Where were you on Thursday?

Were you in L.A.?

I was at home.

I got like a family to do.

Well, family, have you met him?

What were they like?

Are they everything you expected?

I had to meet the new kid.

He’s 19.

What’s his major?

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast.

Yes, we made it to episode 47 in three episodes.

It’ll be episode 50.

No plans to do anything other than just try to record this every week for you,

the loyal audience, with us again.

Coming off an amazing event, a live event on Monday, Tuesday,

and I don’t know if it went into Wednesday, but David Freeberg’s,

the production board event.

We recorded our first live All In.

It seems like it went well on an AV basis and the audience seemed to enjoy it.

What was the feedback, Freeberg?

So, you know, half the room were scientists and they’d never heard of this podcast before,

and they were like, what the hell did we just show up to?

It’s like, who are these four guys on stage drinking this wine,

talking about politics for an hour and a half?

And dropping F-bombs.

And dropping F-bombs.

And there was a little bit of kind of seasoning we had to do afterwards

to get everyone kind of comfortable.

But actually, it was fantastic.

People loved it.

You guys were the highlight.

And I thought it was super fun to do that in person.

I don’t know what you guys thought.

It’s cool energy.

It’s super cool.

It was great.

And with us again, of course, David Sachs, the rain man himself,

and the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya.

What did you think, Sachs, of the live event format?

Obviously, half the audience were fans of the show, half weren’t.

Which is better than putting people randomly into it,

but I’m glad that the people who are not fans of,

or have never heard of the show, didn’t walk out.

We didn’t have walkouts, so that was good.

Yeah, I mean, look, we were slightly more palatable to them

than Andrew Dice Clay or something like that.

But…

Welcome to the production board!

No, I’ve got to run for you!

It was a good change of…

Hickory dickory dock!

The production board!

I’ve got to start at Jack and Jill, when I smell something,

you think Sachs farted!

It was a good change of pace.

I mean, I think some people commented that the lighting,

the production values weren’t that great.

They seemed fine to us at the time.

But, so we’re going to have to do better on that next time.

And other people speculated that we took,

we were easier on each other in terms of debating topics,

because we were in person.

I didn’t feel that while sitting there,

but you guys tell me if you think that was true.

I thought we got a better read on each other in person,

and we had more dialogue than we normally would over a Zoom.

I don’t know if you guys felt the same.

I think so.

And then I kind of liked the evening podcast, The Glass of Wine.

I think there’s something about it, like you’re just like a little…

Yeah, you’re coming in for a landing.

Yeah, you’re coming in for a nice evening.

The pay little cards after.

It could be a thing.

It could definitely be a thing.

I could definitely make Harlan 2012 a regular part of taping this pod.

The problem is we taped too early on a Friday, right?

If we could change the taping to like happy hour or something like that,

it might work better.

Oh my God.

Harlan 2012.

What is it?

That’s a good bottle of wine?

Oh my God.

Even J-Cal knows that.

Look at him pretending.

I know that one.

Pretending to be a man of the people.

It’s the one with the round label.

I know it.

I know. I’m looking at it right now.

Oh my Lord.

Some of those go up in value.

Those things look like as high as $75.

Do you guys think we could do a pod where we like record after playing poker for two hours?

So you’re two hours into the wine and poker and then you record?

Wouldn’t work.

No way.

No way.

It’d be too…

I think the wine yes, poker no.

Yeah.

I think for a first time, the audio was great.

So that’s, you know, job one is to get the audio great because 99% of consumption happens that way.

To do it right.

I like the line of light in Friedberg’s face for the first 45 minutes of the pod.

For all commentators.

You know, it was my wife who actually got up and fixed that like no one else of the crew,

you know, the dozens of people working there did anything about it.

My wife stood up and fixed the curtain.

Dude, without Al, you would be nowhere.

Be nowhere in life.

Exactly.

She’s a great person.

What was the empty seat about between me and Chamath?

I mean, there was an empty…

That was if we wanted to bring up a guest.

So…

Unfortunately, all the people’s names that were written on that piece of paper are

besties did not show up on time.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

No Bill Gurley, Sky Dayton didn’t come in.

They all showed up at like nine o’clock.

Yeah, there may be a reason for that.

Yeah, I heard that actually was the back channel.

Sky Dayton.

The back channel was Sky Dayton and somebody else waited outside because they knew they

might get pulled up.

I got that from…

You’re gonna have to beep his name out.

Yeah, it’s your first time saying his name on the…

No, he’s not gonna want his name mentioned on this pod.

Are you kidding me?

He’s been on my pod.

He’s been on This Week in Star Wars.

He’s one of the first 10 guests.

That was the last press appearance he did was 11 years ago.

He literally does not…

I mean, everybody knows who Sky Dayton is.

Earthling founder, Boingo founder.

Everybody of our generation, but it’s amazing how quickly the tech crowd moves on.

So true.

There’s a famous story actually when Mark Andreessen met Mark Zuckerberg for the first

time.

Zuckerberg didn’t know that Andreessen had created Netscape.

I’m not even sure he knew what Netscape was.

I think he said something like, I created Mosaic.

And he’s like, what’s that?

Oh, right, right.

Mosaic.

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s like, yeah, look, in the tech industry, we’re all concerned about the future.

No one pays a lot of attention to history.

Do you guys feel like last generation’s entrepreneurs and investors at this point?

Well, some of us are still currently creating things, Freebird.

I can’t mention the name of the app as per…

Here we go.

Anti-promotion rules.

But I have recently launched a new product.

You could download my app.

Redacted.

But there’s not a lot of kind of long careers in Silicon Valley, right?

A lot of people kind of have…

Of creating products?

Well, if you have asymmetric success, right, you have these kind of like big bursts.

And then, you know, it’s a different kind of life.

You don’t go kind of push again for the next hard entrepreneurial project.

Typically, not everyone, obviously.

And then you end up seeing like a generation kind of die out.

Like, you know, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

And then, you know, you don’t see them again.

You also see the adventure, right?

80% of them.

I think there’s a lot of truth to that, that…

And I worry about this with my own kids, that I think deprivation creates motivation.

Totally.

Especially to do something as hard as create a company, create a startup.

Deprivation creates motivation.

Welcome to David Sachs’ infomercial.

No, no.

I mean, look, I think…

Thank you for coming to my tent.

That leads to fornication.

You know, beep, beep, beep.

Our friend beep.

Has a saying that sort of became famous when Elon then repeated it,

which is that creating a startup is like staring into the abyss and eating glass.

And it is really hard to create these companies when they’re successful.

And so, not a lot of people want to do it again once they’ve reached that point.

And it does take a certain amount of, like I said, deprivation to do this.

I totally agree.

Which is why giving everybody the participation trophy and

trying to make people’s lives as easy as possible.

I mean, yes, you don’t want to deprive people on the one hand,

but on the other hand, it does often lead to good things.

Totally agree.

We’re seeing a bit of a dry run of this.

If people believe that they have UBI or the government’s going to take care of them,

I would be fine with UBI, you know, everybody getting a little bit of money.

And if it was a safety net, the only thing I worry about is it seems like a little bit of

money if you’re clever means you could never work.

And then what happens to those people in society, right?

Well, I think it’s anti-compassionate because what you do is you kick out the

bottom rungs of the ladder of economic success when you basically pay able-bodied people not

to work.

I mean, those entry-level jobs that may not pay much better than the UBI are an important

stepping stone to where they get to next in their career.

And I think it’s demotivating.

We’ve already seen in California, we’ve been doing this.

UBI is not going to pay you to go to college, but Amazon will, as an example.

So you’re absolutely right.

There’s the GI Bill.

You know, there’s all kinds of examples where in history we’ve used, you know,

entry-level jobs as exactly as they’re meant to be, an entry-level opportunity,

an on-ramp to work your ass off and to make something of yourself.

If you all of a sudden let people opt out of it, then it’s going to be a very – what

they’re not going to realize is by the time they get old enough where they will want to

have some kind of purpose, it’ll be too late.

Because in activating yourself in your 40s and 50s to essentially start your life is

really hard.

I’ll give you an example of this.

Like, you know, right now I – you know, I would say I’m like fairly fluent in Italian.

That’s pretty impressive.

But I started taking Italian lessons and, you know, the last four or five percent of

a language is brutalizing, right?

Because it’s like it’s every little grammatical thing.

You want to get it completely right.

And it’s very demotivating for me sometimes because I’m like, God, why the fuck am I

doing this?

I don’t have to.

I can get it by.

I just speak it.

But I’ve made a commitment to myself.

Same thing in biotech, you know.

I got introduced to it by Friedberg and obviously Nat and now I’m trying to learn.

And it is a grind.

And I think it’s so easy to quit.

Now, you take that to the extreme and some random person that doesn’t have necessarily

the ability to fall back on the success that, you know, we’ve all collectively had and

you have to start from scratch.

My God, it’s really tough.

It’s really tough.

At our age, it is just hard.

Kids are screaming in the background.

You’re trying to manage all this stuff.

It’s impossible.

So.

You think it’s easier when you’re in your early 20s?

Yeah.

Be careful what you wish for.

But why is it easier when you’re in your early 20s?

Isn’t it always a grind to learn something and push yourself to develop yourself?

I mean.

Well, you have nothing.

So the theory is you have some motivation to get something, right?

But if you still have nothing.

You’re going to climb up the mountain because like staying at the shore means you can go

watch out to sea or something.

I spent hours and hours and hours working.

Hours and hours and hours.

My 20s and 30s, like it was like 10 to 16 hour days.

I couldn’t leave the office.

Is that different today?

Yeah.

I don’t work in the same way I did before because I’m trying to do a different job.

But I’ve earned the right and I now put myself under pressure to do it differently because

I have a different job to do.

Right.

But when I was in my 20s and I was a PM, you know, grinding out a product or, you know,

writing a feature spec or, you know, building a model and trying to put all these things

together, it was so much thankless work.

I learned a ton and it was all worth it.

Right.

I was about to ask you, do you regret it or not?

No, look, this is the thing about work.

This is the thing about work life balance that the people are always complaining about

people who are working too hard don’t realize is that, yeah, you want to think about work

life balance, but across your entire life.

I mean, one of the things you’ll do in your 20s is work much harder to set yourself up

to where you want to be in your 50s.

And so Chamath doesn’t have to work as hard in his 50s because he worked much harder earlier

in his life.

And now he’s got the skill set where he can delegate more.

So, yeah, I think we’re, you know, we really shortchange people when we tell them as young

people that they don’t need to work hard or in the extreme case of UBI that we’re actually

paying people not to work.

That’s not developing the right habits that are going to make them successful later on.

And in fairness, though, if you look at minimum wage and you look at entry level jobs, many

of them paid too little.

Historically, these companies like McDonald’s, I know it’s a free market, but we’re paying

very little.

We’re talking $70 an hour and no benefits.

And, you know, this is kind of unnecessary greed in my mind.

And I think that’s what my first job was at Burger King.

I made $4.55 an hour.

Yeah.

I made $4.25 an hour in 1996.

That’s my first job cleaning, cleaning a pool.

Yeah.

$2.50 for me when I worked at Fordham’s computer center.

I think it was $3 it had gone to.

But when I started in the workforce in 88, it was $2.50 was the minimum wage.

What was the minimum wage where you were, David?

What was it like in that 19th century?

It sucks.

Yeah, tell us.

When I was working at –

When you killed the fields.

No, I remember when I was in college, I worked at a bar.

And I mean, I was there drinking so much.

I finally was like, why don’t you just give me a job?

So I might as well make some money while I’m sitting here.

And they paid me $7 an hour.

That’s what I did my senior year.

That’s pretty good.

Yeah.

Pretty good.

That’s a pretty well-paying job.

$7 an hour.

One of the other problems –

But one of the other problems of UBI that Larry Summers has been –

He’s the former US Secretary of Treasury.

Yeah.

He’s been on the record about is the inflationary effect.

So there are pretty smart economists like himself who highlight that as you give people,

everyone, $10,000 a year, first of all, it’s going to cost $10 trillion or whatever the estimate is

to fund that sort of program.

And suddenly, the cost of a burger goes from $0.49 to $0.99 or $0.99 to $1.99

because there’s much greater demand on that area of the economy for consumption.

And so you see an inflationary effect, which trickles its way through.

And so what ends up happening ultimately is by pumping more of that money in for free,

without productivity coming out of it, you effectively see inflation.

And so it wipes itself out.

And so this is kind of one economic theory on UBI is that it can actually

just end up being within 10 years, completely useless and pointless,

because then the basic cost of living climbs so much

that you need to raise the UBI again to give people basic living expenses.

And so it becomes this kind of nasty runaway effect.

So it’s not really sustainable is one argument that’s made against UBI.

But obviously, a different point than what we were kind of saying a moment ago.

Anyway, I think people, I think people don’t know what they want.

And if they get it, they’re going to.

I think of look, a form of a form of UBI does make sense.

And I do think we need to subsidize folks.

But you know, I think maybe it’s probably just a fancier word for welfare.

I grew up on welfare.

And I can tell you that I don’t think our family benefited from it.

Psychologically, we benefited from it socioeconomically, because we needed it to not

starve.

But the knock on effects of, you know, when you’re in that loop of, again, being in your

30s, 40s and 50s, not finding purpose, you know, which my parents had to struggle through.

Coping, you cope with alcohol, you cope with depression,

the knock on effects your kids, I don’t think we want to see that.

And so when people think about UBI, I think they need to understand that,

you know, we’ve run a long experiment.

In this thing called welfare, you know, what welfare does.

A lot of us have felt it.

And there needs to be a better way.

Because if you just let people opt out, I don’t think you really understand what

happens over long durations of time when you’re not doing anything.

Yeah, it’s getting really weird right now, right?

I mean, the fact that restaurants are closing that have customers, but they can’t operate.

And so we’re starting to actually see the effect of it.

You know, in some service.

What’s the open job stat right now?

It’s like 9 million open jobs in the US.

It’s been bouncing from 8 to 10 million.

There’s more unfilled jobs and there are unemployed people, right?

Yeah.

Or unemployment is high, but unfilled jobs is even higher.

Yeah.

We’ve somehow moved away from a political consensus we had in the 1990s that I think

made a lot of sense when Bill Clinton passed welfare reform with, you know,

a lot of Republican support is, look, we need to have a welfare system.

We need to take care of people who either can’t work or can’t find a job for a good reason.

There needs to be a social safety net.

But if you’re an able-bodied person who can find a job, you should be working.

And that welfare reform they passed in the 90s did lead to a lot of people finding meaningful work,

which I think resulted in happier lives.

And somehow we’ve moved off that political consensus that everyone kind of agrees.

Yes, social safety net, but able-bodied people should work to now we have this elite.

It’s really an elite ideology of UBI, which is, look, we’re going to pay people

not to work, which I just think is sort of like un-American.

Isn’t it also like a little insulting being like, you know what?

Don’t even bother working.

You’re making too little money.

We’ll just give you money.

It’s, it’s.

Yeah, it’s like.

It feels insulting to people’s dignity.

I’ll be honest.

Like I wouldn’t want to take it.

I would rather go out and be, I was a waiter or bus boy.

I’ll go be a waiter or bus boy and make enough money to pay my rent.

And yeah, one of the things you want it for free.

Yeah.

One of the things you hear is, well, your job’s going to be replaced by a machine anyway.

It’s not productive work.

So why don’t we just pay you to sit back and, you know, take yourself out of the economy?

Well, I, like you said, the unfilled jobs number shows that even with all the automation

that’s happening in the economy, and that’s a trend that will continue.

There’s still a need for, you know, human labor.

And I think there always will be.

And, and it’s a little bit too soon to be throwing in the towel on the idea that entire

groups of people can’t productively work.

Does everybody believe able-bodied people should work and not get free money?

It’s not that it should or shouldn’t.

I think the question is what’s, what’s in folks’ best interests?

Well, that’s what I mean.

Yeah.

But yeah.

So is it in best people’s best interest?

I’ll phrase it the way you’re saying it is in people’s best interest.

I think the, I think the point where we’re going to go wrong is when we couple UBI with

actually having to work or not work.

And I don’t think that’s the right idea.

I think we have to do a decent job of letting people find the things that they want to work

on, because everybody can find something that they want to work on.

And that shouldn’t exclude you or disqualify you from getting UBI so that all that does

is then just raise the general standard of living.

I think that idea is better.

The problem is when we talk about UBI, what we are talking about it is in the exact way,

Jason, that you said, which is letting people opt out.

I mean, think about how privileged that is to, there are places in the world where there’s

not enough jobs and people are like, wait a second, an American has to be fulfilled

with their job selection in addition to getting a job.

That just seems like the height of entitlements.

Like sometimes you just need a job because you need money to pay your bills, right?

But you’re saying if you get product, if you get job, job candidate, you know, citizen

fit, the uptick will be better.

UBI is a benefit.

The uptick will be better.

UBI is a benefit.

It’s like universal healthcare.

We don’t make a decision about universal healthcare based on who does or does not have a job.

And so UBI should basically be about evening, you know, the bottom few rungs of economic

viability so that everybody has a reasonable ability to have a decent life.

That’s a nice idea.

I think that makes a ton of sense.

But coupling it to having to work or not work, where some people say, oh, great, I can take

this money and not work is the wrong way to figure this out.

If we’re talking politics, why don’t we shift to the recall?

Yeah.

All right.

So postmortem on the Newsom recall.

Secretary of State says the recall cost over $300 million, obviously.

Gavin Newsom won in a bit of a landslide.

Hold on, the $300 million point.

Let me just take care of this real quick, okay?

Because I saw this all day on social media.

You know what?

Yeah, it did cost $300 million.

But all the people crying about that, clutching their pearls about the $300 million, never

said a word about the $30 billion, the 100 times greater EDD fraud that was perpetrated

by our state and by our one-party rule of the state.

And the recall process and the ballot initiative process is the only check we have on elected

leadership in a one-party state.

So listen, I’ll start clutching my pearls about the $300 million when they start talking

about the $30 billion.

But look, let’s shift to the result of this.

What are you referring to?

I’m not sure I know enough about the $30 billion EDD fraud.

This is the EDD fraud where $30 billion basically went to anyone claiming unemployment insurance

and $30 billion in fake claims were paid out.

The process was poorly administered.

So, I mean, people were just creating fake addresses.

They were just sending in claims from anywhere and $30 billion went out.

So look, I mean, that’s the kind of incompetence and corruption that we have in California.

So Zach, your point is that because it’s a single-party state where the Democrats have

supermajority in the assembly and obviously have the governorship, that the only mechanism

for the minority, the Republican Party, is to kind of run recall.

Not even the Republicans, just us as citizens.

I mean, look, let’s remember how the recall and the ballot initiative came to be, that

process.

It actually came from progressives early in the 20th century who said, we need the people

to have some direct democracy because special interests might usurp the electoral process

and get control over all these elected representatives.

And frankly, that’s exactly what’s happened in the state of California.

But the people who have that power are progressives and so they want to amend or abolish the recall

process.

So look, I think $300 million once every 20 years to put the fear of God into politicians

is money well spent in my view, even if this particular recall wasn’t close.

There are much greater examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that the people complaining

about this should be wanting to tackle.

And I’ll believe them about the $300 million when they complain about the $30 billion.

But look, this was a total shellacking for supporters of the recall.

And I do think that whenever you suffer a defeat, I think it’s important for you to

think about what went wrong, you know, and certainly as a supporter of the recall, I

think it’s worth doing a postmortem.

I think, you know, any political party when it loses needs to do some introspection.

And…

So what went wrong?

Well, I think a couple of things.

Okay.

So if you go back to the polls a month ago or so, it was a dead heat.

We even had that shock poll that Newsom was down by 10.

And then what happened?

Well, the Republican Party basically consolidated their support around Larry Elder.

Prior to that, you kind of had this amorphous blob of five different candidates who didn’t

have a lot of name recognition.

They were pretty moderate.

They were a hard target for Newsom to shoot at.

Once the Republican Party consolidated around Elder, it provided a very convenient and rich

target for Newsom to shoot at.

And so you’d have to say that tactically, the Republican Party made a mistake there.

Now, I understand why they did it.

I mean, Elder is smart.

He’s charismatic.

He appeals to that base.

But he’s not the moderate candidate that like a Schwarzenegger was or that I, you know,

Chamath, I wanted you to run.

And so Falconer was sort of that candidate.

And so you kind of had a choice on the Republican side between a moderate candidate who wasn’t

very charismatic, which was Falconer, and a very charismatic candidate who wasn’t moderate.

And it really played into Newsom’s hands.

And he was then able to nationalize the election in the wake of that.

So he branded, I think somewhat unfairly, he branded Elder as a Trumper.

And he ran against Trumpism.

And even Biden came to California to denounce Elder as a Trump clone, which, look, there’s

a lot of things you may not like about Larry Elder.

I don’t think it’s fair to call him a Trump clone.

But that’s what they did.

And so they demonized him.

And so if you look at the issues that Newsom ran on, they were all national issues.

He was, you know, talking about what was happening in Texas with abortion.

And he talked about COVID.

We should come back to that one because I think that is a state issue, too.

We should talk about it.

But he started talking about issues that were really more national issues.

And so the recall moved away from the issues that had galvanized supporters in the polls

polls just one month ago, which were homelessness, crime, schools and school closures and lockdowns.

And Newsom was able to very effectively change the subject.

Well, he got everybody back to school, right?

If people didn’t go back to school, it could have been a different result.

I think the recall is very helpful in that.

And if you remember,

Do you think policy has shifted because of the recall sacks at this point?

And doesn’t that ultimately kind of benefit the issues you were most kind of concerned about?

Look, the 300 million was worth it just to get businesses open and just to send a message to the

education unions that they could not keep schools closed for another year.

I, you know, if you look at when Newsom relaxed the lockdowns, it was at every

step of the recall process.

When the recall finally got enough signatures to get put over the top,

he all of a sudden started liberalizing the lockdowns.

He knew they were very unpopular and he gave up on that issue.

And he got the education unions to stand down on the issue of school reopenings,

I think because he was facing this recall.

So, look, I think the recall was worth it just for that.

But do you think things could have been different if there was a fringe candidate?

Like, I don’t know, a Sri Lankan billionaire that was, you know,

not kind of this hardened Republican that they could charge him?

Yes, I blame Chamath for this.

I think a candidate like Chamath could have won.

OK, a Democratic centrist.

Obviously, I’m joking.

Bloomberg.

I don’t blame you, Chamath.

I understand why you wouldn’t want to run.

But I’m saying a candidate like Chamath,

which is who I supported, or a candidate like Schwarzenegger.

Remember, Schwarzenegger, when he ran in the early 2000s,

he was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage at a time that gay marriage was not very popular.

He was socially very liberal.

You have to take those issues off the table because California is not going to vote.

He was pro-life candidate.

I think he was pro-gay marriage before the Clintons.

Yes, he was very early on that.

He was socially very liberal and very tolerant.

And you got to be in California.

In general, do you think the unions in California,

which is an issue that’s been talked about a lot on this pod, have been weakened

because of the recall and the voice that rose up during this period of time?

Or do you think nothing’s really changed long term?

I think it’s a long-term project to get the public to see

that the education unions are like any special interest,

which is that they will pursue their interest at the expense of the general interest.

And they have to be controlled.

Again, like any special interest.

I think because teachers are rightfully very popular,

people haven’t realized what the union bosses are up to.

I think that that has been exposed because of COVID and the school closures

to a much, much greater degree.

And I think that’s a good thing.

Well, I mean, if you look at the recalls happening locally, too,

with Chesa Boone and the San Francisco School Board,

it seems like now the citizenship is saying, oh, we do have a recourse.

It’s called doing a recall and stating our opinion very strongly

and then attempting to removing people.

And yeah, I think that does change people’s behavior.

You can be sure Chesa Boone is thinking about outcomes a little bit more now.

The implications of this recall, I think, are really important.

And I think it plays out in who runs in two years when Newsom is up for reelection.

And absolutely, it’ll change who runs on the Democratic side in four years,

assuming Newsom wins.

You have to remember, there have been a massive degradation in the quality of life.

The most populous state in America, which represents the fifth largest economy in the world,

under one party control.

Right.

So there is not a single law that cannot be passed.

There’s not a single program that cannot be implemented.

There’s not a single idea that can’t be pursued.

Yet we have had an absolute decline in quality of life under that rubric.

And so when people really come to terms with that,

that’s, I think, when there’s a sea change.

And I hope the sea change is not necessarily a Democrat or Republican thing.

It’s back to centrism.

And I think it’s checking special interests, exactly what Sachs says,

and realizing that just because you use a different name, like union or something else,

you’re still a special interest.

And you need to actually be focused on the interests of the general public,

our kids, the environment, water quality.

And if you can’t walk into a state where everybody up and now the ticket is on your

same team and get shit done, it’s a really tough report card.

Yeah, I’m just super uninspired by these guys.

Like, where is their audacious plan for California?

Has anybody stated like an audacious like, here’s what this state?

No, I mean, no.

Here’s what’s possible.

We could be the best economy with the greatest education system.

And we can build a million units of housing.

Should that be the role of the state government?

I mean, like, you know, should or should the competition,

they are they’re in competition with with Florida and Texas,

they have to compete for business and citizens.

And if it’s not done at the state level, we’re going to have to rely on the federal level.

And we know that that doesn’t work because we have 50 states that are

increasingly more diverse every day.

So the whole idea with the Constitution and the Founding Fathers was like,

we have this incredible startup.

But over time, I think we’ve decided that, you know,

this startup is an umbrella organization of 50 other startups.

It’s a holding company.

And there’ll be these small little, you know,

rules and differences amongst these 50 states.

And that’ll allow us collectively to thrive.

So sexy, put out a tweet.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, I just want to I think we want to believe in that idea.

Like, there is no savior.

You know what I mean?

There’s no savior for 350 people.

And there’s barely a savior for the 60 million people in California.

But it’s not going to happen by just throwing your hands up in the air and expecting some

president to come around because that’s just too hard.

Each state has to act like the citizens and be,

you know, just rugged individualists who are self sustaining and resourceful.

And this state is not self sustaining, resourceful or ambitious.

And it’s falling behind Texas and Florida and other competitors.

So you put out a tweet saying Austin or Miami, are you

are you in the active transition phase or where are you at?

Well, I don’t know.

I mean, we’ll see.

I think the trend line in California is not good.

I think what you’ve already seen in the days since the recall is that

Gavin Newsom has now laid out the strategy for all progressives

in like even from San Francisco to anywhere in the country of how they’re going to run.

And what they’re going to do is this, that no matter

how bad things get in terms of crime, in terms of homelessness,

in terms of quality of schools in cities and states that they have complete control over,

they’re always going to campaign against Trump and Trumpism.

And they’re going to demonize and otherize whoever the candidate is on the other side

as a Trumpist, whether they are or not.

That’s going to be the playbook from now on.

And this is where I think the attacks against

Larry Elder were very unfair is before he even had a chance to define what he was about.

You have publications like the L.A. Times calling him the new face of white supremacy.

I mean, it was like unbelievable, but.

Black Klansman.

Yeah, they basically try to make him out to be a black, which look, he is not OK.

Larry Elder is a libertarian.

Maybe his politics are not in the mainstream in California, but he’s not a black Klansman.

But look, this is what the progressive playbook is going to be for the next two decades, which is

to demonize anybody who stands up to them as basically being a Trumpist.

And the irony of it will be that they will have total control over the problems that

people really care about, crime, schools, homelessness.

And somehow, you know, what Newsom proved is that you can whip people up into, you can stir

their partisan political tribalism when you do that.

Right.

That’s why it’s effective is he gets people to see blue and

and he gets a free pass on these issues that just a month ago, people were very dissatisfied with.

Now, I do think it’s very, very important that our Republican Party

not play into this.

And there was a very good editorial.

I think there’s too much to say.

How come the Republicans are still pursuing a Trumpian, you know, framework?

They’re screwing up.

They’re stupid.

They are.

Look, they’re so dumb.

It’s a really stupid strategy.

And there’s two things they got to fix right away.

OK, so number one, Rich Lowry from National Review had a police, a piece in Politico where

he said that this election, the stolen election myth has become an albatross for Republicans.

They have to get off that.

I think it’s ridiculous.

That’s going to bring them down in 2022.

And the other thing is this anti-vax stuff.

I mean, you know, voters completely forgot about the way that Newsom locked down this state

and then broke his own lockdowns.

Why?

Because he’s pro-vax, even to the point of vaccine mandates, whereas the Republicans

were not.

And frankly, I think, Chamath, your instincts on this were right on, which is people given

a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti-vax position, they will take the vax mandates.

Speaking of instincts, you want to go to the This Week in Facebook’s dumpster fire?

Sure.

Sure.

So, I mean, where to begin?

This all started on Tuesday, 2016 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

OK, well, we’ll get to your victory lap in a moment.

But just to queue up this past week on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook

conducted in-depth research on the impacts of Instagram on children’s mental health from

2018 to 2020.

But they never made the research public, nor did they make it available to academics or

lawmakers who requested it.

You will remember that last year, or earlier this year, Facebook started floating the idea

of Instagram for kids.

So in addition to having this research, which they didn’t share, and here is the slide from

a presentation, it seems like the Wall Street Journal has somebody inside of Facebook giving

them everything, literally.

But here is the quote from presentation slides from 2019, internal Facebook presentation

slides.

We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.

Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.

This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups, according to the Wall Street

Journal.

And Instagram obviously is a juggernaut, over a billion monthly active users and over 40%

of them are under the age of 22.

This is a really interesting issue because we are, this is probably the first example

of a broad based public policy, public health issue that tech has created, not necessarily

amplified, right, or exacerbated, but actually created.

And now we’re going to have to deal with this.

Before I, I want to give you guys, how would you define that issue?

Well, I think it is a public health issue.

If you have a large percentage of a cohort of our population, subject to mental health

issues and eating disorders, that’s not a good place to be, right?

I don’t think that’s what we want as a healthy society, in a healthy society.

Our daughters, and it’s probably, by the way, it’s probably not more than just our daughters,

it’s probably our sons and daughters that are going through these issues.

The question is now about, you know, is it really a public health issue?

If you know about it, what responsibility do you have to do something?

And before I apply, and I just want to give you guys a little bit of data and just get

your reaction.

I actually want to go back to what’s called the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

And the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was entered in November of 1998.

Originally between the four largest US tobacco companies, Philip Morris, R.J.

Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and Laurillard.

Okay.

And the attorney generals of 46 states.

And essentially, it was an agreement that basically said, okay, we’re going to net all

these Medicaid lawsuits together.

We’re going to hold these folks responsible for the downstream implications of the product

that they’ve been selling our kids, and our, you know, adults population without the proper

disclosures, etc, etc, etc.

What happened before this tobacco MSA and big tobacco, though, was there was about eight

or 900 private claims that were filed from the mid 50s, all the way to the mid 90s.

David knows all this, because he made a movie about this.

The reason why I think this is interesting is that whether it happens in the United States

or someplace else, when I read that article, my immediate thought went to the tobacco MSA,

because I was like, well, okay, there’s a public health issue that may or may not have

been covered up cover up, you know, it’s definitely may or may not have been covered up, there

could be criminal liability, there’s probably civil liability.

If you’re, you know, a mother or father who’s lost their kid to an eating disorder or to

depression, anxiety, bullying, suicide.

And I think like, I think the article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was about like

human trafficking.

I mean, these are some gnarly, horribly complicated, gnarly issues.

To me, that’s how I can edit the dots.

So I just love to hear.

Well, I mean, who’s the Jeffrey Weigand in this case?

I mean, this is literally the movie The Insider, like somebody is leaking these documents out.

There’s a deep inside Facebook.

Yeah, well, yeah.

And that’s what the Brown and Williamson was really about is that somebody had the studies

from the 70s of when correct me if I’m wrong, David, when the tobacco industry knew and

did nothing and covered it up.

And then they had the whistleblower.

So do you feel this is exactly analogous, Sachs?

Or how close to analogous?

Are we taking too big of a jump here?

Well, this, this idea that social media is as bad for you as cigarettes has been around

for several years now.

And I’ve always wondered whether that was a hyperbolic claim.

I mean, it can it really be the case that using Facebook is as bad for you as lighting

something on fire and sucking its carbonized ash into your lungs?

I mean, I just, you know, yes, I think there’s like a kernel of truth here in terms of yes,

it does exacerbate body image issues.

But I don’t believe that Facebook or social media created those issues.

I mean, these issues existed before.

And what Facebook does is connect people in a more intense way than they were connected.

And so it might intensify some of the social dynamics that already existed.

But I don’t know that it created them.

And if you’re going to blame Facebook for this, there’s a lot of other places you could

blame too.

I mean, why don’t we be, why don’t we blame the Met Gala?

You know, like, you know, look at all those beautiful people.

Well, we have had actually blame on the fashion industry for making unrealistic body types

and the magazines and they sell regularly.

My kids can’t wear the full body stocking to school that Kim Kardashian wore to the

Met Gala or whatever.

I mean, and they’re upset about that.

So should we ban the Met Gala?

Or I mean, let’s look at all advertising.

I mean, all advertising just about focuses on unrealistically beautiful people.

And what about TV and movies?

I mean, Hollywood tends to cast people who are better looking or even the people reading

the news off teleprompters.

I mean, so this like body image and self-esteem issue is everywhere in our society.

And I think what social media does, as it does in so many of these cases, is really

just hold up a mirror to our society.

And it’s not, and yes, there’s a lot of bad stuff happening on social media, but that’s

because there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in our society.

Well, let me, you know, here’s one thing, David, the, there have been other industries

that have influenced this, but I don’t think that they were as pernicious and as frequent

in their use of as social media, you know, reading a fashion magazine or watching TV,

like slightly different than an interactive version of that, that you might use for five

hours a day, like TikTok or Instagram.

And I just dropped in an image into the Zoom chat there about suicide rates in the United

States.

And this chart you’ll see goes up to 2018.

And right around 2006, when we were at 11 percent, 11 suicides, I think per 10,000,

per 100,000, you’ll see from 2006 to 2008, we go from, you know, 10 or 11, basically

suicides per 100,000 Americans, all the way up to 14, a 40% increase.

So what’s your evidence?

That correlates directly with social media becoming part of what we’re doing here.

But what’s your connection to what’s happened?

I mean, is that among teens?

I mean, what is that?

This is overall suicide rates.

So I just think social media and the anxiety it produce could be actually having it.

I’m open minded to that.

Can I clear up one thing, Sax?

I think that your argument would be reasonable if the first part of your argument made more

sense.

And to me, it doesn’t.

And when you don’t think that smoking and looking at your screen for an hour a day are

the same, let me just, from my perspective, explain to you why they are the same.

Whether or not you’re ingesting something into your lungs, or whether or not it’s your

eyes, at the end of the day, you’re still activating physiological pathways, okay?

There are specific chemicals that are being created through smoking, specific chemicals

that are created through how your brain and your mind is reacting.

And all of these things, when you’re bathed in these chemicals for long periods of time,

have known deleterious consequences.

Some manifest in tumors, which then result in cancer.

You die, lung cancer, cigarettes.

But what we’re learning is some of these things result in long-term imbalances of these critical

hormones and chemicals you need in your brain to stay healthy.

And that results in anxiety, or the propensity to overeat, or the propensity to then throw

stuff up.

And so I would be careful about not assuming they’re not physiologically the same.

I actually think they’re more similar than different at a core physiological level.

It’s just that we’re not used to the fact that something that is equivalent to looking

at a screen could actually do that to you.

I guess the question is, what’s the threshold for regulatory intervention?

If someone did this at the scale, let’s say there was a social network that had 100,000

users, and people were actively using the social network every day and having body

issues or whatever the consequences claim might be.

You’re going to find out.

We’re about to find out.

Are we going to end up creating a regulatory framework across all of these things?

And I think that this goes also to the point of scale, because at the end of the day, if

you end up starting a business and you’re not successful, you don’t really find yourself

in the framing of, well, what are you doing wrong?

All of the companies that scale, the assumption is they did something wrong in order to get

to that scale.

Roloff, both of Sachs’ former colleague and obviously famed investor now at Sequoia Capital,

said that he only invests in businesses that pursue one of the 7 deadly sins, because those

are ultimately the things that consumers increment their consumption of.

There has to be a 7 deadly sin driver, underscoring the success of any business

that sells to consumers.

And if that is actually true, people aren’t making kind of altruistic purchasing and

consumption decisions.

They’re making decisions based on envy and based on greed and based on gluttony.

And all of those drivers, we kind of, you know, are effectively, Jamal, kind of related

back to these physiological drivers.

Right.

And so like, yeah,

no, two things can be right.

What you said can be right.

But I think what also can be right is, are we really willing to bet that now there are

not 50 individually ambitious, politically ambitious state AGs, licking their chops,

reading this stuff, wondering how many kids in their state may have suffered from an eating

disorder or anxiety and blame it on one of these apps?

Of course.

Are we convinced that not a single lawsuit will get filed?

Are we convinced that there’s not going to be any class action?

And by the way, that’s just the United States.

What is somebody that’s sitting around a, you know, around a table of politicians desks

in, you know, Germany, Belgium, France, Thailand, they’re going to find their issue in this

treasure trove of content that’s being, you know, continuously drip fed out to the public.

I guess my point is that this is today’s issue.

And business success, ultimately, over time in consumer markets will always ultimately

be driven by products that have at scale deleterious effects on the consumer market.

And those deleterious effects will be a result of some sort of kind of addictive or negative

kind of consequence that arises when folks use these things frequently.

And the market figures out how to optimize the utilization of products to increase revenue,

to increase profit.

And that’s what a free market does.

And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong.

I’m just pointing out that there isn’t, in my opinion, something unique here.

I mean, you know, Coca Cola is the largest beverage company in the world.

They sell 40 grams of sugar and 12 ounces of water.

And everyone buys that and they feel great from that.

And the sugar creates this addictive problem.

Now we’ve got an obesity epidemic.

I’m not blaming Coca Cola.

But that’s the general trend in CPG over the last 50 years.

Increasing sugar, increasing salt.

And the difference is that this is not sugar, which is a generic compound.

This is, for example, no different than when Purdue Pharma started to make fentanyl.

It’s a really great drug.

It has incredibly superior advantages.

It’s used for a lot of very important things.

When that spilled over knowingly to a level of abuse,

and I don’t think it was a lot of abuse, but there was enough

that essentially was overlooked in the building of a business.

It started with state AGs who stepped in.

And then it basically ultimately drove a federal agreement,

states agreements, a master settlement agreement around fentanyl.

And then Purdue essentially disgorging all the profits that they made.

So you’re right.

Free markets should act in however way they’re going to act.

But when those free market operators themselves are producing data that shows that,

oh, shit, hold on, something could be going wrong here.

Then I do think that politicians will step in regulators could step in.

I mean, what’s crazy here is, you know, the FDA could actually act like

if the FDA is willing to act on jewel, what is the difference?

If the FDA says they feel like let’s just assume that somebody in the FDA says,

we feel like we should have a responsibility to

think about mental health and eating disorders.

But that’s the slippery slope, right?

What’s the threshold?

Right.

At what point do they say, no, we’re not touching this?

And at what point do they say, yes, we are touching this?

Because at the end of the day, any successful consumer product

will have some degree of deleterious effect.

And this is why we have to have some perspective about it.

So in preparation for the segment, I asked my 11 year old girl daughter.

I know, Jake, how you don’t think I talk to my kids, but actually I made no joke.

No joke.

I was thinking of three or four fun things.

Did she ask you if you were the FedEx guy?

She was like, who are you?

Why are you in my room?

Security.

So the first thing she said is, who are you?

And the second, and after I said, I’m your dad.

And then the second thing she said is, the second thing she said is,

I don’t use Instagram.

I’m like, okay, well, what do you use?

She said, TikTok.

I’m like, well, the worst.

So I’m like, well, what do you, what do you use TikTok for?

And she said, well, I watch dance videos.

And I’m like, well, I’ve been reading press articles that say that the only thing on TikTok

is sex and drugs.

And that it’s, you know, it’s bringing you into a vortex of that.

And she said, I don’t watch that.

I watch dance videos.

And then smart as a whip, she said, the only people who end up watching that are the ones

who keep indicating, she didn’t use the word preference, but she basically said that they

keep getting that stuff because they like it and they keep getting fed more of what

they’re watching.

So look, I think we have to have a sense of perspective about this.

At the end of the day, products like Facebook and Instagram are ways for people to share

content and consume content for people they follow.

I mean, that’s basically it.

Now, is there a lot of bad shit on there?

Yeah, because there’s a lot of bad shit in the world.

And should Facebook be trying to control this stuff?

Absolutely.

But I don’t, at the end of the day, think it’s cigarettes.

If they banned kids from using TikTok and Instagram until they were 16 years old, would

you be opposed to that?

Because I don’t let my kids use it.

And I have an 11-year-old daughter.

I don’t let her anywhere near.

We have a complete moratorium on that.

No social media is our rule.

I can’t believe you let your kids use social media.

I mean, I’m not passing judgment, but are you crazy?

I mean, like all they use it for is to watch dance videos.

So I don’t know.

But I think Sax’s point is an interesting one, which is, you know, based on what your

daughter said, that is effectively what’s going on.

It creates an acceleration of the natural evolution of these markets that historically

may have taken, call it 50 years for everyone to want to watch.

MTV didn’t emerge for 60 years until there was radio and television broadcast signals.

And then everyone said, you know what, I want to watch rockers dancing on stage and going

nuts and whatever the consumer demand was that eventually evolved there.

What’s happening in social media is within seconds, you make evolutionary votes on what

you want in a media cycle.

And then all of a sudden, a few hours later, you’re getting exactly what you want over

and over again.

And you can’t say no.

And that’s effectively what digital media generally, social media in particular, has

some nuances to it.

But digital media generally has enabled is an acceleration of the natural consumption

trend that we see with humans, which is they eventually want to go to one of the seven

deadly sins.

And that’s what they kind of get stuck with.

We’ve definitely talked about the danger of getting trapped in an information bubble and

a feedback loop.

And I do think that is a danger of these products.

But so is cable news.

I mean, you look at Twitter, it’s an outrage machine and people get trapped in a cycle

and they only want to they either follow people to get outraged by them or just because they

want to kind of self indoctrinate themselves.

But that is basically why people watch cable news as well.

I mean, it is an outrage machine.

Your friend Tucker.

Or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

They’re both feeding different variations of outrage.

And so my point is, look, I don’t think these problems are unique to social media.

I think they pervade Hollywood and the entertainment industry and even the news industry.

Look, maybe we should put warning labels on them.

At the end of the day, we don’t prohibit cigarettes.

We have an assumption of risk argument.

We put warning labels on them.

Maybe we need warning labels on these influencers.

More than that, right?

You put it you put it behind a counter and there’s a strict prohibition on people under

the age of 18 being able to use them.

And when it looks like, you know, companies like Jewel were trying to circumvent those

things or make it appear more valuable, basically, to hook kids at a younger and younger age,

when they weren’t capable of making those decisions.

They were held liable.

So, okay, so there’s a really interesting topic there, which is should people under

the age of, say, 16 or 18 be prohibited products?

Yes.

100%.

100%.

Look, if you if you think 16 or 18, 16 or 18,

let’s 16 100% 18

16 100% and then there needs to be a way of opting out because I think 16 year olds are

quite sophisticated.

But here’s the thing.

We are living longer and longer than ever.

It is very likely that we’re all going to generally live to our hundreds.

It’s not the end of the world for these kids to have to wait an extra two or three years

until their literal physiology is a little bit better form so that they have better antibodies

to this shit.

And I think that if we as a adult population aren’t necessarily going to take responsibility

for these kids, I think we’re doing them a huge disservice.

You don’t let your kids run around wherever they want.

You don’t let them hold guns whenever they want.

You don’t let them do a whole bunch of things that they may think is okay, but you know,

could have really bad consequences.

And so if you know that this stuff is happening, I think it’s very different to look at a 22

year old and tell them what to do or not to do.

That’s not what we’re debating.

But what that data was about was about long-term systemic health issues to a large percentage

of girls.

That’s really fucked up.

And a lot of the research that’s come out, I dropped a couple of links in the chat.

You know, I haven’t read the studies, but they’re starting to show a correlation between

suicide rates and depression in young kids with social media.

And it does skew towards females.

The theory is females are more adept or more frequently in dynamic or complex social situations.

In other words, cyber bullying type situations where people use the social media to just

kind of bully each other.

I mean, look, I think you guys have a real point with respect to ages 13 to 16, because

I don’t think you’re allowed to use social media, or at least in terms of use prohibited

under age 13.

We all know that’s a joke.

You and I have both had to build products that have to, you know, abide by COPPA laws.

And we always just kind of laugh at it because they’re bullshit.

Right.

Okay, fair enough.

But what I’m saying is I think you guys have a real issue that needs to be explored around

what’s the usage for ages 13 to 16.

But look, what I worry about with these things is you’re always playing whack-a-mole, right?

I mean, you basically ban social media.

And all of a sudden, these kids, because they’re very tech savvy, are going to find themselves

on text groups and text chats, and they’ll be in Signal.

And you won’t even be able to see what they’re doing.

I mean, at least on social media, you can see it.

The whole point of that, though, that makes sense to me.

Because I remember when I was growing up, and we all wanted to smoke,

it was a pain in the ass to get cigarettes.

So most of us just said, well, it’s not worth it.

But yeah, you’re right.

A handful of people found a way to get the cigarettes to sneak behind the school to smoke

them.

That’s fine.

But that’s very different than Juul walking into the middle of the lunchroom and passing

out berry flavored vape pens.

Yeah.

Wow.

That’s basically saying, well, that’s crazy.

Obviously, that shouldn’t be created packaging.

If you look at the why do you have the moral outrage around Juul and berry flavored vaping?

Look, why do you care about Juul?

Or why should we generally care about Juul and not care about soda companies making 40 grams

per 12 ounces of sugar, which is truly dangerous and damaging to the health?

Because we’ve been drinking soda for a long time.

And we’ve already accepted.

So we’ve allowed ourselves to accept it.

We essentially on time.

And then we had this kind of, you know, tobacco moratorium that’s now kind of.

Well, I mean, look, if we’re not smoking, but freeberg, if you said if you said right now,

COVID is a disease of the old and the obese, you would be canceled.

Like somebody tried to say that recently, the guy from the point is you’re talking about

like people are very sensitive about this obesity thing.

And the second you say, like, we need to monitor it, they need to make

40% of Americans with type two diabetes, or whatever.

There’s also personal freedom.

And do you want to drink a Coke Zero?

And so if you have personal freedom, why should some regulator tell you what

social media tool you should or shouldn’t use?

Right?

The cover up is what we’re talking about.

If we’re talking about minors, if we’re talking about what are you going to do with a 13 to 16

year old?

What are you going to do with the 11 year old?

That’s the best part of your argument.

That’s the best part of your argument is when we’re dealing with minors, I could I could see

the argument for more restrictions and and potentially support them depending on what

they are.

I think that’s something.

What about minors not being able to drink soda?

You have to be 16 year old to drink soda.

I mean, that’s actually, that’s where most diabetes and obesity is rooted in this country.

I actually am open minded to that position.

Actually, I know it sounds crazy.

But no, I think that that makes sense drinking Coca Cola makes no sense.

If we have a crazy obesity, if we can actually show that.

So let’s ask the question.

So let me ask, let me ask, let me ask the second order question about this, which is

free burgers, right?

That drinking sodas for 13 year olds has got to be as harmful or more than using Facebook.

OK, so why do we never hear about that?

I would argue that there’s something else going on here with this massive amount of

attacks on social networking companies.

There’s a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media because they’ve

been disrupted by Facebook, by these social media companies.

And so they took their money and they’re looking to publicize any article about the

negative effects of these companies, which they’re not threatened by Coca Cola.

So they’re not going to publish those kinds of studies.

So I just think that there’s an argument that perhaps I’m not saying you’re wrong.

I think there’s absolutely truth in what you’re saying.

It’s all a matter of degree, though, and perspective.

And I do think that the traditional media has an incentive to blow this out of proportion

a little bit because they have an agenda for your science.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think people in power, look, I think there’s a positive thing about social networking.

I mean, because we haven’t said one positive thing about it.

OK, social networking overall enables us to stay in touch with people we care about,

friends, family, and allows us to receive information from people we want to follow.

OK, we never talk about those positives.

I find it an incredibly convenient way to consume news.

OK, so we never talk about that.

But here’s why, is because social media is fundamentally a democratizing force, right?

It enables people to coronate in a much more democratized way than they ever had been able

to before.

I do think that is threatening to people in power.

And given the chance, they would like to suppress it.

Zuckerberg gave a speech a few years ago about social networks being, I think, called the

fourth estate, with the third estate being the press.

And in the same way that there are people in power who want to censor the press, I do

believe that there are people in power who want to censor social networks because they

don’t like the disruptive democratizing force that it represents.

And there is a lot of positive to that in the world.

I think you’re mixing up a lot of things there.

So yeah, you’re right.

And I don’t think any of us are saying cancel these companies and remove them from the internet.

I think what we’re saying is there are very specific ways in which certain features are

built, that they are expressed in features that are now apparently according to their

own work and exploration, are linked to mental health issues.

So I think the point is, people should now decide whether to your point, we should ignore

it because the good vastly outweighs, you know, what’s a third of girls who the fuck

cares, right?

I mean, they’re chicks, so whatever.

Or you say, actually, this is a really big problem.

And so let’s step up and fix it, because somebody needs to protect these people.

And when you’re 16, or 17, or 18, do whatever you want.

Like we let people do today, you want to drink a Coca Cola every day, get diabetes, you can

do that.

Nobody tries to stop you.

Right?

You want to smoke a pack of smokes a day, you can do that.

Nobody stops you.

But we do a lot of other things to try to help kids.

I think I think we’re only talking about ages, if we’re talking about the minors, the kids,

I think you and I can find agreement on this issue, I think, but

I do think that the demonization of social media goes well beyond that.

But look, I think you’ve got a great point with respect to the kids.

Do you guys believe, and this is a theory that’s been growing, that tick tock, run by

the Chinese government is trying to reprogram ethics, morals and doing psych, psych ops,

basically, there’s psy ops on our children.

No, Jay, there’s something bigger than that.

I mean, I think all of you guys probably upgraded to 14.8 iOS this week, I hope you haven’t and

everybody listening, if you haven’t, please go upgrade it.

But, you know, the Israeli spy firm NSO had apparently created a zero click exploit for

the iPhone, where you could turn on the camera and the microphone and basically spy on folks,

completely unaware.

And, you know, Jason, and I were talking about this.

And I think Jason, you were the one that said, you’re like, yeah, we’ve been living with

that with tick tock for years.

It’s not as if, you know, NSO just licensed it randomly to the Saudi government.

I mean, this tool has been available for a while.

So to your point,

but do we think that the Chinese government tick tock are trying to program our children

to be more deviant and to create social unrest?

And no, you don’t think that they’re trying to steer them with the algorithm towards bad

results, because they’re not letting their kids play video games?

No, I think that Wall Street,

did you see the Wall Street Journal article that I just sent to you guys?

Wall Street Journal article basically created a bunch of kids accounts,

and then did searches or what started to go down a rabbit hole.

And just with one keyword search, you know, these kids went into deep,

you know, kink BDSM sort of results.

This is a pretty straightforward weighted tree algorithm.

Okay.

So like, when you start on a branch of a tree, and you keep clicking on those things,

that’s what you will get.

This is no different than how Facebook’s algorithm works,

how Google search algorithm works for you.

Once you start behaving with clicks, or swipes, or likes, they use that as a feedback loop,

and they wait basically weigh the next set of results.

So David’s daughter is right, if you click on sex, drugs, and rock and roll, that’s,

it’s not all you’re going to get, but it’s going to be a large percentage of what you get,

because the algorithm in a blunt way, assumes that that’s what you like.

Yeah.

So I’m not sure that this is repeating anything that’s so, you know, it’s pretty

obvious that that’s how it should work if they want to have maximum utilization.

Well, you know, the thing that’s slightly different about TikTok is, you know,

in Facebook or Instagram, you build your feed and Twitter,

and then it serves it up algorithmically on TikTok, it uses the entire corpus.

So if you do one search for a keyword,

now it’s not just a subset of what your friends posted in some ranked order,

it’s the entire corpus of like long tail.

And so what they show in this TikTok is like how quickly a child who just types in one keyword can

be have their feed be 90% drug use. And, you know, sadomasochistic, whatever you’re into sex,

I don’t know.

If the content is obscene, then it should be taken down to begin with. Okay. And look,

my takeaway from this conversation is that we need to do something different for kids.

I don’t know if it’s a flat out prohibition or what, but yeah, but look, so the TikTok algorithm

thing, if you want to keep seeing more and more content related to something fine,

the algorithm is going to give you more and more of what you want as a consumer.

But maybe for kids, there needs to be some guardrails around that. And we don’t direct,

we don’t direct kids towards certain kinds of content around, you know, sex or drugs or violence.

I have to constantly remind parents like YouTube,

kids should not use YouTube because it goes really to crazy dark places.

And there’s kids YouTube and kids YouTube, they add each and every video. Now you’ll

still get some of that consumption and unboxing of things and your kids will ask you to buy a

bunch of stuff, but you’re not going to get straight up sex, violence, and you know, everything

else. I’ll tell you what does happen. I put kids YouTube on my kids, my four year olds iPad.

And then the other day, she said she saw some like scary horror thing on there and she couldn’t sleep

and she woke up in the middle of the night because you know, if we’re not doing our job

as parents curating the content and curating what our kids are doing, and we’re leaving it to this

app, we’re totally effed. And that’s what I realized I did my laziness in like, just thinking

like, oh, there was something she wanted to watch. I put the app on there and didn’t pay

attention for a few weeks. And all of a sudden she had gone down the rabbit hole, found something

scary. I don’t know if you guys use this, but I use an app called Custodio. It’s with a Q,

Q-U-S-T-U-D-I-O. And you can kind of like lock down all these devices. And then at the end of

every week, it gives you an email of all the app usage and all the links that my kids clicked on,

or just my oldest one, he’s the only one that has a phone.

But that’s nice. And you had a discussion with them about that? Like, Hey,

yeah, it’s a privilege to have this. And yeah, it’s gonna tell me what you did.

I agree. It’s still super, super hard. But this is why I think you need to have some blunt force

instruments right now. And my blunt force instruments are you’re not allowed to have

well, the ones that we’ve, we’re, they’re not allowed to have TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook,

Instagram, Twitter. Yes, hard now. And the only reason we allow YouTube is because a lot of the

school links are to videos inside of YouTube. And so you can’t lock it down. But that’s why I use

this custodial app to see what they’re watching on YouTube. Even then, though, it’s not perfect.

By the way, this thing that just came from the Pentagon is a total Friday news drop.

I mean, talk about a Friday news drop. I don’t know what we don’t know what you’re talking about.

US military acknowledges Kabul drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

We knew this. They’re just confirming something that had been exposed. The New York Times did

excellent reporting on excellent reporting by the New York Times. That was incredible journalism.

I mean, did you guys see that they were like watching frame for frame of like a video,

then they were like going to Google Maps, they were comparing colors of cars, they were looking

at sides of buildings. Incredible reporting by the New York Times. It was really the I mean,

it’s obviously a tragedy was the final debacle of our Afghanistan involvement. This was a

foreign aid worker, who actually he was there as an aid worker. They had him on video loading up his

car with plastic jugs of water. Somehow they thought these were explosives or something like

that. He was doing his errands and then he comes home. They hit the car with a massive missile

from one of these Reaper drones. It kills him as well as basically 10 members of his extended

family, including seven children. Now, the I mean, I think I understand why this well, we don’t

exactly know why this happened. And I think it needs to be investigated. Obviously, the military

in Kabul was on high alert, because we just had that bombing at the airport. And it was the

bloodiest day for America in Afghanistan. I think we had 313 soldiers killed a few days before this,

but it just shows the kind of mistakes that we can make even fighting drone warfare. You know,

the idea was – The term casualties of war exists for a reason. Like, this is how war works. You

cannot do it perfectly. It’s messy. Everybody, innocent people dies is why war is the worst

thing in the world. It should be the last resort. Right. And how did we ever think we’re going to

win hearts and minds in this country by, you know, like, we made too many mistakes.

They’re not interested in democracy, like in the way we want them to be, and the West wants

them to be. By the way, that’s forcing it down their throats is not going to work. We could

have maintained a base there. There were better ways to exit. But let’s fix the schools in

California first. Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’ll ultimately, I think people are going to

forget those images of people on planes and just think, thank God that’s over. I think now that

there hasn’t been 20, you know, and hopefully there’s not another 911. All right. Let’s wrap

with Ellen Powell wrote a piece for the New York Times op ed section, section on sexism in tech,

using the Elizabeth Holmes trial as the main example. She was also on tech checks, the NBC

show, and discussed her op ed. Quote, home should be held accountable for her actions as chief

executive of their nose. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged, very serious

wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing and bad judgment.

She uses Travis Kalanick and Adam Newman as examples of men who have engaged in questionable

unethical, even dangerous behavior in tech without much legal penalty. And that they both went on to

start new companies. Her main example, however, is bias is tech. Executive Kevin Burns, who is

the former CEO of jewel j u u l, who helped the cigarette vaping company raise $12 billion. But

he left jewel amidst a lot of legal blowback. And just this past week with a bunch of with a bunch

of cash with about Yeah, I mean, of course, you get that you secure the bag on the way out Adam

Newman to. And yeah, don’t drop the bag. You have one job to do. Don’t drop the bag. Yes, run. But

don’t do not drop the bag. So she meant she mentioned other stories like juicero. If you

guys remember this company, a couple years ago, they raised $1 million pre launch, right? It was

a juicer that, you know, was supposed to juice for my juicer. Oh, yeah. The claim that they made was

that inside of the packets was like fresh vegetables. And this thing squeezed the fresh

vegetables and fresh juice juice came out. And it turns out that the bag was just filled with juice.

And so no, no, I think the bag was filled with shaved vegetables or whatever. But

you squeeze the bag squeeze the bag. So that it was already pre juiced is what,

you know, Olivia Zaleski, who’s now Olivia Peterson. It was she basically put me she

kind of made a whole video and put it on Bloomberg. They had juice in these packets.

And they were telling people what they thought. Yeah. So they could have put it into a machine

and pay $7 juice, then took that juice, put it in a bag. Yeah, that was supposed to be fresh

vegetables sold that as fresh vegetables to then get juiced together. charged $8 a bag for this

stuff. And who invested in that who invested in that who wrote $100 million ventures anyway,

a lot of people. It was a huge, it was a huge, like, you know, better for the planet story.

But it turns out that the hardware didn’t work. And then they ended up kind of faking it till

you make it. It was very similar to Theranos in the sense that there was a piece of hardware that

made a claim that wasn’t necessarily true. And granted, no lives were at risk in this particular

case. But some might argue lives were at risk in the case of jewel. But I think you know,

you see this a lot more in these kind of hardware, particularly in life sciences companies.

You know, there’s a business like like Zymergen is a good example, right? It’s very hard tech,

very deep tech. Josh Hoffman did an incredible job fundraising rates of $400 million round from

SoftBank took the company public, then they go public. And a few weeks later, they’re like,

Oh, wait, sorry, we don’t actually have any product or any revenue. And we talked about

this a few months ago, a few weeks ago, the stock completely collapsed. There’s another

company called Berkeley lights, which went public. And yesterday, Scorpion Capital,

one of these short sellers put out 160 page report on these guys, showing that Berkeley

lights his product, actually, it’s a it’s a hardware life sciences hardware that costs $2

million. They’ve sold it into all the pharma companies. And Scorpion saying, Look, this thing

doesn’t work. It’s a total fraud. Like there’s no, the machine doesn’t do what they claim it does.

Okay, but so to Alan Powell’s point, is there a double standard or not?

Right. And so these were all run by male CEOs, and nothing happened to them.

And as well.

Um, yeah, yeah, they’re all white.

All right. First of all, let’s take it easy on the white guys.

It’s three other white guys.

I’m asking a qualifying question.

It is. So here’s what I’ll ask is,

I mean, is this a surprise that white dudes will get a hall pass?

I don’t think that’s a shocker.

Yeah, it’s considered it’s considered entrepreneurial failure. But when it comes

to the woman that everyone I think was excited about seeing succeed, because she was a woman,

it becomes fraud. And I think well, you know, there’s two different things. Yeah.

Is it free? But isn’t there two different things between, you know, where she obviously misled

people in a pre meditated way and lied to them, like taking their blood sample, and then putting

it in a fake machine, then doing it in the back on an Abbott machine, and then bringing the results

back and making it on her. There are no Edison machine. I mean, this is literal wire for a

securities fraud. In these other cases, is it people who are ambitious, if you look at the

juicer. Oh, it’s kind of like this is a stupid idea that got overfunded.

He put he put juice in a packet and told you

he put chef shaved vegetables in the packet, and then use hydraulic, which is an actual real thing.

That’s actually not correct. Watch the video that Olivia put on Bloomberg a few years ago,

which I just showed you pictures of it. I mean, maybe there’s a different one.

What they showed is that it was already squeezed. Yes, there was

shit in there. But it was already squeezed. Like, all right, well,

take it all back. I mean, it was like, it was like a crazy story when this came out.

And everyone’s like, Oh, my God, like, it was a standard, like, hardware is really difficult.

You know, novel hardware technology is really difficult. So you fake it till you make it.

In some cases, you launch a product that doesn’t even work. You know, and there’s just and this

isn’t just in hardware. It’s also in like science, as you see this a lot, where you ship a product,

I would probably say that if if regulators believe that those CEOs

tried to commit fraud, they would have done challenges, right? Maybe they still will,

they should follow up with those folks. So why do you think they went after Elizabeth Holmes,

Jamal? Because it was actually there was a legal case. There’s I think there’s one

really important there are two things at play in Theranos, which is different. Number one is

the kinds of investors that were involved here are extremely powerful folks, not necessarily,

you know, technology capable, but very, very well known, highly connected people in the

establishment. And the second was that they were operating in a regulated market, which has very

strict laws. Look, I’ve tried to build competing products to Theranos for years, I’ve been pretty

public about this, I’ve tried five or six times, they failed every single time, I couldn’t even

get out of the starting line. You know, these tests would never work without with a single

drop of blood, it just didn’t make any sense. The only version of this problem that has been

solved well, is the ability to detect cell free cancer DNA in blood, right using a very small

quantum of blood. Companies like garden and grail have actually done and built a great business out

of it. But it requires extremely sophisticated machinery sold to them by Illumina and others. So

if you’re operating in a regulated market, the bar is higher, there is a lot more scrutiny.

And then on top of that, I think she compounded it by including folks and raising capital from

folks that may not have actually known and been able to diligence. And so that’s the cycle of

fraud that may or may not have occurred there. And she has to, or they have, there’s a burden

to prove that. It’s very different, I think, over here in an unregulated market where

you can just kind of build whatever you want. And if smart investors look,

Nick just put in the group chat. So the investors in Juicero were Google Ventures,

Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital. I mean, these are all very sophisticated folks that,

you know, made a decision. And, you know, it’s probably not the case that they were lied to.

I understand why they made the Juicero mistake, because at the time, fresh pressed juice using

hydraulics was a thing. And this guy said, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to use hydraulics,

I’m going to squeeze the vegetable so you get the best stuff out of it. I understand why they

fell for it. Because my wife was buying that press. What the fuck are you talking about?

My wife, Jay, was buying that press juicery juice in LA. You remember this trend?

It’s pure sugar. That stuff is pure sugar.

Well, it’s vegetable juice too, but it would cost like $11 because they would use so much

vegetables. And I saw these presses they used. It’s incredibly inefficient, but the juice tastes

really great. But the thing I have a problem with, with Ellen Powell story is she brings up,

you know, the harassment stuff. And, you know, this is an issue of gender, etc. But

on this week in startups, I’ve been covering fraud after fraud. I don’t know if you saw App Annie

got an SEC fine yesterday.

What happened, Jason? Because I saw you…

With App Annie, they told people who were using their analytics products,

building apps, there’s like 8 million people, that they would never sell their data except

an aggregate. And then they went to Wall Street people and said, here’s actually,

we’ll sell you the data. And you can trade on it. And so…

No.

Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t think that’s like insider trading exactly, but it might be. But anyway,

the guy got fined $10 million.

Well, it kind of is. That’s the whole point of reg FD. The whole point is if somebody knows

something, if you’re a financial actor, Jason, and you know something, so like if all of us were

sitting around a table, you know, and somebody said something about a random public company…

That’s not public information.

If that’s not known, two things have to happen. Number one is I, when I receive it,

must not do anything with it. And that second, that person who disclosed it

needs to then file an 8k and say, oops, I accidentally said this.

Right.

So there’s…

Now where does…

This is an end around around things like reg FD, I think that’s a really big deal.

Well, and then I guess the question is like, what happens with people who use planet labs or

whatever to, you know, to satellite images of the target parking lot or put people as spotters

outside of Starbucks and count the people coming in and out? Is that public information?

That’s public. But if you have a terms of service that says one thing…

Yes.

And you’re violating that, but then you may also be violating reg FD.

So they haven’t gone after people for on the other side of the trade for securities fraud,

but they charged him with securities fraud. He pays 10 million bucks. I think he’s in the

penalty box, can’t be, you know, run up, be a public officer for three years. Then we had

Headspin. I don’t know if you saw that SaaS company, but Headspin was involved in just

basically straight up lying about their SaaS software. Then you have Tether, the stablecoin,

they’ve been banned from New York by the DOJ. They’ve been banned by the Canadian regulators

for the first two crypto exchanges there. And supposedly the DOJ is investigating them.

And then there’s about five ICOs in New York that have been prosecuted already. So

I know Ellen’s saying like, they’re not prosecuting men, but I’m seeing them all the

time. Yeah. They’re just not, the press is not obsessed with them because let’s face it,

Elizabeth Holmes was, she was weird. I mean, the voice, there’s a lot of peculiar things about her

that you don’t see in other folks who are boring, right?

By the way, what you just said is part of the sexist claim that Ellen made,

which is that we talked about her dress and how she dressed and how she talked.

We don’t talk about that kind of stuff when it comes to other entrepreneurs and

Of course they did. Adam Neumann, they were talking about him being a hippie,

walking around with bare feet, being 6'7". Every profile, she’s wrong in that case.

Every profile of Adam Neumann talked about his personal life and his wife is married to,

what’s her name? Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin.

Gwyneth Paltrow. So Ellen’s a hundred percent wrong on that one.

Yeah. And didn’t Elizabeth Holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately,

styling herself in the fashion of Steve Jobs with a black turtleneck and the glasses?

I mean, she portrayed herself as the next Steve Jobs. I mean, it was part of the grift.

It was a setup.

Yeah, exactly. Now, did gender play into it? Yeah, but I think not necessarily in the way

that Ellen Powell thinks. In this sense, that the media wanted to believe so badly

that the next Steve Jobs was going to be a woman that they kind of look past what should have been

staring them in the face. I mean, look, if a man had gotten out there wearing the black turtleneck

and the John Lennon glasses or whatever, they would have said, who is this clown?

Yeah, exactly. But they suspended.

You have to dress up as Steve Jobs in the next episode, Freeberg. You can make it work.

Can we all do it? Can we see?

Oh, let’s do a Halloween episode where we all show up. I’ll do Elizabeth Holmes for

a Halloween episode. But no, but that’s like a nested Steve Jobs. So like you’re going to

be Elizabeth Holmes as Steve Jobs. Yeah, we should all do our own versions of, yes.

Elizabeth as Steve Jobs.

I think, Sax, you’re entirely right. I think you’re right.

I think this is the way that gender has played into it,

is that there’s a lot of people who really wanted the Elizabeth Holmes story to be true.

And frankly, she used that in order to perpetuate her fraud.

She may not have used it, but she was definitely influenced.

Or she benefited from it.

She definitely used it.

I want to ask you guys kind of a controversial question,

because this story made me think a lot about some of what’s gone on in businesses that I know of,

and where I know that there is, to some degree, fraud and misrepresentation happening by the CEO

and founder. And this is a little known secret in Silicon Valley, or a little spoken of secret,

which is that more often than not, if you know about fraud at a company in Silicon Valley,

you’re encouraged to keep your mouth shut.

Because the idea is at the end of the day, if they’re gaining lots of capital,

more capital floats all boats and more money will rush into that market.

And so if there’s businesses that you’re competing with that are committing fraud,

rather than raise your hand, which then people say,

Hey, look, if you’re going to raise your hand and claim fraud and talk negatively about another

company, people are going to start doing that about you.

And they’re going to start doing that about your portfolio.

And so you guys know this, right?

You’re discouraged from calling out these sorts of moments when you see them in Silicon Valley,

because there is the perceived kind of look, we’re all in a club together.

We’re all in it together.

We got to be careful not to talk smack because then capital will stop coming in.

People will come after you.

And we’re much more of a supportive open community.

But have you guys experienced that?

I have with at least two companies in the last year.

And I’ve kept my mouth shut because…

And by the way, I don’t think that there’s necessarily harm going on.

But I know of misrepresentation.

But the investors are like, look, we’d love to see these guys succeed,

because that would be good for you in this way.

Because then you would be more money flowing in and yada, yada.

And there’s always a narrative around why you don’t want to do this.

Why you don’t want to call these things out.

I called it out.

And I’ve still got a crazy founder denouncing me years later.

I mean, look, I hate…

Who has an SEC enforcement against them.

Yeah, exactly.

A sanction.

So, yeah.

I mean, look.

You’re right, Freeberg, that there’s very little upshot to doing it.

But look, I hate…

We have to distinguish between fraud and sort of puffing.

Okay, here’s the thing that I think Ellen Powell’s kind of missing.

Is when she criticizes all these founders who are

visionary and evangelical and promoting something that ends up not working.

That is not fraud.

Every startup, we ask the founder, how are you going to change the world?

What is your big idea?

What is the big dream?

And then they lay out this really pretty unrealistic set of things.

Unrealistic in the sense that it comes true maybe one out of a thousand times, right?

Every startup, their founding mission is a bit of an overpromise.

And just because it doesn’t come true doesn’t make it fraud.

I think that a lot of people out in the non-Silicon Valley investing world

would interpret that as fraud.

Because a founder told them something that ends up not happening, not ends up being true.

100% correct.

And this is why you really…

It’s very dangerous to take money outside of Silicon Valley,

because people don’t really understand this distinction, okay?

Just because it doesn’t work out and what you said ended up not being true,

does not make it fraud.

What is fraud is when you lie about…

I’ve said it before, when you lie about the past.

And what Elizabeth Holmes is accused of doing by these prosecutors

is, again, lying about the present-day capabilities of her product

and actually falsifying documents.

She actually falsified documents.

That is the fraud.

That is the line you cannot cross.

They changed blood test results.

Listen, said another way, Sax,

Elizabeth Holmes’ vision of taking less blood

and doing more tests with it and being more efficient

is a completely valid thing to pursue.

Chamath just said he pursued it five times and failed five times.

Completely failed.

Lying, completely failed.

Tens of millions of dollars burned in a pile.

But what we all buy into here is what if it does work one in a thousand times?

What Elizabeth Holmes did was she lied about the results.

And not only did she lie about the results,

she lied about real people’s blood test results,

like actual civilians.

Well, I have some empathy for Elizabeth Jobs in the following way.

When I was told…

When I was told…

Holmes, you mean Steve Holmes.

No, no, hold on.

When I was told…

I think I told this story.

I was asking an investor,

hey, what’s the hottest company around?

This is in, you know, 2013 or 14.

He said Theranos.

And there was no way to get connected to the company.

So then I was like,

you know, I had heard just the bullet point.

One drop of blood, full characterization of your,

you know, be able to do a blood test, etc.

I thought this is an incredible idea.

But because I had no way of getting connected,

now thank God that turned out to be a good thing.

I was like, well, fuck it.

I’ll just start my own version.

I’ll figure out how to do this.

And Jason, as you said,

it turned out to be much, much harder than I thought.

And five different iterations, five different teams.

And, you know, PhDs from MIT, Stanford, everything.

We couldn’t, Caltech, we couldn’t figure it out.

So it’s not wrong to want to believe

that something is possible.

And it’s not illegal to do that.

But as David said, the minute that you try to,

you tell lies about the past

in order to basically then change the future

in a way that shouldn’t happen,

that’s real, that’s really unfair.

Yeah, it’s, what do you think of the defense

that Balwani, the Svengali defense?

I saw Tara Swisher and some New York Times reporters

and other reporters were basically not buying it.

And we talked about this last time, didn’t we?

Yeah, I’m just curious

if you have been following the trial.

I think it’s hard for somebody who in the moment

took credit for every decision,

for every piece of press,

for claim to be the Jobsian micromanager

to all of a sudden now turn around

and say, no, that wasn’t me making the decisions.

I was under the spell of somebody else.

I think that’s a tough argument to make.

Also, I think, you know, this is going to come out,

but she actually fired Balwani.

So if she fired him, how was she,

you know, it’s harder to do the Svengali defense, I think.

Well, maybe they’re both guilty.

Svengali.

Maybe they’re both guilty.

It could be an and.

I think it’s Svengali, Sven, Svengali.

All right, listen, we’ll close on this.

MailChimp has sold to Intuit for $12 billion

in the largest bootstrap acquisition ever.

We all know MailChimp, and we all know QuickBooks.

It’s a huge deal.

I have one issue with this,

and I don’t know if it’s true or not,

but apparently none of the employees have any equity.

Yes, and that was what I was about to get to.

Employees didn’t have equity.

However, and I’ve known MailChimp for a while,

for over a decade, been using the product.

I know the founder had had them on the podcast before.

Have they been a sponsor of your product?

They sponsored in the first year, I think, or two, and.

Were you an angel investor?

I was not.

I tried to be, and he said, we’re never going to ever raise money.

And he also apparently said he was never, ever going to sell.

And he was also never going to sell.

They gave.

He had 12 billion reasons to change his mind.

Exactly.

They gave him the 20%.

My understanding was employees got a 20% cash bonus,

and they were amongst the highest paid in the industry.

So their plan was, instead of giving people some big reward at the end,

they were just distributing cash.

Basically, they were just distributing cash.

So if you had 100, if you were 150k developer, you got 30k on top.

That’s not an unreasonable way to run a business that has no outside investors that,

you know, and employees know that going in,

they didn’t go in with the expectation of equity,

they went in with the expectation of a high salary and a big bonus, and they got it.

I do that in a few companies, few companies that I own, I do that.

But what I also do is I let them buy into the company every year.

I just think that it’s a good principle to have like an ownership in the business.

I think you should be paying a lot of money,

and we should pay cash bonuses for achieving results.

We do that.

But then what we also say is if you want to buy equity, come and buy it.

But you’re probably right from a performance perspective,

Chamath.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a moral obligation to do that, right?

How this guy wants to run his business, up to him.

You know, I mean, people made the choice, voted.

Yeah, I mean, people that work at your house,

you don’t give them equity in your house, right?

I mean, you own the house, you give them cash.

Or people who play for a basketball team are not allowed to get equity in the team.

But in other countries, right?

I think in soccer, you can.

Yes, but I think one of the best things about Silicon Valley is the fact that

there’s a there’s a practice of giving broad-based options to everybody in the company.

And there’s all those great stories about the chef at Google who got rich

and the secretaries at Microsoft who got rich.

And that is a beautiful thing about the tech ecosystem.

It’s beautiful.

It’s wonderful.

You never and you never hear about that when all the press is doing is writing stories

about greedy VCs and all that kind of stuff.

They talk about VC, but they don’t bring up the point that in these non-VC companies,

the employees never end up with anything.

Someone who came from nothing can afford a beautiful home and have their

life taken care of forever because they work really hard at a great company that worked out.

And that’s the most common story.

And it’s never reported.

Yeah.

And by the way, look, there’s nothing wrong with bootstrapping your company.

So congrats to this MailChimp founder for doing it.

I mean, certainly, you know, like as an investor, I have no desire.

Just explain what bootstrapping is, Sax.

Bootstrapping is just when you don’t raise outside money.

And he did it himself.

And he basically funded profits.

Yeah.

He funded the company with the profits, which is just amazing.

But here’s the thing about that is he did this.

He started the company back in 2001 at the Nadir after the dotcom crash.

And there was very little money going into new startups back then.

And he managed to create this.

So kudos to him.

But the environment now is very different.

If you look at the amount of funding that goes into startups, I mean,

it’s now in the hundreds of billions every year.

And so if you have this mentality of I’m going to bootstrap it,

you’re probably going to lose to a competitor who’s simply willing to

raise money and pursue that same idea with more funding.

Now, look, I’m not in the business of pushing money on people who don’t want it.

I’m just saying realistically, the times are different now.

If you can bootstrap a business, great, go for it.

But I do think that if you’re in competition with someone who can raise VC money,

you’re going to be at a disadvantage.

Hard to compete yourself.

Yeah.

What about AOC, what she wore to the Met Gala?

She wore a tax the rich dress to the Met Gala.

Dave Portnoy had the best tweet about this,

which is she’s about to go have the best night of her life,

parting her ass off with all these rich people.

And she’s wearing this tax the rich.

It’s total hypocrisy.

This is classic socialism where they do this virtue signaling while being friends

and hanging out with the people, the owners of capital they’re purporting to deride.

And frankly, it’s just like the mass things.

You’ve got the servant class working at the Met Gala wearing masks,

while all the guests of the gala don’t have to wear a mask.

I mean, it’s completely hypocritical.

Yeah, it’s like Newsom all over again.

It’s Newsom all over again.

She also drops some merch.

You can buy a tax the rich.

There’s an official AOC team shop.

I can’t believe that that’s true.

That’s what makes it the most lonesome.

She goes to the thing and now she’s selling $58 sweaters, sweatshirts.

A $58 sweatshirt, a $28 dad hat, a $10 sticker pack, a $27 tote bag and a $27 mug.

What’s a dad hat?

It’s like a hat for dads, like for us, you know?

Oh yeah, tax the rich dad hat.

Tax the rich, yeah.

Wow, I didn’t know dad hat was a category.

I know dad jokes and dad bods.

I’ve never saw a dad hat.

Dad hat.

Fantastic, fantastic.

Yeah, I thought it was kind of gross.

Is it wrong to buy some of this?

I think that it’s kind of cool, actually.

I mean, the tax the rich hat is pretty funny.

It’s pretty cool.

Oh my God, if you were a tax the hat.

The sweatshirt.

I think the best thing is if I bought this sweatshirt and wore it around.

Wear it on CNBC, your next scene.

If you wear a tax the rich hat on CNBC, that would be peak Chamath.

I think that would be peak.

Oh my God, that’d be great.

Get assigned by.

All right, anybody got any plugs?

Anybody have plugs?

The craziest thing about that Dave Portnoy tweet was that it got fact-checked.

Can you believe that?

It got fact-checked.

I mean, it was just mind-blowing that this is what.

When you say fact-check, they put a fact-checking.

They put a warning label on it.

Oh God.

So another one.

Warning liberals and socialists at Twitter don’t agree with this tweet.

Right?

No, exactly.

Warning somebody in the out crowd.

Dave Portnoy is criticizing somebody in the in crowd that by definition.

Portnoy definitely gets a seat at All In Summit, right?

He definitely gets a seat.

Is the ivermectin fake story from Rachel Maddow?

Is that fact-checked or no?

She posted some update or other begrudgingly presenting other information.

But I mean, the story should have been completely retracted and it wasn’t.

No, I’m just curious whether there’s a fact-check double standard.

No, there’s absolutely there is no fact-check on that.

For some reason, the Rachel Maddow tweets went on fact-checked.

As far as I know, they’re still on fact-checked.

You know what?

You should wear the rich hat and then get your buy the Hamptons shirt.

I’ve been wearing those on your neck.

Oh my God.

What a great combo.

Can I show you guys a great piece of merch?

Hold on a second.

I’ll be back in a sec.

But can I just say, I don’t look good in hats.

It’s merch for the beep app.

I don’t look good in hats.

No, you don’t.

No.

No.

I’ve wanted to wear a hat for a long time, but it just doesn’t look good on me.

Let’s see his merch.

This is my favorite piece of merch.

Which is somebody made a hoodie.

Oh, besties.

That’s fabulous.

Absolutely great.

Wait, can we just say, by the way, there’s a person that did make a besties merch site.

None of us knows who he is, but there’s an incredible thing that he tweeted at us,

right, J Cal, which is he’s paying his way through college.

Yeah, he puts a note into it.

He told me he made like five grand over the summer.

Right.

And so, you know, he’s probably making like 30 grand a year off of merch.

If anybody’s interested in some besties merch, we don’t make a single dime from it,

but there’s a young, hardworking dude paying his way through school.

I don’t know.

It’s Bestie Apparel.

He’s Bestie Apparel, right?

Bestie Apparel.

BestieApparel.com.

We don’t really want to encourage too many people to go crazy doing this,

but this is our guy, I guess.

And I mean, good for him.

He’s paying his way through school.

Good for him.

Yeah.

And I think they did, you know, the shirts that people wore on their all-in bar crawl

came from that.

But I really want to do the all-in summer.

I’m buying this Tax the Rich sweatshirt, boys, and the T-shirt, and the sticker pack.

I’m going for all of it.

You got me, AOC.

You got me on the hook.

Do they have a men’s bikini with Tax the Rich on the backside for you?

Oh, my God.

I would buy that.

For when we’re in Italy?

I would buy that.

We can – how about we get matching Speedos when we do our walk?

I always threaten to buy a Speedo.

She always says, well, you could –

We have to buy Speedos next time we’re in Italy.

She won’t let me.

And we have to do our bestie walk from pier to pier on the beaches of Italy in a Speedo.

Can you imagine if that image got leaked of us in Speedos?

I did a bestie walk with Sax.

All right, boys.

I got to go.

I got to eat lunch.

All right.

Love you, besties.

Love you, guys.

Take care.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Besties are gone.

That’s my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh, man.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless.

It’s like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What?

You’re the B.

What?

You’re a B.

You’re a B.

B?

What?

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.