This Week in Startups - All-In E4: Politicizing the pandemic, Police reform, Biden’s ideal VP, Twitter vs. Facebook on free speech & more with David Sacks & David Friedberg

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

Follow @chamath: https://twitter.com/chamath Follow @jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis 0:01 Jason checks in on Chamath, Sacks & Friedberg, opening up their social circles, outdoor activities & more 9:31 Issues with politicizing matters of public health, deaths decreasing while new cases spike, masks, lockdowns & more 20:56 Viral videos, doxxing bad behavior & cancel culture 25:39 Reforming law enforcement, separating police from the military, changing police incentives 36:42 Are public unions too powerful? How a lack of leadership has led us here 41:49 Facebook vs. Twitter on free speech, Zuckerberg’s relationship with Peter Thiel, valuing comfort over freedom of expression

All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In Podcast. We're here with Chimoth Polly Hopatia, David Friedberg, and David Sacks. Our usual for some as we chop up the business news and what's going on. And just as a point of order, the frequency of the show is, well, don't ask. As we feel like it. As we feel like it, correct. So do not ask me to advertise on the podcast because Chammoth banned advertising. and do not ask me when the next one is.

The next one is when Chimath decides he wants to go on a rant. But how are you holding up, Best D.C.? Best D.C. is doing pretty well. Yeah. And the family, everything, have you come out of quarantine in any way? The first question I have for people is, has your behavior changed now as we go into, I think, what most people are calling phase two?

any change in what you're doing and the risk you're willing to take? Chimov. It's a really good question. You know, I've kind of ventured out a little bit, but I just kind of put on a mask. The only place I don't wear a mask is when I walk around my house

just because it's, you know, I live in the suburbs, and so there's just so much space between people that you don't really run into anybody. But if I have to go to Walgreens or CV, or whatever. I always bring a mask and gloves. So I've ventured out a little bit, but, you know, nothing, nothing meaningful, to be quite

honest. And Sacks, you're still out of the country in an undisclosed location. How are you feeling about what risks you're willing to take, you know, small groups of people? Are you going out to a restaurant? Are you seeing other people? How do you look at the risk you're willing to take personally? I've adjusted my risk profile, I think, quite a bit. So, I mean, the learning over the past few months was just that relatively, that the fatality rate for, say, relatively healthy people under 50 without risk factors is, you know, 50 times lower than, say, you know, someone under over 60 or someone who has risk factors. And so I'm not being reckless, but I'm willing to kind of reengage in social behavior.

among groups of friends. And on the theory that, you know, all of my friends have been locked down, I was in total lockdown for two months. So of my friends. And so, you know. I have several questions. The first is, I mean, how old are you? You look like 90, roughly.

How old are you exactly? So how did the risk factors apply to you? Second, you have friends. Both of these things. Well, we know there's three on this call. So, sexy poo, I love you. I miss it. Yeah, no, I mean, you raise a good point.

I mean, my physical age might be 90, but my lungs are only 48 years old. And so my, my, hopefully my lungs are, you know, qualify in that under 50 category. So, you know, I've been playing golf with friends. You know, I've kind of widened the circle of people I'm willing to let into my quarantine, basically. So by a dozen, by a hundred, how would you? By about, I've actually let in, not all at once, but at different times, probably about 20 people. Got it. So you feel comfortable.

And those people, you do ask them, have you quarantined? Have you been wearing masks? Have you been tested? Or are you just like, you kind of? I mean, I generally know that people have, I mean, now this may change over the next few months, but everyone's been kind of under shelter in place. And so if you were going to start to socializing with your friends, this would be the safest time to do it because everybody has been sort of locked down to some degree. And, you know, most places have been closed.

And so, you know, if your friends haven't gotten it, they're probably pretty safe. All right. Swing over to you, Dave Friedberg. Tell me what you think of Sacks's position. Obviously, Chmott's still in quarantine, you know, venturing off to the store once in a while. sacks opening up to, you know, 20 people or whatever in small groups playing golf outdoors, but I'm assuming he's not having like an indoor party for 50, obviously. How would you look at the risk he's taking and what risk are you taking, Friedberg,

personally in your life? I'm not too dissimilar. I've got about eight buddies coming over to the pool this afternoon. We're going to do kind of like a Father's Day hang session, but we're going to be outside. And I've done a lot of hiking. without masks and going outside without masks. I'm not really too concerned about outdoor behavior. There was a good analysis done that showed in tracing cases where they actually found the origin

of where transmission occurred, 97% occurred indoors. So generally speaking, like outdoor activity to me is like pretty reasonable to do. So I'm pretty free with like doing stuff outside, meeting friends outside, hanging out by the pool and I've had a bunch of people come by and hang out. And then indoor stuff I try and avoid. So if I'm going to go into a supermarket, I'll wear a grocery store, I'll wear a mask and I'll be in there as short a time period as I need to be.

And I'm certainly not going into restaurants and stuff like that. But you would sit outdoors. Is that a restaurant? I would assume if the tables were six feet apart, would you go to a restaurant and sit in a restaurant? Yeah, I'm not rushing to do that just yet. There's just something a little bit weird about the way some of those are configured, but generally, yes, like outdoor seems fine.

You know, but like the way they set it up, it's almost like you're, exposing yourself to a bunch of people around you because they're pretty confined spaces that they're setting up these tables at. But yeah, sunlight and wind effectively will, you know, break apart the protein that is the virus and you will not have this kind of infectious viral particle. And so that's a pretty, you know, well understood thing at this point. And, you know, but it's not spoken about as much by public health officials because they don't want to kind of mitigate the concerned and they don't want people to start taking off masks and, you know, taking on very risky behavior. But yeah, generally speaking, I think kind of like outdoor behavior is pretty,

pretty safe and non-transmissible. The risky stuff I'm doing is, you know, we had a, you know, just having like folks come back to the house. And that's where I kind of still try and draw the line, which is having people in the house and you don't know where they've been. And so that's a little bit concerning. Inside the house, the spittle particles with COVID-19 in of them, if they did, would be lingering. That is what, I'm sorry to be graphic, but that is the concern. Correct, Freiburg? Is that when you're outdoors, the spittle would blow away. And the particles are in the spake. I mean, it really does evaporate. So the liquid that holds the protein, because the protein needs to be in a liquid to kind of maintain its integrity, when that evaporates and it'll evaporate

from wind or from sun, and that protein will degrade, it becomes kind of a non-infectious particle at that point. And so when you're inside and you don't have those mechanisms, that particle can just float around in the air and that's how it gets spread. And that's why in the tracing work that was done, it shows like 97% of cases happen in an indoor environment just like this. And I don't believe in the six foot thing. I think it's bullshit. Like if you're six foot away from someone in a room, people are coughing and that room gets filled with those particles over a one hour period, it doesn't matter if you're fucking six feet away or 20 feet away, that stuff's in the air. So this whole notion about like, hey, distance yourself in a restaurant and indoor space,

it's like, no, that's actually not going to necessarily solve a problem. Maybe if someone immediately sneeze, you'll avoid it. But, I mean, certainly, SACS is advocacy for masks. Hey, Freeburgers, are you, is that an aura ring you're wearing? Yeah. Have you tried it? Yeah, I actually just bought it a few weeks ago and I've been using it to monitor my sleep. but there was an article that said that, you know,

I think that all the NBA players are going to be given these aura rings as well because it can apparently detect coronavirus three days ahead of other ways because it can see a change in your basal sort of body temperature. Yeah, so UCSF ran this beta with them, and they developed this algorithm that they think is pretty predictive. So we'll see if it works in production. But yeah, that's the theory. Well, there's also this connected thermometer that if you use it, I forgot the name of it, it sends all the data to a central repository, and they've been able to predict it as well. And this just, when we look at how the government, I think it's called rectotempt. Rectatemp, it has to go in your rectum.

And it just whatever's going on of your directive, it goes right to the government. Now, but this is an interesting thing when you think about low-cost ways to deal with this, the amount of money we poured into the system, Chamoth, is so great that if we just sent every single person in America an aura ring or one of these thermometers

and said, just take your temperature all the day, we would know where the outbreaks were. And that would be a lot less. expensive than a lot of the stimulus we're doing to try to cure what's going on. Do you agree that we should maybe include that in some sort of approach? Look, I think the basic issue is that something really odd has happened in the United States, and we were talking about this in our group chat, which is that we have managed to find a way to politicize absolutely everything. And, you know, some things, for example, like universal

basic income or, you know, what is our national policy towards China? Those are political issues. But things of public health, when they get sort of distorted and viewed through a political lens or just idiotic, you know, we view masks as a political statement. We would view these aura rings as, you know, people being afraid that the government was going to track them. So we'll find every good, we'll find a lot of excuses in order to blow up any good idea at this point because we can politicize anything and we do it better than any other country in the world. It's an interesting point you make there, and I'm going to go to you in a second, Sacks. If you pull up my computer for a second, Nick, one thing I cannot understand when I watch the media or I watch this discussion, and we haven't seen Dr. Fauci in about 60 days. I don't know where they buried him, but he's been put in a bunker somewhere. But the number of deaths in the United States continues to go down massively. Now, I know New York was a big outbreak, and that contributes to it.

But at the same time, if you look and you compare. deaths to new cases, you know, the new cases has increased in some regions and testing has gone way up. So in trying to interpret this data, I don't understand why there's not somebody saying, listen, here's the good news. Dets are going way down. Testing is going way up. And here's what we should take from that. Sacks, I think you and I might be slightly different sides of the aisle when it comes to politics. How do you look at this in terms of leadership at a federal level and then the media? And how, you know, to Chimot's point, we politicize this.

Yeah. Well, I agree that things get overly politicized. And Mass is a really good example. It's just a really common sense, easy solution. You know, I wrote a blog that we covered on this pod two and a half months ago saying that I thought mass should be public mask wearing should be policy. It should be the law. Little did I know that I was taking a left wing position. Yeah. Oops. Did you lose any friends over that? Right. Right. I know you guys have me on the show as the token right winger. But actually, I just

appear at CNN just asked me to be on the show today to explain why mass should be policy. So I just thought that was a common sense thing. You know, I'm normally very receptive to libertarian arguments, but, you know, like we talked about, the boundaries of libertarianism are, you know, you only have the freedom to wave your arms until your fist hits my nose, you know, and something similar is true about when your infectious particles hit my nose. You know, there are reasonable boundaries to freedom there in the interest of other people's health. And, and, you know, that blog, a lot of public pronouncements about COVID have not aged very well. Over the last couple of months, I think that blog actually has aged pretty well by comparison.

And because you just look at all the countries that have been successful at fighting COVID. I mean, Japan has 135 million people. It's an old population and they've had under 1,000 deaths. South Korea, 51 million people under 300 deaths. You take a Western European nation like Czech Republic, they had a huge COVID outbreak, spike just like the rest of Europe. They went all in on mask wearing. And they've completely controlled the virus.

It's knocked out. And so it's really crazy to me that we just can't get on the same page as a country about something as obvious and easy as mask wearing. And it's because we, we, the, the, the left wants to get Trump out of office so badly. And they're so triggered by him and they hate him so much, whether that's valid or not, we'll leave aside, that they want to. and then he wants to say no masks, I don't understand his motivation. What do you think Trump is thinking and who's advising him that he should be anti-mask?

I think somehow it's for the right, it's become an act of defiance. And I understand that to some degree because I do think that the lockdowns went on too long. They, I think with 2020 hindsight, we would say that the lockdowns weren't necessary if we had just gone all in on a mask policy. that's what they did in Japan, right? And so, you know, the problem, the problem with kind of the politicians in charge is that, you know, well, backing up a second, I think the right policy is to end lockdowns but wear mass. And the problem with the politicians is half of them didn't want to end lockdowns. And the other half didn't want to wear mass. And that's kind of the weird way in which has become this political football. So Trump was trying to do this as an act of defiance. What was the

left trying to accomplish, do you think? What would be your cynical or charitable approach to their reaction to this and locking down so severely? Well, I just, I think that, what was the purpose of lockdowns? I think it was the, I think the initial reaction was, it was based on what happened in Italy, right? And so in Italy, we kind of had this worst case scenario where the hospital system got overwhelmed, you know, tremendous fatality rate from the virus. And then we started to see the same thing happening in New York. And, and I think, you know, locking.

down briefly in New York to get a handle on the situation, I think was justified. I don't think, again, with 2020 hindsight that we needed to do it anywhere else in the country, if we had instead, you know, just worn mass. Do you think the left though perpetrated a perpetual lockdown? This is the most cynical view that I've heard. And I don't think you hear this often. And that's part of why we do this podcast is to sort of explore these, you know, kind of takes that you hear on the inside, but not maybe on CNN. The cynical interpretation was they wanted to keep lockdown to crash the economy, to make Trump look bad, to get him out of the office. Do you think there's anything valid to that argument? You know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible. I think that it's possible,

though, that the left just kind of underweights, you know, the economic damage of lockdowns. You know, I heard a lot of arguments about from the left that if you wanted to end lockdowns, then you care more about money than lives. And you can't put a price on a life, which is literally what we do all the time, like insurance, health care, we put a price on life. But I was never in favor of doing nothing. I mean, I was tweeting weeks ago that we should end lockdowns but wear masks. And so my argument would be, look at Japan, you do more for lives and the economy by having

a mass policy instead of lockdowns. Freeberg, what's your take on SACS's take? No, I don't disagree. I mean, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not a great expert on kind of the, the politics and, you know, I can kind of comment on policy, I think, in terms of what I think is reasonable and not. I certainly, you know, thought that the lockdowns were unreasonable in the extent, but then the problem was they weren't followed, so they were all for waste. So the worst of all outcomes.

Yeah, but there wasn't all huge, like until they actually went into effect, there wasn't a huge amount of debate about this. It was just like, oh, shit, we better all go into lockdown. What happens, this is almost like the human conscious and unconscious mind. Like, you know, the conscious mind rationalizes what the unconscious already decided to do. So everyone freaked out. Everyone had a great deal of fear. We shut everything down.

And then the left and the right had their own rationalization after the fact about, you know, what that meant, was it good, was it bad? Did we overreact? Did we underreact? Should we have done more? And so I feel like the narrative is told a little bit too late here, where we all kind of like have these commentaries about left and right politics after the fact. And, you know, I don't think it's really meaningful, to be honest. It's just almost like, let's fill in the what happened story with our own point of view based on our tribe or whatever we sit in.

So, Chimath, how do we get out of this now? Because the deaths are going down. No, no, we're out. We're out. We're out. The genie is out of the bottle. Look, the reality is there is not a single country government that can tolerate future lockdowns because I think the populations will revolt. And so we're going to have to deal with cases as they crop up, and we're going to have to deal with infection rates popping up.

And we'll have to deal with this bursty economic landscape. Today, Apple just announced you're closing a bunch of stores in a few states. I'm sure they'll reopen them in a few weeks. But we're going to be in this sort of start and stop mode now for the foreseeable future. But it's just not possible to ask people now to go back into any form of quarantine or shelter in place. I just don't think they'll do it. Right. And people only do lockdowns until there's some activity that they want to engage in that they think is essential.

Right. And so you saw with the protests, if you believe that the civil rights protests are essential, you believe that you're out of lockdown. And, you know, and if you want to go to a Trump rally, you believe that's essential and you're out of lockdown. And so, you know, so every, and, you know, you had the case in Texas of the woman who wanted to open her hair cut salon. And so, you know, you were never going to get good compliance with a lockdown plan. And in addition to the damage and destruction it caused, it was never very effective because people weren't willing to do it. And I think the big public policy mistake here was the politicians squandering their credibility on lockdowns that were never very feasible instead of just going all in on masks and it would have been a lot cheaper.

By the way, the other thing is we need to push mask wearing back into a public health debate. And, you know, Newsom yesterday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California basically said masks are now mandatory in California. the thing is you have to add fines if you don't wear them where, you know, people can be cited and fined. And then the other thing, and David, you said this earlier is you have to be criminally culpable at some level if you go out of your way to not wear a mask and infect somebody. And there is a bunch of, you know, case law on how this can be true. And so I think that, you know, we need to, we need to solve these things because you need to have good hygiene around. mask wearing and what the consequences are if you choose to not wear one. Well, you know, a schmatt that's interesting, you bring that up.

There was a, there have been cases of people purposely infecting people with the HIV virus and going to jail for it and being liable for it. So there is, I think, and I'm, what's the difference? What's the difference? Coughing in somebody's face versus having sex with them when you know you're infected. What is the difference? Well, that, I don't know if you saw this viral video of the Karen, which is, I So many Cairns these days.

So many Cairns. And Aunt Caren just got upset that somebody was calling around for not wearing a mask in a cafe. And she literally coughed on the person. Did you see that video? How is this person not in jail? I think that was in New York, right? I think it was New York. And the woman didn't know she was being filmed.

But oh, my Lord. I mean, the great thing about the Internet right now is like if anybody basically transgresses, they are identified in about a nanosecond. And I mean, I saw that because on the Saturday morning, she coughed on this person who was complaining about her not wearing a mask. And within 15 minutes, they had her LinkedIn. They had contacted Weil Medical Center where she worked. And then Wyle put out a press release basically saying we had fired her, you know,

for being a dummy well before the mask thing. And so the whole thing now just gets so adjudicated and resolved so quickly. It's incredible. We've basically moved to Judge Dredd now. It's like the social media is the judge, the jury, and the cops in this entire equation. The one that I loved actually that really actually, frankly, I look forward to was the cyclist in Maryland. I mean, you cannot go after kids. Touching another person's child and women and like attacking them for putting up, you know, Black Lives Matter posters.

like and then to attack these. But then again, it was the sub-community on Reddit. And it was amazing. It was the actual like Maryland subreddit. Who knows what's going on in the Maryland subreddit on Reddit? What could they be talking about? But they identified this guy. And he was fired.

He was arrested. And it all happened within, you know, probably 36 hours. But you guys know in that story, there was another guy who was identified first. And he was a police officer. And then people went out. after him and he basically had his life ruined within those first 24 hours and he wasn't the guy. No. Yeah.

Yes. And he wasn't the guy. The way they got him was the Stravia data, right? Like he had, they found a guy on Stravia who had done that. Strava. Strava. Stravia is a Sweden. Yeah, the Stevia. That's right.

That's Steve. The guy was using Stevia, the app for the bike people. And they monetized that app through subscriptions. Correct? Don't make fun of my dyslexia and Chamob. You're bullying me on my own podcast. You say monetize on CNBC in front of millions of people. It's unbelievable.

We tried to teach you how to pronounce that word for 15 years. I know, but I say it on purpose now and I lean into it now. It sounds slightly pornographic or something. He also, he also, mostervate. I'm going to go home and mostervate later. Okay, go back to your stevia story. What is it? Wait, so what happened is this guy got in trouble.

And this is my point about the problem with the group bank hive mind approach to these issues is you can end up not when you don't follow a predefined due process and you let the mob kind of rule over these moments bad shit can happen too and so what what happened what happened to the cop the cop he like everyone started chasing him down and like you know his whole life got ruined everyone's like death threats and fucking with him and all this sort of stuff you know calling his employer calling people who know but they found his phone number they found his address they dock got turned upside down yeah but basically like the fact that they found out that it was something that it was someone else doesn't resolve the fact that there are now hundreds of people after this guy and

they don't pay attention to that it wasn't him. And, you know, due process has a role in a civilized society where you can actually create structure and resolve these things in a proper way as opposed to letting mob mentality kind of rule. I mean, otherwise, you know, this stuff can get a pretty ugly, pretty fast as we saw as this being just a really, you know, pretty lightweight example. But I'm not sure I'm a huge advocate of this like, chase the guy down and then punish him at once and cancel the canceled culture is a little bit ugly right now. You don't have all the facts and you miss stuff in a lot of these cases. Yeah, there is definitely, it's great that you can find criminals so quickly.

And I'm curious what people think, and obviously you just don't want to mistarget somebody. And so there's, if you do find somebody who's targeted, like give the information to the authorities, but you may not want to docks them immediately and try to ruin their lives before you actually know what's going on. A lot of companies now, Microsoft, IBM and others. Amazon, I think, are saying we don't want to, we're going to take a pause on facial recognition. I'm curious what each of your thoughts are on law enforcement, and we'll get into the law enforcement discussion and race relations here in this country and what we went through.

We, look, we have been, we have been, we've been arming our police force mistakenly like our military. And we've been doing it for, you know, decades now. And it makes no sense. There was this crazy tweet I saw today. Maybe we can find AOC tweeted out where she found this announcement from some like longtail police department somewhere who basically got a free armored truck carrier. And, you know, they're driving it around town or whatever, pulling it out of the garage.

It looks like downtown Baghdad. And you're like, I mean, they're in like Fargo, North Dakota or wherever they are. I mean, like it's just so it makes. no sense. I don't think I don't think any of us thought that we wanted to apportion or tax dollars to build a second shadow army. I think we all want an army and a Navy and in Marines and an Air Force. We want, you know, aircraft carriers and F-16s and tanks and machine guns and all that stuff, but we want them with our military. And then we want cops, I think, to be extremely well-trained. I mean, half the time, you know, cops are, you know, you asked them to be, uh,

mental health counselors, other times you're asking them to be, you know, CPR givers, other times you're asking them to be criminal apprehenders. The job is too complicated. They clearly can't do it. They're poorly trained. And then you arm them on top of all of that. And you have the shit show that we have today. Yeah, it's not like there's an IED waiting somewhere for them to drive over where they need metal plating on the bottom of the vehicle. That's not what they're dealing with every day. At a minimum, let's like, look, I'm a huge fan of ending qualified immunity. I think that doesn't make any sense. I think we have to stop arming our police like their military.

Don't train them like the military. Train them like a different kind of service. And we may need to go back to first principles to figure out how to actually train them properly, to spot abuse, to deal with mental health. And just to be a little bit more patient and understanding and empathetic versus trigger-happy. Can I ask you a question on that? So a lot of the actions that police take. when it comes to lethal action is defended by the notion that my life was under threat as a cop.

And that sources from the fact that we have a Second Amendment in this country where a lot of people are, you know, gun carriers and are allowed to have arms. So our police force has had to respond with the fact that there are a lot of guns in this country with defensive principles and defensive mechanisms to defend themselves against the loss of life due to a gun. And that makes the United States really unique in terms of the circumstance versus if you look at the United Kingdom where they don't have a Second Amendment right to bear arms. The police aren't armed and the police behavior is significantly different. You can look at this in any country where there isn't a right to bear arms. Do we not have a fundamental problem in this country that stems from the fact that the police feel or can justify that they're always under threat of loss of life due to arms being out in the population? Yeah, the contra, I think it's a fabulous question. The contrary example, I would say, is if you look at Switzerland where the per capita gun ownership is really high, Canada, where per capita gun ownership is really high, what I would tell you is there's a different kind of psychological training that police people go through before they're put on the streets. And that is fundamentally different here. The job as is defined to them here is different than it is in Canada or Switzerland where, you know, gun ownership levels are quite robust. And I think it all comes down to incentives. And the reality is, is that,

there is a, to your point, David, this amplification of this idea that everybody is armed, which I think is fundamentally mostly not true in the day-to-day course of like living one's life. But I think police people tend to be very amplified around that threat. And as a result, the unions have basically written contracts that protect their use of force. The law is written in a way that protects their use of force. And so all of it comes from, to your point, a defensive posture of fear. But if you actually tried to train these people differently,

I think you'd have a different outcome because what I can tell you is the police in Canada do behave differently. They don't reach for their gun every second. It's an interest. I think there's a very interesting example. And I know we don't want to like just take one anecdotal incident and then, you know, make a big sweeping generalization with it.

But if you look at the gentleman in Atlanta who was shot in the back twice, Rashid Brooks, Rashard Brooks. Rayshard Brooks. This example to me is so illustrative of the problem. They spent 40 minutes talking with this individual who was absolutely not a threat. They had frisked him. They knew he was not armed. He was intoxicated. He's in a drive-through. Of all the ways you could have dealt with this. situation. And I come from a family of police officers, and I can tell you a lot of stories about cops letting people go, obviously white people with warnings. In this situation, letting him sleep it off, taking his keys, letting him run away. You know who it is. You have his driver's license. You have his car. You have his keys. Let him run away. Under what circumstances would you feel justified shooting a person when there were so many other options? And it comes exactly, I believe, Chimothram, two things you pointed out. One, they're in a very defensive position and two, the training. They're trained to use lethal force. And if you're in a situation where you feel threatened,

you just shoot. That's it. And if you shoot, you shoot to the center of the body to kill the person. And in their training, they're not trained to think, how do I disarm the situation, diffuse this situation? And what are the other options? This person is obviously not a threat. And you knew the taser was fired twice. I'm not saying the person should have resisted it around. I'm not saying the person shouldn't have aimed the taser at the person. But they should be trained to protect life and diffuse situations at all costs. Jason, like, think about the incentives. They should have been trained maybe to just walk into the Wendy's, buy this guy of coffee,

and then drive him to the motel that he said that he was staying at. Yes. Or they should have been trained to just write a ticket and say, listen, here's a, you know, here's a citation for being drunk because you did technically kind of drive, and now I'm going to leave it alone. They could have done many things that they chose not to do because the incentive was to, you know, project power in that situation versus project any kind of empathy and compassion. Right. And the selection of people who go into the police department and I come from a family of police officers and firefighters, brother, uncle, cousin,

grandfather, up and down the line, Irish cops and firefighters. Big tradition of my family. And I can tell you that there is a contingent of people who go into the police who are power tripping or maybe didn't get wherever else they wanted to be in life and the job of seeing people and dealing with the bad stuff that you pointed out. You know, people in domestic violence situations, people who are mentally ill, homeless, addiction problems. All of that then trains these people to see the worst in humanity. and then they just look at their job as just this dystopian, horrible experience, and they are in that defensive posture, whereas we need to train people, and I made this tweet where we should have a new class of police officer

that is more like a Jedi Knight. You know, they get paid twice as much. They have a master's degree in social work or psychology. And when that call comes in for an emotionally disturbed person, a person who's intoxicated on drugs, a domestic violence situation, you don't want to send the average B cop to that. You want to send the Jedi.

No, but Jason, make it even easier. Like when you go out and get a 911 call and it's, you know, there could be, it's somebody who's in sort of like mental distress or you're going to do a mental health check, why don't you send a really well-trained social worker? Absolutely. And the reason is...

Why don't we have a whole, you know, a whole force of social workers that we pay $100,000 a year? Absolutely. And that's what these police officers are making. And there is an argument to not have them armed. There's an argument for them to be armed, but maybe they're so enlightened and trained so well. I think the training in the United States is in the low hundreds of hours. In other countries, it's thousands of hours. I mean, if a person has a gun, I think police should not get their gun until they've completed maybe two or three thousand hours on the job. In other words, they get to the second or third year. So the first year when you're a probie, why even have a gun? Why not just have them doing things without a gun? And then when you get that gun, maybe you need to have the equivalent of a master's degree. You know, maybe you need to have a level of training. And we need to go to first principles like you're saying, Shemoth, and rethink this whole thing.

In any startup or any problem solving, you would look at the show me the thousand calls. How did they break down? What were the outcomes? And if you look at the outcomes of dealing with mentally ill people or people who are addiction or domestic disputes, the outcomes are things that police are not trained for. That's got to be a very high percentage of these situations, let alone the no-knock warrant, which makes absolutely no sense. I mean, I think there's just a lot of, look, there's a lot of change coming. I think that there's a lot of legislation afoot at every sort of level of government.

And I think the good news is that it's going to be hard for people to sit on their hands on this. I don't think it's going to be universally across the country. but I do think that people will then again self-select and want to live in places where you know sort of like the laws match their ideals and this is going to be an area of tremendous reform and change. You know what's interesting about all of this is like if you actually go back to the Republican ideology it's interesting to me why Republicans aren't the first ones to try to embrace rewriting you know the union contracts and actually decreasing unionized power because that's sort of like has generally been a tent hole theme of Republican ideology.

But then as it gets applied to cops, I think they kind of just abdicate responsibility. So there's a lot of reasons where you could have bipartisan agreement on a bunch of these things. But again, I think we're we kind of like get cut up and we refuse to see the forest from the trees and want to fix these things. But I suspect that a lot of these changes will happen just because they're so bloody obvious. and depending on your ideology, you can frame the same reason for completely different motives and get to the same answer. Nobody wants this. Sacks, what do you think about the union issue as our token right winger?

I think, yeah, I think the police unions have too much power. All the public employee unions do. I think, you know, just like the teachers unions have thwarted school choice and education reform. I think we're seeing the police unions toward a lot of sensible reforms around the use of force. You know, our friend Bill Gurley's been tweeting a lot of great research that around police departments that are unionized, there's a lot more complaints against them. There's a lot more examples of the use of force and unwarranted use of force. And so clearly there's a connection here between police unions and the thwarting of common sense reforms. And I saw someone

tweeted this idea that you know, the reason why no one's taking on the police unions is because Republicans see the word police and Democrats see the word union and they're both fans of those things. And so who's going to take them on? Yeah. I mean, teachers unions is the same thing. And the political system,

the political power of the unions is so entrenched that in order to get in office, for in most cases, you're going to need to have the support of those unions. And if you're don't, they're going to tell people explicitly not to vote for you. Yeah. I mean, well, look, I mean, you look at the cities that have had the biggest problems here.

I mean, starting with Minneapolis. And these are Democrat-controlled cities. These are not, you know, Republican-controlled cities. And the politicians are very much, you know, in cahoots with the big union, the unions there, including the police and the teachers unions and all that. And so, you know, both parties need to be open to reform. To your point, David, there's a. there's a story that came out last or last couple of days about the DA in Atlanta who pressed

charges against the two officers. But the narrative was about how the DA is being investigated for getting 140K in kickbacks from a nonprofit tied to something. And then he was claiming that his main opponent, who's right, because these, you know, district attorneys are politically elected officials, right? Where she had basically done a side deal with the police to not to not go after, you know, use of force in return for their endorsement. And, you know, what a, what a horribly messy, like, complicated gross situation, irrespective of whoever turns out to be right there. So to your point, they've become so entrenched and it's just so low level that then, you know, what should be obvious justice basically just gets thrown away for what's expedient.

and convenient. Yeah. Well, you know, this is another example where like, like with the mass, I felt like there were, you know, I wasn't violating conservative principles. I thought there really was a conservative principle. I think with, you know, with with this example of the overuse of force by police, uh, you go back to what Lord Acton said, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If there's no one standing up to the police unions politically, uh, they have absolute power and that's going to lead to corruption. So I do think like Republicans should be looking into this. Now, I think part of the reason why Republicans want to defend the police is because we've also had these examples of looting and rioting and lawlessness, you know, after the civil rights protest. And I think that, again, we're kind of dividing up into sides. And there's too much justification of bad behavior on both sides because of what the other side is doing, you know. And I heard people on the left justifying the looting and rioting on the grounds that, you know, it was a legitimate expression of, you know, of opposition. It was a legitimate protest.

It was a legitimate expression of opposition to, to the police violence. And I think that that is wrong. And I think it's wrong for people on the right to defend this police, this excessive use of force by police on the grounds that somehow it's justified because we need to control the lawlessness in the rioting. And, you know, I think both are wrong. And we lack a federal leadership to not make this overly political, but when Trump then tear gasses with the military protesters to go do a photo opportunity, you know, it's sending the message that he and he wants to be the law and order president. Now you're just charging things up instead of just going on TV and just saying something to bring people back to the concept that we're all Americans. We're all in this together and we rise and fall together. It's such an easy statement.

Listen, the protesters have valid concerns. We need to work on this issue. And yes, if you see people doing any vandalism, we have to stop them. Please make sure that doesn't happen because it works against the very valid criticism and protests that are going on that need to go on. And the fact that the president can't say that is crazy. Well, what do you guys think about what he has been saying and how Twitter and have basically taken different sides of...

Freeberg, go ahead. What Trump's been saying? Yeah, should Twitter be censoring him slash putting warnings on his posts when he's saying crazy stuff? I don't think so. Yeah, look, I mean, it's such a slippery slope and there's too much room for interpretation. I'm just saying the obvious.

But, you know, if you're a platform, you're a platform. You know, you let the things get built on top of you. Sure, you can have some rules around what can be built. but as soon as you start saying what is true and what is not true and you become the arbiter of truth, you're no longer an agnostic platform. And I think that that is a big,

dangerous risk to take because as you guys know, something may be, and I think we saw this with the, what's that Twitter account, Zero Hedge. Was that the name of them? Zero Hedge. They got banned. And then they came back because it turns out what they said

wasn't necessarily as untrue if Twitter at first thought that they were saying, was untrue. So, you know, it was a great example of how, you know, a point of interpretation can very quickly kind of reverse course, and you can look extremely biased in making that decision at that time. Well, and YouTube took, I think Susan Wajicki took the, Wajicki took the position at YouTube that we're going to allow people to talk about coronavirus if what they're saying is in sync with the World Health Organization. Yeah, and by the way, the World Health

Organization I've had an issue with since well before COVID. just from another life, I won't get into it, but they've said some stuff publicly that was just flat out fucking wrong, scientifically and invalid, and it was politicized, and we kind of got to the root

of the political driver behind it. So I've long held kind of disbelief in the World Health Organization as a trusted source of scientific fact. And to Sachs' previous point, you want to be able to check power. And if the World Health Organization is this incredibly powerful,

organization who got it wrong with masks and didn't even, you know, like David Sacks is getting it right. Some venture capitalists in the Bay Area gets it right about masks and the World Health Organization gets it wrong. Well, he's in Mexico, but yeah. I mean, I'm in a undisclosed location. Into a disclosed location. South of the water. But, okay, Sacks, should they, should they, should they, be putting labels and warnings on politicians when they say things that are consensus wrong? Yeah, I mean, call me old fashion, but I'm. very much in favor of free speech. And I'm against censorship. And, you know, fact-checking your politicians you don't like is basically bias. It's soft censorship. I mean, they're being very

selective in who they decide to fact-check. And, you know, there's no good way to do it, right? I mean, there is no truth API that they can just plug in to fact-check people. The way that you deal with bad speech is more speech. I think it's a line from Justice Brandeis. That is the way historically that we have in this country that we've dealt with speech by people we don't like, which is you have more speech. And I don't think censorship or warnings is the right way to go. To listen to the rest of the episode, search for All In with Chimoth and Jason available on all major podcasting platforms.