SPEAKER_03: Does anybody have any thoughts on this? I mean, I think it's
SPEAKER_06: incredible. Zoda's Freedberg's dog. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the
SPEAKER_03: all in podcast. It's been a week it's been a minute with us today, of course, the queen of Kenwa, David Friedberg and the rain man himself calling in from a nondescript mansion in one of 17 cities, the rain man himself, David Sacks, and cackling like a dictator who got his two Billy back. And he's back in the game. Chamath Palihapitiya for those of
SPEAKER_01: you, he's re he's re billionized. He re billionized. Is he going to
SPEAKER_03: get a car with doors that go like this doors that go like this doors like this. Let's talk a
SPEAKER_03: little bit about the vaccine. Biden says everybody who's an adult is qualified by May 1 is instructed the states to do that. We are now hitting 2.x million a day we had a 3 million shot day I believe Friedberg and obviously the $1.9 billion COVID slash everybody gets a big slice bill got passed. 1.9 trillion with it. Sorry,
SPEAKER_04: that's what I said 1.9 trillion
SPEAKER_03: there's so many people 1.9 billion than us. Yes, 1.9 trillion 1.9 billion is what the COVID went for the COVID NFT went for one. I said in the past a trillion
SPEAKER_04: here trillion there soon enough. It's real money. Yeah, yeah. Well, Biden Biden speech
SPEAKER_01: really kind of begged the question of why we still need this $2 trillion bill if COVID is going to be over in May. But putting that aside, I think Biden's speech was very welcome in that he called for states to drop all of these crazy eligibility requirements that are actually preventing people from getting vaccinated at this point. He says that every adult American should be able to get a dose by May 1. And he's right. And you know, there's a sharp contrast with Gavin Newsom in California who keeps playing political games with the administration of these doses. So in California yesterday, just yesterday, we added 250,000 more doses of unused inventory. So we, the amount grew to 4.5 million unused doses sitting on a shelf. Only 215,000 people got vaccinated. So we're actually building inventory faster than we're building the population of people getting vaccinated. And it's because of all these crazy rules and requirements, you have to go make an appointment. You know, and that really actually it's counterproductive because it discriminates against people who are less computer savvy, don't know how to navigate the website, or, you know, communities who don't want to enter their name in a government database, which, you know, there's a lot of people in California don't want to, you know, put their names in a government database. And so it works against those communities getting vaccinated. At this point, we should just drop all the requirements, drop the website, let anyone who wants a vaccine just get in line and get vaccinated. It'll go much faster. The problem is that we throw
SPEAKER_06: around this word equity, and that we need to do something with equity. And in fact, I think that people who use that word are stupid. I think what they're trying to say actually is we don't want inequity. And the most inequitable thing is to actually take the most impoverished and fragile of the population and prevent them from actually getting the vaccine because they're the ones that actually need to be working and can't afford to actually not work or can't afford to be sick or can't afford to, you know, find solutions to childcare. It's this weird word that like, you know, the extreme left uses now to describe policies that are just frankly, poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. It might even be more pernicious
SPEAKER_03: than that, correct? freeberg in that anybody who gets a shot is helping everybody else because they are now a blocker in the system. I know this is incredibly simplistic. But I'm a simplistic guy. And it just seems to me, that's it. It's a different way
SPEAKER_04: of thinking about the benefit of vaccination. And I've said it in the past, but the benefit of vaccination is to get enough people vaccinated that the virus generally stops spreading, and then the pandemic ends. And that's the objective. It's not about creating equitable protection for individuals. And as Americans, it's interesting, we think about it in terms of an individual benefit. It's like, how much do I get? What do I get from this vaccine? I want to get protected, the other guy's getting protected before me, who gets to go first, yada yada, and it becomes this kind of competitive, you know, frothing for a vaccination. And the reality is, if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough, the pandemic ends. If we can get 200 million shots in arms, this goes back to I think this tweet I sent in early January, December, we get 200 million shots in arms, we can be done with the pandemic based on you know, how many the efficacy of transmission rate reduction, combined with the fact that a certain number of people have already developed immunity to this thing, we get to the point that there should be kind of a, you know, think about a network, and you start turning nodes off the network suddenly becomes really hard to see transmission happen across the network. And, and so the prioritization of you know, who gets the vaccine over, you know, how fast we are deploying the vaccine has been a critical error from day one, in my opinion. Now, look, all that being said, I feel like we could sit here and criticize and argue about tactics and strategy all day long about this and, you know, make politicians look like idiots and administrators look like idiots. But the truth is, we are now seeing 3 million shots a day. In Biden's speech, he said, which, if you'll remember is what I said we really should be targeting is about 1% of the population every day. And that's roughly where we are. Biden said in his speech that we are in a war footing, which is effectively what we said the other day, the federal government is operating 600 mass vac sites. And we are right now getting shots in arms for all of the issues with prioritization and nonsense that's going on. I feel very in the
SPEAKER_01: United States. I agree that Biden has the correct posture on this, which is war footing. We are not doing that in California. I mean, I just talked about how we're building inventories faster than we're getting vaccines administered. Newsom just announced that 40% of the vaccines are now going to be basically separated out and reserved for equity zones. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's even mean, it means that certain communities, only people in certain communities can get those vaccines and they're going to be distributed out through this complicated system of local community groups. All that does is put money through some no bid
SPEAKER_06: contract to some shitty technical company, a bunch of consultants that then take advantage of the system, get paid hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to do nothing. I mean, I tweeted out, there's this bot that now scrapes. And by the way, before I tweeted out this thing about this bot, which is I think, yeah, I sent it to you. It's the
SPEAKER_03: California vaccines available bot. Exactly. And all it does is it,
SPEAKER_06: it, it's, it scrapes that myturn.ca website. But before that in our group chat, that's another friend of ours who wrote his own scraper, if you guys remember. And it was really shocking because all it would show is page after page after page of completely open and available vaccine, vaccine slots, um, you know, at the Moscone center and other places. And you think all of this stuff is just a bunch of, I'll be blunt, uh, rich white people sitting in a room with their head up their ass and they come up with these stupid fucking rules and then they try to implement them with words like equity. And all that happens is that you compound inequality. And let's go back and let's go back to freeburg's first point,
SPEAKER_01: which is that all these unvaccinated people who can't get vaccinated faster, become a giant Petri dish for the virus to continue, continue spreading and experimenting on morphing and morphing. So maybe we actually do get a vaccine resistant strain. The new strains, the variants have been popping up so far are not a vaccine resistant, but the longer the pandemic goes on, the longer there's a chance that one could arise. And then we're back to square one on this thing. So it's going to hurt everybody. Um, and, and, and here's the crazy thing is that, you know, I think we all know a lot of, I know dozens of people who've been vaccinated in California and they all come to me and tell me they're whispering about it, you know, because they don't want to tell anyone they're scared of being canceled. They're scared of being canceled because, you know, um, Newsome and, and, and the equity people have created this idea that if you get a vaccine, you're taking away from somebody else in reality, you're not because anybody who's high risk has already gotten the vaccine by now, or has had access to get the vaccine. And all you're doing right now, if you get the vaccine is taking a dose off the shelf where there's 4.5 million doses sitting there and it's increasing by millions every week. And so what we need to do is, um, well, let me make a PSA actually starting on Monday. Uh, you can, anyone in California can get the vaccine with a doctor's note. And they're saying that doctors have total discretion to give the note. So let me just make a PSA to everyone out there. If you're in California, just go get a doctor's note starting on Monday and go get the vaccine. Yeah. You know, stop, stop worrying about Newsome's stupid rules. Let's also just remember. So two
SPEAKER_04: points on that. Not everyone has the ability to go just get a doctor's note. It's really hard for people that have to go to public clinics and so on to get a doctor's note. Um, what we are seeing is a lot of people just hacking the website, almost like Soviet Union era bread lines where they go to the website, they type in something that's not true to get themselves a slot. And that's how a lot of people are kind of filling the void. The reality is, and I just want to go back to the point I was making at the beginning, I think we're skating out of this thing. And I think that the inventory surplus, which is absolutely being built up at a staggering rate in the United States right now, if you look at the inventory forecast from J&J Pfizer and Moderna, relative to the deployment rate of the vaccines right now, you're correct. We're building up a surplus and inventory surplus and the rate of buildup per day is increasing right now. So 1 million extra shots a day 2
SPEAKER_03: million extra shots a day being probably half a million to a million. And so we're building up an inventory. And so what
SPEAKER_04: top of the 30 million we have
SPEAKER_03: we have already in inventory. So what's happening is there are
SPEAKER_04: natural market dynamics where we are all pointing out and saying is starting to play out in terms of people kind of hacking the system. There's so much supply. There are many vac sites. Now you can go to any supermarket, any pharmacy in California to get a shot. And everyone's just clicking the box and saying yes, I qualify and they're going in and getting shots. So the market demand is starting to meet the supply, even though there are government and regulatory forces that are trying to inhibit that from taking place. And so I do feel pretty good when you look at kind of the inventory forecast and you look at how many shots are being given per day, that in 45 days or so we're going to get to a point that we're starting to skate out of this thing and kind of call it a day. Can I ask you can ask you a question?
SPEAKER_06: Despite the idiocy of the
SPEAKER_04: process that regulators have kind of put in place. Yeah. Freeberg, I just have a quick
SPEAKER_06: science question because I was trying to find the answer to this, but I would love for you to tell us. What is the real efficacy of the vaccine and what is your transmittability like your your carrier status once you've gotten for example, like, you know, let's just say you take the the Pfizer vaccine, right? Yeah. If you get the Pfizer vaccine, how many days until this is like pretty good? And, you know, like, what is really the risk profile between the first shot and the second shot? I'll share this link, and then
SPEAKER_04: we can post it on the show notes on the on the show notes and people can take a look at it. But it's an excellent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine showing basically a population of unvaccinated against Pfizer vaccinated with half a million in each population, half a million people. Yeah. Day eight. Yeah. And they showed basically the accumulated infection rate, severe hospitalization rate and death rate of each of the two populations over time. And that really kind of, I think, highlights the efficacy of the vaccines and at what time period they become efficacious on each of those metrics. And basically the And by the way, even after the first dose across a population of half a million people, the margin of error on death shows that there may even be complete protection against death after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine within seven days of getting that shot pretty
SPEAKER_03: powerful statistic, what just to describe the chart for those people listening, you have two populations, and one's in blue, one's in red. And it's the time is, you know, in days on the bottom axis. And when you get to the bottom, one line goes sideways, and the other one goes keeps going straight up. So it's day eight after the Pfizer that you're basically protected according to this chart. And that's on the first shot. And like, I think it adds like one or two cases. Yeah, that's right. There have been zero deaths. So I think day eight is the day. And the second dose seems like to me, you know, it's just this unbelievable extra. Another amazing chart, which maybe we can dump in the show notes is what's happening in San Francisco, we hit 10,000 shots a day at the end of February, March 1, we're doing now 2000 shots a day. So we literally have dropped 70% or so we're at 3000 shots, I think, from the peak. Yeah. So this crazy wokeness is resulting in, you know, in this, this virtue signaling that, you know, oh, we can't give any shots to anybody unless we get this group first, or that group first is now leading to everybody hacking the system. The hack that I've heard is, since teachers are getting it, childcare people, and food people are getting it, people are now starting to get jobs at door dash, or saying they're a teacher. And if you check that box, according to, you know, the back channel that I've heard, you go get the shot and you don't get they don't ask you your driver's license, no one's
SPEAKER_04: checking. It's just a driver's license pharmacies, the grocery stores, the mass fact sites, the SF DPH, California DPH administered sites, the federal sites, no one's checking, you sign up, you check a box on the website, it says I attest that this is true. And then you go and show your ID and get your shot. And so a lot of people have kind of initially started skirting around the rules by going to be a door dash driver for a day or what have you, and then saying I'm a food and ag worker. And then now generally people I think are just clicking on the box and going in and getting a shot. Now, sorry, just to go back on the previous question, Chamath, I shared it figure two, Nick in this paper I shared, particularly box E shows the deaths due to COVID-19 of a vaccinated population and non vaccinated population. And then it shows documented SARS COVID-2 infection. And you'll see that you basically have almost no incremental infections in the vaccinated population starting around 28 days after your first dose. And so, you know, that's really when you could say you've got, you know, really good kind of protection from the vaccine and you're already starting to get the benefits early on. Antibody studies have also shown that there's this big jump up that happens around that period of time. And so call it three weeks after your first shot and then in particular the fourth week, you're really kind of like locked in with a protective you know, capacity. Now your question around transmissibility is one that's still being studied, which is if I've got a vaccine, am I going to be able to pick up the virus and transmit it to someone else? Right now, you know, they're saying, well, we don't have evidence one way or the other. But I mean, generally the way that the virus is spread is you develop an infection in your body, your body then makes lots of copies of the virus, and then you cough and spit them out in the air. And that's how people get it. So theoretically, you could carry some virus on your mouth or on your nose where those cells don't have immunoprotectiveness. And, you know, the vaccine, the virus is still alive, but it's not spreading in your body, you're not creating a lot of superfluous virus to spread in the world. So, you know, the basic science of it is you should not be spreading COVID if you've been vaccinated, right? I mean, you may have some on your skin or your nose or something for a short period of time, but you're not going to develop a systemic infection that you're then going to kind of start exerting everywhere. So I think we should, we should, we should start to transition to this world of feeling really good and safe and enjoying ourselves. Yeah, we hit 500,000
SPEAKER_03: shots a day sacks in California, and now we're down to 150,000. We've literally gone down two thirds under the management of governor hair gel. It's unbelievable because, because,
SPEAKER_01: you know, and what was his in his state of this, the state speech, which went over like a lead balloon, the most notable quote was, we're not going back to normal. Normal was never good enough. Normal accepts inequity. So because there might be some inequity in the world around the wrong person in line, getting these doses, we're never going back to normal. And he's basically ensuring that result by taking forever with these vaccines. But let me, let me, let me go back to this point about efficacy. So I think Freiburg gave the stats on, look, the bottom line here is that vaccines work. That is the message we should be getting out to people is that they work. And the thing I've been really surprised by in the reactions that I'm seeing to my own tweets on Twitter about this is that this is how loud the anti vax voices are, and how loud and sort of when you say anti vax, you don't
SPEAKER_03: mean not take the vaccine, you mean the vaccine doesn't work and we're never getting rid of COVID. The people
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, there's no it's it there's there's actually a lot of people on Twitter who got really angry when I when I just tweeted, I tweeted something about how it's over, but it's over, I tweeted, it's over, you know, right. Biden says we can now get the vaccine in May, if you decide not to do it, that's on you, the rest of us are moving on. And I got a lot of all I was really saying is look, once the vaccine is available, there's no need for any of these COVID restrictions anymore. But a lot of people interpreted that as me saying something that you should be forced to get the vaccine or something like that. Now, look, I don't think you should be forced to get it, but I think it's highly effective. It works. And but I'm surprised at how loud these sort of anti vax voices are. It's usually conspiracy theory around around the vaccine. And I think part of the reason why those voices are so loud is because they're unopposed, because all the people who believe in the vaccine are getting it, but they're all afraid of like, like you're saying, Jake, how of being canceled. And so there's a conspiracy of silence around this, you know, what we all need to be saying is, look, go get vaccinated, it will take the
SPEAKER_03: win. America, take the win, we screwed this thing up for 14 months, can we just take the goddamn win and move on? I'll
SPEAKER_06: give you a little thing that always pops into my mind and all of these things. Whenever I hear some politician or some like navel gazing intellectual use the word inequity, I think like this is a power grab, because the word equity is really about ownership. Whereas the word equality is about balance. Right. And and power hungry politicians love the word equity and inequity because it's their opportunity to grab power, and to tell us how things should be done or to do things differently in a way where, you know, they can enforce their mandate, which is typically ill formed and not very smart. And I would just encourage all of us whenever you hear the word equity or inequity, this huge, huge red light should be going off in your head saying, whatever this person says next is a crock of horseshit, and it's probably a power grab. Whereas if you hear people really talking about solving inequality, there's really no mechanism to solve inequality through power. Well, I think that's a great
SPEAKER_01: point around the language that gets used. And I have a similar concern about the way that the word privilege gets used. We used to have a term in this country called success. You know, people were successful or not. And, you know, success had a connotation of being earned, whereas privilege has a connotation of being unearned. Well, I mean, now sometimes privilege is earned success and sometimes it's unearned. And, you know, but, but when you start using the word privilege to describe all success, it implies that there's something, you know, unjust or unearned about it and it needs to be reallocated. So, you know, I that to me is another one of these political words is we shouldn't be confusing success with privilege. The two very different things. I have an example of this. Oprah Winfrey
SPEAKER_03: is successful. Prince Henry is has privilege privilege. I
SPEAKER_00: shoehorned the Megan Markle story. I mean, I do want to talk
SPEAKER_06: about the Megan Markle story actually at some point before the end of this podcast, but before we do that right now, uh, okay. Uh, Joe Lonsdale actually also had a tweet, um, pretty unapologetic set of tweets around, you know, the miscasting of this, this concept of privilege. And I thought it was really on point. I really agreed with what he was saying. And it's effectively what you're saying, David. It's like people right now I find are just so well, not, not people, the people that take the time to wallow in Twitter. Um, mostly at least as I interact with them, um, are just so bitter. And I think
SPEAKER_06: that there is no, um, magnanimous happiness for other people's success anymore. It P I think, I think like we live in a culture now where everybody feels it is so zero sum when it's not in fact, zero sum. Um, and people just begrudge other people's success, especially by the way, when it's earned. And the reason is because there's an entire generation of people of all different ages and you know, but this, this last five or 10 years who tap themselves out now, some were legitimately prevented from success, but there's a lot of people that bought into this narrative of, wow, it's a whole conspiracy that's set up against me. So I'm not even going to try. And they are often the loudest and the most embittered. Absolutely. Um, and the reason is because, you know, everybody wakes up in their forties and fifties and starts to rationalize their choices in their lives. And what they really feel deep down inside is, Oh my God, I just let an entire decade of blaming other people. Yeah. And I think there's a surprisingly large amount of that. This ideology of victimization doesn't teach
SPEAKER_01: people the right things because you start to think that, you know, if you're wallowing in your oppression, then you don't have agency over your own life. You're blaming other people for not being successful, not getting ahead when what you should be doing is focusing on working and improving your own life and getting ahead. Or also just redefining what happiness means. Happiness
SPEAKER_06: doesn't mean what that other person has and then saying, because it's not just happening, because I don't have that. I have nothing. Happiness is really like introspectively figuring out like what really makes you complete. And I mean, not to get too syrupy about it, but it's like, that's what we've also lost the script on. So when you, when you put all of these things together, there's just a bunch of people that sit on the sidelines. They either are too scared to enter the arena or they don't want to enter the arena. They don't want the failure that comes from it because they've grown up in a culture where, you know, they had the kindergarten soccer ball handed to them, the gold star in the league they've ever done. Participation trophy. And now what we really need are people in the arena more than ever, folks trying and failing and it's okay. And there's just not enough of them. What instead is there's just a lot of people who just want to bitch and complain.
SPEAKER_01: And I think this is the backlash to the Meghan Markle interview is, is that this miscasting that this is an extremely privileged person or you know, Harry and Meghan both are very privileged. And, but, but I think what they're trying to do by making all these accusations of racism against their own family is they're trying to ground that privilege in victim status. And, and this is the thing about privilege is privilege is a social concept. It's got nothing to do with, with success, which is either earned or unearned. And so the way that people get to maintain their privilege is, is they, again, they grounded in some sort of victimization. It's, it creates these very perverse incentives. My reaction to the
SPEAKER_06: Meghan Markle Prince Harry interview was the following. I had a lot of sympathy for what she was saying. But on the other side, I also thought you must have known what you were getting into on the way in. And there was, it was, and now, and look, I'll say this as a Canadian industry, Duncan. So the queen and the monarchy is an increase. Like I can't describe to you guys, cause you're not part of the Commonwealth, but it is just a definition, definitional part of who we are as we grow up. And I don't know what the equivalent American construct is. I guess there isn't one really. And so, you know, the monarchy is an incredibly important thing, but we all know that it's this kind of like anachronistic thing that just kind of look for us, it's not bullshit. Like, I mean, like if you said to me, despite all my bullshit and raging against the machine and society and blah, blah, blah, and stature, whatever, if I could be invited to meet the queen, I would be there in eight nanoseconds. I think the
SPEAKER_03: equivalent is the presidency. We actually feel that way about the presidency. Like going to visit the president is the president. The presidency is
SPEAKER_04: not an endowed kind of circumstance. There's something about, there's something about
SPEAKER_06: the queen. My point is though, we all know a, that it's important. It's a great symbol of, of the Commonwealth. I'm very proud of all of that, but we also know it's anachronistic and it doesn't make much sense. And so what, what do you, uh, what do you think you were marrying into? And I think, you know, my perspective was I felt bad for her. I can't believe, you know, it got to the place where it like, people wouldn't get help for her when she was sick and, you know, and then they were questioning Harry's or the, the kids, uh, Archie's, uh, skin color. I mean, this is insanity. Like these people are stuck in the 18 hundreds, but then you realize they are actually stuck in the 18 hundreds because they're not allowed to have a normal life. They're not allowed to actually interact. So, you know, are they at fault or they, or is the system that creates these sort of like voyeuristic, you know, exotic animals in a zoo that we call the King, the Queen, these princes is the system at fault. I don't know. I was kind of like 50 50 on the interview, but my perspective was the monarchy is in a really tough spot over the next 30 or 40 years, because again, so now let me tell you where my belief is. I'm kind of a little bummed by the whole thing. The monarchy doesn't mean what it, what it, what it used to be for me,
SPEAKER_03: David, what's, what was more enthralling to you this week, Tucker versus Taylor or the Queen versus Oprah and Fritz
SPEAKER_01: Henry. I didn't, I didn't spend a, I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on, on either one. I mean, look, I, if I were, if I were Harry, I would probably do the same thing, which is to basically leave. Look, the first thing I did my career was lead was quit the, the, the firm, right. I, you know, who wants to work for a firm? Um, you know, it's very tracked. Um, so I don't blame him leaving, going to California, you know, that's what we, that's what we all did. Right. I mean, he was being, that's a very, that's a very entrepreneurial American thing to do. What, what I, what I had a problem with was the way that they're attacking their own family because they're being paid $7 million to do this interview. No, no, no, hold on. They were
SPEAKER_06: not. There was the first question Oprah asked and they were very clear. They were not getting paid. Now they did sign a hundred million. Who made the
SPEAKER_01: 7 million then Oprah did harpo did. Oh, well, she's a genius. Yeah. She's a genius.
SPEAKER_05: Oprah, Oprah is our queen. That's true. Queen of America. Oprah is the queen. Oprah, Oprah figured out a way to get paid. It's even worse.
SPEAKER_01: It's even worse if they did the interview for free and didn't even get a piece of the back end. So all they did was attack and besmirch their family, uh, for, for none of that. And look, I, I guess my, my point is, so, so why would they do it if it's not even about the money? I mean, it's about this idea of defining their privilege, grounding it in victim status. And I think there's something very fake and phony about that. And I think that's why people had this, uh, reaction to it where frankly, they were, I don't think they're on the side of the Royal family because it's, it is outdated, but I think there was a lot of skepticism towards what I had a little bit of a problem with the, like live
SPEAKER_03: from our $15 million Montecito mansion. No, Jason, I mean, it was, that was not for that house. That was a friend. I know, but they also have a $15 million house next to Oprah. Well, they put 5 million down. They know it's public. They put
SPEAKER_04: 5 million down and they took out a mortgage. It's, uh, someone listed this whole thing. No, it's an honest question. Does
SPEAKER_03: the, do the taxpayers of the UK fund the princess? That's the whole point. They went and did
SPEAKER_06: a deal with Netflix and they start and Spotify, and now they have a salary and they're making money like everybody else. So, I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I don't have an issue with any of that. I don't have an issue with that. I thought the
SPEAKER_03: taxpayers were funded the lifestyle. They do fund the lifestyle of the other princes, right? Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the thing. Can we talk about something important?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Okay. So a people NFT sold
SPEAKER_00: for $69 million. I mean, this week, this was crazy. All the
SPEAKER_05: dumbest shit happened this week. Taylor Lorenz, dumb shit, slaughtered on dumb shit. So I miss, I miss Tucker versus
SPEAKER_01: Taylor, but actually the real, uh, the person who took on Taylor that did a brilliant job was Glenn Greenwald. I don't know if you guys read his post, but brilliant, savage, brilliant. And basically what he said is that, look, you've got these class of reporters out there who their job is to go out and they're like little hall monitors, you know, trying to bus people for whatever they might say in a clubhouse room, not just public figures, but private people too. They're in the business of destroying lives and reputations. You know, that, that's basically their business model. But then the second anyone has any criticism for them, they claim it's harassment, which is just absolute nonsense. And they want to be, they want to be immune from criticism. The only person that was
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_06: inoculated against social justice, wokeness to write that article is Glenn Greenwald, because he is, you know, he's gay, he's got Brown kids, he lives in Brazil, you know, with, uh, I mean, it's, it's fat. It's like, you can't, it's like irresistible force moving the immovable, meeting the immovable object. He, he, he's not completely
SPEAKER_01: immune because he was, he was attacked, you know, and, and people said pretty nasty things about him, but yeah, he definitely has some, I think
SPEAKER_06: Greenwald is an unbelievable writer who calls it like he sees it. Um, I don't agree with everything he says all the time. Um, but you know, he's right to call this stuff out. There was another bunch of social justice nonsense this week as well. This, this poor guy had to like give out this crazy apology tweet. Cause he said, wait, what is that story? Okay. This is the greatest. Okay. There's a kid. I've been telling you, Jason, I want you to exercise because I love you. Look at me. I'm looking for Saxifu. I want it. I want both of you guys to exercise. Tell me about it. Oh, by the way, public service
SPEAKER_03: announcement. COVID vaccine CA is the bot. So at COVID vaccine CA, it just tweets every five minutes, a hundred different places. You can go pretend to be a door dash driver and get a shot. Sorry. I mean, vaccinated check a box, check
SPEAKER_01: the box. Let's roll people. Don't let Newsome take away your health. Yeah. Don't let Newsome
SPEAKER_03: put on equity. Meanwhile, he's
SPEAKER_06: at like, Jason, tell us about
SPEAKER_03: this tweet thing. What happened? There's a kid named Dom. He's an entrepreneur. He's building a company. It's a good company.
SPEAKER_06: It's funded by Stripe. You know, it's raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Like good for this guy. Yeah. But he likes to like,
SPEAKER_03: you know, he's kind of like, trying to engage on Twitter. And he basically said, I feel so much better. And I'm performing at such a higher level since I got my diet and my exercise right. I mean, people who are not getting their physical right are really underperforming at work. It's such an opportunity or whatever. And then, you know, the the large and in charge, you know, fat is beautiful. You know, contingent basically tried to cancel him. Sorry, wait, wait, but but did he say that you have to be skinny?
SPEAKER_06: No, he just said you will perform
SPEAKER_03: if you're fat, you're underperforming. Basically, he didn't use the word fat. But he said, if you're not in shape, you're underperforming at work, which I said, Is there science behind this? And yeah, sure. People showed me 100 studies that show if you lose weight, you have better concentration and focus. I mean, it's pretty obvious. But he did the cardinal sin as here, here, I'll read you the tweet. An important lesson I learned well into my career. If you are not physically fit and healthy, you are more physically fit and healthy than you were underperforming at work. Pretty basic, probably not very controversial. But he did what David Sachs always advises, and the the advice he gave to Trump, which is never apologize. And he apologized, Dom apologized and took the tweet down, which then the mob really went after him. And he said, I screwed up. And I'm extremely sorry. I have recently spent a lot of energy focused on my fitness eating and sleep in my enthusiasm for my new fitness regime. I posted a tweet that was meant to celebrate my new healthy lifestyle, but that's not how it came across. And I see now how incredibly sensitive my original
SPEAKER_06: with all the problems that we have that need fixing. I mean, this is what people were focused on this past. Here's the kicker of the
SPEAKER_03: apology. This is something I really need to improve on. And I will, well, no, I'm not making fun
SPEAKER_06: of him. I just think what the hell is going on? I mean, don't
SPEAKER_03: apologize. If you believe being healthier is, you know, good, then you should say it and you know, we'll let the chips roll with it. People can debate it. But I mean, can we have a debate about that? Because this is in the middle of a COVID crisis, when the top two vectors are age and obesity. Period. If you're fat, you die from COVID. That's that's how it works. And you got both those
SPEAKER_05: numbers. You're old and fat.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, today in all in
SPEAKER_03: nonsense. Apparently, there's so much money in the system that an NFT just sold for $69 million after we talked about the previous one bill Lee bought for $6 million. I don't know that he bought it for $6 million. But somebody bought one last week. NFT seemed like a real thing. It's reasonable to trade stuff, but $69 million. I think it's incredible. I mean, like, like,
SPEAKER_06: the the I saw the breakdown of like the number of bidders here, let me actually just get this data up because I think you guys will find it really incredible. My thesis on this or my theory
SPEAKER_03: rather is that there are a bunch of people who have stakes in these crypto assets. And then they all pre meditate decide to buy up these NFTs to get the market started. And then once it started, like Jason, that's honestly, right. You know this, but I've been buying art for a decade plus.
SPEAKER_06: And this is exactly how it works in the art market. You know, we go in there, certain people will go and buy. And then what the gallerist says is, Oh, did you know that Chamath just bought this piece or such and such a person bought this other piece and then all of a sudden the price spins up and then they feed into it. I mean, this is where, you know, an enormous amount of money has been made by gallerists over the last 20 or 30 years. Now it just happens in a different medium. So the the bidding breakdown, by the way of this NFT is incredible. 33 active bidders, 91% of the bidders were new to Christie's. 55% came from the Americas, 27% of bidders were from Europe and 18% were in Asia. The age breakdown is the most interesting. 6% were Gen Z. So 97 to 2012, 58% of bidders were millennials, 19 born between 81 and 96. 33% Gen Xers and 3% baby boomers. So this is really like a transitional change in, you know, basically deciding what's valuable. And I don't think this I don't think this was any different than, you know, when you have this transition from, you know, sort of impressionist in the art world, like if you moved from the body of work, where, you know, these impressionist paintings were just going for high 10s, low hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think it peaked around Van Gogh. And then, you know, basically went from there off of a cliff where you can basically give away impressionist paintings, and everything went to contemporary and, you know, sort of like this postmodern stuff. And that was a decisional change by boomers.
SPEAKER_01: What does giveaway mean to you Chamath? You know, tens of millions. Exactly. Oh my Lord. So I think on the NFT stuff and Beeple, he's Beeple is the artist, there's two things going on, right? So one is on a technology level, NFTs, non fungible tokens, they are, it's a legitimate technology for creating provenance on a blockchain. You know, if a piece of art basically gets put on a blockchain, you have perfect provenance. But that doesn't mean that all NFTs are valuable. In fact, most of them won't be. It's just a technology. Then you have the other thing that's happening is on an art level, what these sort of prestige galleries and so on, they're saying that Beeple is now a major artist. And the reason someone becomes a major artist is because they usher in like, or become representative of some new wave of art. Like Chamath is saying, you've got impressionism, you've got modernism. I mean, the reason why Jackson Pollock sells for whatever, a hundred million dollars. No, no, no. Three, three hundred to six hundred. Okay. It's because he represents an important wave in art and some of those waves fizzle out and they turn into Ponzi schemes and some of them become real and people are speculating that this digital art will be a major wave. And they're saying that Beeple is the most important artist and they're kind of betting on that. Now, do I think it's going to last? I don't know. I mean, hard to say. No, you said the key thing though.
SPEAKER_06: The key feature of NFTs, which I think is amazing, is that you can actually have ownership and provenance written into a blockchain. Now, you take that abstraction, you can apply it to all kinds of surface areas and it makes a ton of sense. Any kind of other asset would make sense if you own a car, if you own clothes, if you own watches, if you own wine. What happens if you own a house? Now, all of a sudden, if you can prove ownership over this stuff, not only can you trade it, but you can also borrow against it. And I think that that is a really interesting idea where once you financialize all of these physical assets that we own, you do eliminate an enormous amount of inequality in the system because you can actually get real transparent pricing. Yeah, blockchains are a ledger,
SPEAKER_01: right? They're a perfect ledger system. And so, like everything, every type of possession that relies on title should eventually be block chained. So, art's a good example. You know, I helped found a company back in 2017 called Harbor, which was a blockchaining real estate and then getting acquired. Acquired or acquired? No, it got acquired. We're going to make money. We're going to make
SPEAKER_01: money. As an LP, I just wanted a clarification.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, no, we're not going to make
SPEAKER_01: like SPAC type money, but we'll make a little bit of money on that deal. So, don't worry. But yeah, look, I think we're in the early, early stages of this type of technology. You're going to see eventually blockchaining of every type of asset where title is important.
SPEAKER_06: David, I think that this is such an amazing idea because like if you think of all of the opaque lending markets where people can't get access to reasonable cost of capital and they own assets, you know, you end up in these crazy worlds where like if you look at the housing crisis or the great financial crisis, you know, there was like so much crazy lending, but behind that lending was like double, triple mortgages. It's happening right now in the car market. All of that stuff doesn't necessarily need to exist because if you have clear provenance and the ability to price risk, you just get, you know, people can borrow a reasonable amount of money at a reasonable rate and pay it back. You know, you can trade assets, you could sell assets. It's a really big deal, I think.
SPEAKER_04: I think if you take a zoom out on the, you know, the notion of what an NFT represents, it doesn't feel too dissimilar from other, what I would argue is like non-productive assets. Like if you think about where one's capital goes, where an individual puts their capital, the first thing is kind of essentials, right? Things you need like food and medicine and housing and clothing and whatnot. And then you kind of enter into these kind of, you know, non-extend, you know, kind of discretionary spending for a consumer, you know, nice stuff, nice clothes, luxury goods, things that are basically going to diminish. Then, as you think about allocating the leftover capital, you're either going to allocate your leftover capital into investable assets that are either productive or non-productive. A productive asset is something you buy that you expect to return, it produces some value for you as you own it, such as owning a home where you get the value of living in it or owning a car where you get the utility of driving around in it, or owning a bond which is used, you know, a coupon or a stock that's going to, you know, generate cash flows at some point in the future theoretically. The non-productive assets are these assets that are just not designed to do that, but they're a store of value that you expect at some point to realize some return, you know, because someone else will pay a higher price to you for that non-productive asset. This is like a piece of art or, you know, some piece of gold or something, you know, something that you kind of hold or, you know, more increasingly, you know, digital assets. And it seems like the explosion in digital assets is, you know, as Jason pointed out at the beginning, like as we've kind of moved to a highly kind of overvalued segment of productive assets, that market is very frothy. It's very difficult to kind of find productive assets that are worth putting capital into. There's continually more interest in non-productive assets across the board because there's excess capital in the system. And it turns out that when that happens, there's enough of a market dynamic that emerges in non-productive assets that gives people a reason to put their capital in and expect to have a return on them in the future. As soon as the market starts to shrinking, as soon as you know, you start having effects that are deflationary, your money will pour out of that market in general. That's always what happens with the art market and has for hundreds of years. And it's the digital means of kind of realizing that same market transition that Shammat talked about. My question is, do you get the
SPEAKER_03: rights, I guess this is dependent on the terms that are set in the smart contract, but in the case of the Beeple, if I were to buy for 69 million, do I have the rights to it so that I can print T-shirts and sell hundred dollar T-shirts? Or can I create 10,000 more of these? Can I monetize it? Is what I'm asking.
SPEAKER_06: That's a great, great, great question. I don't know, but that's a fabulous question. By the way, because the alternative, like, as you pointed out, the
SPEAKER_04: artist and other folks have rights to art, even though the original painting is what sold, you know, the original master of a Bruce Springsteen song could be sold to a collector, but the rights on that track for reproducing it, making money off it are owned by a publishing house. So you can own the physical magnetic tape, but not own the
SPEAKER_03: rights to exploit it commercially. And over time, those rights fall away. So if you think about what
SPEAKER_04: that NFT represents, it represents that particular chain of electrons and, you know, this is these bits that represent this image. Can Beeple make a hundred more and
SPEAKER_03: then sell those? He could change one pixel,
SPEAKER_04: theoretically, or two pixels, and he could go print a bunch of stuff and go sell it. Not really, because those images
SPEAKER_06: were ones that he had, he had this rhythm of creating like one a day, I think, for a very long period of time. And he contributed them all into this master, right?
SPEAKER_04: Exactly. So there's a, this is a,
SPEAKER_06: it's a one of one. Another interesting one of one that just happened was these performance artists, or I guess like underground digital artists bought a Banksy for 125 million or $125,000. I get thousands and millions confused. Just that's a joke.
SPEAKER_05: All right, everybody. You're welcome. That's a, that's a joke. The hashtag you want to use for this
SPEAKER_03: episode is hashtag cancel chamath. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, good luck. Good luck.
SPEAKER_06: Anyways, these four guys bought, bought this Banksy for $125,000. They brought it to a warehouse in Brooklyn. They took a high res image of it. Okay. So they took a picture of it and they created a one of one NFT, right? Okay. And then they created a YouTube video of them burning the original Banksy. So now all you had was the digital manifestation of this physical thing. Wait for it. And then they sold it for $350,000. So they 3x their money. It's the most incredible story. I can find the link and I'll put, I'll put it in the show notes as well, but it just shows you what's happening. And then I also think last thing on NFTs, I saw that I think it was like the Kings of Leon just put out an album and it was like, it's like 50 bucks for a song or something like that. And it comes with like a bunch of interesting content. So it's the beginning of something guys. I just think that you need sort of like popular content to get this movement going. But it seems to me like this is what people want to do. They want to own digital assets. They want to have provenance. They want to have custodial relationships with it. They want to basically. But it's just like, it's like art and
SPEAKER_04: posters, right? Anyone can put the poster up in their resume. Anyone can buy a copy for five bucks. But who owns the original and owning the original may be visually identical, maybe graphically identical. But it is truly about that notion of that theoretical human mind construct of ownership that creates that distinction. And you just effectively have to count on other human minds believing the same thing in the future for you to be able to reclaim that value, that monetary value, or you're going to take a loss on it. I mean, Chumath, have you ever sold art that you bought? You know, I've sold very little.
SPEAKER_06: I tend to buy and accumulate with this idea of eventually endowing something with just because it's like, you know, I think there are two ways to buy art. One is speculatively and the other one is to tell a story. I took the second path. And so, you know, it's stuff that means a lot to me. So it's hard for me to part with it, even though it sits in a free port in Delaware. So it's not exactly, you know, out and about. But this idea that at some points people will get to really enjoy it once. By the way, I mean, one of the things
SPEAKER_04: that happens in the art world, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, but you buy this art and you don't ever, a lot of art doesn't get resold. So everyone kind of buys it under the notion that it's going to be worth more in the future and they can sell it for more. But very few people actually do end up selling it. No, no, no. That's it.
SPEAKER_06: So here's the thing in the trading market, right?
SPEAKER_04: But like, I mean, generally, like a lot of collectors end up endowing art or gifting it. And when you gift it, you get an appraisal done and you get a deduction on the appraised value, right? And so you can definitely do it that
SPEAKER_06: way. So one interesting story is that one of the large auction houses has a financial arm. And the most incredible thing is like over like the last 50 years, their cumulative default rate was 30 basis points on their book. Like cumulatively, not like a year or a month, but ever. Nobody defaults. Well, because they borrow money for the purposes of maybe buying other things or whatever, and then they will very, you know, trade out of things and trade up to things and trade across things. But it's a very vibrant market of buying and selling. It just happens to be very informal and
SPEAKER_06: a little bit closed and very much for insiders. And, you know, another reason that I think that NFTs will change because it will change this is that it just makes it available to everybody because you put all art on a very level playing field. And really at the end of the day, what is art? It's a commentary on society. And I think that having that level of transparency on that kind of stuff is, I think is going to be really valuable because you don't want one or two people who you fundamentally disagree with as being a tastemaker for a kind of art that you think is fundamentally flawed. Right? You'd rather it's just it's no different than being able to go to 95 different media sites to read the content you want or, you know, being able to listen to a thousand different kinds of music. All of it in its totality is a commentary on society. And I think what society says is we want transparency and we want choice. And this is where I think like, that's why I think this is a good dovetail into
SPEAKER_03: what's happening with the stimulus bill and where we started, which was, is this even necessary? We have stimulus checks going out in the amount of $2,000 per individual in households with under 150K, I believe is the income level, which means people who were not impacted financially in any way by what's happened under COVID are going to get in a family of five $10,000 checks, even if nobody was laid off or that's only that's only like 9% of the bill, Jason.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, so it's
SPEAKER_03: it was 450 million out of 1.9 trillion.
SPEAKER_06: So what do we think the impact we sort
SPEAKER_03: of have to have working theory? Oh, sorry,
SPEAKER_06: go ahead, Jason, what are your general
SPEAKER_03: thoughts on this? Is it necessary? And then to what's the what are the second order effects that we each predict will happen over the next 18 months when all of this capital gets injected? So the latter is what I've been focused
SPEAKER_06: on trying to figure out and I saw some really interesting data, which basically I'll ask you guys the question because maybe you guys know the answer. But if you measure wealth inequality, when do you guys think was the most recent period where there was the least wealth inequality the least? Sorry, how do you define that?
SPEAKER_04: You can measure it like the Gini index,
SPEAKER_06: or you can measure it as like, you know, the gap between the top decile and the bottom decile in terms of wealth and accumulated assets.
SPEAKER_03: Well, would it be before the robber barons? No, it was the robber barons and now?
SPEAKER_03: The period of the least inequality in
SPEAKER_06: recent history was in the late 70s, which is an incredible stat to say where the gap between the top decile and the bottom decile was like, you know, kind of like on an index, like 6065. Whereas today, it's sort of like at 100. Now, what happened then? And it's this is really interesting. Wasn't that an inflationary period? There you go. So what happened, and as it turns out, inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease level of the playing field. Absolutely. It decreases people's richness. So it makes rich people poor. That's really the most effective tool that you have to recalibrate. It's very, very hard to redistribute money. And I think every attempt at doing that has largely failed. But the one consistent way and if you go back periods before that, you know, into the beginning of the... But in an inflationary environment,
SPEAKER_04: borrowing costs go up. So, you know, businesses and people that rely on borrowing to grow their net worth or investing assets to grow their net worth kind of suffer more than people that would have a home have a, you know, weight wages go up in an inflationary environment, right? Wages go up, which which actually, if
SPEAKER_06: you think about like, what you said before, like, you know, as people get wealthier, they move their money into you know, essentially financial assets and away from sort of like working assets. And when you know, interest rates go up and the risk free rate goes up, then the attractiveness of those assets go down. Yeah. And so what happens is shares and technology companies go down. But what actually also happens is that your cost of capital for a traditional business, because it's higher, they have to then charge more, which means that they're paying their employees more. And those folks on a marginal basis tend to then, you know, take those dollars and spend those dollars. So, inflation is this very productive mechanism of actually redistributing wealth and actually homeowners benefit homeowners benefit as well. But like, you know, it shrinks, it shrinks the wealth in a mild, mild
SPEAKER_01: inflation, mild inflation is probably good. It's probably it's better than probably deflation. But if it tips over into hyperinflation, then it destroys everyone's savings. Right. And rich people have the ability to protect their assets against inflation a lot better than middle class people do. So you know, you look at like Venezuela, we are Germany hyperinflation. Yeah, people just hyperinflation destroyed the value of of where are we seeing inflation? Where
SPEAKER_03: do we anticipate we'll see inflation? I saw today Tesla's Tesla raised the price on all their cars except for two, they
SPEAKER_06: have to because the inputs of you know, if you think about like, if you break down a Tesla and you look at where the money goes, the money really is in the batteries. And if you break down the batteries, it goes into three critical inputs, lithium, nickel and cobalt, and the prices are highly suspect. And they're, they're very poorly predicted. And so the cost of Tesla's are going to go up by 20 or 30%. And there's nothing that there's nothing that Tesla could do. And by the way, you'll see this across
SPEAKER_04: all commodity products if inflation takes hold in a in a meaningful way. Including, you know, food products, ag products, you know, all commodities, you know, metals, but the businesses that will benefit the most and this is really interesting from a technology perspective, and I think it played in part my understanding is speaking to a number of PMs about this portfolio managers at funds is that, you know, technology companies don't have a lot of hard assets. And so they have less kind of, you know, value accretion, and they don't play in a commodity supply chain. So it's much more difficult for a technology company to say raise rates by 30%, whereas a food company can raise rates by 30%. One of the ways to look at this is to look at the, you know, the book value or the capex, you know, property, plant and equipment of a business and businesses that have a lot of PP&E are generally going to do better in an inflationary environment, they're going to have more throughput on that PP&E, they're going to have higher dollars per unit of PP&E. And so you'll see, you know, this is why there was a shift of dollars into what are traditionally called kind of value stocks or, you know, kind of bigger industrial companies away from, you know, software kind of tech companies, which don't really, really benefit from this inflationary trend. And so there's going to be, you know, some sort of play out in those sorts of products, probably more JCal than I think, David, do we see it
SPEAKER_03: in SAS, because I've noticed that SAS prices are going up, and that people are just keep adding to the price of the SAS price, I was pricing out all the virtual conference, you know, stuff like hop in and all that air meat and whatever. And I was just shocked at how much they wanted to charge, you know, 1550 $100,000 a year. And I was like, but can I use like zoom in this for that, you know, in a chat room, slack room, and are we going to see it happen in SAS, where people are going to start raising the prices and just increase their profit margin, because their employees are going to demand more money, because they're part of the cycle. I think that's a function of pricing
SPEAKER_01: power going up for SAS companies, they become more established and entrenched. Those companies are very profitable. I don't think they're experiencing wage pressure in any way. I think that they're just becoming more successful, their pricing power is going up as they become not necessarily monopolist, but as they have more market share and they dominate their categories, they can increase prices. But I want to go back to this idea of the 1970s. So I want to challenge the idea that the US economy was doing well in the 1970s. So Chamath mentioned the Gini index, there was a different kind of metric called the misery index that was a much more popular index that was used around that time. And the misery index, it was defined by a Brookings economist, and it was basically the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. And in 1980, the misery index was 19.7%. This is why Ronald Reagan got elected is because you had a CPI, which the inflation rate of 12.5%. And then you had unemployment of another 7.2% on top of that. And the 1970s were, especially the late 70s, were an economic disaster for the country. So maybe things were more nominally equal, but everyone was equally more equally poor. And what you saw in the 1980s is that they got inflation under control. Paul Volcker at the Fed broke inflation that lowered interest rates enormously, that allowed people to buy homes, the stock market went up, and, you know, it was an economic boom. So I don't know that this idea that we want to introduce a lot of inflation into the system is a good idea. Like I said, I think mild inflation of say, 2% is better than 2% deflation the other way. But I think we should be very careful here about inflation and making sure it doesn't get out of control.
SPEAKER_03: And the other index to look at is the quality of life index, which is typically, you know, healthcare, and then the property price to your income ratio commuting, pollution, safety, and those kind of things. And, you know, the United States is 15th on that list, with obviously the Nordics and Australia, Germany, New Zealand, just being at the top of those rankings in America, I never really thought about that, right? We don't really even discuss well, yes, you know, and that and that quotient, we don't index for that happiness and low stress. I think we're talking a lot about
SPEAKER_01: quality of life in San Francisco now, because that's a community that's very rich. And yet it's a miserable city to live in because crime is out of control. You know, Jason, you and I have been focusing on this da chaser booting, who's had an enormous impact on people's quality of life because he's simply not prosecuting theft in the city. There's actually is a crazy tweet where a city council member was inside city hall calling for a hearing on the rampant rise in theft in the city. And meanwhile, his car was broken into right outside city hall. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And then the other thing that came out were a whole series of statistics about crime in San Francisco showing, or sorry, trials and convictions. Basically, chaser has not been, has not been conducting any trials. He hasn't been convicting anyone. It turns out that the number of trials and convictions that he's gotten in the 14 months he's been da is one 10th of what Gascon got when he was da. And by the way, Gascon is not the model da or anything. I mean, Gascon is facing a recall in LA for dereliction of duty, and he's still 10 times more productive than chaser booting.
SPEAKER_03: Just a quick update. Many of you when I mentioned the GoFundMe for to put a journalist on chess, if you just type in GoFundMe, chesa, c h e s a into the Google, we added $8,000 since last week, so we have $58,000. That's going to a journalist and a data journalist to cover this exact issue. So thanks to the folks who donated I'm not taking any money from it. I'm donating obviously, other than a small other than a small
SPEAKER_06: finder's fee. No $0. I'm donating to it.
SPEAKER_03: Well, I said I'll be 1% of it. Whatever the final number is. I think the Marina Times has done a
SPEAKER_01: great job with this. Yeah. And that's there's been a couple other sources as well. But, but how dishonest was it? I mean, this has been a recurring theme on the pot. So I just want to touch on it. Chase has sent his little mouthpiece, his little minion, the high school friend to go out and challenge us writing that blog post saying that it was a lie that chaser wasn't prosecuting anybody and lo and behold, the numbers have come out. He tried to claim that chaser had the same rate of charging that goes gascogne did. And that was true. But the problem is he's been pleading down all these charges. He's not taking anyone to trial. He's not convicting anyone. He's certainly not locking anybody up. So I mean, what what a lie that was. Well, and criminals are just so savvy
SPEAKER_03: that they actually understand what the chances are of them actually getting convicted and they shape their grift and their crime to whatever the environment they're in is just like people who deal drugs just like people who take these hardcore fentanyl drugs, they just pick the market where they're going to be most welcome. So they're not going to do it down in Palo Alto or San Mateo or Mill Valley. They're going to do it on 12th street. Yeah, so I think that's how
SPEAKER_01: it starts. But I gotta tell you, you know, I'm in LA right now. And there was an episode like last week at Il Pastaio. But like, oh, yes, in all it's on Cannon Street and downtown Beverly Hills, a lot of number one Italian place. It's a great Italian place. There's a lot of outdoor seating. There was basically a mugging of someone's just sitting at a table. Apparently they were wearing a really nice watch and some and they were they were robbed at gunpoint in the middle, you know, the middle of the restaurant. Lunchtime. And then there was a struggle over the gun. I don't know why the guy just didn't hand over the watch. But anyway, he struggled over the gun. Four shots went off. One of them bounced off the concrete and hit a woman in the leg. Oh my God. So this is like crazy. It's getting I mean, it's getting out of hands like San Paolo where they
SPEAKER_03: chop people's arms off for the watch. I mean, they literally will drive by apparently and just cut your arm off if they can't if you don't give them the watch. Well, I just you know, the
SPEAKER_01: criminals are starting to feel emboldened because Gascon and Boudin are not they're not having trials are not prosecuting. They're not locking people up. And so they're graduating to more and more serious offenses. I'm sure they probably didn't want to shoot anybody or maybe that wasn't their intention. They just want to steal the watch, but it resulted in a shooting, just like the deaths of Hannah Abe and Elizabeth Platt when you had you know, Troy McAllister, you know, hit them with the car. So I mean, the fact that we're not locking people up is resulting in in people dying and a lot of risky, very risky behavior.
SPEAKER_03: Alright, as we wrap here, a lot of SPACs going out, we obviously saw another, I guess, Roblox was a direct listing. Just curious, only only under price by 50%.
SPEAKER_06: It's the same same problem as the IPO just so what you're saying is, Bill Gurley's on
SPEAKER_03: his headset walking around El Camino Real, what I'm calling journalists, what I'm
SPEAKER_06: saying is, irrespective of what the goals of the direct listing were, the result is the same as a traditional IPO. There you go.
SPEAKER_03: Well, can I give a shout out to a company that David Sachs? Sure. Oh pipe?
SPEAKER_04: Yes. Which is an incredible company that
SPEAKER_06: basically like helps you capitalize your contracts with your customers. And it's just it's basically this incredible thing that I'm seeing. And it's and there's a couple of others that do it as well. Clear bank is another one. But you can fund your company non dilutively. And at some point, I think we should actually talk about the state of the union in venture, maybe we can do that in a couple of next episodes, I have a lot of thoughts on where I think venture capital is going. And when I see things like pipe, I'm just like completely so happy because I just think it's, it's it's, it's going to change the the way in which venture investing is done. It's a very brilliant idea. You can go
SPEAKER_03: to pipe comm slash twist to get 12 months free. pipe.com is a two sided marketplace. If you have reoccurring SAS revenue, or any kind of reoccurring revenue, somebody did it with the substack. So I think pump leano, the guy who pumps Bitcoin, he has a newsletter that makes whatever quarter million dollars a year. He sold for 95 cents on the dollar, his forward looking subscriptions for the year, and bought Bitcoin with it when it was at 35. So he's like doubling down. But if you're a SAS company, and we have many of them in our portfolios, you could take all of your monthly contracts, sell them on the marketplace to somebody else, not pipe pipe doesn't buy it. It's some other financial person who says, I'll give you a 94 cents on the dollar, give you 92 cents on the dollar, give you 85 cents on the dollar. And so if you were if you have a $10 million book of business, paying monthly, you could get that 10 million now and deploy it. But Jason, I think this is a good way to end. But I think let's agree that the
SPEAKER_06: next pod, let's start with the future of venture capital. 100%. I mean, it's changing dramatically.
SPEAKER_03: It's changing dramatically. And I think
SPEAKER_06: these non dilutive ways of growing a company will completely impact pricing, you know, pre money, post money, the amount of equity that employees can and should own in these businesses. You know, what is the value of brands like, you know, it like people will know who David Sachs is, who Harry Hurst is, people necessarily don't even care anymore. Like, you know, hey, if I'm calling from Sequoia, what does that mean anymore? They're gonna say who from Sequoia is calling. So these are all really interesting topics that I think are worth talking about. Another path is just the public markets,
SPEAKER_04: you know, right. I mean, public markets are becoming the new late stage private market. And it's really, you know, both the SPAC and early stage IPO and direct listing models are, are changing dramatically. And it's, and there's more speculative risk seeking in the public markets in a way that I don't think we've ever seen. And it's, it's creating an opportunity for companies that are still, you know, what in a traditional kind of sense might be called, you know, early stage or still businesses with a lot of risk, being able to go public and you know, kind of take their companies out and let the public markets wager on on how well they're going to execute and and how well they're going to be able to develop their product or their market and it's it by the way, it's something we've seen historically with biotech where there's kind of very binary kind of bets that happen and binary outcomes because the markets are known and you don't need to kind of productize or build a business around it. But now we're actually taking both business risk, market risk, technology risk, product risk, to the market at all stages. And I think you're going to see these, these scenarios where people will build public portfolios, public business, public company portfolios that will perform a lot like venture portfolios, right, you'll have one or two businesses that will have a 10 bagger and, you know, a chunk that will go to zero and a chunk that will have some modest return on them. And it's going to be Yeah, it's going to be this this tremendous learning experience because a lot of people will put all their money into one stock that they think is already been made. It's already it's already done things. Netflix, it's Netflix, it's, you know, their promise of the future is 100% certain and the reality is their promise of the future is 5% certain. And so depending on the price you're entering and how many of these things you buy, you could build a portfolio that could have a good return. But it's, it's going to be a lot of speculative betting and a lot of losses. And if you don't diversify, you're going to lose a lot of money. And you know, so the question is also, how does it evolve regulatory wise Chumath, how are you communicating that
SPEAKER_03: to the market? Because you'll have some specs that go out, I would think Virgin Galactic is in that more like their deep tech researching phase. And then you have other ones that are already, you know, churning the, the ringing the register, right. So how do you communicate that to retail investors or the audience? Or that's up to them to do the research? How do you think about that? I mean, there's as well as the bad
SPEAKER_03: inventory that are getting added. No, look, I do a tweet storm. I do a one
SPEAKER_06: pager. I have a multi hour detailed investor presentation that's taped. And then we have a typically a 100 to 300 page s4. So you can ingress into finding out the true story of a business at whatever point you want, it really just does come down to doing your work. I mean, a lot of the folks on Twitter, you know, when you see the market straight down, and they complain, my reaction is stop crying and do your own work. And there's an like, we have complete transparency in this process. So it is up to people to do their job. And the thing that I think is happening right now is people think that they don't have to do a job and that money is free. And it's not, it's hard to make it. It's hard to make good investments. It's hard to build a company. Everything is hard. Nothing is really easy. Because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it all the time. And so that's that's what I would love to leave people with. I really got to go guys. I love you guys. Let's let's start with venture capital next week. Yeah. Love you boys. Free David's. Love you. Love you. David's back. Oh, my God. Okay. Love you guys.
SPEAKER_05: I love you. I love you. Chumath. I love
SPEAKER_03: you. I do love you. I mean, we love each other. And we can say it. And then the guys on this side. Love you. They're working on my guys. Look at Jake out dragging it out. Stop
SPEAKER_01: dragging everything out.
SPEAKER_03: We're dragging it out because we love you, David. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_02: I've been on a bender on these red pills.
SPEAKER_00: I've been on a bender on these red pills. I've been on a bender on these red pills. I don't know what's good, but I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. I need more red pills. What a joke. Get me those red pills from Miami.
SPEAKER_02: David gave me just a huge bag of red pills. I've been on a bender on these red pills. Stock's going up, man. Play the funk.
SPEAKER_05: Back, back, back, back up the truck. I see chips. I stack them up. Back, back, back, back up the truck. You see me? You seen enough. NFTs take me out the mud. NFTs never fuck with Trump. Red pill, blue pill, Persian rum.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what's good, but God needs Miami. Chief Reboy peeks a beer, kills. Stanford red pills got me glint. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. All right, anybody give a shit about NFTs.
