SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, welcome back. Besties are back and it's a Bestie Spaxgiving. Congratulations to the queen of quinoa. His second company, David Freeburg, announces today, hours before the taping of this special Thanksgiving pod, that he is taking Metro Mile public through a SPAC and that Bestie C, and here is the quote,
SPEAKER_03: that as only Chamath can tweet, Buffett had Geico, I pick Metro Mile. Unbelievable. I would just like to say.
SPEAKER_05: That's how you move markets.
SPEAKER_03: LeBron James has three rings. Freeburg, tell us what is Metro Mile and...
SPEAKER_05: Well, this isn't a self promoting podcast, is it? I mean like- No, no, but I think it's just, you know, it's your second company. I started the company in 2011 when I was running Climate, when I was the CEO there. And, you know, Climate was offering insurance at the time. We learned a lot about the insurance markets and figured like, hey, you know, telematics or connecting cars to the internet is gonna be a big deal and we're gonna be able to completely change the auto insurance industry. So we set up this company. I was the chairman from the founding in 2011. And, you know, been chairman and I've been an active investor in the business in every round since then. So the business has built some, you know, really compelling value proposition for customers. And, you know, it's got really good unit economics and it's, you know, needed its last round of capital to get profitable. And it turns out, you know, as we were thinking about that this summer, that a SPAC was a really good path for the business given the inflection point it's at. And so- And the basic premise
SPEAKER_03: of the business is instead of paying for insurance by month or time period, the innovation here is you pay per mile.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, insurance today is like, you know, you fill out a form and you get a price for insurance and you pay that rate for six months of coverage. But, you know, depending on when you're driving and how much you're driving, you should be paying a different price, right? So we kind of changed the model to a rate per mile. And so if you don't drive, you save, you know, so the average customer doesn't drive a lot with Metro Mile, they save 47% over what they were paying with like Geico or Progressive Re-Assurance. And you do that with that ODB port?
SPEAKER_03: It's like ODB port? Yeah, the little plug-in device.
SPEAKER_05: And increasingly we're actually doing it directly by connecting to cars direct through a Ford and a couple other big automotive OEMs now have this ability to send the data directly out of the car because they're all internet connected now. So that allows us to just basically, you know, see how many miles you're driving and the rate per mile is what we bill you each month times the number of miles you drove on your car. And you didn't mention how you drive.
SPEAKER_03: I think that was a controversial concept for a while. You know, if you speed, if you- Right. Is that on the roadmap or not? Yeah, that is part of it today.
SPEAKER_05: But frankly, 70% of the price difference you get in auto insurance is from the number of miles you drive and only 30% is really in this variance around behavior. You know, most people are generally pretty good drivers. So believe it or not. So the real variance in terms of, you know, your risk to the insurance companies is how many miles you drive. So that really is the predominant factor. So if we can accurately track that. Now, what's interesting is like in a world of autonomous cars where you're like turning on the car to be autonomous or fully self-driving at some point, you know, it's on and off. You should be getting a different rate for those miles. Right? So if the car is, if your Tesla is on autopilot on the freeway, that should be safer than you on the freeway you shouldn't be paying as much for insurance. Ah, even better. You can kind of think about how this moves into a world where everything is dynamically priced and dynamically billed.
SPEAKER_03: Usage priced.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Usage priced and also fair. So, you know, if you're a good driver and you're driving well, or if you're using autonomous features, you shouldn't pay as much. And ultimately that translates, you know, into a truly kind of more dynamic service. And that's really where the world has to go because those low mileage drivers or those good drivers or those drivers using autonomous features should be paying considerably less. So they'll start using our service and that'll force the other guys to raise their rates. And it creates this huge, you know, kind of market mode. Great. And we're in the very early days. I mean, it's like the first inning still. So we're, you know, we're just getting going.
SPEAKER_03: Chamav, you chose to do a pipe with the SPAC. Explain to the audience what a pipe is, for people who don't know, and what you loved about Metro Mile.
SPEAKER_04: Sure. I think the, what is a pipe? A pipe is a private investment in a public enterprise. And basically what that means is that you're making the round bigger, right? So it's kind of like Sequoia does your series A and invests 10 million. I would come in and put another 10 million and now your series A is 20 million. Same terms as the, as Sequoia's round, except you're now just grossing up the amount of capital. Why is that helpful? Well, what it does is it allows somebody to price the deal. So in this case, David's SPAC sponsor priced the deal, did the diligence and decided to underwrite Metro Mile at that price. And then they came to me and said, hey, do you wanna come and join this round essentially? And I got to know the business. A lot of things that David said basically are true. The thing that I will say is like, everybody talks about the value of machine learning, right? And data oriented learning. The most obvious thing that you can do is if you learn on top of a huge subset of data, especially out in the real world, like driving data or any other kind of information is you should be taking risk on top of it. And this is why sort of these next generation insurance companies to me are so interesting because it's probably where you're gonna see machine learning be used at just massive, massive scale. Cause you're just gonna reprice risk and make it as David said, much more dynamic. So anyways, they showed it to me. I really liked the product. The metrics are really amazing. And so I joined. It was great. I'm really excited for, I'm really excited for a Freedberg.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Congratulations. Great. Chamath and I have never worked on anything together.
SPEAKER_05: So it's awesome. We're doing our first project here on the All In Podcast together.
SPEAKER_02: All right. So it sounds like a brilliant idea
SPEAKER_01: and I'm just pissed that I'm not part of it. I know.
SPEAKER_00: I'm feeling kind of. I read, I read that like two besties. Do we get a festy review here for me and Saks? Yeah. Jason, do you know about this?
SPEAKER_03: I don't know anything. I get, I'm the last to know. We're both cut out of it. First of all, you two. We're both cut out of it. I need to get my beak wet. You two. We got the wet, our beaks. I can't get my beak wet.
SPEAKER_04: You two, you two narcissistic besties have been, have been running around all week touting every single unicorn you guys have been a part of. I miss my allocation in Robinhood.
SPEAKER_05: I miss my allocation in Bert or Uber or whatever.
SPEAKER_03: All right. New bestie rule, new bestie rule. Everybody gets a slice. Even a little tasty poo. Everybody gets their beak wet. Like the old neighborhood.
SPEAKER_05: Like the old neighborhood. Just saying a little bit. Take back, a little share.
SPEAKER_04: Let's, Jason, why don't you start an angelist syndicate for every All In podcast listener?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. All In podcast syndicate. It will be on the syndicate.com. I love the angelist, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. We'll do the syndicate.com slash All In podcast. And then we'll aggregate all these subscribers and I'll take a 20% carry and you guys can suggest ideas. Can I just say, we'll do zero carry
SPEAKER_04: and we'll allow all the listeners to participate in our deals, which I think would be pretty cool. Listen, I've- I love how every time you loop my business into this,
SPEAKER_03: whether it's podcasting or syndicates, you take out the money and the profit. I tell you what, I have an idea. How about we SPAC this week in startups and you do it for no participation. I'm the father of growth. You know how you grow?
SPEAKER_04: By making things free. You want to maximize demand? Just make it free. By the way, on this topic, Saxypoo had this incredible tweet this week, which was basically like, wow, this is like my 95th unicorn that filed to go public. I mean, literally every single unicorn that filed this week to go public, Sax was an angel investor, which is incredible. Says how good he is as an investor. But the best follow-up tweet was Zach Weinberg, the co-founder of Flatiron Health, whose tweet was, I just want to congratulate myself on nothing for having not been a part of any of these companies. I would like to congratulate myself for making no bets
SPEAKER_03: and taking no risk and getting no reward.
SPEAKER_04: No, I thought Zach's tweet was the best.
SPEAKER_05: Sax, don't you find it tiring, all these investments that you've made? Don't these guys call you and want to do meetings and chat all the time? I mean, this has got to be a huge amount of effort, right?
SPEAKER_00: Well, not really. You just put the money in and turn around?
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're not on the board, your obligation is basically to respond when somebody asks you for something. And as an angel investor, it is a little different when you're actually leading around and you're a board member. I was making these investments back in 2012, 2013. That's when these seeds were planted.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_03: These were 50K, 100K, 250K checks, right? So the responsibility is proportional to the dollar amount.
SPEAKER_01: Some are a little bigger than that actually. But I mean, I've written checks, seven figure checks in some of these companies.
SPEAKER_05: Well, Sax, according to your personal balance sheet that we got from your accountant this week. Yeah, Phil Hellmuth sent it.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. We see here a transaction for Houzz. Is it true you did the series B of Houzz, the entire series B? Dollar 40. That's what I heard.
SPEAKER_01: No, no.
SPEAKER_03: I heard it was, you led the series B.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, NEA led that round. I mean, I invested a lot as an individual. I did co-lead the series B or C of Adipar. That was one that I did as an individual.
SPEAKER_03: That's incredible. Yeah, that's amazing. That's gonna be huge.
SPEAKER_04: I have no idea what that company is, but that sounds awesome. They manage funds. They do portfolio management software.
SPEAKER_01: It's coming up on, you know, 100 million. That name sounds awesome.
SPEAKER_04: Just kidding, I'm totally kidding. I'm totally kidding. Let's start the pod, JCal, where are we gonna start? Well, I mean, I think-
SPEAKER_03: Now that we've all self promoted.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Well, I'm just happy to hear that Jason
SPEAKER_01: was cut out of your deal as much as me. When I read about it on Twitter, I'm like,
SPEAKER_00: I better not be the only best to cut out of this thing.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, all right? It's so funny. You're right, you're totally right.
SPEAKER_03: You're right, you're right. It is getting awkward now because people who watch this podcast assume that we do everything together. Like literally they're like, well, you guys go grocery shopping together. You go on vacation together. You guys are living the same TikTok house. Yeah. Yeah, that's not how it works. I think the first thing we should talk about is just this amazing moment in time when because of science, you know, and this podcast started during the pandemic, we have had, as predicted by Freeberg, who gets to take two victory laps, he said by the end of the year, we'd have vaccines and they would have, because of this mRNA, if I remember correctly, 90, 95% efficacy. And sure enough, the week after Trump wins, I'm sorry, loses, sorry, Sax, he lost actually. The week after Trump lost, I know you didn't vote for him, the week after he lost Pfizer,
SPEAKER_03: then the next week, Moderna, and then the next week, Oxford. And I understand Johnson & Johnson is about to announce something. And all of these have 90 to 95% efficacy and that there are gonna be 40, 50 and 60 million doses in December, January and February, just from the first two in America alone. So Freeberg, if you were to put a number on when herd immunity hits, because probably 20 or 30% of people have had it, 20 or 30% of people have some natural immunity, how long is this gonna take? And could we be doing this from, you know, a Warriors game next year? When are we gonna be able to do this in person and not have to test?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I don't know if it was Fauci or someone that's closer to the operation shared that they do think they can get 70% of Americans immunized by May. So, by May, yeah. So, you know, if you'll remember a few podcasts ago, I think I tried to explain a big part of the budget that went into this Operation Warp Speed was to parallelize production of these vaccines while they were being tested. And so we've been scaling up the production and the manufacturing of these, and if they weren't gonna work, we're just gonna crash them, right? A couple billion dollars, who cares? It's a good option for the American people. So we've got a ton of doses that have been produced. It's about packaging and distribution now, and that's supposed to be kind of underway with the plan to be that on December 11th or 12th, when they give the emergency use authorization, these doses start showing up in care facilities.
SPEAKER_03: We basically went all in blind. Like we just shoved the chips in and said, we're gonna make these vaccines even if they're not.
SPEAKER_05: It's more like a spray and pray angel investment portfolio. We bought like four different things or five different things we made bets in all of them and hope that one of them pays off. And it turns out they're all gonna pay off, or a chunk of them are gonna pay off. And we get to have them ready in time to kind of make a difference here. Now, all that being said, if you look at the case numbers in the US right now, we could be as high as 30% of the American people have already been infected with coronavirus based on some estimates. So as of the June 30th paper that was published from those dialysis patients, and they did a pretty good statistical interpretation of looking at antibodies in people's blood, they estimate 10% of the American population was infected by coronavirus as of June 30th. And then if you look at the number of people that have been infected since then, and you apply the similar sort of multiple that you would assume based on tests, there's an estimate that we could already be up to 30% of the US population has been infected. Wow, and therefore immune.
SPEAKER_05: And theoretically, mostly immune, let's just say that, right? And so we share those anecdotes and so on, but yeah, let's just say generally, yes, immune. And so you combine that with these vaccines starting to roll out and we get a pretty kind of comfortable position in terms of the pandemic and hopefully a couple of months here. And that's why the market's going nuts and that's why everyone, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I got some conference invites this last week for conferences for next year that have been canceled this year and were being put on hold. Really? Yeah, so people are starting to lean in on this.
SPEAKER_03: For what timeframe, third quarter or fourth quarter?
SPEAKER_05: Summer, July.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so people are now assuming that and they're booking hotel spaces based on it. That is extraordinary. Sax, you shared this New York Times story. Why don't you summarize it for the audience? And I'd love to get your thoughts in addition to this as to what this recovery might look like if in fact we have more vaccine than we need and even a reasonable number of Americans take it and don't believe that it's a conspiracy theory by Bill Gates to control and the Illuminati and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, this New York Times story is pretty remarkable. It's called Politics, Science, and the Remarkable Race for Coronavirus Vaccine. This came out, I think it just came out today in the New York Times. Actually, sorry, it's published. It published November 21st, updated November 24th. And it's pretty remarkable. It describes the effort by Operation Warp Speed by the administration, by Pfizer, by Moderna. It kind of gives you the behind the scenes play-by-play. And reading the article, you have to come away thinking that the Trump administration did a pretty good job with this whole Warp Speed project. I don't know if the New York Times realizes that it's making the Trump administration look so good or maybe they don't care anymore because he's lost the election. But the article does make the administration look very good. I mean- Competent. Very competent. First of all, they shoveled money to the right people. They offered Pfizer money. Pfizer didn't want it or need it, but Moderna did. So they got a few billion dollars from Moderna. They parallel processed a bunch of different attempts here so that if one company failed, the others might succeed. There was a sort of a Reaganite cutting of bureaucratic red tape wherever they could. There were examples in the story of the drug company needing something, some supplies or what have you. And they would call the administration and they would make it happen. And then finally, the administration didn't do anything to kind of mess with the science. In fact, they described how this new experimental mRNA technique that they used to generate the vaccine, they had the code for that within two days. They actually had the vaccine sort of printed, if you will, within weeks. And really what took all this time were the human trials, the three-stage human trials, which the administration did not do anything to speed up. And probably the irony of irony, the supreme irony, is there's a story, there's a bit in the story. It actually begins with this guy, Slaoui, who's the head of the Trump administration's effort to produce the vaccine. He actually slowed down the Moderna human trials by about three weeks because they weren't including enough minorities in the trial. And that cost him three weeks. If it weren't for those three weeks, Moderna's vaccine would have happened before Pfizer and it would have come out about a week before the election. So you gotta wonder, like Trump has gotta be pulling out his hair about- What hair?
SPEAKER_00: About this twist of fate. David, how does it attribute credit for Warp Speed?
SPEAKER_04: And I'm going someplace with this, so I'm just asking you the question.
SPEAKER_01: Well, the article's not trying to attribute credit. They're just kind of describing the behind the scenes of how Pfizer and Moderna came up with their vaccines. But in describing, you know, Pfizer and Moderna did the work of creating the vaccine, but in describing the ways that Warp Speed contributed, they did things that were only helpful and nothing that was harmful. And so in that sense, it made the Trump administration look quite good.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think the point is that the Warp Speed folks, which is probably the least well-known working group working on coronavirus to the rest of the public, is because it was a lot of wonky insiders. It was a sign of almost proving the exact opposite of what Trump typically does, which is some idiotic, nepotistic leaning where it's his daughter or it's his son-in-law running around completely and effectively doing something, where they become sort of front and center for taking credit. In this case, it was just a bunch of policy wonks. You never heard about the project. We only know about Warp Speed because a handful of us have talked about it. And it turns out to actually have been good because they knew what they were doing and they knew enough to not try to seek the credit and just got out of the way. I mean, it proves almost the antithesis of how the Trump campaign managed their time in the White House.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, you have a point where, you know, I was kind of reading this article wondering, you know, where was Jared Kushner? Because if Kushner knew about this, there's no way he slows down the Moderna vaccine by three weeks. I mean, that might have made the difference right there in whether Trump wins or not. Can you imagine the effect on the election if the vaccine had come out one week before November 3rd?
SPEAKER_03: I think Trump would have won decidedly if he had a vaccine or two out with 90%, but I think he had no credibility. Even though Moderna and Pfizer were saying late November, and he said the vaccines are around the corner, his whole tenure was based on so much lying. He was the boy who cried wolf. He was the president who cried wolf. By the time he told the truth, and he was telling the truth about the vaccines. He, it was like, oh my Lord, he told the truth in the final three months.
SPEAKER_04: Well, can I give you the opposite, David, of that, which is that if Moderna basically says, hey guys, we have a vaccine that works for white people and a disease that's disproportionately killing blacks and Hispanics and brown people, Native Americans, and all of a sudden people are like, wait, what the fuck? Maybe they would have gone into Georgia and they would have just crushed them even more and then you would have actually had the Senate flip too. So you could have had a whole kind of distribution of outcomes there in a different case because you could have had an angry reaction as well. We don't know, I guess is my point. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's ironic
SPEAKER_01: that an administration that was constantly accused of white supremacy probably lost the election because they slowed down this vaccine trial group to include more minorities.
SPEAKER_04: No, I know, but I think what we're saying is it wasn't the actual administration. It was somebody that actually knows what they were doing.
SPEAKER_03: We call that redemption in the movie when the person actually loses because they did the right thing. It's kind of redemption. Freeberg, when you look at these mRNA vaccines, you were educating us about them last night and also for a long time. Tell the audience just one more time how these work briefly and what the potential for them is in the future. Because I think a lot of us now are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is gonna be over. We're gonna be at conferences or going traveling to Europe or whatever it is next summer. But we are all gonna be scarred for life thinking, when is the next coronavirus? Just like for a decade, we were on pins and needles, when is the next 9-11? So this is gonna be scar tissue for a generation or two of people. When the next COVID comes, how quickly will warp speed 2.0 go?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's the right question because our approach to doing vaccines may have just changed permanently. So every cell has your DNA and DNA basically codes proteins. Every three letters of DNA makes an amino acid, codes for a specific amino acid, there's 20 amino acids. The way that DNA turns into proteins is through RNA. So RNA is kind of like a mirror copy of your DNA. It floats into these things called ribosomes in your cells and outcome proteins. And it's like a printer, right? And so those ribosomes make your proteins using those amino acid sequences, coded by the RNA. So the way that the vaccines work historically is you'll get a dead virus, which is basically the protein of a virus. Your immune system then learns to kill that protein. Oh man, Jesus, my dog. Your immune system then learns to remove that protein from your body. And that's how you develop this memory, your immune memory to a specific protein. And so they put this dead virus in your body and hopefully your immune system learns a good response to it. mRNA basically puts the RNA in your body that codes for that protein. Your cells then make that protein. And because it's making a lot more of the protein in a more consistent way, theoretically the idea is your body develops a much more robust immune memory and immune response without it overloading your system with all the immune cells trying to wipe that protein out right away and so on. The challenge is you're putting RNA in your body. And we've always been worried about, we don't know what the side effects of mixing RNA in your body would be. Is it gonna change your DNA? Is it gonna change your genetic makeup? Is it gonna cause other deleterious side effects? So this technology, this capability, this knowledge has been around forever. I mean, not forever, but for a long time. And the idea has always been we could use RNA in this way. But no one wanted to, and we've used it in animals and we've used it in plants and we've seen the capabilities of using RNA to do different things like this. But this is a big leap. And so we kind of leapt forward here getting to the point that we felt comfortable with RNA as a treatment like this and it's working. So in theory, in the future, as Saks points out, you could take any virus or any bacteria, you could read its DNA, you could do that in an hour. Then you could take chunks of that DNA and code RNA for it so that your body makes those proteins that theoretically produce an immune response. So that's the science of like, how do you create a new vaccine that's based on RNA? I think that's the amazing part is the way it's described
SPEAKER_01: in this article is that's almost like laser printing or 3D printing a vaccine. It's kind of like the equivalent of that. You just take the genome of the virus and boom, you've got the vaccine. And then all the other delay is about human trials and testing of it. But imagine if there was the next coronavirus is 10 times as deadly. Something that spreads as contagiously as smallpox and as deadly as Ebola or something like that. We could have a vaccine the next day, like you could, we could have a very, very quickly. The challenge David would be is we'd have it the next day
SPEAKER_03: like we did here, but we would be going through this three phase trial. And so I want to take a moment here and talk to Chamath about something, which is challenge trials. In the UK, they will start doing challenge trials for those people who don't know what a challenge trial is. Essentially, they expose you to something dangerous, i.e. a virus like COVID. And then they give you the vaccine and then they give you the virus. As opposed to how we do a three phase trial, which is you give the vaccine to 30,000 people and a placebo to 30,000. And then you come back three months later and see how many people got infected and it takes time and money. Whereas challenge trials only take risk on the individuals who are part of it. Chamath, hundreds of people in the science community signed a letter and in the UK, they're gonna be doing the first challenge trials in January. The United States is not doing these, I'm certain China is. Do you think it's a moment in time where we need to think about the ethics and morality of challenge trials specifically? And then if so, how do you execute them with that? How do you execute a challenge trial without it being unfair or too dangerous for people? Obviously, you're not gonna just go into a prison and say, hey, anybody wanna get 10 years off the sentence, join the challenge trial, that seems morally bankrupt. But we let people climb mountains without ropes, so. Right.
SPEAKER_04: Well, I think this speaks to a whole bunch of other issues that we've talked about on the pod before. Another example of this was Section 230 before when we talked about it. We had a body of law that was created in a moment of time that essentially was about framing and understanding a specific pathway and a way to use technologies that today look archaic. And we have to rewrite the laws in order to just compensate and understand for where we are. So if you double click on trials as an example, if you have a solution for a rare disease, you can go in a specific pathway with the FDA and get breakthrough and fast track approval. But if you, for example, have a novel immunotherapy cancer drug, you cannot. You have to do a multi-phase trial, a typical three-phase trial. You have to solve for very typical things like fatigue, et cetera, et cetera. All these things slow progress down. Now, in a world where we were somewhat flying blind 40 or 50 years ago, we didn't have things like CRISPR. We didn't have a real understanding of the genome. We didn't have delivery mechanisms like CAR-T. You would say, okay, yeah, we should be really, really careful. But I would say that the more you know, the more you can ease up on the rules because you can actually empower people with a lot of information. And it shouldn't take a disaster scenario for us to be iterative and experimental. So I think the challenge trial is really important. I think the concept of them make a lot of sense. I think a lot of governments should employ incentives to figure out who is eligible and why. But if you're a healthy adult, male or female, and you wanna participate in a trial for whatever set of reasons, you should be allowed to do so. And companies that wanna run those trials should be allowed to run them. Similarly, if you wanna find a complimentary pathway through regulatory agencies to get drugs to the starting line, you should be able to do those too. And I think what we have to do is multi-path these compounds going forward because I think that's where you accelerate all these technologies' ability to actually solve these diseases.
SPEAKER_03: Freeberg, why is it so controversial that a rocket ship company or people who wanna climb on mountains without ropes or a rocket ship company, like there are experimental pilots, we have astronauts, they take unbelievable risk. We send thousands of troops into harm's way for many different reasons, many of which sadly die. And they volunteer for those activities. Those people are volunteering and compensated. But when we look at science and we look at a challenge trial, scientists say this is morally reprehensible to compensate somebody for taking risk. That's exactly what we do in the army. We do it with police officers and we do it with astronauts. Help us understand how scientists think so differently than say war.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if it's scientists as much as it is regulatory framework, like some people would call it a nanny state. And there are things that the nanny state assumes individuals don't have the capacity to understand the extent of the potential loss or the nature of the risk. This is true for angel investing, right? You have to be a qualified investor to invest in a private company without appropriate disclosures. And it's true in a lot of other contexts. So, to give people the authority to make decisions like this, it seems like my, I have no point of view that I'm kind of making here, but it seems like the government assumes or the elected officials assume or the populace assumes that there are things that people aren't really equipped to make decisions on because they can't understand the risk because they're not qualified. And they get excluded from those activities. But SACS is the- Yeah, SACS, how should we reframe this? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think assumption of risk- How should we frame it? I think assumption of risk is a really good principle.
SPEAKER_01: And it is a way for people to engage in potentially harmful behaviors. Just because a behavior is potentially harmful doesn't mean you don't get to do it. In the United States, you're allowed to do things that are manifestly harmful to yourself, like smoking. Well- You assume the risk.
SPEAKER_04: Even worse, if you're in Oregon, you can now do all kinds of hard drugs. I mean, you can assume that risk for yourself. So, if in Portland, Oregon, you can now take heroin openly in the street with no consequence, but you can't participate in a trial that could basically cure a cancer, that's insane to me. We've lost the script. Yeah, I'll tell you the flip side of it.
SPEAKER_05: You're allowed in Nevada to play roulette. I mean, what the fuck? Like, it's got a negative expected value statistically, factually for individuals, but the individual doesn't have the capacity, generally speaking, that's playing roulette to recognize that every dollar they're spending at the roulette table is likely going to be taken away from them. Like there's some percentage of that that's gonna be taken away. There's a five percentage for the house on that game. And so, we make the argument in some cases that people don't have the capacity to understand risk, but in other cases, it's okay for them to not have the capacity to take risks. And I think that there is this notion of what some people call regulatory capture that probably encompasses both of these, which is that there is some degree of profiteering that has created some set of laws that kind of manifestly capture that system in a certain way. So, there are profitable casino enterprises that say, let's get people to spend their money in a risky way that they don't understand. And that becomes the law and then people in Nevada are allowed to do that. There are also pharmaceutical companies that will say, we need to have huge regulatory burdens. So, once we make that big investment and we get patent approval and we can lock in that drug, we can charge a lot of money for it. So, I would argue to some extent that the regulatory capture associated with the profiteering that happens on the backend in pharmaceuticals has in large part driven the structure around risk taking in drug trials, particularly in the US. I mean, you can go get whatever drug you want over the counter in Mexico, right? I mean, we have a very different system. It also happens to be the most expensive in the world and the rationale is, well, you're the most protected, right? Well, the drug infrastructure here has created,
SPEAKER_04: to your point, because of regulation, the entire CRO industry, which is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry, which basically is essentially a retardant of R&D velocity, right? Its entire job is to slow things down, create these double-blinded studies. By the way, and so many of these studies are not even double-blinded, they're not even actually scientifically rigorous, they get basically blown apart after the fact. So, what are they really in the business of doing? It's because they're exploiting a business model that was created by laws, laws that were written by regulators, regulators that were in the hands of lobbyists. None of those folks truly understood at the time, but especially today, what's really possible. So, it does not make sense in the United States of America, just writ large, simply put, that you can buy alcohol and drink yourself into the ground, buy cigarettes and smoke yourself to death. Jambal away your money. Jambal away your money where you're negative EV or openly do illicit drugs, but you can't participate in a thoughtful trial backed by scientific research. In fairness, Jamath,
SPEAKER_03: you can get away with smoking fentanyl in San Francisco and Oregon, but it is illegal to use that plastic straw. So, be careful folks, the laws are very clear here. That plastic straw is gonna get you in a lot of trouble. I don't know what the fine is, but it is completely- I mean, it wouldn't be so crazy if it were true,
SPEAKER_04: but to your point, like you would actually get arrested for having a plastic bag than you will for having fentanyl in San Francisco. Absolutely, they'll arrest you for the bag
SPEAKER_03: that the fentanyl's in, but Chesa Boudin will not arrest you for the fentanyl in the plastic bag. Sax, we've totally lost the script, but Jamath sort of bridged this with the 230 discussion of common carrier and hey, we had great intent with this law, but nobody saw social networks becoming this dominant, addictive, et cetera. So, we need to be more nimble as a government in changing these regulations, whether it's straws, fentanyl, challenge trials, or 230, you wrote a blog post about it. After we had our 230 discussion, a lot of people started talking about it. Have you come to some conclusion as to an exit ramp for 230 or a way to maintain it without throwing the baby with the bathwater? Yeah, yeah, well, okay,
SPEAKER_01: just kind of make one concluding thought on this last topic. Sure, of course. So, the reason why innovation has happened so fast on the internet is because of one word, permissionless. Permissionless innovation. Nobody who has an idea for a startup needs to go get permission from someone in the government repeatedly. That's really what makes a difference. Mark Zuckerberg as a sophomore in college can just build his project. Larry and Sergey's PhD students can just build their project, ship it, start getting users, and they don't have to get the permission of a regulator whose incentive, by the way, is just typically not to get fired by approving something that might rebound on them in some bad way. And to keep their job, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Keep their job. I mean, imagine if, you know, imagine, just to take like a random example, when Elon launched Starman, remember when he put the, like he launched the Tesla into space and there was like a astronaut in there and it was like this kind of really cool moment. I assume he just did it. I assume he didn't get permission from anybody to do it. But could a moment like that have really happened if he did have to get permission? No way. It'd be like making its way up through the chain. No one would know what to think of it. No one would know whether they could be the one to approve it. And then what if something goes wrong? What if the Tesla comes back down to earth and, you know, turns into a meteor or whatever? Those are the scenarios that'd be running through their heads. Nobody would have allowed it, right? And so when you just let entrepreneurs do things, like good things happen, right? And that's why we've had so much progress on the internet. And in so many of these other areas, we've had much less progress because, you know, what a system like that selects for is your ability to go lobby regulators as opposed to just building your project and shipping it.
SPEAKER_04: I think that one of the things that maybe happens is that, you know, we were all expecting, or maybe some of us, I have definitely, some version of a new deal and some grand bargain. And I wonder maybe whether the new deal and our sort of like our version of FDR over the next, I don't know, 10 years is the person that actually says, guys, we're gonna have a wholesale rewrite of the regulatory infrastructure to account for technology. Just period, we're gonna start someplace reasonable and small, and we're gonna make common sense reforms just observing the times as they exist today, right? And we're gonna go and systematically try to make these industries a little bit more resilient, a little bit more entrepreneurial, you know, a little bit less corrupted by regulatory capture and lobbyists and laws that just don't make sense a hundred years later.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it'd be great if we could do that. The reason we can't is because how do you reform the law without the lobbyists getting their fingers in it, right? And the problem is there's no lobbyist for the company that doesn't exist yet, right? For the founder, for the entrepreneur who's got an idea in their head, but they haven't built their company yet, there's nobody representing that person in Washington, right? And what happens is you get new regulations in Washington, some agency gets created, they reach out and touch an industry, now every player that's affected has to create their own lobbying organization.
SPEAKER_04: Not true, and David, what do you think about this? What if the advocate for the entrepreneur or the uncreated company and uncreated product is really the same as just individual civil liberties and rights, how are they really that different? Because really what it's doing is saying the entrenched organizational infrastructure that runs my life gets deconstructed and then power gets pushed down to be the individual. That's tantamount to the same thing, I think.
SPEAKER_03: Well, we have seen some pushback. Well, I mean, there is some silver lining here. If you look right now, the citizens of California, obviously people have been fleeing and we've been talking about California and the one-party system here causing so many problems, but we did have Prop 22 pass and we now have 900,000 people have signed to recall Governor Newsom and these seem to be some pushback against this sort of nanny state where people can't make decisions. And then additionally, today the SEC announced that they will allow gig working companies to give stock to employees as part of their compensation up to 15% of their compensation. In fact, Hester, how do I pronounce her last name? It's not Pierce.
SPEAKER_04: You can't pronounce the word Pierce? Purse, Purse, Purse.
SPEAKER_03: No, it's spelled Pierce, but Hester Purse is worth following on the Twitter, H-E-S-T-E-R-P-E-I-R-C-E. Hester Purse, I had her on my podcast this week in startups and they're really getting aggressive in changing the accreditation law. So anybody's going to be able to be an accredited investor. You've become sophisticated through a testing mechanism and now they want to let gig workers get equity compensation. By the way, sorry, here's a perfect example
SPEAKER_04: of a regulatory body and infrastructure that actually has changed with the times. I think the SEC, in fact, I think maybe we talked about this a little bit the last time. I actually think one of the best Trump appointees has been Jay Clayton. And I actually think Jay Clayton has done an incredibly good job. And a lot of what he's done is just deconstruct this kind of nanny state and say people can become educated and make good decisions for themselves. And because it's in an area that's relatively benign, i.e. investing, people kind of just let it happen without a lot of pushback and everybody kind of generally supports it. Democrats support it, Republicans support it, and the outcomes are really good. To your point, Jason, which is in a world of zero rates, how do you expect any just average ordinary middle American who just works a decent job to save for their retirement to actually make enough money? Well, they're gonna have to get educated and they're gonna have to find a way of putting their money to work and in assets that have a better return, which literally was illegal up until very recently. And so you were systematically letting the rich stay rich.
SPEAKER_03: And you were blocking the poor from having an opportunity to advance. Like what if Apple Store employees could get their paycheck and say, I want to take my paycheck, 70% cash, 30%, you know, restricted stock units at this discount. Like we could let Apple Store employees make, you know, a million dollars after five or 10 years of working there 10, 20 years from now and have generational wealth change. David Sachs, you had a comment.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I was gonna ask, Jomath, do you think this type of deregulation is gonna happen in the Biden administration? Yes. Because what you're discussing is like a very, really kind of classical Republican Reaganite idea, right?
SPEAKER_04: I agree. And I think what's gonna happen is, I think you're gonna continue to see deregulation in areas that are benign and non-controversial. So I think the SEC, the FCC, I think all of these places you'll see movement. I think you'll probably actually see a lot more choice and deregulation effectively in Medicare and CMMI. I think those places will move first. And then I think it'll be up to some leader politician to then really rally the troops on some higher order bits. And one of the biggest higher order bits would be sort of around the broader healthcare infrastructure, social security. Education. Education. Education is probably the biggest one. That's like the, it's just too sacrosanct for the Democrats. You cannot get elected without the teachers. And so unless there is a startup that completely disrupts teacher pay and teacher compensation, then the public school teachers unions will continue to dominate a lot of the federal and state policy for the worst, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_03: Freberg, if you had one regulation or series of regulations or regulatory body, you would most like to see change for the good of humanity and Americans and the rest of the humans on the planet, what would it be?
SPEAKER_05: Probably health. Yeah, it's probably the drug process, the drug development process. There was a gene editing program that ran and someone died. So what year was this? 97, 99? And they basically halted all gene editing programs for 13 years. You know how many people died during that time? It was fucking, it's a crazy, crazy fact where the one death is too many rule basically doesn't take into account the kind of broader implications on the downside. So yeah, I think that one's probably pretty important. But there's a good interview. If you wanna hear some interesting thoughts and again, not trying to be an advocate for any political point of view, but Charles Koch goes on Tim Ferriss. Have you guys heard this podcast?
SPEAKER_04: I've listened to it, yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and he highlights a couple of really good examples about this regulatory capture problem. Like if you're poor and you wanna become a hairdresser and start a salon or go work in a salon and make money cutting hair, the cost and the burden for you to go get the necessary approvals from the Cosmetician Association is too burdensome for the average person who's poor and needs to become a hairdresser. And it's just insane that you can't just go be a hairdresser.
SPEAKER_02: The government needs to ensure
SPEAKER_03: that people don't get bad haircuts. It's worse, it's worse.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. You don't need a license to be the engineer that writes the machine learning code that either drives a car autonomously or that helps propel disinformation in a social network, but you do need to have a license to give someone a buzz cut.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, that's a bingo statement right there.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, in fairness, I am checking out Saks' new haircut here and I'm kind of thinking-
SPEAKER_05: So there should be more regulation? There might- I was practicing without a license.
SPEAKER_00: You were. I mean, did you do that yourself? We can't see the result of this.
SPEAKER_03: You may wanna think this one through. Saks, you're so white and pale,
SPEAKER_04: you're blending it to the background shade. It's impossible to see where your skin ends, your hair starts and the shade ends.
SPEAKER_05: But I feel like the regulatory, if you think about the framework, it extends into education too. Like you can't go get an entry level job without a quote unquote college degree. How fucking useful is a college philosophy degree to someone that's trying to get an entry level job working at X, Y, or Z bank, right? Like it's a bit absurd that the structure is set up so that there are, whether it's government or not, but there is effectively a hurdle, which is this alternative to regulatory capture, but it's like call it embedded system capture. Like there is a significant kind of hurdle that you have to get through that costs a lot and the point of entry has gotten too high for most and it really stalls things out and it's gonna cause more damage than good.
SPEAKER_03: Well, and it's also been completely disconnected from the reality of your employment potential. People are going into debt for $200,000 in a liberal arts degree that provides no scale that is- Do we all agree that that makes sense?
SPEAKER_05: Like does anyone in this group argue for needing a bachelor's degree for everyone? No.
SPEAKER_04: I don't think, I think it's useless.
SPEAKER_03: What do you guys think of ISAs, income sharing agreements? These have become kind of Lambda School does them, a bunch of other schools. David, you saw a startup we just invested in that's doing them and I think you liked them at the demo day we did with craft. Maybe this idea is who should take the risk for an education? And when you look at an ISA, an income sharing agreement, what they're saying is the school takes the risk. They let you come to school for free. They give you what would be the equivalent of let's say a $15,000 coding camp or growth marketer risk. Then you pay double that amount over five, six, seven years as a percentage of your income. But if you don't get income, if you don't break 50K, you don't have to pay it back. And if you decide to go back to school or your income drops below 50, you don't have to do it. Can you imagine if a college had to make that promise? They should do it.
SPEAKER_04: They should start in college sports, but they should do it. Imagine you could, you know, Duke basically went and recruited kids and said, listen, we're gonna pay you to come to Duke. We're gonna get you educated. We're gonna teach you how to play basketball better than anybody else. And we're gonna take 5% of your future earnings, yes or no. You're not gonna have to go to boosters. You're not gonna have to take money. You're not gonna have to do any of this stuff on the side, but just be your best, learn to play the game. We'll get you a reasonable education. We'll give you a good infrastructure. And we take 5% of the backend.
SPEAKER_03: With a cap. So you could cap the upside, right? So you don't take something unreasonable. Maybe there's no cap.
SPEAKER_04: But why do we always have to care about all of this? Like, it's like, you know, it's like, whatever, maybe it's 5% for the rest of your life. You're gonna pay the government 50%. You get nothing in return. So if you pay 5% and you get Coach K to teach you how to shoot a jumper, it's better than that. Right? So why isn't it possible? And I remember how people had this unbelievably paternalistic allergic reaction to income sharing agreements when they were first talked about. They called them indentured servitude.
SPEAKER_03: Modern slavery. And they compared them to slavery. And it was like, oh, so insulting to the concept of slavery. But it's so different. It's so different than signing a contract with an agent
SPEAKER_05: to represent you when you first start out in any industry, music or sports or film or whatever. You could sign an agency agreement where the agent is your rep for 10, 20 years, right? I mean, some of those agreements can have long tails on them and that's effectively the same. You know, it's even worse. Well, the NSA had a cap. Look at, we can talk about this in a second,
SPEAKER_04: but did you see what happened with Chappelle the last couple of days where Chappelle- Oh yeah, let's go. Did you watch the video? I loved it. Yeah. The video is incredible. The video is incredible. So the quick story on this is Chappelle basically did, he had a request, he went to Netflix and he said, take down Chappelle show. Netflix took it down. And he did a little standup. It's on his Instagram. It's like 18 minutes. It's fabulous as most Chappelle stuff is. Peak Chappelle. Peak Chappelle. And he basically told this story, which essentially the punchline is like, you know, he signed a contract where he just got completely fucked. And he's like, this is happening every single day in so many markets. And so the idea that then you have actually a different market, which disrupts something by actually creating transparency and something reasonable is all of a sudden completely immoral makes no sense to me. So there's abuses happening all the time. That is what the contract that Chappelle signed was indentured servitude. He doesn't even have the rights to his name. He cannot create- They took his name and likeness, right? Yeah. If you wanted to create the Dave Chappelle show again, he's got to call it the DC show. But this is a perfect- I'm sorry, but somebody owns his name? What the fuck? In perpetuity in all mediums and platforms forever.
SPEAKER_03: This is a perfect tie back to the earlier statement about,
SPEAKER_05: do you have the appropriate kind of understanding of the risk you're taking or the benefit that you're getting? I think Kanye has been doing this whole thing about he doesn't own the masters to his music originally, right? At the moment that he signed that contract when he signed over all the masters, the master recordings and all the future revenue rights to his music, he was getting paid a ton of money in his mind at that time. He said, oh my gosh, I'm getting whatever it was. Let's say it's $5 million. I'm getting $5 million, most amount of money I've ever seen. It is absolutely worth me giving over the masters of this music and the future royalty rights to this music for 12 songs or whatever it is for me to get $5 million today. And I can live an amazing life and it will change everything for me. Who is to say that he was not, you know, of the appropriate sound mind and understanding to decide in that moment to take that $5 million and give up all future royalties to his music?
SPEAKER_03: Well, Chappelle's argument was the people who are in that ecosystem are all friends. They're all working together and they've commoditized the artist and they collude to do this kind of upside limiting deals. And I think what makes Silicon Valley so special is that we collude the other direction. We want people to have equity participation and we want the social contract of Silicon Valley is, I'm giving you equity. I hope your penny stock becomes worth $1,500 and that you create multi-generational wealth and you become an angel investor. But I don't know, look, if I'm an angel investor
SPEAKER_05: or wanna be an angel investor and some schmo tricks me into investing in his shitty company and I just lose $20,000, but I didn't know how to determine whether that company was shitty or not because I've never done investing before. Is it for the government to regulate that circumstance and say, you know what, you need to be a quote unquote qualified investor to be able to discern a good company for a bad company or bullshit from not. And the same for these contracts, right? Like, I mean, so, you know, we're making the argument, I think for the, you know, the regulatory framework for preventing people from being able to have freedom of choice. And I think like earlier, you know, that the case was made like people should be able to have freedom of choice at any point. Why should the government kind of step in and make a decision for me? I think that there, I'm not advocating
SPEAKER_04: for government intervention. My only point is that there are morally reprehensible things that are happening today using contracts and that, you know, something like an income sharing agreement actually rights the ship in so many ways.
SPEAKER_05: That's definitely the burden of capitalism. Ultimately, you know, it devolves to that, right? Where like, oh, you're sick, you have cancer, pay me a million dollars, I'll give you this drug.
SPEAKER_01: So Hollywood's a little bit of its own beast where there's all these gatekeepers and the gatekeepers are always trying to get control over, you know, the creative product. And so, yeah, like, you know, signing contracts with those sharks is always a dangerous thing to do. I think Silicon Valley is very different. We have much more of a culture of equity. I think the income sharing agreements are much more in that vein. And I think they're a great idea for like any trade that demonstrably increases your earning power, right? So the beauty of Lambda School is they pay for you to get an education being a coder. It then increases your salary and they get a piece of that. That's like a win-win for everybody. I think where this goes, if these ISAs are successful, is that every trade that's valuable will get its own ISA type school. And then that gets peeled out of a university education. So what's left for colleges to do? It's basically, you know, all the stuff that doesn't add value. They're museums.
SPEAKER_03: They're basically like these monasteries again, right? They go back to being monasteries, not places where you get skills.
SPEAKER_04: We need to celebrate vocational capability. Cause I think like, you know, we have so celebrated this mythical bachelor's degree and it just means fucking nothing. It like, it doesn't- Learn a trade. Learn a trade and that's just as, frankly, that should be as respected or more. But in the American culture, you don't do that right now. I've never understood that. If you go, for example, to different countries around the world, Europe's a good example actually of this, because it's the closest analog in terms of quality of living to America. There's a real celebration of people who choose vocational tradecraft because there's an entire educational infrastructure that you can onboard yourself into. You can become a skilled person and you can have a really good, decent life. And- And there's pride in the work. And there's pride in that work. And in America, you know, you covet this piece of paper. The piece of paper is really just a scam that allows administrators to basically pay themselves millions of dollars and or run an asset management business as the Trojan horse of that purpose. It just doesn't make any sense. And so, you know, I don't know, I just think it's, I just think- The most amazing thing about these companies,
SPEAKER_03: I've been digging into them because I'm looking for more to invest in. And these companies, these companies that are, the trade schools that are basing themselves on ISIS, and there are ones who are doing welding and plumbing and all kinds of different things. And there are ISA platforms that are providing ISAs to any school that wants them and doing like the sort of AWS of ISAs. Anyway, these, what this firm told me was inside of one of these trade schools, they spend 50% of their time on placement, 50% on education. And that out of college, they spend 99.X amount of time on the education and less than 1% on placement, which kind of attracts, right? I mean, when we went to college, I don't know if it's changed much, but the career services center was like this two person office, like in the worst part of campus. And they don't, when you're doing an ISA, if you accept more people who are unqualified and can't, aren't ready for the education or not motivated for it, it works against you because they're not gonna pay back the ISA. So you then get sharper. You know, you sharpen the blade of who gets accepted. You start accepting the right people. These colleges, they would accept anybody who would come in and take the loans. That was your qualifier is did you pass your loan?
SPEAKER_01: The ISA as a service idea is a brilliant idea. It's a great idea. I would invest in that. I like that idea as an investment way better than running one of these schools. You know, that's basically issuing the ISAs themselves. But how amazing is that? That we live in a country where people are willing to, you know, as a movement now, people are willing to fund your education because they know it's gonna increase your earning power and then they'll get paid on the backend. That's like fantastic. And like, that's all like happening. All that innovation is happening right now without the government needing to get involved or a big government loan program. And the historical left is calling
SPEAKER_02: it indentured servitude.
SPEAKER_03: Literally like the Vox's and the New York Times of the world and all these publications framed it. Yeah, but I mean, indentured servitude
SPEAKER_05: is having a $250,000 debt that you've gotta pay down. You can never get rid of in bankruptcy for the rest of your life. Bingo. That's real indentured servitude. I think the problem is that, you know,
SPEAKER_04: East Coast left-leaning editorial publications, they have to themselves justify their $190,000 bachelor philosophy from Oberlin College. So, you know, if you take that- You know, Chamath, Oberlin is the number one
SPEAKER_05: listener base we have on this podcast.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you just lost.
SPEAKER_01: No, but you're right. Once you've taken out every valuable trade and moved them from a university where you gotta pay a hundred thousand a year to an ISA where it costs you nothing, like what's left? Is this gonna be people studying Suko? Philosophy. Oh yeah, people studying Suko. Intersectionality studies.
SPEAKER_03: They'll be studying the past.
SPEAKER_04: They'll be studying the past.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what a disaster to collapse upon itself. All right, as we wrap up here, let's just take a moment to think about what some people are calling the big reset. It's Thanksgiving. We have a change in management in the country, which is obviously polarizing. So I'll put that aside, but I think what's happened with these vaccines and science is truly miraculous. And let's face it, a lot of people, there's a lot of pain and suffering this year. A lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people lost their restaurants. A lot of people are suffering from mental illness. Some people are having to take care of their kids and get to know them. I mean, it's been hard for a lot of people. Sorry about that, Sax. I wasn't directed at him. David, do you know your children's names now?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I do now.
SPEAKER_01: David, what's it like to spend three hours
SPEAKER_03: with one of your children? He's got flashcards in front of him right now.
SPEAKER_05: There are pictures on the back, the name's on the other side. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03: That's so brutal. So anyway, I was trying to be sincere.
SPEAKER_01: The kids would even occasionally run into my office during COVID, you know? Yeah, and they want to talk to you and hug you and show affection? Crazy.
SPEAKER_03: They're like, excuse me, sir, who are you? I'm your father. Actually, I am.
SPEAKER_01: I thought I was just working for my office and all these kids show up and tell me it's their home, so.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I just wanted to announce to the all in audience that we have upgraded Friedberg and Sax's chips. Just last week, Chamath and I pushed the update for the Joy 1.7 update and how's it been going to the two Davids now that you have a third emotion? We now have emotion of joy.
SPEAKER_05: Do not use it for- It feels good and warm inside body.
SPEAKER_03: Do not use it all in same day. Spread it out over a month.
SPEAKER_04: Hey, David, did you think that Trump actually resigned two days ago? Was that the equivalent of a, like, or the concession tweet?
SPEAKER_01: It was acceptance of, you were talking about when he authorized the GSA to release transition funds to Biden. Yeah, I mean, that was his concession right there. That's basically what you're gonna get out of him. That's his acceptance of the election result.
SPEAKER_03: So after anger, he's now went into bargaining and then he was depressed and now he's accepting?
SPEAKER_01: Well, what basically happened is, you know, you had Rudy and Sidney Powell and, you know, that legal team going to court to try and challenge all these rules. The whack pack. Yeah, they're trying to go to court to challenge all these rulings. I think Rudy was like one in 35, meaning I think he won one ruling and lost 35. So it was going very, very poorly. So like you versus Alan Keating, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but that's a whole separate story we'll get into. But the thing that really like ended it was when Sidney Powell came out with this elaborate conspiracy theory that actually Trump lost the election because communist code writers had effectively, you know, infected the software that was running the election. And somehow Hugo Chavez was behind this, even though he's been dead for seven years. Hugo got us again. And the Republican governor of Georgia and secretary of state were in on it. Anyway, it was so wild and crazy that basically the narrative just cracked. And so then you had like Steve Schwartzman come out and then sort of the Republican business community and Pat Toomey, you know, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania came out and they all just said, look, this is ridiculous. And so that was the moment I think at which this narrative that the election was stolen kind of cracked is. And I think she kind of, she did everyone a favor by being so like off the reservation that it just brought the whole thing to like a meltdown.
SPEAKER_04: Sidney Powell always, whenever I see her, I always, I just think that she's one second away from her dentures flying out of her mouth and hitting the camera.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's your crazy aunt. That's the crazy aunt at Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_01: She said she was gonna release the Kraken and I guess she meant the hair dye that was running down Rudy's. I think it was the hair dye running down Rudy's face. That's exactly, that's the Kraken.
SPEAKER_03: Rudy's the Kraken. I mean, I'm glad that.
SPEAKER_01: It was a total meltdown. It was a total shit show.
SPEAKER_03: I'm glad the GOP finally, after Trump's defeat, decided with 55 days left to go that they would take a stand against Trump.
SPEAKER_00: Well, let me tell you what I think is gonna happen now.
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you what I think is gonna happen now is I think that this New York Times article, we talked about the top of the show, about the fact this Operation Warp Speed, that it was a big success. I think that the best narrative for Trump, if he wants to maintain this idea that he was robbed, is not that he was sort of legally robbed with fake votes or fake voting software, but rather just that if these pharma companies had put out the news a week earlier, it would have meaningfully changed. And I think he has an amazing story there. I would agree with him. Yeah, and it's kinda like, you know, when you have a major sporting event and there's a bad call by the refs and all the fans basically said, oh, we were robbed. Well, you can't get that result overturned. It is what it is. You lost. But you have a talking point forever that you lost. I mean, if you go to St. Louis or whatever, and you mention the name- There's an asterisk. Yeah, there's an asterisk. Yeah, you go to St. Louis-
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when they suspended Draymond,
SPEAKER_03: when the National LeBron Association suspended Draymond in that series.
SPEAKER_01: There are all these sporting events with asterisks by them. I mean, like, you know, if you go to St. Louis and mention the name Don Denkinger, you know, people will know what you're talking about. I think the Cardinals lost- Cardinography. The St. Louis Cardinals lost to the 85 World Series because of a first base umpires call, or at least that's their view of it, right? And so I think, you know, what Trump can do is say that, look, we were robbed because we never got credit for the vaccine. Now, if, I do think the economy is going to bounce back really strong next year because of the vaccines, right? I think you got to say that if these vaccines end COVID in the next three, four, five months, 2021 is going to be a great year. So if Trump hands Biden these vaccines and the economy does well next year, but something bad happens between now and four years from now, he'll say, I handed this guy everything on a solar platter, he screwed it up. And that'll be his narrative for four years from now.
SPEAKER_01: Could happen, I'm just saying. What do you think about,
SPEAKER_04: what do you guys think about the pick so far?
SPEAKER_05: Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary is great. That guy is not Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, she's really,
SPEAKER_02: well, I do think the biggest challenge we're going to face
SPEAKER_05: is this monetary policy issue. I mean, the dollar is, you know, in decline. We printed 30% of the US dollars in circulation in the last six months. And everyone's cheering that the Dow is at 30,000. It's like, well, you know, there's 30% more dollars. So everything's going to inflate. So I think there's a lot of work to do. It's great to have someone sitting in that seat who understands economic policy really clearly and the tie to monetary policy. I think the pick so far have been really top notch.
SPEAKER_04: Tony Blinken, friend of a couple of ours for Secretary of State, he's a star. Yellen's a dove, which I think is really good for just, you know. Did you guys know the chief of staff,
SPEAKER_05: Sacks, do you know who this guy, he's been like Biden's aide for a long time, kind of, is that the deal? Ron Klain, he's the founder of Revolution
SPEAKER_04: with Steve Case. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: He comes from a venture background. All of Biden's picks have been people
SPEAKER_01: who've been long time washing hands, who he's had personal relationships with for a long time. He really seems to value that personal loyalty. And they've also been kind of, you know, nice and boring, safe, efficient. Pics. I think he's delivering on kind of what he promised to be, which is a president we can forget about. Yeah, just tone it down.
SPEAKER_05: That's his motto.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to be a caretaker president. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: What do we do without Trump to talk about on this podcast? Cause it's been about 34%. We're going to need a new topic to rotate in here. We might need to put in little Netflix as we wrap here. What are you thankful for? And what are you most looking forward to next year? Vis-a-vis just, it's been a rough year. I mean, listen, it's been nice for people's equity portfolios, of course, but it's really, what do you hope for America, for humanity, for yourselves, for your family, for friends, you know, what are you thankful for? And I'll let you, Friedberg, it looks like your processing unit has delivered a result. So let's hear it.
SPEAKER_05: The emotion bank has been cleared.
SPEAKER_05: Look, I don't think that this year was any, any cup of tea for anyone. So I think like everyone, you kind of value your friendships and your family. So it's been a year, you know, going into COVID, I was in the office every day, spending more time at home, being closer to my children. I know their names, by the way, Sax. I'll teach you how to learn them. They're, it's been actually really special being at home a lot and being with the family a lot and realizing like how much that stuff matters and how being close to everyone matters. Because when you're in the run of the life before you kind of get knocked back and just put everything in perspective, you miss those moments. So that's been really special and important to me this year in a really kind of personal way. And just having friendships, right? I mean, it's great for us to all be able to talk as we do every day and have people you can kind of connect with even if you're not sitting in person. I do think that everyone realizes they need that. So anyway, it's been a insightful year. Money inside, it's, I was fucking terrorized in the start of this year about money and the end of the year.
SPEAKER_03: Here you go, finally. There it is, it's all a fucking rollercoaster. Sold the first company and now you got the second one IP on. Congratulations, Mazel. Sax, has your processing unit overloaded with this question or are you gonna be able to articulate something you're thankful for and appreciate it?
SPEAKER_01: I agree with all the things that Freeberg said. The flip side of working from home all this time is you do get to spend a lot more time with the kids. I personally have, I like this shift to remote work where I can do a meeting from anywhere. You don't have to go to the office. That's been kind of nice upside, I think. I think we've probably all learned how self-sufficient we can be. I have learned how to give myself a haircut. Apparently you guys don't think done a very good job with it, but. Well, it's better than you have your long hair, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, but look, I mean, I'm thankful for, knock on wood, we all have our health and weirdly, the economy of Silicon Valley is still doing great, technology's doing great, still the future. And I think the country is, even though COVID is kind of at its worst right now, I do think it's gonna get rapidly better as soon as these vaccines come to market. So I do think 2021 will be a much, much better year.
SPEAKER_02: Chamath.
SPEAKER_04: In this really crazy way, I actually now am pretty thankful for what I've learned during the pandemic. I mean, I wish we didn't have to go through it, but I think that it was the most psychologically stressful period of my life, just to be so isolated from everybody. And I learned something about myself recently, which is that in psychology, it's called repetitive compulsion, which is sort of like, you repeat the sins of your father or in this way, I repeat these tired ways of behavior from my teens and my twenties that were just unproductive. And in the day-to-day life of just running around and going to meetings, as David said, like flying around, go to a meeting, go to the office, go here, go there, you can make a lot of excuses for shitty behaviors that you carry with you. And so what I'm really thankful for is in this lockdown, I've been forced to really find the things that I don't really like about myself and try to fix them. So, you know, I'm really thankful for that because I think hopefully everybody has something positive to look at at the end of this, and that's definitely one thing for me. It's very touching and actually quite appropriate
SPEAKER_03: as we wrap here because Sax and Freeberg and I had some things we don't like about you, Chamath, that we wanted to bring up. So you kind of knocked one off the list already, so we've got four more to go.
SPEAKER_01: It's good you're doing this work.
SPEAKER_03: It's good. We were planning an intervention for this end of the pod, but you kind of opened the door, so here we go. You know, I'll wrap up with just saying, you know, family and friends are the obvious, you know, things that you appreciate at this time. I am thankful also for the hope that we've seen from, you know, what we can do collectively as a society. When we put our minds to something, warp speed comes to mind, these frontline workers. I mean, we really maybe have seen what a global challenging problem being solved can do, and hopefully that can translate into something like nuclear disarmament, a sustainable energy, global warming, et cetera. And so I think on a macro level, the most macro level, is the species, us humans as a species have now had an enlightening moment, just like world wars and, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki kind of changed people's perspective of the entire world. Jade and I were talking about that the other day, how people looked at the world differently after those horrific bombs went off. I think after this bomb goes off, we're gonna look at the world and say, hey, we can solve problems, right? And maybe we can be proactive about that. And then finally, I think for the people suffering from mental illness, who maybe I was callous and made fun of, or maybe just didn't relate to, I can relate to now because I have felt depressed, I have felt anxious, I have felt exhausted from this, right? And it's the first time in the 49 years I've been on the planet that I ever would say I felt depressed. I didn't understand what that meaning was when Saks would tell me how depressed he was, I just never, never hit me. I'm joking, he never said that, but it's a good joke. I am joking. But I, you know, I think for people suffering from mental illness, get help and, you know, talk to people. And I think this really opened my eyes to that. And of course, this podcast, you know, and our friendship- This podcast was the best thing that,
SPEAKER_04: that, and one of the best things in my life that came out of this whole period.
SPEAKER_03: I think for me too. And, you know, I've heard that from a lot of the people who listen to it. And I'm sure if Saks and Friedberg had a fourth emotion, they would agree with us. Frankly, I think this podcast has been doing nothing
SPEAKER_01: but costing me money, you know?
SPEAKER_00: Because I paid you as a Trump supporter. God knows how many deals I've lost. You are not a Trump supporter. Yeah, God knows how many deals I've lost
SPEAKER_01: because Jason keeps trolling me as a Trump supporter. And then on top of it, I get cut out
SPEAKER_00: of the only good bestie deal. If you would- I thought at least I would get this bestie deal. And you guys cut me out of it.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, listen, I just want to be clear. Saks is a conservative and a Republican. He is not a Trump supporter. He did not vote for Trump. This time he did not vote for Trump. Last time he does not support Trump's behavior. You can't have what he's voting, dude.
SPEAKER_03: Sorry, but he told me he didn't vote for him. Well, he did. Which one of us is going to try to hire
SPEAKER_04: Jared Kushner as a general partner?
SPEAKER_03: No, definitely not. If you are saying most likely because now you're reinforcing the theme, Saks.
SPEAKER_04: Actually, if you had to pick a venture fund that is most like the higher Jared Kushner as a GP. Andreessen Horowitz, they'll do anything for Chris. Are they still around? Founders fund.
SPEAKER_03: No. I don't think Peter wants to share the spotlight.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay. I go Andreessen.
SPEAKER_03: They'll do anything to get a press release.
SPEAKER_05: I don't think that guy needs a fund to go work at.
SPEAKER_02: True.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he'll just go buy another. Yeah, he did get three Middle East peace deals done.
SPEAKER_01: So, but you know. Who's got it?
SPEAKER_04: David, actually, come on. By the way, by the way, I mean, talking about inheriting incredible dividends, but is it the most incredible thing that you can come in and get Middle East peace done, but if you really unpack Middle East peace, do you think that Middle East peace would have happened if the cost of solar was not cheaper than the cost of oil? Honestly, it'd be like, if you didn't see an end in sight to oil, do you think that the Middle East peace deal got done? Yeah, I know what you're saying. I don't think so.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I know what you're saying, which is that if the Middle East wasn't becoming less strategically relevant to us, that creates degrees of freedom, I think. But yeah.
SPEAKER_05: That's had profound benefits for Silicon Valley too, right? Like, I mean, all the stuff that went into the Vision Fund and the money from Qatar and the money from like all these sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East has funded a lot of venture funds, has gone into direct late stage rounds in a lot of companies and it's really been a great boom for Silicon Valley. People can make fun of the companies getting overfunded and the nonsense that's gone on all they want. No, no, you're right. Better that than gold-plated Ferraris. It filters out into more angel investing, it filters out into more venture LPs and it ultimately gives a big boost to this ecosystem. So I think that the damage to oil has been great for Silicon Valley. The most incredible dividend of climate change is peace.
SPEAKER_04: It's like, it has made radical Islam a failed startup, a hyped series A that couldn't raise its series B. It's made sworn enemies over thousands of years cooperate together, all for what reason? Because you gotta pull the oil out of the ground now and monetize it because otherwise the cost of wind and the cost of solar- And you have to diversify. And you have to diversify because otherwise the cost of wind and the cost of solar is gonna make pulling the oil out of the ground economically infeasible within three or four years. Yeah, I mean, you already can't do it offshore.
SPEAKER_05: They took Saudi Aramco public, they started selling off the shares and they invested that capital in tech and other stuff around the world.
SPEAKER_01: It's been helpful, but there is another factor at work, which is the fear of Iran is now greater than, on the part of Saudi Arabia and Israel, their fear of Iran is now greater than whatever mutual hostility they used to have. And so it's kind of bringing people together that way. But you gotta give Kushner credit for still getting those deals done. You know, no one thought he could do it. I remember everyone was mocking him. I agree. He's not a moron and he's not an-
SPEAKER_05: He's not a moron. He's the opposite of an abrasive guy and he's very thoughtful and apparently very, I don't know if you guys know him personally, but he's supposed to be very smart. And I'm sure that wherever he ends up next, he's gonna do very well and he's gonna get invited to be in a lot of places.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, it's clear he did a very good job on the Middle East stuff.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, by the way, how crazy is it that Trump delivers on hottest economy ever, peace in the Middle East, and three vaccines for coronavirus and he's still lost? Who would have thought that? I always go to tell you what people think of character.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't know if you watch how he tweets,
SPEAKER_04: but he's something else.
SPEAKER_03: He tweeted himself out of office. If he acted normal sacks, he could actually take those victories. If he stopped the personal attacks, if he stopped the grifting, he would have won. He would have won.
SPEAKER_04: He could have been, he actually could, it would have been more than one. If he came in- He could have been Reagan. If he could, it's exactly what I was thinking. If he came in in 2016, calm, cool, and collected with a team where there was a dial down the insecurity and dial up sort of the intensity of actually calling people out for not passing progressive change, he would have been elected in a landslide. People would have said, well, on the way in, we were afraid, but after four years, the guy actually- He could have been magnanimous is what you're saying. Yeah, and it was a real missed opportunity for him.
SPEAKER_05: I still think much of Trump as he's a WWE superstar, and that's what people voted for. It's why Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota. It's why Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected governor of California. The average person that's looking at that guy versus the old dude that doesn't talk and saying some weird stuff about policy, it's like, oh man, that guy looks awesome. Let's put him in office. This is gonna be fucking fun. And if he turned it down when he got in office, he'd be much less appealing, I think, to a lot of people. I think it's that caricature of himself that makes him so appealing. Then I'd like to go on the record
SPEAKER_04: with my 15-year projection then, which is that The Rock is gonna run for president. And will.
SPEAKER_03: And will. I think the Iran situation, just to put that in perspective, David, if you look at the age distribution on the chart I just put on the chat, it is just extraordinary how young that country is. The median age is, I think, 28 or 29 years old. And they're barely holding onto power there. And it is going to flip into a much more progressive society than it is now. They are barely holding on. When you look at how many 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds there are in that country who are drinking and watching TV and have DPMs. On the internet. Watching YouTube. And they have the internet and they're watching porn and they're gambling, I'm sure, and buying Bitcoin and doing all this crazy stuff. That country is barely holding on. It's gonna be a crazy civil war. And let's just hope they don't have nuclear bombs when that civil war happens. Yeah, guys, guys, guys, being extremist,
SPEAKER_04: it's just a bad product market fit now. It's just not worth it. There's no money to fund it. Nobody cares that much anymore. Everybody's moved on. Low NPS score.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Would you recommend extremism to a friend or family member? Two. All right. This has been another all-in podcast for Bestie C, the Rain Man, David Sacks, and the Queen of Quinoa on his coming out party today. IPO coming up for Metro Mile. Congratulations to Friedberg. Congratulations to Chamath on the pipe. Sacks and I, we're gonna have to figure out a way to lick our wounds and wet our beaks. Let's put our thinking caps on and over the break find a deal we can exclude these two from. Because we gotta get it early, get 30% of a company, and then we gotta have Chamath, Spackett, and Friedberg do the late stage deal with all this Metro Mile money. And we'll see you all next time on the all-in podcast. That was fucking great. Best one yet.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you guys wanna see something funny? You guys see that video my wife just sent me? That's my dog taking a shit on your driveway, Sacks.
SPEAKER_00: Wait, I don't see it. Oh, man. Oh, man.
SPEAKER_03: Where is it? I wanna see that deuce. I just put it in. It's a code 13 again. Oh my God. There's only one person who has a code 13. Does that, Chamath, can you take a shit on his Model X?
SPEAKER_04: Oh my God, that's unbelievable. And then we'd all have code 13.
SPEAKER_03: Boop. Oh no, everybody. Boop.
SPEAKER_00: We rolled over the credits.
