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Hey everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. Besties have reunited. It's been a bestie. Summer chamath, how are you doing? You're back in America. Yes, I am back in America. Back in America. Feels great. Good summer. Yes. I didn't have any summer. I had seven weeks in Italy. It was really incredible. What is the vibe in Italy Post pandemic? Obviously they had the roughest of any nation, I think except for China and Wuhan with COVID-19. How how is the psyche there? That was incredible because they're, I mean, they're so resilient. They basically decided that they don't ever want to go through it again. So everybody wore a mask and people socially distanced. There's lots of dinners outside. No restaurants were really seating people indoors. You'd walk into a store and you'd have to put some, you know, Purell on your hands and wear a mask and. There was like, you know, 4050 cases a day and then I, I keep looking at the news. When I was there, 60,000 a day here I was it's it was just really, it was sad. And then on top of that, to see the riots, the fires, I mean there's a, you know, it's been a disturbing summer here. How are you doing, David Sacks? You're back in San Francisco and you got to spend a little bit of time in an undisclosed location as we we know from the pot last couple episodes of the podcast. How is San Francisco right now? How has your bestie summer been? Uh, it's been great. Yeah, I was. I guess I can now disclose that my undisclosed location was was Mexico, specifically Cabo and that was it was a great place to be for nobody cares. Yeah, exactly. But actually. It was great. It was a great place to be in the early stages of the pandemic because everyone was wearing masks, you know, they did take it really seriously and there were very few cases and seemed like it was under control, at least in the area I was. And then, you know, we came back to. San Francisco for for school, for for the kids school, which you know, I'm not sure we have to be here, but but that's that's you know that's what we came for school actually open. Are they going to school or are they keep pushing it out two weeks like my kids are? Yeah, it's we don't they're not going in person yet, but I think they keep trying to figure out when they're going to start doing that. So it's it's all zoom based right now. Yeah. Which means no learning, right. I mean do you think these kids are actually learning on zoom or do you think it's just glorious little baby? I mean a little bit. I think it's, it's. It's difficult. Yeah, we gave up on it and freeburger you there? I'm here, Bay Area. How's your bestie summer been during this crazy time I've been in the Bay Area, I've been. Crossing all all 7 layers of Dantes Inferno here in California. Moving from the outer layer of COVID to the middle layer of California's proposed wealth tax, to the inner layers of extreme heat, smoke and the absolute central layer of pain. More recently, my 3 year old daughter decided 34 nights ago to not sleep anymore. So yeah, we've been living, living the life. It's been glorious. And. You know, I wear a mask now for COVID, and then I wear another mask on top of that mask for the smoke. So we're just living the California dream? Well, my God, parents immigrated here for, you know, paradise. Well, I guess that's a good place to start. And just if anybody cares, I spent 10 days in Malibu and had a great time. I guess nobody cares how my bestie summer was. Jason. How's your bestie summer? Jake? How's your summer? Yeah. You know, I've been lonely and I tweeted I'm lonely and I got about. 50 phone calls from people who are like, I can't imagine jakal being sad, but I actually had a talk with my wife and I said, what are the symptoms of depression? Because I I think I might have depression. And I went through and I was like, I don't have depression. I'm just, I have great empathy for all the people suffering. And, you know, I just being isolated. You guys know me very well, better than anybody. Like, I like to talk to people, and it's been really difficult for me to, I'll be totally candid to be isolated like this and the podcast. Is is great and doing this podcast is great, but man, I miss people. I just missed people. And what are the symptoms of your depression just before you were self diagnosing? I'm just curious. I wish I I was feeling like just sad about watching the riots and watch people shoot each other and then watching, you know, the, the, the, the wildfires. Watching people die unnecessarily and then watching the madness for the election. It was just all becoming like, I wouldn't say overwhelming, but it just made me very sad. That, you know, so many people can't go back to work and then the stock markets ripping and it's it's a very, I don't know how you guys feel, but it feels very surreal, right, because in our world and I don't know how your portfolio is and investments are doing, you know, a lot of the companies we've invested in as Angel investors are doing just wonderfully and we're investing more than ever. But then you turn on the television, it's like the Doom scrolling is crazy. So I had to just stop Doom scrolling. I think that was the key thing. Chamath was just looking at Twitter. Is that the trending topics? Is so depressing and and just so overwhelming at times that I took three days off this weekend and went camping and I literally didn't pull up Twitter and I felt much better. So I think it was really Twitter related, like just opening up the trending topics. I don't know if you did that on your holiday in Italy, but it really is a quick way to get depressed. The best thing is that I was using it at a different time zone and so I was basically out of the flow and it makes a huge difference because then you're not in the. Emotional turmoil of people's immediate reaction. And so you can just kind of move on. And then also, I just had a really fun summer because I really tried to detach and not use my phone. I had, I had a, you know, I kept my meetings to a few hours a day and then otherwise I was doing things. You want to know, you want to want to know my phone call to Jake Cow. Like, hey, jakal, I I saw on Twitter that you're you're sad and lonely. It's like, yeah, yeah, it's like. Are you suicidal? Like, no? OK, goodbye. I'm too much of an anarchist, just never considered that. But I do. I do want to thank you, David, for having me down to Cabo. And we, we got to have some good times to watch some good movies. Gladiator extended cut was great. Some other movies that we watched could get us canceled. So we won't admit that we watched history of the world or any other Mel Brooks movies, but we had a good time, played a couple of rounds of golf and that was good times. But let's talk about California because I think, you know, we're, we're all residents currently of California. But let me just put it out there. How many people on the call are considering? Uh, leaving California? Anybody? Is that going through anybody's mind right now? It's going through for well, it's not for me. But I think that California is sort of emblematic of what could happen if you actually have. You know, the legislative bodies plus, you know, the the top sort of political leader up and down on one ticket. I mean, you know, you you basically have like massive rife incompetence and it's been compounded you never. I mean you know, if people who are Democrats would have said, oh, the best thing that can happen for Democrats is if you have, you know, local cities plus an assembly plus the state Senate plus the governor as a Democrat. Republicans would have said the same thing. Or Republicans. But as it turns out, it basically creates the worst outcomes. And so instead, what you need is a little diversity of ideas and a little push and pull. But California is like a bunch of clowns in a clown car right now. It's a joke. But I'm not going to move now. Part of it I'm not gonna move, is I I've, you know, my. Taxes I've set up in such a way were California can't get access to most of my assets anyway, so you know they can # sand. Yeah, David, how are you, sacks? How are you feeling about California right now and just the craziness in San Francisco. The homelessness problem in San Francisco has become acute during this. It's it's really, well, it's the wealth task on top of it and it's it's a disaster. It's a disaster. I mean, I'm not, I'm not leaving or anything, but it's certainly a topic of conversation that's come up a lot. And I do know people who have left. I know a couple of people. You know, prominent people and the venture community who've recently moved to Austin. And it's a horrible time for the the city and state proposing all these new taxes as just take one example because people are already realizing that because of COVID and and this new sort of work from home and and zoom business culture where you can kind of work from anywhere that people are realizing they don't need to be in San Francisco or in Silicon Valley anymore to be, you know, in the technology industry. And so at precisely the time that people were reevaluating where they wanted to be, realizing that. That could be anywhere. California is now, you know, proposing to massively increase the cost of being here. So it's it's horrible timing and then, you know, you do have this. Sort of similarly chronic issue in San Francisco, particularly with with the sort of homeless problem, just seems to keep getting worse. And there's there's sort of this weird hostility to technology and tech workers here that I think is somehow uses a scapegoat to prevent the city from dealing with its real problems. And what do you perceive those real problems to be in, in the city? I mean, use the term homeless. I think most people looking at the problem, as one person candidly told me, you know, what we have is not, and I won't say who said this, but it's a prominent person, they said this, you know, Jason, the issue here is this isn't a homeless problem. This is a junkie problem. And they use specifics that I'm using that term because that's the term to refer to people who are addicted to opioids, methamphetamine, fentanyl and that if you were to actually unpack what we're calling a homeless crisis, it's actually a crisis of drug addiction. And specifically fentanyl. I don't know if you guys saw that we're gonna hit something like 500 overdose deaths this year. We're like gonna double last year and it's all fentanyl, which is a particularly you know, deadly drug. So I mean how much do you think that is the problem, David huge. I mean it's it's you're right that homelessness is not the the the cause of the issue that homelessness is the consequence of long term drug addiction and mental illness. I mean this is the, it's the end state. And you're right, the city is it's not really tackling the underlying issues. In fact, it's kind of aiding and abetting them. I mean, how many millions of needles does the city give away every year and that it only collects a small fraction of them with the remainder ending up on the streets. It's just it's it's bonkers. And I think part of the problem is that we keep saying that until we. Is that we can't demand any improvement in the situation in terms of homeless people. You know we have this like Poop Squad in in San Francisco that's literally cleaning poop off the sidewalks because homeless people are using our sidewalks as as like a latrine basically as a bathroom. And and you you keep hearing is that, well we can't do anything about that problem until we solve the homeless problem and that that's A and certainly we should try to solve that problem but it's a very long term you know difficult. Intractable problem. In the meantime, we can certainly do things like demand that homeless people not do that. Yeah, and the policing seemed to there seems to be a distinct issue with policing right now. I, I watched the San Francisco Tenderloin Twitter account, David Frieberg, and they've arrested something like 260 method meth and fentanyl dealers. But we have a DA chesa, I believe his name is, who doesn't believe in prosecuting any of those crimes related to drugs or petty crime. Freeberg, what does the city turned into for you as somebody who's been a long term investor in the Bay Area? Well, I moved here after I graduated College in 2001 and I loved San Francisco. It was, it was a a quieter city and a quainter city. I honestly over the years have found the traffic and the congestion and the build up of the city to be frustrating. I'm a little bit of a anomaly in the sense because I think a lot of people, you know, think that the city should continue to grow and progress and and build housing and so on. Those are all, you know, fine objectives. But I think the quality of life has degraded for some time in the city as as infrastructure. Hasn't kept up with the the changing pace of of companies growing here and as a result we've kind of got this ballooning inflating budget that's been poorly managed. You've got I forgot the statistic but there's some number of 1000 people plus that are city government employees in San Francisco earning over $300,000 a year. And so there's there's a there's a chronic kind of bureaucratic issue that is the cancer that has caused you know a lot of the follow on crises that I think. We're now experiencing acutely here in the city. Now, in terms of leaving to your earlier question, I, you know, I, I was really like, I've just been like everyone, you know, like I call it kind of talk about the the Dante Inferno layers. It's also like for me growing up, it's like a seven layer burrito. It's like one layer of **** after another. Start with the beings and in the middle you got the sour cream. And you know, this city's just gotten kind of and the state has gotten more and more difficult to live in. And I and I was certainly thinking and talking to my wife like we got to leave her. Families here, so we're not going to leave the state, but then I get a call last week that that I think 18 of us were on with Governor Newsom. And you know he he made a couple of really interesting points that really did honestly reset my perspective. You know I've tried to take a step back and think a little bit more broadly about the long term opportunity in California. The way this state operates right now. It's a fifth largest economy in the world. They ran a surplus, they're refinance their debt. They've done a great job kind of managing kind of the fiscal gap that that's that's being created by the COVID crisis. And, you know, Governor Newsom made a point like we have had the California exodus story that's percolated and cycled really for decades. He pointed out an article, which I've not been able to find, but I've been looking forward from Time magazine from 1959 that were like declared. This is the year everyone's gonna exodus out of the state and we hear it every couple of years. There's some crisis that precipitates the mass exodus and it hasn't happened because it is a great place to work. It's diversified industrial base. It's not just tech. Tech is a lot of the growth, but there's. A lot of industry here are just ad producer's largest. What's military? Aerospace, industry, and on and on and on. This is a it's a great diversified economy. It's a great diversified cultural base. It's it's by the oceans, it's by the mountains. It's an incredible place to live and work. And I don't think any of us want to give that up. And the media has done a great job kind of magnifying these small stories that aren't really a story government USA made the case that this wealth tax proposal, you know, was one assembly member. It didn't even get into committee. It wasn't even really being. Considered, but it kind of created this, this press flourish and everyone got involved and everyone I know kind of freaked out about it and it became this kind of another catalyzing event, but it wasn't really real. So if we kind of broaden our perspective a little bit, both in terms of space and time, I, I think we get a little more kind of comfortable with like of all the places to live and all the places to work, this is the best. And you didn't go see some taxes and move to Austin. But I mean you got to go live in Austin, you know, whatever. Well, it's it's it's the, it's the best, you're right that it's the best in terms of climate. Geography, natural beauty, resources and the industries that have developed here and have, you know, strong network effects. But it's not the best politically. I mean, it's among the worst politically. And it seems like the politicians are doing everything they can to mess it up. I mean, I almost wonder if there's like a resource curse issue, particularly with San Francisco, where, you know, there's this thing in in, I mean this, this observable thing with governments that that sometimes you get a resource curse where if there's like a lot of oil in the country or something. Uh, you end up with, with a government that's not very good because people just spend all their time going to war to try and capture it. And I kind of wonder if, you know, San Francisco has been the beneficiary of being proximate to Silicon Valley, this enormous, like wealth creation, prosperity, job creation ecosystem that had nothing to do with creating. And I would say two things to build on what you're saying. The first is I think that when the economies in an environment are really, really good, all the really, really smart. People want to go into those economies, and that leaves generally Dumber people to do things like politics. So, and that's less true in places that have ******** economies. Yeah and and I and I actually think that that's that's practically true. We may not want to think it and it may not may sound a little harsh, but it's true and you know the the way that you reverse it is what Singapore does, which is you make the civil servants the highest paid people in the economy. Right. And you treat them like knowledge workers and you say, wow, look, I'm going to pay these person 250 thousand, $300,000 a year. You're shocked at the quality of the person you get. That's the the first comment I want to make. The second one though is, is that unlike all these other times where I think people have been, you know, sort of prognosticating the doom and gloom of California, the, the, the thing that's different now is that because it is such a dominant political environment for the Democrats, it's much. Easier to judge if they actually know what they're doing and if they are going to do things that are aligned with the sort of like the moral code of the party that elected them. And so, like, let's just talk, for example, about the fact that we are not going to have police reform of any kind. In California, which is where you'd think would be the first state where people got their act together and said, OK, if we really believe that we need to reform police, we can do it in our own backyards. But that legislation is going to get blocked because Californians have decided that they care more about the alignment to police unions than they do to the right of law and to social justice for minorities and blacks. That's crazy. We should be the most progressive is your point on this chamath, and the point is to say it explicitly, is the politicians are in the pocket of the unions, and because they're in the pocket of the police unions and the education unions, we cannot make forward progress even though we're supposed to be the most liberal of all locations. Correct? That's in summary. Yeah, exactly. The we, we, we actually if we believe that we have you know, up and down the ticket, the ability to implement justice. Right. At least justice in the vein of the Democratic Party and what that platform represents. Or for example, all of the people that were out protesting OK during Black Lives Matter during that entire movement, I suspect the overwhelming majority are Democrats slash progressives. Or, you know, let's just say the majority, or at the minimum, the plurality, OK? But then the idea that then you have a state, the most populous and the richest filled up and down the ticket with people who are theoretically aligned with those political values. But then when push comes to shove and the legislation hits the floor, it basically gets mothballed. To me is inexcusable and disgusting. Yeah, I mean, look at the housing issue we we just had a bill that was an incredibly simple bill. I think it was 11. Yeah, SB 11:20, if you followed this one, but I've been following it on the Twitter and it was a very simple piece of legislation. Any single family home lot could have a duplex on it. You could have two homes on a single lot and they couldn't even pass that in a city where, you know, a firefighter, a teacher, etcetera, cannot live within 90 minutes of where they work and they couldn't even pass that. Also, there's there's also a B5, right? I mean, Jason has Uber's third or fourth investor. Yeah. So you have something to say about that, right? I think 3rd or 4th, but here we go to the VC Braggs controversial we just, yeah could we just, can we just pin down exactly which one it is? So you could just say you were the 4th investor or something like that. So much better to say 3rd or 4th and that was obviously but you know a B5 is another one. Look at all the careers in which you can be David Sacks, a freelancer and the high, the more money you make the more you get to dictate your schedule. But if you are poor and if you are in an entry level. Bob, the California government will not let you, even though 70% of drivers for these services want to be freelancers, and the services themselves said they will put into a fund for healthcare like they literally Uber. You know, Dar is like, hey, we're going to put money into this lift is going to put money into it. They still will not let people decide for themselves what shift they want. That makes no sense. I mean and and trickled into like journalists too. I mean there's they said now journalists if you write, if you if you write 30 articles a year for a single outlet, you're technically considered an employee even though you're writing the articles on your own time with your own research and you're getting paid for successful article for good articles that are accepted. And then there was this follow on controversy about translators. It's like well translators takes 5 minutes to translate an article. So why would 30 articles apply to a translator and. Obviously, when you have that degree of confusion and complexity, something's off, right? Yeah. And it's such a, it's feels like virtue signaling. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, well, I mean, the reason why a V5 happened is it was at the behest of the Teamsters, right? They're trying to unionize the Uber and Lyft drivers, and they can't do it unless they're employees. And so, you know, the the author of the the bill look, Lorena Gonzalez, who's sort of in their back pocket. You know that that's why she put forward the bill. And then the absurdity of it was that, you know, they realized after introducing it that it would ensnare all these other occupations, like the writers and journalists and photographers and translators and yeah, even like people like manicurists and so on. Right. And So what they've been doing is they've been now modifying the legislation to exclude all of these categories. And in the process, they're kind of laying bare what's really happening here, which is this is all about either, basically, shutting down. For forcing Uber and Lyft to comply with with the will of the Teamsters. And it seems like the legislation blanked when Uber and Lyft said, well, we'll just shut the service down. So what your thoughts on when that happened, sacks you, what do you think will happen? Who, Who Will Win this AB 5 shutdown showdown? Well, what Uber California, they yeah, they threatened to basically stop service and they got to stay, I think from a judge. So, so A5 doesn't go into effect until November when and there's a ballot initiative that they're sponsoring to get a B5 overturned. So. I think, you know, I don't. I don't try to predict whether it's going to win or not. But that to me is like whether if if AB five were defeated by a ballot initiative in November, that'd be a really positive sign for the state of California. I'll say there was on this call with Governor Newsom last week, he did point out that a B5 was more of kind of a law of inevitability as a result of that whole dynamax State Supreme Court decision where the, you know, the Supreme Court basically said. Look, here's the criteria that defines an employee versus an independent contractor. You know, they get to decide what work they do or what hours or whatever, and there's like some set of criteria. And they said, look, Uber drivers and all these other kind of technically independent contractors don't meet those criteria fully. Therefore, they are employees. And as a result, California Assembly tried to and had to effectively codify what it means to be an employee versus independent contractor. And I'm not arguing for the case. I'm just saying what was conveyed by governor last week on why this ended up coming to bear. Now, if they strike it down, there's gonna be some other law that's gonna pop up because this of the state supreme, the dynamax decision. And that's kind of, you know, something's gonna have to get written down. So sad. Don't you think it ultimately ends up just being some sort of negotiated point between all of these industry leaders and, you know, the state to kind of figure out, OK, what's everyone going to compromise on to, to get something written down that's law. I mean, possibly. I mean, Dynamex is not, like, constitutional. It's not a constitutional decision. So the legislature can do whatever it wants here. You know, and so if you were going to respond to Dynamex, you don't have to kind of enshrine it. So and I guess there there there was certainly some question whether Dynamex would apply to Uber and Lyft and in in this way. You know, I think they they could have they could have made their arguments in front of a court, right? OK, look, the problem is now and whatever applies to California applies to every state legislature. How are these people supposed to figure this out? I'm sorry, but like, you know who, who are we entrusting here to go and then all of a sudden understand the nuances of Lyft and Uber and really understand the job that they do versus the translators, versus the this person versus the that person versus the Dynamex decision. Again, I think 20 years ago I kind of would have believed that politicians were generally some of the smartest people. You know, frankly amongst us. And it it really did attract a certain level of intellectual person who cared about legislating. But you know now basically you just have like you know Jerry Falwell Junior's running around. I mean these are, these are they're all just running around until they get caught on Instagram and get fired. I mean they're just they're not the smartest people that we're dealing with. And So what was what was Gavin Newsom's answer to that is really what I would you know the the Jerry Falwell junior point didn't come up tomorrow, but we can we can follow up. You're right. It does seem to me that if they do become full time, this would be a tragedy for the people who are trying to just do 10 to 20 to 30 hours of gig work. Like what happens to those poor people who wanted to fill in between when they dropped their kids off of school and picked them up and just grab a couple hours here there as a second gig? Like if this actually does pass and their full time. Honestly guys, honestly, you guys are such you're. You're you're honestly, look. It won't affect them. It'll affect the long term profitability in the margins of the companies that have to hire them as full time employees and they'll have to like, you know, make a bunch of rules and blah, blah blah. But it has huge operational implications and it has really terrible OpEx implications for our company. But for the person that wants to work 10 hours, Jason, they'll still be able to work 10 hours. So I think, I think the point is that like on a specific shift, like they're gonna have to come in at a certain shift time. I think the point is like the entire public markets who all of a sudden think that a business looks one way, has to figure out that it's really a cost plus business. And what it really means is you've, if you were comfortable with a 60% or 70% reduction in the market cap of some of these companies, you'd be OK with a B5. And I think that's where the tension is, where the people that made the law don't care about the market cap because they don't own the stock anyways. And the people that are reacting to a B5 are the ones that own the stock and are really thinking about the market cap. Well, but the drivers, the drivers are actually owned the stock and they're against it. No, it's the drivers own 8 shares, David. I mean, come on. No, no, that's what I'm saying is they're not shareholders for the most part, but this really does reduce their flexibility to contract for their labor. No, but I think what you're saying will happen, which is that they will create a, you know, a B5 prime, which is a modification. That's neither this nor what it was. But it seems that the tailwinds are pretty clear, which is that we're moving to a place where these companies have to get built in a very clever way, and even if they are super clever in capturing consumer demand, the unit economics are going to be pretty ******. And I just think we have to own that. And and probably what it means more than anything else is it's not a real venture kind of business. And so you may be deficit financing it or building it in a very different way than we used to, right? But it doesn't have to be that way. What you're saying is I think that this law will have very adverse consequences for their business, OK? I mean, I grant you that. But it's it's what? Why is the the state interfering in the relationship between Uber and its drivers in this way when everyone's happy with it? No, but it's not. I think what actually is happening is the state is effectively capturing the excess return of Uber and Lyft. Meaning I think if you just take a pure unemotional economic view at this, it's like any other market. If there is a huge amount of margin available and there are not many competitors, what happens is somebody comes in to take the excess margin. So you think that's the government it wants to take it and that. Unions want to tell you absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Question, should we, should we let them then dictate what hours people work? The thought exercise that I would ask guys, if there was in a market 90 different competitors for transportation, would AB 5 have been written past adopted? And my answer to you would be that it would not have been so Uber and Lyfts and Doordash's success is what leads to people wanting to get caught and get a slice, the oligopolist. Model of success were not enough. Other companies are pulled through. Got it. Well that gives us a good segue into by the way sorry, last point on this. And The funny thing is the people who created the problem or the ones that hated the most which are the investors because they pile in the incremental dollars into the winners trying to king make a winner through capital. And now what's happening is their rate of returns are basically getting taken away. And I think that in in a in a weird way that's also kind of Fair. Well, I I I would just disagree slightly in the sense that just because this has big distributional consequences like basically who who makes the the surplus doesn't mean it also doesn't have a huge deadweight loss associated with it. And whenever you prohibit people from engaging in the type of economic contracts relationship that they want to engage in, you're reducing surplus. And so I so I hear what you're saying but and and I think there is, I think this is all about. Regulatory capture, right. This is the Teamsters trying to capture a big piece of the value of Uber through their politicians in the legislature. So you're right about that. But I also think that we should care about it not just as Uber shareholders, but as consumers of the product because it's going to get worse. Well, and also the product's going to go away in certain jurisdictions. I mean, if Freeberg wants to get an Uber north of the Golden Gate Bridge or in the East Bay somewhere, they're just not going to have the economics or in some communities. Yeah. And to to even operate the service. So just like Uber eats and Postmates stopped delivering to Treasure Island, a lot of the drivers were in their local communities at home with Uber turned on. And when they or DoorDash and when they got a call, they would leave their house. And that was part of the magic of it is you just be sitting there, you know, netflixing or hanging with your kids, and then a good call comes in and then you leave your house. That's why you would have that like one minute pause if you ever saw it, you know, in an Uber ride where it's like, why isn't the car moving? It's that person's at home. And they were capturing the the one ride every hour. In their local, you know suburban area but if you force them to be hourly we were going to say you know what, it's not worth having an 8 hour shift in you know whatever suburb and and the service will go away and then guess who's going to not have service and transportation? Sorry, I was saying it was like sacks's point like you know from a consumer perspective or chamath point if you end up with 90 of these service providers? And I'm a consumer. I'm less likely to order a cab or order a a rideshare service or I'm less likely to order food for delivery. I don't wanna deal with 50 ******* apps. I don't wanna have to like, go find the one app that has the contract with the one restaurant. Then the natural market dynamics. The the way that the market naturally evolves is I want simplicity as a consumer, I want efficiency. That's what makes me want to use it more. And when you take that away, because you're interfering from a regulatory perspective and how that market operates the product. That's for me. And yeah, the shareholders ultimately suffer. I, I think to your point, the way that that would probably get solved is you have people that are higher order in the consumer behavior that own these relationships, that enforce basically a user experience. For example, Facebook and Google and Apple essentially say we're abstracting all these services because there's 90 of you. Google says I'm going to put all of you guys on the map view. You know, Yelp says the same thing and essentially what? Since what happens is there's some like open way where essentially a service provider can turn themselves on and broadcast into a network that says I'm available to do a for B and it all gets fixed now. That's a future state. Which was the original idea of Uber, by the way, was to make a marketplace like that and now Uber is talking about doing a franchise. Exactly what you're saying. Truth is let some franchisee take the East Bay and then provide their inventory network. I think franchising is a really, really smart business idea. And I think that particularly in transportation and a lot of these services that have this natural dynamic to be local, where there there are an infinite sum of many local markets, I think it's it's like a Burger King. It's like a McDonald's and the the company that moves to a franchising model and then figures it out I think will be a huge winner and that will be and that will be a very asset, light, really operationally sophisticated, very well run, highly profitable business I think. Let's talk about the public markets. Wait, Jason, can we just talk about the police brutality thing in California? Just want to get your take. Like, it really bought. It really bothers me that California, like, I bet you there's going to be states that are diverse in its democratic and Republican composition and some Republican states that passed comprehensive police reform. And California will be one of the laggards. What do you think if you could wave a magic wand Charmouth? What are the 1/2 and three things take a minute to think of through and everybody on the call can what are the 1/2 and three things you would do to change policing in the United States? I have my own list, but I'm curious what you guys think. And I and I actually put a tweet storm out about my number one thing. What are the specific tactical things? Let's get tactical first. I mean, the first one that I've always been a big fan of as I've studied it at least from 10,000 feet, is ending qualified immunity. Explain why and what that is. You know, qualified immunity is essentially that there, there, there is this immunity that certain individuals have and that they that they're not subject to prosecution. And so, you know, they essentially have a carte blanche to behave in ways that can be good. In some cases very, very bad. In other cases, Gray and. Other cases yet there's no adjudication of their behavior. And so you have to allow people with solid, dispassionate, detached judgment to be able to enter and say, hey, listen, you are way out of line here, and there are consequences for it and people coming in. Doing those jobs need to understand those consequences versus you have a carte blanche to basically do whatever you want. And I think let's talk specifically about the, well, the shooting involving, I would say murder right now because I think all the facts are not in. But Jacob Blake was shot in the back. He was obviously not listening to the police. The police then follow him to his car. There is a discussion of if there was a knife on the floorboard and point blank. They shot him in the back multiple times, and I've heard both sides of this. You know, this person is not listening to the police. This person is going into the car. They're reaching potentially for a weapon, and the cops had no choice. It seemed to me that, you know, the training of a police officer might actually be that that was a legitimate shooting. But that means maybe they have to rethink policing because you could have easily taken that person down with it, even the most modest of a chokehold or a tackle. And when we see that, it feels like that's the raw shock test right there of, like, how you look at shootings in police when you saw that. Treating I take it chamath of Jacob Blake and I I saw it and I I just like I I can't see these anymore. They they send me off the rails for days. But yeah, I did see it. Yeah and so I mean when you when you look at something like that that's clearly training has to change because I I believe that based on. Police training and qualified immunity. This is going to be considered. Even though it's shocking to see it, I think it's going to be considered. You know, and allowed shooting or. Yeah. And there's not gonna, the person's not gonna be prosecuted because the person was clearly not listening and there was a knife on the floor and he was going for it. And, you know, it seems to me like we really need to change the actual training. The average is 6 months of training. So I think that's one of the things that has to change is that these police officers have to be trained not to fire first, but to, to, to use other tactics. So. So for me, the first one is that, the second one for me, which I'm a really big fan of, is that there needs to be a new way to actually. Intercept 911 calls and instead of deploying police officers, we have a separate branch of people that we, you know, massively pay and trained that are effectively, you know, social workers plus, plus and and and they should be deployed in all kinds of situations. Where I think that what what people want is a deescalation and I think that sometimes the words D escalation and police don't really sync up and in most a lot of people's minds they think of escalation. So people who are trained to deescalate I think and so for example like you know all of the mental health checks, all of the mental health issues could probably be dead domestic like this domestic disturbances would probably go into that category. The third. One is I would very much rationalize drug use. Just because I think the amount of low level offenses and arrests around drug use is antiquated for peoples general views on drugs. And I think that it needs to sort of correlate to how society views it. And then you know the the last two that I would give you is that there's a concept of no knock warrants. That's how Brianna Taylor was killed. It's it's kind of really scary. The idea that we could all be sitting in our houses right now as we are and literally the police can just charge in is a little totally unnecessarily. I mean she was being for some like low level drug idea. They're gonna knock the doors in and of course the person is going to try to protect themselves. That's the demand has sacks what, you thought they knocked the doors in and they were playing clothes wearing police officers. So people are coming and they did it at like midnight when she was asleep, so. Yeah. People busting into your house at midnight screaming, making noise and not dressed as cops. That's that's crazy situation. Yeah. And then the last one I would give you is militarization of police. A lot of these ideas, by the way, are Justin Amash's ideas I I've retweeted and I've followed. But he was the one that put me on to these things. But, you know, like you have all this excess military equipment in the army that gets basically passed through and now directly sold into police departments, especially post 911. We we basically militarized that. So those attacks you, what are your ideas around policing? And how we should change it. You've heard two months. I I don't have more detailed ideas than chamath. I think he's given some good ones for sure. I mean, I think we definitely need better training and I think better oversight over the use of force the the the body Cam idea. Jason, I've seen you, you tweet about. I think that's pretty interesting too. I think you're right that the body Cam idea I had was. I asked does anybody know and you know, does Black Lives Matter or another organization track? Which police departments, because we could get a list of every Police Department that exists in some database somewhere. Do we actually know what percentage actually have body cams and what model they use and what percentage are working? Because one of the things that I think has happened this year is, you know, the live streaming and the the live video and the number of smartphones out there has resulted in us being able to see what black and brown people have been telling us for decades, which is they're murdered by cops. And now we get to see it and, you know, when you see George Floyd. Murdered. It's it's fairly obvious that that's what happened. We don't have a video or they have the video of Brianna Taylor getting murdered. So that's from a cop webcam. I'm sorry, body Cam. So I was thinking we should just start with that as a basic, which is every single cop car show, a 360 gamer and every cop. It should be a federal mandate, and I don't exactly know how federal mandates were sacked, but don't you think should be a federal mandate for just cameras and car cameras? I think it's a good idea. I think the use of camera is a good idea. I mean, maybe not recording the police officers when they're sitting in their car, but every time there's like a, you know, like, yeah, they pull somebody over sort of, you know, like 4th Amendment type search and seizure, seizure type situation. Yeah, I think it would make sense to have that on video. Why not? Yeah, I mean, there was that. I think every police will behave better. Go ahead, freeberg. There was a case the other day, a young guy, I think it was 19 years old, was shot in DC named Dion Ki. Don't know if any of you guys watched the body Cam footage. And so he was a 19 year old black man. He was shot. He died. But in the body Cam footage you can see that he pulls out this gun and throws it, and when he pulls out the gun and flings his hand around, he's got the gun in his hand. That's when the cop shot him. And so there was about 100 protesters that showed up. But it's largely become a non story as a result of the facts associated with the body Cam footage. But I just want to propose something else that's a little bit more radical. Maybe my libertarian ideals kind of cross with my socialist ideals and forming this this concept, but perhaps you're a socialist. I don't know that I've never been accused of that, but if we. If we trace back, you know, the these systems are are really chaotic. Everything you're talking about is layers and layers of bureaucracy and ideas and **** we should do to manage the problem. But there is kind of 1 common, you know, butterfly effect butterflies at the source of all of a lot of what we're talking about, which is guns. If there weren't any guns in the United States, I would not feel threatened. As a police officer, I would never have any reason to feel threatened and I would never have any reason to pull a gun. The reason I always make to pull a gun as a police officer is my life is threatened. And in the absence of firearms, I have no right to pull a gun. And that's the case in like the UK, for example, where there are like no police officer shootings of of civilians because there are never under threat of being killed by a gun. So there's a simple answer which is get rid of the guns, but, you know, a little too controversial and obviously many layers to that argument, especially from kind of both sides. But I I would say, you know, much, much of what's going to go on now and in the future. Which is chaos theory. It's going to be building more layers of complexity, it's more entropy, it's more kind of associated complexity to try and resolve the underlying problem of all of this, which is that we've got guns on the streets, we've got guns in people's hands and therefore, you know, there's always this threat against every individual that their life might be taken by another. Well, let me make a prediction. Right now there's not going to be any new gun control legislation for a generation because of the the looting and rioting that's going on. Gun sales are an all time high. I mean every single gun store that mostly goes sold out, right? You can't, you can't get guns, you can't get ammo. And there are more first time gun buyers in the United States for the last several months than there's ever been. I mean the the ranks of the NRA must just be swelling right now. And so, so this idea that you're going to get gun reform, I don't think it's going to happen. People aren't going to support it. And, you know, I think, you know, use the word I think idealistic, I mean, I, I think it's like a little bit naive. To assume that you're going to be able to get rid of all the guns in the hands of bad actors. There are a lot of people in this country who feel the need to have a gun to protect themselves. And you know, the cops can't always get there quickly enough and a lot of people feel the need to, to have that for self-defense. I also think the minimum amount of training for a police officer should not be six months. I think they have to re, I mean if we really want to have the society move forward and, you know, to solve our issue of race, which is, you know, like the original sin of America, we're going to really need to start thinking about making, you know, police go back to school for 18 months, 12 months and rethink how we, how we address the situation. Because it's just tragically unfair that one group of people's children has to worry when they're driving in a car. And, you know, other people on this call don't have to worry, right? And, you know, that is just crazy. Let's take a hard shift to the economy and then we'll go into the election. What do you think, Trump? You've been talking a little bit about the economy and the stock market ripping again, and we seem to have hit a pause. But we did have, like, a massive rip with Tesla. And Amazon, Tesla and Apple I guess doing a stock split and we hit all time records. Why are we hitting all time records too much? We have the most important thing that's happened, I think, in economics in the last 10 years. The Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, gave this landmark speech and he basically said we are going to keep rates at zero for the next half decade. Uh, basically. And five years at zero. Yeah. I mean, quite honestly, it's it could be a decade, but they're going to let inflation run before they basically match it with rates. There's no path to any near term inflation of any kind whatsoever. And so, Jason, my, my honest perspective is, you know. You're basically going to get paid to be long equities because your risk free rate is 0 and we'll soon be negative. And what are you supposed to do if you're an asset manager? What are you supposed to do with your take California back using California? Let's just say you're a CalPERS, you're the California pension system, and you have hundreds of billions of dollars. Then you need to generate 5 or 6% a year to make sure that your pension isn't insolvent. And the government is paying you 0. OK. So that eliminates that option, no treasuries for you, your long equities? And when everybody is in that situation, you're overwhelmingly long equities and you know the you cannot fight the Fed and so you cannot wait them out. It's not like you could say, oh, don't worry, they're going to change their mind. They will change their mind, but in reaction to market conditions that are out of your control. So all of these opportunities, in my opinion, are generally buying opportunities and I'm generally bullish. I'm more bullish now than I was before. So you can't put your money into treasuries, you can't put it into a savings account. Obviously, you can't put it you, you. It doesn't seem like real estate or commercial real estate. It's a great bet right now. So your options are private companies or public companies, correct, I think it really is just public companies and I don't even think it's private companies. So meaning where wherever capital is constrained, the returns, again, these excess returns are getting eaten up. And so the the most unimpeded market for gains right now is the public markets. I mean like no offense, but I think that if you were a very good stock picker in the public markets, you're generating better returns than Sequoia benchmark name your best venture fund. You know, I see all these people spouting off on Twitter about how good they are in the early stage markets. It's all kind of small dollars and not that meaningful. You know, I'm on the call, right. I'm on the call. I mean you're literally talking to the guys sounding off about hitting home runs. Sax, what are your thoughts on this like private markets obviously is the op where we operate both David's freeburg and sacks and you're seeing great deals. I think I've invested in twice as many companies during the pandemic as they did before it in the same six month period. What do you see in the private markets and what do you think? What is your take on best C's public markets exactly? Yeah, we saw some of the best deals that we've seen during COVID and. You know I'm I'm very bullish about the state of entrepreneurship in the US I mean just the the number of interesting companies doing interesting things and the the infrastructure that makes it so easy for founders to get started and create new companies. It's so much easier now to create A to create a company that it was ten years or 20 years ago. And of course it's easy to point to all the ones that don't work or that don't seem like good ideas but but there's so many more experiments that are happening and I think it's going to I'm you know I'm very bullish about that part of the. The American economy and freeberg, what are your thoughts on private markets? And obviously, you're building private companies. You have unlimited capital to build them. I take it, given your track record, I spend most of my time accepting rejections from my very close investor friends in my various projects. So I wouldn't say that that ever becomes true. I'll tell you the truth. Still selling everyday dialing for dollars, but no, there are certainly more investors, more capital, more risk taking, more kind of valuation extending than I think as it was the case pre COVID. I think Jamie's point is right though. There is so much more liquidity available through access to retail and international market participants in in a public setting than there is in a private setting and it is because of this. Equity premium and the easy access to putting capital in. It's just extraordinary how much as I've watched close friends and companies and companies I've invested in. I'm sure you guys have done the same transition from private to public. The valuation jump is extraordinary, like on a metrics basis, right. So whatever the metric might be, you get public. There is this flurry of of market participation. As a result, it drives up. There's multiple. Wait. I thought you're sorry, can I just say something that's such a, such an important smart? Thing that Friedberg said. So Jason, for example, like all of us, we're all still in the private markets. And I'm not trying to take away from the private markets, but what David said is so important. If you used to look at a SAS deal, you'd price that SAS deal 10 * R, right? Then there's a little bit of inflation. You know, the rates go up, the prices that people pay go up. Now all of a sudden we're paying 12 * 15 Times Now it's 20 times if you're growing 100% rate over year. So what's happened? The market has become more efficient and the excess return is getting eaten up. And so you're like, OK, well, that's still really good. And you wait four or five, six years and you think you're gonna get paid? The crazy thing is, like once that company transitions to the public markets, I mean all of a sudden if you actually turn the investor base over and you actually create a float so that public market guys can buy it, they'll pay 30 * 35 * 40 times. So there's a massive multiple expansion. So companies should be going public sooner. If you think about this, like if I'm trying to raise money for one of my companies, I'm going to call on my 10:20 thirty friends that I know that are investors in private markets and say, hey guys, do you want to look at this company? And maybe I'll get two or three interested parties and maybe we'll kind of agree on what a fair valuation would be if I could take that same company and instantly make it available to 1,000,000 investors. And all I need to do by the way, is raise $10 million. All I need is some small number of them to write a couple $100 check and I'm able to fill that round out. The valuation as a result of the liquidity available in that market is so much higher because everyone's gonna, there's gonna be much more participation and bidding. And so you know what I think Chamath has tapped into with the spap vehicle. And Umm what Robin Hood is realizing and and and I don't think that we all talk about this enough, but there's this massive massive massive market of international investors, of small of international retail investors who are now rushing into US equities Freeburg didn't we see that in the IC O craze as well? Where you you. I think if we took anything from the Co craze it was and the global appetite for riskandthe.com boom before that. And I think we have to give best DC a lot of credit here for leading the SPAC movement. I mean what's your take on everybody? Hoping you down the stackpath trim off at this point. I had desktop metal as an early Angel investment that just packed and I've been, I I called the pipe. Thank you. Yeah. And they told me that thank you for the markup and I've been hearing like I'm I'm if I'm getting inbound as an Angel investor from I literally got a cold e-mail from some high profile people and they're like, hey, can you do you have anything for us to space? I mean this is like the third or fourth time people are coming down to my ******* level of Angel investing saying, can you introduce us to the calm guys? Can you introduce into Robin Hood? I'm like, I think you can go direct to them. What what is your take on how many spaces have been created since you like literally single handedly restarted the smack movement? I think because you think you've ever gotten a record about this? I'm really proud of what we did when we created this thing two years ago, I said I wanted to basically create a new way of doing IPO's. I called it IPO 2.0. I reserved IPO A through Z on the NYSE. I I hope. To fulfill that, and I think I will, but taking a step back for a second, in the year 2000, there were 8000 public companies in America on the American stock exchanges and in the year 2020, there are 4000. So we've shrunk in half the number of public companies, while at the same time we've, you know, 10X the amount of the amount of capital and the number of people. So we don't have a large enough surface area in the public markets. That's why companies are better off going public because they're going to have a much more receptive audience of people that are dying to own growth of any kind, what's the earliest and the median that people should go public well, so here's the thing, so like if you're like. One of 30 companies in a venture portfolio that's growing at 50 plus percent. You're 1 of 30, but when you go public, you're one of one. You know when you're growing 5060% you you become very unique. All of a sudden you're a sort of a 1% kind of a company. You're an outlier and so you get treated. You know incredibly well. So that's the backdrop. I think a company should be going public around year five, year six what revenue footprint about 50 million. You know at 50 million when they're doubling, I think that they should be going up and you know it allows them to build capital slowly, it allows them to basically contain control, it minimizes dilution. I think it's a really powerful model. And then on, on the number of specs, what I would say is I think it's really good that the market is getting diversified. I think what's going to happen is like. The the thing with Spax is it's it's going to be no different than in some ways the banks that preceded us, which is that there's going to be a distribution. You can go to Goldman Sachs and that'll mean some one thing. You can go to Merrill Lynch or B of A or UBS or Jeffries. It'll mean other things. You can go to Allen and company. It'll mean yet another different set of things. And I'm sure there's going to be a, you know, an organization that is all about cost, that someone is going to be all about relationships some. So I just think that's going to be the distribution. My personal perspective, it's probably us and maybe one or two other people who really dominate the space. And I'll and I'll tell you, the only reason why I say that, I think it's going to be really important when these people try to get these facts done, what they're going to realize is it's really hard and it's hard for a couple of reasons. Number one is you have to marry operational insight. And public market sophistication and the founder will get really smart about being able to figure out whether this person is just a financial arbitrage her or if the person has enough operational experience to deeply understand the business, why you have to translate it to the public markets. Well, that's one huge thing that I think that people will. We'll start to, we'll start to hone in on anyways there's a bunch of other things, but are you now competing with other people for the stacks of sacks, agree with the 50 million? Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm cool with that. I invest well before that. So I'd be happy for you. Probably have a bigger portfolio, $50 million investment. Yeah, it is. It's great for for for me and Jason and I you know, I I think Jamath deserves a ton of credit on on this whole space thing. It is. I don't know if all the listeners are aware of this, but the spec things become a huge wave. Uh, there's a ton of people creating them, Kevin Hart says a new one. Reid Hoffman has a new one there. You know, the East Coast hedge fund guys, Pincus and and then the East Coast hedge funds like Bill Ackman, whatever, they're all creating them. So Trump has really started a wave here. And I think the appeal of a spack to a founder, I'll put in a plug of why I think it's a good idea for a founder to consider. This is because you essentially what founders are used to is doing, you know, private rounds, right. You agree on a on an amount race and evaluation. And it's a percent dilution and you're done. That's it. And that's simple, right? And and when you IPO and need to raise money, it's not like that. You have to then work with an investment bank. They'll put together a book. You do like a roadshow, you do this whole dog and pony thing. You don't know how much money you're going to get at the end of that process or what the valuations going to be. And then on top of that, we know statistically Bill Gurley published all the stats, the investment banks are going to rip you off. So, you know, so that what a SPAC does is it prices like a late stage private round. I disagree with the spec motor on evaluation and amount raised. And then on top of it, you get kind of a direct listing along with it and all of a sudden you start trading as a public company. And so a SPAC is like a combination direct listing plus private round. And I think that's going to be appealing to a lot of founders as they start to discover this more and more sacks. In a way, you're saying it's going to feel more like doing a series D than it does a roadshow. And I think that comfort level for somebody like Robin Hood. Or calm or data stacks or thumbtack or any of these companies that you and I are best free company your portfolio I'm just listen I got two IPO's in two years this is I think this is gonna be the new thing for in early stage investors is we're not gonna count unicorns anymore we're gonna count spacks, we're gonna count public listings right. And and I think that's probably better by the way the other the other thing that I'll say to founders is one is I think you need to you need to think about do these people have. The combination of operational and financial acumen in the public markets. And investing experience in the public markets and the operational credibility to describe the business. And I think you can trade off one for the other if one is so deep. Meaning if Warren Buffett was doing his back, you'd say, well, he has no operational experience, but he's so credible in the public markets, then you know, that's all that matters. But you need to be super, super deep in one or have a really brilliant and thoughtful level of credibility in the publics, meaning an early stage investor who isn't married to somebody who can basically say. I know how hedge funds work. I've made them money and I'm going to make them more money and mutual funds, etcetera is troublesome. The second thing is for founders, you have to really make sure you understand what is in it for the person that's doing this back. I mean in every deal I write a minimum of $100 million personally and that's a lot. And so I skin in the game, I feel very much at risk. And so I take a lot of time to make sure these things go well. And then the third is that for the spec person, what I'll tell them is they are going to. Mind that there's a bunch of land mines and I'm not gonna, you know, say it up front because I think it'll be fun for them to find out themselves along the way. But there. But these things are hard. The first one took Me 2 1/2 years. They're hard. They're hard. They're hard. Hey, let's swing to the election now and talk a little bit about the flip flopping we're all doing because we've gone from Trump's a lock to Trump's not a lock, you know? And we've had many different theories, but here we are. Are we 60 days out now how many days till the election is it exactly 60 and then the first debate remember September 29th. Yeah yeah. So we're we're we're at the 55 or 56 days more than the taping of this and the first debate I think is September 30th. So we're we're but three weeks away from. Joe Biden and Trump going at it, what's everybody's handicapping now? The the market. The markets seem to be saying even money or a slight edge to Joe Biden. But what are our thoughts? I I think that. I think Biden's looked the crispest he's looked. OK. So is that actually encouraging or not encouraging? I think it really is because I think he's a really good, like I said, he doesn't have to be better than Donald Trump. He just has to not be Donald Trump for a lot of people. And so, you know, he becomes a very good do no harm alternative because you know to support Donald Trump you have to have a view to support Joe Biden you can have no view and I think that that in general that's a, that's a demand maximizing. Thing to do. So I think he's relatively well positioned. It's the crispest I've ever seen him on television. There's less stuttering. There's less not stuttering, but like less like mental gaffes. You know, the what do you think of the VP choice, Kamala? Think safe. So I, I I agree with tamales that that was kind of the the take or or theory on Biden like a month or two ago is that he could just run as a protest vote against Trump. And and and and that's why the basement strategy appeared to make sense is that he would say nothing, do nothing, go nowhere and just and just try to run as a protest vote against Trump. And I think that was working a couple of months ago when, you know, a COVID seemed a lot worse, B, the economy seemed a lot worse. We're now down to about 8% unemployment. We were at 13 or 14% and see you know, Trump had seemed to kind of mishandle. The the reaction to to Floyd he seemed to be inciting it but now we have this this issue of the the looting and violence and predominantly Democrat run cities. And I think you know Trump has sort of found his sales pitch now in opposing the basically the the the radical left and these these mobs and and protests that seem to be you know causing tremendous unrest and. Looting and violence in our cities, and I think it's, I think it's a in combination with the improving conditions, the economy and COVID, I think it's a winning pitch for him unless Biden finds a more compelling way of responding, which he has not to date. I think, you know, somebody like Bill Clinton would know exactly how to respond. I think he would, you know, in the just better instincts. Well, I think, you know, he would pull a sister soldier to use a term from the the, you know political dictionary where, you know, maybe he would take this crazy new book in defense of looting. And figure out, you know, and give a speech denouncing that. I mean, he would find somebody to his left who represents, you know, a fringe of the the left that he presumably doesn't support and find a way to distance himself through, denounce them and he doesn't. Like Antifa, like you know the the anyone you know any of the left footing in Portland, looting in Portland. I think there's a lot of talk nobody wants nobody wants to support that. And so Biden comes out and says, hey, we don't support that and it gives him that law and order vote but and he hasn't done he hasn't really done that. I mean so two of my favorite political pundits right now are Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi who are you know very they're strong supporters of Biden. They're very anti Trump, but they think he's failing on sort of. This these issues because he's not. He's not figuring out the right way to to denounce what's happening. I think a lot of this has to do with when kids go back to school and the death rate of COVID. And as I was tweeting and I got, I got a lot of people angry at me about tweeting this. But I said I think this is a set up for Trump to go into the first debate with, you know, well under, you know, six, 700 deaths a day and then the next debate in October with, you know, call it 3 or 400, that's a day. And basically declare that he did solve COVID because we've been trending down for five weeks now. And he started wearing a mask. 5-6 weeks ago, seven weeks ago, July 11th was the first day he wore a mask. A cynic would say he almost timed mask wearing, which is obviously what we talked about in the first episode or two of all in podcast, was our discussion about why is wearing a mask so difficult for him? And it seems like he slow played it. He, you know, he sat, he's he's slow played, he hit his set on the turn and here he is like he wore the mask on July 11th. He wore it four months late. But guess what, as Chamath was saying, everybody wears a mask and every and and these things go down in Italy. We're going to come into the first debate. What if it's 400 deaths a day and then the second debate, it's 200. That's a day. And then our kids are back in school in October, which seems to be the case, right? All the schools are saying, you know, be ready for October to open. And what if he actually does have a vaccine that has somewhat credibility or any of these high speed testing machines? Come on. I mean, this could be a setup of all setups for him to just, you know, drop the microphone. Hey, look, the economy is at an all time high and COVID deaths are an all time low. Well, I mean, yeah, I think they're on fire. That to me seems like the the trajectory. I mean, we spent a long time on this pod talking about what a disaster San Francisco and California are. Those are one party States and cities. And I think, you know, we're not just electing a person as president. We're also electing a party and a movement and a governing philosophy. And however much Trump is, you know, disliked by a lot of people, I think a lot of people are looking at, you know? I I think they they they may like Joe Biden personally and and think that he personally is safe, but they don't like the movement and the party and the governing philosophy that is now associated with Biden. So if you had to put your entire net worth on it chamath Biden or Trump. Biden, I think Biden is going to sacks entire net worth. I I I would I predict Trump at this point you predict but you but you wouldn't put your entire net worth on if you had to. I could see your hesitation. You want Trump Trump to win but you would you wouldn't put you wouldn't put your entire net worth on him. But yeah, of course not. You would put it this is, this is about a 55% sort of thing. So Biden has a 55% chance of winning. So even though you're voting for Trump, you are not going, you would not put your fortune on Biden. You asked me who I predict right now I'm predicting Trump. You'll remember on the last part, I predicted Biden. So it moves depending on what I see happening and I'm going to go with Biden. By the way, Jason knows, Jason, I think, I think a better way to get a better answer is not to force somebody to put their entire net worth on the line. It's just OK. Who do you think is gonna win? Who do you think's gonna win? Sex? How many times I have to answer this question. You think Trump's going to win? You actually, yes. Yes, I do, actually. Really? It's fascinating, huh? And it's free. Remember, there is the first time I've said this here. I think it's, I think it's the same as it was last time for me and has been most of this process is it's a coin flip and it still is a coin flip. And there's a lot of noise between here and 60 days from here. Alright, well then if we if we do think it's a coin flip freeberg what happens if Trump is elected again? Some people think this is all institutions are broken forever. America's broken forever hyperbolic that that's that's the perception on both sides, right? So the perception and the motivation on both sides is democracy is crumbling and the resultant action is to elect the the person you think will restore democracy. The reality is both candidates, to some degree, might move us a little bit. Further away from democracy, and some might argue that Trump makes us feel a little bit more like a autocratic, dictatorial regime. And some might say that Biden makes us feel a little bit more like an AOC socialist regime. It's not all the way as if we had Bernie in the seat, but you know the the the reaction isn't necessarily, let's go back to the middle, let's become a centrist government, let's let's have good political debate and A and a good. By the way, The One Show I've been watching a lot of lately, just to nostalgia, to to chamath tweet earlier today and make me feel better. About life is West Wing, where, you know, Jed Bartlett is the president and he wants a great national debate and we all want to have this intellectual exercise of coming to the truth and coming to the best decision for the nation. And I don't think anyone feels like that's the case today, nor will that be the case tomorrow with either of these guys in the seat. And I think the the point then becomes, well, who's going to better align with my values? And you know, it is really a crumbling democracy kind of motivation, I would guess, if you were to survey people as to how they're making their choice if Trump is elected. Larry Bird, do you feel it is an acute you know existential crisis for America as a democracy you personally I I don't I don't think democracies and with a bang I think they end with a whimper and I think that's been the case historically and you know no democracy has has lasted our our democracy in the US has has lasted longer than many. But democracies I'll just tell you my my point of view on this democracies ultimately enable. About freedom of operation and free markets that that result in greater progress than any other governing system. The problem with progress is that progress is asymmetric. You have some people who progress at a much greater rate than than most and and it is that delta that motivates the end of that system. Ultimately, while everyone in the United States or the average and even the bottom quartile of the population in the US is better off than they were 50 years ago in terms of income and health care and shelter and access to food and access to all these things. There, the top 1% of the US is further ahead than the median. And it is that delta that motivates the end of democracy, and it is that is, which is then perceived to be unfair about this governing system. And that ultimately results in fascism or socialism. And then fascism results. Socialism ultimately restricts anyone from progression. And that's why fascism and socialism ultimately end up in in, in some sort of, you know, democratic outcome. And it is a cycle. And, you know, we're kind of in this, you know, awkward phase of trying to figure out what the hell we're gonna be next. And I don't think that awkward. Is it's realized in the next presidential term, but it is going to be realized in our lifetimes. I think that that's a really good point. I completely agree with that. Go, Biden. Go. Please win. OK, wrapping up here, media selections of your bestie, summer bestie, book bestie, TV show bestie. Binge. What do you got? You got a bestie book recommendation, sacks? You got a bestie? I yeah, my, my, my recommendation is to be a little different. You know, I've been, I've been subscribing to a lot of newsletters on sub stack. Yeah, and I found that to be pretty interesting. And I mentioned two of my favorite writers, especially around politics and election time, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi. So check that windows open enough to get to those two who are super polarized. And they actually kicked Andrew Sullivan out of New York. Magazine for making other writers at New York magazine feel unsafe with these words all all my favorite writers seem to have been cancelled at some previous publication and now they've set themselves up on sub stack. So it is amazing how the Overton Window has closed best DC do you have a bestie binge, a bestie book? Or a bestie newsletter or bestie podcast you want to share with the besties? I would give a shout out to a book called Americana which is about it's a history of American capitalism told in chapters for every. Call it like, you know, 5 to 7 or 10 year, decade. It's really interesting for people into business. It's written by a guy named Boo Srinivasan. OK, bestie freeberg, what do you got? Bestie Queen of quinoa. I took a week off and hung out at the beach and I binge watched the Godfather 1/2 and three as I've done several times in my past. I also watched one of my favorite top five films of all time. There will be blood by Paul Tompkins and such a good feeling. That opening scene is just crazy. Every opening scene. It's just such a beautiful film. High Drake, a milkshake. It got me down. Yeah, got me down this research path on the Standard Oil company and I. Get up First off, I ended up reading all Mario Puzo's godfather, which is very graphic and interesting, but if you've seen the movie, I don't think you get much more from the book. But then I started reading Ron Chernow's biography of Ohh yes, Rockefeller. Yeah. And I don't know if anyone's made it through that 727 page too. I got about 500 pages in. It is detailed, this detailed. So it's not, you know, it's not probably you won't gain as much from it as perhaps reading a Wikipedia article. But the Standard Oil, the, the era, if you think about what technology is and what we call technology in the US today, in our world, and and it's mostly software and now increasingly biotech. Umm. You know, there have been different eras of technology and different eras of Monopoly and and just hearing the story of the railroads and Standard Oil and what took place in this country, it's incredible. And it's so analogous to what's going on and and the outrage and the dissent and the fake news that goes on about these people as they've been successful, you know, it really is history teaches us everything and it's so I've just, you know, just in the era of Standard Oil, just learning about the stories of that time and the people of that. Time. This is one book that's that's been, you know, an interesting part of the tale. Besties. I gotta go. I love you guys. Love you too, Jason and Friedberger. I'll see you on Thursday. Yes. Take it up. Let's go outside. I'll just give them all my closing. The fish that ate the whale, a book about Sam Zemurray, who was the banana King. And another interesting book you might like. I love capitalism. By Ken Langone, who, you know, belt. He Belt Home Depot and it's a pretty great story about both stories of capitalism and I think you'll like them freeberg if you like the yeah, the the books you were talking about. Yeah. Alright everybody, we'll see you next time and don't forget to rate and subscribe and we'll be taping another episode in another 5-6, seven or eight weeks, hopefully earlier than that. Take our sacks, take care freeberg, take our chamath and we'll see you all next time on the all in podcast.