SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast. This is our fifth episode. As you know, we regularly publish this podcast, well, every two to four weeks, something like that. And just to give you a little idea of how well this is going, the podcast peaked at number 10 in tech podcasts, even though we never publish it and we're only four episodes in. So tell your friends about the podcast so we can be number one and just dunk on traditional media, which is full of people who have us as the guests. Jason, number 10 on what, Apple? Apple technology podcasts. We literally raced. I mean, it went from like, we debuted in the twenties, then the teens, and then boom, we hit number 10. And I was talking to somebody in media who has us on as guests and I was like, listen, I formed a super team and we're now getting more traffic. I'm sorry, who are you talking to? Just like a mirror where you were just looking at yourself.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you are so fucking arrogant after that shitty video. What video are you referring to? What video? Oh my God. You want me to say it to all the listeners? You want me to say it? All right, hold on a second. Let me just get through the housekeeping. Somebody made a cut of the billion times Jason mentioned he was an early investor in Uber.
SPEAKER_01: All right, take it easy, Virgin Galactic slash Slack investor. I don't say anything. I mean, I have a lot of companies I could mention. They just put it on the chyron, the lower third, every time you're on. See you at BC, everybody.
SPEAKER_00: My problem is I have too many unicorns to mention just one. Right. I wouldn't know which one to mention. They just go with PayPal and knows Peter Thiel.
SPEAKER_01: David, David, I have a question. Why is there a picture of two pregnant men behind you on
SPEAKER_03: Zoom? We now have the technology for men to be impregnated.
SPEAKER_00: This is a recent picture of Jason and I on the golf course. I'm not sure who's more out of shape. Are you on the first hole? You look like you're about to collapse.
SPEAKER_01: In fairness, it's 106 degrees. Two minutes later, the daddy runs up to him and puts his hands under his shoulders and
SPEAKER_02: holds him up. It's 106 degrees and 80 percent humidity. And I kid you not, this was the second and
SPEAKER_01: third time I played golf. This was the third time. And I'm going to just ask D. Frame, David Friedberg is here, of course. He's our science friend, buddy. And Chamath Palihapiti, he is here. How many holes? I want one of you to set the over under on how many holes we completed each day. The maximum number of holes we completed. Four. Four. Okay. Chamath took a lot of four. And you're taking the over. It was? Six.
SPEAKER_00: Five.
SPEAKER_01: Five. And actually, there's a red door every five holes. So that may have had something to do
SPEAKER_00: with it.
SPEAKER_02: I'm not denying because I figured Jason was on his rush to the hot dog stand. Well, that's where the red door is where the hot dogs are.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: You know why? I said these two dorks with ADHD can barely make it an hour doing anything. And so if you think an average round takes four hours, then basically, you get through four holes in about an hour and then you want to give up.
SPEAKER_01: We got to the fifth hole. I am addicted to golf now. I don't know if you guys know this. You can gamble on golf.
SPEAKER_03: Jason, the biggest match I ever played was a $500,000 million NASA.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what a NASA is.
SPEAKER_03: I lost one and a half bets. I lost 750K.
SPEAKER_01: What is a NASA type bet?
SPEAKER_03: NASA is basically a gambling bet on a per hole basis.
SPEAKER_01: Got it. We had just a ton of fun. And it was great because this was the first time I've ever... It's the single best aspect of golf, in my opinion. If you gamble, it makes that game
SPEAKER_03: one of the most incredible games because people with mental fortitude who cannot play at all can show up and literally make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. We were playing for hundreds of dollars per hole. So let's just leave it at that. In fact, we're playing $100 a hole. So it was just for fun. But man, I don't know about you guys. If we know somebody who's got a membership in one of these places, I'd love to go back out again. But it was great fun. Come to Shadow Creek in Vegas. We can play. It's probably the best gambling golf course
SPEAKER_03: in the world.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm in. So let's get to business. For those of you who are tuning in for the first time, Chamath Palihapitiya is my co-host here on the podcast. We've been friends since we both did a very brief tour at AOL. He then went to work for Mayfield, which is a venture firm you might not have heard of. He stayed there for about 27 weeks before going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. He secured the bag, then started his own venture firm. It grew way too big and he kind of got bored having to manage 100 people. So now he's running his home office venture firm and doing two deals a year. The one you've certainly heard of is Virgin Galactic, where he's taking people to space and he did a SPAC for that. IPOB and IPOC are lined up from what I understand. He'll correct me if I am wrong and he'll be spacking two more companies once a year, I guess will be the pace. Is that correct, Chamath? Among other things, but yeah. And then David Sacks has now become, and David Friedberg have become regulars. We've decided we're going to stick with this foursome as it goes because we're getting a really nice passing of the ball around topics. And David Sacks went to Stanford with folks you know, like Keith Raboy, Peter Thiel during an era where they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on Palm pilots called PayPal. It didn't work until they decided to move it to email. I'm not sure whose idea, who gets credit for moving it to email, Sacks?
SPEAKER_01: Who decided like, hey, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: Sacks' silence is his way of saying me.
SPEAKER_01: Because it was an abject failure when you tried to send money between Palm pilots, Peter Thiel's original idea, but then somebody woke up and said, well, why don't we just do this over email? Well, he hasn't said, let me tell you the names at PayPal he has not said yet. Musk,
SPEAKER_03: Thiel, Hoffman, Levchin, Silence, Radio Silence so far, David Sacks.
SPEAKER_01: Jeremy Stoppelman, Chad Hurley from YouTube, Jerry Stoppelman from Yelp. Anyway, he was part of that cohort. Then he made a movie called Thank You for Smoking, which was Jason Reitman's first film. Jason Reitman then went on to great success. That film actually made money. Sacks was so absolutely depressed by how long it took to make one film and how painful it was. He then decided to go create a billion dollar company in under three years called Yammer, which Chamath made a ton of money on and he cackles about regularly. And then David Friedberg is with us. He is just the smartest kid at the table, but somehow figures out how to lose tons of money to us in poker. He created Climate.com and sold it to Monsanto. He created Metro Mile and he created Itza, which failed horribly. But that just goes to show you nobody remembers what Itza is, but they do remember his giant multi-billion dollar companies. And he now is running his own startup studio, which is making incredibly interesting companies. Can I talk about the one that's related to beverages or not? Not yet. Okay. Anyway, there's a company related to beverages that is so game changing.
SPEAKER_01: I said, no, you can't say it. He showed it to us under friendier. I just said, can I
SPEAKER_01: talk about the beverage company? Yes or no? I'm trying to give the guy a goddamn plug here. Anyway, I'm teasing it. But he said, he said, no, so you can't do a plug. I'm not doing a plug, but I'm teasing it. And I think he's literally sitting on what could wind up being the greatest, most successful company of the entire group. Period. Okay. Let's jump in. I want to talk about, David, you sold Climate to Monsanto for a
SPEAKER_03: billion dollars back in the day when it was shocking to people, that amount of money. It still is. But you were one of the first sort of quote unquote unicorns. And then you were right in the front seat of Monsanto, probably could have been CEO if you wanted. I want you to talk to me about what is going on with Bayer, Monsanto, Roundup. And I want to use that as a jumping off point to talk about the World Health Organization.
SPEAKER_02: So Roundup is a molecule known as glyphosate, and it's been used as an herbicide for decades. And for decades, it was very well studied. The US EPA and the FDA and USDA and global health organizations have studied it carefully because of its incredible use. It biodegrades, the core molecule glyphosate biodegrades in a couple of days. And it is a very effective herbicide. So when farmers grow stuff, they don't want weeds growing in the field. And Roundup was a pretty effective way at getting rid of weeds so you could get more crop per acre, more yield per acre. A long time, people thought that Roundup, like many of the traditional persistent chemical herbicides, was carcinogenic. And people were concerned about that. And as a result, there was a lot of studying done. In fact, before I sold my company to Monsanto, I spent a lot of time researching Roundup and glyphosate to make sure that it was safe, that I wasn't selling my company to what everyone was saying was the devil at the time. And from a scientific basis, I felt pretty comfortable about the data, the studies, the research that had been done. When I was at Monsanto, there was a bit of a political event that took place at the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization runs a group called IARC. It's a cancer research institute that's part of the WHO. And there was a gentleman who was politically trying to get himself on that council to make the case that glyphosate was carcinogenic. And years later, a Reuters reporter identified how he was able to get this council to disregard a number of scientific findings and studies, including the US EPA and other very wide broad ranging studies by international organizations showing that Roundup or glyphosate was non-carcinogenic. But the political process by which he was able to get on the council, get that data excluded from a study, and then get IARC to declare Roundup or glyphosate a possible carcinogen or probable carcinogen, then triggered a bunch of tort lawyers in the United States to start suing Monsanto and now Bayer, because Bayer bought Monsanto a number of years ago, for causing cancer. And the data is absent, but the way the US court system works is if you have some probable definition and you can get a jury to say yes, and the probable cause was there's a probable carcinogen label applied to it by IARC. And this Reuters reporter years ago did a great job highlighting how this whole thing was kind of politically motivated and the data and the science from a broad range of scientists, including the AAAS, a lot of scientific membership organizations very definitively and clearly show that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic. But it was super troubling and frustrating. Now, look, this doesn't bother me personally anymore. I have no interest whatsoever. But it turns out that these lawsuits are now going to cost Monsanto and now Bayer, which bought Monsanto somewhere between 10 and 15 billion dollars to settle this. And this is all a function of some political hacking that took place at the WHO. So for a long time, I've had a bit of a concern about how the WHO operates and the process by which they do scientific assessment and validation. And a lot of this has obviously become much more apparent with the coronavirus crisis and the response with respect to masks and treatment and so on. So that's a little bit of the background I think you're referring to, Chamath.
SPEAKER_01: And so, go ahead, Chamath, if you want to.
SPEAKER_03: No, I mean, like, to me, I think that this is such an interesting thing. I wanted to use it as this on ramp to the WHO largely because it's like the ineptitude keeps compounding in that organization. I just read that we still don't have a definitive posture on masks from the WHO and that they are finally ceding ground to the idea that the coronavirus could partially be spread in air.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is so bizarre because...
SPEAKER_03: It's the middle of July. There are three million cases and half a million people who have died, and we are still there. And so, when I saw that Trump pulled out of the WHO in this weird way, the way he did it was kind of cartoonish and stupid and kind of an insolent child. But the reason he did it was actually pretty reasonable because this organization is not a scientific or health body. It's an academic body. And you can see this in universities where all of a sudden things tilt away from facts and it tilts towards all kinds of very, very, very small points of sort of like political capital that people fight over. And so these politicized organizations are incredible.
SPEAKER_01: And to the point at which we saw this past week the report that well over 250 of their own scientists who they rely on said, hey, it's very clear that this is an airborne phenomenon — aerosol, tiny micro particles of aerosol — when people talk, when they sing, when they cough, when they sneeze, all this obvious stuff floats in the air. And if you have a closed air conditioned location, like say a church in the south or a hotel or a casino, it's not a good idea to be in there. And it's especially not a bad idea. It's especially bad idea to take your mask off. So now the WHO is 0 for 2. And Trump, as you said, in his just horrifically comical way, can explain, as we're very clearly explaining, that this is a political organization that is funded by a duopoly of superpowers that have many issues which we're going to get into today. And we don't have to say who the duopoly is. Sacks, when you look at this being our token conservative here and you see the Trump win, how frustrating is it for you that Trump's delivery and his persona, when he is right and a person can't be wrong all the time — I'm proof positive of that — you have to deal with the fact that he does it in such a stupid, inane way that you don't actually get credit for the win?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, Trump is often the bull in the china shop and kind of disrupts the status quo by throwing a grenade into it. But frequently there are good reasons why the status quo needs to be disrupted. And the New York Times laid out the case in a news story on WHO, the one that reported the scientists complaining that you were talking about. It was just a straight news story, but it almost came across as an expose because WHO's incompetence was laid out so starkly. The fact that they were slow en masse and opposed them and I think kind of lied about them. And then to be downplaying the airborne nature of the virus in favor of maintaining this narrative that it's spread through touching surfaces or fomites, which I think people are realizing now is much, much less likely. And so, yeah, you do kind of have to wonder whose side is who on. And the New York Times article kind of suggests why they do this, which is when they issue a declaration, they have to think about the ramifications in all of their member countries. And so what ends up happening is they sort of start with the policy implication or political result that they are thinking about and they kind of reverse engineer the science. And the article talks about how if who were to come out and sort of be very clear about airborne transmission, that could affect spending or political budgets in all these different countries. And so they've been reluctant to do that. So yeah, it's an organization that's sort of political first and then reverse engineers the science to fit that.
SPEAKER_01: You know what this reminds me of? It's like when you have giant investors on the board of a company, the management team comes out and now they've got to present like a pivot or an acquisition or whatever it is. And they're thinking, well, OK, we've got this funding source. These people own 26 percent of who? This person owns 22 percent. We've now got to present it to them. And what are the downstream ramifications? Luckily, there is an alignment in a single company. The alignment is we all want the company share price to go up. But here in the world, it is not equally aligned. What is in China's best interest, what's in the EU's best interest and what's in America's best interest might be radically different. And they are literally funding them. Correct, Shammoth?
SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a there's a there's a there's this thing called Sayers Law, right, which many of us kind of have seen play out, which is that academic the saying is something like academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small. And in this interesting way, the WHO has lost the script because they fight over politics. Who gets to say what? Who's being positioned? And they lose sight of the real downstream, in my opinion, the downstream implications of the things that they have, because if they actually just thought from first principles and tried to be a truly independent body that said we are going to take the capital we're given from the countries that are supporting us and actually do the best and actually publish like what is the best thing to do? For example, in the case of coronavirus and be definitive and iterate, we'd be in a much better place. But a lot of what is allowed the posture around coronavirus to transition from a health issue to a political issue in many ways has been because organizations like the WHO and the CDC are political bodies and they're academic bodies. And so the incentives of the players within these organizations are not to necessarily project the right public health positioning. They are at some level to think about their own career trajectory and the political machinations that happen within the organization that are blind to normal citizens like us that just consume the output. And so when you see something like an inability to give a definitive ruling on things like masks or, you know, other things, you just kind of scratch your head and wonder, is it that they're dumb? And the answer is no, it's not that they're dumb. They're just motivated by very different things than public health all the time.
SPEAKER_01: Which might be including keeping their jobs. And the fact that we had David Friedberg on this podcast and then Saks, you know, chiming in after it shortly after just definitively saying first principles, why wouldn't you wear a mask? What is the possible downside? And Friedberg saying, hey, I'm getting some testing equipment. We should just be doing mass testing. Friedberg, when you look at this and how when we started the podcast, I think in March or April, we were very clear as people not in the with the exception of yourself, not in the health care space in any way. Why can't they what would be a better structure for the WHO? And or is there a better structure than just a bunch of, you know, randos like us on a podcast very easily seeing through first principles that a seventy nine cent mask is a no brainer that getting testing, mass testing and recording it every day and doing sampling? What is the better solution here for governance or for dealing with these type of, you know, really large problems and ones that kind of have a clock? That's the other thing about this problem is this this problem came with a countdown clock. You had to make a really fast decision in order to protect yourself. And we made a really drawn out decision. Now we're paying the price. I mean, I think under the circumstances you
SPEAKER_02: outline, you know, you need leadership, right? So you need probably a country or some entity to step forward and lead with respect to being proactive and aggressive with action, because any multinational oversight body or political body is going to be kind of molasses out. It's going to be stalled out with the processes and the competing interests, as you guys have highlighted. So the libertarian argument would be let the free market drive outcomes and, you know, some folks will succeed and some folks will fail. If we want all of humanity to succeed, then, you know, the likely scenario is what we've seen with with world wars and such, which is you need leadership. You need one organization or one entity or one national body to step forward and say, this is what we're doing and we're going to lead. And the world was absent leadership over the last six months. Historically, the US has filled that void. But that certainly wasn't the case this year. And so, you know, it seems to me like you're not going to find a political governing system, multinational governing system that's going to be successful in solving these kind of existential global problems overnight. You really need someone to step forward. And the US is kind of leaving a bit of a gap. This might be a good segue because the question next is who's going to fill that gap going forward? Yeah. So let's make that segue when you look at the duopoly that currently is, I would
SPEAKER_01: say, on par now. I don't think we can say we're the superpower anymore and that China's an up and coming superpower. It's pretty clear they are an equal superpower. I don't know if anybody here disagrees with that right now, but if we have an edge, it's a very minor one at this point. How do we look at health problems with an authoritarian country where individuals do not vote? And there is a God King who has recently said, I will be the God King for the rest of my life for sure. How do we manage this relationship with China, Friedberg? Then we can pass it over to Sachs.
SPEAKER_02: From a health care perspective?
SPEAKER_01: Let's start there, for sure. And then whatever other major issue you would like to then segue into climate change comes to mind, trade comes to mind, human rights comes to mind. I would imagine the argument that your geopolitical commentators would make, who are probably
SPEAKER_02: more experienced and experts in this than any of us, would probably relate to the degree of influence. The question of who has the most influence globally may be the way that you define who has the most power globally. And so in the current circumstance, you can look at trade balance between China and other nations. You can look at trade balance between the US and other nations and you can look at the balance sheet, the assets and the debt owed. And you're right. A lot of people are making the case that we're reaching a point of parity through some metric or some set of equations here. And at this point, there's going to be a jockeying for leadership globally in terms of influence. And so that will have ramifications with respect to things that are global in nature, like global pandemics. And I think this is a really kind of key flash moment, a flashpoint moment for us because we are facing that. We did face that circumstance this year and obviously we took the raw end of the deal. We failed most. I mean, we all concur on that. We did worst.
SPEAKER_03: China is just like an extremely good example of focusing on strategy while the rest of us focused on tactics. The last 20 years have been punctuated by the United States spending literally trillions of dollars on endless wars and unnecessary military infrastructure and all kinds of wasted pork barrel spending and programs that just have resulted in zero ROI for the United States and its taxpayers and citizens. And instead, what did China do? They basically went around the world and they used the equivalent amount of dollars and they said, every war that the United States fights is a war that we can essentially be silent on. Let them do that dirty work. And what we will do instead is we will go and basically buy and own large swaths of Southeast Asia, large swaths of Africa, which is the emerging labor pools that will drive GDP forward for us. And what they've essentially created is not necessarily a voting block, but a productivity block. And that's what's so interesting and also really important to understand, which is that China is fighting not an ideological war, they're fighting an economic war. And it is one where they are buying member states to join them with their capital. And so we've kind of like not seen it and it's unfortunately happened right under our nose. So now what we need to do is we need to sort of wake up to this reality and have a very aggressive point of view around what matters. So by the way, this is also why, and I'll hand the mic to David after this, but this is also why I think like we have completely wasted so much time focusing on all these other countries that just don't matter anymore. And I don't say that emotionally, I just say it practically, like every single minute we spend on Russia is just a wasted time. This is a country that just won't fundamentally matter in the world over the next 15 to 20 years. Large swaths of Europe, you know, they're ideologically aligned, but they just don't matter. The United States has to develop a really specific strategic viewpoint on the fact that it is us versus China, whether we like it or not. And it starts in things like public policy, but it stretches to everything including capitalism, technology, intellectual property, healthcare. And this war will not be fought on the ground with guns. It'll be fought with computers and it'll be fought with money. And I think we need to realize that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, loans and joint ventures. Sax, what are your thoughts here on this coming cold war? You know, we beat the Russians in the last cold war. And to Chamat's point, the only thing they have really going for them is they're incredibly sinister KGB style information warfare and the decreasing value of their oil and irrelevance, which is why they have to do things like mess with us on social media. I mean, literally, I feel like it's like the last couple of dying techniques they've got in their playbook from, you know, the 80s as the KGB. And they got a KGB agent running the country. When we look at China, how do you frame our relationship with them and what would be the best practice for the next 10 years? Midterm? Well, I think I think what you've seen just really in the last couple
SPEAKER_00: of weeks is a critical mass of scholarship and punditry declaring that we are in a new cold war with China. And I think, you know, of all the momentous news events that have happened this year, from COVID to the riots and protests, I think that the most newsworthy and historically important event will be the beginning of this and the recognition that we are now in Cold War Two. So TikTok. TikTok is part of it. I mean, COVID. It's paradoxical
SPEAKER_01: about a dance app is literally the tip of the spear. I mean, I think TikTok is sort
SPEAKER_03: of at the fringes. I think the Cold War Two, to David's point, started when the United States basically embargoed Huawei from getting access to 5G technology. And I know that sounds like a very sort of like thin thread that most people don't understand and we can unpack it in a second. But in my opinion, that sort of, you know, at the beginning of this year was when I started to pay attention and try to understand this issue more because it seemed like, wow, that's a shot across the bow and declaring China as the clear, you know, sort of the clear and present danger for American sovereignty.
SPEAKER_01: And the NBA and TikTok being cultural ramifications of that, which are different. No, honestly, Jason, TikTok's irrelevant. Who cares?
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's- Is it irrelevant, Sax?
SPEAKER_00: Well, what TikTok and Huawei have in common is that the sort of proxy battles of Cold War Two will be fought between these sort of client corporations, whereas, you know, Cold War One, you have these sort of these proxy, these sort of client states fighting these proxy wars. Cold War Two, you have more of these like client corporations fighting these proxy wars. So, you know, it's, that's the sense in which I think they're related. What TikTok shows is a company that's desperately trying to maneuver so they don't become one of the first economic casualties of Cold War Two. They appointed an American as CEO. They've pulled out of Hong Kong, so they're not subject to those regulations. And they're desperately maneuvering so they don't get banned in the United States. They want to preserve their market access. But I think there's a very good chance that they will get shut down in the U.S. Yeah, they've been shut down in India. And today is July the 10th. And right before we
SPEAKER_03: went on, the breaking news was that Amazon basically asked all their employees to delete TikTok because of a security threat. So it's happening. I think that TikTok, unless they basically have ByteDance sell under 20 or 30 percent of the company and get it into the hands of Americans, it will get banned. And I think that there will be a massive destruction in enterprise value. But can I tell you why TikTok doesn't matter or doesn't matter as much? I think, David, you're right that it's sort of like collateral damage. It almost is like, you know, it'll exist. But whatever. The Huawei thing, in my opinion, is so important because it shines a light on two things. The first is that, you know, what happened essentially is the United States told TSMC, you know, you cannot basically give Huawei access to the 5G chipsets and the 5G technology that they would use to essentially kind of like, you know, implement their spyware and then sell it into Western nations effectively. And so then what it does is it puts China in the posture of having to figure out how do they get access to this stuff? And, you know, the most obvious answer is to invade Taiwan and take over TSMC. And, you know, why would they do that? Well, obviously, that has huge geopolitical ramifications, but they could only do that again, going back to the first comment is because they've already bought so many nation states into their productivity block that it's still on a balance, a worthwhile trade. And it allows them to solve their version of Taiwanese sovereignty completely and definitively and basically say, look, we've now solved Hong Kong, you know, Macau was already solved and now we're going to solve Taiwan and put the whole thing to bed. And now we have access to this critical technology that we need. So that's why I think sort of like what happens with Huawei, sort of what happens with TSMC, what happens on 5G is so important, because if you're going to force China, you know, to basically have to buy Western technology in order to get access to a critical piece of, you know, Internet infrastructure, they're going to be put to a very, very difficult test about what they have to do. And then they will have to be much more transparent on the global stage about what their ambitions really are and how far they're willing to go. And I think that's, you know, that's a lot more important than, you know, a bunch of kids dancing to short videos.
SPEAKER_00: Well, and just to add to that point, you know, so I think Jamath is right that these sort of chips, the 5G chips, these other chips, they're the new oil, you know, in terms of their geopolitical significance. You know, obviously, all of our technology, our iPhones are advanced event weaponry. It's all based on these, these chips, and, and 70% of them are fabricated in Taiwan. And, and I think, you know, one of the huge blind spots of American trade policy over the last 30 years is, is kind of not to notice that, that this key technology that's really the substrate for all of our technology for our economy, has now been many, it's now been moved and manufactured, you know, in Taiwan, whose sovereignty China does not recognize, and is constantly, you know, threatening with the risk of being being annexed. So, you know, we have a tremendous vulnerability there. And, you know, at the same, you know, we finally after about 40 or 50 years of declaring that we'd be energy independent, we've achieved that. But now we have this new dependency on these chips that... And pharma and manufacturing. I mean, and we and we it seems like now manufacturing,
SPEAKER_01: we're starting to realize, hey, Elon was right, we need to be able to build our own factories. And guess what? American spirit, American ingenuity, American focus, American capitalism,
SPEAKER_01: we can do it. We have the wherewithal to do it. There's no reason we cannot make these chips here. Sorry, I don't buy it that we're, we're going to be this dependent forever. We just need to have the will and the leadership to say, we're going to do this, whether it costs us an extra 50 cents per chip. And... Well, the fabrication of these chips is incredibly complicated. I mean, they're basically...
SPEAKER_00: So let's buy the companies. They're microscopic. And it takes years, like several years to set up the, you know, the facility to do this kind of fabrication. Why don't we buy those companies now? Why don't we just take it to Chamath's point,
SPEAKER_01: which was very clear, which is, hey, this is an economic, this is a ledger, this is, you know, a check writing exercise to win this war. Why don't we take out our checkbook and buy 50% of these companies now and put them on the NASDAQ if they're not already there?
SPEAKER_03: It requires real leadership. At the end of the day, it needs to be led by the United States government. The reality is that, you know, lithography has gotten so advanced. I mean, like, look, I have, you know, companies that are, you know, taping out chips at like seven nanometer. And I don't have supply or diversity. I don't know. I can't basically choose, you know, nine folks to bid it out against of which, you know, five are domestically in the United States. There are two. Right. And so, you know, you kind of just deal with the complexity or the lack of diversity that we have. And Jason, your point is exactly right, which is the first and most important decision here is one that's philosophical, which is again saying that era of efficiency at the sake of all else is over. And we are now moving to an era of resilience, which inherently is more inefficient. But in that inefficiency, we will rebuild American prosperity because it rebuilds American industry and it rebuilds American jobs. There's another example that I want to build on David's point, which is let's all believe and attest that we all care about climate change for a second. And we all want the world to be electrified. Okay. Well, electricity and electrification requires two very, very basic inputs. Okay. One is a battery and the second is an electric motor. Right. Makes sense so far. Yep. Well, inside an electric motor, there is one critical thing that you need to make it work, which is a permanent magnet. The permanent magnet spins around and that's how an electric motor works. Okay. Why is that important? As it turns out that permanent magnets need special characteristics that are only provided by a handful of very, very specific rare earth materials that we need to mine out of the ground and refine. Those materials actually exist in many places, including the United States. Yeah. We stopped mining for them. But right now, China controls 80% of the supply of rare earths. They can choose how they price it. They can differentially price to their own companies, which means that the battery and engine manufacturers inside of China can now lead on electrification, which means China can actually lead on climate change before the United States can, unless we have leadership that says at a governmental level on down, we are going to make this a priority. We're going to fund it. We're going to make sure that they're onshore mines. We're going to make sure that those mines are clean. We're going to build a supply chain domestically and we're going to subsidize. This is what governments do best. It's not act. It's just incentivize on things like climate. So I don't know. Friedberg has spent a lot of time on climate change, so he has a, he has probably a lot of ideas on this, but whenever you look at any of these things, health, climate, food, it all comes down to the United States versus China strategy versus tactics. Friedberg?
SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think that the Chinese action is as deterministic as we think it is or as we kind of frame it where it's China's got this grand plan. They're going to beat the U S and they're going to control things and make decisions that hurt us. I think a lot of this is China. If you think about it less about black and white, there's a continuum and the continuum is one of influence and one of creating an environment whereby these things can happen. So China, for example, made capital readily available for the agriculture industry to be able to buy, buy assets. And so the companies inside of China, which aren't control the Chinese government, isn't telling them what to do. The Chinese government has set a policy that enables them to increase their prosperity. And as a result, increase the prosperity of the Chinese people. You know, when I was at Monsanto, we were, we bid for the largest ag chemicals company in the world based out of Switzerland. It's called Syngenta. And we did like $44 billion to buy this company. And the largest chemical company in China called ChemChina bid $47 billion and acquired the business. And they now own the largest ag chemicals company in the world. China also bought Smithfield's and they bought, they put a bunch of people in Canada. Hey, Friedberg, how much of that money do you think
SPEAKER_01: came from the CCP and what involvement do you think the CCP had in putting their thumb on the scale of making sure that transaction went that direction? Look, I mean, ultimately, wherever the capital comes from, it's no less equivalent than what
SPEAKER_02: you would see in the United States where treasuries fund the central bank, which funds banks, which fund lending to corporations, which ultimately make purchases, right? But do you think the leadership said, hey, we're winning this at all costs?
SPEAKER_02: So here's what happened. In 2007, there was a CCP internal doctrine that was published and it's now reasonably well known. And there was a speech that was given that started this aggressive action in agriculture. And as a result, Chinese citizens started moving to Canada and buying farmland in Canada. They started moving to Australia, buying farmland in China. They started building these facilities in Argentina and Brazil and Africa. And the Chinese government set out a strategic objective and provided the capital and enabled industry and people to go after pursuing these interests. But the CCP didn't say, here's the roadmap. It's not like here's the specific plan for what we need to do. They had a general high level kind of point of view that I think drove all that action and all of that behavior. And so I would say it's not as perhaps coercive as we might think it is in terms of the CCP wanting to target and attack U.S. They're trying to increase their influence around the world. They're trying to increase their own security and increase their own prosperity. And at some point, there's only so many resources globally. There's only so much land, so much magnets that they and they're winning in the markets. And we're kind of crossing that threshold now where they're actually like a competitor. The only difference between this is and I
SPEAKER_01: couldn't. I'm sorry. My point is I just don't want to frame it as like I just think it's
SPEAKER_02: a misstatement to frame it as China has this grand plan to come after the U.S. and they're evil and that's what they're doing. I mean, you know, this is where I think you're completely
SPEAKER_01: wrong, David, respectfully, in that I believe this is an ideological war. And if you you can't diminish what's happening in Hollywood, TikTok and the NBA and other sports where China is explicitly saying, if you put a villain in our in a movie, if you talk about Tibet in a movie, we are going to not play that movie and we're going to start funding your movies. And so they are absolutely using the vector of culture. And I think you're also wrong here where you're saying, oh, TikTok is not important. TikTok is something that a generation of kids absolutely are in love with. And those kids are like, hey, boomers stay out of our platform. And so and the ideological issue here, Freeburg, which I think that you're underplaying is they want to win and they want to spread their ideology, which is the ideology of authoritarianism. They are not going to win Africa and then suddenly say, you know what would be great for Africa if we made the entire continent democracies. That's not in their best interest. How is it different than Trump tweeting?
SPEAKER_03: Well, Freeburg, I just think that it's it's inconceivable to me that the Chinese, when they do this grandiose planning and they do the political theater of having the thousands of people in the Chinese assembly hall once a year, you know, and Xi Jinping talks, that they haven't developed a multifaceted, multilayered plan that they're executing. In part, I think this is why Xi Jinping essentially wants to be this ruler for life inside of China, because he, I think they have a 20 or 30 year plan. And I do think it is to disrupt the United States. And I don't think that they believe, though, which is the smart thing, that there's one silver bullet. I just think that they're going to take a thousand shots on gold, whether it's, you know, monopolizing the rare earths or, you know, figuring out how to basically put spying software in the hands of millions of Americans. That's where I think TikTok is actually really important. It's essentially a vehicle to spy and backdoor into Americans, or whether it's, you know, introducing a digital yuan so that we can try to disrupt the, you know, the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency of the world. They probably have a list of 1000 tactics, and they're going to go and execute them. And I don't begrudge them that. I just think it's well organized machine. I just think we now need to counterpunch. Sax. Yeah, I mean, so China is on a mission of national greatness. I think the immediate
SPEAKER_00: goal is to assert its hegemony over Asia and to kick the US out of that region. But I think ultimately now they see in their sights potentially being the number one country in the entire world because of the chaos that COVID has wrought over here.
SPEAKER_03: And in fairness, David, the incompetence of Trump thus far. I mean, like, you know, it's not fair to think that the Chinese Politburo versus Trump and his cabinet are an equal match. Forget their political persuasion.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. I mean, they clearly seem emboldened. And, you know, just in the last few weeks and months, we've seen the ending of the two systems in Hong Kong, which was a 50 year commitment they made in, I think, 1984. So they abrogated on that. Well, it's actually meant that you happen to do that three or four months before Trump
SPEAKER_01: is looking like he's not going to be in office. So talking about shots on goal, this may be their only shot to do this. And well, there's the whole world's distracted. Yeah. And do they go after Taiwan in the next hundred days where they have a window?
SPEAKER_00: I think we have to be extremely clear that Taiwan is a red line for us and that we're committed to the security of Taiwan, because if we show any hesitation or weakness there, they will seize on that. And, you know, given our- Would Trump do that? Would Trump put his foot down? Because he did nothing when it came
SPEAKER_01: to supporting- Well, I think we need to abstract away from any given president of the United States because
SPEAKER_03: they change every four or eight years. And I think we need to have a bigger discussion, which is, like I said, over the next 40 to 50 years, are we comfortable with the duopoly power structure in the world, which is the United States and China, because that's effectively what we are today? Or are we the shining city on a hill once again? And if so, what are we willing to do to make sure that that's the case? And I think that's independent of your political persuasion and your party. Right. Well, the good news here is that both Trump and Biden are basically racing to sort
SPEAKER_00: of position themselves as the more hawkish candidate on China, which is to say that this recognition of Cold War II is now, I think, bipartisan, which if you want to sustain a policy in this country over, say, 40 years, like we did in containing the Soviet Union, you have to have bipartisan support for that. And so it does seem like finally as a country, I think we are kind of getting our act together on China. I mean, obviously, there will be disagreements within that larger context. But it seems like now people are waking up to the threat that China represents to America being the number one country in the world. And I think...
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. By the way, I agree with Sax. I mean, I think that's exactly what's happening and what will happen here. And it'll certainly it'll be a big hill to climb. I'll just highlight and I'll ask the question of Chamath, you know, per his point earlier. Let me ask you guys, how many factories do you think exist in China? Take a guess.
SPEAKER_03: Eleven million.
SPEAKER_02: Two point eight million. Now, how many do you think exist in the United States?
SPEAKER_03: One hundred and fifty thousand. Close. About two hundred fifty thousand. And China has about eighty three million factory
SPEAKER_02: workers and we have about twelve. So, you know, Chamath, if we do end up in Cold War two, where we escalate the tension and escalate the divide, how do we end up, you know, having avoiding two thousand dollar, three thousand dollar iPhones? How do we get all the televisions we want for five hundred bucks? How do we do that, given that, you know, to catch up with this production capacity will end up costing many tens of trillions of dollars of invested capital that China's invested over decades? Well, this is such a brilliant this is a fabulous question. And I think I don't have the answer,
SPEAKER_03: but here's the way that I think about the solution. You know, the the thing that we had before was in my way, in many ways, like this kind of like perverted sense of globalism. And I think that we we you know, we thought that globalism equals utopia. And that's not true. It's actually more like a chessboard, which means you have, you know, two different sets of colored pieces competing against each other. And each piece on the board in many ways is a country. So, you know, we can look at that as a geographic skew and say like, we need to really consolidate, you know, North, Central and South America as a block, as a productivity block. And so, David, that's where we need to have more trade within those areas so that we can actually build up production capacity in places that can absorb and produce low cost labor or low cost items to compete with the China block. That may be a solution.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that is an incredible point, Chamath, which is why the rhetoric with Mexico, which would love to have a relationship with us, is so dumb. We're talking about factories. They would love for us to put more factories on there. And whatever countries forget, forget work our way down the peninsula. Yeah. Go to go down the peninsula. Go go to Honduras.
SPEAKER_03: Go to El Salvador. Go to Guatemala, where Uruguay, Paraguay. They want work. Yeah. Are screaming for work, which is why they're trying to enter the United States. The best way to not build a wall, take all that money and fuel it into production and manufacturing and warehouse capacity in those places in which they're leaving in the first place. And if we thought like China, we would go ahead. Do it free. No, you can't successfully
SPEAKER_02: sustain a cold war with China without global partnership. And I think this notion of nationalism and isolationism in the United States will not work in a world where we are also trying to compete globally with China and are raising the stakes in a global cold war. You can't have it both ways. So either the current administration policy needs to change. I'd love to hear Saxe's point of view on this. Or we need to have a change in administration and actually re-engage on a global basis with partner states.
SPEAKER_00: Well, okay. So I think that the point about, well, I think what some people on the right would say is that being able to buy cheap goods at Target is not worth the hollowing out of the American industrial base that happened over the past 30 years. And that was a catastrophic mistake. And this is what got Trump reelected was shattering that blue wall in those Rust Belt states. So I think we can kind of look back on that and wonder whether that trade off was really worth it. But moving forward, I think the balance is going to be to realize that trade does create wealth. All wealth, in fact, comes from trade, whether at the level of individuals or nations. If it weren't for trade, all of us would be subsistence farmers or something like that. But we also have to realize that trade creates interdependence because I stopped making certain things in order to buy them from you. And so in order to engage in trade, we have to trust each other. I have to trust that you one day won't decide that your ability to manufacture antibiotics is strategic and you might deprive me of them in order to facilitate some geopolitical interest. And so I think what we're waking up to with production of pharmaceuticals or N95 masks, PPE, and now chips is that we've had this real blind spot with respect to trade. We've basically offshored so many of the elements are necessary for our national survival. And I think those elements have to be brought back so that America is safe and independent. But with respect to so many other things, I think it's fine for us to get them through trade, whether it could be apparel or toys or so many other goods that we do want cheap goods that are not formally strategic.
SPEAKER_01: I want to do a mental exercise. We all, for our living, try to come up with 100x, 1000x solutions, whether we're creating the companies or betting on the companies. I want everybody to just think for a second of the United States as a startup company and a 10x, 100x idea for how we can not only maintain our position, but maybe become the shining hill where we actually lead the world towards democracy, towards human rights. I'm going to start with one that I just happened to hit me while you all were talking, which is why I love doing this podcast because I get such inspiration listening to you guys pass the ball around. We haven't added a state to the United States in a pretty damn long time. What if we said to Puerto Rico, what if we said to the Dominican Republic, what if we said to Honduras? I mean, and I don't want to make this into a exercise in colonialism, but if we said, you know what, Puerto Rico, how do you feel about being the 51st state? Because we're already 80% of the way there. What if we said the United States is going to, and this is just a crazy 100x idea, we're going to start taking countries that maybe love democracy, that would love to be part of the United States and having a bridge towards becoming part of this block, whether it's how Puerto Rico is-
SPEAKER_00: Jason, the United States can barely function as it is. That's why I'm giving you the freedom to say this is a 100x exercise as a startup because
SPEAKER_01: if we put out crazy ideas like this, maybe we can pull people towards thinking like the chessboard of how to play 3D chess or how to win the chessboard, not just move the pawns back and forth.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the first thing America has to do is decide whether it still thinks that national greatness is important and whether it wants to compete to be the leading power in the world because right now it seems like we're hopelessly divided and our guns are literally drawn on each other. You've got this all out assault going on on capitalism, you have sort of cancel culture, and America just seems hopelessly divided. I don't know if Americans still think it's important to be the number one power in the world. All right, so what's your thought experiment on how to make Americans realize this is important?
SPEAKER_01: Or if anybody else wants to jump in here with a 10x idea for America, go ahead, John.
SPEAKER_03: I have an overlaying theory that this is sort of me spitballing, so bear with me. Let's do it. But there's this concept called the Overton window, which is sort of like the minimally viable acceptable surface area of dialogue, at which case it starts to sort of get extreme. I would tell you that the Overton window is the smallest it's ever been. 100. There's basically nothing that you can talk about that is relatively benign without it being politicized. And there's no gradation anymore. It's a very binary thing. You're either in the Overton window, which for example, would be like, you know, vegetables matter, or looking both ways across the street matters. And outside the Overton window, honestly, is Black Lives Matter as an example, you know, and it gets politicized on both sides. Masks, you know, if a balaclava when you're skiing because your face is cold is inside the Overton window, that same balaclava when you go to the drugstore so that you can actually, you know, either prevent disease one way or the other is outside the Overton window. You know, making sure that police, you know, are there to protect you in a time of need is now outside the Overton window because it's framed in the lens of police brutality. So the Overton window has shrunk. So we have very little surface area where we can actually all agree without getting into a fight. We're trying to cancel each other.
SPEAKER_00: I totally agree with that. I mean, we have this sort of epidemic of cancel culture going on and I guess, Jason, you recently experienced this.
SPEAKER_01: Oh my lord. I mean, for the love of God.
SPEAKER_03: What happened, Jason? Tell us what happened.
SPEAKER_01: Listen, I look at Twitter as a place to have vibrant discussions and, you know, 10 years ago it was kind of where the Overton window was most open. You could have a discussion about anything. And we had a discussion about, you know, my feeling that as a former journalist and we're doing random acts of journalism here that I just thought The New York Times was just way too biased and that they picked a side in order for their business to survive. And I actually believe that. I believe they picked the side of Trump. I'm sorry. The side of anti-Trump in order to get subscriptions because their advertising business has been demolished by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. This led to the circling of the wagons of the journalists, which I was part of. But listen, it's pretty easy to hate me. I understand that. I'm a loud mouth. And so now I'm getting piled on by the journal. And you were an early investor in Uber.
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. Don't forget that. Don't forget. The third or fourth. They tell me the third or fourth. Anyway, so there's a journalist
SPEAKER_01: at said publication. I'm not going to say her name because I don't want any harassment of anybody. Nobody does. Who said people are stupid for going back to work and they're
SPEAKER_01: idiots. And I said, you know, this is a very convenient thing for a journalist who works behind a keyboard who makes one hundred thousand dollars a year to say because those people are literally not going to be able to feed their kids if they don't go back to work. And this led to her saying I was harassing and stalking her. Then I was in Clubhouse, the new social network where you talk and the same journalist was in the audience. And I said to the people who were talking, just be aware there is a journalist in the audience, because even though this is a private beta, this could wind up being in The New York Times, which it did. Not that discussion, but another one that was covertly taped. And I don't know if it was covertly taped by journalists or not, but it did wind up in the press anyway. This whole thing turns into a giant fight.
SPEAKER_03: Clubhouse sounds like some dark S&M sex club in Berlin. No, no, that's it. Here's what I think is most entertaining.
SPEAKER_00: That's Clubhouse. H-O-A-U-S. House. Clubhouse.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. What I think is most entertaining about this is that The New York Times journalist
SPEAKER_00: was in this vicious battle with Bology, who's a Silicon Valley founder and personality. And they were arguing. And then Jason somehow comes running over and starts involving himself in this feud. And it's like, and it's like Bology gets fouled, but Jason takes the flop, you know, and all of a sudden, and all of a sudden, Jason's talking about, you know, how he's getting docs. Bology is the guy who was like called out in The New York Times, but somehow Jason, Jason takes the flop.
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, so here's what's happened. I'm only telling the story. I'm not trying to get victim points. Give a fuck about that. It's July 4th. I think I put the kids down for the nap. We, you know, steaks are going on the grill. It's fucking great day. And then I'm on the Peloton trying to be just a little less fat so I can be less fat than Saks so that the photo that we're Saks is using, I just come out five percent less fat than Saks. And I look and I had posted a picture of the tree line outside my house to the beautiful blue sky on July 4th. And I said, listen, everybody, take a break from Twitter, go spend time with your family, which is what I was about to do. A 37 year old private equity douche from Boston does a reverse image search on the tree line, finds a bigger picture of the trees, finds a picture of my pool based on that bigger picture and Google reverse image search and all these other tools and then Docs as me, which basically means releasing your address. He releases my address in my thread where. OK, because so I DM him and he's using his real name and he's got a LinkedIn profile. And I said, do you realize how dangerous this is? He goes, well, you're stalking said journalist. I said, I am not stalking the journalist. Well, she said you're stalking her. So if you apologize to her and you take down the mean stuff you said about her, I'll take down your home address. And I said, hey, hey, this is illegal. Number one. And number two, you're going to lose your Twitter account. And then I said, number three. We're connected, your boss, because you have a you're using your public name. Your boss is connected to 14 people, of which like half are very close friends of mine. And I'm calling your boss and I have all these screenshots of you doxing me. What do you think is going to happen on Monday? And I just gave him my phone number in this. Hold on. Hold on. Wait. Good. And the sick. You want to finish this? OK, sorry.
SPEAKER_01: Let me just finish the story. I tell the guy here's my phone number. He calls me. I said, hey, I know that you're a kid. I know that you did something rash. But this is actually a kind of a dangerous thing because, you know, there's serious mental illness and whatever. Point one percent of the population, there's millions of people now involved in this discussion. It could be a security concern for me. I'm not going to post your address. Please don't post mine. Delete the tweet. He was I refused to delete the tweet to you, whatever. And I said, OK, well, I'm going to call your boss on Monday. We know these people in common. She's going to fire you and you're going to lose your job. Now, I know you're only twenty three or twenty four and this doesn't matter to you. And he goes, I said, how old do you said? Thirty seven. I said, you're thirty seven years old. You married. You say, yeah, I'm married. I got a six year old. Now you want me to make you lose your job because you're so mad at me over nothing. I said, I don't want to call your boss on Monday and tell them what you did because it will certainly result in you being fired. And he goes, oh, I said, you might want to go talk to your spouse about what you did and maybe get her perspective. He writes me an apology letter. We deleted it's all water under the bridge. But I've been trying to tell people you have to be very careful when this gets too personal because there are your dog whistling to crazy people who then might do something crazy. Anyway, end of story. I backed off the whole discussion because I just don't want to I want to finish my second book and I want to do podcasts with guys like you and have a great time with my life and not be involved with a bunch of idiots. End of story. So I
SPEAKER_03: want to go back to this over to window concept for a second. So again, just what my my my idea. So you take the word matters. The word matters is in the Overton window. Nobody can argue that the word matters is offensive. If you if you prepend that word with vegetables, it stays in the Overton window. If you put looking both ways before you cross the street, matters. Okay, we're still there. We're in the window. Stays in the Overton window. If you say black lives as a term, just without the word matters, that's probably in the Overton window. Sure. You put black lives matters, it's out the Overton window. And both sides politicize. I think the left politicizes with this cancel culture and basically like an extreme form of political correctness. And then the right politicizes by, you know, in their way, a vein of hypersensitivity, and then a doubling down on this notion of an attacking of individual freedoms and free speech. And in all of that, both of these two groups miss the fact that they're both sort of the same and they they're they're wronged in the same way, but they're both not listening in the same way. Right. So if I had to put something in the Overton window that would address the US China Cold War thing, here's what I would say. We all
SPEAKER_03: need energy, we all need food and we all need technology. Right. We need to sort of warm our houses, we need to feed our bellies and we need to be able to be productive in some way so that we can make money. And I think that everybody in the United States can agree that on these three dimensions, there are some really simple things that we could do that basically double down on US sovereignty and allow us to basically be more on the offensive. So I'll give you a couple of ideas. On the energy side is we need to continue to support energy independence, and that will require subsidies. And the reason why that's important, in my opinion, is that then what happens is it hastens and accelerates Russia and the Middle East not becoming relevant anymore because they are forced to monetize their oil sooner. The Middle East probably disintegrates into 30 countries. The Middle East was just a kind of a random exercise of basically Americans and Europeans after the war divvying up a bunch of things. It has no sensitivity to culture or language or anything. So that probably goes to a very different direction. Solve itself. And Russia becomes less important because they just have to monetize, otherwise they will lose their only source of revenue. So that's one thing on energy that I think we could do that I think is relatively politically acceptable and inside the Overton window. Second is on food, which is that we have to double down on creating a completely independent food supply inside the United States. And there are ways again, where if we don't need to be building tanks and having $90 trillion programs for aircraft carriers anymore, we could pour that money into US farms and give people like Friedberg a lot more money to go and actually make sure the United States has food security. That in any situation and scenario we can feed the 330 odd million people inside of our borders.
SPEAKER_03: And then the third thing is on technology, which is there are a critical bunch of inputs, whether it's 5G chips, rare earth materials or minerals, things like cobalt and lithium, which we need for batteries for climate change, that we can go and basically co-opt because those things are concentrated in countries like Chile, in places like Africa, where we can actually do a better job of instilling governance and security. So that's my Jason, back to your thing. These aren't sexy ideas, but they would work. And I think they would work by both Republicans and Democrats and it's non-controversial.
SPEAKER_01: I'll even punch up the food part. There's no reason why, the same way we made water in public schools, kind of a given in the United States. Nobody really has to worry about getting water. Nobody has to worry about getting a basic education learning to read. Let's say it's not perfect, obviously. Why not make healthy produce and some amount of healthy food so affordable in the United States that it's essentially free? And then you think about food security, like how are we still discussing food security with the amount of money and prosperity we have in this country? Make it free. We've almost made energy free. We have energy independence. I'll say a Manhattan project to make energy and food as free or de minimis as water would be just an amazing thing for us to rally around because then people can work on the next thing in their life, their careers, their family, their pursuits. Friedberg, what do you think of the Overton window and would you add something to it that we can all agree on that we could work on together and maybe unify the country as opposed to pulling guns on each other in the parking lots because of the color of our skin?
SPEAKER_02: I'm reminded of a great moment in history when Will Smith and his friends blew up the UFO that came to attack Earth. Nothing brings us together like a common enemy. So it could be that the unification is going to be, you know, in part driven by this Cold War two and creating a common enemy in China is going to work for both the right and the left and create a lot of opportunity of Chamath highlights in manufacturing and food production. There's a lot of tools available to us. I think we could all sit here and speculate and I could pitch and plug all the companies I'm involved in that I think are going to play a role. But I do think it's that moment where, you know, we are going to coalesce around a common enemy. And well, it'd be good if you actually shared one or two of those projects you're working
SPEAKER_01: on if you can. I actually would be cool. I mean, I think here what you're working on.
SPEAKER_02: I've shared this before, but I do think bio manufacturing, which is the technology whereby we engineer the DNA of microbes and those microbes then make molecules for us in a big fermentation tank in the same way that we make beer or wine. Bio manufacturing can be used to make flavors and fragrances. And now we're making materials like silks and plastics, plastic equivalents, and more interestingly, proteins for human consumption to replace animal proteins. And the cost of production and the cost of energy associated with making these materials, these molecules, these proteins through bio manufacturing is literally several orders of magnitude less than the traditional technique, which is just insane. If you think about it in first principles basis of growing fucking corn, feeding it to a cow, letting the cow grow up, feeding it hundreds of gallons of water, killing it, chopping it up, transporting it to a restaurant. I mean, the amount of energy that goes into making a pound of ground beef is insane. And the and the greenhouse gas emissions and so on. So I do believe that there is a big wave of bio manufacturing as an industry that is coming on the US this century. And it will hopefully by the end of the century be the primary way that we're kind of producing a lot of the molecules that we consume and that we use for clothing and materials. So then that does what to factories because you know, you did explain earlier the number
SPEAKER_01: of factories if we can bio produce, that's not only our stakes, not only our corn. So that also mean we could bio manufacture steel plastics, cars, not so much steel, but alternatives
SPEAKER_02: to leather alternatives to cloth alternatives to so close to close food. So imagine instead of a traditional factory, think about a factory historically being purpose built. So you build all these components to make one thing, you spent all this money making a giant machine that you put stuff in on one end, and the same thing comes out over and over the other end. And that's classic Industrial Revolution 1.0 and 20th century Industrial Revolution output. In this century, we are going to build these giant printers, they're not going to be single form machines that make one thing over and over, they're going to be systems that are giant fermentation tanks. And in those fermentation tanks, it's like you program them with software and the software in this case is genetic software, you edit the genome of these organisms, they take stuff on the input, and they make on the output a bunch of different stuff.
SPEAKER_01: So if you have an applicator like in Star Trek, and if there was seasonality, and people needed something over the summer for July 4, versus what they need in Christmas or in the winter and ski season, the same factory makes that thing. We're 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from this having an impact on the economy.
SPEAKER_02: Yes. And we're seeing it now. I mean, look, the number of artificial animal protein companies and the funding that they're getting is I think, highlighting investor interest and appetite in backing the capex needed to get this to become a reality right now. Perfect Day just raised $300 million this week. Impossible Foods raised $400 million from the Qatari Investment Authority. You know, obviously, Beyond Meat is where they're at. I mean, these companies are using these techniques of genetic engineering to make microbes that make the proteins and the flavorings. We put 50 places up, we put 500 million into the PPP program, if we put 500 billion, I'm
SPEAKER_01: sorry, 500 billion, put 500 billion into this, how much would it accelerate it?
SPEAKER_02: Pretty substantially. And I think it goes from food to pharma to materials. And that's probably, you know, where you would see the impact. But again, one system can make different materials can make different. So we could be independent of other countries for food to chamat's point, and also pharma,
SPEAKER_01: which we are way too dependent, correct, on China?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're definitely a net exporter. By the way, you know, our largest export partner is China. So most of our soybeans in the United States that we produce and soybeans are grown on 160 million acres in the US, and it rotates half and half each year with corn, but about two thirds of our soybeans historically get exported to China. So we are already food secure from a net resource perspective. It's just the rest of the infrastructure in terms of turning that stuff into meat and other stuff is where we're, you know, we probably have to build up a little bit of infrastructure.
SPEAKER_01: Sax, let's swing the ball over to you when you hear the Overton window ideas when you hear about this bio chemistry slurry tank revolution that free birds working on. How does that change or evolve your view of our relationship with China and the political mess we're in right now in 2020? Yeah, well, I think Cold War Two does provide a lens to rethink and reevaluate a lot of
SPEAKER_00: these domestic political fights. And so for example, are the big technology companies, you know, Google, Facebook, and so on, are they these, you know, even monopolies that need to be broken up? Or are they the crown jewels of the American economy that needs to be protected from Chinese espionage? You know, is the free enterprise system this, you know, horribly, you know, oppressive, racist thing? Or is it actually the engine of prosperity that's built this country? You know, is freedom of speech, an outdated principle, or is it something we want to, you know, that that should be canceled? Or is it something we want to fight for? And I think that, you know, when you start thinking about these issues, you know, in the, you know, through the lens of Cold War Two, it provides an opportunity to kind of reevaluate them and think about what's really important. And, and hopefully, it can provide a little bit of a unify unifying force in America, not because we want China to be an enemy, but just because we want to maintain a sense of national greatness. And I, you know, it's not something we just want to give up on.
SPEAKER_03: I have a question for Friedberg. Are our schools going to be back in the fall? Because I cannot deal with my kids being at home.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's gonna be a mixed bag. It seems like, I mean, if you follow this, this is a political decision, right? It's not a scientific decision. And so there are different politics around nationally that are affecting this. And there are some schools that seem like they've got processes and methods of being comfortable. Some of them are just throwing everything out the window and say, I don't give a shit, the kids got to go back to school. And some of them who are being very conservative and saying, you know, we're not ready for that. We can't take the risk. So you'll definitely see a mixed bag. I don't know where you're living, Chamath. I don't know what's going to happen, per se, but it's definitely a local policy question. So, Friedberg, is it safe to send our kids back to a 10 person pod in a school in California?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's like asking if it's safe to cross a train track. You know, you can look
SPEAKER_02: left, you can look right. But yeah, you're, you know, a busy train intersection during during rush hour. You know, it's hard to say what level of safe is safe. We know that kids are less susceptible to any sort of health risk themselves from the virus. And it looks like there's a lot of studies showing that they're likely less, the virus is less transmissible through kids, especially kids under the age of 14. And so it seems like there's there's some theories that say that, look, it's these ACE2 receptors whereby the virus enters the cells really start to present when you turn 10 years old at a greater rate. And, you know, it scales up to 14. And above 14, you're kind of an adult from an ACE2 receptor point of view. And then there's the severity of the infection, as we all know, is really more of a significant issue for much elderly people. So when you take those factors into account, the virus is likely less transmissible amongst children, therefore, a bunch of kids get together, they're not going to transmit it to each other. And, and it's likely going to be less severe, even if there is an infection for kids. The risk is just about are the teachers comfortable and what happens when they go home. And there have been a number of letters that you guys have probably seen op eds and whatnot written in papers by teachers saying I'm nervous to go back to school. I don't want to teach this fall. I don't want to take the risk for my health. I take care of my mom or my dad or what have you. And so there's a lot of competing interests here. So let's go around the horn of who's sending their kids back to school. I'll start I posted
SPEAKER_01: on calicanus.com yesterday that we've decided as a family, that we're starting a micro school. We put out a call for a teacher and, you know, just looking at teacher salaries, they don't get paid particularly well in our society, as we all know, they're underpaid. So we think we can come over the top and provide a, you know, a better financial arrangement for a teacher. And then have one to five students and we're going to just create a micro school. That's our that's our current plan. Our kids did go to camp this summer in a small 10 person or less pod. And we felt that was safe. Everybody was tested and it was outdoors. But for me being indoors at a school with 300 pods of 10. And I think the best teachers are not going to show up and my kids don't learn over zoom. I don't know about your kids, but it's not working. So we're starting our we're going to roll our own school and hopefully find one or two families who want to chop up the cost with us or we'll we'll just pick up the tab and invite one or two families if they don't have the means to do it. But we're going to we're going to go solo for 2021. Freeberg-Tremoth, what do you think in a minute? Because we're only seven, eight weeks out from this, right? We're less than two months.
SPEAKER_03: I really think like, look, not everybody, Jason, is going to be in a position to hire teachers. In fact, most everybody won't be. Agreed. I think it's I want to send my children back to school. I refuse to create some alternative reality for them. I think it's really important that they are with their friends. I think that we're not really thinking strongly enough about the social implications for, you know, children. Let's just say like, you know, you take an eight year old or a nine year old or a 10 year old and you deprive them of their friends for a year. I mean, that's an enormous part of their life where they... It's like a prison sentence. Yeah. They've been socially isolated, you know. I just think it's a really bad outcome. So I think that obviously from a public health perspective, we want to keep our teachers safe. I just think that it's so important that we realize that, you know, we are going to impact an entire generation of kids. I think that if you're 18 or 19 and have had, you know, 18 or 19 years of normal teenage-dom, you know, and growing up that it's okay if you miss a year or you have to, you know, do your first year of college remotely. Like it sucks, but you can deal. But I really worry about these kids in primary school and middle school. It's really unfair. Yeah. I mean, our plan was to try to get to
SPEAKER_01: four or five students, a small bubble, and then, you know, have outdoor. The problem is in the Northeast, I just think it... I mean, having gone to school, you're inside with a heating system, with a closed ventilation system that was built in 1920.
SPEAKER_03: And I think it avoids the real key thing, which is like, I don't think you go to school to learn as much as you go to school to... Socialize. Socialize. I mean, you learn as a by-product because everybody socializes, not everybody learns. Right? Agreed. And so it's an enormously important formative experience for a child to be around 15 or 20 of their other kids, then to be in the playground to deal with all the adversity that comes with normal life of a kid. That's the biggest thing that I think we're depriving them of. And I understand that, you know, there's an important reason to hold these kids back, but I just want to appreciate that behaviorally and psychologically, this is not going to be for free.
SPEAKER_01: Freeburg. Saxe. What's your latest thinking?
SPEAKER_00: I guess I agree with both Shmath and Freeburg on this, that there are huge benefits to going back and the risk to kids are low in terms of getting it, and also they're less viral if they do. But Israel is sort of a strong recent counter example where they recently opened schools and now all of a sudden they've got a spike. So, you know, we're going to send our kids back, but I expect it to be a little bit of a shit show. I think that the schools will reopen and they'll do all this planning. There'll be all these like pods and half days and smaller groups and that kind of thing. And then somebody is going to... There'll be like one case, either a kid or, you know, one family, and then all of a sudden they're going to shut down again. And I guess, you know, they're spending all this time planning, but I wonder if they're really going to have contingency plans for what happens when there's a case or... That's exactly what I think is happening. I think they'll just shut down. It's just...
SPEAKER_01: It's too scary for a child to die or a teacher to die and the overreaction to it will be to shut everything down, right? And then we're going to be back to our kids. When we sent our kids to camp for the three weeks they went, man, it was just... They were different kids, right? And to Chamat's point, they're little social animals. They need to roll around like little baby tigers and play. And if they don't have that, it dramatically affects behavior. And we saw it in only three months. I mean, 12 months. These kids are going to go mental.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that basically where the country is at is that we're an undeclared Sweden. You know, we've basically... The virus has become endemic. It's everywhere. We've basically given up on trying to contain or stop it. And so now we're just on this path to herd immunity. And it's basically what Sweden did, except we haven't declared that's what our plan is. And so it's haphazard. But it seems like kind of we're, by default, just headed for herd immunity.
SPEAKER_01: Freeburg, as we wrap up here, and I got one final question I want to do after this, and then we'll wrap. Freeburg, what's your thoughts? Kids in schools? I know you have kids. I'm not sure the ages, if they're like, would be going back to... I think they're a little bit on the younger side. So if you did have eight, nine, 10, 12 year olds sending them back to school, starting your own, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I would probably be a little ridiculous and send them and test them every other day at home. And, you know, you can get this Bechner Dickinson testing system now for 250 bucks. It's a handheld device. And these test strips cost 20 bucks. Say the name of it again?
SPEAKER_02: The Bechner Dickinson. It's the company with the V. B. B. B. Wait, wait, are they available?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can buy them through medical retailers. And yeah, the handheld device that they use in hospitals and stuff today, it's 250 bucks. And there's a little test kit that you buy, it'll probably cost 20 to 30 bucks, it'll be available next month, per test, or 15 to 20 bucks. And it takes five minutes to get a result. And so... You literally could do it in the schoolyard before they go into the building.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you could test it. I would test my kids every day if I had a... My kids are... My one kid's in preschool, the other one's... But you had to do a little pinprick on their finger, right?
SPEAKER_01: No, no, you could just do a little swab of the nose.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay. So you can kind of... Yeah, and you can test them every...
SPEAKER_01: Deep nose swab or, you know, halfway?
SPEAKER_02: There's data that shows now that you could actually do a throat swab and, you know, get a pretty good reading on it. So, you know, whatever the protocol is, it'd probably be pretty non-invasive and you could get a result. Now, that's expensive for most people, you know, that's... Not expensive for a school.
SPEAKER_02: Not expensive for a school, that's right. And so I think that company will do well with that testing system they've launched because it actually tests not for the RNA, but for the protein. Is this a public company? Yeah, and the stock's done well. And this test does really well because it tests for the protein, not the RNA. So it's actually a much, you know, much easier test, scientifically, to do. You're not trying to pick up specific nucleotides, nucleic acids, you're trying to pick up a protein. And so it's, yeah, it's pretty effective. All right. If the election was held today, we always like to talk about this a bit, they
SPEAKER_01: went as long as when we talk about it. We talked about Oprah last time, that was our sleeper candidate. I'm changing, I'm changing. Tammy Duckworth. Tammy Duckworth is now my sleeper vice presidential
SPEAKER_03: candidate.
SPEAKER_02: I'm with the Chamath on that.
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely 100. Now, who's going to win if the election was held today? Sax, I'll let you go first since it's the most heartbreaking for you.
SPEAKER_00: Biden's strategy is working. His strategy is basically to say nothing, to be tied in his basement. But it's working because even though he's a cipher, I think people, he's basically a protest vote against Trump. And Trump, you know, is, you know, seen as very divisive and inflammatory. And I think the American people at this point just want to push a button and make it stop. And right now, Biden seems like the make it stop button.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Okay. And should Biden, I'll add to the question, we'll end on this double question, who wins today? And should Biden debate Trump? Or is it better for him to just opt out of the debates and... Well, not risk it? What would you advise? Well, I think Biden's strategy right now is working. I don't know why he would change
SPEAKER_00: it. I mean... So he should not, there's three debates on the books he agreed to. Should he do the three
SPEAKER_01: debates, yes or no, if you were advising him?
SPEAKER_00: So I think he probably will not be able to duck these debates forever. I think, I mean, it seems unlikely that, you know... If you were advising him, would you tell him to do it or not?
SPEAKER_00: I would tell him his strategy is working, which is to say nothing and... So don't go to the debates.
SPEAKER_00: If you can get away with it. I'm not sure he'll be able to get away with it. So I think eventually people, eventually the American public will turn its attention to the election. But part of the reason why his strategy is working is because Trump is running such a bad campaign. In fact, it feels like Trump hasn't even really started to campaign. There's no logic to it for sure. Well, it's, you know, normally what the incumbent does, especially when they've got a lot of money is they use the summer to define the opponent. They start running a lot of ads seeking to define their opponent. And, you know, where are those ads? Where is that attempt to define Biden? I mean, I think it's hard because, you know, it's hard to define Biden
SPEAKER_00: as a radical who represents these woke mobs. Biden doesn't even know how to say the word woke correctly. I think he's called him woke. So that's actually helpful. I was woke last night by my four year old who needed her diaper changed. Right. But the fact that Biden is so clueless and seems like so out of touch actually helps him because I mean, the way for Trump to win the election. Okay. Let's put it that way is to make the alternative to Trump, the destruction of Mount Rushmore. Right. I mean, if Trump can somehow convince the American public that the election of Joe Biden means the ripping down of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Mount Rushmore and the destruction of capitalism, that is the way for him to win. That's, you know, but he has to actually listen.
SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, he has to actually be able to tag Biden with that. Why did Peter Thiel? Why did Peter Thiel drop Trump? You've got a 30 year relationship with
SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel. You talk to him on the regular. Why did Thiel drop him? I don't know that he has. I think you have to get him on the show to talk.
SPEAKER_01: All right. There you go. Good deflection. Bestie C, who wins and should he do those three debates? Biden? Yeah. Yeah. I think you can't get away from them. I wouldn't make
SPEAKER_03: it a big issue because the debates are going to be kind of this random, crappy kind of experience. You know, I don't even know whether they'll be in the same place. I think they should try to make sure that they're not in the same place so that it's done almost over Zoom. Like you can you can cripple the effort, the usefulness of these debates. In many ways, there really isn't much that can happen in the debates. The reality is that people aren't voting for Biden. They are voting against Donald Trump. Any chance Trump wins? And they are voting against the sheer incompetence of him and his family. And, you know, it's going to be very difficult for him to overturn it. There is one thin path for him to win, which is to absolutely shower America with money close to the election day. So if there is a multi multi trillion dollar stimulus bill that passes and it literally puts money into the hands of working Americans, especially in the swing states, it could work. Now, the one thing I'll tell you is if you looked at the exit polls in Georgia, it's scary because there were two hundred and thirty thousand, I think, more Democrats out of the exit polls in the Georgia primary than there were Republican. Now just hold the phone here for a second, because under no calculus on Electoral College, should we ever have to think that there is probabilistically any chance that a Democrat wins Georgia? And I think what this speaks to is a changing demographic longitudinally. And this is not a racial thing, meaning this is an age thing where these young people are very different politically. And so if you think that there is an even remote chance that Donald Trump loses Georgia, don't even worry about Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Florida because he would have already lost those in order to lose Georgia. Also, this
SPEAKER_01: pandemic and work from home is going to result in people, if it is a sustained work from home. We have scarred the American economy, guys, and we don't know the extent of the
SPEAKER_03: injury because, you know, you know the extent of the injury when you get, you know, step out of the chair that first moment the caskets taken off and you put a little pressure on the leg to see how bad it is. And we don't know how bad it is, except we know that it's pretty bad. So, you know, I think that all roads kind of look like Biden. I think the very narrow path that Donald Trump has is, you know, a multi multi trillion dollar stimulus bill directly into the hands of Americans.
SPEAKER_01: Freeburg, is he going to win? Yes or no? Should he do the debates? Yes. If the vote were to
SPEAKER_02: happen today, he would win. Joe Biden would win. I think he's actually more likely to win based on news that just hit the wire, which we haven't talked about today, which is it looks like Facebook is going to ban all political ads this year. What? Yeah. And we do that. Obviously, that Facebook fight for survival right now, that ad camp, amazing
SPEAKER_01: how a bunch of advertisers taking a one month pause all of a sudden brings Zuckerberg to the table. Amazing how my well-timed short thesis tweet played. Yum, yum. So I think
SPEAKER_02: that works. That obviously works to Biden's favor. That's the case. And then my point on the debate, if I were Biden, what I would do right now is I would go on Twitter and I would say, release your tax returns and I'll debate you. And I would repeat that tweet twice a day. Love it. Freeburg gets the dunk. 360. That's a dunk. Vince Carter gets over
SPEAKER_01: Freeburg wins the debate. This show is sponsored by nobody. However, I'm going to ask my bestie C. If somebody were to make a twenty five thousand dollar donation to charity, would
SPEAKER_01: you allow me to read an ad for 30 seconds during the pot at some point? No, but I'll
SPEAKER_03: match it to wherever you want to go. No fucking ads ever. I love I love you guys. I miss you. Love you. Bestie. I love you. Love you. Free. Love you. Sax was great playing golf. Let's
SPEAKER_01: get let's golf. Let's fucking golf, man. I'm losing my mind. We'll see a little let's do
SPEAKER_03: a little small little NASA boys, a little ten thousand. Let's go. Let's gamble. See
SPEAKER_01: you next time on the All In podcast. Tell your friends to tune in if they want to listen to something intelligent. Bye bye.
