E41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more

Summary

Podcast Summary: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg – Episode E41

Title: Vaccine Policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's Latest Breakthrough, Wealth Creation, Opportunity & More
Host/Authors: All-In Podcast, LLC
Release Date: July 23, 2021
Duration: Approximately 95 minutes

In Episode 41 of the All-In Podcast, industry veterans Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg delve into a myriad of pressing topics ranging from COVID-19 vaccine policies and Big Tech dynamics to groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence and the essence of wealth creation. The conversation is rich with insights, personal anecdotes, and spirited debates, making it a comprehensive exploration of contemporary economic, technological, and social issues.

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1. COVID-19 Vaccine Policies and Mandates

Rising Cases and Policy Implications
The episode kicks off with a deep dive into the escalating COVID-19 cases in the United States. David Sacks highlights the surge from an average of 12,000 daily cases to 62,000 within a month, accompanied by a steady seven-day average of 248 deaths. He posits that this spike underscores the necessity for re-evaluating vaccine policies, emphasizing the potential for exponential case increases and related fatalities among the unvaccinated.

David Sacks (07:16): "We're gonna get up to 10, 100,000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated."

Debate on Vaccine Mandates
The panelists engage in a robust discussion on the appropriateness and effectiveness of vaccine mandates. David Friedberg argues for differentiating between public policy and private behavior, suggesting that mandates may not yield the desired compliance and could infringe upon individual freedoms. Conversely, Chamath Palihapitiya emphasizes the public health externalities, asserting that in cases like COVID-19's highly transmissible Delta variant, collective health must take precedence over individual liberties.

Chamath Palihapitiya (12:52): "Public health has to take a priority over any individual's rights. In this very specific, narrow case."

Specific Scenarios Discussed
The conversation further explores scenarios such as requiring vaccine cards for public school teachers, public transportation users, and attendees of large events. While Friedberg remains hesitant about government overreach, Chamath advocates for mandates in contexts where public health is directly impacted.

Chamath Palihapitiya (16:25): "Private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their employees and customers."

2. DeepMind's AlphaFold Breakthrough

Revolutionizing Protein Structure Prediction
Jason Calacanis introduces DeepMind's latest achievement: AlphaFold's ability to predict the structure of every protein in the human body and ten other species. This monumental database promises to accelerate advancements in drug discovery, understanding disease mechanisms, and preparing for future viral mutations.

Jason Calacanis (45:39): "With this capability from AlphaFold, we could predict what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors."

Implications for Pandemic Preparedness
The panel discusses how AlphaFold can enhance our ability to respond to pandemics by allowing scientists to anticipate and counteract viral mutations proactively. This tool is likened to the release of the Rosetta Stone for biology, offering unprecedented insights into protein functions and interactions.

Jason Calacanis (46:45): "It's almost like releasing the Rosetta Stone, in my opinion, in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body."

3. Big Tech, Government Relations, and Free Speech

Government Influence on Big Tech
David Sacks brings attention to recent statements by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, revealing coordinated efforts between the administration and Big Tech companies to flag and remove misleading content on social media platforms. This revelation sparks concerns about censorship and the erosion of First Amendment rights.

David Friedberg (52:24): "The White House is coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies. This is a blatant violation of the people's First Amendment."

Debate on Free Speech and Regulation
The panelists critique the government's role in influencing Big Tech's content moderation policies. Chamath warns against giving a single entity the power to regulate speech, fearing arbitrary and biased enforcement. David Friedberg echoes these sentiments, advocating for dismantling Big Tech monopolies to preserve free speech without government coercion.

Chamath Palihapitiya (58:37): "You can't have a stranglehold on distribution, because it will get perverted."

Economic Power and Innovation
Despite the criticisms, Jason Calacanis acknowledges the pivotal role Big Tech plays in technological advancements and societal progress. He defends companies like Google by highlighting their contributions to humanity, such as DeepMind's AlphaFold, and underscores the importance of private sector-driven innovation.

Jason Calacanis (51:17): "I don't think Covid kind of instigated this because they've been working on this for a very long time... making it freely available and searchable."

4. Wealth Creation, Opportunity, and Societal Perceptions

Debunking the Myth of a Rigged System
The conversation shifts to wealth creation and the prevailing notion that the American system is rigged against the average person. The panel counters this by sharing their personal journeys of hard work, determination, and strategic capital allocation that led to their success.

David Sacks (84:16): "All four of us worked really fucking hard. All four of us came from nothing... we were always the struggling immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are."

Capital and Technological Progress
Jason emphasizes the indispensable role of capital in driving technological breakthroughs and economic growth. He argues that without significant investment, monumental projects like SpaceX or AlphaFold would remain unattainable, thus stifling innovation.

Jason Calacanis (75:59): "The amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at Alphafold or at Waymo or what Bezos and Elon are doing is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work."

Social Commentary on Success and Privilege
Chamath and David Friedberg critique societal attitudes that undermine individual agency and attribute success solely to privilege or luck. They advocate for a mindset that values hard work, resilience, and personal agency as the true drivers of success.

Chamath Palihapitiya (73:41): "It's about trying and learning. That is a huge thing. It's about a learning mindset."

5. The Role of Private Initiative vs. Government in Addressing Global Issues

Private Sector's Contribution to Climate Change and Space Exploration
The panelists laud entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for their substantial investments in climate change solutions and space exploration. They argue that private initiatives complement, rather than replace, government efforts, driving progress through innovation and substantial capital allocation.

David Friedberg (73:02): "Elon, these are two of our greatest inventors... Nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than Elon."

Criticism of Government-Run Social Programs
Contrasting private success, the panel criticizes government-run social programs as inefficient and mismanaged. They contend that excessive funding without effective strategies leads to poor outcomes, such as declining school test scores despite high expenditure.

David Friedberg (86:16): "We spend something like $25,000 per pupil in California schools. The test scores are going down."

Balancing Innovation and Regulation
While celebrating private sector advancements, the panelists caution against excessive regulation that could hinder innovation. They advocate for a balanced approach where private companies are empowered to drive progress while maintaining necessary checks to protect public interest.

Chamath Palihapitiya (64:46): "We want things like AlphaFold to exist. ... But it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody."

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Conclusion

Episode E41 of the All-In Podcast offers a multifaceted discussion encompassing critical issues of the day. From dissecting vaccine policies and their societal implications to celebrating technological breakthroughs like DeepMind's AlphaFold, the panelists provide a nuanced perspective on navigating the complexities of modern economic and social landscapes. They emphasize the importance of private initiative, the judicious allocation of capital, and the need to balance individual freedoms with collective responsibilities. The episode serves as both a reflection on the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and a forward-looking dialogue on fostering innovation and opportunity in an ever-evolving world.

Notable Quotes:

• David Sacks (07:16): "We're gonna get up to 10, 100,000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated."

• Chamath Palihapitiya (12:52): "Public health has to take a priority over any individual's rights. In this very specific, narrow case."

• Jason Calacanis (45:39): "With this capability from AlphaFold, we could predict what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors."

• David Friedberg (52:24): "The White House is coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies. This is a blatant violation of the people's First Amendment."

• Chamath Palihapitiya (73:41): "It's about trying and learning. That is a huge thing. It's about a learning mindset."

• Jason Calacanis (75:59): "The amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at AlphaFold or at Waymo or what Bezos and Elon are doing is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of Episode E41, providing listeners with a clear understanding of the key discussions and perspectives shared by the panelists.

Transcript

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Sachs, I am going to give you $1,000 each to the charity of your choice for every correct answer. Fuck it, 10,000. But you have to answer. You have to answer in real time, and you can't fuck around. Okay? No stalling.

[David Sacks]

This is. This is to any charity chooses included. Tucker Carlson, 2024.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, let's have to give the answers right away. You cannot fucking think about this.

[David Sacks]

Here we go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

3, 2, 1. First, middle, and last name of your children and their birthdays.

[David Friedberg]

Go first, middle.

[David Sacks]

Stalling for time already?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, you're already stalled.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, go, Dino. You can beat these out. Nick, Go ahead, go.

[David Friedberg]

So is January.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, year. What's the year?

[David Friedberg]

Oh, 2008 is October 2010. And then.

[David Sacks]

Little guy, Little man.

[David Friedberg]

Little. You're trying to stop me with the little guy?

[Jason Calacanis]

Little man.

[David Friedberg]

The little guy. The little guy, Bubby. He was born October of 2016.

[David Sacks]

All right, good. He did it. He did it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That was a struggle.

[David Friedberg]

I got it. I got it.

[David Sacks]

He got there. He got there. That matters is he got there. It is. It is.

[David Friedberg]

So you're going to give the. You going to give 10 grand?

[David Sacks]

Yeah, 10 grand each to 10 grand each.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So it's 30 grand. Name 30 grand.

[David Friedberg]

To Tucker Carlson for President DeSantis 2024.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I said, Charity.

[David Friedberg]

Let your winners ride Rain Man.

[David Sacks]

David sat.

[David Friedberg]

And I said, we open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[David Sacks]

Love you, Queen of Quino. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to your favorite podcast, the all in podcast, where we talk about the economy, technology, politics, and, well, basically anything that's in the news. With us today, again, the Queen of Quinoa himself, David Friedberg. How are you doing, David?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm hanging in there today.

[David Sacks]

All right, people are looking for the dog. Where's the dog, Matty?

[Jason Calacanis]

He's sitting here on the floor. Monty, come here. Come on.

[David Sacks]

Come here. Come on, Monty. All right. And from a random palace somewhere in the world, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya. How you doing? See.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm doing great. You know, I got another dog while.

[David Sacks]

You were in Italy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I went to the breeder that I got Aki from, and she had a three year old that was not really, you know, ever gonna become a breeding dog or whatever. So I adopted the three year old. He has a parasite, so he's been pooing everywhere. Everywhere.

[David Sacks]

That's great information for the colon.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

All over the. All over the castle.

[David Sacks]

All over the castle.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Fantastic liquid poop, by the way. But we finally diagnosed it today, and he's going to the. To the vet to get some liquids and to get the parasite expunged from his body.

[David Sacks]

Okay, thank you for that information. I don't know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Nobody cares.

[David Sacks]

Nobody cares. I mean, I asked you how you were doing. I thought you were just going to say great. I didn't know we were going to go straight to diarrhea.

[David Friedberg]

We got a new dog, too.

[David Sacks]

You did.

[David Friedberg]

And it's been kind of a disaster. The kids were like, dad, we found this, like, I think golden that is really calm. She's just super low energy and calm. It's perfect for us. I'm like, I don't know. I think that's just like the puppy's kind of asleep. You, like, it's gonna wake up. They're like, no, no, no, no. This is like a special dog. It's like really well behaved. Whatever. So anyway, we get it. Sure enough, like a week later, the puppy wakes up and she's eating everything in the house, destroying everything. It's been. Yeah. So now we're.

[David Sacks]

Wait, is that dog number two or three for you?

[David Friedberg]

It's dog two. For dog one was a rescue dog. Who's great. So dog number two is now getting trained.

[David Sacks]

All right. David Sacks is with us, of course, the Rayman himself. And in related dog stories, I put all the girls to bed, and then I hear screaming. I get up, I run outside, literally. The new bulldog, who's nine months old, Maximus went on one of his running fits. One of my daughters falls out of bed, gets a bruise on her lower back, and she's wailing. The other daughter feels terrible about it, and then the dog decides that he is going to projectile vomit everywhere all at the same time. You guys have had these moments where, like, it's just complete, utter chaos.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's chaos.

[David Sacks]

It's just chaos. It's cat. Dogs plus kids equals chaos.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Chaos.

[David Sacks]

So.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But would any of us have it any other way? I love the combo of dogs and kids. It's just the best. It's pretty awesome. It's.

[David Sacks]

Dogs are amazing.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And kids, especially when you bring in a new dog or a puppy into the house, it's chaos. But it's a really beautiful chaos.

[David Sacks]

Well, you know what I think also is, like, think about how overrated everything in life is. People like, oh, my God, this place with the pasta in Italy. It's the greatest life changing thing. And, oh, this movie was incredible. It's the best movie ever made. And it's never the best movie ever made or the best pasta ever. It's great. Or whatever. But I think kids and dogs are underrated universally.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Have as many kids as you can possibly biologically have and can economically afford is my one opinion. And the more dogs, the better.

[David Sacks]

I love dogs. Yeah. All right. I think we should start with the COVID cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions, touching on people's freedoms. And it's hard to know where to start here. But I think facts are always a good place to start. Here in the United States we had gotten Covid cases to that 12,000 a day average. It was pretty amazing. And it looked like it was going to go straight down smooth sailing. And we had had deaths down at around, I saw some seven day averages where we were at 150, 200. Now the weekends are kind of weird in terms of reporting, but the seven day average today is at 248. In other words, it's been flat for a month. When you do this, this is according to the New York Times statistics and Google, you can search for Google and you'll find these have some great data that they'll just put right in the search result. However, cases have gone from this 12, 15k a day average soaring in just 30 days to 62,000 a day and a seven day average of 40,000. So we're basically tripled the number of cases. Cases trail traditionally deaths by something in the neighborhood of 10 days. I think I'm correct. Friedberg. So what do you think is actually going to happen here? We're gonna, we're gonna get up to 10, 100,000, 200,000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, you know, the current logic on this is that there will be because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even more infectious variant of COVID The people that are not vaccinated are starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from. So yeah, we will see deaths climb. And I think like we talked about last time, we're starting to see even Gavin did an interview yesterday in California talking about how, you know, there it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions, behavioral restrictions, mask mandates, etc. So there's going to be a set of reactions. And I think as we talked about last time, we saw the market start to react to the potential of that on Monday and then very interestingly kind of reverse course on Tuesday and everything came back when Everyone was freaked out on Monday after they saw the weekend's data which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the US But I think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are going to die. Therefore we're not going to see political leaders force restrictions that are kind of going to damage the economy. And we're going to start to walk what I think Israel's calling the golden line, which is balancing the economy with the health of the citizenry. So we'll see. It's going to come down to policy. But I think from a deaths perspective, there will absolutely be a rise in deaths now as unvaccinated people are going to be the bulk of those deaths. And this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated.

[David Sacks]

And then Sachs, this becomes now a great raw shock test of what do you see in this data and in this moment? Because it's a pandemic, as many people are saying now, I think this is becoming the meme or the catchphrase. It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So people have chosen to opt into this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it. You were part of it even as a vaccinated person, but you're feeling great, you're back to 100%. So what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mask mandates? What's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated?

[David Friedberg]

Well, I think we need to differentiate between public policy and private behavior. So after last week's episode where I said delta variant's real, there's going to be a huge spike in cases, unfortunately. I thought we had this thing whipped a few weeks ago. Now I think the data is showing something different. There's a lot of commenters saying, Sachs, you've turned, you've been blue pilled. No, I think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the policy conversation around it. I think that the difference now from last year, I mean, there's a couple of things. One is that we do have vaccines. So I think for most people, getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table. The other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work and so lockdowns don't work if they ever did. We now know, looking at from what different states did last year, that they don't make a difference. So there's no reason to go back to that. Policy, but also, I mean, I would even say en masse, it should be.

[David Sacks]

Wait, wait, do we know that? I mean, is that.

[David Friedberg]

I think so.

[David Sacks]

Are we sure of that?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I think so. Because the thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are going to adjust their behavior in both directions. So in Florida they didn't have mandates, but people who are at risk took, you know, extreme precautions. They would either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high quality mask. By contrast, in California we had the most severe lockdowns, but they were never really feasible. So there's 10 pages of exceptions. People didn't really abide by them. And then on top of it, you know, you have all these mask mandates, but if somebody wears like a sock loosely affixed to their face, does that really protect them? You know, so you know, people, if they're, if they're not interested in complying with these mandates, they do it in a half hearted way. I'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place. So the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is going to be. We know now so much more about the risks that we all face than we did a year ago. And so just let private citizens decide. I mean I'd even say on, on vaccines. I mean, look, I'm pro vax, I don't really understand where the anti vax people are coming from. But I'm kind of done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated on this show who don't want to get vaccinated if they don't want to send those doses to the developing world where they're desperate for them.

[David Sacks]

Let me ask you, Chamath, do you agree with Sachs's position that, listen, citizens are just going to have to make their own decision here, leave everything open and let's not have the economy collapse again and people are smart enough to make their own decision. And is this framing of this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the correct framing?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Wow, I'm really of two minds. There's the part of me that says that you have to give people the right to make their own decision. The problem is that in this specific case there's so much transmissibility and as a result of that, how this thing can mutate that I think that public health has to take a priority over any individual's rights. In this very specific, narrow, narrow case.

[David Sacks]

Because the delta variant is so transmissible, people are Going to have to lose some freedoms. Is one of those showing a vaccine card when you go to an arena.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops to be unvaccinated as an example. I mean, and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the petri dish of the unvaccinated, you're increasing everybody's risk. And this is where I think individual freedoms, as long as it doesn't trample on collective freedom, then I think live and let live. But I think on this specific issue, I think that it's, it's unconscionable to be in a situation where we are fighting basically a time function where at a certain amount of time you're going to have a variant that, that is, you know, basically will overcome all the vaccines we have, will kill enormous numbers of people, including the vaccinated, will literally shut the economy down. And that's a probabilistic event now. And I don't like the fact that I'm susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who frankly aren't doing it for medical or religious reasons. They're just watching Fox News and just spouting off.

[David Friedberg]

I agree that we're at risk there, but we're also at risk for unvaccinated people in the rest of the world. So delta variant came from India, the lambda variant, I think the wrong came from Peru. I mean the fact of the matter is unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential petri dish for the virus. So I'd rather, I mean this is why we need to send those unused doses that by the way are at risk of expiring we now. I mean there was a tweet about this recently. There's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the US that are going to waste right now. We should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated.

[David Sacks]

Well, specifically to Mexico and Canada. And Canada's I think this month going to, even though we got off to a massive head start, gonna eclipse us in terms of the percentage vaccinated. Let me ask it more pointedly. Should teachers be, public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated? Should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation, airplanes or you know, take buses, you know, long haul buses, long haul trains. And then third, should you be forced to show a vaccine card to get on to go to sporting events or concerts? Let's go through those three. So your Personal freedom ends, you're going to be forced, if you want to go to group behaviors, if you want.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

To participate in a public construction, if you want to consume a public resource, or if you want to provide a publicly funded good, then it's the broader public's rights that are superior to your individual rights. Otherwise, work at a charter school where it's not required. Watch the fucking concert from home or drive your car. Use a bicycle or take an Uber.

[David Sacks]

The end. Sachs, what do you think? And then Freeburg.

[David Friedberg]

So I understand that argument. I would differentiate between public and private requirements because I don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm. So.

[David Sacks]

Well, what you might said you could stay home or you could take your bicycle.

[David Friedberg]

Well, sure.

[David Sacks]

So is that reasonable, that you don't get to go to a Warriors game because you're unvaccinated?

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I think, you know, the warriors stadium is privately owned. The team is private. So I think the. I think that private companies should be able to set up their own rules for the benefit of their employees and customers.

[David Sacks]

What about airlines? Cause that is, you know, a gate. There's a limited number of them.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I think so.

[David Sacks]

Airlines should be able to force it. Now, what about school teachers? Should they.

[David Friedberg]

Well, they can't force it, but they can set the requirements for you to board their planes, you know.

[David Sacks]

Okay, now what about public schools? Should if. Let's do teachers and students. Should teachers be forced to get a vaccine if they want to come in? Because you said if they don't come to work in the fall, on a couple episodes back, you're fired.

[David Friedberg]

Well, why wouldn't they want to get a vaccine? The whole debate with the teachers unions was that they wanted to be at the front of the line for vaccines, which isn't an issue anymore because we have so many. So I don't think that's a serious issue. Now, requiring the kids to get vaccinated is that would be the real policy question.

[David Sacks]

Well, let's tackle both. Should teachers be forced to get the vaccine? Yes or no?

[Jason Calacanis]

You just kind of brushed over.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You forced force. No, I mean, I think it's important to just pinpoint this, like forcing teachers to get vaccinated in order to get, you know, work at the school. I just want to highlight the precedent it sets. Right. Which is, you know, you just said you don't want the government to tell people that they have to go get a shot in their arm if someone has a personal choice that they don't want to get that shot. Does that mean then that they, you know, should lose their job as a public servant?

[David Friedberg]

Well, no. I mean. No, I'm saying that. Look, I said it's not a big deal.

[Jason Calacanis]

But, like, if there's one or two teachers that say, you know what, it is a big deal to me. I have a different. I have a set of reasons why I don't want to get shot.

[David Friedberg]

I think those teachers, that's an assumption of risk. I mean, if they've decided they're going to assume the risk, then, you know, don't come crying to us when they get sick.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, the argument is the vector of exposure, right, that they can affect.

[David Sacks]

And what if they're the petri dishes?

[Jason Calacanis]

As we talk about it, they could be the vector that gets kids sick.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

In all of these situations, there's always a very obvious and justifiable exemption for religious and medical reasons to not be vaccinated. Not just for this, but for anything else. So I struggle to understand why all of a sudden people who don't have a fucking clue about science are all of a sudden these armchair scientists who can judge whether or not a vaccine is appropriate for them, where they probably already gave vaccines of all other kinds to their kids and themselves. They probably take all other kinds of advice from doctors. But on this one specific issue, they narrowly say, you know what? I'm an expert enough because I'm watching this television show. I've made a decision that, to me, makes no sense.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, look, I actually agree with you. I'm in the camp of that everybody, barring some highly specific medical condition that renders you ineligible, should be getting vaccinated. So I agree with you about what the right answer is. But I do think that when it comes to government, it's a more complicated question about how much power you give to government to force people to engage in, you know, behavior they don't want to engage in.

[David Sacks]

Can you.

[David Friedberg]

Private organizations are different.

[David Sacks]

We all agree on private organizations, but we do have to make some decisions on public transportation, and we do have to make decisions about teachers, and we're going to have to make decisions on students. So could you bench the teachers who. Or otherwise penalize them who are not vaccinated? You know, there are some times where, you know, a cop or a teacher is put in a, you know, not in the classroom, not on the beat, for whatever reasons, sometimes disciplinary, but for other reasons. Could you just say, listen, if you're not going to get vaccinated, you're going to not be in the classroom? You're not going to. You'll be a remote teacher. And we're just going to create two classes here.

[David Friedberg]

I don't think there are many teachers who don't want to get vaccinated. But look, I think the virus is everywhere now. It's just endemic. And so to single out like one particular group and saying you're going to.

[David Sacks]

I'm trying to pin you down on your opinion. So you're saying teachers should not be forced?

[David Friedberg]

I'm saying that. I mean, if they work at a private school, the private school could definitely require it.

[David Sacks]

We're talking about public only now. We all agree on private.

[David Friedberg]

Look, you're saying.

[David Sacks]

I think it's a pin you down on it.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I think it's a really complicated question because I think there are clear public health benefits to everyone getting vaccinated. But I also don't really like empowering government to force you because, look, it's like everything else, the government may be right in this particular case, but what else is it going to do with that power? And, you know, I don't like giving government that power. So, look, it's a complicated question. I don't, you know, it's not. I would, I would probably err on the side of not letting government force people to do it. But, but, but look, I, I think it's a close call. I do think it's a close call.

[David Sacks]

Chamath force the teachers to get vaccinated or not? Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And the reason is because these kids are already being left behind, even when school is functioning normally. And you can see it in the test scores. You can see it in our readiness. You can see it in our ability to actually do the jobs that are required. We are not doing what we need to do as it is in the absence of a pandemic. And now you introduce a reason for folks to basically check out and not appear. What do you guys guess? How many years were lost in these 15 months when kids were at home? I would say not 15 months.

[David Sacks]

No, it's more two years, two and.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

A half years, three years, depending on.

[David Sacks]

What grade they are. Did your kids miss graduation? Did they miss senior prom? Did they miss their SATs? I mean, what did they miss in terms of development?

[David Friedberg]

Chamath has a good point, which is that if that when government is the employer requiring it on their employees because it leads to better outcomes for that institution, that is a little different than government just mandating that you, Jason Calcan, as private citizen, have to go get a shot in your arm. Right I mean, so there is a slight difference there. Like military, for instance. Right. The military probably wants to vaccinate everybody so that if they need to be ready for a combat situation, they're not like, you know, incapacitated by an outbreak of COVID Right. So I can. I think, you know, we're getting into shades of gray here from a public policy perspective. You know, I don't want teachers missing school because, you know, for weeks at a time because they didn't do the obvious thing, getting the COVID vaccine. So look, I think there are some really good polypolicy arguments there. But I think again, the one place where I'd say government is clearly overstepping is if they just said, listen, you private citizen, not an employee of the government, has to go get vaccinated. As much as I would like everyone to get vaccinated, I don't want to give government that kind of power.

[David Sacks]

President Biden could legally require military members to get vaccinated, but so far he has declined to do so. July 9, New York Times. Friedberg, where do you stand on this? Chamath says he's all in. You're a teacher, you get vaccinated at the end. Sachs is kind of close, but is a little concerned. What do you say, Freeberg?

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, another way to frame it is that there's a new qualification for a job. Like, you know, there's qualification to be in the military. You have to have certain physical capabilities. Jason, I don't know if you would qualify. I don't think I would. I don't think I can do, like.

[David Sacks]

For totally different reasons. Your inability to fight or throw a punch would be no.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Maybe J. Cal could eat the enemy.

[David Sacks]

Trust me, I would be great in the military. I'm a.

[David Friedberg]

He'd be like Clemenza. He'd be cooking the meatballs or something.

[David Sacks]

Private Joker, Private pile a donut.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think the reason there's sensitivity to it is because there are existing teachers in jobs. And then you're telling them that in order to keep your job, you have to go get a vaccine. Now, if we were to have zero teachers today and we were starting a public school system from scratch, and you said, here's one of the qualifying criteria to be a school teacher. You have to have an education degree. You have to have maybe a master's degree in education. You have to have appropriate qualifications and training and certification. Oh, and by the way, you also have to have a vaccine. If that becomes a criteria, I think people find it less offensive. It's the fact that we are now saying that there are people that are being told that you have to go, go get a shot in order to keep your job. And that's the complicating thing that I think people are trying to wade through. I don't have, I don't think that if you were to say, like, look, it's obvious that the qualifying criteria to be in the military is you have to be able to run and do push ups or whatever the criteria might be, but if you impose that on people that were already in the military and then you're going to kick a bunch of them out, people would be up in arms about it.

[David Sacks]

If you have a BMI requirement.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, and that's the concern, I think that arises with imposing these kind of personal body criteria upon specific jobs when people are already employed in that job and there's absolutely no answer. If you're going to do it, you're going to have incredible backlash and trouble and pain. And we're not in a circumstance where we can build these organizations and these institutions from scratch.

[David Friedberg]

Look, there's a lot of social issues where, particularly on the liberal side, people do not want the government prohibiting them from getting certain medical procedures. Right? Well, you know, I'd say it's even more invasive.

[David Sacks]

Are you talking about people transitioning or.

[David Friedberg]

You know, or the issue of abortion, you know, very hot button social issues where people are saying the government should not have the right to legislate what happens with experimental treatments? Yeah, what happens with my body? Right. Well, force, you know, giving government the power to forcibly inject you with something is, you know, that is, that is invasive. And so I do think there are like rights implications to that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But I want to be very clear. If you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole, if you want to consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share, then you need to sign up for the compact that we all sign up for. That's, that's my overarching argument. The thing with abortion where I'm on the other side of the issue, just to be very clear, is like it is a woman's body. I don't think I have any right to dictate what she does. I don't understand what she goes through. I don't understand what situation she's in. I don't think I have the judgment to do that.

[David Sacks]

It should and it doesn't have an impact on the collective.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with A probabilistic chance that I may die. It does not.

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me or mutate.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm not saying that I have a say, but I do think I should have a say. If you're then all of a sudden going to consume the same resources that I consume, where I've signed up to that compact for public health based on.

[David Sacks]

All this, here's where I come to. What if we gave teachers an off ramp? Listen, you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom. If not, you're going to get a one year buyout or whatever. One month or two months for every year of service. So if you've been with us for 20 years, you're going to get 20 months of pay. Or you could say if the virus is spreading at, under this rate, in other words, we've got under 1% of the population infected or whatever the criteria is, then you can come to work in the classroom. But if this thing is spreading, you're out and that's it. And there's an off ramp here to David's point.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Unless there's a narrow like look, I do think you can be a conscientious objector for legitimate reasons. Again, like we have these very specific definitions for religious or for health specific reasons that you don't get vaccinated. I think those should be respected. It's not that cohort of people we're talking about, it's everybody else that right now wants to not think for themselves and as a result put everybody else and themselves in danger.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. I think the most compelling part of your argument, Chamath, is that is the health externality. Right. That each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting multiplicative contagious particles. And this is why I was in favor of a mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic. Is, is not just an individual decision. Your, your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick. So, you know, this is why I do think it's.

[David Sacks]

It also wasn't very correct, Sachs. I mean, was your other point.

[David Friedberg]

Yes, exactly. Potentially high benefit for very low cost. I think we're. But, but, but the thing that maybe I didn't necessarily take into consideration is, you know, people complied in such a half hearted way. I mean, I do think the mask makes a difference if it's an N95 quality mask that you put on correctly. Right, right. But when people just strap a sock to their face it's loosely fitting and they don't give a shit. I mean, does that really make a difference? I mean, I'm very skeptical.

[David Sacks]

Let me ask you a question, Sachs, and then we'll go to Freeberg and then we'll flip to the next topic. If we were on our third pandemic, or let's, God forbid a second pandemic starts, a totally different one, you know, Ebola type or something, and, and we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a higher rate. Does your calculus change, Sachs?

[David Friedberg]

Because, sure, because, because the downsides, the costs of not imposing those more restrictive regulations goes up considerably. I mean, definitely my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that if you're vaccinated, you're call it 95% likely to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table. And so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk. It's like smoking in a way where when I made the movie Think for Smoking, Christopher Buckley told me he's the author of the book and he said, look, there's something uniquely American about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful. Right? The main character in thank you for Smoking is a spokesman for big Tobacco and he's engaging in political spin. But his argument is, look, people have the right to engage in this behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them. Maybe America is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that. But I do, you know, look, that is, that is, that's freedom is letting people do stupid things. You know, and so we have to weigh the benefits of freedom against the, against the costs.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And by the way, sorry, can I just say something? Smoking is a perfect example because as you know, know there is now a non trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled secondhand smoke. Both the smoker, but also other things, condo boards, other places where all of a sudden you didn't choose to have, you know, tar and nicotine, right?

[David Sacks]

Bartenders. My dad worked in bars where people. It was a cloud of smoke for 30 years.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

30 years, right.

[David Sacks]

They told him he was essentially a smoker.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not just the detrimental activity at the time. Remember we've socialized the cost of treatment for people through public health systems and because of that it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone, that's now got to pay the price.

[David Friedberg]

But government is so omnipresent all of our lives. There's always going to be a social cost to any bad choice people make. And to Mah's point, I mean, everybody uses government services to some degree, so that alone can't be the reason. I do agree that the.

[David Sacks]

Well, no. But Outrageous behavior. David, what about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an hour?

[David Friedberg]

Like it's illegal. That's illegal. But I think Chamath is right, that the smoking example is a good one because we do regulate secondhand smoke because there's an externality, there's a health externality to everybody else if you smoke in a public place. And so we restrict that, but we don't make smoking illegal. We don't stop you from doing it in your own homes or in private places. And the argument is, listen, if you want to do something that's harmful primarily to you, that's your choice as an American. You know, and I know people, a lot of people don't like that. Actually, this is the. This. I posted a tweet that I got.

[David Sacks]

Just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because a behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited. Just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required.

[David Friedberg]

Right.

[David Sacks]

It's a completely reasonable tweet.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty inoffensive anodyne tweet. Just reminding people that just because, again, something is positive doesn't mean you force people to do it. And just because some behavior is harmful, you don't ban it. I think smoking is a great example of that. Right. We let people engage in behavior that's harmful to them because freedom is a value in and of itself. For this, I was attacked as a selfish asshole by this other pod. And I really think Ira Swisher and Professor Coltakes. Exactly.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Professor what?

[David Sacks]

Coltakes. That literally made an index of all of Professor G's takes that Macy's would be incredible and Amazon would lose its money and yada yada. He's kind of obsessed with you too, Chamath Profji, who just got his show canceled on Bloomberg. But they were a little. Kara Swisher was called Sachs an asshole.

[David Friedberg]

Well, triggered. It was bizarre that they would get so triggered by this inoffensive tweet. But I think what you see here is an example of the way that the woke mind thinks, which is, well, hold on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't think Kara's woke.

[David Friedberg]

Are you kidding me? She's like the Madame Dufarge of the Woke revolution. She's.

[David Sacks]

Who's knitting Dufarge.

[David Friedberg]

Madame Dufarge. Charge was this character in the French Revolution who had knit the names of the next person to be guillotined. And she was, you know, one of the. The leaders of the Sans Culottes. No, look, Kara is constantly ginning up the mob to try and, you know, guillotine some non. Non. Woke person.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I don't think that that's true.

[David Sacks]

I don't know. That's true. I think she's kind of modern.

[David Friedberg]

You're trying to. You're trying to curry favor with her. So you don't.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, we're not.

[David Sacks]

No, no. She. I mean, she did get it, right? You are an asshole.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I mean, you are asshole. She got that.

[David Sacks]

I got that. But you're not old and failing. Well, you are kind of old.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You look. Don't. You look old.

[David Friedberg]

She's effectively saying we're all assholes, because I think all of us have talked about the needles.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm an asshole. I love it.

[David Sacks]

Own it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm not a whiner. What's your other choice? Being a whiner on the sidelines?

[David Friedberg]

What we've said on this show is that we have a moral imperative to get. To get back to normal, do we not? That is what we've said. And for that, she's basically saying that that is a let them meet Covid position. Right? That we are basically. We don't care if people get sick and die because of COVID That's not true. You know, we just have a.

[Jason Calacanis]

We have a balance here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think we should make people get vaccinated.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, you're pretty close to getting people vaccinated. I asked you, Sachs, if there were three more variants, and this was an acute situation. You said you would force.

[David Friedberg]

Oh, look, if we. If we had. If we had a variant of COVID that was as deadly as Ebola and as transmissible as Delta variant, it 100% changes the game. There's no question about it.

[David Sacks]

They're not willing to change the government's ability to put a shotgun based on.

[David Friedberg]

It's a benefit cost. Yes, it's a benefit cost analysis, and that's reasonable. But look, I give freedom a lot of weight, and part of my calculation is the fact that I can get vaccinated to most likely take the most serious risks off the table. So while I am impacted to some degree by other people's choices, I'm much less impacted now that we have functional vaccines.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I still have a problem with the way you're thinking about this because you're using. You're viewing this as a linear problem. This thing is transmutating.

[David Friedberg]

And so I know chamath, but there's still billions of people all over the world who are unvaccinated. And we'd be better off focusing on getting them a Marshall plan for the vaccines. All these unused doses. We're wasting our breath in the United States trying to get these vaccine hesitant or anti vaxx people to get vaccinated.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do you guys see that? Emmanuel Macron of France, you know, basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places, going into bars and cafes. They basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated. And he did it in a public address on TV. 22 million people watched it.

[David Sacks]

Yep.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then after he did this, suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20,000aminute. They got 4 million people sign up to get vaccinated after they can't go.

[David Sacks]

To a. I mean, in France, what's the point of being alive?

[Jason Calacanis]

And then let me throw a wet blanket on the framing of this, on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible. I have been to like three events over the last month or two where I was required to be vaccinated. And I literally just took a photo of this index card that I got from this person and sent it to them, which I could go make at Kinko's or I could print at home. It's a lot of effort. My point is, I don't think that there's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about. How are you actually going to know that people going to the warriors game are actually vaccinated? How are you actually going to know.

[David Sacks]

They did it at Madison Square Garden? They literally had you pull out your ID and they matched your name to your vax card. And I think printing out a vax card and faking it could be a fine, could be a $10,000 fine. And so you would do it like anything else. You could make a bogus driver's license.

[Jason Calacanis]

My point is that it's not digital. Right. There's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated and who's not. So so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like, here's this piece of paper that says I'm vaccinated. I think that you're never going to really close the hole on this thing now, you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in France, which is you just announce the restrictions. You announce these rules. Everyone signs up or some number of people will sign up. But I'm not sure this actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior in society over the next short while. Maybe over time, we digitize all this stuff, but we'll see.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, the best case scenario is that because delta is so transmissible, we get to herd immunity because all the people who didn't get vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies, and hopefully this thing hurts.

[David Sacks]

How close are we to that? Because we have 60% of adults in the United States have had one shot or more, which is why deaths probably aren't going up, because that's like 75% in people over 60, I think. So, Friedberg, in your estimation as our science guy, with we have like 30 million people who've been infected that we know of, you got to triple that number, right? Because there's people who we don't know. And then you have 65, you have 60%. So we got to be in the range of 70% have been exposed or been vaccinated. So when does it kick in? Or are we experiencing herd immunity right now with these low deaths?

[Jason Calacanis]

We talked about this before, but there are, you know, there's a spectrum of infection, right? You can have viral replication happening in your body, and then your body clears out the virus before you even know, because you've got enough antibodies to that particular strain of a variant of a virus before your body even. You start to feel symptoms. And there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time. And you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation and all the stuff that follows. And so in terms of how you measure this stuff, it's really difficult to say that you're going to stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to have been exposed. As we've seen, even when you have a broad and diverse antibody pool in your body because you've been exposed to a vaccine, we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant. And so the rate of transmission slows, the rate of severe infection goes way down, and so on. So it's not as binary as, hey, we hit herd immunity, and now we're done. It seems this is, you know, as we talked about earlier and as I think everyone is coming to terms with this is going to be an endemic virus and that means that it's going to be circulating in the population in a modest way, causing sometimes severe, sometimes, you know, modest outbreaks for likely a very long time. No matter how many people get it, no matter how many people get vaccinated. Because you have different.

[David Sacks]

At what level should we ignore it? At what level should we just say, listen, that is the steady state, how many cases a day, how many deaths a day do you think is the steady state that we should just say we just go to work and ignore it?

[Jason Calacanis]

I am a brutal cold hearted libertarian on this point and I have been since we first talked about this last year. I've always been of the mind that we need to balance the follow on life effect from the economic fallout associated with making certain behavioral changes and restrictions relative to the actual loss of life. So you can never go. I really think this point about zeroism and this term about zeroism is an important one. You can never get to zero cases. What is the acceptable number of cases and what is the cost to keep that caseload down? The balance of those two is a very difficult leadership decision.

[David Sacks]

Put a number on it.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's about saving lives, right? So like there are a certain number of people whose lives are going to be ruined, who are, some of them will commit suicide, some of them won't be able to earn an income again, their businesses are going to get shut down. What is the economic cost of that versus the economic cost of the loss of life versus the people?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What is this?

[David Sacks]

What is the number? We had an average of 250 death, 250,000 case known cases a day. At the peak, we had a peak deaths of 4,100 a day. We are now at 200 people dying a day and 30,000 cases. Is there a number at which you say let's just focus on getting back to work and is that number where we are now? I'm trying to get a yeah, again.

[Jason Calacanis]

I wouldn't simplify it to those data points. What I would do, how do we simplify it? Again, I would look at what age are people dying, how many life years are we losing? And how can we address the acute populations that are at risk and the acute populations that are, that are potentially going to be exposed. Manage those populations differently than you manage the broader population that has a lower likelihood of death and a lower likelihood of fatality and the restrictions that you then impose to, you know, start to manage the risk and the Exposure to different populations gets weighed against the saving of life and the loss of life in both circumstances. So it's not easy. Right? And everyone wants to sum this whole thing up to like, how many deaths a day is appropriate. That's not the right answer, right?

[David Sacks]

Because, well, you're saying how many?

[David Friedberg]

That part of it is so obvious, right? That, and we should have known this last summer. The obvious part being that what you want to do is focus your prevention on the part of the population that's the most at risk. And what do we do with lockdowns? We literally lock down the entire population, every business. It was completely insane. We should have focused it on protecting the most at risk populations, isolating the sick or the people at greatest risk. Not everybody. It was just insane. And I mean, I can't believe we're still having that conversation a year later.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Can I. Before we move on to the next topic, can I read the best. Can I read the best. Best comment from Sachs's tweet? So Sachs's tweet. Just because an opinion is wrong doesn't mean it should be censored. Just because a behavior is harmful doesn't mean it should be prohibited. And just because something is beneficial doesn't mean it should be required. The best response goes to distantly social Rumple, whose full name is wendellshirk, who said this message brought to you by the generic self serving platitude Alert network. We now return you to your regularly scheduled episode of the bland soap opera with the Pablum Sisters.

[David Friedberg]

Well, yeah, look, there's an element of truth to that, which is. I almost didn't tweet it because I thought it was too much of a platitude. But the fact that people on the other side got so triggered by it shows why it was actually useful to tweet. It is. They think that if you're calling for any modicum of freedom or return to normalcy, you're basically a selfish asshole. I mean, it's insane. I mean, they want to stay in this world of zero Covid restrictions forever.

[David Sacks]

We gotta move on. We're 45 minutes into Covid, so we gotta move on. But I think if this is in the influenza plus or minus 100% zone, we gotta pick a number where we decide we're moving forward as a society. And, you know, local communities can make decisions if they have outbreaks. But I kind of think if this is within, you know, 2x of our yearly deaths from, you know, influenza and just the normal cold, I think we move forward. As best we can do, we want to go to China, Cuba.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think just real quick, before we move away from this, I really want to just highlight the DeepMind announcement from this morning, because I think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on. Okay, so this Morning, you know, DeepMind, which published AlphaFold, and we talked about this a few.

[David Sacks]

DeepMind is owned by Google. It's their AI arm.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's an AI arm owned by Google. And they basically took protein structure and tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of, of the DNA or RNA that codes the amino acids that make up the protein. Again, when you have a string of amino acids, they combine and they fold into a way that's really hard to predict, and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein. And then it does something in the body. Historically, we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein, which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body. This morning, DeepMind incredibly, published a database with the predicted structure of every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this capability that they now have.

[David Sacks]

What does it mean in English?

[Jason Calacanis]

What this means is we now have a physical model of every protein that human DNA can make. That model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does, how it does it, and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins and how certain drugs can affect those proteins and how we can alter human health by making new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways. So it's an incredible data set that was just published. It's almost like releasing the Rosetta Stone, in my opinion, in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body. They did it for 10 other species and they said that they're going to publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have the sort of data set around which they expect will achieve over 100 million unique proteins in this database over the coming months. Freely available and searchable. And let me just explain, and I know I'm on a monologue here, so I'll win the monologue stat on this one.

[David Sacks]

It's a good one. It's a good one.

[Jason Calacanis]

But let me just explain why this is relevant. The delta variant, what it is is that the SARS CoV2 RNA sequence is about 30,000 base pairs long. Ten percent of those, or about 3,000 base pairs, make up the spike protein, which is the protein at the tip of the COVID virus, the coronavirus that gets into the cells. And for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus, there's about one nucleoside mutation. One of those base pairs changes and the virus evolves. And we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein. And so we suddenly discover empirically and by looking around, suddenly all these people are getting more infected than were getting infected before. We look at the genetic code and we're like, oh, here's the changes that happened. But we could have, with this capability from AlphaFold, predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors on the cells and getting it to cells. And what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the SARS CoV2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible, more deadly. All these sorts of factors, because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair. This tool that was released today, I think highlights that over the next decade, these things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally. It gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them with new drugs and new variant models and new vaccines, well ahead of the, oh my God, we just got hit with a nuclear bomb. Let's clean up the mess kind of in the future. So it's an exciting day, an exciting moment.

[David Sacks]

Would they have been released this David if it hadn't been for Covid coming out? Do you think DeepMind just pivoted their entire group? Because they have about a thousand people, I understand. And by the way, they pay something in the order of six or seven hundred thousand a year on average. And there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year. So just think about the scale of what Google is spending on this.

[Jason Calacanis]

You guys know that I know they.

[David Sacks]

Probably shifted a large number of people to work on this.

[Jason Calacanis]

You guys know that I have long, deep roots at Google and I will tell you that the value system of people there, you know, the press and the public will think what they want, But I think that the value system of people there drove them to realize the importance of this work that they're doing with AlphaFold. And it is important for humanity and it is important for the health, broadly of people. They could have kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that. And I think the importance of this discovery and this capability was realized and is published for that very reason. There's a lot of work that DeepMind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending and all this stuff. And they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for Google per year based on those capabilities. And then there are these things that benefit all of us. And by putting this out publicly, it's a great good for humanity. And they're making it freely available and searchable. And so I don't think that Covid kind of instigated this because they've been working on this for a very long time, since before COVID And this is a very hard biological problem that is key to understanding biology and how biology works. It's been going on for decades. They've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available. And there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database.

[David Sacks]

This is a mitvah to society, to humanity. Does it change the fact that Google is spending well over a billion dollars a year on DeepMind and doing projects like this? Does this change any of your thinking about breaking them up? Chamath, or you know how we look at big tech?

[Jason Calacanis]

That's a good question.

[David Sacks]

No, because how do you afford that? Yeah, where does that. Where does this kind of.

[David Friedberg]

We learned something very disturbing about big tech this week. Actually. This was quite a bombshell that Jen Psaki dropped from the White House press briefing. We got to talk about this. She just sort of casually mentioned that. Oh, yeah, by the way, the administration is flagging posts for a social media company for big tech companies to take down to remove accounts.

[David Sacks]

They're talking about specific accounts and posts.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. And she just kind of just casually mentions, oh, yeah, the big tech companies are very, you know, eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these accounts. Accounts. She even said that when one of these companies takes down an account, the rest should do it too, implying that the White House is providing the central coordinative role in the censorship.

[David Sacks]

A global block list.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

Let's take the most charitable view here. I know that it's very easy to make this a left versus right. They're censoring, yada yada, Trump got banned. But if somebody was saying this was micro, this was an account that was claiming that microchips were in the vaccine, would it not be? How would the and it was hitting scale. You know what would be the way for the White House to inform social media that there was an account that was saying falsely that microchips were in there and that that was trending.

[David Friedberg]

The White House or its officials are free to put out their statements and their position. But this is different. This is the White House coordinating behind the scenes with big tech companies.

[David Sacks]

Well, they're not behind the scenes. They're saying they're doing it right here to everybody.

[David Friedberg]

Correct, correct. The behavior was behind the scenes, but Psaki just admitted it, which is why it's such a bombshell. Look, even the aclu, if you were.

[David Sacks]

President, and there was an account on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, that was saying there was a microchip from Bill Gates.

[David Friedberg]

This is a. This is a blatant violation of the people's First Amendment.

[David Sacks]

Tell them how would you.

[David Friedberg]

You are allowed. You're. The First Amendment gives you the right to say things that are untrue. It is not the business of government to declare what is true and what is false.

[David Sacks]

Okay, Even.

[David Friedberg]

Even the acl. I'm not done. Even the ac. ACLU came out of retirement. We haven't heard from them for the last year during any of these.

[David Sacks]

It's hard to be the aclu.

[David Friedberg]

We haven't heard from them during the past year. During all of this activity that's been going on with accounts being blocked and ghosted. They finally came out of retirement. To say that this is a dangerous violation of people's First Amendment rights. You cannot have the government saying what is true and what is false and then denying people the right to express their opinions based on what the government thinks is the truth. And by the way, there's been a very subtle change here in the language that's being used. If you remember what the argument used to be that we have to stop disinformation. Now it's shifted to we have to stop misinformation. So those two things are very different. It's kind of like that. Well, it's kind of like the difference in the term equality versus equity. They sound similar, but they actually mean very different things. So disinformation is actually a campaign of purposeful. Purposeful campaign of propaganda and lies, usually put forward covertly. So it's the FSB or some intelligence agency putting out CIA, whatever, putting out disinformation, usually under false accounts. So in that case, we can say, no, you can't do that because you can't engage in deception around who you are. Right, but misinformation is simply Information that's being put out that frankly, you disagree with. Okay, or it could be discernibly wrong.

[David Sacks]

Wait, you're kind of framing that wrong? It could be you're putting out information like there's a microchip in the vaccine that is explicitly known to be wrong.

[David Friedberg]

Look, the lab leak theory was considered misinformation by these same people three months ago.

[David Sacks]

Okay, but let's take the specific example of there's a microchip. If it was the case that they said there's a microchip in the vaccine, would you be okay with the White House contacting social media companies saying, hey, you got these accounts that are saying there's a microchip. You might want to look into it. They're not saying take it down. They're saying, take a look into it.

[David Friedberg]

That's not the White House's business. Do I believe in the microchip theory? No, of course not. It's absolutely ridiculous. But it is not the business of to be telling social media who to ban and who to block list.

[David Sacks]

I think they didn't tell him to ban. I think they told them to be aware of it. Go ahead, Chamath. I think your framing's wrong, Sax. Go ahead.

[David Friedberg]

No, no, Pasaki said that when one site takes it down, they should all take it down. And then Biden on top of it comes out and pours kerosene on the fire. By saying that social media sites are literally killing people.

[David Sacks]

Well, yeah, by allowing.

[David Friedberg]

By allowing this misinformation.

[David Sacks]

So here we now, let's be honest.

[David Friedberg]

He's a president. This is the President of the United States using the bully pulpit to call social media sites mass murderers by virtue of allowing people to have free speech. Trump never used language that intemperate. I don't remember him ever calling, oh my God. American companies.

[David Sacks]

Go ahead, Chamath. Mass murderers speak. Let your mot speak.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is the exact reason you. You can't have a stranglehold on distribution, because it will get perverted. And then we either have people we like or people we don't like in these positions of power, or people we like or people we don't like regulating, and it's constantly flipping and we're all just doomed and bound to get fucked over. So back to the thing that Friedberg brought up before. I think AlphaFold is incredible. I think Google has been an incredible company. They make money hand over fist. They waste an enormous amount of money on all kinds of trash. So it's good that they were actually able to do Something useful here. I generally think that companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon unfortunately do not allow the constructive form of capitalism that people want in today's society.

[David Sacks]

They're just too big.

[David Friedberg]

Chamath makes a great point, which is we've got these big tech monopolies who've become gatekeepers over content, okay? And what the administration has done and their allies in Congress is hang a sword of Damocles over the heads of these big tech companies. They've appointed Lina Khan to be the enforcer at the ftc. They've got. There are six bills in Congress right now. They've held congressional hearings around taking away Section 230 protection, which is very economically advantageous for these big tech companies. So they position the sword perfectly over the heads of these big tech companies, threatening to break them up and rein them in. And then Jen Psaki and the White House go to them and say, we want you to take down these accounts that we don't agree with. This is misinformation, okay? That is a huge danger to free speech. It's basically like the administration saying to these big tech companies, nice little social network you got there. It'd be a real shame if anything happened to it. Look at what's going on.

[David Sacks]

Don't you want them broken up?

[David Friedberg]

I do want them broken up, but what I don't want.

[David Sacks]

So which is it? Do you want them to hold the sword or do you not want them to hold the sword?

[David Friedberg]

I actually want the sword to come crashing. I actually want the sword to come crashing.

[David Sacks]

So you want them to swing the sword, not hold it over and then use it for extortion?

[David Friedberg]

Yes.

[David Sacks]

That's actually a great explanation. Then freedom.

[David Friedberg]

Yes.

[David Sacks]

I'm trying to moderate here, Freeberg. Do you give a shit?

[Jason Calacanis]

We've talked about this before.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Freeberg has spent all day on his phone. He is not dialed into this podcast.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm with you guys.

[David Sacks]

I thought we just went over the Alphafold stuff way too fast. I mean the arguing over freedom of speech is happening and all of this debate, Friedberg. At the same time that we are making incredible life changing moments for humanity. Two different companies went to space last week with civilians and then we are basically defining the blueprint for the human and every other species on the planet and we're fighting over people too stupid to take a goddamn vaccine that would save everybody's life and let us continue on. And people are dunking on Bezos for not reading the room. I don't know if you saw this, Friedberg, but how do you think about the space race in relation to reading the room, et cetera.

[Jason Calacanis]

Progress technologically will only arise with capital. So you can assume that that progress, it's not like someone stumbles into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbles into a cave and discovered alphafold. There are years of toiling in labs like Edison did, making the light bulb. Edison had to raise a ton of money to get that light bulb project off the ground. If you guys haven't read, I'm trying to remember the biography. There's wizards of something. It's got wizards in the title. It's a good biography of Edison. And I feel like we're at this moment where the wizard of Menlo Park. Yeah, I think that's the wizard of Menlo Park. That's right. And the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at Alphafold or at Waymo or what Bezos and Elon are doing is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work. You're not going to get a bunch of Kickstarters to fund a SpaceX like project or a Blue Origin like project. And so I think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on multiple billion dollar bets and like Chamath said, waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of 10 of them. But if that $1 billion bet works, it's worth $500 billion. And that money continuously gets reinvested. And look at what Google did with Waymo. They put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone woke up and said, my God, self driving is real, it's possible and it kickstarted an industry. And I just feel like the amount of money, and not to mention the fact that like these are free markets. So these businesses, Google, you don't have to search on Google, you don't have to buy from Amazon. But everyone benefits from searching on Google. Everyone benefits from buying on Amazon. And the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so good. And so I don't feel like these guys are screwing people over. You can consider the small business model as being like, hey, maybe we shouldn't have had small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point distribution was going to be economically advantaged by being centralized and therefore all consumers are going to benefit by centralizing. Is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever? Maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market. But same with what happened with the taxi industry. Technology will force these evolutions. The capital accumulates and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined on a smaller scale. But go ahead.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, no, I do think. Sympathetic to what you were saying, I do think that if you look at every platform innovation that's ever happened, so whether it's, you know, we go from no print to print, you know, to newspapers to radio to television, you've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized monopolistic or oligopolistic kind of early outcomes. And either through legislation or through innovation, then the pendulum swings to decentralization. That's typically happened. Right. And you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that. So it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things. And everybody says the argument is, well, no, because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock in. But I think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the China and the China shop and you have to just start all over. So it's likely that we're going to move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody. And obviously we want things like Alphafold to exist. We want things like Waymo to exist. The question is how should they exist? And if they come out of the goodwill of Google, it is just so easily as likely that some other person, let's say it wasn't Sundar and Ruth Porat, but two other people who didn't like it. These things could have been very different forms and shapes and not existed at all. And I think that's the arbitrary nature of it, which is not necessarily free market capitalism. That doesn't benefit us.

[David Sacks]

Should we chamath be upset that Bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from Amazon?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He had a bad press conference. Let's just be clear at the end of the day, he has wanted to do this his entire life. He built an incredible company. He was able to take a lot of that capital and invested in it. He's invested billions of dollars in other things, $10 billion in climate change. His ex wife has invested, you know, $6 billion just last year alone in all kinds of good works. So those two individuals, because of their success, I think will generally do and have done the right thing. Let's not get that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just put his head.

[David Sacks]

Why was it horrendous?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, I think you said it. You know, the. The thing that he said around, you know, I just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this. It sounded flippant, and it didn't really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on Charlie Rose. Right. So if you. If you actually played those two things back side by side, you'd say, is this the same person? One was thoughtful, extremely respectful. The other one was. Now, maybe he was just amped up. I mean, I could see.

[David Sacks]

I think that's what I think on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Cloud nine, so to speak, you know, and so. And so he just wasn't thinking about it. But, you know, honestly, like, look, he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say, we're assuming you're coming back. So here's some fucking talking points. Why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to Earth, and let's just make sure we nailed this and put our best foot forward. That is where I think he probably has some regrets, based on how people reacted.

[David Friedberg]

This Bezos spaceflight was a real Rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left. But the criticism was very different. The critique I heard from the right was that he's having some sort of midlife crisis and the rocket looked too much like a phallus. Okay, fine. Whatever the criticism from the left was, it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise. You could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that, you know, why was he doing this with his own money? You know, if this had been a NASA flight, I don't think they would have had a problem with it. And so you see here that even though Bezos has been so much more effective using his own money to do this, the left is reflexively hates that. And they kept saying, well, how dare he use this money? The money could have been used on something else so much better.

[David Sacks]

Well, what do you think of that argument?

[David Friedberg]

I think it's wrong in a couple of respects. It basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest inventors. And I don't think that's true. You look at these social programs they want to keep doubling down on. They're not working. You know, these programs are. Our policies towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding. There's a tremendous amount of funding in San Francisco. They're spending $60,000 per tent per year. They're spending $300,000 in social services per homeless person per year. Lack of funding is not the problem. The approach is the problem. We spend something like $25,000 per pupil per pupil in California schools. The test scores are going down. So, you know, these people who are criticizing Bezos don't know what to do with the money. They don't know how to spend any better. They're not good at executing. However, Bezos or Elon, these are two of our greatest inventors.

[David Sacks]

Let them go.

[David Friedberg]

Let them go. Because, you know, they are pushing the boundaries. And I do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result of what they're doing with this new space race.

[David Sacks]

It's also super uninformed. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but they were saying that they should have been doing more initiatives on Earth if you actually. And they were kind of talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space and number one, the rocket ship fuel. My understanding in these is less than what happens in a 747. So put that aside. And then second, Elon has done more for global warming with Tesla than anybody and the battery packs. I think in modern society, I can't think of somebody in the private sector who's done more. And then has there ever been a gift. There's never been a gift of $10 billion to one cause, let alone one cause which Bezos gave, which was climate change.

[David Friedberg]

Nobody has done that.

[David Sacks]

I think also hasn't. You would know. Chamath. I thought Richard Branson had done a lot for Global. I thought he was very involved in the carbon credits space.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think that we're witnessing something that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent, getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong but want to just have a chance to be on the.

[Jason Calacanis]

Field and try and have the freedom to do so.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And that just literally infuriates a certain class of people. It proves itself out by what David said. We are not in a funding crisis. We are running 1020 trillion dollars deficits, you know, or sorry, 10, you know, hundreds of billions of dollar deficits. 10, 20 trillion dollar debt levels that are increasing every year. We have a surfeit of money. We print money whenever we want. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money. And in the absence of people being able to do things, they would rather other people not do things. Not because it's not the right thing to do, but because it makes them feel impotent.

[David Friedberg]

Right. And so what is driving that? I think there is a real contempt for private initiative. And Jason, you're right. You see it in the hatred towards Elon. Nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than Elon. I mean, even the Bezos gift, period, end of story. I mean, the Bezos gift to some philanthropy, I don't know if that's going to make a difference or not. You're right that he's putting his money where his mouth is on that issue, but it's indisputable that Elon, the electric car industry would not exist without Elon. And yet there is contempt and hatred for the fact that he did this through private initiative. If the government.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He does it in a way that is not checking the boxes for this cohort of people who feel incredibly insecure and fragile emotionally. They don't like that he says what he wants. They don't like that he does what he wants. They don't like that he dresses the way he does. They don't like any of it because it's not conformist enough. It's not about the look people.

[David Sacks]

Well, it's also about the money that it's the wealth that's made accumulated too.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, no, no, hold on. I don't think that's what it is at all. No, I actually think what it is is psychological. It is nothing about money. I think what we are witnessing, and I think social media has just blown the COVID off, it is a psychological awakening that people have, which is that they were comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders and they just believed the world would function as it should. Now you see people migrating through this membrane, achieving enormous amounts of success, basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude. And it breaks people's brains because they don't like it. Because now they think, why didn't it happen to me? Why not me? And the thing is, because you're not capable. And at somewhere along the way or.

[David Sacks]

Hardworking, you're not dedicated or you didn't.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Try or you didn't get lucky.

[David Friedberg]

That inactive agency, I mean look, every.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Day, every day the greatest thing that I've learned about the public markets now having been purely on the early stage, technology side building, running then investing is I get a mark every day right now to do both businesses. I get a scorecard every day. And some days I really think to myself maybe I'm just not good enough today. And I say to myself, that is true today. And then the difference is tomorrow I have a choice, which is I wake up and I decide am I going to go back at it or not? And I'm back in the game. And I'm not going to hate on other people who had a good day today just because I had a bad day. And that's what I think we're going through. We're going through. And social media allows it to happen and it allows you to put it out there. You can hide behind a screen name, you can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent up frustration while journalists doing it on its own lives.

[David Friedberg]

Of course, because these journalists are doing.

[David Sacks]

It too where they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The difference is journalists do it with their real screen name under the guise of journalism. Everybody else does it with the fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolling.

[David Friedberg]

In order to do something really great like Bezos or like Elon, you have to believe that you have agency over your own life. You have to believe that you can accomplish great things. You have to act with purpose. And is that really what we're teaching kids today in schools? What we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors at some intersectional framework. We're not teaching them about earned success, we're teaching them about privilege, which is presumptively ill gotten. And it's all about a transference of privilege and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims. But no one's talking about how you actually create change and success. Abundance, abundance. It's all a negative sum. It's always a negative sum game.

[David Sacks]

Freeberg, go ahead.

[Jason Calacanis]

I dated all back to the Kim Kardashian sex tape. I think that there was this moment where someone who was didn't do anything, didn't have a career, wasn't doing anything work wise, but was kind of a pseudo celebrity for being a celebrity. It's like the Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie era, right? Like, folks who don't really have much to talk about except that they're the ones that people are talking about. And then that sex tape turned her into a superstar, and then she became a billionaire a few years later. And so, you know, there is this kind of poignant moment, I think, where folks are like, wait a second, you don't have to do anything to get really rich in this country. You don't have to do anything to achieve all this fame. Therefore, the kind of assumption is, hey, you know what? There are people that just get stuff and get to do what they want to do, and the rest of us don't. And I do think that social media is the magnifying glass that takes those moments and makes them very big. And kind of, then that becomes the assumed standard when the reality is, I mean, all four of us worked really fucking hard. All four of us came from nothing. I don't know about Sachs, but I mean, the rest of us, yeah, his.

[David Sacks]

Dad was an immigrant doctor from South Africa and he moved to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's just. I'm just joining the 80s. I mean. I mean, I think all of us graduated college deeply in debt, and then we all worked our way out of debt, and we all found ways to work really hard and find opportunities for ourselves in this incredible country and to build value and to build businesses and to realize those returns. And we don't start out as elites. We were never elite. We were always the struggling immigrant entrepreneurs that got ourselves to where we are because we clawed and we pushed and we fought and we had grit and we had determination and we had smarts and we had put in the effort. And I think that that's not really. And so did Bezos, and so did Elon. And I don't think that there is any standard of elitism that endowed in them, like maybe in the. The days of the British monarchy, these kind of inalienable rights to have the freedom that they have. And I think that that's so important because people miss that point and they think that Kim Kardashian or the random bolt of lightning or the elite is the kind of endowed upon people in a way that's unfair.

[David Sacks]

They're misreading the situation.

[Jason Calacanis]

Everyone else is missing out.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, they misread the situation.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So a couple things. Kim Kardashian may have gotten some initial fame because of her sex tape, but fuck if she's not an incredible business person, because from there to now, that's execution. There's A lot of toiling hard work, good decision making. She fucking nailed it. Was I lucky to have actually joined Facebook versus MySpace? Yes. But when I was there, did I fucking hit the COVID off the ball? Goddamn, yes. You know, was I lucky to have started social capital and be able to raise capital? Sure. But then did I have to help find a team, coach that team, work with them, make good investments? That's fucking hard. And I think what people forget is that this takes a lot of hard work, that there's all kinds of levels of success that you can be proud of, all kinds of different accomplishments. What I loved is when Friedberg used us and Elon and Bezos in the same sentence. Because I catch myself where I'm ashamed sometimes, where I'm like, I am not as good as those two guys, so how dare I use my name in the same sentence as their name? And then I think, wait a minute. What the. Am I quibbling over? Like, this is insane in any way, shape, or form. We've all made it. Sure, there's different degrees, but it's beyond that. It matters at this point. And this is what I think. We're living in a society where it really distorts you. So if.

[David Sacks]

How do we change it, Chamath? How do we change people from thinking that it's random and that you can't do it? Because people who are.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, it is random.

[David Sacks]

But there are a group of people who believe the system is rigged. I cannot become Chamath.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I'm stuck in a rut. And I'm stuck in a rut, and I can't get out.

[David Sacks]

I can't get out. How do we change that belief?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, the whiners and the complainers and the haters are stuck in a massive rut. And I think the thing that happened, and I said it last pod. I'll say it again. Maybe I'll just say it every fucking pod. It is not about winning and losing. It is about trying and learning. And that is a huge thing. It's about a learning mindset. It's about this idea that things are changing so fast. The only thing that I can do to stay safe is to learn how to learn, because things will constantly be changing underfoot.

[Jason Calacanis]

But what do you say to the single mother with three kids who. Who is in a town where the. The factory is shutting down and she's losing her job and she doesn't have the resources to move?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

She. She is not the person that hates Eli Musk or Jeff Bezos. I will fucking get.

[Jason Calacanis]

Aren't there institutional ruts in the United States?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I understand. These are two completely different topics. My point is, if you go online, it is filled with a small cohort of people that are positive, and then a large cohort of people that are silently trying to just gain information, and a small vocal minority of bitter people who can't do. And all I'm talking about are privileged people. Well, who knows if they're privileged? But I'm just saying they're getting paid.

[David Sacks]

100,000 to work at the Atlantic.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I just think that these people had been checkboxers their whole lives. They tried to play the team sports they were told to, they went to the schools. They tried to do the cfa, the NBA, the this or the that. Nothing worked for them. They work in an environment where they don't feel any equity. Actually. This is where equity is important. They feel disenfranchised and they're angry. And as a result, they just want everything to be different so that nobody wins, because they can't win. But if they were winning, they would be the first one to say, shut the fucking door behind me. I'm convinced of it 100%.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah. The irony is that the people you're talking about all went to these elite institutions and they imbibed these ideologies and philosophies, and I think the people who have been successful went to those. Not in all cases, but they went to those places and then rebelled against it or just shut it out.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Here's what we should do. Here's what we should do. We should all contribute five or ten million bucks into a. Into an llc. We should call Pegasus. We should use Pegasus to infiltrate all the fake screen names on Twitter and then index that to LinkedIn to figure out where they all went to school and what they do and just publish a huge database of all the haters.

[David Sacks]

Well, I mean, it's.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How funny would that be?

[David Sacks]

It's very interesting because I'm watching a group of these complainers leave traditional mainstream media because I'm focused on journalists, because I was one. And I'm watching them leave journalism, a small group of them, and become entrepreneurs on substack or their own products. And I feel like there's a little group of them who are realizing, holy shit, I can make a million dollars if I apply myself. And I quit the New York Times and I go start my own publication.

[David Friedberg]

Right. And I actually say something interesting and differentiated, not just towing the party line at the New York Times.

[David Sacks]

Exactly. There's a whole little. There's A little crack here in this.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'll say. I'll say they are just as successful as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The, the financial quantum may be different, but I bet you the personal fucking satisfaction quantum is the same. And this is the key. This is the key. You could be running a $500,000 a year business and you could feel like a million fucking bucks.

[David Sacks]

Yes. You're king.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You're a queen. Yeah. You have a nice house, you have a nice family, you employ a couple people. You provide a good life. You do what you want to do when you want to do it. The sense of freedom that comes with that and agency is the same as them. And maybe in some ways the super richest guys in the world actually have less agency than these guys would because they're so, you know, scheduled and people are coming after them all the time.

[David Friedberg]

One of my big takeaways from being in the tech industry for 20 years is that if you're smart, hardworking, and don't have behaviors that sabotage yourself, you will be successful in this industry, you know, over two decades. I mean, I've just not. How could you not? You have such tailwinds at your back. There's so much value being created. We saw over the past year more money, more LP dollars have gone into venture capital by far than any other year. And more money, more returns is coming out. That's why more money's going in.

[David Sacks]

I'm on the call when you say anybody could be successful just by showing up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But the first part is the critical part you just said, who are not prone to self sabotage. There is an enormous number of people who are prone to self. I was one, I am still one. But I work on how do you.

[David Sacks]

Sabotage yourself, Your ego.

[Jason Calacanis]

He blew up his firm.

[David Sacks]

That'S true, but I think he blew it up. There was creative destruction. I think he wasn't enjoying it and he needed to start off about it publicly.

[Jason Calacanis]

He said it.

[David Sacks]

But the blowing up of when you. How do you reconcile the blowing up of the firm chamath whatever number of years later and rebooting it?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is all old news. It's like, you know, the amount of success in capital and money that we've made is undisputable. And I've made it under all kinds of weather conditions. So, you know, it all kind of speaks for itself. But the problem is again, if you ask an average person, I don't think they care. I don't think they know. I don't think they have an opinion. If you ask Some, you know, blue.

[David Sacks]

I was asking. I'm interested in how you reconcile or look back on it now. It's so much distance.

[David Friedberg]

I'll tell you from an outside perspective how I reconcile. Chamath's decision there is. I think, that as you become more successful, your tolerance for doing stuff you don't want to do really goes down.

[David Sacks]

It goes to zero.

[David Friedberg]

Chamath has got to a point where he didn't want to be doing it, and he blew it up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Zero.

[Jason Calacanis]

By the way, that is a characterization as well, that, you know, sometimes in. In your career, you have to make it, and in your personal life, you have to make a tough decision. And there is. There is no good outcome. There is no good way.

[David Sacks]

There's no graceful way to do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

But there are these moments where you got a rock falling on you from one side and a rock falling on you from the other side, and you're gonna have to make a tough decision to get out of the way.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I said to myself a long time ago that if I was ever lucky to actually be wealthy enough where my wealth would change by meaningful amounts every order of magnitude, I would do something different. And so, you know, you can do the fucking math. So there it is.

[David Sacks]

It's interesting being friends with you and watching it. And then also, I hate to give Phil Hellmuth any credit.

[Jason Calacanis]

There it is.

[David Sacks]

But being friends with Phil Hellmuth and watching him set outrageous goals for himself in poker, I just thought, you know what? You got to set some outrageous goals for yourself. And that's how I sort of broke through. As I just said, the minute I want to be number one at everything I do, I want to be the largest syndicate, the most. Jason prolific investor.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The minute I realized that I was basically going to become, you know, a billionaire because of my Facebook stock, I fucking quit. And the craziest thing about it is I left so much stock on the table, it's like two, three billion dollars of fucking stock. I couldn't care less. And then. And then, you know, once I figured out that there was something that you can do with capital that's even more meaningful than just investing in companies at a small scale. But now you can control companies and really allocate and shape how economy flows, I made a different set of decisions, and now I'm here, and if I increase it by another order of magnitude, I'll make a different set of decisions. And that's poorly understood by folks because, again, it doesn't map into a worldview. But the point is, it maps into something that keeps me whole and sane and it allows me to not be zero sum about everybody else's success. And that's what I think we need to teach people. Try stuff. It's okay to fail because that's as long as you're not self sabotaging yourself. David said it so well. You will eventually be successful.

[David Sacks]

What have you learned, David, in this next chapter? Being an investor capital allocator?

[David Friedberg]

Me?

[David Sacks]

Yeah, David, you.

[David Friedberg]

Well that's what I said.

[David Sacks]

Have you learned anything or you just.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, no, it's what I said. I mean, just. Well, I mean the thing that's happening right now is just the tech economy keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's just an explosion. There's an explosion in the number of unicorns, an explosion in the amount of funding that's available, explosion in the amount of returns being generated. There are now so many VCs that VCs are literally throwing money at people. I mean any half decent idea now gets funded. The idea that somehow this ecosystem is elitist or exclusionary, it's absurd, right? I mean you've got micro VCs now who no one has to go to Sand Hill Road anymore, right? I mean, I mean there are so many ways to.

[David Sacks]

There's nobody on Sandhill Road. It's a ghost town. Remember the traffic jam? I went down there the other day and there was no traffic jam. I was speaking at Stanford and literally I was like, I got to put 15 minutes into my drive to get through that Sandhill Road because It was at 8:30. I zipped down Sandhill Road to Stanford. There was two cars.

[David Friedberg]

The tech ecosystem is so osmotic, it's so permeable in terms of allowing new people. And in fact it's sucking in all the talent it can find because it can't hire enough people even in the worst economic conditions. And yet when it comes to talking about social and political, talking about opportunity in social and political terms, the only thing you ever hear is that the ecosystem is somehow elitist or exclusionary.

[David Sacks]

I think that's old news. That might have been valid 15, 20 years ago. I know when I went to Sand Hill Road for The first times, 15, 20 years ago, it was a bunch of white partners who went to stanford or had MBAs from, you know, Harvard. But that's not the case now. It's a bunch of people with rolling funds and micro vcs and syndicates.

[David Friedberg]

Totally.

[David Sacks]

And everything in between.

[David Friedberg]

If you're so wrapped up in, in being a social justice warrior that you've just Missed that. There is like basically infinite opportunity, you know, then it's on you. You're sabotaging yourself, and then five, ten years later, you're still stuck in that role. And then you become bitter. And then you become bitter. To Jamal's point, Friedberg, how hard was.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It for you to leave Google? And what, what was that like?

[Jason Calacanis]

I was at Google for two and a half years. I, it had gone through. I joined before the ipo. I was like a couple hundred employees, just under a thousand employees. And then we went public. I got this huge bonus from Sergey to stick around when I was thinking about huge. I mean, for me it was like.

[David Sacks]

Seven figures, eight figures.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was, yeah, it was a couple thousand shares of stock and like $250,000 of cash and I gave it up. It'd be worth a lot of money, but I just felt like I learned so much at Google and I had such an appreciation for the team there and the company. And by the way, I worked at Google and all of a sudden the company went public and I could buy a house. I mean, it was an incredible moment for me. And I suddenly felt what Chamath talked about, which is this freedom in my life. Suddenly I had hit that, that, that next plateau of wealth where I now had a couple hundred thousand dollars of net worth and I could leave, or I guess I had over a million dollars of net worth and I could now leave and go do something I wanted to go do with my. No, I had a couple hundred thousand dollars and I could go leave and do what I wanted to do, which was to build my own business and have the freedom to make decisions. And so I honestly felt really fine just leaving all that money behind. I left millions of dollars behind when I left Google after being there for two and a half years to start my company. And it was a struggle, right? I mean, as you guys know, building a business, which I did from 2006 to 2013, was a nightmare. Every day was a nightmare. I say in entrepreneurism, I said this publicly before, but it feels like every day you're taking a step backwards and one out of five days you take a five step leap forward. So at the end of a week, you're one step ahead of where you started, but your existential memory is that you're failing every day, every day. And suddenly you wake up and seven years have gone by and you're like, oh shit, we've got an amazing business and someone wants to buy it for a billion dollars. And if you don't have the Grit and the guts and the determination to push through those daily battles and deal with that hardship. And I don't think that being in the comfort of the big system of Google felt right for me. I think being in the playing field and battling it out every day is right for me. And so it was the right call for me. Obviously, it worked out, but still, I make choices in my life in terms of what do I want to do, Do I want to go live on a yacht or have some luxury or do whatever, and I prefer to just make great businesses and turn science into commercial opportunity. And that's how I choose to spend my time.

[David Sacks]

And I just want to just send this out to the whole panel. Do you ever think having hit the home runs and having the cash to literally retire at this age and then just, you know, kiteboard or do whatever, do you ever think about retirement and not going into work?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No.

[David Sacks]

Okay. Yeah. You wanna. Do you feel you wanna work harder?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yesterday. Yesterday, as an example, was an incredible day because I was able to bicycle with Nat and the youngest to go get a gelato. I had a kickoff meeting for. I had a kickoff meeting for a startup that's doing something incredible in batteries where, you know, starting from scratch, Series A co founders, me and the other in the other director. And we're starting, literally starting. And I remember the feeling of having done this now 30 or 40 times, and it's the. The best feeling.

[David Sacks]

La doce vita.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And then I. And then I had a call because I'm trying to put a, you know, more than a billion dollars to work in a different battery idea. And I thought to myself, God, like, I'm so lucky. And it's. It was a grindy, long day and I had never felt more thankful, so why would I, you know, you could. And I don't know, I. I feel just so blessed.

[David Sacks]

Sachs, you ever think about hanging up or are you more motivated to go to work every day? Are you annoyed?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[David Friedberg]

I mean, the thing that's giving me the most energy right now is we're in a private beta on call in near this app that we incubated. And I mean, it's getting better. It's good. And it's getting better every day. And I'm really enjoying tinkering on it. And I feel like it's kind of.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Like you're a good tinkerer, by the way. You're a good product.

[David Sacks]

You're good at tinkering.

[David Friedberg]

Good.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The tickling, you know, we tried to hire Sachs as VP of product at Facebook.

[David Sacks]

What?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

What would that have paid him?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

2,000 Sachs? Probably billions, right? Seven billions. Probably billions. 2007 or.

[David Sacks]

You regret not taking that gig?

[David Friedberg]

No, no, because I did Yammer instead, and, you know, Yammer was successful, and I got to be my own boss, and that was better, you know, So I don't know if I probably wouldn't have made as much money. But look, I've done like you guys, I've done made lots of decisions that made me less money. If I just stayed at PayPal for 20 years, my stock would have been worth many, many billions. Right? That's why I tell people, don't sell everything. Let your winners ride at least partially. Yeah, I mean, look, my. I was an investor in Facebook. If I just kept all of that stock, that'd be worth a billion dollars today. So that's pretty crazy. Well, sell some. Just don't sell everything.

[David Sacks]

That's my new philosophy.

[David Friedberg]

Yeah, but to your point about. To your point about what gives me enjoyment? I mean, I'm really having fun tinkering with this app. And you know what it's like? It's like. It's like a new season. If you were in, like, the NBA or something. It's like, can we make a championship run? Can we get one more ring? You know, and so you're like. You know, it'd be like saying to somebody, hey, you already got. You know, to NBA, an NBA champion. Hey, you got three rings. Why do you want a fourth? You know, and it's like, are you kidding me? While I'm still in this league, while I'm young enough and healthy enough to make a run at one more ring, how could you not want to do that?

[David Sacks]

You know, you got to go for it.

[David Friedberg]

Got to go for it.

[David Sacks]

I can see you. You're engaged, which is great to see. All right, listen, this has been an amazing episode. We will see you all next week if you like the show. Thanks. The end. We're not going to beg you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Go try something. Or go try something. Everybody go try something.

[David Sacks]

Do something. Anything possible.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Try.

[David Sacks]

Just try.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Just try.

[Jason Calacanis]

Read a book outside of your comfort zone. Read something that you wouldn't have otherwise. Read.

[David Sacks]

Love you guys, but I love you guys. Love you back.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love everybody listening, too.

[David Sacks]

I mean, literally, if you're listening to this and you are buying into this.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That the system is right, don't be a troll.

[David Sacks]

Don't be a troll. Don't be a douche. Like, the system is not rigged. If anything, the system is rigged for you to participate and succeed. Join the party.

[David Friedberg]

The system is malleable. The system is madness. If you want to change the world, the system is malleable enough that if you pursue it in the right way, you can make it. You can make a dent.

[David Sacks]

You can. Who is this? Who is this little. Hey. Look how happy you are. Who's the best dad?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Where's your dad? Dad? All right, we'll see you all next.

[David Sacks]

Time on the all in podcast. Bye bye. Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sachs.

[David Friedberg]

And instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love you. I the queen of quinoa.

[David Sacks]

Besties are gone.

[Jason Calacanis]

This in your driveway.

[David Friedberg]

Oh, man.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

My habit will meet me at Glenc. 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 somehow.

[David Friedberg]

Your feet.

[David Sacks]

We need to get merch.