add negative value. They can actually destroy and damage a business because they need to feel like they're exerting some degree of influence over the business.

• 52:06David Friedberg?

  And as a result, they push the business to do things that the CEO or founder otherwise wouldn't be doing. And that often ends up in a kind of weird, sticky kind of place.

• 52:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I just validated the Tiger pitch right there.

• 52:16David Friedberg?

  I think that's right. And by the way, it's why Founders Fund, Founders Fund is fantastic. I don't know if you guys are LPs, but their investment returns are so far beyond what I think anyone really realizes. They're incredible investors. And a big part of it is they try and find the entrepreneur that doesn't want and doesn't need the help. And then they give them the capital to go and execute and they leave them the heck alone. And they are just so good at finding those folks, identifying them, and then literally being passive in how they kind of manage and operate their business. And that's why they were so friggin' good.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  I think the people you're talking about are a lot of rookie VCs who come in and then, yeah, they think they have to add value.

• 52:51David Friedberg?

  Not just rookie, just experienced ex-operators even, people who ran businesses who say, I know how to run a business. And look, no two businesses are alike. So maybe the way they ran their business with their team and their market and their industry worked well for them. But now when they got to come in and do it with someone else's business in some other space with some completely different team, you know, they try and exert influence and really it's just, you know, not wanted.

• 53:11Jason Calacanis?

  Let me go to Sacks. Sacks, hold on, I want to just get one from you. Give us an idea because you've been in the business for over 20 years. I mean, by the looks of it, maybe 40, but 20 years of just crushing it in the business. What's the worst behavior you've seen on a board? You can make a composite of like a VC being destructive on a board?

• 53:31David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think sometimes VCs will have sort of hobby horses and they'll keep pushing for things that the founder doesn't want. That's not productive. But what I would say is, first of all, let me just say like, I'm not somebody who likes to take board seats. And I do it as a, it's like, I see it as a cost, not a benefit to me, because it takes up my time. If I didn't have to ever take a board seat, that'd be a great, as far as I'm concerned, that'd be a good thing. I'm not somebody who wants to, you know, insert myself and get on these boards, you know?

• 54:03Jason Calacanis?

  Offered as an incentive, no?

• 54:04David Sacks?

  I only, I only take a board seat.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  Close deals.

• 54:06David Sacks?

  Yeah, the only reason I'll ever take a board seat is because I have to do it because the founder insists that otherwise they won't go with.

• 54:12Jason Calacanis?

  I've seen it.

• 54:12David Sacks?

  With offers. So, exactly.

• 54:14Jason Calacanis?

  And then you'll do it for one year, right? You'll say, hey, I'll do it for a year?

• 54:16David Sacks?

  I always time limit it now because I just can't, I mean, I can't make a 10-year obligation, you know? It's typically like one or two years and then, you know, we'll see. Doesn't mean I'll roll off in two years, but, but I, but I need to have the expectation set up. And, and the reality is if the company can perform well for another two years, they'll be at a different stage and maybe they won't, you know, need my help as much. So.

• 54:39Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath?

• 54:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The two most valuable pieces of private equity that I own?

• 54:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is a company called DCG and it's a company called Netscope. And collectively, it's like billion dollars worth of stock that I own.

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 54:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm on the board of one. I'm not on the board of the other anymore. And I text with these guys maybe once every two or three months at best. So, you know, completely confirming, David, your point that great founders are just N of one individuals. You know, Barry Silbert, Sanjay Barry, next level guys. But that's very different than the the series A playbook. Because when I ran institutional money, I'm telling you, there is a pressure to be involved and show some value. And I do think that there is a level of judgment on the CEO that has happened. Now, maybe that's changed historically, but I think that's the single biggest pivot

• 55:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that one would exploit if you were Tiger or Co2 or D1 stepping into the early stage game, which is to essentially make it a feature. And it's not dissimilar to when DST and Yuri Milner entered the late stage round. You know, what was his big differentiation? I'll take common stock and I won't take a board seat.

• 55:52Jason Calacanis?

  I do not need a board seat to be influential.

• 55:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It seems so counterintuitive and so against the grain, but he acknowledged what was this thing that up until that point was true, which is common and preferred converged in price per share. So buying common in a late stage company was the same as buying preferred.

• 56:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yo, that's something you should explain, Chamath, for a second. People don't know this, but add an IPO.

• 56:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, so when you set up a company, you have a price per share of the common stock and then a price per share that the series A investor has. The series A investor is buying preferred shares that actually looks more like debt than equity. And what I mean by that is there's typically a coupon, there's a rate of return, there's accumulated dividends. All these features give it a certain price per share and the common has none of those features and so it has a lower price.

• 56:41Jason Calacanis?

  Protective provisions.

• 56:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that gap is typically around 20 to one when you set up a company. Okay. And that's what allows you to hire employees and give them very, very cheap options with embedded upside. Then what happens is you raise more and more of these series B, series C, series D, these preference stack, right? Preferred shares build up, but the value of the common keeps rising too. And by the time you go public, the gap converges.

• 57:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What Yuri realized was, hey, wait a minute, I'm buying a company a year or 18 months before it goes public, the price of the common and the price of the preferred are roughly the same. And so I'm just gonna, you know, do that. And I'm not gonna take a board seat because it's clear this company is successful. So similarly, for Tiger, D1 and COTU, I would just observe the obvious and kind of put everything that we've just said on the table, which is, hey, guys, I'll give you the money. You're either N of 1 or not. I'm making a guess that you are, and I'm just gonna get out of your way and leave you alone.

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  So unbundling governance and unbundling the governance and advice piece from the capital piece, but you're gonna still need that governance and advice piece, I think.

• 57:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it could work.

• 57:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of great founders, or they're founders who start young and experience to become great. And the smart ones listen to advice on the way and they seek out people who've done it before. And so, you know, yes, they may be an N of 1 business by the growth stage, but that doesn't mean they don't need any help whatsoever at the Series A stage.

• 58:04Jason Calacanis?

  Such a good observation.

• 58:05David Sacks?

  Yeah, and look, I think there's been, I think there's been an evolution in Silicon Valley. I'd actually say there's been like three distinct phases in the venture capital world, and I remember all of them. So you go back to the late 90s, okay, when you had this mentality on the part of VCs that if a company became successful, you would just automatically replace the founders, right? You'd go bring in a professional CEO.

• 58:25Jason Calacanis?

  Upgrade.

• 58:26David Sacks?

  That was a disaster, okay? And that's when Founder's Fund, Peter came in, I think founded Founder's Fund in 2003. And the reason they called it Founder's Fund is to indicate they were gonna be pro-founder and they would never replace the founder. And they would let you do whatever you wanted. And I think

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  You wanna tell the backstory of the Sean Parker stuff and how that happened?

• 58:43David Sacks?

  Well, yeah, I mean, so basically, both Peter and Sean Parker had, you know, experiences they felt were very negative with Sequoia. And by the way, I have great relationships with Sequoia. Rollo, who worked with us at PayPal, is there, and I think they've evolved as a firm, so I'm not calling them out or anything, but both Sean, Parker and Peter felt like Sequoia pushed to have them replaced.

• 59:05Jason Calacanis?

  With Plaxo specifically.

• 59:08David Sacks?

  There are a couple of different companies involved, but when Peter was CEO of PayPal as well, that, you know, he felt, he felt that pressure as well. So when they then founded, as two of the four founding partners of Foundersome back in 2003, the whole point was, we are going to be pro founder, you are never going to replace you, you will, you do whatever you want. I think that was, that was phase two. And that became, I think, the dominant model. And so becoming pro founder was now table stakes. And I think the third phase has been, you know, what Andreessen Horowitz has now done with this massive, like, the services and the value add, which is that we're going to basically not only be pro founder, but we're going to like bring all these resources to help you. And that's the era we're in right now. I mean, from the, from our perspective, like as, as Kraft, I

• 59:53David Sacks?

  mean, look, it's not in our interest to get into any dispute with a founder. And if we feel like our advice isn't being taken, well, we just back off. You know, of course, we're pro founder. Like, we don't want the control. We're not control investors. And, you know, if it's, if it's, if it's becoming frictional, we'd rather just get out of the way. It's just not worth it.

• 1:00:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, of course. But the, the underlying thing that you're not seeing, though, is because you have enough of a fund that's large enough where you can have enough bets where any of these, any of these things to the upside is a total needle mover. But anything that goes to zero doesn't actually diminish the fund or impair it meaningfully. So there is no upside to getting engaged and really being non anti-founder. So I think it's a, I think it's a part of a business model. But one thing I want to tell you about Parker, Parker was single-handedly incredibly responsible for keeping Zuck in the seat when he was president of Facebook, because Parker wrote, you know, the structure that really allowed Mark to keep control.

• 1:00:45David Friedberg?

  Super voting shares. Sacks, to, to add on to your, your point, I think that there's been, so, so it, there seems to be a bifurcation around the services model or not. But the fourth thing that seems to have happened, and you guys tell me if I'm wrong on this, but it, it plays into the Tiger Global story. When I was, when I got that term sheet for my Series B at Climate Corp, Marc Andreessen, I was trying to raise like 25 to 30 million dollars. And Marc Andreessen was like, we're going to give you a term sheet for 40 million dollars, more than you were asking for. Because we want you to use that extra capital to go faster, to go harder, to grab the market, because we have this big belief in businesses that grabbing the market. And that seems to have also become a bit of a mainstay, but not just a mainstay,

• 1:01:26David Friedberg?

  but now almost like the kind of standard pitch that a lot of the later-stage guys are taking, which is like, here's so much capital that it helps you make the market. And then the SoftBank Vision Fund kind of took that to the extreme with $100 billion raise, and Tiger Global, I think last year, have publicly said they deployed about $15 billion into startups, where a startup may, in a natural cycle, kind of evolve to needing $70 million raise or $100 million raise, and they're like writing checks for $250 or $300, and saying this extra capital gives you the ability to move faster. And the reason is, the faster a business moves, the higher the multiple they get on their revenue. So the higher the growth rate, the higher the multiple. So if you can deploy capital faster, if we can find a business where we can pump money

• 1:02:09David Friedberg?

  through you to get it out the door faster, your multiple goes up. And Tiger's model was, let's just get the multiples up, there's multiple expansion and growth, so we'll make money two ways when the company goes public in 18 to 24 months. Obviously, when the markets end up tanking and all those multiples compress, no growth rate is going to solve that problem for you. But having more capital than maybe you were thinking or asking for also seems to have become kind of a tactic. I don't know if you view that as kind of this fourth evolution, but that certainly wasn't the case 20 years ago when VCs were being careful about, is it a $6 million round or an $8 million round? What's the right amount of capital? And nowadays, it's much more about take more than you need.

• 1:02:47Jason Calacanis?

  I'll say there was a 3.5 in there, which is, you saw a little bit of lack of governance or superpowers on the part of like some incompetent founders or bad founders, just, you know, whether it's WeWork, Theranos, whatever, too much control, not enough governance, things go off the rail. But, you know, based on this discussion, I really think this bifurcates when it's a first-time founder versus a second-time founder, in what I see, because I have been doing board training for seed companies where I will just have three founders sit in on each other's first board meetings. We do one board meeting each, and I train them how board meetings works and what I experienced with Sequoia on my board and other boards. And first-time founders, like the tactical stuff, how to run a board meeting, legal, HR, hiring, partnerships, go-to-market strategies, man, it is...

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  All tactical all the time. And then when I've been on with second and third time founders, you know, they really are like, here's all the materials. Here's what I'm thinking about. What do we think strategically? So they go from the tactical level to the strategic admission level awfully quick. And they actually seem to enjoy having those four meetings a year. Whereas the first time founders really need to have six to 10 a year in those in that first, you know, call it year two of a company. That's my experience.

• 1:03:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I realized in this discussion that the market has really meaningfully changed, meaning when I was actively investing, even in the early 2000s, or sorry, in the, in the, you know, 2011, 12, 13. There was a culture where if you underperformed, you would get replaced. And I think David, what you just spoke about, which I guess is true, has really changed, which is if you're running a multi, multi billion dollar fund, where every check is $20 million, the upside is billions, but the downside is negative 20. There's just no point. And so, you know, Sequoia used to be known as a very, very, very tough, tough, tough place for CEOs that were underperforming.

• 1:04:36Jason Calacanis?

  Now they got a $9 billion fund.

• 1:04:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now you have a $9 billion fund. It doesn't matter anymore. Not, no, not even, even 10, less than 10 years ago. I think it was, I think it was known as a very tough, demanding place. I think Benchmark was known as a very tough, demanding place because the money was much more finite.

• 1:04:51Jason Calacanis?

  But Benchmark's still, still that case. High expectation culture. They never, they never grew their fund size.

• 1:04:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Jason, you're not, you're not hearing me, yeah?

• 1:04:59Jason Calacanis?

  I am. I think what's happening is, listen, I had Sequoia on my board and I worked at Sequoia, so.

• 1:05:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's difference between high expectations, which I think all these folks have to have, and the willingness to replace the founder as CEO. And what I'm saying is every VC claims this, but there were a handful of VCs that had the courage to do this. I mean, famously, Mike Moritz and John Doerr, you know, had it out with Larry.

• 1:05:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At the, you know, right, right after this round, like either go public, you know, get your business model or give us our money back famously at Google. So they're not, they're willing to draw a line in the sand. I think that that has fundamentally changed at all these organizations because the fund sizes have gone up and the mathematical reality of venture capital has changed.

• 1:05:41Jason Calacanis?

  Something else you're missing, which is you've got to remember, Maritz and Dore were not operators and now these companies are being run. Ruloff is running Sequoia and he's an operator and he was there. So the changing of the guard and Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were operators. So the operator class behaves very differently.

• 1:05:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I disagree with you. I think that it fund size dictates...

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we respectfully disagree.

• 1:06:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, hold on. I think that fund size dictates its behavior more than any singular other feature. When you're running a $9 billion fund, you just don't sweat that changing of the CEO and David said it really well. You just say, okay, I'll cut our losses and move on. We don't lose any brand.

• 1:06:16Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's more about the culture change in Silicon Valley of a bunch of MBA finance people who have never run a company now moving and running companies. But, you know, let's move on to the next. Any closing thoughts on this one?

• 1:06:26David Sacks?

  Well, just, I mean, Jason, you start to make this point that if you're a founder and you want to eventually run a great public company, when you IPO, guess what? You're going to have governments. And what I've seen...

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  Big time.

• 1:06:39David Sacks?

  Big time, right? I mean, there's just Delaware law. There's just a lot of like expectations around being a public company. And so if you don't have a board, you know, and you're not constituting one until you go public, there's going to be a massive amount of cleanup that you have to do. I mean, that's what I've seen. And so, you know, you'll end up scrambling to create a board. I think that a board serves so many purposes early on of giving you advice, of giving you structure, of providing support, help, services. You can still remain in control while getting those things. And I'm just skeptical that like if you form a company with completely passive VCs, you don't even serve on a board, like you're going to have to do a lot of cleanup later, I'd say at a minimum.

• 1:07:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Totally. I think that that's true too.

• 1:07:25Jason Calacanis?

  Totally agree.

• 1:07:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not, by the way, I'm not saying I advocate this, but I just think that the reality is that if these large late-stage crossover firms really step into the early stage, I think they could really build a big book of business. I do think there are a lot of founders who would love to just be given the money and just to be left alone. I'm not saying that they think, they know that it's better for them.

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  But on the margin, just to be able to be left alone. Now, what has changed, maybe those, everybody's going to be very hands off, just because all the fund sizes have exploded. So at that point, then, you know, what is the difference between Sequoia and D1? Time will tell.

• 1:08:01David Sacks?

  I just know that, like, when I see a founder doing something that I think could risk the company going off the rails, I'll say so. And then, you know, if it keeps happening and the situation gets worse, I'll say so again. I might mention it a third time, I might not. At a certain point, I'm just like, maybe after like two times, I'm just like, they don't want to listen to me, that's fine. It's their decision. Their company, their decision. They go off the rails, their problem. You know, we'll move on to the next one. I mean, that's the reality.

• 1:08:28Jason Calacanis?

  Sometimes founders have to learn by doing it. Like, sometimes their intent, and you know what? They could be right, and you could be wrong, too. So it's hard as a, as a, as hard as a board member, you know, that's why I'm very judicious in giving advice as a board member now, and I'm on a bunch of boards and do board training. Because when Ruloff was on my board, and he still is, you know, he would ask great questions, and he would be very thoughtful about, hey, have you thought about this? Or when I got advice from Doug or Michael Moritz directly, you know, Doug would say, hey, well, can you share the two-year plan with me? And I'd say, you know, we haven't built a plan. And he said, well, you know, Jason, you know, hope is not a plan. Let's make a plan, and let's discuss, you know, the milestones along here. And it was amazing to have that level of thoughtfulness around your vision as a founder.

• 1:09:09David Sacks?

  I love, I mean, as a founder, I love getting advice. And I think you've got to be really dumb not to seek it out. I mean, I, when I was a founder, I would, even though I was sort of competing with Benny Off, I would meet with him, and I would like get amazing tidbits. Just recently, we did, it wasn't like an official board meeting, because Ruloff isn't on our board, but he's a big investor in one of my incubations, Colin. And we just did a meeting with him, and, and, uh,

• 1:09:35Jason Calacanis?

  Gets it in every time. Not to be confused with Allin, but yeah, not to be confused with all-in trademark.

• 1:09:40David Sacks?

  It was, it was me and Axel, who's the co-founder of Colin and, and Ruloff. And we had like an amazing meeting where we got, like, I'd say amazing advice from Ruloff, that like focused us. And it wasn't that I didn't know these things, but it's just like when you're in the weeds sometimes, you don't necessarily crystallize on focus on the most important thing. And I came out of that meeting, meeting feeling like, okay, Ruloff just refocused us on the most important thing. And it was immensely valuable. And you've got to be like dumb not to seek that out, no matter what stage you're at. Because I seek it out today.

• 1:10:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and think about this, David. You're in the thick of things. He's on Squares board. He's on other boards. He's got a picture of the entire playing field. It's like somebody who's the coach of 15 NBA teams, and you're like the coach of one. He's seeing things on other NBA teams that they're doing in methodologies and best practices that you're just not going to see. So, I mean, again, and then if you look at the great founders, TK used to come to me and say, hey, you know, this is the thing I'm going to be doing at the next board meeting, or here's the thing, can we jam out? And he would just ask for a jam session. He came up with that term, and three or four people would get together and just jam and talk for five hours about the product. It was awesome.

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's go on to David Sacks's favorite section of the show, science with the Sultan of Science himself.

• 1:11:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I thought you were going to say his fight with Paul Graham.

• 1:11:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, enough with that.

• 1:11:06David Sacks?

  Ooh, we can't talk about that. That was so good.

• 1:11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Fighting, you have to, you, if you are engaged in the science segment.

• 1:11:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David Sacks and PG are in a fight.

• 1:11:15David Sacks?

  All right, let's cover it.

• 1:11:15Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the deal. If David Sacks is engaged during the science portion of the class, we will let him have his fight as the, as the teacher here. Tell us a little bit about stem cells and this HIV story.

• 1:11:28David Friedberg?

  I was going to tell Sacks that the, the earth is round. Okay, it's not flat.

• 1:11:32Jason Calacanis?

  I don't care.

• 1:11:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Jason Calacanis?

  How does that affect Solana?

• 1:11:36David Friedberg?

  So, sorry, the, the story that I think we wanted to, you guys wanted to cover today with the HIV story, which, um.

• 1:11:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredible.

• 1:11:42David Sacks?

  I suggested this topic, so I'm interested. Explain it to us.

• 1:11:46David Friedberg?

  HIV is a retrovirus, meaning once you get infected, it doesn't go away. He doesn't care.

• 1:11:52David Sacks?

  We better, we better come back to PG.

• 1:11:55Jason Calacanis?

  He muted you.

• 1:11:56David Friedberg?

  He's flipping through his Politico notes to figure out, what did he miss saying that he was supposed to say today?

• 1:12:01Jason Calacanis?

  He just flipped over to Ben Shapiro on two XPs. He's listening to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris in conversation. Go ahead, Sacks.

• 1:12:09David Friedberg?

  Okay, okay, okay. The, the HIV being cured headline, uh, you know, we can dive into it for two minutes, but HIV is a retrovirus. When you get infected with HIV, it stays in your body forever. It actually ends up living inside of your immune cells. That's what makes it such an interesting. Challenging virus and it destroys those immune cells. So over time you end up getting AIDS. And the way it enters the immune cells is through a specific protein. Some people have a genetic mutation where if there's a change in their DNA and that protein is different. HIV cannot enter their immune cells and they can actually, they are naturally immune to HIV. CCR5. Yeah. And so what's happened is. Found apparently in white northern Europeans. Yeah, like Norwegians, I think.

• 1:12:54David Friedberg?

  Norwegians, exactly. And anyway, so what's the interesting study that was done? All immune cells are made from stem cells in your bone marrow. And so, you know, all the white blood cells that we have that fight off our diseases come from our bone marrow. And when you get a blood cancer, sometimes you end up getting so severe that you have to actually wipe out all the immune cells in your body and you end up with a bone marrow transplant. So you get new bone marrow put in, new blood cells put in. And hopefully, if you can survive the therapy and survive that treatment, that new bone marrow will produce new immune cells and your body will recover and you will be cured of your blood cancer. So what happened is people had HIV.

• 1:13:38David Friedberg?

  And when you get this bone marrow transplant, you end up, you know, they give you radiation and chemo and they wipe out all your blood cells. And then they give you this bone marrow transplant. So they selectively chose bone marrow stem cells that came from people that have the genetic mutation that prevents HIV. So then when these HIV patients that got blood cancer, got a bone marrow transplant with this mutation in it, they were cured of HIV. And so it's a pretty profound kind of demonstration of what we already knew, which is that this genetic mutation can prevent HIV. And there are a lot of therapies that are underway right now.

• 1:14:22David Friedberg?

  To actually use gene editing to induce that mutation in people's blood cells and in their bone marrow without needing to give them a whole transplant.

• 1:14:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The first guy that did it, the first guy that did it was German, right? Or he was in Germany, I think, and he unfortunately passed away. They cured his HIV/AIDS, but he unfortunately had a relapse of the leukemia that killed him. But I think all three cases of people that have been quote-unquote cured have been these leukemia patients.

• 1:14:55David Friedberg?

  But I'll say two things about the future of this kind of possibility. Number one is you don't need to get a bone marrow transplant to have this mutation induced in your cells to prevent this infection from kind of occurring in your body. You can use gene editing tools to do that. And so we are now developing gene editing therapies where rather than go and get a whole bone marrow transplant to cure your HIV, we can actually edit your cells. Those edited cells will now be resistant and you will be resolved of HIV. The second thing is the way that they gave people the bone marrow transplant, the way they created those stem cells for the bone marrow transplant was from umbilical cord blood from newborns, which is very rich in stem cells. And this is a traditional way of kind of giving people stem cell-based therapies is

• 1:15:39David Friedberg?

  you go and source stem cells from another body or your own body, which are called autologous stem cells. But like, I just want to say one thing, what's really interesting in the future is not going to be about pulling other people's stem cells into your body and finding them from fetal blood or what have you. We now have the technology, which I've talked about multiple times on the show, called Yamanaka factors, where theoretically we can take your cells from your own body, turn them into stem cells, grow them in a lab, and use that as the therapy. That's called autologous stem cell therapy. And rather than use stem cells or trying to find them and figure them out where they are in your body and pull them out, we can actually induce stem cells from your body. And that's like, you know, 15 years out is autologous induced stem cell therapy, where

• 1:16:22David Friedberg?

  you actually make your own stem cells and then give yourself all sorts of therapies, not just bone marrow transplants, but you can heal lots of tissue in the body using these stem cell systems.

• 1:16:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We don't really hear about HIV/AIDS anymore. In that article, I think it said that there's about 37 million people around the world that have HIV/AIDS. And it's incredible, actually, the amount of progress that science has made in this disease. I remember when I was growing up, it was made... To be like this incredible boogeyman.

• 1:16:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, and it really governed like a lot of social norms at the time because we were still discovering what HIV AIDS was and, you know, how, you know, how do you think about sexual promiscuity, you know, from a moral and ethical perspective? Um, I think it had a huge impact on my generation.

• 1:17:05Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, it did. It was a death sentence. They, they made us paranoid.

• 1:17:09David Friedberg?

  So, so here's what's happened. Therapies have gotten so good at suppressing, suppressing the virus. If the virus is suppressed far enough, even though you're always going to be infected, if it's suppressed far enough, the WHO and the FDA have both said you can still have unprotected sex and not transmit HIV. And so even though there are plenty of people out there that might be having unprotected sex with HIV, um, the therapies have suppressed the viral load to the point that they're not transmitting it actively. And so that's been the big breakthrough in science over the last decade.

• 1:17:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then they also had these prep pills, right? Which people could take proactively if they thought they might, you know, find themselves. But I mean, Chamath, you and I lived in a generation where, I mean, doesn't.

• 1:17:47David Friedberg?

  It was, it was the end of things, yeah.

• 1:17:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it was the end of days and they're like, I don't.

• 1:17:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was a single biggest thing that I was, that I was taught in sex ed classes to be afraid of.

• 1:17:58Jason Calacanis?

  Be, be really scared at all costs.

• 1:18:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then the problem that it, that it created was like, you know, in countries that had a large Catholic population, um, you know, the Catholic Church was so, you know, uh.

• 1:18:10Jason Calacanis?

  Evil.

• 1:18:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They had, they were undecided on condoms.

• 1:18:13Jason Calacanis?

  They were the opposite of undecided. They told people in Africa to not use condoms. When AIDS was rampant, it was the biggest evil, second biggest evil the Catholic Church did in modern history, obviously the first, we know.

• 1:18:26David Sacks?

  I have a contribution to this segment.

• 1:18:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, got you what? Move on. Here we go, move on.

• 1:18:31David Sacks?

  No, no, no, no, no. I know, I took.

• 1:18:33Jason Calacanis?

  Homocystism, male and an agamous relationship.

• 1:18:35David Sacks?

  Look, I, I remember how scared people were of AIDS, you know, back in the 1980s when this came up. And I remember that there was a head of the NIH who even whipped up people's fear, hold on, whipped up people's fear by saying that even casual, even casual contact within the same household. Can spread it. And you know who that had in NIH was?

• 1:18:57Jason Calacanis?

  Anthony Fauci.

• 1:18:58David Sacks?

  You know who had in NIH was?

• 1:18:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, we know Fauci dedicated his life to trying to solve and reduce the suffering of solve for AIDS and HIV.

• 1:19:06David Sacks?

  No, in the 1980s, in the 1980s, he was the face of government indifference towards AIDS. And he spread fear and was medically wrong about it. Go check the records. He was a screw up then and he's a screw up now.

• 1:19:18Jason Calacanis?

  On it, he worked tirelessly.

• 1:19:20David Sacks?

  He didn't work tirelessly on it.

• 1:19:21David Friedberg?

  Jake Al, I think Sacks is right in the sense that like what we thought we knew back then turned out to be wrong. And I think that's a really important point. You know, particularly in science, it's a process of discovery. What we thought we knew back then turned out it was all a hypothesis. It's all a thesis until it's proven or disproven. And that's the case.

• 1:19:39David Sacks?

  Read Andrew Sullivan. I mean, you know, Fauci was absolutely the enemy, public enemy, number one of the of the gay movement.

• 1:19:48Jason Calacanis?

  Who is it, Tony?

• 1:19:49David Sacks?

  Tony, yeah, well, it was a Tony, Tony Perkins. There was actually a debate that Fauci was in on AIDS where a gay actress literally said to him, I hate you. And if you read Andrew Sullivan's blog, he will talk about how he remembers back in the 1980s that Fauci was sort of public enemy, number one in the gay community because of his position on this during Reagan administration. And so it is.

• 1:20:12Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of civil disobedience, act up, etc. Remember, and he responded by putting massive resources into this. So I think, you know, if he was wrong.

• 1:20:21David Sacks?

  That's not, listen to Andrew Sullivan on this.

• 1:20:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right wing Andrew Sullivan.

• 1:20:25David Sacks?

  He is not that right wing. Wait, Andrew Sullivan is the reason why, more than any other public intellectual, why we have marriage equality today. He is number one. He advocated for marriage equality and in the new republic, made the case for it before anybody else and popularized that argument.

• 1:20:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm a fan of his writing. Let's not.

• 1:20:43David Sacks?

  So don't try and portray him as a far right wing or whatever.

• 1:20:45Jason Calacanis?

  Portray Fauci, you're going to Fauci's intent. You want to believe that Fauci is an evil person.

• 1:20:50David Sacks?

  I think, I think you and many other people have mysteriously forgotten who Fauci really is.

• 1:20:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you think, I know, the conspiracy, that you think Fauci's intent is to, you know, cover up the, uh, and he intentionally was working against, uh, solving for HIV? That's ridiculous.

• 1:21:07David Sacks?

  I didn't say intentionally.

• 1:21:08David Friedberg?

  Do you think Fauci had good intentions?

• 1:21:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and you inferred it.

• 1:21:11David Friedberg?

  Sax, do you think Fauci had good intentions?

• 1:21:13David Sacks?

  I don't, I don't really care about his intentions. I just want to look at his actions. It's amazing, it's amazing to me, it's amazing to me that a public official who was so wrong back then, in the 1980s, 1990s, on the public health crisis of our time, would just be given a free pass, and along comes a new public health crisis in the last couple of years, and he's been completely wrong about that, too. So why are you giving this guy a free pass? I don't get it.

• 1:21:38David Friedberg?

  Sax, in a, in a cloud of uncertainty, in a time of war, do you think that leaders need to show strong intent and clear signals, or do you think that they should be wishy-washy because they don't know enough?

• 1:21:50David Sacks?

  I think they should just be right.

• 1:21:53David Friedberg?

  And if they're trying the best with what they have, with the information they have at the time that they have it?

• 1:21:57David Sacks?

  Okay, well, yeah, there's some forgiveness for, uh, for making mistakes, but when you're constantly wrong, maybe it's time to get somebody else in there.

• 1:22:04David Friedberg?

  That's true.

• 1:22:05David Sacks?

  And look, and Fauci, by the way, Fauci, with respect to COVID, we talked about it before, 100% participated in a suppression of, of the investigation into the origins of COVID. There was an active attempt to suppress that. Come on, you know that. The FOIA emails show it.

• 1:22:23Jason Calacanis?

  It's a good science segment.

• 1:22:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I do want to give a shout out to the, the researchers, uh, who actually did this with this woman, uh, in New York. It's pretty freaking incredible.

• 1:22:34David Friedberg?

  What's incredible is that they did it with, um, uh, HIV patients who had blood cancer, and it was a really kind of like thoughtfully designed experiment.

• 1:22:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incredibly thoughtful.

• 1:22:43David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's been four years, so I mean, this has been baking for a long time.

• 1:22:46David Friedberg?

  By the way, as I zoom out and hear you guys talk about what HIV was like, you know, back in the day and the fear around it, I, I do think that 30, 40 years from now, given the tools we have with induced stem cells and cell-based therapies, and there are hundreds of cell-based therapies coming to market over the next few years, they're all in late-stage clinical trials, as well as gene editing, I think, hopefully, and I'm optimistic that one day we will look back at cancer and aging in the same way that we're talking about HIV today, and that both of those diseases can and will be resolved with the tools that we're developing through science. And, you know, there, there's, there's going to be bumps along the road, but man, I, you know, it's so clear that he's...

• 1:23:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go Sax, go.

• 1:23:23David Sacks?

  Look, I think, I think what Friedberg just said actually is really important and inspiring, and I think it's great. And I was kinda joking around with the Fauci thing. I didn't expect it to become a tangent, so I don't need to keep going on and on about that.

• 1:23:34Jason Calacanis?

  Wait till you see him try to, wait till you see him in editing try to change his position.

• 1:23:37David Sacks?

  No, I'm not gonna change anything in editing. Keep that whole segment. I'm just saying I didn't-

• 1:23:41Jason Calacanis?

  Hey Nick, can you use a, can I do a voiceover to change my opinion?

• 1:23:43David Sacks?

  If you had it become so argumentative, we wouldn't have spent five minutes on it.

• 1:23:46Jason Calacanis?

  If I'm correct or incorrect position that Fauci's intent was wrong-

• 1:23:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Give me your final on-rap, please, cuz I gotta fly to Europe. Go.

• 1:23:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go. David Sacks and Paul Graham have gotten into it. Uh, it's a battle for the ages and the stakes are so low, the stakes are so high, and the animosity is so high because the stakes are so low. Uh, here we go. David Sacks-

• 1:24:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, before this, uh, does Phil Hellmuth qualify this as a billionaire battle? Or a quasi-billionaire battle?

• 1:24:16Jason Calacanis?

  Billionaire, billionaire, billionaire. Literally, he revealed the billionaire. If you follow Phil Hellmuth's account, it's being DA greatest, being Doug greatest on Twitter. Follow being DA greatest to get that Phil- No, Phil Hellmuth outed-

• 1:24:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He outed.

• 1:24:33Jason Calacanis?

  On his Twitter-

• 1:24:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Our friend.

• 1:24:35Jason Calacanis?

  That his new billionaire bestie is, um, his, which he stole bestie from me. I used to call everybody bestie. He just co-opted it, uh, like he co-opted me calling Tremont the dictator, but I'll tell the dictator origin story later. Is Stanley from DoorDash.

• 1:24:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stanley Tang, co-founder, chief product officer of DoorDash. Great guy.

• 1:24:53Jason Calacanis?

  Really, great.

• 1:24:54David Sacks?

  Phil Hellmuth's latest truffle.

• 1:24:56Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Phil Hellmuth's latest truffle.

• 1:24:58Jason Calacanis?

  He found it. Okay, here we go. So if you can introduce him to Paul Graham-

• 1:25:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go ahead, Sacks.

• 1:25:03David Sacks?

  All right, here, here, here's the issue.

• 1:25:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's your beef?

• 1:25:06Jason Calacanis?

  There we go.

• 1:25:06David Sacks?

  Actually, I did not seek out this beef.

• 1:25:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks' vendetta section of the-

• 1:25:10David Sacks?

  No, no, no, listen. PG waded into my tweets. He came after me.

• 1:25:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Waited into?

• 1:25:16David Sacks?

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:25:17Jason Calacanis?

  Waiting, he waited.

• 1:25:18David Sacks?

  By the way, I love it. Please, any billionaires out there who wanna like debate, like come wading into my tweets. Mark Cuban did it, made a big ass of himself. I don't want to deter these guys from wading in because it's great. Here's what basically happened is I tweeted a video of all these multimillionaire celebrity hypocrites partying maskless at the Super Bowl. And then meanwhile, the next day, my three kids have to go to school in California wearing their masks. That is ridiculous, okay? It makes no sense. We all know that, okay? Any sane person knows that. That's what I tweeted about. I don't know why of all issues that was triggering in a PG, but he had to come in and say, well, they were all partying outdoors. It's like, really?

• 1:26:02David Sacks?

  Uh, it looks to me like they're in a skybox, and if it has three walls and a ceiling, I call that a room. Uh, but in any event, that wasn't, he was, he was misinformed because the rule of the Super Bowl was that if you were not eating and drinking, anyone under, over the age of two, had to be wearing a mask. Um, so, you know, my point stands.

• 1:26:22Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to air-

• 1:26:23David Sacks?

  So here, here, here's where things kind of went south is, um, is so that I tweeted, uh, blink twice, you know, Paul. And, and here's the thing, I wasn't totally trying to be snarky with that comment. Um, here, here's why I said that is because-

• 1:26:38Jason Calacanis?

  Can you explain what that means? I didn't understand that. What does that mean, blink twice?

• 1:26:40David Sacks?

  Well, it means like-

• 1:26:41Jason Calacanis?

  You're a captor. You're being held kidnapped by these concepts that you have to wear a mask.

• 1:26:46David Sacks?

  No, you're being held hostage by somebody. And the, and the reason why I said that is because, is, is look, if, if, if PG had just been some crazy dumb person, everyone would have said that. The fact is that PG is smart. He writes extremely well, publishes a lot of interesting things. He's an independent thinker. So it almost seemed to me like somebody is holding him hostage here because how can this really smart person be making this case? Anyway, it kind of went south from there. So, oh, I, I have no desire to continue the debate.

• 1:27:17Jason Calacanis?

  And meanwhile, Kendall Jenner wore North Face shoes to Justin Bieber's, uh- What? Yeah, can you believe it? How dare she knows that he hates North Face? How did he do that? Gossip, gossip, gossip. All right, so this has been Sacks's Vendetta Corner for the week, uh, for-

• 1:27:34David Sacks?

  Can we make this a regular segment?

• 1:27:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I just did. I made it in the segment, Sacks's Vendetta Corner.

• 1:27:38David Sacks?

  But I, but I want to say, I want to stay on the main issue here, which is, oh, please, let's do it every week, but, but look. Am I wrong about this mask hypocrisy that's going on? How in the world are kids in-

• 1:27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Picture of Sax and the mask. Let's put the picture of Sax and the mask up again.

• 1:27:55David Friedberg?

  J Cal, J Cal, stop. I want to air 100% support for Sax on this statement. I totally agree with you on the mask hypocrisy as well as the mask mandates in schools. I think it's ridiculous. We've pivoted, we've pivoted so far away from first principle thinking on this stuff. It's nuts. I totally agree with you completely. And on this point, on you wasting your time fighting with people on Twitter. My personal advice to you as a friend is just cut it out, but do what you gotta do, buddy. But totally agree.

• 1:28:20David Sacks?

  Oh, it's entertainment.

• 1:28:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, for the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya. Rain Man, yeah, David Sax, and the Sultan of Science. If you see him out and about, ask for a selfie. Sultan of Science loves selfies.

• 1:28:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, he does. Love you, boys. Bye.

• 1:28:40Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you all next time on the All In Pod. Bye bye. Love you, besties. Bye bye.

• 1:28:48Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sax.

• 1:28:52David Sacks?

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

• 1:28:57Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, besties. Queen of Kewa.

• 1:29:05Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway. Sax.

• 1:29:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man.

• 1:29:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My haberdasher will meet me at one. We should all just get a room and just have one big Q, Georgie, because they're all just just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:29:24Jason Calacanis?

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