SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, it's me. Jason Calachenas. Welcome. Welcome.
SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, it's me, Jason. Thank god Trump's out. I hate Trump and I love myself.
SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody, happy days are here again. Champagne cup of bottles popping, both cliquot
SPEAKER_02: again. Happy days are here again. Yay, Sax is so happy. Trump's out of office. He gave an amazing speech about how great Biden's inauguration was. Welcome to the All In Podcast. Oh my god. With me today in our post inauguration after glow is the dictator, the queen of Kenai, David Friedberg and riding the blue wave, diving in no more red pills. The blue wave is David Rain Man. Sax is with us. David, how did it feel to watch Biden's inauguration speech,
SPEAKER_02: which you said, hit all the notes and I see you wearing blue today. Let me have a sip of my book clicko and tell us you've got the blue jacket, the blue shirt and the blue headset on. You've written the blue wave. Tell us how you feel with Biden in office. I'm going to drink my vuv.
SPEAKER_00: Jason, I'm just happy to see that that you're happy. And it's does this mean does this mean that your Trump derangement is over? You've gone cold turkey. You're on the wagon. And I'm just happy to have my friend back and not have you part of this Trump derangement zombie horde that you've been in for the last few years. I'll tell you two quick stories.
SPEAKER_04: The first one turned out not to be true, but there was a New York Times alert that came out this weekend saying that they were going to lift the travel plan. For a moment, I was a little in shock. I'm Canadian. My family is in Canada. I haven't seen them in a year. My mom is 80 years old. I haven't seen her in a year. Then the second was on the day of the inauguration, Biden signed an EO, I guess, that starts to basically create a path to citizenship. There are two women in my life who I think are just lovely, lovely people who I've never been able to hire. Now this gives us a path to hire them and compensate them and the way that we wanted to. In these moments, I started crying. I've probably had three or four moments and I realized like, holy shit, I have had so much pent up emotion waiting for honestly just like a normal average day and like simple, humane, good things. I'm not trying to sort of jump on the Biden bandwagon. I think that he's got a lot of work to do. But I do think that just at a level, simple, basic level of humanity, it was a different it was a big sea change. How did you take it free
SPEAKER_02: Berg? I'm curious. Did you cry as well? I observed the inauguration. It was
SPEAKER_01: great your firmware. Sorry. We were supposed to push the two David firmwares for the ability to
SPEAKER_02: cry. But did you feel any emotion of the three emotions we've given you in your programming? Did any of them move at all? I don't remember. I mean, I don't remember the origin of my non
SPEAKER_01: emotional characterization, Jason, but yeah, I think it was based on every interaction we've
SPEAKER_02: ever had with you. But continue. Right. I guess that makes sense. So I feel like the Biden
SPEAKER_01: moment on inauguration day, it really did feel like a sigh of relief, because so much of Trump love him or hate him has been driven by a degree of tension, right? I mean, he came in to office on the premise that he was going to drain the swamp. I mean, that's kind of a very kind of active, you know, position. He's going to go away, he's going to change things. And I think, you know, the Biden tone is like, let's take it down a notch. Let's all take a deep breath. And I feel like that that generated a collective sigh of relief. I'll also say that I watched that with the eyes of someone who voted for Trump. I didn't vote for Trump. But I don't think I voted this year. I can't remember it was in the middle of pandemic. But I basically feel like there was a lot of folks. It's easy to say, let's unite the country when you're on the winning side. And when you're not, and you're sitting there, and your guy got kicked out of office, and your guy claimed that he got kicked out because of fraudulent activity, and you're one of the 46% of Americans that are already disapproving of Biden's performance in his first two days of office. You don't look at that as a moment of relief. You don't look at that as a moment of, of respite. And I feel like there's a little bit of a missed point of view in terms of how we're all covering it and talking about it. It certainly feels good to take the tension down and take a deep breath and have leadership not be putting the tension out there. But there's a lot of anger and disappointment still festering out there. And I think we need to be very cognizant of why and what we can do. And it would have been nice to see Biden not just say, let's unite, but actually step over the line and declare some of the policies and points of view of the other side as being valid and engaging more directly on those points, versus saying we'll all work together in the future. And we're already seeing this rift with McConnell and others in terms of how to deal with the filibuster in a unified senate. And I just don't think that we're there. So yeah, Sacks, what are your thoughts? And then we'll go to you,
SPEAKER_00: yeah, I mean, look, I'm not gonna swoon over an octogenarian reading cliches off a teleprompter. I'm sorry, I just can't do it. Now, that being said, you know, the the inauguration speech struck all the right notes of reconciliation, lowering the temperature coming together. These are the things you're supposed to say at an inauguration. These are the presidential layups, if you will, it's kind of a weird thing that Trump could never quite get these layups in. Biden did what he was supposed to do. And, and I agree that there is a sense of relief in the temperature being lowered. And, and this and the, the situation in Washington feeling a bit depressurized. And so I think he deserves credit for that. That's all for the good. I think the problem Biden's going to have is not just sort of the Trump right opposing him, but the uncivil warriors in his own party. Uncivil warriors, I think was the most memorable line in his speech. There are people, I think, you know, on the left who aren't really on board with the reconciliation agenda. I mean, shortly after the election, you had AOC proposing a truth and reconciliation commission, right? To go after everyone from the Trump era. I don't think that's exactly the kind of reconciliation Biden's talking about. You have, I think, the repressive hand of big tech playing into this revenge agenda by acting as a speech cartel. And now we have the rest of the tech stack jumping on board with the speech cartel. You had an announcement from a whole bunch of finance companies, PayPal, Stripe, Square, that said they would cancel the accounts and by implication livelihoods of anyone connected to January 6. Well, what exactly does that mean? I mean, there were many thousands of people at this rally on the mall. Only a few percent of them breached the Capitol and even smaller percentage engaged in violence. But everybody who was at the mall and really everyone in the MAGA movement is quote unquote connected to that protest. So, how many degrees of Kevin Bacon are we going to play in acting out these reprisals? And I think the worst part of all is that now we have, in Congress, a bill put forward by Adam Schiff that basically would create a domestic Patriot Act to create giant new surveillance powers for the state to go after people they deemed to be traitors and seditionists and domestic terrorists. And I actually tweeted a letter by Rashida Tlaib of the Squad opposing this. It's the first time I've stood with the Squad I was proud to, because the last thing the state needs right now is more surveillance powers. And this idea that we're fighting a war against fellow Americans based on basically political dissent, that's not going to create reconciliation. That's going to lead to the next step in this horrible tit for tat game. Just to build on this for a second, there is a Rasmussen poll that came out today. Today's Friday,
SPEAKER_04: January 22nd, so two days after the inauguration and Biden's disapproval rating is 45%. And all of a sudden you can think again, as you said, three days ago, a lot of people were on the losing side and are now on the winning side. And today, a lot of people that were on the winning side are quote unquote on the losing side. And you see how reflexive the reaction is. It's like an auto hate, right? It's like auto disapproval. And so if that's the case, it just begs the question, how much room and how much tolerance will we have as a society if we start to go after folks that effectively have an enormous amount of political dissent? Are there fringes of both parties that need to get basically found out, exposed and put in jail, whether they're Antifa on the left or the far right, extremists on the right? Absolutely. But hopefully the FBI already has enough power to do that and that's already their remit. And what we're not going to have to do is pass an enormous number of laws. I've said this before, the Patriot Act was so crazy because it was a foreign actor and a foreign event on domestic soil that created it. But between the pandemic and now what happened in the Capitol, a biological Patriot Act, a domestic Patriot Act, these are all in the offing. And I think what we're going to have to do is, again, it sounds cheesy, but find the common ground so that we can expose who are at the fringes of both parties who are the real crazy people, round those folks up and deal with them with the laws that we have today. Because otherwise the unintended consequences for the overwhelming majority of the Americans who are just normal folks is going to be a little scary. I thought a really interesting reconciliation moment happened with the woman who
SPEAKER_02: stole Nancy Pelosi's laptop. I don't know if you guys were have read that story. But this woman who stole the laptop and was considering selling it to the Russians or something. She's 22 years old. She's obviously was misguided in doing this. And the judge basically explained to her that she was releasing her to her mother's, you know, care and that her mother would go to jail if, you know, she did anything further. But she said, Listen, you know, you're a beneficiary of the Constitution, you are getting a speedy trial, you are getting representation. And she used it almost as a civics lesson. And I think we had a discussion maybe two episodes when the when the pot got a little hot, which was great for ratings, by the way. And for our relationships, and it resulted in a reconciliation dinner that we had a little a little wives dinner, or wives brought us together for dinner to just make sure everything was on the Well, Chamath, Chamath brought us together for dinner.
SPEAKER_00: And brought wives. And brought wives. Yeah. And no, I mean, it was it was a good thing, because frankly, Jason, I was starting to hate you just a little bit. But I could feel the hate, you know, and Chamath being empathetic as he is recognize the situation. And so we've decided to do, you know, at least a quarterly besties dinner to make sure that, yeah, that the contentiousness does not get out of hand and interfere with our friendships, which are more important than our politics.
SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, that's what we all hope is comes out of this podcast, which is a deeper understanding and reconciliation of, of issues that we disagree on. And breaking bread, having a meal or having a civil conversation, even if it gets a little heated, keeping it civil is important. I thought that this is the way to handle it. A lot of these, we're going to be able to use some amount of judgment on the people who stormed the Capitol and say, Okay, this person's misguided. They took a selfie, this person broke windows, and then this person, you know, through a fire extinguisher, a cop, and we have to make sure that the justice system is deployed in a fair way and more surveillance and more investigation. I don't think that's the solution. I think more surveillance,
SPEAKER_04: no, more investigations, absolutely, because I think the FBI has the power today to do that. And I think they should, like I said, they should find every single person involved, find the appropriate crime, make sure that they're punished. But the idea of passing broad sweeping surveillance powers over every American citizen is fucking nuts. It's bonkers. And by the way, all that's going to do is create these honeypots for foreign governments to want to attack anyways, because if that capability exists, it exists in code, on servers, somewhere, and folks in China and other places will want to find out where that is, and they will be attacking it all day long. And so the last thing we need is we're already leaking enough information about ourselves online willingly and unwittingly. I don't want there to be a honeypot. That's the first thing. The second thing I just want to say is I thought it was incredible what Mitch McConnell did, just back to your comment, Jason, about making sure folks get the right adjudication. I think Mitch McConnell set the stage to have Donald Trump impeached. And the reason I think that is this was the first time he was completely unequivocal, which is that Donald Trump provoked all these folks. And I think what it allows the Republican Party to do is to get together under
SPEAKER_04: closed doors, behind closed doors, circle the wagons and say, it's either him or us, we choose right now. And I think what's going to happen, if I had to guess, is that that allows a lot of people to break ranks and support the impeachment in the Senate. That's going to start on Monday. And I think there's a real chance now that this impeachment goes through and he gets convicted. I think it's worth just thinking about the implications of that. If you did that, there
SPEAKER_01: are Trump loyalists, there aren't really GOP loyalists. And I guess there are GOP loyalists, but there are a lot of Trump loyalists that are not loyal to the GOP at this point. And Sax, correct me if I'm wrong, but if Trump does actually create a fringe party, does create a Patriot Party, as he suggested he might, you could see up to 20 million Americans joining that party. And that would reduce the ranks of the Republican Party significantly. And then kind of, my understanding is in political theory, what would result is you always have a balance in the parties. And so the parties kind of adjust left or right to create that balance. Ultimately, it's just kind of the organic way this works. In order for the Republican Party to gain, you would probably see a lot of membership move over to the Republican Party, which means that the Democratic Party is going to move further left. And think about the implications of that. If they do actually kick Trump out of the party, and he does set up a fringe party, you will likely see the Democrats move further left, creating a much more kind of conflicting story for some of the centrists than what they're telling today of what's going to happen in the future. And that's a very different America in the next two to three years that could be created if they took that risk. And I think they have to associate that calculus when they're making this decision. You know, you can talk about justice and wanting to kick him out of the party, but the implications of him leaving the party are rather profound. Oh, it would fracture the Republican Party. It would be, I guess, the best historical analog
SPEAKER_00: would be when Teddy Roosevelt left the party to form the Bull Moose Party. He actually fractured the Republican Party and that allowed, I think, Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency, beating Taft. Yeah, I mean, the Republicans would basically lose every election from now until Trump is no longer, you know, a force in American politics if he created, I guess, the- Or they'd have to move left, right? I mean, in order for them to gain, you know, more people,
SPEAKER_01: they'd have to get the centrist Democrats, they'd have to move left and that'll give the Democrats the ability to move left. Yeah, I mean, it would be a dream scenario for the Democrat Party.
SPEAKER_00: I'd be surprised at the end of the day if enough Republicans went along with this to fracture the party. But look, I understand that on some basis, you know, Trump caused what happened at the Capitol. He convened everybody, he rabble roused. But I think that, frankly, if you have a trial, I think the question we have to ask is, like, what agendas does this serve? Does this serve a reconciliation agenda or does this serve a revenge agenda? I mean, the guy's already out of office. I thought we canceled the Trump reality show. And this is like bringing it back to the Senate. This is like bringing it back for another season. Because this trial is going to be a shit show. Just like all things Trump, you have a trial in the Senate, and it's going to turn into a total farce, okay? And, you know, look, I think cosmically, Trump was reckless, he was responsible. But when you actually look at the legal definition of incitement, it's actually very hard to prove incitement. So now Trump's going to get his lawyers up there, and they're going to be pushing him to get his lawyers up there. And it's going to consume the country for months. And I just think we should be moving forward right now. The guy's already out of office days and done.
SPEAKER_02: Why would it take months? I'm curious. You're just saying you're overhang from it?
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna start at mid February, right? It's not going to be three days. This goes on until the trial is over. I mean, it'll be at least a week of discussion, right? So,
SPEAKER_02: do you think prevent the GOP preventing Trump from being able to run again is worth the year the week of animosity? Let's call it? I don't I think we should just move on as a country.
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, at the end of the day, I think that's what's good for Biden's agenda. I mean, this will become very consuming. What's good for the GOP, though, if you're as a person who would
SPEAKER_02: align themselves with Republicans, mainly, I would say, what do you think is best for your party, the party you're part of? Just moving on, just moving forward. What if Trump comes back and
SPEAKER_02: gets the nomination in 2024? I mean, I think that is definitely a risk you take.
SPEAKER_00: But I think that risk, I, you know, I'll leave it to the voters to decide what makes sense.
SPEAKER_04: Interesting. I think that the only salvation for the Republicans is to repudiate Trump. And I actually agree with Friedberg. I think that this creates the opportunity for this, I think Trump wants to call it the Patriot Party, to be sort of center-right. I think Democrats probably add over time, you know, center-left. And then the Republicans actually are this interesting power broker because they can actually tack to the middle and be centrist, you know, about a social safety net combined with, you know, small government. If you could somehow tiptoe and balance on that line, I think that is the winning strategy that people want. But I think that's my point is the Republican Party is going to have to move left
SPEAKER_01: in order to create balance between the two parties again, because they are going to lose 20 million voters to the Patriot Party. And that's the profound shift that's going to happen. And when the Republican Party moves left, the Democrats are going to move further left. And so- Maybe. I don't think that moving that far left is a really winning strategy for them.
SPEAKER_02: No, but I think, I think Freeburg is right. So as an example, I think I can say this, but like I
SPEAKER_04: had a call this week with the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez. What an unbelievably impressive guy. Holy fucking shit, this guy is amazing. What he's done in Miami is incredible. I mean, the GDP growth is like Chinese GDP growth, 10%, 8%, 6.5%. He's running fiscal surpluses, crime is down, down, down. He's done an incredible job. This guy is a fundamental centrist. And when you talk about what his beliefs are, I was like, what is this guy? Is he a Democrat? Is he a Republican? He's like, honestly, I'm a centrist. And so my point is if whoever tacks to the middle will find the ability to attract incredible leaders that I think are our next generation set of leadership. So in that way, Trump as a change agent, sacks was a success in that he broke the system. And
SPEAKER_02: this was Peter Thiel's kind of concept when he put him in. And I know you don't speak for Peter, but Peter's idea was, hey, this person is a change agent, he's going to be this, you know, drain the swamp person, maybe that didn't happen. But he has basically made everybody reconsider what party they want to be part of and what they actually want on the political agenda. And now we're so we've never been more focused on politics, and how our country runs in our lifetime, have we? Well, Trump, you're right, that Trump was a classic disruptor. You know, Keith
SPEAKER_00: Raboy has this line about founders that disruption is created by disruptive people. And Trump was, you know, one of those very disruptive people. I mean, just to take two examples, I mean, he created a total realignment on our views around China, I think it's now a bipartisan consensus that, you know, we should not keep feeding China, and making, you know, keep feeding that the Chinese tiger and turning into a dragon. Everyone seems to think now that some reappraisal is warranted. And the other the other big issue was the forever wars in the Middle East. You know, I think Trump first created a realignment within the Republican Party when he said no more bushes, he meant no more of these stupid foreign wars. And I think that was an important realignment. So yeah, I mean, he's been a very disruptive figure. I think that everyone's breathing a sigh of relief because we've moved on. I think that he unnecessarily was incendiary and sort of pressurized the situation. But I think the best thing at this point is to move forward and not keep rehashing the Trump era. Speaking of rehashing, I don't know if you guys know about what is happening with Facebook,
SPEAKER_02: but they have an oversight board they created last year in the spring. And the oversight board is not to do the day to day policing of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp activity. But it is to be a place where people who have been have had content removed or have had their accounts suspended to appeal. They have taken the Trump case as it were, and given it to their Supreme Court, which is the oversight board. And the oversight board is going to make a judgment based on should Trump get his social media accounts back. They have complete autonomy from Facebook. They are funded by Facebook with 120 or $130 million over the next six years. So they're getting like $20 million a year to run this. They've got a really amazing bench of intellectuals, public intellectuals, and they're sort of above Facebook in this regard. What do we think should happen to Trump's social media accounts? Should he have a path to reclaiming them? And with this board that exists as this a budsman, as I talked about in the last episode, what do we think of this process? And do we think maybe Twitter and YouTube should join this oversight board? Let's separate these two things. And actually, Jason, you just framed it perfectly.
SPEAKER_04: Let's separate the two issues. One is, is any of us comfortable with a random set of people that some people will like and other people not like making these decisions on our behalf that are not necessarily trained to make these decisions? I mean, these aren't elected trained judges or lawyers that sit for a bar exam. They're not trained judges. They're not trained judges. They're lawyers that sit for a bar exam. These are just private citizens, ultimately, at the end of the day. I think that if you allow this to happen at scale, there's going to be a bunch of decisions that you'll be okay with and support. I think a lot of people probably are cheering when Trump got blocked. But if you can abstract it away and think about all the people that you actually care about, what if the administration was on the other side and now all of a sudden these people to curry favor with the administration went in a different direction and people that you cared about got attacked? It is an untenable situation and I think this is the slippery slope that the framers never intended. I don't think it should be people like this making any decision like this. In many ways, it's a fig leaf for these companies to pretend they're doing the right thing while they're really shirking the real responsibility. Friedberg, do you agree?
SPEAKER_01: It's hard to say on the specific. I think we should just take a broader point of view on this, which is how do tech companies create independence in the platforms that they're building so that they don't get scrutinized as monopolists? There are several examples of this being done, both successfully and not successfully across the tech ecosystem. Google made Android open-sourced. And by making the Android operating system open-source, they were able to have their own forked versions that they were able to install on phones with partners like HTC and Samsung and others that they could then have their search engine be the primary search engine. So, the entire Android operating system is available for anyone to work on, for anyone to fork, for anyone to use. And then Google's iteration of that open-source platform and Google's contributions, which they were making regularly, allowed them to have a great commercial outcome without being the owner of the operating system, having learned from the mistakes of Microsoft in the past. Facebook tried to take a similar approach with Libra and it was a total shit show and a disaster. I don't know where it is today. But they tried to create this also independent board to provide oversight and to do all the open-source work on the Libra currency. And Facebook was going to then use that on their platform as their token cryptocurrency solution. And obviously, there was so much scrutiny because no one believed the independence. And I think we're hearing the same thing now about the Facebook oversight board. Jack Dorsey is now taking the same approach with Blue Sky, which is meant to be this open-sourced, independently managed social media protocol system. And so, Twitter would effectively become an application layer on top of this open-sourced approach to how do you decide what goes on social media, how do you decide what's inappropriate and appropriate, and what technology protocols are available for everyone to use, and what business and arbitration protocols are available for everyone to use in an open-source way. And we'll see where Jack goes with Blue Sky. He seems to be doing a better job messaging and organizing teams of people to work on this. And I don't see the pushback that Facebook is getting with their oversight board. So, unfortunately, a lot of these the big tech platforms in order to avoid the monopolistic allegations and the allegations of control and influence, they're creating independent systems and it's hit or miss. And I don't think we yet know. I think in the next year or two, we'll see how Blue Sky, Libra, the Facebook oversight board, and some of these other platform- What would you do, David? Deep platform approaches.
SPEAKER_02: What would you do? Let me just put it to you. If you were in charge, you were the CEO of Facebook or Twitter, would you have a path to reinstating Trump, yes or no? Can I jump in on that? Yeah, let me just get freeburgs. Would you, yes or no, reinstate Trump? Oh, yeah, 100% we should have a path to it. I think, like I've said in the past,
SPEAKER_01: having some objective... I think that, number one, I don't think it was inappropriate for them to kick him off the platform from a legal perspective. I don't... Saxon and I might disagree, but we can probably argue for an hour. But I think from a freedom of speech point of view, they're private companies with private accounts and they did what they wanted to do. Was it the right thing to do? I don't think that was the right thing to do. So you would give him a path to getting his account back?
SPEAKER_02: And so I think you need to create an objective system and you need to give everyone,
SPEAKER_01: whether it's Trump or whomever else, everyone has to have the same set of standards that they're held to. And then a universal approach that anyone can appeal and... Okay, but that's the approach. But knowing what Trump did on January 6th, would you let him back
SPEAKER_02: on your platform if you were CEO? Is the question I'm trying to get out of you, freeburg. But okay, David, you go.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, so here's the fundamental problem is that the town square is now owned by Facebook and Twitter. The town square got privatized and our speech rights are now in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as a practical matter. I mean, you do not have speech rights in the modern world if you get deplatformed by big tech. And until now, there's been no way to appeal their decisions. We have had no transparency into their decisions. So I think Facebook creating this appeals board is a step in the right direction. But they're calling it their Supreme Court. But I'll tell you, my Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. At the end of the day, we all know that the most important part of a trial is jury selection. And Zuckerberg is still picking these 20 people. And you know, actually, just in case in point, he picked the top,
SPEAKER_02: he picked the four and the four pick the next 16. And then they don't have an ongoing ability to pick the next ones, and they have some amount of terms. So just to give you that. Okay, well, fair enough. And like I said, look, I don't want to criticize this move on its own,
SPEAKER_00: because it is a step in the right direction. We need an appeals process when people get canceled. Okay. That part is good. But but what I would like to see, like I said, my Supreme Court is the Supreme Court, and they've spoken to this issue. And I would like to see these social networking monopolies apply a First Amendment standard, a speech policy broadly consistent with the First Amendment. And sometimes that will mean allowing speech we don't like, but it will result in a greater level of speech protection for all of us. Well, it will allow hate speech back on the platform.
SPEAKER_02: No, but hold on a sec.
SPEAKER_04: If you're going to go by that standard. The problem is with this oversight board concept is that it completely violates exactly what the Supreme Court is meant to be, which is a country by country set of governance and standards and laws. Like I'm just looking at the oversight board people right now. These people look incredibly well credentialed. Emmy Palmore of Israel, Catalina Botero-Marino of Columbia, Nighat Dadd from Pakistan, Helle Thorning-Schmidt from Denmark, Catherine Chen from Taiwan, Jamal Green from the United States, Alan Rusbridger from UK, Andreas Sajo from Hungary. And it goes on and on. How are we supposed to adjudicate a set of standards at a national level? Like when we have the – are all these people from all these different countries supposed to apply on US constitutional right of free speech and have an idea? The idea would be they would use some global standard, but then also take into consideration
SPEAKER_02: local standards. That's what their stated purpose is and why they're so diverse. The setup for that though, Jason, is that then when there's a – the Hindu nationalist BJP party
SPEAKER_04: has a specific point of view and so when Modi wants to get elected, there's going to be specific kinds of free speech laws there. Poland is going to have a different point of view and they're not going to respect what's happening in the oversight board. Case in point, Australia passed a potential law or is considering passing a law, which is basically around if treating Facebook and Google as quasi-publishers and that they're – I think that they have to pay some kind of royalty now for articles that are shared or published or whatever. Google said, I'm out. Then Facebook said, I'm out too. What does that mean for 200 million people? You're out. What does that mean you're out? You can make money when the getting is good and all of a sudden you build this public infrastructure when the country's rules change. I actually respect that more than trying to create some of this broad holistic governance committee because I think it's a shit show. You can't cherry pick which laws you want to observe and respect and then which laws you don't.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think Jomath makes an excellent point about how difficult this is going to be to implement. Let me propose an alternative that actually comes from a former law professor of mine at the University of Chicago, Richard Epstein. He made the point that he wants to apply common carrier regulation, at least in the US, to these monopolies. The example he gives is that the railroad monopolies could not deny you service based on your political views. And this is a real issue. Imagine going back in time, we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example. The way that Lincoln and Douglas went around the country was by train. Imagine if some railroad magnate, some oligarch said, Mr. Lincoln, I don't like your views. I'm not going to give you passage on my railroad monopoly. The common carrier rules would have prevented them from doing that. And what Epstein suggests we do is if you're essentially a monopoly, a speech monopoly in the US, one of these platforms that has the gigantic network effects, you have to apply the common carrier rules. It's an interesting concept, I think. Let's move on to the economy. And it'll
SPEAKER_02: be interesting. We'll monitor obviously what this oversight board does. We're going to monitor what's going to happen with this January 6. By the way, sorry, Jason, the last thing on this is
SPEAKER_04: you can tell if you graphed, and I'm sure somebody listening to All In can graph and tweet this, but if you graphed the price to earnings ratio of big tech, as all of these issues have come out, if you looked at a time series of their PE and you put on there things like George Floyd, things like the capital riots, all of these things that have created these issues around free speech, flash points, the massacre in New Zealand and Christchurch that was live streamed on Facebook, all of this stuff, what you'll see is at least capitalism is voting that these companies will not be allowed to be companies much longer. So the smart money is betting that they're going to be regulated and
SPEAKER_02: something's going to change? It's going to be a quasi-governmental organization, exactly, that the
SPEAKER_04: level of regulation at a government by government level is going to be so onerous as to make these companies quasi-nonprofits that work on behalf of countries. Yeah, they're going to become
SPEAKER_01: utilities, right? They're going to get regulated like utilities at some point. Or they're going to
SPEAKER_02: have to adopt some governance, like we've talked about, or other options will emerge. And I think what jack is doing with the blue sky is what they're calling it blue sky. Yeah, yeah, what they're really doing with blue sky is saying your profile and your data is going to be stored on some blockchain or some decentralized system like Bitcoin or like any other peer to peer service, which means it's not on their server, Twitter just pulls all that data together. So we would all have our own domain names and calicanas.com or sax.com slash profile dot whatever the HTML equivalent is, let's just call it dot social, you know, your sax dot social URL would be your profile on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else. And when you post it to it, it would post to Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, they could say we don't actually host this stuff. We're just pulling it together, which then destroys their business model perch moths point. What do we think, as a little aside is going to happen with the tick tock case? Now that Trump is out of office and Biden is in office, we sort of alluded to China, sacks being a super important thing that we all have consensus on now what should happen with tick tock? And do you think Biden will go after tick tock and say, hey, we got to get this out of here because it's, you know, essentially spyware and jock ma was just resurfaced. And let's just talk about China for a second.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the sad reality is that the whole tick tock thing is gonna get swept under the rug. I think there'll be no restrictions on tick tock. I think what we need the issue with like, with banning tick tock, though, is that it's just one place where China can collect data on all of us. I mean, the reality is there's thousands of places. And so, you know, I do think that taking some action on tick tock is warranted, but it would it is a little bit of selective enforcement. But what I would like to see is some guarantee some assurance that that tick tock is not is collecting data in the way they're saying they're collecting it and that there's not sort of spyware within the app. And I don't think we know for sure whether there's spyware or not. I'll say it slightly differently. I've maintained this for a while, but it is inconceivable that
SPEAKER_04: inside of big tech at every single company that you define big tech is not at least one spy from Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan. Saudi Arabia.
SPEAKER_01: Did I tell you guys I had a spy working for me at Climate? No. You got arrested? Did I tell you guys about this?
SPEAKER_04: No, tell us the story. It's public. So I'll share. We had a data scientist named Hightower, great guy,
SPEAKER_01: worked on our remote sensing team and worked on our nitrogen model, which predicted nitrogen content and soil and was very deep in the code base and everything. And shortly after I had left, I found out this climate just for the audience, my company I started and ran was acquired by Monsanto in 2013, which is a big seed company. A lot of people know it for other things. And so I left and I found out that the guy quit, went to the airport, and the FBI intercepted him at the airport and they found tucked into his bag a thumb drive and he had downloaded all of our code base for our nitrogen models. And he was taking them to give them to the Chinese government. And so he's in jail right now. He's in prison in the US right now. But this was like the most nondescript, super nice data scientist guy you've ever met. You would have had zero suspicion. And it turns out... This is the point. How many of those exist in Facebook?
SPEAKER_04: And it was so... And by the way, it was so easy for him to get access to our code base.
SPEAKER_01: And he pulled all this stuff down and he had the whole model. And there's a lot of articles about what happened in our case. But you're right, it's happening all over the place. And I don't think that we fully appreciate how much of America's IP is stored in software and data and how accessible that is to employees inside of these organizations. And that the security is not adequate to protect that data and that IP. And then the crazy thing is, just to connect the two dots here on this Jack Ma thing,
SPEAKER_04: when you saw that video where basically he was forced to show fealty to- I'm okay. I'm okay. And this is all about the Chinese party. I'm not being held captive.
SPEAKER_04: My gosh. I mean, these are all quasi-governmental companies. Alibaba exists because of the largesse of the Communist Party and Xi Jinping. If that wasn't clear after last week, I mean... And so to your point, if any company gets a hold of US user data or otherwise, it's effectively the Chinese government getting a hold of that data. Yeah. We don't need proof, David, when Jack Ma disappears and then comes back and looks...
SPEAKER_02: He looked nervous on that video. I'm no expert, but he did not look like he was the Jack Ma who was giving speeches and inspiring people. And I don't know what this does to entrepreneurship in China, but I mean, who in China is going to start a company now and want to be the next Jack Ma or Jeff Bezos when- No, I think, Jason, it's even simpler.
SPEAKER_04: What happens? It makes entrepreneurship even simpler. Meaning, for those entrepreneurs that thought that there was a balance between financial imperative and moral imperative, there's no balance. You can flush the moral imperative down the fucking toilet. China will allow you to get super rich and super successful as long as you super toe the line. And that's the message. Right. It's like what Putin did with
SPEAKER_00: Kordakovsky in Russia. It's like he basically told all the oligarchs, you work for us now. And it worked. And that's basically... It worked. That's basically the message from the CCP to Jack Ma and to every other entrepreneur in China is, you work for us now. And by the way, civil military fusion was a policy expressly announced by President Xi. One other data point on this I think is really interesting is that Biden just announced that he was keeping on Christopher Wray as the head of the FBI. Christopher Wray gave a speech back in July at the Hudson Institute about the counter espionage efforts that the FBI is engaged in. And he was saying that the FBI has more cases now related to Chinese counterintelligence. He said that the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours. Wow. Two a day. Two a day. And of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. So this is directly from a speech he gave in July. So I think it's really interesting. Now, at the time that he gave this speech, a lot of people were saying, well, this is just more of Trump's China baiting. But I think that by Biden keeping on Christopher Wray, there's a continuity of policy there. And I think focusing on TikTok is probably the wrong thing. We need a more comprehensive policy to deal with counterintelligence. Well, it's a good start for the
SPEAKER_02: start, though, to say if you hit scale, we're not going to let you operate here. And we want reciprocity. Adding to this, outgoing Secretary of Pompeo and his the day before the inauguration tweeted, I have determined that the People's Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in China targeting the Uighurs, Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups. That's quite a bomb to leave the day before. And I think this signals we are going to keep resetting this relationship. And what an incredible opportunity for us to bring factories back here bring, as we've talked about here, manufacturing back, correct? Freeburg? That's what I think. No, it's gonna let's kick it off. We got we got 3, 3
SPEAKER_01: million factories in China. I think we've got less than 100,000 in America. Let's go and it will be
SPEAKER_04: so glorious. It will be so fucking glorious. I mean, think about this, right? Look, think about the amount of money like at the end of the day, what is a government's purpose? Is it to run a profit? No, you know, that's our job, right? Is it to run at breakeven? I would actually say no. I think it's to basically promote the prosperity of current and future generations of its citizens. And so you should be investing. So if you should be so if we're going to be printing, you know, trillions of dollars, and you know, we should talk about the stimulus bill because Biden is going to rip in another 2 trillion, which I think is the perfect and then perfect segue. And then by the way, and then after that, there's going to be this, it's amazing infrastructure bill, put the money to work. Let's reclaim a bunch of this capability on shore and let's rebuild America. Okay, freeburg. You looked at the $1.2 trillion stimulus package that Biden is
SPEAKER_02: proposing. How much of that goes towards rebuilding factories in America?
SPEAKER_01: Well, none. So remember, there's one point nine billion, it's 1.9 trillion, 1.9 trillion. Yeah. And so just to put that in context, you know, Wall Street has talked about there were going to be four massive stimulus bills, you know, since last April, May, I think they've talked about this. And we're seeing this come to fruition now. And Chammav, correct me if you've heard differently, but there's always been the expectation we would have the big first stimulus, which we had last March, then a second stimulus. People have been waiting for the state stimulus or the local government stimulus, which this one now captures. And then the fourth program was always going to be infrastructure. And we haven't seen details of the proposed Biden infrastructure plan yet. But I'm pretty sure it's going to have a lot of green energy stuff tied up in it. But let's just hit the numbers, right? So in 2009, post financial crisis to keep the global economy from collapsing, Congress passed an $800 billion aid package. 800 billion was extraordinary at the time, and we'd never seen anything like it. TARP. And last March, if you'll recall, we passed this emergency $2 trillion package, you know, more than two x what we had during the financial crisis. And now just in December, right before the year wrapped up, Congress passed another $900 billion package. And now we're talking about this $1.9 trillion package getting passed. So we've eclipsed anything you could have ever considered possible in terms of fiscal stimulus. At this point, the M1 money supply, which I sent the link out ahead of this for share, has gone up by 75% in just the past year. And now if we break down the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, you know, a huge chunk of it, and this is what Wall Street's been waiting for, is $350 billion is going to state and local governments. So think about San Francisco or the state of California, the city of Chicago, the city of New York, all of these folks have seen their revenue decline, and they've had to run massive emergency programs. Where's that money coming from? They haven't been able to raise taxes, they've had to put a hold on receipts. And so this is meant to bridge the gap at the local level. And this is really important, because so much of capital markets still very much fund local and state governments through municipal bonds. And those bonds, if they start to default, are going to have a dangerous rippling effect in the economy. So bridging the state and local government budgets with this $350 billion package turned out to be, you know, an absolute need. And the Republicans prior to the election, were pushing hard against this and saying, let those states fail. They're mostly blue states, let those cities fail. They're mostly blue cities, they're mismanaged, they're being stupid about how they're operating. So this is a big deal. There's $160 billion for COVID fighting, some of which, you know, I throw up on $20 billion for vaccination, which equates to about $150 per person they expect to vaccinate, which is an extraordinarily high cost if you actually think about it on a first principles basis, it's ridiculous how inefficient they're going to be at this. $50 billion for testing, $40 billion for protective gear and supplies, and what this indicates to me is so much of what goes on in government and government spending is skating to where the puck used to be not skating to where the puck is going. And it's almost like by the time this money gets deployed, I'm not sure we're going to need as much protective gear and supplies. I'm not sure we're going to need as much testing if we can actually get the vaccinations done in the next 90 to 100 days, and much of the country starts to recover from this. You know, you've now got $150 billion program sitting out there that doesn't need to be out there and it's a waste of money. What we should be doing is taking that money and investing in bio manufacturing infrastructure so we can more quickly develop and deploy vaccines in the future. What would it cost to build a factory just back of the envelope that was capable
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_02: of making the next, you know, let's call it one to one to two shots one to Yeah, it's not a lot.
SPEAKER_01: So it's not a lot. Let me I'll give you guys the unit economic build and you can do the math at home. Four grams per liter is the expected yield of a of a bio manufacturing facility and a liter is like you know, how many liters of water do you have in a tank, you can build half million liter facilities for a couple hundred million dollars. And that's four grams per liter every seven days. And as vaccine or the the antibody therapies that we've seen, the antibody therapies are about two grams, and that'll save someone's life. The the vaccines are a fraction of a gram. And so you can start to kind of do the math on how just a few billion dollars invested in building some of these bio manufacturing facilities that are modular and can be very quickly reprogrammed to make a new molecule can be used to support the future vaccine supply chain and the future anti antibody therapeutic supply chain, which is critically needed in this country. And if I were to take $160 billion for COVID fighting, give me 10% of that. And we'll be ready for any virus in the future. And we'll be able to print out vaccines for the whole country within 30 days. And so a little bit again of this is not really forward thinking. It's scientists and doctors saying what they need, what they're talking about is last year's need. They're not thinking in terms of what the industrial supply chain needs are going to be in the future on an ongoing basis for this country at this point, I'm not seeing it. And so I feel a little bit let down by that. And I hope that the infrastructure programs that are going to be proposed in the next in the next bill will start to encompass some of that work. Paradoxically, it's going to cost
SPEAKER_02: a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear weapons. So we're literally going to spend a trillion dollars over the next decade open, upgrading our nuclear. That's not a statistic. Is that is that true? That's nutty. That's what I'm reading a headline right here. Here's my here's my little
SPEAKER_04: wish list for this infrastructure bill. I think when you look at some of the most compelling work that's happened in the developing world. So like if you're going to go and build a massive water facility or an energy installation, a lot of people are worried, hey, listen, I have to deal with local currency risk, I have to deal with corruption, I could have the government take away this facility from me without notice, the rule of law may not be strong. And the World Bank has this mechanism where you can basically go and ensure for I think it's like one or 2% of your project cost the whole project. And it really makes things work. I would love to see the US government effectively create a program that is similar but different in the following way. There are some enormous things America needs to do, where the IP exists with our allies. And there is an enormous fear what would happen if that IP leaked specifically to China. One example is if you believe and you care about climate change and the making of batteries, there's an enormous amount of IP that sits with the Japanese that if we could license and work with as a country, we could build factories all over the country. And we would be the leader in climate. But that'll take the US government to basically work bilaterally with the Japanese government to basically say, listen, if it takes the NSA to fucking protect this shit, we will do it. But you can send- Or you run them. We could just give them their sovereignty in those factories or something.
SPEAKER_02: Ah, these are for-profit companies that are relatively risk-averse. They're not going to rip
SPEAKER_04: in 10 million bucks to $10 billion to build a cathode plant in the US. I would, other people would. But that's my hope in the infrastructure bill is that we take some of these things that have worked in the developing world and we use it to grease the skids in how we rebuild America. It would be fucking glorious. And also just think about how much a nuclear power plant costs. It's
SPEAKER_02: like $6 to $9 billion to build a nuclear power plant. And we haven't built many new ones. And we're on the way there. But if part of this trillion dollars, we could build 10 more of those energy independence would continue and global warming would go down. Anything to add there, David? Looks like you want to come- Well, just one final word. The great Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, famously said that
SPEAKER_00: a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. And now we're talking about a trillion here and a trillion there. And these are really big numbers. And I think we should be very concerned about debt and deficits. No one's really talking about this yet, but all of this money has to be paid back at some point. And- What's the worst that can happen, David? Let's actually do that. I mean,
SPEAKER_02: I'm asking the question in a non-joking way. What is the worst that can happen?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I mean, a debt crisis. Inflation. Well, not just so inflation, because the government will eventually have to monetize the debt by printing more money. The dollar stops becoming the world's reserve currency. Maybe Bitcoin becomes the world's reserve currency. Maybe something else does. It could lead to very severe, to basically a debt crisis in the future.
SPEAKER_02: What would that look like for companies and citizens of America?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you're middle class, your savings get wiped out. So if you're super rich, the reality is there's already been tremendous asset inflation. So there's already been a lot of inflation. But frankly, if you are very rich and own assets in the stock market, you're protected. But if you're a middle class person with most of your savings in your bank account, that money is now worth a lot less. Or your home. Yeah, you get destroyed by that. It's really very sad. So if you earn equities and the market is on a rip, paying an extra couple of
SPEAKER_02: million dollars for your second home is not a big deal, because your equities have gone up more than that or equal to that. And if you're somebody who makes income, we have a separate issue. Well, look, this is a bigger issue. And I think we should talk about this at some point, because
SPEAKER_04: this is what the grand fallacy of technology was supposed to be. If you break down capitalism into its two most natural states, you have labor and you have capital. You have workers and you have owners. And the biggest problem that technology did was it drove a wedge and it created an extremely small owner class and an extremely massive labor class. And so the reality is that a very handful of people can get extremely wealthy by being owners of these next generation assets. And then everybody else is essentially rendered as labor. And so this wealth inequality just grows and grows and compounds. And so we have to figure out a way- Yeah, how's that different than the
SPEAKER_01: past? Because- I think technology accelerated that dynamic. Well, jumping in on this, I think
SPEAKER_00: that technology creates bigger winner take all outcomes and that's fed into inequality. But the good thing about tech or the tech ecosystem is that frankly, we have option pools. We have broad based ownership of these companies. If you go work for a Google or Facebook or whatever, you get option grants. No, come on. That's 10,000 people. That's 10,000 people. That's no one. And they're
SPEAKER_04: replacing 2 million jobs with 10,000 people. This is why we need to have 100% participation in the
SPEAKER_02: markets by everybody in the country. Joe Greenblatt, who I had on my podcast recently is a proponent of this chamath. So you're tweeting about it. When you're born in the United States, we should put $5,000 in a 401k that you can't touch until you're 65 years old. That is in whatever index funds. And every person born gets that $5,000 and cannot touch it. And then we see where it winds up. I'm not sure it's all it doesn't. But it doesn't it doesn't solve the problem that a lot of people
SPEAKER_01: have to climb up a hill first, right? They take on a lot of debt to get education to put themselves in a position to ultimately be able to generate the income to do that. And I think, you know, sure, give them $5,000 in the beginning, but it's not going to get them where they need to be. But it does solve one portion of the problem, which is they don't have participation. And we
SPEAKER_02: could take out the wondering what your retirement is going to be like. I think both of you are right. I think like there needs to be
SPEAKER_04: something that allows people to have a line of sight to savings like a lot of about being invested in, in anything where you own it, whether it's real estate, or whether it's a piece of artwork, or whether it's stocks and bonds. So many people don't even know how to begin and don't understand the concept of ownership. And so they are stuck in being in the ghetto of labor. And I think like one of the biggest things we can do is you can give them the taste of ownership so that they understand that difference so that they want to be an owner. Okay? Number one. And then to David's point, number two is we still have a responsibility to educate people so that they can actually have skills that they can monetize. And we have a responsibility to do that. And right now, we make it so fucking hard. And we trick people because like we, we send them down the path of getting a $200,000 art history degree, and then they end up working at a Starbucks and then they're Which is impossible to monetize. I mean, it's ridiculous.
SPEAKER_02: You can't monetize that. You can't. By the way, by the way, what you're saying, Chamath, is the reason I think retirement
SPEAKER_01: accounts were set up in the US was to shift away from pension fund models where people were getting a fixed income at retirement, and shifting them to a model of equity and ownership in the markets where they could participate actively on a tax free basis. But obviously, it hasn't done enough. I think the big difference between the industrial revolution, the first and second industrial revolution and where we are with software in the last two to three decades is the capital required, right? It's very little capital to build a highly valuable software business. It required a lot of capital to build oil infrastructure and railroad infrastructure and factories. To your point, you get extraordinarily different outside returns today than you did 100 years ago as an owner versus labor. The bridge to try and give people ownership through retirement accounts certainly hasn't been enough. So to your point, David, I saw this study. It was fucking crazy. I'm going to get the
SPEAKER_04: exact numbers wrong, but the trend is accurate. When people used to actively manage their 401k, there was a very small participation rate, but the mean return was off the charts. The amount of dollars as a function of their paycheck was off the charts. Call it 50, 60 cents of every theoretical dollar you could put into it. The minute that we went to passive and that you could sort of trickle money in, the number of people that participated literally more than doubled, but then the amount of that max dollar went off of a cliff. So the problem that we've had is we haven't taught people. We've misdirected some of them to say, have a 401k. It replaces your pension as if it's the solution. That's still not the solution. We need to have ways of teaching people how to actually manage it. It's not that hard and the basics can be taught very simply, but right now we are massively exacerbating this wealth gap the way that we behave and then all of this money that's going to go in, this 1.9 trillion, whatever, how many trillion comes afterwards is frankly for the few that are smart enough to take advantage of it will be amazing, but it'll still push the overwhelming majority of Americans who are stuck in labor deeper and deeper into that ghetto and they'll never get out. It is definitely every little bit helps, right? Like if you have the 401k that helps
SPEAKER_02: and then educate people. I think if we gave everybody an ISA at birth or an income sharing agreement for these 20 professions and the government provided those. Jason, why is it that, for example, if to invest in a startup, you either have to have more than
SPEAKER_04: $5 million or more than a million bucks a year. It's bonkers. It's bonkers. It's bonkers. If you're a product manager that's really, really talented or if you're like somebody else who's just got a PhD in nuclear biology and frankly has decided to teach for 60,000 and you can't participate even though you have the intellect to judge like we're just like kind of like compound. Shammah, it's even worse than that. The person who's changing the accreditation laws at the SEC
SPEAKER_02: and working on this said, I cannot, I'm writing the accreditation laws. And because I make 150k a year, whatever it is under 200k, I can't participate. And I'm the one responsible for the law. That person must be one of the most sophisticated people in the world.
SPEAKER_04: It literally is the most sophisticated person in the world when it comes to accreditation.
SPEAKER_02: This is why we need to move to sophisticated investor, not accredited, and just some test. And if you did that, every single Uber driver, Lyft driver, Postmates driver, Airbnb host, or person who used the cash app or PayPal would have said, I can, as one of the first users, I have access to buy shares. I'm just going to say this.
SPEAKER_04: I'll buy them. This problem has to get fixed because I think in the next 10 or 15, I think in the next 10 and 20 years, the United States is going to fucking reemerge like a Phoenix. Absolutely. The reason is going to be because of innovation around climate change and agriculture and biotechnology and technology. These four areas are going to recast GDP. But what that also means is that if we're going to create 20 or 30 trillion dollars a year for the next 10 and 20 years, 300, 500 trillion, how the fuck do we make sure that more than 18 people participate? Absolutely. Go ahead, Zach. Well, look, I mean, well, so I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying,
SPEAKER_00: but I can tell you every single one of the companies that I've invested in are looking to hire people right now. They cannot hire people soon enough. It's their biggest challenge. And it's not just coders. It's salespeople. It's marketing people. It's HR people. It's every role in their company. They have trouble trying to hire the right person. And they give options to all those people. So it's not just a small number of founders getting equity. This is basically a new category of call it entrepreneurial labor. It's labor who gets ownership in the company that's never existed before. And really what this comes down to is we need more people participating in the new economy. If you participate in the new economy, then you get ownership. And if you're in the old economy, then you really are stuck in labor. And so what we need to do is spread the opportunity that technology represents to more people across the country.
SPEAKER_02: As part of the minimum wage, maybe we should have a minimum equity participation. So we have the minimum wage over here. But if you're working for an entrepreneurial enterprise, why not get a minimum participation in equity?
SPEAKER_00: Because the free market takes care of that. I mean, if you have the right skills... The free market hasn't taken care of it, David. That's the problem.
SPEAKER_02: No, it has. No, no, no. The free market has. I agree with David. The free market has.
SPEAKER_04: The problem is that... How does a person working at Walmart ever participated in the Walmart appreciation?
SPEAKER_02: That's the point. They will leave and go to a company that gives them equity. And that's
SPEAKER_01: why you'll see this migration. That's convenient to say. But if Walmart is the only job within an hour of their house, it's not.
SPEAKER_00: They got to have the right skills, Jason. And so this all comes back to education. You know, we got to... Yeah, but why not let the people who are in rank and file jobs, the 30 million truck drivers,
SPEAKER_02: cashiers, et cetera, have equity participation as a right? I think you're saying something different. Should they? Absolutely. Should the company that does
SPEAKER_04: that be created? Absolutely. Will they be rewarded with all the people that want to work there? Absolutely. So now somebody should go and start that fucking company.
SPEAKER_02: Okay. I just think it's an interesting concept. I mean, we do have a minimum wage. Why not have a minimum equity participation? Jason, you just had... You know, the same woman that ran Elon out of California,
SPEAKER_04: Lorena Gonzalez... Yes. She's doing another thing now. She's proposed a new bill. Like, do you want her to basically pick the equity thresholds?
SPEAKER_04: Because that's what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00: Well, no. Let's pivot to California. Okay, let's pay for another disaster. California. So the recall is well on its way. They need to
SPEAKER_02: get 1.5 million signatures. We're at 1.1 or 1.2. But we actually really need two because there's some verification process that goes on. So in all likelihood, we will see Gavin Newsom recalled. We agree on that? Yeah. I'll tell you the stats I heard. There's about a million... Call it a million-million-one
SPEAKER_01: signatures. They've seen about an 85% verification rate today. Uh, Sax, correct me if I'm wrong on this. They're getting about 200,000 signatures a week. The cost for marketing and attracting people to get these signatures is coming in at like $3 to $6 a signature. So it's really not a lot of money is needing to be spent to get this done. And even if the verification rate drops to 75% or 65%, you're still on track at this rate to hit the recall target by March 17th, which is the deadline. And so it appears highly likely they're going to get there. Sax, am I right on all that?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think they're at 1.2 million signatures. That's what I heard. And they're trying to get to 2 million to have a buffer so that they don't get pushed under the... But 1.5 is the... The target. Is the number they need. Yeah. They need 1.5 million certified signatures. 70% of the way there according to the website, recallgavin2020.com, which I believe...
SPEAKER_02: I think they will get there. I think they'll get there. And then the recall election would take
SPEAKER_00: place about four to five months after that. There's a couple of months where it moves through the finance committee, the recall election has to be budgeted. And then Newsom would have the opportunity to set a date within, I think, 60 to 80 days, roughly. So I think we're looking at July for a recall election. And Sax, how does a candidate get on the ballot? Because Chamath is asking for a friend.
SPEAKER_01: Right. Wait a second. I want to be on to that. Should we have all four besties be on?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we should all run.
SPEAKER_01: We all four. Can we run a team? Let the voters decide. A squad?
SPEAKER_00: We're probably going to have four Kardashians on there. So we might as well have four besties on there. And one ex-Kardashian. Yeah. So it's stunningly easy to be a replacement candidate. We should expect there'll probably be about 150 replacement candidates on the ballot. Every third tier C-list celebrity is going to... Gary Coleman did it 20 years ago. All every C-list celebrity is going to do it. What are you talking about, Sax? Yeah. To try and boost their Q rating. I'm sure we'll see Kathy Griffin on there. What she's been doing. And so it's going to be a farce. What if Trump puts himself on there?
SPEAKER_04: Andy Dick is going to run for governor.
SPEAKER_01: By the way, can we talk about why he's getting recalled? Because I do get this question a lot from people in tech and out of tech. And I just want to highlight some of the reasons I've heard. And I'd love to hear why you guys think he's... Why there's this push against him. But from people within the tech community, I've heard that the ad hoc lockdown rules have really pissed a lot of people off in terms of when businesses are allowed and not allowed to be open and the responsiveness and the guiding principles around this during COVID. Obviously, the inability to fight against the tax rate, but no one wants to be publicly saying that. The failed vaccine rollout, the failed testing. Sax, Chamath, Jason, what do you guys think is the reason he's getting recalled? What are the top 5 reasons... Hypocrisy is number one. I think it's the hypocrisy of going to those restaurants and
SPEAKER_02: then making people not go to the beach, which is crazy. And then I think number two is the virus. We've only deployed 37% of our doses in California. And that makes us, of the major states that are putting out a lot of these vaccines, one of the worst performers. Second, Texas and Florida and New York are the other large states and they're at 56, 49 and 50%. We're still stuck at 37%. California, the cradle of innovation and technology, and this bum, he's a bum. 37% deployed, we should be leading him 70%. He's a bum. Can I get a new suit? Wait, wait, wait. It's Newsom derangement syndrome. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm trying to get a viral clip. I'm trying to get a viral clip.
SPEAKER_02: You guys are besties. Jason just has a problem with anyone in authority.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's the hair. It's a problem. He's got great fucking hair. It's the hair is too good.
SPEAKER_02: French laundry, the hypocrisy, and then get to work. Personality for you is the biggest driver. Is that right, Jason?
SPEAKER_02: No, it's literally the performance of Washington DC, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, all 66 to 73% of their vaccines are deployed. They're double us. Now it's smaller states, but still we're goddamn California. Here's what I would say as a list.
SPEAKER_04: Number one, we're the most heavily taxed. Number two, we have some of the worst infrastructure in the country. We have some of the lowest and poorest performing schools in the country. We have the highest homeless rates for veterans in the country. We have the worst preparedness for climate in the country. It's basically just a complete bungling at every level. Then the fourth or the last, which is the biggest one is we have now created an inhospitable culture for innovation. The biggest problem with that is if these climate jobs and these technology jobs and these biotechnology jobs pivot to more accepting and progressive local and state managements like Austin, Texas and Miami, Florida, we lose these things forever. This is a multigenerational decay that we're starting. If we care about the state, I love California. I love San Francisco. I love how eclectic and unique and different it is. I was always happy to pay 10, 11, 12, 13, 14% because it was worth it. Now, I don't know what we get for it. I think he should get recalled. I just think he's trash. Just to underscore the point on lockdowns, we now have certainly more cases,
SPEAKER_00: we have more deaths, and we have more deaths per capita than Florida, despite the fact that Florida has no lockdowns and a much older population. I was just in Florida a few weeks ago, like Chamath was saying, as far as the mayor there has created a land of the free. It's really unbelievable. You can go to bars, you can go to restaurants, there's no lockdown whatsoever. They don't have as big a problem as California does right now. Why do you think that is? Because I think that the lockdowns only forestalled the problem. Eventually, the virus finds a way
SPEAKER_00: around them. I also think that the pandemic has been a problem for a long time. I think that the
SPEAKER_00: problem, eventually the virus finds a way around them. I also think the thing that's happening in Florida is that, okay, so my aunt lives there, she's in her 70s. She's not going to bars and restaurants because she knows she's highly at risk. Just because the government doesn't lock down doesn't mean that people don't take sensible precautions on their own. I think that what's happened is that people are going out to bars and restaurants are low risk, and they're keeping the economy going over there. Instead, in California, we have this very draconian lockdown policy, and it's put all these small businesses out of work. No, no, it's worse. It's not a draconian lockdown policy. It's a whipsaw. Oh, it's open. Okay,
SPEAKER_04: great. Now go and invest in a bunch of catbacks to make sure there's outdoor dining. Oh, hold on. You're closed. What is that? That's just stupid. It's incompetent. Tons of restaurant and bar owners in San Francisco spent, on average, $30,000 building
SPEAKER_01: outdoor seating for their facility only to have it all shut down three and a half weeks later. Incompetent. Can you imagine being an owner of that business? What the experience must have been like? No, I mean, you would literally they're going to kill themselves. This is the tragedy of it.
SPEAKER_02: People will lose everything and there'll be suicides, depression, domestic violence. And then this guy's having dinner at French Laundry during the whole... I mean, it's just such
SPEAKER_04: a bad look. You know what, Chamath, I just got a note that he's actually been banished from being at the
SPEAKER_02: French Laundry. Apparently, it's been renamed the Sri Lankan Laundry and some notable Sri Lankan billionaire has bought the French Laundry. And it's been renamed the Sri Lankan Laundry.
SPEAKER_01: They got a $2.6 million PPP loan that got forgiven. So, there's a lot of heat on the French Laundry as a whole.
SPEAKER_02: What does it cost to go to French Laundry? $800 a person? Anybody who's listening to this,
SPEAKER_04: who wants to go to the French Laundry, stay at home, pour a bunch of salt on whatever you're going to eat. Okay. Melt a stick of butter in the microwave. Melt a stick of butter in the microwave, drink it, and then basically take $1500, light it on fire, you've been to the French Laundry. You're welcome. Here's what you do. Take a really
SPEAKER_02: great steak... Trash. ...and then cut it into a cube and throw out 80% of it. That place is trash. Put the cube in the middle of a big, large plate.
SPEAKER_04: That's not even nouveau riche. It's just nouveau stupid. Oh, that's terrible.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I got trash. So awesome. Meanwhile, people are down in Texas getting a brisket burrito for $4. But I think California
SPEAKER_04: really needs to fix this. We need to figure out what's going on. And... All right. And I just want to ask one more question of you guys. You don't think that this... Because
SPEAKER_01: I was having this debate with my family about Newsom and I was telling them about the perspectives I was hearing from tech people and why everyone's so against Newsom. And I've heard all these different things that you guys have shared today. And I'm hearing a lot of people making the counterpoint like, this is a very difficult time. It's been an impossible year for everyone everywhere. So first of all, Newsom was dealt a pretty difficult hand to play. And at the same time, we are all psychologically primed to look for grass being greener on the other side. I think a big part of... Certainly, there's a lot of people leaving California, my belief, for Texas and Florida, primarily because of taxes. And then you justify it with all the things that are wrong with California. But we're all really primed right now with this notion that it's a difficult place to be. But we're also really having a shitty year. We've had this pandemic. Businesses have been shut. Everyone's sick because of the pandemic. The economy's sick. The economy's having issues. There's a really difficult
SPEAKER_00: hand that's been dealt. Well, I don't buy that as an excuse for Newsom. Look, it is true that we're going through a very difficult time. But the reason I don't buy that as an excuse for Newsom is because this is not April or May of 2020, when we thought the fatality rate was 7%. Lockdowns could be justified then. But we now have so much more data. We've had states that did not do lockdowns, like Florida and Texas, frankly, have been no worse off than those that have done very severe lockdowns. And so what is the point of continuing with this facade? And that is what I think we can legitimately blame Newsom for, is the failure to learn and to change course based on data, to adapt.
SPEAKER_02: Adapt. You have to be adapting. And where is the daily press briefing on what's happening? That's what makes for an idea. And by the way, most of the spread is not happening at
SPEAKER_01: businesses. It's happening in homes. And in California, we have a particularly difficult time because of multi-generational family homes, especially in the Latino communities that have been hardest hit by COVID. And the transmission rate... They also happen to skew with diabetes as well.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the transmission rate in those communities is 3 to 5x what it is elsewhere. And I think, you know, and that is not a result of businesses being open. In fact, those communities are also suffering the biggest hardships because businesses are closed. Well, by the way, this goes to the vaccination strategy just being so idiotic. Like, you
SPEAKER_04: wanted to be equitable, then why weren't we just rolling through and basically getting those families to be vaccinated first independent of age? You know, you're... All these vaccination sites, nobody shows up. I spoke to SFDPH, Department of Public Health, about this last week, and they told me that
SPEAKER_01: they cannot get those communities. They're very non-trusting of the vaccine. And they're having a real struggle getting people to sign up to take the vaccine. The problem is, even if that is the case, the problem is you should not be holding up vaccines for one community. Then get everybody else vaccinated so that you cut the head off this fucking transmission.
SPEAKER_04: Over 60 gets it. That's it. There's nothing to discuss. Let's wrap up.
SPEAKER_01: Everyone gets it. But you allocate a certain number of doses to... You basically have like a TSA pre-check line. If you're over 60, or you're in certain communities, you jump to the front of the line and that's it. But everyone can stand in line and put fucking shots in arms because everyone I know that's over 65 can't even get an appointment and it's bullshit. And the whole thing is incompetence.
SPEAKER_04: So, I think what Zach said is so right. It's like, in these moments, J. Cal and Friedberg, like a light gets shone on the ability for people to figure things out. And then you know what the intellectual capability of these people are. And like, look, we saw the intellectual incapability of Trump. Because we all said, this guy could not adapt. Okay. And so we are now seeing the intellectual incapability of Gavin Newsom. And I just think they're part of the same lot. They're just kind of, you know, people who are in over their head. And they're beholden to people who
SPEAKER_02: got them there. And their number one concern is staying in office, which means appeasing a bunch of special interests. Speaking of special interest, David Sachs is still on tilt about conservatives being canceled. David, you wanted us to wrap with this Wilkinson cancellation. So every podcast, we're going to have a right winger who's canceled and David's justification for putting them back on the platform. God, David. Well, actually, so yeah, this is this is this
SPEAKER_00: is the issue. The week with David. Yes, yes, it's well, this is actually it's not a it's not a left wing. So this is the issue to draw on social media right now is that a writer named Will Wilkinson was just fired from his job and canceled. But here's the thing. It was he's not a conservative. He's actually a liberal. And it was a yes. And it was a right wing tweet mob that got together to get him fired. Yes. And so how did you get this mob together to get them canceled?
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So we're back everybody so much for the wives dinner.
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God. Yeah. I'm gonna need another wives dinner.
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, look, I feel the need to speak out on this because I gotta make it really clear that I do not support cancel culture when perpetrated by the right against the left. I think it's what did he do? Okay, so he posted a tweet making a joke that maybe was important. It's not that funny. Basically saying that if we want unity, the one thing that like the Trumpers and the Biden supporters can agree on is hanging pence. You know, it's what is hanging, lynching, lynching, lynching. Yes.
SPEAKER_04: He used was lynching or hanging. He said, he said hang, I think. No, I think he said, hang.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, maybe it's a taste. And it's inciting violence on the march book ahead, sacks.
SPEAKER_02: It's important. Well, no, look, it's a it's a it's a joke. That's not actually that funny. And
SPEAKER_00: maybe in poor taste. What he's referring to is the fact that the, you know, that there were people on January 6, who were going after Mike Pence, right? That was sort of the joke. Anyway, look, he that's not the point. He deleted it. He apologized for it. His boss is still fired him for it. Nobody believes that he was trying to incite violence. Okay. I mean, come on. We all know that was not inciting violence. But, but the mob pretended that he was in order to create its phony outrage. And then his bosses have to pretend that he was. Yeah, in order to get to appease the mob, and they pretend like it was incitement to violence, so they can fire him. And then he even had to pretend that he was inciting violence because he had to then abjectly apologize for it. And there's this, that's the thing about cancel culture, I really don't like it's just it's just so fake and phony. We all have to pretend and things that aren't true in order to pacify some, you know, tweet mob whose outrage is manufactured anyway. And I don't like seeing the right doing this. And that's what I tweeted about. And then we had all these people on the right, responding to me saying an eye for an eye, you know, you know, the left deserves this too. Now they're gonna get a taste of their own medicine. And the problem with that is, look, you know, you're, you're, you might win this particular battle, but you're losing the war, because you're now buying into the premise of cancel culture. You're now buying into this idea that we need to economically cancel people who disagree with us. And I really reject that. It's certainly bad timing to say, Lynch or hang whichever word he used, obviously,
SPEAKER_02: lynching is a much worse word. After people were chanting hang Mike Pence, but he was making a commentary on that. The joke didn't land. And when the joke doesn't land, you need to just take ownership of that and say that you shouldn't be canceled. You just say it was a poor attempt at humor. I apologize. Right. And Jason, you know better than anybody else. When a poor joke,
SPEAKER_00: when a joke doesn't land. So here's one thing to learn about comedy. People don't remember the
SPEAKER_02: jokes that don't land. They remember the ones that land. Okay, everybody's like investing in startups.
SPEAKER_04: It's like you got a lot of losers to find the few winners. Absolutely. That's my I'm a volume guy.
SPEAKER_02: Governor chamath.com. Governor sacks.com. Governor freeburg.com. And can I just say, Jason, Jason,
SPEAKER_04: if Newsom is recalled, I would like to put my name on the ballot. And my commitments are quite simple. I'm going to cut the taxes to zero. And I'm going to basically create an incredibly pro climate change jobs and pro tech jobs and pro biotech jobs economy. And I'm going to raise teacher salaries and I'm going to give everybody a school voucher. Okay. Maybe on the next episode,
SPEAKER_00: we can all declare that we're running for governor and present our platform. Let's do that. Let's do that. Next Friday. Next Friday. All right. If I were governor.
SPEAKER_04: Governor chamath.com. Governor sacks.com. Governor. Let's register our domain names.
SPEAKER_02: Register your domain name before the pod goes live. All four of them.
SPEAKER_01: All redirect to my Twitter handle. Thank you guys. We'll see you all.
SPEAKER_02: Love you boys. Bye. On the all in podcast. Love you besties. Love you. Sachs. Back at you.
SPEAKER_00: Besties are gone. That's my dog. Take it. I noticed your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big you George because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. anticipate BakerArizona P R trying to get you there.
