All-In PodcastE46: False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,065 words- 0:00 – 1:18
Open: LIVE from TPB Symposium
- DSDavid Sacks
Jake Hal looks like he's going to a Night at the Roxbury. I mean-
- JCJason Calacanis
Absolutely. (laughs)
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What?
- JCJason Calacanis
He looks like Joe Pesci. Here we go. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He looks like Joe Pesci-
- JCJason Calacanis
Shut the fuck up.
- DSDavid Sacks
Is it a joke right now or is it, uh-
- JCJason Calacanis
What, like I'm a joke? (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
... the Saturday Night Live skit? You know?
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I mean, you look horrible.
- JCJason Calacanis
Thank you. (laughs) Thank you, Chamath.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Absolutely fucking horrible.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay, appreciate it. (laughs) Wow.
- DSDavid Sacks
Is that your MC outfit or what?
- JCJason Calacanis
Here we go. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- NANarrator
(upbeat music) We're going all in. Don't let your winners ride. Rain man, David Sacks. We're going all in. And I said we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of quinoa. Going all in.
- JCJason Calacanis
Thanks for coming. This is the Production Board Symposium 2021. Tell us just a little bit about why we're here, David, and, and what this is and what it represents for the Production Board.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Uh, the Production Board Symposium, second ever. Thank you all for being here. We're excited. We have, uh-
- NANarrator
(clapping) Woo!
- DFDavid Friedberg
... an amazing group of, um, science, uh, scientists, engineers, folks from academia, from business, from the investing community, some of our investors. So we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple of days, um, and thought we would, uh, chase half of you away by hosting the All-In Pod tonight. So, um, here we go.
- JCJason Calacanis
Great.
- 1:18 – 15:47
False Ivermectin story fools Rolling Stone, Rachel Maddow & more
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, okay, so first up in the news, Rolling Stone, uh, amplifies false ivermectin story. You were following this. Chamath, what do you think this, uh, ivermectin controversy and-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You wanna little, give a little summary of what the issue is before we talk about the hypocrisy of it?
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, on September 1st, Oklahoma News, uh, Station KFOR ran a story and published an article on ivermectin overdoses, uh, backing up rural hospitals. The article was titled Patients, uh, Overdosing on Ivermectin Backing Up Rural Oklahoma Hospital- Hospitals and Ambulances. Uh, first line of the article, quote, "A rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the home dewormer medication ivermectin to fight COVID-19-"
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Jesus.
- JCJason Calacanis
"... are causing emergency rooms and ambulances to, uh, back up." On September 3rd, Rolling Stone amplified the story in its own article. Uh, the only problem was, uh, they treed- they tweeted it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold. It turns out the picture was people waiting for vaccine shots back in January-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... not gunshot victims waiting to get into the hospital.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, the story is totally false. You understand that, right?
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, I didn't wanna say fake news, but I know-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, it was beyond fa- it, it, it was beyond f- fake news. This was basically a doctored up conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. Look, there, you tell me if the, the science of this is wrong. The whole, the whole premise is r- ridiculous. So ivermectin basically, as far as we know, 'cause we don't know that much, acts on a handful of, uh, specific characteristics. One we know to be glutamate, which we don't really express in the same way as, like, fucking worms. And so, yes, technically it can be used as a dewormer, but there are four or five other ways in which it acts which we don't know anything about because we haven't taken the time to do a broad-based double blind study. So I think the fairest thing to say about ivermectin is we don't know what it is. And so neither the people that propose to use it as a solution for, for COVID nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from a basis of fact. But then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea that, you know, people aren't getting vaccines, they're going to use this other thing, they basically doctored up an article. That wouldn't be so bad 'cause nobody reads Rolling Stone, right? It's kind of a, it's, like, it's kind of-
- JCJason Calacanis
It's, it's an ancient brand. Nobody's going there for medical news.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's an ancient brand. Nobody needs it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really, really smart who amplify it. Rachel Maddow amplifies it. Jimmy Kimmel does it on a comedy skit. And then all of a sudden there's this enormous outrage. But the problem is you can't put the genie back in the bottle when it turns out to be a completely fabricated lie. And then all the people that are purporting to basically push this lie, who now have been outed, have no consequences because they're on the left screaming at the right. And what happened when it was the other way around, we basically started to put people in boxes, we basically kicked them off these platforms. And again, so you have this compounding building double standard. That, to me, is the whole, the worst part about it.
- JCJason Calacanis
David, when we look at, uh, the ivermectin story, we also saw Joe Rogan got COVID. That was a big haha moment for a lot of people. Um, and he took ivermectin as part of his treatment, and then people started amplifying that he was taking a worm, uh, drug for horses.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Dewormer.
- JCJason Calacanis
Dewormer and, uh-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's at best an antimicrobial.
- JCJason Calacanis
Right.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right. We talked about this.
- JCJason Calacanis
And he used for both situations.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
And a doctor prescribed it to him. He's thinking of suing some folks for, for tweeting this.
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
What, what does this overall say about the state of communications around this pandemic?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, I mean, look, this is really a media story. You had Rolling Stone publish this article based on a single source. You have this one crank basically saying that emergency rooms are turning away gunshot victims and people having heart attacks, okay? And all they had to do, all Rolling Stone had to do was call up any one of these several hospitals, they immediately would have refuted the source, but they didn't do that. They also could have simply googled the number of toxic ivermectin cases to find out if it was even plausible statistically that you could have ivermectin overdoses flooding Oklahoma hospitals, but they didn't do that either. Why didn't they confirm the sources? Because the article was too perfect. It confirmed all of their priors. Their first prior was about ivermectin. They've been waging this war on ivermectin claiming it's a horse dewormer when it's actually, that is one of its purposes, but it's not the only one. It was a m- it was a drug designed for humans and it's used against parasites. Now, as Chamath said, we don't know whether it's effective against COVID. They gotta do the double blind studies and then we'll find out. But that was sort of their first prior. And let's face it, the second prior was that this is in Oklahoma-... right? And so, Rolling Stone wants to believe you have all these MAGA idiots out in Oklahoma eating horse paste, okay?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
And that's why they love this story so much, and that's why Rachel Maddow loved this story so much, and she then starts spreading it, okay? And after she gets called out, including by, say, Glenn Greenwald, as of last night, she had not taken it down.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
She didn't take it down.
- DSDavid Sacks
Now, why? Because she knows there are no consequences for misinformation and lying. Why? Because Twitter and Facebook do not punish people on the left for misinformation. That is a penalty they only meter out for people who disagree with their cultural and political biases. And that's what's ridiculous.
- 15:47 – 25:36
Biden's recently announced vaccine mandates, why US hasn't been able to solve cheap testing
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
have. Okay, so we are, we are firmly going down because I think it's pretty, it's pretty clear to me, I'd, I'd be willing to make the bet that the media is on the side of vaccine mandates. Okay? They want the top-down control and the sense of theoretical safety that a vaccine mandate gives them in their own little bubble, and so that's why th- I think they support this. And I think, you know, blowing up ivermectin was kind of a method of many that they've undertaken to do that, whether we believe in vaccine mandates or not. But now it's coming. It's coming in the LA school district, it's, you know, Biden is trying to push this thing through the BLS. This is gonna be a very, very big deal. What do you guys think is the right thing to do on vaccine mandates? Irrespective of all we're gonna hear over the next-
- JCJason Calacanis
Gov- government or private employer mandates? Or both?
Well, we should-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
We're seeing both.
- JCJason Calacanis
Let's walk through it. I mean-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
We're seeing both.
- JCJason Calacanis
Uh, for the gover- government employees, let's start with them. Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, the government mandate, no, gets, goes through the BLS. It says any company, public or p- private, that is 100 employees or more-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, I mean, I think we all agree that people in the military or people in healthcare, they should all be vaccinated or they shouldn't come to work. Correct?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, that's also-
- JCJason Calacanis
Do you agree with that?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Tha- tha- but that's also not, not even enforceable. Like, Sorkin, Andrew Ross Sorkin tweeted out, like, he had to take his kid to the urgent care and he walked in and the doctors weren't wearing masks or something.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. I read that. Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And said something about, like, not being vaccinated-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... doesn't matter or blah, blah, blah. And he, like-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, that goes to enforcement, but, I mean-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Moral liberal outrage-
- JCJason Calacanis
... the military has said you have to be-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... ran his kid out of urgent care and I thought, "Wait. You brought your kid to the fucking urgent care. Don't you first need to know what's wrong with the kid?" You can't prosecute this person's opinion on masks and vaccines before you figure out what's wrong with your kid.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, what do you think, Sacks? Uh, military-
Parents are about to walk in.
Four factors: military, healthcare, teachers.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
The, I think the crux of the issue is whether employers should be able to require that... Well, there, there's two issues. One is whether, um, employers should be allowed to require it, which I think everybody agree, not everyone, but, but most people, I think, agree that private employers, and you could lump the government in with this, should be allowed to, um, test or, their employees or require their employees to be vaccinated if they want to. And, or at least I would support-... that part of it, is let private enterprises require vaccination if they want. If they decide, "Hey, in order to come back to the office, you gotta be vaccinated, it's for everyone's safety," they can impose those rules. Now, the question is, do we kn- need to go beyond that to have a federal mandate? And it's not that I'm anti-vaccine, I just think that's, like, an awfully authoritarian thing to do and it raises a bunch of, of questions. So for example, um, I have a friend who owns a chain of dry cleaners, okay? He's got over 100 employees, mostly minimum wage in a bunch of different locations. About 20% of his employ-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What is his ethnicity?
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs) What does that have to do with anything?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Just curious.
- DSDavid Sacks
He's Sri Lankan.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- 25:36 – 34:18
The threat of regulatory capture
- DFDavid Friedberg
statement is regulatory capture, like, is-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... is one of the biggest issues we have.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But, and in related, uh, news-
- DFDavid Friedberg
By the way, another insane statistic, just sorry to interrupt, I saw this today. I forgot, someone we know tweeted this. The, who, who wants to guess the ratio of administrators to doctors in the US healthcare system?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
300 to one.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, I saw a 300 to one, yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
900 to one today.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh my God.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And that is up from five to one in 1970. Think about that. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
By the way, you are... Can I just build on what you said here?
- DFDavid Friedberg
900 to one.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Your initial tweet said 300 to one, and it ended in 2010 right before Obamacare passed. So from 300 to 900 was all Obamacare.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. Regulatory capture. Saks is shaking his head.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Which, by the way, uh, ni- nothing against Obamacare 'cause I think, like, coming as a Canadian, I actually believe in subsidized healthcare. And I think the, the principle of Obamacare was great, but there was one fatal flaw, which is it basically said, "Okay, you know what? You're capped at the following margin." And the minute that people said, "Wait a minute, I can only have a 20% gross margin," what do you do? You just jack up the prices to basically jack up revenue. Because if you can only take 20%, you're gonna take 20% of a bigger number than a smaller number. And so it completely burned the incentives for any healthcare company in the United States to do anything other than just basically walk prices up. And it's funny because if you look at the stock prices of these companies, you, you would've made more money being long United Healthcare than you would've been, uh, owning Facebook, Google, any of these other tech companies in the last decade. Crazy stat. Uh, speaking of regulatory capture, Tesla, uh, got left out of this new tax credit or proposed tax credit (laughs) - Insane. ... for electric cars. I don't know if you saw that, but Tesla wasn't invited a couple of months ago to Biden's EV summit. Elon responded like, "Ha, I wonder why I wasn't invited." It turns out it's because they're not a union shop, their employees make much more money (laughs) than union employees make. Uh, and now-
- DFDavid Friedberg
But it's the ex-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... as a punishment, but hold on.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
As a punishment, the $12,000 credit that they're giving to or they're proposing to give to all EV manufacturers is only if you have union employees, it's 4500 less to Tesla. So literally two massive regulatory captures and corruption go, or maybe Saks. You-
- DSDavid Sacks
No, I, I mean, I don't have much more to add to that. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is to serve the unions, it's not to serve the clean energy or the EV industry. I mean, a little bit for EV, but it's mostly for the unions.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The, um... On the one hand, what we do is we say that climate change is this existential issue, but then when the rubber meets the road, if you look inside the infrastructure plan today, we unveiled basically how we're gonna do all the tax credits. And again, it's just an enormous amount of just sloppy, um, regulatory capture. Um, we're doubling and tripling credits in certain places, we're disallowing credits in other places. When you follow the dollars, what happens is you can map it to companies. Those companies tend to be mostly public, large balance sheets, large lobbying efforts, and it's not necessarily the most important companies that matter. So if, you know, if I said to you, "What are the most important companies in climate change?" You'd probably say, "Well, maybe it's direct air capture, maybe it's nuclear, maybe it's some other thing that basically helps you go to a different place." And where does all the tax credits and tax dollars go? Sunrun, SunPower. These are companies that basically, you know, have this oligopolistic hold, stranglehold on essentially installing solar panels and battery walls in homes across the United States. And it's not to say that that job isn't important, but to basically explicitly block other people out, because all the chatter today on, um, you know, or some of the chatter today was around just if this bill passes as written, you're gonna see these stocks rip. And so obviously the positive reinforcement loop of Wall Street and hedge funds getting behind these companies, their market cap goes up, the amount they allocate to lobbyists go up, and then all this bullshit just continues to cycle through the system. Friedberg, how far are we away from small nuclear reactors and fusion just from a science perf- perspective, and then on a regulatory basis?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I don't know enough. I mean-
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. I, I, look, I mean, w- from what I've seen there, there are great technologies that, you know, we should be able to kind of realize. My understanding in speaking to investors, some in this room, and I know Chamath looked at this area a lot, is, um, you know, there's the, the regulatory burden that's made it so difficult to launch nuclear. Um, technically it seems like there's great breakthroughs. There was an announcement from a group this past week-
- JCJason Calacanis
CFS.
- DFDavid Friedberg
CFS, yeah, on a new, um-... a superconducting magnet system that they spent years designing. This is a Bill Gates-backed company. Anyone here an investor? No. Um-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
None.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Huh? None?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And, uh, basically it enables like the tokamak plasma fusion-based systems, uh, to be kind of reliably produced now. And so they, they, they've had a proof of demonstration of this, uh, of this superconducting magnet system that effectively allows you to control a plasma, which is like 10 million degrees Celsius, in a little donut that spins around. And that plasma allows you to kind of pull energy out that can be used for... You know, effectively, you put a bunch of material in, this thing runs, and more energy comes out than you put in. It's magic. Um, and so, you know, this has been a theoretical kind of concept for decades. Uh, getting the superconducting magnet system to control the plasma in a very small space, uh, using a very small kind of system was proven, and now they think that they're, you know, call it four or five years away. You know, by the way, everything in nuclear is always four or five years away, so four or five years away with a grain of salt, uh, from kind of having a d- a demonstrable kind of, uh, system. So, th- there, there's technologies that are clearly like on the brink or, or proceeding nicely, but as we know, um-
- 34:18 – 45:30
Benefits of the "wartime mentality" when solving major issues
- DSDavid Sacks
- AMAudience member
Freeberg, we talked about not having a wartime stance with the pandemic. We don't have a wartime stance with global warming or extreme weather, whichever, uh, term you want. Should we?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
I mean-
- AMAudience member
That we're, that we're burning money at a m-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Look, I mean-
- AMAudience member
... like a drunken sailor, like-
- DFDavid Friedberg
What's going on right now, and actually a lot of what we're gonna talk about this symposium over the next day or so, is that there is effectively now a raging free market appetite for these solutions. Um, the capital is pouring in. The entrepreneurship is blossoming, ballooning. The technology is advancing. So, you know, to some degree folks might say, you know, this is gonna get solved. But there are major infrastructure solutions that are needed for us to accelerate the outcome and win the, the war. And those infrastructure solutions aren't gonna get funded by SoftBank and they're not gonna get funded by Chamath. They're gonna need to get funded by-
- DSDavid Sacks
Book them.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... a type of dollars. I mean, keep, keep... you keep building your book like you are, you will fund them in the next decade, but Sax, you know, kind of speaks to the kind of numbers that I think, you know, are necessary here. I mean, you think about how much money we spent on COVID without (laughs) any results over the last year, it really begs the question, if we were kind of to take an ROI-based approach to where we're spending these dollars, this would probably be the first on the list. And by the way, the private market and jobs will benefit. And what happened in this, this, this bill, this infrastructure bill this past, um, this past year that's now been, you know, uh, more kind of definitively drafted, is a bunch of infrastructure jobs that are basically giveaways. They're not actually solving problems with climate change. They're not pushing technology forward. They're not creating, uh, these alternatives that we're talking about-
- AMAudience member
It's just brash. (laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
... that, that create 10X and 100X outcomes. They are yesteryear solutions and they're not gonna move the needle enough. And so I... You know, look, I, I do think like it's unfortunate, but the climate change war production board is needed to kind of get-
- AMAudience member
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... the kind of dollars motivated that are, are needed to create the kind of infrastructure to solve these problems, um, despite the free market appetite. And the, the free market appetite, by the way, fuels the outcomes.... but it still needs, uh, it needs something behind it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Chamath, is it possible, just as we're having this discussion here, we're looking at an incompetent, corrupt government that is filled with grifters who are bought and sold, and then on the other side... and, and causing massive-
- DFDavid Friedberg
By the way, I, I-
- JCJason Calacanis
... problems.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... that's a, that's a mouthful. I, I wouldn't say that pe- but I, I disagree that people are corrupt and grifters. I, I, I do think that there's-
- JCJason Calacanis
Really?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. I, I do think that there's a lot of good motivations. I just think that the system-
- JCJason Calacanis
In government? Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
There, look, there may be corruption, but I don't think that that's the, the universal truth, right? People are generally g- you, you know, you... we've all met politicians, right?
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, they're corrupt or are they competent?
- DFDavid Friedberg
We've all met people-
- JCJason Calacanis
Which one is it?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Uh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a point of perspective, right? And, and there's a-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, what's your perspective?
- DFDavid Friedberg
My perspective is that they're all being told by their constituents what they want, and then they're doing it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Or by lobbyists.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Or by lobbyists, but, uh, at the end of the day-
- 45:30 – 49:11
CCP looking to break up Alipay, what this means for US/China relations
- DFDavid Friedberg
end with the CCP, uh, is now, um, moving to break up Alipay's, uh, business. This is after Jack Ma, uh, went on, um, a holiday to learn how to oil paint. Thoughts, Chamath?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, I think this is sort of like one other step in what we've been talking about for a while, which is that China is basically becoming, um, a completely vertically integrated government, where the public and private sector has no real clear delineation. And I think that that actually has a lot of implications to us because they export an enormous amount of technology and building blocks to us, and we have no recourse if those guys ever change their mind. And this is sort of what pulls us into this next very complicated phase of, uh, geopolitics because, for example, if they decide to cut us off, you know, in our... it, they will invade, uh, Taiwan. I've said this before, but I think that they will. And we will have no choice except to deploy troops into Taiwan because in the absence of the silicon that we need from TSMC and a couple of other manufacturers there, we have zero capability here. This is why you see Intel ha-... I mean, for any, like any second, when you guys hear an Intel press release that says they're investing 90 fucking billion dollars, do you not think, "Where does Intel come up with $90 billion?" Right? This is a pull-through from US government because it allows us to start to rebuild an, an enormous amount of critical infrastructure that we've left to other people. So, you know, China is systematically decomposing and basically destabilizing all the China internet companies. They're gonna control and inbound all of the critical resources, and we're gonna have to have these really hard conversations unless... This is again why I go back to I don't believe what you said. Entrepreneurs are not enough of the solution. We need the government to step in with intelligence, not with anything other than that. They don't need laws necessarily. They just need to understand the problem and then you need to-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Or, or get out of the way in some cases?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Or step in and, for example, like, you know, allow the regulatory, regulatory capture to be disrupted. But they won't do it because special interests... And by the way, special interests, what do they spend? You know, if you try to donate to a fucking congressman, $4,000, $2,500? Like these people aren't spending $80 million to defend an $80 billion business. They're spending $80,000. And that's why we can't have progress. That's crazy to me.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Sax, your thoughts on China's recent actions to basically deprecate entrepreneurship?
- DSDavid Sacks
It's a, it's a continuation of the trends we've been talking about on this show, like Chamath was saying. I mean, they're bringing these, um, entrepreneurs, these, their, their moguls, uh, their, their oligarchs under their thumb, under the thumb of the CCP and Xi Jinping. They're consolidating control and power and money. And it's also about the data. That was another part of the, this new law is they wanna get their hands on the data that, um, that Alibaba has.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They control all the credit data of every single person that uses Alipay all throughout Southeast Asia.... that's fucking crazy. They also control all the data of everybody who uses TikTok in America.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And every, and everybody's TikTok user. (laughs) Yeah, we'll get there at the same time.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah. It's crazy-
- DFDavid Friedberg
If, if you were running the, if you were running the Chinese government-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... that we're allowed TikTok in this country. It's crazy. ... would, wouldn't you do the same? I'm, I would do everything that they're doing, which is why it's crazy to us that we are sitting here allowing it to be done to us. That's what the crazy, the crazy part is not what-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right. There's, there's, there's nothing about what they're doing-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What they are doing is not illogical.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right, right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What we are doing is illogical, because we should have a reaction to these things. We should have a point of view. It can't be tacitly sticking our head in the sand.
- 49:11 – 1:11:45
Audience Q&A!
- DFDavid Friedberg
All right, who's got a question for one of the besties? Okay. Let's try and make it a Ty question.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Hock up the book, Ian.
- AMAudience member
Of course, these bills are incredibly wasteful, but you're, you guys are engaged. So, how come you're not looking through 'em and saying, "This piece I like. This piece is messed up." 'Cause it doesn't sound like you've read them either.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
To be, to be honest with you, I haven't read them. I rely on these summaries that I get from my team. And to be honest with you, the legibility of these things are incredibly low. And the problem is every bill that gets written now, it, it's almost like it goes through a process of you take a two-page bullet point bill, which is really what senators or Contra group- Congresspeople understand and approve. And then out comes the other end, 2,000 pages that are indigestible. So, you're absolutely right. I don't... I rely on these summaries. I have zero idea what's really in there.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Let's take another question.
- AFAlex Filippenko
Yeah, um, I'm Alex Filippenko. You did this poll of whether the media are right-winning, leaning, or left-leaning, and the overwhelming majority said left-leaning. But do you think that that's in part because for four years we had been fed so many lies and so much mis- misinformation from the extreme right?
- DFDavid Friedberg
David, that question was directed to you. (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs) I mean, look, I think there were plenty of polls. If you go back, like, 10, 20, 30 years, there's a media organization. There's a guy named Brent Buzzell, who was doing studies of media bias. And if you were to actually look at how people in the media voted, it was 90-plus percent Democrat. I mean, it's, it, it's been a, it's been a thing for a long time. And now, it came to a head, I would say, during the Trump administration because the, the press, I think, in going after Trump, gave up something important, which is they gave up their objectivity. I mean, they flatly would... I mean, it was, you know, whether you want to call it Trump derangement syndrome or whatever. I mean, they now saw it as their duty not to report objectively both sides, but they would just flatly declare, uh, things that Trump were saying were false. You know, you still see this today. Uh, I'm not saying that all the things he said were true. Maybe he did say false things. But normally, if you wanted to say that one person is saying something false, you would get a source on the other side, and then you would quote them, and then that's how you would basically construct the article. And you had the press basically, almost really become unhinged. And I think they, they kind of ripped the empire jersey off their backs, um, to, in order to chase after Trump. And I think, you know, ultimately they got him. Um, Trump was a one-term president, but I think that it's really contributed to the polarized media environment we have now.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Any way to get that referee jersey back on the press, you think?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, no.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Zacks?
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, how? I mean, they, you know...
- AMAudience member
The, the problem is the journalism and media have changed so much.
- DFDavid Friedberg
The nature of press has changed.
- AMAudience member
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right? It's fragmenting and splintering, much like everything else. There's, um... You know, we talk about this at some of our companies. I keep referring to our companies because I know a lot of people are here today, but, you know, we talk about the fragmentation of food brands, for example, or the fragmentation of people's kind of individual media selection. The same is happening in the press where, you know, you're now kind of gonna pick and choose the five articles you want to read, as opposed to buying one of three newspapers and reading everything in that newspaper each day. And I think that's fueling this, which is not necessarily, in my opinion, and I've said this before, not necessarily a constructed or designed decision of the, quote unquote, press, but it's more a phenomenon that arises from the individuals that consume the media, and they make selections. And that selection bias ends up driving the clicks and the votes and the accounts and the prints of that particular form of media. And guess what? We end up choosing the stuff that triggers us more and makes us feel some stronger emotion, and then it creates a feedback loop. And that's where this is coming from. And I think it's enabled by the internet, not necessarily bad actors at platform companies, but it's, it's inevitable in a decentralized world or a platformed world. That's where we're getting at. And, and also part of the story is advertising went away as an option as Google and Facebook took over those markets, so they went subscription. And how do you get subscribers? You pick a side. Y- you can't really go down the middle.
- AMAudience member
I want to, I want to feel something emotional when I click and buy and spend 99 cents or whatever. Like, it's not... I just... I don't want to, like, be bored to death.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right.
- AMAudience member
Everything is so stimulating in this digital world. Like, I want to be stimulated.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right.
- DSDavid Sacks
So, there is a really interesting poll that came out today that speaks to this, which is, um, they, they asked, you know, people on the left or the right, "What do you think the country's biggest problem is?" Um, on the left, the number one answer was Trump supporters, you know. So, you know, now, on, on the right, it was a little bit more varied. It was the Taliban. It was China, you know. Um, it was crime, things like that.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well, what should we be most concerned about, objectively, from each of you?
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, I don't, I, I, I, I think-
- DFDavid Friedberg
What do you think are the top three things we should be concerned about as Americans?
- DSDavid Sacks
I, I, I don't-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Humans.
- DSDavid Sacks
... think the right answer for either side is, like, the other half of America.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well, but, but-
- DSDavid Sacks
I think, I think that happens because you haven't varied your information diet. You're sitting there watching one station on cable news, and you're being fed... You're being, basically being fed this stuff that the others... Demonizing the other side, right? And, you know, the other side is, you know, is, is being otherized.
- DFDavid Friedberg
All right, let's take two more questions. Nico?
Episode duration: 1:12:58
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