All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E46: False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more | LIVE from TPB Symposium!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Jake, how looks like he's going to a night at the rock spirit Absolutely What are you talking about? He looks like Joe Here we go He looks like Joe Joe is like a fuck out of Joe Well, I got my joke

Starting point is 00:00:09 Sorry, my life's good I mean, you look horrible Thank you That's really fucking horrible Okay, appreciate it Is that your answer? That's the rap photo Here we go What? What? What your winner's ride. Bring man David's side.

Starting point is 00:00:27 And it said we open source it to the fans and it's going to be easy. WS Ice Queen of King Wild. Thanks for coming. This is the production board symposium 2021. Tell us just a little bit about why we're here, David, and what this is, and what it represents for the production board. The production board's symposium. Second ever, thank you all for being here.

Starting point is 00:00:52 We're excited. We have an amazing group of scientists, engineers, folks from academia, from business, from the investing community, some of our investors are so we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple of days. And thought we would chase half of you away by hosting the All-In Pod tonight. So here we go. Great.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Okay, so first up in the news, Rolling Stone amplifies false, Iver Mectin story you were following this, Chimop, what do you think? This Ivermectin story, you were following this, Chimop. What do you think? This Ivermectin controversy. And you want a little give a little summary of what the issue is before we talk about the hypocrisy of it. Well, on September 1st, Oklahoma News station K4, ran a story and published an article on Ivermectin overdoses. Backing up rural hospitals hospitals the article was titled

Starting point is 00:01:46 patients overdosing on Ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospital hospitals and ambulances. First line of the article quote a rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the home dewormer medication Ivermectin to fight COVID-19 causing emergency rooms and ambulance to back up on September 3rd, Rolling Stone, amplified the story of its own article. The only problem was they treated it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold.

Starting point is 00:02:20 It turns out the picture was people waiting for vaccine shots back in January, not gunshot victims waiting to get into the hospital. Yeah, the story is totally false. You understand that right? Well, I didn't want to say fake news, but I know it was beyond it was beyond fake news. This was basically a doctorate up conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. Look, you tell me if the science of this is wrong. The whole premise is ridiculous. So Ivermectin basically, as far as we know, because we don't know that much, acts on a handful of specific characteristics.

Starting point is 00:02:58 One, we know to be glutamate, which we don't really express in the same way as like fucking worms. And so, yes, technically, it can be used as a dewormer, but there are four or five other ways in which it acts, which we don't know anything about because we haven't taken the time to do a broad-based double-blind study. So I think the fairest thing to say about Iverbectin is we don't know what it is. And so neither the people that propose to use it as a solution for COVID, nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from a basis of fact. But then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea

Starting point is 00:03:32 that people aren't getting vaccines, they're going to use this other thing. They basically doctor it up an article. That wouldn't be so bad because nobody reads Rolling Stone. It's kind of a... It's kind of... It's an ancient brand, there was going there for medical news.

Starting point is 00:03:47 But then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really, really smart, who amplify it, Rachel Maddo amplifies it, Jimmy Kimmel does it on a comedy skit, and then all of a sudden there's this enormous outrage, but the problem is you can't put the genie back in the bottle when it turns out to be a completely fabricated lie. And then all the people that are purporting to basically push this lie, who now have been

Starting point is 00:04:07 outed, have no consequences because they're on the left screaming at the right. And what happened when it was the other way around, we basically started to put people in boxes, we basically kicked them off these platforms. And again, so you have this compounding building double standard. That to me is the whole whole the worst part about it David when we look at The iVermectin story we also saw Joe Rogan got coven that was a big ha ha moment for a lot of people And he took iVermectin as part of his treatment and then people started amplifying that he was taking a worm

Starting point is 00:04:40 drug for horses d warmer d warmer and it's at best in antimicrobial. Right, we got that. He's used for both situations and a doctor prescribed it to him. He's thinking of suing some folks for treating this. What does this overall say about the state of communications around this pandemic? Yeah, I mean, look, this is really a media story. You had Rolling Stone publish this article based on a single source. You have this one crank basically saying that emergency rooms are turning away gunshot victims

Starting point is 00:05:09 of people having heart attacks. And all they had to do, all Rolling Stone had to do was call up any one of these several hospitals. They immediately would have refuted the source, but they didn't do that. They also could have simply Googled the number of toxic Ivermectin cases to find out if it was even plausible, statistically, that you could have Ivermectin overdose as flooding Oklahoma hospitals, but they didn't do that either.

Starting point is 00:05:32 Why didn't they confirm the sources? Because the article was too perfect. It confirmed all of their priors. Their first prior was about Ivermectin. They've been waging this war on Ivermectin, claiming it's a horse dewormer when it's actually, that is one of its purposes, but it's not the only one.

Starting point is 00:05:50 It was a drug designed for humans as used against parasites. Now, as Jamassah, we don't know whether it's effective against COVID. They gotta do the double-blind studies and then we'll find out. But that was sort of their first prior. And let's face it, the second prior was that this is

Starting point is 00:06:06 an Oklahoma, right? And so Rolling Stone wants to believe you of all these Magga idiots out in Oklahoma eating horse paste, okay? And that's why they love this story so much. And that's why Rachel Maddow loved this story so much. And she then starts spreading it, okay? And after she gets called out,

Starting point is 00:06:22 including my say Glenn Greenwald, as of last night she had not taken it down. She didn't take it now why because she knows there are no consequences for misinformation and lying. Why? Because Twitter and Facebook do not punish people on the left for misinformation. That is sub penalty. They only meet her out for people who disagree with their cultural and political biases. She's not a secret cabal that gets the get out of jail free card. I don't I don't even think in secret. I just think these people all are part of the same cultural sort of meal you. They all have the same political and cultural biases. And there is never

Starting point is 00:06:55 look where is the Twitter warning the Twitter label on the Rachel Maddell post even now saying that this tweet this, is misinformation. It doesn't exist because it's inconvenient. Freeberg, let's talk about the science of our new different sectors. I think I would paint $40 for all-in podcast life. It's dynamic. It's the good words. Yeah, by the way, you're on the show.

Starting point is 00:07:16 So, yeah, me or two. Tell me the last time we heard a new story that didn't have bias to it. What was the last general thing that was reported that we didn't feel had the angle that then elicited emotion either love or hate or alignment or not? You can have that reaction. You don't have that. The only deal that was in the Wall Street Journal just now about like the Democrats' proposal on taxes. I have an emotional reaction to it, but it's fact-based. I've got 100. Is it really? Was it?

Starting point is 00:07:46 My reaction? Or the story? Yeah, they just said that the house proposal now is to move the cap gains rate from 20 to 25, the corporate tax rate from whatever it was to 26 and a half. But my point is, there are articles written by folks who just want to get the facts across and let you judge Whether it's good or bad who knows time will tell then there are folks that basically Manufacture shit because again, I think and I think is Matt Taibi that said this because it creates moral mania Yeah, drive drives an air to drive the emotion But it's the last grasp of power of journalism

Starting point is 00:08:23 That's all they have left at this point. It's just to basically make it a complete fucking free for all. And in it, they still have some kind of relevancy. I have these old New York Times newspapers, like the whole year printed from like 1936 through 1944. It's cool, it's like in this huge book. And, you know, we'll... But you must have been out all the time, but you didn't have time to read those.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Yeah, I mean, but you flip through these things. They're like, they are just like old, like, ticker stories. But you must have been out all the time, but you didn't have time to read those. Yeah, I mean, but you flip through these things. They're like, they are just like old, like, ticker stories, you know? It had absolutely no like narrative attached to it. There was no like, these are the people, almost the implicit right and wrong, right? The implicit morality of every decision that's being made

Starting point is 00:09:00 of everything that's being reported on. I'm feeling a link that's gonna be left in like 10 years as the economist and then like the mob rule in the metaverse. And that's kind of like the thing. Well, you also have podcasts where people can discuss these things and maybe a more honest trend. There's a few great podcasts like that. Mr. Antifacebook, what do you think about this Wall Street Journal article?

Starting point is 00:09:19 It says that there's a secret cabal that basically gets to get out of jail free card on Facebook and nobody else does. There's millions of people though, it's that, right? Yeah. That's a secret cabal that basically gets to get out of jail free card on Facebook. And nobody else does. There's millions of people though, it's that, right? Yeah, that's a lot. You work there. It's exactly the point I've been making, right? Which is that there's two sets of rules. If you are part of the in crowd, if you share the cultural biases, if you're part of

Starting point is 00:09:39 the same class, whether it's socioeconomic or political or whatever, that of the people who are doing the content moderation, doing the censorship, you get out jail free card. The rules are different for you. You can be Rachel Maddow and post an article that's complete bullshit, and even after the entire Twitter sphere calls you out, you don't post a correction, but you don't get labeled, you don't get censored. But if you're on a different part of the political spectrum, you do. I mean, there's two sets of rules.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Yeah, I mean, I think it's insane. I mean, this is exactly what I think people have been saying for a long time when people say, oh, you know, it's algorithmic. It's not really human-controlled. There's no real intervention. And then you find out there's actually literally something called cross-check, which its definition is check the algorithm and override it with my own bias. That's the definition of what the feature is. Well, I mean, whenever we start down this censorship route, like who gets to decide and then what is their motivation? And even if they have pure motivation,

Starting point is 00:10:37 there's no way to not- But it seems the platforms die. It seems everything de-platforms and decentralizes. And then like all media is through sub-stack or through the call-in app or through other kind of media. Well, decentralized crypto-based- Exactly. And so there's no longer a platform,

Starting point is 00:10:54 there's no longer a sensor model. What's gonna end up happening? People are gonna click on the stuff that they wanna hear, confirmation bias, it's gonna become more extreme, it's gonna become even more heated. There gonna become, you know, even more heated, there's gonna be splintering of media creation as there is right now that we see today, right? Every element of the spectrum will be kind of produced,

Starting point is 00:11:11 and you're gonna end up clicking on the stuff that creates the greatest emotional response. Because that people like to consume. How does a citizen who wants to inoculate themselves from fake news bias, how do you recommend they go after science? And how do they, they have to learn the stuff for themselves? They have to try to become an expert themselves.

Starting point is 00:11:27 It's hard, like anything that's hard, right? I mean, there's gotta be a will. I don't think that that's really, it's not to be discouraging. I just think that it's a lot easier to not do that. Right, it's a lot easier to consume ice cream all the time. It's a lot more fun to consume ice cream all the time and to kind of plan your diet, eat healthy

Starting point is 00:11:44 and work out and all this sort of stuff. And I think that's really where media like a lot of things is headed as we create these kind of feedback loops that are all because everything's digital, everything ends up becoming a feedback. I bet you, I bet you. If you look inside, because like now some rabid politician will get a hold of this Facebook cross-check thing. I bet you. If you look and graph, the number of people that were essentially whitelisted from being able to say whatever the hell they want versus what was popular on Facebook, you'd see a left versus right distribution

Starting point is 00:12:14 very clearly. You'd basically see, because if you look at it now, I think there's a, I can't remember his name, but he's a former New York Times reporter that tweets out every day, the top 10 links that are shared on Facebook. And it's like a fucking train wreck. It's like one normal article and then it's like nine like right when it's been a

Starting point is 00:12:35 sister trailer wire. It's a train wreck every day. And so if you're, you know, a hipster sitting in East Menlopark, you know, at some point like the cuff senior jeans are rolled up too tight, the fucking shirt, cuff are rolled Menlo Park, you know, at some point like the cuff senior jeans are rolled up too tight, the fucking shirt cuffs are rolled up too tight, you know, and you're just freaking out. And then you're like, we need to create something. What do we call it? And they're like cross-check, you know, and then all of a sudden what happens is you just start introducing people, hoping that then the list that gets published every day on Twitter changes. But then what happens actually is you find the exact opposite thing happens.

Starting point is 00:13:08 That people are so like they sniff out the bullshit. They're like, what is going on here? But then they double down. And the next thing, you know, Ben Shapiro's nine, you know, eight of the ten top stories every day on Facebook. And that's how you have Dollar Trump and everything else. Next topic. Well, go ahead.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Well, I was going to, I mean, I don't want to believe it. I think both sides are capable of, both sides of the political spectrum are capable of spreading misinformation and bullshit. And you have to vary your information diet, right? I mean, if all you do is participate in, you know, the right wing or left wing echo chamber, you're going to buy into the Ivermecton hoax. You're going to be story here from Rolling Stone or whatever it is. So you have to make an effort to, again, to vary your information diet. For the lab leak mean, The lab leak theory exactly,

Starting point is 00:14:05 but what I'm talking about? We now have five of these during the pandemic alone, right? Right, but see what I object to is the fact that the censorship rules only seem to apply to one side of the spectrum. Is look, both sides are capable of spreading this information, but only one side is being censored why? Because the people running these powerful tech companies

Starting point is 00:14:24 agree they're like, you know, 90 plus percent of that political persuasion. That is not healthy. Can we serve the audience and see if they agree? Great raise your hand if you agree with that. How many people agree with SACs that Trump should be reinstated on all platforms? There you go.

Starting point is 00:14:40 How many people agree that the tech platforms have a political bias? How many disagree have people agree that the tech platforms have a political bias? How many disagree with that statement? No one is saying. Bill Doys, Bill Doys, Bill Doys, Bill Doys, call that a call pass wipe as the chief business officer Facebook. Thanks for the viewers. Tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, tell us, Do we have the audience on? Yeah, no, no, no, it was 90% every one. Everyone, yeah, everyone except for Phil Doherty. Well, these are Silicon best described as Silicon Valley tomorrow. So that's why he has to race his head. No, but to be clear for people listening

Starting point is 00:15:18 feels why for a hundred percent of it. He's got to say no. It's okay. It's okay. 99. But everybody else here agreed with that. And these are all people who are in the liberal. They know. They know. So how many of us are Democrats? I mean, we're all mostly Democrats, I would guess. How many people voted Democrats?

Starting point is 00:15:36 How many are not Democrats? How many people voted for Trump? Raise your hand. Nice and high. No, nobody's there. Nobody. No, literally, that's a very interesting here. Here's a question I have. Okay, so we are, we are firmly going down because I think

Starting point is 00:15:50 it's pretty, it's pretty clear to me, I'd be willing to make the bet that the media is on the side of vaccine mandates. Okay, they want the top down control and the sense of theoretical safety that a vaccine mandate gives them in their own little bubble. And so that's why I think they support this. And I think blowing up Iver Mechden was kind of a method of many that they've undertaken to do that. Whether we believe in vaccine mandates or not, but now it's coming. It's coming in the LA school district. It's Biden is trying to push this thing through the BLS.

Starting point is 00:16:23 This is going to be a very, very big deal. What do you guys think is the right thing to do on vaccine mandates? Irrespective of all we're going to hear over the next government or private employer mandates or both. Well, we should let's walk through it. I'm using both for the government, government employees to start with that. Yeah. Well, the government mandate, no, it goes through the BLS. It says any company, public or private, that is 100 employees or more. Well, I mean, I think we all agree that people in the military or people in healthcare, they should all be vaccinated or they shouldn't come to work, correct? Well, that's not, but that's also not, not even enforceable.

Starting point is 00:17:02 Like, Sorkin, Andrew Rossorkin tweeted out like he had to take his kid to the urgent care and He walked in and the doctors weren't wearing masks or something Yeah, I read that and since something about like not being vaccinated doesn't matter or blah blah blah And he like well that goes to enforcement, but I mean moral Libera military has said you have to I thought wait you brought your kid to the fucking urgent care Don't you first eat and hold it's wrong with the kid you can't prosecute this person's opinion on masks and vaccines before you figure out what's wrong with your kid. Well, what do you think, Saks?

Starting point is 00:17:32 Military, military health care teachers. I think the crux of the issue is whether employers should be able to require that. Well, there's two issues. One is whether employers should be allowed to require it, which I think everybody agree, not everyone, but most people I think agree that private employers, and you could lump the government in with this, should be allowed to test their employees or require their employees to be vaccinated if they want to.

Starting point is 00:17:58 And, or at least I would support that part of it, is let private enterprises require vaccination, if they want, if they decide, hey, in order to come back to the office, you gotta be vaccinated, so everyone's safety, they can impose those rules. Now, the question is, do we need to go beyond that to have a federal mandate?

Starting point is 00:18:16 And it's not that I'm anti-vaccine, I just think that's like an awfully authoritarian thing to do, and it raises a bunch of questions. So for example, I have a friend who owns a chain of dry cleaners. Okay, he's got over a hundred employees, mostly minimum wage and a bunch of different locations. About 20% of his employees- What is his ethnicity? What does that have to do with anything? Just curious. He's Sri Lankan. Anyway, so- He's the third most famous Sri Lankan American. Yes.

Starting point is 00:18:49 So he's got 100 employees, about 20% of the Mer anti-vax, and they will not get vaccinated, okay? So they will walk out if this is required to do it on their own or get that job. Hold on, but he can't run his business if there's a 20% walk out. He just can't do it. Okay. So now we get to the soft part of the mandate, which is, well, instead of requiring the Vax, he can do a weekly test. Well, we did that outside here.

Starting point is 00:19:14 Who's going to pay for those tests? Who's going to administer them? Is it like, you know, they had a nurse out here with the full, you know, you know, hazmat thing. Yeah, the hazmat thing. So, you know, that's not cheap. So, who's gonna pay for that? Who's gonna do that?

Starting point is 00:19:28 What's the documentation around that gonna be? Is it get logged into the computer system? What kind of proof is it? Does it require a trip to the lab or is this something we can do in five minutes? I mean, look, if we had done what Freiburg said a year ago on this pod we should do, which is have these $1.5 minute tests be available

Starting point is 00:19:45 everywhere, then maybe that sort of rapid test out would make these mandates more palatable, but we don't have that yet. You're the aren't enough of these things. And it turns out we still need it even with the vaccines, because no vaccine is going to be 100% effective. And with... Right, but my point is, since we don't really have that solution operationalized, having a hard, Vax mandate on 100 million employees of private enterprises.

Starting point is 00:20:11 That's gonna cause, I think, chaos in the economy. What if we get a variant, David, or I mean, I give a small, if we get a variant, God forbid, that is more dangerous than Delta. Let's say it spreads just as fast, but it's five times as deadly. Is that change you're thinking about this mandate? And where do you stand on the mandate? No, I think the mandate in this very specific narrow instance makes sense. And I think

Starting point is 00:20:32 what we should be fighting about is how we actually write it so that it's not wholly expansive. And the reason is because we know that there is a probabilistic distribution of outcomes where a non-trivial percentage of them results in a variant that is deadly and So we can understand the math and we can understand a sense of time to figure out that if we don't do something And if we don't get to some amount of control around what this is Ruin we're all in really big trouble. So because of that specific thing, I just think this is where, you know, look, the president has the ability to invoke the War Measures Act to do all kinds of things that are super normal. And, you know, we would never say that those abide in normal times,

Starting point is 00:21:18 and we've created a framework for him to be able to do those things in non-normal times and then revert to normal. I think this is one of those cases just because I don't think the economic consequences and the social consequences. If we let this thing continue to compound and continue to mutate, it doesn't make any fucking sense. We're not learning anything. We could have used the Warman-Mandad Act across two presidencies to demand some companies make a dollar test. Yeah, we have 75 80 tests approved in Germany. They're down to two with three dollars. Why has the FDA not gotten us to that level that Germany's at? And why have we done the War Mandate Act? I mean, we have like a constructed capitalist model of like let the free market tell the government what

Starting point is 00:22:04 is the right thing to do. And so then they invite Abbott and they invite the guys in and they're like, you know, the White House, they have a consortium meeting and everyone's kind of a little bit chuckling about this. Like, oh, this is awesome. It's another $2 billion payday, which is what they just got. I don't know if you saw the the right up today. The federal government is paying Walmart for the difference between the wholesale cost and the retail cost so that consumers can now go buy Abbott's at the wholesale price at the store. $2 billion taxpayer money gone.

Starting point is 00:22:35 When we could have had a bunch of smart scientists get together at the White House with a bunch of engineers take over a friggin' factory, and on a piece of paper, print 8 billion fucking tests, and then chop them up and distribute them for 50 cents. And instead we have this problem where we're like, depending on the Korean supply, I kid you not, of the test kits that are like plastic, that's where they make all the like pregnancy test kits and all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:01 And this like, the commercial model is like, tell us how you wanna make these tests, tell us what the commercial model is like, tell us how you want to make these tests, tell us what the right model is. And of course, you end up with a $30 test when in Germany, you can go by a 50 cent test at any liquor store. And so it's constructed a straight up corruption. And if you go back, like, you know, I don't know if you know the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The production boards named after the war production board, which was set up during World War II. Two. What's that?

Starting point is 00:23:28 It's a pretty humble. Yeah. Took the war out. But the idea was like, how do you take a system level design approach to solving kind of big problems? And one of the issues that we had during World War II was a supply chain problem on making tanks and planes. And so they put together a bunch of smart people, don't you know, is this better than anyone? Because he was alive back there. He was alive. And he

Starting point is 00:23:54 was, you can look at the old photos he was there, sitting in the front of guys. We'll see if we can see him. You have the hammer on you before he dies. He made it in the factory floor. Old as fuck. And there was basically a concord coordinated effort. It's a thing. By the way, sorry, the kind of happy birthday. Happy birthday. But there was a coordinated effort by engineers at the top down to design a system for making these things cheap and fast. And that's an approach that I think we lost, right? Like we kind of gave way to this model of, yeah, Lise, Fair, like you come in, you tell me what you think we should do. Okay, that's a good idea. Let's take photos and we're out and that's it. We don't have a wartime mentality right now. We haven't had a wartime mentality since COVID hit. Everyone's continued to

Starting point is 00:24:33 try and parade around and get reelected and earn votes and say anything. We're not taking this. We're not acting, every time a business or a government or any organization goes through a phase, it goes through a wartime phase or a peacetime phase, we should be acting like we're an wartime phase and we're not. Can I ask you a question? If three or four of us basically pollinated up some money, could you go and print eight billion of these fucking tests? In the US, you cannot get them approved without the FDA. I'm not asking for approval.

Starting point is 00:25:00 I'm saying could you do it? 100% and how long will it take? You could buy some old friggin' paper mill and in three months, you know, this is this actually people in this room who can do this in now isn't there a framework within FDA that basically allows you to effectively experiment on yourself? There's a compassion. There's a it's for drugs. It's for therapeutics not for diagnostics. So you're saying that if I want you can't build my own test and use it If you want to build a if you want to build a diagnostic test that tells them on whether or not they have a Analysts you have to get FDA approval in the United States. So

Starting point is 00:25:33 That's also to publish the four-year-old. It's a pretty statement is regulatory capture like is one of the biggest issues Yeah, and in related news By the way another insane statistic. Just sorry to interrupt. I saw this today. I forgot, someone we know tweeted this, the, who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the US healthcare system? 300 to one. Yeah, I saw a 300 to one in. 900 to one today.

Starting point is 00:25:58 Oh my God. And that is up from five to one in 1970. By the way, you think about that. Can I just build on what you said? 900 to one. Your initial tweet said 300 to one in 1970. By the way, can I just build on what you said? 900 to one. Your initial tweet said 300 to one, and it ended in 2010 right before Obamacare passed. So from 300 to 900 was all Obamacare. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:13 Regular Tory catcher. So X is shaking his ass. Which by the way, nothing against Obamacare because I think like coming as a Canadian, I actually believe in subsidized healthcare. And I think the principle of Obamacare was great, but there was one fatal flaw, which is basically said, okay, you know what, you're capped at the following margin. And the minute that people said, wait a minute, I can only have a 20% gross margin,

Starting point is 00:26:33 what do you do? You just jack up the prices to basically jack up revenue. Because if you can only take 20%, you're gonna take 20% of a bigger number than a smaller number. And so it completely burned the incentives for any healthcare company in the United States to do anything other than just basically walk prices up. And it's funny because if you look at the stock prices of these companies, you would have

Starting point is 00:26:54 made more money being long United healthcare than you would have been owning Facebook, Google, any of these other tech companies in the last decade. Crazy stat. Speaking of regulatory capture, Tesla got left out of this new tax credit or proposed tax credit. For electric cars, I don't know if you saw that, but Tesla wasn't invited a couple of months ago to Biden's EV summit. Elon responded like, I wonder why I wasn't invited.

Starting point is 00:27:19 It turns out it's because they're not a union shop. Their employees make much more money than union employees make. And now as a punishment, but hold on, as a punishment, the $12,000 credit that they're giving to, or they're proposing to give to all V-manufacturers is only if you have union employees, it's $4,500 less to Tesla. So literally two massive regulatory captures and corruption go, or maybe SACs. You know, I mean, I don't have much more to add to that. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is to serve the unions, it's not to serve clean energy or the EV industry. I mean, a little bit for you, but it's mostly for the unions.

Starting point is 00:28:01 The, um, on the one hand, what we do is we say that climate change is this existential issue. But then when the rubber meets the road, if you look inside the infrastructure plan today, we unveiled basically how we're going to do all the tax credits. And again, it's just an enormous amount of just sloppy regulatory capture. We're doubling and tripling credits in certain places, we're disallowing credits in other places. When you follow the dollars, what happens is you can map it to companies. Those companies tend to be mostly public, large balance sheets, large lobbying efforts. And it's not necessarily the most important companies that matter. So

Starting point is 00:28:40 if you know, if I said to you, what are the most important companies in climate change, you'd probably say, well, maybe it's direct air capture, maybe it's nuclear, maybe it's some other thing that basically helps you go to a different place. And where does all the tax credits and tax dollars go? Sun run, sun power. These are companies that basically, you know, have this all agopalistic hold, stranglehold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes across the United States.

Starting point is 00:29:06 It's not to say that that job isn't important, but to basically explicitly block other people out, because all the chatter today on, you know, or some of the chatter today was around just if this bill passes as written, you're going to see these stocks rip. And so obviously, the positive reinforcement loop of Wall Street and hedge funds getting behind these companies, their market cap goes up, the amount they allocate to lobbyists go up, and then all this bullshit just continues to cycle through the system.

Starting point is 00:29:34 Freiburg, how far are we away from small nuclear reactors and fusion just from a science perspective and then on a regulatory basis? I don't know enough. I mean, yeah. I mean, from what I've seen, there are great technologies that we should be able to kind of realize, my understanding in speaking to investors

Starting point is 00:29:53 some in this room, and I know Chimapfuk that this area a lot, is there's the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear. Technically, it seems like there's great breakthroughs. There was an announcement from a group this past week, CFS, on a new superconducting magnet system that they spent years designing. This is a Bill Gates backed company. Anyone here an investor?

Starting point is 00:30:19 No. No. Oh, no. Basically, it enables the Tokmack plasma fusion-based systems to be reliably produced now. And so they've had a proof of demonstration of this superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma, which is like 10 million degrees Celsius, in a little donut that spins around.

Starting point is 00:30:43 And that plasma allows you to pull energy out that can be used for effectively you put a bunch of material in, this thing runs, and more energy comes out than you put in, it's magic. And so this has been a theoretical kind of concept for decades. Getting the superconducting magnet system to control the plasma in a very small space, using a very small kind of system was proven and now they think that they're, you know, call it four or five years away. You know, by the way, everything in nuclear is always four or five years away.

Starting point is 00:31:10 So four or five years away with a grain of salt from kind of having a demonstrable kind of system. So there's technologies that are clearly like on the brink or proceeding nicely, but as we know, a lot of a lot of these sorts of technology similarly are kind of regulatory burdened. We're about a hundred degrees away, I think, from a operational functional room temperature but as we know, a lot of these sorts of technology similarly are kind of regulatory bargains. We're about 100 degrees away, I think, from an operational functional room temperature semiconductor. Superconductor, sorry. I've told a team that I'm working with on this project, I don't want to go into energy generation, or unless we can do it in a small form

Starting point is 00:31:41 manufacturing thing that can be adopted broadly. But if you try to go and basically build some distributed energy resource out over here that powers Kavala point, it's impossible because you run into these people who don't really understand the science, won't take the time. And we've taken so many steps backwards from nuclear that it's probably just going to take decades and it's going to take some cataclysmic climate change event where the only way out is the super abundant energy source where you're willing to basically say, ah, fuck it, we're fucked otherwise.

Starting point is 00:32:13 By the way, if you were to go to Mars today, you wouldn't be pulling a bunch of fucking, you know, oil out of the ground and burning it and, you know, rotating a... You should, I mean, and you wouldn't necessarily, I mean, you'd be using, you know, solar at the beginning, but you wouldn't necessarily I mean you'd be using you know solar at the beginning but you wouldn't necessarily rely on solar the you know the cost of material to transport from here to Mars to yield the best energy potential would likely be some

Starting point is 00:32:34 sort of nuclear power so it's right as it is in a lot of military so. That's your question, Saks. Elon was saved by Obama. I mean, just kind of like having, we were there, even meaning like, you know, it was in that moment, he was able to get that deal with Daimler. He was able to get these, you know, tax credits, the, the auto bailout, you know, all of that stuff. But then it seems like we're in the middle of a Democrat administration and they may go out of their way to basically try to fuck this guy. I just think it's like become a special interest free for all. There was an article today that the national deficit

Starting point is 00:33:08 year to date is 2.7 trillion. And I think that we're on an October 1st fiscal year, so there's one more month, so it'll be about 3 trillion. Last year was over 3 trillion because of COVID. They haven't gotten to the infrastructure bill yet. That's going to be another 1.2 trillion. On top of that, the Democrats are saying they want another three and a half well not all democrats but think of for Joe mansion but another three and a half trillion and you know most people can't even really say what's

Starting point is 00:33:34 in that three and a half trillion dollar bill i mean it's we're at twenty eight trillion something like that of national debt i mean and it's all just like special interest plunder well i mean if you look at the results, the results aren't there, correct? Yeah, and then on top of that, well, you know, I understand, I mean, with respect to Obamacare, okay, that's a major item on, let's call it the Democrat wish list

Starting point is 00:33:56 was to give everyone healthcare and we didn't even get there, okay? But you can sort of understand that. But most people, I think, even on the left, can't really say what the big ticket item is, that's going to be delivered for this three and a half trillion that is proposing to be spent. So, I mean, it's just become this like, you know, special interest freefall. Freeberg, we talked about not having a wartime stance with the pandemic. We don't have a wartime stance with global warming or extreme

Starting point is 00:34:25 weather, whichever term you want, should we? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're burning money at a no-look. I mean, I can't say that. What's going on right now, and actually a lot of what we're going to talk about, this symposium over the next day or so, is that there is effectively now a raging free market appetite for these solutions. The capital is pouring in. The entrepreneurship is blossoming, ballooning. The technology is advancing. To some degree, folks might say, this is going to get solved, but there are major infrastructure

Starting point is 00:35:02 solutions that are needed for us to accelerate the outcome and win the war. And those infrastructure solutions aren't going to get funded by Softbank, and they're not going to get funded by Chimoff. They're going to need to get funded by a type of dollars. I mean, keep building your book like you will fund them in the next decade. But SACs, you know, kind of speaks to the kind of numbers that I think are necessary here. I mean, you think about how much money we spent on COVID without any results over the last year. It really begs the question, if we were kind of to take an ROI-based approach to where are we spending these dollars, this would probably be the first on the list.

Starting point is 00:35:38 And by the way, the private market and jobs will benefit. And what happened in this bill, this infrastructure bill was past this past year that's now been more kind of definitively drafted, is a bunch of infrastructure jobs that are basically giveaways. They're not actually solving problems with climate change. They're not pushing technology forward. They're not creating these alternatives that we're talking about. They create 10x and 100x outcomes.

Starting point is 00:36:03 They are yes to your solutions. And they're not going to move the needle enough. And so, you know, look, I do think like it's unfortunate, but the climate change or production board is needed to kind of get the kind of dollars motivated that are needed to create the kind of infrastructure to solve these problems, despite the free market appetite. The free market appetite, by the way, fuels the outcomes, but it still needs it needs something behind it. Shemoth, is it possible, just as we're having this discussion here, we're looking at an incompetent corrupt government that is filled with grifters who are bought and sold. And then on the other side, in causing massive problems, that's a mouthful. I wouldn't say that people I disagree that people are corrupt and grifters. I do think that there's a lot of good motivations. I just think that this is a government. Yeah. Look, there may be corruption, but I don't think that that's the universal truth.

Starting point is 00:36:54 Right? People are generally, you know, we've all met, well, they corrupt, right? We've all met people. Which one is it? It's a point of perspective, right? And there's a... What's your perspective? My perspective is that they're all being told by their constituents what they want and then they're doing it or by lobbyists or by lobbyists But I suppose to listen to a lot at the end of the day the way that the the system is set up is people get reelected By doing what they're the people that are gonna vote and put the dollars and put the votes out for them are asking them to do and That's the way that this has kind of resolved itself So and by the way when when the war's happened,

Starting point is 00:37:28 you know, when, I guess, when a war happened in the 20th century, that wasn't the driving force. The driving force was existential, and it was we have to win the war. And that's the, that really needs to be the mindset we all need to adopt today, which is an existential mindset. We need to win the war,

Starting point is 00:37:44 and it can't be about what my constituents are telling me what the lobbyists are telling you. So despite this either incompetence, graft, or if you're more charitable, it's a complex problem to solve, despite all of that, we have massive entrepreneurship in the country, we have massive capital allocation at an extreme violent rate. In fact, a lot of that money is coming from all this money being pumped into the system. So in a way, do you think the only solution we have, Jamoth, is entrepreneurs in startups who are getting large amounts of money to solve these problems? Because it's not going to happen by government, obviously. We have a ton of great entrepreneurs, and I think that we're doing things.

Starting point is 00:38:23 We're doing, okay, so this is, if you look at the internet, in the 20 years that we're doing things. We're doing, okay, so this is, if you look at the internet, in the 20 years that we've been grinding in the internet, we've had an incredible tailwind that helped us, which is all these people, much like the folks in this room, but in different companies 10 or 20 years earlier than you are now, abstracting parts of the stack so that the rest of us could use it. Right? And so, you know, I remember 2006 we were racking and stacking servers at Facebook in Santa Clara,

Starting point is 00:38:52 me, Adam, DeAngelo, like, and I was like, what the fuck are we doing? And I remember in 2008, when Adam DeAngelo, he was our CTO at the time left, he started a company called Cora. DeAngelo was like, I'm building on. And I thought he was a fucking idiot. I thought, who builds on AWS? You build your own data centers. Now, if you said that to somebody, you would be the idiot. Right? So if it's the tooling and the tool chains

Starting point is 00:39:15 that we've been able to build on top of all of that abstraction and simplification has allowed an order or frankly, probably even maybe two orders of magnitude of entrepreneurship to come. That's also now happening in biotech. So all of that is an incredible progress. The problem now is we used to be a part of the economy that was an afterthought. We were over here.

Starting point is 00:39:39 Politicians didn't need to understand. They didn't need to take the time. Their first reaction is denial because it basically pushes up against power and that really freaks them out. But now we're at a point where we are so integral, they need to understand it better. Here's a perfect example. Last week, Illuminous Patents expired. So if you're in the business of healthcare and if you're in the business of like, you know, CRISPR gene therapy, any of the stuff that actually a lot of you guys are involved in, you would love for the fact that, you know, next-gen sequencing could have a thousand flowers bloom, 90 different methods. The cost of a sequence goes down to

Starting point is 00:40:22 a penny. It's not possible today because you have to go through one methodology. You have one company to work through. You have one set of reagents or a set of reagents at one company sells. And it's basically cordoned off. That can't change because of technology because they can then sue you, go to courts and they win. And so this is where you have to interface with the government and they just need to get smarter Because otherwise there's only so much innovation we can do before They're historical legacy things like patents and IP come and bite you in the ass

Starting point is 00:40:59 Sex what do you think is entrepreneurship alone in capital allocation by aggressive? You know, Votful and bold capital allocators enough to solve the incompetence in Washington or the graph to... Well, it's gonna have to be. And I mean, here's the good news bad news. Okay, I had to tweet that kind of viral. So when Afghanistan happened, you know, we spent $2 trillion, $2,500 American casualties, 40,000 wounded, and what have we gotten out of it?

Starting point is 00:41:24 The Chinese are about to take up residence in Pogrom in our splendid Air Force Base and the Taliban are one of the best equipped armies in the world. That's basically what our $2 trillion got us. And China is going to build a super highway. By the way, do you see the thing where like the Taliban were flying around in our helicopter? No, it was fake apparently. They're I have more black hocks now. I have rage that apparently the helicopters that were left behind are non-functional. So let's just clear that up. That's on true. Yeah, they more black hocks and any other army in the world except for us. I mean, haven't you seen all the photos of them? They're all down our uniforms. Incredible. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They got our night vision goggles.

Starting point is 00:42:05 The whole thing. The whole thing. No, no, no, no. There was reporting itemizing the inventory, the cash of weapons we left behind. It was gigantic. All right. Let's get to the question now.

Starting point is 00:42:15 The good news, bad news. OK. That's the bad news. That's what $2 trillion of government spending got us. The good news is I went back and I looked at how much money has been invested in the venture capital space over that same 20 year period that we're in Afghanistan. And it roughly tallied up to about $2 trillion. I didn't know that actually. I just added up the chart. And about and most of it was in the last five years because it's actually

Starting point is 00:42:39 been a huge acceleration in the amount of money coming into VC over the last several years the soft banks, the tigers and so coming into VC over the last several years, the soft banks, the tigers, and so that you've had these mega- Late stage funds. The mega-late stage funds. So the truth is, for really way less than, I'd say, a trillion dollars of early-state, like true venture money, we've been able to create the entire technology ecosystem as we see it today.

Starting point is 00:43:02 I mean, not entire. I guess to go back 20 years. There's five years in the late 90s. So the the the private enterprise system has accomplished so much with relatively so little money, you compare the efficiency of it. You almost wonder how do we squander so much money in Afghanistan? How is it possible? It took active looting by many different forces to basically squander. I mean, think took active looting by many different forces to basically squander. I mean, think about like literally have to bring money. Every venture back company, every stage.

Starting point is 00:43:32 In the last 20 years, that's when we spent in Afghanistan. I mean, how much of that money went to line the pockets of private contractors and, you know, warlords we were paying off. I mean, it was a giant club talker sea okay so but the good news is look what we got for the same amount of money here you know I not just hear every every private venture back company so I do think we are capable of accomplishing great things but with relatively small amounts of investment and thank goodness for that because that's the only thing is producing anything or society. But it's true, right?

Starting point is 00:44:08 But look at what Washington's about to do. They want to stomp on all this innovation. I mean, they want to jack up the cap gains rate to higher than ordinary income. I mean, that is their turn on investment for venture capital for the kind of investment I'm talking about. I mean, they want to make it punitive. Now that's not going to pass. Thankfully because we got Joe Manchin, but that's about it. By the way, I will I will contradict myself and agree with SACs. I do think there will be 100x,

Starting point is 00:44:34 1000x, 10,000x, breakthrough that will resolve a lot of the challenges we face as a species on planet Earth over this century. So we're optimistic. I am 100% optimistic. I'm actually this, that's my, the title, you gave it away at the title of my talk in the morning, tomorrow morning. But yeah, yeah, I do, and by the way, my talk says absolutely nothing about the government and we've been railing against the government.

Starting point is 00:44:57 Now everyone's kind of feeling sad and we sound like a bunch of old guys sitting at the Starbucks talking about the government now they suck. But at the end of the day, I do think that the ingenuity of the human spirit and science will resolve the problems that we face today. Jesus Christ. And we are not going to end up in the future. I want to talk about one of the other. We should kind of be mindful of that. I can take questions from the audience. If you have a question, I'm going to jump the problem. Right. I want to talk about one other. By the way, we should kind of be mindful of that. We can take questions from the audience. So if you have a question, I'm going to jump out there. Should we do that now?

Starting point is 00:45:28 Because we're kind of... Yeah. Yeah. I'll just end with the CCP is now moving to break up Allie Pay's business. This is after Jack Ma went on a holiday to learn how to oil paint. Thoughts trim off. Well, I think this is sort of like one other step in what we've been talking about for a while, which is that China is basically becoming a completely vertically integrated government

Starting point is 00:45:53 where the public and private sector has no real clear delineation. And I think that that actually has a lot of implications to us because they export an enormous amount of technology and building blogs to us. And we have no recourse if those guys either have changed their mind. And this is sort of what pulls us into this next very complicated phase of geopolitics because for example, if they decide to cut us off, you know, in ours, they will invade Taiwan. I've said this before, but I think that they will. And we will have no choice except to deploy troops into Taiwan. Because in the absence of the silicon that we need from TSMC and a couple of other manufacturers there,

Starting point is 00:46:33 we have zero capability here. This is why you see Intel, I mean, for any, like any second, when you guys hear an Intel press release that says they're investing $90,000 billion, do you not think where does Intel come up with $90,000,000? This is a pull-through from US government because it allows us to start to rebuild an enormous amount of critical infrastructure

Starting point is 00:46:55 that we've left to other people. China is systematically decomposing and basically destabilizing all the China Internet companies. They're going to control and inbound all of the critical resources and We're going to have to have these really hard conversations unless this is again why I go back to I don't believe what you said Entrepreneurs are not enough of the solution. We need the government to step in with intelligence Not with anything other than that. They don't need laws necessarily, they just need to understand the problem. And then you need to... Or get out of the way in some cases.

Starting point is 00:47:29 Or step in, and for example, like, you know, allow the regulatory capture to be disrupted, but they won't do it because special interests, and by the way, special interests, what do they spend? You know, if you try to donate to a fucking congressman, $4,000, $2,500, like, these people aren't spending $80 million to defend an $80 billion business. They're

Starting point is 00:47:52 spending $80,000. And that's why we can't have progress. That's crazy to me. Sachsha thought so on China's recent actions to basically deprecate entrepreneurship. It's a continuation of the trends we've been talking about on this show like Jamal was saying. I mean, they're bringing these entrepreneurs, these, they're moguls, they're oligarchs under their thumb, under the thumb of the CCP, and Xi Jinping, they're consolidating control and power and money. And it's also about the data. That was another part of this new law is they wanna get their hands on the data. That all the credit data of every single person

Starting point is 00:48:33 that uses Ali Pay all throughout Southeast Asia. That's fucking crazy. And they also control everybody's talk to you. It's just fucking America. Yeah, we've got that at the same time. Yeah, it's crazy that we all have a tech talk in a Chinese government we've got that at the same time. It's crazy that we are on the TikTok. If you were on a Chinese government, wouldn't you do the same?

Starting point is 00:48:49 I would do everything that they're doing, which is why it's crazy to us that we are sitting here allowing it to be done to us. That's what the crazy part is. There's nothing about what they're doing. What we're doing is not illogical. What we are doing is illogical, because we should have a reaction to these things.

Starting point is 00:49:06 We should have a point of view. It can't be tacitly sticking our head in this end. All right. Who's got a question for one of the besties? Okay. Let's try and make it a tight question. Talk up the book, Jan. Of course, these bills are incredibly wasteful, but you guys are engaged. So, how come you're not looking through them and saying this piece I like this piece is messed up because it doesn't sound like you've read them either. To be honest with you, I haven't read them. I rely on these summaries that I get from my team. And to be honest with you, the legibility of these things are incredibly low. And the problem is every bill that gets written now, it's almost like it goes through a process of you take a two page bullet point bill, which is really what senators are Congress, Congress people understand and approve and then outcomes the other end two thousand pages that are Undigestible

Starting point is 00:49:55 So you're absolutely right. I don't I rely on these summaries. I have zero idea. What's really in there? Let's take another question Yeah, I'm Alex Filipenko. You did this poll of whether the media are right, winning, leaning or left leaning and the overwhelming majority said left leaning. But do you think that that's in part because for four years we had been fed so many lies and so much misinformation from the extreme right? David, that question was directed to you. I mean, look, I think there were plenty of polls. If you go back like 10, 20, 30 years, there's a media organization. There's a guy named Brent Pizell who was doing studies of media bias.

Starting point is 00:50:41 And if you were to actually look at how people in the media voted, it was 90% plus Democrat. It's been a thing for a long time. Now it came to a head, I would say, during the Trump administration, because the press, I think, in going after Trump gave up something important, which is they gave up their objectivity I mean they flatly would I mean it was you know whether you want to call it Trump to ranger syndrome or whatever I mean they now saw it as their duty not to report Objectively both sides, but they would just flatly declare

Starting point is 00:51:23 Things that Trump were saying were false, You know, you still see this today. I'm not saying that all the things he said were true. Maybe he did say false things, but normally if you wanted to say that one person saying something false, you would get a source on the other side and then you would quote them. And then that's how you would basically construct the article. And you had the press basically almost really become unhinged and i think they they kind of the empire jersey off their backs uh... to in order to chase after trump and i think you know ultimately they got him uh... trump was a one-term president but

Starting point is 00:51:58 i think that it's really contributed to the polarized media environment we have now anyway to get that referee jersey back on the press, you think? No, no. Sax? Well, how? I mean, the, you know, the problem is the journalism and media have changed so much.

Starting point is 00:52:16 The nature of press has changed. Yeah. Right, it's fragmenting and splintering much like everything else. There's, you know, we talk about this at some of our companies, I keep referring to our companies because I know a lot of people are here today, but we talk about the fragmentation of food brands, for example, or the fragmentation of people's

Starting point is 00:52:33 kind of individual media selection. The same is happening in the press where you're now kind of gonna pick and choose the five articles you wanna read as opposed to buying one of three newspapers and reading everything in that newspaper each day. And I think that's fueling this, which is not necessarily, in my opinion, and I've said this before, not necessarily a constructed or designed decision of the quote unquote

Starting point is 00:52:55 press, but it's more a phenomenon that arises from the individuals that consume the media and they make selections. And that selection bias ends up driving the clicks and the votes and the counts and the prints of that particular format media. And guess what we end up choosing? The stuff that triggers us more makes us feel some stronger motion and then it creates a feedback loop and that's where this is coming from. And I think it's enabled by the internet, not necessarily bad actors at platform companies,

Starting point is 00:53:20 but it's inevitable in a decentralized world or a platformed world. And also part of the story is advertising went away as an option as Google and Facebook took over those markets. So they went subscription and how do you get subscribers? You pick a side. You can't really go down the middle. I want to feel something emotional when I click and buy and spend 99 cents or whatever. Like it's not, I just don't want to like be bored to death. Everything is so stimulating in this digital world.

Starting point is 00:53:43 Like I want to be simulated. Right. There is a really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to death, everything is so stimulating in this digital world. Like, I want to be simulated. Right. There is really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to this, which is they ask, you know, people on the left are the right. What do you think the country's biggest problem is? On the left, the number one answer was Trump supporters. You know, so, you know, now on the right, it was a little bit more varied. It was the Taliban.

Starting point is 00:54:03 It was China, you know, it was... Well, what should we be most concerned about? Objectively, from each of you. What do you think of top three things we should be concerned about as Americans? I don't think the right answer for either side is like the other half of America. I think that happens because you haven't varied

Starting point is 00:54:21 your information diet. You're sitting there watching one station on news, and you're basically being fed this stuff that demonizing the other side. The other side is being otherwise. All right, let's take two more questions, Nico. Chema, this goes back to a point that you made about entrepreneurs not being enough and bringing the government. This goes back to a point that you made about entrepreneurs not being enough and bringing the government, I think a lot of the topics covered are bringing a lot of government support

Starting point is 00:54:49 or involvement. So from y'all's perspective, how do we bring in maybe new incentives on the government side to bring in younger people, smarter people, people who are going to make better change than what we may be seeing today. I mean, if you look at country countries, like Singapore, their solution was to elevate the role of government to be so high from a societal value perspective, it was an incredibly respected role. It was well compensated and it was a thing

Starting point is 00:55:19 that was a real jumping off point to other positions of true influence. Here, we started with that idea. So when you think about what played out in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, I think we had a lot of that. But then the problem was we had a handful of things that completely perverted the cycle. The cherry on the cake, I think, was citizens united that basically just tore the bandaid off. And we are where we are where it's not clear today that the most intellectually curious

Starting point is 00:55:52 people are in government, nor does it even get its fair share. Okay. So what do you do about it? I think that there's an element of it, which is you have to play the game on the field, which is folks like us, what I would encourage all of you to do is, if you're in a position to actually accumulate political power, you have a responsibility to do so,

Starting point is 00:56:11 and it is directly correlated with money. And so as you find, found companies and you get liquidity, you have a responsibility to be engaged, because you will have a louder voice. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm not saying that it's fair, but it's the game on the field. The more you spend, the more time you get with all these folks, and you should use that. Beyond that, we have to find a way of orienting them.

Starting point is 00:56:37 So once you get a seat at the table, I think it's about showing them that there's these nuanced laws that are a lot less sexy than they want to talk about, but that actually had real impact. Sex, what do you think of senators getting paid like CEOs, would that help solve the problem if people could look at and say, well, I can pay to half million dollars in that job or a million dollars in that job, would we draw a different caliber of person? I wouldn't be opposed to that. I wouldn't be opposed to people in government that the top people making more money. I don't know that though that that really would be the thing

Starting point is 00:57:06 that attracts a higher. I mean, I think most of those people go into it for power. And the problem isn't that they're not smart. I mean, some of them, I guess, aren't very smart. Well, you also have the lack of, since they can't make money when they're in, they have to figure out how to make it on the way out, you know, before. So probably,

Starting point is 00:57:28 giving them a pay increases, not something I would be opposed to. I mean, it's something that's hard for them to do because it's easy to campaign against politicians who want to pay themselves more. But yeah, I'd rather pay them more salary. So they're less beholden to the special interests when they get out of office. But I don't think that by itself is gonna solve the problem Let's take another question So my question is how do we get both sides to agree right?

Starting point is 00:57:54 We want to get back to the truth and in science and economics We have a way to measure the truth in science Designed scientific experiment and you measure it against reality So you both sides can agree what's reality in economics? The other make money or don't make money right? You can measure it against reality. So you both sides can agree what's reality. In economics, the other make money or don't make money, right? You can measure it against something. So what can we do to get back to both sides agreeing on what is true? I mean, I think the challenge is it takes more than 15 seconds to walk someone through the experimental design and the outcome and the action to be taken as a result, same with any, I mean, I don't know what the viewership is

Starting point is 00:58:27 of the economists, but I'm pretty sure it's been going down. Zero. Right. But this is why markets work better than politics. Right. This is why markets work better than politics, because freeberg in order for you to pursue what you want to pursue, you don't have to convince a majority of the country to support it. You just need to find one person who's willing to fund it. You raise the money. And the same is true for every startup. And that's why progress is made

Starting point is 00:58:54 by startups and not a lot of progress is made by politics. This is actually why, by the way, the whole... That's why I don't think any of us spend time in politics, even though we talk about it all the time. No, but because it influenced our decision making, I think politics has done more to recindle my interest in all things technology and specifically Web 3.0 and DeFi than anything else because these last four years have completely convinced me that we need to find a

Starting point is 00:59:19 very decentralized way of building the future. It's going to be ugly though. I am convinced. I mean, I am convinced in the next 80 years is exactly that. Like, you know, in the physical world, there's a bunch of stuff that's gonna happen. In the social world, it's gonna be related

Starting point is 00:59:33 to this DeFi decentralization movement that's underway. And it's underway because of what we're hearing about happening in China, what we're talking about happening in the US. And, you know, I mean, I don't know, I won't give the context. I was hanging out with some people the other day. They were, they were, uh, uh, work on my house.

Starting point is 00:59:49 And they, um, they were telling me every single one of them were trading crypto. Which else? Uh, every single one of them were trading crypto. And the whole conversation, do you really expensive on the whole, the whole conversation? The whole conversation, the whole conversation was about crypto and I don't trust the US dollar

Starting point is 01:00:04 and everything's inflating away. And I think politically we're not really awake to the fact that this is a broad meaningful social movement. It's playing out with crypto bubbles and NFTs and other nonsense, but those are short-lived bubbles. Those are little feedback loops. Frothene is happening as the tide rises.

Starting point is 01:00:24 And I do think that that is gonna be kind of the big pushing force socially. Which David is why China said, no more crypto, what are your thoughts? That's the big battle. And by the way, everyone's gonna end up saying that. Let me come back to crypto. Just one point on movement.

Starting point is 01:00:35 So there's political movements and then there's kind of economic movements, like private initiative. I wrote a blog post called Your Star Pistom Movement in which I compared being, I said, a good start of founders and evangelists for their cause. It is almost like leading a political movement. You have to go out there, kind of have a stump speech

Starting point is 01:00:53 and evangelize people to your cause, which is ideally a larger mission than just whatever benefits your company, right? This is why Elon has been able to frankly, why he's been able to sell so many cars without spending a dime on marketing is because he creates a much larger movement than just what's good for Tesla.

Starting point is 01:01:16 But the difference, I think, between a private movement and a political movement is this, is that when you're successful as the leader of a company, everyone imitates you. So now, because Elon's successful, everyone else is trying to introduce their own electric cars. Whereas in politics, whenever you start a political organization, you know, an equal and opposite organizational spring up to oppose you.

Starting point is 01:01:40 And it's just very hard to get anything done. Maybe that's the way it should be because we don't want people imposing their political will on us, but this is why I am a big fan of startups and smart young people pursuing startups and not politics. What do you think about decentralized crypto finance and America?

Starting point is 01:02:01 Should we allow it? Should we tax it? Should we regulate it? We should clearly allow it because this whole crypto stack, this whole deep centralized finance stack that's being built could very well be the future of finance. And we certainly want to be ahead of that curve. Maybe there's some bubbles inherent in that.

Starting point is 01:02:18 But I think there's certainly a lot of really smart engineers, coders, entrepreneurs are going to that area. And so I think it'd be a mistake just to discount it. I think we want America to be on the forefront of that technology wave, just like every other technology wave. I'll make a prediction. My prediction is in the next 20 years, the DeFi movement will catalyze a movement against the open internet.

Starting point is 01:02:44 And it is because state actors will compete with private actors for this battle between centralized institutional state-based control systems. Like I wanna have a know your customer if you wanna buy crypto in the US versus all of these offshore places where I can go and sign up, get a bunch of money, and trade forever and never pay the IRS ascent

Starting point is 01:03:01 and live my life in the ether. And the open internet will start to get threatened. We've seen this in the past where proxy servers and DNS servers got, you know, requests from the DOJ and take down notices. And if that starts to happen, where all the servers and all the fiber lines that are running in and out of the US and elsewhere start to get kind of tackled,

Starting point is 01:03:19 like China has the closed internet, you could start to see this become a really ugly battle that starts to play out. And I think we're not too far. I mean, I don't know if you guys agree, but I think the open internet is kind of gonna be the great battle ground to resolve this. Well, the original battle was over information

Starting point is 01:03:35 and now it's over money and the dog. Well, I think there's a really interesting point there, which is, you know, I remember the late 90s, early 2000s, where the big technology investing wave was all about connecting people and goods into seamless global networks. And that's where all the investment went. Today, and behind that was sort of this utopian idea that the internet was going to break

Starting point is 01:03:56 down barriers and tribalism and remove geographic borders and create a single connected world. Well, what exactly is the bet on crypto today? It's a bet that fiat currencies are gonna collapse and deteriorate, be undermined by money printing, the US dollar was stopping the world's reserve currency most likely that individuals need to be protected against the rise of the authoritarian state. These are the big themes of crypto.

Starting point is 01:04:24 And if you think of major technology investing waves as essentially a prediction market on what smart people think the future is going to look like, it's pretty scary that we're going from a utopian technology investing wave to a very dystopian technology investment. It destroys capitalism. You know, if you think about what capitalism is, it's not just a return on investment, but it's the tonnage of dollars. Anyone who's a big investor here, I'll pick out Yon because he's done an incredible job.

Starting point is 01:04:52 You're putting more and more dollars in for more and more dollars out. That's the pressure, Brad. These guys are under enormous pressure to get tonnage of dollars through the system in a productive way. These guys are at the forefront. But when you look at, you know, most of the projects on Solana, they're seated with a few million dollars. And these are 60, 80 billion dollar market cap projects.

Starting point is 01:05:16 And so I don't know how capitalism survives in that world. Number one, number two, governance goes completely out the window because you're essentially replacing a set of Norms that we've all agreed to about what a company is it's an LLC or it's a C-Corp that is Incorporated with laws. There is recourse for you. You can go to these places and sue them now. It's a doubt It's a bunch of rules written in a blockchain. Here's how it all works. Here's how I make my HR decisions. Here's this. Here's that. Here's the other thing. And then you basically decompose everything into

Starting point is 01:05:54 a service where it's recursive. You cannot build with me unless you make yourself buildable to others. Okay. So when you add all these three things together, I think to me, it's the most incredibly, positively disruptive force I have seen. I think it will destroy wealth. I frankly couldn't give a fuck. And I think it's better for the world. Let's take a final question. Thanks, Jason. And maybe to connect some of the dots, I think the power of the individual, perhaps reflected in crypto, has never been greater relative to the power of government.

Starting point is 01:06:35 Thomas Friedman talked about super empowered individuals 20 years ago, whether you're a terrorist, or whether you're a capitalist, the power of the individual is never been greater. The four of you started a movement earlier this year around what was going on in California. A lot of people got excited about the recall, about what might come next. I think where we fail as entrepreneurs, where we fail as allocators, is we had no strategic plan for California. We have no strategic alternative plan for America.

Starting point is 01:07:17 The parties have platforms. Why don't we put together a strategic plan for the state, a strategic plan for the country that brings in these folks? The production board is a strategic plan for winning World War II, right? And so to Chemos Point, that it's incumbent upon us to get involved, I think it's incumbent upon us to step up what it means to be involved. It's not higher elabious than DC.

Starting point is 01:07:47 It's not, you know, just show up and vote. But I actually think that the voice that you have carries a lot of responsibility. And I think that I would have liked to have seen the all-in step up and do something to catalyze a strategic plan for California, right? Not necessarily endorse a candidate, but let a candidate stand on top of that strategic plan. If we really think about decentralized, right? You have to actually, let your family honest to you. I think why didn't you run for governor?

Starting point is 01:08:17 You're so so run for governor. Yeah, no, no. You fucked it up. We don't have as four people are act together. We are still learning because we are like anybody else in a startup, you stumbled into some success. There's about a million people that will listen, watch, consume this a week. And all the polling or all of the data that you pull, it's like New York San Francisco DC. We don't internalize that and use it for any strategic intent. They're still, if I could just to be honest with you,

Starting point is 01:08:48 they're still infighting, bitching, complaining, all kinds of fucking nonsense, where if you saw the inside of it, you'd be like, hey, dipshits, wake the fuck up, get a plan together and act. We don't have that, Brad. And we disagree on a lot. That's okay, but we can't get away from ourselves.

Starting point is 01:09:07 We are learning how to do that. And we've had a bunch of instances where we've had to come together and say, hey, our friendship is the most important. So let's fucking sort this out. And we've always been able to sort it out. We're going to get pushed to what every other startup founder story gets pushed to, which is now what? We're just going to sit here babble on for another fucking three, four years through a pandemic.

Starting point is 01:09:31 And maybe you get the two million views, three million views. Maybe Spotify gives you a deal and you can make 10, 20 million bucks a year. Who the fuck cares? So you're right. We have a responsibility to figure out if we are for reasonable voices in the sea and People are attracted to those voices. What do we use it for and we've talked about it But we haven't put pen to paper and finalize 90 minutes a week on this box and then yeah, we just go into our own lives and you know

Starting point is 01:10:03 It's never been I also think we've also tried to experiment a little bit David and I collaborated on getting Chesa Boone recalled but in different ways David Sacks David Sacks literally helped them start a Recall Chesa Boone campaign Gary Tan who listens to the pod started his own with Democrats and then I tweeted anybody want to donate for an investigative journalist to cover Chesapeakeewins office, because we couldn't find anybody covering it. $60,000 showed up for that GoFundMe page,

Starting point is 01:10:34 and we just gave it to a journalist who started this week, and she's reported in the first 10 days on three different like tragic cases in San Francisco that have not been followed up on by the DEA's office. So that was just a little example of dipping our toes and obviously, Chimoff being pushed to run for governor, caught fire, like we thought that was a joke. It was literally somebody who listens to the pod,

Starting point is 01:10:57 put the website up, he tweeted as a joke, and then all of a sudden it's on CBC. But the best thing has been the feedback we've gotten from people like you, Brad Brad and everybody in the audience, Bill Gurley, a lot of other people here. And we have thought about, hey, what do we use this platform for in terms of making change like that? And I think that'll be year two of the best.

Starting point is 01:11:14 It's the right question and the right challenge, Brad. It is. Appreciate it. All right, David, we should let everybody get to pizza. I want to say thanks to the besties to Jake Hal, Tomah, Zach, we're joining. We're going to be a free bird. Appreciate it. Love you guys. Hal, to mob, favorite, this motherfucker. There's another friend who shall not be named.

Starting point is 01:11:50 Who is a side hugger? Nobody likes us. Who likes a side hugger? Anybody want a side hug? You want to get the full frontal hug when you have a fight. Full frontal hug with sex, give it to him. But I had to force him today because he comes into you, like stand up, I'll show you.

Starting point is 01:12:02 He comes in like this, and then he does this the hip hug Like he does he does kind of a hip that's called that's pretty nice to see you. It's called that's Looks like he's going to night at the rock spirit I mean you look horrible. Thank you. That's truly fucking horrible. OK, appreciate it. Is that your answer?

Starting point is 01:12:29 I'm sorry. Here we go. Let's wrap it up. All right. Well, this has been the All-In podcast, and enjoy your time at the conference. Thank you. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:39 We're going to win. You're like your winner's ride. Rainman David's side. I'm going to win. Yeah. You're like your winners, ride Rainman, David, Science Do we know who he is? And I said we open source it to the fans And they've just gone crazy with me WS Ice Queen of Canoe

Starting point is 01:12:53 I'm going crazy

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E46: False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more | LIVE from TPB Symposium!

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