All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E25: Biden's vaccine mandate, "equity" in distribution, NFT speculation, impact of inflation & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 Does anybody have any thoughts on this? I mean, I think it's incredible. Um... ... ... ... ... ...

Starting point is 00:00:14 ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Hey everybody, hey everybody everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All in Podcast. It's been a week. It's been a minute with us today. Of course, the queen of Ken what David Friedberg and the rain man himself calling in from a non-descript mansion in one of 17 cities, the rain man himself,

Starting point is 00:00:46 David Sacks, and cackling like a dictator who got his two billy back, and he's back in the game, Chimoff, Polly, Hapatia for those of you. He's re-billionized. He's going to get a car with doors that go like this. Doors that go like this. Dores that go like this. Let's talk a little bit about the vaccine. Biden says everybody who's an adult is qualified by May 1st is instructed the states to do that. We are now hitting 2.X. Million a day. We had a 3 million shot day. I believe Friedberg and obviously the $1.9 billion

Starting point is 00:01:31 COVID slash everybody gets a big slice bill got passed. $1.9 trillion with it. Sorry, that's what I said. 1.9 trillion. No, somebody put 1.9 billion in it. Yes, 1.9 trillion. 1.9 billion is what the COVID as a sex. The COVID NFT went for the COVID NFT went for 1.9 billion. As I said in the past, the trillion here trillion went for. The COVID NFT went for one point. As SACS has said in the past, the trillion here, trillion there, soon enough, it's real money. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Well, Biden's speech really kind of beg the question of why we still need this $2 trillion bill if COVID is gonna be over in May. But putting that aside, I think Biden's speech was very welcome in that he called for states to drop all these crazy eligibility requirements that are actually preventing people from getting vaccinated at this point. He says that every adult American should be able to get a dose by May 1st, and he's

Starting point is 00:02:14 right. And, you know, there's a sharp contrast with Gavin Newsom in California who keeps playing political games with the administration of these doses. So in California yesterday, just yesterday, we added 250,000 more doses of unused inventory. So the amount grew to 4.5 million unused doses sitting on a shelf, only 215,000 people got vaccinated. So we're actually building inventory faster

Starting point is 00:02:42 than we're building the population of people getting vaccinated. And it's because of all these crazy rules and requirements, you have to go make an appointment. You know, and that really actually, it's kind of productive because it discriminates against people who are less computer savvy, do not navigate the website, or, you know, communities who don't want to enter their name in a government database, which, you know, there's a lot of people in California who don't want to, you know, put their names in a government database. which, you know, there's a lot of people in California who don't want to put their names in a government database. And so it works against those communities getting vaccinated.

Starting point is 00:03:09 At this point, we should have dropped all the requirements, dropped the website, let anyone who wants a vaccine just get in line and get vaccinated, it will go much faster. The problem is that we, we throw around this word equity and that we need to do something with equity. And in fact, I think that people who use that word are stupid. I think what they're trying to say actually is we don't want inequity. And the most inequitable thing is to actually take the most impoverished and fragile of the population and prevent them from actually getting the vaccine because they're the ones that actually

Starting point is 00:03:40 need to be working and can't afford to actually not work or can't afford to be sick or can't afford to find solutions to child care. It's this weird word that like, you know, the extreme left uses now to describe policies that are just frankly poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. It might even be more pernicious than that, correct freeberg in that. Anybody who gets a shot is helping everybody else because they are now a blocker in the system. I know this is incredibly simplistic, but I'm a simplistic guy and it just seems to be. Well, it's a different way of thinking about the benefit of vaccination. And I've said it in the past, but the benefit of vaccination is to get enough people vaccinated that the virus generally

Starting point is 00:04:25 stops spreading and then the pandemic ends. And that's the objective. It's not about creating equitable protection for individuals. And as Americans, it's interesting, we think about it in terms of an individual benefit. It's like, how much do I get? What do I get from this vaccine? I want to get protected. The other guy's getting protected before me.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Who gets to go first? The idea that it becomes this kind of competitive, you know, frothing for a vaccination. And the reality is, if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough, the pandemic ends. If we can get 200 million shots in arms, this goes back to, I think, this tweet I sent in early January, December, if we get 200 million shots in arms, we can be done with the pandemic, based on, you know, how many the efficacy of transmission rate reduction combined with the fact that a certain number of people have already developed immunity to this thing, we get to the point that there should be kind of a, think about a network and you start turning nodes off

Starting point is 00:05:16 the network, suddenly becomes really hard to see transmission happen across the network. And so the prioritization of who gets the vaccine over how fast we are deploying the vaccine has been a critical error from day one, in my opinion. Now look, all that being said, I feel like we could sit here and criticize and argue about tactics and strategy all day long about this and make politicians look like idiots and administrators look like idiots. But the truth is, we are now seeing 3 million shots a day. In Biden's speech, which if you'll remember is what I said, we really should be targeting. It's about 1% of the population every day. And that's roughly where we are. Biden said in his speech that we are on a war footing, which is effectively what we said the other day, the federal government is operating 600 mass vac sites.

Starting point is 00:06:04 And we are right now getting shots in arms for all of the issues with prioritization and nonsense. It's going on. I feel very in the United States. I agree. I agree that Biden has the correct posture on this, which is war footing. We are not doing that in California. I mean, I just talked about how we're building inventories. Faster than we're getting vaccines administered.

Starting point is 00:06:23 Newsom just announced that 40% of the vaccines are now gonna be basically separated out and reserved for equity zones. And, you know, it's- What does that even mean? It means that certain communities, only people in certain communities can get those vaccines.

Starting point is 00:06:40 And they're gonna be distributed out through this complicated system of local community groups. All that does is put money through some no-bit contract to some shitty technical company, a bunch of consultants that then take advantage of the system, get paid hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to do nothing. I mean, right. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:07:00 I tweeted out, there's this bot that now scrapes. And by the way, before I tweeted out this thing about this bot, which is, I think, yeah, I sent it to you. It's the California vaccines available bot. Exactly. And all it does is it scrapes that myturn.ca website. But before that, in our group chat, there is another friend of ours who wrote his own scraper, if you guys remember.

Starting point is 00:07:21 And it was really shocking because all it would show is page after page after page of completely open and available vaccine slots, you know, at the Malskone Center and other places. And you think all of this stuff is just a bunch of, I'll be blunt, rich white people sitting in a room with their head up their ass. And they come up with these stupid fucking rules and then they try to implement them with words like equity, and all that happens is that you compound in equality. And let's go back to Freeberg's first point, which is that all these unvaccinated people

Starting point is 00:07:56 who can't get vaccinated faster become a giant petri dish for the virus to continue spreading and experimenting. And more things. And more things, so maybe we actually do get a vaccine resistance strain. The new strains, the variants have been popping up so far are not a vaccine resistant.

Starting point is 00:08:11 But the longer the pandemic goes on, the longer there's a chance that one could arise. And then we're back to square one on this thing. So it's going to hurt everybody. And here's the crazy thing is that, you know, I think we all know a lot of, I know dozens of people who've been vaccinated in California and they all come to me and tell me they're whispering about it, you know?

Starting point is 00:08:30 Because they don't wanna, but tell anyone, they're scared of being canceled. They're scared of being canceled because, you know, Newsom and the equity people have created this idea that if you get a vaccine, you're taking away from somebody else. In reality, you're not because anybody who's high risk has already gotten the vaccine by now or has had access to get the vaccine. And all you're doing right now, if you get the vaccine, is taking a dose off the shelf

Starting point is 00:08:52 where there's 4.5 million doses sitting there and it's increasing by millions every week. And so what we need to do is, well, let me make a PSA actually, starting on Monday, you can anyone in California can get the vaccine with a doctor's note. And they're saying that doctors have total discretion to give the note. So let me just make a PSA to everyone out there. If you're in California, just go get a doctor's note, starting on Monday and go get the vaccine. Yeah, stop worrying about new, some stupid rules. Let's also just remember, so two points on that, Not everyone has the ability to go just get a doctor's note. It's really hard for people that have to go to public clinics and so on to get a doctor's

Starting point is 00:09:31 note. What we are seeing is a lot of people just hacking the website, almost like Soviet Union era bread lines where they go to the website, they type in something that's not true to get themselves a slot. And that's how a lot of people are kind of filling the void. The reality is, and I just want to go back to the point I was making at the beginning. I think we're skating out of this thing.

Starting point is 00:09:49 And I think that the inventory surplus, which is absolutely being built up at a staggering rate in the United States right now. If you look at the inventory forecast from J&J, Pfizer, and Moderna, relative to the deployment rate of the vaccines right now, you are correct. We are building up a surplus and inventory surplus,

Starting point is 00:10:05 and the rate of build up per day is increasing right now. Is it one million extra shots a day, two million extra shots a day being found? Yeah, it's probably half a million to a million. And so we're building up an inventory. And so what happens? On top of the 30 million, we have already in inventory. And so what's happening is there are natural market dynamics,

Starting point is 00:10:22 where we are all pointing out and saying, is starting to play out in terms of people kind of hacking the system. There is so much supply. There are many vac sites now. You can go to any supermarket, any pharmacy in California to get a shot. And everyone's just clicking the box and saying, yes, I qualify and they're going in and getting shots. So the market demand is starting to meet the supply, even though there are government and

Starting point is 00:10:41 regulatory forces that are trying to inhibit that from taking place. And so I do feel pretty good when you look at kind of the inventory forecast and you look at how many shots are being given per day, that in 45 days or so we're going to get to a point that we're starting to skate out of this thing and kind of kind of can I ask you a question? This might be an idiocy of the process that regulators have kind of put in place. Yeah. Freeberg, I just have a quick science question because I was trying to find the answer to this, but I would love for you to tell us What is the real efficacy of the vaccine and what is your trans

Starting point is 00:11:12 Midability like your your carrier status once you've gotten for example like you know Let's just say you take the the Pfizer vaccine, right? Yeah, if you get the Pfizer vaccine how many days until this is like pretty good? And, you know, like what is really the risk profile between the first shot and the second shot? I'll share this link and then we can post it on the, um, show notes and people can take a look at it, but it's an excellent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine showing basically a population of unvaccinated against Pfizer vaccinated with half a million

Starting point is 00:11:47 in each population, half a million people. And they showed basically the accumulated infection rate, severe hospitalization rate and death rate of each of the two populations over time. And that really kind of, I think, highlights the efficacy of the vaccines and at what time period they become efficacious on each of those metrics.

Starting point is 00:12:05 And by the way, even after the first dose across a population of half a million people, the margin of error on death shows that there may even be complete protection against death after the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine within seven days of getting that shot. Pretty powerful statistic. What just to describe the chart for those people listening,

Starting point is 00:12:25 you have two populations and ones in blue, ones in red. And the time is, you know, in days on the bottom axis. And when you get to day eight, one line goes sideways and the other one keeps going straight up. So it's day eight after the Pfizer that you're basically protected according to this chart. And that's on the first shot. And like I think it adds like one or two cases.

Starting point is 00:12:48 But that's right. There have been zero deaths. So I think day eight is the day. And the second dose seems like to me, you know, it's just this unbelievable extra. Another amazing chart, which maybe we can dump in the show notes is what's happening in San Francisco. We hit 10,000 shots a day at the end of February, March 1st.

Starting point is 00:13:06 We're doing now 2,000 shots a day. So we literally have dropped 70% or so. We're at 3,000 shots a day from the peak. So this crazy wokeness is resulting in, you know, in this virtue signaling that, you know, oh, we can't give any shots to anybody unless we get this group first or that group first is now leading to everybody hacking the system. The hack that I've heard is, since teachers are getting it, childcare people,

Starting point is 00:13:31 and food service people are getting it, people are now starting to get jobs at DoorDash, or saying they're a teacher. And if you check that box, according to, you know, the back channel that I've heard, you go get the shot. And you don't get, they don't ask you for anything. They're not checking.

Starting point is 00:13:47 They're not checking. They're not checking. They're not checking. They're not checking. No one's checking. It's just a driver's license. The pharmacies, the grocery stores, the mass fax sites, the SFDPH,

Starting point is 00:13:55 California DPH, Administrative sites, the federal sites, no one's checking. You sign up, you check a box on the website. It says, I attest that this is true, and then you go and show your ID and get your shot. And so a lot of people have kind of initially started scurrying around the rules by going to be a door dash driver for a day or what have you, and then saying I'm a food and ag worker. And then now generally people I think are just clicking on the box and going in and getting

Starting point is 00:14:16 a shot. Now, sorry, just to go back on the previous question, Chimoff, I shared it, figure two, Nick, in this paper I shared, particularly box E shows the deaths due to COVID-19 of a vaccinated population and non-vaccinated population. And then it shows documented SARS-CoV-2 infection. And you'll see that you basically have almost no incremental infections in the vaccinated population starting around 28 days after your first dose. And so that's really when you could say you've got really good protection from the vaccine,

Starting point is 00:14:48 and you're already starting to get the benefits early on. Antibody studies have also shown that there's this big jump-up that happens around that period of time. So call it three weeks after your first shot, and in particular, the fourth week, you're really locked in with a protective, you know, capacity. Now, your question around transmissibility is one that's still being studied, which is if I've got a vaccine, am I going to be able to pick up the virus and transmit it to someone else? Right now, you know, they're saying, well, we don't have evidence one way or the other, but I mean, generally, the way that the virus is spread is you develop an infection in your body,

Starting point is 00:15:23 your body then makes lots of copies of the virus and then you cough and spit them out in the air and that's how people get it. So, theoretically, you could carry some virus on your mouth or on your nose where those cells don't have immune protectiveness and the virus is still alive, but it's not spreading in your body. You're not creating a lot of superfluous virus to spread in the world. So, the basic science of it is you should not be spreading COVID if you've been vaccinated, right? I mean, you may have some on your skin or in your nose or something for a short period

Starting point is 00:15:49 of time, but you're not going to develop a systemic infection that you're then going to kind of start exerting everywhere. So I think we should start to transition to this world of feeling really good and safe and enjoying ourselves. Yeah. We hit 500,000 shots a day, sacks in California, and now we're down to 150,000. We've literally gone down two-thirds under the management of Governor Harjell. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I mean, because, you know, and what was his, in his state of the state speech,

Starting point is 00:16:19 which went over like a lead balloon, the most notable quote was, we're not going back to normal. Normal was never good enough. Normal accepts inequity. So because there might be some inequity in the world around the wrong person in line getting these doses, we're never going back to normal. And he's basically ensuring that result by taking forever with these vaccines.

Starting point is 00:16:41 But let me go back to this point about efficacy. So I think Freibergave the stats on look, the bottom line here is that vaccines work. That is the message we should be getting out to people is that they work. And the thing I've been really surprised by in the reactions that I'm seeing to my own tweets on Twitter about this is how loud the anti-vax voices are and how loud and sort of when you say anti-vax, you don't mean not take the vaccine. You mean the vaccine doesn't work and we're never getting rid of COVID. The forever COVID people.

Starting point is 00:17:12 Yeah, well there's actually a lot of people on Twitter who got really angry. When I just tweeted something about how, it's over. It's over. It's over. Biden tweeted it's over. You know, Biden says we can all get the vaccine in May. If you decide not to do it, that's on you.

Starting point is 00:17:33 The rest of us are moving on. And I got a lot of, and all I was really saying is, look, once the vaccine's available, there's no need for any of these COVID restrictions anymore. But a lot of people interpreted that as me saying something that you should be forced to get the vaccine or something like that. Now look, I don't think you should be forced to get it, but I think it's highly effective. It works. And, but I'm surprised at how loud these sort of anti-vax voices are. It's usually like a conspiracy theory around the vaccine. And I think part of the reason why those voices are so loud is because they're unopposed, because all the people who believe in the voices are so loud is because they're unopposed

Starting point is 00:18:05 because all the people who believe in the vaccine are getting it, but they're all afraid of like, like you're saying, J.K.L. of being canceled. And so there's a conspiracy of silence around this. You know, what we all need to be saying is, look, go get vaccinated. It works. Take the win. America. Take the win. We screwed this thing up for 14 months. Can we just take the goddamn win and move on? I'll give you a little thing that that always pops into my mind and all of these things. Whenever I hear some politician or some like naval gazing intellectual use the word in equity, I think like this is a power grab because the word equity is really

Starting point is 00:18:40 about ownership. Whereas the word equality is about balance, right? And power, hungry politicians love the word equity and inequity because it's their opportunity to grab power. And to tell us how things should be done, or to do things differently in a way where, they can enforce their mandate, which is typically ill-formed and not very smart. And I would just encourage all of us,

Starting point is 00:19:04 whenever you hear the word equity or inequity, this huge, huge red light should be going off in your essay. Whatever this person says next is a crock of horse shit and it's probably a power grab. Whereas if you hear people really talking about solving inequality, there's really no mechanism to solve inequality through power. Well, I think that's a great point around the language that gets used. And I have a similar concern about the way that the word privilege gets used. We used to have a term in this country called success. People were successful or not, and success had a connotation of being earned, whereas privilege

Starting point is 00:19:40 has a connotation of being unerred. Well, I mean, now sometimes privilege is earned success and sometimes it's unearned. And, you know, but when you start using the word privilege to describe all success, it implies that there's something, you know, unjust or unearned about it and it needs to be reallocated. So, you know, that to me is another one

Starting point is 00:19:59 of these political words is, we shouldn't be confusing success with privilege. The two very different things. I have an example of this. Oprah Winfrey is successful. Prince Henry is has privilege. This privilege is privilege. I shoot the Meghan Markle story.

Starting point is 00:20:17 Final. Yeah. I mean, I do want to talk about the Meghan Markle story. Actually, at some point, for the end of this podcast, but before we do that, right now. Okay. Joe Lonstead will actually also had a tweet on a polygetic set of tweets. story actually at some point before the end of this podcast, but before we do that. Right now. Okay. Joe Lonstead actually also had a tweet on a pretty apologetic set of tweets around, you

Starting point is 00:20:30 know, the miscasting of this concept of privilege. And I thought it was really on point. I really agreed with what he was saying. And it's effectively what you're saying, David. It's like people right now, I find are just so, well, not people. The people that take the time to wallow in Twitter mostly, at least as I interact with them, are just so bitter. And I think that there is no magnanimous happiness for other people's success anymore. I think, I think, like, we live in a culture now where everybody feels it is so zero-sum when it's

Starting point is 00:21:06 not in fact zero-sum. And people just begrudge other people's success, especially by the way when it's earned. And the reason is because there's an entire generation of people of all different ages, but this last five or 10 years, who tapped themselves out. Now some were legitimately prevented from success, but there's a lot of people that bought into this narrative. Wow, it's a whole conspiracy that set up against me, so I'm not even going to try. And they are often the loudest and the most embittered. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:21:39 And the reason is because everybody wakes up in their 40s and 50s and starts to rationalize their choices and their lives. And what they really feel deep down inside is, oh my God, I just let an entire decade go by of blaming other people. And I think there's a surprisingly large amount of that. This ideology of victimization doesn't teach people the right things

Starting point is 00:22:01 because you start to think that if you're are wallowing in your oppression, then you don't have agency over your own life. You're blaming other people for not being successful, not getting ahead when what you should be doing is focusing on working and improving your own life and getting ahead. Or just redefining what happiness means. Happiness doesn't mean what that other person has and then saying, because I

Starting point is 00:22:20 don't have that, I have nothing. Happiness is really like introspectively figuring out like what really makes you complete. And I mean, not to get too serpious about it, but it's like, that's what we've also lost the script on. So when you put all of these things together, there's just a bunch of people that sit on the sidelines, they either are too scared to enter the arena or they don't want to enter the arena,

Starting point is 00:22:41 they don't want the failure that comes from it, because they've grown up in a culture where they had the kindergarten soccer ball handed to them, the gold star and everything they've ever done. Participation trophy. And now what we really need are people in the arena, more than ever, folks trying and failing. And it's okay. And there's just not enough of them. What instead is there's just a lot of people who just want a bitch and complain. And I think this is the backlash to the Meghan Markle interview is this miscasting that this is an extremely privileged person or, you know, Harry and Meghan both are very privileged.

Starting point is 00:23:15 And but, but I think what they're trying to do by making all these sort of accusations of racism against their own family is they're trying to ground that privilege in victim status. And this is the thing about privilege. Privilege is a social concept. It's got nothing to do with success, which is either earned or un-earned. And so the way that people get to maintain their privilege is, again, they ground it in some sort of victimization. It creates these very perverse incentives.

Starting point is 00:23:44 My reaction to the Megan Markle Prince Harry interview was the following. I had a lot of sympathy for what she was saying, but on the other side, I also thought you must have known what you were getting into on the way in. And there was, it was, and now, and look, I'll say this as a Canadian and a Sri Lankan so the queen and the monarchy is an inquiry like it's I can't describe to you guys because you're not Part of the Commonwealth, but It is just a definitional definitional part of who we are as we grow up and I don't know what the equivalent American Constructors, I guess there isn't one really. And so, you know, the monarchy is an incredibly important thing.

Starting point is 00:24:35 But we all know that it's this kind of like an agronistic thing that just kind of, I look, for us, it's not bullshit. Like, I mean, like if you said to me, despite all my bullshit and raging against the machine and society and blah, blah, blah and stature, whatever, if I could be invited to meet the queen, I would be there in eight nanoseconds. Okay. Well, I think the equivalent is the presidency. We actually feel that way about the presidency. Like going to visit the president is a president. The presidency is not an endowed kind of circumstance. There's something about there's something about the queen. My point is though, we all know a that it's important. It's a great symbol of the Commonwealth. I'm very proud of all of that. But we all should know it's an agronistic and it doesn't make much sense. And so what do you, what do you think you

Starting point is 00:25:14 were marrying into? And I think, you know, my perspective was I felt bad for her. I can't believe, you know, it got to the place where like people wouldn't get help for her when she was sick. And, you know, and then they were questioning Harry's or the kids' archie's skin color. This is insanity. These people are stuck in the 1800s, but then you realize they are actually stuck in the 1800s because they're not allowed to have a normal life. They're not allowed to actually interact. Are they at fault or is the system that creates these sort of like voyeuristic exotic

Starting point is 00:25:48 animals in a zoo that we call the king, the queen, these princes is the system at fault? I don't know. I was kind of like 50, 50 on the interview, but my perspective was the monarchy is in a really tough spot over the next 30 or 40 years because again, so now let me tell you where my belief is. I'm kind of a little bummed by the whole thing. The monarchy doesn't mean what it used to mean for me. David, what was more enthralling to you this week?

Starting point is 00:26:12 Tucker versus Taylor or the queen versus Oprah and Fritz Henry. I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time on either one. I mean, if I were here, I would probably do the same thing, which is to basically, look, the first thing I did in my career was quit the firm, right? I, you know, who wants to work for a firm? You know, it's very tracked.

Starting point is 00:26:37 So I don't blame him leaving, going to California, you know, that's what we all did, right? I mean, he was being, that's a very, that's a very entrepreneurial American thing to do. What I, what I had a problem with was the way that they're attacking their own family because they're being paid $7 million to do this interview. I think that's, no, no, hold on. They were not, there was a first question Oprah asked

Starting point is 00:26:58 and they were very clear they were not getting paid. Now, they did sign 100 million. Who made the $7 million, no, Oprah did, Harper did. Oh, she's a genius. Yeah, she's a genius. Now they did sign a hundred million. Who made the seven million? No, Oprah did. Harper did. Oh, she's a genius. Yeah, she's a genius. No, let's just keep going to get Oprah. Oprah is our queen.

Starting point is 00:27:11 She's like, that's true. Queen of America. Oprah is the queen. Oprah figured out how to get married. It's even worse. It's even worse if they did the interview for free and didn't even get a piece of the back end. So all they did was attack and besmirch their family for none of that. And look, I guess my point is, so why would they do it if it's not even

Starting point is 00:27:30 about the money? I mean, it's about this idea of defining their privilege, grounding it in victim status. And I think there's something very fake in phony about that. And I think that's why people had this reaction to it where frankly, they were, I don't think they're on the side of the royal family because it is outdated, but I think there was a lot of skepticism towards what... I had a little bit of a problem with the like live from our $15 million Montecito mansion. No, Jason. Our victimhood.

Starting point is 00:28:00 That was not for that house. They did house. They have a $15 million. I know, but they also have a $15 million house next to Oprah. Well, they put $5 million down it. No, it's public. They put $5 million down and they took out a mortgage. It's someone listed this whole thing.

Starting point is 00:28:15 No, it's an honest question. Does the to the taxpayers of the UK fund the princess? That's the whole point. They went and did a deal with Netflix and they start and Spotify. And now they have a salary and they're making money like everybody else. So I mean, I'm not, I don't have an issue with any of that. No, I don't have an issue with that. I thought the taxpayers funded the lifestyle.

Starting point is 00:28:33 They do fund the lifestyle of the other princes, right? Sure. Yeah. So I mean, that's the way we talk about something important. Yeah. Okay. So a people NFT sold for $69 million. I mean, this week, this was crazy.

Starting point is 00:28:48 This is what the dumbest shit happened this week. Taylor Moran was getting to this week, and dumb shit. Slotted off. Yeah, that's making dumb shit. So I miss, I miss Tucker versus Taylor, but actually the real, the person who took on Taylor that did a brilliant job was Glenn Greenwald.

Starting point is 00:29:03 Oh, I don't know. I don't know if you guys read his post, but that was brilliant. That was brilliant. And basically what he said is that, look, you've got these class of reporters out there who their job is to go out and they're like little hall monitors, you know, trying to bust people for whatever they might say in a clubhouse room, not just public figures, but private people too. They're in the business of destroying lives and reputations.

Starting point is 00:29:27 That's basically their business model. But then the second anyone has any criticism for them, they claim it's harassment, which is just absolute nonsense. They want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want

Starting point is 00:29:41 to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, they want to be, theyness to write that article is Glenn Greenwald because he is, you know, he's gay, he's got brown kids, he lives in Brazil, you know, with, I mean, it's fat, it's like you can't, it's like, it was a force moving the immovable, meeting the immovable object. He's not completely immune because he was, he was attacked, you know, and people said pretty nasty things about him, but yeah, he definitely has some.

Starting point is 00:30:02 I think Greenwald is an unbelievable writer who calls it like he sees it. I don't agree with everything he says all the time, but you know, he's right to call this stuff out. There is another bunch of social justice nonsense this week as well. This poor guy had to like give out this crazy apology tweet because he said you like that. Oh, you're talking about exercise. What happened?

Starting point is 00:30:22 Wait, what is that story? Okay. This is the greatest. Okay. There's a kid. I've been telling you Jason. I want you to exercise because I love you. I want 20 pounds. Look at me. I'm looking for some food. I want it. I want both of you guys to exercise. Tell me about it. Oh, by the way, public service announcement. COVID vaccine CA is the bot. So at COVID vaccine, yeah, COVID vaccine. It just tweets every five minutes, a hundred different places you can go pretend to be a door to a driver and get a shot. Sorry. I mean, if you work or a get vaccinated, check a box check.

Starting point is 00:30:46 Check a box. Check a box. Check a box. Let's go. Let's roll people. Don't let Newsom take away your health. Yeah. Don't let Newsom put on news on equity. Yeah. Meanwhile, he's at like, Jason, tell us about the said. Tell us about this sweet thing. What happened? There's a kid named Dom. He's an entrepreneur. He's building a company. It's a good company. it's funded by Stripe,

Starting point is 00:31:05 you know, it's raised hundreds of millions of dollars, like good for this guy. Yeah, but he likes to like, you know, he's kind of like trying to engage on Twitter and he basically said, I feel so much better and I'm performing at such a higher level since I got my diet and my exercise right. I mean, people who are not getting their physical right

Starting point is 00:31:23 are really underperforming at work. It's such an opportunity or whatever. And then, the large and in charge, fat is beautiful contingent, basically tried to cancel him. Sorry, wait, wait, wait, but did he say that you have to be skinny? No, he just said you will perform,

Starting point is 00:31:41 if you're fat, you're underperforming basically. He didn't use the word fat, but he said if you're not in shape, you're underperforming at work. Which I said, is there signs behind this? And yeah, sure, people showed me a hundred studies that show if you lose weight, you have better concentration and focus. I mean, it's pretty obvious.

Starting point is 00:31:55 But he did the cardinal sin as, here, I'll read you the tweet. An important lesson I learned well into my career, if you are not physically fit and healthy, then you are underperforming at work. Pretty basic. I probably not a very controversial, but he did what David Sacks always advises and the advice he gave to Trump, which is never apologize.

Starting point is 00:32:18 And he apologized. Dom apologized and took the tweet down, which then the mob really went after him. And he said, I screwed up. And I'm extremely sorry. I have recently spent a lot of energy focused on my fitness eating and sleep in my enthusiasm for my new fitness regime. I posted a tweet that was meant to celebrate

Starting point is 00:32:37 my new healthy lifestyle. But that's not how it came across. And I see now how it totally sensitive my original thoughts. With all the problems that we have that need fixing, I mean, this is what people were focused on this past. Here's the thing. Here's the kicker of the apology. This is something I really need to improve on.

Starting point is 00:32:57 And I will. Well, no, I'm not making fun of him. I just think it's sad that he can't do that. What the hell is going on? No, but don't apologize. If you believe being healthier is, you know, good, then you should say it and, you know, we'll let the chips roll with it.

Starting point is 00:33:12 People can debate it, but I mean, can't we have a debate about that? Because this is in the middle of a COVID crisis when the top two vectors are age and obesity. Period. If you're fat, you die from COVID. That's how it works. And you got both those problems. You're old ant fat. I'm doing good today. All right, today in all in nonsense, apparently there's

Starting point is 00:33:38 so much money in the system that an NFT just sold for $69 million. After we talked about the previous one, Billy bought for $6 million. I don't know if that he bought it for $6 million. But somebody bought one last week. NFT seemed like a real thing. It's reasonable to trade stuff, but $69 million for me. I think it's incredible.

Starting point is 00:33:56 I mean, like the, the, I saw the breakdown of like the number of bidders. Here, let me actually just get this data up because I think you guys will find it really incredible. My thesis on this or my theory, rather, is that there are a bunch of people who have stakes in these crypto assets, and then they all pre-meditate, decide to buy up these NFTs

Starting point is 00:34:19 to get the market started, and then once it started, like, you know, other people do it art, right? You know this, but I've been buying art for a decade plus, market started and then once it started, like, you know, other people do it right? Right. You know, you know, you know this, but I've been buying art for a decade plus. And this is exactly how it works in the art market. You know, we go in there, certain people will go and buy. And then what the galorist says is, oh, did you know that Jamat just bought this piece or such and such, a person bought this other piece?

Starting point is 00:34:39 And then all of a sudden the price spins up and then they feed into it. I mean, this is where, you know where an enormous amount of money has been made by galorists over the last 20 or 30 years. Now it just happens in a different medium. So the bidding breakdown, by the way, of the Cineftes incredible, 33 active bidders, 91% of the bidders were new to Christie's. 55% came from the Americas.

Starting point is 00:35:01 27% of bidders were from Europe and 18% were in Asia the age breakdown is the most interesting 6% were Gen Z so 97 to 2012 58% of bidders were millennials 90 born between 81 and 96 wow 33% Gen Xers and 3% baby boomers So this is really like a transitional change in basically deciding what's valuable. And I don't think this was any different than when you had this transition from impressionist in the art world. If you moved from the body of work where these impressionist paintings were just going for high tens, low hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think it peaked around Van Gogh. And then basically it went from there off of a cliff where you can

Starting point is 00:35:46 basically give away impressionist paintings and everything went to contemporary and this postmodern stuff. That was a decisional change by boomers. What does give away mean to you, Tramoth? I mean, I'm tens of millions. Exactly. Oh, God. So I think on the NFT stuff and people, he's people as the artist, there's two things going on, right? So one is on a technology level, NFTs, non-fungible tokens, they are, it's a legitimate technology for creating provenance on a blockchain.

Starting point is 00:36:21 You know, if a piece of art basically gets put on a blockchain, you have perfect provenance. But that doesn't mean that all NFTs are valuable. In fact, most of them won't be. It's just a technology. Then you have the other thing that's happening is on an art level, what these sort of prestige, galleries, and so on. They're saying that Beeple is now a major artist. And the reason someone becomes a major artist is because they usher in or become representative of some new wave of art, like Jim Althe Stain. You've got impressionism, you've got modernism.

Starting point is 00:36:52 I mean, the reason why Jackson Pollock sells for whatever $100 million, is it 300 to 600? Okay, it's because he represents an important wave in art. And some of those waves fizzle out and they turn into Ponzi schemes and some of them become real. And people are speculating that this digital art

Starting point is 00:37:10 will be a major wave and they're saying that people is the most important artist and they're kind of betting on that. Now, do I think it's gonna last? I don't know. I mean, hard to say probably. You said the key thing though,

Starting point is 00:37:23 the key feature of NFTs, which I think is amazing, is that you can actually have ownership and provenance written into a blockchain. Now, you take that abstraction. You can apply to all kinds of surface areas and it makes a ton of sense. Any kind of other asset would make sense if you own a car, if you own clothes,

Starting point is 00:37:39 if you own watches, if you own wine, what happens if you own a house. Now, all of a sudden, if you can prove ownership over this stuff, not only can you own wine, what happens if you own a house. Now all of a sudden, if you can prove ownership over this stuff, not only can you trade it, but you can also borrow it against it. And I think that that is a really interesting idea where once you financialize all of these physical assets that we own, you do eliminate an enormous amount of inequality in this system because you can actually get real transparent pricing. Like now, could you?

Starting point is 00:38:06 Yeah, blockchain's, blockchain's are a ledger, right? They're a perfect ledger system. And so like everything, every type of possession that relies on title should eventually be blockchain. So our, our, it's a good example. You know, I helped found a company back in 2017 called Harbor, which was a blockchain real estate, and then I'm getting acquired.

Starting point is 00:38:29 So now, as a... A wire door, a acquire. No, I got acquired. We're gonna make a door. Torch about. Torch about, we're gonna make money. We're gonna make money. I just wanted to clarification.

Starting point is 00:38:40 Yeah, no, we're not gonna make like, back type money, but we'll make a little bit of money on that deal, so don't worry. But yeah, look, I think, I think we're in the early, early stages of this type of technology, you're going to see eventually blockchaining of every of every type of asset where title is important. David, I think that this is such an amazing idea, because like, if you think of all of the opaque lending markets, where people can't get access to reasonable cost of

Starting point is 00:39:04 capital, and they own assets, you know, you end up in these all of the opaque lending markets where people can't get access to reasonable cost of capital and they own assets. You end up in these crazy worlds where like if you look at the housing crisis or the great financial crisis, there was so much crazy lending but behind that lending was double triple mortgages. It's happening right now in the car market. All of that stuff doesn't necessarily need to exist because if you have clear provenance and the ability to price risk, All of that stuff doesn't necessarily need to exist because if you have clear provenance and the ability to price risk, you just get people can borrow a reasonable amount of money

Starting point is 00:39:29 at a reasonable rate and pay it back. And you can trade assets, you could sell assets. It's a really big deal, I think. I think if you take a zoom out on the notion of what an NFT represents, it doesn't feel too dissimilar from other, what I would argue is like non-productive assets. If you think about where one's capital goes, where an individual puts their capital, the

Starting point is 00:39:54 first thing is kind of essentials, right? Things you need, like food and medicine and housing and clothing and whatnot. Then you kind of enter into these kind of, you know, non-extend, you know, kind of discretionary spending for a consumer, you know, nice stuff, nice clothes, luxury goods, things that are basically going to diminish. Then, as you think it, such as owning a home or you get the value of living in it or owning a car or you get the utility of driving around in it or owning a bond which issues a coupon or a stock that's going to generate cash flows at some point in the future theoretically. The nonproductive assets or these assets that are just not designed to do that, but there is a store of value that

Starting point is 00:40:45 you expected some point to realize some return. Because someone else will pay a higher price to you for that non-productive asset. This is like a piece of art or some piece of gold or something that you hold more increasingly digital assets. It seems like the explosion in digital assets is Jason pointed out at the beginning. We've moved to a highly overvalued segment of productive assets. That market is very frothy. It's very difficult to find productive assets that are worth putting capital into.

Starting point is 00:41:18 There's continually more interest in non-productive assets across the board because there's excess capital in the system. It turns out that when that happens, there's enough of a market dynamic that emerges in non-productive assets that gives people a reason to put their capital in and expect to have a return on them in the future. As soon as the market starts shrinking, as soon as you start having effects that are deflationary, money will pour out of that market in general. That's always what happens with the art market and has for hundreds of years. And it's the digital means of kind of realizing that same market transition.

Starting point is 00:41:50 That's not talking about that. My question is, do you get the rights, I guess this is a dependent on the terms that are set in the smart contract, but in the case of the people, if I were to buy for $69 million, do I have the rights to it so that I can print t-shirts and sell $100 t-shirts? That's a great question. Or can I create $10,000 more of these? Can I monetize it? Is what I'm asking. That's a great, great, great question.

Starting point is 00:42:13 I don't know, but that's a fabulous question. By the way, as you pointed out, the artists and other folks have rights to art, even though the original painting is what sold. The original master of a Bruce Springsting song could be sold to a collector, but the rights on that track for reproducing it, making money of it, are owned by a publishing house. So you could own that. It's a physical magnetic tape, but not own the rights to exploit it. And over time, those rights fall away.

Starting point is 00:42:43 So if you think about what that NFT represents, it represents that particular chain of electrons. And you know, this is these bytes, these bits that represent this image. And it's not necessarily. Can be make a hundred more. And then he could change. He could change one pixel theoretically or two pixels.

Starting point is 00:42:59 And he could go print a bunch of stuff and go stuff. Not really because those images were ones that he had, he had this rhythm of creating like one a day, I think, for very, very time. And he contributed them all into this master, right? Exactly. So there's, this is a, it's a one of one. Another interesting one of one that just happened was these performance artists, or I guess like underground digital artists bought a Banksy for $125,000.

Starting point is 00:43:22 Or $125,000. I get thousands and millions confused. Just that's a joke. That's a huge joke. You want to use for this episode is hashtag cancel chimoff. Go ahead. Yeah, good luck. Good luck.

Starting point is 00:43:37 Good luck. Anyways, these four guys bought this Banksy for $125,000. They brought it to a warehouse in Brooklyn. They took a high res image of it. So they took a picture of it, and they created a one-of-one NFT. Then they created a YouTube video of them burning the original Banksy. So now all you had was the digital manifestation of this physical thing. Wait for it. And then they sold it for $350,000. So they three X their money. It's the most incredible story. I can find the link and I'll put it in the show notes as well.

Starting point is 00:44:23 But it just shows you what's happening. and then I also think last thing on NFTs I saw that I think it was like Kings of Leon just put out an album and it was like it's like 50 bucks For a song or something like that and it comes with like a bunch of interesting content So it's the beginning of something guys. I just think that you need sort of like popular content to Get this movement going, but it seems to me like this is what people want to do. They want to own digital assets, they want to have provenance, they want to have custodial relationships with it,

Starting point is 00:44:51 they want to basically... But it's like art and posters, right? Anyone can put the poster up in their room, anyone can buy a copy for five bucks, but who owns the original, and owning the original may be visually identical, maybe graphically identical, but it is truly about that notion of,

Starting point is 00:45:08 that theoretical human mind constructive ownership that creates that distinction. And you just effectively have to count on other human minds believing the same thing in the future for you to be able to reclaim that value, that monetary value, or you're gonna take a loss on it. I mean, Chimath, have you ever sold art that you bought? You know, I've sold very little.

Starting point is 00:45:29 I tend to buy and accumulate with this idea of eventually endowing something, just because it's like, you know, I think there are two ways to buy art. One is speculatively, and the other one is to tell a story. I took the second path, and so, you know, it's stuff that means a lot to me so it's hard for me to part with it. Even though it sits in a free port in Delaware so it's not exactly

Starting point is 00:45:50 you know out and about. Put this idea that at some points people will get to really enjoy it once. By the way I mean one of the things that happens in the art world and correct me if I'm wrong on this but you buy this art and you don't ever a lot of art doesn't get result. Everyone kind of buys it under the notion that it's going to be worth more in the future and they can sell it for more, but very few people actually do end up selling it. No, no, no, no, that's it. So here's a piece of great.

Starting point is 00:46:13 Well, I guess in the trading market, right? But like, I mean, generally, like a lot of collectors end up endowing art or gift-a-hand. And when you gift it, you get an appraisal done and you get a deduction on the appraise value, right? And so you can definitely do it that way. So one interesting story is that one of the large auction houses has a financial arm.

Starting point is 00:46:32 And the most incredible thing is like over like the last 50 years, their cumulative default rate was 30 basis points on their book. Like cumulatively, not like a year or a month, but ever. Nobody defaults. What, because they borrow money for the purposes of maybe buying other things or whatever, and then they will very, you know, trade out of things and trade up to things and trade across things. But it's a very vibrant market of buying and selling. It just happens to be very informal and a little bit closed and very much for insiders. And, you know, another reason that I think that NFTs will change, because it will change us, is that it just makes it available to everybody, because you put all art on a very

Starting point is 00:47:19 level playing field. And really, at the end of the day, what is art? It's a commentary on society. And I think that having that level of transparency on that kind of stuff is, I think is going to be really valuable because you don't want one or two people who you fundamentally disagree with as being a taste maker for a kind of art that you think is fundamentally flawed. Right. You'd rather it's just it's no different than being able to go to 95 different media sites to read the content you want or, you know, being able to listen to a thousand different

Starting point is 00:47:44 kinds of music All of it in its totality is a commentary on society and I think what society says is we want transparency and we want choice and This is where I think like that's why I think it is a good a good dovetail into What's happening with the stimulus bill and where we started which was is this even necessary? we have with the stimulus bill and where we started, which was, is this even necessary? We have stimulus checks going out in the amount of $2,000 per individual in households with under 150K. I believe the income level, which means people who were not impacted financially in any way by what's happened to under COVID are going to get in a family of five, $10,000 checks, even if nobody was laid off.

Starting point is 00:48:27 That's only like 9% of the bill, Jason. Yeah, I mean, so it's, that's the 100 grand. It was 450 million out of 1.9 trillion. So what do we think the impact? I have two questions. I have a working theory. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jason. What are your general thoughts on this?

Starting point is 00:48:41 Is it necessary? And then two, what's the, what are the the second order effects that we each predict will happen over the next 18 months when all of this capital gets injected? So the latter is what I've been focused on trying to figure out. And I saw some really interesting data, which basically I'll ask you guys the question, because maybe you guys know the answer. But if you measure wealth inequality, when do you guys think was the most recent period where there was the least wealth inequality, the least?

Starting point is 00:49:12 Well, sorry, how do you define that? You can measure it like the Ginny index or you can measure it as like, you know, the gap between the top desial and the bottom desial in terms of wealth and accumulated assets. Well, would it be before the robber barons? top desial and the bottom desial in terms of wealth and accumulated assets. Well, would it be before the robber barons? No, it was the between the robber barons and now the period of the least inequality in recent history was in the late 70s, which is an incredible stat to say where they the gap between the top desial and the bottom desial was like, you know, kind of like on an index like 60, 65, whereas today it's

Starting point is 00:49:44 sort of like on an index like 60, 65, whereas today it's sort of like at 100. Now, what happened then? And this is really interesting. What's it meant in inflationary period? There you go. So what happened? And as it turns out, inflation is a phenomenal way to decrease level of the playing field.

Starting point is 00:50:01 Absolutely. It decreases people's richness. So it makes rich people poor. That's really the most effective tool that you have to recalibrate. It's very, very hard to redistribute money. And I think every attempt at doing that has largely failed. But the one consistent way, and if you go back periods before that, you know, into the beginning of the... But in an inflationary environment, borrowing costs go up. So, businesses and people that rely on borrowing

Starting point is 00:50:28 to grow their net worth or investing assets, to grow their net worth, kind of suffer more than people that have a home have a... Wait, wages go up in an inflationary environment, right? So, what do you say? Which actually, if you think about like, what you said before, like, as people get wealthier, they move their money into essentially financial

Starting point is 00:50:46 assets and away from working assets. When interest rates go up and the risk-free rate goes up, then the attractiveness of those assets go down. What happens is shares and technology companies go down. What actually also happens is that your cost of capital for a traditional business, because it's higher, they have to then charge more, which means that they're paying their employees more. And those folks on a marginal basis tend to then take those dollars and spend those dollars. So inflation is this very productive mechanism of actually redistributing wealth and actually homeowners benefit, homeowners benefit as well.

Starting point is 00:51:24 But like, it shrinks the the wealth. You know, mild mild inflation mild inflation is probably good. It's it's better than probably deflation. But if it tips over into hyperinflation, then it destroys everyone's savings, right? And risk people have the ability to protect their assets against inflation a lot better than middle class people do. So, you know, you look at like Venezuela, we're more Germany, hyperinflation. Yeah, hyperinflation is a story of the value of...

Starting point is 00:51:57 Where are we seeing inflation? Where do we anticipate we'll see inflation? I saw today Tesla raised the price on all their cars except for two. Well, they have to because the inputs of, you know, if you think about like, if you break down a Tesla and you look at where the money goes, the money really is in the batteries. And if you break down the batteries, it goes into three critical inputs, lithium, nickel, and coal-bolt, and the prices are highly suspect and they're very poorly predicted. And so the cost of Tesla's are going to go up by 20 or 30% And there's nothing that there's nothing that Tesla could do and by the way you'll see this across all commodity products if inflation takes hold in a meaningful way including you know food products, ag products, you know

Starting point is 00:52:42 All commodities, you know metals, but The businesses that'll benefit the most and this is really interesting from a technology perspective, and I think it played in part, my understanding is speaking to a number of PMs about this portfolio managers at funds, is that, you know, technology companies don't have a lot of hard assets, and so they have less kind of, you know, value accretion, and they don't play in a commodity supply chain. So, it's much more difficult for a technology company to say raise rates by 30% or as a food company can raise rates by 30%. One of the ways to look at this is to look at the book value or the capex, property

Starting point is 00:53:17 plants and equipment of a business. Businesses that have a lot of Pp&E are generally going to do better in an inflationary environment. They're going to have more throughput on that PPN. They're going to have higher dollars per unit of PPNE. So you'll see, this is why there was a shift of dollars into what are traditionally called kind of value stocks or kind of bigger industrial companies away from software kind of tech companies, which don't really benefit from this inflationary trend. And so there's going to be some sort of play out

Starting point is 00:53:46 in those sorts of products, probably more Jay Calvin. Just to give your thoughts on it. Do we see it in SaaS? Because I've noticed that SaaS prices are going up and that people are just keep adding to the price of these SaaS products. I was pricing out all the virtual conference stuff like hop in and all that air meet and whatever.

Starting point is 00:54:05 And I was just shocked at how much they wanted to charge 15, 50, $100,000 a year. And I was like, but can I use Zoom in this for that? You know, in a chat room, Slack room. And are we going to see it happen in SaaS where people are going to start raising the prices and just increase their profit margin because their employees are going to demand more money? Because they're part of the cycle. I think that's a function of pricing power going up for SaaS companies, they become more established and entrenched.

Starting point is 00:54:30 Those companies are very profitable. I don't think they're experiencing wage pressure in any way. I think that they're just becoming more successful. Their pricing power is going up as they become not necessarily monopolist, but as they have more market share and they dominate their categories, they can increase prices. But I want to go back to this idea of the 1970s, because I want to challenge the idea that the US economy was doing well in the 1970s. So, Jamoth mentioned the Ginny Index. There was a different

Starting point is 00:54:57 kind of metric called the Misery Index that was a much more popular index that was used around that time. And the Misery Index was defined by a Brookings economist, and it was basically the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. And in 1980, the Misery Index was 19.7%. This is why Ronald Reagan got elected, is because you had a CPI, which is the inflation rate of 12.5%. And then you had unemployment of another 7.2% on top of that. And the 1970s were, especially the late 70s, were an economic disaster for the country. So maybe things were more nominally equal, but everyone was equally more equally poor. And what you saw in the 1980s is that they got inflation under control, Paul Volcker

Starting point is 00:55:52 at the Fed broke inflation. That lowered interest rates enormously that allowed people to buy homes. The stock market went up and, you know, it was an economic boom. So I don't know that this idea that we want to introduce a lot of inflation into the system is a good idea. Like I said, I think mild inflation of say 2% is better than 2% deflation the other way. But I think we should be very careful here about inflation and making sure it doesn't get out of control. In the other index to look at is the quality of life index, which is typically, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:29 healthcare, and then the property price to your income ratio, commuting, pollution, safety, and those kind of things. And, you know, the United States is 15th on that list, with obviously the Nordics and Australia, Germany, New Zealand, just being at the top of those rankings. In America, we never really thought about that, right? We don't really even discuss happiness, you know, and that, and that quotient, we don't index for that.

Starting point is 00:56:57 Happiness and low stress. I think we're talking a lot about quality of life in San Francisco now, because that's a community that's very rich. And yet, it's a miserable city to live in because crime is out of control. You know, Jason, you and I have been focusing on this D.A. Chase of Booten who's had a enormous impact on people's quality of life because he's simply not prosecuting theft in the city. There's actually, it was a crazy tweet where a city council member was inside City Hall calling for a hearing on the rampant rise and theft in the city.

Starting point is 00:57:27 And meanwhile, his car was broken into right outside City Hall. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. And then the other thing that came out were a whole series of statistics about crime and San Francisco's showing, or sorry, trials and convictions. Basically, Chesa has not been conducting any trials. He hasn't been convicting anyone.

Starting point is 00:57:46 It turns out that the number of trials and convictions that he's gotten in the 14 months he's been DA is one tenth of what Gascon got when he was DA. By the way, Gascon's not the model DA or anything. Gascon is facing a recall in LA for their election of duty. He's still 10ize more productive than Chase the booting. Just a quick update. Many of you, when I mentioned the GoFundMe for, uh, to put

Starting point is 00:58:14 a journalist on Chesa, if you just type in GoFundMe Chesa, CHESA into the Google, uh, we had $8,000. Since last week, so we have $58,000. That's going to a journalist and a data journalist to cover this exact issue. So thanks to the folks who donated, I'm not taking any money from it. I'm donating, obviously. Other than a small, other than a small finder's fee. No, $0. I'm donating to it.

Starting point is 00:58:38 Well, they say that I'll be 1% of it, whatever they final number is. I think the Marina Times has done a great job with this. There have been a couple other sources as well. one percent of it, however, they final number is. I think the Marina Times has done a great job with this. Yeah. There have been a couple other sources as well, but how dishonest was it? I mean, this has been a recurring theme on the podcast. I just want to touch on it. Chesa sent his little mouthpiece, his little minion,

Starting point is 00:58:55 the high school friend, to go out and challenge us, writing that blog post, saying that it was a lie that Chesa wasn't prosecuting anybody. And lo and behold, the numbers have come out. He tried to claim that Chesa had the same rate of charging that Gascone did. And that was true, but the problem is he's been pleading down all these charges. He's not taking anyone to trial. He's not convicting anyone.

Starting point is 00:59:17 He's certainly not locking anybody up. So I mean, what, what a lie that was. Well, and criminals are just so savvy that they actually understand what the chances are of them actually getting convicted and they shape their grift and their crime to whatever the environment they're in is, just like people who deal drugs, just like people who take these hardcore fentanyl drugs, they just pick the market where they're going to be most welcome. So they're not going to do it down in Palo Alto or San Matei or Mill Valley.

Starting point is 00:59:46 They're going to do it on Turkish street. Yeah. So I think that's how it starts, but I got to tell you, you know, I'm in L.A. right now. And there was an episode like last week at El Pistaya, but like, oh, yes. And it's on Cannon Street and downtown Beverly Hills. A lot of Italian places. A lot of Italian places. It's a great Italian place. Beverly Hills. A lot of people. The number one Italian place. It's a great Italian place.

Starting point is 01:00:08 There's a lot of outdoor seating. There was basically a mugging of, it's almost a sitting at a table. Apparently they were wearing a really nice watch. They were robbed at gunpoint in the middle of the rest of the time. Lunchtime. Then there was a struggle over the gun. I don't know why the guy just didn't hand over the watch, but know, the middle of the rest side. Lunchtime, yeah. Lunchtime. And then there was a struggle over the gun. I don't know why the guy just didn't hand over the watch, but anyway, he struggled over the gun.

Starting point is 01:00:30 Four shots went off. One of them bounced off the concrete and hit a woman in the leg. Oh my God. So this is like, it's getting, I mean, it's getting out of hand. Sounds like Sam Paula, where they chop people's arms off or the watch. I mean, they literally will drive by, apparently,

Starting point is 01:00:43 and just cut your arm off if they can't, if you don't give them the watch. Well, I just, you know, the criminals are starting to feel emboldened because gascone and budine are not, they're not having trials, they're not prosecuting, they're not locking people up. And so they're graduating to more and more serious offenses. I'm sure they probably didn't wanna shoot anybody or maybe that wasn't their intention.

Starting point is 01:01:01 They just want to steal the watch but it resulted in a shooting. Just like the deaths of Hannah Abe and Elizabeth Platt when you had, you know, Troy McHalester, you know, hit them with the car. So, I mean, the fact that we're not locking people up is resulting in people dying and a lot of risky, very risky behavior. All right, as we wrap here, a lot of SPACs going out, we obviously saw another, I guess, Roblo wrap here a lot of spacks going out. We obviously saw another I guess Roblox was a direct listing I'm just curious only only underpriced by 50%

Starting point is 01:01:32 So safe same problem as the IPL Saying is Bill Gurley's on his headset walking around El Camino real out No, what I'm saying is what I'm saying is I'll come you know, yeah, I'll know what I'm saying is your respective of what the goals of the Direct listing were the result is the same as a traditional IPO. There you go. Well, I can I give a shout out to a company that David Sacks. Sure. Oh, pipe. Yes. Correct. Which is an incredible company that basically like helps you capitalize your contracts with your customers and it's just it's just Basically this incredible thing that I'm seeing and it's and there's a couple of others that do it as well Clear bank is another one, but you can fund your company non-delutively and at some point

Starting point is 01:02:18 I think we should actually talk about the state of the union adventure Maybe we can do that in the couple of next episodes I have a lot of thoughts on where I think venture capital is going. When I see things like pipe, I'm just completely so happy because I just think it's going to change the way in which venture investing is done. It's a very brilliant idea. You can go to pipe.com slash twist to get 12 months free. pipe.com is a two-sided marketplace. If you have reoccurring SaaS revenue or any kind of reoccurring revenue, somebody did it with the substack. So I think Pomp, Leon, the guy who pumps Bitcoin, he has a newsletter that makes whatever, $1,000,000 a year. He sold

Starting point is 01:03:00 for $0.95 on the dollar, forward-looking subscriptions for the year and bought Bitcoin with it when it was at 35. So he's like doubling down. But if you're a SaaS company and we have many of them in our portfolios, you could take all of your monthly contracts, sell them on the marketplace to somebody else. Not pipe. Pipe doesn't buy it. It's some other financial person who says, I'll give you a 94 cents on the dollar.

Starting point is 01:03:23 I'll give you a 92 cents on the dollar. I'll give you a 94 cents on the dollar, I'll give you a 92 cents on the dollar, I'll give you a 85 cents on the dollar. And so if you were, if you have a 10 million dollar book of business paying monthly, you can get that 10 million now and deploy it. But Jason, I think this is a good way to end, but I think let's agree that the next pod,

Starting point is 01:03:39 let's start with the future venture capital. 100%. I mean, it's changing dramatically. It's changing dramatically. And I think these non-deludive ways of growing a company will completely impact pricing, pre-money, post-money, the amount of equity that employees can and should own in these businesses. What is the value of brands?

Starting point is 01:03:59 People will know who David Saxx is, who Harry Hurst is. People that doesn't really don't even care anymore. Like, hey, if I'm calling from Sequoia, what does that mean anymore? They're going to say, who from Sequoia is called? So these are all really interesting topics that I think we're talking about. Another path is just the public markets. Public markets are becoming the new late-stage private market, and it's really both the SPAC and early-stage IPO and direct listing models are changing dramatically. There's more speculative risk seeking in the public markets in a way that I don't think we've ever seen. It's creating an opportunity for companies that are still in a traditional sense might be called early stage or still businesses with a lot of risk. Being able to go public and take their companies out and let the public markets wager on how well

Starting point is 01:04:51 they're going to execute and how well they're going to develop their product or their market. And by the way, it's something we've seen historically with Biotech where there's very binary bets that happen and binary outcomes because the markets are known and you don't need to productize and build a business around it. But now we're actually taking both business risk, market risk, technology risk, product risk to public markets. And all stages.

Starting point is 01:05:11 And I think you're gonna see these scenarios where people will build public portfolios, public company portfolios that will perform a lot like venture portfolios, right? You'll have one or two businesses, it'll have a 10-bagger and a chunk that'll go to zero and a chunk that'll have some modest return on them. And it's gonna be, yeah,

Starting point is 01:05:30 it's gonna be this tremendous learning experience because a lot of people will put all their money into one stock that they think has already been made. It's already done things. It's Netflix. It's Netflix. You know, their promise of the future is 100% certain. And the reality is their promise of the future

Starting point is 01:05:44 is 5% certain. And so depending on their promise of the future is 5% certain. And so depending on the price you're entering and how many of these things you buy, you could build a portfolio that could have a good return. But it's going to be a lot of speculative betting and a lot of losses. And if you don't diversify, you're going to lose a lot of money. And so the question is also how does it evolve regulatory wise? Jimout, how are you communicating that to the market? Because you'll have some specs that go out. I would think Virgin Galactic is in that more, like, there are deep tech researching

Starting point is 01:06:10 phase and then you have other ones that are already, you know, churning the, ringing the register, right? So how do you communicate that to retail investors or the audience or that's up to them to do the research? How do you think about that? I mean, there's, as well as the bad inventory that's getting at it. No, look, I do a tweet storm. I do a one-pager. I have a multi-hour detailed investor presentation that's taped. And then we have a typically a 100 to 300 page S4. So you

Starting point is 01:06:41 can ingress into finding out the true story of a business at whatever point you want It really just does come down to doing your work I mean a lot of the folks on Twitter, you know when you see the markets straight down and they complain my reaction is stop crying and do your own work and There isn't there like we have complete transparency in this process So it is up to people to do their job and the thing that I think is happening right now is people think that they don't have to do a job And that money is free And it's not it's hard to make it. It's hard to make good investments. It's hard to build a company Everything is hard. Nothing is really easy because if it was easy everybody would be doing it all the time

Starting point is 01:07:14 And so that's that's what I would love to leave people with I really got to go guys. I love you guys Let's start with venture capital next week. Yeah, love you boys. Free David's, love you, love you, David's. Back to you. Love you, David. Oh my god. Okay, love you guys. Love you, Jake Alps. All right, love you. I love you, Chimoff.

Starting point is 01:07:31 I do love you. I mean, we love each other and we can say it. And then the guys on this side, love you. They're working on it. Bye guys. Look at Jake Alps dragging it out. Stop dragging everything out. We're dragging it out because we love you, David.

Starting point is 01:07:43 We'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Red, red, pale, Scott, Stop dragging everything out. We're dragging it out because we love you, David. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Red-Pred-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pill's got me to the lit.

Starting point is 01:07:58 Red-Pill's got me to the lit. Red-Pred-Pill's got me to the lit. I've been on a bender on these red pills, but I've been on a bender on these red pills, but I've been on a bender on these red pills, but I've been on a bender on these red balls. I need you She for a boy, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a boy,

Starting point is 01:08:48 She for a girl, She for a boy, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a girl, She for a boy,

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Starting point is 01:09:04 She for a boy, She for a boy, She for a boy, week's end I've been on a banderox, Red pills fly Stalk slow up and play the phone Back back back back up the truck I see chips I stack them up Back back back up the truck You see me, you see me now And if you stick me on the mud And if you step up all the truck

Starting point is 01:09:19 Red pill, blue pill, purge, you know Red pill, oh it's good God needs my amy Keep her boy, keep her dear, keep her low I'm ready to go! They've been on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f**k, you're on a f

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E25: Biden's vaccine mandate, "equity" in distribution, NFT speculation, impact of inflation & more

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