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Look at this red on my stock screen. I can't believe what's going on. Does it mean I'm a loser? I don't know. I need some self worth now. Ohh God in 3/2. Let your winners ride. Rain Man, Davidson. We open sources to the fans and they love you. Mom? Hey everybody. Hey everybody, welcome back. The All in podcast is back. Apologies about last week I had a personal emergency. Are we allowed to say why? Of course. I mean you could say it. Go say it. Say it. Say anyway, a humble bread with us today. David Freiberg. Tremont following the dictator and the Rain Man himself. David sacks. I was on a world tour. I was on a world tour. No, no, no. Come on. Just. I'll, I'll tell the story. Obviously, I don't like to talk about a certain friend of mine because he's very high profile and I don't talk about it in public. Just flex. Just flex. Just do it. And I've been lifting. I just want to let people know the gun shows back. You were backstage at SNL, helping Elon with the SNL appearance. Were you not? This is true. Tell us what that was like. Tell us about the backstage experience. That. Tell us about the backstage experience. I mean, we were we were living it out in real time with you guys, but tell us what it was, really. Tell us why. Why? Elon recruited you to do it. Alright. So are you. Elon's funniest friend? Arguably. Well, I mean, he knows. I mean, he's got guys. Hold on. Don't you remember the joke in the at saxes roast five years ago? Remember when Elon was late and I had that ad Lib joke? There were two jokes that I landed at Saxis thing, which I thought were the two fun. No, Jason, my thing. I and I was being roasted. No, wait. Was it Jason's party socks? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I hosted Jason's roast. That's right, because you're a roast. Anyways, OK, go ahead. You're the funniest flies known as the the funniest night of all of our collective lies. It was really fun. That was really tough. Just tell stories from that. Sometime, sometime we'll tell the Jackal roast. You probably are Elon's funniest friend and and have a talent for for writing. Let's not beat around the Bush. Thank you. I'll take that. I'll take the compliment. So I left to go on a little trip to go to Austin to see some friends and then Miami to see some friends. One of those friends who I hooked up with and was hanging out with the Miami was obviously Elon. And. He was doing Saturday Night Live and we were just coming up with ideas around the dinner table and we were just laughing our ***** off, just brainstorming ideas that would never be allowed on television. You know, and he said, hey, would you come with me to send Night Live? And I was like, oh, that's great, you have enough tickets. I assumed he meant Saturday night, you know, and. You know, I said, no, I don't have a lot of tickets. It's COVID. It's like half his money. I would you come with me to the writers room and just, you know, be my wingman, basically. So I had like three or four board meetings if I podcast. So I just, you know, I talked. It was like an instant. Yes. You checked your schedule was like, you have to, you have to check your schedule to check my schedule. No, I mean, I take my work seriously, like you have to call it. Can you give me about half a second to decide? Already made the decision in my mind that if my friend needs help, you guys have been in similar situations where you've asked me for help. I've, I've rolled with Chamah on speaking gigs or going down to try to, you know, save sacks from going into complete utter madness. And Oh my God, this is our crisis management anyway, so you said yes. You went to US and. You know, without giving I well, without giving away anything that was private or confidential. They have a process that they've been doing for 46 years and we came in, you know, with our own process of what we wanted to do. And it kind of was, you know, kind of an interesting thing because a lot of the ideas I had. Were, let's just say, a little too far out for the cast or for the writers. But some of them landed and. I got to spend a lot of time with Laura Michaels and I really worked on my impersonation of him. Canadian. He's Canadian and I was like, so Lauren, tell us who were the worst hosts ever and he's like. It's an interesting question, Jason. You know, we don't. Like to think of it that way, but. With some there in terms of people who thought they were smart and maybe were not as smart as they thought they were. Steven. Segal was a little bit difficult and what a safe choice. That's a very safe choice. There was Kris Kristofferson, you know, back in 78. He wasn't a musical guest. That was Carly Simon and. He liked to drink and in this very green room in 78 he had a couple of drinks before during the rehearsal, the dress rehearsal. So we we wheeled in some coffee and like any sports team, when the game starts, we play the game sometimes. Who anyway? So who was responsible for the Chad skit? OK, so Chad's an existing character and that was a really amazing one to watch because we went to Brooklyn to a warehouse and the production was incredible. And what the role I played, if I'm being totally honest, is to just, you know, be alliance friend and be there with him. But also. You know, was that funny for you? Was that should I do that? Should I not do that? Because there are some, no. You are a punch up man. I was a punch up guy. I wrote some lines without, you know, taking anything away from the writers there who do the bulk of the work and the actors and the set designers. It is amazing to see what they do. Like we had to go through 40 scripts and you know, when you read something in a script, it it's kind of hard to know if it's funny. But then when you put Chloe or, you know, Kate McKinnon or Colin Jost or Che or Mikey day like this, these people are phenomenally talented. So all of a sudden the script comes alive. But for the, for the. The the the two punch shops. I I got really good. I'll just give you one anecdote. I don't wanna get myself in too much, but you're responsible for besties and the Gen Z hospital. No comment on that one. I thought that what is soon as I saw it, I thought of you. And then the other, the other one that I thought was incredibly well done was murder Dirter. OK, so I had nothing to do with that one. And I thought we thought that was like, we thought that one was incredibly dumb. Like when you read it on the script, it was like, is this funny or not? But they, you know, this is the thing you you add tremendous performance and you add incredible set design. And we were, we were in Brooklyn at three in the morning and Elon comes out with that wig on. In a in a suit and we just start laughing, hysterical, and he just goes right into creepy priest. It was it was hilarious. But one of those, what about what about the Asperger's joke? Because, yeah, that was me. Yeah, because you use that as a tease amongst people we may mutually know a lot. Yeah. And so when I heard it, I was like, oh, that's a Jason show. That's just, that's actually what? Chronic. No. But what's so ironic is the Asperger's joke came out and then everyone, all these press articles got written saying Elon has admitted publicly to having it for years. And he is. We are so proud of him. And it is such a moment to come clean about having this, this thing. And it was like a Jason Schmidt. Yeah. This Jason joke that became a Oh my gosh. You know what? I'll tell you, I'm particularly proud of that one because here's how that one went down. They had an idea to do jeopardy, and it was probably the flattest pitch. Because, you know, it's like 11:00 o'clock at night or rider comes in and says we wanna do jeopardy auditions and we want. It's a kind of a feature for the cast to do auditions, if you ever saw the Star Wars auditions or the Jurassic Park auditions, kind of in that vein. So I was like, for me, I was like, oh, that sounds like it's got potential, but it was a very dry pitch. They didn't have any examples. And when they actually did it, it was like really weird characters that were obscure. So I had pitched my own version of jeopardy, and Elon had his version of jeopardy. Elon's version of jeopardy was dictator jeopardy. Which was Kim Jong-un, you know, MBS, Putin, you know, stratera. And then I was like, how to deal with your adversaries? And he was like for 800 and he's like plutonium. And I was like genocide. And we got really dark. And so we are laughing our ***** about that, you know? But then, like there were security concerns, basically we're kind of dialing this around the IT would be as funny as the IT would be a direct correlation of funny. To the chances of Elon being assassinated by one of those people. So then we decided maybe we don't do that one, and I said I've got a great idea. Asperger's jeopardy and it would be Zuck Elizabeth Holmes which Chloe from the show who's an absolute genius, incredibly sweet and she really engaged deeply with Elon and connected with our team. And then obviously Elon. And so you'd have Elon playing Zuck, somebody playing Elon and then Chloe playing Elizabeth Holmes. And they would be like, you know how to deal with an intense situation with an employee and then presses it, don't make eye contact, you know, like. And so one of the writers, I could tell she was not happy about that. And she said, listen, my husband has Asperger's, my two brothers have Aspergers. And all of a sudden we're in like. OK, you know, we can't offend anyone, land. We can't offend anybody. Landed. I would say, you know, 8090% of the staff is very, you know, like, let's go for it. And then there's probably 10 or 20 who are very sensitive to different topics. And so it's there's a little navigation you have to do there, but we really want. And then so you goes, I have aspergers and, you know, like the whole room is like, wow. So then I was workshopping with somebody and I wasn't in the writers room. I I contributed 2% that Max. Other than, you know, being Elon's friend and and and supporting him. But you know, they came in and said, hey, when they didn't want to ask Elon something they came to me and I negotiated some situations like they didn't originally want to have any dosh father or any cryptocurrencies on the show. We had to negotiate that. Oh my God. Well, I mean, no, they have, they have, they have general counsel there. They have standards. They're now on at 8:30 now. Now we know why the show is not funny anymore. There's too many people with the veto. Love the show. I think it's very funny. I just think Elon, Elon made it culturally relevant for the first time. In like a decade. But what you're describing is too many people with a veto right over the content of the show. That's what makes it not funny. You gotta be willing. No, I think the show, I think the show is very funny. I think they take some artistic at risk. And what's not funny to us might be like funny to some other folks. So that's why it's hit or miss. But certainly moving the show from 11:30 on the West Coast definitely has an impact. So what they could have done 10 years ago, before the timing was synced between the West and East Coast is different. They're now on prime time. There's still a big cultural shift that's happened. It's like, yeah, I'll give you the two, the two best moments. It's not John Belushi anymore when the the, like, the corporate CEO comes on the show and and wants to do crazier, Wilder stuff than the people, you know, who are the regulars. But anyway, keep going. So anyway, you know, the one of the folks who is working on the monologue, you know, comes in and the original monologue, you know, all these things go from rough to potential to good to great to amazing. And so for me, it was, you know, just, you guys know, my career choice. It just really made me think. Maybe I picked the wrong career choice. Pretty ******* good at this. I should do this. So I was talking to Colin at the after party. I was like, you know, I've kind of made my money already. Any chance I can get an internship? He's like, no. But you Jason, you can. You can always take credit for being the 3rd or 4th rider on Elon's monologue. Perfect. So anyway, they're doing the they they said they wanted to do an Asperger's joke. I said, so I I wrote the Asperger joke of, you know, hey, I just want to let people know, I'm, I've got aspergers and Umm, so there's not going to be a lot of eye contact tonight. So if you see me looking off screen, it's not that I'm looking at cue cards. It's just I have Asperger. So they didn't keep the cue card part, but they kept the rest of it. And then they did the OJ joke, which was written by Colin Jost, who is absolutely phenomenal as a human. Just as a writer and and a collaborator. And we spent a lot of time with Colin Jost. He came in and they had this joke about OJ having been on at 79 and 96. The 96 was a joke. He wasn't actually on a 96. I think that's when he went to jail or something. And I said to him, I said, I don't think people understand the joke. They actually think he was on in 96. He goes, well, let's just rehearse it. So we're in the green room rehearsing and Elon goes, you know, so, hey, and, you know, like OJ, like, you know, like I'm smoking weed on every podcast. It's that's like saying OJ, you know? You know, murdered once and now he's a murderer forever, you know. And you know, side note, he was on in 79 and 96 and I just go like this. And he killed both times. And the room, there's like a silence and that everybody goes to start. It was like one of my, you know, poker aside. How can I take a sip of my wine? That's fabulous. I drop it. There was like a split second where everyone looks left and right. It's like, is it OK? That's my point. Like, is it OK to laugh at this? Yeah. And Colin Jost just looks at me and goes, that's getting in there. And as I landed that one. So that way, you know, some moments like that. For me, I I tell you, I'll get emotional talking about it. It's one of the happiest times I've ever seen in Elon's life and I've been with him for 20 years, actually. Known him for 25, obviously. And the feeling of Monday and Tuesday that, Oh my God, this could be a complete, utter disaster. I mean that was our fear and that like we we we're just not In Sync here and these maybe it's going to be unfunny and this is a huge mistake. Like that was kind of our vibe from our our squad. And we had three of us there, including Elon and then. You know, we, we the, the Asperger jokes lands. And I, I tell you, a woman from a wardrobe comes in and she's crying. She's crying and she says, you know, she sees me first. And we she had been there when we were doing the joke and she said, my son, you know, was beat up for having Asperger's. And, you know, this changes everything. Wow. Just came. It became like a serious thing. Three or four people came in to the room. I kid you not crying about because one in 21, one in 20 boys I think now have Asperger's. You guys remember in living color? You remember that show from the early 90s? Yes. Oh my God. Can you juxtapose, like like comedy today and comedy from in Living Color where they had, like, Damon Wayans as like the the homeless guy and like everything that would be so, like non PC today and like totally inappropriate. And how much things have shifted were like even the joke becomes like you know serious kind can I ask a question. Sorry Jason, when when people are getting emotional it was because of why they were like thank you for validating and putting it out there and showing a a role model that is that one of the Squawk alley guys you know, basically got choked up twice on Monday and he said Elon can go do no wrong in my mind now because I'm dealing with a son who has Asperger's and they do something sometimes that can be very challenging as a parent, right. And it just explains a lot. About and we all know people who have Asperger's, David's and we. We know people further on the spectrum and someone who's been accused of being on the spectrum. Can I speak to this issue? I mean, like, look, if anything, Asperger's is correlated with an extreme ability to focus and to be successful. That's why there's so many people in tech who have Asperger's or have been accused of having Asperger's. So I don't know that it's something that people have to be, I guess, unless you have like an extremely, like extreme. Base like on the kind of in the autistic part of the spectrum, but like mild Asperger's probably is correlated with success because you it's like the opposite of ADD right it's a it's an extreme ability to focus but honestly like. What you're describing to me sounds so lame, like This is why the show's not funny anymore. It's not about the jokes, look, it should be about the jokes. I disagree 100%. That joke landed. It made everybody laugh. It may have landed a little too close to somebody. Guys, guys, just to just to just to distract. The reason, David, you're saying this is because we all know at least the three of US 4 of what was not, what did not make it and what's on the card. That's why you're saying it. And so I think you have to just kind of. Don't say what you can't get to the floor, but I will tell you what I will. I will reveal 1 skit. That means you can't you can't, you can't, you cannot. You can. It's just one. I mean there was one they recorded which I think will come out as a digital short and the premise is FOMO. Capital, fear of missing out capital. That was good and that was a good one. That was your that was your idea or Ian. Kind of remember where it originated. We were just talking about you know, just the state of like people buying NFTS and everything. And I think Elon may have said like they all have FOMO. And then I was like, yeah, I'd be like a venture capital firm that and then he named it FOMO Capital. So it was a little bit of a collaboration, but I think mostly Elon in that one. And the this person comes in and the skid is hilarious. So they probably going to release it as a digital short like cut for time, but release it and this kid, the first thing comes in and there's like an associate who's being trained. And he's they're like, welcome to formal capital where we never say no to nothing. And he's like, OK, I don't know if I understand that. Like, sit down. You get the hang of it. And then people come in with increasingly ridiculous ideas and I'll just tell you, one of them, which was a woman, comes in because. So you guys know impossible meats. This is impossible vegetables. These are these tastes just like vegetables, but this broccoli is made with. Endangered white rhinos, which takes up hydrophyte, tastes just like broccoli and Elon goes is amazing and they hand them a Picasso and then somebody comes in and says like, Oh no, no, no, it's just hilarious. It's just more, more money being on the show. Well, what they do is they do a 2 hour show with a live audience and they just take out two or three skits. And so there were three skits, I think, that were taken out for time and then those could be released digitally now. So they just want to have extra. They did a long opening. They did like, I think it was like 10 minutes on the Mother Mother's Day one. Can I can I just say Miley Cyrus has the most incredible voice? Oh my God, I could listen to her sing forever. She ohh she has got an incredible voice. So I was on the opening. I thought the opening was really shaky. I mean, I was there. This is the first time I've watched live TV in like 10 years, ever since Apple TV was invented. I'm sitting there waiting for Elon to come out and and crush the monologue. And then Miley Cyrus does this. Long, unfunny thing with all these mothers. It's great. You know it's meant to be. First of all, David, it's not a thing. It was a song. It was a song and it was it was a tree. Was at WTF moment for me. I was like, where is Elon? Bring out Elon. I'm not here to see a bunch of mothers. I mean, that's interesting. I said I'll tell you. That was an interesting moment, David. Because they were like Elon. We'll put you in like 4 of the skits out of the seven. And Elon? And we don't want to work. You know, Elon, too hard. So I was doing these sort of sidebars with. That some of the producers, one in particular, who is just a phenomenon, she's she's an amazing producer who just gets everything done because this all occurs from Monday to Saturday and they work 1618 hours a day. And, you know, as you said, you know, we don't want to take up too much of his time. So we think forces are right. Number and I said, you know, he gave up the week. He's the busiest guy in the world. Arguably. He wants to be in every skit and she's like, well, nobody really does that. Maybe a comedian here or there and, you know, just said, if I'm here, use me. I want to be in every skit. And like they we had to, like, reshuffle the deck a bit and and he was willing to do anything, including Wario or, you know, and you're a costume or be the creepy priest, you know. Elon was funny, and it was. I think he surprised everyone here, being a performer just in terms of his performance. I think it was really strong. It was as good as like, you know, someone who's in the entertainment business would be. I think. I think, yeah, exactly. It's universal. Take. Even Elon sort of haters had to concede that he performed well. He kind of committed to all those roles, even when it was like poking fun at himself. Yeah, I had to. I had to dunk on Professor Dummy Galloway. Who was like. I'm gonna live tweet Elon. And he's just, like, going on CNN talking about Elon. He's going on every ******* cable channel he can to to, like, ride alongs coattails. And he tweeted Elon with Tesla would lose 8090% of its value two years ago. Like, just are you kidding me? But I agree. Like, even someone like Professor Galloway, who said Tesla was worthless, he's now just all over it. And and it humanized him, you know? Which is nice. I think he did. I think he did a great job and it was fun. I'm super happy. Michaels came in and said, Elon, you did a great job. Come back anytime, sincerely. And I said how about next year like. You're his agent. You're like his agent, basically. What? What are we what are we making a sequel? And he's a punch up guy. He's the agent. He's the hype man, the negotiator. I was doing mostly negotiation and and and and Laura, Michael said. Absolutely, Jason, we'd love to have you on back. You're absolutely crushed it and I. You know, Elon's busy in the green room, by the way. Do we know what the ratings were? Third batch show of the season so far? I think, not counting all the YouTube views and the international views, I think Chappelle is the only person who beat him. So, you know, I think a couple of those, a couple of those skits are going to live forever, I think, on YouTube. I mean, the Chad skit in particular was really hit it out of the park. By the way, my observation on the skits were the ones where Elon was kind of indispensable, were like the really were really great, like the chat. Thing I thought that the Western run where well, Laron, where he plays this like 18th century Old West version of himself. It's like this genius in the Old West who's telling them to write electric horses or something. For me, that was really funny. So I thought the ones were Elon was sort of indispensable. The more indispensable Elon was to the skit, I thought the better it was. And then some of the skits. I mean, look, live sketch comedy is very hit or miss. I thought the ones that were more miss were the ones where they could have done it without Elon. It could have been a skit. Any any, you know any. SNL and it's kind of like, yeah, it's like, why wouldn't you take advantage of having Elon there? And and then they did, you know? And just to the staff, you know? Yeah. First off, I'm sorry I was such a ruckus. And she described her in the in the space. But really, I mean, what a great time. Ellen had a great time. The after party was amazing. And describe the after party where they wearing masks. That's a good that's a good thing. No, I'll just leave it. Side was an outside party, but we danced until this is actually for real. Yeah, and I think it's a good segue into just what we're seeing out there. I left San Francisco having been yelled at somebody because my mask fell off. I didn't know it. And I had gone into, you know, a store, and they were like, your mask. And they yelled across the store, you know? Oh, sorry, you know, just kind of, you know, when they fall off, you don't notice it. Then I got to Austin. And when I'm in Austin, I'm walking down the street. I'm the only person in Austin wearing a mask, and somebody points at me and goes. You don't have to wear that mess, son. And I was like, oh, and I look around this, nobody wearing a mask. It's my first day there. And he goes, you've been vaccinated. I said, yeah, he goes, you really don't need to wear a mask. So I take the mask off, I get to Florida. A friend of mine was out, you know, at having a cocktail at a bar, invites me to meet him for a cocktail. I go to meet him for a cocktail. There's a DJ and there's he who shall not be named. Anyway, I want to have a cocktail as one does in Miami. There's 102 hundred people, 200 people in the club. The only people wearing masks are the staff who are wearing them as chin guards. And I'm like, that's not the purpose or miss, but OK, so and then I get to New York. And everybody in New York is wearing one or two masks on the street on I walked down an empty St OK, so we should talk. We should talk about that CDC article that was in the New York Times because that's an incredible summary, Jason, of of this whole issue in a nutshell, which is it's it's unbelievable. And and then to just give Satan Night Live a nod every day. Everybody tested you got, you know, two tests like the. I forget the names of them now since I stopped taking them. But you did like the the big one and the small one every day you got tested. Every day you got wristbands. You had to wear a mask 100% of the time, and then when you were in the studio, you had to wear the glass shield. So if you saw the picture I did of myself and Elon and Bloodpop Michael, who's a famous producer for Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, who's a friend of ours. Mike had to wear it too. So we're, I mean, Elon had a mask on because he had to take it off to do skits. But all the rehearsals, everybody was messed up, including the actors, and everybody was vaccinated. So they really are taking this seriously. And I understand because they in New York, they had a ton of people die. And to get a my understanding is what I heard secondhand was that Lauren Michaels had to get a special variance to keep Saturday Night Live on the air from, you know, the governor and the mayor, and everybody had to sign off on it. Yep. I tweeted is not this is not taking COVID seriously. This is this is basically an irrational fear of COVID. Well, they because they got hit the hardest, David. So I think that they get hit the hardest. And I tweeted why is everybody wearing a mask in New York? And of course I got like 100 because there's a pandemic. But then what the the two reasons that made sense were so many people died and there's so much suffering in New York that people out of a sign of respect are still wearing them until they hit her herd immunity, officially. Which, I know you could roll your eyes at David, but, you know, they did have a it would be an equal. I don't think that's the real reason. No, anyway, I do actually do think it's the real reason, because people, multiple people, said to me it's a way of showing people that you actually care about them and that you're going to really take this seriously until the end. No, I think it's it's more what Ezra Klein said, which is this is the red maga hat for Team Blue. This is pure virtue signaling possible. The other thing they said was on a practical basis. In New York you're, you know, on the subway, your office and in, you know, going into a cafe you have to wear it and you're doing that 17 times a day. So taking the mask on and off just becomes less work than just leaving it on. That's those were reasonable answers I got. But anyway, somebody summarized this another, another reason, I think, is that look, if you're, if you're in a blue part of the country, the media sources for team blue are still promoting this idea that outdoor spread is a thing. That it's it's a risk we're we're finally now getting. I mean we've known since last summer that there were no cases, no documented cases of casual outdoors spread anywhere in the world. The Atlantic was reporting on this. OK. This is not a conservative publication. This is a liberal, a skew liberal publication. Liberal leaning, yes, exactly. So we've known since last summer. I mean when Gavin Newsom declared that we weren't allowed to go to the beach, it was widely mocked. And so only now. Is the CDC getting around to loosening its guidance on outdoor mask wearing, but it's still not loose enough. And so there was a great article by David Leonard in the New York Times that just came out, I think yesterday or two days ago called about the cautious CDC and. And what he said is, by the way, this is validates everything I've been saying on the pod for the last few months. Leonard chronicles the the sort of absurdly conservative guidance given by the CDC. Basically, the CDC continues to suggest that outdoor transmission accounts for up to 10% of cases when the real number is certainly under 1% is probably under .1%. And this is all based on a single study in Singapore where that was misclassified. It was based on a construction site that really wasn't even an outdoor spread. And yet the CDC still insists that unvaccinated people need to wear masks outdoors, that vaccinated people wear them in large public values, and that children at summer camp wear them at all times. This is the current CDC guidance. And so yesterday, when the head of the CDC was pulled in front of a congressional hearing and asked about this, she doubled down on this less than 10%. And the reason why it's so misleading is, technically speaking, less than 10% is correct, but when the real number is .00. 1% or something like that. It's highly misleading to give 10%. And the reason the line in the article which I loved is it is accurate to say that sharks eat less than 200,000 humans a year. But it is also more accurate to say Sharks attack 150 humans a year and 150 is very different than 200,000. But if you say sharks attack, you know, 200,000 people or less a year, you would think that it's a, it's a much bigger problem than it actually is. And I think that's the whole point. Which is we we're not being scientific, we're being emotional and reactive. And the paper that Leonard references, basically they took this data that identified how spread was occurring empirically and identifying, you know, through tracing, you know, where are people actually picking up COVID. And that's really where this empirical evidence suggests we're talking about a less than .1% casual outdoor spread rate. And you can see that empirically in the data. But then there's also this deterministic kind of approach where you could say, like, look, how does spread happen? Spread happens with viruses. We know that viruses need to live in liquid in order to survive. When you're outdoors, if there's any amount of wind or UV light, the virus can very quickly degrade, the protein can degrade, the RNA doesn't transfer. And so there's a a deterministic rationale for scientific rationale for why that may be the case. And this evidence that this paper, which I've now shared, kind of gathers together shows that, you know, that that is indeed what the statistics are showing. And so, yeah, you're right. I think that the precautionary principle, David, is where the argument would be made on the other side, which is, you know, what's the cost of wearing a mask, if there's any risk at all. And by the way, I'm not, I'm not making this case personally, but I think that's where a lot of people would would make the counter argument rather than debate the facts and the evidence and the science, they would say, but who cares? It's just a mask. Why does that matter? And so I think the question is why does it matter, right? Like, why does it matter if they're telling us to wear masks? Is there really that much of a cost to people to do that? Well, I mean, if people are doing it voluntarily, that's their right to do so. But the question is mass mandate, should we continue to have mandates on the population for something that isn't necessary? And look, I was one of the first people in March of 2000 to call for mass wearing and mask mandates because we were seeing the data out of the Asian countries showing that they were effective, they were high cost or high benefit, low cost. So I was in favor of it when there was a pandemic raging, but. And T0, the rate of transmission is in freefall everywhere. And now we've learned that outdoor spread is not an issue. I don't support restricting people's freedom and if, you know for for for a for a reason that's not rooted in science. And, you know, the problem with the CDC guidance is that people really act on it. So you've got politicians, you've got local jurisdictions who will not schools, school schools. I mean. So the schools have remained closed. And by the way, the schools have been open in Texas and Florida for six months. We know, based on empirical data in the real world, seeing what's happening in Texas and Florida that that you're not seeing an increase in COVID cases in those places because of school reopening. And yet the CDC has not moved its guidance on school reopening. You have summer camps now that for liability reasons, will make kids wear masks because they can't take the risk of getting sued. And then you've got politicians like Gavin Newsom who won't wipe their *** without the CDC's permission to do so. So it has a real consequence in the real world that the CDC. Is stuck on this ridiculous guide we did. We read the actual sentence from the New York Times about under 10%. So that you could read it because it's it's really sad, actually. In terms of the misleading CDC numbers, they said in quotes under 10% of the spread has occurred outside when in reality the share of transmission that occurred outdoors seems to be below 1% and maybe below 1. Multiple epidemiologists tonight. Well also also read the quote. This is directly from David Leonard in the New York Times and I think it's important to you know, it's great when you can quote the New York Times or the Atlantic because these are left-leaning publications so team blue should be more willing to accept them. What Leonard? That is, there is not a single documented COVID infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions. But do people know that I mean do the people walking down the street with masks on know that they'll they'll know it now because according by the way did you guys know, Jason just told me this we accumulate 1,000,000 views slash solutions a week to our podcast now archives growing so now now that now now million people will at least know. I mean at least I think it's you know it's it's a little bit self selective. So let's be honest, you know. Yeah for intelligence I mean people were actually. Other people. No, no, no. But but the real question is like, isn't this an opportunity for the CDC to actually re establish some credibility, which is to say, OK, we're going to get back to facts. We're not gonna, we are not. We know that people will be prone to acting on anecdote and emotion. So we're going to be grounded in truth. In fact, we went back, we looked at the Singapore study, here are the flaws in it. Here's how it applies. And so we're going to own it and revise it and that would go such a long way. The fact is they they, it's it's important to understand like what do you think the incentives are for them to keep? Doubling down on bad decision making. Downside, I think I said this. I I think I said this a few months ago, which is I don't think that the CDC or any kind of medical, you know, administrative group in particular has to think about the synthesis of the effects of some of the policy that they're recommending. Their objective is to save lives. So if I'm running the CDC, I'm going to tell people don't leave your home, ever, don't drink alcohol, don't eat red meat. Exercise. You have to exercise 60 minutes a day or you get taxed. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could see if, if you were purely focused on saving lives, you would make specific recommendations only to save lives without thinking about the consequences outside of saving lives. The consequences outside of saving lives of, you know, telling people to wear masks is it minimizes economic activity. Some might argue, therefore there's going to be an impact on airlines and hotels and outdoor thing and spending and all this, other people being willing to go to work and people being afraid of being in the office. I mean, I see this across all my depression where people, even though they're vaccinated and they're scientists. They're afraid to go to work. And so, you know, part of part, part of the perpetuation of the fear that arises from these policies that are all about the absolute saving of any life, is that you end up having a significant cost that's not related to the objectives of that particular medical organization. And we see it around the world. Sorry, this just goes back to what I said about leadership a few episodes ago, which is the the leadership of the administration should be synthesizing the recommendation of that group along with the effect that other groups might be indicating would arise from that recommendation and coming up with a kind of concrete, you know, kind of objective around. OK, well, how do we balance these, these different effects? What you're saying is absolutely correct. The people who are making the decisions are only thinking about their responsibility. So it's like a Secret Service agent when the president's like, can I go out & autographs? So absolutely not. They're going to say no because. They are responsible for keeping the president alive now there. The other pernicious thing about this is they kept trying to game the public and the public. When you try to game the public and you get caught where they say don't, Fauci says, don't wear a mask because he doesn't want to run out of masks. Then they say keep the masks on because they want to, you know, virtue signal or whatever it is. Or they won't simply say the vaccine is not dangerous or that the vaccine is actually going to keep you from dying. They undersold the vaccine. And now everybody's going to question everything they do for all time, don't manage us, manage the facts, stop trying to manage people and just start managing your communication and make it crisp and clear. And then somebody has to be a *** **** leader and say, OK, the doctors are saying this, the economy is saying this. And here's how those two things overlap. In schools, being closed means more suicide in kids, more depression in kids and people not being able to put food on their tables means we're going to. Create who knows what this economic policy is going to create, which is another segue. David, you had something to say? Well look, I I I agree with that, but I think you guys are being a little bit too charitable to the CDC. It's not just that they're wrong, and it's not just that they have a bureaucratic incentive for for CYA and to be too conservative in their guidance. It's the fact that when an error gets pointed out, like by David Leonard in the New York Times, they double down on the lie, and so Leonard followed up his. His article, it happened, so go go to this tweet that I put in the chat, he said at a Senate hearing today. Senator Collins asked CDC director doctor Wolinsky about today's edition of morning, which was his article, which explains why the CDC's claim that less than 10% of COVID transmission is misleading and wollensky then double s down and has a bunch of excuses and basically defends this 10% number, which is a lie. Now why would the CDC be doing this? There is a separate reporting by the New York Post. Go to this article on teachers unions. Collaborated with the CDC on school reopenings so this guidance that the CDC put forward on school reopenings the teachers unions were part of writing that guidance, and all of their suggestions were actually accepted and incorporated by the CDC. Now, how is this science? This is politics. Last year, there are a bunch of articles accusing the Trump administration of incorporating, you know, political considerations into their guidance. Were huge scandals about this? Where is there reporting today about the influence that the teachers unions are wielding over the CDC to deliberately keep schools closed, even though the science does not support that? This is a gigantic scandal and yet no one's covering it is left for the New York Post to cover this instead of the New York Times. By the way, I think this is a good transition to that Druckenmiller interview because you know a sax. I just retweeted what you had sent, which was a link to the to the video. Interviews. So you know Stanley Druckenmiller is this incredible, incredible investor. GOAT goats. There's a there's a there's many stories about Druckenmiller at one point. You know, he's the guy that notoriously they say broke the Bank of England where he was betting against the British pound and forced the the the the central bankers in in the UK to devalue the pound. And he's made billions of dollars managing initially George Soros's money and then spun off and runs his own money now as an investor. And so he he's a macro guy. So he thinks about kind of macroeconomic conditions and effects and he talks a lot about Fed policy. So he gave this interview on CNBC. And I think the, you know, the, the, the most kind of prescient quote and it was also based on an op-ed he wrote. Right. Sacks in, in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, yeah. But the interview is fantastic. The TV interview is great. Just watch that. The interview is great. And he said in, in, in the write up, he said clinging to an emergency after the emergency has passed is is what the Fed behavior indicates right now. And I think that, you know, kind of what we're talking about broadly is perhaps the emergency in the United States where you have this uncontrolled increase in COVID cases. That's not the case today. So the emergency has passed. We still have COVID, but it is not an emergency. And the point is there's a lot of institutions and individuals and businesses that are still operating as if we were in the throes of the emergency. And and so Druckenmiller is making the case that the Fed and the Fed policy is acting as if we're in an emergency. But broadly, we're seeing this across a lot of institutions like the teachers unions and others, where people are effectively, you know, never let a good emergency go by without taking advantage or whatever the. The saying is never waste a crisis, never waste a crisis. And the crisis keep the crisis going is kind of the model everyone's in right now, which is like the crisis crisis. They're keeping it going as long as they can. And Druckenmiller gave some pretty amazing quotes. He said that. Well, first of all, he described our current monetary fiscal policy as being the most radical he had ever seen. And this guy's been watching markets for decades. the Fed has pumped 2.5 trillion of QE into the economy post vaccine post retail recovery. He said that. Right now, retail demand is 5 years above trend, meaning not only has retail demand fully recovered, it's where if you look at the trend line, it would be 5 years from now. So they are pumping like demand like crazy. They've issued 6 trillion of new debt and then this is the thing I didn't know at all, he said. the Fed is buying 60% of new debt issues. Without this, the bond market would be rejecting this massive fiscal expansion because interest rates would become prohibitive. And he said that when when interest rates. Revert to the norm, the historical norm interest expense on our debt will be 30% of the government budget. So I mean think about that that look the the the markets have had to intervene and we have essentially decoupled. What the government thinks is happening with what the capital markets needs people to know and that's a really unique dynamic like I mean I'm I, I'm not nearly as successful as stand or have been in the markets as long as him, but in my 20 years this is the first time I've really seen that. So just to give you a sense of this, you know the markets are now acting to establish inflation expectations that the Fed just seems to not want to do anything about and what was so for just to give you guys a sense of this like you know when. In February, the markets really kind of had its first capitulation. What happened was that all of a sudden people digested all these facts that Stan just said and realized, wait a minute, like all of this money is going to drive prices higher. And So what they did was they took the they took the yield on the 10 year bond up by like 100 and 5000 basis points and the markets freaked out. They went from like .75 to 1.75. And the Fed came out and said, hey, hold on, nothing to see here. This is everything's going to be fine. But then everything since then has been sort of leading to this realization. Commodity prices are up 50%. There's this kind of like joke that like, you know, you see a bed of lumber moving across a railroad. It's like a billion dollars of lumber just because of how expensive it is. You know there are shortages everywhere. You'll be shocked to know that today Chipotle put out the following guidance, which is they said they are increasing the minimum wage to $15.00 and that within three years you can make $100,000 a year at Chipotle. Is as much as some engineers and coders in the United States. Dora Koshai, the CEO of Uber, said on the Uber earnings called last week that the average hourly rate that some drivers in New York, Uber drivers in New York, were getting paid was 38 bucks an hour. What $38.00 an hour. So what does all of this mean? I think what stand is trying to say dollars a year, but we're in this weird place where we've decoupled the government institution that's responsible for fiscal stability and then the overall capital markets. Used to work in tandem, and they are no longer working in tandem because you have a narrative and a set of data points that aren't supported by the facts. And so this is an interesting thing. So in the CDC versus the American people example, there's no way to push back, right? I mean, governors can act independently, cities will act independently. But at the end of the day, you know, the teachers unions are working with the the CDC, the school camps have this guidance and you're stuck in this morass. In the capital markets, that's not necessarily true. And so you can change and you can you can re rate asset prices based on sentiment. And I think what everybody is saying in this example is we're past the emergency, we've put too much money in the economy. We need to reopen and we now need to face the fact that there are massively rising prices, which means that there will be inflation and if you don't act, the capital markets will continue to act. For us. And so this is an example today where you're just seeing a bloodbath in the markets. And by the way, the the only time the two government officials tried to be on the either side. Janet Yellen last Friday, kind of casually in an interview, kind of put her toe out in the water as Treasury Secretary and kind of said something that said there could be inflation and literally was hand slapped and had to put out something that disavowed her comments less than 24 hours later. So that's where there's there's a bloodbath in the markets today and there's been one for the last couple of months and in particular all the growth stocks have been hammered. And just to build on what you're saying to mouth, so there's a announcement today, there's some data that the the inflation, the CPI is up 4% and climbing and so people are now pricing in big interest rate increases. And so that makes growth stock that hammers growth stocks because all the earnings are in the distant future and so they get now discounted at a higher rate and so the valuations. Would absolutely hammered. So you know, it's it's it's absolutely souring that the markets are basically souring on this Biden agenda. And you know, I just, you know, I, I'm beginning to wonder if Biden's going to be a Jimmy Carter here, because frankly, all he had to do was leave things well enough alone. COVID was winding down, we had a vaccine. All they had to do was distribute it to as many people as possible and COVID let the recovery take shape and instead they push this insane. $10 trillion agenda of taxes and spending that are now over stimulating the economy, that are causing inflation, that are now creating interest rate increases. No, that's that's not that's not true yet. Meaning he did do a good job on the vaccine, David. But then to your point, the federal government's posture on reopening is still been stunted and he's proposing so much more incremental capital which we all know probably will not be efficiently spent and there isn't any other good. Ideas and so he believes his path to reelection which is true is to spend and to put money to put money to the economy. It's gonna backfire I think backfire master and and to tax right. So he the spending he's trying to he's trying to offset with higher taxes on the wealthy which you know from his point of view is not going to affect him and be analysis is probably fair. It's not going to affect his his voter bloc. Gonna backfire massively. Look, if the economy turns, we were set for a post COVID boom, and right now that is all at risk, because tomorrow, like you're saying, they're keeping the economy closed, or part parts of it way too long. They then overcompensate for that by printing a ton of money, and then they overcome, say, for that by raising taxes too much just to build on that. So that second step of their overcompensating, their inability to open with money, is so true, because then what happens is your labor force. These impaired because people make enough money by not working. This is the key issue right now for a lot of businesses. I mean you have restaurants that are overbooked cannot get servers. Jim Cramer was saying he's he's up to $18.00 you know per hour per servers he's going to move it to 20. It won't make a difference because with that extra 300 I think in federal, federal unemployment plus 3 to 700 I think depending on where you are, you're now at sixty 7080% and people are like. Well, people will still go to work and it's like, yeah, but you're saving commuting and you probably have side hustles and you've lowered your commute expense. So what is going to incentivize people to go back to work? We are now running a dry run with cryptocurrency and, you know, stimulus, a Ubi experiment. And the result of this Ubi experiment is negative economic growth or throttled economic growth. We cannot be productive if people don't want to work and contribute. So just to your point, we need for people to go to work. So just to your point, on Friday Montana which was part of the federal government's, you know pandemic related UI benefits program basically said that we're canceling those benefits and we're opting out. And on top of that I think they're now offering a $1200 bonus to return to work. And the problem is because State Montana now has a severe labor shortage, but it's not just Montana, it's every state in the Union. So we have these two opposing forces, right? We have so much stimulus, we have an under motivated. Labor force, we have more taxation that's also just going to be wasted. So very poor ROI. And then now we have input costs going up and prices going up to try to attract people. It's it's all going to drive prices. Here's the quote from the Governor of Mississippi. The purpose of unemployment benefits is to temporarily assist Mississippians who are unemployed through no fault of their own. After many conversations over the last several weeks with Mississippi small business owners and their employees, that has become clear that the pandemic unemployment assistance. And other like programs passed by the Congress may have been necessary in May of last year, but are no longer so in May of this year. And Can you imagine the hit you're going to take from voters, from woke mobs, from people who believe in income inequality? When you say, I think we have to stop sending people free money so they go back to work like, this is a very hard position to take. And we now have this occurring on a micro basis in California. We have a is is it true? We have a $75 billion surplus this year as the city devolves and now we're going to take that. And instead of lowering taxes and maybe trying to get Tesla or Oracle or other venture capital firms that have left, instead of doing that, what would be, what would be, what could we do, David, with that 75 billion? Well, OK, so great point. So the $75 billion surplus, 1/3 of that is a is from the federal bailout, which obviously we don't need and that's the money printing that's coming out of Washington back right to another state. That's good luck. Good luck. Exactly. No, the other 2/3 is because last year we had all these unexpected tax receipts from the stock market boom and so you had all these California taxpayers paying capital gains on that. So, but but what this highlights to me is, and what I wonder about is how many of those taxpayers have left the state because we know that we had net migration loss of 182,000 in 2020. So how many of those people left the state and won't be paying taxes this year? And if Biden breaks the stock market through this insane tax and spend? Then where is this like surplus going to come from next year? And what this highlights to me is I think we have people in Washington and Sacramento for that matter, who've lost sight of the fact that ultimately the private sector and the and the public sector are a partnership because the private sector generates the largesse and the wealth to fund the public sector and to fund the creation of these public goods, to fund education, to fund law and order. To fund social programs, and they've stopped seeing it that way. They see the private sector not as something like a cow to be milked or a, you know, or or, you know, or a sheep to be sheared. But they want to skim the sheep instead of instead of shearing it and and so they're, they're really at risk of or, you know, killing the golden goose. I guess you could put it, put it that way. You know, and I think that, you know, during the Clinton years, just to take A to take a contrast, we had a government spending as a federal government spending as a percent of GDP was between 8 1/2 and 22%. That was the range and we had a boom. So when you have a federal spending as a percentage GDP around 20%, it works, right. And that doesn't mean you can't increase government spending. It just means that government spending will increase as the economy gets bigger. But what you have now is federal spending over 30% of. And everything is starting to break. That's the problem. Very, very big problem. And of course, and that's why we're all getting red pilled, right? How many people in Silicon Valley, frankly, who make a living off growth stocks are now starting to scratch their heads going, Gee, what did I vote for? It's definitely becoming a thing. And I would say the the purple pill party, you know, like chop it up, let let's mix these two things, let's candy flip, whatever it takes, like, to get out of this, you know, we got to get this party restarted. Centrism is the answer. It absolutely is. And, you know, centrism is the answer. And I think it's probably good for us to take a pause here and maybe talk about this Business Insider hit piece or what was likely to be a hit piece but turned out I think on the margin fair. Calling this all in podcast and I I didn't know if this is accurate, but I thought it was pretty funny. Possibly the single most disruptive click in California politics this year. I think they're referring to the four of us. And that, of course I get. Absolutely skewered for making clucking noises. I own those clucks. I'm proud of those clucks. Back, back, back. Here's what I'm saying. Can I, can I, can I say something? I think that. Look our. I don't know. I'm a little exhausted about local politics in California politics. I'm not exhausted by federal politics because I think it's it's an important lens. As David said into like how we actually conduct business because all of the businesses were involved with are inherently global and America leads. Here's what I'll say, though about about that article, which I didn't read, like most of these things, which I don't really read, never read your press. Rule #1 in the game. I think it's incredibly important to realize that California was a bellwether for opportunity and the ideals of American upward mobility. And a lot of people came here irrespective of the taxes because they sought out like minded people. They sought out a moderate liberal, liberal viewpoint and an economic set of opportunities. Two of those 3 boundary. Conditions are changing, and that's why I think California is now important, because it is a Canary in the coal mine for the rest of the United States, which is do we become a balkanized country of 50 states. Or are there like generic, progressive, moderate ideals that everybody can agree to & up to, and where governments largely still get out of the way this like? I don't think. You know, if you look at sort of like tech oligopolists and the hatred we have for them, I don't think political oligopolists are any better. And so, you know, I don't think we want either of them in charge is really the answer. And so we just, we just got to use this election cycle, I think, to kind of like vote a moderate agenda. The most disruptive thing that can happen in California is somebody emerges who is rational and moderate, who says you can categorize me as a Republican or a Democrat on a whole bunch of issues. I had to pick a platform because this stupid election model makes me pick one. So call me a Democrat or call me a Republican, but the reality is I'm a centrist. Here's what I believe and if that person gets voted in, then hopefully it changes the conversation for the rest of the country. Otherwise, we are headed to 50 Balkanized states operating independently. And Jason, the thing where you make a joke is actually kind of sad if you get $25 billion and you don't need it. The ideal thing is that you actually give it back to the federal government because you think there's some accountability for all these dollars and it actually is the right thing to do. And the fact that everybody laughs because we know of course, that we'd rather just dig a ditch and fill a ditch for 25 billion or, you know, 2 1/2 miles of high speed rail or whatever the crazy thing is. That's kind of sad. And so that's sad and it's corrupt, right? It's a corruption. It's a corruption that we've just gotten used to, which is you're gonna take 26 billion that you don't need, that you don't deserve. It's like the school board in San Francisco announcing they're going to open school for one day to qualify for incentives, for reopening that Gavin Newsom gave him for 12 million bucks. It's a pure money grab. It's out. It's outrageous. You know, it's all about the Benjamins for these guys. And and by by that, I do not mean students named Benjamin. Wow. There you go, folks. David Sacks punching it up on the next test. Now I wonder what I'm gonna do. Bite you to come with them. I'm gonna stick with my. I'm not as good as you, Jason. I'm gonna stick with my day job. But but but let me can we go back to this article? I want to give you my two cents on this article. I did. You know, it was behind a paywall, so it was hard to read, but I got a copy of it. Here's my view on it. First of all, I think they did pull their punches a little bit because we did the pre battle. You know, we called them out before based on their very biased list of questions they sent me. But at any rate, they they kind of pulled their punches a little bit, but the article was kind of suffused with this. How dare they pissiness, you know, and in a couple of areas. One was, you know, the reporter was very upset that we're going direct, right? We've talked about going direct meeting, going around reporters and speaking directly to the public. It's kind of, well, how dare they do that, you know, they should be talking through us, you know? You know, we the objective reporters and then we'll tell the story for them. No, we're going direct. We want to have an influence. We want to speak our minds. And the second thing they're upset about is the fact that we're contributing to these elections. And the reporter made a point of saying that I sought out the Boudin recall. They didn't just come to me. I sought them out and wrote $25,000 as if. What is he really up to? Why did he seek them out? Well, if you want to know what I'm up to, I've written about it. I wrote a blog on, you know, the problem of Chase ability. And I've written A blog on the on how Gavin Newsom has moved very far to the left. You don't need to speculate or wonder what I'm up to. I've spent thousands of words. Yeah, here's the problem. Talking about it, David, they want you to go through them. Exactly. And the fact that this podcast has bigger reach than when we go on CNBC or bigger reach than we're in Business Insider. And, you know, when The New Yorker article on Chamath comes out, more people will listen to this podcast and read that article. That's what this is, yes, absolutely. There's a certain threatening nature to what we're doing here where, you know, as they admit we're more influential than they are. Well then why read them? Like, what is the point? Especially if they're doing link baiting, they look even they look dumb when compared to the dialogue we're having here. They can't have the dialogue we're having here because let's face it, we're we're for insiders. We see the what's happening on the inside. And if we talk to them, they might get 10 or 20% of the picture and in aggregate they might get to 50 or 60. But we get 100%. Let let me connect a couple dots, because I think what you're saying is is really important. In my mind, I think this is another example of like the CDC example or the financial markets example, where in all of these cases what we have is the following dynamic, which is. Like if you think about when the newspaper used to hit your front door, right, like you used to wake up and you know when the paper was delivered, right? We all remember that and you'd pick it up and it was a physical paper. Now I'm just going to use it and this number to make it. To make an example, let's just say it was 8 1/2 by 11. You take this 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper and what you have is a fixed container. And So what there was was inherent competition. And so inherently, you had this leverage where it was only the best things that got into the paper, right? They segregated by sections. People wanted to advertise against it. And having a fixed amount of of real estate really made that real estate precious. And I think that that was really, really important. Now think about what's happened when you go to that same paper online. Let's just use a New York Times. Effectively that container has become infinite. And so now you've completely taken away the ability for anybody to actually assign real value. There's no above the masthead or above the fold concept as much as there used to be, especially an infinite scrolling. The point of all of this is This is why there's no value in coming back and re, you know, telling the truth. You just go to the next clickbait title because you're just keep on going and going and you're just wonder, hey, wait a minute. To tell the truth is an inconvenient artifact of my business model today. Whereas before telling the truth was really important, it was an anchor which created more value for you to sell ads, now it's just it just gets lost in a sea of things. There's such an agenda. So, so the point is, the financial markets in this interesting way is the only or it's one of the few places left where you can vote in real time about the truth. Right. And so for example, like you know, you get all of these readings and you get all of these documents from the Fed, which is the financial markets version of the CDC, but you can vote that you don't believe them and you can see it every day. The gap between what they say is narrative and what the facts are. And that's a really healthy dynamic that still exists in in finance and capital markets. We just need to figure out a way where it exists everywhere else. Otherwise people will always want to make sure that they have a direct conduit to tell their version of the truth. And allow people to decide for themselves uh before we get to science with freeberg if we get this camera back up and running. I don't know if you guys know, but Vox cancelled us this week with an assist from Teller Thorens. The funniest story has turned in all of this is the multi millionaire VC is cooperating the language of young women MLM marketers in an effort to seem cool and hip with us. Why white men are using the term besties. I don't know if you saw that. I think, I think Taylor Lorenz has had her sense of humor surgically removed. I mean doesn't, doesn't she doesn't? Yeah, doesn't she understand that this is a self deprecating, self mocking bit that we came up with or that you came up with? I mean, come on, it's a gag. We know it's funny for 50 year old guys to be calling each other best. Just the reason why, by the way, just if everybody wants to know the origin of that. Is one of our other friends. Phil Hellmuth kept calling me Bestie C and we used to think it was the dumbest thing that we've ever heard and then what we thought was would be even funnier is to just Co opt it. And it was done, no credit. But it was done both initially to make fun of what how Muth used to call me because we used to call it actually has the maturity level of a teenage girl. So that's true. That's true with the name dropping. I don't when he used the term bestie he was not using it ironically. No, we're using it ironically. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about science so we can keep the freedberg ratio up for all these freedberg stands, including the whichever maniac is running freeberg's dogs anonymous Twitter handle. I don't know if you talked to Twitter security about that yet. Friedberg, my dogs on a walk right now. He'll come back and then he can tweet later as well. It is my, it is my dog that runs the the account. Yeah. Yes. So much for our ratings. No. Yeah. What what is your dog's name again? Monty. Monty Montgomery. Wiggins with no Montgomery. This this is going to be lowest lowest episode in a long time. But his name was. Was Wiggins at the SPCA where I adopted him from? And I and I wanted to name him Monty because he's like a hustler. He hustled his way, you know, from the streets of the mission into a nice condo in PAC Heights. So I gave him the full name, Montgomery. So he's Montgomery Wiggins now. Oh, here he is. Monty, come here. Come on. Come here. Come here. Come on. Come on, Monty. OK. Tweet something ironic. There's a lot going on with synthetic biology. We saw two different IPOs in I believe the last month or so. Tell us about the, the gink, gingko, bioworks public offering and the zammer gin. So so the the premise of synthetic biology which dates back you know many years, right. Genentech is one of the first companies to effectively use synthetic biology to to to make products. So you know Genentech and Amgen started making these proteins that that became biologic drugs. And the way you you can kind of think about synthetic biology is the DNA is software and we can program the software to get the Organism. Of the, you know, whatever DNA we're changing to make something that we wanna use. And so synthetic biology is all about editing the genome or editing the DNA of an Organism, editing its DNA and doing that in in a way that you can kind of make a product. And so this was done initially for biologic drugs and and over the last kind of 20 years or so using synthetic biology as a as a kind of approach, we've kind of thought about well, how can we make things like fuel and increasingly more commoditized products like. You know, proteins that we might consume for animal consumption instead of using animals to make proteins. And so the underlying technologies have all followed an accelerated path that's greater than Moore's law. You know, DNA sequencing costs have dropped faster than Moore's law over the last 10 or 15 years. The ability to synthesize or print DNA CRISPR, you know, kind of provides us with a set of tools to do much more precise DNA editing and and so on and so forth. And there's just a confluence of technologies sort of like there were leading up to the. Personal computing revolution that are now going to enable this incredible proliferation of a new industry that many argue will rewrite all industrial systems, all industry that makes everything that humans consume from materials to food to the chemicals to the plastics, everything that we use in our daily life can be rewritten using synthetic biology. And so the promise of this dates back again like 2 decades or so. There was a company called Amyris that John Dornbach that was one of the first. Companies, that was one of the few companies from the original synthetic biology companies that actually survived and made it through and they're still around, they're still a publicly traded company. And more recently there have been these kind of more digitally enabled. At least that's the premise that they kind of make for, for what, for their businesses, companies. So Zymergen, which was, you know, got a bunch of SoftBank money, they raised a billion dollars as a private company. They got public with like I think 13 or 14 million of revenue and they're worth $5 billion in their IPO. So they just went public and this other company. Called Ginko Bioworks, which is a similar sort of, you know, synthetic biology platform company just went public or just announced they're going public via SPAC at a $15 billion market cap with, you know, I think less than 100 million revenue. So, you know, the the game is on and and I think one way to kind of think about this is these businesses aren't great businesses today, but the promise of the next century being all about synthetic biology, you know, we're, we're biology becomes software and you can. Program biological organisms to make and print pretty much anything we as humans consume is a premise that everyone believes is going to come to fruition. The century and it will completely reinvent industry, will improve sustainability. I think it is going to be the great savior for this planet and for our ability to sustain on this planet to these are kind of you know, two big IPO's that validate that the capital markets are there. There's so many big institutional investors chamat can share more on this that are like backing quote UN quote SG companies. Synthetic biology is this kind of ESG, you know, moment. Umm, and and and and and I think these two IPO's happening at the valuations that they're happening and the capital that's going in, I think these are kind of like the Netscape moments for synthetic biology and we're going to see a tremendous amount happen over the next couple of years. So Chamath, how close are these from being science projects in the lab to being scalable revenue companies in your estimation, because these are dominus amounts of capital we're talking about. So this feels like the minimum amount of revenue do minimum amounts of revenue, large amounts of large amounts of capital. Is this a? Is this how far is it to to actually cross that chasm? We, I think that we're still trying to figure out what the right business model for these companies is. So for example, like if you look at chip design, right, like, so there's an entire value chain where there's the people that manufacture the equipment, right, there's the people that run the factory, there are the people that develop the tool chain. So the software that you can use to characterize and build the chip, right. And if you look at those. Industries the the factory in the middle tends to be the least valuable. Companies like Verilog, you know, folks that make the software are really important and then folks that make the equipment, because the equipment is so precise and very complicated is valuable. If you translate that to biology, we need to sort out where the value is going to be. So the the amazing thing about Ginko is what it's promise is what the promise that they that they're going to make to the market is we're going to make. Biology programmable so that the an entire generation of biologists and chemists who would otherwise have not been able to just actually literally like write into a command line interface. And generate biologic samples, we're going to be able to enable that the same way an electrical engineer. So like you know, for example like you know when I was doing internships or you would literally be writing Verilog and it would get, you know, basically generating what was called the netlist and you could send a net list to a fab and all of a sudden outcomes a chip. So that's what we're trying to do. The problem that they have to figure out now is, are you a tool provider? Are you, you know, pick and shovels, are you doing it yourself on balance sheet and taking risks? Are you a product company? And this is where we're too early to know what the answer is, but as the market sorts that out. As David said, more people will get comfortable applying money. This is why Zymergen and Ginko are two really important data points, because as David said, it will force the market. To help these companies rationalize where they are and what the tool chain looks like, and compare it to semiconductors. And in that you're going to have an entire generation of companies get built. It's super exciting. I spent time in and around these businesses without getting too specific and I think they're really compelling, really interesting. And this is, I mean I never, I, I don't generally speak my book, but this is where I spend most of my time, right. So I really am making a bet on my career and my capital and my time. On synthetic biology and and the opportunity it presents for our species this century. So all of the work I do and I have several businesses that I would say compete with Ginger and zymergen in different ways and are attacking this problem in different ways, which is I mentioned this last time, but how do you produce enough by what biological material how do you make stuff once you go once you fermenters, fermenters and you know so are there fermenter tank companies are there you know cheap fermentation platform companies you know do we need to scale? These things up, do we need to kind of reinvent how they're operating? There's a lot of stuff we need to kind of figure out over the next couple of years for this to really kind of sweep the world. But but the fact that we can like program biology to make stuff for us is, is, is, is kind of where we're at today. That's the moment. So here's another example of a fabulous company. This is, this is a private company, but you know you'll you'll see them in the next probably three or four years debut as a public business called Pivot Bio, another synthetic biology company, which I think is just masterful and you know what essentially? If it bio does, it essentially is a clean alternative to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. So like, you put this **** in the ground when you're planting seeds, and what it enables is plants that were previously incapable of nitrogen fixation, meaning getting nitrogen out of the soil. They're able to do it. Now all of a sudden, yields go up, density goes up, predictability of the crops go up and it's a huge advance for farming. What's interesting about, you know, so pivot bio like like chamath mentioned, there's a lot of plants like soybeans, legumes that will fix nitrogen. They'll take nitrogen out of the air, right. Most 70% of the air is nitrogen. And so plants need nitrogen to grow. All protein has to have nitrogen in it. So nitrogen is key to growing plants. Corn, you need to put nitrogen on the ground. So around 6% of global electricity is used to make ammonia. Which is the fertilizer that farmers around the world put on their fields to grow their corn and the and the the, the ammonia that sits on the field and doesn't get absorbed by the plant turns into nitrous oxide, which is a 300X worth greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Think about that. 300 times the heat capacity of carbon dioxide when it goes up into the atmosphere. So the environmental effects of nitrogen based agriculture are awful and you know, pivot is one of the first they actually commercialized a research microbial strain to do this and you put it on the seed. Before you put it in the ground, but now the ability for us to engineer microbes and the microbes now pull the nitrogen out of the air and stick it into the plant. The ability for us to engineer microbes opens up this universe of possibility where pivot is kind of like, you know, kindergarten level of what's going to happen over the next couple of years where we can now engineer all these microbes to pull nitrogen in the atmosphere and maybe reduce all fertilizer use and have a huge effect on greenhouse gas resulting from from from from agriculture. A lot of what you've mentioned seems to be things in the world, products that. Going to be approved and refined. What about inside of our bodies? I know there are some efforts to understand what cells are doing and maybe use synthetic biology to get a reading on a molecular or cellular level as to what is going on inside your body. And then there are these self replicating systems that might be able to, you know, I don't know if your white blood cells were low, you know and it was the 80s and it was HIV, you could just boom produce more whites of blood cells with a shot or something. Well the original idea of Moderna which we all know now is being kind of this. Any vaccine producer was you could put RNA in your body and therefore provide the code to get your cells to make specific proteins that can do things in your body. And so we did this example well the example we're using now is the COVID vaccine, right? So it makes the COVID the spike protein which we then develop an immune response to. But the idea with Moderna is you could eventually replace medicine with these RNA shots and now your cells can start to make specific proteins to do specific things in your body. Now we're very elementary as a species and our understanding of how proteins drive. Systems level biology and outcomes. So we're starting to learn about this, but I will tell you there is a really interesting research team at UCSF led by. A woman named Hanel Samid and and this research team is identifying they're building a toolkit of proteins where these proteins can almost have like robotic arms. They can have really interesting function. Think about Martin Short and inner space. Remember that machine? He went in and went on the body and he started doing stuff in the body. They're working on building basically a toolkit. So it's not just a single protein that now you it goes and does something, but really complicated combinations of proteins that can now go in the body and fix things and repair things and and react environmentally to specific. Conditions in the body like, oh, there's a cancer cell here. I'm gonna go do something to it now. And so there's this whole, there's this whole world of like dynamic, you know, kind of making things more dynamical than they have been historically. Just just thinking about aging. Would it theoretically be able to help with hearing loss, eyesight loss, you know, and those type of things? Would you be able to. There's another area of biology we could talk about this at, like, but there's other biology called stem cell therapy where you can basically take, you know, all cells evolve from stem cells in your in your body. So these are kind of the original cells that you have. Initially in an embryo, right. And then as your body kind of grows, you end up with these stem cells and you have stem cells in your body today those stem cells when they make a copy, they could differentiate into different cells in your body. So for the last, you know, 1020 years in California by the way has about a $4 billion if I remember right, stem cell grant program where they're funding research into stem cell therapies. So there are significantly successful. Therapies right now multiple companies or productizing and launching and they're already active in the market for fixing blindness with people that have specific diseases called retinitis pigmentosa where you're you're the the retinal cells in your body and your eyes degrade and stop working. You will get a stem cell injection of progenitor retinal stem cells into your eye and you will grow a new retina and you can see again and the efficacy is insane. It is incredible how well this works and they are doing this with lots of other stem cell therapy so. We're getting so smart, and here's an incredible thing scientists discovered a few years ago. I think these guys won the Nobel Prize. For this you could take any cell in the human body. And induce it chemically, meaning you put a bunch of chemicals on that cell and get that cell to convert back into a stem cell. Now you've created your own stem cells from your own body and you can now put them back in your body and get them to turn into any other cell in your body. So this is called induced pluripotent stem cell therapy I PSC, so I PSC now forms the basis for a lot of these stem cell therapy kind of programs that are underway. And so this is going to be and it's insane field over the next couple of decades freedberg if we took the 25. $1,000,000 that we don't need in California and gave it to these companies. How quickly could we survive? This problem nothing drives me more nuts than when I see money not going to science. I mean, it is just, I mean seriously, like let's we need to start our own political party that is based on reasonable suggestions like the one I just made or the ones, you know, the middle ground party. Just a reasonable party tax. Do you think there's a possibility for 1/3 for a true third party in the United States? Structurally, no, it's really set up to be a two party system. You have to really take over one of the two parties. And frankly the problem in our politics right now, I'm not saying the Republican Party is great, but the Democrat Party has basically been taken over by woke socialists, so you know, but so I think that kind of like limits your options. But I mean you what you have to do is create a movement and then you, you basically take over one of the parties, right. I mean what we're describing today, I mean just up level it is, it almost feels like we're in a race between technological acceleration and social and political deterioration, right. So like technology one more time we're, we're in a race I think for the future between technological acceleration and social and political deterioration. And the question is which one of these forces is going to win the future? Everything freeberg described as incredibly hopeful, right? We're going to be able to cure people with all these miracle technologies. I mean, even the new M RNA vaccines that were developed for COVID. I mean, it's miraculous, right? And we're going to be able to use that same M RNA technology for other things, other diseases, maybe even to attack cancer cells. So there's so many positive things happening. We all see it in the technology ecosystem. There's been an explosion of wealth creation and opportunity created over the last 20 years in technology. And so we have this very positive. Of course. And then everything that seems to be happening in our politics and society is negative. It's it's involves deterioration. It's it's basically a special interest corruption. It's. You know, it's basically people wedded to these insane ideologies. And you're right, like what we really want is just a pragmatic, pragmatic party that allows the private sector to do its job, generate the wealth necessary to then fund social programs instead of trying to upturn the whole system, which is what it feels like so many people empower trying to do today. So I registered a registered reason party for us if we, if we ever want to go there. So if you want to bookmark reason party. Let's let's let's talk about this tonight, Bois, because I gotta run and I'm is it on? Yum Yum. I'm gonna see two of you tonight. Sex. You gotta fly up. You gotta fly. Sax, what are you doing? Having a bird. If you don't let the bird out of the cage, our friend from LA is flying up. Yeah, I mean, you could. Other friend who puts the ball in the basket is coming. There are many friends. Many friends. Come on, sacks. Come on, football friends. Free the bird. I'll take it under advisement. Speaking of bird, they just announced a aspac today. So here comes the. Love you guys got ******* gotta go. Like to give the gotcha to burn on. I love you, besties. And we'll see you see you next time. See you guys the all in podcast. Bye. Bye. Love you guys. To let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sasha. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties? My dog taking out your driveway? Man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're all just useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release some out there. B. See what we need to get merchants?