E38: Bestie brawl, Robinhood's $70M fine & S-1, Delta variant, future of the political parties, FTC takes losses against big tech & more
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Is J. Cal here? I can't see him. Maybe I've been blocked. I don't know. I'm getting so static on the line. I can't hear anything. I can't hear anything. Why do the two fat guys have to ruin everything? I mean, get your shit together, you two. We have something good going on. Don't save it for the show. The show started, Freeberg. You've lost control already. No, no, no. Here we go. Here we go. You guys ready? I'm not fat anymore. In three, two, one. Rain Man, David Sackett.

And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Love you guys. Queen of Kinwa. I'm doing all in.

If you'd like to skip the Bestie Twitter drama and get right into the episode, jump to 20 minutes and 48 seconds. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. We've got a great show for you today. What a treat. This is going to be here at the All In Podcast. We cover everything technology, business, market, politics, science, and of course, the besties' emotions and their feelings. I'm Dave Friedberg, the King of Cannolis. Joining me today are the guys that used to be besties.

First, joining us from Berlusconi's Boomba Boomba Palace, the Pied Piper of SPACs himself, Chamath Palihapabuyu. Chamath, welcome. You look great today. Thank you. And from one of his many houses, the Sass bully himself, David Sachs. And, of course, our former moderator and host, the one and only...

the internet famous, the Bronx bully, Jason Calacanis, everybody. J. Cal, welcome. You're looking great. You look like you're ready to do a little jab and a hook. So for those of you joining us today that haven't been following on Twitter... I'm sorry, Chamath, did you get Kermit the Frog to host the show? I mean, Jesus Christ, that opening was the worst, most painful thing I've ever heard. It really was not very good. Okay, well, welcome...

Sax and J-Cal not really feeling great about their... Fuck this. You can't. It's a failed experiment already. I thought the opening was good. Good job, Freebird. I think you're doing well. It's a fucking four of ten. Stop prejudging his performance. It just began. And by the way... Yeah, you're interrupting already. Stop interrupting. Stop interrupting, Calcanis. So the moderator is moderating and J-Cal has to take the mic. J-Cal, I'm going to mute you. The dreamers and me. Mute him. Block him. I'm going to mute him. Thank you. So gentlemen, welcome. As we know,

Over the past week, there has been a Twitter feud between Jason and David Sachs. And I'm going to give you guys a little bit of this background for those of you who haven't followed online, which I'm assuming is the vast majority of you. But there's a Twitter account called All In Stats, and they published an analysis showing that J. Cal has been talking a lot on our podcast.

And Sachs, you know, kind of quote tweeted and said, you know, here is statistical proof of Jason's piss poor moderation of the all in pod. J. Cal, if you were moderating correctly, you would be fourth place in airtime instead of tied for first. Your job is to facilitate discussion, not dominate it. Stop interrupting and let the grownups talk. J. Cal immediately jumps up with a response. Maybe you could start your own pod with Peter Thiel and Keith Robois and have Tucker Carlson moderate.

Sachs says, "I know it's rough doing 10 years of This Week in Startups and never getting to number one. Then Shamath Freidberg and I do it effectively on the first take. But this is why you need to stick to your lane and stop talking over us." Oh my god. So brutal, Sachs. Jcal then responds with, "A niche podcast about just startups is never going to be number one. It's not for a general audience like All In by design."

Number two, sure, trash the guy who has relentlessly supported you for decades because you're obsessed with your stats and forget about the quality of the conversation. Then J. Cal blocks David Sachs on Twitter publicly. Sachs tells everyone J. Cal blocked him. And this whole thing escalates and snowballs. So the besties, have they broken up?

Are they going to get back together? Is this podcast going to continue? My mom sent me a text this morning. Has the pod disintegrated? Jason pulled out? The drama ensues. So gentlemen, I leave it to you, Sax, with your opening remarks and then J-Cal, you may respond. I'm here to moderate this opening of today's All In Pod so we can kind of get past this and hopefully get the besties back together and continue our conversations that I think many people find valuable.

and are super helpful and useful for us and for our listeners. Sax, please. Well, I mean, I can see on Jason's face that he's hurt by my tweets. You know, I...

Maybe he should go first and explain what's so hurtful. I mean, look, the reality is about this show that, you know, breaking balls is part of it. We've been doing it for, you know, a year and a half and nobody does it more than Jason. And then all of a sudden, you know, he's on the receiving end of a couple of mean tweets and he's like the schoolyard bully who finally gets popped in the nose and goes running to the teacher and he can't stop bawling.

So, you know, where is it that somehow the word piss poor crossed a red line for you after all of the, you know, ball busting you've been doing for the last year that somehow that's out of bounds. And now you're going to block me and potentially end the show in our friendship. So explain that to me, big baby. All right. Number one, I want to talk about the statistics in my role.

on my perception of you, David, is that you got a taste of fame and celebrity, and it's gone to your fucking head. And you're out of your ego is out of control.

You now have stopped doing your job every day, and you are obsessed with your statistics and how you're perceived on the pod. As seen by your obsession and your bromance with Henry or Harvey, Bell, Castor, whatever. You're sitting there obsessing over what percentage each of us talk. None of the other besties are reading all in stats or getting obsessed with Henry Bell, Castor, and how they're perceived on the pod.

You have taken a championship show, which I pulled together with my decades of experience and team as the point God, I am the Chris Paul of moderating. The reason this show is number one is because I created a super team. There are four people on this podcast who bring a lot to the table.

And you have asked for decades for Air Cal. I will not pull out a list. But the time that you were going to get canceled because of beep and the other time that your company was in the beep because the beep was investigating it, you called Air Cal. You called in Air Cal. You can't deny it. And nobody has benefited more from my skills in media than you.

are you are you speaking in an accent i'm not speaking in an accent i'm getting uh this is when i get upset what he's getting for clem he's getting for clients he's controlling it okay i'm bringing the ball up court and i pass the ball to everybody i am white chocolate on this team i am the professor i am chris paul okay and i pass the ball now

If you want to be a point guard like me and throw crisp passes that make the audience laugh and make them cheer and bring down the whole goddamn stadium. Well, sometimes I'm going to do a no look pass is going to hit you in the back of the head or it's going to bounce off. You can't fucking cry about it constantly, David. And if you're looking at the minutes, I have to read the story and prep the story so I can put it in your lap.

which I love to do. I love my role here. And you're taking my min account, which is at least two thirds moderation. And you're saying that's indicative of me being piss poor. Now, if it's all a goddamn joke, that's fine. But you're messing with my business. My business is podcasting and performing. If you got a problem with me as the moderator, you have my fucking phone number, you can call me.

But don't go out and start some fight with me and then go start hanging out with Henry Belcaster when I'm your boy. Okay? And then everything with you is about your call-in clubhouse killer, and we've got to move the pod to that. You're getting out of control, David. You need to realize we started a podcast that went to number one instantly. And be grateful about that and stay the course.

The end. I'm done. Well, all right, good. All right. So can I respond? So first of all, J Cal, I agree. You put the super team together for this pod. You're an indispensable part of it. I'm not questioning that. You know, I don't think we should. I don't think. Well, let me come to that. Let the adults talk. Let me first. I'm actually saying some positive things about you before I get into my critique. Okay.

So, look, you deserve credit for putting this thing together along with Chamath. It wouldn't be the same without you. You do bring an element of entertainment to it. Lord knows if it was just Freeberg moderating all the time, it'd probably be extremely boring. So...

Look, although we're going to give him a chance today, so who knows? But... Rough start. And it's not that I was angry or upset or concerned about my airtime or any of that stuff. I was frustrated, okay? Because your moderation... I have a couple of concerns about...

I guess complaints. Okay. One is that you do tend to interrupt. And I'd say you interrupt me more than the others. Okay. And specifically, not true. Let's talk about the issue. The issue where this came up was the Eric Adams issue last pod. Okay.

So you didn't even go to me. This issue, the Eric Adams issue is all about the crime issue. What the audience doesn't know is that you went to Chamath like three times, then you moved on and we had to come back. I said, no, listen, I raised my hand to get back into the conversation. We edited that part out. You skipped over me completely. I don't know how that was good passing. Where was the dish to me on that issue? Okay, let me explain to you. Can I respond to that? Sure. Sure.

You've got three people on the team who can score. I come down the court. I pass it. Sometimes there's two open guys. You're the guy who was open, who didn't get the pass. And now you're walking down the court complaining. No. Instead of keeping your head in the game. This would be like not going to Freeburg on a science issue. All right. So I understand. I understand. Any chance for you.

to defend the cops beating up criminals i understand that's your wheelhouse next time when it comes to that i'll make sure it would be it would be a conspicuous i agree with you i agree with you it's an oversight i can't hit every perfect pass you're expecting perfection so then it's a missed pass and now you're upset about it okay okay so then so then i basically say listen i want to talk to this issue i have three points to make

I'm not through point number two before you're interrupting me and taking the ball away. The specific reason why I said I have three points is to telegraph to you. Don't interrupt me, bitch. I got three points to make. Okay. What do you do? You cut me off in the middle of point two. How is that good moderation? I don't think you do that to Chamath or even Freeburg. This really is about Chamath versus you and my relationship with each other. I love you both. No.

And the reason why I brought up the all in stats, okay, is not because I'm concerned about my airtime, but to show a little concerned. No, because they broke down that I was like fourth in airtime. And so the only point about that is why are you giving me the hook when I'm not talking too much? If I were talking too much, if I were monologuing, it'd be a whole different story. But you're yanking the mic away from me in the mid sentence.

Before I even had a chance to finish. And there's one more thing, okay? Which is as soon as I bring up any concern with a moderation, where do you go? You start calling me Tucker. You start labeling me in this way. Have you had dinner with Tucker in the last year? Just like a year ago. Have you had dinner with Tucker in the last year? You're proving my point. Where do you go? It's called a joke.

Yes, but why are you trying to label me that way? I'm trying to keep the show entertaining and keep it moving. No. Part of keeping the show entertaining and moving is keeping you guys from monologuing. I have to cut you off and make jokes. Exactly.

A year and a half ago, at the beginning of the pod, we had to have the last time we had a sort of session like this. It was because you kept trying to paint me as the Trump supporter, which is not my agenda. Okay. Now you're trying to vote for Trump. Now you're trying to hang the Tucker label on me. Why aren't you saying, Hey, let's hear from George Will. Let's hear from William Buckley. The reason why you're choosing those labels is because, you know, they are anathema of

to most people in Silicon Valley, and you're trying to stigmatize me with them. No. That is, you're trying to hang... Are you reading from your notes? Are you reading from your notes? You're trying to hang that albatross over my neck, okay? And that is, you're trying to anathematize me in the view of most people in Silicon Valley. You're causing... That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make a joke. But you are causing the audience to prejudge my message, my points, before I've even had the chance to say them. That's not what I'm trying to do. By...

By attaching the boogeyman of the left to me, okay? The result of that is the audience is going to prejudge what I have to say. And probably a third of the audience will never want to hear what I have to say because you've pre-labeled and prejudged me. That is a serious problem. And that is fucking with my business. That is fucking with my business. Is it really? A lot more than me calling out your shitty moderation on one show. Oh, so now it is shitty moderation. Oh, okay. I thought it was great moderation. Now we're back to it being shitty moderation.

Let me ask you. You know what you're doing. Did you have dinner? Did you have to talk? You know what you're doing? Have you had dinner with Tucker? Answer the question. I'm going to mute both of you now. OK, I'm in the moderator. Do you want to weigh in on these two idiots and talk a little bit about how we can move the show forward? And at this point, I'm thinking about vetoing the publication of the show so we can just have this conversation offline.

This was so stupid. Nick, edit all this nonsense out and make it 30 seconds and move on. Hey guys, this is a really important, powerful thing that we accidentally stumbled into. I'll make two points. David does get labeled and I don't think it's fair. And Jason does an excellent job of moderating. And sometimes I think that Jason does get excited.

And in getting excited, you know, he's also not just there to moderate, he's there to contribute as well. And so I think that if you look at the number of minutes as a guide, it's not going to be accurate because he does have two jobs to do, whereas the rest of us only have one. And David does bring an enormous amount of clarity to what he says in a very fair way. And it is unfair to him that he gets basically slathered with, here's the crazy guy on the right.

So I think what I would just say is, just let's just tone it the fuck down and calm down. Okay, we're at a million fucking people a week, we could be a 10 million people a fucking week, and we could fucking own the distribution of our ideas to millions and millions of people.

Let's just stay the course and calm the fuck down. Well, I agree with all that, actually. I agree with all that. I'm 100% in agreement. I want to address the labeling issue. I want to address the labeling issue. I am joking nine out of 10 times when I talk about Trump because it's hilarious and your relationship with Tucker.

I think it's hilarious that you're part of the Keith raboy and teal thing. And I don't think it's damaging for your business at all. And I think people are telling me I'm purple viewed, we're moving to the center here. So I believe that we're doing something noble by bringing all these voices together. It's all a big joke. And you know what, I don't care what you say about me on Twitter. I

I know I'm good at what I do. There's nothing you could say that can change that. Why did your accent change? I think in general, you are good at what you do. And I, and I, and the reason why. I have two of the top 10 tech podcasts. Go open up your fucking podcast player. Don't tell me to get my fucking shoes. I don't try and choose anymore. Four and number four and number eight. No,

No, nobody's saying that. So I think, I think what, what David literally what he said, that's literally what he's doing right now is showing why I had to tweet, which is you won't take a note. I can't tell the guy, Hey, listen, for me, it's not going to happen on Twitter. You got my fucking phone number. It doesn't happen in private either. We know that you could fucking call me. Oh really? You're going to take a note in private. I've tried. We've had this conversation before. We had this specific conversation about the Trump thing a year ago.

We haven't talked about Trump in six months. You're back to all your bad habits. Can we just hear an apology from one to the other and tell the other person what you want? I'm absolutely willing to hear Sax's apology. Tell him what you appreciate about him and what you like about him. Go ahead. Fucking Christ, is this therapy? All right, I unblocked fucking Sax and I'm following him. Enough. Thank you. We move on. We move forward. Apologize to each other. All right, I'm sorry you tweeted that shit, Sax. I'm sorry you tweeted that. No, come on, seriously.

David apologized to him. Let's just move on. Jason, tell Sax you're sorry for labeling him and, you know, you'll be more conscientious in the future, please. I'm sorry that I brought up your relationship with Tucker and that I labeled you a Trump disciple.

I don't even need an apology. I just want him to recognize... He just asked me to, so I'm trying to be the bigger man. Fuck it. I take it back. Okay. I unblocked you and you're followed. I unblocked you and you're followed. That's enough. Zach, his feelings were hurt by you telling him that his podcast sucks and...

and yeah piss poor okay look you asked me to have 10 of your founders on the podcast in the last two years i counted your team is in the mix trying to get people booked on the show we're not gonna keep it going you've benefited from this relationship as well so thank you for that i never said i didn't thank you for that is thank you to you all right we good look my frustration

over your moderation boiled off into a couple of tweets last week. I did not mean to hurt your feelings. I was just trying to give you a note, okay? If you would take the notes in private, I would give them to you in private. I do think that overall, you're a great moderator. Your contribution to the show is absolutely necessary and essential. Never disputed that. I think we should keep doing the show. I didn't expect you to block me. Honestly, I didn't expect your feelings to be so hurt by what I said.

And so, yeah, look, I apologize for that. All I wanted to do was give you a note and I would appreciate if you could try and respect my note, not mischaracterize it. I think you know what I'm saying, right? I just want the chance to be able to present my views without the audience prejudging them because you know that certain labels will not go over well with our audience, okay? It'd be like introducing Chamath as the Michael Milken of SPACs, okay? There

There is a... Oh, I edited that out. No, I mean, I'm not saying he is. Collaborative damage. I'm saying...

No, I'm saying it would be as if you did that, right? You understand what you'd be doing if you labeled him that way. I don't think that is a fair label. In fairness, I thought the labeling and the joking about you being the token Republican was a meta joke about the fact that Silicon Valley doesn't have too many of you and Teals and Reboys, etc. There's a small cohort. I think the whole point of what we were trying to say is Silicon Valley's heads up their ass. I agree. So maybe the problem we've identified is

All these left-leaning people are just sniffing their own balls, basically running to a cliff. Sweating balls. Yeah, a lot of my views on free speech are the old center-left. Exactly. And now you're for universal healthcare. Look at you. I haven't moved. The whole world's gone crazy. I mean, everybody...

Everyone supported free speech until five minutes ago. Okay. That's what I went on Tucker to discuss. You were free market about education and you were free market about healthcare. Now you're like, I mean, we should have healthcare and safety nets. I am a believer in markets. All right, Jason, let's start. Go. Let's fucking start the show.

Three, two, hey everybody, hey everybody, the All In podcast is back, Besties Unblocked with us again, the Rain Man himself, David Sachs, and David Freeberg, the Queen of Quinoa, and from his Italian hideaway, gallivanting in...

Italy, Chamath Palihapitiya, the dictator. Big news for besties this week. Robinhood has filed their S1 and paid a FINRA fine $70 million for outages and misleading customers multiple days of outages back in March 2020. We talked about here and poor communications around options trading risks.

Robinhood's S1 highlighted some extraordinary growth during that period, as we discussed on the pod. 18 million funded accounts, and they're on a $2 billion run rate, $522 million in revenue in the first quarter, up 4x. And monthly active users have more than doubled, 8.6 million accounts to 17.7 million. Just in the last year, revenue was up 300%.

Any thoughts on Robinhood's S1? Obviously, I'm an interested party. It's the largest fine ever, I think, of this type. But on the- FINRA's largest fine, yeah. Yeah. So it should be a black eye for the company. But the reality is that they're happy to pay the fine and just move on. So they don't have this issue hanging over their heads anymore. And now they're going to be able to IPO at like a $50, $60, $70 billion valuation. And so for them, it's a sort of cost of doing business. I think there's something a little bit

off about that but um that's kind of how it works freeberg anything i mean congrats to you jay cal looks like you're gonna do really well with this deal huh it will return roughly this one deal will do three or four times the value of the first fund the launch fund one which was 11 million dollars did you invest in the seed round or the a or what round did you invest in i think it was the seed round um and so what's your multiple going to be on a 50 billion dollar market cap do you know

It would be 500X. Amazing. Amazing. Congrats, big boy. Yeah. Congrats, Jake Allen. I'm happy to see that your success is finally catching up to your ego. Oh, God. Here we go. Too soon? Too soon? Too soon?

Your net worth is catching up to your waist size. Congrats. Oh, God. Well, actually, between this and the composition, you know, listen, it's a long way to go before we distribute, obviously. But that first fund I did, which came after the Scouts fund, my Sequoia Scouts portfolio. My only advice to you, Jason, is talk to a few seasoned GPs like Gurley, Fred Wilson, and figure out the right distribution strategy. One of the biggest things that I see these folks do is

early stage venture investors thinking that they're public market investors, trying to time the market, trying to figure out how to do distributions, and it never works.

Which means do you hold the shares for another year or two? I would distribute them immediately. Book the win, move on. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. A lot of the top firms that I'm in are holding their shares. And I had a firm that had Square and they held some number of them until it's 7x and then distributed. So I guess technically they get to book that win.

What are your thoughts on that, Sax, of when to distribute and how are you doing in a year fund? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The reality is that, you know, let's say that you're in year four or five of a 10-year fund. You could hold the shares for another five years, right?

And if the shares go up over that five-year period, you'll do better. So I think the question is- Better on IRR. Your numbers will look better. Well, I mean, you're compensated on the absolute amount of return that you generate. And so it might bring your- No, but if you distribute the shares and then if you're in carry and you just hold the shares, you'll realize the same gains. You know, you're not- Well, it depends what happens to the stock price. I guess what I would say is- No, no, but hold on a second. If the stock were to go 10X and you get 20% of those shares, if there were 100 shares-

you had 20 if a 10x, you're still getting 20%, right? So it nets out to the same if you hold the shares yourself personally, this is why I think that if you're in the business of running a multifund business, I think you're better off generally. And I think again, if you talk to the best firms out there,

they typically will not try to guess what's going to happen in the public markets, they distribute and they move on to their next fund. And then because you have to remember the IRRs, you know, you go through these rough patches, it decays quickly. And all of a sudden, something that looks great can start to look not so great. And the example of that might be snowflake or something going down after it went public. And if you had distributed it, you would have booked the win at that high multiple.

Yeah. And then you're thinking to yourself, wow, I hope it goes back up. And then you're like, well, when do I distribute? These are all not things that venture capitalists should be engaged in. They should be there to help build the next David versus Goliath. I think the counter argument to that is if you really believe in the company and think you understand it better than the public markets do, or because you've been on the board and you have information, if you hold it for another, yes, there's going to be ups and downs, but let's say that you plan to hold it for another four or five years.

Yeah, you'll still get the same 20-25% carry, but the point at which that carry will crystallize would be at like a much higher level. And so essentially, you're preventing your LPs from selling is what you're doing. And so you may get an extra turn of your fund by doing that. How do we feel as LPs, David Freeberg?

But there's, sorry, there's also, isn't there like a, I'm just trying to pull up the Goldman Sachs report they did in 2019, where they analyzed 4,500 IPOs over a 25-year period.

And I think that I could be wrong on this, but if I remember some summary of this, I'm trying to find it. So I can't find it right now. But that they basically highlighted that IPOs as an index generally outperform the market over some period of time, whether it's one year or three years. And so if you have access to those IPO shares, assume you're a venture investor.

you can beat the S&P by 10, 15 points, just generally without having any thought about the business itself or the company itself. And participate in 20% carry on the upside from there or 25% carry on the upside from there. And so generally, the rule of thumb becomes, well, you shouldn't distribute right away, you should hold. Is that not a common dogma amongst GPs nowadays?

Well, look at Square. Look at Square. I mean, Square, like most of the appreciation happened in the public markets. I think Sequoia held on to their Square shares, did way, way, way better because nobody sold effectively for several years. And I mean...

And, you know, a good business going public has a much better chance of performing well as a public company than, you know, just tracking the S&P after an IPO, regardless of the valuation it exits at. Well, how do we feel as LPs, Chamath? You're LPs in a lot of funds. I'm in 15 funds. You want your shares. I don't know, no offense to any GP out there, but I don't think they're as good of a public market investor as I am. So give me the shares. I'll manage it myself and get out of the way.

I give money to a lot of to your point, a lot of GPS, because I want private market exposure. I don't want them speculating in the public markets for me. I do that for myself.

And so I would rather just get the shares and make my own decision. You know, a lot of foundations, for example, are in the situation where they're there to fund programs. So if they have a, you know, multi hundred million dollar position in a great company, and they can't fund a program or the, you know, a hospital system can't do what they need to do, because some GP is speculating in the public markets, I think it's insane. So give you give it give it give the LPs the money and move on. It's not your job.

Otherwise, you should run a generalized fund. And most people don't because they can't. Generally, how do you guys when you are a large owner in a company that goes public, or just say the pool of venture investors or owners in a company that goes public, and the lockup is expiring, you know, typically six months after the IPO, and you can now distribute your shares to your LPs.

Do those, you know, investors take note of or have concern about the impact it might have on the stock price when they're making those distribution decisions typically? I think they think about that. But a lot of these LPs, particularly the nonprofits,

They're forced day one sellers the minute that they get the stock. That's my point. It's like as soon as the stock gets distributed, everyone's selling and the stock takes a hit, right? Yeah, you know what? There's something happening. I mean, this is speculation that I don't have. So just, you know, take it as that. But my understanding was some investment banks went to

the and Shamath might know the background on this went to some of the major LPS in the world, I'll leave it at that. And said, Hey, you have a position in I don't know this cab company. It's going public, it's fully valued, or it's very well valued. Would you like to color your shares before that, and we will take them off your hands and lock you into a certain price for some percentage of it, basically and running the GPS decision making process.

Of course, there's a lot about that happens. This is why I'm saying I think the GP is better off if you're in the venture fund business, be in the venture fund business, do a great job at that. Raise funds, distribute cash, do what you're supposed to do. But please don't try to do some it's kind of like asking, you know, the firemen to also operate on you. No, I don't want that. Take me to the hospital and let the doctor do the job.

I think it's a very valid perspective. I think it's probably the baseline that VCs should operate from. But I do think there are exceptions where if the VC has been on a company board for a while, it feels like they have, they understand the company better than the public markets, especially during the first two years as a public company when the markets can be really choppy and the company's trying to find its level and people don't really understand it. I think there is an argument for

the VC having expertise in that initial public run, then they might be doing their LPs a favor by holding. But look, I think Chamath's point is well taken.

Also, companies are going public earlier. So this is going to become a bigger issue because it's an easy decision in year 11. If you were an Uber investor, an Airbnb investor say, Okay, it's been 11 years, we're going to give you your shares. But if you're in year five, and the company goes out so early, you know, you could make an argument, hey, maybe we hold it for two or three years, just going back on the previous topic, J. Cal, the FINRA news on Robin Hood, right? So FINRA just

So everyone understands it's not a government regulator. It's a private entity. Yeah, it's called a self-regulatory organization. And these SROs are basically, they have a board and a bunch of people that run them, but they're pooled and managed by all the participants, the private regulators.

participants in the market. So Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and all the banks, they are all part of the FINRA SRO. And so the way that these SROs are set up is to avoid government regulation and to avoid government intervention in markets and allows the markets to effectively self-regulate themselves in a way that everyone in the market is kind of keeping an eye on each other and making sure that this is

being taken care of. And I think one thing to take note of from this fine is that it telegraphs that FINRA and the markets in general, the market participants in general, may be rather concerned

and rather worried about government intervention in some of these new markets and emerging fintech practices. Because they wanted to say, look, we put the gauntlet down on Robinhood. We made them pay the biggest fine ever. We made them pay $70 million. Stay away. We're taking care of it. Because the concern everyone's had is that AOC and Elizabeth Warren and a bunch of people on Capitol Hill are waving flags saying, we need to step in. We need to regulate these companies. We need to regulate these practices. We need to protect consumers. And so this fine really signals...

That the market is a bit concerned that the government is going to come in and start trying to tell fintech companies how to practice and how to operate and generally tell all market company, you know, market participants how to operate, which is a very scary prospect for them. So to me, this was really big news about what it telegraphs the backdoor conversations are, you know, that are going on with market participants right now.

What you're almost saying is that this is a benefit to Robin Hood to pay the largest fine because it says to the, you know, to the politicians, look, we've already been punished in this, you know, maximal way. You don't need to layer it on top. So in a way, it's better for Robin Hood that they paid 70 million instead of 10 million.

Yeah. And it's not, it's not, by the way, it's not even for Robinhood. I think all the market participants, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, they all have huge, you know, tech teams and they all have acquired FinTech companies and they are all trying to go digital. And everyone is worried about the government intervening and changing how this business is transforming. Because as soon as the government gets involved, it's going to slow down the transformation. It's going to make things much more challenging.

And I think that everyone's trying to keep the government at bay while the great digital transformation of markets is underway. And I think that's like the biggest signal from this FINRA find.

And there's, there's some interesting nuances there that they brought up something like the confetti. So when you buy something on Robin Hood, it used to explode confetti gamification, they're like, oh, we're going to take that out. And you know, if you go to Vegas, they've got bells and whistles going off everywhere when you place a bet. And so it is a little bit of window dressing. I think it's also interesting that you bring up the self regulatory organizations, there's two other equivalents for people who are

thinking about this, the MPA motion Picture Association, which was formed back in 1922, because people had the same fear about movies. And Valentini, I think was the the guy who really changed how movies were perceived in the PG 13 era, allowing a lot more violence Terminator, those kind of movies.

And then you had a similar thing happen in the video game industry in 94. Does Robin Hood still have like the lawsuits with like Massachusetts? There's like 10 other lawsuits, class actions, etc. about... No, no, no. But these are more like with government entities, right? Like, didn't Massachusetts try to... State Attorney General. Yeah, something like that, I think, right? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

But the other one that was very interesting was the ESRB, which is the entertainment software ratings board, because video games like Mortal Kombat and those and Doom were, you know, had to self regulate, right? So either you regulate yourself, Jason Chamath was asking a question about losses that Robin Hood, I know, I was trying to deflect. Can we move on to the Delta variant, because I'm supposed to be

hysterically afraid of getting COVID now because I've been vaccinated. People keep talking about there's this delta variant, it's spreading. And then I'm hearing one set of information, which

is, if you're vaccinated, it's not an issue. And then other folks are going on TV saying, this is going to be like, we're gonna have to put masks back on in California, I can't find any data about how many actual cases there are. But according to the US CDC, 46% of the total US population has been vaccinated now. And New York, New Jersey, California, all well above 50%. Some people are in the 60% of adults 70% of adults

Florida still trailing, but I can't and people are saying this is going to become the dominant variant freebreak. How should we look at the delta variant if you're vaccinated? And then how should we look at it in terms of are we going to go through

mandatory masks again which people are starting to signal already in certain uh coastal cities yeah so trevor bedford's a great guy to follow on this uh he's a epidemiologist virologist who um on twitter on twitter yeah trv rb is his uh twitter handle

And so he's aggregated a bunch of good data. So there was a paper published two days ago out of the UK, where they are trying to estimate the, you know, the reproduction rate of the Delta variant. And it looks like it's about 1.3. That means for every person that gets infected with the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, 1.3. That's the R0 you're talking about? That's, yeah, some people call it R0, yeah. And so...

It turns out that, you know, that number is higher than what we saw with the original SARS-CoV-2, which I think was probably closer to 1.1 or so. And so, you know, what that means is this variant is much more infectious, right? It could spread through the air, the proteins could last in oxygen much longer and not degrade, all these different reasons why it might be kind of more infectious, right?

And there are some cases of people that have been vaccinated, but this is not the predominance of what we're seeing, that have tested positive for having this Delta variant, but are having mild to moderate symptoms. There aren't at this point, a lot of people, there's not a lot of data to indicate that this is actually kind of like a lethal risk or fatal risk to people that have been vaccinated in case. In fact, that seems to be not true. And one way that that data is kind of demonstrated right now

is there was another analysis that was done where they showed what is the reproduction rate of this variant based on what percentage of the population has been vaccinated by state.

And they show that, you know, for a state that's had maybe 30% of its population vaccinated, the R naught is closer to 1.35. When 60% of the state is vaccinated, the R naught is just at one. And so there's this, you know, you know, negatively correlated kind of relationship between how many people have been vaccinated and how much this variant is transmitting. And that makes intuitive sense, right? Like if people are vaccinated, they're not going to get infected. The virus isn't going to hop from person to person to person.

Now, when you do the analysis of what percentage of the US population is unvaccinated, and how reproductive this virus is, a lot of epidemiologists are saying that the models indicate that we could see up to 10% of the US population now get hit with this variant. And what we don't know is what percentage of people actually had, you know, SARS-CoV-2 in the first run around last year.

but we are seeing this variant pop up. Now, the fatality rate doesn't appear to be much higher than what we saw with SARS-CoV-2 the first time around. And so there's no indication to say like, hey, this is going to be much more lethal. So when you combine those factors, it seems like at this point, you know, the death rates in the U.S. are remaining flat,

and stable while we are going to see and may expect to see a continuing upsurge, surge up in terms of the number of cases. Are we going to require masks? This goes back to kind of my previous point about I think we've kind of normalized ourselves to masks and shutdowns and lockdowns and all the stuff that we did last year, thinking that it had an effect. A recent paper showed that lockdowns had no effect on the reproduction rate in the United States because at the end of the day, if a government says lockdown or a government says put masks on,

people still have a tendency to do whatever the hell they wanna do. And at least in the United States, that is the case. That is not the case likely in Asian countries where we did see an effect of lockdowns and masks. But in the United States, these restrictions obviously had adverse economic effects, but didn't seem to have a strong epidemiological effect

based on a recent paper that I will share in this thing. So what are we going to do? I don't know. I feel like we've normalized masks, we've normalized lockdowns, we've normalized these responses, but SARS-CoV-2 is going to be here forever, and it is going to cycle through variants, and that's the concern right now. Let me make a prediction. I think that what, at the end of this thing, what I think I have come to the conclusion of is there was a lot of unknowns that got...

perverted into hysteria and mania by a handful of organizations to basically sequester power. And what we realized is that these people were incompetent. And they didn't know what they were doing. Because you ended up in the same place with all of these different distributions of actions. And so now I think when you have this other variant, I think there's a growing sensation by a lot of people, not just Americans,

that the CDC, the WHO, whoever it is, is probably at best guessing and at worst making it up. And the ultimate result is there, this, it's almost as if they like being drunk with power. And so I think the last part of what you said, Freeberg, is what I really agree with, which is that this is not going to be tolerated anymore. And the reason is because

They are also politicizing science. And what they're doing is when they don't know, they're making poor guesses in the name of science, which is just as bad. So, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with the Delta variant, maybe a lot, maybe a little, but as far as I can tell, I think people are tired of uninformed science.

impacts to their lives, and they're not going to put up with it anymore. Sacks, chances California goes back to lockdowns or some sort of mask mandates? Well, they are. They're imposing mask mandates indoors in places like LA. And you have the teachers unions, the National Education Union is now putting down all these conditions on going back to school in the fall.

So I think you could be in a situation where we do not have, they will call it school reopening, but we will not have five-day-a-week in-person learning. And the schools, the public schools that have it are going to have all sorts of insane restrictions and conditions, like making kids who really aren't at risk for COVID, even the Delta variant, they're going to force them to wear masks. They're going to enforce this ridiculous social distancing. They're talking about making the kids who aren't vaccinated

it sit at a separate table like the outcasts I mean it's insane what they're talking about doing so why is that insane David not to interrupt you but I'm just curious for how much it unpacked that

Because so look, I'm pro vaccine. You know, I think adults should get vaccinated. I don't think my kids need to get vaccinated. I don't think that is a wise policy to to force kids to get vaccinated. They're at very low risk for getting the virus. They're very low risk for transmitting the virus if they get it. And even if they get it, they're at almost no risk for it being vaccinated.

harmful, or to cause serious illness or death. And so, to impose all these restrictions on kids, it's like we're living in a time warp. Back to last summer, we didn't know as much about the virus. I mean, to Chamath's point, they're imposing all these restrictions, which are just unscientific. And it really seems like the real point is to create excuses for the teachers not to have to go back to work. And you know,

You know, a school system is borked when the truancy is on the part of the teachers, not the students. The students want to go back. The teachers want to be truant. It's like they want to be on permanent vacation forever. It is a really broken system. By the way, let me just highlight, you know, to support this.

Oh, the concern that I think people like people that Saks is kind of speaking to might be having. A research letter was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association two days ago. Lead researcher was a guy named Harold Walsh. And this paper is going viral amongst kind of the scientific and medical community right now. And what these guys did is they measured the carbon dioxide content of children's lungs

from wearing masks. And so they were trying to identify like, is this a risk to children to actually be wearing masks health wise, and the results are pretty scary. It turns out that, you know, in in in air in ambient air point oh 7% by volume is carbon dioxide.

And then they measured kids, randomized control, double blind. We're not double blind, but randomized control. There's kids that have masks and kids that don't. The kids that don't have masks, their carbon dioxide when they exhale is about 0.28%. When you have to wear a surgical mask, your carbon dioxide increases to 1.3%.

And when they looked at this in a more detailed way, it turns out that it could be as high as 3.8%. And so this starts to reach a medical level that is concerning for doctors that having these kids wear masks for hours a day

could actually be having an adverse health effect because it is increasing the carbon dioxide content of their blood because their lungs aren't strong enough to breathe all this carbon dioxide out. It builds up in their body. And so there is now a counterpoint that is being made by scientists and doctors that maybe the benefit of the safety we might get from kids wearing masks and spreading the virus...

is outweighed by the cost to their health as a result of wearing these masks. And to ask kids to wear masks for eight hours a day or five hours a day for nine months a year, we're just now waking up to the fact that there may actually be consequences to this. And I'm not making a strong case. It's like child abuse. So we sent our five-year-old to a summer camp in LA, okay? And the camp is outside and all the adults are vaccinated, okay? But they're making the kids wear masks

And it's no fun, you know, and they can't play sports the way they need to. And we just said the hell with this and we took them out. Now, what I don't understand is why people aren't laying this at the feet of Gavin Newsom. This is 100% his order. You know, all he has to do is say, listen, we don't need these rules anymore. It's kids, it's outside, and all the adults are vaccinated. What is the point of this? And, you know, and I think we have this recall election now that's been scheduled for mid-September.

You know, right now it looks like Newsom is going to cruise to winning. But if we had a candidate in California who could say, listen, we need five day a week in person schooling in the fall. No exceptions. All the teachers need to go back to work or they're going to need to be looking for new jobs. We're not going to kowtow and give in to all these unnecessary unscientific restrictions. OK, because Newsom will not make that guarantee. I think they could they could basically steal this thing.

We don't have anyone standing up saying that. And I think the closer we get to the start of school, if we don't have that kind of five-day-a-week instruction, I think parents are going to be up in arms about this. I think they will be. And I think what we're going to prove is none of these folks really know what they're talking about. And so, they will make it up. And someone will have some shred of evidence about something on either side of any topic

And all it'll do is obfuscate and confuse. And the end of it will be somebody imposing something onto you that will have a negative impact on your life.

But for their benefit, in the teachers, for their benefit, like, I don't want to go back. There's I mean, listen, I want to say all teachers don't want to go back to school. I know a lot of teachers want to go back to school and teach kids and take the masks off because it's insufferable. No, you can say the union and separated from teachers. Exactly. Yeah, I don't think it's all teachers. It's some percentage of teachers. But I think we're going to move David Freeberg, correct me if I'm wrong here. We're going to move to a two class system here. If you're vaccinated, you get one set of rules. And if you're not vaccinated, you

you get another and this is where David, I think, kids who are over the age of 11 or 12, who do get vaccinated, they shouldn't have to wear a mask at school. But then well, sorry, can I just say something? This is what the insanity of this thing is. It's like, okay, we're going to throw around again, we're probably going to use the word equity when we make these new rules. But then fine, why don't you just create a school that has everybody in it who is vaccinated?

I don't even understand. I don't understand this because all of us are vaccinated. So we don't need to worry about it. So in other words, we're going to impose restrictions on people and force kids or whoever to get vaccinated to protect whom? If all the adults are vaccinated, we're not protecting anybody. All we're doing is protecting, I guess, unvaccinated adults. That makes no sense to me. Well, they're taking the risk, right? I mean, if you're choosing to not get the vaccine at this point, Friedberg,

you're taking some significant level of risk or some moderate level of risk. Well, does the government have a responsibility to protect that person? I don't think it matters. What I think matters is, remember, like the societal responsibility

is not and cannot be to protect every individual. The societal responsibility is to make sure that society functions. And if we take a zoom back, and I just want everyone to reset your brains, go back to March of last year. And we were talking about the surge of deaths in hospitals and hospitals were going to be overwhelmed. And that was the reason we needed to go into lockdowns. And the reason we needed to stop the surge was

Even if this Delta variant is highly infectious, there are enough people vaccinated in the United States at this point that this Delta variant is not going to crush our hospital system. It's not going to cause massive amount of fatalities, which is the reason we went into lockdowns in the first place.

All of the concerns that we had last year that rationalized a lot of the extreme behavior that we undertook no longer exist. And we are now talking about continuing those behaviors under a different set of standards. And the set of standards is now I can't put a teacher at risk. I can't put an individual at risk. And even if that individual got infected, if the fatality rate is so low...

I can still say, well, they could die. Therefore I can't have them exposed. Right. And that has become the new standards. What I think Saxon, that, that article kind of talked about a zeroism, you know, you get to a point if you're, if you're fighting a war on a battlefield and you're like, well, I can't let any of my soldiers die. We can't move down the field.

You're not going to move down the field. You're not going to win the war. And I'm not saying that this is a war. The point is society has to progress. The economy has to progress. People's lives have to progress. People have to be educated. Life is about progress. And if we halt progress because of the concern that any individual might get harmed because of the progress of the group as a whole, we will not go anywhere. And we've created a new set of standards that I think creates that very reality. And it is frightening.

Let me put a finer point on this, which is just this Delta variant is just more COVID fear porn. Okay. This is the third variant of concern where they've been running around alarm saying that we have to worry. The truth is, is it more transmissible? Yes. It is going to, I think, sweep through areas of the country in the fall that aren't vaccinated. But the question is,

How does it perform against the vaccines? And so far, the vaccines are holding up. The variants, none of the variants have really punched through the vaccines in a meaningful way. I think the stats on Pfizer were it's it was it maybe reduced the effectiveness from 95 percent to 88 percent or something like that. But it wasn't a material difference. If you are double vax with Pfizer, you are protected against the Delta variant.

And so this is just more fear porn that they keep pumping. I'm in agreement with you. And I think this reminds me of when we were growing up in the 80s, they tried to scare us about sex and HIV. And were you not going to have sex if you were in your 20s, in the 90s and into the 80s? No, you learned about HIV. You learned to use condoms. You learned that you probably couldn't do

you know, what people did in the 60s and 70s, which had many, many partners, you maybe had to have fewer partners, maybe longer term partners, but you could, you could take your own risk. By putting on a condom, you could make that decision for yourself. Here, I think there's a group of people who don't want anybody to make any decisions for themselves. And in this case, the vaccine is wearing a condom. If you're wearing a condom, like your chance of getting HIV go down dramatically is just a known fact. And we're at 263 people

on average dying a day, how many of those Friedberg do you think are with COVID versus from COVID? If you had to take a guess, I have always I hate doing this because people think it's like an inhuman analysis. But the way that actuaries or economists would kind of take a look at this sort of decision tree, and this sort of data is the number of life years lost.

Okay. So imagine someone is going to die tomorrow. If someone's going to die tomorrow, and they catch COVID today, and they die a day early, you have lost a life day. And everyone Yes, that is absolutely devastating. And it is awful emotionally. But like, when we're making big decisions, we have

to think with the data. And so if someone catches COVID and they lose five years and they die five years early, then they statistically would have died. That's five life years lost. When a child dies, you are losing 68 life years, right? That is an incredible loss of life is one way to kind of think about this statistically.

And so, you know, part of I think what's been missing in the equation, and it's easy to tell the narrative by speaking about people that have died that tested positive for COVID when they died, is it now speaks to the fact that this is a binary experience, and there's a binary number of lives lost.

But the statistical, the data-driven exercise, which may sound inhuman and may sound awful, but again, we have to make these decisions using data if we're going to make large decisions that are going to impact everyone in a meaningful way, is to look at the number of life years lost. And I think if you were to do that, you would still find...

that the vast majority of deaths associated with COVID are very elderly people who are already very close to dying. And that's why we are seeing the fatality rates so low right now in the United States, even though COVID is still spreading with the Delta variant. It is because almost 90% of people over 70 have been vaccinated.

And as a result, the people that are most at risk of dying are well protected, and we are not seeing a significant loss of life associated with this terrible virus. The terrible virus is still spreading, but the life loss is still not there. Now, someone might raise their hand and say, well, we don't know the long-term implications, long-term ramifications. Long-haul COVID, yeah. I would raise my other hand and say, show me...

what the data is that says that there are those long-term implications ramifications. Cause I can say the what ifs about anything and then implement any policy decision I want by just saying, what if, and we don't know, we have to say, we do know here's the data in order to make a tough decision versus saying we need to be, you know, protective and use the protective, you know, uh, principle of, um, of precaution or the precautionary principle and be really careful in these circumstances, uh,

because at this point, the impact and the damage associated with some of our practices to quote unquote guard against COVID and, and, you know, protect people, it's turning out there are real consequences to those decisions.

All right, Freeberg, final question on COVID. Should you wear two condoms? In other words, should you get Moderna and Pfizer or J&J and Pfizer? There are studies coming out now to say one plus one equals three. There is some super effect of getting two. I am looking into this. I'm thinking I'm going to get a second vaccine. I might get to get a Moderna or a Pfizer or J&J. Don't waste the vaccine shots. Let them go to other countries, you know, not needed.

Not needed, even though the studies are starting to show it gives you increased. I mean, do you need your test? Do you need your Tesla to go from 180 to 185 miles an hour? I mean, like, you know.

That's a good point. I mean, look, everything we learn about the vaccines makes them look better and better. The protection lasts longer than we thought. They're more effective against variants than people were afraid of. And now we learn that there is even more protection by sort of this mix and match idea. So the vaccines have worked. There are still, I think, a couple of groups in America that are very vaccine hesitant. Evangelicals and African-Americans are the two groups. I thought it was male Republicans.

It's more like evangelicals. And so in a place like Mississippi, where you have large numbers of both, the vaccine rates only like 29, 30%. It's actually pretty low in a place like that. You could see the Delta variant sweep through in the fall and you could see a lot of cases. I, you know, let me,

Let me buck your labeling categorization of me, J. Cal. I was ready to say it. By saying that I don't think the leaders on the right are doing anyone any favors, any of their voters any favors by not coming out and saying, look, the vaccines work. You know, I think Trump could do a lot of good by coming out and just saying, listen, I got the vaccine. I'm pretty sure he did. Right. He did. He did. And so, you know, I think if you are.

in one of those groups, you know, and certainly you're over like 40, you should be getting the vaccine. I mean, they work. Not to harp on this, but what did Trump say when you suggested he come out publicly about it? Nobody's listening to me. No, it's fine. Nobody's listening to me, obviously. I mean, it is very weird that Trump spent massive amounts of money on the vaccine and now doesn't want to take credit for Project Lightspeed by telling everybody to get it.

I think he's got a lot of other issues. I think he's got a lot of other issues on the plate to deal with, including an indictment that just landed yesterday. So maybe, you know, maybe he just doesn't know what to focus on because he sees his his budding empire unraveling before him. Did you see the report that said that Trump was extremely thrilled by the fact that his CFO was indicted?

For two reasons. One is it kind of indicates that they didn't have enough to go after him. And two is it's going to make Joe Biden look bad and his administration look bad because it looks like they're being kind of prosecuted and persecuted now. But that he views this as a positive and he's thinking about it as a way to kind of stage a 2024 run.

Well, I didn't see that particular story, but I do think that... It was from Maggie. Maggie Haberman tweeted it. Okay. Well, what the charges show, I think, is that they got nothing on Trump directly. I mean, this turned out to be a big nothing burger after years of investigation, just like the whole Russia thing. Hold on. 15 felony counts? Hold on.

Let's not finish this point. Trump was not... Let me finish. Trump was not named. They didn't get close to Trump. All they got was they're trying to charge Wesselheim, who's a CFO, with basically receiving certain perks as compensation. T&E. It was T&E violations. It was crazy. Yeah. This is penny ante stuff. It does look like persecution rather than prosecution. And what they're trying to do is they're going after this guy, Wesselheim, to squeeze him to try and roll over on Trump. Well, good luck with that. That's about as likely...

to happen as Putin releasing the P tapes. Not going to happen. Sorry, J Cal. Trump is getting away. The one thing I would say, I think that I disagree with respectfully is, um,

This is a 15 year tax avoidance scheme that included more than T and E included people getting their tuition paid for for free and free apartments. So the equivalent would be and then hold on, they then knowingly did this and change the books knowingly. So they caught them going into their accounting and changing

to hide it and so the cover-up worse than the crime this is an explicit way to not pay their taxes this would be if all of us took our personal residences and our kids private school tuition and didn't pay taxes on it's it's significant jason so the total amount for example that this guy got in uh tuition reimbursements over this 15 year period was about 375 000 dollars

The total amount of some other rent perks that he got was for about $1.6 or $7 million. The total amount of value that I think his son got, you know, was spending $1,000 a month in a Trump-owned apartment. When you add it all up for a guy that was accused of, you know, being in cahoots with Russia, this and that and everything…

you pinch the CFO for a few million dollars, effectively, again, T&E, let's just say that he did it, you know, some of these checks came directly from Trump. I think I agree with David, it's a bit of a nothing burger. And it really does look like it's politically motivated. And the reason is because

These kinds of chargers are typically not brought. These are things that typically result in a civil penalty or restatement, and you just kind of move on. You know, nobody's trying to send somebody to jail for, you know, getting for miscategorizing. I have a theory because we don't have full information. And they weren't investigating this stuff before Trump became a politician. Why weren't... If this has been going on for 15 years, why didn't this investigation happen five, six, seven years ago? I could tell you why. His...

The daughter-in-law of Weisselberg's received a lot of these perks, and then she dropped a dime and gave all the documents to them. My theory on this is, because we don't have complete information yet,

I think that they have other, I think they have this bigger tax case around making the assets look smaller when paying taxes and inflating the value of the assets when getting loans. And I think they want to get that. And the way to get that is to flip Weisselberg because Trump does not use email and communications. I think that that's what's going on here. But- Yes, you're right. They're trying to flip him. Look,

The KGB had a saying, show us the man, we'll tell you the crime. Okay. They decided we're going to go after Trump. This is entirely political. They weren't interested in him five, six, seven years ago. Once he got into politics, they became interested in him. He became the man. And now they are trying to roll up and flip all these people and try to get them to turn on Trump and give them something. These Democratic pit bull prosecutors, they are going to make Trump look like the victim here. This will rebound dramatically.

I think in a negative way. It is a really stupid thing that they're doing. I mean, this, this could have happened in so many different ways. The guy was finished and washed up, right? He was in his little hovel in Florida, you know, no Twitter account, you know, in the one, no Twitter account, no access to his base. Um, the one time he actually showed up in New York two or three weeks ago. I don't know if you guys saw the photos. He looks so disheveled, so old, so broken. Um,

let the guy wither into obscurity. But instead, you pin these charges, you create an entire press cycle, you're going to rally so many people on the right, and actually a lot of people in general who feel like, wait, what are we doing as a country? Why don't we just let it just be done with this guy? I don't ever want to hear about him ever again. And instead, we're kind of like,

bringing it all back front center. I just think it's a bad look. What do you think about the insurrection commission? Do you think that that should, should be disbanded as well? Because you think that should that should be pursued? Yeah, because that's not necessarily about Trump, that it is about a whole totality of things that really will lead into the fact that we have a lot of far right organizations that

that need to be understood. We have one far left organization that needs to be understood all in the same light, which is that these folks are destabilizing force to democracy. And so yeah, you got to get to the bottom of what the hell happened. So do you think the insurrection commission is going to be equally kind of politically motivating for for Trump's face and for folks like that?

Well, I just think that you have to decide as a country whether you're going to keep relitigating what happened in the previous administration. I mean, if we're going to go back and keep this going, are we going to go back and look at why did the FBI use the Steele dossier to go to a FISA court to spy on members of the Trump campaign? There were 17 misrepresentations in their petition to the FISA court.

I mean, there was clear misconduct there. Are we going to go back and relitigate that and go after people and punish them? Look, maybe we should. Okay. But I think that this is the thing about politics. Everyone just wants to move forward. We're in a new administration now. Whatever misconduct occurred, I think the punishment was paid at the ballot box.

I think it's just time to move on. And I agree with that. And look, I know there's gonna be a lot of partisans on both sides who just want to go relitigate and punish their enemies forever. But, you know, I think the American people just want to move forward.

Yeah. What are you in the far? What are you in the far left want to do? Well, I'm not on the far left. I mean, I think that there is a I do think that there is a bunch of gamesmanship here. I think this is a chessboard that on the left, they're saying, if we we if we have a chance to take Trump out of political life, we need to do that because the cost of him getting reelected in 2024 is too great. And so what we're talking about here is

you know, what is the best path to doing that? And, you know, Chamath's right, like just letting him fade into obscurity. He may not want to run again because he's so old and it's so painful to be president for him. He's 75. I mean, he's going to be 78 or no, 70. He'll be the same age as Biden going in. I mean, this is ridiculous. Both of these two guys are one term presidents. I think that is ridiculous.

abundantly clear. I think the question is, what is Biden's transition plan? You know, does he actually only stay two years and transitions it to Kamala?

I don't know. But there's no way that he's running for a second term either. He does not look healthy. I think that much is at least and I'm saying this as you know, a centrist Democrat, he doesn't look completely fit. And it's only going to get worse. And this is the most incredibly stressful job in the world. Neither of these two guys are a long term solution. It's time to let it all go.

Right? It's like we had four years of just chaos. We now get to have four years to catch our breath. It's time to find the late 40s to mid 50s centrist normal people again. And we have three years to do it.

Who do you think that is on the Republican side? And who do you think it is on the Democrat side? Who's going to run for the next election cycle? Because just this morning, by the way, an article came out that highlighted that several insiders in the White House are completely like up in arms about how chaotic

Kamala Harris's offices, which is basically a way of starting to shoot her down, right? So if you think about the motivation here, someone in the White House is starting to shoot Kamala Harris down, which means they're starting to weaken her a little bit in terms of whether she could actually be a good replacement for the next term. I don't know if that's truly the motivation, but that's typically what these sorts of stories indicate.

So if not her, if not her who on the Democrat side, and you know, if not Trump, who on the Republican side in the next election cycle, because those folks are going to start to pop their head up, right? The Well, I mean, I think the I think the person who has enough credibility to take a shot, it's not clear that she will. But if she did, she would be really serious. And she could actually get people to be relatively normal as Nikki Haley.

On the right. But Ron DeSantis is going to be the right candidate, correct? And she's kind of normal. DeSantis is definitely the early frontrunner. There was a straw poll in which he was the first Republican to actually run ahead of Trump in a straw poll for, what, four or five years? And so, yeah, it looks like he now...

He's running for reelection in Florida in 2022. So that's on his plate. But I think it looks like he's going to sweep to victory. He made the right decisions on lockdowns. This is the central feather in his cap that-

Before any other governor, really, he looked at the data, saw that to Freeburg's point, lockdowns don't make a difference. He went back to normal. The state benefited. You look at per capita COVID deaths in Florida, it's middle of the pack, which is actually a really good result given how many old people they have.

So he did a phenomenal job, I think, setting COVID policy in Florida. And he did it in the face of a hostile media that was just tearing him limb from limb. And so he showed that he not only can find the right policy, but that he's got the spine to stand up for it. And I think as a result of that, yeah, he has galvanized early the Republican base,

If he wins reelection in 2022 by a strong margin, I think he does become the putative frontrunner for 2024. Very similar in a way, I think, to the way that George W. Bush, you know, he basically won reelection in Texas two years before he ran for president. And on the heels of that victory, he was able to make the case, look, I just got reelected.

I'm very popular in a huge state of the country. You know, I should be the front runner. I think DeSantis is in a similar position. What do you think about Nikki Haley sex?

I think Nikki Haley is sort of popular with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, but she does not bring together both the sort of the establishment wing with the populist wing. And what DeSantis has been able to do is get the business Republicans and the establishment Republicans to get behind him as well as the populist Trump base loves him. And that's

That's the combo you got to have, I think, to win the Republican nomination. And so Nikki Haley, I think, you know, everybody who sort of reads elite media is going to over index on her. But if you go to the straw polls and the rallies, she's just not going to perform in those polls. There was a very interesting article in Politico, though, over the past week about how DeSantis is being very careful not to do anything to upset Trump.

And I think he understands. Is he the VP candidate with Trump, you think?

Well, that pre-assumes a lot of things happening. I mean, look, we don't know what's going to happen. I think that, you know, the number one way to resurrect Trump is what Jamal said, is to keep poking that bear, to fill him with the rage to sort of counter punch and come back. I think it would be better, however, for a new generation of leaders to, look, we're being run by a gerontocracy right now. So, I mean, just

Biden is 78. Pelosi is 80. Schumer is 77. McConnell is 80. And Trump is 75. And that's today. Okay. In 2024, all those people are going to be in their 80s or just about to turn 80. Who will even be alive? I mean. Feinstein will be 91 or 92. It's time to have a new generation in both parties. Why are we being run by this gerontocracy? What a joke. Do we want to move on to the drought and impending death and... Or the Facebook FTC dismissal.

Oh, that was incredible. And also at the FTC got two gut punches in a row. And then, you know, Amazon writes this petition to recuse Lena Kahn. It's like, that's why she was hired. Incredible. She was hired because she's an expert on Amazon. The Amazon, the Amazon letter was actually extremely well written and basically said,

I know that she's in charge of basically finding fairness and fairness seems to be that we will get legislated, but we believe that it's unfair to us. So please take her out of the mix. I just think it was fantastic. I mean, it's incredible.

It's like, isn't this the point of having her in the job? It's like we've hired a new prosecutor who specializes in organized crime. And the Gambino crime family has petitioned to have them. Exactly. Recuse. Recuse from doing any organized crime. Right. Their argument is that she should be recused because she published articles. She's biased. Yeah, that Amazon should be broken up. And they're saying she's already prejudged the situation. There's no way this is going to fly. There's no way she's going to get recused.

but I think what they're trying to do is put an argument on appeal so that if Lena Khan does break them up somehow, they can then go appeal to the Supreme court or wherever. And this is basically reserving an argument they can make later. So just to highlight the FTC, um,

brought this case against Facebook saying that they're a monopoly and their monopolistic practices are damaging the market. The DC federal court threw out the case and they basically said that the FTC failed to demonstrate in any way that Facebook has a monopoly over anything because they kept using the 60% market share term and they're like 60% what? And the FTC was never able to give them data or facts to indicate what Facebook has a 60% share of.

There are other social media services, there are other advertising platforms, there are other content sites that are all in aggregate much larger than Facebook. And so the case was dismissed because there was no demonstration at all. Yeah, which is why Lena Kahn is...

the antitrust laws entirely, redefine what it means to be a monopoly, redefine what this impacts. And so I think the big question is, how much of a priority is it going to be for this administration and for this Congress before they're out of session, and we end up with a split Congress again, to step up and rewrite antitrust laws at this point? Is this really a high priority question? Or is it going to get overruled by themselves? That's why Lena Kahn is being brought in is to take another approach, like we talked about on the last episode, which is,

you know, the harm is competition and not the monopolistic power, but downstream competition, as Chamath eloquently explained on the last pod. The irony of the Elizabeth Warren statements was that she released them on Twitter, not her Facebook. Somebody dunked on her like she's

She's talking about the monopolistic powers of Facebook on Twitter. Right, right. You have an alternative. That's the point. I mean, how big of a legislative priority is this going to be for Democrats to...

Because if they rewrite the laws, it could be impactful to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, you know, huge. It's a huge priority. There's six bills that just got passed in the House is going to the Senate. And I do think fast, this is one of the areas where you could actually get some bipartisan agreement.

in the Senate. You remember, it's a 50-50 Senate. All it would take would be a few Democrats to defect and they wouldn't be able to pass anything. But you got 21 Republicans who supported Lena Kahn. So, you know, that says to me that legislation is likely. I think it's going to go through. I think we are going to see some big changes. And in fairness to Lena Kahn, this FTC lawsuit that got thrown out was brought before she got there. She didn't have a chance –

to shape those arguments. They have 30 days to refile. It'll be really interesting to see how she handles this hot potato now, whether she brings the lawsuit in a different way in the next 30 days or whether she lets it drop. But I do think that of all the big tech companies, the argument for breaking up Facebook is the weakest because it's true. It's harder to say definitively

They have a monopoly in social networking when you've got Twitter, you've got Snapchat, you've got Reddit, you've got TikTok, you've got LinkedIn, you've got so many other companies in social media. But that does not mean that the argument against Amazon, Google, and Apple isn't strong. Those companies are clearly monopolies or duopolies in their spaces. Nobody can effectively compete with them. Their network effects or monopoly scale effects are insuperable. I think that Facebook's monopolistic impact probably tends towards

some form of information distribution, but it's a very technical argument that has to be framed accurately on the one side, or it's how they've aggregated long-tail advertisers on the other. But to your point, David, on the idea of social networking, I don't think they're a monopoly in the least. Well, also, they're relitigating the approved acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. I kind of feel like it,

If you bought these things and you approved it, what is it, nine years ago and seven years ago? Yeah, they said if you guys had an issue, the state's attorney general that filed the suit against the Instagram acquisition and WhatsApp, they're like, if you had an issue with it, you should have filed the suit years ago. You waited too long.

And clearly, there's, you know, you know, other motivations, like just because Google was successful buying YouTube doesn't mean you can go back in and unwind YouTube because they did a great job building YouTube. 99.999% of YouTube success is because of Google, not because of YouTube. They took a small team and they rebuilt that whole thing and they scaled the heck out of it. Let me ask you a question to Saks. If these companies paid more taxes and got out of the censorship business, do you think they could

you know, maybe take a little wind out of the sails of these? Yes. Yeah, of course. Look, the only reason those 21 Republicans have now gotten on board with regulating the power of these big tech companies is they see those big tech companies using their gatekeeper power to restrict free speech. And it's all one-sided and it's partisan against, you know, their side of the aisle because these companies are populated, generally speaking, by people on the other side of the aisle.

And so, you know, big tech, if they had just reined in their own impulses to want to censor the other side, they would not be in the hot water they're in right now. Can they unravel that now? Because it seems like Facebook is starting to backtrack on the Trump ban. Well, they haven't. Twitter isn't. And I think they've got a big problem now. No, look, I think they should have been doing this over the last couple of years. The cat's out of the bag. What they thought could never happen all of a sudden became arbitrary. And the thing that they did was they started to legislate

a private company started to legislate power. And that's just a third rail issue. The minute you do that, you have every government in the world saying to you're saying to themselves, wait a minute,

I am only focused on this one thing, right? I don't take a huge salary. I've been grinding at the low levels of politics for 40, 50 years to get to this exact place. And now I have a bunch of hipsters in Menlo Park telling me what I can and can't say to the people that I worked a lifetime to basically be able to govern over. I mean, you know, it's-

It can't stand. Yeah. So I think a big mistake that Zuckerberg made goes all the way back to 2016. Facebook basically bought into the disinformation argument. They apologized for it. That was the time for Zuckerberg to fight. He should have said, no, listen.

Was the FSB, were these bad actors on Facebook? Yes. But when you look at the total number of impressions and page views, it was like a drop of water in the ocean. We're not the ones who caused this election to go the way it did. Obama used Facebook very effectively in 2008 and nobody had a problem with us then. And that was the time to fight.

That was a time to fight. And to your point, David, he actually should have been even more. He said, the reason Trump got elected was not me, but it was Obama. You know, he could have really gone on the attack and he would have done himself. Well, look, Hillary just ran a bad campaign. If Hillary had just campaigned in Wisconsin, it would have gone a different way.

in 2016. So what Zuck should have... She had an idiot team. She had an idiot team. She had a terrible team and they were bad at everything, including Facebook. Including everything. They were bad at everything. They were just bad at social media. So Zuck should have said, listen, don't blame us for the fact the campaign was bad at social media. They put victory into the jaws of defeat. Let's end on this US Sprinter case. I think it's super interesting. US Sprinter, shock. It's unbelievable. Richardson tests positive for marijuana and is suspended a month, putting her Tokyo Olympics in doubt. What a joke.

She is the gold medal favorite in the women's 100 meter. And she could miss the games after testing positive. She said she smoked pot when she found out in Oregon legally, when she found out her mom had died. And it's on the United States. I don't being agency announced this result on Friday. Her explanation is so fucking heartbreaking.

I mean, what are we doing here? This makes no sense. Change this decision. Well, there was, there was, this is similar to the golfer who was about to win the PGA and got kicked out on the final day because he tested positive for COVID without any symptoms. Yeah, that was dumb. And an outdoor sport. He's outside. Guys, I cannot imagine. Put a mask on and let him finish. I cannot imagine a worse drug for a sprinter than marijuana.

Yeah. I mean, for healing, great. But it's I mean, you're going to run the hundred meters and stop for a cheeseburger. You're going to take it up. It's not a it's not a performance enhancing drug. What this is, is this legalism, these bureaucratic legalistic technicalities gone wild in this case of this runner in the case of the golfer. I mean, it's like it's like the bureaucrats enforcing the rules have completely lost sight of what the purpose of these rules are.

The spirit of the rule is super important. And there was a professional snowboarder, and his name was Ross. Galati from Canada, and he wanted a medal, and they took his medal away. Because he had THC in his system, and qualified him and then they went back and gave him his metal back, I believe.

And so this is heartbreaking and ridiculous. And I'm not going to watch the I love watching the Olympics. I watch a lot of the Olympics. I really enjoy it. I think it's awesome. And I'm just not going to watch this this year. Fuck it. I just I'm so offended by this.

Like you want these people to take like opioids for their pain and suffering? We want to take some antidepressant. I mean, Jesus Christ, Jason, look, also say like in in our friend group, we have a handful of NBA players. And I don't, I don't think you remember this conversation. Maybe you do. I think we were all together when they talked about the up until marijuana was more widely used in the NBA.

The pills that these players were given were literally borderline opioids. Crazy. Ripped their stomach apart, ripped everything apart, you know, created dependencies. And all of a sudden you had a natural alternative and people are going to judge folks for taking. I mean, these guys are brutalizing their bodies for effectively our entertainment.

And then we don't give them a reasonable way to manage their pain. It's outrageous. And everybody else is smoking a doobie during halftime or taking a gummy on the way home to sleep. I mean, it's so hypocritical.

And it feels like, I mean, this country just feels like it's being run by a bunch of bureaucratic technocratic weenies. And whether it's all monitors, whether it's we should give them a wedgie and throw them in the locker. That's what we should do with this. I whoever put this person, they get a wedgie and get thrown in a locker.

I knew you were a schoolyard bully, J. Cal. I'm not a schoolyard bully, but I do think the hall monitors... You know those... You were a hall monitor, weren't you, Sax? Did you volunteer to be a hall monitor? Be honest. No, no, no. You were in the chess club. I liked our chess game, Sax. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, this is how I knew. This is how I knew that J Cal wasn't real. I knew I knew I had heard him. Okay, I knew he was genuinely hurt, but I knew he would get over it. When I got I saw my push notifications or request from chess.com. He started a chess game with me.

So I'm like, oh, how did I play? Because I'm a neophyte. He couldn't be away for too long. How easy was it to beat me as a 1200 player to my 600? Yeah. Well, the chess.com analysis said that I was never in any danger, but I thought you played pretty well. And yeah. Give me a tip. What's my tip?

Well, you didn't castle fast enough. I was trying to get that bishop out. Yeah, you let me trap your king in the center and then, you know, it was a... But you did good. You did good. All right. I knew I was okay with you when I got the chess.com. I think we need a Vegas trip. Maybe we're all just a little cooped up. Maybe we need to go to Vegas, do a quick 48-hour run this weekend. Should we do a little 48-hour Vegas run?

All right, everybody. This has been an amazing episode. So I'm officially unblocking Saks. I love you guys. And I even followed him. Love you, Chamath. Love you, Saks. Love you, Freebird. J. Cal, I have something to say to you as well, which is I appreciate you. I love... I love... System breakdown. Fuck it. Back at you. Let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sasson. And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Weston. I'm the queen of kinwad. Besties are gone. Go 13,000.

What?

Are you wearing your boxers? What are you wearing? What are those pants, dude? These are my swim trunks. Whoa, swim trunks. There they are. The internet famous legs. I mean, these legs are actually much, much bigger. Look how big they are. Oh, please tell me you're recording, Nick. Look at how big these are.