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
0:19
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
0:55
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
1:13
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
1:38
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
1:52
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
2:14
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
2:36
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
2:54
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
3:09
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
3:31
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
3:48
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
4:09
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
4:25
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
4:42
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
4:58
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
5:19
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
5:39
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
6:01
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
6:20
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
6:42
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
7:00
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
7:23
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
7:43
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
8:00
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
8:21
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
8:36
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
8:59
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
9:13
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
9:33
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
9:46
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
10:06
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
10:21
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
10:35
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
10:56
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
11:19
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
11:36
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
11:53
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
12:20
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
12:44
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
13:14
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
13:38
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
13:58
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
14:17
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
14:39
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
14:59
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
15:23
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
15:41
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
16:04
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
16:25
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
16:46
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
17:04
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
17:28
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
17:49
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
18:06
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
18:23
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
18:45
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
19:08
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
19:28
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
19:50
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
20:09
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
20:31
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
20:44
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
21:03
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
21:22
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
21:40
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
22:01
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
22:25
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
22:41
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
23:05
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
23:21
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
23:42
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
24:01
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
24:23
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
24:43
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
25:06
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
25:24
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
25:44
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
25:59
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
26:19
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
26:33
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
26:53
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
27:10
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
27:25
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
27:43
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
28:01
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
28:20
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
28:42
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
29:07
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
29:23
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
29:45
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
30:05
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
30:25
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
30:44
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
30:59
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
31:17
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
31:33
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
31:50
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
32:08
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
32:29
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
1:08:23
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