guys my [ __ ] dog is in jail joker's in jail joker got in jail again okay so he's been jailed in italy he was jailed in palo alto when will that dog learn i've spent quality with my dog he's out of control why did he got jailed because he's a runner he went to he's a runner he's a runner he's a track star he uh the the we he we send him to like a you
know like the dog walker where he goes and runs around and they come pick him up but then they the guy opened the vendor anyways he gets found they they're trying to call me um because i guess my number is on the thing which i hadn't realized you don't pick up can't reach me well i'm in dc in new york and uh they put them in the kennel and we get this picture and nick you can
post the picture but you know because i sent it to you poor poor joker and dog joe he's a great dog but he is he's wait is he back did you get now he's back we got him back but he's bad he's out of jail again honestly he's only going to learn if he goes to jail you should get a little tag for him those little uh remote tracking that's not i mean it could scrape but it
doesn't stop him from escaping that dog there's something wrong with that dog remember when jax came over yeah was like growling i punched he's not been trained we have to trade him i mean i i i get it he hasn't betrayed but he's so cute did you train that dog to hate white people that dog is a little racist [Music] [Music] all right everybody welcome to another
episode of all in the podcast that you've been listening to for 48 episodes here we are on the precipice of greatness 49 episodes in with us again today the queen of quinoa your science ambassador david friedberg also on the pod the rain man himself definitely his dad lets him drive in the driveway david sacks and batting cleanup the dictator himself chamath paulie
what did we all think of last week's pod with biology i felt it got cut off too soon i was getting into a groove with biology and i'm trying to figure out how to pick that up with him because i thought that we were getting into some pretty interesting discussion towards the end and we obviously ran out of time jamaat had to hop off so uh it would it would have been great
to keep that conversation going apology i really do think there's a big question mark on like how does the decent centralized web or decentralized social networks in particular work with respect to kind of that you know recommendation application layer which is effectively what search solved on the internet um and so i'm i'm curious to
keep the conversation going and seeing you know what this means i made the decision to end the pod because chamoth had to go sax had to go there was a hard stop and i was like i don't want to keep this going without the other besties and people were very upset they thought i um shut it down abruptly but we had a certain amount of time and we can always have them back so
everybody relax but i did look at the stats we each came in with our you know whatever percent pro rata and he had double so he had 40 and we all had basically which is right for a guest i think i felt right didn't it feel right i think it's important to hear what when folks come on what they have to say um he's a really smart guy and
you know you can kind of just let him go and riff for a while um and then just react to him so i think it's it's lovely to hear such a deep thinker think out loud quite honestly yeah and even if you don't agree with him i don't agree with him on a lot of his points about you know decentralized everything i think centralized works for you know many things better
i'm curious sax you know looking back on it where there are moments that you felt maybe you disagreed with him more or agree with him more and wanted to lean into a conversation obviously it's very hard to have five people on a pod and only get a certain amount of air time etc well look i think um i think biology is a great guest to have on once in a
while i mean it does kind of turn the pod a little bit more into a ted talk uh definitely have that vibe but the the fans liked it and i mean biology should have his own show i mean he can go for a while i mean he's got a lot to say for hours yes and he has he has and and i think he should do his own show because there's definitely a huge fan base for it and uh and if people want more
biology i interviewed him for about an hour on purple pills which is kind of the the i don't know if you were called solo pod solo show that i do where i occasionally interview people on call download call in and go check out purple pills uh so yeah you know i gave biology a little pep talk coming in saying hey listen it's a round table discussion and i've interviewed you
before and you can kind of tip into the monologuing and explaining very big picture things so just try to pass the ball a little bit here and i think he he did adjust his game a little bit but it's you know it's hard to have somebody like that on i think you pointed it out zach said it's more like a ted talk for him we're having a conversation and he's used to being
interviewed and i think that is a that's a transition but you know um it was fine let's move on yeah okay so i think we'll start off with something we talked about on episode nine which was coinbase's ceo brian armstrong wrote a very controversi very very controversial blog post uh exactly a year ago coinbase is a mission focused company at the time
he was dealing with a never-ending debate inside his own company about black lives matter about social justice and any number of issues and he said listen the company is mission focused our mission is to you know make people more financially independent literate etc and we're going to ban any discussions on our electronic communications you can do things on your
own time and it was quite controversial at the time we had a good discussion i re-listened to our discu i really listened to our discussion on that pod and we all universally felt like it was the right move well he went ahead and uh picked up the hornet's nest he did not have to talk about this ever again everybody had forgotten about it and he grabbed the hornet's nest ran
into the end zone and spiked it jason can you well before you do that can you say how many people left as a result of his blog post and all do you know those stats because i think i don't have those there was a big article about it this was i think i think it was worth him doing a follow-up post this was the one year anniversary of his blog post and he
was kind of giving us the status update and what he basically said is that the policy had worked um so you gotta so first of all should we just review what the policy was the policy was that they were gonna declare the workplace to be politically neutral that people would leave their politics at the door they would not have sort of extraneous political conversations at work that
doesn't mean you couldn't support whatever causes you wanted on your own time or tweet whatever you want on your own time but while you're at work they would declare it to be sort of a political dmz like a demilitarized zone basically all he was doing was reasserting the old center the old etiquette of hey when you go to work you you're not engaged in
you're politically heated yeah you're paid to work you're not there to engage in political activism so that was the policy and of course uh the the the woke mob became completely hysterical about it uh as it turns and so then what happened is that brian offered everyone a very generous severance policy if they didn't want to stick around certainly
policies yes extremely generous they made it really easy then generous right they made it really easy for people to check out if they want to check out well only five percent took the policy people yes and then on the heels of that there was a gigantic new york times hit piece against the company the usual disinformation and slanders um against the company
and then now we have this follow-up piece and i think what brian basically reported is that today coinbase is a more aligned company because everyone who's there wants to be there for the mission that's what they focus on when they go to work he talked about how they had hired top talent away from other companies i mean basically he put out
the bat signal and people came running because you know we have they wanted neutrality they did not want it people are voting with their feet yeah they're fed up with the politics and distraction and and i think the employees were secretly relieved that he declared this policy basically he took the heat on himself for the larger benefit of all the employees who just wanted to be
there and work and not have to wonder whether they're doing something right or wrong because they're on the wrong side of a political issue friedberg nailed it when he said uh in our episode 9 which you go back to freeburg you may not remember your comments but you said what about the employees who just want to come to work and don't want to engage
in political speech now you're infringing on them to force them to be participate in these discussions and they don't have a choice because they need to feed their families need to go to work and so freiburg i think you take a little victory lap there he says in this tweet storm i'll just read the third part of it one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it
would impact our diversity numbers since my post we've grown our head count about 110 doubled it while our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved in some metrics so all of the hand ringing and pearl clutching that this would have a negative effect on the company has turned out to be wrong go ahead chamboth and then freeburn i mean if you want it's like i think
it's important to set the context for what this is there is a um a productivity war going on inside of um institutions around the world and what's happening is that people's personal beliefs are bumping up against what the mission and um goals operational goals of a company are or a university or all these other places and so this is probably the first
big example this is a what is a 50 60 billion dollar public company um 50 billion dollar public company that basically said enough's enough this is our mission everybody else um basically just needs to shut the [ __ ] up and i think that that's very important now if they then go off and actually crush their goals that's the one missing piece in all of this because when that
happens then you can write a through line through all of this and say okay this is in part what allowed them to do it so i think that the the the folks that you know uh were really up in arms still have uh one small straw in the fight which is that if these guys don't achieve their goals they'll point to this as one of the reasons why but
diversity is strength or if you know like yeah you're suppressing free speech you know that argument but i think if brian then goes and delivers a couple of knockout quarters and a couple of knockout years then you know what he will be able to say definitively which no one can refute is we leave our politics at the door we define our okrs and then we go and we
build things that people need as a company and then you go off and you can do whatever you want and i think that that's very powerful for uh many companies and institutions friedberg you heard my recap of what you said last i'm not sure if you remembered or you re-listened what are your thoughts today i think it's um it's worth just noting less about the
particularities of what was said and the particular issue at hand here and i i would look more to kind of brian's um leadership style as an excellent example of defining and creating strong culture culture in an organization can give that organization what it needs to succeed it puts everyone aligned in a specific way on how we make decisions
how we operate it doesn't matter what his particular beliefs and opinions were what to exclude what to include in the dialogue and the discourse and the model for discourse within the organization i think what matters that he put a line in the sand and he said this is what we're gonna do this is what's in and this is what's out and organizations that do that and do
that effectively generally win they win more they do better the teams are aligned the teams are more unified and i think that definition may sometimes be controversial and you'll notice that as companies get bigger go public they're larger they bring in professional managers and the founders ceo steps out they generally don't do that right they generally try to not do that
definitional work because they're trying to minimize loss and not kind of take the bet on maximizing long-term gain and doing the things that they think culturally define or will enable success long term so i i think it's a great example of leadership generally on how you kind of can um can be very vocal about defining a strong culture elon calls it i think elon calls
it corporal speak what happens most companies when they get bigger they gravitate towards corporate speak and then what happens is some cohort of employees who are really good just feel trapped in this kind of morass of mediocrity and by the way look at elon's um you know call it attrition rate right by the typical large-scale public company
corporate metric of like how many people are leaving per year you'd say oh my gosh something's up with that organization but it really speaks to a strong culture there's a company that's famous for this called bridgewater associates you know run by ray dalio 100 billion dollar hedge fund one of the best performing investment vehicles of all time and they have incredible
culture i've talked about ray dalio's book principles before and some of the work he's done on this where he is so adamant about getting culture right within the organization how you operate that they almost have i think a 30 attrition rate after the first year of people that come in because they not only try and screen for these elements of what they consider to be the right
cultural fit for their organization up front but then they also screen people the heck out of the door if they're not a good fit and and i think elon has a similar sort of model and you know i think brian the way he speaks about the organization is a similar model and it's about defining the lines it's about being very crystal clear about what's in
and what's not whatever as a ceo and a founder whatever you believe you need to believe in it strongly and you can communicate it clearly and then communicate it and then let people vote they vote with their feet they don't get to vote whether to change it they just get to vote whether they get to stay or whether they go and i think that that's a really smart i think that's well said
yeah i think there's one other issue here jake allen this goes back to your point about why did brian have to bring this back up was it unnecessary did he spike the horn assess in the end zone here's why i think it was necessary if you go to point seven and eight of his tweets storm he says it was the most positive reaction i've gotten from any change
i've made in the history of the company which is saying something how could something be so negative in the press that turned out to be incredibly incredibly positive with every stakeholder 95 percent of of employees privately all the investors were telling him it was a great thing and then what he says is the only sense i can make of it is there's a huge
mismatch right now between people's stated and revealed preferences and we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up so to me this is the point of this tweetstorm i'm bringing up now is without people like brian standing up and saying what the truth is that look everybody wants this they're just afraid to articulate the principle
uh we we keep um we keep encouraging this climate of fear and you know the alternative to coinbase you know one of the other companies we've talked about is apple i mean you can basically choose to be coinbase or apple what has apple done they booted out antonio garcia martinez because of a passage in his book that they knew about and ever since then the
company's been roiled by boycotts and petition writing from the employees about some new calls every couple of weeks and eventually that'll show up in the operating results of the business it's just a matter of time right and so so why why does that go on i mean i'm sure most employees at apple don't want to be you know constantly roiled by these like petition campaigns
uh but they have to put up with it because everyone's so afraid to speak up and that's why it's important that what brian did we have to basically recognize that this woke mob who's cowed everyone to silence is maybe five percent of these companies and if everybody just acts like brian the problem will be over well we know we know what the trail of breadcrumbs is
right now and i think we should probably you know shine a light on it which is that that five percent is uh exactly the same as donald trump they just exist on the left you know and there's a there's more and more research that shows that just as much as we thought they were right authoritarians they're also left authoritarians and this is what we're
seeing that that the craziness that you know everybody decries on the right actually also exists on the left and they just put a button on that before we pivot to the next story armstrong was very clear that the mission is about global wealth inequality so staying focused on that in his mind is the the high order a bit and will result in the most great change
so paradoxically or ironically you know all these woke people attacking coinbase coinbase might do more for wealth inequality and justice in the world if they stay focused than if they try to tackle everything and you know this is a road to nowhere for apple i think saks you pointed this out about how if you were running apple you would fire anybody who does the petition because
i'll tell you where apple is about to to basically land by enabling all of this woke mob inside their own company by coddling them addressing them and not keeping them focused they will eventually get to the fact that china is you know has three million uyghurs in a concentration camp and those uyghurs are proven to be providing through slave labor equipment and
components to companies that eventually make their way to apple products ergo apple supports slavery and that's what the employees will eventually get to and that will cause chaos but there's something even closer more closer to home that that's probably true or could be true i don't know it is true um but you know the fact that apple had the the
most important security leak in their entire software career just a few months ago is also quite important like you had a because why is it so you had a zero so the ios 14.8 exists because of why because a researcher or a set of researchers in toronto discovered that there was a zero click exploit in ios that allowed you to basically turn on the microphone turn on the
camera you know grab anything you needed from iphones it was the most secure device until two months ago when it turned out it was actually the most insecure device so i tend to think i tend to think those kinds of technical mistakes happen when people take their eye off the ball and i think people take their eye off the ball because they're
demoralized with dealing with distractions sex yeah i mean i think it's the whether it's the uyghurs or the security issue it's a good example of uh the employees at apple see the spec in somebody else's eye but not the log in their own i mean that's that's the the principle and um and they would be much better off focusing on dealing with their own
internal issues um but but let's go can we go back to that article that your mother referenced about the authoritarian anything you got anything else on this issue do you want to before we we sag way over no i thought this is a really great article do you want to explain it jay cal yeah i'll just give you a quick overview and then you can dive right in since you put
on the docket psychiatrist and rother sally satell uh hopefully i'm pronouncing that correct wrote an article for the atlantic entitled the experts somehow overlooked authoritarians on the left the main point here is that trump's presidency sparked a ton of research and coverage of authoritarianism on the right but mostly ignored the left with some
researchers even suggesting that the left wing that wet left wing authoritarianism isn't real in an email to satell a social psychologist from rucker said the following uh for 70 years the law the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism has been found exclusively on the political right why is that one reason left-wing authoritarian authoritarianism
barely showed up in social psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole sex well actually chamoth put this on the docket so dude do you want to introduce what you liked about it the reason i saw this and i thought it was so interesting was
basically we had an entire body of research trying to understand why some folks are attracted to these authoritarian figures like trump and overwhelmingly all the research at the time said they only exist on the right and you know you and all of this started after hitler and so there was all this research around the you know social and attitudinal uh reactions to hitler and
how he came to power and then all of the iterations of folks like him on the right afterwards and so people put trump in that category and then they said it can only exist there but as it turns out when this person did this research and she surveyed 7 000 people and all of this data was very well summarized in this atlantic article which i'm sure we can post in the show
notes that folks should read lo and behold it actually exists on both sides so as it turns out the extreme right and the extreme left are exactly the same they're moral absolutists they believe in themselves and themselves only and they believe anybody else that outside of where they are is fundamentally in the wrong and if you actually look at that
and see how trump behaved in his presidency and now how you see how the left names and shames you factually find a lot of commonality so the reason i found that article interesting is that it actually says again what we've been saying which is coming down the middle and finding you know reasonable compromise is the only way forward because this minute you
start moving in either direction you are the same and that person is an ugly person that we don't want around let me give the money quote and then get your feedback freeberg the similarities in the study included quote similarities between authoritarianism on both sides left and right preference for social uniformity check prejudice toward different group different others willingness to wield
group authority to coerce behavior cognitive rigidity aggression and punitiveness toward perceived enemies outsized concern for hierarchy and as chamath pointed out moral absolutism uh freebird i think authoritarian figures resolve when a population feels uh insecure so i mean we talked about this last pod but i do think that you know the notion of freedom
emerges after the comfort of security has been provided and i think the absence of security drives people away from the drive towards freedom like when you have a feeling of insecurity with respect to kind of your ability to get a job i mean remember hitler rose to power when unemployment um you know post weimar republic was skyrocketing people you know couldn't
get jobs they couldn't afford food and the authoritarian figure was going to provide the security needed i think to resolve the concerns that the population had and then you know people latch on to that so you know there are moments in time when i think authoritarianism can emerge with different forms of resolution it doesn't necessarily mean that the authoritarian
actor needs to take a left or a right point of view they're just going to give you a path to security when you're feeling insecure if you don't feel insecure you're going to say that's ridiculous so countries that are wealthy countries that are privileged with the opportunities that maybe the united states has are less likely and less inclined to fall in in
you know in favor of authoritarian leaders and then as we slip backwards economically unemployment wise etc we're more likely to be uh to be in favor of of those sorts of actors um and so i think that you know we'll see him but don't you think it's crazy that we actually uh didn't think it could exist in one end of the political spectrum and now it does you have a point in that or
no i never really understood the whole like hitler is purely a right-wing guy like he was a you know a socialist and he was trying to enable like you know socialized services and socialized systems for people you know in a lot of political circles that would be argued as being a very kind of left point of view um and so i i don't know if it yeah
let's go beyond let's go beyond hitler you're right the the nazi party was a national socialist party that's what that's what the name of the party was but there's also stalin pol pot mao i mean if you're paying attention to history you know that there's been authoritarianism on the left not just the the right and so but you know in the universities and in the
media they only want to focus on the right-wing version of it and i think what this study does is it up ends 70 years of dogma that that you know authoritarian authoritarianism is only to be found on the political right i mean it's obviously can be found on the political left as well and you can see that in cancel culture in speech restrictions in uh these um
very aggressive covet mandates that are now happening you can see it in the um the sort of the um the ghoulishness anytime somebody in the right you know uh dies from kovid i mean there's there's always some uh chortling on the part of the left about this um the harsh penalties for non-compliance i mean right now rigidity is the one that stands out for me like there is
just on the left they make a decision amazon is bad and they cannot move off of that right david like what about what about willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior and what about aggression and punitiveness towards perceived energy cancer culture that would be connected to me it begs a good question which is um what socialist regimes
have come to power without an authoritarian figure has there just none they're all revolutionaries right actually the study has a really good point about this which is they they say that um the researchers described what they called anti-hierarchical aggression so one of the traits of authoritarianism is is they call it an outsized concern for a hierarchy
but you know leftists think that they don't believe in hierarchy but actually they do they believe in an anti-hierarchical hierarchy which is they want to turn upside down the social hierarchy and they're willing to justify the the ends justify the means in other words if you can turn the hierarchy upside down they'll let you do anything and it's actually pretty scary that's
where the sort of the revolution comes from here's a practical thing jkl about what you said which illustrates this point even further right now we have a three and a half trillion dollar bill um kind of meandering um through congress and you know it's very much a question mark about whether it gets past or not and one of the elements that's in there
is free community college now when it passes if it passes there's a lot of support that that's something that the government should do it's a good thing but if you're a private company like amazon who just announced that they will give you free college they're still a bad company and and this is the example of this intellectual rigidity that doesn't
actually see the forest from the trees what do you really want do you want the process where you control and you meter out progress or do you actually want the outcome where somebody can get a job where they make 15 or 20 an hour and also now get college paid for yes much better the latter yeah much better if the government didn't have to provide i'd love i'd love it if the government
could pay for it but i'm really glad that amazon is in a position to pay for it as well but if you start to become absolutist and say well no it just needs to be top down and metered out this way and any private organization that wants to try to do it is still bad i think that's where that rigidity holds us all back it's unnecessary here's where i see
the rigidity hm off is they keep saying gig workers are bad nobody should be allowed to be a gig worker and david had a great interview with the ride-sharing guy on call-in and in which they talked about the fact and this is somebody who is super pro advocate of drivers said listen 80 of people do not want to do shift work they do not want the
government dictating how they work and i talked anecdotally with an uber driver said he's making like 70 bucks an hour during peak hours they were fighting to get minimum wage for drivers now drivers are making twenty thirty forty fifty dollars an hour uber rides have gone and lift rides massive competition free market works well and and they can't take the win
they still are so rigid on the left that they're demanding whatever that woman's name is who is you know in the pocket of the lorena gonzalez lorena gonzalez in the pocket of the the unions how cynical are they the victory is upon them people are getting paid five times more three times more than minimum wage and they still want to screw them the takeaway for a
lot of people should be that your spidey senses should go up when folks present solutions as a choice of one source only ah you know one thing when things just cannot can only happen in one way and it's the way that i feel the most comfortable yeah your spidey sensor should go up and you should think to yourself really is that is that really the only way like can't we have
choice can't we have different ways of solving this can't maybe we can run an experiment and see what happens go ahead sex well i think your spidey sense should also go up whenever somebody is basically saying that speech needs to be censored for some higher purpose you know uh that that that whatever people are trying to abridge and take away
our rights and our sort of long-held values uh our freedoms you have to start getting concerned and there's always a reason why they want to do it in the study the quote that the the left-wing authoritarians agreed with was getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called right to free speech so there's always some higher reason the means always
justify the the answer always justify the means um but but that's that's what you have to look out for is when they're taking away your right to speech another fun proof point um fun because it's dave chappelle uh uh that you can listen to or watch to see a flavor of this left-wing authoritarianism is called redemption song which is a little clip he put out recently
and the the entire clip is more about him getting his body of work back from comedy central but the part in the beginning talks about um folks on the left that really tried to dunk on him when he got coveted and you should just listen to his reaction and how he frames it because i think it's pretty powerful and again it explains that extremism on both sides they actually
end up looking the same yeah aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies and i think that applies to anyone who anyone who defies it that whatever the conventional wisdom is on kovit there's another another example in the study of uh that that the people who the left-wing authoritarians agreed with the statement i cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political
conservative so you know you've got these social groups that are completely uniform and by the way there's been like studies for a long time showing that uh liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to be upset if their son or daughter were to marry someone of the opposite party so this has been this has been turned up in polls for a while but
this and you've seen it on universities and college campuses right but there's this idea that you know anybody of the other uh political side is just suspect you know morally suspect needs to be shunned uh needs to be expelled um like those are the people you have to be concerned about yeah you can't be friends i can't be friends with you sacks because you voted
for trump it's just ridiculous people have this no but it's i think it's the derangement to give the other side of this i think trump was so extreme and so trolling and so great i mean if you think about his super power it was to troll the left and put them into such a deranged mindset that they did actually become that which they hated most right but he he did he did troll the
left but but here's but here's the thing is that we only hear uh in the media about the authoritarianism of the trump administration how many times were they screaming fascism during the trump years and and now today and of course you know if you go to msnbc it's it's january 6 all day all the time that's all they want to talk about but you there's a total blind
spot with respect to the authoritarian tendencies of the left which we see right now in covit policy i mean it is getting so extreme right now and i mean freeburg you posted uh the breaking news that just announced via press conference gavin newsom is now implementing mandated coveted vaccines for all public k through 12 schools in california starting this fall
wait wait these students yeah all all eligible kids in all in all public schools in all public schools in order to go to school in california you have to have a vaccine i mean kindergarten kindergarten well i mean they're not eligible yeah if it's when they're eligible yeah they're they're they're going to be eligible very soon i mean look i i i so so we have a 13
year old an 11 year old and a 5 year old the 13 year old got vaccinated she wanted to we supported it the 11 year old wasn't eligible she didn't get a vaccine she got coveted for me it was a mild case and our five-year-old isn't eligible for the vaccine he never got coveted now if if and when a new vaccine comes out that our five-year-old is eligible i
don't think he needs it i mean i'm not anti-vaxx i mean i'm glad i got the vaccine i'm glad you know is he going to school my thirteen-year-old got the vaccine yeah i guess the question is do you if it is safe do you want them going to school catching it spreading it and you want them to not have to wear a mask how can you say conclusively
what's safe for a five or six year old at this point it's a little hard their bodies are developing and yeah you need some time i mean do we really need to mandate this i mean why why can't parents make up their own decision because of other people in society who would be impacted i mean you also see this you know look i think i think vaccines maybe are complicated debate
because vaccines do actually provide protection let's talk about these mass mandates which i supported at the beginning of the pandemic because it's all we had to fight it but you take an example like san francisco still has these stringent mass mandates the mayor london breed was caught out at um dancing singing screaming but in fairness to her it was tony tony tony
yeah i mean that's when she stopped her defense she was like she was basically like it's tony tony tony guys what do you want me to do here i'll risk the covenant which is i mean what do you want to do what do you want her to do what do you think about let me ask this question what she said when she got caught was actually correct which is we should be out
supporting restaurants we should be out supporting nightlife adults should be able to make their own decision about the risks they're willing to take the problem is she's not willing to give the rest of us that choice right and we can all make our own choice and by the way look the idea that the cove is not to get you where you know once you take off your
mask when you get to the table you know we've talked about this right yeah you wear the mask and the mater d stand to the table then you take it off to eat and drink and the cove is somehow not going to get in she was saying she was like i listen they were like you weren't eating we have you on video you weren't drinking she's like it's unrealistic for an adult
to put the mask on and off in between sips and bites and i was on a flight and i was flying coach as opposed to business class recently and when i was in business class i was eating and drinking there was no entire foreign language so far you're speaking what are you saying anyway most people pay for a plane ticket and then they get on an airplane
so but the interesting thing was when i was in business class i was eating my meal i was drinking no issues i had the mask off for whatever 20 minutes i was eating and drinking when i was in coach same situation the flight attendant was going up and down the aisle and while people were eating and drinking if she didn't have the mascot she was kind of being like uh a whole monitor saying
please put your mask on in between bites and i was like okay yeah and when we supported this mass mandate way at the beginning of the vaccine we all thought the government's going to distribute n99 or at least n95 high quality 3m mass right you never got those i mean we never got those testing kits i know and people people are like walking around wearing these cloth mat
these loose-fitting cloth masks it's ridiculous it's like the covet goes you know through the bottom over the top through the site you go right through it i mean like it doesn't do anything and yeah you're the lone ranger yeah how's that work i mean i look if you wear a high quality like you know ppe type mask i think it might be helpful but you know
it's a marginal benefit once we have vaccines oh by the way just as we end this what do we think of um andrew wiggins well you can't comment on this maybe because you're an owner on the team but a number of nba players uh high profile ones in fact in new york and california where you're not allowed in the arena if you're not vaccinated are now deciding
to sit out their home games so kyrie irving being the highest profile one is refusing to get the vaccine and he will be getting paid he's got a 200 million dollar contract max player i think he gets 40 50 million a year um he's gonna give up half of his salary to not 20 million a year to not get the vaccine at least and leave his team to not play with him in home games
what are our thoughts on mandating nba players who are playing inside an arena to be vaccinated do you see draymond's interview i did what did what did they have to say about this he said he said he's so [ __ ] strong isn't he yeah he was like this is ridiculous that we don't like respect each other's like we've made this so political and it's all like antagonistic
as opposed to he went meta recognizing that there are differences and people have differences of opinion and respecting them and embracing each other for those differences rather than like attacking each other and finding fault in each other and forcing them yeah and it's a great point but um i don't know i mean i don't think that this point is any different than the
point about you know mandating a vaccine for anything any workplace any school i mean if you're going to mandate if you're going to mandate vaccines for workplaces and mandate vaccines for schools you know the mba is going to you know not be kind of excluded here it's what it is right just happens to be a bigger paycheck and a higher profile stage i
think as a matter of policy the the right policy is to let private employers decide whether they're going to require vaccination or not i think i think private organizations have the right to do that if you know if a restaurant tour wants to say that we are going to be an all vacs restaurant you want to you know they're only going to take clientele who are vax that should be
their right to do it if another restaurant says we don't care people can go to that restaurant if they want you know i think that the free market can sort of sort this out i don't know that we need the government imposing it if the mba decides this is what they want to do they can't it has decided well i mean what i wonder about is how
necessary it is um i mean given the fact that you know all the players are young and healthy um and if they want the vaccine they can get the vaccine look i'm really glad i got it you know i think it but but i just you know if it given that everybody is vaccinated now who wants it i just you know what is the point of forcing that last 10 of holdouts to do something they don't
want to do i mean this is where i think the authoritarian i would resist the authoritarian impulse freedberg is there a new pill that's coming out uh i saw a story today about this i don't know where to cover that i'll go to unicorns first uh merck published some results uh on this uh basically um antiviral pill it effectively uh inhibits rna replication uh
in viruses and it's kind of uh it was designed to be kind of broadly applicable it was you know discovered at emory university years ago and they were testing it for influenza and then even priests pre-covered they were testing it on other kind of coronaviruses asars and mers and so the the data that they just published shows that there's a 50 percent reduction in hospitalizations 50
percent uh in hospitalizations for uh for people that are the test positive for a sars cov2 infection and then they start the pill within some number of hours you take a few of these pills i think they said five days right yeah within five i think well they did the test on like uh it was effectively yeah four or five days that's right um
and you end up reducing the number the percentage of people that end up in the hospital by 50 now you know uh so the idea is that for countries that don't have access to vaccines you can very cheaply make this chemistry it's a cheap molecule that you could theoretically produce at scale and you could ship it all over the world and countries that don't have you know
broad scale vaccination programs they can make these pills available quickly and cheaply and then you know as people get uh infected with stars kobe 2 they just pick up this pill you know put it in every pharmacy go grab a couple and then the hospitalization rate goes down we don't yet know if it reduces the transmission rate so there's a lot of
question marks on like does this actually solve the problem of the pandemic it's certainly another instrument to blunt the uh you know the impact pronounce the name of it it's malnourished the government um by the way there wasn't a lot of people in the study no one that took the pill died people that didn't take the pill did die uh in the in the infection in the infected
population because they split them right they gave some people a placebo and some people the pill the people that had the placebo there were deaths no one in the group that had the pill um the actual pill died and so um you know so so theoretically we don't yet have enough data to know but there's also a big question on the side effects typically these
uh anti uh uh viral the rna kind of um blocking drugs have other side effects they're usually pretty mild but um you know so so there'll be a little bit more studying but generally people view this as a super big positive it's another instrument i'm gonna make a i'm gonna make a prediction here we go i think that the combination of vaccines and what is equivalently
tamiflu for covid which is effectively what this is is the one two punch we need so that this basically is rendered um you're missing the three you're missing a key piece there the testing you must have testing to know that you have to take this uh but i i think that that's a i think like the testing is it's not efficient but solutions exist my point is if you have a combination of all
these things this is like a flu which means that there'll be less ability for folks to not show up to work which means that most of the economy will get back going and i think then we can get back to really addressing what are all that 10 or 12 trillion dollars how does it show up in the economy that's where the inflation comes from that's for all this
other stuff so uh i'm i'm pretty excited by what i read today but now my mindset is going to 18 months from now midterm inflation i think that's going to be what it's all about we ordered 1.7 million courses of this i'll call it's a we can just call basically this is the equivalent of a z pack so called as the mpac um if this uh hits i've taken
probably 1.7 million z packs a million that's just on the way back from vegas hey um so i mean this feels like the end game and they are going for emergency use so let's keep our fingers crossed this would mean the stock market's going to rip jamuth i know i think the stock market um is in a little bit of precarious position because if you have to if you have to
reposition yourself for inflation there's a lot of tech stocks that will get just absolutely obliterated like well when when you when you when you have inflation so the the order of operations inflation means prices go up the the government sees prices going up and they say how do we control that they raise interest rates so that the cost of borrowing goes up so that then less
money is being spent right so that we become a little bit more restrained when you do that then all of a sudden people have to think about how much money you're going to make in the future because if you're not investing as much in the future you won't make as much in the future and when you discount all those dollars back there's less of them
and so all of a sudden you start to think about oh my gosh well i want dollars today not dollars 10 years from now that really puts a lot of pressure on tech stocks because we trade on multi-year valuations in the future so inflation is very bad for technology stocks inflation tends to be good for companies that make money today why because if i get a dollar today i can
put it in this in the you know bond markets or i put it into a savings account and i can get more interest than i would have otherwise and then separately you also want to own things that are physical and real because those have more value so all of that has to then get worked out into the economy and we have to make a bunch of economic decisions
so we so now the solution for that in all of those cases though is still if you're a hyper growth company you'll be okay so if you're growing more than 50 60 a year you're fine but if you're growing 20 or 30 and you're kind of a middling business and rates are going up and inflation is going up you're in a very very very precarious spot and um saks what do you
think okay well there was there was a great article in the wall street journal over the past week called university endowments billions in the golden era venture capitals basically talking about i mean these these university endowments are like gaining 50 year-over-year there's been like nothing like it before there's so many unicorns being created there's
and if you there's a separate article in i think pitch book as well about the rate of unicor or crunch base yeah that the rate of unicorn creation i think last year it was like one every few days now it's it's more than one a day bonkers and so you know we're getting multiple unicorns now created every day this year it's just this golden era of
vc this engine of wealth and prosperity creation so that's the good news and and to connect this to a point we were talking about earlier if the the radicals on the left would just allow the golden goose to keep laying golden eggs we're going to have enough wealth and prosperity to pay for all these progressive programs in the long run but they're not willing to wait and so
you have in washington for example i think a political program that really could upset the apple card i mean you're talking about a three and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill it'll probably get brought down to somewhere between one and a half and two then you got a 1.2 bill trillion dollar infrastructure bill they've already spent one point nine trillion on a
coveted relief bill this is after the six trillion what would you like would you advise it should be the amount spent well okay good question so last year the federal government generated record tax receipts the most revenue it's ever raised and it was about 19 and a half percent of gdp when bill clinton left office he bro boasted about the fact that government
spending was only 18 and a half percent of gdp last year it was about 30 percent of gdp my theory on this is that if you have uh government spending as a you know share of the economy at around 20 percent from a tax and spending standpoint things basically work okay but as you try to go up to 25 and 30 it starts to break you have too much deficits and debt too much money
printing too much taxation too much inflation you become more brittle and you start to you basically are you know unhealthy you're killing the golden goose and so you know all we have to do is let the economy keep ripping 20 of it is gonna is going to be government share and you'll be able to fund more and more progressive programs over time as
society gets richer and by the way this this um prosperity that's being created in the tech ecosystem it's available to everybody who has a good idea i mean this is not so so as we all know so it's not just government that's creating advancement and uh economic opportunity for disadvantaged people the tech economy's creating it as well and what i
worry about is is why are we taking so much risk in upending this whole system that is working quite well well the other thing is this is all in the face of there being 11 million open jobs there's 1.4 jobs for everybody who's unemployed so the idea that in some ways society is broken and people can't be employed now these might not be there's a greatest job there's only four million
there's only four million people looking for work there's 11 million outstanding jobs yeah i mean it is bonkers friedberg do you think this is sustainable what are your thoughts on spending and turning over the apple cart as sax is saying the longer you guys have me on this podcast the more likely it is you guys are gonna unmask me as a die-hard
libertarian um i will not let my tendencies um you know come out in full force uh the spending is ridiculous and there's a lot of waste so i mean i'll just leave it at that what i think is interesting though is this unicorn creation system uh this unicorn creation machine you know it's worth highlighting because i think that that crunch based article showed that these
unicorns in aggregate were worth like what one and a half trillion dollars or something um and those so those are all private companies three point four trillion dollars so is that the amount of both bills 3.4 trillion is the total market cap of all the private unicorns not just in the us but the world and right now in washington they're talking about three
and a half trillion dollar reconciliation bill same size can you imagine governments spending basically the entire value of the tech ecosystem in one year it's bonkers right and so this but by the way i mean like i think that that 3.5 trillion you can kind of think about that as being the future economy of the future of global economy right so the entire uh i just
pulled up the latest uh quarterly stat but the entire uh market cap of public u.s companies uh today stands at 47 trillion dollars the top 500 or about 38 trillion dollars so you know these private companies that are kind of the emerging tech companies are you know call it ten percent or you know eight percent uh of uh today all public pub today of all public companies
today and you know it used to be the technology company started in silicon valley sold technology to traditional industries what's happening in silicon valley today and over the last 10 years or so is that technology quote unquote companies are becoming the next industrial companies they are replacing profound incidents and so this is like what we saw you know
airbnb is a hotel chain without hotels uber is you know a transportation company without vehicles doordash but even more importantly there's an entire emergent class of life sciences companies of novel hardware companies and these businesses are leveraging their core technology competence to create an advantage in replacing an old model of doing industry they're not
selling it to the old school company and so i think that the you know and people are freaking out about you know some of these big investors like tiger global coming in and writing crazy checks if you take an index of the three and a half trillion dollars today and said you know what these guys today are gonna be worth more than the 46 trillion dollar
market cap of all the other public companies that's it today in the next 20 or 30 years that's a pretty good way to kind of place your money over a 30-year horizon i'm going to go ahead and put as much money as i can into the index of the private companies and expect that they're going to be worth more than 46 trillion in 30 years i'm going to make a
10 bagger that's a retirement fund for my family and so it makes a ton of sense i think that these um you know these unicorns given the advantages that are inv you know kind of uh evolving from software and like sciences and so on do end up kind of playing out uh it's going to be ugly and that when what will happen is you'll end up seeing the asymmetry you'll see the like oh my gosh
there's something that's a thousand x you know 100x return it'll become a 100 billion dollar public company or two billion dollar public company and then there'll be a bunch of them they're going to die um and people are going to focus on the depths and say this was overhyped the bubble is over but the reality is the index of companies today
i would be willing to bet 20 to 30 years from now it's worth more than the 46 trillion dollar of all the public companies today so chamath one of the things we're seeing here and you're playing a small part in it or a large part depending on who you talk to we now have over 6 000 publicly traded companies on u.s exchange no we have less than four thousand we have about
thirty eight hundred okay uh no we had thirty six hundred in 2016 according to the research i have here according to mortgage watch six thousand public trading companies and u.s exchanges so they could be counting the pink sheets and over the counters which is we're seeing dramatically more publicly traded companies many speculative ones or ones where
you're getting to buy in in year four five or six obviously you're part of that with uh you know all the different ipo as through what are you up to now what's the yeah we have six tech specs we have four biotech packs you know i mean i've started or invested in a bunch of others that have gone public um so let's look at this through the lens of the the public markets as well
my mac review is exactly what friedberg said we are much better off with as many technology companies being birthed and being viable because over the long arc of time those companies will rebuild things that are today inefficient and broken in a better way and the world becomes better the question is for a lot of people well what if the wealth isn't better because it's only you know a
fraction of the number of people with a very specific skill set that then the other people don't have that i think is a valid argument but then there's a different way to attack this problem which is you could actually do something really meaningful around corporate interest rates and corporate tax policy that would then get it right so like even if those
those thousand companies if you assume that that 3.4 trillion dollars 10 x's that's 34 trillion of eventual market cap right that's going to be supported by trillions of dollars of earnings but maybe those things only have a million or two million employees but there's eight billion eight you know odd people in the world well the way you get the
money into the government's coffers so that they can reallocate it to everybody that doesn't work at those thousand companies is through sensible tax policy that goes after the companies because those companies will still do the job right it's not like you're going to choose to not work at a you know world-beating startup in a mission that you care about because
of the corporate tax rate nobody's going to do that right so i think this is where like if you if you if you actually um take a step back and think of the bigger picture the answer is right in front of us we just choose not to listen this is why you know again what trump did was kind of stupid you know he focused on corporate tax policy cutting it unnecessarily
and now what we're doing is we're fighting over tax policy and part of the reason why this bill isn't going to get passed is because of corporate tax policy and trying to raise it again but really what we should do is actually raise it leave personal rates roughly where they are you know elon even said when when asked by kara swisher this week he's like i paid 53 taxes what
about you yeah and it's going to 57 and you know it's 53 57 61 who cares sure whatever that's all and he has to the point he made was listen the pro public article was really disingenuous they said he got a tax refund and they didn't they never explained well that's because he overpaid his taxes massively the year before so they're selectively pulling information
and the fact is he said i will be the first money into spacex and tesla i'll be the last money out that is something we want uh more founders to do which is never sell their shares and be have more skin in the game sorry i i'm sorry i disagree with that i think that's a that's a bunch of [ __ ] malarkey why if you choose to not sell so be it okay
but look at the good that bill gates has done by selling down microsoft so i mean yeah shouldn't exist the bill gates foundation shouldn't exist no no no the reproductive protection it had to be paid some he did that when he hits his 60 years old i'm sure no you know no he started to do it when he was 40 years old jason and he wanted anyone sold paypal and he was able to use that money
to reinvest in tesla i think elon's putting all the money back into two companies that are solving two major issues he wouldn't have been able to do that if he hadn't sold in the first exactly my my point is let's not conflate the problem if you generate wealth i think that you should be bound morally bound by society to put the money back to work he chooses
to put the money back to work by reinvesting so aggressively into the things that he's doing that's laudable yeah i think that's virtuous yeah i agree but it's not the only way bill gates took a different path which is to basically take all those profits sell it down to then be able to go and put it into the gates foundation people will take multiple paths the point that's the
same among all these people is there's a moral obligation they feel to do the right thing for the future then we're in agreement so let's just celebrate that not some tactical thing about it by the way one other point i'd make like you you said that you know we should tax the the wealth creation and distribute it there's another way to get that
redistribution of wealth which is to enable access to the investments earlier by public pension funds by the endowments by the places where people by the retirement funds where you know a broader swath of the population you know have savings sitting right and they use the accreditation we've historically kind of forced the narrative that everyone in the united
states needs to have a home and have 80 90 of their wealth tied up in a piece of real estate and then we end up with these massive kind of inflationary bubbles to keep that value that book value kind of growing for them the reality is if that money was put more productively into building businesses via retirement funds that had access to
venture capital the public pension funds already do but they should they probably under allocate to venture capital today relative to where they're putting over here we talked about the endowments they're looking at look at that that's another way by the way if that was the model you wouldn't need to tax right by the way one of the brilliant
provisions in this reconciliation bill is they're actually disallowing retirement funds to invest in alternative assets including startups and and insane venture capitalists insane that is so wrong so friggin wrong yeah what that's in there taking pension funds and saying you can't have access to them you as an individual through a 401k or ira cannot invest in alternatives
yes partly in response to that well they should just make it a cap don't you think they should cap peter thiel's um i think why why cap anything who's this who's this episode because it was against the spirit of it the spirit of the wrath was let's let's discuss this as a specific issue i'll see it out for you saks uh peter thiel put his facebook stock in his roth
and yeah you're supposed to get that tax free so you can have a great retirement he did that as an end run around paying taxes on the facebook investment that became worth billions of dollars reportedly so now they're saying you can have a roth but anything above 50 billion you got to pay tax on because the goal here isn't for you to use it as a shelter against some massive
uh venture gains sacks yeah i i don't have a huge problem with them putting a cap on the benefit of these accounts however my my issue with what's in the bill there's a couple of issues one is like we said they're disallowing investments and alternatives which i just think is bad for savers why would you want to do that second is the treatment of what happens when
you exceed the cap and right now what they're saying is you have to distribute out all of those funds and then subject subject them to immediate taxation at ordinary income rates which is confiscatory because you could have made the investment outside the retirement account and paid locked long long term capital rates if you do go over it should be yeah
long-term tax of course yeah and and furthermore it's even worse than that because what they're saying is let's say that you do have an alternative like an investment in a startup or a venture fund you have to distribute it out and pay tax on that even though that investment is not liquid right so you should be able to take it out and just be treated normal cap gains and not have
to liquidate it do you think well what it's going to do is it's going to get it's going to give people an incentive it's going to warp the incentives for saving because what it's going to say to people is you want to do well but not too well right because if you hit the cap you're not subject to a confiscation you get penalized yes it should be so
neutral yeah exactly i think situation work is you have a cap at any distribution above that you basically that becomes the basis for future taxation all of this can be summarized more simply i think that we have unfortunately gotten so confused that we've decided to fix the finish line and stagger the starting line right because all of this still doesn't
apply to rich people no this is rich people rich people can do all of these different things they can set up these out-of-state trusts they can set up generation skipping trusts they can be you know qualified um investors they can have qsbs deductions and so what this will do unfortunately is entrench the kind of wealth gains that peter thiel was able to generate in
a very visible way that will just piss everybody off and i think instead you got to go back to a different um to a different litmus test so i jason you have been the strongest advocate for letting people participate in the economy i have always agreed with that we need to figure out how we can make sure it's important that it isn't abused but that's the best way
is to educate folks about financial literacy so that they can actually be a part of it even the starting line let everybody be able to put stuff into this stuff and learn about it i mean what peter did essentially was put lottery tickets into his you know non-tax retirement fund lottery tickets being buying stocks in private companies early but regular americans aren't allowed to
do that so rather than retroactively try to penalize peter because you disagree with his politics or because he did it too well i think it's better that everybody be allowed to be an accredited investor and do what peter did which is everybody should be able to take their 401k or their roth and be able to buy the next linkedin uber so if you were a civilian
and you took an uber or you used linkedin to hire somebody in year two and you had an opportunity to buy those shares you should be allowed to buy it because you're a human resources person or uber driver and you realize this is a great service that will change the world doesn't take a genius to figure that out uh freeberg yeah look i mean the the
downside is you see speculative concentrated bets that white people out and that's the reason the protective provisions are in there so i think there are probably sensible ways of managing that um you know around uh you know qualifying you know pools of these investments in a way creating indexes against them etc uh and maybe that's the right way to provide access but you know
giving individuals uh that maybe you know don't have the right kind of point of view uh on a particular investment the ability to put all of their capital into that investment generally i would say go for it the problem is we've socialized you know uh protection right so and this is the same with healthcare in a model for governing or model for a
state where you provide socialized care for people through healthcare socialized healthcare or you provide socialized support for people through you know the social security system and other services like that um it's difficult to say okay the government's going to be your backstop and is going to provide the support for you and we're also going to let you take
risky behavior and that's where i think the two have to go hand in hand if you want to get rid of one you got to get rid of the other um and so because otherwise we all end up paying the cost of the person that takes the you know outsized risk and then we all end up having to foot the bill for that person taking that risk so if we're all going to be there to
protect that person we have to tell them you can't take unnecessary risks okay hey um saks let me ask you a con conspiracy theory here peter thiel supported trump when trump was teetering on the access hollywood tape and he went to bat for him he gave him a big donation at that time then obviously did the republican national convention and was a key intellectual
uh influencer in his election plan now the democrats are in and suddenly the focus becomes this one outsized roth ira and we're going to rewrite the law so that peter thiel has to take 5 billion or so is one of the estimates that i saw online on cnbc out of his ira do you think this is specific vindictiveness on the part of the democrats to try to attack
specifically peter thiel i know he's your best well yeah i mean he does feel and i'm not i'm not a peter teal apologist but this feels vindictive and personal so yes and no okay so what i would say is there have been proposals over the last i think going back to maybe even 2014 on providing some restrictions or caps on the you know these these iras and the
roth iras um however there's never been a proposal as punitive and retroactive and confiscatory as what they're doing here and specifically it's the fact that they're going to force peter to distribute out everything above the cap and then tax it as ordinary income i mean that that's just changing the rules that part i think is directed at peter and i've actually
heard that staffers on capitol hill are calling this the peter thiel provision so let me just confirm that part for you so what i would say is i think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts but the way they're doing it is so punitive i think it is motivated by political revenge against peter chamoth what do we
think of the number of unicorns being created in the private markets obviously when a company hits unicorn status i think they're going to start buzzing around and maybe knocking on your door and stacks and boards might start thinking about that these companies sometimes have 10 million dollars 30 million dollars in revenue 50 million in revenue and they're becoming worth a
billion dollars do these valuations make sense writ large and are you concerned that this is a bubble i don't think there's a bubble okay explain why there's not a bubble in early stage private companies well i think it's because of what we just talked about which is that these companies by and large are growing at incredibly fast rates and they are replacing
legacy incumbents that are growing very slowly or not at all with and who who have basically won for a long time with inferior products and so as these superior products with more nimble organizations get capitalized to go to market they're just going to win and so i think what we're seeing is a wholesale replacement of the economy from the old to the new and so that's
why these companies will do well and i think it's going to be a a really powerful force in the world because like the world should be a little bit more efficient and fairer when you have all this modern technology working on your behalf so i'm a real supporter of all of this i think there's going to be even more and i think you know the the thing that we have to be
comfortable with is whenever something goes from a fringe thing which is what venture capital was jason when all of us were you know first in silicon valley 20 years ago to you know today in 2021 we're sitting here uh this is going to become a fundamental part of the economy and when that happens uh there'll be more and more money the returns won't be
as good that'll be okay but there'll be a lot of progress and so you know we're going through the same transition that private equity did in the 80s and 90s that venture that hedge funds did you see all the different venture capitalists who are retiring bichon from spark the kid from uh lightspeed a bunch of other folks obviously our friend bill grimley is stepping up
why don't you call me jeremy jeremy jeremy's 50 he's 50. yeah am i doing something wrong here i'm like busy creating a venture firm at age almost 50. you're always people you're on the wrong side of this distribution i mean what what do we think's behind this they just made too much money and they're getting money or is it because it's too competitive now it's too hard
they're moving to wyoming i would say it's slightly different than this i don't know i don't know i mean i know all of those guys but i don't know what their motivation is but what i would say is i tend to think that the mindset of venture has a relatively short half-life and i think it's about 15 years and i think that there is a and because you know company building is
roughly a 10-year arc you know like when you get into something early and so i i i think that there is like a newness whenever you start i don't think it matters what your age is and um then there is this sort of like uh death march that sets in by year eight or nine and then you try to see it through to returning the capital and making sure
all the employees and and uh founders you've been invested with land the ship and and i think what these guys did was get to that place and say okay i've had this 15-year beautiful arc do i want to do another 15-year arc and for a lot of people um it won't make much sense and then also i think your patience to do it goes away right because it's like you guys know what it
is it's exhausting it is exhausting it's exciting the amount of drama i'm dealing with right now in my portfolio is bonkers the the the bad i don't know if you're seeing the sax but the amount of shenanigans bad behavior fraud uh lying backstabbing is that an all-time high that would be your portfolio jkl yeah no it's like no it's literally three
companies i'm literally dealing with three companies with drama out of 350. i think it's one out of 100 is probably fine but i am seeing all kinds of shenanigans even in the diligence phase i'm seeing it jason i meant something more tactical which is like for example you know yesterday we're starting something really ambitious in batteries
and i have to sit there for an hour and we have to go through ordering the equipment setting up the lab getting you know human resources and there's only so much of that that you have the energy to do after a certain amount of time it's important work you have to do it right but it feels uh a little low leverage now for that ceo it's everything and so you have to be on
top of your game to help that person and i think this is where i appreciate their honesty in basically saying guys i don't have that level of detailed focus in me anymore and that's important because in the next generation of folks who want to put in that 15-year journey you need somebody committed you need somebody who's super committed yeah and i do think there's a difference
between being a partner in a large partnership where you kind of have your portfolio of companies and you know to chamas point you're going to be on that arc with them and then kind of building a firm from scratch where like quite frankly i would go crazy the way that you know you're dealing with jason and chamoth is saying i would get burned out
if i didn't have a team right so we now have like a pretty big team how many to well just on the investment team i think we've got about 15 people and and then we now have a bunch of operating partners so you know we were looking at what andreessen harwich has done with services you know we had this big debate in the venture community for a long time
about whether venture firms should operate it should offer services and operating partners and andreessen you know went hog wild with that they've got like 200 people doing it and i think they've proven that it works in the sen i don't you know it's not totally clear how much value they're delivering but it clearly works in the sense that founders would like
the services if they can get them it's great marketing but it may not be it's great it's it's great it's great marketing if you're a great founder when you were a great founder you wouldn't want andreessen horowitz telling you how to run your hr and doing your marketing for you yammer right but so what we've done is what we've done is focus on bringing
on not 200 people but an expert in every functional area that a sas company might need because you do want access to an expert when you're setting up the department you want to go talk to the digital marketing person or the legal person or you know or you know we have an executive briefing center now so we do believe that there is a version of the services model that makes a lot of
sense and we are building that if i had to do all of that value add myself yeah i would i would burn out yeah i mean i think it's a very good point i literally last week launched thesyndicate.com syndicate just for the same reason so i can build a group of individuals who are focused just on that and who have that domain expertise but they're the great founders do not want
you up in their business so i i i'm concerned with like that that's why we have like kind of we call it a teach them how to fish model where we don't want to do the work we want to give them an expert as a resource who can meet with them show them show them some best practices coming to you expecting you to do the work because that's what think happens
sometimes is that although can you find us a developer and i'm like no but i can talk to you about finding developers but i don't have a recruiter on staff do you have a recruiter yeah we actually do now we have three recruiters on staff so um so you're paying a half million dollars a year to recruit for your companies that's a big basically basically that's a big advantage is it
working are you actually landing developers yeah i mean look we can't freeze and i don't give a [ __ ] about any of this all right well anyway this is us in the weeds so you want to talk about some okay well just to upload up a level for a second yeah i just want to go back to this like golden era point when we're talking about venture capital because
look obviously in the weeds we're going to talk about our problems but i really think that what's happening here with a thousand new unicorns being minted every year is just unbelievable if you look at the number of billionaires in the us i just googled this there were 614 billionaires in the us as of october 2020. now there's probably more i don't know let's
say there's a thousand well if you're mincing a thousand new unicorns every year how many billionaires is that creating i mean how many millionaires more importantly how many people who are making 50 to 250 000 a year before they join the ecosystem and now are worth millions will buy homes hire people start in the next let me just give you
guys the counterpoint to that which i'm not necessarily arguing but i'm this is what i think the narrative is which is that those businesses that are kind of you know accumulating wealth and accumulating revenue are effectively destroying the old economy and shutting down companies and shutting down there's 11 million job openings that's [ __ ]
i don't i don't i don't believe it's a zero-sum game yeah i think there's it's it's created by destruction it is disruptive right so there is a there is kind of a temporal flux and there's a flux of people across from the old economy to the new economy and it's that's flux that i think creates the great uncertainty and the great yes heartache that everyone's trying that's
the hand ringing that's the hand this is why it is so important to get corporate taxation right because if you're going to replace gdp dollar for dollar don't focus on the fewer employees that work there focus on the largest number possible which is the revenue that these employees are helping to generate for these companies so if you had much much
higher corporate taxation you can play around with all the personal taxation you want but if a lot of people do get shut out of the economy you're not going to make nearly as much for the government as you would by taxing companies more chamath should there be a backstop because we know tax law is so sophisticated and if you're intelligent you could make it seem like you didn't make any
money because you're investing you're distributing yada yada should there just be a hey listen whatever you want to do with your taxes is fine but x percent of your top line revenue is your base tax and you cannot get around that should there be something like that there's a couple things that this tax bill attempted to do which could be really powerful if it does get passed
i think that corporations should pay a large tax i think that they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on r d and i think they should be forced to spend a certain percentage on basically benefits for their employees and i think that would do a lot to level the playing field then i do think that you can have much higher individual taxation but you need
to make it simpler because there's too many easy ways like that propublica article showed for you to play games for individuals to not pay taxes and so you got to simplify all of this stuff because it's too complicated so if you're rich enough to hire a fleet of lawyers you will work your way around it yes period and they and they repealed it as part of the
the amt was for corporations was repealed as part of the tax cuts and jobs act i think i don't know where that stands but it does seem like a lot of companies because i don't know how that makes sense jkl i mean like some businesses run high margin some are low margins some are losing money some are over investing it's complicated i don't have the solution
that's why i'm sort of saying well one of the i think one of the optics issues here is you know people are like that company didn't pay any taxes that company sells this many iphones that companies yes because they're they're doing what tax laws were designed to do which is to encourage investment uh so how do you fix it give me a solution freebird i
don't i think that once businesses are mature and they start dividend in cash and making distributions and they're profitable that might be the time to tax them i'm not sure why would they ever do that if they had an army of people saying hey you don't have to you don't want to change the point if they're investing in growth they're creating jobs and they're growing the economy and
that's what we said was fine i don't think they're creating as many jobs as you think but they are growing the economy that's why you have to tax the corporation because that's the effective proxy for taxing gdp yeah look i i would be all about let me just i'll wear my libertarian hat again for a second but like i would be all about taxation if i felt like my
dollars had a positive roi where they ended up and the problem right now is like government spending is set up in such a way that it's effectively been gamified and people extract capital from the government and my dollars are not getting a positive roi for me or for society i would rather have them which is why you left let's be honest that's
why you left san francisco i mean it's just that's spending more time i left san francisco i've got a family and i and i need a backyard so that's a little bit but it isn't part of it that you are san francisco is a separate degree of incompetence like but yes you're right they're spending more than ever and it's getting worse san francisco's a
whole another a whole other nightmare jake out well like i'm just speaking california in general right now whether it's the state level or the federal level it feels to me and i think it feels to a lot of people that dollars aren't being spent in a way that's generating a return for the taxpayer and i think we all feel that way and i think that's what's frustrating it's not
about how much one's being taxed it's about how are those tax dollars being spent and are they being spent in a way that secures the future of our nation of our people of our livelihoods etc and making you know giving everyone access to opportunity what's hap what's happened what's happened is we've created things like student loan programs and you know housing programs
and infrastructure programs that are literally just giving away money to private companies that are profiteering off of government spending right and it's cronie as our favorite professor scott galloway says it's one thing i really do agree with it it is that there is this notion of crony capitalism where the united states and state governments even local
governments as seen in san francisco california all the way up to the federal level are spending money in a way that i think we all feel um is benefiting some disproportionately to most now if there was a high degree of taxation and everyone was benefited in a meaningful way and those programs were well managed and capital flowed meaningfully to to
support everything we want to support great i think everyone would raise their hand raise two hands and say tax the heck out of me let's make that happen but that's not what happens and i think that's the primary aversion to high taxation sacks you get the final word yeah i mean look what i'm worried about is taxes are going up big time no matter what happens
in washington spending is going up big time we now have peacetime deficits that are the biggest that they've ever been the deaths the national debt the peacetime national debts the highest has ever been uh we have a looming debt crisis in china we have supply chain shortages what could go uh i mean you know there's a lot of things here that could
upset the apple cart and i what i'm afraid of is we're going to look back at this year the thousand unicorns being minted and say that really was the golden era and everything happened and after that we really screwed up sex you sound like the old guy at starbucks it says that every generation and complains about the last generation on the golden era and it's all down how much does
music suck today normally normally i will say how impressive it is that ten years ago none of those unicorns existed and it is likely the case that three trillion dollars of value was created via private funding and private companies over the last 10 years so all these entrepreneurs all these employees anyone working at these businesses anyone involved in these businesses
should be thrilled about the fact that you from xero created three and a half trillion dollars of value in 10 years that's extraordinary yeah i'm not i'm not trying to create nostalgia about the past i'm talking about the present and trying to preserve it because i'm seeing some storm clouds on the horizon yeah i would like to play the best song from
tony tony tony as we leave yeah okay everybody we're heading out this one's for you london breed [Music] state state approved entertainment you can take off your mass for this entertainment it's so good you guys watch uh squid game anybody watch wig game no we have lives nobody watched my game okay my kid my kid's been talking about that should i
be letting them watch the squid game or is that no it's the most violent uh korean horror dystopian uh show ever watched they're going to be scarred for life hey as a follow-up did you uh did you stop your kids from uh from tick tock did you take your kids off tick tock they told yeah i went in there i'm like kids what are you watching [Music] i'll tell you in a second [Music]
yeah so did you take your kids off tick tock yeah i went in there i was like kids what are you watching they're like dad get the hell out of here yeah they said tell us our names and he was like okay i'll be right back jack if you could tell me to turn it off tick-tock by my name i'll do it david's like see you later the conversation was what do
you guys watching on tick tock i hear it's all sex and drugs they're like no we're watching dance videos i'm like okay go ahead i trust you the dance videos are literally like absolutely uh sex and drug based every single one of them it is so devious oh stop it is not that you're so exaggerated i am so not exaggerating literally the if you listen take the most obscene
lyric to uh obscene hook to any rap song that's what trends oh my god it's so true guys every generation says the same about the natural it's unbelievable right no but it is like explicit listen whatever i mean like you know um i just want to pearl jam and you know all the way back to the beach boys and shaking his hips yeah exactly yeah but i mean no this when i say it's
explicit it is literally expensive you just don't get the youth j-cal you don't understand them i i think i understand it a little bit too well anyway you do not see you listen i oh hey guys are we going to do the all in summit or not i actually went to the code conference and i was like this was amazing to get back out you got to stop talking about ideas and actually
just doing them what are you talking about we created this pot i'm just trying to get buy in jason just do it okay all right i need your buy-in we have a voting system here we're going in miami miami okay first year second year italy not so here's how it's going to work 250 tickets 200 for purchase 50 for scholarship all in summit three days miami saks and i are off to the races
more people bro why do you have to keep it so exclusive you're just so excited what is it i want to invert the top top-down hierarchy to what i want to be a left-wing authoritarian what is it that i have to believe that is what you are a left-wing authoritarian i just want to be rich and powerful i don't care what party i money status am power yeah let me tell
you let me tell you why i like this idea is because to the points we're talking about with coinbase earlier we you know we have these conferences in the tech industry and they're frankly run by people who hate tech in the tech industry and people who have successful tickets right exactly and so the i see these tech founders going up on these stages and subjecting
themselves to these interrogations by people who hate them and i'm like what are they doing like it makes no sense i'm putting up a form i'm going to let people take deposits i'm going to pick a month and we're going to go how many people went to the conference guys you went to this week uh i the code conference i think was probably three or
four hundred by design it was a third or half how much how much tickets i i didn't actually buy a ticket because i didn't want to be in the conference itself because i was concerned about a breakthrough virus but i did host the poker game with skye and brooke tickets i think are 8 000 for code and i think ted is up to 10 or 15. so maybe how much are we charging we made like
twenty seventy five hundred seventy five hundred we're charging seventy five hundred so two hundred and ten tickets and then fifty scholarships for people who wouldn't be able to afford it so the the gross revenue here so we want 1.5 million and what's our cost going to be cost will be a million and what so wait so we're get so we're making profit on this
deal no i'm making a profit we spend i may be very clear we spend what we i am buying the wine and you will shut the [ __ ] up okay so then it's going to be it's going to cost 2 million so it's going to make 1.5 i don't know if he's going to win no it's gonna cost i want a wine budget so that everybody that comes is it feels like they've had an
exceptional food and beverage experience is gonna spend half a million dollars on wine no joke so then it has to be 10k a ticket but you know what the people who are coming can afford it they don't check out we're not privileging you with some profiteering i'm not profiteering off of it honestly the reason i want to do it most is i want to play poker for
three days and i want to have us the four of us interview the most iconoclastic interesting people and i want to do it for the fans so that some number of fans get to come who wouldn't normally be able to come to a conference at this level and i just think it would be a blast it'd be fun to get together okay stop talking about it and do it okay i'll do
it all right i want to make sure everybody's bought in i mean so get you [ __ ] on the side i'll set a date okay not not the first week of february because i think i have a i think in march april march april also not the third week of february because i think i'm skiing in europe just [ __ ] can you just give up you're not gallivanting around europe and other
places bro i'm i'm grinding every day here you see what i'm doing it's like i'm [ __ ] working hard too i mean it's crazy right now it's like the i've never seen the market like this i mean it is bonkers enjoy a lot less what's that enjoy it while it lasts exactly all right everybody we'll see you next time for the dictator champ polly hopper tia for the rain man david
sacks and the queen of quinoa david friedberg i'm j-cal and we'll see you on episode 50 bye bye [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] we need to get these [Music]