hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another all-in podcast we just got the show notes and i'm ripping them up because the president has the rona we knew this was a possibility we had an incredible docket brewing but as fate loves irony we found out on wednesday night i believe just
in a brief timeline here wednesday night uh hope hicks is a personal assistant uh got the rona and then of course um president trump announced late last night that he in fact had the rona and that
his uh wife melania also had the coronavirus so with us today to discuss all things tech politics and coronavirus david friedberg david sachs and bestie c chamoth paulie hoppatia are with us uh i guess maybe we'll just drop it right to you freedberg you you are our um science
kid here in the class uh what is when we look at the president's um physique he's clinically obese technically i'm not saying that to be cruel but he's a 74 year old who's clinically obese and snorts adderall we don't know that that's just a claim um but seriously what what is the
prognosis here and then my i understand he's now got a experimental treatment was just announced an hour ago uh the taping of this on friday afternoon and of course we wish them all the greatest speedy recovery et cetera but let's get right let's get into the facts here i think the the overall
mortality rate for um someone of his age is then call it the two to four percent range right and for someone with with you know he's not known to have diabetes or high blood pressure but generally you can kind of say there's some risk factors may be associated um so a couple points but the
reality is the treatment that he got is one that's not available to the public and is effectively like creating these uh you know uh taking these antibodies to the coronavirus and he got a eight grams of this immunoglobulin therapy um that is basically a bunch of antibodies that'll eliminate
the virus and they're not um widely available they're not publicly available these treatments but uh you know uh based on the early trials and the general experience with using synthetic and you know polyclonal antibodies for uh infectious uh disease like this
it's pretty effective and he should kind of uh you know recover pretty quickly i would imagine so him dying would basically be a two-out or him getting this special treatment makes it a a one outer if we were talking about this in poker terms uh chamath when you when you look
at this turn of events and you saw the news what was your first thought um that it's now basically a hundred percent guaranteed that we will have all of the most transparent data about coronavirus um
soon so for example you know we we've been in this position where we've been debating hydroxychloroquine we've been debating these um you know all of these different uh regimens um and the reality is the president of the united states if he doesn't get the absolute top-notch care
um we're all in some ways [ __ ] so it's it's probably likely that he's going to get the thing that folks know to work and then it'll be hard for everybody else to not want to ask for that and then it's going to be even harder for everybody to then not get some version of it and so
i think probably we're going to de-escalate a little bit of mass stuff of testing stuff of you know what the right course of care is and you know frankly i'll be honest with you i hope you know i i wouldn't vote for him but i hope he's well um i don't want anything to happen to the guy um
and i hope that he recovers and it you know he kicks it in the ass and that um whatever he took to get better everybody else can get it too all right sax coming around the horn here talking about the political ramifications of this you were feeling that uh trump was likely to lose
uh but here we are with the october surprise and i hate to make this uh handicapping of the election but this certainly is gonna have some impact so with your rain man mind and when you go through this deck of cards here what does your brain how do you assess this as uh the rain man
is this un going to be a net positive for his election um results a negative neutral handicap this for us in your mind you must be thinking through this and and again disclaimers we all want him to get better nobody wishes him out i'm sure some people do but
i'm saying i'm seeing a lot of uh glee frankly on on twitter yeah a lot of people saying i told you so or karma's a [ __ ] or something like that yeah um you know sort of implying that trump getting
this was was a moral failing you know um and uh so you know certainly a lot of people are kind of reveling in it um i think he was certainly careless i mean he didn't wear masks he said he didn't like to wear a mask so well i mean do you wear a mask inside your house no but if i was
in walking around at a a debate or something like that if i was on an airplane with 20 people yeah i would wear a mask actually i mean you know there were certainly a lot of precautions around the president i mean more than most people i mean any of us could get it from anybody yeah you know um
if you know our wife happens to go out to meet a friend for lunch or something like that and then brings it back so there's almost no amount of carefulness you can do to completely avoid this unless you're willing to kind of lock yourself alone somewhere um so i just you know this idea
that somehow getting cove is a moral failing is is what i would take issue with it's not um it's not altogether unlike the crazy things that um the religious right was saying in the 1980s like you know about aids like when you know jerry falwell said it was god's punishment
or something like that trying to imply that the gay plague i mean let's just call it what it is they basically said they implied somehow that this was um you know some sort of uh just comeuppance you know or something like a retribution from god contribution exactly exactly and and you know the
virus doesn't know who it's infecting obviously it doesn't target sinners or whatever and so i just think that um you know this all this this sort of gleeful um sort of blaming us going around um is is inappropriate and i think it could really backfire if um if trump rapidly gets
better i mean if trump is better in say a week um and is hitting the campaign trail again you know what what previously will have appeared to be a moral failing could it could now be argued would
be a moral strength since he you know overcame it so easily and um you know so i think that if if he rapidly recovers from this and hits the campaign trail again it's going to make him look strong i think that if he has a hard time with the virus if it's innervating the way that i think it
took out boris johnson i mean i've heard british commentators say that boris johnson's just not not even the same doesn't have the same level of energy even now than he did behind before the virus then i would think he could really hurt trump in the last you know this campaign look we
i think we all know people um i'm sure you guys do i do who have gone through this and they all say the same thing which is this thing really sucks now there are all these people that say oh it's
like dancing on tulips or daffodils i've never encountered a single person like that i see that um i see that maybe on twitter or a friend of a friend but all of my friends who've gotten it they have really struggled through it some of these people are older some of these people are younger
some of these people are healthy some of these people are not and consistently they say the same thing which is that there's a couple of days where it literally feels like your chest is being uh pounded inside you you can't move you're just in pain and then afterwards
the aftermath is you're at you know 50 60 70 percent of your lung capacity like it it does for a couple of weeks i mean doc says a friend of ours and he was very public with his experience he tried to avoid it as best he could he got hit with it he got hit hard and he said he felt
like he was gonna die it was the worst thing he's ever experienced i i have friends that that still complain two three four months after the fact that they're at 50 60 of cardiovascular capacity and you know these these people that i that i'm specifically thinking about were really healthy
going into coronavirus and so i i don't know i just think it's something none of us want um i don't think you would want to wish this on anybody of course not yet you know especially frankly the president of the united states has a role um and so i think folks just need to sort of like
class up here um and hope that we figure out that he a gets the best care and then b we all know what it is and then c that we can get access to it too that's that's i honestly i think that's all we should be wishing did you see did you see the letter they published and what he's getting
so they go ahead and read it go ahead and read the free breakfast the doc the doctor published it was not too long ago right jason i saw it on youtube it just happened like an hour ago i tweeted it yesterday so he got he got eight grams of polyclonal antibodies this is the regeneron
formulation so basically they've isolated the antibodies that neutralize coronavirus that patients have presented in their body and then they use recombinant dna technology to produce those antibodies synthetically so it's a bunch of antibody proteins and then they turn it into an
injection into a formula that they can put in your body and you now have effectively neutralizing antibodies so they gave him eight grams which is a pretty high dose and it gets it you know goes in
intravenously you can have sometimes an allergic reaction to that but it seems like he was fine from that because they didn't announce an allergic reaction and then uh you know the the antibodies are now in his bloodstream and they bind to the virus so any virus that's floating around
immediately gets wiped out it gets eliminated from the body so theoretically this is the way we should treat all infectious diseases that's right and i do think that by the way i do and i've written about this i think that is the future of infectious disease is we're all going to get a
polyclonal cocktail every year instead of getting a flu shot you get a bunch of antibodies to all the new stuff that's emerging and it wipes out this david just think about this there was so much raging debate that got politicized between the left between the right between different folks
of people who believed in different things around what the right course of care was there was no single source of truth i'll just say this again when you treat the president of the united states and he gets better that is canonical single source of truth i'm sorry but there can be
no debate after that that the smartest people with the access to all of the research i mean let's be clear you don't think a call went out last night before they deployed the nuclear warhead stuff to all of the um r d labs and all the big pharma companies and said what do you got
and the answer came back at the top of the ticket was this regeneron cocktail yeah they had they definitely have made that call before to prep for this but yeah totally agree now um when you say it highlights what the future of infectious disease treatment is and should be which is
that all of us should be getting a booster shot every year of synthetically produced antibodies uh that will counteract any new infectious disease floating around in the world and we're getting to
the point in the next 10 15 years that that should be reality for everyone yeah it highlights that but it also highlights that in the absence of the most powerful man in the world getting the sickness that we're all gonna basically [ __ ] and point fingers about what the right solution is and
so it can't be the case that the next time there's a crazy illness that's floating around in society we need to go and target you know five or six of the leaders of the g8 plus the pope plus this plus
that beyonce heaven forbid you know what i mean like this is crazy yeah this can't this can't be how we find single source of truth yeah well i think if i think politically speaking i think there's a lot of upside here for trump if he does get better in a week i mean if these polyclonal
antibodies work then and he emerges from the white house you know if it is a fiddle in a week he's going to say the cure is here you know i was right you don't even need a vaccine the cure is here it's over and um and all the i told you so's might might flip around would that be from
the truth david well if the police anybody's work i mean then it's just a matter of scaling them can it be scale freeberg is this easily scalable yes um but by the way i'll just point out the challenge with this is a lot of people uh north of 15 will have uh because antibodies remember
they're a protein and if your cells didn't make that protein they look like a foreign protein when they show up in your body and so very often when you get a foreign antibody treatment like this you will have some sort of allergic reaction because your body will react and attack that protein and
so it's not as simple as just saying hey we should just scale this up and give it to everyone because the clinical trials that are going on with it are to figure out what percentage of people what's the
right way to treat people what's the right way to protect them from anaphylactic shock all that sort of stuff that comes along with this sort of thing so it's not that simple we're making it out but you you would admit that many of those questions the answer the answers to many of those questions
must have been well in hand because there's just zero way oh regeneron's been running these trials since march 100 yeah 100 that's right they what they i i can tell you for sure when trump got this treatment i guarantee they gave him benadryl and they gave him um a steroid shot and they probably
gave him a little bit of cortisone or they had it on the side because that's kind of like the standard sort of regimen you would use when you get this sort of um you know synthesized or or convalescent plasma type treatment and uh you know he comes out of this thing on the other
end and he's fine um but uh but but that treatment regimen is required so you know you sit down in an id booth and you get a [ __ ] id and you get shots to go along with it so it's not as simple as just
shipping it out to everyone's home and giving them that treatment you know and only am i correct that only 300 or so people have gotten this to date is that correct with the trial i don't know the answer to that i know that convalescent plasma which is call it the poor man's version of this
treatment which is instead of synthesizing the antibodies you're taking the actual antibodies from other people that have had coveted and recovered you're isolating those antibodies and you're injecting them in other people's bodies so that is what convalescent plasma is
it is effectively a soup of all the antibodies from recovered patients polyclonal antibodies is the synthesized version of those isolated antibodies where we use fermentation systems and bioengineered cells to make those antibodies then we isolate them and we and we use it is there
any chance that the president would make a bad decision here because he would get to dictate his treatment as a powerful person like steve jobs did tragically i saw a doctor saying this is one of the problems with powerful people is that they actually can you know make a bad decision because
doctors will let them have too much of a saying is that possible in this situation you think i think the answer is no because they didn't put out a letter saying he got bleach and uv light in his face so i think he's fine so he didn't go with his own treatment protocol and and also you're
going to have chemo no i was just gonna say and also you know it it eliminated all of the other less nonsensical but equally sort of question mark treatments and so you know i think they went right
to the answer which would only have been really possible if the best docs basically said this is what we're doing and i think david mentioned this earlier that it had been decided well in advance i think that's a good insight yeah there's a there's a protocol that was written down
months ago vetted and re-vetted probably every week or every month as they get as they got more data and so the minute it happened there was nothing to talk about and and i suspect that that is probably what happened because there is no way you'd want to be
you know it's kind of like being a pilot like you follow a systematic set of rules to deal with the overwhelming majority of boundary conditions and this seemed like a pretty obvious boundary condition you would have wanted to have a protocol for well in advance so
okay so i want to just do one handicapping here sax i'll have you take this one off the bat because this was the chatter on twitter number one uh the first two i think are just crazy conspiracy there is he got it on purpose or he's lying put those aside for a second you can answer them if
you want to but the third one is hey what happens if he's incapacitated and cannot run or god forbid he died uh and so if he's on a ventilator if he cannot leave the hospital he's an icd it's not even a question the 25th amendment deals with that yeah yeah so it goes to pence
and if pence cannot do it for whatever reason but he's i think he's okay i was actually going to refer to the election though what happens to the election if in the next three four weeks he's in icu what happens then oh that i don't know well that's what i was trying
to make a change to his ballot if they wanted to but i think if he's in the icu he stays on the ballot so we would literally have an election with him on a ventilator or him i mean if he was unconscious could he could people still go vote for him i think this is a possibility i think
these are very low probability outcomes i think the most i think the most likely outcome here is that because he's got the best care um he's you know it's it's probably like at least 50 that this is over for him in about a week um and it redounds to his political advantage i think
there's probably a 40 chance that you know he's got more like a three or four week case which i think would hurt him because he's gonna be able to campaign and then there's maybe like a five or ten
percent chance of something more serious i wonder if he's got if he even if he recovers in a week the odds are pretty high that he'll have you know a long tail of fatigue right and so if he he doesn't change his if he changes his strategy and and just does things remotely and whatnot
doesn't do rallies anymore um you know and and he he doesn't really come out and say he's fatigued but but there's this behavioral change does that change things do you think i think he needs to be able to campaign and hold these rallies i think that's an essential part
of his uh election strategy but also it's always been his way of you know going over the heads of the media that hates him and talking directly to people and rallying his base and field testing his ideas there was that period when during lockdowns when he just stopped doing rallies for several
months and it really felt like he was adrift um so yeah i think if he can't do rallies i think you know that could easily swing the election a couple of points and cause him to lose i think saxipoo's 100 right i was in indiana last week and uh there were a bunch of folks in the
neighborhood where i was staying and i i was walking my dog and they were walking their dogs we were all kind of walking side by side and they all were ramping up to go to a trump rally they were super excited about this this moment to go hear what he has to say they were they sounded
like they were kind of in this undecided camp but they wanted to go to the rally to hear what he had to say and kind of experience that trump moment um it was a real kind of ground level um
i think um proof point for your uh for your statement around like you know people really need to feel and because that's a big part of his uh his kind of mo is that groundless it is and i think it was it was one of the reasons why his um no one saw his election coming in 2016
is if you turned on the tv and just listened to the commentators i mean aside from maybe fox it seemed like everyone just hated him but if you attended the rallies you would see that he was reaching a lot of people tens of thousands of people at each event and he was flying around
doing three events a day uh tremendously energetic just um so yeah i think it's it would hurt him a lot um but look if he's back on the stump a week from now you're probably gonna see all sorts of people on the right saying you know i told you so and god healed him and you know he must be the
chosen one or you know who we we we could be uh we could be seeing a weekend at bernie's moment here even if he's just tired they'll prop him up on a big stick and hold him up in front of the crowds and then put him back in the airplane and fly him back home i think i'll know if he's if he's too
tired because you know he gets up there and he talks for like an hour and a half i mean right he's done two or three yeah it's like an hour and a half is short for him yeah so is it possible we could be talking about
trump having less energy than biden in a debate which i think is a good segue here are there gonna be two more presidential debates and what was our take on the absolutely embarrassing [ __ ] show that we saw on tuesday night which was supposed to be the topic today that we're going to lead
off which was the debate which seems unimportant now it feels like a year ago how do you expect us to comment on something that happened so long ago it was 72 hours ago i mean come on people oh my god it feels like it's like years 2020 is so exhausting i think i've aged 30 years
in one year it's like three decades that debate that debate was just a dumpster fire um you know the way that i thought about it was wrong yeah not true i mean imagine no no i agree it was a disaster for trump it was a disaster for trump go ahead sacks explain because he's
your boy um are you now not going to vote for him after that just to clarify for the audience uh i'm not i'm not pro-trump i'm just just voting for him i'm anti-hysteria i always support the side that seems least hysterical to me at any given time did you vote for trump last election yes or no
or would you be comfortable even saying that i think you'd be surprised if i told you who i voted for really but okay so on to the debate um i think both biden and trap biden and trump both had a trap to avoid i think biden's trap was appearing senile i think trump's trap was appearing unhinged
i would say that biden avoided his trap and trump did not um by constantly attacking biden interrupting him uh it was counterproductive i mean what you want to do with biden is let the man talk he's a gaff machine you know let him talk let him say things that will get him
in trouble instead by constantly interrupting him trump kind of let him off the hook and um so it's now look i mean both of their bases uh you know it's like it's like a sporting event there's gonna
root for the side they they already came to you know to support uh but i don't think trump helped himself with a few percent of independents who are still out there you know looking to make a decision i think you're totally right it was um it was really surprising because if he had just
left him to his own devices you would have let it play out but i thought biden to be honest there were some moments he was fabulous so i thought he was excellent on race i thought he was incredible in the moment that he basically stood up to trump about his son hunter and he looks in
the camera and he basically says look i love my son my son's had troubles and i support i mean amazing and so like in those moments it's so hard to not see that guy as presidential and i don't mean like it's easy for democrats or people that are voting for him like me but
i think if you're a republican you got to look at that guy and say man that is a decent dude he did in certain key moments he did fabulously well and in other moments where there were traps he actually got billed up because trump kept interrupting and joe was smart enough to stop
talking so that it amplified the sense that trump was interrupting him trump to me seemed pathetic and scared that was my like he's scared of losing he felt like a bully who had been like laughed at by the whole class like nobody takes him seriously like the moderator
what's his name um chris wallace chris wallace the moderator was kind of like what what are you doing sir please i think chris wallace i mean i know people were critical of him but chris wallace is like sir please just trying to appeal to like basic
decency and trump just not getting it me trump looks so bad it's just i think confirmed with people say the demographic he has to win is white women in a lot of these swing states i mean i don't think women want to vote i'm not going to speak for women here but
my understanding is women don't like guys like that who interrupt constantly and who are belligerent and badgering and they kind of like a great dad who defended to your point chamoth you know his son and said hey listen my son's got problems my other son died
i really think i really think and i and i and we talked about this a little bit before but the surface area in terms of policy between the republicans and the democrats now are virtually non-existent so look if you unpack foreign policy they both hate russia
they both hate china they both need india and the middle east is irrelevant because we're moving to a carbon neutral alternative energy world they also don't need russia as an example so all of this stuff that used to matter before in so much of the foreign policy that dictated
how americans would fight wars spend money you know incite democracy protect certain leaders it's all out the window and they both think about it the same way because the surface area is so uh similar that's not what about what about the economy so number two economically
they're so similar because they both want to spend trillions of dollars just under a different label you know one is sort of under a green new deal and the other is called an infrastructure bill or whatever it is and then number three they will both have the same federal reserve that is tied to
the hip of treasury who has already committed to be trillions of dollars a year in hawk backing up all the debt that basically exists and so if you put all these things together it's a popularity contest and this is why i think joe biden has an advantage because in a popularity
contest where you're just picking the figure that you would you know either have a beer with or feel the most comfortable with there's an element of this which is like it's just a decent human being it's easier for biden to get that across than it is for trump and when trump behaves that way
it just violates some simple rules of decency like they were in the debate against hillary clinton he didn't act this way and he was more um uh he it's it was like watching like a show like you were kind of like tuning in to see um what the theatrics would be or in the debates
in the primaries in 2016 against the republicans it was theatrical here it was just it was it was just kind of not it was it was pretty sex in that way sax you think the democrats put up the right candidate because if you did put up elizabeth warren if you did put up a bernie sanders or god
forbid both of them at the same time it would be a very stark contrast you would have the socialist ticket that wants to you know ban the billionaires and stop capitalism and kneecap it and uh spend a
bunch of money uh on redistribution of wealth and here biden doesn't he's never said redistribution of wealth he's never said ban the billionaires he's pro-capitalism feels like a safer bet to the
majority of americans did they did the democrats actually do a good job putting biden up there i think so um i think he is the most now that we know he's not senile i mean i think there was some real question about that going into the debate i think he proved in that debate that he's not
um and you know he's always kind of had the decency card that jamal talks about um now that we know he's not senile i think he he's he is the the democrats most electable candidate because he is more centrist than certainly an elizabeth warren or some of the other candidates that you mentioned
elizabeth warren would have moved the the election to be about substance and if this in many ways strategically no but think about this if you basically converge on roughly the same strategy with different labels you make the election one of style and there are a lot of people who
really want decency back in the presidency more so than they want anything else because they already come into the election with a level of skepticism that policy a won't change that fast and b to the
extent it changes doesn't affect them and so you know for years we've been electing people we like and this is probably the most extreme test of that idea i think i think there was like i mean like if you think about that debate you could probably simplify it down into the audience being part of
three camps they either know who they're voting for trump they know who they're voting for biden and then some folks who are kind of maybe they're changeable and for the folks that are changeable there's a diversity of objectives right there are some folks
who care about the decency some folks who care about policy but at the end of the day i think um you you go into this debate with an expectation of trump and an expectation of biden and i would say that trump was flat to down relative to expectation and biden was flat to up
and so um that's where i would kind of give the the the ticker to and sorry i don't want to interrupt but i just want to read you this headline president trump will be admitted to walter reed medical center on friday uh for a few days yeah i read that and that hold on a second
well his doctor said it's because they're out of an abundance of caution they just want to have him in a place where he can be treated if and as he needs it that maybe you buy that a cover story i think that look if you don't buy that i think he's in trouble uh jason that's that
it is it is very strange when you get a treatment when when you get a treatment like he got today you know eight grams of uh immunoglobulin therapy like that it sucks uh i've had this treatment
i've had uh immunoglobulin therapy before and you get knocked out you you're on all these steroids you're on all this anti-allergy stuff you are a mess for a day or two and you know you want to get like ivs and stuff that they give you all sorts of stuff to go with it i got to imagine
that after getting that therapy he's going to need to be in some degree of care and i would imagine it's probably better to just do that around doctors and with all the equipment than trying to you know kind of bring everything into the white house so i don't read it as negatively but
um well i mean do you do you think it could be like an anaphylactic you know you might be having some reaction yeah totally like i said a large percentage of people that get these antibody therapies have um some sort of allergic response it's all the way from anaphylactic to
hey i'm having my throat's closing hey i feel i'm getting flushed i'm getting a fever there's all sorts of ways that this can kind of present so the the world is changing so fast that we can't even complete a podcast without it being obsolete can i tell you one other thing um what did you guys
think about the fact this is a little morbid so you can we can choose not to talk about it but the stock market basically did nothing today on the news that the most important person in the free world theoretically um i think you just answered your own question
i could chime in on this one i don't think that people perceive that trump is good or bad uh for the economy either way and that the economy is separated now from politics because they think biden or trump are going to have the same policies which you said before they have the same policies
so why does it matter if trump were to tragically die it would not make a difference in the american economy it's not going to affect people buying iphones it might shake people psychologically but i don't think in a massive way because he's almost out of office so i think it's all baked in
that's why the market did join what do you think i want to disagree slightly with the idea this election doesn't matter um i think it will matter a lot if uh the democrats win the senate as well as the presidency because then they will have one party control and they can pass much legislation
as they want and i think a lot of things will get signed and i think the biden presidency could be very consequential at least for two years um while all this legislation has passed even if you know
he's not you know out in front saying very much um i mean the significance will be in the in the pen to sign the legislation if the republicans hold on to the senate but biden wins the presidency i agree with you that it's not going to be a tremendously consequential election because we'll
have gridlock and divided government again and so i think a lot hinges on whether biden wins with or without the senate i i don't disagree with you the only thing that i will say is that i think that
biden will drag the country especially if it's a you know up and down democratic ticket back to the 80s and 90s more to the sort of the george baker school of diplomacy and governance and i think that if i and i don't know him to know this but i think that if he really
were to have a legacy i'm susp i i would suspect that part of again because he's mentioned that you know why did he run he said the pivotal moment was like charlottesville and trump's reaction to charlottesville i think biden is really moored by this concept of decency
and i think that if if he were there and he thought to himself i'm going to be here for four years because that's the right responsible thing to do but no more um i don't think that you're gonna see a bunch of crazy legislation pass i think biden's gonna
say guys this is what i expect to do by the way did you because and i and i think i would bet on that because of what he said at the beginning of the debate he's like uh i am the democratic party i don't know if you guys remember that yeah i do remember that that was incredible that was so that
was a that was a very darth sidious emperor move when he said no no no he was i think he was trying to basically say like firewall the extra the far left or the far left the socialist left and say that rhetoric is not what i was elected on i was elected on my platform i am the party this is what
i believe and everybody else will have to toe the line and by the way in the end that's not such a bad thing yeah it's amazing i i i agree i think that that was a really important moment for him is for him to say look i'm in charge here because the republicans have been making the argument that
he's a trojan horse for all these like far left elements aoc aoc and so it was very it was very important to come forward and say no i'm i'm the one leading this ticket now that being said and i
think it would be a great thing for the country if biden brought the democratic party back to more of a you know bill clinton to you know obama type centrism or you know center leftism i guess you could say as opposed to this sort of like crazy you know woke marxism or maoism whatever you want
to call it um yeah but i'm i'm very skeptical that he will because i think biden has always positioned himself throughout his career as being at the center of the democratic party and i think he moves as the democratic party moves i agree he's not going to be all the way to the left of
the democratic party but those left elements will drag his sort of center to further to the left and we'll end up with sort of a compromise and i think at the end of the day if the democrats win congress he'll sign whatever they they pass i'm not so sure i really i really i'm not so
sure the the white house is uh not that far away it looks like it's a 30 minute drive from walter reed sending a helicopter is that normal because he drove there last time would that be indicative of this as an emergency type situation sending marine one as opposed to
just driving there for 20 minutes there'd be a lot of liability if he had an actual medical emergency and they were just like yeah we're gonna send him for a few days out of an abundance of caution the fact that they said out of an abundance of caution i think you if there is an emergency
you you can't get away with saying that oh you can for sure they would lie i don't know it'll come out you're saying the trump administration is above lying about situations if he's unconscious they gotta swear pension yeah there's a lot of reasons why you gotta be careful
i'm not saying he's unconscious i'm just saying it it's not even unconscious marine one like i'm just thinking out loud here is sending a helicopter for a 20 minute ride then a motorcade like seems a little i mean i would take a i would take a helicopter to the 7-11 if i
had a helicopter fair enough you're taking a helicopter that is something i would say okay uh let's this is i think a good jumping off point to an interesting discussion that blew up on twitter earlier this week which is we can't keep up with all the politics the the rhetoric
the vitriol and this polarization so uh coinbase co-founder and ceo brian armstrong wrote a letter saying hey listen if you uh want to talk about politics that's fine not at my company anymore
we're going to have a no politics rule no debating the stuff and we're going to be ultra ultra focused focused i'm sorry at work and you can check your politics at the door when you read this sax you've come out in support of brian armstrong uh what was your take on his position
about leave your politics at the door when you get to work right well i think i think what brian so i did i did compliment it um his his manifesto and i i think are you an investor i am i'm a small investor in coinbase um and uh and and i'm friendly with with brian and so
i i certainly you know liked the idea of defending him against unfair attacks but um i also genuinely liked the manifesto and i think you know his argument kind of boils down to three components i think number one that having these debates on every issue whatever the issue
du jour is pulls the company's focus away from its core mission which he really emphasized and um you know that mission mission is challenging enough in its own right um second he was saying that in something i've said before as well which is just
that politics is just increasingly divisive in our society it's just inherently divisive and therefore it's uh corrosive to team cohesion and the more you have of that in your company the worse it is for you know the team and i think the third thing he he mentioned which i thought
was really interesting is that the freewheeling debate of or discussion of politics you know like like that we're having here but we kind of have our own little safe zone here it risks uh hurt feelings or misunderstandings that can become hr issues because people can then complain
about they feel unsafe they feel unsafe and they report to and so that's a further destruction moments in this podcast i'll be honest there's a couple of moments well i think well i think one of
the reasons why this pod sort of works is because we're all we're all friends and uh we've created a safe space for us to have these conversations but the workplace is very different it's not you know and and what i read brian trying to do is to reimpose a true safe space by saying leave
your politics at the door now i think he's been deliberately misconstrued by by critics who want to say that well you have to leave your conscience at the door you know that's not true he's not saying that you can't have your own political views or contribute to causes that you like but
you just you got to do it on your own time kind of like mr han said in fast times at richmond high you know like do that on your own time um and and that makes sense to me i think like i mean look i think about this from the point of view of one of the employees working at one of
these companies that doesn't want to be a party to the debate um if i'm an engineer at google or coinbase i go into work and i am captive right i don't have the option of not showing up to work if i go to a rally i have the option of saying i'm going to go to this rally and walk away because
i don't like the speaker or i'm going to go to the rally because i want to participate in this dialogue or this debate i can't do that at work so it's unfair for work which is a place that i as an
employee have to go to every day to be a forum for people to express themselves on political points that i may or may not agree with but more importantly may or may not want to actually be a party to the discussion around um and i think that's the most important thing to note here is
like it's not about enabling the free speech of the employees that want to debate it's about the protecting the workspace for the employees that don't want to debate and don't want to be exposed to that um and that's really important as chamath is a person of color who um you know have i'm sure
some has some strong feelings about what we've seen in terms of police shootings or maybe in your own personal life experience facing racism uh again as a person of color what are your thoughts on the workplace is it is it possible for you to leave that at the door that was the criticism i
think i saw from the you know people who were supportive of blm and they said the background here was they were trying to get brian to explicitly say black lives matter and to you know have the company rally behind that um and that he didn't he didn't want to have that be part
of the work environment and that he was offering people four to six months severance if they would leave if they don't like the new rules so what are your thoughts i think that this whole thing
became a quagmire unnecessarily i think that he showed um a lot of naivety um and frankly like um you know a little bit of stupidity really um it was really poorly written um and that's why it's been so misunderstood and misconstrued in my opinion i think a lot of what he had to say was
valid but when it was so poorly presented and you know the the essay was like eight minutes and it was rambling and the mission was like you know 97 down on the you know and it's just like it was a
convoluted [ __ ] mess so if i had to do it again if i were him or if i was his advisor and he had asked me you know to proofread the essay what i would have said is more of the following which is our mission which is you know i think to create financial liberty or something something like that
you guys can find out what it is for the whole world is unbelievably important we will talk about every issue through the lens of achieving our mission and we will be disciplined about saying which things matter and which things don't so for example if somebody says listen i really believe
in spaying and neutering dogs the right answer shouldn't be hey shut the [ __ ] up it says okay um how does that allow us to maximize our users how does that allow us to achieve our mission why does it allow us to achieve our mission and if you ask the question why four or five times
in the very first principles way you'll get to the answer so i would have rather said we are going to train people how to understand what builds up to our mission and what is otherwise something that
you should leave at home and in that context there are a lot of things actually that are political that need to be brought especially into a company like coinbase which is working in crypto which is all about eliminating the financial barriers of people that don't have access to it like you are
trying to dismantle an extremely exclusionary part of the economy and so there are potentially many movements that matter and those movements in countries in which you will want to gain users may look like political movements well and that was jack dorsey's point he uh so i just think yeah
so i just think it was a it was a it was kind of a too super it was very silicon valley-esque reaction it was emotional um it was a little insecure and it to me it missed the mark because there was a lot of validity in what he was saying but presented in an kind of in a lens of you know
silicon valley [ __ ] and it was not well thought through so if he had rewritten it and he had said 99 of what he said but through the lens of why we're going to think about a first principles way of defining how everything ladders into the mission he will train his employees instead
what he created was a schism and a decision point and i'm not sure that that's how you maximize value in 2020 as a ceo because at the end of the day you have to deal with an entire population cohort that is that are in their 20s early 30s teenagers that will eventually want
to work for you and whether we like it or not they're different and one of the things you need to do if you're going to run an enormous company is understand the psychology of your employees understand the psychology of how movements and decisions are organized and then play to win
and it's no different than anybody else if you want to be in the job you know to be the starting point guard for the warriors you got to know how to [ __ ] pass the ball and if you're going to be the power forward you have to know how to do a certain set of things
that are different than that and so i would sort of have framed it there because i think there was a lot of goodness in what he said but presented in a pretty shitty manner i think it's good he
brought up the topic i do think there's a tactical issue here and he he could have laid out the ground rules for i think to your point jamal of how we should talk about uh politics at work and what are the ground rules i think the number one issue here which people don't talk about is that
slack and email and forums inside of companies have created a massive distraction and when somebody goes into the random channel which is built into slack and i know this is in the weeds but i have seen this happen at multiple companies now slack infects a company somebody creates a
room about a topic whether it's trump or police violence or immigration whatever it is and then people want to sound off on that and now you've got an electronic form where people are talking about highly charged issues that makes people feel unsafe and so what i told my companies was um the
two companies i run you could talk about politics if you want to go for a walk with somebody and have coffee or lunch and you want to have a two-hour discussion about it go for it please do not put this in electronic form because it's a massive distraction uh and there'll be a record
that could create downstream human resources issues to your report sex i have a suggestion and this is an organizational design experiment and maybe somebody listening will implement at their
company allow 100 free form debate about anything one condition you literally need to have a soapbox and like in the 1880s hyde park in london yep you put the soapbox someplace in a safe space where you can go and you can talk and people who want to listen will listen and people who need to work
can work and people who don't want to listen don't have to be forced to listen what's the a literal place in your office you put the soap you have a soapbox you grab it you put it on the ground you stand on it and you say it and if you're not willing to do that
then right you know are you saying that there's no digital version of that because people could what i'm saying is that two things one is the digital version is actually training people to ask why why does it matter now the reason why it's important to ask that is because somebody may say
i'll use jason's example that he loves we need to support the uyghurs in china the best way to do that is to proliferate our software in the following way because it will free them from ensavement of the chinese and it'll give them access to financial independence wow
i mean okay that seems to be paying off the mission so if you would if so you gotta give freedom for people to come up with these ideas because it may the first version of this idea may may not actually be what the final version is in the final version maybe the killer feature so i
in the digital forum in the slacks it should be why respect and that's a very respectful question it shouldn't it should not be in any digital forum because it leads to chaos because we see that on twitter and what's happening is the twitter derangement
that we all suffer from is now infected inside the community the communication system that runs the operating system of the company go ahead exactly yeah that that's the thing yes i do i do agree with jake on this one so so look i mean chamath is right that i'm sure
i'm sure trumath would have written a better letter but i think we understand the gist of what brian was trying to say and actually i thought it took a lot of courage to to write it and what he's basically saying is that politics has become so divisive
in our society that that i mean it'd be nice if we could have these reasonable debates the way that we're having this discussion inside companies we didn't have to have these artificial restrictions but we do we have to you know it's the same reason you know that we have the separation of church and
state is because people couldn't stop killing each other over religious wars and so finally we had you know the treaty of westphalia to stop it and what brian's basically proposing is a is a treaty for the workplace because we cannot get along around politics but david he is the ceo of an
8 billion dollar company could he not have hired somebody to edit that essay okay well i mean look i i just to me it's like if it's meaning if it's seriously well thought through and it and if it was as important as westphalia you would probably have a couple proofreaders corporate corporate
version okay it's not it's not historical it could have been polish for sure here is jack dorsey's response and i'll have you guys respond to it i think it's in your wheelhouse in terms of what you
said chamoth bitcoin aka crypto is direct activism against an unverifiable and exclusionary financial system which definitely affects so much of our society important to at least acknowledge and connect the related societal issues your customers face daily this leaves people behind i think he's
right you have to view this problem not through the lens of your own emotions not even through the lens of the frustrations of your employees you have to help shift the discussion to say why does this achieve our mission and just constantly in a thoughtful respectful way
ask why and by the fourth or fifth why it will either be something that doesn't matter and you can dismiss it quickly or something that actually is rooted in fact and probably is something you need to pay attention to and maybe the way that the conversation started was probably not with the
right language that people given the chance would have framed it differently okay the worst take uh according to the internet's uh twitter's ability to ratio people which is when you get more comments than likes um which is not normally how it works people are actually taking the time
to explain to you how bad your take was as opposed to liking it is what a ratio is if you don't know um goes to dick casolo uh who's a friend of ours me first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against
the wall and shot in the revolution i'll be ha i mean and that's that's enough to get you ratioed and have this thing go supernova i mean mike cernovich is retweeting this and losing like his mind over it you know that the former ceo of twitter is inciting violence he's a comedian as
well um to costello so i think he's joking here and but he adds the punk the exclamation point i'll happily provide video commentary yeah here here's here's here's my uh disagreement with with
dick and with jack is ultimately the societal value of a company doesn't come from whatever platitudes or political statements its co makes but rather from the quality of its products and the impact of its products and in that sense dick and jack are living in a glass house i mean
twitter is a sewer of political diatribe and polemical hate you know it's i don't know anyone who feels better uh you know after spending time on twitter you know if facebook is like cigarettes you know i i don't know what twitter is i mean it's like fentanyl or something yeah
so so ultimately you know maybe jack should spend his time figuring out how to make twitter into a less socially divisive product instead of you know because just issuing woke plates is not going to do it i agree with the i agree with that i don't think platitudes does it all i'm saying is
you have to view it through the lens of i want to become the most relevant company possible and achieve the most impact and i think that there are a lot of times where some of these issues when presented politically underlying it is actually some feature or some capability or
some way of seeing the problem that unlocks more demand that can help you win and not knowing a priori what the answers to those questions are it's important to train people on a framework versus say you can't talk because i guarantee you what will happen is somebody with some killer
feature will be too scared to say something because they're not sure how to say it well and you and i both know because we've seen many companies that have gone through that cycle those companies decay and die yeah i think it'd be great if a policy like this wasn't necessary
i mean it's i i agree it's suboptimal but i think it's it's caused by the fact that people just can't get along around politics anymore friedberg what is your take on ultimately how coinbase winds up the year or two after this do they get more resumes of hyper-talented people
who want to embrace a politics social issue free workplace or do millennials and you know gen c and this next group of talented folks say i don't want to work for somebody who doesn't want to talk about these issues at work and then at the production board where you have a factory
where you build uh companies do you have some rule around this yourself or thoughts about how you run your companies i think the more clearly you define culture the more successful your company will be and right or wrong about whether or not you enable the debate in the discussion and how you
define the forums for kind of political discussion within your company the fact that there is a clear definition and delineation around this point i think removes the uncertainty and i think he'll do
exactly what he's hoping to do which is to get people to leave and to attract other people that better fit with that cultural model i want to put my game face on i want to go to work and i want to win the game i'm here to play i'm not here to [ __ ] around i'm not here to do other stuff
i want this job because i believe in this mission and i want this company to succeed in what it's trying to do and i think other places that allow people to run around and you know do things that they may or may not appreciate other people doing or and you have
this kind of low definition kind of culture where some people are happy some people are unhappy it all kind of you know slows things down and and i wouldn't kind of encourage anyone to um to let that happen i think it's really important to just define how it is you want to operate
be really clear about the rules and the boundaries and then um that i agree with as well i mean i think it's very much within his right and i think it took i do applaud his courage in doing it i just think that it misses the mark because i think it was
too emotional i think he could do a 2.0 version and just keep building on the manifesto and say hey based on the feedback i got here's how we're going to do it no discussion here on the election reid hastings put out that fantastic uh powerpoint that i think we all know really well the cultural
playbook from netflix and he when did he put that out like it's almost a decade ago no two decades ago was 2000 2001 and he's continued to refine it right if you look at there's recent iterations of
it and they continue to kind of do a better job of defining um you know uh how do they intend to operate uh with people um and i think it's it's only continue to reinforce the innovation that drives that company into the hundred billion dollar plus valuation it's earned yes and if you
if there's one important thing which is that there's a meaningful difference in the average age of a netflix employee and the average age of a silicon valley company now that may be also part of it as well i i think the one thing that brian could clarify is that you don't have to check
your conscience at the door you it's not we're not saying that you can't have political views you're allowed to say things on twitter or take political stands or donate to whoever you want it's just that the company itself is going to be a demilitarized zone you know we're not going to
bring we're not going to bring these contentious divisive debates that really aren't related to our core mission inside the company so we can all work better so we can all work better as a team towards the reason that we all joined this company but that's totally fair but you know while
i'm saying all i'm saying again i'll just say it again that is such an important thing to say you could have had it proof for it a couple times you didn't could have been could have come across the way you're saying it it didn't have to be written by gpt3
you know what i mean also i think that it was a the the dunk he did afterwards where he's like and by the way if you don't like it here's four months severance get the [ __ ] out that was a pretty uh aggressive move as well all right i don't know how you guys feel i think i kind of
like the gangster nature i like it i think it's i think it's great it's like if i'm on the team and i believe in what he just said i feel great that he's flushing this [ __ ] out and if i don't
agree with it it's like [ __ ] yeah i'll take it you know like it's really clear and i think the clear-cut definition of culture is what every company needs to kind of pursue and it's an ongoing pursuit and you can always do a better job with it and culture is what
you choose not to do as much as it is what you do right i'm not going to talk about politics i think is totally right it takes a lot of courage to say here's what i believe and if you don't if you don't believe in it then it's okay for you to leave and here's a severance package
that takes a lot of courage so i applaud him for that yeah i mean look it's a free country and we all have limited time we should all go work on the mission that is most important and inspiring to us and coinbase has a very specific mission that brian's defining he's trying to find it clearly
and if that mission is important and inspiring to you then go work there and if it's not then go work at the place that you know where that you know where the mission does inspire you and it may be a startup or maybe you know a political organization whatever it is go go do
that thing that's most meaningful to you that's kind of my interpretation of what he was saying all right as we wrap here it was hard for me to interpret because it was so poorly written well also i mean it was also like a huge bomb on twitter and people's reaction to it was based
upon i think how they feel at this moment in time and a lot of people feel this is why i'm sorry but communications is important how you say things what you say yeah style is really important yeah whether it's take the time get it right yeah all right so 2021 is going to
be upon us before we know it and i wanted to wrap here with each of your feelings on uh the economy uh technology and politics economy technology politics how do you feel uh about 2021 are you optimistic pessimistic neutral on those economy politics have you
guys ever been to magic mountain or disneyland you ever get you get in one of those log rides and it's like raging rapids or roaring waters or whatever they're called sure and it's just [ __ ] like you hop in and this thing just takes off down the river
i mean i don't know nothing summarizes not better for me but in so many ways is that where i feel we are right now we've all jumped on a bunch of [ __ ] logs and we're shooting down this rapid river um and i think a big part of what i'm feeling and chamath is in the middle of this
but there's this extraordinary velocity of capital right now and um when i say that i just mean capital is moving in large amounts very freely and that creates like once in a generation kind of opportunity it's in part because the fed has dropped interest rates to zero so
there's all these trillions of dollars moving markets there's a change in an outlook and the world is being shifted in so many ways this is this really amazing moment that i think we can all be afraid of because we're on a [ __ ] roaring rapid on a log trying to stay afloat
but um there is so much happening uh in in these markets that we kind of operate in there's never been a better time to get your business funded or to take your company public or to get customers to make quick decisions and change their behavior whether they're a consumer
or an enterprise customer money and decisions are happening at a money's moving at a faster pace than we've ever seen and decisions are happening at a faster pace than we've ever seen that's my general sentiment i don't think it stops going into 2021 there's just another
kind of floodgate about to open with this election one way or the other um but the these we're in the middle of this kind of raging rapids right now and it's uh it's it's a pretty um it's a pretty scary but also kind of exciting kind of time so it's so well
said quinoa i really agree with you i i think that it's kind of like if you used to take um a second to make a one dollar decision and a minute to take a hundred dollar decision the amount of money being flooded into the economy now allows you to uh make a hundred dollar decision in
a second right so like the order of magnitude of the mental barrier that it takes um has changed and uh i agree with you i was thinking earlier this week that um it's a really incredible time to be alive for one very in one very specific way which is obviously there's stuff that's
happening that's really turbulent but there is a chance that a bunch of us can really um like change things in a meaningful way and um and i find it exciting so i'm generally like i'm super bullish uh on the economy i'm super bullish on tech um and i think i'm actually kind of like
reasonably optimistic about politics i think that we're gonna find our civility soon um and uh and i don't know why that's going to happen or how it's going to get triggered um but i think honestly like the election of biden um will go such a long way to just um you know
just showing what is rewarded and then to figure out how to reward the folks that were supporting trump in the first place for purposes of economic um you know pushback could be a nice de-escalation
in fact and maybe an olive branch if biden can bring that republican party into the conversation yeah and sac sacks had this really beautiful thing that he posted on twitter which was like you know a lot of san francisco's dysfunction is really going to spread wealth throughout the rest
of the country because a lot of cities that were shut out of all these tech gains will now see it and now you can imagine uh all kinds of people there's a guy that i you know follow on twitter he he he lives in bowie maryland he's a engineer at vmware um this black guy and he was just
talking about how he got promoted and he's now a principal engineer and you know and i just thought like this is really [ __ ] cool like there's gonna be all this redistribution of opportunity all around the country um and that'll happen because of coronavirus because of people's
frustration with california because you know of a handful of us how fed up we've gotten with the culture of silicon valley including by the way right what brian armstrong wrote which was which again still very important um and so we'll all be better off for that so i
don't know i'm pretty optimistic sax tech economy politics 2021 well i i'm i'm super bullish about you know how about the entrepreneurial energy in the american economy um it's it's it's a hundred times greater than when we started out our careers in this business you know 20 years ago in terms of
the number of companies that get funded the ideas the tools that are available the funding i mean when you think about it this might be the first time in human history where money is chasing the like throwing money at the ideas i mean throughout history until i'd say the last 10 20 years ago
you know the people who had no money but had great ideas have always had to go hat in hand to go find the capital and now it's going it's completely the other way around there's so many vcs and they're all racing around trying to find the people with ideas and um it was worse than
that sax they had to go give their ideas to a big company and take a salary right like so tesla you know nikola tesla the original inventor didn't profit at all from his ideas you know um and so that was pretty common and um and so just this just how entrepreneurial the u.s economy
has become i'm very the new economy is completely taken over and i'm bullish on that i think the the you know the the tweet that smoth was referencing you know i said that san francisco's loss is going
to be america's gain the rest of america's gain because middle america was really left out of the new economy it's just not where it was taking place and so you know globalization really gutted industrial america and cultural america they didn't get to participate
in the enormous wealth creation of the last two or three decades and i think you know on i guess you know because of what san francisco has done in terms of driving out companies i think the companies are going to be you know tech companies are going to be all
over the us now yeah totally it's so it's [ __ ] awesome should be uh super interesting uh and so uh let's just lay the odds as we wrap here on biden winning biden 65 35 approaching 70 30. okay david's you gotta you got a handicap for me on fighting winning
what do you think sax well i mean the the betting line is is like somewhere in the 60 to 70 range and so you'd have to say that the the betting markets are probably you know pretty accurate i guess you know probably there's a 70 chance of him winning
if i had to bet on that line i'd probably take the 30 underdog because i think you know there's alway things are so in so much turmoil right now that anything can still happen so you think there's a chance that trump could win yeah and it's probably bigger than 30 percent yeah it's
probably bigger it's slightly bigger than what the betting markets are giving them credit for free what are your thoughts probably right yeah i don't have anything to add to that all right uh any speculation that we want to end with chamath uh on the uh i just noticed that a
meal from uh uber is doing a spec mark pincus is doing his bag everybody's doing specs now any speculation on uh what we're gonna see in that market nope god bless them and i love you all besties all right besties back to the grind back to the garage and we'll see you next time
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