SPEAKER_03: Jake how it looks like he's going to a night at the Roxbury.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, you look horrible. Thank you. Fucking horrible. Okay. Appreciate it. Is that your MCI pet or what?
SPEAKER_10: Thanks for coming. This is the Production Board Symposium 2021. Tell us just a little bit about why we're here, David, and what this is and what it represents for the Production Board.
SPEAKER_02: The Production Board Symposium, second ever. Thank you all for being here. We're excited. We have an amazing group of scientists, engineers, folks from academia, from business, from the investing community, some of our investors. So we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple of days and thought we would chase half of you away by hosting the All-In pod tonight. So here we go.
SPEAKER_10: Great. Okay. So first up in the news, Rolling Stone amplifies false ivermectin story. You were following this, Chamab. What do you think this ivermectin controversy and you want to little give a little summary of what the issue is before we talk about the hypocrisy of it?
SPEAKER_09: Well, on September 1st, Oklahoma news station K4 ran a story and published an article on ivermectin overdoses.
SPEAKER_10: Backing up rural hospitals. The article was titled patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospital hospitals and ambulances. First line of the article quote, a rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the home dewormer medication ivermectin to fight COVID-19. Causing emergency rooms and ambulances to back up on September 3rd, Rolling Stone amplified the story in its own article. The only problem was they treated they tweeted it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold. It turns out the picture was people waiting for vaccine shots back in January, not gunshot victims waiting to get into the hospital.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the story is totally false. You understand that right? Well, I didn't want to say fake news, but I know beyond it was beyond fake news.
SPEAKER_09: This was basically a doctored up conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. Look there. You tell me if the science of this is wrong with the whole the whole premise is ridiculous. So ivermectin basically as far as we know, because we don't know that much acts on a handful of specific characteristics. One we know to be glutamate, which we don't really express in the same way as like fucking worms. And so yes, technically it can be used as a dewormer, but there are four or five other ways in which it acts, which we don't know anything about, because we haven't taken the time to do a broad based double blind study. So I think the fairest thing to say about ivermectin is we don't know what it is. And so neither the people that propose to use it as a solution for COVID nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from the basis of fact. But then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea that you know, people aren't getting vaccines, they're going to use this other thing. They basically doctored up an article that wouldn't be so bad because nobody reads Rolling Stone. Right. It's kind of a it's like it's kind of it's an ancient brand.
SPEAKER_10: No, he's going there for medical news. Yeah. But then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really, really smart, who amplify it.
SPEAKER_09: Rachel Maddow amplifies it. Jimmy Kimmel does it on a comedy skit. And then all of a sudden, there's this enormous outrage. But the problem is you can't put the genie back in the bottle when it turns out to be a completely fabricated lie. And then all the people that are purporting to basically push this lie who now have been outed have no consequences because they're on the left screaming at the right. And what happened when it was the other way around, we basically started to put people in boxes, we basically kicked them off these platforms. And again, so you have this compounding building double standard. That to me is the whole the worst part about it. David, when we look at the ivermectin story, we also saw Joe Rogan got COVID.
SPEAKER_10: That was a big ha ha moment for a lot of people. And he took ivermectin as part of his treatment. And then people started amplifying that he was taking a worm drug for horses. Dewormer. Dewormer. And it's at best an antimicrobial.
SPEAKER_09: Right. It's used for both situations and a doctor prescribed it to him.
SPEAKER_10: He's thinking of suing some folks for for reading this. What what does this overall say about the state of communications around this pandemic? Yeah, I mean, look, this is really a media story.
SPEAKER_03: You had Rolling Stone published this article based on a single source. You have this one crank basically saying that emergency rooms are turning away gunshot victims and people having heart attacks. Okay. And all they had to do all Rolling Stone had to do was call up any one of these several hospitals, they immediately would have refuted the source, but they didn't do that. They also could have simply googled the number of toxic ivermectin cases to find out if it was even plausible statistically that you could have ivermectin overdoses flooding Oklahoma hospitals, but they didn't do that either. Why didn't they confirm the sources? Because the article was too perfect. It confirmed all of their priors. Their first prior was about ivermectin. They've been waging this war on ivermectin claiming it's a horse dewormer when it's actually that is one of its purposes, but it's not the only one. It was a it was a drug designed for humans is used against parasites. Now, as Jamaa said, we don't know whether it's effective against COVID. They got to do the double blind studies, and we'll find out but that was sort of their first prior. And let's face it, the second prior was that this is in Oklahoma, right? And so Rolling Stone wants to believe you have all these maggot idiots out in Oklahoma, eating horse paste. Okay. And that's why they love this story so much. And that's why Rachel Maddow loved the story so much. And she then starts spreading it. Okay. And after she gets called out, including by say Glenn Greenwald, as of last night, she had not taken it down. Now why? Because she knows there are no consequences for misinformation and lying. Why? Because Twitter and Facebook do not punish people on the left for misinformation. That is a penalty. They only meter out for people who disagree with their cultural and political biases. She's part of the secret cabal that gets the get out of jail free card.
SPEAKER_09: I don't I don't even think it's secret. I just think these people all are part of the same cultural sort of milieu.
SPEAKER_03: They all have the same political cultural biases. And there is never look, where is the Twitter warning the Twitter label on the Rachel Maddow post even now, saying that this tweet this article is misinformation? It doesn't exist because it's inconvenient.
SPEAKER_09: Freebird. Let's talk about the science of I think I would do $40 for all in podcast live.
SPEAKER_02: It's dynamic. It's like it works. Yeah. By the way, you're on the show. So okay.
SPEAKER_10: Tell me the last time we heard a news story that didn't have bias to it.
SPEAKER_02: What was the last general thing that was reported that we didn't feel had the angle that then elicited emotion, either love or hate or alignment or not? With the audience? You can have that reaction to facts. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal just now about like the the Democrats proposal on taxes.
SPEAKER_09: I have an emotional reaction to it, but it's fact based.
SPEAKER_02: I've got 100. Is it really? Was it? My reaction or?
SPEAKER_09: No, the story.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, they just said that they the the house proposal now is to move the cap gains rate from 20 to 25, the corporate tax rate from whatever it was to 26 and a half. But it's my point is, there are articles written by folks who just want to get the facts across and let you judge whether it's good or bad. Who knows? Time will tell. Then there are folks that basically manufacture shit because, again, I think and I think is Matt Taibbi that said this, because it creates moral mania drives the narrative drives the emotion. But it's the last grasp of power of journalism. That's all they have left at this point is just to basically make it a complete fucking free for all. And in it, they still have some kind of relevancy. I have these old New York Times newspapers, like the whole year printed from like 1936 through 1944.
SPEAKER_02: It's cool. It's like in this huge book. And, you know, well, but you must have been out all the time.
SPEAKER_09: But you didn't have time to read those. Yeah, I mean, but you flip through these things.
SPEAKER_02: They are they are just like old like ticker stories. You know, it had absolutely no like narrative attached to it. There was no like these are the people almost the implicit right and wrong, right? The implicit morality of every decision that's being made of everything that's being reported on. I have a feeling the only thing that's going to be left in like 10 years is The Economist and then like the mob rule in the metaverse. And that's kind of what you also have podcasts where people can discuss these things and maybe a more honest, transparent, few great podcasts like that.
SPEAKER_02: Mr. Anti Facebook, what do you think about this Wall Street Journal article says that there's a secret cabal that basically gets to get out of jail free card on Facebook and nobody else does.
SPEAKER_09: Millions of people though, it's it right? Yeah, that's a lot. You work there.
SPEAKER_02: It's exactly the point I've been making, right, which is that there's two sets of rules.
SPEAKER_03: If you are part of the in crowd, if you share the cultural biases, if you're part of the same class, whether it's, you know, socio economic or political, whatever, that of the people who are doing the content moderation, doing the censorship, you get a get out jail free card, the rules are different for you. You can be Rachel Maddow and post an article that's complete bullshit. And even after the entire Twittersphere calls you out, you don't post a correction. But you don't get labeled, you don't get censored. But if you're on a different part of the political spectrum, you do. I mean, there's two sets of rules. Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's insane. I mean, this is exactly what I think people have been saying for a long time when people say, Oh, you know, it's algorithmic, it's not really human controlled.
SPEAKER_09: There's, there's no real intervention. And then you find out there's actually literally something called cross check, which his definition is check the hue, you know, check the algorithm and override it with my own bias. That's the that's the definition of what the feature is. Well, I mean, whenever we start down the censorship route, like who gets to decide, and then what is their motivation? And even if they have pure motivation, there's no way to, you know, not
SPEAKER_10: assume the platforms die, assume everything, the platforms and decentralizers, and then like all media is through substack, or through the colon app or through other kind of media, decentralized crypto based.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. There's no longer a platform, there's no longer a sensor model, what's gonna end up happening, people are going to click on the stuff that they want to hear confirmation bias, it's going to become more extreme, it's going to become, you know, even more heated, there's going to be splintering of media creation as there is right now that we see today, right? Every every element of the spectrum will be kind of produced. And you're going to end up clicking on the stuff that creates the greatest emotional response to people like to consume.
SPEAKER_10: How does a citizen who wants to inoculate themselves from fake news bias? How do you recommend they go after science? And how do they have to learn the stuff for themselves? They have to try to become an expert themselves? Yeah, it's hard, like anything that's hard, right? I mean, there's there's got to be a will, I don't think that that's really it's not to be discouraging. I just think that it's a lot easier to not do that. Right? So it's a lot easier to consume ice cream all the time. It's a lot more fun to consume ice cream all the time and to kind of plan your diet need healthy and workout and all this sort of stuff. And I think that's really where, you know, media like a lot of things is headed, as we create these kind of feedback loops that are all because everything's digital, everything ends up becoming feedback.
SPEAKER_02: I bet you, I bet you if you look inside, because like now, some rabid politician will get a hold of this Facebook crosscheck thing, I bet you. If you look in graph, the number of people that were essentially whitelisted from being able to say whatever the hell they want, versus what was popular on Facebook, you'd see a left versus right distribution very clearly. You'd basically see it because if you look at it now, I think there's a camera his name, but he's a he's a former New York Times reporter that tweets out every day, and he's a former New York Times reporter.
SPEAKER_09: tweets out every day, the top 10 links that are shared on Facebook, and it's like a fucking train wreck. It's like one normal article. And then it's like nine, like, right wing info wars, Ben Shapiro, daily wire, it's a train wreck every day. And so if you're, you know, a hipster sitting in East Menlo Park, you know, at some point, like the cuffs in your jeans are rolled up too tight, the fucking shirt cuffs are rolled up too tight, you know, and you're just freaking out. And then you're like, we need to create something. What do we call it? And we're like, cross check, you know, and then all of a sudden, what happens is you just start introducing people hoping that then the list that gets published every day on Twitter changes. But then what happens actually, is you find the exact opposite thing happens, that people are so like they sniff out the bullshit. They're like, what is going on here, but then they double down. And the next thing you know, Ben Shapiro is nine, you know, eight of the 10 top stories every day on Facebook. And that's how you have Donald Trump and everything else.
SPEAKER_02: Next topic. Well,
SPEAKER_03: go ahead. Well, I mean, I don't want to believe. Yeah, look, I think both sides are capable of both sides of the political spectrum are capable of spreading misinformation and bullshit. And you have to vary your information diet, right? I mean, if all you do is participate in, you know, the right wing or left wing echo chamber, you're going to buy into the ivermectin hoax, you're going to be story here from Rolling Stone, or whatever it is. So you have to make an effort to get into very important diet.
SPEAKER_10: But more the lab leak theory, I mean, loudly theory exactly, but we now have five of these during the pandemic alone, right? Right. But see what what I object to is the fact that the censorship rules only seem to apply to one side of the spectrum is look, both sides are capable of spreading misinformation. But only one side is being censored. Why? Because the people running these powerful tech companies agree, they're like, you know, 90 plus percent of that political persuasion. That is
SPEAKER_03: not healthy. Can we can we serve the audience and see if they agree? Raise your hand if you agree? How many people agree with sacks that Trump should be reinstated on all platforms? There you go. How many people agree that the tech platforms have a political bias? How many disagree with that statement?
SPEAKER_02: Nobody. Interesting. Tell Phil Doit. Phil Doit's wife is the chief business officer at Facebook. Thanks. Tell us, let's check with Phil after the next investing day.
SPEAKER_09: For the viewers at home who couldn't see that because I don't know, do we have the audience on? Yeah, no. It was 99%. Everyone except for Phil Doit. These are silicon, best described as Silicon Valley to Barney. So that's why we have to raise his hand. But to be clear for people listening, Phil's wife works at Facebook. He's got to say no, it's okay. It's okay.
SPEAKER_03: 99. But everybody else here agreed with that. And these are all people who are in the tech industry. They know. So how many of us are Democrats? I mean, we're all mostly Democrats, I would guess. How many people voted Democrat? How many are not Democrats? How many people voted for Trump? Raise your hand. Nice and high. Nobody.
SPEAKER_10: No, literally, there's only that's very interesting. Here's a question I have. Okay, so we are firmly going down because I think it's pretty clear to me, I'd be willing to make the bet that the media is on the side of vaccine mandates. Okay. They want the top down control and the sense of theoretical safety that a vaccine mandate gives them in their own little bubble. And so that's why I think they support this. And I think, you know, blowing up Ivermectin,
SPEAKER_09: was kind of a method of many that they've undertaken to do that, whether we believe in vaccine mandates or not. But now it's coming. It's coming in the LA school district. It's, you know, Biden is trying to push this thing through the BLS. This is going to be a very, very big deal. What do you guys think is the right thing to do on vaccine mandates, irrespective of all we're going to hear over the next
SPEAKER_09: government government or private employer mandates, or both? Well, we should let's walk through it. I'm using both for the government government employees. Let's start with that. Yeah. Well, the government mandate. No, it goes through the BLS. It says any company, public or private that is 100 employees or more. Well, I mean, I think we all agree that people in the military or people in healthcare, they should all be vaccinated, or they shouldn't come to work. Correct. Well, that's also not not even enforceable. Like Sorkin,
SPEAKER_09: Andrew Ross Sorkin tweeted out like he had to take his kid to the urgent care. And he walked in and the doctors weren't wearing masks or something. Yeah, I read that and said something about like not being vaccinated. It doesn't matter, blah, blah, blah. And he like that goes to enforcement. But I mean, moral liberal military has said, I thought, wait, you brought your kid to the fucking urgent care. Don't you first need to know what's wrong with the kid. You can't prosecute this person's opinion on masks and vaccines before you figure out what's wrong with your kid.
SPEAKER_09: Well, what do you think sex, military, military healthcare teachers,
SPEAKER_10: I think the crux of the issue is whether employers should be able to require that. Well, there's two issues. One is whether employers should be allowed to require it, which I think everybody agreed, not everyone, but but most people, I think, agree that private employers and you could lump the government in with this should be allowed to test or their employees or require their employees to be vaccinated if they want to.
SPEAKER_03: And, or at least I would support that part of it is let private enterprises require vaccination if they want, if they decide, hey, in order to come back to the office, you got to be vaccinated. So everyone's safety, they can impose those rules. Now, the question is, do we need to go beyond that to have a federal mandate? And it's not that I'm anti vaccine, I just think that's like an awfully authoritarian thing to do. And it raises a bunch of questions. So for example, I have a friend who owns a chain of dry cleaners. Okay, he's got over 100 employees, mostly minimum wage in a bunch of different locations, about 20% of his ethnicity. What does that do with anything? Just curious, he's Sri Lankan. Anyway, so he's the third most famous Sri Lankan American. Anyway, so he's got 100 employees, about 20% of them are anti vaccine.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_03: And they will not get vaccinated. Okay, so they will walk out if you know, if this is required to another job, that job, hold on, but he can't run his business. If there's a 20% walkout, he just can't do it. Okay, so now we get to the soft part of the mandate, which is, well, instead of requiring the VAX, he can do a weekly test. Well, we did that outside here, who's going to pay for those tests? Who's going to administer them? Is it like, you know, that a nurse out here with the full, you know, you know, hazmat? Yeah, the hazmat thing. So you know, that's not cheap. So how who's gonna pay for that? Who's gonna do that? What's the documentation around that gonna be? Is that get logged into the computer system? What kind of proof? Is it does it require a trip to the lab? Or is this something we can do in five minutes? I mean, look, if we had done what freeberg said a year ago on this pod, we should do, which is have these $1 five minute tests be available everywhere, then maybe that sort of rapid test out would make these mandates more effective. And that's why we're making these mandates more palatable. But we don't have that yet. You're the aren't enough of these. It turns out, we still need it even with the vaccines, because no vaccine is going to be 100% effective. And with rights, but my point is, is we don't really have that solution operationalized, you know, having a hard VAX mandate on 100 million employees of private enterprises, you know, that's going to cause I think chaos in the economy. What if we get a variant David or
SPEAKER_10: a variant, God forbid, that is more dangerous than delta, let's say it spreads just as fast, but it's five times as deadly. Does that change your thinking about this mandate? And where do you stand on the mandate? No, I think the mandate in this very specific narrow instance makes sense. And I think what we should be fighting about is how we actually write it so that it's not wholly expansive. And the reason is because we know that there is a probabilistic distribution of outcomes where a non trivial percentage of them results in a
SPEAKER_09: variant that is deadly. And so we can understand the math and we can understand a sense of time to figure out that if we don't do something, and if we don't get to some amount of control around what this is, ruin, we're all in really big trouble. So because of that specific thing, I just think this is where you know, look, the president has the ability to invoke the war measures act to do all kinds of things that are super normal. And, you know, we would never say that those abide in normal times. And we've created a framework for him to be able to do those things in non normal times and then revert to normal. I think this is one of those cases just because I don't think the economic consequences and the social consequences. If we let this thing continue to compound and continue to mutate, it doesn't make any fucking sense. We're not learning anything. We could have used the warming mandate act across two presidencies to demand some companies make $1 test. Yeah, we have 7580 test approved in Germany, they're down to two or $3. Why has the FDA not gotten us to that level that Germany's at? And why haven't we done the war mandate? I mean, we have like a constructed capitalist model of like, let the free market tell the government what is the right thing to do. And so then they
SPEAKER_02: invite Abbott and they invite the guys in and they're like, you know, the White House and they have a consortium meeting and everyone's kind of a little bit chuckling about this, like, Oh, this is awesome. It's another $2 billion payday, which is what they just got. I don't know if you saw the the write up today. But the federal government is paying Walmart for the difference between the wholesale cost and the retail cost so that consumers cannot now go buy Abbott tests at the wholesale price at the store $2 billion taxpayer money gone. When we could have had a bunch of smart scientists get together at the White House with a bunch of engineers take over a friggin factory and on a piece of paper, print 8 billion fucking tests, and then chop them up and distributed them for 50 cents. And instead, we have this problem where we're like, depending on the Korean supply, I kid you not, of the test kits that are like plastic. That's where they make all the like pregnancy test kits and all this stuff. And these this like the commercial model is like, tell us how you want to make these tests. Tell us what the right model is. And of course, you end up with a $30 test when in Germany, you can go buy a 50 cent test in any liquor store. And so it's it's constructed straight up corruption. And if you go back, like, you know, I don't know if you know, the production boards named after the trade into the microphone named after the war production, which was set up during World War Two. Humble. What's that? It's pretty humble. Yeah. took the war out. But it was, but the idea was like, how do you take a system level design approach to solving kind of big problems. And one of the issues that we had during World War Two was a supply chain problem on making tanks and planes. And so they put together a bunch of smart people. Deutsch knows this better than anyone.
SPEAKER_02: Because he was alive. He was alive. And he was you can look at the old photos. He was there. He had the hammer. He made it in the factory floor. Old as fuck. And, and there was basically a coordinated effort. It's his birthday today, by the way, sorry. Lakhaim, happy birthday. Happy birthday. But there was a coordinated effort by engineers at the top down to design a system for making these things cheap and fast. And that's an approach that I think we lost, right? Like we kind of gave way to this model of laissez faire, like you come in, you tell me what you think we should do. Okay, that's a good idea. Let's take photos, and we're out. And that's it. Like, we don't have a wartime mentality right now. We haven't had a wartime mentality since COVID hit. Everyone's continued to try and parade around and get reelected and, you know, earn votes. We're not taking this, we're not acting, we're thinking, you know, like, every, every time kind of a business or government or any organization goes through a phase, it goes through a wartime phase or peacetime phase, we should be acting like we're in a wartime phase. And we're not can I ask you a question? If you may, three or four of us basically pointed up some money? Could you go and print 8 billion of these fucking tests? In the US, you cannot get them approved without the FDA. I'm not asking for approval. I'm saying could you do 100%? And how long you can buy some old friggin paper mill and in three months, I mean, you know, this is actually people in this room.
SPEAKER_02: Who could do this in now isn't there a framework with an FDA that basically allows you to effectively experiment on yourself? There's a compassion. It's for drugs. It's for therapeutics, not for diagnostics. So you're saying that if I want to get build my own test and use it, you want to build it. If you want to build a diagnostic test that tells them on whether or not they have an illness, you have to get FDA approval in the United States. So that's all published the form.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a pretty statement is regulatory capture, like is one of the biggest issues. And in related news, by the way, another insane statistic, just sorry to interrupt, I saw this today. I forgot someone we know tweeted this. The Who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the US healthcare system? 300 to one. Yeah, I saw a 300 to one in
SPEAKER_02: 900 to one today. Oh my god. And that is up from five to one in 1970. By the way, think about that. Can I just build on what you said? 900 to one.
SPEAKER_09: Your initial tweet said 300 to one, and it ended in 2010, right before Obamacare passed. So from 300 to 900 was all Obamacare. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: regulatory capture, Sax is shaking his head, which by the way, nothing against Obamacare, because I think like coming as a Canadian, I actually believe in subsidized healthcare. And I think the the principle of Obamacare was great. But there was one fatal flaw, which is it basically said, Okay, you know what, you're capped at the following margin. And the minute that people said, wait a minute, I can only have a 20% gross margin. What do you do? You just jack up the
SPEAKER_09: prices to basically jack up revenue. Because if you can only take 20%, you're going to take 20% of a bigger number than a smaller number. And so it completely burned the incentives for any healthcare company in the United States to do anything other than just basically walk prices up. And it's funny, because if you look at the stock prices of these companies, you you would have made more money being long United Healthcare than you would have been owning Facebook, Google, any of these other tech companies in the last decade. Crazy stat.
SPEAKER_10: Speaking of regulatory capture, Tesla got left out of this new tax credit or proposed tax credit insane for electric cars. I don't know if you saw that. But Tesla wasn't invited a couple of months ago to Biden's Evie summit. Elon responded like, I wonder why I wasn't invited. It turns out it's because they're not a union shop. Their employees make much more money than union employees make. And now as a punishment, but hold on as a punishment, the $12,000 credit is going to be the credit that they're giving to or they're proposing to give to all even the manufacturers is only if you have union employees. It's 4500 less to Tesla. So literally two massive regulatory captures and corruption go or maybe sacks. No, I mean, I don't have much more to add to that. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is to serve the unions. It's not to serve clean energy, or the EV industry. I mean, a little bit for you. It was mostly for the unions.
SPEAKER_09: The on the one hand, what we do is we say that climate change is this existential issue. But then when the rubber meets the road, if you look inside the infrastructure plan today, we unveiled basically how we're going to do all the tax credits. And again, it's just an enormous amount of just sloppy regulatory capture. We're doubling and tripling credits in certain places. We're disallowing credits in other places. When you follow the dollars, what happens is you can map it to companies, those companies tend to be mostly public, large balance sheets, large lobbying efforts. And it's not necessarily the most important companies that matter. So if you know, if I said to you, what are the most important companies in climate change, you'd probably say, well, maybe it's direct air capture, maybe it's nuclear, maybe it's some other thing that basically helps you go to a different place. And where does all the tax credits and tax dollars go? sun run sun power. These are companies that basically, you know, have this oligopolistic hold stranglehold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes across the United States. And it's not to say that that job isn't important, but to basically explicitly block other people out. Because all the chatter today on, you know, or some of the chatter today was around just if this bill passes as written, you're going to see these stocks rip. And so obviously, the positive reinforcement loop of Wall Street and hedge funds getting behind these companies, their market cap goes up the amount they allocate to lobbyists go up, and then all this bullshit just continues to cycle through the system.
SPEAKER_10: freeburg, how far are we away from small nuclear reactors and fusion just from a science perspective, and then on a regulatory basis? I don't know enough. I mean, yeah. I look, I mean, from what I've seen, there, there are great technologies that, you know, we should be able to kind of realize my understanding and speaking to investors, some in this room. And I know, chamat looked at this area a lot is, you know, there's the the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear. Technically, it seems like there's great breakthroughs. There was an announcement from a group this past week. CFS Yeah, on a new,
SPEAKER_02: superconducting magnet system that they spent years designing. This is a Bill Gates backed company. Anyone here an investor? No.
SPEAKER_02: And basically, it enables like the Tokamak plasma fusion based systems to be kind of reliably produced now. And so they've had a proof of demonstration of this, of the superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma, which is like 10 million degrees Celsius, in a little donut that spins around. And that plasma allows you to kind of pull energy out that can be used for, you know, effectively, you put a bunch of material in this thing runs, and then you can control the energy that's going to be in the system.
SPEAKER_02: And more energy comes out than you put in its magic. And so, you know, this has been a theoretical kind of concept for decades, getting the superconducting magnet system to control the plasma in a very small space, using a very small kind of system was proven. And now they think that they're, you know, call it four or five years away. You know, by the way, everything in nuclear is always four or five years away. So four or five years away with a grain of salt from kind of having a demonstrable kind of system. So there's technologies that are clearly like on the brink or proceeding nicely. But as we know, a lot of a lot of these sorts of technologies similarly are kind of regulatory burden. We're about 100 degrees away, I think from a from a operational functional room temperature semiconductor, and superconductor, sorry. And, you know, I've told a team that I'm working with on this project, I don't want to go into energy generation, or unless we can do it in a small form manufacturing thing that can be adopted broadly. But if you try to go and, you know, basically build some distributed energy resource out over here that powers Kavala point, it's impossible because you run into these people who don't really understand the science won't take the time,
SPEAKER_09: and, you know, we've taken so many steps backwards from nuclear, that it's probably just going to take decades. And it's going to take some cataclysmic climate change event, where the only way out is this super abundant energy source where you're willing to basically say, ah, fuck it, we're fucked. Otherwise, by the way, if you were to go to Mars today, you wouldn't be pulling a bunch of fucking, you know, oil out of the ground and burning it and, you know, rotating, you should, I mean, and you wouldn't necessarily I mean, you'd be using, you know, solar at the beginning, but you wouldn't necessarily rely on solar, the, you know, the cost of material to transport from here to Mars, to yield the best energy potential would likely be some sort of nuclear power source, right? As it is in a lot of military
SPEAKER_02: systems. Question, Saks. Elon was saved by Obama. I mean, just kind of like having we were there, you meaning like, you know, it was in that moment, he was able to get that deal with Daimler, he was able to get these, you know, tax credits, the the auto bailout, you know, all of that stuff. But then it seems like we're in the middle of a Democrat administration, and they may go out of their way to basically try to fuck this guy.
SPEAKER_09: I just think it's like become a special interest free for all. There was an article today that the national deficit year to date is 2.7 trillion. And I think that we're on October 1 fiscal year. So there's one more month. So it'll be about 3 trillion. Last year was over 3 trillion because of COVID. There haven't gotten to the infrastructure bill yet. That's gonna be another 1.2 trillion. On top of that, the Democrats are saying they want another three and a half. Well, not all Democrats, but thank God for Joe Manchin, but another three and a half trillion.
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, most people can't even really say what's in that three and a half trillion dollar bill. I mean, it's we're at 28 trillion, something like that of national debt. I mean, and it's all just like special interest plunder.
SPEAKER_10: Well, I mean, if you look at the results, the results aren't there. Correct. Yeah. And then on top of that, well, you know, I understand. I mean, with respect to Obamacare, okay, that's a major item on let's call it the Democrat wishlist was to give everyone health care, and we didn't even get there. Okay. But you can sort of understand that. But most people, I think even on the left, can't really say what the big ticket item is, that's going to be delivered for this three and a half trillion that is proposing to be spent.
SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, it's just it's just become this like, you know, special to free for freeburg. We talked about not having a wartime stance with the pandemic. We don't have a wartime stance with global warming or extreme weather, whichever term you want, should we?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're burning money out of no look at drunken salary, what's going on right now. And actually, a lot of what we're going to talk about this symposium over the next day or so, is that there is effectively now a raging free market appetite for these solutions.
SPEAKER_02: The capital is pouring in the entrepreneurship is blossoming, ballooning, the technology is advancing. So, you know, to some degree, folks might say, you know, this is going to get solved. But there are major infrastructure solutions that are needed for us to accelerate the outcome and win the war. And those infrastructure solutions aren't going to get funded by SoftBank. And they're not going to get funded by Chamath. They're going to need to get funded by a type of dollars. I mean, keep keep you keep building your book like you are you will fund them in the next decade. But Sachs, you know, kind of speaks to the kind of numbers that I think, you know, are necessary here. I mean, you think about how much money we spent on COVID without any results over the last year. It really begs the question if we were kind of to take an ROI based approach to where we spending these dollars, this would probably be the first on the list. And by the way, the private market and jobs will benefit. And what happened in this, this, this bill, this infrastructure bill this past this past year, that's now been, you know, more kind of definitively drafted, is a bunch of infrastructure jobs that are basically giveaways. They're not actually solving problems with climate change. They're not pushing technology forward. They're not creating these alternatives that we're talking about. They create 10x and 100x outcomes. They are yesteryear solutions, and they're not going to move the needle enough. And so I you know, look, I do think like, it's unfortunate, but the climate change war production board is needed to kind of get the kind of dollars motivated that are needed to create the kind of infrastructure to solve these problems, despite the free market appetite. The free market appetite, by the way, fuels the outcomes, but it still needs it needs something behind.
SPEAKER_02: Shemagh, is it possible, just as we're having this discussion here, we're looking at an incompetent, corrupt government that is filled with grifters, who are bought and sold. And then on the other side, and causing problems.
SPEAKER_10: That's a that's a mouthful. I wouldn't say that people I disagree that people are corrupt and grifters. I do think that really, yeah, I do think that there's a lot of good motivations. I just think that the government Yeah, look, there may be corruption, but I don't think that that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_02: Look, there may be corruption, but I don't think that that's the the universal truth, right? People are generally good. You know, you, we've all met. Right? We've all met. Which one is it? It's it's a it's a point of perspective, right? And there's a short perspective, my perspective is that they're all being told by their constituents what they want, and then they're doing it or by lobbyists or by lobbyists. But listen to at the end of the day, the way that the system is set up is people get reelected by doing what they're the people that are going to vote and put the dollars and put the votes out for them.
SPEAKER_02: are asking them to do. And that's the way that this has kind of resolved itself. So and by the way, when the war when when wars happen, you know, when I guess when a war happened in the 20th century, that wasn't the driving force, the driving force was existential. And it was we have to win the war. And that's the that that really needs to be the mindset we all need to adopt today, which is an existential mindset, we need to win the war. And it can't be about what my constituents are telling me what the lobbyists are telling. So despite this, either incompetence,
SPEAKER_10: graft, or if you're more charitable, you know, it's a complex problem to solve. Despite all of that, we have massive entrepreneurship in the country, we have massive capital allocation at an extreme violent rate. In fact, a lot of that money is coming from all this money being pumped into the system. So in a way, do you think the only solution we have to mouth is entrepreneurs in startups, who are getting large amounts of money to solve these problems? Because it's not going to happen by government, obviously,
SPEAKER_09: we have a ton of great entrepreneurs. And I think that we're doing things we're doing, okay, so this is this is, if you look at the internet, in the 20 years that we've been grinding in the internet, we've had an incredible tailwind that helped us, which is all these people, much like the folks in this room, but in different companies, 10 or 20 years earlier than you are now abstracting parts of the stack, so that the rest of us could use it, right. And so, you know, I remember 2006, we were racking and stacking servers at Facebook in Santa Clara, me Adam D'Angelo, like, and I was like, what the fuck are we doing? And I remember in 2008, what Adam D'Angelo, he was our CTO at the time left, he started a company called Quora. D'Angelo's like, I'm building on AWS. And I thought he was a fucking idiot. I thought, who builds on AWS, you build your own data centers. Now, if you said that to somebody, you would be the idiot. Right? So if it's that, or if it's the tooling and the tool chains that we've been able to build on top of all of that abstraction and simplification has allowed an order or frankly, probably even maybe two orders of magnitude of entrepreneurship to come. That's also now happening in biotech. So all of that is an incredible progress. The problem now is we used to be a part of the economy that was an afterthought. We were over here. Politicians didn't need to understand they didn't need to take the time. Their first reaction is denial, because it basically pushes up against power. And that really freaks them out. But now we're at a point where we are so integral, they need to understand it better. Here's a perfect example. Last week, Illumina's patents expired. So if you're in the business of healthcare, and if you're in the business of like, you know, CRISPR gene therapy, any of the stuff that actually a lot of you guys are involved in, you would love for the fact that, you know, next gen sequencing could have 1000 flowers, boom, bloom, 90 different methods, the cost of a sequence goes down to a penny. It's not possible today, because you have to go through one methodology, you have one company to work through, you have one set of reagents, or a set of reagents that one company sells. And it's basically cordoned off. That can't change because of technology, because they can then sue you go to courts, and they win. And so this is where you have to interface with the government, and they just need to get smarter. Because otherwise, there's only so much innovation we can do before their historical legacy things like patents and IP come and bite you in the ass.
SPEAKER_10: Sax, what do you think? Or is entrepreneurship alone, and capital allocation by aggressive, you know, vaudeville and bold capital allocators enough to solve the incompetence in Washington or the graft? Oh, well, it's gonna have to be. And I mean, here's the good news, bad news, okay, had a tweet that kind of went viral. So when Afghanistan happened, you know, we spent $2 trillion 2500 American casualties 40,000 wounded. And what have we gotten out of it, the Chinese are about to take up residence in Bagram, in our splendid Air Force base, and the Taliban are one of the best equipped armies in the world. That's basically what our $2 trillion got us
SPEAKER_03: and China is going to build a superhighway. Right. By the way, the thing where like the Taliban were flying around in our helicopter. It was a helicopter. It was fake. Apparently, there was a fake news.
SPEAKER_02: They do have more. I have fake more coverage. Apparently, the helicopters that were left behind are non functional. So let's just clear that up. That's not true. Yeah, they more Blackhawks than any other army in the world, except for us. I mean, have you seen all the photos of them? They're all decked out in our uniforms. Incredible. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They got our night vision goggles and the whole thing.
SPEAKER_03: Photos on the internet.
SPEAKER_02: No, no, there was reporting itemizing the inventory, the cache of weapons we left behind. It was gigantic. Right. That's the good news. Bad news. Okay, that's the bad news. That's what $2 trillion of government spending got us. The good news is I went back and I looked at how much money has been invested in the venture capital space over that same 20 year period that we're in Afghanistan. And it roughly tallied up to about $2 trillion. I didn't know that actually, I just I added up the
SPEAKER_03: coins. And about then most of it was in the last five years because it's actually been a huge acceleration and the amount of money coming into VC over the last several years, the soft banks, the Tigers and so that you've had the late stage funds, the mega late stage funds. So the truth is, for really way less than I'd say a trillion dollars of, you know, early stage, like true venture money, we've been able to create the entire technology ecosystem as we see it today. I mean, not entire, I guess go back 20 years, there's five years in the late 90s. So the the private enterprise system has accomplished so much with relatively so little money, you compare the efficiency of it, you almost wonder how do we squander so much money in Afghanistan? How is it possible it took active looting by many different forces to basically squander? I mean, think about like, every venture back company, every stage in the last 20 years, airbases, when we spent in Afghanistan, I mean, how much of that money went to line the pockets of private contractors? And, you know, warlords we were paying off, I mean, it was a giant kleptocracy. Okay. So but the good news is, look what we got for the same amount of money here, you know, not just here, every, every private venture backed company. So I do think we are capable of accomplishing great things, but with relatively small amounts of investment. And thank goodness for that, because that's the only thing that's producing anything or society. But, but it's true, right? But But look at what Washington's about to do, they want to stomp on all this innovation. I mean, they want to jack up the cap gains rate to the same to higher than ordinary income. I mean, that is the return on investment for the for the for venture capital for the kind of investment I'm talking about. I mean, they want to make it punitive. Now, that's not going to pass, thankfully, because we got Joe Manchin, but that's about it. By the way, I will I will contradict myself and agree with sex. I do think there will be 100 x 1000 x 10,000 x breakthrough that will resolve a lot of the challenges we face as a species on planet Earth over the century. So we're optimistic. I'm 100% optimistic. I'm actually this might that's my title, he gave it away the title of my talk in the morning, tomorrow morning. But yeah, I do. And by the way, my talk says absolutely nothing about the government. And we've been railing against the government. Now everyone's kind of feeling sad. And we sound like a bunch of
SPEAKER_10:
SPEAKER_02: old guys sitting at the Starbucks talking. Yeah, talking about the government now they suck. But at the end of the day, I do think that the ingenuity of the human spirit and science will resolve the problems that we face today. Jesus Christ, and we are not gonna solve the problem. All right, I want to talk about one other way we should kind of be my questions from the audience. So if you have a question, I'm going to jump out there. Should we do that now? Because we're just end with the CCP is now moving to break up Ali pays business. This is after jack Ma went on a holiday to learn how to oil paint thoughts, chamath.
SPEAKER_09: Well, I think this is sort of like one other step in what we've been talking about for a while, which is that China is basically becoming a completely vertically integrated government, where the public and private sector has no real clear delineation. And I think that that actually has a lot of implications to us, because they export an enormous amount of technology and building blocks to us. And we have no recourse, if those guys either change their mind. And this is sort of what pulls us back to the point where we're talking about the government, the government is a whole new thing. And so that's why we're trying to pull us into this next very complicated phase of geopolitics. Because for example, if they decide to cut us off, you know, in ours, it, they will invade Taiwan. I've said this before, but I think that they will. And we will have no choice except to deploy troops into Taiwan. Because in the absence of the silicon that we need from TSMC and a couple of other manufacturers there, we have zero capability here. This is why you see Intel. Like any second, when you guys hear an Intel press release that says they're investing 90 fucking billion dollars, do you not think, where does Intel come up with $90 billion? Right, this is a pull through from US government, because it allows us to start to rebuild an enormous amount of critical infrastructure that we've left to other people. So, you know, China is systematically decomposing and basically destabilizing all the China internet companies, they're going to control and inbound all of the critical resources. And we're going to have to have these really hard conversations unless this is again, why I go back to I don't believe what you said, entrepreneurs are not enough of the solution, we need the government to step in with intelligence, not with anything other than that. They don't need laws, necessarily, they just need to understand the problem. And then
SPEAKER_02: you or get out of the way in some cases, or step in and for example, like, you know, allow the regulatory regulatory capture to be disrupted. But they won't do it because special interests. And by the way, special interest, what do they spend? You know, if you try to donate to a fucking congressman $4,000 $2,500, like these people aren't spending $80 million to defend an $80 billion business, they're spending $80,000. And that's why we can't have progress.
SPEAKER_09: That's crazy to me.
SPEAKER_10: Saxure thoughts on China's recent actions to basically deprecate entrepreneurship.
SPEAKER_03: It's it's a continuation of the trends we've been talking about on the show, like to mouth was saying, I mean, they're bringing these entrepreneurs these their moguls, their their oligarchs under their thumb under the thumb of the CCP, and Xi Jinping, they're consolidating control and power and money. And it's also about the data that was another part of the this new laws, they want to get their hands on the data that that all you control all the credit data of every single person that uses alley payers,
SPEAKER_09: all throughout Southeast Asia. That's fucking crazy. And they also control everybody's TikTok user. Yeah, we get that the same time. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. If you were running the Chinese government, wouldn't you do the same? I would do everything that they're doing, which is why it's crazy to us that we are sitting here allowing it to be done to us. That's what the crazy the crazy. There's nothing about what they're doing is not illogical, right? What we are doing is illogical.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_09: Because we should have a reaction to these things. We should have a point of view. It can't be tacitly sticking our head in the sand.
SPEAKER_10: All right, who's got a question for one of the best? Okay, let's try and make it a tight question.
SPEAKER_07: Talk up the book, Jan. Of course, these bills are incredibly wasteful. But you're you guys are engaged. So how come you're not looking through them and saying this piece I like this piece is messed up? Because it doesn't sound like you've read them either. To be honest with you, I haven't read them. I rely on these summaries that I get from my team. And to be honest with you, the legibility of these things are incredibly low.
SPEAKER_09: And the problem is every bill that gets written now, it's almost like it goes through a process of you take a two page bullet point bill, which is really what senators or Congress people understand and approve. And then out comes the other end 2000 pages that are undigestible. So you're absolutely right. I don't I rely on these summaries. I have zero idea what's really in there. Let's take another question. Yeah, I'm Alex Philip Enko. You did this poll of whether the media are right winning, leaning or left leaning and the overwhelming majority said left leaning.
SPEAKER_04: But do you think that that's in part because for four years, we had been fed so many lies and so much misinformation from the extreme right.
SPEAKER_10: David, that question was directed to you. I mean, look, I think there were plenty of polls. If you go back like 1020 30 years, there's a media organization, there's a guy named Brent Bizell, who was doing studies of media bias. And if you were to actually look at how people in the media voted, it was 90 plus percent Democrat.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's, it's been it's been a thing for a long time. And now it came to a head, I would say, during the Trump administration, because the, the press, I think, in going after Trump, gave up something important, which is, they gave up their objectivity. I mean, they flatly would, I mean, it was, you know, whether you want to call it Trump to Ranger syndrome, or whatever. I mean, they now saw it as their duty not to report objectively both sides, but they would just flatly declare things that Trump were saying were false. You know, you still see this today. I'm not saying that all the things he said were true, maybe he did say false things. But normally, if you wanted to say that one person saying something false, you would get a source on the other side, and then you would quote them. And then that's how you would basically construct the article. And you had the press basically almost really become unhinged. And I think they they kind of ripped the umpire jersey off their backs to in order to chase after Trump. And I think that's what he did. In order to chase after Trump, and I think, you know, ultimately, they got him. Trump was a one term president. But I think that it's really contributed to the polarized media environment we have now. Any way to get that referee jersey back on the press?
SPEAKER_10: You know, no.
SPEAKER_10: Sachs?
SPEAKER_03: Well, how I mean, they, you know,
SPEAKER_09: the problem is the journalism and media have changed so much.
SPEAKER_02: The nature of press has changed. Yeah, right. It's fragmenting and splintering much like everything else. There's, you know, we talked about this at some of our companies, I keep referring to our companies, because I know a lot of people are here today. But, you know, we talk about the fragmentation of food brands, for example, or the fragmentation of people's kind of individual media selection. The same is happening in the press, where, you know, you're now kind of going to pick and choose the five articles you want to read, as opposed to buying one of three newspapers and reading everything in that newspaper each day. And I think that's fueling this, which is not necessarily in my opinion, I've said this before, not necessarily a constructed or design decision of the quote unquote, press, but it's more a phenomenon that arises from the individuals that consume the media, and they make selections. And that selection bias ends up driving the clicks and the votes and the counts and the prints of that particular form of media. And guess what we end up choosing the stuff that triggers us more and makes us feel some stronger emotion. And then it creates a feedback loop. And that's where this is coming from. And I think it's enabled by the media. And I think it's enabled by the internet, not necessarily bad actors at platform companies, but it's it's inevitable in a decentralized world or a platformed world. That's what we're gonna also part of the story is advertising went away as an option as Google and Facebook took over those markets. So they went subscription and how do you get subscribers, you pick a side, you can't really go down the middle, I want to feel something emotional when I click and buy and spend 99 cents or whatever, like it's not I just I don't want to like be bored to death. Everything is so stimulating in this digital world, like I want to be simulated.
SPEAKER_03: There's a really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to this, which is, they they asked, you know, people on the left to the right, what do you think the country's biggest problem is? On the left? The number one answer was Trump supporters. You know, so, you know, now on the right, it was a little bit more varied. It was the Taliban, it was China, you know, it was what should we be most concerned about objectively from each of you? What do you think? Well, three things we should be concerned about? I think as Americans, I don't think the right answer for either side is like the other half of America. I think I think that happens because you haven't varied your information diet, you're sitting there watching one station on cable news, and you're being fed, you're being basically being fed this stuff that the others demonizing the other side, right? And, you know, the other side is, you know, is being
SPEAKER_03: authorized. All right, let's take two more questions, Nico.
SPEAKER_06: Chamaat, this goes back to a point that you made about entrepreneurs not being enough and bringing the government. I think a lot of the topics covered are bringing a lot of government support or involvement. So from y'all's perspective, how do we bring in maybe new incentives on the government side to bring in younger people, smarter people, people who are going to make better change than what we may be seeing today? I mean, if you look at countries like Singapore, their solution was to elevate the role of government to be so high from a societal value perspective, it was an incredibly respected role. It was well compensated, and it was a thing that was a real jumping off point to other positions of true influence.
SPEAKER_09: Here, we started with that idea. So like, you know, when you think about what's what played out in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, I think we had a lot of that. But then the problem was we had a handful of things that completely perverted the cycle. The cherry on the cake, I think was Citizens United that basically just tore the bandaid off. And we are where we are, where it's not clear today that the most intellectually curious people are in government, nor does it even get to the point where they're just going to be able to make a change. And so, what do you do about it? I think that there's an element of it, which is you have to play the game on the field, which is folks like us, what I would encourage all of you to do is if you're in a position to actually accumulate political power, you have a responsibility to do so. And it is directly correlated with money. And so as you find compound companies, and you get liquidity, you have a responsibility to be engaged, because you will have a louder voice. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm not saying that it's fair, but it's the game on the field. The more you spend, the more time you get with all these folks, and you should use that. Beyond that, we have to find a way of orienting them. So once you get a seat at the table, I think it's about showing them that there's these nuanced laws that are a lot less sexy than they want to talk about. But that actually have real impact. Sachs, what do you think of senators getting paid like CEOs? Would that help solve the problem? If people could look at it and say, well, I can get paid a half million dollars in that job or a million dollars in that job? Would we draw a different caliber of person?
SPEAKER_03: The problem isn't that they're not smart. I mean, some of them, I guess, aren't very smart. Well, you also have the lack of, you know, they can't make money when they're in. They have to figure out how to make it on the way out.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, giving them a pay increase is not something I would be opposed to. I mean, it's something that's hard for them to do because it's easy to campaign against politicians who want to pay themselves more. But yeah, I'd rather pay them more salary so they're less beholden to the special interests when they get out of office. But I don't think that by itself is going to solve the problem.
SPEAKER_03: Let's take another question.
SPEAKER_05: So my question is, how do we get both sides to agree? We want to get back to the truth. And in science and in economics, we have a way to measure the truth. In science, you design a scientific experiment and you measure it against reality. So both sides can agree what's reality. In economics, you either make money or you don't make money. You can measure it against something. So what can we do to get back to both sides agreeing on what is true? I mean, I think the challenge is it takes more than 15 seconds to walk someone through the experimental design and the outcome and the action to be taken as a result. Same with any I mean, I don't know what the viewership is of The Economist, but I'm pretty sure it's been going down.
SPEAKER_02: Zero.
SPEAKER_03: But this is why markets work better than politics. This is why markets work better than politics because in order for you to pursue what you want to pursue, you don't have to convince a majority of the country to support it. You just need to find one person who's willing to fund it. You raise the money. And the same is true for every startup. And that's why progress is made by startups and not a lot of progress is made by politics. That's actually why by the way, that's why I don't think any of us spend time in politics, even though we talk about it all the time. No, but because it influences our decision making. I think politics has done more to rekindle my interest in all things technology and specifically web 3.0 and defy than anything else because these last four years have completely convinced me that we need to find a very decentralized way of building the future. It's gonna be ugly, though, I am I am convinced I am convinced in the next 80 years is exactly what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02: the next 80 years is exactly that like, you know, in the physical world, there's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen in the social world, it's going to be related to this defy decentralization movement that's underway. And it's underway because of what we're hearing about happening in China, what we're talking about happening in the US. And, you know, I mean, I don't know, I won't give the context, I was hanging out with some people the other day, they were they were working on my house, and they they were telling me every single one of them were trading creatures, every single one of them were trading crypto. And
SPEAKER_02: the whole conversation really expensive. The whole conversation was about crypto, and I don't trust the US dollar and everything's inflating away. And I think, politically, we're not really awake to the fact that this is a broad, meaningful social movement. It's playing out with crypto bubbles and NFTs and other nonsense. But those are short lived bubbles, those are little feedback loops, frothing is happening as the tide rises. And I do think that that is going to be kind of the big push
SPEAKER_02: in for socially, David is why China said no more crypto. What are your thoughts? That's the big battle. And by the way, everyone's gonna end up saying that
SPEAKER_02: let me come back to crypto just one point on on movement. So there's political movements, and then there's kind of economic movements like private initiative, I wrote a blog post called your startup as a movement in which I compared being I said a good start founders and evangelists for their cause it is almost like leading a political movement, you have to go out there kind of have a stump speech and evangelize people to your cause, which, you know, is ideally a larger mission than just whatever, you know, benefits your company, right? This is
SPEAKER_03: why Elon has been able to, you know, frankly, why he's been able to sell so many cars without spending a dime on marketing is because he creates a much larger movement than just what's good for Tesla, right. But the difference, I think, between sort of a private movement and a political movement is this is that when you're successful, as the leader of a company, everyone imitates you. So now because Elon successful, everyone else is trying to introduce their own electric cars. Whereas in politics, whenever you start a political organization, you know, an equal and opposite organization will spring up to oppose you. And it's just very hard to get anything done. And maybe that's the way it should be, because we don't want people imposing their political will on us. But this is why I am a big fan of startups and smart young people pursuing startups and not politics.
SPEAKER_10: What do you think about decentralized crypto, you know, finance and America? Should we allow it? Should we tax it? We should clearly allow it because this whole crypto stack, this whole decentralized finance stack that's being built could very well be the future of finance. And we certainly want to be ahead of that curve. Maybe there's some bubbles in here and that. But I think what's really interesting, there's certainly a lot of really smart engineers, coders, entrepreneurs who are going to that area. And so I think it'd be a mistake just to discount it. I think we want America to be on the forefront of that technology wave, just like
SPEAKER_03: every other technology wave. I'll make a prediction. My prediction is in the next 20 years, the defy movement will catalyze a movement against the open internet. And it is because state actors will compete with private actors for this battle between centralized institutional state based control systems. Like I want to have a know your customer if you want to buy crypto in the US, versus all of these offshore places where I can go and sign up, get a bunch of money and trade forever and never pay the IRS a cent and live my life in the ether.
SPEAKER_02: And the open internet will start to get threatened. We've seen this in the past where proxy servers and DNS servers got, you know, requests from the DOJ and take down notices. And if that starts to happen, where all the servers and all the fiber lines that are running in and out of the US and elsewhere, start to get kind of tackled, like China has a closed internet, you could start to see this become a really ugly battle that starts to play out. And I think we're not too far. I mean, I don't know if you guys agree, but I think the open internet is kind of going to be the great battleground to resolve this. Well, the original battle was over information, and now it's over money and the dollar.
SPEAKER_10: Well, I think there's a really interesting point there, which is, you know, I remember the late 90s, early 2000s, where the big technology investing wave was all about connecting people and goods into seamless global networks. And that's where all the investment went. Today, and behind that was sort of this utopian idea that the internet was going to break down barriers, and tribalism and remove geographic borders and create a single connected world.
SPEAKER_03: Well, what exactly is the bet on crypto today? It's a bet that fiat currencies are going to collapse and deteriorate, be undermined by money printing, the US dollar was stopping the world's reserve currency, most likely, that individuals need to be protected against the rise of the authoritarian state. These are the big themes of crypto. And if you think of major technology investing waves as essentially a prediction market on what smart people think the future is going to look like, it's pretty scary that we're going from a utopian technology investing wave to a very dystopian technology investing wave. It destroys capitalism. You know, if you think about what capitalism is, it's not just a return on investment, but it's the tonnage of dollars, right? So anyone who's a big investor here, I'll pick out Jan because he's done an incredible job, you know, you're putting more and more dollars in for more and more dollars out. That's the pressure, Brad, you know, these guys are under enormous pressure to get tonnage of dollars through the system in a productive way. And so, you know, these guys are at the forefront.
SPEAKER_09: But when you look at, you know, most of the projects on Solana, they're seeded with a few million dollars. And these are 60 $80 billion market cap projects. And so I don't know how capitalism survives in that world. Number one, number two, governance goes completely out the window, because you're essentially replacing a set of norms that we've all agreed to about what a company is, it's an LLC, or it's a C Corp that is incorporated with laws, there is recourse for you, you can go to these places and sue them. Now it's a doubt. It's a bunch of rules written in a blockchain, here's how it all works. Here's how I make my HR decisions. Here's this, here's that here's the other thing. And then you basically decompose everything into a service where it's recursive. You cannot build with me, unless you make yourself buildable to others. Okay. So when you add all these three things together, I think, to me, it's the most incredibly positively disruptive force I have seen. I think it will destroy wealth. I frankly couldn't give a fuck. And I think it's better for the world. Let's take a final question.
SPEAKER_10: Thanks Jason. And maybe to connect some of the dots. You know, I think the the power of the individual, perhaps reflected in crypto has never been greater relative to the power of government. Right? Thomas Friedman talked about super empowered individuals 20 years ago. Whether you're a terrorist, or whether you're a capitalist, the power of the individual is is never been greater. The whole idea of the power of the individual is never been greater.
SPEAKER_01: Before a view started a movement earlier this year, around what was going on in California, right? A lot of people got excited about the recall about what might come next. I think where we fail as entrepreneurs where we fail as allocators is we had no strategic plan for California. We have no strategic alternative plan for America. The parties have platforms. Why don't we put together a strategic plan for the state, a strategic plan for the country that brings in these folks? The production board is a strategic plan for winning World War Two. Right? And so to Thomas point that it's incumbent upon us to get involved. I think it's incumbent upon us to step up what it means to be involved. It's not hire a lobbyist in DC. It's not, you know, just show up and vote. But I actually think that the voice that you have carries a lot of responsibility. And I think that I would have liked to have seen the all in step up and do something to catalyze a strategic plan for California. Right? Not necessarily endorse a candidate, but let a candidate stand on top of that strategic plan if we really think about decentralized, right? You are really honest with you. I think why didn't you run for governor? So run for governor? We are not you fucked it up. We don't we don't have as for people are act together. We are still learning. Because we are like anybody else in a startup. You stumbled into some success. There's about a million people that will listen, watch consume this a week. And all the polling or all of the data that you pull. It's like New York, San Francisco, DC.
SPEAKER_09: We don't internalize that and use it for any strategic intent. There's still if I could just to be honest with you, there's still infighting, bitching, complaining, you know, all kinds of fucking nonsense, where if you saw the inside of you'd be like, hey, dipshits, wake the fuck up, get a plan together and act. We don't have that bread. And we disagree on a lot. That's okay. But what we but we we can't get we can't get away from ourselves. We are learning how to do that. And we've had a bunch of people who have been doing that.
SPEAKER_09: And we've had a bunch of instances where we've had to come together and say, Hey, our friendship is the most important. So let's fucking sort this out. And we've always been able to sort it out. We're going to get pushed to what every other you know, startup founder story gets pushed to which is now what? We're just going to sit here, babble on for another fucking three, four years through a pandemic. And, you know, maybe you get the 2 million views, 3 million views, maybe Spotify gives you a deal and you can make 1020 million bucks a year. Who the fuck cares? So you're right, we have a responsibility to figure out if we are for reasonable voices in the sea, and people are attracted to those voices, what do we use it for? And we've talked about it, but we haven't put pen to paper and finalize. We spent about 90 minutes a week on this podcast. And then we go into our own lives. And, you know, it's never been. I also think we've also tried to experiment a little bit. David and I collaborated on getting Chesa Boudin recalled, but in different ways. David
SPEAKER_10: Sachs, David Sachs, literally helped them start a recall Chesa Boudin campaign, Gary Tan, who listens to the pod started his own with Democrats. And then I tweeted anybody want to donate for an investigative journalist to cover Chesa Boudin's office because we couldn't find anybody covering it. $60,000 showed up for that GoFundMe page. And we just gave it to a journalist who started this week. And she's reported in the first 10 days on three different, like, tragic cases in San Francisco. That have not been followed up on by the DA's office. So that was just a little, you know, example of dipping our toes and obviously Chamath, you know, being pushed to run for governor caught fire, like we thought that was a joke. It was literally somebody who listens to the pod put the website up. He tweeted as joke. And then all of a sudden, it's on CNBC. But the best thing has been the feedback we've gotten from people like you, Brad, and everybody in the audience, Bill Gurley, a lot of other people here. And we have thought about, hey, what do we use this platform for in terms of making change like that? I think that that'll be your two. It's the right question and the right challenge. Brad. It is appreciate it. I appreciate it. All right, David, we should let everybody get to pizza. I want to say thanks to the besties to J Cal, Chamath, Sachs.
SPEAKER_02: Love you, free bird. Love you guys. I love you too. And just thanks for listening to the show. Thanks to Friedberg. If you want to make things truly uncomfortable. David loves to give a long embrace a nice hug. Tell him come on. This motherfucker. He there's another friend who shall not be named, who is a side hugger. Nobody likes us. Who likes a side hugger? Anybody side hugging? You want to get the full frontal hug when you
SPEAKER_09: hug with sacks, right? Give it to him. But I had to force him today because he comes into you like stand up. I'll show you. He comes in like this. And then he does this. The hip hug like he does. He does kind of a hip. That's called Asperger's. Nice to see you. It's called Asperger's.
SPEAKER_10: Looks like he's going to a night at the Roxbury. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you look horrible. Thank you. Absolutely fucking horrible. Okay. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00: All right. Well, this has been the all in podcast and enjoy your time at the conference.
SPEAKER_09: Fans.
