False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more | LIVE from TPB Symposium!
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Segment 1
Jay Cow looks like he's going to a night at the Roxbury.
Absolutely. Look at that. He looks like Joey. He looks like Jonah's workout. Is it
terrible? Well, we joke.
Sorry to be life scared.
I mean, you look horrible. Thank you. Thank you, Chihuahua. -- fucking horrible. Okay.
Appreciate it.
Is that your lap it all. Here we go. The weather winner's wide. Rainman,
David Saffens. And I said We open source it to the fans and make discoveries.
Love you.
Thanks for coming. This is the production board Symposium
2021.
Tell us just a little bit about why we're here, David, and and what this is, and what it represents for the production board.
The the production board symposium, second ever. Thank you all for being here. We're excited. We have an amazing group of science scientists, engineers, folks from academia, from business, from the investing community, some of our investors. So we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple days.
and thought we would chase half of you away by hosting the all in pod tonight. So here we go. Great.
Okay. So first up, in the news, Rolling Stone amplifies false, ivermectin story. You were following this. Shamab, what do you think? this ivermectin controversy
and You wanna 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 k 4 ran a story and published an article on ivermectin overdoses. backing up rural hospitals. The article was titled 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 --
Jesus. -- causing emergency rooms and ambulances to back up. on September 3rd, Rolling Stone amplified the story in its own article. The only problem was they treated they tweeted it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold. It turns out the picture was people waiting for a vaccine shot 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 wanna say fake news, but I know -- It
was beyond it it was beyond fake news. This was basically a doctored up conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. Look. There you tell me if the the science of this is wrong. The whole the whole premise is ridiculous.
So ivermectin, basically, as far as we know, because we don't know that much, Axon, a handful of specific characteristics. 1, 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 4 or 5 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 for COVID nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from the basis of fact. But then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea that, you know, 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.
Right? It's kind of a it's like kind
of -- It's an ancient brand. Nobody's going there for medical use. Yeah.
But then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really, really smart, who amplify it. Rachel Maddow amplifies it 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 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 the worst part about it.
David, when we look at the ivermectin story. We also saw Joe Rogan got COVID. That was a big 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 drug for horses.
Dwormer. Dwormer. And
--
It's at best in antimicrobial. Right. Like, as
he's used for both situations and a doctor prescribed it to him, he's thinking of suing some folks for for treating this. What 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 and people having heart attacks. Okay?
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 overdoses flooding Oklahoma hospitals, but they didn't do that either. 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 hasty warmer when it's actually that is one of its purposes, but it's not the only one. It was a it was a drug designed for humans is used against parasites. Now as Tumasa, we don't know whether it's effective against COVID. They gotta do the double blind studies in the find out.
But that was sort of their first prior. And let's face it. The second prior was that this is in Oklahoma. Right? And so rolling Stone wants to believe you of all these MAGA idiots out in Oklahoma eating horse paste.
Okay? And that's why they love this story so much, and that's why Rachel Maddow love the story so much, and she then starts spreading it. Okay? And after she gets called out, including my, say, Glenn Greenwald, As of last night, she had not taken it down.
She didn't
take it down.
Now why? Because she knows there are no consequences for misinformation in lying. Why? Because Twitter and Facebook do not punish people on the left for misinformation. That is some penalty they only meter out for people who disagree with their cultural and political biases.
She's more of the secret cabal that gets the get out of jail free card.
I don't I don't even think it's secret. I just think these people all are part of the same cultural sort of mule you. They all have the same political and cultural biases. And there is never look, where is the Twitter warning, the Twitter label on the Rachel Maddal Post even now saying that this tweet, this article is misinformation.
Forever exists because it's inconvenient.
Frevert. Let's talk about the science of -- I think I
would -- -- $4 for all in podcast live.
It's dynamic.
It's like it works. Yeah.
By the way, you're on the show. So -- Okay. I'm here too.
Tell me the last time we heard a news 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 with with the audience.
have that reaction to tax. The only reason
I put up
on The Wall Street Journal just now about, like, the the Democrats' proposal on taxes. I have an emotional reaction to it, but it's fact based.
I've got a 100. Is it really? Was it?
My reaction or No.
The story.
Yeah. They just said that they the the house proposal now is to move the cap gains rate to from 20 to 25. The corporate tax rate from whatever it was to 26 and a half. But it's it my point is there are articles written by folks who just wanna 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 it's Matt Taibi that said this, because it creates moral mania,
and they won't -- Prime drives the narrative.
It derives the emotion. But it's the last grasp of power of journalism. 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 taking this book. And, you know, we'll -- But
you must have been out all the time, but you didn't have time to read those.
Yeah. I mean but you flicked through these things. They're like, they they are 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 of everything that's being reported on. I have a feeling the link that's gonna be left in, like, 10 years is the economist, and then, like, the mob rule in the metaverse. And that's kinda
Well, you also have podcasts where people can discuss these things and maybe a more honest trade -- Sir,
I'm sorry. -- a few great podcasts like that.
Mister and mister anti Facebook, what do you think about this Wall Street Journal said that there's a secret cabal that basically gets to get out of jail free card on Facebook, and nobody else does.
Millions of people, though, it's set. Right? Yeah. I -- That's a lot. you work there and
what do you think? -- exactly the point I've been making. Right? Which is that there's 2 sets of rules. If you are part of the in crowd, if you share the cultural biases, if you're part of the same class, whether it's, you know, socioeconomic or political or whatever, that of the people who are doing the content moderation, doing the censorship, you get a a get a 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 sensor. But if you're on a different part of the political spectrum, you do.
§02Segment 2
I mean, there's 2 sets of rules.
Yeah. I mean, I think 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, and you know, it's algorithmic. It's not really human control. There's There's no real intervention.
And then you find out there's actually literally something called cross check, which its definition is check the hue you know, check the algorithm in override it with my own bias. That's the 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? Even if they have pure motivation, there's no way to, you know, not -- But assume
the platforms die. Seen everything deplatforms and decentralize it. And then, like, all media is through sub stack or through the colon app or through other kind of media.
Well, decentralized. crypto
based blockchain, Twitter. There's no longer a platform. 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, you know, even more heated. There's gonna splintering of media creation as there is right now that we see today. Right? Every every element of the spectrum will be kind of produced, and you're gonna end up clicking on the great.
It's emotional response to that. Do 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? Yeah.
It's hard. Like, anything that's hard. Right? I mean, they're they're be a will. I don't think that that's really it's it's not to be discouraging.
I just think that it's a lot easier to not do that. Right? So 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, and workout, and all this sort of stuff. And I think that's really where you know, 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 loop.
I bet 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 in 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 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 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 9, like, right
wing features, bench gear.
It's a train wreck every day. And so if you're, you know, a hipster sitting in East Menlo Park, You know? At some point, like, the cuffs in your 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 we'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. that people are so like, they sniff out the bullshit. They're like, what is going on here? But then they double down.
And then next thing, you know, Ben Shapiro's 9 you know, 8 of the 10 top stories every day on Facebook, and that's how you have Donald Trump and everything else.
Next topic. Well
Go ahead.
Well, I
was gonna I mean, I don't wanna believe
it right. yourselves.
Yeah. Look. 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 gonna buy into the ivermectin hoax.
You're gonna be story here from Rolling Stone or whatever it is. So you have to make an effort to to, again, to vary your inflation, dialects.
But -- Or the lab leak theory? I mean -- The
lab leak theory. Exactly.
But what I -- Now 5 of these during the pandemic alone. Right?
Right. But, see, what what I object to is the fact that these censorship rules only seem to apply to one side of the spectrum is, look, both sides are capable of spreading misinformation, but only one side is being censored. Why? Because the people running these powerful tech companies agree. They're, like, you know, 90 plus percent of that political persuasion.
That is not healthy.
Can we can we survey
the audience and see if they agree? Raise your hand if you agree
with Saks. How many people agree with Saks that Trump should be reinstated on all platforms? Alright. There you go. you how many I proved your point?
--
people agree that that the tech platforms have a political bias. How many disagree with that statement?
nobody. Interesting.
To tell --
Build always to build -- Call back. Call back wife as a chief business officer Facebook. Thanks for that.
It's in
the viewers. Tell us. Tell let -- There's no bias for the next best thing
day. requisite handrail. For the
for the viewers at home who couldn't see that? because I don't know. Do we have the audience on camera?
No. Yeah. Go ahead. I will. -- percent.
No. Everyone. Yeah.
Everyone except for Phil Doris.
And these are Silicon best described as Silicon Valley.
--
to Marty. So that's why you have to raise his hand.
No. But to be clear for people listening
-- Phil's wife works. A 100% of a -- He's gotta say no. It's okay. It's okay. 90 nine percent.
But everybody else here Agreed with that. And these are all people who are -- Silicon Valley Liberal. They know. Yeah. They know.
So -- How
many of us are Democrats? I mean, we're all mostly Democrats, I
would guess. many people voted democrat in the last
11
years? How many are not Democrats?
How many people voted for Trump? Raise your hand. Nice and I.
No. Nobody's doing it.
Nobody no.
Literally, there's only That's very interesting.
Here's a here's a question
here's a question I have. Okay. So we are we are firmly going down because I think it's pretty it's pretty clear to me. I'd 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 you know, blowing up ivermectin 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, you know, Biden is trying to push this thing through the BLS. This is gonna 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 gonna hear over the next
Government government or private employer mandates or both?
Well, we should let's walk through it. I'm using both. For the gover government employees, let's start with that.
Yeah. Well, the government mandate. No. It goes through the BLS. It says any company public or private that is a 100 employees or more.
Well, I mean, I think we all agree that people in the military or people in health care, they should all be vaccinated or they shouldn't come to work. Correct? Well, that's what I thought.
But that's also not not even enforceable. Like, Sorkin Andrew Raw Sorkin 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, it doesn't matter, blah blah blah. and he like -- Well,
that goes to enforcement, but I mean, moral liberal risk has
said you have to be
--
I thought, wait. You brought your kid to the fucking urgent care. Don't you first need to know what'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?
A military -- Here in the world.
--
military, health care, teach
I think the crux of the issue is whether employers should be able to require that well, there there's 2 issues. One is whether employers should be allowed to require it, which I think everybody agree not everyone, but but most people I think agree that private employers, and you could lump the government in with this. should be allowed to test or their employees or require their employees to vaccinate it if they want to. And or at least I would support that part of it is let private Enterprises require a vaccine 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 know need to go beyond that to have a federal mandate 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 of questions. So, for example, I have a friend who owns a chain of dry cleaners.
Okay. He's got over a 100 employees, mostly minimum wage in a bunch of different locations. About 20% of his
employees. -- ethnicity?
What does that have to do with anything?
Just curious.
East Sri Lankan. Anyway, so --
He's the 3rd most famous Sri Lanka American.
Anyways, so He's got a 100 employees, about 20 percent of them are anti vaxx, and they will not get vaccinated. Okay? So they will walk out if you know, if this is required to put that job. Hold on. But he can't run his business if there's a 20% walkout.
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. Who's gonna pay for those tests?
Who's gonna through them, is it like, you know, they had a nurse out here with the full, you know, you know --
Hazmat.
Yeah. The hazmat thing. So, you know, that's not cheap. So how who's gonna pay for that? Who's gonna do that?
What's the documentation around that gonna be? Is it get logged in 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 5 minutes? I mean, look. If we had done what Frebrooke said a year ago on this pod, we should do.
which is have these 1 dollar 5 minute tests be available everywhere, then maybe that sort of rapid test out would make these mandates more palatable, but we don't have that yet. You know, there aren't enough for these things.
It turns out we still need it even with the vaccine. because no vaccine's gonna be a 100% effective. And with -- Right.
But but my point is this, we don't really have that solution operationalized. You know, having a hard vax mandate on a 100,000,000 employees of private Enterprises, you know, that's gonna cause, I think, chaos in the account.
§03Segment 3
What if we get a variant David or I'm gonna give this to Shamal. 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. Does that change your thinking about this mandate? And where do you stand on the mandate?
No. I I I think the mandate in this very specific narrow instance makes sense. And I think 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 nontrivial 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, we're 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, and we've created a framework for him to be able to do those things in nonnormal times and then revert to normal. I think this is one of those cases just because I don't think 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 war man mandate act across 2 presidencies to demand some companies make a dollar test. Yeah. We have 75.80 tests approved in Germany. They're down to 2 or $3. Why has the FDA not gotten us to that level that Germany's at?
And why haven't 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 is the right thing to do. And so then they invite Abbott, and they invite the the guys in, and they're like, you know, the White House. They have a a consortium meeting, and everyone's kinda a little bit chuckling about this. Like, oh, this is awesome. It's another $2,000,000,000 payday, which is what they just got.
I don't know if you saw the the write up today. but the federal government is paying Walmart for the difference between the wholesale cost and the retail cost so that consumers cannot now go buy avatars at the wholesale price at the store, $2,000,000,000 taxpayer money gone. When we could have had a bunch of smart scientists get together at the White House, with a bunch of engineers, take over a freaking factory, and on a piece of paper, print 8,000,000,000 fucking tests, and then chop them up and distributed them for 50¢. 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 all the, like, pregnancy test kits and all this stuff.
And these this, like, the the commercial model is, like, tell us how you wanna make these tests, tell us what the right model is, of course, you end up with a $30 test when in Germany you can go buy a 50¢ test at any liquor store. And so it's it's constructible.
It's straight up corruption. And if you know that, like
you know, I don't know if you guys know the the the production board's named after the
--
Straight into the microphone.
Named after the war production board, which was set up during World War 2. -- humble. What's that?
It's pretty humble.
Yeah. Took the war out. You know? But it was but it 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 2 was a supply chain problem on making tanks and planes.
And so they put together a bunch of smart people, Deutsche knows this better than
he won.
because
he was alive back.
He was alive, and he was you can look at the old photos
he was in there.
--
sitting in the phone, guys.
We'll be
--
You have the hammer for you guys. He made
a dip in the factory floor. Old as fuck. And -- Fuck. -- and there was basically a con coordinated effort.
It's a good thing today, by the way. Sorry. Lacaim, 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 kinda gave way to this model of, laissez faire. 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. Like, we don't have a wartime mentality right now. We haven't had a wartime mentality since COVID hit. Everyone's continued to try and parade around and get reelected and, you know, earn both -- So we're basically not we're
we're not taking this.
We're we're not acting. We're we're thinking, you know, like, every every time kind of 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 in a wartime phase,
and we're not. Can I ask
you a question? If you may. 3 or 4 of
us basically polarity up some money. Could you go and print 8,000,000,000 of these fucking tests?
In the US, you cannot get them approved without the FDA.
I'm not asking for approval. I'm saying, could you do it?
100%.
And how long would
it be? -- some old freaking paper milling in 3 months. You I mean, you know, this this actually, people in this room who could do
this in -- Now isn't there a framework with an FDA that basically allows you to effectively experiment on yourself?
There's a compassionate there's a it it's for drugs. It's for therapeutics, not for diagnostics.
So you're saying that if I wanna -- You can't build my own test and use it
--
If you wanna build a if you wanna build a diagnostic test that tells someone whether or not they have an an illness, you have to get FDA approval in the United States. So -- Mhmm.
And that's also -- -- published the format.
Summary statement is regulatory capture. Like, is is one of the biggest issues we have.
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 who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the US health care system?
300
to 1. Yeah.
I saw 300 to 1. Yeah.
900
to 1 today.
Oh my god.
And that is up from 5 to 1 in 1970. By the way, can
I just build on what you said? 900 to
1.
Your initial tweet said 300 to 1, and it ended in 2010 right before Obamacare passed. So from 300 to 900 was all Obamacare.
Yeah. regulatory cat check. Zach is shaking his ass.
Which, by the way, not nothing against Obamacare, because I think, like, coming as a Canadian, I actually believe in subsidized health care. And I think the The principle of Obamacare was great, but there was one fatal flaw which is it 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. What do you do? You just jack up 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 health care 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 you would have made more money being long UnitedHealthcare 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
--
Insane.
--
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, hey. I wonder why I wasn't invited. turns out, it's because they're not a union shop.
Their employees make much more money than union employees make. And But 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 EV manufacturers is only if you have Union employees. It's 45100 less to Tesla. So, literally, 2 massive regulatory captures and corruption go or maybe Saks.
to you?
No. I 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 the clean energy.
or the EV industry. Or, I mean, a little bit for EV, but it's mostly for the unions.
The 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, look inside the infrastructure plan today, we unveiled basically how we're gonna 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 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?
Sunrun, SunPower, These are companies that basically, you know, have this oligopolistic hold strangle hold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes. across the United States. And 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 gonna 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.
Frederic, 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 I look. I mean, from what I've seen, there there are great technologies that, you know, we should be able to kinda realize my understanding in speaking to investors and some in this room. And I know Timotte looked at this area a lot, is, you know, there's the the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear.
§04Segment 4
Technically, it seems like there's great breakthroughs. There was an announcement from a group this past week. CFS. CFS. Yeah.
On a new superconducting magnet system that they spent years designing. This is a Bill Gates Backed company. Anyone here at investor? No? None.
None. And, basically, it enables, like, the Tokamak plasma fusion based systems to be kind of reliably produced now. And so they've they've they've had a proof of demonstration of this of the superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma which is like 10,000,000 degrees Celsius in a little doughnut that spins around. And that plasma allows you to kind of pull energy out that can be used for you know, effectively, you put a bunch of material in, this thing runs and more energy comes out that you put in, it's magic. And so, you know, 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
4
or 5 years away. You know, by the way, everything in nuclear is always 4 or 5 years away. So 4 or 5 years away with a grain of salt. from kind of having a demonstrable kind of system. So there there's technologies that are clearly, like, on the brink or or proceeding nicely, but As we know, a lot of a lot of these sorts of technologies similarly are kind of regulatory burdened.
We're about a 100 degrees away, I think, from a from a operational functional room temperature, semiconductor. and superconductor. Sorry. And, you know, I've told a team that I'm working with on this project, I don't wanna go into energy generation or unless we can do it in a small form manufacturing thing that can be adopted broadly. But if you try to go and, you know, basically build some distributed energy resource out over here that powers Cavallo Point, it's impossible because you run into these people who don't really understand the science won't take the time And, you know, we've taken so many steps backwards from nuclear that it's probably just gonna take decades And it's gonna take some cataclysmic climate change event where the only way out is this super abundant energy source where you're willing to basically say, fuck it.
We're fucked otherwise. By the
way, if you if 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 you shouldn't I mean, it and 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 export from here to Mars to yield the best energy potential would likely be some sort of nuclear power source, right, as it is in a lot of military systems.
--
question, Sacks. Elon was saved by Obama. I mean, just kinda like having we were there even meaning, like, you know, it was in that moment. He was able to get 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 I just think it's, like, become a special interest free for all. There was an article today that the national deficit year to date is 2,700,000,000,000. And I think that we're on an October 1st fiscal year, so there's 1 more month. So it'll be about 3,000,000,000,000. Last year, it was over 3,000,000,000,000 because of COVID.
There haven't gotten to the infrastructure bill yet. That's gonna be another 1,200,000,000,000. On top of that, the Democrats are saying they want another 3 and a half well, not all Democrats, but thank god for Joe Manchin. But another 3 and a half trillion And, you know, most people can't even really say what's in that 3 and a half $1,000,000,000,000 bill. I mean, it's we're at 28,000,000,000,000 something like that of national debt.
I mean and it's all just, like, special interest plumber. 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 I understand. I mean, with respect to Obamacare, okay, that's a major item on what's called the Democrat Wish list was to give everyone health care, 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 gonna be delivered for this 3 and a half trillion that is proposing to be spent. So, I mean, it's just it it's just become this, like, you know, special free fall.
Friedberg, we talked about not having a wartime stance with the pandemic. We don't have a wartime stance with global warming or extreme weather, whichever term you want, should
we? Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean
--
We're -- Yeah. We're burning money out of milk, like a drunken sailor.
What's going on right now and, actually, a lot of what we're gonna 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. So, you know, to some degree folks might say, you know, this is gonna get solved, but there are major infrastructure solutions that are needed for us to accelerate the outcome and win the the war.
And those infrastructure solutions aren't gonna get funded by SoftBank, and they're not gonna get funded by Chamath. They're gonna need to get funded by -- Okay.
--
or type of dollars I mean, keep keep you keep building your book like you are. You you will fund them in the next decade. But Saks, you know, kinda 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. And by the way, the private market and jobs will benefit.
And what happened in this this this bill, this infrastructure bill this 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 tech technology forward. They're not creating these alternatives that we're talking about. It's just that they create 10 x and a 100 x outcomes.
They are yesteryears' solutions. and they're not gonna move the needle enough. And so, you know, look, I I do think, like, it's unfortunate, but the climate change war production board is needed 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 the free market appetite, by the way, fuels the outcomes. but it still needs it needs up and behind it.
Shamalff, 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, and and causing mess problems.
That's a that's a mouthful. I I wouldn't say that but I I disagree that people are corrupt and grifters. I I I do think that -- Really? Yeah. I I do think that there's a lot of good motivations.
I just think that the -- In government, Yeah. There look. There may be corruption, but I don't think that that's the the universal truth. Right? People are generally you you know, would we've all met politicians.
Right?
We've all met people. Which one is it?
It's it's it's a it's a point of perspective. Right? And and there's a -- -- mature 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 Are they supposed to listen to a lobby?
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 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 the when when wars happen, you know, when I 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 that really needs to be the mine we all need to adopt today, which is an existential mindset.
We need to win the war, and it can't be about what my constituents are telling me what the lobbyists are telling me.
So despite this either incompetence, graft, or or if you're more charitable, you know, it's a complex problem to solve. Despite all of that, We have massive entrepreneurship in the country. We have massive capital allocation at a 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, Jamov, is entrepreneurs in startups, who are getting large amounts of money to solve these problems because it's not gonna happen by government, obviously.
We have a ton of great entrepreneurs, and I think that we're doing things We're doing We're Okay. So this is 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 in 2006, we were racking and stacking servers at Facebook and Santa Clara. Me, Adam DeAngelo, like, we're 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 Quora. DeAngelo's like, I'm building on AWS, 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 that or if it's the tooling and the tool chains 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 2 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. 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, Illumina's patents expired. So if you're in the business of health care 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 1000 flowers boom, bloom, 90 different methods The cost of a sequence goes down to a penny.
§05Segment 5
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 that 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 their historical legacy things like patents and IP come and bite you in the ass.
sex, what do you think? Or is
entrepreneurship alone in capital allocation by aggressive, you know,
thoughtful and bold capital allocators enough to solve the incompetence in Washington or the graph to -- Well,
it it's gonna have to be. And, I mean, here's the good news, bad news. Okay? I had a tweet that kinda went viral. So when Afghanistan happened, you know, we spent $2,000,000,000, 25100 American casualties, 40,000 wounded, and what have we gotten out of it?
The Chinese are about to take out residence in in our splendid air force base. and the Taliban are one of the best equipped armies in the world. That's basically what our $2,000,000,000,000 got us.
And China is gonna build a super way. Right.
By the
way, sir,
they're getting sucked all
the way.
--
see the thing where, like, the Taliban were flying around in our helicopter?
It was
it was -- Morning.
We're in the
fire helicopter. No.
It was fake apparently.
Yeah. It was fake biggest thing.
Don't they do they do have more black holes now. --
outrage that. Apparently, the helicopters that were left behind are nonfunctional, so let's just clear that up. That's not true. Yeah.
They More Black Hawks than any other army in the world except for us. I mean, have you seen all the photos of them? They're all decked out. Our uniform is incredible. Really?
Oh, yeah. They got our night vision goggles and the whole
thing.
--
on the Internet.
No. No. No. No. They were reporting itemizing the inventory, the cache of weapons we left behind.
It was gigantic.
Alright. Let's get to the question now.
The
good news bad news. Okay.
So that that's that's the bad news. That's what $2,000,000,000,000 of government spending got us. The 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 were in Afghanistan. Yeah. And it roughly tallied up to about $2,000,000,000,000.
I didn't know that actually. I just I added up
the charts.
And about and most of it was in the last 5 years because there's actually been a huge acceleration in the amount of money coming into VC. Over the last several years, the soft banks, the Tigers, 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 $1,000,000,000,000 of, you know, early state, like, true venture money, we've been able to create the entire technology ecosystem as we see it today. I mean, not entire, I guess, to go back 20 years. There's 5 years in the late nineties. 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 about, like --
It literally had to
burn money. Every bench venture
backed company will ever stage
testing.
In the last 20 years --
Uber airbags.
-- 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 kleptocracy. Okay? So but the good news is look what we got for the same amount of money here. you know, and not just here, every every private venture backed 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 that's producing anything in our society. But But I mean, it's true. Right? But but but look at what Washington's about to do. They wanna stomp on all this innovation.
I mean, they wanna jack up the cap gains rate to the same to higher than ordinary income. I mean, that is the return on investment for the for the for venture capital, for the kind of investment I'm talking about. I mean, they wanna make it punitive. Now, that's not gonna pass, thankfully, because we got Joe Manchin, but that's about it.
By the way, I will I will contradict myself and agree with I do think there will be a 100 x, 1000 x, 10000 x breakthrough that will resolve a lot of the challenges we face as a species on planet over the century.
So we're optimistic.
I am
a 100% optimistic. I'm actually this might that's my the the the title. You gave it away. The title of my talk in the morning tomorrow morning. But yeah.
Yeah. I I do and and and by the way, my talk says absolutely nothing about the government, and I would win railing against the government. Now everyone's kinda feeling sad, and we sound like a bunch of old guys sitting at the Starbucks talking
--
Yeah.
--
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 gonna end -- Oh, fuck.
We're not
gonna end up in the computer.
--
in the government. Yeah. To solve the problem.
Right. I wanna talk about one of the
--
By the way, we should kinda be
multiple times. -- questions from the audience. So if you have a question, I'm gonna jump out there. Should we do that now?
because yeah.
I'll just end with the CCP. is now moving to breakup Alipay's business. This is after Jack Ma went on a holiday to learn how to oil paint thoughts, Chamath? 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 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 blocks to us, and we have no recourse if those guys either change 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, it they will invade at 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, We have zero capability here. This is why you see Intel head I mean, for any, like, any second, when you guys hear an Intel press release that says they're investing
$90,000,000,000
do you not think, where does Intel come up with
$90,000,000,000?
Right? This is a pull through from US government because it allows us to start to rebuild an an enormous amount of critical infrastructure that we've left to other people. So, you know, China is systematically decomposing and basically destabilizing all the China Internet companies. They're gonna control and inbound all of the critical resources and we're gonna 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 meant 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 -- Or
or get out of the way in some cases?
Or step in. And, for example, like, you know, allow the regulatory 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,
$4000, $2500.
Like, these people aren't spending $80,000,000 to defend an $80,000,000,000 business. They're spending
$80,000.
And that's why we can't have progress. That's crazy to me.
Saks your thoughts on China's recent actions to basically, deprecate entrepreneurship?
It's a it's a continuation of the trends we would talk about on the show, like Timothe was saying. I mean, they're bringing these entrepreneurs, these their moguls, their their 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 the this new law as they wanna get their hands on the data that that all They
control all the credit data of every single person that uses Alipay all throughout Southeast Asia. It's fucking crazy.
And they ever and everybody's TikTok too. fucking America. Yeah. We got that at the same time. Yeah.
It's crazy.
If if
you were running the Chinese government, wouldn't wouldn't you do the same?
I'm I would do everything that they're doing, which is why crazy to us that we are sitting here allowing it to be done to us. That's what the crazy the crazy part
is not what nothing about what they're doing.
What we
are doing is not illogical. Right. What we are doing is illogical because we should have a reaction to these things. We should have a point of view it can't be tacitly sticking our head in the sand.
Alright. Who's got a question for one of the besties? Okay. Let's try and make it a tight question.
Talk up
the book, Yan. Of course, these bills are incredibly wasteful. But you're 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 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 it's almost like it goes through a process of you take a 2 page bullet point bill, which is really what senators or congress people understand and approve, and then out comes the other end two thousand pages that are undigestible.
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.
§06Segment 6
Yeah. I'm Alex Phillip Henco. 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 4 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 Bezel, who is doing studies of media bias And if you were to actually look at how people in the media voted, it was 90 plus percent democrat. I mean, it's it's been a it's been a thing for a long time. And now it came to a head, I would say, during the Trump administration.
Because the 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 wanna call it Trump or Andrew syndrome or whatever. I mean, they now saw it as their duty not to report objectively both sides, but they would just flatly declare 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 hinged.
And I think they they kinda ripped the Empire jersey off their backs to in order to chase after Trump. And I think, you know, ultimately, they got him. Trump was a one term president, but I think that it's really contributed to the polarized media environment we have now.
Any way to get that referee jersey back on the press, you think? No. No. Sachs?
Well, how? I mean, the, you know The
the problem is the journalism and media have changed so much.
The nature of presence 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 know, we talk about the fragmentation of food brands, for example, or the fragmentation of people's kind of individual media selection. The same is happening in the press where, you know, you're now kind of gonna pick and choose the 5 articles you wanna read as opposed to buying 1 of 3 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, 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 form of media.
And guess what we end up choosing? The stuff that triggers us more and makes us feel some stronger emotion, 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, but it's it's inevitable in a decentralized world or a platformed world That's
more 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. can't really go down the middle.
I wanna feel something emotional when I click and buy and spend 99¢ or whatever. Like, it's not I just I don't wanna, like, be bored to death. Everything is so stimulating in this digital world. Like, I wanna be stimulated.
Right. So there is a really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to this, which is they they ask, you know, people on the left to 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 on the right, it was a little bit more varied.
It was the Taliban, it was China, you know, it was -- Well,
what should we be most concerned about objectively from each of you? What do you think the top 3 things we should be concerned about? I think -- That's Americans.
I I I don't think the right answer for either side is like the other half of America. I think I think that happens because you haven't varied your information diet. You're sitting there one station on cable news, and you're being fed you're being basically being fed this stuff that the others demonizing the other side Right? And, you know, the other side is, you know, is being otherwise.
Alright. Let's take two more questions, Nico.
Shamal, 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 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 gonna 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 that was a real jumping off point to other positions of true influence. Here, we started with that idea. So, like, you know, when you think about what's what played out in the 19 forties, fifties, and sixties, 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 toward the Band Aid off. And we are where we are, where it's not clear today that the most intellectually curious 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 and it is directly correlated with money. And so as you find com 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 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. 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 wanna talk about. but that actually have real impact. Sex, what do
you think of senators getting paid like CEOs? Would that help solve the problem if people could look well, I can get paid a half $1,000,000 in that job or a $1,000,000 in that job. Would we draw a different caliber of person?
I wouldn't be opposed to that. I wouldn't be a people in government, the the top people making more money. I don't know that though that that really would be the thing that attracts the higher I mean, I think most of those people go into it for for power. And, you know, 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 you know, they 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 -- Yeah.
--
before. So probably -- So let me
-- -- pay increase is not something I would be opposed to. I mean, it's it's something that's hard for them to do because it's easy to campaign against politicians who wanna 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. my question is, how do we get both sides to agree? Right? We want to get back to the truth and in science and in economics, we have a way to measure the truth in science, design, scientific experiments. 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 something. So what can we do to get back to both sides agreeing on what is true?
I 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 and the action to be taken as a result, same with any I mean, I I don't know what the viewership is of The Economist, but I'm pretty sure it's been going down
0.
Right?
But but this is why markets work better.
Thank you
for my subscription. Then then politics. Right? This is why markets work better than politics because Friedberg in order for you to sue what you wanna pursue. You don't have to convince a majority of the country to support it using it to find one person who's willing to fund it.
you know, you raise the money. So and and the same is true for every startup. And that's why progress is made by startups and not a lot of progress made by Paul.
This is
actually why, by the way,
the whole -- That's 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 it influenced our decision making, I think politics has done more to rekindle my interest in all things technology and specifically web 3.0 and DeFi. than anything else because these last 4 years have completely convinced me that we need to find a very decentralized way of building the future.
It's gonna be ugly, though. I I am I I am convinced -- Yeah. I mean, I am convinced that 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 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 was I won't give the context. I was hanging out with some people the other day. they they were they were working on my house, and they they were telling me every single one of them were trading crickets Every single one of them were tweeting crypto. And the whole conversation
--
Really expensive on it.
No. The whole the whole conversation
-- --
really expensive.
§07Segment 7
The whole conversation was about crypto, and I don't trust the US dollar and everything's inflating away. And I 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 frothiness happening as the tide rises. And I do think that that is gonna be kind of the big pushing force socially
David is why China said no more crypto. What are your thoughts? That's the big deal.
And by
the way, everyone's gonna end up saying that.
Let me let me come out to crypto. Just one point on on movement. So there's political movements, and then there's kind of economic movements like private initiative. I I wrote a blog post called Your Start as a Movement in which I compared being I 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 and kinda have a stump speech and evangelize people to your cause, which, you know, is ideally a larger mission than just whatever, you know, benefits your company.
Right? This is why Elon has been able to, you know, 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. Right? But the the difference, I think, between sort of a a private movement and a political movement is this is that when you're successful as a 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 organization will spring up to oppose you. 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 I am a big fan of startups and smart young people pursuing startups and not politics.
What do you think about decentralized, crypto, you know, finance, and America?
Should we all should
we allow it? Should we tax it?
Should we regulate it? We should clearly allow it because this whole crypto stack, this whole decentralized finance stack that's being built could very well be the future of finance, and we certainly wanna be ahead of that curve. Maybe there's some bubbles inherent in that. But I think what's really there's certainly a lot of really smart engineers, coders, entrepreneurs who 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. 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 a cent, 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, request 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. Like, China has a closed Internet. You could start to see this become a really ugly battle that 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 the great battleground to resolve this.
Well, the original battle was over information and now it's over money and the dollar. Well, I
think there there's really interesting point there, which is, you know, I remember the late nineties, early 2000 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 and and behind that was sort of this utopian idea that the Internet was gonna break down barriers and tribalism and remove geographic borders and create a single connected world. Well, what what exactly is the bet on crypto today? It's a bet that Feehaw currencies are gonna collapse and deteriorate, be undermined, by money printing. The US dollar will stop being 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. And if you think of losing waves as essentially a prediction market on what smart people think the future is gonna look like. It's pretty scary that we're going from a utopian technology investing wave to a very dystopian -- It -- -- technology investing wave. --
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. Right? So anyone who's a big investor here I'll pick out Jan because he's done an incredible job.
You know, you're putting more and more dollars in for more and more dollars out. That's the pressure, Brad. You know? These guys are under enormous pressure to get tonnage of dollars through the system in a productive way. And so, you know, these guys are at the forefront.
But when you look at, you know, most of the projects on Solana, they're seeded with a few $1,000,000. And these are $60,801,000,000 market cap projects And so I don't know how capitalism survives in that world. Number 1. Number 2, 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 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 DAO. 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 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 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, You know, I think the the the power of the individual perhaps reflected in crypto has never been greater relative to the power of government. Right? Thomas Friedberg 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 is is never been greater.
The four of you started a movement earlier this year around what was going on in California. Right? 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.
The parties have platforms why don't we put together a strategic plan for this state, a strategic plan for the country that brings in these folks The production board is a strategic plan for winning World War 2. Right? And so to Chamas 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 elobvious than DC.
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 -- Actually, I'll let you roll it.
--
really honest with you.
I think -- Why didn't you run for governor?
You're just
the one for governor.
Yeah. No. Come on. You fucked it up.
We don't we don't have as four people our act together. We are still learning because we are like anybody else in a start up, you stumbled into some success. There's about a million people that 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.
there's still if I could just, to be honest with you, they're still in fighting, bitching, complaining, you know, 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 what we but we we can't get we can't get away from ourselves. We are learning how to do that. And we've had a bunch of 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, you know, startup founder story gets pushed to, which is now what We're just gonna sit here babble on for another fucking 3, 4 years through a pandemic. And, you know, maybe you get to 2,000,000 views, 3,000,000 views. Maybe Spotify gives you a deal and you can make 10, 20,000,000 bucks a year. Who the fuck cares? So you're right.
We have a responsibility to figure out If we are 4 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 finalized.
And we we by the way, we spent we spent about 90 minutes a week on those podcast. And then -- Yeah.
§08Segment 8
We just go on to
our own lives and, you know, it's never been kind
of constructive. -- we've also tried to experiment a little bit. David, and I collaborated on getting Chesa Boone recalled, but in different ways.
David Sachs.
David Sachs literally help them start a recall Chesapeake 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 Chesobouin's office because we couldn't find anybody covering it
$60,000
showed up for that GoFundMe page, and we just gave it to a journalist who started this week, and she's reported in the 1st 10 days on 3 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, you know, example of dipping our toes in, obviously, Chamath, you know, being pushed to run for governor caught fire like, we thought that was a joke. It was literally somebody who listens to the pod, put the website up, He tweeted as joke, and then all of a sudden, it's on CNBC. But the best thing has been the feedback we've gotten from people like you, 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 that'll be year 2. It's the right
question and the right challenge, Brad. It is. Appreciate it. I appreciate it.
Alright, David. We should all that everybody get to pizza. I wanna
say thanks to the besties to Jake Hall, Tamac, Zach's.
Love you.
Love you, Friedberg. Love
you, Jade.
Love you, guys.
Go ahead, Zach.
Say,
I love you too, Freeberg. said.
Back at you. Yeah. I got you. --
motherfucker. Yeah.
And just thanks for listening to the show. Thanks to Friedberg. If You wanna make things truly uncomfortable. David loves to give a long embrace, a nice hug. Tell him come on yours.
This motherfucker.
He there's another friend who shall not be named, who is a side hugger. Nobody likes us. Who likes a side hugger? anybody's side hugging now?
--
get the full frontal hug when you
--
Full frontal hug with Saxx. Give it
to him. But I had to force him today because he comes into you. Like, stand up, I'll show you. He comes in like this. then he does this
--
The hip hug.
Like, he does he's just kind of
a -- It's a hip.
That's called Asperger. So nice to see you. It's called Asperger.
And then he was that looks like he's going to a night at the Roxbury. Absolutely.
Sorry. Your life's good.
So -- I mean, you look horrible. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. -- truly fucking horrible. Okay.
Appreciate it.
Is that your absolute outfit or what? Here we go. Alright. Let's wrap it up. Alright.
Well, this has been the all in podcast and enjoyed your time at the conference. to let your winter ride. Rainman, David Sachs.
And I said, we open source it to the fans, and they've just got the reason over.
Love you. Ice ice
cream up and rock.