E23: Radical DAs, breaking down FB/Google vs. Australia, sustained fear post-vaccine & fan questions

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jk are you going to do your trump impression were  you going to do your your okay yeah everybody i'm getting my twitter arrangement syndrome right  before we start the podcast i want to warm him up this doesn't warm him up it gets them deranged get  your show notes up [ __ ] let your winners ride

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rain man david sacks it to the fans  and they've just gone crazy with them hey everybody hey everybody welcome to  another all in podcast with me today of course the dictator chamath polly hoppetea the queen  of kin wah david friedberg and of course yeah definitely the rain man is here david sacks  he's an excellent driver in the driveway yeah

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okay boys uh i guess we made it to episode 22.  your intro becomes one second longer for every episode we do it's just people love it and it's  so laborious you know they don't they think it's so stupid i am you have to understand persuasion  what i'm doing is i do the same intro and it warms

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up okay see we're still we're still talking about  the intro okay let's just see everybody's obsessed about it you prove my point all right guys are we  gonna dress elephant in the room the elephant in the room or do we just move on to topics i will  say elephant in the room after the last show um i fought very hard with the three of you  to not post that episode you wanted to can't

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you want to spike the episode i wanted to spike  the episode and i'll tell you why um i thought it was not good content i don't think vlad said  anything new or remarkable or interesting i don't think we had good analysis and i think the whole  thing kind of felt flat and felt like a pr stunt

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and i felt that truly and honestly and i you know  i made the case to you guys that we should cancel um obviously i lost uh and i think going forward  we should have a veto right but you know we can talk about that offline did you quit the show  or did you threaten to quit the threatened the show i'm gonna after this i'm gonna propose to  you my rules my ground rules for for going forward

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one of which i think should be no  more pr [ __ ] from jason's portfolio but um you know besides that i think i think i  hear a bestie guestie is that com.com at the door and i i don't think that we're journalists by  the way i don't i don't think that the journalism thing works for us i think we're like analysts  and commentators and you know we have opinions

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and so to bring someone on and try and interview  them with a four-on-one format it just feels weird it doesn't seem to work it doesn't  create an opportunity for discourse and frankly you know when you try and do  journalism in this context you either appear like you're softballing or you appear like you're  doing gotcha journalism and i think both are bad

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and so i think it works really well when the four  of us just kind of chat and analyze and shoot the [ __ ] and have opinions and talk and debate um  and so my vote is to kind of avoid doing bestie guesties unless you know it's something pretty  amazing and critical and we can all kind of build

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a dialogue with that person around a topic but um  yeah so that's kind of my where i'm sitting and how i feel about it but we've had a lot of debates  obviously since uh since the last episode about it can can i can i build on what you're saying um  you know this is like kind of like that really uh famous teddy roosevelt quote about sort of  like the man in the arena with the dust on his

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face right um i feel like all four of us are in  the grind doing things and i think what makes the podcast good is it's almost like there's like you  know in a basketball game of four quarters there's a time out and you come off the floor and you  can actually just take a second to observe what

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you're seeing and then the ref blows the whistle  and you go back into the game and i think for me what makes this thing so fun is i feel like every  friday for these two hours you know it's basically the ref calls a timeout or the coach calls a  timeout and we can just kind of take a breath and just observe all right what's happened before  we get back in the arena and so you know just to

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your point um i don't think we're journalists  and i don't think we should try to be because i don't think that's the point of what this is  it should be for friends talking about things that are important and then to the extent that  it's important and interesting for other people they'll listen or not listen and i think  these last few weeks we got caught up a

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little too much in you know ratings where is  it ranking how can we go higher and it's that the gamification of people's reactions that i  think caused us you know to do that um whereas the episode before i actually kind of liked because  draymond is legitimately one of our really good

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friends you know he's a bestie we see him we  see him many many times obviously less during basketball season but a ton when he's outside  we play poker together we all hang out together so it's that to me i think is sort of  inbounds um last week and then also you know

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last week i was i think we were all supposed to  be on point i'll just tell you personally for me i had an extremely crushing two  weeks of work i was extremely tired i ended up literally unplugging and not doing  anything for three days straight and sleeping um and so i didn't even do my best even just to  be either supportive or you know uh argumentative

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with vlad so i don't think i got anything out  of it myself okay coming around the horn sacks do you how do you feel that episode stands on  its own obviously it's very polarizing we got barbecued in the comments we got barbecued  on reddit we got barbecued on social media but then there were a large number of people  who said they really liked it uh my mom um

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david pr my portfolio manager right i mean people  who liked it excellent right there's 12 people in the watch fun give us your candid assessment  because you weren't as hard as these other two on it yeah i wasn't as hard as these other two and  i do feel like that if they felt they that we were

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soft on vlad then they should have brought it  harder and they should have gone after vlad and challenged him more that being said i completely  understand and agree with what freeberg is saying that look we're not journalists we're not playing  a game of gotcha it's not our job to go after vlad

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i think a lot of the you know the comments on  twitter that's what they wanted us to do but that's not who we are you know um it's difficult  for business to sex i mean if you're attacking vlad and then the next day we have to go into  supporting founder mode it's kind of a bad look isn't it yeah i mean it's not what we do right i  mean we we are like your mouth was saying we are

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in the arena we're doing things we're not critics  sitting on the sidelines pointing out you know what the doers of deeds did wrong you know and so  it's not our job to you know run an inquisition on on vlad you know and so we're not really  equipped to do that i think i think freeburg is

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right that it doesn't really make sense to have  guests on the show if the job is to you know to get to the bottom of something as investigators  you know we're not we're not investigators and it was you know a big story uh just to  sort of put a cap in it from my perspective you know i'm always supportive of my guys i try  to be supportive of whoever i invest in and i

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try to give them the benefit of doubt and this  is a situation where you know people are upset there were mistakes that were made and so i  think anything other than demolishing vlad is considered by some constituency as a failure  right and so what are we supposed to do here i can't be trashing my own company that i'm an  investor and a supporter of and founders who i

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believe in it just it would well i think there was  a moment there was a moment in the pod jason where i think actually uh so on the whole i thought  vlad did it did a good job in accomplishing his objective on our pod which was the same objective  he had in front of congress which was basically

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to run out the clock without saying very much you  know and uh you know he actually whoever prepped him for for congress did a pretty good job because  he testified for five hours and said nothing quotable you know which which is pretty much kind  of the goal during that situation it's kind of the goal for your head down yeah exactly so but  there was a moment in the pod last week where i

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think vlad got himself in a little bit of trouble  freeburg did ask actually a pretty tough question about the guy in the street who who had lost all  of his life savings how would vlad respond to that he made this claim well i saved that person money  because i shut down trading at the high and then

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we pointed out no i mean it was a high because  you shut down trading you have the causation backwards and then you you ran and said whoa whoa  whoa whoa you know well my guy was on the floor i got to pick him up what are you talking about i  called the timeout i got in there but let's yeah exactly yeah all right let's move on let's see do  we talk about the insanely high profile guest that

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was planned for march 5th that just canceled on us  no no we should we should talk to you do we put it on the tab because i you know this this the other  thing about protocol i'll just say freeburg is if we have a guest on you cannot just spike the  guests if they took the time to be on that was my

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unless you tell them before they come on i may  say we might spike it if it doesn't if we don't like it yeah do they get that right none of us do  this for a profession none of us are getting paid we don't have any advertisers like i completely  agree we're not here to get a tr machine for people i mean vlad had his friggin pr woman  sitting on the zoom call while we were doing it

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last week you know like i just don't think that's  a little inside baseball that got interesting i think explain what happened when well no we don't  have to go there jason i just think i just think what freebrook says is right like we we do this we  don't make any money from it we do it because we

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like to talk we i think we all learn from it  i think other folks enjoy it they learn from it but i do think that freeberg's right we're not  going to be used as a shill i think we're learning i think we're learning what the ground rules  should be just like any other business vlad's made mistakes he's going to change we've made  some mistakes and we're iterating and i think one

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positive iteration that freeberg has proposed is  if any one of us don't like an episode because we think it's basically moving away from our values  we should be able to spike it and i i support that i support it generally but i don't like the idea  of inviting a guest on and then it doesn't go well

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and then telling you know from our perspective  it makes us look bad and then we tell the guests well you came out that's good and we came out down  there we're killing you no no i don't think that's the point i think what freeberg says is like  look this is not for to be a marketing thing and

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so we're going to ask things that are exposed that  are about having a real conversation where there's real honesty and if you're going to just be there  and bat around as sac said to run the clock out then we're just gonna spike fair enough fair  enough i think if that's communicated ahead i'm okay by the way come with your a game and this  is a great segue to talk about what actually we

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were a person that was gonna come on and realize  that they probably were going to get so pilloried um that they basically spiked themselves  uh is yeah they opted out jessa boudin the the district attorney of san francisco tell tell  the guys what happened sex well no we we invited him to come on the podcast no no we didn't  invite him to come he an intermediary said

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that she could get him on the pod would we like to  have him on the pod we said we discussed that we said sure have chested on and then go from there  sex we didn't like seek him out he was well okay so he he great so he but he agreed to be on the  show and then you our scheduler got an email out

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of the blue like a day or two ago saying sorry  he's not coming on the show no explanation right isn't that what happened yeah that's basically  it i mean so look here's what i would say is um chaser mr district attorney you don't have to come  on the show but i will challenge you to a debate

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anytime anyplace any format on your policies  in san francisco so if you have if you have the huevos to engage in a debate i am ready and i  thought chaser was a guy who had a little bit of courage i mean there was that night when people  were discussing the situation in san francisco and on clubhouse and he jumped into the room so  i thought this was a guy who had some cajones

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so chase if you have if you have the hotspot  if you have the cajones if you have the huevos let's debate let's talk about your policies and  by the way he's an expert this is what he does you know he's an expert isn't he a defense  attorney sacks you're going to have a he was a public defender he should he  should mop the floor with me i'm just some

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shallow tech bro yeah tech bro who doesn't  know anything who he can easily demonize so i would say come on let's go let's do a  debate i'll agree to whatever format you want but we need to talk about what's happening in  san francisco because crime is out of control and it's his fault trigger the young  spielberg rain man song right about

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we should talk about what's happening in san  francisco okay so since since the last pod there there has been another victim  um sharia muslim who was a young young man from from originally from kenya  who he came to the united states for college just like hannah abe uh who was killed on new  year's eve uh he went to dartmouth all of his

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advisers said he was brilliant he had a young  wife and a three-year-old baby he was in san francisco for 10 days goes out running and  gets hit gets gets killed by another drugged out hit and run driver who had been uh named um uh  let's say i think it was uh jerry jerry oli adams

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or something like that um i don't have the the  guy's name but he was arrested four or five times in the last year and he was released every single  time by boudin's office it's it's just like the new year's eve story where you had this repeat  offender troy mcallister hit you know he was he

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had stolen a car he was fleeing another crime he  had committed he was on drugs and he killed hannah abbey and elizabeth platt and this was this was  another case where he was caught five times over the past year and every single time he was not  charged by buda and he was just let go and so we have this case we have a district attorney who  doesn't want to prosecute people his agenda is

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decarceration it's like a fire chief who doesn't  believe in using water yeah and he is part of the burn it all down party yeah let me challenge you  with the argument he might make which i think i've heard him make a few times um which is really  um a position on the criminal justice system

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not necessarily on local prosecution but really  what he says is once um you know once someone ends up in the criminal justice system in the united  states it causes this cycle of recurrence and the cycle of repeat that is very difficult to get out  it basically minimizes the opportunity for reform for an individual for a criminal to to reform  themselves and to have a shot at being a

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successful member of society again in the future  and the objective is find other ways to to kind of accelerate reform and not use incarceration as  the only tool in the toolbox what is um you know what is the the argument back to him when he makes  that point because i've heard him make that point

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a number of times and how do you kind of move  past that uh that point with him yeah so so the the i'm not saying that incarceration is the only  answer but boudin's only answer is decarceration he doesn't want to prosecute anyone he doesn't  want to lock anybody up and we see the results immediately in this community you have these  repeat offenders now killing people they should

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have been locked up it's you know boudin's always  putting forth these elaborate theories this is you know the the central chronicle an article  about it about why these crimes occur and he never wants to put the fault on the people who  are actually perpetrating the crimes it's always economic desperation he just put afford  a theory that a decline in tourism

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is causing uh people to commit more uh home  invasions you know he he never wants to yes this is in the service of chronic article here i'll put  it up on this i mean it's crazy i mean the other thing you left out david i'll say is and this was  really you know hits home to anybody with kids is a food driver for doordash not that it  matters which service but uh was in san

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francisco's pacific heights neighborhood which  is the safest and most elite neighborhood uh in it's you know the beverly hills or bel air  of san francisco and his car was carjacked with his four-year-old daughter and two-year-old boy  inside now of course you should not be leaving two

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kids in the car putting that aside that mistake  which i'm sure this father is suffering over but he needed to make deliveries obviously he  made a mistake of leaving the kids in the car but we all got an amber alert last week on our  phones i mean this is the level of lawlessness it's turned into escape from new york level  gotham city level chaos and the criminals know

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they will not be prosecuted and this is the  key criminal justice problem here if you say you are not going to prosecute crime and you  demonstrate to the hardest core faction of criminals that you don't prosecute they're going  to take advantage of that weakness and and that's what's happening let me take the counterpoint  just for a second just so we can construct

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what the other side of the argument looks like the  other side of the argument says okay these folks are largely you know engaged in an enormous amount  of petty crime to support their drug habit right i think that's probably the and that you know  underneath that is just an explosion uh of opioids

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and fentanyl and whatnot underneath that is sort  of economic uncertainty that's been compounding and just basically crusting over um and so folks  would say okay these guys are a victim of a much broader economic malaise that needs to get fixed  i'm just i'm just you know you're shaking your

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head jason but i'm just saying i think that  that's where the trail of breadcrumbs grows in the counter in the counter in the in in the  counter argument so well th th these are these are the types of arguments that chaser makes in order  to um obfuscate and disguise that his real agenda is basically radical decarceration you know  he's got this this childhood background

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where his parents went to jail when he was just a  baby and he grew up he says his earliest memories are visiting his parents in jail and it profoundly  affected his political views and now we have to suffer through this we're suffering for his  childhood trauma here's his childhood trauma and so so tremoth you're right about deeper causes  but it doesn't excuse the need to lock people up

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when they are dangerous to the community and it's  not just petty crime i mean let's go through the actions he's taken as da okay so first week on the  job just about he abolished the whole cash bail system okay which voters in november just voted uh  in with prop 25 to affirm so voters of california

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want the cash bail system because it keeps  criminals locked up what chase has said is that he would replace cash bail with an algorithm well  what exactly is that algorithm he won't explain well he won't submit to third party audit there  is no algorithm they're just letting people go okay then the next thing he did was fire seven  veteran prosecutors in the da's office who weren't

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on board with his agenda these are people who  have spent their whole lives prosecuting murders rapes i mean hardcore crime and it takes years of  experience to learn how to be a prosecutor like that so for him to just purge this office of these  veteran prosecutors is a disaster for the city

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i've been talking to people who used to work in  the da's office and they tell me that the problem goes much deeper than that that in addition to  these seven veterans he purged over 30 prosecutors which is about a quarter of the whole office  have left under his reign because they don't like working for him so you know and he complains about  being short-staffed he says a lot that he can't

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you know prosecute everyone needs to be prosecuted  he's so stuff the reason he's short staff is no one wants to work for him you know by the way i  think it's worth highlighting this guy was elected right so the the the city the voters in the city  runoff i understand right he won by something

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like 2000 votes it was a tiny tiny number of votes  regardless people voted him in on a platform that he very clearly articulated and is now realizing  in office so there's something about that platform that i think is worth noting was and is appealing  uh and and probably is to a large number of people

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largely right and no the the the part of it that's  appealing okay is that is that is that we we do believe that there are too many people in prison  and that a better and a better way to deal with a drug addict who commits say petty theft is to send  them to treatment okay as opposed to putting them

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in prison right so i think we can all agree on  that but but his agenda is so much more radical than that he just doesn't want to lock people  up take um take troy mcallister okay this is a dangerous person who uh he was uh he was facing  trial for his third strike okay he committed armed

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robbery he robbed a store with a gun okay he was  facing a third strike for that for that robbery and one of the first things uh chase did when he  came in was basically uh releasing for time served he basically pleaded that down that was someone  who's facing a life sentence that is the reason why hannah abbey and elizabeth platt are dead  is because he didn't want to prosecute that's

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a violent offender sex i i'm not disagreeing by  the way i think like what is interesting to me is that so many people um have an eye on and  agree with the notion that criminal justice system needs reform the problem is realizing  that reform with a radical district attorney doesn't really resolve to a solution it resolves  to more problems on a local level what's good

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and even chase said this publicly which is like  you can't just solve this problem from the da's office it is a much bigger and broader problem  and the radical action he's taking isn't solving any problems it's creating far more and um i think  it is worth noting though that there is should and

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likely will be especially with uh kamala harris  uh um as vice president some attempts at reforming on a federal level um uh you know how how  criminals are treated how the system realizes opportunities for them to reform and come back  into society as productive members but to your point you lose all sense of safety and security if  you try and do it solely on the local level well

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let me let me ask a question like look now we have  basically political activism and judicial activism on not just the right right people used to pillory  trump for putting in all these you know extremely conservative judges who felt they were gonna just  sort of like legislate their own point of view

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you know supreme court nominees who  were going to try to overturn roe v wade uh but it turns out it's happening on the  left as well i guess just more at the local level um how pervasive is this like meaning the issues  of san francisco are they are these the same issues of other cities and towns in america well  i mean you've got gascon in la who's running the

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exact same agenda as chase abu deen he's not  prosecuting third strikes he was just sued by an organization of deputy da's and the judge is  now requiring him to uphold the law which is three strikes he will not bring third strike charges on  his own he's also this is both gascon and boudin

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now have prohibited prosecutors from attending  the parole hearings of dangerous convicts murderers rapists whatever and victims groups  are up in arms because they need a prosecutor to go there and explain to the parole board  why this person does not deserve to be released and so you now have recall movements forming  and by the way they've also done stuff like take

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death penalty off the table they've take taken  gang enhancements off the table they're like voluntarily they're unilaterally disarming  their their the prosecution teams they're taking away weapons at their disposal to lock  people up and this is why you're already seeing recalls forming around guests going into la  there's now a recall of uh boudin forming okay

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david david go back to what friedrich just said  they're probably not doing a bait and switch on their platform so let's just like what do  you think it is about what they are saying that resonates on the way in with the plurality  of people yeah here's the thing that resonates um and and it's not that again it goes back to this  idea that incarceration is definitely not the only

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answer this is where i agree the problem is budin  is on the other side of it where decarceration is his only answer right we need to use uh multiple  weapons or tools in our toolkit here so hold on so for example okay let's take the let's take  the drug addict who commits a petty theft we

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all agree that person should go to treatment not  to jail or prison right a non-violent of course offender okay reason but how how are you gonna get  that person to go to treatment because right now there is no leverage whatsoever to get that  person to go to treatment because boone's just not bringing charges he's not prosecuting the  choice should be given to that person listen you

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can either go to jail or you can go to treatment  what's it going to be yeah that's right right now we have all these social services guess what  nobody uses them because a hardcore addict is not going to avail themselves of those services  i would make the argument that we have a broader

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bigger problem with the criminal justice system  as it operates and it is deep and it is complex and it is friggin awful there's a book from a few  years ago that this guy named shane bauer wrote i'm just trying to remember the name  i think it's called american prison and uh the guy goes undercover and he goes and  works in a in a in a penitentiary in louisiana

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um and he reports on what the conditions are like  and these are these these prisons that are run by private companies that are contracted by the state  locally and what it's like to be an employee at one of these companies and what these employees  do and how the prisoners are treated there is no

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system for reform once you end up behind bars  in most prisons in the united states and that is um you know he makes the argument others have  made the argument that is a has a long history that dates all the way back to slavery in the  united states and in some cases it's just about ineptitude in some cases about unions especially  in california where we have a huge cost for uh for

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corrections and for the uh the health care and the  pensions for corrections officers and so there's a lot of complex competing interests in history  that relates to why this criminal justice system doesn't largely work on a moral and ethical basis  as we might all kind of you know wear our hearts

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and look at like at how things are working and  so the problem is everyone sees this or a lot of people will see this voters will see this system  treating people poorly being inept being corrupt and they want us being racist and they want to  fix it and the way they fix it is they see a guy

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who shows up and he's like i'm a sledgehammer and  i'm going to fix it i'm going to take care of all these people and the reality is when you try and  take a shotgun and shoot it inside of a room it's going to cause more problems than good and i think  that's really what he is he is a manifestation of the anger of voters and the  anger of people that look at how

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complex and racist the system is and how difficult  it is to resolve these problems and we're all looking for a simple big hammer answer and he's  got the biggest mouth around the biggest family and that's why people vote for him all  right chamoth and then we'll wrap it here absent a few uh words specifically racist if you  took that out you could use that entire statement

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you said and describe trump as well meaning the  left and the right are moving to these polls where it's all about authoritarian sort of strong men at  the federal state local level folks to your point david that just want to go and take a sledgehammer  to things and depending on your political beliefs

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or depending on the biases or depending on your  life lived you're going to gravitate to these two polls and what's crazy is over the next 20 or 30  years these polarizing figures will become crisper sharper smarter you know they'll find a way to  foment all of all of the support without any of

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the long tail shittiness that trump figured out  like trump was you know he's like a beta test of an idea right he was like version 0.1 wait till  we see version 1.0 of the american strong man or strong woman it's really going to be [ __ ]  scary well yeah and this is this is a guy who um uh was a fan of of hugo chavez long after he  revealed himself to be a strong man intent on

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ruling for life and so yeah he is very much in  that mold he is a sledgehammer to the system but but look i think and and the problems are big and  complicated but look we all have a role to play the reformers have a role to play public defenders  and defense attorneys have a role to play and the

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district attorneys and prosecutors have a role  to play and the problem we have right now and the role of the district attorney is to prosecute it  i don't think that this by the way sacks is a very difficult problem to solve i think there are just  so many misaligned incentives it's very clear that we don't try to reform people when they go to  prison and that there's a weird incentive when

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it's a for-profit prison and the customers and  the revenue is based on how many people you have in the prison so if we just get rid of that  there's no private prisons where people have an incentive to keep people in there and then  if we made treatment free for everybody and had over capacity of treatment centers and  then we look at the drug schedule and say

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these are the drugs that are not these are the  drugs that are not harmful and these are the drugs that are really really really harmful we're  looking at a fentanyl issue like it's a cannabis issue and that that's drugs you know cannabis  versus fentanyl is like a nuclear bomb versus

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like a slingshot it's sure there's no  comparison between these two things right and but here's the thing no one's going to  treatment when they're not forced well of course right but there's no treatment to go to maybe  the weight for treatment is six no no no that's not true that's not true we have a lot of social  services that aren't being used there are there

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is a lot of treatment available people don't  want to do it unless they really have to let me bring it back to where we were before maybe the  right thing is to actually have a bunch of these sledgehammer folks go off for the next 10 or 20  years you know the trumps and the chesabuddins

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maybe they're all the same and maybe what  we're all just saying is enough's enough this system doesn't work so let's just tear it  down every single brick of it brick by brick at the local state and federal level all i'm  saying is um just i just want to get your reaction to that statement guys maybe maybe that's what  we're seeing people are that that is what bhutan

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is doing is he is deconstructing the district  attorney's office from the inside he is destroying it he is not bringing charges against people  he's driving away all the veteran prosecutors he's bringing in all his he's bringing in his  own people who all were uh public defenders

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and have that mindset and people are dying look  we can see the results right now in the streets innocent people are dying hannah abbey elizabeth  platt cheerio it's an emergency but at chamatte's point is there any validity sacks or fredberg to  the burn it all down cause chaos and then people

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come in and say you know what that's not gonna  this doesn't need to be fixed let's have a new discussion will nuance be added to this discussion  sacks we need to improve things incrementally okay you're not going to make things better by  dismantling the whole district attorney's office i mean come on we need to improve things  incrementally yeah i mean look everything looks

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exponential until it cycles back so you know  you're only going to have so much um evolution to gotham in san francisco until enough people  put their hands in the air and say okay you know time for a change let's go back and let's start  fixing this they are they are saying that that's why we're having that i mean there's a recall  chesa budden movement flexing a muscle and making

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it stronger i think you know we're learning a lot  about what approaches to criminal justice reform work and what approaches do not work and it is  clear that a local only non-prosecution position is not going to work with respect to both criminal  justice reform and the satisfaction of the society

32:45

at large um and we're realizing that and i think  we are inevitably i mean there's so many people that are up in arms we are inevitably going  to cycle back the other way at some point very soon here yeah and honestly i think you guys  are over intellectualizing this a little bit you know when when sharia uh died because he got  hit by by that repeat offender they asked his

33:04

uh wife who's responsible for this she said very  clearly the d.a that is who is responsible and she's right let's stop over intellectualizing  this i know the problems are big and complicated frankly people like chase up prey on that because  they can kind of obscure what they're doing with

33:24

you know some nice sounding obfuscation some  nice sounding words but the reality is he's not prosecuting the way he needs to we got to stop  this yeah and it is possible to have nuance and to hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time  david you could there's a practical reality too

33:40

people cannot murder people people cannot  drive in cars and run red lights on fentanyl while saying the criminal justice system is  incredibly biased and racist and people who are of color in texas you know wind up in jail  for five or ten years for selling a bag of weed and then we're investing in companies that are  making weed gummies or people are buying stock

34:02

in weed companies at the same time you can't have  one person who's a black teenager in texas going to jail for decades for doing what somebody in  california or seattle or canada is getting an ipo for i mean this is a fundamental injustice in  the world and you're right that's something that

34:18

chester preys on but there must be nuance here  where we look at each individual situation say what are the ways to solve the problem surgically  not with a shotgun to david freeburg's point but with maybe a scalpel and a sniper rifle do  we want to move on to questions from our audience because they submitted hundreds of questions  or do we want to move on to the australian news

34:39

and facebook backing out of publishing news if you  like let's end with the q a i think saks what the [ __ ] is going on with facebook and australia  and climate change and this is insanity yeah so i think what's going on in australia australia  is is contemplating a law that would require facebook and google and i think just those  two companies to essentially pay royalties for

35:02

hyperlinks to to to news publications and i think  this is mostly at the behest of some powerful uh newspaper magnates down there i think like  rupert murdoch and i love the way you say magnates it's like well they are i mean you know um and so  uh it but but but this issue is going to be very

35:22

closely watched by europe and maybe even the u.s  um it's basically a tran like a a wealth transfer from google and and facebook to the traditional  media and to traditional publishers um this is an issue where i actually um side with with  zuckerberg and facebook on this i mean i kind of threw up a little bit in my mouth saying that  but um but uh no but look tim berners-lee has

35:50

come out and said that it could really interfere  with the open internet and the world wide web if you start to tax hyperlinks i mean historically  hyperlinks and the titles on hyperlinks were um were were fair use you could you could use those  things without violating somebody else's copyright

36:12

or need to pay them a royalty and so i think  that it's it's bizarre to me that that facebook and google wouldn't now be able to use hyperlinks  and i'm kind of worried about where that goes and uh you know i so facebook facebook said that  they're not going to publish links now for australian news and then but then they followed  that up with they were also going to start

36:34

dismantling any anti-climate change content i  don't know if that's just just an illustration well there's labeling so there's another thing  going on which is they've decided not to label any posts involving climate change which  is part of the whole censorship debate and um and so yeah i mean well it's separate but  related in the sense that the traditional media

36:54

is cheering on censorship but then when facebook  essentially uh censors these links because they don't want to pay royalties to traditional media  then the traditional media is up in arms and so they're very selective in how they how  they view these issues my principle is very consistent which is i want an open internet  i'm against censorship in all of its forms and i

37:16

and i you know and i'm worried that this new  australian law could really lead to some lead to an overall reduction or shutdown here's what's  really i think going on is that with fair use the doctrine of fair use it's a four-part test uh  you're a lawyer obviously you know all this sacks

37:33

but to sort of educate people in the audience who  don't there's no specific uh number of characters no specific percentage of the original work that  you uh can use you to clear yourself of fair use fair use is a test when it goes before a judge a  judge looks at this four-part test the percentage

37:52

of the work you used is the public confused is  there some educational or criticism version of it so if you were to use 10 percent of this podcast  and you were to wrap it with you know put us in a picture window and you were 50 of it there  was no confusion that you were commenting on this that would be fair use or if you were to  use it in educational system and if you were

38:12

monetizing it now if you were to just clip our  podcast like this one website clipped the podcast and made 60 clips of it took our file and i sent  them a cease and desist actually and said hey don't do this we're doing it ourselves they fought  us they said we're fans and i said i don't care

38:26

if you're fans or not you're not linking back  you're not giving us credit and you're doing 60 clips if you want to do one or two clips and you  want to comment on it that's fine but you can't take all 60 clips and make a 60 clip version of  this um and so fairness is in the word fair use the problem with zuckerberg and with how google  has used journalists content is they are clipping

38:50

out specific sections of it and putting  it in something called one box on google so many of you might have said how many people you  know how many pounds are in you know whatever or what time is this tv show on and then the content  that was made by the ringer or the new york times gets clipped and they put just that section david  with an algorithm and they give you the answer so

39:12

you don't need to go visit that website this is  tipping over into what i would call unfair use because you're eliminating the person linking  now let me finish yeah if it was just the url and you didn't pull the headline you didn't pull the  abstract and you didn't pull a photo that would be

39:27

fine there is a very easy solution to this which  is if you want to pull the link and the headline you pay zero dollars but if you want to pull  anything else a hundred characters etc you need to get a license from that person unless you are  doing actual criticism so there's nothing to stop

39:46

anybody in australia right now from taking  a screenshot of a new york times story or an australian you know newspaper story and writing  some commentary on it you just can't wholesale take everything and so what we're seeing here is  a real-time negotiation between private parties into what is fair and i think google has  a really rich history of sharing revenue

40:07

the app store they give 70 to app developers  youtube they give 55 to creators and with adsense they let you put adsense on your website and  they give you 68 cents on the dollar or something in that range they never actually disclose the  exact percentage but that's what i'm told it is

40:22

facebook has given zero dollars to instagram users  zero dollar whatsapp uses zero dollars to facebook folks they're too greedy and what facebook  needs to do is either not use the content or come up with some reasonable payment and come  to an agreement with these folks who are now banding together and they're realizing the traffic  we get from facebook and google is not worth

40:43

what they're taking away from with us which is  all that revenue that you know they earned in the free market and so this is a free market debate  and i think the government should stay out of it to a certain extent and let the free market work  which is all publishers should get together in the

40:57

united states and confront facebook and say pay us  unless you use anything more than the headline but jason i think these things are interconnected  though right on the one hand if you're if you have an economic stake in distribution of content  but then you're also then going to decide under you know an opaque definition what is truth or not  truth you all of a sudden just become i mean the

41:22

purest form definition of a publisher right and  i think it just becomes a very treacherous place for both facebook and google to end up in so it's  almost paying the bell by the way yeah no you're right google's paying for it facebook's decided  not to but facebook they said something like only

41:39

four percent of their their their posts involve  this kind of content so it's just not a big deal for them the way it is for for google well i  think it is a big deal for facebook they're just trying to make a point here because zuckerberg  yeah yeah and they're they're being they're being they're being overly heavy-handed in their  response yeah there's no question about they're

41:57

throwing their weight around it doesn't look good  but i'm not defending facebook i'm defending the principal i mean look if this australian principle  were used you wouldn't have the drudge report you wouldn't be able to create a site of newsletters  no you could if it was commentary you could put

42:11

the link and right it's when you just rip the  links people are objecting to ripping the links without any commentary judge reporter rewrites the  headline puts his own spin on it and then links he would never get caught into this and there is  no publication that would ever object what they're objecting to is taking the photo taking the first  paragraph and the the the synopsis is 30 or 40

42:32

percent of the value and so facebook is a better  and twitter with their algorithms are better front pages than the new york times front page  well why isn't this applying to twitter then i i think it will ultimately they'll go there as well  i think this will become the test case which is

42:48

if you want to take more than just the headline  and like you know basically that's it or the url if you want to have that little snippet pay us  pay us something it doesn't have to be a lot but this could actually solve if these networks  that are making tens to hundreds of millions of billions of dollars if they just said you  know what one percent to the news organizations

43:12

to keep them viable just like anybody else would  pay on the licensing fee for terrestrial rights why is the australian government setting the price  and why are they only applying this to google and facebook well i think they're going to go right  down the line i think it's just a starting point

43:26

but to my point i said earlier is i don't think  the government needs to do this right i think the news organizations on mass should get together  and put their foot down and say no and if they did they would get it sounds like what the government  should do is clarify what fair use entails maybe it's just maybe it's a link plus a title i  mean look it's it's never just a link right it's a

43:46

hyperlink plus the the plus the work yeah exactly  yes the snippet is the issue right so fine so the government should clarify what fair use is  and then if google and facebook or ever want more they got to go negotiate for it exactly but but  australia is doing more than that they're setting

44:03

the price and they're limiting their overreaching  policy just to google and facebook because they know that if they applied it to everybody  by the way we do that we already do this in the united states david with local carriage  of uh news organizations on terrestrial tv so we already have we already mix it up with the  ftc doing this with licenses and the public good

44:23

so it's the extent i think the other thing that  you know is going to happen with all of this is like on the other on the other side of this  the actual media organizations themselves that theoretically could benefit from this are frankly  just going out of business anyways i i there's a you know there's a wall street journal alert um  for the owner of the la times who's about to sell

44:43

the times like it's very likely that the times in  four or five years doesn't even exist so i don't really know where all of this goes except that you  know everybody's just going to be an individual person blogging and tweeting whatever opinion they  want right so there'll be no money to pay anybody

45:00

because it won't really matter but what will be  left is then these rules on arbitration of fact and fiction and i think that that's where we're  going to end up that's going to be a crazy place because then those folks those folks  then really are the puppet masters yeah i i i agree that these traditional  publications have like a fundamental

45:18

business model problem and it's not going to be  salt like i think there's a like a misplaced blame on facebook and google i mean the fundamental  problem with all these publications are you go search for a news article on something and  there's like 10 versions of the same thing or more

45:33

100 versions and you know when newspapers we saw  thousands of newspapers all across the country and they had a local geographic monopoly but once it  all got digitized and moved online you realize how much redundancy there was you have thousands  of reporters creating the exact same thing and there needs to be consolidation it doesn't  make sense to have 100 articles not only that

45:53

but a point we made last time which is um you know  facts have largely commoditized or most facts like you know remember we used to open the newspaper  and look at what the stock market prices were we we opened the newspaper looked at the sports  scores we looked at what happened in this place

46:08

in this place facts about events facts about  the prices of things facts about sports scores that's all completely commoditized i mean that's  like 90 of the content of what people used to read the newspaper for has gone online and so as we  talked about last time newspapers and publications

46:23

of the like have largely moved into you  know different sorts of narratives and um you know it's created a a marketplace that  has a lot more competition because anyone can write that as we're seeing with sub stack and  medium and as we're seeing with our own podcast that we're seeing with our own podcast and i  think that's um this feels to me like you know

46:42

i went to a media conference back in 2008 and  there was this huge battle between google and viacom and i was at the conference and i  think larry page was on stage or someone or eric schmidt was on stage and the viacom ceo  got up and he's like when are you gonna start paying us for our content and uh i think that  that and he really screamed at him in a room of

47:06

like 800 people and i feel like that same kind of  point of view has persisted until there's finally some legislation that they feel kind of gets them  justice meanwhile the world has passed them by and you know i think this uh this will be kind  of some transitory uh legislation that ultimately

47:22

the content is going to democratize anyway and the  content creation's going to democratize last topic for me because i really want friedberg's answer  to this because i also just saw an alert how the federal government is opening up a vaccination  site in miami-dade county i actually saw francis

47:36

suarez retweet it um what the hell's going on with  vaccinations are we going to get vaccinated soon i said it in december and i tweeted about it and  i've repeated it multiple times since that the u.s has enough supply to vaccinate pretty much anyone  that wants to get vaccinated because we are producing and delivering three to four million  doses per day in the us right now and um there

48:02

is a just a fundamental issue especially like  i mean look at california you know they haven't opened up quote unquote vaccination to people  outside of tier or what they're called tier 1a and so this is much more of a kind of policy  issue than an administrative issue than a supply

48:19

and demand issue there's enough people that  want the vaccine and there's enough vaccine so just let people get [ __ ] vaccinated um  and so i feel like the market forces are now kind of converging with policy a little bit more  than they were a month ago and the policymakers are no longer fighting and complaining about  supply and complaining about constraints you know

48:37

we've got mass vac sites now in california the  amount of money that's being wasted by the way in this process makes me want to vomit every time i  read about it that's a whole other separate issue but it feels to me like we're probably may june  when enough people are vaccinated that we can have you know a circumstance where people are  going to fly without masks and be comfortable

48:56

doing so but i'm sure there will be these over you  know constraining rules around what people can and can't do in public for a very long time like i  mentioned would happen i do want to say one thing that i've noticed we were we were all we played  some poker the other night we were with a friend

49:11

who uh got vaccinated and i was like he said this  is my first time playing poker with people and i was like well you got vaccinated like why are  you he's like well i don't know if other strains are going to get me or you know if this thing's  evolving and other people are going to get sick and um if you think about what's happened over  the last year people have been conditioned to be

49:28

afraid and so even though we're getting vaccinated  even though this thing is moving and working i'm concerned that we're not going to end up in a  more civil state schools aren't opening people aren't flying people aren't doing stuff even after  vaccinations and science and data shows that these

49:43

things are okay texas in florida or maybe there's  something maybe there's some cases of it but what i'm saying is like you know the human subconscious  gets trained first and then our conscious mind rationalizes what we feel we've all now been  trained over the past year to be very afraid and then we all come up with these rational  excuses about why i can't do x y and z it's

50:04

like but you've been [ __ ] vaccinated you're  fine like all the data all the science says go do whatever you want to do go into a nightclub sweaty  next to people robbing beats yes tell us about the throbbing nightclub yeah it's like they've never  seen you so animated it's like that scene from

50:21

goodwill hunting i remember when he talked to the  psychologist he's like tell us about your rave did the molly just kick in friedberg did  you drop a molly at the start of the pod but my point is like people are really  afraid and i think uh i just got the best idea for an episode the biggest concern  i have is frankly less about are we going

50:45

to get vaccinated i feel like the convergence  between market forces and government nonsense is now going to allow us to all get fascinated  but the issue is really going to be like how do you break through these rules and the fear  that that's basically because i want but i don't understand where where are the max vaccination  sites in california and who's eligible like

51:02

why aren't we just making this thing  like a drive-through this is where we can absolute violent agreement that california is so  messed up with respect to how we're vaccinating we have so much supply we're sitting on half our  friggin supply right now in california 30 million vaccines sitting on shelves we are now at 75  percent deployed 80 california's got like four or

51:24

five million vaccines sitting in storage it should  be a drive-through and you just get in line and you go and sometimes what we're doing is you know  but in what we're doing now is you got to schedule oh yeah scheduling's [ __ ] because you first  you got to qualify then you got to schedule

51:37

an appointment and then the the the clinic or  whatever's only open from nine to five and so like how many doses are they really administering  when you've got to make an appointment probably one every half hour so maybe they get through  16 people a day or something qualifications yeah and they can find a million dollars and lose their  medical license if they inject the wrong person so

51:57

i mean you're talking about 16 people per day at  a site when they could be doing a couple hundred i mean it's crazy well johnson and johnson is  coming and that's refrigerator stable right freeberg so you don't even need we now have bought  1.2 billion but let me go back to freeberg's point

52:13

about when will life get back to normal i'm not  as pessimistic as you are dave about this idea that life won't go back to normal and part of  the reason why is i'm seeing so much outrage about school closures right now california is  one of the only states in the country that still completely closed all the schools and people are  absolutely up in arms i'd say it's as big an issue

52:33

as this exploding crime issue crime is a big issue  in the cities and school closures is the big issue in the suburbs and if these two things don't turn  around i think avenues is going to get recalled i mean people are just on fire about this yeah  but i mean my point was like our our wealthy

52:50

conservative you know uh friend that lives  in florida was afraid to go do stuff even after he's been vaccinated yeah and i think that's  what's permeated everywhere it's just like there's free work it's like a shark attack you know if  there's a shark attack you know at half moon bay

53:06

or whatever people don't swim there for a couple  of weeks and then somebody swims and they're like oh the water's great people will jump back in i  think it's april david to your point of when this goes back to normal because if you look now people  have been saying freebird correct me if i'm wrong would you put a 5x multiplier on the  confirmed cova cases a 4x multiplier

53:24

5x i think is the right medium medium so if you  have 30 million people who've had the vaccine uh had covid you're looking at five times that is  150 now you have 60 million people who have been vaccinated we're at 210 there are 330 million  americans 70 million are under our kids so

53:40

you know we're basically getting to herd  immunity and if you look at the slopes right now what is causing the drop in cases this massively  david is it herd immunity vaccine or are people suddenly wearing masks what is it there's  complexity because everyone assumes that there's one thing that affects the whole population but  remember the way viruses work is they're hyper

54:01

local and so the local population dynamics looked  at on a scale is where you see the statistical results of the scale and so you know we saw this  in north dakota a bunch of people got really sick they got to herd immunity in communities and  then all of a sudden it dropped off the curve

54:16

when you zoom out and that's happening combined  with behavioral changes combined with vaccines then you start to see these statistical things  happen at scale so it's not a simple answer but the answer generally can be we are coming down  the slope we are getting to a point of you know general like low case counts low death counts low  fatality and we should be living a normal life

54:36

allowing our economy to kind of progress again  um and we're still caught up in this kind of fear fear um let's just do this end on this pick a date  when you think all four besties are vaccinated i'm gonna say april 1st june june okay what do  you got free break i say april 1st we're all going to be vaccinated it's literally a choice i  mean any one of us could go get vaccinated in the

54:57

next month i mean how none of us are over 30 bmi i  mean saks was for a minute california's opening 1b a lot of the other states are opening broadly if  any of you wanted to get on a plane and go get vaccinated somewhere else you could i mean there's  enough places now that have open vacs or will in

55:11

the next 30 days you can go get vaccinations  okay so you say 30 days which would be march 15th or so yeah i think that's a choice  for the four of us if you guys want to hop on a plane we can go get vaccinated does anybody have  access to it sorry but doesn't that kind of you you're saying in an open vac state anybody can  show up without proof of advice you have to have

55:28

a driver's license i've looked into this there  have been different ways that this has played out but generally speaking there are market forces at  play where you know where there's a will there's a way not saying that you're cutting line and  screwing people over but there are vaccinations

55:41

that are happening all over the country now with  people that want to get vaccinated by the way in california next week tier one b opens up so  anyone what does that mean what does tier one be it's a total bs definition it is absolutely  ridiculous i absolutely think this is the

55:55

biggest waste of time and money ever but tier  one b definition in california is health care work sorry child care workers so anyone  that's a teacher or works with children uh if your nanny or your daycare uh people um you  know wanted to they could go and get vaccinated oh wait our nanny can get vaccinated starting next  wednesday in california and so all you need to

56:15

do is go get to a vaccine with vaccines and by  the way they all a lot of them have vaccination um supply now uh or they will this weekend there's  apparently big shipment going out um and also all food and agriculture workers loosely defined so  people that work in grocery stores restaurants farm workers you're saying anyone should have  anyone if you have a chef they can get back to no

56:35

no i think two people out of four on here might  have chefs i think two of us definitely don't so so if you take care of your own kids and cook  your own food you can't get vaccinated but if you do that for somebody else you can so wait you're  saying if you have a chef and you have nannies you

56:49

get vaccinated no you don't you don't saying is  you yeah if you're a chef or a nanny for someone else you can go get vaccinated next week right  but david what do you want for dinner i'm coming over right now to make whatever you want i'll  watch your kids this weekend david get me a shot

57:05

it's so insane we have all these ridiculous  job categories and distinctions it's just like with the lockdown policy they had 10 pages  of exceptions for essential workers listen if you've got a policy with 10 pages of exceptions  the policy doesn't make any sense yeah like all the like and this caused all the controversy in  l.a like anyone that works in the movie business

57:24

is an essential worker but people that work  there's people that work in restaurants and bars they're not let's see this for what it is it  is payoff to doosans political supporters uh the the politicians are using they use essential  worker exceptions and now they're using vaccines

57:42

as political capital they dole them out to their  supporters so that you know in exchange for you know votes down the road also the remember the  exception david if you serve more than seven courses in your prefix you can get a vaccine  so that is the french laundry if you add an amuse booze and an intermezzo you qualify for  the vaccine there are people going to states

58:04

renting houses and getting driver's licenses  and getting vaccines i know about that's called vaccine tourism by the way think about it this way  in six weeks i think a lot of those restrictions are gonna fall by the wayside because the supply  is gonna completely outstrip the nonsensical you know restrictions and prioritization methods  we put in place and hopefully god willing

58:26

these idiots who have the ability to vaccinate  people open up their sites 24 7 and drop all the [ __ ] questionnaires and registration  requirements let people drive in get a shot wait 15 minutes and leave and have just some  basic principled people on site that can take care of people if they have a adverse allergic  reaction and get shots in arms we have the shots

58:48

we have the supply we're going to be over supplied  by may we're going to have far more shots than there will be demand and so you know we just  need to get this this kind of nonsense thrown out the window straight to q a this is from uh  vadesh he says where are you investing your money

59:04

over the next 10 years so friedberg you want  to start and then we'll go to saks and then pretty largely uh you know on the podcast i  mean two areas that are super interesting to me that i'm spending a lot of time on is obviously  biomanufacturing so the idea that we can kind of move away from traditional animal based  agriculture and systems of production to systems

59:29

where we use a genetically engineered microbial  organisms to produce molecules and materials and food and that that that system of production can  have a radical impact on on the environment on the opportunity for jobs on the cost of goods  and uh and things that humans want and consume

59:50

and that's that's a primary area of interest for  me and i think it's a multi-decade i think by 2050 you know we should see um most of our goods  that are manufactured rather than being made in the traditional sense which is basically  old technology scaled up uh which is what the industrial revolution did uh but really  shift to a new model of manufacturing where we

1:00:11

use a smarter machine which is a gene a biological  organism to make stuff so that's my risk sex yeah so i'm i'm focused on the area of bottom up sass  which is basically business software that can go viral uh very much in the mold of yammer which  is a company i founded and sold back a dozen

1:00:29

years ago it was a precursor to slack let's be  honest right it could have been 27 billion but you did not ride your winner you took the quick  billy and that was not a mistake because it lets you invest in the other 20 unicorns correct  kinda i mean so so so oh you do have a chip on your shoulder about selling too early no no no  no it's not a chip i would say that around the

1:00:51

time that paypal hit a 200 billion dollar market  cap and slack had a 27 billion dollar outcome i started realizing you know if i just stuck with  my ideas longer you know i probably would would do better and i'm like you know i don't really  need to come up with a new thesis or a new idea

1:01:07

i already came up with the idea 12 years ago which  is to make business software viral i'm just going to keep investing in that thesis so it's not that  original or new for me but um but but it is you know bottom up has become the i would say almost  the dominant mode now explain that to somebody who doesn't understand what you mean bottom up  yeah so so bottom up means that the entry point

1:01:30

for the software is any employee in the company  they can just start using it they go to your website they start using it they spread to their  co-workers as opposed to down top down is like the oracle sales guy who carries a bag and goes to  meet with the cio and you know sells them a big

1:01:44

expensive implementation that's the and that's  traditionally what business software used to be is a is a big top down i t sale bottom up is this  is going in through the rank and file employees all right chamoth poly hoppitya for the next  10 years where are you putting your money uh two areas uh inequality well it's not even  10 i would say for the next for the rest of my

1:02:06

life um so it's i think these are multi-decade  but uh inequality and climate change and so um you know the inequality side what does that mean  it's any by the way the second you said inequality and climate change sacks left like he  went to throw up yeah he's like what he's read he went to throw up he's like oh god  here we go there he's back now he's back zach

1:02:46

he just called the security he went and he  kissed his gold bricks that he keeps in his house no inequality basically means uh anything  that evens the starting line so they if that's healthcare software that solves  a chronic condition or if that's financial software that drives inclusion um  and then climate change is pretty obvious but

1:03:08

the the panoply of things that we need to do to  basically you know slow the warming of the earth those are the two areas huge opportunities  for vadesh if you even care i take a remora like approach um if you don't know what  a remora is you ever see like a big shark and then there's like a bunch of things stuck  to it and it's like following the shark and it

1:03:29

just eats whatever so basically what i do is i'm  getting behind these three guys and i just draft on these three sharks and just try to weasel my  way onto their cap tables it's a it's a living you know basically let's go to the poker game  and try to no uh in all sincerity i am stay i am

1:03:43

vertical agnostic because i think the great  companies uh make the verticals they create the categories and the categories don't exist at your  schedule particularly yeah what's that all right yeah and so what i do in the early  stages i am focused on the process and the process i'm trying to master here is what  i do with the syndicate.com which is find great

1:04:03

companies and share it with now 7 000 accredited  investors and let them decide you know how much they want to invest in each deal and just to give  people an idea we are on a 60 million dollar run rate this year of deploy capital via the syndicate  in other words it'll be four times five times what

1:04:22

my fund will do the fund has access to 100 of  deals but the syndicate has access to 60 roughly so now that we've broken our no advertising role  no i mean we're all talking our book here let's take another question um and uh angel is available  from harpercollins business what oh here's a good one by the way if you want to save money on  car insurance metromile.com sorry go ahead

1:04:46

absolutely fantastic also the ticker symbol  uh what's the biggest investment venture miss you had early starting out that would  have been a ridiculous return what is our anti-portfolio looking like friedberg we'll  start with you and then go check out thingosax i was with um jack dorsey and um in at  this conference and he went around and

1:05:11

did a pass of the hat and who wanted to  invest in his new startup called square that's my story what what is that a 50 is that  a 50 million dollar myth um yeah i'm not going to say it it would have been bad 50k in at 10  million but i mean the pro here's by the way an interesting thing going back to this the point  sacks made earlier and that we've said in the past

1:05:35

you know when square went public there was a lot  of questions and trepidation around its valuation big fund managers were poo pooing the company and  what's the market cap of square today sacks you might know 100 120 120 billion wow i mean 125  billion today that's incredible right because

1:05:52

like when they went public people were kind of  poo pooing it saying this thing is a this is a sub billion dollar company you know it shouldn't  be worth anything more than a billion dollars and look at it just a few years later um anyway yeah  i missed it i missed that one on the uh seed round

1:06:05

and um and i've just watched with with all what  you get to innovate as a public company it traffic a four billion dollar valuation it did right it  did like five years ago and so within five years it's gone from 4 billion to 124 billion i was in  a venture capital fund that invested in it they distributed the shares i sold half and i was like  i'll just keep half i like jack i sold half at 72

1:06:28

and now it's at 276 and so ride your winners  folks uh saks anti-portfolio which one is the most painful honestly i haven't missed that  much to speak okay um unbelievable what a douche well actually um i i analyzed my chess game  with peter thiel and uh actually my check

1:06:54

my castle uh queenside castle was actually a  brilliant move uh if he hadn't pinned by no i mean look i uh i i i ten i i look i don't  overthink these things too much i mean it's why i'm in like 27 unicorns if the company  looks good i i invest uh is this phil hellmuth what would you say your total like multiple  is on all your angel investing like that's

1:07:24

not the question saks answer the question  come on the audience asked what you missed can you just be humble enough to say yeah  yeah no no i'll tell you i'll tell you so this was a sort of a semi miss is that um oh my  god it's not even a mess well here's how i made up for it no no put in half my normal amount no  no let me tell you what happened i did miss it so

1:07:43

uh back in 2007 um i thought twitter was going  to take off i had a like a former employee who wanted to sell secondary and so you know i had a  deal worked out to buy i think a couple hundred thousand dollars of shares at i don't know 40  million dollar evaluation or something like that

1:07:59

and um we submitted it to the company and then  they roofered it for because i think chris for chris sacca basically i don't know if you remember  saka had set up like some secondary secondary thing yeah so yeah the fact that you know i wasn't  able to complete that transaction probably cost me you know a couple hundred million bucks uh chamath  anti-portfolio what's this i have a huge airbnb

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portfolio huge robin hood you know airbnb at a  billion obviously i actually did invest i agreed to invest but then i got into a huge public snafu  with with chesky because he was taking a bunch of money off the table and then we ended up not even  finalizing the investment and your letter was your

1:08:38

letter was published your email was leaked  my email was leaked yeah it was leaked so i was really pissed when they did that but anyways  that was a decade ago not much has changed i guess um there is one thing that above all others which  is sadly also in my portfolio so my portfolio my

1:08:57

andy portfolio is the same thing you can guess  what it is but that's bitcoin at one point you know we controlled low single digits mid  single digits of the entire float and had i held on to that that's talking about you know a mid  deca billion dollar position so my anti portfolio uh in in the unrealized loss and unrealized  gains or losses if you will on bitcoin

1:09:21

is in the many tens of billions of dollars yep  mine is clearly bitcoin as well because i was reporting on it when it was 10 cents and i was  one of the first journalists to write about it and talk about it on my podcast and i had like  maybe 10 of these bitcoins in a wallet of um that was a mount gox and it got hacked and it all  went away and then my wife bought it at under 200

1:09:43

and so now we have a joke in the house that my  wife is going to because of her incredible trade because she she saw it as well um return more  on her it's conceivable she'll return more than my entire investing career so shout  out to jade uh for getting that one um actually i i made that mistake too that's moth  made of not huddling enough long enough so that

1:10:05

that is that did you guys see did you see this  article i i fished this article out but in 2014 i was buying uh a land at mardis camp in lake  tahoe and i told the sales guy there jeff hall i said hey listen i'll buy this lot if you let  me buy it in bitcoin because i wanted to promote bitcoin bitcoin as a transactional infrastructure  so we went to a company called bitpay they wired

1:10:29

it up and i bought it for 1.6 million dollars  in bitcoin that was 2 800 coins which right now is worth 140 or 150 million dollars what are you  going to build on that lot are you going i don't you should make it a grave you should make it a  grave plot you should just well my my ex-wife owns

1:10:48

a lot i hope you know she enjoys it but i'm saying  you literally could have bought the next lakers and the warriors and been the majority owner  in each all right let's take another question what's the number one macro uncertainty  or risk you guys are most worried about

1:11:05

for your investment portfolios there is only  one and i think it's inflation but i think it's important to understand where inflation is  coming from the single biggest risk to all of us is what's going to happen in the  following order of operations so i think all of this sort of at the coming  out of the pandemic basically what you're going

1:11:25

to have is like four or five major trading blocks  in the world right you have china as a standalone you have europe as a standalone you have america  slash north america under biden i think it could be more north america as a as a standalone and  then you have these sort of what i would call

1:11:42

random you know friends with benefits africa  south america japan korea okay but those are all bit players to these three huge trading  blocks everybody was going to go and they're going to go and get vertically integrated so it  sort of builds a little bit on what david said like you're not going to have you know one central  place where you get this thing basically i.e china

1:12:05

that you ship on a boat to get over here for a  whole host of reasons national security carbon etc so you can have all these vertically you know  vertically integrated supply chains and resilient economies you know what that does when you have  to try to build that stuff prices go screaming higher because instead of having one factory in  china making nine billion iphone cases you have

1:12:30

now 50 factories all around the world each with  their own infrastructures and costs and whatever and so i think you're gonna reflate the world um  i don't know when it happens but um that's sort of the biggest risk to all of what we do is that all  of a sudden you know real rates go to like six or

1:12:46

seven percent and then all of a sudden you're  not going to look at a company trading at 50 times earnings and say um you know you're going  to you're going to question that so that i think that's the biggest risk that i think friedrich  what's your risk facts what's your risk zach you go ahead yeah so actually mine is pretty similar  to moss which is i think we're accruing these

1:13:05

unpayable deficits and debts uh and obligations  and uh you know all this money has to be paid back at some point uh that the u.s government's  incurring i mean there's a california version of this where we've accrued a trillion dollars of  pension obligations that we have no ability to pay

1:13:24

so yeah i mean i think that eventually it  translates into inflation but i think it translates into something even worse which is at  some point people become skeptical about loaning money to the us government and the the because  they don't want the u.s to just print dollars to

1:13:40

pay back these these loans and uh the us dollar  stocks becoming the world's reserve currency i think the reason why we're seeing bitcoin go  to the moon right now is people are starting to speculate on the idea that that this might be  the future world reserve currency because it's not subject to manipulation by by you know um  by central banks and uh and and you know

1:14:04

and let's think like that that world looks if  you think about like a world in which the the us dollar is not the world's reserve currency  anymore in which the government is basically uh broke i mean that is it's it's pretty scary  to think about there's a ray dalio who's a um uh famous uh and you know prominent uh hedge fund  founder of bridgewater associates wrote an essay

1:14:29

if anyone's interested called the big cycle of  money credit debt and economic activity you can find it online he published it last year highly  recommended reading he has a few chapters that that proceed and follow that talks about the grand  macroeconomic cycle of governments and societies

1:14:47

and it's really worth the read um i think one  really basic principled economic point is that governments operate in such a way that their um  their people ask for goods and ask for services um the government spends on those services  by borrowing more than they're making in income in that year um and and that is i think  the uh you know the premise for a lot of how

1:15:10

governments operate around the world the only  way that that works over time is if your future shows that that borrowing allows  you to grow your revenue more and therefore you can underwrite taking on debt to  pay in the future so you force growth and you know i've said this a couple of times before but it is  the most basic principle but it is also the most

1:15:33

scary and shocking principle which is the only  way you can afford debt is if you have growth and that forces you to find growth and when  you're forced to find growth you get all of these unnatural perturbations in terms of economic  activity and market forces it is not necessarily the case that things should and would always grow  and we force things to always grow because of the

1:15:55

mechanism by which we fund our services at a  government level and that is what's basically going to ultimately lead to a lot of different  types of crises both kind of financial crises but uh but also societal crises in terms of you know  revolution and and social pushes for socialism and

1:16:14

and all the other things that that are  typically associated with things like inflation um and so it is it is the big crisis of the the  21st century will be you know we underwrote growth in the 20th century um and there's a lot of uh  forces that that make kind of you know bring that

1:16:31

all to kind of bear this section i see one that's  maybe a little less acute and a little bit more big picture which is the number of people living  in democracies in the world as a percentage of population which has been going down uh which if  you asked anybody they would be pretty shocked to hear but just looking at the percentage of  humans on the planet not the percentage of

1:16:51

countries because the percentage of countries that  are democracies or you know flawed democracies um is right now at um you know 45 percent and we  have 55 of regimes are authoritarian or hybrid and the population of people living in those  is growing so we we have countries that are authoritarian that are growing countries that are  democracies like in europe or or in the west and

1:17:17

the u.s canada are declining and or not keeping up  pace in terms of population growth and that is uh i think going to be the the major issue which is  does china win capitalism plus authoritarianism where does democracy plus capitalism work the next  question i think is super fascinating uh which

1:17:35

is what would each of you wish you could teach  every 12 year old right now what a great question chamath uh you want to go first do you have  something that comes to mind do you need a minute to think about it well it's such a fabulous  question that's a great question there's so many very personal for all of us yeah there's so many  answers there uh well let's let's workshop it

1:17:54

anybody else what comes to mind is very this  is very tactical okay so i'm sure there's like grander things but just the two things we're not  really teaching are coding and financial literacy and those are like the two big i think omissions  in the curriculum right now and would be very

1:18:11

helpful for for people to learn oh i mean on  that theme i would also then add um like better eating habits um and uh mental health exercises  um freeburg you got any that come to mind things you want your 12 year old or everybody's 12  year old to learn i think the principles of

1:18:34

uh biology and how we look i mean again like  i feel like we underestimate and we don't talk enough about the opportunity and the reality  that is about to hit us like a tidal wave of bioengineering um you know everything in medicine  is moving towards this notion of using biological machines to fix our bodies like not just a  molecule which is the historical way of doing

1:18:57

medicine where you find a molecule does something  in the body you stick it in you turn into a drug but we are actually on the precipice of  creating machines biologically engineered or designed cells and proteins that can go into  your body and do specific things and enhance your your life and improve your health and solve you  know disease similarly like i talked about earlier

1:19:15

biomanufacturing to make all the materials and  food in a more sustainable way in a lower cost way and so i think teaching the principles of dna  how dna causes protein how protein causes function and how cells operate um and and how that is  basically being softwarized and you can basically

1:19:35

think about biology now as being software  uh i think that is the the trend of um of science and engineering i think computing  created a great foundation but i i think that's really if i were to tell my twelve-year-old  uh daughter in eight years what she should consider doing um or spending her time  studying it's bioengineering and and what the

1:19:54

opportunities are that are going to arise from  that uh all great answers i think for me i'll again move it up a level since  you guys took some of my answers financial literacy was definitely going to be in  there for me but i would say radical self-reliance and entrepreneurialism and resiliency  i think a lot of young people right now

1:20:15

don't believe that they have agency in their  lives in the world that they can create stuff that they can not be stopped if they go and do  something and they there's a victim uh mentality and culture that the system is rigged against you  and that you cannot rise above which i understand

1:20:32

why people feel that way but i actually think it's  less true than ever and so we have to basically really remind people that if you are radically  self-reliant you can live the american dream you can create anything you want there is  absolutely nobody who can stop you and you know all the knowledge you want to learn is out there  and so so the in radical self-reliance for me

1:20:53

is this concept of the ability to learn and the  ability to learn how to learn and having faith that you can learn any skill you know even 60 70  percent you know uh very quickly is what i see uh results in you know people being successful in  life this ability to take on any new topic with

1:21:11

a zeal and an understanding that you can master  it or or even 60 or 70 mastery means something going around the horn we're gonna plan a a bestie  trip and we might even allow besties to come for the first live bestie show what is your vote  i want everybody to type it into the chat room i everybody's going to type in where they most  want to have a bestie show all right i like it

1:21:34

okay so chamath and i both want to go to new york  saks wants to go to miami to see keith reboy and peter thiel his besties those are his  alternate universe besties by the way they won't do a podcast together no oh  my god how great would that podcast be i think that would be i think you call that the  righties the writings you've got the besties

1:21:57

you've got the leasties and you're gonna get the  right i'm starting the leasties it's gonna be me howard lindsen sarah cohn and uh prof g profgt why  why won't you call it the worsties the worst to be the worst yeah i'm gonna do the worsties just as  a thing i had an idea here's an idea if we want to

1:22:14

be the number one podcast freedberg do you have  any of that molly from your 1999 2000 era i've never i've never done molly i've never done it  sure you just made your own synthesis of it and took it okay great here's how to become the number  one podcast we all take molly at the start of the

1:22:32

podcast and we start the podcast 30 minutes in and  then we see if david sacks could say i love you can i just say we've done more self-referential  naval gazing [ __ ] on this pod than any other pod and i don't know this is like even worse  than you don't have to listen to it people we may need to spice and vlad nick will need to  edit the [ __ ] out of this and spike it spike it

1:22:57

all right boys here we love you boys i love you  besties love you david love you mother david i gotcha love we upgraded the david's by the way  with their outrage and cantankerous firmware which we saw from friedberg when he threatened to quit  the podcast over the publishing of the robin hood

1:23:15

no that's why we added the thirst strap feature  set that's why he went to throbbing and pulsating he was just throbbing and pulsing we'll  see you know we have time on the all-in-one let your winners ride rain man david besties we should all just get a  room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's we need to get back i'm going on