SPEAKER_03: I'm going all in, where you'll be, where you'll be, where you'll be I'm going all in, let your winner slide, Rain Man David Saks
SPEAKER_02: I'm going all in, and it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it I'm going all in
SPEAKER_03: Alright everybody welcome. It is the podcast you've been waiting for the All In Pod Emergency Episode 20 The number 11 podcast in the world. Number one in tech, number 11 overall Joe Rogan, Sway, Pivot, NPR, Rachel Maddow, Left in the Dust Welcome to the number 11 podcast in the world. Can you believe it? Besties with us the queen of Ken Wai himself, David Friedberg, Rain Man David Saks Hot Off the Banger by Young Spielberg closing up Episode 19 And of course, the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. How we doing boys? Lovely. How are you?
SPEAKER_02: Lovely. Friedberg
SPEAKER_01: Lovely. Lovely. It's a lovely Tuesday emergency pod
SPEAKER_03: And Saks retired from craft ventures to pursue his dream of being a Fox News host How's that going for Saks now that you've got full media blitz? Well, yeah, I've been I've been invited. I was on Bloomberg. I've been invited on CNBC tomorrow. I might even be on Fox on Thursday
SPEAKER_00: So everybody, maybe Tucker, everybody wants a piece of the besties. Everybody wants a piece
SPEAKER_03: Unbelievable. We were pariahs in our own industry and now we've transcended tech and taken our rightful position. I got invited on CNN, which is crazy. On what show? On what show? The guy with the British accent. He kind of does the Piers Morgan? No, there's another guy who does CNN International and they were doing like a whole Oh, that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the guy with the glasses. He's funny. He's pretty funny. Yeah, I didn't do it. I really do not want to speak for Robin Hood. But we do need to pick up where we left off in Episode 19, which a lot of people were wondering, Chamath, are we still friends? Are we still besties? We are. But I do want to say one thing. Jason and I talked this weekend and he said something to me which I actually thought about a lot.
SPEAKER_02: Which is that, hey, Chamath, when you get that emotional, I think the point of what you're saying gets lost. I had a lot of time to think about that. One, I wanted to say, J. Cal, if anything I said, hurt your feelings, I want to say I'm sorry. I think you are the most incredibly loyal person and that spans friendship to being an investor too. So I just wanted to say I'm sorry to you. And to be quite honest with you, when I listened to a couple of my comments, I was like, wow. I was a little emotional and I think it didn't need to be that super extreme. I think the thing that it touches for me is I forget sometimes maybe where I'm at today and I go back to where I was 20 years ago or how I felt as a 16-year-old. And I channeled that a little bit. So anyways, J. Cal, I just want to say I love you with all my heart and I'm sorry for you. I love you too, Chamath. It did get a little bit personal and we were all passionate about our positions.
SPEAKER_03: And it was a little difficult for me because I'm trying to give my guys, my team, Robin Hood, the benefit of the doubt. And it wasn't an easy week, obviously, to do that. But just to recap here, Sunday Vlad was on Clubhouse with Elon Musk, our pal, who almost blew up Clubhouse. And there were so many people trying to get into that room. And I think it tops out at 5,000 on Clubhouse that people were holding their phones up to their YouTube accounts. I think that's probably how most of us listen to it was the YouTube people were just syndicating it live to YouTube. But you are on did a tremendous job interviewing Vlad, which is leads to a really interesting topic, David, about subjects just routing around the press and going directly. I mean, Elon is now the best interviewer in the business. And he basically said, Listen, did you have a gun to your head? And I think it was pretty much that. According to the reports that have come out the depository and trust and clearing Corporation, which is Wall Street's main clearinghouse for stock trades demanded $3 billion in addition to collateral from Robin Hood, which they said was an order of magnitude more than usually required. We all know they raised 2.4 billion this week on top of the 1 billion from Wednesday on top of the $600 million credit line that's 4 billion in cash. Apparently, the requirement for them went from 3 billion to 700 million. So it seems like that's there's some equaling out of what they have to cover. And the GME short interest dropped in half. Today. It's Monday. I'm sorry, it's Tuesday, but yesterday had dropped in half. The squeeze seems to have settled down. Wall Street bets is clearly one. And of course, episode did Jason supernova I didn't listen to it. But did Do you guys think that Elon and Vlad got to the truth? Like was it clear?
SPEAKER_02: Was it a sex? Well, let's get an independent party or sex. Yeah. So I thought the the interview was was a bit curious. Because it took Elon several tries to get Vlad to say the quite frankly, the obvious answer.
SPEAKER_00: And Elon set it up saying, you know, what I think all of us were thinking, which is, look, were you either forced to do this? Or is it an action that you decided to take? And if so, why? And, you know, and, and Elon kept trying to get him to say, Yeah, we were forced to do this. And Vlad wouldn't quite say that he gave these very vague and vigorous answers, which is why Elon finally said, Listen, did you have a gun to your head or not blink twice, you know? And it was, I don't know whether it was a function of miscommunication, or whether we just don't know all the facts yet. But I don't feel like the interview put everything to rest the way that it easily could have. And I and look, I don't want to be I don't want to pile on to the situation. I you know, I'm pro founder, I'm going to give Vlad and Robin Hood the benefit of the doubt here. I think probably they were compelled in some way to do this. I don't think they wanted to do it. But, you know, if we're going to make this a teaching moment, what I would say is, like to any founder, if you're ever in the position of having to take an action that is a numerical to your stated mission, right, and their stated mission is freedom to trade. What was the word you used? Anemic? Anemic? Anathema? Sure. Yeah. If you're going to basically violate your stated mission, you either need to post the government order that required you to do that. Or you need to post a very well reasoned blog explaining why you're doing that. And you know, if I were Robin Hood, and I got a call in the middle of the night, saying that you have to basically take this trade offline, I would say, well, give that to me in writing, because I'm gonna have to post that on my website, right? If I don't have a choice about that, I, you know, I need to be able to refer back to this industry order that I'm receiving. And the fact they didn't do that, and the fact that they didn't post a blog explaining the reasons behind the choice, and in fact, Vlad's now had to go back three times to explain it. I think that's created this world of problems for them. There's a difference between this being a regulatory requirement and a commercial requirement. Like if you think about the, you know, the law, the regulatory body that oversees the law that kind of oversees what they're doing business wise, the SEC or whoever could have come in and said, here's what I'm telling you, you have to do, I'm your regulator.
SPEAKER_01: But what happened was there are these clearing firms that they partner with that said, I need you to post more capital. And rather than post more capital or take the risk of going bankrupt, they said we are going to restrict trading to minimize the capital requirements that we have on our book. And so if you think about what that decision comes down to, it's a decision of either our customers are going to lose money, or we're going to lose money. And, and I know that it's not that black and white. But, you know, it's very difficult to kind of explain the nuance of what took place there. But it really was a point of like, we are going to lose money, or we are going to go bankrupt, or our customers are going to have to lose money. And that's such a tough decision. I can't imagine any executive, any of us being in that situation, and deciding you protect your shareholders, and you protect your customers, and how much do you let your shareholders lose? How much do you let your customers lose? And it was a very complicated situation that they found themselves in because their business model was predicated on this clearing, you know, on this model that they ran, that when suddenly a lot of risk came on the book, they didn't have the capital to cover it. And they had to basically, you know, limit their customers as a result. It was a pretty ugly situation. But David, well, I'll just say one thing, I actually think that if the choice is simply between you losing money, you the company, or your customers, or your users losing money, I think that's an easy choice. I think the company eats it.
SPEAKER_00: Look what Airbnb did during COVID, right? When they had a whole ton of cancellations because of COVID, they ate, they ate all those deposits, they made good on that. And I actually think if that's all that was involved, that was a big mistake. I think Robinhood should have eaten it. Chamath, you want to chime in here as we go around the horn?
SPEAKER_03: Look, I think here's what we've learned, which is that there's all kinds of ways in which this financial infrastructure works that none of us really understand. It turns out that it may have also included the people running Robinhood, to be quite honest.
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, we know what payment for order flow is now. We know that, you know, some companies like Public have completely issued it. You know, folks like Robinhood make a ton of money from it. I think it's clear that, you know, Elizabeth Warren to AOC, to whomever are going to now spend a bunch of time talking about it. It may or may not change. But the problem with the whole situation of GameStop actually doesn't really surround that because it's more of a symptom. The real problem was what led up to it. And what led up to it was, you know, the insistence that a bunch of organizations needed access to a preferential set of data so that they could theoretically participate in that order flow before. And the second was that the rules for, you know, certain organizations are different than those for banks. And so, you know, hedge funds can lever themselves up to such a massive degree that you create that, you know, LTCM type of issue where, you know, you take 5 billion and all of a sudden you have 1.5 trillion. So that shouldn't happen, right? So we need to figure out how we can actually deal with those systemic issues upstream. And then we need to have better disclosure downstream so that consumers could choose. Hey, listen, if you want, you know, PFOF, by the way, as I've learned in the last couple days, payment for order flow is actually not necessarily such a bad thing in certain cases, because it actually guarantees better price execution in some cases. But that's not always true for options. I think it's somewhat more true for stocks. There are, you know, for example, like Jason, when you asked me, you know, I asked the team at SoFi, like, you know, what's the how much is made on payment for order flow? And the answer was $1.5 million. And the forecast for next year was like 400k. So that's materially different than $400 million. Right? So you start to figure out like, okay, how should we think about these problems? And I think that's what we have to face. We have to get answers to these questions. So yeah, there's definitely going to be a lot of investigations into this and thinking it through, I think there are kind of three possibilities here. When you when we analyze this now that we're a week out from it, I think, all going down, which is, was there poor communications or other non disclosures in place? Right? We're trying to figure that out with Robin Hood, it feels like there's both right there. There could very well be non disclosures with this private company, the DTCC. And obviously, they could have optimized
SPEAKER_03: communications. And then was this a black swan event? Or to your point, is it poor preparedness? Jamaaf, we have to figure that out, how prepare are these companies to deal with this kind of stuff? And then is it really bad optics that Citadel and all these people are involved? Or is it a conspiracy, a grand conspiracy? And then if there's going to be an investigation, it's going to be pretty hard to cover up any conspiracy, right? Can I offer one idea? I think that there are certain parts of the economy, or the way in which the world works, where you can't distinguish bad operational capability and black swan events. I'll give you an example, airplanes. There is just no situation where you can say a plane crash was a black swan event and you move on. Right? And we decided that a long time ago.
SPEAKER_02: And so, as a result, just the amount of risk management and compliance is so high that every time something like that happens, it's an enormous process. And we've seen that in the 737 thing for Boeing. Yeah, 737 MAX, by the way, that just got settled too, for just 2.5 billion, which is kind of crazy. Those planes are back on and nobody went to jail.
SPEAKER_02: Right. So that's an example. At the other end of the example, we have things that have happened like on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, which is like, hey, all of a sudden, certain kinds of content or certain things happened like the Christchurch mass shooting. The societal judgment there was that that was a black swan event. We don't need rules and regulations. And so I think that another important question that we have to ask is, is the financial plumbing that allows the capital markets to work, and specifically the financial plumbing that allows retail normal folks to participate in order to try to make money and get ahead? Should that be deemed more like what you said, Jason, black swan like infrastructure where it's like, sometimes shit happens, and we just move on? Or is it more like an airplane crashing where you say, none of this stuff should be allowed to happen? Can I can I add one more point to that, which is, I think that it's frankly spin to be trying to characterize concerns about what happened as a conspiracy theory. You know, I heard Vlad use that word. And Jason, now you're you're echoing the company's talking points. The reason this is not a conspiracy is because Citadel is on both sides of the train. It's a conflict of interest. We should be using the word conflict, not conflict.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're using the word conflict. And so we're using the word conflict as a conspiracy. Now the question is, how do we interpret that conflict of interest? You have company, you have Citadel, providing payment for order flow. So they're basically executing Robin Hood's trades, they're their biggest customer. And then at the same time, they're moving in. And they're backing up. Citron and Melvin. So they're on both sides of this trade. How does that work? How can we not have questions about that? And to then characterize that? Oh, it's a conspiracy theory. If you have questions about it, really? No, no, I'm totally fine with people having investigating if there is a conspiracy, right. And the conspiracy that people were floating is Robin Hood was told to stop trading the stocks by Citadel. That did not happen. If that did happen, that would be explosive and impossible to cover up. What it was is, this is DTCC have some influence or to Citadel have influence on the DTCC. You know that those are the questions that I think remain unanswered.
SPEAKER_02: The DTCC is a cooperative. So it's a collection of its member organizations. So I think we'll find out which organizations were part of DTCC, who made the decision, who then told Robin Hood. We'll also find out, by the way, who put in the money to Robin Hood. Did they have a direct beneficial interest in them having the DTCC make that decision? And so I think where David's right is like, imagine this conflict of interest. I now let's just use me as an example, I as social capital, I am buying their order flow. I am also a member of the cooperative, also backstopping their investment. And now all of a sudden, you would say, whoa, Chumath, your hands are way too messy here. Right? Like your your fingers are in a lot of pots. And how do I know what you know, exploding message on signal wasn't sent? You don't know. Yeah, all we do know is that you had all these insiders, right? You had you had Citadel, you had, you know, this industry consortium, whether it's the collective or Citadel individually, they were under pressure by the industry. And at the same time, you had these outsiders, you had these Reddit kids who had basically taken them for $20 billion, right? They had finally figured out a way to beat the insiders at their own game. And just at the moment that these insiders came in, they had a way of saying, look, I'm just going to buy this game.
SPEAKER_00: And if these outsiders were winning, and about to deliver the coup de gras, and bust these guys out of the business for good, somehow the insiders managed to tip the board over and start a new game. That is what people are reacting to. And look, I mean, you know, I'm not saying that I don't know why Vlad would have done it unless he was frankly forced to do it. Right? Because why would he? So I'm not blaming him. But there is something fundamentally very corrupt at the way that the system and these insiders who have all the power and all the money, finally got threatened. They basically figured out a way to turn the board over at the outsiders.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, the the other thing that isn't getting covered, and this is going to be the tragedy of this is, none of us really knows the cost of the $3.4 billion that they took in. I'll tell you the only group of people that are for sure going to get completely creamed in this, which are employees. Right? I mean, we know that you think they're going to get too much preference stack, because they got they got diluted. Oh, my gosh, I mean, how do you not put three? Do you put
SPEAKER_02: $3.4 billion in at par? Who would do that? Yeah, I think that's what's exactly happened. I don't have inside information. But I think that's exactly what happened. Yeah, that's my house. I mean, if I think that or perhaps a discount to the IPO, which is imminent from what I've been reading online. Yeah, talk about terrible timing to right. I mean, they were trying to go public this year, Mike, like this terrible timing, or maybe perfect timing. I mean, it may be that, Jason, if it turns out that they were able to, I mean, then it then it creates a whole host of issues, which is how stupid are these investors, but
SPEAKER_02: if that is, in fact, what happened, because you look at the, for example, the pound of flesh that you know, Silver Lake got out of Airbnb, what a brilliant trade. I mean, so like, if there was one organ, explain it to you, I'm looking that was my deal of the year from last year from our from our bestie awards. You're good. Explain it freeburg. Yeah, they put in debt, and then they got warrants and the warrants ended up making them silver, like, four, it's insane. They made they made like three, $4 billion. Right, but the company's worth over 100 billion now. So as downside protection during a pandemic that could have gone on for three
SPEAKER_03: years. No, no, no, but that's the whole point. If you think about if you think about the trade of the great financial crisis, it was Warren Buffett putting capital into Goldman Sachs, which was and Swiss rate. He didn't feel Yeah, he did 5 billion into each of them the same weekend. Exactly. And he said, Hey, guys, everything is fine. These guys are going to be fine. They're backed by by Berkshire. And it turned out everything was fine. And, you know, he made he made an incredible fortune. And I think I mean, on top of his already fortune. So the point is, he made a great trade. I think that in the in the Silver Lake example, they did
SPEAKER_02: the exact same thing. They were like, Hey, guys, we believe in this, everything's going to be fine. And when all of us were literally losing our mind, because we were stuck in our apartments and houses thinking the world is going to end. Silver Lake saw they had clarity, they did a deal, which was the trade of the year, David's right. And so similarly, you would have thought that this moment was the opportunity for the trade of the year of 2021. I mean, we're early on, but all I know is I've been getting increasing offers for my Robin Hood shares in the secondary market, you know,
SPEAKER_03: throughout two questions here, we have been having a hard time understanding who short what the short interest is. There's a bunch of like data companies that are providing estimates. And maybe the data is only clear best, you're right, the best source of data that I have access to is a company called market ma rk it. They're, they're, they're, they're quite large. But as of this Friday, the short interest was still, I think, about 50% in GameStop. And so it's been it's been
SPEAKER_02: ebbing down. I didn't check today.
SPEAKER_03: Well, the report was it got cut in half, again, and that there was a very small short interest now, but the stock dropped another 60% today. So obviously, if you're short the stock, you may start buying and taking your profit, your gains and going home at this point, moving on. So do we need to, is this going to start a discussion of transparency and shorting? And should all that information be short? Should you be allowed to short more than the shares that are available or that are
SPEAKER_03: available in the float? I think and should we readdress shorting in general?
SPEAKER_02: No, there's a simp. There's an even I think shorting is a healthy component of the market. And I wouldn't I would leave it alone. Because there I think there are some legitimate organizations that short for three reasons. Reason number one is that they are developing a market neutral strategy for their clients. And people are should be allowed to pay for that. Right. Number two is people are directionally betting on a trend or investing on a trend. And they are trading that against potentially some other position where they are long. So that's an explicit view less about being market neutral. And then the third is that some people see outright frauds, and they're trying to vote loudly that, hey, listen, there's something untoward happening here. So I think shorting is really good. I actually think the simpler solution, and listen, and tell me if you guys agree is just go to t plus zero settlement. Why? All these margin requirements go away altogether. The problem. The reason why we have all these margin requirements is all of a sudden you have this weird 28 hour period that you know, it's like, oh, wait, who's got the shares? Do I have the shares? No, do you have the shares? So they did I lend them to you? Did you lend them to me? Are you going to pay me first? Am I going to pay you first? And instead, you know, this is the kind of thing where it's like, in 2021, this should be real time and automatic. Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_01: Every share should be ID'd right. And then you should know exactly where it is. You know, by the way, there's another point that there's another point that Chumat didn't make, which is that there is a benefit to the long holders and equities when there is shorting of that equity in the market, which is that they're getting paid borrow on those shares. So for folks that don't realize or their broker is, but you can access that borrow, if you own shares in a company that you're going to keep holding, let's say you own some shares in Amazon, and someone else wants to short Amazon, they have to borrow those shares from someone, and they're paying a fee and interest rate to borrow those shares. And so the cost to short a stock is actually not zero, you have to pay a borrow to borrow someone else's shares. So if you're holding those shares in Amazon, you can actually make money. If you have the appropriate broker relationship for those shares being sold short by someone else. And so this isn't just a people are coming in the market and slamming down stocks, they are paying the people that are long the stock for the right to borrow their shares and sell them ahead of you know, buying them back later. And so in the case of GameStop, I think the cost to borrow got so high, that you're basically paying 30 4050 60% interest rate to borrow GameStop shares to sell them short because there was so much interest in selling short, but there, you know, there is a market dynamic in the cost to sell short, that, you know, that doesn't come at a kind of negligible or free cost. My initial my introduction to shorting in that example was when I first bought Tesla. That, you know, my broker said, you know, Chamath, if you lend your shares out, you can make 24%. I remember this conversation 24% a year interest. And I thought, Oh, my God. And then I said, Well, what what am I really doing? And he's like, Well, you're like,
SPEAKER_02: allowing people to bet against Tesla. And I said, No. And I just kept the shares. And I was like, I'm never going to allow people to really. And since then, to really, I've never I've never ever, ever allowed my shares to be borrowed ever. And it's just a philosophical decision. I don't like shorting. But I believe that you should be allowed to do it.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you're going to be a long holder anyway, you're saying I'm going to hold these shares for five years, 10 years, whatever. I just, you know, it's a way to juice your returns. It's true. It's how a lot of people think about especially mutual funds that own its large positions and stocks, they'll, they'll make really good juice returns, because they're getting paid to borrow. David, it gets even better if you're if you're running a levered book, because then you know, you take a buck, you spin it up to six bucks, you buy six bucks a Tesla. Now all of a sudden, you're earning 24% on six shares, even though you've notionally bought one share. Right? I've still never done it. I can't I can't bring myself to do it. I just feel like it's just so I just can't do it. I just like it's like, how can you be long and then bet against your own company? I guess?
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, it doesn't make sense. But tomorrow, I'm sorry, sacks, should we limit the amount of shares that can go short against the company in some way? And should we add a transparency where if you short more than x percentage of those shares, we know your short position, because that seems to be also very confusing here. There are people speculating on Twitter, that the wall street bets crew and I have no knowledge of this or other hedge funds came in and saw this mess. And that will be seen the last couple of days where other people shorting at 300.
SPEAKER_03: Or it could have even been the same traders or some portion of the traders who ran this up with the short squeeze, then flip their position from long to short.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I look I clearly we need more transparency, we need to resolve some of these conflicts of interest prevent them from happening. I think a lot of the the users of Robin Hood didn't understand that they were the product, not the customer. That that is a real issue. But let me let me kind of up level this and speak to the politics of this because something really interesting happened. You had everybody from AOC to Ted Cruz, basically denouncing what happened here, taking the side of Wall Street bets against these Wall Street moguls. And so what you're seeing now is a new fault line in American politics in the post Trump era. It's not just about left and right anymore. It's about insider versus outsider. And I think this is going to be a major major theme that we see. And let me actually I want to I want to share something, you know, I just wrote a blog post called the insiders game about this idea. And I found a passage in Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren's book, which is really interesting, because it describes how the insiders game works. And the person who described it to Warren is Larry Summers. No, no, no other than Larry Summers, who was the former Treasury Secretary under Obama, he was president of Harvard, he's the consummate insider, and he taught the insiders game to generations of Harvard students. So here's what he said he presented Warren with a choice. He said to her, she said, I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. This is from her memoir in 2014. A fighting chance. She wrote, outsider recording Larry Summers, outsiders can say whatever they want, but people on the inside don't listen to them. insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People powerful people listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don't criticize other insiders. That is the insiders game. It's a protection racket, where these powerful insiders, these powerful elites of Wall Street, of Big Business, big media and politics, they get together, and they protect each other, no matter how incompetent they are, how corrupt they are. Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, they're involved in this too, but big tech. And this is the revolution, I think that's going to happen. I think Trump was kind of a forerunner of that is that we are going to see a movement of people across this country who are sick and tired of the insiders game, and they're going to rise up and vote these insiders out of office and put in some new people who aren't beholden to these powerful special interests.
SPEAKER_01: What you're speaking to is populism, right, Sax?
SPEAKER_00: You can call it populism. I call it insiders versus outsiders.
SPEAKER_02: I think it's going to be very important for folks to not be a career anything, meaning career executive, career politician, career regulator, career – if you can put that word in front of your sort of existence, I think what people will see is someone who, as you said, thrives on being an insider. And I think that there's just going to be a ton of distrust. Career school administration official, you know, career administration, admissions person. Career anything now is not what you want to be. You want to be sort of a little bit more dynamic because you can have multiple arcs to your life and you're not beholden to anybody.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's not as black and white as institutions are bad or institutions are good. There are many examples where the institutional framework allows for continuity and performance over time. You know, a lot of Trump's rhetoric – and I know that we're past the Trump era at this point, but there was a lot of conversation about this notion of a deep state because there was frustration with how some or many of these institutions, government institutions were operating. But if not for that deep state, we may have found ourselves in a lot of very ugly situations over the last four years that there really were layers and layers of career public servants that did incredible and incredibly heroic things to preserve democracy, to preserve the rights that we all hold dear in the Constitution. And those were, you know, really important roles. And the institution played a really important role in providing continuity and providing trust and security. And so I think it's easy to bash institutions when things aren't working perfectly. But we also have to keep in mind that it's not that all institutions are always bad. It is absolutely true that there is corruption. But there are certainly benefits that we have to kind of not allow populism to become a runaway framework for how we deal with everything we're frustrated with. I'm not saying that. I think what I'm saying is institutions are critically important. But now I think we have to change the rules for how you can be a part of them and then how long you can stay.
SPEAKER_02: So for example, like if the rule was, you know, you can only be a two term politician. Wow, that would be what a cleansing effect that would have on anybody that chose to serve in politics. Up and down the board, you know, at the federal level, at the state level, two terms in and out. California has that, you know, we have a 12 year limit, right, in the state assembly and Senate. And so, you know, I think we're seeing that happen in progressive places like California.
SPEAKER_01: You know, obviously a good segue, but very, I think very much agree that the notion that there needs to be, you know, we talked about this last time, we need to ensure that the institutions don't become beholden to special interests. And that there isn't accountability because the failure, the lack of accountability is really where things bloat over time because you just add stuff on, you don't ever take stuff apart. And ultimately, you have kind of an inept non-functioning institution. So let me give you the report card on California, and then we can figure out if term limits can't fix it, what can fix it. So here's just some data points.
SPEAKER_02: First, I'll do one section, first section number one, economy and jobs. Nearly the highest unemployment rate in the US at 8% plus, highest poverty rate in the US, 18.5% of all Californians, highest income taxes in the US, 13.3%. $30 billion of potential fraudulent unemployment benefits from 2020, $11 billion already determined fraudulent, doubled the oil and gas drilling permits instead of incentivizing, you know, maybe climate or biotech or tech jobs. A $227 billion spending plan for 2021 in terms of quality of life, highest homelessness in the country, worst graduation rate in the country, around 17% of students in California don't graduate, the worst slash highest cost of living in the country and the worst wildfires in the country, 1.8 million plus acres burned. On COVID-19, third highest rate of COVID-19 infections in the world, 658 cases per 100,000 people, and then the worst vaccination deployment in the US around 50%. And then culturally, I didn't know this, I don't know if you guys know this, but here are the number of companies, this is just a subset that have left California, Toyota, Charles Schwab, Tesla and Oracle in some way, shape or form, which is estimated now to have cost California 77,000 people. California, $77 billion of future revenues and 300,000 jobs. Over the past few years, nearly 3 million people have left the state, 53% of Californians want to leave the state and 63% of Californians believe the American dream is dead. Okay, so if let's go and figure out, okay, so if term limits at 12 years don't work, what do we do? Well, I think we have to have politicians who stand up to special interests and aren't in the pocket of special interests.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the problem we have in California, the biggest problem, the reason why California is such a mess is that we have government of the special interest, by the special interest, for the special interests. I mean, the politicians in Sacramento, we have a one party state effectively, and they are beholden completely to these special interests. Look at the deals they make. I mean, so example, in California, we have over 340,000 public employees who make over $100,000 a year, that cost taxpayers over $45 billion. Okay, and you know, we have lifeguards making a quarter million dollars a year. It's crazy, right? I mean, because the people making these deals are in the pocket of these government unions. They're the biggest contributors to California politicians. And, you know, this is my fundamental, I guess, concern or beef with Gavin Newsom, is that, you know, fundamentally, you know, he's worked his way up the ladder of California politics by, you know, by basically benefiting from these special interests. Throughout his rise, you know, step by step, he's never challenged the insiders, or any special interests. He just kind of caters to this political class. And so that's why I think fundamentally, he's not going to be part of the solution. It just feels like every job he's had in politics is just a stepping stone to get to the next step. And even the governorship now is just a stepping stone to get to whatever's next. And I think, you know, Californians are tired of being stepped on in this way.
SPEAKER_01: There are some structural challenges in the state, right, guys? I mean, like, we should not forget the fact that there are some voter mandated supported propositions that have passed over the last couple of decades that really create a structural challenge in terms of how do you allocate resources and capital and how can you effectively govern in the state? You know, the three that are often highlighted is Prop 13, which passed in 1978, which is the state property tax limits. We've talked about that one, I believe in the past, there was a Proposition 4 in 1979, that limits the amount of money that states can appropriate, that the state can appropriate. And then Prop 98, which passed in 1988. And this is the big one. Prop 98 has been challenged in courts. And there have been, you know, many, many kind of efforts at finding loopholes and getting around it and litigating it. But it mandates funding levels in the state from pre-K through community colleges. And it creates a structure that is really difficult to navigate around and really difficult to operate or manage. It's almost as if you guys were running a private company, and your board said, here's how much you as the CEO have to spend this year, and here's how you have to spend it. It is such a difficult decision for the governor to have to kind of say, well, you know, I'm going to make some changes to that because he'll end up in court. And so, you know, I want to just kind of highlight that there are structural challenges to the way the state operates. And obviously, to get a lot of things done, you still have to pass through the state assembly in the state senate. And it's not as simple as making better decisions in the governor's mansion. I think there's a lot that we have to kind of resolve structurally in the state. It's going to take a long friggin time and a lot of cooperating parties to get there. And so, you know, I know for those of us who are very much about making fast, quick and accurate decisions, you know, good decisions, this is a really difficult place to do that, the state, the way the laws have been set up and the way that the legislature has oversight. Well, I mean, look, you're right. But this is why we need real leadership. We need somebody who's going to come forward and say, listen, we need to change this proposition. Another one we need to change is Prop 47 that decriminalized a whole bunch of behavior. I mean, crime is exploding in the state. That proposition needs to be looked at as well.
SPEAKER_00: Right. I mean, we need somebody who's going to come at government from a completely different perspective, which is to think about the citizens of California, first of all, to pay attention to the middle class of California, and to think about us as consumers of government services who need to be satisfied. And right now we have, if you were to think about the services government's providing, people are churning off of it. We had net immigration of 135,000 people net left the state, right? You know, 40,000 families in California pay about half the taxes. If say 10,000 of them leave, we've got a giant hole in the budget that no one knows how to replace. And we have no idea how many people have even left, how many families have left the state. So we really need leadership here to not just go along with the special interests who are in power and who are willing to stand up and push for some of these reforms.
SPEAKER_01: By the way, I think it's worth just highlighting some of these numbers because they also speak to the structural challenge in the state. The state of California generates about $140 billion in revenue. 70% of that comes from personal income tax. And as Saxe pointed out, half of that comes from the top 1% or 40,000 households. It is a heavy weighting. And by the way, that top tax rate of 13.3% applies to households over a million dollars of income. And for those that don't know, there's income strata that are defined by the state. And depending on what strata you pay a different tax rate, the highest strata is making over a million dollars a year where you pay 13.3%. And that's where these 40,000 households cover most of that budget. And 20% is sales and use tax and 10% is corporate tax. To speak to the corporate tax rate for a second, that's 10% of our revenue as a state. We charge a 9% average corporate tax rate in the state to operate. That's incredibly high. And it's one of the reasons besides kind of the challenge that Elon and others kind of made very public here over the past year. But that corporate tax rate makes it very difficult to operate in the state relative to other states that are offering no tax rate, lower cost of labor, and less of a regulatory burden to operate. And it's why we're seeing an exodus not just of people from the state because the services are obviously not being well managed, but also of businesses, you know, a better place to operate.
SPEAKER_02: In Canada, there's an approach that I think is really useful here, which is that, you know, the Canadian government offers credits called shred credits. I can't remember if it's at the federal level, but it's definitely in the state of Ontario, because I've used this for for some of our companies. You hire engineers, and you can basically capitalize their salary, and you can offset their costs so that when you're a young company, you're effectively paying zero tax. Or if you're a small company, you effectively pay zero tax. And that seems really right. You know, where you're a small business person, and you know, you're holding, you know, 510 employees, and you're making, you know, a million bucks a year in revenue, whether you're a restaurant or a software company, you basically pay nothing. But then at the other end of the spectrum, you know, when those credits burn off, theoretically, if you're a Facebook or a Google or an Amazon, now all of a sudden, you know, you can pay a much larger percentage of what to do. And I think that there's all kinds of progressive tax schemes that work on the corporate side. There's a bunch of tax credits that you can use to sort of incentivize certain kinds of jobs. And I think you're just much better off because then, you know, these companies can't leave if all the people want to stay in one place. I want to highlight one more structural problem. So even if you do resolve that, even if you do resolve these propositions that have passed, that have passed in the past, and are causing us problems in terms of budgeting and ability to budget adequately going forward.
SPEAKER_01: One of the other challenge, and even if you do resolve the tax structure to generate a more balanced revenue model that allows for innovation and allows for employment, allows for opportunity, we have a, this is an interesting stat I found this week. How many Americans, I'll just say the number, one out of nine Californians are a member of a public pension fund in the state of California, one out of nine. And the public pension funds in California, as of the last reporting, are roughly $250 billion underfunded relative to the payment obligations they have to their members. Think about that for a second. So not only does the state have a lot of debt, we've got a $250 billion hole for paying people money that they believe they're owed in the future. And that is creating a massive problem where the state needs to figure out how do we fill that hole? How do we meet these obligations to our citizens who worked, who earned what they believe to be a fair income stream for the rest of their lives that they may not ever get, you know. And so we've got both the legislative problem in terms of how the state is structured, we've got these propositions that have passed that kind of, you know, buckle down the governor and buckle down the decision makers in terms of what they can and can't do legally. We've got an income generation problem with respect to concentration. And we've got some of these, you know, heavy burdens on us like health services, but also this underfunded pension liability that is almost like such a priority, and no one's really paying attention to it because the sirens are going off. And meanwhile, the service providers in the state are completely effing up the service that they're supposed to be providing. You know, to mark highlighted a bunch of great ones in terms of fire response and whatnot at the beginning, and obviously the vaccine rollout we know is just completely flawed. But, you know, here's another interesting stat, the California EDD. This is the link I just sent out by the way on our on our zoom chat, but there's $114 billion in unemployment claims paid since COVID. This is an insane statistic, but it looks like roughly 27% or $30 billion of fraudulent claims were paid by the EDD on those unemployment claims. So the folks that are actually running these institutions themselves aren't even operating well, you know, not to mention the actual huge liabilities the state has accrued over the years and the structural deficiencies. So as much as I would love to, you know, kind of propose that we could all come up with a simple solution, this is a complex friggin set of problems that probably require several books to resolve. And I just want us to be honest and real about that, that this is, you know, this is going to be a challenging issue probably for decades to come for this state to get itself out of the holes it's dug itself into. You know, one thing I'll say is as goes California, so goes every other state and so goes America, because if there's one state that theoretically you think would have been positioned from a human capital perspective to figure these out and political will, it's this state.
SPEAKER_02: And if this state can't figure it out, we're in a whole fucked ton of trouble.
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're not doing a very good job figuring it out right now. That's why we need to make a change. I mean, David, you're right about the magnitude of the problems, the challenges, but it all starts with some sort of, you know, outsider rebellion. And that's what's going on with this recall. That's why we have to support it. That's why I support it. It's not gonna be the end of the, it's not the, it's the beginning of the solution, not the beginning of the beginning, the beginning, it's the beginning of the beginning. But we need to create an institution to solve the problems over time, right? It's gonna be, it's gonna be the coalescence of what you're pointing out, Sax, which is the, you know, the will of the strong, the will of the rebellion to figure this out and resolve the time.
SPEAKER_01: The institution may be the all in pod, but, but, but let me build on. Yeah. But let me, let me build on. Yeah. I would actually Jake, how you posted a tweet saying what should we call our party? And anyway, my suggestion was the outsider.
SPEAKER_00: Surprise party. Yeah. Let me build, let me build on, on freeberg's point about the pensions. Okay. Where did these giant underfunded pension obligations come from? Because I think that's a really important point to explain. So here's what basically happens if you're a government worker in California, you could typically retire after 20 years with all of your benefits and, and not just a hundred percent of your salary, but the salary you made in your last year. And so what happens is when people get to that 20 year mark, they get a lot of overtime. And so that's why we've seen articles about people retiring, you know, after, you know, if you're retiring after 20 years, you could be in your forties. Okay. Well, wait, don't you get half pay for your pension, so they double up their overtime, they get to 250k, then they get a pension of 125. You don't get your full salary in retirement.
SPEAKER_03: There's a there's a complicated formula. But the point is, you can stuff it with overtime, and it's very generous. And then they can go because they're still in their 40s, they can go get a another government job somewhere else, and then stack that pension on top. And then by the way, it doesn't just last until they die, but it lasts until their spouse dies. So now there was a proposal years ago,
SPEAKER_00: to move this whole system to like a 401k type of system. And it was squashed by who the unions and Newsome opposed it, because, you know, he doesn't do anything that the unions don't want. And so we have these completely unsustainable pension liabilities. Everybody can see this train wreck coming, but nobody has the guts to stand up the unions and do something. Yeah, I mean, there's very few careers that still offer pensions, even the New York Times, you know, over a decade ago got rid of their pension because people live too long. They retire too early. And then the cost of health care is just so ginormous here that it's going to crush any pension fund. So you have to move to a 401k. And we're, we're, it's kind of hard to say to a cop, or a firefighter who's running into a burning building or putting themselves in harm's way that they don't get one because it's such a high risk job. And so it's not a good idea to do that.
SPEAKER_03: It's such a high risk job. But we really do need to think of something more reasonable, like a 401k. And that's coming from my entire family is, you know, cops and firefighters and of service in New York City. And they all have pensions. And you are right, David, there is a tradition of trying to get a little extra overtime because they average out usually your last three or four years to give your average salary, the to base your pension off of. And then of course, you can do another job or go work, go from a firefighter to a cop, vice versa, garbage, sanitation worker to get those things. We didn't talk about the nimby ism, and how extraordinarily hard it is to build homes here and how extremely expensive it is. A lot of the young people who are thinking of coming to California are looking at the housing prices, they want to come here to start companies. They love the California vibe, but the housing is a non starter, you can't live in the peninsula, or anywhere in the the wider Bay Area unless you are, you know, a dual household income with what are you talking about? 400 500 $600,000 minimum minimum minimum minimum, and that's not even counting private school, but you're talking about where are there sub $1 million homes within the proximity of the Bay Area, they don't exist. You go to Austin, and I've been looking at Austin real estate, just coincidentally, and there are many homes that are $300,000 that are $400 a square foot, everywhere within 3040 minutes of downtown Austin, and that's where young people are going. And then finally, if we look at our to law and order, David, we are not treating fentanyl like the super drug it is, you know, it's one thing to have drug reform and to have prison reform. We know these are important, but you can keep that in your mind that we want to make a more just legal system, while at the same time, not allowing people to deal fentanyl. And if you just type into Google, fentanyl versus heroin, lethal dose, and click on the image search you will see two vials and it's a very famous photo where there's like, you know, a pinch of, you know, heroin, that's the lethal dose. And then in the other vial, there are like seven grains of fentanyl and that's the lethal dose. And we are conflating a homeless problem with a super drug. Yeah, can I can I can I add to that? So please, so. So you know, I was on the side of decriminalizing cannabis. And I think that there were and I think that there, we we overcharge too many people for drug crimes when they were disusers and should have been in treatment. And that's why I think there's been a reaction against over incarceration. And I understand that. But I agree with you that fentanyl is in a separate category. It is the super drug. And here's the problem. It is so powerful. It is so addictive. It is so
SPEAKER_00: destructive. Nobody can hold down a job and get off that drug once they start once they start taking it. I mean, it's just game over. So they end up living in the streets and turning to crime and petty theft to support their habit. And that's the situation we're in today. And we have this growing mass, massive numbers of people living in the streets addicted to this super drug. And we got to stop it, we got to get tough on this. Because it's just, you know, right now, the solution that our D A seems to be pushing, whether it's gas going to LA or chase a booty in San Francisco, is there just not prosecuting anything? You know, we had Prop 47, downgrade a whole bunch of property felonies to misdemeanors, and now the da's are prosecuting the misdemeanors. So they basically have the same solution. And it's not that they're not going to get on the streets, they're just going to be in the streets and this is the serious problem. And it's not that they're going to get up and die in the streets, they're going to get hurt. It's not that they're going to get hurt. It's not that they're going to get hurt. And it's not that they're going to get killed. It's not that they're going to get killed. And I think that's the problem. I think, you know, it's the problem. But I think it's very important that that, you know, just decriminalize burglary. And so you've got all these, you know, drug addicts living on the streets committing these crimes, and they need to be in treatment. So I think part of what we need to do here actually think this is a big investment California is to make. We need giant treatment centers to address this problem. And if somebody gets caught committing a crime, and they're addicted to drugs, I don't want to send them to jail, but I would make them go to treatment. We have to think about true compassion, true compassion for
SPEAKER_03: somebody who is addicted to fentanyl, is getting them off the street and getting them into a rehab program or giving them the choice of going to jail for the crimes they may have committed so that there is this pressure to go into treatment. Just to give you a stat in 1999, we had like 18,000 overdoses, we're now over 70,000. And if you look just in San Francisco, we're talking four or five times the number of overdose, overdose deaths to COVID deaths. This is a level of human suffering that just makes no sense. And it's such a nuanced discussion, right? You can't, you can you have to be able to hold into your brain that cannabis, you know, psychedelics, MDMA, psilocybin, or one you have a long list. I
SPEAKER_02: have a long list here of the drugs that you want to be recreational. Here are the drugs I'm a fan of good. Here are the
SPEAKER_03: drugs that I don't take bad. No fentanyl. I think you just have to look at the the chance of recovery and the chance of addiction and fentanyl and heroin are just tragedies. tragedy. We also have to like have the courage to actually not
SPEAKER_02: look at just the symptom like, I think, treatment centers are a
SPEAKER_02: great idea. I think not sending people to jail is like an obvious idea. I also think if you take two or three steps back and you think about what are the two things that send people off the rails, number one, I think is lack of a job. And then number two is a lack of mental health resources. You put those two things together, it's you're done. It's like it's like kindling. And it's like kerosene and a match all in one and boom, it goes and, you know, we didn't need to know that answer because you saw that over the last decade building up in the rust bill. So we knew that that was the those are the boundary conditions for this. So how do you get people back to work? How do you actually give some it you know, the crazy thing about Reagan, I mean, we all forget, but Reagan was the one that defunded all of the mental health institutions, you know, when he was governor of California and sent all these folks spilling into the streets.
SPEAKER_03: Well, think about how many jobs that would create if we brought back, you know, psychiatric facilities and made them free. This is where if we look at health care, not having a national health care program, especially for mental health is costing us more on the other side when it comes to suicide, mental point like if we're going to spend money and if we're going
SPEAKER_02: to be in debt, be in debt for the right reasons. Like, sure, find a way to be accountable and transparently spend money. That's fine. Spending money is fine. Government should not be for profit. You know, government should I don't even think government should be breaking even I think that government should be generally running at a loss. And then the net GDP as long as that's positive and accretive, we're doing great as a society, right. So government should be doing the things that that they need to do for people to have an even starting line.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Jamal.
SPEAKER_02: No, I was just gonna say that that's where we get it wrong. Because like we, you know, we like pat ourselves on the back when a government turns a surplus. And then you know, we like explode when a government runs a deficit. Instead, they're managing to the political theater of a number instead of really understand how to run a business.
SPEAKER_01: But I just want to be clear, like, the entire premise of how that is run, and how we think about this from an economic point of view, is that we have to have GDP growth. And if you don't have GDP growth, the whole formula fails. So let's just break this down in a simple way. If I'm working and I'm making 60 grand a year, I can take out some credit card debt, knowing that I'm going to make an extra 10% next year, an extra 10% the year after if I know my income is going to climb, I can afford to take on some debt, which means spending more than I'm making right now. Because I know that in the future, I'll be making more than I am today. And I'll be able to pay down that debt. And so the whole premise of how we run government is we should run at a deficit, we should accrue debt, we should build infrastructure. But in order for that work to work, I have to increase my tax revenue in the future. And there's two ways to do that raise taxes, or see significant GDP growth. And if you raise taxes, you suffer the problem that California may be suffering now, which is very high net worth people leaving the state, which is going to cause a collapse in the revenue stream and the whole system fails. If you want GDP growth, well, you have to kind of enable the system to allow for GDP growth, which means reducing taxes and growing housing. But the problem is the life that people want to live doesn't necessarily mean that we need to have and so this goes back to the housing question, do we need to have more business growth in the state? Therefore, do we need to reduce tax rates to encourage business growth? And by doing so we have to also build more housing. And the reason people want to build more housing is because they want to see more business here. And the whole premise is kind of flawed. If at the end of the day, getting more business here means you also have to lower tax rates and cause all those problems. It's also how you have community. And
SPEAKER_02: it's also how you have diversity. Like nobody wants to live in a model culture where everybody's really, really poor, or everybody's really, really rich. I grew up it's so sickening. I grew up in a place where everybody was really, really poor. I now live in a place where everybody is really, really rich. And the model culture sucks. And instead, what you want is you want transitions, you want people moving up, you want people moving down, you want the hard luck story, you want the got lucky story, you want it all. And this is this is where we've lost it. I'm gonna ask you a question. freebird. Are you saying that if 40,000 people left California, we would blow a $70 billion hole in the budget? No, we would we would
SPEAKER_01: blow a yeah, about 40,000 account for half the income tax. So it's about 35% of 140. Yeah. So we would we would blow 50 $60 billion hole in the budget. 40,000 people 40,000 Yeah, out
SPEAKER_02: of 60 million 40,000 homes 40,000 homes out of 60 million 40
SPEAKER_02: million out of 40 million. Yeah. Yeah. 40,000 similar thing
SPEAKER_01: happened to New Jersey and Connecticut when they had
SPEAKER_03: everybody moving down to Florida. And so this is not unprecedented, especially with hedge funds and really high taxpayers, you know, but what I'm Yeah, what I'm asking is, is
SPEAKER_01: there a better way where you don't have to depend on GDP growth to balance your budget and to provide the social services you want to provide to the state?
SPEAKER_00: No, of course, of course not yet. All it all starts with having a healthy economy. I mean, always right, because that's what generates the the prosperity to pay for all the social programs. It's to pay ahead of the curve, right? That's my point is like,
SPEAKER_01: we're always paying ahead of the curve, which forces us to find GDP growth, which is how we get stuck in these cycles and these problems. And this is true not just of the state, but of nations as well. The US faces this and others, but by by spending ahead of the curve by creating infrastructure by creating social services, by setting up these pension obligations, the only way to get out of the debt you've just taken on is to grow. And that creates all of the systemic problems and ultimately lead to populism and all of these kind of frameworks for failure that are going to ultimately end. Here's
SPEAKER_00: hold on. Can I disagree with that? Look, yeah, growth is a precondition for everything else. That's good. Okay, growth, growth needs to be managed. Okay, but it doesn't growth is not the problem here. The problem is a set of policies that are actually killing growth and driving entrepreneurs and innovators out of the state. We saw Elon Musk leave the state why he said that California was starting to take its success for granted, and it had been winning too long. Okay, California needs to realize it's in a highly competitive situation now. And because of COVID, you can work from anywhere and Austin has become a tech hub and Miami has become a tech hub. And this is where we're seeing a massive tax rate. And those states have no income tax. And we have politicians in California, just keep raising taxes as if we're not competing against these other states where we are, and people are leaving, we're seeing a mass exodus here. We've got to realize that we can't raise tax rates beyond the point where people are willing to bear them.
SPEAKER_03: This is the this is your I think your best point, David is that what the great pause did was it let people reassess their lives. How many people do we know who either left the state change or broke up with the spouse, whatever it is, people reassessed everything in their life. And what people uniformly came to was, why am I paying this much and getting this little in the Bay Area in California, when I could get twice as much three to maybe three times as much in Austin or Miami, and not pay this amount of taxes, and be happier. And that is an existential problem for the Bay Area. If you know, this is not just John Musk, or Larry Ellison Oracle, it's also rank and file developers, and the developers don't need to be in the office. So you could have this massive middle leave to that nobody anticipates. And if all the developers said, you know what, I want to be on the Reno side of Lake Tahoe. You know, I want to be in Austin or wherever I'm paying less taxes, and I'm making the same money and I got a better quality of life. What do you guys think happens? So J Cal, what do you what
SPEAKER_02: happens to California or Connecticut or New Jersey? And what happens to Florida? Just tell me what I think it's a
SPEAKER_03: death spiral for New York and for California where it unless the representatives in government start to represent the people who are voting and living there and voting their interests as opposed to the special interest to David's point about the insiders, we have disconnected what the citizens of California want from what the government officials are providing. They're just not in sync. They're basically partowing to teachers unions or special interests and not the people who are building companies or just people living here. People want to build housing and they won't let them. You can't build apartments in Palo Alto or you know, any city. I mean, this is crazy. You're right. And the only middle
SPEAKER_00: classes can be left in California pretty soon. It our government workers. I mean, that's it. That's the only people who can be making over $100,000 a year in California government workers because everyone who's middle class who's running a business is just is finding it too difficult and too difficult to earn with the level of taxation and to run their business and their regulation, regulation and they're leaving. I mean, just think about the regulation
SPEAKER_03: issues of doing any real world I mean, you've done construction in San Francisco. We've had businesses that are real world businesses with storefronts. It's it's jumping over hurdle after hurdle after hurdle. I have an idea down. It's brutal.
SPEAKER_02: What if whenever you started a company in California, you got, you know, three or four years worth of tax credits for engineers in return for 1% of the equity that California was not allowed to sell?
SPEAKER_03: Sure. I mean, some equity upside would be great. I have an idea. Chamath, how about you run for governor?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Chamath.
SPEAKER_03: Why don't you? Isn't that why we're doing the emergency pod?
SPEAKER_01: Sax, Sax, Sax, I think you should run.
SPEAKER_02: We'll be right behind you. Have we disparaged you too much? Or
SPEAKER_01: has this been too difficult?
SPEAKER_02: Speaking of politics, though, I do need to tell the story. This is a complete non sequitur. In 2012, 12 or 13, I can't remember which year, Mike Bloomberg invites a bunch of us from technology to the White House Correspondents. We're like, yes, the White House Correspondents. Did you go? But it's awesome. Of course, I went once here. So you know, myself, Ian Osborn, Jose Ramon, the founder of Jawbone. And I have two amazing stories about my experience at the White House Correspondents.
SPEAKER_02: Number one, well, three. Number one is like, the dinner itself is kind of like a prompt just because there's just so many people, right? And so, you know, you have to have a rubber chicken dinner because there's like 1000 people in the room. But the second was that Ella McPherson was there. And I've never seen more incredible hair in my life. Just I have this image of this person's hair. And it was like the thickest. Like it was like, curly, but like it looks so soft. And this is the most incredible hair I've ever seen.
SPEAKER_03: I think those are called extensions or a wig, but go ahead. It didn't look like that it looked like real hair, but it
SPEAKER_02: just it looked like like a lion, like the mane of a lion. And then the third story is I were in a reception, there's an after party at the French ambassadors place, I start talking to this person randomly. And there's like all these stars everywhere. But I just start talking to this to this person. And, you know, she she's very chatty, and I'm chatty, chatty, chatty, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we're talking, talking, talking. And then at the end of this, like, sort of like five minute conversation, and we had not really introduced each other. She just kind of said, Hey, and I said, Hi. And so we started talking. She says to me, Do you mind if we take a picture? And I'm like, Yeah, of course. And I had no idea what was coming. So I was like, so we take a picture. And she searched me and she says, you know, I think you're really fantastic in Parks and Recreation.
SPEAKER_02: So hard. You thought I was Aziz? I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. How does this happen?
SPEAKER_03: At least she didn't call you Urkel. That was her second choice. Oh, my gosh. I love you in Parks and Rec. Anyways,
SPEAKER_02: that's my that's my interaction with politics. I think you're
SPEAKER_01: ready for politics because you just avoided the question.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, look, let's be really honest. Like, I'm not ready to do any of that I what I need to do is, I need to figure out, you know, a my business and where it's going. And then B, I do think it's worth figuring out what are the conflict of interest laws? And what do you have to do if all of this were to come to pass? Because I could not make a credible decision unless I knew that. Because I just have things that I want to do. And that to me are the most important things. Like, I'll just be really honest with you. Like I'm working on something in batteries that I think is, it's important for a lot of places
SPEAKER_02: much, you know, more than just California. And so like, if I have to abandon this battery project, I wouldn't do it, you know, just that simple. So I got to figure that out. And you got to write down all the illegal things you've done
SPEAKER_01: on a piece of paper and all the illegal things you're doing on a daily basis. And then we got to make sure that you have a case of moleskins because I can start filling that in.
SPEAKER_03: They're never gonna get uncovered.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the APO research has begun. Right. That's what the dinner on Thursday should be about. Should start the APO research program. Oh my gosh. That's a long program.
SPEAKER_02: But there's certainly a groundswell in interest, right,
SPEAKER_01: Saxon? There's certainly- Oh yeah, it's crazy. I think Chamath has a lot of folks that love his passion and the way he speaks to them and that, you know, he has a real sense for what I think people are feeling and can speak to that and obviously has experience in kind of making decisions and allocating resources, right? So, you know, I think there's a lot of interest Chamath and a lot of drive to see you- Here's what I'll say. ... shit or get off the park. Here's what I'll say. Here's what I'll say. I've grown up
SPEAKER_02: with nothing. And getting to the other side, I'm completely convinced that poverty is a disease. And I'm convinced that it is a disease, that it is, except in this disease, it is systematically reinforced. You know what I mean? So, Jason, stop that, Jason.
SPEAKER_03: The fucking talking Chamath is good. And I would like to say, all Americans and the citizens of California- I came from nothing. I came from nothing. I would eat rice three days a week, and then I would eat the plate the other four.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, the reality is that if I were to do it, if like all the checks came back, and it seemed like it was a plausible thing, I would only do it for the 18 months and just kind of, you know, but you'd have to get elected on a mandate where it was so clear that it's like all of California wanted these five or six laws to pass. Like, I think it's like, you're not running a candidate, you're running a platform. So it doesn't matter who it is, you know, whoever goes in, it could be me, but it could be frankly, Kim Kardashian, or The Rock or David Sachs. I think what's really important is we should get alignment on a handful of laws that change the trajectory of the state. And the reason why that's important is if those laws can pass, and the state turns around, then that's a roadmap for the other 49 states. And I think that's a big deal. That's a really big deal.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's about getting adoption of a playbook, a playbook, a playbook to fix California. And if that playbook is something that a group of people from different parties and different backgrounds can coalesce around, and you know, publish that playbook in a way that's easily understood. And and you can take it and run it. Let's, let's pick what our top
SPEAKER_03: item would be. For me, it's the building of multifamily unit housing, I think would be in my top three, what's in your top three sacks?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if if I were to write a, a met a sort of catchphrase for for a campaign, it would not be make it make California great again, it but it would be something more like tough and tolerant, because that's what I think California wants. So tolerant on LGBTQ rights, you know, tolerant towards people have different nationalities towards immigration, you know, tolerant on social issues, but I think what California is really want now is tough on crime, tough on hard drugs, negotiate tougher deals with these unions and special interests who are just pillaging the state. We and then, you know, and frankly, tougher on the politicians, because they're making it too tough on the people to, you know, to live and to run their businesses. And, you know, we need to make it easier on the people and tougher on the politicians.
SPEAKER_03: Freebird, what do you got in your top three items, if we if we could only put three items on the docket, you know, one, two, and three, I think, from creating much more affordable housing, through multifamily, you know, going up as opposed to building out, and just allowing, you know, anybody who wants to add a couple of stories, add a couple of stories, and just more housing would lower the price of housing. And maybe we have to change, you know, the taxation and maybe re evaluate the value of homes because right now you buy a home in 1970 for 50k, you're paying 1% of that for the rest of your life, right? Which then makes it impossible to move. And you got two people living in 5000 five bedroom square foot home, because they can't move because their tax basis is so low on it, right? What do you got freeburg? I mean, I don't look the
SPEAKER_01: challenges with any one of these things, you have to balance it. It's like we talked about last time. You know, we talked about adding a transaction tax to trading on markets, but you also have to get rid of the capital gains tax. Right? If you're gonna get rid of that, you know, that proposition that locks in the property tax rate, I think it's Prop 13, right sex, if you're going to get rid of Prop 13, you've got to phase it out over time. But to create the opportunity on the other side, which means how do you create more affordable housing at the same time that you get rid of Prop 13, you've got to enable, as you pointed out, the ability for more rapid housing to be developed and dropping regulatory constraints, and maybe removing some of the union pricing and some of the work that gets done in the supply chain and so on. And so, you know, I think it's about the balance trade off amongst these things, you know, if we're going to talk about trying to keep the top 40,000 households in California, and you're going to drop the tax rate on them to keep them here, which is an extremely controversial anti-populist move. And, you know, right now, you'd have to find another way to kind of resolve, resolve that gap, or at the same time kind of reduce the cost of our top cost is education. So you need education reform. Our second top cost is health care, and other related services and how you resolve that, that there's a lot of structural things in there, it's probably a checklist of 10 things that you would say, let's go negotiate better prescription drug prices, let's make, you know, the services more efficient, meaning how many patients does a doctor get to see per hour per day per year per week, whatever, there's all these things that you kind of go through, and you can make each one of those dollars that are being spent more efficient. So as much as I'd love to kind of rattle it up to three different things, this is a management problem. And you know, as those of us who have run businesses that are struggling or challenged, have experienced, there isn't one thing to do to fix a problem when something is not operating well. But you really, it really does come down to talent. And so you know, I would think that the people that are sitting in those assembly and senate seats need to be the right people. And the person sitting in the governor's mansion needs to be the right person who will surround him or herself with the right people who are operators and managers and leaders who know how to resolve these problems and go through and do just like that guy did and Dave with the napkin. And you know, right out, look, here's the 10 simple things we can do to fix HHS. And here's the 10 simple things we can do to fix higher education, and go in and cut half the expense. And if you cut half the expense, you have a lot of things you can start to do. And so yeah, I don't have a simple answer for you, Jake. But I think it comes down to balance, would you say school vouchers, since you're brought up education are the quickest
SPEAKER_03: solution there to create more competition quickly, by giving parents the ability to take their voucher and go to whatever school they want. I'll be honest, I've been read enough on
SPEAKER_01: school vouchers to know that the ramifications of the program programs that have been proposed, so I'm not going to be very well, very thoughtful on that.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll speak in favor of the idea of giving parents more choice. I mean, these schools are being are they being run for the students or for the special interest? Because right now, the parents don't really get any choice. I mean, look, if we can recall the governor, why can't we? Why can't the parents of a school recall the headmaster? I mean, why don't we give them the ability to circulate a petition if they're unhappy? I think in the case of the governor recall, if we get 12% of voters to sign the recall petition, then you get a recall election. So what if you had a system where the parents of a school could sign a petition, and then they vote and if the majority of Yeah, I mean, majority of the parents vote to recall a school, then they can basically replace the headmaster and run it in a different way. Why shouldn't they have that choice? It's crazy to me. Well, they're paying for who's that's why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, let me give you let me give you a little math I just did on my on my calculator here. So the average student in California costs $18,000 a year, roughly, okay. And we have a classroom size on average of about 25 students, it's actually higher than national average. So you multiply 18,000 by 25. That's $450,000 per classroom. Okay, now how much does a teacher cost? I mean, okay, no, that's the average in California. For
SPEAKER_03: teachers. It's
SPEAKER_00: let's say let's say that we paid teachers extremely well. Let's say we paid the teachers 100,000 a year because we all believe in having great teachers, okay, that would still leave $350,000 left over. And remember, you don't have a real estate cost, right? The state already owns all these schools. So where is the money going?
SPEAKER_02: We've systematically entrenched poverty. I think that what happened to you, freeburg, or sacks, or me or J Cal, I don't think it's possible anymore. And I think that we are aberrations and I think that folks that are younger than us would look at us. And they look at us, I think, in part, because they're like, God, I would love to have that shot. And I don't think they know where to start. And I think they also see a system that feels very much rigged against them. So just buy Bitcoin. I mean, this is why they're attracted to
SPEAKER_03: buying Bitcoin, or doing what they did with GameStop. And why Wall Street insiders versus outsiders, they feel like they have this opportunity to show the man and they don't this is why they don't want to take on school that I mean, I don't blame millennials for being disgruntled. If they got 100 or 200 k in debt. And they were told this degree would get them you know, this would be their ticket. And it was it's been disconnected. It's a lot. It's a great lie. It's a great lie. And
SPEAKER_02: so you know, that's, that's one of the big lies. And I think we're sacrificing it now because like, you know, we're, we're, we're making this great sacrifice because we're exposing these lies to be exactly as they are. So I mean, if you if I had to pick a couple things, J. Cal, I would say, the most important thing for me is school vouchers tied to ink, I would increase public school salaries, you pick your number, I don't really care what it is 100 grand 125 grand, but you need to tie it to school vouchers so that any parent can put their kid into the best school that is for them, or start their own school.
SPEAKER_03: Like there needs to be more start the live parents get together and they each get an 18 18 k voucher, they can spend 100,000 on a teacher to teach five students. And if they hit their goals, like, they're going to do better, what what five parents even the, you know, the most disadvantaged parents would take advantage of this. To me, that would be the that's like
SPEAKER_02: the first above all else, because I think it creates accountability. And it allows our kids to have a decent shot. The second thing I would probably do is I would actually just cut all taxes to zero on the personal side, but I would introduce a progressive taxation system for corporations. And I would try some of these novel things like getting equity in turn for in turn for credits and allowing folks to capitalize certain expenses. I mean, these are like, I know people think that's also stupid. But like, you know, if all we did was just own 1% of Apple, Google, Facebook, you'd have $3 trillion, $4 trillion trillion with a T. You know what I mean? Well, not not you. That's 4 trillion a market cap. But you know, you know what I'm trying to say, like, if you control 1% of that, it goes a long way. So there's that. And then I do think that there's something that we need to do for people to be able to live. I remember interviewing somebody. And, you know, he's what he said to me just made me so sad. He's like, I, you know, he drives an hour and a half into work every day, and then drives an hour and a half home. And I was like, how is this possible? And I just thought to myself, like, what does that do to you and your family? He goes, I don't see my family. And I'm like, well, can't we just increase your salary? And, you know, that's not possible because of the job that he had, and then he couldn't afford to live. And so all these things just build up in the system. So those would be my three things. It sounds like we have a bestie platform. We we need to figure
SPEAKER_00: out who the bestie candidates going to be, hopefully, we can convince to mouth to do it. But the next thing, but the first thing we got to do is, we got to make sure this recall happens, there's another five weeks or so to gather signatures. So as you can see, we have a lot of money to do. So everybody should check out the website, it's rescue California.org to rescue California.org. If you have the means to donate, please do I donated $50,000 to it, they are taking donations. And even if you're out of state, but believe in this cause, like Jamal said, what happens in California, or as California goes, so goes the nation, you know, it would be a really good thing to send a message to the state to these special interests who are ruining the state that this isn't gonna be tolerated, because every politician in the country is going to hear that. And they're going to start realizing, oh, I can't just pay attention to the insiders, I need to start paying attention to the outsiders to the majority of citizens who've never been organized before. But now they are getting organized. And so we need to send this message. That is the first step, we're not going to get any positive change in this state until the politicians are held accountable. So the starting point for that.
SPEAKER_03: And if you take a picture with the form, and CC your besties, we will follow you back or retweet your like you some combination of that I saw a couple people did it after the last pod. So print out the form. And go ahead and take the next
SPEAKER_02: season next the next podcast. Just for everybody to know, Episode 21, we are going to start by reading mean tweets. There have been some there have been some unbelievably vicious tweets targeted you typically at Jason, and then and then at me a little bit of David Sachs, but finally, we really went after the queen, we've broken the seal and the queen has been targeted. Really? He was called he was called what's the modious he was called sanctimonious on Twitter. We're gonna make him read his tweet to kick off Episode 21. And we will
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_03: see you all next time on the All In podcast. Love you guys.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release. What you're about to be? You're a bee. We need to get merch.