This Week in Startups - All-ln E12: Biden wins, Pfizer vaccine, markets rip, Trump’s next act, COVID endgame scenarios & more

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Hey, everybody, welcome to another All In podcast. This is an all bestie, no guesty episode of All In. The last time you heard from the besties, it was election night and it was a shit show. A fucking crazy shit show. Let's be honest. I mean, we, if we go back and look at that historical document, we had moments where we thought Trump was going to absolutely crush. then we had moments of confusion and now here we are and i think we have to give a couple of

besty kudos to first off chumov pointing out pennsylvania was going to be big and then second when we went through the possible scenarios of who what what could possibly happen a big giant blue wave uh trump winning it all and then maybe something in the middle optioned three came through and that was Saxy poo nailed it. I think that was your assumption sacks, the soft landing. The soft landing, yeah.

So why don't we just for the people who didn't tune in live? Sorry, Jason, can ask you a question. Saxi poo. Was that your like projection or was it from that guy who lives in his dad's basement, his mom's basement

that you brought in my researcher. Well, Newman works for me. So we, Newman, Newman. Yeah. Newman and I worked together on those takes. But yeah, the take that we thought was possible, but probably unlikely, but could represent a really good scenario was the soft landing where you get a split decision. And I think that's what the American people voted for. You know, you had the Democratic frame on the election was that we needed a return to normalcy and decency. The Republican frame was that the radical left cannot. be trusted with power. And voters basically said they were both right. They sort of surgically removed Donald Trump while thwarting the radical left's dream of total control in Washington. And what the electorate seems to be saying is they want the parties now to work together instead of voting for extreme ideology. But TBD sacks. I mean, Georgia's still up for grabs. They're going to

go after it hard, right? I mean, they filed in Pennsylvania. Yeah. So I think there's a series of of court challenges we can talk about. I think that they're unlikely to prevail, very, very unlikely. I think Joe Biden will be the next president. We can kind of compare this to, you know, Bush v. Gore from 2000. And if you, you want to compare Trump's case to Gore's case, it's weaker in every respect. I mean, first of all, with Bush v. Gore, Gore only had to overturn one state, which was Florida, whereas Trump has to now contest and overturn three or four.

state simultaneously. Second, you know, Gore was within a few hundred votes of Bush. It was extremely close. Trump is no closer than about 12,000 votes in Georgia. That's the closest one. Third, you know, Gore, or Bush never trailed Gore in any in any recount. And Trump has that problem that he's never, and he's very far behind Gore as well. So you look at those three things and you'd say, you know, Gore couldn't overcome it. And he had a closer situation than this. And of course, I'd say finally, you know, a W had the Velvet Hammer James Baker working for him,

whereas Trump, frankly, has Rudy Giuliani, who's throwing press conferences in the parking lot of forces and landscaping between a dildo shop and a crematorium. And, I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I think somebody was tweeting, you know, this is perfect because, you know, they were saying they wanted to, Rudy to fuck off and die. So it was so appropriate that this press conference was held between a dilder shop

and a crematorium. So, you know, it's not exactly the A-Team that Trump Scott playing for him here in the courts. I mean, David Bossy, by the way, David Bossy, who was in charge of the whole thing. David Bossy is not even a lawyer. And then he gets COVID. So now he's on the sidelines. I mean, just there's so many angles we can take here, including the fact that, that, am I correct that Trump's campaign advisor got COVID, like the day after?

No, no, no, Mark Meadows. Chief of staff. Chief of staff got it. But David Bossy, who's in charge of this whole recount process, got COVID as well. Okay. So I want to just shift us now to what could have. So many things went right for the Democrats. But there was also something very clear here that happened.

which is what I call the HSP, the hysterical socialist party of America, I think was dealt a death blow. If you look, this was very close. And so, you know, even if we want to talk about the electoral college, etc., these are still very low numbers. I believe if the Pfizer news comes out last week, Trump wins. or if any combination of AOC Biden, AOC Bernie or Warren were in any way involved in this election process and Warren pushed to the side, the squad was squashed because we knew that if they got any kind of play,

Trump sales into victory. So when we look at what happens going forward, and I'll let any one of the three of you take this, What does this say about the hysterical socialist party, the HSP, the squad, the Bernie Bros, what does this say about them? Well, you have a, you have a, look, you have a loud group of people on both sides. And the reality is that both extremes of both parties actually after this election have very little to stand on that's unique.

Because if you think about what the plurality of a. Americans want is actually just a common decent centrist do no harm alternative. And they're going to pick that more times than they're not going to pick it. It's only when things get extreme like in 2016 in order to send a message, will they do it? And until it's resolved, they tried to do it again now. So we should actually talk about that. I don't think that this was, you know, a runaway. It was way too close on too many dimensions that actually matter for the future prosperity of America. But that being said, what does it mean for the future? I think the future is like Pete Buttigieg must be high-fiving, you know, the people in his camp right now because a common, decent, thoughtful, centrist platform will win.

For example, like, let's just say you believe in gay rights. Guess what? You don't need to be at the fringes to believe in that. That's mainstream. You believe in like a reasonable form of healthcare. That's mainstream. If you believe in climate change, it's mainstream. You start to go and tick off the things that the extreme.

would want to believe, there's very little room for them to stand on. So one party is going to be basically about like a federalized nanny state, and the other party will be a bunch of conspiracy theorists crazies. And I think it's going to force more and more people to the middle. I think that's the future. To me, that's a much safer place to be than I think where we could have been if, you know, Trump had won or if the extreme left had basically been validated with a candidate that won. right and I would add to that that the the proof of that the proof of the elector's desire to attack towards the center as you look at the down ballot elections so you know in the Senate the Republicans are still holding onto a majority pending the Florida runoff but the the Democrats failed to take out Susan Collins Tom Tillis Steve Danes these were three incumbent Republicans who were way behind in the polls heading into election day they didn't come close to taking out Lindsay Graham or Mitch Montgomery.

despite spending a $2 million. How did Lady G get out of this one alive? I explain that to me. Susan Collins? No, Lady G. Lindsay Graham. Oh, I see. You know, Lindsay Graham, they said that it was neck and neck, and he actually ended

winning that state by like 14 points. It wasn't close. The polls were wildly off. And you saw that across the board. In the House, too, Democrats expected a gain of 10 to 15 seats. Instead, they've lost about 10 seats. They failed to defeat a single GOP incumbent. the GOP House members ran about two or three points ahead of President Trump.

And then the Democrats were completely shut out in Texas, which was supposed to be going purple. There were eight open GOP seats. Democrats won none of them. So this, you know, so anyway, I'm providing some support to the idea that this was a split decision election. The voters voted to remove both of the, or to voted against the extremes of both parties. So Friedberg, when you look at this, you see.

I think an absolute just people don't want to deal with Trump anymore. How much of this do you think is Trump's derangement system as a syndrome? And what got Trump into office eventually taking him out, which is the guy just takes up too much oxygen in the room. And that's coming from me. And the guy is just incredibly annoying to have to deal with day to day. That's also coming from you. And that's also coming from me.

Freeberg, what do you be? I think we've, I think we've been at a rave for four years, and everyone's, like, coming down from the Mali, and you're not going to go to a Maryland Manson concert, like right after being at a raid. Like, you want to go sit in the parking lot,

and you just want to chill out a little bit, and we all just want to, like, have a beer and relax, you know? Like, I mean, I think that's the... I need some 5-HTP and a banana. You just, yeah, you want to go sit the 7-11 parking lot at 4 in the morning, and you want to, like,

go get a, fucking sweet cappuccino, smoke a cigarette, and relax. Like, it's been, it's been too much. And I think it's like, everyone's just kind of ready to chill out a bit. And so this whole fucking swinging back to the, you know, to the concert across the road sounds just as bad as what we've just been through. So let's just, you know, let's just live our lives a little bit. And, you know, we'll come back in four years and figure out how to fuck things up again. I think that's kind of the psyche. That's right. I think voters won a presidency they can forget about, you know, I think Trump's sort of Achilles heel is.

he demanded too much of the voters constant time and attention. There was like this psychic cost to it. It obviously antagonized the other side and drove turnout for the Democrats. But it seems like voters are saying, look, just leave us alone. We want to just forget about what's happening in Washington for four years. And now they can because, you know, pending the Georgia runoff, it looks like Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden will have to be in a power sharing arrangement. And nothing gets done unless the two of them agree.

And by the way, just on that, there was a great tweet by Paul Graham. he said the day after the election, something to the effect of, it feels like some background process in my computer was just killed that was consuming 5% of my CPU. And it's so true. Mac operating system spinning wheel of death. But it's, David, it's so right. It's like, you know, it's been this omnipresent thing in all of our lives over the last four years.

And it's just exhausting. And, you know, there wasn't that much value that came from. paying so much attention and worrying so much. And so it's just a great opportunity to come off the sugar high and reset ourselves and take a nap. I think that's a very astute point, Chamoth, in that what was gained from this Trump derangement, from this Trump sucking all of the attention and constantly tweeting? And, you know, I think the big win here, Herefrieberg is, if you look, the proof is in the pudding. Trump, we find out on Saturday morning that Trump is, you know, has lost and Biden has won.

And 48 hours later, we find out Pfizer has 90% efficacy on their vaccine. Obviously, these two things are highly correlated. Biden has already delivered the vaccine in just 48 hours. and then today we got the rapid testing has been approved by the FDA. I mean, look at this. At this rate, Biden's going to cure global warming by the end of the end of the year. Look, first off, I think it's a little... It is pretty paradoxical that the vaccine news came 48 hours.

I don't think it's paradoxical. I mean, that was crazy. I mean, you know, there's supposed to be an October surprise, not a November surprise. I think if Trump has any legitimate argument about being done dirty in this election, it is over this vaccine news because, you know, the Chinese announced it three hours after Biden's declared president. Pfizer announces it a day after Biden's declared president. I mean, you know, when Trump went around this, the, you know, was campaigning saying a vaccine was mere weeks away. Everyone thought that was bullshit. But as it turns out, he was telling the truth.

And if those guys had announced it, Jason, like you were saying, two weeks before the election, it might have changed this thing. thing. Now, that might have a hundred percent, 100 percent. And this is not something he can go to the courts. It's not like he can go to the courts and get the election recounted overturned because of this. So it's not something that's legally actionable. But I do think that on this news alone, Trump, in four years, we'll be able to claim on some level that this was a stolen election. But couldn't the same be said about Hillary's email server, right? So like, 100%. That news came out. And it was like timed around the election. And I do think that there was a, a concerted effort to not let, you know, the progress with COVID get in the way of the election

in any way, you know, biased it either way. And I think it's like pretty reasonable and fair to say, like, let's just not make this part of the news cycle leading into the election. And this was expected. Like, if you guys go back a couple of podcasts, like you had a prediction on when we would have a vaccine, I think I predicted end of September because of the way that they set up the production cycle in parallel with the testing cycle and the way that they were fast-tracked. a lot of the testing in a way that wasn't normal for this sort of a development. And it was going to happen this fall. If I'm an executive at one of these companies, I don't want my vaccine to become a politicized event, right? Like, I just want to be like, I think it's the reasonable thing to say,

like, let's just put it on hold, let's deal with it all after the election. We're still moving forward. We're not holding anything up in terms of production and getting this thing across the finish line. It's just the announcement of where we are. So why make that part of the new cycle, you know? And I think like people learned their lesson with Hillary's server last time. It's like this one news, you know, bombshell drops in the news cycle spins up and she loses the election. Everyone blames her losing the election for that coming out. No one wants to be culpable for that, right? I'm a Pfizer exec.

I'm just trying to make fucking medicine. Like, I don't want to be on the hook for. Said another way. Someone winning or losing an election. Said another way, Chimoff. Nobody wants to go to a Warriors finals game versus the Lakers and have the refs. call, you know, decide the game in the final couple of minutes. So do you think, Chimov, this is, if you were running Pfizer, if you were on the board of Pfizer, and you have

this information and you know it can come out in this two-week window at any time, what decision would you make, Chimov? Well, just imagine that the vaccine was 90% ineffective, and it was announced two weeks before the election. You'd have an entire cohort of people saying this was meant to basically sabotage the election in the other direction. So the point is it's a no-win situation. The only answer is to wait until after the election because that's the only way that you can actually say,

you know, we were not, we were being impartial. So I'm sympathetic to this idea that all the news had to wait two or three days or maybe it was two or three weeks. Now, knowing in advance what the answer was, obviously you can read into that. But I think even if it was 90% ineffective, it should have waited until after the election as well.

Sachs, do you agree with that? I don't get the sense that you do agree with that, Sacks. Well, let's put this way. I mean, we know from our time working at large companies that it takes them weeks to even approve a press release. And so Pfizer had this news weeks ago. Now, I understand their reason for not wanting to appear to be, influencing the outcome of the election. So that's why they held on to it. I think everybody saw the

way that Facebook was scapegoated four years ago for the election and no one wants to, no corporation wants to put themselves in that position of being accused of affecting the election outcome one way or another. I'm sure that's why they did it as opposed to a conspiracy against Trump. But, you know, this news was available. I think we will find out weeks ago. And so I guess you'd have to blame or there'd be some culpability on the part of Trump's. election team or, you know, his, his head of the FDA or what have you, they must have known some of this information. And you would think they would have done a better job getting it out there. No, he did say at every rally. It's just around the corner. It's just around the corner. We're

rounding the corner. And we all thought it was bullshit. You thought it was bullshit. We thought it was bullshit, right? And you know why we thought it was bullshit? Well, because Trump does have a tendency towards hyperbole. On Trump's most honest day, he's hyperbolic. On Trump's average day he is lying incessantly. So if anything, if he was right and he was right that we were turning the corner and the vaccine was coming and it was going to be beautiful, a beautiful, perfect vaccine and everybody was going to get it. He's paying the price for being a liar for four years. Right. But it's the kind of thing. He cried wolf. He's the boy who cried wolf. Well, and so does the media, by the way. But yeah, look, in order for a piece of news this big,

to be believed before the election. It can't come from a candidate. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's some other source. You would think that some of the people on the health care task force that Trump appointed might have been, you know, surfacing this or paying attention to it. Maybe Pfizer did a really good job hiding it. I don't know. But, um, it is pretty amazing that didn't come out sooner. Well, the, the other crazy thing is like, you know, even the Pfizer team didn't exactly know what was going on. The chief, the head of vaccine research, she said we're not part of the federal government's, you know, warp speed program. And then two days later, Pfizer was like, actually, we are part of the warp speed program. It's just that, you know, we're a supplier.

The whole point is that I'm not sure that Pfizer actually knew two weeks in advance, David. I think that they were probably trickling stuff together and they probably had a sense of it at the end of the last week. I'm surprised it didn't leak, to be quite honest. That's the more shocking thing, which means that it was probably something that very, very, very few people knew about. Well, the CEO put out a statement saying that he would be first in line to take the new vaccine, which I thought was a great statement because a lot of people were questioning whether, you know, how real it was or how rushed it was. But in order for him to do that and in order just to get, like a press release announced i don't think that's the kind of thing that comes together in the

you know one or two day period between uh the announcement of joe biden winning the election and their and their announcement so you know i i just think they had to know weeks ago i just want to say to my greek brother alberto borloss the ceo of fiser a great greek who has led to the saving of the world. Upa. Saginaki is on me. If you take 90% efficacy and you assume at most in the United States, 40% of people will take the actual vaccination,

you'll have 36% of the population covered, which is still not enough to get the R not less than one. Is that correct, Freeberg? What do you think? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not an epidemi. I'd have to.

What, I mean, does it sound directionally correct to you that the people in the States are going to take it? I mean, if you don't take it, isn't this like a... Everyone who's high risk will take it. Yeah. And as of about two months ago, you know, it was estimated that 30% of people on the East Coast had already developed immunity due to the seroprevolence studies that showed antibodies.

On the West Coast, it was much lower, closer to 3%. You could estimate based on the growth in cases. since then and assuming we're kind of missing a bunch. We're probably on a national basis. We're at 10% back then. On a national basis, you're probably up to 20% right now of Americans have already been effectively immunized by getting the virus. So, you know, if that's true, then you're at 55%.

And you're getting pretty close to, you know, an ability to kind of inhibit this thing from spreading rapidly again. So how do we each feel? I'll just go around the horn. How do we each feel about the COVID-19 end game? When will we see all schools open, all NBA arenas open with no distancing, give us a quarter in 2021 when in America enough vaccines will have been delivered and distributed and rapid testing, that life goes back to, let's call it, 85% of normal?

I don't think you ever get there. I mean, it's like we talked about this a couple episodes ago, but it's after 9-11, you know, the TSA emerged and American travel never went back to the way it was before. And I think there'll be a lot about the way we live that's going to be, you know, kind of permanently scarred and permanently changed here for a while, whether it is taking people's temperatures at football games, wearing masks and, you know, farmers markets, who knows, there's going to be all these weird rules they're going to pop up. They're going to last for years. regardless of how much immunization takes place, regardless of how cheap and available testing is, we're going to have this scar for a long time in terms of how we live as a society. I don't think we should kid ourselves that we're going to go back to quote unquote normal. And I do think kids are going to get tested and schools are going to be like this frigging, you know, almost like TSAs now. You know, kids are going to go into school and get tested regularly and they're going to do all sorts of stuff that we would have never dreamed imaginable in a free country.

a year ago. And I think that's permanent. I think, you know, we're going to, you're already seeing people going nuts at bars and restaurants and people that have had it are out there partying and living their life again. So there's certainly a lot of, don't you think if you get the vaccine, you're just going to be like, Yolo, I've had enough of this? Yeah, but I don't think that systems are going to change back to normal. I think systems have changed to the point that we've now got a way of living that we think is safer, that we think is, we are now kind of inhibited because of the system. Shamaf, you agree?

Yeah, there'll be a lot fewer. It's what Dave Chappelle said on Saturday. There'll be a lot fewer mass shootings. The pandemic has done a great job of keeping the whites at home. We watched it together. All you fucking whites. Three out of four besties watched it together. All you guys go down your mass shooting rant pages.

You know, the whites are at home. They're frustrated, but they're at home. Thank God. So I think there'll be some advantages. Well, I mean, but let's talk about it, Chimoff. Does 20-21 mean kids go back to school? 2021, September, no problem. No, I think Free Burger's right.

I think that the best we'll get back to is sort of this 80% state, and I don't think it happens until probably 2022 and maybe 2023, but probably 2022. Because you have to remember, like, we have to ramp up now billions of vaccine production. Like, this is a non-trivial path from here to, quote, unquote, mass market. And that takes a long time. I think we have to figure out how we're going to administer it. By the way, it's, and the way that the Pfizer vaccine works and maybe these other folks is you get the shot and then, you know, three months, three weeks later,

I think you get a booster. So you have to take two cycles of this thing. And it's not going to last forever. And it's not going to last forever. So this is, Freeberg's right. It's the beginning of a very different way of living. I think I think that the good part about it is that, you know, we've made a lot of changes that makes our lives a lot more efficient. The bad part about it is we're even more detached from our neighbors. And, you know, we're probably even more likely to be a little bit more separated if we don't make an effort to be together. Sacks, do you buy this? Because I get the sense that you might be more optimistic than Freiburg and Chimaud. I guess I am. I think COVID's going to be a distant memory by next summer.

I think we'll have one to two quarters of transition. But I think that once the vaccine's widely available, plus the treatment and the testings for the people who slip through the cracks. Yeah, I tend to think things are going to snap back very fast, and COVID will just be this bad memory, a very distant bad memory. And I think, in fact, I think things may bounce back the other way. Everyone having been cooped up and afraid of getting some life-threatening illness are going to come out of this, really wanting to party. I think the whole world's going to be like Tel Aviv for, you know, a few months or something.

And, yeah, I mean, I really do think it's going to bounce back. I think to the point politically where a few years from now, people could ask, wait, why was it again that Trump lost, you know? You know, this COVID thing will be, it will be so in the rearview mirror that will wonder why we were so afraid of it. I think this is, I'm going to go with David's Sax's position here because of the simple fact that we had 130,000 confirmed cases, you know, up until this election period the last week or so. And deaths still not spiking. It's a little, just a minor uptick.

You know, we had a day with like, I think maybe 1,500, but still staying in that, you know, a thousand range, even with cases spiking. And I think that we were so incompetent with test and trace in this country that we didn't see exactly what happens in an authoritarian country or a country that is lucky enough to be an island and has easy borders, which we almost do. I mean, we basically have two borders. We're like two thirds of, you know, 50% island. But Hawaii, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia, all quarantine people on the way in. They tested them and they had extremely, extremely low death counts and extremely low case counts with the vaccine being half as effective as, you know, they claim and rapid

testing, which some of us have no, some of us know people who have experienced rapid testing at homes. That combination, I believe, is going to make this go so low. And the people who are high risk are still going to be scared staying home. I think, like David, come the summer of next summer, people are going to be at a rave with Freeberg's, you know, custom-made Molly or whatever he's making during this downtime going absolutely bonkers. I think Burning Man next year becomes like the greatest burning man ever. It'll be the burn of all burns. Why was, let's shift a bit over to the economy. What a rip did we see when that Pfizer, I mean, the election and Pfizer this week led to a huge

rip. Obviously, there's a little bit of cyclical movement. The tech stocks were the big winners. Now people are starting to buy Disney back up to 140. I guess people assume the parks will reopen. What's our outlook for the stock market in David Sachs's scenario three? I don't say gridlock government, but forced to compromise government. What do we think the markets look like the next two years?

I think you have to go ahead, Saxe, but I was going to say gridlock is great for the markets, both when Bill Clinton was president with a Republican House and when Obama was president and there was a Republican House and I guess Senate for a period of time. Gridlock is great for the markets, especially given the amount of stimulus that's taken place. I mean, you had the Trump tax cuts, especially those corporate tax cuts, really set the market on fire. And then you've got this pumping by the Fed and the Treasury, all the stimulus money for COVID. I mean, those conditions. And then, you know, why is gridlock good?

We didn't explain that here. Well, because. Explain to somebody who doesn't understand why gridlock is good, why gridlock is good. Well, because it creates predictability for business. And it means that Washington's not going to get in the way and do something to screw up the good times. I mean, we have fundamentally, you know, great underlying conditions for economic growth, which is we have now pretty low taxes and we had this, for better or worse, we had this tremendous amount of stimulus, fiscal stimulus.

What we know historically is over the past 100 years, right, since the 20s, independent of Republican administrations or Democratic administrations, you know, more progressive, less progressive, more conservative, less conservative during World Wars, not during World Wars. the markets go up 8% a year. So the do no harm solution is that things inflate naturally by 8%, especially if those things are public stocks. So, you know, the markets love the fact

that there's nothing that could theoretically get in the way of that natural 8%. And then when you layer on top of it, as David said, all this free money that's just like rocket fuel, jet fuel. But you know, But you saw, though, that there was a rotation, right? There was a rotation out of these high growth software names, particularly the work from home bid kind of got crushed.

I mean, I think Zoom was off 25% over two days or some crazy thing like that. Meanwhile, sort of all of these theme park stocks and cruise lines and airlines all of a sudden ripped. So, I mean, look, the reality is the scary thing about all of this is if any of that stuff actually comes to pass, we're going to see inflation. And the reason is because if you start going out and say, spending a bunch of money on tickets and vacations and flights and this and that and pumping money into the economy and taking all that stimulus money and putting it back to work, prices will go up. And by the way, that's not such a bad thing for the economy, which needs

a little bit of it. So all of this is, I think, generally very, very good news. Freeberg, do you have a position on what you think will happen in the coming? I would think the midterm is what people care most about. So that would be, let's call two to six quarters. There's one potential speed bump still, which is what I mentioned at the beginning, which is Georgia. The Democrats could still win both runoffs in Georgia for Senate. And they could, because Kamala Harris would then have the breaking vote, it would be a 50

Republican, 50 Democrat Senate, and the vice president would break any ties. The question is, if you have that same turnout, where do the libertarians break? because I think the libertarians were almost 2% of the vote. Well, I think, yeah, what's interesting is the, I don't know if you guys have, but I've gotten emails from a lot of people asking me to donate money for this runoff campaign in Georgia. Oh, my God, I got so many, so many.

I think we're going to see literally the biggest, the biggest funding for a Senate runoff race in history by far. Don't you think, Sachs, like probably north of $100 million dollars being spent, maybe $100 to $200 million being spent on advertisements in Georgia to try and get people to go vote one way or the other. The Democrats think they have a real run at this. They think it's make or break, two years to kind of get their, you know, history-changing policies in effect. Republicans think it saved the nation time. So everyone's rushing to Georgia right now.

So the markets are going to have a very close eye on what's going on over there, I think. I'm very nervous about it. if the Democrats look like they're getting much more money into the state and they're actually going to, you know, get people to the polls and to the voting boots and actually get into this runoff on January 5th and actually flip, get both of those seats to be a, to be blue. It's going to be a very different market environment. I mean, you could see the market drop by 30, 40 percent in the next six months. We have a situation where it's 48, 48. There are two seats up for grabs. Those two seats are in a runoff.

And I want to get into the end. Let me correct that, Jason. It's 4850. Yeah. The Republicans have a 50 to 48 advantage with two open seats in the runoff. Actually, sorry, one seat is open. The other has an incumbent Purdue who's facing awesome. Purdue won in the last election.

He got like 49.9%. You have to get 50. You have to get to this runoff in January. Georgia is the only place that has this where you have to get to 50 in order to win? Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. So weird. Is this just they want the extra?

attention or who came up with this idea? This seems just like... Every state's got its own history. It's crazy. It is one of the unique things about living in the United States of America as opposed to America. Let's talk about exit polls. Well, this is what's incredible. Here, let me tee this up for you. So in 2020, Biden got 80% of the black vote. Trump got six. This is aggregate. So we can break this down by men and age group and you can. And it looks even. even more interesting.

Latinos, Biden got 67, Trump got 22% of the Latino vote. Between the ages of 18 to 34, so boomers, or sorry, pardon me, Gen Z and millennials.

Again, I would have thought 100% Biden, it was 62% Biden, 23% went for Trump, one and four. Amongst women. And again, And, you know, we thought, oh, okay, you know, suburban women are breaking Biden 80, 20.

It turned out Biden got 58% of women. Trump got 35% of all the female vote. And the coup de grace with a degree, again, you would have thought this would have been 80, 20, 90, 10, and said it was 53% Biden, 38% Trump. So this really was something, if we look at this, if we look back on this, the pollsters were completely wrong in thinking once again that these groups of people are monolithic. And then I think the most mind boggling to me, and I had a candid discussion about this was the term Latin X. is a catch-all term for people who are of Latino, Spanish-speaking descent. And what somebody told me who is in this Latinx group is that it's the most insulting thing they've ever been told.

It's almost as a term, like the term saying Oriental to describe people from Asia. You're just grouping us all into one thing. People from Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico all think the same. This is the absolute, you know, end game of identity politics, which is we have to put you in a corner. We own you. We own your opinion. And you belong to our party, whichever party it is. Oh, you don't have a degree.

You're a GOP Hillbilly. Oh, you're Latin X. Okay. Well, then we own you. You're a Democrat. David, what, and I know that this is an area where, you know, you have a lot of expertise. What are your thoughts? Well, as it turns out, promoting socialism to people who fled Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to escape it, turns out not to be a great

election strategy. And so, yeah, this idea that Latin X is one block. It's not. It consists of a bunch of immigrants from a bunch of different nations. And the ones who fled socialism are not eager to reenact it in the United States. The Republicans flipped two house seats in South Florida, where there's a lot of Cuban Americans. And even in the heavily Mexican-American counties along the Rio Grande and Texas, Trump improved, let's see, it looks like he improved 59 and 39% respectively over his 2016 showing. So this is not just some fluke of the exit polls. It seems like Trump really made progress in a lot of these groups that seem to defy their, you know, what the promoters of identity politics, the way that they wanted them to vote. Gay Americans were another one.

I think Trump improved his share of the gay vote from 14% in 2016 to 28% this year. So, I mean, really, it's pretty amazing. people are not voting the way that they're supposed to vote. Trump also improved from 12 to 18% with black men and 4 to 8% of black women. I mean, those are still pretty low numbers, but there was improvement there. And I think part of the reason is that not all of the African American community is on board with defunding the police. Well, I also think what it means is identity politics is a stupid strategy. Forget whether you're offended by it or not.

At this point, what's clear is it's a stupid fucking strategy. It doesn't work. It's a path to losing because the more and more you do it, the more and more you're going to disenfranchise individuals who want to be judged sort of sound mind and body, right? I mean, if he took a thousand Sri Lankans and put him in a room and said, Chamath, I'm going to judge you as a Sri Lankan vote. I would tell you to go fuck yourself. You know, I would be deeply offended by that.

And this is where I think the radical left is going to have to retool because their theory of how they take power in America was always that demographics is destiny. that, you know, as the country simply becomes more diverse, we're going to, they're automatically going to vote for us. And there's a lot of data in this election to show that that's not what's going to happen. You actually have to run on issues that people care about. Let's think about this in the context of internet advertising, right? The world prior to internet advertising, you had, you know, channels. And you would have an audience that was estimated to be made up of some demographic set on that channel.

and you would buy an ad spot on that channel, and that's who you would reach, and so you would create a message for that. Now, today, we can create personalized ads and personalized messages, and internet advertisers are much more thoughtful about targeting, targeting based on psychographic profiling, behavioral targeting.

And I think that's where politics has to head in the United States. It's kind of keeping up with this personalization of both products, but also of media and ads. And I think that's what we're going to see. If you listen to James Carville, who's like, you know, a classic kind of, Democratic campaign advisor. And he did a podcast just leading up to the election.

And if you listen to this podcast, these guys are very old school. It's like the whites are going to do this and the blacks are going to do that. And the college educator are going to do this and the others are going to do that. And they don't realize that the segmentation that's possible today, I think, reveals a lot more about the character of the population. They're basically, I think it's such an astute point, Freiburg. They're basically living in the level of granularity. It's like network TV. It's like they got to cable TV and they're like, okay, BET, ESPN, NASCAR.

And guess what? Like, like, the world is much more complex. Individuals have found their own personal voice. And they found their own personal voice through social media, through Instagram, through this ability to kind of define themselves not fit within a cohort. And I think that's what's... Or maybe they always did feel that way and we just had never had the technology to get there. Yeah, but I think it's also about people. Like people have complex points of view. You know, the four of us sit here. And none of us, none of us identify as a party anymore. We all identify with certain points that we think are important to us individually. And then we have a point of view on those points. And I think that's the case for the majority of the population in the United States. I don't think people are like, I'm just a fucking Democrat no matter what.

And I'm a Republican, no matter what. People care more deeply in a more complex way. And I think politics needs to resolve to that. And that's going to require a shift in how you communicate, how you message, how you get feedback, how you drive blocks for voting. And it's going to, it's going to, you know, be a really interesting change over the next 15 to 20 years. And it may be what saves the Republic.

I think this is an incredible observation. I think it might be the observation of the episode. And I just want to point to a tweet I did because this is, this election has really led to me doing two things. One, I've been just thinking deeply about what do I actually understand about Americans in America. and then I also, you know, there's all these red pills around, so I decided I would crush up a red pill and I would just, you know, put a little on my finger and I try a little red pill for a second.

To listen to the rest of the podcast, search for All In with Chumath, Jason, Sacks, and Friedberg, available across all major podcasting platforms.