All-In PodcastE41: Vaccine policy, Big Tech, DeepMind's latest breakthrough, wealth creation, opportunity & more
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,099 words- 0:00 – 5:48
Intro & Dog update
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... Sacks, I am gonna give you $1,000 each to the charity of your choice for every correct answer. Fuck it, 10,000.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But you have to answer- you have to answer in real time and you can't fuck around, okay?
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, here we go.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No stalling.
- JCJason Calacanis
This is to- this is to any charity he chooses, including Tucker Carlson 2024? Okay, let's go.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You have to give the answers right away. You cannot fucking think about this.
- JCJason Calacanis
Here we go.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Three, two, one. First, middle, and last name of your children and their birthdays. Go!
- JCJason Calacanis
(instrumental music plays) Um, first, middle, last- (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
No, I mean... Stalling for time already.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, I know. You're already stalled. Okay, go, Dino. You can beep these out, Nick. Go ahead, go.
- JCJason Calacanis
So (beep) is, uh, January (beep) .
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, year. What's the year?
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, uh, 2008. (beep) Uh-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs) (beep) ... uh, is, uh, October (beep) , um, (beep) , uh, 2010.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
And then, uh-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Little guy, little man. The little guy. First name Little- You're trying to sup me. ... middle name Man. You're trying to sup me with the little guy.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Little man, Bubby. The little guy- the little guy- Bubby. ... Bubby, uh, (beep) , he was born October (beep) of, uh, 2016.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
All right, good. He did it. He did it. (laughs) That was a struggle.
- JCJason Calacanis
I got it. I got it. He got there. He got there. That's all that matters is he got there.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He got there. He got there.
- JCJason Calacanis
It is- it is all... So you're gonna give the- you're gonna give 10 grand? Yeah, 10 grand each to, uh-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh, 10 grand each? So it's 30 grand. Name your charity.
- JCJason Calacanis
30 grand to Tucker Carlson for president. DeSantis 2024. (laughs)
- 5:48 – 26:26
COVID, Vaccine mandates, public vs. private policy
- JCJason Calacanis
I think we should start with the COVID cases because this is impacting everything from the economy to people's decisions, touching on people's freedoms, a- and it's hard to know where to start here, but I think facts are always a- a good place to start. Here in the United States-We had gotten COVID cases, you know, to that 12,000 a day average. Uh, it was pretty amazing, and it looked like it was going to go straight down, smooth sailing, um, and we had had deaths down at around, uh, I saw some seven-day averages where we were at 150, 200. Now, the weekends are kind of weird, um, in terms of reporting, but the seven-day average today is at 248. In other words, it's been flat for a month when you do this on... This is according to the New York Times statistics and Google n- You can search for Google and, and you'll find these. They have some great data that they'll just put right in the search result. However, cases have gone from this 12, 15K a day average, soaring in just 30 days to 62,000 a day, and a seven-day average of 40,000. So we're basically triple the number of cases. Cases trail traditionally deaths by something in the neighborhood of 10 days. Uh, I think I'm correct, Friedberg? So what do you think is actually going to happen here? We're gonna, we're gonna get up to 10, 100,000, 200,000 cases a day and maybe double the number of deaths from the people who are not vaccinated?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah, uh, you know, uh, the current logic on this is that there will be, um, because of the number of people that are generally infected and are spreading what is now an even more infectious variant of COVID, the people that are not vaccinated are, um, starting to get it at a higher rate and that's where the deaths are starting to come from. So, um, yeah, we will see deaths climb and I think like we talked about last time, we're starting to see... Even Gavin did an interview yesterday in California talking about how, you know, there, it's on the table that we may go back to certain restrictions, uh, behavioral restrictions, mask mandates, et cetera. Um, so there's gonna be a set of reactions and I think as we talked about last time, we saw the market start to react to the potential of that on Monday. Uh, and then very interestingly, it kind of reversed course on Tuesday and everything came back when everyone was freaked out on Monday after they saw the weekend's data, which showed that cases are climbing like crazy in the US. But I think the conventional wisdom is not that many people are gonna die, therefore we're not gonna see, you know, um, uh, political leaders, uh, force restrictions that are kind of, uh, gonna damage the economy and we're gonna start to walk what I think Israel's calling the golden line, which is balancing the economy with the, uh, the health of the, uh, citizenry. So, um, so, you know, we'll, we'll see. Uh, it's gonna come down to policy but I think from a deaths perspective, there will absolutely be a rise in deaths now as unvaccinated people are the, gonna be the bulk of those deaths and, and this thing is spreading again amongst people that haven't been vaccinated.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, the... And then Sax, this becomes now a great Rorschach test of what do you see, uh, in this data and in this moment because it's a pandemic, as many people are saying now. I think this is becoming the meme or the catch phrase, it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. So people have chosen to opt in to this pandemic and then a group of us have chosen to not be part of it. You were part of it, even as a vaccinated person but you're feeling great. You're back to 100%. So what do you think should happen in terms of closings or shutdowns or mask mandates? What's your take on the pandemic of the unvaccinated?
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, I think we need to differentiate between, uh, public policy and private behavior. So, you know, uh, after last week's episode where I said, you know, Delta variant's real, there's gonna be a huge spike in cases, um, unfortunately I thought we had this thing whipped, you know, a few weeks ago. Now I think the data is showing something different. You know, everyone, there, there was a lot of commenters saying, "Sax, you've turned. You've been blue-pilled." No, it's, you know, I, I think there's a difference between acknowledging what's going on and then having the, the policy conversation around it. Um, I think that the difference now from last year, I mean there's a couple of things. One is that we do have vaccines so I think for most people, getting vaccinated will take the worst risks off the table. The other is we know so much more about what works and what doesn't work. And so lockdowns don't work if, you know, if they ever did. They, they, they, they, they, they, we now know looking at from what different states did last year that they don't make a difference, so there's no reason to go back to that policy. But also, I mean, I would even say en masse it should be a re-
- JCJason Calacanis
Wait, wait. Do we know that? I mean is that-
- DSDavid Sacks
I think so.
- JCJason Calacanis
... are we sure of that?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, I think so because, um, th- the, the thing that the government planners never take into account is that private citizens are gonna adjust their behavior in both directions. So in Florida, they didn't have mandates but people who were at risk took, you know, extreme precautions. They would either lock themselves down or be very fastidious about wearing a high-quality mask. By contrast, in California, we had the most severe lockdowns but they were never really feasible so there's 10 pages of exceptions. People didn't really abide by them. And then on top of it, you know, you have all these mask mandates but if somebody wears like a, a sock loosely affixed to their face, does that really protect them? You know? So, you know, people, if they're, if they're not interested in complying with these mandates, they do it in a half-hearted way, I'm not convinced that the mandates work in the first place. Um, so the, the smart thing to do here is just to have recommendations and let private citizens decide what their response is gonna be. We know now so much more about the risks that we all face, uh, than we did a year ago. Um, and so just let private citizens decide. I mean, I'd even say on va- on vaccines, I mean, look, I'm pro-vax. I don't really understand where the anti-vax people are coming from, but I'm kinda done wasting my breath trying to convince people to get vaccinated, you know, on this show who don't wanna get vaccinated. You know? If they don't want to, send those doses to the developing world where they're desperate for them.
- JCJason Calacanis
Let me ask you, Chamath, do you, do you agree with Sax's position that, listen, citizens are just gonna have to make their own decision here, leave everything open and let's not have the economy...... collapse again and people, people are smart enough to make their own decision? And is this framing of this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated the correct framing?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, I'm, I'm really of two minds. There's, there's the part of me that says that, um, you have to give people the right to make their own decision. The problem is that in this specific case, there's s- so much transmissibility and, um, as a result of that, how this thing can mutate, that I think that public health has to take a priority, um, over any individual, individuals' rights, in t- in this very specific, narrow, narrow case.
- JCJason Calacanis
Because the Delta variant is so transmissible, transmissible, people are going to have to lose some freedoms. Is one of those showing a vaccine card when you go to, uh, uh, an arena?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, you wouldn't need that, you wouldn't need that if everybody was vaccinated or you had to go through a lot of hoops to be unvaccinated, as an example. I mean, and, and the reason is because the longer you allow this thing to float around in the petri dish of the unvaccinated, you're increasing everybody's risk.
- JCJason Calacanis
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And this is where I think individual freedoms, as long as it doesn't trample on collective freedom, then I think live and let live. But I think on this specific issue, uh, I think that it's, it's, it's unconscionable to be in a situation where, um, we are fighting basically a time function, where at a certain amount of time you're going to have a variant that, that is, you know, basically will overcome all the vaccines we have, will, uh, kill enormous numbers of people, including the vaccinated, will literally shut the economy down. And that's a probabilistic event now and I don't like the fact that-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... I'm susceptible to that because of a bunch of people who, frankly, aren't doing it for medical or religious reasons. They're just watching Fox News and just spouting off.
- DSDavid Sacks
I agree that we're at risk there, but we're also at risk from acci- unvaccinated people in the rest of the world. So, Delta variant came from India, the, uh, Lambda variant, I think they're on, came from Peru. I mean, the fact of the matter is, unvaccinated people everywhere are a potential petri dish for the virus, so I'd rather ... uh, I mean, this is why we need to send those unused doses that, by the way, are at risk of expiring. We now ... I mean, there was a, a tweet about this recently. There's huge stockpiles of vaccine in the US that are going to waste right now. We should ship those anywhere in the world that people are ready to get vaccinated.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, specifically to Mexico and Canada, and Canada's, I think, this, uh, month going to, even though we got off to a massive head start, going to, uh, eclipse us in terms of the percentage of vaccinated. Let me ask it more pointedly. Should a te- should teachers be f- public school teachers be forced to be vaccinated? Should you be forced to have a vaccine card to get on public transportation, airplanes or, you know, take buses? You know, long-haul buses, uh, long-haul trains? Uh, and then third, should you f- be forced to show a vaccine card to get on ... to go to sporting events or concerts? Let's go through those three. So y- your personal freedom ends. You're going to be forced-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you wanna participate-
- JCJason Calacanis
... if you wanna go to group behaviors, yes.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you wanna participate in a public construct, if you wanna consume a public resource, or if you wanna provide a publicly funded good, then it's the broader public's rights that, um, are superior to your individual rights. Otherwise, work at a charter school where it's not required, watch the fucking concert from home, or drive your car, use a bicycle, or take an Uber.
- JCJason Calacanis
The end. Sach-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... what do you think? And then Freeburg.
- DSDavid Sacks
Uh, so I, I understand that argument. I would, uh, differentiate between public and, and private requirements 'cause I h- I don't like the idea of giving government the power to forcibly stick a needle in your arm. Um, so ...
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, what you might say, you could stay home or you could take your bicycle.
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, sure, so-
- JCJason Calacanis
So is-
- DSDavid Sacks
... well-
- JCJason Calacanis
... is that, uh, r- reasonable that you don't get to go to a Warriors game because you're unvaccinated?
- 26:26 – 36:56
Collectivism, comparison to cigarettes, Sacks' latest podcast beef
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But I wanna be very clear. If you want the services that are offered to you by the collective whole, if you wanna consume and be a net drag on the resources that we share, then you need to sign up for the compact that we all signed up for. That's, that's my overarching argument. The, the, the thing with abortion, where I'm on the other side of the issue, just to be very clear, is like, it is a woman's body. I don't think I have any right to dictate what she does. I don't understand what she goes through. I don't understand what situation she's in. I don't think I have the judgment to do that. It should be her decision.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And it doesn't have to impact on the collective.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And her decision to carry or not carry a baby doesn't theoretically come with a probabilistic chance that I may die. It does not.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But when you choose to not get vaccinated to a highly transmissible respiratory disease that could kill me-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Or mutate, yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'm not saying that I have a say, but I do think I should have a say if you're then, all of a sudden, gonna consume the same resources that I consume where I've signed up to that compact for public health.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Based on all this, here's where I come to. What if we gave teachers an off-ramp? Listen, if you, um, you, you need to be vaccinated to be in the classroom. If not, you're gonna get a one-year buyout or whatever, one month or two months for every m- year of service. So if you've been with us for 20 years, you're gonna get 20 months of pay. And, or you could say, "If the virus is spreading at under this rate," in other words, you know, "we, we've got under 1% of the population infected," or whatever the, the criteria is, "then you can come to work in the classroom. But if this thing is spreading, you're out." And that's it, and there's an off-ramp here, to, to David's point, okay-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Unle- unless there's a narrow, like, look, I th- I do think you can be a conscientious objector for ru- legitimate reasons. Again, like, we, we have th- these very specific definitions for religious or for health-specific reasons that you ch- that you don't get vaccinated. I think those should be respected. It's not that cohort of people we're talking about. It's everybody else that, right now, wants to not think for themselves, and as a result, put everybody else and themselves in danger.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, there, I, I think the most compelling part of your argument, Chamath, is that we're, is the health externality, right, that, that, that each person's decision does have an impact on whether they could be transmitting, you know, multiplicative contagious particles. And this is why I was in favor of a mask mandate at the beginning of the pandemic, is, it's not just an individual decision. Your, your choice actually does affect whether other people get sick. So, you know, this is why I, I do think it's a close, a close call-
- DFDavid Friedberg
It also wasn't very invasive, correct, Sachs, I mean, was your other point?
- DSDavid Sacks
Th- yes, exactly. The, uh, potentially high benefit for very low cost. I think we're, but, but, but the thing that maybe I didn't necessarily take into consideration is, you know, people complied in such a half-hearted way. I mean, I do think the mask makes a difference if it's an N95 quality mask that you put on correctly, right?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Correct.
- DSDavid Sacks
But when people just strap a sock to their face, it's loosely fitting, and they don't give a shit, I mean, does that really make a difference? I mean, I'm very skeptical.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Let me ask you a question, Sachs, and then we'll go to Friedberg, and then we'll flip to the next topic. If we were on our third pandemic or, or let's, God forbid, a second pandemic starts, a totally different one, you know, Ebola type or something, and we're on the fifth variant and people are dying at a higher rate, does your calculus change, Sachs? Because the economy-
- DSDavid Sacks
Sure, because, because the, the, um, the downsides, the, the cost of, you know, not, not imposing those m- more restrictive regulations goes up considerably. I mean, definitely my thinking today is highly influenced by the fact that, that if you're vaccinated, you're, call it 95% likely to be taking the most deadly or serious risks off the table. And so the people who are choosing not to get vaccinated are essentially assuming the risk. You know, it's like s- it's like smoking in a way, where-... when I made the movie, Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley told me, you know, he's the author of the book, and he said, "Look, there's something uniquely American about defending people's right to do something that's manifestly harmful," right? You know, th- the main character in Thank You For Smoking is a spokesman for big tobacco and he's engaging in political spin, but his argument is, "Look, people have the right to engage in this behavior even if it is known to be harmful to them." Maybe America is the only place in the world where people buy into arguments like that, but I do (laughs) , um, I, you know, look, that is, that is, um, that's freedom, is letting people do stupid things, you know? And, um, and so we have to weigh the benefits of, of freedom against the, the, against the costs and, um-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
By the way, sorry, can I just say something?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, s- smoking is a perfect example because as you know, there is now, um, a non-trivial amount of law around the liability related to individuals that enabled, um, secondhand smoke. Both the smoker, but also other things, condo boards, other places, where all of a sudden you didn't choose to fucking have, you know, tar and nicotine-
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... filtered-
- JCJason Calacanis
Bartenders. My dad worked in bars where peop- it was a cloud of smoke-
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
... for 30 years.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
30 years.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
They told him he was essentially a smoker.
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's not, it's not just the detrimental activity at the time. Remember, we've socialized the cost of treatment for people, uh, through public health systems, and because of that, it's not just an individual's choice if there is a socialized cost for everyone that's now gotta pay the price.
- DSDavid Sacks
But, but, g- the government is so omnipresent in all of our lives, there's always gonna be a social cost to any bad choice people make. And to Thomas' point, I mean, everybody uses government services to some degree, so that alone can't be the reason. I, I do agree that the-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, no, but there is outrageous behavior, David. What about people speeding on highways at 125 miles an hour? Like, it's the same thing.
- 36:56 – 45:39
Vaccine incentives in France
- DSDavid Sacks
vaccinated.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Did you guys see that, um, uh, Emmanuel Macron of France, uh, you know-
- JCJason Calacanis
Had some back.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... basically tightened all these restrictions around access to public places, uh, going into bars and cafes. They basically put all these rules in place that you have to be vaccinated and he did it in a public address on TV. 22 million people watched it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yep.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And then after he did this, suddenly the vaccination signups went up to like 20,000 a minute. They got four million people sign up to ve- get vaccinated-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yep. Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... uh, after they put these restrictions in place.
- JCJason Calacanis
If you can't go to a cafe, I mean, in France, what's the point of being alive?
- DFDavid Friedberg
And then let me throw a wet blanket on, uh, the framing of this on whether all of this talk about forcing vaccinations even makes sense or is possible. I have been to like three events over the last month or two where I was required to be vaccinated, and I literally just took a photo of this index card that I got-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... from this person and sent it to them, which I could go make at Kinko's or I could print at home. So like-
- JCJason Calacanis
It's a lot of effort.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Th- th- there's... I don't... My, my point is I don't think that there... (laughs) There's not a great digital system today to enable the level of restriction that we're actually talking about. How are you actually gonna know that people going to the Warriors game are actually vaccinated? How are you actually gonna know?
- JCJason Calacanis
They did it at Madison Square Garden. They, they literally had you pull out your ID and they matched your name to your vax card. And I think printing out a vax card and faking it-
- DFDavid Friedberg
If I, if I, if I carry... Yeah. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... could be a fine, could be a $10,000 fine. And so you would do it like anything else. You, you could, you could make a bogus driver's license-
- DFDavid Friedberg
My point is that it's-
- JCJason Calacanis
... and drive cars.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... it's not digital, right? There's no r- there's no kind of centralized system where we know who's actually been vaccinated and who's not. So, so much of this is just this like analog paper trail thing of like, here's this piece of paper that says I'm vaccinated. I think that you're, you're never gonna really close the hole on this thing. Now you certainly will see the sort of psychological behavior that they saw in France, which is you just announce the restrictions, you announce these rules, everyone signs up-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... or some number of people will sign up. But I, you know, I'm not sure this a- actually ends up becoming this truly enforceable mechanism of behavior i- in society, uh, over the next, uh, you know, short while. I mean, maybe over time we digitize all this stuff, but we'll see.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, I mean the best-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Anyways.
- DSDavid Sacks
... the best, the best case scenario is that because Delta is so transmissible, we get to herd immunity because all the people who didn't get vaccinated just get it and get the natural antibodies and hopefully this thing burns out.
- JCJason Calacanis
How close are we to that? Because we have 60% of adults in the United States have had one shot or more, uh, which is why deaths probably aren't going up because that's like 75% in people over 60, I think. So, Friedberg, i- in your estimation as our science guy with w- we have like 30 million people who've been infected, uh, that we know of. You gotta triple that number, right? 'Cause there's people who we don't know and then you have 65... You have 60%. So we, we gotta be in the range of 70% have been exposed or been vaccinated. So w- when does it kick in? Or are we experiencing-
- DFDavid Friedberg
You know-
- JCJason Calacanis
... um, herd immunity right now with these low deaths?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Um, we talked about this before, but there are, um, you know, there's a spectrum of infection, right? You're, you're, you're... You, you can have viral replication happening in your body and then your body clears out the virus before you even know because you've got enough antibodies to that particular strain of... variant of a virus before your body even... you know, you start to feel symptoms. And there are cases where the virus kind of replicates in an uncontrolled way for a period of time and you have incredibly bad symptoms and you have inflammation and all the stuff that follows. Um, and so, you know, i- in terms of, uh, how you measure this stuff, it's really difficult to say that you're gonna stop all viral replication by getting a certain number of people to be... to have been exposed. As we've seen, even when you have a broad and diverse antibody, um, pool in your body because you've been exposed to a vaccine, we are still seeing that some of these variants can break through for some period of time because there's not enough of the antibodies that can actually bind to that specific variant. And so the rate of transmission slows, the rate of, um, uh, severe infection goes way down and so on. So it's not as binary as, Hey, we hit herd immunity and now we're done. It, it seems... This is, uh, you know, as we talked about earlier and as I think everyone is coming to terms with, this is gonna be an endemic virus, and that means that it's gonna be circulating in the population in a modest way, causing sometimes severe, sometimes, you know, modest outbreaks for likely a very long time, no matter how many people get it, no matter how many people get vaccinated 'cause you have different strains.
- JCJason Calacanis
At what level should we ignore it? At what level should we just say, listen, that is the steady state. How many cases a day, how many deaths a day do you think is the steady state that we should just say we just go to work and ignore it?
- 45:39 – 59:40
Friedberg's science corner: DeepMind's latest breakthrough, Big Tech censorship, free speech infringements
- JCJason Calacanis
Cuba?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I think, just real quick, before we move away from this, I really want to just highlight the DeepMind announcement from this morning, because I think it's actually quite relevant to the tracking of variants and what's been going on.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- DFDavid Friedberg
So this morning, you know, DeepMind, which published, uh, AlphaFold, and we talked about this a few, uh, uh, episodes ago-
- JCJason Calacanis
DeepMind is owned by Google. It's their AI arm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's, it's an AI arm owned by Google, and they, they basically took protein structure and, uh, tried to predict what a protein looks like physically as a function of, uh, the DNA or RNA that codes the amino acids that make up the protein. And so again, like when you have a string of amino acids, they, they combine and they fold into a wave that's really hard to predict, and that's the shape of the molecule that we call the protein, and then it does something in the body. And historically, we've had very hard times understanding how genetic code translates into physical structure of protein, which would allow us to predict what that protein can then do in the body. So this morning, DeepMind, incredibly, published a database with the predicted structure of every protein in the human body and in 10 other species using this, uh, this capability that they now have.
- JCJason Calacanis
What does it mean in English?
- DFDavid Friedberg
And so, you know, what this means is we now have a, a physical model of every protein that human DNA can make. Um, and that model would allow us to basically now predict what that protein does, how it does it, and how certain drugs can bind to those proteins, and how certain drugs can affect those proteins, and how we can alter human health by, um, uh, making, uh, new molecules or adjusting the genetic code to change the shape of those proteins in specific and targeted ways. So it's an incredible data set that was just, um, published. It's almost like, you know, releasing the Rosetta Stone, i- in my opinion, uh, in terms of we now have this ability to translate human genetic code into the physical form of the molecules that run our body and do things in our body. They did it for 10 other species, and they said that they're going to publish this proteome database and scale it for all other species of life that we have this sort of data set around, um, for, uh, which they expect will achieve over 100 million unique proteins in this database over the coming months, freely available and searchable. And let me just explain, and I, I know I'm on a monologue here, so I'll win the monologue stat on this one.
- JCJason Calacanis
It's a good one. It's a good one.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Um, but let me just explain why this is relevant. The Delta variant, what it is, is the, you know, the, the, the, the SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence is about 30,000 base pairs long. 10% of those, or about 3,000 base pairs, make up the spike protein, which is the protein at the tip of the COVID virus, the, the coronavirus that gets into the cells. And, um, you know, for every 10 people that are infected with coronavirus, there's about one nucleoside mutation. One of those base pairs changes, and the, the virus evolves. And we don't know how that change in that genetic code translates into a different structure of the protein. And so we suddenly discover empirically, and, you know, by looking around, suddenly all these people are getting more infected than were getting infected before. We look at the genetic code, and we're like, "Oh, here's the changes that happened."... but we could have, with this capability from AlphaFold, predicted what changes make the spike protein do a better job binding to human ACE2 receptors on the cells and getting at the cells, and what other changes could be made in the whole genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that could cause this virus to be more transmissible, more deadly, all these sorts of factors, because we can now estimate the physical form of that protein by changing the base pair. And so this tool that was released today, I think highlights that over the next decade, these sorts of things that are going on with viruses mutating and variants occurring and, um, that are affecting our population can be better estimated and tracked digitally. And it gives us the ability to start to prepare tools and defense mechanisms against them, uh, with new drugs and new variant models and new, um, uh, vaccines well ahead of the, "Oh my God, we just got hit with a nuclear bomb, let's clean up the mess," kind of in the future. So it's an exciting day and an exciting moment.
- JCJason Calacanis
Would they have been... release this, David, if it hadn't been for COVID coming out? Do you think DeepMind just pivoted their entire group of... 'cause they have about a thousand people, I understand. And by the way, they pay something in the order of six or 700,000 a year on average, and there's many people there who are getting paid millions of dollars a year. So just think about the scale of what Google is s- spending on this.
- DFDavid Friedberg
You guys know that I, uh-
- JCJason Calacanis
The- they probably sh- sh- m- shifted a large number of people to work on this, because of the pandemic, right?
- DFDavid Friedberg
You guys know that I, uh... I have, I have long, deep roots at Google and-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... um, I will tell you that the value system of people there, you know, p- the press and, and the public will think what they want, but I think that the value system of people there, um, drove them to realize the importance of this work that they're doing with AlphaFold, and it is important for humanity and it is important for the health, broadly, of people. They could've kept it all inside and used it to build therapeutic drug companies and make money from that. And I think the importance of this discovery and this capability, um, was, uh, was realized and is published for that very reason. Uh, there's a lot of work that DeepMind does to optimize ad targeting and ad spending and all this stuff, and they make tens of billions of dollars of incremental revenue for Google per year based on those capabilities, and then there are these things that benefit all of us. And by putting this out publicly, it's a g- it's a great good for humanity and, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're making it freely available and searchable. Um, and so I, I, I don't think that COVID kind of instigated this because they've been working on this for a very long time, since before COVID, and this is a very hard biological problem that, that is key to b- understanding biology and how biology works that's been going on for decades. They've unlocked it with software and they're making it freely available, um, and, you know, there will be hundreds of drug companies that will now start because of what's in that database that was published today.
- JCJason Calacanis
I mean, this is a, this is a mitzvah, uh, to society, to humanity. Uh, does it ch- the, the fact that Google is spending, uh, well over a billion dollars a year on DeepMind in doing projects like this, does this change any of your thinking about breaking them up, Chamath, or, you know, how we look at big tech?
- DFDavid Friedberg
That's a good question.
- JCJason Calacanis
No? Because-
- DFDavid Friedberg
W- where would that funding come from?
- JCJason Calacanis
... could, 'cause how do you afford that? Yeah, where does the, where does this kind of...
- DSDavid Sacks
We learned something very disturbing about big tech this week, actually. Um, this was quite a bombshell that Jen Psaki dropped from the White House press briefing.
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh. Incredible.
- DSDavid Sacks
We, we, we gotta talk about this. She just sort of casually mentioned that, "Oh, yeah, by the way, the administration is flagging posts for a social media company for big tech companies to take down, to remove."
- JCJason Calacanis
Accounts. They're-
- DSDavid Sacks
Accounts, yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... talking about specific accounts.
- DSDavid Sacks
A- and, and posts, yeah. And she just ki- kind of meant- just casually mentions, "Oh, yeah, the big tech companies are very, y- you know, eagerly cooperating with the administration to take down these counts, accounts." She even said that when one of these companies takes down an account, the rest should do it too, implying that the White House is providing the central coordinative role in this censorship. They're act-
- JCJason Calacanis
A global block list.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, they... (laughs) And kind of behind-
- 59:40 – 1:10:46
Capital's role in progress, Bezos' poor press conference, difference in criticism by party, Elon & Bezos as capital allocators
- DSDavid Sacks
- DFDavid Friedberg
Progress technologically, um, will only arise with capital. So you can assume that, that progress, you know, it, it, it's not like someone stumbled into a cave and discovered a rocket ship or stumbled into a cave and discovered AlphaFold. Uh, there are years of toiling in labs like Edison did making the light bulb. Um, it, Edison had to raise a ton of money, uh, to get that light bulb, uh, project off the ground. If you guys haven't read, uh, I'm trying to remember the, the biography. There's a, uh, Wizards of something. Um, Wiz- it's got wizards in the title. It's a good biography of Edison. And, um, uh, you know, and, and I feel like we're at this moment where...
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The Wizard of Menlo Park?
- DFDavid Friedberg
W- yeah, I think that's the, that's The Wizard of Menlo Park, that's right. And, and the amount of capital that it takes to make these breakthroughs at AlphaFold or at Waymo, uh, or what Bezos and, and Elon are doing, um, is so extraordinary that you have to be in a position where you can fund this work. You're not gonna get a bunch of Kickstarters to fund a SpaceX-like project or a, a, you know, Blue Origin-like project.And so I think that the benefit of scale that comes out of some of these businesses is that we can do research and development and we can progress our capabilities as a species forward in a way that would have never been possible if not for the capitalist system and the ability for these businesses to accumulate a large enough pool of capital to take on multiple billion-dollar bets and, like Chamath said, waste a lot of money and lose on nine out of ten of them. But if that $1 billion bet works, it's worth $500 billion and that money continuously gets reinvested. And look at what Google did with Waymo. They put over a billion dollars in that project before everyone woke up and said, "My God, self-driving is real, it's possible," and it kickstarted an industry. And I, I just feel like the amount of money... A- and not to mention the fact that, like, these are free markets. So these businesses, Google, you don't have to search on Google, you don't have to buy from Amazon, but everyone benefits from searching on Google, everyone benefits from buying on Amazon. And the capability of these businesses is rooted entirely on the fact that consumers are choosing to use their products and their services because they are so good. And so I don't feel like these guys are, um, screwing people over. You can consider the small business model as being like, you know, hey, maybe we shouldn't have had small business retailers for as long as we did because at some point, distribution was gonna be economically advantaged by being centralized and therefore all consumers are gonna benefit by centralizing. Is there really a right to maintain local distribution sites that we call small businesses that should remain in business forever? Maybe there's a way to help them transition into a new business model or a new market, but same with what happened with the taxi industry.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I just-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Technology will force these evolutions, the capital accumulates, and that capital can be invested in things that we would have never imagined, um, on a smaller scale. But go ahead, Chamath. Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, I do think sympathetic to what you were saying, I do think that if you look at every platform innovation that's ever happened, so whether it's, you know, we go from no print to print, you know, to newspapers to radio to television, you've always first started with a pendulum that was very much firmly in the camp of centralized, uh, monopolistic or oligopolistic, uh, kind of early outcomes. And either through legislation or through innovation than the pendulum swings to decentralization. That's typically happened, right? And you can look at all of these industries that's gone through that. So it stands to reason that technology will be not dissimilar to those things, and everybody says the argument is, well, no, because technology has these specific features of network effects and lock-in, but I think that betrays this idea that legislatively you can come and just basically destroy the China in the china shop and you have to just start all over. So it's likely that we're gonna move to a place that's a healthier outcome for everybody, and obviously we want things like AlphaFold to exist. We want things like Waymo to exist. The question is, how should they exist? And if they come out of the goodwill of Google, it is just so easily as likely that some other person, let's say it wasn't Sundar and Ruth Porat, but two other people who didn't like it, these things could have been in very different forms and shapes and not existed at all. And I think that's the arbitrary nature of it, which is not necessarily free market capitalism. That doesn't benefit us. Should we, Chamath, be upset that Bezos is going to space and spending tens of billions of dollars that he made from Amazon? Like- He had a bad press conference. Let's just be clear. At the end of the day, he has wanted to do this his entire life, he built an incredible company, he was able to take a lot of that capital and invest it in it. He's invested billions of dollars in other things, $10 billion in climate change. His ex-wife has invested, you know, $6 billion just last year alone in all kinds of good works. So those two individuals, because of their success, I think will generally do and have done the right thing. Let's not get that confused with a horrendous press conference where he just- Why was it horrendous?
- DFDavid Friedberg
But why was it horrendous?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, I think you said it. You know, the f- the thing that he said around, uh, you know, "I just want to thank the customers and the employees for paying for this." It sounded flippant and it didn't really acknowledge the incredible amount of heavy lifting and hard work that he did acknowledge in the clip from 2000 on Charlie Rose. Right? So if you, if you actually played those two things ba- back, side by side, you'd say, "Is this the same person?" One was thoughtful, extremely respectful, the other one was... Now, maybe he was just amped up. I mean, I could see how he could be- I think that's what I think happened.
- DFDavid Friedberg
He was super hyped.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He was absolutely on cloud Nine, so to speak.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You know? And so, and so he just wasn't thinking about it. But, you know, honestly, like, look, he is smart enough and that team is smart enough to say, "We're assuming you're coming back, so here's some fucking talking points. Why don't you just look at those on the way down as you float down to Earth? And let's just make sure we nail this and put our best foot forward." That is where I think he probably has some regrets based on how people reacted.
- DSDavid Sacks
This Bezos, um, space flight was a real Rorschach test because he took heat from both the right and the left, but the criticism was very different. You know, the critique I heard from the right was that, uh, he's having some sort of midlife crisis and the rocket looked too much like a phallus. Okay, fine, whatever. The, the criticism from the left was, um, it had much more to do with a real contempt for private initiative and private enterprise. You could almost see them being horrified and dismayed that, you know, why was he doing this with his own money, you know? If this had been a NASA flight, I don't think they would have had a problem with it. And so you see here that even though Bezos has been so much more effective using his own money, uh, to do this, the, the left just reflexively hates that. Uh, th- it... A- and, and, and, and they kept saying, "Well, how dare he use this money? The money could have been used on something else so much better." Well, well what do you-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes. What do you think of that argument? Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
I, I think it's wrong in a couple of respects. It basically implies that the purveyors of these social programs are better distributors of societal resources than our greatest inventors, and I don't think that's true. You look at these social programs they want to keep doubling down on, they're not working. You know, w- these programs... Our p- our policy towards homelessness is not failing because of lack of funding. There's a tremendous amount of funding.In San Francisco, they're spending $60,000 per tent per year. They're spending (laughs) $300,000 in social services per homeless person per year. Lack of funding is not the problem, the approach is the problem. We spend something like $25,000 per pupil and- per pupil in California schools, the test scores are going down. So, you know, th- these people who are criticizing Bezos don't know what to do with the money. They don't know how to spend it any better.
- JCJason Calacanis
They're not good at executing. Let's be honest here. Yeah, it's pretty sad.
- DSDavid Sacks
They're not good at executing. However, Bezos or Elon, these are two of our greatest inventors.
- JCJason Calacanis
Let 'em go. Let 'em rip.
- DSDavid Sacks
Let 'em go because, you know, they are pushing the boundaries and I do believe there will be great engineering and scientific breakthroughs that come as a result of what they're doing with this new space race.
- JCJason Calacanis
I- it's also super uninformed if... Correct me if I'm wrong here, but they were saying that they, they should have been doing more initiatives on Earth. If you actually... And they were kinda talking about climate change and the use of these fuels to get to space. Uh, and number one, uh, the, the rocket ship fuel, my understanding in these, is less than the- what happens in a 747, so put that aside. And then second, Elon has done more for global warming with Tesla than anybody in the- and the battery packs, I think, in modern society. I- I- I can't think of somebody in the private sector who's done more. And then has there ever been a gi- there's never been a gift of $10 billion to one cause, let alone one cause, which Bezos gave, which was climate change.
- DSDavid Sacks
No- nobody-
- JCJason Calacanis
So it, it-
- DSDavid Sacks
Nobody has done more-
- JCJason Calacanis
And, and also hasn't... You would know, Chamath. I, I thought Richard Branson had done a lot for global warming. I thought he was very involved in the carbon, uh, credits space.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think that we're witnessing something that can best be described as people who have reached a point in their life where they've realized that they're impotent, getting incredibly angry at people who are willing to be wrong, but wanna just have a chance to be on the field and try.
- JCJason Calacanis
And have the freedom to do so.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And that just literally infuriates a certain class of people. It proves itself out by what David said. We are not in a funding crisis. We are running $10, $20 trillion deficits, you know... Or sorry, uh, 10- you know, hundreds of billions of dollar deficits, $10, $20 trillion debt levels that are increasing every year. We have a surfeit of money. We print money whenever we want. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of capable people who know what to do with that money. And in the absence of people being able to do things, they would rather other people not do things, not because it's not the right thing to do, but because it makes them feel impotent.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right. And, and, and so what, what is, what is driving that? I think you... There's a real contempt for private initiative. And, and Jason, you're right, you see it in the hatred towards Elon. Nobody has done more to actually reduce carbon emissions than Elon. I mean, even the Bezos gift-
- JCJason Calacanis
Period. End of story.
- 1:10:46 – 1:21:32
Modern online pessimist psychology & how to fix it
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
all.
- JCJason Calacanis
No?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I actually think what it is, is psychological. It is nothing about money. I think what we are witnessing, and I think social media has just blown the cover off it, is a psychological awakening that people have, which is that they were comfortable knowing that there was a class of insiders and a huge cohort of outsiders, and they just believe the world would function as it should. Now you see people migrating through this membrane, achieving enormous amounts of success, basically eclipsing every single insider possible by orders of magnitude, and it breaks people's brains because they don't like it, because now they think-
- JCJason Calacanis
Why didn't it happen to me?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... "Why not me?"
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And the thing is, because you're not capable and at, somewhere along the way-
- JCJason Calacanis
Or hardworking. You're not dedicated.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Or you didn't try.
- JCJason Calacanis
Or you didn't get lucky.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Or you didn't try.
- DSDavid Sacks
They didn't act with agency.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I mean, look, every day, every day... The, the greatest thing that I've learned about the public markets now, having been, you know, purely on the early stage technology side, building, running, then investing, is I get a mark every day. Right now, to do both businesses, I get a scorecard every day and some days I really think to myself, "Maybe I'm just not good enough today." And I say to myself, "That is true today." And then the, the d- the difference is tomorrow I have a choice, which is I wake up and I decide, "Am I gonna go back at it or not?" And I'm not-
- JCJason Calacanis
Get back in the game.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... And I'm not gonna hate on other people who had a good day today just because I had a bad day. And that's what I think we're going through. We're going through... And social media allows it to happen and it allows you to put it out there. You can hide behind a screen name. You can basically say whatever you want to vent this pent-up frustration one has-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, it's also journalists doing it too, like-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... with one's own lives.
- DSDavid Sacks
Of course, of course, because, look-
- JCJason Calacanis
These journalists are doing it too and they're just so bitter that they feel dunking on the greatest inventors of our time is a productive use of their space.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The difference is journalists do it with a real screen name under the guise of journalism.
- JCJason Calacanis
That's true. Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Everybody else does it with a fake screen name and it's all just a bunch of trolling.
- DSDavid Sacks
In order to do something really great, like Bezos or like Elon, you have to believe that you have agency over your own life. You have to believe that you can accomplish great things. You have to, you know, act with, with purpose. And is that really what we're teaching kids to d- uh, today in schools? What we're teaching them is they're either victims or oppressors at some intersectional framework.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... we're not teaching them about earned success. We're teaching them about privilege, which is, you know, is presumptively ill-gotten, and it's all about a transference of privilege and, um, and basically money from people who are oppressors in this framework to people who are victims. But no one's talking about how you actually create change and success in the world.
Episode duration: 1:35:51
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