SPEAKER_04: Let's see if we get sax and one Alright guys, I guess sax isn't I guess sax is blowing it off because he's too busy. Okay, so no fuss So we'll start without sax. Okay, three, two, one. Love you, West.
SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast. With us today, the Queen of Kinwah on fire in California, which also happens to be on fire, sadly.
SPEAKER_04: And the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. David Sax will not be joining us today. He's too busy with his All In app. Oh, I'm sorry, it's actually Call In. He put a C in front of it. No, no, it's Call In. Call In. Call In is Call In app, which is debut this week. But sax will be, if you're a sax stan, I think sax is...
SPEAKER_04: No, we've done one show without Freeburg, now we're doing one without sax.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this will be the sax free episode. Sax free episode. Alright, so we got a lot going on.
SPEAKER_04: I'm here, I'm here. I'm here. All too eager to take credit for Call In on Twitter, so don't pretend like you're not part of it now.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sorry, I meant Call In app. The All In app. This guy creates them.
SPEAKER_02: I hope Call In is worth a trillion dollars.
SPEAKER_03: I can't believe it. This guy is complaining that I'm leveraging the pod.
SPEAKER_00: No, he did because I listened to his interview with Emily Chang. And I listened to his thing with Axios with Dan Premack. And he's very... David had a very good presentation, and then he was really magnanimous in kind. So thanks, Saxipoo.
SPEAKER_03: And I gave so much credit to JCal. I said that if it wasn't for JCal, I never would have done this whole podcasting thing because it was too hard. I never would have figured it out.
SPEAKER_03: And then you gave me a shout out because of organizing it so that we could all be friends on... I like that. I appreciate that. Very nice. I actually haven't listened to it. But for those who don't know, David Sax has created a podcasting slash casual audio app. It's called Call In. It's available for download for iOS, just coming out of private beta. My understanding is you're at somewhere around 10,000 folks?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of signups yesterday. I haven't got all the latest numbers yet. But yeah, no, it's taking off. All the reviews of it have been sort of rave reviews. People are really excited about it.
SPEAKER_00: Fantastic. But yeah, look, the concept is we're combining social audio with podcasting. We call it social podcasting. You've seen these apps where people create a room, and they have these many-to-many conversations. They tend to be ephemeral. No one really records or saves them. And the quality of the conversation is a little bit chaotic. But we've taken that concept and put it in the service of creators who can now essentially record their pod in front of a live studio audience. They can bring up the... We call them callers. They can bring up people from the audience one by one to ask their questions. It's much more organized and structured. It's not a free-for-all to try and grab the mic. And then once you record the episode, you can then go into post-production in the app, you can edit the transcript in order to edit the episode, and then you publish it and you can share it. So it's basically like OnlyFans but audio.
SPEAKER_03: It's OnlyFans, but for people who don't look good on camera.
SPEAKER_04: Do you still jerk off at the end or no? Oh! Family show. Family show. Family show. Come on. I do. I do when this becomes a unicorn.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no!
SPEAKER_02: The plan is all getting cut. Cut, cut, cut. No, not delete! It's my birthday today, goddammit.
SPEAKER_03: All right. Happy birthday, Chamath. We're going on the horn here. Everybody's patting themselves on the back. Let's all take a moment to say what we like about Chamath.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, great. Let's get back to the episode. That was quick. What do you... I was thinking about what birthday present do I get for Chamath, and then I was like, gee, what do you get for the dictator who has everything? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: What does Kim Jung-il and me need? Exactly.
SPEAKER_02: Wait a second. What did they get MBS for his birthday?
SPEAKER_04: Actually, I'll tell you.
SPEAKER_00: Very rare wine. Very rare wine.
SPEAKER_00: There's actually an answer to that question. Apparently, Madeline Albright won Scott Kim Jong-un a basketball signed by Michael Jordan for his birthday. So apparently that's what you get a dictator. Access. You get them access to people they wouldn't normally have or a bone saw.
SPEAKER_04: A very, very, very old French Burgundy.
SPEAKER_03: Ideally white, but the white doesn't hold up as well. But, you know, if you go back... I mean, I wonder if you could drink like... Yesterday, I had the two Phils, Deutsch and Muth at my house. And we had... We drank 1996 Salon, Claude de Maisonil. No, sorry. 1997 Salon, Claude de Maisonil. And then we drank a bottle of 1996 Paul Roget, Sir Winston Churchill champagne. Fabulous. Only champagne. We could also get you some Plononium if you want to...
SPEAKER_04: No, guys. Guys, I don't need anything. I would like you to come and play poker next Thursday, you fuckers.
SPEAKER_03: And then just bring a bottle of... Bring a really nice bottle of wine or champagne. We'll drink it together. That's fine.
SPEAKER_01: Oh my God. I got cases of terrible wine. I'm going to bring them. No, you asshole. Did you hear what this fucker did?
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God. This fucking asshole shows up. This piece of shit showed up last week. And he's like, Chamath, here are these fantastic bottles.
SPEAKER_03: And I looked at this like 1985 Caymus. And I'm like, that's not a good year. Right in the garbage. Right in the garbage. It gets better. It gets better. He has two bottles. And so he gives them to Joshua and Joshua looks at them and Joshua doesn't know what to think. And he looks at me and I'm like, just like, you know, and so Joshua's like, wow, David, thanks, Friedberg. This is incredible. I appreciate it. And then Friedberg does the fucking most brutal thing. Open it. Open it.
SPEAKER_02: Josh was so appalled. He opened it and poured it on Chamath's cherry tea. I threw it out. He took it right to the herb garden.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_03: He said, where did you find this? He goes, oh, it was in my basement in the hot tempered, humid fucking San Francisco weather for 10 years.
SPEAKER_02: I had no idea. I moved, you know, I moved like two weeks ago and I went to the basement to like get all my boxes.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I've got like hundreds of bottles of wine that I have not seen in years. And I started going through these. They were controlled right next to the furnace. They weren't lying flat. I'm like, these are all like, they're all coral. They're all coral. And there's like stuff from the 80s, from the 90s. Yeah. So me, Josh took them and poured them over the arugula salad.
SPEAKER_04: He was just like, no, he didn't.
SPEAKER_02: I would read the fucking vegetables and herbs in the garden.
SPEAKER_03: He basically clean drain. I'm going to bring them on to my windshield.
SPEAKER_02: Any more wine to my house. Oh, my God. I'm bringing wine for your dog. If your dog's coming back with Nat, my dogs are coming back today.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. They're flying back from the. All I have to say about that game is thank God.
SPEAKER_04: Mr. Beast has 100 million followers. Oh, YouTube. Rest. RIP Mr. Beast. All right. By the way, I want to say Mr. Beast is fucking incredible.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what a great, what an incredible entrepreneur. What a great human being.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, for 23 years old to be that sophisticated. He's 23? 23. This guy, I thought he was guy. This guy is clearly on track to being an enormous figure in culture. Oh, he's going to be a fucking multi multi-billion. He is easily determined, hardworking, smart, kind, good, clever, ambitious, amazing, great.
SPEAKER_01: And his ideas, he's creative and he's just a good human. Mr. Beast was one of the most impressive people I've met in a really, really, really long time.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, he and I had been texting for a long time on Twitter and then and then just on text. But then to finally meet him and we had talked on the phone and we had zoomed before I'd never met him in prison. But what an incredible, why don't we have him as the best guest on the phone?
SPEAKER_04: He totally like he totally with the group too. He was great.
SPEAKER_01: Just funny. All we should do is we should all round everybody up.
SPEAKER_03: We should fly to to Greenville. We should surprise him. Yeah. Yeah. Do a little game at his.
SPEAKER_04: Now here's an idea. No, we could do is we could tweak Phil Hellmuth and just have a game and replace Phil in the game with him as our new bestie. Oh, my God. Let's let's replace the new place.
SPEAKER_02: The youth with Mr. Beast, kind of like a better bestie in many ways.
SPEAKER_04: OK, by the way, are we skipping next week to record at the symposium on Monday or are we going to do next week and then also do Monday?
SPEAKER_04: No. Double double down. Let's double down. All right. Listen, I mean, a lot of shit to cover.
SPEAKER_01: Good notification. We're doing our first altogether recording of the all in pod a week. Monday at the TPB symposium. No reason to production board the board. No reason to publicize it. But I'm excited because it's a closed event. What is the purpose of the event? I just get together a bunch of scientists, investors, entrepreneurs and CEOs. And it's a day of science talks mostly. And then some business talks on the next day. But we're having a really fun event the night before with poker. Our friends are all coming to play poker and we're going to record it for the science day.
SPEAKER_04: I'm there for the full time stay for the science day to learn. So the poker night is going to have poker and we're going to record the all in pod live or together in person for the first first time.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that should be really cool. And for those of you wondering, you know, we're going to do our own all in summit, which will be probably like 100 or 200 iconoclastic people.
SPEAKER_04: And we're going to probably do that in the first quarter or second quarter of next year. Post we got to choose a date. You know, my people are going crazy because you won't give them a date.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we should do it in here we go in Rome. Okay, so
SPEAKER_03: you're watching Italy Rome. So I mean, what's Miami? I'm telling you guys there.
SPEAKER_03: Hotel is the sickest hotel in the world. And I'll tell you why the people you have never seen. These people are amazing.
SPEAKER_04: Tremendous. In the wrong way are great.
SPEAKER_03: It attracts the hottest people. I mean, it's fucking right. We're not doing it based on aesthetics. We're doing it on ideas.
SPEAKER_04: It's not just aesthetics. Wherever you are going to go to Rome, you know, Miami. The good thing about Miami is we know it'll be open no matter what. Right.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we can't count. We can host our own super spreader event. Fantastic.
SPEAKER_04: No, I mean, we're hosting the code conference, Kara Swisher's conference is at the end of the month, and sky and Brooke and I are hosting our poker again. And I was like, Is there any way this conference is going to occur? And if it does occur, what happens if they're I mean, obviously, everybody's going to be back, everybody's going to be Mac mass, I don't know if they're going to do testing.
SPEAKER_00: You think everyone should be mass at the conference? They're going to be unless they're going to be because it's indoors and there's a breakout event amongst the vaccinated, which can happen between Delta and Zeta to your you're going to be forced. What do you think,
SPEAKER_04: Sax? Well, I just think how do you effectively have a meeting with people whenever indoors when everyone's wearing a mask? I just think that's and I mean, there's a cheapie beat symposium. Really? We have to wear a mask indoors, not during the dinner and stuff. Look, I mean, I think for poker, but we are testing everyone on entry all three days.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that makes sense to me, right? We do a rapid test at the door. And so but then once you've done the test, and it's the ones negative, why would you need a mask once you go in? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: The stupidest thing is they do stuff like make you wear the mask, but then take it off for dinner. Like what you can't get COVID when your mouth is full. I mean, how does that work? It makes no sense. That's the whole it makes no sense.
SPEAKER_01: Put your mask on. Let's do risk assessment here and then take it off when you sit down three feet away. It's security theater. Well, let's do it. Let's do risk assessment. None of us would go to an indoor event if it wasn't fully vax. Correct. Would anybody attended indoor event of this nature? Hundreds of people if they didn't have the VAX requirement? I would Yes, I don't do what I will. I mean, what I would care about is I wouldn't attend it if people weren't all being tested on entrance. Okay, well, I'm trying to do a good start.
SPEAKER_04: Based on vaccine first. The VAX doesn't seem to eliminate transmission. So for you to go to an event, you would have to be vaxed and tested that day. Morning of rapid test. Yeah, look, I mean, I think in general, everyone's kind of standard. It's like make sure VAX because it reduces the likelihood of transmission. But still, like it's not stopping transmission. Clearly, I'd rather what I care more about is his point of entry testing, which is what we're doing at our symposium. I just want everyone to get tested upon entry.
SPEAKER_01: What would you do? Let's talk about something important. Okay. All right, listen, I think the most interesting thing going on in our industry this week is Elizabeth Holmes has trial has begun. jury selection started this week. And it's going to cover 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud over false claims she made about the blood test results from their knows. They have now selected a jury of 12 Northern California residents consisting of seven men and five women. It took two days to question
SPEAKER_04: around 100 potential jurors about their answers to a 28 page questionnaire that included news outlets they read what news outlets they read if they knew any witnesses and if they had any negative medical experiencing experiences. And it was complicated to get these because it is impossible to not know about it. And now it seems the interesting thing is Elizabeth Holmes, who worked on this company for two decades, close to two decades and was involved in this fraud from start to finish, is now taking the position that she was under the control of her business partner, Sonny balwani. And that he had been abusing her and controlling her. What are your thoughts on and so he's being tried separately, by the way, they're going to be tried in sequential order. So whenever this trial ends, then he gets to get tried. What are your thoughts on if she will be convicted and her defense strategy? I think this is more this is like less about the specific evidence against her, as much as it's and it's much more right now about the whole Silicon Valley fake it before you make it approach to entrepreneurship. And you know, we all hear this from, you know, all the entrepreneurial kind of advisors and, you know, experience stories of experience and stories of success that in order to kind of
SPEAKER_01: achieve success as an entrepreneur, you really have to oversell and promise and create an incredible narrative about where your business is headed. And in many cases that gets ahead of you. Now, the public, the general public that doesn't operate within Silicon Valley with as much breadth as we do, I think they hear the stories of the Adam Neumann's and we work in the collapse and Elizabeth Holmes and this this Trevor Milton guy and Nicola. But there's thousands of these other sorts of smaller stories where VC rolls his eyes, where the first board meeting after raising a money is like, wait a second, we're actually going to be half our forecast when we raise money, or the numbers are going to be way below or the product doesn't actually work as we presented it. Sorry, I don't think I've ever funded a company where that hasn't been the case.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. And so I think that's the that's the big question, right? Come off is like, does this trail does this trial kind of indict the way Silicon Valley operates and the storytelling models and the narrative models, there are examples of these people getting a little too far ahead of their skis. And maybe you can argue, they could perceive something to be non fraudulent, while other people can, you know, kind of perceive it to be fraudulent. But don't we see this kind of broadly in Silicon Valley? And doesn't this kind of bring up a question on like, are all startups now? Is the industry going to have to be able to do that?
SPEAKER_01: And is this going to have a shift as a result of this trial, in terms of behavior as investors and as entrepreneurs, and how you tell stories, how you diligence, etc, etc?
SPEAKER_03: This is this is only going to get meaningfully worse. I don't know if Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud or not. I think that, you know, these folks will be able to figure that out in detail. But here's something that I do know pretty precisely, which is the amount of money that's trying to get into Silicon Valley is going exponentially up. And as that happens, you guys now see it every day where there are firms whose entire business now is just to literally write a check every day. They're closing deals every single day. They're doing zero diligence. And so what that's going to create is an incentive for founders, particularly those whose backs are against the wall, or who's doing something that's highly speculative and hard to diligence to stretch the truth to get the capital. And it's impossible for guys like us to actually step in and do diligence on a lot of these companies, even if you actually have time. But then if the competitive dynamic is such that you don't even have the time because somebody else beside you is going to rip rip in a check with by just meeting somebody. And, you know, quote unquote, having done the work on their own, which is impossible because they're not you don't have access to somebody's, you know, financial books. This problem is only going to get worse. And so I think we as an industry just have to realize that there's going to be an incentive to lie. There's going to be an incentive to stretch the truth. And it's because of the amount of money that's available. And yes, the lack of diligence that's happening.
SPEAKER_04: Sax is this an example, in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, of somebody being delusional as a strength, or somebody committing fraud as a crime?
SPEAKER_00: It's probably both. Now, look, I think you guys are giving a little bit too much credence to the media narrative that Theranos is a quote unquote, Silicon Valley failure. The truth of the matter is there was no major Silicon Valley VC firm, in fact, not even a minor one that invested in Theranos. As far as I know, there was no VC on the board of Theranos. We've talked about this before was a bunch of kind of grand poobah types. And there was no one who actually had the technical competence to do diligence. And so Elizabeth Holmes isn't so much an example of Silicon Valley, as somebody who was selling Silicon Valley, she was selling the promise of Silicon Valley, she was selling the idea that this was going to be a decacorn or a centric to people who are too unwilling to know and I see, you know, Tim Draper, a lot of people are really hanging their hat on the fact that Tim Draper wrote a seed investment to Elizabeth Holmes, I you know, that that really is very different. You know, when you write a seed investment, you know, you write a seed investment, you know, you write a seed investment. Apparently, as with homes was like a neighbor of his, she clearly daughters were friends is my yeah, and she clearly was an impressive person, you know, she came across impressively in person, she obviously cast a pretty big reality distortion field to a lot of, you know, smart people. So, you know, she's the type of person who you would write potentially a sea check to just based on you know, a talent bet. The fact that she later chose to engage in fraud, I don't think that's like Tim Draper's fault.
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't make this like a Silicon Valley fraud again, you know, show us the VC firm that was hoodwinked by this, but you are seeing David, this trend of the the firms coming in and not doing diligence, not having audit rights, not having information rights, not doing proper diligence, and basically relying on the previous investors, right? How troubling is that? And what are you doing to protect crafts LPS?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so look, I think there's a big difference between going into a board meeting and finding out the projections were inflated, because like, frankly, we all take projections with a grain of salt, right, but versus the founder lying about the past, right? So people are always going to put the rosiest picture, or they're going to puff up with the future is going to look like, and it's up to you as the investor to determine if that's true or not, but they cannot lie about the past, they cannot lie about what their revenue was, like,
SPEAKER_00: last year, what contracts they signed before you invested, that is fraud, right? And that is what that's where Elizabeth Holmes crossed the line, she wasn't just painting a rosy picture of, you know, what the technology would look like, you know, years from now, she was lying about their capabilities at the time people were investing, that is the line you cannot cross. Look, we conduct diligence, we, you know, try to look at wheat financials, we try to make sure that the numbers are all true. You know, frankly, we're not investing in things that involve a tremendous amount of technical risk, a lot of technology risk. So we always use the product before we invest the idea that the product would be faked, I think it'd be hard to perpetrate that kind of fraud with a SAS company. But so look, I mean, that's what we look at. Interesting you bring that up, I just dropped a link into the zoom chat, co founder and former CEO of Palo Alto based startup technology company headspin, charged with securities fraud and wire fraud. And this guy, Lakhwani 45 from Santa Clara County, basically was lying about their ARR in a SAS company. And this is this is a raised a bunch of money. So this is an example of something that happened in every company. Yeah, it can happen at
SPEAKER_04: sex. I think I don't think you're inoculated just because you invest in SAS. My point is, if you have a person that's willing to rip in a check $100 million, three hours after meeting you asking for no diligence, at some point, David, your back is going to be against the wall, because you're gonna have to justify to your LPS, why you aren't in some of these theoretically good deals, right. And some of them will become fraudulent. They'll just turn out to be just the laws of distribution. So it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. You're saying Shema?
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I don't do it. How do you have to get deals done? Look, you're up against people who won't do diligence. No, no, it actually comes down to something different, which is then you have to differentiate with real brand, meaning, if somebody really wants you on the cap table, they will absolutely slow everything down to get you. Correct. So for example, like, let's let's assume like it's Mike Moritz, I'll use up. There is nobody in the world, I think, who's not a complete buffoon moron who wouldn't slow his process down.
SPEAKER_03: Or her process down to get Mike to be on their board. And so if you're willing to basically just scuttle an entire process, and just take the fastest money, I think it actually says something that there is more risk in backing somebody like you than somebody that wouldn't slow down. Or, right. So then, you know, the problem is there's fewer, there's fewer and fewer Mike Morris's in the world. You know, I think Sachs is one of those people. I think Peter Thiel is another kind of person. You know, Bill Gurley is another kind of person. So there are these people in our industry where I think that you will slow things down. And I do think allow these folks to do diligence. And I think there will be less fraud in general for that cohort. But if your platform becomes one that's just about ripping money in and I think the late stages are roughly this. They're all it's all brand independent, because the money is the same. The value. Right. Freeburg, freeburg. Yeah. Doesn't it introduce the risk of the retail investor, you know, we're seeing more retail participation via syndicates, you know, via, you know, one off investments, online kind of marketplaces, and also SPACs, where the retail investor relies on, you know, to mock some of these kind of bigger institutional or perhaps some name that gets them carried interest in an investment, doing the diligence.
SPEAKER_01: And if the activity level is going up, and the dollars are flowing in, and the margin of error is increasing, you know, is there not some inevitable kind of SEC backlash and consideration around how our private companies ultimately raising money? And how much they are closing? And we kind of face this, you know, regular, regular, I can address this as a syndicate lead, you know, we only take accredited investor money at this time. And so anything that happens is with obviously, sophisticated people, the top 4% of Americans investing in companies. And in our diligence, now, we have seen a spike in what I'll call massaging, or painting the picture in a way that I'm not comfortable with. And we have maybe tripled the amount of time we're putting into diligence now, because I really care about my reputation. And
SPEAKER_04: maybe 20 30% of the companies we wind up after initially wanting to invest, maybe giving them an offer getting an allocation. In recent history, 2030% were winding up backing out during the diligence process, because their revenue was not software based, there was 100,000 in consulting revenue. For me, it's like, if you're going to, you know, make these kind of decisions early on in the company, I think it's indicative of future fraud or future moral or ethical issues. So we're sitting out in a lot of cases, there are public platforms now Republic and seed invest, which I know are also increasing their diligence process, because there's so many newcomers to the space. And I think there's a level I'll be quite frank here of entitlement amongst founders that is being, let's say, encouraged in unintentionally by the lack of diligence that's going on, people are not taking the process as seriously as they did 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Well, let me Yeah, look, I agree. I think the diligence you're doing is really good. And here's what I agree with with Chamath. So we have seen this trend in our industry of the private equity money coming in in greater volumes, in greater, you know, earlier and earlier, and faster and faster, right. And it started with, you know, you have these, like, frankly, like public company investors were looking at the value at IPO relative to the last private round, and they saw, wow, there's a lot of people who are looking at this.
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, there's like, two, three x mark up here for one year, those are phenomenal returns. Let's ARP that by getting into the last private round, then they look at the second last private round, they're like, well, wait, there's a big return there. So they keep moving earlier and earlier to ARB out that return. But to to most point, it's just they're applying a financial model where they're not in the diligence business. They're just and I think they just see like fraud is a cost of doing business, right? So I mean, they can that's exactly what the portfolio but oh, but the only reason they can model it out that way and have a fraud be an acceptable and predictable sort of cost of doing business is because you had these firms in our industry who actually did diligence at the seed at the series A, right? Yeah. And now and now the private guys, they're moving so early, they're actually even now doing the they're moving all the way to series A. So no one's doing the diligence. And so so that is that is a risk, I think, because it might actually change things. And this is where bringing it back to Elizabeth Holmes. I think it's important here that there's a conviction. I think she should do time. This was clearly a major fraud, big time fraud. And even if she didn't directly perpetrated on Silicon Valley VCs, I think the message to the industry would be absolutely horrible if she gets away with it. And frankly, I'm a little concerned she's going to get away with it. You know, because she is incredibly charismatic. John Kerry was saying on a CNBC hit that don't underestimate her charisma and ability to snow people and the Svengali defense and she just had a baby which you know, people don't want to discuss because it seems like it's sexist, but she is a Svengali herself who will manipulate people in the way you say that Svengali she's a string like Svengali but
SPEAKER_03: right now I exist. What do you handicap her likelihood of conviction? I think it's probably like a 5050. And I think so. So here's, here's the thing when she was running this company, she wanted everyone to believe she was Steve Jobs, even did the media tour with the turtleneck. She wanted everyone to know that she was a jobsy and micromanager who made every decision was responsible for the success. Now that she's on trial, she wants us to believe that she wasn't calling the shots. She wasn't the
SPEAKER_00: person in charge 9% voting power in the company. Yeah, look, yes, you know, this is sort of the the Romy and Michelle's high school reunion defense where she wants us to suddenly believe that she was sort of like, you know, the sort of ingenue who didn't know anything. And, you know, but she might get off because she kind of looks like Lisa Kudrow, you know, three
SPEAKER_00: rounds. That is the number of polls there. Exactly how old you are. And Michelle's wedding, Lisa. She's gonna go up there and pretend to be Lisa Kudrow or something. It's super offensive that she wants to get up there and say that she was this abused woman. I mean, for women who actually are abused for her to get up there and say she's an abused woman and she perpetrated this 20 year
SPEAKER_04: hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. We don't know whether she was abused or not. And if she was, it may or may not have implicated in what she did, which we don't know whether she did because again, thank God for the laws in America, she is presumed innocent. So let's, let's all just like, I think I think what David where I agree with you is the following, which is, we do need to know that, you know, investors, we all sign up for expressing the fiduciary responsibilities, and we all sign up for expressing the fiduciary responsibilities.
SPEAKER_03: On behalf of our LPS, or on behalf of our stakeholders, okay, there needs to be some equivalent standard that founders are held to. And there needs to be consequences for lying, particularly about the past. Because in the future, you say I'm just projecting. But in the past, you're right, you have to be able to rely on what's given to you. Like, look, when we do diligence in a company, we are given everything that they have, right, we talked to their lawyers, we talked to their lawyers lawyers, in some cases, in the past, in the public markets, all of this has to be transparently published so that we can come to our own conclusion. Sometimes those conclusions are right, sometimes they're wrong. But we can at least know that they're not lying to us the minute that it turns out that they were fudging the numbers that they gave us. You're making, you know, the best decisions you can, you're assuming that it's great data. But if the data is fudged, you're fucked. And so to the extent that she did that, then she should be punished. She needs a standard. She this isn't good. And this goes beyond money.
SPEAKER_04: She was switching people's results. She was saying that she was giving them a blood result on her incredible very nice machine. And she was running it to the back and running it on an app. And she so she was taking investors putting their blood into her machine, the very nice machine, then taking them for coffee, running it to an abbot machine and giving their results. I mean, this was the definition of a premeditated, deliberate and multi year fraud. I put her at 80%, likelihood of guilty and I put the over under 32.5 months served, tossed her I don't know what the taking the under 32.5 months served, observed, I'll take the under what do you got?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I hope you're right. Because, yeah, I mean, I'm a little worried that she's gonna figure out a way to pull the rug over people. What, what what are kids gonna get in jail if we were Chinese right now and they played video games?
SPEAKER_03: How many rounds are they gonna get? Basically, I think you would do harder time. So moving on to our next story, the consequences is to the Chinese internet companies. No, what's the consequence to the kids if they're caught on video games? No, no, you're not you're
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know companies have to turn it off. Right, right. Right. All right, here we go. China bans young people from playing video games. This is for kids who are under the age of 18. They are now restricted from playing games on weekdays can only play for three hours, most weekends. And these were
SPEAKER_04: set as a response to China's physical and mental health being affected by gaming according to Reuters. It limits
SPEAKER_03: I think they're doing what all American parents would want our government to do for our kids.
SPEAKER_04: I don't disagree with that. gamers are now penalized if they don't obey and the gaming companies will be as well gaming companies will have to prove they have an identification system in place like monitoring use their real name and their social media. And I don't know how fucking hard it is I have I have I have three kids in that age, age range. I am sweating who they're texting, who they're talking to what game they're playing the new game they want to download. Fuck that this is the only thing I've ever said that would make me want to move to China. This rule
SPEAKER_03: is the most incredible thing I've ever heard. And I and they are so smart. By the way, what's so beautiful is they they send fentanyl in on tik tok to us so that we get addicted to that. And they're like, No, you guys are going to learn STEM so that you can, you know, take over the world. It's beautiful. It's brilliant. Yeah, I would say like everything about China is is a measured decision. Right? The the the Pollock Bureau, the decision makers are not sitting there randomly shooting from the hip based on intuition and saying, Hey, I think we should stop video games. They seem bad for kids. There is clearly evidence and data and statistical models that are driving this decision and their objective function is improve the health, the longevity and the economic prosperity of our society as a whole.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, did you get this statement from China? What are you doing? Comrade?
SPEAKER_02: Continue. I'm pointing out these guys are these guys generally don't make decisions based on someone's kind of like flippant intuition. They make decisions based on what they believe to be in the better interest. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but in the better interest of economic
SPEAKER_01: let's be honest, they want to win. And I think we all know it intuitively, we can certainly read reports. But in the United States, we value individual liberties above all else. And so we don't find ourselves in the circumstance. It seems foreign and scary and crazy. But again, it's another in my opinion, it's another tool. We're gonna get to something else. We're gonna compete this century. Yes, that's true. But let's let's be clear. We don't we don't value human individual liberties. That's not true. That's just what we tell people. But that's not totally true. And you know, that's gonna go there. But yeah, well, I mean, we are literally sitting here fighting. There is a group of individuals who are fighting to wear masks, or not have to wear a mask rather not have to take the vaccine. And at the same time, and I don't know if we want to go there. We are denying a woman's. We have to
SPEAKER_04: let's go to David. David Sachs, are you in support of Texas's abortion ban?
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I think it's a stupid law. And I'll explain why in a second. But just on the China thing for a second. This is I'll be a dissenting voice here. This is like if we had given tipper gore dictatorial powers. I mean, this is insane. They're gonna, they're gonna determine how many hours a kid can play video games. I mean, look, I get
SPEAKER_00: the potential benefit. But this is incredibly intrusive into the lives of citizens. And I'm not sure that video game playing is all together a negative thing. You know, I think it's mostly our kids go through a phase where they play a lot of games, they grow out of it. And you know, you talk to developers, computer programmers, they all went through some phase where they were like, hyper addicted to video games, it, you know, builds hand eye coordination, it builds sort of your computer literacy. So I'm not sure it's like that. Look, obviously, if someone does nothing but computer games their whole life, that's a problem. But as a phase that it can go through, I agree with you, because I used to play three hours of fucking Zelda day when I came home, because I was no, because I was a latchkey kid. I was a latchkey kid, and I didn't have anybody to take care of me. I don't think David, though, that that's what kids are getting when they're playing four hours of fucking Call of Duty every night, four hours.
SPEAKER_03: And I think they're playing 10 hours.
SPEAKER_04: By the way, I think China has another motivation for this ban, which is they've got a lot of because of the one child policy, right, they've got a radical misbalance of, you know, male to female ratio, they've got a lot of young males without romantic prospects in that country. Basically, they have an insult problem. It's a giant insult problem. I don't think we hear much about it. Because they control the media, but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of just random violence out there. And the last thing they want to do is have these in cells playing Fortnite and Call of Duty shooting people five hours a night and then getting their brains wired that way that might be playing into this decision. I don't know. Well, again, you're just validating the mental health aspect. They've studied the mental health implications of these video games.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not arguing for the ban. I'm arguing for the fact that China has certainly done something to indicate they have some data that indicates why they should make this decision. It may be you're right, it may be about kind of, you know, growing, getting people to be more romantic and get out of the house and go get married and have kids and whatnot. But there's certainly a and remember, their objective function is always about longevity and economic prosperity. So you know, there's something that's making them say that we can increase economic prosperity, increase longevity by doing it. And so I think that's a really important point.
SPEAKER_01: I think there's something to read into it. But no matter what every big decision they make has some degree of competitive advantage for them. And you know, those kids, if they're not playing video games, they're going to be doing some doing something else, like, I don't know, programming computers, doing biotechnology in a lab, figuring stuff out on the internet, writing the next cryptocurrency. I don't know, but there's going to be some advantage on the internet. technology in a lab, figuring stuff out on the internet, writing the next cryptocurrency, I don't know, but there's going to be some advantage that's going to arise out of the time and the productivity that's going to be generated by this. And I think that's the calculus that they're undertaking here. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. We all agree they're thoughtful.
SPEAKER_04: The question is, what is this going to do for this generation if they don't play video games? Are they going to be more productive? Are they going to be, you know... They'll be good drones for the collective, you know?
SPEAKER_00: You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. Exactly right. And that's the downside here is even if they get it right in this particular case, how much freedom do you have to give up? How much state surveillance is there in the enforcement? And how many other insane policies will they foist on people with this mentality of you don't get to live your life individually? You got to serve as collective. This is actually, I think your best point, Sax, is that I think what could happen here
SPEAKER_04: is you can overplay a hand and by squeezing people too tightly, you can't play video games. You can't run your own companies. You're going to get replaced. You can't practice your own religion. You can't say what you want. Be a journalist. These things could add up and they could, you know, piss off a young group of people who do what happened in Tiananmen Square or in Hong Kong, and they could be dealing with, you know, their own revolution. And what if it's video games? Humans have started over similarly seemingly simple acts by an authoritarian government taking away people's right to sell fruit on the street, you know, famously started the spring awakening in the Middle East. So you could see this actually, I think, you know, maybe it's a small chance, 5% or 10%, you know, creating a lot of social unrest.
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to go to Texas? You guys want to talk about that? I mean, I have social unrest.
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to lose my mind here.
SPEAKER_04: All right, here we go. SB8 creates a private cause of action that enables Texans to sue those who perform or aid and abet the performance of abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected. The ban comes two years after abortion restrictions were proposed in Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana. The previous propositions were spoken out publicly against by progressive tech companies, companies with a female customer base, women-led businesses. That proposed bill never became law. Sax, you want to just frame for us the legal sort of case here? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Let's go to... Do you want to go back and actually frame Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey? I think those are important to understand what the hell is going on here.
SPEAKER_00: Sure. Okay. Well, so, you know, Roe obviously gave women the right to choose, you know, the reproductive freedom over, you know, invalidated abortion law is very, very in a very, very sweeping way. But Casey sort of modified Roe. It upheld it but modified it saying that the state could impose some restrictions as long as it didn't place an undue burden, that was a key term, undue burden on a woman's right to choose. And I think what was at issue in that case was, I think it was Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania imposed a waiting period and some consultation with an advisor. And so it delayed the abortion but it didn't restrict or did it otherwise eliminate it. Let me add... Yeah. So, Casey, Roe as modified by Casey is really the law of the land right now, which is the undue burden. Then Texas comes along and do you want to explain this law?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So this law is, regardless of what you think about abortion, it's a really bizarre law because what it does is it doesn't just ban, it doesn't ban abortion outright. What it does is create a private right of action, basically a right to sue in civil court anyone who aids and abets in abortion after about five or six weeks. So six weeks. Six weeks. Basically after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, so which is about six weeks into the pregnancy. And the way the law works is that... Okay. So point one, abortion providers are prohibited from performing abortion if they can detect fetal heart tones. Again, that's six weeks. There's no exception for rape and incest. I think that's really explosive politically. And horrible?
SPEAKER_04: Do you think it's horrible as a human? Yeah. I'm curious your personal position.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Well, let's get that. Let me just explain the law. So the law puts the onus of enforcement on private citizens, not government officials. Okay. They do that to avoid, to make it harder to legally challenge this under Roe and Casey. Okay. So what the government has done here, what Texas has done is it gives private citizens the ability to sue abortion providers or anyone who aids and abets someone to get an abortion. So it could be an Uber driver. It could be a friend who simply drives someone to the abortion clinic. It could be a person who provides financial assistance. It could be a secretary who works at the abortion clinic. They can all be sued now under aiding and abetting. And here's really the... The person who had the abortion cannot be sued, but anyone who aided and abetted can be. That's how they're getting around the right to choose. And here's the craziest part is the citizens who choose to sue don't need to show any connection to the person they're suing. And they don't even have to live in the state. Right? So there's no connection to them. There's no personal injury to them, but they're basically suing under a personal injury, under a civil right of action. And if they succeed, the law states that they're entitled to at least $10,000 in damages in addition to their legal costs. So if they win, their legal costs get paid, but if they lose, they don't have to cover the defendant's legal fees. So they just get a free shot here, which is also... I've never seen a loser pay rule like this. I mean, there are loser pay rules, but they're symmetric. So we have an asymmetric loser pays rule, but I don't think we've ever had a civil law like this where somebody can sue where there's no injury to them. There's no standing here. This is the thing that's fundamentally, I think, at odds with our entire legal tradition. And I think regardless of what you think about abortion, this law will eventually be invalidated by the Supreme Court or a lower court on that ground that they're allowing people to sue without standing. And it's a horrible precedent because can you imagine if what Texas is basically doing is deputizing private citizens to enforce in civil courts a prohibition that they cannot or will not pass directly? Is this the best they could come up...
SPEAKER_04: In your... Well, hold on.
SPEAKER_03: Let's just take a couple more facts. This was an extremely well thought out law. I think that the pro-life faction in Texas clearly had some very smart constitutional thinkers that were able to navigate around Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey to get something written that could be passed in a way where Sam Alito is basically punted and said, we're not going to give a stay. And so this is going to have to meander through the courts. There is still a risk that it could just get kicked down to Texas and it could remain a state issue, which there is a big risk. And if that's true, then other states could basically take Iran at copying this law. What I wanted to talk about was if you bring it all together, Friedberg said something about we really value personal freedom and this is where I was like, cynically, actually that's not true. This is an example in my opinion of where this is just like we are very hypocritical.
SPEAKER_03: Where if we talk about a vaccine mandate, there's just an entire fiery up in arms of people usually typically in the same states that are very anti-abortion that are like, tread on me lightly, you can't touch my body, I have the right to decide. But when it comes to this topic, they abandon all of that and they go to the extreme opposite side, which is the government mandates. And to be able to say that to 50% of the population, that just because you are born with reproductive organs that you're treated differently, specifically, you know, a uterus, ovaries and a vagina, you're treated differently than a man, to me just seems absolutely insane and just like fundamentally just erodes this idea of equality, like at just a very principled level. And the even worse thing is that then, you know, the corporations that actually used to be on the front lines of helping to drive social justice so far have been completely absent, right? You have to remember in 2019, when we had these very repressive abortion laws, I think it was in Mississippi or Alabama, you had all of these companies come out and say, hey, no, not here, not under our watch. Then when you had all these voter suppression laws in Georgia, right, you had all these companies come out and say, hey, absolutely not, not on our watch, we will leave the state if you implement these things. But so far, what you've seen in this law is complete radio silence in Texas. And this is, you know, you have to remember, Texas is the ninth largest economy in the world, right? In the world. So you have every single kind of company from technology to otherwise who have chosen to either start or relocate their businesses in the state. And I got to think that, you know, these employees and these leaders of these businesses should be saying something and they haven't said a damn thing.
SPEAKER_00: But freebird, you have thoughts.
SPEAKER_04: And then we'll go to your sex.
SPEAKER_01: Um, look, I feel like everyone has a limit to what they believe defines individual liberty. You know, should everyone have complete freedom to the point that they can take a gun and go shoot anyone that they want? The answer is no. I think even the most diehard libertarians would argue that there's some degree of what is it, John Stuart Mill's sex. You know, you should have the ability to do whatever you want within your sphere of influence, as long as it doesn't intersect with the sphere of influence of others. And so the philosophical argument that I believe the pro-life movement made, which is really a different point of view on values, is that the sphere of influence of a fetus exists at some point in time, and therefore shouldn't be invaded by the mother. Now, I'm not speaking, obviously, my point of view, my point of view is extremely pro-choice, just to be very clear. But the argument is, I think, one that we all kind of blush over and assume that it's about taking away a woman's right without recognizing the voice on the other side, which says that there is a right to life by a fetus at a certain point in time. And so to me, there's almost like this principle debate that arises, and it probably certainly falls more along religious lines than it does along on a religious spectrum than it does on a kind of a libertarian spectrum or a spectrum of liberties that kind of defines that crossover point for people. But clearly, Texas is a really interestingly confused state, right? There's this argument about individual freedom, but now what comes across is a highly kind of conservative point of view with respect to the freedom of a pregnant woman. And so, I don't know if there really is an easy answer. It certainly seems to me nowadays that the pro-choice movement is the majority, the pro-life movement is the minority, and maybe I'm off on that, Zach, you probably know better. But I'm not sure this truly does set a precedent that becomes kind of a widespread recognition of a new way of addressing kind of the pro-life movement or giving the pro-life movement some additional movement. I still think that the pro-life movement remains a minority and over time, there'll be perturbations, but there'll certainly be some resolution over time in favor of what I think the majority is.
SPEAKER_03: Where are all the politically correct people? Where are they? Where are they right now? Where are all the politically... I mean, I guess they were happy to get Mike Richards or whatever the guy's name was fired from Jeopardy last week, but where are they now when we really need them?
SPEAKER_00: But Chamath, are you really saying there's not enough outrage about this? I mean, I'm seeing a ton of outrage on social media about this. Yeah, I see everything.
SPEAKER_01: I see nothing.
SPEAKER_03: I see a lot of useless virtue signaling. I don't see anything that's actually organized in the... Well, I think what we're talking about here is the leadership of companies and leaders
SPEAKER_04: in big companies. Where are they? My prediction is there's going to be a million person march within 45 days.
SPEAKER_01: Okay. Well, let me go back to Chamath's point about whether...
SPEAKER_00: He called this bill smart in the sense that it was really thought through. I agree that it's a deliberate attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade and make it harder to sustain a legal challenge against it. But I don't think this is smart. I think it's stupid philosophically, politically, and legally even for the pro-life movement. So philosophically, I think the problem here is they're creating unlimited standing to sue across state boundaries by somebody who hasn't even experienced harm. I mean, this is so far from what conservative jurists and legal scholars have always professed to believe. I mean, I remember 20 years ago, tort reform and ending frivolous lawsuits was the absolute bedrock plank of the Republican Party. So they're just throwing that out the window here with unknown consequences. Come on, facts. Hold on a second. For example, why wouldn't this be used to circumvent people's Second Amendment rights? Why wouldn't you just create a private right of action to sue anyone who couldn't aid and abetted a gun crime? So I think this is going to boomerang on conservatives. Second... Wait. Okay. Let me get to the political stupidity of it and then... Henry Bellcaster wanted this as one piece so he didn't have to do so much editing, Chamath.
SPEAKER_04: No, look. So I finished.
SPEAKER_00: No, look. The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial today. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a great piece. This is from... They basically say, look, they said, sometimes we wonder if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a progressive plant. That's the guy behind this. His ill-conceived legal attack against Obamacare backfired Republicans in last year's election and lost at the Supreme Court. Now he is leading with his chin on abortion. How about thinking first? So they're pretty clear this is going to get overturned. And frankly, then politically, this is just handed. This is... Democrats are already having a field day with this. So Biden said, this law is so extreme, it does not even allow for exceptions in the case of rape and incest. I mean, look, he's right about that. And Gavin Newsom, the polling for him is now going through the roof because all he has to do for the next 10 days is talk about right to choose in this Texas bill. And he's going to cruise towards defeating the recall because it's basically...
SPEAKER_03: You're talking about something differently than I was. What I'm saying is something very specific. If you go back to Roe v. Wade, it was written by a man, first of all, which we can debate whether that makes any fucking sense. But Harry Blackmun went to the Mayo Clinic and lived there for like six or eight weeks reading medical textbooks and came up with this trimester framework. And again, I'm just going to go out on a limb and say, I don't have a fucking clue what's going on in a woman's body. And I don't think Harry Blackmun did, even though he was much smarter than I and was on the Supreme Court. Okay. And then Casey tried to clean this up by going to this fetal viability thing. So we have this law that was really kind of ill-conceived, but was kind of going in the right direction, but it was really a very first form of judicial activism. We tried to clean it up in the early 90s, but it's always been an issue where eventually what's really been happening is we've been pushing this to a states' right issue. And I think that the cleverness of this bill, and it's dangerous, but it was very well fought out. This was not a random thing where two haphazard dipshits got together and wrote this bill, David. I think that this was methodically planned out for years.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that- They are dipshits though. It's totally going to backfire on them. It's not going to- It's going to backfire on them.
SPEAKER_03: It's going to backfire on them. For example, we now have an activist Supreme Court who may actually not opine on this on the validity of the issue, but say this is a states' right issue. If this stays in Texas and doesn't get outside of Texas, you will have this specific thing hold and stand. And I think that that's a very bad precedent to have set. I think that these folks planned this out, and I don't think they thought that it was an easy way to overturn it. And I think that's why when everybody was waiting with bated breath for Alito to basically stay this, he didn't.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, I think there's a lot of hysteria and hyperbole on social media right now saying that Roe v. Wade's been overturned. The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. I'm not saying that. Yeah, I get it. Those are morons who don't know anything. I'm not saying that. Yes, but they're saying that because the Supreme Court ruled on very narrow procedural grounds that it wasn't ready to hear about the Texas law because a harm hasn't been committed yet. But they haven't said they won't look at it in the future. I believe they will. I believe that this law will be found unconstitutional. Not necessarily do you think the whole companies not not actually because of abortion, but just because I don't because they're changing the legal definition of standing in a way that flies against everything we know about how the court system works. I just I think ultimately, this is too clever by half by the by the state attorney general. I think it was I don't think I think he's a he's a he's a tool.
SPEAKER_03: All right.
SPEAKER_04: Do we want to move on and talk about Apple allowing people to link to their own websites and the the Apple thing is really big news because it kind of goes to show you that you
SPEAKER_03: had you had a pretty progressive legislative framework in South Korea. I don't think it's particularly a huge market for Apple because most of the most of the app activity I think is Android more than it is Apple. But they basically just seeded the market and by deciding to basically conform to this law then then they started with these reader apps and allowing payments. It's the beginning of the beginning for you know, the app stores to be deconstructed and opened this just so people understand Apple said it would allow media apps to create in
SPEAKER_04: app links to sign up pages on those companies websites allowing the likes of Spotify Netflix to bypass the iPhone makers cut of subscriptions. Now of course, you can use Spotify and Netflix on your phone, but you may have probably people haven't experienced this because they've already become members of it and did it on their site, but you can't actually pay through your phone and you can't sign up through the app. They're not they were technically not allowed to link to it. So this is a small small concession only to media folks. So what do you think sacks?
SPEAKER_00: Well I think the term office kind of said this at the beginning of the end. I think there's some truth to that. Look I think the the the the root of this is the fact that Apple has this 30% rate on any in-app purchases and like Bill Gurley said it's a rake too far right just because you can charge 30% doesn't mean you should charge 30%. Ultimately this is why the whole ecosystem has been up in arms they formed an industry coalition to challenge Apple that resulted in a lot of legal challenges lawsuits and a lot of these companies like Spotify and tile they testified against Apple in hearings. So I think this 30% rake has ultimately backfired on Apple. It's created a huge backlash and now they're paying the price. They've already had to roll it back for these so-called reader apps. So you know if what you're doing is buying a subscription to say Netflix, Netflix will now be able to redirect you to the website you can buy it there and then consume the content you know on your iOS app without Apple getting a part of the split. But this now opens the door for this type of thing to apply to games as well where there's a lot more in-app purchases like Fortnite right. So I just think this is a case where you know what's the old line that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Apple has been a hog and now it's getting slaughtered.
SPEAKER_01: By the way I want to point out like this is a really interesting experience of the free market you know clearly consumers and the developers on the apps in the App Store ecosystem were vocal and angry enough that this behavioral change from Apple the structural change kind of came to bear it didn't require regulatory intervention. I just want to point out how important and relevant that is that you know having the market is functional. The market is functional and having the government and regulators come in and you know people complaining to the Senate about Google and Apple monopolizing them out of their businesses ultimately gets resolved when enough there's enough kind of collective mass from the consumer slash partner that says to the the big incumbent player we're not going to play by these games anymore by these rules anymore. I gotta think Lina Khan being appointed did make Apple think maybe maybe it's not enough
SPEAKER_01: fear here right to kind of to kind of start giving concessions right some modest concession
SPEAKER_04: that yeah if you're a Spotify or a Netflix or Audible we're going to let you buy through the app. I mean do you want to live regulation and don't you think this is a nice win for the
SPEAKER_01: free market?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah I do. Well look I don't think monopolies are I don't think letting monopolies do whatever they want is free market. I mean the monopolies end competition they will squash innovation they will you know they will basically get in the way of permissionless innovation so I you know I'm in favor of reading in these monopolies and the two big issues I think with Apple and Google well Apple especially is number one side loading of apps so the idea that they have total control over what app what apps get loaded onto your iOS device people want the ability to create alternative app stores that already exists for Android right so I think that is coming for Apple Apple claims is a security issue but it is I mean what they should do is if you click
SPEAKER_04: on low side load apps it should just give you a warning you are no longer protected by us you know you're right you're subjecting yourself to phishing scams your information and buyer beware and then people can make their own decision I've always thought that would be the best decision for what I like about this is I think this gives Apple the ability to now just compete against everybody in the App Store without having to have this you know well we're partners with you they are not partners with people in the App Store they watch the App Store and when something great comes and emerges they will copy it they just do it slower than Facebook so Apple Music studied Spotify and they created their own Apple product Apple TV Plus now with Ted Lasso is competing against Netflix they watch Netflix and I signed up for Apple Arcade for my daughters because I didn't want them to be paying for like you know in-app purchases I'd rather just have the games be stop upselling them and that's been wonderful for five or ten bucks a month to have that and I pay for the news product so now they can just compete against everybody directly I think all of these media companies are going to be video games podcasts TV shows and music so I don't know if you saw Netflix is going to be doing podcasts about their shows and video games I think Amazon will be video games content it's all going to be one thing and Disney Plus will have games built into Disney Plus I bet in that subscription price so the consumer is going to win ultimately you know I think monopolies are good because monopolies are
SPEAKER_01: just like lazy and it's easier to innovate and compete against a monopoly to be honest than it is to compete against cronyism when there's kind of embedded kind of government regulation that prevents emerging competitors from competing effectively it's a lot harder to win than against some slow big uninnovative monopoly and well yeah go ahead well here's
SPEAKER_00: here's the counter argument so I agree with you that big slow lumbering monopolies can be great to compete against but here's the problem when they control access to an ecosystem when they're gatekeepers that's the problem because now you have to go to them and they're going to be slow lumbering and stupid in terms of allowing you to innovate and when they see you becoming a threat they'll squawk you that's the problem if these guys didn't control platforms that would be one thing but they control the most important platform there is which is the operating system so I just think that you know this is Microsoft and Windows all over again except there's two of them right there's iOS and Android and
SPEAKER_04: Microsoft's example you could load whatever software you wanted they were just bundling they weren't saying you couldn't load net Netscape they're just saying we're going to give you Internet Explorer with the operating system so this is even worse I mean right Apple can't even install your app yeah Microsoft was actually pretty open by comparison but
SPEAKER_00: but there is like a version of bundling here what Spotify said is look when we have to pay 30% and Apple music doesn't have to pay anything we can't compete with that you know and they have a point there yeah it's a it's a completely valid point California's on fire
SPEAKER_04: this is what the third or fourth year in a row this has gotten acute for the Bay Area people are now making plans as free bird mentioned on the last pot I think that there's or two pods ago there was like two or three weeks of the year maybe even a month where you just can't really be outside and do stuff Northern California you can't you can't be outside three of our friends have been evacuated because you know they moved up there in the middle
SPEAKER_03: of the pandemic they had to come down they said it was raining ash you know one of our friends's homes is is literally threatened it's it's it's just like and then the fire season is moving up earlier and earlier in the year you know my kids were in Campan Tahoe this this July and they had to be evacuated and fortunately for us you know we had a really good friend of ours a neighbor here whose whose kids were also at that can't be able to drive up in the but my god like that was you know there's there's about what's going
SPEAKER_01: on there's about eight trillion dollars of real estate value in California and you know if you assume a tenth of that is exposed in the middle of this kind of dense fire these dense fire regions let's say it's a let's say it's a trillion dollars there's a trillion dollars of real estate value that you cannot ensure anymore so I had an idea about this
SPEAKER_04: freeburg I was looking two or three years ago when these fires started maybe it was four or five years ago now for a blanket that could go over a home could be installed or dropped over a home with helicopters I know this sounds crazy but is there a material that's light enough that you could put it on a helicopter and drop it over one of these yeah yeah well why doesn't this startup exist I mean this would be amazing imagine if these
SPEAKER_04: homes had on the roof some sort of a system that when fire heat got there it just deployed the blanket and protected the home I don't know if you guys know this but right now in
SPEAKER_01: Marin County in California it's nearly impossible to get fire insurance and this is becoming kind of a predominant factor in California particularly in all the areas with lots of forest land there's 100 million acres of forest land in California so if a trillion dollars of real estate is actually exposed to fires and you can't get fire insurance ask yourselves the question what's going to happen when hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate literally goes up in smoke or or gets sold off who ultimately bears the cost where does that cost have its economic flow and that's just the tip of the iceberg of the effect that may arise as these things start to take hold you know we had this huge upswing in real estate in Tahoe as everyone moved out of California and went to Tahoe during the pandemic now we're seeing Tahoe real estate sell off like crazy this happened in wine country in Sonoma Napa County last year after the big fires they had there and so there are counties where you start to have these massive fires causing this massive real estate sell off and or the real estate burns and it's uninsured and guess what happens FEMA steps in right the federal government steps in and ultimately the federal government's going to have these like Katrina events four or five times a year that we're going to be underwriting losses for people's real estate that's valued in a way that doesn't account for the effects of climate change you know I started a massive shift in economic value that we're gonna someone's gonna have to pay for over the next decade and this is just the beginning of it all is my is my strong belief I tweeted this out about maybe six or seven months ago but with a another with
SPEAKER_03: this fabulous entrepreneur named David Soloff I co-founded an insurance company called OTT risk and you know we've been trying to build models and price this kind of insurance climate insurance you know social media kinds of like disruptions civil unrest insurance things that are very typical atypical sorry and to your point freeburg it is really really hard to try to forecast what's going on in a way where you can actually ensure these things with the margin of safety and so just as the as a person who would be the provider of this kind of insurance what I'm telling you know what I'm learning is man these and we're negotiating multi-hundred million dollar policies with these big corporates and you know for example like you know they want pandemic insurance if there's the next delta variant or whatever and I have to shut down my facility and here's my economic loss I want to you know you to ensure that and okay it's impossible and so I can only imagine what it's like then and the ground floor somebody to just buy some insurance that says if my house burns down yes it's very hard so and this kind of parametric insurance doesn't exist which means that it if you live in any of these areas like I basically I think what it means is that climate change is going to ravage suburbs and it's going to ravage these sort of like far flung communities because nobody's going to want to step in there and ensure the parametric risk that allows people to live their safety just realized my last company right climate corp we were
SPEAKER_01: what we started out in 2006 we offered parametric weather insurance online and so it was all about our mission was to manage and adapt to climate change and so you could buy weather insurance online and you underwrite the risk and the way you underwrite risk like this and auto insurance and any kind of insurance if you look at past data you build a statistical model that's represented by the past data and the frequency of certain things happening and that's how you price the insurance the problem now is the past data has absolutely no bearing on what's going on and so you have to basically create more fundamental deterministic models of fires which is something no one's really good at no one has any ability to do it because we've never seen this kind of environment before we've never seen hot year after hot year dry year after dry year and so there's no historical data to draw from to build the model so all the insurers throw their hands in the air and they say we can't take on that risk we don't know how to price it and when they don't do that i'm telling you the government's gonna end up having to step in and pay people money for the lost or the government's gonna
SPEAKER_04: have to say the reality here is that we can't afford to do this and you can't build homes there and what's talk about functioning markets i think what we're realizing is the market now is so convinced that global warming is real and you can't deny it that we just can't ensure for it therefore we're going to have to make serious societal changes and that's part of this process insurance being denied for hurricane zones and insurance being denied for fire zones is part of the process of people accepting the reality that we're not doing enough yeah jcal the problem is not that it's going to be denied it's that you're not going
SPEAKER_03: to be able to get it and if you are you're not going to be able to afford it and so so it's not even that people are really open to writing the kind of cover that allows you to go and safely live in lake tahoe 10 or 15 years from now and that that's the shame of it so we have these beautiful places that i think are just going to be under duress and under pressure and it's going to force everybody to live more and more in the major metropolitan areas which is you know i'm not sure that that's what everybody wants going
SPEAKER_04: to change building i mean we saw now in florida and other places you know louisiana other places that are flood zones nobody builds on the ground floor anymore everybody builds you know on stilts and they put a car garage underneath it because it's gonna flood it i have friends in new york this week and i'm here and i had to change my flight to come to new york for the wedding that i'm going to i had to change my flight because last night we were going to be flying into this craziness here they got three inches of rain in one hour uh 15 people my understanding is died in basement apartments because they couldn't or they didn't get out in time it's kind of hard to understand but i guess people stayed in their apartments while they were filling up with water and then did you see the did you see the video of like the the flood waters ripping into the new york subway
SPEAKER_04: yeah it's crazy oh my god then new york is not built for this so now new york's gonna just basically have to say you know what all the basement apartments all the basements that exist they're not livable you can't live in a basement anymore and when we build new structures the first floor is going to be built like they build them in miami which is for water to flow straight through them right the garages underneath are designed to accept massive flood waters i've been spending a lot of time on water recently and the the
SPEAKER_03: thing that i learned this week which i i not the thing that i learned but a great way to summarize this for folks listening if they don't understand climate change is the areas that are hotter get hotter the areas that are drier get drier and the areas that get wetter get much more wet and so when you have a period of dryness or heat it's going to be extreme and when it rains it's going to be so extreme and we're just going to get buffeted back and forth between these two extremes and this is only going to escalate over the next 20 years or 30 years because we have so much embedded pollution that we have to work our way through forget all the new stuff but all this embedded pollution has a cost and we're just starting to begin processing that pollution well welcome to
SPEAKER_04: the all in depressed episode i mean fucking depressive what wait this is my goddamn birthday
SPEAKER_03: guys what the fuck happy birthday the happy birthday women's rights are being uh taken
SPEAKER_04: away the planet is on fire new york is underwater uh covet is not ending nobody can sure ensure anything and uh yeah i don't know man the market's ripping there's lots of money coming
SPEAKER_01: into climate change investors and entrepreneurs are more optimistic than they've ever been you know there's a backdrop of challenge but with challenge because opportunity and i think people are pursuing it like nuts right now and it's pretty exciting no i like the way you say entrepreneurs because i say it entrepreneurs but you said entrepreneurs yes got an e and
SPEAKER_01: a u tomorrow i mean entrepreneur yeah but i'm very it's a very literal pronunciation
SPEAKER_03: of it that i'm like yeah look i i think you're in your real friend galley of the word uh
SPEAKER_03: you're gonna monetize something now sax go ahead sax monetize your new app monetize calling
SPEAKER_02: yeah leverage the all in audience yeah that's that's the good news here colin's doing really
SPEAKER_00: well great long i'm gonna be rich the great the jewel of california calling that 10 000
SPEAKER_02: downloads i i um look i think i think that uh in terms of processing all the the bad
SPEAKER_00: news i i do think we have a tendency to underestimate how much political partisans sort of whip things up in any event should we should we end with this rogan thing i actually think it's a pretty good issue to talk about joe rogan got covid um he was i think they misframed
SPEAKER_04: what he said i actually saw the original quote where he said should a young person uh take the vaccine this was in the very early days of the vaccine or should they wait a little bit and see if it's safe uh i think was his position um not one i agree with but i don't think what he said was absolutely crazy his quote was if someone has an ideological physiological reason for not getting vaccinated i don't want to force him to get vaccinated so and then he got it and he had to cancel some shows i i think there's something kind of funny
SPEAKER_00: here but also kind of serious here about the way the media covers news like this first of all the media is positively gleeful whenever they can report that somebody who expressed any vaccine has sincere skepticism gets covid right it's almost ghoulish i think um look i i'm vaccinated i'm really happy i got the vaccine i think it gave me it helped me have a much much milder case of covid than either was would have had so i'm pro-vaxx or whatever but but here here's what the media does and the craziest headline i saw about rogan was that rogan is taking a horse dewormer that was so dumb referring to ivermectin right now look i i don't know whether ivermectin is a helpful treatment or not i think you got to do a double blind study to figure that out but i also think that it's very dishonest to be describing ivermectin as a horse dewormer i mean the the the person who invented ivermectin intended it as a treatment for humans humans do take it as a treatment against certain parasites it also happens to have a benefit in deworming horses but that's just one of its applications so to describe this drug as a horse dewormer as if it was the only thing it does the the purpose of that is to make anyone who thinks that ivermectin is a possible treatment to make them look ridiculous right and you know so why why is the press doing that well the agenda is the press decided that vaccines are good okay i agree with them about that but they but this is where it goes off the rails they decide that anybody in pursuing that agenda they have to make any alternative vaccine which would be any therapeutic treatment and anyone who would take that therapeutic treatment look ridiculous and this is where i think the media just crossed over into total dishonesty they're doing the same thing with monoclonal antibodies which actually i think our treatment that works but anyone who is expressing support for this all goes back to the polarization with trump right he was
SPEAKER_04: the um drug that he was so which a big proponent of that didn't actually work hydroxychloroquine so i think it's back to that uh what do you think friedberg um are you have any opinion on joe rogan getting dunked on another anecdotal story it's interesting to observe how much
SPEAKER_01: we've kind of as as with a lot of things when i say we i mean like society each of us reading social media the internet media itself uh kind of orient things along a spectrum right and wrong black and white left and right uh i feel like vaccination and vaccines have similarly become you're either vaccinated and you're good or you're not vaccinated or you're bad or the opposite is true um and it's pretty clear there's tons of evidence that vaccination while it may reduce kind of the um the severity of covid um you know there seems to be a much less protective effect with respect to transmission particularly with this delta variant now and that's just a fact you know you can say oh my gosh i'm vaccinated therefore i'm safe it's like no you're also exposed to delta as someone who's unvaccinated in terms of catching it and transmitting it to other people there may be less severity and there may be less transmission one interesting fact by the way is that there's much much much less time when you're vaccinated um and you get infected with delta when you're actually infectious yeah incredibly uh incredibly reduced amount of time from like 10 days to like one to two days um but still that is a very infectious kind of variant and so it's spreading but it's almost like we're blaming people that aren't vaccinated for delta spreading delta spreading because it's a really effective virus at spreading it's like end of story and uh this orientation around like you're you're the reason that delta is spreading is completely false and everyone tries to then fit the story into that narrative you know the children right don't you think there's like such a strong agenda the guy got infected
SPEAKER_02: it sucks like it has nothing to do with was he vaccinated or not he was vaccinated i don't
SPEAKER_01: know who cares like the point is it's not about well i mean he didn't do anything wrong in the sense and he's not to blame this delta variant is infecting people sax got infected with delta he's he's no i mean i i think you're i think the point people are trying to make
SPEAKER_04: here friedberg is that he's been kind of people believe that with his platform he should be more pro-vax because vaccines there's no downside but but jcal look don't you agree there's
SPEAKER_00: such a media agenda here like once they decide what the agenda is gonna be in this case it's pro-vax and i'm not saying that's wrong okay i'm just saying that the way the media works is first they decide what the agenda is going to be then they distort everything to fit what their agenda is so for example ivermectin is called a horstey wormer and and the logic here is completely tortured they just don't want there to be any therapeutic alternative to vaccination they don't want to give credit they don't want to give credit they don't want to give credit to potentially and the same thing's true now look i'm not saying ivermectin is an effective treatment i have no idea but there's no need to distort and demonize it before we even know what the truth is by the way i wouldn't i i wouldn't um use
SPEAKER_01: the term agenda i know that that's a commonly used term that the media has an agenda i would argue that the media has a narrative and i would secondly argue that that narrative isn't necessarily defined by the media or by some set of people in control but that narrative is in effect defined by the consumers that consume the media and they never they click on more they vote with their views and so the more views the more clicks the more dollars you spend on certain media outlets and certain writers the more those writers get more stories to write and the more the consumption happens and so my point of view is that the consumer ends up ultimately being the writer of the narrative and the definer of the narrative and the storyline starts to fit that narrative versus feeling like we maybe felt years ago that oh my gosh there's a few people that this cabal that's in control of the media and they're running everything and they're telling us what to believe in ct i think we vote i think consumers vote with their dollars they vote with their views and as a result that that is the narrative that gets written yeah they were not supposed to be tribal they
SPEAKER_04: were supposed to be objective that was the concept of reporting is to just report the facts and let the not only became a consumer product well now it's well it's always been a consumer product but now it's just become so hard to run those businesses right it's yeah the more you sell the more the more money you make and if it's not you know what it
SPEAKER_04: was supposed to be subscriptions were supposed to inoculate the reader the writers from this that oh we're getting paid for subscribers therefore we don't have to worry about clicks anymore now what's happened it's worse because you will lose your paid subscribers if you don't give them what they want yeah i'm gonna predict right now our downvotes on youtube
SPEAKER_01: are gonna be in the six to ten percent range we've covered we've covered you're not paying
SPEAKER_02: kovat abortion jorogan vaccine uh like this is gonna be our worst rated episode but it was a good discussion between the the four of us all right everybody for the rain man
SPEAKER_04: david sachs please download the all-in app uh just put a c in front of all in and you'll find it in the app store congratulations to the uh folks who got into the syndicate and thank you to sachs for allowing uh all-in syndicate to uh participate and lead the series b we're going to be leading the series b sachs gave us uh the ability to lead the series b 45 bitches 45 i 45 never felt 45 you look good by the way we have a show called all-in
SPEAKER_00: after party on call-in where we you know we've done a couple episodes including we introduced our whack pack um you know so sort of in between so like actually what we should do is all the fans of the show if you like all-in and you want a little more bestie go go to the after show go to the go and sign up for all-in after party we have 4400 subscribers already after one day on the app it's pretty good yeah that's good i mean it'd be great for
SPEAKER_04: those especially if the whack pack gets in there i i talked to our guy who does the uh merch the bestie merch guy and he said he's made like five or six grand on merch in the last quarter he's paying his way through school on it that's so great yeah i'm happy for him all right uh freeberg we'll see you at the uh production board closed event nobody can get in sorry if you want a ticket it's not available chamath happy birthday happy birthday
SPEAKER_01: c thanks guys all right we'll see you all wait sachs this is where you say happy birthday
SPEAKER_03: you fucking yeah happy birthday say i love you bestie hbd hbd slash hbd hbd uh has sachs
SPEAKER_04: ever used uh an emoji i don't think sachs has ever used some emoji i mean i i have i have 10 years of text messages with this fuck he's never used a single emoji once no that's
SPEAKER_04: because he has no emotion we'll put the emoji in there in the david he's written he's written
SPEAKER_03: at one point smiley emoticon he wrote those words all right and congratulations to producer
SPEAKER_04: nick who is getting married yeah great fucking decision see you on the other side you fucking dumbass congratulations nick we love and rachel and
SPEAKER_04: rachel congratulations guys rachel you're gonna get half of the call-in stock that nick
SPEAKER_03: has yeah congratulations you got half of his advisor shares to to call in all right we'll
SPEAKER_04: see you all next time bye bye
SPEAKER_02: oh man we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release that out what you're the bee bee what you're a bee
SPEAKER_00: i'm going all in
