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Hey everybody. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of all in the podcast, episode 8. Besties are here to talk about tech, economy, politics, the election, and our lives in Silicon Valley. Welcome back to the pod. David Freedberg, the Queen of Quinoa, is here. Jakel always, always a joy. Yes. Undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest. You you bowled on SF. After the smoke, you you lasted how many days into the BBQ, into the Orange cloud? I left on the Wednesday of the Orange cloud. And took it was crazy. Took my kiddos and were waiting it out. The fires in the in the Midwest. Well, it's beautiful the last two days here. Also from an undisclosed bestie location. David Sacks back on the program. Rain Man is here. Yep. Definitely here. Good to be here. Alright, well, there you go, man of many words. And Speaking of the man of many words, hot off of seven keynotes this week talking about spacks, the Prince of Spacks, Chamath Palihapitiya back on the pod. How are you besties? Well, we had a little bestie reunion, which I think we can talk about. Charmouth invited us over to have an outdoor bestie reunion. Yeah, and you gave one of them gonorrhea and you gave the other two. Well, we it's crazy to say, but I literally had to call chamath. Two or three days after he hosted ohsawa socially, by the way, a socially distanced dinner outdoors, socially distant dinner outdoors. Wonderful. We had some great rib eye, fantastic cracked open, a nice bottle or two of wine and the port and but but then what did you do? Well then, a family member of mine who shall remain nameless. Decided to go to a party. In San Francisco and possibly got the Wrona and he tested positive. And then I had to get everybody in my house tested twice. Everybody came back negative, but I had to call Chamath and tell him listen. I I wasn't exposed, but some members of my family were. Therefore I might have second hand exposure. I took two tests, came back -. 2 times in a row. Can can I just say though, it's really crazy like you, we have to develop all these new social norms and you're not sure what to say and you're not, you're not sure how to react. And it's like, it must have been like when you know, you got to call and it's like, hey, listen, you know, your girlfriend's like, I may be pregnant or like, you know, somebody's like, hey, listen, I have an STD. Like you're just like what? I felt like that when I was texting. Chat there's like three of us, and I had to text with my tail between my legs. I think I've been exposed. I'm really sorry, guys. I think calcaneus is the Greek word for turd in the punch bowl. You know, it's all. Yeah, it's some. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if we can tell the the code 13. Oh, I'm going to tell the code 13 story. I wasn't even there, but I. Is legendary Jason Jason Jason Calcanis gets invited by David Sacks out of his benevolence to come to stay in Hawaii at The Four Seasons. And at somewhere, at some point during this week long Vacation Day, Christmas Day, you hear a shout from the pool from the lifeguard. Well, no, no, it was it was even before that we were sitting at the bar. So me and Jason and his brother-in-law were sitting at the bar having drinks and all of a sudden there's a commotion and the bartenders and the staff and you started hearing people on walkie talkies. In Code 13, code 13 and people running, people who are right, we don't. We don't know what to make of that. We think it's a terrorist attack. Literally, The Four Seasons is on a high alert, alarms are going off, boom, boom. And then and then we hear, OK, well, we were like we said to the Barton, what's the code 13. And he's like, well, it means that some kid, you know, crapped in the pool. Yeah. Dead and #2 in the pool and we're and we're like, you know, and then and we're like, OK, well, you know, it was Jason's kid. Well, so then then I started hearing, sorry about like the sax kids and I'm like, Oh no sax code 13. Yes, he picked on sax. They they thought it was us. And then it turns out it was it was Jacob's kid. And we were we were never able to get a a reservation. But they have this again. Well, it's so funny. It's like I I've been, I went, I went there at one point a few years later. And it's a whole ordeal because they said, so how do you guys deal with like, you know? Code 13 they're like ohh code 13. Evacuate. The whole half the island gets sent away. Here's what had to happen. This is on. Just to put the code 13 perspective, I think my 10 year old at the time was two years old. My sister-in-law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody and the baby's not wearing a swim diaper and so. Basically, a Snickers bar floats out of the. And there's the Snickers bar at the pool. OK, you guys have kids. You know how big these things could get. You're like, how is that possible that you know, like a movie theater size, snicker king size? Snicker pool is floating in the middle, but this is on December 25th. These poor people are spending $3000 a night. There is not a single chaise lounge by the pool that's not occupied. It is peak capacity at The Four Seasons Hotel on the Big Island or wherever it was. The pool has to be shut down for four hours. The person has to get in with the hazmat suit, retrieve the Snickers bar, King size Snickers has to get out of it. Then they have to throw in every chemical known to man. So much so that the pool is ruined for Christmas Day. And that's the code 13 straight. Getting back to our topics, Tik T.O.K is on the verge of being banned from additional US downloads of Commerce Department has announced that it will ban us downloads and business transactions with Tik T.O.K and WeChat. Somehow WeChat got pulled into this on Sunday, this will. Seemingly, we're going to allow Tik T.O.K to operate until November 12th, so they got a little bit of a stay of execution. But of course, if they can't update in the App Store, that means there could be any security vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated. And Steven Muchin attempting to push through a Tik T.O.K deal that will enable retaining some Chinese ownership. And there's some sort of agreement now with Oracle. We'll have some kind of an. Oversight board to do continuous third party audits. What does this say chamath about where we're at and do you believe that? You know, a Democratic leader, let's say, Obama or Biden, would have taken the same approach here. Does it worry you that the government's getting this involved? Or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and saying, hey, listen, we're gonna need to have some basic level of reciprocity from China if we're gonna allow you in our app, Sir. You know, I think, I think it's kind of like, you know, like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other and they're like, turn left and you're like, no, no, I'm going to turn right. And then you realize you should have turned left, but then you keep turning right. More times than you take a couple more lefts, but then you end up at the same place. But it was complete ****. Dumb luck. I feel like we're going to end up in the same place here with Tik T.O.K, which is that I think that the Trump administration probably is doing this, and Donald Trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power. And, you know, American exceptionalism, which I'm not sure is the right reason to do it, but I think the outcome is right, which is that for years China has essentially been shut out to American companies unless you effectively just kowtow to these guys. And, you know, some companies have and some companies like, you know, Google have not, and other companies like Facebook have been totally, basically blocked from entering. And so I think it's completely right. It's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantage that that Chinese. Companies have had and so you have to play hardball to create a different set of rules. And I think this probably gets us to that place. The reason why it's happening is probably more because the tick tock people played that joke on Trump at the Tulsa rally. If you had, if I had to guess, yeah. What do you think Friedberg is this a good sign for America and the globe that you know and and the democratic nations of the world that we're going to put our foot down with China and say, hey, some reciprocity or you're not gonna be able to participate in our marketplace or is this a personal vendetta? From Trump or a little bit of both, I don't see how it's anything but a slippery slope forward in the escalation of, you know, what's gonna be kind of transpiring between these two nations and the the next couple of years and maybe decades. You know, this goes back to the, you know, early 2000s when Google and others wanted to enter China, and China has for, for those who don't know, China has this great firewall, right? Chinese citizens can't openly access the rest of the Internet, and China wanted to censor content and censor what their citizens are accessing. And so there's been a back and forth between the tech industry and China going back almost 20 years now to try and figure out how we can bring our services to China and then. Trying to launch as a service that's very successful in the US and in Tik T.O.K and I think it's just a, you know, a part of the reciprocity equation which doesn't resolve anything, it only escalates things. So it's unfortunate, but it's just kind of another step in the path that I think is inevitable in front of us here. Saxa will give you the the final word here. Is this a good thing for humanity for? International relations that China is, you know, having a little bit of a hand check here like, hey, there's going to be a limit to how you could operate in the West or is this a personal vendetta from Trump? And then what do you see going forward? It's it's true that, I mean first of all our social networks are not allowed over there. So I don't think we need to feel bad about not allowing their social networks over here. But besides reciprocity or the lack of it, I think the deeper reason for this is just around data security and how the and I think that the CCP has given us adequate grounds here to ban not just tick tock, but apps like that because President Xi himself declared this policy. Civil military fusion, which means that any business in China, any business asset there, including data, can be appropriated to serve the ends of the Chinese military or the Communist Party. And, you know, the the CCP has set up this vast surveillance apparatus over its own citizens. It's asserted extra territorial sovereignty over former Chinese citizens would, meaning dissidents, so that the Chinese diaspora anywhere in the world, they've asserted sovereignty over that. And, you know, recently there was a pretty remarkable speech by the FBI Director, Christopher Wray. Describing, you know, Operation Fox Hunt, which is the Chinese effort to track down and presumably ultimately punish Chinese dissidents anywhere in the world. And as part of that, that the Chinese have sort of weaponized AI and social media. And so he also described, I mean this is like pretty amazing. I didn't, you know that the, that the Equifax hack, which collected data on something like sensitive data over 100 million Americans, the Chinese were behind that. I didn't know that. And so, you know, it's it's it's true. It's true that, you know no one piece of data poses a, by itself a risk to, to, to the security of of America or Americans. But it's sort of the systematic collection and aggregation of the data and the hacking collectively that I do think pose a security threat. And I think you've got to stop right there, sack. Actually, an individual's data could absolutely be compromised if they have access to your passwords because through the clipboard. Have access to your phone role. If a young person had photos that were, say, compromising in their photo roll, the phone is, you know, basically given access to that. They upload that. Now you could use that as compumate against a senators child or against a senator themselves. And this seems like an abstract thing, but this is exactly what the Chinese and Russians have been doing for a very long time. If you've seen the series the Americans and you go back to the 80s to see the weaponization of, you know, somebody who was in the closet who was gay during that time. Or somebody was having extramarital fair. You could compromise anybody with just sexual compromise. And you hear we're giving access to hundreds of millions of people's photo libraries, by the way clipboards. By the way, you just said something that's really scary, which is like, if you're, if you're the Chinese and you know they have the patience to play the long game, you just aggregate and collect this thing for 30 years on the off chance that one of these people becomes important. I mean, what is the real Manchurian candidate? Just you. You just surveilled 300 million Americans and just say, you know what? We'll take our shot. I mean, it's going to cost us a few billion dollars a year in storage. Who cares? Yeah, I'm not like is, is there really a case that what they're doing in the Tik T.O.K app, I don't know how much you guys have read some of the studies on what they are actually pulling, but is there really a case that what they're pulling is particularly different than what would be pulled by pretty much any other social app or photo sharing app on your phone? There was some kind of insight that, hey, they were capturing the Mac address, but that was up until last November. After November, like the, the app kind of refreshed and stopped doing that. And it was a hack that some number of apps out there were already doing. But my understanding is the way that they've built the app, it's the same kind of ad tracking type approach that a lot of apps are taking. I think. I think it's a naive position that because we haven't caught them doing something nefarious that they aren't actually doing something nefarious right now. If you look at what MBS did to Jeff Bezos sending that, I guess it was a movie file or an image. That then wound up hacking his WeChat and his phone like, yeah, I think they've built the software. I think it's purpose built, whether it's WeChat or tick Tock, to have these backdoors. It there's no way the Chinese government is not influencing that. Guys. Look, if you if you had to bet, David, what do you think the odds are between zero and 100 with 100 being absolute certainty that there are foreign national spies that work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft? That's my point. It's. That, I mean look, I think that there are no, but do you think it's 100% ohh of course it's 100. Yeah, I think at every one of them it's probably 100%. Yeah, at least one, you know, foreign national that has a connection to intelligence in China. Yeah, it's probably 100%, a 100%. So my point is Tik T.O.K is 100 Chinese, 100% Chinese. So we don't even have to guess whether it's. But my, my my point is, like if if if there is some, you know, access to personal data that we're all concerned about being compromised at literally every other ******* app company. Where every other app, I mean that is not connected to, you know, but the point that chamat just made is that they very well could be. The fact is we as individuals have exposed all of our personal and private data to six or seven companies. I think you're saying it may be really right thing. It is a this is a Canary in the coal mine for a bigger issue. This is why I'm saying I think that, you know, Trump is probably acting out of an expression of power, but I think what we're realizing is actually this is about core fundamental privacy. And the safety and security of each of us as individuals. And it should start a bigger conversation, like privacy. I really do think this privacy is the killer feature of the 2020, right? You know what David just said about like, if you're a Chinese X national, the idea that you're like, look, I've been a citizen of three countries. The idea that the Sri Lankan Government all of a sudden may not like what I have to say and can spy on me or, you know, root my phone or steal my data. That it really disturbs me like, I'm sorry, but no, go **** yourself. Like I left that country for a reason. Yeah. So I think, I think the Republican to watch on this is, well besides Trump, I guess, is there's a senator, Josh Hawley, who is crazy. Well, he's he, he's sort of a a critic of of big tech. And I think he's got some interesting things to say, but but in this particular area, he is proposing legislation to regulate the types of information that can be collected. By applications that are based in countries that are fundamentally hostile or adversarial to the US and that, to me seems like the right policy because, you know, it's not just about Tik T.O.K. It's about all the apps that collect information on Americans that can be appropriated by, you know, the Chinese Communist Party or Russia or Iran, places like that. And so I think we need a more holistic policy here than just banning Tik T.O.K. And it may not be necessary to ban Tik T.O.K. If you had the right limitations placed on them but but I but I but I do think this this this whole sort of compromise solution with Larry Ellison and Oracle that makes no sense to me. This idea that you know Ellison will own 20% of the company but nothing else really changes. It'll still be based in China, a Chinese company they'll still be Chinese engineers based in China who you know and they still own 80% of it. I mean how how does that really address the the data security don't you don't you think David that that's just basically a way of. This it's a wealth transfer to Larry Ellison, which I think is amazing. I mean if I could I would do it. Yeah. Despite dance. It's no, it's it's it's it's bite dance. Put it in your lap. Yeah. No, it's it's bite dance. It's bite dance. Paying political protection money. Yeah to Larry Ellison to be their bodyguard in this political process. But and I but that's why I don't think it's gonna fly. I mean Holly has already said that it's not good enough for him and so even if I think and it doesn't live up to to Trump stated criteria even though. He seems to be. Is this ultimately a Cepheus ruling sex? Is that who's gonna make the final call on this? Or does Trump have sole executive kind of authority on, on foreign security, on security grants to kind of block it? Does it go to Cepheus? That's a good question. I think Sophie is disapproves M&A, right? It has to approve it. Yeah. I mean, so you're right. I mean there are there are members of Congress that are all gonna need to be convinced to get this thing done well, but Sophia approves M&AI didn't think they could like block applications. As of last year, as of as of last year, every investment triggers Cepheus. It's it's a weird new thing that happened. I was involved in a company recently that seems secondary to the national security power that the that Trump may have. So this is almost like A2 tier kind of thing. One is to approve, one is for it. You know, for Trump to be a cool with it national security terms and then second is the antitrust issues. If we just go back a second talking about the broad, you know as chamath called it, kind of this Canary in a coal mine. You know, I don't know how many of you guys use an Amazon Echo or Google Home or Amazon Fire TV or a nest thermostat. Every, every single, every single one of them has ambient audio listening on it. Every single one of them even. And another thing people don't realize is every speaker is actually a microphone as well as a speaker. You can actually listen. Any House Speaker, whether it's a Sonos device or what have you. And so we've got, you know, our homes are already wired. Amazon Fire TV runs on ******* Android. I mean, there's 100 ways into your home as it is. It seems to me like there's a significant concern about how much data we are already exposing that's being highlighted here. I don't think that there's, you know, it's sort of like playing a the where you try and pop the hamsters in the game. It's like at some point we're going to realize these things are here. Everywhere. And it's not just a company, but it is how we are living our lives now and how technology is kind of capturing every piece of information about everything we do. This is like go back to this, somebody will take this or many people will take this and run with it. But I think that there is an enormous amount of money. That consumers will pay for the assurance of anonymity and privacy. I don't really know how it's expressed, David, but like, you know, for example, like if I could get a phone. That was completely locked down and encrypted and. Like a burner phone is what you're talking about. And like a lot of people are now doing this, they take a second phone, they put AP, VPN. So the are the first step in all right, and you're seeing I tried to become very popular. Well, like I tried to use signal, I try to use FaceTime audio, I'll even use WhatsApp now just because these things are end to end encrypted and I have nothing particularly important or interesting to say or hide. But I just don't like the idea that in the open wild, I'm just, I just feel very vulnerable. To data breaches more than any other kind of breach. I mean, I had this conversation with somebody that was, you know, sort of helping me lock down my Wi-Fi network. And for a long time I only had one endpoint. And all of a sudden he's like, look, let's have a home and a guest. But in that conversation, what he was saying is the biggest form of theft isn't like burglaries anymore. It's basically people just having packet sniffers outside your house because they can get access to everything and anything. And can I ask you, can I ask you a question? There's a, there's a book by a guy named Stephen Baxter as a science fiction book from years ago. And Arthur Clark called the light of other days. And these guys developed wormhole technology. They could put it in any house and they could see and listen to everything. And suddenly the technology became kind of ubiquitous, so everyone could create a wormhole anywhere and see and hear everything. So effectively, information was completely transferable and free and available to everyone. And the book kind of highlights how society changed in that context. So in a world where you see where everyone is and what everyone is doing and saying. There's no longer any notion of information asymmetry. And the way people operate and behave changes because so much of our life is dependent on people not knowing things about us that we know. So when you're when your employee is gonna go interview for another job and they tell you they're going to the dentist, you can say, like, hey, that's not true. And the guy says, you know what? I'm actually picking about looking for another job because I hate working for you. You suck. So everyone starts changing kind of how they behave. Do you think that 50 years from now that's where the world heads? Do you really think it's possible to stop this train in its tracks and not end up in a world of what I would call? Kind of like hyper transparency where all information becomes kind of because it's already being collected everywhere about everyone and it's only, I think it's rising exponentially. People are gonna start, I think that people are gonna start turning their homes into those skiffs, sensitive compartmented information facilities. You always hear about like senators going into the skiff kind of situation for private stuff. I think like people are going to start taking this very seriously as they get compromised, you know, time after time and embarrassing and you can see it with Apple making it their marketing strategy. You don't, you don't. You don't think society changes. Oh, I think it was already changed already with like, people getting their phones hacked and they're, you know, nudes being leaked. People now normalize that. I think it makes the world a much ******** place because it basically robs us of our own independence and our fundamental right to privacy. And I just think that's a really bad outcome. And so, you know what? Like if if like the need for likes? And tweets and followers leads me to a place where I lose privacy. I would just say shut them all down now because I think that people's self worth is much bigger than what they understand it to be if they're willing to make that trade off. But yeah, most people appreciate that. Well, I would also just add that just because there's more transparency doesn't mean that it serves the interests of truth. Like Jason said earlier, this information can be used to create. Of OPS, you know and right. Manipulate and you know, it's. And so, yeah, you know, like Trotsky said, just because you're an intern, war doesn't mean war isn't interested in you. I mean, this data can be collected to run operations on people that don't serve, you know, the interests of greater transparency or I think, I think people don't think from first principles on this topic. This is sort of like the idiotic orthodoxy of Silicon Valley, which is like. They wrapped themselves in the flag of transparency, like it meets something, but they have no real idea what it really means at scale and at the limit and right. You know, there's one thing about getting access to a ******* looker dashboard. Who cares? But the word transparency is used for that, the same way that it's used for David, exactly what you just said. And there are two completely different things. They have completely different meanings and the latter's implications are so much more important. And we need to think about this from first principles, because I think peoples inherent. Identity as human beings ultimately gets put at risk over time. It should absolutely be the case that these social networks or anybody collecting data gives an this is the way I would form the legislation. If you are running a service like Facebook, Twitter, Google for free and you're monetizing through advertising, you must provide an office like what they do. Provide this. Mortised. Listen, if you're using your service to advertising services, then I think you should be forced to give a option for whatever the amount of that monetization is a year to pay us a subscription. So for example, if Facebook makes $80.00 per person. You lost it. You lost this a monetization Jason sorry I think let's it's it's over, it's over. Next segment. Next, next, next segment. Segment, next next segment. Alright well just as we wrap up here on this segment, Kevin sister might he's in the running apparently to take over for Tik T.O.K is that a good idea sacks is I think you know system I I think it's a pretty it's it's a dumb idea unless the company literally becomes an American company. I don't know why you've made this point in the context of Kevin Mayor like if if he's working for bite dance he's working for the Byte Dance Board directors which reports to the CCP it's just why would someone who's. In his position, when a sacrifices independence to do that, yeah, it makes no sense. I mean that's this is becoming the big test on everybody's moral compass, especially Hollywood, which is changing the ending of movies to satisfy the CCP, like literally the people who are the biggest virtue signals in the world. Celebrities, Hollywood, China, China knows how to use its market access. We don't. We just threw open our markets to their products, which caused, you know, us to lose our whole, you know, industrial. You know, manufacturing capacity, we didn't demand anything really in exchange for that. Whereas in order to get access to China you have to say and do the right things or certainly to to not criticize them. And so they they know how to as we saw with the NBA and the whole. Daryl Morey thing, you know, they they know how to use their market access. Alright, well let's go on to the economy here. We've been sheltering in place essentially for six months and now people are starting to talk about, hey, maybe we need to do another lockdown and obviously this economic challenge is being felt very differently in some places. It's an opportunity obviously a lot of people with SAS software and. You know, people who work behind keyboards are having a renaissance and a lot of the economy is pouring into their keyboards while restaurants, retail and anybody who has to work in the real world is part of what's becoming essentially a permanent unemployed class that perhaps this is starting to look like a drive one of Ubi. What are your thoughts from off on this permanent unemployment situation? I, I have a, I have a bunch of thoughts here. Let me just go kind of give you the stream of consciousness like Trump. Powell gave a speech, I think it was two or three weeks ago in Jackson Hole and he basically said, like, look, the Federal Reserve is taking a completely new posture on rates and you know, they they basically clarified that in explicit detail. Just. Just a few days ago and they basically said we're keeping rates where they are until at least 2023. You know, my personal view is for rates are going to stay basically at zero for the next half decade. And I think it's probably pretty likely that we're going to see rates stay at zero probably a full decade. So what does that mean? OK, well, in a typical recession, what happens is you don't know where the bottom is, right? Things sort of sort of decay. They get a little bit worse. I get a little bit worse. They get a little bit worse, then things bottom out and then, you know, you start to grow and you can use interest rate policy to kind of help navigate how soft the landing is as well as how fast the recovery is. That's sort of like classic economics and how bankers and the markets and all these folks used to work and it eventually would trickle into Main Street. Now we just have none of those things. We have rates 0. They're not going to go anywhere. They're not going to go up. They're probably not going to go down. They're going to kind of just stay where they are. That's one thing. Second is we priced in the bottom, which was the first month. Of the coronavirus, we took the markets basically assuming, oh, there's no growth and now we've priced things back as if they'll recover. The rating agencies are out to lunch. They've basically said, you know what, I'm going to look out till 2021 or 2022. Give me a reason to justify not to downgrade you so that you can continue to raise more debt, which by the way is free. So you have all these dynamics where I think the capital markets are in an expansive mood and an expansive mode. And in that, I actually think there's a real bid to employment because there isn't really that many ways now you can, without just getting completely ripped apart, put money to work. And so the real earnest capital allocation strategy that's left for most CEOs is to actually buy things, invest in things, try more things. And all of those, I think, lead to net employment. So in general, I'm kind of constructive and bullish, and I don't think that this idea that there's a permanent unemployment class. Sticks around freeberg. What are your thoughts? Obviously, a lot of Americans work in retail. You know, we obviously have all these restaurant workers who are out of work and travel is now hitting the end of the furloughs at a lot of these different airlines, etcetera. What's your thought on this unemployment, Middle America? Catastrophe. Well, I don't think happiness comes from. You know, absolute standards of living. I think happiness arises. From ones relative standard of living, whether that's relative to how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor and and seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy. It's otherwise society decays. So the notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined, that inflation adjusted basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent, which is, you know, some sort of decay, societal decay. We have to resolve the the opportunity framework for people, which is how do you give people an opportunity to kind of progress in their lives and earn more overtime and have access to, you know, doing more with themselves while they're here on planet Earth. I mean that's just what humans need. So, you know, maybe there's a short term fix, but I think we've got some structural things to fix to kind of enable opportunities and and give people kind of an inherent, you know. Uh, kind of step ladder in life. I heard a really dark theory a few years ago, which is if we do this, we're gonna resolve to a world where we're gonna have a bunch of people playing video games. Because then the only way you can get people to feel like they're progressing in their lives is to give them more medals on their video games and give them a higher ranking and score. And that's where society kind of gets to you to kind of keep people psychologically kind of satiated. And it's a pretty dark, you know, sad place. If that's where we end up, it's like a bad episode of Black Mirror. But we've had a few episodes of Black Mirror. Here so you know we'll sounds like ready Player one with a masters we're playing video games instead of actually going out in the that's world totally sax what what's your thought on you know just the next two years, let's say, and how this all shakes out and and this will give us a good segue into the coronavirus. And and where we stand right now with this potential second lockdown and the impact that might have psychologically on people and also on the economy. There's not gonna be a second lockdown. It doesn't make any sense. And even if there were, people aren't going to support. But certainly any of the red states aren't going to do it. I guess the blue states may they they still haven't, you know, sort of unlocked down. So maybe that gets more protracted in places like California but. We're, we're not gonna go back into lockdowns and people won't support. And I think the thing that we basically figured out that should have been obvious months ago now is that coronavirus is really like two different diseases in terms of its effects on people. So for elderly people and for people with risk factors, it's very dangerous. You know, I'm very worried about my parents and you know, for people in that group they have to take, you know, extreme precautions. But for young healthy people without risk factors, it's it's not been that deadly. It's it's very unpleasant. It's a very bad two weeks. But but, you know, for example, if you look at the data now on on colleges coming back, there's been some reports that the virus is spreading like wildfire on college campuses. That's true. But hospitalizations and deaths have not gone up. And so because it's just not that, it's not that deadly to to to younger people. And so I think this idea of shutting down the whole economy to protect people at risk is just seems like overkill. And I think if we had to do it all over again. We wouldn't have done lockdowns, we just would have protected at risk, people. Uh, we've still consistently had 1000 deaths a day we thought this might go down. Where your thoughts on Americans just being OK with that, that basic death toll sex, well, I mean any deaths is, is obviously bad and tragic and you know, and statistically there are going to be people who who die even who are in the, you know, logos group so for sure. But you know, but we've had about 200,000 deaths, the original estimates from this virus. Or two to three million. So it's I guess my point is not that it's not bad but it's you know, but that it's you know much less deadly than I think was originally thought. There was an argument that that's not deaths directly attributable to coronavirus, right. And that the vast majority of of those folks had comorbidities and that you know the the primary driver. This is an argument many have made. I'm not going to take a strong point, but you know 85% plus of folks have. Significant comorbidities. And, you know, this virus may be kind of has a contributing factor to their death. But if, let's assume everyone in the United States had coronavirus today, then every death that was reported today would be reported as a coronavirus death. And so they're testing a lot of folks, you know, in the hospital finding that they have coronavirus. It's, you know, it's very difficult to then prove that the reason that they died or the sole reason that they died. As coronavirus if you pick a percentage free bird where would you put it half of all deaths if you just had to guess but that's my point is I don't think it's one thing right. I I'm not sure that it's someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus and they've also got severe diabetes, heart disease, cancer. They're on chemotherapy. I mean you could list the other things that they might have what caused their death. You know you can't as as a corner it's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death but when they test that person and they find that their coronavirus positive they that number is now being. Counted in the statistics that say that was a coronavirus death that day and coronavirus is so prevalent in the United States right now. It's such a significant part of the population. It's also very difficult to say, hey, guys like you know, these deaths are so I'm not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus. That is absolutely happening. But it's very difficult to say what is the net effect on life right now. We're still learning a lot about how this virus interacts with different people based on their genetics and. Based on their disease state and and and other factors, let me ask you one more way for your free bird and then I'll give it over to chamath, which is Freeburg in your estimation as a scientist and somebody who's, I would say a man of science on the call here. Are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021? And what's your best outlook for our return to normalcy? If you had to pick a time when it feels like we can go to a Warriors game or play cards regularly or go to the World Series of Poker, Wendy, do you have a a a time period where you think that could possibly happen? It's all politics and social behavior. It has nothing to do with science. Like after 911 there were no more serious, like terrorist attacks on the United States, but our ******* lives changed dramatically. We go sit in TSA lines and, you know, get our ***** swapped when we get on an airplane now, and that's still going on 20 years later. So I'm, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of change that's here to stay in the US because of coronavirus and will be even after everyone gets vaccines and the death drop below 10 a day and yadda yadda. So, you know, I'm, I'm not convinced that this is like, hey, here's the date, we're all going to be out of it and then we're safe because people are psychologically scarred, behavior has changed, businesses have changed, the landscape of how we work as a society has changed. And that's not going away. So it's it's it's it's not like we're going to go back. I think it's like we're going forward into a different world where we operate differently much as what happened after 911. What's your take on that, champ? I think that David's right, that you know we're at. But for coronavirus, I think a lot of these people that died would still be alive. And so you know, I don't think it really matters how much of the blame we're trying to ascribe to it. It's just that it was a meaningful, non trivial contributing factor. So these deaths are avoidable and we have to deal with that. The second is I don't think what we know what the peak to trough looks like because we haven't really gone through a real full blown flu season yet. You know, coronavirus came to America at the tail end of the winter and it's going to be. I think tough to figure out what it's going to do in October, November, December, January or February when it's really cold in many parts of the United States and you know, whatever effects again, we still don't know it in totality, but whatever effects the warm weather had in muting it or whatever mutation muted it may change. So I tend to think it's another 18 to 24 months of this posture. But Friedberg is really right, which is like this is what's so sad, which is when you could point a finger and look at somebody. Say you you're the cause. It was much easier to react and create rules and create boundaries as uncomfortable or as inconvenient as they were, and live by them. And because this is more nameless and faceless, it's impossible. So, all right, well, here's some good news I was able to acquire. I've been on a little investigative journalism kick asking people if they have access to rapid testing kits, IE they have them in Korea, and I was able to get, and I'm curious, your thoughts on this freeberg the rapid response, liberty COVID-19 IG/IG M test cassettes and they cost 15 to 20 bucks each and they take 10 minutes. They're easy to use. I mean, I've had those since March, and they cost $0.50 each. So, uh, so these are now officially available, though in the United States. You had those from some other country, correct? I got from China and I got from the US and I got from Korea and and and these things are just made everywhere and they're like they're these are the antibody accurate, right? Yes. Yeah, the. So there's a paper that was published at UCSF. I I got an acknowledgment because of my donations to support the research and it showed that it these tests have actually very good specificity and the sensitivity is going to be, call it 85%. But these are antibody tests and further research has shown that not everyone has the same antibody response after getting infected. And there's a relationship between how severe the disease is for you and and various other factors. So and these will only show up typically. You know, days to weeks after you get infected, the antigen tests, which are the more common kind of ones that everyone's looking for now, are these tests that can actually find the virus itself. And so they'll take a swab of your nose or some saliva from your mouth and see if there's any virus in there. And it's a much, much lower sensitivity than the PCR test, which is you expensive, you know, lab tests. But it can be done on a stick. And it's a good enough thing for letting people into, say, a football game and are a good friend of ours just texted me and told me that they're doing this. The UT Austin game, they're using this antigen test to let people into the football game today so or this weekend. So it's getting kind of more widespread use. And so when we have those tests that scales, what will the world look like Freeburg? I don't know. It's just like the TSA. You'll get swabbed and you know these things. It's great business to be in, by the way, if you guys. You know, wanna spack a Korean antigen testing? These things are gonna sell like crazy. Yeah there's a company that I heard of through a friend which had it's an Israeli company. I never followed up on it, which was a effectively a breathalyzer. Which would be could you just imagine that would be incredible, right? Right you just well they're even few seconds. But we've talked about this in our chat group there are there are startups like. Was it Quidel harmodius Q who've got these little, you know, two $300.00 little handheld readers and the cartridges are basically mouth swabs or lower nasal, nasal swabs, you know, cost 10 bucks. And I think, you know, I think they'll be, they're going to be rolling out over the next few months and assuming we can scale the production of them, I think they will be everywhere. And you know, I don't think it will be a government mandated things. I don't think the government will get its act together, but it'll be the kind of thing where you go shopping at a store or whatever and they'll be early adopters. Or restaurant, they'll start using it. People will realize that way. I don't wanna get swabbed three times a day. So then they'll get some sort of like receipt or voucher they can take with them to the next place. And so I I think, you know, I'm, I'm like actually like, I think I'm more optimistic than you guys about COVID right now. I think that whether it's because of these rapid tests or because of treatments coming or just this fundamental fact about comorbidities, again not absolving, not saying that COVID isn't serious, but this is the fact that we've learned that it's. You know that it's it's really deadly primarily for people who have comorbidities. I think for all of these reasons I think COVID is going to be a distant memory by next summer. I really do. I think I think fairly too. What's that you think behavior changes as well like businesses and movie theaters and sports and I think people, we think people will largely be back to what they were doing last summer or by next summer. I think we're going to have like you know call it a six month period where you know. We we do these rapid tests just to make sure. And but but I but I think as the case rate starts dropping off, things will kind of revert back to to where they were. I mean the the the question to ask is kind of you know which trends were there before COVID and have been accelerated. Like I would say the the move from like death of retail, the shift to ecommerce that feels to me like it's here to stay but you know food delivery, things like that. But there was no trend of people not going to sports games anymore, you know and I think like stuff like that will just snap right back. I don't know. I don't know about you guys. I'm still, like, feeling ****** ** by the whole thing. You don't really realize how much your psychology has changed until you kind of reflect on decisions and behaviors. Like, there's still a fear factor that I think needs to kind of be ironed out. But, you know, we'll see how long it takes for people. It's just like it's so different when you're so used to just waking up and hopping on zoom for work and avoiding people and putting masks on when you go walk your ******* dog. I mean, it's like, you know, it's going to be hard to kind of change out of that overnight. I think there's. I think this idea of the greater flexibility around working arrangements, ability to work from home, I think offices will become a little bit more like coworking spaces for a single company where people come in three days a week and work from home a couple days a week. I think there'll be a permanent flexibility, but but I also think that people want to get back to work and they want to back to offices and they want to interact with people. And I think everyone's gonna be excited to do that again. It's not like everyone is going to be working from home forever, so I think again. Next summer is kind of my my date for when things are back to. Back to normal. Uh, well, this has been certainly driving a lot of our politics right now. You've probably saw. The book that came out with the tapes of Trump saying that, you know, he was trying to play it down sacks as a lifelong Republican, what were your thoughts when the Republican presidential candidate, the Republican president, said, hey, I'm trying to play this down when he was at the same time saying it was deadly serious? Does that make you worry about Trump as a candidate and what do you think that's going to how that might play into the election? It must have been disappointing for you to hear you're a candidate, Trump say at the same time. This is deadly and I wanna play it down well. Trump, Trump's leadership on this has been a little bit erratic for sure. And and by the way, let's go back and remind the viewers here that in the first pods we were doing back in April, I think we kind of nailed what the right policy response should be. I wrote a blog on April 2nd talking about that mass should be required that that was the right response. But we also said that lockdowns very quickly after the start of lockdown said that it was excessive and that what we should do is be going all in on mass not lockdowns. I certainly would have liked to have seen. Get that right several months earlier. That being said, let's not forget everybody else who got this stuff wrong too. I mean, you look at CDC. You know, or WHO? We had talked about this on previous pod. I mean, WHO? Was was also unclear about mass and and falchi, I guess now retroactively saying that he didn't think that masks were necessary. He was trying to prevent a run on supplies. I mean the whole, the whole response of the healthcare establishment, they were all, they were all like really bad. And so I have a greater degree of forgiveness for people who made mistakes back in March or April. But what I think is hard to forgive now are these people? Who are promoting the wrong policies now that we know so much more. And I mean at this point I would think, I think that COVID is COVID policy is a net plus for Trump in this campaign because you know the other side of it is, is, is these permanent lockdowns. You know this is an article in was a foreign policy saying that we need to go back to lockdowns and I think Biden's said that we need to have lockdowns again and you know his policy would be to listen to the experts but all these experts again were wrong about so many things. And and so you know again I think this, this idea of permanent lockdowns if that is the alternative to Trump will help Trump win. And so you don't think that this Woodward book and that kind of stuff plays into the election or the debates in the coming weeks? I I think it's sort of priced into the stock. You know, I mean, look, if it weren't for COVID, I think that if you go back to like January, February, when Trump gave that state of the Union speech, his ratings were the highest they had been, the economy was on fire. You know, he kind of, it looked like he was on cruise control to winning reelection and then COVID happened and, you know, and his ratings went down to their. For their lowest point and and so I think he already paid the price for you know the the let's call it inconsistent leadership that that Woodward described. So I think that's priced in and and now the question is if the economy gets good enough, fast enough and the other side is on the side of lockdowns and Trump is on the side of reopening. You know I again I think COVID policy becomes a net plus for him. Shamatha 538 has in its simulation 77 wins and 100 for Biden. You think that's accurate? Yeah, I mean, I I think that until the debates, I think that this thing is basically where it's been for a long time. And if, if Biden flubs the debate and basically comes out, as, you know, intellectually too inconsistent to be voted in by a plurality of Americans, he's done for. And Trump's going to win. So he can't have these, you know, verbal gaffes and basically seem like he's a, you know, a senile octogenarian. If he does come off that way, he's going to lose. But if he doesn't, then look, many of the moments you see him now, he's actually pretty crisp. That probably gets the job done because like I said, I think more people just want a non Trump alternative, then want the Trump alternative even within the Republican Party and look like preference falsification can cut both ways. All the people that said they weren't going to vote for him but then did, you know there's also probably a cohort of people that now feel obligated when they came out of the woodwork as supporting him. Now they just feel like it's easier to be publicly supporting him. But then in the, you know, they may go the other way. So it all kind of works in both directions. But I I still think on the margin, Biden is the Biden is the favorite. And you know, how different will the world look chamath in your estimation under a Biden Presidency, we get to January 1st. How different does the country feel? Is it going to be some great relief? Is it gonna be some great joy like when Obama won? What do you think the feeling is in the country? So all these things are emotional overreactions in both directions. The reality is that if you if you actually graph substantive. Policy that affects your everyday life. The magnitude of the impact of the Presidency has been shrinking since the 1980s. I think the most impactful president of our lifetimes, our lifetimes. So, you know, 70s onwards was Reagan, and it's basically been decaying ever since. And so I think, you know, I think that the job of the Presidency is mostly window dressing except for foreign policy that matters less and less. And I'll tell you why that matters less and less because all the things that the President used to, you know, really govern like foreign policy was a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things. For example, our entire posture on the Middle East, which has been a ******* **** show, where our entire posture on Russia was in part because of our energy policy and in a world of sustainable energy. Those entire regions are not important anymore. So it doesn't let them basically fend for themselves. We do not need to be involved. They're going to, they're going to devolve because they're gonna have to suck out all the oil out of the ground to try to monetize it before wind and solar and everything else become the dominant form of of energy. And so if you take energy policy off the table, all of a sudden the national security interests to care about large swaths of the world go to 0, right? So then there's less for the President to do. It's pretty, pretty pretty short, isn't it? Yes. So, so my point is the surface, the surface area of the impact of the president is shrinking. And it shrinks as technology. Like, if you think about it, what is driving foreign policy and national security policy changes over the last 10-15 years, definitely over the next 40 or 50. Is technology right? If we get, if we get, for example, if we get any form of like carbon sequestration at scale broadly available, you're going to have a complete resurgence of Western economies. If that technology is invented in the United States or Western Europe, freeberg quickly you'd think that Biden is going to win. And then what? Do you think the country feels and looks like into a Biden Presidency? And then let's move over to energy and sustainable energy and carbon after that. I I don't know. You know, I'll say the same thing I've said in the past. I I don't think the the notion of a sense of relief is, is realistic. I I don't think this is about people think it's about Trump, but Trump is the product of what it's all really about. And so I'll just, you know, kind of highlight, I think, you know, Biden is, is a column. Instead of thinking about things as Democrats and Republicans and left and right, if we think about it as kind of populism and free market theism and in the middle of centrism, you know, we're probably taking a notch. Umm. Toward centrism. And at the end of the day, the March towards populism seems to be continuing. And you know, whether Trump is kind of the product of that March or maybe the next one will be Elizabeth Warren or AOC, it's kind of the same thing in my opinion. But I I think that's the bigger kind of concern is, you know, how do we again keep general, generally keep most people in the United States feeling like they can progress in life, feeling like they can find happiness in life and feeling. Like, there's opportunity for them to kind of, you know, achieve their objectives. And if they don't feel like they're getting it, they're gonna try and wrap it all up. And unions will continue to scale, and AOC will become the vice presidential nominee in 2024. And you gotta freeberg, what are your thoughts on the wildfires, global warming and the politics of all that? And then we'll go to cancel culture with you sex. California has. 33 million acres of forest land, it's about 100 million acres in total land. So forest to make up about 1/3 of our land so far we're we're burning 3 1/2 million, so about 10% of our acres. When we burn an acre, we release. About 15% of the carbon that's stored in that acre into the atmosphere. So thus far if you do the math on that, we've released about as much CO2 as we've as the California cars released in a year by the wildfires and the politics we're seeing play out. So it's it's it's a significant problem. But over the last 40 years we've added about 1/4 ton of carbon to each acre per year and the reason we've done that is we haven't kind of you know lit. Fires and manage the forests and cut down trees, and there's been all these restrictions in California. So there's an argument that some are making that this is about forest management. And then there's an argument that others are making that this is about climate change and dry weather and hot weather causing the fires. And the reality is it's both. But it's as everything else in this country right now, becoming highly politicized that. And, you know, Trump visited Newsom in a very kind of symbolic gathering this week. I don't know if you guys saw the packet that was handed out to Trump. It was awesome. It was like 24 point font. And it was like, yeah, it was like that. Yeah. Why? Pictured, whether it fight fire is burning state, you know, it's like and it was. I mean you guys gotta see it. It's awesome. The little packet he got and and then and then use some sat like exactly 6 feet from him with the mask on and Trump sitting there without the mask on. I mean it's such a ******* political circus and you know, I think all things are true and all things are false and we can move on. The, the, the debate on the fires is, I mean what what it's the the debate has has become sort of climate change versus forest management. You know, that's sort of the debate about it. And like most of these debates, you don't necessarily have to choose. There can be an element of truth on both sides, you know, regardless of how much climate change has caused these fires. We've done a very, very poor job in the state managing them and you know, this idea that we can just fix global warming and or or wait. You know, not have good forest management until, you know and just kind of wait for global warming to be fixed as I mean that's a really stupid idea. So regards to how much climate change is to the cause of this, I think we need a much more competent state reaction to, you know, to to the fact these fires, do you believe in global warming, David Sachs? I believe in the, you know, in greenhouse the greenhouse gas theory and that yeah that it's you know that man made CO2 emissions are going to have an impact on the environment. I think that, you know, what's a little bit hard to know is that the exact timing and magnitudes of some of these things, but I agree with what Elon said, which is that we're running a very high risk experiment here, continually putting out CO2 greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Why is it so difficult for the Republican Party? And I I feel like you're almost straining. And couching your words there, David, that you believe in global warming, you believe in what Elon saying is not worth doing this risk. Why do Republicans seem to have such an aversion to just saying, hey, global warming is a thing and we need to fix it? Because because because Democrats wrapped those words around them like a flag. And so it became a political issue, like with everything else. I mean, I think so. So again, as we have this false choice now of whether you want to save the environment or or save the economy. And and and the the problem is, I think, I think that a lot of Republicans don't want to concede the issue. Oh, hey little guy, a lot of problems. Don't want to concede the issue because they're afraid it will lead to something like the green New Deal. And So what we need to do is figure out some responses to the problem that don't require us to destroy the economy. Right. And for you, if we did incentives, if the, if the country spent incentive sacks to get solar on roofs and stuff like that, you wouldn't be opposed to it, would you? You mean like taxing carbon emissions? Or just giving discounts on putting solar in, subsidizing solar for people's houses? Or maybe the middle ground of creating more nuclear reactors, which seems like something that neither party can agree to? Hold on, little guy. Sorry, I got. He's got a little podcast. OK, sorry. No problem. Yeah. Look, I think I I think to the extent that carbon emissions are an externality, the traditional way of dealing with this is you would internalize the externality by placing support tax or penalty on that. But so look what, I rather tax carbon emissions than something else. Yes, I mean, but the only way you're going to get something like that through is if you agree to something like a one for one tax reduction other areas. Right? Because there's a there's this other larger debate about whether you know what else should be taxed. What about you, chamath? What are your thoughts on solving global warming in this polarized sort of Republican Democrat? If you're for global, if you're, if you believe in global warming, you're not a Republican. There's a I I think that this is the most correlated thing with a healthy economy, because I think that whoever solves climate change or the set of solutions that solve climate change, first of all, they'll be unbelievably economically successful. They will employ enormous numbers of people. Then they'll have a really profound legacy in the world. So. The the question is how to do it. And I think the problem is right now there's there's, as David I think actually puts the best lens on the topic, which is right now we don't even have enough canonical data so that there's a single source of truth that we can all rely on. And not having to judge it as climate change, I think is an important step, which would just mean having a longitudinal measurement of temperature and, you know, having a longitudinal measurement of everything from PM 2.5 to PM 10 to, you know, carbon, methane, all of the other normal sort of. Nitrous oxide. All this stuff so that then you can just understand what men and women, as part of the human race, are doing to **** with the counterfactual. Because the counterfactual is if we were just like living normal chill lives. And so once you understand that, then you can figure out how to at least mitigate that back to what the counterfactual would have been, or do it even better. I think the best thing, again, we talked about this in a pod a couple weeks ago or a couple couple months ago, the best thing the governments can do is introduce incentives. And I think the the most meaningful incentives here are not at the consumer level, but they're more upstream. So you know, if you take something like cement, you know, cement, which is responsible for I think 20% of all the carbon emissions, it's a really pernicious industry because, you know, they all, they are very local. They operate within 300 local kilometers of every place where you ship. Meant to make concrete and whatnot, and when you look at sort of where the emissions are, they're at a very specific part of the chain, which is effectively impossible to mitigate. So you have to have a level of material science. You know, improvement to really move things away from cement altogether, well, just knowing that you're going to have to have the incentives that a government creates to pull that forward. Another example is when you look at, like, manufacturing all the **** that we all love, you know, I don't care whether you like ******* normal pants or hemp pants. You know, when you go back and you look at how H&M makes those pants, there's our high temperature processes that are burning fossil fuels. They're emitting all kinds of really terrible junk into the environment. And so it doesn't matter whether you're vegan. Say you know you're not going to go around unclothed, you're not going to not use spoons, right? So all of that, the totality of all of that, we need to completely reinvent high temperature manufacturing. That's not gonna happen unless the government steps in because like, for example, take something as simple as steel. You know, it's a tragedy of the Commons, right? I mean, basically is if, if if no individual can make a major impact, maybe they won't freeberg you think we have all the technology we need to do this and it's really just a matter of incentives and deployment right now in terms of global warming or stemming global warming. Is that a correct statement that we have the technology? We just haven't? Correct. Correct. And I think it's 100%. OK. Let's unpack what well, well what I will say is we have the science, the the engineering and the resourcing and then the market are the are the kind of unresolved, right. And so resourcing is capital. The market can be created artificially by putting in place government subsidies or having the government be a customer or you just have to wait a long enough period of time if you listen to. The Tim Ferriss interview with Coke, which one was it? Charles Koch. He talks about how ultimately consumers will vote with their dollars if climate change is real and global warming is starting to have an effect on planet Earth. And we're seeing that right. We're seeing people make a switch to a vegetarian diet, we're seeing people buy Teslas. We're seeing people make choices for sustainability. So the free market is resolving and will resolve climate change, is the argument that some libertarians might make. And then I think it is that true in your mind? Freeburg you buy that? I think it's I I I I'll be honest with you, I've been ******* shocked by how many people are choosing to pay a premium for vegetarian meat alternatives. I was wrong on this. I I bet against these companies eight years ago. I didn't bet against it, but I chose not to bet for them because I made the argument consumers will only buy stuff that's cheaper and taste as good. And I was wrong. Millions of consumers are going to Burger King and buying a veggie burger now, which wasn't the case. And we're seeing this across the world. It will eventually out of a crisis of consciousness, right? Like you're saying. That's right. So it's a behavioral change. Wow. Because they yeah, that's what they want in the market. That's what they want to spend their money on. They want to spend their money on having a nicer world. It's just like when people will spend a premium amount of money on a nice suit. It makes them look good and feel good. It's the same sort of notion. I I feel good when I'm buying a Tesla. I feel good when I'm buying a veggie burger instead of a meat burger, knowing that it is harming my people around me. I couldn't bring myself to buy. A carbon based ice engine. Recently I was thinking about you know if I'm in Tahoe and I need to go off the road or there's no conditions, I need to have a car for it. And I wound up, I'm picking up the model Y with the dual engine and putting snow tires on it as opposed to getting the new you know Jeep Wrangler or the the new defender. But whether it's biomanufacturing or you know synthetic meats or I I think we're we're not just in a point where we have to create luxury markets. I think we are going to disrupt commodity. Markets. And I think we're gonna do that this decade and it's gonna blow people's ******* mind when everything you're eating looks, tastes and and feels the same and it's cheaper and it was just made in a more sustainable way using bioengineering, which is kind of, you know, the ability to to write the physical world with software, except it's realized through genomics and it's it's an incredible thing that we're how much of this is the generational shift. I mean, Gen X seemed pretty absorbed with our own projects and a little bit of consciousness, but these millennials are now getting into. Their 30s and their 35 years old, these the oldest millennials, and they seem to be incredibly focused on the environment and doing what's right. This is a generational shift in your mind, Freeburg. No, I I think this is just the slow March of of humanities ability to master our world in technology. And, you know, look, let me just give you a scenario. Timoth kind of says we're going to decarbonize the atmosphere. If we could build an algae or a seaweed from scratch or using some basis and use software to resolve what's the right sort of seaweed to create that will grow like crazy in the oceans. When it gets heavy, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. And it literally. Let's pull the carbon out of the atmosphere and drops to these 40,000 foot or you know, 4000 foot deep kind of wells. We have already built around 70% of planet Earth. We have the tools to do that again, the engineering and the capital to do that. And then the market for is there a market for that? It doesn't. If if governments are like, it's a crisis, let's put a billion dollars into this like we did in the Apollo program. We will get that done in five years. I mean, there's just there's no shortage of tools and science to be able to resolve that sort of a problem today, much like we're about to produce a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of months after discovering the virus, which is unprecedented. So our ability to kind of read. Genomics and right genomics and as a result create biological machines that can do things in the physical world. And self propagate gives us this incredible toolkit humans never had at its disposal before. And it will be the way that we'll resolve climate change and it will. In the meantime, we're going to bridge the gap between here and there by creating these nice luxury markets. By the way, here's A and so on. Here's an incredible example. So when you look at sort of where methane is a really problematic greenhouse gas and most of the methane emissions are from cows. But it's from enteric fermentation, which is, you know, fancy language for burping. And what's incredible is there are now efforts to use CRISPR to genetically engineer, you know, cows that don't necessarily have that same gut Biome, you know, dynamic so that you're burping methane that there's also feed that you can actually give a cow that'll minimize methane emissions burping by 30 or 40%. All these things are to your point, David. They're they're so fantastical if you think about it, but they're possible today and we just need to organize and get a kind of like a center of gravity. Around these things and they'll happen. Can we get, can we get Jason the human version of that? Does it also cover tuting? Does it work for flatulence? Interestingly, Chris Sacca tweeted about investing in a company called Running Tide, which grows kelp and will suck carbon from the atmosphere, and he just thinks it to the ocean floor. And they're selling carbon offsets by putting seaweed on the ocean floor. So, such such a no brainer, right? I mean, like, the ocean is so big and it's this, and like, it's not getting in the way of land where you don't have to go figure out licenses and rights. You got it. You gotta basically get carbon to go into the ocean. And so then you basically need an Organism that can grow and self propagate quickly and radically accumulate biomass in the ocean and then figure out how to get rid of it. So the the best way to get rid of it is have it sink. It's gotta be some sort of seaweed or kelp or algae and you just put it in the open ocean and it'll propagate. I mean that that's just such a great obvious and there's 1000 scenarios like that that I think, you know we're going to kind of creatively come up with and and resolve here. Nuclear, not even on the discussion. Freeberg. I'm curious like is it just too tainted? Look we. The, the work I've done, the work I've done on nuclear, it used to cost something like some number of dollars to get a nuclear power plant through the regulatory barriers in the United States and now it is so cost prohibitive. It's something like $10 billion now from maybe, you know, 100 million, you know, two decades ago. There's something about the regulatory barriers. Yeah, well, there's a huge, there's a huge NIMBY problem, right. I mean, who, who wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard? Nobody. I mean, nobody wants it, Jason, but but I agree with like the larger point here that the solution to the problem. Ultimately going to be all these new technologies, these innovative solutions, not making people feel bad for consuming and, you know, being alive. You know, you you look at Tesla and it's moving the whole world to electric cars, not with the government mandate, but despite creating a better car. And so it's ultimately going to be technology companies, you know, increasing the solution set and giving people new choices. That's how we're gonna ultimately solve the problem. And interestingly in the news, new scale is creating small nuclear reactors and they just got approval. And this is a the Portland based new scale powers. They had a small modular reactor that has been approved by the US Department of Energy for a site in eastern Idaho. We'll see if that ever comes online, but it does seem like small nuclear reactors could solve part of the NIMBY problem in that they're smaller. So if something were to go wrong, we would have some ability to contain or have a smaller footprint in a disaster like situation. Let's wrap with the Overton window. Chamath talked about it closing and sacks. There was a good article that a taxonomy of fear that you shared with the group. Tell us a little bit about that article. A taxonomy of fear by Emily Yoffe. I think it's, yeah, her name. Yeah. She's a writer for the Atlantic who wrote this. Again, it's called the taxonomy of fear and and persuasion. I think it's an important article. What it does is analyze cancel culture and the language that's used to cancel people. And one of the, you know, one of the things she diagnosis is what she calls safety ISM, which is anytime. Somebody doesn't like what you know an idea or what somebody else is saying. They claim that their safety is being threatened by that idea. And it's kind of invoking these magic words that HR has come up with where if anyone is creating an unsafe work environment or an unsafe college campus, well, the the source of the problem has to be removed immediately. And so this is the the the language of cancel culture and you know, the the the problem with it is that. It doesn't really matter what the intent of the person was, or. You know, intense, sort of irrelevant or whether the objection is reasonable or not, you know, whether it it it, it causes, whether actually, you know, threatens anyone's safety. And so there's an example of this when 50 prominent sort of writers, intellectuals wrote a letter to Harper's magazine, including JK Rowling and Matt Iglesias, who's a co-founder of Vox. And so there was a, you know, there's a trans writer. There's a writer on who's a trans person at Vox who claims that her her safety was threatened, but because one of the cofounders had signed this letter. The letter didn't discuss trans issues. It was simply the fact that Iglesias had signed it along with JK Rowling. And so JK Rowling apparently is. You know, I miss active. Yeah, I I missed this part of Harry Potter. But apparently the the trans movement is, yeah, harp is really gets her, but women who were bought, women who were born biologically female are different than women who transition. But this is. But see, that's the key. Right. So, so. Right. And that's her position. But her position is being attributed to Iglesias by association. Yeah, exactly. And so. That would be like saying that I'm in support of Trump just because I'm on this podcast with you sounds to be clear it's yes, it's contamination. It's contamination by association is what she calls it this sort of, you know, cancel culture and everybody being scared of words. And this will be if, if Trump wins in November, it'll be because this whole thing just gets too much for too many people. There is a massive plurality of people in the middle. Who think this over wretching sensitivity by the extreme left and the extreme right are are just completely out to lunch and 100% agree, 100% agree. And I think that by the way, the extreme left and the extreme right, they should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're all this useless ******** anyways. All of them. Both of them on the extreme light, like when Antifa and the Alt right are fighting with each other. It's like this, like. Sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Thanks for tuning into the all in podcast. I I mean, I mean most people are in the middle. Most people don't need to have this like us or them. You know, it's it's it's like you're not allowed to have an opinion. Like I actually learned more from people that I disagree with just by hearing them and not trying to judge them. And I think that most of us as well have our views that are sort of moderately in the middle. So for example, there was a USC professor that got sanctioned because he was trying to, he was teaching a language class and he used the. Chinese word for that, which sounds like the N word and I think he didn't preface it correctly or what have you, but then, you know, he apologized, he was suspended and folks wrote a letter. Now everybody has a right the the people who felt offended have the right to write the letter. The administration had the right to react. And then I think people read that article and think to themselves, is this actually the has the pendulum swung too far or not and. And Mark my words, if people feel that the pendulum has swung too far, they will elect Donald Trump because he is the complete antithesis of giving a **** about any of this stuff. So that will be the bellwether. No, that's exactly right. So I think it's really important. I think there's a large part of the country that feels that Trump is a shield, not a sword, that he is their protector against this, this type of cancel culture. And I know Trump. Seems like an instigator, and he's very threatening to a lot of people on the other side. But again to these people he's he's more of a shield. And I think it's it's not just the fact that he speaks out and denounces cancel culture that makes him a hero to these people. It's his his superpower is his uncancelled ability. It's this, you know, it's the fact that the left has done everything they can to try and get rid of this guy, to impeach him, what have you. And he's and he keeps surviving. And so it's it's his very, you know, Uncancelled ability that makes him such a hero to these people. And I think this is the the thing that. The the left or the media doesn't quite understand is that denouncing Trump in ever more hysterical terms doesn't you know it doesn't work because it kind of feeds it into this it actually hurts is it adds more, right it adds more people to his cohort who say you're overreacting right bacterial Ness of overreacting like I tweeted I I've been on this you know many tweet effort to tell people listen there are Chromebooks in the world they're very cheap. 90% of the. Americans are, excuse me, on the Internet, high speed and there are so many online resources for you to get ahead in life. Go try to be a marketer, go do Khan Academy, go learn UX and design. These are the clearest paths into the technology industry and I get hysterical liberals who say people don't have access to the Internet, people don't have access to Chromebooks and people don't have the free time where the motivation to improve their lot in life and it's like. Are you? Who are you talking about? Because 90% of the country has access to the Internet and uses it already. And if you go and do a search for a Chromebook on eBay, used one, you could find one for 50 to 150 bucks. So we have this narrative that people cannot rise up and people cannot improve themselves. And every time I say I believe people can improve themselves, people say that I'm like a racist, that I believe that people could improve themselves. And it just makes me further away from the Democratic Party. It makes me further away from the left that I think I think this. I'm going to put out a crazy idea, which is that I think if Donald Trump wins in a meaningful way in November, I don't think he will. But if he does. The actual silver lining for for everybody is I think the Republican Party will disintegrate and the Democratic Party will disintegrate and in its place I think you'll probably have three or four parties and I think that that would be amazing. So it's the burn it all down vote, which was Peter Thiel's idea in the beginning was like, I think sax and TO when they coordinated this Trump election it was all burn it down. Burn it down, right. Sex. That was your star chamber discussion with teal, which you wanna guys wanted to burn it all down. I think you're trying to. I think what you're doing is contamination by association there. Yeah. Just because you went to College of Peter TL. When's the last time you talked to Peter Thiel? No. Peter Peter's a friend of mine, but I don't. But again, and and I agree with him about some things. I disagree with him about other things. But the site. Yeah. You disagree with this idea, but but this idea that we can't hang out with people, you know, or or that hanging out with people means that we must endorse every view they have. Like, why is it even relevant that, you know, I'm friends with Peter? We are like, for example, we're friends in our group chat with a couple of guys who are very far right. We're not going to name who they are, but I would say that I think that the group chat is better off for them being able to say what they believe and push back. And just like there's a bunch of us who are in the middle and we waffle back and forth between the left and the right, and then there are folks that are more on the far right or far left or on the left. So I just think that we forget that there is enormous value in the diversity of thought. And and people think that there is some sort of safety and conformity. And in fact, I'll tell you that's actually the exact opposite. You're more likely to be in conflict with someone that you are very similar to because eventually you will always end up competing for the exact same resource and that resource becomes scarce. If you are actually spending time with people that are divergent and different from you, you actually end up not. Competing for the same resources because you're one. Second, you're built differently, so there's just less conflict. So This is why multiparty systems work. This is why you have less fighting when there's, you know, in Canada and in Europe than you do in the United States because the United States tries to reduce things down to two choices. And so we we all of a sudden like just glom into these pools that are seemingly similar and we just we end up hating each other. Freeberg. Any final thoughts on cancel culture? Yeah, I think it's just gonna be bad. Like, I I totally, I totally agree with Jamal that if Trump wins the election, this will be the reason that the same thing happened when the Republicans overplayed their hand with Bill Clinton, right. And it was said at that time that, you know, Clinton was always very fortunate and who his enemies were because no matter, you know, what he did wrong or how badly he screwed up his enemy, he's always made too big a deal of it or they overreacted and it played into his hands. And I, you know, I have to wonder if that's what's happening right now with this whole cancel culture. Yeah, all right. Well, we'll leave it at that. We've gone over an hour. If you're listening to the all in podcast and you'd like to advertise, it's not possible. There's no ads on this podcast. And if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast, that's also not possible. There's no guests. So send your advertising and guest requests to tomorrow at spacksbackpack.org Breaking News. Right now there is a tech crunch story that just broke while we're on air. Can't stop, won't stop social capital. Just followed for its fourth SPAC. If you're into spacks, no, that's not the, that's the that's not the article. The article one of the article is CHAMATH launches SPAC. No, that's that's back as he spacks the world with spacks. Yeah, we just announced three. Yeah. Ohh. You just announced #3. Yeah. No, NO33DE and FDEF got approved. No. Yeah, they're filed with the SEC now. And when would DE and F be available for people to buy shares in it then? Is that like a 60 day, 115 days? Oh, OK, great. Alright, well, there you have it. And then you confirmed that the second spec was opened to her, right? Is that confirmed or is that was announced on Tuesday? Yeah. Congratulations. All that and then how do you feel about all these people stealing your Thunder with spacks? I think it's that. I think there's no, there's no it's it's great. I think it's growing the market. It's good for entrepreneurs. It's amazing. I mean what this is going to mean that companies with 50 to 150 million will be able to go public on a a clear path. I hope so. I I've said this before, we've gone from 8000 public companies to 4020 years. So let's reverse the tide, let's go back to double the number of companies. That's right. I mean you think that we should have gone up, you would think it would be in a world. 0% interest rates. It has to. Yeah, yeah. Alright, well, here we go. Please. For the love of God, somebody convinced com, Robin Hood, thumbtack and dated stacks to go public. Because I've got kids to put their school. Alright, everybody for best DC, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks, and the Queen of Quinoa fried burgers. This is the all in podcast. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Love you. Love you, besties.