SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of All In, the podcast. Episode 8 besties are here to talk about tech, economy, politics, the election, and our lives in Silicon Valley. Welcome back to the pod, David Friedberg, the Queen of Kinwah is here. From an undisclosed location.
SPEAKER_01: J.K. always a joy. Undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest. You bailed on SF after the smoke. You lasted how many days into the barbecue, into the orange cloud?
SPEAKER_01: I left on the Wednesday of the orange cloud and took, it was crazy, took my kiddos and we're waiting out the fires in the Midwest.
SPEAKER_03: Well it's beautiful the last two days here. Also from an undisclosed bestie location, David Sacks, back on the program. Rain Man is here. Yep. Definitely here. Good to be here. Alright, well there you go, man of many words. And speaking of the man of many words, hot off of seven keynotes this week talking about SPACs. The Prince of SPACs, Chamath Palihapitiya back on the pod. How are you besties?
SPEAKER_03: Well we had a little bestie reunion, which I think we can talk about. Chamath invited us over to have an outdoor bestie reunion. Yeah, and you gave one of them Goderia and you gave the other two.
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's crazy to say, but I literally had to call Chamath two or three days after he hosted...
SPEAKER_04: Oh, a socially, by the way, a socially distanced dinner outdoors.
SPEAKER_03: Socially distanced dinner outdoors. Wonderful. We had some great ribeye. Fantastic. Cracked open a nice bottle or two of wine and the port. But then what did you do?
SPEAKER_03: Well, then a family member of mine who shall remain lameless decided to go to a party in San Francisco and possibly got the Rona. And he tested positive and then I had to get everybody in my house tested twice. Everybody came back negative, but I had to call Chamath and tell him, listen,
SPEAKER_03: I wasn't exposed, but some members of my family were, therefore I might have secondhand exposure. I took two tests, came back negative two times in a row.
SPEAKER_04: Can I just say, though, it's really crazy. Like we have to develop all these new social norms and you're not sure what to say and you're not sure how to react. And it's like, it must have been like when, you know, you got a call and it's like, hey, listen, you know, your girlfriend's like, I may be pregnant. Or like, you know, somebody's like, hey, listen, I have an STD. Like you just like, I felt like that when I was texting the group chat, it was like three of us and I had to text my tail between my legs.
SPEAKER_03: I think I've been exposed. I'm really sorry, guys.
SPEAKER_00: I think Calcanis is the Greek word for a turd in the punch bowl. You know, it's all. Code 13. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if we can tell the code 13. Oh, I'm going to tell the code 13 story.
SPEAKER_04: I wasn't even there, but I think it's legendary.
SPEAKER_02: Jason Calcanis gets invited by David Sacks out of his benevolence to come to stay in Hawaii at the Four Seasons.
SPEAKER_04: And at somewhere, some point during this week-long vacation, Christmas Day, you hear a shout from the pool from the lifeguard. Well, no, no, it was even before that.
SPEAKER_00: We were sitting at the bar. So me and Jason and his brother-in-law were sitting at the bar having drinks. And all of a sudden there's a commotion and the bartenders and the staff and we started hearing people on walkie talkies saying code 13, code 13. And we don't know what to make of that. We think it's a terrorist attack.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, literally the Four Seasons is on a high alert. Alerts are going off.
SPEAKER_00: Bloop, bloop. And then and then we hear, OK, well, we were like we said to the bartender, what's a code 13? And he's like, well, it means that some kid, you know, crapped in the pool. Did a number two in the pool. And we're like, you know, and then we're like, OK, well, you know. It was Jason's kid. Well, then I started hearing something about like the Sax Kids and I'm like, Sax Code 13.
SPEAKER_02: Yes. They thought it was us.
SPEAKER_00: And then it turns out it was Jacob's kid. And we were never able to get a reservation. But it's so funny. It's like I went there at one point a few years later and it's a whole ordeal because they said, so how do you guys deal with it?
SPEAKER_04: With like, you know, a code 13. They're like, oh, code 13. You have to evacuate the hotel. Half the island gets sent away.
SPEAKER_03: Here's what had to happen. This is just to put the code 13 in perspective. I think my 10 year old at the time was two years old. My sister in law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody. And the baby's not wearing a swim diaper. And so basically a Snickers bar floats out of the and there's a Snickers bar in the pool.
SPEAKER_02: You guys have kids. You know how big these things get? You're like, how is that possible?
SPEAKER_02: You know, like a movie theater size snicker Snickers pool is floating in the middle. But this is on December 25. These poor people are spending $3,000 a night.
SPEAKER_03: There is not a single chase lounge by the pool that's not occupied. It is peak capacity at the Four Seasons Hotel on the Big Island or wherever it was. The pool has to be shut down for four hours. A person has to get in with a hazmat suit, retrieve the Snickers bar. King size Snickers has to get out. Then they have to throw in every chemical known to man. So much so that the pool is ruined for Christmas Day. And that's the code 13 story. All right, getting back to our topics. TikTok is on the verge of being banned from additional US downloads. The Commerce Department has announced that it will ban US downloads and business transactions with TikTok and WeChat. Somehow WeChat got pulled into this on Sunday. This will seemingly we're going to allow TikTok to operate until November 12. So they got a little bit of a stay of execution. But of course, if they can't update in the App Store, that means there could be any security vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated. And Steve Muchin is attempting to push through a TikTok deal that will enable retaining some Chinese ownership. And there's some sort of agreement now with Oracle will have some kind of an oversight board to do continuous third party audits. What does this say, Chamath, about where we're at? And do you believe that, you know, a Democratic leader, let's say Obama or Biden, would have taken the same approach here? Does it worry you that the government's getting this involved? Or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and saying, hey, listen, we're going to need to have some basic level of reciprocity from China if we're going to allow you in our App Store?
SPEAKER_04: You know, I think I think it's kind of like, you know, like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other and they're like, turn left and you're like, no, no, no, I'm going to turn right. And then you realize you should have turned left. But then you keep turning right a few more times, then you take a couple more lefts, but then you end up at the same place. But it was complete shit, dumb luck. I feel like we're going to end up in the same place here with TikTok, which is that I think that the Trump administration probably is doing this and Donald Trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power. And you know, American exceptionalism, which I'm not sure is the right reason to do it. But I think the outcome is right, which is that, you know, for years, China has essentially been shut out to American companies unless you effectively just kowtow to these guys. And you know, some companies have and some companies like, you know, Google have not and other companies like Facebook have been totally basically blocked from entering. And so I think it's completely right. It's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantage that that Chinese companies have had. And so you have to play hardball to create a different set of rules. And I think this probably gets us to that place. The reason why it's happening is probably more because the TikTok people played that joke on Trump at the Tulsa rally, if I had to guess.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. What do you think, Friedberg? Is this a good sign for America and the globe that, you know, and the democratic nations of the world that we're going to put our foot down with China and say, hey, some reciprocity or you're not going to be able to participate in our marketplace? Or is this a personal vendetta from Trump or a little bit of both?
SPEAKER_01: I don't see how it's anything but a slippery slope forward in the escalation of, you know, what's going to be kind of transpiring between these two nations in the next couple of years and maybe decades. You know, this goes back to the early 2000s when Google and others wanted to enter China. And China has, for those who don't know, China has this great firewall, right? Chinese citizens can't openly access the rest of the Internet. And China wanted to censor content and censor what their citizens are accessing. And so there's been a back and forth between the tech industry and China going back almost 20 years now to try and figure out how we can bring our services to China. And then China launches a service that's very successful in the U.S. in TikTok. And I think it's just a part of the reciprocity equation, which doesn't resolve anything. It only escalates things. So it's unfortunate, but it's just kind of another step in the path that I think is inevitable in front of us here.
SPEAKER_03: Sax, we'll give you the final word here. Is this a good thing for humanity, for international relations, that China is having a little bit of a hand check here, like, hey, there's going to be a limit to how you can operate in the West? Or is this a personal vendetta from Trump? And then what do you see going forward?
SPEAKER_00: It's true that, I mean, first of all, our social networks are not allowed over there. So I don't think we need to feel bad about not allowing their social networks over here. But besides reciprocity or the lack of it, I think the deeper reason for this is just around data security and how the, and I think the CCP has given us adequate grounds here to ban not just TikTok, but apps like that because President Xi himself declared this policy of civil military fusion, which means that any business in China, any business asset there, including data, can be appropriated to serve the ends of the Chinese military or the Communist Party. And the CCP has set up this vast surveillance apparatus over its own citizens. It's asserted extraterritorial sovereignty over former Chinese citizens, meaning dissidents. So the Chinese diaspora anywhere in the world. They've asserted sovereignty over that. And recently there was a pretty remarkable speech by the FBI director Christopher Wray describing Operation Fox Hunt, which is the Chinese effort to track down and presumably ultimately punish Chinese dissidents anywhere in the world. And as part of that, the Chinese have weaponized AI and social media. And so he also described, I mean, this is pretty amazing, that the Equifax hack, which collected data on something like sensitive data on over a hundred million Americans, the Chinese were behind that. I didn't know that. And so it's true that no one piece of data poses by itself a risk to the security of America or Americans, but it's sort of the systematic collection and aggregation of the data and the hacking collectively that I do think pose a security threat. And I think you got to stop right there, Zack.
SPEAKER_03: Actually an individual's data could absolutely be compromised if they have access to your passwords, because through the clipboard, they have access to your phone roll. If a young person had photos that were, say, compromising in their photo roll, the phone is basically given access to that. They upload that. Now you could use that as compromise against a senator's child or against a senator themselves. And this seems like an abstract thing, but this is exactly what the Chinese and Russians have been doing for a very long time. If you've seen the series, The Americans, and you go back to the 80s to see the weaponization of somebody who was in the closet, who was gay during that time, or somebody who was having extramarital terror, you could compromise anybody with just sexual compromise. And you hear we're giving access to hundreds of millions of people's photo libraries and their clipboards.
SPEAKER_04: By the way, you just said something that's really scary, which is like, if you're the Chinese and they have the patience to play the long game, you just aggregate and collect this thing for 30 years on the off chance that one of these people becomes important. I mean, what is the real cost? And you got a Manchurian candidate. You just surveil 300 million Americans and just say, you know what, we'll take our shot. I mean, it's going to cost us a few billion dollars a year in storage. Who cares? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not like, is there really a case that what they're doing in the TikTok app, I don't know how much you guys have read some of the studies on what they are actually pulling, but is there really a case that what they're pulling is particularly different than what would be pulled by pretty much any other social app or photo sharing app on your phone? There was some insight that, hey, they were capturing the Mac address, but that was up until last November. After November, the app refreshed and stopped doing that. And it was a hack that some number of apps out there were already doing. But my understanding is the way that they've built the app, it's the same kind of ad tracking type approach that a lot of apps are taking. I think it's a naive position that because we haven't caught them doing something nefarious,
SPEAKER_03: that they aren't actually doing something nefarious right now. If you look at what MBS did to Jeff Bezos, sending that I guess it was a movie file or an image that then wound up hacking his WeChat and his phone like, I think they've built the software. I think it's purpose built, whether it's WeChat or TikTok to have these backdoors. There's no way the Chinese government is not influencing that.
SPEAKER_04: Guys, look, if you had to bet, David, what do you think the odds are between zero and 100 with 100 being absolute certainty that there are foreign national spies that work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft?
SPEAKER_01: That's my point. I mean, look, I think that there are. No, but do you think it's 100 percent?
SPEAKER_04: Oh, of course, it's 100.
SPEAKER_01: I think at every one of them, it's probably 100 percent. At least one foreign national that has a connection to intelligence in China, yeah, it's probably 100 percent.
SPEAKER_04: 100 percent. My point is TikTok is 100 percent Chinese, so we don't even have to guess whether it's going to be a Chinese company.
SPEAKER_01: My point is if there is some access to personal data that we're all concerned about being compromised at literally every other fucking app company, we're exposed. Every other app company is not connected to, you know.
SPEAKER_01: But the point that Chamath just made is that they very well could be. The fact is we as individuals have exposed all of our personal and private data to six or seven companies.
SPEAKER_04: I think you're saying the really right thing. This is a canary in the coal mine for a bigger issue. This is why I'm saying I think that Trump is probably acting out of an expression of power. But I think what we're realizing is actually this is about core fundamental privacy and the safety and security of each of us as individuals. And it should start a bigger conversation. Privacy I really do think this privacy is the killer feature of the 2020s. What David just said about if you're a Chinese ex-national, the idea that you're like, look, I've been a citizen of three countries. The idea that the Sri Lankan government all of a sudden may not like what I have to say and can spy on me or, you know, root my phone or steal my data, it really disturbs me like, I'm sorry, but no, go fuck yourself. Like I left that country for a reason.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So I think the Republican to watch on this is, well, besides Trump, I guess, is there's a Senator Josh Hawley who is— Crazy. Well, he's sort of a critic of big tech. And I think he's got some interesting things to say. But in this particular area, he is proposing legislation to regulate the types of information that can be collected by applications that are based in countries that are fundamentally hostile or adversarial to the US. And that to me seems like the right policy because, you know, it's not just about Tik Tok. It's about all the apps that collect information on Americans that can be appropriated by, you know, the Chinese Communist Party or Russia or Iran, places like that. And so I think we need a more holistic policy here than just banning TikTok. And it may not be necessary to ban TikTok if you had the right limitations placed on them. But I do think this whole sort of compromised solution with Larry Ellison and Oracle, that makes no sense to me. This idea that, you know, Ellison will own 20% of the company, but nothing else really changes. It's based in China, a Chinese company. It'll still be Chinese engineers based in China who, you know, and they still own 80% of it. I mean, how does that really address the data security issue?
SPEAKER_04: Don't you think, David, that that's just basically a way of just it's a wealth transfer to Larry Ellison, which I think is amazing. I mean, if I could do it, I would do it.
SPEAKER_00: Totally. Yeah, it's ByteDance. No, it's ByteDance. Try to put it in your lap, yeah. No, it's ByteDance paying political protection money to Larry Ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process. But I don't think it's going to fly. I mean, Hawley has already said that it's not good enough for him. And so even if I think and it doesn't live up to Trump's stated criteria, even though he seems to be supporting right now. Is this ultimately a CFIUS ruling, Sax?
SPEAKER_01: Is that who's going to make the final call on this? Or does Trump have sole executive kind of authority on foreign security, on security grounds to kind of block it? Does it go to CFIUS? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: That's a good question. I think CFIUS disapproves M&A, right?
SPEAKER_01: It has to approve it, yeah. I mean, so you're right. I mean, there are members of Congress that are all going to need to be convinced to get this thing done.
SPEAKER_00: Well, but CFIUS approves M&A. I didn't think they could like block applications.
SPEAKER_01: As of last year, every investment triggers CFIUS. It's a weird new thing that happened. I was involved in a company recently. Yeah, but that seems secondary to the national security power that the...
SPEAKER_01: That Trump may have. So this is almost like a two-tier kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03: One is to approve... One is for Trump to be cool with it, national security terms. And then second is the antitrust issues.
SPEAKER_01: If we just go back a second, talking about the broad, as Chamath called it, kind of this canary in a coal mine. I don't know how many of you guys use an Amazon Echo or a Google Home or Amazon Fire TV or a Nest thermostat. Every single one of them has ambient audio listening on it. Every single one of them. And another thing people don't realize is every speaker is actually a microphone as well as a speaker. You can actually listen on any house speaker, whether it's a Sonos device or what have you. And so we've got... Our homes are already wired. Amazon Fire TV runs on fucking Android. There is 100 ways into your home as it is. It seems to me like there's a significant concern about how much data we are already exposing that's being highlighted here. I don't think that there's... It's sort of like playing where you try and pop the hamsters in the game. It's like at some point we're gonna realize these things are here everywhere and it's not just a company, but it is how we are living our lives now and how technology is kind of capturing every piece of information about everything we do. This is... I go back to this.
SPEAKER_04: Somebody will take this or many people will take this and run with it. But I think that there is an enormous amount of money that consumers will pay for the assurance of anonymity and privacy. I don't really know how it's expressed, David, but like, for example, if I could get a phone that was completely locked down and encrypted and... Like a burner phone is what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_03: And a lot of people are now doing this. They take a second phone. They put a VP. The VPNs are the first step in all this. And you're seeing... I try to use...
SPEAKER_04: They're very popular. Well, I try to use Signal. I try to use FaceTime audio. I'll even use WhatsApp now just because these things are end-to-end encrypted. And I have nothing particularly important or interesting to say or hide, but I just don't like the idea that in the open wild, I just feel very vulnerable to data breaches more than any other kind of breach. I mean, I had this conversation with somebody that was sort of helping me lock down my WiFi network. And for a long time, I only had one endpoint. And all of a sudden, he's like, look, let's have a home and a guest. But in that conversation, what he was saying is the biggest form of theft isn't like burglaries anymore. It's basically people just having packet sniffers outside your house because they can get access to everything and anything. Can I ask you a question?
SPEAKER_01: There's a book by a guy named Stephen Baxter. It was a science fiction book from years ago, and Arthur Clarke called The Light of Other Days. And these guys developed a wormhole technology. They could put it in any house and they could see and listen to everything. And suddenly, the technology became kind of ubiquitous. So everyone could create a wormhole anywhere and see and hear everything. So effectively, information was completely transferable and free and available to everyone. And the book kind of highlights how society changed in that context. So in a world where you see where everyone is and what everyone is doing and saying, there's no longer any notion of information asymmetry. And the way people operate and behave changes because so much of our life is dependent on people not knowing things about us that we know. So when your employees go to go interview for another job, and they tell you they're going to the dentist, you can say like, hey, that's not true. And the guy says, you know what, I'm actually thinking about looking for another job because I hate working for you. You suck. So everyone starts changing kind of how they behave. Do you think that 50 years from now, that's where the world heads? Do you really think it's possible to stop this train in its tracks and not end up in a world of what I would call kind of like hyper transparency, where all information becomes kind of because it's already being collected everywhere about everyone? It's only rising exponentially.
SPEAKER_03: People are going to start turning their homes into like those skiffs, you know, sensitive, compartmented information facilities. You always hear about like senators going into the skiff kind of situation for private stuff. People are going to start taking this very seriously, as they get compromised, you know, time after time, and embarrassing. And you can see with Apple making it their marketing strategy, Apple's, you don't you don't you don't think society changes?
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I think it will already changed already with like people getting their phones hacked
SPEAKER_03: and they're, you know, news being leaked. People are now normalized that I think it makes the world a much shittier place because it basically robs us of our
SPEAKER_04: own independence and our fundamental right to privacy. And I just think that's a really bad outcome. And so you know what, like, if like the need for likes, and tweets, and followers, leads me to a place where I lose privacy, I would just say shut them all down now. Because I think that people's self worth is much bigger than what they understand it to be if they're willing to make that trade off. But yeah, most people appreciate that.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I would also, I would also just add that just because there's more transparency
SPEAKER_00: doesn't mean that it serves the interests of truth. Like Jason said earlier, this information can be used to create, you know, ops, you know, and manipulate and, you know, it's, and so, yeah, I don't, you know, it, like, like Trotsky said, just because you're not interested in war doesn't mean wars and interested in you. I mean, this data can be collected to run operations on people that don't serve, you know, the interests of greater transparency or the truth.
SPEAKER_04: I think people don't think from first principles on this topic, this is sort of like the idiotic orthodoxy of Silicon Valley, which is like they, they wrap themselves in the flag of transparency like it means something, but they have no real idea what it really means at scale and at the limit. And you know, there's one thing about getting access to a fucking Looker dashboard, who cares, you know, and but the word transparency is used for that the same way that it's used for David, exactly what you just said. And they're two completely different things. They have completely different meanings. And the latter's implications are so much more important. And we need to think about this from first principles, because I think people's inherent identity as human beings ultimately gets put at risk over time.
SPEAKER_03: It should absolutely be the case that these social networks or anybody collecting data gives an op. This is the way I would form the legislation. If you are running a service like Facebook, Twitter, Google, for free, and you're monetizing through advertising, you provide an offer.
SPEAKER_02: They do provide service to advertising services, then I think you should be forced to give
SPEAKER_03: a option for whatever the amount of that monetization is a year to pay as a subscription. So, for example, if Facebook makes 80 dollars per person, you lost your losses.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I think it's over. It's over the next segment. Next segment. Next segment.
SPEAKER_02: All right. Well, just as we wrap up here on this segment, Kevin Cishter might he's in the running apparently
SPEAKER_03: to take over for TikTok. Is that a good idea? Sax, I think you know Cishtram.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a pretty it's a dumb idea unless the company literally becomes an American company. I don't know why you've made this point in the context of Kevin Mayer. Like if he's working for ByteDance, he's working for the ByteDance board directors, which reports to the CCP. It's just why would someone who's in his position want to sacrifice his independence to do that?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it makes no sense. I mean, this is becoming the big test on everybody's moral compass, especially Hollywood, which is changing the ending of movies to satisfy the CCP. Literally the people who are the biggest virtue signals in the world, celebrities, Hollywood.
SPEAKER_00: China knows how to use its market access. We don't. We just threw open our markets to their products, which caused us to lose our whole industrial manufacturing capacity. We didn't demand anything really in exchange for that. Whereas in order to get access to China, you have to say and do the right things or certainly to not criticize them. And so they know how to use, as we saw with the NBA and the whole Daryl Morey thing, they know how to use their market access. All right, well, let's go on to the economy here.
SPEAKER_03: We've been sheltering in place essentially for six months. And now people are starting to talk about, hey, maybe we need to do another lockdown. And obviously this economic challenge is being felt very differently in some places. It's an opportunity. Obviously, a lot of people with SAS software and people who work behind keyboards are having a renaissance and a lot of the economy is pouring into their keyboards while restaurants, retail and anybody who has to work in the real world is part of what's becoming essentially a permanent unemployed class that perhaps this is starting to look like a dry run of UBI. What are your thoughts, Chamath, on this permanent unemployment situation?
SPEAKER_04: I have a bunch of thoughts here. Let me just go kind of give you this stream of consciousness. Like Jerome Powell gave a speech, I think it was two or three weeks ago in Jackson Hole, and he basically said, look, the Federal Reserve is taking a completely new posture on rates. And they basically clarified that in explicit detail just a few days ago. And they basically said, we're keeping rates where they are until at least 2023. My personal views for rates are going to stay basically at zero for the next half decade. And I think it's probably pretty likely that we're going to see rates stay at zero probably a full decade. So what does that mean? Okay, well, in a typical recession, what happens is you don't know where the bottom is, right? Things sort of decay, they get a little bit worse, they get a little bit worse, they get a little bit worse, then things bottom out. And then you start to grow. And you can use interest rate policy to kind of help navigate how soft the landing is, as well as how fast the recovery is. That's sort of like classic economics and how bankers and the markets and all these folks used to work. And it eventually would trickle into Main Street. Now, we just have none of those things. We have rates zero, they're not going to go anywhere, they're not going to go up, they're probably not going to go down, they're going to kind of just stay where they are. That's one thing. Second is we priced in the bottom, which was the first month of the Coronavirus, we took the markets basically assuming, oh, there's no growth. And now we've priced things back as if they'll recover. The rating agencies are out to lunch, they've basically said, you know what, I'm going to look out till 2021 or 2022, give me a reason to justify not to downgrade you so that you can continue to raise more debt, which by the way is free. So you have all these dynamics where I think the capital markets are in an expansive mood and an expansive mode. And in that, I actually think there's a real bid to employment because there isn't really that many ways now you can, without just getting completely ripped apart, put money to work. And so the real earnest capital allocation strategy that's left for most CEOs is to actually buy things, invest in things, try more things. And all of those, I think lead to net employment. So in general, I'm kind of constructive and bullish. And I don't think that this idea that there's a permanent unemployment class sticks around. Freeberg, what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_03: Obviously a lot of Americans work in retail. You know, we obviously have all these restaurant workers who are out of work and travel is now hitting the end of the furloughs at a lot of these different airlines, et cetera. What's your thought on this unemployment, middle America catastrophe? Well, I don't think happiness comes from, you know, absolute standards of living.
SPEAKER_01: I think happiness arises from one's relative standard of living, whether that's relative to how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor. And seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy. It's otherwise society decays. So the notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined and inflation adjusted basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent, which is some sort of societal decay. We have to resolve the opportunity framework for people, which is how do you give people an opportunity to kind of progress in their lives and earn more over time and have access to doing more with themselves while they're here on planet Earth? I mean, that's just what humans need. So maybe there's a short term fix, but I think we've got some structural things to fix to kind of enable opportunities and give people kind of an inherent, you know, kind of a step ladder in life. I heard a really dark theory a few years ago, which is if we do this, we're going to resolve to a world where we're going to have a bunch of people playing video games because then the only way you can get people to feel like they're progressing in their lives is to give them more medals on their video games and give them a higher ranking and score. And that's where society kind of gets to to kind of keep people psychologically kind of satiated. And it's a pretty dark, you know, sad place if that's where we end up. It's like a bad episode of Black Mirror, but we've had a few episodes of Black Mirror this year. So, you know, it sounds like Ready Player One with the Masters were playing video games
SPEAKER_03: instead of actually going out in the real world. Totally. Saxx, what's your thought on, you know, just the next two years, let's say, and how this all shakes out? And this will give us a good segue into the coronavirus and where we stand right now with this potential second lockdown and the impact that might have psychologically on people and also on the economy.
SPEAKER_00: There's not going to be a second lockdown. It doesn't make any sense. And even if there were, people aren't going to support it. Certainly any of the red states aren't going to do it. I guess the blue states may. They still haven't, you know, sort of unlocked down. So maybe that gets more protracted in places like California. But we're not going to go back into lockdowns and people won't support it. And I think the thing that we've basically figured out that should have been obvious months ago now is that coronavirus is really like two different diseases in terms of its effects on people. So for elderly people and for people with risk factors, it's very dangerous. You know, I'm very worried about my parents. And, you know, for people in that group, they have to take extreme precautions. But for young healthy people without risk factors, it's not been that deadly. It's very unpleasant. It's a very bad two weeks. But you know, for example, if you look at the data now on colleges coming back, there's been some reports that the virus is spreading like wildfire on college campuses. That's true. But hospitalizations and deaths have not gone up. And so because it's just not that, it's just not that deadly to younger people. And so I think this idea of shutting down the whole economy to protect people at risk is just seems like overkill. And I think if we had to do it all over again, we wouldn't have done lockdowns. We just would have protected at risk people.
SPEAKER_03: We've still consistently had a thousand deaths a day. We thought this might go down. What are your thoughts on Americans just being okay with that, that basic death toll, Sacks?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, any deaths is obviously bad and tragic. And statistically, there are going to be people who die even who are in the loaders group, so for sure. But we've had about 200,000 deaths. The original estimates from this virus were two to three million. So I guess my point is not that it's not bad, but that it's much less deadly than I think was originally thought.
SPEAKER_01: There's an argument that that's not deaths directly attributable to coronavirus, and that the vast majority of those folks had comorbidities and that the primary driver — this is an argument many have made. I'm not going to take a strong point. But 85 percent plus of folks have significant comorbidities. And this virus maybe kind of has a contributing factor to their death. But let's assume everyone in the United States had coronavirus today, then every death that was reported today would be reported as a coronavirus death. And so they're testing a lot of folks in the hospital, finding that they have coronavirus. It's very difficult to then prove that the reason that they died or the sole reason that they died was coronavirus. If you had to pick a percentage, Friedberg, where would you put it?
SPEAKER_03: Half of all deaths? If you just had to guess.
SPEAKER_01: But that's my point, I don't think it's one thing. I'm not sure that someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus and they've also got severe diabetes, heart disease, cancer, they're on chemotherapy. You could list the other things that they might have. What caused their death? As a coroner, it's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death. But when they test that person and they find that their coronavirus is positive, that number is now being counted in the statistics that say that was a coronavirus death that day. And coronavirus is so prevalent in the United States right now. It's such a significant part of the population. It's also very difficult to say, hey guys, these deaths are... So I'm not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus. That is absolutely happening. But it's very difficult to say what is the net effect on life right now. We're still learning a lot about how this virus interacts with different people based on their genetics and based on their disease state and other factors.
SPEAKER_03: Let me ask you one more way for you, Friedberg, and then I'll give it over to Chamath, which is Friedberg, in your estimation as a scientist and somebody who's, I would say, a man of science on the call here, are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021 and what's your best outlook for a return to normalcy? If you had to pick a time when it feels like we can go to a Warriors game or play cards regularly, or go to the World Series of Poker, Wendy, do you have a time period where you think that could possibly happen?
SPEAKER_01: It's all politics and social behavior. It has nothing to do with science. Like after 9-11, there were no more serious like terrorist attacks on the United States, but our fucking lives changed dramatically. We go sit in TSA lines and get our asses swabbed when we get on an airplane now, and that's still going on 20 years later. So I'm pretty sure there's a lot of change that's here to stay in the US because of coronavirus and will be even after everyone gets vaccines and the deaths drop below 10 a day and yada, yada. So I'm not convinced that this is like, hey, here's the date, we're all going to be out of it and then we're safe because people are psychologically scarred. Behavior has changed, businesses have changed, the landscape of how we work as a society has changed and that's not going away. So it's not like we're going to go back. I think it's like we're going forward into a different world where we operate differently, much as what happened after 9-11.
SPEAKER_04: What's your take on that, Shammah? I think that David's right that were it but for coronavirus, I think a lot of these people that died would still be alive. And so I don't think it really matters how much of the blame we're trying to ascribe to it. It's just that it was a meaningful, non-trivial contributing factor. So these deaths are avoidable and we have to deal with that. The second is I don't think what we know what the peak to trough looks like because we haven't really gone through a real full blown flu season yet. Coronavirus came to America at the tail end of the winter. And it's going to be, I think, tough to figure out what it's going to do in October, November, December, January, February when it's really cold in many parts of the United States. Whatever effects, again, we still don't know it in totality, but whatever effects the warm weather had in muting it or whatever mutation muted it may change. So I tend to think it's another 18 to 24 months of this posture. But Friedberg is really right, which is like, this is what's so sad, which is when you could point a finger and look at somebody and say, you, you're the cause, it was much easier to react and create rules and create boundaries as uncomfortable or as inconvenient as they were and live by them. And because this is more nameless and faceless, it's impossible. So all right, well, here's some good news I was able to acquire.
SPEAKER_03: I've been on a little investigative journalism kick asking people if they have access to rapid testing kits, i.e. they have them in Korea. And I was able to get and I'm curious your thoughts on this Friedberg, the rapid response Liberty COVID-19 IGG slash IGM test cassettes. And they cost 15 to 20 bucks each and they take 10 minutes. They're easy to use. I mean, I've had those since March and they cost 50 cents each.
SPEAKER_01: So these are now officially available, though, in the United States.
SPEAKER_03: You had those from some other country, correct?
SPEAKER_01: I got from China and I got from the US and I got from Korea. And these things are just made everywhere. And they're like, these are the anti-bias. Are they accurate?
SPEAKER_01: Yes. So there's a paper that was published at UCSF. I got an acknowledgement because of my donations to support the research. And it showed that these tests have actually very good specificity and the sensitivity is going to be call it 85%. But these are antibody tests and further research has shown that not everyone has the same antibody response after getting infected. And there's a relationship between how severe the disease is for you and various other factors. And these will only show up typically days to weeks after you get infected. The antigen tests, which are the more common ones that everyone's looking for now, are these tests that can actually find the virus itself. And so they'll take a swab of your nose or some saliva from your mouth and see if there's any virus in there. And it's a much, much lower sensitivity than the PCR test, which is the expensive lab test. But it can be done on a stick and it's a good enough thing for letting people in to say a football game. And a good friend of ours just texted me and told me that they're doing this at the UT Austin game. They're using this antigen test to let people into the football game today or this weekend. So it's getting more widespread use. And so when we have those tests at scales, what will the world look like for you, Berg?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know. Just like the TSA, you'll get swabbed and these things. It's great business to be in, by the way. If you guys want to spack a Korean antigen test business, these things are going to sell like crazy. There's a company that I heard of through a friend, which is an Israeli company.
SPEAKER_04: I never followed up on it, which was effectively a breathalyzer. Could you just imagine? That would be incredible. You just breathe in a few seconds.
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about this in our chat group. There are startups like, was it Quiddel, Hamodious, Q, who've got these little $200, $300 little handheld readers. And the cartridges are basically mouth swabs or lower nasal swabs, cost 10 bucks. And I think they're going to be rolling out over the next few months. And assuming we can scale the production of them, I think they will be everywhere. And I don't think it'll be a government mandated thing. I don't think the government will get its act together. But it'll be the kind of thing where you go shopping at a store or whatever, and there'll be early adopters or a restaurant. They'll start using it. People will realize, well, wait, I don't want to get swabbed three times a day. So then they'll get some sort of receipt or voucher they can take with them to the next place. And so I think I'm more optimistic than you guys about COVID right now. I think that whether it's because of these rapid tests or because of treatments coming, or just this fundamental fact about comorbidities, again, not saying that COVID isn't serious, but the fact that we've learned that it's really deadly primarily for people who have comorbidities. I think for all of these reasons, I think COVID is going to be a distant memory by next summer. I really do. I think... Behaviorally too?
SPEAKER_01: What's that? Do you think behavior changes as well, like businesses and movie theaters and sports and things of that sort?
SPEAKER_00: I think people will largely be back to what they were doing last summer or by next summer. I think we're going to have like, call it a six month period where we do these rapid tests just to make sure. But I think as the case rate starts dropping off, things will kind of revert back to where they were. I mean, the question to ask is kind of which trends were there before COVID and have been accelerated? I would say the move from like death of retail, the shift to e-commerce, that feels to me like it's here to stay. But food delivery, things like that. But there was no trend of people not going to sports games anymore. And I think stuff like that will just snap right back.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you guys. I'm still feeling fucked up by the whole thing. You don't really realize how much your psychology has changed until you kind of reflect on decisions and behaviors. There's still a fear factor that I think needs to kind of be ironed out. But we'll see how long it takes for people. It's just like, it's so different when you're so used to just waking up and hopping on Zoom for work and avoiding people and putting masks on when you go walk your fucking dog. I mean, it's going to be hard to kind of change out of that overnight.
SPEAKER_00: I think this idea of the greater flexibility around working arrangements, the ability to work from home, I think offices will become a little bit more like co-working spaces for a single company where people come in three days a week and work from home a couple days a week. I think there'll be a permanent flexibility. But I also think that people want to get back to work and they want back to offices and they want to interact with people. And I think everyone's going to be excited to do that again. It's not like everyone's just going to be working from home forever. So I think, again, next summer is kind of my date for when things are back to normal. Well, this has been certainly driving a lot of our politics right now.
SPEAKER_03: You probably saw the book that came out with the tapes of Trump saying that he was trying to play it down, Sacks as a lifelong Republican. What were your thoughts when the Republican presidential candidate, the Republican president said, hey, I'm trying to play this down when he was at the same time saying it was deadly serious. Does that make you worry about Trump as a candidate? And what do you think that's going to have that might play into the election? It must have been disappointing for you to hear your candidate, Trump, say at the same time this is deadly and I want to play it down.
SPEAKER_00: Well, Trump's leadership on this has been a little bit erratic, for sure. And by the way, let's go back and remind the viewers here that in the first pods we were doing back in April, I think we kind of nailed what the right policy response should be. I wrote a blog on April 2nd talking about that mass should be required, that that was the right response. And we also said that lockdowns, very quickly after the start of lockdown, said that it was excessive and that what we should do is be going all in on mass, not lockdowns. I certainly would have liked to have seen Trump get that right several months earlier. That being said, let's not forget everybody else who got this stuff wrong too. I mean, you look at CDC or WHO, we had talked about this on a previous pod. I mean, WHO was also unclear about mass and Fauci, I guess, now retroactively saying that he didn't think that mass were necessary because he was trying to prevent a run on supplies. I mean, the whole response of the healthcare establishment, they were all like really bad. And so I have a greater degree of forgiveness for people who made mistakes back in March or April. But what I think is hard to forgive now are these people who are promoting the wrong policies now that we know so much more. And I mean, at this point, I think that COVID policy is a net plus for Trump in this campaign because the other side of it is these permanent lockdowns. There's just an article in, what is it, Foreign Policy, saying that we need to go back to lockdowns. And I think Biden's said that we need to have lockdowns again. His policy would be to listen to the experts, but all these experts again were wrong about so many things. And so, again, I think this idea of permanent lockdowns, if that is the alternative to Trump, will help Trump win.
SPEAKER_03: And so you don't think that this Woodward book and that kind of stuff plays into the election or the debates in the coming weeks?
SPEAKER_00: I think it's sort of priced into the stock. I mean, look, if it weren't for COVID, I think that if you go back to January, February, when Trump gave that State of the Union speech, his ratings were the highest they had been, the economy was on fire. It looked like he was on cruise control to winning reelection and then COVID happened and his ratings went down to their lowest point. And so I think he already paid the price for the, let's call it, inconsistent leadership that Woodward described. So I think that's priced in. And now the question is if the economy gets good enough, fast enough, and the other side is on the side of lockdowns and Trump is on the side of reopening, again, I think COVID policy becomes a net plus for him.
SPEAKER_03: Chamatha, FiveThirtyEight has in its simulations 77 wins and 100 for Biden. You think that's accurate?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, I think that until the debates, I think that this thing is basically where it's been for a long time. And if Biden flubs the debate and basically comes out as intellectually too inconsistent to be voted in by a plurality of Americans, he's done for and Trump's going to win. So he can't have these verbal gaffes and basically seem like he's a senile octogenarian. If he does come off that way, he's going to lose. But if he doesn't, and look, many of the moments you see him now, he's actually pretty crisp. That probably gets the job done because like I said, I think more people just want a non-Trump alternative than want the Trump alternative, even within the Republican Party. And look, preference falsification can cut both ways. All the people that said they weren't going to vote for him, but then did. There's also probably a cohort of people that now feel obligated when they came out of the woodwork as supporting him. Now they just feel like it's easier to be publicly supporting him, but then they may go the other way. So it all kind of works in both directions. But I still think on the margin, Biden is the favorite. How different will the world look, Chamath, in your estimation, under a Biden presidency?
SPEAKER_03: When we get to January 1st, how different does the country feel? Is it going to be some great relief? Is it going to be some great joy, like when Obama won? No, no, no. What do you think the feeling is in the country and the reality is?
SPEAKER_04: All these things are emotional overreactions in both directions. The reality is that if you actually graft substantive policy that affects your everyday life, the magnitude of the impact of the presidency has been shrinking since the 1980s. I think the most impactful president of our lifetimes, our lifetime, so 70s onwards, was Reagan. It's basically been decaying ever since. So I think that the job of the presidency is mostly window dressing, except for foreign policy. That matters less and less. And I'll tell you why that matters less and less, because all the things that the president used to really govern, like foreign policy was a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things. For example, our entire posture on the Middle East, which has been a fucking shit show, or our entire posture on Russia was in part because of our energy policy. And in a world of sustainable energy, those entire regions are not important anymore. So it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03: We can let them basically fend for themselves. We do not need to be involved. Well, they're going to.
SPEAKER_04: They're going to devolve because they're going to have to suck out all the oil out of the ground to try to monetize it before wind and solar and everything else become the dominant form of energy. And so if you take energy policy off the table, all of a sudden, the national security interests to care about large swaths of the world go to zero. So then there's less and less for the president to do.
SPEAKER_03: Window to monetize is pretty short, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04: Yes. So my point is the surface area of the impact of the president is shrinking. And it shrinks as technology. Like if you think about it, what is driving foreign policy and national security policy changes over the last 10, 15 years? Definitely over the next 40 or 50 is technology, right? If we get, for example, if we get any form of like carbon sequestration at scale broadly available, you're going to have a complete resurgence of Western economies if that technology is invented in the United States or Western Europe.
SPEAKER_03: Freeburg, quickly, you'd think that Biden is going to win. And then what do you think the country feels and looks like into a Biden presidency? And then let's move over to energy and sustainable energy and carbon after that?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know. You know, I'll say the same thing I've said in the past. I don't think the notion of a sense of relief is realistic. I don't think this is about people think it's about Trump, but Trump is the product of what it's all really about. So I'll just kind of highlight, I think Biden is a column, instead of thinking about things as Democrats and Republicans and left and right, if we think about it as kind of populism and free marketism and in the middle of centrism, we're probably taking a notch towards centrism. And at the end of the day, the march towards populism seems to be continuing. And whether Trump is kind of the product of that march or maybe the next one will be a Elizabeth Warren or AOC. It's kind of the same thing in my opinion. But I think that's the bigger kind of concern is, you know, how do we, again, generally keep most people in the United States feeling like they can progress in life, feeling like they can find happiness in life, and feeling like there's opportunity for them to kind of achieve their objectives. And if they don't feel like they're getting it, they're going to try and wrap it all up. And unions will continue to scale and AOC will become the vice presidential nominee in 2024. And yada, yada. Freeburg, what are your thoughts on the wildfires, global warming and the politics of all that?
SPEAKER_03: And then we'll go to cancel culture with you, Sax.
SPEAKER_01: California has 33 million acres of forest land. It's about 100 million acres in total land. So forests make up about a third of our land. So far, we're burning three and a half million. So about 10% of our acres. When we burn an acre, we release about 15% of the carbon that's stored in that acre into the atmosphere. So thus far, if you do the math on that, we've released about as much CO2 as the California cars released in a year by the wildfires. And the politics we're seeing play out. So it's a significant problem, but over the last 40 years, we've added about a quarter ton of carbon to each acre per year. And the reason we've done that is we haven't lit fires and managed the forests and cut down trees. And there's been all these restrictions in California. So there's an argument that some are making that this is about forest management. And then there's an argument that others are making that this is about climate change and dry weather and hot weather causing the fires. And the reality is it's both. But as everything else in this country right now becoming highly politicized that... And Trump visited Newsom in a very symbolic gathering this week. I don't know if you guys saw the packet that was handed out to Trump. It was awesome. It was like 24 point font. And it was like... Four words? Fire is bad. Fire is good. Temperature is up. Weather hot. Fire is burning up state. And you guys got to see it. It's awesome. The little packet he got. And then Newsom sat exactly six feet from him with a mask on and Trump sitting there without the mask on. I mean, it's such a fucking political circus. And I think all things are true and all things are false and we can move on.
SPEAKER_00: The debate on the fires is... The debate has become sort of climate change versus forest management. That's sort of the debate about it. And like most of these debates, you don't necessarily have to choose. There can be an element of truth on both sides. Regardless of how much climate change has caused these fires, we've done a very, very poor job in the state managing them. And this idea that we can just fix global warming or wait... Not have good forest management until... And just kind of wait for global warming to be fixed is... I mean, that's a really stupid idea. So regardless of how much climate change is the cause of this, I think we need a much more competent state reaction to the fact these fires... Do you believe in global warming, David Sacks?
SPEAKER_00: I believe in the greenhouse gas theory and that, yeah, that man-made CO2 emissions are gonna have an impact on the environment. I think that what's a little bit hard to know is the exact timing and magnitudes of some of these things. But I agree with what Elon said, which is that we're running a very high-risk experiment here, continually putting out CO2 greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_03: Why is it so difficult for the Republican Party... And I feel like you're almost straining and couching your words there, David, that you believe in global warming, you believe in what Elon's saying is not worth doing this for risk. Why do Republicans seem to have such an aversion to just saying, hey, global warming is a thing and we need to fix it?
SPEAKER_04: Because Democrats wrapped those words around them like a flag and so it became a political issue, like with everything else.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think... So again, we have this false choice now of whether you want to save the environment or save the economy. And the problem is I think a lot of Republicans don't wanna concede the issue... Oh, hey, little guy. A lot of Republicans don't wanna concede the issue because they're afraid it'll lead to something like the Green New Deal. And so what we need to do is figure out some responses to the problem that don't require us to destroy the economy.
SPEAKER_03: Right. And for you, if we did incentives, if the country spent incentive sacks to get solar on roofs and stuff like that, you wouldn't be opposed to it, would you?
SPEAKER_00: You mean like taxing carbon emissions?
SPEAKER_03: Or just giving discounts on putting solar in, subsidizing solar for people's houses, or maybe the middle ground of creating more nuclear reactors, which seems like something that neither party can agree to?
SPEAKER_00: Hold on, little guy. Sorry, I got... Hey, I'm doing a podcast, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Sorry. No problem.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Look, I think to the extent that carbon emissions are an externality, the traditional way of dealing with this is you would internalize the externality by placing some tax or penalty on that. But so look, would I rather tax carbon emissions than something else? Yes. I mean, but the only way you're gonna get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one for one tax reduction in other areas, right? Because there's this other larger debate about what else should be taxed.
SPEAKER_03: What about you, Chamath? What are your thoughts on solving global warming and this polarized sort of Republican Democrat if you're for global... If you believe in global warming, you're not a Republican.
SPEAKER_04: I think that this is the most correlated thing with a healthy economy because I think that whoever solves climate change or the set of solutions that solve climate change, first of all, they'll be unbelievably economically successful. They will employ enormous numbers of people and they'll have a really profound legacy in the world. So the question is how to do it. And I think the problem is right now, there's...David, I think actually puts the best lens on the topic, which is right now, we don't even have enough canonical data so that there's a single source of truth that we can all rely on. And not having to judge it as climate change, I think is an important step, which would just mean having a longitudinal measurement of temperature and having a longitudinal measurement of everything from PM2.5 to PM10 to carbon, methane, all of the other normal sort of emissions, nitrous oxide, all this stuff, so that then you can just understand what men and women as part of the human race are doing to fuck with the counterfactual because the counterfactual is if we were just like living normal, chill lives. And so once you understand that, then you can figure out how to at least mitigate that back to what the counterfactual would have been or do it even better. I think the best thing, again, we talked about this in a pot a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago. The best thing the governments can do is introduce incentives. And I think the most meaningful incentives here are not at the consumer level, but they're more upstream. So if you take something like cement, cement, which is responsible for, I think, 20% of all the carbon emissions, is a really pernicious industry because they are very local. They operate within 300 local kilometers of every place where you ship cement to make concrete and whatnot. And when you look at sort of where the emissions are, they're at a very specific part of the chain, which is effectively impossible to mitigate. So you have to have a level of material science improvement to really move things away from cement altogether. Well, just knowing that, you're going to have to have the incentives that a government creates to pull that forward. Another example is when you look at like manufacturing, all the shit that we all love, I don't care whether you like fucking normal pants or hemp pants. You know, when you go back and you look at how H&M makes those pants, there's our high temperature processes that are burning fossil fuels, they're emitting all kinds of really terrible junk into the environment. And so it doesn't matter whether you're vegan, per se, you know, you're not going to go around unclothed, you're not going to not use spoons, right? So all of that, the totality of all of that, we need to completely reinvent high temperature manufacturing. That's not going to happen unless the government steps in because like, for example, take something as simple as steel. You know, it's a tragedy of the commons, right?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, basically is if no individual can make a major impact, maybe they won't. Friedberg, you think we have all the technology we need to do this, and it's really just a matter of incentives and deployment right now in terms of global warming or stemming global warming? Is that a correct statement that we have the technology we just haven't deployed?
SPEAKER_01: Correct. Correct. And I think it's 100% correct. It's unpacking. What I will say is we have the science, the engineering, and the resourcing, and then the market are the kind of unresolved, right? And so resourcing is capital. The market can be created artificially by putting in place government subsidies or having the government be a customer, or you just have to wait a long enough period of time. If you listen to the Tim Ferriss interview with Coke, which one was it, Charles Coke? He talks about how ultimately consumers will vote with their dollars if climate change is real and global warming is starting to have an effect on planet Earth. And we're seeing that, right? We're seeing people make a switch to a vegetarian diet. We're seeing people buy Teslas. We're seeing people make choices for sustainability. So the free market is resolving and will resolve climate change is the argument that some libertarians might make. And then I think the science is- Is that true in your mind, Friedberg? Do you buy that? I think it's... I'll be honest with you. I'm fucking shocked by how many people are choosing to pay a premium for vegetarian meat alternatives. I was wrong on this. I bet against these companies eight years ago. I didn't bet against them, but I chose not to bet for them because I made the argument consumers will only buy stuff that's cheaper and taste as good. And I was wrong. Millions of consumers are going to Burger King and buying a veggie burger now, which wasn't the case. And we're seeing this across the world. And they're doing this out of a crisis of consciousness, right?
SPEAKER_03: Like you're saying. That's right.
SPEAKER_01: It's a behavioral change. Wow. And yeah, that's what they want in the market. That's what they want to spend their money on. They want to spend their money on having a nicer world. It's just like when people will spend a premium amount of money on a nice suit, it makes them look good and feel good. It's the same sort of notion. I feel good when I'm buying a Tesla. I feel good when I'm buying a veggie burger instead of a meat burger, knowing that it is harming my people around me.
SPEAKER_03: I couldn't bring myself to buy a carbon-based ICE engine. Personally I was thinking about, you know, if I'm in Tahoe and I need to go off road or there's no conditions, I need to have a car for it. And I wound up picking up the Model Y with the dual engine and putting snow tires on it as opposed to getting the new Jeep Wrangler or the new Defender.
SPEAKER_01: But whether it's biomanufacturing or synthetic meats, I think we're not just in a point where we have to create luxury markets. I think we are going to disrupt commodity markets. And I think we're going to do that this decade. And it's going to blow people's fucking mind when everything you're eating looks, tastes, and feels the same and it's cheaper. And it was just made in a more sustainable way using bioengineering, which is kind of, you know, the ability to write the physical world with software, except it's realized through genomics. And it's an incredible thing that we're seeing now. How much of this is the generational shift?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, Gen X seemed pretty absorbed with our own projects and a little bit of consciousness, but these millennials are now getting into their 30s and they're 35 years old, the oldest millennials, and they seem to be incredibly focused on the environment and doing what's right. This is a generational shift in your mind, Freebird?
SPEAKER_01: No, I think this is just the slow march of humanity's ability to master our world and technology. And, you know, look, let me just give you a scenario. Chamath kind of says we're going to decarbonize the atmosphere. If we could build an algae or a seaweed from scratch or using some basis and use software to resolve what's the right sort of seaweed to create that will grow like crazy in the oceans. When it gets heavy, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and it literally just pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and drops to these 4,000-foot deep wells we have already built around 70% of planet Earth. We have the tools to do that. Then the engineering and the capital to do that and then the market for is there a market for that. It doesn't. If governments are like it's a crisis, let's put a billion dollars into this like we did in the Apollo program, we will get that done in five years. I mean, there's no shortage of tools and science to be able to resolve that sort of a problem today much like we're about to produce a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months after discovering the virus, which is unprecedented. Our ability to kind of read genomics and write genomics and as a result create biological machines that can do things in the physical world and self-propagate gives us this incredible toolkit humans never had at its disposal before. It will be the way that will resolve climate change. In the meantime, we're going to bridge the gap between here and there by creating these nice luxury markets. By the way, here's an incredible example.
SPEAKER_04: When you look at sort of where methane is a really problematic greenhouse gas and most of the methane emissions are from cows, but it's from enteric fermentation, which is fancy language for burping. What's incredible is there are now efforts to use CRISPR to genetically engineer cows that don't necessarily have that same gut biome dynamic so that you're burping methane. There's also feed that you can actually give a cow that will minimize methane emissions burping by 30 or 40%. All these things are to your point, David, they're so fantastical if you think about it, but they're possible today. And we just need to organize and get a kind of like a center of gravity around these things and they'll happen.
SPEAKER_00: Can we get Jason the human version of that?
SPEAKER_04: Does it also cover tooting? Does it work for flatulence?
SPEAKER_03: Interestingly Chris Saka tweeted about investing in a company called Running Tide, which grows kelp and will suck carbon from the atmosphere. And he just sinks it to the ocean floor and they're selling carbon offsets by putting seaweed on the ocean floor.
SPEAKER_01: Such a no brainer. The ocean is so big and it's not getting in the way of land where you don't have to go figure out licenses and rights. You got to basically get carbon to go into the ocean. And so then you basically need an organism that can grow and self propagate quickly and radically accumulate biomass in the ocean and then figure out how to get rid of it. So the best way to get rid of it is have it sink. It's got to be some sort of seaweed or kelp or algae and you just put it in the open ocean and it'll propagate. I mean, that's just such a great obvious... And there's a thousand scenarios like that that I think we're going to kind of creatively come up with and resolve here. Why is nuclear not even on the discussion, Freeberg?
SPEAKER_03: I'm curious. Is it just too tainted?
SPEAKER_01: The work I've done on nuclear, it used to cost something like some number of dollars to get a nuclear power plant through the regulatory barriers in the United States. And now it is so cost prohibitive. It's something like $10 billion now from maybe $100 million two decades ago. There's something about the regulatory barriers. Well, there's a huge NIMBY problem.
SPEAKER_00: Who wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard? Nobody. I mean, nobody wants it, Jason. But I agree with the larger point here that the solution to the problem is ultimately going to be all these new technologies, these innovative solutions, not making people feel bad for consuming and being alive. You look at Tesla and it's moving the whole world to electric cars, not with a government mandate but just by creating a better car. And so it's ultimately going to be technology companies increasing the solution set and giving people new choices. That's how we're going to ultimately solve the problem.
SPEAKER_03: And interestingly in the news, NewScale is creating small nuclear reactors and they just got approval. This is the Portland-based NewScale powers. They had a small modular reactor that has been approved by the U.S. Department of Energy for a site in eastern Idaho. We'll see if that ever comes online. But it does seem like small nuclear reactors could solve part of the NIMBY problem in that they're smaller. So if something were to go wrong, we would have some ability to contain or have a smaller footprint in a disaster-like situation. Let's wrap with the Overton window. Chamath talked about it closing and Saks, there was a good article, A Taxonomy of Fear, that you shared with the group. Tell us a little bit about that article, A Taxonomy of Fear by Emily Yuff. I think it's her name. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: She's a writer for The Atlantic who wrote this, again, it's called Taxonomy of Fear and Persuasion. I think it's an important article. What it does is analyze cancel culture and the language that's used to cancel people. And one of the things she diagnoses is what she calls safetyism, which is any time somebody doesn't like an idea or what somebody else is saying, they claim that their safety is being threatened by that idea. And it's kind of invoking these magic words that HR has come up with where if anyone is creating an unsafe work environment or an unsafe college campus, well, the source of the problem has to be removed immediately. And so this is the language of cancel culture. And the problem with it is that it doesn't really matter what the intent of the person was or intent is sort of irrelevant or whether the objection is reasonable or not, whether it causes, whether it actually threatens anyone's safety. And so there's an example of this when 50 prominent writers and intellectuals wrote a letter to Harper's Magazine, including J.K. Rowling and Matt Iglesias, who's a co-founder of Vox. And so there's a trans writer, there's a writer who's a trans person at Vox who claims that her safety was threatened because one of the co-founders had signed this letter. The letter didn't discuss trans issues. It was simply the fact that Iglesias had signed it along with J.K. Rowling. And so J.K. Rowling apparently is radioactive. Yeah, I missed this part of Harry Potter, but apparently the trans movement is really
SPEAKER_03: answered by women who were born biologically female are different than women who transitioned.
SPEAKER_00: Right. So. Right. And that's her position. But her position is being attributed to Iglesias by association. Yeah, exactly. And so.
SPEAKER_00: That would be like saying that I'm in support of Trump just because I'm on this podcast
SPEAKER_03: with you, Sam. To be clear. Yes, it's contamination.
SPEAKER_00: It's contamination by association. What are your thoughts on this sort of, you know, cancel culture and everybody being scared
SPEAKER_03: of words and etc?
SPEAKER_04: This will be if Trump wins in November, it'll be because this whole thing just gets too much for too many people. There is a massive plurality of people in the middle who think this over-wretching sensitivity by the extreme left and the extreme right are just completely out to lunch. And I think. 100% agree. 100% agree. And I think that, by the way, the extreme left and the extreme right, they should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy because they're all just useless fuckwits anyways. All of them. Both of them on the extreme right. Like when Antifa and the alt-right are fighting with each other, it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Thanks for tuning in to the All In Podcast.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, most people are in the middle. Most people don't need to have this like us or them. You know, it's like you're not allowed to have an opinion. Like I actually learn more from people that I disagree with just by hearing them and not trying to judge them. And I think that most of us as well have our views that are sort of moderately in the middle. So for example, there was a USC professor that got sanctioned because he was trying to he was teaching a language class and he used the Chinese word for that, which sounds like the N word. And I think he didn't preface it correctly or what have you. But then, you know, he apologized, he was suspended and folks wrote a letter. Now everybody has a right. The people who felt offended have the right to write the letter. The administration had the right to react. And then I think people read that article and think to themselves, is this actually the, has the pendulum swung too far or not? And and mark my words, if people feel that the pendulum has swung too far, they will elect Donald Trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a shit about any of this stuff. So that would be the bellwether.
SPEAKER_00: No, that's exactly right. So I think it's really important. I think there's a large part of the country that feels that Trump is a shield, not a sword, that he is their protector against this type of cancel culture. And I know Trump seems like an instigator and he's very threatening to a lot of people on the other side. But again, to these people, he's more of a shield. And I think it's not just the fact that he speaks out and denounces cancel culture that makes him a hero to these people. It's his superpower is his uncancellability. It's this, you know, it's the fact that the left has done everything they can to try and get rid of this guy to impeach him, what have you. And he keeps surviving. And so it's his very uncancellability that makes him such a hero to these people. And I think this is the thing that the left or the media doesn't quite understand is that forcing Trump in ever more hysterical terms doesn't, you know, it doesn't work because it kind of feeds into this. It actually hurts.
SPEAKER_03: It adds more people to his cohort who say you're overreacting. And it's the hystericalness of overreacting. Like I tweeted, I've been on this, you know, mini tweet effort to tell people, listen, there are Chromebooks in the world. They're very cheap. 80 percent of the Americans are, excuse me, on the Internet, high speed. And there are so many online resources for you to get ahead in life. Go try to be a marketer. Go to Khan Academy. Go learn UX and design. These are the clearest paths into the technology industry. And I get hysterical liberals who say people don't have access to the Internet. People don't have access to Chromebooks and people don't have the free time or the motivation to improve their lot in life. And it's like, who are you talking about? Because 90 percent of the country has access to the Internet and uses it already. And if you go and do a search for a Chromebook on eBay, a used one, you can find one for 50 to 150 bucks. So we have this narrative that people cannot rise up and people cannot improve themselves. And every time I say I believe people can improve themselves, people say that I am like a racist, that I believe that people could improve themselves. And it just makes me further away from the Democratic Party. It makes me further away from the left.
SPEAKER_04: I think I'm going to put out a crazy idea, which is that I think if Donald Trump wins in a meaningful way in November, I don't think he will. But if he does, the actual silver lining for everybody is I think the Republican Party will disintegrate and the Democratic Party will disintegrate. And in its place, I think you'll probably have three or four parties. And I think that that would be amazing.
SPEAKER_03: So it's the burn it all down vote, which was Peter Thiel's idea in the beginning. I think Sax and Thiel, when they coordinated this Trump election, it was all burn it down, burn it down. Right, Sax? That was your Star Chamber discussion with Thiel? Was you guys wanting to burn it all down?
SPEAKER_00: I think you're trying to I think what you're doing is contamination by association there.
SPEAKER_02: Just because you went to college with Peter Thiel. When's the last time you talked to Peter Thiel? No, Peter's a friend of mine.
SPEAKER_00: But I don't. But again, and I agree with him about some things. I disagree with him about other things. But this idea that we can't hang out with people, or that hanging out with people means that we must endorse every view they have. Why is it even relevant that I'm friends with Peter?
SPEAKER_04: For example, we're friends in our group chat with a couple of guys who are very far right. We're not going to name who they are. But I would say that I think that the group chat is better off for them being able to say what they believe and push back. And just like there's a bunch of us who are in the middle and we waffle back and forth between the left and the right, and then there are folks that are more on the far left. So I just think that we forget that there is enormous value in the diversity of thought. And people think that there is some sort of safety and conformity. And in fact, I will tell you, that's actually the exact opposite. You're more likely to be in conflict with someone that you are very similar to, because eventually you will always end up competing for the exact same resource. And that resource becomes scarce. If you are actually spending time with people that are divergent and different from you, you actually end up not competing for the same resources because you're... One second, you're built differently. So there's just less conflict. So this is why multi-party systems work. This is why you have less fighting in Canada and Europe than you do in the United States, because the United States tries to reduce things down to two choices. And so we all all of a sudden just glom into these pools that are seemingly similar and we just end up hating each other.
SPEAKER_03: Freeburg, any final thoughts on cancel culture?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's just going to be bad.
SPEAKER_00: I totally agree with Jamaat that if Trump wins the election, this will be the reason. The same thing happened when the Republicans overplayed their hand with Bill Clinton. And it was said at that time that Clinton was always very fortunate in who his enemies were, because no matter what he did wrong or how badly he screwed up, his enemies always made too big a deal of it or they overreacted and it played into his hands. And I have to wonder if that's what's happening right now with this whole cancel culture. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: All right, well, we'll leave it at that. We've gone over an hour. If you're listening to the All In podcast and you'd like to advertise, it's not possible. There's no ads on this podcast. And if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast, that's also not possible. There's no guests. So send your advertising and guest requests to Jamaat at SPAC, SPAC, SPAC.org. Breaking news right now. There is a TechCrunch story that just broke while we're on air. Can't stop, won't stop. Social Capital just followed for its fourth SPAC. If you're into SPACs. No, that's not the article.
SPEAKER_04: The article is...
SPEAKER_03: Oh, no, the article is, Jamaat launches SPAC.
SPEAKER_04: SPAC and SPAC as he SPACs the world with SPACs.
SPEAKER_04: We just announced three. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, you just announced number three. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_04: Three, three. D, E and F. Oh, D, E and F got approved?
SPEAKER_04: No, yeah. They're filed with the SEC now.
SPEAKER_03: And when would D, E and F be available for people to buy shares in it then? Is that like a 60 day?
SPEAKER_04: 15 days. Oh, okay, great.
SPEAKER_03: All right. Well, there you have it. And then you confirmed that the second SPAC was open to it, right? Is that confirmed? Yeah, that was announced on Tuesday. Yeah. Congratulations on that. Thank you, sir. And you're still seeing all these people stealing your thunder with SPACs.
SPEAKER_04: I think it's... Is that annoying or is it inspiring? No, no, it's great. I think it's growing the market. It's good for entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_03: It's amazing. I mean, this is going to mean that companies with 50 to 150 million will be able to go public on a clear path?
SPEAKER_04: I hope so. I've said this before. We've gone from 8,000 public companies to 4,000 in 20 years. So let's reverse the tide. Let's go back to 8,000.
SPEAKER_03: It should be double the number of companies, right? I mean, we should have gone down. We should have gone up. You would think it would be...
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the world with 0% interest rates, it has to.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, here we go. Please, for the love of God, somebody convinced calm Robin Hood thumbtack at Data Stacks to go public because I've got kids to put through school.
SPEAKER_02: All right, everybody. For Bestie C, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks, and the Queen of Kinwah, Fried Burgers.
SPEAKER_03: This is the All In podcast. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Love you, Besties.
