SPEAKER_01: This is an incredible fashion disaster we have today. David Sacks is dressed like, where's Waldo? Okay. Freeberg is dressed like driving a fucking Subaru Outback.
SPEAKER_01: Oh God. Unbelievable. I mean, this is ridiculous.
SPEAKER_03: Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kinwah. I'm going all in.
SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, everybody. It's another episode of the All In Podcast, episode 31 with us today from, well, it's just rolled out of bed, the Queen of Kinwah himself, David Freeberg is here. Let me do my hair. Hopefully, get that hair, it's not gonna help. Have you been studying the homeless problem
SPEAKER_00: by yourself going out on the streets or what? What is happening?
SPEAKER_03: Freeberg man. Do we need to do an intervention?
SPEAKER_02: All right, I'm gonna go change. Give me a few minutes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: We have to keep the Freeberg minutes up.
SPEAKER_03: We have to keep the Freeberg ratio up. I had somebody stop me in Miami and say, keep the Freeberg ratio high. Also with us chiming in is where's Waldo himself, the skipper, David Sacks, Rain Man is here. The skipper. The skipper is here.
SPEAKER_03: Don't change my nickname.
SPEAKER_00: Don't change my nickname. I'm comfortable with Rain Man. Don't throw me off. Yeah, definitely, I'm definitely okay with Rain Man.
SPEAKER_03: Of course, not the skipper, not the skipper. And the dictator himself got a full night's sleep, I hope this time. I did. Chamaf, Kali Hapatia. And of course, I'm J. Cal, the baby seal here in Miami.
SPEAKER_03: Look at the view, how beautiful. It's been an incredible, incredible week. The tiger has been unleashed. I went to Austin. Now I'm in Miami. J. Cal, you're more like a pudgy hyena.
SPEAKER_01: I'm lifting weights. No, let's have a tiger. I don't know. You're not really a tiger.
SPEAKER_03: The quarantine 15, big announcement, 10 pounds are gone, five to go. I'm lifting weights outside in Miami. It's been amazing. Field report, I get to Austin, I kid you not. I got my mask on. 10 people, first of all, 10 people say, I love the All In Podcast, every like 15 feet walking in Austin and in Miami. But somebody looks at me with my mask and says, are you okay, son? And I was like, what? And he said, I kid you not. And he said, are you vaccinated? And I said, yeah. He's like, why you're in a mask? And I realized it's time for independent critical thinking. And I'm like, Sax, I got to give it to you another great, great tweet for me to copy and adapt to steal your deal. Well, I love this tweet that you had, where you said early in the pandemic, explain the tweet or maybe read the tweet. This is, this to me, the one about masks, about one group of people wouldn't wear masks. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Well, at the beginning, that's right. I mean, the dysfunction of our politics is that half the country wouldn't wear a mask at the beginning of the pandemic. And now the other half of the country won't take them off at its end. This is the problem is that the mask has become, it's the equivalent of the red MAGA hat for team blue. This has become some sort of virtue signaling, even when it's not necessary, but it's actually destructive because it's performatively sending the signal to people that the vaccines don't work. And we have a third of the country today is still vaccine hesitant. And this is not helping. What we need to be sending the message to them is look, get vaccinated so life can get back to normal so you don't have to wear a mask. And we still have the CDC putting out this ridiculously conservative and timid guidance saying that, well, if you get vaccinated, you can take off your mask outdoors as long as you're not with too many people. Well, like what? No, I mean, look, once you get vaccinated, you should need to wear a mask outdoors or indoors. And we had this sort of mini state of the union this past week with Biden. And it was this really like jarring image. No, it was like an empty room because of social distancing. And they were all wearing masks, even though you know every single one of them is vaccinated. And so I think Biden really missed an opportunity in that speech. Yes, he said that everyone should get vaccinated, but show not tell. I mean, he walks up to the microphone in a mask saying that we should all get vaccinated. Well, what is the mask for? Why don't you tell people that if you get vaccinated, you don't need a mask anymore? And so, you know, we have this sort of contrast. It's actually really, it's really incredible
SPEAKER_01: because to your point, he was trying to make some very important points in that speech, David. And when the camera would actually pan from behind him, so instead of looking at him and Kamala and Nancy Pelosi, it would look, there was nine people. And you thought- Another sold out crowd for President Ambien?
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no, because typically when you give these sort of state of the union or, you know, these kind of like 100 day addresses, it is packed because you have everybody in Congress, you have everybody in the Senate, you know, you have typically like a bunch of other officials, you have the Supreme Court judge, like in a state of the union address, and there was nobody. And it felt really striking to watch that. If Trump's mistake was not wearing a mask in April of 2020,
SPEAKER_00: I think Biden's mistake is not taking it off in April of 2021. Why can't we get a political leader who is willing to put on masks at the right time and take them off at the right time? Or do risk assessment.
SPEAKER_01: Just we need a political leader who's reasonably scientific and will actually say, here's the intersection of science and common sense that everybody can map to and copy me. Because it is, to your point, David, you know, the leader of the free world is given that title for a reason. It's not completely ignore what I say, I've been put in this position because I am, you know, on some dimension, expected to be the most thoughtful person in the room and set the example for everybody else.
SPEAKER_02: Let's just talk like the important consequence of this, and I agree with Sax. The important consequence of this, however, is the economic effect it has. So for example, in San Francisco, restaurants are only allowed to be at a quarter capacity. So there are restaurant owners that wanna get back to business that wanna generate income again, that wanna get off of the PPP loan program and all of the government support. And they should be able to, because most people in San Francisco at this point, the vast majority in fact, are vaccinated. And the restaurants for no scientific reason are shut down or limited to a quarter capacity. And this is the case across a lot of cities and a lot of states in the country right now, where the conservatism with respect to coming out of the major part of this kind of pandemic is what's now keeping the economy, or not just keeping the economy because we're fueling the economy with stimulus, but is keeping business owners and keeping people that wanna participate actively in building and running their businesses from getting back to work because we're so conservative about this. And you know what? Sax is totally right, yeah. Like take the masks off, let people go into restaurants and let people go have dinner in San Francisco. Let these places get back to work.
SPEAKER_01: By the way, we have an AB test that's actually nobody's talking about, which is that the more conservative version of America's posture, right? America's sort of like half we don't care and half we care too much. But in Europe, you could see a more homogeneous approach to the problem. And we printed a negative 0.6% GDP growth in Europe. So to your point, with all the vaccines that are out there, with all of the logic and all of the science, not being able to just take the mask off and get back to life as normal was negative 0.6% GDP growth in a quarter where they also printed hundreds of billions of dollars. And now you come into the United States. Last year, I don't know if you guys remember this, but every forecast I saw had, from the smartest folks saying Q1 GDP would be on a run rate to be around 10%. It would be one of the best in history. It was only 1.6%. So we're on a 6.4% GDP growth run rate. Guys, that's not 10%. Now it's still a lot, but the point is we gotta get back to life as normal. We have to show that these vaccines work. We have to tell people that you can have a normal life. You should be going out, spending money, going back to the office, live normally.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we should just cover the data. I mean, it'd be great to put up the latest CDC data on the screen. Yeah, if you use the CDC as a source for the data, as opposed to listening to their interpretations of it, their policy interpretation, it's actually pretty illuminating. So out of 87 million people who've been vaccinated, there've only been 408 serious cases, which would be, you count as hospitalization or death related to COVID. So those are odds of one in 213,000. The odds of being hit by lightning are one in 180,000. So your odds of being struck by lightning are greater than your risk of getting seriously sick by COVID. What are the odds of a royal flush?
SPEAKER_03: I need this in poker terms. I think it sounds like hitting a royal flush twice. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. How many royal flushes have we each hit?
SPEAKER_02: I'll put this article up and you guys can share it in the...
SPEAKER_03: Show notes. The technology review one? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think it does a good job of speaking to Saks' statistic. Now, yeah, so I think Saks, I think this represents the CDC data in the first paragraph in this article, but it goes on to kind of speak about the statistical... Why don't you read it? Likelihood of these events. So basically, it opens up by saying, as of April 20th, 87 million people in the United States have been vaccinated and only 7,157 or 0.008% went on to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, 330 of whom were hospitalized and 77 of whom died from the disease. And I would guess that of those people, there is likely some immune dysfunction, which is a likely reason why. It doesn't mean that every individual has that risk. It means that there are certain people out there that are gonna have immune dysfunction and won't react well to... Won't develop the appropriate kind of protection from the vaccine. And that's small, small, small, small, small percent of people are where we're kind of seeing actual risk.
SPEAKER_00: That's where I get the 408 number is it's the number of hospitalizations plus deaths minus the ones that they say in the footnote were not related to COVID. So there's some other like cause. So 408 out of 87 million.
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, I think it's worth just highlighting, just think about the rationale for why there is conservatism here still. So if there are still pockets where people have not been vaccinated in the country, and there are still areas where people are hesitant to get vaccinated and there's a large unvaccinated population, the official guidance, the official kind of reasoning I believe is that we need to be conservative to get all of those people to behave in a conservative enough way to keep a surge from occurring regionally around the country. And the loss, the downside is very negligible where people still have to wear masks. What I don't think that that calculus accounts for is that the loss is actually not negligible. The loss of telling people broadly to keep wearing masks is a hesitancy to go back to work, a hesitancy and a conservancy to engage in normal economic activity. And so, I think that we're kind of missing that point in the kind of officiating of this exit strategy here. And it's certainly, I'm aligned with Saxe on this. I certainly think it's biting us more than it's helping us.
SPEAKER_03: To give you an idea, just like experience wise, when I was in Austin, every restaurant is at 110 capacity. The locals there were like, I can't get a reservation for a week or two. The town is packed. Everybody in the country is going to Austin and Miami because they've just learned that Austin and Miami have officially declared, if you have the vaccine, you can go have your life. But there is still a little bit of theater on the margins. When you go into a restaurant, I went in to get a meal and I didn't have my mask on. I kid you not, 110 capacity, 100 people sitting at the bar, 200 people at tables. She hands me a mask and I said, I'll have one. I put it on, I said, can I ask you a question? And she, the hostess says, why should you wear a mask when there's 300 people in here without a mask and the doors are closed? I was like, that's the exact question. She goes, it makes no sense. The governor wants no mask, the mayor wants masks. And so, they're having their own little version of the national conversation in Austin, which is locally scared, or at least the politicians are, and then reasonable otherwise. So you literally put your little mask on, you walk 10 feet to your table and then take it off for the rest of the time. In Miami, I, this is true story, I go to Miami, I walk into, I haven't been out in 14 months, so I decided I would check out a club. And I went to a nightlife club and people were dancing and having a great time. People were also popping bottles. And I was like, oh my God, it's over. And- A nightlife club. A nightlife club. And no, it was not a, yes, anyway, it was a legitimate club here in South Beach. And so I took a little Insta and I fed the Insta and immediately I got three comments from friends who were like, what are you doing in that club? And I wrote back to all three, I'm vaccinated. And they were like, okay. And I was like, is this not obvious?
SPEAKER_02: But I think this was the point I made a few months ago, which is I do think that the subconscious training, the fear factor that's been kind of built into us over the last year, year and a half, is gonna take a while to kind of train our way out of. People aren't gonna be that rational and that conscious about, oh, I've been vaccinated. People are, basically the default is fear, the what ifs, the buts, but oh my God, people are still getting COVID even though they're vaccinated, but there's variants. But, and everyone looks for a conscious, a kind of conscious reason why they're rationalizing their subconscious fear. And everyone's got this fear to go and do things and this fear to go back in the world because we've literally been trained and beaten into a corner for the last year. Now, the conscious reality is you don't need to be fearful, but I'm fearful, therefore I'm looking for reasons to maintain my fear. And I think this is like what, again, I said it like four times before, but this is what happened after 9-11 and it lasted for years. And we still have ridiculous TSA processes.
SPEAKER_01: We need our leaders to take their masks off, tell everybody they're vaccinated, take their masks off, go back to normal life so that everybody else will feel that it's okay too. Because even if you're not fearful, David, the other thing that you are is just guilty. And you know. Right, totally. And you gotta get rid of that as well. And the only way you'll do it is if highly visible people are now actually going back to life as normal.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like the peer pressure element of it. It's like I feel bad going into a store when everyone else is wearing a mask and like I'm the asshole. There was this crazy MSNBC moment.
SPEAKER_03: One of the hosts of one of their shows said I've been fully vaccinated, but I went running in Central Park, so I double masked. And I'm like the virtue signaling was so insane. And I'm like, wait a second, you're outdoors. That's insane. In a double mask.
SPEAKER_00: This is the Joy Reid thing. Yeah. I don't want to say the person's name because then if you mention who it is,
SPEAKER_03: then you might be attacking a person of color or a woman host. So I just said. Well, now you're avoiding it,
SPEAKER_01: which makes it think that you are. So who is it? How am I supposed to say it without being. Does anybody want, I mean. Nobody watches MSNBC.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. What is MSNBC? MSNBC was the Trump derangement syndrome therapy was MSNBC. The ratings go up. I have a question for the three of you.
SPEAKER_03: Knowing what we've seen here between the logic of both sides and the media and the insanity, what do you take away from the year of the pandemic as it comes to a close in how you personally look at the world? Sax, you want to start like.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll tell you. I feel like the American people are constantly being propagandized and there's almost like an information war being perpetrated on the American people where we cannot get the data, the facts and the truth. I think it's true now in terms of people not taking off their masks, even though we have the CDC data that basically shows the lightning strike probability of getting COVID. But we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic, remember I have all these people on Twitter telling me every time I tweet about this, why don't you just listen to the experts, right? They want me to shut off my brain and just do whatever the CDC says. And I'm like, well, do you realize the CDC was against masks at the beginning of the pandemic back in March of 2000, last year when I was saying we need to wear masks because I was looking at the success of the Asian countries and some of the data coming out of that. The CDC was very, very slow in adopting masks. They were against it. They were telling us we didn't need to do it.
SPEAKER_03: And that was the historical CDC, right? They've been around for a long time. And then also Trump was anti-mask. And so you had-
SPEAKER_00: Trump was slow to adopt masks too. And yeah, and absolutely. And so, yes, I mean, I've said that there's like a Venn diagram of American politics where one circle is favored mask wearing one year ago and then wants to get rid of mask mandates today. The Venn diagram of overlap between those two groups is very small. I'm in that overlap. I feel like I'm in like a very lonely part of the political graph.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Chamath, how has your thinking, now that we've had to process this event in our lifetime that is probably the most consequential moment? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I've thought about this a lot, Jason. You ask a really important question and I think everybody should probably try to take five minutes and actually write this down because I think, I'll tell you what I learned. I learned three things. The first thing I learned is intellectual and it's exactly the same thing that David Sacks said. It is completely shocking to me how much disinformation there is and also how we are so prone to turning off our brains and not thinking for ourselves. So it's really shocking and I think 2020 was the year that that was laid bare. That the institutions that feed you information can't really be trusted, that you can't really trust the interpretation of actual simple data, that nobody wants to think in first principle. So that's the first one. We have stopped thinking for ourselves and that's a recipe for disaster. And so that's an intellectual thing that I've realized and I don't wanna do it. And so I'll think for myself and I'll take the consequences. The second was economic, which is, wow, we have really over-rotated to this crazy form of globalism that is gonna get undone over the next 30 years. And that's gonna have a lot of implications and it can be done in a way that can rejuvenate the United States, which I think can fix a lot of the stuff that was created and we should talk about that later today. And then the third is physiological, which is if you didn't know before, I'm gonna tell you now, and it's this three letter word that we make into a four letter word in America, which is the letters F-A-T. We have a fat epidemic in the United States. Almost 80% of every single person that was hospitalized because of COVID was clinically obese. And you can't say it. And you're not allowed to say it. If you say that somebody is fat or if you say that somebody is obese, it's all of a sudden like, you're gonna get virtue signal canceled. And instead what we're doing is we're leaving an entire generation of people completely abandoning them because we're not confronting the problem that by a combination of food and the lack of movement, we are setting them up to either die acutely of something like COVID or chronically by heart disease and diabetes. And that it was like, it is now so obvious. And by the way, that's the other thing where these healthy fit people were running around double vaccine or double masking in Central Park and they don't even know the basic data. Like even if you thought you were gonna go to the hospital, the 80% of all of those millions and millions of hospitalizations were from people that were obese. They had physiologically completely taken their body to a place that it wasn't able to fight. Right. So those are my three takeaways, intellectual, economic and physiological.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll insert one thing on that is because I agree with everything Chamath just said is this idea of laying bare, that laying bare the sort of corruption of these like institutions that are supposed to be coming up with good policies and educating us. And it turns out they keep giving us this foolish guidance. But there's also another institution I think that was laid bare, which are these education unions, right? We had school closures for a year. The learning loss and the isolation that kids have experienced, we don't even know what the results of this are gonna be. This could be a generational consequence. And what do we see from the education unions? They didn't wanna go back to school. They fought it. We had the whole Oakley school board resign because they just said, well, they want us to go back to work to be babysitters for their kids so we could smoke pot. These are people who don't care about the kids. And after this year, I don't know how anyone can be against school choice or charter schools or giving parents more involvement in their kids' educations. 100% freeburg coming out of the pandemic
SPEAKER_03: and looking at your own psychology and your own life. What have you learned and what do you take forward in terms of lessons and how you're gonna approach post pandemic life? I'll kind of flip it a little bit.
SPEAKER_02: One of the first experiences I had with how broadly people could be influenced in a way that doesn't have grounding or rooting in fact and reality is when I sold my company to Monsanto in 2013. And J. Cal, I think you came with me on one of these trips that I took. Yeah, I visited Monsanto with you. It was very educational. And there was an incredible bias by my team and by me personally, prior to even engaging in conversations with Monsanto against that company because they were deemed to be evil. And as I spent a lot of time personally kind of digging into the facts and the history of the business and kind of how we got here, it was surprising to me like how much of the bias against Monsanto was not rooted in fact and was in fact a series of claims that then became truth and reality because of the perception. And it just became, things got stuck that way. GMOs are bad, GMOs are evil. That the science of how they work, what they do, why they're useful was never contemplated, never became part of the dialogue. It was just this assumed fact that this is an evil company, that this stuff is bad. And this is a long, long topic. We could talk about this, I'm sure, for an entire hour and a half about the science and technology behind GMOs and how we make food and all that sort of stuff. And I'll be happy to do that another time. But like for me, I was just so surprised when I engaged with thoughtful friends of mine who were scientists even, and they had this bias. And then when you engage them in a dialogue about like, why, where does that come from, what's the rooting, it just wasn't there.
SPEAKER_02: And I got, and I mentioned this to you guys when I was an executive at the management team in Monsanto, we had a WHO ruling where a guy got himself elected to the IARC, this is the cancer research group within WHO, he was this liberal guy who was very anti-technology, who got himself elected to the IARC board and got a ruling made that Roundup is a possible carcinogen. And that ruling led to a $10 billion lawsuit that Monsanto, or now Bayer, is settling, which wasn't rooted in the science or the facts that the other scientists on the committee had kind of previously kind of previewed and gone through and said, this isn't cancerous. And it's incredible the implications it's had. And so I've always, for several years now, I've had this kind of belief that like, people can be led to believe things that aren't necessarily rooted in objective truth, or in facts, or have empirical evidence behind them. And this goes back to the origins of religion and monarchies and like, these myths and these tales we tell ourselves, where we all end up believing something and there's some influencing factor that drives that. I think this has just been an incredible manifestation of that, the misinformation on both sides, from the beginning to the end of the pandemic. And it's just been extraordinary to watch. I don't think you change it. I think social networks amplify it. I think that the rate at which information or misinformation flows back and forth is making it easier and quicker to kind of adopt this systemic, inaccurate belief system that people might adopt. And so, it's a big question mark for me. I don't know how we as a people kind of move forward with objective fact-based decision-making and belief systems. And I don't know if we ever will, but it's just how humans are wired maybe.
SPEAKER_03: I've been giving it a lot of thought. I really like all of your answers because mine is very similar. Number one, I feel like I was always an independent critical thinker in my life. And that I think I kind of started to pick sides because of Trump, that like, I just found him so offensive. And I realized I have to go back to being just an independent critical thinker. I affiliate with no party. I assume all news stories are fake news. I assume all data is being manipulated. I assume everybody's got an agenda. I believe everybody's virtue signaling now. And I'm making the decisions for myself. And one of the things Dove tells exactly what you said, Chamath, which is this was a disease of old people and fat people, obese people, of which I have been one for far too long. And this is my commitment is just, I got to take my health 100% seriously now that I'm 50 years old. I got a trainer, I got a masseuse. I'm working out and doing weights. I'm doing everything. I changed my diet. I'm taking supplements, the stuff we talked about here. I went right to my doctor after that episode. We did Chamath. I'm getting that body scan for four fucking grand or whatever it costs. And I'm just doing it all. Are you saying a masseuse is going to help you lose weight?
SPEAKER_03: No, but I've had shoulders. Maybe the ass.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the ass.
SPEAKER_03: No, no. I just beeped that out. Beep that out. No, I just realized I don't stretch. I don't stretch. And my shoulders were getting very tight and being on the computer and everything. So I'm just functionally- What a man of the people.
SPEAKER_00: What a man of the people. Oh, look at you. Which house are you in? I got a personal trainer. I got a masseuse.
SPEAKER_03: Sex every week. I got to figure out. No, I got a personal. I got a $4,000.00. I'm spending my money on making myself healthy. The third thing, and this is heartfelt and sincere, is that friendship and our loved ones are really, with along with health, is so important. And I am cherishing every moment, every experience with every friend, knowing that the world can shut down and whatever, and we have to take advantage of every moment. And that for me is the takeaways.
SPEAKER_01: Just to build on something, I'm really proud of what you're trying to do, Jason, for your health. I remember, you know how you all have these high grade school pictures? Yep. Right, like you go to like picture day or whatever? Yeah. And there was this crazy contrast that I had in my grade school pictures. There was like two of them when I was in Sri Lanka. So I was like five and six. And then great, then I was seven or eight. And then all of a sudden this crazy, hey, what's up Antonio? Antonio's here.
SPEAKER_03: What's up? Miami, Miami, mucho caliente. Does Antonio realize he's on an international podcast?
SPEAKER_00: You're on a podcast that goes out to 500 people.
SPEAKER_03: You're on YouTube, you're just an international. Yeah, it's going international. Nobody even knows who he is, don't worry. He's like one of the most powerful guys in our industry.
SPEAKER_01: What I was gonna say is like, by like, I think when I was like nine or 10, I had gotten really fat. Really? Yeah, because when we moved to Canada, it was a very different food supply. And then economically, we were in a different place. We ate what we could afford, and I put on a lot of weight. And that weight carried with me until college. And then after college, and that's when I said, I gotta get in shape, exactly for the same reason, Jason, because like my dad was getting dialyzed. He was constantly dealing with these health issues. And I said, I don't deal with this shit. But that's a rare thing that happens. If you think about the number of people that are put in this predicament of like not even forget you're able to get a trainer or whatever, but there are a ton of people that can only eat what they can afford. Yeah. Right, and the reality is, it is just meaningfully cheaper to eat at McDonald's than it is to go to Whole Foods and be able to buy organic food. And so it's just not even on the agenda for people. So this is what I mean by, you have to be able to say that it's not that people are fat because they choose to be, that there are these systemic imbalances that make people sick. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03: Education and health. These are the things that we need to work on in America. Like Sax, you said it, was it last week, Sax, you said, I think this is a great bargain that could happen in America with all this polarization. If even a Republican conservative like Sax can say, everybody should get a great education and everybody should be healthy, right? And Sax isn't a socialist, but this is important. And it's so easy to just get a happy meal than to eat a salad or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: I was in Washington, DC this week. And I met with this organization, which anybody who is interested in this should check out called Third Way. And what Third Way is, is a centrist organization, right? So they largely work with Dems to try to pull them here. And I think the Republican version is called the Niskan Center. But the idea is I sat with these guys and I was like, just teach me something. And they taught me the most incredible thing. You guys know who Pew is? Pew goes out and does all these surveys. The Pew Research Center, they've been doing it for decades.
SPEAKER_03: They're the most respected, I think, in service.
SPEAKER_01: Pew does this incredible thing where they go to like a whole bunch of countries in the world. And they ask this basically very simple question. I'm gonna ask you guys what you think the answer is. On a zero to 10 scale, where 10 is important, what do you think Americans think to the following question? How important is hard work to get ahead in life? Meaning, right, so it's a proxy for how Americans think about hard work. How important is hard work to get ahead in life? Friedberg, what percentage of Americans do you think that say that hard work is important to get ahead in life? And I'll give you a couple of data points. In Indonesia- I would say 80%, yeah. But the setup is Indonesia, 28%, India, 38%, Germany, 50%.
SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, what do you think the answer is?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it should be 100%, but what do I think it is in the US? I'm hoping it's above 60.
SPEAKER_03: I agree with you, Sax. 100% is the right answer. And I believe Americans don't believe it. I'm gonna put Americans at 35%.
SPEAKER_02: Because we've seen so many people get lucky and get rich in the United States.
SPEAKER_03: Or just people think the system's rigged or the victim culture where people tell everybody, don't bother trying because it's rigged. And you just, it's- I think the argument, sorry, Chamath,
SPEAKER_02: I'll let you give us the answer in a second. But I think the argument is that like, entrepreneurism fuels these moments of extraordinary success, but the perception creates the opposite effect, which is someone can get rich very quickly and therefore there's this luck factor or this unfairness factor that is inherent in the system. And so while it does enable hard work to drive tremendous outcomes, the perception is that, holy crap, in three years, Kylie Jenner went on Instagram and became a billionaire or whatever, right? And people get really kind of blown away by that. And I think it's discouraging. Or one person's success makes it such
SPEAKER_03: that other people can't, that it's zero sum, when in fact a company- What's your number for America?
SPEAKER_02: 80%.
SPEAKER_01: The number is 73%. And we are the third highest ranking country in the survey. Wow, that's great. So it's amazing. Now, if you ask then Americans, who better represents the interests of hardworking people, among Republicans and Democrats, the overwhelming answer is now Republicans, which is really interesting. Democrats, even in exit polling, basically voted for Biden because they just really found Trump distasteful. And a lot of the people that basically said, he's an ass, and so they voted him out. But it was not because they believed that Democrats could do the job of actually reinforcing the values of hard work. And this goes back to- Yeah, they don't want handouts. People don't want handouts. They don't want handouts. People want a fair shot. They want an even starting line. They don't want an even finishing line.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no one wants paternalism. And everyone wants opportunity. But you take what you're given when it's available to you, no one says no. I spent a lot of time with farmers in the Midwest and the United States, very diehard conservative generally. And farmers benefit greatly from significant government, federal government support programs, primarily a crop insurance program and some commodity price support programs. But they are very anti-government. And there's this tremendous irony there because they don't want a handout. They want to kind of be left alone. They want to be able to run their business. And I'm generalizing, but I'm just speaking broadly to kind of the theme of things I hear when I meet with farmers. But when the crop insurance program shows up and direct support payments show up, you're like, okay, I'll take the check. And so it's hard to say no, but I think the motivation for everyone is universally the same, which is right. I want to have the opportunity to be successful independently.
SPEAKER_03: Are we creating policies that reinforce this? And are we creating the condition that makes people feel less like a victim, less looking for handouts and less- I have a concern about the stimulus checks. I do think it was a smart thing to do to get us out of this. But do you guys wonder if this generation, which is not going back to work, we have a shortage of Uber drivers, we have a shortage of bartenders, waiters, a lot of people are just choosing not to go to work because they have their stimmies.
SPEAKER_01: America is a place where you come to because you want to grind. You want to find your own little engine room and you want to be in there and you want to put in the hours. And the people that it attracts from around the world speak to that. The way that you can explain why Indonesia and India are so far to the left on that same question is because it's an extremely homogeneous population with zero immigration. No immigration, yeah. I actually think the reason why America so far to the right is it itself selects, not by some kind of gender, age, or religion or color of skin-
SPEAKER_02: By motivation.
SPEAKER_01: It's motivation. Yeah, totally. If you're motivated to crush, you come to the United States. You come to the United States, yeah. We've all, we're all, what are we? Like, you know, one generation away, except Jason, you're two generation American? My Irish side is sixth generation.
SPEAKER_03: We're all first generation except for Jason, right?
SPEAKER_02: We all moved here to the United States as immigrants. As immigrants. With motivated family, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I think that's why I'm the least successful of the group. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, you're the lazy, complacent American,
SPEAKER_00: whereas we're the hungry immigrants. I'm trying, I'm trying.
SPEAKER_03: Hey, listen. You're the Daniel Day Lewis character. I'm glad you all could do the podcast, so I'm doing something right.
SPEAKER_02: You're the Daniel Day Lewis character in gangs in New York. You know, you hate the immigrants, you sit at the boats, you throw eggs at everyone.
SPEAKER_03: It's interesting you bring that up. Do you know where my Irish forebears came from and where they immigrated to? Ireland? The five points. Oh, the five points. We were in the five points. It's exactly accurate. Yeah. Of course I was, it makes total sense.
SPEAKER_02: You're not Daniel Day Lewis. You're the heavier, shorter guy though. That was kind of the- Not for long, you know what?
SPEAKER_03: I dropped 10 on my quarantine 15 and I gave it to Sax.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you did. You're looking good, J. Cal. You look good in Miami.
SPEAKER_02: Miami suits you. In a weird way, I gotta give J. Cal
SPEAKER_00: as much credit for where he came from as Chamath, because I don't know, those parts of Brooklyn are maybe as tough as Sri Lanka.
SPEAKER_01: kids with guns, kids with guns. Yeah, you know, child warriors. You're gonna get jumped. Always roll with the posse.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, you know, on immigration, I don't know if you guys saw this, you know George W. Bush paints now and he paints immigrants. Yes. So I bought his book. I bought a signed copy of it. I should have brought it to the podcast today, but it's a great book. I highly recommend it. Trigger warning. No, but he actually has some writings in there that talks about the power of immigration and how immigration is so core to the success of the United States, just to our point. So this conversation made me think of the book that I just bought this week. Really cool book, by the way, George W. Bush, amazingly great artist, really captures the personality of immigrants in his work. I think the thing is like,
SPEAKER_01: everybody wants to come here to work hard. Everybody that's here is willing to work hard, right? Whether you're first generation or not. And then the question is, can government create policies that allow us to do that and actually just create a safety net to catch us if we fall? Because that's what we also all want. So there are parts of Biden's bill that I think made a ton of sense, like, you know, making community college free. That's a really disruptive idea because it'll put a ton of pressure on for-profit colleges, right, to like get their act together or not. That's a good idea. The child tax credit so that you can actually have subsidized, you know, childcare for your kids. That's a good idea. But then where you kind of go astray is then when you start to figure out, you know, the levels of taxation, again, we talked about this last time, but, you know, I just think that that's where you can kind of demotivate people to not then put in the hours.
SPEAKER_03: I think this is a good segue also into immigration through our southern border and this incredibly polarizing issue and how the media is polarizing it, how the parties are polarizing it. Just to ask a question to see if we even understand the data, how many people do you think are illegal immigrants in the United States right now? 20 million.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Freeberg Sachs? That's a guess.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I guess 18 million. I'll take a slight under to Chamath, but that's about the right order of magnitude. The last number I heard was like 12 million,
SPEAKER_00: but that was a few years ago. And so it's 12.
SPEAKER_03: Now, how many people are apprehended at the southern border a year since 2010 every year?
SPEAKER_02: Half a million.
SPEAKER_03: Anybody else want to take a guess? 50,000. All right, it's 350,000. So we literally are tearing the country apart. And I know that because I watched the movie Sicario
SPEAKER_02: and I'm estimating based on the scene where they round everyone up at the border and took them away. So that's my- Terrifying film and awesome. Like you will- Awesome. Incredible film. Just bring us Xanax
SPEAKER_03: because you might have a panic attack. My favorite modern director, Dennis Villanueva,
SPEAKER_02: he's unbelievable. But we digress. Yes.
SPEAKER_01: That scene when they're racing the cars into the border crossing border checkpoint. What it is so intense. So if you guys are into sci-fi,
SPEAKER_02: that guy directed The Arrival, which is one of my favorite films. Yeah, that's a fabulous movie. Beautiful film. Yeah, beautiful film.
SPEAKER_03: So literally the country's being torn apart. A country of 330 million. Over 3 million would be 1%, 0.1% coming into the border. And we just said, immigration is just all these amazing people coming here to who want to strive and who want great things. Why are we tearing the country up over this issue? This is a tough topic.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think Jason,
SPEAKER_00: I think your point of view on immigration really depends on where you're sitting in the economy. So I think for all of us who are in Silicon Valley, we know that something like half of startups have an immigrant co-founder. Totally. So we've seen like PayPal, I think there were like three or four immigrants on the founding team. Peter was born in Germany. Elon was born in South Africa. Max was born in Russia. I was born in South Africa. And then you go down the list. Same thing with Google. Sergey Brin came from Russia and just on and on it goes. So if you're sitting in Silicon Valley as a tech worker, you see that these immigrants bring tremendous dynamism to the economy. However, if you're in a low wage job, maybe low skill service, then a lot of this immigration is competition and it creates wage pressure for you. So this is why historically the unions have not been in favor of immigration. You have a lot of service workers in the minority communities. There's a lot of animosity towards immigrants because of that. Fundamentally, it creates job competition and wage competition. And I do think, well, so look, it's easy for us to sit here in Silicon Valley where we sit in the economy and say, oh, well, let's just have unlimited immigration. It doesn't matter. Well, yeah, it doesn't matter to us. But if you're in the low skill part of the economy, it does matter a lot to let in a flood of immigrants who are in that low skill category. And by the way, we're worried about these jobs getting automated away as well. So I think you have to have a sensible policy. I mean, yes to immigration, but I think you have to think about how much sort of low skill immigration can we assimilate and absorb?
SPEAKER_03: Right, but aren't a lot of those people who are coming in also then taking lower wages because they're off the books and they're illegal. Whereas if we had a more reasonable policy of letting whatever percentage in, like we could just pick a number. And if that actually worked and they were getting paid on the books, then it would remove some of that downside pressure. So you're not paying somebody under the books to be a delivery person or a dishwasher, whatever the entry level job is, they have to get paid that minimum wage. But Jason, I think this speaks to the broader
SPEAKER_02: kind of set of political topics, which relates to the enablement of competition. And it speaks to some of the trade policy points that I think the last administration made, which is to limit trade and to limit access to global markets to provide services and products to the United States and to tax them, because the lower cost labor ultimately out competes with higher cost labor in the United States. And so, you get lower cost goods, but the balance is, is it worth having lower cost goods and services where you could actually see too much of a decline in the employability or in the wages of people that are currently producing those goods and services in the United States. And that's the tricky balance, right? There's no blue or red right way to do this. We wanna enable competition, we wanna enable progress, we wanna enable lower cost of production, lower cost goods and services, but we also don't wanna have the economic impact and the social impact of people being under employed and unemployed. And balancing those two, one of the tricky pieces of that balancing puzzle is immigration. Another one is trade, another one is regulation, et cetera, et cetera, right? So a lot of these things kind of drive that tricky balance. I really bounce around on this.
SPEAKER_01: I, of all of the four of us, I was the only one that immigrated myself, so I didn't, it's not that my parents did it. Oh, you did it, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I did it myself. I drove to the border, I got a TN visa stamp, I crossed the border into Buffalo, I stood in line, I got my own social security number, and I started a life in America in the year 2000. How old were you? 22, I guess, or 23? You had a job lined up already?
SPEAKER_02: I had a job, I had a job offer, I had my offer letter,
SPEAKER_01: I did the whole thing, then I transferred onto an H-1B visa, I had to go through all of that, then I had to wait in line, I got delayed, I had to refile. So as a person that went through the immigration system and finally got their green card in 2007 or eight, and then my citizenship in 2011 or 2012, I bounce around on how I feel, because I remember the insecurity I felt in not wanting to lose my visa and have to leave and go back to Canada. And so if somebody was in that situation, I could see why they would get very agitated if they saw a lot of immigration being lumped in into one broad brush. And because if you look at it, actually, there's a really interesting conundrum, because it's not like immigration is a thing where all immigrants are pro-immigration. It's actually not that at all. It tends to be sort of cultural elites are pro-immigration because it's a synthetic way of showing openness and open-mindedness. But then inside, no, right? I mean, it's true. It's because they don't get affected by it. It doesn't affect them. It doesn't affect them, right, exactly. If anything, it makes it easier for them
SPEAKER_00: to maybe find people to hire.
SPEAKER_03: Well, as someone that lived through it, what I would say is if I was still waiting
SPEAKER_01: for my green card and waiting in line and having the idea that there was some amnesty program would have made me feel very insecure. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to it, but in that moment, I would have felt insecure. So the broad solution to immigration is you have to separate the two problems and say, this part of the problem can be solved almost like a professional sports team, which is to say, we have the ability to draft every year the smartest and most interesting capable people that wanna come here and work hard. That will probably be a rising tide. Then there are these two other buckets. Bucket in the middle is just compassionate openness, family members and other people, refugees, because I was emigrated into Canada, not in the first bucket, because we didn't have much to contribute economically, but in the second bucket, which is for social justice and refugees. Then there is a third bucket, which is there are people that are not gonna be in a position to wait in line. They are gonna come to the border, and we have to have a mechanism of saying, okay, you shouldn't have done it, but you did, and now here's a pathway where you can earn the right to prove that you should be here. I think that there is, but we can't have that nuance because nobody wants to hear it. You wanna lump it into one. This is where, for example, like last year when Trump decapitated the H1B program, I thought this is just so dumb. Yeah, no nuance. It's basically telling, it's forcing a star athlete to go and play a different sport. Why would you do that? It's so artificial, it doesn't make any sense. It's such a reasonable, there's such a reasonable discussion
SPEAKER_03: to be had here because other countries have solved this exact thing with the point-based system. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and others have all worked on a system like this, which is you get points for each of the qualities that you bring, and then you put some numbers on it, but there is no difference. Yeah, but Jake, those countries are much, much harder
SPEAKER_00: to get into than the United States. Good luck getting into New Zealand. You better buy a property or something like that. It might be that the point-based system is
SPEAKER_03: letting in the people that make the society stronger. No, Canada has a really progressive view on this.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they have a point-based system, but they do a lot. They're really compassionate about, they'll take in a lot more refugees than most other countries, and I think that they've never lost that spirit. And I think that, the point is, I think I agree with Jason, it's possible, it's logical. The problem is it's too logical, and you know- Let's polarize it. It's like the masks. Well, I think Freeburg made an interesting connection
SPEAKER_00: to the issue of free trade. So, look, I majored in economics in college. I was a believer in free trade, sort of completely ardent free trade, because why? It creates economic efficiency, and so- It's logical. It's logical, and if people lose their jobs and their factory closes because we're not as good, then yes, you let the chips fall where they may. I think what we've learned over the last 20 or 30 years is that we have to consider the distributional consequences of a policy like free trade, because it's about, well, who benefits and who loses? And yes, American consumers have benefited from the flow of cheap goods from China and other places, but we've seen our manufacturing- American producers have lost. Have lost, yeah. And so throughout the Midwest and the Rust Belt, you've got these empty factories, they just line up like tombstones up in places like Detroit. And you've got these towns that used to be factory towns that are now just kind of empty, and the people are hooked on fentanyl, and it's a social disaster. And so I think what I've kind of learned about this is you have to take into account the consequences of these policies, and it can't just be about- So you've evolved your position. I have. It can't just be about a Darwinian economic efficiency anymore. You have to think about who wins and who loses. And by the way, what's ironic- Everybody's got feedback on this one.
SPEAKER_03: What's ironic is a lot of the current globalization policy
SPEAKER_02: that the United States embraced over the last two or three decades, I think, Sax, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of this originated during the Clinton era, which was a Democratic president. And then ironically, the free trade Republicans are the ones who have flipped over the last couple of years to realize the economic consequence on the production side of the United States is so severe that we need to now limit free trade. And if you remember, Paul Ryan, who was the House Speaker a few years ago, had this six-point plan for the Republicans going into the primaries. And one of the key points was to enable the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They were trying to continue to push free trade. And I think that the policy shift is ironic because it's always been kind of a red issue, then it became a blue issue, then it became a red issue. And I think, like everything, we are evolving our points of view as we experience and learn more things and get more data. And perhaps the rate of progress isn't the thing to optimize for, but the rate of progress balanced against the equality of progress seems to be where the United States is at right now.
SPEAKER_00: To respond to what Freeberg said about how this happened. So there's an old saying in Washington that the best, sorry, that the worst ideas are bipartisan. And the idea of bringing China into the World Trade Organization and giving them sort of MFN trading status, that happened under Clinton, but it was absolutely a bipartisan decision. And part of the reason why our politics are so royal today- Well, no, it was proposed Clinton, it was passed in Bush.
SPEAKER_00: Right, okay, but they both supported it. It was a bipartisan sort of disaster. And I think one of the reasons why our politics are so royal today, you've got this populism on the right and you've got a populism of the left and where they both agree is in restraining, is having a more protectionist trade policy. That's right.
SPEAKER_01: So I think a little bit of history here is important. I think you got most of it right, but if you go even one step back under Clinton, there was nothing that they actually did, but it was something that Deng Xiaoping did, which was that for a large time, I think until the mid 90s, 94, the RMB was firmly pegged to the US dollar. And it was like 5.8 RMB to the US dollar. And all of a sudden they basically said, well, look, we have this hapless economy, we have to do something about it, and we have this enormous bulge of young people. And so they did this brilliant thing. And China said, we're gonna basically devalue our currency and they're gonna basically make it essentially float. And instantly you re-rated the currency by 40%. And over time it re-rated by almost 60%. And what it did was all of a sudden it unleashed, as you said, all of these subsidies into the United States. Why? Because now Chinese goods became 30% cheaper, right? And then the Thai goods became 30% cheaper. Indonesian goods became 80% cheaper, right? Vietnamese goods became 50% cheaper. That's that entire contagion in Eastern Asia that we went through in the late 90s. So it's like China deep values their currency. All of a sudden you have all these young people in China who can make things for 30% cheaper. You're able to flood the American market with goods. We were like, wow, this is incredible. My jeans that cost $10 now cost $7. I'm just using it as a representative example. I'm just gonna buy more jeans. And so you're consuming, consuming, consuming. All of a sudden Bush comes along and says, well, this seems to be working out well. I wanna go to war with Iraq. I need to basically get China to vote yes in the Security Council. Okay, what's it gonna take? China's like, admit me to the WTO because even during all of this, they were still not part of the WTO. And to David's point, and that's when the nuclear bomb went off in 2004. The minute that they were involved and they could actually have bilateral trade relationships and normalized trade relationships, then all of a sudden the next wave happens because instead of just buying cheap Chinese jeans, every American company was like, wait a minute, I can drive up earnings by just exporting this factory to China writ large. And the Chinese had all this capital that they had built up, all these US dollars to then support it and subsidize it. Well, it's a prisoner's dilemma, right, Chamaf?
SPEAKER_03: Because if you don't do it as an American company and you don't move your manufacturing there and everybody else does, you're dead. Your shareholders will decapitate your stock price.
SPEAKER_01: As a CEO, you get fired. And so then that's when, David, what you said happened, that's when you hollow out from 2014 to 2016, you hollow out the middle class, you hollowed out the inside, the rust belt, and then basically you deindustrialize the West. You saw the rise of populism. You saw the rise of opioids as essentially a coping mechanism for people's inability to even work hard. To have purpose, Chamaf. Americans are wired to work hard. And so they need to self-medicate if you can't let them work hard. They turn to fentanyl and opioids to do it, and then all of a sudden Donald Trump gets elected in 2016. So what if we-
SPEAKER_03: A man without hope is a man without fear. You give people no job and no purpose in the morning, what happens?
SPEAKER_00: And the Democratic Party's turned to socialism. I think that's part of it as well.
SPEAKER_03: So this is really interesting because we're talking about second, I think everybody who was doing this was considering the second order problems. And what we're experiencing now is the third order problem, which is things that people couldn't predict. Like we now have a communist country that is not changing its human rights record and is not changing its behavior and might even be getting worse. And we've enabled them.
SPEAKER_01: But Jason, China will actually self-regulate. I actually think now the China issue is a little overblown the way we take it. Meaning I think China's central planners are frankly just much, much smarter than ours, right? They just are. Well, they have several planning. And they have better tools.
SPEAKER_03: They don't have a limit- In the domain, communism. A limbic system that's just reactionary to the current-
SPEAKER_03: Or any legal system. They have no legal system.
SPEAKER_00: That should scare us that they're more effective planners than our politicians. But here's the thing.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the thing that smart policy can't outrun though. It cannot outrun demographics. And the most important takeaway that I learned over the last few weeks when I was studying this problem, because I've been thinking a lot just currently like, okay, inflation, what's the 10-year view? What's just gonna happen? Like, what's my macro view of the world? And I saw the most interesting stat, which is the median age in China and the median age in South Asia is greater now than the median age in America. So it's in the mid-40s versus the mid-30s. And that's an enormously important thing because now you have an aging population in China. You've had this one-child policy that's really has worked against them for a very long time. So they have an under-representation of these young people. And so you're flexing now to managing a demographic shift where folks are older. They're not gonna work in a factory. They're not making goods the same way they used to. Economic growth is tapering. And so that whole China situation, in fact, demographically, is gonna solve itself. But the implications for America are not good, meaning I think inflation goes up, commodity prices go up, prices of everything go up. But it allows us to actually reestablish and rejuvenate the industrialized rust belt of America. We just have to spend the money. And this is where I think, like when you look at Biden's plan, this is where, I wonder, like, didn't anybody do this simple macroeconomic trace route to actually come up with this? Because it's pretty obvious what to do. And then you wonder- Which is why- I mean, have literally a trillion dollars allocated to reestablishing entire supply chains across critical industries that we wanna own. Which I think, Friedberg, you brought up,
SPEAKER_03: what, 15 episodes ago, that this is an incredible opportunity for us to bring manufacturing here and bring the next generation. And reinvent manufacturing.
SPEAKER_02: I still think biomanufacturing represents this complete great domain where the United States could build and lead. I'll just give you some statistics. Globally, there's about 25 million liters of fermentation capacity or biomanufacturing capacity. Of that, about 20 million is used to make beer and wine and pharmaceutical drugs today in an enclosed system. Five million is available for rent. And of that, four million is already rented out. So there's only a million liters of capacity really available for rent. There's a hundred synthetic biology companies that are looking to produce fermentation-based products. From materials for clothing, to food, to animal protein, to new drugs. And they can't get the capacity to make this stuff. And every one of them is scrambling around Silicon Valley looking to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding to go build friggin' manufacturing capacity for biomanufacturing. This is where the United States can lead. Because we can make every material, every drug, and every consumable that the entire world would use using biomanufacturing. And just to be clear, biomanufacturing- Let's roll. Let's effing go.
SPEAKER_02: So you edit the DNA of an organism and it can be programmed to make a molecule for you. And so we can use large fermenter tanks to make this stuff. I did the math recently, and you would need about 10 to 50 billion liters of capacity to make all the animal protein for the entire world. And using 45,000 liter tanks, which are three meters wide each, it would take about 30 to 40 square miles of fermentation tanks to make all the protein for the whole world. We could build that in the United States for about three to four- In Nebraska. For about three to $400 billion. And we could build it in a couple of years. I mean, that is like a moonshot. You could also make materials for clothing. You could make- Detroit. You could make bioplastics. Go to the Ross Bell.
SPEAKER_03: Put it there.
SPEAKER_02: And this is like this, because today the science exists. It's like, go back to like the internet era. We now have this ability to program organisms to make stuff for us. This did not exist 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Today is the moment it exists. So if we don't capitalize on this huge budget to build infrastructure, to go after this massive opportunity to make everything that the world consumes, we're going to miss out and free markets will compete us away. This is the one time that big check can be written and that big check can enable this new industry. And instead of making cars and making all this stuff that maybe we don't need to be making anymore.
SPEAKER_00: You really think that all this trillions of infrastructure spending is going to what you just described? That's my point. It's not. That's my point. No, no, it's not. That's my point.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that, but that's what I mean is we're missing this opportunity.
SPEAKER_00: We're rebranding the same old social programs as infrastructure because the politicians know that's one of the last categories of spending that's still popular. I mean, it's not going to go to the right things.
SPEAKER_01: It does. It does. Those labels pull well when you say jobs. Like for example, one of the things I learned, which is insane is that for whatever reason, people think fixing climate change is a net negative because it will restrict one's way of life and destroy jobs. Whereas in fact, it's the exact opposite. It should actually allow you to do more, live healthier, and there should be an entire renaissance of industries and jobs. And so it goes back to the disinformation and just makes a rational conversation almost impossible.
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of politics, can we just shift to Caitlyn Jenner real quick before we wrap, because we're almost out of time. Caitlyn Jenner is officially running for governor
SPEAKER_03: and I guess people are making light of it, but Saxx, you actually wrote a considered post on it. So unpack it for us.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was defending Caitlyn Jenner. I mean, look, I mean, what Caitlyn Jenner came out and said is that Gavin Newsom's DAs, Chasid Boudin and George Gascona in LA are presiding, I'm putting words in her mouth, presiding over a crime wave. And she was calling him out on that. And what you then immediately saw was all of Gavin's people come out and criticize her for being stupid because supposedly she didn't know that DAs were locally elected. Well, I think a couple of points there. First of all, why hasn't Gavin Newsom come out and distanced himself from Chasid Boudin and George Gascona and what they're doing in those cities? He hasn't done that because he's been cozying up to their side, the sort of progressive, extreme radical decarcerationist wing of the party. And the reason we know that is because he recently had a job to fill, the attorney general spot in California. He could have chosen anybody for that job. And he chose an East Bay assemblyman named Rob Bonta for it, who is an ally of Chasid Boudin and Gascona and this progressive DA alliance. And so, yeah, it's true that Newsom didn't appoint these DAs but he's appointing their allies to posts that are even more important, the attorney general of all of California. And so I think it was a very legitimate issue for Caitlyn Jenner to come out and call out Gavin Newsom on. And I think she's onto something here, which is there's a lot of issues in California. There's a lot of things that are wrong from homelessness to unemployment and these crazy COVID restrictions. But the number one issue I think has to be crime. We are seeing an explosion of crime in our streets. We all know there are large parts of LA and San Francisco that we do not feel comfortable walking around in anymore. Oh my God, you'd be crazy to walk down the street with a child. The livable area where you feel safe living or opening a business or walking around has drastically shrunk in the last few years. And if you do not feel safe in your city, nothing else politically matters. The government's first responsibility is to protect its people. And I think if Caitlyn Jenner can keep speaking out on issues like this, I think maybe she has a shot.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that she's got a credible shot if she has a reasonable economic policy behind it and the school voucher thing on education. Those are the things that'll carry California voters because I do think, and by the way, here's where I think we should take some credit. The best thing about this podcast, other than the fact that we used ourselves to keep us sane, it's made it fashionable to think independently again. And eventually what becomes fashionable becomes de rigueur. And what that means is I think that there'll be more and more people that will think for themselves. And if she has reasonable policies and a platform that's understandable, she can win. And that's an incredible testament, I think, to people making their own decisions. And being able to have a reasonable conversation
SPEAKER_03: with people with different opinions, I think is the other takeaway from the podcast that people always give me that feedback when they see me on the street or whatever and talk to me about it. And as a point, going to Austin, they are now dealing with tent city problems like LA and the same problems that we're dealing with in San Francisco. So I went for a walk around the lake a couple of times was great. And, you know, there were a lot of tents. And they're literally taking the most beautiful lake in the entire beautiful part of the city. And it's becoming camp central. They're basically ruining it for the actual citizens who are not homeless. Austin lifted the tent ban they had in Texas. Now Texas is voting now. The entire conversation when I was in Austin, all conversations did not go to NFTs crypto, the border or anything, it went to tent city. And people in Austin who are very liberal, were saying, I'm voting to ban tent city. I'm voting against, you know, this insanity, because it's we don't want to become San Francisco, we don't want to become LA. So the and these are liberal people. And the concept that a city would allow people to camp in the center of the city and ruin it for everybody else is insane. Portland's version of Amsterdam is still up and running.
SPEAKER_01: It's been a year. I mean, if people want to camp, we have some sense for that.
SPEAKER_03: Send the campers to the campgrounds. Can I tell you the secret origin story of Miami
SPEAKER_00: and why Miami is now a tech hub? It's because of this issue. It's because a tech entrepreneur got punched in the face by a homeless person in San Francisco. I don't know if he'd want me to tell the story. I'll find out afterwards and you can beep out his name. But basically, who is a prolific tech founder, he's got, I don't know if he'd want me to tell the story, but he was out just, Would you do two beeps? Fine. We'll do two beeps. Anyway, he was out walking around San Francisco and a crazy homeless person just walked up and punched him in the face for no reason. And this is something this homeless person's done many times. The cops were there, just kind of shrugged, didn't want to prosecute it, didn't want to write up a ticket. He's like, no, I really want to press charges. So the cops like, okay, fine. So then, you know, he presses charges, nothing happens, the DA office basically keeps, you know, giving him the runaround until he basically says, fine, forget it. He drops charges, he just moves. He just votes with his feet. So he moves to Miami. He was the first one from that sort of, like the sort of the core, like Silicon Valley plugged in ecosystem to move out to Miami. He says he did the seed round. Then he talked to Keith Raboy and he's the one who convinced Keith Raboy to move to Miami. So Keith Raboy then, he did the series A. So was the seed investor of Miami and he got Raboy to do the series A and then Raboy, you know, he's very, you know, prominent, loud on social media. He's been evangelizing the whole thing. And then he got Deleon and Founders Fund and their whole noise machine to move, you know, their circus to Miami. And now look at it, look at it. But it's, it's this, I'm here. Now it took, they've got a mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, who actually said, we want tech here. We want tech here, right? You know, and they don't have a homeless problem. The city has a lot of cops, it's well managed. So look, he's got the right environment. And most of all, the city of Miami is welcoming to the tech ecosystem where San Francisco, the politicians seem to, can't wait to get rid of it. But it's all comes back to this homeless issue. I think if he hadn't gotten punched in the face by the homeless person, I think this all would have played out very differently. It's very, very true.
SPEAKER_03: Let's wrap on a quick fang. I don't know, you must have seen every single major tech company had a massive blowout quarter. And when I say massive, I mean, unbelievable. And the five, the five tech companies now collectively
SPEAKER_01: this year will make more than $1.2 trillion, trillion with a T of revenue. If those five companies were a country, it would be the 14th largest country in the world. Wow. We're not talking market cap here, folks.
SPEAKER_03: We're talking cash in the bank account. Just revenue. No, no, just revenue. Revenue, right. Which I think is a good proxy for GDP.
SPEAKER_01: And so the point is, if these companies were countries, collectively fang would be a top 15 country. And so I guess really what we've learned is what we've known, which is, okay, these are monopolies. They have pricing power. Unfortunately, Facebook had to actually even disclose that inventory only grew by 12%, but prices grew by 35%. Google basically showed the same thing. And if you go back to sort of like the pillar of antitrust law, which is that 1970 odd Supreme court case, it defined what's called the consumer welfare test, right? So the FTC and DOJ, they're relatively toothless in the face of companies cutting prices, but they can really act when companies raise prices. And here's where their definition of a monopoly, which is brittle, it doesn't account for 2021 tech companies, does come into play because now you can see that they're winding up their pricing power if they can raise prices, number one. The second thing that I'll say is the Apple Facebook thing is a very important canary in the coal mine as well, because it's not as if the five of them can actually work together. There's infighting, right? And so- Yeah, it's Game of Thrones. Well, with this new update to iOS, what those dialogues will essentially do, in my opinion, if I had to guess is limit inventory, right? So Facebook and Google will have fewer ads that they can actually run in a targeted way. And so the only way that they can keep then growing revenue with fewer impressions is by raising prices even more. And then the last thing I'll say is, this complicated dynamic between Apple, Facebook and Google is that Google still pays Apple almost 70 or $80 billion for search, whereas Facebook pays them nothing. So if you put all these things in a box, I think you're gonna see the beginning of the end. This is where now you can see the end game come into focus, which is- Red wedding? Well, you don't need necessarily new laws in Section 230, although we'll have that. You now see FangM moving into the line of sight of the traditional antitrust framework, because now they can use very traditional anti-competitive pricing law to go after these guys. I am gonna strongly disagree with Chamath, okay?
SPEAKER_02: I've not disagreed with Chamath this strongly since we've done the podcast. The reason I strongly disagree is because this is not inventory that is being sold at a fixed price where the price is set by the company. Facebook and Google in particular, run an auction model. They are a marketplace business. They have advertisers who show up and they bid on ads, which is the inventory that they're able to get based on the data that they're able to match to that particular ad slot. If the advertisers can get more value by bidding a higher price because of the data that they're getting that shows that this customer is more likely to click on the ad and ultimately buy something, they will bid more for the ads. What has been such an incredible juggernaut of a business for both Google and then Facebook, which was effectively a mimic of Google system was this auction model. And the innovation has been in getting more data as you track consumers around the internet. And secondly is in the smart ad targeting, which is where the algorithm figures out which ad to show the consumer based on whether that consumer is likely to click on the ad or not. And the more consumers click on the ads, the more advertisers are willing to pay for an impression because that ad is now gonna convert to more revenue for them. That is why this is not a monopolistic approach to pricing. Can I say something? It is an auction approach. And I think, and it's why they've won in the past over this argument, but yeah, go ahead. I could, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01: At Facebook, my team was the one that built it. So I oversaw those guys back in 2008 and nine when we did the first version of it. Obviously it's gotten much more sophisticated and you're right, it's a victory auction. And literally my mandate to the team was, I don't want your innovations, copy Google and give me a version of what Google looks like and we're gonna implement it. There's a problem. It's not exclusively that. Ads are not sold entirely based on that system. Ads are sold direct via a team. So for example, when Budweiser writes a hundred million dollar check or Procter & Gamble, they're not necessarily stepping in the auction the same way as a small and medium sized business. And if you look at how Facebook and Google have oriented their policy, they've only highlighted those people because David, to those people, you're absolutely right. There's a very legitimate market clearing price argument for them, but there are an entire class of advertisers that come in over the top. You're saying brand advertisers.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that get structured deals, that get structured APIs, they get structured access and Facebook and Google is setting price and Microsoft is setting price. And so this is where that's the entry point because at the end of the day, an impression to David Friedberg, whether it's seen by the local taco shop or Procter & Gamble, some of it will be a victory auction, some of it will be structured inventory. It's a convoluted mess of the two. You can't tease it out. You're right.
SPEAKER_02: At the end, it's about getting CPM higher, right? It's about cost per thousand impressions, but I think this is a good conversation for us to have. This is episode 31 for sure. I would love to talk about some of my early days at Google and how we made some of those decisions because I think it's instrumental to how this is designed to be ultimately a system of commerce efficiency that's really important, not just a system of selling ads. But let's talk about it later, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, as we wrap, most impressive observation from these quarterly reports that just came out, for me, Amazon's ad business, 24 billion growing at 77% year over year on top of their Amazon web services business.
SPEAKER_01: It'll be bigger than AWS in three years at this rate. Yeah, what's everyone else's most-
SPEAKER_02: That to me was like, whoa. What was the most impressive thing for the rest of you guys on all the earnings history? And there's a lot of impressive things here.
SPEAKER_03: I have a second, but go ahead. It was unbelievably impressive,
SPEAKER_01: but we have four enormous monopolies on our hands. And if I was a betting man, end of decade, these four monopolies will not exist. I'll make that bet. What? Oh, broken up.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: By the end of this decade, so 2030?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Okay. Long bet. I'm willing to bet you dollars to donuts. That what?
SPEAKER_02: They face breakup? I'll bet a couple of donuts. You bet a couple of dollars. Okay.
SPEAKER_03: And we'll- Give the donuts to Saks. I'm off donuts.
SPEAKER_01: Saks, what was your takeaway?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I would up level it slightly. In antitrust, there's historically two schools. There's the Bork School and the Brandeis School. Bork was narrowly focused just on consumer harm and would be closer to like the Freeburg position. The Brandeis School is more about concentrations of power and would be more concerned about, you know, not letting people get too powerful in this American democracy. And I think the interesting thing is now that there's folks on the right who definitely are buying into the Brandeis School because of the restrictions on free speech and access to the marketplace of ideas that companies like Amazon, actually all of them, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook have all imposed. They're limiting people's access to the marketplace of ideas. So I think now it's really interesting. You're seeing a combination of both the right and the left get together saying these companies are too big, they're too powerful. I think the Republicans are saying, we'll let you keep the money. We're not gonna take your wealth. The Democrats are saying, we're gonna take your power and your wealth. The Republicans are just saying, we wanna level your power a little bit. But I think, you know, these forces are gonna come together. And I agree with Chamath. I think, I don't know exactly when, but I think these companies are gonna get broken up and knocked down because they are too powerful.
SPEAKER_02: It's a good counterargument, Sax. I mean, the other, that more important point of view of power versus, you know, economic harm to consumers is an important one. Clearly, there's no accounting for that quantitatively. And politics will drive it. I think like, it's just incredible. I mean, if you guys think about it as a consumer, I mean, how incredible are the products that Alphabet, Amazon and Apple have made? I mean... And all free. They'll still exist if they get broken. And Amazon basics. I mean, even the iPhone, like ordering stuff on Amazon. Android. Every day I'm amazed and I marvel at the world we live in, at the shit that we can do with the click of a button. I mean, it is such an incredible world we live in because of these businesses. So as much as we can have them for all the wealth and monopoly power. But David, here's the problem.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the problem is that Apple and Google in particular have a monopoly on the applications that can exist on these incredible phones. And if you can't get access to the App Store, you can't exist as an app. App Store is the layout. And frankly, you can't really even, you can't even have a business in the modern world if these guys cut you off. And so we already saw a congressional hearing very recently in which Spotify and some other apps were testifying against Google and Apple because- And the Apple tax. Because yes, because these platforms were discriminating against those applications in order to benefit themselves. And I think that in particular has to be looked at and I think eventually stopped. Two things, two things.
SPEAKER_01: Apple just got sued by the EU today. So they got slapped with antitrust for their App Store. So that's gonna sort itself out as well. So you have all this, as Jason said, Game of Thrones. I wanted to read to you guys something, Justin just put it in the chat. This is something I said to Brad Gerstner in 2019 when he was interviewing me for something. And I think it's even more true today than it was in 2019. I said the following, I said, my perspective on Facebook is the reason why the market gives it a small multiple. Because by the way, you hear this all the time, like, my gosh, these companies are so cheap. Why are they so cheap? I said, the reason why the market gives it such a small multiple is because they don't believe, the market. The market doesn't believe that their earnings potential is durable. Because the market is sure that in the next 10 or so years, governments will start to act because they care about their own self-preservation. So if you get very reductionist, at the end of the day, that's what governments care about. And so they're going to legislate to protect their monopoly, which is the ability to have power. All right, there it is, folks.
SPEAKER_03: A shout out from Chamath to Chamath in 2019. Shout out! I'd like to give a shout out to myself in 2019.
SPEAKER_01: No, Jason, I would like to do this. I'd like to... Don't hurt your arm, patting yourself on the back so hard.
SPEAKER_03: You got to stretch that out with your functional stretching on Sundays. I get my functional stretch on. Love you, Besties.
SPEAKER_01: Besties, when are you guys coming back, please? Can we play poker now that we're all vaccinated? Please.
SPEAKER_03: I might have to go to New York next week to just round out my three city tour.
SPEAKER_02: Can we book the Miami trip, Chamath? Let's go out there.
SPEAKER_03: No, we're doing a live show. Oh, big news is coming, everybody. We are going to be putting up a voting mechanism. You're going to be able to vote with your dollar with a tiny donation to see all in live, whichever city gets the most donations. I think we're going to go to you. No, no, let's just go to Miami. All right, fine, we're going to Miami. But where are we going to donate the money to?
SPEAKER_01: Have we decided that?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think it should be something in relation...
SPEAKER_02: We can play poker and the winner do a single hand pillow and the winner gets to decide the charity of their choice.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I like that. I like that. That could be fun. I mean, I think something that we've all agreed on...
SPEAKER_01: Can we just decide to sell tickets in Miami and New York and be done with the show? Miami, Miami.
SPEAKER_03: I know. I think Miami and New York, we could just do a one, two. I mean, it's a hot, quick jump.
SPEAKER_02: Chamath, you decide the date. The rest of us will make it work. These guys are already out of there. End of May, we're going to pick a date.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to go to Miami. We're going to do the first taped live all in. And we're going to sell tickets for like five or 10 bucks. All the proceeds go to charity.
SPEAKER_03: It's got to be more like 50 or 25 because of the venue. Because the venue's got to get there big. But anyway, love you besties. Love you guys. Love you, Freeburg. Love you, Chamath. Back at you. Most of all, everybody. Love you, Jacob. Love you, Sax. Love you, Sax. Back at you. Back at you, Sax. We'll see you all next time on the All In podcast. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_03: ["I'm Going All In"]
SPEAKER_00: ["I'm Going All In"]
