Hey, everybody, Everybody Welcome to another episode of all in the Podcast Episode eight Besties are here to talk about tech, economy, politics, the election and our lives in Silicon Valley. Welcome back to the pod, David. Freedberg Queen Akin Y is here from an undisclosed tell. Always. Always enjoy undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest. You bailed on SF after the smoke you lasted. How many days into the barbecue into the orange Cloud? I left on the Wednesday of the Orange Cloud and took It was crazy. Took my kiddos and we're waiting it out. The fires in the Midwest? Well, it's beautiful. The last two days here, also from an undisclosed bestie location. David Sacks back on the program. Rain Man is here. Yep. Definitely here. All right, well, there you go. Man of many words. And speaking of a man of many words, auto off of seven keynotes this

week talking about Smacks Thea Prince of Saxe Jamaat Palihapitiya Back on the pot. How are you besties? Well, we had a little bestie re union, which I think we could talk about Your mouth invited us over to have an outdoor bestie re union. Yeah, and you gave one of them gonorrhea and you gave the other two way. It's crazy to say, but I literally had to call him off. Uh, two or three days after he hosted eso socially, by the way, A socially distanced dinner outdoors, Social, distant dinner outdoors. Wonderful. We had some great rib eye. Fantastic. Cracked open a nice bottle or two of one and the port. And but But then what did you dio? Well, then, Ah, family member of mine who shall remain nameless, decided to go to a party, uh, in San Francisco and possibly got

Corona and he tested positive. And then I had to get everybody in my house tested twice. Everybody came back negative, but I had to culture meth and tell him, Listen, I wasn't exposed, but some members of my family were therefore I might have second and exposure. I took two tests, came back negative two times around. Can I just say, though it's really crazy like you, we have to develop all these new social norms and you're not sure what to say. And you're not You're not sure how to react, and it's like it's It must have been like when you know, you gotta call. And it's like, Hey, listen, uh, you know your girlfriends, like I may be pregnant or like, you know, somebody's like, Hey, listen, I have a STD like you. Just like I felt like that when I was texting, the chat was like three of us on. I had to text with my tail between my legs. I think I've been exposed. I'm really sorry, guys. I think Cal canIs is the Greek word for a turd in the punch bowl, you know, that's all. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if we could tell the code 13, so I'm gonna tell the code 13. I wasn't even

there, but I e his legendary Jason Jason. Jason Calacanis gets invited by David Sacks out of his benevolence to come to stay in Hawaii at the Four Seasons and at somewhere some point during this week long vacation. Christmas day, you hear a shout from the pool from the lifeguard? Well, no, no, it was It was even before that we were sitting at the bar, so me and Jason and his brother in law were sitting at the bar having drinks and all of a sudden there's a commotion and the bartenders and staff, and we started hearing people on walkie talkies saying Code 13. 13 People running people way don't know what to make of that. We think it's a terrorist attack. E mean, that's right. The Four Seasons is on a high alert. Alarms were going off, and then and then we hear Okay, well, we're like we said to the market, What's the code? 13? And he's like, Well, it means that some kid, you know, crapped in the pool. Yeah, I had a number two in the pool and we're like

, you know, and then they were like Okay, well, yeah, it was Jason Kidd. Well, e start hearing about like the sacks kids. And I'm like a tax code. 13 sacks. They thought it was us. And then it turns out it was way were never able to get a reservation, but they have again. Well, what's so funny is like I went there at one point a few years later, and it's a whole ordeal because they said so How do you guys deal with, like, you know, a code 13? They're like, Oh, e evacuate all off the island gets Cento. Here's what had to happen. This is just to put the Code 13 perspective. I think my 10 year old at the time was two years old. My sister in law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody, and the baby is not wearing a swim diaper. And so basically a Snickers bar floats out of the on. There's a Snickers bar pool. You guys have kids. You know how big these things to get your like, How is that possible? That

you know, like, Ah, movie theater size snicker King size Snickers buoys floating in the middle of all. But this is on December 25th. These poor people are spending $3000 a night. There is not a single chase lounge by the pool that's not occupied. It is peak capacity at the Four Seasons Hotel on the Big Island or wherever it was. The pool has to be shut down for four hours. A person has to get in with a hazmat suit, retrieve the Snickers bar king size. Snickers has to get out of here. Then they have to throw in every chemical known to man. So much so that the pool is ruined for Christmas Day and that's the code 13 story. Alright, Getting back to our topics. Ticktock is on the verge of being banned from additional US downloads of Commerce Department has announced that it will ban US downloads and business transactions with ticktock and wechat. Somehow wechat got pulled into this on Sunday. Um, this will seemingly we're going

to allow tick tock, uh, to operate until November 12, So they got a little bit of a stay of execution. But of course, if they can't update in the APP store, that means there could be any security vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated. And Stephen, which you can see beauty, right? It's attempting to push through a tick tock deal that will enable retaining some Chinese ownership. Um, and there's some sort of agreement now, with Oracle will have some kind of an oversight board to do continuous third party audits. What does this say Jamaat about we're at? And do you believe that you know a Democratic leader? Let's say Obama or Biden would have taken the same approach here. Does it worry you that the government's getting this involved Or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and saying, Hey, listen, we're gonna need to have some basic level of reciprocity from China if we're gonna allow you in our officer. You know, I think I think it's kind of like, you

know, like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other and they're like, turn left and you're like No, no, no, I'm gonna turn right and then you realize you should have turned left, but then you keep turning right a few more times, then you take a couple more left, but then you end up at the same place. But it was complete shit. Dumb luck. Um, I feel like we're gonna end up in the same place here with tic tac, which is that I think that the Trump administration probably is doing this and Donald Trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power. Andi, you know, American exceptionalism, which I'm not sure is the right reason to do it. Um, but I think the outcome is right, which is that you know, for years, China has essentially been shut out to American companies unless you effectively just count out to these guys on. Do you know some companies have and some companies, like you know, Google have not in other companies like Facebook have been totally basically blocked from entering on DSO. I think it's completely right. It's it's It's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantages

that that Chinese companies have had. And so you have to play hardball to create a different set of rules, and I think this probably gets us to that place. The reason why it's happening is probably more because the ticktock people played that joke on Trump at the Tulsa rally. If you had, if I had to guess, Yeah, what do you think? Friedberg? Is this a good sign for America and the globe that, you know, and in the Democratic nations of the world, that we're gonna put our foot down with China and say, Hey, some reciprocity or you're not gonna be able to participate in our marketplace? Or is this person a personal vendetta from Trump or a little bit of both? I don't see how it's anything but, ah slippery slope forward in the escalation of, you know what's gonna be kind of transpiring between these two nations and the the next couple of years and maybe decades. You know, this goes back to the, you know, early two thousands when Google and others wanted to enter China, and China has for. For those who don't know, China has this great firewall, right? Chinese citizens

can't openly access the rest of the Internet, and China wanted to censor content and sensor. Um, what what's their citizens are accessing on DSO? There's been a back and forth between the tech industry and China going back almost 20 years now to try and figure out how we can bring our services to China. And then China launches a service that's very successful in the US in Ticktock. And I think it's just ah, you know, ah, part of the reciprocity equation, which doesn't resolve anything. It only escalates things, So it's unfortunate, but it's just kind of another step in the path that I think it's inevitable in front of us here. Saks will give you the final word here eyes. This a good thing for humanity, for international relations that China is, you know, having a little bit of a hand check here like, hey, there's gonna be a limit to how you can operate in the West. Or is this a personal vendetta from Trump? And then what do you see going forward? Um, it's it's

true that I mean, first of all, our social networks are not allowed over there, So I don't think we need to feel bad about, um, you know, not allowing their social networks over here, But besides reciprocity or the lack of it, I think the deeper reason for this is just around data security and and how the, you know. And I think that the CCP has given us adequate grounds here to ban, not just tick tock. But you know APS like that because President Xi himself declared this policy of civil military fusion, which means that any business, um, in China, any business asset there, including data, can be appropriated to serve the ends of the Chinese military or the Communist Party. And, you know, the CCP has set up this vast surveillance apparatus over its own citizens. It's asserted, um, extra territorial sovereignty over former Chinese citizens with meaning dissidents eso that the Chinese diaspora anywhere in the world. They have asserted sovereignty over that. And

, um, you know, recently there was a pretty remarkable speech by the FBI director Christopher Wray, describing, you know, Operation Fox Hunt, which is the Chinese effort to track down and presumably ultimately punished Chinese distance anywhere in the world and is part of that that the Chinese have sort of weaponized ai and social media. And so, hey, also described. I mean, it's like, pretty amazing. I didn't you know that the the Equifax Hack, which collected data on something like sense of data over 100 million Americans, the Chinese were behind that. I didn't know that. And so, you know, it's it's true. It's true that, you know, no one piece of data poses by itself a risk toe thio the security of America or Americans. But it's the sort of this systematic collection and aggregation of the data and the hacking, uh, collectively, that I do think, pose a security threat, and you've got to stop right there. Sacks. Actually, an individual's data

could absolutely be compromised if they have access to your passwords, because through the clipboard, have access to your phone role. If a young person had photos that were saying compromising in their photo roll. The phone is, you know, basically given access to that. They upload that now you could use that as kompromat against, ah, senators child for against a senator themselves. And this seems like an abstract thing. But this is exactly what the Chinese and Russians have been doing for a very long time. If you've seen the Syrians, the Americans, and you go back to the eighties to see the weaponization of you know somebody who was in the closet, who is gay during that time or somebody was having extramarital affair, you could compromise anybody with just sexual complement. And you here we're giving access to hundreds of millions of people's photo, by the way, clipboards, By the way, you just said something that's really scary, which is like, if you're if you're the Chinese and you know they have the patience to play the long game, you just aggregate and collect this thing for 30 years on the off chance that one of these people becomes

important. I mean, what is the real train candidate? Just you just surveil 300 million Americans and just say, you know what? We'll take our shot. I mean, it's gonna cost us a few billion dollars a year in storage. Who cares? Yeah. I'm not like, Is there really a case that what they're doing in the ticktock app? I don't know how much you guys have read. Um, some of the studies on what they are actually pulling, But is there really a case that what they're pulling is particularly different than what would be pulled by pretty much any other social app or photo sharing app on your phone? Um, there was some, you know, kind of insight that hey, they were capturing the Mac address. But that was up until last November, after November, the the the APP kind of refresh and stop doing that. And it was, ah, hack that some number of aps out there were already doing. But my understanding is the way that they've built the app. It's the same kind of ad tracking type approach that that a lot of APS they're taking, I think you think it's a naive position that because we haven't caught them doing something nefarious, that they aren't actually doing something nefarious right now

. If you look at what MBS did to Jeff Bezos sending that I guess it was a movie file or an image that then wound up hacking his wechat his phone like I think they've built the software I think its purpose built. Whether it's wechat or tic tac toe have these back doors, there's no way the Chinese government is not influencing that. Look, if you if you had to bet David, what do you think? The odds are between zero and 100 with 100 being absolute certainty that there are foreign national spies that worked at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft? That's my point. Is it? I mean, look, I think that there are no But do you think it's 100%? Of course it's 100. Yeah, I think at every one of them it's probably 100%. Yeah, at least one you know, for National that has a connection to intelligence in China. It's probably 100% 100%. So my point is tic tac is 100 Chinese, 100% Chinese, so you don't even have to guess whether it Z My point is like if if if

there is some you know access to personal data that we're all concerned about being compromised at literally every other fucking app company where every e I mean, it's not too. But the point that Jamaat just made is that they very well could be. The fact is, we as individuals have exposed all of our personal and private data to six or seven companies. I think you're saying too many, really right thing. It is a This is a canary in the coal mine for a bigger issue. This is what I'm saying. I think that, you know, Trump is probably acting out of an expression of power. But I think what we're realizing is, actually this is about core fundamental privacy and the safety and security of each of us as individuals. And it should start a bigger conversation like privacy. I I really do think this privacy is the killer feature of the 2000 and twenties. Um, you know what David just said about like, you know, if you're if you're a Chinese ex national, the idea that you're like, Look, I've been a citizen of three countries. Three idea that the three Lincoln

government all of a sudden may not like what I have to say and can spy on me or, you know, root my phone or steal my data. It really disturbs me like I'm sorry, but no, go fuck yourself. Like I left that country for a reason. Yes, I think I think the Republican toe watch on this is well, besides, Trump, I guess, is there's a Senator Josh Holly who is, um, well, he's He's sort of, ah, critic of big tech, and I think he's got some interesting things to say. But in this particular area, he is proposing legislation to regulate the types of information that could be collected by applications that are based in countries that are fundamentally hostile or adversarial to the U. S. And that to me, seems like the right policy because, you know, it's not just about tick tock. It's about all the APS that collect information on Americans that can be appropriated by, you know, the Chinese Communist Party or Russia or Iran

, places like that. And so I think we need a more holistic policy here than just banning ticktock, and it may not be necessary to ban Tic tac if you had the right limitations placed on them. But But But But I do think this this this whole sort of compromise solution with Larry Ellison and Oracle that makes no sense to me. This idea that you know. Ellison will own 20% of the company, but nothing else really changes. It will still be based in China. Ah, Chinese company will still be Chinese engineers based in China who, you know, and they still own 80% of it. I mean, how does that really address the data security, Don't you think, David, that that's just basically a way of just it's a wealth transfer to Larry Ellison totally think is amazing. I mean, if I could totally yeah, it's bite Dance Zeit dance. You know, it's it's bite dance. It's bite dance, paying political protection money toe Larry Ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process. But I But that's why I don't think it's gonna fly. I mean, Holy

has already said that it's not good enough for him. And so even if I think and it doesn't live up to the Trump stated criteria, even though he seems to be this ultimately a sifi, its ruling sex is that who's going to make the final call on this? Or does Trump have sole executive kind of authority on foreign security on security grounds to kind of block it? Does it go to Citius? That's a good question. I think Sophia's disapprove, Um, em in a It has to approve it. Yeah, I mean, so you're right. I mean, there are There are members of Congress that are all going to need to be convinced to get this thing done well, But Sylvia's approved them, and I didn't think they could like block applications. As as of last year, as as of last year, every investment trigger Sofia's. It's It's a weird new thing that happened. I was involved in a company recently, but that's secondary to the national security power that the Trump may have. So this is almost like a two tier kind of thing. One is to approve. One is for, um, you know, for Trump to be a cool with

it national security terms. And then second is the antitrust issues. If we just go back a second talking about the broad, you know, as Timothy called it kind of this canary in a coal mine, you know, I don't know how many of you guys using Amazon Echo or Google home or Amazon Fire TV or nest thermostat every every single, every single one of them has ambient audio listening on it, every single one of them even. And another thing people don't realize is every speaker is actually a microphone as well as a speaker. You can actually listen on any House speaker, whether it's a sonar device or what have you, Um, and so we've got, you know, our homes are already wired. Um, Amazon Fire TV runs on fucking Android. I mean, there's 100 ways into your home as it is. It seems to me like there's a significant concern about how much data we are already exposing That's being highlighted here. I don't think that there's, you know, it's sort of like playing Ah, that where you try and pop the hamsters in the game. It's like at some point we're gonna realize these things there, here, everywhere, And it's

not just ah company, but it is how we're living our lives now on how technology is kind of capturing every piece of information about everything we dio. This is this is I go back to this, somebody will take this or many people will take this and run with it. But I think that there is an enormous amount of money, um, that consumers will pay for the assurance of anonymity and privacy. I don't really know how it's expressed, David, but like, you know, for example, like if I could get a phone that was completely locked down and encrypted and, um, like a burner phone is what you're talking about. And a lot of people are now doing this. They take a second phone, they put BP VPNs are the are the first step, and you're seeing treading on very popular. Well, like I try to use signal, I try to use facetime audio. I'll even use WhatsApp now just because these things air intend encrypted. And I have nothing particularly important or interesting to say or hide. But

I just don't like the idea that in the in the open wild, I'm just I just feel very vulnerable to data breaches more than any other kind of breach. I mean, I have this conversation with somebody that was, um, you know, sort of helping me lock down my WiFi network, you know, And for a long time I only had one endpoint, and all of a sudden he's like, Look, let's have ah ah, home and a guest. But in that conversation, what he was saying is the biggest form of theft isn't like burglaries anymore. It's basically people just having packet sniffers outside your house because they could get access to everything and anything. And can I ask you, Can I ask you a question? There's a There's a book by a guy named Stephen Baxter is a science fiction book from years ago. Arthur Clarke called The Light of other days, and these guys developed a wormhole technology. They could put it in any house, and they could see and listen to everything. And suddenly the technology became kind of ubiquitous, so everyone could create a wormhole anywhere and see and hear everything so effectively. Information was completely transferrable

and free and available to everyone, and the book kind of highlights how society changed in that context. So in a world where you see where everyone is and what everyone is doing and saying there's no longer any notion of information, asymmetry and the way people operating behave changes because so much of our life is dependent on people not knowing things about us that we know eso when your when your employees going to go interview for another job and they tell you they're going to the dentist, you can say like Hey, that's not true And the guy says, You know what? I'm actually thinking about looking for another job because I hate working for you. You suck So everyone starts changing kind of how they behave. Do you think that 50 years from now that's where the world heads? Do you really think it's possible to stop this train in its tracks and not end up in a world of what I would call kind of like hyper transparency? We're all information becomes kind of because it's already being collected everywhere about everyone, and it's all I think it's rising exponentially. People are going to start. I I think that people are gonna start turning their homes into like those skiffs, you know, sensitive compartmented information facility Joyce here about like senators going into the skiff kind

of situation for private stuff. I think like people are going to start taking this very seriously as they get compromised, you know, time after time and embarrassing. And you could see it with apple making it their marketing strategy. Apples you. Oh, I think it was already changed already with, like people getting their phones hacked. And there, you know, E. I think it makes the world a much shittier place because it basically robs us of our own independence and our fundamental right to privacy. And I just think that's a really bad outcome. And so you know what? Like if like, the need for likes on tweets on followers leads me to a place where I lose privacy, I would just say Shut them all down now, um, because I think that people's self worth is much bigger than what they understand it to be if they're willing to make that tradeoff. But most people appreciate that. Well, I would also I

would also just add that just because there's more transparency doesn't mean that it serves the interests of truth. Like Jason said earlier, Um, this information could be used to create, you know, ops, you know, and manipulate. And, um, you know, it's, um and so, yeah, I don't you know, like like Trotsky said, Just because you're not interested in war doesn't mean wars and interested in you. I mean, this data could be collected to run operations on people that don't serve. You know, the interests of greater transparency here that I think. I think people don't think from first principles on this topic. This is sort of like the the idiotic orthodoxy of Silicon Valley, which is like they wrap themselves in the flag of transparency, like it means something. But they have no real idea what it really means at scale and at the limit. And, you know, there's one thing about getting access to a fucking look or dashboard. Who cares, you know, And but the word transparency is used for that the same way that it's used for David exactly what you just

said, and they're two completely different things. They have completely different meanings, and, uh, the latter's implications are so much more important on Do we need to think about this from first principles? Because I think people's inherent, um, identity as human beings ultimately gets put at risk over time. It should absolutely be the case that the social networks or anybody collecting data gives an up. This is the way I would form the legislation. If you are running a service like Facebook, Twitter, Google for free and you're monetizing through advertising, you must provide it off. Like what they do provide a They monetize. Oh, listen, your service through advertising services, then I think you should be forced to give a option for whatever the amount of that monetization is a year to pass a subscription. So, for example, if Facebook makes $80 per person, you

lost, you lost, uh, monetization Jason. Sorry. I think Lett's over its over next segment. Neck's. Uh alright, Well, just as we wrap up here on this segment, Kevin Systrom might, uh, he's in the running, apparently to take over for ticktock. Is that a good idea? Sacks e think you know a system. I think it's a pretty it's It's a dumb idea. Unless the company literally becomes an American company. I don't know why you've made this point in the context of Kevin Mayer. Like if if if he's working for bite dance, he's working for the By Dance board directors, which reports the CCP. It's just why why would someone who's in his position want to sacrifice? Is independence to do that? Yeah, it makes no sense. I mean, that's this is becoming the big test on everybody's moral compass, especially Hollywood, which is changing the ending of movies to satisfy the CCP like, literally the people who are the biggest virtue signals in the

world. Celebrities Hollywood, China. China knows how to use its market access. We don't. We just threw open our markets to their products, which caused, you know, us to lose our whole you know, industrial, um, you know, manufacturing capacity. We didn't demand anything, really, in exchange for that, Whereas in order to get access to China, you have to say and do the right things or certainly toe not criticize them. And so they know how to you, as we saw with the N B A and the whole Daryl Morey thing, Um, you know, they know how to use their market access. All right, well, let's go on to the economy here. We've been sheltering in place essentially for six months on. Now, people are starting to talk about Hey, maybe we need to do another lock down. Andi, obviously, this, uh, economic challenge is being felt very differently In some places. It's an opportunity, obviously, a lot of

people with SAS software and, um, you know, people who work behind keyboards were having a renaissance. And, ah, lot of the economy is pouring into their keyboards while restaurants retail on. Anybody who has to work in the real world is part of what's becoming essentially a permanent unemployed class that perhaps this is starting to look like a drive. One of you, be I What are your thoughts? Come off on things permanent unemployment situation. I have, ah, have a bunch of thoughts here. Let me just go kind of give you the stream of consciousness. Like Trump, Powell gave a speech. I think it was two or three weeks ago in Jackson Hole. Andi basically said, like, Look, the Federal Reserve is taking a completely new posture on rates and, you know, they basically clarified that in explicit detail. Just, um uh, just a few days ago on, they basically said we're keeping rates where they are until a least 2023. You know, my personal views for rates are going to stay basically

zero for the next half decade. and I think it's probably pretty likely that we're going to see rates day at zero. Probably a full decade. So, um, what does that mean? Okay, well, a typical recession. What happens is you don't know where the bottom is, right? Things sort of sort of decay. They get a little bit worse, they get a little bit worse, they get a little bit worse, then things bottom out. And then, you know, you start to grow, and you can use interest rate policy to kind of help navigate how soft landing is as well as how fast the recovery is. That's sort of like classic economics and how bankers and the markets and all these folks used to work, and it eventually would trickle into Main Street. Now, we just have none of those things. We have rates. Zero. They're not gonna go anywhere. They're not gonna go up there. Probably not gonna go down. They're gonna kind of just stay where they are. Um, that's one thing. Second is we priced in the bottom, which is the first month of the coronavirus. We took the markets, basically, assuming there's no growth. And now we've priced things back as if they'll recover. The rating

agencies are out to lunch. They basically said, You know what? I'm gonna look out till 2021 or 2020 to give me a reason to justify not to downgrade you so that you can continue to raise more debt. Which, by the way, is, uh, free. Um, so you have all these dynamics where I think the capital markets are in an expansive mood and an expansive mode, And in that, I actually think there's a riel bid thio employment because there isn't really that many ways now you can, without just getting completely ripped apart, put money to work. And so the rial Ernest capital allocation strategy that's left for most CEOs is to actually buy things, invest in things, try more things, Onda. All of those, I think, lead to net employment. So in general, I'm kind of constructive in bullish on. I don't think that this idea that there's a permanent unemployment class sticks around Freeburg, where your thoughts obviously a lot of Americans work in retail

. Um, you know, we obviously have all these restaurant workers who are out of work and travel is now hitting the end of the furloughs at a lot of these, um, different airlines, etcetera. What's your thought on this? Unemployment? Middle America. Uh, catastrophe. Well, I don't think, um, happiness comes from, you know, absolute standards of living. I think happiness arises from one's relative standard of living. Whether that's relative to how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor and seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy. It's otherwise society decays. So the notion of some sort of flatlined, or even flatlined and inflation adjusted basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent, which is, you know, some sort of decay. Societal decay. We

have to resolve the opportunity framework for people, which is how do you give people an opportunity to kind of progress in their lives and earn more over time and have access Thio, you know, doing more with themselves while they're here on planet Earth. I mean, that's just what humans need. So, you know, maybe there's a short term fix, but I think we've got some structural things to fix to kind of enable, um, opportunities and and give people kind of an inherent, uh, you know, uh, kind of stepladder in life. I heard a really dark theory a few years ago, which is, if we do this, we're gonna resolve to a world where we're gonna have a bunch of people playing video games. Because then the only way you could get people to feel like they're progressing in their lives is to give them more medals on their video games and give them a higher ranking and score. And that's where society kind of gets to to kind of keep people psychologically kind of satiated on, gets a pretty dark, you know, sad place. If that's where we end up. It's like a bad episode of Black Mirror. But we've had a few episodes of Black Mirror this year, so, you know

, it sounds like Ready Player one with the Masters were playing video games instead of actually going out in the world. Total sacks. What's your thought on? You know, just the next two years, let's say and how this all shakes out and this will give us a good segue into the coronavirus and where we stand right now, with this potential second lock down and the impact that might have psychologically on people and also on the economy, there's not gonna be a second lock down. It doesn't make any sense. And even if there were, people aren't going to support it. Um, certainly any of the red states aren't going to do it. I guess the Blue States May they still haven't, you know, sort of unlocked down. So maybe that gets more protracted in places like California. But But we're not gonna go back into lockdowns and people won't support. And I think the thing that we basically figured out that should have been obvious months ago now is that, um, coronavirus is really like two different diseases in terms of its effects on people. So for elderly people and for people with

risk factors, it's very dangerous. You know, I'm very worried about my parents and, you know, for people in that group, they have to take, you know, extreme precautions. But for young, healthy people without risk factors, it's, um it's not been that deadly. It's it's very unpleasant. It's a very bad two weeks. But you know, for example, if you look at the data now on colleges coming back. There's been some reports that the virus is spreading like wildfire on college campuses. That's true, but hospitalizations and deaths have not gone up. And so because it's just not that, um, it's just not that deadly thio younger people. And so I think this idea of shutting down the whole economy to protect people at risk, it just seems like overkill. And I think if we had to do it all over again, we wouldn't have done lockdowns. We just would have protected at risk people. We've still consistently had, ah, 1000 deaths a day. We thought this might go down where your thoughts on Americans just being okay with that

, that basic death toll? Sex? Well, I mean, any death is obviously bad, tragic and, you know, and statistically there are going to be people who die even who are in the, you know, loaders group. So for sure, but you know. But we had about 200,000 deaths. The original estimates from this virus were 2 to 3 million. So it's I guess my point is not that it's not bad, but it's you know, but that. It's, um you know, much less deadly that I think was originally thought There is an argument that that's not deaths directly attributable to coronavirus, right? And that, um, the vast majority of those folks had co morbidity ease and that, you know, the primary driver. This is an argument many have made. I'm not gonna take a strong point. Um, but, you know, 85% plus of folks have significant co morbidity ease. Um, and you know, this virus maybe, um, kind of has a contributing factor to their death. But

if let's assume everyone in the United States had coronavirus today, then every death that was reported today would be reported as a coronavirus. Death on DSO. They're testing a lot of folks, um, you know, in the hospital finding that they have coronavirus, it's, you know, it's very difficult to then prove that the reason that they died or the sole reason that they died was coronavirus. You know, percentage, you put it. Yeah, but that's my point is, I don't think it's one thing, right. I'm not sure that it's someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus, and they've also got severe diabetes, Heart disease cancer there on chemotherapy. I mean, you could list the other things that they might have, what caused their death. You know, you can't as as a corner. It's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death. But when they test that person and they find that their coronavirus positive there, that number is now being counted in the statistics that say, that was the coronavirus death that day and coronavirus. It's so prevalent in the United States right now. It's such a significant part of the population

. It's also very difficult to say, Hey, guys like you know, these deaths are so I'm not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus. That is absolutely happening. Um, but it's very difficult to say. What is the Net effect on life right now? We're still learning a lot about how this virus interact with different people based on their genetics and based on their disease, state and other factors. Let me ask you one more way for your free bird, and then I'll give it over to your mouth, which is free. Bring in your estimation as a scientist and somebody is, I would say, a man of science on the call here. Are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021? And what's your best outlook for our return to normalcy? If you had to pick a time when it feels like we could go to a Warriors game or play cards regularly or go to the World Series of Poker? Wendy, do you have, AH, time, period, where you think that could possibly happen? It's all politics and social behavior. It has nothing to do with science. Like after 9

11, there were no more serious like terrorist attacks on the United States. But our fucking lives change dramatically. We go sit in TSA lines and, you know, get our ass is swapped when we get on an airplane now, and that's still going on 20 years later. So I'm pretty sure there's a lot of change that's here to stay in the U. S. Because of coronavirus, and will be even after everyone gets vaccines and the death drop below 10 a day and yada yada. So, you know, I'm not convinced that this is like, Hey, here's the date, we're all gonna be out of it. And then we're safe because people are psychologically scarred. Behavior has changed. Businesses have changed the landscape of how we work as a society has changed, and that's not going away. So it's It's not like we're gonna go back. I think it's like we're going forward into a different world where we operate differently. Much is what happened after 9 11. What's your take on that map? I think that David's right that, you know, were it. But for coronavirus, I think a lot of these people that died would still be alive. And so, you know, I don't think it really matters how much of the blame we're trying to ascribe to it. It's just that it

was a meaningful, nontrivial contributing factor, so thes debts are avoidable and we have to deal with that. The second is I don't think what we know what the peak to trough looks like, because we haven't really gone through a really full blown flu season yet. Um, you know, coronavirus came to America at the tail end of the winter, and it's gonna be, um I think tough to figure out what it's gonna do in October, November, December, January February, when it's really cold in many parts of the United States and, you know, whatever effects again, we still don't know it in totality, but whatever effects the warm weather had in muting it or whatever mutation muted it may change. So I tend to think it's another 18 to 24 months of this posture. But Friedberg is really right, which is like, This is what's so sad, which is when you could point a finger and look at somebody and say you you're the cause. It was much easier to react and create rules and create

boundaries as uncomfortable or as inconvenient as they were and live by them. And because this is mawr, nameless and faceless, it's impossible. Um, alright, well, here's some good news I was able to acquire uh I've been on a little investigative journalism kick, asking people if they have access to rapid testing kits, I have them in Korea and I was able to get and I'm curious your thoughts on this friedberg the rapid response. Liberty Cove in 19 i g slash I gm test cassettes. Um and they cost 15 to 20 bucks each, and they take 10 minutes. Um, they're easy to use. Um I mean, I've had those since march, and they cost 50 cents each. So so these are now officially available, though in the United States. You had those from some other country, correct? I got from China and I got from the U S. And I got from Korea, um, and and and these things they just made everywhere

you and they're like these air the ante by accurate, right? Yeah. Eso There's a paper that was published at U. C s F um, I I got an acknowledgment because of my donations to support the research, and it showed that it, uh, these tests have actually very good specificity. And the sensitivity is, um, is gonna be call it 85%. But these air antibody test and further research has shown that not everyone has the same antibody response after getting infected. And there's a relationship between how severe the diseases for you and and various other factors. So and these will only show up typically, you know, days two weeks after you get infected, the antigen tests, which are the mawr common kind of ones that everyone's looking for now are these tests that can actually find the virus itself. And so they'll take a swab of your nose or some saliva from your mouth and see if there's any virus in there. And it's a much, much lower sensitivity. Then the PCR test, which is

the expensive, you know, lab test. But it could be done on a stick, and it's a good enough thing for letting people into, say, a football game, Um, and are a good friend of ours just texted me and told me that they're doing this at the U. T. Austin game. They're using this antigen test toe, let people into the football game today. So, um, or this weekend So it's getting kind of more widespread use. And so when we have those tests that scales, what will the world look like? Freeburg. I don't know. You just like the TSA. You'll get swapped, and you know these things. It's great business to be in. By the way, if you guys, you know, wanna SPAC a Korean, uh, antigen test things they're gonna sell like, uh, there's a company that I heard it through. A friend which had its an Israeli company. I never followed up on it, which was effectively a Breathalyzer, which would be Could you just imagine that would be incredible, right? You just well, there even seconds. We've talked about this in our chat group there. There are startups like, um was

a quid el Hamadi askew who've got these little, you know, 2 $300 little handheld readers. And the cartridges air basically mouth swabs or lower nasal swabs, you know, cost 10 bucks. And I think, you know, I think that they'll be there gonna be rolling out over the next few months and assuming we could scale the production of them, I think they will be everywhere. And, you know, I don't think it will be a government mandated things. I don't think the government will get its act together, but it will be the kind of thing where you go shopping in a store. Whatever. And they'll be early adopters or a restaurant. They'll start using it. People will realize the way. I don't wanna get swapped three times a day, So then they'll get some sort of like a receipt or voucher they could take with him to the next place. And so I think, you know, I'm like, actually, like, I think I'm more optimistic than you guys about Cove it right now. I think that whether it's because of these rapid tests or because of treatments coming or just this fundamental fact about co morbidity, ease again. Not absolving, not not saying that, Cove. It isn't serious, but this the fact that we've learned that it's

, um you know, that it's really deadly primarily for people who have co morbidity is I think, for all of these reasons, I think Cove is gonna be a distant memory by next summer. I really dio I think, um, I think particularly to What's that? You think behavioral changes as well, Like businesses and movie theaters? Yeah, sports, I think. I think people, we I think people will largely be back toe what they were doing last summer. By next summer, I think we're gonna have, like, you know, call it a six month period where you know we do these rapid tests just to make sure, um and but But I but I think as the case rate starts dropping off, things will kind of revert back toe where they were. I mean, the question to ask is kind of, you know, which trends were there before Cove it and have been accelerated, Like, I would say, the move from, like, Death of retail, the shift to e commerce that feels to me like it's here to stay, but, you know, food delivery, things like that. But there was no trend of people not

going to sports games anymore, you know? And I think like stuff like that will just snap right back. I don't know. I don't know about you guys. I'm still, like feeling fucked up by the whole thing. You don't really realize how much your psychology has changed until you kind of reflect on decisions and behaviors like there's still a fear factor that I think needs to kind of be ironed out. But, um, you know, we'll see how long it takes for people. It's just like it's so different when you're so used toe just waking up and hopping on Zoom for work and avoiding people and putting masks on when you go walk your fucking dog. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's gonna be hard to kind of change out of that. Well, I think there's gonna, I think, this idea of the greater flexibility around working arrangements, ability to work from home. I think officers will become a little bit more like Coworking spaces for a single company where people come in three days a week and work from home a couple of days a week. I think there'll be a permanent flexibility, but But I also think that people want to get back to work and they want it back toe offices and they want to interact with people. And I think everyone's gonna be excited to do that again. It's not like everyone's gonna be working

from home forever. Eso I You know, I think again next summer is kind of my my date for when things air back toe back to normal. Well, this has been certainly driving a lot of our politics right now. You probably saw, um, the book that came out with the tapes of Trump saying that, you know, he was trying to play it down Sacks as a lifelong Republican, what were your thoughts when the Republican presidential candidate, the Republican president, said, Hey, I'm trying to play this down when he was at the same time saying it was deadly serious. Does that make you worry about Trump as a candidate? And what do you think that's gonna? How that might play into the election? It must have been disappointing for you to hear your candidate, Trump say, at the same time, this is deadly and I want to play it down Well, Trump's leadership on this has been a little bit erratic for sure on, By the way, let's go back and remind the viewers here that in the first pods were doing back in April

, I think we kind of nailed what the right policy response should be. I wrote a block on April 2nd. Talking about that mass should be required, that that was the right response. But we also said that lockdowns very quickly after the start of locked down said that it was excessive, you know, and that what we should do is be going all in on Mass, not lockdowns. I certainly would have liked to have seen Trump get that right several months earlier. Um, that being said, let's not forget everybody else who got this stuff wrong, too. I mean, you look at CDC, um, you know, or w h o. We have talked about this on previous pod. I mean, w h o was It was also unclear about Mass and and Fauci, I guess now retroactively saying that he didn't think that master nest because he's trying to prevent a run on supplies. I mean, the whole response of the health care establishment, they were all they were all, like, really bad. And so I have

a greater degree of forgiveness for people who made mistakes back in March or April. But what I think is hard to forgive now are these people who are promoting the wrong policies now that we know so much more. And I mean, at this point, I would think I think that Cove it is covert policy is a net plus for Trump in this campaign because, you know, the other side of it is, um, is these permanent lockdowns? You know, there's this an article and was a foreign policy saying that we need to go back to lockdowns, and I think Biden said that we need to have lockdowns again, and, you know, his policy would be to listen to the experts. But all these experts again, we're wrong about so many things. And and so, you know, again, I think this this idea of permanent lockdowns, if that is the alternative to Trump, will help Trump win on DSO. You don't think that this Woodward book and that kind of stuff plays into the election or the debates in the coming weeks? I think it's sort of priced into the stock, you know? I mean, look, if it weren't for

co vid, I think that if you go back to like January February, when Trump gave that State of the Union speech, his ratings were the highest they had been, the economy was on fire. Um, you know, he kinda It looked like he was on cruise control toe winning re election. And then Cove it happened. And, you know, um, and his ratings went down to their to their lowest point, and and so I think he already paid the price for, you know, the let's call it inconsistent leadership that that would were described. So I think that's priced in. And now the question is, if the economy gets good enough fast enough, um, and the other side is on the side of lockdowns and Trump is on the side of reopening. Um, you know, I again I think Kobe policy becomes a Net plus for him. Jemaah tha fivethirtyeight has in its simulations 77 wins and 100 for Biden. You think that's accurate? Yeah. I mean, I I think that until the debates, I think that this thing is basically where it's been for a

long time. Um, and if if Biden flubs the debate and basically comes out as, um, you know, intellectually too inconsistent to be voted in by a plurality of Americans, he's done for and Trump's gonna win eso he can't have these, you know, verbal gaffes and basically seem like he's, uh, you know, a senile octogenarian. If he does come off that way, he's going to lose. But if he doesn't and look many of the moments you see him now, he's actually pretty crisp. Um, that probably gets the job done because, like I said, I think more people just want toe non trump alternative, then want the Trump alternative even within the Republican Party and look like preference. Falsification can cut both ways. All the people that said they weren't going to vote for him, but then did, um you know, there's also probably a cohort of people that now feel obligated when they came out of the woodwork of supporting him. Now they just feel like it's easier to be publicly supporting him. But then in the you know, they may go the other way. So it all kind

of works in both directions. Um, but I still think on the margin Biden is the Biden is a favorite on, you know, how different will the world look? Trauma. In your estimation, under a Biden presidency, we get to January 1st. How different does the country feel is gonna be some great relief is gonna be some great joy. Like when Obama While no. Yeah, well, a lot of these things are emotional Overreactions in both directions. The reality is that if you if you actually graft substantive policy that affect your everyday life, the magnitude of the impact of the presidency has been shrinking since the 19 eighties. I think the most impactful president of our lifetimes, our lifetime. So, you know, seventies onwards, uh, was Reagan and it's basically been decaying ever since. Um and eso. I think you know, I think that the job of the presidency is mostly window

dressing except for foreign policy that matters less and less. And I'll tell you why that matters less and less because all the things that the president used to, you know, really governed like foreign policy was a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things. For example, our entire posture on the Middle East, which has been a fucking shit show or our entire posture on Russia was in part because of our energy policy. And in a world of sustainable energy, those entire regions are not important anymore. So do you let them basically fend for themselves? We do not need to be involved. They're going to they're going to devolved because they're gonna have to suck out all the oil out of the ground to try to monetize it before wind and solar and everything else become the dominant form of energy. And so if you take energy policy off the table, all of a sudden, the national security interests to care about large swaths of the world go to zero, right? So So then there's less and less for the president. It's pretty pretty, Pretty short, isn't it? Yes. So So my my point is the surface, the surface area of the impact of the president is shrinking, and it shrinks as technology

. Like if you think about it, what is driving foreign policy and national security policy changes over the last 10, 15 years, Definitely over the next 40 or 50 is technology, right? If we get if we get, for example, if we get any form of like carbon sequestration, uh, at scale broadly available, you're gonna have a complete resurgence of Western economies if that technology is invented in the United States or Western Europe. Freeburg, uh, quickly you think that Biden is gonna win, And then what do you think the country feels and looks like into a Biden presidency? And then let's move over to energy and sustainable energy and carbon. After that, I don't know, Um, you know, I'll say the same thing I've said in the past. I don't think, um, the notion of a sense of relief is realistic. I don't think this is about people think it's about Trump, but Trump is the product of what it's all really about. eso I'll just, you know, kind of highlight. I think you know Biden is Ah, call him instead

of thinking about things that Democrats and Republicans and left and right, if we think about it as kind of populism and free market is, um, and in the middle of centrism, you know, we're probably taking a notch, um, towards centrism. And, um, at the end of the day, uh, the march towards populism seems to be continuing. And you know whether Trump is kind of the product of that march or maybe the next one will be Elizabeth Warren or AOC. It's kind of the same thing, in my opinion, but I think that's the bigger kind of concern is, um, you know, how do we again keep general Generally keep most people in the United States feeling like they can progress in life, feeling like they can find happiness in life and feeling like there's opportunity for them to kind of, you know, achieve their objectives. And if they don't feel like they're getting it, they're going to try and wrap it all up, and unions will continue to scale and AOC will become the vice presidential nominee in 2024. Gotta gotta free bird. What are your thoughts

on the wildfires? Global warming and the politics of all that. And then we'll go to cancel culture with you. Sex. Um, California has 33 million acres of forest land. It's about 100 million acres in total land. So for us to make up about a third of our land, Um, so far, we're burning 3.5 million. So about 10% of our acres, Um, when we burn an acre, we release uh, about 15% of the carbon that's stored in that acre into the atmosphere. So thus far, if you do the math on that, we've released about as much co two as we've as the California cars released in a year by the wildfires. Onda politics we're seeing play out. So it's it's it's a significant problem. But over the last 40 years we've added about a quarter, uh, ton of carbon teach acre per year. Um, and the reason we've done that is we haven't kind of, you know, uh, lit fires and managed

the forests and cut down trees. And there's been all these restrictions in California. So there's an argument that some are making, that this is about forest management. And then there's an argument that others are making that this is about climate change and dry weather and hot weather causing the fires. And the reality is, it's both. But it's as everything else in this country right now becoming highly politicized that, um and you know, Trump visited Newsom in a very kind of symbolic gathering this week. I don't know if you guys saw the packet that was handed out to Trump. It was awesome. It was like, 24 point pump font. And it was like, Yeah, like that. Yeah, Wire. Uh, fire is burning state. You know, it was like it was you guys got to see It is awesome. The little package he got on day and then use, um, sat like exactly 6 ft from him with a mask on and trump sitting there without the mask on. I mean, it's such a fucking political circus. Um, and, uh, you know, I think all things are true and all things are false, and we can move on. Uh

, well, the debate on the fires is I mean, what what? It's the debate has has become sort of climate change versus forest management. You know, that's sort of the debate about it. And like most of these debates, you don't necessarily have to choose their commune element of truth on both sides. Um, you know, regardless of how much climate change is caused, these fires, we've done a very, very poor job in the state managing them. And you know, this idea that we could just fix global warming and or wait, you know, not have good force management until you know, on just kind of wait for global warming to be fixes, E. I mean, that's a really stupid idea. So regards of how much climate change is toe the cause of this, I think we need a much more competent state reaction. Thio. The fact these fires do you believe in global warming? David Sacks, I believe in the, you know, in greenhouse, the greenhouse gas theory and that, Yeah, that it's you know, that man made co two emissions. We're gonna have an impact on the environment

. I think that, you know what's a little bit hard to know is that the exact timing and magnitude of some of these things, but I agree with what Ellen said, which is that we're running a very high risk experiment here, Um, continually putting out, you know, co two greenhouse gasses in tow into the atmosphere. Why is it so difficult for the Republican Party? And I feel like you're almost straining and couching your words there, David, that you believe in global warming. You believe in what Ellen saying It's not worth doing this real risk. Why do Republicans seem to have such an aversion to just saying, Hey, global warming, something. And we need to fix it because because because Democrats wrapped those words around them like a flag. And so it became a political issue, like with everything else. I mean, I think so. So again, we have this false choice now of whether you want to save the environment or save the economy. And the problem is, I think I think that ah, lot of Republicans don't want to concede the issue. Hey, little

guy, um, a lot of problems don't wanna concede the issue because they're afraid it'll lead to something like the green New Deal. And so what we need to do is figure out some responses to the problem that don't require to destroy the economy. Right? And for you, if we did incentives, if the if the country spent incentive sacks to get solar on roofs and stuff like that, you wouldn't be opposed to it, would you? You mean, like taxing carbon emissions or just giving discounts on putting solar in, subsidizing solar for people's houses? Or maybe the middle ground of creating more nuclear reactors, which seems like something that neither party can agree. Thio, Hold on, little guy. Sorry, I got I'm doing a podcast. Okay, Sorry. Uh, yeah. Um, look, I think I think to the extent that carbon emissions are in externality, the traditional way of dealing with this is you would internalize the externality by placing your tax or penalty on that. But so look

what I rather tax carbon emissions than something else. Yes, I mean, but the only way you're gonna get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one for one tax reduction in other areas, right? Because there's a there's this other larger debate about whether you know what else should be taxed. What about you to mouth where your thoughts on solving global warming and this polarized sort of Republican Democrat. If you're for global, if you're if you believe in global warming, you're not a Republican. There's I I think that this is the most correlated thing with a healthy economy, because I think that whoever solves climate change or the set of solutions that solve climate change, first of all they'll be, uh, unbelievably, economically successful. They will employ enormous numbers of people on bail, have a really profound legacy in the world. So the question is how to do it. And I think the problem is right now there's There's David, I think, actually puts the best lens on the topic, which is right now. We

don't even have enough canonical data so that there's a single source of truth that we can all rely on and have not having to judge. It is climate change, I think is an important step, which would just mean having a longitudinal measurement of temperature. And, you know, having a longitudinal measurement of everything from PM to five PM tend to, you know, uh, carbon methane, all of the other normal sort of emissions, nitrous oxide, all this stuff so that then you could just understand what men and women as part of the human race are doing. Thio fuck with the counterfactual Because the counterfactual is if we were just, like, living normal chill lives. Um, and so once you understand that, then you can figure out how to at least mitigate that back to what the counterfactual would have been or do it even better. Um, I think the best thing again, we talked about this in a pot a couple weeks ago or a couple of a couple months ago. The best thing the governments could do is, um, introduce incentives. And I think the most meaningful incentives here are not at the consumer level, but they're more upstream

. So, you know, if you take something like cement, you know, cement, which is responsible for I think 20% of all the carbon emissions is a really pernicious industry, because, you know, they all, they are very local. They operate within 300 local kilometers of every place where you ship cement to make concrete and whatnot. Andi, when you look at sort of where the emissions are, um, there at a very specific part of the chain, which is effectively impossible to mitigate. So you have to have a level of material science. Um, you know, improvement to really move things away from cement altogether. Well, just knowing that you're gonna have to have the incentives that a government creates to pull that forward. Another example is when you look at, like, manufacturing all the shit that we all love, you know, I don't care whether you like fucking normal pants or ham pants. You know, when you go back and you look at how H and M makes those pants, there's are high temperature processes that are burning fossil fuels. They're admitting all kinds of really terrible junk into the environment. And so it doesn't matter whether you're vegan per se

. Um, you know, you're not gonna go around unclothed. You're not going to not use spoons, right? So all of that, the totality of all of that, we need to completely reinvent high temperature manufacturing. That's not gonna happen unless the government steps in because, like for example, take something a simplest steel, you know, it's a tragedy of the Commons, right? I mean, basically, is if if no individual could make a major impact. Maybe they won't free. You think we have all the technology we need to do this, and it's really just a matter of incentives and deployment right now in terms of global warming or stemming global warming. Is that a correct statement that we have the technology? We just haven't deployed? Correct? And I think it's 100% unpacked. Well, what I will say is we have the science, the engineering and the resource ing on. Then the market are the kind of unresolved right, and so re sourcing is capital. The market can be created artificially by putting in place government subsidies or having the government be a customer

. Um, or you just have to wait a long enough period of time. Um, if you listen Thio the Tim Ferriss interview with Coke. Which one was a Charles Coke? He talks about how, um ultimately consumers will vote with their dollars of climate change. Israel and global warming is starting to have an effect on planet Earth, and we're seeing that right. We're seeing people make a switch to a vegetarian diet. We're seeing people by Tesla's. We're seeing people make choices for sustainability. so the free market is resolving and will resolve. Climate change is the argument that some libertarians might make. Um, and then I think, is that true in your mind? Freeburg. I think it's I I'll be honest with you. I've been fucking shocked by how many people are choosing to pay a premium for vegetarian meat alternatives. I was wrong on this. I bet against these companies eight years ago. I don't bet against it, but I chose not to bet for them because I made the argument. Consumers will only buy stuff that's cheaper and taste as good. And I was wrong, Um, millions of consumers air going toe Burger King and buying a veggie burger

now, which wasn't the case, and we're seeing this across the world eventually, out of a crisis of consciousness right there, you're saying that's right. It's a It's a behavioral change because they yeah, that's what they want in the market. That's what they want to spend their money on. They want to spend their money on having a nicer world. It's just like when people will spend a premium amount of money on a nice suit. It makes them look good and feel good. It's the same sort of notion. I I feel good when I'm buying a Tesla. I feel good when I'm buying a veggie burger instead of a meat burger, knowing that it is harming my people around me. I couldn't bring myself to buy a carbon based ice engine. Recently I was thinking about you know, if I'm in Tahoe and I need to go off road or there's no conditions I need to have a car for And I went up, I'm picking up the model. Why, with the dual engine and putting snow tires on it, as opposed to getting the new you know, uh, Wrangler or the the new Defender? But whether it's bio manufacturing or, you know, synthetic meats, um, or I

think we're not just in a point where we have to create luxury markets, I think we are going to disrupt commodity markets. Andi, I think we're going to do that this decade, and it's gonna blow people's fucking mind. Um, when everything you're eating looks, tastes and and feels the same, and it's cheaper and it was just made it in a more sustainable way. Using bioengineering, which is kind of you know, the ability toe to write the physical world with software, except it's realized through genomics. And it's it's an incredible thing that how much of this is the generational shift? I mean, Jen AC seemed pretty absorbed with our own projects and a little bit of consciousness. But these millennials are now getting into their thirties and they're 35 years old. These the oldest millennials and they seem to be incredibly focused on three environment and doing what's right. This is a generational shift in your mind fever. No, I think this is just the slow march of of humanity's ability to master our world in technology. And, you know, uh, look, let me just give you a scenario tomorrow kind of says we're gonna de carbonized the atmosphere If we

could build an algae or seaweed from scratch or using some basis and use software to resolve what's the right sort of seaweed to create that will grow like crazy in the oceans. When it gets heavy, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and it literally just pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and drops to these 40,000 ft or, you know, 4000 ft deep kind of wells. We have already built around 70% of planet Earth. Um, we have the tools to do that again, the engineering and the capital to do that and then the market for Is there a market for that? It doesn't if governments, or like it's a crisis. Let's put a billion dollars into this like we did in the Apollo program. We will get that done in five years. I mean, there's just there's no shortage of tools and science to be able to resolve that sort of a problem today, much like we're about to produce a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months after discovering the virus, which is unprecedented. Our ability to kind of read genomics and right genomics and, as a result, create biological machines that could do things in the physical world and

self propagate gives us this incredible tool kit humans never had at its disposal before. And it will be the way that will resolve climate change, and it will. In the meantime, we're going to bridge the gap between here and there by creating these nice luxury market. Here's and so on. Here's an incredible example. So when you look at sort of where, you know, methane is a really problematic greenhouse gas, and most of the methane emissions are from cows. But it's from enteric fermentation, which is, you know, fancy language for burping. Um, and what's incredible? Is there now efforts to use crisper to genetically engineer, um, you know, cows that don't necessarily have that same gut bio? Um, you know dynamic so that you're burping methane, that there's also feed that you can actually give a cow that will minimize methane emissions burping by 30 or 40%. All these things air to your point. David, they're they're so fantastical if you think about it. But they're possible today, and we just need to organize and get a kind of like a center of gravity

around these things that will happen. Can we get? Can we get Jason the human version of that? Does it also cover tooting? Does it work for flatulence? Interestingly, Chris Soccer tweeted about investing in a company called Running Tied, which grows kelp and we'll suck carbon from the atmosphere. I mean, he just thinks that the ocean floor and they're selling carbon offsets by putting seaweed on the ocean floor. So such such a no brainer, right? I mean, like, the ocean is so big and it's this, like it's not getting in the way of land where you don't have to go figure out licenses and right, so you got it. You got to basically get carbon to go into the ocean. And so then you basically need an organism that can grow and self propagate quickly and radically accumulate biomass in the ocean and then figure out how to get rid of it. So the best way to get rid of it is having sink. It's got to be some sort of seaweed or kelp or algae, and you just put it in the open ocean. It will propagate. I mean, that's just such a great obvious. Uh, there's 1000 scenarios like that that I think, you know, we're gonna kind of creatively come up with

and and results nuclear. Not even on the discussion. Freeburg. I'm curious like, is it just too tainted? Look, the work I've done the work I've done on nuclear, it used to cost something like some number of dollars to get a nuclear power plant through the regulatory barriers in the United States, and now it is so cost prohibitive. It's something like $10 billion now from maybe, you know, 100 million. Uh, you know, two decades ago, there's something about the regulatory barriers. Well, there's a huge There's a huge NIMBY problem, right? I mean, who wants ah, nuclear power plant in their backyard? Nobody. I mean, nobody wants it, Jason, but I agree with, like, the larger point here that the solution to the problem is ultimately gonna be all these new technologies, these innovative solutions not making people feel bad for consuming and, you know, being alive. Um, you know, you you look at Tesla and it's moving the whole world to electric cars, not with the government mandate, but despite creating a better car. And so it's ultimately going to be technology companies, you know, increasing

the solution set on giving people new choices. That's how we're gonna ultimately solve the problem. And interesting in the news. New scale is creating small nuclear reactors, and they just got approval. Uh, this is a Portland based new scale powers. They had a small modular reactor, Uh, that has been approved by the U. S. Department of Energy for a site in eastern Idaho. We'll see if that ever comes on line. But it does seem like small nuclear reactors could solve part of the NIMBY problem in that they're smaller. So if something were to go wrong, we would have some ability to contain or have a smaller footprint in a disaster like situation. Let's wrap with the Overton window. Sheymov talked about it closing and sacks. Uh, there was a good article, the A taxonomy of fear that you with the group tell us a little bit about that article. Attacks Nominee of Fear by Emily Yoffe Yeah, yeah, she's a writer for the Atlantic who wrote this against called Taxonomy of Fear in Persuasion. I think it's an

important article. What it does is analyze, cancel culture and the language that's used toe cancel people and one of the you know what one of the things she diagnosis is what she calls safety is, um, which is any time somebody doesn't like what you know, an idea or what somebody else is saying. They claim that their safety is being threatened by that idea, and it's kind of invoking these magic words that HR you know, has come up with where you know, if anyone is is creating an unsafe work environment or an unsafe college campus. Well, the source of the problem has to be removed immediately. And so this is the language, um, of cancel culture. And you know, the problem with it is that it doesn't really matter what the intent of the person waas or you intense sort of a relevant, or whether the objection is reasonable or not, you know whether it it causes, whether actually, you know

, threatens anyone. Safety. And so there is an example of this when, um, 50 prominent sort of writers intellectuals wrote a letter to Harper's magazine, including JK Rowling and, um, Matt Iglesias, who is a co founder of Box. And so there was Ah, you know, there's a trans writer. There's a writer on who's a trans person at Box who claims that her her safety was threatened because one of the co founders had signed this letter. The letter didn't discuss trans issues. It was simply the fact that, uh, glaciers had signed it along with J. K. Rowling, and so JK Rowling apparently is is, um you know, uh, yeah, I I missed this part of Harry Potter, but apparently the trans movement is Yeah. Really? Yes, sir. But women who were bought women who were born biologically female are different than women who transition eso

right, And that's her position. But her position is being attributed thio by association. Yeah, exactly. And so you're saying that I'm in support of Trump just because I'm on this podcast with you? Sack's Yes, it's contamination. It's contamination by association. What? She calls on this sort of, you know, cancel culture and this everybody being scared of words. And this will be if if Trump wins in November, it'll be because this whole thing, um, just gets too much for too many people. There is a massive plurality of people in the middle who think this over retching sensitivity by the extreme left and the extreme right are are just completely out to lunch and 100% agree, and and and and And I think that by the way, the extreme left and the extreme right, they should all just get a room

and just have one big, huge George because they're all this useless fuck wits anyways, All of them, both of them on the extreme, right? Like when Antifa and the alright are fighting with each other. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Thanks for tuning in to the E. I mean I mean, most people are in the middle. Most people don't need toe have this, like, us or them. You know, it Z, like, uh, you're not allowed to have an opinion like I actually learn more from people that I disagree with just by hearing them and not trying to judge them. And I think that most of us as well have our views that are sort of moderately in the middle. So, for example, there was a USC professor that got sanctioned because he was trying to He was teaching a language class, and he used the Chinese word for that, which sounds like the n word. And I think he didn't preface it correctly or what have you? But then, you know, he apologized. He was suspended on DFO Oaks, wrote a letter. Um, now everybody has a right. The people who felt offended have the right

to write the letter. Thea administration had the right to react on. But I think people read that article and think to themselves. Is this actually the? Has the pendulum swung too far or not? And on Mark my words, If people feel that the pendulum has swung too far, they will elect Donald Trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a shit about any of this stuff. So that would be the bellwether. No, that's exactly right. So I think it's really important. I think, that there's a large part of the country that feels that Trump is a shield, not a sword, that he is their protector against this type of cancel culture. And I know Trump seems like an instigator, and he's very threatening toe a lot of people on the other side. But again, to these people, he's more of a shield. I think it's it's not just the fact that he speaks out, denounces, cancel culture that makes him a hero To these people, it's his. His superpower is his UN cancel ability. It's this, you know, it's the fact that the left has done everything they can to try

and get rid of this guy to impeach him. What have you any people? And he keeps surviving. And so it's It's his very, you know, un cancel ability that makes him such a hero to these people. And I think this is the thing that the left or the media doesn't quite understand. Is that denouncing trump and evermore hysterical terms? Doesn't you know it doesn't work because it kind of feeds it? Actually sources it adds more. It adds more people to his cohort who say you're overreacting and hysterical nous of overreacting like I tweeted I've been on this, you know, many tweet effort to tell people. Listen, there are chrome books in the world. They're very cheap. 90% of the Americans air. Excuse me on the Internet, high speed and there are so many online resource is for you to get ahead in life. Go try to be a marketer. Go do Khan Academy. Go learn you X and design thes air the clearest path since the technology industry and I get hysterical liberals who

say people don't have access to the Internet, people don't have access to Chromebooks and people don't have the free time with the motivation to improve their lot in life. And it's like, uh, are you Who are you talking about? Because 90% of country has access to the Internet and uses it already. And if you go and do a search for a chromebook on eBay used one, you could find one for 50 to 150 bucks. So we have this narrative that people cannot rise up and people cannot improve themselves. And every time I say, I believe people could improve themselves. People say that I'm, uh, like a racist that I believe that people could improve themselves, and it just makes me further away from the Democratic Party. It makes me further away from the left that I think I think this I'm gonna put out a crazy idea, which is that I think if Donald Trump wins in a meaningful way in November, I don't think he will. But if he does theatrical silver lining for for everybody is I think the Republican Party will disintegrate and the Democratic

Party will disintegrate. And in its place, I think you'll probably have three or four parties, and I think that that would be amazing. So it's the burn it all down vote which was Peter Thiel's beginning, was like, I think Sacks and T o when they coordinated this trump election, it was all burn it, burn it down, right? Sex That was your star chamber discussion with you. Would you want guys wanted to burn it all down? I think you're trying toe. I think what you're doing is contamination by association there. Yeah, just because you went to college. Peter Thiel, When was the last time you talked to Peter Thiel? Peter is a friend of mine, but I don't, but again, and I agree with him about some things. I disagree with him about other things, but you just get this idea. But this idea that we can't hang out with people, you know, or or that hanging out with people means that we must endorse every view they have. Like, why is it even relevant that friends with Peter like we're like, for example, we're friends in our group chat with a couple of guys who are very far right. We're not gonna name who they

are, but I would say that I think that the group chat is better off for them being able to say what they believe and push back. And just like there's a bunch of us who are in the middle and we waffle back and forth between the left and the right, and then there folks that are more on the far right or far left on the left. So I I just think that we forget that there is enormous value in the diversity of thought, Andi, and and people think that there is, uh, some sort of safety and conformity. And in fact, I will tell you, um, that's actually the exact opposite. You're more likely to be in conflict with someone that you are very similar to, because eventually you will always end up competing for the exact same resource and that resource become scarce. If you're actually spending time with people that are divergent and different from you, you actually end up not competing for the same resources because you're one second you're built differently. So

there's just less conflict. So this is why multiparty systems work. This is why you have less fighting when there's, you know, in Canada and Europe than you do in the United States. Because the United States tries to reduce things down to two choices. And so we all of a sudden, like, just glom into these pools, that air seemingly similar, and we just end up hating each other. Freeburg. Any final thoughts on cancel culture? Yeah, I think it's just gonna be bad. E totally. I totally agree with your mouth. And if Trump wins the election, this will be the reason, um, that the same thing happened when the Republicans overplayed their hand with Bill Clinton. And it was said at that time that, you know, Clinton was always very fortunate and who his enemies were, because no matter you know, what he did wrong or how badly he screwed up, his enemy has always made too big a deal of it. They overreacted and it played into his hands. And I, you know, I have to wonder if that's what's happening right now with this whole cancel culture. Yeah

, all right. We'll leave it at that. We've gone over an hour. If you're listening to the all in podcast and you'd like to advertise its not possible. There's no ads on this podcast on def. You'd like to be a guest on the podcast. That's also not possible There's no guests. Eso send your advertising and guest requests Thio That's packs Packs back orig Breaking news Right now there is a TechCrunch story that just broke while we're on air. Can't Stop, Won't stop. Social Capital just followed for its fourth SPAC. If you're into Smacks, that's not that's that. That's not the article. The article the article is Jamaat launches SPAC back back as he stacks the world with stacks. We just announced three. Are you just announced number three? No, No. 33 D E and F o d E and F got approved. No. Yeah, They're filed with the SEC. No. And when would D. E and F B available for people to buy shares in it, then? Is that like a 60 day, 15 days

? Okay, great. Alright. Well, they have it. And then you confirmed that the second SPAC was open door, right? Is that confirmed that Tuesday? Yeah. Congratulations on that. And how do you feel about all these people stealing your thunder with fax? I think it's zgray. No, no, it's it's great. I think it's growing the market. It's good for entrepreneurs. It's amazing. I mean what this is going to mean that companies with 50 to 150 million will be able to go public on a clear path. I hope so. I've said this before. We've gone from 8000 public companies to 4000 and 20 years. So let's reverse the tide. Double the number of companies. That's right. I mean, we should down. We should have gone up. You would think it would be called a 0% interest rates. It has thio. Alright, Well, here we go, please. For the love of God, somebody convinced Com Robin Hood thumbtack data tax to go public because I've got kids to put through school. All right, everybody for best E c. The Rain Man himself David Sacks and the Queen of Kin Wah Freed burgers

. This is the all in podcast. We'll see you next time. Uh, luckily, besties